Unspeakable! The Secret History of Nameless Cults by Bobby Derie

As the John Hay Library at Brown University continues to digitize its collection, and place them online, interesting little tidbits are revealed for the more detail-minded among us.

Farnsworth Wright to H. P. Lovecraft, 2 Apr 1934

Dear Mr. Lovecraft: I just received your letter of last Friday, and hasten to answer it. I shall try to look up further authority regarding "unaussprechlich" and "unnennbar". If I can find good authority for "unaussprechlich" I am inclined to let that stand; for "unaussprechlich" has a sinsiter aspect that is lacking in "unnennbar". Just got a letter from the Sultan of the Southern Kingdom, Lord Malik (accompanying a manuscript). He and Juggernaut are about to leave the land of the Osages and trek westward. He hopes to see Conan the Reaver as he passes through Texas; and the Lord of Xothique and Averoigne after he leaves San Francisco. I envy him his trip. I read in yesterday's paper about the death in Baltimore of Edward Lucas White last Friday. He was 68 years of age, and died from illuminating gas--the journal does not say whether it was suicide or accident. He was a strange genius. My wife, who used to be a librarian before I married her, considered his "El Supremo" one of the very best adventure stories she ever read. I have not read it. We are keeping the windows of our office closed today, so as to retain what cool air there is; that is, cool compared with the air outside. The morning paper says that cooling off has begun in the far Northwest; so I suppose the coolness will reach here within a few days. But until then... I am glad that Barlow likes the pictures. I myself admired Doolin's illustration for THE STRANGE HIGH HOUSE. The trouble with Doolin is that although he occasionally turned out something good like this, yet the most of his illustrations lacked imagination. The lack of imagination is why we have let Wilcox go. I was surprized, when I read the page-proofs of THROUGH THE GATES OF THE SILVER KEY, to find no mention whatever of Unaussprechlichen Kulten. So there was nothing to change. In the typescript of Mrs. Heald's story, OUT OF THE EONS, Unaussprechlichen Kulten is mentioned twice; and I have changed this in the typescript (following Howard's example) to Nameless Cults. Thanks again for your promptness. Regards to both you and Barlow. Cordially yours, Wright.

 

Farnsworth Wright

[[ Link to letter, with images: https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:423149/ ]]

The beginning and the end of the letter concern Robert E. Howard’s creation Unaussprechlichen Kulten, which first appeared in “The Black Stone” (Weird Tales Nov 1931) and “The Thing on the Roof” (WT Feb 1932) under the English title Nameless Cults. The book, inspired by works such as Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, was well-received by HPL:

And this reminds me to remark how much I enjoyed “The Thing on the Roof”. That carried the sort of kick I enjoy! Before long I mean to quote Justin Geoffrey and von Juntz’s “Black Book” in some story of my own.

—H. P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, 16 Jan 1932, MF 1.264

Neither Lovecraft nor Howard were fluent in German, but Lovecraft felt the book should have a German title and attempted to create one. Before he used it, however, Lovecraft tried out the title on August Derleth, whose family retained some German (his grandmother being Pennsylvania Dutch), which led to this exchange:

By the way—in case I ever try any more tales for my own amusement, can you tell me if Ungenennte Hedenthume is an even approximately decent German equivalent of the title “Nameless Cults”? I want to be able to make casual allusions to von Junzt’s Black Book in the original. I only took German a year, & that was in 1906—the present possibly ridiculous attempt at translations being a result of blind & unintelligent groping in a meagre grammar & wholly inadequate dictionary. I thought it best to give the word “Cult” its darkest signification—the phrase as above being really, I suppose, “Unnamed Heathenisms”. Any light you can shed on this matter will be of the utmost interest to an illiterate old man. I have a remote notion of some day hinting at the reason why von Junzt’s great-grandson lately cut his throat after discovering certain papers in his ancestor’s long-sealed Düsseldorf attic.

—H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 28 Jan 1932, ES 2.446

 

Thanks for the original title of the Black Book. I feel sure that Unausprechlichen Kulten is the correct version!

—H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 2 Feb 1932, ES 2.448

Neither phrase is grammatically correct German, but Lovecraft passed the title on to Robert E. Howard.

I feel honored that you should refer to Von Junzt’s accursed document, and thanks for the German of “Nameless Cults”, which I’ll use in referring to it. Though I’ve lived adjacent to Germans for many years, I know nothing of the language—and neither do a lot of them.

—Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, Apr 1932, MF 1.279

The new title did not make an “official” appearance immediately, although Lovecraft began to make reference to it in his letters (cf. DS 367, MF 1.308, etc.) Lovecraft would first make reference to the book under its German title in “The Horror in the Museum” (WT Jul 1933), ghostwritten for Hazel Heald. Farnsworth Wright, however, was not in on the joke, as was apparent when he wrote:

A Letter From Seabury Quinn by Bobby Derie

Seabury Quinn—whose longer tales I simply cannot wade through—is the perfect popular ideal—those who differ from him have just so much less chance of suiting cheap editors.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Emil Petaja, 4 Dec 1934, LWP 390

Seabury Quinn was the most popular writer at Weird Tales during his lifetime, and his sales eclipsed those of Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith. Where those later writers have gained greater respectability in death, and their work published and republished, adapted to comics, film, music, and other media, Quinn’s fiction has only partially and periodically regained the notice of the public, and the study of his life and works largely neglected. In part, this is because unlike Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith, there are very few surviving letters from Quinn’s pen or typewriter, and those are mostly in private hands, unpublished, or lingering in obscure fanzines.

This is one such letter, a relative rarity both in length and content. It was written to Weird Tales fan Emil Petaja in December 1934. Around this period, Petaja had also written to and received letters back from both H. P. Lovecraft, recently collected in Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei and to Emil Petaja from Hippocampus Press; and Robert E. Howard, the latter incident appearing in Novalyne Price Ellis’ memoir One Who Walked Alone.

[Address - Seabury Quinn] 24 Jefferson Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y. December 6, 1934. Dear Mr. Petaja: Thanks a lot for the mighty good letter you sent me November 25. I’ve been intending to get an answer off ever since I received it, but the necessity of making a trip over to Cincinnati upset all my plans, and this is my first opportunity to attend to any personal correspondence for some time. About a Ms. I’m sorry, but I haven’t got such a thing around the house.[1] You see, I’m mos casual in my work. My stuff is roughed out in longhand---and very rough it is, too, being little more than a series of notes, set down for the most part in my own private system of shorthand. Then it’s typed, and I make only one copy---no carbons. They are a damned nuisance, and when one is an inexpert typist, such as I, the necessity of doubling all corrections makes the work too heavy for a lazy man. Too, the fact that I’m pretty much a one-magazine man, writing only for W.T., and then only as occasion, inclination and pressure of work permits,[2] I have a rather small output. In 1934, for instance, I wrote only three stories.[3] “The Jest of Warburg Tantavul” was published in September, in January will be another de Grandin yarn, and the last of the year’s output comes out in February, I think. I called it the Web of Bondage, but only God and the NRA[4] know what Farnsworth Wright will decide to call it when he prints it. However, it’s a departure---for me, at any rate. Not about Jules de Grandin --- but I hope you like it. Several of my readers have been kind enough to ask for Mss. and I have suggested that they write to Editor Wright and ask him for his copy when the printers are done with them. He’s a good scout, Wright is, and will let you have a Ms. if he has one available. Then, if you’ll trouble to send me the title page of the thing, I’ll be mighty glad to put my John Hancock on it and mail it back to you and voila, as we occasionally say in Brooklyn, you’ll have the autographed Ms. though only Secretary Wallace and the AAA know what you want of the damned thing.[5] Me, I always want to get rid of ‘em as fast as I can. Just at present I’m seething to go on some more yarns, but just haven’t been able to find time to put ‘em down on paper. I’ve a notebook full of new plot situations, and if I can get around to it, I can turn out a year’s supply for W.T. in a couple of months. The job is to get started, however. I’m not a slow workman. Two thousand words a sitting is my usual stint, and generally a story takes only about a week (evening work) from inception to mailing. Typing is the hardest work of all. If I could bawl ‘em out to a stenographer it would be a lot simpler, but I’ve tried it a couple of times with disastrous results. The darn girls all think they now what I wanted to say better than I did, with the result that dictation meant double duty--- one job of making notes and dictating, a second one of revising and “restoring” the typist’s ms. No luck in that. During October I was down in New Orleans and had a great time poking around a lot of out of the way places. Tried to drink up all the licker in town, too, but failed miserably in the effort.[6] But I came back with a lot of plot suggestions, and 1935 should see some of them germinating into real stories. An afternoon spent in old St. Louis cemetery, reading and coping the French epitaphs was an inspiration in itself.[7] Yeah, I surely feel the birth-pains tearing me right now. Have you read Price’s latest?[8] That feller is surely one great writer, as is Hamilton.[9] I’m a great admirer of Greye La Spina, too. She’s a hot number, and one of my greatest pleasures is to have her over to my place for dinner and a chat. How about Lovecraft? He, personally, is a delightful chap, but I don’t go for his writing in such a big way.[10] Like Hamilton better. Or Price, or Kline.[11] If you’d really like to have one of my Mss. just drop a line to Farnsworth Wright, tell him your desire, and I know he’ll be glad to let you have one. He’s might decent and accommodating that way. And thanks again for your kind criticisms of my work. I’m going to try to merit some more from you and the other W.T. readers in the coming year. Cordially yours, Seabury Quinn [12]

[1] Petaja, like R. H. Barlow, wrote to pulp writers asking for the manuscripts of their stories that appeared in Weird Tales.

[2] While not always a “one magazine man,” Weird Tales was the main outlet for Wright’s pulp fiction in this period, as The Magic Carpet Magazine had ceased publication in 1934.

[3] Probably “The Jest of Warburg Tentavul” (Weird Tales Sep 1934), “Hands of the Dead” (WT Jan 1935), and “The Web of Living Death” (WT Feb 1935).

[4] The National Recovery Administration.

[5] Henry Agard Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture and a supporter of Roosevelt’s New Deal administration, including the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA).

[6] Prohibition was repealed in December 1933.

[7] New Orleans formed a backdrop to several of Quinn’s stories, the French epitaphs may have been a possible inspiration for “Pledged to the Dead” (WT Oct 1937). In a letter to Virigl Finlay in 1937 about illustrations for the story, Quinn wrote:

To walk through old St. Louis Cemetery is to turn the clock back two centuries. Even in broad daylight, ladies arrayed as Julie was [...] St. Louis Cemetery in the moonlight --- how H. P. Lovecraft would have reveled in it! (FCA 25)

[8] E. Hoffmann Price, probably “Queen of the Lilin” (WT Nov 1934) starring Pierre d’Artois, his own occult detective. This was the last of the d’Artois stories, and Price wrote in the introduction to Far Lands and Other Days:

Quinn and I conferred. Although my Pierre d’Artois was coeval with his Jules de Grandin, so that neither could be considered as having influenced the other, Quinn’s hero had won such tremendous applause, and had appeared so many times, that I told him I did not wish to be in the position of doing pastiches. I dumped d’Artois. (xvii)

In his memoir of Quinn in the Book of the Dead, Price expanded on this:

Seabury and I exchanged letters, and I said to him, “This is not a matter to debate. As a matter of self protection, I am killing the Pierre d’Artois series, lest someone fancy that I am imitating you. Not that I would not—it is that I could not do a good job of it!” (164)

[9] Edmond Hamilton, better known for his space opera stories, but a Weird Tales regular.

[10] Quinn and Lovecraft had met in 1931; neither was particularly fond of the other’s approach to fiction, though they recognized their respective talents.

[11] Otis Adelbert Kline, who had some early success with Weird Tales and by the 1930s had largely turned to being an agent, working with E. Hoffmann Price, Frank Belknap Long, and Robert E. Howard among others.

[12] Quinn had a habit of drawing a smiley face (and, less often, a frownie face) in the culminating Q of his signed letters; this is very typical of the signatures in his letters to Virgil Finlay, published in the Fantasy Collectors Annual 1975.

Works Cited

FCA     Fantasy Collectors Annual 1975

LWP    Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei and to Emil Petaja

Farnsworth Wright’s Favorite Weird Tales by Bobby Derie

Julius Schwartz

In 1932, teenage fan Julius Schwartz became involved with the Science Fiction Digest, a high-end fanzine (which in 1934 would become Fantasy Magazine). One of the features of SFD was a series titled “Titans of Science Fiction,” short biographical pieces based on interviews with the subject. The last such piece before SFD changed its name concerned Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales from 1924 to 1940. In that piece, Schwartz reports:

Thinks the following stories are the best he has published, not in order:

The Stranger from Kurdistan—E. Hoffman Price;

The Phantom Farmhouse—Seabury Quinn;

The Outsider—H. P. Lovecraft;

The Werewolf of Ponkert—H. Warner Munn;

The Shadow Kingdom—Robert E. Howard;

The Canal—Everil Worrell;

The Wind that Tramps the world—Frank Owen.
—“Farnsworth Wright” by Julius Schwartz, Science Fiction Digest, March 1933

A year later in another fanzine called The Fantasy Fan, Schwartz and his frequent collaborator Mort Weisinger (who also wrote in SFD and would be the editor of Fantasy Magazine) wrote a column titled “Weird Whisperings,” containing factoids and scuttlebutt about weird and fantasy pulp writers and editors. One detail was apparently taken straight from the Wright interview:

Farnsworth Wright says the best stories he’s printed in Weird Tales are (not in the order listed): “The Stranger from Kurdistan” by Price, “The Phantom Farmhouse” by Quinn, “The Outsider” by Lovecraft, “The Werewolf of Ponkert” by Munn, “The Shadow Kingdom” by Howard, “The Canal” by Worrell, “The Wind that Tramps the World” by Owen…—“Weird Whisperings” by Schwartz & Weisinger, The Fantasy Fan June 1934

Farnsworth Wright

It isn’t clear why this particular list came out at this time; Farnsworth Wright was not normally in the habit of naming favorites. But the list may or may not have been influenced by a conversation among the Weird Tales circle a few years earlier. In 1930, August Derleth was working on his B.A. thesis at the University of Wisconsin, on weird fiction, and had sent a long list of what he considered the best stories in the Unique Magazine to H. P. Lovecraft. The Old Gent from Providence went through his own archive of the magazine, and sent a letter to Wright with his own list:

Last week I went over my whole file of Weird Tales in an effort to check up a list of best stories prepared by young Derleth and came to the conclusion that, of everything published since the first number, the following items have the greatest amount of truly cosmic horror and macabre convincingness. I don’t know whether Derleth will agree with me or not, but these are all on his vastly longer list of superior tales. They are:

The Best Robert E. Howard Christmas Ghost Story by Bobby Derie

Now I remember those old women’s words,

Who in my wealth would tell me winter’s tales,

And speak of spirits and ghosts that glide by night

- Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta (1589)

A Christmas Carol original
illustration by John Leech

The Christmas ghost story was more of a British than an American tradition, but one that is still remembered in the lyrics of "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" (1963) when Andy Williams sang "There'll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of the Christmases long, long ago." The most famous Christmas ghost-story is Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas" (1843), which has been adapted innumerable times for the stage, radio, television, film, etc., but the tradition was alive in well into the 20th century with the likes of M. R. James, whose volumes Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), and A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925) all follow the same pattern of Christmas Eve entertainments.  James himself wrote in the introduction of the first volume that most of the stories "[...] were read to friends at Christmas-time at King's College, Cambridge[.]"

In the United States in the 20th century, readers might well trace the tradition in the pages of Weird Tales, with entries such as H. P. Lovecraft's "The Festival" (Jan 1925) and Seabury Quinn's novel Roads (Jan 1938)—it being remembered that the January issues actually hit the stands in mid-December. Not all every "Christmas ghost story" had to be set at Christmas, nor involve an actual ghost. The point was not any specific formula, but as James put it in his essay "On Ghost Stories": "...written with the sole object of inspiring a pleasing terror in the reader[.]" To recall the thrill of a weird tale told on a cold winter night, perhaps facing a fire, the wind howling out of doors; yes, pulp writers fall well into that category.

It might well be asked then...what would be the best Robert E. Howard ghost story to read at Christmas-time?

Weird Tales and Strange Tales were two of the Texas pulpster's steadier markets, so there is no shortage of raw material to choose from. Even as Ebenezer Scrooge received a ghostly visitation, so too did Conan of Cimmeria in "The Phoenix on the Sword" and "Queen of the Black Coast"; ghostly aid supports the black boxer Ace Jessel in "The Spirit of Tom Molyneaux"; Solomon Kane faces eerie spirits in stories such as "Skulls in the Stars," "The Right Hand of Doom," and "The Footfalls Within." All of these contain passages and scenes that can raise a shudder, though far from the rather sedate horrors of M. R. James.

The Spirit of Tom Molyneaux
Illustration by Greg Staples

Tales closer to that older tradition but with a Southwestern setting include some of Howard's best work; classic stories such as "Old Garfield's Heart," "The Dead Remember," and "Pigeons from Hell." Those stories written in the style of the Cthulhu Mythos such as "The Black Stone," "The Hoofed Thing," "The Thing on the Roof," and especially "Dig Me No Grave" definitely echo at least a touch of Jamesian horror, with their scholarly protagonists and more subtle horrors (by Howardian standards, at least), and might well fit a Yuletide mood.

What most of Howard's ghost stories lack is that particular aspect of reticence so characteristic of James' stories—yet neither does Howard ever attempt anything quite so staid as a traditional haunting, even in "The Haunter of the Ring" or “The Cairn on the Headland” which are perhaps as close as Howard gets. There is one story though, oft-neglected among Howard's weirder and more graphically fantastic stories, which nevertheless has my vote for the most fitting to read on a Christmas holiday, either aloud to listeners or alone to oneself.

"For the Love of Barbara Allen" was never published during Howard's lifetime, and more rarely anthologized than many of his better-known stories, though it can still be found in Crimson Shadows: The Best of Robert E. Howard Vol. 1 (2007, Del Rey), and in Pictures In The Fire (2018, The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press). It is not quite a haunting, at least not in the traditional sense, though it deals with life and death, love and loss. Nor is it as supremely weird as "Worms of the Earth" or "The Shadow Kingdom," or as epic as "The Grey God Passes."

It is a small, intensely personal story set in the world of only a few generations ago, and in the Texas that Robert E. Howard knew and loved so well. There is something inexpressible in the pages of "For the Love of Barbara Allen," a process to experience, an ending as inevitable as it is fitting. While it may not deliver much of creep, if the story does not shift your heart as the nights stretch longer and the dawn is far away...well, it is a story of giving that final gift that may be given, when and where it is needed most.

If that isn't appropriate for the holiday, I don't know what may be.

The Cthulhu Mythos and Space Opera by Bobby Derie

H.P. Lovecraft

As a young man H. P. Lovecraft would have thrilled to the sword-and-planet adventures of John Carter in Under the Moons of Mars (1912), and the intimation of ancient alien presences on Earth in A. Merritt’s The Moon-Pool (1918); but by the time he was writing his own adult material he had largely turned to fantasy—but it was the fantasy of the pre-Atomic age. E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen policed the galaxy in the pages of Amazing Stories, Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age city of Xuthal was lit by radium lamps, Leigh Brackett imagined a solar system full of habitable planets, C. L. Moore’s Northwest Smith was an outlaw on many planets with ray-gun in hand, Clark Ashton Smith’s last survivors of Atlantis and Hyperborea journey to far Sfanomoë (Venus) and Cykranosh (Saturn), and Lovecraft’s monsters were not the typical witches and vampires, but stranger, alien entities.

            A keen amateur astronomer, Lovecraft largely eschewed the dynamics that made space opera feasible. In his 1935 essay “Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction” he railed:

A good interplanetary story must have realistic human characters; not the stock scientists, villainous assistants, invincible heroes, and lovely scientist’s-daughter heroines of the usual trash of this sort. Indeed, there is no reason why there should be any “villain”, “hero”, or “heroine” at all. These artificial character-types belong wholly to artificial plot-forms, and have no place in serious fiction of any kind. The function of the story is to express a certain human mood of wonder and liberation, and any tawdry dragging-in of dime-novel theatricalism is both out of place and injurious. No stock romance is wanted. We must select only such characters (not necessarily stalwart or dashing or youthful or beautiful or picturesque characters) as would naturally be involved in the events to be depicted, and they must behave exactly as real persons would behave if confronted with the given marvels. The tone of the whole thing must be realism, not romance. [...] Hoary stock devices connected with the reception of the voyagers by the planet’s inhabitants ought to be ruled rigidly out. Thus we should have no overfacile language-learning; no telepathic communication; no worship of the travellers as deities; no participation in the affairs of pseudohuman kingdoms, or in conventional wars between factions of inhabitants; no weddings with beautiful anthropomorphic princesses; no stereotyped Armageddons with ray-guns and space-ships; no court intrigues and jealous magicians; no peril from hairy ape-men of the polar caps; and so on, and so on. [...] It is not necessary that the alien planet be inhabited—or inhabited at the period of the voyage—at all. If it is, the denizens must be definitely non-human in aspect, mentality, emotions, and nomenclature, unless they are assumed to be descendants of a prehistoric colonising expedition from our earth. The human-like aspect, psychology, and proper names commonly attributed to other-planetarians by the bulk of cheap authors is at once hilarious and pathetic. Another absurd habit of conventional hacks is having the major denizens of other planets always more advanced scientifically and mechanically than ourselves; always indulging in spectacular rites against a background of cubistic temples and palaces, and always menaced by some monstrous and dramatic peril. This kind of pap should be replaced by an adult realism, with the races of other-planetarians represented, according to the artistic demands of each separate case, as in every stage of development—sometimes high, sometimes low, and sometimes unpicturesquely middling. Royal and religious pageantry should not be conventionally overemphasised; indeed, it is not at all likely that more than a fraction of the exotic races would have lit upon the especial folk-customs of royalty and religion. It must be remembered that non-human beings would be wholly apart from human motives and perspectives.

In his own fiction, Lovecraft largely kept to these principles, the main exception being “In the Walls of Eryx” (1936), written in collaboration with Kenneth Sterling and published after Lovecraft’s death. In his own fiction, Lovecraft allowed horrors from the stars to come to Earth—most notably Cthulhu in “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926), “The Colour Out of Space” (1927), the Mi-Go in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930), the K’n-Yans of “The Mound” (1930), the Elder Things in At the Mountains of Madness (1931), and the Yithians in The Shadow Out of Time (1935), with passing references in other tales; he also touched on interplanetary fiction in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (1932) with E. Hoffmann Price and in his part of the round-robin “The Challenge from Beyond” (1935).

           

Clark Ashton Smith

Lovecraft’s friends and compatriots had no such qualms, and followed their own muse. Clark Ashton Smith set stories on Mars, Venus, and Saturn, blending cosmic horror with space opera. Robert E. Howard occasionally dropped Lovecraftian monsters from “the Outer Dark” into his Hyborian Age setting for Conan to face, and wrote the sword-and-planet novel Almuric, published after his death. C. L. Moore, who was part of the Lovecraft circle and major contributor to Weird Tales from 1933-1937, was not a direct contributor to the Mythos, but her space opera outlaw Northwest Smith faced monsters no less Lovecraftian for their lack of direct ties to the Cthulhu mythology.

            In the decades since then, many writers have expanded on the creations of Lovecraft and his friends, taking them into every conceivable setting—including space—such as Richard A. Lupoff’s classic “The Discovery of the Ghooric Zone” (1977). In the late 80s a short-lived magazine focused on tales of scientifiction called Astro-Adventures (1987-1989), which included tales both old and new worth seeking out and reading. The best of the new tales might be Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette’s Boojumverse (“Boojum,” “Mongoose,” and “The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward”) full of space pirates and living ships which are fantastic.

            Lovecraft himself never gave a single, consistent approach to the Mythos he created—nor did he require his friends and co-creators to adapt themselves to his philosophies of writing. The Mythos of his stories takes place in a dark and strange cosmos, where beings from distant stars and planets had visited Earth in the distant past...and some of them still survived, or their relics at least. The different approaches that the creators of the Mythos took, the occasional contradictions and fans’ efforts to reconcile disparate representations of the Mythos and its relationship to space, are all part of the fun of the setting. Mythology need not be consistent, and it need not all be true...lies, distortions, omissions, and forgotten truths underlay the mythology of Cthulhu and Hastur, Shub-Niggurath and Tsathoggua. It is up to the readers to decide where exactly is the cold planetoid Yuggoth from whence the Mi-Go come, or whether Mars and Venus ever bore life and were habitable by human beings.

            In the decades before humanity split the atom, they looked up at the stars at night and dreamed of walking on other planets—not knowing what they would find there. There was a sense of limitless possibilities, with their feet upon the dusty earth, and their imaginations flying through Venusian skies, disturbing the dust in some million-year-old ruin on Mars. It was an age when solar empires were planned out with pencil and paper, and realized on typewriters. Much of it never happened, and what did happen not the way they thought it would—but it’s a fun dream to visit sometimes.

Suggested Reading

Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette: “Boojum,” “Mongoose,” “The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward”

Ramsey Campbell: “The Insects from Shaggai,” “The Mine on Yuggoth”

Robert E. Howard: Almuric, “The Vale of Lost Women,” “Xuthal of the Dusk”

H. P. Lovecraft: At the Mountains of Madness, “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Colour Out of Space,” The Shadow Out of Time, “The Whisperer in Darkness”

H. P. Lovecraft & Hazel Heald: “The Horror in the Museum,” “Out of the Aeons”

H. P. Lovecraft & Zealia Brown Reed Bishop: “The Mound”

H. P. Lovecraft & E. Hoffmann Price: “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”

H. P. Lovecraft & Kenneth Sterling: “In the Walls of Eryx”

Richard Lupoff: “The Discovery of the Ghooric Zone,” “Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley”

C. L. Moore: All of the Northwest Smith stories, but especially “Shambleau,” “Julhi,” “Yvala,”
“The Cold Grey God,” and “Lost Paradise.”

C. L. Moore, A. Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, & Frank Belknap Long:
“The Challenge from Beyond”

Clark Ashton Smith: “A Voyage to Sfanomoë,” “The City of the Singing Flame,” “The Demon of the Flower,” “The Door to Saturn,” “The Dweller in the Gulf,” “The Immortals of Mercury,” “Master of the Asteroid,” “Mnemoka,” “The Plutonian Drug,” “Seedling of Mars,” “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis,” “Vulthoom”

E. E. Smith: The Lensman series, especially the core four novels (First Lensman, Galactic Patrol, Grey Lensman, Second Stage Lensman)

Bobby Derie’s latest work is Space Madness!, a roleplaying game of adventure & horror in an atompunk future inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, & other Mythos writers.

A Tale of Two Letters by Bobby Derie

Not every letter from every pulp writer that survives has been published; many remain on the open market and in private hands, coming up for sale from time to time...and they have stories to tell about Robert E. Howard.

The letter was posted on Facebook in Sep 2016 by Bob Meracle, who wrote of the acquisition: 

One of the "lots" August Derleth Offered to sell to me (and I gladly snapped it up) was a collection of manuscripts which included 3 signed typewritten Conan stories. I sold the 3 a couple decades ago, but held onto this cool note that was sandwiched between them.

While not explicitly stated, these typescripts were likely originally from the collection of R. H. Barlow. In 1932, Barlow solicited manuscripts and typescripts from Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, C. L. Moore, and other pulp writers, and Howard responded by sending several early typescripts for stories. Barlow’s receipt of these typescripts is mentioned in his 1933 diary, as well as in surviving letters from Howard. (CL 2.519; 3.47, 219) After Barlow’s death, his mother sold his collection.

The identity of the recipient is unknown; the name on the letter, although effaced, is too long to be "Barlow," and we know Howard sent Barlow a letter dated the very next day (14 June 1934, CL 3.215), so it is unlikely that Barlow was the recipient. So we are left with only the internal evidence of the letter. The reference to a request for a snap-shot recalls Barlow’s correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft in late 1933, although this might be coincidental. (OFF 78, 81) The reference to turpentine camps and voodoo is thus the primary clue.

“Turpentine camps” were work camps, largely employing black labor, including leased convict labor and sometimes workers held in debt bondage (i.e. charging them for food, clothing, etc. more than their wages could supply). These workers distilled turpentine from the resiny pine forests in the southern United States; during the 1930s their geographic range extended from North Carolina to Louisiana near the Texas border, with notable operations in Georgia and Florida. Zora Neale Hurston visited such camps to collect folk songs, magical recipes, and stories, some of which were published in academic articles and her collection Mules and Men (1935).

This was part of a general trend of anthropologists and collectors of ethnic music and folklore visiting prisons, work camps, and remote communities in the 1930s to record this material before it was lost—including a friend of R. H. Barlow.

Well, well—& so a friend of yours, like William B. Seabrook, has come into first-hand contact with the horrors of Damballa & his serpents. Who knows what waddling nigger washerwoman may not be a potent & dangerous mamaloi with power to evoke nameless horrors & send hideous zombis stalking through the land!—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 21 Oct 1933 (OFF 83)

Thanks tremendously for the voodoo report, which I've read with extreme interest. your friend seems to have been quite an amateur Wm. B. Seabrook—& the experience must have been powerfully moving in its way. Later on, if you ever make a copy, I certainly wouldn't mind a spare carbon. Those "geachi" blacks must be rather an interesting study.—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 13 Nov 1933 (OFF 85)

That voodoo encounter surely was picturesque—I'd hardly care to get into such close quarters with a crowd of excited blacks, but anthropological zeal will carry one far. So the "geechis" owe their superiority to insular isolation! I believe that, in general, all the Carolina island negroes are called "gullahs", & that their dialect differs from that of the mainland blacks. No doubt the geechis are a variety of these.—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 29 Nov 1933 (OFF 88)

Robert E. Howard’s Cow by Bobby Derie

Yes, there was a cow. I saw the critter. Her name was Delhi, and hump shouldered to suggest Indian blood—Asian-Indian, I mean.—E. Hoffmann Price to L. Sprague de Camp, 11 Feb 1977 (IMH 297)

LT: A Guernsey milk cow, named Delhi (pron. dell-high). I think I told you about that one time.—Lindsey Tyson, interview with L. Sprague & Catherine Crook de Camp, 7 Mar 1978

Howard House date unknown

The Howard House in Cross Plains, Texas sits on a grassy lot, some ways away from Main Street (Highway 206) and the downtown district, with a field behind it. When the Howards lived there, the property included a barn, and though not rural in any real sense—the Howards could easily see their next door neighbors—the country was not far off, and they had space to grow vegetables and keep a few animals. H. P. Lovecraft, a native to cities, was under the impression that they lived on a small farm (ES2.523-524, LFB 32), but Robert E. Howard declared:

We are not farmers. We live in a small town and have only a very small piece of land, but we have enough to keep a little stock and raise a garden. Right now we have far more than we need of greens, radishes, turnips, and the like. We have been taking cattle, hogs and canned stuffs on debts, as well as grain and feed. We have a good supply of hay, oats, cotton-seed, maize, and corn, and we have meal and flour ground from corn and wheat we got the same way. We have milk from our own cow, and plenty of meat. We had a whole calf canned — it’s surprizing how much meat a good fat calf makes — cans of steak, roast-beef, soup, hash, chili, liver, heart, tongue — everything but the hoofs.—Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, Jan 1932 (CL2.297, MF1.259)

This was the first reference to the Howards owning a cow, possibly taken in trade by Dr. Howard, as the Great Depression made itself known and cash was in short supply. Novalyne Price recalled: “A lot of people couldn’t pay a doctor bill, but they could give a dozen eggs.” (DS 10) and observed that Dr. Howard took payment in meat and vegetables. (OWWA 167, cf. CL2.450, MF1.396)
The Agricultural Outlook for 1932 produced by the U. S. Department of Agriculture noted that in the face of weakening demand the price of beef—and cattle—had declined; average price per head had dropped from $56.69 in 1929 to $26.64 in 1931, for a national loss in value of $730 million dollars. (31) The response from the government was the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, a New Deal program under which the government purchased millions of stock animals, not to butcher or process, but simply to kill them and reduce the supply. Milch cows (or milk cows, the terms were used interchangeably) were often advertised for sale and trade in the local newspapers—there are many advertisements thus in the Cross Plains Review, Brownwood Bulletin, and Abilene Morning Reporter—but cash prices are difficult to come by.
How long the Howards kept this cow, or even its name and breed, is unknown. Presumably it was this cow or a successor to which Howard refers when he wrote:

Nip suckles all impartially, with the possible exception of the stray kitten, who however, seems quite capable of taking care of itself, and which I’m trying to teach to stand on its hind-legs and drink milk squirted from the cow’s teat into its mouth. I haven’t had a cat that did that since Bebe.—Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, May 1935 (CL3.323-324, MF2.850)

Nip and Bebe were two of the many cats around the Howard house. Dr. Howard would later recall:

At the time of Robert's death, there were thirteen cats who had gathered up around the house. They were strays. I had spoken to him about carrying them away myself. He discouraged this, and continued milking his goats and feeding his cats. (IMH 269, WIW 151)

The ‘32 cow may or may not have been Delhi; Lindsey Tyson in a letter to L. Sprague de Camp dated 18 Feb 1977 claims the Howards owned the cow “4-5 years” before Robert E. Howard’s suicide in 1936, which would place ownership back to 1931 or ‘32. However, Delhi was not the Howard’s first cow,  which Robert E. Howard described as:

[...] a Jersey, and wild as a kite. Her teats were small, and she kicked and tossed her head and hooked, and raised hell generally and her calf was worse than she was. If she got through eating before I got through milking she’d turn her head, stare at me in feigned amazement as if she never saw me before and wondered what the hell I was doing there, and then kick out with both hind legs and go careering off around the lot, and sometimes I’d have to lasso her before I could catch her again. She was mean and vicious, and hooked me every chance she got, to say nothing of kicking the milk bucket out of my hand and stamping on my foot. Once I was leading her in at the lot gate, and she hooked me in the back, hooked me in the face when I turned, and an instant later hooked me beneath the heart and tore some skin off my ribs. This irritated me, and I gave her a bust on the jaw with my fist that knocked all the fight out of her and nearly broke her jaw. After that she never attempted to hook me again, but pulled all her other tricks, and her infernal calf nearly cost me an eye. Just a few days before it was traded off, along with her, I went into an adjoining lot to catch it and bring back to feed, and it refused to be caught, racing around wildly all over the lot, as big a fool as the old cow, and even meaner. I never could throw a rope worth a hang, and after a few attempts I lost patience, and ran at it and made a sort of flying tackle, aiming to grab it around the neck with my arms. Which I did, but it threw up its head just in time to spike me on its short, sharp horn. It caught me on the brow and instantly my eye was full of blood, but I hung on to the wretched beast, and got the rope on it and dragged it home — dragged is the word, because it always braced its legs and fought back every step of the way. All the time I was feeding the stock blood kept running into my eyes so I could hardly see, and when I got through and went into the house and looked into a glass, I found the horn had struck me just over my left eye, making a deep gash which penetrated to the bone. A fraction of an inch lower and it would have destroyed my eye, past doubt. I put some rub alcohol on it and it healed quickly, leaving only another scar of the many which decorate my features and body.—Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, May 1935 (CL3.323-324, MF2.851)

The Howards traded this animal for Delhi, although it isn’t clear when. In April 1934, E. Hoffmann Price and his wife left his job in a garage in Oklahoma for his native California, and stopped in Cross Plains on the way—and by then, the Howards definitely had Delhi, which he described to Lovecraft:

We have plenty of milk for them, because our cow came in fresh recently, but with a bull calf, to my disgust. I’d hoped for a heifer. The cow, Delhi, otherwise called the Begum, is a fine milch-cow, Guernsey with a touch of Brahma, or Holy Cow of India, which gives her more poise and a better temper than a Jersey cow generally possesses. She was bred with a registered Jersey bull, and I hoped much for the result, if it happened to be a heifer. But a mixed-breed milk bull is no good; all you can do is can him, so we gave him away. That is to say, you can’t make any money out of him, because everybody wants to breed their cows to a pure-bred registered animal. Price was much interested in Delhi’s Indian blood, and found her milk much to his liking. Indeed, her milk does taste better than any I ever drank, and tests out a very high percentage of butter fat; almost the maximum. On good grass she gives about four gallons a day, and in a dry lot, when well fed, she gives two to three gallons, enough for a medium sized family. I like her better than any cow I ever tried to milk. She has a splendid bag, and large teats, easy to juice, and she’s sensible, gentle and not nervous, as so many Jerseys are. [...] You have no idea what a relief it is to have a cow like Delhi.—Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, May 1935 (CL3.323-324, MF2.850-851)

The average pregnancy for a cow is 280 days; if Delhi gave birth around April or May, and the Howards had bred her, then it was impregnated around August 1933, so the Howards must have owned her since at least that time.
European colonizers brought their cattle (Bos taurus taurus) to the Americas in waves; including English breeds like the Jersey and Guernsey. Beginning in the late 19th century, however, some ranchers imported zebu, or Indian cattle (Bos indicus), to interbreed with their stock. The Indian breeds Nellore, Gir, Guzerat, and Krishna Valley were favored for their tolerance to heat, ability to withstand drought, and resistance to insects—traits that were passed down to offspring when crossbred with the European-derived cattle stock. (Parr 20) Cattle with significant zebu heritage are usually discernible by the characteristic hump on their back and dun color to their coat, as was the case with Delhi.
In America, these cattle were called Brahma or Brahman, after the Hindu deity Brahma (and, by extension, the Brahmin varna which specialized in priests and teachers), and Robert E. Howard’s characterization of her as the “Holy Cow of India” portrays the common misconception of Hinduism’s complex relationship with cattle. Cattle feature prominently in Vedic literature, and an overall trend in Hindu religion promoted by the Brahmins since that period was for the cow to be held in higher esteem for its production of ritual offerings particularly ghee (clarified butter), and symbolic of various goddess-figures, and subject of various religious festivals, celebrations, and ceremonies. In some sects, penalties became associated with killing a cow or eating beef, and the doctrine of ahmisa (non-injury of living creatures) became a communal point for Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism. (Brown)
The name “Delhi” likely comes from the famous Indian city; Lindsey Tyson’s pronunciation suggests either he or Robert E. Howard had never heard the city’s name spoken aloud. The nickname “Begum” comes from Turkish, the wife of the beg (or bey, baig, beig, begh, etc.), usually translated as “lord” or “chieftain”; “Lady,” in the sense of a title, would probably be a fair approximation of how Howard ment it. The term was used thus for several characters in Harold Lamb’s stories of the Middle East and Asia, which Howard read and borrowed terminology from, and it may be so again here.
Lovecraft, as a cat-lover, was more enthusiastic about the Howard felines than bovines, but wrote to his Texas friend about his cattle:

Conan and Jirel: Robert E. Howard and C. L. Moore Part Three by Bobby Derie

WT March 1936

Kuttner had just broken into Weird Tales in the March 1936 issue with “The Graveyard Rats,” but Lovecraft quickly adopted him as a new pen-pal, and set him to circulating some views of Marblehead, Mass. (the inspiration for Kingsport):

Keep these views—when they come—as long as you like; & when you’ve finished with them you may forward them to Miss C. L. Moore, 2547 Brookside Parkway, South Drive, Indianapolis, Indiana—the gifted creator of “Shambleau” having expressed a wish to see these glimpses of crumbling “Arkham” & “Kingsport”.—H. P. Lovecraft to Henry Kuttner, 18 May 1936, LCM 240 (cf. 243, 140)

It isn’t clear whether Kuttner had written to Moore before this, but when he did finally send her a letter in 1936, she recalled with amusement that he addressed it “Dear Mr. Moore.” (Ross 326, Roark 28) Another correspondent also praised Moore in the “Eyrie”:

T. Torbett, of Marlin, Texas, writes: "I've just read with appreciation the February issue of WT. As far as I am concerned, a story each month by C. L. Moore and Robert E. Howard would constitute a complete issue. Howard's Hour of the Dragon is superb and so was Moore's Yvala. Moore's The Dark Land in the January number I also found to be of excellent literary quality and I liked the author's accompanying illustration also. (WT Apr 1936)

Frank Thurston Torbett was a friend of Robert E. Howard, who several times took his mother to Marlin for treatment at the Torbett Sanitarium, including the end of February-March 1936. (CL 3.425, 426) Thurston Torbett had previously written in support of Howard’s fiction in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror Jan 1933), and now was writing in support of both Howard and Moore. In her letters to Lovecraft, Moore mentions that she was in correspondence with Torbett (LCM 130, 199, 200), but not how this came about. Given that Howard was previously in contact with Moore, it would have been simple for the Texas pulpster to supply her address; alternately Torbett may have written to Moore via Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales. In any event, their letters seem to have revolved around Torbett’s love of weird fiction and the occult:

A correspondent of mine, Thurton Torbett of Texas, friend of REH’s, has been regaling me with passages from books on the occult which state that all the dreadful things we imagine must have had origin in fact or we would be unable to picture them.—C. L. Moore to H. P. Lovecraft, 11 Dec 1936, LCM 199

Back in Indianapolis after her brief Florida sojourn, Moore did something a little unusual:

Today I sent off a gory horror-tale to Kline for marketing, the first and only story I've had time to write since I got home.—C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 19 May 1936

Otis Adelbert Kline was a pulp writer and editor turned literary agent; he was, in fact, the literary agent for Robert E. Howard, and also did some work for E. Hoffmann Price, Frank Belknap Long, and others. Previous to this, Moore had shown no signs of employing an agent: she submitted all the stories herself, handling acceptances and rejections along with writing and her day job. Maybe she wanted to try Kline out, or expand into the shudder-pulp market as Robert E. Howard was doing with stories like “Graveyard Rats” (Thrilling Mystery Feb 1936). According to Moore:

Conan and Jirel: Robert E. Howard and C. L. Moore Part Two by Bobby Derie

Dec. '34 WT

Jirel’s first adventure was quickly followed up by a second; “Black God’s Shadow” appeared in the Dec 1934 Weird Tales. The cover, and vote for most popular story of the issue, however both went to Robert E. Howard for the Conan story “A Witch Shall Be Born.” Lovecraft considered it a “good second.” (LRS 41, ES 2.671, cf. LFB 248) Clark Ashton Smith, too, was tiring of her a little. (CAS 262) Praise for Moore, and comparisons with Howard and his creations, continued in the “Eyrie”:

Now about this latest bombshell to burst so suddenly and astoundingly in our horror-seeking midst: C. L. Moore. More power to you! You have introduced a refreshing, vitally alive, human character whose actions are presented to us in a very capable, wholly artistic way. With Smith, Williamson, Howard and Merritt, you now hold a much-deserved place of honor at the ladder's top rung.—Louis C. Smith, WT Dec 1934

Of all the different characters I have read in numerous magazines, there are none that appeal to me as do Northwest Smith and Conan.—Bert Felsburg, WT Dec 1934

Conan vile, C. L. Moore splendid.—Robert Bloch, WT Dec 1934

'Tis with unholy glee that I read your announcement about the new serial; to wit, The People of the Black Circle, by Robert E. Howard. I always thought that the Conan stories were all too short, so you can imagine what a treat in store that is. Perhaps, some day, my other bosom pal, Northwest Smith, will appear in a book-length novel too.
—D. de Woronin, WT Dec 1934

I (and I'm sure many others) want to hear a great deal more of Jirel. She's the kind of person I'd like to be myself. A sort of feminine version of Conan the Cimmerian. He, too, is one of my favorites.
—Mary A. Conklin, WT Dec 1934

The character of Jirel may become as famous to us as Conan. I vote her first place.—Claude H. Cameron, WT Jan 1935

The praise was not unanimous however; one reader in particular wrote in:

The Black God's Kiss was by far the poorest C. L. Moore story yet. The first three of C. L. Moore's tales were excellent, but the last two were rather pediculous.—Fred Anger, WT Dec 1934

William Frederick Anger was one of the correspondents of H. P. Lovecraft, who felt the need to reply in private:

Conan and Jirel: Robert E. Howard and C. L. Moore Part One by Bobby Derie

The peak was reached in 1933, when he handed me something by one C. L. Moore. 

“Read this!” he commanded, the moment I stepped into the new editorial rooms at 840 North Michigan Avenue, in Chicago. 

I obeyed. The story commanded my attention. There was no escape. I forgot that I needed food and drink—I’d driven a long way. [...] The stranger’s narrative prevailed until, finally, I drew a deep breath, exhaled, flipped the last sheet to the back of the pack, and looked again at the by-line. Never heard of it before. 

“For Christ’s sweet sake, who and what is this C. L. Moore?” 

He wagged his head, gave me an I-told-you-so-grimace. 

We declared C. L. Moore day. I’d met Northwest Smith, and Shambleau. (BOD 16, cf.261)

C.L. Moore

Catherine Lucille Moore (1911-1987) was an employee at the Fletcher Trust Company in her native Indianapolis, Indiana, and engaged to be married. Shortly after entering first grade, illness forced her to return home, and she did not re-enter school until the fifth grade. (Shroyer 162) Taught at home, Moore absorbed the Oz books of L. Frank Baum, Alice in Wonderland, and the Mars and Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. (Ross 326, Elliot 46, Roark 27) As she later put it:

I was reared on a diet of Greek mythology, Oz books and Edgar Rice Burroughs, so you can see I never had a chance. (EV2 36)

Along with reading, the young woman also began to write:

What happened was that I had a cousin with whom I was very close, and we used to make up romantic tales of mythical kingdoms. We would take long, long walks in the neighborhood under the trees—it was a lovely time in the world to be alive—and we each worked out our own fantasy kingdom with dashing young heroes and lots of swashbuckling adventure. Then we began separately to write it out. It was not anything that either of us considered offering for publication; it never occurred to us. (Ross 326) 

Ever since we were about nine a friend and I have been evolving a romantic island kingdom and populating it with a race which, inevitably, is a remnant of Atlanteans. We've a very detailed theology and mythology, maps all water-colored and scroll-bordered and everything, a ruling house whose geneology and family tree and so forth has been worked out in tables and charts from the year minus—oh, just about everything that two imaginative girls could think of over the space of fifteen years. [...] We have songs and long sagas of heroes, and a literature full of tradition and legends, and we even made and colored a series of paper dolls to illustrate the different types and their costumes, and then there were wars and plans of battle, and we have the maps of all our favorite cities, and we've written a good deal of history. And that history is what I take seriously. 

We centered on a favorite period, around 1200-1250, and the history gradually became the biography of the outstanding man of that generation, and for the past ten years at least I have been writing, off and on, about this rather picaresque hero and his adventures. [...] And of course a lot of it is romantically school-girlish, and a lot full of undergraduate tragic, because it's grown up with me and has a long way to grow up yet. [...] The hero's name was Dalmar j'Penyra, and he had red hair and black eyes and was a pirate and a duke and a mighty lover and quite invincibile in anything he chose to undertake. How we used to thrill over his escapades. he died in 1256, at the age of 35 (that seemed to us the absolute ultimate at which a man might remain even remotely interesting) and almost wept whenever we thought about it.
—C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 10 Sep-9 Oct 1934 (cf. LCM 89-94)

After high school, Moore entered Indiana University, “with art school and business college filling in summer vacations,” but was forced by the Great Depression to quit school after three semesters and find work. (Roark 26, EV2 36) It was then in 1931 that she found her first pulp magazine, Amazing Stories “whose cover portrayed six-armed men battling to the death”—the September issue—at a newsstand across from where she worked. (Elliot 45, cf. EV2 37)

From that moment on, I was a convert. A whole new field of literature opened up before my eyes. (EV2 37)

C. L. Moore began reading pulps on the sly:

Conan and the Little People: Robert E. Howard and Lovecraft’s Theory by Bobby Derie

This theory is not generally agreed to, but I scarcely think that it has ever been disproved, and it was upon this that my story “The Lost Race” was based — that the Gaelic tribes preceded the Cymric peoples into Britain, by way of Ireland, and were later driven out by them. […] The blond Britons appear to me to be a closer branch of the ancient Aryan stock, the Gaels arriving later, and being mixed with some Turanian or Mediterranean blood. But every man is entitled to his own view and a writer has the right to use any and all theories, no matter how conflicting, in his stories. I may write a story one day upholding a certain theory of science, letters, anthropology or what-not, and the next day, a story upholding a theory directly opposite. A fiction writer, whose job is to amuse and entertain, should give all theories equal scope and justice. But I’m taking up too much of your time. —Robert E. Howard to Farnsworth Wright, Jun 1930, CL 2.43

In the prelude to his correspondence with Lovecraft, as discussed in Howard, Lovecraft, & “The Sin-Eater,” Robert E. Howard had written to Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, to praise and question H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Rats in the Walls.” Wright forwarded the letter to Lovecraft, who in turn wrote to Howard. In the first extant letter from Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, the discussion of “The Rats in the Walls” has led to the question of the ancient population of the British Isles:

This departure from the original Celtic stock might have taken place in Ireland after the invasion, despite legends to the contrary—might have merely been a result of the conquerors mingling with their Mediterranean subjects.—Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, 1 Jul 1930 (MF 1.22) 

Arthur Machen

Though Howard did not know it, the segue led into a line of thought which Lovecraft had been developing on his own for some time. In early 1923, Lovecraft became aware of the work of Arthur Machen, when Frank Belknap Long lent him The House of Souls (1906). The book contained “The White People,” “The Three Impostors” (including “The Novel of the Black Seal”) and “The Red Hand,” and Lovecraft immediately became a Machen fan. (DS 49, SL 1.228) “The Novel of the Black Seal” and “The Red Right Hand” both concern the survival of a strange, prehistoric, subterranean race; essentially connecting the idea of the fairies or “Little People” of the British Isles with euhemerism, the idea that myth has some basis in fact:

They would be seen by a peasant in the fields walking towards some green and rounded hillock, and seen no more on earth; and there are stories of mothers who have left a child quietly sleeping, with the cottage door rudely barred with a piece of wood, and have returned, not to find the plump and rosy little Saxon, but a thin and wizened creature, with sallow skin and black, piercing eyes, the child of another race. Then, again, there were myths darker still; the dread of witch and wizard, the lurid evil of the Sabbath, and the hint of demons who mingled with the daughters of men. And just as we have turned the terrible 'fair folk' into a company of benignant, if freakish elves, so we have hidden from us the black foulness of the witch and her companions under a popular diablerie of old women and broomsticks, and a comic cat with tail on end. [...] Supposing these traditions to be true, who were the demons who are reported to have attended the Sabbaths? I need not say that I laid aside what I may call the supernatural hypothesis of the Middle Ages, and came to the conclusion that fairies and devils were of one and the same race and origin; invention, no doubt, and the Gothic fancy of old days, had done much in the way of exaggeration and distortion; yet I firmly believe that beneath all this imagery there was a black background of truth. —Arthur Machen, “The Novel of the Black Seal” (1895)

Machen also wrote another tale dealing with the idea, “The Shining Pyramid,” but Lovecraft would not read that until 1925. (LNY 135) The Welsh reporter would also write an essay “The Little People” which appeared in Dreads and Drolls (1926), but it is not known if or when Lovecraft ever read that. In either case, Machen was deliberately pursuing a line of contemporary anthropological thought, seeking a grain of historical truth in tales of the elves, fairies, or “Little People” by conflating them with a “Mongoloid” or “Turanian” dwarf race that existed in Europe before the coming of Caucasians. (Silver 141, 146). After discovering Machen, Lovecraft would read Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921):

The most revealing and stupefying book among those I have been reading is “The Witch Cult in Western Europe” by Margaret Alice Murray, which was published in 1921 and reviewed with great attention by Burton Rascoe in the Tribune. In this book the problem of witchcraft superstition is attacked from an entirely new angle—wherein the explanation of delusion and hysteria is discarded in favour of an hypothesis almost exactly like the one used by Arthur Machen in fiction [marginal note: The Three Impostors]—i.e., that there has existed since prehistoric times, side by side with the dominant religion, a dark, secret, and terrible system of worship nocturnally practiced by the peasants and including the most horrible rites and incantations. This worship, Miss Murray believes, is handed down from the squat Mongoloid peoples who inhabited Europe before the coming of the Aryans; and reflects the life and thought of a barbarous culture in which stock-breeding had not yet been supplanted by agriculture. THis latter feature is clear from the dates of the two great nocturnal feasts and orgies...Roodmas, or April 30, and Hallowe’en, or October 31—dates having a connexion with nothing whatever in agriculture (unlike such agricultural festivals as Easter, Harvest-home, etc.), but corresponding with uncanny fidelity to the breeding-seasons of the flocks and herds. Buttressed by an amazing array of sound documentary evidence taken from witchcraft trial reports, Miss Murray unhesitatingly asserts that the similarities and consistencies in the testimony of witch-suspects cannot be explained on any assumption save one which allow for a certain amount of actuality. In her mind, practically all the confessions treat not of dreams and delusions, but form highly coloured versions of real meetings and ceremonies conducted in deep woods and lonely places betwixt midnight and dawn, attended by secretly initiated peasants stolen thither one by one, and presided over by local cult-leaders clad in animal skins and called the “Devils” of their particular branches or “Covens”. The hideous nature of the cult-rites is amply attested—and the whole subject takes on a new fascination when one reflects that the system probably survived to comparatively recent times.—H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 30 Mar 1924, LNY 53-54

Murray’s hypothesis opens fairly directly:

The connexion of the witches and fairies opens up a very wide field; at present it is little more than speculation that the two are identical, but there is promise that the theory may be proved at some later date when the subject is more fully worked out. It is now a commonplace of anthropology that the tales of fairies and elves preserve the tradition of a dwarf race which once inhabited Northern and Western Europe. Successive invasions drove them to the less fertile parts of each country which they inhabited, some betook themselves to the inhospitable north or the equally inhospitable mountains; some, however, remained in the open heaths and moors, living as mound-dwellers, venturing out chiefly at night and coming in contact with the ruling races only on rare occasions. As the conqueror always regards the religion of the conquered as superior to his own in the arts of evil magic, the dwarf race obtained the reputation of wizards and magicians, and their god wa identified by the conquerors with the Principle of Evil. The identification of the witches with the dwarf or fairy race would give us a clear insight into much of the civilization of the early European peoples, especially as regards their religious ideas. (Murray 14) 

This was expanded upon in “Appendix I: Fairies and Witches”:

The dwarf race which at one time inhabited Europe has left few concrete remains, but it has survived in innumerable stories of fairies and elves. Nothing, however, is known of the religious beliefs and cults of these early people, except the fact that every seven years they made a human sacrifice to their god—‘And aye at every seven years they pay the teind to hell’—and that like the Khonds they stole children from the neighbouring races and brought them up to be the victims. That there was a strong connexion between witches and fairies had been known to all students of fairy lore. I suggest that the cult of the fairy or primitive race survived until less than three hundred years ago, and that the people who practised it were known a witches. I have already pointed out that many of the witch-belief and practices coincide with those of an existing dwarf race, viz. the Lapps. (Murray 238)

Thomas Henry Huxley

That Machen and Murray dovetail is not surprising, given that they both were following a definite trend in anthropology. Murray’s emphasis on Lapps (the Sami people) jived with scientific racialism of the day that followed Thomas Henry Huxley’s delineation of the human species into three broad racial categories: Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid—the latter of which encompassed all Asian peoples, Native Americans, and some Europeans, as Lovecraft would later make a point of Robert E. Howard:

He asked me what the native races of Europe were, and I told him Caucasian and Mongolian. That last didn't suit him, and he began to tell me that Asia was the only home of the Mongol. Then I reminded him of the Lapps, and of the original stock, at least, of the Finns, Magyars, and Turks.—H. P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, 25 Mar 1933 (MF 2.582-583) 

Lovecraft was so taken by the combination of Machen and Murray that he began to work it into his stories: