Robert Jordan vs. J.R.R. Tolkien, Part 4: Plot and Endings

[Back to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3]

And now we come to the real spoiler-filled part: what does the ending say about the compare and contrast between Jordan and Tolkien?

As was shown in one way with the heroic charges at the end, always coming when all hope (or some amount of said hope) is lost, a formula that Tolkien even formalized as the "eucatastrophe": both books are eucatastrophic in multiple ways, which requires dense, precise plotting. It's one of the joys of the genre. Tolkien obsessed over making sure that his entire plot fit together neatly, so that when, for example, Frodo and Pippin are looking "at each other" across the expanse between them without knowing it, the time and phase of the moon work out precisely. Again, for all his historically-based fulmination about industry, Tolkien has a place for detail and even mechanism in his stories. Jordan's story is, if anything, even more mechanical. Min, for example, seems like a fairly useless character who becomes elevated to a particular role in the Seanchan all of a sudden and then is able to use her "fortune-telling" power to out a spy. Even the non-warriors, the Ogier and the Tinkers, have a role in the Last Battle. Some of the build-up is incommensurate to the pay-off -- I'm looking at you, Padan Fain -- but how could it be truly commensurate? After all, Sanderson's already expanded Jordan's timeline by three books that are all faster-paced than the 11 previous books. I'm just happy to be done and gain surprises like Min's where appropriate. That was fun.

In fact, Jordan's mechanisms are, if anything, too obviously mechanical at the end. I don't blame Sanderson for this; I blame Jordan for imagining he had only one book left to write when he truly had four or five, "condensed" into three by Sanderson. I would have loved to see Jordan's full treatment about how all the nations could be brought together by Rand as a treaty, for example, or the Seanchan realizing they owe fealty to Rand (although I really wonder why they didn't figure this one out before, it's awfully obvious to me). One of the hidden joys of these books is the very detailed procedure that at first glance looks boring, which is presaged famously in Tolkien by The Council of Elrond. This happened when Egwene was elevated to the Amyrlin Seat and in some ways in Elayne's ascent to queenhood as well, but there just wasn't time for it when it mattered most. This is not Sanderson, because Jordan himself did not allow time for it in his own 12-book plan. Another testament to just how amazing Tolkien was in orchestrating his storylines in three books: on an overall basis, it's a close call but I judge that Tolkien is still the king of plot.

Earlier I mentioned how I didn't really know how to assess Jordan's entire work till I saw how he ended it. I would have loved for Jordan to have "pulled a Tolkien" with his ending, with an element of Tolkien's world that not many people know about. Let me explain, and yes, this does involve the Silmarillion. Wake up, now!

The way I read it, Tolkien's world used to be flat and is now spherical like ours. It happened like this: Numenor was the great continent of men that could see all the way to the Blessed Lands in the West (if you squint). But Sauron preyed on their pride and they tried to assult the Blessed Lands by force, which of course failed, but to make the failure really concrete, the Valar literally severed the Blessed Lands from the rest of the world and made the world wrap around itself. They made the world spherical, so I guess the directions to the Blessed Land change from "go west young man" to "go west and UP." This is one of the way the Fall happens in Middle Earth.

Since in Jordan, time itself is circular, I was hoping Rand would throw a fast one by literally breaking the Wheel of Time and making it linear again. Is this unexpected enough? It would have been to me (at the point at which I began to half-expect it, that is). Instead of the world breaking, the cycle of revolutions would be broken and redemption would be possible. The cycle of re-births would also be broken, making each life more independent and in my view, important. I like the theological implications of all this too.

Despite my detailed and well-reasoned plans, Jordan didn't do any of this. He kept time in a wheel and the Dark One in a bottle. The only moderately interesting theological "debate" was whether the Dark One should be destroyed or not. Leaving aside the implications of how a human could destroy a god, the only question seems to be, would a world without evil be any good? The scenes of a world with too much evil, and with too much good, are mildly interesting but nowhere near as richly realized as the world itself. Some passages says Shai'tan is a personified force, but the whole confrontation depends on Shai'tan being a force-bearing personality. The whole philosophical side of this has the complexity of a late-night bull session in a dorm. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) Because evil is necessary it must be imprisoned rather than destroyed, and, um, what does that really mean? Death is ultimately a friend, not an enemy, and in my opinion no true redemption is possible. Which fits because time is still stuck in a wheel. Alas. Conversely, in Tolkien, evil is defeated by the humble, the patient, and the suffering as was as the noble and heroic. In fact, the heroes come to the point of sacrificing themselves so that the hobbits may sacrifice themselves! This carries a deep echo that maybe, in real life, evil can be defeated with the same spiritual judo move. That's a better ending than Jordan's solution: returning to square 1 while, this time, actually caring about all these people who are dying for you while you get off just fine in your enemy's mortal flesh. The death of Lews Therin is more resonant for me than the post-battle life of Rand al'Thor.

So that's the ending, but it's not the very ending in Tolkien. In the very ending,Tolkien has the scouring of the shire, one of the most enduring parts of the book (at least in my experience of multiple readings) in which the hobbits truly grow up and Frodo's persistent wound and unfitness for the world is clear. In its place, Jordan ends abruptly instead of lovingly. I have this vision of Sanderson collapsing on the floor with exhaustion unable to write another word. Rand rides off into the sunset alone with three women contentedly pining away in the background. After all the wounds that won't heal and taints and tragedies inherent in power in Jordan, it's all washed away by reversion and we are back where we started, and the wheel continues to turn. I guess saidar is cleansed, that's something. But how was it cleansed? Some very powerful magic that has no emotional or personal equivalent beyond requiring male and female cooperation and a really big ter'angreal. In Jordan, the world is saved to be back where it was. In Tolkien, the world is saved for the new healer-king to rule and the one who saved it is not fit for it anymore. I have to tell you, one of these resonates more with me, and it's not the one with the women left behind. It's the one with the women ruling alongside their spouses and healing the land itself. Jordan's ending is, indeed, too happy. It does not ring true, and I only teared up a little, once. When reading Tolkien I couldn't even finish when Frodo sees the white sands at the end ...

So, in the end, the very end, a very good place to end: as I've grown up Robert Jordan has grown in my estimation and is now my second-favorite fantasy author. First place used to be Tad Williams but as you can tell, with time and seasoning he dropped to third place (I still don't think he's topped To Green Angel Tower). As you can tell, in my reading, Tolkien's genius endures and grows with depth the more it is explored. Long live the tweedy king.

Robert Jordan vs. J.R.R. Tolkien, Part 3: People and Heroes

One huge difference, perhaps the largest, between Tolkien and Jordan is in the way they write people. The differences are evident in the population of the world: Jordan's is clearly more "human" in focus. Of non-humans, the evil creatures are the diverse ones (Trollocs, Myrddraal,  Draghkar, Gray Men, the entire ecosystem of the Blight), although we understand more of Tolkien's orc society than we ever do of the evil non-humans in Jordan.  Don't even start about the Aelfinn and Eelfinn, they're just plain weird. As for good creatures, you have the Ogier, and I suppose the weird Seanchan beasts, but really all the diversity is in the human culture itself. Jordan's people are truly distinct, almost a little too distinct in that if you've seen one Domani, you've seen them all, and there's so many permutations of hairstyles that I lost count. Two of Jordan's greatest creations are the social structures of the Aiel and the Seanchan. And then there's an entire other people, the Shara, who drop in without warning to make the Last Battle a fair fight for the bad guys. Only in Robert Jordan can the reader forget an entire subcontinent.

This societal diversity in Jordan's world is mirrored by racial diversity in Middle-Earth: elves, dwarves, two (three?) kinds of orcs, trolls, dragons, Balrogs, and of course hobbits. There's a few nations of humans but who can tell them apart? One of them likes horses and mead-halls. The interesting thing here is that there's more fluidity between Tolkien's races than there is between Jordan's societies, in that you have the half-elven and the fact that orcs were made in imitation of (and if I recall correctly, FROM) elves. The Rohirrim and the Gondorians have many deep connections. Much of Tolkien's emphasis on race rubs 21st-century sensibilities the wrong way, but the barriers are not as strong as they seem on first glance, even between species. I do wish we knew more about the Harad men and Easterlings, because after all my Tolkien study they still seem like crudely drawn stereotypes to me, in a way that even orcs do not. Of course, we spend time with orc companies on two occasions and we never see the other human countries except in battle.

As for the "made male and female" form of diversity, Robert Jordan clearly has the edge in obvious, strong female characters. All the wizards are women, at least at first, and they do fine at taking care of themselves, thank you very much. One of the most resonant parts of Jordan is the limitations on men, the "taint" on male saidin magic that means all the magic power goes to the women of his world. This "taint" is like its own substance and is driven out with power. This is quite the opposite of Tolkien's version of corruption (the ring, but also the dragon-sickness and the dwarvish greed for vengeance), which is more a subversion of the will and seems to come from within rather than be imposed from without.

Jordan clearly has the edge on female charcters that are believable and important. Yet I still want to point out that in the context of Beowulf, the kind of story Tolkien was trying to write, the female characters in Lord of the Rings stand out from that just as much as Jordan's women stand out from Tolkien's! And for all the strength of the female characters, in Jordan, it's really the male characters that we follow and that run the show: Rand, Mat, and Perrin. One of the aspects of the Wheel of Time that continues to bug me is Rand's harem, that somehow he's such a ta'veren that he makes three different, strong women fall in love with him and share him without issues. I remember when that kind of thing happened in the Old Testament and I don't believe it was too stable of an arrangement.

But there's another but to this but: Egwene. I would never have predicted this, but in the last 4 or 5 books of the series, basically since she became Amyrlin, she became my favorite character. And (I TOLD YOU THIS WOULD HAVE SPOILERS) it seems incredibly fitting that she dies in the end. She is the youngest Amyrlin seat, and believably wields authority. She fights back against incredible odds, politically, in taking back the White Tower. My biggest surprise from Jordan is that my favorite sequence involves how this young magic-user negotiates the politics of sacrifice and endurance to plausibly defeat her enemies from within, without "firing a shot" of magic power in her own defense. I thought my favorite sequence would be the last battle, but it was Egwene winning the White Tower. Even her role in the Last Battle is one of my favorites, as she figures out anti-balefire and self-immolates in the light, stamping the entire ending with an entirely appropriate sense of loss. I thought that would be Rand, and perhaps it should have been Rand too. But in that scene, I think Egwene did what Rand also should have done. At least someone did it.

Which brings us to the heroes of the Last Battle. Jordan gets what Tolkien also got: battles are about heroism, not tactics. The key part of the Battle of Pelannor Fields is the charge of the Rohirrim and the arrival of Aragon in the ships of the Corsairs, the thrilling turns of the tide. There's enough of that in Jordan but it's more on the personal level, at least in the Last Battle, than it is on the level of surprise tactics. (The surprise tactics in the Last Battle include ambushing people with gateway cannon, which just seems unsporting and downright non-heroic, though still kind of a cool idea.) The sequence of attacks against Demandred, beginning with Gawyn riding off on a doomed march with the bloody Seanchan rings, and running through Galad, Logain, and finally Lan, is just what heroism is about. I do wish more of them had died, actually. Lan's ending move to defeat Demandred was obvious but perfectly fitting in that obvious kind of way. I only think it would have been more perfectly fitting if he had indeed lost his life in taking Demandred's. For a series that is fully ending, A Memory of Light was a little light on the body count. But, really, so was Lord of the Rings.

The best moment of the Last Battle? Olver blowing the Horn (something no one expected, thinking it would have to be Mat), all alone, almost ended, and then ... his old friend rides up as one of the resuscitated Heroes of the Horn, back from the grave to save him one last time. That little moment with that (literally) minor character, perhaps because it caught me off guard, was my favorite of that 200-page chapter. That's what heroism is about.

On the whole, I think Jordan's people resonate with me more, but I also have to remember that, while Jordan took all the time he could to make his characters detailed and relatable, Tolkien was looking for a bit of distance in his people and how he wrote them. Tolkien deliberately made his characters stilted (except for the hobbits, of course) and made them say things like "alas" and "behold" and all that. Tolkien just didn't place as high a priority on humanizing his characters, because he was consciously writing an epic, not a novel. So there's certainly more humans in Jordan, but I do wonder if, in 50 years, that will seem as archaic and odd as Tolkien's -- only not deliberately so. And all those heroes did what they did, but none literally walked through the valley of the shadow of death like Aragorn on the paths of the dead. Hard to be more heroic than that.

[Next in Part 4: Plot and Endings]

Robert Jordan vs. J.R.R. Tolkien, Part 2: Science and Magic

The worlds Jordan and Tolkien have created are built out of the ordinary atop a substrate of extraordinary. I'd like to look at the invisible forces first, that is, how their worlds are constructed and the forces, technological and magical, that manipulate each one.

Science/Technology:

Both Jordan and Tolkien have an implicit direction of technological advancement. This is obvious in Jordan, with characters who invent cannons, gunpowder, and steam engines. I like those details, it gives the books a steampunk vibe that is different from Tolkien's vision. True, Jordan's visions of the distant past include flying vehicles and other futuristic images, but it's never clear if those are magic or science (or, in Clarke's famous quote, both?). Whatever happened in the Age of Legends, for the current age, science and mechanism is providing a way forward.

What most people don't realize is that Tolkien has a more tragic, less mechanical vision of progress, but he has a vision nonetheless. Although he's vague on these points, Tolkien at times told others he intended Lord of the Rings to be our own myth, in our own past. As such, it shows the ascent of man and the departure of the elves. The dwarves, ents, and even the Astari/wizards are also clearly on their way out. The closest thing to a mechnical inventor is Saruman -- Tolkien clearly has a less "mechanical" vision of how humans should progress! -- but the return of the King is leading to a world of less magic and more humans. I can imagine someone inventing a cannon in the future. Anybody care to write fan fiction about cannon vs. balrog?

Magic:

Jordan's magic is divided up into five elemental-like substances (the four usual suspects + spirit) consisting of the One Power. The male/saidar and female/saidin components of this are separate classes as well. Then, in a move that I'm still not sure is exactly parsimonious, he introduces a different power, the True Power, in the later books that is part of the "Dark One's Essence". Does that mean Shai'tan is being tangled around when one of the Forsaken weaves the True Power? Whatever is going on there, it's a bit like chemistry in that magic-users combine elements and, well, make reactions go, like fireballs or Healing. It's a nice system that conveys complexity and the need for skill in determining the power of different magic-users. You even have specializations in that Nynaeve can Heal well and Androl can make gateways but do little else.

The gateway magic itself seems to be something that Jordan only graadually realized could be so powerful, but it certainly became perhaps the hallmark spell of the series. Not only gates to transport or see new things, but spinning Deathgates were invented. Some of the rules seem arbitrary (thank goodness Trollocs can't go through Waygates) but there's an empirical process of discovery and trial and error in which the reader, and presumably the author himself, figures out the implications of these magical gates as we go along. In this way the magic is like science, and is somewhat technological as well.

Tolkien's magic is never emphasized the way it is in the later examples of the genre he founded. We never find out what it really is, or what constitutes strength in a field, or what makes it go. What we do see is usually explainable by other means, such as Gandalf's delaying the trolls till the sun comes out, or the mano-a-mano confrontation of Gandalf and Denethor. It's important to remember that Denethor is in some senses an equal of the great wizard Gandalf, so magic and political power overlap at least somewhat. Also, the political power of King Elessar is combined with a healing hand, another way in which social power and medical power overlap. Tolkien is saying something about the healing of all of creation, in which body and soul are joined and a good king is also a good doctor.

As you get into the story, Tolkien's magic seems more real and Jordan's less so. The fact of the matter is that fireballs are cool the first time and after a few go-rounds seem just like fancy cannonballs. Think of the difference between the way magic feels at Dumai's Wells and in the Last Battle. Even balefire becomes normal with overuse. The more powerful a detailed magic element is, like balefire, the less easy it is to work out its implications. What makes something disappear vs. lose a bit when balefire hits it? Shouldn't there be a popping sound when air is balefired out of the Pattern? (Note that Perrin finds out that creating a vacuum prevents the propagation of sound at one point in the last book!) Strength in Tolkien's magic is closely related to the human will itself, something that I think in our 21st-century enlightment we discount or even forget.

Perhaps Jordan's magic is ultimately mechanical and Tolkien's is organic, growing from life itself and the ties that bind creature to environment. Tolkien never forgot that "spell" means "word" at its root, and the very act of speaking and persuasion is therefore a form of magic, useful for healing or destruction. That makes Tolkien's magic more enduring, more relevant, and more real. The persuasive powers of Saruman's voice constitute a magic spell ultimately more chilling than balefire.

Next up in Part 3: People and Heroes

Robert Jordan vs. J.R.R. Tolkien, Part 1

Having just finished Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, I can finally look back over the whole thing and compare it to the trilogy that started it all, J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (considering The Hobbit as prelude). Lest this seem like simply an "ugliest orc" and "sharpest sword" type comparison, I'm going to focus on the more fundamental aspects of their work. How do the authors see the world? Having the chance to "sub-create" (in Tolkien's terms), how did they craft their worlds? In essence, what is the natural theology of the worlds they have made? It's interesting how I could not make a real comparison between the two until Jordan had finished his story. So much depends on the ending.

Theology is not an accidental or artifically imposed term. Both were commited Christians, Tolkien a Catholic and Jordan a self-described high-church Episcopalian (almost like Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis?). There are distinct differences, the biggest being that Tolkien grew up in the first half of the 20th century while Jordan grew up and wrote in the second half. But they both imagined worlds that are attractive just for the level of detail in them, worlds with magic and swords and evil monsters and heroic deeds.

Sometimes I'm disappointed looking around with the level of detail that is present in, say, an ordinary church built 100 years ago vs. one built (or more likely, repurposed) today. Tolkien and Jordan give evidence that the faithful detailing that used to go into the stone through a craftsman's chisel may now be evident in the interior spaces carved out by our authors. The keyboard as the new chisel. Both worlds are certainly as intricate as a vast mosaic or a cathedral's statuary.

Since I'm convinced that this fantasy genre is indeed valuable (convinced enough to have spent hundreds of hours reading about people and places that don't technically exist), I think it's valuable to dig down into it. Since this introduction is long enough in itself for a blog post, I'll split it up into parts and work my way through the comparisons over the next month.

It should go without saying in huge letters: SPOILER ALERT. Part of the whole tension of waiting for an ending is seeing what it reveals about the author's beliefs, intentions, and view of the world. So, yeah, I'll be talking about how it all ends. The Internet sort of forces immediate consumption of any new media for spoilerphobes at any rate. (But my recent review of the last book is indeed spoiler-free!)