Dune influenced The Wheel Of Time

Jordan's debt to Tolkien is the one usually discussed, and the graph already holds it. Herbert supplies what Tolkien does not:

• A prophesied messiah engineered by a centuries-old order of women, the Bene Gesserit and the Aes Sedai, breeding and steering toward a man who can do what they cannot
• A protagonist terrified of the prophecy who tries to escape it, and whose ascension is treated as a catastrophe rather than as a happy ending
• Ancestral memory as a usable faculty, and a desert people whose fanatical loyalty becomes the hero's most dangerous weapon

Filed as LOW. While the structural overlap in world-building is too precise for readers to ignore, Robert Jordan's explicit denial means it cannot be categorized as a definitive, conscious influence. As Jordan himself concluded:"No, there was no intention to make any similarities between Dune and my writings. And I am certainly a big fan of the original Dune novel. Although I doubt if I've read it since it first came out!" — From discussions on Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange and A Wheel of Time Wiki.