Randolph Carter

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Randolph Carter
Dream Cycle character
The Statement of Randolph Carter by Andrew Brosnatch.jpg
Illustration by Andrew Brosnatch
First appearance"The Statement of Randolph Carter"
Last appearance"Out of the Aeons"
Created by H. P. Lovecraft
Portrayed by
  • Darryl Tyler (1987)
  • Mark Kinsey Stephenson (1988; 1993)
  • Art Kitching (1998)
  • Mad Martian (2005)
  • Daniel Hill (2009)
  • Greig Johnson (2016)
Voiced by Bronson Pinchot [1]
In-universe information
Alias
OccupationWriter
Ex-soldier
Relatives(ancestor)
NationalityAmerican

Randolph Carter is a recurring fictional character created by H. P. Lovecraft. The character first appears in "The Statement of Randolph Carter", a short story Lovecraft wrote in 1919 based on one of his dreams. An American magazine called The Vagrant published the story in May 1920. Carter appears in seven stories written or co-written by Lovecraft, and has since appeared in stories by other authors.

Contents

Appearances in Lovecraft's writing

TitleDate WrittenFormNotes
"The Statement of Randolph Carter"1919Short story
"The Unnamable"1923Short story
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath 1926–1927Novella
"The Silver Key"1926Short story
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward 1927NovellaMentioned only
"Through the Gates of the Silver Key"1933Short storyCo-written with E. Hoffmann Price
"Out of the Aeons"1933Short storyCo-written with Hazel Heald

Profile

Carter shares many of Lovecraft's personal traits:. He is an uncelebrated author whose writings are seldom noticed. A melancholy figure, Carter is a quiet contemplative dreamer with a sensitive disposition, prone to fainting during times of emotional stress. He can also be courageous, with enough strength of mind and character to face and foil the horrific creatures of the Dreamlands, as described in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath .

H. P. Lovecraft, the creator of Randolph Carter H. P. Lovecraft Portrait, June 1934.png
H. P. Lovecraft, the creator of Randolph Carter

He is an antiquarian and one-time student of the fictional Miskatonic University.

He grew up in and around Boston. At the age of nine, he underwent a mysterious experience at his great-uncle Christopher's farm and thereafter exhibited a gift of prophecy. He is the descendant of Sir Randolph Carter, who had studied magic during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England. Sir Randolph had then emigrated to America and his son Edmund Carter later had to flee the Salem witch-trials. Carter also had an ancestor involved in one of the Crusades, who was captured by the Muslims and learned "wild secrets" from them.

Carter served in the French Foreign Legion during the First World War, and was badly wounded in fighting near Belloy-en-Santerre in 1916, presumably during the Battle of the Somme in which the Legion participated. Poet Alan Seeger perished there in the Foreign Legion on the first day of the Somme, and Lovecraft may well have had Seeger in mind; Lovecraft penned a poem to Seeger's memory in 1918.

"The Statement of Randolph Carter" is narrated in flashback by Carter while being interrogated by the police, who suspect him of murdering Harley Warren. Carter and his friend Harley Warren investigate a mysterious crypt in an ancient abandoned cemetery. [2] The story was a nearly verbatim rcording of one of Lovecraft's nightmares, with but minor changes like the name "Lovecraft" to "Carter".

In "The Unnamable", "Carter" (presumably Randolph Carter) and his friend Joel Manton are attacked by the titular monster in an 18th-century cemetery. Here, "Carter" is not given a first name and described as an author of weird fiction., [3] but an oblique reference to the incident is found in "The Silver Key".

During the course of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath , one of Lovecraft's longest stories, Carter searches for several months for the lost city of his dreams. The story reveals Carter's familiarity with much of Lovecraft's fictional universe. He is also shown to possess considerable knowledge of the politics and geography of the dream world and has allies there. After an elaborate odyssey, Carter awakens in his Boston apartment with only a fleeting impression of the dream world he left behind, though he now knows what the lost city actually is.

The short story "The Silver Key" finds Carter entering middle age and losing his "key to the gate of dreams."

"Through the Gates of the Silver Key," written in collaboration with Lovecraft admirer E. Hoffman Price, details Carter's adventures in another dimension.The investigation into Carter's disappearance takes place four years later, in 1932.

"Out of the Aeons" by Lovecraft and Hazel Heald (published as a work by Heald alone) features a brief 1931 appearance by Carter, while trapped in the alien body. He visits a museum exhibiting an ancient mummy from a long-forgotten civilization and recognizes some of the writing on the scroll that accompanies it.

In work by other authors

Literature

Comics

Parodies

Games

Film

Radio

Chronological appearances

This list is based in the An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia .

An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia doesn't mention anything about the chronology of "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" or "Out of the Aeons". Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi used the chronology Lovecraft gives in "The Silver Key" in which the events in "The Statement of Randolph Carter" took place when Carter was in his late forties. Joshi says it would also explain why he was called a "bundle of nerves" in that story, since it took place after his World War I service in which he was nearly killed and might still have post-traumatic stress disorder.

Possible origin

Lovecraft's character may have been based on a real-life Randolph Carter, who was a Scholar at Christ's College, in the University of Cambridge, from 1892 to 1895. Carter took his Part I Tripos in Oriental Studies (Arabic), and his Part II in Egyptology. While at Cambridge, he was an acquaintance of Sir James George Frazer, author of The Golden Bough . Carter's whereabouts after Cambridge are unclear, but, like his fictional namesake, he may have used the French Foreign Legion as a route into exploring the North African deserts. College records do not indicate whether Carter was a US or British citizen.

References

  1. Lovecraft, H. P. (2013). "Through the Gates of the Silver Key". The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death. Blackstone Audio. ISBN   978-1-4829-4840-0. OCLC   859541275.
  2. "The Statement of Randolph Carter" in H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, S.T. Joshi, ed. (Arkham House: Sauk City, Wisconsin, 1964) p. 300.
  3. See "Unnamable, The," S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2001), pp. 283-84.
  4. "Los espectros conjurados". La Tercera Fundación (in Spanish). Retrieved 2014-07-17.
  5. "Cosa Nosferatu" . Retrieved 2014-07-17.
  6. "Charles Cutting Oxford artist and illustrator" . Retrieved 2014-07-17. Based on H. P. Lovecraft's novella 'The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath' the first quarter of the graphic novel first appeared on the Illustrated Ape website...
  7. "Sloth comics | Kadath" . Retrieved 2025-01-01.
  8. "BoardGameGeek".
  9. "Macabre Fantasy Radio Theater". Macabre Fantasy Radio Theater. Retrieved 4 April 2020.