|
|
Post by linefacedscrivener on Sept 30, 2020 12:36:05 GMT -5
 G.W. Thomas at Dark Worlds Quarterly had a good article on "Conan and the Cthulhu Mythos." I always thought my favorite Conan yarn, "The Tower of the Elephant," should qualify as an entry into the Cthulhu Mythos, but I have rarely seen it mentioned. Thomas not only included that REH yarn, but many of the other original stories as well. Link to the article here: darkworldsquarterly.gwthomas.org/conan-and-the-cthulhu-mythos/ |
|
|
|
Post by zarono on Sept 30, 2020 19:47:16 GMT -5
I would add in the Scarlet Citadel for lovecraftian touches: first off the main villain Tsotha-lanti is only half human and his father was pre-human demon, somewhat similar to Wilbur Whateley in the Dunwich Horror . " As for Tsotha — men say that a dancing-girl of Shadizar slept too near the pre-human ruins on Dagoth Hill and woke in the grip of a black demon; from that unholy union was spawned an accursed hybrid men call Tsotha-lanti—" Deuce wrote some stuff on the old forum about Tsotha-lanti's name and the similarity to Tsothaggua, could be on here too but I'm not sure. And then you have this monster Conan encounters in the catacombs under the Scarlet Citadel: "The weeping grew nearer as he advanced, and lifting his torch he made out a vague shape in the shadows. Stepping closer, he halted in sudden horror at the amorphic bulk which sprawled before him. Its unstable outlines somewhat suggested an octopus, but its malformed tentacles were too short for its size, and its substance was a quaking, jelly-like stuff which made him physically sick to look at." The Yothga plant which is slowly drinking Pelias's soul is an extraterrestrial thing from the same planet as Yag-Kosha (or Yogah as some of us like to call him  ) Not direct but the seeds of a sentient monster-plant floating through space seems pretty lovecraftian to me. "Tsotha preferred to keep me alive, in shackles more grim than rusted iron. He pent me in here with this devil-flower whose seeds drifted down through the black cosmos from Yag the Accursed, and found fertile field only in the maggot- writhing corruption that seethes on the floors of hell. REH also directly connects the Hyborian Age to his modern Cthulhu Mythos tales featuring Von Junzt's Nameless Cults in an unfinished story fragment in which an ancient tomb is being excavated in Egypt. One of the characters "Allison" states that Von Junzt discovered the Hyborian Age and wrote of it in Nameless Cults, then goes on to say he thinks the tomb contains the body of a Stygian, a race that predated the historical Egyptians and built the pyramids and Sphinx. It's only one page, so who can say how REH would have finished it but still it shows he must have been considering a "canonical" connection of the Cthulhu mythos (at least his version of it) and the Hyborian Age. There's no title for the fragment but you can read it on page 505-506 of The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard (Del Rey/Ballentine Books). |
|
|
|
Post by linefacedscrivener on Oct 1, 2020 11:12:35 GMT -5
I would add in the Scarlet Citadel for lovecraftian touches: first off the main villain Tsotha-lanti is only half human and his father was pre-human demon, somewhat similar to Wilbur Whateley in the Dunwich Horror . " As for Tsotha — men say that a dancing-girl of Shadizar slept too near the pre-human ruins on Dagoth Hill and woke in the grip of a black demon; from that unholy union was spawned an accursed hybrid men call Tsotha-lanti—" Deuce wrote some stuff on the old forum about Tsotha-lanti's name and the similarity to Tsothaggua, could be on here too but I'm not sure. And then you have this monster Conan encounters in the catacombs under the Scarlet Citadel: "The weeping grew nearer as he advanced, and lifting his torch he made out a vague shape in the shadows. Stepping closer, he halted in sudden horror at the amorphic bulk which sprawled before him. Its unstable outlines somewhat suggested an octopus, but its malformed tentacles were too short for its size, and its substance was a quaking, jelly-like stuff which made him physically sick to look at." The Yothga plant which is slowly drinking Pelias's soul is an extraterrestrial thing from the same planet as Yag-Kosha (or Yogah as some of us like to call him ) Not direct but the seeds of a sentient monster-plant floating through space seems pretty lovecraftian to me. "Tsotha preferred to keep me alive, in shackles more grim than rusted iron. He pent me in here with this devil-flower whose seeds drifted down through the black cosmos from Yag the Accursed, and found fertile field only in the maggot- writhing corruption that seethes on the floors of hell. REH also directly connects the Hyborian Age to his modern Cthulhu Mythos tales featuring Von Junzt's Nameless Cults in an unfinished story fragment in which an ancient tomb is being excavated in Egypt. One of the characters "Allison" states that Von Junzt discovered the Hyborian Age and wrote of it in Nameless Cults, then goes on to say he thinks the tomb contains the body of a Stygian, a race that predated the historical Egyptians and built the pyramids and Sphinx. It's only one page, so who can say how REH would have finished it but still it shows he must have been considering a "canonical" connection of the Cthulhu mythos (at least his version of it) and the Hyborian Age. There's no title for the fragment but you can read it on page 505-506 of The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard (Del Rey/Ballentine Books). Nice! Some great observations. You know, I see a lot of people writing here and there about certain aspects of Conan and the Cthulhu Mythos, but has anyone ever written a complete treatment on this topic? It seems to me this would be a fantastic study for something like The Dark Man. |
|
|
|
Post by zarono on Oct 4, 2020 9:18:05 GMT -5
There's been a lot written about the Hyborian Age connections with the Cthulhu Mythos over the years with a lot of different perspecitves, I'm sure it's out there somewhere but there doesn't seem to be as much interest in the subject nowdays.
|
|
|
|
Post by linefacedscrivener on Oct 5, 2020 11:03:43 GMT -5
|
|
|
|
Post by bobbyderie on Oct 5, 2020 21:44:40 GMT -5
I actually wrote a longer piece on Lovecraft, Howard, and the Mythos titled "From Cimmiera to R'lyeh: Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft" - but it's only in German right now; I sold it to Festa Verlag for their new edition of Howard's Mythos fiction, and they translated it.
|
|
|
|
Post by elegos7 on Oct 5, 2020 23:21:20 GMT -5
I actually wrote a longer piece on Lovecraft, Howard, and the Mythos titled "From Cimmiera to R'lyeh: Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft" - but it's only in German right now; I sold it to Festa Verlag for their new edition of Howard's Mythos fiction, and they translated it. Do you plan to publish your Mythos essay in English somewhere?
I would certainly be interested in it.
|
|
|
|
Post by linefacedscrivener on Oct 6, 2020 13:37:56 GMT -5
I actually wrote a longer piece on Lovecraft, Howard, and the Mythos titled "From Cimmiera to R'lyeh: Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft" - but it's only in German right now; I sold it to Festa Verlag for their new edition of Howard's Mythos fiction, and they translated it. Do you plan to publish your Mythos essay in English somewhere?
I would certainly be interested in it.
As would I! Just Curious: Did you write it in German or was it translated into German? |
|
|
|
Post by bobbyderie on Oct 6, 2020 22:24:48 GMT -5
I wrote it to spec, work-for-hire deal; so I don't have any plans to publish it, though I might do an expanded version at some point. I wrote it in English, they handled the German translation.
|
|
|
|
Post by linefacedscrivener on Oct 10, 2020 18:03:04 GMT -5
I wrote it to spec, work-for-hire deal; so I don't have any plans to publish it, though I might do an expanded version at some point. I wrote it in English, they handled the German translation. Cool! Congrats on the work for hire deal. Always a sign your work is highly respected. |
|
|
|
Post by zarono on Oct 13, 2020 9:28:02 GMT -5
I think another subtle homage to Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror is Salome in A Witch shall Be Born
, similar to Tsotha-Lanti in that that there is a demonic strain in her bloodline and again compare the half human parentage of Wilbur Whateley in Lovecraft's Dunwich Horror. Wilbur is a lot more monstrous than Salome though, most of her outer evil is mental and not physical other than the witch mark.
Salome: "They tell how the first queen of our line had traffic with a fiend of darkness and bore him a daughter who lives in foul legendry to this day."
Wilbur: "They from outside will help, but they cannot take body without human blood."
Salome: "But the life in me was stronger than the life in common folk, for it partakes of the essence of the forces that seethe in the black gulfs beyond mortal ken."
Wilbur Whateley: "I wonder how I shall look when the earth is cleared and there are no earth beings on it. He that came with the Aklo Sabaoth said I may be transfigured there being much of outside to work on."
Salome replaces Ishtar with idols of various known dark gods but there is something even older and stranger involved:
She has destroyed the ivory image of the goddess which these eastern Hyborians worship (and which, inferior as it is to the true religion of Mitra which we Western nations recognize, is still superior to the devil-worship of the Shemites) and filled the temple of Ishtar with obscene images of every imaginable sort—gods and goddesses of the night, portrayed in all the salacious and perverse poses and with all the revolting characteristics that a degenerate brain could conceive. Many of these images are to be identified as foul deities of the Shemites, the Turanians, the Vendhyans, and the Khitans, but others are reminiscent of a hideous and half-remembered antiquity, vile shapes forgotten except in the most obscure legends. Where the queen gained the knowledge of them I dare not even hazard a guess.
Eventually Salome conjures the monster Thaug and gives him regular sacrifices (a creature somewhat reminiscent of Thog in Xuthal of the Dusk and the creature in The Black Stone, I would put the monster in The Hoofed Thing in this category too) Unlike Wilbur Whateley's monstrous brother Thaug is vulnerable to human weapons and goes down pretty quick under a cloud of arrows.
|
|
|
|
Post by keith on Oct 18, 2020 3:36:34 GMT -5
Yes. Deuce did a really fine and cogent article on that topic, in his 'zine YAGKOOLAN! #11. It was called "Tsathoggua! REH Was First!" Among other things he pointed out that REH left some definite but fairly subtle philological hints in the names of various partly human villains to suggest their ancestry - even paternity - stemming from Tsathoggua, who possessed vast extra-dimensional knowledge which he could share if inclined, but also seemed impelled by an overwhelming urge to procreate with other species - maybe so that his offspring could open gates to Earth or serve the purposes of the Other Gods in other ways.
Among others, the Pictish shaman Zogar Sag in "Beyond the Black River" was fathered by an ancient being called Jhebbal Sag. As Deuce noted, pronounce "Zogar Sag" with a slight lisp and you have "Tsogar Thag" which is a mere short step from "Tsathoggua." The same principal operates with regard to "Jhebbal Sag." "Zhebbal Thag" isn't more than a hop, step and jump from "Tsathoggua" once you drop the l and the double b. "Thog" and "Thaug" are even more clearly just juvenile batrachoid kids of Big Daddy Tsathoggua.
It's true that Thaug died a bit quickly and easily for a scion of the great toad, but I've wondered if perhaps those Zuagir arrows had been carefully made with spells and charms by a Zuagir wizard over the months before the attack on Khauran. It would have taken a lot of work - there must have been a couple of hundred arrowheads - but there was time to do it, and maybe that desert shaman knew something about Salome and Thaug. Salome said herself that her (and Taramis's) remote half-human female ancestor "lives in foul legendry to this day." It really seems to me that just common arrowheads wouldn't have done the job ...
|
|
|
|
Post by zarono on Oct 19, 2020 9:33:25 GMT -5
Yes. Deuce did a really fine and cogent article on that topic, in his 'zine YAGKOOLAN! #11. It was called "Tsathoggua! REH Was First!" Among other things he pointed out that REH left some definite but fairly subtle philological hints in the names of various partly human villains to suggest their ancestry - even paternity - stemming from Tsathoggua, who possessed vast extra-dimensional knowledge which he could share if inclined, but also seemed impelled by an overwhelming urge to procreate with other species - maybe so that his offspring could open gates to Earth or serve the purposes of the Other Gods in other ways. Among others, the Pictish shaman Zogar Sag in "Beyond the Black River" was fathered by an ancient being called Jhebbal Sag. As Deuce noted, pronounce "Zogar Sag" with a slight lisp and you have "Tsogar Thag" which is a mere short step from "Tsathoggua." The same principal operates with regard to "Jhebbal Sag." "Zhebbal Thag" isn't more than a hop, step and jump from "Tsathoggua" once you drop the l and the double b. "Thog" and "Thaug" are even more clearly just juvenile batrachoid kids of Big Daddy Tsathoggua. It's true that Thaug died a bit quickly and easily for a scion of the great toad, but I've wondered if perhaps those Zuagir arrows had been carefully made with spells and charms by a Zuagir wizard over the months before the attack on Khauran. It would have taken a lot of work - there must have been a couple of hundred arrowheads - but there was time to do it, and maybe that desert shaman knew something about Salome and Thaug. Salome said herself that her (and Taramis's) remote half-human female ancestor "lives in foul legendry to this day." It really seems to me that just common arrowheads wouldn't have done the job ... Deuce let me read that one, good stuff! Old Tsathoggua must have been on viagra back in those days I've thought a bit about Thaug's demise, it may been that he was a creature with more substance from our dimension than the "outside". going back to the Dunwich Horror comparison Wilbur Whateley has a fair amount of the "outside" in him but is solidly material and ends up getting mauled to death by a big dog (imagine the kind of beating Conan could have given him) but Wilbur's Brother is a creature almost completely composed of other dimensional substance and invulnerable to physical damage and completely invisible although solid enough to leave trails, destroy structures, and devour people. Perhaps the greater amount of Earth dimension substance in completely visible creatures makes them more vulnerable to physical weapons (also of note fire and silver seem to be very effective against a certain type of REH demon demon like the Black Stranger so I wonder how they have affected Thog or Thaug). |
|
) Not direct but the seeds of a sentient monster-plant floating through space seems pretty lovecraftian to me.
