It's important to understand the foundational difference between the father of modern fantasy, Prof. J.R.R. Tolkien, and one of Tolkien's literary descendants, Robert Jordan. Understand that I'm not writing this to proclaim one of these author's king, nor am I trying to convince others of the literary merits--academic or aesthetic--of the writers who happened to be born after Tolkien and so must proclaim homage to Tolkien due in the least to the linear flow of time. Instead, it is important to understand why Tolkien does deserve such an homage, and how he has been successively surpassed particularly in the craft of writing.
To put it simply, Tolkien was an academic, and as such Tolkien has had the strongest understanding or sense of the nature of myth, fairy stories, and their relationship to the fields of historiography and art. Tolkien's two most famous lectures-turned-essays on these topics, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," and "On Fairy Stories," give us exactly the type of groundbreaking academic perspective you would expect from a forward-thinking professor ruminating on their well-trodden field of study. Tolkien understood fantasy, fairy story, or myth, as a cultural artifact, but moreover elucidated the value of that artifact in relation to human experience. Myth, in Tolkien's hands, became real. Conversely, I do not know of any writings by Robert Jordan--or other major contemporary fantasy writers, for that matter--that approach the subject from the angle of academia that Tolkien did. In fact, I think Tolkien did so so effectively that Tolkien essentially closed the book on the value of the fairy story. We're convinced Tolkien-- thank you.
However, this is not to say that Robert Jordan's writing of fairy story, or, as Tolkien coined it, Jordan's use of the land of Faerie (though others like Edmund Spenser used the phrase) was in any measurable way better than Tolkien's, because Jordan obviously owes a tremendous debt to Tolkien's understanding of mythology or fairy story. In short, Tolkien was an academic, a fantastic storyteller, but in the end a mediocre writer. "Clumsy" is the best way to describe The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings (LotR), and The Silmarillion. The appendices at the end of LotR and the very existence of The Silmarillion itself, exemplifies Tolkien's lack of mastery over written narrative. I contend that had Tolkien been a master writer, The Silmarillion would have been worked in to the larger tale of LotR. This failure is exactly where Jordan succeeds. The Silmarillion is essentially a giant appendix to LotR. It is part of the story that Tolkien didn't understand how to include in the main body of the LotR narrative. Jordan, on the other hand, doesn't use appendices, but rather 14 novels to make the story--appendices and all--unified. The entirety of the story is meshed together. In a very real sense, Jordan is standing on the shoulder's of Tolkien's genius regarding how fairy stories work, and where Tolkien failed in the craft of writing them, Jordan succeeded.
In Jordan's contiguous (although certainly not chronological) narrative, we get the Breaking of the World and the wonders of the Age of Legends which preceded it. We follow the rise of Artur Hawking and note the fall of the Aes Sedai from worldly importance-- all without appendices and all without breaking stride from the original narrative, because the history of Jordan's world is the narrative, or more specifically, the characters in Jordan's world experience their own mythology in the way that Tolkien explained we ourselves should be experiencing mythology in his essay "On Fairy Stories."
In a sense, I then see Tolkien's five books (previously mentioned) as the equivalent in narrative volume as Jordan's fourteen books. Jordan required the mythological interstitial fluid to connect the mythologies and histories to his characters, and this written connection birthed a tale larger in physical books than Tolkien's, but on the same capacity of narrative accomplishment. This is exactly what makes Jordan's tale so much more readable than Tolkien's and a much more smoother experience. We are not asked to fit the Tolkien-appendix apparatus into Jordan's story, for Jordan does it for us. That is a master writer, and that is exactly what separates the two apart.
