The Kraken Was Real: How the Giant Squid Left Legend for the Record Books

2026-06-12 · Mysterious Creatures · 8 min read

For most of recorded history the largest invertebrate in the ocean existed only as a story. Aristotle wrote of a great teuthos off the Greek coast, and Pliny the Elder described a monster that raided the fish tanks of Roman Spain. But it was in the cold north that the beast took its enduring shape. For centuries the kraken shared a shelf with the mermaid and the sea serpent, a mountain of arms and suckers that rose from the deep to drag a ship under or swamp it in the whirlpool of its own diving.

In 1755 the Norwegian bishop Erik Pontoppidan set the creature down in his Natural History of Norway as the largest and most surprising of all creation, round and full of arms, so vast that fishermen mistook its back for an island. He traced the tale to older Icelandic accounts of the hafgufa, the sea-mist monster. Carl Linnaeus, the great cataloguer of life, had briefly listed the kraken among the cephalopods in an early edition of his Systema Naturae before quietly deleting it. Alfred Tennyson made a poem of it in 1830, a beast sleeping its ancient dreamless sleep on the sea floor until the end of the world.

Reader comments (0)