Lovecraft was easily scared

So, I've been listening to an audiobook collection of four Lovecraft stories: "The Call of Cthluhu" and "The Dunwich Horror" plus two short pieces, "Dagon" and "The Hound". I enjoy Lovecraft, but that's because I read him as a fantasist. As a horror writer, I think he's a dud for the simple reason that his stories aren't frightening. I have an active imagination and hence am easily spooked, including by writers like John Bellairs, and Clark Ashton Smith, and M. R. James, but not by Lovecraft.

Listening to the opening paragraphs of "The Dunwich Horror" helped clarify why. The simple truth is that Lovecraft found lots of things frightening that most of the rest of us just don't get scared by. Like fish. And if you don't share his assumptions, then the triggers he puts into his stories don't go off.

To  highlighting just how many things Lovecraft found frightening, here are the first four paragraphs from that famous story, interleaved with some observations by me:


When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country.

--to a city dweller, the countryside is a strange and somewhat disturbing place

--

      The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. 

--roads are a little unsettling in themselves, esp. narrow ones

The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, 

--trees are scary, especially when they're large

and the wild weeds, brambles and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. 

--plants are scary when they grow well

At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; 

--plants are also scary when they don't grow

while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation.

--run-down farms are scary

      Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. 

--farmers sitting on porches? scary

Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. 

--locals who keep to themselves? better not risk it

When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. 

--mountains? scary

The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, 

--round mountains? that's just crazy talk

and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

--stone circles: scary

      Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, 

--gorges and ravines: yup. scary

and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. 

--bridges? scary. 

(actually, as an acrophobiac, I'm with him on this one)

When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, 

--marshes? scary

and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter 

--birdsong? at night? scary!

and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance 

--fireflies: scary

(is Lovecraft the only person who ever lived

who's afraid of lightning bugs?)

to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs. 

--frogs: scary

The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.

--rivers are scary, especially when they meander

      As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep their distance, 

--hills are better the further away they keep

but there is no road by which to escape them. 

--don't want to get too close to those round hills

(I hear they rise wild)

Across a covered bridge one sees a small village huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, 

--small towns: creepy

and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of the neighbouring region.

--old buildings: scary

 It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, 

--collapsing buildings: okay, that can be scary

and that the broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet. 

--God given way to Mammon? 

some find that scary, others just kinda sad

One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it. 

--again, I'm with him on the bridge thing

Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odour about the village street, 

--"that good fresh country air", as my father-in-law used to call it

as of the massed mould and decay of centuries. 

--really old stuff is scary, the older the scarier

(for an antiquarian, HPL was spooked by age)

It is always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around the base of the hills and across the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. 

--getting back on track after an unintended detour: definitely a good feeling

Afterwards one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.

--i.e., that creepy place with the farms and falling-down buildings

and a bridge and trees and hills.

And fireflies. Don't forget the fireflies.

--Luckily, I shd soon have an audiobook of his dreamland stories, Lovecraft's best work, so there's that to look forward to.

--JDR

A Hankering After Old Games: MYTHOS

So, our friends Jeff and Kate held one of their periodic Game Days this holiday weekend, where there was much gaming and visiting and catching up with folks (and, at the very end, petting of cats). We arrived late, having been to our monthly meeting of Book Group (Mythlond) earlier that same day, where our book was LORD KELVIN'S MACHINE by Blaylock.*  But we still had time for two rounds of INGENIOUS (a tile-placing game I hadn't played before; good one) and, on my part, a quick game of TICKET TO RIDE (I came in third of three). In the invitation, Jeff had said something to the effect of 'bring whatever game you'd like to play', which got me thinking what that might be. I looked at the boardgame shelves both in the closet and box room and saw many fine possibilities (e.g. BLUE MAX, STELLAR CONQUEST, et al), but none that seemed quite right for the occasion, when I saw the boxes of MYTHOS cards and thought: the perfect thing.

I've written elsewhere about MYTHOS, in Jim Lowder's collection HOBBY GAMES: THE 100 BEST (2007), for now I'll just say that this is the CALL OF CTHULHU collectable card game, populated with characters and locations and tomes from Lovecraft's stories. Its best feature is the Adventure card(s) that give a storytelling element to the card game: each grants the player rewards (Sanity points and victory points) but only if the specific other cards it lists have to have been played. It's a great game, by far my favorite of all collectable card games -- but the problem is it's long out of print. And the folks I used to play it with have mostly moved away or I've gotten out of touch with (Lester Smith and Burl at the Game Center in Lake Geneva days; Chris Pramas and Jennifer Clarke Wilkes and Steve Miller and Robert Weise and Ed Stark, among others, as a WotC lunchtime game).

Hence if I were to get folks to play it with me, I'd have to provide the cards -- and to make it workable, they'd have to be in the form of pre-made decks, so that while folks wd need to learn the rules to play they won't have to delve into the minutia of deckbuilding as well. And that meant I'd need a lot of cards.

Luckily, I had a lot of cards. But unluckily, I couldn't find all of them. The Allies and Adventures, Great Old Ones and Monsters and Tomes were all in the closet, right where they were supposed to be. The New Aeon cards were all in the leather box where they were supposed to be. And downstairs I had bunches of semi-sorted cards (gifts from friends who'd I'd played with back in the day, kindly given to me when they got to the stage of cleaning out their own closets), mainly from the Dreamlands set.**  From these I had quite a few Events and plenty of Spells and some Artifacts (enough to play with, though lacking some needed for specific adventures). But there was nowhere near enough Locations, esp. since every deck needed a good assortment. Placing the decks in different locations (e.g., an Arkham deck, a Dunwich deck, an Innsmouth deck, a Mideast deck), something I'd intended all along, lessened the problem but it still just didn't look workable. Then, yesterday afternoon I found the four card-file boxes containing Locations and more Monsters and Artifacts and more Spells, et al.

Put these together with those I'd already found and sorted, pull out those old notes I'd kept detailing specific decks I'd made and played with years ago (when I remembered the rules and individual cards' effects much better than I do right now), and I think we'll be good to go. So next up is merging the sorted cards, making up some sample decks, and re-reading THE ART OF PLAYING MYTHOS get remind myself how gameplay goes and be able to teach it to others who have never played, or if so not for a long long time.

So, not in time for this game day, but definitely got enough interest when I asked around among out CALL OF CTHULHU group to make this do-able at a game day in the future. We'll see how it goes.

--John R.

 *universally judged to be a great disappointment (next month: THE DRESDEN FILES).  

 **(the set which, along with overprinting of the Standard non-collectable dual-deck, sank the game. But that's another story).

Weighed and Found Wandrei

Weighed and Found Wandrei

So, as part of my project of slowly working my way thr. the various WEIRD TALES authors in Lovecraft's circle, I've now reached one who played a major role historically but seems to have been insignificant literarily: Donald Wandrei, one of the older of HPL's young disciples, having corresponded with Lovecraft from 1926 onwards. His role as co-founder of Arkham House means he shares with Derleth the credit for rescuing HPL's work from obscurity, and likewise the blame of ghettoizing said work into small-press-dom. Derleth of course put himself front and center as the defender of Lovecraft's legacy, as well as claiming the right to say exactly what that legacy was, while Wandrei remained more in the background, playing relatively little part from the early/mid 1940s onward aside from his major project of trying to assemble and transcribe virtually the whole of Lovecraft's correspondence --the first volume of which did not appear until more than a quarter-century after Lovecraft's death, in 1965.

As a person, Wandrei seems to have been an internet troll before his time. This book skirts his role in driving Lovecraft's chosen executive, R. H. Barlow, not just out of Lovecraft studies but out of fandom altogether, as well as the question of his knowledge of, or duplicity in, Derleth's various frauds. But it's not a good sign when the biographical essay at the end of the book ("Of Donald Wandrei, August Derleth, and H. P. Lovecraft", by D. H. Olson) starts by arguing that Wandrei was not a paranoid crank, whatever we might have heard. Talk about an "unaccustomed as I am to public speaking" opener! My own feeling, after reading said piece, was that "paranoid, litigious crank" about summed it up.

Still, personality and talent are very different things. There are authors I don't much like whose works I love, and vice versa. Having now read two volumes of Wandrei stories, I conclude that I've read enough -- I'll probably read his novel THE WEB OF EASTER ISLAND (1948) if I ever get the chance, but two thick volumes of over 700 pages of short stories seems a fair trial to say this stuff is not for me. Of the two, the collection of detective stories, FROST (Fedogan and Bremer, 2000) reads like the kind of stories Harry Stephen Keeler was parodying as far back as the 1920s: infallible inscrutable detective, beautiful sidekick, and bizarrely complicated / spectacularly improbable crimes. It's a tradition still alive and well today in manga like DETECTIVE CONAN and KINDAICHI CASE FILES; readable enough but impossible to take seriously.

The other, DON'T DREAM, collects horror and pulp science-fiction stories together -- in fact, I discovered after the fact that it largely replicates the contents of Wandrei's first book, the Arkham House collection THE EYE AND THE FINGER (1944). Those looking for early Mythos tales will come away wanting: aside from references to "the old ones" "the whisperer in darkness" "the color out of space" [sic] and "the call of Cthulhu" -- all in a single more or less irrelevant paragraph in the story "The Lady in Grey" [WEIRD TALES, 1933] -- there's only one truly Mythos story, though not marked as such: "The Monster from Nowhere" (which shd have been titled The Shoggoth from Space). Two variant stories -- "When the Fire Creatures Came" [1932] and its revised form "The Fire Vampires" [1933] introduce the flame vampires and Fthaggua (Derleth's Cthugha) but are schlock science fiction, not horror; something later adopted into the Mythos rather than an intentional contribution.

Most of these stories are predictable, gruesome pulp sci-fi, with a handful of horrors from exotic jungles contributing their bit. He's fond of past-life regression stories (always accompanied by physical regression as well), as well as amoeba-like division and runaway reproduction of monsters (a theme he uses time after time). Although said to have been fond of the prose-poem, the examples included here show he wasn't any good at the form: these are the most static, uninteresting prose-poems I've ever read (and, as an admirer of Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, and Poe, I'm a great admirer of the form). 

Still, a few stories stand out. "The Destroying Horde" [WEIRD TALES, 1935] seems to be the origin of the famed DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS monster 'the gelatinous cube' (deadly because perennially underestimated). "Spawn of the Sea" [ibid, 1933] is a too-obvious prequel to Hodgson's great tale "The Derelict", with bits from Poe's PYM thrown in (Wandrei testifies elsewhere "The discovery of Poe was the greatest literary event of my life" -- p. 356).  It's interesting to note that the opening story here, "A Fragment of a Dream" [1926] features a green sun, but this seems serendipitous; the chances of Tolkien's having seen it -- either in its first appearance in the MINNESOTA QUARTERS [1926] or its reprinting in W. Paul Cook's fanzine THE RECLUSE [1927] or in the Arkham House collection [1944] -- seem effectively nil. Also of minor interest is a Wandrei essay "The Imaginative Element in Modern Literature" which defines all "imaginative literature" as falling into three groupings: ghost stories, horror stories, and "pseudo-scientific romance" (p. 361). It's a good indicator of just how narrowly fantasy can be defined, but wholly inadequate when compared to, say, "On Fairy-Stories" or "Supernatural Horror in Literature": Wandrei was no Tolkien or even a Lovecraft.

There is one outstanding story in this collection, however, which makes the whole seven-hundred-page slog worthwhile just to discover it: "Strange Harvest" (WEIRD TALES, 1953). One of Wandrei's later tales, it's wonderfully atypical. If I came across it anonymously in an anthology I wd have instantly identified it as the work of Rbt Arthur (one of the great unappreciated authors of the era, best known for his later work on Alfred Hitchcock anthologies). It's not an original idea -- all the plants in a remote region gain sentience, and object strongly and effectively to the local farmers' baffled attempts to harvest them -- but handled extremely well, with great humor and effectiveness. The escaping apple orchard, who replanted themselves in a spot more to their liking and whom the would be harvester unwisely pursued, was my favorite bit, but it's hard to resist a line like "Not least among the remarkable events in Shawtuck County that morning was the saga of the fugitive potatoes." (p. 304). That line pretty much tells you whether this is a story you'd like or not. For me, the answer is v. much yes; I'll be hanging on to this volume solely for the essay on Wandrei at the end and this story.

Finally, there's a puzzling passage in Wandrei's deposition, drawn up as part of his suits and counter-suits against Arkham House after Derleth's death and incorporated into the volume's terminal essay. At one point, after mentioning Lovecraft's having appointed Barlow his literary executor, Wandrei goes on to say

"Lovecraft had also given specific authorization to six persons to use all story ideas in his notebooks, and to use all his Cthulhu mythology, these six individuals including Clark Ashton Smith, Frank B. Long, Derleth, and me." (p. 377)

Now, in the first place this does not ring true to the way Lovecraft approached the mythos, which was much more free-form and informal. That he wd encourage some and discourage others doesn't seem to fit the facts very well. And in the second place, assuming any such document or instructions ever existed, who are the other two names, and why did Wandrei omit them from his list?  I can think of lots of possibilities --Howard? Bloch? Kuttner? Price? Barlow? Leiber? et al. -- but no way to narrow it down plausibly to the ones Wandrei had in mind.

So, done with that. Wandrei's true legacy is not in his works (not the short stories and essays, anyway) but in having co-founded a legended small press at age thirty. Now to see if I can find that novel, or whether Donald's brother Howard Wandrei was any better . . .

--JDR

Derleth and the Mythos

So, one of the books I've been reading recently is DISSECTING CTHULHU: ESSAYS ON THE CTHULHU MYTHOS, ed. S. T. Joshi (2011, Miskatonic River Press). A loan from friend Jeff G. (thanks, Jeff), this is the first scholarly work from a relatively new publisher of some quality 'old school' CALL OF CTHULHU rpg adventure anthologies (NEW TALES OF THE MISKATONIC VALLEY [2008] and MORE ADVENTURES IN ARKHAM COUNTRY [2010]), which I used to run a C.o.C. campaign off and on for about a year and a half.* Now they're branching out into both Mythos fiction and, more significantly, scholarship.

This present collection is devoted not just to denouncing August Derleth, who certainly deserves it, but to attempting to debunk the idea that there ever was a Cthluhu Mythos anywhere outside Derleth's imagination. There's a lot of baby with the bathwater here; the anti-Derlethians are right that (a) Derleth's ideas were markedly unlike Lovecraft's on key points (e.g., the Xian gloss he applied -- ludicrously so, given that Lovecraft was a stark atheist) and (b) Derleth indulged himself in a good deal of fraud to pass off his ideas as Lovecraft's own.** But in trying to expunge these accretions some go so far as to deny Lovecraft's own contributions: contrary to their claims, most of 'the Cthulhu Mythos' as we know it today derives directly from H.P.L.'s writings, extrapolated from works like "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Dunwich Horror" and THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH. And the evolved form it now has owes less to Derleth (whose take on the Mythos now seems distinctly quaint) than to Sandy Petersen and his peers, and the form they gave it (which in turn builds directly on Lovecraft's own practice in his treatment of material from earlier writers like Chambers and Dunsany). Today most people first encounter Lovecraft's work not through Derleth's essays and introductions dating back to forty-plus years ago but through the CALL OF CTHULHU roleplaying game.

Stripped of their smugness and absolute self-certainty (reading the first half of this book is like skimming through a year's worth of issues of THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER all in one sitting), the essays here range from claims that the Mythos can be restricted to as few as three stories to more general approaches that it might include as much as a dozen or so. Generally, as the volume's editor notes, attempts to define the Mythos center in on three or four elements:

(1) eldritch tomes, like THE NECRONOMICON. If every story by Lovecraft and others in his circle that mentions one of these tomes is a 'Mythos story' (as most of us implicitly accept), then the Mythos is pervasive throughout much of HPL's fiction AND poetry (e.g. the sonnet sequence THE FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH) AND a considerable portion of his correspondence as well. Several of the critics included here consider this just window dressing and so don't take it into account, but I'm wary of arguments that can only make their point by excluding great blocks of evidence.

(2) the gods. Lovecraft may not have come up with the term 'The Great Old Ones", but like Tolkien's "A Mythology for England" it's useful & distinctive shorthand for another of the most characteristic features of his work. Is it only a Cthulhu Mythos story if it directly involves Cthulhu or Nyarlathotep or Yog-Sothoth as a character who actually appears, in person, in the narrative? That line of thought wd lead to the conclusion that v. few stories indeed qualify. Or is mentioning one of the Other Gods enough?-- wh. vastly expands the field. How about the Elder Ones (wh. seems to have been Lovecraft's name for the Titans), like Nodens? Or the Greek gods (whom he called "the Great Ones"), who figure in passing in THE DREAM-QUEST?

(3) Arkham Country. Lovecraft set some stories in Providence or other real New England towns, but many take place in imaginary towns like Arkham, Dunwich, and Innsmouth, or along the Miskatonic River, or feature some doomed professor from Miskatonic University. This is one of the most distinctive features of Lovecraft's work: it's often been observed that landscape almost approaches the status of a character in his tales. But is this subcreated world part of the Mythos, or independent of it?

(4) Joshi, the volume's editor, stresses a philosophical element: does the story center on 'cosmicism', Lovecraft's own personal brand of nihilism? Certainly there's a sense of threat from vast cosmic forces in the best of his tales, but for me there's v. much a sense of an author's reach exceeding his grasp: Great Cthulhu, whose advent is supposed to spell doom for the entire world, is defeated by being rammed by a yacht. The half-god prophet Wilbur Whateley's apocalyptic schemes end when he's eaten by a watchdog. His brother, an unstoppable massive engine of destruction, spends most of his time flattening barns and eating cows. The gap between conception and execution cd hardly be more ludicrously large. More to the point, the gods of the Mythos are supposed to evoke terror in us by representing our exposure to vast, inconceivable forces who are utterly indifferent to us, yet when they show up in the tales they act that ordinary boogiemen who delight in stalking and devouring the mere mortals whose existence they're supposed to be supremely unaware of. The core point of Lovecraft's credo -- that we wd be driven mad and instantly destroyed were we to become aware of the vastness of the cosmos and our insignificance within it -- is conveyed better by Douglas Adams' Total Perspective Vortex than by anything in any of Lovecraft's tales; the closest Lovecraft comes to dealing with the theme directly is in the story "From Beyond" -- far from his best, but the only real 'Mythos story' he ever wrote by that standard.

Taken altogether, the presence of at least one of these elements marks most of Lovecraft's work. So, if you consider each an element of the Mythos, it follows that 'Lovecraftian' and 'Cthulhu Mythos' are effectively synonyms. That's the conclusion Chaosium reached, meaning that any story by Lovecraft cd be considered authoritative and drawn on for a Mythos adventure. Personally, I find Chaosium releases like THE MASKS OF NYARLATHOTEP, SHADOWS OF YOG-SOTHOTH, and DAY OF THE BEAST truer to the pulp stories Lovecraft actually wrote than anything that anything that might correspond to an idealized image of Lovecraft as conveyed by the strictures set down in this collection.

Two small take aways that made me glad I read this book: the short essay by Will Murray on Nug & Yeb, two v. minor Great Old Ones who never play any significant role in any story. Murray shows that they're referred to with surprising frequency in HPL's letters, and collects those references to show that Lovecraft had some well-thought out ideas regard even v. minor Mythos beings. I remember Dr. Humphrey Havard telling me much the same re. Tolkien: that he only had about 10% of what he knew about any given character in his legendarium written down, and cd expound at length about any of them.

Even better is another piece by Murray about the town of Foxfield. I'd been rather annoyed when the Miskatonic River Press adventure collections each included a scenario set in a 'Lovecraft Country' town they'd made up themselves: the little village of Foxfield, Mass. Well, it turns out this is a creation of Lovecraft himself; Murray's piece tells how S. T. Joshi, back in 1994, found a hand-drawn map HPL had created of the town, which he obviously planned to use as the setting of a story. We don't have the story, nor any indication of what it might have been, and so can extrapolate only from the details of what sites Lovecraft chose to include and label on the map (rather like scholars trying to work out the conclusion of EDWIN DROOD from the illustrations Dickens commissioned for the unwritten chapters). This is a great little piece of research; highly recommended.

--John R.

current reading: A MOUSE & HIS CHILD by Hoban; ORTHODOXY by GKC

current audiobook: OVER SEA, UNDER STONE by Cooper.

....................................

*which unfortunately now seem to have run its course.

**On a personal level, which they don't go into here, Derleth's behavior is much more reprehensible, both in his persecution of HPL's chosen executor, Barlow, whom Derleth slandered and drove from fandom and publishing circles, and in his pretense that he represented 'the Lovecraft estate', a self-appointed role which he exploited to collect royalties he had no legal right to and to veto projects he shd have had no say over. Not to mention, of course, his occasional forgeries. Of course, on the positive side, Derleth does deserve credit for rescuing the 'Weird Tales' school of pulp horror writers from oblivion. The argument has been made, rather unconvincingly, that Derleth ghettoized Lovecraft and held him back from mass popularity and literary acceptance; even if we grant this dubious claim, there's no doubt that Derleth promoted Clark Ashton Smith, the greatest writer in that group by far, bringing new volumes into print over the decades even though Smith's books sold poorly. And he was responsible for one of Dunsany's late books having an American edition, for which he made sure to pay Dunsany a royalty, so that's to his credit as well. --JDR

Tyndarus House?

So, recently I've been reading Greek tragedies (SEVEN AGAINST THEBES, THE CYCLOPS) and Roman comedies (THE CAPTIVES, THE HAUNTED HOUSE), filling in some of the gaps from the last time I read Greek drama, when I took a class in classical lit. back as an undergrad (i.e., plays not assigned then that for one reason or another sounded interesting). Plautus' comedies really do turn out to be just like A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM, except not as good (since it's a modern distillation of the whole genre), or THE COMEDY OF ERRORS (where Shakespeare, being Shakespeare, absolutely nailed it). But I was slightly bothered by one character's name, Tyndarus (usually abbreviated TYND in the Kindle version I was reading). It was only after I'd finished the play that it suddenly struck me how close this was to Tindalos, as in 'the Hounds of Tindalos'.

I don't know if 'Tindalos' was inspired by Tyndarus -- I can easily see Lovecraft, who was v. knowledgeable about classical authors (indeed, something of a prodigy), adapting it -- but this particular contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos came not by Lovecraft himself but his friend Frank Belknap Long in the story of the same name [1929], and I don't know much about Long's erudition (or lack thereof).

If the name Tyndarus* did inspire 'Tindalos', then it fits the pattern whereby Lovecraft seems to have derived the name Nyarlathotep from Dunsany's Mynarthitep (from "The Sorrows of Search", in Time & the Gods [1906]), rather than his taking over a real-world name like Nodens (whom he believed to have been a Titan) or Dagon (a non-classical deity).

On the other hand, anyone who's any good at making up names for imaginary places will inevitably make up some combination that resembles a real-world name, whether they're aware of it or not (there are only so many good combinations of consonants and vowels to go around). So the question becomes is this a name like Kor, which Tolkien borrowed from Haggard and put to his own use, or a name like Gondor, which Tolkien invented but which resembles both Twain's Gondour and the real-world city of Gondar in Ethiopia, neither of which seems to have been Tolkien's model**. I suspect it falls in the latter category, but the possibility of its being Long's actual source seemed interesting enough to be worth sharing.

--John R.

*rather than from this play, Long cd also have taken it from the rather more famous King Tyndareus, father of Helen of Troy and at least one of the Gemini Twins (Castor and Pollux).

**the name of The Kingdom of Stone was originally Ond, then Ondor, then finally Gondor in Tolkien's successive drafts.