Talk:Elder Thing

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The article is mistitled. It should be "The Old Ones," since the term "Elder Things" refers to the flying polyps.

In At the Mountains of Madness, the term "Elder Things" is clearly used synonymously with "Old Ones". In the story, Mr. Lake relates: "Dyer and Pabodie have read Necronomicon ... and will understand when I speak of Elder Things supposed to have created all earth life as jest or mistake". This sounds like Old Ones to me. SpectrumDT 20:55, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

Forgive me if I'm way off base here but in the Library of America edition the star headed Antartic dwellers of 'At the Mountains of Madness' are referred to, almost without exception, as "the Old Ones" and the strange imprisoned horrors of 'Shadow out of Time' are referred to as Elder Things (as are lots of other things around the stories). But in the mention of the star-headed beings 'In Shadow out of time' they are again specifically called 'the Old Ones'. It's all a bit confusing, but star-headed winged beings from Antarctica are distinctly "the Old Ones" by sheer weight of usage as far as I've seen. MuJoCh 22:55, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] first alien race to come to earth?

This article states the Elder Things where the first alien race to came to earth, and that they arrived during the Cambrian, which began 542 MYA - but the article on the Flying Polyps says they arrived 750 MYA. So who did Lovecraft actually say got here first, the polyps or the elder thingies? --Krsont 22:41, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

• I corrected the factoid (now reads "one billion years ago") using a verifiable source — namely, the timeline at the back of Harms' 'Pedia. I also changed the link to the most likely geological era.
  
  It is worth noting that the aforementioned timeline updates Lovecraft's dating method, because at the time that HPL wrote his stories (pre-1940) the scientific community believed that the world was much younger.
  ,-~^R'lyehRising~-, 03:39, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Lovecraft doesn't actually say which came first - the flying polyps aren't mentioned at all in "Mountains of Madness" and the elder things only get a couple throwaway references in "Shadow out of Time". But if the Elder Things create the precursors of earth life, they're probably earlier than the polyps (Lovecraft says 600 mya, which is late Archaean to him, probably circa 2 billion years ago in real time). Vultur 02:07, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Old Ones / Old One / Elder Thing

On the Old Ones (plural) page I have posted a recommendation to change it so that instead of redirecting straight to this page (Elder Thing) it would provide links to both this page and the Old One (singular) page. The rationale is that the term Old One/Old Ones has more meanings than Elder Thing. These other meanings are currently described in the Old One page. For example, both singular and plural Old Ones appear throughout Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series. It doesn't seem to make sense to try to cover the gap by adding a link from this page (Elder Thing) to the Old One page, so instead I'm posting this note. Salliesatt 16:42, 14 February 2007 (UTC)