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Mythical Astronomy of Ice and Fire 5: Tyrion Targaryen


LmL

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12 hours ago, Blue Tiger said:

Somehow we've managed to translate whole ' Astronomy Explains the Legends of Ice and Fire' in less than one week. Here it is: http://www.ogienilod.in-mist.net/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=4868

I'm leaving for holidays, so my real-world friend and co-translator GreatMou from Ogień i Lód.pl (Ice and Fire.pl) will work on 'Lucifer means Lightbringer'. I'll have WiFi there, put typing few thousand words long texts on phone isn't the most comfortable thing ;).When I return, we'll start 'Bloodstone Emperor Azor Ahai'. 

Our previous translation of 'GRRM is writing modern mythology' was featured on the home page of the biggest ASOIAF website in Poland.

http://piesnloduiognia.pl/czy-george-r-r-martin-pisze-wspolczesna-mitologie-wstep-do-mitycznej-astronomii-ognia-i-lodu/ 

It has many positive comments, some people were already familiar with it, but we've also seen many new readers commenting on the forum. Thanks to you for writing all that awesome stuff and to my friend Mou for HUGE help with translations. ;)

 

Man this is the coolest thing, I love it. All I can say is if anyone has any direct questions for me or whatever, don't hesitate to contact me and I'll be happy to answer so you can translate back. So glad to see lots of people interested in the underlying mythology of the series... And yeah I've noticed the traffic coming from your bulletin board. Very cool and again let me know if I can be of service in any way.

Enjoy your vacation! 

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I just found a cool quote which draws another parallel between Tyrion and Azor Ahai reborn, shadow child of the solar king, from ADWD:

Quote

“The Wall is the last to learn, my father used to say. The dwarf’s escaped. He twisted through the bars of his cell and tore his own father apart with his bare hands. A guardsman saw him flee, red from head to heel, as if he’d bathed in blood. The queen will make a lord of any man who kills him.”

Just as Arya is called "blood child," and just as AA reborn is symbolized by bleeding stars and bloody stones and bloody swords, and just as Mithras slays the bull to bathe the world in blood, Tyrion kills his "father" and bathes in blood (according to hearsay, lol). The language of twisting through the bars matches the shadow baby born by Mel and Stannis, with Stannis being a solar king and Mel a fire moon maiden. That black shadow, which represents AA reborn as I have discussed, twists through the bars in that scene. 

Pretty cool. 

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On 6/6/2016 at 7:46 PM, Elisabetta Duò said:

every one of us is the child of the parents who raised him and Tywin and his actions as a father 'shaped' Tyrion for good and for worse. But I think their relationship is way more deep, intense and dramatic if Tyrion is Tywin's son in name, in blood and in skills, if they both were trapped in a relationship they didn't want but it was 100% bonding.

I feel like if Tywin weren't Tyrion's father, then:

1. yeah he killed him but technically it wasn't kinslaying (easy way out);

2. Tywin didn't want him as his son, never treated him as such and guess what, in the end he wasn't (that would be cheesy imo.. most of us had a lovely childhood but some fathers do treat their own sons like s*** at times, sadly… and the child can dream someone else is their true father, but it's not);

3. Tyrion felt like he was an outcast all his life and if he's not Tywin's son, it fits the stereotype of the adpted child who doesn't fit in the family and wasn't truly meant to a member of that family because his true parents are others (too easy: as I was saying, unlucky kids do feel alone and like outcasts in their own family and they dream that a child exchange happened and one day they'll find out who their true parents are, because everyone would be better...but these are escape dreams for sad children, the crude reality is that the parents who don't love them are truly their parents);

Have you seen this Rolling Stone interview of GRRM, giving a rare glimpse into his formative years:

http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/news/george-r-r-martin-the-rolling-stone-interview-20140423  ?

Herewith, an excerpt which I find pertinent to some of what you're saying:

Quote

Was your relationship with your parents close? 
My father was a distant figure. I don't think that he ever understood me, and I don't know that I ever understood him. We didn't use the term then, but you could probably say he was a functioning alcoholic. I saw him every day, but we hardly talked. The only thing that we really bonded over was sports.

Did you get out of Bayonne much before college? 
We never had a car. My father always said that drinking and driving was very bad, and he was not going to give up drinking [laughs]. My world was a very small world. For many years I stared out of our living-room window at the lights of Staten Island. To me, those lights of Staten Island were like Shangri-La, and Singapore, and Shanghai, or whatever. I read books, and I dreamed of Mars, and the planets in those books, and of the Hyborian Age of Robert E. Howard's Conan books, and later of Middle-earth – all these colorful places. I would dream of those places just as I dreamed of Staten Island, and Shanghai.

This is a reminder that books are not born in a vacuum, but plug in to painful personal experiences (that Jamiesque 'laughter' while relating the 'joke' about his father's drinking masks a well of pain), as well as inevitably referencing other books and channeling more universal archetypes and ancient mythologies, as many including LML, sweetsunray and others have highlighted.  

There are echoes of Tyrion, Jon and Bran incubating here:  the solitary, sensitive, imaginative child staring out a window -- the seer -- dreaming of alternative realities to the 'natural' 'biological' one (presumably GRRM's father was his biological one, although, judging from the excerpt above, he may have been made to feel 'like a bastard in his father's eyes'...) in which he found himself 'confined' and 'crippled' by circumstance (e.g. by his father's emotionally remote demeanor, and the largely unspoken devastating effects of alcoholism on the family, which also had more practical implications like rendering the family housebound).  Unsurprisingly, he yearned to scale those walls both literally and metaphorically, to travel to other places and people, to hatch free.  

Consequently, this child turned to stories and then storytelling, turning inward and thereby outward -- and in a glorious sleight of hand transformed falling/failing/flailing into flying!  The fantasy genre is a kind of 'escape dream' as you put it, combining wish fulfillment (I am a secret Targ/dragon rider, yay!) with GRRM's characteristically unflinching gritty realism.  A child saw and felt things he shouldn't have had to too early, and he never forgot.  Considering his childhood, it's no wonder that GRRM is preoccupied with themes of paternity and working through what and/or whom constitutes ones 'true' family.  

Another excerpt from the same interview in which GRRM comments on the fantasy-reality dialectic, with reference to some of the responses he received from readers to the fictional account of the Red Wedding, as well as tying the dialectic into themes closer to home for him with reference to his own reaction dealing with the non-fictional event of his father's death:

Quote

Those characters mattered – the readers took them seriously, couldn't bear those fates[Red Wedding]. One letter I got was from a woman, a waitress. She wrote me: "I work hard all day, I'm divorced, I have a couple of children. My life is very hard, and my one pleasure is I come home and I read fantasy, and I escape to other worlds. Then I read your book, and God, it was fucking horrifying. I don't read for this. This is a nightmare. Why would you do this to me?" That letter actually reached me. I wrote her back and basically said, "I'm sorry; I do understand where you're coming from." Some people do read . . . I don't like to use the word escape, because escapism has such a pejorative aspect, but it takes you to another world. Maybe it is escape. Reading fiction has helped me through some bad times in my own life. The night my father died, I was in Michigan and I got word from my mother. I couldn't get to a plane until the next day, so I sat around thinking about my father, the good and the bad in our relationship. I remember I opened whatever book I was reading, and for a few hours, I was able to stop thinking about my father's death. It was a relief. There are some people who read and want to believe in a world where the good guys win and the bad guys lose, and at the end they live happily ever after. That's not the kind of fiction that I write. Tolkien was not that. The scouring of the Shire proved that. Frodo's sadness – that was a bittersweet ending, which to my mind was far more powerful than the ending of Star Wars, where all the happy Ewoks are jumping around, and the ghosts of all the dead people appear, waving happily [laughs]. But I understand where the other people are coming from. There are a lot of books out there. Let everyone find the kind of book that speaks to them, and speaks to what they need emotionally.

GRRM has written according to what speaks to him emotionally.  Likewise, his readers will hope in turn for an outcome which speaks to what they need.  So, depending on ones emotional needs and capacities, one will either prefer Tyrion as Tywin's or Aerys's biological son, and find corresponding 'evidence' with which to bolster the case respectively.  Consciously or unconsciously, however, GRRM arguably does seem to be leaning to this romantic notion of taking refuge in Targaryen exceptionalism as an endgame haven for a number of marginalized characters including Tyrion, rather than having him be 'just' a Lannister.  Regardless of how the 'paternity test' (proof of which we're never gonna get beyond piecing together all these allusions and illusions) pans out, I'm more interested in his plans for Jaime, whom I consider to be a far more complex character:

Quote

Later, though, we see a more humane side of Jaime when he rescues a woman, who had been an enemy, from rape. All of a sudden we don't know what to feel about Jaime. 
One of the things I wanted to explore with Jaime, and with so many of the characters, is the whole issue of redemption. When can we be redeemed? Is redemption even possible? I don't have an answer. But when do we forgive people? You see it all around in our society, in constant debates. Should we forgive Michael Vick? I have friends who are dog-lovers who will never forgive Michael Vick. Michael Vick has served years in prison; he's apologized. Has he apologized sufficiently? Woody Allen: Is Woody Allen someone that we should laud, or someone that we should despise? Or Roman Polanski, Paula Deen. Our society is full of people who have fallen in one way or another, and what do we do with these people? How many good acts make up for a bad act? If you're a Nazi war criminal and then spend the next 40 years doing good deeds and feeding the hungry, does that make up for being a concentration-camp guard? I don't know the answer, but these are questions worth thinking about. I want there to be a possibility of redemption for us, because we all do terrible things. We should be able to be forgiven. Because if there is no possibility of redemption, what's the answer then?

Sorry for digressing on your thread, @LmL.  I happen to be more interested in the psychological rather than the astrological dimension, but that shouldn't be taken to mean I haven't appreciated the many excellent interconnections you've made!  As an example, I loved your take on Winterfell being not only an egg 'shell' but a beating 'heart' with an elaborate circulatory system, harboring something latent, organic, dynamic...Winterfell-- or perhaps we should rename it 'Wing-terfell' --  is more than a building-- it's a geophysical-magical-tectonic-space-time nexus...a cracked shell built over a crack in the earth's shell from which power emanates...a tree with an extensive root telecommunication system, an individual in its own right... So, I hope you'll forgive me my digressions, and perhaps we can meet in our mutual appreciation for the metaphorical dimension in which all such signs and portents converge!  

Quote

A Clash of Kings - Bran VII

Meera looked to her brother for the answer. "Our road is north," Jojen announced.

At the edge of the wolfswood, Bran turned in his basket for one last glimpse of the castle that had been his life. Wisps of smoke still rose into the grey sky, but no more than might have risen from Winterfell's chimneys on a cold autumn afternoon. Soot stains marked some of the arrow loops, and here and there a crack or a missing merlon could be seen in the curtain wall, but it seemed little enough from this distance. Beyond, the tops of the keeps and towers still stood as they had for hundreds of years, and it was hard to tell that the castle had been sacked and burned at all. The stone is strong, Bran told himself, the roots of the trees go deep, and under the ground the Kings of Winter sit their thrones. So long as those remained, Winterfell remained. It was not dead, just broken. Like me, he thought. I'm not dead either.

In line with your Winterfell-as-egg point, there's a 'crack' in Winterfell and the breach in the 'curtain' wall is reminiscent of that delicate, though leathery membranous sac enclosing an egg's contents,  and deep beneath the Kings of Winter are sitting up, not lying down, stirring like stone embryos waiting for the signal to hatch.  Interestingly, 'the stone is strong' evokes 'the seed is strong,' and recapitulates the idea of embryonic growth potential within even the most seemingly fossilized.  Your ingenious discussion of the gargoyle and all manner of stony eruptions reminded me of this prophecy:  

Quote

 Clash of Kings - Daenerys IV

From a smoking tower, a great stone beast took wing, breathing shadow fire. . . . mother of dragons, slayer of lies . . . 

In light of your framework, do you think it may have any connection to Tyrion?  I've always liked the idea of Petyr (literally 'stone') Baelish being the savage stone beast in question.  He's also from the stony Fingers, the male counterpart of lady Stoneheart, titan/stone colossus as sigil, and a major hatcher of shady schemes and promulgator of inflammatory lies which are begging to be slain.  The tower in question might be the Eyrie (how often has it been impressed on us that the Eyrie, like Harrenhal Lord Petyr's other seat, is 'impregnable,' at least from the land, implying that it like Harrenhal is just waiting to be cracked open with fire from the air... Moony Lysa was also a tough nut to crack and to all appearances also seemingly 'impregnable,' though Petyr managed it... I also imagine him, mockingbird that he is, 'taking wing' through the Moon Door, and finally 'killing two birds with one stone,' namely fulfilling the prophecy of the maid slaying the savage giant in a castle of snow, as well as Robyn Arryn's eternal plaintive request 'to make the bad man fly'!  As I recall, he's also a -- if not the -- major destructive change agent who skulks in the shadows:

Quote

A Game of Thrones - Eddard VIII

When he had gone, Eddard Stark went to the window and sat brooding. Robert had left him no choice that he could see. He ought to thank him. It would be good to return to Winterfell. He ought never have left. His sons were waiting there. Perhaps he and Catelyn would make a new son together when he returned, they were not so old yet. And of late he had often found himself dreaming of snow, of the deep quiet of the wolfswood at night.

And yet, the thought of leaving angered him as well. So much was still undone. Robert and his council of cravens and flatterers would beggar the realm if left unchecked … or, worse, sell it to the Lannisters in payment of their loans. And the truth of Jon Arryn's death still eluded him. Oh, he had found a few pieces, enough to convince him that Jon had indeed been murdered, but that was no more than the spoor of an animal on the forest floor. He had not sighted the beast itself yet, though he sensed it was there, lurking, hidden, treacherous.

Finally, I'm curious to see what you make, from an astrological-metaphorical perspective, of the following constellation of 'seven wanderers':

Quote

A Storm of Swords - Jon III

So many stars, he thought as he trudged up the slope through pines and firs and ash. Maester Luwin had taught him his stars as a boy in Winterfell; he had learned the names of the twelve houses of heaven and the rulers of each; he could find the seven wanderers sacred to the Faith; he was old friends with the Ice Dragon, the Shadowcat, the Moonmaid, and the Sword of the Morning. All those he shared with Ygritte, but not some of the others. We look up at the same stars, and see such different things. The King's Crown was the Cradle, to hear her tell it; the Stallion was the Horned Lord; the red wanderer that septons preached was sacred to their Smith up here was called the Thief. And when the Thief was in the Moonmaid, that was a propitious time for a man to steal a woman, Ygritte insisted. "Like the night you stole me. The Thief was bright that night."

Considering that 'the sword of the morning' has the equivocal meaning of at once an actual sword, a person who wields that sword, a star/constellation in the heavens serving as a beacon by which humans navigate, as well as a fallen star on earth, a paradoxical prosaic-magical burntout-luminous piece of celestial rock out of which the famous sword is fashioned; I feel this, in conjunction with the fact that the significant number 7 is mentioned, is meant to suggest to the reader that these stars represent key players/archetypes/aspects/characters of the saga.  For example:  

 'Ice Dragon' -- Jon

'Shadowcat' -- Tyrion

'Moonmaid' -- Sansa, Arya, Brienne, Dany

'King's Crown/'Cradle' -- that's the big question, isn't it?

'the Stallion'/'Horned Lord' -- Dany, Gendry, Bran, the Night's King, or even thinking laterally Samwell Tarly of Horn Hill (in possession of a certain potentially gamechanging horn)

'the Red Wanderer'/'the Thief' -- Arya, Littlefinger, Tyrion, Dany, Bran 

'Sword of the Morning' -- Jaime, Jon; then again, 'the Sword of the Morning' could also represent Bran, considering Bran is a fallen Star(k), always dreamed of being a knight, and is supposed to be pivotal in ending the Long Night (it's likely that Bran's will be the very last, as he was the very first, of the POV chapters we'll ever hear).

Should you not agree, or find something I've written trivial or offensive, bear in mind, as Ygritte taught Jon: 'We look up at the same stars, and see such different things...'  Which is why it's fun to compare notes as we go about joining the flickering dots in the firmament!

 

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Hey thanks for the great comments @ravenous reader! I'm on the way to work at the moment but I will return and answer later. I don't mind your interjection of ideas at all! I like discussing basically anything if it's interesting and compelling.  Cheers!

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On 19 luglio 2016 at 1:25 AM, ravenous reader said:

 

On 07 giugno 2016 at 1:46 AM, Elisabetta Duò said:

every one of us is the child of the parents who raised him and Tywin and his actions as a father 'shaped' Tyrion for good and for worse. But I think their relationship is way more deep, intense and dramatic if Tyrion is Tywin's son in name, in blood and in skills, if they both were trapped in a relationship they didn't want but it was 100% bonding.

I feel like if Tywin weren't Tyrion's father, then:

1. yeah he killed him but technically it wasn't kinslaying (easy way out);

2. Tywin didn't want him as his son, never treated him as such and guess what, in the end he wasn't (that would be cheesy imo.. most of us had a lovely childhood but some fathers do treat their own sons like s*** at times, sadly… and the child can dream someone else is their true father, but it's not);

3. Tyrion felt like he was an outcast all his life and if he's not Tywin's son, it fits the stereotype of the adpted child who doesn't fit in the family and wasn't truly meant to a member of that family because his true parents are others (too easy: as I was saying, unlucky kids do feel alone and like outcasts in their own family and they dream that a child exchange happened and one day they'll find out who their true parents are, because everyone would be better...but these are escape dreams for sad children, the crude reality is that the parents who don't love them are truly their parents);

Have you seen this Rolling Stone interview of GRRM, giving a rare glimpse into his formative years:

http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/news/george-r-r-martin-the-rolling-stone-interview-20140423  ?

Herewith, an excerpt which I find pertinent to some of what you're saying:

Quote

Was your relationship with your parents close? 
My father was a distant figure. I don't think that he ever understood me, and I don't know that I ever understood him. We didn't use the term then, but you could probably say he was a functioning alcoholic. I saw him every day, but we hardly talked. The only thing that we really bonded over was sports.

Did you get out of Bayonne much before college? 
We never had a car. My father always said that drinking and driving was very bad, and he was not going to give up drinking [laughs]. My world was a very small world. For many years I stared out of our living-room window at the lights of Staten Island. To me, those lights of Staten Island were like Shangri-La, and Singapore, and Shanghai, or whatever. I read books, and I dreamed of Mars, and the planets in those books, and of the Hyborian Age of Robert E. Howard's Conan books, and later of Middle-earth – all these colorful places. I would dream of those places just as I dreamed of Staten Island, and Shanghai.

This is a reminder that books are not born in a vacuum, but plug in to painful personal experiences (that Jamiesque 'laughter' while relating the 'joke' about his father's drinking masks a well of pain), as well as inevitably referencing other books and channeling more universal archetypes and ancient mythologies, as many including LML, sweetsunray and others have highlighted.  

There are echoes of Tyrion, Jon and Bran incubating here:  the solitary, sensitive, imaginative child staring out a window -- the seer -- dreaming of alternative realities to the 'natural' 'biological' one (presumably GRRM's father was his biological one, although, judging from the excerpt above, he may have been made to feel 'like a bastard in his father's eyes'...) in which he found himself 'confined' and 'crippled' by circumstance (e.g. by his father's emotionally remote demeanor, and the largely unspoken devastating effects of alcoholism on the family, which also had more practical implications like rendering the family housebound).  Unsurprisingly, he yearned to scale those walls both literally and metaphorically, to travel to other places and people, to hatch free.  

Consequently, this child turned to stories and then storytelling, turning inward and thereby outward -- and in a glorious sleight of hand transformed falling/failing/flailing into flying!  The fantasy genre is a kind of 'escape dream' as you put it, combining wish fulfillment (I am a secret Targ/dragon rider, yay!) with GRRM's characteristically unflinching gritty realism.  A child saw and felt things he shouldn't have had to too early, and he never forgot.  Considering his childhood, it's no wonder that GRRM is preoccupied with themes of paternity and working through what and/or whom constitutes ones 'true' family.  

Another excerpt from the same interview in which GRRM comments on the fantasy-reality dialectic, with reference to some of the responses he received from readers to the fictional account of the Red Wedding, as well as tying the dialectic into themes closer to home for him with reference to his own reaction dealing with the non-fictional event of his father's death:

Quote

Those characters mattered – the readers took them seriously, couldn't bear those fates[Red Wedding]. One letter I got was from a woman, a waitress. She wrote me: "I work hard all day, I'm divorced, I have a couple of children. My life is very hard, and my one pleasure is I come home and I read fantasy, and I escape to other worlds. Then I read your book, and God, it was fucking horrifying. I don't read for this. This is a nightmare. Why would you do this to me?" That letter actually reached me. I wrote her back and basically said, "I'm sorry; I do understand where you're coming from." Some people do read . . . I don't like to use the word escape, because escapism has such a pejorative aspect, but it takes you to another world. Maybe it is escape. Reading fiction has helped me through some bad times in my own life. The night my father died, I was in Michigan and I got word from my mother. I couldn't get to a plane until the next day, so I sat around thinking about my father, the good and the bad in our relationship. I remember I opened whatever book I was reading, and for a few hours, I was able to stop thinking about my father's death. It was a relief. There are some people who read and want to believe in a world where the good guys win and the bad guys lose, and at the end they live happily ever after. That's not the kind of fiction that I write. Tolkien was not that. The scouring of the Shire proved that. Frodo's sadness – that was a bittersweet ending, which to my mind was far more powerful than the ending of Star Wars, where all the happy Ewoks are jumping around, and the ghosts of all the dead people appear, waving happily [laughs]. But I understand where the other people are coming from. There are a lot of books out there. Let everyone find the kind of book that speaks to them, and speaks to what they need emotionally.

GRRM has written according to what speaks to him emotionally.  Likewise, his readers will hope in turn for an outcome which speaks to what they need.  So, depending on ones emotional needs and capacities, one will either prefer Tyrion as Tywin's or Aerys's biological son, and find corresponding 'evidence' with which to bolster the case respectively.  Consciously or unconsciously, however, GRRM arguably does seem to be leaning to this romantic notion of taking refuge in Targaryen exceptionalism as an endgame haven for a number of marginalized characters including Tyrion, rather than having him be 'just' a Lannister.  Regardless of how the 'paternity test' (proof of which we're never gonna get beyond piecing together all these allusions and illusions) pans out, I'm more interested in his plans for Jaime, whom I consider to be a far more complex character:

Quote

Later, though, we see a more humane side of Jaime when he rescues a woman, who had been an enemy, from rape. All of a sudden we don't know what to feel about Jaime. 
One of the things I wanted to explore with Jaime, and with so many of the characters, is the whole issue of redemption. When can we be redeemed? Is redemption even possible? I don't have an answer. But when do we forgive people? You see it all around in our society, in constant debates. Should we forgive Michael Vick? I have friends who are dog-lovers who will never forgive Michael Vick. Michael Vick has served years in prison; he's apologized. Has he apologized sufficiently? Woody Allen: Is Woody Allen someone that we should laud, or someone that we should despise? Or Roman Polanski, Paula Deen. Our society is full of people who have fallen in one way or another, and what do we do with these people? How many good acts make up for a bad act? If you're a Nazi war criminal and then spend the next 40 years doing good deeds and feeding the hungry, does that make up for being a concentration-camp guard? I don't know the answer, but these are questions worth thinking about. I want there to be a possibility of redemption for us, because we all do terrible things. We should be able to be forgiven. Because if there is no possibility of redemption, what's the answer then?

Thank you very very much, I hadn't read this interview and I found the pragraphs / points you have highlighted really interesting and quite fitting! 

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1 minute ago, Elisabetta Duò said:

Thank you very very much, I hadn't read this interview and I found the pragraphs / points you have highlighted really interesting and quite fitting! 

Glad you enjoyed it!  GRRM is a very private person, so I find it interesting when he offers us, even if unintentionally, these glimpses into his world, including the painful elements which form the basis of his urge to build these fantasy worlds.

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2 minutes ago, ravenous reader said:

Glad you enjoyed it!  GRRM is a very private person, so I find it interesting when he offers us, even if unintentionally, these glimpses into his world, including the painful elements which form the basis of his urge to build these fantasy worlds.

I truly did and you're right about him. honestly, it's one of the reasons why I like him. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I've started essay about sigils and heraldry supporting ideas of Mythical Astronomy, here are some notes about the Vale of Arryn sigils, could you tell if I got those things right in your opinion?

Quote

 

Heraldry supports the Astronomy of Ice and Fire:

 

I’ve noticed that many sigils can be hints from George - hints about events of the Dawn Age, Lightbringer, Azor Ahai and other things connected to it.

 

So, let’s begin with sigils that directly relate to astronomy - arms showing suns, moons and stars.

 

Thanks to authors of Wiki’s list of coat of arms and list of personal arms.

http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/List_of_personal_arms

http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/List_of_houses

 

The Vale of Arryn

 

House Donniger’s http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/List_of_houses

sigil shows ‘red sun rising from a grey-green sea against a yellow sky’ - the sun rises from the sea, being reborn, just like Azor Ahai was supposedly reborn and in Christianity yellow is colour associated with easter, rebirth and Resurrection, however it has also negative meaning - symbolizing betrayal - Judas Iscariot is often dressed in yellow robes on paintings. Normally I wouldn’t assume that George would even think about this meaning - but Judas’s story is major plotpoint in GRRM’s ‘The Way of Cross and Dragon’ short story.

Donniger surname seems to be reference to Wendy Doniger, an American Indologist who wrote books about mythology - Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva; Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology; Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts - name few. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Doniger

In Hinduism yellow is colour of Krishna…

Grey is of course color of ashes, and green is color of rebirth, spring, joy - but also dragons.

 

House Upcliff - cresting wave, sea green on black - seems to refer to something falling into the sea during night and creating waves.

http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Upcliff

 

We should remember that House Upcliff is from Witch Isle, located on the seas before Vale of Arryn - an there is another House with seat on island in that area - House Pryor of the Pebble - of course a pebble is a stone, so might symbolise a moon metheor - this Pebble is close to the Mountains of the Moon. http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Pryor

Pryor sigil is very interesting, it shows partial eclipse, black moon over yellow sun, on dusty pink - well…. It might be the most direct hint ever given to us… something important happened when there was a partial eclipse.

 

The unfortunate ser Hugh of the Vale appeared for only half of first AOIAF book, but things his death and sigil show us might be really important.

His sigil is crescent moon on blue, and he dies when Mountain’s lance passes through his throat…

http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Hugh

 

House Arryn’s sigil shows a falcon against white moon on blue field - IMO the falcon is not important, the important thing is that something flies from the moon - reference to the moon meteors. Blue is also color of Virgin Mary - nod to Nissa Nissa’s sacrifcie?

 

House Breakstone’s sigil is unknown, but their surname might be reference to breaking of the moon.

 

House Egen http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Egen has yellow sun, white crescent moon, and silver star on blue chief above white as sigil, it might suggest that sun, moon and comet were visible at the same time - during day as the blue-white field below suggests, Ser Vardis Egen was member of this house and during his duel with Bronn he wielded Jon Arryn’s falcon sword - so maybe falcon at Arryn sigil represents the Lightbringer?

 

http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Grafton’s sigil is a burning tower in yellow, within a black pile, upon flaming red - so it might reference the fiery storm covering the sky after moon’s destruction or it shows moment when moon was engulfed in flames (stone tower=moon?)

 

House Lynderly’s field of snakes on black http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Lynderly

Might refer to moon-dragon meteors striking Planetos during Long Night.

 

I have no idea what http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Ruthermont

Ruthermont five black starfish on a gold pale, on pean mean….

 

Tollet sigil http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Tollett

And words ‘When All is Darkest’ might refer to the Long Night.

 

http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Templeton Templeton sigil are  nine stars, one of 7 points and eight of 6 points, upon a gold saltire on black, and again I don’t think it relates to Astronomy.

 

Waxley’s sigil might refer to meteors being like candles, lighting the Long Night. Their words support this idea ‘Light in Darkness’ http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Waxley

 

Sigil of House Royce of the Gates of the Moon shows moon - behind bars - maybe it’s the second moon hidden during the Long Night? http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Royce_of_the_Gates_of_the_Moon

 

 

 

 

 

]

 

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I wasn't exactly sure that your way of analys was correct, and that George really thought about all of that, but after reading 'Nightflyers', I'm sure you're right, maybe not everywhere, not in everything, but main concept is right.

Here are characters of 'Nightflyers', doing the exactly same analys of myths as you do:

Quote

 

The name was strange to him, but it took Royd only a moment to consult his library computer. "An alien race on the other side of human space, past the Fyndii worlds and the Damoosh. Possibly legendary."

D'Branin chuckled. "Your library is out-of-date. You must supplement it the next time you are on Avalon. Not legends, no, real enough, though far away. We have little information about the Nor T'alush, but we are sure they exist, though you and I may never meet one. They were the start of it all.

"I was coding some information into the, computers, a packet newly arrived from Dam Tullian after twenty standard years in transit. Part of it was Nor T'alush folklore. I had no idea how long that had taken to get to Dam Tullian, or by what route it had come, but it was fascinating material. Did you know that my first degree was in xenomythology?"

"I did not," Royd said. "Please continue."

"The volcryn story was among the Nor T'alush myths. It awed me; a race of sentients moving out from some mysterious origin in the core of the galaxy, sailing towards the galactic edge and, it was alleged, eventually bound for intergalactic space itself, meanwhile keeping always to the interstellar depths, no planetfalls, seldom coming within a light-year of a star. And doing it all without a stardrive, in ships moving only a fraction of the speed of light! That was the detail that obsessed me! Think how old they must be, those ships!"

"Old," Royd agreed. "Karoly, you said ships. More than one?"

 

"Oh, yes, there are," d'Branin said. "According to the Nor T'alush, one or two appeared first, on the innermost edges of their trading sphere, but others followed. Hundreds of them, each solitary, moving by itself, bound outward, always the same. For fifteen thousand standard years they moved between the Nor T'alush stars, and then they began to pass out from among them. The myth said that the last volcryn ship was gone three thousand years ago."

"Eighteen thousand years," Royd said, adding, "are your Nor T'alush that old?"

D'Branin smiled. "Not as star-travellers, no. According to their own histories, the Nor T'alush have only been civilized for about half that long. That stopped me for a while. It seemed to make the volcryn story clearly a legend. A wonderful legend, true, but nothing more.

"Ultimately, however, I could not let it alone. In my spare time, I investigated, cross-checking with other alien cosmologies to see whether this particular myth was shared by any races other than the Nor T'alush. I thought perhaps I would get a thesis out of it. It was a fruitful line of inquiry.

"I was startled by what I found. Nothing from the Hrangans, or the Hrangan slaveraces, but that made sense, you see. They were out from human space, the volcryn would not reach them until after they had passed through our own sphere. When I looked in, however, the volcryn story was everywhere. The Fyndii had it, the Damoosh appeared to accept it as literal truth—and the Damoosh, you know, are the oldest race we have ever encountered—and there was a remarkably similar story told among the gethsoids of Aath. I checked what little was known about the races said to flourish further in still, beyond even the Nor T'alush, and they had the volcryn story too."

"The legend of the legends," Royd suggested. The spectre's wide mouth turned up in a smile.

"Exactly, exactly," d'Branin agreed. "At that point, I called in the experts, specialists from the Institute for the Study of Nonhuman Intelligence. We researched for two years. It was all there, in the files and the libraries at the Academy. No one had ever looked before, or bothered to put it together.

"The volcryn have been moving through the manrealm for most of human history, since before the dawn of spaceflight. While we twist the fabric of space itself to cheat relativity, they have been sailing their great ships right through the heart of our alleged civilization, past our most populous worlds, at stately slow sublight speeds, bound for the Fringe and the dark between the galaxies. Marvelous, Royd, marvelous!"

"Marvelous," Royd agreed.

Karoly d'Branin set down his chocolate cup and leaned forward eagerly towards Royd's projection, but his hand passed through empty light when he tried to grasp his companion by the forearm. He seemed disconcerted for a moment, before he began to laugh at himself. "Ah, my volcryn. I grow overenthused, Royd. I am so close now. They have preyed on my mind for a dozen years, and within a month I will have them. Then, then, if only I can open communication, if only my people can reach them, then at last I will know the why of it!"

 

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On August 17, 2016 at 3:09 AM, Blue Tiger said:

I wasn't exactly sure that your way of analys was correct, and that George really thought about all of that, but after reading 'Nightflyers', I'm sure you're right, maybe not everywhere, not in everything, but main concept is right.

Here are characters of 'Nightflyers', doing the exactly same analys of myths as you do:

 

Oh man that's great - comparative mythology illustrated in world in one of his short stories. That's pretty rich. Yes, in my opinion if you do any kind of decent level of research into mythology you cannot escape the idea of comparative myth, and if you think most mythology is purely abstract and not a form of history, then you'll badly underestimate our ancestors and the knowledge they possessed. I am glad that more people are learning to take myth and folklore a bit more seriously. Great example here. 

 

By the way I missed your previous comment when you posted it; I'll take a look at your sigil interpretation when I have a moment. 

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