Kraken — the giant of the deep
The world's most famous sea monster is Norwegian by paperwork — first described as natural history (not folklore) by Bishop Erik Pontoppidan of Bergen in 1752, who claimed it was the size of a floating island and had been seen by reliable witnesses.
The kraken has an unusual claim among Norwegian sea-creatures: it did not enter the world as a folktale. It entered as natural history, in a serious book, written by a bishop.
The bishop’s catalog
Erik Pontoppidan was the Bishop of Bergen, and in 1752 and 1753 he published a two-volume work with the earnest title The First Attempt at a Natural History of Norway. It was meant as exactly that — a catalog of the country’s animals, plants, minerals, and weather, compiled by an educated man before the system of modern scientific classification had fully arrived. And among the fjord birds and the whales and the fish, Pontoppidan described, in the same matter-of-fact register, the kraken.
His kraken was enormous — by his account a creature a mile and a half across, so vast that sailors mistook its back for a chain of islands and dropped anchor on it. When it submerged, the whirlpool of its descent could pull a ship down. Pontoppidan did not present this as a legend. He presented it as a poorly-studied but real piece of Norwegian fauna, attested, he insisted, by reliable witnesses — fishermen and ship’s officers, sober men, who had no reason to invent it.
What was actually out there
Pontoppidan did not invent the kraken. He collected it. The northern sailing cultures had long carried traditions of vast things in the deep water — sea-serpents, the havmann, shapes that surfaced and sank — and Pontoppidan, doing his honest best as a naturalist, wrote those traditions down as data.
And the data was not pure fantasy. The North Atlantic genuinely contains the giant squid, Architeuthis — a real animal, many meters long, with eyes the size of dinner plates, that lives in deep water and was effectively never seen alive until modern times. A dying giant squid at the surface, or a carcass, glimpsed by a fishing crew with no framework for what they were looking at, is a perfectly good seed for a monster a mile wide. The kraken is what happens when a real and genuinely strange animal is reported by people without a science to file it under.
The afterlife
Once Pontoppidan had given the kraken the dignity of print, it never left. Tennyson wrote it a poem — “The Kraken,” the monster sleeping its ancient dreamless sleep far down in the sea. It swam out of Norwegian natural history into the literature and the films and the games of the whole world, and it is now probably the most famous sea monster there is.
It also never quite stopped being Norwegian, or being a working sailor’s idea. The fishing and ferry routes of the North Atlantic coast — the cod waters, the long Hurtigruten run up the edge of the country — still carry it. Passengers still ask the crew about it, half-joking. And the honest answer is the interesting one: there is something very large and very strange down there, it has eyes the size of plates, and the bishop was not entirely wrong.