"The Warder of Knowledge" is a Cthulhu Mythos story by Richard F. Searight, written in 1935 but not published until 1992, in the Fedogan & Bremer collection Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos. The story is notable for its explication of the Eltdown Shards, pre-human records invented by Searight in his story "The Sealed Casket" and elaborated upon by H. P. Lovecraft in the round-robin story "The Challenge from Beyond".
Lovecraft read Searight's unpublished story in manuscript, and wrote to him about it on November 4, 1935:
I like the story exceedingly, & hope you will not let [Weird Tales editor Farnsworth] Wright’s rejection discourage you....The references to the Eltdown Shards are fascinating—but woe is me! I’ve given a lot of dope in that composite story [“The Challenge from Beyond”] which conflicts directly with the true facts as here revealed!... I also fear that I described the shards in a conflicting way. Oh, well—in sober truth relatively few people will ever see the composite yarn anyhow.[1]
Synopsis[]
Gordon Whitney, chair of the chemistry department at Beloin University, a small Midwestern college, has always been impelled "by a restless, driving urge, without motive or practical goal, to crowd into one mind all the vast aggregation of discovered scientific fact as well as the limitless secrets still undisclosed to research." He becomes obsessed with the Eltdown Shards, fantastically old tablets reputed to record pre-human knowledge, and their apparent reference to an entity called the Warder of Knowledge. Whitney is able to invoke this being, and the ensuing flood of information he receives kills him.
The Eltdown Shards[]
"The Warder of Knowledge" provides the fullest description of "the cryptic and half-decipherable Eltdown Shards" by the author who invented them. Searight's account conflicts in certain respects with their treatment by other Mythos writers, particularly H. P. Lovecraft.
In Searight's story, the Shards were discovered "some forty-four years before" the time of the story, which was written in 1935, so approximately 1891. They were found in an "early Triassic stratum" in a "gravel pit near Eltdown"; the "geologic stratum in which the shards had lain indicated an antiquity antedating by millions of years the earliest inscriptions previously known." (The Early Triassic is the geologic period from approximately 252-247 million years ago.[2])
The first experts to examine them, Dalton and Woodford, "had announced them to be untranslatable"; they were placed in the "small red-brick museum" at the obscure Beloin University, seemingly to prevent them from attracting more attention. There they are kept in a "high cabinet of black walnut".
Searight describes them as
ticketed slabs of iron-hard grey clay, of all shapes, and ranging in size from the fifth shard, an oblong piece about four inches by eight, to the fourteenth, a jagged, roughly triangular tablet nearly twenty inches across. Most of them were incomplete and some were mere fragments. Eons of time, geologic disturbances, and unknowable mishaps, had cracked them and split off portions.
The shards are covered with unique text:
The writing or carving—it was useless to speculate regarding the means used to produce it—consisted of intricate, delicately proportioned characters confined within a surrounding margin about an inch wide; a style of delineation followed in all twenty-three of the shards. Fine, symmetrical symbols writhed over the entire space within this border.... Examinations had revealed that the writing surface was sunk slightly below the marginal level—a circumstance which, together with the extreme hardness of the material, probably accounted for the specimens being found in as legible a state as they were.... [T]ranslation was made possible only by the suggestive similarity of various symbols to certain primitive Amharic and Arabic word roots, whose prototypes they appeared to be.
The character Whitney is particularly interested in one particular fragment:
The nineteenth shard...presented an odd exception to the others. Its lower edge had been sheared away as cleanly as if by the stroke of a scimitar; and the unbroken line of cleavage, differing so markedly from the ragged indentures and smooth, roundly worn edges of the other tablets, suggested a deliberate mutilation when the clay had been fresh and comparatively soft. In other respects the shard, which was roughly a foot square, was in rather better condition than the average. Its smoothly rounded edges were broken only occasionally by unimportant chippings, and none of the writing was obliterated.
It is this fragment that contains the invocation of the Warder of Knowledge.
References[]
- ↑ Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos, "Introduction", by Robert M. Price (Fedogan & Bremer, 1992).
- ↑ Wikipedia, "Early Triassic".