The Eltdown Shards are twenty-three pottery fragments recovered near the village of Eltdown in Sussex, England, in 1882, their surfaces cut with characters no one could read. They first appeared in Richard F. Searight’s story “The Eltdown Shards” (1935) and were folded into the Mythos canon that same year when Lovecraft drew on them in the round-robin “The Challenge from Beyond.” The hieroglyphs correspond in part to the Pnakotic Manuscripts and are said to be written in a language older than humankind.
What the shards record are beings who exchange minds across space and time — identified with the Great Race of Yith and the Yekubians. That the nineteenth shard holds an evocation to summon the Warder of Knowledge is the detail that rhymes with our thesis: reading can be a summoning. Whether the transcribed line calls its subject into being or merely foretold it is left sealed.