Kraken

The kraken is a comparatively late and comparatively documentary monster. It enters print through eighteenth-century Norwegian description, above all the Natural History of Norway (1752-53) of Bishop Erik Pontoppidan, which presents it as a real animal of enormous extent, an island-sized creature whose back sailors mistake for land and whose descent drags down ships in a whirlpool. Older Norse references to a hafgufa ("sea-mist") lie behind it.

In the nineteenth century Alfred, Lord Tennyson gave it its literary form in the sonnet "The Kraken" (1830), and Jules Verne and later writers fixed the image of a ship-crushing tentacled beast. The modern reinterpretation is zoological: the discovery, and eventual filming, of the giant squid (Architeuthis) and the larger colossal squid gave the legend a plausible natural kernel, and the kraken is now routinely explained as an exaggerated report of real deep-sea cephalopods, an explanation that fits the tentacled version but postdates, and partly reshaped, the island-sized animal that Pontoppidan actually described.

The kraken enters print as natural history rather than as folklore. Erik Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen, described it in his natural history of Norway published in the early 1750s, reporting the accounts of fishermen: a creature so broad that sailors mistook its back for an island, whose descent pulled a whirlpool, and whose feeding grounds fishermen sought out because the fishing above it was good. Pontoppidan was collecting testimony and presenting it as fact, which is what a naturalist of that period did.

The nineteenth century supplied an animal. Large squid carcasses came ashore in Newfoundland and elsewhere in the 1870s, specimens reached museums, and the genus Architeuthis was described. A giant squid does not sink ships and is not the size of an island, but it is large, it has arms, and it was unknown, which was enough for the identification to stick.

That identification is a modern reading and should be labelled as one. It explains some of the reports and it does not explain the island, the whirlpool or the fishing ground. What the sequence does show is a monster moving in the opposite direction from the usual one: not a real animal exaggerated into a legend, but a legend that a real animal was later recruited to explain.