In 1752, Erik Pontoppidan, the Bishop of Bergen, published what he modestly called the first attempt at a natural history of Norway. In it he described a creature he was quite confident existed. It was, he wrote, incontestably the largest sea monster in the world. Fishermen along the Norwegian coast knew it well and described it to him with remarkable consistency: a creature of such colossal size that its back, when it surfaced, was mistaken for a chain of small islands. It was round, flat, and full of arms or branches. When it submerged, it created whirlpools powerful enough to drag ships to their doom. The fishermen called it the Kraken.
Pontoppidan was not writing myth. He was writing natural history. He believed the Kraken was real, that the fishermen who described it to him were describing genuine encounters, and that the creature belonged in a catalogue of Norwegian wildlife alongside the more conventional fauna of the northern seas. The fact that he was a bishop does not appear to have given him pause about any of this.
That combination of genuine belief, careful documentation, and absolute wrongness about the existence of the creature is part of what makes the history of the Kraken so interesting. It sits at the intersection of folklore, natural history, and the particular quality of the northern sea that made enormous things seem not just possible but probable.
Before Pontoppidan: The Hafgufa
Pontoppidan is usually credited as the first serious written source on the Kraken, but the creature he was describing had a much older name in the Norse tradition. The hafgufa, meaning sea-mist or sea-reek, appears in Old Norse texts going back to the 13th century and carries the same essential characteristics: an animal of such size that it is mistaken for land, associated with whirlpools and the disappearance of ships, lurking in the deep waters of the northern seas.
The Konungs skuggsja, the King’s Mirror, a Norwegian educational text from around 1250, describes two creatures said to inhabit the seas around Greenland and Iceland. One of them behaves exactly as the Kraken would later be described: it surfaces, is mistaken for islands by sailors who get too close, and when it submerges it creates whirlpools that drag those ships down. The King’s Mirror hedges on whether this creature is genuinely enormous or whether the whirlpools it generates are simply its main danger, but the outline is unmistakably the same tradition that Pontoppidan would document five centuries later.
The Örvar-Odds saga, one of the Norse legendary sagas, also describes the hafgufa as a creature that rises from the sea trailing tentacles. The connection between this older tradition and the Kraken that Pontoppidan named and popularised is not coincidental. The name changed. The underlying figure, the impossibly vast sea creature that surfaces from the deep and takes ships with it when it descends, remained consistent across centuries of Scandinavian maritime tradition.
The name Kraken itself appears to derive from a Scandinavian word for a crooked, twisted, or gnarled thing, related to the word for the crooked branches of a tree. Hans Egede, a Danish-Norwegian missionary writing in 1729, was possibly the first to document the Kraken using direct oral sources from Norwegian informants, describing a body of many miles in length with many heads and claws. Pontoppidan then systematised and popularised what had been circulating in coastal communities for generations.
The Tradition on Its Own Terms
Most articles about the Kraken reach quickly for the giant squid as an explanation and then consider the matter settled. The explanation is probably correct as far as it goes: the giant squid, which can reach lengths of around ten metres in reality and was completely unknown to science until relatively recently, would have been a genuinely startling thing to encounter at sea, and encounters with its arms or its corpse could reasonably generate legends about something far larger lurking below.
But reducing the Kraken to a misidentified squid misses what is actually interesting about the tradition, which is what the Kraken meant to the people who developed it rather than what animal it might have been based on.
Norwegian and Scandinavian coastal communities in the medieval and early modern period had a relationship with the sea that people who live inland find difficult to fully appreciate. The sea provided almost everything: food, trade, transport, and the primary means of connection between communities. It also killed people with a regularity and unpredictability that no amount of skill or experience could fully mitigate. Storms appeared without warning. Currents shifted. Ships that had made a crossing dozens of times were simply gone, and sometimes there was no explanation available for why.
The Kraken provided one. A creature of vast size, lurking below the surface, occasionally rising in ways that created dangerous whirlpools and could drag even a substantial vessel down: this is a description of the sea’s lethal unpredictability given a shape and a cause. The ship did not sink because of an inexplicable combination of wind and wave. It sank because something below pulled it down. The Kraken did not make the sea less dangerous. It made the danger legible.
There was also, notably, a more ambivalent side to the Kraken in the tradition. Pontoppidan’s fishermen did not only fear it. They also knew that when the Kraken rose to near the surface, it brought enormous quantities of fish with it from the deep, and those fish could be caught in abundance. Fishing near a submerged Kraken was dangerous, but the catch was exceptional. The creature that could destroy you was also the creature that could feed you, which is a more nuanced relationship than the pure monster of popular culture suggests.
Pontoppidan’s Account in Detail
What Pontoppidan wrote in 1752 is worth dwelling on because it is more careful and more specific than most retellings acknowledge. He was not simply repeating sailors’ tall tales. He was attempting to apply the same empirical methods that natural historians of his era applied to observable phenomena, and he took the fishermen’s testimony seriously as evidence.
His description of the Kraken’s back being mistaken for islands is specific about the geography: there were reported locations along the Norwegian coast where sailors knew to be careful about formations that appeared suddenly and were not on the charts. Some of these, Pontoppidan suggested, might be Kraken rather than actual islands. The creature surfaced slowly, allowing its back to be seen above the water for some time, before descending in a way that created the lethal whirlpool.
He described its arms or tentacles as extending far from the central body, capable of reaching the rigging of a ship, and he noted the fishermen’s observation that the smell of the Kraken, when it was near the surface, was itself distinctive and unpleasant. He estimated its size in terms that made it larger than any island in the region. He treated the whole account as a description of a real animal whose biology was simply not yet fully understood.
The confidence with which an educated, senior churchman in the mid-18th century treated the Kraken as a real creature is itself historically interesting. It is a reminder that the boundary between natural history and mythology was considerably less fixed in that period than we now assume, and that what we call folklore was, to the people living inside it, often simply a description of the world as they understood it.
The Jormungandr Connection
The Kraken tradition does not exist in isolation in Norse culture. It sits alongside and in relationship with older mythological figures, particularly Jormungandr, the Midgard Serpent, the world-encircling sea creature of Norse cosmology whose eventual battle with Thor at Ragnarok will end both of them.
Jormungandr is not the Kraken, and conflating them flattens both traditions. But they share a conceptual space: the idea that beneath the surface of the sea there are things of such size that they dwarf human comprehension, that the ocean contains depths where something vast and ancient waits, and that the relationship between those things and human seafarers is one of fundamental asymmetry. The sea is not hostile in the way a predator is hostile. It is simply operating at a scale that makes human concerns almost irrelevant.
That scale is what the Kraken tradition keeps returning to. Not the tentacles or the whirlpool or the specific mechanics of how it kills. The size. The impossibility of the size. The idea that something so large it is mistaken for geography could be alive, could be breathing somewhere beneath the surface of the water that fishermen crossed every day without knowing what was below them.
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The Kraken entered wider European consciousness largely through Pontoppidan and then through the writers who built on his account. Alfred Tennyson’s poem The Kraken, published in 1830, gave the creature a literary presence that influenced how subsequent generations imagined it: sleeping in the dark of the ocean floor, rising only at the end of the world. Jules Verne’s giant squid in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea drew on the same tradition without naming the Kraken directly. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick references it.
The modern version, the enormous tentacled monster of films and games, has drifted considerably from Pontoppidan’s round, flat, arm-covered creature, and even further from the hafgufa of the medieval texts. But the core remains: something beneath the surface of the sea that is larger than anything should be, that surfaces occasionally and disastrously, and that descends again leaving only the whirlpool where it was.
The northern seas that generated the tradition are still there. The waters off the Norwegian coast where fishermen described the Kraken to Pontoppidan are still cold and deep and not entirely understood. The giant squid that probably inspired at least some of those descriptions still live there, still reaching lengths that would have seemed impossible to anyone who had not seen one. The ocean is still operating at a scale that makes the Kraken feel, if not real, then at least not unreasonable.
For more on the creatures of Norse and Scandinavian tradition, the Legendary Creatures section has a growing collection. The Mester Stoorworm covers a related tradition of vast sea creatures from Scottish and Norse mythology.
