Robert M. Price on the pronunciation of "Cthulhu"

You say ca-TOO-loo; I say ca-THOO-loo-- ...let's call the whole thing off.

Back in the 90s, when Lovecraft was so niche that trying to talk about this tentacle-headed thing required you to start by explaining what the pulps were, my friend group of high school nerds was insular. They'd discovered Lovecraft by way of Shea and Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy, and later I found the tabletop roleplaying game while bored during a game of Gurps at a local game store, so we were able to seek out his stories in the back corner of Waldenbooks and the wonderful old used book stores that were bursting with 20th century paperbacks back then. But outside the half dozen or so of us, nobody knew what we were talking about.  We were on our own for context and, relevant to this post, pronunciation.  

We decided it was "CHOO-loo."  Later I settled on "CTHOO-loo," with no schwa between the C and TH, and that's still what I use today. 

It was only later that I heard the common pronunciations with the schwa (ca-THOO...) and soft and hard TH, and read that epistolar excerpt everybody copy/pastes from Wikipedia in which HPL instructs us to hawk out KHLOOLHLOO! wetly as though we're trying to cough out a slug stuck in the throat.  But it turns out that if I'd come along a bit earlier and been following the 'zine culture of the 1980s, I'd have had a much more complete answer much earlier.  

In the Fall 1987 issue of Lovecraft Studies, Robert M. Price's essay "Mythos Names and How to Say them" collected multiple documented pronunciations of the name which Lovecraft said can only be approximated "as nearly as human organs could imitate it or human letters record it," but which he, according to his friends and colleagues, attempted to approximate many times in writing and in person.  

For starters, Lovecraft's letter to Duane W. Rimel does indeed say:  

The actual sound—as nearly as human organs could imitate it or human letters record it--may be taken as something like Khlul-hloo, with the first syllable pronounced very gutturally and very thickly. The u is about like that in full; and the first syllable is not unlike klul in sound, since the h represents the guttural thickness. The second syllable is not very well rendered--the l being unrepresented.  

In Medusa’s Coil and Winged Death, ("collaborations" with Bishop and Heald, respectively) the unfortunately stereotyped African characters reference "Clooloo" and "Clulu," respectively, backing up this pronunciation.   

The next account adds a detail small but telling:  

Two years later, Lovecraft recommended pretty much the same version to Willis Conover: "The best approximation one can make is to grunt, bark, or cough the imperfectly formed syllables Cluh-Lhu with the tip of the tongue firmly affixed to the roof of the mouth"

Experimentally, that detail about welding your tongue to the roof of your mouth distinctly does add an inhuman weight to the name, defying my instinct to flap the Ls.  

These accounts paint a consistent picture, but we have additional descriptions from people very close to him demonstrating that, in person, Lovecraft used a variety of pronunciations.  

[...] Lovecraft's close friend and literary executor Robert Barlow recalled that "Lovecraft pronounced Cthulhu as Koot-u-lew".  While even an eyewitness report must yield in authority to first-person sources like the letters just quoted, Barlow's recollection does receive support from Lovecraft's tale "The Mound", where the underground dwellers in K'n-yan worship the primeval octopus-headed god "Tulu".  

[...]

Another close friend of Lovecraft, W. Paul Cook, whose encouragement was instrumental in getting Lovecraft to start (and later to continue) his fiction writing, recalled that "Lovecraft denied any derivative or phonetic source or system for the combination of letters making up that word and others. The reader must pronounce to suit himself. In that especial case, however, he suggested 'Thulu,' both 'u's' long. Some of them are less easy."

Yet another friend of Lovecraft, Donald Wandrei, shared his recollection of Lovecraft' s pronunciation: "I referred to [The Call of Cthulhu] one day, pronouncing the strange word as though it were spelled K-Thool-Hoo. Lovecraft looked blank for an instant, then corrected me firmly, informing me that the word was pronounced, as nearly as I can put it down in print, K-Lütl-Lütl. I was surprised, and asked why he didn't spell it that way if such was the pronunciation. He replied in all seriousness that the word was originated by the denizens of the story and that he had only recorded their own way of spelling it."

Whence all the unsuspected "t's" and "l's"? Recall that Lovecraft had written to Conover that one must keep the tip of one's tongue fixed to the roof of one's mouth while (as he told Rimel) enunciating the syllables gutturally. Keeping all this in mind, Wandrei's transcription matches pretty closely what we might expect Lovecraft' s prescribed pronunciation to sound like.

Finally, there is an even weirder account of HPL himself "pronouncing" Cthulhu:   

Nelson Bridwell writes: "In the August 1947 Famous Fantastic Mysteries there is a one-page feature on Lovecraft which describes Cthulhu as 'a word which only he could properly whistle.' I once asked [Lovecraft's former literary agent] Julie Schwartz about this, and he confirmed having heard HPL do just that--and said my own whistling was quite close to his."  Cf. Lovecraft's words to Rimel: "The kind of ... noise made in this way is not really like speaking, but is more like the sound a man makes when he tries to imitate a steam-whistle"

I admit, going into this essay I had not expected to be told to attempt to whistle the Old Octopoid's name.  I can get a bit of a tooth-whistle into the KHLUL-hlu mouthful, but perhaps mercifully I can't run my attempt by Lovecraft for his opinion. 

In short, even within the fictional reality of Arkham no pronunciation a human being can make is "correct," and it appears Lovecraft himself experimented in real life both with ways to make it variously alien, and with casual pronunciations kinder to conversation.  If a body wants to bark out KHLHOOOHLOOO each time with tongue planted on roof of mouth while blasting air past his teeth like a steam whistle, I won't judge.  Or at least I won't say he's wrong.  But I also don't judge people who prefer a more casual, human-friendly pronunciation like "kuh-thoo-loo" or "kuh-too-loo," both of which were endorsed at times by Lovecraft.  However you say it, all our minds will all be rent by the unmasked reality of the universe on his rising, so it doesn't do to fret too much on the details.