According to H. P. Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness (published in 1936, but written in 1931), the Elder Things are the first extraterrestrial species to come to the Earth, colonizing the planet about one billion years ago. They stand roughly eight feet tall and have the appearance of a huge, oval-shaped barrel with starfish-like appendages at both ends. The top appendage is a head adorned with five eyes, five eating tubes, and a set of cilia for “seeing” without light. The bottom appendage was five-limbed and was used for walking and other forms of locomotion. The beings also had five leathery, fan-like retractable wings and five sets of branching tentacles that sprouted from their torsos. Both their tentacles and the slits housing their folded wings were spaced at regular intervals about their bodies. Lovecraft described the Elder Things as vegetable-like or echinoderm-like in shape, having radial symmetry instead of the bilateral symmetry of bipeds. They also differ in that they have a five-lobed brain. The Elder Things exhibit vegetable and animal characteristics and reproduce via spores. The Elder Things can withstand the pressures of the deepest ocean, interstellar travel, and can hibernate for vast epochs of time. Few die except by accident or violence. Their science was extremely advanced, and they are depicted as having potentially created life on Earth. Their primary achievement is the creation of a servitor race, the shoggoths, upon which they become increasingly dependent. Although they initially colonized the entirety of Earth, successive wars over millions of years with the Great Race of Yith, the Star-spawn of Cthulhu, the Mi-go, and a rebellion of the Shoggoths weakened them. Radical climate change eventually forced them to abandon most of their great cities. The final fate of the Elder Things is explicitly unclear, and the human scientists in the story openly speculate that hidden undersea cities may still survive in some places.
Appearance List “At the Mountains of Madness” in Astounding Stories (Feb-Apr 1936, written 1931), “The Dreams in the Witch-House” in Weird Tales (Jul 1933), “The Shadow Out of Time” in Astounding Stories (Jun 1936)
Description According to H. P. Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness (published in 1936, but written in 1931), the Elder Things are the first extraterrestrial species to come to the Earth, colonizing the planet about one billion years ago. They stand roughly eight feet tall and have the appearance of a huge, oval-shaped barrel with starfish-like appendages at both ends. The top appendage is a head adorned with five eyes, five eating tubes, and a set of cilia for “seeing” without light. The bottom appendage was five-limbed and was used for walking and other forms of locomotion. The beings also had five leathery, fan-like retractable wings and five sets of branching tentacles that sprouted from their torsos. Both their tentacles and the slits housing their folded wings were spaced at regular intervals about their bodies. Lovecraft described the Elder Things as vegetable-like or echinoderm-like in shape, having radial symmetry instead of the bilateral symmetry of bipeds. They also differ in that they have a five-lobed brain. The Elder Things exhibit vegetable and animal characteristics and reproduce via spores. The Elder Things can withstand the pressures of the deepest ocean, interstellar travel, and can hibernate for vast epochs of time. Few die except by accident or violence. Their science was extremely advanced, and they are depicted as having potentially created life on Earth. Their primary achievement is the creation of a servitor race, the shoggoths, upon which they become increasingly dependent. Although they initially colonized the entirety of Earth, successive wars over millions of years with the Great Race of Yith, the Star-spawn of Cthulhu, the Mi-go, and a rebellion of the Shoggoths weakened them. Radical climate change eventually forced them to abandon most of their great cities. The final fate of the Elder Things is explicitly unclear, and the human scientists in the story openly speculate that hidden undersea cities may still survive in some places.
