Hugin & Munin Journal

Cover image: The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan, published by Tor Books. Cover art by Darrell K. Sweet. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. Robert Jordan's The Shadow Rising used to sit, alongside The Fires of Heaven , at the absolute peak of The Wheel of Time for me. I thought so when I first read the series, and I still thought so when I returned to it perhaps fifteen years ago. This time was different. I still recognise the book I loved, and some of its best sequences remain among my favourite parts of the series. What has changed is how much I am prepared to accept between those sequences. The length bothers me more, but length is only part of it. Character behaviour that once generated tension now often feels like machinery designed to keep people in conflict. Mysteries I once enjoyed analysing can look like unnecessary branches when I already know where they lead. Some of Jordan's psychological assumptions are harder for me to believe than they were w...

There is a scene in The Great Hunt where Rand fights Ba’alzamon in the sky above Falme. The duel is not merely witnessed by the people nearby; it is projected across the sky for the armies below, turning a private confrontation into public legend. Robert Jordan returns to this kind of release throughout The Wheel of Time . Mat defeats Galad and Gawyn with a quarterstaff when almost everyone present expects him to be humiliated. Nynaeve matches and later captures Moghedien, then finally breaks the block that has constrained her use of the One Power for much of the series. These are not only reversals or displays of power. They are moments when accumulated frustration, concealed ability and mythic significance arrive together. Calling them “moments of awesome” can sound like faint praise, as though the series were a collection of highlights separated by very long corridors. Yet Jordan’s greatest climaxes are not random eruptions of spectacle. They are delayed, layered and prepared b...

When Prime Video’s The Wheel of Time began, I decided to reread the books alongside it. The original plan was simple: finish the relevant novels before each season arrived, notice the divergences and see whether the adaptation captured what had made the series matter to me in the first place. I did not always keep pace. Nor did the programme follow the books closely enough for each season to have one obvious corresponding volume. Season Three, for example, was adapted primarily from The Shadow Rising , but it redistributed characters, combined storylines and borrowed selectively from elsewhere. By the time I wrote this in December 2025, Prime Video had also cancelled the series after its third season . What began as a reread alongside an ongoing adaptation had unexpectedly become a comparison with an unfinished one. That comparison has still proved useful. An adaptation does not merely reveal what has been changed. It can expose the structure of the original: which scenes carry ...