| rdfs:comment | - The Cthulhu Mythos (クトゥルフ神話 Kutourufu Shinwa?) is the name given to the fictional universe, featured in the world of Toaru Majutsu no Index, in which the stories of H. P. Lovecraft (referred to as the "genius author" in the narrative) and other authors after his death are based. It has been used as a base for spells created by certain magicians who desired to see the world described in those stories.
- The Cthulhu Mythos encompasses the shared elements, characters, settings, and themes found in the works of H.P. Lovecraft and associated horror fiction writers. Together, they form the mythos that authors writing in the Lovecraftian milieu have used — and continue to use — to craft their stories.[1] The term itself was coined by the writer August Derleth. Although this legendarium is also sometimes called the Lovecraft Mythos, most notably by the Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, it has long since moved beyond Lovecraft's original conception.
- a.k.a. Dr. Bender's Field Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos This article was written by the inestimable Dr. Bender, and published in the Crystal Hall Forums, WA Universe section: Lovecraftian Influences That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die. -H.P. Lovecraft
- The Cthulhu Mythos is a fictional universe based on the work of H.P.Lovecraft. In these stories, eldritch entities traveled through space and time to Earth, where on occasion, human beings encounter them at the cost of their sanity. The Mythos includes pastiches written by other writers.
- An informal and, appropriately, chaotic Shared Universe that squarely defines the darkest and edgiest of genres, cosmic horror. It was started unintentionally by HP Lovecraft and his circle of peers (informally called the 'Kalem Club') who belonged to the embryonic Fandom, at that stage less about Speculative Fiction but more about writing short amateur "weird" stories for the 'pulp' magazines, at least for Lovecraft. See also the Call of Cthulhu RPG Sub-settings within the Cthulhu Mythos 'verse include:
- The Cthulhu Mythos (Originally referred to as Yog-Sothothery) refers to a collection of artificial mythology created by H. P. Lovecraft, and is widely regarded as one of the strongest verses in fiction. Inside of it, all of existence was created by a mindless questionable omnipotent being named Azathoth who sleeps at the center of creation. The most notable character from the series is Cthulhu and the most notable story is "The Call of Cthulhu".
- Cthulhu Mythos is the term coined by the writer August Derleth to describe the shared elements, characters, settings, and themes in the works of H. P. Lovecraft and associated writers. Together, they form the mythos that authors writing in the Lovecraftian milieu have used—and continue to use—to craft their stories.
- [[wikipedia:File:Cthulhu sketch by Lovecraft.jpg|thumb|A sketch of the fictional character Cthulhu, drawn by his creator, H. P. Lovecraft, May 11, 1934|]] [[wikipedia:File:Weird Tales March 1944.jpg|thumb|Cover of the pulp magazine Weird Tales (March 1944, vol. 37, no. 4) featuring The Trail of Cthulhu by August Derleth. Cover art by John Giunta.|]] The Cthulhu Mythos is a shared fictional universe, based on the work of American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Authors of Lovecraftian horror use elements of the Mythos in an ongoing expansion of the fictional universe.
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| abstract | - [[wikipedia:File:Cthulhu sketch by Lovecraft.jpg|thumb|A sketch of the fictional character Cthulhu, drawn by his creator, H. P. Lovecraft, May 11, 1934|]] [[wikipedia:File:Weird Tales March 1944.jpg|thumb|Cover of the pulp magazine Weird Tales (March 1944, vol. 37, no. 4) featuring The Trail of Cthulhu by August Derleth. Cover art by John Giunta.|]] The Cthulhu Mythos is a shared fictional universe, based on the work of American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. The term was first coined by August Derleth, a contemporary correspondent of Lovecraft, who used the name of the creature Cthulhu—a central figure in Lovecraft literature and the focus of Lovecraft's short story "The Call of Cthulhu" (first published in pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928)—to identify the system of lore employed by Lovecraft and his literary successors. The writer Richard L. Tierney later applied the term "Derleth Mythos" to distinguish between Lovecraft's works and Derleth's later stories. Authors of Lovecraftian horror use elements of the Mythos in an ongoing expansion of the fictional universe.
- The Cthulhu Mythos (クトゥルフ神話 Kutourufu Shinwa?) is the name given to the fictional universe, featured in the world of Toaru Majutsu no Index, in which the stories of H. P. Lovecraft (referred to as the "genius author" in the narrative) and other authors after his death are based. It has been used as a base for spells created by certain magicians who desired to see the world described in those stories.
- An informal and, appropriately, chaotic Shared Universe that squarely defines the darkest and edgiest of genres, cosmic horror. It was started unintentionally by HP Lovecraft and his circle of peers (informally called the 'Kalem Club') who belonged to the embryonic Fandom, at that stage less about Speculative Fiction but more about writing short amateur "weird" stories for the 'pulp' magazines, at least for Lovecraft. Lovecraft had already incorporated small elements of Robert W Chambers' earlier The King in Yellow and the writings of Arthur Machen by way of Shout Outs, and as time went on, Lovecraft and his friends began referring to his Eldritch Abominations and Tomes of Eldritch Lore in their writings, though usually not actual characters, and to share references made in his friends' stories or private letters. Mythopoeia defined the abstract, and original, cosmic setting. The actual term Cthulhu Mythos, depending on how you define it, post-dates Lovecraft's death, at which time H. P. Lovecraft's work got seized and expanded on by August Derleth. Lovecraft called his budding mythology "Yog-Sothothery". Due to the Shared Universe's informal nature there have arisen several rather divisive conceptions of the Mythos, generally categorized as the Lovecraft purists' version; the version including the broad post-1930s expansions by later writers like August Derleth (who is a controversy unto himself) and Ramsey Campbell; and then there's the rigidly codified and de-mystified Tabletop RPG adaptations which crunch down Mind Screwdriver-style to produce orderly game rules from an inherently disorderly canon. Information from the latter has tended to proliferate across the Internet disproportionately, resulting in simple Google searches producing a majority of pages derived from the game and its various campaigns, which are not always labeled as such. HP Lovecraft has his own trope listing, so tropes here should be for tropes that are not specific to his work, or have been greatly expanded from his work. See also Cosmic Horror Story (for works which deal with Lovecraft's themes [and, optionally, make use of the Mythos) and Lovecraft Lite for works that take Lovecraft and Mythos less seriously. See also the Call of Cthulhu RPG Sub-settings within the Cthulhu Mythos 'verse include:
* Lovecraft Country: Lovecraft's own setting; Arkham, Dunwitch, Innsmouth, and Kingsport, and anywhere nearby that fits the imagery.
* Campbell Country: Any Mythos-derived setting in Europe, most often England. The old castle from HPL's The Rats in the Walls and Ramsey Campbell's Severn Valley region are ideal examples.
* The Dreamlands: Fantastical world created by people's dreams, focusing more on the surreal than terror.
* Delta Green: The Mythos meets government conspiracies and black ops.
* Hyperborea: Prehistorical Greenland before the ice age. Created by Clark Ashton Smith, it focuses more on the weirdness than horror.
* Kull, Conan the Barbarian, and Bran Mak Morn: Robert E. Howard's works form a peripheral part of the Mythos - the stories tend to be human-centric. "The Tower of the Elephant", one of the best early Conan stories, features a Lovecraftian abomination.
- The Cthulhu Mythos (Originally referred to as Yog-Sothothery) refers to a collection of artificial mythology created by H. P. Lovecraft, and is widely regarded as one of the strongest verses in fiction. Inside of it, all of existence was created by a mindless questionable omnipotent being named Azathoth who sleeps at the center of creation. The most notable character from the series is Cthulhu and the most notable story is "The Call of Cthulhu". Please note, that everything that is not made by H. P. Lovecraft or his close friends during his life is considered non-canon for the purposes of this wiki, even though the Cthulhu Mythos is now public domain. Profiles on this wiki use only the primary canon as opposed to the expanded Mythos, and will primarily use the works of Lovecraft himself, along with occasionally contributions to the Mythos from close friends, such as Frank Belknap Long and Clark Ashton Smith.
- Cthulhu Mythos is the term coined by the writer August Derleth to describe the shared elements, characters, settings, and themes in the works of H. P. Lovecraft and associated writers. Together, they form the mythos that authors writing in the Lovecraftian milieu have used—and continue to use—to craft their stories. During the latter part of Lovecraft's life, there was much borrowing of story elements among the authors of the "Lovecraft Circle", a clique of writers with whom Lovecraft corresponded. This group included Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner, and others. Lovecraft recognized that each writer had his own story-cycle and that an element from one cycle would not necessarily become part of another simply because a writer used it in one of his stories. For example, although Smith might mention "Kthulhut" (Cthulhu) in one of his Hyperborean tales, this does not mean that Cthulhu is part of the Hyperborean cycle. A notable exception, however, is Smith's Tsathoggua, which Lovecraft appropriated for his revision of Zelia Bishop's "The Mound" (1940). Lovecraft effectively connected Smith's creation to his story-cycle by placing Tsathoggua alongside such entities as Tulu (Cthulhu), Yig, Shub-Niggurath, and Nug and Yeb in subterranean K'n-yan. Most of the elements of Lovecraft's mythos were not a cross-pollination of the various story-cycles of the Lovecraft Circle, but were instead deliberately created by each writer to become part of the mythos — the most notable example being the various arcane grimoires of forbidden lore. So, for example, Robert E. Howard has his character Friedrich Von Junzt reading Lovecraft's Necronomicon in "The Children of the Night" (1931), and Lovecraft in turn mentions Howard's Unaussprechlichen Kulten in both "Out of the Aeons" (1935) and "The Shadow Out of Time (1936).
- The Cthulhu Mythos encompasses the shared elements, characters, settings, and themes found in the works of H.P. Lovecraft and associated horror fiction writers. Together, they form the mythos that authors writing in the Lovecraftian milieu have used — and continue to use — to craft their stories.[1] The term itself was coined by the writer August Derleth. Although this legendarium is also sometimes called the Lovecraft Mythos, most notably by the Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, it has long since moved beyond Lovecraft's original conception.
- a.k.a. Dr. Bender's Field Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos This article was written by the inestimable Dr. Bender, and published in the Crystal Hall Forums, WA Universe section: Lovecraftian Influences That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die. -H.P. Lovecraft
- The Cthulhu Mythos is a fictional universe based on the work of H.P.Lovecraft. In these stories, eldritch entities traveled through space and time to Earth, where on occasion, human beings encounter them at the cost of their sanity. The Mythos includes pastiches written by other writers.
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