Originally believed to be a creature of the Icelandic Sagas, the first actual sightings of the Kraken were in the late 18th Century by Erik Pontippidan, he wrote of the creature: ‘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’.
Sailors would often report of an octopus like brute with huge tentacles, covered in polypi writhing at the surface of the sea. As more and more sightings were reported, it became clear that the thing grotesque and haunting eyes, larger than any man. It was said that to stare into the eyes would be like looking into an abyss, inducing despair, almost as if you had looked upon death.
The Kraken Sleepeth
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate and close friend of Queen Victoria, wrote The Kraken in 1830. Tennyson had witnessed the disastrous floods of 1829 and knew that the creature responsible was not of this world. Tennyson himself was a member of ‘The Cambridge Apostles’ a secret intellectual society known to explore ‘moral sciences’.
Tennyson’s sonnet dedicated to this beast was more than simply a description. Within the poem, Tennyson hid the secret incantation that would stop the Kraken from surfacing and flooding the Thames.
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