One can easily imagine a reader enjoying both The Lord of the Rings and Dune. Both of those works of epic fantasy were published in the form of a series of long novels beginning in the mid-twentieth century; both create elaborate worlds of their own, right down to details of ecology and language; both seriously (and these days, unfashionably) concern themselves with the theme of what constitutes heroic action; both have even inspired multiple big-budget Hollywood spectacles. The reader equally dedicated to the work of J. R. R. Tolkien and Frank Herbert turns out to be a more elusive creature than we may expect, but perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us, given Tolkien’s own attitude toward Dune.
“It is impossible for an author still writing to be fair to another author working along the same lines,” Tolkien wrote in 1966 to a fan who’d sent him a copy of Herbert’s book, which had come out the year before. “In fact I dislike DUNE with some intensity, and in that unfortunate case it is much the best and fairest to another author to keep silent and refuse to comment.”
That lack of elaboration has, if anything, only stoked the curiosity of Lord of the Rings and Dune enthusiasts alike, as evidenced by this thread from a few years ago on the r/tolkienfans subreddit. Was it the materialism and Machiavellianism implicit in Dune’s worldview? The preponderance of invented names and coinages that surely wouldn’t meet the etymological standard of an Oxford linguist?
Maybe it was the aristocratic isolation — a kind of anti-fellowship — of its protagonist Paul Atreides, who comes to possess the equivalent of Tolkien’s Ring of Power. “In Dune, Paul willingly takes the (metaphorical) ring and wields it,” writes Evan Amato at The Culturist. “He leads, transforms, and conquers. The universe bends to his vision. He suffers for it, yes, and questions it, but he never truly rejects the call to rule. Contrast this with the world of Middle-earth, where all Tolkien’s heroes do the opposite. When Frodo offers the Ring to Aragorn, he refuses. Even Samwise, humble as he is, feels the surge of the Ring’s power, and lets it go.” Assuming he managed to get through the first Dune novel, Tolkien could hardly have approved of the narrative’s moral arc. Whether his or Herbert’s vision puts up the more realistic allegory for humanity’s lot is another matter entirely.
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I’d argue that Tolkien’s work sits squarely in the Hero’s Journey camp and is the model for prophecied heroes, ah la Aragorn. Dune on the other hand, very pointedly highlights the dangers of following a prophecied hero and how even a seemingly benevolent colonizer is still a colonizer. Herbert disliked the Hero’s Journey and wrote Dune as dark counterpoint.Tolkien filled his tales with noble heroes who saw through and defeated the flawed people steering Middle Earth to ruin. He also filled his tales with whimsy. Herbert made his central characters, all of them, the flawed ones and his universe is more ominous than all but the darkest part of Middle Earth. While both are great tales they’re opposed in many of the details of what an epic looks like.
Frank Herbert’s Whipping Star and Dosadi Experiment and other stories featured BuSab,
The Bureau of Sabotage in an interstellar society divided between humans and Gowachin [froglike sapient beings]. Busab evolved as a Libertarian terrorist response overly powerful, efficient, and concentrated government power in earlier eras of human government. It was eventually incorporated into official government structure as a check on state power capable of assassinating overly powerful demagogues.
Herbert’s concept of Gowachin law featured courts in which any party present, the plaintiff, the defendent, their advocates, or the judge(s), could be killed in the course of due process. This inclined everyone toward settlement outside of court and toward a respect for justice–because justice denied to anyone outside of court could be deadly to anyone in court.
Very different from Tolkien.
The religious angle had to particularly rankle JRRT. The interesting thing is Herbert, as much as he deconstructs it, is poetically reverential in tone, especially when describing the rites of the Fremen. The ambiguity makes it all the more compelling. Tolkien’s approach, which I love just as much, is that he has all spiritual presence embodied in the characters and events of Middle Earth but no one talks of scripture, liturgy, Gods, or rites. But the spiritual element is there and ever present, if nowhere else than the title character who is basically an arch-demon.
Dune is the flipside of LotRs. It tells the story of what happens when you don’t reject the power — that it leads to corruption and ruin. It’s a warning about trusting false messiahs. But it’s also set in a world where the orcs and other denizens of the dark have won. Herbert was also exploring whether it’s ok to fight evil with evil in order to defeat it, or to put it into more Christian terms, whether Paul Atriedes sacrifices himself, just like Jesus Christ, in order to save his people, knowing he would ultimately go down in history as a vile monster.
His politics are ostensibly right wing, extremist militaristic power fantasies. This brings another aspect to the original trilogy — that maybe this isn’t a satire or critique of power corrupting absolutely, being a mirror to LotRs, that shares the same political view, but chooses to present it from the viewpoint of the Dark Lord… But really is a treatise on fascism. There is a great deal to suggest it is, and not a lot to suggest otherwise. The viewpoint is always from the point of those with power, and they abuse that power remorselessly. There is no other viewpoint, to suggest that the fascism is in any way seen as a mirror darkly. It reads very much like a straight up Nazi fantasy. If Herbert meant it as a warning about fascism, it failed to make clear that it was. Tolkien would have read it read it as a fascist text and I’m pretty sure that Trump’s America sees it as a fascist treatise.
Herbert would have seen Tolkien’s pastoral view of the world as being fatally romanticised, this is a world where ideas of good and evil are heightened and that romantic views of natural justice are what separates us from the villains. In Tolkien’s world there is a creator and he’s caring. In Dune the creator is dead and the devil has won. Both viewpoints have their merits. Tolkien wasn’t naive enough to think his world was a true reflection of reality, but he hoped that it would be held up as a handbook on how one should live and warned against what happens when people don’t do their diligent best. Herbert may have been arguing that he wasn’t going to sugar coat the pill. If we keep thinking we live in a fairy story, we’ll end up living in hell because we’re too complacent.
These books are not as easily decipherable as you might imagine. They could actually be extraordinarily very close in intent, or they could be at opposite ends of the political spectrum. As with the ring, what you think of them might be as much to do with own prejudices as those of the authors. The ring embodies that perfectly, that our ideologies amplify what is already there, filtering out everything that doesn’t agree with our world view.
Tolkien believed in saviors. Herbert warned us against them.
In Arda and Middle Earth, like in Christian theology, there is an ultimate good creator who has promised aid to the faithful, even though conditions continue to deteriorate within the creation. And there are many faithful, at different levels of power.
In Herbert’s universe, anyone claiming spiritual authority to lead followers is almost certainly abusing it, or eventually will. If there’s an ultimate good, it is MIA.
Any concept absolute belief is implicitly criticized by Herbert, even when believers like the Fremen are sympathetic.
And also, LOTR is founded in unexamined British colonialism. The peoples of the global East and South fall under the Dark Lord’s sway. And Mordor is only held in check by Numenorean colonists. The West represents faith, hope and ideals. In LOTR, this is utterly foundational, even though people of the West can be corrupted.
OTOH, Herbert’s most sympathetic people are Arab-coded. The extractive colonists are not at all sympathetic. That must’ve been hard for Tolkien to read.
Hmm, I never thought about the two as so dissimilar that the author of one would scorn the other. I’m afraid I’m drawn to both TLOTR and DUNE. The point raised about isolation resonates. Any community in DUNE appears to fall apart. Any shared vision seems thwarted. But that is a theme about that work. Maybe I appreciate nihilism as I appreciate togetherness, I don’t know. But I guess I’d expect disinterest from Tolkien at most. Thanks for sharing this (to me) news!
Thank you for the news, it is very interesting to hear of Tolkien’s feelings about Dune. Wikipedia reports that Frank Herbert wrote in Chapterhouse, “It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.” Tolkein, too, was clearly motivated to portray power as an agent of corruption for humans. As they say, the devil’s in the details.
Perhaps Tolkein saw Dune as Frank Herbert playing with fire. It’s easy enough to picture Tolkein as someone who wants to write good books with a capital G, and who sees Dune as a bad book with a capital B. Judging by the way that Tolkein shows us his characters and the worlds they inhabit, he was not a person who would easily look upon what he considered to be abomination. Though he may have carefully avoided saying so, he might have seen Dune as a serial portrayal of abomination heaped upon abomination.
That being said, I remain in awe of the literary accomplishments of both of these men and I agree with Luuta, above, that our fascinated speculation here about their works remains quite speculative. Actually, it could be a blast to write a hypothetical conversation between those two authors on precisely these matters. That project would certainly require a considerable amount of research.