SELMA

Opening

Selma, Seljordsormen in Norwegian, is the serpent said to live in Seljordsvatnet, a lake in Telemark about 13.5 kilometres long and up to 145 metres deep. Witnesses describe a long, humped body and a head compared to a crocodile's, a horse's or an elk's. The oldest written account dates from 1750, when the creature was said to have overturned a boat belonging to a man from Bø crossing from Ulvenes to Nes.

Seljord has put the serpent on its coat of arms since 1989. Since 1977 a Swedish team led by Jan-Ove Sundberg has searched the lake with echo sounders, sonar, underwater robots and hydrophones. It has recorded echoes, sounds and a filmed wave, but no animal has been caught, photographed clearly or found dead. The one carcass ever reported turned out to be a joke.

Timeline

1750Gunleik Andersson Verpe of Bø is moving his household by two small boats from Ulvenes to Nes. The account says the serpent overturned the boat he was towing.

1786Parish priest Hans Jacob Wille's description of Seljord says the creature goes under water like an eel and once bit a man's big toe at the Laxhøl river.

1880sA woman named Gunnhild at Bjørgesanden is said to have killed a metre-long, lizard-like animal with a washing paddle.

1977Sundberg's group, later called the Global Underwater Search Team (GUST), makes its first expedition and reports echo contacts.

June 1983Mari and Harald Foss find a dead snake 3.65 metres long at Lauvnes. It is a constrictor planted as a joke by an assistant at the University of Oslo's Zoological Institute.

1989The serpent goes on Seljord's coat of arms.

1998GUST98 logs about 250 hours on the lake with side-scan sonar and remotely operated cameras. It produces 11 photographs of a wave and about 20 minutes of video shot by Ulf Burman.

1999GUST99 adds aerial surveillance and a hydrophone, reported by The Guardian on 1 September 1999.

2012Sjøormtårnet, a 17-metre viewing tower, opens on Bjørgeøyan. In July, TV2 reports that 17-year-old Lisbeth Vefall filmed an object moving in the lake.

Key figures

Gunleik Andersson Verpe, the man in the 1750 account.

Hans Jacob Wille, the priest whose 1786 parish description put the serpent in print.

Halvor J. Sandsdalen, a local writer who collected the serpent stories.

Jan-Ove Sundberg, the Swedish investigator behind the GUST expeditions.

Lisbeth Vefall, whose 2012 film is the most recent widely reported image.

Physical and documentary trail

The written record starts in 1750 and is thin until the 20th century: Wille's 1786 description, then local stories gathered by Sandsdalen and others. A local book, Seljord og sogene, maps roughly 100 places where sightings have been reported around the lake. Reports tend to cluster in hot, still summers, when the surface is calm enough to show any disturbance.

The instrumental record belongs almost entirely to GUST: echo contacts from 1977, the 1998 sonar and video, and the 1999 hydrophone work. Sundberg presented these as evidence of large animals. None of it has been published in a form other researchers could test, and none of it identifies a species. The only physical object, the 1983 snake, was a prank by a zoology assistant.

Corrections to the earlier version of this report. The 1750 account does not describe an attack on a rowing man; it says the serpent overturned the second boat he was towing while moving house. The earlier report also said Seljord holds an annual serpent festival. I could not confirm one. Seljord's big annual event is the Dyrsku'n agricultural fair, held since 1866, and the dedicated serpent site is the 2012 tower.

Things you might not know

• The carcass was a joke. The 3.65-metre dead snake found in 1983 had been planted by an assistant from the University of Oslo's Zoological Institute.
• It bit a toe. Wille's 1786 account, among the oldest, records a bite to a man's big toe rather than anything grander.
• The heads do not agree. Witnesses have compared the head to a crocodile's, a horse's and an elk's.
• The tower was designed by architects. Sjøormtårnet was built by the practice Rintala Eggertsson as a place to watch the lake.
• A washing paddle features. The 1880s story from Bjørgesanden ends with a small lizard-like creature killed by a woman at her laundry.
• The coat of arms is by a sculptor. Trygve Magnus Barstad designed the gold serpent on red adopted in 1989.

Competing explanations

An unknown animal. Sundberg's position is that the lake holds large animals and the echoes and film show them. Against it: a lake of about 16.5 square kilometres would struggle to feed a breeding population of large animals, and nothing has ever been caught or found dead.

Known animals and water effects. Swimming elk or deer, otters, large eels or fish, floating logs and boat wakes can all look like a humped serpent on a long, narrow lake. A wave train crossing calm water, which is what the 1998 photographs show, fits this reading.

Tradition shaping what people see. Once a lake has a serpent, any odd shape on it has a name before anyone looks closely. The concentration of reports in calm summers fits both this and the previous explanation.

Later life of the case

Selma is part of Seljord's identity. It is on the municipal arms and has its own viewing tower, and the expeditions themselves have become part of the story. Sundberg's searches drew international press in the late 1990s, and each new film, like Vefall's in 2012, briefly revives the question.

Finding

No specimen. A lake legend with a dated account from 1750, a priest's description from 1786 and decades of sonar and video that never resolved into an animal. Waves, wakes and familiar animals cover the recorded sightings, and the one body was planted.

What still will not resolve: the GUST raw data. Sundberg's echo traces and the 1998 footage have not, as far as I can find, been released for independent analysis, so the best modern evidence is still known mainly through his own descriptions.