I was struck today by one of those comparisons you sometimes make to events or people that do not, on the surface, appear to have very much in common. The comparison I made was between Arwen (in Tolkiien's 'Lord of the Rings') and Irulan (in Herbert's 'Dune'); both characters end up married to a 'hero' (Aragorn and Mu'ad Dib respectively) and yet scarcely appear in the respective novels as characters in their own right. Arwen is largely confined to someone Aragorn uses to fend off Eowyn's attentions in Lord of the Rings* and Irulan is, in the main, reduced to quotes from her writings as chapter headings; both characters presage an ending to the novels which does not make much sense until you do indeed reach the end.
Of course, the two characters marry for different reasons, Arwen for love and Irulan for political expediency, however it still feels quite strange to me that neither author felt it necessary to flesh out the characters. Arwen is simply a cardboard cut-out until you read the appendices and then the parallels with the tale of Beren and Lúthien Tinúviel in the Silmarillion, which was not published until much later, become apparent. Irulan is scarcely much better; the chapter headings, which are quite obviously a device to provide more information and a perspective on the narrative, could have been written by anybody.
This may have, in both cases, been done as a 'literary device' by both authors, although the reason for it escapes me, and yet in both Jackson's trilogy of films of 'Lord of the Rings' and in the three part TV mini-series of 'Dune' (Lynch's film is too short to do any kind of justice to the book), the directors or producers felt the need to expand on the characters; give them some depth. Most of the time, I am largely dissatisfied with adaptations of books which run to more the 300 or so pages; too much often gets omitted. Although I have issues with what was left out of both adaptations, the additions in these cases seem to me to be entirely appropriate and fitting.
That comparison aside, the books, though widely different in tone, style and subject matter, one 'high fantasy' the other sci-fi, do share at least one commonality; the well being of the planet. Tolkien, raised as he was, in part, in the English countryside had a great love of the 'unspoilt' England, much more in evidence in the years prior to the Great War (1914-1918), although the landscape even then had already been blighted to some extent by the effects of the industrial revolution. It is scarcely an accident that evil in Tolkien's world is not only measured by the pain and suffering done to other people of middle earth but also in the damage that is done to environment. Mordor is a volcanic wasteland, devoid of green; Isengard is surrounded by pits containing forges and breeding dens; the Shire, Tolkien's picture of an idealised 'Albion', is transformed after Saruman's expulsion from Orthanc and the hobbits' lengthy absence into a landscape of smoking sheds and desolation. Good, in Tolkien, is always represented by a love of growing things. Elrond, Galadriel, Thranduil, the Ents have their forests, their trickling streams, their wild flowers; Aragorn is well versed in herbology and the ways of the wild places in Middle-Earth; even Faramir is stationed in the Vale of Ithilien, with its woodland, ideal for ambush, and, of course, coneys!
Herbert, on the other hand, takes a more pragmatic approach, more in keeping with a writer of sci-fi. While Herbert is content to view Arrakis, the planet-wide desert that it is, as something natural, a product of sand worm activity, still he seeks to change it for the better; at least for humankind. Liet Kynes' work, in using simple technologies to condense water from the atmosphere and so start a process to hold back the desert from selected areas, not only gives the Fremen a common goal, something to unite behind, long before Mu'ad Dib gave them a reason and a way to fight the Harkonnen but is also a 'call to arms' for our own dilemma; the Sahara has been steadily advancing south since Roman times and we, so far, have done little or nothing to stop it. ** Perhaps it was not the first book to highlight ecological disaster and simple technologies to alleviate or overcome it (Silent Spring was published 4 years earlier, albeit non-fiction) but it was probably one of the first to establish ways in which an entirely dystopian vision of the future could be avoided.
* I do not care what the consensus view is; I think Miranda Otto's performance in Peter Jackson's trilogy of films of Lord of the Rings is spot on. It is not easy to play the love struck teenager, especially when Tolkien himself did not make that good a job of it.
** There was an interesting idea some years ago, which never took off as far as I know, which involved building cities or towns from the dunes at the southern border of the Sahara to halt the march a of the desert. Using a binder, eg concrete, to stabilise the dune on the south side and coarse grass to stabilise the dune on the north side, each dwelling would, in effect, be 'carved' into the face of the sand dunes.
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