How much did Tolkien, or even Eddings’ Belgariad chronicles influence the WOT series?
Eddings certainly not at all, and as for Tolkien, only to the degree that (1) he showed that it was possible to write a very large series of books, a very large story, and (2) the fact that I purposely did the first, oh, perhaps 80 pages of The Eye of the World as an homage to Tolkien in a way, that it was set in the same sort of pastoral country that Tolkien wrote about.
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