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Description
Besides Jörmungandr, the vile serpent Níðhöggr is the quintessential dragon of Norse mythology. Often Anglicized as "Nidhogg", his name means something like "the one who strikes with hate". Pretty appropriate, as while mentions of Níðhöggr in our primary sources are vanishingly rare, they paint a picture of an ancient and eldritch monster, the antithesis of creation itself, which is metal as all hell. Níðhöggr most often comes up in summaries of Norse cosmology. Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, drawing from the poem Grímnismál, places Níðhöggr at the base of the World Tree Yggdrasil, gnawing at the roots with his blightful maw. Between his hobby of eating the literal foundation of all creation itself, Níðhöggr finds time for his rivalry with the hawk at the very top of the World Tree, Veðrfölnir. For as long as anyone can remember, Níðhöggr and Veðrfölnir have exchanged insults to one another by sending the cosmic squirrel Ratatoskr up and down the tree to relay the messages. My personal headcanon which I utilize in the Drake Hero Universe is that the messages themselves aren't all that insulting, it's just Ratatoskr himself who's an agitative little man who chooses violence every single time he wakes up. I like to imagine Níðhöggr and Veðrfölnir are kind of in on the squirrel's capacity for vulgar embellishments, and they're able to translate the real message out whenever Ratatoskr stops by and belts out something obscene. That's my take, though. I honestly just love the notion of "cosmic insult squirrel", preferably with a barely-translatable Scottish accent.

In the Eddic poem Völuspá, Níðhöggr is associated with a particular hall in Hel facing north towards Niflheim. This especially dreary afterlife is called Náströnd ("Corpse Shore"), and is depicted as being a building made entirely out of interwoven snakes perpetually spitting venom into a wading pool below where the wickedest of evil men (your oathbreakers, murderers, and folkists), are forced to soak for all eternity. Awesome. Níðhöggr is said to "suck" on the corpses of these vile wastes to human society, which I can only assume means he slurps them up like wet spaghetti after "the wolf", as Völuspá puts it, tears their bodies apart. Snorri expands this set up a little bit by claiming there is a deeper, even worse well located in Niflheim called Hvergelmir, which Grímnismál attests as the source of all waters. This pit is so infested with venomous snakes that it is beyond man's capacity to name all of them individually. It is here that one of the three roots of Yggdrasil stretches into, and where Níðhöggr does all his spaghetti slurping. I do find it interesting that despite his name and cosmically horrific portrayal, we only ever hear of Níðhöggr doing this to torment evil men. Perhaps this hints at some lost characterization as more of an enactor of divine justice and wrath, or perhaps we're reading too much into material we just don't have. It's certainly an interpretation I like to roll with in personal practice and in Drake Hero.

The only other major appearance of Níðhöggr is after the end of the world, curiously enough. The ending of the Völuspá, which describes the state of the world inherited by the survivors of Ragnarök, has an incredibly uncertain air to it, as if even the Norns have no place speaking on this new world which is so different from the previous age as to be an entirely new universe in a way. As the new gods emerge and the last remnants of humankind are left to pick up the ashes of the previous world, Níðhöggr at last leaves his den in Niflheim. The shadowy serpent comes flying over the Niðafjöll mountains which guard the rest of creation from the realm of frost. He bears corpses in his wings, ready to descend. And… the poem just ends there. The resurrected völva explaining these prophecies to Odin just sinks back into her grave, silent on what actually happens next. Is Níðhöggr coming to finish the job, becoming the next big threat for Thor's surviving sons Móði and Magni to take up their father's hammer against? Or does he come in peace, an eldritch horror who is nonetheless wise for all his age, perhaps even related to the "mighty one from above who rules all" mentioned in the Hauksbók version of this poem? This stanza is often seen as a later addition crammed in to reference Jesus where he wasn't originally, but we can't be sure. Honestly, I'm okay with not being sure. I have my theories, but if even the Norns have nothing to say on the next world, I should hardly expect a commoner like me to survive that long to study it myself.

Design notes, this one actually proved to be more challenging than I expected. In my head, I initially envisioned Níðhöggr as basically a giant cosmic salamander, quite literally dripping with gross necrotic slime that corrodes any surface he steps on. While I did my best to maintain the latter half of that aesthetic, I found it very difficult to keep him amphibious as originally conceived. In the Eddas, he's actually described as having feathers of all things. Initially I thought I could get away with coating him in some sort of mossy tendril texture, but I couldn't find any real animal to reference which quite matched what I had in mind. The closest thing I could find were some spiky reptiles, and while I did end up taking a little inspiration from the marine iguana, I still couldn't find a spike pattern I felt could be satisfactorily adapted into a feather-like covering. So, ultimately I turned instead to the actually feathered reptiles: birds and their dinosaur ancestors. I took the body shape from something called an anhinga, colloquially known as snakebirds for their long noodle bodies. Seemed appropriate enough in that regard. As for the wings, because I'm a nerd, my mind immediately went to Yi qi, that little dinosaur with the really weird bat wings, for something more in line with that classic dragon silhouette. I also threw some hanged men tangled up under the membranes as a reference to the macabre visual in Völuspá. To maintain that slimy appearance I initially wanted to roll with, I tried to take inspiration from birds who fell victim to oil spills. That just ended up making me sad, though, and I'm not even sure it comes across very well in the illustration. It's very hard to do wet fur or feather texture in pencil, especially with the black color palette that always gives me trouble. I also gave him that unnecessarily threatening komodo dragon drool, just to emphasize how toxic his maw is. Overall, while it's not what I originally planned, I'm still quite happy with what I ended up with, at least in terms of lineart. Praise be the dragon king.

Description
Besides Jörmungandr, the vile serpent Níðhöggr is the quintessential dragon of Norse mythology. Often Anglicized as "Nidhogg", his name means something like "the one who strikes with hate". Pretty appropriate, as while mentions of Níðhöggr in our primary sources are vanishingly rare, they paint a picture of an ancient and eldritch monster, the antithesis of creation itself, which is metal as all hell. Níðhöggr most often comes up in summaries of Norse cosmology. Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, drawing from the poem Grímnismál, places Níðhöggr at the base of the World Tree Yggdrasil, gnawing at the roots with his blightful maw. Between his hobby of eating the literal foundation of all creation itself, Níðhöggr finds time for his rivalry with the hawk at the very top of the World Tree, Veðrfölnir. For as long as anyone can remember, Níðhöggr and Veðrfölnir have exchanged insults to one another by sending the cosmic squirrel Ratatoskr up and down the tree to relay the messages. My personal headcanon which I utilize in the Drake Hero Universe is that the messages themselves aren't all that insulting, it's just Ratatoskr himself who's an agitative little man who chooses violence every single time he wakes up. I like to imagine Níðhöggr and Veðrfölnir are kind of in on the squirrel's capacity for vulgar embellishments, and they're able to translate the real message out whenever Ratatoskr stops by and belts out something obscene. That's my take, though. I honestly just love the notion of "cosmic insult squirrel", preferably with a barely-translatable Scottish accent.

In the Eddic poem Völuspá, Níðhöggr is associated with a particular hall in Hel facing north towards Niflheim. This especially dreary afterlife is called Náströnd ("Corpse Shore"), and is depicted as being a building made entirely out of interwoven snakes perpetually spitting venom into a wading pool below where the wickedest of evil men (your oathbreakers, murderers, and folkists), are forced to soak for all eternity. Awesome. Níðhöggr is said to "suck" on the corpses of these vile wastes to human society, which I can only assume means he slurps them up like wet spaghetti after "the wolf", as Völuspá puts it, tears their bodies apart. Snorri expands this set up a little bit by claiming there is a deeper, even worse well located in Niflheim called Hvergelmir, which Grímnismál attests as the source of all waters. This pit is so infested with venomous snakes that it is beyond man's capacity to name all of them individually. It is here that one of the three roots of Yggdrasil stretches into, and where Níðhöggr does all his spaghetti slurping. I do find it interesting that despite his name and cosmically horrific portrayal, we only ever hear of Níðhöggr doing this to torment evil men. Perhaps this hints at some lost characterization as more of an enactor of divine justice and wrath, or perhaps we're reading too much into material we just don't have. It's certainly an interpretation I like to roll with in personal practice and in Drake Hero.

The only other major appearance of Níðhöggr is after the end of the world, curiously enough. The ending of the Völuspá, which describes the state of the world inherited by the survivors of Ragnarök, has an incredibly uncertain air to it, as if even the Norns have no place speaking on this new world which is so different from the previous age as to be an entirely new universe in a way. As the new gods emerge and the last remnants of humankind are left to pick up the ashes of the previous world, Níðhöggr at last leaves his den in Niflheim. The shadowy serpent comes flying over the Niðafjöll mountains which guard the rest of creation from the realm of frost. He bears corpses in his wings, ready to descend. And… the poem just ends there. The resurrected völva explaining these prophecies to Odin just sinks back into her grave, silent on what actually happens next. Is Níðhöggr coming to finish the job, becoming the next big threat for Thor's surviving sons Móði and Magni to take up their father's hammer against? Or does he come in peace, an eldritch horror who is nonetheless wise for all his age, perhaps even related to the "mighty one from above who rules all" mentioned in the Hauksbók version of this poem? This stanza is often seen as a later addition crammed in to reference Jesus where he wasn't originally, but we can't be sure. Honestly, I'm okay with not being sure. I have my theories, but if even the Norns have nothing to say on the next world, I should hardly expect a commoner like me to survive that long to study it myself.

Design notes, this one actually proved to be more challenging than I expected. In my head, I initially envisioned Níðhöggr as basically a giant cosmic salamander, quite literally dripping with gross necrotic slime that corrodes any surface he steps on. While I did my best to maintain the latter half of that aesthetic, I found it very difficult to keep him amphibious as originally conceived. In the Eddas, he's actually described as having feathers of all things. Initially I thought I could get away with coating him in some sort of mossy tendril texture, but I couldn't find any real animal to reference which quite matched what I had in mind. The closest thing I could find were some spiky reptiles, and while I did end up taking a little inspiration from the marine iguana, I still couldn't find a spike pattern I felt could be satisfactorily adapted into a feather-like covering. So, ultimately I turned instead to the actually feathered reptiles: birds and their dinosaur ancestors. I took the body shape from something called an anhinga, colloquially known as snakebirds for their long noodle bodies. Seemed appropriate enough in that regard. As for the wings, because I'm a nerd, my mind immediately went to Yi qi, that little dinosaur with the really weird bat wings, for something more in line with that classic dragon silhouette. I also threw some hanged men tangled up under the membranes as a reference to the macabre visual in Völuspá. To maintain that slimy appearance I initially wanted to roll with, I tried to take inspiration from birds who fell victim to oil spills. That just ended up making me sad, though, and I'm not even sure it comes across very well in the illustration. It's very hard to do wet fur or feather texture in pencil, especially with the black color palette that always gives me trouble. I also gave him that unnecessarily threatening komodo dragon drool, just to emphasize how toxic his maw is. Overall, while it's not what I originally planned, I'm still quite happy with what I ended up with, at least in terms of lineart. Praise be the dragon king.