{"id":16826,"date":"2018-09-09T06:01:42","date_gmt":"2018-09-09T03:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tentaclii.wordpress.com\/?p=16826"},"modified":"2022-04-24T17:25:44","modified_gmt":"2022-04-24T17:25:44","slug":"an-early-lovecraft-appearance-in-fiction-the-black-druid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2018\/09\/09\/an-early-lovecraft-appearance-in-fiction-the-black-druid\/","title":{"rendered":"An early Lovecraft appearance in fiction: &#8220;The Black Druid&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An early appearance of H.P. Lovecraft in fiction is to be found in &#8220;The Black Druid&#8221; by Frank Belknap Long, published in <em>Weird Tales<\/em> for July 1930. The Editor, Farnsworth Wright, knowingly bills the story on the contents page as: &#8220;A short tale that compresses a world of cosmic horror in its few pages&#8221;, trusting the regular reader to make the connection between &#8220;cosmic horror&#8221; and Lovecraft.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.jurn.link\/tentaclii\/oldimages\/blackdruid-header.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.jurn.link\/tentaclii\/oldimages\/blackdruid-header.jpg?w=529\" alt=\"\" width=\"529\" height=\"526\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-16827\" \/><\/a>The picture illustrates the Lovecraft character in his &#8216;dream form&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>The story is interesting to scholars of Lovecraft&#8217;s life for being a knowing bit of fun-poking fictional commentary on Lovecraft, by someone who knew him on a near-everyday basis during the New York years.  Lovecraft is only lightly veiled as &#8220;Stephen Benefield&#8221; and the character has similar concerns, physical attributes and locales. The story also fictionalises Lovecraft&#8217;s wife Sonia.  Possibly the <em>Bene<\/em> in the name Benefield was even a comment on Lovecraft&#8217;s frugal diet, hinting at <em>beans<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Archive.org&#8217;s OCR of the text is middling, but I&#8217;ve made the story readable as a PDF and have given it some annotations and a little introduction &mdash; along the way solving a very minor scholarly mystery about an entry in Lovecraft&#8217;s <em>Commonplace Book<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.jurn.link\/tentaclii\/pdfs\/the_black_druid_belknap_long1.pdf\">Download PDF<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An early appearance of H.P. Lovecraft in fiction is to be found in &#8220;The Black Druid&#8221; by Frank Belknap Long, &hellip;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2018\/09\/09\/an-early-lovecraft-appearance-in-fiction-the-black-druid\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,11,12,19,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historical-context","category-lovecraft-as-character","category-lovecraftian-arts","category-new-discoveries","category-scholarly-works"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16826"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53706,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16826\/revisions\/53706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}