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Was GRRM influenced by Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series?


MorgulisMaximus

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I've read both, and to be honest, I don't see many similarities.... Jordan's scope is so much smaller --which is not meant as a slight-- but his story is really about Rand... then to a lesser extent, Matrim, Perrin, and the Aes Sedai, and their travails.... whereas AsoIaF is an entire world, politics, nations at war.... there is some of that in WoT, but the way these stories are told is very differently

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12 minutes ago, Martini Sigil said:

I've read both, and to be honest, I don't see many similarities.... Jordan's scope is so much smaller --which is not meant as a slight-- but his story is really about Rand... then to a lesser extent, Matrim, Perrin, and the Aes Sedai, and their travails....

Hmmm.... There are actually analytics on POV percentages. Let's take a look at book #3: http://wot.wikia.com/wiki/The_Dragon_Reborn

Egwene: 33%

Perrin: 33%

Rand al'Thor: 2%

I think that pretty much proves The Wheel of Time is not about Rand al'Thor. There are literally hundreds of characters. The Companion book which is basically an encyclopedia is 815 pages long (hardcover and very few pictures). Page after page of endless characters. Endless plot lines, political factions, military strategies and lores galore... I find it all mind-boggling complicated. And yes, it eventually becomes mind-boggling boring at around book 6 and 7. Ironically, Robert Jordan's death appears to have resulted in an enormous improvement in the final three books which were written by Brandon Sanderson.

 

 

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5 hours ago, Werthead said:

When it comes to direct fantasy influences on A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin has namechecked Tad Williams's Memory, Sorrow and Thorn sequence, Jack Vance's Dying Earth and Lyonesse series, Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series (and, for its structure, the Gap SF series), Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, Glen Cook's Black Company and Tolkien as being much more direct influences. I think he's also cited Dune as a more general and less direct influence.

He's also clearly influenced by Mervyn Peake, H.P. Lovecraft, and Robert Graves.

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One of the similarities between Robert Jordan and J.R.R. Tolkien is that both had real-life battlefield experience. Tolkien was at the Battle of the Somme during WWI. One of history's bloodiest battles. Jordan served in Vietnam.

George R R Martin had zero battlefield experience. Interestingly, his stories have more graphic violence than RJ and JRRT. 

That said, there are a lot of battles in Robert Jordan's work. And his military experience does show. Some of his characters sometimes quote slightly altered versions of real world military figures.

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I have only read the first book but I do not see common points between Black Company and SoIaF, so this seems to be at most an indirect influence. (I was not terribly fond of Black Company but there is no doubt that it is highly original both in style and setting, I'd say it has far fewer of the stock fantasy tropes than SoIaF.)

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10 hours ago, MorgulisMaximus said:

I felt that only the very first book "Eye of the World" had Tolkien qualities.

Saying The Eye of the World "had Tolkien qualities" is THE biggest understatement I've seen on the Literature board.

It was as much, if not more, of a LotR rip-off as The Sword of Shannara.

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10 minutes ago, baxus said:

Saying The Eye of the World "had Tolkien qualities" is THE biggest understatement I've seen on the Literature board.

It was as much, if not more, of a LotR rip-off as The Sword of Shannara.

I'll take this as sufficient warning not to bother with "The Eye of the World". My recollections of Shannara are very dim but for me the "Iron tower" series by McKiernan took the prize among the most blatant Tolkien rip-offs.

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27 minutes ago, Jo498 said:

I'll take this as sufficient warning not to bother with "The Eye of the World". My recollections of Shannara are very dim but for me the "Iron tower" series by McKiernan took the prize among the most blatant Tolkien rip-offs.

IIRC, the issue with McKiernan is that he wanted to write a sequel to LOTR, was told "no", so changed the names and published anyway.

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Yes, I also recall some trouble with the Tolkien heirs. Although I thought he wanted to write a sequel about the dwarves re-settling Moria which to me recollection is not the main plot of the Iron Tower and while the "warrows" are a mix between hobbits and dwarves, they are far closer to the former.

As for changing names Tolkien wrote that dwarves should linguistically correct be "dwarrows" and used this form in e.g. "dwarrowdelf", so McKiernan stole that name as well (I have no clue about old German/Anglo-Saxon linguistics but in modern German "-rg" does often correspond to "-row": borgen - borrow, morgen - morrow, therefore Zwerg - dwarrow)

Anyway, McKiernan is pretty weak and not recommendable, unless one loves Tolkien clones.

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The most likely influence from the WoT series is that he'll die before completing it and leave the project to Brandon Sanderson... :-)

However, similarities between ASOIAF and other great series don't have to be because the one borrowed from the other, so much as (much more likely) being that both were themselves influenced by the same earlier source, which was one of many such sources. Nothing exists in pure isolation, after all.

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1 hour ago, Jo498 said:

I'll take this as sufficient warning not to bother with "The Eye of the World". My recollections of Shannara are very dim but for me the "Iron tower" series by McKiernan took the prize among the most blatant Tolkien rip-offs.

Hey, bear in mind that's just my opinion, it might not be right. Though you'd be hard pressed to find anyone but the most hard-core fans to deny it's LotR-like structure.

2 minutes ago, JLE said:

The most likely influence from the WoT series is that he'll die before completing it and leave the project to Brandon Sanderson...

I've been thinking the same thing, though I still hope that won't be the case.

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4 hours ago, baxus said:

 

Saying The Eye of the World "had Tolkien qualities" is THE biggest understatement I've seen on the Literature board.

It was as much, if not more, of a LotR rip-off as The Sword of Shannara.

Agreed, the structure is very similar. But it feels like Robert Jordan did not envision the magnitude of his full story while writing book #1. It seems like he adds "fudge factors" to later books in order to make it possible to expand the scope of his story.

I read many Terry Brooks books back in grade school. In hindsight, he is quite the ripp-off artist. The reason why the MTV Shanara Chronicles skipped Sword of Shanara was because it was too similar to LOTR. Another one of Brooks books is a complete ripp-off of Star Wars. No creativity!

That said, I feel that Robert Jordan became a lot more creative after Eye of the World. He actually ended up building his own world in enormous detail and that world had very little resemblance to Middle-Earth.

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2 hours ago, Leap said:

To be fair, the series is incredibly inconsistent like this. You get one book that's almost all Rand, another that's mostly Mat, another that's mostly Egwene, and so on. The difference is that unlike ASOIAF, all of these characters are actually directly linked to Rand. Rand is definitely the protagonist of this series, that's kind of the point of him being Lews Therin Telamon reincarnated, or something. The fact that a lot of the series is devoted to supporting characters is as much a product of the abominable length as it is the story actually being about them. It's like Lord of the Rings - Frodo is the protagonist, but that doesn't mean the Fellowship don't get their own story.

The fact that Rand barely appears in a book named after him is not an indication that the story is not about any one person, it's an indication that naming the book after your protagonist and then spending hundreds of pages deliberately not having him on page is kind of a shitty approach to writing a book.

 

Whether Rand is the central protagonist might well be just an indefinite matter of opinion...

The Hobbit is clearly the story of Bilbo Baggins. But is The Lord of the Rings really just the story of Frodo? I think that is very debateable...

 

 

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4 hours ago, Jo498 said:

I'll take this as sufficient warning not to bother with "The Eye of the World". My recollections of Shannara are very dim but for me the "Iron tower" series by McKiernan took the prize among the most blatant Tolkien rip-offs.

Tolkien's shadow covered most of the Fantasy genre for many many years. I think GRRM might become the new JRRT in the years to come. GRRM, thanks in part to HBO, has far wider audience appeal than "traditional" tolkien-esqe fantasy. JK Rowlings will also be hugely influential in the years to come as all those once-children grow up and become writers.

Also, as our discussion indicates, readers are completely fed-up and bored of Tolkien clones. Readers want creativity and new plot structures.

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46 minutes ago, MorgulisMaximus said:

Tolkien's shadow covered most of the Fantasy genre for many many years.

Once again, we're not talking about "Tolkien's shadow covering The Eye of the World". We're talking about borderline plagiarism.

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35 minutes ago, baxus said:

Once again, we're not talking about "Tolkien's shadow covering The Eye of the World". We're talking about borderline plagiarism.

An understandable opinion if you only read book #1. But let's consider what happens afterwards:

First of all, Tolkien had almost no female characters. Jordan literally has hundreds of female characters. I often felt he had too many female characters. In fact, Rand appears to marry 3 women (not sure, because I haven't quite reached that yet).

With the exception of Moraine, none of the hundreds of women in the story have any comparable role in Tolkien. They hold many of the highest positions of power but their character storylines are extremely non-Tolkien.

I was surprised that Jordan was even able to get into the minds of female characters so often... perhaps his editor and wife played a role in creating these characters?

 

Next, Tolkien is strictly influenced by Anglo-Saxon lore. Jordan is very heavily influenced by many more cultures including East Asian and South Asian. The good vs evil concept is very much western... surprisingly, Jordan becomes much less good vs. evil as the series progresses and adopts a more eastern philosophical tone. Westerners might consider an eastern novel like Romance of the Three Kingdoms to be very amoral but it's really just a different way of thinking.

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Major authors in fantasy are almost certainly bound to be influenced by writers that have come before them, and by each other.  That doesn't mean that they've based their characters on each others' stories, unless they've deliberately ripped off that story, like McIernan and his Iron Tower, of taken a story and written it from an alternative point of view (eg Jacqueline Carey's Sundering novels).

And, it's always going to be the case that there are some stock tropes and characters that just turn up in many stories. The heir to the Throne, who's on the run;  the ordinary person who goes on a dangerous quest and proves his mettle;  the minor nobleman who just falls outside of the elite, and resents his status accordingly;  the servant who's much more competent than his master;  the Dark Lord and so forth.

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