The Axe and The Hammer
The night Perrin left the Two Rivers, he received his signature weapon from his blacksmith master: a moon-bladed hand axe, crafted on contract but never sold. Perrin has acquainted himself well with it, using muscles accustomed to swinging ten pounds of steel. Not long after meeting Elyas Machera, he asked if he should throw the axe away, but Elyas told him only to do so once he found himself enjoying its use. In Tear, just before Rand took the Stone, Perrin stopped for an unplanned night's work at a Tairen forge, and in payment (and gratitude) the blacksmith gave him the hammer he had used.
The choice of axe or hammer is one Perrin is constantly having to decide in the wolf dream, where he can change things, and symbolizes the choice between destroyer and creator.
Perrin eventually discarded the axe, just after using it to sever a captive Shaido's hand from his arm in an attempt to scare the Shaido into revealing the location of his wife Faile who was captured and made gai'shain.
When a Banner-General of the Seanchan army with whom Perrin cooperated met Perrin, she quoted a section of the Prophecies of the Dragon:
When the Wolf King carries the hammer, thus are the final days known.
When the Fox marries the raven, and the trumpets of battle are blown.
She believes he is the wolf king. The second line refers to Mat marrying Tuon. The final days and trumpets of battle mean that Tarmon Gai'don nears.
In "Towers of Midnight," Perrin, with the help of some Asha'man and Wise Ones, crafts a new, Power-made hammer named Mah'alleinir and leaves the old hammer behind.
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Famous quotes containing the words axe and/or hammer:
“If the axe is not sharp, it doesn’t matter how hard the wood is.”
—Chinese proverb.
“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)