In an article published in 1941, the American scholar of traditional narrative Alexander Krappe noted the appearance of a distinctive story pattern in this Ragnarr material, as well as in an episode from the medieval Persian compendium of myth and legend, the Shahnameh (Book of Kings) attributed to Ferdowsi, and also in a bizarre back-story tucked away in an Early Modern Irish prose text featuring heroes from the so-called Fenian cycle, Tóruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne (Pursuit of Diarmaid and Gráinne), or TDG, as we shall refer to it henceforth. Krappe observed that all three sources, as well as various other Old- and New-World traditional narratives cited in his article, feature a worm or small serpent that, nurtured by a female (usually), grows to monstrous size and becomes a ravenous dragonlike creature, so threatening as virtually to invite a hero to come and slay it. Krappe’s thesis is that the story originated in the Middle East and migrated to Scandinavia, carried by a well-traveled Viking, and thence to Ireland, via the substantial Scandinavian presence on the island in the late first and early second millennium CE (Krappe 1941).

The following are sketches of the salient details of the three narratives. I will begin with the Irish, not because it deserves primacy of place in this investigation but because it is where this Celticist first encountered the story pattern we are attempting to elucidate.

The particular narrative excursion in which we find our serpentine pattern is actually a prequel to a prequel. It is a strange account that to my knowledge is told nowhere else in extant Irish literature. The story unfolds as follows:

Fionn, humiliated by Gráinne’s having left him on their wedding night to run away with the most valuable member of his team, furiously pursues the couple, sometimes sending forth others to conduct the vengeful pursuit on his behalf. Among these is a pair of brothers, seeking not only to make peace with Fionn, whom their father had helped to slay, but also to join Fionn’s band of heroes, the fian. Fionn imposes upon them as the condition for their acceptance into the band that they fetch either Diarmaid’s head or a handful of berries from a magical rowan tree guarded by a one-eyed giant. The brothers encounter Diarmaid and declare their intent. He explains to the rookie warriors that they are between a rock and a hard place. Not only would it be impossible for such newcomers to the heroic arena to overcome him, but they would also be incapable of overcoming the giant guarding the tree. Diarmaid, in addition to telling the brothers the story of why the rowan tree has a monstrous guardian, also points out to his would-be opponents that this is not the first time Fionn has deviously drawn those whom he perceives to be his enemies into what most likely will turn out to be a suicide mission. Diarmaid recounts a comparable situation from the past, back when he was still a trusted member of Fionn’s retinue.

A warrior named Conán, the son of the Liath Luachra, yet another mortal enemy of Fionn’s deceased father, comes to Fionn seeking reconciliation. The price dictated, in this case, is for Conán to bring Fionn a head of the multi-headed, overgrown “worm” (the word used is cnuimh, a variant of the more common cruimh) which used to dwell in the head of Cian, son of Oilill Ólum and his wife Sadhbh. (This Oilill, or Ailill, is said in earlier texts to have been a king of the province of Munster, but in TDG he is not specifically so described.)

Diarmaid, at this point in his narration, inserts the story explaining how Cian came to have a worm in his head—quoting verbatim, he claims, from the account that Oisín, the son of Fionn, gave to Conán at the time.

Approaching a branch full of sloes, the pregnant Sadhbh, Oilill’s wife, riding with her husband in his chariot, is overwhelmed by a craving for the berries. Wishing to satisfy her, Oilill shakes the branch, and she thus obtains her fill of the fruit. Later, when their child is born (named Cian), a protuberance is found on his forehead that grows as he matures. Embarrassed by his deformity, the mature Cian swaddles his head so that the bump will be less noticeable. When he is in need of barbering, Cian slays anyone who, undoing the wrapping, shaves him and/or cuts his hair—in order to keep the unseemly growth on his head a secret.

Whether Diarmaid, having told this story, would have been able to dissuade the brothers from pursuing their quest with the exemplum of Conán (perhaps not the best case to cite, since it ends in success for that seeker), we will never know for certain. His lover Gráinne, overhearing the conversation between Diarmaid and the young seekers, inquires about the rowan tree from which they are supposed to obtain fruit. Once she hears the story Diarmaid retells about the tree and its guardian (information the brothers, and the audience of TDG, already have), Gráinne, announcing her pregnancy in the story for the first time, insists that she must have some of the berries too—a craving that her man must satisfy, just as Oilill satisfied Sadhbh’s craving. Hence, the alternative mission assigned to the brothers, to fetch the fruit of the special rowan tree, has become Diarmaid’s task, and those who came seeking to fight with Diarmaid can now rely upon him to do the heavy lifting. After he slays the tree-guardian, there are plenty of berries for everyone. Diarmaid instructs the brothers, now his veritable protégés, to return to Fionn with the fruit and with the false story that they themselves slew the giant. Diarmaid and Gráinne, meanwhile, take shelter in the top of the tree, where the berries are sweetest. Fionn, upon receiving the berries from the brothers, detects the scent of Diarmaid on the fruit and deduces who actually performed the valiant feat. He sets out for the rowan tree himself, bringing the story closer to the climactic encounter between the betrayed husband and his wife’s reluctant lover hiding in the tree.

The daughter of an insignificant poor man named Haftvād (Having Seven Sons) finds a worm in an apple she had started to eat at the beginning of the task of spinning her daily portion of cotton. Cinderella-like in relation to her father, who presumably is interested only in his sons after whom he is named, the girl invokes the worm as her good-luck charm to help her to be as industrious and productive as possible. The worm fulfills her wish, and, keeping the creature in her spindle-case and feeding it daily with pieces of the apple, the (unnamed) girl becomes the source of great wealth for her father and brothers. With the riches he wins through his daughter’s industry (which in turn is predicated on the worm), Haftvād hires soldiers and has an impregnable fortress built for himself, his family, and the vermian “pet” on a mountaintop. His growing worm-based power starts to threaten even the monarch of the land where Haftvād dwells, the Persian king Ardeshir. In his home on high, Haftvād leaves the task of caring for the worm to his daughter, who found it in the first place, as well as to the other females in the household, while the increasingly omnivorous worm grows to be as big as an elephant.

Ardeshir, thwarted in his military attempts to suppress Haftvād’s insurgency, turns to deceit, knowing that eliminating the worm is the only way he can keep his throne. Stooping to the degradation of disguising himself and some trusted companions as merchants, the king gains entrance into the worm-fort and asks to see the wondrous creature that he has heard resides there. Allowed into the worm’s presence, and slyly plying the guards with a surfeit of wine, Ardeshir and company are free to kill the worm by “feeding” it molten metal. With Haftvād’s good-luck charm eliminated, Ardeshir returns to being the unchallenged sovereign of his realm.

In linking together the stories we are considering in this essay, Krappe, who added Cian’s internalized worm to the narrative mix, was following the findings of an earlier comparative folklorist, Felix Liebrecht, who had noticed the parallel between the Persian nouveau riche despot’s luck-bringing kerm “worm” featured in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and the serpent(s) slain by the young Ragnarr (Liebrecht 1862). It is to his story that we now turn, relying on Ragnars saga loðbrókar.

Ragnarr, the son of the king of Denmark, wins a wife and a fortune in gold after slaying a snake grown monstrously large under the care of Þóra, the daughter of a wealthy man. The latter had given the girl a serpent (lyng-ormr “heather-snake”, ormr being cognate with Irish cnuimh/cruimh, Persian kerm, and English worm) as a token of his paternal affection. (The creature is still small and very pretty.) Þóra, in her own dwelling built specially for her by her father, places the creature on top of some gold in a box. The pile of precious metal subsequently increases in mystical sympathy with the pampered snake, which gradually outgrows the box and even the girl’s private quarters, encircling it and becoming an unfriendly, ravenous nuisance.

The father offers the double reward of his daughter and the gold to anyone who can kill the monster. As in the Persian and Irish analogs, cleverness and concealment are required in the encounter with this wormlike serpent-turned-beast, nestled around the girl’s bower. Applying a combination of pitch and sand to his pants and cape, Ragnarr invents a way to make his clothes resistant to the flood of venomous blood that erupts after he kills the snake. He also thereby wins the nickname loðbrók “Shaggy Pants”.

After the death of Ragnarr, his sons plan to attack England and slay the English king in retaliation—except for Ívarr, who holds back and does not participate in his brothers’ expedition, which ends in defeat. As was the case with his father when, faced with the lyngormr Ragnarr had devised a “shaggy” means of insulating himself from poison and when, planning to invade England, he built his oversized “serpent” ships, Ívarr diverges from the more predictable, confrontational path of behavior and resorts to a more subtle form of attack. This carries its own risks, as we saw when Ragnarr’s deceptive vessels went awry. But, entering into seemingly friendly negotiations with King Ella of England, not only does Ívarr succeed in tricking the English king out of a good deal of land, but he craftily lures away enough of Ella’s men so that the other sons of Ragnarr, back for a revenge-match, can now have their fill of bloody retribution.

By now, the reader has perhaps had the opportunity to see the workings of the four narrative elements outlined at the beginning of our traversal of these three stories. The following chart sets out what we have so far:

Controlling Female	Generational (Dis)continuity	Serpentine Hide-and-Seek	Entrepreneurial/Devious Protagonist
TDG: Sadhbh (Cian’s mother) protects the newly emerged worm	Cian’s relationship with his protective mother, and his parents’ ambivalence about the worm “sibling”	Cian hides his bump; The monster-worm hides in a cave	Conán strikes a shady deal with Fionn, and with Diarmaid for the spear
Shahnameh: Haftvād’s daughter nurtures the worm	Haftvād is named after his sons; his daughter loyally creates wealth for her father	The worm is hidden in an apple, in a spindle-case, and finally in an inaccessible fortress	Ardeshir gains access to the monster-worm by disguising himself as a merchant
Ragnars saga: Þóra nurtures the snake; Randalín nurtures snake-like sons	Ragnarr competes with his overachieving sons; Randalín helps to avenge the deaths of Ragnarr’s sons	At first the snake lives in a box; as a child, Randalín, the mother-to-be of snakelike heroes, is hidden in a harp and later is forced to disguise herself	Ragnarr launches a secret attack (unsuccessfully) against the English in his snakelike ships; in revenge, his son Ívarr tricks and outmaneuvers the English king

The tale of Cian and his worm begins with Sadhbh’s craving for sloes, which leads to a peculiar situation in which Cian parodies the process of gestation by carrying and giving birth to a worm from his head. The worm, like its story (as told by Diarmaid as previously told in his presence by Oisín), is doubly framed: no wonder, then, that there are thematic links between the framed tale and the master framing narrative as it is picked up after the killing of the worm. In the now of the main tale it is Gráinne who, we learn for the first time, is pregnant and, suffering from pica, starts to yearn for berries. On the other “side” of the framed tale, both of the stories framing it present a problem that resonates with the issues of relation and responsibility haunting the parents in the frame tale, Oilill and Sadhbh, as well as Cian—a quandary that also comes to the fore in the latter’s obligation to his foster relative who is injured by Cian’s verminal “twin”. That is, both Conán, in the story Diarmaid tells, and the young men to whom he tells the story seek an answer to the difficult question, “To what extent are children’s lives determined by the deeds of their parents?” The answers might share ground with the solution sought by the characters in the Cian story, struggling with the problem of a paradoxical “nonrelative relative”, the worm that grows dangerously out of control.

The “entrepreneurial” motif is less developed in the Cian story TDG tells than in the other stories we are considering. True, Sgáthán brings about an end to the vicious cycle Cian has brought upon those unfortunate enough to be his barbers, and Conán, thanks to Diarmaid, goes about slaying the monster in a fool-proof manner. More relevant in this regard are Cian’s so easily taking offense at the (false) report of Sgáthán’s having withheld hospitality from Cian’s servant, and the murderous jealousy Cian feels toward Sgáthán and the supposed recipient (Fionn) of the hospitality withheld from Cian’s representative. There is no indication in the story as told in TDG that the presence of the worm brings any good fortune or wealth to Cian and his family. At best, keeping the worm alive keeps Cian alive as well, although the text does not tell us whatever finally happened to Cian—did he die simultaneously with the worm or not? Still, Cian’s small-mindedness, his insecurity and fear of others, point to an avaricious personality of a kind we can see most clearly in the figure of Haftvād in the Shahnameh episode.

Just as Haftvād, who with the wealth his daughter and the worm supply can buy himself a mighty army and kingdom, presents the most explicit example of the antiheroic entrepreneur in our ensemble of stories, so his (unnamed) daughter showcases how intimate the relationship can be between woman and worm. No less shy than Cian’s creature, the girl’s wiggly good-luck charm commutes from apple (in which she found it, and from which she derives its food, initially) to spindle-case, and finally to a hidden fortress high in the mountains. Whatever benefit she derives from her relationship with the worm seems to be little more than the satisfaction of having contributed spectacularly to the family’s welfare. Moreover, the girl fades away from the story in proportion to the growth of what was once a rather cute pet. The relative insignificance of her character and of her role in the family’s decision-making brings out by contrast the strong bond between father and sons. The former is actually named after his male offspring (“Seven Sons”), who form the core of the “corporation” Haftvād builds with his wealth. With the fall of the father, his sons disappear as well.

His ultimate failure notwithstanding, the poor man turned tyrannical magnate—as insatiable as the worm that brought him his luck becomes (but that could so easily be fooled into consuming molten metal)—does leave his mark on the hero who defeats him and deprives him of his source of wealth and power. For the only way the king Ardeshir can protect his throne, and the only way he can gain access to the secreted worm and thereby aright his own increasingly dire situation, is by assuming the guise of a merchant. Ragnarr transports his army to England in merchant vessels, and his son Ívarr bargains with Ella and the English nobles he wins over to his side like a canny trader, but it is in the Shahnameh that the “entrepreneurial” and out-of-character element manifests itself in the actions of an individual most clearly. A king in a strictly hierarchical society such as that of medieval Persia should not be lowering himself to the level to which the desperate Ardeshir sinks—but this is what dealing with the overgrown worm and the social disruption it occasions entails.

The story of Ragnarr presents us with a remarkable fungibility among the four motifs I have adumbrated in our three narratives. Lines of descent hold firm in the story as told in the saga, and there is both intra- and inter-generational continuity, extending as far as the seemingly indomitable trémaðr “tree-man” (see note 17 above). This continuity is made possible, however, by the repeated demonstrations of the alarming ease with which serpent-slayers in the world the story conjures can pass on serpentine traits to their descendants, serpent-like humans can be heroes, and women can both raise serpents and give birth to heroes.

The central players in this fluid world of possibilities all initially play hide and seek, from the orphan in the harp, to the girl deprived of her beauty and rendered a “Kráka”, the snake in the box, the overdressed hero seeking to protect himself from snake poison, and the no-longer-concealed, distractingly beautiful girl, who later is both covered and revealed by her abundant hair. All this hiding-and-revealing bespeaks a fluidity of identity, a characteristic most flamboyantly exemplified by the name-changing figure of Kráka/Áslaug/Randalín. Perhaps it is why the saga leaves out any reference to her death, leaving us with the impression that she lives as long as or even outlives her sons. In this respect, as in many others, she stands in stark contrast to Ragnarr, whose death comes well before the end of the text, once his attempt to compete with a new generation in adventure and deeds of conquest ends in failure. As soon as the hero is deprived of the “shaggy” hair-shirt given him by Randalín, an item of clothing that both harks back to his loðbrók days and serves as a reminder of what he has gained by taking her as his wife, Ragnarr is exposed to the attacks of a new generation of serpents in a pit from which he cannot escape. It is undoubtedly a venerable heroic circumstance in which to find oneself, reminiscent of King Gunnar’s fate in Völsunga saga (ch. 37), but this “downward” and “backward” nightmare of immobilization and vulnerability, where serpents are poisonous nemeses, is the opposite of the shifting, flexible, and “upward” future Ragnars saga envisions, in which serpent-sons (and their mother) will prevail.

Translation

Translation

Translation

Tóruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne (TDG) I

Tóruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne (TDG) II

Translation see Ragnars saga loðbrókar