R'lyeh

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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

R'lyeh[1] is a fictional city that first appeared in the writings of 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 architecture is characterized by its non-Euclidean geometry.[2] Because of the portrayal of the picture of the gorgon in "Medusa's Coil" some suppose that R'lyeh has an attribute that allows those inside to breathe underwater. Others discredit this, saying that it was merely the gorgon herself that could achieve this, or otherwise that it was merely a painting and not a reflection of actual events.

Contents

[edit] Description

[T]he nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh ... was built in measureless aeons 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 fiction, 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".[3]

[edit] Location

Lovecraft said that R'lyeh is located at 47°9′S, 126°43′W in the southern Pacific Ocean.[4] August Derleth, however, placed R'lyeh at 49°51′S, 128°34′W in his own writings.[5] Both locations are close to the Pacific pole of inaccessibility, the point in the ocean farthest from any land. Derleth's coordinates place the city approximately 5100 nautical miles (5900 statute miles or 9500 kilometers), or about ten days journey for a fast ship, from Pohnpei (Ponape), an actual island of the area. Ponape also plays a part in the Cthulhu Mythos as the place where the "Ponape Scripture", a text describing Cthulhu, was found.

In summer 1997, the U. S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s autonomous hydrophone array in the Equatorial Pacific Ocean repeatedly recorded a peculiar sound of a nature suggesting its biological origin. Yet, the sound’s amplitude was too large to be produced by any known animal species, and its source remains a mystery. According to NOAA, the readings yield a general location of the sound’s source “near 50° S 100° W”. The sound was given the name “Bloop”.

Charles Stross's novella 'A Colder War' implicitly locates R'lyeh in the Baltic Sea: it describes Cthulhu as being "scraped from a nest in the drowned wreckage of a city on the Baltic floor" [1]. This is presumably because a Baltic location was more convenient for Stross's plot.

[edit] Other appearances

  • Twice in Worms of the Earth, a Bran Mak Morn tale by Robert E. Howard mention is made of the "black gods of R'lyeh". Lovecraft was a friend and correspondent of Howard and their works are littered with references to each other's creations.
  • In Shadow Hearts: Covenant, one of the forbidden documents is called the R'lyeh Text and explains how to summon an alien being akin to a god. However, this is a continuity error, since in Shadow Hearts this document was called the Codex of Lurie.
  • The Cradle of Filth song "English Fire" from their Nymphetamine album refers to R'lyeh as one of four prophetic cities of olden times.
  • The Vision Bleak song "Kutulu!" * Carpathia - A Dramatic Poem is also a tribute to Lovecraft's story. See [2]
  • In Roger Zelazny's short story, "24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai", the main character has a dream in which she encounters a temple inhabited by priests of "Old Gods", whose intent is to raise the city of R'lyeh from the depths. She also finds a cat, which she names R'lyeh.
The description of the sunken alien city T'leth in the game X-COM: Terror from the Deep.
The description of the sunken alien city T'leth in the game X-COM: Terror from the Deep.
  • Progressive metal band Adagio has a song called "R'Lyeh the Dead" on their 2006 album Dominate.
  • The computer game X-COM: Terror from the Deep features, as its climactic final mission, an assault on the alien city of T'leth. The description of the city, shown in the screenshot to the right, has several commonalities with R'lyeh, including a powerful alien who resides in the city, neither alive nor dead, but "sleeping".

[edit] References

  • Derleth, August [1952] (2000). "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., Oakland, CA: Chaosium, p. 255. ISBN 1-56882-119-0. 
  • Lovecraft, Howard P. [1928] (1984). "The Call of Cthulhu", in S. T. Joshi (ed.): The Dunwich Horror and Others, 9th corrected printing, Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN 0-87054-037-8.  Definitive version.
  • Pearsall, Anthony B. (2005). The Lovecraft Lexicon, 1st ed., Tempe, AZ: New Falcon. ISBN 1-56184-129-3. 

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ On the non-canonical CD A Shoggoth on the Roof, R'lyeh is pronounced /ˈɹu.li.a/ or /ɹɪl.ˈai.ɛ/.
  2. ^ 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.)
  3. ^ Pearsall, "R'lyeh", The Lovecraft Lexicon, p. 345.
  4. ^ Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu", The Dunwich Horror and Others, p. 150.
  5. ^ Derleth, "The Black Island", Quest for Cthulhu, p. 426.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../r/27/l/R%27lyeh.html"