Stoor worm

[12] A gigantic beast with a ferocious appetite, it was able to demolish ships and houses with its prehensile forked tongue it used as a pair of tongs, and even to drag entire hillsides and villages into the sea.

[14] According to folklorist Jennifer Westwood, the stoor worm's head was "like a great mountain";[7] its breath was putrid, contaminating plants and destroying any humans or animals with its blast.

[17] The king of one country threatened by the imminent arrival of the stoor worm sought the advice of a wise man or spaeman,[a] who suggests that the beast might be appeased if it is fed seven virgins every week.

[15] In line with the wise man's advice, every Saturday the islanders provide a sacrificial offering of seven virgins,[12] who were tied up and placed on the beach for the serpent to sweep into its mouth as it reared its head from the sea.

[20] The day before the princess is due to be sacrificed, Assipattle, the youngest son of a local farmer and despised by his family, mounts his father's horse and at dawn arrives on the beach where the creature is just beginning to awaken.

[24] The islanders, believing that the world is about to end, clamber up a hillside to watch the final death throes of the creature at a safe distance from the resulting tidal waves and earthquakes.

[2][23] The Orcadian folklorist Marwick highlights the similarity between the method Assipattle used to kill the mythical creature and those recounted in the slaying of the Worm of Linton and the Cnoc na Cnoimh of Sutherland tales.

[23] Hartland published an analysis of the myths of the Perseus cycle in the last decade of the 19th century with the stated aim to determine "whether it be possible to ascertain what was its primitive form, where it originated, and how it became diffused over the Eastern continent.

[28] When researching the Dartmoor legend of Childe's Tomb folklorist Theo Brown[29] also drew comparisons between the slaying of the stoor worm and Jonah's three-day confinement inside a whale.

[30] Hartland concluded that tales of this genre were confined to countries beginning to move away from primitive beliefs and possibly evolved "out of the suppression of human sacrifices to divinities in bestial form.