Frank Herbert: Giant sandworms lol. /j
Frank Herbert: … and dogs that are also chairs… rips bong… chairdogs
Frank Herbert is what happens when a genius writer takes too much shrooms while studying dunes. Like that is literally what happened.
Fuckin Herbert just decided to write philosophy disguised as a sci-fi story lol
Tolkien also created complete Languages for each race of his stories.
Sometimes I think he just liked world-building, and writing stories about his world came second.
From reading his biography, it seemed he mostly liked creating languages and then crafted stories and worlds based off them.
Tolkien’s the GOAT.
He only wanted to create languages, for fun… but he wanted to do it properly, so he needed full cultural backgrounds for his languages, including epic poetic sagas written in said languages… and to do that properly he needed a whole history of the world said languages and cultures had developed in… so the maniac built that. And then he wrote a children’s book set in that world, for his kids, as one does.
He was a philology teacher, so that’s indeed the case. You see it with how much details the language have, like real languages dialects and evolution. It was really his craft.
Philology Professor at Oxford, no less.