Sea Monster Stories

The sea was mysterious and dangerous to ancient travellers, so it became the perfect home for enormous monsters.

Jörmungandr

The World Serpent

Jörmungandr is the World Serpent, an enormous creature who lies in the ocean around Midgard. He is a child of Loki and the jötunn Angrboda, and brother to Fenrir and Hel. Odin throws him into the sea, where he grows until his body circles the human world and his mouth reaches his own tail. His greatest enemy is Thor. Their meetings build towards Ragnarok, when each will kill the other. Jörmungandr is terrifying, but I also feel the gods create part of the danger by trying to remove him before he has done anything wrong.

Fun fact: Thor almost lifts Jörmungandr when the serpent has been disguised as an ordinary cat.

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Apep

Darkness & Chaos

Apep was the gigantic serpent of chaos who tried to stop the Sun god Ra during his nightly journey through the underworld. His name is also written Apophis, the Greek form. Egyptians did not treat him as a normal god with temples and helpful powers. He represented darkness, destruction and the collapse of the ordered world. Every sunrise proved that he had failed again. I like this myth because dawn becomes more than a pretty view. It is the visible result of a battle that the forces of order must win every night.

Fun fact: Some texts give Apep a body more than one hundred cubits long.

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Kraken

The Terror Beneath the Waves

The Kraken is a gigantic sea creature from later Scandinavian folklore. Today it is usually pictured as a huge octopus or squid wrapping tentacles around a ship. Older descriptions are less definite. Some make it resemble an island, a mass of seaweed or an enormous many-armed animal. The Kraken does not appear in the Poetic Edda or the main Viking Age myths, so it does not belong in Odin’s family tree. It comes from seafaring tales recorded many centuries later.

Fun fact: The Kraken belongs to later Scandinavian folklore, not ancient Greek mythology.

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Sirens

Singers No Sailor Could Ignore

Meet the Sirens, the mysterious singers who could lure sailors towards disaster! In Homer’s Odyssey, their voices were so irresistible that anyone who stopped to listen would never return home. Odysseus wanted to hear their song, so he filled his crew’s ears with wax and ordered them to tie him tightly to the ship’s mast. Ancient Sirens were usually shown with women’s heads and birds’ bodies, not fish tails like modern mermaids. Their song did not just sound beautiful. They promised secret knowledge about the world. I think that makes them much scarier. They do not chase you. They simply offer exactly the thing you are most desperate to hear.

Fun fact: Ancient Sirens were bird-women, not mermaids. The fish tails arrived much later!

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