Weaver of the Wheel
A Vietnam veteran and nuclear engineer who began a fourteen-book cycle of turning Ages, then left the notes and final chapter from which it was finished.
Novelist & Epic World-builder
Follow James Oliver Rigney Jr.—Robert Jordan—from two Vietnam tours and a physics degree to The Wheel of Time, a fourteen-book cycle of turning Ages whose last chapter he wrote before he died and whose final volumes Brandon Sanderson completed from his notes.
James Oliver Rigney Jr. was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on 17 October 1948. He served two tours in Vietnam with the U.S. Army as a helicopter gunner and came back with the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Bronze Star among other decorations.
He then studied physics at The Citadel, graduating in 1974, and worked as a nuclear engineer at a naval shipyard. By the end of the decade he had left engineering to write full time.
Asked about battle scenes in a 2003 interview with the Charleston City Paper, he described real combat as mass chaos and confusion, hard to picture unless you had been there. In the Wheel of Time, large battles are usually seen from inside that confusion, through one character’s viewpoint at a time.
He began writing in 1977. His first novel, Warrior of the Altaii, was bought by DAW and dropped about a month later; Tom Doherty acquired it at Ace in 1978, yet it stayed unpublished until Tor issued it in 2019, twelve years after his death.
Doherty went on to co-found Tor, and the editor Harriet McDougal, later Rigney’s wife, joined him there. As Reagan O’Neal, Rigney wrote The Fallon Blood, a historical novel Doherty expected to stand alone; it grew into three books. Doherty and McDougal also steered him to Conan, continuing Robert E. Howard’s barbarian, partly because Warrior of the Altaii had made a barbarian culture convincing.
The Conan books carried the name Robert Jordan, and he kept it for his own fantasy so that readers of the historical novels and the fantasy would not connect them. He had written only two Conans when he and Doherty began talking in 1983 about an epic of his own. Doherty doubted it would fit in three volumes; in early 1984 Tor signed the first six.
Five years later, in late winter 1989, McDougal finished editing the manuscript of The Eye of the World and telephoned Doherty to urge him to read it. He agreed with her.
Tor published The Eye of the World in January 1990 as a large trade paperback, wary that a fat hardcover would be hard to sell, under a Darrell K. Sweet cover that McDougal remembered as a big expense for a small company. It sold about 40,000 copies in its first year, and The Great Hunt followed that November.
The book opens outside its own time. In the prologue, “Dragonmount”, Lews Therin Telamon wanders a ruined palace without seeing the bodies of his wife and children. The One Power has a male half, saidin, and a female half, saidar; the Dark One has tainted saidin, so every man who channels it is driven towards madness. Healed into sanity by an enemy just long enough to grasp what he has done, Lews Therin draws so much of the Power that he destroys himself and raises a mountain from a riverside plain.
Chapter one, “An Empty Road”, then drops an age forward to a farm boy, Rand al’Thor, walking beside his father’s cart towards Emond’s Field for the Bel Tine festival. The only uncanny thing is a black-cloaked rider whose cloak does not stir in the wind. The reader already holds the knowledge the village lacks: a man who could touch saidin destroyed a world once, and the story is about to ask who will touch it next.
Cyclical time is built into the books’ opening pages. Each first chapter begins with the same refrain: the Wheel of Time turns, Ages come and pass, and a wind rises somewhere in the world. “There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time,” the passage says. “But it was a beginning.” The wind is then followed across the land until it reaches the scene; in A Memory of Light it crosses a dying forest, a town in rubble, refugee roads and a burning Caemlyn before finding the armies, a survey of a continent in a single weather report.
In the same 2003 interview Jordan said he had been thinking about where legends come from: stories retold until time has twisted them. Inside the books, the past survives as garbled myth and half-remembered prophecy, and the present keeps discovering which old story it is living.
The Dragon Reborn (1991) was the series’ first hardcover and its first New York Times bestseller; by the fourth book Tor was selling the first as a mass-market paperback. Success changed the shape of the story. The Eye of the World keeps its young travellers mostly together; later volumes scatter Rand, Mat, Perrin, Egwene, Nynaeve, Elayne and others across a continent, give each thread its own run of chapters, and braid them back together at the climaxes.
The braid was also the series’ cost. Reviewing Crossroads of Twilight, the tenth book, in December 2002, Publishers Weekly still counted Jordan among the genre’s greats and praised the novel’s breadth, but warned that readers impatient with the slow movement of the previous four books would find more of the same: Mat still fleeing, Perrin still hunting, Caemlyn and Tar Valon still besieged. That is the fair form of the familiar complaint about the middle volumes.
The workshop behind the books grew too. Maria Simons, hired in 1996 to answer fan mail, was asked around 1997 to consolidate Jordan’s notes; she and Alan Romanczuk became the continuity editors who could find any scene. In 1998 Jordan wrote New Spring, a prequel novella set twenty years before the main story, for Robert Silverberg’s anthology Legends, and expanded it into a novel in 2004.
Knife of Dreams (2005) answered the complaint. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review for returning to the pace of the early books as long-running plot lines closed or moved. It was the last main-sequence novel Jordan finished.
In December 2005 doctors at the Medical University of South Carolina diagnosed primary amyloidosis with cardiomyopathy, a rare blood disease. He made the diagnosis public in spring 2006 in a letter to Locus explaining how he planned to fight it. He kept working on the final book, A Memory of Light, leaving outlines, notes, audio recordings and written scenes, among them the ending.
He died on 16 September 2007, aged 58. The next year he was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors.
Late in 2007 Harriet McDougal, his widow and editor, asked Brandon Sanderson, author of the Mistborn novels, to finish the book from Jordan’s notes, outline and written sections. The material would not fit one volume, so it became three: The Gathering Storm (October 2009), Towers of Midnight (2010) and A Memory of Light (January 2013).
McDougal edited all three. Simons and Romanczuk searched the notes for answers to Sanderson’s questions and checked his drafts for continuity, as they had Jordan’s. Sanderson has said that the last chapter of A Memory of Light is the last thing Jordan wrote. Jordan is the originating author; Sanderson is the completing author.
Darrell K. Sweet, who had painted the U.S. covers since 1990, died in December 2011 while working on the final one. Michael Whelan, already commissioned for the ebook, painted the hardcover and said he would not have taken the job had Sweet lived to finish it.
A way in: begin with The Eye of the World, as Jordan insisted new readers must, and read through The Dragon Reborn, which closes the first movement. The Shadow Rising and The Fires of Heaven are where the braided structure pays off most richly; books six to nine slow down and reward patience with the world more than with plot. Knife of Dreams turns back towards speed, and Sanderson’s three volumes carry every thread to the Last Battle. New Spring, published between books ten and eleven, works best once Moiraine and Lan are familiar. Amazon’s Prime Video series (2021–2025) adapted only part of the cycle before it was cancelled after three seasons.
J. R. R. TolkienEpic fantasy built from language, myth and remembered history
George LucasA modern mythology shaped as a serial world
Joseph CampbellRecurring patterns of myth and transformation
