Thomas: Speak for yourself. I intend to make fun of them. Especially this first one.

Jude: Yes, well, we’re going to do these adaptations in chronological order, so first up is 1978’s Lord of the Rings, directed by Ralph Bakshi. We never actually watched this movie until now despite being huge Lord of the Rings fans in our youth.

Thomas: Its reputation was one of artistic and commercial failure. I read enough about it to remember that contemporary critics weren’t happy about the rotoscoping. I didn’t really know what “rotoscoping” was but I knew that people felt very strongly about this. Finally, I knew it was directed by Ralph Bakshi, but I thought his name was spelled “Bakashi” and only just now learned the correct spelling.

Jude: Bakshi got his start doing edgy, adult-audience animated films before doing children’s fantasy instead. I guess Fritz the Cat is his most successful movie? I’ve vaguely heard of that and I read an article calling Wizards fascist many years ago, but I was surprised to read his Wikipedia article and not even recognize his older work. I guess it wasn’t until the 1980s that there were strong Disney alternatives for American animated films.

Thomas: I don’t think we need to belabor the intro here. We have now seen this movie for ourselves, and the verdict is clear. Despite what the conventional wisdom would have you believe, this movie is actually…yeah, okay, sometimes the conventional wisdom is completely correct. This is an extremely bad movie. Let’s start making fun of it, because what else is there to say?

Jude: Not so fast. Let’s see if we agree on the reasons why it’s bad. Despite its many faults, this is still recognizably Lord of the Rings, one of the most popular books of all time. Some people said it was simply unfilmable, but two decades later it was made into an extremely popular trilogy. So what’s the problem here? “It sucks”…but why? If Lord of the Rings is super popular and good, how come it sucks in this form?

Thomas: This could be our longest post yet. Where do we even start?

Jude: One massive problem at the outset is that it tries to cram Fellowship of the Ring and most of Two Towers into a single two hour movie. If you asked me twenty years ago to guess why it failed, that’s probably what I would have said. You just can’t do justice to this story in such an abbreviated form.

Thomas: Yeah, if only Tom Bombadil was in there, that would have really saved it.

Jude: You joke, but when Peter Jackson started working on his movies, there were fans who were convinced Tom Bombadil was an essential piece of the story.

Thomas: Obviously he’s not. Jackson dropped him and only the truly fanatic missed him. What about that scene where the fellowship hides from flocks of birds and decides to head for the snowy pass at Caradhras? That was in Jackson’s Fellowship but not in Bakshi’s film. It’s a good scene. But is it fatal to miss it?

Jude: The many extra moments Jackson has time for definitely help us to get a feel for the many characters. In Bakshi’s film, Merry and Pippin get absolutely no characterization. Nor do Legolas and Gimli. Even Sam is a cipher, getting only a couple lines before the breaking of the fellowship. It’s really only Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn, and Boromir that come through with any clarity. So most of the cast certainly suffers.

Thomas: There’s also no time for explanation. Where is Mordor? Who is Saruman? What is a hobbit? Bakshi’s film doesn’t have time to explain what hobbits are and they often seem like children. Pippin sucks his thumb after dropping the rock in Moria, so even the animators didn’t realize he isn’t supposed to be a little kid! The choice to send Frodo out of Rivendell on his dangerous mission is a bit dodgy in Tolkien’s book, actually, but at least there’s the some implication that Frodo has proven unusually resistant to the ring’s corruption. Here, it’s child abuse.

Jude: Right, but suppose the viewer has read the books. We certainly have! No explanations needed for us. We know where Mordor is and who Saruman is. Did we like it?

Thomas: Hell no.

Jude: Why not? The overall plot is very faithful to the original, despite some omissions. A great deal of the dialogue, much more by percentage than in Jackson’s films, is lifted straight from the book. When we eventually come to discuss Jackson’s films in detail, we’re going to say that the dialogue cribbed from Tolkien is by far the best. So why doesn’t it work here?

Thomas: If you want a theory of what’s wrong here, I’ll give you one. It’s just flat-out poorly executed. We’re not film experts and this isn’t a film site, so we might be missing some vocabulary but I’ll try to run through some of the major problems.

First, the infamous rotoscoping. It’s not always bad. But often it is, and sometimes it’s very bad indeed. There’s no internal artistic reason for the sometimes dramatic shifts between what appears to be hand-drawn animation (traced against rotoscoped originals), footage that looks much more like blurry video than animation, and then a third style where you have silhouetted people in front of drawn backgrounds.

But I think much worse than the rotoscoping itself is the way it’s animated in the majority hand-drawn style. Again, I might be missing some vocabulary, but the characters are always moving and shifting. That’s a problem because there’s often a lot of characters on screen and when they’re all moving at once, what should I look at? Who is the focus of the scene? Sometimes it’s not even clear which character is speaking.

Worse, the characters move in unnatural ways. Facial expressions especially feel like they are linear interpolations that play out across several seconds between two very different points. I’m not sure how human expressions change, but they don’t change at a constant rate, that’s for sure. The whole thing has this creepy, liquid feeling. Just to make sure I wasn’t holding it to some recent film language, I pulled up some clips from Disney’s Robin Hood, released a few years earlier, and sure enough, it might show its age a bit but it was massively easier to watch, both in terms of viewer focus and in legible facial expression.

But that’s not all! Even besides the constantly shifting facial expressions, the acting is bad.

Jude: I actually thought the voice acting was…okay? The performances aren’t great, but they aren’t terrible.

Thomas: You’re right, but I mean the physical movements of the characters. I’ve never come out of a Disney film and said, “Wow, the character movements were so good!” But it turns out they can be very bad. In this movie, too often the movements simply don’t match the way the characters are talking and feeling. Sometimes, and this might be even worse, the movements kind of match but aren’t timed very well to what is being said. Gandalf is a particularly bad offender. He loves pointing. He points over and over again. Stop pointing. Jeez.

The editing: also bad. A lot of scenes simply don’t make any sense. For example, when they are approaching Rivendell, pursued by the Black Riders, Frodo gets on Legolas’s horse. A Nazgul comes galloping towards them, brushing aside Aragorn without slowing. Legolas says “fly, fly to the ford” and then…the Nazgul stops his horse, which then just kind of stands there skittishly. Frodo and the Nazgul then sit on their horses opposite each other for almost a minute with the horses anxiously stepping sideways.

Jude: I guess it’s supposed to be tense?

Thomas: But what is happening? Eventually the rider speaks and Frodo turns and gallops away. But what was the point of all that? Why didn’t he ride away when Legolas told him to? Why did the rider stop twenty feet away instead of closing the distance?

Jude: Yeah…

Thomas: This isn’t just a one-time thing. “Don’t bar the door, we’ll be trapped!” someone says at Balin’s tomb in Moria, so they leave the doors cracked…and rush to the other side of the room. Then some orcs start to come through, so Boromir rushes the door and pushes them back with some help from Sam (I think? One of the hobbits, at any rate). Then…they just run away from the doors again to the far wall, so of course the orcs just come right through. The action just doesn’t make any sense.

Jude: I think this might have been because their process was they shot a ton of live-action footage, then went and drew over it. But they must not have had the budget for reshoots, so when editing they had to do the best they could with whatever they had shot months earlier in the live-action phase.

Thomas: Yeah but that’s most movies, at least at this time before cheap film stock and digital cameras. Part of the art of directing is making sure you get the shots you’re going to need in the editing room. Bakshi doesn’t seem to have come close to doing this correctly.

Jude: I’m not sure he had any live-action film experience.

Thomas: Then he shouldn’t have tried it on what was, for him, a big project!

Jude: We’re not sufficiently film literate to have any authority on this, but I do think that for whatever reason the craft of, let’s say, replacement-level practitioners in Hollywood has gotten a lot better over the years. A few years ago I watched “Encounter at Farpoint”, the first episode of Star Trek the Next Generation, and was shocked at how bad the direction and cinematography was in basic scenes of people talking to each other. Today, even bad TV shows usually have good editing and direction, but they had to make shows much faster back then. And Bakshi likewise seems to have been rushed and underfunded.

Thomas: Well, the tragedy of the film industry is that a huge number of people can work very hard and employ objectively impressive artistic talent and then, through no fault of their own, the result of years of their professional lives is a terrible movie.

Jude: So are you done ranting about the poor execution?

Thomas: No! This is animation, so what about the art? We’re not art experts either so I still have no fancy terminology. All I can say is: the art sucks. You can blame the budget for having only a single establishing shot of each place, but you can’t blame the budget for the one look we get of Rivendell looking like this:

Even leaving aside whether this is what Rivendell should look like—to be honest I never got a clear image from reading Tolkien—why is there this vaguely uniform fogginess? Why are there red accents that make a place that in the story is a safe refuge seem ominous instead? Why are some near parts of the mountain obscured and why are some distant peaks visible? Why is the lighting so different on different parts of the building that are facing in the same direction?

Jude: Maybe they wanted it to be…in the clouds? But also shadowed by some mountains we can’t see?

Thomas: Even if there’s some geography that could account for all this—though I doubt it—this is bewildering. And not the “built by an ancient race” kind of bewildering. The “this is ugly” kind.

What about the backgrounds? Here we have…something…in the background in Moria as the fellowship goes across a wooden bridge:

What the heck is that? It looks like a huge bug.

Jude: Maybe that’s the balrog.

Thomas: Alas, it is not. This is the balrog. Slightly taller than Gandalf. We’re doing animation, and he looks like a guy in a suit.

Jude: I guess with the rotoscoping, maybe he was a guy in a suit.

Thomas: Probably the standout visual moment is when we first meet Legolas. Most fans probably have a hard time shaking Orlando Bloom’s portrayal, but here’s Bakshi’s interpretation:

Jude: Uh…I mean…he is an elf. They ought to look different, right? You could argue that Peter Jackson’s elves were too close to human

Thomas: But should they look like this?

Jude: No. Definitely not. They should also have more than just four arrows, it seems to me.

Thomas: Anyway it doesn’t seem to be an elf look because here’s Elrond.

Jude: He’s only half-elf.

Thomas: Celeborn looks like Elrond, but Galadriel looks just as, uh, winsome as Legolas does. But while we’re looking at that Elrond image, I have to also point out that in this scene, the council of Elrond, while everyone else is standing around a big table, Elrond is sitting on a throne that is itself placed on the table everyone’s sitting around. It’s a very odd arrangement.

Jude: Elvish customs are different than ours.

Thomas: I think it interferes with the important moment where Frodo accepts the mission, because it feels like this king is looking down at a weak child and being like, “You know what, let’s send the kid on this dangerous mission.”

Jude: But that’s back to being an example of a lot of the necessary context being lost. The idea that a hobbit is unusually resistant to the ring and very hard to see is in the book, and going back to The Hobbit was the idea that they’re stealthy and can sneak into places—in this respect Frodo is just doing a much more elaborate riff on Bilbo’s burglar thing in The Hobbit.

Thomas: In Peter Jackson’s movie, he wisely avoids talking about racial resistance and instead makes it seem like Frodo is a compromise, a bad choice everyone is forced into because no one trusts anyone else to carry the ring. Which is also fine. Doing none of that, though, and presenting Elrond as a powerful king, makes this seem weird.

Jude: True. I want to get to my theory of what’s wrong here, so are you done with your complaints about the art?

Thomas: Just to sum up, movies combine the output from many types of artists. There are good movies where some element—writing, direction, acting, visual art—is particularly great. Great movies are great in many elements at once. Here, the movie is already deeply handicapped by the need to abbreviate its source material. The art could have helped make up for what was lost, but instead, it makes it worse.

Jude: Well, before we change the subject, I want to say that it’s not all bad. Well, it’s mostly bad. Almost entirely bad. But I do respect the approach taken with Aragorn, who is supposed to “look foul but seem fair” in the book but is presented as a young, handsome prince from minute one in Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring (and Jackson tried to cast an even younger, prettier male actor before ending up with Viggo Mortenson). Bakshi to his credit gives us an Aragorn who hasn’t had a modeling career:

I think he’s also got a Native American vibe, which is a cool association to make for a ranger.

Thomas: Counterpoint: he doesn’t wear pants. No wonder people in Bree don’t like him. He’s a stranger who wanders in with no pants on.

Jude: He wears a toga, which is appropriate if you think of Numenor as being like the Roman Empire.

Thomas: Correction: he wears a toga with an enormous belt buckle. Meanwhile Boromir wears furs and a horned helmet even though he comes from a much warmer southern climate. Though Boromir also doesn’t wear pants. No wonder they couldn’t make it through the snow! I believe pants come directly from the Germanic tribes whose cultures were the basis of Tolkien’s human cultures in Lord of the Rings. They wore pants because it gets cold in northern Europe!

Jude: Moving off of pants, I think you’re right that overall this is movie is badly executed. But I want to propose a more nuanced explanation for why it wasn’t very successful. When we talked about why Lord of the Rings remains popular, we noted that unlike Dune which has tons of different cool elements, Lord of the Rings goes very deep on a couple factors and by evoking them repeatedly in different ways gives people multiple paths to appreciate them.

For me, the biggest was Tolkien’s emphasis on personal virtue. All four hobbits are models for personal behavior that readers can aspire to: first Frodo, then Sam, and eventually Merry and Pippin as well. I still think Aragorn is meant to be an unattainable ideal, not a relatable character, but he, Gimli, and Legolas embody important qualities as well. Many of their important moments of decision remain in the film: Frodo accepting the ring, Sam joining him to go into Mordor, Aragorn deciding not to abandon Merry and Pippin.

But squeezing so much story into so little time means these moments aren’t set up enough for them to matter. There’s little sense of what alternatives there might be or the stakes of these decisions. Aragorn promises to help Boromir’s city, but it was never explained why it needed help. Aragorn then risks Gondor to pursue Merry and Pippin, but who even are these guys? Pippin had one moment (dropping the rock in Moria and then sucking his thumb, sigh) and Merry has essentially zero.

My other components to Lord of the Ring’s popularity were the connections to the world, to the past, and to other people. In Bakshi’s film the world is almost entirely absent. There’s no time to explain anything, of course, and as you’ve said the background art is woefully inadequate to the task. The past likewise goes mostly unexplained and unevoked. And since only Frodo, Gandalf, and Aragorn really get much screentime, there isn’t much lower case f fellowship either.

Thomas: My contention was that Lord of the Rings is popular because it’s suffused with nostalgia, showing us a world that used to be better and is getting worse, and that nostalgia really resonates with people. This is also completely absent from Bakshi’s film. The idea that the elves are leaving Middle Earth, the idea (driven home by ruins at places like Weathertop) that the entire first third of the story takes place in the ruins of what used to be a prosperous kingdom, even the idea that Moria used to be beautiful and now is not…all this is gone. Only one trace survives: Galadriel saying that success in the quest will be the end of Lothlorien. But once again, there’s not even minimal setup: we haven’t seen anything of Lothlorien that would make us care about it, so big deal.

Losing that means losing an important dimension to our heroes’ determination: they can’t bring back the lost past, but they decide to fight and sacrifice to try to keep the future from being a lot worse than the present.

So unfortunately, this film fails on nearly every front.

Jude: But to return to the point about length: maybe that failure was inevitable? Certainly both before and after this movie was made, people thought it was impossible to translate Lord of the Rings to film. Maybe they were right! And while Peter Jackson’s comparative success argues otherwise, he was fortunate enough to have about five hours to cover this material, not to mention a much larger budget for artists of all kinds of help visualize things, better actors, etc. Maybe Bakshi’s task simply was impossible given the time and money he had to work with.

Thomas: Maybe. And certainly the poor artistic level was always going to hold back an animated film of this type. But at least in Japan it is common for there to be comparatively low budget anime shows that nevertheless achieve more impact with their audience than lushly animated competitors. Given everything we’ve said, I think the problem was actually that Bakshi was unwilling to really apply the razor and cut more out.

Sure, he dropped some of the initial adventures Frodo has before meeting Aragorn (as did Jackson). But why not also drop Lothlorien? In fact, why not just drop the Two Towers material entirely and go from Rivendell to Minas Tirith and Mordor and just end the story?

Jude: There’s a couple challenges. One, Tolkien fans, the only built-in audience for a movie like this, would hate to see the story butchered like that. And two, the Two Towers material is the best material. We talked previously about how Frodo and Sam’s trek through Mordor is intellectually interesting but kind of a drag to read.

Thomas: Then maybe skip the black riders, teleport Frodo to Rivendell, and then focus on the Fellowship’s adventures in Moria and then Rohan. Bring Frodo along if him being in Mordor is too much of a drag.

Jude: Not only would Tolkien fans hate Bakshi far more than they do today, you’re going to make them hate us for even suggesting this.

Thomas: All I’m saying is that if you want to do a mostly faithful adaptation, you need to commit to a length that allows it. If you’re going to make it shorter, like this movie, then that’s already out the window. People are already going to be mad you cut Tom Bombadil and whatnot. So then you have to be aggressive about cutting so that what’s left can still function. And not just function, but embody the subtle virtues we claim are the source of the story’s lasting resonance.

Jude: This is something we can come back to with Dune adaptations, I suspect, since they tend to be much more aggressively downsized. But next we’ll spend at least a little bit of time on the Rankin/Bass made-for-TV movie Return of the King (1980).

Thomas: Maybe the problem with Bakshi’s film was there weren’t enough songs.

Jude: We’ll find out.

Thomas: First, though, we should address the most straightforward path to getting “more Dune”. Frank Herbert wrote five sequels. So…just read those.

Jude: Ah, well, it’s not so simple. The sequels have a well-earned reputation for being increasingly weird. Of course there’s weird stuff in Dune as well. The thing is, whereas our central thesis about Dune is that succeeds because it's packed full of many different ideas, the sequels get narrower and narrower. Right away, Dune Messiah really undermines Paul as not just a savior but even as an active protagonist. And unmoored from coming-of-age framework that anchors Dune to hundreds of other stories you've encountered, Herbert has free reign to really focus on what he's most interested in.

Thomas: I guess you’re not really getting “more Dune” so much as “more Frank Herbert”. Not such an attractive proposition, it turns out.

Jude: Some people love the Dune sequels, to be clear. It just depends how much you like picking up what Frank is putting down. The typical advice is to keep reading the Dune series as long as you like what you’re reading, and then the moment you don’t like it anymore…stop. Because it’s only going to get worse from wherever you are when you hit that point.

Thomas: For most normal people, that point is probably the end of Dune.

Jude: Then I guess we aren’t normal people. I am very glad to have read Dune Messiah!

Thomas: Of course we’re not normal! We’re not even real!

Jude: Don’t remind me. Anyway, I guess I should also say that—according to Goodreads—some people even like the posthumous novels published by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. I’ve never met anyone in person who admitted this, but apparently they exist! So you never know. You, reader, could be one of these people.

Thomas: But…you probably aren’t.

Jude: Yeah, if you finish all of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels and still want more, I think you’re better served trying his four book Pandora Sequence. Destination: Void predates the later Dune novels but has some similarities to them in its elevation of character and philosophy over action.

Thomas: If you’d like to read a book-length treatise on artificial intelligence and the philosophy of consciousness that’s written fifty years ago by someone without any actual expertise in either subject, Destination: Void is a great choice.

Jude: I’m not sure how well it all holds up, but the overall framing of wanting to benefit from powerful AI but being deeply afraid of the consequences feels like it is still relevant to modern circumstances.

Thomas: Yet we haven't read past the first one in that series. Let's move on to the options not written by someone with the last name “Herbert”.

Jude: Right. Well, one of the distinctive elements of Dune is its focus on the hostile desert environment. If Lord of the Rings is, at some level, about a fun camping trip, Dune has that camping element as well, but the camping is unpleasant. So here’s another book in a similar vein: Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson. This is the first of a trilogy that was very popular back in the 1990s but which I don’t hear about so much anymore.

Thomas: These days he’s associated with near-future eco-dystopia with books like The Years of Rice and Salt and New York 2140.

Jude: I’m partial to a different book of his, Aurora, which is a farther-future science fiction novel with a revisionist take on the venerable SF novel trope of generation starships. Although there’s still a pretty strong strain of eco-dystopia in there.

Thomas: Still, the Goodreads ratings suggest the Mars trilogy is still his most read work.

Jude: Yeah, Red Mars is from 1992 and describes the beginning of an ambitious colonization and terraforming project on Mars. Obviously you get a hostile, desert-like environment, and its one that Robinson really puts a lot of effort into describing in incredible detail.

Thomas: Stupendous detail. Stupefying detail, maybe.

Jude: It can be a lot, but I think it’s a book that’s clearly in dialogue with Dune and its notions of Fremen terraforming, something that the actual Dune sequels don’t really choose to focus on. Robinson’s trilogy also has plenty of political intrigue as the colonists argue and eventually fight over what to do and how to govern themselves.

Thomas: It’s been a while, but as I recall, there’s also a lot of crude national stereotyping. And by the time you get to Blue Mars, a lot of board meetings and executives touring facilities.

Jude: Well, they weren’t perfect at the time and I’m sure they haven’t aged perfectly either, but I don't think anything since has done a better job painting a picture of starting a colony on another planet. They’re also worth reading because at this point there’s been an influential generation of people who grew up reading these books and are still inspired by them.

Thomas: That’s funny because Kim Stanley Robinson is, politically, so far from Elon Musk, and yet…

Jude: Musk surely read these, but I think it’s more helpful to think of his employees as having read them, particularly at SpaceX. In the early 2000s, for people who read books like Red Mars, NASA seemed hugely disappointing, so someone coming along with a vision for doing better in the private sector was really compelling.

Thomas: Poor KSR, he inspired thousands of people who are, slowly, making his visions a reality, except the monkey’s paw curls and the guy leading it has the politics of a character in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash instead of Robinson’s thoughtful eco-socialism.

Jude: Let’s move on to the next book. Another key thing people like about Dune is the scheming characters and political intrigue. Dune has several different semi-independent factions jostling for power and influence throughout the book. You’d think this would be a simple formula to copy, but it must be harder than it sounds because there aren’t a lot of similarly successful books.

Thomas: Our culture has a reasonably strong preference for essentially good and honest protagonists and a very strong preference for the hero to be an underdog. It’s not impossible to reconcile this with scheming, but it’s not a good fit. Villains obviously make sense as schemers and so comic book villains often do a lot of this, but people realized a few decades ago that a scheming outcast weirdo, like a typical Batman villain, isn’t nearly as intimidating as someone who sits on top of society and wields its power against the protagonist. But if they are running the society, there’s no need for villains to scheme. The Emperor has a really fun scheme in The Phantom Menace when he’s not actually Emperor yet and a bit of an underdog going up against the Jedi, but by the original series he’s just sitting around and the best scheme he can manage in Return of the Jedi is “you naturally assume our defense contractors are way behind schedule and over budget, but thanks to my evil scheme, they are slightly less behind schedule than you expected”.

Frank Herbert skillfully arranges matters in Dune so that a lot of the scheming happens in the phase of the book where the main character, Paul, is mostly a bystander. The book’s chief villain, Baron Harkonnen, is quite intimidating yet isn’t in charge of his society, so he needs to scheme.

Jude: Anyway, a book I’d recommend along these lines is one that won the Hugo award in 1981 but unfortunately has been mostly forgotten since, The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge. This novel uses the Hans Christian Andersen fable as the plot outline but transposes it to an obviously Dune-inspired science fictional setting. An interstellar human society is exploiting a single planet for its unique resource.

Thomas: But it’s different because it’s a water world instead of a desert world!

Jude: It’s a lot more different, actually. There are two different “native” societies on the planet in Snow Queen, relatively sophisticated city people and people more primitive and superstitious, but whereas Herbert can’t help making the rustic Fremen powerful manly men who are obviously superior to Arrakis’ city people in every way, Vinge’s city people can hold their own. In particular, their leader, the eponymous Snow Queen, is a schemer who collaborates with the interstellar humans but who has big ambitions of her own. The Snow Queen is the villain from the Andersen fable and we as readers don't like her methods, but Vinge makes sure we understand her motivations and aims aren't entirely unjust.

It's also different from Dune because instead of Dune's coming of age revenge story, the underlying fable sets up the story to follow two lovers who have been cruelly separated by the Snow Queen's machinations. Needless to say this gives it a much different vibe.

Thomas: If you finished Dune and said, I wish this had a lot more sexual tension, then yes, this is the book for you. Unfortunately, the male half of the pair of lovers leaves a lot to be desired.

Jude: There's an follow-on story we haven't read and then a full sequel, Summer Queen, which we read as teenagers and thus were unprepared with how the fable scaffold fully drops away and the reader is confronted with realistic relationships suffering from sadly realistic problems.

Thomas: See, this is what happens when you give love interests more depth than Chani. All you get are problems.

Jude: The female love interest, Moon, is really the main character in Snow Queen, actually!

Thomas: I wasn't talking about her, I was talking about the male half of the love interest, Sparks, who is clearly the Chani of that particular relationship.

Jude: Ouch.

Thomas: I know, not really fair to Chani, who at least isn’t annoying.

Jude: Chani, direct your complaints to Thomas, not me. But let’s keep going to our next book. This time, I was thinking about the intersection of religion and mysticism. Clearly an important part of the Dune recipe!

Thomas: Important enough that people feel like it needs to be included, but unlike Frank Herbert, they usually boil it down until there's nothing interesting left, as in Star Wars with the Force.

Jude: Well, I want to recommend something that approaches this freighted topic with a similar courage: Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light. Published in 1967 only a year after Dune, this novel combines two seemingly very different stories: intrigue and in-fighting among the leaders of a space colony and the emergence of Buddhism as a reaction to and an answer for some concerns present in the Hinduism of Buddha's day.

Thomas: The moral of this story is that if you find yourself joining Elon Musk on a ship going to colonize Mars, make sure you're a senior member of his crew and not just a lowly passenger.

Jude: In Zelazny's story, the crew of the colony ship has access to high technology that, among other things, allows them to fly, shoot lightning bolts, change one's gender at will, and to scan people's brains and recreate them as babies after their death, optionally with their memories intact. Naturally, they decide to deprive the passengers of any ability to understand or wield this technology and to set themselves up as gods. Specifically, the Hindu gods, enforcing a reincarnation cycle where your karma determines the status of your next life.

Thomas: Very natural behavior.

Jude: It's not a coincidence or a situation where a distinct civilization has independently landed on Hindu-ish concepts. The ship is from Earth and the crew is literally copying ideas from Hinduism. And so when one of the crew members decides he wants to lead a revolution against the "gods", he uses the weapon that history has provided to fight their religion.

Thomas: Islam?

Jude: Buddhism.

Thomas: Seems like you would pick the competing religion with billions of adherents over the one with millions.

Jude: Well, he picks Buddhism. Anyway, Zelazny is a gifted writer but above all very clever, and he is in top form coming up with ways to align science fictional tropes with Hindu and Buddhist concepts. And very relevant to the sham prophecies of Dune, although I'm not sure if there was a direct influence, the main character, Sam, is definitely not a Buddhist and doesn't at all believe what he's preaching.

Thomas: A quality he shares with the author.

Jude: And with us, so if you are skeptical that a white American author in the 60s did a good job capturing the essence of Hinduism and Buddhism…you're probably right to be, but it seemed convincing to me!

Thomas: Zelazny makes a lot more jokes than Frank Herbert does, which adherents of these religions might not always appreciate but which I as a reader definitely approve of.

Jude: I'd argue that while Lord of Light does have a cynical streak running through it—how could it not with that premise—it also foregrounds the experiences of actual religious believers and respects them in a way that Dune frankly never does.

Thomas: Unless the believer is Christian…

Jude: Yeah, like you said, there are a lot of jokes in here, and I'd argue the Christian character is Zelazny playing a bit of a joke on what must have been a predominantly Christian readership. Anyway, although it won a Hugo, this book is increasingly obscure and Hollywood surely will never have the guts to adapt it, so definitely check it out. I actually think it’s a better book than Dune, to be honest.

Thomas: The reader’s mileage may vary, though.

Jude: Of course, just throwing that out there. Finally, I think we should address maybe the most important aspect of Dune: its grand, sweeping vision. It incorporates ideas from the past, like barbarian tribes bringing down empires in general and the Arab conquest of Persia and parts of the Byzantine Empire in particular. It references issues from the present, like climate change and the presence of oil in the Middle East. And—although this is more of a feature of the sequels than Dune itself—it's interested in the future of humanity and how to free it from stasis.

Thomas: That's a lot to cover with just one recommendation.

Jude: But there is a good book to recommend here: Glen Cook's 1988 novel The Dragon Never Sleeps. It's probably not a coincidence that it fits so well. Glen Cook must have been strongly influenced by Dune, although sadly this book continues to languish in obscurity. Apparently the publisher went bankrupt right after publishing it, so it was extremely hard to find for two decades before finally coming back into print.

Thomas: The title is also bad. There are no dragons in this book.

Jude: The title's a metaphor that makes plenty of sense…if you've read the book. But yes, like Dune this is a far-future science fiction novel. Like Dune, there's a longstanding interstellar empire with squabbling noble houses that's clearly drawing on past archetypes, although in this case it's Rome much more than Constantinople. And like Dune, the setting is packed with wild ideas, albeit different ones: bio-engineered aliens, senile AIs, soldiers who are effectively thousands of years old because their minds backed up on computers, and plenty more.

Thomas: Maybe it’s a little too wild for it's own good. The usual problem that beset fantasy and science fiction in those days was massive books that moved way too slowly, but Dragon Never Sleeps reads like a trilogy that has been haphazardly edited down into a single book. In fact, Cook told someone in an interview pretty much that, minus the word "haphazardly". It's all a bit frayed and doesn't quite hang together.

Jude: Maybe so, but I also think the book succeeds magnificently at much of what it sets out to do. And perhaps because of all that editing, it takes on portentous topics like immortality, humanity's future, and decaying empires in a way that's not nearly so ponderous as you'd expect. Also, compared to Herbert's work where the author has a clear thesis they expect you to end up agreeing with them about, Cook allows his setting and many of the characters to remain ambiguous. Is his weird AI space empire a good thing? Characters provide some good arguments on its behalf compared to potential alternatives, yet the day to day lives of its unprivileged inhabitants really aren't acceptable. The book does a really rare thing where it encourages us, successfully I think, to root for (and against) characters on both sides of the conflict.

And that's all I have today, but I daresay it's a good set of books! They're all really unique, really strong in ways, and a mix of well-known and off the beaten path. So we can wrap up, unless you want to do the thing you did in our Lord of the Rings recommendations and do anti-recommendations?

Thomas: I do, but it's much harder here. Dune was quite influential, but it wasn't genre-defining in the same way that Lord of the Rings was, so it hasn't attracted nearly the same amount of work rejecting its premises. But there’s one book I’d like to put forward that offers very different perspectives on a few of the key themes.

Jude: Let's hear it.

Thomas: It’s Kameron Hurley's God's War.

Jude: Really? But…that book, and series, is absolutely nothing like Dune!

Thomas: Yes? These anti-recommendations are about opposites, aren't they?

Jude: I guess, but—

Thomas: And there actually are a few resonances. God's War takes place on an inadequately terraformed colony planet where there's a lot of desert and where future-Muslims are engaged in holy war. In fact, my initial reason for picking it was that I thought it takes religion in general and Islam in particular much more seriously than Frank Herbert did, or even Roger Zelazny in Lord of Light.

Jude: Yes, but we're now two for two on recommending books involving other religions written by authors who, to our knowledge, didn’t grow up with or spend any meaningful time practicing that religion.

Thomas: God's War isn't even all that interested in religion itself, but it's very interested in its characters and what motivates them, and that requires it to take religion seriously. The main character, Nyx, is a woman who works as a bounty hunter, tracking down and usually killing deserters who are fleeing service in the titular war. The most important secondary character is a man named Rhys, and he and Nyx present the reader with a series of contrasts. Nyx's society has become matriarchal due to most of the men dying in the war while Rhys is from a conservative and patriarchal society. Nyx is a rogue and an antihero, a swaggering, promiscuous, violent, and reckless person. Rhys is prim, religious, bookish, and completely useless in a fight. It's basically a gender swap of the archetype of a tough guy protecting a damsel in distress.

Jude: Also, trigger warning, besides all the swearing and violence, the technology on this planet is based on biotech and so a lot of unpleasant things happen involving bugs. The colony world was supposed to be terraformed by a variety of very sophisticated bugs, but due to infighting among the colonists, they lost control of the bugs and the technology to construct them. Or even understand them, really.

Thomas: Ah yes, the bugs, it's quite clever, taking the sort of high technology we associate with squeaky clean starship corridors and making it seem literally dirty by embodying it within insects.

But the point here is that while I don't think Hurley really had Dune in mind while writing this, God's War inverts a lot of things people take for granted about Dune. Nyx isn't a noble like Paul, she doesn't really have much control over her society or the grand sweep of events, she has hardly any self-control, and she solves problems with her fists and her guns rather than her brain. The focus of the narrative is always down at the level of individuals, where life is messy and unexpected and doesn't fit in with what the people running society might plan. The idea that any individual, however gifted, could seize the reins of this society and direct it toward an intended future is completely laughable.

And that is a much more honest view of the world, I’d argue, than is provided by the science fiction and fantasy genres in general and Dune in particular.

Jude: As our futile attempt at summarizing makes clear, though, the setting is jam-packed with interesting things, so that at least is another similarity with Dune. This was published in 2011 at the height of “grimdark” so it sure hits a lot harder than Dune was well.

Thomas: Sometimes grimdark fiction goes too far, but when telling this sort of story, I’d also argue that God’s War does a far better job making its point about the horrors of war than Dune’s offscreen jihads.

Jude: Well, there you have it. “God’s War is better than Dune.” — Thomas.

Thomas: I didn’t say it’s better, I said it’s more true and I’ll stand by that.

Jude: No doubt a completely mundane novel by a New England literature professor about a literature professor having an affair in New England would be even more true.

Thomas: Probably, but even I can only handle so much truth at once.

Jude: And our readers can only handle so much of us at once, so we’re going to wrap up here. Hopefully we’ll be back sooner than last time with looks at Dune and Lord of the Rings adaptations.

Thomas: I mean, the entire genre is downstream of Lord of the Rings, so that’s not unreasonable.

Jude: Maybe not, but I’d say that modern fantasy has evolved quite far from the Tolkien formula. There’s also now a substantial portion that grounded in different folklore traditions than Tolkien or in dialogue with other genres like romance. Anyway, you can find generic fantasy recommendations all over the Internet. We wanted to try to give something more targeted. If you really liked Lord of the Rings—

Thomas: You should read something totally different for a while and then come back and reread it. It’s all downhill from here.

Jude: That’s not very helpful.

Thomas: I think we just have to say at the outset, if you really, really like Lord of the Rings, the truth is it’s one of a kind.

Jude: That’s true of any great book.

Thomas: But it’s, uh, extra true here. Many have tried to crib from it, but no one had anything like Tolkien’s strange combination of talents.

Jude: Aside from Tolkien being a special snowflake, our theory of popularity is that really popular pieces of art are strongly appealing in multiple ways so different people can follow different paths to appreciating it. If you go looking for something that is appealing in all the ways Lord of the Rings is and to exactly the same degree, you’ll never find it. It’s like a fingerprint. 

So instead, we’re going to try to break out some of the things that might appeal to you about Lord of the Rings and try to suggest novels that share that particular strength. Some of these will be prominent novels you’ve heard of and perhaps already read, but we’ll try to bring in some less common picks here as well.

In our first article about why Lord of the Rings is popular, we ran through many of its strengths. Probably we should start with the basics, though: it has a well-constructed plot in which people from diverse backgrounds in a secondary world work together to defeat evil. This is probably the aspect that has been most successfully copied.

Thomas: Certainly Star Wars did, right? And through that, you get everything Star Wars influenced.

Jude: Lots of people who read modern epic fantasy are reading it for plot first and foremost, so the blockbuster series you’ve probably already heard of are reasonable picks here, whether it’s Ursula K. LeGuin, George R. R. Martin, Robin Hobb, N.K. Jemisin, and so on. Each of those writers are amazing at one thing or another, but specifically for plot, I’d say Brandon Sanderson is the preeminent practitioner. His Mistborn trilogy is a good place to start.

Thomas: Just keep in mind going in that Sanderson earned his massive fanbase through great plotting…but also prodigious output. He’s a quantity over quality guy.

Jude: You’re going to make that massive fanbase hate us.

Thomas: I think even Sanderson would admit he doesn’t work hard to make each sentence into a polished jewel. And the characters are, uh, fine, but it’s not his strength either. And his video-game approach to magic—

Jude: Maybe “scientific” is a more charitable term.

Thomas: —is totally distinct from Tolkien’s vague and mystical magic. Some people love Sanderson’s rigor and some people can’t stand it.

Jude: We might do a series of articles on Sanderson at some point, so we won’t belabor this. But I think if you want a fantasy novel with a good plot, you won’t go too wrong sticking to the most well-known authors who get recommended all the time.

Now, one obvious way to get more Tolkien after reading Lord of the Rings is to just…read more Tolkien. If you haven’t read The Hobbit, it’s aimed at kids so it feels somewhat different, but it’s more hobbits and dwarves and Gandalf. And if you appreciate the deep lore and elevated language of the later parts of Lord of the Rings, well, The Silmarillion has got you covered.

Thomas: Just be aware there’s a reason we mentioned going to popular fantasy if you want plot before getting to Tolkien’s other work. The Silmarillion isn’t really a novel.

Jude: It’s a book of myths. There’s not much in the way of dialogue or even scenes, because it jumps from story to story and character to character. And while as the product of a single mind it’s much more thematically unified and consistent than, say, Greek myths, it’s a lot less so than Tolkien’s two actual novels.

Thomas: The important thing for people wanting more Tolkien to notice (since it’s intentionally obscured by publishers) is that Tolkien wrote and finished The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. That’s it, except for oddities like poems, essays, and a short story or two. The Silmarillion was assembled posthumously by his son Christopher Tolkien from extensive but contradictory drafts written at various times in his life.

Jude: Yeah, and in the last twenty years or so Christopher Tolkien has put out various short-ish stories that are sold as if they are novels. But really, for more of the Middle-earth drug, you have to tackle the The Silmarillion. It’s not quite popular enough to be a subject of our paired sequences, but maybe we’ll do a special post on the Silmarillion someday. There’s a lot of really fascinating aspects to it, but because it doesn’t have a narrative story the way Lord of the Rings does, it’s only for Tolkien die-hards.

What else? Well, for people who really do want Lord of the Rings all over again, but different, but not too different, for a while in the 80s and early 90s the fantasy genre did its best to produce this.

Thomas: And then stopped trying to do this because they clearly couldn’t.

Jude: Yes, but works from that era of the genre do have some of the qualities people might like in Lord of the Rings. Long trips, battles, dark lords, and so on. It’s been a while, but I’d say now what they didn’t have was Tolkien’s command of older forms of English, his deep affinity for landscape, his complex nostalgia, or his love of Scandinavian myth that, then and now, strikes most readers as similar but slightly alien to the folklore that directly fed into English-speaking culture. But you can still write a good story without any of those things, and using mythological traditions that are more squarely in the popular consciousness might even help in some ways.

Thomas: If these Tolkien remixes are so good, why haven’t we personally read any in, like, at least fifteen years?

Jude: We got it out of our system before that. Anyway, in sheer quantity Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time has to be considered the winner, and that series does move into some unique places after a veryTolkien-derivative first book. It’s also very long, so if you like it, well, there’s a lot of it. There are some others that are decent. Guy Gavriel Kay actually briefly worked with Christopher Tolkien on the Silmarillion before writing Fionavar Tapestry, but he wrote his best novels later in a much less Tolkienian mode. David Eddings and his wife, alas, turned out to literally be child abusers, but they’re dead so won’t benefit from people reading books like the Belgariad. It’s cheesy and manages to take Tolkien’s orcs and make them more problematic, but otherwise it’s a breezy take on epic narratives.

Those are all decent, like I said, but back in 2010 when these things were much fresher on our mind, we felt that the best Tolkien remix was Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy. Williams at nearly all times writes very long books with a very slow pace, but unlike some other authors we could name, he finishes his projects and everything ends up feeling coherent.

Thomas: Full disclosure, we remember almost nothing about this trilogy. We liked it when we read it, but it hasn’t stuck with us, so I’m not sure we should be recommending it.

Jude: We’ve read an awful lot of books. “I’ve forgotten more good books than…” sounds like the start of a boast, but it’s actually a lament. And it’s also true. And it’s especially true of the fantasy novels from this era. We don’t remember any of them, so we’re going with some thoughts we wrote down back in 2010

Thomas: It might be worth mentioning, then, that Tad Williams later wrote a massive four-book science fiction epic, Otherland, that is also very long and slow, but which we enjoyed and remember a lot better than his fantasy novels.

Jude: True, but if I’m recommending something for someone who likes Tolkien—and I am—then I’ll stick with his original fantasy trilogy as our pick over other valid choices like Jordan, Kay, and Eddings. Plus Terry Brooks and Goodkind, whose reputations were already bad enough back then that we didn’t bother reading them, so who knows, maybe they’re actually good.

Thomas: Yeah, who knows, maybe we should read some old refrigerator manuals! We haven’t read those either, and you never know, maybe they’ll be a great fantasy in the tradition of Tolkien?

Jude: Yeah, yeah. All right, well, moving on, we’ve made a big deal about the role of nostalgia in Tolkien’s work and as a component of its popularity, but this theme was mostly dropped by the fantasy genre subsequently.

Thomas: We’re not historians but my sense is that genre fantasy is a sort of colony of genre science fiction. SF fans weren’t, and aren’t, the only people to read and love Lord of the Rings, but they were the ones who mustered enough demand for publishers to create a new marketing category. Those fans loved the novelty of Tolkien’s secondary world and found something in it’s connection with nature and folklore they weren’t getting from science fiction, but they had no use for the idea that the past was somehow better than the present and, especially, that the present was better than the future.

Jude: Yeah, that was discarded almost immediately. Often people preferred to imagine societies as existing in a technological or social stasis, or even use fantasy to dramatize social and technology progress, truly the antithesis of Tolkien’s attitudes.

Thomas: That’s because the fantasy genre grew up in the 80s and 90s when the popular culture was comparatively optimistic. In the last twenty years, pop culture has taken a really negative turn. “The world is awful” everyone wants to say now even though it’s really not markedly worse than in the 90s and probably better in most respects.

Jude: Given that, you’d think Tolkienian nostalgia for the past would be coming back into fashion, but if so, I haven’t really seen the evidence of it.

Thomas: Maybe our current culture is less nostalgic and more purely negative? It simultaneously sneers at Tolkien’s glorification of the past, seeing as the past was an era of slavery and tyrannical gender roles and so on, while simultaneously maintaining everything now is terrible. Instead of saying the past was great, people today prefer to talk about how much the future is going to suck. So we just have some depressing ecological fiction about New York City being underwater or scattered bands of people living in a desertified world.

Jude: Nevertheless, I wanted to recommend a book to people who feel like Tolkien’s attitude to the past resonates with them.

Thomas: I feel like there’s tons of such people, but very few of them will admit to it, so your effort is probably wasted.

Jude: Nevertheless, I wanted to recommend a book, and came up with one: Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana. We mentioned him already because he started his authorial career by writing a trilogy with strong Tolkien and Narnia influences. Later he would write a few excellent books and a lot of decent books that were all in his own unique style of fantasy that is almost, but not quite, historical fiction. Tigana was the transition point. There’s still a lot of magic and the supernatural, but the setting is clearly derived from pre-unification Italy.

So instead of one modern nation-state, there are nine “provinces” that are politically distinct despite strong linguistic and cultural similarities with each other, and antipathy between provinces has led the region to come under the influence or even outright rule of foreign powers. Before the book begins, the son of a very powerful foreign warlord is killed in a province called “Tigana” during its conquest. Enraged, the warlord casts a powerful spell that prevents anyone born outside pre-conquest Tigana from ever hearing its name. The survivors of Tigana must live with their homeland’s name wiped not just off the map but out of the minds of everyone they meet. The story follows efforts by some Tiganan patriots to defeat the warlord and reclaim their cultural heritage.

Thomas: It’s an interesting novel because on one hand Kay really wants you to be sympathetic to this cause and the characters’ love for their home, but you know in the back of your mind that Tigana as such doesn’t have much of a future regardless. These people are passionate patriots for the equivalent of the Principality of Piedmont. I guess for people living in northern Italy today, they might still have a sense for what that means and Piedmont must have made some cultural contribution to modern Italian culture…but how valuable is this, really?

Jude: But Tigana directly engages with those feelings. Tigana can never defend itself from foreign powers alone, so they know they’ll need to create the equivalent of Italy, and yet they feel conflicted about that. Meanwhile, the warlord who curses Tigana is not some demonic figure like Sauron. He’s a human being with emotions, relationships, and goals he considers laudable. He also knows, on some level, that his curse on Tigana was immature and self-sabotaging. So whereas Tolkien’s nostalgia is largely implicit, in Tigana it is explicit, but it’s deep in the fabric of both works, and both confront the necessity of accepting that what’s past is past and we have to live in the present and find a workable path to the future.

Thomas: So what’s next?

Jude: One of the many things that distinguish Tolkien was his understanding of medieval life. Most of the fantasy genre trades in cars and guns for horses and swords, but otherwise it takes thoroughly contemporary attitudes and doesn’t try to conjure the mindset of people who lived in the past.

Thomas: Contemporary books engage with contemporary ideas and are read by contemporary readers.

Jude: Sure, that’s why it’s very rare that Tolkien deviates so strongly from that. I don’t want to overstate it; as we’ve said, the Hobbit elements of Lord of the Rings are modernist and only seem less than contemporary to us because of our distance from Tolkien himself. But Tolkien spent so much time reading old texts that he had an unusual understanding of how people used to think and act, and that translates into a setting and characters that feel both authentic and slightly alien. So I wanted to recommend something else that really gets into that headspace for those who find it interesting.

The best book I’ve found for this was actually Michael Flynn’s Eifelheim, but that’s a science fiction story (first contact with aliens by a medieval village) that is just fundamentally different than Lord of the Rings, so instead I’ll recommend Kate Elliot’s Crown of Stars series that begins with King’s Dragon.

Thomas: First Tad Williams and now this. You’re really setting out to punish anyone who likes fiction to move at even a reasonable pace.

Jude: Yes, these books are also long and slow. But I think even more than Tolkien, Kate Elliot writes a secondary world with characters who really seem to inhabit a medieval mindset. Unlike Tolkien, who completely sidesteps religion and mostly avoids politics, Elliot’s series puts both front and center while still maintaining a heavy supernatural element throughout.

Thomas is right the series is very long. In tone and theme it’s pretty consistent, so if it it doesn’t click after one book, there’s no need to keep going. But if you like it, there’s a lot of it, and she takes things to some interesting place.s

Those are my picks, so that’s it for today. Next time we’ll—

Thomas: Wait, I want to make some recommendations too.

Jude: But…you don’t like anything.

Thomas: It’s all relative. You made your recommendations based on the idea that if someone likes Lord of the Rings, you should recommend them a book that—let’s face it—is probably worse but which has some small element that’s the same. I have an alternative methodology. We don’t tell someone who likes steak to eat three meals a day of nothing but steak. You need some contrast in life. Not only might you like, say, a salad with your steak on its own terms, but a good salad also helps you appreciate the steak.

Jude: I look forward to hearing what texts you think provide the maximum contrast is from Lord of the Rings. “17 Facts About Taylor Swift (you won’t believe #11)”? Advertising copy for suntan lotion?

Thomas: I didn’t say maximum contrast. Just sticking within genre fantasy, you could fill a bookstore with books that were written by authors specifically setting out to subvert, deconstruct, or refute some aspect of Lord of the Rings. I think it’s worth picking a few of the most interesting for people to consider.

Jude: Like what?

Thomas: Let’s start with Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy.

Jude: I don’t think “grimdark” fantasy has aged well, has it?

Thomas: Maybe not, but that’s not why I’m recommending this.

Jude: I think it’s fallen far enough out of the discourse we have to explain what grimdark is for people who don’t know.

Thomas: Briefly, then, I’d say that grimdark was a reaction against the mostly bloodless fighting in Tolkien and his imitators. People die now and then, but most of the fighting has this stylized feel. In Peter Jackson’s movie adaptations of Lord of the Rings, the actors mostly just thwack orcs with nerf weapons and the extras fall over. That’s pretty true to how the books read.

The essence of grimdark was to say, no, fighting is not like that. Fighting is ugly, it’s gory, and it’s not all speeches and glory and victory. Tolkien knew that, of course, but he was writing for an audience that knew it too. Multiple generations of people had seen the horrors of war firsthand amid mass mobilization. War is farther from most of us.

Jude: That’s very charitable. I would have said that grimdark gloried in being more-violent-than-thou and rubbing the reader’s face in how “intense” and “realistic” everything is with long descriptions of blood, guts, excrement, violence, and sexual assault. It rooted its claims to authenticity in being literally disgusting.

Thomas: It’s weird that there’s such a fine line between being horrified by violence and exulting in it, but yes, a lot of fantasy fiction marketed to men from the mid-00s to the mid-10s was probably on the wrong side of the line. Abercrombie comes away looking better than most, I think. There’s a Tarantino influence there, sure, but he’s got a lot of other things on his mind besides violence and sex. That’s why I picked him, actually. George R. R. Martin famously complained that there wasn’t enough politics in Tolkien’s books, but we’ll deal with Martin some other time.

Abercrombie clearly sets out to pick apart the fundamental idealism of Tolkien, the belief that there’s good and bad, light and dark, and everyone agrees what they are. He wants us to admit the world is full of shades of gray. He does a good job making his case.

Jude: He’s wrong, at least as far as these books go, because the books would have you believe that ultimately everything happens because the people at the top are self-serving and exploitative. Taken to its proper conclusion (farther than Abercrombie does, of course) this is the logic of the paranoid conspiracy theorist who sees evil intent in everything that ever happens. Lots of the terrible things happen in world due to chance, or worse, because political leaders actually believe the ideals they preach.

Thomas: Fair enough, but readers can read this trilogy and decide for themselves. As a plus, if you like Abercrombie’s work here, he’s been remarkably consistent throughout his career. His follow-up novels are quite strong. He even wrote a good YA trilogy about post-apocalyptic vikings.

Jude: Yeah, he’s always worth reading, and that’s high praise from us.

Thomas: So if that’s a political response to Tolkien, next I want to cover a religious one with Jacqueline Carey’s two-book Sundering series. She’s better known for Kushiel’s Dart and its sequels, but here she clearly takes on Tolkien’s moral universe.

Jude: “What if Sauron was a good guy, actually?” So edgy. So brave.

Thomas: It’s a question worth asking! And while a couple different authors have done variations of this, I think Carey’s got the most interesting take. She does filter things through a somewhat more romantic lens than Tolkien, but it’s fun watching characters working for the not-actually-bad guys try to prevent kings returning, prophecies being fulfilled, and so on.

Jude: My only caution on this one is that to get the most out of it, you probably have to have read The Silmarillion, not just Lord of the Rings.

Thomas: Yeah, like I said, she goes straight for the religious assumptions behind Tolkien’s work. What is evil? What is good? The Silmarillion makes a lot of that explicit with its creation narrative.

Jude: At this point, is it still mind-bending to discover the guys who are supposed to be good are actually bad? This has been the “shocking twist” in thousands of novels, video games, TV shows, and movies at this point.

Thomas: I don’t think it’s a twist here. The twist version is that the protagonist amd the reader both assume they’re working for the good guys and discovers the truth along the way. Here, you have a Witch King-like figure named  “Tanaros Blacksword” who has abandoned his mortality to serve the supernatural lord of “Darkhaven”. He chose to do that, so if anything, he thinks he’s working for the bad guys. But it’s pretty obvious what Carey is up to, so the fun is seeing how it plays out and how she sets up her contrasts with Tolkien’s angelic Valar and his dark lords Morgoth and Sauron.

Jude: Just 4,500 ratings on Goodreads, so you’re at least delivering on my promise to recommend some comparatively obscure books. So what’s next?

Thomas: Next up is Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter. This is a book—

Jude: I can’t believe you of all people are recommending a book with an “X’s Daughter” title. You hate that crap.

Thomas: …yes, this title format is very lame. The most important thing about a woman isn’t who her parents are. But in this case it’s at least slightly redeemed by the fact the main character is not, in fact, the dragon’s daughter. It’s just a metaphor.

Anyway, the setup here is that a young girl gets kidnapped and taken to Faerie as a changeling. But instead of dancing around a faerie court, changelings in this world are put to work. In factories. Factories that build weapons for the military industrial complex. The titular “Iron Dragon” that she befriends is a dragon very much in the Tolkien tradition, a frighteningly intelligent and evil creature whose malign intellect wants to slaughter all living things. But it’s also, simultaneously, a constructed flying machine, a sort of magical jet fighter. The Fairyland factory where Jane is a child laborer constructs these demonic aircraft, binding them to the service of their buyers so they don’t just slaughter indiscriminately. The protagonist steals one and flies it away. Complications ensue. Lots and lots of complications.

Jude: This sounds suspiciously like steampunk. Does she have goggles and a big wrench?

Thomas: It’s a fantasy world that’s gone through the industrial revolution, but I’m recommending it here because I think even that quick description of the premise shows it’s deeply opposed to Tolkien’s reactionary tendencies while still using some of the same tropes.

Jude: Lots of fantasy these days is left-wing, but I should warn people that Iron Dragon’s Daughter is (unlike Tolkien, obviously) R-rated at minimum. It’s also very bleak. Not for the faint of heart. Since you’re willing to go this far and you’re trying to invert Tolkien’s politics, I’m surprised you didn’t pick China Miéville.

Thomas: Miéville is an actual communist, or at least he was, and at his best he’s even more inventive, but at all times he’s operating a lot farther from the Tolkien tradition. Swanwick says nice things about Tolkien and says he was mainly responding to the bland 80s knockoffs we talked about earlier, but I’d still say he’s responding directly at times to Tolkien while retaining some of his elements, like the dragon’s evil nature. And while it’s not always fun to read, it’s not actively unpleasant the way Mieville can be, or worse…

Jude: Worse? Why would anyone set out to read something “actively unpleasant”?

Thomas: Who knows? Some people only like comfort food, but some people like some bitterness in their food. So for people out there who want to truly go beyond the pale, I have one more recommendation.

Jude: Uh oh.

Thomas: If you want to really subvert Tolkien, you don’t go after his idealism or his politics or his notions of heroism. You attack the very idea of the existence of an escapist secondary world. You read Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

Jude: Those books are an attack on the idea that a book should ever, at any point, be enjoyable to read.

Thomas: Donaldson is one of the few authors whose prose is as carefully atypical as Tolkien’s. Like Tolkien, he picks his words in order to produce an effect on the reader. But instead of producing a foreign but euphonious aspect like Tolkien does, he wants to make the reader feel unpleasant and unhappy.

Jude: And he succeeds. Look, my sense is that these books have mercifully become obscure over the last decade or so, and if they hadn’t, they would have been deservedly canceled. But when Thomas and I were coming of age in the 90s, these deeply unpleasant books had a real following. As did Beavis and Butthead, Limp Bizkit, and Jackass. Over two decades before Me Too, readers were abandoning Lord Foul’s Bane in disgust because of the main character’s shocking behavior toward women. The books might be too obscure now to be properly canceled, but you’re going to get us canceled by recommending them.

Thomas: There’s no way to sugarcoat this. At the very beginning of the first book, the protagonist rapes a woman. But—

Jude: How can there be a “but”?

Thomas: It’s not supposed to be a good thing! It’s supposed to be shocking and terrible. The guilt plagues the protagonist throughout the series. I’m not sure if I’d go so far as say the book centers the victim’s perspective—

Jude: Clearly it doesn’t. She’s not the protagonist.

Thomas: But it’s a weird situation, because she’s a vastly more sympathetic character than the protagonist. Most importantly, though, this serves an important artistic purpose. The central theme of the series, the thing that is more genuinely transgressive than thirty “grimdark” novels put together, is the rejection of reality. Thomas Covenant is a man who, for medical reasons, prides himself on his ability to stay in touch with reality at all times (he has leprosy and must visually monitor his numb extremities). He’s transported, Narnia-style, to an idyllic fantasy land where everything is wonderful, his leprosy is cured, and he has a heroic destiny that would normally makes everyone like him. His very sensible reaction is to think it’s a dream, a hallucination, a psychotic break. He concludes he’s trapped in a fake, imagined world and he must escape. And since it’s not real, nothing he does matters.

The reader’s sympathies are with the other characters. It’s a fantasy novel, so of course it’s not a dream! But…in one sense it really is fake: it’s just a story. No one actually suffers from what he does at the beginning of the book.

Jude: The reader suffers.

Thomas: Maybe so. But this is just a big list of recommendations, we definitely don’t have time to untangle the philosophy behind all of this. Most people aren’t going to read these books anyway. It’s been nearly fifty years since Donaldson’s first book was published and I say it’s still the preeminent rejection of Tolkien.

Jude: We reread a lot of books, don’t we?

Thomas: Yes.

Jude: We read this, what, at least twenty years ago?

Thomas: Yeah.

Jude: Have we reread it since then?

Thomas: Hell no.

Jude: I rest my case. Readers should keep your “endorsement” in mind.

Thomas: The Covenant books will challenge you. We still remember them after all these years because they grapple with problems that most fantasy doesn’t even touch.

Jude: All right, well, on that note, let’s get out of here before the mob finds their pitchforks. Next time we’ll talk about recommendations for people who like Dune.

Jude: Having talked about the role of women—or lack thereof—in Lord of the Rings last time, we’re back to consider the same subject for Dune.

Thomas: Let the mansplaining…continue.

Jude: So right at the outset, I think we can say that women figure prominently in this story in a way they simply don’t in Lord of the Rings. I certainly haven’t done a major survey of science fiction circa 1965 but I strongly suspect Dune was way ahead of its time in this respect.

Thomas: As I’m sure we’ll get to soon, Frank Herbert appears to be just as much of a gender essentialist as we assume J.R.R. Tolkien was. The soldiers in Dune are all men, for example. But this is fundamentally a book about political intrigue and Herbert is wise enough to realize that throughout history and certainly in the medieval contexts that very loosely inspired the book’s politics, women played important roles even if they weren’t Dukes or Barons.

Jude: I don’t know, Dune is a story of adventure and revenge. It would be easy to write it like Treasure Island and basically have only male characters.

Thomas: I’m just saying that Lord of the Rings is at some level a book about going on a really long camping trip. It’s been a long time since I read Treasure Island but I recall a lot of sailing being involved. Today we think of these as pretty much unisex activities, but in Tolkien and Herbert’s time, I’d argue going on long, adventurous journeys was something one did with the boys. Whereas with Dune, despite its name, nearly all of its important scenes take place inside. The book frequently skips over action in its haste to reach the next meeting.

Jude: When Jessica and Paul first join Stilgar’s band in the desert, I’m not exactly sure what the Fremen were doing out there so far from Sietch Tabr, but it was a long camping trip and the band has both men and women. Everyone’s armed, too.

Thomas: Yeah, I’m not sure Herbert really thought that through. Would a society where high-status women like Chani are armed and trooping around in mixed company also be a society where killing someone in a duel results in being awarded his wife?

Jude: I think a more important observation here is that whatever the details of individuals on the ground, Dune is very concerned with big political factions and there is a distinctive organization that is entirely run by women, the Bene Gesserit.

Thomas: I guess we can call that representation. There are a half-dozen factions or so ranging from the Emperor, the nobles, the Spacing Guild, and some groups like the Bene Tleilax that don’t really figure until the sequels. All the other factions appear male-dominated. Men being in charge is the default and the Bene Gesserit are the exception.

Jude: I wasn’t saying this is something someone would write in 2024, just that the author is thinking about women more than Tolkien and a lot of their contemporaries. The Bene Gesserit isn’t a sewing circle, it’s a hugely important institution that appears to serve a similar role to the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. Historically, nobles were often more concerned with fighting each other and doing awful things to peasants, and it was the Church that was at least somewhat more attentive to what we would call “human rights” and tried to restrain the nobility with ideas like the Peace of God.

Religion is deemphasized in Dune and the Bene Gesserit seem like a secular institution, but their efforts across thousands of years to produce the Kwisatz Haderach is a long-term project to benefit humanity that often operates at the expense of short-term benefits to local nobility. And although eugenics no longer seem progressive to us today, I’d argue that the Bene Gesserit are in many ways the most sympathetic faction.

Thomas: It’s funny you compare them to the Catholic Church. Characters who don’t like the Bene Gesserit call them witches, and although that’s supposed to be a slur, one can’t help but notice Herbert has drawn from a bunch of misogynist stereotypes: women with unholy powers, conspiring with each other in secret groups to work against the interests of the men of their society and even their husbands, twisting sex and procreation for their own ends, standing in the shadows behind theoretically powerful men and acting as puppeteer. These are fears men have had about women for all of human history.

Jude: But don’t you think the text approves of this behavior? Sure, they are schemers, but everyone in Dune is scheming. The Bene Gesserit are smart, capable, and maybe most importantly, they are cool. They have what would otherwise be called magic powers, but they don’t get them by sleeping with the devil, they get them through scientific study and rigorous mental disciplines. Science fiction authors and readers of this era thought “psi” powers might really be something it was possible to cultivate, but somehow in most other words it is men who happen to cultivate them. 

Thomas: The Bene Gesserit are cool, but everything in Dune is cool. If anything, they are overpowered. They seem like the most competent faction in the book, and Jessica and Paul’s Bene Gesserit martial arts make them better fighters than the Fremen even though the Fremen are supposed to be the universe’s best fighters. But despite all these advantages, they never exercise power directly. They have to influence the world through the role of wives, like Jessica, and servants, like the Reverend Mother’s work for the Emperor as a “truth-sayer”. Gurney Halleck and Thufir Hawaii suspect and eventually believe that Jessica could betray Leto to the Harkonnens, but the thought she would just take over the Atreides to rule in her own stead, or on behalf of the Bene Gesserit, never occurs to them. It’s apparently unthinkable that women could hold power themselves.

Jude: Maybe this is a way in which the historical sources are leaking into the fiction in ways that no longer make sense. Herbert is modeling his space feudalism culture after real feudalism, a time when women influenced dukes and emperors as wives and servants but didn’t rule directly. And he didn’t reexamine that piece of it after powering up the Bene Gesserit with their space opera martial arts and psi powers.

Thomas: Is that really true historically? It might have been rare but it wasn’t unthinkable for a woman to rule in her own name, like Queen Elizabeth. And failing that, they could rule as regent for a son too young to take the throne. I think this is less about sloppy worldbuilding and more about Herbert’s belief that women are fundamentally different from men. Today our culture argues about this mostly in respect to sports, but in Herbert’s day much more significant differences were considered plausible.

Jude: Yes, though it’s important to note these hypothesized differences weren’t always ways of saying women were inferior. Early feminists thought that women were literally kinder and gentler and thus if women were in charge of countries, there would be no wars or oppression. I suppose this is one way in which Dune has become quite dated: Herbert builds this antique gender essentialism directly into the metaphysics of the story. The Bene Gesserit's savior, the Kwisatz Haderach, has to be male because there’s a place in every woman’s mind where she can’t go…but a man can?

Thomas: Herbert tries to make it sound mystical but these days it sounds almost unhinged:

There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed…These things are so ancient within us…that they’re ground into each separate cell of our bodies…It’s as easy to be overwhelmed by giving as by taking.

Each separate cell? What does he think happens when a woman gets a man’s kidney transplanted? Or vice versa?

Jude: Maybe that was after—

Thomas: No, I looked it up, the first kidney transplant was in 1954. But I think that quote, alas, shows that the Kwisatz Haderach having to be male is a matter of perhaps unconscious sexism on the part of the author. It doesn’t make sense based on the book’s own metaphysics. Okay, men and women are super different, fine. So why can’t a woman take on a bit of maleness and become the Kwisatz Haderach that way? Why does it have to be a man doing the reverse? If it were at all possible to have a female Kwisatz Haderach, the Bene Gesserit would definitely prefer that option.

Jude: Maybe the Bene Gesserit have internalized the patriarchy. Or maybe they could make a female Kwisatz Haderach, but society wouldn’t accept that person as Emperor, so they need a man.

Thomas: The way that quote is written strongly suggests transsexuality to us today, or at least that the Kwisatz Haderach is a nonbinary person, but obviously Paul’s masculinity is never challenged or complicated in any way.

Jude: As odd and perhaps inconsistent as it is, at least Herbert is engaging with this. It’s also worth noting that he ends the book on a conversation between Jessica and Chani about…well, partly about Paul, so I guess it’s not passing the Bechdel test, but it really centers their experience in a surprising way: “History will call us wives.” That’s the last line of the book!

Thomas: I guess Dune fans will consider this blasphemy, but sorry, this is just a bad way to end the book. It’s great that Herbert is paying attention to Jessica and Chani’s lived experience, and had he wanted to make it a major theme of the story, he could have. But it’s not even the most important thing going on with these characters, much less the overall story, so what is it doing being given such emphasis? Imagine how much harder this line would have hit had it been about the jihad. “History will call us righteous.” Not only would that put an exclamation point on the book’s central preoccupation, it would tie in to the Princess Irulan chapter headings. Damn right history will call us righteous, we’re going to be writing the history! Instead, the person we see writing the history in this book is the person who is probably least sympathetic to Jessica and especially Chani.

Jude: Let the record show that I, at least, am not arrogant enough to think I can improve on Frank Herbert’s masterpiece. I think that last conversation reminds us of the personal costs to politics and alludes to the distinction between truth and history.

Thomas: But it actually asserts that history will be more correct than contemporary understanding! This, from a book that assumes this period will be documented via propaganda!

Jude: Speaking of propaganda, since we talked about three of the most notable female characters from Lord of the Rings, let’s look at the three major female characters from Dune. And I think we should start with Princess Irulan.

Thomas: The one who is in, like, one scene?

Jude: Functionally, she’s the Arwen of this story. She’s a distant and seemingly unattainable princess who the hero gets the marry at the end because of his great victory. We get to know Arwen—slightly—from an appendix, but Irulan gets quoted ahead of each chapter, so she has a strong presence throughout the story.

Thomas: Yeah, what a strong character. None of these quotes from her relate to herself. And it’s debatable whether she makes any choices of her own. She meekly does what her father wants. Or maybe what the Bene Gesserit want? I’m not even sure, that’s how little there is to work with here.

Jude: I didn’t mean she was strong, just that a strong impression is left on the reader. Whereas I suspect many people finish reading Lord of the Rings (and perhaps even watching the movies) without having a clear idea of who Arwen is.

And although she doesn’t actually play a large role in the story, Herbert uses Irulan to subvert the trope of the trophy princess. Yes, Paul marries her when he wins, but he doesn’t want this trophy and wishes he could avoid it. For some reason Herbert liked this idea so much he used it twice in the same book, first with Jamis’ wife Harrah and then with Irulan, and in each of these situations he makes sure to take note of what the women involved think and feel about it.

Thomas: I’ll give him credit for paying attention to them at all—not a given in 1965—but unfortunately I think he’s much more interested in Paul than he is in any of the women. He’s just using two different female characters to try to make his male hero look better. Paul, like nearly all Dune readers, is monogamous and stays loyal to Chani despite these various temptations.

Jude: In our second Dune article you were keen to emphasis that Chani herself is basically a princess.

Thomas: I was, yes, but the text doesn’t. She’s Paul’s age and they meet cute out in the desert, so it’s a love that feels natural and pure compared to Paul’s essentially arranged marriages to Harrah and Irulan.

Jude: I think Herbert wants to dramatize the tension between one’s role in society and the chaotic attachments of interpersonal love. Paul/Chani and Leto/Jessica are both love matches and it’s mildly tragic that neither can become a marriage. Western culture has a strong individualist streak so this is a common theme, but instead of railing against these strictures, Herbert portrays people as being not trapped per se but able to maneuver within their social framework and find ways to express themselves in it.

Thomas: The men express themselves, maybe, but it doesn’t seem like any of the women are happy with these arrangements.

Jude: Irulan gets to express herself plenty in her books. And we are told she likes books.

Thomas: Usually when a book describes a character as bookish the reader—probably quite “bookish” themselves after all—is supposed to consider this a compliment even if the other characters don’t. But in Herbert’s swaggering universe of knife-fighting men and sorceress women, Irulan is an annoying geek and we’re supposed to root for Paul and Chani to stuff her into a locker.

Jude: She’s the daughter of Paul’s ultimate enemy, so naturally she’s positioned as a villain. The book actually ends right as her story is getting interesting, I admit, but this does get explored more in Dune: Messiah.

Thomas: We’re not covering the sequels, but that could have been much more interesting. Instead, she continues being a villain, conveniently becomes remorseful when she’s finally caught after years of bad behavior, and then becomes a governess. It’s a very lame way to resolve a really interesting setup.

Jude: You’re right, we’re trying to avoid discussing the sequels, so let’s move on to the second woman of the three, Chani.

Thomas: She is also the Arwen of this story. In this case I don’t think more is better.

Jude: She’s not a trophy! Their relationship starts halfway through the book.

Thomas: She’s the “good job impressing the Fremen” trophy instead of the “you won the book” trophy, but otherwise I think it’s the way to describe what happens. Like the princes and princesses at the end of fairy tales, they fall in love instantly and conveniently moments after meeting. There’s very little evolution to their relationship, nor is there much of a sense that Chani is bringing much with her to this combination. Paul just takes her by the arm and that’s that.

Jude: Backing up, maybe I’m grading on a curve but I think the book deserves some credit here. She is literally Paul’s dream girl but when they meet, she turns out to be a tough Fremen woman. I’d also argue that even though technically she is kind of a princess, the book portrays her as a girl-next-door sort of love interest rather an an ideal woman.

Thomas: Sorry, I don’t think you get many feminism points for using tropes like “girl-next-door”. Even the name of that idea centers the man.

Jude: How about this, then: whereas Tolkien feels it necessary to have various other characters validate that Arwen is extremely hot, implicitly assigning her worth through her appearance, I don’t think anyone ever comments on Chani’s looks.

Thomas: She’s repeatedly described as “elfin”. For all we know, Herbert literally had Arwen in mind when he was writing this.

Jude: But does “elfin” even mean someone is attractive? I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone use this word in real life.

Thomas: I doubt many people have strong associations with it now, but I suspect that, to Herbert, it strongly suggested “smoking hot”.

Jude: Let’s look at the dictionary.

(with reference to a person) small and delicate, typically with an attractively mischievous or strange charm.

Thomas: There you go. Hot, but exotically hot. Doubly problematic.

Jude: My original point is that no one makes any remarks about this, so you have to admit that it’s much less emphasized than in Lord of the Rings, which already was pretty light on the male gaze.

Thomas: Okay, but Chani is nevertheless emblematic of what people used to complain about when they talked about a lack of “strong female characters”. Sure, she is a tough desert woman who can probably fight a little bit, so the text respects her more than, say, Irulan. But as we just said, she instantly falls in love with Paul and afterward she doesn’t do anything or even feel like a real character. Arwen at least chooses Aragorn over her family and friends. It’s only a single choice and it’s relegated to an appendix, but it’s at least a big, conflicted decision that she gets to make! Chani just has kids and mostly stays off screen.

Jude: At least she isn’t “put into a refrigerator” at the end to motivate Paul.

Thomas: No, but she’s had a daughter by that point so the book still uses a female character for that, even Alia’s hostage situation is a bit odd and doesn’t seem to impact Paul’s choices much.

Jude: Alia literally liberates herself. What could be more feminist than that?

Thomas: I know you’re kidding, but I will give credit where it’s due: “St. Alia of the Knife” is an extremely cool name. But it’s fortunate we’re not covering the sequels, because her character gets the rawest of raw deals. Dune is kind of ambiguous but seems to lean toward Alia being persecuted for being too smart—a sure way to make a character sympathetic to SF readers—and that the Fremen women and Bene Gesserit who object to her existence seem like they are being needlessly superstitious. Then, in the sequels, it’s like: oops, sorry Alia, the conventional wisdom was, in fact, totally right. You are an abomination who is better off dead than alive! Sure wish you had been strangled at birth so you wouldn’t cause problems for other people!

Jude: She’s trapped by destiny, but so is Paul. In fact, you could argue that Paul doesn’t have any more agency than Chani, Alia, or Irulan.

Thomas: You could, but come on, philosophy aside, it’s obvious that he has more apparent agency than any of them. And Alia is on a whole other level: the sequels would have us believe her entire existence is massively negative in value. The text’s objective statements about her are pretty much the worst things someone suffering from major depression might think—mistakenly!—about themselves.

Jude: If you’re going to start dropping hot takes about the sequels, are you going to move on and tell us what you think about the Fish Speakers? What about the Honored Matres?

Thomas: No, because any readers who love the later sequels probably understand them better than I do, and no one else will have any idea what we’re talking about. Let’s get back on topic. Where were we?

Jude: We talked about Irulan and Chani, but we’ve been saving the most important female character for last. Jessica plays a huge role in the story. In a book with a lot of head-hopping, she’s probably the second most common perspective we see besides Paul’s. She’s a wife and a mother, but she has her own desires, dreams, and abilities distinct from her husband and son. And whereas most male heroes leave behind their parents after chapter one, Jessica is part of the story throughout. It sounds odd to say about someone with, when you stop to think about it, over-the-top magic powers, but she is also probably the most realistic character in the novel because she has a lot of understandable but conflicting goals that she must try to navigate.

Thomas: That’s all true, and you also have to once again underline the fact that this was all quite exceptional for a 1965 science fiction novel, so that’s very much to Frank Herbert’s credit.

Jude: Great! Glad we agree.

Thomas: …but it’s a shame she doesn’t get to do anything. That keeps her from getting Strong Female Character status.

Jude: I don’t think that’s fair. She wins the trust of the Fremen housekeeper Mapes, her intervention is crucial to saving Paul and herself in the desert, and then she insinuates herself into the Fremen’s female religious institutions to help with Paul’s project.

Thomas: Yeah, she helps Paul, sure. No feminist points for that, sorry.

Jude: It’s what she wants to do!

Thomas: The text puts her in a position where everything she does is helping a man. First Leto, then Paul. Of course she benefits indirectly from their success, but she doesn’t get to do anything that is purely for her. She doesn’t even seem to want anything for herself, since her conflicted feelings are mostly about whether the family as a whole should try to escape, initially “with the family atomics” and then later she and Paul sneaking offworld.

Jude: Only a cartoon feminism would criticize a woman for valuing her family. You could say everything Paul does is for the Atreides honor too!

Thomas: People can make up their minds about whether they think it’s a big deal or not, I’m just noting it. I think it’s more of a shame that she is put in a position where things just happen to her while she frets: Paul is tested, establishing the palace on Arrakis, being taken into the desert by the Harkonnen, watching Paul become a religious leader: for all her intelligence and ability, she spends the entire novel being anxious and strictly reactive. Paul gets to make all the choices.

Jude: Well, he is the protagonist. And Herbert explicitly tries to depict Paul “becoming a man” not just through coming of age rituals but also through his steadily diminishing reliance on his parents. That is something that really happens with children and I think it’s a more humane sort of story as a result than the typical adventure formula where the protagonist’s parents are killed or they’re an orphan in the first place.

Thomas: Those stories clear out the parental figures for a reason, though. Dramatically, it feels wrong for Jessica to just sit around the Fremen sietch in the second half of the story worrying about Paul but—as far as we can tell—unable to do much of anything. In the first half of the book, in spite of my complaints, the book really does paint her as a very smart and capable person, so it’s hard to accept that she doesn’t have more to offer Paul’s project in the later parts of the book.

Jude: Yes, that’s the cold logic of storytelling. Supposedly Obi-Wan wasn’t originally supposed to die in Star Wars, but George Lucas noticed he didn’t have anything to do in the last third of the movie, so he changed it so that he died before that point. I suppose you think that Jessica should have died during the escape to better “activate” Paul. This is why I called this “humane”. Instead of killing Jessica the moment she isn’t one hundred percent needed by the story, Herbert allows her to continue to be a lesser influence on Paul’s life, just like most parents are in real people’s lives.

Thomas: Yes, Dune is very realistic, what with the sandworms and the faster than light travel.

Jude: That stuff is just set dressing, though. Human feelings and relationships are the most important part of stories and their value comes from being relatable. That’s why far future science fiction like Dune still imagines people whose inner lives are very similar to ours. You could write an SF novel about twelve-gendered aliens who don’t experience “love” or “fear” but instead “glorp” and “juxood”. And I suppose a few brave authors have tried. But that ends up being a bloodless intellectual exercise instead of a story people want to read.

Thomas: You know, Frank Herbert doesn’t give a name to the mental region that women inexplicably can’t look into, which leads to some unfortunate dialogue, like when Paul has to shout triumphantly: “Try looking into that place where you dare not look!” Clearly it would be a better book if he was yelling, “Try looking into your juxood! You'll find me there, staring out at you!”

Jude: Okay, well, it’s also worth saying that Frank Herbert paid a lot of attention to sociology, a lot more than most authors, so perhaps he felt “realism” demanded that Jessica be present because Paul needed someone who could help him by taking over the women’s side of the society. For good or for bad, the book tends to assign men and women to different spheres, not just amongst the Fremen but in the Great Houses as well. Only by working together can Paul and Jessica lead all of the Fremen.

Thomas: That’s cool and might even be what Herbert had in mind, but I don’t know, it’s not really on the page, is it? At various points the book weakly gestures at Paul slowly taking over, but it’s not very interested in the process by which the Fremen are coopted. Except for the Jamis fight, it doesn’t even really depict it as contingent. Like everyone, the Fremen are prisoners of fate: the Bene Gesserit gave them an exploitable religion, so now they’re screwed. So the book spends nearly all of its time on Paul going through his coming of age rituals and worrying about the coming jihad.

That said, I don’t think Jessica would be needed even if the book wanted to better dramatize the Fremen takeover. If Jessica died in the escape, Chani could take on that role and get a lot more space in the narrative as a result. It would be harder for her since she’s a young woman and doesn’t have Bene Gesserit magic powers, but hey, that gives her a bigger challenge to surmount.

Jude: That would be interesting, but I think Jessica serves as an outsider’s perspective. She actually does that throughout because she’s still something of an outsider amongst the Atreides, so we see their strengths and failings through her eyes, then we see the Fremen as both strange and relatable through her in the second half. And throughout she’s an outside view of Paul, of course. Chani doesn’t know Paul before he comes to the desert, so we need Jessica to help us see how he’s being changed.

Thomas: I suppose, but, just saying, Gurney Halleck is yet another character who doesn’t have a whole lot to do once he comes back. If Jessica wasn’t in the second half, he can provide that perspective on both Paul and the Fremen.

Jude: When you start trying to rewrite a famous masterpiece, that’s a sure sign we’ve got to hurry and wrap up before you really piss off all the fans with your blasphemy.

Thomas: What’s up next?

Jude: We’ve still got to figure that out. Maybe we’ll do some recommended reading pieces for Dune and Lord of the Rings, but at some point here we also should really talk about the adaptations. People want us to do not just the “major” ones but things like the Dune miniseries and the animated Tolkien stuff. Are you excited to watch some singing orcs?

Thomas: I’m feeling massive amounts of glorp.

Thomas: So this week, someone had the brilliant idea that what the Internet needs is two men explaining female characters in Lord of the Rings to you. Maybe I should say two more men, because there’s already a massive Wikipedia article devoted to summarizing the many things various critics and “Tolkien scholars” have said.

Jude: Just to clarify, some of those people it quotes are women.

Thomas: Great. I’m just saying, it’s always hard to say something new about Lord of the Rings, but surely this is our toughest assignment yet

Jude: Those concerns are easily put to rest by the simple strategy, one we always follow in any case, of not bothering to read most of what has already been said. I doubt our readers have either, after all. Now if they really have read everything already said, well, they clearly have an insatiable appetite for this so they’ll enjoy yet another article. So we can’t lose!

Thomas: Famous last words

Jude: Let’s start by establishing some facts about what we’re up against here. Lord of the Rings is kind of famously a story by a dude, about dudes. There are nine people in the fellowship of the ring and they’re all men, for example. I thought we should start with some numbers, but there’s lots and lots of named characters that essentially don’t matter. That’s true even if you just restrict it to characters with dialogue.

So how many important characters are there, and how many are women? I pulled up the Wikipedia category “The Lord of the Rings characters” and am going to list all the characters that have their own independent Wikipedia page. Note this the real English Wikipedia, not one of the many Tolkien fan wikis.

There are 30 such characters. Of those, 25 of them are men and 5 of them are women, about 17%. Not terrible, I’d say! Could have been worse. To be honest I was expecting worse.

Thomas: I still say it’s worse. Are there really five female characters with their own pages? There are really only three important female characters. Don’t tell me Rosie Cotton has her own page.

Jude: Don’t be ridiculous, she doesn’t.

Thomas: Then who are they?

Jude: Very notable characters. Arwen, Galadriel, and Eowyn, for example.

Thomas: Yes, those were the three I mentioned earlier. So if not Rosie, who else is on your list? Lobelia Sackville-Baggins? Ioreth the nurse?

Jude: No, those are also silly. We’re talking important characters here. So another one is…ahem…Goldberry.

Thomas: You’re kidding me! Goldberry has her own Wikipedia page? That’s incredibly stupid.

Jude: What, you’d rather we shove her into a subsection of Tom Bombadil’s page? This is the twenty-first century, the post-Me Too era.

Thomas: This is clearly a double-standard. Or does Celeborn also get his own page?

Jude: Uh, no, he’s a redirect to Galadriel.

Thomas: I knew it.

Jude: You were complaining we weren’t going to say anything new, and here you are discovering that men are the underrepresented characters in Lord of the Rings.

Thomas: Celeborn’s representation in Lord of the Rings is fine, this is about Wikipedia. Which we’re not here to discuss, I know, but it’s just funny. Celeborn and Goldberry seem to me like equally unimportant characters. But wait, you said five female characters. Who is the fifth?

Jude: Shelob.

Thomas: That’s even worse. Shelob is a giant spider. She doesn’t count towards female representation

Jude: Why not?

Thomas: Because…because…she’s not a human being. A teenage girl reading Lord of the Rings doesn’t look at Shelob and see someone they can relate to.

Jude: Why not?

Thomas: Because…because a teenage girl isn’t a monstrous spider and can’t ever become one?

Jude: A teenage boy can’t become a walking tree, but Treebeard was on my list of male characters.

Thomas: Would the many people who have criticized the lack of women in Lord of the Rings be satisfied if you put out a slightly revised version with “who was female” appended to every occurrence of a horse?

Jude: Probably not, but Shelob is a much more powerful and impressive character than, say, Hasufel, the horse Eomer gives to Aragorn.

Thomas: Shelob is also a carnivorous monster born of a primordial evil that presumably was twisted by the story’s Satan analogue. She’s basically Satan’s grandchild. Grandspider. Or something.

Jude: Female representation doesn’t have to be limited to good characters. In fact, it shouldn’t be. Sauron is male, as is the Witch-King and Smaug in the Hobbit. Should all villains be male? It’s beneficial for representation that Shelob is female.

Thomas: Maybe I’d better see your list of male characters with Wikipedia pages to make sure it’s not full of absurdities like Bill the Pony or the spoon from Frodo’s drinking song.

Jude: Sure, here they are: Aragorn, Bilbo, Frodo, Tom Bombadil, Boromir, Merry, Denethor, Elendil, Elrond, Eomer, Faramir, Samwise Gamgee, Gandalf, Gimli, Glorfindel, Gollum, Grima Wormtongue, Isildur, Legolas, Radagast, Saruman, Theoden, Pippin, Treebeard, Witch-king of Angmar.

A very reasonable list, if I don’t say so myself. So I think this helps—

Thomas: Hold it, Sauron isn’t on that list! And I just checked and he does, in fact, have his own Wikipedia page.

Jude: For some reason it’s not in the category. Don’t complain to me, take it up with the bureaucrats of Wikipedia. I admit this method isn’t perfect, but I think it helps demonstrate that female representation is actually a pretty complex thing that few people think rigorously about.

Thomas: “There are very few female characters in Lord of the Rings” isn’t hard to express, though.

Jude: But why should we care? It might be a problem if most books didn’t have many female characters, but that’s something that—if we decided it was an issue—should be addressed at an industry level, not at the level of any one individual work. Is it a problem that the important characters in the Aubrey and Maturin series are all male? Or so I assume. I confess I’ve only read one of them, but the 2003 film adaptation is famously a movie with no female characters whatsoever.

Thomas: That’s a historical fiction series that takes place on sailing ships two hundred years ago. As a matter of history, those ships were crewed almost exclusively by men, so no, it’s not an issue if that’s reflected in a story about them. But Lord of the Rings isn’t historical fiction. It’s completely made up. You can’t say, “Well, historically speaking, nearly all jewelry-related adventure groups were comprised of male creatures.” Tolkien is writing loosely in traditions of folklore, but very, very loosely. So it’s reasonable to ask: in this fantasy, in which anything was possible, why are there so few women? Surely women’s lives and their interactions with men are, separately or in combination, extremely important components of the human experience?

Jude: I don’t think we’re going to get very far with “why”, though for those interested, I think I can gesture at an answer: Tolkien met Edith Bratt at age 16, married her at age 24, and seems to have been happily married for the next forty-seven years until Edith died two years before he did. There were a few bumps in their initial courtship, but all in all, romance and love and marriage were easy matters in his life compared to the horrors he saw firsthand in the first World War or the fear he must have felt staying home during the second World War while one of his sons fought in France and Germany.

But no one really cares about “why”. The reason this has been so hotly debated is that there’s a kind of value judgment beneath it. Some contemporary critics said the lack of women and, maybe more importantly for them, sexuality made Lord of the Rings fundamentally childish. But every work of art need not address all aspects of humanity to be “adult” or interesting to adults. Think of all the mindless Hollywood action movies that shoehorn in an incredibly underbaked “romance” just to check that box. Are they more “adult” than Lord of the Rings?

Thomas: Hollywood romances are juvenile, yes, but they do it because they think it makes more people come to the movie.

Jude: Well, plenty of people have bought Lord of the Rings and plenty more have seen the movies, so there’s no problems there.

Thomas: I think we can dispense with those old critics. The uncomfortable feeling about it today stems from the sense that there’s something unhealthy in the lack of female characters. It sets off people’s misogyny radars. A weird decision must come from a weird person.

Jude: That’s a very narrow-minded way to approach art. Great artists are all weird people. Great art is itself weird. By definition, a normal person produces art that’s mediocre at best and probably flat-out bad.

Have you ever noticed there are very few parent/child relationships in Lord of the Rings? There’s Denethor with Boromir and Faramir, of course, and then there’s a couple characters who technically are parent and child but who never interact in that way, like Gimli and Gloin or Legolas and Thranduil, but Frodo and Eomer are orphans, Aragorn’s mother lives for much of his life but is basically not mentioned, and characters like Gandalf and Treebeard that, so far as we can tell, literally have no parents. We could ask why and once again, speculate based on Tolkien’s biography: his father died when he was three years old and his mother died when he was twelve. It’s something unusual about him that manifests in his fiction. But so what?

Thomas: People aren’t worried about the oppression of orphans. Maybe they should be, actually! But there’s not an awareness of systemic discrimination, prejudice, and stereotyping of orphans that there has been with women. In particular, many believe that girls are harmed—or at the very least, were harmed in the past—by growing up without good fictional role models. As white men we can’t really relate to this firsthand, but there’s lots of testimony from people about what a difference it made when they finally found an adventure story, fantasy story, movie, or whatever, where they felt a hero or heroine represented them in some way by sharing their gender, race, sexual orientation, and so on.

Jude: Maybe this is a good time to shift gears and look individually at the three major female characters of Lord of the Rings. Obviously someone wanting to see the exact image of a liberated woman of 2024 will be definitely be disappointed by what they find in a book written by a middle-aged male professor in the 1940s and 1950s, but I think there’s more good than bad here.

Thomas: So are we starting with Goldberry or Shelob?

Jude: We’re starting with Arwen. Her role in the story perhaps mirrors that of female characters in the story more generally: she seems like she ought to be a central character but there’s not nearly as much of her in the story as you’d expect. Frodo sees her at a dinner in Rivendell, then she shows up at the end after the victory to marry Aragorn, something that’s a much bigger deal than it sounds like because she’s half-Elven and by marrying Aragorn, she turns out to be metaphysically renouncing her immortality and choosing to die like a mortal.

Thomas: I’d put it differently. She sits safely at home thoughout the story, sews Aragorn a “have fun storming the castle” banner, then marries him after it’s all over like she’s a prize on the top shelf at Chuck-E-Cheese that he’s redeeming after playing skee-ball for hours.

Jude: That banner plays a key role in one of the book’s most dramatic scenes…but yes. To read the story of their courtship and the clear explanation of Arwen’s sacrifice you have to read the appendices.

Thomas: Yeah, appendix A part (v), squeezed in after a genealogy of Aragorn and before the list of the kings of Rohan.

Jude: Tolkien did say it was the most important part of the appendices and insisted it be included when a Swedish publisher was going to drop all of them (and did drop all the others).

Thomas: But if it’s so important, why is it not in the text itself?

Jude: Tolkien said something to the effect that he couldn’t make it work structurally. I’m not sure if he meant the way the story is told by Hobbits or the timeframe of it.

Thomas: Sounds like he didn’t try hard enough. You know, I do like the idea of having Aragorn and Arwen meet, grow to love each other, get married, and go on a honeymoon to Ithilien or something, but all with Pippin standing around awkwardly at a polite distance, wishing he was somewhere else but forced to be there by the author.

Jude: As we’ve discussed previously, Tolkien felt the main theme of Lord of the Rings was death, something that doesn’t really come through clearly for most readers. That’s why he felt this story was important. And as far as Hobbit mediation, the appendix is written in a very elevated style. Elendil, for example, tells Aragorn he “shall neither have wife, nor bind any woman to you in troth”. I think Tolkien felt this story was too much a matter of legend to be told in the modernist style of the Hobbit portions of the main text.

Thomas: Maybe so, but he also elevates his style a great deal in sections of Return of the King when the Hobbits aren’t around. I think he just didn’t want to put this story in the main text and don’t really accept any of his justifications, even if he believed them himself. Somewhere deep down, he knew this shouldn’t be there.

People will say it gives Aragorn “motivation”, but this does nothing but cheapen Aragorn’s character. Is he only fighting against the forces of demonic evil because Elrond won’t let him marry Arwen unless he wins and becomes a great king? That’s a lot less heroic than the image of Aragorn we are consistently given in the text, the humble man who fights in the shadows to protect townspeople who scorn him.

Also, the relationship is fundamentally unequal. Both because Arwen is about 2,700 years old and Aragorn is just a very young-looking 87, but also Arwen is making this huge sacrifice for the relationship, leaving an immortal future spent with her family and friends for a hundred years of marriage to Aragorn. Whereas Aragorn is apparently marrying one of the hottest people on the planet. Good for him, but is that heroic?

Jude: Once again there’s a clear biographical analogy for all this. Tolkien met his future wife Edith when he was 16 and she was 19. He was Cathloic and she was Protestant. Tolkien’s guardian disapproved of their relationship and forbid any contact until Tolkien was 21. Tolkien waited, re-established contact, and soon they were engaged. The prospect of Edith converting to Catholicism caused her own guardian to throw her out of the house. They were engaged in 1913 but not married until 1916, when Tolkien was about to go to fight in France and it seemed nearly certain he would die.

All these facts are paralleled in Aragorn and Arwen’s story. Edith was three years older, not thousands of years, and she seemed to be choosing widowhood rather than death by marrying a young officer, but this must have all been deeply resonant for Tolkien himself. He probably knew on some level this wouldn’t have the same emotional power for many his readers, but he couldn’t bear to remove it, so he stashed it in the appendices.

When you look at it that way, I think it’s kind of sweet that he couldn’t resist putting his wife into the story.

Thomas: Maybe so, but previously we were talking about what message a female character sends to the hundreds of thousands—actually, probably millions—of girls and women who read Lord of the Rings. Arwen’s message seems to be: women should stay home and look pretty while men go out in the world and take care of the important things. If you get bored, try sewing something to help inspire your man to greatness.

Jude: Then let’s move on to a very different sort of character. Galadriel is an elf-queen, the “lady of the golden wood”. Tolkien doesn’t use this language, but in conventional terms she’s a formidable sorceress who is known and feared in neighboring Rohan. She’s married to Celeborn, but at all times he portrayed as very much the junior partner. She is confident that—unlike Frodo—she is “great” enough to use the One Ring to rule the entire world. But she is also wise enough—and good enough—to avoid the temptation of the ring, unlike Saruman and Boromir. She seems to be able to almost read minds and knows more than just about anyone else how bleak the circumstances are, but unlike Denethor she’s wise enough to avoid despair. She hands out magical artifacts, issues prophesies, and after Sauron’s downfall, she apparently destroys his old fortress of Dol Goldur more or less singlehandedly. Talk about a strong female character!

Thomas: I don’t know, she’s impressive, yes, but the text puts her on a pedestal. She’s more like the Virgin Mary than she is a real woman.

Jude: It’s true that some people come away with that impression, but Tolkien didn’t mean for Galadriel to be some sort of perfectly good person. The reason she’s in Middle-earth in the first place is she rebelled against God, or at least the angels, in the Silmarillion. It’s not supposed to be a given that she turns down the ring.

Thomas: Perhaps not, but she turns it down instantly, so it feels like it. This is going to be long enough without digging into women in the Silmarillion, but Tolkien only added her in after writing Lord of the Rings. Until then, it was just Fëanor and his sons leading the rebellion. And I think it’s worth mentioning that although Galadriel has powerful magic, Tolkien has this weird gendered take on magic where Fëanor and other male elves do things through a sort of engineering, creating gems and rings, whereas Galadriel just pours some water into a bowl. Very domestic.

Jude: I’m not sure exactly why, but Tolkien really wants magic to be vague and fuzzy, not rigorous and quantified. Maybe because to him it was analogous to creative art.

Thomas: But when Celebrimbor forges a ring of power, he’s literally creating something. When Galadriel pours water in a big bowl, all she’s created is a birdbath.

Jude: Well, to sum up, your objection to Galadriel is that she’s not a good female role model because she’s too impressive and powerful? But also that her magic is too wimpy?

Thomas: I should also mention that although Tolkien in all other ways writes a completely sexless narrative, he’s still got enough of a male gaze that it is really important to him to clearly establish that Galadriel is extremely attractive.

Jude: Maybe that’s just part of being a deeply impressive elf.

Thomas: Okay, then is Elrond hot?

Jude: Uh…probably?

Thomas: It doesn’t say, does it? Galadriel and Arwen are just so hot it has to be mentioned all the time, but what about Elrond or Aragorn?

Jude: I think it’s very safe to assume they are both super-hot.

Thomas: I disagree, but even granting that, with men it’s subtext whereas with the women it is text. Also, since I mentioned Arwen stays home until the war is won, I also need to point out that Galadriel stays home too.

Jude: So does her husband! And unlike the movie, so do all the elves she rules, male and female!

Thomas: Just saying. Even when Tolkien took the trouble to write her into the Silmarillion, he ended up having her stay in Doriath for basically the whole time. As disappointing as the Amazon TV series has been, at least they recognized that Galadriel ought to be doing cool things.

Jude: Then let’s turn to the third woman since she definitely does not just stay home. Éowyn is the niece of King Théoden. She endures a brief and incredibly unrequited crush on Aragorn before defying orders to remain at home to instead ride to war in disguise as a man. There she does what Aragorn and Théoden failed to do and kills the Witch-King, the leader of the Ringwraiths who have menaced Frodo and the other characters for the entire story. The feminism here is just off the charts, especially when you consider this is a novel from the 1950s.

Thomas: Except you somehow forgot to mention she gives up being a warrior, marries a random male character, and takes up gardening.

Jude: We’ll come to that, but first I think it’s worth quoting a big chunk of Éowyn’s conversation with Aragorn in Return of the King, after he insists on walking the paths of the dead:

‘You are a stern lord and resolute,’ she said; ‘and thus do men win renown.’ She paused. ‘Lord,’ she said, ‘if you must go, then let me ride in your following. For I am weary of skulking in the hills, and wish to face peril and battle.’

‘Your duty is with your people,’ he answered.

‘Too often have I heard of duty,’ she cried. ‘But am I not of the House of Eorl, a shieldmaiden and not a dry-nurse? I have waited on faltering feet long enough. Since they falter no longer, it seems, may I not now spend my life as I will?’

‘Few may do that with honour,’ he answered. ‘But as for you, lady: did you not accept the charge to govern the people until their lord’s return? If you had not been chosen, then some marshal or captain would have been set in the same place, and he could not ride away from his charge, were he weary of it or no.’

‘Shall I always be chosen?’ she said bitterly. ‘Shall I always be left behind when the Riders depart, to mind the house while they win renown, and find food and beds when they return?’

‘A time may come soon,’ said he, ‘when none will return. Then there will be need of valour without renown, for none shall remember the deeds that are done in the last defence of your homes. Yet the deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised.’

And she answered: ‘All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.’

‘What do you fear, lady?’ he asked.

‘A cage,’ she said. ‘To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.’

‘And yet you counselled me not to adventure on the road that I had chosen, because it is perilous?’

‘So may one counsel another,’ she said. ‘Yet I do not bid you flee from peril, but to ride to battle where your sword may win renown and victory. I would not see a thing that is high and excellent cast away needlessly.’

‘Nor would I,’ he said. ‘Therefore I say to you, lady: Stay! For you have no errand to the South.’

‘Neither have those others who go with thee. They go only because they would not be parted from thee – because they love thee.’ Then she turned and vanished into the night.

Thomas: This is a really good exchange and it’s all the more notable for how rare it is. Today books and movies are full of “banter” but it’s rare in Lord of the Rings for two sympathetic characters to disagree so sharply. That’s a shame because Tolkien is quite good at this.

Jude: Éowyn is not merely present in the story as this defiant warrior-woman archetype, I think she clearly gets the better of the much older and allegedly wiser Aragorn in this little debate.

Thomas: I wish, but I think we’re supposed to agree with Aragorn that Éowyn is being childish. She’s wrong to value fame and glory so highly.

Jude: Yes, despite the fact he’s writing an adventure story of the sort that inevitably glorifies battle to some degree, Tolkien served in the trenches and has no illusions about war. But Éowyn pivots and points out that if she shouldn’t risk her life fighting in Gondor, why on earth should Legolas and Gimli?

Thomas: Éowyn has that mic drop moment, but their friendship with Aragorn has been built through many months of dangerous travel, whereas she just has a schoolgirl crush on him. It’s not really equivalent and in the next scene Aragorn turns his back on her begging to accompany him and rides off.

Jude: But if the text is on Aragorn’s side, you have to explain why she grabs another, even more sympathetic character in Merry, rides off to war, and wins a shocking victory through a great act of heroism. Had she not been there to kill the Witch-King, the battle at Minas Tirith might not have been won, or at least might not have been won without far worse casualties.

Thomas: I’m sure Tolkien felt women were athletically inferior to men and had no business being on the battlefield. Éowyn nearly dies, and the sight of her on the battlefield causes Éomer to despair and nearly get killed himself. Putting female characters “in the refrigerator” just to motivate male characters is a trope we look down on these days.

Jude: You have to admit that Faramir is put in a very similar refrigerator—actually, the opposite—during the very same sequence. Gandalf has to go save him and, it is implied, as a result can’t prevent Théoden from being killed. Whereas nothing bad actually comes of Éomer’s charge. It all works out great in the end.

Thomas: Despair is Tolkien’s great sin, and Éowyn is guilty of it. Implied in her side of the argument above, and to an extent even in Aragorn’s responses, is the idea that they are inevitably going to lose, so why shouldn’t she lose fighting on the battlefield instead of amongst the burning houses afterward? She and Merry go to the battle as almost a kind of suicide.

Jude: True despair is a sin, but being valiant in the face of hopelessness is a great virtue for Tolkien. The reward for this is “eucatastrophe”, the sudden and unexpected good outcome that is meant to reflect, in Tolkien’s view, the religious truth of Jesus. 

Accordingly, he structures the battle at Minas Tirith as a series of hopeless moments that are unexpectedly relieved: the Witch-King breaking the gate only to hear the horns of Rohan, the Witch-King killing Theoden and saying no man can kill him only to be slain by Eowyn, Eomer finding not just Theoden dead but, seemingly, his sister and thinking all his loved ones are dead, and finally the arrival of the ships that seem sure to be bringing reinforcements from Umbar but instead are revealed as Aragorn leading men from southern Gondor.

Thomas: She still feels hopeless after the battle, but then there’s deliverance: a man. She ends up as Faramir’s prize for helping Frodo.

Jude: I think you could just as easily say Faramir is her prize for fighting courageously. She wouldn’t have met him if she had waited meekly in Rohan.

Thomas: Instead she retires meekly to Ithilien.

Jude: Because she rides to war so dramatically, people get hung up on the fact she settles down afterwards, but everyone in the story stops being a warrior. Frodo himself refuses to even fight when they return to the Shire. The text is consistent in favoring characters who have interests beyond war. It’s a failing of Boromir’s character that he doesn’t, for instance, and a credit to Faramir that he does. In marrying him, Éowyn puts away her childish things: the hopeless crush on Aragorn and the selfish desire for glory.

I think what’s most remarkable about her story is how much it leaves to the reader. Most of Lord of the Rings is black and white, but the text allows you to read about her and wish she stayed in the saddle as a cavalry commander, celebrate her turning to peaceful life, believe Aragorn was right and she should have done her duty at home, or exult in her daring decision to ride to war. Tolkien leaves readers to decide for themselves what to make of all of it.

Thomas: Made it’s time for us to do the same. Unless you want to spend a while discussing whether Shelob is a Freudian analogue for—

Jude: I really don’t, actually. So yes, we’ll leave Goldberry and Ioreth for the readers to decide about as well. Next time we’ll turn to Dune, which has…well, it has a very different set of things going on with its female characters that should provide an interesting contrast.

Jude: After a little hiccup in the posting schedule, we’re back today to follow-up our look at Good and Evil in Lord of the Rings with a companion examination of Dune. Our discussion of Lord of the Rings is way too long to summarize properly, but surely I can say that one thing that distinguishes it from a lot of more modern fiction is that good and evil are nearly always conveniently labeled. The Dark Lord isn’t a good guy, the Grey Pilgrim is. Even without those labels, the names “Sauron” and “Gandalf” alone tell you what you need to know just by sound. So—

Thomas: Not so fast. Although supposedly compiled by Hobbits, Lord of the Rings is at minimum deeply influenced by Elvish propaganda. “Sauron” is not his name, it’s an Elvish word meaning “the abhorred” or “the abominable”. It’s a mocking pun on his actual name, Mairon, and so a sort of Elvish version of Donald Trump’s nicknames for his enemies.

Jude: Okay, sure, but let’s not get into revisionist readings of Tolkien in a Dune article. I was just trying to say that compared to Lord of the Rings, Dune is comparatively more willing to deal in shades of gray.

Thomas: I guess it’s more gray, but it’s not that much more gray seeing as right from the outset, the text strongly encourages us to see the Atreides as Good and the Harkonnens as Bad. That gets a little more complex later, but it never goes away. The whole “Paul’s jihad is bad actually” twist doesn’t change the fact that Harkonnens are always bad. Paul himself is still a good man, he’s just revealed to be powerless in the face of destiny.

I think it’s also worth noting that this is a book that moves from scene to scene at a fast pace and is bursting with ideas, but Herbert finds it necessary to linger on the Harkonnens in scenes that pound into the reader’s skull that they are evil.

Jude: Maybe he does that because he feels he can’t just call him the Dark Baron and move on. Having villains doing over-the-top evil things as they go about their business is certainly a much older dramatic device than Dune. I think you can go back at least as far as Shakespeare, or forward to Star Wars where you have Tarkin blowing up an entire planet pour encourager les autres and Vader disrupting a meeting by choking someone for displaying too much atheism.

Thomas: Tolkien does this a bit himself, most notably in Two Towers when Uglúk beheaded one of Grishnákh's followers.

Jude: But beyond even the scenes where the Baron and his sons are present themselves, Herbert takes pains to emphasize that the Harkonnens are tyrannical rulers.

Thomas: Yeah, but considering the Atreides are happy to rule as space feudalists themselves, I think we should be a little skeptical about this. Are the Harkonnens really so bad? There’s at least some gestures towards the idea that the real trouble with the Harkonnens is that they are nouveaux riche latecomers and not a true ancient house.

Jude: They supposedly go back all the way to old Earth, so they really are ancient, but they got demoted when an Atreides accused a Harkonnen of cowardice after a battle. Hence the feud.

Thomas: And how long ago was this battle?

Jude: Uh…surely this detail doesn’t matter, let’s just—

Thomas: How long before the events of Dune was it?

Jude: Sigh…ten thousand years earlier.

Thomas: Ten thousand years.

Jude: Or so the various wikis say. There are posthumous prequels about this, but I think Dune itself has nearly all the relevant information: the cowardice accusation starting the feud at the dawn of the current dynasty and the dynasty lasting ten thousand years.

Thomas: Well, needless to say, that is very dumb. No one today has a family is mad at another one for something that happened between two people in a cave ten thousand years ago. In fact there are some estimates that say an individual who lived just five thousand years ago is the ancestor of every human alive today.

Jude: Please direct your complaints about this to Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. Maybe they can retcon this somehow. The bottom line is that the Harkonnens were exiled, or dishonored, or something, but through canny business dealings they bought their way up to Great House status. So functionally they are “new men” despite simultaneously being a really old house.

Thomas: I think that’s interesting because there has been tons of fiction, including lots written much more recently than 1965, that just slides into the assumption that being true nobility is good and that upstarts are bad, even though we live in a world that has almost entirely rejected the idea of nobility. Whatever you think of business people in general, climbing the ladder through business merit like the Harkonnens apparently did is considered much more admirable than just being born to the purple.

We get a lot from the Baron’s perspective in Dune and often he seems like the smartest person in the novel, easily outmaneuvering Leto, fooling Hawat, and coming really close to having all his schemes succeed magnificently. He would come close to being a sympathetic character were it not for the lies, torture, murder, and repeated sexual assaults.

Jude: That’s really not close at all.

Thomas: No, it’s not. I guess that’s why Herbert spends so much time on the evil deeds.

Jude: Apart from the Baron’s many personal crimes, he’s also portrayed as a tyrant. For example, he enacts high taxes to enrich himself personally while keeping the people poor.

Thomas: True, whereas Duke Leto…also taxes people. But less? No one likes high taxes, obviously, but in the medieval feudalism that this setting is based on, rulers raise taxes because they (or some previous ruler) are ambitious and need to pay for something important. Occasionally that can be something like a series of massive buildings, but the main thing that’s expensive enough to require high taxes is war.

Jude: We’re told the Harkonnens have to pay an absolutely massive amount of money to the Spacing Guild to launch their attack. That’s got to come from somewhere.

Thomas: Sure, but the crisis is happening in the first place because the Atreides are training their own military force that is rivaling that of the Emperor. Training a good army is exactly the kind of expense that leads a feudal ruler to need more taxes. We aren’t told how people on Caladan feel about all this, but Leto does say that they ruled Caladan with “sea power”, not with “the consent of the governed” or “low taxes and high quality government services”.

Jude: Well, the other tyrannical thing we see from the Harkonnens is they wage a brutal counter-insurgency campaign against the Fremen. And perhaps more generally, they show no concern for fortunes of the people they rule. Gurney Halleck got a scar in Harkonnen “slave pits”. The Atreides certainly are never said to have slave pits, but I have a sinking feeling you’re going to say that the novel never says they don’t have slave pits.

Thomas: I won’t, but if I did, I would be right. The real issue is that despite working as a speechwriter for a U.S. Senator, Herbert doesn’t care all that much about government policy. He at least mentions taxes, so that puts him ahead of Tolkien, and he’s very interested in what I would call sociology, but there aren’t many details about the governments.

Jude: Yeah, I think what he does spend time establishing is that Leto is a Good Leader, which Herbert defines as someone who cares at least a little bit about the people working for him, listens to their advice, and trusts them enough to delegate. The scene where Kynes is surprised Leto wants to save the men working on a spice harvester is particularly notable, but nearly every scene with Leto involves him acting like a pretty good boss, albeit one who’s very picky about how he’s addressed. Whereas the Baron is a Bad Leader and every scene with both his subordinates and his relatives is marked by toxic behavior on all sides. Leto inspires his men, whereas the Baron rules through fear, intimidation and, in one or two cases, by getting his underlings addicted to drugs. You know, there might be money to made here. Lead Like Leto: Axioms For Business Success. Written by Princess Irulan, of course.

Thomas: I worry it might get outsold by Killing the Competition: Harkonnen Lessons for the Modern CEO. But I think it’s interesting that the text specifically calls out that Leto—unlike, it seems, the Harkonnens—prioritizes propaganda. Based on Princess Irulan’s post-jihad corpus it seems like Paul continued that pattern. It’s interesting that such a loaded term is used for the “good duke”. Leto notices the little people, but that mostly leads to him recognizing the need to manipulate them.

Jude: I’m not sure that’s right. The Baron tells Rabban to “squeeze” Arrakis, and that’s certainly part of the Harkonnen tyranny theme, but this is actually part of an elaborate game of bad cop, good cop. The plan is for Feyd-Rautha to replace Rabban, lighten people’s burdens, and therefore become loved by the populace.

Thomas: Does that actually work? Are there some good historical analogues for this? Everyone hates a guy, then his relative takes over who is slightly less oppressive and now everyone loves him?

Jude: There have been an awful lot of monarchs, to say nothing of dukes and barons, so I can’t say no. But I don’t really know of any examples.

Thomas: I think for most of human history, central governments were pretty weak and so regions frequently rebel the moment they can spot what might be an opportunity. Despite the fact that the Fremen feel like analogues to Arabs in the time of Mohammed, the Fremen style of ethnic guerrilla resistance feels very modern, as do the instruments of control that the Harkonnen (and Atreides) use. I think if you just look at the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, you don’t see any good analogues for the Feyd-Rautha plan or even the Atreides coming in and being liked, because ethnic or national identity has been so important in establishing legitimacy. A people like the Fremen today really wouldn’t want to accept rule by non-Fremen. This is never really discussed in the novel and Frank Herbert doesn’t engage with the idea of self-determination even though it had been a major trend for at least the prior fifty years.

Jude: Dune is a blended setting, so while the aircraft and high-tech soldiers remind us of the occupation of Iraq or Vietnam, the government is feudal, and in the associated historical periods, national and even ethnic identity was a lot weaker. We’re told the Fremen think they’re superior to the cityfolk, but you get the sense the Fremen just want to be left alone, not that they dream of ruling the cities.

Thomas: Historically, people of the “less civilized” regions get a lot of luxury products from trading with cities, or raiding them, and that leads them to want to take over cities and get even more of the luxury goods for themselves. The setting of Dune is perfectly set up for this phenomenon: you would think the Fremen would bust into cities and either take the water, or just take over the infrastructure and live water-rich lives. Since the story requires them to be the ultimate warriors, it’s not clear how anyone would stop them from doing this. But the Fremen look down on “water-fat” city living and seem to prefer to live in their desert sietches, pinning their hopes on their Rube Goldberg geoengineering project. I guess it’s noble to work for centuries to expand the pie for your great-grandchildren instead of stealing someone else’s slice today, but…this just isn’t how the world works.

Jude: I feel like, as usual, we’ve gotten way off topic. We are talking about the book’s notions of good and evil, and I want to note that the text does not endorse the idea that the Baron’s plan with Feyd-Rautha would actually work. He clearly doesn’t understand the Fremen culture, perhaps because he doesn’t stop to notice “little people”.

Thomas: Rabban is supposed to be an uncaring, evil ruler but he seems to understand the Fremen much better, though the Baron ignores his advice.

Jude: Which just goes to show I think we should expect the Baron’s good cop scheme to fail even were it enacted. Leto’s efforts to cultivate the Fremen are portrayed much more positively, and while we never see if they would have worked, I think we’re supposed to assume they would have.

Thomas: The Fremen are relevant, though, because we’ve said Leto is good and the Baron is bad, but what about the Fremen? At times they feel like Noble Savages, like glamorized Native Americans or perhaps the Na’vi of Avatar.

Jude: Yet we’re told they have sophisticated factories and, to your point about luxury goods from cities, they apparently are better at manufacturing things like stillsuits than the city people are.

Thomas: Yeah, that’s Herbert trying to have it both ways. He’s writing for a science fiction audience, and if you just have high tech city people getting beat up by burly desert fighters, that’s a bit too much like having to root for the jocks against the nerds. So the Fremen are “surprisingly sophisticated” while nevertheless living a simpler and more authentic life that’s in touch with nature.

Jude: Again, it’s a blended setting. That’s part of what makes it interesting. I don’t think it’s fair to complain that it doesn’t work as historical fiction. I think for our good and evil dicotomy, the Fremen aren’t all good or all evil. They are a primal, chaotic force. The book is not sympathetic to their marriage customs (Paul refuses to sleep with Jamis’ wife) and especially rejects their idea that to lead you have to kill the former leader.

Thomas: It’s nice that Paul pushes back on this and the Fremen aren’t always right about everything, I guess, but the leader thing in particular is such an idiotic idea I almost want to say it’s racist to even have the Fremen espouse it. I wonder if this book the origin of this notion? I refuse to believe there is any historical basis for a leadership principle that would result in leaders taking over the tribe at nineteen and being in charge until they are about twenty-five and killed by an ambitious nineteen year old. Is it Dune’s fault that there’ve been a dozen Star Trek episodes desperately trying to make us believe that the Klingon navy functions as an effective spacefaring military force in which officers get promoted by assassinating their superiors?

Jude: That’s an interesting question, but answering it would require actual research…

Thomas: Yeah, that’s not happening.

Jude: So we’ll just have to say the Fremen are just a mixed bag. They are praiseworthy in many ways, but they also have some silly traditions and cultural practices, the most important of which is their religion. Noble Savages are usually portrayed as more spiritual than “civilized” people, and the Fremen are more interested in spirituality and religion than the city people, but boy does the text not endorse this. As we’ve said before, to a degree that’s incredible for a book written in 1965, Frank Herbert is here to say the Fremen religion is incredibly dumb, allows them to get exploited by outsiders, and creates the conditions for a horrible war that causes a massive amount of suffering.

Thomas: True, though of course you have to read carefully to see that. You could imagine a version of Dune where the Harkonnens are also religious, so that religion is clearly identified with the bad guys. Instead, they seem like atheists, whereas the Atreides have “Orange Catholic Bibles”. I guess the Harkonnens are atheist, the Atreides are Unitarians, and the Fremen are, of course, fundamentalists.

Jude: I think by 1965 we’d reached a time where elites were often explicitly atheist, and Herbert definitely wants his bad guys to be decadent elites. The Baron himself is painted as a man of unrestrained appetites, a glutton for food and sex.

Thomas: And revenge!

Jude: Hmm, let’s come back to revenge. First I want to say that his lack of athleticism in a culture that seems to pride itself on dueling is supposed to be repugnant but might make him accidentally sympathetic to the modern reader. So might his homosexuality. It would be easy to spin a revisionist story around the idea he suffered as a boy due to his sexual identity and that society’s cruelty to him made him what he is.

Thomas: We don’t actually see any evidence that society rejects his homosexuality. It seems widely known and tolerated. He doesn’t even seem to have a nominal wife. That could be some unexpected tolerance on Herbert’s part, but I think it’s more likely that the wider society’s acceptance of the Baron’s homosexuality is—for Herbert—more evidence of its decadence.

Jude: Maybe, although it’s not enough that the Baron is homosexual, Herbert emphasizes again and again his sexual desire is expressed through sadistic violence and, probably, pedophilia.

Thomas: Evil-pedophile-homosexual is considered a toxic archetype now since it is seen as reinforcing the incorrect prejudice that all homosexuals are pedophiles, but so far Herbert seems to have gotten a pass.

Jude: Yes, although here the pedophilia thing has a dramatic function in that it allows the Baron to believably threaten our heroic protagonist with sexual violence.

Thomas: Heightening dramatic tension via the threat of sexual violence is another thing that is, well, not “cancelable” per se since George R. R. Martin is doing fine, but it’s frowned upon by a vocal set of readers as both exploitative and triggering.

Jude: We don’t have time to get into all that, but I think it’s important to acknowledge in passing that these are probably the two aspects of the book that will be most alienating for modern readers.

Thomas: I think the alienation goes beyond just those elements being present, though. Last time you let me spend a long time digging into Tolkien’s concept of evil. Frank Herbert in some ways has a simpler conception: the Baron is uses deception, torture, and murder to achieve his ends. That’s evil, and even more, his failings are somehow fully replicated from the top to the bottom of the Harkonnen organization. I guess because he doesn’t hide his evil ways, the book just assumes that only evil people sign up to work for him. The only low-level Harkonnen soldiers we meet directly in the story are the men who take Paul and Jessica into the desert, and they are ready for murder and rape at a moment’s notice.

So the Baron is an evil villain and his foot soldiers are represented as not just complicit but just as bad themselves, so killing them is a morally uncomplicated virtuous act. Last time I complained about the orcs not being allowed to surrender. No one surrenders in Dune, because surrendering to the Harkonnens results in torture and surrendering to the Fremen probably results in swift execution.

Jude: The Emperor and his people surrender at the end. And don’t the Sardaukar in the cave surrender as well?

Thomas: Okay, true, but those were both special cases. But I was saying all that to establish that while Herbert has a straightforward conception of evil, he has some very outdated notions about decadence, and while that might not be quite the same thing as evil, it’s a major theme in the story and does mostly line up with the good and evil characters. Leto and the Atreides more broadly are clearly the least decadent element of the existing feudal regime, whereas the evil Harkonnens are the most.

Jude: Maybe. Might the Emperor be the most decadent? I guess we need to define it better. In Herbert’s view, living a difficult life toughens you up, so it follows that powerful people in a fundamentally peaceful feudal empire become weak and decadent. The Fremen are strong because they live in such adverse conditions, whereas the Sardaukar are from a hellish planet and are still strong, but they’ve gotten just a bit soft. Whereas pretty much the rest of the civilization has been living with air conditioning and showers for far too long.

None of that is Frank Herbert’s idea, really. The notion that civilization makes people soft goes back at least to the Roman Empire and can still be found in present-day memes.

Thomas: Yes, but it’s important to note that historian Bret Devreaux makes a compelling case that for all its longevity, this idea about tough barbarians and soft civilized people is not, in fact, true.

Jude: Yes, but at any rate, decadence for Herbert consists of delighting in the pleasures of food and sex. The Baron gratifies his every desire whereas the Fremen live tightly disciplined lives.

Thomas: I would go farther, and this is where modern readers chafe, and should chafe: for Herbert, decadence has a strong whiff of the feminine about it.

Jude: Fremen women are as tough as the men, though, or nearly so.

Thomas: Yes, but beyond just “self-discipline”, the virtues that are being lost in civilization and that are celebrated in the Fremen are clearly masculine virtues. Fremen fight, they are very sensitive to any signs of disrespect, they use dueling both to resolve simple disputes and to “elect” leaders. Loyalty is celebrated, but weakness is abhorred. There’s almost no notion of caring for others; if someone is too weak to contribute, they are killed for the good of the tribe.

Contrast that to Count Fenrig, who is smart and capable but completely emasculated by the Bene Gesserit, both figuratively when his wife seduces Feyd-Rautha and literally, seeing as the breeding program caused him to be born a eunuch.

There’s no explanation for why the Atreides have somewhat escaped this trap, but they clearly retain some of these masculine virtues. They’re so masculine, in fact, that all the Atreides characters are male: Leto, Paul, Gurney Halleck, and Duncan Idaho. Even after twenty years in the family, Jessica is portrayed as fundamentally an outsider.

Jude: Herbert definitely has some odd ideas about masculinity but I’m not sure that’s totally right. I think his idea is maybe a bit simpler: strength comes through harsh self-discipline, so enjoying any pleasure is suspect. We don’t see much of Leto, but he seems like a workaholic. The only thing we hear of Atreides dukes doing for fun is hunting bulls, which is surely a very manly, even martial, hobby.

Feyd-Rautha, meanwhile, fights duels and that seems like a manly, martial hobby, but it’s all fake because his opponents are drugged. The real problem, though, might be that we see him dueling from his perspective and he loves doing it. He’s getting lots of pleasure from it and the text, I think, portrays this as indecent even beyond the obvious sadistic elements.

Thomas: Yeah, we have to assume that when Leto’s father went bull hunting, he did so with grim determination and he never enjoyed it more than a little bit.

Jude: Meanwhile we get an anecdote where Princess Irulan very approvingly describes the Emperor as rejecting a dancing girl as “too beautiful”. If this was just bro-code masculinity, surely the most beautiful girl is the most desirable. But the text is suspicious of pleasure in nearly all its forms.

Thomas: The Fremen do have some sort of drug-fueled orgy, but I guess that’s a very limited form of release that’s heavily bounded by ritual. You mentioned ancient antecedents for the idea of decadence, but maybe this is all just a variation of Roman-era stoicism.

Jude: It’s probably in that tradition, but the Romans were suspicious of romantic love and actually thought it was a bit unmanly to be in love with your wife. Christianity spent almost two millennia fighting that attitude, so it’s become a fairly alien notion to us today. Certainly Dune approves of Leto’s love for Jessica and Paul’s love for Chani, but even there, self-discipline is crucial: they don’t marry their lovers. The text considers that tragic, I think, but doesn’t ever manage to disapprove of it. By not marrying (in Leto’s case) or marrying for political convenience (in Paul’s), they’re denying their own desires and being tough, rational men.

Thomas: There’s a lesson in all this for Dune fans. You can enjoy Dune, but it’s best read with grim determination and not too much pleasure. If you enjoy reading it too much, you might start reading the posthumous books, which is sort of the Dune reader equivalent of Feyd-Rautha fighting against drugged opponents.

Jude: That seems like a nice, practical note to wrap up with. Next time we’re going to finally turn to consider the famous adaptations of these two books and talk about Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy of films.

Thomas: Sure, the author is dead, literally for both of these books, but I think we are interested in the authors. You’re happy to talk at length about how, say, Tolkien’s background in languages gives Lord of the Rings a texture unique both in its time and today. So why wouldn’t we also consider Tolkien’s evil characters in the same way?

Jude: It’s different because saying Tolkien’s use of language is cool isn’t a moral judgment on him or the authors we compare him against.

Thomas: And you’re afraid of moral judgments?

Jude: There’s a strain of discussion in Internet circles that pours over art from the past and eagerly looks for reasons to tear it down. I think rather than trying to produce art that is worthy of being placed alongside or even above the great works of the past, people would rather find ways to morally disqualify the art of the past from consideration so they don’t have to compete with it.

Thomas: That’s a remarkably cynical take from you! That’s supposed to be my job. Anyway, your point sounds like the complaint artists have been making about critics for thousands of years: “Stop pointing out flaws in my work and make your own…if you can!"

I think it’s totally reasonable for people to want cultural products that align with and reinforce their own values, especially when—as with Lord of the Rings and Dune—we’re talking about material often consumed by impressionable teenagers.

But it’s hard enough to say anything new about Tolkien, let’s not make our challenge worse by trying to say something new about literary “cancel culture” as well.

Jude: Okay, then where should we start?

Thomas: I propose we go ahead and first apply the values we have in 2024 to Lord of the Rings and allow ourselves to be unafraid of what we might find. Then we can talk about what Tolkien himself was trying to do and whether it all makes sense even by his own standards. He thought about these things much more deeply than the typical modern author, but, spoiler alert, he still wasn’t perfectly consistent.

Jude: All right, but this sounds like it’s going to be a lot of nitpicking to me. I think it was Emerson who said that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Isn’t a hobgoblin a type of orc?

Thomas: The Internet tells me that Tolkien only uses the term “hobgoblin” once, in The Hobbit, and implies when he does that hobgoblins are bigger than regular goblins. But in a letter, Tolkien admitted that in folklore, hobgoblins are actually smaller. So perhaps he would say: small hobgoblins are the consistency of foolish minds.

Jude: You did it. You just said what surely is a brand new thing about Lord of the Rings. Maybe we should quit while we’re ahead.

Thomas: There’s no fun in that. I wanted to start with our modern values, and we modern folk do not care about hobgoblins. Or even goblins, really, since we are focusing on Lord of the Rings.

Jude: Since you insist, I will say at the outset that I think Tolkien looks better when viewed through a modern lens than anyone should have any right to expect. He is clear-eyed about the horrors of war, he literally focuses on the little people and not just the Great Men of history, and there’s little overt sexism or racism despite Lord of the Rings being written in a time where most books were riddled with both. In fact, there’s even a little genuinely feminist material with Eowyn, although we’ll save the role of women in the story for another article. And the Fellowship of the Ring is literally an act of multiracial, multicultural unity. Legolas and Gimli, in particular, learn to look past their own prejudices and become the best of friends. Clearly Tolkien is all about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Thomas: I agree he does pretty well if you are grading on a curve, but you’ve also got to admit: when you consider representation, it’s a disaster. Hardly any women anywhere, and although there are different races in the fantasy sense of hobbits, elves, dwarves, and men (Tolkien always uses “men” to mean humans, which really clangs on the modern ear), these different races all seem to amount to different types of white people.

Jude: Although Tolkien himself didn’t quite articulate this himself, fans have often seen his work as creating a mythology for England, or perhaps a mythology for northwestern Europe more generally. For all its epic scope, Lord of the Rings clearly takes place in a small, northwest portion of Middle-earth. It doesn’t exclude anyone but, uh, it just so happens to be about white people.

Thomas: Mm-hmm.

Jude: Not every story has to involve every people from every part of the world!

Thomas: Sure, but Lord of the Rings does have some things to say about those other places. It’s not completely clear, but the story strongly implies that they are all under the sway of Sauron and send him human troops for his armies. Two of the five angelic wizards are sent to those foreign lands, but evidently they failed and they are never heard from again. Saruman was also with them for a time, and that’s another way in which he’s suspicious from the start and contaminated by harmful ideas. There’s nothing overt, but you have to admit there’s a decent amount of subtle xenophobia baked in here. Western Europe is not only good, it’s almost unique in having the ability to be good.

Jude: First, I’ll note in passing that Tolkien started to revise these ideas near the end of his life. Since the rest of Middle-Earth is so much bigger than the part where the story takes place but Sauron doesn’t have overwhelming numbers of human soldiers, he decided that Sauron must not have actually controlled the rest of it, and that the two wizards must have helped disrupt his domination.

But as far as the sense we get in Lord of the Rings, I know today we inevitably leap to a racial view of this, but I think in Tolkien’s day, a religious view would be more common. For many centuries, Europeans saw Europe as a bastion of Christianity in an otherwise fallen world before the process of colonization made Christianity the worldwide religion it is today. There’s no explicit religion in Lord of the Rings, but it is the “West” that is most influenced by the elves and by extension the angelic Valar.

Thomas: The idea of “the west” opposed to “the east” was very common in the Cold War, with the west standing for freedom and religion against the atheist tyranny of the USSR. Lord of the Rings was written only at the beginning of the Cold War, so it’s a little surprising it inhabits that mindset. Historically, Christianity itself came from the east.

Tolkien basically inverts this. In the Silmarillion, he leaves Eden in the east but contrives a way for all good and righteous things to nevertheless come from the west. If you view the Silmarillion as the Bible of the elves, then Beleriand is similar to the Levant and Númenor is like Constantinople. Like the Levant and Constantinople from the perspective of Europeans, both are catastrophically lost. But geographically they were both west of where Lord of the Rings takes place, not east of it.

Jude: Maybe the Holy Land should be Tol Eressëa? But I think we’re getting too far afield in these analogies

Thomas: You’re right. The point here is really just that, in a way we should be uncomfortable with today, Tolkien locates “good” in a certain part of the globe and even in a cardinal direction. There is, must I say it, no such thing in history. Christian nations weren’t necessarily “better” than other nations even judged by their own moral standard. And while we recently had a lot of people eager to see Christianity and Islam as fundamentally opposed, the Christian and Islamic nations of the past were more likely to play power politics than worry too much about who believed what, as when France and the Ottoman Turks were allies for centuries to counterbalance the Hapsburgs.

Jude: But Tolkien really doesn’t care about geopolitics. Previously you’ve said that it’s not productive to yell at him for things like monarchy when he doesn’t really care about government; I think we were right to say that, and surely the same thing applies here. So is that it for your modern scolding?

Thomas: No. I also have to say that it’s weird that “race” is a real thing in Tolkien and much subsequent fantasy fiction. In real life, race is at best a murky concept. There’s obviously some association with genetic traits like skin color, but overall race in our culture is socially constructed whereas Tolkien’s races are genetically essential with really huge biological differences.

Jude: I don’t think that’s “problematic” at all! His races are obviously not the same thing as what our culture struggles with, and if anything, having obviously fanciful races helps undermine our skin color prejudices concept. Arwen chooses to be human instead of an elf and it’s not a matter of social construction. She doesn’t just “pass” as human. Instead, it has some metaphysical effect where she somehow stops being immortal and gets the “gift” of human death. There’s a massive divide between her and Aragorn, but they marry anyway. Against that, how could anyone have a problem with interracial marriage? When Tolkien was writing, plenty of people did.

Thomas: You can’t celebrate the fellowship as a glorious, multiracial coalition if you’re saying the races aren’t the same thing. Also, there’s the problem that there’s an entire other race with human-like intelligence that is irredeemably evil.

Jude: Yeah, the orc thing just sucks. I assume in the next part you’ll want to go into more detail about it.

Thomas: Yep. People still get enormously mad at CS Lewis for sending Susan Pevensie to hell for liking makeup, but at least he let a well-intentioned guy from the “bad people” into heaven! His buddy Tolkien couldn’t manage this.

Jude: Anything else you want to complain about while we inflict present day values on a seventy year old book? Going to complain about all the meat eating?

Thomas: Well, there’s either not enough gay people or too many gay people, depending on how you categorize people.

Jude: Yeah, that’s definitely what people think when they say Tolkien is problematic: not enough heterosexual representation.

Thomas: I’m just saying there’s very few women around and none of the men seem to mind. Perhaps you could say Tolkien was ahead of his time on asexuality.

Jude: Surely this is a clear sign we’ve exhausted this part of the discussion. Let’s go to your other category.

Thomas: Wait, can we talk about Treebeard being an incel?

Jude: No. We are absolutely not going to talk about that.

Thomas: “My life sucks. Hoo-hoom. There’s no women out there for me. Hrm-hum. It’s definitely not anything I said or did. Every single woman just coincidentally stopped talking to me and moved away.”

Jude: No! The other category.

Thomas: Okay, well, like you said this is mainly going to amount to an inquisition on the orc business, but we have to start by considering good and evil in Tolkien’s own terms. What would you say his view of evil is?

Jude: In the Silmarillion, we get a creation narrative that transposes the basic genesis story into a story about God giving a theme to a choir of angels. But the greatest angel, Melkor, is proud and wants to sing his own music and refuses to follow the correct theme.

Thomas: There’s a bit of Milton’s Satan in that. Melkor the rugged individualist.

Jude: That’s why the choir analogy is inspired. You really have to have harmony in a choir. Anyway, the song they sing basically becomes both space and time, so all the events of all human history past and future are part of the song. All the bad things that happen in the world, from war and murder and infant mortality to splinters and the rain that starts to fall just when you’re too far from home to go back and get an umbrella…that’s all Melkor’s wrong notes.

Thomas: And like Milton’s Satan, Melkor’s big sin is pride.

Jude: Yes, because it leads to selfishness. Melkor was already the greatest angel, but he wasn’t satisfied with the biggest role in the choir. He wanted to completely dominate the world instead of simply allowing his influence to meld with that of other angels.

Thomas: So to relate this biblical stuff to the issues of today, I see an echo here in the tension between the idea of individuals succeeding on merit (a somewhat right-wing idea in the United States, at least) contrasted against an egalitarianism that views everyone as equal.

Jude: Tolkien absolutely believes different people have very different capacities, but it’s a sin to take pride in abilities that, being innate, are gifts from God and not anything you did yourself. The humble hobbit has a strength of his or her own, and more importantly, great value. In fact, moral value is completely decoupled from innate abilities and at least implied to be more often found in those having less. Fëanor is a great artist, but he’s clearly a terrible person.

Thomas: I called Tolkien a reactionary in an earlier discussion, but I’d say this seems vaguely progressive. Some progressives today are uncomfortable with even admitting differences in ability, but as long as they go that far, they’ll be on board with a hard separation of that ability from the worth of a person. Whereas on the right, even though it’s been a century since anyone genuinely advocated for something like an aristocracy, there’s still a lingering sense that good and great go together.

That said, I think what makes Tolkien seem right-wing is that he doesn’t seem to believe in the power of government to help increase equality.

Jude: Tolkien really goes out of his way to have wise characters like Gandalf say hobbits are great people, but no one reaches the obvious conclusion that if they’re so great, maybe the hobbits should be in charge at the end of the story instead of Aragorn or Faramir. Tolkien respects great artists, but he can’t endorse meritocracy or technocracy because he's got what we might call a libertarian streak in him that really, really, really doesn’t like people being forced to do anything.

Sauron and Saruman want to order the world, initially be out of a good desire to improve it, but because they are too proud to tolerate dissent, this desire leads to tyranny and domination. Aragorn is king at the end of the story, the rightful ruler of the Shire, but because he’s a good king, he basically doesn’t tell them to do anything. Whether he collects taxes from the Shire isn’t discussed but it sure seems unlikely. There’s no evidence that anyone collects taxes anywhere in Middle-earth, in fact.

Thomas: Naturally people on the Internet have checked this. Sauron and the (fairly evil by this point) Númenóreans collect “tribute” and Saruman’s evil regime in the Shire might also tax people. Meanwhile, the only reference to good people doing anything like taxes is a mention at the Council of Elrond of the Beornings collecting tolls.

Jude: Surely we’re not going to endorse the famous George R. R. Martin criticism that we don’t know Aragorn’s tax policies, something we both said we didn’t agree with previously.

Thomas: Tolkien doesn’t care about the details of government and that’s fine, but it was worth mentioning here because Tolkien very well understands that medieval governments needed taxes to equip and feed armies. And if soldiers aren’t paid, they pay themselves by looting. He knows that, but heintentionally leaves that stuff out because he doesn’t like it.

Jude: Buried in the details of the Shire, it mentions that they claim they sent archers to help the King of Gondor in a battle against the Witch-King. This is how Tolkien likes to see people relating to a king: since the king is fighting the forces of evil, we will voluntarily send some people to help. But there’s no taxes to fund his army and there’s no conscription of young men from the villages.

Tolkien rarely seems to draw much from classical Greece and Rome, but to me this reminds me of the ancient Greek self-conception as citizens defending their homes against the slave soldiers whipped into battle by the Great King of Persia.

Thomas: Sure, but you rightly call it a “self-conception”. In actuality Athens and especially Sparta were slave societies. The moment Athens got a leg up on their neighbors, they became a despotic empire themselves.

That’s probably why Tolkien prefers to focus on Germanic tribes who apparently had some quasi-democratic institutions but where there isn’t enough written history to know any details about how they coerced people.

Jude: Tolkien’s model leader is Gandalf, who is almost always the smartest and most knowledgeable person in a room but who virtuously chooses to lead through inspiration rather than coercion. The most powerfully “good” being in Middle-earth is Tom Bombadil, an entity so pure he can only react beneficially in the moment to what is happening to him. He cannot use his enormous power for any future plan whatsoever. That constraint is necessary to make him safe enough for Tolkien to imagine him as good.

Thomas: There’s an old strain of Christianity which viewed planning for the future was innately suspect, a thing merchants did to try to trick people out of money. The most virtuous thing to do is live in the moment and trust God with the rest. I think that’s mostly been expunged from Christianity, but Tolkien doesn’t seem to trust things that operate above the scale of the interpersonal.

That’s probably why he doesn’t trust money as a store of goodness. Today, many people treat giving to various types of charities as equivalent to directly doing good, and I suppose in the past giving to the Church served the same purpose, but the only charity we see in Lord of the Rings is Aragorn using his medical knowledge to help the sick and injured.

Jude: Aragorn’s life pre-Lord of the Rings is portrayed as a sort of charity. He and the other Rangers risk their lives in the wilds to protect the unknowing villagers of the Shire and places like Bree.

Thomas: That still involves Aragorn marching out there with his buddies and killing trolls or something. There’s no sign of the real-world equivalent of this, where Aragorn and his buddies force villages to send able-bodied young men to Rivendell and then those guys have to go up and fight trolls. And when a village doesn’t cooperate, they order the young men to go sack the village in punishment.

Jude: Again, we said that Tolkien is only interested in the interpersonal. He doesn’t necessarily posit that this is a utopia we can achieve, he just wants to dramatize the interpersonal and not the political.

Thomas: Right, but having established all that, we turn to Tolkien’s antagonists. Melkor, Sauron, and Saruman all fit into the template of pride leading to a desire to dominate. But whereas there’s a lot of continuity with the good characters—I think Gandalf, Aragorn, and Frodo all act according to similar virtues—the low-ranking bad guys don’t try to dominate others.

Jude: I think they’re just too weak to do that, so they try to hold what they can for themselves. Gollum tries to keep the Ring all to himself, at least in the revised version of The Hobbit. The orcs we meet in Lord of the Rings seem more interested in looting and banditry when they aren’t forced to serve Sauron. And Wormtongue is a thief who is promised Éowyn in return for helping Saruman.

Thomas: The key observation here, which lots of people have already discussed in excruciating detail elsewhere on the Internet, is that Lord of the Rings portrays the orcs like bandits but also as kind of mean stereotypes of poor and uneducated people. Even according to Tolkien’s own value system, in fact perhaps especially by it, their humble lives should have value and worth. But instead, they are irredeemably evil and present in the story just so that the good guys can slaughter them in vast numbers. Saruman’s human allies are allowed to surrender, but there’s never any thought of extending the same mercy to orcs. According to the narrative, they will run away in fear, but they never surrender, which is hard to believe.

Jude: Tolkien himself was unhappy about this. Originally he thought the orcs might have been made out of mud and therefore had no souls, but an element of his conception of evil we haven’t mentioned yet is the idea that evil cannot create, only pervert. I suppose this follows from the Christian idea that God created literally everything, even Satan, and is the omnipotent “author” of history. Tolkien’s metaphysics, even the choir analogy, is centered on the idea that God is an artist and that pursuing art is good (“subcreation” he famously called it).

But this means Melkor cannot create orcs, trolls, dragons, and so on. He can only twist existing things into these corrupt forms. This pattern extends down the chain of being. The people of Gondor make statues; orcs can only vandalize them. But this led him to the unpleasant idea that elves must have been corrupted into orcs through a dysgenic breeding program. Late in life he realized this was a problem, but he died without having found a good solution.

Thomas: It’s nice that he realized the problem, but that just shows what a big problem it is. They have an essentially human intelligence, so they really ought to be redeemable. Instead, Tolkien uses them comedically.

Jude: Not comedically, or at least not just comedically. I think they put into practice his feelings about evil. Perhaps his original intention was to represent orcs as perfectly obedient, sort of like machines. And in Lord of the Rings it is implied that while Sauron lives, the orcs can’t help but obey him. We see that a lot today, actually, because robots are the only sort of henchmen a modern hero can kill. But armies of clockwork enemies are in their own way a lot more threatening than the hapless orcs.

It reminds me of the idea you still often hear that fascists make the trains run on time. But I doubt Tolkien believed this about fascists (and indeed it doesn’t seem to have been true). For him, evil creatures only cooperate out of fear, which is to say they can barely cooperate at all. The voluntary association of the free peoples of Middle Earth makes them strong and formidable in battle, not weaker, because they can cooperate effectively. And when evil creeps in, as with Wormtongue or Denethor, the result is fractiousness and mistrust. Since the orcs are thoroughly evil, they have these problems more thoroughly than any of the free societies.

Fiction, historiography, and even political commentary often wants to say that a free society is weaker than tyranny. Sometimes this is because we want to situate ourselves as the underdog, or to make past victories in World War II or the Cold War feel even bigger victories than they were. But I think Tolkien is right that freedom is a strength, not a weakness that we altruistically accept.

Thomas: Stirring words. I just wish some orcs could surrender. If Sauron dominates their minds and forces them to obey, that’s a bit gross, but okay. But when he dies, the orcs run away but still can’t give up.

Jude: I guess there’s no real defense on that point, but I do want to say that our culture is still grappling with this all these decades later. The recent Star Wars trilogy thinks about it long enough to show a stormtrooper defecting, then somehow it immediately forgets this happened and the heroes—including the former stormtrooper!—gleefully kill hundreds of them for the rest of the trilogy

Thomas: I guess the Saturday morning cartoons of our childhood were ahead of their time. We grew up watching the Ninja Turtles slaughtering ninjas left and right…robot ninjas. Shredder had an implausibly high robotics budget. I remember being kind of shocked when the first “live action” movie came out and there were actually human ninjas working for Shredder.

Jude: Don’t forget GI Joe where instead of stormtroopers always missing and the heroes being really accurate, they had a more egalitarian vision where GI Joe and Cobra soldiers fire lasers by the thousands at each other and no one ever hits anything. Vehicles were allowed to be blown up, but only because its human occupants would dive or parachute to safety.

Thomas: I guess this is another answer to the “what will future generations hate us for” game. When they finish ranting about how many of us still eat meat, they will yell at us for enjoying fiction where the heroes violently kill people.

But one more point about the surrender of orcs. You mentioned Star Wars, but it’s worth noting the original Star Wars trilogy is deeply centered on the idea of redemption. The stormtroopers don’t get to surrender, but Darth Vader, who surely is a far worse person than any stormtrooper, is able to become good again.

Jude: We don’t discuss movie franchises here, but I hope you’re not about to claim Star Wars is superior for saying that a guy who chopped up children with a lightsaber and participated in the cold-blooded murder of a billion people on Alderaan should get to be a happy ghost just because in the last ten seconds of his life he was such an amazingly good and selfless person that he very reluctantly killed Space Hitler to save the life of his biological son.

Thomas: I’m just saying it’s interesting that Star Wars—in other respects a story that wants to align its spirituality with vaguely Buddhist notions—has redemption as a central motif. If Tolkien had done the same, we’d be saying it was his Christianity coming through. But, alas, redemption is nowhere to be found.

Jude: Gollum destroys the Ring.

Thomas: Sure, by accident. And Frodo’s mercy is rewarded, not by Gollum turning his life around and becoming Sméagol again, but by Gollum accidentally destroying the ring and dying in the process. Theoden lets Wormtongue go, and he is rewarded by his allies gaining a palantír. Back in the Silmarillion, the greatest of the angels, Manwë, lets Morgoth go after he is captured, and is rewarded…wait, that one was an incredibly terrible decision by the allegedly wise Manwë that worked out horribly for the entire world.

But the point is, Tolkien is pro-mercy, but whereas today we usually portray mercy as being necessary because those receiving it are somehow deserving of it, in Tolkien’s work, mercy is extended to those who don’t deserve it and the people who get the mercy don’t benefit much from it. But we should do it anyway because it somehow turns out to help the person who extended the mercy via some unlikely chain of events.

Jude: That seems a little unfair. Gandalf’s famous “many die that deserve life” line just argues that you can’t be sure about who deserves what.

Thomas: I just think it’s interesting that while we have various examples of people who started good going bad—

Jude: Every bad character started good. Not just Saruman, but Sauron too was good originally. Everything that comes from God is initially good for Tolkien.

Thomas: Except the orcs, they’re bad from the start. But I was saying, it’s weird there’s not a single character who goes from bad to good.

Jude: There’s so many characters, are you really sure there isn’t at least one?

Thomas: I can’t think of any.

Jude: You aren’t thinking hard enough. Galadriel rebels along with the other Noldor and then repents and goes back to the West.

Thomas: I did think of her and she doesn’t count. Tolkien creates her for Lord of the Rings, then goes back to the Silmarillion to jam her into it. But he wants to have it both ways: she’s a fierce and important person in the revolt, but wait, no, she fights hard against Fëanor to try to prevent the kinslaying and pretty much at no point does she ever do anything bad. She just hides out in Doriath for the whole remainder of the First Age.

Jude: That seems like a technicality, but fine, I’ve got another one.

Thomas: Who?

Jude: Lobelia Sackville-Baggins. She spends most her life greedy and envious of Bag End, but she’s imprisoned during the war and gets out to find her son has been murdered. This seems to teach her humility and empathy. She humbly gives Bag-End back to Frodo, and when she dies, she requests in her will that Frodo use her fortune to help homeless Hobbits.

Thomas: Fine, you got me, but you had to reach pretty far down the character list for that.

Jude: Since I just won a decisive victory, this seems like a good spot to wrap this up. Next week we’ll think about the very different portrayal of good and evil in Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Jude: We’re back this week to look at famous quotes from Dune. As we did last week with Lord of the Rings, we’ll run through the top Goodreads quotes and consider what each can tell us about Frank Herbert and his novel.

Thomas: And we’ll nitpick whenever we can.

Jude: Yes, there’ll be lots of that too. Let’s get started.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Jude: This has got to be the most famous Dune quote, the litany against fear. Most of what Paul does involves powers achieved via eugenics, or at least thousands of hours of practice, but this is much more practical and something readers to try to use themselves. Recite this mantra and try to calm down.

Thomas: The first two sentences are short and memorable. Then it gets a lot more wordy than seems necessary or helpful.

Jude: Maybe so, but a lot of people online self-report that it actually works! Dune isn’t just a thrilling work of science fiction, it’s a practical self-help book.

Thomas: The real question is does it work better than any other mantra. Have there been any studies? Maybe you could make a double-blind study by giving teenagers copies of Dune with the real litany replaced by other litanies.

Jude: I looked, and there are some pop psych articles that try to talk about it scientifically, but nothing in a peer reviewed journal as far as I could find. And maybe the wordiness is a feature? The business about over and through and turning might help the mind focus on these mental images instead of whatever is causing fear or anxiety.

Thomas: If there’s any psychology PhD students out there looking for a dissertation topic, here it is, no charge, but please cite us in your papers about this.

The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.

Jude: The Reverend Mother says this to Paul. It sounds wise.

Thomas: This is the way an allegedly wise person says they don’t actually know the answer. I was already experiencing life and reality before I met you. Thanks for nothing.

Jude: I guess it’s saying you can’t find a solution, so you should stop trying?

Thomas: Then just say that!

Jude: Or maybe it’s something more like “life is about the journey, not the destination”

Thomas: Could be! It’s very unclear, isn’t it?

“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”

Jude: This is the aphorism Paul offers in answer to the previous one. The book tells us this is the “First Law of Mentat”. It’s not bad, though a little less poetic than hers.

Thomas: Apparently Gandalf was a mentat, because this seems so close to his line about breaking a thing to understand it that you wonder if Herbert had it in mind when he wrote this.

Jude: You were full of criticism of Gandalf for that line, so I suppose you’re unhappy about it here, too.

Thomas: This one is much narrower since it’s talking about processes, not things, but it still seems, you know, false. Or else we wouldn’t ever understand something better by taking a photograph of it.

Jude: This one gets close to a theme of the book that was very important to Herbert but which hasn’t, I don’t think, made much of an impact on readers: the idea that there isn’t a “natural world” distinct from the human sphere, but rather humans are just parts of an overall “planetary system” that’s always changing and evolving. But maybe people don’t notice it because it is taken for granted now that humanity impacts the ecosystem of the world around us.

Thomas: Perhaps, but I think Herbert would look askance at the still-prevalent ideas that the best environment is one that is untouched by humanity, that the climate before human influence is the “correct” climate, and so on. I take him here and elsewhere as trying to say there’s no point trying to see humans and the natural world as separate in any way.

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”

Jude: This is the first of many quotes we’re going to be considering from Princess Irulan. Lots of people seem to like these quotes, but I think it’s an open question whether they are supposed to be taken as wise.

Thomas: Herbert’s very clever with these. If you think they’re wise, great, but if not, hey, Princess Irulan is this bookish woman trapped in a marriage of convenience shoveling out propaganda for Paul’s regime, so within the story there’s a reason they’re not actually wise. Very different than when Gandalf says something dumb.

Anyway, this particular one is kind of funny because it’s saying humans want the universe to be logical, but it’s locating that need deep in the human unconscious, the part we usually say isn’t rational or logical.

Jude: The universe seems pretty logical to me. The real one that is, not one where the spice melange can induce a prophetic trance.

Thomas: Herbert’s universe might be more logical than ours. In our world, I think most people accept that there’s a lot of contingency to history. Some kind of war would probably happen in Europe in the early twentieth century if Franz Ferdinand’s driver doesn’t make a wrong turn, but it could have been a very different war. Frank Herbert though is really big on the big, impersonal forces of history.

Jude: If you’re thinking of the sequels with their human stasis and Golden Path, surely God-Emperor of Dune is a big endorsement of the Great Man theory of history? Or at least the Great Worm theory of history, I guess?

Thomas: Even there, setting up the Golden Path is only possible because human society behaves predictably in response to conditions, so intentional sociological engineering is possible. It’s Asimovian psychohistory, just with a much more offbeat version of Hari Seldon.

What do you despise? By this are you truly known.

Jude: This was apparently something Princess Irulan needed to say in her “Manual of Maud’dib”.

Thomas: That hasn’t aged well. Video games don’t have manuals at all now and Ikea furniture just gives you cryptic pictograms.

Jude: The quote itself seems like a forecast of what American politics has become, though. It’s all about negative polarization.

Thomas: What I despise is when drivers don’t line up in the turn lane and instead go all the way to the intersection, then sit there with their blinker on blocking a through lane as they try to cut in line. There. Now you really know me.

There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.

Jude: This is Princess Irulan again, attributing this to Maud’dib. Surely you’ll agree this one is true.

Thomas: I don’t. There’s all kinds of people who have escaped paying for the violence of their ancestors. And good thing! I don’t care where you’re from; every human’s ancestors were extremely violent.

Jude: He’s talking about cycles of violence and retribution, I assume. These are really common.

Thomas: But they can end! No one is killing anyone in Northern Ireland anymore, thank goodness.

Jude: Maybe someone paid for that earlier violence already?

Thomas: But if we’re talking about cycles of blood feud, the way out is to stop paying for it and just let it go. That’s really hard, but that’s how you get to better times. Since Maud’dib carried out a bloody vengeance on his family’s killers and then led an interstellar jihad, it’s convenient to him (and to Frank Herbert’s prisoner-of-fate plot arc through Dune Messiah) to say violence is inescapable. But it’s not a foregone conclusion and even if it’s hard, we should be aspiring to do this more and more!

Jude: In context, I don’t think Paul would be talking about his own ancestors since his father was a victim, not a perpetrator. Maybe he’s talking about the ancestors of the Fremen?

Thomas: Fremen culture is implausibly violent, but as I understand it, they had to make some sort of Mormon-like pilgrimage to Arrakis to escape persecution, so they also were victims. I think the best we can do is say that as an apologist for the regime, Irulan is saying the people conquered in the jihad had it coming.

When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.

Jude: This is Jessica stating a “Bene Gesserit proverb” that gets close to stating another core thesis of the story. I don’t think it’s too surprising now, but it might have stood out more in 1965’s much more religious America. In the context of the story, it seems both obviously right but also beside the point: Paul doesn’t worry much about Jessica and Gurney’s unease with his religious role. So readers can dwell on this or ignore it as they choose.

Thomas: Paul says that jihad is inevitable, so I guess we have to accept it, but it all plays out in his prophetic visions and those are mostly off the page. Intuitively, you’d think there’d be plenty of leverage in early moments of a messianic movement. Paul (and I guess Herbert) says no: if Paul dies or gives up, the Fremen still go on their offworld jihad. I wish this came out more in the actual story, though. We’re mostly told this, not shown it. Without Paul’s powers and connections, it’s hard to understand why there aren’t futures where the Fremen end up staying on their slow terraforming path.

Jude: It’s funny that the Bene Gesserit have a proverb warning against using religion in politics when in this case they have somehow planted the religion, or at least the messianic elements, into the Fremen culture. If you think this is a bad idea, you shouldn’t have done that! But it’s a good proverb at least.

Thomas: Is it, though? Like the litany, there’s good imagery but it’s too wordy for my taste. Also, I don’t think it’s true.

Jude: “Theocracies are good, actually” is certainly a hot take.

Thomas: I think people excited about political movements can “put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice” without any help from religion. Most nasty political movements in history had a religious element because most people in history were religious. But starting a few hundred years ago we started experimenting with secular politics and we still have come up with all sorts of bad outcomes.

Many have marked the speed with which Muad'Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis of this speed. For the others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.

Jude: More Princess Irulan. Sometimes people quote it with just the next to last sentence since that’s a lot more pithy. I suppose you’re going to say this one is wrong somehow also.

Thomas: This one actually is quite ahead of its time, it seems to me, anticipating Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset” idea in educational psychology and the idea of “grit” as a personality trait. There’s some controversy about how well these concepts can be applied in education and I certainly don’t have the expertise to weigh in on that, but these are ideas that got going—in their scientific forms at least—in the 90s, so it’s interesting to see Princess Irulan giving a version of it decades earlier.

Jude: Frank Herbert: unique genius.

Thomas: Or maybe this stuff was being bandied about by a lot of people back then and it was only systematized recently?

Hope clouds observation.

Jude: The Reverend Mother says this to herself when testing Paul. It’s pretty basic but seems reasonable.

Thomas: Sure. This one I will approve as being appropriately pithy and true.

Jude: It’s not super-interesting, but I think in combination with other lines we’ve seen here, it’s notable that Herbert was trying to write his characters as people who had learned, remembered, and tried to wield these aphorisms.

Maybe that seems kind of obvious, but I think it distinguishes him from modern writers and also, I think, from his contemporaries. Most science fiction writers don’t think to invent sayings like this and, if they mention them at all, they often just lazily use things in circulation today. “Wasn’t there a writer from the late twentieth century who said…”

The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.

Thomas: Now this one is great! Not really actionable, but definitely pithy and, more importantly, it makes a philosophically interesting observation about the world that’s quite thought-provoking! Definitely a work of genius!

Jude: Okay, okay, as you obviously already know, Jessica says this to herself, but the text notes she’s quoting St. Augustine, so Frank Herbert doesn’t get credit for writing it. Instead he gets credit for reading it and having her quote it. Or are you going to claim you read St. Augustine all the time and knew this quote already?

Thomas: No, you’re right, I definitely didn’t. Do you think people twenty thousand of years from now are still going to be quoting St. Augustine?

Jude: Probably not, but at least it’s a quote that’s already lasted fifteen hundred years!

Thomas: Let’s see a fuller version of the quote from its original source.

The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance. The mind commands the hand to move, and it so easy that one hardly distinguishes the order from its execution. Yet mind is mind and hand is body. The mind orders the mind to will. The recipient of the order is itself, yet it does not perform it.

Jude: That’s from his Confessions.

Thomas: We aren’t here to discuss the memoirs of saints, but this is a pretty interesting observation. I guess it prefigures the idea of an unconscious.

“The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.”

Jude: This one is a “Bene Gesserit axiom” that Jessica thinks to herself while she and Paul are in the desert and Paul is suddenly taking charge. Maybe you’ll say it’s wordy again.

Thomas: No, it’s not trying to be a pithy aphorism, it’s just summarizing a scientific truth. Or at least, a scientific “truth”. It sounds psychologically informed but…again, is this really true?

Jude: Some people stay calm under stress. Training helps you stay calm. I think it checks out? What would you say instead?

Thomas: It posits a binary and says the mind will do one of them under stress, which seems tautological. But whatever, if it’s a fancy way of saying “some people rise to the occasion in crunch time” then fine, I’ll accept it.

He who controls the spice controls the universe.

Jude: It seemed necessary to include this since it’s maybe the most famous quote from Dune and is on the Goodreads list but, alas, it’s not from the book. It’s from the David Lynch movie, so we don’t need to discuss it.

Thomas: We don’t need to, but this one is bad too.

Jude: Silly me. Of course it is. What could possibly be wrong with this?

Thomas: It’s not true! Think about it. Spice was already an oil metaphor when Herbert wrote it. Lynch made his movie after the oil embargo of the 70s.

Jude: And?

Thomas: Who controlled the world of 1980? Hint: it was not Saudi Arabia.

Jude: Saudi Arabia was getting, and has continued to get, enormously, monstrously rich.

Thomas: Yes, but that’s not what the quote says. OPEC was able to annoy the United States with their embargo and arguably prevent Jimmy Carter from being reelected, but the US and the Soviet Union were still in charge. To the extent anyone was in charge. And really, no one was in charge!

Jude: I suppose there were a lot of conspiracy theories about Saudi influence on George W. Bush and the Iraq war. If you accept those, maybe they do control the universe, they’re just secretive about it. Very Herbert-ian if so. Plans within plans and all that.

Thomas: I definitely don’t buy it. The Saudis are struggling just to control professional golf. If it said, “he who controls the spice can buy a Premier League team” I would accept it.

Jude: Fair enough. But as we said, that quote isn’t from Herbert. Let’s see what the real book says about this topic.

The people who can destroy a thing, they control it.

Jude: Paul says this to Gurney.

Thomas: Now this—

Jude: Hang on.

He who can destroy a thing has the real control of it.

Jude: Paul says this to Jessica and Chani later.

Thomas: Right, and—

Jude: Still not done.

The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.

Jude: Paul says this to the Emperor. These three quotes are not only in the same book, they’re within about a hundred pages of each other. Frank Herbert really wanted us to get this point.

Thomas: These are much better than the Lynch version. It posits Paul controls the spice, not the universe. If he could control the universe with the spice, presumably it wouldn’t have been necessary for the Fremen to fight a huge jihad. Although now that I mention it, it’s not obvious to me why they had to fight the jihad at all. Wasn’t Paul’s marriage to Irulan part of a coup that put him atop the empire?

Jude: I think a lot of planets didn’t go along with it and had to be beaten into submission. The new Villeneuve movie puts in a line to make this explicit.

Thomas: But then why bother with the political marriage at all, then?

Jude: Maybe some of them did go along with it? Or maybe it was the marriage that got the Spacing Guild to cooperate? That would make it necessary since you need them to transport your Fremen warriors.

Thomas: But if it was necessary, then Paul dying before that point would have stopped the jihad.

Jude: All I can say is the Frank Herbert didn’t really care about these details or else he would have put it on the page.

I'll miss the sea, but a person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside, allowing him to grow. Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.

Jude: People also quote this one and it’s not from the book either. I assume it’s also from the Lynch movie. Paul’s father says it, I believe.

Thomas: This one at least looks like a Herbert quote with a pithy core, “the sleeper must awaken”, surrounded by a bit more words than are necessary. Also, we go from “a person” to “him” to “us” to “the sleeper”. Pretty confusing.

Jude: “Change is good, stasis is bad” is a core concept of later Dune sequels so at least it’s in line with Herbert’s thinking.

Thomas: Yes, but it’s such a strange thing for Duke Leto to say about leaving Caladan. He’s not trying to grow as a person, he’s making a chess move in a dangerous game of political intrigue.

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

Jude: The Reverend Mother says this early in the book to Paul. Dune was way ahead of its time worrying about AI.

Thomas: Yes, although these days people are more worried about the machines themselves enslaving us. The quote sounds a bit more like Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four worrying about technology enabling totalitarianism.

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

Jude: This shows up in a couple different ways. This might actually be the most influential legacy of Dune as AI regulation becomes more and more of an issue.

Thomas: I don’t remember who it was, but I saw someone say once that this was just a convenience for Frank Herbert that allowed him to focus on human characters.

Jude: I doubt it. A key point of the Dune sequels is that, in Herbert’s idiosyncratic worldview, machine intelligences are creatures of stasis whereas biological human intelligence has the capacity to grow and evolve, albeit over very long time scales.

Thomas: That doesn’t really make any sense. It’s weird to say that humans have some essential thing that makes them qualitatively different from machines, but instead of a soul it turns out to be evolution. It was evolution that got people to think that maybe humans are just machines in the first place!

Jude: I don’t know. Frank Herbert said a lot of weird things. And in fairness to him, he was writing mostly before work with genetic algorithms showed that the biological process of evolution could be mirrored in computation to solve problems, work that eventually led to the AI we have today.

Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.

Jude: Jessica thinks this as she and Paul try to integrate with the Fremen. Very pithy. Maybe it’s a saying from Caladan.

Thomas: As usual I will ask: is this true? Swimming in strange water seems like it could be essential to success, thriving, growth, or dealing with change. But survival is kind of a low bar. Frank Herbert was concerned with stasis so you’d think he would appreciate how a lot of people just stick to safe, known waters and survive that way.

Jude: That kind of safety is quite privileged, isn’t it? Maybe if you live in a dangerous world, like the Fremen do, or even like Jessica herself in a world full of political intrigue, then you are forced into strange water whether you want to be or not.

Thomas: The book is very clear that the Fremen survive by hewing carefully to customs that they have created for surviving in the desert. Those waters aren’t strange to them. But I agree Jessica herself, despite her access to wealth and luxury, could be said to be always having to move in strange waters.

Jude: One other thing worth mentioning here, I think, is how many of these quotes have been internal monologues. Dune is full of characters thinking to themselves and trying to apply rules and sayings they’ve learned to their situations. Very stark contrast to Lord of the Rings where the aphorisms almost all emerge in dialogue. Perhaps Dune just much more concerned with the interiority of its characters?

Thomas: I think that’s a distortion from looking at popular quotes. We do see a lot of interior thoughts from Sam, for example, as he tries to adapt to the strange waters of leading Frodo through Mordor. But in Lord of the Rings, the hobbits don’t say much that people put on inspirational wall posters. And unlike in Dune, which is willing to hop into basically anyone’s head, Tolkien almost never gives us access to the interior thoughts of the “wise” characters like Gandalf and Elrond who produce most of the sayings.

Try looking into that place where you dare not look! You'll find me there, staring out at you!

Jude: Here’s some dialogue, then! Paul says this to the Reverend Mother at the climax of the book.

Thomas: I think we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel now. No one quotes this. Way too awkward. And the business about women having a place where they dare not look is, uh, weird. At best. And at worst—

Jude: Yeah, yeah, we’ll talk about gender in Dune in a different article.

Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: ‘Now, it's complete because it's ended here.’

Jude: Here’s a Princess Irulan aphorism. I like this one a lot and hope you aren’t going to tell me it’s wordy or false.

Thomas: No, no notes on this one. Concise, feels meaningful. Not tremendously useful but I’ll allow it.

Jude: I think by the standards of these things it’s quite useful as an anti-perfectionism aphorism. Good job, Princess.

The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called “spannungsbogen” -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.

Jude: Princess Irulan again, this time trafficking in some ethnic stereotyping. The Fremen are all two marshmallow people. Just massive amounts of willpower.

Thomas: So many problems here. First, I don’t buy the notion that the Fremen would have more willpower than anyone else. Maybe they’d have even less? They have to focus on the here and now, both because they’re poor and because they’re in a really dangerous environment. This delayed gratification stuff is about sitting still in school, navigating long-term interest rates, and other challenges of modern life that our ancestors on the savannah didn’t have to deal with.

And second, when someone in Dune talks about “the ancients” they mean us. We’re the ancients. Which brings us to the question, do we really call this “spannungsbogen”? Is that really a thing? I’ve never heard of it.

Jude: Let’s find out.

In real-world German, 'Spannungsbogen' has only one meaning: A sequence (literally 'arc'='Bogen') of events in a movie, play or other work of art that creates suspense or tension (Spannung='tension, suspense'). The translations given [in Dune] are completely bogus. Granted, 'Spannungsbogen' might conceivably mean all that, but it doesn't.

Jude: That’s from the Wiktionary talk page for Spannungsbogen, which, naturally, appears to be full of English speakers insisting that Dune must be correct and incredulous German speakers saying no, it’s not.

Thomas: My guess is Frank Herbert read something that used this term as a one-off metaphor, misinterpreted it as common usage, and no one ever knew to correct him. Imagine how hard it would be to fact-check this before the Internet existed.

Jude: Or maybe it’s in character for Princess Irulan to be bad at German.

Thomas: Princess Irulan lives, like, twenty thousand years in our future. No offense to Germans, but she’s not going to know any German whatsoever. Or English for that matter.

Jude: True. The educated people of the future speak Chakobsa for some reason.

Thomas: If you read between the lines of the very charitable Wikipedia article, I’m afraid Chakobsa is probably not a real thing, or at least not more than a handful of words even as originally spoken.

Jude: That doesn’t preclude people in the future from explicitly inventing it, or repurposing a bunch of words from Arabic, Romani, and other langauges (as Herbert himself did) and convincing themselves it is Chakobsa.

Anyway, that’s all for today. We’ll be back soon with more, including looks at the role of women in Dune and Lord of the Rings, the somewhat problematic antagonists, and comparing the movie adaptations.

Jude: Today we’re going to look at some quotes from Lord of the Rings. There are many great lines in the book that are pretty well known, not least because Peter Jackson did a good job working many of them into his movies. We’ll be sticking with quotes that go back to the original books, however, and seeing what we can learn from them about Tolkien’s writing, wit, and wisdom.

Thomas: There are enough interesting quotes in Lord of the Rings we could probably have a blog with nothing but posts about them, but we took these from Goodreads, which sorts them by the number of likes, so this sample is very scientific, though we’re not going in order. So let’s get started.

I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

Thomas: As someone who likes more than half of books half as well as they deserve, I think this is a wonderful place to start. Does being a linguist train you to write sentences like…whatever this is? If so, it’s an underrated discipline. Then again Tolkien is not really a wordplay guy and part of the weight of this, especially on re-reading, is that it kind of comes out of nowhere.

Jude: Not nowhere, I think it’s in line with the arch, satiric tone of the early hobbit material. I think Tolkien was actually quite good at that sort of writing, but his interests were such that he rarely used it. But it’s worth noting this isn’t just a cool line, it’s a character moment: Bilbo is tired of being in the Shire and is both showing off his facility with words and playfully taunting the audience for not being erudite enough to understand him. Yet despite coming close to being a taunt, it’s also a fundamentally self-deprecating thing to say. He’s acknowledging he hasn’t connected with his neighbors the way he probably should have.

‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.

‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’

Jude: Although this is dialogue, this is one of many quotes that are effective platitudes. This one is probably on a bunch of inspirational posters. But it has a bit more weight since we know the author writing it had to live through two world wars, fighting in one and sending two of his sons to fight in the other.

Thomas: It seems like Gandalf is agreeing with Frodo and also wishing he, Gandalf, didn’t have this happen in his time. But as Tolkien fanatics know, Gandalf is essentially an immortal angel who started pretending to be a human wizard explicitly to resist Sauron. So this is doubly untrue about him. First, because he’s immortal and older than the world, literally everything that happens is happening in “his time”. And second because if you interpret this as referring to his own incarnation, well, he didn’t have to do this! Unlike all of us, he actually chose to come into this fallen world from Tolkien’s version of heaven at precisely the time Sauron was menacing it.

Jude: I guess that’s right, but surely this is exactly the kind of nitpicking that keeps people of a critical bent from enjoying anything.

Thomas: Ah, but I wasn’t finished. If you read this even more closely you can see that what must be happening is that Gandalf is agreeing that he wishes this wasn’t happening…in Frodo’s time. Perhaps he’s just being nice and would have said this to anyone, but I like to think it’s a super-sneaky dig and Gandalf is saying: “You wish it wasn’t happening to you, and I wish that too…Bilbo would have been much better at this. Or maybe if Sauron could have waited just a little longer, one of Sam’s kids with Rosie could have handled this situation. They’re likely to be much better options.”

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.

Jude: The part about gold is a really common saying now. I see it pretty frequently.

Thomas: Sorry, but Tolkien just slightly rephrased something that was already common. Shakespeare has it in Merchant of Venice: “All that glitters is not gold / Often you have heard that told.” So not only is it a cliché now, it was already a cliché in 1598. You can also see it in Chaucer (twice!) and even Aesop. Tolkien’s contribution here is the poetry. And that, I’m afraid, is not—

Jude: Now hang on, lots of people knock Tolkien’s poetry, but I think it’s quite underrated. When I first read Lord of the Rings I just skipped past it, but upon rereading I started reading them out loud. I won’t claim to be a poetry expert but there’s some really cool poems in there.

Thomas: “Hey dol! Merry dol! Ring a dong dillo!”

Jude: Uh, the Bombadil stuff maybe isn’t so great. But I think others are, most notably the Earendil poem Biblo recites with its really complicated but beautiful rhyming scheme. Until I read it to myself out loud I had no idea how cool it was: “Beneath the Moon and under star / he wandered far from northern strands, / bewildered on enchanted ways / beyond the days of mortal lands.”

Thomas: I’ll be diplomatic and say that the quality of Tolkien’s poetry varies much, much more than that of his prose. And he put a lot of poems in Lord of the Rings. Worst of all, to this day he makes authors think that fantasy books should have poetry in them and so they write it despite having never written, or even read, a poem outside of a classroom before. At least Tolkien read and enjoyed poetry!

‘Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens,' said Gimli.

'Maybe,' said Elrond, 'but let him not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall.”

Jude: Here Gimli and Elrond have an aphorism battle. Both of these aphorisms are really good, I think, and serve as a good example of a time when Tolkien elevates his style from everyday language and it works really well.

Thomas: Does this count as elevated style? It’s dialogue, not narration.

Jude: No one talks like this.

Thomas: No one talks like this now but in older cultures with relatively few books, educated people quoted from them all the time when speaking with each other. Maybe Gimli is quoting the dwarf equivalent of Tacitus and Elrond is responding with a quote from an elvish version.

Jude: Well, as far as I know Tolkien wasn’t quoting anyone, he just wrote these from scratch, and I think it shows off his skill with archaic style and even poetry. What makes Gimli’s line work really well is the subject/verb inversion that sets up the alliteration between “Faithless” and “farewell”. I don’t know the criteria Tolkien used to decide when to invert and start with the verb, but it’s noticeably more awkward in later writers so I think he was doing something right.

Thomas: I agree these two lines both pull off the archaic style, but you’re being too generous when you imply Tolkien was never awkward with it.

The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.

Jude: This is said by Haldir, the Lothlorien border guard, and although I suspect most readers just zoom past, this is a very concise statement of Tolkien’s answer to the problem of evil. Why does a good God Iluvatar allow evil to exist? Tolkien posits that love “mingled with grief” is greater than it would be otherwise. Lord of the Rings doesn’t engage much with this idea but it is extremely important to The Silmarillion. It’s very appropriate for Haldir to be saying this since The Silmarillion is meant to be a compendium of Elvish legends (just as there’s a thin metatextual layer situating Lord of the Rings as “the red book of Westmarch”, a text originally written by Frodo and Sam themselves just as Bilbo supposedly wrote The Hobbit).

Thomas: While we’re here, it’s worth noting that Tolkien’s constant use of “fair” and “dark” as synonyms for “good” and “evil” has unpleasant connotations for some modern readers. I don’t think it’s, uh, fair to read conscious racism into things like this but at the very least it’s an example of linguistic drift starting to take its toll on an aging text.

Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

Thomas: But don’t cancel Tolkien just yet, because here he has Gandalf come out very stridently against the death penalty. Very progressive for 1954!

Jude: Politics aside, it seems like a generally wise thing to say? In Tolkien-influenced fantasy we encounter lots of characters who are supposed to be wise but I’d say relatively few authors manage to actually show them being wise instead of just saying so. I should also add this is one of several places that prefigure the role of mercy at the end of the story (Gandalf is even specifically talking about mercy to Gollum, here).

He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.

Jude: Here’s another of Gandalf’s wise sayings.

Thomas: Uh, this one definitely sounds really profound…but it isn’t actually wise at all. What does this even mean? How should we put this great wisdom to use in our day-to-day lives?

Jude: You should…avoid breaking things, I guess? Tolkien lived during an era where “conservationists” would conserve African animals by shooting them and taking them to a taxidermist.

Thomas: Who do I talk to about getting some more context here? What is Gandalf even talking about? What did he say before this?

“I liked white better,” I said.

Thomas: Gandalf the White? More like Gandalf the White Supremacist.

Jude: Very funny. The full context is that Gandalf is narrating his confrontation with Saruman in first person.

I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.

“I liked white better,” I said.

“White!” he sneered. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.”

“In which case it is no longer white,” said I. “And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”

“You need not speak to me as to one of the fools that you take for friends,” said he.

Jude: With the full context, we see that Gandalf isn’t a racist, he just has good taste and isn’t down with the Vegas-like aesthetics of Saruman’s technicolor dreamcoat.

Thomas: We also see that Saruman is completely right! If you actually think about what he’s saying, Gandalf appears to be taking a strong ethical stand against…dyed clothing, writing on paper, and prisms. It sounds very wise, but it doesn’t make any sense even in context. Saruman never even said he was breaking light to find out what it is! Gandalf is talking nonsense here.

And before you say I’m being nitpicky and cynical, look at what follows! Gloriously, Saruman immediately calls Gandalf out on his bullshit.

Jude: I should have known you’d be pro-Saruman.

Thomas: I’m just calling it like I see it. Saruman goes on from here to give Gandalf a speech saying they need to join forces with Sauron since his victory is inevitable and that in doing so they can try to mitigate his evil and eventually control him. “There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.” It’s funny though to think that right here in the text, Gandalf’s means seem to be exposed as: give wise counsel when you have something wise to say, but failing that, say some nonsense that sounds profound, I guess to keep your reputation up. Basically, instead of Saruman’s authoritarianism, he chooses the path of the self-help guru.

Jude: If those are the only two choices, Gandalf still seems like right choice to me.

It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope.

Jude: More Gandalf wisdom, this time at the Council of Elrond, referring to the plan to take the One Ring into Mordor. The first sentence could serve as a thesis for Lord of the Rings. And, I suppose, it’s also a criticism of consequentialism.

Thomas: This seems like a conscious echo of a famous line by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Gandalf’s version is more than a little dubious. Since even the wise cannot see all ends, how are you weighing these other courses? Specifically, they say there’s at least a slim chance of destroying the ring by walking with it into Sauron’s front yard, but how are they so sure there’s no chance of safely wielding the ring against Sauron?

Even if there’s, like, a ninety-nine percent chance of Gandalf being corrupted and turning evil if he uses the Ring to defeat Sauron, that still might be a better chance of success than their preferred strategy of “simply walk into Mordor and hope he doesn’t notice”.

Jude: Somehow I don’t think Gandalf and Elrond were using Bayesian decision theory.

Thomas: One of the many, many things Sam Bankman-Fried has been correctly vilified for is saying that he would accept a huge chance of human extinction as long as, in the unlikely outcome that humans survive, the resulting benefit to them was big enough. But that’s just what Gandalf is advising here!

Jude: If anyone is a crypto bro in this story, it’s got to be Saruman, right? He tries to create his own ring. Maybe the One Ring is really a metaphor for the corrupt power of the traditional financial system. But we’re getting way too far down the rabbit hole on this one, there’s still more quotes for us to cover.

‘You cannot pass,’ he said. The orcs stood still, and a dead silence fell. ‘I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn. Go back to the Shadow! You cannot pass.’

Jude: We have to mention Gandalf’s famous defiant speech to the balrog on the bridge.

Thomas: This is another instance of Gandalf using profound-seeming babble to make himself seem impressive.

Jude: It’s not babble, he’s talking to the balrog. The balrog knows very well what Udûn is even if no one else present (or the reader) does.

Thomas: If you translate this from the deep Tolkien lore that no reader would have known until The Silmarillion was published after Tolkien’s death, it comes out as: “You cannot pass. I serve God and wield the fire of the sun. You cannot pass. Your black magic won’t work, fire demon from Satan’s original fortress. Go back to your hole. You cannot pass.”

Jude: Good work, you’ve demonstrated why Tolkien is a world-famous author and you are not.

Thomas: I will say it is fun to think that when he says he wields the fire of the sun, Gandalf means his fire magic is a very low-yield version of nuclear fusion.

“At the hill’s foot Frodo found Aragorn, standing still and silent as a tree; but in his hand was a small golden bloom of elanor, and a light was in his eyes. He was wrapped in some fair memory: and as Frodo looked at him he knew that he beheld things as they had been in this same place. For the grim years were removed from the face of Aragorn, and he seemed clothed in white, a young lord fall and fair; and he spoke words in the Elvish tongue to one whom Frodo could not see. Arwen vanimelda, namarie! He said, and then he drew a breath, and returning out of his thought he looked at Frodo and smiled.

`Here is the heart of Elvendom on earth,’ he said, `and here my heart dwells ever, unless there be a light beyond the dark roads that we still must tread, you and I. Come with me!’ And taking Frodo’s hand in his, he left the hill of Cerin Amroth and came there never again as a living man.”

Jude: Here’s an example of the Aragorn/Arwen romance becoming briefly visible during the main part of the story. As he often does, Tolkien leaves the Elvish words untranslated (“Arwen beautiful and beloved, farewell”). Most of this is only intelligible when re-reading the book after having read the Appendix about Aragorn and Arwen and learning this is where Aragorn proposed to Arwen. Other authors intentionally write books with little things for re-readers to catch, but I’m not sure if Tolkien was doing that on purpose.

Thomas: A lot of the Lothlorien material just kind of washes over the reader on a first read, I think, without making a lot of sense. The last part of this quote, however, is a kind of a cheap trick since it makes it seem like Aragorn is going to get killed in the story, but actually it turns out to just mean that after his victory, Aragorn is too busy being King to ever stop by Lothlorien even though he’s king for more than a century and Lothlorien is really not that far away from Minas Tirith.

The Sword of Elendil was forged anew by Elvish smiths, and on its blade was traced a device of seven stars set between the crescent Moon and rayed Sun, and about them was written many runes; for Aragorn son of Arathorn was going to war upon the marches of Mordor. Very bright was that sword when it was made whole again; the light of the sun shone redly in it, and the light of the moon shone cold, its edge was hard and keen. And Aragorn gave it a new name and called it Andúril, Flame of the West.

Thomas: Here’s Tolkien in his heightened, archaic mode. Awkward it is, for John son of Arthur uses not the normal order of words when excited he gets.

Jude: Certainly a little bit of this goes a long way, but in terms of story pacing this is getting the reader excited for the next stage of the journey so I think it’s appropriate.

War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor, and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom. Not feared, save as men may fear the dignity of a man, old and wise.

Jude: Faramir here is stating another crucial theme of Tolkien’s, one that many readers ignore: to fight against evil is necessary, but otherwise it is better not to fight at all. It’s stated as a mark of Gondor’s decline that warriors are esteemed over poets and gardeners.

Thomas: Certainly that’s a big contrast to Dune’s elevation of rugged masculinity. Tolkien saw the horrors of war firsthand (unlike, I believe, Frank Herbert) and knew peaceful life is better. But I’m not sure he succeeded in writing an anti-war book. Certainly Frodo’s pacifist turn during the scouring of the shire comes as a bit of a surprise, I think.

Jude: His views on war are why he made his main characters hobbits instead of characters like Aragorn or even Faramir. But as we talked about last week, ever since he wrote this story, many readers have read Aragorn as the protagonist instead.

Thomas: To some extent he has himself to blame for that. He mostly uses hobbit perspectives, but the kidnapping of the hobbits in Two Towers puts Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli at the forefront of important chapters and even though they reunite with Merry and Pippin and their perspective is used for most of the action in Return of the King, the damage is done. The reader is focused on Aragorn, Theoden, Eomer, and Gandalf with Merry and Pippin being sidecars at best.

‘In one thing you have not changed, dear friend,’ said Aragorn: ‘you still speak in riddles.’

‘What? In riddles?’ said Gandalf. ‘No! For I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to; the long explanations needed by the young are wearying.’

Thomas: This quote is mainly important because it shows Aragorn agrees with me and Saruman. He’s tired of Gandalf’s shtick. He perseveres in pressing Gandalf to explain himself after this and at length Gandalf actually does. The explanation is helpful, not at all too difficult for Aragorn’s tiny mind, and shows Gandalf has no need to be so opaque all the time.

Jude: The colon after the word Aragorn is interesting, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that anywhere else. I think the idea is the colon was in his dialogue but it moved to the other side of the attribution, similar to the way commas are moved in American English.

Thomas: Aragorn’s colon can only move like this without killing him because the blood of Numenor runs true in his veins. You won’t be so lucky. If your colon does this, get immediate medical help.

Thus Aragorn for the first time in the full light of day beheld Éowyn, Lady of Rohan, and thought her fair, fair and cold, like a morning of pale spring that is not yet come to womanhood. And she was now suddenly aware of him: tall heir of kings, wise with many winters, greycloaked, hiding a power that yet she felt. For a moment still as stone she stood, then turning swiftly she was gone.

Jude: Here’s the point that really kicks off what modern readers will expect is a love triangle but no, it’s very much just a love, uh, line segment.

Thomas: “Not yet come to womanhood”. Ouch. Hope Eowyn never reads Frodo and Sam’s book.

Jude: What’s funny about this is that Eowyn wants to be the protagonist in a Twilight-type romance. It turns out she’s 24 at this point whereas Aragorn is a very, very young-looking 88, not too far off from Bella and Edward’s 17 and 104. Except here, Aragorn has the reaction you’d want a comparatively old man to have in this situation: “Um, no, you’re a child.”

Thomas: The joke’s on her. Aragorn also wants to be in a Twilight-style romance, it’s just that he wants to be Bella to Arwen’s Edward. He’s a mere child of 88 years whereas Arwen is (checks notes) over 2,700 years old. Yeah, not a typo. That’s a two thousand six hundred year age gap.

Jude: At least she didn’t meet him in high school. But let’s move on.

Thomas: Wait, I got distracted by the math, but I also wanted to say that these sentences are really not Tolkien’s best work.

Jude: I think they’re better than what you get from the modern writers who try to write like this.

Thomas: Maybe, but “like a morning of pale spring that is not yet come to womanhood” is a mixed metaphor. Mornings don’t become women. Meanwhile we’re rushing from full light of day to morning to spring to winter…it’s too much, man, too much.

Aragorn threw back his cloak. The elven-sheath glittered as he grasped it, and the bright blade of Andúril shone like a sudden flame as he swept it out. 'Elendil!' he cried. 'I am Aragorn, son of Arathorn, and am called Elessar, the Elfstone, Dúnadan, the heir of Isildur Elendil's son of Gondor. Here is the Sword that was Broken and is forged again! Will you aid me or thwart me? Choose swiftly!

Jude: On its own, this one looks quite ridiculous, but in the context of an the uneasy first meeting with Eomer, after several pages where Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, and Eomer are cautiously sparring with guarded words, it’s very fun and cathartic.

Thomas: Aragorn thinks he has more names than a character in a Russian novel. Fortunately no one really ever calls him Elfstone. And though I agree it’s a cool moment overall, it’s just confusing to shout “Elendil” in Eomer’s face just because he’s drawing his sword. You’re about to list so many names, but then you start out with one that’s not even yours, it’s your great-great-great—I don’t how many, but lots of greats—grandfather.

‘Halflings! But they are only a little people in old songs and children’s tales out of the North. Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?’

‘A man may do both,’ said Aragorn. ‘For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!’

Jude: From the same conversation, Aragorn gets to show off his own wisdom as he dunks on one of Eomer’s men. Hopefully you agree this one passes muster as actually wise.

Thomas: I’ll allow it, though of course if he didn’t have the misfortune to be a bit character in a fantasy novel, Eomer’s friend would be the one who was right. Things only mentioned in old children’s stories don’t exist.

‘But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.’

Jude: This is Frodo at the end of the story. Surely this one checks out.

Thomas: The less exalted the character, the wiser their profundities are. This is a pretty straightforward, but beautifully phrased, description of soldiers giving their lives to protect those at home.

Jude: This one makes me wonder how much Tolkien himself identified with Frodo, given the trauma he must have experienced at war as a young man. But at minimum it certainly applies to his friends who died fighting in France.

Thomas: Not to be cruel, but I can’t help noting that, at least for British soldiers, giving up their lives so others may keep them makes a lot more sense in the second world war than the first. It’s not at all clear the terrible losses of the first world war helped anyone keep anything, at least on the Western front.

The whole thing is quite hopeless, so it's no good worrying about tomorrow. It probably won't come.

Jude: This is the kind of cheerful, inspirational material that makes the Mordor section of the book such a joy to read.

Thomas: By Frodo’s standards in this part of the book, this is a lighthearted joke. It sounds despairing, the big sin for Tolkien, but in context, Frodo’s saying they’ll just forge ahead and ignore the fact they don’t have enough water to be able to drink anything tomorrow. Since they’re still moving forward, it’s not truly despair. 

‘A time may come soon,’ said he, ‘when none will return. Then there will be need of valour without renown, for none shall remember the deeds that are done in the last defence of your homes. Yet the deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised.’

She answered: ‘All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.’

‘What do you fear, lady?’ he asked.

‘A cage,’ she said. ‘To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.’

Jude: Eowyn gives at least as good as she gets here, I think, as she does in the larger conversation about why she needs to stay with the people while the army is away.

Thomas: She’s not exactly a feminist icon, but her dialogue here really holds up well. If it wasn’t for the somewhat elevated register they speak in, these could be lines from a modern fantasy novel.

Jude: We’ll cover the role of women in the story in much more detail later, but with Eowyn it’s important to remember Tolkien’s view that being a warrior is not a good aspiration for anyone, male or female. Eowyn’s courage is praiseworthy but her fixation on glory is misguided not just for her but for anyone.

I stand in Minas Anor, the Tower of the Sun; and behold! the Shadow has departed! I will be a Shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.

Jude: Here’s Eowyn after her transformation. It’s probably hard for a lot of people to accept since it feels like she’s going from challenging gender roles to accepting them, but again Tolkien approves of this for everyone. Sam, after all, is a gardener himself. Faramir undergoes a similar transition.

Thomas: It’s amusing though that this is her answer to Faramir’s marriage proposal. And she says a lot of words here, but none of them are “yes”. He has to ask again, basically, and she never is shown saying yes, though of course it’s implied. Then, later, the guy running the hospital where she’s been treated for depression releases her “to the care of the Steward of the City”—Faramir—but she refuses to leave and claims now she wants to live in the hospital until her brother gets back. Faramir, buddy, I don’t think she’s into you.

Jude: The whole Eowyn/Faramir whirlwind romance is…not the strongest part of the book.

But Sam turned to Bywater, and so came back up the Hill, as day was ending once more. And he went on, and there was yellow light, and fire within; and the evening meal was ready, and he was expected. And Rose drew him in, and set him in his chair, and put little Elanor upon his lap.

He drew a deep breath. “Well, I’m back,” he said.

Jude: These are the last lines of the book, unless you count the appendices. I think it’s mainly noticeable that it’s the only real domestic scene in the whole thing. Maybe in all of Tolkien’s work? A mother, a father, a baby.

Thomas: Just some last minute family values. But why shouldn’t we count the appendices? Let’s see the real last sentence in the book.

It must be observed, however, that when the Oldbucks (Zaragamba) changed their name to Brandybuck (Brandagamba), the first element meant “borderland”, and Marchbuck would have been nearer. Only a very bold hobbit would have ventured to call the Master of Buckland Braldagamba in his hearing.

Thomas: With these immortal words ends one of the great novels of modern English literature.

Jude: The last appendix before the index is written by Tolkien in the first person describing how he “translated” the words from the “original text”. It’s a very, very Tolkien thing, obviously.

Thomas: It’s actually kind of brilliant. After reading thousands of pages of this story and plowing through vast stretches of twee hobbits and legendary warriors, Tolkien is like, oh, by the way, I was lying to you about all the names. Samwise Gamgee? His real name was—no kidding—Banazîr Galpsi. Merry Brandybuck’s real name was Kalimac Brandagamba. Obviously. Frodo Baggins? More like Maura Labingi. Even the Shire’s real name was the much more Persian-sounding Sûza. All the names have such texture, and they all turn out to be lies.

Jude: He explains he intentionally changed the names precisely to have the effect on the native English speaker that they would have had to a native speaker of the in-story language of Westron.

Thomas: Since we’re at the end of this article I’m going to admit that even though Jude’s name has been rendered as “Jude” so as to be something your pitiful English-speaking mind can grasp, whenever I say his name I’m actually using our native language, a language in which names are typically rendered as a series of seventeen varied glottal stops followed by—

Jude: Sorry, that’s all the time we have for today! Next time we’ll look at quotes from Dune and see how Herbert’s style of profundity differs from Tolkien’s.

Jude: After talking about the plot of Dune last time, today we’re going to talk about the plot of Lord of the Rings. With Dune, we discussed the fact many readers see Paul as conventional hero, active and triumphant, but Frank Herbert intends him to be seen as a tragic hero who is trapped by his fate. For Lord of the Rings, I think that instead of reading one protagonist in different ways, readers find themselves with a choice of protagonist.

Thomas: Yes, and as we said when talking about the popularity of Lord of the Rings, I don’t think Tolkien meant for readers to have a choice. He wants hobbits to be the modernist viewpoint that help us access the mythic world of Gandalf, Aragorn, and so on. For all of Fellowship of the Ring it seems crazy there are four hobbit characters—to the point that Elrond even complains about it from within the story—but Merry and Pippin eventually split up in Return of the King to mediate Rohan and Gondor for us.

Jude: But there are other options. Even within the text, you can argue that Sam ends up being the protagonist. It’s mostly his efforts that move Frodo to the end of his quest. He gets the last lines of the book and the most unambiguously happy ending.

Thomas: True, though I think readers today have some real issues with Sam. Lots of people read Fellowship of the Ring and feel a little uneasy about him even if they don’t quite put their finger on the fact that, although he doesn’t have a title, Frodo lives the life of a rich nobleman. He’s in an agrarian society but appears to do no physical labor and in fact doesn’t appear to produce anything of any kind. His Sackville-Baggins relatives are said to want his house, but perhaps they really want the rents that tenants are paying him to support his lifestyle. Sam’s slightly obsequious servitude is a nagging reminder that there’s a huge class divide between not just Frodo and Sam but between Frodo and nearly every reader.

Jude: There’s no denying some amount of early twentieth-century British class consciousness is intruding on the narrative with Sam, but I think it’s important that he isn’t ordered to go with Frodo. He volunteers, and not just at first when he doesn’t know what he’s getting into. He repeatedly passes up opportunities to avoid danger and it’s clear he’s motivated by genuine friendship with Frodo.

Thomas: Eventually it’s friendship, certainly, but I’d call his motivation for much of the story something much more like loyalty. People are pretty suspicious of loyalty these days and even more sensitive to power imbalances. We prefer to imagine friendship as best expressed between equals. The less mutable classes of Tolkien’s childhood probably made unequal friendships make more sense to him and people who read it at the time of publication.

Jude: Anyway, I think that as a hero, Sam still fits into the story in a similar way to Frodo. He is better rewarded than Frodo since he gets the family he wanted and becomes a leader of his community, but like Frodo, he succeeds through courage and endurance. He’s not special, he’s not of noble blood, and he isn’t some kind of great fighter.

The alternative protagonist I want to consider is Aragorn. I think Tolkien meant Aragorn to be more of a mythic ideal than a full-fledged character. He has no real flaws and doesn’t meaningfully grow or change over the course of the story. Hollywood considers this unacceptable: characters must face inner obstacles that mirror the external challenges they struggle against, so Peter Jackson tries to give him a lack of confidence, a fear that he’ll repeat the mistakes of Isildur…but it doesn’t really amount to much even in the movies.

Thomas: Now that the movies leaned pretty hard into Aragorn as an invincible action hero, it hard to get that out of our heads, but I think in the books he’s a bit more of a wise leader who is decent but not extraordinary at sword-fighting. He fights beside Boromir and then Eomer and does fine, but he himself is essentially a human Macguffin, a plot coupon who can be traded in for a King at Minas Tirith (and having a King instead of a Steward means +10 to Gondorian soldier morale, I guess).

Jude: If you put it like that, I guess he’s also a plot coupon for the Paths of the Dead. Redeemable for one army. But the point is that Tolkien doesn’t invest him with much inner conflict or depth because he’s just supposed to be a moral exemplar.

Thomas: Yeah, for some crazy reason Tolkien seems to have thought that readers couldn’t empathize with a character who has the wisdom of a hundred-year-old scholar, has the athleticism of rookie NFL player, is widely praised for his lifelong career of unappreciated heroism (bit of a paradox there), is the secret heir to the throne of a great kingdom, and has a girlfriend who everyone agrees is, at minimum, one of the two or three hottest people on the planet.

Jude: When you put it like that, I do start to see a lot of myself in this guy…

Thomas: You joke, but while Tolkien was a smart man in a lot of areas, he doesn’t seem to have understood that everyone is, in their own minds, super-smart, potentially super-athletic if they had a need to apply themselves, and completely unappreciated by the dim bulbs around them. Maybe they don’t have the hottest significant other possible and they aren’t universally acclaimed as rightful ruler of all free people…yet…but if they did and were, it would be no less than they deserve! It’s obvious everyone is going to gravitate toward Aragorn and not Frodo “extremely short, weak, prone to fainting” Baggins.

Jude: Frodo is at least rich.

Thomas: He is, but he doesn’t enjoy it enough. It’s not really clear what Aragorn does with all his time prior to the start of the story, but we’re repeatedly told it’s valuable and helps defend the unknowing townspeople of Eriador. Very selfless, but he also has time to frequent the Rivendell party scene and hang out with his girlfriend. Meanwhile, Frodo goes for walks and looks pensively off into the distance.

Jude: Yeah, and since we’ve been talking about Dune, it’s worth noting Paul Atreides is clearly an Aragorn-type figure, not a Frodo or Sam.

Thomas: Exactly. Paul Atreides is absurdly special, yet readers still root for him and see at least a little of themselves in him.

Jude: And the fantasy genre books that followed in Tolkien’s footsteps jettisoned the Frodo archetype almost from the start. For example, Garion and Rand al’Thor, protagonists in David Eddings’ Belgariad (1982) and in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time (1990), are humble people who turn out to be from kingly bloodlines.

Thomas: Let’s throw Luke Skywalker in there too since those authors probably had him in mind. In fact, I’d argue that these characters aren’t as elevated as Aragorn. He seems humble, but unlike them he knows his ancestry at the beginning of the book. The Luke Skywalker farmboy template is the innovative idea that a hero should start out as Frodo, or maybe even Sam, and then over the course of the narrative they discover that—phew, what a relief—they aren’t Sam at all but are Aragorn instead.

Jude: Am I right that there’s more than a little judgment in your discussion of Aragorn-as-protagonist? Sophisticated people like you and Professor Tolkien appreciate Important Literary Themes and thus appreciate Frodo’s tragic journey, whereas the benighted masses want simple stories about Aragorn becoming king and winning the hand of the fairy princess.

Thomas: No, I’m a man of the people. It was only last week that I unleashed the scorching hot take that tragedy is lame. I’m not saying I’m perfectly consistent, but it’s going to take longer than seven days for me to forget and contradict myself. The Aragorn-centered halves of Two Towers and Return of the King are way more exciting and more fun than the Frodo halves. Are you going to pretend to disagree?

Jude: I…I guess not. I want to like the Frodo storyline more, but the Aragorn storyline is much more fun. But I don’t think that’s because Frodo is a tragic hero and Aragorn is a conventional one. After all, we said Sam is also a more conventional hero and he’s right there in every scene with Frodo.

Thomas: Sure, but he’s not declaring his ancestry, impressing local noblewomen, and leading armies of both the living and the dead.

Jude: I think what I’m saying is that Frodo’s storyline is much more interesting in theory. It’s got way more psychological depth and nuance. Even the dialogue is more impressive, I’d say. Frodo, Sam, and Gollum each have a unique voice. You would know who’s speaking even if the dialogue wasn’t attributed.

Aragorn’s obstacles are easier to appreciate. They’re visible and external: armies of orcs, corrupted allies, even a spooky path. There’s lots of sympathetic characters there helping him, people like Gimli, Legolas, Eomer, Merry, Pippin, and Eowyn. Gimli and Legolas aren’t all that distinct in the book, actually, but Eomer, Eowyn, and the two hobbits all offer interesting contrasts. Oh, and of course there’s Gandalf, the only reliable source of information in what otherwise is a wide and confusing world. People gallop this way and that, battles with thousands of people are fought, we get to see several distinct societies, including one that’s a small number of talking trees. It’s all just…fun.

By contrast, Frodo’s chief obstacles are either more abstract (like the increasing “weight” of the Ring) or more prosaic: there’s a mountain range in my way, we ate our last food, and so on. There’s some cameos from Faramir and some orcs but basically there’s just three characters locked in an unpleasant friend-triangle. And one of them is Gollum, who is a microcosm of the whole storyline: a very interesting psychological portrait but in practice quite tiresome.

Thomas: I’d also say that the Shelob sequence is probably the most frightening thing in the story by a good measure. That could be a benefit or a detriment, depending on your tastes. The paths of the dead sequence is, let’s be honest, way less successful. It should be a big moment, but it’s pretty dull on the page. Being told in flashback doesn’t help.

Jude: The books present it in flashback to preserve the twist of the appearance of the corsair ships becoming Tolkien’s “eucatastrophe”, the suddenly good outcome. That moment is amazing and really works well, so I think it’s worth abandoning any dramatic tension that you might have felt following Aragorn to Erech without the flashback structure (very little, by the way, no one would believe some random zombies are going to do in Aragorn, Legolas, or Gimli at that point).

Shelob being a terrifying spider is unpleasant, but that’s only in a few scenes. I think the bigger issue is that there’s this pall of despair over the entire storyline. It seems impossible that Frodo could succeed, and Frodo himself is a real downer. Is it accurate to say he’s struggling with an ever-deepening Ring-induced depression? It’s just not a fun time.

Thomas: So maybe all this is an intentional effect. It’s like those old movie theaters that tried to make movies more immersive by blowing wind in the audience’s faces during horseback riding scenes. Frodo’s chapters inspire the same feelings of hopelessness, threat, and claustrophobia in the reader that Frodo himself is feeling. The reader struggles to turn the page just as Frodo struggles to keep taking steps. Then, when the Ring is destroyed, both Frodo and the reader feel an exhausted relief.

Jude: I’m not sure that’s true, but maybe you’re right. Certainly it’s written in a very different register than the Aragorn storyline, that much must be intentional. Maybe that’s why Tolkien didn’t interleave the chapters. Doing that, as the movies do, makes everything kind of average out. I guess Tolkien really was a literary genius!

Thomas: If “genius” means “intentionally wrote a very tiresome set of chapters”, then, sure. Congratulations. But I’d rather read fun stories, not the intentionally unfun stories.

Jude: I guess it’s worth saying here that we both read Lord of the Rings for the first time two and a half decades ago, so our impressions of the experience of reading Frodo’s story is almost entirely coming from rereads. It’s a little odd to say this because I don’t think of Tolkien as someone who does M. Night Shyamalan twists, but Frodo’s storyline does have something of a twist ending. How can he possibly get himself to the mountain, you wonder, and even if he makes it, it’s clear he’s too far gone to throw the ring away himself. Tolkien has an ingenious solution to this, but when rereading you probably remember it so that source of suspense isn’t present.

Thomas: You might be right about that. Almost everything else about the story holds up really well on reread. It’s been a really long time, but I’m pretty sure that the significance of what happens to Frodo after throwing the Ring into the fire is something I didn’t really appreciate on the first read. I certainly picked up on the very bittersweet tone of the concluding chapters, but I think I didn’t really grasp why it wasn’t ending like every other story I knew.

Jude: Yes, like Paul Atreides, Frodo has a tragic destiny. Through great heroism, he brings the Ring to the fire, but the process of getting there has left him unable to resist claiming it for himself. It’s only through a lucky break of sorts that the quest doesn’t fail. Except it’s not really “luck” when Gandalf has several times broken the fourth wall to muse that “his heart tells him” Gollum still has “some part to play”. Checkov’s Gollum comes down from the mantle and fires. Or bites, I guess.

Thomas: I have to note here that it’s actually not just Providence that saves Frodo.

Jude: Yes, yes, Frodo chooses to spare Gollum. He shows mercy and therefore is shown mercy himself.

Thomas: Also true, but I actually mean something else. When they first accept Gollum as a guide, Frodo doesn’t just trust blindly. He extracts an oath:

‘No, I will not take it off you,’ said Frodo, ‘not unless’ - he paused a moment in thought - ‘not unless there is any promise you can make that I can trust.’

‘‘We will swear to do what he wants, yes, yess,’ said Gollum, still twisting and grabbling at his ankle. ‘It hurts us.’

‘Swear?’ said Frodo.

‘Sméagol,’ said Gollum suddenly and clearly, opening his eyes wide and staring at Frodo with a strange light. ‘Sméagol will swear on the Precious.’

Frodo drew himself up, and again Sam was startled by his words and his stern voice. ‘On the Precious? How dare you?’ he said. ‘Think!

One Ring to rule them all and in the Darkness bind them.

Would you commit your promise to that, Sméagol? It will hold you. But it is more treacherous than you are. It may twist your words. Beware!’

Gollum cowered. ‘On the Precious. on the Precious!’ he repeated.

‘And what would you swear?’ asked Frodo.

‘To be very very good,’ said Gollum. Then crawling to Frodo’s feet he grovelled before him, whispering hoarsely: a shudder ran over him, as if the words shook his very bones with fear. ‘Sméagol will swear never, never, to let Him have it. Never! Sméagol will save it. But he must swear on the Precious.’

Gollum swears not to allow Sauron to have the Ring, even though Frodo warns him the Ring will twist his words. Later Frodo notes that with the Ring, he can command Gollum:

"In the last need, Sméagol, I should put on the Precious; and the Precious mastered you long ago. If I, wearing it, were to command you, you would obey, even if it were to leap from a precipice or to cast yourself into the fire. And such would be my command."

And then on the slopes of the volcano, Gollum attacks Frodo and we can infer he does put on the Ring and command him:

…and before it stood stern, untouchable now by pity, a figure robed in white, but at its breast it held a wheel of fire. Out of the fire there spoke a commanding voice.

‘Begone, and trouble me no more! If you touch me ever again, you shall be cast yourself into the Fire of Doom.’

So when Frodo gets to the fire and seizes the Ring for himself, Gollum’s oath to protect it from Sauron activates (even with the Ring, Frodo isn’t strong enough to prevent Sauron from taking it from him, Tolkien said later in a letter). But Gollum’s oath twists against him: he takes the Ring from Frodo, but then the curse Frodo put on him activates and he is cast into the fire. Gollum’s betrayal of his word is his doom, but it’s the Ring’s own power that causes itself to be destroyed.

All of which is to say that if you are reading carefully, Frodo uses the Ring to destroy Gollum and, by extension, the Ring itself. Maybe the twisted oath part is fortunate, but Frodo insists on the oath and even notes before Gollum swears that it will be harmful to Gollum. His command later is clearly intentional.

In another book, this would all be placed at the forefront and celebrated as clever spellcasting. Tolkien puts it there but really doesn’t emphasize it. To him, I think, it’s not at all laudable and actually shows how corrupted Frodo has become. Using the Ring to force someone to do anything is a huge sin for Tolkien, no matter how well-intentioned. The fact it makes Gollum incinerate himself makes it a lot worse. Some of Frodo’s later trauma may be guilt over doing this, and his pacifism a sign of growth and repentance.

Jude: That’s a great example of the subtlety and craft of the Frodo storyline that is very admirable and really makes me wish I liked it better than reading about Aragorn fighting orcs. It’s also something I bet hardly anyone catches on their first reading. But the overall theme of the story is consistent: Frodo and Sam are heroes who save the world by being courageous amid hardship and steadfastly doing the right thing.

Thomas: That’s the way it’s very different from Dune, where first Leto and then Paul are trapped in the same manner as tragic heroes have been trapped by fate going all the way back to ancient Greek drama. Paul frets and peers into the future, but all his choices lead to jihad.

Jude: The nature of the tragedy is also very different, to the point that we should probably be using a different word. Frodo isn’t a tragic figure like Oedipus, he’s a tragic figure in the colloquial sense of the word. He ends up so scarred and traumatized by his experiences that he never can live a normal life. I don’t think it’s too absurd to say he has literal PTSD, in fact, even though the medical concept hadn’t been invented yet. Tolkien presumably drew on what must have been firsthand observations of the psychological aftermath of the world wars in soldiers.

Thomas: “Shell shock” as they said in the first World War.

Jude: Right. But I was saying that not only is Frodo not a prisoner of fate, he heroically saves the world and though of course the world is still a declining place, it’s vastly better off thanks to Frodo’s efforts. But the price of that victory falls on to Frodo.

Thomas: Not entirely on Frodo. Tons and tons of random people die during the story. Think of poor Grimbold, the Rohorrim commander who dies at the battle of Pelannor Fields! He probably left behind a family who miss him terribly.

Jude: Okay, but you know what I mean. Frodo has made the world a better place, but he personally is worse off. That’s almost the reverse of what happens to Paul Atreides. He ends Dune as Paul Maud’dib, messiah and emperor. Just from a quality of life perspective, he’s doing great. It’s the world that suffers as the jihad rages. Even the Fremen themselves are worse off, both in the moment as tons of them die on campaign, and then later as their culture gets effectively destroyed by Paul’s tyrannical successor.

Thomas: And since we’ve said personal courage is such a big theme of Lord of the Rings, it’s worth noting that courage seems almost completely absent from Dune. It’s plans within plans, big social forces, terrible purpose, inevitable jihad, and so on. No sense that staying strong in adversity is all that valuable.

Jude: The Fremen’s plot-important peerless fighting stems from their adverse conditions. I guess it takes a certain amount of courage to live in the harsh desert conditions.

Thomas: But they don’t have a choice. The moment they have any ability to choose, they want to terraform Arrakis and get rid of the deserts.

Jude: I guess to sum things up, while some form of Providence is looking out for him, Frodo achieves his destiny through his own choices. And while he’s particularly negatively impacted, the bittersweet ending shows us every character, even the mighty King Aragorn, ages and passes away. That’s their tragic destiny, and ours.

Thomas: Wonderful. Glad we’re ending on such an uplifting note.

Jude: Sorry, but next time we’ll lighten the mood a little bit with some irreverent commentary on famous quotes from these books. Just to switch things up, we’ll start with Lord of the Rings quotes and then look at Dune.

Jude: We kicked off our paired discussion of Dune and Lord of the Rings by thinking about what makes each of them popular. We’re back today to continue our in-depth look at Dune with discussion of its plot. Thomas has suggested we begin by letting him have the floor for a few minutes to describe the plot of Dune. This is clearly a bad idea. You don’t even like Dune.

Thomas: I like it. Sort of. And everyone knows the damn plot already. And if you don’t, but for some reason want to read a huge article about it, then Wikipedia’s got you covered. 

Jude: Then let’s just skip the recapitulation of the plot and go straight to the discussion!

Thomas: Nope, I’m going to summarize it. I have studied the possible futures in a prophetic trance and found all your efforts to stop me will be futile.

Jude: Dare I ask what substance you consumed to be able to see these futures?

Thomas: Spicy food, of course. So let’s begin. Ahem.

Dune begins with a boy named Paul Atreides. It rapidly becomes obvious that Paul Atreides is a very special boy. He’s the only son and heir of an important Duke, a powerful noble near the pinnacle of a vast feudal space empire. But that’s not all! He’s having dreams, prescient dreams. After just a few pages it’s obvious that Paul is not just heir to the important Atreides family, he’s heir to an even more important bloodline: the Bene Gesserit eugenics program. In fact, he’s the “Kwisatz Haderach”, an honest-to-God Messiah. Though actually God isn’t involved, this is a totally secular sort of messiah.

Jude: You know, I’m pretty sure the plot actually starts with the Atreides family moving from Caladan to Arrakis. You’re just describing the main character at length.

Thomas: The plot isn’t really about moving to a new planet, it’s about Paul being the special-est boy who ever was. What I just went through makes that clear enough, but I wasn’t even finished! See, after arriving on Arrakis, Paul rapidly becomes identified as the Lisan al-Gaib, an actual religious Messiah to the Fremen. That’s right, he’s two separate Messiahs at once.

Jude: I’m not sure if that should count as two since the Bene Gesserit made him the Kwisatz Haderach and they also planted the Lisan al-Gaib legend, so really—

Thomas: Still not done. Paul is also an unstoppable martial artist.

Jude: That’s pretty common for main characters. In fact you could say this book was far ahead of its time. The martial arts craze in Western culture starts in, what, the 1980s? This is about twenty years before all that.

Thomas: I don’t think the 1980s invented the idea of a badass, that was just when it started getting associated with Asian martial arts. Herbert is probably channeling pulp heroes like John Carter of Mars. Hell, we could go all the way back to Homer’s Achilles.

Jude: Heroes like Achilles, John Carter, and Kal-El are all literally born different, though in three very different ways. Paul achieves his badassness through long study and practice of esoteric disciplines associated with vaguely eastern-sounding lingo (“prana-bindu”).

Thomas: You’re right, that must have been the very leading edge of the martial arts thing. But it’s still worthy of mention here because this is the book where it’s a critical plot point that the extremely harsh environment of Arrakis has made the Fremen into peerless warriors. They’re objectively the baddest dudes in the universe, but when Paul shows up he can beat up any of them without breaking a sweat despite having been raised in incredible privilege.

Jude: All right, all right, he’s pretty special, you’re right. So—

Thomas: Nope, I’m still not done, because in case being a Duke’s heir, what I maintain are two distinct kinds of messiah, and an unstoppable martial artist, we have to also remember that once he gets out into the world he instantly meets a cute girl who immediately signs up to be his girlfriend. Many readers probably finish the book without even noticing that Chani is the daughter of Liet Kynes and so is basically a Fremen princess because, alas, the book is too preoccupied with other matters to spend much time on Chani. But make no mistake, she’s a princess and she’ll be hanging out on backpacks and lunch boxes with Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, and the rest if Disney ever manages to get the rights to Dune.

Jude: Okay, so you’re complaining that Paul is a Special Protagonist with a Glorious Destiny. Maybe you think this is a tired trope, but why is it so tired? I think a big reason is stories have been following the template of Luke Skywalker since 1977, another boy who turned out to be quite special. But it’s probable that Paul Atreides was a big influence on the character of Luke Skywalker. Isn’t Tatooine being a desert planet a cultural echo of Arrakis?

Thomas: That seems like too strong a claim to me. Unprovable, too, though I guess you could do a ton of boring research to try buttress it. Off the top of my head, T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone was published in 1938 and his Special Protagonist comes straight from the Arthurian tradition.

Jude: Maybe Dune just did it better. It’s true that your list of Paul’s specialness was unusually long. Arthur and Luke Skywalker are comparatively less special, I think.

Thomas: Part of the reason I don’t like Special Protagonists is that, as you said a minute ago, the idea’s been run deeply into the ground by thousands upon thousands of books, movies, television shows, and so on. I also don’t like it because it makes me uncomfortable as a reader to feel flattered by the author. It’s natural to identify with the protagonist of a novel and feel happy when they triumph and a little sad when they have setbacks. When an author gets me to see some of myself in a character and then spends the rest of the book telling the character—and me by extension—how great they are, it seems a little cheap.

Jude: I don’t think I fully agree with your premise. There’s a limit to how Special a protagonist can be before they become a bit too special to be relatable to the reader. Paul starts out as someone quite relatable, I think: he’s young and therefore new to the world. The reader learns alongside him from his father, his mother, and their trusted men about the politics, technology, and challenges of the world. Paul is a little special since he’s a Duke’s heir, but his special-ness is pretty low key. His father is more politically powerful, Idaho and Halleck are better fighters, and his mother is better at wielding the Bene Gesserit powers.

Thomas: That’s true. Dune’s story can usefully be divided into two parts, though not quite where the recent movies divided it. The first runs from the beginning of the book through Paul and his mother being taken captive into the desert by the Baron’s men. Throughout that time, Paul is a lot like the reader: passive and learning the world. His parents and their chief lieutenants, who seem like very impressive people, give him love and respect, so as readers we feel some of it ourselves. When he defeats the assassination device or surprises Kynes with his oracular knowledge of how to put on desert clothes, it’s a fun little victory, but in the larger story he’s still a passenger.

As soon as he and his mother end up in the desert, the second part begins and the Specialness ramps up rapidly. That’s a problem for the narrative because it risks making him less and less relatable. This is an area where I think later work improved on Dune’s formula. Characters like Luke Skywalker are designed to remain as relatable as possible for as long as possible by delaying the full realization of their specialness until the end.

Jude: You say “improved”, but as we discussed last time, Frank Herbert has artistic goals and they prevent him from doing that. He makes sure to show us that many of the impressive people who previously validated Paul as a special young man are worried. His mother fears his increasing detachment, for example, and Gurney Halleck frets that Paul doesn’t care about his men’s lives the way his father did. Those doubts are moments that don’t really pay off until Dune Messiah.

Thomas: I meant “improved” with respect to popular, reader-flattering work. But from a plot perspective, whether or not you share my intellectual dislike of Specialness, one of the chief problems with Special protagonists is they sometimes make it hard for a story to generate dramatic tension. If you stop to think about it, you know someone like Paul is definitely too Special to die and probably too Special to fail at anything important.

Jude: Once again, you’re calling out something true of nearly all protagonists. And surely there’s still dramatic tension in such stories. The trench run in Star Wars is tense and dramatic, even though if you paused the movie back in 1977 and surveyed the audience, probably everyone would admit that Luke won’t be killed and the Death Star will be destroyed somehow.

Thomas: Skilled creators try to surmount this through pacing. If things are moving fast you don’t have time to stop and think. But I mentioned dramatic tension because it’s interesting that Frank Herbert completely eschews most common forms of dramatic tension. For example, the fact that Yueh is the traitor is immediately revealed to the reader, as are the Baron’s secret plans with the Emperor. The Irulan quotes at the beginning of chapters quickly reveal to a somewhat attentive reader that Yueh’s treason will be mostly successful. In the second part of the story, it is even more obvious that Paul triumphs. Paul claims that he sees outcomes of his duel with Jamis where he lies dead, but come on, that’s clearly not going to happen. Paul continues to occasionally think he could die, but mostly even he takes his triumph over the Emperor for granted. What he wants, he tells us, is to find some way to prevent the jihad that will happen afterwards. Yet the Irulan quotes again make that outcome almost entirely clear.

Jude: I think there’s still a lot of tension on a first read since we don’t know the exact form of his victory and the resulting Maud’dib cult.

Thomas: But we know it’s extremely powerful and associated with an Imperial Princess. I think it’s easy to imagine what a Hollywood script doctor would say about all this. “Frank, buddy, I like what ya got here, but let’s tighten some things up!” Tell us there’s a traitor, but hide the identity. Reduce Jessica’s viewpoint in the first part so the possibility she really is the traitor becomes a live issue. Focus more on the adults in the story. Give Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck more to do! Get rid of that Irulan stuff so that the outcome is in doubt. If Paul must be prescient, let him see that nearly every possible future is one where the where the evil Baron Harkonnen is triumphant and laughing with the Emperor over the graves of Paul, Jessica, and Leto.

Jude: Is your point that Hollywood formulas are good? All that would be good advice if Dune was just an adventure story, an update of Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars. But Frank Herbert wasn’t trying to write an adventure story. He was writing a tragedy. The principal tragic arc in Dune as published is that of Leto, but Herbert was trying to write a tragedy about Paul. The Irulan chapter headings are not meant to indicate triumph, but forebode failure. 

Thomas: I think that’s a pretty accurate assessment of Frank Herbert’s intent, but did he really succeed? I don’t think most readers are paying enough attention to understand these elements. That was my thesis from last time: a majority of Dune’s readers enjoy it as a straightforward story of Paul getting revenge. But whether on those terms or the ones Herbert intends, the second half of the novel isn’t nearly as well-paced or cohesive as the first. Paul works his way through several different coming-of-age ritual episodes (killing a man, mounting a sandworm, awakening his full powers through a drug-induced trance) that don’t have any dramatic tension before his final confrontation with the Emperor.

Meanwhile all sorts of dramatic material is left off-screen, from the process of Paul winning over skeptical Fremen leaders and leading raids against the Harkonnens to, most notably, the death of his first son in a raid and the capture of Alia. A major thread seems to be introduced with the Baron successfully deceiving Thufir Hawat into thinking Jessica was the real traitor, but nothing at all comes of it.

Jude: Yeah, that’s perhaps where Dune shows its age. Had it been written in the last thirty years, I think it’s a no-brainer that the publisher would have wanted the first book expanded into a trilogy so every last ounce of dramatic material could be extracted before Paul’s triumphant defeat of the Emperor. Genre fiction was still grounded primarily in short stories in 1965 and it would be another generation before it became common for novels to have the unified structure and pacing we expect today.

Thomas: But maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, because as you said, Frank Herbert wasn’t trying to tell a story of Paul triumphing over the Emperor. He races past the victories and defeats that build up to that moment so he can spend more time lingering on Paul’s brooding about jihad and the rituals that convert him from a political figure (heir to the Atreides) into a religious figure (the Fremen messiah). In the end, the final confrontation with the Emperor is mostly an anticlimax not just because Paul’s victory feels inevitable but so does jihad. Despite the illusion of agency, Paul is just as much a passenger in the second half of the book as the first. He wants to avoid the jihad, but none of his choices make any difference.

Jude: Later, in the sequels, we are told Paul saw a “golden path” leading away from all this but didn’t have the courage to take it.

Thomas: Yeah, but I view that as a retcon Herbert made later as his own interests shifted from the sociological forces that shaped history (with the jihad an obvious allusion to the early Muslim conquests) to those he speculates will shape the future. I see no hints in Dune or Dune Messiah that Paul has turned away from anything. Instead we’re firmly in the mode of ancient Greek tragedy, where nothing the hero does can change his fate (Dune Messiah and Children of Dune have some elements that even more explicitly link Paul to Oedipus). The jihad itself is such a foregone conclusion that Herbert leaves it entirely off-screen between Dune and Dune Messiah.

Jude: I agree that the plot of Dune is structured as a tragedy, or at least the first act of a tragedy. That seems like a good thing to me! There are tons of adventure stories out there that don’t amount to much in the end. Maybe tragedy is a richer vein of story for lasting significance and meaning, one that has helped give Dune its lasting appeal.

Thomas: I think tragedies are bad, actually.

Jude: What? That’s definitely a hot take. So Sophocles and Shakespeare are just hacks who would have written happy endings if they’d been better at their jobs?

Thomas: Shakespeare obviously knew how to write happy endings. I admit this is subjective, both on an individual and a cultural level, but here and now, for most people like us? I’m sure someone has studied this in detail and I admit I’m pontificating without bothering to do any research—

Jude: As is your wont.

Thomas: —but in the modern, English-speaking world that kind of tragedy has been almost completely excised from popular culture. I don’t know why audiences in Athens or Elizabethan London had more of a taste for it, but I know what people today think of tragedy: they don’t like it. It’s relegated to arthouse cinema and capital-L literature. Whereas in popular culture, Luke triumphs over the Emperor and  romance novels guarantee happy endings on the back. As we said last time, popular isn’t always good, but if I admit that I prefer stories to end in triumph rather than bleak futility, at least I’m in good company!

Jude: As we said last time, Herbert’s perhaps unintentional genius is you can get a happy ending by reading Dune and an unhappy one by reading Dune and Dune: Messiah, so readers can get the experience they want.

But we’ve been going on long enough for today, time to wrap up.

Thomas: We’ll let the readers who got through all this decide whether it was a Dune or a Dune: Messiah sort of experience for them, then we’ll be back next week to think about destiny and tragedy in Lord of the Rings.

Thomas: This is only the second post here and we’re already screwing up. This is three books, not one.

Jude: Tolkien wrote it as one book and it’s frequently published as one today, so we’re going to call it one book. Now hopefully I don’t have to defend the proposition that Lord of the Rings is a popular fantasy book? It’s very popular. But it wasn’t always so! It had an even slower start than Dune. It had some prominent early fans like C.S. Lewis and W.H. Auden, but word of mouth appears to have spread slowly for a decade until it exploded in popularity following its American publication in 1965. From there it just got more popular, and of course it was eventually brought to movie fans through big budget Hollywood adaptations starting in 2001, but it was already a massive success by that point.

Thomas: Perhaps in this case the passage of time allowed Tolkien to create more fans. Lord of the Rings is extremely popular, but it’s not even the most popular book Tolkien wrote. I guess we’re not doing children’s books here, but The Hobbit was a big success in what was then a relatively sparse children’s literature market. Generations of children read The Hobbit as they grew up and were thus prepared to appreciate Lord of the Rings as teens or adults.

Jude: I don’t know remotely enough about the book’s early publishing history to really say why it took ten years to really get going, but certainly by the 1980s it had spawned a whole genre, first of imitators, then of reactions trying to “deconstruct” it. The fantasy genre has since grown outward in many diverse directions, but I’d still say that nearly all of the tens of thousands of fantasy novels out there can be traced back through a chain of influences to Lord of the Rings.

Thomas: I’ll try not to hold that against it, but it’s going to be hard. So many terrible books!

Jude: But also some masterpieces. Yet despite having so many successors, Lord of the Rings itself remains enormously popular. My Goodreads rating count metric considers it the most popular adult fantasy novel (still beating out A Song of Ice and Fire by a small margin despite being much older and therefore having far more reads not tracked by Goodreads) and the fourteenth most popular book of any kind. Of course if you bring in children’s books, it’s eclipsed by the Harry Potter series and as you already mentioned, even The Hobbit, so it’s not the final word on fantasy, but certainly it’s a towering presence.

Thomas: For now. Fewer and fewer people actually read books, so to keep going it’s got to lean heavily on the original trilogy of films from two decades ago. Meanwhile the terrible Hobbit adaptations are doing their best to undercut it and Amazon’s absurd decision to try to adapt the appendices isn’t helping either.

Jude: So compared to Dune, which I said last week was bursting with interesting ideas so that lots of different readers found something to like, I think Lord of the Rings is much more focused and cohesive. There’s a couple of core ideas here that I’d say are very deeply explored. I’ll sum them up as personal virtue and connection. Personal virtues of courage, faith, and mercy are demonstrated in different ways, and with different amounts of success or failure, by the various characters. And connection is explored in several respects: connection with the natural world, connection with the vanishing past, and connection with the people around us. That may not seem like a short list, but this is a very long book (or three normal length ones, if you insist) so it develops each of these to a much greater degree than Dune has room to do.

Thomas: But if Herbert was a weird dude, J.R.R. Tolkien was a really, really weird dude. Lord of the Rings reads like 75% of what he was reading were things no one else was reading at the time or since. And I say it seems “like” that, but actually it’s probably literally true! While ordinary people were reading things like, I don’t know, The Old Man and the Sea or The Good Earth, Tolkien was reading Old English poetry and Finnish sagas and whatnot.

Jude: Right. Last time we didn’t say much about Frank Herbert’s skill with language because—

Thomas: Because he didn’t have any?

Jude: —Because while his prose is effective, it’s complementary to the core elements of Dune. But Tolkien’s use of language must be considered part of the main event. Because he was reading those older forms of English and related languages, he had a nearly unique ability to come up with proper nouns that seem foreign yet familiar and euphonious to the ear of a native English speaker. Meanwhile his long study of sagas and epic poems surely helped him craft a compelling quest narrative.

Thomas: Yeah, yeah, people have already written millions of words about what great linguist and scholar Tolkien was and how that made Lord of the Rings so amazing, but I can’t help but notice that modern fantasy novels have almost none of this. They’re written in a modern style, the prose is fine but usually not amazing or poetic, and the authors aren’t lifelong obsessives who are carefully modeling the sound changes that happened in Elvish languages over the course of thousands of years.

Jude: By ordinary standards there’s a massive amount of worldbuilding in epic fantasy series like Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire or Brandon Sanderson’s series, but it’s true they don’t really have the incredible depth Tolkien achieved through a lifetime of work on a single setting. But it’s hard to tell if modern authors don’t employ Tolkien’s archaic style and worldbuilding methods because this is no longer a path to popularity, or if they don’t because they just can’t manage it.

Thomas: I think it’s telling that Tolkien’s Silmarillion, which puts that archaic style and worldbuilding firmly on center stage, languishes in comparative obscurity.

Jude: Two hundred and ninety thousand ratings on Goodreads! I’ll be thrilled if our work here ever reaches such heights of obscurity!

Thomas: Come on, I said “comparative”. Lord of the Rings is so popular it generates a steady stream of people who want more, open up the Silmarillion, and then wonder how they ended up reading biblical fan fiction. I know there are Tolkien diehards who love it, but I think even most of them would admit it’s a very niche product compared to something like The Name of the Wind.

Jude: I don’t think that tells us the archaic voice and so on aren’t valuable, it just suggests that moderation is a virtue in this as in so much else. In fact, I think the simplest explanation for the success of Lord of the Rings is that what really made Tolkien unique is that he was a really unusual man—a weird guy if you insist—who therefore had this very unusual authorial skillset, but despite this, in Lord of the Rings he was able to mediate the force of his passions and create something approachable to modern readers by centering relatable, down-to-earth characters.

Thomas: So the secret is hobbits? The other element that modern fantasy books have almost entirely dropped?

Jude: Modern fantasy books don’t need them. Tolkien does. He writes the hobbits with a modern voice (modern as of the 1950s, at least) and he allows them to slowly encounter the secondary world around them along with the reader. The hobbits are changed by that encounter and return to their world at the end of the story, again mirroring the reader’s own experience.

Thomas: If hobbits represent the reader, then it’s interesting that Tolkien makes fun of them.

Jude: He satirizes the hobbits and it’s no surprise that Bilbo and Frodo are somehow both more adventurous and more scholarly than the rest of their society, like hobbit Indiana Joneses, but unlike many modern authors who comment on quotidian middle-class life, Tolkien isn’t angry at them or contemptuous of their way of life. You can tell he likes the hobbits even as he pokes a little fun at them.

Anyway, since other epic fantasy authors don’t have Tolkien’s facility with the archaic voice, they either try to copy him in those elements and fail, or they eliminate them, producing very readable works (like Game of Thrones, Mistborn, and Name of the Wind) that are popular and have plenty of their own strengths, but which don’t have the same gravity and sense of depth. This is why I think Lord of the Rings is a timeless classic that will continue to be read widely until English changes enough that it falls out of our ear the way Shakespeare has.

Thomas: Don’t be ridiculous, it won’t last as long as Shakespeare. A lot of people already bounce off the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring because they don’t actually want to be immersed for chapter after chapter in hobbit-stuff. I won’t try to argue those early chapters aren’t well done, but they’re undeniably stuffy and way too slowly paced for the modern reader. Peter Jackson’s miraculously decent adaptation is what will keep Lord of the Rings going until either someone else makes a better adaptation or it dies.

Jude: I think it will last for hundreds of years because it’s so good at what it does and what it does is so unique. The whole modern fantasy genre is ultimately complementary to it, not a replacement for it.

Thomas: Sheesh, people won’t even be reading novels pretty soon. Prose is going the way of poetry. People will sit in their VR classrooms and struggle through Tolkien at the behest of their AI teachers the way high schoolers today struggle through Paradise Lost or Dante’s Inferno.

Jude: I disagree, but that’s a question for another day. It sounds like overall you’re agreeing with me, so maybe it’s time to wrap up.

Thomas: Not yet. I want to propose a different, though I guess not exclusive, theory of Lord of the Rings’s popularity: it’s deeply, profoundly reactionary. And people just love that. But it’s also fairly vague, and that is the key, because there are lots of variations and types of reaction, but just about everyone who feels that way can see themselves somewhere in Lord of the Rings.

Jude: Ah, I should have known you’d try to cancel it for being too right-wing.

Thomas: Not right-wing, even that is too specific. People can and do read Lord of the Rings and get mad that Aragorn is the rightful king through the divine right of his bloodline, and that’s as right-wing as it gets, it’s literally what the people sitting in the right wing of the French assembly thought, but the book is obviously not interested in forms of governance. The Shire has hilariously little government not because Tolkien was a committed anarchist but because he wasn’t interested in exploring it. In fact he relegates politics and religion, the animating forces of at least five hundred years of wars and suffering when Tolkien was alive, both firmly in the background. He’s laser-focused instead on personal behavior. Frodo doesn’t go on his quest because the mayor of the Shire, the duly elected executive who embodies the collective will of the hobbits, orders him to go. He goes because it seems to him that it’s the right thing to do.

Denethor is a villain of sorts not because he won’t recognize Aragorn as the rightful king but because he despairs of the fight against evil. The story takes it for granted Aragorn will be a good king not because he will collect the right amount of taxes or help the downtrodden, but because he tries his best to be a good person. Faramir is good because he keeps his word, Boromir is not because he breaks it. 

Jude: I agree with all this, but “reactionary” is a term from political science and is supposed mean politics.

Thomas: Fine, then let’s call it nostalgic instead. The really central idea here is that the old days were better, things are going downhill, and we’re not fighting evil so that everything will be great, we’re fighting evil just so that things won’t go downhill quite so fast. It’s completely set against any notion of progress. The only progress in this story is the progress of entropy.

And my argument is this nostalgia is just massively resonant. Even politically left-wing or progressive people complain about how the traffic is worse now, or it’s too hard to park, or that today’s right-wing leaders are worse than the old ones. Most humans are just programmed to think things were better when they were young.

Jude: All right, but by the same token, aren’t lots of authors nostalgic, by this definition?

Thomas: Maybe, but Tolkien was unusual for two reasons. First, his personal sentiments along these line were pure in way that is unusual, especially in America. American culture dominates the English language world, so it’s true both that most popular modern fantasy authors are American and even the ones who aren’t can’t help but be powerfully influenced by American attitudes. America experienced the world wars of the twentieth century and even the Cold War as triumphs, so it’s only in the last two decades or so that American popular culture has taken a turn for the pessimistic. In contrast, Tolkien personally experienced the horrors of war in the trenches of World War I, so it’s no surprise he came out of that experience convinced that technological “progress” was nothing to get excited about. He also loved nature and green spaces, so the steady addition of highways and parking lots and other forms of development happening throughout his lifetime were repulsive to him.

Jude: I guess I agree, but surely this still isn’t all that unique to Tolkien. No one likes highways. And there are plenty of British authors who served in the wars and had a different sensibility. Ian Fleming comes to mind.

Thomas: Fleming was too young to serve in World War I and then was a spy of some sort in World War II. He didn’t serve on the front lines. Presumably a lot of powerful authorial voices who could have interpreted the war into fiction as Tolkien did died in the trenches instead, like Ian Fleming’s older brother and many of Tolkien’s friends.

But if you want to me to identify something unique and special about Tolkien, a specific quality of artistic genius as you like to say, I think that most nostalgia is grounded in memory but not knowledge. In other words, people remember their childhoods as being nice, but they don’t rigorously explore that recent history. If they did, they’d realize that actually, for most people, the past wasn’t so great. Tons of aspects of the past were worse in ways that are hard for us to remember, things like disease, racism, quality of life, infant mortality, technology, and so on.

Tolkien was unusual in that he studied the past with the rigor of a scholar but, whereas this activity teaches most scholars to appreciate the comforts of modern life, he somehow came away from this still seeing the past as better. Because he understands the past, especially the literary past, he can wield it in his fiction in a way that resonates with most people’s uninformed nostalgia.

Jude: I can agree that the Shire is the England of Tolkien’s childhood that never really was. But that’s a recipe for a work that resonates with people from a specific time and place, not something with readers who love it around the world and across generations. You yourself argued a minute ago that the Shire parts of the story no longer work for many people.

Thomas: The nostalgia goes far beyond the Shire, though. It’s baked into every part of the setting. It’s not like the lack of a happily-ever-after is a twist ending. Right at the outset, “wise” characters like Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel are telling Frodo that look, this is going to be terrible, and even if your quest works out, the world won’t be fixed. That’s an important part of Frodo’s decision: he’s not fooled or being foolish. He’s not laboring under the delusion he’s creating a better world. Tolkien deliberately built this into every part of the story.

Aragorn’s restored kingdom won’t be as good as Elendil’s, and Elendil’s wasn’t as good as lost Numenor. After the story ends, Gimli goes around doing, uh, cave things, and they’re cool, but they can’t hold a candle to the cave things the dwarves did in Moria before they dug too deep. Saruman calls himself ringmaker and wears a ring when he imprisons Gandalf, but even though he’s supposed to be on even metaphysical footing with Sauron, Saruman’s ring apparently sucks. The knowledge Sauron and the Elven smiths used to make the rings of power is lost, but even they were not able to make anything remotely as amazing as the silmarils that Fëanor made long before them. Those are just a few examples, but I could go on and on.

This is also why the story ends by following all the members of the Fellowship to their deaths (or ends, in the case of those who go over the sea to Tol Eressëa, but that removal from the world amounts to death as well). That’s a bizarre choice in a typical story that’s about defeating the evil wizard or restoring the rightful king and then living happily ever after. But in a letter, Tolkien said he meant for the story to be about “death and the search for deathlessness”.

Jude: Right, but here I would have expected you to argue that, like Frank Herbert last week, this is a case of the author’s intention being lost on his audience. How many readers of Lord of the Rings, teenage or adult, would say it’s about “death and the search for deathlessness” if you asked them after they finished it for the first time?

Thomas: Zero, but—

Jude: Zero because they would instead say it’s about defeating evil, or succeeding in a quest, or something like that. They wouldn’t say it’s about how everything’s going downhill and nothing can stop it. Frodo and the rest of the fellowship stop a great deal!

Thomas: Yes, but all the declinist material is still there and it still has a powerful impact. It resonates with people and leaves them feeling like it’s a deeper story as a result.

Jude: You mean because it is a deeper story! 

Thomas: Yes, true. But what I was getting at is that because the nostalgia or declinism or whatever you want to call it is baked in so thoroughly, it manifests in lots of different ways, and people can therefore choose to relate to it in a lot of different ways. This is the way it’s like Dune. Whereas Dune gives you lots of distinct things to like, Tolkien gives you lots of paths to the same core experience.

If you see your childhood as a place of comfort and familiarity that you long to return to but no longer can access, then you relate to the characters finally returning and finding it a changed place. If instead you feel like the society around you is often a place of stifling conformity, you relate to Frodo and his friends leaving for adventure but failing to make a true home elsewhere and having to come back. Places as different as Moria and the forests of Lothlorien used to be better before greed and evil and simple time took its toll, and those can stand in for all sorts of things in people’s lives. We’ve seen the books appeal successfully to very different sorts of people, from new age hippies in the 60s to environmentalists to nerds.

Jude: And to, ahem, normal people, at least via the movies.

Thomas: Yes, and coming out when they did, American movie audiences readily identified the threat of Sauron with the threat of Islamic terrorism. I think Tolkien would have found that outrageous, but he was dead and couldn’t complain. That just goes to show how flexible the story is to interpretation since it’s set in this medieval secondary world with lots of focus on character decisions and a congenial blurriness around the religious and political details that would have alienated people had Tolkien put his own feelings more explicitly in the story. Sauron is barely on the page at all and Tolkien has only the barest theory of evil, just a little bit about a desire to dominate. So it’s easy to associate Sauron with any faction or force or nation that you consider to be evil. By the same token, he disperses “good guy” status pretty widely among humans, hobbits, elves, and dwarves, so readers can choose to identify with not just Frodo but Sam, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Eowyn, Merry, and so on. Yet the core theme of decline and nostalgia applies to everyone.

Jude: This is a very interesting theory, but aren’t most new fans coming to Tolkien as teenagers? Are teenagers really nostalgic for childhoods they haven’t even left?

Thomas: I don’t think either of us are experts on teenage psychology, but I’m pretty sure most teenagers see themselves as having left behind their childhood innocence. High school is famous for being a much more socially stressful experience than earlier stages of school. Also the flexibility I mentioned still applies, so a teenager can, for example, relate the oppressive, all-seeing eye of Sauron to their parents or school administration. The emotions here are universal.

Jude: Many years ago I was trying to explain Tolkien’s love of “northern courage” to a friend and describing how elves in the Silmarillion fight “the long defeat” against Morgoth, a hopeless battle against an evil far beyond their ability to ever defeat. He said surely it was dumb to fight if you can’t win, and I don’t know what I said in response, but it was only later that I realized that, duh, we are all fighting a losing battle!

Thomas: Yes, against death. Surrender in that fight is, in Tolkien’s view, the sin of Denethor. He would have us make Frodo’s choice instead: to push on and do the best we can and to make the world around us…not a better place, really, but a less-bad place. That’s the human condition. In the letter where he said Lord of the Rings was about death and deathlessness, Tolkien went on to say that this “is hardly more than to say it is a tale written by a Man”. But that’s very humble. What he did, and what has mostly not even been attempted by the authors who followed in his footsteps, is to write an epic where every part of the endless fictional history of the secondary world speaks to the reality of aging and decline that we all experience.

Jude: If that was his goal, it seems like elvish immortality complicates things. They’re just wandering around the forests, communing with nature and never dying.

Thomas: That’s the one area where I think Tolkien’s intention really doesn’t come through clearly and so might be a bit similar to Frank Herbert’s views about messiahs. Reading the Silmarillion, you get a very different picture of the elves. The elves of Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings either didn’t obey the divine summons to Valinor (Legolas is descended from these), explicitly rebelled against it (Galadriel), or are at least heirs to those rebels (Elrond). Elves aren’t really immortal in Tolkien’s conception, they just age at the same rate as the world. Because they remember the good ol’ days so well, they are prisoners of the same nostalgia that Tolkien himself felt. The elves of Middle-earth are trying to hold on to what by all rights should be gone already. Their desire seems reasonable in Lord of the Rings, but it causes immense suffering in the Silmarillion and leads directly to the forging of the rings of power. And no matter how useful the three elven rings are, forging rings with Sauron was definitely a mistake. It’s a sin to give up entirely the way Denethor does, but Galadriel makes the right choice when she gives up on trying to hold the world in stasis and accepts the decaying world for what it is.

Unfortunately Lord of the Rings accidentally (I think) portrays this as a noble sacrifice on Galadriel’s part, and on all the elves’ parts, when I think Tolkien intended it to be seen as repentance. It’s too bad because for me this is Tolkien’s most “artistic genius” aspect. I think it’s clear he himself strongly felt the desire the elves have to hold back the changing in our world, but he knows he has to accept it.

Jude: Not so reactionary after all!

Thomas: He was a complicated man! But you should take his message to heart. You want the popularity of Lord of the Rings to continue unchanging for centuries. Instead, you must accept it will diminish and fade, as indeed novels will as a medium. The world that follows will be a poorer, diminished place. There’ll be a much decayed cultural landscape of short-form algorithmic video and people spending hours wearing virtual reality helmets instead of going outside or reading a book. But this is the natural order of things.

Jude: You know what, I’ve changed my mind. Tolkien was wrong! We must rage against the dying of the light!

Thomas: Nice Interstellar quote.

Jude: Ugh, let’s wrap up before this gets too depressing. Next time we’re going to dig into the plots of both of these books with a particular focus on tragedy and destiny in first Dune and then Lord of the Rings.

Later in this series we’ll be discussing in detail Dune’s plot, its desert setting, its memorable quotes, and more, but today our lead topic is popularity. What can Dune teach us about what makes a work of art enduringly popular?

Dune is a great basis for a discussion of popularity seeing as it’s been continuously in print since it was published in 1965 and is frequently said to be the bestselling science fiction novel of all time.

Thomas: “Bestseller” is one of those words people put on nearly anything. Is there real evidence it’s sold more than any other SF novel?

Jude: Well, to be honest, I can’t find any reliable evidence this is actually the case. But people say this a lot.

Thomas: That’s not very convincing. People say a lot of dumb things, especially on the Internet. I can say that William Shatner’s TekWar is the bestselling SF book of all time but that doesn’t make it true.

Jude: And yet no one has ever said that. At least, before you did just now. So I still say that tells us something. Meanwhile there are other indicators. A lot of popular books eventually get adapted to film or television, but Dune has been adapted three different times.

Thomas: That’s true, but it would be more convincing if any of those adaptations were actually, you know, hits.

Jude: I think Villeneuve’s 2021 movie did very well considering it was released simultaneously in theaters and on streaming in the middle of the pandemic.

Thomas: It did okay. We’ll see how “part 2” fares, I guess.

Jude: Dune has also birthed a franchise of sequels and prequels, originally by Herbert himself and since his death, by his son and a co-author. Those books have continued right up to the present.

Thomas: If we’re going with “everyone says” evidence, I’ve got to point out that everyone says all of the books by his son are terrible.

Jude: I haven’t read any of them, so I can’t say how good they are. Have you read them?

Thomas: Oh, definitely not. I don’t let trivial details like that stop me from saying they’re bad, though.

Jude: Well, if they’re really terrible but still being published, someone must be buying them, and that shows that Dune is so popular there are people willing to buy more books in the franchise even though it’s been decades since a good one was published.

Thomas: Too bad we can’t get reliable statistics on this. Maybe no one has bought any of them for years and the publisher keeps putting them out as some sort of tax writeoff.

Jude: The closest thing we have to public numbers is the Goodreads rating count. That works best for comparing sales between two books published at the same time since older books have a lot more readers who didn’t use Goodreads, but it’s pretty indicative I think. Anyway, if you rank all books by Goodreads rating count, Dune comes in ninety-second. If you restrict that list to just adult SF novels, Dune comes in ninth. And I think seven of the eight books above it, books like Nineteen Eighty-Four and Frankenstein, are getting propped up by getting assigned in schools. I don’t think Dune is getting much help from teachers and professors.

Thomas: Is it really help? I would have a much higher opinion of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist if I hadn’t read it, but my ninth grade English teacher made sure I know I don’t like it.

Jude: Yeah, but unfortunately in this Goodreads rating measure of popularity, your angry one star review of Oliver Twist makes it more “popular”.

Thomas: Great metric you got there. Anyway, despite my nitpicking, I will concede that the original Dune is popular.

Jude: Thanks, that’s very generous of you. But even though it’s taken us an absurdly long time to agree on it, just saying Dune is popular isn’t that interesting. The real question is: why? I think we should start with a common sense observation: Dune is a really good book!

Thomas: That implies that anything popular is really good art, which is plainly untrue. Or, I guess, that really good art will become popular. That also seems false. Hopefully you’re going to pick one of those as your position so I can start bringing up terrible blockbuster movies, terrible pop songs, and–

Jude: No, don’t get your hopes up, I don’t think everything that’s popular is good art. I think I’d say instead that a lot of popular art is carried by the winds of the moment. It’s in tune with the zeitgeist, it’s in the right time at the right place, whatever cliché you want to use. That kind of thing is popular, but it’s here today, gone tomorrow.

If you look at the top-grossing films in America in 1980, the number two film was a movie called 9 to 5. I’m not really a film geek but I’ve never even heard of that movie. It must have been popular at the time, but it didn’t last. On the other hand, the number one film was Empire Strikes Back. That movie has been enduringly popular in a way most movies aren’t, including some more recent Star Wars movies. When something has enduring popularity, it’s speaking to different generations and cultures as people change over time. Dune has been doing that since 1965. It’s got to be doing something right.

Thomas: Maybe. But maybe it’s just got a sort of first-mover advantage. Since you brought up Star Wars, I think the original was a pretty good film, but I can’t help but notice that whenever I meet people in their twenties and thirties who didn’t see it until they were adults…they don’t think it’s that good. Maybe part of its lasting appeal is that it got itself stuck in people’s heads and didn’t leave enough room in the culture for similar films to take hold.

Jude: I guess you could try to make the first-mover argument about something like Frankenstein, which was arguably the first science fiction novel in 1818. But Dune is from 1965. It wasn’t the first mover as a science fiction novel, it was a ten-thousandth mover or something.

Thomas: Okay, but even though there had been novels for hundreds of years, the genre of science fiction novels was still fairly new in 1965. Frankenstein and turn of the century books like those by Jules Verne or H.G. Wells were just considered literature. Science fiction as a marketing category and an audience meaningfully separated from generic fiction is something that came from short story magazines in the early twentieth century. If you look at “classic” SF novels of the 1950s, books like Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End started out as short stories and just got fixed up into novels. The idea of genre SF intended to be a novel was still quite new in 1965.

Jude: Dune itself was published as two different serialized novellas before it was packaged into a novel. So what?

Thomas: My point is that you have to at least wonder if Dune was just good by the standards of its time, the least bad of a bad lot. That got it some justified plaudits, but then it got stuck in the cultural consciousness for the next sixty years. So it’s more “popular” than recent, better books, but that just goes to show that the best way for an author to write a popular novel is to hop in a time machine and publish their book back when far fewer books were published and the overall quality was worse.

Jude: I think you’re overstating how easy it is for a story to get “stuck” in the culture. Robert Heinlein was hugely popular and had a lasting presence for many years…but I feel like in the last twenty years his work has all but evaporated. People today can’t tolerate his politics, his treatment of gender, and so on.

Thomas: If we’re going to talk about authors whose gender ideas are worthy of cancellation, let’s talk about Frank Herbert and how he depicts Baron Harkonnen–

Jude: We will, but another day. Right now I want to posit that Dune has endured because it does so many things so well. It’s so good at so many things they are hard to list, but I’ll try to list them quickly here since we’ll cover most of them in more detail in future discussions:

• It’s a relatable coming of age story

• The main character, who the reader can identify with, discovers he has special powers and an important destiny

• It’s an exciting space opera story that combines cool technology like spaceships and vehicles that fly by flapping their wings with old-fashioned courtly manners and duels

• It’s a story that, unusually for its time, features a central female character who is powerful, capable, and sympathetic

• It’s deeply interested in the lived environment of its characters to the point it has a lengthy appendix with more details about the Arrakis

• It posits a complex society and actually uses sociological ideas for a major plot point

• The story involves generous helpings of palace intrigue, mass politics, and economics

• There’s clear historical analogues for characters, situations, and factions in the story, but these aren’t so direct that it becomes dry, predictable, or unintelligible to readers who don’t know anything about the parallels

That is a big list. I certainly am not going to say that Dune is peerless at all of those things, but where Dune really is close to peerless is just how many interests the story can connect with. You may not be interested in all of these things, or even most of them, but if one of them resonates with you that’s probably enough for you to have a positive experience with the novel. And if two or three resonate, you’re probably getting an experience few other novels can replicate.

Compare that to Heinlein. In many of his adult books, if you don’t like his politics then you’re in trouble because you have to sit through page after page of an author-insert character preaching odious politics at you. I think some readers today won’t be comfortable with, say, the portrayal of Harkonnens, but any time you get annoyed with Dune about something, you can turn the page and it’ll have moved on to something else that’s interesting in a different way.

Thomas: I agree both that your list is impressively long and that Dune isn’t peerless at all of them, but I think we should go farther and say that there are books out there that do every single one of those things better than Dune. Do you agree?

Jude: …I guess so. Probably there are individual books out there that do each individual item from the list better, but they are all different books.

Thomas: Right. I guess I can get behind a grand theory of popularity that amounts to: be great at being mediocre. Be mediocre more thoroughly than anyone else. 

Jude: Hang on, “mediocre”? I need to revise what I said because I think Dune is really good at all these things. To complain it’s not the very best at any one of them is setting a really high bar. We have a lot of hindsight bias since there were hundreds of SF novels published the same year as Dune and we’ve forgotten almost all of them. Most of those books were probably worse in every respect than Dune.

Thomas: I don’t know, you can’t truly be sure without going and reading all of them.

Jude: Nope, no thanks, you can do that if you want. I’m just going to assert it. And since now we’re just quibbling over terminology, I’m think we can move on. Because if we’re asking why Dune is popular and the answer is it’s great at a lot of things–

Thomas: I’ll sign up for “it’s fairly okay at a lot of things”

Jude: –then that just moves the question to why Dune is so much better at, uh–

Thomas: Better at being fairly okay.

Jude: Better at being broadly interesting and well-rounded than nearly any other book.

Thomas: Dumb luck?

Jude: Very funny. No, I think it’s better because Frank Herbert was clearly a sort of genius. That he was an artistic genius is almost true by definition since he wrote this classic novel, but before he became a writer, he was a man who had unusually broad intellectual interests. That’s exactly the sort of person you would expect to be able to write a book that can be interesting in so many ways to so many different people.

Thomas: If Frank Herbert was this towering genius, how come your Goodreads rating thing shows a dramatic drop-off in popularity for his later Dune novels? The first sequel, Dune Messiah, has only twenty percent of the ratings that Dune does. The last sequel he wrote, Chapterhouse Dune, has five percent of Dune’s ratings. His non-Dune novels are less than half a percent, despite the fact he wrote them long after Dune made him famous and successful! It’s hardly the case that everything he wrote was popular!

I wasn’t kidding when I said dumb luck. Here’s an alternative explanation that better explains this evidence: he was a weird dude who wrote very weird books. He got lucky with this one in that it happened to be weird in a popularity-producing way, but that was an accident. He didn’t do this intentionally, or if he did intend it, he certainly never managed to do it successfully again.

Jude: Is calling him a “weird dude” supposed to be a criticism? Of course an artistic genius is going to be a little different from the rest of us. I’d say he was an artist with bold, artistic vision that he followed without worrying too much about popularity. Surely that’s the more admirable path then just pandering to the audience?

Thomas: It was Dune’s success that enabled him to quit his day job and write whatever kind of books he wanted. Are you agreeing that he got lucky with Dune’s popularity or do you think he intentionally “sold out” with Dune and then used that to finance bold, uncommercial art like White Plague and Destination: Void?

Jude: I don’t know his biography well enough to know anything about his intentions, though in his short essay “When I Was Writing Dune” he claims he was focused on the art and not the audience. What I feel safer saying, though, is that he could have just cashed in by pumping out cookie cutter clones of Dune, but he definitely didn’t do that. He wrote sequels to Dune, but they’re pretty different from Dune and even from each other. And that same artistic vision was what enabled him to write a great novel like Dune in the first place.

Thomas: You’re working hard to explain why the same author that produced a runaway success like Dune never wrote anything else that resonated with people, but I have a much simpler explanation: Dune is not popular because of Herbert, it’s popular in spite of him. As you said, there are a lot of different strands of ideas in Dune, but probably the most important one is a very cynical notion about religious movements. Paul is this charismatic religious leader for the Fremen and they love him, but it’s all a sham. The prophecies he seems to fulfill were planted in their culture by external elites, his seemingly supernatural abilities are the result of eugenics, and his emergence as a religious figure causes many, many Fremen to die or get injured in the resulting holy wars.

That’s a really interesting theme and a bold artistic vision, but it’s not the theme of a popular book. The popular art version of this is: Bad men kill Paul’s father, he escapes and becomes the destined heroic leader of the fierce but simple-minded Fremen, he leads them to victory and revenge for his father. That’s not what Herbert wanted to write, but it’s what generations of people have read in Dune.

Jude: I would say he wrote that also. What’s really amazing and maybe unique about Dune is that not only does Herbert have this wonderful breadth of themes and ideas, he positions the narrative with just enough ambiguity that two different readers can essentially read two different stories. There’s the simple white savior revenge story, yes, but the same book also has that cynical depiction of a foreign man coopting a nation of people for his own purposes.

It’s like the way children’s movies, good ones at least, will weave in jokes and other elements that only the parents understand so that both children and adults can enjoy watching the same movie together.

Thomas: That’s a good analogy, but the difference is the people who write those movies are very carefully designing them to achieve that double-vision outcome. I think with Dune it’s a complete accident. That’s why I say it was in spite of Herbert.

Jude: We can’t ever really know what’s going on in an author’s head, and we haven’t even read his biography or other things that might tell us a little about that.

Thomas: No, but I’m fine making sweeping statements based on thin evidence. It’s fun. And actually I think the evidence is pretty clear. Before Dune was published as a novel, Herbert had apparently written at least parts of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. I think he conceived of a large arc of story that encompassed at least the broad strokes of both Dune and Dune Messiah: the rise and fall of Paul Atreides. Maybe you can also throw Children in there too, though to me it’s not nearly as cohesive as the first two.

Jude: Yes, he certainly intended Paul to eventually become a flawed or even failed leader from the start.

Thomas: Have you ever known someone prone to interrupting you when you’re trying to speak?

Jude: No, I definitely only speak with people who let me finish what I’m saying and who–

Thomas: When talking to someone like that, you have to be careful with saying complicated things. If you try to say “it seems like this, but I actually think it’s that” you might get cut off before you get to your second clause, making you sound like you think something you don’t. Or if, hypothetically, you are trying to say something ironic, you might not get enough of it out for people to to understand your point.

Jude: Okay, but what does this have to do with Frank Herbert? No one interrupted him. Supposedly twelve publishers turned Dune down.

Thomas: I think he had a long story in mind and was working on that, but he also wanted to publish his work, both because authors want their work to be read and because he wanted to get paid for his work. The first and most immediate path to publication was serializing the story in a short fiction magazine. Even serialized, magazines preferred stories to be shorter than a full novel, though. So Dune was published as two separate serialized stories, Dune World and Prophets of Dune. The boundaries are visible in the published novel. Dune World is part 1 and Prophets of Dune is the rest of the book.

Novels can vary a lot in length, but this was less true in 1965 and when publishing a novel by an unheralded author, publishers like them to be the standard length and not super-long. So Dune couldn’t be so long that it included the material in Dune Messiah that makes Herbert’s cynical spin on messiahs unmistakable. Had it not been for those limitations, Herbert might well have published it all together and Dune might never have become so popular.

Jude: Maybe. Dune Messiah wasn’t published until four years after Dune so even if some parts of it existed in early draft form, it’s not like it was ready to go.

Thomas: I don’t know the exact timeline of its writing, but apparently John W. Campbell, the legendary editor of Analog who had published Dune World and Prophets of Dune, turned down Dune Messiah. Campbell explained his decision by noting that in Dune, Leto Atreides is a helpless pawn of fate but Paul rises above this to triumph. In Campbell’s view, this triumphant agency is what science fiction fans wanted, so he considered Dune Messiah, where Paul himself is a helpless “pawn of fate”, to be a non-starter. And he was right: many readers who love Dune hit Dune Messiah like a brick wall. Some people appreciate what Herbert does with the story—I’m one of those people!—but it’s clearly more of a niche appeal.

Jude: Yes, but Dune Messiah is not a twist, it’s an elaboration of material that was already present in Dune. Many readers just don’t notice, or at least don’t focus on it when there’s so much else going on.

Thomas: Sure, and my point is that’s the secret of Dune’s success: Herbert’s true interests and intentions are being temporarily obscured. Although Paul Atreides’ story is the main manifestation of this, I think you can see it in other areas.

Another example is that Dune feels like an environmentalist story because it’s so attentive to climate and ecology. The mercantilist offworlders with their machines and mining operations see the environment as something to be fought and pillaged, whereas the spiritual Fremen humbly live as part of their larger world, deeply understanding it and adapting to it.

That’s enough that people have been reading environmental themes into Dune ever since, and it’s true that one of Herbert’s core ideas was humans as participants in, not mere bystanders to, the natural system. But whereas modern environmentalism is dominated by little-c conservative impulses, trying to save species from extinction and prevent the climate from changing too far away from the preindustrial status quo, Frank Herbert’s real interest was always in something closer to terraforming.

Jude: Yes, and again that’s right there in Dune. The Fremen live in the desert because they have to, they don’t enjoy it, and their long-term plan with Liet Kynes is to completely change the planet’s ecology. The Fremen riding sandworms is a pretty good visual metaphor for human domination of nature.

Thomas: It’s absolutely there. I’d say it’s even more clear than the flawed-messiah stuff. But not so clear that readers can’t get a more conservation-orienting reading out of it.

So I think we can combine our perspectives to sum up Dune’s path to popularity. It has an unusual number of interesting ideas in play and therefore finds ways to appeal to a lot of different people, like you said, and because it has so many ideas going in so many directions, readers can easily miss or ignore Herbert’s authorial intentions to subvert themes they enjoy.

Jude: Fair enough, there’s probably more that could be said here but I think we’ve been going on long enough. We’ll stop here before we alienate too many of our readers.

Thomas: Don’t worry, we don’t have any readers to begin with, so you can’t alienate them.

Jude: Next time, we’ll think more about popularity by diving into Lord of the Rings, then come back to Dune to discuss its protagonist and story.