Elder Things

The drill broke through into a cave under the Antarctic ice, and the biologist’s lamp fell on fourteen barrels lying among the bones of things that died before the dinosaurs. They were dark grey and taller than a man. Eight were whole. When the men dragged them up into the wind the sledge dogs went mad with hatred, and had to be kept behind a wall of snow blocks at a distance, because of the smell: sharp, sour and wrong.

This is how the Elder Things enter literature. They are the creation of H. P. Lovecraft, who wrote At the Mountains of Madness in the first months of 1931. The magazine Weird Tales turned it down as too long. It sat in a drawer until an agent sold it to Astounding Stories, which ran it in three parts from February to April 1936 and cut it about badly along the way. The beings have no folklore behind them and no older source. One man in Providence, Rhode Island, made them up.

He made them carefully. The biologist Lake, radioing his find back to base, describes a torso six feet long and shaped like a cask, with five ridges running down it where staves would be. In the grooves between the ridges lie wings, thin membranes on a frame of tubes, which fold away like fans and open to a spread of seven feet. Round the middle is a ring of five arms that each branch and branch again into fine tentacles. On top sits a yellowish head in the shape of a starfish, covered in stiff hairs that shimmer with every colour, with a red-irised eye on a stalk at each of the five points and a set of tubes ending in small toothed mouths. At the other end is a second, greenish starfish, with five muscular legs that end in triangular webbed paddles. Everything comes in fives. The flesh is so tough that Lake’s scalpels can hardly mark it, and when he does cut one open he cannot decide whether he is looking at an animal or a plant. He names them, half as a joke, after the Elder Things in an old book of forbidden lore called the Necronomicon.

Their history is told in pictures. Two men from the expedition, the geologist Dyer and a student named Danforth, fly over a range higher than the Himalayas and find a dead city on the plateau behind it, mile after mile of cubes, cones and five-pointed towers half sunk in ice. The inner walls are carved from floor to ceiling, and the carvings are a chronicle.

They came down from the stars when the Earth was new and had no life, crossing space on those membranous wings. They settled first under the sea. There they made food animals, and then they made workers: the shoggoths, shapeless masses of living jelly that could grow any limb or organ on command and were steered by a kind of hypnotic suggestion. In the carved scenes a shoggoth heaves a block the size of a house into a wall while an Elder Thing stands by, directing it with no visible effort, like a foreman with a very quiet crane. Scraps of that manufactured life drifted off and were left to evolve by themselves. All the plants and animals of Earth come from the leftovers. So do people, which the carvings show as a shambling little mammal kept partly for meat and partly for amusement.

For a long time they ruled the planet, in the sea and on land. Then came rivals. A race of octopus-like beings arrived from space with Cthulhu, and the two fought until a peace gave the newcomers the fresh Pacific lands and left the old sea and the Antarctic to the Elder Things. Later the fungoid Mi-Go drove them out of the north altogether. By then they had forgotten how to fly between the worlds. They could not leave.

The worst blow came from the workshop. The shoggoths grew brains of their own, learned to copy their masters’ voices and rose against them. That first rebellion was put down with strange weapons and the shoggoths were broken to harness again, but the carvings made after that date are clumsier, as if the sculptors had lost heart. When the great cold came, the Elder Things went down through tunnels to a black sea deep under the mountains and built again there, in the dark, with shoggoth labour.

The eight whole specimens in the cave were not dead. Warmed by the sun outside Lake’s tent, they woke. What the relief party finds at the camp the next day is a slaughter: men and dogs torn apart, one man and one dog missing, and the damaged specimens buried upright under six neat five-pointed mounds of snow. In the city Dyer and Danforth find the missing man and dog, wrapped and stored with great care on a stolen sledge, like samples. Then, far down the tunnel toward the hidden sea, they find the travellers themselves. Four of them lie in a row with their heads torn off, coated in black slime. They had gone home after an age under the ice and found the servants in charge.

Dyer’s response is the turn that makes the story more than a monster tale. He stops being afraid of them. They had woken among barking animals and strange two-legged creatures, defended themselves, taken specimens exactly as Lake had, buried their dead and set off to find their own kind. He calls them men.

Their strengths are those of a body built for anywhere. They withstood the pressure of the ocean floor and the cold of open space, lived on land or under water, needed almost no shelter, and could lie frozen for whole geological ages and get up again. They were engineers and artists who made living things to order. Their voice was a musical piping across a wide range of notes, and it is their sound the shoggoths still imitate, the cry of Tekeli-li that Lovecraft borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe.

Their limits are just as plain. They bred slowly, from spores, and only when they needed new colonies. They lost their old sciences one by one. They leaned on a slave race cleverer than they liked, and they were afraid of something in a still higher range of mountains to the west, which the carvings never show clearly. They turn up twice more in Lovecraft’s work, without their name: as the winged shapes on a balcony under three suns in The Dreams in the Witch House, published in 1933, and in a passing mention in The Shadow Out of Time, in 1936. Neither story says any of them are still alive.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Elder Things?

The Elder Things are a fictional alien race invented by H. P. Lovecraft in his novella At the Mountains of Madness, written in 1931 and published in 1936. In the story they came to Earth from space when the planet was young, built great cities and created the shoggoths. They are also called the Old Ones and the Elder Ones.

What do the Elder Things look like?

An Elder Thing is about eight feet long with a dark grey, barrel-shaped body marked by five ridges. It has folding membranous wings, five branching arms at the middle, a yellowish starfish-shaped head with five stalked eyes, and a greenish starfish-shaped foot with five paddle-tipped legs. Its body shows features of both animals and plants.

Did the Elder Things create humans?

In Lovecraft’s story, the Elder Things created life on Earth, first for food and then as workers. Earth’s plants and animals, including the ancestors of humans, evolved from leftover scraps of that created life. Humans were an accident and not a planned creation.

What is the relationship between the Elder Things and the shoggoths?

The Elder Things made the shoggoths as shapeless living servants and used them to build their cities. The shoggoths later developed minds of their own and rebelled. By the end of At the Mountains of Madness, a shoggoth has killed the last Elder Things seen in the story.

Are the Elder Things evil?

The Elder Things kill most of an Antarctic expedition camp, but the narrator of the story does not judge them evil. He concludes that they woke among strangers, defended themselves and collected specimens as human scientists would. He ends by regarding them with sympathy.

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