“An anaconda-sized serpent said to round rowboats in a Telemark lake, now proudly displayed on the local coat of arms.”
Lake Seljordsvatnet is a cold trench of water thirteen kilometres long in the Telemark hills, and for nearly three centuries its surface has refused to stay quiet. Since 1750, locals and visitors have reported a long, dark, humped creature — Selma, the Seljord serpent — rolling through the calm of hot summer evenings. Witnesses describe a black, thick-bodied animal anywhere from ten to forty feet long, sometimes with flippers, sometimes with a strangely horse-like head and large dark eyes.
Selma is that rare monster a town has formally adopted. In 1989 the municipality of Seljord placed her on its coat of arms — a golden serpent coiled on a red field, designed by sculptor Trygve Magnus Barstad — and she has drawn sonar-equipped expeditions, camera crews and curious tourists to the lake ever since. Whatever swims in Seljordsvatnet, it has become the town's signature.
The Legend
The written record opens in 1750, when a man from Bø, rowing across the lake from Ulvenes to Nes, met something in open water that rounded his boat — a serpent where no serpent should be. The account set the pattern for everything that followed: an enormous snake-like animal surfacing without warning in a landlocked Norwegian lake, far from any sea it could have swum in from.
Sightings accumulated through the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tending to peak — as the record itself notes — during hot, quiet summers when the water lies flat. Descriptions vary in the details: a string of humps, an equine head, flippers, sheer black length. But the core animal stays consistent enough that Seljordsvatnet is routinely compared to Loch Ness, a lake of similar scale with a similar tenant.
Documented Sightings
Selma has been hunted with instruments. Beginning in 1998, expedition leader Jan Sundberg brought his GUST team to Seljordsvatnet, first gathering witness testimony, then returning with acoustic microphones, active sonar, underwater cameras, divers, mountain observation posts and — in 2000 — a specially built eighteen-foot tubular net trap designed to take the serpent alive.
The hunts produced fragments rather than proof. Hydrophones lowered into the deep water recorded sounds that researchers from the marine research institute in Bergen and the University of Copenhagen judged to have been made by a large mammal — species unknown. Sonar registered unidentified moving contacts, and in 2004 Sundberg claimed a photograph of a small creature about 1.5 metres long, though the image showed only a vague tubular outline.
The Lore
Selma's shape has shifted with her audience. The earliest accounts speak plainly of a serpent; modern witnesses tend toward something thicker-bodied and flippered, closer to a plesiosaur than a snake, with an equine head. Doubters have never lacked mundane candidates for a dark line on calm water, but two and a half centuries of testimony from people who live on the lake — farmers, rowers, swimmers — keeps the question honestly open in Seljord itself.
The town, for its part, stopped hedging long ago. Since 1989 Selma has coiled in gold on Seljord's red coat of arms, and the municipality wears its monster proudly rather than nervously. In a country of deep, dark lakes, Seljordsvatnet is the one where the old belief in the lake serpent never quite drowned — it simply learned to pose for sonar.
Field Notes
- ✦ Earliest written account, from 1750, describes the serpent rounding a rowboat between Ulvenes and Nes.
- ✦ Featured in gold on red on Seljord's coat of arms since 1989, designed by sculptor Trygve Magnus Barstad.
- ✦ Target of Jan Sundberg's GUST expeditions from 1998, using sonar, hydrophones and a purpose-built trap.
- ✦ Lake recordings were judged by Bergen and Copenhagen researchers to come from a large unidentified mammal.
- ✦ Sightings peak during hot, quiet summers when the 13-kilometre lake lies calm.
Case File
- Classification
- Lake serpent
- Category
- Lake/Sea Monster
- Territory
- Lake Seljord (Seljordsvatnet), Telemark
- First Sighted
- 1750 (oldest written account)
- Habitat
- Deep, cold inland lake
- Reported Size
- Reported at 30–45 feet, anaconda-like with humps
- Also Known As
- Seljordsormen · Seljord serpent