I don’t know why this ditty from the Cthulhu Hymnal cheers me up so, but it really does make me smile. (And I really do hate the idea of filk generally.)
God Rest Ye Scary Great Old Ones
God Rest Ye Scary Great Old Ones,
Let everything dismay.
Remember Great Cthulhu shall rise up from R’lyeh
To kill us all with tentacles
If we should go his way.CHORUS
O tidings of madness and woe, madness and woe
O tidings of madness and woe!In Yuggoth and in Aldebaran
The Great Old Ones were spawned
Imprisoned by the Elder Gods to wait for eons,
Enticing humans to release them,
Chanting dreadful songsCHROUS
An Arab said: “That is not dead
Which can eternal lie,
And with Strange Eons even death may die.”
The Great Old Ones will rule once more
And all will be destroyed.CHORUS
I think, in order to make it scan right, you have to really stretch out the ‘e’ in eons. “Eee-ee-ons” or something. I’ve added some link annotations to the Wikipedia.
(An aside: It shouldn’t surprise me that the Cthulhu Hymnal is part of Cosma Shalizi‘s web site, but it does a little. When I put up my first web site on a university server back in the early 90s, I had a link page, and the first link on that page was to Cosma’s site–he was at a different school then; these academics do move around. The link was captioned “My favourite page on the whole ‘Net that wasn’t written by a woman.”)
