Malin din Toral Breaking Wave Log In
Description
Malin din Toral Breaking Wave is the Wavemistress of Clan Somarin and the Sailmistress of Windrunner. She is high ranking in the Sea Folk hierarchy.
For more details on Malin din Toral Breaking Wave, visit Encyclopaedia WoT.
Interview Questions (13 total)
| Question | Action |
|---|---|
|
First, I'd like to thank you for your incredible Wheel of Time series. It's given me incredible reading enjoyment as well as given me the opportunity to build Wheel of Time areas on an online internet game, a MUD. My question is, when was the transition period between the Old Tongue and the New Tongue? I assumed it was after the Breaking, but many of Mat's memories still have the Old Tongue in them, and they were long after. When was the change, and what caused it?
I have gone into this in some depth in other places, but basically after the Breaking, the primary language was still what is called the Old Tongue IN the period between the breaking and the Trolloc wars, what would become the language spoken today began to develop as a common or vulgar tongue. During the period between the Trolloc wars and the war of the 100 years, that vulgar tongue supplanted the Old Tongue as the usual or everyday mode of speech, and the Old Tongue regressed to being more and more something of scholars. At the time of Artur Hawkwing, anyone who was educated, whether noble or commoner, could speak and write the Old Tongue, but in everyday life, most people used something very much like what is spoken today. And it was the simple swamp. |
View More Details |
|
What Age was the Age of Legends?
The Age before the Third Age. The Breaking of the World brought on the Third Age. The Trolloc and Hundred Years Wars were only punctuations in local history. |
View More Details |
|
John from Front Royal, Virginia: Were either of the Aes Sedai seen at Rhuidean in The Shadow Rising Deindre, the Age of Legends Aes Sedai from the beginning of the Breaking? Is she responsible for Foretelling the entire Prophecies of the Dragon? Thank you for taking time to respond to our questions this evening.
No, she wasn't, and you're welcome. |
View More Details |
|
John from Front Royal, Virginia: Were either of the Aes Sedai seen at Rhuidean in The Shadow Rising Deindre, the Age of Legends Aes Sedai from the beginning of the Breaking? Is she responsible for Foretelling the entire Prophecies of the Dragon? Thank you for taking time to respond to our questions this evening.
No, she wasn't. And you're welcome. |
View More Details |
|
In the scene during which the taint is cleansed, Cadsuane uses a ter’angreal that detects the One Power being channeled and the direction it is coming from. She watches the ter’angreal, and when the enemy channels, she points, and someone attacks. Why doesn’t it point to the huge amounts of the One Power that Rand and Nynaeve are channeling — far more than the Forsaken are being pegged for?
Cadsuane’s ter’angreal was made during the Breaking of the World, at a time when men and women no longer linked, or at least very rarely, since male channelers were going mad at a rate of knots. What the maker was particularly interested in detecting was men channeling, but a man channeling in combination with a woman was, by definition, safe, because no woman was going to link with a man unless she knew absolutely that he was sane and not going to go over the edge into insanity while they were linked. Thus, saidin and saidar being worked in combination could be ignored, and in fact would be a distraction, since this was and is a warning device. Cadsuane’s ter’angreal won’t point to the two halves of the Power being wielded in combination. |
View More Details |
|
How come, a language, over three thousand years - isn't that right? - three thousand years of the books' story, everyone spoke the Old Tongue didn't they? So over three thousand years the language has managed to change so much that you can't even understand a word or a phrase of that language. But over one thousand years, on the other hand, it has changed so little that you basically understand it as an accent.
If you consider English. You wouldn't understand Old English. You couldn't even read it. You could read the letters, probably. I couldn't; I've seen manuscripts. But printing does stabilize a language, so there is some shift, because, say, a thousand years, a little bit of shift. See, what I have got here, look at these points. This is the Breaking, the Trolloc Wars, the War of the Hundred years and now. Okay. From here to here the language changes somewhat, and from here to here the language changes somewhat. Now, a person here, from this period, right here, just before the War of the Hundred Years could understand somewhat the Old Tongue, but would think "he's got a strange accent". He's got a strange way of expressing himself, his grammar is strange. He puts the words together oddly and he's got a very strange accent, but that's the extent of it. It might be that the gap is not all the way from here to there, but maybe from here to here, that he thinks "I should understand this, but I don't quite, I don't quite understand" and a guy here, listening to this language, says "Yeah, I can understand him. He's got a funny accent, but I understand him." So okay, from here to here, he says, the guy here listens to someone from here speaking and he says "he's got a funny accent, but I understand him". A guy from here listening to someone from this point says "you know, I understand some of that, but it's not quite, you know" and from here to here he says "yeah, I almost think I should understand that, but I can't make out a word" and from here to here he says "What?" I know that the intervals and the true progression of a language are never that smooth, and that's one reason why I have never tried to put it in the books as exactly where these points of commonality existed and where the points shifted from being "I understand him with an effort" to "I think I should be able to understand this but I can't" to "what the hell is he saying, is he talking, I don't know this". |
View More Details |
|
Speaking of the Breaking, how did Dragonmount survive all that rearrangement of geography?
Well, the Breaking had different effects in different areas. Some areas were raised up, others lowered, others moved around... but the effects were relatively mild in some areas; Dragonmount was one of them. Note that Shayol Ghul used to be a subtropical island. The Tar Valon area was moved, but as an entire piece, so the mountain, the island, and the river stayed in the same places relative to each other. |
View More Details |
|
How did the White Tower form after the Breaking?
Aes Sedai slowly got together. |
View More Details |
|
How did the people of the current Age go three thousand years without discovering the military applications of explosives? Were the Illuminators just that ruthless?
The Illuminators were completely ruthless in protecting their secret. And they put about tales such as that exposure to air could sometimes makes the substances inside fireworks explode without fire, and even more violently than fire did, in order to discourage close examination. Then there is the fact that there hasn't been a single three thousand year climb from barbarism and disaster, but three roughly one thousand climbs, from the Breaking of the World, from the near total destruction of the Trolloc Wars, which either destroyed or doomed every nation then existing, and from the devastation of the War of the Hundred Years. As an historical note, fireworks were used in China for roughly a thousand years before someone decided to use gunpowder as a weapon. As a matter of desperation, they dropped large firecrackers on the heads of soldiers climbing siege ladders. And by the evidence I've seen, gunpowder wasn't used as a weapon again for several hundred more years after that. I can see the view. All right, they held off the assault, but firecrackers? Firecrackers? |
View More Details |
|
What about Mazrim Taim? Isn't his withstanding of the madness for 15 years something exceptional?
The duration varies from man to man; the circumstances are different, and the men themselves. Nobody really knows how long the process takes (or has to take), since once you start channeling the Aes Sedai usually find you pretty quickly, and gentling stops the progression of the madness and the taint (though it does not cure what's already happened). Channeling is addictive; once you've done it, you can't stop. The Breaking took about a hundred years before all the men finally died, though some of them did shelter in the Stedding for a while. Nobody knows how long the process takes, except that there is variation. It's all in my notes. |
View More Details |
|
What were the female Aes Sedai doing during the Breaking? Surely they could have got together in circles of six or thirteen or whatever, cut off one man from the Source, and gone onto the next.
Several things. Partly, you have to find the men before you can do anything. Partly, by the time they realized what was going on, it was too late. The massive geological upheavals were only a part (and not the most important part) of the Breaking. There was also the cumulative social collapse, breakdown of transportation systems, etc.. Imagine a city like Seattle that suddenly loses ALL contact with the outside world. Also, the women were (after a point) trying to preserve what they could, not fight the men directly. Finally, in order to make someone stop doing something, you have to be able to threaten them. What can you threaten a madman with, that he will listen to you and stop? |
View More Details |
|
Your societies seem to all place women in a very influential role. Any particular reason why you created so many matriarchies? Also, do you already have a solution for Rand's love triangle?
1. 3000 years ago, the world was destroyed by men: specifically men, and for all of that time, every society has been afraid of any man who can channel. The result has to be greater power and influence for women. 2. Yes. |
View More Details |
|
Did you have the intention to explore what happened before the Breaking of the World?
No; anything I do there would have a sense of inevitability. You know what's going to happen. |
View More Details |
Wheel of Time Database on Facebook