The writer didn’t have very good things to say about Dune.
No one doubts that The Lord of the Rings and Dune are among the founding literary sagas of fantasy and science fiction in the 20th century. But, apparently, one of the authors didn’t like the other’s masterpiece at all.
A reserved but emphatic opinion
We know that, with Dune, Frank Herbert influenced everything from Alien to Blade Runner and, above all, Star Wars, but JRR Tolkien didn’t see any fun in the story. His opinion was found in a letter the author wrote in 1966, a year after the publication of Dune:
In fact, I intensely detest Dune, and in this unfortunate case the best and fairest thing for another author to do is to remain silent and refuse to comment.
The reasons why he didn’t like it are only known to him. Many believe that Tolkien, being a devout Catholic – to the point of helping CS Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, to return to Christianity – may have had his conflicts with Herbert’s much more cynical work.
Tolkien himself described The Lord of the Rings as “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work”, rich in Christian symbolism, while Dune experiments with and distorts Abrahamic religions with a cynical version of the hero and religion.
The reality is that the two franchises continue to define popular culture on a massive scale, currently with a million-dollar Prime Video series on one side, and a sequel that is sweeping the box office on the other.
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