Loathly Worm

The Loathly Worm is the wingless, two-legged dragon of British border legend — most famously a bespelled princess at Spindleston Heugh, restored by her brother's three kisses.

The loathly worm — laidley and laidly in the border dialect the name comes from, both meaning loathsome — is the British dragon in its native form: gigantic, hideous, wingless, a serpentine body with two feet set at the front. The type belongs to the worm legends of the north country, where the same coasts and rivers that keep the Lambton Worm's milk-trough and reputed scraps of its hide also keep the most famous loathly worm of all, on the rock-bound Northumbrian coast at Spindleston Heugh near Bamburgh.

That tale, put into ballad verse in the eighteenth century from what its author claimed was a thirteenth-century mountain bard's original, is a transformation story. The princess Margaret was turned into a loathly worm by her stepmother the queen and banished to the Spindleston hills, where her poisonous breath blighted the country for miles until the people feared a permanent wasteland. Her brother the prince, home from abroad, vowed to slay the dragon — not knowing it was his sister — and at the cave's mouth the worm begged him not to strike but to kiss it three times and it would surrender. He did, and the princess stood restored; brother and sister went hand in hand home to Bamburgh castle, and the wicked queen was herself transformed into a loathly worm, condemned to crouch on the beach spitting poison at passing maidens until the end of time.

The story is the male-rescuer mirror of the loathly lady romances, in which a cursed monstrous bride is freed by a knight's kindness, and the ballad tradition knew its own kin — the border collectors noted its close resemblance to the enchanted-worm ballads of Scotland. What distinguishes the loathly worm among dragons is that the monstrosity is so often a sentence rather than a nature: the worm is what someone has been made into, and the cure is an act of trust exactly where trust is hardest.

[Generated Content] The loathly worm reads less as a personality than as a predicament, and its temperament follows: wretched rather than wicked, destructive by condition rather than intent, and retaining — in the begging of kisses, the naming of terms — the buried courtesy of what it used to be. Where the enchanted worm speaks, it speaks to end itself. The queen's version, spitting poison on the beach forever, shows the same shape with the moral reversed: malice finally wearing its true body. Read from the ballad, and marked as speculation.