#vatnaorm

“Dyschromia”

Over the holiday break two important additions were added to my inventory: Jón Baldur Hilðberg and Sigurður Ægisson's Meeting with Monsters and a scanner. So now I have a whole-ass book on Icelandic creatures and a way of uploading traditional art without resorting to a shitty 3DS camera. So, while I'm in-between school and job surfing, there will be a few selections from my sketch-book to tide everyone over before an actual drawing is finished. This page... was actually finished before I got the book or the scanner. Whoops.

The first drawing is the original sketch of Jacob and the Haug-folk, which I've talked extensively about here.

Slightly below that is a cat-snake. Well, not really a cat-snake, but a vatnaormur, or water snake from Icelandic folklore. This was spurred on by A Book of Creature's entry on them, specifically the brief mention of the Hvalvatn snake, which was described as striped and with a cat-like head. This made me remember that I used to draw lindworms exclusively as cat-snake-seal monsters. I think it looks a little cute, especially the second one where the stripes are really standing out. Maybe one day I should do a full portrait of all the different water serpents from Iceland. Similar to what Pristichampsus did with Heuvelmans' sea serpents. Also ironic that literally two days after I drew this I got the book from which the description came from.

Finally, there is the finngalkn. It is a really obscure creature that I was trying to research at the time. This came after a very amateurish attempt at trying to translate the Swedish Wikipedia entry for the finngalkn. The beast in question is referenced in a few medieval sagas, namely Orvar-Odd's saga, Njal's saga, and Hjálmþés saga ok Ölvis. Most often it appears as a sort of centaur, half human and half-beast, although a traditional centaur form might not always be necessary. English translations of Njal's saga most often call it a wild man or something like that; a man-shaped beast that lives in the wild like an animal. The name approximately translates to "Enemy of the Finns". Whether this is because it was known from Lappland or that the Lapps (Sami) lived in what the Norse considered the wilderness and fought it, or something else entirely eludes confirmation. 

Most of the time people slay them like any other monster. Going back to Njal, it's mentioned right alongside a flying dragon as something a character just happened to slay as they were going about their business. Hjálmþés saga ok Ölvis describes a female finngalkn with 'a horse's tail, hooves, like a long man; bright eyes, a broad mouth, and huge hands'. To add to the confusion, as time went on it was mixed more and more with the Greco-Roman basilisk. Suddenly it gained deadly eyes and huge claws. Somehow its name was given to the Shadow Baldur, a relative of the skoffin in Iceland.