A new article is now available in the Reference Library: Dew Drop Inn : Wheel of Time AccommodationBack in 2007, Linda put together for Wotmania this compendium of all the Inns mentioned in The Wheel of Time series, organized chronologically by their first appearance in the novels.
Inns are an omnipresent feature in The Wheel of Time, an aspect the introduction to this article explores. Robert Jordan often used the names & signs of inns to add layers of symbolism, from the subtle or mythological to the purely comical, often referring to the journey, in the largest sense, of the characters involved. Linda explored this aspect, adding to her descriptions of the Inns many clues to their possible symbolism.
For its Thirteenth Depository publication, Dew Drop Inn - Wheel of Time Accommodation has been split in 12 (and eventually it will become 15) installments, one for each book, to be released on a regular basis. This week, we offer you the New Spring The Novel entry. We have added to the article several illustrations of Inn signs, executed in the naive, comical or occasionally pretentious styles of 17th century inns. Robert Jordan (and this might surprise the part of his readers who consider him overly descriptive) has elaborated on fairly few Inn signs through the series, so these illustrations are mostly meant to set an atmosphere as you read.
This announcement also gives me the opportunity to mention to our more research-oriented readers a companion Index page to Dew Drop Inn, which lists alphabetically all the Inns, their locations, owners and personnel. It will be completed in parallel with the Dew Drop Inn installments.
Finally, I also attract your attention on another feature page of the Index, a repertoire of Real Life Parallels and Symbolism in the series - listing everything from historical figures, mythological or legendary characters, locations, objects, animals etc - with links to references in our articles. It can be accessed from the keywords Parallels, Symbolism and Themes in the Main Index. Like all the index features, it is a work in progress which we fine tune and augment with each new article we publish.
Good reading, and as always we welcome your comments.
Whilst recently tootling around on the WoT Wiki the subject of inns came up and I was surprised to see very few inns had any kind of entry there. The thought of going through all twelve books to find the references for each individual tavern was slightly daunting, so your articles may prove timely.
ReplyDeleteObviously I mean that in a 'reminding me who visited what inn when so I can write an entry' way, not 'ripping off your hard work' way ;-)
:D You'd be a fool to redo all the research to get the very same listing at the end of the day! There are a few things in the series for which it's not healthy to redo the research from scratch... the Inns, Herbs and Plants, Food & Drink, Sigils and Clothing are some of them. We have resources for most of those either awaiting tweaks/revisions or illustrations to be re published. Some are rather in the writing stage, but most are on stand-by.
ReplyDeleteFor many of the articles we have no choice to make all the research for scratch - including the all the primary data gathering and cataloguing (food, clothing, herbs, sigils and banners were some of those), but we also make use of the existing resources when it's possible, if only to get the listing established before going to the books for the rest of the research. This series's world building - and word count - are so vast, if we didn't all build on the existing resources to go further, we wouldn't go very far!