The Kraken

But despite its fearsome reputation, the monster could also bring benefits: Brave fishermen could thus risk going near the beast to secure a bounteous catch. The history of the Kraken goes back to an account written in by King Sverre of Norway. As with many legends, the Kraken started with something real, based on sightings of a real animal, the giant squid.

Kraken - Wikipedia

For the ancient navigators, the sea was treacherous and dangerous, hiding a horde of monsters in its inconceivable depths. After all, the tale grows in the telling. Not even Carl Linnaeus — father of modern biological classification — could avoid it and he included the Kraken among the cephalopod mollusks in the first edition of his groundbreaking Systema Naturae And so what had become legend officially entered the annals of science, returning our image of the Kraken to the animal that originated the myths.

The largest Architeuthis recorded reaches 18 metres in length, including the very long pair of tentacles, but the vast majority of specimens are much smaller. Like some other squid species, Architeuthis has pockets in its muscles containing an ammonium solution that is less dense than sea water.

Scientific legend

This allows the animal to float underwater, meaning that it can keep itself steady without actively swimming. The presence of unpalatable ammonium in their muscles is also probably the reason why giant squid have not yet been fished to near extinction.

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For many years, scientists debated whether the giant squid was a swift and agile hunter like the powerful predator of legends or an ambush hunter. Even as late as , when the Bishop of Bergen, Erik Ludvigsen Pontoppidan, wrote his The Natural History of Norway he described the kraken as "incontestably the largest Sea monster in the world" with a width of one and a half miles.

What Is a Kraken?

The Bishop also noted that the animal had starfish type protuberances: Because fish were attracted to the vicinity of the kraken, he also notes, Norwegian fishermen would often fish over the creature, despise the risk to their ship and their lives. An octopus-like kraken attacks a sailing ship.

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Later Kraken stories bring the creature down to a smaller, but still monstrous, size. Though early descriptions of the animal give a more crab-like appearance, by the 18th century it started showing up in drawings as a giant, many armed cephalopod like an octopus or squid. In the French scientist Pierre Denys de Montfort stated in his book on the natural history of mollusks that the creature encountered by Norwegian sailors was the kracken octopus.

Montfort even suggested that there was even a larger type of octopus than this, the colossal octopus that had been known to attack sailing vessels. The Kraken of legend is probably what we know today as the giant squid. It [the lyngbakr ] is the largest whale in the world, but the hafgufa is the hugest monster in the sea. It is the nature of this creature to swallow men and ships, and even whales and everything else within reach.

It stays submerged for days, then rears its head and nostrils above surface and stays that way at least until the change of tide. Now, that sound we just sailed through was the space between its jaws, and its nostrils and lower jaw were those rocks that appeared in the sea, while the lyngbakr was the island we saw sinking down. However, Ogmund Tussock has sent these creatures to you by means of his magic to cause the death of you [Odd] and all your men. He thought more men would have gone the same way as those that had already drowned [ i.

Today I sailed through its mouth because I knew that it had recently surfaced.



The narrator proposed there must only be two in existence, stemming from the observation that the beasts have always been sighted in the same parts of the Greenland Sea , and that each seemed incapable of reproduction, as there was no increase in their numbers. There is a fish that is still unmentioned, which it is scarcely advisable to speak about on account of its size, because it will seem to most people incredible.

There are only a very few who can speak upon it clearly, because it is seldom near land nor appears where it may be seen by fishermen, and I suppose there are not many of this sort of fish in the sea. Most often in our tongue we call it hafgufa "kraken" in e. Larson 's translation [6]. Nor can I conclusively speak about its length in ells, because the times he has shown before men, he has appeared more like land than like a fish.

Neither have I heard that one had been caught or found dead; and it seems to me as though there must be no more than two in the oceans, and I deem that each is unable to reproduce itself, for I believe that they are always the same ones. Then too, neither would it do for other fish if the hafgufa were of such a number as other whales, on account of their vastness, and how much subsistence that they need.

It is said to be the nature of these fish that when one shall desire to eat, then it stretches up its neck with a great belching, and following this belching comes forth much food, so that all kinds of fish that are near to hand will come to present location, then will gather together, both small and large, believing they shall obtain their food and good eating; but this great fish lets its mouth stand open the while, and the gap is no less wide than that of a great sound or bight , And nor the fish avoid running together there in their great numbers.

But as soon as its stomach and mouth is full, then it locks together its jaws and has the fish all caught and enclosed, that before greedily came there looking for food. Pontoppidan also proposed that a specimen of the monster, "perhaps a young and careless one", was washed ashore and died at Alstahaug in He stays at the sea floor, constantly surrounded by innumerable small fishes, who serve as his food and are fed by him in return: Pontoppidan writes, lasts no longer than three months, and another three are then needed to digest it.

His excrements nurture in the following an army of lesser fish, and for this reason, fishermen plumb after his resting place Gradually, Kraken ascends to the surface, and when he is at ten to twelve fathoms , the boats had better move out of his vicinity, as he will shortly thereafter burst up, like a floating island, spurting water from his dreadful nostrils and making ring waves around him, which can reach many miles.