Wheel of Time Reread - The Eye of the World - Chapter 1 - Part 2

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The second half of this chapter starts with a description of the Green, which doesn't have as much grass as it should this time of year. The geese don't think there's anything there worth their attention, which sort of implies that geese in this setting...don't eat grass? Alternatively, there might be something a little bit wrong with this grass, which the geese are sensitive enough to pick up on, even if the milk cow that's also staked there isn't. Of course, it's also entirely possible that they're just doing fine eating weeds in the ponds of the Waterwood and just can't be bothered with the sparse grass. 

We get more of the layout of Emond's Field, following the Winespring to the Waterwood, which we're told is swampy in addition to having, as already established, numerous streams and ponds. Th Windespring is described here as "sweet enough to justify its name a dozen times over". Water can be described as "sweet" for a lot of reasons. The Winespring could contain unusually high levels of calcium and iron. It could be a bit alkaline. Heck, the colloquial description of water as "sweet" often just means it's soft water that's good to drink. But given the unusual history of this setting in general and this area in particular, I think it's worth considering that the Winespring may consist partly of heavy water, water where one of the hydrogen molecules is deuterium. It can't all be heavy water, because that would kill everyone for whom it was a primary water source, but enough for the characteristic sweet taste to be detectable. There are basically two ways to get deuterium, and by extension heavy water, in real life. Quite a lot of it was produced during the birth of the universe in which we live, and most of what we use is what's left from the Big Bang - it's in seawater, and can be separated out through industrial processes. It can also be made in a hydrogen-1 fusion reactor, but that isn't really practical. Technically, deuterium is also produced in stars, but it doesn't stay deuterium very long, and I'm almost sure there isn't a star somewhere under the Sand Hills or in the Mountains of Mist. This, assuming it is actually heavy water, leaves two possibilities, on considerably more interesting than the other. Th less interesting option is that there's a ter'angreal somewhere in or near the Winespring's aquifer that makes heavy water, although why anyone would create such a thing I have no idea. The other option, which is more interesting and to my mind more plausible, is that when Eldrene went nuclear during the fall of Manetheren, she in some sense literally went nuclear, creating some kind of ongoing reaction that adds neutrons to some of the water molecules. The Winespring did well up during that part of the battle, so it would make some sense for there to be a connection. 

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There are bonfires already laid for Bel Tine, and the Spring Pole is going up, although Rand does his  best to ignore it - the men are supposed to pretend to be surprised when they see it tomorrow. If this is based on any real world maypole tradition, or any real tradition of any kind, I can't find anything about it. It founds vaguely familiar though, so it's entirely possible that this is a real thing in some context and I'm just not good enough at research. At noon, the unmarried women will dance around it, while the unmarried men sing. If this is a tradition for maypoles or Beltane, I don't recall it, but "the unmarried women all do a thing, and the unmarried men all do a different thing" is certainly a thing for spring fertility rites, which this clearly is. Bel Tine is what, if it weren't so very far removed from the source material, I would call a syncretic tradition, since Beltane and maypole celebrations are actually totally separate things...or they were. I've never in my life participated in a Beltane celebration that didn't include a maypole, but The Eye of the World is a year older than I am, which seems to open up the possibility that this book influenced not just the subsequent literature but actual contemporary neopagan tradition. 

No one in the Two Rivers knows where their Bel Tine traditions came from, or what they're about, but it's an excuse to sing and dance, and that's good enough for them. This, along with the fact that no one knows why the North Road becomes the Old Road south of the Wagon Bridge, serves to underscore that the Two Rivers is a very old place, where things change slowly if they change at all, and that at least as far as Rand knows (and we have no reason to doubt him on this), they like it that way. The information that Two Rivers folk will take pretty much any excuse to sing and dance is an important complication to what we learned in the first half of this chapter about how stubborn they are, how when disaster strikes (and it sometimes does), they go "meh" and start rebuilding. Life in the Two Rivers can be hard, but it's not miserable, and their individual and collective resilience comes as much from community, celebration, joy as it does from toughness and determination. That's incredibly important, both of the characterization of most of the Two Rivers kids, and as the first piece of the groundwork for how very wrong things have gone when, many book from now, Rand starts trying to just make himself harder, deliberately discarding the springiness that makes the people of the Two Rivers so difficult to break. 

We get a full list of the competitions held as part of the Bel Tine festivities: archery, sling, quarterstaff, riddles and puzzles, lifting and tossing weights (not clear if this is one activity or two), singing, dancing, playing the fiddle, sheep shearing, bowls, and darts. This list is reproduced here largely for the sake of thoroughness - I have few immediate thoughts, except that I don't think bowls is ever mentioned again in the entire series, and that the establishment of archery, and the use of the sling and quarterstaff, as things they have reason to get better at than the practical usefulness of these items to their daily lives would otherwise necessitate helps lead into the numerous instances in the early books when facility with one or another of these items saves the kids' butt, or at least allows them to impress the shit out of someone. 

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The Winespring Inn, largest and fanciest building in Emond's Field, has a foundation of stone that some
say came from the mountains, which I feel goes nicely with my theory from the previous post about there having been a quarry. It also used to be bigger, which can be seen from the remains of a much larger foundation, which Bran al'Vere uses for outdoor seating, around an oak tree 30 paces around. That... is a big, old tree. In our system of measure, that's 90 feet, or about 24.7 meters in circumference. For aging a tree, we actually want the diameter in inches, not the circumference in feet, so we're gonna multiply that 90 feet by 12, to get 1080, and then divide by pi, for a diameter of roughly 344 inches. This is where we have to start making guesses, because we don't know the tree's actual species, beyond "oak". If it's a white oak, based on growth factor tables, it should be about 1720 years old, meaning it was planted around FY 413, after Davian was captured and gentled, but before whatever exactly happened with Queen Sulmara of Masenashar. If it's a red oak, it's about 1376 years old, planted ca. FY 757, around the time Kyera Termendal was translating the Karaethon Cycle. And if it's a pin oak, it might only be 1032 years old, planted in the last decade or so of the War of the Hundred Years. Our ability to extract anything useful from these calculations is complicated by the fact that oak trees just don't live that long, nor, properly, should they get this big. Trees with this kind of lifespan are virtually all conifers, although a couple of exceptions exist, including African Baobab and Sacred Fig, neither of which could readily be mistaken for an oak tree, although the latter can reach the size and spreadiness described here. There are, therefore, three reasonably possibilities for what is going on with this tree. 1) It's a Sacred Fig, and not an oak tree at all (age notwithstanding, no other non-baobab broadleaf tree reaches this diameter, and the Sacred Fig only manages it by having multiple trunks kinda smooshed together). 2) It's some kind of Age of Legends cultivar or something, and able to exceed the normal limits of an oak tree's age and size. 3) This is an oak tree of ordinary species, which at some point got attention from an Ogier, allowing it to live longer and/or grow larger than it otherwise could. The fourth, less reasonable possibility, is that subsequent to the Breaking, CO2 levels are higher or something, and conditions cause most plants, or at least trees and other long-lived things, to get bigger than they do in our world. (Which would throw even the roughest age estimates out of whack). We can look to rule out the first and fourth possibilities by keeping an eye on whether there's any mention of acorns here, and whether other plants are described as larger than they ought to be. 

This got really long and ended up taking 3 times as long as it was supposed to, which is why it's Friday afternoon right now, instead of Wednesday evening. We're going to finish Chapter 1 next week, hopefully on Wednesday. The next Dresden Files post will be going up tomorrow. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!