The Kraken, Monster of the Northern Seas between Legend and Giant Squid
From the hafgufa of the sagas to Bishop Pontoppidan's kraken and the discovery of the giant squid: the story of the monster of the northern seas.
For the sailors of Norway and Iceland the open sea held creatures so large that they could be mistaken for islands. The kraken is the most famous of these presences, an immense being that rose from the depths and could drag ships down with it. Its name, which entered European languages in the eighteenth century, comes from a Norwegian term that perhaps meant a twisted or misshapen animal, but the exact origin of the word remains debated.
Islands That Move
The idea of a sea monster mistaken for dry land is very old. The Physiologus speaks of the aspidochelone, an enormous whale on which sailors land believing it to be an island, until the animal dives and drags them down with it. The Navigatio sancti Brendani, the medieval account of the voyage of the Irish monk Brendan, tells instead of monks celebrating Easter on the back of a gigantic and peaceful fish called Jasconius.
In the North, the Norwegian treatise known as the King's Mirror, composed in the thirteenth century, describes the hafgufa, a monster of the Icelandic seas that opens its mouth and lures fish in to devour them. The Saga of Örvar-Oddr likewise mentions the hafgufa as the greatest monster of the sea. In 1539 the Swede Olaus Magnus published the Carta marina, a map of Scandinavia teeming with serpents and sea beasts of every kind.
Pontoppidan and the Birth of the Kraken
The kraken as we know it, however, was born in the eighteenth century, thanks to Erik Pontoppidan, bishop of Bergen. In his Natural History of Norway, published in 1752 and 1753, he gathered the testimony of fishermen and described an animal whose back, about a mile and a half long, broke the surface like a series of small islands. When it sank, he said, it caused a whirlpool capable of sucking in nearby boats.
Pontoppidan did not regard it as a diabolical monster, but as a real and rare animal whose habits the fishermen knew. It was said that abundant shoals of fish gathered above it, and that the most experienced fishermen could recognise the moment to row away. The bishop also spoke of long arms that the kraken raised out of the water, and some later naturalists identified it with an octopus or squid of colossal size.
From Myth to Science: the Giant Squid
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the French naturalist Pierre Denys de Montfort published the image of a colossal octopus wrapping a sailing ship in its tentacles, an illustration destined for great success. A few decades later, in 1857, the Danish zoologist Japetus Steenstrup gave a scientific description of the giant squid, which he named Architeuthis, on the basis of stranded remains and a large beak.
The giant squid, which can exceed ten metres in length including its tentacles, lives in deep waters and long remained mysterious. Only in 2004 did a team of Japanese researchers manage to photograph a live one in its natural habitat, off the Ogasawara Islands. Meanwhile literature had already claimed the creature: in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas, published by Jules Verne in 1870, the Nautilus is attacked by giant squid.
The kraken is a rare case in which myth finds partial confirmation in nature. No animal the size of an island lives in the oceans, but there are abyssal creatures of impressive size, which the fishermen of old could glimpse only rarely. Legend magnified those encounters until it made them the symbol of the unknown that lies hidden beneath the surface of the sea.