Is the Kraken Real? The Giant Squid Behind the Legend

What was the kraken?

The kraken was a sea monster of Scandinavian folklore, said to live in the sea off Norway and Iceland. Its name comes from Norwegian, where kraken means “the krake,” an old word for a crooked, stunted tree with twisted branches. Such a tree, or a drag anchor made from one, readily calls to mind a creature with many arms.

The first known description of the kraken by name appears in a Norwegian glossary by Christen Jensøn, published in 1646, which describes a many-armed sea monster that pulls boats down into the deep. In 1729 the Norwegian missionary Hans Egede wrote that, according to fishermen, its body was miles long and it had many heads and claws. He equated it with the hafgufa, a giant sea creature in a medieval Norwegian text, the King’s Mirror, written around 1250.

The most famous account came from Erik Pontoppidan, bishop of Bergen, in his natural history of Norway published in 1752–1753. He described a creature so large that its back was mistaken for a group of small islands. Fishermen supposedly fished over it, because fish gathered there in great numbers, but they had to row away fast when it rose, and when it sank it left a dangerous whirlpool. Pontoppidan also passed on the claim that its arms could pull down the largest warship.

How the legend grew

Pontoppidan’s book was widely read across Europe, and the kraken grew with every retelling. In the early 1800s the French naturalist Pierre Denys de Montfort published an engraving of a “colossal octopus” wrapping its arms around a three-masted ship. He even blamed giant octopuses for the loss of several warships in 1782, which had in fact been lost in a storm.

Writers took up the theme. Alfred Tennyson’s 1830 poem “The Kraken” pictured the monster sleeping in the ocean depths. Victor Hugo’s 1866 novel Toilers of the Sea featured a man-eating octopus, and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870) included a famous battle between the crew of the Nautilus and giant squid. In modern times the kraken has appeared in films such as Clash of the Titans (1981) and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006), and it gave its name to the Seattle Kraken ice hockey team. In German, Krake has become the everyday word for an octopus.

The real animal behind the legend: the giant squid

While the kraken grew in stories, naturalists slowly uncovered a real giant. The giant squid lives in all the world’s oceans, and the North Atlantic, around Norway, the British Isles and Newfoundland, is one of the places where it turns up most often. Dead or dying giant squid occasionally float at the surface or wash ashore, and sailors who saw one would have found it hard to forget.

Pontoppidan himself mentioned a long-armed creature that stranded and died in northern Norway in 1680, which he thought might be a young kraken; some later naturalists concluded that it was probably a giant squid. In 1857 the Danish zoologist Japetus Steenstrup gave the giant squid its scientific name, Architeuthis, and argued that some old sea-monster reports were based on it.

Proof came soon afterward. In 1861 the crew of the French warship Alecton tried to haul a giant squid aboard near the Canary Islands and recovered part of its body. In the 1870s many giant squid stranded in Newfoundland, and specimens were measured and described by scientists. In 1873, fishermen in a small boat in Conception Bay, Newfoundland, reported that a huge squid wrapped its arms around the boat after they struck it, and they cut off a tentacle that was later studied. Soon afterward, a whole specimen from nearby Logy Bay was photographed, among the first photographs of a giant squid ever taken.

Other possible sources of kraken stories

The giant squid probably does not explain everything. The island-sized kraken that attracted shoals of fish does not match any known animal. The medieval hafgufa, which Egede linked to the kraken, is described in terms that many scholars think fit a whale better than a squid. The 19th-century naturalist Henry Lee suggested that the clouded water said to come from the kraken might have been the ink of a cephalopod.

The Swedish writer Olaus Magnus’s 16th-century description of a Norwegian sea monster mixes features of whales and squid, and some writers have suggested that such accounts came from sightings of sperm whales with squid near the surface. Sperm whales hunt giant squid in the deep, and many carry sucker scars on their heads. The real relationship between the two animals is described in do sperm whales fight giant squid?

Historians also point out that many old sea-monster stories were linked to the giant squid only in the 19th century, when naturalists began studying stranded specimens. Sailors who actually saw giant squid usually described them as unusual sea animals, not monsters.

Myth vs fact: could a giant squid sink a ship?

Myth: the kraken was as big as an island. The largest giant squid are estimated at about 12–13 m (39–43 ft) including their two feeding tentacles, and claims of 18–20 m (60–66 ft) have never been confirmed. The real figures are explained in how big is a giant squid?

Myth: giant squid drag ships underwater. A large female giant squid weighs only about 275 kg (606 lb), and most of its length is thin, elastic tentacles. It usually lives 300–1,000 m (1,000–3,300 ft) deep, and squid seen at the surface are usually sick or dying. In the 1930s, crew of a Norwegian naval tanker, the Brunswick, reported that large squid had rammed its hull, but these accounts were never verified, and there is no confirmed case of a squid damaging or sinking a ship.

Fact: giant squid are real and impressive. They have the largest eyes of any living animal except perhaps the colossal squid, up to at least 27 cm (11 in) across, and their suckers are ringed with sharp teeth. A live giant squid was not photographed in its deep-sea home until 2004.

Is anything bigger than the giant squid?

The heaviest invertebrate known is the colossal squid of the Southern Ocean, with a confirmed weight of about 495 kg (1,091 lb), although it is shorter than the giant squid. It lives around Antarctica, far from the Norwegian waters where kraken stories began. The two species are compared in giant squid vs colossal squid. No living squid or octopus comes anywhere near the size of a ship, let alone an island: the kraken remains a creature of legend, with a real and remarkable animal at its heart.