Kraken

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Names & Creature Profile

The kraken is an immense sea-being of Norwegian lore whose partly exposed body can look like islands. Natural historian Erik Pontoppidan records Kraken, Kraxen and Krabben among its names in his 1755 English edition. His creature is round, flat and many-armed, but incompletely known. Later portraits often resemble giant squid. The island-like back and the recognizable cephalopod belong to a history of changing descriptions. [1][2]

Tales & Encounters

Pontoppidan’s fishermen row several miles offshore on warm summer days. Judging their position by landmarks, they expect eighty or a hundred fathoms of water, but their lines find twenty or thirty, sometimes less. Cod and ling crowd the hooks. As many as twenty boats gather, keeping a moderate distance from one another and checking whether the depth remains steady. The rich catch makes this a place to seek, provided the crews know when to abandon it. [1]

When the water seems shallower still, they stop fishing and row away. At the expected depth they rest on their oars and watch. What rises looks like small islands surrounded by drifting weeds. Fish leap on higher parts resembling sandbanks and slide back into the water. Bright points appear, growing thicker as they climb to the height of masts. After a short interval the creature slowly sinks. Its descent raises a swell and a whirlpool said to drag surrounding things down. Withdrawal is as dangerous as arrival. [1]

The Reverend Mr Friis supplied Pontoppidan with an account dated 1680. A krake entered the water between rocks and cliffs in the parish of Alstahoug. Its extended arms caught trees near the water, and its body or appendages became entangled in openings in the rock. Unable to free itself, the creature died there. The decaying carcass reportedly filled much of the narrow channel, and its smell made passage almost impossible. Pontoppidan presents the relation on Friis’s credit and laments the missed chance to examine the whole animal. No preserved body accompanies the account. [1]

Pontoppidan also relays a boatwreck near Fridrichstad. Two fishermen enter water thick with slime and try to turn away. Before they can escape, one of the kraken’s horns crushes the bow. They struggle to save themselves on the wreck, although the sea is calm. Unlike the broad account of profitable fishing, this report ends in the loss of a boat. Pontoppidan says it is the only such harmful incident he has heard described, then observes that people killed at sea could bring back no report. His qualification acknowledges an absence without supplying another witnessed event.

Nature & Powers

The attraction of fish receives an explanation of its own. Pontoppidan reports that the creature alternates long periods of feeding and excretion. Its emissions cloud the water and draw fish by scent or taste; it then gathers and swallows them. Digestion makes the next bait. The fishermen’s catch interrupts an imagined feeding cycle in which the same abundance that brings them profit also sustains the animal below. [1]

Pontoppidan is less certain about that cycle than about the creature’s existence. He also interprets the rising points as arms or feelers and repeats the claim that they could pull down a warship. Observation, explanation and reported capacity run together in his chapter, but not with equal confidence. The fishermen describe what seems to happen at the surface; the author tries to give the unseen body a way of moving and feeding. [1]

Appearance & Signs

Pontoppidan estimates the visible upper surface at about an English mile and a half in circumference, explicitly choosing the smaller of the figures he has heard. Even that extraordinary outline leaves most of the creature hidden. Calling it an island offers a scale familiar to a mariner, while making the sea itself unreliable: a boat may approach apparent ground that can rise or vanish. [1]

Modern giant and colossal squid have eight arms and two longer tentacles, as the Natural History Museum explains. That count supplies a definite anatomy beside Pontoppidan’s shifting banks, weeds and points. The partly concealed tentacles in this folio select the later cephalopod-like image; they do not complete the missing outline of his reported animal. [6][1]

Homeland & Tradition

Sveinung Lutro and Anne-Sofie Schjøtner Skaar’s Norwegian reference account locates coastal kraken legends especially in western and northern Norway. Clear, still, warm summer conditions recur in the appearances they describe. The monster can therefore disturb a day whose weather seems favourable, as it does in Pontoppidan’s account of the wreck near Fridrichstad. [2][1]

In the fishing sequence, danger enters an occupied working world. The crews have landmarks to steer by, hooks to fill and neighbouring boats to consider. They neither flee at the first sign nor remain until the body appears. Their supposed knowledge lets them profit from an extraordinary presence, then leave before the advantage reverses. The encounter turns on timing as much as terror. [1]

Historical Record

Pontoppidan also uses the kraken to explain land that will not stay on a map. Through the physician Urban Hierne, he quotes Baron Charles Grippenhielm’s account of sounding among rocks near Stockholm. A place called Gummars-ore was said to appear and disappear, yet a map included it as an island. Grippenhielm sees three points of apparent land and wonders whether he has previously overlooked them. He calls a local man to ask about the place. By the time the man arrives, there is nothing to see. [1]

The local man regards the disappearance as a sign of a storm or plentiful fish. Pontoppidan chooses a different explanation: the mapped island must be a kraken surfacing among the rocks. He presents this conclusion forcefully, although his access to the event is through another author’s quotation. His argument converts uncertain geography into a living body. The proposal explains why the apparent land moves, but the cited encounter does not reveal the complete animal he imagines beneath it. [1]

He is selective about older sea stories. He rejects Olaus Magnus’s account of sailors landing and lighting fires on a huge whale, while treating it as a distortion of something like his kraken. Branching forms described in older natural history then help him propose an affinity with a polyp or starfish. His confidence grows through comparison, rather than through examination of a captured specimen. The modern name Architeuthis does not appear as the answer to that eighteenth-century classification. [1]

Variants & Kindred Beings

Store norske leksikon places the kraken beside the medieval hafgufa and other sea beings mistaken for land. Fish-like and cephalopod-like descriptions coexist in its survey. A shared island illusion is a useful connection, but the names come through distinct texts and histories. Pontoppidan’s own rejection of the whale landing story shows that even a writer convinced of the kraken could disagree about which mariners’ wonders belonged with it. [2][1]

Meaning & Belief

Alfred Tennyson’s The Kraken, first published in 1830, gives the creature a fate far beyond a fishing voyage. It sleeps beneath faint light while immense sponges grow above it and other enormous beings move nearby. Ages pass. It feeds in its sleep until a final fire heats the deep; then it rises before human and angelic witnesses and dies at the surface. Its only universal revelation is also its ending. Beside Pontoppidan’s regret over Friis’s decaying carcass, the poem makes an unsettling contrast: the collector wants a chance to examine the animal, while Tennyson postpones its appearance until earthly observation can have no future. [3][1]

Landscape & Associations

The fishing boats wait at a measurable distance; Tennyson’s sleeper lies beyond ordinary access. Both settings withhold a body, but one gives people a practical margin in which to act. The other stretches waiting across ages. A familiar name can carry the threat beneath a working boat or place it far below the world’s everyday sight. [1][3]

Later Retellings & Reception

Real giant squid supply a different kind of encounter. In September 2004, researchers Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori photographed one attacking bait at 900 metres off Japan’s Ogasawara Islands. A camera and depth logger recorded the event; a severed tentacle was recovered and examined through morphology and DNA. Their 2005 paper documents a particular animal in the North Pacific, with material that could be studied after it disappeared from the camera’s view. [4]

James Ashworth’s Natural History Museum account explains why claims about enormous squid still require care. Long appendages and incomplete specimens complicate estimates of size. Giant squid are widely distributed, while colossal squid belong to Antarctic waters. The impressive scale is real, but each name and measurement concerns an animal with its own anatomy and range. A cephalopod resemblance cannot by itself identify the body reported in a Norwegian channel centuries earlier. [6]

Evidence & Open Questions

A second animal reached the Natural History Museum after a trawler caught it in 2004. Lisa Hendry describes its capture, freezing and preservation, and gives its length as 8.62 metres. Kubodera and Mori worked from a live encounter and recovered tissue; the museum acquired a body. Each route leaves a different record for subsequent researchers. Neither can retrospectively supply the missing carcass in Friis’s account. [5][4]

Pontoppidan’s disappointment remains attached to that narrow channel. The report gives him a place, a date, trees caught in the arms and a carcass whose smell keeps travellers away. What it cannot give him is the chance to examine it. The most obstructive body in the account becomes, for the natural historian, an absence. [1]

Sources & Manuscript Notes

Pontoppidan’s chapter preserves coastal reports, his own differences in confidence and a proposed eighteenth-century classification. Store norske leksikon supplies Norwegian reference context. Tennyson transforms the creature into a poem of withheld sight and final emergence. Kubodera and Mori, together with the Natural History Museum accounts, document giant squid observations and specimens whose identities can be considered on their own evidence. [1][2][3][4][5][6]

The Natural History of Norway, part II ↗
Erik Pontoppidan · A. Linde, London, 1755; Smithsonian Libraries scan via Internet Archive / BHL · 1755 · English translation of Danish
Part II, chapter VIII, sections XI–XIII, printed 210–216; fresh scan printed 213 (E-rara PDF leaf 34)
Consulted in the English translation, pp. 210–216. Friis’s report and the Hierne/Grippenhielm quotation are known here through Pontoppidan.
Checked 2026-10-11
Kraken ↗
Sveinung Lutro and Anne-Sofie Schjøtner Skaar · Store norske leksikon · Updated 2026-02-05 · Norwegian Bokmål
Definition; Beskrivelser og sagn; Sagn; Lignende vesen; author/update credits
The comparison with medieval hafgufa follows this Norwegian reference; the medieval works were not independently consulted.
Checked 2026-10-09
↗

Artwork

Illuminated folios

Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.

Immense partly submerged tentacle curves surround a tiny sailing vessel on a moonlit sea, within a dark maritime astronomical frame. — Original modern cephalopod-like interpretation of Kraken, with most of the immense form concealed beneath the sea; the image does not reconstruct Pontoppidan’s reported anatomy.

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