Frank Herbert's "Dune" series deals with the plight of the Fremen people and their
struggle to stop intergalactic overlords from mining their planet to death. The Fremen
serve as "Dune's" emotional center and provide its narrative backbone. This is their story.
Frank Herbert didn't create this desert culture out of whole cloth.
He drew inspiration from a healthy mix of world religions and several actual
indigenous cultures on Earth. In particular, he looked at the way that these peoples managed
to make a life for themselves in places that might be considered inhospitable.
Herbert was compelled to write Dune after hearing of a project by the United States
Department of Agriculture that would stop Oregon's marching sand dunes from moving.
The USDA planted different kinds of grass along the dunes to calm their movements,
as the blowing sand could wreak havoc on nearby roadways and towns.
Herbert decided to contrast the government's response of changing
the landscape with the way that native people across Earth have historically
learned to live in harmony with the planet's natural processes.
The Empire of Dune came to represent these outsiders reshaping worlds in ways that make
them more profitable, while the Fremen stood in for the ideas of harmonious living. Herbert based
the Fremen in large part on the San people who live in the Kalahari desert. Like the Fremen, the
San learned to conserve water in order to survive in some of the most unforgiving terrain on Earth.
The Fremen are descendants of a persecuted religious group called the Zensunni Wanderers.
This nomadic group fled across the void of space to evade imperial violence. Herbert created their
religion from the combined tenets of Sunni Islam and his own belief in Zen Buddhism.
Their final stop was Arrakis,
a barren desert planet believed to be worthless before the discovery of a spice called melange.
"He who controls the spice controls the universe!"
This spice gave all who consumed it a minor amount of prescience. It quickly became
crucial for navigating ships in a galaxy that had created faster-than-light travel.
So, the Fremen found themselves in a familiar situation to anyone who knows about the Amazon
rainforest or the so-called American frontier. They were the people living
on top of a coveted natural resource, and they suffered in similar ways to those indigenous
peoples on Earth.
The Fremen were viewed as backward and savage by Dune-colonizing outsiders. Their culture
was an example of the ways in which humanity can survive in the least probable situations.
Because of the extreme scarcity of water on the surface of their planet, a huge chunk
of Fremen culture and ritual is based around the collection and conservation of this vital mineral.
They travel the surface of Dune dressed in stillsuits, full-body coverings that collect
and filter sweat, respiratory droplets, and waste, and store it in catch-pockets.
This water is then recycled via tubes that are pumped through levers in the stillsuit's heels.
In this perfectly closed system, not a drop of water is wasted.
The Fremen conception of wealth also revolves around the collection of water. They live
in small bands that move between underground sietches, where they store their water communally.
Individuals wear jewelry that symbolize their share of the water. When Fremen die, their
bodies are rendered in a holy ceremony, and their water is added back to the wealth of the tribe.
The Fremen have also managed a cautious coexistence with the desert's greatest threat:
sandworms. Called "makers" by the Fremen, the massive creatures tunnel through the desert sand
and appear at the slightest noise. Fremen learn at a young age how to walk through
the desert in a sliding, arrhythmic gait that mimics the natural settling of sand.
They do this to avoid drawing sandworm attention — unless they're looking to hitch a ride.
That's right: The Fremen also have a strategy for riding the sandworms of Dune.
It's a dangerous maneuver that allows them to cover massive stretches of the desert at
a clip. This technique is a closely guarded secret of their community.
Though the Empire believes that they are few in number,
the truth is that a massive society has blended into the desert.
"My Lord, I suspect an incredible secret has been kept on this planet,
that the Fremen exist in vast numbers."
From the safety of their underground sietches,
the collected Fremen have been working on a generational terraforming project.
Their goal is to eventually transform Dune into a verdant and hospitable planet.
This secret society of desert nomads provides an army lying in wait for Paul Atreides,
who assumes the Fremen name Muad'dib, to invade the polar port city of Arrakeen.
In the real world, mu'addib is Arabic for teacher.
During the epic Dune saga,
an imperial governor on Dune is overthrown by a scheming family looking to settle a
blood feud. The son of that governor escapes to the desert with his mother, the Lady Jessica.
Jessica takes advantage of prophecies that had been seeded among the Fremen
by a holy order known as the Bene Gesserit to which she belongs.
Using this Missionaria Protectiva, she coerces the Fremen into accepting her son as their
messiah. His name is Paul Atreides, but he quickly assumes a Fremen name meaning "kangaroo mouse."
The Fremen admire this creature for its ability to live on the surface of Dune.
It's Paul's reciprocal embrace of Fremen traditions that leads him to the spice and
the awakening of his dormant powers of prescience. Without the Fremen,
Paul and Jessica might never have survived their exile to the desert.
They certainly wouldn't have been able to mount an assault on Harkonnen Arrakeen.
Paul became a true messianic figure during his time among the Fremen.
The boy had been trained by his mother in the weird arts of observation,
perception, and control practiced by the Bene Gesserit witches for generations.
This all-woman mystical order exerts influence by subtly molding the genealogy of Great Houses.
They then insert their converts into bloodlines in the hopes of creating
their own messiah known as the Kwisatz Haderach. This figure would be able
to access areas of prescience that the Bene Gesserit witches could not reach.
"This is the place they cannot look."
In short, generations of witches had worked to eventually create a son who would be trained
in their ways. Though Paul's mother had not been given the go-ahead to train Paul,
she trained him anyway knowing that he would be killed by the forces allied against their family
if he was not prescient. When these powers combined with Paul's training as a Fremen,
he became a mystic desert dweller who could see the future and use it to reshape Dune.
Paul then uses an army of Fremen, who heard his revolutionary message,
to destroy the precious spice that facilitates all space travel.
He simultaneously attacks the Empire's outposts, while holding the galaxy's spice supply hostage.
The Emperor is forced to cave to Paul Muad'Dib, who becomes the undisputed ruler of Dune.
Even though Paul is revered as a god in the flesh by the Fremen,
history quickly slips out of his control. The reverence and religious fervor surrounding
Muad'Dib transforms into a cosmic jihad waged in Paul's name. It's fought and led almost entirely
by his army of Fremen fedaykin warriors with the backing of his religious order, the Qizarate.
Hundreds of worlds and billions of people come under the sway of Paul's empire in the
early days of his reign. A religion grows around him and the Fremen homeworld of Dune
becomes a kind of space-age Jerusalem. Paul's prescience shows him where this
path is headed. But he becomes hemmed in by his future visions and his status as the godhead. So,
Paul is essentially paralyzed to act in any way that might assure his people's enduring salvation.
Among the Fremen, there is an undercurrent of dissent from older veterans of Paul's war
who don't like the way that Fremen culture is changing. As
Paul makes water more available, older Fremen look
on in horror as the strict codes observed by previous generations begin to disappear.
In addition to that, the fedaykin become disillusioned with the war
effort when they come home to meager pensions
and comfortable suburban homes that carry little trace of the harsh life of the sietch.
A plot is hatched among these Fremen dissenters to assassinate Paul.
These rebels are egged on by the Spacing Guild who have lost their unfettered access to the
spice melange. The Bene Gesserit witches, who have lost control over their breeding program,
also encourage the revolt. Paul sees these machinations in his visions,
but has trouble figuring out how to avoid the plots bearing fruit without causing more misery.
Ultimately, he allows himself to be grievously wounded by the Fremen dissenters.
He is blinded by a nuclear blast near the holy city — an attack that he foresaw. The
strict Fremen way of life holds that anyone who loses their sight
must wander out into the desert and allow himself to die, rather than slowing down the tribe.
Though Paul is an emperor and could have carried on without his sight,
he sees in this path a way off the treadmill carrying him toward the Fremen's ultimate demise.
In sacrificing himself pursuant to traditional Fremen law, he silences the doubts of the
traditionalist hardliners who worried that he had forgotten the ways of the Fremen.
Under the 3,500-year reign of Paul's son Leto II, the Fremen culture grows faint.
By merging with sand trout, a kind of larval stage of the great sandworms,
Leto II becomes a nearly immortal human-sandworm hybrid. He rules long enough to realize the
great dream of Liet-Kynes to terraform Dune into a moist, temperate planet.
Leto is ultimately killed by one of his descendants,
a Fremen-Atreides named Siona who has evolved the ability to hide from his power of foresight.
Siona's assassination of Leto sets off the "Great Scattering." This is an event that sees the many
peoples of the former empire dispersed in a galactic diaspora. Without access to the spice,
they are essentially isolated for thousands of years on their planetary islands.
When the peoples of the Scattering return, one particularly violent sect — The Honored
Matres — bombards the surface of Dune with planet-destroying weapons. These weapons,
called Obliterators, kill the last remnants of the Fremen civilization. In Frank Herbert's original
series of six novels, only one Fremen escapes the scouring of Dune. This is a girl named Sheeana,
a name derived from the original Fremen "Siona," and a mainline descendant of Paul Atreides.
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