Here's some annotations...
The Black Stone ~ by Robert E. Howard (first appeared in
Weird Tales, November 1931)
Epigram:
"They say foul things of Old Times still lurk
In dark forgotten corners of the world,
And Gates still gape to loose, on certain nights,
Shapes pent in Hell."~Justin Geoffrey~
the "nameless narrator": Ironically (or fittingly), he has access to one of the "original" editions of
Nameless Cults.
Nameless Cults: also known (in the original Deutsche) as
Unaussprechlichen Kulten (according to Derleth and Wright), it was also called "the Black Book". It was originally published in Dusseldorf in 1839, "with heavy leather covers and...iron hasps". A "pirated" edition was issued in 1845 by Bridewall of London. The translation is generally considered as "cheap and faulty". A "carefully expurgated edition" was published by Golden Goblin Press of New York in 1909. The nameless narrator doubts "if there are half a dozen such volumes in the entire world today" of the original, accurate Dusseldorf edition. Many copies were burned after the details of the the author's demise were known.
Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt: was born in 1795 in Germany (Dusseldorf?) amidst the turmoil of Napoleonic Europe. He "spent his entire life delving into forbidden subjects". Von Junzt "traveled in all parts of the world, gained entrance into innumerable secret societies, and read countless little-known and esoteric books and manuscripts in the original". He was working on a new manuscript in 1840 when "he was found dead with the marks of taloned fingers on his throat" within a "locked and bolted chamber".
Alexis Ladeau: a Frenchman, was von Junzt's closest friend. He discovered his friend's body amid the scattered pages of von Junzt's unpublished manuscript. After piecing them together and reading the contents, Ladeau burnt the manuscript and "cut his own throat with a razor".
the Black Stone: is a "curious, sinister monolith that broods among the mountains of Hungary". It is mentioned in Nameless Cults. Von Junzt seems to imply "that the Black Stone represents some order
or being lost and forgotten centuries ago." He "spoke of it as one of the
keys". REH's and von Junzt's use of "keys" would seem to have been inspired by Lovecraft's sonnet,
The Key.
Otto Dostmann: was a German(?) historian/archaeologist and the author of
Remnants of Lost Empires. His "pet theme" were the Greco-Roman ruins of Asia Minor.
Remnants of Lost Empires: was published in Berlin by "Das Drachenhaus" Press in 1809. In it, Dostmann refers to the Black Stone "briefly". His theory was that the Stone "was a remnant of the Hunnish invasion and had been erected to commemorate a victory of Attila over the Goths". Von Junzt contradicted this theory in
Nameless Cults, "remarking that to attribute the origin of the Black Stone to the Huns was as logical as assuming that William the Conqueror reared Stonehenge." Dostmann pronounced the defaced characters on the Stone as being "unmistakably Mongoloid".
Stregoicavar: is the name of the Hungarian village "adjacent to the Black Stone". According to Dostmann, its name means something like "Witch-Town".
Dornly's "Magyar Folklore": mentions the Black Stone in the
Dream Myths chapter. It notes the superstition that if anyone sleeps in the vicinity of the Stone, that person will "be haunted by monstrous nightmares for ever after". There were tales about those who visited the Stone on Midsummer's Eve and "who died raving mad". These traditions bear a striking similarity to legends in Wales concerning certain stones there. If a person sleeps near such stones on certain nights, then he will awake as a poet or a madman. Justin Geoffrey would fit this discription. While on the subject of "dream myths", there are the
mazzerri, or "dream-hunters" of Corsica. In her book, Barbara Carrington discusses them and theorizes that they are remnants of shamanic practices dating from Stone Age times. The Corsican word for "witches" is
stregoi. Here's a link:
http://www.terracors...o/mazzeri2.htmlJustin Geoffrey:"the mad poet" who wrote the poem,
The People of the Monolith.
Temesvar: is a Hungarian city situated in the far western corner of the country.
Stregoicavar: to reach it, the narrator took a "train of obsolete style" from Temesvar to an uncertain point. He then endured a three-day coach-ride to reach Stregoicavar, "which lay in a fertile valley high up in the fir-clad mountains". Those mountains would seem to be the Trans-Danubian Medium Mountains, which lie just east of Temesvar.
Schomvaal: is the site of a battlefield, three days' ride from Stregoicavar. It was at Schomvaal that "the brave Polish-Hungarian knight, Count Boris Vladinoff, made his gallant and futile stand against the victorious hosts of Suleiman the Magnificent, when the Grand Turk swept over eastern Europe in 1526."
Larson's "Turkish Wars": refers to the Battle of Schomvaal. According to Larson, Vladinoff was standing amidst the ruins of an old castle when hidden Turkish artillery batteries bombarded the Count's position. The ruins collapsed upon the Count, killing him. The Hungarian forces, leaderless, were "cut to pieces".
Stregoicavar: its inhabitants were "friendly" and "quaint".
Justin Geoffrey: according to the tavern-keeper of Stregoicavar, visited the village ten years before the narrator (approximately 1920). The inn-keeper said that Geoffrey "mumbled to himself" and that his "actions and conversations were the strangest of any man I (the tavern-keeper) ever knew." According to the narrator, JG "died screaming in a madhouse five years" before.
the Black Stone: The tavern-keeper says that he wishes it "were ground to powder and flung into the Danube", implying that Stregoicavar probably lies in the Trans-Danubian Mountains. He also said that once men tried to destroy it, "but each man that laid hammer or maul against it came to an evil end".
Stregoicavar: In 1526, the Turks (led by the scribe, Selim Bahadur) swept through the area, killing every human they could find. The present inhabitants of the village came from the lower valleys later on. The original inhabitants were "pagans" who had "dwelt in the mountains since time immemorial". Apparently, settlers of "sturdy...Magyar-Slavic stock had mixed and intermarried with a degraded aboriginal race...producing an unsavory amalgamation".
the Black Stone:lies "a few hours' tramp" from Stregoicavar. Once past fir-clad slopes, one comes to a "rugged solid stone cliff" jutting boldly from the mountainside. Atop the cliff is "a sort of thickly-wooded plateau". There, in the center of a wide glade, stands the Black Stone. It is "octagonal in shape, some sixteen feet in height and about a foot and a half thick." Heiroglyphics spiral up the Stone. They are mostly defaced for the first ten feet from the ground, higher up, they are more legible. The narrator claims that the glyphs were like nothing of which he had seen or heard. "The nearest approach to them", in his opinion, "were some crude scratches on a gigantic and strangely symmetrical rock in a lost valley of Yucatan." His theory was "that the rock was really the base of a long-vanished column" was laughed at by his archaeologist friend, who said that "if it were built with any natural rules of architectural symmetry" it would be "a column a thousand feet high". The narrator says of the Stone's glyphs and those of the "column" that "one suggested the other". The original, undinted surface of the Stone was "a dully gleaming black". The narrator says that it "was if the monolith had been reared by alien hands, in an age distant and apart from human ken". This line suggests the REH poem,
The Symbol.
the tavern-keeper's nephew: As a child, he had slept near the Stone. Ever since, he had experienced terrible nightmares. He clearly remembered only one dream. In it, "he had seen the Black Stone,
not on a mountain slope but set like a spire on a colossal black castle".
Xuthltan: the name given to Stregoicavar by its original inhabitants, according to the local schoolmaster. "He believed that a coven had once existed in the vicinity", part "of that fertility cult which once threatened to undermine European civilization and gave rise to tales of witchcraft." REH is almost for sure referring to the theories expounded by Margaret Murray in her
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, a book which HPL recommended to Howard. To the narrator, the name "Xuthltan" did not suggest "connection with any Scythic, Slavic or Mongolian race to which an aboriginal people of these mountains would, under natural circumstances, have belonged." The schoolmaster "did not believe that the members of the cult erected the monolith", they simply used it for their own purposes.
Midsummer Night: The narrator finds himself in Stregoicavar on the date of this ancient festival. In legend, this was an especially dangerous time to be near the Stone. A "broad silver moon" hangs in the sky. This lunar factoid should allow us to set an exact year for this yarn. Here's a Midsummer link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midsummer the Black Stone: The narrator, when he comes to the cliffs below the Stone, notes that "in the weird light they appeared less like natural cliffs and
more like the ruins of cyclopean and Titan-reared battlements jutting from the mountain slope". At the edge of the glade on the side toward the cliffs "was a stone which formed a sort of natural seat". The narrator speculates that it was here that Justin Geoffrey probably sat. Once again, this agrees with the Welsh legends I noted above. The narrator falls asleep and awakens around midnight. He tries to rise, but feels himself "gripped" and "helpless".
The narrator sees the glade thronged by hundreds of skin-clad worshippers "not fifty yards away". They were short and squat, with low brows and broad, dull faces. "Some had Slavic or Magyar features, but those features were degraded as from a mixture of some baser alien strain". They formed a broad semi-circle in front of the Stone. Some sort of priest stood before the monolith, clad in a goat-skin and wearing a wolf-mask. The priest and worshippers kept shouting "a single word, over and over". What that word was, the narrator could not determine. The priest lashed a dark-haired "votaress" with fir-branches until she was bloody. She crawled to the Stone and kissed it "in frenzied and unholy adoration." "The priest swept up the infant (which lay before the Stone) with a long arm, and shouting again
that Name(...)dashed its brains out against the monolith". Suddenly, "a huge monstrous toad-like
thing" squatted atop the Stone. It was "bloated, repulsive and unstable". Its "huge blinking eyes" were filled with "lust, abysmal greed, obscene cruelty and monstrous evil". The priest lifted a bound, nubile girl to his god and the "monstrosity sucked in its breath, lustfully and slobberingly". At this point, the narrator loses consciousness. The narrator opens his eyes "on a still white dawn". There is no sign of the obscenities he witnessed.
Count Boris Vladinoff: The narrator calls him a "Polish adventurer".
Schomvaal: "a little village lies a few miles from the old battlefield".
Justin Geoffrey: According to the narrator, the poet "tarried there (at the Black Stone) only in the sunlight, and went his way".
Selim Bahadur: "a soldier as well as a scribe" in the Turkish imperial court. He commanded the forces that cleansed Xuthltan. He discovered the obscene cult that infested the valley. Through torture, Selim learned of "the lost, grim black cavern high in the hills". There the Turks found "a monstrous, bloated, wallowing toad-like being". They hemmed it in "and slew it with flame and ancient steel blessed in old times by Muhammad, and with incantations that were old when Arabia was young." The thing took "a half-score of his slayers" with him. From around the neck of the wolf-mask priest, Selim took a golden idol-pendant, depicting the "god". Selim set down the account of all that transpired in a "neat" hand, in "Turkish characters"(?). He placed the account, along with the silk-wrapped pendant, in a lacquered case. He was slain at Schomvaal and the case given to Vladinoff. When the castle ruins collapsed on the Count, the lacquered case was buried with him.
the narrator: By the end of his account, he now
understands what von Junzt meant by "his repeated phrase of
keys!" "Keys to Outer Doors -links with an abhorrent past". The Stone is a Key. It is a "symbol of a forgotten horror" (once again recalling "The Symbol" poem). The narrator also realizes "
why the cliffs look like battlements in the moonlight". He speaks of the "masking slopes" which hide ancient secrets. He says:"For the cave wherein the Turks trapped the -
thing - was not truly a cavern". "May no man seek to uproot the ghastly spire men call the Black Stone!" He notes:"Man was not always master of the earth -
and is he now?"
BTW, every single book mentioned in this yarn was created by Robert E. Howard.
