Talk:Kraken/sandbox

Revised version
Kraken ( or ) are fictional sea monsters of giant proportions.

History
The Old Icelandic saga Örvar-Odds saga referenced the massive heather-backed sea-monsters of the Greenland Sea named Hafgufa and Lyngbakr that fed on whales, ships and men. After returning from Iceland, the anonymous author of the Old Norwegian scientific work Konungs skuggsjá (c. 1250) described in detail the physical characteristics and feeding behavior of these two beasts and suggested the pair may possibly be the same animal, regarded by the Norse as the Kraken. The narrator proposed there must only be two krakens in existence, stemming from the observation that the beasts have always been sighted in the same parts of the Greenland Sea, and that each seemed incapable of reproduction as there was no increase in their numbers. Carolus Linnaeus classified Kraken as cephalopods (designating the scientific name Microcosmus)in the first edition of his Systema Naturae (1735), a taxonomic classification of living organisms. The creature was excluded from later editions.

Kraken were also extensively described by Erik Pontoppidan, bishop of Bergen, in his "Natural History of Norway" (Copenhagen, 1752–3). Pontoppidan made several claims regarding Kraken, including the notion that the creature was sometimes mistaken for an island and the real danger to sailors was not the creature itself but rather the whirlpool left in its wake. Fishermen apparently also risked fishing "over Kraken", since the catch was plentiful (hence the saying "You must have fished on Kraken" ) and that a young, deceased specimen was washed ashore at Alstahaug in 1680. Pontoppidan described the destructive potential of the giant beast: "It is said that if [the creature's arms] were to lay hold of the largest man-of-war, they would pull it down to the bottom".

Swede Jacob Wallenberg described the Kraken in the 1781 work Min son på galejan ("My son on the galley"):

"... Kraken, also called the Crab-fish, which [according to the pilots of Norway] is not that huge, for heads and tails counted, he is no larger than our Öland is wide...Kraken ascends to the surface, and when he is at ten to twelve fathoms, the boats had better move out of his vicinity, as he will shortly thereafter burst up, like a floating island, spurting water from his dreadful nostrils and making ring waves around him, which can reach many miles. Could one doubt that this is the Leviathan of Job?"

In 1802, the French malacologist Pierre Dénys de Montfort wrote the Histoire Naturelle Générale et Particulière des Mollusques, an encyclopedic description of mollusks. Montfort speculated that there were in fact two types of creatures: the first the kraken octopus as described by Norwegian sailors and American whalers, and a second larger version, the colossal octopus, that was reported to have attacked a sailing vessel from Saint-Malo, off the coast of Angola. Montfort unfortunately disgraced himself when he proposed that ten British warships (including the captured French ship of the line Ville de Paris, which had disappeared in 1782) must have been destroyed by giant octopi, when the British in fact knew what had happened to the ships.

Sightings of actual giant squid may have confused the issue, as the creatures are estimated to grow to 13 – in length. Although normally existing at great depths, giant squid have been sighted on the surface and have reportedly attacked ships.