I’ve now had a chance to read through the auto-translation of the Italian book Tolkien e Lovecraft (2023), mentioned at the end of my recent Tolkien and Lovecraft post. I’ve noted down the book’s various additional points of comparison, beyond those which Honneger made or which I added in my earlier post.

* Tolkien e Lovecraft discusses, for most of its short length, the fantasy reading that both writers shared in their youth. Dunsany (early work), Edgar Rice Burroughs (early work), E.R. Eddison (Ouroboros). With other writers being less certain. William Morris certainly for Tolkien, but only read in passing by Lovecraft. Poe certainly for Lovecraft, but only very much a ‘maybe, we don’t really know’ for Tolkien.

* Both had a vast knowledge of the past, but often a somewhat idealised past. A past in which they often spent long periods of time. I would add that idealisation of the past was partly made possible by the patchy coverage of the scholarship and archaeology before the Second World War and before modern genetics.

* Both had a strong love for a cultivated, crafted and tamed landscape. Implicitly an English landscape, well stewarded for future generations. This love overlapped with their disdain for modern ugliness and befoulment.

* Both drew on an essentially 18th century gothic conception of horror and terror.

* Both were drawn to obsolete or arcane languages.

* Both upheld what might be termed a ‘civalric’ attitude in their personality and personal dealings.

* Both were averse to allegory in literature.

* They saw fantastical escapist literature as positive, something “authentically creative” and not a lesser or debased form of literature.

* Both devised a fantastic pantheon and lore from scratch. And highly believable ones.

* The book also reminded me that Lovecraft had an interest in faery lore, albeit a passing one, evidenced by his essay “Some Backgrounds to Fairyland” (1932). In my view this (even if deemed erroneous now) valuably encapsulated the secondary understanding of such things that could be had from a large library circa 1922-32.

I would add, finally, that…

* Both had an open ’21st century approach’, by the standards of the 20th century, to sharing what they made with others. Tolkien expected “other minds and hands” to expand and fill in his Legendarium after his death. While Lovecraft fairly freely shared his Mythos before his death, and then Derleth and public-domain did the rest.

* For both, horrific creatures are the result of unnatural cross-breeding (orcs by wizards / hybrids by cult leaders).

There’s now a Kindle edition of the Italian Tolkien e Lovecraft: Alle origini del fantastico. The paper version can’t be sent to an Amazon locker for pick-up, so that had meant ‘no deal’ for me. Not that I can read Italian, but I could have flatbed-scanned and translated the pages and got the gist of it.

A potential buyer can now get a free 10% sample of the ebook. I had this sent through, and as a result I find that a Kindle Fire tablet will permit screenshots of books being displayed in the Amazon reader app (nice, I didn’t know that). These screenshots can then be opened on the desktop PC, OCR’d by Abbyy Screenshot Reader, copied out to a Word .DOCX then auto-translated. The contents of the new book are then…

Introduction.
Premise [of the book].
1. Distant biographies [between the two writers]…
2. …but not too much.
3. Shared readings.
4. William Morris and George MacDonald.
5. Edgar Allan Poe.
6. Herbert George Wells and William Hope Hodgson.
7. Algernon Blackwood and Montague Rhodes Tames.
8. Eric Rucker [E.R.] Eddison.
9. Lord Dunsany and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
10. Tolkien’s gothic and Lovecraft’s fantasy: the beauty of Perilous Realms.
Bibliography.
Parallel biographies: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

And here is the English translation for the one-page “Premise [of the book]”, clarified for sense and fluency in English:

‘In their mastery of the narrative of the imaginary, a mastery never again attainable, it is commonly supposed that John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and Howard Phillips Lovecraft are polar opposites. Even now this is still the view, after these writers have over many decades achieved deep worldwide resonance with scholars and readers. When they have both strongly contributed to the modern re-foundation of a mode of storytelling whose ancestral roots are lost in ancient epics and the very beginnings of man’s literary adventure. When they have both laid the foundations of a real philosophy of the ontological sustainability of alternative worlds born from the creative imagination. Yet on the surface, one has to admit that there does seem an evident and apparently unbridgeable difference between these two master-artisans of the fantastic. Tolkien with his luminous living fairy tale of Arda, crafted with all the slow rigour of the world’s leading philologist combined with the aesthetic wisdom of a medieval amanuensis. The dark, pre-human cosmic horrors of the dreamer of Providence, tempered only by his occasional ventures into the fabulous and otherworldly ‘dreamlands’. Of course, these two writers seem two extremes of what critics would like to deem an irreconcilable dichotomy. One ‘light’ and the other ‘shadow’. Yet does not this seeming dualism assure us of the vast range of the narrative territory which they have mapped? They have shown us new worlds alternately capable of arousing enduring hope or sudden terror, visions of divine providence or blindly impersonal cosmogonies. In these wide gaps, where on earth might one find points of significant contact? The aim of this work is to at least shorten the distances — perhaps inevitably only via my circumstantial inferences — firstly by showing their common literary reading and their appreciation of earlier or contemporary authors. Then by discussing some subtle similarities in artistic and aesthetic sensitivity. I hope these twin approaches will make their paths to the fantastic seem less antithetical than some might have been led to believe.’

Turns out the full £10 ebook runs to only 98 pages, which works out in a Word document at 24,000 words for the body-text minus the biographies at the back. Regrettably these biogs do not run side-by-side by-date for quick comparison.

Via the screenshots for the whole book, and via Abbyy Finereader, I got a Word .DOCX file. This then went through Google Translate. Who knew auto-translating short Kindle ebooks was so easy?

Hot on the heels of my recent long blog post on “Lovecraft and Charles Fort” comes a new book. My post could only recommend the book The Fortean Influence on Science Fiction (2020). But the latest Reason magazine (ever alert to the forces of unreason) reviews Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and his Followers (University of Chicago Press) and thus alerted me to another one. The new book is set for release on the 3rd of July 2024.

The book’s 394-pages survey not only the influence on imaginative writers, paranormal research and crypto-zoology (‘Bigfoot’ etc), but also what the Reason review calls “the libertarian-leaning strains of Fort’s following, from the San Francisco Renaissance to the Discordians”. These are left unexplained by the reviewer and may be unknown outside of a West Coast crowd of a certain age. So I should perhaps explain that the former references the 1950s/60s Beat generation writers (Ginsberg, Burroughs et al), and the latter a prank religion perhaps best known to science-fiction readers via mentions its primary text Principia Discordia in the infamous Illuminatus! Trilogy of the mid 1970s.

On searching the Google Books version of Think to New Worlds (already online), “Lovecraft” gets 17 hits. So his posthumous intertwingling with Fort is not ignored.