kent_allard_jr (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kent_allard_jr) wrote2010-09-17 11:51 am
kent_allard_jr) wrote2010-09-17 11:51 am
Sword & Sorcery Monsters in Weird Tales
As I've said many times, I've always been more interested in myth and legend than in contemporary fantasy, and this was true when I discovered D&D as a kid. So the book that most excited me was Deities and Demigods. That book was my introduction to the Cthulhu Mythos (as well as "Melnibonean" and "Newhon"), but it presented the material out of its original context. The Erol Otus artwork suggested, as you would expect with a D&D supplement, that Lovecraft's stories took place in a standard Medieval setting with castles and princesses and the rest of it. It presented the mind-boggling prospect of a Cleric of Cthulhu, armed with mace, shield and chainmail, marching into the dragon's lair with a standard D&D party, no different from any other evil cleric except that he can't say his god's name and he sacrifices virgins in his off-hours.
Lately I've been reading short stories of Clark Ashton Smith and CL Moore, part of my research into pulp heroic fantasy. The odd thing is, their "Medieval romances" resemble that hypothetical D&D pretty well. The monsters are Lovecraftian, with little resemblance to creatures of myth or legend, and pagan priests are presented as sinister and bloody-minded. As I recall this was also the case with the Conan stories I read as a teenager. I expected this from Smith, a horror specialist who (like Howard) was a frequent Lovecraft correspondent, but I was surprised to find it in CL Moore's Jilel of Joiry stories.
I don't know where this taste for tentacled blobs comes from (Hodgson? Merritt? Burroughs?), but it's interesting to see a very different approach from Tolkien when it came to the forces of darkness and evil. Ideally, I'd say, you should follow one or the other if you want a consistent atmosphere.
Lately I've been reading short stories of Clark Ashton Smith and CL Moore, part of my research into pulp heroic fantasy. The odd thing is, their "Medieval romances" resemble that hypothetical D&D pretty well. The monsters are Lovecraftian, with little resemblance to creatures of myth or legend, and pagan priests are presented as sinister and bloody-minded. As I recall this was also the case with the Conan stories I read as a teenager. I expected this from Smith, a horror specialist who (like Howard) was a frequent Lovecraft correspondent, but I was surprised to find it in CL Moore's Jilel of Joiry stories.I don't know where this taste for tentacled blobs comes from (Hodgson? Merritt? Burroughs?), but it's interesting to see a very different approach from Tolkien when it came to the forces of darkness and evil. Ideally, I'd say, you should follow one or the other if you want a consistent atmosphere.
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And remember that even Morgoth was intimidated by Ungoliant? Tolkien really did not like spiders ... wonder if he'd ever heard of Clark Ashton Smith's Atlach-Nacha?
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Good point!
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Just tossing in a comment: We had an interesting review recently of a Lovecraftian novel, Mall of Cthulhu; the reviewer pointed out that almost all of the horrors of the novel except the big baddie at the end were very non-Lovecraftian--demons and vampires succubusses and other Christian monsters. What was particularly jarring is that Christian monsters should, properly, exist as moral stains on a moral universe, whereas Cthuhlu emphatically does not.
Also, recall that Moore was initially writing in Weird Tales, and a lot of her work there, especially Northwest Smith, reads like a mashup of Lovecraft, Howard, Smith, and pre-Golden Age space adventure. Of course, the Weird Tales tradition is the polar opposite of Tolkien.
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Darn. Fixed.