Comparing the texts and “realworld” contexts of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit / The Lord of the Rings and Frank Herbert’s Dune (3)
Neither Tolkien’s nor Herbert’s works arose without some precursors. Tolkien, for example, had read George Macdonald’s and William Morris’s fantasy works. Britain was also the locus for the Arthurian legends and their literary renderings. Tolkien also had high respect for Beowulf, the great Old Anglo-Saxon poem. Another influence was the epic poem “The Ballad of the White Horse” (1911) by G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) portraying an idealized King Alfred. Much of Tolkien’s creativity was shaped by his interactions with the Inklings group, especially C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), whose own children’s fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia, appeared in seven volumes between 1950-1956 -- beginning with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
As for Herbert, he could have been to some extent inspired by Isaac Asimov’s (1920-1992) Foundation trilogy (originally published 1951-1953), and the attempts in the space-opera subgenre to meld archaic and advanced technology with feudal structures. A good example of the latter is “The Rebel of Valkyr” (1950), by Alfred Coppel (1921-2004) – which has been characterized as quote “horses in the starship hold”. However, in the typically written space-opera, this was done without close attention being paid to well-considered sociological and technological explanations for such a state of affairs.
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