Lindorm and Unktehi — folkloristic memories of CIS lobes and jökulhlaups?

The events described in Erlingsson (2008) may have been preserved in folklore. Although flood myths are very wide spread, also on the North American continent, different stories have different character. One story in particular caught the attention. It is from the Lakota Indians (the prairie Sioux), recorded by Erdoes and Ortiz (1984, pp. 220-222). This is a summary:

Unktehi was a great water monster, a snake with scales and legs, who filled the Missouri River from end to end (cf. Figure 1). She could place her body and puff it up in such a way that it made the Missouri overflow. Thus she created a great flood that spread over the whole country, killing most of the people. There were also smaller water monsters that did the same thing. The waves even threatened the mountains. The Thunderbirds fought them for many years, during which the earth trembled and the waters burst forth in mighty torrents, and the nights were like days because of the flashes of lightening. Finally the Thunderbirds retreated to the sky and sent out all their bolts at the same instant. The forests were set on fire, the waters boiled and then dried up. Until then the Unktehi had represented the water power, but now that power was taken by the Thunderbirds.

The story can be interpreted in the following way, using principles outlined in Erlingsson (2004, p. 96). It may recollect an advancing and growing CIS lobe in the Missouri valley that erupted in a jökulhlaup. The flood inundated large areas—effectively all lowland since it allegedly reached the mountains. The event led to widespread thunderstorms. Erosion of the Mississippi Canyon eventually reached an oil and gas reservoir. After several years and towards the end of the flood, a flash of lightening ignited rising methane gas, and the oil floating on the water was set ablaze. After this the ice retreated, since the glacier (Unktehi) was replaced by thunderstorms (Thunderbirds) as the symbol of water.

If this indeed is a mythical recollection of the jökulhlaup, it is probably the oldest historic memory that has been identified so far anywhere in the world, since it apparently is over 14 600 years old. This memory of the ice age does not appear to be unique, though.

Scandinavian folklore talks about the Lindorm, a word possibly created by combining two words for snake, and meaning ‘ensnaring snake’. It may be a giant snake with or without two front legs, a dangerous “wheel snake” biting its tail and rolling with an incredible speed, or the word may refer to the benevolent “white snake” whose skin it was a blessing to get. In heraldic, but not in folklore, it is a wyvern. On the Danish islands, which have an equivalent position in relation to the Scandinavian CIS lobes (Erlingsson 1994) as the Lakota tribal grounds have to the Laurentian ones, Lindorm folklore speaks of a very large snake with scales and two front legs. While sometimes described as a sea snake, in other cases it is described as a giant snake poking about in the ground, the appearance of which brings great destruction. The similarities with Unktehi are obvious.

Also the Cherokee, in the Mississippi valley, have a flood myth. They speak of a dog warning of the flood, and as a sign of the danger it showed its bare flesh and bones on its neck. Could it be that the ice lobe, covered by ablation till, had started to grow up from an increased floating level in the captured lake, so that the ice was visible? Could the bones refer to the ice, and the skin to the till? Recalling that the Danish and Swedish word for bone and leg is the same, “ben”, one may speculate that the Lindorm rather than having “front legs only” had “bones in the front only”. Remarkably, the same applies to Unktehi. In Lakota the word for leg is “hu”, while the same word “hu” repeated twice means bone (Vivian High Elk, pers. comm. 2006). An inexperienced interpreter might have translated “hu hu” to ‘legs’ rather than ‘bone’. Hypothetically, all three stories recollect that it is a bad omen when ice starts showing through the ground at the end of an elongated ridge, something that quite possibly can be a sign of an imminent jökulhlaup.

Although the Lindorm appears in many ostensibly unrelated guises, it seems that they can all be derived from an original meaning of ‘captured ice shelf lobe’. The rapid movement of the dangerous “wheel snake” could refer to a jökulhlaup. The “white snake” could refer to benevolent ice lobes (jökulhlaups bring up till in the ice according to Alley et al. 2005, why clean ice is a good sign). The valuable Lindorm skin could be the clay till, which is an extremely fertile soil. The saga of King Lindorm, who had to shed nine skins to become human, could be a literary corrupted tale of the many ice advances in the Danish area, each with its terminal moraine. Sigurd Favnersbane killing a Lindorm by digging a hole in his path and waiting for the dragon to come over it, could reflect the fact that a CIS lobe can not expand when there is a narrow gorge in its way (since a jökulhlaup will be set off when the hydrostatic seal reaches the gorge). The city of Klagenfurt is allegedly located where there formerly was a Lindorm, at the eastern end of the deep and narrow Wörthersee in the Austrian Alps. If the above interpretation is correct, an ice lobe advanced in the lake and the city is located on its outwash plain.

Figure 1. Ice lobe in Dakota ca 14,600 years ago, according to a glaciological reconstruction based on the Captured Ice Shelf hypothesis. The valley is the snowed-over Missouri river. Was this Unktehi? If so, this is what the "water monster" looked like when damming the valley, shortly before bursting forth in a gigantic flood of one to ten million cubic meters per second, according to the hypothesis.

References

Alley, R.B., Dupont, T.K., Parizek, B.R., Anandakrishnan, S., Lawson, D.E., Larson, G.J. and Evenson, E.B., 2005: Outburst flooding and the initiation of ice-stream surges in response to climatic cooling: A hypothesis. Geomorphology 75:76-89.

Erdoes, R. and Ortiz, A., 1985: American Indian Myths and Legends. Pantheon.

Erlingsson, U., 1994: The ‘Captured Ice Shelf’ hypothesis and its applicability to the Weichselian glaciation. Geografiska Annaler 76A (1–2): 1–12.

—2004: Atlantis from a Geographer’s Perspective. Lindorm, Miami.

— 2008: A jökulhlaup from a Laurentian captured ice shelf to the Gulf of Mexico could have caused the Bølling warming. Geografiska Annaler 90A (2): 125–140. [ manuscript | paper ]