Of all the sea monsters of world mythology, the kraken is the most famous. It is the great beast of the deep, the creature sailors feared when the wind dropped and the sea grew still, the monster that could grip a ship in its tentacles and drag it down to the bottom of the ocean. The kraken is a creature of Norse and Scandinavian folklore, and it has been a part of the popular imagination for at least a thousand years.
The kraken is best known in its modern form as a giant octopus or squid, but the original kraken was something more ambiguous — a vast sea creature so large that sailors could mistake it for an island. The description of the kraken in the Norse Kings’ Mirror (c. 1250) is one of the most striking in medieval literature: a creature so large that it looked like land, a great fish that could swallow ships whole, a creature that the sailors called the hafgufa, the “sea-mist” or the “sea-island.”
The kraken entered the modern imagination in the eighteenth century, with the publication of Erik Pontoppidan’s The Natural History of Norway (1752-53), which described the kraken in detail and was widely translated. From the eighteenth century on, the kraken has been a stock monster of sea stories, appearing in the works of Jules Verne, of Herman Melville, of H. P. Lovecraft, of the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual, of the Pirates of the Caribbean films, and of countless other works.
The Norse Origins
The earliest known description of the kraken is in the Norse Örvar-Oddr, a saga composed in the thirteenth century but drawing on older oral tradition. In it, the hero Örvar-Oddr is fishing off the coast of Greenland, and a great sea-monster takes his bait. The monster is described as a sea-creature of vast size, a creature that has been seen in the waters of the Greenland sea for centuries.
The next important Norse source is the Konungs skuggsjá (The King’s Mirror), composed in Norway around 1250. The King’s Mirror is a didactic work, written in the form of a conversation between a father and a son, on the manners and customs of the various peoples of the world. In the section on the wonders of the sea, the author describes a creature he calls the hafgufa. The hafgufa, he says, looks like an island, and sailors who land on it are doomed, for the creature is alive and will sink back into the sea, taking them with it. The hafgufa is said to be the largest of all sea-creatures, and it has two arms with which it grasps its prey. The description is clearly the kraken.
The hafgufa of the King’s Mirror is also called the kraken in some later Scandinavian folklore, and the two terms seem to refer to the same creature. The word kraken may come from the Old Norse kraki, meaning “twisted” or “crooked,” perhaps referring to the twisted shape of the creature’s tentacles. The word was used in Scandinavian folklore from the sixteenth century on, and it entered the European languages in the eighteenth century through Pontoppidan.
The kraken was also told to King Sverre of Norway in the 1180s, according to the Saga of King Sverre. The saga tells how the king was on a voyage in the North Atlantic when a kraken appeared. The king was skeptical, and the sailors were frightened, and the creature was described as a great fish with arms like tree-trunks that could pull a ship down. The story is one of the earliest written records of the kraken in Scandinavian literature.
The Eighteenth Century: Pontoppidan
The kraken entered the modern European imagination in the eighteenth century, with the publication of Erik Pontoppidan’s The Natural History of Norway (Det første Forsøg paa Norges naturlige Historie) in 1752-53. Pontoppidan was a Danish-Norwegian bishop and naturalist, and his Natural History was the most influential single book on the natural history of Norway in the eighteenth century. It was widely translated — into German, French, English, and Dutch — and it made the kraken famous throughout Europe.
Pontoppidan described the kraken as a creature “as large as a floating island,” with arms like cables that could pull down the largest man-of-war. The kraken, he said, lived in the deep waters off the coast of Norway, and it rose to the surface only when it was feeding. Its body, he said, was a kind of soft, jelly-like mass, and it was covered in a forest of tentacles. When the kraken rose to the surface, the water around it was disturbed, and the air above it was filled with a strange, fishy smell. Sailors who saw the kraken would sometimes land on what they thought was an island, only to find that it was moving. Pontoppidan also reported the observation of a kraken in 1680, when a large, tree-covered island was seen in the waters off the coast of Norway, with arms coming out of the sides and grasping the bottom of the sea.
Pontoppidan’s description was widely read and widely believed. The kraken became a standard monster of sea stories, and it was reported from many parts of the world — off the coast of Norway, off the coast of Greenland, off the coast of Newfoundland, off the coast of West Africa. The reports were usually second-hand, and the kraken was always described as larger and more terrifying than the previous one.
The Nineteenth Century: The Giant Squid
The kraken took on a new form in the nineteenth century, with the discovery of the giant squid (Architeuthis dux). Specimens of the giant squid began to be recovered in the 1850s, after centuries of reports of vast tentacled creatures in the deep ocean. The first well-documented specimens were found in the North Atlantic — off the coast of Newfoundland, off the coast of Denmark, off the coast of Ireland. The Danish naturalist Japetus Steenstrup described the giant squid in 1857, and the species was named Architeuthis dux (literally “ruling squid”) in 1860.
The discovery of the giant squid was a sensation. The creature, it turned out, could grow to a length of forty feet or more, with tentacles that could grasp a small boat. The arms of the giant squid were covered in suckers, each of which could leave a circular scar on the skin of a sperm whale (sperm whales, the natural enemies of the giant squid, are often found with these scars). The giant squid was a real creature, and it was large enough to be the basis of the kraken legend.
The discovery of the giant squid did not destroy the legend of the kraken. Instead, it gave the legend a new foundation. The kraken of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a giant squid, a real creature of the deep, exaggerated into a monster. The kraken is no longer just a Norse legend; it is also a biological reality, the giant squid that lives in the deep ocean and is seen only rarely, when it is washed ashore or captured by a sperm whale.
Jules Verne, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), gave the kraken one of its most famous modern appearances, with a giant squid attacking the submarine Nautilus and a crewman killed in the fight. The full scene is described in the long-tail page on the Norse origins of the legend. The kraken has since become a fixture of modern popular culture, appearing in the works of H. P. Lovecraft, J. R. R. Tolkien (the Watcher in the Water at the gates of Moria), the Pirates of the Caribbean films, Clash of the Titans, and countless other works.
The Modern Revival
The kraken has been a stock monster of modern popular culture for two hundred years. It appears in the works of:
- H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, where the kraken is one of the many sea-monsters summoned by the dreaming god Cthulhu. In Lovecraft’s fiction, the kraken is a creature of the deep, rising from the sea to attack ships.
- J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, where the Watcher in the Water, the tentacled creature that guards the doors of Moria, is a clear descendant of the kraken. The Watcher has black, slimy tentacles, and it tries to drag Frodo and his companions into the water.
- Dungeons and Dragons’ Monster Manual, where the kraken is one of the most powerful sea-monsters, a giant squid-like creature with the intelligence of a human, capable of grappling ships and casting spells.
- The Pirates of the Caribbean films, where the kraken is the great monster that attacks ships at the bidding of Davy Jones. In Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) and At World’s End (2007), the kraken is shown as a vast, tentacled creature that can crush a ship in its arms.
- Clash of the Titans (1981 and 2010), where the kraken is the monster that the gods release upon the earth to destroy humans, and the hero Perseus must defeat it.
- The Disney animated film Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), where a kraken-like creature guards the underwater city.
- The Lusca of Caribbean folklore, the half-octopus, half-shark creature of the blue holes of the Bahamas.
- The Scylla of Greek myth, the sea-monster of the strait of Messina, with six long necks rising from a single body hidden in a rock, who took six of Odysseus’s men.
- The Umibōzu of Japanese folklore, the great black sea-monster of Japanese fishermen’s tales, with a smooth, round head like a monk’s tonsure and a vast body that could overturn ships.
The Kraken and the Other Sea-Monsters
The kraken is one of a worldwide family of sea-monsters, and the parallels are striking. The Norse Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent of Norse myth, is the great world-encircling serpent, the child of Loki and the giantess Angrboða, cast by Odin into the world-sea that surrounds Midgard. At Ragnarök, Jörmungandr will rise from the sea and fight Thor on the plain of Vígríðr, and they will kill each other. The Jörmungandr is the great sea-serpent of the Norse, the cosmos-twisting serpent, and it is related to the kraken as a member of the same family of sea-monsters.
The Greek Scylla is the sea-monster of the strait of Messina. In Homer she has six long necks rising from a single body hidden in a rock, each neck topped with a triple row of pointed teeth, and she seizes a sailor from each passing ship. The Greek Charybdis is the great whirlpool of the same strait, three times a day swallowing the sea and three times a day spewing it out. Together, Scylla and Charybdis form the most famous navigational horror in the Odyssey — and they are part of the same family of sea-monsters as the kraken.
The Hebrew leviathan is the great sea-monster of Hebrew scripture, the primordial sea-serpent defeated by God at the beginning of time. In the Book of Job, God describes the leviathan as a creature of immense strength, with scales like shields, with breath that kindles coals, and a heart as hard as stone. The leviathan is the great adversary of the Hebrew cosmos, and it is the relative of the kraken.
The Chinese Ao Guang, the Dragon King of the East Sea, is the great dragon of the Chinese eastern ocean, the bringer of the spring rains, the ruler of the eastern waters. The Ao Guang, like the kraken, lives in the sea, but he is benevolent — he brings the rain, he governs the tides, he is the patron of fishermen. The Ao Guang of the Journey to the West is a great dragon-king who has to be appeased by the pilgrims.
The Japanese Umibōzu is the great black sea-monster of Japanese fishermen’s tales, a creature of vast size that appears suddenly in calm seas and demands a barrel of fresh water from the fishermen. The Umibōzu is a member of the same family of sea-monsters as the kraken, and the two are often confused in modern popular culture.
The Real Cephalopods Behind the Myth
The kraken, in the modern era, is closely associated with the real cephalopods of the deep ocean. The giant squid (Architeuthis dux) is the largest known invertebrate, with specimens reaching forty-three feet in length. The colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni), discovered in 1925 and described in more detail in recent years, is even larger, with specimens estimated at forty-six feet and possibly more. Both creatures live in the deep ocean, both have the large eyes and the long tentacles of the kraken legend, and both are rarely seen by humans.
The giant squid was first photographed alive in its natural habitat in 2004, by a Japanese-led team of scientists. The photos, taken in the North Pacific, showed a giant squid of about twenty-six feet in length, with its body and tentacles fully visible. The video footage, taken in 2012 by the same team, showed a giant squid in the waters off the Ogasawara Islands, Japan, and was the first video of a giant squid in its natural environment. The real creature is not the kraken of legend, but it is large, strange, and beautiful enough to inspire the legend.
The kraken, then, is one of the great mythical creatures whose legend has been confirmed, in part, by the discovery of the real creature. The Norse sailors of the medieval period were telling stories of what they had seen or heard of, and what they had seen or heard of was a real creature of the deep ocean. The legend grew in the telling, the creature grew in size, but the kernel of truth was there from the beginning. The kraken was a real cephalopod, the giant squid, that was turned into a monster by centuries of storytelling.
The Symbolism of the Kraken
The kraken has been read as a symbol of many things. To the Norse sailors, it was the terror of the deep, the monster that waited in the calm seas, the thing that could pull you down. To the eighteenth-century naturalists, it was the great unknown of the deep ocean, the creature that could not yet be fully explained by science. To the modern reader, it is the ancient terror, the monster of the deep, the great unknown that is still partly unknown.
The kraken is, in a sense, the sea-monster par excellence, the creature that represents the fear of the deep, the fear of the unknown, the fear of what might be lurking in the waters below the ship. The kraken has been with us in some form for at least a thousand years, and it will be with us for at least a thousand more. The deep ocean is still partly unknown, and the kraken, the great monster of the deep, is still one of the ways we talk about the unknown.
Last reviewed: June 2026.