The Kraken is a well-known mythological sea monster that has seen adaptation and inclusion in numerous stories and pop culture around the world. A huge sea creature which looks like a gigantic octopus or some other kind of cephalopod, often depicted as the size of sea-faring ships themselves, with the power alone to drag them deep down into the murky depths using its massive tentacles, killing everyone on board the ill-fated vessel.
The legend comes from Scandinavian folklore where it was once widely believed that the creature lived in the deep depths off the coasts of Norway and Greenland. There is a high likelihood that the sightings of giant squid were mistaken for sea monsters and led to the origination of the Kraken legend itself.
The legend would have been furthered through the telling of Tall Tales from sailor to sailor and would have played into the superstitious aspects that these seamen faced in their day to day jobs out in the sea. Superstitions ran rampant among sailors, especially in older times, due to the danger of the sea being a big factor every day and these sailors would have been months out at sea and so to them luck was a very important factor. The Kraken would have been for an obvious reason something very unlucky out at sea.
And with these Tall Tales came more and more traits that are picked up and added on to the legend and passed on again and again from sailor to sailor, port to port, place to place… it’s folklore in a nutshell. Such stories include the Kraken’s poop attracting its fishy prey which was likely again a mistake of identity of other matter expelled by existing cephalopods, which is known as ink and some species were also able to expel mucus which could create false bodies to distract predators. All of that sort of stuff could have been mistaken as poop by early sea-farers.
But it isn’t completely out of the question to discount something this large not existing, at least in small numbers, due to the ocean being so large and so deep and unexplored as well as being pitch black in the most unexplored areas, there are many creatures we have not yet discovered, possibly even very big ones that spend most of their life in the deep dark depths, only to come up on very rare occasions. Maybe there is something bigger than the Giant or Colossal Squid out there?
An anonymous author of the Konungs Skuggsja, an Old Norwegian Natural History work from 1250 wrote a small piece on the Kraken after returning from Greenland, talking about its sheer unbelievable size and speculated that there could be no more than two of them within the ocean. The author also talks about the Kraken belching out food from its mouth to attract prey rather than using poop; he said that the Kraken would hold open its huge mouth while fish swarmed in for the food, once its mouth was full it would then close it and devour the fish it had attracted.
So, the next time you’re out at sea on a cruise liner or some kind of boat, just keep in mind what monsters may lurk below! The ocean is so deep and so unexplored that we really have little idea of what could be down there that we haven’t yet discovered.
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