Kraken

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For other uses, see Kraken (disambiguation). For generic sjøuhyre, see sea monster.
Kraken vs. ship
Kraken attacking ship
(top) Kraken, an unconfirmed cephalopod[a]
— engraving by W. H. Lizars, in Hamilton, Robert (1839). Naturalist's Library. adapted "from Denys Montford" [sic.][4]
colossal octopus engraving
—drawing by Pierre Denys-Montfort, engraved by Étienne Claude Voysard [fr], 1801[5]
colossal octopus in color
—hand-colored woodcut[6] or pen and wash.[citation needed]
(left) a "colossal octopus" that attacked a ship. (right) colorized facsimile[1]

The kraken (/ˈkrɑːkən/)[7] is a legendary sea monster of enormous size said to appear off the coasts of Norway.

Kraken, the subject of sailors' superstitions and mythos, was first described in the modern age at the turn of the 18th century, first in a travelogue by Francesco Negri in 1700, followed by writings by Dano-Norwegian natural history. Egede (1741)[1729] described the kraken in detail and equated it with the hafgufa of medieval lore, but the first description of the creature is usually credited to the Norwegian bishop Pontoppidan (1753). Pontoppidan was the first to describe the kraken as an octopus (polypus) of tremendous size,[b] and wrote that it had a reputation of pulling down ships, but the French malacologist Denys-Montfort of the 19th century is better known for these.

The great man-killing octopus entered French fiction when novelist Victor Hugo (1866) introduced the pieuvre octopus of Guernsey lore, which he identified with the kraken of legend, and this led to Jules Verne's depiction of the kraken, which he did not really distinguish between squid or octopus.

The legend may have indeed originated from sightings of giant squid, which may grow to 13–15 meters (40–50 feet) in length.

If Linnaeus wrote on the kraken, he only did so indirectly. Linnaeus had published on the Microcosmus genus (an animal with various other organisms or growths attached to it, comprising a colony). And these, including Bartholin's cetus called hafgufa, and Paullini's monstrous marinum. These have been referred to as "krakens" by subsequent authors.[c] The claim that Linnaeus printed the vernacular name "kraken" in the margin of a later edition of Systema Naturae fails to be confirmed, and another claim that he published on the cephalopod species Sepia microcosmus[d] has been shown to be erroneous, though these continue to repeated as fact by modern-day writers.