There is something fascinating about an ancient manuscript, whether on papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper, quite apart from its merely being a different format, quaint with the romanticism implied by its great age, and removed from our often humdrum and mundane world by obscured intervals of Time and Space. I often think the broken-in Lovecraftian-Howard reader, being inured to the charm implicit in their descriptions of incredibly aged, yellowed, and tattered manuscripts in tongues old when the Aesir were new, is apt to just as readily find pleasure in real old manuscripts which are far removed in content from those described in Hyborian or Cthulhuthian literature; fortifications, for instance, or perhaps the work of some mediaeval cartographers, or some pompous political declaration or other. I'm not certain (because I haven't had the experience) that the process is as valid the other way around. That is, can one expect that a person who is in the first place fascinated by real antiquarian documents will eventually develop a preference for Lovecraftian-Howard literature? I suppose fantasy readers, not to say outright active fans, who may not successfully resist being regarded as belonging to this category of readership are somewhat rare; and rarer still is the mediaevalist scholar who has employed ancient and mediaeval letters as a stepping-stone to fantasy and gothic horror.
I don't really understand my own concern with these questions, since they cannot possibly be important to anybody outside of a literary critic, which Ghu knows I'm certainly not. Yet they are the type of questions I somehow find curiously interesting: what else is there about the mention of ancient manuscripts in fantasy writing, besides their more explicit connotations, that fascinates the aficionado? We are in an ostensibly "rational" and "scientific" age; we cannot hope to believe, other than in fiction, that the formulae contained in some of the more esoteric documents might actually operate. Do I challenge the suspension of disbelief achieved by our more skillful writers when I say this? I think not...
--Fred Phillips
[pp. 22-3, NO-EYED MONSTER #14, Summer 1968]
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