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The Kraken is another notable example of the studies in unnatural history of the ancients. Pliny gravely narrates that one of these monsters-the "mountain fish " of the old Norsemen-haunted the ocean off the coasts of Spain and North Africa, but, owing to its bulk, was unable to penetrate through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. According to some old writers the kraken, when floating on the surface of the sea, stretched to a length of about a mile and a half, and appeared like an island. It is a difficult problem to say which would be the most embarrassing position-for a seaman to find himself stranded on the creature's back on its sudden arrival at the surface, or to be engulfed in the whirlpool that would arise from its sinking again into the depths of ocean. One old writer tells us of a party of sailors that, from the tangled sea-weed on the creature's back, took the kraken for an island, and after fishing for some time with some little success in the pools of water in the hollows of his back, proceeded to light a fire to cook their take, and suddenly found themselves engulfed in the sea when the heat became
sufficienly great to awaken their animated island from its nap. Alaus Magnus, archbishop of Upsala, describes this colossus of the deep as the kraken, but he stops short at the length of a mile; while Pontoppidan, bishop of Bergen, adds that a whole regiment of soldiers could manoeuvre on its back ; while yet a third ecclesiastic, another bishop, tells us that he did actually erect an altar on the creature's back and celebrate mass. We are told that the kraken submitted to the ceremony without flinching, but no sooner was it over than it plunged into the depths of the sea, to the great astonishment and peril of the divine. It may at first seem curious that so many of these stories should spring from ecclesiastics, but it must be remembered that they were in these early days the great repositories of truth, the laity being steeped in ignorance and superstition.
It has been conjectured that the kraken myth has sprung from stories of gigantic cuttle-fish or octopus, the devil fish described so vividly by Victor Hugo in his " Toilers of the Sea ; " but one can hardly fall in quite readily with this notion, since the leading idea, so to speak, in the kraken belief is that of a monstrous and quiescent mass, suggestive more than anything else of an island rising from the sea, while the dominant idea in our minds of the octopus is of a creature armed with far-stretching and numerous arms that enwrap their hapless victim in their pitiless embrace. The kraken would scarcely have been described without any reference to these fearful feelers, armed with double rows of suckers, if the myth had had the origin that has been in several directions claimed for it.- The belief in the kraken chiefly springs, probably, from that delight in something tremendously big that has also given us the roc carrying away elephants in its talons, or the serpent that encompasses the world in its folds, so that we need not then too anxiously strive to find any counterpart of it in nature. "They that sail on the sea tell of the dangers thereof, and when we hear it with our ears we marvel thereat. "For therein be strange and wondrous works, variety of all kinds of beasts, and whales created." |