The Kraken belongs to a 600-year tradition of Scandinavian sea monsters; creatures so vast that medieval sailors mistook their backs for islands and landed on them.
The word itself is said to have first appeared in a Norwegian glossary in 1646, but by the 1750s, Erik Pontoppidan was cataloguing fishermen's accounts in his ‘Natural History of Norway’, treating the creature not as folklore but as a species awaiting classification.
But what were these sailors actually seeing? Was it mass hysteria? Mistranslated whale sightings? Or genuine encounters with something the world hadn't named yet?
In this chapter, I trace the Kraken from 13th-century Norwegian texts to the harpoon scars left on dying sperm whales and to 2004, when researchers finally photographed a living giant squid in its natural habitat for the first time in human history.
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