The Kraken: An (Un)Natural History
The legacy of the Kraken, believe it or not, is more science than myth.
Well, actually, I suppose that’s debatable. Bear with me.
Before the modernization of our grasp on biological and natural law, the mythos of creatures like kraken was actually a pretty decent effort at understanding ecology around us. The lines between nature and mysticism were undefined; terminology that we now recognize as mythical were, at the time, used broadly as categorical tools to keep records and information collected. Stories of kraken spawned from hundreds, if not thousands, of inexplicable encounters on the open sea with benign but misunderstood ocean critters.
Of course, fast forward a few centuries and the Kraken has become go-to throwaway public-domain sea monster: Pirates of the Caribbean, A Song of Ice and Fire, Clash of the Titans, GEICO Commercials…
And note that I’m making an effort at maintaining case-appropriateness throughout this article — Kraken capitalized refers to specific mythical characters, often godlike or mystical in some nature. The lowercase kraken, used more broadly as a debunked aquatic species, is where the history gets really interesting.
In the beginning, kraken were first “observed” (define that however you like) by sailors and explorers dating back to the 13th century. The history can be traced to a few notable legends and folktales, but if you look more broadly at the evolving stories, sightings of kraken form a rather ill-defined cloud of information that spans centuries.
The accounts of the animal varied wildly — sometimes the creature was octopus-like, other times looking more like a crab or lobster. And the kraken’s size, perhaps its most defining quality, was also wildly inconsistent — ranging between 100 feet and “miles” long in different accounts.
Still, given the vast oddities of the open ocean, let’s humor a bit of comparison.
As an industry standard set by the naturalist Pierre Denys de Montfort in 1802 and popularized recently by Pirates of the Caribbean, our kraken estimate is approximately ten warships placed end to end.
Between the 13th and 19th centuries, sailors indiscriminately used the term “kraken” to catalogue any enormous, unidentifiable, or uncanny sea beast that may (or may not) have crossed their paths during early ocean exploration. Despite the myths and magic that would later be associated with the creature, for the time… this process is remarkably scientific, in a certain sense. These explorers and storytellers were inadvertently uncovering new phenomena about the open ocean and associating it under a unified umbrella: kraken.
And here’s where the nomenclature becomes really fascinating.
It’s likely that the origins of these stories were actual, flesh-and-blood sea creatures: humpback whales look awfully “lobster-like” at a quick glance, and we now verifiably know that giant and colossal squid indeed roam the open ocean. At the time though, anything dubious was just labeled kraken and thrown into the proverbial bucket of myth and legend.
But still, these myths allowed data to be tracked and compiled. By the 1700s, after centuries of sightings, kraken (still lowercase!) had gathered enough data to be genuinely considered real. In 1735 Carl Linneaus actually classified kraken as a species with a scientific name: Microcosmus marinus.
The transition into Kraken, capitalized and mythical, was kickstarted in 1830 by renowned sea-monster enthusiast Lord Alfred Tennyson. This is when things get super interesting.
In a narrow few decades in the mid-1800s, the Kraken grew rapidly into an icon of popular science fiction literature, bookended by references in Moby Dick (1851) and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1871), although not mentioned by name in the latter.
During this time, popular culture began replacing the pseudo-scientific archive of kraken (lowercase) with the mythical idea of a Kraken (uppercase).
For those unfamiliar with Google ngram, the database of word usage in literature, it’s a powerful deductive tool.
Throughout most of the 19th century the terms “kraken” and “Kraken” shared pretty much equal footing in popular literature. But sure enough, slowly as our understanding of natural sciences matured and the Kraken became an icon of sea fiction, not fact, the terminology shifted into its modern usage. You can see this happening on the graph above right around 1885.
I find this absolutely amazing.
If the scientific “classification” of the kraken began with Linnaeus in 1735, my best efforts to track down the end of this pseudo-science legacy bring me to a 1872 paper submitted to the Royal Society of Biology. The full publication — which I recommend reading in its entirety — examines how mythical creatures tend to derive from exaggerated claims of real-life biology. In the publication, the Kraken is acknowledged as “simply an enormous exaggeration of the gigantic species of cuttle fish known or believed to exist in the Indian Ocean.”
Myth debunked. Although the rest of the publication goes on to defend the existence of the Bunyip, a mythical beast from Australia which would take a few more decades to thoroughly disprove.
And hell, if people today still think mermaids are real, I can’t say for certain that myth ever truly weeds itself completely out of our collective culture.
But there’s a 150-year-or-so window that holds a lot more information about the transition from kraken to Kraken; from myth to biology. The way science and research evolved during the Age of Enlightenment meant a more critical look at the natural world around us — and more importantly, a more robust methodology when naming organisms and collecting data.
As I said earlier, the kraken originally served as a catch-all for unknown and unidentified sightings at sea. So what happened when we sailors and explorers adopted a more modernized method of observing, naming, and categorizing sea creatures?
And thus the Kraken was released, not by man, but by science.
Before about 1820, the Kraken (I’m using all case-forms here) was the dominant language used in describing cephalopod life, at least in quite primitive terms. Over less than 50 years, from about 1820 to 1870, humanity adopted a new way of talking about the ocean world.
Octopus. Squid. Cephalopod. By 1900, they had all eclipsed our dear kraken.
This isn’t the only myth to be replaced by modern scientific understanding.
Evidence for dragons was eventually replaced in the popular consciousness by an understanding of dinosaurs and the fossil record. And it’s well-documented that mermaid myths were simply sparked from a mischaracterization of manatees. Gorillas, actually, were once thought to be entirely mythical before being thoroughly recognized by western scientists in 1847. We just kept the name intact as the myth transitioned into reality.
Myths like kraken serve an invaluable role in helping science develop — they give the inexplicable and misunderstood elements of the natural world a banner to be collected underneath. Sure, that name is eventually replaced with more accurate language, but just because science was a bit early that doesn’t mean it was wrong.
And luckily for kraken, this story actually ends on a high note.
Two genuine squid species — Giant and Colossal respectively — also lived on the precipice of myth and science for hundreds of years before the degree of sightings and specimens eventually became overwhelming. In the late 19th Century, early photo evidence lead to widespread acceptance of the creature as fact rather than fiction — a confirmation that gave new life to the Kraken legend.
The mythical monster may have risked fading into obscurity if not for a newfound connection — almost a vindication — in actual biology.
During the Enlightenment era, it may have seemed like our improving understanding of science took us further away from the miraculous and the mythological. But now, as we look deeper into the true oddities of nature, we come full circle with actual acknowledgement of the bizarre extremes in the natural world—wildlife that does exist but pushes our imagination in new ways. So let’s keep discovering and embracing the blurred lines between wildlife and fantasy.
Because if the mantis shrimp isn’t completely made up, I don’t know what to believe.
