I already explained the similarities and Tolkien’s subtext, so my disagreement is pre-registered.
Lord of the Rings is a better adventure story and created a genre unto itself. That said, Dune has a helluva lot more to say. As between the two, Dune is a vastly more serious work.
Doon and Bored of the Rings?
Baron Harkonnen could totally kick Sauton’s immaterial ass in a single afternoon with a squadron of ornithopters and a lite lunch (which for the Baron would be four whole chickens).
It’s fascinating to read this thread. It’s especially fascinating to see LOTR called a “bang up fantasy story” and a “better adventure” in comparison to Dune, which does the textbook adolescent Hero’s Journey thing (which LOTR does not) in a fraction of the space,.
Some part of me wonders if people aren’t conflating LOTR with The Hobbit - they are very different beasts. As my ten-year-old self learned to my great disappointment, picking up LOTR and wanting it to be more Hobbit. (I gave up on LOTR until I was in my twenties, which in the end I think was a good thing.)
I think you’re conflating Dune, the book with Dune, the series of books, or Paul’s Story with the larger universe. His story in the first book might be a Hero’s Journey on the surface, but the various pressures that beat it into shape are much deeper. For every Argleb’arg came from Frooptydoo and conquered Wibjubb and drove the elves blah blah in LOTR, there’s:
In Dune, the Bene Gesserit breeding scheme is, in theory, to have come to full fruition from the union of an Atreides daughter (planned to be born of the Bene Gesserit Lady Jessica and the Duke Leto Atreides) and Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, nephew of the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (himself secretly the natural father of the Lady Jessica). This plan is disrupted when Jessica chooses to conceive an Atreides son rather than the daughter she had been ordered to produce. This son, Paul Atreides, later proves to be the Kwisatz Haderach, born a generation early. Political intrigue affects Paul’s rise to power as Emperor of the Known Universe, secured by his stranglehold on the melange supply. A decade later in Dune Messiah, the Bene Gesserit are frustrated to be at the mercy of their own creation, but a conspiracy to remove Paul from power fails. He realizes, however, that while prescience grants control, that control paradoxically traps the prescient in a foreseen future that they can not change. Despising the religion that has risen up around him and seeing where it will lead, Paul walks into the desert seeking death in hopes that he can change the course of the future. Paul’s son Leto II (born of Chani, daughter of Liet-Kynes, and Paul) is also a Kwisatz Haderach; seeing the same future, Leto decides to do what his father could not. He takes control of both the empire and the Bene Gesserit breeding program in Children of Dune, and begins his own transformation into a sandworm to give himself the time he needs for his Golden Path to be fully realized. Thirty-five hundred years later, his breeding plan produces Siona Atreides, the first in a line of humans who are able to disappear from prescient sight. Leto dies 1,500 years before the events in Heretics of Dune. In Chapterhouse Dune, the Bene Gesserit have restored their breeding program. However, they are too terrified of the consequences of producing another Kwisatz Haderach, so instead breed for special individuals of great talent and usefulness in order to amplify certain human characteristics and preserve them. Now aware of Leto’s Golden Path, the Bene Gesserit widen their goals of advancing mankind and saving it from extinction.
That’s quite a bit heavier than magic rings.
Rant: Would everyone please stop conflating things. “Confusing” is almost always the better and more accurate usage, and it has the appropriate negative connotation to boot.
As for Arglebargle XXIII, there’s just as much of that in Dune, plus the core Dune trilogy is about the same size as LOTR, so there’s really not much room for fans of one author to complain about padding in the other. Moreover the story of the KH in Dune is just as arbitrary, anti-scientific, and deus-ex-machina-like as anything found in fantasy.
Lord of the Rings. Also, Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun is better than Dune any day.
And a coke.
Well, yes, but it’s also better than LOTR, too. Not as “seminal”, though :)
diet coke. He has to watch his figure so the girls (and boys) will too.
As a mythology I prefer LotR, but I think that Dune is a better read.
Read it in 79 when I was 14yo, had to ask my older brother what a dildo was.
Dune is head and shoulders above LotR as a book, with its Politics, Hero’s Journey, Environmental takes, Genetics and look at human future. The narrative is even much more interesting - look at the chapter intros and how they respect what is to come.
LotR as books, really aren’t that great, but they defined a genre and inspired a generation.
LotR is more important, but Dune is a better book. I can’t speak for the rest of the Dune books as I could never get into the second enough.
Hopefully he didn’t show you…
Ok I was prepared through rereading Dune to pronounce it as the winner until I ran into Herbert’s 57th use of the word “prescient”. There’s just no excuse for that. Tolkien wins.
I put this to my Sunday Night Roleplaying group, who’s literary opinions I respect (LASFS members, writers, and librarians with vast reading experience in SF&F). It was unanimous: LotR over Dune. A more proper comparison of “The Dune Trilogy” vs. “The Lord of the Rings Trilogy” was even more strongly felt. Basically, Herbert had one good book in him, and the next two took a huge nosedive in quality. We all liked Dune, but the one we reread is LotR. Too often we found the characters just kind of there as window dressing without real emotional attachment in Dune.
He wrote plenty of other books outside that series, many much better than all the other Dune books after the first. But yeah, somehow each succeeding book in the series was worse, which you would think would be pretty hard to achieve.
It’s like the Algonquin Round (or should I say “Square”) Table…but made up of LARPERs and D&D players. ;)
Did one of them tell you that “you can lead a level 10 Barbarian to culture, but you can’t make him think”?
No idea what point you are trying to make there. Sorry.