Reading through the back-issues of the Tolkien Society members-journal Amon Hen, in #272 I came across a report of a conference in Italy titled “Tolkien and the literature of the Fourth Age”, which took place just before Christmas 2017. Some big names were there, including Tom Shippey and Thomas Honegger. The latter presented “Tolkien and Lovecraft”, and the report summarised some of the talk’s main points…

– both worked within frameworks of myth and to an extent dream;

– both were interested in changes in language over large time-scales;

– both were interested in “worlds in decay” which nevertheless contain decaying “monuments of fallen grandeur”;

– both loved the mystery of ancient things, ancient landscapes;

– Tolkien’s late “Smith of Wootton Major” tale as comparable to Lovecraft “The Silver Key” and parts of “Dream-Quest”;

– both wrote foundational “theoretical texts” which shaped the work of those who came after them (“On Fairy Stories”, and “Supernatural Literature”).

– both inspired many imitators, continuators, borrowers, and also a wealth of illustrators;

– August Derleth as being in a somewhat similar situation as Christopher Tolkien, as ‘posthumous editor’ and ‘re-shaper’.

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To which I would add…

– both gave ‘creative house-room’ to notions of a sort of personal racial memory, and past lives;

– both were interested in time-travel, as the idea then stood;

– both had a very rich store of knowledge about the classical world / the wild North;

– both wrote tales set within the framing of ‘recovered but partial’ scholarly knowledge (often by amateurs);

– both were anti-Freud and his acolytes, and more generally anti-modernist;

– both went ‘over the heads’ of the literary establishment, and appealed direct to the masses;

– both used a literary technique and style deemed ‘outmoded’ for the era;

– the depiction of evil was a key focus for both authors;

– both were aware of the power of ‘un-named creatures’ to evoke fear (though Tolkien uses these with a very light touch);

– both had ‘broadcast telepathy’ by the evil one, e.g. in Tolkien the evil Sauron mentally sends out his Cthulhu-like ‘call’ to all evil things;

– both greatly valued poetry and the oral tradition;

– both were deeply English in outlook and heritage, although Lovecraft was ‘at one remove’ in New England;

– they both deeply valued the physical fabric/landscape and traditions and people of their ‘local place’, for Lovecraft New England and 18th-century England, and for Tolkien mediaeval ‘old England’ and its later survivals.

– both were keen genealogists, though Tolkien’s family-trees were fictional.

– both were keen walkers, in different ways (‘dawdling vs. darting’ might sum it up), though both had a keen eye for traces of the past of a place;

– neither was afraid to offer readers long loving descriptions of a landscape in its season, adding strong doses of ‘travel writing’ to their fiction;

– both valued the imagery of the sea and the coast, in a romantic way;

– both were keen to correctly depict astronomical observations in their fiction;

– both were fatherless and were raised by kindly men who nurtured their talents;

– both were very open to collaborating with and mentoring / working equally with intelligent women;

– both greatly valued the simple Epicurean consolations of life in their personal everyday, though each in their different ways;

– both had a robust and deep-rooted conservative outlook, and could draw (if needed) on robust intellectual support for that outlook;

– neither man expected his tales would make him world-famous for centuries to come, with not only wide public readership but also many attentive scholars and historians.

– many trenchant early critics claimed to have read their writing(s), but quite evidently had not done so (or, at best, as Tom Shippey says… “had not read them with any attention”). At the same time, both were often reviled as arch conservatives.

– the work of both men inspired a wealth of popular music after their deaths, first in various forms of heavy-metal music and now more widely.

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‘Were the 2017 proceedings published?’ I wondered. I tracked them down to the first issue of the Italian journal I Quaderni di Arda (2020). Sadly the papers given in English are there translated, and the Lovecraft talk becomes “Re-incantare un mondo dis-incantato: Tolkien e Lovecraft (1890-1937)”.

I see the English PDF used to be on the journal’s iquadernidiarda.it website, but that domain and site have now lapsed. Then I found that the English paper had since been deposited as “Re-enchanting a Dis-enchanted World: Tolkien (1892-1973) and Lovecraft (1890-1937)”. For non Academia.edu members, this can be had by searching for “Re-enchanting a Dis-enchanted World” on Google Scholar. Scholar has an arrangement with Academia.edu for many (but not all) papers re: easy no-membership downloads.

Were there any points in the PDF to add to the list given by the conference report? Just a few…

– both often suggested an “indissoluble connection between language and identity”;

– both “subscribe to the general principle of phonaesthetics”, for example with evil speech sounding ugly and jarring;

– neither was afraid to use dialect on the page.

Honegger published on Lovecraft in English a little later, in the journal Fastitocalon #9, 1 & 2: ‘Fantastic Languages / The Language of the Fantastic (2020). This had his essay “Language, Historical Depth, and the Fantastic in the Work of H.P. Lovecraft”.

Both journal volumes are still available, in paper, for now.

And finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t also note the new book in Italian, Tolkien e Lovecraft (2023). This is now at least on Amazon.co.uk and can be added to a personal List, but cannot be shipped to the UK. I can’t read Italian and haven’t seen it, nor any review for it.

On ploughing through the Tolkien fan-journal Mallorn, from #53-64 (current) I discovered that January 1934 was the likely date when C.S. Lewis (the Narnia books, and he was also the midwife for The Lord of the Rings) started paying regular attention to American pulp magazines. This appears to mean Astounding magazine, which would mean that he read the magazine’s chopped-about versions of Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Shadow Out of Time”. He may also have read Lovecraft in better form in at least one British book collection, but we can’t be sure. The problem being that his books became jumbled up with those of his SF-loving live-in girlfriend.

“Kuranes came very suddenly upon his old world of childhood. He had been dreaming of the house where he was born; the great stone house covered with ivy, where thirteen generations of his ancestors had lived” (“Celephaïs”)

The buildings Lovecraft strolled past and visited were often substantially covered in greenery, usually ivy, often to an extent that seems incredible today. Such as this…

Tolkien also lived in the same sort of environment, with the venerable Country Life magazine going so far as to chide his College for their “excessive” love of greenery, at a time when such greenery was everywhere rampant in England.

The bareness of brick often seen today is a legacy of the post-war ‘ivy removal’ fad, which by the 1960s and 70s had run as rampant as the ivy it condemned. Ivy removals worked alongside the fetish of the average modernist for bare everything, including brickwork and concrete. And perhaps alongside the interests of modernism-demented city authorities, with their passion for the sight of any visible decay which might justify demolishing swathes of old buildings. The economic depressions of the 1970s probably didn’t help — easier to tear the ivy down, than pay a man to trim it back every two years.

Yet it now turns out that ivy removal was the result of a false consensus, one with no basis in either building science or home economics. I was interested to learn of a recent major UK study by the Royal Horticultural Society and the University of Reading. An ivy covering reduces surface temperature swings on new brickwork, thus preventing flaking and cracking from developing over time. Damp was not ‘trapped’, as was commonly said by the ivy-haters, and the humidity was actually stabilised by the ivy covering and rain was kept off. Again, this stability helps to preserve the brick surface. Frost, salts, and vehicle pollution are all protected against, far outweighing any micro-damage done by the tiny adhesion points of the climbing ivy stems.

There appears to be a big energy benefit. The study found indoor summer temperatures cooler by up to 7.2 degrees. Given the UK’s usual dismal summer temperatures, this may not actually be a good thing, and might involve the inhabitants donning pullovers and hats. But the finding may interest places such as Lovecraft’s Providence, which endure much more steamy summers. Less air conditioning would be needed. The test houses also lost less heat in winter (costing less to heat, by as much as 20%), which would have been of much more use in the British climate.

That saving would of course have to be weighed against the cost of trimming back the ivy every two years. But likely the house owner could come out on top financially, especially given the soaring cost of energy. Also, I wonder if some sort of ivy-trimming flying drone might not yet be invented, with an AI camera to detect young and easily cut-able shoots? Consider also the ivy’s likely deterrence of the sort of graffiti scrawls which devalue one’s house, and also the entire street, through deterring possible house buyers.

The new UK study confirms earlier work which asked “Is Ivy Good or Bad for Historic Walls?”. Another recent study in Toronto suggested the easy-grow big-leafed Boston Ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata) as the ideal for restoring cities on the East Coast of the USA and Canada.

“… the ivy was climbing slowly over the restored walls as it had climbed so many centuries ago, and how the peasants blessed him for bringing back the old days” (“The Moon-Bog”).

And perhaps not only restoring. Those who laugh at the Syd Mead-like visions of a ‘solarpunk’ future, pointing to the unlikely abundance of greenery hanging from the gleaming white buildings, perhaps overlook both the likely advances in materials bio-science (building materials ‘grown’ from fungi) and in the tools (drones and robots) needed to control vegetation. Possibly also an advanced form of drip-feed irrigation. Future white-walled towns built from fungi and clad with gothic ivy, perhaps. Lovecraft would surely approve of that.

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Ivy is rarely a notable feature of Lovecraft’s work, other than the two instances above where it is linked with an ancestral home. Since such greenery was at that time a commonplace which was all around him. As he states in Dexter Ward, speaking of this lack of interest in what one knows and sees everyday…

The odd thing was that Ward seemed no longer interested in the antiquities he knew so well. He had, it appears, lost his regard for them through sheer familiarity; and all his final efforts were obviously bent toward mastering those common facts of the modern world

He did make one early venture into plant horror, “The Tree”, but that was not a very successful tale.

But his protege Belknap Long, an inhabitant of the largely greenery-starved New York City, would create a wartime series for boys featuring monster plants (John Carstairs). For a high-rise apartment dweller such as Long, plants were a more unusual thing, and thus might be monster-ized following the lead given by various earlier pulp tales.

There are however some instances in Lovecraft’s letters, such as this from 1923 in which an ivy clad house elides with brief horror…

The coach ride [to the old Salem-Village] was delightful, giving frequent glimpses of ancient houses in a fashion to stimulate the antiquarian soul. Suddenly, at a graceful and shady village corner which the coach was about to turn, I beheld the tall chimneys and ivy’d walls of a splendid brick house of later Colonial design [… Asking to alight from the coach, and going around the back of the house] I loudly sounded the knocker […] My summons was answer’d simultaneously by two of the most pitiful and decrepit-looking persons imaginable — hideous old women more sinister than the witches of 1692, and certainly not under 80. For a moment I believ’d them to be Salem witches in truth…

Call for articles on ‘Fantasy flora / Flore imaginaire’, for a special issue of the journal Fantasy Art and Studies. Deadline: 10th June 2024.