Remaking Lord of the Rings out of Only Public Domain Sources: Part 3

Ilya Repin

Part 1, Part 2

Home stretch, let’s go.

The Balrog

How did I skip the Balrog? Absolutely shameful.

Anyway:  dig too deep and you’ll find a guardian of the underworld, so I’ll roll with Ox-Head and or Horse-Face from Chinese folk religion because honestly if there’s a giant horse-headed monster wrecking your day who looks like this, yeah I’m going freak the fuck out a bit.

• Q: Who was fucking around with the underworld enough to bring these guys to earth?
• Q: Is anything going screwy in the underworld now that they’re busy here?

Shelob

A jorōgumo, which both gives me a giant monster spider and allows me to take a shot at Shadow of Mordor’s drearily uncreative sexy lady Shelob (since jorōgumos have the shapeshifting into a lady feature built in.)

Pseudo-Shelob will in turn be the rebellious bad-apple daughter of Spider Grandmother, who will be replacing Ungoliant; this marks a total inversion from the source text, since Spider Grandmother is a positive figure in the lore of indigenous peoples across the southwest and beyond. More on that in a bit.

Wormtongue

Well he’s gotta be some kind of evil vizier, a trope which has existed as long as there have been viziers. Or court eunuchs, for that matter. But the trope is also like one of the standard-issue Orientalist tropes so if he’s going to be attached to Themiskyra or Iram of the Pillars or what have you he should be sourced  from a story on the right side of the Bosphorus.

I’m going with one of the OGs, Haman from the Book of Esther. Who, now that I think about it for more than 10 seconds, is actually a perfect fit for multiple reasons:

• Book of Esther is set during the height of the Achaemenid Empire, and if we presume that Ahasuerus is supposed to be Xerxes I (as most people do) much of the central government has moved out of Babylon but the city and territory is well within the empire (easy connection to the Tower of Babel)
• Makes total sense for not-Persia to send a diplomatic envoy to the Amazons, being both neighbors and culturally-close (easy reason why he’s in Themiskrya).
• If Queen Hippolyta has been kidnapped by Theseus and her sisters are acting as regents, that’s a perfect opportunity for a scheming vizier to scheme a major power play.
• Rather than following the Book of Esther’s plot directly, I can just extrapolate it into “Haman is more than willing to inflame existing ethnic and religious tensions for his own benefit” (good justification for his antagonism)
• If Bradamante is going to ride Rakhsh, that means Rostam is dead (potentially fairly recently)...

…which means that fantasy!Persia (where Haman would be from) is also likely in a state of political disorder (not aided by Alexander the Great running his operation out of the Tower)...

…because if Rostam is dead it means that Siyâvash (son of the shah Kay Kāvus, who has an eagle-powered flying throne he used to fly to China) is also dead… 

…and if Siyâvash is dead then it means his wife Farangis has fled the country with their son Kay Khosrow…

…which means that we have either an elderly ruler with no heir apparent or a recently dead ruler with a very young heir and that is a textbook scenario for a regency.

Which is a long way of saying that Gondor is fantasy Persia.

• Q: How does a weakened Themiskrya benefit Haman? What’s his end goal?
• Q: Who supports him back in the Empire? Who supports him here?
• Q: What stops people from just killing him?
• Q: What existing tensions is he going to take advantage of?

• Addition: Mission to rescue Hippolyta
• Addition: Theseus and his incredibly underwhelming and stupid death (some jobber named Lycomedes throws him off a cliff)

Denethor

Surprisingly a lot more difficult than Haman for Wormtongue; I can’t find a regent in the Shahnameh (in my defense, there are a lot of characters in the Shahnameh and I’m flying by the seat of my pants), Googling “regents in folklore and mythology” got me nothing but pages about revenants and ents, and the relevant TVtropes pages are in similarly dire condition.

From Arthuriana there’s King Lot, who I could syncretize with Biblical Lot, and I could even have Farangis fill the role if I need to, but this might be the first case of the knock-on effects from the changes rendering it unnecessary to port over a Tolkien character.

If we already have an old king, a missing heir, and a scheming vizier, what point does pseudo-Denethor have? He wouldn’t be Sigurd’s father, so that’s out, and pseudo-Faramir is going to be the same deal. 

So yeah, I think this is going to be a solid Not Applicable.

Faramir

He lives in the woods with a bunch of outlaws, wears green and has a bow: he’s Robin Hood. Non-zero chance Tolkien intended the connection anyway. 

With Denethor out of the picture and Boromir-Sigurd having no narrative room for siblings, what remains is the guerilla war against Alexander’s forces minus the direct connection to Persia-Gondor. I could maintain his relationship with Bradamante and make him Ruggiero and call it a day, but that feels a bit too pat.

Going further afield for a more radical change, I’ve entertained the thought that Faramir could serve as a representative / leader of some sort of alliance among indigenous peoples of Middle Earth in their fight against Alexander. Tolkien frustratingly doesn’t entirely overlook this front of the war, but reduces the Druedain to isolationists who aid the Rohirrim in one key operation but are otherwise wholly absent from the narrative.  

The premise of the project being what it is, most sources will get me boilerplate noble savage at best. It’s possible to write those characters with more nuance, but even then there won’t be a lot of grist for the mill.

But…  roll with me for a moment.

So I said a couple entries ago that Spider Grandmother / Spider Woman is taking the role of nega-Ungoliant. 

If Gondor = Persia, the climate where pseudo-Faramir would be operating would be a lot drier and hotter than Sherwood Forest: Grandmother Spider is associated primarily with the peoples of the American southwest, a region that is also a lot drier and hotter than Sherwood Forest.

In Navajo narratives, she goes by Na'ashjé'ii Asdzáá (Spider-Woman) and she directly aids the hero twins Naayééʼ Neizghání (Monster-Slayer) and Tóbájízhchíní  (Born-for -Water) in their fights against all sorts of giants and monsters.

Witch-King Alexander the Above-Average doubtlessly has a lot of giants and monsters on his payroll (metaphorical; they don’t get paid); if pseudo-Faramir is an outlaw leading a guerilla war against two much larger imperial powers all while killing the nastiest monsters around, not a big leap for people to call him Monster-Slayer. Especially if he has some sort of boon from Spider Woman. The line between mortal man and legendary hero can get mighty blurred, after a while.

• Q: Is there going to be an equivalent to Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham?
• Q: What are the odds he lives in Humbaba’s Woods?
• Q: Wait hold up is Humbaba also one of these giants?

• Addition: Anaye / Nayéé’ (aforementioned monstrous giants)
• Addition: The Merry Men
• Addition: Gifts from Spider Woman
• Addition: Another outlaw leader filling the role of Born-for-Water?

Gandalf

Gandalf I am still sorta figuring out because I’ve got two options that could work both combined into a single character or as two separate but related characters, and I still haven’t decided which I like more. So here’s both.

Option A: Glinda the Good Witch
Meddlesome in favor of heroes, delivers quests, and - for a touch of meta appropriateness via Sir Ian McKellan - outrageously gay. The lady canonically lives in a palace with the 100 most beautiful women in Oz. 

Claims that she was based on Matilda Joslyn Gage don’t seem to have any substantial foundation, but Matilda Joslyn Gage was certainly about as close to “meddling witch on the side of good” as you can get in real life.

Source B: The Angel of Eden
The one with the fiery sword and all that. They don’t have a consistent name in any of the apocrypha; you’ll find some people saying Uriel, though I can’t find any textual source to back that up. I’d probably sub in a Sumerian name for the vibes (probably Uanna / Oannes).

Anyway: I’m fond of the idea that this particular angel has grown attached to humanity via proximity and acts as a sort of Prometheus figure in the Fall. Strong shades of Aziraphale there, but by a different route.

• Q: What other forms have they taken?
• Q: What’s their relationship with other angels?
• Q: What’s their relationship with the other wizards?
• Q: What’s their bigger game plan wrt the Seal & Nyarlathotep?
• Q: Can I resist K6BD vibes? (No, I cannot)

• Addition: Gigantic fiery sword

The Peoples of Middle-Earth

All right, got a lot to work through here.

Orcs are tharks, did them in Part 1. 

Uruk-hai are going to be soldiers grown from dragon’s teeth, which happens a few times in Greek myth via Jason and Cadmus. (Friend of the blog Dandibuja, who has been an immense help with this project, suggested that this could be tied into Archimago hunting dragons as a way to get into the good graces of society: I think that’s a killer idea.)

Goblins is goblins, but in the folkloric sense of just being every weird little magical guy possible. You can just call anything weird a goblin, them’s the rules. Between the Denham Tracts and the Gazu Hyakki Yagy, I’m spoiled for choice.

Ents and trolls are going to be played by a wide variety of ogres and giants. Plenty of ogres and giants from all over the world, people love asking “what if there were big people”. 

Dwarves are neanderthals, no muss no fuss. There’s overlap there with REH’s Picts but I’m going to lean heavier on reality than Hyboria for that one.

Humans (or to crib Dungeon Meshi parlance, tallmen) are are going to broadly reflect the major populations in prehistoric Europe and the Mediterranean (adjusted with a bit of anachronism for artistic flair) - Tolkien prepped the layup for me on this one because he was aware that there was a migration into Europe that displaced or absorbed the peoples already living there and kinda-sorta modeled it into the relationship between Rohan and the Woses / Druedain and between the Edain and the Easterlings. 

Since it’s very easy to get both far too into the weeds on this (archaeogenetics is extremely complex!) and also fairly easy to run into some issues (go too deep and you straight up just start sounding like Measurehead even if you’re being careful), I’m just going to strip the moral judgements and flesh out Tolkien’s general shape of things with modestly more historically appropriate material.

• Druedain = Western Hunter Gatherers
• Edain = Early European Farmers + Western Steppe Herders.
• Those dang Indo-Europeans with their horses and wheeled carts, I tell ya.
• Easterlings / Rhûnedain - Other Indo-European speaking peoples (Anatolians and Indo-Iranians)
• Numenoreans = Atlanteans, which in this case means that the mi-go have been fucking around in their genome for Mi-Go Reasons™.
• Honestly this excuse lets them pull triple duty as both Valyria and Melnibone if I want to go that route. 
• Additions: Non-IE speaking groups

(If I was ever to actually do a project using Nostratic this would be the place to do it, but like many crank theories requires too much elbow grease to be feasible. Existing conlangs would be easier.)

Elves, continuing on the threads set out by my picks for Elrond and Galadriel, are going to be WHGs who got magic through contact with the Otherworld (Annwn, Tír na nÓg, etc). This sets them up nicely as a thematic counter to the Seal by giving their magic a source in reciprocal relationships with the spirits of the world and the world beyond. It also gives them more of a material reason to be isolated from the rest of humanity than just being ethereal and sad (i.e. they, as effectively the Tuatha Dé Danann, lost the war)

Hobbits are tricksy; there’s no shortage of little folk in folklore and early fantasy to choose from - “what if there were small people” is about as universal as “what if there were big people” - but the hobbits’ size is mostly thematic, a way to reflect them as distinct from capital-M Men visually as well as culturally, and to reinforce the idea that evil isn’t defeated with power. They’re not particularly magical and they’re protagonists rather than figures the protagonist encounters, which puts them at odds with the rest of the literature. Doubly so when we consider that hobbits are first and foremost idealized English villagers.

Those themes don’t require little people to function, and during brainstorming I found the little people options tended to cut off the stronger picks for the main quartet. So I going to go for a fairly radical move and split hobbits as a people from the main quartet of Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin.

For hobbits the people, I’m going to take a major swerve and go with Arthur Machen’s little people, asterisk.

Machen’s version is that the folkloric little people of the British Isles (same tradition that Tolkien was pulling from) were based on a population of relict hominids driven to the most remote wilderness and / or underground by the arrival of the Celts. This idea was enormously popular with both Lovecraft and REH, and through them the rest of weird fiction and onward.

It’s also just as gross and racist as you’d expect for the time period. Not satisfied with making his little people rapists and murderers, Machen presents their mere existence as abhorrent instead of one of the most important scientific and anthropological discoveries in history. Oh no they’re short and brown and use stone tools come the fuck on Arthur that’s just homo erectus (note: h. erectus was not discovered until after Machen wrote The Black Seal).

(Learning all this has really made me appreciate what Tolkien did with the Hobbits; the situation was dire wrt little people in fantasy fiction back then.)

(Early science fiction honestly kinda hates any field outside of material science. New alloys and rays and objects are good and cool, everything else is bad.)

I’m getting off track. Hobbits as a people are descendents of homo erectus (close to floriensis, obvs) who live out in the deep wilderness, but are no more horrible than anyone else. Honorable mentions go to the Pygmies of Paracelsus, Lilliputians from Gulliver, Munchkins from Oz, but those I would include as cultural groups.

The Hobbits

The hobbit quartet have a few key prerequisites I need to carry over to their analogues:  they’re young, they have no political / martial / magical power, they have no prior connections to major goings on in the world, and they come from farm country. Frodo is technically landed gentry but that’s simple enough to work around.

Merry and Pippin are easy: Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Search your feelings, you know it to be true. That just leaves Frodo and Sam as the final replacements to make.

(Add a drumroll here if you’d like.)

Frodo and Sam are going to be played by Dorothy Gale and Princess Ozma. They’ve got the intimate friendship across a class divide thing down pat, and Glinda spearheads the quest to find Ozma in a display of good Gandalfian meddling. Being royalty of Oz does violate the “no political power” thing, but that can be worked around in a fair number of ways (Oz being a small backwater kingdom, Oz still being under the rule of the Wizard, Oz not operating according to real world political logic, etc)

(Actually now that I mention it, the Shire is split into four farthings, and Oz is split into four countries along the same lines…)

For purposes of the story, I imagine that the quartet would be older than in their source material and would have had at least the general shape of their adventures happen to them. Kansas probably doesn’t exist, but there’s certainly a place very much like Kansas out there. Probably the farmland upriver from Lud-in-the-Mist, since I decided that’s where Biblo’s from.

• Q: Whose body got exhumed the night Tom and Huck went to the graveyard?
• Q: Were the resurrectionists in question Dr. Frankenstein and Herbert West? (Yes)
• Q: If Jim is included, how do I best handle everything else his inclusion entails? There are a couple novels from the time period I could pull from, but this would basically require a dedicated post. 

• Addition: Assorted early-book Oz side characters (Lion, Scarecrow, Tin-Man, Wogglebug, General Jinjur, Mombi the Witch etc)

 

Final Roundup 

• Frodo & Sam = Dorothy and Ozma (Oz series)
• Merry & Pippin = Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) 
• Gandalf = Glinda the Good Witch / Angel of Eden (Oz series, Book of Genesis)
• Legolas = Zorro (The Curse of Capistrano et al.)
• Gimli = Conan the Barbarian (The Phoenix on the Sword et al.) 
• Boromir = Siegfried (Der Ring des Nibelungen)
• Aragorn = Pwyll (The Mabinogion) 
• Elrond = Arawn (The Mabinogion)
• Arwen = Rhiannon (The Mabinogion)
• Galadriel = The Venus of Willendorf (Real life) 
• Gollum = Caliban (The Tempest) 
• The Balrog = Ox-head and Horse-face (Chinese folk religion)
• Shelob = Jorogumo (Japanese folklore)
• ungoliant = Spider Grandmother (SW Indigenous American folklore) 
• Saruman = Archimago (The Faerie Queene) 
• Theoden = Hippolyta (Greek myth)
• Eowyn =  Bradamante (Orlando Furioso, etc)
• Wormtongue = Haman (Book of Esther) 
• Shadowfax = Rakhsh (The Shahnameh) 
• Treebeard = Humbaba (The Epic of Gilgamesh) 
• Denethor = Not included
• Faramir = Robin Hood + Monster-Slayer (British + Navajo folklore)  
• Tom Bombadil = Elder Thing (At the Mountains of Madness)
• The Council of the Wise = Many assorted magic-users 
• Bilbo Baggins = Nathaniel Chanticleer (Lud-in-the-Mist) 
• Middle Earth = Various composite sources
• Humans = Assorted archaic populations (Real world)
• Elves = Real-world archaic population + magic
• Dwarves = Neanderthals (Real world)
• Hobbits  = H. erectus descendants (Real world + a bit of Machen) 
• Orcs = Tharks / Green Martians (A Princess of Mars + sequels)
• Uruk-hai = dragon's-teeth soldiers (Greek myth)
• Goblins = goblins (Various folklores)
• Ents & Trolls = orges, giants, etc (Various folklores)
• The One Ring = Seal of Solomon (Testament of Solomon, etc.)
• Eru Illuvatar -MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI (The Gods of Pegana)
• The Valar = The Zoa (The prophetic works of William Blake)
• Mordor = The Land of Darkness (The Alexander Romance)
• Barad-dûr = The Tower of Babel (Book of Genesis) 
• The Nazgul = The 12 Paladins of Charlemagne (Orlando Furioso, etc)
• The Witch-King = Alexander the Above-Average (The Alexander Romance)
• Sauron = Nyarlathotep (Cthulhu Mythos, various)
• Mount Doom = Mt. Elbrus (Real world + Zoroastrian mythology)
• Numenor = Atlantis (The Lost Continent, etc)

**

And there we go. Experiment successful beyond my wildest predictions. 

My takeaways at the end are fairly similar to those I had in the beginning: this is the most fun I've had writing in recent memory. I kept surprising myself with how well features clicked into place with each other, without me intending to leave an opening. Rambling forward with no plan and just doing what seemed right in the moment turned into something with a stronger weave than expected, and perhaps stronger than if I had made them up on my own.

While I’m satisfied with this as an endpoint for the experiment (no outline for the story, at least not now), I really want to keep going and I probably will. There’s so much out there to play with, but few people do and more people should. I want to encourage as many folks as I can to do stuff like this. Pardon this box of soap, no idea how it got here…

We live in a world where less than a dozen companies control the overwhelming majority of media you encounter. If they had their way, there’d be even fewer companies and they’d control all of it. They benefit from making people think that stories are objects to be owned, that there’s only one way for them to be, that there is a canon to be clung to with all the dogmatic fervor of an early church father. Making a silly public domain mashup isn’t going to change that, but it’s going to be better for you as an artist and as an audience. It's self-care, a little moment of freedom where you can fly above the powers that want to own the thoughts of every synapse in your head.

You don’t have to go watch a version of the Odyssey subsidized by Morocco’s colonial engine in Western Sahara. You own the Odyssey as much as Christopher Nolan does. What makes his version special, that there’s money in it? You don’t need money to make a good version of the Odyssey. You don’t even need to write it down. 

Give yourself a little freedom today.

Remaking LotR With Only Public Domain Sources: Part 2

Arthur Rackham

Part 1, Part 3

As before, I’m letting things grow organically. No real order besides the order ideas come to me.

Housekeeping

Before I get started, three things.. 

#1: A few of my real-life friends said it’d be helpful to have a list of references, since they’re more familiar with Tolkien than the works I’m pulling for the experiment, so here’s the list for part 1:

• Middle Earth = Various (To be determined)
• The One Ring = Seal of Solomon (Testament of Solomon, etc.)
• Eru Illuvatar -MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI (The Gods of Pegana)
• The Valar = The Zoa (The prophetic works of William Blake)
• Mordor = The Land of Darkness (The Alexander Romance)
• The Nazgul = The 12 Paladins of Charlemagne (Orlando Furioso, etc)
• The Witch-King = Alexander the Above-Average (The Alexander Romance)
• Orcs = Tharks / Green Martians (A Princess of Mars + sequels)
• Sauron = Nyarlathotep (Cthulhu Mythos, various)
• Mount Doom = Mt. Elbrus (Real world + Zoroastrian mythology)
• Numenor = Atlantis (The Lost Continent, etc)

#2 is I learned about Tales Before Tolkien, which is a collection of 21 pre-Tolkien fantasy stories compiled by Douglas Anderson (did the annotated Hobbit, got to see him give a talk once, that was fun). Most if not all of those are PD; I haven’t properly dug through it yet, but I’m going to keep it as a nice backup resource for the future.

#3: Morgan Long pointed out in the comments to the Part 1 that I skipped over Der Ring des Nibelungen, and while my initial response had been “using Alberich’s ring itself is a bit on the nose and I just don’t care for the Cycle as a whole”, thinking about it more has opened up a very good path forward, and since I have no better segue let’s get into that.

Boromir

Siegfried / Sigurd, as portrayed in Der Ring des Nibelungen. My initial resistance fell off on further review, because he’s some of the rawest antagonist potential possible. The guy was raised in isolation as a human-shaped guided missile aimed towards a dragon’s hoard, and is easily read as a sociopath, and his parents were siblings, and he fucked his half-aunt and he’s a stooge of German nationalism. He’s the hero and he’s going to make it everyone else’s problem. Even if we're purely going on the first point and ignoring everything else, a human being raised to adulthood by an abusive parent with 0 other social contact is going to be absolutely fucked in the head. 

What happens when the great golden manchild convinced that he's fated for age-defining greatness is put into a story that doesn't revolve around him? When the mask finally drops and the rest of the characters realize too late who they're working with, oh buddy that's where the drama lives. Chef's kiss.

• Q: How much of Der Ring can I offload to the background?
• Q: What happens after his betrayal of the fellowship? 
• Q: How is his crusade to defeat Alexander going to backfire terribly after he steals the Seal?

• Addition: Mime the dwarf, Fafnir the dragon, a good number of the rest of the cast.
• Addition: The fortress of Valhalla and its king who started this entire mess by trying to get out of paying the contractors he hired to build it.

Treebeard

I had been combing Wikipedia for mythical and magical trees, but then remembered that ents in the books are tree-like but not necessarily trees themselves. So why not go with the OG forest guardian, Humbaba? (There is no reason why not)

• Q: So what else have Gilgamesh and Enkidu been doing? I suppose they didn’t kill Humbaba this time around - what sorts of injuries does he have?
• Q: Is he related in any way to the giants who built Valhalla?

• Addition: Cedars of Lebanon used in construction of Solomon’s Temple, which would provide some connection to the Seal.

Theoden

Hrothgar would be the obvious choice, but Hrothgar loses the horses and without horses it’s hardly Rohan. But! You know who has horses? Amazons. They also had a shit-ton of queens if we go by just the Greek sources, but Hippolyta is the main one and comes with some extremely fruitful potential expansions.

• Q: Is Hippolyta actually on the throne, or has the abduction-by-Theseus plot happened and Antiope or Penthesilea is ruling in her stead?
• Q: Speaking of which: what else has Theseus fucked up beyond all repair?
• Q: Well he did kill the Minotaur which means he now has a connection to Atlantis; how’d that turn out for him? Find any other treasures while looting the ruins?

• Addition: Herakles and/or Theseus, fucking around as usual.
• Addition: The Attic War
• Addition: Queen Calafia / any number of additional Amazonian monarchs
• Addition: Assorted cities / islands of women etc.

Eowyn

There’s no shortage of ladies in armor to choose from, but I think I’m going to go with Bradamante from the Orlando duology. It’s a bit of a double-dip since I’m sourcing the Nazgul from the same texts, but Bradamante has the bona fides to justify it:

• Accomplished knight on her own merit
• Equals-on-the-battlefield enemies-to-lovers plotline with the Andalusian warrior Ruggiero.
• Rescues Ruggiero from the evil wizard Atlantes by using a magic ring to break into his tower.
• Refuses to marry a man who can’t match her in combat (so as to counter her father’s attempt to marry her off to the prince of Byzantium)
• Sister of Rinaldo the paladin (and so would be related to one of the Nazgul in this version)

Pretty stacked resume. Absolute crime that she doesn't show up more often.

• Q: So how’d she end up as the foster daughter of the queen of the Amazons?
• Q: What’s her relationship with Rinaldo like?
• Q: So is Atlantes intentionally invoking a connection with Atlantis in his name? Like calling himself “the Atlantean” or something like that.
• Q: I guess his tower would probably be the equivalent of Isengard, then.

• Addition: Ruggiero, obviously
• Addition: Using the Seal to rescue Ruggiero from the Atlantes’ tower.
• Addition: Probably need a stand-in for Islam, now. Or at least a faction to stand in for Andalusia. Iram of the Pillars would be the obvious choice but I’m not making that call just yet.

Shadowfax

Rakhsh, steed of Rostam in the Shahnameh. If Rohan = Amazons and Amazons = Scythia, that's right next door. Rakhsh also has the “legendary horse who can only be ridden by a legendary hero” thing going on, though he also died alongside Rostam in the story. So either a surviving (and potentially wounded) Rakhsh, or a descendant. Either way, it should be a Big Deal when he chooses a rider.

• Q: Who does Rakhsh permit as his rider? One time deal, or no? 
• Q: It’s probably going to be Bradamante, so what circumstances lead us to that point? Would it be the mission to rescue Ruggiero, or a later battle?

• Addition: Rostam & his seven feats, Zahhak, Div-e Sepid
• Addition: Indo-Scythian peoples (since that territory would overlap with Samangan and that's where Rostam's wife Tahmina is from, boom there’s a Rostam > Amazonia link.)

Fun fact: Rakhsh is Aramaic for “horse”, so he’s the horse named Horse.

Gollum

It’s gotta be Caliban: Classic fucked-up little dude who has connections to at least two powerful magic users and is part of a plot centered around imprisoned spirits. Easy pick.

• Q: How did he get the Seal? Inherited it from Sycorax? How'd she get it?
• Q: What else is on that island?
• Q: How does Prospero get entangled in all this?

• Addition: Ariel and the spirits of the island
• Addition: Sycorax, who is clearly not on good terms with the rest of the wizards 

Tom Bombadil

An Elder Thing with old hippie professor energy. Could probably pull double duty as Dr. Doolittle (an Elder talking to humans is kinda like a human talking to animals, from their point of view) or Professor Challenger (banger name; also, I like the premise of Elders as Victorian gentleman-scientist-explorers)

Since Goldberry doesn’t have much to her beyond “some sort of river spirit”, we’ve got more nymphs, naiads, nixies, undines, rusalkas, and so, so many others to choose from. But Nimue / the Lady of the Lake has the most connective tissue to draw on and I’ve yet to find an alternative of similar caliber (though Jenny Greenteeth has “spooky monster with a fun name” covered.)

• Q: All right, who’s she throwing swords at this time?
• Q: Are we going to keep in the Lancelot connection?
• Q: What do people think about the Elder? What do they think he is?
• Q: Are there any other surviving Elders on the planet?
• Q: What’s his beef with the mi-go about?
• Q: Actually, wait, hold up; Wagner’s ring is made from gold stolen from the spirits of the Rhine, Goldberry-Nimue is our resident water-spirit, did the Seal get stolen from her in parallel? Would that imply that the Seal is an Elder Thing artifact? Or did it just fall into Nimue’s possession for a while?

• Addition: So about those shoggoths…
• Addition: Cambrian sea life, as a treat

Elrond

Elrond’s a problem child in this experiment: his primary role in the narrative could be fulfilled by any old wizard, but his primary relationship is bound up with Arwen, and Arwen is tied up with Aragorn, and I still don’t know what I want to do with Aragorn.

The three of them basically come as a package deal, and the two main packages that I know of are:

• Alveric, Lirazel, and the King of Elfland from Dunsany’s King of Elfland’s Daughter
• Pwyll, Rhiannon, and Arawn from the Mabinogion

I like the Pwyll triad better, but it’s also definitely a major direct inspiration of Tolkien’s, which I have generally been trying to avoid. So I’d either need to tie in some wildcards or learn to suck it up and deal. I mean I already used Der Ring the glass on that box has been broken.

I’ll come back to this, see what I can do with it later. How elves are actually going to be situated is still very much in-progress.

Galadriel

The Lady von Willendorf herself, a pick that will not surprise regular readers of the blog but may require a hear me out for folks just wandering by, so hear me out:

Galadriel is extremely powerful, extremely beautiful, and extremely old. And while there are plenty of powerful + beautiful + ancient women in myth and literature to choose from, I don’t think many of them can brag about being an instantly-recognizable sex icon 20,000+ years after their creation. This also throws a fun wrench into the genre by portraying one of the OG ur-elves that everyone ripped off afterward as short, brown and fat instead of tall, pale and thin, while still presenting her with the dignity and respect that she’s owed. 

As a bonus, the Venus gives us an entirely different direction to approach elven melancholy: Galadriel’s depressed because she remembers when there used to be mammoths, and now the mammoths have gone and they will never return. 

• Q: Is she actually an elf in this anymore, or an immortal human living among the elves? 

• Addition: Okay well now I gotta have one last mammoth show up. There will be waterworks.
• Addition: Of course the mammoth remembers her, whose blog do you think you're reading?  Man might forget, but the elephants do not.
• Addition: And you’d best believe she was one of the painters of Lascaux. Like her house is just built on top of or right beside the entrance. 

And, having said all that, I could very easily invoke many of the elements I used for the Great Lady for the "instead of a dark lord you would have a queen" bit. Works out nice, especially since Nyarlathotep = Sauron. Never met a good idea I wouldn't use twice.

 

Bilbo Baggins

Nathaniel Chanticleer from Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist. Fantasy-English small-town burgher whose life is normal and regular and entirely un-adventurous up until magical adventure barrels into his life and turns it upside down. 

• Addition: Fairy-fruit and its importation into the human world

Gimli and Legolas

Conan and Zorro, no contest. Got the heavy fighter and the finesse fighter, got the opposed personalities primed for a mild antagonism > grudging respect > unbreakable friendship storyline. Howard’s Picts are basically Frazetta-style cavemen, you already know I’m going to use neanderthals as dwarves, the numbers check out.

Bonus: since they both have terrible vulture estates who love suing over trademarks, both of them need makeovers and new names. Conan’s easy, already did him: Spakāya of Cimmeria, or we can just call him “The Hound”. Zorro is “fox” in Spanish, which is “Rusc” in Sindarin (fun fact: only materials about conlangs fall under copyright, since you can’t copyright a language) and while Fox and the Hound isn’t public domain, it is a funny little reference.

(Note: Zorro was actually a suggestion from skullelongator on bluesky, who got it from their mother. Thanks, skullelongator’s mom.)

• Addition: Side characters, etc. Leaving this part open, since the advantage of long-running picaresque pulp heroes is that you can drop them in just about anywhere without worrying about connections.

Barad-dûr

The Tower of Babel is the perfect fit, especially if I weave in its historical inspiration, Etemenanki. Its name is literally “Temple of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth”, it’s located at the seat of imperial power, it’s dedicated to the usurping god of kingship who built the world out of a corpse, historical Alexander the Great ordered it rebuilt. Throw in the “everyone spoke one language” with an implied “by force” and you’ve got the axis mundi of mythic oppression.

• Q: Can I resist the urge to go “invading the heavens wasn’t an exaggeration, they built a fucking space elevator”?
• A: No, probably not.
• Q: Can I resist the urge to go “and it was built on top of Çatalhöyük because I know authors who use subtext and they are all cowards? (Mysteryspice suggested this)
• A: Again, probably not.
• Q: Alexander’s obviously using it as a base of operations - why?
• Q: What connection, if any, between the Tower and Atlantis? 

• Addition: Marduk, Tiamat, the Enuma Elish etc
• Addition: Oh hey Gilgamesh, how’s it hanging, man?
• Addition: The confusion of tongues (yay linguistic diversity)

The Council of the Wise

There’s a passage in Fellowship where Gandalf describes Saruman as “...great among the Wise [...] chief of my order and the head of the Council.” and that really makes it sound like there are more than five of them. Certainly more than two. I still don’t have a true pick for Gandalf yet, but the shortlist for the wizards’ council includes:

• Archimago (The Faerie Queene)
• Atlantes (Orlando Innamorato)
• Prospero (The Tempest)
• Medea (Medea, Argonautica, etc)
• Circe (The Odyssey, etc)
• Merlin (Arthuriana)
• Morgan le Fay (Arthuriana)
• Väinämöinen (Kalevala)
• Oannes (Sumerian myth)
• Gorice XII (The Worm Ouroboros)
• Oscar Diggs (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) 

Could probably throw in Hermes Trismegistus if I wanted to, but keeping him as fictional in-universe appeals to me, especially if I’m rolling with a layer of obfuscation about the Seal. Or he could be the wildcard that everyone in-universe thinks is fictional.

• Q: So how do these wizards interact with the rest of the world?
• Q: Who has beef with who?
• Q: What do they know of / care about the Seal? Have they done anything about it?
• Q: Has the Gandalf stand-in gone rogue?
• Q: Where do they meet?
• Q: How did the Wizard of Oz get invited, anyway?

• Addition: Lairs, drama, etc.

**

And that’s a wrap on Part 2. This experiment continues to be extremely fun, I've already got some ideas cooking already for Part 3, stay tuned.

What do people know about the Mythos? Part 2

Picking up from where we last left off.

Tlācayoh

A headless spirit, said to have been born from the anger of a woman murdered by her wicked husband for trying to escape with her lover. While frightening, she is depicted as a neutral or even helpful figure so long as she is treated respectfully. Petitioners will occasionally receive direct aid from her in the killing or cursing of abusive fathers or husbands.

The Classical Nahuatl name listed above is a compound of tlācatl (“human being”) and the suffix -yoh (“made of, full of, covered in”).

n!Kai

A hapax legemenon, claimed to be the name of a legendary subterranean city in the journals of an anonymous Franciscan friar writing in New Mexico province c. 1680. The friar claims to have heard the term from the local Pueblo in reference to a mythic underworld reserved for monstrous creatures and humans who have transformed into them, but this is not substantiated by either Spanish or indigenous sources. The brief description of the word’s pronunciation is sufficient enough to identify an alveolar nasal click; no known language of the Americas, extant or historical, features click consonants of any kind.

The Slave Market at Dylath-Leen

An 1874 painting by artist and professional dilettante Sir Calvin Halsey that is nothing short of a crowning achievement in how many orientalist stereotypes one can fit onto a single canvas. It depicts a short, dark-skinned and narrow-faced man with an orange turban pacing through a moonlit plaza, inspecting the unclothed bodies of a line of captive women. Cloven feet and the tufts of furry ankles peek out from beneath the man’s silk robes and an opium pipe smolders in his ringed and jeweled hand.

Draft sketches of the painting were discovered by chance in 1996, revealing that the slaver had undergone significant revisions in design; the first iteration was an unclothed, rotund, furry creature with a flat face, wide mouth, short horns, enormous ears and six eyes, described by one art historian as “the cousin that Ewoks buy their meth from”.

The Venus of Boncuklu Tarla

8cm black granite figurine of an obese, masturbating woman. The announcement of its discovery in 2018 was immediately beset by controversy on all fronts:

• The discovery was neither announced nor verified by the Mardin Museum, which oversees excavations at the site.
• The discovery was published in the Journal of Truth-Centered Archaeology and Anthropology, which regularly espouses fringe and conspiratorial theories of human history.
• While the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B culture would potentially have had the means to shape granite with flint or emery, it is unlikely that they could do so with such precision and realistic proportion at such a small scale.

All together, the figure is considered a modern forgery. But, while she failed to revolutionize archaeology, she has gained some small online fame both for the expected reasons, and for triggering the Twitter meltdown and resignation of the Journal's head editor after the Venus was depicted in fanart as a protestor against UK gender-essentialist legistlation.

Tablet 65

Fragmentary Akkadian-era cuneiform tablet describing an exorcism performed on a man that had started eating the dead and speaking in their voices, and who had only been captured after the killing and consumption of a six-year-old boy. The lack of formality in the text indicates that the text was a private missive, but beyond the address of the recipient as “my brother priest of Nanna-Sin” there’s no identifying information present for either party. The author asks for guidance, feeling that he is unfit to continue in his office, as well as aid with a matter obscured by a lacuna in the text. 

H.P. Lovecraft

A prolific but forgotten-in-his-time writer of gothic fantasy and historical romance stories, who gained post-mortem fame when he was used as a shared pen-name by over two dozen science fiction authors as the center point of an elaborate metafictional shared universe / comedic bit.

Bigfoot (Austrolopithicus gigantus pattersoni)

A descendent of the robust austrolopith lineage, averaging 6-8 feet tall. Migrated out of Africa ~2 mya and underwent relatively rapid gigantism to adapt to the Tibetan Plateau and northeastern Siberia, with populations migrating to the Americas through Beringia ~100 - 80 KYA. Driven to extinction by arrival of H.  sapiens, with the most recent remains dated to ~11 KYA.

History of the Kings of the Divs

1868 French 'translation' of a supposed Classical Persian text detailing the sordid three-thousand year-long political history of the demonic dynasties of Mazandaran (separate from the Iranian province of the same name) and culminating in the defeat of Div-e Sepid by the hero Rostam. 

While near-certainly a modern invention (no source text or substantiating manuscripts have ever emerged), the author was at least familiar with the Shahnameh and had a solid grasp of the language. With that factored in, it is a surprisingly solid fantasy epic filled with grotesque monsters, daring-do, a crumbling empire, wicked sorcerer-viziers, and mild-to-moderate period-appropriate racism.

Tape #53 (08-14-76)

8-track cassette tape recording of a conversation overheard by amateur radio enthusiast Charles “Chuck” Angstrom of Coconino County, Arizona sometime between 1:30 and 3:00 AM on August 14th, 1976.

The six-minute conversation, spoken entirely in Navajo, consists of four men (callsigns Bear, Fox, Owl, and Turtle), coordinating the hunt of a presumably-rabid coyote. All four speakers use both conversational and coded speech, indicating that at least one of them had been trained as a code talker.

The original 8-track cassette was in poor condition at the time its contents were digitized by Charles’ son in 2007; much of the conversation is difficult to understand even for native speakers, and several sections have yet to be deciphered. The tape ends mid-conversation with Owl saying “Two, no, three up ahead. Yeah, three of them,” followed by the slam of a car door.

The Pohnpeian Mermaid

Daguerreotype of a hairless, fish-tailed hominid, taken in 1852 by missionary Laurence Douglas  in situ on the shoreline where it was discovered. Subject appears deceased. Douglas later wrote in his journal that he believed the being to be pregnant, and he gave it a Christian burial in an undisclosed location on the island rather than let the corpse be burned per the wishes of the local Pohnpeians.

Sagart & Carey Plastics

A small plastics manufacturing company headquartered in Jackson’s Hole, Wisconsin. Made national news in March of 2023, when a DEA raid turned into a 3-hour long siege and gunfight. An estimated 60-80 employees escaped the premises and remain at large.

Aihoat

Signature monster of the 1973 horror movie God In the Labyrinth - a many-legged and many-eyed off-white blob inhabiting a seemingly endless maze outside normal time and space (see: Navidson Tapes). The effects aren’t great, but the puppeteer and cameraman do their best with the resources they have. The film is somewhat infamous in cult horror circles for the suicide of the writer-director during editing, with the last three sequences prior to his death being the “tunnel chase”, “human pens” and “Cistine (sic) chapel contact”.

At the end of the film, it is revealed that Aihoat’s luring of humans into its maze and subsequent implantation of parasitoid larva is the monster’s attempt to preserve some of humanity against nuclear war. The surviving characters are offered a choice: live as a zombified host for Aihoat’s larva, try to survive on their own in the labyrinth and find other survivors, or brave a return to the now-irradiated surface. The film ends before choice is made.

“The Majestic 12”

Informal name for a group of US Air Force officials affiliated with Project Blue Book and the investigation of unidentified flying organisms.

First and Last Dynasty of Mu

1974 science-fantasy novel by Alphonse Lowe about the collapse of the titular lost continent’s royal family. One is unlikely to find a more corrupt collection of incestuous backstabbers than this horrid lot, and Lowe revels in the grossout horror of it all to a degree most modern readers would find concerning.

The Harvestman

Urban legend: a gigantic arachnid that, when seen at a distance and under low light conditions, appears as an exceptionally tall human with obscured or blank facial features. Also called “Mr. Long Legs”.

Point Nemo Anomalous Exclusion Zone

An 850 km diameter no-sail, no-fly zone maintained around the oceanic pole of inaccessibility. The cordon began as an American endeavor (with support from the United Nations) in 1962, with Soviet ships present under the Nautilus Treaty from 1972 to 1979.

No verifiable information has been produced regarding the purpose of the cordon or the Zone’s contents. Photographs taken from the ISS and leaked to the press in 2006, if not doctored, indicate an island in the center of the Zone that is otherwise not accounted for in public-facing satellite imagery.

All civilian attempts to breach the cordon have been rebuffed with force.

The Cruel Empire of Tsan-Chan

An early roleplaying game in the vein of Dungeons and Dragons, set in a tyrannical sci-fantasy empire of far-future Earth. While never particularly popular, the novel setting attracted a small and dedicated fan base until posthumous revelations that its author had kidnapped and imprisoned a woman in his basement for over a decade before burying her dismembered body on his property. 

The Navidson Tapes

Handheld camcorder footage chronicling  the discovery and exploration of a featureless, lightless and seemingly-infinite labyrinth within the home of a man who introduces himself as “Will Navidson”. Five copies of the tape were found in storage at the University of Richmond’s film department in the fall of 2000, leading most to assume that it is either an abandoned student film or an elaborate hoax; None of the persons in the film have been identified due to intentional face-blurring of all involved parties, though the place and time of shooting have been narrowed down to Virginia in the spring of 1990. 

Ixion

15 Jupiter-mass brown dwarf orbiting at a distance of 1.68 light years from the Sun, discovered by the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer in 2011. This discovery spawned a wave of panic among the public due to its similarities with the Nemesis hypothesis and it was immediately tied to apocalyptic theories regarding the end of the Mayan long count calendar in 2012; the available evidence does not support its involvement in a mass-extinction cycle on Earth, but subsequent observations have confirmed at least two major moons, the larger of which is estimated at 0.84 - 1.2 Earth masses. Unmanned missions to Ixion have been proposed, but have been judged unfeasible by multiple space agencies given the time cost.

 

The Gollynack

Urban legend emerging in the mid-80s nightclub scene of southwest England with a core narrative as follows:

A woman returning home alone after a night out is stalked and then attacked by a man (usually described as a serial rapist and murderer escaped from a nearby prison or mental institution) who pursues her into an abandoned house. Cornered in the cellar, the woman decapitates her attacker with an axe and buries the still-moving body behind an unfinished brick wall. There the killer transforms into a flabby, headless monster with mouths in its palms that incites victims of its influence to acts of violence and sexual depravity (though stories differ on whether the creature’s influence forces its victims to act, or simply encourages tendencies that were already present.)

The creature’s popularity has remained relatively consistent over time, thanks to the Aristocrats-style one-upmanship that flows naturally from the premise, but has never been particularly high for the same reason.

 

Liao

Opium derivative encountered by American troops during the Vietnam War, predominantly in the highlands by the Laotian border. Users commonly report highly distorted perception of time and hallucinations of threatening entities; additional effects include extreme paranoia, an irrational fear of man-made enclosed spaces, and seizures triggered by sustained observation of right angles, all of which may persist after the drug’s other effects have worn off.

Copycat street drugs (Reverb, Black Lotus, Dog’s Paw,  Picasso, etc) have occasionally surfaced in the United States since the 1970s; these have thus far all been invocations of liao’s mysterious reputation applied to ordinary and often adulterated heroin, LSD, or ecstasy.

Crom

Celtic name of unclear provenance; known only from a single Primitive Irish inscription along the blade of a bone knife found alongside the body of Gallagh Man II: “By Crom (this thing) is done”. 

Scholars are divided as to whether the name is in reference to a deity or a human figure, and further divided as to whether it is related to Old Irish cromb (“bent, stooped”), the PIE root *ker- (“host, warband”), or a substrate borrowing.

Liber Ivonis

Purported pre-Roman grimoire, though no copies can be dated to earlier than the 1620 Venetian manuscript. It was predictably banned from publication by the church and later elevated as a core text by the 19th century occult revival, despite its actual contents being a biting and unsubtle satire of European esotericism. The egomaniacal, bloviating Hyperborean’s increasingly absurd attempts at avoiding his creditors, compounded with his repeated failure to accomplish any of the fantastic feats he claims to be able to do and the total indifference of the spiritual entities he encounters, make for a remarkably funny book even 4 centuries after it was written. The trip to Saturn episode in particular has earned the text a spot in many histories of science fiction.

The Witch House of Keziah Mason

Tourist attraction in Arkham, Massachusetts; a supposedly cursed house that once sheltered the witch Keziah Mason as she fled execution in Salem. While all signs point to the Mason narrative as a fabrication to draw in tourists, the house was the centerpoint of the very well-documented 1928 kidnapping and killing of 7-month old Bernard Hamm by Walter Gilman, a graduate student of mathematics at Miskatonic University. Gilman was judged unfit to stand trial due to insanity, and died shortly afterward in the Arkham Sanitarium.

Remaking LotR With Only Public Domain Sources

Foot of Mt. Ashitaka, Takahashi Hiroaka

Last summer I had the chance to go see Fellowship of the Ring in concert. Great show, movie still slaps. But I had an odd thought while watching it, brought on by my Leslie Stone transcription project and a slowly-compiling list of inspirational resources I’ve been gathering.

“Is it possible to remake Lord of the Rings using only public domain source material? Like a ship of Theseus type thing, where you replace individual components in the structure. How does it change? What does it transform into? Does it even remain recognizable?”

You know, normal thoughts.

To spoil the rest of this post it turns out you can, thanks to the transitive property of fiction, and the end result is a good deal of fun. Let’s-a-go!

Guidelines

All replacement components must be public domain in the United States at time this post goes up. This encompasses:

• ≤ 1930: Automatically PD
• 1931 - 1963: Published without copyright notice, or published with copyright notice but not renewed within 28 years
• 1964 - 1977: Published without copyright notice
• 1978 - March 1 1989: Published without notice and without registration within 5 years of first publication
• Any: Explicit relinquishing of rights by creator, including Creative Commons 0

There's also the grey area of works that are in the public domain in their country of origin but not necessarily in the US because of course the US doesn't just hold to the Rule of the Shorter Term. I bring it up because the art for this post is technically from 1932, but has been public domain in Japan since 1995 because they're Life+50 and they follow the Rule so [throws up hands]. It's outside the core premise I can have a cheat day.

For thematic cohesion (and for the amount of resources available), I'm going to predominantly lean towards pre-1931 works. I’ve also added some follow-up questions and potential additions to each entry, just to show how the method can result in a wildly divergent story and setting.

Middle-Earth

Sticking with the premise of “Earth in the mythic past” (something Tolkien gestured at but didn't really dial-in on) leaves us with the Hyborian Age as the primary public domain option. This works, but I don’t think it’s ideal as the primary base: Howard used it mostly so he could evoke whatever broad historical stereotypes he wanted without worrying about actual history / having to do any heavy-lifting with worldbuilding, and I don't roll with either of those. Still good for a bit of cafeteria picking and choosing, though, the Tower of the Elephant is bound to show up at some point.

The option I'm leaning towards now would be something in the general shape of our world (as a great many fantasy worlds are), filled in with various fictional and legendary (and occasionally real-but-mythologized) locations in the generally right place. To keep the vibes of mythic prehistory, I'm leaning towards ~10-8k BCE, because that gives me Doggerland, the African Humid Period, and the Anatolian proto-cities - but I'm not going to be too picky about accuracy. Gotta have mammoths.

• Addition: Filling up the map would probably be multiple posts by itself, so I’m saving that for another day. But it’s going to be chock full of lost cities, pseudoscientific sunken continents, legendary realms, historical misinterpretations of actual places and good ol’ bullshit.

The One Ring

The Ring of Gyges and the Ring of the Nibelung are more or less direct inspirations to the One Ring, so they’re out of the running. Instead, I’ll be going with a move that will have serious ramifications down the line: the Seal of Solomon, asterisk.

That asterisk is me doing that thing I love to do, which is add in a bit of historical metafiction to muddy the waters. (We can all thank Dr. Sledge of Esoterica for sending me down this rabbit hole.)

So the Seal is extrabiblical to begin with, but that’s never stopped anything from becoming extremely popular. When we cut away the cruft built up over the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Seal of Solomon isn’t actually Solomon's Seal, but instead the Seal Famously In the Possession of Solomon: it's God’s signet ring, a bureaucratic artifact given to Solomon that allowed him to act as the authorized representative of the divine. This means that if you aren’t Solomon (an extremely large category of people, or so I am led to believe), possession and use of the Seal is basically stolen credentials. Depending on the status of the original in a given story, the Seal could even be forged credentials. All of this is an extremely good justification for why it brings ruin to its wielder / cannot be allowed to fall into the wrong hands / needs to be destroyed / returned / otherwise disposed of.

Then on top of that, Sauron’s end goal of “dominate and control all life in Middle Earth” can segue neatly into the historical metafiction layer by mirroring the appropriation of the Seal (and Solomonic magic more broadly) by Christian occultists and its subsequent transformation into what is, if you think about what is actually being described instead of taking a wizard's word for it, the use of supernatural prison slave labor.

• Q: Who was actually supposed to have the ring?
• Q: Who do people believe is supposed to have it?
• Q: Who else has gotten their hands on it? 
• Q: Is it even legitimate in the first place?
• Q: Why hasn’t it been reclaimed yet?
• Q: So what kinds of spirits are we dealing with, and what leftover business do they have to settle?

• Addition: The shamir, because everyone loves a big magical worm
• Addition: The relationship with all the various spirits has changed drastically (for the worse) since the ring was originally handed out.
• Addition: Ancient sorcerer-priest-king, who might have just been a local warlord who got hyped up later on down the line.
• Addition: Demons! Oh, so many demons.

Eru Illuvatar and the Valar

I’m penciling in MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI and the Zoa, for the upper echelons of the pantheon, though I want to do a lot more with the lower layers; pre-1931 means we’re still early enough in spec-fic that mythopoeia has some early adopters but the usage of constructed pantheons isn't particularly widespread and there even fewer well-developed ones / ones that are not just used as stock colonialist antagonists.

The new religious movements of the period could potentially provide some good material, though they provide their own barrel of worms to deal with (mostly racism and racism accessories, with the added malus of "now with an organized belief structure behind it".)

The potential shortlist is currently:

• Theosophy, Thelema, Oahspe movement, Mormonism, Aradia / the Gospel of Witches, the Golden Bough, Uther Index of Folklore Motifs, HPL, CAS, REH, rest of the Weird Tales crew and the other pulps as well. Most of them will only provide one or maybe two gods each - weird pattern, I think it's probably to do with serial short stories and whatnot. 
• Spiritualists are unlikely to get much play, because ineffable invisible spirits are visually boring.

If you have any other good recs for "interesting bespoke gods (or really wild takes on classical ones) in PD stories", drop me a comment; this section is where I’m going to greatly diverge from Tolkien simply by virtue of me being a huge fan of some fantasy-ass fantasy religious practices, and that means importing a lot of material.

Mordor

The Land of Darkness from the Alexander Romance, because it’s a big vaguely defined land of badness and narrative convenience called the Land of Darkness.

• Q: Who lives there? What's life like for them?
• Q: How did it become the Land of Darkness? Is there something special about it, or is that just what people call it?
• Q: How has it previously interacted with the known world?
• Q: What does the known world believe about it, falsely or otherwise?

• Addition: Water of Life - The thing that Alexander is out to find, in the Romance. Nice and vague, the Water of Life could have whatever properties you please.
• Addition: Gates of Alexander - Everyone loves a nice "this is the end of the known world" structure.
• Addition: Gog of Magog - This is how it's rendered in the Ezekiel, as I understand it. Gog and Magog slipped in somewhere along the translation chain by the time Revelation was penned.
• Addition: Tied into beliefs about the apocalypse
• Addition: Hyperborea (magical land, far to the north, no sun, lot of bullshit to pick from, etc)
• Addition: There's so much stuff in the Romance, Skerples was way ahead of the curve on this.

The Nazgul

Alexander himself, complete with horns (this isn’t a non sequitur, the Horns of Alexander are a thing), handily fulfills the role of the Witch-King. “Celebrated hero (who might not be all that heroic) rides off with his retainers into the Land of Darkness to defeat a great evil and never returns (at least not until he’s suborned by said great evil)” is just good storytelling. I don’t make the rules. 

The other Ringwraiths are played by the 12 paladins of Charlemagne. I could go Round Table, but the Round Table has hundreds of them to pick from and I don’t want to comb through all those Large Adult Sons. Orlando innamorato / Furioso are as good a place as any for the 12, and gets us Orlando, Oliver, Fierabras, Astolpho, Ogier, Ganelon, Reynaud, Maugris, Florismart, Guy, Naimon, and Otuel.

• Q: How did things break back home when they never came back?
• Q: How are things currently breaking because of them?
• Q: How does the belief in Alexander’s heroic return cause problems?
• Q: What shit has history whitewashed? What actually good stuff did they do back then?

• Addition: Existing relationships / accomplishments / lore of the 12, adjusted as needed. Knights come pre-packaged with a bunch of connective tissue to other characters and quests, so they're high bang-for-buck.
• Addition: Bradamante 

Orcs

The modern orc is a green Klingon and Klingons are tharks with forehead ridges, so tharks it is. I lose the “this is what happens to people under fascism” thematic element of Tolkien’s orcs, and I won’t say the tharks were particularly nuanced in the Barsoom novels, but they’re a pretty easy canvas to add complexity to if you start writing them as people with a culture and history and whatnot.

Tying into the Land of Darkness: tharks would already be adapted to the cold of Mars, and would naturally gravitate towards northern climates. Plus “Gog of Magog” is basically the archetypical orc name so that’s double appropriate.

• Q: What’s the relationship between the tharks, Alexander, and the Sauron analogue?
• Q: How did they get here, anyway? Is other Martian life also transplanted here? Were the mi-go involved? (Yes)
• Q: What happens after this whole plot?
• Q: What relationships do they have with nearby humans?

• Addition: Barsoomian wildlife, since there are now 7 books to pull from and ERB loved him some monsters.
• Addition: John Carter - human warlord who has somehow risen to prominence among the tharks - could be analogous to Alexander, a direct lieutenant to Alexander, or just some opportunist taking advantage of the current political situation.
• Addition: Other inhabitants of Mars, Barsoomian and otherwise
• Addition: Water of Life = River Iss? Oh ho ho, delightfully devilish, Seymour...  

Sauron

Nyarlathotep: Sauron was literally the evil vizier to the last king of Atlantis and was called both “bringer of gifts” and “the wizard”. He's gonna be played by the Crawling Chaos.

Azathoth is then the natural choice for Morgoth, and if I correlate Mt. Etna with Mt. Doom there’s an avenue open to bring in Typhon. Exactly what the relationship is with Nyarly, or what Nyarly’s relationship with the rest of the world is, I am going to leave for later.

• Q: What is Nyarlathotep’s role in all this? How has he interfered in the world?
• Q: What sorts of monsters has Azathoth-as-Typhon spawned?
• Q: What happens if Azathoth gets out from under the mountain? How would that happen?

• Addition: Mythos material directly linked to Nyarly or Azathoth, which actually leans towards the Dreamlands, which can loop right back around and include basically everything Dunsany wrote.
• Addition: Say it with me, everyone: "It's the fucking mi-go, Charlie Brown!"
• Charlie Brown is, unfortunately, unavailable until 2046 thanks to Sonny Bono and the Copyright Extension Act. 

Mount Doom

I had originally planned on Mount Etna for the Typhon connection, but in snooping around for alternatives I stumbled across Mount Elbrus, which hits basically every check every box I want to hit, plus extras: it’s volcanic, it’s fucking huge (largest volcano in Eurasia), it’s erupted within historical record ( ~50 CE), it’s located in the Caucasus (and thus in the same general direction as the Land of Darkness via transitive property) and has mythological importance via Zoroastrianism as Hara Barazaiti.

• Q: Perhaps instead of destroying the Seal, the quest is returning it to the heavens?

• Addition: Hara Barazaiti lore - planets orbit around it, pretty sure Mithra was born there... 

Numenor 

Is literally Atlantis, which means I’m spoiled for choice. There is simply so god damn much available to sort through, those theosophists loved writing some bullshit about Atlantis.  

To start with, I'm going to use the real-world historical Atlantis (the Theran Eruption of ~1600 BCE that obliterated half of Santorini) as my baseline, say Phorenice from The Lost Continent was its last monarch, and I'll pencil in “Minotaur narrative” for later.

• Q: What did Nyarlathotep do in Atlantis?
• Q: Was the Seal known to / in possession of Atlantis?
• Q: What leftovers of the Atlantean empire remain?
• Q: Were the mi-go involved and why is the answer “yes”?
• Q: Typhon/Azathoth the cause of the eruption? Maybe there are two important mountains?

• Addition: Entirely unscientific dinosaurs
• Addition: Atlantean technology
• Addition: Atlantean ruins

**

I’m going to call it here for now; there’s a lot of material to cover and I haven’t even gotten to the Fellowship yet. It’s been an incredibly fun exercise so far, and I think it’s already shaping up to be something special. Experiment successful. The method works. Probably (definitely) going to expand beyond the boundaries of the initial premise, knowing how much my pattern-seeking brain likes drawing connections.

It’s very refreshing - honestly it feels a little bit like I am almost getting away with something - to do something so purposefully derivative at every step of the process, only to see that it somehow circles back around to feeling new again simply because the strictures of public domain force me to bypass 95 years of genre feeding on itself. I'm rebuilding LotR out of sources Tolkien would have known about, but not limiting myself to the sources he used. Looking at it that way it's almost an alternate history (almost, but not quite, considering all the sources that would have been copyrighted at the time.) of what could have been.

I have a feeling - call it a hunch - this will expand well beyond the boundaries of the initial experiment. 

E: This series has since completed - check out Part 2 and Part 3 

Fragments of an Old Alt-History Setting

Back around 2012 or so, I cooked up an alternate history setting. You’ve got to have at least one, it's obligatory. It percolated for a few years, I ended up using it in some assignments for my writing courses in college, and it fizzled out. 

[Aside: Point 2 ultimately led to Point 3, in no small part to the misery that was my senior project - I fought tooth-and-nail against my professor’s “no spec-fic” policy, and I ended up with the weaker compromise choice of stringing together my stories in a shitty Twine game with a vague gesture at intertextuality. Absolute dogshit on all fronts. Should have just gone with a story-within-a-story meta maneuver and saved everyone the trouble, but alas, historical Dan was a dunderhead.]

But such things tend to trickle forward into the future. This setting was the origin point for both Lighthouse (which had most of its shape already present even back then) and the very first seeds of what would become Unicorn Meat (which would be almost completely re-hashed multiple times over - the list of unicorn breeds in the module is present in the same order in the very first iteration of the story, while the carvers themselves won’t show up for another few years.)

A lot of the ideas that accumulated in this setting were not alt-history in the strictest sense, being more just Dan Standard Weird Shit (much of which found its way into my Lighthouse Field Guide series of posts), and most of the actual alternative history bits existed primarily as flavor for the modern-day Lighthouse material. It was very much a “pulled in two directions accomplishing neither” type of project. 

**

Major Divergence Points

Magic Exists
It’s not easy and it's not the kind of thing you can go to school for or infinitely replicate, but it exists. It’s the old tomes and teacher-student transmission type magic. Alchemy is more stable. Surprisingly for the era I wrote this in (ie at my most charitable to Sanderson), I didn’t properly set down a system for it (despite that actually being appropriate for the time period, because I knew essentially nothing about historical occultism at the time). I know geomancy (leylines and so forth) was important.

The history of the US gets completely derailed early on
This was where I bit off potentially more than I could chew, because I had two extreme divergences I wanted to include and ended up adding several more equally or more extreme ones in order to justify them. and as it turns out Dan of 10+ years ago did not know many things.

• I think, but cannot confirm if it was actually there in the old notes, that Washington dies of an infection at Valley Forge. I know I didn’t properly think about the ramifications of this until much later, though 
• Revolutionary War ends up coinciding with a major demon / things that are called demons outbreak that cut off most trans-Atlantic travel but also makes the situation in the colonies much more tenuous despite winning the war.
• Big Ticket Derail 1: Post-Revolution westward expansion is halted (primarily due to vague magic reasons - a cop-out, sure, but it did give me the image of giant black monoliths stretching along the entire length of the Mississippi), coupled with a drastic about-face wrt relations with indigenous peoples; The general idea was that, as part of recovery efforts from the demon incursion (since the main incursion was over the Atlantic, the colonies & coastal regions got hit harder than indigenous territory further inland) the official policy became one of voluntary admission into statehood under a less-federalized system, simply because there was 30-40 years where the states couldn’t afford to expand and likewise couldn’t afford to piss off the neighbors.
• Big Ticket Derail 2: The Haitian Revolution spreads to the southern states (aided by a wizard putting his thumb on the scales); slavery is abolished in the 1790s 

Ben Franklin the alchemist
He invented a method of making homunculi stable enough that they could be consistently but not mass-produced. I think I called it the Franklin Crucible.

“John”
Escaped slave turned pirate turned whaler turned immortal sorcerer; his aid was critical in helping the colonies win independence / not collapse entirely, and he never let them live it down (Jefferson in particular). He remained a lingering influence over the political landscape long after he fucked off to do inscrutible wizard things / potentially seek godhood. He’s shown up occasionally in slightly modified form in more recent works - if you ever see anything about Botfly or the King of Wands, that’s him.

[Aside: I was in my Malazan phase at the time, so John took considerable inspiration from the emperor Kellaneved and has retained a good amount of it.]

Minor Divergence Points

• Alexander the Great of Macedonia is Alexandra the Great of Themiskyra
• This was the sorta-origin point for how I handle amazons in MSF and elsewhere, though most of the details got filled in later.
• Independent state of Deseret
• This was added not because I was particularly knowledgeable about the history of Mormonism, nor because it fit with anything else in the setting I was making, but because it was a New Thing I Learned About (well, mostly the script) and wanted to include as a background element.
• A highly syncretic form of Christianity survives in Japan to the present (filling a similar niche as Voodoo in the Caribbean)
• Mostly because I thought it’d be cool to explore what would happen when Japanese converts are cut off from contact with Rome, but not driven fully underground. Included stuff like Amaterasu filling the role of Gabriel, and the like. Of all the discrete scenarios I mashed together into this thing, this is the one that I think has the strongest conceptual though probably not practical legs, though it still needs to thread the needle of how to make it happen. Though it’s also a premise where the right extremely charismatic person in the right place can kick things off.
• Japanese ships reach California sometime in the 1500-1600s.
• Not a full-blown colonial effort, more of an accidental confluence of right time / right place / right people in charge for someone to try a circumnavigation. Doesn’t strike me as particularly feasible in hindsight. 
• Hawaii remains an independent kingdom.
• Considering the States’ lack of westward expansion in this timeline, this isn’t all that terrible of a stretch.
• The break-in at the Watergate Hotel was actually the heist of an occult artifact called the Eye of Providence.
• This is so fucking goofy, I love it.
• The Internet achieves apotheosis
• This wasn’t portrayed as a good thing, even back then, though it was a lot more insufferably early 2010s about it. It was more like a semi-divine thoughtform-gestalt thing rather than AI, and it was never more than a gestured-at background hazard, but it was definitely meant to be a danger in the background. This was not nearly as cynical, bleak, or horrifying as it should have been.

And there we have it. For a mess of things that I thought were cool at the time thrown at the wall to see what stuck, it's pretty okay. Not going to win any awards for cohesion, but my method's always been Cool Shit first, justifications later (as is no doubt obvious here). 

Who knows, perhaps the muse might return in the future and have something new in this genre for me.

What do people know about the Mythos?

I don't buy into the premise of a masquerade between the mundane and supernatural. False dichotomy, Enlightenment hubris, strains disbelief, requires too many extra parts, no conspiracy is airtight, removes potentially interesting interactions, etc etc. Essay for another time. People are going to know something.

Anyway, this post is "what can your DG agents / hapless bystanders / plucky investigators / meddlesome kids find with 30 seconds and a Wikipedia tab". They're meant to be trailheads and initial breadcrumbs - maybe it's a real lead to the real Mythos, maybe it isn't. Just because people know something doesn't mean it's accurate, but it will be something, and that's a sight better than the constant vagaries this genre subjects its readers to.

Been too long since I've done a post like this; the last Lighthouse Field Guide was four years ago. Don't know why I stopped; I wrote enough entries for this one that I had to split it into multiple posts.

 

Innsmouth, Massachusetts 

Historical fishing hamlet along the north coast of the state, rendered a ghost town in 1927 after an FBI raid to break up a bootlegging and gold-smuggling operation. The site was never resettled and was declared a nature reserve in 1937. Hobbyist explorers would occasionally “make pilgrimage” to the ruins of the town, but this ended when the last standing structure (the meeting Hall of the Esoteric Order of Dagon fraternal society) collapsed during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Peaslee-Boyle Syndrome

An extremely rare psychological disorder where the subject will experience a sudden and totalizing shift in personality that will last anywhere from several weeks to several years. Affected individuals will obsessively study niche topics despite no previous interest, neglect existing relationships and occupations, demonstrate both uncharacteristic knowledge and ignorance about topics, and drastically shift the manner and content of their speech.

Episodes will end without warning or apparent cause; affected individuals will return to their previous personality with no memory of the intervening time.

The Mammoth Caves Sloth-Man

Cryptid hailing from south-central Kentucky, first reported by a trio of backpackers in October 1971. Described as a huge, black-furred creature combining the body of a prehistoric ground sloth with the face of a vampire bat. Fairly popular among cryptid fandom. The nearby town of Hoker’s Mill has a festival / farmer’s market / craft fair in his honor the first weekend of October every year. Claims that it was known to the Cherokee as tsatokokwa are, to the best of anyone’s research, wholly fabricated in 2012 by a now-deleted tumblr account.

Black Hat, Red Scarf

A string of purported encounters with a supernatural individual or individuals. The figure varies in appearance and sex (though is usually male), but is always seen wearing a suit, a black hat, and a red scarf, necktie or handkerchief (leading to the common abbreviation of BHRS). 

Encounters typically fall into one of three categories; happenstance meeting, sudden appearance, or conspicuous recurring observation. Many contactees claimed that BHRS possessed intimate knowledge of and familiarity with them, and nearly all of them claim to have received some form of cryptic message. 

Sightings of BHRS have occurred from the mid 1940s to the present, with spikes in the 1970s and late 2010s. The majority of these have been written off as fiction (including all supposed sightings prior to 1945), hoaxes, or pranks; the consistent and easily-replicated wardrobe has ennobled generations of copycats.

Roswell Incident

The June 1947 crash of a high-altitude listening balloon associated with the USAF’s Project Mogul, which over the course of nearly 80 years has proven to be the single most effective piece of disinformation ever devised by human beings entirely by accident. You can tell people the truth, you can put all the evidence in front of them in 8 by 10 color glossy photos with circles and arrows on them, and they will downright refuse to believe that reality could possibly be that fucking boring.

Zhào Zhāo / 兆𬬿

“Graveyard sickle”; a monster (appearing alone or as a group) that occurs sporadically in Ming-dynasty gods-and-demons fiction. Described as a reclusive tribe of cannibal dwarfs from the southern uplands (modern Vietnam and Laos) who desecrate graves, attack travelers with darts covered in paralytic poison, and carve up their still-living victims with heavy iron sickles. While lurid, these narratives are repetitive and occasionally plagiarized, with the trope of the unlucky traveler realizing that their dumplings contain human flesh just before the trap is sprung being particularly rote. No evidence linking the Zhào Zhāo to a real-world cultural group has ever been found; the narratives themselves petered out around 1610 and the monster remained obscure until its inclusion in the 1986 Japanese RPG Tower of Lictor for the PC-88.

March Technologies

American defense contractor that made it big in the wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror. Weapons R&D, surveillance, AI development, private security. They have fingers in pies, irons in the fire, and a “Controversies” subheading on Wikipedia the length of a moderately-sized novel. 

Despite doing extremely well for themselves over the last two decades, the company has been showing signs of internal chaos in recent years. C-suite turnover is high, lawsuits are numerous, media scrutiny is high, shareholders are antsy, at least one high-cost classified project for the Air Force has been scuttled, and capping it off the CFO was assassinated in February 2025 and the head of marketing was incriminated on sex trafficking charges through his connection with Jeffrey Epstein in emails released in November of the same year. Public opinion, already at the bottom of the barrel, has managed to dig through the bottom and find a new barrel.

Book of Azathoth

Anonymous High German grimoire, written in Nuremberg during the late 17th century. Composed of three books:

• Book 1: Instructions on summoning various spirits of earthly / heavenly / infernal forces.
• Book 2: A treatise of alchemic principles, mathematics, and natural law.
• Book 3: A treatise on astrology and astronomy, including charts, tables, and observational data.

The author demonstrates vocal support of Copernicus and Galileo, and spends considerable time in Book 3 compiling a new method of divination for his bespoke heliocentric cosmos. Presaging the later development of the galactic model, the author supposes the existence of a central divine-motive force around which the sun orbits in conjunction with the other stars. This force, referred to interchangeably as “azoth”, “azathoth”, “azimuth” and “atziluth”, is claimed by the author to be the originator of both material and spiritual reality, and the engine by which it moves, changes, is destroyed, and renewed.

The Cornucopia House Killings

Quadruple homicide of the staff of a Maryland orphanage on February 5th, 2001. Emergency responders called to the scene by reports of a fire on the property found 19 nonverbal children, nightmarish conditions, and the bodies of four adults shot and thrown into the fire that consumed one of the buildings on the property. That the extreme abuse at Cornucopia House had flown under the radar of the Maryland DCS for years gave police and governmental officials good reason to minimize what they gave to the media, and so the full details of the case were not known by the public until over a decade later.

The initial police investigation was unable to identify or find the killers: all that could be said for certain was that there were multiple assailants, they had prepared for the attack beforehand, and they cleaned up after themselves. A car believed to have been used in the attack was found in the afternoon of Feb 6th, having been dumped into the Chesapeake, but this provided no further leads.

“The French Play”

A 2-act drama supposedly written in Paris during the 1890s, said to drive its readers, actors, and audience mad. Any further details of the characters and plot are vague and inconsistent, besides its placement in the royal court of a far-away and fantastic country,  decadence as both atmospheric feature and artistic style, and the presence of a central figure variously called “Golden Phantom”, “Dandelion King”, “Lord Midra” “Monarch of Masks”, “Aurelius Le’garde”, and similar appellations.

“Atlantean Minotaur” 

Skeleton of a highly-deformed male individual found on the island of Crete in 1923. Subject suffered from gigantism (likely as a symptom of Proteus Syndrome), alobar holoprosencephaly, and heavy cutaneous horn growth, and died at around 14-17 years of age. Skeleton found in a sealed underground chamber at palace site. Cell walls decorated with bull iconography. Trace organic compounds present, analyzed as fecal matter.

 

Verde Arrowhead Cave

A paleolithic site in Portugal, noteworthy for the presence of both homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis bones dated to approximately 54,000 years ago. Surviving cave paintings depict handprints, human figures, fauna, abstract shapes, and a single anomalous inclusion: a row of three triangles painted with a malachite-based green pigment.

Dog-Face

Low-quality photograph circulated as part of various creepypasta stories since 2005. Depicts a hunched figure with a skeletal, dog-like head. The figure’s mouth is open, and most associated pastas claim that it is smiling or laughing. While regarded as a hoax, it has resisted attempts to identify how it was made: the oldest version of the file displays no obvious artifacts of digital manipulation and is believed to be a scan of a physical photo.

 

1930–31 Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition

Disastrous geological survey mission, led by Dr. William Dyer and funded by the N. D. Pickman Foundation. Of the original 20 members (4 faculty, 7 graduate students, 9 mechanical support staff), 12 died after Dr. Thomas Lake split the party to pursue excavations at a secondary location. Survivors claimed that there had been signs of violence at the Lake campsite, though no bodies were recovered nor photographs taken to confirm.

Dr. Dyer dedicated the remainder of his life to unsuccessfully dissuading further expeditions to Antarctica, claiming to have seen a ruined city dominating a mountainous plateau in central East Antarctica;  the 1935 Starkweather-Moore Expedition performed two flyovers of the provided coordinates and found nothing. 

The Necronomicon

A Latin translation of a supposed Greek recension of Abdul al-Hadrat’s Kitab al-Layl, with a later partial English translation of the Latin by John Dee and a full translation of the Greek by Miskatonic University Press in 1938. The most famous grimoire in the world, beyond even the Ars Goetia, the Necronomicon has long been held by both occultists and the public alike as a madness-inducing lodestone of all that is evil in the cosmos.

This is, ultimately, an exaggeration born of absence. With so few manuscripts surviving, European occultists and church authorities filled the gap with an arms race of who could invent the more lurid and blasphemous secrets to slip between its covers. The only madness it is liable to produce would be born of the reader’s exasperation with its tedious bloviating and manic self-contradiction.

The rediscovery of a nearly-complete first-generation manuscript of the Kitab al-Layl in 2008 revealed that nearly nearly 80% of the Necronomicon was original material written centuries after al-Hadrat’s death, based on the Great Circle school of Byzantine occultism which was in many cases only lightly and spuriously based on the original text.

 

Abd al-Hadrat

The 1) pseudonymous 2) pseudopigraphic 3) wholly fictional 4) actual author of the Kitab al Layl. Credited with dozens of other texts and a life so full of portentous occult happenings that it would be a miracle if he had any time to eat, sleep or shit amongst it all. Also known as Abdul Hadrat, or the Latinized Alhazred.

Tsalal

Volcanic island located on the Balleny Hotspot south of Australia. At only 150 miles from the Antarctic coast, it is the southernmost location permanently inhabited by humans. The island’s volcanic soil and hot springs allow for an ecosystem density sufficient to sustain an estimated 800 individuals; the origin of the inhabitants is unknown, with the two leading hypotheses being that they are descended either from a Polynesian or Australian group.

The Tsalal-islanders have rebuffed all outsiders to the island with violence since the island’s discovery in 1828 by the Jane Guy; it is unclear if “Tsalal” is the indigenous word for the island, the people, the ground in general or “What?”, as the only source is the journal of Arthur Gordyn Pym and the eyewitness account of Dirk Peters.

The most recent cruise-by was made by a South Korean vessel on the way to Jang Bogo Station in 2022. Video taken by the crew and later leaked online showed a group of islanders armed with spears and bows emerging from the treeline. One member of the war party, wearing a masked turtleshell helmet and woven coconut-fiber robe, gained a moment of internet popularity (and a long conspiratorial tail) as “Spaceman”.

 

“Dagon”

A humpback whale encountered off the Newfoundland coast in 1836 by the whaler Marcus Green. If the crew’s accounts are accurate, it was potentially the largest member of its species ever observed. Named by the ship’s spotter, Jed Marsh, after the Mesopotamian deity commonly misidentified as a sea god up through the 1920s.

Stephen Alzis

New York nightclub owner, alleged antiquities smuggler and suspected kingpin of semi-apocryphal criminal organization “the Fate”. Shot and killed in 2002 by an unhoused man who believed him to be Satan. The NYT obituary described Alzis as “a peddler of human misery with a narcissist's insufferable charm, whose death will be celebrated by many and mourned by only a hypothetical few.”

 

Miskatonic University

A private liberal arts college in Arkham, Massachusetts. 2024 enrollment: 1049 students. Division-III basketball team with a record that would be hilarious were it not deeply pitiable. Possesses a not-unwarranted reputation as a dumping ground for cranks and failsons; has been pumping out / hiring spiritualists, theosophists, and UFO cultists since the Second Great Awakening and onwards.

Founded in 1741 as the Arkham Presbyterian Seminary, granted a charter as Arkham College in 1785, changed name to College of the Miskatonic in 1803 and finally  became Miskatonic University in 1849. Closed the medical school and sold off most of the infamous “special collection” in 1968 to cover mounting debts.

 

Pentacanthus protomegas (Yéye)

Extremely well-preserved fossil remains of an enormous Cambrian-era echinoderm, unearthed from the Maotianshan Shales in 2014 and overturning the evolutionary history of Earth ever since. Affectionately nicknamed Yéye (“grandpa”) by the research team, pentacanthus possessed a long, cylindrical body with five-fold radial symmetry. Pronounced ridges (the source of its genus name) ran the length of the body, each serving as anchorpoint for a long, winglike fin used for locomotion and terminating in five short tentacles around the mouth opening (each outfitted with a complex and well-developed eye) and five longer tentacles at the posterior end. At over two meters in length (and nearly double that with the tentacles included), Yéye would have been the largest organism on Earth when it was alive, and is believed to have been a suspension feeder similar to the radiodont Aegirocassis.

 

 **

 

I didn't intend for 2025 to turn into the Year of Lovecraft, but turn it did. As frustrating as I find so much of the source material, the remixing is consistently very fun. "Shit makes for good fertilizer" proves itself a reliable truism once again. Special thanks to friend of the blog MysterySpice for pointing out the al-Hadrat replacement for al-Hazred, which turns our beloved ur-occultist from a nonsense name to "servant of the presences" and that's a fucking winner right there.

Also worth shouting out at the end is this post I found linked in a Deep Cuts review, about how HPL and REH built on Machen and off of each other in their stories about prehistoric little folk, which gave us the Tcho-Tcho via Derleth and Schorer. Never have I been more glad that Tolkien hijacked an entire concept so completely than with hobbits: what came before was fucking dire. 

The next post is well under way, and will be incorporating some non-Mythos but thematically appropriate material. Stay tuned.