L — authorial invention

Dagon

Literary invention
Scritto luglio 1917 · pubblicato in «The Vagrant» n. 11, novembre 1919

Dagon — in Lovecraft's cycle, the name of a sea deity worshipped by amphibian creatures.

On a raised sea floor, beneath an enormous moon, a monolith covered in bas-reliefs emerges from the mud; a castaway in his shirt watches it from the slimy shore while, a little beyond, something large rises out of the black water.

First appearance: Short story Dagon. Reprinted in «Weird Tales», October 1923.
What is told: The name of a sea deity worshipped by amphibian creatures. It is the first germ of what, twenty years later, would become the people of the Deep Ones, but in the 1917 story there is as yet no system: there is a castaway, a monolith and a thing that rises.
In the corpus: The first brick of the entire corpus in chronological order. Dagon is also a real biblical name, a Philistine deity: Lovecraft takes an existing name and hollows it out.
Publication data: «The Vagrant», an amateur magazine, issue 11, November 1919; reprinted in «Weird Tales», October 1923.

Reality checkestablished

What has been established today.

Dagon really does exist, but not as a sea god: Dagan is attested from the third millennium BC at Mari and Ebla, where he headed the civic pantheon, and at Ugarit he had a great temple. The etymology now prevailing links him to Ugaritic dgn and Hebrew dāgān, that is, grain: Sanchuniathon renders him Siton, «grain», and calls him the inventor of the plough. The fish-god idea arises much later, in medieval rabbinic circles, with Rashi and David Kimchi (thirteenth century), who associated the name with dāg, fish. Lovecraft therefore inherits a seven-century-old etymological error and makes an amphibian deity out of it.

J. Fontenrose and subsequent Assyriological scholarship on Dagan; Rashi and David Kimchi, commentaries on 1 Samuel 5; H. P. Lovecraft, «Dagon», 1917

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Entries that share the motif, the phenomenon behind it or the history of their collection — not the geography.

Dagon

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