It's got an eye the size of your head, it's got a jet propulsion system and three hearts that pump blue blood." "It has eight lashing arms and two slashing tentacles growing straight out of its head and it's got serrated suckers that can latch on to the slimiest of prey and it's got a parrot beak that can rip flesh. It would have made a weird sight, "about the most alien thing you can imagine," says Edith Widder, CEO at the Ocean Research and Conservation Association. Sailors would have encountered it at the surface, dying, and probably thrashing about. The huge mollusc takes pride of place as the personification of the terrors of the deep sea. Most likely the Kraken is based on a real creature - the giant squid. And when we can go no further - there lurks the Kraken. The deeper we travel into the ocean, the deeper we delve into our own psyche.
In his short 1830 poem The Kraken he wrote: "Below the thunders of the upper deep, / Far far beneath in the abysmal sea, / His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep / The Kraken sleepeth." This terrifying legend occupied the mind and pen of the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson too. If it saw the ship it would pluck the hapless sailors from the boat and drag them to a watery grave. If sailors found a place with many fish, most likely it was the monster that was driving them to the surface. One Norse legend talks of the Kraken, a deep sea creature that was the curse of fishermen. "Monsters say something about human psychology, not the world."
"They don't really exist, but they play a huge role in our mindscapes, in our dreams, stories, nightmares, myths and so on," says Matthias Classen, assistant professor of literature and media at Aarhus University in Denmark, who studies monsters in literature. Many academics agree that monsters lurk in the deepest recesses, they prowl through our ancestral minds appearing in the half-light, under the bed - or at the bottom of the sea. "This inhuman place makes human monsters," wrote Stephen King in his novel The Shining.
What is it that draws us to these creatures? Sea monsters are the stuff of legend - lurking not just in the depths of the oceans, but also the darker corners of our minds.
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