Wow, this Scandinavian folktale about a royal family with a half-man half-snake prince is crazy awesome! glumshoe tells the tale of King Lindworm in this post and adds some amusing speculation at the end. They didn’t even mention the parts of this story where the queen, in an effort to overcome her childless situation, follows the advice of an old crone, who tells her to eat two onions. She didn’t peel the first onion before eating it, causing the first twin to be a snake man (sounds legit, lol). Also the lindworm does eat a bunch of his brides before he settles on the one, yikes. Anyway, here’s the Scandinavian folktale:
Source: glumshoe
(via: r/tumblr)
As the elder brother, he presumably inherits the throne. He’s the King now. If they had tabloids, they would have a very easy generation of muckrakers.
Nah. The tabloids would already have had their field day when he was born (royalty birth was always a big to-do). He would have eaten them long ago.
But in truth the transformation only last for a short while. Soon his skin starts scaling again, and one morning his legs are fused together again. When the prince tries to shed normally nothing changes, it’s only when he and his wife go through the ritual or slowly undressing multiple layers of clothing that he can shed back to his human form. They continue this for years. When on the verge of war the prince purposefully allows himself to change into the worm to defend his kingdom. Once victory is secured the men return changed hard, but the wives of the land have heard the stories of how the queen has changed the prince back to a man. So each wife does the same, upon their man’s return, dresses in many layers and upon their reunion night slowly sheds a layer while asking their husband to do the same. Just as the ritual between king and queen, it works of the wives and husband’s. The hardness and trauma or war is slowly replaced by the person who left. It becomes a ritual followed by the entire land to help men readjust coming back from war.