The Cats of Ulthar

Infobox short story
name = The Cats of Ulthar
author = H. P. Lovecraft
country = United States
language = English
genre = fantasy
published_in = "Tryout"
publication_type = Literary journal
publisher =
media_type = Print
pub_date = November 1920

"The Cats of Ulthar" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft, written June 15, 1920, and first published in the November 1920 issue of the amateur press journal "Tryout". It belongs in the Dream Cycle series of tales and reads much like a fairy tale explaining Ulthar's unusual law that "no man may kill a cat".

Inspiration

The primary inspiration for the story is no doubt Lovecraft's well-known love of cats (as spelled out in his 1926 essay "Cats and Dogs", reprinted as the title essay in the 1949 Arkham House collection "Something About Cats"). Lovecraft seems to be speaking in his own voice in the story's introductory paragraph:

:For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroe and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.

The story is considered one of Lovecraft's Dunsanian pieces; the plot resembles the many revenge tales in Dunsany's "The Book of Wonder" (1912). The "dark wanderers" of Lovecraft's story recall the "Wanderers...a weird, dark tribe" in Dunsany's "Idle Days on the Yann" (1910). [S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, "Cats of Ulthar, The", "An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia", p. 35.]

Characters

Menes

A young boy, one of the "dark wanderers", orphaned by the plague; a tiny black kitten is his only companion. When the kitten disappears, he prays in a peculiar tongue to the sun for vengeance.

His name hints at connections with Ancient Egypt; Menes is the name of a legendary pharaoh who united Upper and Lower Egypt. (The wanderers, like the Egyptians, worship "strange figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams and lions.") Menes' name also evokes Argimenes, the title character of Lord Dunsany's play "King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior" (1914). [Joshi and Schultz, p. 35.]

Atal

The little innkeeper's son, who sees the cats of Ulthar circling the old cotter's cottage. See "The Other Gods".

Plot

As mentioned this tale tells of the forming of the law "that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat". Previously to this an old cotter and his wife took great delight in slaughtering the cats of their neighborhood in some unknown yet horrid manner. After they kill the kitten of Menes, an orphan of the strange wanderers who visit the town, he utters a strange prayer before he and his people disappear forever that evening. In response to that prayer that night the cats of the town descend on the old cotter's house, witnessed by Atal, and presumably kill and eat them in retribution.

Connections

*Atal reappears in "The Other Gods" and "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" . In the latter tale, Randolph Carter visits him in Ulthar, some three hundred years past the date of the events narrated above, and finds a town heavily populated by felines as a consequence.

*In "The Other Gods", mention is made that Barzai the Wise advised the "burgesses of Ulthar when they passed their remarkable law against the slaying of cats".

* Alan Moore's graphic novel and short story "The Courtyard" features a band called the Ulthar Cats, fronted by female singer Randoph Carter.

* Brian Lumley's Dreamland novels feature Ulthar prominently, and two characters in the waking world recognize each other as fellow dreamers through knowledge of its famous law.

Notes