Ireland is an island in Europe, the homeland of the Irish people. For centuries part of the British Empire, the majority of the island gained its independence as the Republic of Ireland in the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921). It figures as a setting in H. P. Lovecraft's fiction, most extensively in "The Moon-Bog". It is also significant to Lovecraft as the home of one of his chief literary influences, Lord Dunsany.
In Lovecraft's Fiction[]
Thomas Malone, the New York detective who is the protagonist of "The Horror at Red Hook," is "a Dublin University man born in a Georgian villa near [Dublin's] Phoenix Park."
In "The Whisperer in Darkness," Albert Wilmarth at first dismisses reports of strange creatures in the Vermont hills as akin to the "universal legends of natural personification" that "gave to wild Wales and Ireland their dark hints of strange, small, and terrible hidden races of troglodytes and burrowers." This is an allusion to the Welsh writer Arthur Machen's "The Novel of the Black Seal," in which the legends of "little people" turn out to be based on horrific reality.
Listing the signs of Cthulhu's global influence, "The Call of Cthulhu" notes, "The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumour and legendry."
The "strange regularities" of the titular mountain range in At the Mountains of Madness are compared to "the famous Giants’ Causeway in Ireland."
Expanded Mythos[]
In 2024, designer Colin Dunlop released a sourcebook for Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu role-playing game simply titled Cthulhu Ireland, and published through the Miskatonic Repository player-driven resource initiative. The book details the Emerald Isle in the Roaring 20s with elements of the Cthulhu Mythos added as appropriate.