User:Kiyoweap/Stoor worm
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The stoor worm, or Mester Stoor Worm, literally "greatest great serpent", was a gigantic evil sea serpent from Orcadian folktale, capable of contaminating plants and destroying animals and humans with its putrid breath. It is probably an Orkney version of the Norse Jörmungandr, also known as the Midgard Serpent or world serpent., and has been described as a sea dragon.
![Painting of Thor fighting serpent](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/74/Johann_Heinrich_F%C3%BCssli_011.jpg/640px-Johann_Heinrich_F%C3%BCssli_011.jpg)
In the folktale, the king of one country threatened by the beast's arrival was advised to offer it a weekly sacrifice of seven virgins. In desperation the king eventually issued a proclamation offering his kingdom, his daughter's hand in marriage and an heirloom sword to anyone who could destroy the monster. Assipattle, the youngest son of a local farmer, defeated the creature; as it died its teeth fell out to become the islands of Orkney, Shetland and the Faroes, and its body became Iceland.
The tale was preserved by 19th-century antiquarian Walter Traill Dennison: a short standard English version and a long local-dialect version reprinted in Sir George Douglas's collection of Scottish Fairy and Folk Tales (c. 1893). Another version by Orcadian folklorist Ernest Marwick is a 20th-century retelling, integrating Dennison's texts with tidbits from other oral storytellers.
Similarities between Assipatle's defeat of the monster and other dragon-slayer tales, including Herakle's destruction of a sea monster to save Hesione, have been noted by several authors. It has been suggested that tales of this genre evolved during a period of enlightenment, when human sacrifices to bestial divinities were beginning to be suppressed.