Editors Reads Verdict
The Great Hunt expands the Wheel of Time's world dramatically, introducing new cultures, characters, and mythological layers while deepening the series' central mystery. Many readers consider it the moment the series found its full stride — it is where Jordan establishes beyond doubt that this is a world worth living in for fourteen volumes.
What We Loved
- The world expands dramatically — new cities, cultures, and political structures open up the series' scope
- The character of Rand begins the psychological complexity that will define him across the full arc
- The Seanchan invasion introduces one of the series' most morally challenging societies
- The ending at Falme is one of the great set-pieces of epic fantasy
Minor Drawbacks
- The plot is driven significantly by characters making avoidable mistakes — a pattern that will recur in the series
- The pacing slows in the novel's middle section as the pursuit of the Horn extends across multiple storylines
Key Takeaways
- → The weight of prophecy is that it removes the freedom to fail — but not the freedom to choose how to succeed
- → A world in which the past literally recurs requires characters who can distinguish between learning from history and being imprisoned by it
- → The power of a symbol — a horn, a banner, a name — often exceeds the power of the thing it represents
- → The Seanchan provide Jordan's most sophisticated moral challenge: a society that is wrong in a way that is internally coherent
| Author | Robert Jordan |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Tor Books |
| Pages | 681 |
| Published | November 15, 1990 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, Fiction |
| Difficulty | Intermediate |
| Best For | Readers who have completed The Eye of the World and want to continue the series; particularly recommended for readers who found the first book's Tolkienesque beginning hesitant — The Great Hunt is where Jordan's own voice fully takes over. |
The Series Finds Its Stride
The Great Hunt is where many readers of the Wheel of Time will tell you the series truly begins to be itself. The first novel wore its Tolkien inheritance openly — the flight from the Shire, the fellowship, the dark riders. By the opening of book two, Jordan has clearly settled into the confidence of a writer who knows his world is not Tolkien’s world, and that the differences matter.
The novel opens with the theft of the Horn of Valere — an artefact of legendary power, capable of summoning the dead heroes of previous Ages to fight for whichever side claims it — from Fal Dara, where the company has been sheltering. Rand al’Thor, Mat Cauthon, and Perrin Aybara are pulled back into danger when the Horn is taken. The quest to recover it drives the plot across two continents and a dramatically expanded cast of characters.
The World Opens Up
One of the great pleasures of The Great Hunt is the sense of a world becoming larger. Rand’s journey takes him to Cairhien, a city of intricate political scheming; to Tar Valon, the city of the Aes Sedai; and eventually to Falme on the Aryth Ocean coast, where the novel’s climax takes place. Each new location in Jordan’s world is a distinct civilisation with its own customs, power structures, and relationship to the One Power — and the cumulative effect, by the end of the second novel, is of a world whose edges are still invisible.
The Amazon Prime series covers significant portions of this material in its second season, though with substantial modifications. Readers who want to understand what the TV series is drawing on — and what it has changed — will find The Great Hunt illuminating on both counts.
Rand’s Burden
The novel’s emotional core is Rand’s deepening relationship with his destiny. He knows, with increasing certainty, that he is the Dragon Reborn — the prophesied champion and also the prophesied source of catastrophe, since the last Dragon broke the world. His attempts to escape this knowledge, and his eventual, partial acceptance of it, are handled with more psychological nuance than the first novel’s genre conventions allowed.
Egwene al’Vere and Nynaeve al’Meara’s storyline — their capture and experiences with the Seanchan — introduces one of Jordan’s most consistently interesting moral challenges. The Seanchan use women who can channel as weapons, leashing them with a device called the a’dam. It is a system of extraordinary cruelty and, within the Seanchan’s own cultural logic, perfectly coherent. Jordan never makes the moral issue simple, and he never lets the reader settle comfortably into the view that all the series’ problems have clear answers.
A Confident Second Volume
Where many epic fantasy series stumble in their second novels — caught between the need to expand and the difficulty of maintaining momentum without a clean premise to drive the plot — The Great Hunt succeeds by trusting its world and its characters. The plot is sometimes frustrating in ways that are deliberately part of Jordan’s design: characters make mistakes because they are young, frightened, and confronting forces they do not understand. The frustration is the point.
Our rating: 4.4/5 — The Wheel of Time expands dramatically in its second volume, introducing new cultures, deepening its central characters, and building to one of epic fantasy’s finest climaxes; the series’ full ambition becomes clear here.
Ready to Read The Great Hunt?
Check the current price on Amazon.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)Prices and availability are subject to change. See Amazon for current price.
Review last updated: