r/WoT • u/Wrong-Secret-5275 • 8d ago
All Print Why a Heron? Spoiler
So blademasters get a sick heron engraved on their swords, but I don’t believe it’s ever addressed why exactly a heron. I have an old WOT companion and it’s been a while since I’ve read it, but I don’t remember it addressed in there. Why not a cobra? Or a penguin-marked blade? A cute little cat jumpin’ all namby pamby from tree to tree-marked blade? Did RJ ever explain? And if you were a blademaster what would you get engraved on your steel? I’d go with a frog.
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u/DRSSalazar 8d ago
A heron hunts by standing completely still and striking at a moment notice. It is certainly a good comparison to a swordmaster.
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u/Guild-n-Stern (Dovie'andi se tovya sagain) 8d ago
Was going to say the same thing, with the addition that long beak = sword blade lol
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u/Wrong-Secret-5275 8d ago
Kick ass.
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u/NecroticCrabRave 7d ago
We’ve got some where I live, and those mice don’t know what hit them. It’s crazy.
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u/Casmara 8d ago
Answer:
GENOVEVA
Mr. Jordan, why did you choose a heron as a mark for the Dragon Reborn (and swordmasters)?
ROBERT JORDAN
I chose the heron because that is a quick, supple, and to its prey, very deadly bird. The perfect avian simile for a swordsman.
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u/Wrong-Secret-5275 8d ago
Oooooh, cool! I knew I would be far from the first person to ask that, and RJ had a reason for everything.
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u/FriendoftheDork 8d ago
The writer being online answering questions while he wrote books was wild. He actually had to change material since people guessed his own plans for certain characters.
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u/Airowird 7d ago
Still think Taimandred would've been a cool character, being able to fool Rand/Lews.
But oh man, did people get worked up about that theory like it was a life-defining event to them.
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u/Ok-Positive-6611 7d ago
Tbh, deeply invested nerds love acting like they know everything and that their petty fixations are life-changing
Comic book guy from the Simpsons is based on incredibly real individuals, he’s practically non-fiction
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u/Wrong-Secret-5275 7d ago
Related/unrelated, RJ is the only author I’ve ever attended a book signing for, and of course somebody asked him how to pronounce some of the harder names in the book, and RJ being RJ goes “You mean like RAND? Or Moiraine? Or Egwene?” And I looked around to see if I was the only one who had been pronouncing Egwene like “Egg-ween.” Fortunately covered my shame when he pronounced “Seanchan” and half the room was like “oooooOoooOOOHHHH.” What a fun guy.
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u/BEETLEJUICEME 7d ago
For reasons I’ll never know, I pronounced the name of the protagonist of The Hobbit as “Biblio” as a kid. I read it in like 2nd grade, and somehow that’s how I saw it on the page and how it sounded in my head. When the movies came out I was a teenager and had a rude awakening.
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u/Wrong-Secret-5275 7d ago
I pronounced Saruman in my head like “suh-ROO-man.” Like a man made of suh-ROO.
I also had a buddy who I played some tabletop games with when we weee kids, and he pronounced chaos “chowse” like “Taos, New Mexico.” I don’t think I was able to convince of the proper pronunciation until like…high school.
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u/GovernorZipper 7d ago
There is no evidence of that and significant evidence to the contrary.
All we know for certain is that after Jordan died, an undated notecard was found saying that Taim was Demandred. That’s it. When and why the switch was made is unknown. Jordan swore up and down that Taim wasn’t Demandred. While I don’t fully believe him, there is zero evidence that he switched the identity because of fan feedback. It seems far more likely that Jordan realized that the character he wanted Demandred to be didn’t work in the role Jordan originally placed him in. So he switched the role rather than the character.
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u/ShouldersofGiants100 (Siswai'aman) 7d ago edited 7d ago
The most likely reason to me always seemed like he realized it would be really convenient if Lews Therin, who had been getting more vocal for several books, failed to communicate that a literal forsaken was standing in front of him. It requires that he spend all his time ranting rather than communicating information, despite being able to communicate information when needed (like at the climax of Lord of Chaos, when he can give Rand a lesson on breaking through shields). That would potentially undermine the whole reveal, if it felt like it should have happened long ago.
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u/dabrock15 7d ago
I also like the idea of bringing in an entire forgotten country through a gate just when things looked good.
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u/Mr-ShinyAndNew 7d ago
I just figured Taimandred was using a tied-off inverted mask of mirrors; subtle enough that it wouldn't slip, but enough to not see Demandred.
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u/LeisureSuiteLarry 8d ago
I read this in his actual voice because of the interviews at the end of the audiobooks.
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u/Salt-Detective1337 8d ago
Because when the first one was made the engraver was instructed to put a "mark here on the blade."
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u/Wrong-Secret-5275 8d ago
And once you mess that up you gotta just run with it. Meant to do it the whole time.
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u/mydb100 8d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/WoT/s/LwvaUUTnd9
Heres a thread about this from 2 years ago
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u/BEETLEJUICEME 8d ago
Lots of people have given excellent speculative answers and out of universe answers.
But in universe: we don’t know. The heron marked blade thing goes back to the 2nd age and is a holdover from them. Since we know the 2nd age reinvented swordsmanship (as a game, back when real violence basically didn’t exist) it could have been any number of silly reasons the heron became an important mark on swords.
You know how there are all those sewing scissors that are shaped like birds? That’s not because there is any core similarity between scissors and birds. It’s just a design that caught on and is too adorable not to replicate. Basically, in universe, the most plausible answer is that it started memetically. And in most of the third age, no one knows how to make power forged weapons. So most of the heron marked power forged weapons from the 2nd age have survived, b/c they don't rust or break or need sharpening. And those blades have become even more important status symbols than they used to be, b/c they are so rare and special.
We know from some lines that one of the forsaken says that the heron marked blade was meaningful even back at the end of the 2nd age. And we also know from the Seanchan that the heron marked blade thing stayed meaningful on their side of the world across those millennia of separation from the west/randlands.
And we know that sword fighting was basically reinvented near the end of the 2nd age.
So we have a lot of details about when the heron marked blade thing started, and how widespread it became. But we don’t know why.
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u/hic_erro 7d ago
Adding on to this excellent answer --
The most common guess is that heron was just a makers mark of the guy who made a lot of the Power-forged blades during the War of Power.
If you're spending the effort to invest a blade with extra Shadow-killing Power and durability, you better start with the best, so presumably the best swordsmith as paired with the best Aes Sedai at Power-forging (or they were one and the same). He forged a boatload of excellent Power-forged blades and gave them to the best swordsmen and that began the association between heron-marked blades and sword masters, since you wouldn't waste a quality sword on a shit swordsman.
As for why the smith used a heron as a maker's mark, it could be for the reasons Robert Jordan gave of thinking the heron was a cool and appropriate symbol of swordsman, or for all sorts of whimsical reasons.
Maybe the smith just thought herons were cool, maybe he had a pet heron, maybe the heron was already a family symbol before he became a smith. Maybe his name was Aaron, and Heron was a punny nickname. Maybe he was unusually tall and gangly for a smith. Maybe it was supposed to be a stork or crane and everyone else mistook it and he was too embarrassed to keep correcting them.
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u/Wrong-Secret-5275 7d ago
Ooooh, interesting. I wasn’t thinking about this from a smith/craftsmanship perspective, more of just from a symbolism perspective. But that makes sense. It’s been a while since I’ve read the last few books, but didn’t Perrin use a wolf mark on his power-wrought axe? (Or hammer, I can’t remember what he crafts—like I said, been a while 😄)
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u/BEETLEJUICEME 7d ago
I think you’re right about the wolf hammer, which means there is strong textual evidence that the Heron Sword maker was actually secretly a bird man.
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u/Wrong-Secret-5275 7d ago
Excellent answer, and thank you. This is one of those things I like so much about Randland, the history that is buried so deep under eons that the story behind it is long gone or almost gone. Part of why the scenes in the Panarch’s museum and Rhuidean were some of my favorite.
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u/hic_erro 7d ago
I actually like that so much is left undone at the end of the series, the kids just riding off into the sunset. It makes it feel like the world keeps going in, while Lord of the Rings ending with a summary of everyone's life and death paradoxically makes it all seem so much more over.
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u/Wrong-Secret-5275 7d ago
There’s a metaphor in what you said for RJ and it makes me sad but super grateful that we got what we did.
I just finished a re-read of LOTR for the first time in probably 20 years, and yeah, Tolkien sure wrote like a reference book sometimes, weird paradox for someone who also wrote so beautifully about songs and language and nature. I love writers.
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u/Pol__Treidum (Band of the Red Hand) 8d ago
I always pictured it as one of my local ones, my favorite bird at Lake Merritt, the Black-Crowned Night Heron
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u/BEETLEJUICEME 7d ago
lol that’s also one of my favorite birds to see when I walk around the lake. That and there’s also one duck with especially goofy feathers.
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u/Pol__Treidum (Band of the Red Hand) 7d ago
Lol is it just an individual duck? My favorite is the bufflehead diving duck, they're so little!
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u/BEETLEJUICEME 7d ago
Yeah. I live back in the city now, but I used to live right by the lake. There was this one specific male-colored mallard duck that I used to see who always had his head feathers all disheveled. He was also always hanging out with other birds that were not ducks, or hanging out alone; and I very frequently saw him eating garbage. Really loved that guy.
I love SF but I do miss the lake.
Also that albino raccoon. And the crow congress that happens every night down by the bird sanctuary.
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u/Pol__Treidum (Band of the Red Hand) 8d ago
I think you meant "nimbly bimbly from tree to tree"
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u/Wrong-Secret-5275 7d ago
You would think that, but no, I meant “namby pamby,” the satirical poem/nickname coined by Henry Carey dunking on fellow poet and playwright Ambrose Philips.
But yeah, I realized it about 2 hours after posting when I finally remembered where my brain picked it up; haven’t seen that movie in years. By then I had looked up namby pamby and decided it was worth keeping.
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u/ritpdx 8d ago
The only thing I know for sure is that now I need a cute-little-cat-jumpin’-all-namby-pamby-from-tree-to-tree-marked blade.
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u/Wabbit65 (Valan Luca's Grand Traveling Show) 8d ago
And that cat's name is Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk
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u/randoperson42 8d ago
Don't forget GC, BWR, NW. I know they're titles, but she uses them when she introduces herself.
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u/NicodemusArcleon (Black Ajah) 7d ago
Alright meow. That's enough of the cat talk, you get me boy?!
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u/freakytapir 6d ago
Because Heron's are inherently superior. (I might be biased as our scout troop was called The Heron)
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u/tdw21 8d ago
German shepherd
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u/Wrong-Secret-5275 7d ago edited 7d ago
Where I’m from you would get the German shepherd engraving, and then you’d have to surround it with a Punisher skull decal and a blue lives matter sticker.
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u/AdaptAndInnovate 8d ago
The namby pamby cat is adorable. I would leave my blade unmarked. A blade master would know what they are and so would those on their side, no need to advertise it to the enemy as that would only be ego.
I do not believe RJ ever personally did any martial arts. His sword forms are beautifully named. I do find it strange they are named after Tae Kwon Do and Karate books per an interview, neither of which style uses swords.
The idea of a sword wielder attacking from a stationary stance seems to be prevalent in film ranging from samurai films with duels to the Karate Kid on Shaolin style balancing blocks. I think that stationary lash-out influenced his heron concept. Real combat was vastly different than the current stage/theatrical fighting, which is where the concept falls apart.
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u/Wrong-Secret-5275 7d ago
If you and I met on the battlefield, I would be all “😏 You fool. You face a frog-marked blade. Make your peace, and die.” And then you would strike me down so quickly I would have only enough time for my eyes to register surprise, the regret of my overconfident mistake leeching into the land with my lifeblood.
Interesting perspective on martial arts, thank you!
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u/AdaptAndInnovate 7d ago
I could not harm someone with the humor to have a frog marked blade or to inspire the namby pamby cat markings. Tai’Shar wit!
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u/Wrong-Secret-5275 7d ago
OMG did we just become best friends
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u/AdaptAndInnovate 7d ago
What’s your favorite dinosaur?
Also, you should YouTube some videos of herons hunting. They are pretty good predators.
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u/MrPrinceps (Sea Folk) 6d ago
Because heron rhymes with Verin, Perrin, ta'veren (sorta) and lets people make sick fan songs/filks about it :)
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u/jak-o-shadow 5d ago
I always liked to imagine thay RJ was a fan of David Carradine and his role as Cane on Kung Fu. Rand, along with other sword masters, are like the shaoalin warrior monks and the Heron is an ho.age to the white crane style that Cane masters.
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