“A tentacled colossus whose rising mistakes itself for an island and drags whole ships into the swirl.”
The kraken is the sea monster that Norwegian fishermen treated as a fact of navigation. A creature so vast that crews mistook its surfacing back for an island — and, in some accounts, landed on it — it haunted the deep water off Norway, and the danger was less its arms than its exit: when the kraken sank, the sea followed it down, and a whirlpool took whatever floated above. Eighteenth-century naturalists catalogued it beside the whales, in perfect earnest.
The legend has deep roots and a real animal at the bottom of it. The medieval Norwegian King's Mirror of about 1250 already describes the hafgufa, a sea-beast of impossible size, and the name kraken itself enters print in a Norwegian glossary of 1646. When nineteenth-century science finally hauled Architeuthis, the giant squid, out of the abyss, the kraken stood half-vindicated: the sailors had been embroidering something that was really down there.
The Legend
The canonical account belongs to the Norwegian churchman Erik Pontoppidan, whose Natural History of Norway (1752-53) set down what the fishermen told him: the kraken's back could be mistaken for a cluster of small islands; fish swarmed thickly above it — drawn, the accounts said, by its own murky, pungent discharge — so boats worked the water over the monster and counted the risk into the catch; and when it began to sink, every crew pulled hard away from the whirlpool that followed.
Size was the story's whole grammar. Norwegian tradition made the surfacing kraken indistinguishable from land — an islet with a mouth, in the encyclopedia's summary, 'as large as a fjord' — and described it variously as monstrous fish, giant octopus, whale or turtle. The island-trick has a long pedigree: the hafgufa of the King's Mirror and of Orvar-Odds saga worked the same deception on seafarers centuries earlier.
The Record
The paper trail is unusually good for a monster. Christen Jensen's Norwegian glossary of 1646 gives the first description under the name kraken — a many-armed thing that grabs boats down into the abyss; the Italian traveller Francesco Negri describes the sciu-crak in his travelogue of 1700; Hans Egede records the many-headed, clawed monster in 1729 and equates it with the old hafgufa. Pontoppidan's natural history then carried the creature into the libraries of Europe.
Science kept citing it. Linnaeus listed a genus Microcosmus in the 1735 Systema Naturae with the hafgufa tradition among his sources, and Pierre Denys de Montfort's 1802 treatise split the legend into two giant octopuses, one of them the ship-attacking 'colossal' kind of the famous engraving. The turn came in 1861, when the French warship Alecton brought back pieces of a giant squid; the naturalist A. E. Verrill's Architeuthis gave the kraken a Latin name and a residence — real, deep, and merely enormous.
The Lore
Etymology keeps the beast Norwegian: kraken is the definite form of krake, tied to Old Norse words for a crooked tree or a hook — a trunk with twisted branches being, as the philologists note, a ready image for a sprawling cephalopod, while the Norwegian encyclopedia offers Old Norse krekin as another candidate root. Beneath the word lies the older hafgufa tradition of the mid-1200s Kongespeilet, where the sea-beast already stirred maelstroms when it dived.
Alfred Tennyson's 1830 poem 'The Kraken' translated the fishermen's hazard into English myth — the thing sleeping in the abyss until the latter fire wakes it — and popular culture has never put it back: the kraken surfaces in Pirates of the Caribbean, Game of Thrones and a fleet of video games. Norway's contribution to global monster lore remains distinct in one respect: it began as a practical warning, told by the men who fished the water directly above the thing they feared.
Field Notes
- ✦ Popularized across Europe by Erik Pontoppidan's Natural History of Norway (1752-53).
- ✦ Probably inspired by the giant squid Architeuthis — proved real when the Alecton took a specimen in 1861.
- ✦ Now a fixture of global maritime folklore and fiction, from Tennyson's 1830 poem to Pirates of the Caribbean.
- ✦ First described by name in Christen Jensen's Norwegian glossary of 1646.
- ✦ Its medieval ancestor, the hafgufa, appears in the King's Mirror (c. 1250) and Orvar-Odds saga.
Case File
- Classification
- Giant cephalopod sea monster
- Category
- Lake/Sea Monster
- Territory
- Norwegian and Greenland seas
- First Sighted
- Named in print 1646; hafgufa lore from c. 1250
- Habitat
- Deep northern oceans
- Reported Size
- Said to be the size of an island, over a mile across
- Also Known As
- Krake