Lettre du 8 février 1937 de H.P. Lovecraft à Mr. Fritz Leiber : DATA. PROVIDENTIAE. VIII. A.K. FEBR.           FLAVIUS. SENILIS. P. CORNELIO. SCIPIONI. S. P. D.           The reprehensibly late date of this bulletin may be charged jointly to the plethora of tasks currently pressing upon me, and to the reduced amount of energy available for their performance. For the past month I have been more or less on the semi-invalid list — with a recurrent winter malady manifested in swollen feet and ankles, plus a curiously persistent combination of intestinal indigestion and general weakness perhaps allied to the prevailing grippe. Not that I've been laid flat — indeed, I've managed to take regular walks for my health on warm days in a pair of cut and stretched old shoes, and have attended most of the recent college lectures... on subjects as diverse as Peruvian antiquities, Italian Romanesque architecture, biological implications in philosophy, modern French painters, and Greek astronomical hypotheses. But I've had to rest frequently, and it has taken me a hell of a while to get anything done . ........           ..........R E H had a splendidly self-consistent world of pre-history mapped out for his King Kull and Conan tales, and he made it vital and vivid despite his very unfortunate use (how vainly Price and I have lectured him on this point !) of a nomenclature fraught with misleading historical suggestions. Have you seen the issues of the little Pbantagraph containing Howard's own serial account of his legendary lands — The Hyborian Age ? ... Klarkash-Ton, High Priest of Tsathoggua, likewise has two very well-coördinated mythical worlds — the Hyperborea of the fabulous past and the Zothique of the infinite future in addition to his enchanted mediaeval-French world of Averoigne — which latter is sort of European « Arkham country » of 800 years ago. I have helped C A S give Averoigne a pseudo-history extending back to Gallic days, when the Averones trickled in from a sunken western land and brought with them the hellish tome known in later years as Liber Ivonis or Livre d'Eibon. This dark people set up the worship of Tsathoggua, Sodagui, or Sadoqua in the region where they settled, so that by the Gallo-Roman period the Regio Averonum or Averonia was feared as the abode of a black and unearthly sorcery. Especially dreaded were the towns of Simaesis (Ximes) and Avionium (Vyones), where certain cults obscurely flourished. Timid references to the Averones and Averonia occur in certain unknown Gallo-Roman authors such as Flavius Alesius (whose Annales tell of the Dark Ones' coming) and the poet Valerius Trevirus. Trevirus, in his hideously necromantic poem De Noctis Rebys (circa. A. D. 390), thus alludes to the Averones : NIGER. INFORMISQUE. VT. NUMEN. AVERONUM. SADOQUA. — which, in Theobald's privately printed English translation (1711), runs :           Black and unform'd, as pestilent a Clod           As dread Sadoqua, Averonia's God.           Merovingian and Carlovingian legends hold dark allusions to the Averones, and by the 11th century the Catholic hierarchy of Averoigne was thoroughly tainted with diabolism. For accounts of mediaeval conditions in this shadowy land, C A S is a better authority than I. As you know, Gaspard du Nord's translation of the Liber Ivonis (whether from the corrupt Latin text or from the accursed Hyperborean original we cannot be sure — his accomplishments were dark and obscure) into mediaeval French in the 12th century brought about frightful consequences — the popular diffusion of certain rites and incantations causing Averoigne to receive that shadow of concentrated necromancy from which it has never quite emerged . ........ Your obt. servant, H. P. Lovecraft