Mountains of madness

This article covers the horror story Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft. For the board game of the same name based on it, see Mountains of Madness (game)

Berge des Wahnsinns (Original title At the Mountains of Madness ) is a 1931 horror story written by HP Lovecraft , which was first published in 1936 in Pulp magazine Astounding Stories and in 1939 was included in The Outsider and Others collection. Like many of Lovecraft's stories, it also ties in with the Cthulhu mythology .

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The first-person narrator William Dyer, a geologist at the fictional Miskatonic University , breaks his silence about his experiences and insights during an expedition he led in the past to Antarctica . He feels compelled to do so because a new mission to the Antarctic is currently being planned, which he must fear that the future of humanity could be threatened. By disclosing the information that has been kept secret so far, he hopes to shake up the public and prevent the new expedition.

He reports that the expedition he is leading is getting off to a promising start. With the help of a new drilling device, the scientists can take many geological samples in a short time and come across numerous fossils . The biologist Lake is conducting a sub-expedition in a northwesterly direction with part of the team due to strange triangular, scratched marks on fragments of slate . He reported over the radio that they had encountered mountains of unprecedented proportions with the highest peaks on earth. In the explosions carried out there, they find, to everyone's astonishment and enthusiasm, frozen beings from the early history of the earth that cannot be classified in the known orders, half animal, half vegetable. Some of the bodies are badly damaged, others appear to be intact. Lake performs a section on one of the damaged specimens and he feels reminded of the description of the legendary Old Ones that he knows from reading the mysterious Necronomicon . In the course of the connection to Lake breaks due to a severe storm in his camp. Dyer and the rest of the crew remaining in the main camp organize a rescue mission.

Upon arrival at Lake's camp, a picture of devastation emerges: Lake and his men except for one (Gedney) and all sled dogs but one have been killed. There is no trace of Gedney and the dog or three sleds. The damaged Ancient Beings are buried in mounds of snow, while the intact specimens have disappeared.

Dyer and a student, Danforth, decide to fly over the massive mountain range. There they discover on a plateau that they take to be the legendary Leng Plateau , the ruins of a huge, million-year-old city. After ending up at risk of death, they explore the city. In the buildings you will find artistic bas-reliefs on the walls from which you can understand the history of the ancient beings. Here they learn that the ancients originally came to Earth from space before there was any life on it. They created life on earth and built their huge cities with the help of the protoplasmic , hypnosis- controlled beings they created , the chocolate goths . In the course of time, the Schoggothen developed further and developed their own intelligence and will, which made them rebel against their masters several times. The reliefs also tell of the arrival of other types of extraterrestrial beings who fought with the ancient beings for land on earth. Over the millions of years of their history, the ancient beings lost their ability to fly into space and create new creatures. The reliefs show a change in style, which Dyer interprets as increasingly decadent. In the many battles with the other extraterrestrial beings and the chocolate goths, the old beings are finally forced to retreat to their original Antarctic settlement area.

Dyer and Danforth come across fresh traces of a sledge on the floor and follow them. You find the sleigh from Lake's camp and tied to it is the body of Gedney and the dead dog. You come across huge but peaceful and apparently terrified blind albino penguins. Following the traces they get into the underground of the city, where they finally find several of the old men, whom Lake had thawed and thus brought back to life, decapitated and covered by a slimy mass lying on the ground. A sudden sound from the abyss awakens a terrible fear in Dyer and Danforth and they flee from the tunnel system under the city. Running for their lives, they look back one more time and see behind them a terrible chocolate goth, consisting of protoplasmic bubbles and equipped with countless greenish eyes that form and dissolve, which pursues them and soon threatens to overtake them. Only with luck do they escape and reach their plane with which they fly back to the camp. On the return flight, Danforth reportedly saw a mirage that frightened him so much that he refused to tell Dyer what he saw himself. Dyer and Danforth arrive at the camp; the expedition is canceled and the remaining crew returns safely. Dyer and Danforth agree that they want to be silent about what they see.

Work history

Lovecraft wrote the story from February 24 to March 22, 1931. It was first published in Astounding Stories magazine in 1936 (in the February, March and April issues).

Influences

Literary scholar and Lovecraft biographer ST Joshi points out that Lovecraft has been fascinated by expeditions to Antarctica since childhood. He followed the expeditions of Borchgrevink , Scott and Amundsen with great interest . The literary scholar Jason Eckhardt pointed to the influences of Richard Evelyn Byrd's Antarctic expedition in the years 1928–1930, which were particularly evident at the beginning of the story.

The geological theories discussed at the time are also processed, such as the split-off theory of the origin of the moon developed by George Howard Darwin , or maps are mentioned on which the later continents are shown united to a single land mass, with express reference to the theories of continental drift from Frank Bursley Taylor , Alfred Wegener, and John Joly are referenced. In addition, typical disturbances of shortwave radio traffic in polar regions are described, such as the phenomenon of polar ice cap absorption . Such disturbances were observed during the polar expeditions at the time, but could not yet be explained at the time.

The text makes several references to Edgar Allan Poe's story The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket , a horror story also set in Antarctica. The call of the primeval beings "Tekeli-li!" Is taken literally from Poe's story. In "Berge des Wahnsinns" Lovecraft writes that this call is an imitation of sounds from the language of the Ancient Ones (or Ancient Beings), since the Schoggothen, created by the Ancient Ones, had no language of their own.

Further references refer to the pictorial work of the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich , whose Himalayan images inspired the author. Lovecraft had seen the pictures in the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York.

Place in Lovecraft's work

The work makes it clear again that most of the beings of the Cthulhu myth are of extraterrestrial origin. For Robert M. Price , who first referred to this form of demythologizing in Lovecraft, the narrative moves in the context of the rest of his oeuvre, even if it makes the reference a little clearer.

expenditure

• First published in Astounding Stories of Super Science , February, March & April 1936
• English edition: At the Mountains of Madness . In: At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition. Introduction of China Miéville. The Modern Library, New York 2005, ISBN 0-8129-7441-7
• German first edition: Berge des Wahnsinns. German by Rudolf Hermstein. In: Mountains of Madness. Two horror stories. Insel, Frankfurt a. M. 1970
• Paperback: Fantastic Library, Volume 350 = Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch 2760, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-518-39260-3 .
• Work edition: Mountains of Madness . In: Necronomicon . Collected works in 6 volumes. Volume 4. In the series: HP Lovecraft's Library of Secrets. Volume 20, Festa 2620, Leipzig 2007, ISBN 978-3-86552-063-0 .

Adaptations

radio play

• Mountains of Madness (2 CDs). With the voices of Lutz Harder, David Nathan , Christian Rode , Friedrich Schoenfelder and Herbert Fux . Editing and direction: Gerd Naumann. Lauschrausch, Berlin 2006. ISBN 978-3-9805820-3-2 .
• Berge des Wahnsinns, Horror Cabinet - episode 44 & 45, Titania Medien, 2010. With the voices of Reiner Schöne , Jan Panczak , Eckart Dux , Bettina Weiß , Annina Braunmiller and Alexander Turrek . Quite free adaptation, u. a. with gender changes in some characters. ISBN 978-3-7857-4386-7 .

Audio book

• HP Lovecraft's Library of Secrets - Mountains of Madness , read by David Nathan , 2008.

Movie

2010 announced Guillermo del Toro at the Mountains of Madness to film . Filming was due to begin in May 2011 and James Cameron was to be the producer. After del Toro possible similarities with the 2012 tarnished film Prometheus - by Ridley Scott had arranged before he saw him, he wanted to make the decision on the possible film after viewing the film. As a result of the major overlap with Prometheus, Universal has decided to delay the project indefinitely. In January 2013, del Toro announced in an interview that he would continue to pursue the project out of personal interest. Funding from Warner Bros. is under discussion following Pacific Rim's financial success .

game

2017 appeared in Iello publishing Mountains of Madness as a cooperative board game of the American game designers (Mountains of Madness Engl.) Rob Daviau .

The mountains of madness also served as a template for the computer game Conarium .

Web links

Wikisource: English-language original text  - sources and full texts

• Mountains of madness in German translation on hplovecraft.de (PDF; 333 kB)
• Mountains of Madness in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ST Joshi: time HP Lovecraft in his: A dreamer and a visionary. Liverpool University Press 2001, ISBN 0-85323-946-0 , p. 302.
2. ^ ST Joshi, David E. Schultz: To HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001; Title page of the February 1936 edition ( Memento of January 21, 2013 in the Internet Archive ).
3. ↑ Chapter VII: "They came not long after the matter forming the moon was wrenched from the neighboring South Pacific"
4. ↑ Chapter VII: "Later maps, which display the land mass as cracking and drifting, and sending certain detached parts northward, uphold in a striking way the theories of continental drift lately advanced by Taylor, Wegener, and Joly."
5. ↑ Mountains of Madness (PDF) Festa Verlag. P. 137. Retrieved January 24, 2019.
6. ^ ST Joshi, David E. Schultz: To HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001. pp. 9-13.
7. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: "At the Mountains of Madness". In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia, Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 12
8. ↑ Tom Cruise is confirmed for Guillermo del Toro's 'At the Mountains of Madness' (UPDATE) , accessed March 9, 2011
9. ↑ Filmstarts.de - information about the film adaptation. Retrieved January 17, 2013 . 
10. ↑ Entertainment Weekly - 'Prometheus' vs. 'At the Mountains of Madness'. Retrieved March 18, 2014 . 
11. ↑ firstshowing.net - Del Toro Will Try 'Mountains of Madness' Again. Retrieved March 18, 2014 .