Last year, I wrote about connections between Weird Tales and Fate magazine. You can read what I wrote by clicking here. One of the points in my first essay is that Fate was one successor to Weird Tales, possibly the primary successor--at least until the 1960s when Robert A.W. Lowndes began as editor of Magazine of Horror. As have I pointed out, weird is from the Old English, wyrd, meaning "fate." So, Weird Tales and Fate are named for and treat the same concept, namely wyrd or weird or fate.
Fate is Latinate. Clipped, monosyllabic, with two hard consonant sounds, it sounds instead like an Anglo-Saxon word. The main title logo in Weird Tales is a little fancy and has an Art Deco appearance. The designer of that logo, which is still in use, was J. Allen St. John, who did cover art for both magazines. The main title logo for Fate is less fancy. It has a stern and uncompromising look, just like the word it represents.
The logo of Fate is made up of white lettering enclosed in a red rectangle. Life magazine also had white lettering enclosed in a red rectangle. The typeface in Fate is Roman, while that in Life is Gothic. Life and fate, perhaps two sides of a coin, are there represented, as are the ancient Roman (and Latinate, fate) and the medieval Gothic (and English, life).
Fate included in its contents art by Weird Tales artists and articles by Weird Tales authors. It also had brief articles, used as fillers, about real-life events, just as in the first many issues of Weird Tales. In both magazines, the use of these fillers might have been after the example of Charles Fort. (Fort's last name and the word fate have the same number of letters and the same two hard consonant sounds.) Many of the short filler articles in Fate are about the workings of fate. Many of them are essentially contes cruels. Both Weird Tales and Fate were strongly influenced by Fort. Fate was founded by Raymond A. Palmer and Curtis Fuller, both of whom were Forteans.
The conte cruel is a type of weird tale characterized by torture, cruelty, and torment. It was named for a collection of stories by the French author Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, from 1883. Although Villiers was not in Weird Tales, he was in Lowndes' Magazine of Horror. One edition of Contes Cruels shows a man chained to a Catherine's wheel on its cover. The wheel is of course a circle, like the wheel of fortune, "fortune" being another meaning of the root word wyrd. Regarding circles, Charles Fort declared, "One measures a circle, beginning anywhere." All things seem to turn in circles. Remember that "to turn" is the root meaning of wyrd.
Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley
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