Wouldn't the conduit have to be of the power? If the power can remake it, that leads me to think that the power is what makes it. Maybe males are made of saidar and females saidin?

 

Possibly, that could explain why a woman can heal a man back to full strength but only give another woman back a faction of her original power and vice versa. However it do seam likely that if this is the case that the connection is made up of both sides with a main bulk of it being made up of the opposite side from the gender of the channeler since a woman can heal a female channeler at least partly, and if a woman's connection was pure saidin and vice versa then a channeler should not be able to heal severing in someone of the same gender as them at all.

The Cleansing scene seems to say that Saidin and Saidar repel each other, which then implies that saidar has some sort of attraction to itself. So making a Saidar Conduit out of Saidar would lead to a "clogging" of the flow of the power, while saidin would allow for complete flow.

While I'm not supporting this theory, it could also be that since saidar and saidin repel, all of the saidin channeled through a conduit of saidar makes it to the other side, whereas saidin channeled through a conduit of saidin is permeable, meaning the pipe is leaky, and leaks just go right back to the True Source, while only a much lesser amount makes it across the bridge.

I doubt Be'lal knew exactly how events went down at the Eye of the World, if he even knew of it at all.

@Vard The Joker in The Dark Knight. He lost RIGHT at the end because he didn't understand people as well as he thought he did. Not because the technicals of his plans were off.

 

Mostly, I just want the villains to actually BE a threat. So I have a reason to care about what's going on

I believe that they are, but that one weakness of the series is that Jordan's unable (imo) to consistently make that threat level feel present. It requires analyzing what the villains have actually accomplished, which is quite a bit, but a lot of it is done off-screen.

What exactly was Bel'al's plan? How was he planning to get Callandor from Rand after he picked it up? Use the Wonder Girls as hostages? Use the black Ajah to shield Rand from the power then take Callandor from him?

 

No. Just kick his arse once Rand touched it. Rand only had to breach the shield and it was broken, so when rand touched it, BAM, blow him up before he draws through it.

 

All in all, not a very smart plan.

Beating an untrained, slightly mad youth who can't even grasp saidin at will or see his own weaves? That actually sounds pretty easy, if still a bit of a risk. Be'lal and the Forsaken still had no real knowledge of ta'veren and the effects they can have. There's comments that LTT seemed lucky at times, but the idea of it actually being a real attribute is entirely new. Be'lal also couldn't have anticipated that any modern, "primitive," Aes Sedai would even know the weave for balefire, let alone have the will to use it.

I just tackled The Hunger Games trilogy. Not perfect, but very good in many respects. I'm still letting myself process the final book. I'm a bit older than its targeted audience, but after hearing so much about it (and positive things as well from some reviewers I respect) I thought I'd look into what teens are reading these days.

From EncWoT http://encyclopaedia.../taringail.html

 

Taringail plots to become the first king of Andor. Thom Merrilin learns of the plot and Taringail dies in a "hunting accident". (TSR,Ch17, TFoH,Ch19)

 

Recall that Thom is known as the Grey Fox.. and has 'very special' knives. He's not just a gleeman.

From EncWoT http://encyclopaedia.../taringail.html

 

Taringail plots to become the first king of Andor. Thom Merrilin learns of the plot and Taringail dies in a "hunting accident". (TSR,Ch17, TFoH,Ch19)

 

Recall that Thom is known as the Grey Fox.. and has 'very special' knives. He's not just a gleeman.

 

I suppose I failed to read between the lines or something. I mean I got the while he killed Galladrian or whatever, but I never got the hunting accident one. WTF.

Let me direct you to a quote from a different thread.

It's been hinted at and conjectured but not certain that Thom is a double-regicide. Galdrian we're almost 100% sure he killed and we know the reason. About Taraingail, there is a hint however, in Moiraine's conversation with him in TSR. Chapter 17

Her smile was just short of laughter' date=' but she spoke as if reading from a page. “Thomdril Merrilin. Called

the Gray Fox, once, by some who knew him, or knew of him. Court-bard at the Royal Palace of Andor in

Caemlyn. Morgase’s lover for a time, after Taringail died. [b']Fortunate for Morgase, Taringail’s death. I do not

suppose she ever learned he meant her to die and himself to be Andor’s first king. [/b]But we were speaking of

Thom Merrilin, a man who, it was said, could play the Game of Houses in his sleep. It is a shame that such a

man calls himself a simple gleeman. But such arrogance to keep the same name.”

Clearly Moiraine thought he had and Moiraine had a personal interest since she was Taraingail's step sister.

http://www.dragonmou...lled-tarangail/

So it seems like one of those things that have never been clarified but is intuitively obvious to the astute reader.

Has the idea that the 23 stars represent the 21 sitters plus the Keeper and the Amyrlin been dismissed? I don't know if it's my favorite idea, but I've seen it mentioned.

Keep in mind that over 1,000 years have passed. A thousand years ago I'm pretty sure Europe was dominated by warlords and kings seeking to expand their own power and warring with each other.

 

You're missing the point. We don't know what is connected to anything. Rand said he could have tied off that weave holding those people down (regardless of what you say, it's a good example using the strength argument), what is he tying it down too? The ground? So if you dig it up will that mean they can move? You're applying real world physics to a world that defys it. In our world, you need a catalyst to create fire, they create it out of nothing.

 

And yes a man can lift 2 women, I can lift 3 depending on size, but the amount of weight I can lift is not only judged by my strength, but my balance and real world physics, i.e. if woman a leans too far forward, we will tip over. If RL physics apply, the balance issue should come into play when lifting weights/people. Otherwise, it's not anchored to the person at all, and is self-supporting. Unless you want to apply some physics and not other.

They can't make fire out of nothing, they make it out of the One Power. It's fueled by the flows that they call Fire. Evidence pretty much shows that flows of air supporting things need to be grounded in some way, either to the person, or between pillars of support (Elayne making a bridge). As for balancing issues, I don't think it breaks the laws of physics. Is it anchored to the channeler, or is it anchored through the channeler to the True Source itself? I don't know. But just because we don't know the explanation doesn't mean there isn't one.

WoT world is not 100% compatible with medieval times in our world. But there are certain strands, issues, disciplines, areas, etc. that are very similar to our world. These include the human race populating Randland, the warfare, the farming, the transportation system, the economics, the technology, and other similar issues.

 

In our world, it requires each couple to have 2.2 children for society to continue to grow numerically. Can we apply this stat to Randland? Or does it take 4.0 offspring per couple for society to grow?

 

On Rand's\Mat's flight to Caemlyn from Whitebridge they entered a number of farms. Most of them seem to have traditional farming families. I remember one farm where the farmer said that his 4 healthy boys will come soon. And the Grinwell household had many children. And in Perrin's march through the Two Rivers during the Trolloc attacks, we find that households have many children.

 

When RJ and the experts say that Randland population has been in decline since the Breaking, then that is the case. No arguing against it. But that doesn't fit with the principles of demographics of a similar world. Maybe Randland is hit with a "Great Plague" every few generations. The one that happened in our medieval world killed one-third of Europe's population!

 

Well think about, it, for all those families we see with multiple children, we see some with none, or 1 or no survivors left. Look at Ny, she was an only child right? As was "Rand." Sure, Perrin and Mat were both one of many, as well as Eggy, although I always found that odd that her siblings were the only ones never really mentioned, besides the fact that her mother raised some. Did they leave Two Rivers?But there were other families in the Two Rivers with none, Aunts and Uncles and such. We don't know enough to really go too in depth with it.

 

I think that if we go back; we'll find that most farming communities had a majority of households that had multiple children. In any case, taking the discussion down that route will have me running around in circles. And I don't think I can take notice of household statistics in my current reread! The facts are there: Randland population has been in decline since the Breaking.

I don't think the bolded is entirely accurate, at least not in the way I think you mean it. The Breaking, the Trolloc Wars, and the War of the Hundred Years/Seanchan conquest/Shara invasion all took many lives of those living. But the unnatural downward pressure on population growth seems to have only started within the last millenia of the story, and perhaps even the last few centuries, as the DO's ability to touch the world has increased.

As long as the magic is consistent, you can apply the scientific method to it and figure out how it works.

 

Science has a long history of new paradigms, all it really means is that the rules that applied before the discovery have to be modified to account for it.

 

Of course, if you have a magic model that isn't consistent, an omnipotent god who applies magic when he feels like it for instance, then that is outside science as reproducibility is key to the whole system.

I meant physics as we know it. I mean yea you can apply rules to magic, but they would constantly be changing as people developed skill with the magic, much moreso that we have with science today.

Well, I don't know if Jordan accounted for the Higgs Field, but I'm pretty sure the laws of physics do apply on most levels. Universal and world history may defy science a little, though, and there's probably a source of energy putting energy into the system so the universe doesn't end up energy-less, but Newton's Laws, Einstein's theories of general and special relativity, and even a bit of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics (on a more limited, non-universal level) certainly apply.

It is as if the Seals only partially succeeded.

They did only partially succeed. That's part of the foundation for the plot.

It's been awhile since my last read, and I may be wrong on the timeline, but is there any chance Halima "strengthened" Egwene as an Amyrlin and pushed her to actually declare war on Elaida? What could be better for the Shadow than trying to create a bloody civil war between Aes Sedai?

What is technology if it's not the means of applying human labor to raw materials to produce some intermediate or final good or service? Slavery and human rights abuses aimed at generating production certainly are technologies, they're just not particularly desirable ones. And one thing we know about human beings is that we use the technology that has the highest production/cost ratio available. Slavery often has the highest production/cost ratio, because it's pretty cheap to keep a human being and keep him/her relatively healthy through their productive lives, and human beings with even just a little bit of experience/education are usually extremely productive. Over the long run, slavery can have a higher production/cost ratio than even the use of competitive wages (and yes, that's a kind of tech as well), because competition will drive the wages below sustainability, which depresses production. Add magic into the mix, and slavery of channelers will certainly have the highest production/cost ratio. The only reason the Westlands don't enslave channelers is because they lack the a'dam, and now that the Seanchan have introduced it, whether they survive or not, ongoing enslavement of channelers for productive purposes is an economic certainty unless the currently free channelers are able to destroy every last a'dam and the means to produce more.

 

This does present an issue for competing technologies, and since we're talking about magic here, that's all technologies, because there's no reason to develop, say, that steam engine that pulls trains of wagons we saw in Tear into the rail system we see in Avi's glass column visions when we've got Elayne's Gateway service provided by the Kin or the same thing provided by legions of collared Seanchan damane. Why bother increasing the efficiency of that engine when you can pay substantially less to the noble or merchant who owns the damane who can make gateways? Why bother applying that engine, or the device that uses animal power to run multiple scythes, or any other such innovation, when you can sing and channel your crops into growing and harvest? The idea that there are too few channelers to do everything that needs doing is an issue, but channelers doing the major heavy-lifting significantly impedes the development of competing technologies.

 

The Age of Legends could plausibly be an age of legends because it follows our own age, when technology has been advanced as far as it has in the absence of magic, and where the discovery of magic as a technological innovation takes all the previous innovations, things like automobiles and lasers and skyrise towers and modern agriculture and radically advances them. The steam engine, or more properly, the internal combustion engine, has an economic role to play in the Age of Legends, but only because it had a role to play prior to the discovery of the One Power, and the One Power enhances that role. But in the Third Age, there is no easy role for the steam engine or the i-c engine to play. It'd be cheaper to simply breed channelers so there's not such a dearth of them and teach them to link and Travel.

 

And in fact, economics and demographics is Jordan's weakest point in his world-building, so probably the best thing to do is to not try to justify the economic/demographic decay of the Third Age in some rational sense. Look at it from a purely demographic perspective. Channelers live 4 to 6 times longer than the ordinary person, are vastly more productive/adaptable/valuable than an ordinary person, and apparently remain fertile for 4 to 6 times longer than an ordinary person as well. It shouldn't take more than a few hundred generations for Channelers to dominate the population if Channeling is at all hereditary, and the books heavily imply that it is. Instead, even at the end of the AoL, channies make up only at most 3%. Jordan didn't understand demographic dynamics and he didn't understand economics very well either and all but admits it in the scene where Rand starts worrying about the poor in Tear and the idiocy of the nobles, and Lews Therin is depicted as maundering on about taxes and jobs and public works and things Rand didn't understand. Rand's lack of understanding is Jordan's lack of understanding. So basically, the economy/population fell because that's what the plot requires.

Tear's class stratification is abysmal, even compared to the rest of the Westlands. To some degree it reminds me of France in the 1700s. I'm not saying Jordan's spot on with his economics or demographics, but I'm not sure how Rand's thoughts on worrying about the poor really sheds light on anything in this context.

As for the decrease in population, that's odd. Even if we assume a lower fertility rate due to the empowerment of women, the population should still be increasing. The "best" explanation may very well be "the dark one did it".

As for the slave commentary, really, just stop. There are plenty of civilizations that banned slavery because they found it abhorrent before modern machinery replaced it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_slavery_timeline

And there are labor intensive industries still where slaves would be more cost-effective than paid labor.

Also, with respect to food spoilage, there are instances in the book where the one power and even more mundane efforts such as cold storage (cellars and iceboxes) can slow the food degradation. This is very important given the very finite food resources that must tide the world over up until the final battle and afterwards in the event of victory. I do however think the books focused far too much on this spoilage. At the rate it was supposedly happening half the people in the world should be dead by now anyway.

Your talking as if the spoilage is natural. It's not. The wards that keep food (and other things) preserved and in stasis don't even protect against the spoiling anymore.

Thanks, Suttree. That's the type of source I wanted.

Are we sure that the population is actually in decline? Or are we just going off of the inability of governments to hold onto territory and maintain themselves?

Yes, we are sure that the population is in decline. There are a great many sparsely inhabited regions on the map.

Alright, this is a flippant remark, but I wasn't aware that the maps in the book included anything on population density.

Mr. Ares Randland has had 996 years of relative calm, the entire time the population has been decreasing, it isn't subtle and unnoticed, it has been noticed, Ingtar says it out loud.

What is unclear is how it is happening... what mechanism is in effect? why just randland and not the Aiel?

It doesn't make sense.

 

No comment on population, but the collapse of nations, political instability, and weakening of governments is due to corruption by the infiltration of darkfriends at all levels of power structure. That much has been made obvious. It may be easier to assume that the less bureaucratic and adherence to ji e toh nature of the Aiel have made them more difficult to corrupt and infiltrate.

 

Are we sure that the population is actually in decline? Or are we just going off of the inability of governments to hold onto territory and maintain themselves?

 

 

Just going based on how much the population should have bloomed. Those vast tracts of unclaimed land should have been claimed slowly every generation. Farmers having 9 sons should send some out into nearby empty land, who would then farm the land and have sons and do the same. One would think empires would continue to grow every year, given a lot of empty space. Well, they've got the land, but they're not expanding into it.

We don't really know for sure how populated the vast territories of the westlands are. Just because there is no organized political body claiming lines on a map doesn't mean an area isn't populated. Without a government, most of these little villages are probably pretty insulated and don't see much growth. I still stand by my statement that the fertility rate might be lower in Randland compared to in the real world for comparable time periods because of the higher status of women and easier access to contraception.

Mr. Ares Randland has had 996 years of relative calm, the entire time the population has been decreasing, it isn't subtle and unnoticed, it has been noticed, Ingtar says it out loud.

What is unclear is how it is happening... what mechanism is in effect? why just randland and not the Aiel?

It doesn't make sense.

No comment on population, but the collapse of nations, political instability, and weakening of governments is due to corruption by the infiltration of darkfriends at all levels of power structure. That much has been made obvious. It may be easier to assume that the less bureaucratic and adherence to ji e toh nature of the Aiel have made them more difficult to corrupt and infiltrate.

Are we sure that the population is actually in decline? Or are we just going off of the inability of governments to hold onto territory and maintain themselves?

like perrin, his story wasn't bad, faile was horrible, a real negative influence,

Everyone complains about Faile, but not usually because of who she is, but because they think Perrin sucks. Faile pretty much agrees with all of you and tries to encourage him to be more authoritative and to take up his leadership role, yet she gets the blame for his failings and his codependency. It's not as if she ensorcelled him with magic or even attempted to manipulate him through feminine charms. That's what Berelain does. Perrin would have been a lot weaker without Faile. She's only been a positive influence.

Good insight. I kind of always knew this about Perrin, but never really made the logical leap to thinking about him as an introvert.

A lot of people are turned off by Perrin's single-mindedness and his dangerous obsession with freeing Faile from the Shadow, even if it means "making a deal with the Dark One". Part of me wonders if he wasn't also being pushed and pulled by the Pattern during this sequence, but he didn't notice it this time because it did align with what he wanted, even if it made him go to extremes.

I wonder if we can assume that the higher status of women in Randland has led to lower (on average) fertility rates within the population. It also seems like the population has access to family planning methods as well (heartleaf tea). I think the biggest factor in the decline of civilization in Randland has to do with corruption. Jordan never made a major plot of the corruption issues outside of the White Tower, but the most rational explanation to the stagnation and decline is that most of the political and social institutions in Randland are nearly as infiltrated.

See the future? See the past? You would think that they wouldn't have cracked the Dark Ones Prison if that was the case.

 

I don't think that the world was more advanced then ours.

 

I think it actually was our world. Just in a future time when we have Aes Sedai. Go ahead and laugh. But the descriptions of some of the Sangreal etc. Elayne found a statue of a hippy from woodstock. There are others as well. Planes and cars. Flashlights = Glowsticks. Tazers = Shock Lances. It's all there.

Our Age is most likely the First Age, the Age Before the Age of Legends - there is evidence of that in the books, such as Thom's stories. The AoL is more advanced that out own Age. Shock lances are directed energy weapons, not just tasers, their vehicles are more environmentally friendly than our own, and they can create a giant research station that floats in the air. That last without the OP.

It seems considerably more likely to me that our age is somewhere between the 5th and 7th ages, as we see in Aviendha's vision in Rhuidean a future of guns, cannons, steam-driven vehicles etc. If we take such a level of technology as the 4th age, which in our calendar would probably have been the late 17th century onwards, then following the logical technological progression from there, it makes sense. That is very much a convergent technological development system.

I've held our "Age" to be the 7th Age to help explain the existence of the portal stones. That may not be necessary, it could be the 1st. Anyway, an age isn't stagnant in its technological progress. It doesn't mean much that 4th age technology is equivalent to our 17th century technology in terms of placing the Age. I don't remember a single global empire existing a few hundred years ago. The way I see it there will be another global calamity. Our world-wide mythologies about massive floods and the story about the Tower of Babel (we're everyone's scattered and speaking different languages) seem to hint at that (remembering that Jordan's basic premise that history eventually becomes mythology and that he used mythology to inspire the Wheel of Time). It won't necessarily be a physical Breaking, just something that breaks apart civilization.

(Let me also clarify that I'm not saying every Age ends with a Breaking of some sort. I don't believe that.)

The White Tower strikes me as a deeply conservative institution. The Dark One's prison breached due to progressive experimentation with the one power, and this led to the Breaking and the fall of civilization. In addition to that trauma, most of the knowledge was lost; Aes Sedai became a rare commodity, and the focus had to be on preserving what knowledge they had and preserving what numbers they had. This is why there's such a strong tradition of not experimenting in the White Tower; this mindset is drilled into the heads of novices and accepted, and it's only in recent times that young members are passing through the ranks so fast (due to their great relative strength to the rest of the Tower) The Aes Sedai have also been focused on preservation of history and knowledge, first after the Breaking, then after the Trolloc Wars, then after the civil wars after the collapse of Artur Hawkwing's empire. The long lives of Aes Sedai have also slowed down the evolution of the White Tower as an institution.

They are about conservation. They are about preservation. You're not going to see progressive ideology emerging from such an institution. Especially not as the White Tower has become more and more insular and politically weaker as time has passed, particularly post-Hundred Years War.

As for the rest of society not producing enlightenment values? We may be able to partly attribute the Enlightenment as a counter-movement to the the corruption between Church and State and oppression of ideas. There's really no such institutional oppression in Randland, at least on such a large scale.

300 feet is HUGE, when every other building in the area is 30 feet tall.

 

I admit, I see WT as a TOWER several times as tall as it is wide, but that's likely just a cultural assumption. If the tallest building in Indianapolis was 10x as tall as all the rest, I'd find it impressive no matter WHAT shape it was.

 

This is a really neat thread, one of the few that can go into the most intricate details and keep me interested.

---------

Someone asked about the size of the Stone of Tear, and if anyone has any thoughts on it, it would be cool to read.

 

Another thought. I just finished ACoS reread. Many of the buildings in the Rahad in Ebou Dar are said to be six or more stories tall. Does anyone know how feasable this is with that level of technology? (Though, since RJ's said late-17th century tech., I suppose it might click.)

 

I just woke up, so perhaps it's not the best time to be posting, but much of "Old Tar Valon" also constructed by the Ogier is pretty tall. Doesn't Mat speak of bridges fifty spans or paces in the air in the Dragon Reborn?

 

I should find a quote.

 

The Dragon Reborn - The First Toss

Twilight was beginning to cover Tar Valon, but there was still enough light to grace the fantastical buildings, and the oddly shaped towers connected by high bridges spanning open air over hundred-pace drops.

 

...

 

Ogier had built the great buildings and towers of Tar Valon, but other, newer parts had grown under the hands of men. Newer meaning two thousand years in some cases. Down near South-harbor, men's hands had tried to match, if not duplicate, the fanciful Ogier work. Inns where ships' crews caroused bore enough stonework for palaces. Statues in niches and cupolas on rooftops, ornately worked cornices and intricately carved friezes, all decorated chandlers' shops and merchant houses. Bridges arched across the streets here, too, but the streets were cobblestone, not great paving blocks, and many of the bridges were wood instead of stone, sometimes as low as the second stories of the buildings they joined, and never higher than four.

 

So these Ogier built towers in "Old Tar Valon" reach over 300 feet high if they have bridges connecting them together at that height. That's more than half the height of the White Tower (and it's more than half the height regardless of whether or not you agree or disagree with the foot = foot conversion, as 100 paces (the height of the bridges) is half of 100 spans (the height of the White Tower). Even so, the White Tower dominates even them.

 

As for whether 6-8 or so stories tall was feasible in 16th century tech, I can't say.

 

Speaking of time period, I've always wondered about the level of industry and the economy in this world. On my first read when I was much younger I kind of imagined it being an earlier setting, but these people are obviously printing books and other things. What's their textile industry like? What else?

only the seanchan have a printing press at this point, i remember it being mentioned somewhere, the westland books are done by scribes. but yah rj seemed to love to describe things, but something he sorely neglected was technology. i would think that as the seanchan have printing presses that they would have automatic looms (it is suprisingly similar tech) but i would bet the looms in the westlands are hand run and operated (don't think i've even heard of one waterwheel or even windmill in this series, although an auto loom can be ran by a hand crank or pedals just like a small printing press can be). as for a 6 story 16th century building, look at venice, a city with a large number of buildings that pre-date the 17th century, and allot of those buildings are at least 4 stories. many are 5 or more, and only some are over 6. it also has canals which makes it a great analogue for the rahad.

 

as for other buildings in tar valon reaching 300 feet, that just makes a 600 foot centerpeice all the more awe inspiring.

I'm fairly certain RJ said that the printing press was one of the few inventions to survive the breaking. I used ideal seek to check the books for mentions of print and printing.

PRINT

The Shadow Rising - Chapter 53

"They print many very fine books in Caemlyn"

The Fires of Heaven - Chapter 24

"It was a small fat volume with crowded lines of small print"

PRINTING

The Strike at Shayol Ghul

"we can only be thankful that the art of printing survived the Breaking of the World when so much else did not"

Lord of Chaos - Chapter 18

"A great hulking shape of levers and huge flat plates was a printing press"

Winter's Heart - Chapter 16

"Another wagon held a long printing press"

I opened up my book to Lord of Chaos - Chapter 18 to find more of that quote.

This is at the school in Cairhien.

"A great hulking shape of levers and huge flat plates was a printing press, much better than those already in use, according to its maker."

Emphasis mine. There was a library of books, even if it's not that great, in the Two Rivers, and many inns seem too have libraries. I'd have a hard time believing all of those were hand-copied by scribes. There also seems to be a very high rate of literacy that wouldn't really fit in a world without printing presses.