The Kraken is the great sea monster of Scandinavian legend: a creature so vast it could be mistaken for an island, and so strong it could drag a ship to the bottom. Unlike many monsters in this index, it has a satisfying ending. The legend grew over several centuries from Norse sea tales, fishermen’s stories and the speculations of an eighteenth-century bishop, and in the nineteenth century naturalists identified a real animal that matched much of it: the giant squid, which was finally filmed alive in the deep sea in 2012.[1][2]
| Name | Norwegian kraken, the definite form of krake, an old word for a crooked or stunted tree |
|---|---|
| Region | The seas off Norway and Iceland |
| Earlier relatives | The hafgufa of medieval Icelandic and Norwegian texts |
| First described by name | Christen Jensøn’s Norwegian glossary, 1646 |
| Made famous by | Bishop Erik Pontoppidan, The Natural History of Norway (1752–53) |
| Real animal behind it | The giant squid, Architeuthis dux, named in 1857 |
| First filmed alive | July 2012, off Japan’s Ogasawara Islands |
Before the Kraken: the hafgufa
Medieval Norse writers already knew of a monster that looked like land. The Norwegian King’s Mirror (Konungs skuggsjá), written around 1250 as a book of advice for a king’s son, describes the hafgufa, a sea creature so enormous that it is seldom seen, which feeds by opening its mouth so that fish swim in. Some scholars think the author was describing a whale. The Icelandic Örvar-Odds saga includes the hafgufa as one of the two greatest monsters of the sea. These are the ancestors of the island-sized Kraken of later legend.[1][4]
The name and the first descriptions
The word itself is Norwegian. Krake originally meant a crooked or stunted tree, and kraken is its definite form. The scholar Finnur Jónsson suggested in 1920 that the name came from the resemblance between the creature’s many arms and the twisted trunks or drags used by fishermen. An alternative name, horven, “the harrow,” may refer to the way it seemed to plough through the sea.[1]
The first known description under the name kraken comes from a Norwegian glossary compiled by Christen Jensøn in 1646, which describes a many-armed sea monster that drags boats into the deep. The Italian priest Francesco Negri, who traveled in Scandinavia, described a vast, many-armed “fish” he called the sciu-crak in 1700, and the missionary Hans Egede, writing about Greenland in the early eighteenth century, equated the kraken with the Icelandic hafgufa. Earlier still, the Swedish writer Olaus Magnus had filled his famous 1539 sea chart, the Carta marina, with monsters, some of them part whale, part squid, though he did not use the word kraken.[1]
Pontoppidan’s island monster
The Kraken became famous through Erik Pontoppidan, the Bishop of Bergen, whose Natural History of Norway (1752–53, translated into English in 1755) tried to set down everything known about the country’s nature, including its sea monsters. Pontoppidan described the kraken as the largest animal in the world, its back so broad that it looked like a cluster of small islands when it rose to the surface. Fishermen, he wrote, knew it was below when the water became suddenly shallow and fish were unusually plentiful, and they rowed away quickly before it surfaced. When it sank again it could create a dangerous whirlpool. He suggested that it might pull down even a large warship, and he guessed it might be a giant crab, a starfish or a kind of octopus.[1][3]
Pontoppidan was not simply credulous. He was trying, by the standards of his time, to collect the testimony of people who knew the sea. But the island-sized beast he described was assembled from secondhand reports, and it became the classic image of the Kraken.
Science takes an interest
The great Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus included a genus Microcosmus in the 1735 first edition of his Systema Naturae, which some writers have linked to the Kraken, although the claim that he formally named the Kraken is not confirmed. In 1801–02 the French naturalist Pierre Denys de Montfort went much further, describing a “colossal octopus” and a “kraken octopod” in his encyclopedia of mollusks. He blamed giant octopuses for the loss of ten British warships in 1782, a claim later critics called reckless falsity, and his reputation suffered for it.[1]
The giant squid is found
The breakthrough came in the nineteenth century. In 1857 the Danish zoologist Japetus Steenstrup described the giant squid, Architeuthis, from a beak and other remains, and argued that it lay behind the old stories. In 1861 the crew of the French gunboat Alecton tried to haul a huge squid aboard near the Canary Islands but managed to recover only part of its tail.[1][2]
Then, between 1870 and 1880, a remarkable series of giant squid washed ashore or were caught in Newfoundland. In 1873 a fisherman named Theophilus Piccot and his companions were attacked, they said, by a giant squid in Conception Bay and cut off one of its arms with a hatchet. Such specimens convinced scientists that animals of truly monstrous size lived in the deep sea. Many more strandings followed in New Zealand later in the century.[1][2]
What the giant squid really is
The giant squid, Architeuthis dux, is one of the largest invertebrates on Earth. Females, the larger sex, may reach about 12 to 13 m in total length including their two long feeding tentacles, though the main body (the mantle) has never been found longer than about 2.25 m, and the heaviest are estimated at about 275 kg. Its eyes, at least 27 cm across, are the largest of any living animal. Its main predator is the sperm whale, whose skin often carries circular scars from squid suckers. By 2011 close to 700 specimens were known, most found dead or dying.[2]
Seeing one alive took far longer. On 30 September 2004 the Japanese researchers Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori photographed a live giant squid attacking bait at depth off the Ogasawara Islands, publishing the images in 2005.[5] In July 2012 a team from Japan’s NHK and the Discovery Channel filmed a roughly 3-meter giant squid in its natural habitat near the same islands, and the footage was broadcast in January 2013. In 2019 Nathan Robinson and Edith Widder filmed a young giant squid at 759 m in the Gulf of Mexico during a NOAA expedition.[2][6]
How the giant squid fits the legend
- Many arms dragging things down. Squid and octopus arms fit the earliest descriptions of a many-armed monster pulling boats under.
- Size. A real animal 12 meters long is genuinely monstrous, though nowhere near the size of an island.
- Rarity. Giant squid live hundreds of meters down and are rarely seen at the surface, usually when they are sick or dying, which makes each sighting memorable.
- The island. The island-sized Kraken is harder to explain with squid. Pontoppidan’s account probably mixes in whales, floating mats of seaweed, shoals of fish, and the hafgufa tradition of a creature that feeds by attracting fish, which may itself describe whales feeding at the surface.[1][4]
The Kraken in literature
The Kraken was a gift to writers. Alfred Tennyson’s 1830 sonnet “The Kraken” imagined it sleeping for ages in the abyss until the end of the world.[7] Herman Melville gave a giant squid a haunting appearance in Moby-Dick (1851), Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea (1866) featured a man-eating octopus, and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas sent giant squid against the Nautilus. John Wyndham’s 1953 novel The Kraken Wakes used the name for invaders from the deep, and H. P. Lovecraft’s tentacled Cthulhu owes something to the same tradition. Today the Kraken is one of the most recognizable monsters in film, games and sport.[1]
Our assessment
The Kraken is one of the rare legends where a real animal was eventually found. It was not exactly the monster of the stories: no squid is the size of an island, and none is known to sink warships. But the giant squid is real, huge and strange, and it explains the core of the Kraken legend, a many-armed giant from the deep, far better than any cryptozoological alternative.
For a smaller octopus legend from Japan, see Akkorokamui, and for a sea serpent that never turned into a real animal, the Gloucester Sea Serpent.
References
- “Kraken,” Wikipedia, citing C. Jensøn (1646), F. Negri (1700), H. Egede, E. Pontoppidan (1752–53), F. Jónsson (1920), P. Denys de Montfort (1801–02) and others.
- “Giant squid,” Wikipedia, citing T. Kubodera and K. Mori, “First-ever observations of a live giant squid in the wild,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 272 (2005), and N. J. Robinson et al. (2019).
- Erich Pontoppidan, The Natural History of Norway, part II (London: A. Linde, 1755), ch. VIII, on the kraken.
- The King’s Mirror (Speculum Regale – Konungs Skuggsjá), trans. Laurence Marcellus Larson (New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1917), ch. XII, on the hafgufa.
- T. Kubodera and K. Mori, “First-ever observations of a live giant squid in the wild,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 272 (2005): 2583–2586.
- NOAA Ocean Exploration, “Journey into Midnight: Light and Life Below the Twilight Zone” expedition (June 2019), giant squid footage by N. J. Robinson and E. A. Widder.
- Alfred Tennyson, “The Kraken,” in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (London: Effingham Wilson, 1830).
Correction note (October 2026): This entry was rewritten from historical and scientific sources. An earlier version said the Kraken was mentioned in Norse sagas under that name, and described eyes the size of dinner plates and a beak that could crush metal, without sources. It now traces the name and the legend’s development and explains the giant squid. The illustration above is an artistic impression.