Kraken: The mythical sea creature known to overturn ships
If you have watched the movies from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, you would be aware of the bone-chilling tales of adventure mixed with terrors that pirates face on the open seas. Be it storms or invisible icebergs, sailing across the ocean can be a perilous business. But weather isn’t the only danger; and there is always the fear of being attacked by gigantic sea creatures, such as the shark or the whale. Guess what? There’s also another danger, that of the kraken. Are you familiar with this sea creature? Is it for real? Come, let us find out.
A colossal sea monster
First things first, no, kraken is not real. It is a legendary creature from the Norse mythology and is deemed as a colossal sea monster known to attack ships and sailors (including the terrifying pirates!). Kraken is supposedly native to the depths of the sea off the coasts of Norway and Iceland.
Okay, but how does a kraken look? Well, it turns out that kraken looks like an octopus. In fact, the term ‘kraken’ is German for ‘octopus.’ Maybe that’s why if you look for an image of a kraken on the internet, you would see that this large creature has many arms. If you observe closely, you can also see how most artists perceive them as a sea monster with arms long enough to reach the top of a ship’s main mast, in turn forcing it to overturn. Legends also have it that once a ship comes face to face with a kraken, it hardly ever survives. Besides the ship being sunk down, the ship’s crew either gets devoured by the sea monster or forced to drown.
The real-life inspiration
People who deal with myths and legends also believe that the kraken may have been based on a real-life creature known as the giant squid. For those unaware, the giant squid has long tentacles and can grow up to 40 to 50 feet long. They generally live deep in the sea and only come to the surface when they locate a ship.
Kraken in literary culture
Kraken was first described with the turn of the 18th century by an Italian Catholic priest and traveller Francesco Negri in his travelogue about Scandinavia. More than three decades later, it was again mentioned by Danish-Norwegian missionary and explorer called Hans Edege who described the sea monster in detail and identified it something similar to hafgufa (massive sea monster from Iceland’s medieval folklores). Then there was another Norwegian bishop named Pontoppidan who described the kraken in 1753 as “an octopus of tremendous size with a reputation for pulling down ships.”
However, the kraken rose to global fame when poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote a sonnet called The Kraken in 1830. In the poem, he described a gigantic sea creature that lived deep in the sea and rose only to attack voyagers.
Apart from literature, kraken also appears in pop culture, such as in Marvel comics as well as the popular film Clash of the Titans. You can find it in popular video games such as Sea of Thieves and Return of the Obra Dinn.