[Mythical animals] phoenix, chimera, hydra, sphinx, minotaur; griffin, griffon; centaur; saggittary^; kraken, cockatrice, wyvern, roc, dragon, sea serpent; mermaid, merman, merfolk^; unicorn; Cyclops, men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders [Othello]; teratology.

These amorphous creatures glided about in the seas, and vast sea-worms, or centipedal asps, the parents of modern krakens and sea-serpents, doubtless, accompanied them.

the unicorn, the kraken, the sea-serpent, are all, perhaps, zoological facts.

We have gone over the vast extent of waters which encompass our globe, and been for some months engaged in examining the wonders of the ocean, without meeting any of the monsters of the deep, such as krakens, sea-serpents, &c.; nevertheless, I am not so skeptical as to disbelieve all I have not the opportunity of viewing with my own bodily eyes.

And then I see all frightful shapeslank ghosts, Hydras, chimeras, krakens, wastes of sand, Herbless and void of living voicetall mountains Cleaving the skies with height immeasurable, On which perchance I climb for infinite years; broad seas, Studded with islands numberless, that stretch Beyond the regions of the sun, and fade Away in distance vast, or dreary clouds, Cold, dark, and watery, where wander I for ever!

Then, like a kraken huge and black, She crushed our ribs in her iron grasp!

" Then he was a Kraken fish, outspread like an island upon the deep: then a mighty black cloud affrighting the mariners with its presence: then a flying island, like that which greeted the bewildered eyes of Gulliver.

There is a popular idea among the Norwegians, that this animal is the young of the famous Kraken, of which Pontoppidan has related so many wonders.

Much of it is applicable to the whale; much is referable to thick, low, fog-banks, which even experienced seamen have mistaken for land, an opinion coinciding with what has been said of this same Kraken, by a Latin author of considerable antiquity.

So I have not been permitted to design a fine nightmare or a creditable terrornothing morbid or blood-freezing, no sea-serpents or krakens or hippogriffs, nor anything that gives me a really free hand,for months and months: and my art suffers.

The Scandinavian navigators, who had never encountered it in their fjords, nicknamed it the kraken, exaggerating its proportions and even converting it into a fabulous being.

In such cases they had to escape before the kraken should awake and sink the vessel as though it were a fragile skiff among its whirlpools of foam.

It was the Prince of Monaco, supreme pontiff of oceanographic science, who established forever the existence of the fabulous kraken.

KRAKEN, a huge fabulous sea-monster, reported as at one time seen in the Norwegian seas; it would rise to the surface, and as it plunged down drag ships and every floating or swimming thing along with it.

The great ice-kraken dimly curled The white seas of the frozen zone; And like a mighty lifted shield The hollow heavens forever shone On gleaming fiord and pathless field!