In various pieces of fan fiction #KingAlfred, a mysterious creature makes its appearance: the wyrm. Intrigued by this secretive being, I was inspired to research its earlier appearances. During Old English Fun Time Online, I shared my findings in a short presentation, and it seemed nice to me to further process my rambling/braindump ehm… ‘research notes’ into a blog post. So, for Paulo and other people that have asked me about it: here are some of my thoughts on the mysterious wyrm! 🙂 All comments & suggestions are very welcome, as always. Since the publication of this blog post, I have incorporated my research on the wyrm in two scholarly publications. Please follow the links below to read them. The unaltered original blogpost follows underneath. [2022 update] …

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Surakian wrote this untitled fanfiction for The Last Kingdom, in which King Alfred gets very sick (when hiding in the Athelney marshes) and Modwenna cures him. She finds out that he has a wyrm in his spinal cord, and her herbal medicine does not seem to work, but when he is as good as dead, she summons the wyrm (that is called Gifer) to go away. Republished with permission of the author.