Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

Thanks to a hint/pointer from Askaris, I've determined that Travels in Arabic Deserta by Charles Montagu Doughty, another of those wonderful British travelogues, was used by Frank Herbert as a source of names and terminology in his Dune novels.

Things found thus far: gom & jabbar; Feyd; khala; and Nefud. Plenty more to come, I'm sure.

Very cool.

Is this the same book as "Wanderings in Arabia"? I found it on archive.org :

part 1
part 2

That appears to be the 1908 abridged version, but yes, that's it. Thanks for posting the links; I didn't think to look for it in online archives, even that's how I found the other book. D'uh.

If you load the txt version (808 KB; I'm downloading both for searching) of part 2

http://www.archive.org/stream/wandering ... g_djvu.txt" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

and search for "gom", you'll find this:

Girby, water-skin.
Gdm, enemies (sing, gomdny),

Haibdra, a bustard.

So the scan is pretty bad: the main entry should be "gôm", so it's just the "gom" in "gomdny" (gomâny) that's responsible for the hit. (You may notice that searching for "gom" turns up a quote: "Gome with me...." Crappy scan!)

The sources of Dune are right there in front of us, if we just bother to look. So much for the HLP and the "world's greatest Dune fans" and their research.

This is why we do what we do. To investigate this stuff. This is why we have three websites dedicated to this man.