With some signs that the Wheel of Time TV adaptation may be moving forwards, it may be worth a look at how Robert Jordan came up with the book series in the first place. Back in 2014 I had the opportunity to read some of Robert Jordan’s original notes for The Wheel of Time in some detail. Subsequently I also had access to some additional information, along with of course Jordan’s public statements and interviews (print and on the net) going back to the 1990s, not to mention his Tor blog. The results should allow us to put together the genesis of the story and setting.
As I noted in my History of Epic Fantasy entry on Robert Jordan, the genesis of the series went back to the late 1970s. Oliver Rigney, Jr. (to give him his real name) had been a soldier in the Vietnam War and a nuclear physicist working for the US Navy in Charleston, South Carolina. A bad fall had left him with a life-threatening blood clot. Although he survived that, it left him reliant on using a cane to walk whilst still only in his late twenties. Figuring life was too short not to do what he loved, which was writing, he began penning fiction. His first fantasy novel, Warriors of the Altaii, was considered for publication in 1977 by Jim Baen but ultimately he rejected it. Jordan complained to a local bookstore owner, who put him in touch with Harriet McDougal, a local editor who’d worked with both Baen and another well-known editor, Tom Doherty. McDougal could see why Altaii had not sold, but rather than suggest rewrites she asked Jordan for something else. He submitted a period bodice-ripper, The Fallon Blood, which was far superior and was published in 1980.
By that time Jordan and McDougal had begun a relationship, eventually marrying in March 1981. During this period Jordan got to know McDougal’s son, Will, who played Dungeons and Dragons with his friends. Jordan agreed to play the role of the Dungeon Master in several games for Will and his friends, circa 1978-79. Around this time Jordan would later report that he had the first ideas for The Wheel of Time.
Jordan didn’t start work on the fantasy series immediately, however. The Fallon Blood sold well and sequels were requested. He wrote two more books in the series and a stand-alone Western called Cheyenne Raiders. He had the idea of writing the definitive novel of the Vietnam War under his own name, so used pen-names for everything else: Reagan O’Neal, Jackson O’Reilly and others. When Tom Doherty, who’d just set up his own imprint at Macmillan, Tor Books, asked Harriet McDougal to suggest someone who could write some new Conan the Barbarian books in a hurry for them, she recommended her husband; choosing the pen name “Robert Jordan”, he quickly produced seven short novels in the setting.
Impressed with the short turn-around, Doherty asked Jordan if he had ideas for anything else. Jordan said he’d been developing ideas for an epic fantasy series and started discussing it with Harriet, who would edit it, and Doherty, who would publish it.
The First Idea (aka the “Death Metal Wheel of Time”)
The first idea for Wheel of Time that Robert Jordan had was what can be best described as “a bit crazy”. It was essentially George R.R. Martin on acid. This story contains some crumbs of the final Wheel of Time narrative but also significant differences.
In this version, the ultimate enemy is a humanoid creature called Sa’khan. Unlike the later Shai’tan, the Dark One, Sa’khan was not a godlike being. Instead, Sa’khan was a powerful and apparently immortal alien warlord from another dimension. He could cross into other worlds via portals. During the First Great War – later the War of the Shadow or War of Power – he attempted to invade Earth but was halted. During this war he was served by half-human, half-demon minions called the Forsaken. At the end of the war the gateway between his world and Earth was sealed shut and all was well. Periodically the Forsaken, some of whom had survived, would try to reopen the gateway, leading to the Second Great War (which later became the Trolloc Wars) but ultimately they failed.
The story itself would begin with Rhys al’Thor being tapped by destiny to oppose the Forsaken and their new attempt to open the gateway and allow Sa’khan to invade Earth (I get the sense that the setting is somewhat more obviously post-apocalyptic Earth than in the final version). Critical to this plan were evil servants of the enemy, warriors from the eastern deserts and plains who had been subverted to Sa’khan’s cause and lived in a village near the enemy’s primary stronghold. These villains were known as “Sightblinders” and it was their destiny to find and destroy the Seven Eyes of the World. It might be that the Seven Eyes were the devices which prevented Sa’khan’s entry into Earth. The Sightblinders evolved into the red-veiled Aiel, so one of the earliest conceptions in Jordan’s mythology was one that would survive to become one of the last; the red-veiled Aiel and their village did not actually appear in the story until A Memory of Light in 2013, about thirty years later.
Other elements were present at this time, although in some cases somewhat different. There were multiple small Blights rather than just one big one spanning the globe. The Stone of Tear was called the Stone of Stair. There was a large Blight just north of Stair which took the form of a rotten, fetid swamp (this evolved into Haddon Mirk instead). The Westlands were much smaller: Rhys and his allies travel from the Two Rivers to the Spine of the World to Tar Valon in a matter of days or weeks. There also seems to have been some confusion if the action was restrained to one large kingdom or a collection of nations as in the final books (or a fusing of both, since the single kingdom of Artur Hawkwing collapses into independent nations in the final version of the story). The Aiel Waste was present, but was called “The Wastelands” and was home to two to four Aiel clans rather than twelve.
One significant subplot, which may have lasted a book or two, sees Rhys shipwrecked on a series of massive reefs far across the ocean. He makes his way through the reefs and finds himself on a mysterious supercontinent ruled by women. This storyline, after radical rewrites, inspired Seanchan. It appears Jordan really loved this original idea as he recycled it many years later for his planned Infinity of Heaven series which, alas, he never got around to writing.
The One Power was called just “Power”. There were naturally-occurring angreal, which worked like stedding but instead of blocking Power they instead enhanced it. The sa’angreal were so rare that each one had its own individual name (an idea which seems to have crept back into the later books with the naming of the Choedan Kal).
The Ogier – “Ogyr” to start with – had arrived on Earth via The Book of Changes (later The Book of Translation). Their origin point – a wholly alien planet or a Portal Stone world – remains a mystery, as it did in the final series.
In the original notes, Morgase was the name of the queen of a remote city-state who was more of a seductress and schemer. This character seems to have evolved into Berelain. Galad and Gawyn were still her children, but Elayne (under a different name, Elyn) was the daughter of the Queen of Andor, who was a different character altogether. In a surprising move, Rhys actually slept with Morgase. This drives the furious Galad into the camp of the Shadow. He then becomes a channeler and one of Rand’s main enemies. It would have been revealed that Lan was Galad’s father (plot twist!). A character called “Kadsuane” is also mentioned in the earliest drafts (an important point, for those who claimed that Cadsuane was introduced on the fly in A Crown of Swords as a deus ex machina).
In this version Tar Valon was built directly on the volcanic slopes of Dragonmount itself, with a number of Aes Sedai permanantly assigned to keeping the volcano quiet and the city inhabitable. This changed later on for reasons of practicality.
The white-hot iron viewing Min has of Rand in the books was a storyline RJ abandoned, possibly because it was rather grim: Rhys gets his hand cut off and is blinded by the Queen of Andor (both would later be Healed). Oddly, RJ seems to have abandoned the viewing idea some time before finishing Eye of the World, so it’s unclear why he left the viewing in there.
Moiraine and Siuan also appear to have originally been the same character, and were split when it became clear that Moiraine-as-Amyrlin didn’t make sense.
A very interesting worldbuilding point given the criticism it has received over the decades: Jordan dedicated substantial amounts of material to building a series of religions for the Wheel of Time world, with extensive notes on customs, beliefs and priesthoods. However, when he changed the idea of Sa’khan being a powerful-but-not-omnipotent being to becoming the Dark One, it appears he changed his mind. The religions were reworked to become, with varying degrees of direct transition, the Way of the Leaf, the Children of the Light and the Red Ajah (among others).
Robert Jordan started writing The Eye of the World in 1984 and did not finish it until late 1988 or early 1989, a surprising amount of time given his later fast production rate. The reason for this slowness is apparently that few of Jordan’s original ideas survived direct contact with the word processor without being changed, adjusted or completely thrown out.
There are also many other changes in this time (such as angreal orginally being called cris). This period is exhaustively detailed in this thread at Theoryland. Some of the other interesting things to emerge from this is the revelation Jordan originally planned to end the First Age in a nuclear war and also had other “gods” (besides Sa’khan) in the story who were capricious and unpredictable, but later removed these from the story.
Oh, and the best (and most hilarious) bit from the notes: Mazrim Taim was Demandred and he killed Asmodean. Jordan wasn’t expecting this to be rumbled as early as it was, so he changed it to Graendal once a fan proposed a convincing alternate theory (Jordan printed out this theory and wrote “THIS IS RIGHT!” on it, in a dramatic display of retconning). This is actually interesting because it suggests that Shara would not have been involved at all in the Last Battle (since Demandred wasn’t supposed to be there) and the Graendal-in-Shara scenes were a red herring.
Other changes came about due to external factors. For example, although Jordan decided not to set any of the primary narrative on the Seanchan home continent, Jordan still envisaged it as a vast supercontinent spanning a huge chunk of the world. But the maps created by John Ford show it as much smaller than originally planned. Southern Seanchan was supposed to extend much further eastwards into the southern Aryth Ocean, with the whole continent (which is already completely massive, maybe three times the size of the Westlands) being maybe 75% bigger than what appears on the world book maps. However, it was too late to change it before the map appeared in The World of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time (1997), so thus Seanchan became much smaller than originally planned.
One of the more interesting things to emerge from this study was that Jordan’s notes was to learn that the notes were originally much looser and less-detailed until the writing of The Path of Daggers (1998). Between A Crown of Swords and The Path of Daggers Jordan seems to have written the majority of the most detailed notes on the series, including his exhaustive list of every single Aes Sedai character and her Power level (although he’d started this process earlier), the Old Tongue dictionary (which eventually exceeded 1,000 words and phrases) and voluminous notes on dress, customs and military matters. These seem to have expanded from the notes that he’d provided Teresa Patterson for the world book and the glossary notes he’d been keeping since the first book in the series.
It would be interesting to see a more detailed study of The Wheel of Time and the writing process behind it, perhaps in the mode of Christopher Tolkien’s work on The History of Middle-earth, but alas it does not look like this is on the cards at the moment. Still, I hope this overview is of interest.
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