Etymology of Lovecraft country

[TransconaSlim]

Hi folks,

I was wondering the other day, what where the insperations for the words Miskatonic, Dunwich, Arkham and/or Kingsport.  Does anyone know how these where developed?

[Eric Lofgren]

I would imagine that the word Miskatonic represents an American Native Indian bastardization applied by colonials. The rest would just be just riffs on actual existing towns from New England, and probably England.

[Genus Unknown]

I once read (I think in the Simonomicon) that "Miskatonic" and "Cthulhu" both derive from "chtonic," meaning "of or relating to the underworld." And while that's probably not true at all, it certainly seems appropriate.

[Eric Lofgren]

I always heard the name  'Misquamacus' in my head when I read Miskatonic. But there's no reason to think that you aren't correct GU. Maybe a combination?

[old book]

Misktonic, turn the M upside and mix up the letters a little and it's almost Woonsockett. Then there's Mystic, Rhode Island. Misquamicus sounds good, too.

Arkham... ARCane plus HAM as in hamlet, village? Ark of the Covenant plus Noah's son Ham? Noah's Ark plus hotdogs?

Dunwich, some place in England that fell in the sea...

Kingsport, some place in New York, and probably England... sounds neat.

Innsmouth, my favorite etymology is another one I made up, that it's a corruption of hypothetical Greenlandic Inuissimuit.

Cthulhu, past tense second person male Arabic "he killed," ka'tulu.

Kadath, corruption of another Greenlandic placename probably beginning with a Q and containing strange double vowels, or a play on Ararat, or just pleasing to the ear.

Iranon, like Iran, but not.

Sarnath, plucked out of the fresh Himalayan air, probably heard, sublimated and remembered vaguely.

Irem, of the Pillars, from the short stories by Ilowizi and probably others. Brings to mind Hiram, of the cedars, in Levanon.

Your explanation is as good or better than mine. What about the semi-mythos names that crop up, like Dean's Corner in Derleth, Aylesbury ... are those only in Derleth, or did he borrow them from others? Is Dean's Corner related to Coffin Corner, the town started by someone on grandpa Whipple's side?

[MartinRonnlund]

All I know is that Sarnath is an actual place in India. I don't think that HPL knew that, thou.

[Genus Unknown]

Yeah, I think HPL just pulled a lot of these names out of thin air (particularly the names for alien or fantastical creatures / places). "Miskatonic" was probably picked simply as something that sounds both vaguely Indian and vaguely sinister.

For Innsmouth, I like to think "Inns" is an old name for the Manuxet, which flows through the town. That's the way it was presented in CthulhuMUD, where, IIRC, there were two rivers, one of which is the Inns, and has its mouth nearby. That's not canon, but of course we're just spitballing here anyway.

[Kaelestes]

I like to think he had a hat full of letters, and that he'd occasionally yoink a few out and arrange them until they were as interesting as possible.

[old book]

But isn't K'nyaa built on "canyon" and doesn't it have something to do with the Grand Canyon and Clark Ashton-Smith out in California? Comte D'Erlette or however you spell it is D-Erleth, August Derleth. I mean it's not always completely random or onomatopaeic.

[Genus Unknown]

Oh yeah, it's not always random, and I know he liked to use his friends' names when referring to mysterious wizards and the authors of forbidden tomes (my favorite being the Atlantean priest Klarkash-Ton, named after Clark Ashton Smith). I'm just not aware of any particular basis for the names in his fictional New England geography, and figure he invented them to sound sort of... New Englandy. New English?

[TransconaSlim]

according to Wikipedia:

Lovecraft concocted the word Miskatonic from a mixture of root words from the Algonquian language[1]. Place-names based on the Algonquian languages, which was nearly extinct by the 17th century, are still found throughout New England. Anthony Pearsall believes that Lovecraft based the name on the Housatonic River[2] which extends from the Long Island Sound through the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts and western Connecticut.

Daniel Harms suggests that Miskatonic is derived from the Misqat, a tribe descended from the Native Americans of Massachusetts.[3]

Another likely origin, to the mind of this editor, for the word Miskatonic is that it actually is a phonetic contraction of the English prefix 'Mis-', indicating something wrong (as in ‘misplaced’), or bad (as in ‘misanthropy’), and Chthonic (from Greek ? – chthonios, "in, under, or beneath the earth"), which designates, or pertains to, deities or spirits of the underworld, especially in relation to Greek religion. The Greek word khthon is one of several for "earth"; it typically refers to the interior of the soil, rather than the living surface of the land. It evokes at once abundance and the grave.[4] This would clearly fit with Lovecraft’s wit and mythos.

[old book]

Dear Wikipedoea:--

WRONG!!! As usual.

"Miskatonic" is what you get you get when you drink one too many whiskeys and tonic and ask the bartender for just one more, and then when he fails to apprehend the meaning of your words, you try to write it on a cocktail napkin, but the W comes out upside down somehow. [6]

[Genus Unknown]

I thought it's what you got when you're really drunk and slurring your words, and you ask the bartender to "mix a tonic."

[old book]

"Miksh me a tonic, old fellow, old one, you can't fool me, cthulhu me will ya? Lookie here, not only can I hold my lloigor, I can even shoot pool. Arkham up, lesgo. Migo first? Yuggoth, I need a drink. Mishkatonic, bartender, cthanku very much."

[TransconaSlim]

"Miksh me a tonic, old fellow, old one, you can't fool me, cthulhu me will ya? Lookie here, not only can I hold my lloigor, I can even shoot pool. Arkham up, lesgo. Migo first? Yuggoth, I need a drink. Mishkatonic, bartender, cthanku very much."

the talk of a liquorice octogenarian.