I have a kind of a question which…so much doesn’t connect directly to the Wheel of Time world except that it also connects Wheel of Time to the broader scope of our world, and I’ve just been itching to ask this: I’ve recently been in a course in Restoration Literature, and in the historical studies there, I noted that there seem to be connections between Cairhien and London around the time of the mid-to-early 1600s: the fact that the city is part built against a river, the city burns when the Aiel attack, and there are various cultural features that seem to reflect London around that time period, and I was wondering, am I just completely imagining this? I know occasionally Mr. Jordan would take things from various different places and kind of merge them together to create a unique, individual space, and I just was sort of wondering if there is actually any of historical London in Cairhien, and if there is, is there any more anywhere else in the major cities?
Yes, yes. One thing you have to remember about Jim is he never did a single reference in any of his descriptions, whether it’s a military uniform, a city, a character—everything seemed to draw from multiple sources. So yes, Cairhien was most likely in part based on London, but you look at the map of it, and you can see it’s very different as well. It’s laid out in a very rigid grid fashion. You could say in that case, well, maybe it’s based on New York City in part as well, and it has a palace up on the highest hill within the bounds of the city. That’s not true of London, but it’s true of other places. And London wasn’t the only city burned by attack; there were many others. But yeah, I mean Jim had a huge number of books in his reference library, and he traveled a lot as well, so he saw many of these places, and in typical Jim fashion…you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had eight or ten or twelve influences in the creation of Cairhien.
That’s great, because what actually caught my notice—because, even the Great Fire of 1666 probably would have passed me by in connection to the Wheel of Time world, except for the fact that, then I looked at the semi-Puritanical dress that the nobles in the city were taken to wearing, and then we were…I actually on the day I thought of this question was sitting there looking at a screen with the picture of Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector, and I was just like, “You know, that’s like, almost what I kind of envisioned the Cairhienin nobility to kind of look like.”
Well, one thing we’ve never seen in any of the Wheel of Time history that I can recall—and London, just talking about it brought it to mind—is, we’ve never seen a large-scale plague in history, like with the Great Plague of the year…I’ve forgotten now.
Mmhmm.
Yeah.
Well, of course, so many of the rats have been eliminated, but they’re back now.
They’re back! Maybe your plague is coming, like they need more trouble. [laughter]
The Last… (cross-talk)
No, go ahead…
The Last Battle is…
It’s funny that you brought up London as an influence, because most people when they’re talking about influences on Cairhien, they really pick up on the court of the Sun King and Marie Antoinette because the style is very, you know, 1700s, late-1700s and Marie Antoinette, and there’s also a lot of Japanese influence, and that tends to be what people pick up on. So this is the first time I’ve had somebody say, “You know, I think there’s a London in Cairhien,” so that’s kind of interesting.
I guess everybody brings something different to the books, and interprets them in their own way.
Oh yeah, definitely.
Yeah, another interesting point: anyone remember what the name Cairhien means in the Old Tongue?
Hill of the Golden Dawn.
Hill of the Golden Dawn. The Order of the Golden Dawn was an occult society in London back before the beginning of the 20th Century.
This particular society was Kabbalistic, and their hierarchy is based on the Tree of Life. Many other parallels can be drawn.
Yeah, that’s right. I’d forgotten that.
Which I just bring out as, you know, yet another thing that Jim latched on to and threw into the mix.
Most people think ‘the hill of the golden dawn’ is like, ‘Oh, the land of the rising sun!’ which would be Japan, because there’s a heavy Japanese influence in just the style of the buildings and things like that seem very Japanese.
Sure. And the Sun King of France.
Yeah. It’s kind of like he just pulled everything that was related to the sun and just kind of melded it together to make Cairhien.
Yeah.
He liked mixing things up.
And it works really well. That’s the surprising thing to me is that he was able to pull from so many different sources and make things seem very coherent and logical for the cultures.
Yeah, I like the fact that everything that you read as you’re going along, all these things sort of tug at the back of your mind and you’re thinking, ‘Oh, this reminds me of this, and this reminds me of that’, and it makes you really think that it adds a depth to the thing that you can come back later and explore it again.
Okay, I’ve got a game for you. Go to Wikipedia. Put in something like ‘golden dawn’, let’s say…or just anything. Pull anything from the Wheel of Time books that’s distinctive. Put it into Wikipedia until you find a hit. I almost guarantee, within that article, you’re going to find yet another reference from the Wheel of Time. Track that. See how many hits you can go before you run out.
I’ll have to try that.
I did that the other day, and I wound up spending an hour and a half of just going from one thing to another. It was really amazing.
Yeah, I can see myself losing an afternoon doing that.
Oh yeah, easily.
Very easily.
I’ve lost too many hours to Wiki-walking already.
I guess that’s why it bothers me so much about that library ter’angreal …if I had that, I’d never be able to put it down, and I guess I just don’t understand how somebody could…if they can’t deal with it, then delegate, but this is me. It’s the equivalent of having a computer hooked up to the internet; I could not walk away from it. It would be a Mindtrap for me. [laughter]
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