The Kraken: Monster of the Deep, From Norse Legend to the Giant Squid
Le Poulpe Colossal — Pierre Dénys de Montfort, Histoire Naturelle Générale et Particulière des Mollusques , 1801. The iconic image of the kraken as giant octopus attacking a sailing ship: the ocean's immensity made flesh, seizing the human world from below. The sea has a floor. Human beings have known this intellectually for as long as they have thought about the sea — but the ocean floor, for most of human history, was as inaccessible as the surface of the moon, as dark as the inside of the earth, as foreign to experience as the kingdom of the dead. What lived down there, in the absolute darkness and pressure of the ocean's abyssal depths, no one could know. And into that ignorance — as into all sustained ignorance about what lies in the dark — the imagination projected something adequate to the scale of the unknown. The Kraken is Scandinavia's answer to the abyss: a creature of such enormous size that sailors who anchored on its back mistook it for an island, who w...