Vrhnika's baby dragons: Valvasor's lizard and the olm

A page from the Ljubljana Tourist Board, September 2022, says that Valvasor wrote of the dragon Lintvern, who spews out water and his young.⁸ Valvasor’s chapter, printed in 1689 in Die Ehre dess Hertzogthums Crain (vol. 1, Book IV, chapter XXXI), does have a young dragon, a junger Lindwurm.⁹¹⁰ It is one dead animal that a postmaster said he had hung up in his house for three weeks.¹ The dragon in it is a Lindwurm, and the water is called Bella.¹¹¹²

Valvasor does have a dragon that drives the water out, and he does have a young one. He has no dragon that spews out its young, and no olm. Aljančič and his co-authors, in their 1993 book on the olm, say Valvasor’s dragon turned into one.⁶ The earliest suggestion of an olm that we found is a museum’s, from 1846.⁷

A water that runs when it is poked

On 24 June 1684 Valvasor was riding home from Cornial and stopped for the night not far from Loitsch, where he asked some peasants about local curiosities and heard of a water in the hills that ran only when touched.¹³ Aljančič (2019) places the peasants between Logatec and Vrhnika.³ The next day they led him there through the wilderness, and he had to work to get his horse down into the valley.¹³

The water is called Bella in Carniolan, he writes, and Weiss in German. It does not flow all the time: once at night around twelve, once by day around nine.¹¹ He had printed the story of the same stream earlier, in Book III, where a Dr. Schönleben had been told it ran only every fourth or fifth day. Valvasor corrects him from his own inspection and test: once by day and once by night.¹⁴

A woman who lived nearby told him her father once had a mill on the dry gully, the Stare malen, the Old Mill. When there was grain to grind, the family went up to the source, pushed a long stick into the hole and stirred, and the water came out white and ran for a quarter of an hour. The hole had been closed with a great rock four years before.¹⁵

The herders and a peasant he met gave a different reason. They firmly believed Lindwürme were in the mountain. There was a spring where the Lindwurm lay, the peasant said, and when the water collected until it was too much for him, he drove it out.¹² Steinberg’s book on Lake Cerknica (1758 to 1761) says the herders near Ober-Laibach believed a big Lindwurm rolled about in the hollow mountain and pressed the water out. Steinberg had not been to the spring, and he did not bother to repeat Valvasor’s long account.¹²¹⁶

The peasant said he had seen three Lindwürme in his life. Two years before, a young one had come out of the hole, and the hillside had fallen in behind it until it lay dead. For a witness he named the postmaster of Ober-Laybach, Herr Hofmann, who had carried it home dead.¹⁰ Valvasor took it all for “Narrethey und Fabeley” (“foolishness and fable”).¹⁰ He could hardly hold back his laughter at the peasant’s talk.¹⁰

Hofmann at the inn

As soon as he reached Ober-Laybach, Valvasor sent for the postmaster, who came to him at the inn. Hofmann said yes to what Valvasor had heard of the water, and then added that he had caught a Lindwurm two years before, carried it home and hung it up in his house, where it hung three weeks.¹ That differs from the peasant’s version, in which Hofmann carried it home dead. Valvasor gives both.¹⁰¹

From the postmaster’s description Valvasor draws this sentence:

“Summa”, he continues, “it was an earth-worm and vermin” (ein Erdwurm / und Ungeziefer).² He explains how the people made a dragon of it. It had rained hard those days, rainwater had torn earth and stones down from the mountain, and a good deal had been undercut at the side where tufa was dug. The little creature was then found dead half an hour below the hole, and the simple people (“einfältige Leute”) took it for a young Lindwurm.² Hofmann also told him that only small trout, about a finger long, ever came out of the spring.¹⁷

Valvasor does not claim to have seen the animal. It had hung in Hofmann’s house for three weeks, two years before, and Aljančič (2019) says he never saw it.¹¹⁸ His words do not settle what it was: a lizard-shaped earth-worm and vermin, found dead.²

He went back on 11 September 1684 with four peasants, who cleared the rocks from the hole.¹³ He pushed a two-fathom pole into it himself and stirred, and the water burst out white as soapy water.¹⁹ Valvasor put it down to air loosened by the pounding and a siphon inside the hill.¹⁹ Steinberg gave a siphon too.²⁰

A fish from another river

Steinberg’s book has another early report of an animal a span long. In 1751, he writes, Primus Sicherte caught five unknown fish in the Unz river after a flood. They were a span long, with snow-white skin and four feet, and they screamed and whined when they were brought into the boat.²¹ The Unz is not the spring at Ober-Laibach, and Steinberg does not connect the two, though both are in the same book.²¹¹⁶ Aljančič (2019) notes that Steinberg never saw the resemblance to Valvasor’s animal.²²

A sawmiller in 1846

In what we read, the olm first appears in 1846, 162 years after Valvasor’s visit, and the idea comes from a museum. Anton von Schöppl wrote in 1903 that reading Valvasor’s small, lizard-like “vermin” made the administration of the Carniolan provincial museum suspect olms in the Bela brook. Nobody had looked, so the museum’s custodian, Freyer, went on 4 November 1846.⁷ The museum’s report on the visit, as Schöppl quotes it, gives the place as per lintvernu, two hours beyond Oberlaibach.⁷ That is the earliest use we found of the name Lintvern for the spring; Valvasor’s chapter has Bella.¹¹²³

The mouth of the spring had collapsed and was blocked with masses of stone. A sawmiller dammed the water with a weir and let it off twice a day. He knew nothing of Valvasor’s swelling and vanishing water, and he had never seen a proteus in his pond; he promised to watch for one. Freyer believed him and dropped the inquiry, since the place had no proteus.⁷ In 1885, according to Schöppl, Deschmann spoke to the Carniola section of the Alpine Club and held that the wonders Valvasor ascribed to the spring belonged to fancy and that the brook had lost any intermittent quality it ever had.²⁴

Schöppl himself says the spring had dropped out of Carniola’s literature between Valvasor and 1847. In his own year, he writes, articles by Putick in the Laibacher Zeitung and the efforts of Oberlaibach’s mayor Jelovšek had drawn attention to it again.²⁵ Steinberg’s section on it, in his book of 1758 to 1761, shows it was not quite forgotten.¹⁶

How the dragon became an olm

Laurenti named the olm Proteus anguinus in 1768 and gave Lake Cerknica as its home.²⁶ The books that tie it to Vrhnika come much later, and they do not agree on how sure to be.

Of these, the 1993 book dates the visit two years early. It gives 24 June 1682, where Valvasor’s chapter has 1684.⁴¹³ It also says the spring above Stari Malin has since been tapped for a water supply.⁶ Makarovič reads the story as the earliest written evidence of how ordinary people pictured a dragon, a real animal, not a symbol of evil, and notes that even then the belief was not general.²⁷ Aljančič (2019) calls Valvasor’s account the earliest known published description of any cave animal.³

Each of those is a reading of a text that does not say “olm”. Freyer’s visit of 1846 found no proteus, and Hofmann, who says he had the animal in his house, described it to Valvasor two years after it hung there.¹⁷ What the sawmiller saw afterwards is not in anything we read.