Heresy 127

[The Snowfyre Chorus]

That doesn't make sense to me, the common tongue has the word dragon. How could you mistranslate dragon as prince if your language already has the word dragon in it ? I'm being really dumb, I'm sure but I'm not getting it :dunno:

Well, translations aside, part of the issue is that the word "dragon" is used as a synonym for "prince" in Westeros - and in the Targ family. (Targs being the only ones terribly concerned with this prophecy, it seems.) So, in Mystery Knight, we get conversations like this (careful now - if you haven't read it, this could be a legit spoiler):

"And who are you to tell the King's Hand what to do?"

Egg did not flinch. "You know who I am, cousin."

"Your squire is insolent, ser," Lord Rivers said to Dunk. "You ought to beat that out of him."

"I've tried, m’lord. He's a prince, though."

"What he is," said Bloodraven, “Is a dragon. Rise, ser.”

Dunk rose.

"There have always been Targaryens who dreamed of things to come, since long before the Conquest," Bloodraven said, "so we should not be surprised if from time to time a Blackfyre displays the gift as well. Daemon dreamed that a dragon would be born at Whitewalls, and it was. The fool just got the color wrong.”

Dunk looked at Egg. The ring, he saw. His father's ring. It’s on his finger, not stuffed up inside his boot.

So, "dragon" definitely refers to certain men in Westeros (Targaryen princes, to be precise) - and once the actual dragons die out, that effectively becomes the primary meaning of the word. Sort of the way "lions" and "wolves" are used in the Riverlands after Ned dies and the fighting starts. Everyone always has to clarify whether they're discussing predators of the "four-footed, or two-footed" variety.

But Aemon puts the translation error a thousand years in the past. So it looks like the common tongue is not the first, but at least the second, translation of the prophecy. And if we assume Valyrian to be a gendered language (similar to the Romance languages, in that nouns must be assigned a gender - whether or not the subject has an actual social / biological gender of its own)... then part of the problem seems to be that translating a non-gendered subject word (or a word designating a subject whose gender was unknown) from the original language would have required the use of a masculine word in Valyrian. Like translating from English into Spanish, where the word dragon (non-gendered English noun) becomes el dragón (masculine Spanish noun).

Then of course, those in Old Valyria who were fortunate enough to have dragons become very powerful citizens - they were princes, as BC would say... and eventually "dragon" and "prince" come to be used interchangeably. For the Targs (maybe all dragonlords), this would be compounded by the placement of the dragon on the House coat of arms. And in Westeros - if not before - the masculine-gendered grammar of the word for dragon ("el dragón") is conflated with social / cultural assumptions about sex. If dragons are rulers and rule is inherited by men, then dragons are men (princes as opposed to princesses). Then the actual dragons themselves die out, only Septon Barth and Maester Aemon remember anything about the changeable nature of dragon sexual characteristics, and nobody cares about the prophecy except religious fanatics and the dead.

And voila. There you have it. What started out as a gender free "dragon" is now identified as a male hero from the ruling class. The error has officially "crept in from the translation." :)

[wolfmaid7]

From last thread:

ATS said : In an effort to gain favor with your largest supporter

That maybe part of it,it may not but as i said sending a 10yr Old to the Wall is not going to done for merely political reasons.It is something that they "had" to do.

Kalessi did nothing wrong said:

Like when? The decline of the Night's Watch seems to be a relatively recent thing that happened gradually over the course of the Targaryen rule. Back in Jaeharys' time they were still numerous enough to have use for the New Gift, and since they allegedly made such a good impression on queen Alysanne they might not have been as full of rapists and murderers back then as they are now either, for example. Also up until 90 (?) years before present there were numerous tamed dragons around in Westeros, which might have discouraged them further. Since even if I don't agree with the people who say the series is going to end with Dany and her dragonriders Jon and Tyrion burning up all the Others and then flying back to the Iron Throne, dragons are still probably quite dangerous to them (I don't think it is a coincidence that all anti-wight weapons we know of so far have "dragon" something in their name. Dragonglass, dragonsteel etc).

Or it could have something to do with the resurgence of magic that for unknown reasons has happened during the series, with old spells starting to work again or produce much stronger results (wildfire) , krakens pulling down ships, Red Priests being able to resurrect people and so on. Since the Others likely rely on sorcery to raise and control their undead hordes they might need these pro-magic conditions to wage war properly.

I disagree it was dwindling way before that Queen Alysanne used her own money( from the jewells in her crown i believe) so that the NW could use a smaller less costly Castle because the amount of men per the size made it not feasible. We have no idea if the wws even care about Dragons being in the land or not i get the sense that they don't or wouldn't care one way or the other. They have a Job to do and its going to get done.

Remember having Dragonglass in the name doesn't mean anything Obsidian is a manifestation of both elements it is called "frozen fire" and may well kill a Dragon utilizing the "Frozen" aspect to neutralize it we don't know.

Another thing magic was never absent from the land it was always around the difference is that there were not lightning in the bottle situations occuring. That is to say the proper triggers were kept away from their triggees.

The moment the Direwolves came over the Wall and into the lives of their counterparts the Wolfdreams,treedreams and crow dreams started not because they weren't always there but because they for the first time in how many hundreds of years had their other halves.

the Halfhand's message to Mormont wasn't really correct " Tell Mormont the trees have eyes again" .The trees always had eyes the old powers were always around looking it is only now those suseptible have been awaken.

Same with Dany,a Dragon egg would have stayed cold stone for eons,but right trigger,right triggee....Dany got the eggs and wham.

[#Fire and Blood]

True enough. Though there's also something to be said for the shock of taking something that's been played for laughs and making it suddenly chilling. A loose parallel might be how in Harry Potter, it's so silly how everybody keeps calling Voldemort "You-Know-Who," but later there's a curse placed on the name so that Voldemort really is "notified" every time his name is spoken.

Which makes me wonder: one, if this is true, is Hodor actually poking at something dangerous every time he says "hodor"? And two, I wonder how long he's been disabled; it's possible he was even the one to inadvertently wake the Ice power, and had his wits burned out of him in the process a la someone who tried to wake up Cthulhu.

Would Old Nan remember the exiled Night Kings name? I would think by the way she was talking about it she did know his name, however she was not willing to say it. But....I wonder if she has ever said Hodor in the books? I can't think of a time she said it, but I am sure somebody could check that really fast with their fancy tablet reader!

[wolfmaid7]

Good questions and good post, redrose! I wondered the same thing about greenseer aging as I was reading through a Bran chapter the other day. It struck me as odd that, even though the caves only house "three score" Singers, Bran (as Hodor) finds an entire room full of what appear to be seated greenseers (of the Singer variety), apparently still living. At first glance, that didn't seem to jive with the line you quoted above - that a "gifted" singer is born only "once in a great while"... at least, the proportions seem a bit off. The simple resolution, I guess, is to say... well, Singers live a super-long time anyway (in human terms), so if their greenseers live even longer, then it's plausible to imagine scads of greenseer Singers still operational long after the other - uh, unplugged? - Singers dwindle away. I also wondered whether "three score" ends up being a large or a small number. I mean, Meera seems to think it's not that many... and the fact that Bran was brought there at all sort of leaves us thinking the place might be CotF HQ... but it's possible there are other Singer communities in other places. (But maybe all the greenseers are brought to HQ, and hardwired into the Weirnet mainframe? :dunno: )

And re: Hodor. I wonder about this off and on, and I do think Hodor fits a certain fairy tale archetype rather well - the human child "blessed" with knowledge of the fairy realm, able to see the fae creatures... but struck dumb and branded as "simple" by other men. A great example of this is the Bee Boy, in Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill. Long ago, his umpteenth grandmother, the Widow Whitgift, helped the fairies in a time of great need out of the goodness of her heart - freely, not asking any bargain, etc. In return, the local fairy pledged that, "So long as Whitgift blood lasted... there would allers be one o' her stock that—that no Trouble 'ud lie on, no Maid 'ud sigh on, no Night could frighten, no Fright could harm, no Harm could make sin, an' no Woman could make a fool of." Or, as the family remembered it - "there was always to be one of 'em that could see further into a millstone than most." In Kipling's story, the Bee Boy (Hobden's son) is the heir of this blessing. His mother recognized that "when [she] first found he wasn't like others," and by reputation he sounds a lot like Hodor: he's "not quite right in his head, but... can pick up swarms of bees in his naked hands." He also knows and is known by the fairies, who remain hidden to other humans.

Now, what does Martin do with that? I don't know. Martin's (so far) remained very subtle with his magic... so maybe it's enough for now that Hodor can wander the caverns in the cave of bones to see and visit Singers that Bran himself can't. As you noted, he also seemed to have some awareness of danger in the Winterfell crypts beyond what Bran, Luwin, and Osha could sense. In a way, Hodor behaved more like a direwolf than a human, in terms of his unwillingness to descend those stairs (like Summer, at least - and like Ghost did at the Fist of the First Men) - as if he had a similar kind of sixth sense. So there's definitely more going on with this "stableboy" than meets the eye.

(BTW - If you have a link to Martin's comments on Hodor, I'd love to re-read what he had to say about it. Every now and then this topic comes up, but I haven't ever saved a copy of the SSM / interview...)

I always took the term "Singer" to be broader than the COTF and i believe their are hints in the text to this effect which may shed more light on how the gods mark. To me the gift meant "the sight". So lets throw away all the labels of which particular gods are involved and lets just say magic. Magic has marked certain individuals to recieve the "sight" Jojen,Ghost(Jon),Shaggy(Rickon) Drogon (Dany) Blood Raven the GHH. All these individuals and creatures have been marked,they all have the sight in common and they all "Sing" or share a "song" with a creature with the correct eyes that does.

I completely agree that "dabbling" in magic by humans has been going on for a very long time. I'd gotten the impression that the CotF might have helped the FM start to dabble, while it might have been figured out separately in Essos. I'm not wed to that impression, though.

I really wonder where Martin's going with this in terms of origins. Will it be like with our own anthropology of several ancestors emerging in different locations, or is he going with a more singular "first man" genesis, from which all other men come? I think it's possible that he's giving us a "Cradle of Civilization" with the Vaes Dothrak area, but that's something different from the dawn of man, though would still give us at least a singular cultural origin.

I bring that up only because I think that anthropological question might be relevant in terms of whether Martin's designed everything so that it comes from a single source that then dispersed. Which would probably include magical dabblings, as well as religions and gods. That question's always been a bit of a mystery to me in terms of whether humans on both continents figured out how to work magic separately, or if that came from a single source. Especially because I had the impression the CotF might have taught a few things to the FM (we know they taught men to speak to ravens, but might they have taught them other things?).

Th religions suggest that a split from one might have occurred. The Dothraki worship the sun and moon; the FM's original gods (according to the Borrel on Sweetsister) are the "Lord of the Skies" and the "Lady of the Waves." "Lord of the Skies" makes a great deal of sense as a name for the sun, and "Lady of the Waves" makes sense to me as a name for the moon given that the moon causes tides. Of course, sun and moon are very universal, as is the idea of duality, and it might simply be a comment on the human collective consciousness that 2 separate places developed worship of 2 obvious natural elements. But I lean toward the possibility that everyone in ASOIAF may have actually come from the Vaes Dothrak region-- at least, this was the first civilization from which all come.

I guess the next question is whether man had mastered magic before of after that. Perhaps they had in some capacity, and the FM fled from the effects of that (oppression and so forth), only to have to deal with magic again when they found the CotF. I'm not sure about special bloodlines, though; I tend to think anyone could probably wield magic if conditions were right.

I'd say they screw the pooch on that,man has always ever known doing things without consequences. That's how magic works there is always a price to be paid ,you can't take and mot put back in something of equal value and sometimes what you think you give aint enough to cover.I agree there is commonality here and that's what i hope one day to figure,men had magic before coming across the bridge. I could see the Dothraki region being the "motherland" so to speak.

[#Fire and Blood]

Have we ever discussed why Bran blacked out when going into Hodor right before he entered into the cave of the 3EC? Did something happen that GRRM did not want us to see?

[moudii]

Gotta love the idea that the nights king was named Hodor Stark!

[Eira Seren]

from ButcherCrow Posted Yesterday, 11:41 PM

This unusual name is of early medieval English origin, and derives from a nickname meaning a beautiful, radiant person or one with very bright, fair hair. The derivation is from the Olde English pre 7th Century word "scir", bright, fair, in Middle English "scher" and "schir", with the French (Norman) intensive suffix "(h)ard". ..

...One of the Coats of Arms most associated with the family depicts two gold boars, passant, a canton, ermine, on a blue shield.

I bolded the most relevant info. The fact that the name can be descriptive of hair is of course tantalising given the role that hair plays in the books.

So who was King Sherrit ? Why was he at The Wall and why was he cursing the Andals ? The most logical explanation I can come up with is that Sherrit was an FM king who was defeated by the Andals, his lands lost and his entire family killed but because he was "of royal blood" the Andals allowed him to take the black and serve in the watch.

OR

FM king who was deposed by the Andals but escaped to the north with the express intent of using the magic on the Wall to curse those who had wronged him.

I'm on board with Sherrit being a FM king; I also find interesting the connection between the Sherrit name and the golden boars. Who else do we know that shows up in book 5 with a boar? The idea that the NK may have been predisposed to magic before he ever started 'sacrificing to the Others' is quite interesting.

Earlier today [but in the previous thread] Butcher Crow raised a question about the oddly named King Sherrit at the Nightfort. Just a couple of thoughts. Firstly Kings are always referred to primarily by their given name, so this guy was indeed called Sherrit [something]

Its not a name of course that we associate with the Starks or anybody else for that matter and certainly doesn't figure in the family tree prepared for the World Book, but... as Old Nan tells us "...all records of Night’s King had been destroyed, his very name forbidden..."

That rather sounds as if it went out of fashion very quickly and accounts for why none of the recent Starks bore the name Sherrit.

The alternate history of King Sherrit. I'm buying.

snip

And voila. There you have it. The error has now "crept in from the translation." :)

I'm with you here. Also, in regards to this discussion:

From Snowfyre Also, I wonder a little bit whether Martin uses the word "direwolf" to mean, in a sense, "door wolf." The OE word "dyr" can mean DOOR. And of course, "wulf" would be "wolf." (Of course, dire could also be a version of "deer," using the same method... and Ghost does look like a white stag in wolf guise. Almost as if Ghost were the offspring of the mother direwolf and that stag that killed her?)

From ATS

I would venture a guess that GRRM chose the word 'direwolf' because he was endeavoring to describe a larger than average wolf & that is exactly was a direwolf is (or once was)...

The dire wolf (Canis dirus "fearsome dog") is an extinct carnivorous mammal of the genus Canis, roughly the size of the extant gray wolf, but with a heavier build. It was most common in North America and South America from the Irvingtonian stage to the Rancholabrean stage of the Pleistocene epoch, living 1.80 Ma—10,000 years ago, persisting for approximately 1.79 million years... [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dire_wolf]

I really can't imagine that the concept of "Door Wolf" ("dyr"= "door" therefore direwolf = "door wolf") is a concept that ever crossed GRRM's mind. Similarly, I doubt the individual who originally named the Canis dirus ever considered the concept of "door wolf", It seems evident to me that they were going for "fearsome dog" as the Wikipedia article referenced above suggests...

While I'm sure the wiki article offers solid information about direwolves (and their subsequent Latin names and classifications), I don't think it's a problem to look at the linguistic variances for meanings. Your entire point about Targaryen dragons and what gets diluted (or deluded, sorry, couldn't help it) from translation may apply here, where we're looking at Old English meaning, translated and stamped with Latin by a group of people in a much later time period (starting more in the 18th c.), eager to put everything in its little box. People who may, or may not, be nerdy English major types who like looking at these things don't mind the layering of meanings.

. . .

I disagree it was dwindling way before that Queen Alysanne used her own money( from the jewells in her crown i believe) so that the NW could use a smaller less costly Castle because the amount of men per the size made it not feasible. We have no idea if the wws even care about Dragons being in the land or not i get the sense that they don't or wouldn't care one way or the other. They have a Job to do and its going to get done.

Remember having Dragonglass in the name doesn't mean anything Obsidian is a manifestation of both elements it is called "frozen fire" and may well kill a Dragon utilizing the "Frozen" aspect to neutralize it we don't know.

Another thing magic was never absent from the land it was always around the difference is that there were not lightning in the bottle situations occuring. That is to say the proper triggers were kept away from their triggees.

The moment the Direwolves came over the Wall and into the lives of their counterparts the Wolfdreams,treedreams and crow dreams started not because they weren't always there but because they for the first time in how many hundreds of years had their other halves.

the Halfhand's message to Mormont wasn't really correct " Tell Mormont the trees have eyes again" .The trees always had eyes the old powers were always around looking it is only now those suseptible have been awaken.

Same with Dany,a Dragon egg would have stayed cold stone for eons,but right trigger,right triggee....Dany got the eggs and wham.

I happen to agree. It might have been in the Maester's interests to dispell the idea that magic still exists and that's why they downplay it so much. Or are disappointed because they themselves haven't figured out how to use it as effectively as the COTF, etc. It seems like it's always been present; the issue is one of visibility.

[TheButcherCrow]

Well, translations aside, part of the issue is that the word "dragon" is used as a synonym for "prince" in Westeros - and in the Targ family. (Targs being the only ones terribly concerned with this prophecy, it seems.) So, in Mystery Knight, we get conversations like this (careful now - if you haven't read it, this could be a legit spoiler):

"And who are you to tell the King's Hand what to do?"

Egg did not flinch. "You know who I am, cousin."

"Your squire is insolent, ser," Lord Rivers said to Dunk. "You ought to beat that out of him."

"I've tried, m’lord. He's a prince, though."

"What he is," said Bloodraven, “Is a dragon. Rise, ser.”

Dunk rose.

"There have always been Targaryens who dreamed of things to come, since long before the Conquest," Bloodraven said, "so we should not be surprised if from time to time a Blackfyre displays the gift as well. Daemon dreamed that a dragon would be born at Whitewalls, and it was. The fool just got the color wrong.”

Dunk looked at Egg. The ring, he saw. His father's ring. It’s on his finger, not stuffed up inside his boot.

So, "dragon" definitely refers to certain men in Westeros (Targaryen princes, to be precise) - and once the actual dragons die out, that effectively becomes the primary meaning of the word. Sort of the way "lions" and "wolves" are used in the Riverlands after Ned dies and the fighting starts. Everyone always has to clarify whether they're discussing predators of the "four-footed, or two-footed" variety.

But Aemon puts the translation error a thousand years in the past. So it looks like the common tongue is not the first, but at least the second, translation of the prophecy. And if we assume Valyrian to be a gendered language (similar to the Romance languages, in that nouns must be assigned a gender - whether or not the subject has an actual social / biological gender of its own)... then part of the problem seems to be that translating a non-gendered subject word (or a word designating a subject whose gender was unknown) from the original language would have required the use of a masculine word in Valyrian. Like translating from English into Spanish, where the word dragon (non-gendered English noun) becomes el dragón (masculine Spanish noun).

Then of course, those in Old Valyria who were fortunate enough to have dragons become very powerful citizens - they were princes, as BC would say... and eventually "dragon" and "prince" come to be used interchangeably. For the Targs (maybe all dragonlords), this would be compounded by the placement of the dragon on the House coat of arms. And in Westeros - if not before - the masculine-gendered grammar of the word for dragon ("el dragón") is conflated with social / cultural assumptions about sex. If dragons are rulers and rule is inherited by men, then dragons are men (princes as opposed to princesses). Then the actual dragons themselves die out, only Septon Barth and Maester Aemon remember anything about the changeable nature of dragon sexual characteristics, and nobody cares about the prophecy except religious fanatics and the dead.

And voila. There you have it. What started out as a gender free "dragon" is now identified as a male hero from the ruling class. The error has officially "crept in from the translation." :)

That's very intense, good work :D

However, I just read an interview with David Peterson and in it he says:

“[Martin] is delighted by the fact they’re there,” says Peterson. “But he’s not really super interested in the languages in and of themselves.”

http://entertainment.time.com/2013/05/03/tongues-of-ice-and-fire-creating-the-languages-of-game-of-thrones/interview

George isn't really into languages it would seem. It will be as simple as a gender neutral term in Valyrian being translated as masculine in Common and "Prince" will simply have been the closest approximation to the Valyrian word.

[Urrax2]

Unfortunately for the theory (I think), "gender" in Valyrian is not sex-related:

http://wiki.dothraki.org/High_Valyrian_Gender

[TheButcherCrow]

Unfortunately for the theory (I think), "gender" in Valyrian is not sex-related:

http://wiki.dothraki.org/High_Valyrian_Gender

That's in David's language, the one written about 18 months ago for the show. As I say, GRRM is not really a linguistics expert, he would have kept it simple.

[The Snowfyre Chorus]

That's very intense, good work :D

However, I just read an interview with David Peterson and in it he says:

George isn't really into languages it would seem. It will be as simple as a gender neutral term in Valyrian being translated as masculine in Common and "Prince" will simply have been the closest approximation to the Valyrian word.

Thanks. The irony here is that I'm a bit like Martin in this respect: not all that interested in developing fictional languages. I'd never heard of David Peterson, and have never ventured into those language forums (?)... yet here I am explaining this hypothetical "translation error." Honestly, I don't think it's as complicated as it seems. It all boils down to the fact that certain languages require a gendered default for each noun. If you wanted to mess with readers' heads, that might come in handy.

(Plus, I think Aemon's conclusion is misleading. He concludes that the prophecy foretold a princess instead of a prince... but only because he's now heard of Dany's dragons. The more logical conclusion to draw from his explanation is that the gender doesn't matter. What was promised was a Dragon.)

Unfortunately for the theory (I think), "gender" in Valyrian is not sex-related:

http://wiki.dothraki.org/High_Valyrian_Gender

Whoa. What the...? :stunned: Seriously, who is this guy? And if Martin's not interested in the languages... who's developing this stuff?

(ETA: No need to answer that. I followed the link and read the bio. Fortunately, we can rule out the entire complication of HBO Dothraki by authorship and publication date. Whew!)

[Urrax2]

... I followed the link and read the bio. Fortunately, we can rule out the entire complication of HBO Dothraki by authorship and publication date. Whew!)

Well, maybe not, if, as Peterson claims, GRRM is getting Valyrian sentences from him for the future books.

[TheButcherCrow]

Thanks. The irony here is that I'm a bit like Martin in this respect: not all that interested in developing fictional languages. I'd never heard of David Peterson, and have never ventured into those language forums (?)... yet here I am explaining this hypothetical "translation error." Honestly, I don't think it's as complicated as it seems. It all boils down to the fact that certain languages require a gendered default for each noun. If you wanted to mess with readers' heads, that might come in handy.

(Plus, I think Aemon's conclusion is misleading. He concludes that the prophecy foretold a princess instead of a prince... but only because he's now heard of Dany's dragons. The more logical conclusion to draw from his explanation is that the gender doesn't matter. What was promised was a Dragon.)

I'm with you, I'm no linguist either but for some ungodly reason I'm going to keep going with this :D

I actually think that you might be drawing the wrong conclusion, sorry :leaving: When Aemon says that dragons can be either male or female he was using that as an example of why the word translated as "prince" could also mean "princess" because, as you said earlier, Targs call themselves dragons. The logical conclusion I draw is that the word in Valyrian meant "child of the leader" and this was mistranslated into Common as "prince". Simple. In a sense you are right though because Targ and dragon are pretty much interchangeable, in the minds of the Targs anyway, so it is indeed "the dragon that was promised" and "the Targ that was promised"

That actually feeds nicely into my next point. Those fricking valyrian sphinxes :D Man, woman and dragon all mixed up, almost indistinguishable, sound familiar ?

[Bennis of the Brown Shield]

True enough. Though there's also something to be said for the shock of taking something that's been played for laughs and making it suddenly chilling. A loose parallel might be how in Harry Potter, it's so silly how everybody keeps calling Voldemort "You-Know-Who," but later there's a curse placed on the name so that Voldemort really is "notified" every time his name is spoken.

Which makes me wonder: one, if this is true, is Hodor actually poking at something dangerous every time he says "hodor"? And two, I wonder how long he's been disabled; it's possible he was even the one to inadvertently wake the Ice power, and had his wits burned out of him in the process a la someone who tried to wake up Cthulhu.

That is definitely true, and I do agree that it probably means something important.

Yeah, I think if some actual force was what turned him from a normal boy into how he is now, then "Hodor" is probably not something good, whatever it is. That's possible. Maybe he was a potential seer like Bran, though I like Black Crow's idea that he went down to the deepest levels of the crypts when he was little and met something there, because it would be great from a story telling perspective.

I don't have AGOT with me, but it is never hinted at or mentioned if Hodor was born like he is or if he became that way?

[Ygritte]

That is definitely true, and I do agree that it probably means something important.

Yeah, I think if something did turn him from a normal boy into the mental wreck that he is now, then "Hodor" is probably not something good, whatever it is. Yes, that's possible. Maybe he was a potential seer like Bran, though I like Black Crow's idea that he went down to the deepest levels of the crypts when he was a boy and met something there, because it would be great from a story telling perspective.

I don't have AGOT with me, but it is never hinted at or mentioned if Hodor was born like he is or if he became that way?

I don't remember, though the phrasing "took his wits" suggests the latter to me (as opposed to the gods not giving him any to begin with).

[The Snowfyre Chorus]

Well, maybe not, if, as Peterson claims, GRRM is getting Valyrian sentences from him for the future books.

True. Moving forward, maybe we pay more attention. But Aemon's end-of-life revelation about the "translation error" was published in 2005, and Peterson only started working on Game of Thrones in 2009. So one way or another, Martin had already decided he could make this particular puzzle work... no Peterson input required. And as I mentioned above, I really don't think the idea is as complicated as it might seem. In a Spanish 101 course, gendered nouns would come up on day 2, at the latest. Martin makes it more confusing by combining the gender "error" with the human / beast ambiguity of "dragon," and all that on top of the fact that he refuses to give us the actual text of the prophecy itself. Plus, he throws in the mysterious Septon Barth for good measure. As I said - I don't think for a minute that Aemon finally "solves" the prophecy before he dies. Martin mostly just uses his shipboard ramblings to add wrinkles to this mystery.

Of course, one other thing Martin does with Aemon's ramblings - and it's not insignificant - is that he once again highlights the theoretical issue of gendered literature, texts, narratives, and archetypes, and the potential "errors" that might arise through the implicit othering of marginal groups by the language of dominance. (Poor Rhaegar. Poor self-centered, narcissistic fool... thought everything was about him, the whole time, and threw his life away. :( )

[Bennis of the Brown Shield]

I don't remember, though the phrasing "took his wits" suggests the latter to me (as opposed to the gods not giving him any to begin with).

True.

Then again, if I think about how this would have turned out in practice it's strange that none of the characters in Winterfell over the course of the books ever discuss or mention what could have caused Hodor to suddenly become like that. I mean, Shouldn't the likes of Luwin, Ned and even Old Nan have been pretty interested in that? A normal boy goes playing in the castle and then comes back like a "lackwit" repeating a single word over and over again. Sounds strange.

[#Fire and Blood]

Sorry, another random hodor thought. For awhile I thought Hodor must be an anagram but that is to easy. Does it rhyme with something we have seen obscurely?

[Ygritte]

Of course, one other thing Martin does with Aemon's ramblings - and it's not insignificant - is that he once again highlights the theoretical issue of gendered literature, texts, narratives, and archetypes, and the potential "errors" that might arise through the implicit othering of marginal groups by the language of dominance. (Poor Rhaegar. Poor self-centered, narcissistic fool... thought everything was about him, the whole time, and threw his life away. :( )

Definitely. It's a thing that happens in real life too. There's a whole debate within Christianity about the Holy Spirit's gender, because the words have been translated into a series of different languages with different gender rules.

True.

Then again, if I think about how this would have turned out in practice it's strange that none of the characters in Winterfell over the course of the books ever discuss or mention what could have caused Hodor to suddenly become like that. I mean, Shouldn't the likes of Luwin, Ned and even Old Nan have been pretty interested in that? A normal boy goes playing in the castle and then comes back like a "lackwit" repeating a single word over and over again. Sounds strange.

Point taken. You'd think there'd at least be some gossip.

[#Fire and Blood]

Have we talked about how everything written about the Age of Heroes, the Dawn Age, and the Long Night originates from stories written down by septons thousands of years later?

It seems odd to me the leaders of the Faith wrote this information down. We have been getting most of our history from the Maesters. What kinds of things did the Septons do to muck up the information?