The Kraken: The Complete Legend of the Sea Monster Feared by Northern Sailors | Scandinavian Folklore for Sleep

The Kraken: The Complete Legend of the Sea Monster Feared by Northern Sailors | Scandinavian Folklore for SleepA slow, quiet retelling of the kraken legend, from the old sailors' accounts to what was eventually found, made for falling asleep to.The whole story of the monster that northern sailors believed was down there, told at a pace that's deliberately too slow to follow properly. That's the point. You're not meant to reach the end.The kraken was not originally a monster in a story. It was something fishermen off Norway and Iceland believed was actually out there, the way you'd believe in a sandbank — a thing so large that men mistook its back for an island and landed on it, that pulled ships down with it when it went under, and that the best fishing was always found directly above, because of what gathered around it. What follows is where that belief came from, the old accounts of it in northern writing, the eighteenth-century bishop who wrote it all down in earnest and gave it the shape everybody knows, and then the strange second half of the story: the arms that washed ashore, the carcasses that turned up on beaches, and the slow realisation that something enormous and many-armed really does live down there in the dark, and had done all along. It just doesn't do any of the things people said it did.But the point of this recording isn't really the legend. It's the hour or two spent drifting through it. The voice stays low and even the whole way through. No music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Nothing in it is built to frighten you. Every sentence sits at roughly the same level as the one before it, so nothing ever pulls your attention back up to the surface.That's what makes it work on the nights when your head won't switch off. It's just interesting enough to give your thoughts something to hold, and slow enough that they let go of it on their own. You don't have to follow along. You don't have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift off somewhere out on the old northern water and wake up much later, several centuries further along, you've used this exactly the way it's meant to be used. Most people don't make it past the first half hour, and the rest will still be here tomorrow night.Put it on, turn the volume down, and let it go on without you.Mythology & Folklore for Sleep — long, calm retellings of Greek myths, Norse legends, Egyptian tales, Hindu epics, Chinese classics, Scandinavian folklore and old stories from around the world, made for insomnia and the hours when you can't sleep. Bedtime stories for adults, told in a slow, quiet voice. New episodes every day.