- worm. In Older Scots, a worm could be anything from an earthworm to a dragon. As late as 1590, Pitcairn's Criminal Trials describes a case where Bessie Roy was charged, amongst other heinous things, with drawing a circle on the ground, making a hole in it and,
be thy conjuratiounes, thow causit ane grit worme cum fyrst out of the said hoill, and creip owre the compase.
She was found to be innocent.
In James Somerville's Memorie of the Somervilles (1679), he describes
Ane hydeous monster in the forme of a worme soe called... by the country people (but in effect hes been a serpent, or some such other creature,) in lenth three Scots yards, and somewhat bigger then ane ordinary man's leg, with a head... in forme and cullour to our common muir edders.
By this time a degree of scepticism about dragons seems to have crept in.
However, you can still see dragons in Scotland today. Just look at the foot of the Apprentice Pillar in Rosslyn Chapel and there, sucking at the roots of the stone vegetation which decorates the column, is a circlet of little dragons. As the Earls of Rosslyn have strong connections with Orkney and, hence, with Norway, it is likely that these little dragons are a reference to Niðhogg, the dragon of Norse cosmography, who lurked under the earth feeding on the roots of Yggdrasil, the world-ash.
Earthworms were once held to be of great therapeutic value and in Dalyell's The Darker Superstitions of Scotland (1647) you can read how, all for the good of its health,
A child being stripped was rubbed with the oyle of wormes [and] held over the reik of a fyre.
A worm-web is a spider's web. James Hogg describes a chilly night:
My bed-clothes consisted of a single covering not thicker than a worm-web.
A worm in the cheek is toothache but a cure is at hand. Notes & Queries (1854) states that, in Orkney,
toothache is by the country people called 'The worm', from a notion they have that this painful affection is caused by a worm in the tooth or jawbone. For the cure of this disease, the... charm, called 'wormy lines', is written on a slip of paper.
This could be the answer to the current shortage of National Health dentists in Scotland.