Read "The Kraken" by Jorge Luis Borges online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The Kraken is a Scandinavian version of the zaratan and of the sea dragon, or sea snake of the Arabs.
In 1752-54, the Dane Erik Pontoppidan, Bihsop of Bergen, published a Natural History of Norway, a work famous for its hospitality or gullibility. In its pages we read that the Kraken's back is a mile and a half wide and that its tentacles are capable of encompassing the largest of ships. The huge back protrudes from the sea like an island. The Bishop formulates this rule: ‘Floating islands are invariably Krakens. ' He also writes that the Kraken is in the habit of turning the sea murky with a discharge of liquid. This statement has inspired the hypothesis that the Kraken is an enlargement of the octopus.
Among Tennyson's juvenilia we find this poem to the curious creature:
The Kraken
Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.