Eltdown Shards

Eltdown Shards
Created by	Om Oris
Type	Book
Real World Information
Creator	Richard F. Searight
First Appearance	CIRCLE: "The Sealed Casket"
Other Appearances	HPL: "The Diary of Alonzo Typer" The Shadow Out of Time "The Challenge from Beyond" CIRCLE: "The Warder of Knowledge" EXP: Call of Cthulhu Arkham Unveiled Escape from Innsmouth The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana "Wrath of the Wind-Walker" The Keeper's Companion Ramsey Campbell's Goatswood and Less Pleasant Places "Admonition from the Past" Before the Fall "The Coming of Ouran-Atun" "The Horror from the Shards" Lurking Fears "Mists of Death" "Seized by the Warder" Walker in the Wastes

“	He recalled their published statements disparaging the importance of the discovery; and the odd haste with which the specimens had been shunted to this obscure museum and locked away. And, thinking of how completely these fragments had been forgotten by scientific men, he wondered if enough could have been deciphered of the halfobliterated symbols to provide a hint of the appalling nature of the meaning[...] He had never seriously suspected that the Shards had been deliberately discarded because of their contents, for he attributed his own success with them to certain recondite documents that had suggested the key. But now he wondered.	„
	~ Richard F. Searight , "The Warder of Knowledge"

The Eltdown Shards are a fictional archeological discovery, depicted as a collection of pottery fragments that preserve pre-human writing. They were invented by Richard F. Searight in his story "The Sealed Casket" (1935), and incorporated into the Cthulhu Mythos through H. P. Lovecraft's contribution to the round-robin story "The Challenge from Beyond" (1935). They are named for Eltdown, the fictional village in England where they were discovered.

Description

The Eltdown Shards are 23 pottery fragments inscribed with mysterious characters. The slabs are hard as iron and of all shapes and sizes, "from the fifth shard, an oblong piece about four inches by eight, to the fourteenth, a jagged, roughly triangular tablet nearly twenty inches across". The inscribed characters are intricate, and the margin decorated with various symbols. (CIRCLE: "The Warder of Knowledge")

The hieroglyphs contain similarities to portions of the Pnakotic Manuscripts because it is written in the language of the Elder Things. (EXP: The Keeper's Companion)

The shards describe beings that could exchange minds across spacetime (Yithians and Yekubians), how the mind swapping technology of the Yekubians landed on Earth during the Yithians' rule, and the action they took against it (HPL: "The Challenge from Beyond"). Also included is a way to contact the Yithians. (EXP: The Keeper's Companion) The 5th shard mentions Avaloth (possibly another name for Ithaqua) and his temple (EXP: "The Sealed Casket", "Wrath of the Wind-Walker"). Other mentioned beings are PneephTaal (CIRCLE: "Mists of Death") and Ouran-Atun (EXP: "The Coming of Ouran-Atun").

The 19th shard contains an evocation to summon the Warder of Knowledge, and another evocation to banish the Warder with some parts deliberately cut out (CIRCLE: "The Warder of Knowledge"). A spell to summon Flying Polyps and evoking the Elder Sign are scrawled on blank pages at the end of the Winters-Hall translation (EXP: Ramsey Campbell's Goatswood and Less Pleasant Places).

The Eltdown Shards, along with parts of the Pnakotic Fragments, fill in the gaps in the Celaeno Fragments, suggesting that these 3 may be part of a larger work. (EXP: The Keeper's Companion)

The authorship of the shards is disputed. Reverend Arthur Brooke Winters-Hall and Professor Turkoff of Beloin College suggests that they are writings of the Elder Things when the super continent Pangaea still existed. Others contend that the author is a Yithian itself. (EXP: The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana)

History

The Eltdown Shards were found in an either early-Triassic (CIRCLE: "The Warder of Knowledge") or pre-Carboniferous (HPL: "The Challenge from Beyond") rock stratum near Eltdown, Sussex, Southern England in 1882 by Doctor Abel Dalton and Doctor Nigel Woodford of Cambridge during a geological survey. They declared the shards untranslatable and unimportant, and eventually sent them to one of their assistants, Gordon Whitney, at Beloin College in Hanover, Wisconsin. (CIRCLE: "The Warder of Knowledge") One source maintains that the shards were in fact found in Greenland in 1903. (EXP: The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana)

A crude reproduction of some shards made of metal with additional proto-Semitic text filled in were uncovered outside London during the Blitz. (EXP: "Wrath of the Wind-Walker", The Keeper's Companion)

Most of the shards are currently in the Beloin College Museum, though not on public display. A few are kept at the Miskatonic University Library. (EXP: The Keeper's Companion) One copy is in the library at the basement of the van der Heyls house (HPL: "The Diary of Alonzo Typer").

Translations

• A 64-pages English translation named The Eltdown Shards: A Conjectural Translation by Reverend Arthur Brooke Winters-Hall, one of the people assisting with the excavations of the fragments, was published in 1912 (HPL: "The Challenge from Beyond", EXP: The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana). 50 copies were published, then 300 more in 1917 by an anonymous source. This version only covers the highlights of the original content, and much info is badly interpreted. (EXP: The Keeper's Companion, Call of Cthulhu)
• An English translation named The Eltdown Shards: A Partial Translation by Gordon Whitney. It confirms much, and is more accurate than the one by Winters-Hall, but was never published and remains at the Beloin University library to this day. (CIRCLE: "The Warder of Knowledge", EXP: The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana)
• An English translation by Doctor Everett Sloan, which also confirms the content of the Winters-Hall translation. (EXP: The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana).

Translation copy locations

Some translations still survive to this day, mostly in the hands of private owners:

• Kermit Allen Rawes, an Innsmouth resident (EXP: Old Acquaintance).
• Jasper Ravelle, a drug dealer on the Bowery, New York City (EXP: The Starshrine).
• Douglas Enright, an Ithaqua worshipper, in his home in London (EXP: Walker in the Wastes).
• Owner of the Windthrope Manor in Severnford (EXP: The Windthrope Legacy).
• Laban Shrewsbury, an Arkham resident (EXP: Arkham Unveiled).
• Members of Arkham's Eye of Amara Society (EXP: Arkham Unveiled).
• Miskatonic University Library (EXP: Arkham Unveiled).
• Library of St John the Beheaded. (EXP: Millennial Rites)
• New York City's Natural History Museum. (EXP: "The Collect Call of Cathulhu")

Behind the Mythos

The Eltdown Shards have a complex history. They were created by Richard F. Searight as a prop for his story "The Sealed Casket". Through letter correspondence, Lovecraft took the name and ran with it, inventing a whole history for it in "The Challenge From Beyond". However, Searight had written an alternative history for it, which Lovecraft only knew of some time later. (EXP: Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos) As Lovecraft was better known, most authors followed Lovecraft. After Searight's version in "The Warder of Knowledge" became available in 1992, Joan C. Stanley tried to harmonise the information in her booklet Ex Libris Miskatonici: A Catalogue of Selected Items from the Special Collections in the Miskatonici University Library (Necronomicon Press, 1993). Searight's son, Franklyn has also written Mythos material following his father's guide, notably in the book Those Dreadful Eltdown Shards (H. Harken Productions, August 2016) which collects all the fiction about the Shards in one place. Attempts have been made to separate and distinguish between the versions.