One Dune fan has managed to decipher a scroll that appears for just a second in the latest trailer for Dune: Part Two – and we're extremely impressed.
A still of Florence Pugh's Princess Irulan holding a scroll, which appears at 0:23 in the trailer, was posted to r/Dune with the intention of finding someone who could decode the message.
"The first row reads: 'Imperial Kinsman...' and that's about everything I can make out from it," a fan commented, breaking down the message line by line. "The second row, however, is much clearer, and from that, I was able to read: '...Convention, if the Emperor and his people...' The third row is also pretty clear: '... down their arms and come to me here...'"
The fan posits that this is the message Paul Atreides sends to the Emperor demanding his surrender in Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune: "I, a Duke of a Great House, an Imperial Kinsman, give my word of bond under the Convention. If the Emperor and his people lay down their arms and come to me here I will guard their lives with my own." Princess Irulan is the Emperor's eldest daughter.
They went on to explain that the scroll is written in Galach, the official language of the Imperium and the most widely spoken language in the Known Universe: "Galach is a phonetic language, and the alphabet can be found online. In the movie, Galach is portrayed simply as contemporary English, but written in a phonetic style, where each character represents a sound or a set of sounds."
Dune: Part Two is the second of director Denis Villeneuve's two-part adaptation of Herbert's novel (with the Dune book series containing a whopping 28 installments.) The sequel sees Paul (Timothée Chalamet) team up with the Fremen people in order to bring down the Harkonenns – whom Paul's family has been fighting for centuries – once and for all.
