🦶 CRYPTID SIGHTING · EXP. Nº9046
ACTIVE
Kraken
Kraken is a cryptid — a creature whose existence is unconfirmed by science — with reported sightings near Norwegian Sea, NO. This file collects the accounts and folklore surrounding it.
Where and when was Kraken sighted?
- Location
- Norwegian Sea, NO
- Date sighted
- 1752-01-01
- Coordinates
- 66.0, 4.0
- Testimonies
- 0
- Last updated
LOCATION
What is Kraken?
The Kraken is a legendary sea monster of Scandinavian folklore, imagined as a colossal, tentacled creature capable of dragging entire ships beneath the waves of the Norwegian Sea. Norse sagas and later Scandinavian accounts described it less as a single beast than as an island-sized entity whose surfacing could create whirlpools and swallow vessels whole, blending sailors' fear of the deep with genuine maritime hazards. The creature's definitive description came in 1752, when Norwegian bishop and naturalist Erik Pontoppidan published his "Natural History of Norway," writing that sailors mistook its broad back for "a number of small islands" rising suddenly from calm water. The legend likely drew on real encounters with giant squid, whose enormous size and rarely seen carcasses would have seemed monstrous to sailors long before marine biologists documented the species. Over the centuries the Kraken shifted from local seafaring lore into wider European literature and popular culture, becoming a broad symbol of the ocean's untamed vastness rather than a creature anyone still claims to track scientifically.
What is the history of Kraken?
The kraken is the only entry in this atlas that has an ending. Not a debunking — an answer.
Its oldest layer is Norse, and it is not squid-shaped. Konungs skuggsjá, the King's Mirror, written in Norway around 1250 as instruction for a prince, describes the hafgufa: a fish so vast it was taken for an island, which fed by belching up a slick that drew shoals into its open mouth. The Icelandic Örvar-Odds saga has a crew sail between what they take for two rocks and which turn out to be the creature's jaws. Neither text uses the word kraken. Rodrigo Salvador and Barbara Tomotani, who traced the pedigree in 2014, stress that hafgufa, lyngbakr and kraken began as separate monsters and were folded into one by later writers.
The word itself is Norwegian — krake, in its definite form kraken — from a root meaning something crooked and misshapen: the image of a hooked tree trunk or a grappling drag. It became a scientific claim in 1735, when Linnaeus listed Microcosmus marinus in the first edition of Systema naturae. He had never seen one, called it a singular monster of the Norwegian seas in Fauna Suecica (1746), and quietly dropped it from later editions.
Then came the man who fixed the legend in place. Erik Pontoppidan, Lutheran bishop of Bergen, published Det første Forsøg paa Norges naturlige Historie in 1752-53; Andreas Berthelson's English translation was printed in London by A. Linde in 1755. Pontoppidan was not writing fiction. He was writing natural history, gathering fishermen's testimony the way a naturalist gathers specimens. His kraken is round, flat and full of arms; its surfacing back can be mistaken for a scatter of small islands, broad enough for a regiment to drill on; fishermen anchor over it deliberately, because the fishing there is extraordinary; when it goes down it drags a whirlpool with it. He also records that it stains the sea with a gush of dark liquid — the one detail a modern reader recognises at once.
Because there was an animal. In December 1853 the Danish zoologist Japetus Steenstrup obtained the beak of an enormous cephalopod stranded on the Jutland coast, and in 1857, in a four-page note to the congress of Scandinavian naturalists, he gave it a name: Architeuthis dux. The giant squid stopped being a rumour and became a species.
For almost a century and a half afterwards, everything known about Architeuthis came from the dead: strandings, beaks cut out of sperm whale stomachs, the ruined half-mantle the French gunboat Alecton hauled aboard off Tenerife in November 1861. Nobody had seen one alive. That ended at 09:15 on 30 September 2004.
Timeline: the documented record of Kraken
- c. 1250 The Norwegian Konungs skuggsjá (King's Mirror) describes the hafgufa, a fish mistaken for an island that belches up a slick to draw fish into its mouth. The Icelandic Örvar-Odds saga tells a comparable story. Neither uses the word kraken, and neither describes a cephalopod.
- 1735 Linnaeus lists Microcosmus marinus in the first edition of Systema naturae, giving the kraken a scientific name. He calls it a singular monster of the Norwegian seas in Fauna Suecica (1746), admits he has never seen one, and removes it from later editions.
- 1752-53 Erik Pontoppidan, bishop of Bergen, publishes Det første Forsøg paa Norges naturlige Historie. His kraken is round, flat and full of arms, is mistaken for a chain of islands, is fished over deliberately by Norwegian fishermen, drags a whirlpool down with it and darkens the water with dark liquid. Andreas Berthelson's English translation appears in London in 1755.
- December 1853 Japetus Steenstrup obtains the beak of a huge cephalopod stranded on the Danish coast. It is the physical evidence on which the scientific description will rest.
- 1857 Steenstrup publishes "Oplysninger om Atlanterhavets colossale Blæksprutter" and names Architeuthis dux. The kraken ceases to be folklore and becomes a species with a type description — the moment a cryptid was resolved.
- 30 November 1861 The French vessel Alecton harpoons a squid about 7.5 m long near Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. The body breaks up as the crew try to haul it aboard and only the rear of the mantle is recovered — but the fragment is real, and it is seen by officers of a navy.
- 1870s A run of specimens reaches shore in Newfoundland. The Reverend Moses Harvey obtains squid from local fishermen and photographs one before sending it to naturalists in Connecticut; among the material is a tentacle some 19 feet long, cut from an animal that fishermen said had come at their boat.
- 30 September 2004 At 09:15, at 26°57.3'N 142°16.8'E off the Ogasawara Islands, a baited camera rig lowered by Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori photographs a live giant squid at 900 m. More than 550 images are recorded over about four hours; the animal tears free leaving a 5.5 m tentacle behind, confirming a specimen over 8 m long. The images show an active hunter, not the drifting animal that had been assumed.
- 2008 The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa puts on display a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) taken in the Ross Sea. It remains the only colossal squid on public display in the world.
Is there a rational explanation for Kraken?
Here the sceptical move runs the other way. The kraken is the best argument this whole file has: a monster that turned out to be an animal.
What it is not is a licence to read every old sea story as a squid. Almost nothing in Pontoppidan's account matches Architeuthis. A back you could march troops across, an island that submerges into a maelstrom, a creature two ships could anchor over — that is the hafgufa, the island-fish of the medieval bestiaries, and Salvador and Tomotani warn that the identification of those traditions with the giant squid is retrospective, made after 1857 by people who already knew what they were looking for. The ink is the only line in Pontoppidan that a cephalopod could plausibly have written.
The numbers do not survive either. Giant squid mantles are not known to exceed 2.25 m, and total lengths measured relaxed after death are estimated at some 12 to 13 m for females and 10 m for males; the specialist Steve O'Shea has shown that the longer figures in circulation were obtained by stretching the two feeding tentacles like elastic bands. The behaviour is a straight invention: there is no documented case of a giant squid sinking a ship, or attacking one. The predation runs the other way — sperm whales eat them, and a great deal of what science knows about the species comes from beaks recovered in whale stomachs.
And the name still attracts bad science. In 2011 the geologist Mark McMenamin proposed a Triassic kraken that had killed ichthyosaurs and arranged their vertebrae into a pattern; palaeontologists replied that collapsing skeletons and circulating currents do that unaided, and that the arrangement has not been seen at any other site.
Can you visit Kraken?
There is no kraken site to visit. What there is, is a short list of places where you can stand in front of the animal.
The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, at 55 Cable Street, Wellington, has the only colossal squid on public display anywhere in the world — Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, taken in the Ross Sea, one of three specimens the museum holds. It opens daily from 10:00 to 18:00 except Christmas Day; entry is free for people living in New Zealand and NZ$35 for overseas visitors aged 16 and over.
The Natural History Museum in London keeps "Archie", an 8.62 m female landed in 2004, in a nine-metre tank in the Darwin Centre, where she has been since 1 March 2006; the preserved collection is seen on guided tours, so check availability before travelling. The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington displays two Architeuthis, a female of roughly 13 m and a male of roughly 6 m, and admission is free.
Two cautions. We could not confirm a giant squid on permanent display anywhere in Norway, the kraken's own coastline; the closest thing to a pilgrimage is the University Museum of Bergen, Villaveien 1A, in the city where Pontoppidan was bishop. And the Museo del Calamar Gigante at Luarca, in Asturias, which once held the largest collection of specimens in the world, lost most of it to a storm in February 2014 — check its status before making the trip.
Sources consulted
- Erich Pontoppidan (trans. Andreas Berthelson), «The Natural History of Norway, in Two Parts» — A. Linde, London — English translation of Det første Forsøg paa Norges naturlige Historie (1752-53), 1755 book
- Japetus Steenstrup, «Oplysninger om Atlanterhavets colossale Blæksprutter (original description of Architeuthis dux)» — Forhandlinger ved de Skandinaviske Naturforskeres Møde, 7 (1856): 182-185 — record consulted in the World Register of Marine Species, 1857 academic
- Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori, «First-ever observations of a live giant squid in the wild» — Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 272, no. 1581, pp. 2583-2586, 2005 academic
- Rodrigo B. Salvador and Barbara M. Tomotani, «The Kraken: when myth encounters science» — História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 971-1002, 2014 academic
- Riley Black, «The Giant Squid: Dragon of the Deep» — Smithsonian Magazine, 2011 newspaper archive
- Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, «Colossal squid» — Collections and visitor information, Wellington, 2026 web
Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-07-29 · How we verify our content
📎 Source: Folclore (curado)
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