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Interview #455: TGS Midnight Release - Matt Hatch, Entry #4

Question

Robert Jordan uses a great deal of mythology and lore in his books.

Brandon Sanderson

My answer is, I’m doing my darndest. One thing I love and always have loved about the Wheel of Time is Robert Jordan’s use of mythology. He doesn’t use mythology in kind of almost, how should I say, the bubble gum pop version of it that you see in some other fantasy works. There is a depth and a reality to his mythology that has always amazed me. One of the greatest concepts is what he says in that first paragraph: an Age long past, an Age yet to come. I didn’t get these things the first read through, I was a fifteen-year-old kid I didn’t know what’s going on. I didn’t notice the first time I was reading it that Buzz Aldren and the Cold War are referenced as mythological events in The Eye of the World . […] I love how he’s used mythology as his history and just how Mat in particular but a lot of them are founding myths that become our mythology. I don’t know if you guys have read up on Odin and Locke. Go read up on the mythology of Odin and Locke. They were actually thought to be one person in all of the original myths. See the things attributed to them, including things like ravens and the spear of Odin and things like this. And then see what Mat is doing. The idea is that Mat is actually founding these myths and by the time our Age comes we remember Mat but we have all of this other mythology associated with him and we’ve forgotten that he was even known as Mat. That’s just genius So, I’m doing my best to continue that. It would be very easy to over do it in fan sort of a way. I have to be very careful to not put a reference to something like that in every chapter just because it’s fun. But if you search through The Gathering Storm you should be able to find a few things that are happening. Particularly, I don’t want to give any hints, but the things happening in Hinderstap were intended as things that through a lot of mythology later on become myths in our time. There are references to writers from our world being referenced in The Gathering Storm among books people are studying.

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