Tales of Iceland -or- Running with the Huldufólk in the Permanent Daylight by Stephen Markley

Author:Stephen Markley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Matthew Trinetti
Published: 2013-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

The Lagarfljótsormur

Illustration © SiggaRún, 2013

Six

Lake Monsters and Cute French Hitchhikers

Iceland has a mythical lake creature akin to Scotland’s Loch Ness Monster called the Lagarfljót worm. After we left Seyðisfjörður and descended into Egilsstaðir, we decided to drive all the way around Lagarfljót in case the monster decided to make an appearance.

With sightings dating back as early as 1345 and as recent as February 2012, this worm monster ain’t no fucking joke. There is even—ahem—a YouTube video of it. I’m not shitting you. Go look it up. Google “Iceland worm monster” and it will be the first hit. A sheep farmer drinking his morning coffee spotted the creature from a window, recorded it for a few minutes, and took the video to the news station in Egilsstaðir. Now admittedly, the video does look like a stationary bit of debris being pushed around by the current in icy, snow-covered water, but it also doesn’t not look like it might not not be a monster.

Lagarfljót is a glacial finger lake with Iceland’s “most important forest” surrounding its banks. Heavy siltation gives the water poor visibility (every lake with a lake monster conveniently has poor visibility), but sightings of the creature suggest it’s a serpentine, humped beast that’s either a few feet long, as long as a football field, or as long as the lake itself, depending on how drunk you are when you see it. In 1998, a schoolteacher and group of students claimed they saw it. Back in 1963 the head of the Icelandic National Forest Service claimed he saw it. In 1983, a contractor laying a thick telephone wire across the lake encountered something in the water that didn’t like the cable, and when he pulled it out of the water, his crew found severe damage to the cable in 22 places. He told a Reykjavík newspaper, “I believe we dragged the cable directly over the belly of the beast. Unless it was through its mouth.”

Sure, you can believe that methane gas, seeping up from fissures beneath the lake could send up material that might trick the eye, but we all know what happens to the asshole who offers that explanation in the movie, which is that he gets eaten by the huge fucking worm monster.

First of all, I refuse to be that guy. Secondly, I used to love all this cryptozoological shit when I was a kid. To the point where I read textbooks about unexplained phenomena from Bigfoot to the Big Bird of Texas well into middle school.

[However, because I was a savvy operator with the ladies, I never went on and on about the Chupacabra, the gigantic, man-eating Wuhnan Toads of China’s isolated Hubei province, or the Goatman of Prince George’s County, Maryland where sightings first began in Forestville and Upper Marlboro roughly around 1957. Unless she brought it up first, of course.]

As we drove by the lake, I explained my nostalgic predisposition to believing there are certain creatures hiding out in remote corners of the world

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