Kraken

Region/Culture: Northern Europe (Norway and the wider Scandinavian seafaring world)
Mythos: Norse Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A sea-beast of impossible size that lies still in the deep, draws fish to its mouth, surfaces like an island, and pulls ships down in the whirlpool it makes when it sinks.
Role in Mythos: It is the great terror of the northern fishing grounds, the reason a rich catch over empty water was read as a warning rather than a blessing.
Relation to Humans: It sinks ships by rising beneath them, by feeding, or simply by being mistaken for solid ground that sailors try to land on. Fishermen both feared it and followed it, since the fish it gathered made for the finest catch a boat could take, provided they left before it moved.

The fishing was too good, and that was the warning. Out past the known banks, where the chart showed only deep empty water, the nets came up heavy and thrashing, more cod and ling than the boat could hold. The old hands knew what it meant. Somewhere below the keel, down in the black, something enormous was lying still and feeding, and the fish they were hauling had gathered over its back the way crows gather over a carcass. The wise move was to fill the hold fast and row for shore before the sea began to move.

This is the Kraken, the great sea-beast of Norwegian and wider Scandinavian sailors’ lore, the largest thing anyone ever claimed swam off the coasts of Norway and Greenland. Its name comes from the Norwegian krake, a word for a twisted, sickly, unnatural animal, and everything about the creature argues that the cold sea can grow something too big to be right. It is a monster of scale before it is a monster of malice, and the two are hard to tell apart when the thing is a mile and a half wide.

No one agreed on its shape, because almost no one who saw the whole of it came back to say. What the accounts share is size. Its back broke the surface like a low dark island, streaming seawater, so that sailors took it for a real shoal and steered toward the promise of solid ground. Points and horns stood up from the water around it, which some read as the arms of an enormous squid or octopus and others as the masts of a drowned fleet. Erik Pontoppidan, the bishop of Bergen who gathered the fishermen’s reports into his Natural History of Norway in 1752, settled on “round, flat, and full of arms,” and left the finer anatomy to God and the deep.

The creature is older than that book. Something like it already swims through the medieval north. King Sverre of Norway spoke of a monster in the twelfth century. The thirteenth-century King’s Mirror, a Norwegian father’s patient lesson to his son about the world, describes the hafgufa, the greatest of all sea-creatures, so large and so seldom seen that men doubted there could be two of them alive at once. The saga of Örvar-Oddr set the hafgufa beside the lyngbakr, the heather-back, a whale grown so vast that a crew moored their ship to it and lit fires on its spine, mistaking the living animal for an island, until it felt the heat and sank and took them down. The Kraken inherits both halves: the island that is not an island, and the mouth in the deep that swallows whatever drifts near it.

The hafgufa fed by lying motionless on the bottom and opening its jaws, and from that mouth came a scent, or a slick of chum, that drew fish in their thousands into the dark cavern of its throat. When enough had gathered, it closed. Pontoppidan’s Kraken did the same on a monstrous scale, and added the detail every sailor dreaded. It would rise slowly, and a ship might find a new island where the map showed open water, and the crew might even go ashore on it. Then the island began to go down. As it sank it pulled the sea after it, and the water became a whirlpool wide enough to swallow a ship, spinning down into the same black depth the fish had come from. The surest sign of the Kraken was the one read from a distance: water gone suddenly shallow and suddenly teeming, over ground that had no business being shallow at all.

It was not a demon. It was simply too large for the world it lived in, a natural animal scaled past all reason, and it did what large hungry animals do.

Its power was its size and its patience. It could sink a boat without deciding to, by rising or by feeding or by turning over in the swell, and no weapon a fishing crew carried could mark a body that wide. It commanded the water around it, drawing fish to itself and folding calm sea into a devouring funnel. And it needed to do almost nothing to be deadly, because a thing that can be mistaken for firm ground kills the people who trust it without any cruelty at all.

But the same scale that made it unkillable kept it away. The Kraken belonged to the deep and rose only rarely, spending what the stories imply were long ages lying still on the floor of the sea. It was a creature of cold and darkness and crushing pressure, and the surface was never its element. Alfred Tennyson, writing in 1830, gave the idea its strangest turn: his Kraken sleeps a dreamless ancient sleep far below, battening on the great worms of the deep, and will rise to the light only once, at the end of the world, to be seen by men and angels and to die there. Whatever it was, its true home was the one place its size did not matter, and it left that place at its peril. Now and then the sea gave up a giant squid, arms longer than a longboat and eyes the size of dinner plates, washed dead onto a northern beach. A fisherman looking at that would not have thought he was seeing the whole of anything. He would have thought there was more of it out there, and he would not have been wrong.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Kraken?

The Kraken is a colossal sea monster from Norwegian and Scandinavian folklore, imagined as a squid- or octopus-like beast large enough to seize and sink ships. It was said to lurk off the coasts of Norway and Greenland, lying in the deep and surfacing so rarely that sailors could sail a lifetime without meeting it.

Is the Kraken based on a real animal?

The Kraken is most likely rooted in real encounters with the giant squid, a deep-sea animal that can reach around 40 feet in length and washes up dead on northern beaches. Sailors seeing such a carcass, with its enormous arms and dinner-plate eyes, understandably imagined an even larger living creature waiting in the depths.

What does the Kraken do to ships?

The Kraken sinks ships in several ways: by rising directly beneath them, by being mistaken for an island that crews try to land on, and above all by the whirlpool it creates when it descends, which is strong enough to pull a vessel down after it. Bishop Erik Pontoppidan’s Natural History of Norway from 1752 describes exactly this whirlpool as the creature’s deadliest trait.

Where does the Kraken come from?

The Kraken comes from Norse and later Scandinavian seafaring tradition, with roots in the medieval hafgufa and lyngbakr, two sea monsters described in the thirteenth-century King’s Mirror and the saga of Örvar-Oddr. The word itself derives from the Norwegian krake, meaning a twisted or unnatural animal.

How big is the Kraken?

The Kraken was described as being more than a mile across, so vast that its back was routinely mistaken for a low island. This scale, rather than any special malice, was the source of its danger, since a creature that large could sink a ship simply by moving.