The Wheel of Time is a series of 14 novels by Robert Jordan, which debuted in 1990. You may never have heard of them, but they’ve sold 100 million copies and add up to more than 4 million words. (The Bible is well short of 1 million.) The books are slowly being adapted for TV: it began streaming on Amazon in 2021, and its second season has just started, to be followed by a third, having already been renewed. It’s one of the rare successes in the post–Game of Thrones scramble to create fantasy series.
Since it’s a hit, and since a generation has passed between publication and screen adaptation, we should try to understand how fantasy and popularity have changed the epic’s character. For his part, Jordan wanted to restore in his novels something of the high ambition of Tolkien, and even took up Tolkien’s problem—to connect the Christian idea of the struggle between good and evil defining the conscience to the pre-Christian world defined by magic and tragedy.
Read Full Article »