I am currently engaged, or more correctly have been engaged, in a project involving a book about the worlds of H.P. Lovecraft. You may be aware I previously wrote a book on Lovecraft’s fiction. A bluffers guide of sorts to his writings and stories. It started as a series of blog posts and accidentally became a book, which has been surprisingly successful for a book I never originally intended to write…

The upshot of writing that book is I am perceived as something of an expert on Lovecraft in general. Which given I hung around with him for about five years while I was researching and writing the first book, is not unfair. However a book about Lovecraft’s creatures and worlds is a very different tentacle shaped handbag to one about his fiction. The brief is more restrictive, and wider at the same time. Thus it is requiring a whole lot of additional research, because of course it does…

Or at least, I am doing a whole lot of additional research, whether it is required or not, because that is generally what happens when I work on non-fiction, or on fiction come to that… But with non-fiction this tends to throw up fun little footnotes*, which I have called ‘notables’ in my current WIP folder for this one.

*where as in fiction it tends to present itself as my narrator wandering off track for a while…

So here me, back up to my neck with old tentacle hugger, getting annoyed at him. Just like old times… thus here are a few ‘notables’ which will probably find the cutting room floor in the end but have amused me for one reason or another in the meantime.

1/ There is an ancient city named Sarnath (which dates back to beyond the 5^th century BCE) in the Uttar Pradesh region of India. It was there the Buddha gave the ‘Dhammacakkappavattana Sutra’ or ‘The sermon of the deer park’ not long after he had gained enlightenment. It was also where the Kassapa Buddha (the Buddha before Buddha) was born, which was why the newly enlighten Buddha travelled there to teach.

Lovecraft claimed to have never heard of Sarnath, that he invented it himself, and that this shares the name with one of humanity most ancient cities is purely coincidental.  

2/ It is more than likely that Lovecraft derived the name Shub-Niggurath from a passage in ‘Idle Days on the Yann’ by Lord Dunsany always one of Lovecraft’s favourite writers.

‘I liked not to pray to a jealous God there where the frail affectionate gods whom the heathen love were being humbly invoked; so I bethought me, instead, of Sheol Nugganoth, ‘

3/ There is a dark elongated region along the equator of the planet Pluto that for a long time had been known as ‘the whale’ due to its shape. A NASA team involved in the New Horizons mission proposed changing the name to the ‘Cthulhu Region’, and it was given the informal name ‘Cthulhu Macula’. The International Astronomical Union vetoed the idea, possibly due to a chronic lack of whimsey

4/ Aside the version of Dagon created by Lovecraft that appears in so many Lovecraft inspired texts, the Mesopotamian version of Dagon appears in a broad suave of literature. He is mentioned both Paradise Lost by Milton, and of all things Middlemarch by George Elliot.  

5/ Nyarlathotep is not in the early Lovecraft story that predates the Dark Pharaoh, ‘The Crawling Chaos’ Lovecraft merely reused the name because he ‘liked the sound of it’  

6/ The Selkie’s in the mythologies of the Baltic and North Sea peoples. Selkies Human – seal shape shifters who also inter breed with humans. Though in Selkie tales of Orkney and Shetland it is often the humans who mistreat the Selkies. Stealing their seal skins to force them into servitude of one sort or another. The humans are usually punished in the end.

Lovecraft would certainly have been aware of Selkie legends, and possibly inspired by them.         

You may have noticed an aquatic to some of these, I have spent at least three days messing about with Deep Ones and speculating as to whether the race can not longer breed among themselves or not and so need to create hybrids to keep the race alive. And if water based lubricants are ineffective or not… It would however explain Hartlepool, and the towns obsession with hanging monkeys… Its been a strange couple of days.