ABSTRACT
Published 1830, not reprinted until restored in 1872, ‘Juvenilia’. T. comments: ‘See the account which Erik Pontoppidan, the Norwegian bishop, born 1698, gives of the fabulous sea-monster — the Kraken (Biographie Universelle)’ [1823]. Pontoppidan’s account was summarized in the English Encyclopaedia (1802), of which a copy was at Somersby (Lincoln). T. would also have read of the kraken in Scott’s Ministrelsy (Leyden’s The Mermaid), and in T. C. Croker’s Fairy Legends ii (1828) 64, a book which he knew and later owned (Lincoln). Paden (p. 155) observes that T.’s monster has only its name in common with Pontoppidan’s, and argues that T. associated it with G. S. Faber’s religious mythologizing, where the serpent (the evil principle) leads to the deluge: hence the sea-snake, and hence the ‘latter fire’. On T.’s later owning books by Faber, seep. 149. D. Bush, Major British Writers (1959) ii 380, cites Revelation xiii 1, ‘And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea.’ The adaptation of the sonnet form is discussed by R. Pattison, Tennyson and Tradition (1979), pp. 41–2. Ian Kennedy suggests adding to the sources a dream in Lytton’s Falkland (1827,p. 269), a book T. knew (Letters i 23): ‘He was a thousand fathoms beneath the sea… he saw the coral banks, which it requires a thousand ages to form, rise slowly… and ever and ever, around and above him, came vast and misshapen things, — the wonders of the secret deeps; and the sea-serpent, the huge chimera of the north, made its resting place by his side, glaring upon him with a livid and death-like eye, wan, yet burning as an expiring sun’ (PQ lvii, 1978, 97).
