God Emperor of Dune

“[E]verything that once had been Fremen had now a museum quality—rote recitals learned from Museum Fremen. It was Fremen loyalty that kept Ulot silent in the full awareness of his doom. A fine display of the ancient qualities, and rather pitiful when none of the runners had any but book knowledge and the legends of the Oral History about the virtues they aped.”

Herbert begins the first chapter with the depiction of the Fremen, the mighty and resilient culture from the first three novels, reduced to simulations and neglect. The description illustrates how Leto’s 3,500 years of rule have diminished the planet and its people. The Fremen, once a symbol of the planet’s desert power, are now “pitiful” mockeries of their ancestors, and all ten of Siona’s companions die in the first chapter. The inauthenticity of the Museum Fremen functions as a critique of histories and legends that fail to accurately describe or preserve a culture.

“Leto had found his accusation irritating, like a grain of sand in an eye. He held onto the remnants of his once-human self with a grimness which could not be denied, although irritation was the closest he could come to anger.”

Leto’s lost humanity becomes one of the pivotal themes that garners sympathy for his character. When the older Duncan accuses Leto of no longer being human, his reaction is a resigned irritation rather than anger. The simile of the “grain of sand in an eye” is a pun on Leto’s sandworm transformation, as his natural habitat is the desert. He has become so desensitized to insults to his humanity that they are minor nuisances, like sand to a sandworm. Leto has accepted his alienation and isolation from the rest of humanity, and this scene heightens the thrill Leto experiences when Hwi sees his human side as no one else does.