Sjøormer — the serpents in the deep lakes and fjords
Norway's lake and fjord serpents — black, humped, surfacing under a fishing boat and gone again. Seljord's Selma has reported sightings going back to 1750 and a place on the municipal coat of arms. The kraken is the same fear scaled up to the open ocean.
In the deep water off Seljord, in Lake Mjøsa, and down the long western fjords lives the worst thing in the lake country: a black coil that surfaces under a fishing boat and is gone again before anyone can name it. Norwegians call them sjøormer — sea-worms — and they have been reported, in writing, for the better part of three centuries.
The descriptions never agree, which is half the fear. On one lake, in one century, one witness gives it a horse’s head with a mane down to the water, the next a dragon’s head, the next a black eel as long as a barn. Lake Seljord in Telemark has the most famous of them — the Seljordsormen, called Selma — with accounts reaching back to 1750, when something large circled a rowboat crossing the lake; more than a hundred sightings followed after 1900, clustered almost entirely in the tourist months. Lake Mjøsa, the deepest in the country, has a serpent that lies on the surface like a thick black log until it moves.
Some of the oldest accounts read like court records, because they were. The parish priest Hans Jacob Wille wrote in 1786 that the Seljordsormen had once bitten a man on the toe in the Lakshøl river. The Hamarkrøniken says a bishop’s servant on the Hamar shore shot a stranded serpent with a crossbow in 1522 and burned the carcass. In August 1746 Lawrence de Ferry — commander of Bergen Castle — fired his musket at a long horse-headed serpent off Molde and watched the water redden; two of his oarsmen swore to it afterwards in court at Bergen, and Bishop Erik Pontoppidan filed the deposition in his 1753 Natural History of Norway, between entries on fjord birds and the weather.
The open ocean had its own version, scaled up. The kraken Pontoppidan catalogued in the same book — round, flat, a mile and a half across — turned out, two and a half centuries later, to be the giant squid.
The lake serpents were never resolved. In August 2000 a team led by Jan-Ove Sundberg lowered a baited, hydrophone-rigged trap into Seljord and reported sonar contacts they could not identify; the cage came up empty. By then the serpent had already been made official — Selma swims, gold on red, on the coat of arms Seljord adopted for itself in 1989.