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In one of August Derleth's passages from the Necronomicon in The Lurker at
the Threshold, we find this phrase: "Ubbo-Sathla is that unforgotten
source whence came those daring to oppose the Elder Gods---"etc. Now this
doesn't seem to make much sense, and we may suspect some kind of transcriptional
error. We were able to check the Victor Gollancz edition, the Ballantine
paperback, the version of Lurker
contained in The Watchers out of Time,
the quotation from Lurker in Lin
Carter's "H. P. Lovecraft: the Books", and Mark Owings' quotation of
Carter's glossary in The Necronomtcon: A
Study, and all of them have "unforgotten".
Our solution lies in a parallel quote given in "The House on
Curwen
Street
", which Carter attributes in
his glossary to the R'lyeh Text. In
Carter's quoted version, it reads: "Ubbo-Sathla is the unforgotten
beginning," but upon checking Derleth's original in The
Trail of Cthulhu, we find "unbegotten beginning". In other words
Ubbo-Sathla, the source of all earthly life, was not itself spawned by any
anterior source. This makes perfect sense, and it is obvious that Carter's
mistake repeated one which must have occurred the very first time Lurker
was typeset: "unbegotten" was inadvertently replaced by
"unforgotten".
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