On 20 April, Innsmouth Free Press proudly presented its newest publication to an unsuspecting world – Historical Lovecraft, an anthology of stories set in times past. I am proud to say, that my ‘Good Bishop’ is part of this august assembly. As part of our plot to further world domination by our motley crew of squidglings and Cthulhu  devotees a program of Guest Bloggings was created. My blog partner is Jesse Bullington whose wonderful story “The Saga of Hilde Ansgardottir” is part of the collection. Below he tells you something about how he came to write it

 Guest Blogger - Jesse Bullington

 As soon as I heard about Innsmouth Free Press’ planned Historical Lovecraft anthology I knew I wanted to do something for it. Not just because I loved IFP and loved the idea of contributing to their debut anthology, but because I’ve long wanted to do a historically-set and Lovecraft-inspired piece but never made the time for it. I’m a procrastinator of the first water, and so a deadline is often the only thing that will get me to spring into action.

 Rather than expanding on some idea I already had germinating in the recesses of the brainbank, I decided to come up with something brand new. For me, one of the first steps was deciding on what era and culture I wanted to work with, although not necessarily a specific event or date. The other initial stage of planning my piece was determining which element or elements of Lovecraft’s I wanted to explore, as I rather like the idea of incorporating Howie’s particular themes rather than simply using his mythology. Something else I considered, and what ultimately helped me to settle on the time and place that I did, was the possibility of pastiching the specific storytelling style of whatever culture I was focusing on. The abandonment of the Norse settlement in Greenland in the early 15^th century eventually struck me as an ideal starting point for my story because it, a) dealt with a people, and a place and time, that I’m interested in, b) directly featured the decline and failure of a small society, and, c) afforded me the ability to write in a bastardized version of the Saga of Icelanders, which I grew up reading in various translations.

 Norse history has long been of interest to me, my grandmother Ulame Bullington née Knutson telling me stories of heroes and trolls and gods and such from a very early age. An English teacher and a rabid reader, she insured myself and my siblings always had texts on the subject that were either at or just over our reading levels, and so I graduated from Eriksen’s Trolls and Their Relatives to Magnusson’s Tales from Viking Times and Terry Jones’s (he of Monty Python fame) The Saga of Erik the Viking to the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition of The Sagas of the Icelanders and Seamus Haney’s Beowulf. There were many others in there, books she’d give us and stories she’d tell, with the end result being that even before I went to college and adopted a more academic approach to exploring history I had a keen interest in my distant ancestors, especially their folklore-infused accounts of their own histories.

 As for incorporating Lovecraftian elements into the tale, I felt it was important to play with the ideas that he favored beyond the superficial x monster or y forgotten god level. The rapid degeneracy of a civilization, the fragility of the human mind, the quest for knowledge at the cost of sanity, and other common themes in Lovecraft’s oeuvre worked their tendrils into the story, but out of a desire to also keep with the style and themes of the culture whose sandbox I was playing in I ended up bringing in a bit more action and bravado than Lovecraft cared for. The result no doubt owes a debt to Lovecraft’s chum Robert E. Howard, though overall there’s still more of Howie than Two-gun Bob in the piece.

 In terms of the Saga of Icelanders that I was inspired by, there are sundry schools of thought on what constitutes a good translation, and as I read and enjoyed a variety of said differing styles in equal measure, incorporating several of these into one piece seemed a bit more fun than only hewing to one style. The bulk of the story I decided to tell in the more flowery, eloquent prose that you find in much of the earlier scholarship, and for the dialogue I adopted the parsed down, crisp style of more literal translations. The result is a bit of hodgepodge, but then this anthology as a whole seemed to be just that, so I hope that “The Saga of Hilde Ansgardottir” works well in the greater context of the anthology. It was a lot of fun to write, and I can’t thank my editors and fellow contributors enough for all the fine work they’ve done.

 Skål!

Jesse Bullington spent t he bulk of his formative years in rural Pennsylvania, the Netherlands and Tallahassee, Florida. He is the author of the novels The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart and The Enterprise of Death. His short fiction and articles have appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies and websites. He currently resides in Colorado and can be found online at www.jessebullington.com.

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