R'lyeh

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R'lyeh is in the middle of one of the biggest patches of empty ocean on Earth.

R'lyeh[1] is a fictional city that first appeared in the story, "The Call of Cthulhu,"[2] by H. P. Lovecraft. R'lyeh is also referred to in Lovecraft's "The Mound" as Relex. R'lyeh is a sunken city located deep under the Pacific Ocean and is where the godlike being Cthulhu is buried.

R'lyeh's bizarre architecture is characterized by its non-Euclidean geometry.[3]

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[edit] Description

[T]he nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh ... was built in measureless eons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults . . . until the end.
—H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

When R'lyeh rises in Lovecraft's short story "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928), the only portion of the city that emerges is a single "hideous monolith-crowned citadel" in which Cthulhu is entombed. The human onlookers are awed by the sheer immensity of the city and by the frightening suggestiveness of the gargantuan statues and bas-reliefs.

The city is a panorama of "vast angles and stone surfaces ... too great to belong to anything right and proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and disturbing hieroglyphs." The geometry of R’lyeh is "abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours."

In Lovecraft's stories, R'lyeh is sometimes referred to in the ritualistic phrase "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn", which roughly translates to "In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming".[4]

[edit] Location

Lovecraft said that R'lyeh is located at 47°9′S 126°43′W / 47.15°S 126.717°W / -47.15; -126.717 (R'lyeh fictional location (Lovecraft)) in the southern Pacific Ocean.[5] August Derleth later placed R'lyeh at 49°51′S 128°34′W / 49.85°S 128.567°W / -49.85; -128.567 (R'lyeh fictional location (Derleth)) in his own writings.[6] Both locations are close to the Pacific pole of inaccessibility (48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W / 48.8767°S 123.3933°W / -48.8767; -123.3933 (Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility)), the point in the ocean farthest from any land. Derleth's coordinates place the city approximately 5100 nautical miles (5900 statute miles or 9500 kilometers), or about ten days journey for a fast ship, from the real island of Pohnpei (Ponape). Ponape also plays a part in the Cthulhu Mythos as the place where the "Ponape Scripture", a text describing Cthulhu, was found.

Charles Stross's novella A Colder War implicitly locates R'lyeh in the Baltic sea, describing Cthulhu as being "scraped from a nest in the drowned wreckage of a city on the Baltic floor".[7] In Nick Mamatas' novel Move Under Ground, it is located off the coast of California.

According to Donald Tyson's book Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred, the island and/or city of R'lyeh, sank beneath the water in the Ocean south of Cathay. Cathay, refers to the ancient name of what in the modern age is referred to as China. According to this reference, R'lyeh would be more likely located in the South China Sea, or possibly the Pacific Ocean, within Earth's eastern hemisphere.

[edit] Other appearances

  • Robert E. Howard's Worms of the Earth mentions the "black gods of R'lyeh". Lovecraft was a friend and correspondent of Howard and their works are littered with references to each other's creations.
  • The Cradle of Filth song "English Fire" from their Nymphetamine album refers to R'lyeh as one of four prophetic cities of olden times. Also in "Mother of Abominations" the intro begins with Doug Bradley's chants of "Ia! Ia! Kutulhu Fhtagn!"
  • In Roger Zelazny's short story, "24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai", the main character has a dream in which she encounters a temple inhabited by priests of "Old Gods", whose intent is to raise the city of R'lyeh from the depths. She also finds a cat, which she names R'lyeh.
  • Progressive metal band Adagio has a song called "R'Lyeh the Dead" on their 2006 album Dominate.
  • Technical Death Metal Band Nile, has a song on the album Ithyphallic called "what may be safely written" which opens with the lyrics: "Great Cthulhu, Ever the Warrior God Of All the Old ones he is the Most Terrible..."
  • In Age Of Empires 3: The Warchiefs, the saloon structure that can be built turns from a saloon into a place called R'lyeh Roadhouse upon declaring revolution in your colony's name.
  • Doom metal band Catacombs has an album entitled "In the Depths of R'lyeh".
  • In Hohlbein's Der Sohn des Hexers(The Sorcerer's Son) R'lyeh, including a black pyramid that contains Cthulu's tomb, was located near an English coastline at 'the end of time', in a separated timeline only reachable with a time machine.
  • Uncanny X-Men #148-150 features Magneto living on what appears to be the island of R'lyeh (sunken city raised from the bottom of the sea, Cthulhoid engravings everywhere, odd time-space anomalies, the characters' conjectures that it was built by some non-human race, and a general sense of unease on the part of the characters) though it is never formally named as such.
  • In the comic book series Return to Wonderland, Wonderland, R'lyeh, and Limbo are one and the same. They are "where all the madness comes from". Also, in Part 6, a "sleeping entity" (who bears a resemblance to Cthulhu) is seen, taking a sacrifice to "keep [the] madness from infecting [the] world".
  • The Bloop was detected in an area near the fictional location of R'lyeh.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ On the non-canonical CD A Shoggoth on the Roof, R'lyeh is pronounced /ˈɹu.li.a/ or /ɹɪl.ˈai.ɛ/.
  2. ^ Lovecraft, H. P.. ""The Call of Cthulhu"". http://www.mythostomes.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=30&Itemid=75. 
  3. ^ Lovecraft's "pseudo-geometry" supposes that certain shapes can extend into other dimensions; thus, appearing "non-Euclidean" from a human perspective. According to Robert Weinberg, this is impossible. Since the three-dimensional world is a closed system, no structure could be built so as to overlap into another dimension. (Robert Weinberg, "H. P. Lovecraft and Pseudomathematics", Discovering H. P. Lovecraft, pp. 88–91.)
  4. ^ Pearsall, "R'lyeh", The Lovecraft Lexicon, p. 345.
  5. ^ Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu", The Dunwich Horror and Others, p. 150.
  6. ^ Derleth, "The Black Island", Quest for Cthulhu the great, p. 426.
  7. ^ A Colder War - a novelette by Charles Stross
  8. ^ http://www.the-vision-bleak.de/index2.html

[edit] References

  • Derleth, August (2000) [1952]. "The Black Island". Quest for Cthulhu. New York, NY: Carroll & Graf. ISBN 0-7867-0752-6. 
  • Harms, Daniel (1998). "R'lyeh". The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana (2nd ed. ed.). Oakland, CA: Chaosium. pp. 255. ISBN 1-56882-119-0. 
  • Lovecraft, Howard P. (1984) [1928]. "The Call of Cthulhu". in S. T. Joshi (ed.). The Dunwich Horror and Others (9th corrected printing ed.). Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN 0-87054-037-8.  Definitive version.
  • Pearsall, Anthony B. (2005). The Lovecraft Lexicon (1st ed. ed.). Tempe, AZ: New Falcon. ISBN 1-56184-129-3. 
  • Schweitzer, Darrell (ed.) (2001). Discovering H. P. Lovecraft. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press. ISBN 1587154706. 

Coordinates: 47°9′S 126°43′W / 47.15°S 126.717°W / -47.15; -126.717 (R'lyeh fictional location (Lovecraft))

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