“Regner Lodbrog’s Epicedium“

   Poem (68 lines in 7 stanzas); written in late 1914. First published in the Acolyte(Summer 1944). The work is an English translation of a Latin translation of an eighth-century Runic poem printed in Hugh Blair’s A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian(1763), dealing with the military exploits of Regner Lodbrog. HPL relied heavily on an English paraphrase supplied by Blair of the final six stanzas; this is why the first stanza contains more deliberate gaps than the others. HPL quotes some lines of the Latin version as an epigraph to “The Teuton’s Battle-Song” ( United Amateur,February 1916). HPL misconstrued Blair’s remarks on Wormius (Ole Wurm, 1588–1654) and assumed that he dated to the thirteenth century; he is so mentioned when HPL attributes to him the Latin translation of the Necronomicon(see “History of the Necronomicon”).

   See S.T.Joshi, “Lovecraft, Regner Lodbrog, and Olaus Wormius,” Crypt No. 89 (Eastertide 1995): 3–7.