THE DEEP ONES: "The Moon-Bog" by H.P. Lovecraft

"The Moon-Bog" by H.P. Lovecraft

Discussion begins on May 12, 2021.

First published in the June 1926 issue of Weird Tales.



ONLINE VERSIONS

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mb.aspx

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41879

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories
Dagon and Other Macabre Tales
The Lurking Fear and Other Stories

MISCELLANY

https://www.tor.com/2015/08/04/the-luck-of-the-irish-and-other-cliches-the-moon-...
https://www.hplhs.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon-Bog
https://tinyurl.com/dzaz9ryp

I read this fifteen years ago or so, but since I'd evidently thoroughly confused it with something else, so reading it now felt like reading it for the first time.

The American scion of Old World gentry is reminiscent of “The Rats in the Walls”, but otherwise this struck me as somewhat atypical Lovecraft. WP agrees, saying it’s an unusually conventional take on the supernatural from his pen.

I assume the labourers and servants from “the North” are Protestants from Northern Ireland, who can be trusted not to share local superstition and be unlikely to mingle too much with the locals?

Word of the day (thanks, Grandpa): saltant (adj.) Leaping; jumping; dancing.

This story is one often cited in the HPL criticism of Gavin Callaghan. He is an attentive reader, and picked up on a cue a little too subtle for me. Where I thought that the workers lured into the bog had merely drowned, he suggests that they may have been transformed into the strangely novel frogs (H.P. Lovecraft's Dark Arcadia, 34, 126). Reviewing the story with this notion in mind, I suppose that the most notable frog--whose gaze directs that of the narrator--"one very fat and ugly" is supposed to have been the exceptional figure among the workers: "the ugly and unwieldy form of the cook" who was last to succumb.

I assumed the frogs to be the transmogrified workers, but didn’t connect the fat one with the cook.

S. T. Joshi's, in his biography of Lovecraft, this story was written by Lovecraft for reading at a St. Patrick's Day reading in 1921.

I'm sure Lovecraft didn't want to bring in contemporary affairs to a story lest it break the atmosphere, but I found a tale set in Ireland and written in 1921 not mentioning the ongoing turmoil in the Emerald Isle a bit strange.

What the story reminded me is John Buchan's better take on the subject "The Wind in the Portico". Lovecraft liked that story, but I don't know when he read Buchan. I get the impression it was after this story was written.

I'd read the story before and remember finding it nothing special and decidedly minor Lovecraft.

Callaghan has a whole chapter on "The Moon-Ladder" that is instanced in Barry's final ascent, which is mentioned even in "At the Mountains of Madness," among other appearances. The general idea is of a persistent communication between chthonic menace and its celestial representation, and there are a lot of references to feminine powers including our "aged moon-priestess Cleis." This latter is comparable to Cthulhu, in that she "lay cold and silent" in the speaker's dream-vision, and the surprising lunar connection of Cthulhu is Grandpa's evident acceptance of the theory that the matter of the Moon was taken from what is now the basin of the South Pacific.

I found this a comfortable HPL tale, not especially Weird or exceptional but very confident in its prose and command of atmosphere. HPL's phrasing and vocabulary were evident from the first sentence ("Somewhere, to what remote and fearsome region I know not"), but I found it flowed smoothly and avoided distracting me from the telling or wandering off the plot.

I remarked especially the moon-ladder and how its light didn't reflect in the water, as well as the stone edifices allegedly found beneath the bog. Interesting ideas, but HPL does better elsewhere.

The "northern laborers" I assumed also to be Protestants. I recalled a claim made by Gregory Bateson (in much different contexts and without reference to HPL at all) that the epistemological outlook of Catholics has a significant advantage over that of Protestants in acknowledging the possibility of supernatural phenomena, taking them to be (potentially) as real as anything empirically verified by science. Protestants, so the analysis goes, must take supernatural events as either mistakes or illusions, and without ontological substance.

A bit late coming to this one (though I know I've read it at least once in the past).

What most struck me was a rather un-Lovecraftian, almost English feel to it—or British, anyway. Not sure I would have recognised it as Lovecraft if I didn't know.

>9 elenchus:
There's a somewhat similar argument to Gregory Bateson's recounted in Roger Clarke's A Natural History of Ghosts: the post-Reformation attitude to alleged hauntings had to be that they were either natural phenomena (whether fraud or hallucination) or the direct work of the Devil - Protestant theology having no space for the spirits of the dead to be anywhere other than in Heaven or Hell.

There's a Classical element to the Irish myths isn't there? Added to it in a Classicizing later age, rather like the idea that Brutus fled Troy and then founded Britain. So Lovecraft's heavy use if it here in place of the sidhe or his own invented Cosmic horrors isn't incongruous.

I'm not so sure the labourers would have been as immune from superstition as Lovecraft supposes. There's an essay of Arthur Machen's in the recent Hippocampus press edition of his Autobiographical Writings in which he recounts a 1913 visit to Northern Ireland (by this time he's already been obliged to take up journalism as a career). Talking to his host "a leading Presbyterian and an eminent solicitor of Belfast" as they pass through "a dreary village; the ugly houses full on the street, without a sign of a garden or a flower anywhere"...

..."I had noticed that, although there were no gardens, nearly every house had a mountain ash planted by its door. I said:
"You seem very fond of the mountain ash here."
"Well", he replied, "the people think that they keep away the fairies. And, as a matter of fact, " he added with a queer smile, "you'll see a good many mountain ash trees planted round my little place out here that I am taking you to."

I listened to this story fairly recently before I saw this thread. (Yes, it's still been a few). It did remind me of a more subtle version of "The Rats in the Walls" but I expect that's because of the starting premise, the heir reworking traditional property.

I don't know the politics of the areas, so all I can say with regards to the "Northerners" and superstitions, is that they were not local and therefore didn't carry the same reservations regarding that particular bog.

I don't recall much of the moon ladder, but that could be because I either spaced or fell asleep towards the end of it. (I've done that an annoying amount of times now, such that I can't trust my youtube to tell me if I've actually heard a story or not!).

I do remember the frogs though, and I did suspect that they were likely the transformed workers, especially when the one frog seemed similar to the cook. I imagine there's nothing unusual about frogs in a bog, so to make a special point of mentioning them tells me that something out of the ordinary is going on with them.

One thing stuck out a bit to me though. Lovecraft does talk now and then about people like artists, poets, and such, that are more sensitive to the supernatural that's lurking around them. I would have though that labourers would fall into the less sensitive category, or would this be something that relates more to the vulnerability of the mind and sanity over actions? Like, the workers were all lured to go dancing but didn't remember any of it.