The kraken is a legendary sea monster of enormous size from Scandinavian folklore, said to live in the Norwegian Sea off the coast of Norway. Krakens are usually pictured as a giant squid or octopus that could drag whole ships under the waves.
The kraken is not a real animal, but the legend probably grew from real sightings of the giant squid, a deep-sea animal that can reach around 10.5 metres (34 feet) in length. Sailors who saw one at the surface, or found a dead one on a beach, had every reason to tell a monster story.
Kraken: key facts
- What it is: a legendary sea monster (a cryptid), not a known species
- Origin: Norwegian and Scandinavian sailors’ folklore
- Name: from Norwegian krake, a crooked tree or a hooked drag anchor; “kraken” means “the krake”
- First written mention: a Norwegian glossary by Christen Jensøn in 1646
- Made famous by: Bishop Erik Pontoppidan’s natural history of Norway (1752 to 1753)
- Likely real inspiration: the giant squid, Architeuthis dux, up to about 10.5 m (34 ft) long
- Famous appearances: Tennyson’s poem The Kraken (1830), Clash of the Titans, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, and the Seattle Kraken hockey team
Source: Wikipedia: Kraken.
Where does the kraken legend come from?
The kraken belongs to the sea lore of Norwegian fishermen and sailors, but the stories reached the rest of the world through a series of writers between the 16th and 18th centuries.
The hafgufa and the King’s Mirror
Medieval Norse writing describes a huge sea creature called the hafgufa, roughly “sea reeker”. The Norwegian treatise known as the King’s Mirror (Konungs skuggsja, around 1250) describes it, and later writers equated the hafgufa with the kraken. The hafgufa itself, however, is usually treated as a fabulous whale.
Olaus Magnus and the Carta marina
In 1539 the Swedish writer Olaus Magnus published the Carta marina, a map of Scandinavia full of sea monsters. One of them, in the Norwegian Sea, is a fish with tentacle-like growths around its head and huge eyes. Magnus did not call it a kraken, but his description mixes whale and squid features in a way that later readers linked to the legend.
The first krakens by name
The word first appears in a Norwegian glossary by Christen Jensøn in 1646. The Italian writer Francesco Negri described a many-armed sea “fish” called the sciu-crak in a travel book in 1700, and the missionary Hans Egede described the kraken in detail in the 1730s.
Erik Pontoppidan
The writer who made the kraken famous was Erik Pontoppidan, the Danish-Norwegian bishop of Bergen. In his natural history of Norway (1752 to 1753) he wrote that the kraken was so large it could be mistaken for a group of small islands, that fish gathered above it in such numbers that fishermen risked fishing over it, and that its arms could pull even a large warship to the bottom. He was unsure what it was and suggested a giant crab, a starfish or a giant octopus.
The real animal behind the kraken: the giant squid
Most experts think the kraken legend grew from sightings of the giant squid (Architeuthis dux). It lives in the deep ocean and is rarely seen alive, which made it the perfect raw material for a monster story.
- Length: up to about 10.5 m (34 ft) including its two long feeding tentacles; claims of 20 m (66 ft) or more have never been scientifically documented
- Eyes: among the largest in the animal kingdom, up to about 27 cm (11 in) across
- Enemies: sperm whales hunt giant squid, and whales often carry sucker scars from the fight
In 1861 the French ship Alecton recovered a piece of a giant squid at sea, which the naturalist Henry Lee later discussed in a chapter on the kraken. In 2004 a Japanese research team took the first images of a living giant squid in its natural habitat. In July 2012 scientists filmed the first video of a live giant squid, swimming about 2,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific.
Other cephalopod tricks behind the stories
Squid and octopuses can change color, squirt clouds of ink and grab prey with sucker-covered arms. Giant squid also occasionally wash up on beaches. Any of these, seen briefly at sea or on shore, could easily grow into tales of a monster that darkened the water and seized ships.
What does the kraken look like in legend?
Descriptions vary, but most stories agree on a few things. The kraken is vast, with a back so broad it looks like a cluster of small islands covered in seaweed. It has many long arms or tentacles, sometimes said to rise as high as a ship’s mast. When it sinks back down, it leaves a dangerous whirlpool behind.
Early writers described it as a giant octopus, a giant squid, a crab or even a many-armed starfish. The modern picture of the kraken as a giant squid or octopus attacking a ship took hold in the 19th century.
The kraken in folklore
In Norwegian lore the kraken was both a danger and an opportunity. Fishermen said that when the sea bottom suddenly seemed much shallower than it should be, and the water was full of cod and ling, the kraken was lying below. A good catch could be had, but if the monster began to rise, the boats had to row away as fast as they could before it surfaced and before its whirlpool pulled them under.
The kraken also stood for the power of the sea itself, a way of explaining lost ships, strange currents and the unknown depths below a fishing boat.
The kraken in literature
- Alfred Tennyson, The Kraken (1830): an irregular sonnet about a monster sleeping on the sea floor
- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851): the chapter “Squid” refers to the kraken
- Victor Hugo, Toilers of the Sea (1866): a giant octopus that Hugo linked to the kraken
- Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: a kraken-like attack, in which Verne did not distinguish between octopus and squid
- John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes (1953): a science fiction novel that borrows the name
The kraken in movies, games and sport
The kraken appears in the 1981 film Clash of the Titans and its 2010 remake, and it is the pet monster of Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) and its sequel At World’s End. In George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and the series Game of Thrones, a kraken is the sigil of House Greyjoy.
Video games including Sea of Thieves, God of War II, Return of the Obra Dinn and Dredge feature krakens, and the name was chosen for the Seattle Kraken ice hockey team.
Was Linnaeus fooled by the kraken?
A popular story says the great naturalist Carl Linnaeus listed the kraken as a real animal in his Systema Naturae. What he actually described, in 1735, was an imaginary genus called Microcosmus, a body covered in other growths. He cited older accounts of sea monsters, and later writers called these krakens. The claim that Linnaeus himself wrote the word “kraken” in a later edition has never been confirmed.
Understanding real cephalopods
The real animals behind the kraken, squid and octopuses, are remarkable in their own right. An octopus has eight arms, while squid have eight arms plus two longer feeding tentacles, all lined with suckers.
Cephalopods have three hearts and blue, copper-based blood. They are smart animals that can solve problems, and octopuses are known to use tools. They change their skin color and pattern to hide and to signal, and they release ink to confuse predators while they escape.
Frequently asked questions
Is the kraken real?
No. The kraken is a legendary sea monster. The real animal most likely behind the legend is the giant squid, which can reach about 10.5 metres (34 feet) but has never been shown to attack ships.
What does the word kraken mean?
It comes from Norwegian, where krake means a crooked tree or a hooked drag anchor, and “kraken” means “the krake”. The branching shape probably reminded people of a creature with many arms.
Where does the kraken live in the legend?
In the Norwegian Sea, off the coast of Norway and between Norway and Iceland, where fishermen said it rested on the bottom and rose to the surface.
Is the kraken an octopus or a squid?
Both, depending on the story. Pontoppidan thought it was most likely a giant octopus, while modern writers usually link it to the giant squid. Early accounts also compared it to a crab, a starfish or a whale.
Who first wrote about the kraken?
The word first appears in a Norwegian glossary by Christen Jensøn in 1646, but Bishop Erik Pontoppidan’s account from 1752 to 1753 is what made the kraken famous across Europe.