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this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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chapotraphouse
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Okay serious question, what the fuck is up with the names of things in Dune? Landsraad looks suspiciously like a Danish word for a house of parliament (though I think ours was specifically called Landsting rather than Landsraad) and the bad guys are apparently named Harkonen, which is also the name of every 4th guy in Finland, so like, was that writer on some weird mission against Scandinavia?
This is difficult to answer precisely without my nice thick leatherbound copy of the series in front of me with its notes and appendices to quote from directly lol.
Trying to show weird through-lines and syncretism of recognizable cultural motifs is an important part of Herbert's world building. Here is a very good article published just before the first Villeneuve movie came out by a professor of Islamic Studies on this question but from the angle of the Islamic/Arabic influences on the text.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/10/11/paul-atreides-led-a-jihad-not-a-crusade-heres-why-that-matters
You can replace Arabic and Islam in that final line with "Scandinavian" if you'd like, but the point being it's to make sure there's something in the setting that makes it feel both familiar and alien at the same time.
Yeah I love Dune for things like this. For example, the religion of the Fremen is Zensunni, a religion founded by a breakaway sect from Maometh aka the Third Muhammad. Their holy book is the Orange Catholic Bible, which takes from the Bible of our own time but also mixes it with points of wisdom from the Butlerian Jihad.
And "Orange Catholic Bible" in itself tells us that the schism in Christianity was healed, referring to the Orange Order of protestants in Northern Ireland and (obviously) the Catholic Church
No lie, Herbert saw the name Harkonnen in a phone book and thought it sounded Russian. He wanted a scary Russian name to suit the evil, Machiavellian, despotic homosexual villain that was Baron Vladimir Harkonnen.
Of all the names to sound Russian, it looks Nordic to me
It's actually Ural-Hungarian, if we want to be pedantic.