Mitchell Loughlin’s Reviews > Origins of The Wheel of Time: The Legends and Mythologies that Inspired Robert Jordan > Status Update

Jordan’s writing process began as summarizing what he believed the sequence would be and interjecting with comments and questions that he would fill out later. Once he had a general outline he will fill it out with prose. This often left hints to his original ideas and changes such as Taim and Damondred originally being one person
We are now in the glossary so I will likely be skimming through the end of the book

Matrim Cauthon named for cotton Matthew an advocate of witches being burned in the Salem witch trail highlights his fear of aes sadai. Math was a general in king authors days known for his luck

Sa’angreal comes from the Bible as a note on the whole grail

Sha’tain the dark one is satan

This list goes on and on for every character was very intentionally named

Rand al’Thor - king author

Nyneve was named for women in the white godess who tricked a women named moraine into a cave stuck between life and death for eternity. The tower moraine was trapped in plus her role in the final scene, a cave

Padan fain - fain = to fake

Thom Merillan hints at Merlin the wizard and Thomas Doritaty owner of Tor

This book is incredibly cool. There are so many intentional choices that flew right over my head.

Names have never really been important to me when reading but to Jordan they were everything. He labored and tweaked names endlessly in his opening drafts hinting at characters arcs rooted in history and mythology.

I’ll note a couple examples in the next summary

Jordan was inspired by three major works. The white godess which examined the lore of story’s and there interconnectedness, the tales of king author which consolidated his many story’s into one and LOTR which gave him permission make his own story using these ideas.

Jordan uses a broken ying yang as the symbol for aes Sadai to symbolize the error in exclusion and distilling identities down to one trait

Jordan’s assistant shed light on his perspective from Vietnam in that when you kill it breaks the barrier you have of us vs them. You have to push past it but it leaves a TAINT on u. Interesting to consider the dark ones taint in that light

Tolkien built an alternative history for England’s from the ground up while WOT built a weave of world history that would become the past and future. He wanted it to read as both fantasy and science fiction.

Robert Jordan’s death, a beautiful and tear merino g tribute from Harriet and the story of how Brandon took over the reigns.

The book starts by highlighting the early life of Robert and Harriet. Robert grew up Poor but way ahead of his peers due to his love of reading. He served in Vietnam where he was awarded the monicer “The Iceman” aka death

Meanwhile Harriet grew up wealthy and quickly became friends with tom doritey as an editor

They connected in S.C. And she became his editor

Early years the writing pace was too much for him