Idril Celebrindal
Exile of Gondolin
- Joined
- Jul 31, 2024
- Messages
- 666
I have the "edit" option on my recent posts, but it's not there on the older ones.
I have the "edit" option on my recent posts, but it's not there on the older ones.Hmm. I do everything on my phone, so you may not see the dots, but you should see an "edit" at the bottom of your post -- it's next to the little square and "Report".
Tolkien on Dune:"on the one hand/on the other hand"
I use "hate" (and""love"), as do a lot of people, when talking informally about non serious preferences.Thank you for pointing this out, I think another person mentioned it before as well. I would change the thread title and my post to disliked instead of hated, except that I have no idea how, or if that's even possible. Also, I was not saying that dislike = hate. I was simply abbreviating "dislike with some intensity" to "hate", albeit sloppily. I suppose that a small amount of miscommunication is present whenever the internet is used to communicate. I understand why the "hate" part in my post bothers some people, but I honestly have no idea how to edit it.
I'm not sure I grasp your meaning -- Wolfe did use Greek words himself, like "peltast" -- though what he was describing was hardly that. I seem to remember his explaining the use of such terns, though I don't recall what he said about it.I longed for Gene Wolfe's clever 'defamiliarization' of a world where destriers mix with alzabos
Ummm.... the meteors are over in the Trivia thread (just thought you might like to know that... 😇)...
You might enjoy Harry Harrison's Eden series for its attempt to seriously think through and work out the implications for a world developed differently from ours -- in this case, an earth where a major meteor strike didn't kill off the dinosaurs.
It's kind of like reading Tolkien; his stories are fantasy.I've started on this book and, so far, I'm a bit put off by the idea of a planet that's entirely desert. But I'm gonna give the benefit of the doubt that there'll an explanation for this, as well as for how water is deadly to worms and machines that have wings like birds. I've not gone very far into the book, so, please, no spoilers.
I mean, it's not a deal-breaker. After all, Star Wars has its ice, jungle, desert, etc. planets too (perhaps an idea Lucas cribbed from Dune?). But Star Wars is at least as much fantasy as it is science fiction so it seems a bit more viable (for lack of a better word) there. I expected Dune to be more science fiction. Ironically, Middle-earth is perhaps more believable from a geological standpoint.It's kind of like reading Tolkien; his stories are fantasy.
So with Dune...as long as you can accept his initial "premise" (his "sub-creation") it works.
At least, it did with me.
Another author I want to read more of.The planet in this novel has no land at all, being entirely covered with an ocean.
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Yep, I get you.... Tolkien was pretty consistent with his sub-creation.I mean, it's not a deal-breaker. After all, Star Wars has its ice, jungle, desert, etc. planets too (perhaps an idea Lucas cribbed from Dune?). But Star Wars is at least as much fantasy as it is science fiction so it seems a bit more viable (for lack of a better word) there. I expected Dune to be more science fiction. Ironically, Middle-earth is perhaps more believable from a geological standpoint.
No fan of Lovecraft but I find myself liking him for this!It might useful to compare Tolkien's comments on E.R.Eddison, about whose work he had conflicting, or we could say "nuanced" views, writing in a 1944 letter to Christopher of hearing Eddison read "a new chapter from an uncompleted romance -- of undiminished power and felicity of expression".
In Letter 199 (1957) he writes:
(My emphasis)
I'd call that as extreme an example of an "on the one hand/on the other hand" attitude about an author as you could find; we can only guess at whether he might have expressed something similar, had he written more about Herbert.
About the Alice stories, it should perhaps be kept in mind that they're filled with parody and satire, aimed at many targets, some, like Victorian politics and moral attitudes, losing their sharpness and relevance to the mere passage of time; some, like the White Knight's song as an elaborate parody of Wordsworth, due to lack of familiarity with their originals; or many which are more or less in-jokes, such as the Hatter's "Twinkle, twinkle, little bat", which, besides parodying the "Little Star" song, something that would have delighted the young Liddell sisters, referred to a mathematics professor at Oxford, who was known as "The Bat" because his lectures flew over the heads of his students.
One more little note:
In this, he reminds me of H.P.Lovecraft, that lover of everything 18th century, and hater of everything 19th, who, when finding himself at any event where "America" ('My Country, 'Tis of Thee') was being sung, would loudly sing the words to "God Save the King". 😄
I don't know about the origin of the Bene Gesserit name or the Atreides being connected to Homer (interesting observation, though), but I do know that Herbert used real languages in Dune. I gave Dune to one of my Arabic-speaking friends just so that she could look at the first few pages, and she said that Lisan-Al-Gaib actually means "he who is many places at once" and "voice from the outer world" in Arabic. I've noticed some familiar words in Chakobsa as well. I think Herbert intended the people in Dune to be our descendants, so it kind of makes sense if they have some similar languages, customs and names to ours.There is such a wealth of literary knowledge in this thread - I have learned a great deal and, having given up on Dune after a few chapters, have nothing to add.
I would just like to ask whether there is a Watsonian explanation in Dune for the 'recycling' of cultural phenomena and indeed names? In my brief scan, I encountered the Bene Gesserit, whose name evidently came from the legal phrase of term-limitation "quamdiu se bene gesserit"; the Landsraad on loan from the Holy Roman Empire, the Atreides on loan from Homer and Aeschylus...within the story itself, are these far-future people echoing old Earth terms for some sensible reason? For example, through a conscious desire to recreate solid certainties of the past, when faced with a vast and appalling galaxy? Is there an intentional jumbling of the Greek and the German etc. to give the impression that old parochial Earth distinctions are as nothing, faced with the variety of the modern galaxy? Like the mix of Chinese and American culture in Firefly?
At first, I found it it irritating to see all these familiar words, rather than bold reimaginings. I longed for Gene Wolfe's clever 'defamiliarization' of a world where destriers mix with alzabos...Then it occurred to me that there is probably some clever and satisfying reason in Herbert's mind, which I was not patient and generous enough to wait for. But it made me wonder whether Tolkien, with his love of principled sub-creation and his intolerance of importations from the "primary" world (such as when C.S. Lewis imported Father Christmas to Narnia), might have faulted Herbert for not creating cultures from wholer cloth, for borrowing too much? Perhaps someone can enlighten me.
I saw the first film and saw its honour-and-vengeance morality as being stolidly and uprightly pagan, worthy of Homer. Deficient or incomplete, but not willfully twisted. I gather that the characters' motivations are revealed to be more and more cold and grandly inhuman as the narrative goes on.
All of the people who were close to Duke Leto, such as Thufir Hawat, Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck knew that Leto "suspected" the Lady Jessica of treatchury (of course, Leto didn't actually believe that she was a traitor, but the only person he told about that was Paul). If you recall, there's a scene after the big banquet that Leto hosts where Gurney Halleck comes back drunk and is making a disturbance. When Jessica tells him to drink coffee, he says, more or lessA little help, please. At one point Gurney Haleck says, "The she-witch! Alive! The one I swore vengeance against!" Not sure if that is an exact quote but it's close enough. Anyway, first of all, I'm not sure how that makes a lot of sense, but more to the point, I thought it was Thulfir Hawat who suspected Jessica and swore to kill her? I can't even recall that much POV given to Haleck. Am I losing it here? 😕
No spoilers, please, if it can be avoided. I have about 130 pages to go.
So he definitely suspected Jessica even then.I don't take orders from a **** Harkonen spy
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