Fairyland
ELDRITCH, adj. Jenny Hamilton of Reading the End asked people on twitter to give their own definition of this word without looking it up:
without googling it for phrasing tips, define "eldritch" for me
September 15th 2020 4 Likes
I didn’t comply with Jenny’s very simple request because I’m like a fictional character being drawn to touch a cursed object despite every ominous warning. The call of the dictionary overpowered me.
Anyway, most of the replies to Jenny’s tweet were something along the lines of “creepy, weird, monstrous” with a side of tentacles, which is pretty much what’s in the dictionary—minus the tentacles, but more on that in a minute.
According to the OED, “eldritch” is Scottish. Fittingly for a word that means “weird, ghostly, unnatural, frightful, hideous,” it’s of obscure origin. It is perhaps connected to the word “elf,” based on the existence of the variant form “elphrish,” which is super cool.
The OED has nothing further to say about the origins of “eldritch,” but Merriam-Webster adds this:
The word is about 500 years old and believed to have come from Middle English "elfriche," meaning "fairyland." The two components of "elfriche" - "elf" and "riche" - come from the Old English "ælf" and "rīce" (words which meant, literally, "elf kingdom").
This made me laugh because as a reader of English-language speculative fiction in 2020, my strongest association for the word “eldritch” is “eldritch horror,” as in the phrase/genre originated by crusty old racist HP Lovecraft, inventor of giant tentacle monster Cthulhu. The word “eldritch” wasn’t much in use when Lovecraft put his tentacles all over it, but he left enough of a slimy mark that we now associate it with him and with the idea of sinister cultists in dark robes chanting to awaken an ancient, unknowable cosmic horror (but still kinda knowable, because we’ll recognize it by its tentacles).
So I’m very excited to reimagine the word “eldritch” as meaning “fairyland,” because I think that will make Lovecraft fans mad. This is eldritch horror now, I don’t make the rules:
Lee Pace as Thranduil in the Lord of the Rings movies
(Yeah, yeah, I know, fairies are plenty horrifying in folklore. Ancient, eerie, hideous, etc. Let me have this.)
Shockingly, this week I read nothing that qualifies as Capital-R Romance (i.e. books in a Romance language) or small-r romance (i.e. romance novels with Happily Ever Afters—I’m in the middle of several, but it’s my policy to only write about things I’ve finished, unless they’re like, Les Mis length).
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, but might qualify as eldritch depending on your definition, I did read The Devourers by Indra Das. What a book. What a full-body sensory experience. The prose in this is astonishing. Here are two passages, one drawn from the frame story set in contemporary Kolkata and one drawn from the embedded story set in the Mughal Empire:
…Shah Jahan’s empire lay sprawled below me like a painted map feathered with dark forest and threaded with road, stretched across the rocky table of the earth. The lamp of the sun was still hidden behind the edge of that table, though its light had begun to creep up the vaulted tent of the heavens, weakening the pinholes of the stars. The cobweb clots of clouds had torn apart after the rain, and hung threadbare in the dawn.
and
Winter returns to Kolkata, slow and hesitant, the shadows of my apartment growing cool enough to banish the whir of the ceiling fan. Outside, during the day, the city looks the same, if a little less sweaty, the more thin-skinned among its populace wrapped in monkey caps, shawls, and scarves. Bereft of the damp of summer and monsoon, the air begins to smell rich and smoky. At night, the streetlights wear thin wedding veils of mist.
Gonna be savoring that for a while. Every sentence was just right, but not in a distant, condescending “this book is about the beautiful prose, stories are for commoners” way. Fuck that, man. This book is about monsters.
Naturally, like most books about monsters, it’s also about humans, and what the difference is. Monster/human is the first dichotomy the book sets up, as the protagonist, history professor Alok Mukherjee, meets a man who claims to be “a half werewolf” in the first pages. Alok immediately asks the stranger what the other half is—and aren’t all werewolves half human?
Monster/human is a false dichotomy, since humans are frequently monsters, and many of the monsters in this book long to be human. It’s the first of many false dichotomies the book catches, plays with, and eventually guts: straight/gay (Alok is bisexual), man/woman (many characters are nonbinary or trans), alive/dead, and as with any story-within-a-story, real/fictional and true/false. All of these categories prove unstable. People die and then live. Every character inhabits their identity and defies it—French and not French, Muslim and not Muslim, human and not human. People are alienated from their birthplaces and only at home elsewhere. Borders are crossed, erased, redrawn. Many of the book’s major scenes take place at twilight or dusk, not quite day and not quite night, or in traveling caravans, or in Fatehpur Sikri—a city that is not a city, emptied of human life—or the Sundarbans—a forest that is not a forest, because it’s sometimes a river, or a land that is not land because it’s sometimes ocean.
Did I write all this just so I could make you look at a photo I took in Fatehpur Sikri in 2005? I’m not saying I did, but I’m not saying I didn’t.
The boundary that proves most permeable is the body. It should be no surprise that a book called The Devourers is so concerned with eating. The monsters survive by feasting on human flesh. As they consume their victims, they also ingest traces of feeling, memory, and knowledge. Thus the Norse and French werewolves, having eaten their way along the Silk Road, arrive in Mughal India speaking many languages. You are what you eat.
Eating is not the only way to absorb someone else into your body. The book’s shapeshifters dress in animal pelts, decorate themselves with victims’ bones, and sometimes take on the appearance of their victims. Sex and rape (a topic this book confronts directly, but I thought it did so with care for the character who survives) present other ways of penetrating, merging, or absorbing one body into another. And, of course, there’s reading.
The stranger Alok meets, the one who claims to be a half werewolf, asks him to transcribe a story. As Alok reads and rewrites the story, he absorbs it, hypnotized by its strangeness, reliving and reproducing it in his dreams. The embedded story tells the story of someone whose contact with shapeshifters changed their life, put them outside of human society and its categories. The pattern repeats in the frame story, as transcribing this tale changes Alok, and again when I ingest The Devourers, which now lives inside me.
This is another photo I took in Fatehpur Sikri, a relief carving of a tree and some flowers and animals, done in red sandstone. Remember when we were allowed to go places?
I am incapable of closing this newsletter without mentioning Mark Strand’s poem “Eating Poetry,” which I shared once before when I was also talking about reading-as-eating.
Have a good week, y’all. Don’t eat anything suspect, and try not to touch anything or repeat any cursed chants that might allow a betentacled cosmic horror passage into our world. Or don’t, I guess, maybe now’s the time to try something new.
