Tolkien's Problem with Dune

This video has been sponsored by Squarespace. More on later science fiction and fantasy, although relatively contemporary genres love their classics, you have the works of Jules Vern or HG Wells, the seminal writings of Andrew Lang and Lewis Carroll; however, if you are looking at modern. The sci-fi fantasy scene doesn't get much more classic than that of JRR Tolkin, The Lord of the Rings and Frank Herbert. Both works have managed to become cornerstones of their genres, giving rise to and aiding many of the tropes, themes, settings. Quite niche genre categories are accepted by the general public, but not only are they parallel in terms of importance within their genres, both The Lord of the Rings and Dune draw on older narrative traditions and incorporate new contemporary concerns to create a kind of modern style. day legendarium many talking fans see Dune as science fiction's Lord of the Rings and comparisons like this have been instrumental in the success of Frank Herbert's work;

In fact, one of the reasons Dune is the success it is today is because of someone very smart. Tolking fan Sterling e Laner was this fan's name and he was working at Chilton Books, known primarily for publishing automobile repair manuals in 1964, just as The Lord of the Rings was reaching its peak Dune, meanwhile he was a bit lagging behind the Lord of the Rings. was just published in the pages of the analog science fiction magazine and there is nothing wrong per se with publishing stories within magazines; In fact, publication in magazines was the way that science fiction surpassed its golden age in which genre fiction was only published in magazines, however, outside of the dedicated and pre-established magazines for fans of fantasy and science fiction, did not obtain a greater number of readers.

Had Dune remained published solely in a magazine, it may have been lost along with the thousands of other stories that never made the jump to traditional publishing knowing that publishing Dune as a book was their next goal. Herbert had been selling his Dune story to various publishers, but was rejected again and again because they claimed Dune was too dense and too complex. The genre found mainstream success. Sterling The Laner, however, had read Dune in the analog pages and instantly saw an opportunity. The Lord of the Rings, after all, was at the time experiencing huge mainstream success with hippie academics and Lord of the Rings-like dinner table conversations.

It was successful precisely because it was dense and strange and relying heavily on its themes, Lanyar saw Echoes of Middle-earth in Dune and so approached Herbert and his agent directly purchasing the rights for a small first publication of Dune and well, the rest is history. Dune climbed its way to massive success praised for the complexity of its world building the depth of its themes on par with Tolkin's trilogy. However, there was one person who didn't really seem to see these similarities between The Lord of the Rings and Dune and that was a pretty important voice in this case, JRR, Tolken himself, Laner, being a Megaan Tolken, actually sent him He wrote a copy himself in 1965 and Tolken promised to read it when he had some free time despite writing a few letters back and forth over the course of the following year.

Tolken never said anything else about Dune directly about Laner, this was because, as we discovered in his 1966 letter to John Bush, Tolken wasn't really a fan of it. Thanks for sending me a copy of Dune. I got one last year from Laner and I already know. There is something about the book: it is impossible for an author who is still writing to be fair to another author who works in the same vein, at least it seems that way to me, in fact, I don't like Dune with a certain intensity and, in that unfortunate case , is by far the best and fairest. another author stays silent and refuses to comment would you like the book back because I already have one or to give it to you and for tolken on the tolken scale it's a good take you know how everyone likes to say they hated ? allegory Well, technically speaking, he only wrote about cordially disliking allegory, so for him to say he didn't like Dune with some intensity, it's enough to say Dune didn't like Cup of Tea, of course, invokes the rule of if you don't have something good to say, don't say anything at all and avoid specifically pointing out what you didn't like out of politeness, but fortunately I'm not a very polite person, so I'm going to formulate a hypothesis as to why Tolken He didn't like Dune. and if at this point you're wondering why we would care, you're probably not on the right channel because, as many people care, Tolken was a landmark author not only in writing fantasy fiction but also in writing about how he wrote fantasy and in my opinion was pretty good at that.

That said, Tolken didn't like a lot of things, from the art of theater to cars to Santa Claus in CS Lewis's Narnia. He was a very particular man with a very particular taste and I think sometimes people on the Internet can get a little lost in this idea that if Talking didn't like X thing, you're wrong if you like X thing and that's a really perspective. boring and limited, we can learn a lot about the craft of Storytelling from examining what Tolken in his very particular way of telling stories did not like about Dune but despite that this will also be a video in defense of Dune because I like it a lot and I get a lot out of it so if you're here because you hate Frank Herbert, go ahead and save yourself the headache and click through, but don't do it just yet because you'll want to hear about the sponsor of this video, Squarespace.

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Go to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com ofthe Shire to get 10% off your first website or domain purchase. Many thanks to Squarespace for supporting the channel and thanks to all of you for checking out my SP sponsors when I have them, as I said before. Tolken really loved fantasy and fairy stories, as long as they fit his very specific criteria. Tolken liked the kind of stories he wrote and firmly believed that his way of creating fantasy was the right way now, of course, you could argue these points because it's a very limited perspective, but since Tolken probably can't respond to my arguments, I'm just going to use this as a framework with By analyzing Dune, we will be able to see the way in which Herbert's craft differed from Tolkin's and the way in which science fiction and fantasy are fundamentally different genres.

In his essay on fairy tales, Tolken argues that fantasy or as he generally refers to them, the fairy. Stories have four intended effects: fantasy, recovery, escape, and comfort. These four factors, of course, are beautifully demonstrated in Tolkin's works, but it's also very interesting to look at Dune through this lens. First, let's talk about the fantasy idea of ​​Token, which in this context means a well built secondary world for him, this manifests in Middle Earth with its deep backstory, its linguistic framework and its rich world building and the World building is very important to Tolken because without it, immersion in a story is impossible.

Tolken explains that it is difficult but he accepts it perfectly. capable of creating a world that says it has a green sun, but it takes a very skilled world builder to make the green sun make sense. Why is the sun green? You have to find out what effect this has on the planets that fall under this sun and the people who inhabit them, what myths do they have about the green sun? How does this green Sun change your lifestyle in the world around you? A truly good world builder will use his rationality and logic skills, his understanding of human nature to create a detailed hermetic world. that people can truly get lost in and for Tolken, creating this secondary world is not an exercise in absurdity or illusion, fantasy is a natural human activity, it certainly does not destroy or insult reason and it does not dull the appetite or obscure perception. of the scientific variety, on the contrary, the sharper and clearer the reason, the better the fantasy and if we are to ask if Dune manages to generate this type of fantasy, I would say yes, it is simply different from the Middle Earth of the token of Middle Earth that emerged from a language base Tolken was above all a philologist and created Middle Earth as a way to give shape and history to the languages ​​that Herbert was inventing, however he was a journalist by profession he knew a little about everything politics religion philosophy psychology medicine and the most important thing is ecology, that is, just environmental ecology, although Herbert said that I think there are things like psychological ecology, religious ecology, economic ecology, etc., and none of them can exist in a vacuum , they are all interrelated, so the world of Dune emerges from this ecology and Herbert's belief that ecology is about understanding and accepting consequences and when you look at it, Dune is all about these consequences technology becomes too advanced, that means it begins to overwhelm humanity.

The logical answer to that is that humanity is going to fight back, they are going to have a holy war and destroy all thinking technology, the consequence of that is the world we see in Dune, one that has regressed, pushed back through all of it. this technology to return to a pseudo-medieval dispute of the State of Herbert. The fervent pursuit of the consequences of discovering the effect of each cause means that you have a very rational, very well-reasoned world, on par with most fantasies and just as immersive in its own right, of course, despite how well constructed that I think is Herbert's fantasy world.

Tolken likely would have seen it a little differently in Middle-earth, a world brought to life by language and the inherent music of language and words. Herbert Stone's web of cause and effect may have seemed too clinical, although both authors built very inventive and immersive fantasy worlds, it probably came down to a matter of taste and when it comes to the fact that the two had very different perspectives, the Tolk's next need within a fairy tale is what he calls recovery, this arises from his idea that Our everyday lives blind us to the wonderful things around us.

Things that used to seem magical or exciting lose their shine when we see them every day, day after day. Once they attracted us by their brightness or their color or their shape and we laid our hands on them. about them and then we lock them in our horde we acquire them and then we acquire them we stop looking at them good fairy tales have the ability to take things that have become boring and vulgar and reset them to bring them back the strangeness of the fairy kingdom the glamor of the unreal takes things like trees, friendship, honor and the sun and shakes the dust off of them, recovering these ideas in a new environment and allowing us to see them for the wonderful and beautiful things they really are;

It makes love seem like something carved in Fate and time are something revolving and spectacular, it shows us what a gift forgiveness, honor and Redemption are. It takes mundane things like trees and stars and shows us once again how truly magical they can be. Recovery takes on a very different tone when it comes to Dune and other sci-fi It works one way The concept of token recovery is the entire goal of the genre. Really great science fiction not only looks to the future but also tells us a lot about our past and our present by examining humanity in new times in new places on new planets it tells us a lot about ourselves and

dune

excels at this.

Herbert considers the timeline of humanity to have a very musical structure like a fugue in music, the fug is usually based on a single theme that is played in many different ways, sometimes they are gratuitous. voices that do fanciful dances around the interaction there can be secondary themes and contrasts in harmony Rhythm and Melody from the moment a single voice introduces the themeMain however the whole is woven into a single fabric the human society we see in Dune is not strange, it is not strange, it is our same Society repeated over and over again, undergoing minor changes through time and space, but remaining virtually unchanged and yet making Dune what it was, an adventure story set on an interesting planet with interesting characters rather than just a dry story. article telling humans they need to be better Herbert invokes the symbolic notion of recovery using these strange alienating capacities of fiction, fantasy or science fiction Herbert shows us the

problem

s of today under the guise of tomorrow, revealing them in a way that we would never accept from a dry lecture or an article that, having said that, comparing this to the way speaking uses recovery, it is quite pessimistic speaking calls us to look at what is good, what is beautiful in our lives, made even more surprising and fresh by fairy magic, while Herbert shows us, today's

problem

s, thrown into a grim spotlight by the power of science fiction.

This all comes down to Token's third fairy tale. He must have Escape, he thought that fairy tales were by nature escapist. But he also argued that despite the common thinking of the time this was not a bad thing, why should a man be despised if, being in prison, he tries to get out and leave? home or if when you can't do it you think and talk about others? themes than jailers and prison walls, the outside world has become no less real because the prisoner cannot see it. Tolkin's fantasy gave us a window into another world, a world where modern problems did not exist, where we could look back through history to a simpler, idealized time. and unsurprisingly the Lord of the Rings does a beautiful job of this, no one in Middle Earth cares about paying their car insurance, filing their taxes or going to work on Monday, they have swamps, dragons and Lords dark to fight, not DMV employees and exhaustion.

The world of The Lord of the Rings is not our world, and its intact pre-technological purity is a breath of fresh air, but this perspective, this goal, somehow fundamentally clashes with the goals of science fiction in fairy tales. Specific call out to people who try to claim that because the 20th century is advancing rapidly in technology, people are now gaining insight into the real world, have trouble with the proposition that a factory chimney is somehow more real than an elm just because he wants to write about castles instead of department stores, about horses instead of cars, about heroes instead of humans.

Does that make your work less relevant and less real as far as authors hoping to predict the future of humanity? Tolken despises the gravity with which they write. predict our history, judging by some of these tales, humanity will remain as lustful, vengeful and greedy as ever and the ideals of its idealists hardly go beyond the splendid idea of ​​building more cities of the same type on other planets; from improved means to deteriorating ends Tolken saw his works as an escape from these concerns, it is not surprising then that he so disliked Herbert's works from the beginning, they present a world that is as lustful, vengeful and greedy as ever and yet , when you dig a little deeper into the themes of Dune, I think it's pretty clear that advancement isn't necessarily good and that technology shouldn't progress without regard for morality.

I mean, certainly, it says that there are patterns of bad behavior that humanity will inevitably fall back into. Petres describes the progression of humanity. like a plastic memory, shape it however you want, but relax for a moment and it will break into ancient shapes, but what Herbert does is demonstrate that Tolk's castles, his horses, his heroes will never truly be devalued, that no matter our technology and our advancement, these are the core things that we always come back to, we will always recreate these things that Tolken loved. Tolken talks about improved means to impaired ends, but Dune's means aren't particularly improved, they're the same human tools we've always had a political belief in.

Dune's ingenuity, wisdom, and intended ends may not be Token's lofty aspirations, but I certainly don't think they're impaired. All they seek is knowledge, survival and life for the human race. Dune provides Escape in a very different way than the Lord. of the Rings, rather than giving us a beautiful, glittering distant world to contemplate in science fiction, gives us a platform on which to explore our ideas freely. Escape isn't always bright and sunny, sometimes it's worth exploring the darkest parts of our imagination to let ourselves go. our worries and fears manifest themselves and to find a good path forward, I think the heart of the token problem with Dune probably came down to the ultimate requirement I had for fairy tales.

The consolation token stories were written with the goal of a happy ending and an ending that he describes as catastrophic in a catastrophic conclusion a term that Tolen invented despite how bad everything has gone despite how destroyed the world in the end goodness will prevail and the world will be made right is the mark of a good fairy tale of the highest or fullest kind which, however fantastic or terrible, may be the adventures it may bring to the boy or man who hears it when the day comes. turn, a sigh, a beat and a lifting of the heart near or accompanied by Tears in such stories when the sudden turn When it comes, we can catch a penetrating glimpse of the joy and desire of the heart that for a moment passes outside the frame, tears from made the very network of history and lets a shine pass through.

This shine has its roots in Token's devout Catholicism. The happy endings to their stories are not just a comfort to the afflicted, they are a promise that they truly believed that in the end times God would come and set things right and this faith, this optimism fuels Middle Earth and the Lord of the Rings, in fact. Tolk's faith is stamped into every atom of The Lord of the Rings' beautiful creation story, which parallels many Catholic teachings with Christ analogies that can be made for many of Middle Earth's main characters. and his philosophy and morality, are informed entirely by Token's beliefs in which he believed in a firm line between good and evil and the battle between the two shaped his story from the opening moments to its resounding conclusion.

Herbert, however, was not religious, his family, especially his aunts, were Catholic and he studied and included in his works some principles of Zen Buddhism, but it is likely that in terms of his current personal beliefs he was agnostic throughout his life. of the world is manifested very strongly in his works where religion can be seen mainly as a tool. This does not mean that Herbert denies the power of religion, but rather the strength of religion and its capacity. changing people is one of the biggest themes of

dune

when paul and jessica arrive at araus, native fans immediately begin to wonder if he could be their lisan alib, the long-awaited prophet who was supposed to come. from another world, although we come to learn. that this belief in lisan alib was not organic, it did not arise naturally, it was planted there by the witches of Ben jeser as a safety mechanism so that, if any of their sisters and their children were stranded on the planet of araus, the locals would take them and protect them thinking that they are their benefit, religion is also used in the context of ecology to try to save the desert planet of Araus and return it to being an aquatic paradise, the father of the planetary ecologist leader Kines, advises his son. religion and law among our masses must be one and the same an act of disobedience must be a sin and require wrath religious sanctions this will have the double benefit of bringing greater obedience and greater courage although he personally did not believe in any religion that Herbert did believe in religion, he knew it was a central part of human ecology and looks at everything with a cynical eye, knowing that the mines of politics are entirely created by humans, knowing that if a messiah figure appeared, he would be human, and knowing the dangers that would imply.

Let's go with it, as expected, there is no catastrophic conclusion to Dune, there is no happy ending, but there is shit. The same musical themes that have been at the base of humanity always continue despite what it may sometimes seem like. Destiny, what it can sometimes seem like. The destiny of human beings has to come to accept that they will always be at war with their Universe, not working towards an ultimate goal, but simply working forward. Olist Leet Kines, once a great advocate of progress and advancement, learns when the planet Oracus swallows him up. Overall, all these plans and schemes may have been useless since his planet killed him.

It occurred to him that his father and all the other scientists were wrong. That the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error. There is no great Universal plan in Herbert's works beyond those that are man-made, there is no force of good acting in the universe, there is no final goal, but it is simply humanity fighting against random forces. of the universe and society. This bleak outlook is not surprising; he probably rejected Tolken. I saw that the purpose of the stories was not a warning but a comfort; However, many people, including myself, don't necessarily see this bleakness as a flaw in Dune's story because, despite the universe and its randomness in Dune, humanity is still important, still dependent on Brave. good people to do what they can to guide Humanity Dune says there is no easy way out of the mix of human history there is no easy solution to the horrible ways history has unfolded or the ways in which can be repeated we can't I really imagine what the universe will be like when the future unfolds, but it's what we want to survive and change.

Dune says change is possible. A lot of people like Lord of the Things and they like Dune because, frankly, they're both good stories. Tolken and Herbert, although they believed in radically different things, both believed strongly in what they wrote and this belief, this desire to share their ideas, is reflected in the writing in an incredible way. The Lord of the Rings and Dune are complex, challenging and intriguing. Explorations and presentations of the author's worldview, they plant their feet deep in the oldest and most fundamental myths of humanity, affirming and subverting them, taking us out of this world and taking us to another, to a place where we can test our ideas and ideals.

For those of us who love stories that inspire us, that challenge us, and that change us, both The Lord of the Rings and Dune have stood the test of time. I mean, the fact is that we will never know specifically why Tolken didn't like Dune. It's possible he just didn't think Duncan Idaho was a very good character name, which I understand, I mean comparing the two even though it's an interesting conversation, it's like asking an apple why it hates an orange, They are like that. completely different beasts, but that's why it's very interesting to me how many Lord of the Rings fans love Dune, whether you like Dune or not, especially if you're a Lord of the Rings fan.

I'd love to know why it's similar. and different about these stories that intrigue so much, let me know in the comments. I'll take next week off because I want to breathe and stuff, but I'll be back next week, I think it's the 22nd with another conversation. themed video so subscribe if you want to stay we are getting dangerously close to 100,000 subscribers which is a lot we may have reached it there is a small chance we will have reached it by the time this video comes out but I doubt it but either way I will do it. make a cheesy post in the community when that happens, but for now I want you to know how grateful I am to each and every one of you for tuning in the more I do this work, you know, reading, writing, and sharing these stories with you and how much I better do it, I think the more I fall in love with it, I'm not going to cry right now because my camera is about to run out of space so I have to end this, but you guys.

They are letting me do things that I always wanted to do and that I always thought I could do if I had the opportunity and I had the opportunity and I am really very happy, so thank you very much, thank you. Thank you very much for joining me this week and every week and I hope you have a very happy fan day.