The Original Dune Timeline

[Cpt. Aramsham]

I've long been interested in the Dune writing process. Mainly because I think understanding this process and what the book looked like in earlier drafts can help us interpret the meaning of the final book, and explain puzzling details.

So, for some time I have been developing a theory that the appendices (including the Terminology) represent a later, additional layer of composition, separate from the final version of the story itself. Furthermore, that some of the things explained in the appendices were not what Frank Herbert had in mind when he wrote the main narrative, but are a kind of "retcon" within the book. (Of course, this doesn't mean that everything is: a lot of the worldbuilding presented in the appendices reflects ideas that reached their final form earlier in the writing process.)

There are various clues in the book that originally made me suspect this. For example:

• The term "Zensunni" is never used in body of the book, only in Appendix II and the Terminology (and Appendix II only says that the Fremen borrowed from the Orange Catholic Bible, which included Zensunni elements—it does not explicit identify them with the Zensunni); in the main text, RM Ramallo speaks only of "our Sunni ancestors"
• The body of the book never hints that the calendar has been reset, and the introduction of this reset (again, in Appendix II and the Terminology) creates a number of chronological difficulties
• The story RM Gaius Helen Mohiam tells about the Butlerian Jihad and the founding of the Great Schools is subtly different from the version in Appendix II: she says that the Bene Gesserit and Guild are survivors of ancient schools that were set up after the Butlerian Jihad, while Appendix II describes both the Guild and Bene Gesserit operating before the Jihad

Examining Frank Herbert's working papers confirms the theory. Letters show that the appendices (except Appendix III) were largely composed after the book itself, on the request of Chilton editor Sterling Lanier. (Though Frank Herbert did make some final, unrelated small adjustments to the main text of the book, too.) And an earlier draft of the glossary shows that "Zensunni Wanderers" is a later edit: originally it just talked about the "Wanderers," "Sunni Wanderers" or "Wandering Sunni," and there was no separate entry about the Zensunni. Similarly, in this draft, the entry for "Guild" states:

The Spacing Guild's monopoly on space travel and transport and upon interplanetary banking had been maintained more than eleven [inserted: seventeen (?)] hundred years before the birth of Muad'Dib.

(The handwritten edit is a little difficult to read.)

So that would place the establishment of the Spacing Guild monopoly only a little over 1,115 or 1,715 years in the past, while the final version of course makes it the starting point of the new calendar, 10,191 standard years before Dune.

However, it should also be mentioned that the entry for "Jihad, Butlerian" in the same draft of the glossary does use the final "B.G." dates (the only entry to do so in this draft), and that an entry for "B.G." has been added by hand:

B.G. — Before Guild — Imperial dating dating system based on Spacing Guild genesis

("Genesis" is of course not the same thing as "monopoly.")

What I make of this is that originally, Frank Herbert intended the "Stdrd 10,191"-style dates in the book to be in our calendar (just like the Imperium uses kilometers, liters and other SI units), so that the story would take place some 8,000 years in the future.

Under this timeline, the Butlerian Jihad probably took place around 2,500 years before the time of Dune (so around Stdrd 7,700—or as we would write it, 7700 CE), which is why the Bene Gesserit breeding program is "ninety generations" long: if we reckon 25 years per generation (and Frank Herbert implicitly does so in a couple of places), that's 2,250 years. (This also fits with them having known about the importance of Harkonnen gene-markers for the breeding program for "almost two thousand years.")

It also fits much better with Shaddam IV being the "81st of his line (House Corrino) to occupy the Golden Lion Throne" (this information comes from Appendix IV, but my guess is that it is based on the earlier timeline)—and keep in mind that without the glossary entry on the Battle of Corrin, we have no reason to think that the Corrinos have been on the throne since shortly after the Butlerian Jihad.

It's an open question where events alluded to in the book—such as the Battle of Corrin, the forced migrations of the Fremen (not yet at this point identified with Zensunni), the Old Empire when the palace in Arrakeen was built, or the time when Arrakis was "His Imperial Majesty's Desert Botanical Testing Station"—would fall in this timeline. Frank Herbert may not have had any definite idea himself.

I believe that as he was working on the glossary, he initially used this "short" timeline to place the start of the Guild Monopoly 1,100+ years in the past (which implies a period after the Butlerian Jihad when the Guild did not have a complete monopoly on space travel). But then he got the idea for the calendar reset, thereby moving the story further into the future and increasing the time since the Butlerian Jihad (and so also the age of the Bene Gesserit and the Guild) by a factor of four. This was probably at around the same time he wrote Appendix II and the line about the "one hundred and ten centuries that preceded the Butlerian Jihad."

The interesting thing is that he didn't make any changes to the main text of the book to insert any reference to the revised timeline, so without the appendices it remains perfectly consistent with the original timeline.

[georgiedenbro]

Very interesting, thanks for doing that research!

Under this timeline, the Butlerian Jihad probably took place around 2,500 years before the time of Dune (so around Stdrd 7,700—or as we would write it, 7700 CE), which is why the Bene Gesserit breeding program is "ninety generations" long: if we reckon 25 years per generation (and Frank Herbert implicitly does so in a couple of places), that's 2,250 years. (This also fits with them having known about the importance of Harkonnen gene-markers for the breeding program for "almost two thousand years.")

Without having looked over the text with all this in mind, I particularly like this conclusion.

[Cpt. Aramsham]

Thanks georgie!

I just noticed another clue that the Butlerian Jihad was originally intended to be about 90 generations in the past:

It is pleasant to think that Bomoko understood the prophecy in his words: "Institutions endure." Ninety generations later, the O.C. Bible and the Commentaries permeated the religious universe.
When Paul-Muad'Dib stood with his right hand on the rock shrine enclosing his father's skull (the right hand of the blessed, not the left hand of the damned) he quoted word for word from "Bomoko's Legacy"

If 90 generations is not the gap that separates Bomoko and Muad'Dib, why mention such an arbitrary number? Of course, this is in Appendix II, which has the line about the "one hundred and ten centuries" of space travel before the Butlerian Jihad (which necessitates the calendar reset), but it might be that the first draft was written before the idea of the calendar reset (the appendix otherwise mentions no dates), and that that particular line was added or the number changed later on, while the line about the generations didn't get changed.

As for Frank's calculation of generations:

"But how long?" the Fremen demanded.
"Oh, that: about three hundred and fifty years."
So it was true as this umma had said in the beginning: the thing would not come in the lifetime of any man now living, nor in the lifetime of their grandchildren eight times removed, but it would come.

From this we can conclude that (1 Fremen lifetime) + (10 Fremen generations) < 350 years. That means that a generation cannot be much more than 25 years unless Fremen lifespans are unreasonably short (if it's 30 years, it implies that no Fremen lives to be 50).

On the other hand, he calls the Butlerian Jihad (201–108 BG) "two generations of chaos," which implies 46 years per generation.

Frank Herbert is not very reliable when it comes to arithmetic, so I wouldn't put too much weight on these calculations. But I'm convinced that he never intended 90 generations to be 10,191 years.

[georgiedenbro]

Frank Herbert is not very reliable when it comes to arithmetic, so I wouldn't put too much weight on these calculations. But I'm convinced that he never intended 90 generations to be 10,191 years.

I suppose this is mired in the issue I brought up a few years ago, where I theorized that he had originally intended spice to have been a very recent discovery, but scrubbed that in a later edit. Some details in the early chapters of Dune seem to support the idea that spice harvesting had only been going on there for 100 years or something (I forget the figure). The compressed timeline theory would seem to be in line with the idea that in the 2,200 years since the jihad, most of them were spent using other non-spice drugs, and that the discovery of spice is what has suddenly shifted the balance of power, and perhaps even caused the BG plans to derail.

[Cpt. Aramsham]

Another detail where the additional material appears to contradict or at least make up something new that's not in the main text (unless I'm overlooking something):

The Terminology mentions in the entries for "Second Moon" and "Muad'Dib" that the second moon has markings that resemble a kangaroo mouse. But there is no reference to this in the main text, as far as I can find. On the other hand, the text mentions that Muad'Dib is a constellation that points North. I wonder if Frank Herbert forgot. Or maybe, having an entry for the first moon (with its hand/fist pattern, which is mentioned in the text), he felt a need to come up with something to say about the second moon too.

(In the scenes where Paul chooses his Fremen name, Lynch's movie emphasizes the moon link, while Villeneuve's Dune Part Two talks about the constellation.)