R'lyeh

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Image:R'lyeh map.png R'lyeh<ref>On the CD A Shoggoth on the Roof, R'lyeh is pronounced Roo-lee-ah or Rill-AYE-eh.</ref> is a fictional city that first appeared in the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. R'lyeh is a sunken city located deep under the Pacific Ocean and is where the godlike being Cthulhu is buried. R'lyeh's architecture is characterized by its non-Euclidean geometry <ref>Lovecraft's "pseudo-geometry" supposes that certain shapes can extend into other dimensions; thus, appearing "non-Euclidean" from a human perspective. According to Robert Weinberg, this is impossible. Since the three-dimensional world is a closed system, no structure could be built so as to overlap into another dimension. (Robert Weinberg, "H. P. Lovecraft and Pseudomathematics", Discovering H. P. Lovecraft, pp. 88–91.)</ref>.

1 Description
2 Location
3 Other appearances
4 References
- 4.1 Notes

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Description

[A] coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry [surrounds] the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults . . .
—H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

When R'lyeh rises in Lovecraft's short story "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928), the only portion of the city that emerges is a single "hideous monolith-crowned citadel" in which Cthulhu is entombed. The human onlookers are awed by the sheer immensity of the city and by the frightening suggestiveness of the gargantuan statues and bas-reliefs.

The city is a panorama of "vast angles and stone surfaces ... too great to belong to anything right and proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and disturbing hieroglyphs." The geometry of R’lyeh is "abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours."

In Lovecraft's fiction, R'lyeh is sometimes referred to in the ritualistic phrase "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn", which roughly translates to "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming"<ref>Pearsall, "R'lyeh", The Lovecraft Lexicon, p. 345.</ref>.

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Location

Lovecraft said that R'lyeh is located at Latitude 47° 9' S, Longitude 126° 43' W in the southern Pacific Ocean<ref>Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu", The Dunwich Horror and Others, p. 150.</ref>. August Derleth, however, placed R'lyeh at S. Latitude 49° 51' S, Longitude 128° 34' W in his own writings<ref>Derleth, "The Black Island", Quest for Cthulhu, p. 426.</ref>. The latter coordinates place the city approximately 5100 nautical miles (5900 statute miles or 9500 kilometers), or about ten days journey for a fast ship, from Pohnpei (Ponape), an actual island of the area. Ponape also plays a part in the Cthulhu Mythos as the place where the "Ponape Scripture", a text describing Cthulhu, was found.

In Brian Lumley's Titus Crow novels, three psychics working for the Wilmarth Foundation attempt to locate R'lyeh psionically and are driven mad when they make contact with Cthulhu.

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Other appearances

The 1994 Doctor Who New Adventures novel All-Consuming Fire by Andy Lane features many elements inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos. Much of the action takes place on the planet "Ry'leh", which is clearly an homage, reference, or corruption of R'lyeh.

R'lyeh appears as a playable nation in the turn-based strategy game Dominions II.

In Shadow Hearts: Covenant, one of the forbidden documents is called the R'lyeh Text and explains how to summon an alien being akin to a god. However, this is a continuity error, since in Shadow Hearts this document was called the Codex of Lurie.