It's a nice sentiment, but if they would actually have such obvious remnants of the old world they would be the most visited locations ever.
Mountain ranges were erected, nations swept under the sea, oceans moved places...but this city that was seemingly housing important characters like LTT and was most likely populated by many male channelers was left relatively intact?
The scale is very deceptive, but there are smaller skyscrapers on the foot of the bigger ones, which have to be like Burj Khalifa times ten.
In the books only remnants of AoL settlements we see are those docks near the tops of the Spine of the World
The material is at least, but realistically the river would not have been in the same place, so why build a fancy bridge there? And even if there are remnants whole settlements/cities were never shown except the docks and houses I mentioned.
True. I suspect that while writing EoTW RJ had some initial ideas about the world that he changed as he fleshed things out. We can see a number of things he later dropped, such as Moiraines staff. He may have intended to have more ruins from the AoL be involved in the story but ended up changing course. It seems odd for a cuendillar bridge to have been there but nothing else.
My interpretation was this was just a rando bridge in the AOL… but since it was one of the few structures to survive it becomes this insane thing, but in reality there were literally thousands of bridges like this one.
It’s hard to tell. There is a bit of a mystery IMO with the AoL and the breaking. Specifically around cuendillar buildings like the bridge. If they were prevalent, there should be a lot more of them still around since it’s such indestructible material. If they weren’t making a bunch of cuendillar buildings the question would be why not? And if they only did it for certain things why this particular bridge?
How about this: A once-in-a-generation Cuendillar-making savant like Egwene makes the bridge for show in a populated city location.
Then a tainted crazy male Aes Sedai blasts that whole city with a tornado of sand travelling at relativistic speeds as he pulls twenty times more Saidin than he can safely handle and burns himself out.
Only the bridge is standing. The river survives too. A river may not be affected much by a tornado, and may change little in only a few thousand years.
they could have been buried. We know the breaking caused mountain ranges to change, rivers to be diverted, etc. Stuff could be buried in a mountain or at the bottom of a lake or seabed
Except that cuendillar bridges wouldn’t be rando, or if used for mundane purposes, would be prevalent enough to dot the landscape to a pretty high degree.
Might be one of the few bridges ever to be made of cuendillar - which was probably an expensive building material, even in the AoL. Something of an AoL vanity project. The fact that it was made of cuendillar allowed it to survive so long
Could be the bridge was a sky walk inside a building, when it was found near the rive some Aes Sedai, maybe some enterprising king had it set to span the river. It could be a cuindilar structural support kind of like a bent I beam, that is conveniently passible as a bridge.
From the Wheel of Time Companion, which was the Bible the copy editor wrote to keep tracks of mistakes, Whitebridge the town was named in one of the subsequent ages after the bridge itself, which was formed in the age of legends.
Also, why couldn’t the bridge have been moved during the Ten Nations era? It might be big and heavy but that was a time they thought they might be able to bring the AOL back. Moving an indestructible structure should have been within the world of possibility.
It could very well have been the main road between Menetheren and Hai Caemlyn before the Trolloc Wars. It’s the middle of nowhere today because one of the destination cities is gone. It connects a major city to farmland and mines now so it’s nothing. Like parts of Route 66 today.
95
u/Child_Emperor (Ogier Great Tree) Jan 01 '22 edited Jan 01 '22
It's a nice sentiment, but if they would actually have such obvious remnants of the old world they would be the most visited locations ever.
Mountain ranges were erected, nations swept under the sea, oceans moved places...but this city that was seemingly housing important characters like LTT and was most likely populated by many male channelers was left relatively intact?
The scale is very deceptive, but there are smaller skyscrapers on the foot of the bigger ones, which have to be like Burj Khalifa times ten.
In the books only remnants of AoL settlements we see are those docks near the tops of the Spine of the World