Martin Theiller, “Kraken: a British Myth?”
The monstrous legend of the Kraken originated as a nautical tale shared by Norwegian fishermen in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. It eventually rose to prominence on the European stage after several Scandinavian works of natural history—all translated into English—introduced the sea monster to a wider and educated public in the late 18th century. This paper proposes to examine the crucial role Britain played in popularising the legend at the time and ensuring the survival of its legacy. Indeed, before the publication of highly popular novels by Jules Verne and H. P. Lovecraft, British travellers and poets had already appropriated this figure, which resonated with the political, aesthetic, and scientific concerns of the early 19th century. The Kraken appeared in the travelogues of English tourists and admirals, as well as in the ballads—and even the dreams—of some Romantic writers like Robert Southey, Walter Scott, and Alfred Tennyson. When the attention of the British public was drawn to Greenland, after the Admiralty launched new campaigns of exploration in search for the Northwest Passage, the Kraken also became a propaganda tool, a monster against which the worth of the explorers and the Empire could be tested in the Arctic seas. The analysis of these simultaneous cultural transfers will therefore suggest that, in spite of its Scandinavian origins, the Kraken developed into a British myth in the first half of the 19thcentury.
