The Festival
| "The Festival" | |
|---|---|
| Author | H. P. Lovecraft |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Published in | Weird Tales |
| Publication type | Periodical |
| Media type | Print (Magazine) |
| Publication date | January 1925 |
"The Festival" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft written in October 1923 and published in the January 1925 issue of Weird Tales. It is considered to be one of the first of his Cthulhu Mythos stories.
The story was inspired by Lovecraft's first trip to Marblehead, Massachusetts, in December 1922. Lovecraft later called that visit
the most powerful single emotional climax experienced during my nearly forty years of existence. In a flash all the past of New England--all the past of Old England--all the past of Anglo-Saxondom and the Western World--swept over me and identified me with the stupendous totality of all things in such a way as it never did before and never did again. That was the high tide of my life.
The narrator's path through Kingsport corresponds to a route to the center of Marblehead; the house with the overhanging second story is probably based on Marblehead's 1 Mugford Street. The church in the story is St. Michael's Episcopal Church on Frog Lane, built in 1714 and the oldest Anglican church building still standing on its original site in New England. The church, which stands on a modest hill, has a rare colonial crypt where early parishioners were interred, and had a steeple for most of the eighteenth century. Lovecraft would have discovered these facts from visiting the church and talking with the rector, a fact corroborated by his signing of the guest register.
Lovecraft cited a book as another inspiration for the story: "In intimating an alien race I had in mind the survival of some clan of pre-Aryan sorcerers who preserved primitive rites like those of the witch-cult--I had just been reading Miss Murray's The Witch-Cult in Western Europe." This is why Lovecraft refers to the narrator's folk as "an old people, and...strange, because they had come as dark furtive folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spoken another tongue before they learnt the tongue of the blue-eyed fishers." The idea of "pre-Aryan" survivals was the basis of Arthur Machen's "The Novel of the Black Seal", which Lovecraft had recently read and been much impressed by.
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