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Your search for the tag 'breaking of the world' yielded 20 results

  • 1

    Interview: Nov 21st, 1998

    Robert Jordan

    On the subject of a story set in the Age of Legends, most probably not. The Age of Legends was entirely too boring to write about, up until the time it became too interesting. And at that point, it became too gloomy because it was a long, drawn out apocalypse.

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  • 2

    Interview: Jul, 2002

    Question

    In the scene during which the taint is cleansed, Cadsuane uses a ter’angreal that detects the One Power being channeled and the direction it is coming from. She watches the ter’angreal, and when the enemy channels, she points, and someone attacks. Why doesn’t it point to the huge amounts of the One Power that Rand and Nynaeve are channeling – far more than the Forsaken are being pegged for?

    Robert Jordan

    Cadsuane’s ter’angreal was made during the Breaking of the World, at a time when men and women no longer linked, or at least very rarely, since male channelers were going mad at a rate of knots. What the maker was particularly interested in detecting was men channeling, but a man channeling in combination with a woman was, by definition, safe, because no woman was going to link with a man unless she knew absolutely that he was sane and not going to go over the edge into insanity while they were linked. Thus, saidin and saidar being worked in combination could be ignored, and in fact would be a distraction, since this was and is a warning device. Cadsuane’s ter’angreal won’t point to the two halves of the Power being wielded in combination.

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  • 3

    Interview: Jan 25th, 2005

    Week 3 Question

    How do the Seanchan Ogier cope with the Longing, given that their duties in the Deathwatch Guard take them overseas? Are there many stedding in Seanchan?

    Robert Jordan

    There are many more stedding in Seanchan than there are in the part of the world where the story is taking place, and that is why the Seanchan Ogier don't suffer from the Longing. Because there are so many more stedding, they were able to find them more easily even during the Breaking and therefore never had the very extended separation that Ogier on this side of the Aryth Ocean had, though they seldom were able to settle in one for very long until the Breaking ended.

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  • 4

    Interview: Jan 25th, 2005

    Week 12 Question

    In Winters Heart, you mention that back in the Age of Legends, there were several other Forsaken that the Dark One had killed because he suspected they would betray him. What's their story? Were those people ever as high ranking as the 13 survivors, or where they more like high-ranking Dreadlords then actual Forsaken?

    Robert Jordan

    First off, Dreadlords was the name given to men and women who could channel and sided with the Shadow in the Trolloc Wars. Yes, the women were called Dreadlords, too. They might have liked to call themselves "the Chosen," like the Forsaken, but feared to. The real Forsaken might not have appreciated it when they returned, as prophecies of the Shadow foretold would happen. Some of the Dreadlords had authority and responsibility equivalent to that of the Forsaken in the War of the Shadow, however. They ran the Shadow's side of the Trolloc Wars, though without the inherent ability to command the Myrddraal that the Forsaken possess, meaning they had to negotiate with them. Overall command at the beginning was in another's hands.

    Forsaken was the name given to Aes Sedai who went over to the Shadow in the War of the Shadow at the end of the Age of Legends, though of course, they called themselves the Chosen, and despite the tales of the "current" Age, there were many more than a few of them. Since they occupied all sorts of levels, you might say that many were equivalent to some of the lesser Dreadlords, but it would be incorrect to call them so. At the time, they were all Forsaken—or Chosen—from the greatest to the least.

    Some of those Forsaken the Dark One killed were every bit as high-ranking as the thirteen who were remembered, and who you might say constituted a large part of the Dark One's General Staff at the time of the sealing. With the Forsaken, where treachery and backstabbing were an acceptable way of getting ahead, the turnover in the upper ranks was fairly high, though Ishamael, Demandred, Lanfear, Graendal, Semirhage, and later Sammael, were always at the top end of the pyramid. They were very skilled at personal survival, politically and physically.

    In large part the thirteen were remembered because they were trapped at Shayol Ghul, and so their names became part of that story, though it turned out that details of them, stories of them, survived wide-spread knowledge of the tale of the actual sealing itself. Just that they had been sealed away. Other Forsaken were left behind, so to speak, free but in a world that was rapidly sliding down the tube. The men eventually went mad and died from the same taint that killed off the other male Aes Sedai. They had no access to the Dark One's protective filters. The women died, too, though from age or in battle or from natural disasters created by insane male Aes Sedai or from diseases that could no longer be controlled because civilization itself had been destroyed and access to those who were skilled in Healing was all but gone. And soon after their deaths, their names were forgotten, except for what might possibly be discovered in some ancient manuscript fragment that survived the Breaking. A bleak story of people who deserved no better, and not worth telling in any detail.

    Footnote

    The 'another' mentioned at the end of the first paragraph probably refers to Ishamael; there are hints in the BWB that he began the Trolloc Wars during one of the periods where he was free from the Bore.

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  • 5

    Interview: Oct 25th, 1994

    Question

    What were the female Aes Sedai doing during the Breaking? Surely they could have got together in circles of six or thirteen or whatever, cut off one man from the Source, and gone onto the next.

    Robert Jordan

    Several things. Partly, you have to find the men before you can do anything. Partly, by the time they realized what was going on, it was too late. The massive geological upheavals were only a part (and not the most important part) of the Breaking. There was also the cumulative social collapse, breakdown of transportation systems, etc.. Imagine a city like Seattle that suddenly loses ALL contact with the outside world. Also, the women were (after a point) trying to preserve what they could, not fight the men directly. Finally, in order to make someone stop doing something, you have to be able to threaten them. What can you threaten a madman with, that he will listen to you and stop?

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  • 6

    Interview: Oct 25th, 1994

    Question

    Speaking of the Breaking, how did Dragonmount survive all that rearrangement of geography?

    Robert Jordan

    Well, the Breaking had different effects in different areas. Some areas were raised up, others lowered, others moved around... but the effects were relatively mild in some areas; Dragonmount was one of them.

    Note that Shayol Ghul used to be a subtropical island. The Tar Valon area was moved, but as an entire piece, so the mountain, the island, and the river stayed in the same places relative to each other.

    Tony Zbaraschuk

    [Which I suppose makes sense, since nobody lived in the area (of Dragonmount), the men would likely have been elsewhere.]

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  • 7

    Interview: Oct 25th, 1994

    Question

    What about Mazrim Taim? Isn't his withstanding of the madness for fifteen years something exceptional? [Short segue from there to Taim=Demandred?]

    Robert Jordan

    The duration varies from man to man; the circumstances are different, and the men themselves. Nobody really knows how long the process takes (or has to take), since once you start channeling the Aes Sedai usually find you pretty quickly, and gentling stops the progression of the madness and the taint (though it does not cure what's already happened). Channeling is addictive; once you've done it, you can't stop. The Breaking took about a hundred years before all the men finally died, though some of them did shelter in the stedding for a while. Nobody knows how long the process takes, except that there is variation. It's all in my notes.

    Question

    But what about Taim? Isn't fifteen years something really exceptional? [Subtext: Is he Demandred???]

    Robert Jordan

    Read and Find Out.

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  • 8

    Interview: Nov 1st, 1994

    Fast Forward

    And that resonates in Perrin's fighting his way toward Rand in the climatic scene in this battle. He basically refuses to think of them as males or females, because if he thought of the person in front of him, trying to kill him, as a female—because there is a mixture of both in the group they are fighting—he wouldn't be able to proceed, and he'd end up being killed. So he has to blank that out of his mind so he can be purely reactive. So it's almost a repeat of that.

    Robert Jordan

    Yes, in a way it is. It's something that comes out of the way they think. And it fits with the society, as well, as it's been devised. Three thousand years ago men destroyed the world. In effect, O.K. it was the male Aes Sedai, but it was MEN that did it. For three thousand years the world has been afraid of men who can channel. You have that sort of history, and women are going to have power, women are going to have influence and prestige. There is not going to be the same sort of subjugation of women you find in other cultures in our world. Given that, and given the fact that men are, quite simply, stronger than women. There's no two ways about it, on the average man is stronger than woman.

    Fast Forward

    We're talking physically stronger.

    Robert Jordan

    Right. Physically stronger. It's going to be, in many cases, a very strong cultural prohibition against a man using that strength against a woman. It seemed to me to fit very well with the way the cultures are set up.

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  • 9

    Interview: Jun 16th, 1995

    Robert Jordan

    The concept of the unified language he basically explained as there had been a single language in use (the Old Tongue), and the writing and printing of books continued throughout the Breaking, albeit in a very limited extent. The written word introduced a very large conserving factor in the language-change mechanism.

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  • 10

    Interview: Jun 26th, 1996

    Compuserve Chat (Verbatim)

    Jeff Jarrell

    What made you decide to make male Aes Sedai go insane versus female Aes Sedai using magic somewhat safely?

    Robert Jordan

    I'm not sure about the last of that question, but this was part of the basis, the foundation of the story. If women had gone insane using the power and not men, it would be a much different world, a much different story, and not the story I was interested in writing!

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  • 11

    Interview: Oct 9th, 1996

    Question

    What age number was the Age of Legends?

    Robert Jordan

    The age before the Third Age. The Breaking of the World brought on the Third Age. The Trolloc and Hundred Years Wars were only punctuations in local history.

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  • 12

    Interview: Oct 19th, 1998

    John from Front Royal, Virginia

    Mr. Jordan, were either of the Aes Sedai seen at Rhuidean in The Shadow Rising Deindre, the Aes Sedai from the beginning of the Breaking? Is Deindre responsible for Foretelling the entire Prophecies of the Dragon? Thank you for taking time to respond to our questions this evening.

    Robert Jordan

    No, she wasn't, and you're welcome.

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  • 13

    Interview: Jul 14th, 2005

    ComicCon Reports (Paraphrased)

    Question

    Why are there so many dominant and powerful women, almost matriarchies, in the Wheel of Time?

    Robert Jordan

    After the Breaking, men were viewed as destroyers. Also, almost all the male leadership of the world were Aes Sedai who were now dead. Add to that the dominant political force in the world for three thousand years being the all female White Tower. It's a natural consequence for women to be more dominant than not in the rest of the world.

    A side note—he brought up the story thread where he introduced a misogynist (Agni Neres, the boat captain on the trip from Samara to Salidar). Instead of being angered by his attitudes, Elayne and Nynaeve are puzzled and can't understand him at all.

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  • 14

    Interview: Sep 2nd, 2005

    Question

    Did you have the intention to explore what happened before the Breaking of the World?

    Robert Jordan

    No, anything I would do there would have a sense of inevitability. You know what's going to happen.

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  • 15

    Interview: Oct 26th, 2005

    Question

    Why don't the Gardeners have the Longing?

    Robert Jordan

    That's simple. There are a lot more stedding on the Seanchan continent and as a result they were not missed during the Breaking, so they don't have the Longing.

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  • 16

    Interview: Oct 21st, 1994

    AOL Chat 2 (Verbatim)

    Question

    How did the White Tower form after the Breaking?

    Robert Jordan

    Aes Sedai slowly got together.

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  • 17

    Interview: 2006

    FORCED-LINKING-STUDIES

    Robert Jordan

    When Careanne (Sareitha) is explaining about the impossibility of one woman forcing a link on another, this study should have survived from the Breaking, I think. Or, at least, it was begun during the Breaking. After this second study was begun and had gone on for a number of years, more of the original was discovered. With the destruction of the intervening years, relatively little is known, some of it only to the Black Ajah.

    Footnote

    This topic is explored a little more thoroughly here.

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  • 18

    Interview: Dec 2nd, 2010

    Mark

    I actually have a question that leads more onto the line of channeling and weaves—and I think this might have been yours, Virginia, but it's also been tickling the back of my mind for a while. Why is that no other channelers have rediscovered any lost weaves—like they did with Traveling, Skimming, cuendillar, real Healing, and all that fun stuff—before the Wondergirls?

    Maria Simons

    Well, we don't really know no one did. If they did, they didn't share it, sure. You know, not all channelers are Aes Sedai, and even Aes Sedai don't always share things.

    JENNIFER LIANG

    Yeah, they keep a lot back.

    MARIA SIMONS

    The Blue Ajah, you know, has all its little secret weaves, and I'm sure all the other Ajahs do as well. And two, there's always the whole thing that, 'the Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills', and sometimes the Wheel weaves out what it needs, and with the Last Battle coming, it needs all the help it can get…so the really talented people, the really ta'veren people, they come out again. That's for most of them. For Healing, maybe there's a different answer. Aes Sedai…they know how to Heal people, and that's the way they do it, and they don't need to know anything better! I mean, it's just Aes Sedai being Aes Sedai. They think they know what they're doing, so they don't look for a better way to do it.

    JENNIFER LIANG

    And if they have discovered a better way to do it, they're probably not sharing it with other people, because every Aes Sedai is looking for an advantage over the others.

    MARIA SIMONS

    Right.

    MARK

    Oh, okay. So then that sort of partially answers the next half of my question, which is: How did some of these weaves get lost in the first place?

    VIRGINIA

    Oh, my favorite rant. All the Aes Sedai woke up one morning with amnesia. How did I Travel? I can't remember.

    MARIA SIMONS

    Well, part of it…I mean, I was reading, of all things, the Big White Book, and you know, the Breaking lasted a really long time, and things were really breaking. I mean, you might know how to Travel, but you didn't know if where you were trying to go was still there. You know, it might be in the middle of the ocean now, or on top of a mountain, so people probably weren't Traveling as much...and Aes Sedai were being killed right and left. There were all these crazy men, channelers wiping out entire cities, and the Aes Sedai women were trying to stop them, and sometimes they succeeded, and sometimes not…so, things really went to hell in a handbasket. Fast. And, you know, if a woman knew how to channel and she couldn't find anyone else who had the strength to channel, she couldn't really teach anybody to channel.

    VIRGINIA

    That's true.

    MARIA SIMONS

    To Travel, is what I meant to say.

    ALAN ROMANCZUK

    Yeah, there was a time of course when the White Tower wasn't there. You know, the White Tower was a recent innovation in the grand scheme of things, and so the Aes Sedai after the Breaking were everywhere, so there wasn't that institutional memory in all things at that point, and things were lost.

    VIRGINIA

    So the Hall of the Servants, then, basically was a much looser organization than the somewhat hierarchical White Tower…

    ALAN ROMANCZUK

    Mmhmm.

    VIRGINIA

    …than we have now.

    MARIA SIMONS

    Mmhmm.

    VIRGINIA

    So we have a sort of central storing place for knowledge, or anything like that.

    ALAN ROMANCZUK

    Right.

    JENNIFER LIANG

    Yeah, think of what would happen to us if there was a horrible disaster that wiped out the internet. We would lose all of our knowledge except for, you know, the stuff that we still have in books. But you know, a good portion of our knowledge and communication that is electronic now would be gone.

    ALAN ROMANCZUK

    But this podcast would remain in people's hearts. [laughter]

    VIRGINIA

    Well, you got me on that one, Maria, because if my computer was suddenly taken away and there were no others to replace it, I think I would probably have the equivalent of amnesia. It's my plastic brain, and I really need it. [laughter]

    JENNIFER LIANG

    I've always thought that the lost talents were related to strength, because the modern Aes Sedai are weaker than the Age of Legends Aes Sedai, and a lot of these rediscovered weaves require a certain level of strength that just doesn't exist in those Aes Sedai.

    MARIA SIMONS

    Right, and also talent, because to do this Healing, you have to have a certain Talent for Healing. To make cuendillar...Janya couldn't make cuendillar worth a darn, and…she didn't have that Talent, so if somebody knew it, but there was nobody they could teach it to, it's gone!

    VIRGINIA

    Yeah.

    MARK

    Well, the thing is though…leading up to that comment: remember in—I believe it was Crossroads, but it might have been Knife of Dreams—when Sorilea (soar-ih-LAY-uh)—I have no idea if this is how it's pronounced...

    MARIA SIMONS

    (soar-ih-LEE-uh)

    MARK

    She taught Cadsuane how to Travel, even though she couldn't make the weave work herself. So just because you don't have the strength to make the weave finish doesn't mean you can't form the weave anyway.

    MARIA SIMONS

    That's true, but...okay. We've got our nameless Aes Sedai after the Breaking, and she's found a little crew of people, and none of them are strong enough to Travel. Well, she's going to show them how to do it anyway and hopefully one day they'll find somebody strong enough but, you know, they never do. So we've got the same thing, and you know, sooner or later it's going to…if you can't actually use it for anything, you're going to put it aside and not pay any attention to it, and it will get lost.

    VIRGINIA

    Or, by the time that bunch of people finds someone who is [strong enough], it might have gone through several iterations and they might have the weave just a little bit wrong, so that it doesn't work either.

    MARIA SIMONS

    Yeah.

    JENNIFER LIANG

    And—correct me if I'm wrong on this—but I don't think it's possible to write down how to do a weave. I think it's something that you have to learn through demonstration. You can't just write it down, and be like, 'Well, I'll put this on the shelf, and some day a hundred years from now someone will come along and pick it up and figure out how to weave...whatever from this. I feel like you have to be shown how to do a weave.

    MARIA SIMONS

    That is...I mean, that's how they do it. You know, the novices don't run around with heavy books; they run around being taught by actual people. It's my belief that writing might could give clues or something, but you have to be able to show it or work it out on your own.

    VIRGINIA

    Of course, I was going to say they could just check on YouTube and find out how, but then, would the One Power weaves even show up on video? [laughter] If they even had that...

    MARIA SIMONS

    Oh, that's a good question!

    VIRGINIA

    I actually was just wondering about that; I wonder if any these things—I'm sure that the effects would—but I presume that if most non-channelers can't see weaves that probably there's nothing there for a video to pick up, either...but it's an interesting question.

    MARIA SIMONS

    That is.

    VIRGINIA

    How to detect channeling: Whip out your camcorder! [laughter]

    ALAN ROMANCZUK

    With a wi-fi finder.

    VIRGINIA

    Yeah, okay. I'm going to be good now. That would be too funny. It's a shame Jessi couldn't be with us. She really wanted to be, but she had to work, and couldn't get off. One of her favorite premises is, you know, how drastically the Wheel of Time story would all be changed if they had access to cell phones and texting and the internet and everything.

    MARIA SIMONS

    Oh yeah. There would be no story.

    SPENCER POWELL

    They do though! Elayne has the communication ter'angreal. They have cell phones...ish. They just don't use them! [laughter]

    MARIA SIMONS

    Give 'em time.

    VIRGINIA

    I sort of [?] a couple of the guys before one time when we were podcasting and I had to get up in the office; I was working and I had to turn a phone off, and I came back and I said "I just had to disable that callbox ter'angreal." And they said, "Oh, you are such a geek." [laughter]

    SPENCER POWELL

    It's true.

    VIRGINIA

    A 'dork' is what actually they said.

    MARK

    No, you are a geek, because dorks have no social status whereas geeks are more knowledgeable in one or two given fields, and since we are all major WoT nerds—we qualify as nerds, not dorks.

    VIRGINIA

    Yeah, we got some cred there anyway.

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  • 19

    Interview: Apr 20th, 2013

    Terez

    Were the Seanchan originally controlled by the Shadow after the War of Power, or was it just Ishamael meddling at random times?

    Maria Simons

    I don't know.

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