L — authorial invention

Mi-Go

Literary invention
Scritti febbraio-settembre 1930 · «Weird Tales», agosto 1931

Mi-Go — winged fungoid beings from Yuggoth, which the story identifies with Pluto.

In a Vermont wood after a flood, two winged fungoid beings work by night: one adjusts a surveying instrument on its tripod, the other handles test tubes beside a polished metal cylinder set on a boulder; above, the lit window of an isolated house.

First appearance: The Whisperer in Darkness. Also called «the fungi from Yuggoth».
What is told: Winged fungoid beings from Yuggoth, which the story identifies with Pluto. They extract minerals from the Earth and carry human brains in metal cylinders: they are scientists, not demons.
In the corpus: A perfect example of Lovecraft's method: hooking the invention to a piece of very recent scientific news in order to produce plausibility.
Publication data: «Weird Tales», August 1931. Pluto was discovered in February 1930, that is, while the story was being written.
Caution: The connection between the discovery of Pluto and the writing can be documented by comparing the dates, but it should be presented as a chronological observation, not as a statement by the author.

Reality checkestablished

What has been established today.

Yuggoth is Pluto, and the chronology demonstrates it. Clyde Tombaugh located the planet on 18 February 1930 and the discovery was announced on 13 March 1930; Lovecraft, an amateur astronomer who had written astronomy columns for the Providence papers since adolescence, wrote «The Whisperer in Darkness» between February and September 1930, incorporating the news as it appeared in the press and placing the Mi-Go outpost on the newly found planet. It is the clearest case in which Lovecraftian mythology attaches itself in real time to a real scientific discovery.

H. P. Lovecraft, «The Whisperer in Darkness», written February-September 1930, published in Weird Tales, August 1931; announcement of the discovery of Pluto, Lowell Observatory, 13 March 1930

The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.

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

Mi-Go

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