New on Archive.org, Mirages fanzine for Summer 1966. This has “Some Backgrounds to Fairyland” (1932) by one H.P. Lovecraft. So far as I can tell this essay is otherwise not online and is only available in print in either Collected Essays, Volume 3: Science or Marginalia (1944). The same fanzine issue also has a 12-page “Chronology” for the life/work of Clark Ashton Smith, though I expect this has probably been superseded since the late 1960s.

Never intended as an article or for publication, Joshi has it in Collected Essays that Lovecraft’s “Some Backgrounds to Fairyland” was… “Presumably an extract of a letter to Wilfred B. Talman, dated 23rd September 1932”, with the original of this letter apparently being no longer available for scholars to consult. Thus the unstated implication is that we can’t be sure that Derleth didn’t tweak or abridge it for publication in Marginalia (1944).

It runs to 2,800 words. In the first third Lovecraft surveys mythic beliefs with more or less scholarly accuracy, and then steps onto far shakier ground as he briskly summarises a handful of historical theories which have since been swept away by the archaeology, genetics and linguistics. But these are nevertheless interesting for presenting a clear view of what competing historical-ethnographic theories might be seriously entertained by a highly self-educated layman of the late 1920s. As such they seem to illuminate the roots of Tolkien, re: hobbits and dwarves, Tolkien having just started his professional career at Leeds at that time. Lovecraft, for instance, has it that…

“A third theory […] postulate some hitherto unknown race of dwarfs (either Mongoloid or otherwise) which populated wide areas of Europe at a very remote though not palaeolithic period. This theory has considerable vogue at the present time [my emphasis], and is upheld by the existence of certain prehistoric excavations in Southern Austria which seem to have been made by men of less than normal stature. […] Recent discoveries of large numbers of Erdstalle in Austria make it likely that the Danube region was at least a leading seat of the prehistoric dwarf-Aryan conflict. These artificial caverns, plainly constructed by a race not over five feet tall, and holding artifacts indicating a late stone, copper, and early bronze-age date, are occasionally of great elaborateness; some apparently being temples, while others are clearly refuges (like the burrows of small animals) from enemies of larger physique. About 700 of them are known…”

In such apparently widespread musings of the late 1920s (I assume Lovecraft was a few years behind the times on this, in 1932) one might glimpse the deep refuges of Helm’s Deep and the hobbit-holes of the Shire.

The Erdstalle are as Lovecraft described them and they appear to baffle both the scientists and the historians to this day. The “artifacts” Lovecraft mentions don’t appear in the current writings on them that I can swiftly find, and the earliest they can be reliably dated by modern means is A.D. 950, via coal found inside one — but they could be far older. There are now known to be far more than “700”, so they were a widespread phenomenon of central Europe. Who or what inhabited them is now unknown.