Using My Time

March 14, 2026 — Pat Bertram

The more I reread The Wheel of Time books, and the more I can retain those millions of words, the more the irony and the subtle humor become apparent.

In one scene, one of the heroes, who is being kept as something of a sex slave for a queen, entered a room where a bunch of women newly come to the palace were milling around. He had a bad feeling about the situation, and he stood there waiting for “one of the Forsaken [what the disciples of the Dark One were called] to leap out of the flames in the marble fireplace, or the earth to swallow the Palace beneath him.” That isn’t amusing, of course, but what is amusing is that although he didn’t know it (nor could anyone who hadn’t previously read the books in their entirety), one of the women in the room really was one of the Forsaken.

In another case, a woman who was sort of a slave caretaker (Robert Jordan created some appalling civilizations), thought that one slave’s new-found acceptance of her situation meant she was going to try to escape, and so doubled up on her conditioning. What I found amusing is that the slave keeper herself ended up being blackmailed into helping the slave escape.

Because of small things like this, which cannot be seen until a reread or two, I’m finding this read through to be more amusing and more touching than I expected. It helps, I think, that I skip the torture scenes. (Those Forsaken do love their torture. Oddly, most of them undergo just as much pain as they give. I suppose that’s what happens when you dedicate yourself to the Dark One. Since he’s also called “The Father of Lies,” you’d think that would be a clue to his nature, right?)

It also helps that I know so much mythology and history, long ago customs and costumes, and all the other bits that make up Jordan’s world, because the knowledge makes the books richer, though I miss a lot. In a passage I just finished reading, someone mentioned the seals on the Dark One’s prison, saying three were hidden away, three were broken, and no one knew where to find the seventh seal. Seeing “the seventh seal” written out like that was a hitting-palm-on-forehead moment for me. I don’t know why I never associated these seals with Revelations and Armageddon, though I should have. I knew the last battle was Armageddon, though in the books it’s called Tarmon Gai’don. I just never got the connection with the seals. Now I’ll have to go through the books and see if I can identify what seals were broken and how they affected the Wheel of Time world. Like the fisher in The Fisher King legend, the Wheel of Time hero is “one with the land,” which is becoming obvious as the hero’s tempestuous moments are reflected by stormy weather. So too must the broken seals have some sort of correlation with what’s happening in that world. As if there’s not already a headful of correlations to find!

I know there’s a lot of correlations between historical battles and those of Jordan’s, such as the off-screen skirmish called “Altaran Noon,” which was based on the “Sicilian Vespers.” Since I don’t know much about battles, I’m sure I miss a lot of what he intended. Or maybe I’m not missing what he intended — it’s possible he didn’t really intend for anyone to see what he was doing; it’s possible he recreated those battles for his own amusement since he was a self-avowed military historian. (Before becoming a full-time writer, he was a nuclear engineer, and before that, he’d served two tours in Vietnam as a helicopter gunner, which contributed to his interest in military history. It’s also what inspired him to give his male characters their unique perspective about not killing women.)

I seem to be writing a lot about these books lately, but there’s a great deal to process, though sometimes I wonder why I want to. Still, I need to be doing something, and studying these books and this world is a good a use of my time as any. And who knows — if I can come to understand his world, maybe I can understand ours.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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Stringing Stories Together

March 11, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I happened to read an old review of the Wheel of Time book saga, where the reviewer dismissed the massive work by saying all Jordan did was string together stories like The Lord of the Rings and Dune.

That made me laugh because that was sort of the point — an iteration of previous tales, stringing them together to create his world. No, Jordan didn’t copy those books. He simply paid homage to writers he loved, though there could be more similarity than maybe he intended because he used a lot of same sources as did those authors. What he did do, during the ten years he spent researching his world before writing one single word of the first book, was . . . well, research. He researched world myths, legends like King Arthur, folklore, history, costume, culture, war. Then he broke all that up into little pieces and rebuilt his world from those fragments of our past and an imagined future. There are few if any direct parallels to our word but instead there are multiple parallels for each character and culture.

For example, a lot of people think Jordan’s warrior culture, the Aiel, is based on the Fremen from Frank Herbert’s Dune since both are desert-dwelling warrior cultures, and perhaps Jordan did give a nod to Dune, but Jordan’s warrior culture is an amalgam of Zulu, Bedouin, Apache and Japanese cultures, and maybe some others. Their looks (pale skin, light hair, and light eyes) and their system of clan and sept is a parallel of old Scottish and Irish clans and septs. The Aiel are further connected to the Irish through the Tuatha’an, a Wheel of Time culture named after The Tuatha Dé Danann. And something I just discovered — their system of ownership, where women own the houses and everything in them, comes from the Cherokees. (In case you’re wondering, this puzzle aspect of the books is one of the reasons I keep rereading. It’s fun for me to dig out all the references.)

Jordan said over and over again that he wanted his world to be both our past and our future. As he pointed out, “You can look two ways along a wheel.” Also in his world, what goes around, comes around so that the characters in the books are the source of many of our myths and legends and we are the source of many of theirs. He said he wanted to explore what the nature and sources of our myths might be.

His explanation for why the myths and even the histories that the characters experience in The Wheel of Time are so different from ours is that what is remembered and how it’s remembered changes throughout the ages, like the game of Whisper, or Telephone, or Gossip, where someone passes a secret to the next person, who passes on what they heard to the next person, and in the end, what results is generally unlike what was originally said. His point was that things change over time, that stories change, that names change.

He points this out at the beginning of the first chapter of every book: “The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.”

When asked where he got the idea of a wheel, he said, “The name comes out of Hindu mythology, where there is a belief that time is a wheel. Many older cultures believe that time is cyclic, that it repeats. In fact, I believe the best thing the ancient Greeks gave us was (the idea) that time was linear and change was possible.”

That’s for sure! There is a fatalism to the books stemming from the wheel, where everything will be repeated when the wheel comes around again, though perhaps with minor differences. Which also gives them their belief that you can change your life in small ways, but not large ones. Not an easy philosophy to live under.

But I’m getting away from my original point: to say that Jordan strung a bunch of stories together is true. Sort of. But it completely negates the brilliance of the world he created — our distant past and perhaps our distant future.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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Point of View

January 27, 2026 — Pat Bertram

The Wheel of Time culture shows me exactly why people can’t agree politically on . . . well, on anything.

By Wheel of Time culture, I don’t mean the various cultures in the books, though there are many, but the real-life culture surrounding the books. There are hundreds of websites devoted to discussions of the books, many websites that offer encyclopedias of Jordan’s world, other sites that offer snippets from Robert Jordan’s notes showing the development of his ideas and that sometimes include answers to questions fans ask (his answer most often is, “read and find out,” though sometimes he does elucidate). There are also companion books to the series that offer more information on characters, motivations, glossaries, a dictionary of his made-up language, explanations of things that don’t show up in the books like outlying cultures that have little to do with the story and things that Jordan never wanted people to know.

His subtlety (which it seems he prided himself on) is such that often there is no way to find the truth in the books themselves. In one case, we don’t find out who killed a particular bad guy until we see it in the glossary of the following book. I understand that he wants people to think about the issues and the happenings in the books, tries to get them involved in his world, and accords them the intelligence to be able to fill in vague lines. (The person who finished the series after the death of Jordan had no subtlety, no granting readers a modicum of intelligence, and explained every little detail.) I can also understand an author wanting people to figure things out on their own, such as Frank R. Stockton did in his 1882 story, “The Lady or the Tiger,” but at times it also feels a bit like a cheat. If it’s important, it should be in the books somewhere. If it’s not important, it shouldn’t be treated as if it’s some sort of mystery. (Though as Jordan admitted once in an interview, he was surprised when these — to him — throwaway incidents garnered much discussion.)

Still, as long as I can find out the information I want by checking online sources, I don’t really care that much if such particulars aren’t in the books since I certainly can’t remember every single detail of a 4,000,000 word story. I often end up checking on characters who showed up again after 1,000,000 words and I needed a refresher on who they were and what they had done. Sometimes if I can’t find an explanation for a certain minor point in any of the encyclopedias, I end up reading various discussions to see if any reader had figured it out.

All this to explain why I get caught up in other people’s opinions of the various aspects of the books.

It makes sense, of course, that people would have disparate opinions about the unsaid bits, but what’s really interesting to me is even when the story is explicitly laid out, when the characters’ actions are visible to everyone, when the motivations are obvious, that readers all see something different and are vocal about defending their point of view.

And this is just a story. The words are static. There are no edited versions of the sentences making them seem to say what they didn’t say, no edited videos making us see a different version of the action. It’s all right there in the books. And yet, the interpretations are wildly different. Some people hate a couple of the characters because their plot line goes on and on and seems to accomplish nothing. Other people love those characters and hate other characters. That makes sense to me. Some people even hate the main hero while loving the books, which doesn’t make sense to me, but it doesn’t have to make sense. It’s about preference.

But misinterpreting the story? Seeing what isn’t there? Not seeing what is there? That doesn’t make sense to me since we all have access to the exact same words. I suppose it’s possible that it is I who is misinterpreting the story, since after all, I am totally the wrong demographic (older by decades!) but even that would prove my point, which is . . .

Hmm. What is my point? I suppose it’s that if people can’t even agree on what they are seeing in a book series, can’t agree on what is right and what is wrong when it matters little, it’s easy to see why there is no agreement about what is best for us individually and ultimately the country.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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