L — authorial invention

Shoggoth

Literary invention
Nome nei sonetti 1929-30 · descrizione in «Astounding Stories», febbraio-aprile 1936

Shoggoth — shapeless protoplasmic masses, able to form organs at will, created as a bio-engineered slave race by the Elder Things.

In a carved cyclopean corridor beneath the ice, a black, glistening protoplasmic mass fills the passage, generating provisional eyes and limbs as it advances; on the walls remain the bas-reliefs of its creators.

First appearance: The name appears in Fungi from Yuggoth, a sonnet cycle written between 27 December 1929 and 4 January 1930; the full description is in At the Mountains of Madness.
What is told: Shapeless protoplasmic masses, able to form organs at will, created as a bio-engineered slave race by the Elder Things. Their revolt contributed to their creators' decline.
In the corpus: It is the most politically legible creature in the corpus: an artificial slave who emancipates himself, in an author whose racial positions were what they were.
Publication data: «Astounding Stories», serialised in the February, March and April 1936 issues.
Caution: The cry «Tekeli-li» is taken from The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe, 1838, and is explicitly cited by Lovecraft in the text.

Reality checkestablished

What has been established today.

The shoggoth has an identifiable literary source. «At the Mountains of Madness», written between February and March 1931, explicitly cites twice «The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket» by Edgar Allan Poe (1838) and takes over from it verbatim the mysterious cry «Tekeli-li», which in the story becomes the call of the shoggoths. The Antarctic setting is not imaginary either: Lovecraft followed Richard E. Byrd's 1928-1930 expedition in the papers, mentioned it several times in his letters, and modelled the Miskatonic University expedition on it, taking up as well the real datum of the fossils that indicated a tropical past for the continent.

H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, written February-March 1931, published in Astounding Stories, February-April 1936; E. A. Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, 1838

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.

Shoggoth

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