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R'lyeh is a fictional city that first appeared in the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. R'lyeh is also referred to in Lovecraft's "The Mound" as Relex. R'lyeh is a sunken city located deep under the Pacific Ocean and is where the godlike being Cthulhu is buried. R'lyeh's architecture is characterized by its non-Euclidean geometry . Because of the portrayal of the picture of the gorgon in "Medusa's Coil" some suppose that R'yleh has an attribute that allows those inside to breathe underwater. Others discredit this, saying that it was merely the gorgon herself that could achieve this, or otherwise that it was merely a painting and not a reflection of actual events.
Description
When R'lyeh rises in Lovecraft's short story "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928), the only portion of the city that emerges is a single "hideous monolith-crowned citadel" in which Cthulhu is entombed. The human onlookers are awed by the sheer immensity of the city and by the frightening suggestiveness of the gargantuan statues and bas-reliefs. The city is a panorama of "vast angles and stone surfaces ... too great to belong to anything right and proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and disturbing hieroglyphs." The geometry of R’lyeh is "abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours." In Lovecraft's fiction, R'lyeh is sometimes referred to in the ritualistic phrase "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn", which roughly translates to "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming". Location Lovecraft said that R'lyeh is located at Latitude 47° 9' S, Longitude 126° 43' W in the southern Pacific Ocean. August Derleth, however, placed R'lyeh at S. Latitude 49° 51' S, Longitude 128° 34' W in his own writings. Both locations are close to the Pacific pole of inaccessibility, the point in the ocean farthest from any land. Derleth's coordinates place the city approximately 5100 nautical miles (5900 statute miles or 9500 kilometers), or about ten days journey for a fast ship, from Pohnpei (Ponape), an actual island of the area. Ponape also plays a part in the Cthulhu Mythos as the place where the "Ponape Scripture", a text describing Cthulhu, was found. Charles Stross's novella 'A Colder War' implicitly locates R'lyeh in the Baltic Sea: it describes Cthulhu as being "scraped from a nest in the drowned wreckage of a city on the Baltic floor" *. This is presumably because a Baltic location was more convenient for Stross's plot. Interestingly, in 1997 US Navy operators recorded an ultra low frequency "bloop" near the same coordinates described by Lovecraft.* Other appearances Notes | ||||||||
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