Origins of The Wheel of Time: The Legends and Mythologies that Inspired Robert Jordan

One day, not long after I penned the letter at the start of this book and began working through this project in earnest, a wind arose around the White Tower of The Citadel, stirring palm trees and easing along the sidewalks where a young Jordan once strode. It carried in through my open window and down upon that same beloved copy of Eye, which lay open on the desk that was his. The pages stirred and fluttered before I pressed them back down. A wind. Only a wind. But a reminder, too: Jordan gave the world the great gift of his imagination, and to open The Wheel of Time is to know him. He lives there still. Thank you, Jim.

Randland. Though not used within the books, this is the term used to refer to the fullness of Jordan’s world in The Wheel of Time. It is our Earth in a different age: the result of a different shifting of tectonic plates along with the cataclysmic Breaking of the World. Something of our geography is nevertheless written into the rocks of Randland. We conventionally describe Earth as having seven continents—Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America—but in terms of contiguous lands there are four continental landmasses: Afro-Eurasia (Africa, Asia, and Europe), the Americas (North and South America), Antarctica, and Australia. Jordan’s world is based on this concept. Most readily apparent is his “Antarctica” (under the Southern Ice Cap) and his “Australia” (the Mad Lands). North and South America is the continental landmass containing Seanchan. The continent from which the Seanchan colonists came—and the one upon which most of the series’ action takes place—must thereby contain the broken remnants of our Africa, Asia, and Europe. In Jordan’s world, this continent is split in two by the horizontally running Mountains of Dhoom, above which is the Great Blight. Below this line of peaks are three general regions from west to east: the Westlands, the Aiel Waste, and Shara. How these map to the Earth is perhaps predictably imprecise. A direct reading might connect the fertile Westlands to the west coast of subSaharan Africa, the desolate Aiel Waste with the Sahara, and Shara with China and Southeast Asia. Everything north of this—Europe and the former Soviet Union—would be within the Great Blight. The Isles of the Sea Folk between this continent and the Mad Lands would be an echo of the islands of Indonesia, Malaysia, and other countries. In its historical contexts, however, the Westlands are far more connected to Europe: it is here that Artur Hawkwing arises (an analogue to King Arthur), and from here that the colonists were sent to Seanchan (an analogue to the Americas). In this view, the Mediterranean appears to have been erased, with parts of northern Africa having been shoved upward to be east of Europe beyond the mountain range called the Spine of the World. And we have, among Jordan’s papers, notes that the Sea Folk were based on Polynesians and the Māori.