The Wheel of Time Crosstalk: Did we enjoy reading The Eye of the World?

Amazon is currently hard at work on a TV adaptation of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series, a 14-volume fantasy epic that follows the adventures of Rand al’Thor and his friends as they battle the Dark One and his minions. With the series approaching, we figured it was a good time to talk about the series, starting with the first book — and likely the basis for the first season of the show — The Eye of the World.

Whether you’re on your tenth reread of The Wheel of Time or you’re newcomers like us, it’s a great time to be talking about Jordan’s saga. So let’s talk.

Caution: There will be SPOILERS.

COREY: As the first entry in the series, The Eye of the World plays it pretty safe overall. There are more than a few similarities with The Lord of the Rings, with many characters feeling like clones of J.R.R. Tolkien’s creations. I don’t mean that to sound like a negative; Rand, Lan and Moraine all have enough differences to be interesting, but clearly Jordan was playing it a bit safe in his first novel. Having read ahead in the series, I’m happy to report that the longer the novels go on, the less resemblance they beat to Tolkien’s series.

Plot wise, I’d say Eye of the World veers pretty strongly away from The Lord of the Rings in that there isn’t a macguffin our heroes are trying to keep out of the hands of the Dark One. Sure, the novel begins in a Shire-like part of the map, and our heroes quickly flee from that quiet corner of the world, but again, it’s just a matter of time until the plot veers away of Middle-earth. Most importantly, the book does a good job of setting up the world without inundating us with information. Jordan’s world is massive, and he explores every corner of it before things are all said and done, but Eye of the World manages to explain what’s going without overloading the reader.

DAN: Okay, so you’re a ways into the series, and I pretty much just finished The Eye of the World, so it’s still fairly fresh in my mind.

And I suppose the similarities to The Lord of the Rings are a good place to start, because they are definitely there. In fact, I think you might be underselling them. So we begin our story, after the prologue, in the bucolic country backwater of Emond’s Field, which is clearly an analog for the Hobbiton, with the Two Rivers as the Shire. We have lead characters Rand, Mat, and Perrin, all small town boys who go on an epic quest: meet our hobbits. They’re accompanied on their journey by Moiraine Damodred, who is basically Lady Gandalf, and they fight Trollocs, which are orcs by another name. There’s even a Gollum-type figure in pitiful thrall to the Dark One who follows them from town to town, and an Ent-ish creature who talks very slowly and who I swear to god once described himself as “hasty,” which was one of Treebeard’s favorite words. And at the end of the book they’re in the Blight, which gives off serious Mordor vibes.

So YEAH, there are similarities. You say that Jordan was playing it safe, but I wonder if it was more of a marketing tactic. Like, if you’re trying to sell a new fantasy epic to publishers, what better way than to say, “It’s like The Lord of the Rings but the lines between good and evil are blurrier and there are actually prominent female characters”? People like what they know. I know I did. As familiar as some of the book was, it did feel kind of cozy and comfortable. I had an easy time settling in, and when it went down different paths, I was wiling to follow, trusting it would go somewhere good.

I agree that the world was set up very well. There’s a lot of meat on the bones. It’s almost odd how little of it gets filled in, though. Like, we hear a lot about the Aes Sedai — how untrustworthy they are, how powerful they are — but little in the way of specifics regarding their organization, their history, etc. But there are 13 books to go so Jordan has to save something, and it did leave me wanting more.

Lemme ask you a simple question: did you enjoy reading this book? Cause I did, overall.