I know the comparison between the mythical Kraken and the insanity-inducing Cthulhu is an obvious one, but in the course of some casual research on Krakens (yes, when I am procrastinating I read up on my mythical beasts. At least I’ll be prepared when they come for me!), I came across the following poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson:
Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far far beneath in 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 seaworms 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.
Of course, being a fan of H. P. Lovecraft, the similarities between Tennyson’s portrayal of the Kraken and Cthulhu immediately became apparent. He sleeps beneath the sea, waiting for ages to sleep until the time is right (in Lovecraft’s case, the stars, in Tennyson’s, the heat), and then he will rise up to the surface – and then die? For this, I shall just point you to Lovecraft’s quote from the Necronomicon: “And with strange aeons even death may die.” The poem even managed to get Polyps – though of the flying variety – in there.
Quite the coincidence, don’t you think? Perhaps Lovecraft read this poem, had a nightmare about it, and so Cthulhu was spawned. Or maybe, as a friend of mine suggested, Lovecraft used a time machine.
Z. M. Wilmot 