Unleashing the Kraken: The Myth, The Legend, and The Hilarious Facts You Never Knew

Around the year 1250, an anonymous Norwegian author sat down to write a book of practical wisdom for a young prince—a mixture of court etiquette, geography and natural history now known as Konungs skuggsjá, the “King’s Mirror”. Among its descriptions of the seas off Iceland and Greenland is an account of a creature so vast that sailors mistook it for an island, so rare that the author doubted whether more than two of its kind could exist without eating the ocean bare. He called it the hafgufa, the “sea-mist”. Centuries later that beast would acquire the name we know it by: the Kraken. What is remarkable is not that a medieval writer invented a monster, but that he was, in a roundabout way, describing something real.

The Kraken is the rare legend that grew smaller, not larger, as we learned more—and in the process turned out to be a genuine animal wearing a very tall tale.

Where the monster first surfaced

The oldest thread runs through the Old Norse saga Örvar-Oddr, in which the hero and his crew, sailing the waters near Greenland, encounter two enormous sea-beasts: the lyngbakr, or “heather-back”, and the hafgufa. The saga’s monsters are dreamlike and half-glimpsed, more portent than zoology. It is the roughly contemporary Konungs skuggsjá, around 1250, that first tries to describe the hafgufa as an actual animal with a body and a way of feeding, rather than a mere omen.

The word “kraken” itself is later and Norwegian, related to a word for something twisted or crooked—fitting for a beast imagined as a tangle of arms. By the eighteenth century the name had settled, and the creature had swollen in the retelling into the island-sized terror of maritime lore, capable of dragging a full ship beneath the waves.

The bishop who made it official

The Kraken owes much of its fame to a real churchman with a scholarly bent. Erik Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen, published his Natural History of Norway in 1752 and 1753, and in it he treated the Kraken not as a fable but as a real, if poorly understood, sea animal. He described it as “round, flat, and full of arms”, so large that when it surfaced its back looked like a stretch of land, and warned that fishermen who felt their boat lifted on a sudden shoal in deep water should row for their lives. Pontoppidan was earnest, not satirical, and precisely because a respected bishop had written it down, the Kraken entered the age of natural science as something scholars felt obliged to take seriously.

His account also set the trap that would later spring: by insisting the monster was a real animal rather than a myth, Pontoppidan guaranteed that when a real animal fitting the description eventually turned up, the two would be joined forever.

The animal behind the legend

That real animal is the giant squid, Architeuthis dux. For most of history it was known only from carcasses and fragments—a beak here, a torn arm there, washed up on a beach and impossible to reconcile with anything in the textbooks. The decisive moment came in 1853, when a large cephalopod stranded on a Danish shore and the Danish naturalist Japetus Steenstrup obtained its beak. Working from that fragment, Steenstrup formally described and named the giant squid a few years later, giving the sailors’ monster a Latin name and a place in the catalogue of living things.

Giant squid can reach lengths of around 12 to 13 metres including their two long feeding tentacles, and they possess the largest eyes in the animal kingdom—roughly the size of a dinner plate, evolved to gather the faintest light in the deep. There is a second contender for the crown, too: the colossal squid, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, which lives in the freezing waters around Antarctica, is shorter but far heavier and bulkier than its giant cousin, and arms itself with swivelling hooks on its arms rather than mere suckers. Between the two of them, the deep ocean has quietly furnished us with animals that outmatch almost anything the medieval imagination dared to invent. A living one was not photographed in its natural habitat until 2004, by the Japanese researchers Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori, and not filmed alive in the deep until 2012. The monster that terrorised medieval imaginations turned out to be a shy, deep-dwelling mollusc that most of us will never see—which is, if anything, stranger than the myth. The ocean’s genuine capacity to hide enormous creatures in plain sight is the same thread that runs through our unease about the great white shark, the sea’s other legendary grey giant.

From natural history to popular legend

Once Pontoppidan had lent the Kraken scholarly respectability, writers and naturalists across Europe took up the beast and steadily reshaped it. The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, architect of modern biological classification, is often said to have listed a Kraken-like cephalopod under the name Microcosmus in an early edition of his Systema Naturae in 1735, before the wilder claims were quietly dropped from later editions—a sign that even the founder of scientific naming was, briefly, willing to entertain the monster. The French naturalist Pierre Denys de Montfort went further at the start of the nineteenth century, publishing dramatic accounts and an engraving of a “colossal octopus” pulling a ship’s masts down into the sea, which did as much as anything to fix the image of a tentacled leviathan in the public mind.

The Kraken then made the leap from natural history into literature and never came back. Alfred, Lord Tennyson gave it a haunted, apocalyptic sleep in his 1830 sonnet; Jules Verne set his crew of the Nautilus against a giant squid in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870, drawing directly on Pontoppidan and Montfort; Herman Melville nodded to the “great live squid” in Moby-Dick. By the time Hollywood inherited the creature—from the stop-motion beast of the 1981 Clash of the Titans to the barnacled Davy Jones of the Pirates of the Caribbean films—the Kraken had travelled a full circle, from a medieval attempt at zoology to pure spectacle. Each retelling kept the essential silhouette the bishop had described: round, flat, and full of arms.

Why a sea monster endures

The Kraken survives because it answers a question the sea keeps asking: what is down there that we cannot see? For a medieval fisherman, the deep was a genuine unknown, and a monster was a reasonable hypothesis for why boats sometimes vanished. We now know the answers are usually mundane—storms, rogue waves, human error—but the emotional logic that produced the Kraken has not gone away. The ocean is still, functionally, the least-explored surface on Earth, better mapped in some respects on Mars than on our own seabed.

That gap between what we depend on and what we understand is not a medieval problem. It resurfaces every time a familiar body of water does something unexpected, whether that is the deep hiding a giant squid or a great reservoir behaving in ways nobody planned for, as it did when Lake Mead’s water level fell to expose long-submerged wreckage and remains. The Kraken is really a placeholder for everything the water refuses to tell us.

Fun facts

• The Konungs skuggsjá author worried, around 1250, that there could only ever be two hafgufa in the whole ocean, because any more would eat everything and starve—an oddly ecological anxiety for the thirteenth century.
• The chemical element tantalum was almost the source of the squid’s genus name; instead, “kraken” gave its name to a cocktail, a rum brand, several warships, and a US ice-hockey team, the Seattle Kraken, founded in 2021.
• Sperm whales are the giant squid’s main predator, and biologists find circular sucker scars on whale skin that map the size of squid the whales have fought in the dark, kilometres down.
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote a short 1830 poem titled “The Kraken”, imagining the beast sleeping through the ages until the end of the world, decades before science confirmed anything like it existed.
• The first clear photographs of a living giant squid in the wild were taken in 2004—meaning humans landed on the Moon a full 35 years before we managed to photograph the animal behind our oldest sea legend.

A closing reflection

There is a particular pleasure in a myth that turns out to be partly true, because it flatters both the storyteller and the scientist. The medieval sailor who swore he had seen a monster was not simply superstitious; he had glimpsed, or heard of, something genuinely enormous and genuinely alive, and he did the honest thing with limited information—he described it as best he could and made it a little bigger for the telling. What the Kraken finally teaches is humility about that process. Our own confident descriptions of the world are also drawn from fragments washed up on beaches, and some of the monsters we have not yet named are, no doubt, quietly swimming beneath us right now.