19 Although W. Paul Cook (In Memoriam: Howard Phillips Lovecraft [1941; LR 129]) claimed that HPL derived the name Sentinel Hill from a landmark in Athol, Massachusetts, there does not seem to be an actual place of this name in Athol; but there is a farm called Sentinel Elm Farm, and this is probably the source of the name. The topographical source for Sentinel Hill is probably Wilbraham Mountain near Wilbraham, Massachusetts.
20 The Pocumtucs are one of the seven aboriginal Indian tribes of Massachusetts. They settled the entire Connecticut River Valley, and their chief settlement was near the present-day town of Deerfield in north-central Massachusetts.
21 It is not certain where HPL got the name Whateley. There is a small town in northwestern Massachusetts named Whately, and it is not far from the Mohawk Trail, which HPL traversed on a number of occasions, including the summer of 1928.
22 February 2. In Christian theology, Candlemas commemorates the presentation of Christ in the Temple. This is the first of many mentions of Christian feast days in this story, but some of these also correspond to the four important celebrations of the Witches’ Sabbath: Candlemas, May-Eve (April 30), Lammas (August 1), and Hallowe’en (October 31). The most significant of these were May-Eve and Hallowe’en. These latter two festivals have their origin in primitive times, specifically in certain rituals of the Celtic tribes.
23 Perhaps an echo of Salem Village (now Danvers), where the Salem witch trials actually took place. See n. 12 to “Pickman’s Model.”
24 A term formerly used for two distinct breeds of dairy cattle, Jersey and Guernsey, originally raised on the Channel Islands off the southeast coast of England. Guernseys were first imported to the United States in 1830, Jerseys in 1850.
25 Cf. Anthony M. Rud, “Ooze” (Weird Tales, March 1923; rpt. January 1952): “. . . Rori had furnished certain indispensables in way of food to the Cranmer household. At first, these salable articles had been exclusively vegetable—white and yellow turnip, sweet potatoes, corn and beans—but later, meat! Yes, meat especially—whole lambs, slaughtered and quartered, the coarsest variety of piney-woods pork and beef, all in immense quantity!” (p. 255).
26 October 31; sometimes referred to as All Hallow’s Eve, the evening preceding the Feast of All Saints (Hallowmass). As noted earlier (n. 22), Hal lowe’en and May-Eve are the two great festivals of the Witches’ Sabbath.
27 HPL had himself engaged in this activity when staying with his friend Vrest Orton in Vermont in June 1928: “I have learned how to build a wood fire, & have helped the neighbours’ boys round up a straying cow” (HPL to Lillian D. Clark, [June 12, 1928]; ms., JHL).
28 See n. 115 to The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. This tale is the only one in HPL’s oeuvre in which Yog-Sothoth figures prominently; in other tales he is only mentioned in passing.
29 April 30, the evening before May Day. The day was also known in Germany as Walpurgisnacht (“the night of St. Walpurga”), and is so mentioned by HPL in “The Horror at Red Hook” (1925), “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1932), and other stories.
30 In the summer of 1917, when the United States declared war on Germany, development camps were established across the country to train soldiers for war duty. Recall HPL’s own rejection for army service during World War I (n. 12 to “The Thing on the Doorstep”).
31 Mythical newspaper; first cited here, then in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930) and At the Mountains of Madness (p. 248). In “The Colour Out of Space” an Arkham Gazette is cited, evidently a newspaper of earlier date.
32 Properly, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; founded in 1866. The first such society was founded in England in 1824.
33 Mythical. The name seems derived from Coldbrook Springs, a small town in central Massachusetts, or perhaps from Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, the site of a celebrated laboratory devoted to genetics and eugenics.
34 August 1. Its origin and significance in Christian theology are debated: it refers either to the consecration of bread made from first-ripe grain at Mass or to the tribute of lambs at Mass.
35 A common New England name, as in the Houghton Library at Harvard (see n. 36) and the Boston publishing firm Houghton Mifflin. Burleson points out that there was a Houghton’s Block in Athol.
36 HPL has cited several of the most important libraries in the world in this list. The Widener Library (built 1913-15) was in 1928 both the main and the rare book library of Harvard University (the Houghton Library now houses rare books and manuscripts). The Bibliothèque Nationale is the national library of France, as the British Museum in London (now called the British Library) is one of the national libraries of England, where all books published in France and England, respectively, must be sent for registration of copyright. It is not clear why HPL selected the University of Buenos Ayres (archaic spelling of Aires), whose exact name is the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires. Its library was not notable at the time, even among South American countries; however, the Biblioteca Nacional de Argentina, the country’s national library, was a noteworthy institution.
37 The Necronomicon is the most celebrated mythical book invented by HPL. It was first cited by name in “The Hound” (1922); Abdul Alhazred was first mentioned in “The Nameless City” (1921). In “History of the Necronomicon” (1927; MW) HPL provides a tongue-in-cheek history of the volume. In that essay he makes the mistake of dating Olaus Wormius’s Latin translation to 1228, when in fact Wormius (Ole Worm, 1588-1654) was a Danish doctor and scientist who lived in the seventeenth century and wrote treatises on Danish antiquities, medicine, and the philosopher’s stone. HPL’s error derives from an erroneous interpretation of a discussion of Wormius in Hugh Blair’s Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763). See S. T. Joshi, “Lovecraft, Regner Lodbrog, and Olaus Wormius,” Crypt of Cthulhu No. 89 (Eastertide 1995): 3-7.
38 Dee’s English translation of the Necronomicon had been invented by Frank Belknap Long in “The Space-Eaters” (Weird Tales, July 1928), where it was cited as an epigraph (omitted in many reprints of the story). Long was working on the tale around September 1927 (see SL 2.171-72), and HPL had read the story in manuscript no later than January 1928 (SL 2.217). John Dee (1527-1608) was an English mathematician and astrologer who for a time was physician to Queen Elizabeth I. In later life he engaged extensively in necromancy, claiming to have discovered the philosopher’s stone and to have raised spirits from the dead.
39 The following passage is the most extensive excerpt from the Necronomicon to be found in HPL’s work. Indeed, aside from the “unexplainable couplet” (“That is not dead which can eternal lie, / And with strange aeons even death may die”) first cited in “The Nameless City” and a prose passage cited at the end of “The Festival” (1923), HPL provides no actual quotations from the Necronomicon.
40 This conception goes back to Greco-Roman and other early mytholo gies. Cf. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath: “It is known that in disguise the younger among the Great Ones often espouse the daughters of men, so that around the borders of the cold waste wherein stands Kadath the peasants must all bear their blood. This being so, the way to find that waste must be to see the stone face on Ngranek and mark the features; then, having noted them with care, to search for such features among living men” (MM 313).
41 Kadath was first cited in “The Other Gods” (1921), and appears there to be a mountain in some unspecified locale in the dim prehistory of the earth. It is said that the gods have gone there after having abandoned Mt. Ngranek and “suffer no man to tell that he hath looked upon them” (D 127). Cf. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath: “It was lucky that no man knew where Kadath towers, for the fruits of ascending it would be very grave” (MM 312). The generally oracular and rhetorical tone of the passage may derive from Lord Dunsany: “Some say that the Worlds and the Suns are but the echoes of the drumming of Skarl, and others say that they may be dreams that arise in the mind of MANA because of the drumming of Skarl, as one may dream whose rest is troubled by the s
ound of song, but none knoweth, for who hath heard the voice of MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI, or who hath seen his drummer?” The Gods of Pegana (1905), in The Complete Pegana, p. 8.
42 The extraterrestrial entity introduced in “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926).
43 This utterance first appears, of all places, in HPL’s revision of a story by Adolphe de Castro, “The Last Test” (1927; HM). Later Shub-Niggurath becomes a sort of fertility goddess, and in a late letter HPL declares somewhat whimsically: “Yog-Sothoth’s wife is the hellish cloud-like entity Shub-Niggurath, in whose honour nameless cults hold the rite of the Goat with a Thousand Young” (SL 5.303). The name is probably derived from Sheol Nugganoth, a god mentioned in Dunsany’s “Idle Days on the Yann,” in The Complete Pegana, p. 201.
44 A parody of Jesus’ sermon on the mount: “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:20).
45 The reference is to “The Great God Pan,” a novelette by Arthur Machen (1863-1947) first published in The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (1894) and a significant influence upon “The Dunwich Horror.” HPL owned Machen’s The House of Souls (1906; rpt. 1923), which contained the story.
46 Roodmas: May 3; more commonly termed Holy-Rood Day. In Christian theology, it commemorates the Invention (i.e., finding) of the Cross.
47 That is, the autumn equinox, September 21.
48 As Burleson has pointed out, the names Rice and Morgan are significantly linked in the history of Athol. An H. H. Rice sold the mill power in the town to the Morgan Memorial in the nineteenth century. A Stephen Rice is mentioned in “The Colour Out of Space” (see CC 178).
49 HPL may have derived the notion of a diary from Arthur Machen’s “The White People” (in The House of Souls [1906]), in which a little girl keeps a “Green Book” in which she unwittingly recounts her nurse’s inculcation of her into the witch cult.
50 The name is perhaps derived from Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s play, Giles Corey, Yeoman (1893), about the Salem witchcraft. HPL read the play in 1924 (see SL 1.360).
51 The following New England backwoods dialect is first found in “The Picture in the House” (1920) and is used at great length in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931). It is not clear where and how HPL evolved this dialect. In 1929 he wrote in a letter: “As for Yankee farmers—oddly enough, I haven’t noticed that the majority talk any differently from myself; so that I’ve never regarded them as a separate class to whom one must use a special dialect. If I were to say, ‘Mornin’, Zeke, haow ye be?’ to anybody along the road during my numerous summer walks, I fancy I’d receive an icy stare in return—or perhaps a puzzled inquiry as to what theatrical troupe I had wandered out of!” (SL 2.306). When in Vermont in the summer of 1928, however, HPL wrote to his aunt: “Whether you believe it or not, the rustics hereabouts actually say ‘caow’, ‘daown’, ‘araound’, &c.—& employ in daily speech a thousand colourful country-idioms which we know only in literature” (HPL to Lillian D. Clark, June 19, 1928; ms., JHL). Jason C. Eckhardt has plausibly conjectured that HPL derived this dialect in part from a series of poems by James Russell Lowell, The Biglow Papers (1848-62). See Eckhardt’s “The Cosmic Yankee,” in An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft, ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991), pp. 89-90.
52 Cf. Algernon Blackwood’s “The Wendigo”: “. . . before he had gone a quarter of a mile he came across the tracks of a large animal in the snow, and beside it the light and smaller tracks of what were beyond question human feet—the feet of Défago. The relief he at once experienced was natural, though brief; for at first sight he saw in these tracks a simple explanation of the whole matter: these big marks had surely been left by a bull moose that, wind against it, had blundered upon the camp, and uttered its singular cry of warning and alarm the moment its mistake was apparent. . . . [But] now that he examined them closer, these were not the tracks of a moose at all! . . . these were wholly different. They were big, round, ample, and with no pointed outline as of sharp hoofs. . . . And, stooping down to examine the marks more closely, he caught a faint whiff of that sweet yet pungent odour that made him instantly straighten up again, fighting a sensation almost of nausea.” The Lost Valley and Other Stories (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1910), pp. 101-2.
53 Edith Miniter and Evanore Beebe had a hired boy named Chauncey (last name unknown). See HPL’s “Mrs. Miniter: Estimates and Recollections” (MW 479).
54 There actually is a site called the Bear’s Den near North New Salem, Massachusetts, and HPL’s subsequent description of it is quite accurate. He saw it in the summer of 1928, and describes it as follows in a letter: “On Thursday evening [June 28] [H. Warner] Munn came down to dinner in his Essex Roadster & afterward took [W. Paul] Cook & me on a trip to one of the finest scenic spots I have ever seen—Bear’s Den, in the woods southwest of Athol. There is a deep forest gorge there; approached dramatically from a rising path ending in a cleft boulder, & containing a magnificent terraced waterfall over the sheer bed-rock. Above the tumbling stream rise high rock precipicas crusted with strange lichens & honeycombed with alluring caves. Of the latter several extend far into the hillside, though too narrowly to admit a human being beyond a few yards. I entered the largest specimen—it being the first time I was ever in a real cave, notwithstanding the vast amount I have written concerning such things” (HPL to Lillian D. Clark, July 1, 1928; ms., JHL). Donald R. Burleson rediscovered the site.
55 Mythical. In HPL’s day the Boston Transcript was one of the best-known papers in the country. HPL’s friend W. Paul Cook worked for many years for the Athol Transcript.
56 The news agency was founded in 1848.
57 In 1928 there were only 16.3 telephones per 100 people in the United States, and even this was a much higher rate than in other parts of the world. Party lines were the earliest type of telephone system, in which two or more telephones were connected to a single telephone line. They were common in rural areas but by no means restricted to them at this time; many working-class families in large cities also used them because of the expense of installing private lines, which required one or more switching stations. As late as 1950, 3 out of 4 residence telephones in the U.S. were party lines. See John Brooks, Telephone: The First Hundred Years (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 267.
58 Cf. Anthony M. Rud, “Ooze” (n. 25): “Far more interesting were the traces of violence apparent on wall and what once had been a house. The latter seemed to have been ripped from its foundations by a giant hand, crushed out of semblance to a dwelling, and then cast in fragments about the base of wall—mainly on the south side, where heaps of twisted, broken timbers lay in profusion. On the opposite side there had been such heaps once, but now only charred sticks, coated with that gray-black, omnipresent coat of desiccation, remained . . . no sign whatever of human remains was discovered” (p. 253).
59 Probably a reference to the Kufic script, a formal and decorative script used throughout the Arab-speaking world (not only in Mesopotamia) from the eighth to the twelfth centuries C.E. Mesopotamia had been conquered by the Muslims by 641, who ruled there until they were driven out by the Mongols in 1258.
60 These authors and titles are all cited, in this order, in the entry on “Cryptography” by John Eglinton Bailey in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which HPL owned. The Polygraphia of Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516) was first published in Latin in 1518 and translated into French in 1561. The treatise concerns kabbalistic writing. De Furtivis Literarum Notis, a work on ciphers by Giovanni Bat tista della Porta (1535?-1615), was first published in 1563. Traicté des Chifferes ou Secrètes d’Escrire by Blaise de Vigenère (1523-1596) was first published in 1586. Cryptomenysis Patefacta; or, The Art of Secret Information Disclosed without a Key by John Falconer was first published in 1685. An Essay on the Art of Decyphering by John Davys (1678-1724) was published in 1737. Philip Thicknesse (1719-1792) published A Treatise on the Art of Decypherin
g and of Writing in Cypher in 1772. William Blair wrote a lengthy article on “Cipher” for Abraham Rees’s Cyclopaedia (1819). G. von Marten published Cours diplomatique in 1801 (4th ed. 1851). The Kryptographik of Johann Ludwig Klüber (1762-1837) dates to 1809. On the subject of cryptography, see Donald R. Burleson, “Lovecraft and the World as Cryptogram,” Lovecraft Studies No. 16 (Spring 1988): 14-18.
61 A term found in Arthur Machen’s “The White People” (see n. 49). The little girl’s diary states at one point: “I must not write down the real names of the days and months which I found out a year ago, nor the way to make the Aklo letters, or the Chian language, or the great beautiful Circles, nor the Mao Games, nor the chief songs” (Tales of Horror and the Supernatural [New York: Knopf, 1948], p. 125). No further elucidation of this term is offered, and Machen clearly intends it (as does HPL) to suggest something occult and inexplicable.
62 A Hebrew word retained untranslated in the New Testament, meaning “The Lord of Hosts”; later it erroneously became a variant spelling of “Sabbath,” the Lord’s day. Here it means any day reserved for a religious ritual.
63 Another term (also unexplained) derived from Machen’s “The White People”: “It was all so still and silent, and the sky was heavy and grey and sad, like a wicked voorish dome in Deep Dendo” (Tales of Horror and the Supernatural, p. 127).