H.P. Lovecraft, Cosmic Horror, & August Derleth-Part Two

August Derleth quoted Harold Farnese on H.P. Lovecraft, putting words at the tip of Lovecraft's pen that were never there.

Derleth also misquoted Lovecraft in a newspaper column called "The New Books," published in the Madison, Wisconsin, Capital Times on August 2, 1942. His subject was Clark Ashton Smith and his new book Out of Space and Time (Arkham House, 1942). Derleth wrote:

"None strikes the note of cosmic horror so well as Clark Ashton Smith," wrote the late great master of the macabre H.P. Lovecraft.

It's nice that Smith was getting some press. Somewhat questionable is the idea that Derleth the reviewer was promoting in his column a book that Derleth the publisher had just made available for sale. Unacceptable is the fact that Derleth misquoted his "late great master," for what Lovecraft actually wrote, in "Supernatural Horror in Literature," is this:

Of younger Americans, none strikes the note of cosmic terror so well as the California poet, artist, and fictionist Clark Ashton Smith [. . .].

Emphasis added in both quotes.

So Derleth replaced "terror" with "horror." You might call that a quibble. Someone else might see it differently. After all, terror and horror are not the same thing. More to the point, by 1942, "cosmic horror," perhaps already synonymous with Lovecraftian horror, at least in the fan's imagination, had probably become or was beginning to become a thing.* Clark Ashton Smith may have written Lovecraftian tales of cosmic horror, but Lovecraft didn't say that. Derleth did, thereby putting words into Lovecraft's mouth. Again we have to wonder whether this was a simple mistake or misinterpretation, or something done because it suited Derleth's purposes. Did he seek to make a claim to "cosmic horror" as a concept in the way that he seems to have done to the ideas and works of H.P. Lovecraft? Answering that question would take more research than what I can accomplish right now. I'll just add that in her review of Out of Time and Space, Gail Stackpole of the Oroville (California) Mercury-Register was original in describing Smith's collection as "these tales of cosmic horror" (Nov. 12, 1942).

In misquoting Lovecraft in print, Derleth once again propagated an inaccurate idea about his subject, in this case Clark Ashton Smith. When Robert Elder wrote his obituary of Smith (Auburn [California] Journal, Aug. 17, 1961), he perpetuated that idea, using Derleth's exact words--"cosmic horror"--from 1942. Elder may have used Derleth's previous review as a source for his quote. Again, this might be just so much quibbling, but if "cosmic horror" is a real category, we should use the term describing it with as much precision as possible. A larger principle is that we should be as assiduous in our research and as accurate in our quotations as we can be.

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*The first use of the modifier Lovecraftian in newspapers that I have found was by William T. Evjue, writing in the Capital Times on November 28, 1945, in regards to an essay ("Tales of the Marvellous and Ridiculous") by Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker (Nov. 24, 1945). The first of its opposite, un-Lovecraftian, is in R.S. Devon's review of The Lurker at the Threshold by August Derleth (1945), in the same paper on December 31, 1945. I agree with Devon that Derleth's book is un-Lovecraftian, possibly even anti-Lovecraftian. I have written before on Wilson and The Lurker at the Threshold. Click on the name and title for a link.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

First Verse

Although he did not receive credit in the table of contents, Clark Ashton Smith had, in the issue of July/August 1923, the first verse in Weird Tales. The first of his two poems in that issue is entitled "The Red Moon." You will find it on page 48.

The Red Moon
by Clark Ashton Smith

The hills, a-throng with swarthy pine,
Press up the pale and hollow sky,
And the squat cypresses on high
Reach from the lit horizon-line.

They reach, they reach, with gnarled hands--
Malignant hags, obscene and dark--
While the red moon, a demons'-ark,
Is borne along the mystic lands.

The second, a sonnet, appearing on page 68, is entitled "The Garden of Evil":

The Garden of Evil
by Clark Ashton Smith

Thy soul is like a secret garden-close.
Where the cleft roots of mandragores enwreathe;
Where lilies and where fumitories breathe,
And ivy winds its flower with the rose;

The lolling weeds of Lethe, green or wan,
Exhale their fatal languors on the light;
From out infernal grails of aconite.
Poisons and dews are proffered to the dawn.

There, when the moon's phantasmal fingers grope
To find the marbles of a hidden tomb.
In cypress-covert sings the nightingale;

And all the silver-bellied serpents pale
Their ruby eyes among the blossoms ope,
To lift and listen in the ghostly gloom.

There were three poems in the January 1924 issue of Weird Tales, "Hops" by Preston Langley Hickey, "Solution" by Clark Ashton Smith, and "The Cataleptic" by Charles Layng. Mary Sharon had the first poem by a women. Hers was called "The Ghost," and it appeared in the February 1924 issue:

The Ghost
by Mary Sharon

There is a ghost that walks for me,
     A Presence that I dread;
The Spirit of the Youth I was
     Before my dreams were dead.

I sit before my study fire,
     While shadows writhe along the wall,
And Spirit hands rap on the door,
     And ghostly feet glide down the hall.

Outside my window, lifeless trees
     Lift fleshless fingers to the sky;
The night wind whistles eerily,
     Its moaning echoes will not die.

This ghost of mine will not be laid,
    Time cannot set me free; 
It is the wraith of dear dead days,
    That comes to torture me.

Note the similarity in imagery between Smith's poem "The Red Moon":

They [the cypresses] reach, they reach, with gnarled hands--

And Mary Sharon's lines:

Outside my window, lifeless trees
     Lift fleshless fingers to the sky;

Should we take that as a swipe? An inspiration of one author to another? Or two minds arriving independently at the same image?

There were six poems in the issue of March 1924 but only one in the issue of April. That one, called "Nemesis," was by H.P. Lovecraft.

I will soon have more on the first of Lovecraft in Weird Tales, including lines of verse he inserted in his letters to "The Eyrie."

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales, July/August 1923

The issue of Weird Tales magazine for July/August 1923 was the first to cover two months rather than one and the first to have fewer than 100 pages. It was also the first issue in volume two of the magazine. The cover by R.M. Mally illustrates "Sunfire" by Francis Stevens, aka Gertrude Barrows Bennett. It was his second of nine covers for Weird Tales, and it was her first and last story for "The Unique Magazine." In fact, it was the last published story of her writing career: one hundred years ago this late summer season, Gertrude Barrows Bennett fell silent.

There are sixteen stories, one credited essay, and two poems in the July/August issue. The poems were by Clark Ashton Smith and were the first of their form in Weird Tales. All of the interior illustrations were by William F. Heitman (1878-1945). There are sixteen uncredited nonfiction fillers with titles in this issue as well, plus at least three without titles. And there are two features, "The Cauldron," conducted by Preston Langley Hickey, and "The Eyrie," the regular letters column. As in the previous two issues, there are three columns of type. The interior of the magazine contains 96 pages.

The stories, essay, and poems and their authors:

• "Sunfire," part one of a two-part serial by Francis Stevens (1883-1948).

• "The Outcasts" by George Warburton Lewis (1878-1963).

• "The Room of the Black Velvet Drapes" by B. W. Sliney.

• "Doctor X," called "A Five-Minute Tale," by Culpeper Chunn (1889-1927). I wonder what the first story was in which someone or something was referred to as X. Could it have been "Doctor X"?

• "The Two Men Who Murdered Each Other" by Valma Clark (1894-1953). The title of this story is of course a variation on "The Man Who . . .".

• "The Strange Case of Jacob Arum" by John Harris Burland (1870-1926). I believe Heitman's illustration for Burland's story is the first in Weird Tales to show a black man.

• "Black Cunjer" by Isabel Walker.

• "The Red Moon," poem by Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961).

• "Shades" by Bryan Irvine (1885-1945).

• "Voodooism" essay by Will W. Nelson.

• "Senorita Serpente" by Earl Wayland Bowman (1875-1952).

• "The Room in the Tower" by D. L. Radway.

• "Riders in the Dark" by Vincent Starrett (1886-1974).

• "Mandrake" by Adam Hull Shirk (1881-1931).

• "The Garden of Evil," poem by Clark Ashton Smith.

• "People vs. Bland" by Theodore Snow Wood (1877-1940).

• "The Evening Wolves," part two of a two-part serial by Paul Ellsworth Triem (1882-1946).

• "The Corpse on the Third Slab" by Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946). Kline's story, set once again in Chicago, has an Irish beat cop named Ryan, as well as a character called Coroner Haynes, who would show up again in Kline's Dr. Dorp story "The Malignant Entity" in the issue of May/June/July 1924.

• "The Guard of Honor" by J. Paul Suter (1884-1970).

I have written before about nine of these authors, seven at length and two with much shorter entries. Click on their names for links.

Next: "The Eyrie" for July/August 1923.

Weird Tales, August/September 1923 with cover art by R.M. Mally illustrating "Sunfire" by Francis Stevens. I have read "Sunfire," and I can't figure out which scene in the story is illustrated in Mally's drawing. I would call this one of the poorest covers in Weird Tales, a magazine with more than its share of poor covers.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Ooze, Blobs, Jellies, & Slime in Weird Fiction

By the late nineteenth century, then, there seems to have been an image or awareness of the ooze and slime that lay at the bottom of the world's oceans. If the 1890s were the beginnings of our current popular culture, then maybe ooze made its debut in genre fiction during that same decade. I can't say that that's true, but I have an example, Rudyard Kipling's short story "A Matter of Fact," from People magazine, 1892, and collected in Many Inventions in 1893.

"A Matter of Fact" is more than just one thing. It's a sea story, a weird tale, an early example of cryptozoological fiction, and a story about journalists and journalism. In that way, "A Matter of Fact" might be a little metafictional, just as is "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud. Kipling's story falls into two parts. The first takes place at sea, in the kind of isolation necessary for a weird narrative to play out. The second part is set on sober land. The seagoing part of "A Matter of Fact" is exciting, suspenseful, and filled with sensations of awe and terror. You can almost believe that Kipling really did witness the death of a sea serpent caused by the eruption of an undersea volcano. The landed part consists mainly of conversations among the three journalists who were witnesses to this event. That part of the story is ironic and a little humorous. If you're an American, prepare to be poked a little.

There is both ooze and slime in "A Matter of Fact":

The gray ooze of the undermost sea lay in the monstrous wrinkles of the back, and poured away in sluices. [. . .] Then the death-struggle began, with crampings and twistings and jerkings of the white bulk to and fro, till our little steamer rolled again, and each gray wave coated her plates with the gray slime.

* * *

In July 1917, twenty-six-year-old H.P. Lovecraft wrote "Dagon," one of his first published short stories. It's the tale of a man who, having escaped in a boat from German sea-raiders, finds himself on what can only be an upthrust stretch of seabed:

When at last I awaked, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see, and in which my boat lay grounded some distance away. [. . .] There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a nauseating fear.

There's a lot of namedropping in "Dagon." In the space of a couple of thousand words, Lovecraft invoked Gustave Doré, Edgar Allan Poe, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton and alluded to John Milton. There's a lot of word-dropping, too. For example:

I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.

And: 

Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then.

And:

Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity.

My advice to young (and sometimes middle-aged) Lovecraft: try. Please just try.

Namedropping is not storytelling. (Nor is it analysis or criticism.) Word-dropping is also not storytelling. Words can sometimes act as talismans. They may have magical power in them. But certain kinds of words and phrases are not suitable substitutes for real description and real expression. What, for example, is "the fathomless chaos of eternal night"? If you compare "Dagon"--an early work to be sure--to "A Matter of Fact" you can easily see that Lovecraft could have learned a thing or two by reading Kipling.

"Dagon" was first published in The Vagrant #11 in November 1919. It was reprinted in Weird Tales in October 1923, Lovecraft's first story in "The Unique Magazine." It was reprinted again in January 1936 and November 1951. Call it a dry run--or maybe a wet, slimy run--for "The Call of Cthulhu."

* * *

"The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft is from 1926 and was published in Weird Tales in February 1928. It has slime:

He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone [. . .].

There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults [. . .].

So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.

And ooze:

Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror.

Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen's command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9′, W. Longitude 126° 43′ come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror--the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars.

Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen.

The slime and ooze wasn't alive just yet. That would come soon enough.

* * *

Shoggoths

Lovecraft first described shoggoths in detail in his novella At the Mountains of Madness, written in 1931 and published as a serial in Astounding Stories in February-March-April 1936. Shoggoths are plastic, protoplasmic, and amoeba-like. They make me think of the giant amoeba in "Ooze":

They were normally shapeless entities composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles; and each averaged about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. They had, however, a constantly shifting shape and volume; throwing out temporary developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing, and speech in imitation of their masters, either spontaneously or according to suggestion.

 As works of the imagination, however, shoggoths seem to go farther back than that:

It was under the sea, at first for food and later for other purposes, that they [the Old Ones] first created earth-life--using available substances according to long-known methods. The more elaborate experiments came after the annihilation of various cosmic enemies. They had done the same thing on other planets; having manufactured not only necessary foods, but certain multicellular protoplasmic masses capable of moulding their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs under hypnotic influence and thereby forming ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of the community. These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered about as the "shoggoths" in his frightful Necronomicon [. . .]. [Emphasis added.]

More explicitly:

The steady trend down the ages [Lovecraft wrote] was from water to land; a movement encouraged by the rise of new land masses, though the ocean was never wholly deserted. Another cause of the landward movement was the new difficulty in breeding and managing the shoggoths upon which successful sea-life depended. With the march of time, as the sculptures sadly confessed, the art of creating new life from inorganic matter had been lost; so that the Old Ones had to depend on the moulding of forms already in existence. On land the great reptiles proved highly tractable; but the shoggoths of the sea, reproducing by fission and acquiring a dangerous degree of accidental intelligence, presented for a time a formidable problem. [Emphasis added.]

So, like urschleim and Bathybius, like primordial slime and primordial ooze, first of pre-science, then of pseudoscience, shoggoths were created under the sea from nonliving matter. There are lots of oozy and slimy words attached to shoggoths, also lots of colloidal words. Lovecraft's descriptions of them make me think of fruitcake batter or those Jello salads that people used to make using mini marshmallows, Maraschino cherries, and mandarin orange slices.

* * *

Ubbo-Sathla in Clark Ashton Smith's story of the same name (Weird Tales, July 1933), isn't a shoggoth, but it has shoggoth-like qualities. In a kind of body-vision, a man named Tregardis travels back through the aeons to a time before time:

Through years and ages of the ophidian era it [i.e., his de-evolving body] returned, and was a thing that crawled in the ooze, that had not yet learned to think and dream and build. And the time came when there was no longer a continent, but only a vast, chaotic marsh, a sea of slime, without limit or horizon, that seethed with a blind writhing of amorphous vapors.
     There, in the gray beginning of Earth, the formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla reposed amid the slime and the vapors. Headless, without organs or members, it sloughed from its oozy sides, in a slow, ceaseless wave, the amebic forms that were the archetypes of earthly life. Horrible it was, if there had been aught to apprehend the horror; and loathsome, if there had been any to feel loathing. About it, prone or tilted in the mire, there lay the mighty tablets of star-quarried stone that were writ with the inconceivable wisdom of the pre-mundane gods.

The image of a limitless sea of slime recalls the upthrust seabed in "Dagon." Moreover, as "a vast, chaotic marsh, a sea of slime," an oozy place in which life is generated, beginning with "amebic forms," it is an almost perfect evocation of the primordial ooze, primordial slime, primordial soup, or warm little pool of pre-science, pseudoscience, and unsupported or evidence-free "science" that we seem to have taken for granted for a very long time now. Tregardis' regression through evolutionary time had precedent in Otis Adelbert Kline's serial "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," which is also about a kind of ooze, slime, or plasm.

* * *

Shoggoths came back in "Notebook Found in an Deserted House" by Robert Bloch (Weird Tales, May 1951):

I looked back at the big black thing that was a shoggoth. I looked back as it kep swelling and growing. I guess I told about how it could change shape, and how big it got.

It was real tall and all inky-black, without any particular shape except a lot of black ropes with ends like hoofs on it. I mean, it had a shape but it kep changing--all bulgy and squirming into different sizes. They was a lot of mouths all over the thing like puckered up leaves on branches.

That's as close as I can come. The mouths was like leaves and the whole thing was like a tree in the wind, a black tree with lots of branches trailing the ground, and a whole lot of roots ending in hoofs. And that green slime dribbling out of the mouths and down the legs was like sap!

Lovecraft didn't mention hooves, but if you're going to live on land, you might need them. Pseudopodia are good only in a liquid medium.

* * *

In "Slime" by Joseph Payne Brennan (Weird Tales, Mar. 1953), we have the fullest, clearest, and most detailed description yet of living ooze or living slime, including its origins. It's hard to believe that Brennan did not write his story in full awareness of the history of ooze and slime, including a possible reading of "Ooze." His story begins:

     It was a great gray-black hood of horror moving over the floor of the sea. It slid through the soft ooze like a monstrous mantle of slime obscenely animated with questing life. It was by turns viscid and fluid. At times it flattened out and flowed through the carpet of mud like an inky pool; occasionally it paused, seeming to shrink in upon itself, and reared up out of the ooze until it resembled an irregular cone or a gigantic hood. Although it possessed no eyes, it had a marvelously developed sense of touch, and it possessed a sensitivity to minute vibrations which was almost akin to telepathy. It was plastic, essentially shapeless. It could shoot out long tentacles, until it bore a resemblance to a nightmare squid or a huge starfish; it could retract itself into a round flattened disk, or squeeze into an irregular hunched shape so that it looked like a black boulder sunk on the bottom of the sea.
     It had prowled the black water endlessly. It had been formed when the earth and the seas were young; it was almost as old as the ocean itself. It moved through a night which had no beginning and no dissolution. The black sea basin where it lurked had been dark since the world began--an environment only a little less inimical than the stupendous gulfs of interplanetary space. 

Everything would have been fine for us surface-dwellers . . .

     Had it not been for a vast volcanic upheaval on the bottom of the ocean basin, the black horror would have crept out its entire existence on the silent sea ooze without ever manifesting its hideous powers to mankind.
     Fate, in the form of a violent subterranean explosion, covering huge areas of the ocean's floor, hurled it out of its black slime world and sent it spinning toward the surface.

So we have come full circle, beginning with Kipling's "A Matter of Fact," then on to Lovecraft's "Dagon" and "The Call of Cthulhu," finally to "Slime," for each involves a submarine disturbance of one kind or another that raises something from the ocean floor to the surface. (The dinosaur in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, released in 1953, is also awakened by a disturbance at sea.) Here's another full circle: Brennan's monster arrives on land in a swamp:

     Along with scattered ash, pumice and the puffed bodies of dead fish, the black horror was hurled toward a beach. The huge waves carried it more than a mile inland, far beyond the strip of sandy shore, and deposited it in the midst of a deep brackish swamp area.

And at last we have an overt example of sea-ooze, Brennan's slime monster, becoming the swamp monster of American popular culture.

Astounding Stories, February 1936. Cover story: "At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. Cover art by Howard V. Brown. This was the first installment of Lovecraft's novella and depicts, I believe for the first time, a shoggoth, a colloidal kind of creature made from inorganic matter on the ocean floor, what Kipling referred to in his poem "The Deep-Sea Cables" as "the womb of the world." Like the giant amoeba in Anthony Rud's "Ooze," they escaped from their creators and captors to wreak havoc upon the world. After their experiences in Antarctica, these polar explorers are likely to become bipolar explorers.

By the way, the swamp creature on the cover of Beware #13 (Jan. 1953), which I showed the other day, looks a lot like Brown's shoggoth shown here.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

What's in a Title?-Part Two

Weird

Weird is an old word. In fact it's from an Old English word, wyrd. The origins of weird are in a presumed Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root, *wer-, meaning "to turn" or "to bend." We use weird as an adjective, but originally it was a noun, meaning, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, "fate, chance, fortune; destiny; the Fates." For purposes of talking about weird fiction, it might be best to reduce the meaning of weird to "fate" or "destiny." That's how I think of it, although "chance" might apply in the case of a certain kind of weird story, the conte cruel, in which characters face a cruel and arbitrary (or undeserved) fate. Conte, by the way, is translated as "tale."

The Fates are of course from Greek mythology, in which they are called the Moirai, also spelled Moirae or Mœræ, meaning "lots, destinies, apportioners." There are three of them, all women. Their names are Clotho, the "spinner"; Lachesis, the "allotter"; and Atropos, "the unturnable." Note in the names of Clothos the Spinner and Atropos the Unturnable the references again to the verb "to turn." As for Lachesis the Allotter, remember that one meaning of lot has to do with fate or destiny, as in the expression cast one's lot or one's lot in life.

Our word Fates is from the Latin, Fata, or fata, originally from a PIE root, *bha-, meaning "to speak, tell, say." That suggests a linguistic or conceptual connection between the two component words of the title Weird Tales: weird, meaning "fate," originally "to tell," and tales, or a story that is told. Maybe fate must be spoken. I should warn you at this point that pursuing the meanings and origins of words can easily lead you down a rabbit hole from which you might not return.

There are Fates in other cultures and mythologies. In Norse mythology they are called the Norns, and their names are Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld. Urðr is a cognate of wyrd, and like wyrd, it means "fate." There are suggestions that the names of the Norns denote past, present, and future. I don't know whether that's true or not, but the idea makes me think of the three ghosts of Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol (1843). Men and women in threes returned in Dracula's brides in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), in the film The Three Weird Sisters (1948), and in Albert K. Bender's Three Men in Black (MIB) from the 1950s. More on another threesome will begin in three, two, one . . .

The three women of fate are elsewhere in English literature, namely in Macbeth, Shakespeare's "Scottish Play." By the way, this is the four-hundredth anniversary year of its publication. The play refers to these three women as "the weyward Sisters." We know them now as the Three Witches or the Weird Sisters. They were not originally referred to as witches. As for weird, there's a way to get there from the word weyward.

Spelling was of course nonstandard in Shakespeare's time. His referring to his three women as "the weyward Sisters" gives us an idea, I think, of one possible pronunciation of weird, something like "way-ard." Wiktionary, the Free Dictionary gives weïrd as an alternate and obsolete spelling of weird. The diaeresis over the -i- of course indicates that the second part of the word, -ird, is pronounced as a syllable separate from the first. Thus weyward (or weyard) easily became weird, and the weyward Sisters became the Weird Sisters. This case for an association or transformation is strengthened, I think, in the meaning of the word wayward, for the -ward part of wayward (literally, "turned away") is from the same root as weird. "Turned to," then, is toward or towards, and so on.

Although it was originally an Old English word, weird dropped out of common usage in English. It persisted, however, in the spoken language of Scotland. Shakespeare as much as anybody may have saved it for us. (The only instances of weird I have found in newspapers before 1843 are in reference to his three Weird Sisters.) I'm no Shakespearean scholar, but I have read references to an increased emphasis on the weirdness--meaning the uncanniness or supernatural quality--of the Weird Sisters in performances of the Scottish Play during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is perhaps from those performances that weird became a synonym for uncanny, another Scottish (as well as northern English) word.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary: "By 1843 it [the word uncanny] had a general sense in English of 'having a supernatural character, weird, mysterious, strange'." During the pulp era and afterwards, there were magazines with the words weird, strange, and uncanny in their titles, all used more or less synonymously. There was even a small magazine called Wyrd. In any case, the year 1843 has come up three times in this essay. That suggests that weird, uncanny, and related words and ideas came into common usage again in the early to mid 1800s after having fallen into disuse everywhere but in Scotland during the previous couple of centuries. In other words, words that were previously only spoken in one relatively small place were finally written down for the whole English-speaking world to see and to read. This was, I think, a key development in the history of weird.

One possible explanation for the allure of this very old word is that it may have seemed new and glamorous, in an older sense of that word. (Glamour is another Scottish word by the way.) Weird may have carried with it a kind of meaning or utility otherwise lacking in the English language. It may actually have been a needful word in a century characterized by the twin advances of materialism and progressivism, and by an increasing faith in science and a loss of faith in the supernatural. In times of change and anxiety brought on by change, we very often fall back on old things. One possibility here is that weird is a conservative reaction to a science- or reason-based progressivism.

And that sets up a literary dichotomy about which I'll soon write more.

* * *

I'm not done with this exploration of the word weird just yet. It is my weird to look into these things a little further . . .

So why did weird persist in Scotland? Why do we think of it as a Scottish word? I can't say, but I can speculate:

First, Scotland is on the fringes of the United Kingdom. Old things often last on the fringes while disappearing in the rapidly moving heart of a larger culture or society.

Second, Scotland is home to traditional cultures and traditional ways. In their rush into modernity, cultures and societies leave behind tradition and folkways. Only later do they realize what is being lost. Only then do they rush in the opposite direction to preserve while they can the things of the past. There was a lot of that in the 1800s, I think. Maybe weird was saved not only by Shakespeare but also by folklorists or gatherers of traditional ways, poems, songs, and tales. Robert Burns may have been one of them. In fact, the word weird appears in his poem "Her Answer," from 1795. Significantly, it is used as a noun rather than an adjective. Significantly, that came during the Romantic Era, which was in part a reaction to the rationalism of the eighteenth century.

Third, a question: Is there a peculiar Celtic sense of fate or doom? I'm from an Old World-type Irish family. There is or was certainly that feeling among my dad's family. It's hard to escape even today. (I joke that our family left Ireland more than 100 years ago and are only now arriving in America.) In Celtic cultures kept under the thumb of their English overlords, there may have been a sense that a man is not in control of his own life or destiny. That sense promotes the feeling that nothing can be done and that one must accept one's lot in life, or, in Scottish, one must dree his weird.

And fourth, another question: Could the idea of the weird as fate have been reinforced in Scotland by the Calvinist concept of predestination?

* * *

In its presumed Proto-Indo-European root, weird means "to turn" or "to bend," or, in a more complex working out of the concept, "to become," as in "to turn into." Becoming, turning into, or being transformed is a common theme in weird fiction, for example in "The Wendigo" by Algernon Blackwood (1910). The protagonists in that story, by the way, are Scotsmen. "To turn" or "to bend" also shows up in certain expressions related to fate or destiny, for example, twist of fate or to reach a turning point in one's life. In literature there are plot twists, and in reading, page turners. This kind of thing could go on and on.

In its Old English origins, weird was a noun. Again, we use it now as an adjective, thus we get away from its original meaning. I think the intention behind the naming of "the Unique Magazine" as Weird Tales may have been to invoke the original meaning of weird, that is, as tales of the weird (fate) or tales of fateful things rather than as tales that are weird (strange or uncanny) or that tell about weird (uncanny or supernatural) things. "The Basket" by Herbert J. Mangham (Herbert J. Maughiman) in the first issue of Weird Tales is an excellent example of a tale of one man's weird, if I understand the word and concept correctly, without any resort to the supernatural.

Clark Ashton Smith was an expert at archaic words. He used them with a facility that is perhaps unique in genre fiction. There are only two stories in Weird Tales that use weird as a noun in their titles. Smith's story "The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan," from June 1932, is one of them. The other is "The Weirds of the Woodcarver" by Gardner F. Fox, from September 1944. Notorious might be the right word to describe Fox's habit of borrowing from other authors. Maybe he did and maybe he didn't borrow from Clark Ashton Smith. Anyway, all other uses of weird in titles of stories that appeared in Weird Tales are as adjectives. In this way, the so-called "New Weird" (which, being more than a decade old, isn't new anymore) returns to origins and to old things. And so we're back to the nineteenth century or before.

There is one more story to mention on this topic. It is called "Norn," and it was by Everil Worrell, writing under her pseudonym Lireve Monet. "Norn" was in Weird Tales in February 1936. Everil Worrell is the first woman to come up in this series. There will be more women shortly.

Next: Tale.

The Norns Vanish by Arthur Rackham (1924).

Thanks to Hlafbrot for information on Scottish words.
Revised very slightly on March 31, 2026.
Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley