Birgitte Silverbow
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Birgitte Silverbow is a fictional character in Robert Jordan's epic fantasy series, The Wheel of Time.
Typically described as having a long blonde braid of hair down her back, wearing a man's coat and trousers, and being deadly with a bow and arrow, Birgitte Silverbow is the heroine of many hundreds of gleemen's tales and legends. Like many of the great heroes of the Wheel of Time, she has been "spun out" into the Pattern many times, taking a different name but always following the same pattern: an archer, sometimes a soldier, who is linked to a lump-faced man who fights with two swords (most famously known as Gaidal Cain), whom she at first hates but eventually falls for. She is also one of the Heroes of the Horn of Valere, and, like Artur Hawkwing, like Gaidal Cain, like a hundred other heroes, can be summoned to fight for he who blows the Horn.
When not being woven into the Pattern, or fighting in spectral form, she and all the other heroes of the Wheel reside in Tel'aran'rhiod, and it was there that she first made her acquaintance with Elayne Trakand and Nynaeve al'Meara. The two were hunting Darkfriends in the World of Dreams, and despite injunctions to the contrary (and the ridicule of Gaidal), she insisted on stepping in. This led, eventually, to a confrontation with Moghedien in which Birgitte was ripped bodily from Tel'aran'rhiod and expelled directly into the waking world, instead of being born (re-incarnated) into it normally. When Nynaeve and Elayne found her, she was dying, a condition not even Nynaeve could heal. Elayne, with no other recourse, bonded Birgitte as her Warder, which saved her life, and Birgitte has served in this capacity ever since. Deadly and unspeakably competent with a bow, she is also by far the most raucous of Elayne's entourage; she and Mat Cauthon share a fondness for drink, carousing and foul language, a friendship strengthened by Mat's memories and the fact that he is, in fact, the Hornsounder.
Birgitte is an oddity in several respects. She is one of the world's only female Warders--both she and Elayne have discovered at first hand that the bond of their shared gender increases the empathic link of the Warder bond to sometimes unacceptable levels (when Birgitte gets drunk, Elayne gets tipsy, and likewise when Elayne and Rand spend some time alone, Birgitte gets... disturbed, to put it mildly). She is also the first Hero of the Horn to have been expelled from Tel'aran'rhiod: she still has the memories of all her past lives, though as time passes they are beginning to blur together. Finally, she is intimately linked with Gaidal Cain.
[edit] Gaidal Cain
Gaidal himself is one of the many oddities of the series. Just before Moghedien expelled her from Tel'aran'rhiod, Birgitte indicated that Gaidal had left to be reborn (naturally) into the Pattern. Shortly after, one of Min Farshaw's viewings indicate that Birgitte is linked romantically to a man who is simultaneously ten years older and ten years younger than Birgitte herself. This is almost certainly Gaidal reincarnated, but who he has been reincarnated as is the much more pertinent question.
Some fans believe that Gaidal will be the as-yet-unborn child of Elayne Trakand and Rand al'Thor, with opposition pointing out that Gaidal left Tel'aran'rhiod some three or four months before the child was conceived, and that Birgitte is presented as of an age with Elayne herself (making her physically about twenty years old). Others favor Mat's ten-year-old orphan ward, the famously ugly but curiously charming Olver, but his birthday is somewhere around 990 AE, ten years before Gaidal left the World of Dreams. This could mean that the "ten years older" points to Olver being in the real world ten years longer. Also, "ten years younger" could mean that Birgitte is ten years older than Olver once she is pulled out of Tel'aran'rhiod. Supporters of this theory point to an early bit of exposition from The Eye of the World, in which Thom Merrilin claims that sometimes people are reincarnated into already-existing bodies. However, this bit of dialogue comes from the very first book in the series, and Jordan has not mentioned the idea again. The mutable nature of time in Tel'aran'rhiod itself further complicates discussions. All that is certain is that, with only one book left in the series, Robert Jordan will soon need to answer the question himself.
