The kraken is the great sea monster of Norse and Scandinavian folklore — a creature so vast that sailors could mistake it for an island, a creature with arms as thick as the masts of a ship that could pull the largest man-of-war down to the bottom of the sea. The legend of the kraken is, in some ways, the legend of the fear of the deep ocean, the fear of what might be lurking in the calm waters off the coast of Norway. This page traces the origins of the Norse sea monster legend, from the earliest written records of the Middle Ages to the modern myth of the giant squid.
The Earliest Norse References
The earliest written reference to the kraken is in the Norse Örvar-Oddr, a saga composed in the thirteenth century but drawing on older oral tradition. The Örvar-Oddr tells the story of the hero Örvar-Oddr (literally “Arrow-Oddr”), a mighty warrior who fought many battles and went on many voyages. In one of his voyages, 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, with arms as thick as tree-trunks. The hero and his crew try to pull the monster to the surface, but the line breaks, and the monster escapes. The story is one of the earliest written records of the kraken-like sea-creature in Scandinavian literature.
Another important early 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 (literally “sea-mist” or “sea-island”). The hafgufa, he says, looks like land, 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 hafgufa of the King’s Mirror is, in essence, the kraken. The description is the earliest detailed account of the creature that will later be called the kraken, and it is one of the most striking in medieval literature. The author of the King’s Mirror was clearly relying on oral tradition and on the reports of sailors, and his description has the ring of truth to it — a description of a creature seen in the distance, a creature that could be mistaken for land, a creature so vast that no ordinary ship could resist it.
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, and it shows that the creature was already a part of Scandinavian folklore in the twelfth century.
The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
The kraken legend continued to develop through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the folklore and natural history of Scandinavia. The word kraken began to be used in Scandinavian folklore in the sixteenth century, perhaps derived from the Old Norse kraki, meaning “twisted” or “crooked,” referring to the twisted shape of the creature’s tentacles. The kraken was reported from many parts of the North Atlantic — off the coast of Norway, off the coast of Greenland, off the coast of Iceland, off the coast of the Faroes.
The kraken was sometimes confused with the sea-serpent (the sjøorm in Norwegian, the sjöormur in Icelandic, the sea serpent in English), another Norse sea-monster. The sea-serpent was a long, undulating creature, more snake-like than octopus-like, and it was reported in many parts of the world — the most famous of the modern era being the Loch Ness Monster. The kraken and the sea-serpent were often treated as the same creature in the popular tradition, but they were distinct in the older folklore.
The kraken was also sometimes confused with the soe-orm (sea-serpent) of the Danish folklore, and with the sjöodjur (sea-monster) of the Swedish folklore. The Scandinavian sailors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had a rich bestiary of sea-creatures, and the kraken was one of the most important.
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. The “island” was seen by many sailors, and they reported arms coming out of the sides and grasping the bottom of the sea. Pontoppidan took this report seriously, and he included it in his Natural History as evidence for the existence of the kraken.
Pontoppidan’s Natural History was widely read, and the kraken was widely discussed in the scientific and popular literature of the eighteenth century. The kraken 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 kraken became a standard monster of sea stories, and it was a stock reference in the literature of the age of exploration.
The Nineteenth Century: The Discovery of 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 creature was found to 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 discovery of the giant squid was a sensation, and it transformed the kraken legend. 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 a famous appearance. The narrator, Professor Aronnax, is a prisoner of Captain Nemo aboard the submarine Nautilus, and he sees a giant squid attack the submarine. The squid is described as having arms as thick as the masts of a ship, with a parrot-like beak and eyes as large as the heads of barrels. The crew of the Nautilus fights the squid with axes and harpoons, and one of the sailors is killed. The scene is one of the most famous in all of Verne’s work, and it fixed the image of the kraken as a giant squid in the modern imagination.
The kraken was also reported many times in the nineteenth century, off the coasts of Norway, of Newfoundland, of the West Indies, of the Indian Ocean. The reports were often second-hand, and the kraken was often confused with other sea-monsters. But the discovery of the giant squid gave the legend a new foundation, and the kraken of the late nineteenth century was a real creature, a creature that could be studied, even if it was rarely seen.
The Twentieth and Twenty-First Century
The kraken has been a stock monster of modern popular culture for two hundred years. It appears in the works of H. P. Lovecraft, in the Cthulhu Mythos, where the kraken is one of the many sea-monsters summoned by the dreaming god Cthulhu. It appears in 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. It appears in the 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. It appears in the Pirates of the Caribbean films, where the kraken is the great monster that attacks ships at the bidding of Davy Jones. It appears in 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 real 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 colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni), discovered in 1925 and described in more detail in recent years, is even larger than the giant squid, with specimens estimated at forty-six feet and possibly more. The colossal squid is the largest known invertebrate, and it lives in the deep waters of the Southern Ocean. The colossal squid, like the giant squid, is a real creature, a real cephalopod, a real inhabitant of the deep.
The Lasting Conflation
The legend of the kraken has been told for at least a thousand years, and it has gone through many transformations. The Norse hafgufa of the King’s Mirror was a vast sea-creature that looked like an island, with two arms. The kraken of Pontoppidan in the eighteenth century was a giant octopus with arms like cables, a creature “as large as a floating island.” The kraken of Verne in the nineteenth century was a giant squid with a parrot-like beak. The kraken of Lovecraft in the twentieth century was a tentacled monstrosity from beyond the stars. The kraken of the Pirates of the Caribbean films is a vast, tentacled monster that can crush a ship in its arms. The kraken of the modern world is all of these, and more.
The kraken has been conflated with many other sea-monsters — with the Norse sea-serpent, with the Greek Scylla, with the biblical leviathan, with the Arabian Bahamut. The kraken of the modern imagination is a kind of universal sea-monster, the embodiment of all the sea-monsters of world mythology. The kraken has become, in the modern era, the monster of the deep, the great unknown, the thing that might be lurking in the waters below the ship.
The legend of the kraken is, in this sense, a legend of the modern world as well as of the ancient. 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. The kraken is, in a real sense, the monster of the modern age — the monster of science, of exploration, of the discovery of the deep.
Last reviewed: June 2026.