“The Kraken, As Seen By The Eye Of Imagination” by Edgar Etherington, 1887

The Kraken: Surprisingly Sort-of Real Sea Monster

Welcome to Weird Wednesday! If you asked me to name my favorite legendary creature, I would either say Megalodon or the Kraken. I think the sea is a wonderful place to go looking for monsters! So step aboard and we’ll set sail.

If you sailed anytime in the last 300 years, you’d probably hear tales of the monstrous, ship-sinking kraken. Sailors’ stories are often assumed to be exaggerated, but the thing about the sea is nobody really knows what’s down there. Sure, some sea serpents are just dolphins swimming in a line, and globsters that wash up on shore are decaying pieces of known animals (for example, whale blubber all by itself looks like some horrible amorphous beast of the deep). But sometimes the tales were true—sightings of creatures like krakens, for example, may actually have been new (at the time) animals.

Of course, though sailors may have been describing the same creature, their stories didn’t all agree. Which is fair, considering sailors were often seeing pieces of dead animals on the surface, or live animals hidden by waves. So krakens were variously said to be huge fish with tentacles on their heads; “bearded whales;” monsters with many heads, arms, or horns; or sometimes, a squid or octopus—just really, really big. Like big enough to sink ships—and yes, that sounded like sailors’ exaggeration. But nobody was really sure.

(Check out the Devil Whale, another supposedly enormous known animal.)

A “bearded whale” (right) from The Carta marina, by Olaus Magnus, 1527-39

Sometimes ships disappear at sea. (Or, sometimes, the ships stay and the people disappear.) Without survivors, there’s no way to tell what happened, so families and fellow sailors are left scrambling for an explanation. The naturalist Pierre Dénys de Montfort hypothesized that the 1782 sinking of a fleet of British and French ships was due to a kraken or krakens dragging the ships under. (In reality, the 1782 Central Atlantic Hurricane was to blame, and we know this because there were survivors.)

But in 1861, amidst terrifying tales of krakens, the French ship Alecton encountered a live giant squid (probably Architeuthis) at the surface, with a body 18 feet long, plus tentacles. It was one of the first times anyone had gotten a good look at a living giant squid. It seemed the kraken was real after all.

To be fair, the giant squid is not exactly like the kraken stories. For one, it’s too small a giant. Krakens big enough to take down entire ships were said to be hundreds of feet long. The giant squid Architeuthis dux can get up to a max size of about 43 feet, including tentacles. (Shorter but heavier is the colossal squid, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni.) Secondly, the giant squid is not an aggressive ship-eating beast. In fact, squid are not surface-dwellers at all: squid seen by sailors were most likely ill, dying, or too busy trying to elude whales to go after ships, which they were too small to sink anyway.

Of course, those of us who love monsters will continue to keep the kraken alive in our hearts, and in our fiction! So here are some monstrous writing prompts:

Squad goals. The idea that a group of kraken took down a fleet of ships in 1782 is unusual. Most tales of krakens speak of only one creature. So why would a squad (okay, technically a group of squid is called a shoal but come on) of squid or tangle (yes, really) of octopuses decide to sink a fleet of ships? Maybe one of the krakens was injured by a ship strike or guns. Maybe the ships unknowingly strayed into well-defended kraken territory. Or maybe some sailor has aboard a cursed object that summons monsters—whether he knows it or not.

“Le Poulpe Colossal” (Giant Octopus) by Pierre Dénys de Montfort, 1801

Not of this earth sea. Speaking of curses, maybe krakens are real—but also not. That is, maybe the really big ones are not natural, but magical. You could have a magical character summon (maybe accidentally) a monster from another world into our ocean, or cast a spell to make a giant squid truly gigantic, maybe in order to wage war on ships. But would this character be able to control the kraken they created?

Tall tales. It is true that large sea animals do sink ships. So let’s say a kraken destroys a ship, and there’s a survivor left to tell the tale. He climbs into a lifeboat and after a few awful days, gets picked up by another ship. Would anyone believe his story? What would they do if they didn’t? Maybe people think the time in the lifeboat addled the sailor’s mind so he doesn’t remember what really happened. Or maybe they think he’s trying to cover up a bloody mutiny gone wrong. And maybe they’re right.

Triassic kraken. So this is a tale worthy of the golden age of sail. A bunch of fossilized ichthyosaur vertebrae in Nevada were found seemingly arranged into a pattern. Octopuses do indeed play with toys and enjoy mazes, so a couple of scientists proposed the idea of a “triassic kraken,” a monstrously large creature (who of course, wouldn’t fossilize as it has no bones), who might have been playing with the vertebrae. Other scientists say it’s more likely the ichthyosaur bones ended up that way from natural processes like gravity and water currents. But the idea that the kraken was real at one time is great for stories, because here’s where you get the Megalodon-type cryptids: real animals who were thought to be extinct, but maybe aren’t. And if these cryptids are really big, you have to give them somewhere to hide, so that’s how you get dinosaurs in the jungle and giant sharks in the sea. Why not krakens too? Your story could have those scientists proved right—and maybe that’s not a good thing.

The Kraken, a sonnet. Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote a poem about the kraken, describing it as a massive creature sleeping on the sea bed until the end of days. Let’s get a little less metaphorical and say it’s an actual animal, and some poor submersible stumbles across it. So here’s the real deal, the legendary kraken, big enough to sink ships, proved to exist after all this time. What would the world do with this knowledge? It depends how realistic you want your story to be. You could pen a classic creature feature where the kraken would rather eat people than mind its own business, a spy story about trying to keep the discovery a secret, or a political thriller where nations try to use the creature as an asset in war. Aaand we’re back around to a monster movie where the kraken’s not the only unknown creature down there—or the biggest.

Thanks for spending your Weird Wednesday here! I hope you go home with some good sea stories.

Want to chat about the blog? Did you use one of the prompts? Hit me up on social media.

If you like creepy tales of the sea, you can read my story The Sea is Full of Ghosts in the anthology Dark Waters, Volume 2. A deep-sea merman encounters the ghost of a drowned sailor.

Sources & further reading:

Kraken: Wikipedia

List of giant squid specimens and sightings: Wikipedia

Sea monsters and their inspiration: serpents, mermaids, the kraken and more: Natural History Museum, London