The lindworm (worm meaning snake, see germanic dragon), also spelled lindwyrm or lindwurm, is a mythical creature in Northern, Western and Central European folklore that traditionally has the shape of a giant serpent monster which lives deep in the forest.

Legend tells of two kinds of lindworm: a good one, associated with luck, often a cursed prince who has been transformed into the beast (compare to the Frog Prince and Beauty and the Beast stories), and a bad one, a dangerous man-eater that will attack humans on sight.

A lindworm may swallow its own tail, turning itself into a rolling wheel, to pursue fleeing humans (compare ouroboros and hoop snake).

[1] The head of the 16th-century lindworm statue at Lindwurm Fountain (Lindwurmbrunnen [de]) in Klagenfurt, Austria, is modeled on the skull of a woolly rhinoceros found in a nearby quarry in 1335.

To counter this, during hunting they swallow their own tails to become a wheel and roll at extremely high speeds to pursue prey.

He gathered around 50 eyewitness reports and in 1884 offered a cash reward for a captured specimen, dead or alive.

It generally appears with a scaly serpentine body, a dragon's head, and two clawed forelimbs, sometimes with wings.

Some examples, such as the 16th-century lindworm statue at Lindwurm Fountain in Klagenfurt, Austria, have four limbs and two wings.

[11] There exist several related offshoots of the winged lindworm outside Northern and Central Europe, such as the French guivre, and to some extent the British wyvern.

The French guivre, earlier vouivre, are more dragon-like than the traditional lindworms while the British wyvern is canonically a full-fledged dragon.

[12] A different heraldic definition by German historian Maximilian Gritzner was "a dragon with four feet" instead of usual two,[13] so that depictions with - comparatively smaller - wings exist as well.

[15] The shed skin of a lindworm was believed to greatly increase a person's knowledge about nature and medicine.

[16] A German folk legend, written in the 17th-century by Juspa Schammes, tells that the origin of the name of the city of Worms is rooted in a tale involving lindworm: This creature, resembling a snake and a worm, arrived in the city of Germisa and terrorized its inhabitants.

Every day, the people held a lottery to determine which of them would be sacrificed to the lindworm in order to spare the city from destruction.

[21] Because none of the chosen maidens are pleased by him, he eats each one until a shepherd's daughter who spoke to the same crone is brought to marry him, wearing every dress she owns.