WHEEL OF TIME BLOWS MY FRIKKIN’ MIND.

If I was allowed to swear on this blog, this post would look like an impenetrable wall of curses, but it’s for a school assignment, so that’d be a bad idea. That’s how much I love Wheel of Time. I’m willing to not curse in order to make people understand how kick-donkey it is. That’s big, coming from me.

Quick note: There will be some spoilers in these posts. Part of that is because you can’t really talk about Wheel of Time without spoiling some stuff, especially a few plot elements from the first three books, but especially the first.

So why is Wheel of Time great?

The story opens on a prologue about a man named Lews Therin Telamon, but it’s kind of confusing, so I’ll go into more detail about it later. The story moves away from Lews Therin pretty quickly and when we start the first chapter we find ourselves in the GREATEST OPENING TO A FANTASY NOVEL KNOWN TO MAN. None of this nonsense about “eleventy-first birthdays” or “hobbit holes”. Everything you need to know about Wheel of Time is contained in the first paragraphs of the first chapter, and new readers don’t even know it yet.

“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legends fade to myth, and even myth is long forgotten by the time the Age that gave it birth comes again.”

Let’s look at this line by line, because it’s a sort of ‘mission statement’ for the series.

“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass.” Simple enough. Time moves forwards. But to us, time is linear. As in, a line. A line that’s straight. No bendy bits. So what’s this Wheel nonsense? I’ll tell you what. Time is a wheel. Like, circular. That’s right. We’re going full-on Hindu with this. Brahma the creator and Shiva the regenerator better get in here, because Robert Jordan is totally stealing their thunder.

“… leaving memories that become legend.” Why is this here? Is it just there to sound epic? I mean, it does. It effectively sets the tone for the series. There will be legendmaking going on here. But there are other ways to do that. So why this sentence? The answer is in the later half of the opening.

“Legends fade to myth, and even myth is long forgotten by the time the Age that gave it birth comes again.” What’s this huge emphasis on myth and legend? I’ll tell you what it is, because that’s the whole point of this blog post. Wheel of Time is about stories. As in, it is intentionally structured based on Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey theory. The mechanics of the universe are the mechanics of the story. Let’s look at them, one by one.

Reality is known as ‘the Great Pattern’ in Wheel of Time. It says that each person’s life is a thread in that pattern, woven together to form a great tapestry. But the Pattern is more than just a metaphor for how life and and human interaction works. The Pattern is literally a pattern. (Whoa, mindblowing, I know, I’m getting to it) It is the destiny of all men and women. They move in establish patterns according to their roles in life. A farmer lives and dies in a small village. A woman is born a princess and takes the throne as queen (this is part of the sexism theming found in the series that I might talk about). They, by and large, do not shift from these roles. But every once in a while, a person appears who the world seems to revolve around, and the world shifts on its axis. We have seen these people throughout history: Alexander the Great, Jesus of Nazareth, Muhammad (pbuh). They don’t just change the world, they influence it. To the people around them, it might seem like the world exists only for them.

In Wheel of Time, these people are known as ta’veren. Our main characters are all ta’veren. To ta’veren, the Pattern is not fixed. It bends around them. Reality is changed, nearly impossible events occur. Does this seem familiar to anyone?

It should. Ta’veren are not just a plot element in Wheel of Time. Ta’veren are what we call ‘main characters’. Reality shifts around main characters. The impossible becomes possible, for whatever reason. Maybe they’re smart, or strong, or fast, or maybe they’re just lucky. Maybe they have power that could tear the world apart. Being born ta’veren, or being born a main character, means that the world moves for you.

In Wheel of Time, God, the supreme force in the universe, is known as the Creator. This is for a reason. When we refer to God, we refer to the way He exists. He is above us, deific, all powerful and all knowing. So why is the Creator, who is never directly referred to as God, though He undoubtedly is, called that?

The Creator created the world. He created every person in it. He wove the Pattern and He designated ta’veren.

The Creator is the writer of stories. Specifically, this story.

Wheel of Time is about stories. It is about how they are structured. It is about the people within them. The characters in Wheel of Time are archetypes for a reason. We see the effect that the lives characters live have on them. I, a Christian, can see the burden my God carried through the Messainic figure who is the story’s main character (more on him in a later post). Other people might find other characters more compelling for different reasons, but that’s not really relevant right now. Wheel of Time is a work of genius not because it’s necessarily original, but because it is simple. It harkens back to the earliest stories that Man ever told and it shines a new light on them. That is why Wheel of Time is great.

I mean, it’s also mind-blowingly awesome with kick-donkey characters living in a kick-donkey world by a writer that gave me the shivers at least a dozen times in every book he ever wrote. But that’s not why Wheel of Time is great in a literary sense. I will, however, get into why Wheel of Time is a great story on its own some other time.

I realize there are some pretty radical shifts in tone in this post, but that’s sort of how I think, especially as it pertains to my favourite works. Hopefully it’s still legible.