R'lyeh
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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...
—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 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 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), 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] Footnotes
- ^ On the non-canonical CD A Shoggoth on the Roof, R'lyeh is pronounced /ˈɹu.li.a/ or /ɹɪl.ˈai.ɛ/.
- ^ Lovecraft, H. P.. ""The Call of Cthulhu"". http://www.mythostomes.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=30&Itemid=75.
- ^ 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.)
- ^ Pearsall, "R'lyeh", The Lovecraft Lexicon, p. 345.
- ^ Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu", The Dunwich Horror and Others, p. 150.
- ^ Derleth, "The Black Island", Quest for Cthulhu the great, p. 426.
- ^ A Colder War - a novelette by Charles Stross
[edit] See also
[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.
