Kraken

Quick facts

These fields describe the historical text’s claims, not verified animal observations. Name variants retain this English edition’s spelling; they are not presented as separate species or translated into modern scientific names.^[1][2][3]

What Pontoppidan reports

Section XI introduces the Kraken through correspondence and enquiries, acknowledging that the resulting description is incomplete. Section XII then attributes a recurring experience to fishermen: where they expect 80 or 100 fathoms of water, their lines find only 20 or 30, sometimes less. The unusually good catch is taken as a sign that the Kraken lies beneath them. Further shallowing signals that it is rising, and the boats withdraw.^[1][2]

From a safer distance, the fishermen reportedly see an upper surface resembling several islands, with fish slipping from its raised parts. Points rise and thicken into what the narrator interprets as arms, as large as ships’ masts. Its return below water is said to create a dangerous swell and eddy. The statement that these arms could drag down a warship is a reported possibility, not a narrated warship sinking.^[2]

Two particular reports follow. The minister Mr. Friis tells Pontoppidan of a Krake that became trapped among rocks at Alstahoug in 1680 and decayed there; Pontoppidan explicitly passes this on under Friis’s authority. A separate account near Fridrichstad concerns two fishermen whose boat’s bow was crushed by a horn while they tried to escape thickened water. They survived on the wreck. These are distinct reports, not episodes in one creature’s life.^[2]

Description and uncertainty

Pontoppidan calls the creature round and flat, with many arms or branches. The exposed upper part is estimated at an English mile and a half in circumference. That extraordinary estimate concerns an apparent surface, not a measured whole animal: he says its entire body has probably never been seen, apart from supposed young specimens.^[1][2]

He also records a feeding explanation in which scent and discharged excrement attract fish, which the Kraken then gathers with its arms. He expressly gives this claim less assurance than he gives the creature’s existence. The text’s turbid water is therefore not silently relabelled as a confirmed defensive ink cloud.^[2]

In section XIII, his proposed classification turns to branching starfish and the animal he calls Medusa’s Head. The English terms “Polype,” “Polypus,” “Star-fish,” arms, horns, and tentacula belong to this historical discussion. They do not establish an eight-armed octopus or a ten-limbed squid. No fixed arm count, beak, or complete body plan is supplied for the reported Kraken.^[3]

Henry Lee later reproduced a ship-attacking Poulpe colossal after de Montfort in Sea Monsters Unmasked (1883), while criticising de Montfort’s fleet-destruction story. Lee says de Montfort treated this colossal octopus as distinct from the Kraken. That later illustrated discussion should be read separately from the 1755 testimony.^[4]

Source realm: Norwegian coastal waters

The fishermen’s account is placed several miles out to sea, with land still used to judge position. Alstahoug and Fridrichstad locate the two specific incidents in the translation’s geographical vocabulary. These locations describe the provenance of reports, not an established biological range.^[2]

The archive groups this record under Folklore places, alongside other geographically situated historical accounts. Its record type remains natural history; a Norwegian setting alone does not place it in the Eddic mythic cosmos.

Themes in this account

Abundance beside danger

The same signs that promise a rich catch warn fishermen to leave as the creature rises. This tension comes from the reported fishing sequence, rather than an assigned symbolic meaning.^[2]

The limits of testimony

Pontoppidan distinguishes information received from others, uncertain habits, and his own explanations. His confidence in the creature coexists with an admission that its nature remains incompletely known.^[1][2][3]