Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

Ye means "I." He is "sin," she is "sar," you is "asa," and it is "aso."

One of the difficulties is context and flexibility: for example, al can mean "the" or "of the." The word cuebiyar can mean simply "heart," or "my heart," or when capitalized, "the heart" as in the heart of a people or nation. The word moridin means "grave" or "tomb," but when capitalized it means "the grave," standing for "death." It is intended to be a language of subtlety, where the meanings of words can change to a great extent according to context. Remember Moiraine's comments on the difficulty of translation.

The Fourth Age titles are not Old Tongue, though influenced by it. Some common names are from the Old Tongue, and some aren't. Sorry I can't go into more detail, but we're talking a treatise.

Well. I am going to have to cut this off, now. Thanks for writing. Keep me posted on your deductions. One of these days, maybe I'll have time to give congratulations on the hits and point out the misses. One clue to some: sometimes when words are combined and the end of the first word is the same as the beginning of the second, they overlap.

With best wishes, I am,

Etc, etc.

The question that I have for you is, now that you know the ending of Wheel of Time, after the final book has been released will it be a world that you could set a game in? Or will it be like Tolkien where after the end of Lord of the Rings the world is pretty much over? I ask because it looks to be a great place to set an RPG and I want to know if I should be looking to a time before The Eye of the World or if I should run a new age?

I'm going to stick pretty close to things Mr. Jordan has said or implied regarding this. Things he has said have implied strongly that it is not going to be like Tolkien; though the Wheel will eventually turn to a point where the One Power is forgotten and the land becomes like our world, that is NOT the Fourth Age. I think it would still be a fantastic place to set an RPG game.

I will do a blog post soon about this and similar questions. However, I can't answer much because I don't know much.

Brandon Sanderson

He did not explain much about the epilogue, even in the notes.

It was not, but I agree with how it is. Those sorts of endings—like in Harry Potter—don't work for me as well.

Brandon Sanderson

However, Harriet has promised to release what we know of RJ's planned sequel trilogy to give you more info.

Hey! [laughter]

Hey!

Stefan

I'm Stefan from American Fork, locally, and I had a really good question, but I looked it up on the internet before I came, and it was answered both on Dragonmount and Theoryland. [laughter] And so I had to come up with something else.

So, we have seen the hierarchies explained in a lot of the different orders in Randland, like—you know, the Wise Ones, it's kind of force of will, right? Like, Aes Sedai, they kinda defer based on the strength of Power, that kind of thing. Have we seen that in the Black Tower, and is that what's going on with how the men treat Androl?

Brandon Sanderson

The Black Tower is still unformed. They've begun...you've gotta remember—like you mentioned the Wise Ones; you mentioned the White Tower—these are institutions that have been going for a long, long time, and they've had plenty of time to build their hierarchies organically. The Black Tower has not had that chance yet, and I think that if you were to watch the Black Tower for the next thousand years, assuming it survives—assuming it survives even this book [laughter]—you would see them come up with their own method of stratification, and it might be similar to one of the others; it might be different, and you'll just have to read and figure out on your own what you think would happen.

Stefan

Read And Figure Out.

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, Read And Figure Out. [laughter] Because you're trying to compare, in a lot of ways, apples and oranges, because something that's had a thousand years to grow is going to be—you know, it's going to have some of that rigidity that something brand-new doesn't have.

Stefan

Okay, thank you.

So far as I know, yes. And for the same purpose.

Raj Iyer

Do other groups start using the Rod too?

Brandon Sanderson

Do you think the Aes Sedai are likely to let others manhandle one of their ter'angreal?

Kamarile Sedai

Did men start to use the Oath Rod too, or did it continue to be only women?

Brandon Sanderson

No men. Neither group would like that. The Asha'man are NOT male Aes Sedai. RJ was clear about this in the notes.

Keith Martin

Will the White and Black Towers reunite to form one Aes Sedai again?

Brandon Sanderson

RJ was clear to me that the Asha'man were not Aes Sedai, and were not going to become them.

Brandon Sanderson

That said, a united male/female Aes Sedai will come again someday.

That is an excellent question...that I'm not allowed to answer. (Sorry.) I feel bad. I'm giving you lots of RAFOs.

Andy Nogar

Is Rand still ta'veren? If not, how did he warp reality and light his pipe at the end?

Brandon Sanderson

These are questions that I'm not answering, I'm afraid. RJ wanted some things about the ending to remain ambiguous.

Mike W

How can you still be RAFO'ing stuff? What is left to read?

Brandon Sanderson

To RJ, RAFO sometimes meant "Read, think about it, and decide." It didn't always mean "I'll give an answer."

Peter Binkowski

Is 'RAFO' basically to mean we're never going to find some things out?

Brandon Sanderson

There's a "Talk it over, see if you can figure it out" aspect to it as well.

"That was exactly as Jim wrote it."
"He wanted to leave you feeling that the next Age will be even stranger than the last."

Asha'Gerard

I asked if Rand now had some powers of the Creator & she again reiterated (maybe clarified?) that the next Age will be profoundly different.

So I then asked if that ability is going to be exclusively Rand's & she spread her hands to give me a look that said "maybe, maybe not".

The vibe I got from her is that she didn't really know what her husband meant for that to mean and she didn't want to say one way or another, but that is just my opinion so take it for what it's worth.

Can you give any further detail on Min's viewing of Aviendha having Rand's babies? (Per the quotation: "Aviendha would have Rand's babies, too. Four of them at once! Something was odd about that, though. The babies would be healthy, but still something odd.")

They are natural quadruplets (no, Aviendha does not adopt Min's or Elayne's children in order to get four), and the "odd" thing is specifically their ability to channel from birth.

Do you know about how many Aes Sedai are left after the Last Battle?

Um, Harriet said "many".

Terez

Many? (laughs) Yeah...

Brandon Sanderson

(laughs, coughs) Boy they lost a lot.

No, The Wheel of Time universe will not become open source.

Question

At a book signing the other day Brandon said that there would be no more books written, prequels, sequels etc. He said that the only extra book would be this updated encyclopedia. Will all the characters bios include what happened before and after the WOT series?

Maria Simons

Some characters' bios will contain more information about a character’s history. For the most part, they will not contain what happened to them after the end of A Memory of Light. Robert Jordan is on record as having no intention of wrapping things up neatly for all characters. As a fan myself, I like this, because it means that in my own mind, the character that I loved can live on happily forever, and the characters that I hate can suffer woefully and die painful deaths.

In addition, Robert Jordan’s notes did not have information about what happened to each character before and after the series, and since we at Team Jordan don’t know his thoughts on these things, we are reluctant to just make things up. I would be happy to share my personal imaginings for the characters that I care about, but they are not canon.

Who wrote the scene in which Aviendha flash-forwards to the future in the glass towers? The scene was beautifully epic because of how it shows the transition of the post–Last Battle Randland, and every time I read it, I feel well and truly sad that I will never see stories set in that time.

(Having said that, what you did with the Mistborn series and the Wax/Wayne novels is a pretty good substitute for reading Fourth Age stories, so there is that. Thanks a lot!)

The glass pillars was me, as I believe some fans have already figured out. One of my big pitches to Harriet and company was that we needed to take risks and chances with these stories, because that's what RJ would have done. If we played it exactly safe, we would have a bland ending to the story.

We couldn't always take the same risks that RJ would have, but we needed to have a dynamic plot where characters, and the world, grew and became something different. They were very scared of this sequence during my pitch, but it's one that—when they read it—they were sold on it very quickly.

As for Wax and Wayne, just wait until we get the Mistborn space opera books.