The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan. Tor, 1990. Wheel of Time 1.
Table of Contents
The Wheelwright Writes the Wheel
Reading The Eye of the World
The World Tolkien Began to Reveal
A Beginning
The story many fans, critics, and scholars of sff tell about their personal history with the genre often describes reading voraciously across sff in childhood and young adulthood, reading classics and contemporary publications alike, and developing a strong sense of personal taste for certain authors, series, (sub)genres, and story- or character-types. My own story has often left me feeling that my childhood was literarily impoverished when compared to many other sff readers, because most of what I read growing up was Dungeons & Dragons novels, Star Wars novels, Harry Potter, and ElfQuest comics. Outside of these, I wasn’t much of a fiction reader, though I devoured nonfiction (mostly history). Where other twelve-year-olds read Tolkien, deepening their love for Peter Jackson’s films in the early 2000s, I only read The Hobbit because I found The Lord of the Rings quite dull to read and I had little patience for challenging reading. I also generally didn’t read fiction that wasn’t explicitly recommended to me by someone I admired, so my “discovery” of D&D and Star Wars novels were really the result of a friend’s reading habits (he was one of those who read all the sff he could), ElfQuest came from a family friend, and Harry Potter followed the release of the first film (my mom, a teacher, had been reading them all along, but I’d never heard of them until the film came out). It’s no wonder, then, that I never read Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time (1990–2005 by Jordan, 2009–2013 by Brandon Sanderson based on Jordan’s notes) and didn’t learn of it until well into adulthood.
As I’ve grown up and read sff voraciously in the past decade-and-a-half to make up for lost time, Wheel of Time has continued to peek out from the shadows, but I’ve put off reading it for one reason or another. At first it was because most of the fantasy criticism and scholarship I was reading generally warned me off—and when you’re still developing as a scholar and questioning whether you should read 14 doorstop novels, and major names in the field write the series off (more below), what’s the likelihood you’ll spend precious time with Jordan’s tomes? More recently, I was put off by the Amazon Prime adaptation (2021–2025, cancelled after the third season), which was so laughably bad, excepting a few performances (namely Rosamund Pike as Moiraine), that I found myself in no greater rush to get to the books. But as my work on fantasy has continued to develop in the past few years, as my commitment to writing a more rigorous, holistic history of the genre has come into focus, and as my frustration with earlier scholarship and its oversights has grown, Wheel of Time emerged as an obvious gap in my reading. It is one of the most successful fantasy series of all time—ta’veren in the Pattern of fantasy’s history—and after I found the first eight novels at once at one of my favorite used sellers, it seemed the time had come. Time to see what the wheelwright wove and why it matters. Starting at the beginning: Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World.
To hear most critics and scholars of fantasy tell it, though, Jordan’s Wheel of Time might be the worst thing to happen to fantasy fiction after Terry Brooks’s Sword of Shannara trilogy (1977–1985) and David Eddings’s Belgariad (1982–1984). There is a prevailing narrative that reads the history of fantasy fiction in the years after Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings rose to mass market popularity in the mid-1960s as a struggle between good, literary fantasy that didn’t sell well and bestselling, conservative, intellectually lazy, schlocky imitators of Tolkien that sold like gangbusters. Another way to tell the narrative is to pit Tolkien-inspired medievalist, secondary-world fantasy against all the rest, a divide made possible in large part by publishers’ self-conscious marketing of medievalist, secondary-world fantasy using references to Tolkien from the late-1970s onward.
There is, of course, always a grain of truth to a prevailing narrative. There is a strong strain of conservatism in much medievalist fantasy, and especially in Jordan, who described himself as a Christian “libertarian monarchist,” and there is a lot of poorly written medievalist fantasy, and a lot of both conservative and poorly written medievalist fantasy sells well. And a lot does not. And the same can be said of both literary and non-medievalist fantasy (where they don’t overlap), which is not without its conservatism and poor writing and bestsellers. My point here is not to say there is no truth to or nothing critically interesting about the prevailing narrative, but that it is an unnecessarily reductive one that misses the trees for the forest and, in doing so, says nothing very interesting about Jordan’s Wheel of Time (or Brooks’s Shannara or Eddings’s Belgariad). With regard to thinking more deeply about these texts, I’m inspired by Dennis Wilson Wise’s provocation in a recent review essay that, “If reading Tolkien encourages readers to think historically, what about reading Tolkien’s […] imitators, people like Robert Jordan and David Eddings? Does reading The Wheel of Time or The Belgariad help us think historically too?”
To be fair, the prevailing narrative of fantasy’s history—told in only a handful of books, e.g. Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James’s A Short History of Fantasy (2009) and Adam Roberts’s more recent Fantasy: A Short History (2025)—is largely a function of the paucity of fantasy scholarship, which has no more than a handful of key critical texts. Work by Mendlesohn, James, and Roberts (not to mention John Clute and John Grant before them) has had to swim upstream against the lack of good, earlier referents for the history of the genre, and they have had the unenviable task of summarizing decades—in some cases centuries or millennia, depending on where they start—of literary history with very little precedent, drawing on their own reading of hundreds of novels. Their writing, and that of others working to tell the history of fantasy (e.g. one of my favorites, Jamie Williamson’s The Evolution of Modern Fantasy (2015)), has been monumentally important and new work could not proceed easily without the foundations they’ve laid. In many ways, then, the prevailing narrative is an easy target for criticism because it represents an obviously and admittedly simplistic summary, one which is meant to serve as a starting point and a frame for further work. The work falls to later critics—hi!—to nuance and expand the earlier narratives, with gratitude, and also with a sharp eye for the chinks in the armor.
That said, one thing that is clear in the prevailing narratives of fantasy’s history and from the few texts in the field that are understood to be absolutely foundational to any future study. And that is the more literary taste of this scholarship, which often gives greater attention and praise to those authors who have written out of or against the mainstream of genre fantasy, such that the field has tended to overlook (at worst) or shallowly engage with (at best) what is understood as especially popular among readers of fantasy fiction. Of course, there are good reasons to focus on more well-written texts, hidden gems, and works written by authors who are overlooked because of their positionality (e.g. women, authors of color, queer authors, authors who tackle “difficult” topics, and so on). There are equally good reasons to give discrete attention to the most popular texts precisely because their position in the culture and their influence on the genre demand that we understand what they’re about at the deepest level, what cultural and ideological work they’re doing, and why readers gravitate toward them in such large numbers. My own vision of fantasy studies is a field broad enough to sustain engagement with every fantasy novel published—an absolute fantasy itself, given how few of us do this work and the pressures of time and job security, but it’s one I cherish and embrace as the gleefully sisyphean task it is.
Robert Jordan, though, is hardly part of the great unread, since his Wheel of Time novels have been beloved by millions of fans and were recently adapted for television. But as the foregoing suggests, Wheel of Time doesn’t rate very well in fantasy scholarship. Setting aside the desire for a richer, fuller picture of fantasy’s history that motivates my critical project, it’s evident by any relevant measure that Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels were a literary phenomenon. They stood out in the fantasy fiction landscape not only for the length of individual volumes (all longer than 600 pages) and the series as a whole (indeed, Adam Roberts, in his reviews of the novels, suggests bemusedly that the sheer scale of the series accounts for its popularity), but also for their Tolkienian vision of a pre-history mythology for humanity, the depth of the novels’ worldbuilding, and Jordan’s themes of history, prophecy, chosenness, the conflict between the individual and the social, and that perennial favorite: “good” vs. “evil.”
And the novels sold really fucking well. So much so that many critics (and even fans, exasperated in awaiting the end of the narrative) have suggested that the series grew in scope and length from a trilogy to six books to nine to twelve to ultimately fourteen in order to rake in ever bigger piles of cash. It’s a nice story, but one undermined by the fact that while Jordan thought he had a trilogy’s worth of story, his editor and publisher at Tor, Tom Doherty, felt it would likely be longer, and signed a six-book deal for Wheel of Time in the mid-1980s before Jordan had even penned a word (see Livingston, 61–62). Moreover, it seems clear from everything I’ve read about the series itself, and about Jordan’s writing practices, that the series grew organically in the telling, both because of Jordan’s writing style and the increasing complexity of what he wanted to do with the series (it’s worth noting that the problem of a series growing in the telling also plagued George R.R. Martin, and still does, with A Song of Ice and Fire unfinished after nearly three decades). Whether what Jordan wanted to do with the narrative, whether how he wrote “worked” or not, and whether his story was complex in a meaningful or critically interesting way, are entirely different stories.[1]
Wheel of Time thus slots superficially and neatly into a narrative of cash-grabbing, commercialized fantasy fiction that has long characterized the story of the genre’s emergence and development from the 1960s onward. It’s a story that usually points to Del Rey Books and their fantasy line edited by Lester Del Rey as the source of the genre’s woes, a narrative about a publisher poisoning the fantasy genre well with industrial-strength Extruded Fantasy Product. This is a narrative that overlooks the sheer breadth and ecstatic diversity (though not among authors) of fantasy publishing from the 1970s onward and that ignores the epic scale of what was being published and how rich the literary landscape for fantasy was in this period, despite and indeed because of the successes of a few bestsellers (many, yes, from Del Rey; see Dennis Wilson Wise’s data on fantasy bestsellers, 1977–1990). It’s also a narrative that refuses to recognize the value readers and audiences find in fantasy, even when those fantasy novels read to the critics as trashy, uninventive, and poorly written. (I’ve struggled against this impulse myself, and all critics do; see my essay on Knaak’s Fire Drake for an example of how I push myself to work through it; Benjamin Robertson has wonderfully demonstrated how to read and find meaning in what he and Gerry Canavan refer to as “mere genre,” ostensibly the barest form of literary art subsumed wholly to market incentives but vitally important to fans.)
This narrative about fantasy’s history circulates not just in scholarly spaces but among professional critics. One telling instance, ironically, is sff critic and editor David G. Hartwell’s essay for the New York Times, titled “Dollars and Dragons: The Truth about Fantasy” (April 1990), blaming Del Rey for capturing fantasy publishing and taming it into a hypermasculine genre of Tolkien-imitating wish fulfillment (again, grains of truth on a beach of context; a savvy reader almost immediately pointed out Hartwell’s overly determined reading of the genre’s history in an opinion response from June 1990 that emphasizes how variable fantasy storytelling was despite Del Rey’s successes and supposed “formula”). I say ironically because from 1984 on Hartwell was a well-known editor at Tor, which published Jordan’s The Eye of the World just months before in January 1990, launching the Wheel of Time phenomenon and making Tor an ungodly amount of money. And Tor would go on to publish a good deal more lengthy medievalist fantasy novels and series throughout the 1990s (e.g. by Orson Scott Card, Louise Cooper, Dave Farland, Mercedes Lackey, Morgan Llywelyn, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., Andre Norton, Diane L. Paxson, and so many, many more), easily competing with Del Rey and other major fantasy publishers and imprints (e.g. Ace, Avon, Baen, Bantam, Berkeley, DAW, Roc, TSR, etc.). Hartwell’s narrative of fantasy’s history is enduring and regularly crops up in discussions of the genre, for example in The Second Story’s recent video essay “This is Why We Never Got Another Lord of the Rings” (see Wise’s response, though I wouldn’t call Del Rey a hero myself).
My principal concern is not that critics and scholars are “negative” about Wheel of Time—hark and destroy all idols!—but that they have overwhelmingly been dismissive of the series as a whole, usually because of admitted exasperation with what they see as the poor quality of Jordan’s writing, ideas, and iteration on the Tolkienian idiom. There are a few welcome exceptions. James Gifford, for example, in A Modernist Fantasy (2015) spends only a few pages writing about Brooks, Eddings, and Jordan together, mostly in a critical light through the lens of a sophisticated ideology critique, but this is a compelling reading that genuinely engages the text. C. Palmer-Patel’s The Shape of Fantasy (2019) spends a chapter on the second Wheel of Time novel, The Great Hunt (1990), and argues that Jordan’s concepts of the Pattern and the ta’veren challenge readerly and critical assumptions about fixed destiny in heroic narratives. And Stefan Ekman, in the masterful book Here Be Dragons (2013), compares the landscape of Jordan’s Blight and what it says about Shai’tan to similar landscapes and Dark Lord figures in Tolkien and Stephen Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever series (1977–1979); importantly, Ekman demonstrates that careful critical attention to the differences between these instances of Dark Lords and their lands reveal unique interpretations of evil in the work of each author despite employing a shared topos. Joel Christensen and Sarah Bond, Classicists writing about the unfortunate legacy of Joseph Campbell, parse the complexity and ambiguities of Wheel of Time and its inversion of the hero narrative with a single phrase.
It doesn’t matter whether any of these scholars “like” Wheel of Time because they take it seriously as a work of art, as a cultural production, and as a key text in fantasy fiction’s history, tracing the way Jordan engages with fantasy’s tropes, themes, ideas, and earlier texts. Outside of scholarship, in the popular sff criticism space, Tordotcom( now Reactor)’s several in-depth reread series on Wheel of Time (in 2009 and 2015 by Leigh Butler and 2018 by Sylas K. Barrett) demonstrate thorough care in reading the novels, regularly raise critical questions about them, and offer fun, insightful responses to Jordan. The distinction I’ve mapped here between dismissive and engaged critique is crucially important: if millions of people are fans of these novels, they need more attention than a quick aside that passes the novels off as Tolkienian pablum grossly driven by pure commercialism.
Because The Eye of the World and Wheel of Time have such a prominent place in fantasy’s history, and are undoubtedly among the bestselling fantasy novels of all time (per Book Riot, arguably the second or third bestselling series, after The Lord of the Rings and Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire), and because they have received little or shallow attention in contrast to their influence in the literary landscape, this essay will be a long one. I want to demonstrate what deep engagement with a supposedly shallow bestseller could look like, though I won’t be able to say everything; one beauty of literary criticism is that no essay is the last word on any topic. These essays of mine are always intended as a starting point, a spur to furthering thinking and engagement—for me and, I hope, for others. I want to build on what has been said, think critically through and with the novels I read, and begin to tell a deeper, wider history of fantasy. And so, a stopover at one of the major fantasy landmarks.
The Wheelwright Writes the Wheel
When I first write about the work of an author, I try to do due diligence to their relevant background, insofar as I’m able to find information, since who an author was (or is), is relevant to any critical or historical understanding of their work. The goal here is less to discern authorial intent—although that’s always in play, it’s not maximally determinative to a good, convincing reading—and more to have a solid grasp on authorial context. Fortunately, Robert Jordan was much loved by his fans and has inspired a great deal of interest in his life and ideas about his fiction. Michael Livingston, an academic medievalist and fantasy writer, as well as a former collaborator with Jordan’s widow and his estate, has written a useful introduction to Jordan’s life and the creative process behind Wheel of Time, and was a major (if flawed) source for me.
Livingston’s book, Origins of the Wheel of Time (2022), is supremely valuable, but I also get the sense that it’s a bit of an inside job. It never offers a single criticism of the novels and is written with an unprecedented level of access to Jordan’s family and friends. There are multiple instances when Livingston seems to go out of his way to interpret things in the best light possible, to avoid criticism whatsoever (for example, by never addressing Jordan’s libertarianism and how that might have influenced his books, or how Livingston never offers anything but glowing reviews of Jordan’s treatment of gender and sexuality). Then there’s the glaring fact that Livingston’s book was published by Tor and endorsed by Jordan’s widow and former Tor editor, Harriet McDougal. That said, Origins of the Wheel of Time is an important resource that draws deeply from Jordan’s papers at the College of Charleston. It provides a biography (really, a hagiography) of Jordan, including some disturbing details about his time as a two-tour soldier in Vietnam, a look at his writing career prior to Wheel of Time, a detailed study of Jordan’s major influences, and an almost blow-by-blow look at the development of The Eye of the World through dozens of drafts, from sheafs of paper filled with character names mapped to figures from the Arthurian mythos, to scenes that were ultimately cut, to the final novel.
The image of Jordan that emerges from Livingston’s Origins of the Wheel of Time is that of a fastidious, detail-oriented (one might say, detailed-obsessed) writer who had a grand vision to tell the story that could serve as a pre-history of human mythologies, not just one for England, as Tolkien would have it, but for the whole of humanity, plundering liberally from the myths, folk tales, and beliefs systems of cultures the world over (and, often, I would argue—even at this early stage in my familiarity with Jordan—with little interest in the specificity or deeper meaning of the things borrowed; I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this as I continue with the series). Livingston tries to demonstrate Jordan’s synthetic ethos through a reading of Rand’s famous heron-mark sword, and goes on for paragraphs and paragraphs about Western boardswords’ hilts and pommels and Japanese katanas’ curves and the heft of the blade and the blade having a single edge and, frankly, it does not sell the potential depth of Jordan’s worldbuilding as an intellectual project. Livingston’s conclusion that, with this sword, “Jordan has applied philological principles to material culture, something Tolkien never dared in quite the same way” reads as downright silly, trying to sell the sword for more than it’s worth (56). But what is compelling in Livingston’s account of the creation of Wheel of Time is his detailing of Jordan’s three principal inspirations: Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the Matter of Britain as collected and streamlined by Thomas Malory in Le Morte d’Arthur (1485), and, most surprisingly, Robert Graves’s The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948).
Real name James Oliver Rigney, Jordan was a decorated helicopter gunner during the Vietnam war in the late 1960s and worked as a nuclear engineer for the U.S. Navy in the 1970s before turning to writing full time. In an unpublished version of the author bio that typically appeared on his book covers, from c. 1990, Jordan described himself thus:
Robert Jordan was born on 17 October 1948, the Chinese Year of the Rat, in Charleston, South Carolina, where he now lives in a two-hundred year old house. He served two tours in Vietnam, and his decorations include the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Bronze Star with ‘V’ and two Vietnamese Crosses of Gallantry. A graduate of The Citadel (The Military College of South Carolina), he has a degree in Physics, and before resigning to write full-time he was a nuclear engineer for the United States government. In addition to fantasy, he has written historical novels, westerns and international intrigue, and he is also an editorial consultant for Tor Books. His hobbies include hunting, fishing, poker, chess, go and shogi, as well as collecting Oriental and African art. He is a devoted pipe-smoker, and both a Ricardian and a Sherlockian. He is an advocate of Solar Power Satellites, the Strategic Defense Initiative, the industrialization of space, the colonization of the Moon, Mars and beyond, and O’Neill colonies. Politically he considers himself a Libertarian Monarchist. (Livingston 28)
The bio is, to say the least, a lot, portraying Jordan as a Southern everyman almost from a bygone era: a soldier, a former white-collar government worker smart enough to resign, educated at a renowned Dixie military academy, a lover of all the classy manly hobbies, but also a go and shogi player, a collector of “exotic” art, whose intellectual fancies run toward dead, maligned British kings and Victorian detectives, as well as to the most pressing space-age questions on the mind of Reaganites, namely, ideas supported by the Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy (which had as its principal members a cadre of libertarian sff writers). And then the banger ending—“he considers himself a Libertarian Monarchist”—that could be a joke, and there is a degree of self-conscious humor in the bio, but the preceding litany of conservative space policy interests he advocates, paired with comments from Jordan elsewhere, suggests that he was at least conservative. (In any case, I’m very tempted to read Wheel of Time and its vision of rulership in light of this niche-as-hell political term; it mattered enough to him that he included it in his early biography and was likely cut in order to sell Jordan to audiences in the most politically neutral light possible.)
Jordan began working as a writer in 1977 while recovering from a post-accident surgery and its complications. His first novel, Warriors of the Altaii, was offered a contract by DAW Books but the offer was rescinded over disagreements about subsidiary rights (the novel was later bought by Jim Baen for Ace, but after Baen departed, the new editor reverted rights back to Jordan). Still, the novel and more so the offer of a contract, later convinced fellow Charleston local Harriet McDougal—formerly an editor and vice president at Ace, under Tom Doherty, and editor of her own imprint called Popham Press, distributed first by Dell and then Ace—to take a chance on Jordan. McDougal was looking for someone to write historical romance, something set in South Carolina but not about the Civil War. And so Jordan’s first novel, about a South Carolina family during America’s Revolutionary War, became The Fallon Blood, published by Popham in 1980 (distributed by Ace) under the pseudonym Reagan O’Neal. Publication of The Fallon Blood inaugurated several years of incredibly productive writing for Jordan. He published two more Fallon novels (1981, 1982), a Western (Cheyenne Raiders under the pseudonym Jackson O’Reilly) in 1982, and seven official Conan novels between 1982 and 1984—the first novels on which appeared the pseudonym “Robert Jordan,” establishing the name’s reputation in fantasy fiction. The Conan novels were published by Tor, founded in 1980 by Doherty after he left Ace Books, and where McDougal quickly became a senior editor working long-distance. Jordan and McDougal married in 1981 and Doherty became Jordan’s editor. As noted above, Jordan was given a contract for six books sometime in the mid-1980s after Jordan pitched Doherty his then-vague ideas for an original fantasy series that would become Wheel of Time.
Jordan spent the rest of the 1980s developing Wheel of Time, writing the first draft in 1987–1988, and working through at least twenty-three drafts of some chapters to finally produce The Eye of the World, writing the sequels The Great Hunt and The Dragon Reborn in rapid succession, so that the first three novels were published virtually back-to-back in 1990–1991. By 1996, the scope of the series had grown so large that Jordan required a full-time writing and research assistant, Maria Simons, and by 2001 a second assistant was hired, Alan Romanczuk. Jordan died in September 2007 of heart complications from amyloidosis, with Wheel of Time unfinished at eleven novels (2005’s Knife of Dreams being Jordan’s last). But aware of his medical condition, Jordan had worked with Simons and Romanczuk to leave copious notes for a successor, who could finish the series. Brandon Sanderson was selected by McDougal in December 2007 to complete Wheel of Time, and he worked with McDougal and Jordan’s assistants to write books twelve through fourteen, concluding the series in 2013 with A Memory of Light.
The notes left behind in Jordan’s personal papers, as related by Livingston, reveal an author obsessed with the minutiae. Livingston repeats multiple times that Jordan’s personal library ran to more than ten thousand volumes, covering diverse subjects on history, cultures, myths, folk tales, and languages across time and space. Jordan also made list after list of things—whether the names and descriptions of various plants or weapons or architectural terms or names from myth and history—and all of these things became the texture of his world (annoyingly, Jordan never gave the world of Wheel of Time a name, like Middle-earth or Narnia or Faerûn, so fans came to call it, even more annoyingly, Randland). This worked, on the one hand, because Jordan’s vision for Wheel of Time was to tell a story that could be the pre-history of our collective human mythologies.
In other words, in Jordan’s grand vision of the series, the fabric woven by the Wheel of Time was unravelled into individual threads that became the different mythologies and beliefs and practices of our world. Here, Jordan was drawing on Tolkien’s precedent in creating a mythology for England. The difference, of course, is that Tolkien wasn’t a random collector of things but a deliberate and methodical repurposer with an eye to the implications of his repurposings of history and language. By comparison, much of Jordan’s borrowings seem purely textural, they create a sense of a world, their use doesn’t often seem to have the same intellectual depth as Tolkien’s (see, e.g., Richard Littauer’s discussion of Jordan’s Old and New Tongues). But this is something to interrogate as individual cases crop up in the novels, and I don’t want to paint Jordan’s work as simplistic or unintelligent, even as I want to keep a critical eye on what he does in his worldbuilding, why he does it, and whether it (a) means anything beyond a reference and (b) works at a narrative or worldbuilding level. Livingston’s book is therefore a great aid, since he gestures at the known and, when unknown, the likeliest sources behind Jordan’s names, places, ideas, etc.
The last thing to know about Jordan is what, exactly, his vision was for Wheel of Time. What did he want to say with this series? What did he want to do with these novels? And why was fantasy the genre in which to do it? It was clearly something he cared a great deal about, and not just because it made him good money (there was no guarantee of its bestseller status), since he spent half-a-decade developing Wheel of Time and then nearly two decades writing a series that spread to well over ten thousand pages by the end of his life. In some ways, I can’t answer these questions because I’ve only yet read The Eye of the World, and it seems premature to try to give a definitive answer. But, as a critic, I want to know from the beginning myself because, to state the obvious: if an author has a vision and purpose for their work, it’s an absolutely crucial frame for—not a determiner of or limit on—thinking about that work. And thankfully Jordan has said what his vision was.
To hear Jordan tell it, in the late 1970s,
The first idea that came to me, the first thought, was what is it really like to be the savior of mankind? What’s it really like to be tapped on the shoulder and told you are the savior of mankind, and oh by the way, we expect you to go mad and die in order to fulfill prophecy and save everybody. That was the genesis. (interview from 1994, qtd. in Livingston 61)
As numerous fans have glossed it, Wheel of Time is about how much it sucks to be the Chosen One. Jordan might have been doing some retrospective editing of the originary idea (after all, it seems a big jump to go from “what’s it like to be the savior?” to “what’s it like to be told you’re going to go crazy?” and which just happens to be the underlying plot re: the effect of saidin on male users of the Source), but the fundamental notion that the series is about the psychological toll of saving the world, and the humanity of the savior of humankind, is key to his vision. As is another claim he made about good and evil, and their relationship to fantasy fiction, in a later interview:
One of my themes is (and it’s one reason I wrote the books as fantasies) there is good, there is evil, there is right, there is wrong—it does exist. If you do that in a mainstream novel you are accused of being judgmental unless you’ve chosen the right political viewpoint. (interview from 2002, qtd. in Livingston 42)
Both of these explanations of his vision for Wheel of Time are simplistic, but they tell us a lot about Jordan’s worldview. Here, his understanding of good and evil appears to be fundamentally Christian, but what’s most interesting is how he frames fantasy as a space for the presentation of a struggle between good and evil, over and above literary fiction. His comments about discussions of good and evil being “judgmental unless you’ve chosen the right political viewpoint” is perfectly worded to appear neutral, but this framing of “you can’t even say evil anymore in literature!” reads to me as fundamentally conservative and smacks of complaints about political correctness.
Moreover, Jordan claims that fantasy is the literary genre par excellence for dealing with questions of good and evil—a literary space that still accepts the binary conflict between right and wrong, that seemingly doesn’t have to worry about political viewpoints. This is a fascinating frame for Wheel of Time and, unfortunately, reinforces the critiques many levy not just against Wheel of Time but against medievalist epic fantasy of the Tolkienian type generally. There is no doubt some truth to claims about the conservatism of epic fantasy and the ways in which the stark contrast between good and evil—among other of the genre’s topoi—can serve to simplify complex conflicts, offering up a conservative triumph of light over dark, of good against evil, and all the allegorical and cultural-historical allusions those terms entail (see, for example, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s The Dark Fantastic (2019) and Joy Sanchez-Taylor’s Dispelling Fantasies (2025)). But the conservatism that so many write (purposefully or not) and read into the form is worth exploring, as are the ways in which epic fantasy authors contend against conservatism, when and where and how they do.
There will be much more to say about this later, and in response to future books as the conflict between good and evil comes into greater focus, but what I don’t want to do is offer an oversimplified critique of Jordan’s work. Though he may speak of his series’s vision in nice interview-y soundbites like those above, the actual proof of his vision stretches to over eleven thousand pages. There has to be more than just “conservative Tolkien rip off” here, as there often is in texts given that label by critics too quick to dismiss what they’ve only given shallow engagement. And even if Wheel of Time is actually a libertarian monarchist manifesto—Jordan also summarized his series with three words: “Life changes. Deal.” (qtd. in Livingston 29); it’s hard to imagine a better gloss of self-reliance-focused conservatism—about the blandest savior of humanity imaginable, that is also interesting and worth understanding precisely because of the series’s popularity and its impact on so many subsequent writers.
Reading The Eye of the World
My initial concern about reading Wheel of Time was bolstered by the prologue of The Eye of the World, which gives us a scene from the Breaking of the World in which the original Dragon, Lews Therin Telamon, has succumbed to the madness of the newly out-of-whack saidin and killed his family, seemingly at the goading of Ishamael, one of the Forsaken who joined forces with the Dark One. The prologue is all melodrama, Telamon searching madly for the loved ones he has killed, not knowing he is the cause of the devastation around him, and none of it landed for me. It felt thin, trite, and dramatic in a completely unearned way. But the prologue ends with Telamon summoning so much of the Source that he creates the equivalent of a nuclear explosion—if not greater—and from this explosion and the molten rock of the earth rises the Dragonmount.
I take this connection between nuclear catastrophe and Telamon’s unleashed power from Stefan Ekman’s Here Be Dragons, where he argues that the Power and especially the effects of the Dark One’s use of the Power are often described in nuclear terms, as having the cancerous effect of radiation (208–212). To take it further, the novel—and by extension the series—begins with a nuclear explosion, not just that which formed the Dragonmount, but the corrupting influence and violent actions that taint the saidin or male half of the Source: the Breaking of the World. In our world’s terms, as Oppenheimer once reflected about how he felt at the first successful testing of the atomic bomb, he/they/America, had “become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” And if we are to read Jordan in light of the Vietnam War much in the same way Tolkien is read in the shadow of the First World War (and even the Second), then this framing of war and death and destruction, and the start of it all, in the prologue of one of the most influential fantasy series, has everything to do with the unleashing of a new world order in the wake of America’s creation of nuclear weaponry during WWII. Time, after all, is a cycle for Jordan, its ages repeating, and the nuclear hegemony of the US, and the struggle to keep that hegemony in the face of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, a struggle that led directly to the Vietnam War, are no small part of the influence on Jordan’s Weltansicht as expressed in Wheel of Time.
But for all this, I did not find the prologue interesting; if anything, it was a bit silly, bland, and plodding. The madness of Telamon felt played up, unreal; his tempting by Ishameal felt like an even thinner version of Darth Vader’s and later the Emperor’s tempting of Luke Skywalker to join the Dark Side of the Force in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi (at least Lucas’s wooden story earned its emotion by films two and three). But mostly it was too much melodrama at once, with no stakes established, nothing to grab on to or care about. Of course, such a framing is meant to entice, to plant a seed, the roots of which will burrow their way into the narrative of the novel as it spreads before us. So, I bade myself be patient, to let the Wheel weave.
And in short order my concerns about reading The Eye of the World were allayed by the first paragraph of the first chapter, a paragraph that is repeated in the first chapter of each subsequent book in the series:
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning. (1, emphasis in original)
The paragraph is brilliant. It is lofty and philosophically rich; it establishes (but does not explain) a major cosmological principle of the series (the cyclicality of time), while raising questions about how Ages pass and return, and the relationship between them; it gestures to major themes of myth and story, at how these take on new meanings (or lose them) with time, and how time itself is almost a material thing in this world, turned by a Wheel; and most interestingly it suggests the complexity of history, of the goings on that become the basis of memory, legend, myth, the events we use to measure time and our relationship to the world. More importantly, history, as framed in this opening salvo, is not singular; it is not driven by one force alone, it is multiple. The wind rising in the mountains is a beginning, it is one thread in the Pattern. As we learn throughout this novel, there are so many other threads.
It may seem small, but what excited me about this first paragraph is that—for all the grumblings of a simple, obvious, derivative, Tolkienesque chosen-one narrative I had heard about Wheel of Time and come to expect—Jordan suggests from the series’s very beginning that, whatever may come, he is attuned to complexity and multiplicity in his storytelling. The story of Wheel of Time may be that of Rand’s battle against the Dark One, but it is not merely that, and this very subtle shift in the expectations of the destiny-driven, chosen-one topos (which was in Tolkien from the very beginning, too), is an important frame for The Eye of the World. To take this further, I think the novel is driven by a narrative tension between the story of Rand (the special boy, the chosen one, the Dragon Reborn) and everyone and everything else happening in its 782 pages, playing up this tension through point-of-view choices, highly limited narrator knowledge, clashing perspectives and expectations across characters, and more.
Central to this is Jordan’s slow doling out of information to the reader (through protagonists who have to learn about the world alongside us), such that the central drive of the narrative—three boys running from the Dark One, who wants them for some significant, nefarious purpose—is not understood by any of the characters until very late in the novel (and by late, I mean hundreds of pages in). The Eye of the World is no quest for something, it’s a constant flight from danger, the reasons for which are unknown, even to the worldly mentor figures who accompany the boys. In many ways, The Eye of the World is an anti-quest narrative that upends the logic of the quest and whose principle not-questers have absolutely no desire to be not-questing (a positionality that is, I think, fundamentally different to a chosen one refusing the call to adventure). Jordan’s opening paragraph poetically captures so much about his novel, with so few words.
The first paragraph also introduces a natural motif, that of the wind—of change?—that sweeps the world, marking a beginning, and he follows this wind for another paragraph:
Born below the cloud-capped peaks that gave the mountains their name, the wind blew east, out across the Sand Hills, once the shore of a great ocean, before the Breaking of the World. Down it flailed into the Two Rivers, into the tangled forest called the Westwood, and beat at two men walking with a cart and a horse down the rock-strewn track called the Quarry Road. For all that spring should have come a good month since, the wind carried an icy chill as if it would rather bear snow. (1)
Jordan tracks this wind, this beginning, across the relevant lands of the novel’s first section. This movement introduces the main character and his father as anonymous laborers in a medievalized landscape, connects that landscape—and the obscure, quiet backwater of the Two Rivers—to a larger world (introduced on the previous two pages with world and region maps), and ties these lands to the mythic resonances of ages long past. The wind also introduces themes of both nature and climate—and of the normalcy or abnormalcy of both in relation to the conflict between good and evil—that are threaded throughout The Eye of the World and the rest of the series. The wind is an omen, a foretelling, the Wheel reaching out for the next thread in the Pattern and bearing the reminder that things are already in motion when we first meet Rand al’Thor and his father Tam.
The wind bears readers to a cold, lonely road where father and son sheepherders are bringing their homebrewed alcohol to the local inn at the village of Emond’s Field, at the heart of the Two Rivers region, for the upcoming Winternight festival. Immediately we are introduced to the narrative stakes portended by the wind, as Rand sees a black rider, face obscured in the darkness of his hood, his unseen gaze striking fear, and his cloak unmoved by the gusting wind. The black rider is the first touch of the Tolkienian we feel in The Eye of the World and Jordan’s iterations on characters, concepts, and occasional plot beats from The Lord of the Rings is an important—but I think misunderstood or, better, misread—aspect of the novel that I’ll deal with more fully in the next section. Importantly, only Rand sees the black rider; Tam does not, but takes Rand for his word, a far cry from the parents in so many fantasy novels who dismiss their children’s experiences of “unbelievable” or “impossible” things (fantasies within fantasy). As Rand and Tam make their way to Emond’s Field, the experience of the black riders quickly embroils Rand and his two best friends, Perrin and Mat, in events yet to be understood, as they, too, have seen and been stalked by the menacing figures.
Here, in the comfort and safety of Emond’s Field, we are introduced to most of the novel’s principal characters. Among the villagers are Egwene, a young woman who has recently been granted the right by the Women’s Circle to braid her hair, marking her as having transitioned from adolescence to adulthood; she is, in The Eye of the World, Rand’s main love interest and he spends most of the book being overly protective of her while also resenting her desire to be first a village Wisdom (a healer, herbalist, midwife, wisewoman), which would take her out of Emond’s Field, and later an Aes Sedai, one of the novel’s powerful women magic users. Also from the village is Nynaeve, the local Wisdom who is young and highly capable, also gifted like Egwene with the ability to touch the Source, and preternaturally skilled at its use, able to “read the wind” and understand the land better than trained trackers and warriors. Nynaeve is written as quick-tempered, over-bearing, and desperately loyal to the younger Emond’s Fielders. These are the main “little people” of Two Rivers who will form the basis of the party that journeys out of this small, cozy little world of sheepherders and tabac farmers and into danger, forced by circumstances, fate, and the minions of the Dark One. They are joined in their flight from evil by Moiraine, a powerful Aes Sedai and dedicated enemy of Shai’tan, and her Warder or protector, Lan, the last prince of a lost kingdom destroyed at his birth by the forces of the Dark One. Also introduced is Thom Merrilin—a gleeman or traveling troubadour/skomorokh, and former lover of the queen of Andor—who flees with Moiraine, Lan, and the Emond’s Fielders out of concern for the three boys and what the Aes Sedai might do to/with them. And, finally, there’s the traveling peddler, Padan Fain, later revealed to be a Darkfriend (a vowed human servant of the Dark One and his minions), who reappears several times in the novel to minorly inconvenience or frighten Rand, and serves ultimately, after his capture by Moiraine in Fal Dara near the end of the novel, as a useful device for tying together loose narrative threads and revealing the motivations of Ba’alzamon (given the tight POV used in the novel, there’s no other good way to get this information).
Jordan spends nearly 150 pages—or the first 10 chapters out of 53— introducing the Emond’s Fielders, the visitors (Moiraine, Lan, Thom, Padan), the various personages of the village and their minor political squabbles (especially those between the all-men Village Council and the all-women Women’s Circle), and the events on Winternight that turn what would be a celebration of spring’s arrival into a bloody ransacking of the village by the monstrous part-human/part-animal Trollocs, Shadowspawn of the Dark One created to serve as troops in his vast armies, and their commanders, the black riders or Halfmen or Fades or Myrddraal, who earlier stalked Rand and the lads. And, of course, it’s the three lads the monsters are after. The choice to spend so long developing this intense, deeply layered sense of place and home for Rand, who serves as the POV character for most of the book (more later), is a smart one. It’s a far longer segment spent in the “good,” safe, familiar place of, say, the Shire in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and one might suspect that it would drag after awhile, but Jordan here expertly develops a strong sense of comfort in the idyllic world of Emond’s Field, where the biggest problems are Mat’s childish pranks and the obnoxious families and old codgers, like Cenn Buie, who cast doubt on every decision made by the Village Council and the Women’s Circle.
Emond’s field is, as Adam Roberts described it in his reviews of Wheel of Time re-published in the essay collection Sibilant Fricative, “an idealised nostalgic past with all present-day bourgeois creature-comforts”: tea, books, beer, a fully stocked tavern, no capitalism, no poverty, no hunger. And, unlike the Shire, Two Rivers doesn’t appear to reduplicate the social stratification of Victorian/Edwardian England, but rather offers a classless vision of people thriving together in an isolated farming village that has forgotten it belongs to the Kingdom of Andor and has been left alone, not paying taxes or seeing a member of the Queen’s Guard in decades. We might read Emond’s Field as American libertarianism’s wishful dream of self-sufficient farming communities that could preserve the amenities afforded by a complex, networked welfare state and its globalized economy but avoid the ills—war, inequality, political oversight at a more-than-local level—that might be ascribed to the modernity that allowed the development of such states. That Jordan builds this idyllic fantasy world of Emond’s Field within the larger fantasy of The Eye of the World, and that he spends so much time familiarizing that world for his readers, so that the small events of Rand’s life (e.g. Egwene braiding her hair for the first time, a gleeman coming to town) take on major significance for us, too, is a smart move that belies Jordan’s careful attention to the psychological terrain of the storyworld, not just to the facts of the world (which the POV characters learn slowly, with us, as they journey beyond the Two Rivers) but to how that world is experienced, how it becomes real, in a sense, for readers just as it does for its characters.
This technique, all this time spent in Emond’s Field, lends greater contrast to the world beyond; it’s a classic technique of defamiliarization practiced in a great many portal-quest fantasies, as Farah Mendlesohn calls them in Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008). As in many such novels, it can serve as something of an allegory for the transition from youth to adulthood, while also giving authors a good excuse for explaining a complex storyworld by gradually introducing it to readers through the novel’s equally uninitiated characters. Here the technique is played—quite effectively, I think, though there’s obvious disagreement among critics—to interestingly maximalist ends by Jordan, for by the time Rand, Perrin, Mat, Egwene, Nynaeve, Thom, Moiraine, and Lan leave Emond’s Field, we’re halfway through the length of a more typical fantasy novel—but less than twenty percent through The Eye of the World.
The novel and its narrative flow can be divided into three roughly equal sections. The introductory chapters in Emond’s Field make up the first half of the first section of the novel, which we might call the “Flight from Two Rivers,” and which follows the characters as they flee the Trollocs in order to save themselves and ensure that the Trollocs don’t return and kill more people, and as they escape northward, starting a journey to the seat of Aes Sedai power at Tar Valon, where the Dark One cannot touch the boys and where Egwene and Nynaeve can begin Aes Sedai training. In this first section, Moiraine gradually provides historical detail of the world as Rand and the others grapple with the psychological fallout of being pursued by monsters for some unknown reason, because the greatest evil in the world mysteriously wants them—oh, and there’s the dreams where Ba’alzamon taunts them, pushes them to fear the Aes Sedai, and threatens them if they don’t capitulate. It’s all very melodramatic, but not unearned and not shallow; there is strong pathos in this journey, and Rand and his comrades find themselves both completely at a loss, in this wider world, and not sure whether they can fully trust the ones guiding them (Moiraine and Lan).
The second section of the novel could be called the “Narrative Split,” and takes places between pages 297 (midway through chapter 20) and 626 (midway through chapter 41), and follows what happens when the party gets split up during an attack by Trollocs in the haunted, cursed city of Shadar Logoth. One thread of the section follows Rand, Mat, and Thom, as they take a direct route to the metropolis of Caemlyn, hoping to reunite with Moiraine there. But Rand and Mat get separated and most go it on their own when Thom is (ostensibly) killed by a Fade. Many readers complain about Rand and Mat’s chapters in this section, since for nearly 100 pages the two boys travel from village to village, inn to inn, facing various threats from Fades and Darkfriends and cutthroat innkeepers along the way. But I found these chapters, particularly 31–33 fascinating, in large part because the chapters play with the reader’s (and Rand’s) experience of time in pretty inventive ways, with each chapter nested inside of itself and structured by multiple flashbacks that create significant confusion for careful readers, such that fans have argued about and circulated proposed timelines of the events in these chapters online for decades; moreover, Jordan winkingly acknowledges the purposeful confusion here, at the start of chapter 34, as Rand “wondered if his whole sense of time was getting skewed” (513). It is, I would argue, a virtuosic, almost postmodern play with narrative temporality that cued me in to Jordan as a cannier writer than most critics give him credit for. Rand and Mat’s chapters also show, subtly at first and glaringly obvious as time goes on, that Rand is able to wield the One Power—a frightening prospect in a world where men who can do so are “gentled” by the Aes Sedai, since without being cut off from the Source they will go crazy and become dangerous. Another thread in this middle section follows Perrin and Egwene, who are lost in the wilderness and meet up with a mysterious man, Elyas, who can communicate with wolves; here, Perrin learns that he, too, is a wolfbrother, and later they travel briefly with the Tinkers, a nonviolent people loosely inspired by the Roma, before being captured by the Children of the Light (a sort of Inquisition/Knights Templar faction) and mistaken for Darkfriends. These chapters are told from Perrin’s perspective and are a deep breath of fresh air. The third thread of the “Narrative Split” is the thinnest, and follows Nynaeve, who reunites with Moiraine and Lan, and grows to grudgingly respect Moiraine while also lowkey falling in love with Lan (and he with her).
In the third and final section, all three threads are woven back together in Caemlyn, where the characters reunite and are joined by the Ogier Loial. Ogier are a unique creation of Jordan’s and the only non-human species in the novel (discounting evil beings, like Trollocs, Fades, Draghkar, Mordeth, and Masahadar); they are a mix between generic fantasy ideas about dwarves and elves, are long-lived, and are attuned with the natural world in an almost religious way, while also being regarded as great stonemasons who built many human cities in the wake of the Breaking of the World. Loial joins the party as they finally discover—through disparate stories and tales Moiraine is able to piece together, and which were picked up during each group’s travels during the “Narrative Split”—that the Dark One (or, rather, Ba’alzamon masquerading as Shai’tan himself) is making a move on the Eye of the World. At this point, they still do not know why the Dark One wants Rand, Perrin, and Mat, but it is clear that they—along with Egwene and Nynaeve—are ta’veren and that the Wheel is weaving a Great Web, a circumfusion of events to bring about great change in the world. As Loial describes it,
The Wheel of Time weaves the pattern of the Ages, and the threads it uses are lives. It is not fixed, the Pattern, not always. If a man tries to change the direction of his life and the Pattern has room for it, the Wheel just weaves on and takes it in. There is always room for small changes, but sometimes the Pattern simply won’t accept a big change, no matter how hard you try. […] But sometimes the change chooses you, or the Wheel chooses it for you. And sometimes the Wheel bends a life-thread, or several threads, in such a way that all the surrounding threads are forced to swirl around it, and those force other threads, and those still others, and on and on. That first bending to make the Web, that is ta’veren, and there is nothing you can do to change it, not until the Pattern itself changes. The Web—ta’maral’ailen, it’s called—can last for weeks, or for years. It can take in a town, or even the whole Pattern.” (554)
And as Moiraine describes it a little later, reflecting on all the seeming coincidences that have occurred—the Trollocs seeking the boys, Egwene and Nynaeve having great potential as Aes Sedai, Mat speaking in the Old Tongue and choosing out a cursed dagger from Shadar Logoth, Perrin being revealed as a wolfbrother, and more—, “The Pattern is forming a Great Web, what some call the Lace of Ages, and you lads are central to it. I don’t think there is much chance left in your lives, now” (580).
Caught up in this Great Web, the party speeds off to the Eye of the World, hidden in the Blight (the land of the Dark One) by its makers—Aes Sedai during the Breaking of the World—in a magically protected grove cared for by the Green Man, a mythic figure symbolizing the natural world and common to Western Indo-European (especially Celtic) cultures. The Eye of the World, we discover, is a font of untarnished saidin, the male half of the Source, purified and secreted away by the last male Aes Sedai after saidin was tainted by the Dark One. Here, in the last few dozen pages, Rand is finally revealed as the one sought by Ba’alzamon, as the “chosen one,” whatever that may come to mean, and Rand is able to tap the untainted saidin in the Eye of the World to defeat Ba’alzamon. But the defeat, as the novel quickly reminds us, is temporary; the story of Wheel of Time has only begun. Rand is left, in the end, terrified of himself and his ability to wield the One Power, for he knows that it will drive him mad and he fears he will become either a tool or enemy of the Aes Sedai. Moiraine, however, knows him for what he is, and whispers it to herself with the book’s final words: the Dragon Reborn, the fulfillment of a prophecy that Lews Therin Telamon will be reborn, and that he will lead the Last Battle against the Dark One.
Needless to say, in both length and narrative scope, The Eye of the World is epic fantasy. Its narrative is vast, its characters embroiled in prophesied events, and yet, while the stakes are clearly titanic—the stuff of the moral universe itself, of good and evil—, the narrative is rendered in a deeply personal way and Jordan keeps careful track of what it means to Rand and Perrin and Nynaeve, inasmuch as they are our POV characters, to live through these events. It means, then, that for 750 pages Rand has no sense of why his life has changed, why he is being pursued by evil’s minions. He only knows that the worst things imaginable from the stories and legends he has heard all his life, populated with the very monsters who menaced those stories’ heroes, are now happening to him and his dearest friends. Moreover, becoming the chosen one is not a welcome prospect in The Eye of the World. Jordan goes beyond presenting the expected, near-archetypal refusal of the call to adventure, emphasizing that to be the hero—whether a False Dragon or the actual Dragon Reborn—means to go mad, to be tainted by the Dark One, to be a pariah hunted by the nations of the world. It’s a lesson Rand learns from what happens to the False Dragon Logain, captured by the Aes Sedai and displayed as a human-monster before all Caemlyn, a figure so hated and feared for his connection to the saidin that thousands of Andorans flock to the capital for a glimpse at the man-become-monster. So, too, Perrin fears what he is becoming, a wolfbrother. And both of them without choosing. Meanwhile Egwene and Nynaeve, though their prospects seem much peachier as future Aes Sedai, are also given great power and its consequences and a place in this expanding Great Web, without choice. It is a theme central to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, yes, but played to a different tune here and made an explicit part of Jordan’s cosmology.
In spite of its nearly 800 pages, the novel never drags, and to my surprise nothing felt extraneous or unnecessary (perhaps there could have been fewer inns on the road to Caemlyn, but as I explored above, even that swathe of the novel worked extremely well for how Jordan manipulated the temporality of the narrative experience). At the same time, the novel isn’t exactly a breathless adventure hopping from one scene of action to another. It is methodical and reflective, at times, at other times the narrative can take on a gripping unease for dozens of pages at a stretch. Its pace is uneven, but purposefully so, with long stretches of breathtaking action broken by periods of calm and rest, and vice versa. The length affords Jordan the time to unfold a realistic sense of the journey, one that captures both characters’ emotional reactions as well as the physical dangers and quotidian hardships of the multi-factional world they are threatened by, about which the Emond’s Fielders know so very little and must learn as they go. And while it is not exactly beautiful prose, Jordan is clearly an accomplished storyteller. He turns up the occasional finely wrought phrase; he fills the novel with proverbs and sayings that make sense within the world and give depth to the social experience of its communities; and he pays careful attention to the way the world changes from town to town and across the land, from the fashion and the jobs people perform, to the way songs have different local names, lyrics, and meanings. He also has some clunky writing and some undercooked worldbuilding, too, especially with regard to gender (more below).
I’ve spent a great deal of time reflecting on this novel before getting to my critical dives into The Eye of the World, its themes, and its place in fantasy history. Partly, this is because Jordan has written such a big book—and there’s plenty I’ve left out!—that to attend carefully to the novel requires depth and detail. Partly, I’m (over?)reacting to the shallow engagement many critics have given the novel. Its sheer presence in the fantasy fiction landscape demands attention, which has sorely been lacking, and which is oversimplified in much criticism so that a great deal of the nuance that matters in Jordan’s tome is lost. A lot happens in The Eye of the World and deliberately so; it’s not all interesting, no, and it doesn’t all “work” for me as a reader, but I admit to finding myself compelled by the book in ways I could not have imagined. It felt comforting, yes, and familiar, but at the same time Jordan carefully cultivated that sense in order to regularly disrupt it, to upend the expected iterations, and to extend the defamiliarization process of a journey out of the frying pan and into the fire, as it were, across hundreds of pages. Everything about The Eye of the World, to me, bespoke the work of a careful creator.
It’s not always deep or provocative, it’s rarely impressively written at the prose level, and it does have a streak of conservative nostalgia to it (which, rather than being merely written off, should be explored!), in addition to an inability to imagine fundamentally different gender relations following from the world’s supposedly matriarchal power structures resulting from the Breaking of the World, yet still it is a fascinating novel. And because of its landmark status in the history of fantasy and the critical work it’s doing as a fantasy novel intervening in and commenting on the genre’s literary history, The Eye of the World needs greater and more careful attention from fantasy scholars.
The World Tolkien Began to Reveal
Perhaps the most famous quote about Wheel of Time, and the one that has cemented the relationship between Tolkien and Jordan indelibly in the public and critical consciousness, is a phrase that appeared on nearly every volume’s cover from the mid-1990s until a recent mass market paperback redesign c. 2019 shifted the series’ look to a minimal aesthetic: “Jordan has come to dominate the world that [sic.] Tolkien began to reveal.” The blurb was taken from a 1996 New York Times essay, “Flaming Swords and Wizards’ Orbs,” by Edward Rothstein (copy of article here), with “that” unnecessarily added to Rothstein’s original text—an inconsequential typo printed on the cover of millions of books. Prior to Rothstein’s essay, Wheel of Time covers sported first quotes by other sff authors, such as Piers Anthony and Orson Scott Card, whose established names and associations could motivate their readers, and later by smaller, regional, and industry review outlets, such as ALA’s Booklist (a major resource for libraries and booksellers).
Interestingly, not one of these earlier blurbs made a Tolkien comparison and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel went in a different direction entirely, describing The Eye of the World as “a combination of Robin Hood and Stephen King” (the former I don’t get; the latter I can see, as Jordan does have a knack for scenes that have a horror edge to them). But there is no doubt, really, that Jordan’s Wheel of Time was not only written in the medievalist epic fantasy mode of The Lord of the Rings but also directly inspired by it. Even the least savvy reader is likely to notice the great many parallels between Tolkien’s trilogy and The Eye of the World. And, as noted above, Jordan himself claimed The Lord of the Rings alongside Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and Robert Graves’s The White Goddess as one of the principal wells he drew from.
Rothstein’s essay is worth considering beyond the handy quote it gave to Tor’s marketing team. The essay is ostensibly a discussion of Robert Jordan, but he is really a springboard for a wider conversation. Rothstein uses Jordan’s recent rise to NYT bestseller status, with A Crown of Swords (1996), and his having sold five million Wheel of Time novels in just six years, to consider what might be driving the popularity of fantasy novels at the end of the twentieth century (i.e. the “dragons and dollars” Hartwell lamented about in the pages of the same paper six years earlier). Rothstein neatly retells much of the established narrative about fantasy’s history recited earlier in this essay, charting Tolkien as the origin and all others as operating in his shadow. But Rothstein is more expansive than many critics, listing a range of multi-volume series—Brooks’s Shannara, Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant, Eddings’s Belgariad, yes, but also Goodkind’s Sword of Truth, Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar, Joel Rosenberg’s Keepers of the Hidden Way, Orson Scott Card’s Tales of Alvin Maker, and novels by Guy Gavriel Kay and Marion Zimmer Bradley (acknowledgment)—that shows a refreshing familiarity with the genre.
Rothstein provides a reading of fantasy that emphasizes its interest in nation-building projects and restoration of lost knowledge; its quest narratives that focus on forestalling apocalypse; and its staging of a productive tension between technological presents/futures and a nostalgic, enchanted past. At the narratological level, he succinctly argues that “fantasy fiction attempts to show destiny unfolding on a large scale, describing societies from high to low, from king to peasant, from clan leader to serf”; a cognitive mapping, if you will (not that Jameson would concede fantasy’s potential to do such ideological work). All of this, Rothstein suggests, is because fantasy—the modern, mass market genre—is fundamentally a response to the state of postwar modernity: it interprets authors’ own experiences of the post-WWII period, and indeed of the wars that have shaped successive generations (particularly Vietnam), while iterating on Tolkien’s post-WWI text.
Rothstein’s argument is simple, in a neatly Sontagian way, and the conclusion is provocative:
Fantasy fiction takes place at the moment of imminent change, when all might be lost. It is medieval in atmosphere, 19th-century in its concerns, contemporary in its manners. It tells of old things anxiously clutched and new things barely formed. These novels are popular elegies at the edge of a new millennium, mourning for modernity, ersatz scriptures recounting our origins, reminding us again and again of the many Lothloriens long gone, and the many battles yet to come.
He succinctly captures the transtemporal influences on Tolkienian medievalist fantasy while also indexing some of the form’s major anxieties and political expressions, without making the move to claim that fantasy, as a genre, is a conservative political form. The argument here is broad enough to accommodate texts that manipulate fantasy’s forms to different ends, as evidenced by the range of texts he draws on. Of course, I’m often skeptical of broad strokes readings of entire genres—and Rothstein is essentially arguing that Tolkienian medievalist fantasy is fantasy, which may be a good measure of bestselling fantasy but isn’t a good measure of the genre’s actual breadth—but I’m largely sympathetic to this explanation of the readerly appeal of the genre (as narrowly redefined in Rothstein’s formulation). In this short essay, Rothstein attempts to suss out what the genre is symptomatic of in order to understand why the genre has staying power; importantly, he doesn’t proffer the reductive answer that fantasy is simply the genre of conservative nostalgia but instead anticipates more recent understandings of the political power and ideological work of (re)enchantment, framing fantasy (of this kind) as a set of topoi for critically engaging history and modernity simultaneously.
Rothstein’s central example of Jordan and his relationship to Tolkien, and their literary differences, is instructive. For Rothstein, Jordan is almost an American Tolkien—an idea that Livingston endorses. The search for American Tolkiens, a favorite for generating web traffic, has also turned up names like George R.R. Martin and Stephen King. What the search reveals is both the centrality of Tolkien to fantasy’s understanding of itself—or, more often, the culture-at-large’s understanding of fantasy—and the sense that there is a single author who best exemplifies, through their genre work, the “American experience,” who explains best through fantasy what it means to be American. For Rothstein, the Americanness of Jordan has something to do with his focus on detail and on his workmanlike prose (an ideologically laden explanation, no doubt!). Jordan is an author who gets things done. Jordan’s writing, to Rothstein,
is all dispatch; the narrative drive stops only to engage in minute description of a street, a battle, the feel of wielding the Power. There is a practical quality to these books—their job is to tell a story—and if sometimes the wheels of destiny turn a bit too noisily, and pasteboard romances become too overbearing, the pages still keep turning.
Of course, this has been noted by critics before, perhaps most boisterously by Roberts in the essays on Wheel of Time collected in Sibilant Fricative, but Rothstein does not let the dispatchiness of Jordan’s writing color over his assessment of Jordan’s project. Indeed, he admits “Even a reader with literary pretensions can be swept up in Mr. Jordan’s narrative of magic, prophecy and battle” (Roberts would disagree). Moving beyond comparisons between Jordan and Tolkien at the craft level, Rothstein shows that the authors share a similar vision shaped by their experiences of war, and it is here where Jordan might be understood to be a successor to Tolkien:
The books’ battle scenes have the breathless urgency of firsthand experience, and the ambiguities in these novels—the evil laced into the forces of good, the dangers latent in any promised salvation, the sense of the unavoidable onslaught of unpredictable events—bear the marks of American national experience during the last three decades, just as the experience of the First World War and its aftermath gave its imprint to Tolkien’s work.
This is an absolutely crucial observation and one, surprisingly, missed by most fantasy critics who see only the similarities (the character types, the narrative resonances, the medievalist fantasy world) and the differences (the depth of characters, the quality of the prose) with Tolkien, but not the work Jordan does himself. Moreover, Rothstein highlights the ambiguities of Jordan’s narrative, an aspect of The Eye of the World which struck me rather intensely, since my critical reading had suggested I would find only moral simplicity and a typical quest narrative filling its nearly eight-hundred pages. Quite the opposite! Whatever the rest of the series does, as I’ve shown in the reading of the novel above, The Eye of the World is anything but a simplistic, “mere” imitation of Tolkien, even if it also isn’t a work of literary genius.
Important to my interest in fantasy as a field of literary practices and institutions shaped by the full range of actually existing texts, is that Rothstein frames Tolkien both as an individual artist—a singular producer with a unique vision and background—but also as synecdoche for a whole genre. In doing so, Rothstein opens up a path for talking about Jordan not as a hack imitator of a particular artist but instead as an iterator on a set of topoi that Tolkien, followed by a catalog of later authors, helped concretize in the popular imagination as what fantasy “is” (or, to be more precise, what medievalist epic fantasy is, which is virtually the same thing as “fantasy” to general readers). That’s a subtle but important shift that allows us to see Jordan as an author writing within a tradition, rather than a mimic simply imitating what someone else did better. Of course, this doesn’t foreclose criticism of Jordan as a writer, or criticism of any medievalist epic fantasy writer and their interpretations of Tolkien, but it frees us to shift our focus to the particular work of those writers, to what they do with the tools of the (sub)genre they work in, to how they play in “the world Tolkien began to reveal.” Put another way, I find Rothstein’s essay a welcome reminder—a drum I’ve been beating for ten thousand words now—to actually read Jordan for Jordan, as much as we read Jordan against Tolkien or Thomas Mallory or Robert Graves or medievalist epic fantasy generally.
In thinking about reading Jordan against Tolkien, and how to approach doing so in a way that doesn’t dismiss Jordan or reduce The Eye of the World to mere imitation, I find Matthew Sangster’s discussion in An Introduction to Fantasy on the “value of iteration” and its crucial place in fantasy’s history to be extremely valuable, especially when paired with Brian Attebery’s careful attention in Fantasy: How It Works to the role of intertextual reading for enlivening and deepening our engagement with fantasy texts (80–94).
In his tome of an introduction, Sangster spends a 64-page chapter discussing iteration, its role in fantasy, and its importance to the genre’s narrative function and to the social world of its readers. He begins with an anecdote told by Christopher Tolkien about Hugo Dyson’s reaction to a reading of his fellow Inkling’s draft of The Lord of the Ring, during which a despairing Dyson ostensibly declaimed, “Oh God, not another fucking elf!” (97). Sangster notes that, to readers who share Dyson’s distaste for fantasy, the genre “appears to do the same thing over and over again, endlessly proliferating, rather than striking out in bold and original directions” (97). Sangster refers to iteration and its purposeful manipulation in fantasy fiction as “networked propagation” that emphasizes the interrelated nature of genre fiction writing and pushes back against the “kind of selective rhetoric [that] posits great writers as peculiar one-offs” (100). For Sangster,
While Fantasy is certainly a field that can comfortably accommodate eccentricity, its base assumptions are predicated on a different view of cultural and aesthetic production, one that I would contend is more accurate, more democratic[,] and—at least potentially—more inclusive. Rather than denying relations of lineage and influence, fantasies often joyfully acknowledge such connections, building iteratively on existing tropes and systems, reaching new positions through incremental processes of variation and modification. This is an element of Fantasy creativity that is often demeaned or undervalued. However […] it is fundamental to many of the most powerful effects that fantastic forms achieve. (100–101)
Indeed, where Mendlesohn and James point to Diana Wynne Jones’s satirical The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (1996) in order to demonstrate how, for them, medievalist epic fantasy—and especially Jordan—was by the 1990s imitative dreck smartly shown up by Jones’s satire, Sangster counters that,
while there are numerous works that include some—or even most—of the predictable elements Jones sets out [in her anatomy of fantasy], there are very few that employ tropes as unthinkingly or exactingly as her satire implies. Like composers of classical music, fantasy creators enjoy elaborating on themes, but in doing so, they can produce near infinite variety. […] Works of Fantasy deliberately take advantage of their audiences’ knowledge to sketch quickly using a shared symbolic language. However, the same works will often innovate in other areas by taking something familiar and making it new and strange, changing inflections, modifying contexts[,] or questioning underlying assumptions. (102–103)
To summarize Sangster’s points: “Fantasy’s creative possibilities thus inhere in processes that interweave adherence to and divergence from established patterns” (103).
Of course, iteration is a fundamental part of how genres operate and is by no means unique to fantasy. My final quotation from Sangster—hell, any of them—could substitute “science fiction” or “romance” or “mystery” for “fantasy,” and the meaning would still obtain. Sangster has, in essence, outlined the function of genres, whose constituent texts exist in a tension between established patterns, tropes, topoi, on the one hand, and innovations on those parameters, on the other. New (sub)genres emerge when authors begin to diverge greatly from established patterns and those divergences become patterns themselves, which are reified by other authors and accepted by the social world of the genre (publisher, magazines, reviewers, and, most importantly, readers).
But this fundamental function of genre is often ignored by critics who, for one reason or another, have a difficult time reading past a text’s iterative aspects, or reading for what readers might find valuable in the way an author iterates—not only what they riff on, but what they don’t, and how they do it (or not). To extend Sangster’s metaphor from the world of classical music, The Eye of the World is certainly in the medievalist epic fantasy style—just as both Shostakovich and Chopin wrote waltzes, Mozart and Wagner operas—and certainly echoes a number of elements (“established patterns”) from Tolkien, as do a great many fantasy novels after 1965, but the tone, mood, tempo, key, dynamics, articulation, ornaments, and instrument choices are all different. Whether it’s a good piece of music is still a critical question worth asking, but the piece of music still has to be taken for the thing itself for any useful criticism to start.
One of the common responses to The Eye of the World—less so the following novels, since it is this first one that engages Tolkien’s trilogy so intimately—is to list all the ways Jordan’s novel draws from Tolkien. I’ve suggested some of the obvious connections above, while also pointing out how even those comparisons (e.g. Two Rivers as the Shire, Moiraine as Gandalf, Padan Fain as Gollum) rarely account for how different these similar things are from one another. Wheel of Time fan communities have long noticed, debated, and, as Sangster would put it, found joy in drawing out these comparisons. There are dozens of webpages about this, but a particularly thorough one can be found at The Thirteenth Depository, a Wheel of Time blog.
In a different context, Dennis Wilson Wise has raised the spectre of Tolkien to ask how, in the wake of Tolkien’s popularity, an early Del Rey fantasy novel (Simak’s The Fellowship of the Talisman (1978)) inhabited the Tolkien milieu. Here he offers a list of 23 tropes revolving around character types, world-building, and plot elements, comparing what Tolkien does to whether or not Simak iterates on each of those tropes, and he gives The Fellowship of the Talisman a rating of 13 out of 23. This is a fun, cheeky little experiment in literary comparison, and one that is explicitly interested in the level of similarity to Tolkien at a time when fantasy was quite literally getting its genre name branded on novel spines for the first time, when fantasy was finally legible as a market category. At the same time, there’s no easy way to classify Tolkienian tropes, and no clear indication whether a really fine-grained classification of tropes or a really broad-strokes one is more efficient for the purposes of comparison; moreover, in comparing this way, the particularities of iteration get erased in lieu of a yes/no binary that elides valuable information about the function of the iteration in context. For Wise, Simak’s novel constitutes a rip off, a term that indexes both the number of tropes iterated (56%; I’m not sure at what percent something isn’t a rip off) but also, and I think more so in Wise’s estimation (without putting words in his mouth!), the literary quality (and lack thereof) of the novel (a point I’m certainly sympathetic to). I have to wonder if a novel that was, for Wise, better written and executed would be less likely to get the label of rip off, whatever the “Tolkien score.” To be up front, I think most of us, myself included, would be tempted to overlook even a score of 23/23 for a novel that was, in all other respects, a true work of art.
My reading of The Eye of the World suggests that while Jordan would certainly receive a high “Tolkien score,” this wouldn’t say much about The Eye of the World‘s use of Tolkienian elements. As Gifford notes in A Modernist Fantasy, one of the functions of reductive readings of iteration, which tend to crop up in the Marxist-historicist tradition of Suvin and Jameson, is to “naturalize” the process of intertextuality, so that iterations of earlier texts and their forms end up being read by critics as normalizing the politics (or, we might say, meanings) of the forms iterated. This process allows little variability for political (or other) readings between texts within a genre and across a genre’s history, since by this measure given forms have given politics. As Gifford notes, “the normalization of this interpretive paradigm makes it extraordinarily difficult to squint around or outside the interpretive scheme [of the Marxist historicist paradigm] to recognize works, histories, or emphases in texts that do not fit” (37). Gifford is specifically talking about the inability of Marxist critics working in the Suvinian/Jamesonian tradition to read what might be politically interesting about fantasy, especially since it reads fantasy only in relation to (a highly, if not disturbingly, delimited understanding of) science fiction. My point isn’t that The Eye of the World is politically radical, by any means, but that critics who see in it only imitation of Tolkien are doing similar work by naturalizing the meaning of particular “established patterns” and, in essence, failing to see how iteration actually works in a given novel.
As noted in the introduction to this essay, a few valuable critical works on Wheel of Time have addressed elements of Jordan’s novels that are bound up with Tolkienian medievalist fantasy and which see value in Jordan’s iterations, whether on the figure of the Dark Lord or the nature of chosenness. I have suggested above, too, that what is interesting about The Eye of the World is both its familiarity, in the Tolkienian sense, but also the way Jordan’s uses of Tolkien diverge. In fact, to look only for the Tolkienian in The Eye of the World is to miss what else the novel is doing, not only what is unique to Jordan’s vision and storyworld (explored more below), but also how he engages with other intertexts. As Livingston goes to great lengths to show, there is an equally rich, if not richer, intertextual relationship between The Eye of the World and Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, which is largely ignored or overlooked in the critical literature (and perhaps concerningly so, since the storyworld’s historical Arthur figure, Artur Hawkwing, pursued a global, nationalist project to subjugate the world and bring “civilization” to its furthest reaches under the auspices of his Empire—an ideological project worth unpacking in comparison to the use of the Arthur myth in British nation-making projects from the medieval period to today).
In this section, I’ve tried to sketch the stakes of the critical gestures that position Tolkien and Jordan in conversation with one another, and which tend to read the latter as purely/merely imitative of the former. At stake is not whether the two are intertextual, but what critics do with that fact. Looking at Rothstein’s early essay in The New York Times and at important interventions by Sangster, Attebery, and Gifford that think about iteration and intertextuality in fantasy—and how we can think about this fundamental function of genre more expansively—I’ve hopefully made clear that while Jordan is certainly in conversation with Tolkien, the question of how and why and what he does with Tolkien is far more interesting. Tracing that intertextuality thoroughly would take a book, and I’ve suggested a few ways to do so already in my reading above, focusing on the opening of The Eye of the World (which comes under the most critical fire). Frankly, I don’t find it personally very interesting to do that work at a more granular level, but I felt it important to address the topic and put the common reaction of “Tolkien rip off” under the critical spotlight, to dissect the motivations (and ideologies) behind such claims, and to provide some tools for others who want to tackle this issue. To be fair, though, this is part of a broader problem in most critical writing about fantasy, popular or scholarly, where the similarities between texts tend to get read so as to obscure their differences—that is, what makes the iteration interesting—especially when the texts in question are very popular.
A Beginning
As I’ve tried to show in the preceding too-many-words, The Eye of the World often gets overshadowed by both what it represents—a kind of Tolkienian medievalist fantasy that, for some, is the manifestation of all that is wrong with fantasy—and its own popularity, being the first in a series of novels that spanned 23 years and 14 novels, lived beyond the death of its creator, sold millions of copies, and became an Amazon Original TV series. The first novel of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time is by no means a masterwork, but it is interesting and Jordan is iterating on the medievalist epic fantasy tradition in unique ways. No doubt, part of the novels’ success is that they riff on the Tolkien stuff quite well, but they aren’t bound to that influence alone; they draw liberally and sometimes crazily from a huge range of sources to create a palimpsestic text. Within that frame, The Eye of the World simultaneously courts simplicity—say, in its vision of evil or in the gender dynamics—and embraces complexity—say, by framing chosenness as the worst outcome of the story or by rejecting the logic of the quest narrative. While The Eye of the World and Wheel of Time more generally have been overlooked or written off by most critics of fantasy, the novel raises plenty of interesting critical questions for fantasy studies and, I think, Jordan’s text is capacious enough to sustain deep critical engagement.
Perhaps the most obvious concern to address is that of gender, since gender is front and center in the worldbuilding of Wheel of Time, is in fact central to the plot and to the problematization of chosenness—and of power—in ways that most medievalist epic fantasies about a chosen special boy completely ignore. Beyond that, the very idea that magic is gendered should be of interest, since Jordan’s conception of gender is at least interesting and at worst quite problematic. After all, the Source is explicitly gendered so that only men can touch saidin and only women saidar; given the negative effects of men using saidin (a whole discussion unto itself that reflects a Gravesian ideology of corrupted masculinity displacing originary female power and therefore disrupting any potential for gender harmony), this means that the series’s magic users are largely women. This apparently has knock-on effects throughout the series’s world, since many nations are ruled by hereditary queens and local villages by Women’s Circles. At the same time, Jordan’s vision of gender is partly (and perhaps accidentally?) reactionary, in that the Aes Sedai are framed as terrifying witches feared by just about everyone and held as nearly morally equivalent to Dark Friends. One could read this as, say, a feminist account of people fearing women’s power, but this world has existed with women holding power both magically and governmentally for thousands of years, and living in apparent gender harmony prior to the Breaking of the World. Moreover, at the day-to-day level of characters’ lives, gender dynamics are not at all different from what they might be in a patriarchal world; matriarchy, in other words, doesn’t seem to affect the social world in a way that makes it different to ours. Rand’s relationship with the women in his life looks like that of every other chosen special boy of any other series that lacks Jordan’s awareness of gender as a constituent factor in social life. And this is just the surface of how gender seems to be operating in The Eye of the World let alone the series as a whole. It’s a tangled mess that inherits and expresses a range of ideas about gender, history, society, and power, and does so idiosyncratically and strangely.
Another obvious and major issue in The Eye of the World are the natures of good and evil. I’m particularly interested in the representation of evil in this novel, which reads as simplistic—evil is what corrupts, corrodes, and demeans—but which raises questions about how evil operates and what it means to serve the Dark One. The narrative of Padan Fain is particularly illustrative of the way the text treats evil and is also a strong intertext with Tolkien. Fain’s evil is so all-encompassing, his soul so twisted by his commitment to and fear of the Dark One, that even the Black Wind (Machin Shin) of the Ways is corrupted by its interaction with him. There is no sense (at least in The Eye of the World) that Fain is redeemable; indeed, there is no suggestion that service to the Dark One can be redeemed and many of his servants we encounter in the first novel are either caricatures of evil types (Howal Gode) or pure monsters (Myrddraal and Trollocs). Fain, as noted, is often compared to The Lord of the Rings’s Gollum, but Tolkien, in his Catholicness, is deeply sympathetic to Gollum and his “fall” and he offers redemption even if Gollum in the end cannot overcome his desire for the Ring, leading to his death (and the destruction of the Ring). Tolkien’s vision of good and evil, then, is at once stark—there is identifiable good and evil, and they are at war—and complex. Jordan has (seemingly) none of that complexity about evil in The Eye of the World, but a great deal of complexity about what it means to be good (or not-evil, at least). This is, I think, often overlooked by critics (though Rothstein notes the ambiguities written into the narrative). Writing this off obscures both why Jordan might present evil in such a way and how he presents the nature of goodness. Even in the seemingly simple, there is something worth poking at. Moreover, as both Ebony Elizabeth Tomas and Joy Sanchez-Taylor have noted, visions of the “Dark Other” are more often than not coded or at least intertextual with understandings of race, deviance, and wrongness that become especially problematic when coded as “evil,” and I think Jordan’s text is certainly working in that vein and the operation of otherness and evil in Wheel of Time deserve greater consideration.
Beyond these obviously but largely overlooked areas of inquiry, critics could deal productively with a range of other issues and ideas raised in The Eye of the World, such as the role of maximalism, detail, and scale at a narratological level (here and in doorstop novels generally); Jordan’s obvious political inclinations as a self-described “libertarian monarchist” (what does this mean for his vision of heroism, government, and leadership?); the idea of the Wheel and destiny and whether the Wheel has consciousness since it “wills” things; the nature of story and prophecy and knowledge (i.e. “speculative epistemologies” and “truth effect,” per John Rieder, in this novel and fantasy generally); cyclicality and temporality; ecology (per the Ogier); the violence and nonviolence (per the Tinkers or the Children of the Light); Jordan’s appropriations of cultures and folklores in his worldbuilding; and I’m sure a great many other ideas that didn’t come to me on this first reading. Needless to say, a careful reading of Jordan against his major intertexts would tell us a great deal about Jordan’s novels, Tolkien’s novels and his legacy in fantasy, and the reception of Arthuriana in fantasy.
The Eye of the World was a phenomenon for a reason. It’s our duty as critics and as cultural historians to understand why. But it wasn’t just a fantasy bestseller that came and went in a flash. It sustained interest for over two decades in literary form and has revived interest through continued and newfound fandom with a television adaptation. Something about it calls out to readers. There are pleasures here worth taking stock of and plenty worth critiquing. A few insightful scholars and critics have given us some starting points in the midst of a larger narrative about fantasy’s history that casts The Eye of the World as everything wrong with the genre and which therefore suggests that it is largely to be overlooked. As I hope I’ve shown, there’s a lot here worth engaging and Jordan is far from the worst thing to happen to fantasy. While I can’t say I loved the novel, as a major text in the history of fantasy and a flashpoint in critics’, fans’, and publishers’ responses to how the genre had changed by the early 1990s, The Eye of the World is a critically exciting work that promises a series worth considering. Whether I’ll finish Wheel of Time and have the time and energy to track down all the critical leads Jordan touches off in The Eye of the World is another question.
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Footnotes
[1] To be clear, the length of fantasy series and the predilection in the post-Tolkien world for trilogies, pentalogies, cycles, etc. can and should be brought into the critical conversation, but I don’t think the literary form of the trilogy/series can be so easily dismissed as purely commercial. The same can and should be said of the length of fantasy novels themselves, that is, of the “doorstop” form or what literary studies more generally calls the “mega-novel.” I think there’s a huge amount of room for interesting criticism to be written about the “scale” of fantasy writing—at the level of worldbuilding, of narrative scope, of the books themselves, of the series, of literary shared-world universes, such as D&D’s Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms novels, and more. But little of that work has been done so far and I haven’t yet read anything usefully interesting about scale, narrative form, and the fantasy series/trilogy (to my excitement, Matthew Oliver has a book on the topic, Reading Length in Fantasy Fiction, due out in March 2026). It’s something I’ll continue to think about as I work on my own projects, which inevitably confront scale as a critical problem of fantasy fiction.
To point to one notable commentary on size/scale in fantasy, in their A Short History of Fantasy (2009), Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James argue that the period between the 1970s and the 1990s saw enormous growth in the size of individual novels: “if one stacks fantasy books by date order, up to 1977 they were relatively slim at 250 pages. After that, they expand to 500. In the 1980s, the medievalist fantasies ballooned, often reaching 1,000 pages” (143–144). What they are claiming is not strictly true; a great number of novels published in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, for example, are over 250 pages—as are all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Moreover, fantasy novels running to 500 pages were uncommon in both the late 1970s and the 1980s, barring a few major outliers, and I can think of only a handful of books before the 1990s that ran to 1,000 pages. The claims are hyperbolic, to say the least, but the sense of fantasy novels expanding—particularly secondary world medievalist fantasy—holds. Mendlesohn and James go a bit further and state that they have been told by numerous editors (at what publishers, is unclear) that they encourage longer novels because that allows the publisher to (1) write author names horizontally on the spine and (2) take up more shelf space to outcompete other publishers. While I can see an editor saying these things, they sound more like wishful thinking or at least a back-of-the-envelope explanation and shop talk than an actual practical consideration by editorial, marketing, or production teams. For one, a horizontal name doesn’t really sell a book if readers don’t already know they want to buy books by that author. For two, books still cost money to print, so a longer book means either a higher cover price than shorter books, a larger print run to reduce per-page printing costs, or a cover price similar to shorter books and a lower margin on sales; publishers don’t want to sacrifice purchases for a higher cover price because a book is longer, and they will only do a larger print run to reduce printing costs if they assume the book will sell well. So I’m not convinced that editors thought “longer books = better sales.” And for three, publishers release dozens of books a year; by pushing books off of shelves, they risk pushing out their own books. Given recent revelations about the changing nature of marketing and the increasing prominence of blockbuster sales drivers at the Big Five publishers, I can see this latter point being a contemporary rationalization for publishing big books, but I’m not sure it maps to the 1970s–1990s.
Sean Guynes 
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