the first age being our own modern era, the third age’s myths and stories being our modern events garbled by word of mouth, and our legends and stories about the past being the third age’s events garbled into myths as the wheel turns around again (causing the parallels between wheel of time characters and our stories about odin, jesus, arthur, etc), never fails to mess with my head!!
its about the cyclical nature of storytelling, the way the series and our myths reflect and refract back on each other, the meta quality of how the author was directly looking at us in the face and saying “a story takes on a quality of truth when you tell it enough times”
This is also the implication of the Heroes of the Horn: those spun out again and again in endless variation to make new myths and stories. The Dragon is the savior of the world and parallels many historic saviors, the High King is all the great conquerors of the past from Alexander the Great to Charlemagne to Napoleon, Birgitte is a combination of famous archers from Artemis to Robin Hood to Skadi: the wheel favors these patterns, these legends and that’s why they crop up and reoccur so often in both our folklore and that of Randland.
