Some Famous Ghosts of Literature

I'd forgotten all about this ghostly article by legendary Melbourne book dealer and Penny Bloods collector, John P. Quaine. It also appeared in The Argus, in January 1938, and mentions Roy Bridges' A Mirror of Silver at the end.

SOME FAMOUS GHOSTS OF LITERATURE
Queer Tales of Witches, Vampires, Ghouls, Banshees, -and Doppel-gangers

"Like one that on a lonesome road doth
walk in fear and dread,
And, having once looked round, goes
on and turns no more his head,
Because he knows a frightful fiend
doth close behind him tread!"

It is no use any longer disguising the unwelcome truth that we are living in an age of terror. I am not alluding to any of the numerous political and social worries over which the world weeps at present, but to another and (from the bookman's point of view) more unwholesome development.

Leering at us from every bookstall to-day is a bewildering array of ephemera devoted solely to alleged tales of terror, horror, and associated frightfulness. In every case the coloured wrapper is garnished with the portrayal of a fear smitten maiden in the clutches of a ghoul-like creature busily engaged in putting her to death by some unimaginable method of maltreatment.
It is only just to mention that the terror goes no further than the wrapper. The "nerve-jolting tales" describe the menace of unearthly love-makers. Usually the heroine takes a midnight stroll through a lonely, forest, crosses a glade, and encounters a select company of the "undead dead" dancing merrily on the moon-kissed sward. She discovers, of course, that they are not nice people to know.

These tales, so unutterably wearying in their straining after thrills, add nothing to the world's ghost-lore, and they are merely conducive to profanity. Students of the uncanny in literature positively refuse to enthuse over the antics of corybantic cadavers.

No simple scribbler can write a readable ghost story. Like an effective painting, it has to be the work of an artist. Surrealism in the field of the phantom is out of place. The Rev. Montague Summers, the world's greatest authority on terrific literature, avers that only those who believe in ghosts can write about them properly.

This is a somewhat debatable point. H. G. Wells and other writers who scout the idea of supernaturalism have produced some excellent ghost stories. The authors of such narratives, like the ever increasing army of people who collect them, are men and women of all shades of belief - or none at all. The ghost story enthusiasts, whether they believe in veritable psychic phenomena and are familiar with the activities of the doppel-ganger, polter-geist, wraith, or revenant, or, on the other hand, laugh at such manifestations as subjective hallucination ("plain hooey," in modern American), are united in their appreciation of the story-as a story.

So we of the Bug and Goblin Brother-hood are not concerned with the truth or falsity of any of the choice items we prize. Allegedly true accounts like Dale Owen's "Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World," Mrs. Crowe's "Night Side of Nature" (a classic of legendary lore), or the scores of purely propagandist volumes issued from the era of the "Rochester Rappings" down to our own time find room on our shelves alongside such avowedly imaginary tales as Stevenson's "Body-snatcher" or Bram Stoker's "Dracula."

Now the collecting of ghost stories does not mean cramming our shelves with everything relating to the debatable land. Were it so, even the most modest collection would more than fill our Public Library. Only the very rare volumes or those produced by master hands are worth shelving, and the innumerable stereotyped tales of benignant or malignant phantoms gliding through dismal corridors may be classed with the modern ephemeral literature already alluded to.

The very air breathed by the specialist in supernatural lore is impregnated with warlocks, witches, vampires, ghouls, boggles, trolls, leprechauns, and banshees.

The orthodox spectre, with warning finger uplifted, plays only a small part in the great ghastly drama displayed before the mental optics of the occult student.

Of all the terrifying performers in these supernormal romances the vampire is universally regarded as first favourite. The vampire was rare in English literature before the beginning of the 19th century. On the Continent of Europe, of course, he was always a commonplace. Then Byron introduced us to one in his "Giaour"; Southey had another in his poem "Thalaba," but there was nothing in prose form until Byron's slight fragment, upon which Dr. Polidori based his gruesome story, so long attributed to Byron himself. This tale, it will be recalled, was, like Mrs. Shelley's much abused "Frankenstein," the result of that famous gathering at Geneva in 1816.

I am sure Coleridge's "Christabel" would have been a very fine vampire story, but just as we are beginning to appreciate the lovely Lady Geraldine the poet stops dead and refuses to finish the narration. It remained for the father of all modern phantastic stories, Le Fanu, to finish the adventures of the sprightly lady. His tale "Carmilla" seems built upon Coleridge's fragment, combining the dreadful terrors of Prest's "Varney the Vampire or the Banquet of Blood" with the eerie suggestiveness of "Christabel." The more modern "Dracula" is only an enlargement of "Carmilla," with sundry additional horrors thrown in.

Le Fanu, curiously enough, was neglected for many years; you will search the pages of encyclopaedias and bibliographical dictionaries in vain for any reference to him. With the exception of a memoir in the "Dictionary of National Biography" he was ignored until recently, but now at last he is coming into his own.

He is the great master in the field of fear. Just a century ago he began his "Purcell Papers" in the "Dublin University Magazine" (a periodical which seems to have specialised in fierce stories), entitling the first of them "The Ghost and the Bone-setter." He never relied on impressive titles for his pieces; neither did he open up with "a wild scream of horror," but in the old-fashioned manner of his era he led up gradually to the terrible denouement, investing the narrative with an atmosphere of dread. Even his long detailed accounts of adjacent scenery hinted at inevitable infernal atrocity; his forest foliage breathed anathema; like the mysterious tree in Thomas Hood's "Dream" there were

"A crouching satyr luring here, and there a
goblin grim,
As staring lull of demon life as Gothic
sculptor's whim."

Le Fanu admirers here and abroad are still engaged In identifying his unsigned fragments which appeared in various publications. The list is not complete, but we are hopeful that eventually some-thing like a collected edition of his works will be published.

Besides the many ghost stories which rely on sheer horror for their sensation there are the hundreds of humorous supernatural narratives which abounded in old-time periodicals. These, as long as they do not end with a natural explanation of the phenomena (which renders a ghost story null and void In the eyes of the cult), are added to the collector's bag. Thus Ingoldsby's "Spectre of Tapplington" (a prose piece apart from the "Legends"), Samuel Lover's "Stories and Legends of Ireland" (all pure burlesque), and other note-worthy works which have embodied tales of the supernatural, humorously illustrated, are allowable in a ghost collection.

Tales of witchcraft, of course, rank next in popularity to the vampire stories, and of these Harrison Ainsworth's "Lancashire Witches," with all the plates by Gilbert, is the rara avis.
Australia has contributed little to the literature of Ghostland. For years we had to be satisfied with "Fisher's Ghost," and that unfortunate spectre had to work overtime.

It is rather surprising that more has not been done in acclimatising the old world phantoms. It may be that we are lacking somewhat in tapestried chambers and baronial halls, which seem so necessary for a self-respecting spectre during his nocturnal perambulations. Still, there is ample scope for such work. Scenes of violence (more sordid, may-hap, than those which sent forth the oversea phantoms on their wanderings) were common enough in our early days, and the sin-expiating beneficiaries would be passable substitutes for the bewigged or beshackled wraiths of Europe.

Our own Roy Bridges, however, be-stowed a boon on the Brotherhood of the Bug and the Goblin when he wrote his "Mirror of Silver." It finds pride of place in many a ghost-lover's collection.

Christmas and Ghosts

On a yuletide note, the following article, from the 12 December 1936 issue of the Melbourne newspaper The Argus, may be of interest - a rare insight into the history of these popular Victorian annuals. Roy Bridges was a Tasmanian author of popular novels and tales who lived for most of his life with his sister Hilda, herself a noted crime writer.

CHRISTMAS AND GHOSTS: AN ANNUAL OF THE EIGHTEEN-SIXTIES

The copy of "Beeton's Christmas Annual" is faded and fingermarked. It is musty with the burial of years in a deal chest, dating from the Portsmouth lad who, in 1817, left his ship to settle in Van Diemen's Land. The book was a Christmas gift to a youngster of this Tasmanian farm in the eighteen-sixties. The title page bears his name; a stone in the Sorell Cemetery has borne the name for years.

Not all the fingermarks, of a Christmastide stickiness, could have been his. Possibly none was, for his youth was of a time when a new book was rare and precious in the farmhouse. Even a paper-covered book must have a brown paper wrapper put on to protect it. This book, like all the children's books of the farmhouse of his time, came down to other generations because of the care shown through the eighteen sixties. So the "Annual" survives, draggle tailed, disreputable, and dog-eared, but bearing, from its shred of paper cover to its last worm-eaten page, a record of the pleasure it has given to youngsters from one generation to another down 70 years.

Not that the "Annual" was a children's Christmas book and no more. The idea of the publisher was Dickensian - Christmas was an affair for family and friends, and for young and for old. The "Annual" was planned to amuse the adult as well as the juvenile. Clearly it succeeded, for this number - for 1865 - was the sixth of the series, edited and published by S. O. Beeton, of the Strand, London, and written, illustrated, and decorated by authors and artists who could conjure up the spirit of Christmas on sound old English lines.

So the "General Contents" range from "Beautiful Helen" - F. C. Burnand's parody of a Greek comedy, not of his best work, but meant only for performance in the "Theatre Royal, Back Drawing-room" - to "Amusing and Curious Card Tricks" - were card tricks ever amusing? Certainly the pages of funny pictures by Charles H. Ross are really funny - illustrating the sort of jokes folk at Christmas parties would see very easily when they were in a seasonable mood and were beginning to see double, before beginning not to see at all.

But the quality of the "Annual" for entertainment-and its real quality lies in the ghost stories, collected as "Hatch-ups," or "Tales Told in the Dark" - the chief section of the worthy old Christmas book.

The tales are told by youngsters in a dormitory at the Rev. Jabez Owlthorpe's school - the idea recalls David Copperfield’s telling his stories to Steerforth and his fellows at Salem House. Mr. Owlthorpe's young gentlemen listen and thrill to, or laugh at, the yarns spun by their fellow with a skill that suggests an early development of literary talent. The usher seems a distant relative of Mr. Mell. Regardless of discipline, he listens secretly in the darkness, and nobody suspects his presence till he is due to take the floor and to reveal a gift for the ghostly decidedly suggestive of J. S. le Fanu. A deep sigh is heard from the middle of the room –a low, wailing sigh: "Gentlemen," says a solemn voice, "pardon the intrusion, but I have been an undetected listener to your stories."

He has interrupted, not to do his duly to the Rev. Mr. Owlthorpe and the young gentlemen, but to reveal himself as an authority on the awful. Nobody is afraid of him. Matched with the ghostly, ghastly, and ghoulish creatures of imagination, the poor, shabby-genteel usher simply docs not matter.

"Since I am here," says the usher, “shall I tell you a ghost story? Shall I tell you of a ghost that sat upon a rail in Australia, with the moonbeams shining through him, till his murderer was brought lo justice?"

“No, please don't!" says the smallest boy. “We have all read it!”

"Well," says the usher, "will you have the story of some other ghost not yet introduced to the public?"

“Yes, if it’s jolly horrible!"

“I must be a poor hand,” says the usher, "if I can’t make you feel like fifty eels running all over your body, and if I don't set your hair on end, so straight and so stiff that it pulls you out of your boots. I'll permit you to call me a humbug!"

They tell him gleefully to go ahead.

“Well," he says, "I have seen so many horrible things in my life, boys that I scarcely know what particular horror I shall put forth for your benefit to-night. I have heard of ghosts who were torn cruelly from their fleshy tenement by murder, walking to and fro on the earth till the appointed day arrives, when, in the course of nature, they would have died, until which time they had no right to enter the abode of spirits. So they wandered restless through the world without a home, haunting houses, sitting on graves in churchyards, or walking in lonely places There was a soldier at Perran buried alive, and his spirit was often seen at night haunting the new-made graves, tearing at the earth, as though he thought any poor creature like himself was buried living."

The dismal usher is warming up - or freezing down - to his work. He wants to thrill his audience, and he succeeds. He preludes his story, told to him by his cousin Phoebe, of a ghostly face looking from a stone wall in an old chateau of the Ardennes with the declaration, “I can never relate the history without referring first to Phoebe’s death at sea and her bridegroom’s dream: I believe my poor cousin has laid a spell on me which forces me to call her up to tell herself the story of the old chateau!”

The moonlight suddenly streaming into the room discloses the melancholy usher, leaning his pale face on one hand, and holding up the other to impose silence while he fixes his large, prominent eyes on the darkest portion of the room. All eyes follow his, and for a moment several nervous youngsters take a long bolster lying on the floor for the corpse of the dead girl sewn up in her shroud, and floating in the sea. The ticking of a watch grows loud and ghostly “a very death-watch in sound,” and the low growl of the dog downstairs seems to warn the approach of a ghostly visitant.

First the usher tells that his cousin Phoebe died on her way to India to marry Captain Herbert. On the night of her death her lover dreamed that he saw a woman’s hand floating towards him, he was on the seashore, and the waves cast it up at his feet. On the fourth finger of the hand was the diamond ring which he had given to Phoebe. He took the ring and read within it: “Died at sea on 10th September 1845.” On the arrival of the ship the ring was sent to him at Calcutta by a fellow passenger with a letter stating she died on 10th September.

Now as a girl Phoebe was one of a wedding party at the old chateau which was haunted. A white face showed from the wall in the lumber room upstairs. First a little girl who had been sent up to the little room in the turret to look for an embroidery frame came rushing into the drawing room, white as death, and went off into violent hysterics. After the “usual amount of hartshorn and fuss,” she shrieked out, “Oh don t let me see that horrible face again!” Quietened and consoled she told that looking from the wall she had seen a woman’s face - a face white as snow with dark hollow eyes and an expression of unutterable horror.

The room was searched, nothing was found. Wedding guests crowded into the chateau. The room, brightened with a glowing stove, was allotted to Phoebe’s brother Jack. He was about to go to bed late that night when he saw in the wall- “a face, dead, white, and ghastly, staring at him in a fixed and awful manner.” He rushed from the room, and roused Captain Herbert; again search revealed nothing. The young man did not spend the night in the room.

Next day was the wedding day. Phoebe ran up to the room, thinking to find her brother. Not finding him, she turned to go – when, suddenly, she saw in the midst of the wall a ghastly face, whose eyes met hers with a look of such unutterable anguish that she fell on the floor in a swoon.

After that, thorough search was made. High up in the wall a deep hollow was found – a stone had been left out from the masonry. From it a skull grinned at the searchers. It was resting on an iron collar. Long black hair and bones had fallen in a heap into the deep hollow space of the wall. Far back in the Middle Ages a girl, in chains, had been built up in the wall, with an iron collar set around her neck.

“We never heard the story,” the usher tells. “Perhaps, in the old cruel days when she died, the peasants feared their feudal lord too much even to whisper it among themselves, and so the tale of her wrongs, her crime, and her death, was lost in the world forever.

But the usher rounds it off very neatly. “The three who had seen the face in the wall died young. Jack was drowned about a year afterwards in fording a river in Australia, and the little girl, Maggie, before the year was out, was thrown from her pony, and “never spoke again. It looks as if death took the ghost-seers in succession, just in the order in which they saw the apparition.”

Temperamental Authors

I recently acquired an issue of the magazine supplement to the old New York World newspaper of the 1920s.  Specifically, I got this issue, dated 6 February 1927, because it has a journalistic story by Leonard Cline that is completely new to me, but there turned out to be bonus:  an illustrated article headed "Behind the Scenes in Temperamental Authors' Workshops" by Sarah Macdougall.  Basically, the authoress solicited comments from a bunch of authors of the day, ranging from the noted (Sinclair Lewis, Rebecca West, Ellen Glasgow) to the less-known and now forgotten (e.g., Homer Croy, and Lulu Vollmer, the author of "Sun Up" and "The Shame Woman", who "does all of her writing on an ironing-board which fits across the arms of a wing chair in her studio home"). Some of the authors who provided comments are remembered for their fantasy writings:

Irvin S. Cobb was the first to be interviewed, because his day starts at eight in the morning and because the only time to ask him questions is before he leaves his Park Avenue home. "I don't like to work at all," said Mr. Cobb. "I'd never work if I didn't have to. When I do work, which is every day, I sit wherever there is a place to sit, take a pen, a pencil or a typewriter--in the city, in the country, on a train, on a ship, and I work. I have no moods. I don't need to have the light over my left shoulder. The only thing I need is an idea. I am always at work early in the morning. I was raised on an afternoon paper and I do my best work before noon. I never work at night. I do not care who is around while I am working. Ordinary noises of the city do not bother me in the least."

Robert W. Chambers is another man who does not like to work. But few Wall Street men toil such long hours as this author whose fiction has brought him as much wealth as if he were a successful financier. Mr. Chambers does his year's work in the winter months so that he may be free to play all summer. He does most of his writing in New York because he finds fewer interruptions in the city than in the country, and fewer distractions for the author. He finds October and November the best time to work in the country, "because every one else is in town." Mr. Chambers never works at night, and he is always on hand for a dinner party.

Lord Dunsany's plays have been written with quill pens. In Ireland he shoots geese for recreation. He takes the quils to London, and on his desk in his home in Cadogan Square a dozen quills are crowded in a jar. 

 The illustration of Dunsany is reproduced above.  Either the artist was ignorant or misinformed, but no type of goose has a green head.  Presumably the artist was drawing a common mallard, but that's a duck, not a goose. And a duck feather would not be as handy to use as a writing instrument as a goose feather, which is significantly larger.

Ghost Stories: stories of ghosts

In my reply to the good news that a two volume set by John Locke, entitled Ghost Stories, and devoted to the since long gone magazine Ghost Stories, was recently published, I was glad to mention a little booklet (it numbers 32 pages) that I bought a long time ago.

I think it is the first study in regards to Ghost Stories, and am happy to post its cover here.

The bibliographical elements are: James R. Seiger, Ghost Stories, stories of ghosts, 'Neglected Repository Of Supernatural Fiction', essay by Sam Moskowitz, index by James Seiger, 'The Apparition In The Prize Ring', story by Robert E. Howard, introduction by Glenn Lord, Opar Press, Evergreen, Colorado, May, 1973. 32 pages.

How did the magazine look like? See here for depictions of 21 full colour covers.

W. Compton Leith

For a long time I kept and would glance through a book by the essayist W. Compton Leith, Apologia Diffidentis (1908), which was dressed in vellum edges and marbled boards. I only lately learnt he was really Ormonde Maddock Dalton (1866-1945) – so a fairly close contemporary of Machen -, a British Museum antiquarian, co-chronicler of the bronzes of Benin, and also a byzantinist, who wrote a note on “The Byzantine Astrolabe at Brescia”, (Proceedings of the British Academy 12 (1926), pp 133-146), an instrument of 1062. I have his third volume, as by Leith, Sirenica (1913), which is a long meditation on the mythical riddle about “what Song the Sirens sang”, with many digressions and elaborations upon the theme. Somewhere still (though it is not readily to be found), I may have that first one: there was, it seems, a second, Domus Doloris (1909). He was compared to A.C. Benson, De Quincey, Sir Thomas Browne, and R.L. Stevenson, and (we might add) Machen in his discursive London Adventure style . Very fine, graceful, somewhat studied prose, with what used to be called “the smell of the lamp” about it, from overmuch burning of nocturnal oil. Not exactly fantasy, but certainly working upon its dim and misty margins.

GHOST STORIES: The Magazine and Its Makers

 John Locke, with his Off-Trail Publications, has quietly been producing some excellent books for anyone interested in the pulp magazines, and especially for those of us who, in particular, are also interested in the men and women behind the stories—the authors, editors, and artists. One recent release deserves special attention for the exemplary coverage of one particular pulp magazine, Ghost Stories.  It ran for a total of 64 issues, from July 1926 through the December 1931/January 1932 number.  There has been one previous anthology centered on this pulp: Phantom Perfumes and Other Shades: Memories of Ghost Stories Magazine (2000), edited by Mike Ashley.  It contains seventeen stories, along with a history of the magazine by Mike Ashley, a short Foreword by Hugh B. Cave (who contributed two stories to the magazine in 1931), and two appendices: the first a checklist of issues of the magazine, the second an index to the contributors.

John Locke’s new project brings us not one but two books:  twenty stories in volume one, and another fifteen in volume two, with no overlap of stories from Mike Ashley’s anthology and with plenty of extras.  These volumes are formatted the same size as the original pulp magazine, so you get some neat extras like a sprinkling of facsimile ads, a bunch of the original illustrations to the stories, and full page reproductions of all sixty-four covers to the magazine.

Ghost Stories: The Magazine and Its Makers, Volume 1 (9781935031093  $24.00 trade paperback) additionally includes a lengthy history of the magazine, putting it in the context of other magazines of the time, particularly those published by MacFadden Publications, who were responsible for nearly four years of the run of Ghost Stories before it was sold. Other lengthy sections give biographies of all of the editors, and all of the authors who are represented in volume one.  And these are not the usual short one-paragraph biographies, but often a couple of pages, giving the results of original research on these people.  There are also some statistical analyses of that magazine, showing that it paid 2 cents a word under MacFadden, but slipped to 1 cent (and up) under later owners.  Over its run, Ghost Stories published 517 short stories, 12 novelettes, 47 serials (of various installments), 148 nonfiction items, 44 editorials, and one poem.

Ghost Stories: The Magazine and Its Makers, Volume 2 (9781935031130  $24.00 trade paperback) continues on in the same comprehensive manner, with biographies of the authors who appear in volume two, a section on the artists, and the cover gallery of all sixty-four of the covers.  (Each volume also has an index.) 

To mention only a few of the stories reprinted in these two volumes, H.P. Lovecraft’s friend, Muriel Eddy, is represented with a short “True Ghost Experience” from the April 1926 issue.  Nictzin Dyalhis's single contribution to Ghost Stories, “He Refused to Stay Dead” (April 1927) which had been announced in the previous issue as “My Encounter with Osric, the Troll”, is also reprinted.  And Leonard Cline, author of God Head (1925) and The Dark Chamber (1927), is represented with his pseudonymous story “Sweetheart of the Snows” (August 1928), as by Alan Forsyth.  It’s is a tale reminiscent of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Glamour of the Snow”.  Cline’s title for the story had been “The Lady of Frozen Death”, and his typescript version under that title can be found in the booklet The Lady of Frozen Death and Other Weird Tales (Necronomicon Press, 1992).  Comparing the texts, one can see that the editor at Ghost Stories made numerous minor changes and additions, ones which tend to lessen Cline’s distinctive style and to add more pulpish sentimentalities.

This two-volume history and anthology brings the pulp magazine Ghost Stories, defunct now for almost seventy years, vividly back to new life.  I recommend it highly.

Weird Words

For some years, Dan Clore has been sharing, via a few e-groups of which we are both members, entries from his vast personal database of unusual words, and examples of their usage, from authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, Mervyn Peake, E.R. Eddison, Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and many others, ranging from James Branch Cabell and Leonard Cline to H.P. Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley.  This is quite fun, and I’ve always looked forward to his postings, covering words like:  bemerded (Cabell, Eddison, Crowley);  dwimmerlaik (Layamon, Tolkien); fray-bug (Eddison);  kadishtu (A. Merritt, Henry Kuttner); lingam (Cabell, Crowley, Smith); scîn-lâc, scin-læca (Bulwer-Lytton, Blavatsky, Machen, Crowley); Spintria (John Donne, Charles Maturin, Cabell, Compton Mackenzie, Montague Summers);  tripsarecopsem (Eddison); and yoni (Cabell, Smith).

Now comes a first volume based on Clore’s database:  Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon (trade paperback, $25.00)  It’s a fine selection, a hefty 568 pages, but it leaves out most of the words I mentioned above, concentrating instead on words that Lovecraft used, like: blasphemous, Cyclopean, dæmonic/demonic, eidolon, eldritch, fœtid/fetid, ichor, leprous, litten, meep, night-gaunt, noisome, shoggoth, squamous, Tekeli-li (originally from Poe’s “The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym of Nantucket”), and vigintillion.

Which doesn’t mean that all the really odd words are excluded.  I was glad to see glame stone (from Arthur Machen’s “The White People”) make an appearance, along with hippocephalic, maunder, and nyctalops.

One of the first entries I turned to was that for Nodens, which has Tolkien, Machen and Lovecraft associations.  Here is some of Clore’s entry:

    Nodens, Nodons, Nudens, pr.n. [see quotation from Puhvel] In Celtic mythology, a deity pertaining to healing, hunting, and the sea. Roman ruins found in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, dating from the fourth century CE, include a number of votive tablets bearing well-known inscriptions to this deity. Based on his appearance in H.P. Lovecraft's "The Strange High House in the Mist" and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, August Derleth made Nodens into the head of his pantheon of benignant Elder Gods.[Not in OED.]

    Titles: J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Name 'Nodens'" in Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Sites in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire (1932)

    Dr. McCaul quotes from a letter from Meyrick to Lysons that "Deus Nodens seems to be Romanised British, which correctly written in the original language would be Deus Noddyns, the 'God of the abyss,' or it may be 'God the preserver,' from the verb noddi, to preserve; both words being derived from nawdd, which signifies protection." Prof. Jarrett, a profound Celtic scholar, to whom I applied for a translation of "Deus Noddyns" without mentioning Meyrick's explanation, at once rendered it as "God of the deeps," a sense that every circumstance confirms.
                Roman Antiquities at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire: Being a Posthumous Work of the Rev. William Hiley Bathurst, M.A. (1879)

    The name of the god, as given in the inscriptions, varies between Nudons and Nodens, the cases actually occurring being the dative Nodonti, Nodenti, and Nudente, and the genitive Nodentis, so I should regard ō or ū as optional in the first syllable, and o as preferable, perhaps, to e in the second, for there is no room for reasonably doubting that we have here to do with the same name as Irish Nuadu, genitive Nuadat, conspicuous in the legendary history of Ireland.
                John Rhŷs, Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx (1901)

    Underlying the stories of Nūadu (genitive Nūadat) and Lug and that of Lludd and Lleuelys we may thus discern a Celtic myth of Lugus bringing relief to Nōdons; the latter is attested in dedications from Lydney (cf. Lludd!) in Gloucestershire bordering South Wales (Deo Nodonti) and seems to mean 'Fisher' (cf. Gothic nuta 'fisherman', from *nudōn[s]), the probable ancestor of the Arthurian "Fisher King" of the Grail legend, whose maiming resulted in the Waste Land.
                Jaan Puhvel, Comparative Mythology (1987)

    After I had seen most of the sculptured stones, the coffins, rings, coins, and fragments of tessellated pavement which the place contains, I was shown a small square pillar of white stone, which had been recently discovered in the wood of which I have been speaking, and, as I found on inquiry, in that open space where the Roman road broadens out. On one side of the pillar was an inscription, of which I took a note. Some of the letters have been defaced, but I do not think there can be any doubt as to those which I supply. The
    inscription is as follows:

        devomnodenti
        flavivssenilispossvit
        propternvptias
        quasviditsvbvmbra    

"To the great god Nodens (the god of the Great Deep or Abyss) Flavius Senilis has erected this pillar on account of the marriage which he saw beneath the shade."
              Arthur Machen, "The Great God Pan" (1890)

    Down the valley in the distance was Caerleon-on-Usk; over the hill, somewhere in the lower slopes of the forest, Caerwent, also a Roman city, was buried in the earth, and gave up now and again strange relics -- fragments of the temple of "Nodens, god of the depths."
              Arthur Machen, Far Off Things (1922)

    "By Nodens," said Caswallon drily, "your prayer was granted. Tros --"
             Talbot Mundy, Tros of Samothrace: Lud of Lunden (1925)

    A sea-god of the Britons, later confused with Neptune by the  Romans.
              Talbot Mundy, note to Tros of Samothrace: Lud of Lunden (1925)

    Trident-bearing Neptune was there, and sportive tritons and fantastic nereids, and upon dolphins' backs was balanced a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss.
                H.P. Lovecraft, "The Strange High House in the Mist" (1926)

    He spoke, too, of the things he had learnt concerning night-gaunts from the frescoes in the windowless monastery of the high-priest not to be described; how even the Great Ones fear them, and how their ruler is not the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep at all, but hoary and immemorial Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss.
                H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927)

    And with his hideous escort he had half hoped to defy even the Other Gods if need were, knowing as he did that ghouls have no masters, and that night-gaunts own not Nyarlathotep but only archaick Nodens for their lord.
                H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927)

    Dear, shall I pray the gulf's great deity,
    Nodens, to bring once more for you and me
    Some love-relinquished hour we could not save
    That westered all too swiftly to the wave,
    Ebbing between the cypress and the grass?
                Clark Ashton Smith, "Sea Cycle"

All in all, some fine browsing and reading is to be found in this book.  I would have preferred that it have some kind of introduction, spelling out the methodology for inclusion and some history of the project, but I suppose that is my own particular bias. What is most clearly called for is a follow-up volume, of Weirder Words.  Removing the Lovecraft-centric emphasis on any further undertaking would make for a more wide-ranging and engaging volume. 

Lovecraft on Le Fanu

Many have wondered why H. P. Lovecraft held such a low opinion of the work of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, whose work merits barely a nod in Lovecraft’s seminal essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” [W. Paul Cook (ed.) The Recluse, 1927. Revised 1933-4]:

“The romantic, semi-Gothic, quasi-moral tradition here represented was carried far down the nineteenth century by such authors as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H. Rider Haggard (whose She is really remarkably good), Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson . . .”

How could one of the most influential writers of weird fiction in the 20th century fail to appreciate one of the masters of the prior century, an author whose work was extolled as exemplary by M. R. James, whose work received an entire chapter in the same essay?

We may ascribe part of the answer to Lovecraft’s atheism, which would have taken issue with the trappings of Christianity in Le Fanu’s work, though the view of Christianity displayed in Le Fanu’s fiction is considerably less orthodox than one finds in either James of Machen. An examination of Lovecraft’s correspondence with Donald Wandrei, Clark Ashton Smith, and August Derleth suggests that the nature of the works to which Lovecraft had been exposed were probably equally to blame.

After reading a reference to “Le Fanu’s anthology 'A Stable for Nightmares' ” in a letter from Donald Wandrei dated 5 January 1927 [Mysteries of Time and Spirit: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei. Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. Night Shade Books, 2002, p. 11], Lovecraft remarked, “I wish I could get hold of Polidori’s ‘Vampyre’ & something by Le Fanu. The latter has long been a familiar name to me, yet I have seen absolutely nothing of his.” [Mysteries of Time and Spirit, p. 14]. By 13 March 1927, Lovecraft had received Wandrei’s copies of A Stable for Nightmares and one of Le Fanu’s novels:

“As soon as I have read 'All in the Dark' I’ll return that and 'A Stable for Nightmares'.” [Mysteries of Time and Spirit, p. 54]

These are unfortunate choices for several reasons. A Stable for Nightmares was a gathering of eleven anonymous and unremarkable supernatural stories published by Trusley Brothers of London for the Christmas market in 1867. Seven of those stories reappeared in an American edition in 1896, with “Le Fanu” stamped on the spine, “J. Sheridan Le Fanu . . . Sir Charles Young, Bart. and Others” on the full-title page, and no author’s names supplied for any of the stories within. One of the stories new to this edition is Le Fanu’s “Dickon the Devil”, the second is “What Was It?” by Fitz-James O’Brien, and the third, “A Debt of Honor”, is attributed to Sir Charles Young by default. No evidence has been put forward to establish that Le Fanu had anything to do with the first edition, and the author had been dead for 23 years by the time the American edition appeared, yet various anthologists and critics have assumed that at least some of these anonymous tales were written by Le Fanu ever since.

Lovecraft had some suspicions concerning the authorship of these stories from the beginning:

“I see that Le Fanu collection has Fitz-James O’Brien’s ‘What Was It?’—have you been able to identify others?” [Mysteries of Time and Spirit, p. 40].

Nonetheless, this first encounter with work he had first assumed to be by Le Fanu cannot have been an auspicious one.

Unfortunately, his second, more prolonged exposure was not much better. As a double-decker novel before a triple-decker demanding public, All in the Dark (1866) did not fare well with Le Fanu’s contemporaries, and in surviving notes for a lecture he delivered on Le Fanu on 16 March 1923, even the otherwise sympathetic M. R. James states, “Weakest of all the novels is All in the Dark—a domestic story with a sham ghost: an offence hard to forgive in any writer but much harder in Le Fanu’s case, seeing that he could deal so magnificently with realness without incurring any more expense.” [“The Novels and Stories of J. Sheridan Le Fanu”, in M. R. James, A Pleasing Terror. Ash-Tree Press, 2001, p. 494. The first printing of this article in Ghosts and Scholars 7 omits this passage.]

Lovecraft admitted to August Derleth that he was not impressed with the book when he first approached it on 26 March 1927— “I’ll tell you about Le Fanu when I’ve read 'All in the Dark'—but I don’t think he’ll prove anything marvelous.” [Essential Solitude: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth. Edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, Hippocampus Press, 2008, p. 75]—then went on to pan the book to the same correspondent in a letter dated 26 July 1927, even though he admits that he has perhaps not read the best examples of Le Fanu’s work: “What I have read of Sheridan Le Fanu was a great disappointment as compared with what I heard of him in advance—but it may be that I haven’t seen his best stuff. I don’t know 'Uncle Silas', but the thing I read (I can’t even recall the name) was abominably insipid and Victorian.” [Essential Solitude, p. 100]

A few years later, Lovecraft was given the opportunity to read one of Le Fanu’s best novels, but again it was a work almost guaranteed to frustrate him. Although long touted as a supernatural novel based on the two early chapters devoted to “Ghost Stories of the Tiled House”, Le Fanu’s The House by the Churchyard (1861-2) is a sprawling portrait of life across class levels in 18th century Dublin that more often resembles the darker specimens of Jacobean and Restoration comedy than it does the Gothic novel. Derleth must have belatedly realized this when he decided not to publish the edition he had announced during the early years of Arkham House.

That he was misled concerning the book’s content is made clear by Lovecraft’s letter to Derleth on 26 September 1929:

“Just now I am making a bold effort to keep awake over an old Victorian novel which some damn’d misguided oaf recommended to me as ‘weird’—J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 'House by the Churchyard'. I had been disillusioned before by Le Fanu specimens, & this one just about clinches my opinion that poor Sherry was a false alarm as a fear monger, & I shall cut him out of any possible 2nd edition of my historical sketch [i.e. “Supernatural Horror in Literature”].” [Essential Solitude, p. 216]

Lovecraft seems to have given up attempting to read Le Fanu’s novels, but continued to express a desire to read “Green Tea”, “though”, he confessed to August Derleth on 20 November 1931, “I can scarcely imagine a really weird tale by the author of 'The House by the Churchyard' & other Victorian products which I have seen.” [Essential Solitude, p. 415]. He finally received an anthology containing the story in January 1932— “Cook has just presented me with 'The Omnibus of Crime', & I think the first thing I shall read will be the much-discussed ‘Green Tea’ by Le Fanu.” [Essential Solitude, p. 435]—but was initially put off by its length— “Well—I guess I’m too sleepy tonight to read ‘Green Tea' after all! It’s longer than I anticipated.” [Essential Solitude, p. 438].

This is the point at which we can assume that a combination of repeated disappointments, expectations too exalted to fulfil, continued difficulty in locating the author's work, impatience with Victorian manners, and distaste for Christian mysticism finally took their toll. After reading sham Le Fanu in an anthology, sham supernaturalism in one of Le Fanu’s own novels, and genuine supernaturalism diluted by the hundreds of pages of societal melodrama in which they appear, “Green Tea” may have appeared to be too little too late. To Clark Ashton Smith on 16 January 1932, Lovecraft wrote, “I at last . . . have read ‘Green Tea.’ It is definitely better than anything else of Le Fanu’s that I have ever seen, though I’d hardly put it in the Poe-Blackwood-Machen class” [quoted in an annotation to Mysteries of Time and Spirit, p. 15].

When August Derleth sent Lovecraft an article on Le Fanu in April 1935, Lovecraft remembered not “Green Tea” but his disappointment in the novels, “Thanks abundantly for the article on Le Fanu. I have 'The House by the Churchyard'—thought it is an insufferably dull & Victorian specimen. In reading it, it was all I could do to keep awake!” [Essential Solitude, p. 693]

If only Lovecraft had gained access to a volume of Le Fanu in full supernatural regalia his assessment may have been different, or perhaps with the aid of the critical apparatus M. R. James supplied in Madam Crowl's Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery—published in 1923, a mere four years prior to Lovecraft's first surviving reference of Le Fanu to Donald Wandrei—he may have seen a kindred spirit beneath those ostensibly Christian trappings. On the other hand, Heaven and Hell may have remained parochial to the cosmic materialist in Lovecraft no matter how creatively they had been couched by Le Fanu.