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Alysanne, Jaehaerys I, Direwolves and a Bit of Barth


Dr. Pepper

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Direwolves Go Missing

Around two hundred years before the start of the series, Jaehaerys I and Alysanne came to visit the North, bringing with them six dragons. Alysanne left at some point to explore.

The King had matters to discuss with his Warden of the North, and Alysanne grew bored, so she mounted her dragon Silverwing and flew north to see the Wall.

At the wall, she convinced the watch to abandon the Nightfort and build Deep Lake.

“We left the Nightfort two hundred years ago,”

Another thing that happened two hundred years ago is that direwolves disappeared from south of the wall.

“There’s not been a direwolf sighted south of the Wall in two hundred years.”

There is an easy conclusion to be drawn here. Alysanne and Jaehaerys I had something to do with the disappearance of direwolves south of the wall.

Direwolves Found

Surprisingly, despite the direwolf being the sigil for House Stark, not everyone is excited about the idea of direwolves being around.

“Direwolves loose in the realm, after so many years,” muttered Hullen, the master of horse. “I like it not.”

“No matter,” said Hullen. “They be dead soon enough too.” Bran gave a wordless cry of dismay. “The sooner the better,” Theon Greyjoy agreed. He drew his sword.

Even Ned had to be convinced to allow the wolf pups to live.

Acceptance of Wargs and Skinchangers

Wargs and skinchangers are respected, though feared, north of the wall. South of the wall, the story is very different. They are despised, feared, mocked and hated. Janos Slynt wanted to hang Jon for being a turncloak, but his desire for Jon's death turned passionate once he saw Jon with Ghost.

“Look! The beast that tore the life from Halfhand. A warg walks among us, brothers. A WARG! This . . . this creature is not fit to lead us! This beastling is not fit to live!”

Tywin was working on a way to eliminate the 'warg army' threat.

He’d bought a ton of silver to forge magic swords that would slay the Stark wargs.

Alysanne heading off to the wall on Silverwing right around the same time direwolves disappeared south of the wall might have some connection with Tywin thinking to use magical silver swords to kill Stark wargs. Stories can get twisted in their tellings. Like playing a game of Telephone.

Barth and the Machine

Septon Barth, the son of a blacksmith, was Jaehaerys' Hand. Barth's enemies "claimed he was more sorcerer than septon." Barth wrote a book called Dragons, Wyrms, and Wyverns: Their Unnatural History. In this book, Barth identifies several important facts about dragons, including how they can and cannot be killed. There are theories that Barth's book is layered with dishonest facts and may be more propaganda than fact. It is strange to think that a ruling Targaryen with at least six dragons would sign off on his Hand publishing a book that details how to kill their major weapon.

There may be nothing to this, but there was a Lord Barth Stark. Bran names them off, starting with Rickard, Brandon and Lyanna.

Lord Edwyle his father, Lord Willam and his brother Artos the Implacable, Lord Donnor and Lord Beron and Lord Rodwell, one-eyed Lord Jonnel, Lord Barth and Lord Brandon and Lord Cregan who had fought the Dragonknight.

If he's going in descending order, then Lord Barth would have been around well after Septon Barth since we know that Aemon the Dragonknight was alive 150 years ago. Still, the Barth name does give one pause. It certainly makes me wonder if Septon Barth had reason to know about the North and skinchangers and also why he was called a sorcerer. Perhaps this was something he learned in the libraries of the Red Keep and passed it on to the king and queen, who sought to investigate in person and then attempt to eliminate the direwolves in the hopes that it would also eliminate wargs who could potentially control the dragons. Perhaps he was called a sorcerer because he was a warg/skinchanger?

The reason I bring up Barth is because of the question of propaganda. When did wargs became hated south of the wall? Why is there no story about the disappearance of direwolves? How come Ned Stark and Stark servants aren't outrageously excited about their sigil suddenly appearing? Why was Tywin buying silver to make magic swords to kill Stark wargs?

My tentative theory is that Alysanne and Jaehaerys I deliberately removed direwolves from south of the wall. Septon Barth then stepped up on his propaganda machine to spread stories meant to facilitate fear and distrust of wargs and also to remove suspicion from the king and queen when the direwolves disappeared just around the time they were visiting up in the north and doing wonderful things like aiding the Night's Watch and abolishing the first night. If this is the case, then I think it's a reasonable to assume that the Targaryens at the time had cause to fear the wargs in the north. Perhaps even possible that there was a warg living at the time who attempted to gain control of a dragon.

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This makes an awful lot of sense. While it's certainly possible to find other explanations, this fits together very nicely so far.

Also, I'd add Bran's vision of a pale lithe youth cutting three weirwood arrows to this line of thinking; something is up with that vision, and as long as we don't know the exact circumstances, we can only guess... but he idea that weirwood might kill dragons has been thrown around quite a bit in recent discussions around here.

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I also didn't understand why Eddard wasn't more initially thrilled when he saw direwolves returning to the realm, particularly after we took a look at their crypt with the statues of the Kings of Winter seated on thrones, each with a direwolf at their feet. I mean, did he think direwolves were just their symbolic sigil, the way lions apparently are for the Lannisters? Did no one look at those lifelike statues of past kings and lords and think that at some point in their past, Starks and direwolves were intimately connected? That they kept direwolves almost as pets (or at least wargs)?

When I read about the crypts, I imagined that the direwolf carved at each king's foot was actually the king's warg, that each direwolf was as unique and individual as each king.

When did they go from being a king's pride (carved with their immortalized likeness) to being an undesirable animal everyone was pleased lived only north of the wall?

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I always assumed that wargs were hated for the same reason that nobody believes in the Others ... the Starks are the blood of the First Men, but everyone else came much later ... and as such would fear what they could not understand. However i like this theory :)

i suppose Ned was cautious was because dire wolves had been gone so long he saw it as a threat to his children rather than a gift ... Interestingly, the mother dire wolf was killed by an antler in the neck, south of the wall. Ned was killed by decapitation after following a stag south. Coincidence? I think that the starks are linked to their wolves, and to me that makes nymeria-arya very very interesting, as there may be a bit of foreshadowing for when arya does come home (finding her dead mother and trying to save her???)

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Love this! and I wonder if she who holds the crown commands the direwolves? ( crackpot I know :) )

The ancient crown of the Kings of Winter had been lost three centuries ago, yielded up to Aegon the Conqueror when Torrhen Stark knelt in submission. What Aegon had done with it no man could say.

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Love this! and I wonder if she who holds the crown commands the direwolves? ( crackpot I know :) )

The ancient crown of the Kings of Winter had been lost three centuries ago, yielded up to Aegon the Conqueror when Torrhen Stark knelt in submission. What Aegon had done with it no man could say.

I'm trying to make connections here and doing quite a sloppy job of it, but hopefully you or someone else can work something out.

Bran's watching through the weirwood at Winterfell. The visions start with his father and go back to what we presume to be Lyanna and Benjen, then perhaps to Brandon Snow (recent speculation). He starts seeing the faces of the lords and kings he recognizes from the crypts. At the end, a bearded man forced a captive down onto his knees before the heart tree. A white-haired woman stepped toward them through a drift of dark red leaves, a bronze sickle in her hand. “No,” said Bran, “no, don’t,” but they could not hear him, no more than his father had. The woman grabbed the captive by the hair, hooked the sickle round his throat, and slashed.

This is a woman who seems to be in charge. There are levels of the crypts that we have not seen. I wonder why. Was there a time that there were Queens of Winter? Were women the ones who forged the pact with the COTF, and perhaps became the initial wargs amongst the FM?

Ok, drifting a little too far into crackpot and losing focus here. But back to the crown. One does wonder what Aegon I did with the crown. What did he do with any of the crowns he presumably confiscated from defeated kings? Is there a possibility that he let some of them keep their crowns as mementos? Seems unlikely. Did Torrhen even take the 'real' King in the North crown with him when he went to kneel? Or was the real crown hidden down in the depths of the crypts? Did Alysanne find it while she was at Winterfell? Whether she found it or had it, could she have tossed it over the wall? While there is certainly a connection to the timeline when wolves disappeared and when the king and queen came north, it's almost implausible to think that six dragons would have clandestinely swept the north for all direwolves and put them to the flame. So how did they disappear. Too many questions. And we come right back around to how they came back. If it's by use of a crown, who could have crossed the wall with something like that around the time of the direwolves return? I mean, there was Gared who was found hidden in a holdfast near where the direwolves were found.

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I like the theory though I was looking at the timeline in the appendix and Jaehaerys I reigned until 103AL. The books take place around 300AL so 200 years ago (100AL) is about the end of his reign. Sometime between 131-157AL is when the last dragon died but IIRC no one ever refers to that event as 200 years ago (think it is described as 150.) Jaehaerys I ruled as early as 48AL and I'm not sure if we're told an exact date for the visit to the Wall. None of this is overly problematic for the theory but there seems to be some vagueness about the precision of the 200 years ago. Either way the decline of direwolves south of the Wall can easily coincide with the visit even if the vanishing is somehow off by a decade or two from the visit (which I'm not at all convinced it is.)

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Around two hundred years before the start of the series, Jaehaerys I and Alysanne came to visit the North, bringing with them six dragons. Alysanne left at some point to explore.

At the wall, she convinced the watch to abandon the Nightfort and build Deep Lake.

Another thing that happened two hundred years ago is that direwolves disappeared from south of the wall.

There is an easy conclusion to be drawn here. Alysanne and Jaehaerys I had something to do with the disappearance of direwolves south of the wall.

These things happened in the same timeframe, but correlation does not equal causation. Keep in mind that not long after this, the Targaryen dragons began to go into decline as well. I think it's more likely that the ebbing tide of magic in the world, along with the social evolution of Westeros, played a role here. I don't see any reason why, specifically, Jaehaerys and Alysanne would take action against the population of direwolves in the North.

We know that the direwolves disappeared 200 years ago, but we're not told if the population had been steady or declining prior to that time. We also have Leaf's statement that the direwolves are in their twilight, along with the Children of the Forest. It seems to me like they've been on their way out for many centuries now, especially as the world south of the wall becomes more civilized and more distant from nature and its roots.

Even Ned had to be convinced to allow the wolf pups to live.

Ned knows only about the direwolf as the symbol of his house. It's a powerful and imposing creature and Ned grew up in a time and place far removed from a direwolf's environment. It's natural that he might have reservations about bringing such a creature home. He's a good deal more civilized than the ancestors we see in Bran's visions.

Septon Barth, the son of a blacksmith, was Jaehaerys' Hand. Barth's enemies "claimed he was more sorcerer than septon." Barth wrote a book called Dragons, Wyrms, and Wyverns: Their Unnatural History. In this book, Barth identifies several important facts about dragons, including how they can and cannot be killed. There are theories that Barth's book is layered with dishonest facts and may be more propaganda than fact. It is strange to think that a ruling Targaryen with at least six dragons would sign off on his Hand publishing a book that details how to kill their major weapon.

We know that Jaehaerys is the king who ended Maegor's war against the Faith Militant by convincing the Faith to disarm and promising that the Crown would defend Septs and Septons. In Feast, Cersei describes one of the Militant orders like this, "They were the Swords. Holy men, ascetics, fanatics, sorcerers, dragonslayers, demonhunters . . . there were many tales about them. But all agree that they were implacable in their hatred for all enemies of the Holy Faith."

The odds are a bit against Septon Barth being a knight, but there's a chance he could have been a meber of the Warrior's Sons (Swords). Between his reputation as a sorcerer and the subject of his most famous work, it certainly sounds like there's a lot of overlap there. What if Barth wasn't particularly close to Jaehaerys, but he was the Faith's inside man in an attempt to maintain some of its temporal power by bringing the great Targaryen kings down to earth a bit? We don't know the conditions under which Barth's book were published, so it's hard to say whether it was sponsored propaganda or a clandestine attempt to undermine their power. But it sounds like a case can be made for Barth being something other than an ally of Jaehaerys.

If he's going in descending order, then Lord Barth would have been around well after Septon Barth since we know that Aemon the Dragonknight was alive 150 years ago. Still, the Barth name does give one pause. It certainly makes me wonder if Septon Barth had reason to know about the North and skinchangers and also why he was called a sorcerer.

I think the name is just a coincidence. There are a pool of names that we see repeated throughout the Seven Kingdoms, so I don't think there's a Stark connection there.

I also don't think we can say that Barth had any particular reason to dislike the North or engage in a focused campaign against direwolves. I've offered one explanation above for how he might have gotten his reputation as a sorcerer. He was also a very powerful man for a long time, possibly with enemies who would have spread rumors about him in an attempt to check his power. We don't know how active of a king Jaehaerys was, so we have no way of knowing how much of the ruling Barth actually did.

The reason I bring up Barth is because of the question of propaganda. When did wargs became hated south of the wall? Why is there no story about the disappearance of direwolves? How come Ned Stark and Stark servants aren't outrageously excited about their sigil suddenly appearing? Why was Tywin buying silver to make magic swords to kill Stark wargs?

I think wargs fell out of favor south of the Wall because people tend to view those kinds of powers with suspicion and as they began to disappear from their world, they became the subjects of legends and stories used to frighten children. As the North became more civilized and gave up its older, more barbaric practices like human sacrifice, it follows that they would come to disdain the more "savage" parts of their heritage. Ned is a man who would be very upset to learn that Bolton's accusation of the Umbers practicing First Night were true. The religion of the North went from one that could be quite brutal and bloody to an abstract idea about praying to trees.

The Starks changed with the times as well, and it's understandable that they might not have been prepared or thrilled about the return of the direwolves.

My tentative theory is that Alysanne and Jaehaerys I deliberately removed direwolves from south of the wall. Septon Barth then stepped up on his propaganda machine to spread stories meant to facilitate fear and distrust of wargs and also to remove suspicion from the king and queen when the direwolves disappeared just around the time they were visiting up in the north and doing wonderful things like aiding the Night's Watch and abolishing the first night. If this is the case, then I think it's a reasonable to assume that the Targaryens at the time had cause to fear the wargs in the north. Perhaps even possible that there was a warg living at the time who attempted to gain control of a dragon.

We have no indication that Barth wrote about wargs at all, much less that anyone engaged in a major public relations campaign against them. The atmosphere of fear and understanding against wargs can easily arise from the combination of a difference in religious beliefs, the distance of time, and the suspicion with which strange/different people are always treated in human society.

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I like the theory though I was looking at the timeline in the appendix and Jaehaerys I reigned until 103AL. The books take place around 300AL so 200 years ago (100AL) is about the end of his reign. Sometime between 131-157AL is when the last dragon died but IIRC no one ever refers to that event as 200 years ago (think it is described as 150.) Jaehaerys I ruled as early as 48AL and I'm not sure if we're told an exact date for the visit to the Wall. None of this is overly problematic for the theory but there seems to be some vagueness about the precision of the 200 years ago. Either way the decline of direwolves south of the Wall can easily coincide with the visit even if the vanishing is somehow off by a decade or two from the visit (which I'm not at all convinced it is.)

The timeline issues do make it a little sketchy. It's odd to think of an old and grey king heading off for the north with his court and six dragons.

One thing that might be of interest is that Balerion died during Jaehaerys' reign. It was 200 years old when it died. Silverwing is the only dragon mentioned by name in relation to the Northern visit. One would think that if Balerion was with the king's entourage, it would bear some mention. Did Balerion's death possibly spark the need to visit the north?

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I was of the belief that when Ned and company found the direwolves part of their reluctance was the overall circumstance along with the surprise that direwolves weren't extinct. It seemed to me that the image of the wolf devouring the stag troubled all of them a great deal. I always looked at this as some sort of foreshadowing. I must say that I like some of the ideas tossed around in this thread. Makes me want to go back and do some research; very insightful.

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Great Op.

There is a lot of theories on what else is in the older WF crypts, Kings of Winter, Night Kings, dragons, but I no real answer.

As for the women and the sickle, I had always thought that it had something to do with a 100's before when the Stark men where killed by Skaggs leaving only women and children, but if its Bronze, that would make it much older.

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There may be nothing to this, but there was a Lord Barth Stark. Bran names them off, starting with Rickard, Brandon and Lyanna.

If he's going in descending order, then Lord Barth would have been around well after Septon Barth since we know that Aemon the Dragonknight was alive 150 years ago.

Ran had access to GRRM's Stark genealogical tree and confirmed that Bran is citing the Stark lords out of order. Not that this affects your theory much.

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Interesting thought process, though I don't understand why eliminating the direwolves would necessarily mean eliminating the wargs.

Maybe the North, unlike the Targs, realize that these mythical creatures, whilst cool and all, are capable of a lot of destruction and so the world may be better off if they dont have to deal with these majestic beasts.

Alysanne could've just been curious to see the Wall, though I agree it is a bit interesting that both these events happened at the same time, adding to the fact that Jaehaerys' hand was an interesting fellow.. I wonder if there's something to this or if we're just connecting the dots to something Martin just blurted out a generic long ago number for. (The disappearance of the direwolves. )

Again, since this isn't a plot relevant mystery, I wonder if GRRM would answer this question if put forth, or if the world of ice and fire will answer this question.

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Interesting premise - but the mention of Aegon taking the Crown of Winter intrigued me more and now my mind is crackpotting all over the place wondering if this will make a strategic appearance in our timeline. :X

I'm not sure if the presence of dragons would be enough to send the wolves of their own volition North of the wall or the if the Targ's had a selfish motivation that would give them reason to do it. What makes me scratch my head is we seemingly have no wargs south of the wall when Aegon landed besides BR (who was a greenseer) until the Stark kids. Why was that? Did the direwolves disappear because wargs did? Or did wargs disappear because of the direwolves?

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