Urban Legends
Luke Mordue examines the historical impact of the stories that haunt our society, tales that have gripped towns and cities worldwide for centuries as actual events - Urban Legends. First, hear the tales retold as short stories before delving into the history of the legend, dissecting its cultural significance, factuality, and origins.
Released Fortnightly.
Urban Legends
The Kraken
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The Kraken belongs to a 600-year tradition of Scandinavian sea monsters; creatures so vast that medieval sailors mistook their backs for islands and landed on them.
The word itself is said to have first appeared in a Norwegian glossary in 1646, but by the 1750s, Erik Pontoppidan was cataloguing fishermen's accounts in his ‘Natural History of Norway’, treating the creature not as folklore but as a species awaiting classification.
But what were these sailors actually seeing? Was it mass hysteria? Mistranslated whale sightings? Or genuine encounters with something the world hadn't named yet?
In this chapter, I trace the Kraken from 13th-century Norwegian texts to the harpoon scars left on dying sperm whales and to 2004, when researchers finally photographed a living giant squid in its natural habitat for the first time in human history.
This is Urban Legends.
Contact me at: luke@lukemordue.com
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