Wheel of Time Reread - The Eye of the World Chapter 1 - Part 3

Photo by Bill Fairs on Unsplash

Bran is standing outside the inn, wearing the silver balance scales medallion that's his badge of office as mayor, along with the real scales that he uses to weigh the coins of merchants coming in to buy wool and tabac. This is the first time we're told what the exports of the Two Rivers are, although we could potentially have guessed about the wool, given that the status of lambs has already been mentioned twice at this point. It establishes part of why they're in such a fix, with the spring refusing to come. Their cash crops, the things they devote the largest part of their agricultural space and labor to producing, aren't edible. If they were growing say, grain as a primary export, and had a bad year, there would at least be options, decide how much to sell and how much to hold onto and eat, depending on whether they could get a price on what little their was that would let them buy whatever else was needed. They do grow some of their own vegetables, but this doesn't seem to include much in the way of starchy, high calories root vegetables like turnips and potatoes, much less cereal grains. (Although Cenn Buie makes reference to root cellars, so maybe they do and it's just not talked about). This is a little hard to gauge, of course. The series spends very little time in the Two Rivers, almost none of it under normal circumstances, and we don't see any farms other than the al'Thors', so it's hard to know what exactly everyone is growing. There's a mill, and a miller, so someone very well might be growing wheat, rye, or barley, even though it's never mentioned, the same way the existence of honey cakes implies the possibility that someone is keeping bees. 

Bran wouldn't normally be wearing the medallion, since it's not Bel Tine yet, but with everyone so stressed about the weather, Rand figures maybe Winternight, the night before Bel Tine, when everyone visits each other's houses, exchanging small gifts and having snacks, is reason enough. This, at least, I recognize as a kind of mashup of Halloween (itself an intensely syncretic holiday), Christmas, leaving may baskets (appropriately), and for some reason I'm getting Martinmas vibes even though there's no actual description here of lanterns or singing. Given what we're told about how ready Two Rivers folk generally are to sing and dance, I can't imagine they don't sing. 

Photo by Ijon Tichy on Unsplash

Tam and Bran talk a little bit about the wolves and the weather. Mostly Bran is complaining, village council member to village council member, about people complaining to him, as though he can do anything about it. This, of course, prompts Cenn Buie to start in about the storks. By Bel Tine, there should be storks nesting on the roofs, and it's a bad omen that they're not. That's kind of understandable - storks return to the same nests every year, and they're not small. Having a bunch of big stork nests everywhere, standing empty when their owners should have returned by now, is going to make the storks themselves conspicuous in their absence. It's unsettling. Cenn has a longish list of complaints, about Nynaeve, about the very real possibility of starvation, but what catches my notice here is his intuition that the winter isn't planning to end at all. The thing is, he's right, and I'm not sure that Tam's crack about Cenn listening to the wind like a Wisdom is all that far off the mark This isn't the only piece of evidence that Cenn Buie can channel, or if not then that he has one of the other weird talents, along the lines of sniffing, or Min's viewings. Tam asks, sarcastically, if Cenn is a soothayer, a term which I don't think we see at all after the first book, and which is only otherwise used in Eye of the World in a discussion of how Min isn't one. We don't really know what soothsayers are in this setting, but sensible people like Tam act as though they're a real thing, so maybe whatever a soothsayer is, maybe Cenn actually is one. 

At this point in the conversation, Mat surreptitiously gets Rand's attention, and invites him to come release a badger on the Green. Literally the first thing we're told about Mat here is that he "never seemed to grow up", which is true enough in its way, but I think creates some unfair anchoring bias about his character development, especially in the early books when he' still pretty annoying, but increasingly responsible and possessed of more perspective than the other characters give him credit for. Rand, who is far more...overtly responsible than Mat, refuses, saying that he promised to help unload the cart. This is an echo of Tam at the beginning of the chapter, when we're told how he promised to bring the brandy and cider. And it has weight that carries all the way forward to the thing in A Memory of Light where Rand says that the difference between him and Lews Therin is that he was raised better. 

Apparently Mat saw the Myrdraal too, although he doesn't know what it was any more than Rand does. They agree that he was terrifying, and Nat says that for a second he actually thought the cloaked figure might have been the Dark One, or one of the Foresaken. Apparently when he was little his mother frightened him with stories of how Ishamael or Aginor would get him if he didn't "mend his ways". I'd be immensely interested to know what he was told Aginor would do to him, but we're never told. Rand responds by reciting the catechism about how the Dark One and all the Foresaken are bound in Shayol Ghul until the end of time, and were sheltered in the Creator's hand. While it's not immediately obvious at this point in the series, this is actually the sum total of canonical religion in this setting. They don't have a bible, or any equivalent. They don't have churches or clergy. Rituals and holidays are apparently secular, even High Chasaline, although it's hard to tell in a setting that apparently only has one faith. They just have these two sentences. Freaking Veggie Tales took longer to make essentially the same point, and it wasn't trying to cover all of Christianity. I use the word "catachism" here because it's what people in the series call it, but a catechism is "a summary or exposition of doctrine...traditionally used in...religious teaching of children and adult converts" (wikipedia), and so far as I can tell, this is the doctrine in its entirety. If there ever were a longer or more involved version, it's been lost or abandoned for a very long time now. Since the 1500s, catechisms are also usually in a question and answer format, which this isn't, although if I squint my brain a little, I can sort of imagine it having once been part of something that was?

Photo by aisvri on Unsplash

Mat's other thought is that perhaps the man in the black cloak was the Dragon. This is also the first time that title is mentioned, excepting the prologue, and we're given no additional context on what that name has come to mean. They agree that it would be better if they could tell the grownups what they saw, but since both of them have already told their fathers and not been believed, they're not sure how to go about it, and Rand notes that since Mat is such a well-known prankster that he's sometimes blamed even for things he didn't do, his corroboration won't be worth much. 

There's a small thing here that I find interesting - as far as Rand knows, murder is not a thing in the Two Rivers. Obviously this is drawing from the thing in Lord of the Rings where Hobbits don't deliberately harm one another, made realistic for a human population (they have fist fights and such, but they don't kill each other), but there's something about this that strikes me as significant, even though I can't quite put my finger on what it is. 

Their discussion is interrupted when Tam noticed Mat and promptly drafts him into helping unload the cart. Mat's efforts to escape are disrupted by the news that there's a Gleeman in town for Bel Tine. This naturally causes a lot of excitement for Rand and Mat, although Cenn Buie thinks it's a waste of money. He feels much the same about the fireworks, which leaves me with questions about how exactly money works in the Two Rivers. Plainly the Village Council has access to some kind of petty cash fun for things like arranging entertainment on feast days, but where does this money actually come from? Do the members of the Village Council kick in money for stuff, or is there some kind of hyperlocal taxation going on? Does the Women's Circle have a similar cash reserve? I'm guessing that Cenn's objection here is that the Gleeman and the fireworks are coming out of the same money that would be used to like, bring in extra food in the event of a famine, and that's not entirely unreasonable, although I'm with Bran on the importance of keeping spirit up, and it sounds like he sent for the fireworks months ago, whn there wasn't yet any reason to believe things would get this bad. I would love to know how he hired Thom. Gleemen aren't all that common, even in an almost-city like Baerlon, so I guess that around the same time he sent away for the fireworks, Bran would have put out some kind of advertisement to which Thom responded (presumably by messenger?) at some point in the interim, which mans he randomly happened to be in Baerlon sometime last fall? 

Photo by Gianluca Carenza on Unsplash

It's also established here that the harp and flute are the signature instruments of a gleeman, as much a badge of his office as the patched cloak. I note this largely because it had an impact on the 1995 justified fantasy series Singers of Nevya, in which Cantors and Cantrixes uses these same instruments (albeit with in-world names) to maintain the light and warmth of Nevya's few inhabited places, while lower status Singers use the flue alone to do much the same thing on a smaller scale, guiding those without their Gift through the frozen wasteland between the Houses. This hierarchy of instruments also comes from Wheel of Time, as we see later in Thom's willingness to teach Rand and Mat the flue while refusing to let them touch his harp. 

Mat asks why Bran didn't tell people there was going to be a gleeman, and Bran prompts him to think it through. It's Rand who figured out that if Bran let anticipating build up, when it was possible he wouldn't come, the disappointment would be a bigger blow to public morale than the excitement would be a boost. Rand's ability to figure this out is like, the second or third actual piece of characterization Rand gets - he's smart about specifically this kind of thing, and that's gonna be important later. It's also significant that this is what the Village Council, and in particular the Mayor, does. Unless Perrin's assessment when he comes back to the Two Rivers is wildly off-base, the people here don't need a lot of day-to-day leadership, so a big portion of Bran's job is keeping everyone's mental health good so they can continue to make good decisions for themselves. Bran is impressed by Rand's reasoning, and suggests that he might be on the Council himself some day. He also hints that Nynaeve has expressed objections to Cenn Buie's presence on the Council. One gets the impression that in this place, at this time, the traditional opposition between the Village Council and the Women's Circle, between the Mayor and the Wisdom, may be more of a hinderance than a healthy system of checks and balances. Not to say that Bran should remove Cenn from the council, any more than the Women's Circle should remove Nynaeve as Wisdom just because Cenn thinks she's too young, but I get the sense that Bran is frustrated that he can't even openly consider her input.

Covert-responsible Mat sticks around to help unload the cart, even after Rand assures him that he doesn't have to. He takes the opportunity to give Rand a hard time about his crush on Egwene. Rand himself is immensely confused about his feelings there, and can't figure out whether he wants to see her or not. 

This has been...one chapter of the first book of this immense series. I hope you're having as much fun reading these as I am writing them, because we're gonna be here for a while. As usual, we'll have Dresden Files chapter 21 on Saturday, and the first post for Eye of the World Chapter 2 this coming Wednesday. We may experience greater delays than usual, because I've got some paying work coming, and that's going to take up some of my time for the rest of this month. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!