Talk:Byakhee
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[edit] Who are the Byakhee?
I've got a problem : There seems to be a consensus that byakhee appear in the Festival, but I've never read the name in any writing by HPL, nor any evidence that the creatures depicted in the stories are them, except the fact that most published articles dealing with so called "byakhee" use that description. Their links to Hastur (one of his pet deities), and the major utility role they play in Trail of Cthulhu point to Derleth involvement, but even so, I never found evidence tying Derleth's byakhee to the Festival creatures, which isz not too surprising as I've not read Derleth extensively, nor paid much attention to his conceptions. Could anybody tell me how byakhee and the Festival creatures came to be identified? or did just a student of the mythos (or CoC RPG designer) make an uncalled for amalgamation that just stuck, if only because it told people who wondered what those creatures from The Festival were? --Svartalf 12:52, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
- The following is quoted from Daniel Harms' Encyclopedia Cthulhiana in the article about the "Byakhee":
Call of Cthulhu [the role-playing game] has taken its description of the byakhee from the creatures in Lovecraft's "The Festival", but it is uncertain whether Lovecraft and Derleth's creations are one and the same.
—Harms, Encyclopedia Cthulhiana, pp. 42.
- My guess (original research warning!) is that Derleth appropriated the bat-like steeds in "The Festival", gave them the name "byahkee", and linked them to Hastur in order to firmly connect them to the "Cthulhu mythos". On the other hand, it is possible that the creators of the CoC RPG recognized the similarity between Derleth's and Lovecraft's beasties and presumed they were the same creatures.
BTW, I've read some of the Derleth stories that feature the Byakhee ("The House on Curwen Street", "The Gorge Beyond Salapunco", and "The Black Island"—in which a nuclear bomb is dropped on R'lyeh; I'm not kidding! Maybe I need to put a big mushroom cloud in the middle of my signature?) and it's obvious that the CoC RPG gets most of its material from Derleth.
-,-~R'lyehRising~-,- 05:18, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
