The kraken is a supposed sea monster of vast size, said to have been seen off the coast of Norway and Iceland. An early description was by Erik Pontopiddan, bishop of Bergen, in his Natural History of Norway (1755), but the name can be traced to the end of the 16th century. The name was disseminated in English by Alfred, Lord Tennyson's popular poem "The Kraken," (essentially an irregular sonnet), published in 1830. Tennyson's description apparently influenced Jules Verne's imagined lair of the giant squid in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1870.

In the 1981 film Clash of the Titans, "kraken" is given as the name of the creature that is sent to kill Andromeda. In fact this monster, slain by Perseus, was typically referred to as a "ketos" by the ancient Greeks, a word that is best translated by the English phrase "sea monster". The ketos has no historic connection with the kraken.

Since the late 18th century, the kraken has been depicted in a number of ways, primarily as a large octopus-like creature. However this was not its earliest form which was more crab-like. The term is not used in the Norse sagas, and the kraken was always distinct from more serpentine sea monsters.

Pontoppidan's kraken might have been based on sailors' observations of the giant squid.

See also

• cryptozoology