Whisht! lads, haad yor gobs,
An' aa'll tell ye aall an aaful story
Whisht! lads, haad yor gobs,
An' Aa'll tel ye 'boot the worm...
An' aa'll tell ye aall an aaful story
Whisht! lads, haad yor gobs,
An' Aa'll tel ye 'boot the worm...
The Lambton Worm is a folktale from North East England which is also the basis for a folk-song in the area's characteristic regional dialect.note Like most folktales, the details vary from telling to telling, but in brief, it generally runs as follows:
John Lambton, the son of the lord of the Lambton Estate in County Durham, is the sort of kid who would rather go fishing than go to church on a Sunday morning, which of course makes him a total Delinquent in the medieval society where he lives. However, all he catches one Sunday morning is a hideous worm-like creature, which he throws down a nearby well in disgust. Anyway, he eventually grows up into a good guy who regrets his past misbehavior, and goes off to fight in The Crusades.
However, while he's away, the worm grows into a gigantic monstrosity which emerges from the well and starts laying waste to the countryside. When he comes home John is naturally appalled by this and prepares to fight the monster. He consults a wise woman, who tells him where the worm came from and gives him some useful pointers but warns him that beating the worm comes with a price; he must kill the first living thing he sees after the fight, or his family will be cursed. Following her advice, he attaches spearheads to his armor, so when the worm wraps itself around him to try to crush the life out of him, it just impales itself on the spikes and dies.
Unfortunately, although John has left careful instructions for a dog to be released as he returns so he can kill that, his father is so pleased to see that John has survived that he rushes out to greet him. John can't bring himself to kill his own father, so the curse descends; nine generations of his family are doomed not to die in their beds.
The Lambton Worm provides examples of:
- Adaptational Distillation: The song, being just song length, misses out a lot of the details that show up in prose versions of the story — most notably, the wise woman, the spiked armor, the Worm's regeneration and the clause about Sir John killing the first creature he sees are all absent.
- Anti-Regeneration: The worm is difficult to kill because it can reattach parts of its body that are cut off. Sir John fights it in the River Wear while wearing that armor — so the river flow washes its severed body parts away before it can reattach them.
- "Begone" Bribe: When the worm first approaches his castle, John's father offers it a kind of bribe — the milk of nine good cows, enough to fill a large trough. This does sedate the worm somewhat, but either the effect is incomplete or the expense of losing nine good cows' milk every day is ruinous, because Sir John comes home some years later to find the estate devastated.
- Blue Blood: The story is a legend about the history of a real-world upper class family (although, strictly speaking, the Lambtons weren't raised to the aristocracy until the 19th century). Sir John becomes The Dragonslayer; there's a bit of Authority Equals Asskicking there, but this is one of those cases where it would help that the nobility can afford weapons, armor, and combat training. Unfortunately, a Hereditary Curse then falls on his lineage.
- Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: Defeating the worm carries a major Hereditary Curse as a side-effect (albeit with a get-out clause that, unfortunately for the Lambtons, doesn't help). It's not clear if the Worm itself can somehow invoke a dying curse or if this is some kind of weird price attached to the wise woman's advice.
- Create Your Own Villain: The Worm came into being to begin with as a result of John Lambton a) going fishing when he shouldn't have been, and b) tossing it down a well and forgetting about instead of making sure he'd properly disposed of it.
- Dragons Are Demonic: Sir John first discovers the Worm by fishing it up from a river on a Sunday during mass-time. The circumstances suggest that the worm is allowed into the world because Sir John skipped church, and the Hereditary Curse it bestows on him further emphasizes that this isn't just a dangerous animal.
- The Dragonslayer: Sir John just kills the one draconic monster, but he gets the job done when even other knights have been killed by the Worm. The difference is that he has the good fortune to receive sound advice from the wise woman, and the good sense to act on it.
- Dragons Versus Knights: Several knights are usually described as coming to Durnham to try to slay the Worm, but fail. Ultimately, John, now a battle-hardened knight himself, comes and puts down the beast for good.
- The Fair Folk: The worm itself may not be a faerie being — although its weird and dangerous nature places it somewhere in the same area — but the mysterious, exposition-rich (and possibly treacherous) advisor figure who sets the plot rolling or moves it along in various versions of the tale, sometimes by prodding John into foolhardy acts under the banner of dragon-slaying daring-do that will be immortalised in song? That could very well be at least an echo of a faerie being, taking advantage of the initially sinning, unsanctified, and thus unprotected John.
- From Nobody to Nightmare: The Worm starts out as a tiny, harmless fish caught by John Lambton while fishing, small enough to be handled with ease and casually tossed down a well. The Worm then spends years growing within the well, and by the time it crawls back out it's a huge, powerful, terrifying monster that can hold all of the countryside in terrified thrall.
- Gigantic Adults, Tiny Babies: The infant creature that John pulls out of the river is only a tiny, wriggling worm, small enough that John can easily carry about his rod with it dangling from the line. As an adult, the Worm is large enough to wrap itself ten times around a local hill.
- Healing Factor: The Worm can heal any injury it takes, to the point that it can rejoin segments of its body that have been hacked off. The only way to defeat it is for John Lambton to wear a suit of armour covered in spearheads and fight it in a river. When the Worm, which fights by crushing opponents, wraps itself around the knight, the blades on his armor cut it apart, and the running river washes the individual segments away so the Worm can't reconnect itself.
- Hereditary Curse: John unintentionally brings a curse down on his family. The story may have been created to explain why a number of Lambtons did die young, in battle or accidents, though not actually for nine consecutive generations.
- Improvised Weapon: For a change, it's the non-humanoid monster manifesting this trope. The worm grabs uprooted trees in its jaws and swings them around to batter opponents.
- Our Dragons Are Different: The worm is a typical example of a medieval folkloric dragon — it's a huge, horrifying, reptilian monster, laying waste to the countryside, devouring livestock and children, and needing to be killed by a hero. It's limbless and doesn't fly, showing more of an inclination for living in water, and doesn't breathe fire (although, in some versions of the story, its breath is poisonous enough to pollute the whole district), and it doesn't show much sign of intelligence, being strictly a ravening beast. It also has amazing regenerative powers and the smarts to swing uprooted trees around in its jaws as weapons, which are unusual features for a dragon. Its larval form is sometimes described as having a row of nine holes on each side of its mouth, which artwork often depicts on the adult beast as well, suggesting that it may have been based on a lamprey.
- Pulling Themselves Together: The worm can heal any injury it takes, to the point that it can rejoin segments of its body that have been hacked off.
- Rash Promise: John Lambton promises the witch who helps him slay the worm that he will kill the first thing to meet him when he returns home. He prepares ahead of time by telling his dad to let a dog out, but his father forgets and runs out to greet his victorious son, getting there ahead of the dog. John figures nobody will know the difference and kills the dog, resulting in the family being cursed for several generations.
- Reptiles Are Abhorrent: The worm is a serpent-like creature which employs a constriction attack (interestingly, in that there are no large constrictor snakes native to Britain) — and it's a hideous monster that just needs killing.
- Solitary Sorceress: The wise woman who Sir John consults is described as a "witch" in many tellings of the story. All she does is provide advice, but who knows where she gets her information from? It's freely given and effective, so apparently she isn't a Wicked Witch — unless of course she actually tacks the nine-generation curse onto it herself as a nasty price tag.
- Spikes of Villainy: An unusual non-villainous and actually useful version; Sir John's spiked armor kills the worm where other knights with more conventional equipment have failed and died.
- Would Hurt a Child: As the song says, the worm would happily "swally little bairns alive", demonstrating its qualifications as a horrifying menace. But then, it's just a hungry carnivore; there's no point in expecting it to recognise moral limitations.
