The word "eldritch"

[Extollager]

The American Heritage College Dictionary suggests that "eldritch," meaning "strange or unearthly; eerie," derives from a hypothetical Middle English word "elriche" and thence from Old English el-, meaning "strange" or "other," and rice, meaning "realm."

"Eldritch" is, obviously, widely associated today with Lovecraft's writing, both by those who relish it and those who don't. My first point is that "eldritch" passes the test for a useful word: it meets a need; there is no exact equivalent. If "eldritch" suddenly became illegal, we would have to use "unearthly," "otherworldly," etc. I submit that these words don't mean precisely what "eldritch" means. We may test this claim by taking a phrase containing one of those words and asking if "eldritch" would do just as well. Here we go:

---"Neptune," the final sequence in Gustav Holst's orchestral suite The Planets, dies away into an unearthly serenity.---

I think everyone would agree that the meaning changes if we write:

---"Neptune," the final sequence in Gustav Holst's orchestral suite The Planets, dies away into an eldritch serenity.---

My second point: the word "eldritch," which many readers have never encountered except in Lovecraft and his imitators, critics, and parodists, has, in fact, been used by some other writers who possessed very good ears indeed for language.

[A] a poem by the late Ruth Pitter:
The Bat
Lightless, unholy, eldritch thing,
Whose murky and erratic wing
Swoops so sickeningly, and whose
Aspect to the female Muse
Is a demon’s, made of stuff
Like tattered, sooty waterproof,
Looking dirty, clammy, cold.

Wicked, poisonous, and old:
I have maligned thee! . . . for the Cat
Lately caught a little bat,
Seized it softly, bore it in.
On the carpet, dark as sin
In the lamplight, painfully
It limped about, and could not fly.

Even fear must yield to love,
And pity makes the depths to move.
Though sick with horror, I must stoop,
Grasp it gently, take it up,
And carry it, and place it where
It could resume the twilight air.

Strange revelation! warm as milk,
Clean as a flower, smooth as silk!
O what a piteous face appears,
What great fine thin translucent ears!
What chestnut down and crapy wings,
Finer than any lady’s things –
And O a little one that clings!

Warm, clean, and lovely, though not fair,
And burdened with a mother’s care:
Go hunt the hurtful fly, and bear
My blessing to your kind in air.


Pitter received a gold medal for poetry from Queen Elizabeth II and other honors. She is my favorite recent poet.


From one of the century's most readable and stimulating books of literary history and criticism -- C. S. Lewis's English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama [meaning he doesn't undertake to discuss Shakespeare's plays, etc.]

Lewis refers to a late-medieval school of Scottish poets. He refers to comic but weird poetry that uses "'eldritch' material, as they would have called it" (p. 71). He invites us to read some of this work and enjoy "the northern wildness, the grotesque invention, the eldritch audacity which likes to play with ideas that would ordinarily excite fear or reverence" (p. 72). He mentions poems of "eldritch humour," e.g. a poem exhibiting "a charnel house morality in which three death's-heads warn us that we shall shortly resemble them" (p. 73). Lewis discusses the "fun [that] is of a ferocious kind" in a poem by Dunbar in which "the comic overlaps with the demoniac and the terrifying. He also is of the 'eldritch' school," etc. (p. 94).

I will, however, disagree with what I anticipate JDW and others may say, if they take the view that Lovecraft's uses of "eldritch" are always appropriate. The word is strikingly unusual, and, I would say, should be used with a little more caution than (without checking) I think HPL always showed.* For example, it might have been better to shy away from using "eldritch" early on in a story describing a rural landscape. One sees, of course, what HPL is trying to do, but (to me, at least) this feels like HPL is too obviously soliciting my effort to ratchet up, in myself, a creepy mood. It really is his job to work that spell, and it is sometimes counterproductive to use "eldritch" too readily or too early. On the other hand: what an interesting word. Props to Lovecraft for helping to bring it into circulation.
*Incidentally, Samuel Taylor Coleridge seems to have thought that “eldritch” should be used sparingly. In an early version of his most famous poem (see The Rime of the Ancyent Marnere, In Seven Parts), we have the lines:
I look'd upon the eldritch deck,
And there the dead men lay.
However, in a later version of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (an eldritch poem for sure, like Coleridge’s Christabel!), we have
I looked upon the rotting deck,
And there the dead men lay.

Dale Nelson

 

[Extollager]

A further thought about Lovecraft's use of this word.

I think, if we are honest with ourselves, we Lovecraft fans often don't experience the word "eldritch" the way Lovecraft intended, when we read his stories -- especially if we are Lovecraft fans. The word is so notoriously associated with Lovecraft that encountering "eldritch" in one of his stories or poems affects us with a pleasure of recognition. We are actually reminded, by the appearance of this unusual but, in Lovecraft's writings, characteristic word, that we are reminded for a moment that we are reading something he wrote.

It's like spotting Alfred Hitchcock's cameos in his movies. The movie may be intended, overall, to evoke anxiety, but Hitchcock's fans get a small pleasure from their "Aha!" For a second we are reminded that we are watching a movie -- and Hitchcock gets away with that. He perhaps even gives us a cunningly-placed moment of relaxation of tension, which is so important if a director is going to orchestrate an audience's anxiety, because you cannot keep people in a state of steadily increasing anxiety with no relief at all for more than a very little while.

Lovecraft never anticipated any such thing in writing his stories and poems. I'm saying that, for Lovecraft's fans, the word "eldritch" probably doesn't help to deepen the eerie mood he wanted to evoke; rather, it actually makes us feel at home with what we are reading, makes us feeling affection towards the author, etc.

With me so far?

It follows that "eldritch" is probably a word that Lovecraft imitators should shun. It is virtually impossible for the word to work the way HPL intended it to. Instead it is a brightly-flashing neon sign saying "Don't forget that this story is written by a Lovecraft fan!" And that is un-Lovecraftian. Lovecraft was aware of the influence of other authors on his own work and (eventually, at least) lamented it -- in that well know remark "There are my Dunsanian stories and there are my Poe-esque stories, but where are my Lovecraft stories?" (approximate quotation).

I suspect that the same reflections would pertain, to a lesser degree, to some other words beloved by Lovecraft, e.g. "abhorrent," "blasphemous, "Cyclopaean," etc.

 

[w h pugmire esq]

I use the word often, in story after story, book after book; but I try to limit its use to describe sound -- an eldritch wailing, an eldritch moaning from underneath the earth, &c &c. I love the word. More than one professional writer has told me that a modern Lovecraftian writer should never use it in their work. To which I reply, "Eldritch off."

 

[The Ace]

...Coffins stood like open presses,
That showed the deid in their last dresses
And by some eldrich caintrip silght,
Each in his cauld haund held a licht.....

From, 'Tam O' Shanter,' by Robert Burns, (Eighteenth Century) was certainly the first time I'd seen the word.

 

[Extollager]

I use the word often, in story after story, book after book; but I try to limit its use to describe sound -- an eldritch wailing, an eldritch moaning from underneath the earth, &c &c. I love the word. More than one professional writer has told me that a modern Lovecraftian writer should never use it in their work. To which I reply, "Eldritch off."

Here's two more cents' worth.


Willum, Owen Barfield showed that language may be regarded as a polarity, meaning that the one "power" has two "forces" (analogy of a single magnet with - and + poles). Language has an "expressive" pole and a "communicative" pole. At its purest, the "communicative" force is seen when words encode a single, unambiguous meaning for all readers. An example might be the manual that comes with an appliance. At its purest, the "expressive" force is seen in verbal works by which the author expresses his inwardness in a way that may be unintelligible to others. Not meaning here to suggest any religious implications, I suppose glossolalia or ecstatic utterance would be a good example.


When I suggested that Lovecraftian authors aiming for the kinds of effects that Lovecraft seems to have aimed for should avoid "eldritch," for the reasons I indicated, I was focusing more on the "communicative" aspect. You might be defending use of "eldritch" on the basis of the "expressive" aspect. Not to put words in your mouth, but might you be, by using the word, not only aiming to communicate to readers an eerie quality (in the sounds you mention, for example) but also to express and to communicate your enjoyment of the word itself and all its associations, including its association with an author of whom you and they are fond? They would pick up on, and perhaps relate to, your affection for Lovecraft, your enjoyment of the sheer sound of the word "eldritch," etc. Similarly, movie fans enjoy spotting Hitchcock in his cameos.


But I'm thinking that if what an author is trying to do above all is to create the kind of "cosmic strangeness" that HPL relished, it might be that he would avoid the word. The mood or atmosphere HPL wanted to create almost has to be worked on a reader "stealthily" -- ? And I'm just saying that the word "eldritch" doesn't work on readers that way. It might generally be too "obvious."

 

[w h pugmire esq]

One uses the word, now, almost with a sense of defiance. I don't use it just to be a Lovecraftian ****** -- I use it only when it absolutely asserts itself into my narrative -- but that is often, although perhaps not as often as I imagine. One of the great joys, for me, in writing Lovecraftian weird fiction is to use that language and imagery that seems blatantly Lovecraftian, but to use it in a manner that is natural to your individual narrative voice. It's a fascinating occupation, being a professional Lovecraftian writer -- HPL's shadow is so huge, and one needs to be almost perversely "individual" in language and imagination to exert one's own personality. I love it, I confess, to the point of obsession.

 

[Extollager]

One uses the word, now, almost with a sense of defiance. I don't use it just to be a Lovecraftian ****** -- I use it only when it absolutely asserts itself into my narrative -- but that is often, although perhaps not as often as I imagine. One of the great joys, for me, in writing Lovecraftian weird fiction is to use that language and imagery that seems blatantly Lovecraftian, but to use it in a manner that is natural to your individual narrative voice. It's a fascinating occupation, being a professional Lovecraftian writer -- HPL's shadow is so huge, and one needs to be almost perversely "individual" in language and imagination to exert one's own personality. I love it, I confess, to the point of obsession.

I think I get it!

Two more cents' worth:

From the point of view of language, one contribution of creative writers can be the restoration of obscure or forgotten words to circulation again. We've already seen that no other word quite means what "eldritch" does -- so it would be regrettable if it fell entirely out of circulation. It's generally good when words with distinct meanings get back into circulation. They enable one, I suppose, not only to express and communicate, but even fully to experience, experience more fully.

Conversely --- eh, I can get a little preachy on this broader issue. But I do think that there is always pressure, and probably more pressure in our time than in some others, from laziness and so on, to use words in ways that degrade them. Take the word "unique." Fingerprints and snowflakes are unique. And so using "unique" when "extraordinary" is really all that is meant is deplorable. We already have "extraordinary." Or there's the familiar example of "decimate" used loosely just to mean "do a lot of damage." This kind of thing reminds me of the totalitarians in Orwell's novel, who want to reduce and reduce vocabulary, so that it becomes impossible to express, to communicate, and so to experience, modes of thought that the State doesn't desire.

Now I'm thinking -- Praise to Lovecraft for doing more than perhaps any other "pulp" author to restore a richer vocabulary to currency within the field. I do think his work sometimes shows literary faults typical of the autodidact, but still -- credit where credit is due.

 

[dask]

Humph! On the off chance I actually understand what you guys are talking about I'll toss out my own cogniskeet in the hope it won't catch a direct hit too soon. Etymologies are helpful but limited: they tell us where a word is from, sometimes where it is going, rarely where it will be interred. As David B. Guralnik, Editor in Chief Emeritus of WEBSTER'S NEW WORLD DICTIONARY, said in his historical overview to the third college edition, a dictionary's job "was not to create the impression that it was authoritarian, laying down the law; it was to play, rather, the role of a friendly guide, pointing out the safe, well-traveled roads." The question now is, how does a road become well-traveled? Well, you need a road to begin with. Someone has to hack a swath through the forest to get it started. The same is true for side streets and alleyways. This is why some words have so many different, sometimes contradictory, definitions. If Lovecraft was using a word, if not exactly incorrectly, then somewhat questionably, perhaps he was making a path of his own. Evolution of language in action. He has as much right as anyone, and I fancy his machete is sharper than any of ours.

 

[Extollager]

Dask, a problem with a descriptive rather than prescriptive approach to dictionary-making and usage is, again, that we are naturally lazy speakers and writers, with the consequence that meanings may erode or become subject to fashion in a way that is harmful to language. "Nauseous" is a word that Lovecraft, to the best of my knowledge, consistently uses correctly, to mean that something has the quality of inducing nausea. Most people say they "feel nauseous" when it would be easy for them to say, correctly, that they feel, or are, "nauseated." We have no other word that means "nauseous." If we lose its proper meaning, we shall have to say, e.g. "It makes me sick" when we mean that something is nauseous. But "It makes me sick" has an overtone of resentment that is not present in the more objective "nauseous." I say that we need words that express such distinctions in meaning.

There are two groups that are primarily responsible for fighting against the tendency of all of us to erode our own language: teachers in the broad sense (I would include makers of dictionaries that maintain a prescriptive as well as descriptive approach) and creative writers. I honor Lovecraft for (so far as I'm aware without sitting down right now and rereading a bunch!) a generally high achievement as regards conscientious diction, as well as the related matter of good grammar and punctuation. But his writing developed. Is there, does anyone know, a good article out there about that?

 

[Extollager]

PS Does anyone ever wish that he or she could have urged HPL to read some book or see some movie? The first edition of Owen Barfield's Poetic Diction was published in the 1920s, in plenty of time for HPL to read it. Since I can't recommend it to him, I will recommend it to y'all. And how I wish HPL could have read Barfield's Saving the Appearances, a unique work on modern science and language. It was published in the 1950s in plenty of time for Lovecraft to have read it if he hadn't died so young.

 

[dask]

According to the dictionary in my computer nauseous means both "causing sickness in the stomach" and "sick in the stomach." Under nauseated it says "some careful writers do try to maintain the distinction" between the two. Unfortunately if a word is used incorrectly enough it becomes legimate. Overtones seem unavoidable, even necessary, with slander laws and etiquette performing the biggest juggling act in print. As careful distinctions may come across to many as nitpicking I fear the good fight you propose is already lost.

If writers are lazy in the precise use of words perhaps it's up to editors to become more savy and catch these misuses while still in manuscript form since it seems it is in the professionally published format the prescriptive is losing ground to the dog at its heels. And not to make excuses but every writer knows at some point rules/traditions need to be broken, bent, twisted, something, to avoid storytelling stagnation. As John Gardner says in THE ART OF FICTION: "When one begins to be persuaded that certain things must never be done in fiction and certain other things must always be done, one has entered the first stage of aesthetic arthritis, the disease that ends up in pedantic rigidity and the atrophy of intuition." I don't want to read more into this than is intended but I cannot see how evolution of language does not fit into it.

You know, looking this over it sounds like I'm arguing. I'm not, just blabbing.

 

[Extollager]

Dask, I agree that a good author may deliberately break the rules. My concern is with a situation in which the rules are so shapeless from constant abuse that it hardly matters when an author breaks them deliberately.

There's a nice example of rule-breaking in a Grapes of Wrath passage. Everyone knows that in modern English usage you do not start a sentence with "and." Steinbeck does that here:

"The sun shone on the grass and warmed it, and in the shade under the grass the insects moved, ants and ant lions to set traps for them, grasshoppers to jump into the air and flick their yellow wings for a second, sow bugs like little armadillos, plodding restlessly on many tender feet. And over the grass at the roadside a land turtle crawled, turning aside for nothing, dragging his high-domed shell over the grass." The rest of the passage focuses on the land turtle.

By beginning his second sentence with "and," Steinbeck has, on the one hand, linked the land turtle to the "insects" -- they are all creatures stirred by the sun's warmth. By giving the land turtle its own sentence, Steinbeck has zeroed in on the creature that, in fact, he will stick with for many subsequent sentences. I admire the effectiveness with which he has linked the turtle to the other animals and yet isolated it, at the cost of a breaking of a familiar rule.

If, however, it becomes simply routine for writers to start sentences with "and," then, when there's a special reason (as above) for doing so, the effectiveness is diminished.

Coming back to Lovecraft, I would suggest that his idiosyncratic use of "blasphemous" might sometimes be justifiable based on the same argument (an author recognizing a departure from standard usage but determining that it would be effective in this case) -- but probably not always.

 

[dask]

It is possible that if, hypotheticlly, writers started to begin sentences regularly with "and" the effectiveness you mentioned would wear off, but isn't it possible, or even likely, in the wake of this "new" although careless usage, new types of effective scene setting would be made available? We might not appreciate it now but those writing after we're long gone might. I'm still stuck with the notion that evolution is a mighty force capable of producing effects we might not wish materialize.

 

[Extollager]

It is possible that if, hypotheticlly, writers started to begin sentences regularly with "and" the effectiveness you mentioned would wear off, but isn't it possible, or even likely, in the wake of this "new" although careless usage, new types of effective scene setting would be made available? We might not appreciate it now but those writing after we're long gone might. I'm still stuck with the notion that evolution is a mighty force capable of producing effects we might not wish materialize.

But language does not evolve apart from the use of writers and speakers. It changes because of the innumerable choices of innumerable speakers and writers. On these speakers and writers, laziness, ignorance, and other things work to degrade language: that is, to make it, on the one hand, less capable of nuanced, beautiful, intelligent communication and, on the other hand, ever more prone to the promotion of shabby thinking and unwholesome imagination and emotion. We can surrender to this entropic tendency, but I see such acquiescence as abdication to the extent that someone is an aware and able speaker and writer. This doesn't mean that such people have to become irritating language police, busybodies who annoy other people; it means, first of all, that one tries to speak and write responsibly oneself, and that one makes a point of reading good writing. This doesn't mean a dutiful chewing of writing that one would never read otherwise but just reads to improve oneself. On the contrary! It could mean, for example, making a point of reading an Orwell essay now and again, or an Evelyn Waugh novel, or relishing Hawthorne's rich prose.

I don't have any citations at hand, but I suspect Lovecraft would agree with my principles.

 

[dask]

But language does not evolve apart from the use of writers and speakers.

Absolutely, and we don't speak exactly as we did a few centuries ago. Does that mean every change since has been the result of "laziness, ignorance", and degradation? I doubt it. Not every writer who initiates an alteration is ignorant and lazy. Besides, the more meaning a word has the more nuance it is capable of. If a word has only one meaning, its original, and can be used only one way, then nuance becomes not just elusive, but degrading.

I don't have any citations at hand, but I suspect Lovecraft would agree with my principles.

So do I, mostly.

 

[Extollager]

Dask wrote, "Does that mean every change since has been the result of 'laziness, ignorance,' and degradation? I doubt it."

I've referred to good changes that happen when language is used responsibly. I'm just saying that the natural tendency is "entropic." To speak and write well is what takes effort. To speak and write irresponsibly is what is easy. Since not all speakers and writers are interested in using language responsibly, teachers and creative writers have a special responsibility to make that effort.

I applaud Lovecraft for leading by example to the extent that, as a fiction writer who wrote exclusively for pulp magazines, he sought, consciously, to elevate weird fiction from being an idle diversion pandering to crude minds, to an art form that could do some things that no other literary form could do. One aspect of this enterprise was his effort to forge one or more appropriate styles. I think his achievement is uneven; I think he wrote under various personal and genre disabilities; but, sticking to the topic at hand (diction), one can see that he was at least trying to develop an appropriate rhetoric of the weird. Obviously it took hard work.

Admirers of Lovecraft: your hero himself would probably urge you to read outside the pulp fiction realm. I do not believe that Lovecraft thought he had set the bar, even though, as regards the Weird Tales pulp milieu specifically, he probably had. Lovecraft might have said that authors such as Poe, Machen, and Blackwood (and Hawthorne?) had set the bar for the genre of weird fiction, but not for fiction and poetry in general, and I think he would further have said that aspiring writers should be acquainted with the best writing, period. This will help one to get a greater sense of what writing can do.

 

[dask]

I've referred to good changes that happen when language is used responsibly. I'm just saying that the natural tendency is "entropic." To speak and write well is what takes effort. To speak and write irresponsibly is what is easy. Since not all speakers and writers are interested in using language responsibly, teachers and creative writers have a special responsibility to make that effort.

But that is what I see as a, if not the, problem: how do we know if a change is genuinely good or bad? Perhaps a writer wants to alter a word meaning one thing to possess a nuance for the opposite, such as that quip from an old tv sitcom: " When I'm bad, I'm bad. But when I'm good, I'm really bad!" Responsible, irresponsible? Entropic, non-entropic? Who decides definitively? (Don't ask me.) Then we have writer's handbooks of which no two are identical ("split that infinitive and I'll see you hang...," "I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man." "Fill your hands...") and even some sticky points of grammar such as collective pronouns are dealt with differently depending what part of the world you live in. The US handles them one way and the UK another. Again who decides? Consensus? Over the expanse of time probably, but isn't that, too, sloppy and irresponsible since any two people, experts or otherwise, are prone to disagree with one other? Finally, isn't it possible there could be an instance where what we accept as a responsible change for the better today was actually due to an irresponsible misuse in the murky past? If so and it slipped under the radar so no one was aware of it, would it or should it make a difference? What if we are living a lie?

 

[dask]

I wonder if something as common as the thesaurus could be partly responsible for some of the laziness leading to the dilution of language. It's a good tool if you're looking for a particular word with just the right definition needed to convey whatever idea is swirling around the inside of a writer's head, but if someone just wants a fancy word rather than the common one that comes to mind and won't budge, they might sacrifice exactness for closeness figuring what the heck, no one will notice. I've done it, but don't feel too guilty as I very much doubt I have the power to change a mighty force like the English language. But some big names might. Stephen King advises against using one.

 

[Extollager]

But that is what I see as a, if not the, problem: how do we know if a change is genuinely good or bad? Perhaps a writer wants to alter a word meaning one thing to possess a nuance for the opposite, such as that quip from an old tv sitcom: " When I'm bad, I'm bad. But when I'm good, I'm really bad!" Responsible, irresponsible? Entropic, non-entropic? Who decides definitively? (Don't ask me.) Then we have writer's handbooks of which no two are identical ("split that infinitive and I'll see you hang...," "I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man." "Fill your hands...") and even some sticky points of grammar such as collective pronouns are dealt with differently depending what part of the world you live in. The US handles them one way and the UK another. Again who decides? Consensus? Over the expanse of time probably, but isn't that, too, sloppy and irresponsible since any two people, experts or otherwise, are prone to disagree with one other? Finally, isn't it possible there could be an instance where what we accept as a responsible change for the better today was actually due to an irresponsible misuse in the murky past? If so and it slipped under the radar so no one was aware of it, would it or should it make a difference? What if we are living a lie?

I wrote a reply to this message that failed to appear here, and I won't try to recall it all.

Good writing protects and fosters the capacity to express nuances. Thus I would keep the distinction, which many writers disregard, between "that" and "who," using the latter to refer to people rather than using "that":

Liadain is a woman who knows her own mind. (Not "that knows...")

"That" should be used for non-humans.

The wolf is an animal that has suffered from human prejudices.

The office that handles complaints is down the hall.

English is or at least was well-furnished with words that can convey nuances, thanks to the multitude of languages that have fed into it. Thus "aureate" doesn't have exactly the same significance as "golden," although that is what both words mean. But we are losing the former word. My computer flags it as a misspelling!

 

[dask]

To go one step further (farther?, or further? I checked the dictionary and a writer's guide and an argument could be made for either one. "Farther" for physical distance as implied by "step" as people strolling along the path to better understanding, and "further" for adding to the exent of something such as examples?) andrew offutt (this is no mistake, last I heard he preferred lower case letters for initials) said you can do away with "that" almost entirely by either substituting "which" or just not using it at all. Not being a grammarian I can't vouch for this but I do believe there will always be exceptions.