Monday, August 01, 2011

Theodoric and the Serpent

Today there's a nice piece by Theodoric the Obscure over at Mythopoeic Rambling about the Ouroboros, the enigmatic symbol of the snake circled round to bite its own tail.  It's a good read.  Here are a couple of ouroboric images I wanted to share.

Here's a dragonish variant of the ouroboros.



And here's one where instead of a simple circle, the serpent is twisted into an infinity symbol.


I prefer the infinity symbol to be horizontal, but I have yet to see an authentic ancient or medieval example.  This one is a tattoo design.


And here's the dragon version combined with the horizontal infinity version.
Another tattoo design. 


This one is my favorite.
One of the inns found in my Wessex setting is called The Turn of the Wyrm.
Something like this decorates its sign.

5 comments:

  1. Good stuff, as always.

    I tend to use an ourboros somewhere in every campaign. For my current one, it was carved into the wall of a round room - that also happened to be a teleporter room to another room identical except that the carvnig ran the opposite direction (my players missed the clue, though I managed to describe it both as clockwise and counterclockwise).

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  2. The Turn of the Wyrm...I like it! ::yoink::

    Thanks for the mention, Jeff! I like the infinity symbol update to the classic circle. One feels like there would be an ancient or at least a medieval example of it out there somewhere, for occasions when a rectangle of space needed filling. It seems like something that Got Medieval? would document for us.

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  3. The Midgard Serpent is one of these, isn't he?

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  4. Guy: I got you and Jörmungandr covered. ;)

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