Lauren Poyer is an assistant teaching professor in Scandinavian studies. She teaches courses in Scandinavian mythology and Vikings in contemporary culture, among other topics, and she is well steeped in all kinds of Nordic and Icelandic lore.
Lauren PoyerUniversity of Washington
Thanks to Ann Milam for finding this. So how do you feel about this name for our hockey team. As the author notes, ” I thought, “I can’t wait to go to a hockey game!” Can you imagine how much fun it will be to be in the crowd when the announcers yell, “Release the Kraken!” and the fans flails their arms like squid tentacles while the players skate out into the ice? I’m hoping for some tentacle-y homemade costumes, too.”
After word that the new Seattle hockey team would be named Seattle Kraken , UW News caught up with Poyer to learn more about some of the mythology behind Seattle’s newest cryptid creature.
The idea of mythical sea creatures in Nordic mythology dates back centuries. Why were sea creatures such a big part of ancient lore?
Stories about sea monsters are not unique to Scandinavia, but Scandinavian folklore certainly has a lot of them! People in medieval Scandinavia spent a lot of time by and on the sea. Oftentimes we think of the stories they tell about creatures like sea monsters as evidence that people in the past were less knowledgeable about their environment than we are today, but I would argue that the opposite is true. The average person in medieval Scandinavia would have known a lot about their local environment; they would have been familiar with using birds to navigate, for example, with using fish to estimate ocean depth, with reading the skies to predict weather, the list goes on. Stories about sea monsters, I think, reflect more than just a sense of mystery or fear of the open ocean: They reflect an understanding that living creatures in the sea, and even the sea itself, have their own knowledge and their own agendas, only some of which we humans will ever understand.A UW psychology professors explains the science behind real-life kraken here.
In Scandinavian folklore, the kraken wasn’t always an octopus-like creature. In medieval times, people believed the kraken was a giant whale. Can you tell us more?
The word kraken is a Scandinavian loanword into English, but it does not actually appear in the medieval written record in Scandinavia. Two different 13th-century Scandinavian texts use the name hafgufa (“sea-mist”) for a particular sea monster that lives at the bottom of the sea, which modern readers identify as the kraken. It’s important to note, though, that the earlier of these two texts, the Konungs skuggsjá, or King’s Mirror, which is a bit like a medieval encyclopedia, does not describe the kraken destroying ships. Instead, the kraken is just a very large sea creature that has a peculiar way of hunting: It opens its mouth very wide and regurgitates food to attract fish. Once the fish have gathered around its mouth, it slams its jaw shut and captures all of the surrounding fish in its mouth, which sounds a lot like whales and schools of fish all gathering to feast on krill. The later text, the legendary Örvar-Odds saga, describes a hafgufa that has been sent by an evil sorcerer to sink the hero’s ship. Medieval people loved high fantasy tales of adventure as much as we do!