He was published by Arkham House in 1962. His first collection came out in 1964. We devoured his Cold Print collection in 1985. He’s been called many things (as well as Mr Campbell Sir) – “Perhaps the finest living exponent of the British weird fiction tradition” and “The leading horror writer of our generation”. And he’s still at it. Not only writing, but turning up at meetings or adding his musings to Facebook groups, as if Pharaoh himself had suddenly turned up to point out that your mud-bricks are a bit sloppy.
black labyrinth
So we felt that we had to draw your attention to the release of The Booking by Ramsey Campbell, from Dark Regions Press. It would have been wrong not to. Continue reading Excavating Ramsey the Great→
Greetings, O Best Beloved. Today we celebrateSwan River Press’s release of The Pale Brown Thing by renowned weird fiction writer Fritz Leiber. But wait! Because this is greydogtales, we also provide you with a lot about the 19th century origins of Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness, a little about Leiber and the cinema, and the connection with that lithe siren Sandahl Bergman, of Conan the Barbarian fame.
swan river press dust jacket
Fritz Leiber (1910 – 1992) was a damned fine writer. We’re sure we should post something about books like Swords of Lankhmar one day, because his fantasy tales were great. He’s even cited as the originator of the term sword and sorcery. His science fiction and alternate takes on the future are excellent. Many greydogtales listeners will, however, be familiar with his weirder stories, which included post-Lovecraftian before we even had such a word, and some very original horror.
Leiber’s work first appeared in the pulp magazines of the 1930s, and he even corresponded briefly with HP Lovecraft. To give you a timeframe, Lovecraft died in 1937 and Leiber launched his fantasy characters Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser in 1939. A multiple award winner, his short stories such as Smoke Ghost and The Sinful Ones are well-known, and he was one of those writers who moved forward rather than harked back. Ramsey Campbell has said that Leiber was his greatest influence, and in a few days, quite by chance, we’ll be talking about Ramsey’s latest work. Nice how these things happen.
But on to our main topic. A while back we interviewed Brian Showers of Swan River Press in Dublin, (see swan river secrets)and as we talked he mentioned their plans for The Pale Brown Thing. Let’s cheat for a moment and use Swan River’s summary:
“Serialised in 1977, The Pale Brown Thing is a shorter version of Fritz Leiber’s World Fantasy Award-winning novel of the supernatural, Our Lady of Darkness. Leiber maintained that the two texts “should be regarded as the same story told at different times”; thus this volume reprints The Pale Brown Thing for the first time in nearly forty years, with an introduction by the author’s friend, Californian poet Donald Sidney-Fryer.
“The novella stands as Leiber’s vision of 1970s San Francisco: a city imbued with an eccentric vibe and nefarious entities, in which pulp writer Franz Westen uncovers an alternate portrait of the city’s fin de siecle literary set — Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Clark Ashton Smith — as well as the darker invocations of occultist Thibaut de Castries and a pale brown inhabitant of Corona Heights.”
This new, high quality edition contains the following:
“Thibaut de Castries, Revenant” by Donald Sidney-Fryer
“The Pale Brown Thing” by Fritz Leiber
“Story-telling Wonder-questing, Mortal Me: The Transformation of The Pale Brown Thing into Our Lady of Darkness” by John Howard
And much of the matter we’re covering today relates to Leiber’s novel Our Lady of Darkness. It’s a peculiar beast, often cited as having Lovecraftian elements, but it’s also its own thing. It blends psychological theory, particularly Jungian elements, with early urban fantasy and an invented occult science, megapolisomancy, whose creator and prime agent is one Thibaut De Castries. Megapolisomancy is, in short, the art of seeing and changing the future by gaining an understanding of cities.
“The ancient Egyptians only buried people in their pyramids. We are living in ours.” — Thibaut de Castries
Leiber indicates that De Castries, while living in San Francisco, became acquainted with Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, Dashiell Hammett and later Clark Ashton Smith, as well as poet George Sterling. For a while De Castries amassed a minor cult following among the bohemians of the city, including London and Bierce, but his practices apparently were too esoteric to maintain interest for long, and his occult society, the Hermetic Order of the Onyx Dusk, collapsed.
In the book, Leiber introduces the idea of paramentals, elemental spirits which manifest through inanimate materials such as glass, concrete and steel, hence the city connection. A brown, vaguely man-like paramental with an eyeless triangular face and long chin that taper to a snout, is the Pale Brown Thing of the earlier version. Paramentals are not friendly, and to become aware of them is not a good thing. They are described as “about midway in nature between the atomic bomb and the archetypes of the collective unconscious.” Franz Westen, the protagonist, is one who starts to have glimpses of megapolisomancy and the nature of the city.
As we’ve suggested, Our Lady of Darkness is a sort of horror novel, but an odd one.
“Rather than the grand confrontations with the supernatural at the heart of Lovecraft’s stories, Westen has little brushes that are more ontologically rattling than viscerally horrifying. Instead of witnessing living nightmares that he can only try desperately to suppress, the things he sees come off as unreal, as if they might turn out to be optical illusions and other misapprehensions. Just as Lovecraft tended to be vague about such matters as the contents of the storied Necronomicon, the reader is treated to very little of the contents of Megalopolisomancy.”
Nader Elhefnawy, Tangent 2010
Anyway, if you fancy picking up a copy of The Pale Brown Thing, dash over to Swan River Press and check it out. They do some very nice, collectable books, we have to admit.
Right. That title, Our Lady of Darkness, has a specific and interesting source, and that’s where we’re going next. It’s drawn from Thomas de Quincey’s collection of prose-poems linked together under the name Suspiria de Profundis (Sighs from the Depths). De Quincey (1785 – 1859) is probably best known for his book Confessions of an Opium Eater. He was an English critic and essayist, addicted to opium and constantly in debt. The prose-poems of Suspiria are supposed to be developments of various opium-inspired dreams.
Suspiria de Profundis was first published in fragmentary form in Blackwood’s Magazine in the Spring and Summer of 1845. It was never finished as such – de Quincey had planned to add more sections and release it as a sort of sequel to Confessions. The section relevant to today is this one:
“Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow — beginning with a discussion of Levana, the ancient Roman goddess of childbirth, De Quincey imagines three companions for her: Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears; Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of Sighs; and Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness.”
Note for Tired Listeners: If you want to read about the Three Ladies in depth, we give the relevant passages below. If not, skip to later for a roundup of Fritz Leiber movie trivia, horror film mentions and other such inconsequential stuff.
Our Ladies of Sorrow
What is it the sisters are? What is it that they do? Let me describe their form, and their presence: if form it were that still fluctuated in its outline, or presence it were that for ever advanced to the front, or for ever receded amongst shades.
The eldest of the three is named Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears. She it is that night and day raves and moans, calling for vanished faces. She stood in Rama, where a voice was heard of lamentation,—Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted. She it was that stood in Bethlehem on the night when Herod’s sword swept its nurseries of Innocents, and the little feet were stiffened for ever, which, heard at times as they tottered along floors overhead, woke pulses of love in household hearts that were not unmarked in heaven.
Her eyes are sweet and subtle, wild and sleepy, by turns; oftentimes rising to the clouds, oftentimes challenging the heavens. She wears a diadem round her head. And I knew by childish memories that she could go abroad upon the winds, when she heard the sobbing of litanies or the thundering of organs, and when she beheld the mustering of summer clouds. This sister, the eldest, it is that carries keys more than papal at her girdle, which open every cottage and every palace.
She, to my knowledge, sat all last summer by the bedside of the blind beggar, him that so often and so gladly I talked with, whose pious daughter, eight years old, with the sunny countenance, resisted the temptations of play and village mirth to travel all day long on dusty roads with her afflicted father. For this did God send her a great reward. In the spring-time of the year, and whilst yet her own Spring was budding, he recalled her to himself. But her blind father mourns for ever over her; still he dreams at midnight that the little guiding hand is locked within his own; and still he wakens to a darkness that is now within a second and a deeper darkness.
This Mater Lachrymarum has also been sitting all this winter of 1844–5 within the bed-chamber of the Czar, bringing before his eyes a daughter (not less pious) that vanished to God not less suddenly, and left behind her a darkness not less profound. By the power of the keys it is that Our Lady of tears glides a ghostly intruder into the chambers of sleepless men, sleepless women, sleepless children, from Ganges to Nile, from Nile to Mississippi. And her, because she is the first-born of her house, and has the widest empire, let us honour with the title of “Madonna!”
The second sister is called Mater Suspiriorum—Our Lady of Sighs. She never scales the clouds, nor walks abroad upon the winds. She wears no diadem. And her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor subtle; no man could read their story; they would be found filled with perishing dreams, and with wrecks of forgotten delirium. But she raises not her eyes; her head, on which sits a dilapidated turban, droops for ever, for ever fastens on the dust. She weeps not. She groans not. But she sighs inaudibly at intervals.
Her sister, Madonna, is oftentimes stormy and frantic, raging in the highest against heaven, and demanding back her darlings. But Our Lady of Sighs never clamours, never defies, dreams not of rebellious aspirations. She is humble to abjectness. Hers is the meekness that belongs to the hopeless. Murmur she may, but it is in her sleep. Whisper she may, but it is to herself in the twilight; Mutter she does at times, but it is in solitary places that are desolate as she is desolate, in ruined cities, and when the sun has gone down to his rest.
This sister is the visitor of the Pariah, of the Jew, of the bondsman to the oar in the Mediterranean galleys; and of the English criminal in Norfolk Island, blotted out from the books of remembrance in sweet far-off England; of the baffled penitent reverting his eyes for ever upon a solitary grave, which to him seems the altar overthrown of some past and bloody sacrifice, on which altar no oblations can now be availing, whether towards pardon that he might implore, or towards reparation that he might attempt.
Every slave that at noonday looks up to the tropical sun with timid reproach, as he points with one hand to the earth, our general mother, but for him a stepmother,—as he points with the other hand to the Bible, our general teacher, but against him sealed and sequestered;—every woman sitting in darkness, without love to shelter her head, or hope to illumine her solitude, because the heaven-born instincts kindling in her nature germs of holy affections which God implanted in her womanly bosom, having been stifled by social necessities, now burn sullenly to waste, like sepulchral lamps amongst the ancients; every nun defrauded of her unreturning May-time by wicked kinsman, whom God will judge; every captive in every dungeon; all that are betrayed and all that are rejected outcasts by traditionary law, and children of hereditary disgrace,—all these walk with Our Lady of Sighs.
She also carries a key; but she needs it little. For her kingdom is chiefly amongst the tents of Shem, and the houseless vagrant of every clime. Yet in the very highest walks of man she finds chapels of her own; and even in glorious England there are some that, to the world, carry their heads as proudly as the reindeer, who yet secretly have received her mark upon their foreheads. But the third sister, who is also the youngest——! Hush, whisper whilst we talk of her! Her kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises almost beyond the reach of sight.
She droops not; and her eyes rising so high might be hidden by distance; but, being what they are, they cannot be hidden; through the treble veil of crape which she wears, the fierce light of a blazing misery, that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read from the very ground. She is the defier of God. She is also the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles, and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within.
Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding, and with tiger’s leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater Tenebrarum—Our Lady of Darkness.
These were the Semnai Theai, or Sublime Goddesses, these were the Eumenides, or Gracious Ladies (so called by antiquity in shuddering propitiation), of my Oxford dreams.
As an aside, Our Lady (in the singular) of Sorrows is of course the Mater Dolorosa, a name by which Catholics know the Blessed Virgin Mary in relation to the sorrows in her life.
OK, you can open your eyes now. Let’s go to the movies to round off today’s article.
Leiber at the Movies
Firstly, did you know that the Italian horror director Dario Argento used De Quincey’s Suspiria, particularly Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow, as an inspiration for his “Three Mothers” trilogy of films, which include Suspiria, Inferno, and The Mother of Tears? You did? Rats.
OK, we’ll try you on Leiber himself, then. Fritz Leiber can be seen in several movies – his father Fritz Senior was an actor by profession. They appeared together a couple of times, and Junior had a small uncredited speaking part in the The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) in which his father had a credited part. The two chaps sometimes get mixed up, but the father appeared in movies for some forty years. Junior had only a few small roles.
If you like weird and horror films, Leiber (we’re talking all Junior now) did have a cameo as the geologist in the cult horror film Equinox (1970) (also known as The Beast), directed by Jack Woods. The original version of the movie has a longer appearance by Leiber recounting the ancient book and a brief speaking role, all of which was cut from the re-release of the film. In the edited version of the movie Leiber has no spoken dialogue in the film but features in a few scenes. He also appeared in the The Bermuda Triangle documentary (1970), based on the book by Charles Berlitz.
As far as we know, he never appeared in any of the adaptations of his own work. Listeners may be familiar with Leiber’s novel Conjure Wife, which was turned into the movie Night of the Eagle (1962). It’s also confusingly known as Burn Witch Burn, which is the title of a 1932 novel by A Merritt. But whatever you call it, Night of the Eagle is definitely worth a look.
Not quite as effective is an earlier adaptation of Conjure Wife, released as Weird Woman (1944). This time the story is transplanted to the South Seas, starring Lon Chaney Jr as the academic who this time marries a native woman and gets dragged into a voodoo-like scenario.
Equinox, as mentioned above, is not as good as Night of the Eagle, but it’s weird enough to be here. Four friends are attacked by a demon while on a picnic, due to the fact that they possess a tome of mystic information (?) – and it goes downhill from there. Mark Thomas McGee was the writer, and he turned out scripts or screenplays for quite a few horror movies, from the curious to the ridiculous. Mind you, he was apparently only a teenager when he wrote Equinox. Here are some of his titles:
Sorority House Massacre II
Bad Girls from Mars
Inner Sanctum
Witch Academy
Possessed by the Night
Our favourite of his has to be Possessed by the Night (1994), an everyday story of a mutant embryo in a jar, the mutant being able to control people’s actions. It gets a whole 4.1 on IMDB – which is more than Bad Girls from Mars manages. We like it because the story makes little sense, the acting is quite dodgy, the ‘erotic’ bits are pointless and it co-stars Sandahl Bergman.
Sandahl can do no wrong since starring as Valeria, the “Queen of Thieves” in Conan The Barbarian (1982), and then the brain-boggling Hell Comes to Frogtown (1988). She’s not exactly at her best here in thespian terms, but what the heck.
And there you have it. Valeria has stolen all our time, and we must leave. See you in a couple of days…
Yes, it’s the return of the beasts. We regularly have guest writers, editors, artists and even performers on greydogtales, but today is a Guest Dog Day – see later below. If you’ve been following our dark and weird fiction articles, or our Lovecraftian mythology dissections, this might seem confusing. And so it is. But lurchers and longdogs are weirder than most stories, so we are unrepentant.
our most handy guide book
A while ago we provided you with the cover design for the useful book How to Find Your Lurcher. Mainly because our own two extremely fast longdogs disappear completely in the long grass and bracken on the moors.
Occasionally one will surface for a moment, like a hyperactive tuna arching from the ocean, and then disappear once more. So we have to follow the ripples and hope there’s a dog at the end of them, not something scary. Or scarier. One day we will come face to face with a feral hippopotamus, probably, one which has come out of the River Wharfe for a bracken sandwich. Yorkshire can be like that.
However, we are currently nearer home, fighting Django’s aphid infestation, in which he comes back from every walk covered in the little buggers. We’re not joking.
our terrifying new enemy
We’re not sure what spectrum greenfly use to see with, but apparently Django is lit up like a bonfire, because they gather on him in their hundreds, if not thousands. So the rare greenback lurcher has been catalogued, but cameras have not yet been to hand. At the moment the only treatment is to take him outside again and brush him until the numbers go down to a tolerable level, then rush him back in and slam the door.
Speaking of Django, we also think we’ve got a lead on his kangaroo parentage, as we found this on the net recently:
supposedly a dozing kangaroo
Compare and contrast:
supposedly a dozing django
If his ears had been sticking up, as they sometimes do, we would have been sure of it.
But back to ladybirds, conveniently the natural enemy of greenfly. We were fortuitously provided last week with some words from another lurcher victim, Daryl Green, who suggested, via Jenny Kirk, possible contents for a Ladybird Book of Lurchers. All based on painful experience, it would seem. So we thought we’d share…
chuck and jazz (whippet lurcher)
Where is my lurcher?
This is Jazz. Jazz is a dog.
He is also called a lurcher. When he was a puppy he went to obedience classes. He didn’t learn anything in the twelve weeks he was there. His mummy and daddy wasted their money. They could have spent it on wine.
our recommended alternative to obedience classes
Jazz hasn’t got a very big brain, He knows his name. He doesn’t know many other things. He doesn’t know ‘fetch’ or ‘come’. He never fetches anything and he comes when he feels like it. Not when he is called.
Jazz has long legs. He likes to run. He runs over the hill. We don’t know where he is. Rabbits and hares know where he is. They like to run too but not as fast. Rabbits and hares taste very nice.
Jazz has sharp claws. He likes to dig. He doesn’t know why he is digging. He never finds anything. He makes lots of deep holes in the cricket pitch. The park keeper gets angry.
a typical lurcher hole
Jazz loves crisps. He loves cheese and meat and shepherd’s pie and Bovril on toast. Jazz does not like dog food.
boringgggg!
Jazz enjoys visiting his friend, Chuck.
Chuck is also a dog and a lurcher. They always play biteyface. Humans don’t play biteyface. They like playing cards and drinking alcohol.
Dogs and humans are best friends. Best friends don’t have to have everything in common.
We don’t think that you can say fairer than that. Thank you, Daryl, Jenny, Jazz and Chuck.
As to playing cards, regular followers of the old greydog himself on Facebook will have seen that dogs may not be immune. In the continuing saga of The Journal of J Linseed Grant, posted every few days, such depravity has arisen a number of times, eg.
From the journal of J Linseed Grant, 18th June: “Gambling is a curse on our household. Had to increase the allowance of the Dog that is born of Kangaroo. He lost everything in an extended evening of gin-rummy with the black dog and a passing badger. The badger was sick in the umbrella stand before it left. These animals are most vexatious.”
But the world of that noted recluse is perhaps not typical. Here’s a parting shot of our own real-life pups at their most companionable:
our not-running-at-the-moment dogs, bored because we’re working
And that’s all we have time for today, as we are supposed to be writing and earning money. Ha ha. More dark fiction, horror, folklore, weird art and mad lurchers every couple of days. See you soon.
In which we poke brutally at some common weird fancies, argue and then give up because it’s easier. And we cross-question the spirits of H P Lovecraft and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Join us now for an exhaustive (brief) and in-depth (glancing) study of the Kraken and mighty Cthulhu. We might have written more, dear listener, but we know that you have washing-up to do.
we would have numbered this, but we can’t remember how many ‘stranger seas’ posts we’ve done
Today’s article is not about giant squids. Right? Everybody’s obsessed with giant squids and enormous octopuses. Maybe because they have the most astonishing eyes. Maybe because they are rubbery and thrash their tentacles, a habit not often seen in household pets or other commonly encountered creatures. Add to that the fact that there might always be an even bigger one just a little deeper… well, they had to find their way into myths and horror stories. It was inevitable.
So when many people think of either the Kraken or of H P Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, they shoot straight into octopus or squid mentality. We lump these two mythological beings together today because of Tennyson, the Victorian Poet Laureate – and because neither are quite as squid-y as you might think. Stick with us. We’re following in the footsteps of our ‘deconstruction of ghouls’ series (see ghoul versus ghul).
Cthulhu
It’s generally thought that H P Lovecraft’s early story Dagon (1917) provided the building blocks for his later Call of Cthulhu (1926). These two stories have in common the tales of suffering sailors, oceanic monstrosities, carved stones from the deep and a sense of almost indescribable horror.
(We’ll leave aside any connections with the Philistine or Phoenician fish-god, especially as theological Dagon is a confused concept and may refer to an earlier god of vegetation and grain-supply as well.)
The key monstrosity seen in Dagon, which is not specifically named as a god itself, is described thus:
“…the thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds.”
The classic cyclops Polyphemus was the one-eyed son of the god Poseidon and Thoosa a sea-nymph, from Greek mythology (Poseidon in turn was the son of the Titan Cronus). His first recorded mention is in Homer’sOdyssey, and despite his aquatic parentage, he was a land-based, man-eating giant.
Nine years later in CoC, H. P. Lovecraft described a statue of Cthulhu as “A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.”
When the god-like being is encountered directly, it ‘lumbers’ and strikes out with those claws. Call of Cthulhu again:
“…on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the Titan thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus.”
Eventually it takes great strokes through the ocean waters, much like any swimmer, in pursuit of the ship. In both stories the most pertinent feature is the gigantic, anthropoid nature rather than the cephalopod qualities – the realm of the Greek cyclopes and Titans.
Note also the repeated use of the term Cyclopean in such weird fiction when referring to masonry, for the cyclopes were associated with the building of massive stone works, as well as smith-craft.
By the time HPL had conceived of Cthulhu, he was clearly drifting into his own mythic world, but if we did want to go seriously Greek, then we could add in the early sea god Proteus. Another son of Poseidon, Proteus could assume any form and his flesh could be as changeable as water – observe the plasticity demonstrated by Cthulhu’s recombination after being struck by the ship in CoC.
Apart from brick-laying and gigantism, the defining characteristic that placed the cyclopes apart from others was their possession of only one eye each. To mess with our heads, Lovecraft’s own 1937 sketch of Cthulhu is a side view, and appears to show one dominant and two subordinate eyes, at least on the left side of his head. There is no obvious sign of the suction cups which might make the feelers true tentacles. The mouth-parts of squid and octopus form a distinct horny beak, but there is no indication of this in the texts for Cthulhu.
(Given that this is Lovecraft, it’s also quite possible that Cthulhu’s eyes are ambulatory, toddling around all over his head, and variable in number. We’re not going to take all this too seriously.)
What you do have is an utterly enormous man-shaped being with a questionable number of eyes and a wibbly chin whose origins may be more related to the line of the Greek Titans than to Olly the Octopus. We accept that Cthulhu will remain forever welded to squidity more than to polyphemity, because that head is a great image. When drawn by slightly better artists than the old gent…
Note: If you like delving into the origins and natural history of HPL’s beings, you might also enjoy Fred Lubnow’s great Lovecraftian Science site:lovecraftian science
polyphemus by gustave moreau, 1896
And so to our connection between these two horrors. It’s tempting to think that H P Lovecraft had poet Alfred Tennyson’s work in mind when he fleshed out his concept of Cthulhu. Tennyson (1809 – 1892) was an odd fellow. Robert Browning complained that the poet edited and revised his poems to the point of insanity, and W H Auden famously said:
“There was little about melancholia he didn’t know; there was little else that he did.”
But we like some of his verse, and this poem of his seems too relevant for HPL to have missed:
The Kraken
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 Unnumbered 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.
Alfred Lord Tennyson 1830
Unbeknownst to many, the original Kraken was devoid of cephalopod qualities. Tennyson had merely built on a growing mythology of giant squid and general fantasies of ships being pulled down into the depths by flailing tentacles. His poem is based on the 17th and 18th century manipulations of much earlier Norse legends, concerning a gigantic creature that supposedly preyed upon shipping in the sea off Northern Europe.
The squid version was first fully described by Bishop Pontoppidan in A Natural History of Norway (1752). Pontoppidan described the destructive potential of the giant beast: “…it is said that if [the creature’s arms] were to lay hold of the largest man-of-war, they would pull it down to the bottom”. The Bish also alludes to reports of a large cephalopod washed up on Norwegian shores, assuming this to be a junior Kraken of some form.
c. john coulthart
Unfortunately, the earliest legends of the Kraken off Norway and Greenland do not seem to have referred to squid. The word kraken essentially mean ‘crooked’ or ‘unnatural’.
There was certainly talk of a monster, but it was variously whale-like, or some form of giant crab-fish mutation, if it was described clearly at all. It was huge, and could be mistaken for an island. It had an enormous mouth, and was said to drag ships down not with the use of tentacles but via the wash or whirlpool formed when it submerged again.
It’s interesting to look at what else could have originated the myth of the Kraken in its original state. The early mixing of kraken and the word hafgufa in stories is curious – hafgufa means sea-steam or sea-mist. One of the characteristics of the waters around Iceland is the degree of volcanic activity. This results in land masses which rise seemingly from nowhere, areas which disappear under the sea and highly dangerous currents around active areas. The sea bubbles and steams, as if something huge lies below.
The mythology of vanishing islands is a subject in itself, and other accounts of sea-monsters which appeared to be islands are common, from Nordic to Arabian tales. See for example the tenth/eleventh century Old English poem, The Whale:
“…a kind of fish, the great sea-monster which is often unwillingly met, terrible and cruel-hearted to seafarers, yea, to every man; this swimmer of the ocean-streams is known as the asp-turtle.
His appearance is like that of a rough boulder, as if there were tossing by the shore a great ocean-reedbank begirt with sand-dunes, so that seamen imagine they are gazing upon an island, and moor their high-prowed ships with cables to that false land, make fast the ocean-coursers at the sea’s end, and, bold of heart, climb up.”
Other suggestions are of course whales themselves, moving under or just on the surface and not fully visible, and the nature of tidal islands and sandbanks.
So the Kraken as a multi-tentacled monster or gigantic squid is basically a crooked version in itself, confabulated by naturalists and fantasists until it became the thing it is today. Not squid-y at all.
We should have stopped there, but it seemed mean not to mention a few of the Kraken appearances in media while we have it with us. So you can indulge yourself with films such as these:
clash of titans, 1981
a) Clash of Titans, both the 1981 and 2010 versions. Their Kraken is a mixture of giant fish-man and octopoidal thing. The earlier one is most humanoid; the later one is more bestial and incorporates crab-like features as well. How these monsters of the Northern ice-seas ended up in the Mediterranean is a mystery we cannot fathom.
b) Kraken (2006), with the lovely Victoria Pratt. Not a terribly lovely film, though. Not enough Kraken, and this time it really is just a boring old giant squid.
c) Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. A proper full-blown squid Kraken, but with the mouth and teeth of a sand-worm from Dune. Shai Hulud!
In books, China Miéville’s novel Kraken (2010) features a cult devoted to the worship of the creature, whilst John Wyndham’sThe Kraken Wakes (1953) rather disappointingly has no Kraken in it at all, but underwater aliens instead. Shame.
cover to sub-mariner #27, july, 1970. sal buscema, wikipedia
As for comics, Marvel’s Commander Kraken was a self-styled modern-day pirate who first encountered and fought Namor the Sub-Mariner. Namor used the Kraken, a gigantic octopus, to defeat his foe.
art jordi bernet
Far darker and more interesting, but typically not in English, is the Spanish Kraken comic (1983-1984?). Here, the Kraken is a mythical monster haunting the darkness, evil incarnate according to some, and the most dangerous creature of the sewers and underworld. But we haven’t got a copy, so we can’t tell you any more.
We are over-oceaned and must stop. What was I supposed to say? Oh yes, buy my books, sign up to greydogtales immediately and be kind to your lurchers. That covers most things…
the pale brown thing link
