Unabridged? Only in Morgenstern’s translation into Florinese.
I did have a children’s edition with the E. H. Shepard illustrations. (“Oh bother,” said Pooh, as Great Cthulhu rose to devour him. “It’s a shogg-ogg-ogg-oth!” cried Piglet.)
thepillar: I have no opinion on the “cipher manuscripts” except to note that Victorian mystery-lodge founders are capable of telling as amazing a story as any other group of people, and that the age of the paper does not mean that anythign was written on it when it was new. The fact that they were written in English in a substitution cypher makes me think of a schoolboy’s secret clubhouse more than revealed Wisdom of the Ages. But I am a cynic.
On the “Mr Ed was a zebra” – yeah, many (many!) years later, after the snopes’ hoax was removed, there’s still one or two questions each year in Cecil’s mail about the validity of this claim. Sigh.
Lovecraft and his colleagues (Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, etc.) did a very good job of establishing a “fake mythology” of strange alien gods, cursed texts, lost civilizations, and such like. I think that the quasi-mystical and pseudo-scientific mishmash just “rang true” to a lot of the people who read the pulp adventures of Cthulhu and his ilk.
During Lovecraft’s lifetime, there were readers who believed that Lovecraft was channeling his stories from mystical entities. That phenomenon continued after his death in 1937. Aleister Crowley’s disciple Kenneth Grant was firmly convinced that HPL was under the influence of otherworldly beings.
Peter Levenda, aka “Simon” of the 1977 Necronomicon, has recently published a fascinating book, “The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic” :
Fascinating reading even for a skeptic! (I enjoy reading about fringe beliefs.)
And on a more skeptical note, Jason Colavito, who has written debunkings of the “Ancient Astronauts” phenomenon, will soon come out with a fun book called “Cthulhu in World Mythology” :
Nonsense. If you did not antecedently know that the Necronomicom is something made up in modern times there is nothing about that page to suggest that is a hoax, any more than all the other pages on that site that deal with “genuine” esoteric books. And if you do know a bit in general about the availability of manuscripts in the renaissance era, yeah, the claim that Dee would have had access to translations in both languages might surprise you.
It’s a little like the Sherlock Holmes “game.” Make believe it’s real, and keep a straight face about it. (Or, without the straight face, make believe P.D.Q. Bach was real…)
And it continues to this day! Writers of fantasy and horror continue to drop in little allusions to Lovecraftian stuff. It’s a game anybody can play.
(It’s only fun until someone has their soul dragged screaming out through their pores.)