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Is there any confirmation the Age of Legends was the Second?


Yitzi2

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All the discussion on fansites and the wiki seems to assume that the Age of Legends was the Second Age, and ours (which is indicated to be the one before the AoL) is therefore the First.  I have some issues with that, though:

-The Ages should presumably count from some point of significance at the beginning of the First Age.  Nothing has happened recently to remotely compare to the Breaking of the World.

-If this is the First Age, that would imply that memory turns to myth in only two Ages and is completely forgotten in three...but there are many, many things from the Third Age that are clearly intended to be the source of terms we have today, five ages later.  It is possible that it normally takes longer and the Breaking of the World accelerated the process, but this still seems difficult.

Therefore, if it is an assumption rather than an explicit statement that the Age of Legends was the Second (or, equivalently, that the Third began with the Breaking of the World), I would posit the following revised chronology:

-The First Age lasted roughly 1000 years, from the Breaking of the World until the Trolloc Wars.

-The Second Age lasted roughly 1000 years, from the Trolloc Wars through Hawkwing's death.

-The Third Age lasted roughly 1000 years, from Hawkwing's Death until Tarmon Gai'don.

-The Fourth Age, while not shown, presumably lasts roughly 1000 years, likely ending with the fall of Rome. 

-The Fifth Age is the Middle Ages.

-The Sixth Age begins with the Renaissance, and ends with the first scientific use of the One Power.

-The Seventh Age is the Age of Legends.

Thus, the count begins at the Breaking of the World (the most momentous event in historical memory at the time the phrase "Third Age" came to be), and the time for memory to fade completely is on the order of three or four ages (half the turning of the Wheel), not just two.

Anybody have more info to support or refute this?

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I am not knowledgeable enough to contribute except to ask have you checked out The Wheel of Time Companion that was released recently? It is a official release made by the authors wife and others. I would imagine it would have that info in there.

Edited by Ammanas
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you are relying on several flawed assumptions here.

Quote

-The Ages should presumably count from some point of significance at the beginning of the First Age.  Nothing has happened recently to remotely compare to the Breaking of the World.

give it time. nothing say the first age has to end now. it could go on for millennia. there is a myth about "merk and monsk fighting with spears of fire in the sky" or something like that hinting at an atomic war, but one has to consider the first book was written in the 80s, when an atomic war looked like the more probable catastrophe around. nowadays it would probably be something to do with pollution and global warming. there is also nothing to say that the end of an age must always come with a major catastrophe. maybe the second age just begun when someone learned to channel for the first time?
 

Quote


-If this is the First Age, that would imply that memory turns to myth in only two Ages and is completely forgotten in three...but there are many, many things from the Third Age that are clearly intended to be the source of terms we have today, five ages later.

 

first thing, myths can be very long-lived, especially if they become rooted in religion. consider how many religions have myths regarding a global flooding, and some think it originates in the flooding of the black sea after the dardanelles opened. we don't know if it caused the legends or if it is merely coincidence, but if it did, it's certainly a great deal of time to pass on stuff orally. which brings us to the second point: with printing, stuff is never forgotten, or at least not for a very long time. the breaking of the world destroyed records and technology, so stuff got forgotten pretty fast. things like the trolloc wars and hundred years war also did a lot of destroying. without those dramatic events, things are going to be remembered for much, much longer. they will only fade when there is so much accumulated knowledge that nobody will look for that specific bit. also consider that people who survived the end of the fourth age knows very well how big a danger shai'tan is, and know that it will eventually be forgotten, so they'll do all they can to remember it as long as possible. finally, we have no flippin idea what happens in the 4th to 7th eras, so it may be that something similar happens again.

As for your revised chronology, i'd say it is too fast to really forget things. if you were right, we remember things very well from way back to the roman empire, and we have goood clues from before, but we have a big blank just before that? if randland is at the beginning of a roman empire and no catastrophe will happen, how come they have printing and clocks and the romans didn't? if our age was only 5000 years before the books, shouldn't they still find tons of plastic garbage wherever they dig?

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23 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

you are relying on several flawed assumptions here.

give it time. nothing say the first age has to end now. it could go on for millennia. there is a myth about "merk and monsk fighting with spears of fire in the sky" or something like that hinting at an atomic war, but one has to consider the first book was written in the 80s, when an atomic war looked like the more probable catastrophe around. nowadays it would probably be something to do with pollution and global warming. there is also nothing to say that the end of an age must always come with a major catastrophe. maybe the second age just begun when someone learned to channel for the first time?
 

first thing, myths can be very long-lived, especially if they become rooted in religion. consider how many religions have myths regarding a global flooding, and some think it originates in the flooding of the black sea after the dardanelles opened. we don't know if it caused the legends or if it is merely coincidence, but if it did, it's certainly a great deal of time to pass on stuff orally. which brings us to the second point: with printing, stuff is never forgotten, or at least not for a very long time. the breaking of the world destroyed records and technology, so stuff got forgotten pretty fast. things like the trolloc wars and hundred years war also did a lot of destroying. without those dramatic events, things are going to be remembered for much, much longer. they will only fade when there is so much accumulated knowledge that nobody will look for that specific bit. also consider that people who survived the end of the fourth age knows very well how big a danger shai'tan is, and know that it will eventually be forgotten, so they'll do all they can to remember it as long as possible. finally, we have no flippin idea what happens in the 4th to 7th eras, so it may be that something similar happens again.

As for your revised chronology, i'd say it is too fast to really forget things. if you were right, we remember things very well from way back to the roman empire, and we have goood clues from before, but we have a big blank just before that? if randland is at the beginning of a roman empire and no catastrophe will happen, how come they have printing and clocks and the romans didn't? if our age was only 5000 years before the books, shouldn't they still find tons of plastic garbage wherever they dig?

If a future event were to be major enough to make its age count as the First Age, I think it would be major enough to mark the end of one age and the beginning of another.

And I agree that the end of an age need not be a major catastrophe; however, the beginning of the First Age should probably be major even by "beginning of an age" standards.

Myths can indeed be very long-lived.  But that should apply to all myths; if the myths rooted in the Third Age last until the First, those rooted in the Seventh should probably last until the Third, but they don't (we have no indication of anything from before the age before the Age of Legends).  It's not the particular length that is an issue for the "Age of Legends was the Second" theory, but rather the lack of consistency.

It is possible that the upheaval of the Breaking and the Trolloc Wars/100 Years War caused the mismatch, but it is still better, in the absence of a reason not to, to posit that the Breaking began age 1.

And you're misreading my chronology: Randland was 1000 years before the fall of the Roman Empire, and we do remember things from that to some extent (if not all that accurately); and the Hundred Years' War was 1000 years before that.  If they do have printing, that would make things more difficult as far as the precise chronology goes, though even if one removes the presumption of 1000-year ages in order to allow for a technology-reducing catastrophe at the end of the fourth age prior to the Romans, I still think reading the Age of Legends as Seventh makes a lot more sense.

As for plastic garbage: Between the Age of Legends and the Breaking of the World, its absence can be fairly adequately explained even if the Age of Legends was not all that long.

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10 hours ago, Yitzi2 said:

If a future event were to be major enough to make its age count as the First Age, I think it would be major enough to mark the end of one age and the beginning of another.

And I agree that the end of an age need not be a major catastrophe; however, the beginning of the First Age should probably be major even by "beginning of an age" standards.

Myths can indeed be very long-lived.  But that should apply to all myths; if the myths rooted in the Third Age last until the First, those rooted in the Seventh should probably last until the Third, but they don't (we have no indication of anything from before the age before the Age of Legends).  It's not the particular length that is an issue for the "Age of Legends was the Second" theory, but rather the lack of consistency.

well, considering that we know nothing of an age that comes before ours, it would make sense that whatever comes at the end of the 7th age is a sort of big reset button for all civilization, starting back to no further than the iron age, and causes to forget the power too. so if we accept that whatever begins the first age is major, it's another argument in favor of our age being the first.

and i insist, it makes no sense that randland is 1000 years before the fall of the roman empire. we know pretty well what was happening at the time, we have plenty of archeological records from way before that, and there's no way we can forget channeling and lose all power objects in that time.

ok, i can agree with you that there is some inconsistency over what myths survived. but you are trying to introduce several major inconsistencies to explain a small one

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3 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

well, considering that we know nothing of an age that comes before ours, it would make sense that whatever comes at the end of the 7th age is a sort of big reset button for all civilization, starting back to no further than the iron age, and causes to forget the power too. so if we accept that whatever begins the first age is major, it's another argument in favor of our age being the first.

Ah, so our age may have begun quite a long time ago...that could be.  I'd still be interested in knowing if there's anything official, though.

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  • 2 weeks later...

About the point mentioned earlier about artifacts from our age: In book 1, Bayle Domon mentions "a mountain hollowed into a bowl, and in its center, a silver spike a hundred spans high, and any who comes within a mile of it, dies".  That sounds like something from a bit later in our age.

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  • 1 month later...

I found confirmation: Eye of the World, p. 550 (in the hardcover), Rand says "Men found you in the last Age, in the Age of Legends".  So clearly, the Age of Legends was the second, and this is the first, and stuff persisted amazingly well over 5 ages to become the legend of King Arthur.

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  • 1 month later...

"Touch the beginning point on a wheel."

Historians "in-story" found references to an age that came before the age of legends, The Age of Legends started around the time when Tamrylin first started channeling.  The "third age" has no information going back any more than that.  So by their frame of reference that would make the Randland age the "Third"  and since most of the records in the third age survived. the next one will know it is the Fourth, but if the fourth age ends as badly as the "Second" the next age might think it is the second or third age, because they will not have any surviving knowledge of ages before.  We know the Age before the Age of Legends did not have channeling, but we don't know in which of the 7 ages Channeling gets "Lost", it could be the 4th through the 7th ages, probably near the end of one of those ages i would imagine.  I would assume that the one age that completely loses all knowledge of any age before would best be considered the "First".  Which might be the age before the age of legends or one of the ones before that.  All of this is assuming that each time an age ends it ends in a fairly similar fashion.

Edited by Hawkido
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