R'lyeh

R'lyeh (pronounced /ˈɹu.li.a/ or /ɹɪl.ˈai.ɛ/)A Shoggoth on the Roof CD is a fictional island city created by H. P. Lovecraft, which makes its first appearance in the 1928 short story "The Call of Cthulhu". R'lyeh is also referred to in Lovecraft's The Mound as Relex.
R'lyeh is a sunken city located deep under the Pacific Ocean and is where the Great Old One Cthulhu is interred. R'lyeh's bizarre architecture is characterized by its non-Euclidean geometry, colossal structures, and shifts in perspective that can make an observer unsure about what is vertical and what is horizontal. (: "The Call of Cthulhu")
The city is extraordinarily ancient, having been built on dry land in the Paleozoic era. It sank to the bottom of the sea along with all the other cities of the alien Cthulhi in a prehistoric cataclysm (: At the Mountains of Madness), which the K'n-yanians believe was caused by a race of "space-devils", inimical to Cthulhu (: The Mound).
==Description==
When R'lyeh rises in Lovecraft's short story "The Call of Cthulhu", 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." The strange architecture of the city makes navigation on foot disorienting and treacherous; surfaces that appear flat may actually be tilted, and angles of masonry that appear convex at first glance may actually be concave.
In Lovecraft's stories, 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."Pearsall, "R'lyeh", The Lovecraft Lexicon, p. 345.
==Location==
In "The Call of Cthulhu," Lovecraft located R'lyeh at 47°9'S 126°43'W in the southern Pacific Ocean. August Derleth, however, in "The Black Island" placed R'lyeh at 49°51'S 128°34'W. Both locations are close to the Pacific oceanic pole of inaccessibility (48°52.6'S 123°23.6'W), the point in the ocean farthest from any land. Derleth's coordinates place the city approximately 5,100 nautical miles (5,900 statute miles or 9,500 kilometers), or about ten days journey for a fast ship, from the real island of Ponape (Pohnpei). Ponape also plays a part in the Cthulhu Mythos as the place where the Ponape Scripture, a text describing Cthulhu, was found.
Another Derleth story, "Something in Wood", places R'lyeh in the Atlantic Ocean, as opposed to the Pacific. In "The Seal of R'lyeh", Derleth goes as far as to suggest that R'lyeh might be an enormous ring-shaped sunken continent that extends from the South Pacific all the way to the Atlantic coast of Massachusetts. In the Titus Crow series by Brian Lumley, the total area of R'lyeh is estimated as being about half a million square miles.
Charles Stross in "A Colder War" suggests that R'lyeh lies in the Baltic Sea, describing Cthulhu as being "scraped from a nest in the drowned wreckage of a city on the Baltic floor." (: "A Colder War", Charles Stross). In Nick Mamatas' Move Under Ground, it is found off the coast of California.
==In Other Media==
*In the Futurama episode "Decision 3012", R'lyeh is represented at the convention that nominates Travers as a candidate for president of Earth.
*R'lyeh is personified as a character in the 2020 book The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin.
*R'lyeh appears in the Japanese television series Ultraman Tiga, where it is associated with Ghatanothoa, rather than Cthulhu.
==Gallery==
==See also==
*R'lyehian, a language associated with R'lyeh and Cthulhu
==References==
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Category:Structures
Category:Locations Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works