Of all the monsters in the northern seas, the Mester Stoor Worm was the biggest, the oldest and the worst. In Orkney tradition it was a sea serpent so vast that its body stretched for unimaginable distances under the waves, its tongue could sweep whole villages into the sea, and its breath — foul, poisonous — withered crops and killed people and animals wherever it blew.
It lay off the coast of the kingdom and every morning it yawned, and as it yawned it demanded to be fed. The king's advisers, led by a wizard, decided that the only way to keep it quiet was to feed it seven young maidens every Saturday. The people suffered this for as long as they could stand. Then the wizard announced that the Worm would only leave if it was given the king's own daughter, the princess Gem-de-lovely.
The king offered his daughter, his kingdom and his great sword Sickersnapper to anyone who could kill the beast. Champions came from far and wide. When they saw the Worm yawn, most of them were sick on the spot and went home.
The hero, in the end, was the least likely person in the land: Assipattle, the youngest son of a farmer, who spent his days lying in the ashes by the fire telling tall stories about his own bravery. Everyone laughed at him. On the morning the princess was to be sacrificed, he took his father's fastest horse, a small boat and an iron pot holding a live peat from the fire, and he went down to the shore.
When the Stoor Worm yawned, Assipattle rowed his boat straight into its mouth, and down its throat, into the dark, deep inside the monster, until he found its liver. He cut a hole in it and pushed the burning peat inside. The liver, full of oil, burst into flame. The Worm writhed in agony. It flung Assipattle and his boat back out onto the shore with a great heave, and it began to die.
The death throes shaped the northern world. As the Worm thrashed, its teeth fell out, and they became the islands of Orkney. More fell, and they became Shetland. Later, more still became the Faroe Islands. Its tongue, lashing out, tore a channel through the land — which, some tellings say, became the Skagerrak between Denmark and Norway. Finally the Worm curled up tight and died, and its body became Iceland — and the liver, still burning, became the volcanoes there.
The Stoor Worm is a close cousin of Jörmungandr, the Norse serpent that coils around the whole world, and it keeps company in Orkney lore with the Nuckelavee and the Sea Mither, who battle for the sea each year. But the story belongs completely to the islands: the smallest, laziest boy with the burning peat, and the islands as the teeth of a monster.
Wear the Stoor Worm and you carry Orkney's greatest tall tale — told, fittingly, by an ash-boy who turned out to be telling the truth.