An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

The name de la Poerhas been seen to be an allusion to Edgar Allan Poe; but, as John Kipling Hitz points out, the name is a slight alteration of an actual name, Le Poer, which Poe and his erstwhile fiancée Sarah Helen (Power) Whitman believed to be in both their ancestries. HPL would have known this from reading Caroline Tinknor’s biography of Whitman, Poe’s Helen(1916), which he owned. Although the English atmosphere is depicted deftly in the tale, HPL appears to commit some errors. The town nearest to Exham Priory is given as Anchester, but there is no such town in England. HPL must have been thinking either of Ancaster in Lincolnshire or (more likely) Alchester in the southern county of Oxfordshire. Perhaps this is a deliberate alteration; but then, what do we make of the statement that “Anchester had been the camp of the Third Augustan Legion”? Neither Alchester nor Ancaster were the sites of legionary fortresses in Roman Britain; what is more, the Third Augustan Legion was never in England, and it was the Second Augustan Legion that was stationed at Isca Silurum (Caerleon-on-Usk) in what is now Wales.

Certain surface features of the tale—and perhaps one essential kernel of the plot—were taken from other works. As Steven J.Mariconda has pointed out, HPL’s account of the “epic of the rats” appears to be derived from a chapter in S.Baring-Gould’s Curious Myths of the Middle Ages(1869). The Gaelic parts of de la Poer’s concluding cries were lifted directly from Fiona Macleod’s “The Sin-Eater” (1895), which HPL read in Joseph Lewis French’s anthology, Best Psychic Stories(1920). (This borrowing would have a curious sequel. According to a now discredited historical theory, Gaelic was thought to have been spoken in the north of England rather than the South, where Cymric was spoken. When the tale was reprinted in WTfor June 1930, Robert E.Howard noticed the discrepancy and sent a letter to the editor, Farnsworth Wright, pointing it out; Wright passed the letter on to HPL, thereby initiating an intense six-year correspondence between the two writers.)

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The idea of atavism or reversion to type seems to have been derived from a story by Irvin S.Cobb, “The Unbroken Chain,” published in Cosmopolitanfor September 1923 (the issue, as is customary with many magazines, was probably on the stands at least a month before its cover date) and later collected in Cobb’s collection On an Island That Cost $24.00(1926). HPL admits that Frank Belknap Long gave him the magazine appearance of this story in 1923 (see HPL to J.Vernon Shea, November 8–22, 1933; ms., JHL), and he alludes to it without title in “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” This tale deals with a Frenchman who has a small proportion of negroid blood from a slave brought to America in 1819. When he is run down by a train, he cries out in an African language— “Niama tumba!”—the words that his black ancestor shouted when he was attacked by a rhinoceros in Africa. The story was reprinted in HPL’s lifetime in Christine Campbell Thomson’s Switch On the Light (1931). Its appearance (with “The Dunwich Horror”) in Herbert A.Wise and Phyllis Fraser’s Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural(Modern Library, 1944) was a significant landmark in HPL’s literary recognition.

See Barton Levi St. Armand, The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft(Elizabethtown, N.Y.: Dragon Press, 1977); Steven J.Mariconda, “Baring-Gould and the Ghouls: The Influence of Curious Myths of the Middle Ageson ‘The Rats in the Walls,’” CryptNo. 14 (St. John’s Eve 1983): 3–7 (rpt. in Mariconda’s On the Emergence of “Cthulhu” and Other Observations[Necronomicon Press, 1995]); CryptNo. 72 (Roodmas 1990) (special issue on “The Rats in the Walls”); Hubert Van Calenbergh, “The Roots of Horror in The Golden Bough,” LSNo. 26 (Spring 1992): 21–23; Paul Montelone, “‘The Rats in the Walls’: A Study in Pessimism,” LSNo. 32 (Spring 1995): 18–26; John Kipling Hitz, “Lovecraft and the Whitman Memoir,” LSNo. 37 (Fall 1997): 15–17; Mollie L.Burleson, “H.P.Lovecraft and Charles Dickens: The Rats in Their Walls,” LSNo. 38 (Spring 1998): 34–35; John Kipling Hitz, “Some Notes on ‘The Rats in the Walls,’” LSNo. 40 (Fall 1998): 29–33. “Regner Lodbrog’s Epicedium.”