50 free Kraken trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Kraken trivia for anyone who has shouted 'Release the Kraken', flinched at the tentacles in Pirates of the Caribbean, or wondered whether there really is something that big down there. The quiz starts with the legend itself: the Norwegian fishermen who told Bishop Erik Pontoppidan about a beast the size of an island, the 1646 glossary that first used the name, the medieval hafgufa of the King's Mirror, Olaus Magnus's monster-filled 1539 map, and the French naturalist who blamed giant octopuses for sinking ten British warships and ruined his career. Then it moves to the animals behind the myth - the giant squid first photographed alive in 2004 and the colossal squid with the largest eyes of any creature that has ever lived - and to the kraken's long second life in culture: Tennyson's 1830 sonnet, Melville and Verne, Laurence Olivier and Liam Neeson in the two Clash of the Titans films, Davy Jones's pet in Dead Man's Chest, and the name's spread to an NHL team, a black spiced rum, a crypto exchange, a roller coaster and a methane sea on Titan. Questions run from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. Looking for the hockey team? Try our Seattle Kraken quiz.
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Q 01The kraken legend comes from the folklore of sailors off the coast of which country?
Norway
The name is the Norwegian definite form of 'krake', so 'kraken' already means 'the krake'.
Q 02Per lore recorded by Hans Egede, how could a fisherman escape a kraken tangled on his hooks?
Speak its name aloud
The same fishermen said you could stand on the beast as if it were a sandbank, since fish swarmed around it.
Q 03The root of the word 'krake' in Norwegian refers to what?
A crooked tree
Old spruce tops with crooked branches were used as primitive anchors, and their tentacle-like look is thought to have inspired the monster's name.
Q 04Pontoppidan wrote that if the kraken's arms took hold of even what, they would drag it to the bottom?
The largest warship
He also thought the beast spent months feeding and then months excreting a thick cloud that lured fish - which a later writer suspected was cephalopod ink.
Q 05Who is usually credited with the first detailed description of the kraken, published in 1753?
Bishop Erik Pontoppidan
He was bishop of Bergen, and his two-volume natural history came out in 1752-53.
Q 06Pontoppidan wrote that the kraken was often mistaken for what when it surfaced?
Small islands
The catch above it was so rich that fishermen said of a lucky man, 'You must have fished on Kraken'.
Q 07The whirlpool a submerging kraken supposedly created was compared to which famous Norwegian current?
The Moskstraumen
It is the same 'Maelstrom' that Edgar Allan Poe later used for a short story.
Q 08The earliest description of the kraken by name appears in a 1646 glossary by which Norwegian?
Christen Jensøn
He described a many-armed sea monster that dragged boats down into the abyss.
Q 09Hans Egede, who described the kraken in 1729, was a missionary best known for work in which land?
Greenland
He equated the kraken with the hafgufa of the Icelanders, and his informants said its body measured many miles.
Q 10Which Swedish writer's 1539 Carta marina shows a tentacled sea monster sometimes read as the kraken?
Olaus Magnus
He drew it in the Norwegian Sea beside a tusked monster; the naturalist Conrad Gesner named that one the 'swine whale'.
Q 11The medieval Norwegian sea monster hafgufa, often equated with the kraken, has a name meaning what?
Sea-reek or sea-steam
Modern research suggests the tales describe whales 'trap-feeding' with open mouths at the surface.
Q 12The King's Mirror, a Norwegian text of about 1250, concludes there must be only how many hafgufa in the sea?
Two
The king reasoned they must be infertile, or the oceans would be full of them.
Q 13Which saga hero's ship sails through the jaws of the hafgufa, mistaking them for rocks?
Örvar-Oddr
The 14th-century version calls it the largest sea monster of all, feeding on whales, ships and men.
Q 21Which creature has the largest eyes of any animal known to have ever existed?
The colossal squid
The largest collected specimen's eyes were estimated at up to 40 cm across, and its arms carry swivelling hooks no other glass squid has.
Q 22A giant squid named 'Archie', caught off the Falklands in 2004, is displayed at a natural history museum in which city?
London
At 8.62 metres it was a rare complete specimen; most are found rotting on beaches or inside sperm whales.
Q 23Which poet published 'The Kraken', a 15-line sonnet about the sleeping monster, in 1830?
Alfred Tennyson
Q 14Under what genus name did Linnaeus describe a fabulous 'body covered with various other bits'?
Microcosmus
The claim that he wrote 'kraken' in the margin of a later Systema Naturae has never been confirmed.
Q 15In which year did Pierre Denys de Montfort claim giant octopuses sank ten British warships?
1782
The Royal Navy knew a hurricane had done it, and the disgrace wrecked his career; he died poor in Paris around 1820.
Q 16Denys de Montfort's famous engraving shows a colossal octopus doing what?
Attacking a three-masted ship
He based it on a votive painting that sailors who met the beast off Angola had left in a chapel at Saint-Malo.
Q 17A squid piece recovered by which French ship in 1861 was later identified as a giant squid?
Alecton
Jules Verne name-checks the same encounter in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.
Q 18In 1873, fisherman Theophilus Piccot fought off a giant squid in Conception Bay and proved it by doing what?
Hacking off two tentacles
Conception Bay is in Newfoundland, one of the world's giant-squid hotspots.
Q 19A team from which country took the first photographs of a living giant squid in its natural habitat in 2004?
Japan
Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori found the squid by tailing sperm whales to their hunting ground; the animal left a 5.5-metre tentacle on the lure.
Q 20Estimates put a giant squid's maximum body length, excluding feeding tentacles, at roughly what?
5 m
Claims of 20-metre monsters have never been scientifically documented; the two feeding tentacles add up to about 10 metres.
Benjamin Britten later set it in his song-cycle Nocturne, and John Wyndham's novel The Kraken Wakes takes its title from the poem.
Q 24Which H. P. Lovecraft story is thought to have been inspired by Tennyson's sonnet about the kraken?
The Call of Cthulhu
Both feature a vast sea creature sleeping for aeons and destined to rise in an apocalyptic age.
Q 25In Moby-Dick, what does Starbuck call the 'vast pulpy mass' the Pequod's crew meet?
The great live squid
The encounter fills chapter 59, and Ishmael calls the creature the 'Anak of the tribe' of cuttlefish.
Q 26Which 1866 Victor Hugo novel introduced the man-hunting giant octopus into French fiction?
Toilers of the Sea
Its hero Gilliatt kills the beast with a knife; the book directly inspired Jules Verne's version four years later.
Q 27In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, a school of giant squid attacks which vessel?
The Nautilus
Verne used the same French word for octopus and squid, so translators have argued about what actually attacked.
Q 28Which pioneer first shot the octopus-in-a-bathtub kraken footage in 1906, later reused in many silent films?
Georges Méliès
The film was Under the Seas, and the footage was recycled for years.
Q 29In the 1981 film Clash of the Titans, who speaks the famous line 'Release the Kraken' as Zeus?
Laurence Olivier
The film's Kraken is a scaly four-armed humanoid with a fish tail, based on the Greek sea monster Cetus rather than anything Norse.
Q 30In the 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans, which god created the Kraken?
Hades
The film has him build it to defeat the Titans, then unleash it on Argos to get back at Zeus; Liam Neeson's line reading became an internet meme.