Fremen - Origins

Origins

In Dune, the Bene Gesserit Lady Jessica undergoes the spice agony and gains access to the memories of her ancestors as well as those of the Fremen Reverend Mother Ramallo. This reveals to Jessica that "the Fremen culture was far older than she had suspected. There had been Fremen on Poritrin ... a people grown soft with an easy planet, fair game for Imperial raiders to harvest and plant human colonies on Bela Tegeuse and Salusa Secundus ... Jessica saw the slave cribs on Bela Tegeuse ... saw the weeding out and the selecting that spread men to Rossak and Harmonthep." Herbert elaborates in "Terminology of the Imperium," the glossary of Dune, by noting that the planet Poritrin is "considered by many Zensunni Wanderers as their planet of origin, although clues in their language and mythology show far more ancient planetary roots." The former Imperial capital (and later prison world) Salusa Secundus is "the second stopping point in migrations of the Wandering Zensunni. Fremen tradition says they were slaves on S.S. for nine generations." The "third stopping place" is noted as Bela Tegeuse, and Harmonthep is the "sixth stop."

In an early, alternate Dune outline by Frank Herbert called Spice Planet, the Fremen are called the "Free Men" — convicts who had been transported to "Duneworld" to work for the spice operation of the "Hoskanners" in exchange for a reduction in their sentence.

Read more about this topic:  Fremen

Famous quotes containing the word origins:

    The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?”
    Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)

    Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.
    W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)

    Grown onto every inch of plate, except
    Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
    Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
    Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
    The origins of art.
    Howard Moss (b. 1922)