Resurrecting Nidhoggr

A friend of mine who is a big fan of my Norse inspired work sent me an alligator skull that was found beside the swamp on his property in South Georgia and told me to see what I could do with it. It was missing a couple of teeth, but it was pretty clean (and it looked really cool), so I thought, hmmm, this could potentially make a nice dragon (as an aside, the same thing recently happened with a couple of deer skulls, but I’m digressing and will get to that in a future post). I’ve been wanting to do three Norse dragons for a while, those being Jormungandr, Nidhoggr, and Fafnir, so this was a pretty fortuitous find as far as I was concerned. I feel a bit of reverence where natural things are concerned - I don’t really like anything to go to waste.

I decided to go with Nidhoggr first, probably due to all the chaos that has been in the world lately. I got the skull all cleaned up and spent several days just looking at it from different angles before I landed on how I wanted to approach the Nidhoggr piece. I decided to just start at the bottom while I continued to mull over the logistics of turning an alligator skull into a dragon. I had a couple of long slices of cedar that I had gotten from a spot where people were clearing some land to build on and decided that it would make an excellent base for the piece. Besides, I have an affinity for cedar wood - i love the way it looks, the way it smells, the way it sands down, and I really just thoroughly enjoy carving it. Plus, there’s that whole not-letting-anything-go-to-waste thing again. As another aside, the Guardian Tree of my own home happens to be an old cedar and, as I am wont to do by tradition, I cast beer over its’ roots from time to time.

At any rate, with the cedar slice, it was nice and dry already. I got the bark stripped off, did a basic sand on both sides, then set about drawing on it. I took inspiration from the Völuspá (The Wise-Woman’s prophecy from the Poetic Edda), the Bellows translation, specifically stanzas 38 and 39:

38. A hall I saw, | far from the sun,
On Nastrond it stands, | and the doors face north,
Venom drops | through the smoke-vent down,
For around the walls | do serpents wind.

39. I saw there wading | through rivers wild
Treacherous men | and murderers too,
And workers of ill | with the wives of men;
There Nithhogg sucked | the blood of the slain,
And the wolf tore men; | would you know yet more?

So, in this portion of the seeress’ (Völva) vision, she’s seeing Niflheim (“Mist Home” or “Mist World”), one of the Nine Realms in Norse myth, a cold dark realm of mist and fog. It is, by some accounts, the last of the nine realms, a place into which evil men pass after reaching the region of death (Hel). The dragon, Nidhoggr, lives here and guards the eldest spring in the world, called Hvergelmir, from which all cold rivers originate. One of the three roots of the world tree, Yggdrasil, stretches into Nilfheim and draws water from this spring. When he’s not chewing up the villainous souls that inhabit this realm, Nidhogg spends his time trying to chew through Yggdrasil’s root, in an effort to bring about Ragnarök.

The Völva envisions and is telling us about the place where the oathbreakers and other treacherous sorts go when they die (no Valhalla or Fólkvangr for them!). She sees a Viking Hall sitting on a piece of waterfront land. Prime real estate, sure, except the longhouse is covered with snakes, and their venom is dripping down into the hall through the smoke vent (e.g., the hole in the roof to let fire smoke out, as Viking homes didn’t have chimneys or windows). In this passage Nidhoggr and the wolf (presumably Fenrir) are out on the shore devouring all the departed criminals of Viking society.

I decided I would go with relief carving - a winding serpent motif on the base of the piece, to represent the snakes covering the longhouse. While I know there are a plethora of much more modern, simpler and efficient means of carving, I still enjoy just doing everything with hand tools. It can be physically tiring and is certainly time consuming, but there’s something cathartic about the whole process.

For the rest of the piece, I drew inspiration from a couple of different sources. I ran across this illustration from a 17th century Icelandic manuscript depicting the various denizens of the World Tree, Yggdrasil. At the bottom of the tree is Nidhoggr, gnawing at the root.

Detail from 17th century Icelandic manuscript depicting Nidhoggr gnawing at the root of Yggdrasil.

Many times, when I see Nidhoggr (or Nidhogg) depicted in modern times, for some reason it’s as a giant snake. I, and obviously others, don’t subscribe to that particular interpretation. I personally think that for those who do, it may be due to a conflation of the snakes surrounding Nidhoggr with being the same as Nidhoggr. I don’t believe they are. Again, drawing reference from the Völuspá:

66. From below the dragon | dark comes forth,
Nithhogg flying | from Nithafjoll;
The bodies of men on | his wings he bears,
The serpent bright: | but now must I sink.

During Ragnarok, the bright, dark dragon Nidhoggr flies out from Nithafjoll (“the Dark Crags”) carrying the corpses of all those treacherous people (that we read about in stanzas 38 & 39) on his wings and is set loose on the world. Unsurprisingly, Nidhoggr is one of the few beings that survive Ragnarök. Nidhoggr as an entity is certainly representative of chaos, transformative destruction, regenerative cycles, and perhaps of judgment, but not of “evil” per se. There’s much more to say about the themes and concepts represented in this piece, but that is a story for another time.

At any rate, supporting the idea of Nidhoggr as a dragon, the illustration from the 17th century manuscript clearly (in my view) depicts Nidhoggr as a different being than the obvious snakes that are drawn at the end of his tail.

The obvious choice for a “dark, bright” dragon would probably be a glassy black; however, in this series (and in the previous series as well) I aspired to a certain aesthetic that I feel is evocative of the era when these myths were such a pervasive part of the lives of the Nordic people, and glassy black just didn’t “fit”. I knew I was going to go with earth tones -partly because of the aforementioned aesthetic I was after (not to mention, I just like working with earthy colors), but also because it seemed fitting for an underworld dragon living beneath the root of a tree.

Next up, the squirrel Ratatoskr and Yggdrasil’s root. I’ll save that for next time.

Rough sketch on cedar and beginning the carve out of the base for Nidhoggr:Ragnarok

Continuing to make progress getting the design cut in. I ended up deciding not to go too deep because I needed the stability of the wood to support the weight of whatever I’d need to fashion to hold the skull and the other items that would be attached to the base.

After a bit of accent pyrography and a first coat of Danish Oil almost ready to wipe down, progress. The darkness of the initial oiling of the cedar will decrease and a more reddish color will take its place on the heartwood, creating a nice dimensional interest, as you’ll see in subsequent photos.

After I gathered different bits of horn and worked them (carved, shaped or inlaid) to my liking, I set about figuring out how to get them attached to the skull so that they would not only be stable, but would serve as a base for the work I intended to do over the bone.

I stabilized the lower jaw and used apoxie sculpt to lock all the teeth in their sockets. This was also the method I used to initially fuse the upper and lower jaws. Apoxie sculpt worked well for this due to its ability to be sanded and polished.

Clay progression - almost ready to fuse the jaws shut. I decided to go with a closed mouth this time. I worked on the two pieces separately because I found it easier to move around and manipulate the sections when they were still split.

After the Danish Oil dried and completely soaked in, the redness of the cedar’s heartwood lifted up. For those who may be curious, the runes around the base (in the style of the Lingsberg Runestone) depict the Nidhoggr passages from the Völuspá, and I use a Colwood Super Pro II wood burner.

Here’s the skull with the horns attached and the building up of the nose ridge started. I erred on the side of caution and allowed this section to cure for several days just to make sure that everything was going to hold up. For those interested, this was done with Aves Apoxie Sculpt.

Initial layering of clay over the apoxie sculpt started. Apoxie sculpt has some heat resistance and isn’t flammable. Due to my previous use of it for securing teeth, I knew it would most likely be fine underneath the clay. Luckily, it did hold up well.

After fusing - beginning to look darker and brighter. I set the skull aside (for the time being, as there were still a few things to be done to it) at this point and began working on two other elements - Yggdrasil’s root and Ratatoskr.