Crysknife

This article or section refers to elements from Original Dune
There are separate pages for this subject as it appears in the other canons such as Crysknife in Expanded Dune and Crysknife in the Dune Encyclopedia

Crysknife (art by Matt Howarth, The Dune Encyclopedia) — Crysknife illustration in *The Dune Encyclopedia*

A crysknife was a knife whose blade was made from the tooth of a dead sandworm of Arrakis. It was the weapon of choice for the Fremen, the natives of Arrakis. It was a curved and double-edged blade (double-edged like a kindjal), some 20 centimeters long, milky white in color and iridescent, and had a black handle with deep finger ridges separated from the blade by a slim round ring instead of a shearing-guard. The tip of a crysknife was also commonly poisoned, with an unnamed poison residing where the nerve of the tooth used to be. This poison is quick-acting and powerful as shown with the killing of the Laza tigers by Leto II and Ghanima.

Crysknives usually came in two forms:

Unfixed: Knives where the blade would disintegrate unless they were kept close to a human body's electrical field,
Fixed: Knives that had been treated so that they would not disintegrate, and could be put into storage.

To the Fremen, the crysknife was sacred, and they maintained much tradition around it. If it was drawn, it could not be resheathed until it had drawn blood. Moreover, the blade was not allowed to be seen by those considered to be outsiders by the tribe; otherwise they would have to die by it, or be "cleansed" in an elaborate ritual.

The sharpness of a crysknife was unparalleled. It was usually perceived to glow with a faint light. They averaged 20 cm in length.

Blades were considered a necessity on Arrakis. This was because neither shields nor Lasguns could be used in the Arrakis desert, due to the Holtzman field attracting sandworms.

Images of crysknives[]

Behind the scenes[]

In Dune: House Atreides "fixing a crysknife" is explained as "keyed to the body of the owner so it would dissolve upon his death" which contradicts the above definition.

Portrayal in adaptations[]

The crysknife designs used in the 1984 and 2021 film adaptations are not entirely identical to the description in the books. Shape-wise, the 1984 film version of the crysknife resembled a large trailing-point knife, while the 2021 version of the crysknife resembled a yatagan.

It's worth noting the crysknives of the 2021 film do not have a uniform shape, aside from the length and slight curvature. No two crysknife props seem exactly alike.

The 2000 and 2003 television series' crysknife props probably come closest to the description seen in the book, at least in terms of the overall length, shape and curvature of the knife's blade.

Trivia[]

The "crys-" part of the term might be a reference to the crystallic structures of a sandworm's "tooth". These are not like the typical teeth of vertebrates, and are more comparable to a single strand of the baleen structures in the mouth of a filter-feeding baleen whale. Like the baleen strands, they are keratinous, horn-like in origin, rather than a true bony structure.
A similarly named real bladed weapon is the assymetrical kris dagger of Javanese origin, historically used mainly by Malay people in modern day Indonesia and Malaysia, and more rarely in other parts of southeast Asia. The kris is mainly employed in the indigenous (now largely Muslim) martial art, Silat. The kris is not technically a combat weapon, as is made plain by its pistol-grip hilt. Rather, the blade was typically poisoned and it was used furtively as an assassination tool. In this way the crysknife toxin and the Atreides characteristic "hidden blade" style of fighting both nod to silat, Islamic martial traditions, and the Javanese kris.
The computer game Spelunky references the Crysknife by adding it as a ingame powerup, found in the Worm level, the worm's design being a reference to Dune as well.

External links[]

Crysknife article at Technovelgy.com