Kraken, << KRAH kuhn, >> is a mythical sea monster said to appear in the Greenland Sea off the coast of Norway. Poetic descriptions of kraken are recorded in long Icelandic stories called sagas. The sagas tell of the kraken as enormous monsters that feed on whales and ships. They describe the creature as crablike or resembling a gigantic octopus or squid.
Scientists in the 1700’s took tales of kraken seriously. In 1735, the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus classified the kraken as a kind of cephalopod, the group of animals that includes octopus and squid. In 1752, Erik Pontoppidan, the bishop of Bergen, Norway, examined what he believed to be a young kraken. He reasoned that an adult kraken would be enormous. It could easily wrap its tentacles around even the largest ship and drag the vessel beneath the waves. The Swedish author Jacob Wallenberg wrote about the kraken in 1781. He added detail to the common belief that fish swarmed over submerged kraken. He believed the fish fed on the beast’s wastes.
In 1803, the French naturalist Pierre Dénys de Montfort described two kinds of kraken based on reports by American and Norwegian fishermen. He described a smaller one he called the kraken octopus. The other he called the colossal octopus. This kind had been said to sink ships. Most scientists today think the myths of the kraken may be based on sightings of giant squid (see Giant squid).
