R'lyeh

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

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

Contents 1 Description 2 Location 3 Other appearances 4 Footnotes 5 References

[edit] Description

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

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

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

In Lovecraft's 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".^[4]

[edit] Location

Lovecraft said that R'lyeh is located at 47°9′S, 126°43′W in the southern Pacific Ocean.^[5] August Derleth, however, placed R'lyeh at 49°51′S, 128°34′W in his own writings.^[6] 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 the real island of Pohnpei (Ponape). Ponape also plays a part in the Cthulhu Mythos as the place where the "Ponape Scripture", a text describing Cthulhu, was found.

Charles Stross's novella 'A Colder War' implicitly locates R'lyeh in the Baltic Sea: it describes Cthulhu as being "scraped from a nest in the drowned wreckage of a city on the Baltic floor".^[7]

[edit] Other appearances

• The 1994 Doctor Who New Adventures novel All-Consuming Fire by Andy Lane features many elements inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos. Much of the action takes place on the planet "Ry'leh".

• It's mentioned in the 1st Edition of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons rulebook Deities & Demigods, that any mortal seeing R'lyeh instantly becomes insane because of its unearthly construction.

• Robert E. Howard's Worms of the Earth mentions the "black gods of R'lyeh". Lovecraft was a friend and correspondent of Howard and their works are littered with references to each other's creations.

• In Brian Lumley's Titus Crow novels, three psychics attempt to locate R'lyeh psionically and are driven mad when they make contact with Cthulhu.

• R'lyeh appears as a playable underwater nation in the turn-based strategy game Dominions II: The Ascension Wars and its sequel, Dominions 3: The Awakening.

• The Cradle of Filth song "English Fire" from their Nymphetamine album refers to R'lyeh as one of four prophetic cities of olden times. Also in "Mother of Abominations" the intro begins with Doug Bradley's chants of "Ia! Ia! Kutulhu Fhtagn!"

• The Vision Bleak song "Kutulu!" * Carpathia - A Dramatic Poem is also a tribute to Lovecraft's story.^[8]

• Jack Kerouac witnesses the rising of R'lyeh from the sea and goes on the road with Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs to save the world from Cthulhu, in Nick Mamatas's novel Move Under Ground (2004).

• 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.

• In Charles Stross's novella 'A Colder War', R'lyeh is found by Nazi scientists during World War II; after the war, Soviet scientists recover the not-dead-but-dreaming Cthulhu to use as the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, under the name Project Koschei, as a deterrent against the west - a rather extreme form of mutually assured destruction.

• Progressive metal band Adagio has a song called "R'Lyeh the Dead" on their 2006 album Dominate.

• Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab has a perfume called "R'lyeh" in its "A Picnic in Arkham" collection.

• In To Mars and Providence, R'lyeh is located under Syrtis Major on Mars, and it is its discovery which shocks the Martians into launching their invasion of Earth.

• In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, R'lyeh is mentioned as having been discovered off the coast of New Zealand in 1926 (the publishing year of "The Call of Cthulhu").

• In the depths of R'lyeh is a song by the funeral doom band Catacombs^{[citation needed]}.

• In Hohlbein's Der Sohn des Hexers(The Sorcerer's Son) R'lyeh, including a black pyramid that contains Cthulu's tomb, was located near an English coastline at 'the end of time', in a separated timeline only reachable with a time machine.

[edit] Footnotes

[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. 

• Schweitzer, Darrell (ed.) (2001). Discovering H. P. Lovecraft. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press.