Did the Kraken Exist? The Real Sea Creature Behind the Myth

Background

Stories of an immense sea monster capable of dragging ships beneath the waves circulated across Norway and the wider Scandinavian world for centuries before they reached a wide readership. The most influential written account came from Erik Pontoppidan, a Norwegian bishop and naturalist, whose "The Natural History of Norway" (published in Danish in 1752–53 and translated into English in 1755) treated the kraken as a real, if poorly understood, animal, describing a creature so large that fishermen mistook its back for a shoal of small islands, and crediting it with a strong scent that supposedly drew fish to the surface just before it submerged.

The kraken briefly entered formal scientific classification too. Carl Linnaeus, the founder of modern taxonomic naming, included the kraken as a cephalopod species, "Microcosmus marinus", in the 1735 first edition of his "Systema Naturae". He removed it from later editions once it became clear no verified specimen supported the classification, an early example of the boundary between documented natural history and unverified travellers' report being actively policed rather than simply assumed.

Main Theories

The giant squid explanation

The explanation with the strongest evidential support holds that the kraken legend grew from genuine, if garbled and exaggerated, encounters with the giant squid, Architeuthis dux, a real deep-sea cephalopod that can reach roughly 12 to 13 metres including its feeding tentacles. Giant squid remains, carcasses washed ashore or snagged in fishing gear, have been documented in the North Atlantic for centuries, well before science could explain what kind of animal produced them, and occasional surface encounters with a genuinely large, tentacled, ship-troubling creature would have been more than sufficient to seed and sustain a folklore tradition long before any living specimen was ever properly examined.

Confirmation of the living animal came comparatively recently. On 30 September 2004, Tsunemi Kubodera of Japan's National Science Museum and Kyoichi Mori of the Ogasawara Whale Watching Association took the first photographs of a live giant squid in its natural deep-sea habitat, using a baited line and camera roughly 970 kilometres south of Tokyo. Kubodera, working with deep-sea explorer Edith Widder and marine biologist Steve O'Shea, went further in July 2012, filming a live giant squid from a submersible off Japan's Bonin Islands using a camera system Widder designed to mimic bioluminescent jellyfish and lure the animal into view; the footage aired on NHK and the Discovery Channel in January 2013.

The literal sea-monster claim

A more literal reading, largely confined to folklore, historical fiction, and popular culture rather than serious modern zoological argument, treats the kraken as a distinct, possibly still-undiscovered leviathan considerably larger and more aggressive than any confirmed cephalopod, closer to Pontoppidan's original island-sized description than to any verified giant squid specimen.

This reading has no supporting physical evidence: no carcass, sonar contact, or verified sighting has ever indicated an animal approaching the scale Pontoppidan described, and every confirmed giant squid specimen, including large adult females, falls well short of the "mistaken for an island" version of the legend. Marine biologists generally treat the gap between folklore description and confirmed animal as ordinary pre-scientific exaggeration of a genuinely striking real creature, the same pattern documented in numerous other historical sea-monster accounts, rather than evidence of an unconfirmed second, larger species.

Current Consensus

Marine biologists agree, with high confidence, that the kraken legend originated in real historical encounters with giant squid, whose true scale and deep-sea habitat remained scientifically undocumented until direct photographic and video evidence emerged in 2004 and 2012 respectively. What remains genuinely open is narrower: giant squid behaviour, feeding habits, and population range in the deep ocean are still incompletely studied, since the animal remains extremely difficult to observe alive in its natural habitat even with modern equipment, and no living specimen has ever been filmed at the ocean surface in the dramatic manner Pontoppidan's accounts describe.

Why This Mystery Endures

The kraken endures because its resolution arrived unusually late and unusually cleanly: unlike many folklore creatures whose closest real counterpart remains debated, the giant squid is a confirmed, named, and now directly photographed and filmed species, yet confirmation took more than two and a half centuries after Pontoppidan's account and required deep-submersible technology that did not exist for most of that time. That gap, a real animal, genuinely elusive, taking that long to be seen alive, gives the legend a durability that outright fictional creatures rarely achieve.

The comparison to the Loch Ness Monster and Ogopogo is instructive: all three are cryptid legends whose most credible modern explanation replaced an imagined monster with a real but far less dramatic candidate, sonar-elusive fish and floating logs at Loch Ness and Okanagan Lake, a genuinely large but non-monstrous cephalopod for the kraken. The kraken's case is unusual only in how decisively the giant squid explanation was ultimately confirmed by direct observation, rather than remaining a plausible but unconfirmed best guess. The kraken is part of this site's cryptids coverage.