ravenous reader Posted November 25, 2016 Share Posted November 25, 2016 Hi @Seams! Hope your hiatus away from the forum was 'fruitful.' I've missed your thought-provoking posts. Quote 3 hours ago, Seams said: I LOVE the tomb / tummy notion. The word "tummy" seemed like the word a child would use, and didn't seem to fit with GRRM's usual word choices for his characters. So a wordplay explanation helps to make sense of it. The idea that tombs are like forges, where weapons are melted down and reborn as new weapons, has been discussed in the forum. So the tomb / tummy connection would extend and strengthen the metaphor with a link to the place where babies are "forged" and then born. Very nice catch! @Isobel Harper's tomb/tummy is a great addition to your Tobho Mott-inspired hot tomb/womb. In connection to my previous suggestion of how the stages of alchemy might correlate with the archetypal hero's journey, it's notable that the first stage 'nigredo' which that blogger I quoted likened to 'soul-spelunking' (descent into blackness, decomposition, putrefaction) is also called 'cooking' and is related to the process of 'digestion'! So, to all these great ideas tomb/tummy/womb/cave, we can add 'oven', e.g. the idiom 'a bun in the oven'... Quote Quote The link between caves and tummies is also interesting. Jon and Ygritte have a memorable love-making session in a cave that is an extension of Mance Rayder's great hall. Since feasts are often associated with death, it seems important that Jon and Ygritte are engaged in a fertility-related activity off to the side of a feast location. I can't think of any pie/cave puns, but there was a discussion on the Puns and Wordplay thread of Pycelle / sky cell / pie shell / Celador and some other names that might relate to pies and cave-like prison cells. I presume you're making the connection between 'bats fluttering about in the tummy' and bats in a cave, thereby tummy and cave. Not really a pun per se, but in connection to the digestion aspect of 'nigredo' I highlighted above and the feast/pie/cave connection you've identified, it's interesting that caves are often configured as mouths waiting to devour the unwary, most notably when Bran enters Bloodraven's lair: Quote A Dance with Dragons - Bran II The child went in front with the torch in hand, her cloak of leaves whispering behind her, but the passage turned so much that Bran soon lost sight of her. Then the only light was what was reflected off the passage walls. After they had gone down a little, the cave divided, but the left branch was dark as pitch, so even Hodor knew to follow the moving torch to the right. (As an aside, perhaps coincidental, but this reminds me of Dany's 'always the next door to the right'..!) Quote The way the shadows shifted made it seem as if the walls were moving too. Bran saw great white snakes slithering in and out of the earth around him, and his heart thumped in fear. He wondered if they had blundered into a nest of milk snakes or giant grave worms, soft and pale and squishy. Grave worms have teeth. Perhaps I'm stretching here, but if one bakes live birds into a pie, then the pie becomes a nest of sorts! Analogously, if the cave is compared to a 'nest of milk snakes' then the cave is a kind of pie (or is that just 'pie in the sky' on my part?) It's interesting too that the snakes are associated with a foodstuff, especially one associated with nurturing babies, so the connection to eating -- and indeed womb-tombs (as these selfsame milk snakes are also called 'grave worms')-- is made subconsciously, if not recognised overtly at first. As one reads further, however, the connection to eating is made explicit and reinforced by GRRM's trademark repetition with the mention that the 'squishy pie filling,' as it were, has teeth! This is a marvellous inversion of expectations via which the 'pie' ends up eating the ostensible consumer of the pie, rather than vice versa -- which ties back to the 'nursery rhyme' you referenced, namely 'sing a song of sixpence,' where after the pie was opened the liberated blackbirds after first flying up, turned back, flew down and 'pecked off her nose'! In addition to the snakes, the cavern is host to several 'birds' who also are said to 'nest' there! Specifically, Bloodraven, Bran, the singers and the ravens would all qualify, particularly the greenseers who are described nesting on their thrones: 'Before them a pale lord in ebon finery sat dreaming in a tangled nest of roots, a woven weirwood throne that embraced his withered limbs as a mother does a child' (ADWD-Bran II). The selfsame nest or pie nurturing him like a mother is also eating him! 'His body was so skeletal and his clothes so rotted that at first Bran took him for another corpse, a dead man propped up so long that the roots had grown over him, under him, and through him. What skin the corpse lord showed was white, save for a bloody blotch that crept up his neck onto his cheek. His white hair was fine and thin as root hair and long enough to brush against the earthen floor. Roots coiled around his legs like wooden serpents. One burrowed through his breeches into the desiccated flesh of his thigh, to emerge again from his shoulder. A spray of dark red leaves sprouted from his skull, and grey mushrooms spotted his brow. A little skin remained, stretched across his face, tight and hard as white leather, but even that was fraying, and here and there the brown and yellow bone beneath was poking through'(ADWD-Bran II). Again, GRRM's sly reference to a foodstuff -- here, 'mushrooms' -- highlights the food connection. Quote Hodor saw them too. "Hodor," he whimpered, reluctant to go on. But when the girl child stopped to let them catch her, the torchlight steadied, and Bran realized that the snakes were only white roots like the one he'd hit his head on. "It's weirwood roots," he said. "Remember the heart tree in the godswood, Hodor? The white tree with the red leaves? A tree can't hurt you." "Hodor." Hodor plunged ahead, hurrying after the child and her torch, deeper into the earth. They passed another branching, and another, then came into an echoing cavern as large as the great hall of Winterfell, with stone teeth hanging from its ceiling and more poking up through its floor. Isn't 'the great hall' where banquets would be held, so another connection to feasting? The description of the upper and lower rows of teeth is a vivid visual of the cave as mouth. 'A tree can't hurt you..' (ha ha) On 11/24/2016 at 10:20 AM, Seams said: Others - sweetsunray, I think? - have pointed out that Sansa feels fluttery bats in her tummy when Joffrey looks at her, and that there is a symbolic pregnancy based on that and some other clues. Bats instead of birds coming out of a pie is a specific Lothston/Whent symbol and brings us back again to Harrenhal. Indeed, 'brings us back to Harrenhall'...In that vein, I believe the 'different roads lead to the same castle' very likely refers to Harrenhal! In light of our discussion, Harrenhal is both a forge and an oven symbolically, having roasted all those black blood finger- or sausage-shaped towers along with Harren and his family! In that case, the dragons served as the grill-masters or cooks. Indeed, Harrenhal has seen many dubious cooks -- and dishes served -- over the years. Also, not to forget that Arya of the 'weasel soup' worked in the kitchens over there. Quote A Clash of Kings - Arya VI Every day they marched, and every night she said her names, until finally the trees thinned and gave way to a patchwork landscape of rolling hills, meandering streams, and sunlit fields, where the husks of burnt holdfasts thrust up black as rotten teeth. It was another long day's march before they glimpsed the towers of Harrenhal in the distance, hard beside the blue waters of the lake. It would be better once they got to Harrenhal, the captives told each other, but Arya was not so certain. She remembered Old Nan's stories of the castle built on fear. Harren the Black had mixed human blood in the mortar, Nan used to say, dropping her voice so the children would need to lean close to hear, but Aegon's dragons had roasted Harren and all his sons within their great walls of stone. Arya chewed her lip as she walked along on feet grown hard with callus. It would not be much longer, she told herself; those towers could not be more than a few miles off. A Feast for Crows - Jaime III The other captives had been better treated. Ser Wylis Manderly was amongst them, along with several other highborn northmen taken prisoner by the Mountain That Rides in the fighting at the fords of the Trident. Useful hostages, all worth a goodly ransom. They were ragged, filthy, and shaggy to a man, and some had fresh bruises, cracked teeth, and missing fingers, but their wounds had been washed and bandaged, and none of them had gone hungry. Jaime wondered if they had any inkling what they'd been eating, and decided it was better not to inquire. None had any defiance left; especially not Ser Wylis, a bushy-faced tub of suet with dull eyes and sallow, sagging jowls. When Jaime told him that he would be escorted to Maidenpool and there put on a ship for White Harbor, Ser Wylis collapsed into a puddle on the floor and sobbed longer and louder than Pia had. It took four men to lift him back onto his feet. Too much roast goat, Jaime reflected. Gods, but I hate this bloody castle. Harrenhal had seen more horror in its three hundred years than Casterly Rock had witnessed in three thousand. Jaime commanded that fires be lit in the Hall of a Hundred Hearths and sent the cook hobbling back to the kitchens to prepare a hot meal for the men of his column. "Anything but goat." A Feast for Crows - Jaime III Across the pewter waters of the lake the towers of Black Harren's folly appeared at last, five twisted fingers of black, misshapen stone grasping for the sky. Though Littlefinger had been named the Lord of Harrenhal, he seemed in no great haste to occupy his new seat, so it had fallen to Jaime Lannister to "sort out" Harrenhal on his way to Riverrun. That it needed sorting out he did not doubt. Gregor Clegane had wrested the immense, gloomy castle away from the Bloody Mummers before Cersei recalled him to King's Landing. No doubt the Mountain's men were still rattling around inside like so many dried peas in a suit of plate, but they were not ideally suited to restore the king's peace to the Trident. The only peace Ser Gregor's lot had ever given anyone was the peace of the grave. Cool how GRRM plays on the word 'plate' which could mean either armor or a dish from which one eats, particularly apt given how the people are described as 'peas' rattling about in Harrenhal, as if the castle itself were the pie and the people the filling! Certainly, a lot of cannibalism goes on there. Indeed, the very walls are impregnated with human blood. A note on 'fluttering': the leaves of the weirwoods are frequently described as 'fluttering bloodstained hands'. Then, in the context of a potential Sansa pregnancy, it's noteworthy that Littlefinger is also associated with fluttering -- by association with moths: Quote A Game of Thrones - Eddard XV I failed you, Robert, Ned thought. He could not say the words. I lied to you, hid the truth. I let them kill you. The king heard him. "You stiff-necked fool," he muttered, "too proud to listen. Can you eat pride, Stark? Will honor shield your children?" Cracks ran down his face, fissures opening in the flesh, and he reached up and ripped the mask away. It's as if Robert is giving birth to Littlefinger, or hatching Littlefinger's plan before our eyes. I've long said that I see Littlefinger as a bird of a false feather, who lays his eggs in other bird's nests. Based on my belief that he not Jon Arryn fathered Robert Arryn, we can say that a mockingbird impregnated a fish to give a robin who came out of the falcon's egg in the Eyrie, the falcon's nest. Definitely fishy! ETA: To the profusion of parasitic bird imagery, we might add that poor old Jon Arryn (he of not-so-strong seed) was 'cuckolded' (derived from the 'cuckoo' bird). Quote It was not Robert at all; it was Littlefinger, grinning, mocking him. When he opened his mouth to speak, his lies turned to pale grey moths and took wing. Moths are elsewhere described as fluttering: Quote A Feast for Crows - Cersei I Within the tower, the smoke from the torches irritated her eyes, but Cersei did not weep, no more than her father would have. I am the only true son he ever had. Her heels scraped against the stone as she climbed, and she could still hear the moth fluttering wildly inside Ser Osmund's lantern. Die, the queen thought at it, in irritation, fly into the flame and be done with it. Two more red-cloaked guardsmen stood atop the steps. Red Lester muttered a condolence as she passed. The queen's breath was coming fast and short, and she could feel her heart fluttering in her chest. The steps, she told herself, this cursed tower has too many steps. She had half a mind to tear it down. So fluttering is associated with death, particularly death traps, plans hatched, nests infiltrated, pies spiked. As @Lost Melnibonean has speculated, considering Lord Tytos Lannister's heart gave out climbing the stairs, Cersei's breathlessness and 'heart flutter' is probably not a good sign! Quote A Dance with Dragons - Tyrion II Shae's hands had beat at him as the golden hands dug into her throat. He did not remember if they'd been warm or not. As the strength went out of her, her blows became moths fluttering about his face. Each time he gave the chain another twist the golden hands dug deeper. A chain and a keep are nothing, compared to a woman's kiss. Had he kissed her one last time, after she was dead? He could not remember … though he still recalled the first time they had kissed, in his tent beside the Green Fork. How sweet her mouth had tasted. A Dance with Dragons - Jon III Within three heartbeats the whole pit was aflame. Clutching the bars of his cage with bound hands, Mance sobbed and begged. When the fire reached him he did a little dance. His screams became one long, wordless shriek of fear and pain. Within his cage, he fluttered like a burning leaf, a moth caught in a candle flame. Jon found himself remembering a song. A Dance with Dragons - Bran III "Will I see my father again?" "Once you have mastered your gifts, you may look where you will and see what the trees have seen, be it yesterday or last year or a thousand ages past. Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come. Certain moths live their whole lives in a day, yet to them that little span of time must seem as long as years and decades do to us. An oak may live three hundred years, a redwood tree three thousand. A weirwood will live forever if left undisturbed. To them seasons pass in the flutter of a moth's wing, and past, present, and future are one. Nor will your sight be limited to your godswood. The singers carved eyes into their heart trees to awaken them, and those are the first eyes a new greenseer learns to use … but in time you will see well beyond the trees themselves." "When?" Bran wanted to know. The Rogue Prince Long before any man had reason to doubt her innocence, the question of selecting a suitable consort for Rhaenyra had been of concern to King Viserys and his council. Great lords and dashing knights fluttered around her like moths around a flame, vying for her favor. I think we can safely conclude that Sansa sensing 'flutterings' with her ill-developed 'third-eye' is in danger. On 11/24/2016 at 10:20 AM, Seams said: It makes sense that eggs and live birds (or dragons?) "hatching" out of pies would be related, but I can't quite pin it down. I suspect there are further clues in the name "Whitewalls" symbolizing an egg shell that will be broken, and in the "flying" of convicted criminals from the Moon Door at the Eyrie or from the sky cells (rhymes with pie shells) there. If you can stand this symbol going even further down that path, when Tyrion is imprisoned at the Eyrie, he says at one point that he wonders what is happening "beyond the wall" of his sky cell. This may be a hint that the giant ice wall is also part of the egg shell symbolism, and that we will eventually see a massive "hatching" at that location That's really brilliant-- and, yes, I can stand the symbol going even further down that path... The idea of the Wall hatching the Others has tremendous symbolic, strategic and aesthetic appeal! In support of this idea, their speech is likened to 'ice cracking' and one might argue that as potential candidates for the 'crows white as snow' lurking under the sea of Patchface's prophetic utterances, 'hatching' from the wall might be very apropos. 3 hours ago, Seams said: The blood orange that Arya throws at Sansa could, of course, be foreshadowing Ned's death. The orange lands in Sansa's lap because Ned would have snuck out of town and been safe if Sansa hadn't gone to Joffrey and Cersei, expressly violating Ned's instructions to keep their departure plans a secret. Sansa salvages the dress by dyeing it black and wearing it as a sign of mourning for King Robert (King of Summer). But Ned is a symbolic king as well (King of Winter) so the mourning dress has two layers of meaning almost immediately. Very nice. The blood orange landing in Sansa's lap with a messy splatter like Ned's beheaded head reminds me of the deserter's head birthed/delivered by Theon and landing at his feet: Quote A Game of Thrones - Bran I His father took off the man's head with a single sure stroke. Blood sprayed out across the snow, as red as summerwine. One of the horses reared and had to be restrained to keep from bolting. Bran could not take his eyes off the blood. The snows around the stump drank it eagerly, reddening as he watched. The head bounced off a thick root and rolled. It came up near Greyjoy's feet. Theon was a lean, dark youth of nineteen who found everything amusing. He laughed, put his boot on the head, and kicked it away. As you correctly highlighted, both Sansa and Theon are thereby marked as deserters (who will get their 'just des(s)erts'..!) Sansa dyeing her cloak is visually emblematic foreshadowing of how she like Theon will be a turncloak (here very literally indeed as she turns the cloak another color!) 3 hours ago, Seams said: The melon that Ser Dontos uses as a "play" weapon in an attempt to divert Joffrey's attack on Sansa is probably symbolic as a "head" as well. I'll have to go back and look for your comments on the symbolic Joffrey / Sansa impregnation, because I think the melon scene, with the juice and seeds running down Sansa's face and the blue dress she chose that day because she thought Joffrey would like it, were part of that discussion. Melon is not associated with pies, but Sansa loves lemon tarts and there is melon / lemon wordplay in the books. Maybe a melon is the opposite of a lemon, for Sansa, so nightmare scenarios play out when she comes in contact with melons. When Penny and Groat perform at Joffrey's wedding feast, part of the act is a pretend beheading, where a helmet that appears to have a head inside lands in someone's lap. The head turns out to be a melon and the actual head of the dwarf reappears again from inside of the armor he had ducked inside. The probably foreshadows Tyrion's reappearance after he returns to Westeros. Melons are frequently referred to as 'blood melons' and compared to or used as substitutes for heads in various scenes. Strangely, the scene you mentioned above reminds me of this one: Quote A Game of Thrones - Bran III He looked south, and saw the great blue-green rush of the Trident. He saw his father pleading with the king, his face etched with grief. He saw Sansa crying herself to sleep at night, and he saw Arya watching in silence and holding her secrets hard in her heart. There were shadows all around them. One shadowwas dark as ash, with the terrible face of a hound. Another was armored like the sun, golden and beautiful. Over them both loomed a giant in armor made of stone, but when he opened his visor, there was nothing inside but darkness and thick black blood. Instead of a headless giant we have a headless dwarf: Quote A Storm of Swords - Tyrion VIII It took some time to sort that out, but in the end they spurred to opposite ends of the hall, and wheeled about for the tilt. As the lords and ladies guffawed and giggled, the little men came together with a crash and a clatter, and the wolf knight's lance struck the helm of the stag knight and knocked his head clean off. It spun through the air spattering blood to land in the lap of Lord Gyles. The headless dwarf careened around the tables, flailing his arms. Dogs barked, women shrieked, and Moon Boy made a great show of swaying perilously back and forth on his stilts, until Lord Gyles pulled a dripping red melon out of the shattered helm, at which point the stag knight poked his face up out of his armor, and another storm of laughter rocked the hall. The knights waited for it to die, circled around each other trading colorful insults, and were about to separate for another joust when the dog threw its rider to the floor and mounted the sow. The huge pig squealed in distress, while the wedding guests squealed with laughter, especially when the stag knight leapt onto the wolf knight, let down his wooden breeches, and started to pump away frantically at the other's nether portions. While the anecdotes seem to have nothing to do with one another, they are both concerned with putting on masks/masques and faces/facades. I believe the 'giant' in the first passage is related to the 'dwarf' in the second, a giant hiding behind the dwarf, or vice versa -- 'a small man who casts a large shadow' -- the stagemaster and coinmaster having paid for the show in 'penny and groat' and, not able to resist, organised the dwarf pageant down to the headless dwarf -- representing wish fulfilment on Littlefinger's part as he's desired for some time to eliminate Tyrion, one of his main rivals in the 'game.' And, indeed, he's fond of hiding his corrosive intentions behind an assortment of sweet fruits: Quote A Storm of Swords - Sansa VI The new name would take some getting used to. "Games? I . . . I suppose it would depend . . ." Grisel reappeared before he could say more, balancing a large platter. She set it down between them. There were apples and pears and pomegranates, some sad-looking grapes, a huge blood orange. The old woman had brought a round of bread as well, and a crock of butter. Petyr cut a pomegranate in two with his dagger, offering half to Sansa. "You should try and eat, my lady." "Thank you, my lord." Pomegranate seeds were so messy; Sansa chose a pear instead, and took a small delicate bite. It was very ripe. The juice ran down her chin. A Storm of Swords - Sansa VI "So one of the Kettleblacks put the poison in Joff's cup?" Ser Osmund had been near the king all night, she remembered. "Did I say that?" Lord Petyr cut the blood orange in two with his dagger and offered half to Sansa. "The lads are far too treacherous to be part of any such scheme . . . and Osmund has become especially unreliable since he joined the Kingsguard. That white cloak does things to a man, I find. Even a man like him." He tilted his chin back and squeezed the blood orange, so the juice ran down into his mouth. "I love the juice but I loathe the sticky fingers," he complained, wiping his hands. "Clean hands, Sansa. Whatever you do, make certain your hands are clean." Sansa spooned up some juice from her own orange. "But if it wasn't the Kettleblacks and it wasn't Ser Dontos . . . you weren't even in the city, and it couldn't have been Tyrion . . ." 3 hours ago, Seams said: The head turns out to be a melon and the actual head of the dwarf reappears again from inside of the armor he had ducked inside. This probably foreshadows Tyrion's reappearance after he returns to Westeros. I agree. It means Tyrion can successfully play Littlefinger at his own 'death-ducking, fruit-plucking and realm-...' game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seams Posted November 30, 2016 Author Share Posted November 30, 2016 I've had to read this a few times to absorb everything, rr. Some amazing insights. It seems like we're getting close to solving pie, and not even top mathematicians can make that claim. It's easiest for me to use a new color within the box showing highlights of your post: On 11/25/2016 at 3:22 PM, ravenous reader said: Isobel Harper's tomb/tummy is a great addition to your Tobho Mott-inspired hot tomb/womb. In connection to my previous suggestion of how the stages of alchemy might correlate with the archetypal hero's journey, it's notable that the first stage 'nigredo' ... is also called 'cooking' and is related to the process of 'digestion'! So, to all these great ideas tomb/tummy/womb/cave, we can add 'oven', e.g. the idiom 'a bun in the oven'... That initial discussion (on the Puns thread) of pies and their possible meanings included some mention of Arya's friend, Hot Pie, I think. Your comment reminds me that Hot Pie chooses to stay with Gendry when Arya tries to continue her journey to Winterfell. I wonder whether Hot Pie respresents Arya's womb? A strange thought, but Gendry is associated with Tobho Mott, and we have a Hot Pie that is now associated with the pregnant "tummy" where babies are forged . . . I presume you're making the connection between 'bats fluttering about in the tummy' and bats in a cave, thereby tummy and cave. ... it's interesting that caves are often configured as mouths waiting to devour the unwary, ... Perhaps I'm stretching here, but if one bakes live birds into a pie, then the pie becomes a nest of sorts! Analogously, if the cave [Bloodraven's cave, entered by Bran] is compared to a 'nest of milk snakes' then the cave is a kind of pie ... It's interesting too that the snakes are associated with a foodstuff, especially one associated with nurturing babies, ... As one reads further, however, the connection to eating is made explicit and reinforced by GRRM's trademark repetition with the mention that the 'squishy pie filling,' as it were, has teeth! This is a marvellous inversion of expectations via which the 'pie' ends up eating the ostensible consumer of the pie, rather than vice versa -- which ties back to the 'nursery rhyme' you referenced, namely 'sing a song of sixpence,' where after the pie was opened the liberated blackbirds after first flying up, turned back, flew down and 'pecked off her nose'! And this brings us back to Arya because Jeyne Poole may lose the tip of her nose to frostbite as she makes her escape from the Boltons and to the Crows of the Night's Watch. With the pun on "nose" and "knows," (You know nothing, Jon Snow), it will be interesting to see what happens to Jeyne. Other characters have lost an eye to a bird (Crow's Food Umber) and I believe Arya sees birds eating the faces of dead corpses near the God's Eye before she and Gendry and Hot Pie are captured. But the idea of the cave as a mouth probably also connects to the mouths on weirwood trees - Jon sees burned skulls inside a weirwood mouth at an abandoned wildling village of Whitetree, north of the wall - and to the inlet north of the Vale containing the Three Sisters and leading to White Harbor. The inlet is known as The Bite. I'll have to keep an eye out for more mouths in the landscape. I think you're getting at something here. Your ideas also tie into a connection made after reading another thread. (Unfortunately, I no longer remember which thread.) I think GRRM wants us to draw a connection between Bran's weirwood net, which is maintained by "singers" and which he taps into after eating a bowl of weirwood paste; and the bowls of brown that are the staple diet in Flea Bottom. I had already wondered about a leaf / flea wordplay connection, and I think the bowls of brown may be it. Tyrion calls the brown stew singer stew, because he tells Bronn to get rid of the body of the singer, Symon Silver Tongue, and jokes about selling it to a pot shop. So there is a singer in Flea Bottom, although he plays a slightly different role than the singers in Bran's cave. But Bran can feel the presence of the CotF singer when he skin changes into a raven, and Bloodraven tells him that a little bit of the previous skinchanger stays in the bird. They also become part of the root system of the trees when they die. So the idea that there is a little singer in each bowl taken from the ever-simmering pots of brown seems to fit with the eternal consciousness of the weirnet. Of our major POV characters, I know Arya eats brown. Does Tyrion? Probably Davos Seaworth also ate brown in his childhood. Davos then becomes the only POV character to eat a bowl of sister stew. So that brings us back to The Bite. The selfsame nest or pie nurturing him like a mother is also eating him! 'His body was so skeletal and his clothes so rotted that at first Bran took him for another corpse, a dead man propped up so long that the roots had grown over him, under him, and through him. What skin the corpse lord showed was white, save for a bloody blotch that crept up his neck onto his cheek. His white hair was fine and thin as root hair and long enough to brush against the earthen floor. Roots coiled around his legs like wooden serpents. One burrowed through his breeches into the desiccated flesh of his thigh, to emerge again from his shoulder. A spray of dark red leaves sprouted from his skull, and grey mushrooms spotted his brow. A little skin remained, stretched across his face, tight and hard as white leather, but even that was fraying, and here and there the brown and yellow bone beneath was poking through'(ADWD-Bran II). That's the point I meant to make about the bowls of brown: they nourish the people who eat them, but they also contain the flesh of Symon Silver Tongue and who knows what other dead bodies. GRRM is giving us these graphic examples of the cycle of carbon through the ecosystem, I think. The grave worm eats the skeletal face of The Kindly Man, but Arya tries to eat the grave worm. ...Indeed, 'brings us back to Harrenhall'... Harrenhal is both a forge and an oven symbolically, having roasted all those black blood finger- or sausage-shaped towers along with Harren and his family! In that case, the dragons served as the grill-masters or cooks. Indeed, Harrenhal has seen many dubious cooks -- and dishes served -- over the years. ... The fate of Vargo Hoat seems very relevant to sorting out the meaning of the bowls of brown and perhaps also to understanding the role of Lady Hornwood, who eats her own fingers. Vargo Hoat is forced to eat some of his own extremities as he is punished for the maiming of Jaime Lannister. Lady Hornwood seems like a pure and simple victim - she doesn't even threaten to blackmail someone with a song about a secret mistress, as Symon Silver Tongue did. I'm going to ponder whether GRRM is hinting at a connection between Hoat and Hornwood. Cool how GRRM plays on the word 'plate' which could mean either armor or a dish from which one eats, particularly apt given how the people are described as 'peas' rattling about in Harrenhal, as if the castle itself were the pie and the people the filling! Certainly, a lot of cannibalism goes on there. Indeed, the very walls are impregnated with human blood. This is a really interesting observation and opens up some new possibilities. The peas reference is immediately followed by a reference to peace, so that has to be deliberate. And the peas rattling around in the armor almost certainly has to connect to the melon in the helmet when the dwarfs joust. We suspect that Gregor Clegane will be separated from his head and then become Ser Robert Strong, a knight who never takes off his helmet and who is suspected of being dead (ADwD epilogue, Kevan Lannister POV). All this melon and peas in armor seems linked to the eating of human flesh described above. It also reminds me of the death of Lord Rickard Stark, who is roasted alive in his armor. (Rattleshirt, who I suspect might symbolically represent Ned Stark, is also "cooked" in a metal cage by Melisandre and Stannis. I believe Rattleshirt also wore the skull of a giant as a helmet.) I feel as if we're building a nest here out of all these scraps of interrelated symbols and stories, but I don't yet know how the nest holds together structurally! A note on 'fluttering': the leaves of the weirwoods are frequently described as 'fluttering bloodstained hands'. Then, in the context of a potential Sansa pregnancy, it's noteworthy that Littlefinger is also associated with fluttering -- by association with moths: It's as if Robert is giving birth to Littlefinger, or hatching Littlefinger's plan before our eyes. I've long said that I see Littlefinger as a bird of a false feather, who lays his eggs in other bird's nests. Based on my belief that he not Jon Arryn fathered Robert Arryn, we can say that a mockingbird impregnated a fish to give a robin who came out of the falcon's egg in the Eyrie, the falcon's nest. Definitely fishy! Yes, I'm getting increasingly suspicious about Littlefinger. This is a topic for another thread, but I'm wondering whether he might be a Longwater in disguise, or on his mother's side of the family. If so, he would be a Velaryon descendant. Why couldn't the three heads of the dragon by Targaryen, Blackfyre and Velaryon? ETA: To the profusion of parasitic bird imagery, we might add that poor old Jon Arryn (he of not-so-strong seed) was 'cuckolded' (derived from the 'cuckoo' bird). Moths are elsewhere described as fluttering: See, your great catch of the moth in the lantern seems connected to Lord Rickard roasting in his armor in the Red Keep. (Cersei hopes the moth will just fly into the flame and die as she ascends to the scene of her own father's death, right?) So fluttering is associated with death, particularly death traps, plans hatched, nests infiltrated, pies spiked. As @Lost Melnibonean has speculated, considering Lord Tytos Lannister's heart gave out climbing the stairs, Cersei's breathlessness and 'heart flutter' is probably not a good sign! I think we can safely conclude that Sansa sensing 'flutterings' with her ill-developed 'third-eye' is in danger. Maybe the fluttering experienced by Sansa is like the leaves, and puts her in a position of power. The fluttering of the moths seems like the opposite, though, and indicates someone trapped. I guess we'll have to wait and see. That's really brilliant-- and, yes, I can stand the symbol going even further down that path... The idea of the Wall hatching the Others has tremendous symbolic, strategic and aesthetic appeal! In support of this idea, their speech is likened to 'ice cracking' and one might argue that as potential candidates for the 'crows white as snow' lurking under the sea of Patchface's prophetic utterances, 'hatching' from the wall might be very apropos. This also reminds me of the Miasma Theory that has been put forward in a blog outside the forum. Flu and other viruses infiltrate the CELLS of human bodies where they multiply until the cell bursts and the virus floods the body, sometimes causing a person who appeared healthy to suddenly collapse with illness. So eggs hatching and cells bursting could be both similar or opposite - one brings birth and the other brings death (for the host, but not the virus). And birds flying out of a wedding pie immediately precede Joffrey's death . . . ... Melons are frequently referred to as 'blood melons' and compared to or used as substitutes for heads in various scenes. Strangely, the scene you mentioned above reminds me of this one: Instead of a headless giant we have a headless dwarf: While the anecdotes seem to have nothing to do with one another, they are both concerned with putting on masks/masques and faces/facades. I believe the 'giant' in the first passage is related to the 'dwarf' in the second, a giant hiding behind the dwarf, or vice versa -- 'a small man who casts a large shadow' ... Agreed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Isobel Harper Posted November 30, 2016 Share Posted November 30, 2016 13 minutes ago, Seams said: Yes, I'm getting increasingly suspicious about Littlefinger. This is a topic for another thread, but I'm wondering whether he might be a Longwater in disguise, or on his mother's side of the family. Well, both Aurane Waters and LF have grey-green eyes. Quote Why couldn't the three heads of the dragon by Targaryen, Blackfyre and Velaryon? Shameless promotion. http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?/topic/144369-aurane-the-unburnt/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ravenous reader Posted December 5, 2016 Share Posted December 5, 2016 On 11/29/2016 at 7:24 PM, Seams said: I've had to read this a few times to absorb everything, rr. Some amazing insights. It seems like we're getting close to solving pie, and not even top mathematicians can make that claim. It's easiest for me to use a new color within the box showing highlights of your post: 'When a moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie That's amore...' LOL. Yes, close(r) to solving pie and the swords that slice them... About the mathematics of cracking open those linguistic faultlines, we jest -- however, there may be more truth than we know regarding a deliberate pun on pie/pi. @Pain killer Jane once mentioned to me that she believes GRRM may have incorporated this ratio into the text in some way, although I didn't follow exactly how she'd reached that conclusion unfortunately! I still don't understand the deeper implications of LF's cryptic comment about this key pie. What does he mean by 'if the pie is opened' -- which pie exactly and why wouldn't Varys like that?: Quote A Game of Thrones - Eddard IV Littlefinger smiled. "Leave Lord Varys to me, sweet lady. If you will permit me a small obscenity—and where better for it than here—I hold the man's balls in the palm of my hand." He cupped his fingers, smiling. "Or would, if he were a man, or had any balls. You see, if the pie is opened, the birds begin to sing, and Varys would not like that. Were I you, I would worry more about the Lannisters and less about the eunuch." In any case, there seems to be a definite connection drawn between pies and sexuality. The juxtaposition of Varys's 'balls in the palm of his hand' together with the 'birds held in the pie casing' has the unfortunate (perhaps deliberate) effect of aligning Varys's balls with the birds, visualising Varys's balls like purple plums (plums are stone fruit, and stones like seeds are strong and are related to personal power, including reproductive potency) baked in a pie of Littlefinger's devising, making Littlefinger a baker in addition to a brothelkeeper and keeper of coin. Perhaps these three vocations are not so different, after all, uniting our le pain (=bread), lepin (=rabbits/fertility/sexuality) and pay(ne) (=financial transactions and karmic payback) puns, respectively. ETA: I'm reminded of the proverb 'a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush' considering LF claims he holds Varys's 'eggs' in the palm of his hand, in much the same way as the pie holds the birds within. Continuing the analogy, opening ones hand is the same 'movement' as opening the pie, with the result of Varys and the birds flying away. Originally, the specific bird-in-hand was a falcon, making this proverb of especial potential relevance considering LF's machinations in the Eyrie, a falcon's (i.e. House Arryn's) nest. The proverb refers back to 'mediaeval falconry where a bird in the hand (the falcon) was a valuable asset and certainly worth more than two in the bush (the prey).' Therefore, we can say that Varys is a falcon (not necessarily an Arryn, but a raptor of some sort symbolically) whom it behooves LF to contain, in the sense of 'keep your enemies close' (in this category, Tyrion might be another bird who maddeningly keeps fleeing the various traps LF sets for him; significantly, the first place Tyrion eluded capture was in the Eyrie where he perfected the neat trick of flying out the pie without flying out of the moon door...he's now a falcon at large). Rather counterintuitively, ones enemies become valuable assets to obtain, while the 'two in the bush' who represent the prey are deemed less valuable in the sense of being less formidable competitors. 'Having ones finger in many pies' as Littlefinger has his 'little finger' (undeniably an expression of his promiscuous opportunism) additionally has an 'obscene' connotation, as he himself emphasises above. Fittingly, the pie synonym 'tarts' is also one frequently used to denote predatory transactions between humans, in that 'tarts' -- or prostitutes -- are kept in a brothel, making Littlefinger as the brothelkeeper 'a keeper of tarts'! Running through the text, there is a connection between consumption (food), consumerism (money) and consummation (sex) (to which I might add a fourth to complete my alliterative quartet, combustion (fire)...every pie or 'bun' if you like is baked in an oven and that requires fire). We can see an echo of this dynamic in how Littlefinger plies Sansa, his next 'pie' for the taking, with endless lemon pies up in the Eyrie; they literally and figuratively are 'pies in the sky.' If the Eyrie is a nest, and a nest contains eggs, this is analogous to the birds in the pie or Varys's balls in the hand ripe for the plunder and promising fruitful opportunities for extortion. Extending the metaphor to Sansa, therefore, it implies Littlefinger has taken hold of her reproductive potential, with an intention to harvest her precious Northern 'eggs' for his own benefit. (Not so-)sweetrobin, whom I consider to be a double for Littlefinger, both in a Freudian sense as representative of his deeper, unvarnished desires (the rampant, devouring 'Id') together with my belief that 'Robin' is the mockingbird's biological son, has this to say regarding his appetites and preferences (which we may accordingly interpret as indicative of Littlefinger's basic appetites and preferences, both practically and symbolically). 'The seed is strong,' remember, implying biologically related 'seeds' mirror one another, 'blood calls to blood' giving rise to recognisable echoes or reiterations of one another, from which we may infer a great deal -- even though the characters themselves may be oblivious of the relation: Quote A Feast for Crows - Alayne I He needed a tongue to confess. "Be a good boy and eat your porridge," Alayne pleaded. "Please? For me?" "I don't want porridge." Robert flung his spoon across the hall. It bounced off a hanging tapestry, and left a smear of porridge upon a white silk moon. "The lord wants eggs!" "The lord shall eat porridge and be thankful for it," said Petyr's voice, behind them. Petyr is being a bit hypocritical, considering he like his son hates porridge and desires eggs -- Sansa's eggs (ovaries) and perhaps some 'nest eggs' (the Eyrie, Harrenhal and perhaps Riverrun or Winterfell would be nice) or -- why stop there, the sky's the limit -- dragon's eggs to go with them, 'three' to be precise: Quote A Feast for Crows - Alayne I She found Lord Robert alone in the Morning Hall above the kitchens, pushing a wooden spoon listlessly through a big bowl of porridge and honey. "I wanted eggs," he complained when he saw her. "I wanted three eggs boiled soft, and some back bacon. The egg is the quintessential symbol (he's a self-made 'bird' after all) of Littlefinger's quest for power, his lifelong desire to transform himself, requiring him to enthrall, steal and smash other people's eggs in the process. It also happens to be a principal ingredient for any baker, without which no pie is possible, nor birds to fly out of said pie! By the way, have you considered exploring the notion of 'stolen tarts' (and hearts)? It's interesting that the two sisters seem to be on opposite sides of that equation, so that Arya becomes a thief who kills pigeons (the latter who can be baked in pies, dead or alive, as we've encountered) and considers on occasion stealing tarts; versus Sansa who in contrast is configured as the juicy fruit pie for the taking, passed around the table of schemers, all of whom attempt to filch a piece of her -- Arya and Sansa as the plucking and the plucked, respectively. This relationship is cleverly reflected by GRRM in their names, as many have noted, Arya being a solo piece vs. Sansa being a piece that is played by another (a 'thumb piano' under someone else's thumb...someone's little finger perhaps!) There might be a motif of purloined pies running through the narrative, considering Lyanna the prime piece of pie whose abduction when the thief was in the moonmaid (the moon as I hinted above being another kind of pie in the sky) is a central device, begging to be cracked open, as evidenced by the endless threads speculating on exactly what transpired in that respect. On 11/29/2016 at 7:24 PM, Seams said: It's easiest for me to use a new color within the box showing highlights of your post: On 11/25/2016 at 3:22 PM, ravenous reader said: Isobel Harper's tomb/tummy is a great addition to your Tobho Mott-inspired hot tomb/womb. In connection to my previous suggestion of how the stages of alchemy might correlate with the archetypal hero's journey, it's notable that the first stage 'nigredo' ... is also called 'cooking' and is related to the process of 'digestion'! So, to all these great ideas tomb/tummy/womb/cave, we can add 'oven', e.g. the idiom 'a bun in the oven'... That initial discussion (on the Puns thread) of pies and their possible meanings included some mention of Arya's friend, Hot Pie, I think. Your comment reminds me that Hot Pie chooses to stay with Gendry when Arya tries to continue her journey to Winterfell. I wonder whether Hot Pie respresents Arya's womb? A strange thought, but Gendry is associated with Tobho Mott, and we have a Hot Pie that is now associated with the pregnant "tummy" where babies are forged . . . Well Jaime does equate marrying a 'fat-faced inkeep' (obvious Hot Pie reference) with marrying a 'burly blacksmith' (Gendry) by linking these as suitable suitors with Sansa in an equivocal manner which leaves room for interpretation so that the 'unmarried sister' in question might in actual fact be Arya (Sansa is already married to Tyrion of which Jaime ought to be aware, considering Sansa is his sister-in-law!). Jaime's prediction therefore additionally links Arya to these figures (which she is practically in any case through their shared sojourn in the Riverlands), so perhaps bakers and smiths are similar, and additionally given a sexual connotation, laboring in their dust-covered aprons over their sweaty hearths, producing their respective 'baked goods' (or perhaps 'not so good goods', in the 'au bon pain' vs. 'bad pain' French bread pun tradition!) Then we have the perverse description of Old Nan 'plucking at a hot pie' which might be construed to have both cannibalistic and sexual connotations, which I've previously identified in my exploration of GRRM's use of the word 'plucking' (which as luck would have it rhymes with...). I do think there's a romantic subtext between Arya and Gendry in particular. He's her 'forest love' and she's the latest 'incarnation' of the 'knight of the laughing tree' and they have a habit of wrestling in symbolic and actual forges. In 'Nissa Nissa' terms (another moon/womb/tomb/cave/pie), there's a certain poignancy to the idea that Arya and Gendry, should they ultimately prove to be a successful romantic union in the end, would represent 'the third forging' between the Houses of Stark and Baratheon (as Robert intended when he suggested to Ned 'let's join our houses') after failing twice previously -- Lyanna-Robert and Sansa-Joffrey representing the two dud attempts or souffles which failed to rise to the occasion (to the list of flopped forgings one might add and/or substitute the ill-fated Ned-Robert bromance itself, depending on ones inclination)! On 11/29/2016 at 7:24 PM, Seams said: On 11/25/2016 at 3:22 PM, ravenous reader said: I presume you're making the connection between 'bats fluttering about in the tummy' and bats in a cave, thereby tummy and cave. ... it's interesting that caves are often configured as mouths waiting to devour the unwary, ... Perhaps I'm stretching here, but if one bakes live birds into a pie, then the pie becomes a nest of sorts! Analogously, if the cave [Bloodraven's cave, entered by Bran] is compared to a 'nest of milk snakes' then the cave is a kind of pie ... It's interesting too that the snakes are associated with a foodstuff, especially one associated with nurturing babies, ... As one reads further, however, the connection to eating is made explicit and reinforced by GRRM's trademark repetition with the mention that the 'squishy pie filling,' as it were, has teeth! This is a marvellous inversion of expectations via which the 'pie' ends up eating the ostensible consumer of the pie, rather than vice versa -- which ties back to the 'nursery rhyme' you referenced, namely 'sing a song of sixpence,' where after the pie was opened the liberated blackbirds after first flying up, turned back, flew down and 'pecked off her nose'! And this brings us back to Arya because Jeyne Poole may lose the tip of her nose to frostbite as she makes her escape from the Boltons and to the Crows of the Night's Watch. With the pun on "nose" and "knows," (You know nothing, Jon Snow), it will be interesting to see what happens to Jeyne. Other characters have lost an eye to a bird (Crow's Food Umber) and I believe Arya sees birds eating the faces of dead corpses near the God's Eye before she and Gendry and Hot Pie are captured. Add to those the famous cardinal sin of the naughty boy (Bran) who taking after mythological archetypes like Icarus or Lucifer climbed or flew too high, for which he in his hubris was struck down by lightning, whereafter crows pecked out his eyes. Losing a nose, eye, or ear is a symbol for the paradoxes attending the acquisition of special powers such as greenseeing, hence the lost 'nose' becomes 'knows' (the true 'smelling'), the lost eye represents the boon of the 'third eye' (the true 'seeing'), and the sacrificed ear of corn becomes the bread (the 'pain' in all our identified connotations, and the true 'hearing') in the vein of Garth the Green who reaps great powers at great cost. Likewise, the 'bite' particularly 'frostbite' refers to ice which inevitably is linked to the sword Ice, and further associations with the jaws of the wolves, the maws of the weirwoods, and whatever power is moving the Others, as you've suggested here: On 11/29/2016 at 7:24 PM, Seams said: On 11/25/2016 at 3:22 PM, ravenous reader said: But the idea of the cave as a mouth probably also connects to the mouths on weirwood trees - Jon sees burned skulls inside a weirwood mouth at an abandoned wildling village of Whitetree, north of the wall - and to the inlet north of the Vale containing the Three Sisters and leading to White Harbor. The inlet is known as The Bite. I'll have to keep an eye out for more mouths in the landscape. I think you're getting at something here. Regarding 'the Bite' -- a locale which embodies the way the North expresses itself, otherwise stated how the North 'remembers' -- we'll identify that eating is connected with remembrance (in the same vein pecking off the nose is related to knows/knowledge and sacrifices to the weirwoods are related to how the trees see and remember). Manderly, who has something of the greenseer about him, is configured as a wily (pun on his name Wyman as well as his son Wylis), rather predatory, as we know bloodthirsty and cannibalistic figure, who fittingly makes his court above the 'Wolf's Den,' the original fortress there, which likewise evokes a carnivore's lair or cave. It's interesting that Manderly's allegiance to the Starks, dictating the direction of his predatory gaze south, is predicated upon a long history of remembrance, in which the Manderlys remember how they were taken in by the Starks after having been exiled from their home in the Reach, reciprocally causing them to assume the mantle of 'defenders of the dispossessed' on behalf of the Starks, which is another way of saying, 'We remember.' And how do they defend the dispossessed Starks..? Well, for one thing, by cooking -- and eating! Almost everyone in that family is plump and pasty (pastry? ), so it's logical to assume they engage in such activities frequently and with gusto... Quote A Dance with Dragons - Davos III Kings and corpses always draw attendants, the old saying went. So it was with Manderly. Power is associated with eating in this image of the king like a corpse drawing attendants who fly about him like scavenging crows desirous of obtaining a piece of the pie. So, perhaps pies can symbolise corpses as well as containing them. Pies are implicit here, in the foreshadowing of the 'pork pies' Manderly will serve up to his enemies, some of whom are present in court seeking his favor at this time, representing an inversion again of the expected relationship between the pie and the consumers of the pie. Accordingly, the attendants hoping to exploit their relationship with Manderly in order to gain power, in a twist end up baked into his pie, instead of vice versa. As I've mentioned, in the same breath Manderly like Bloodraven or the Grey King is configured as a greenseer (in the greenseer's case 'the attendants' would be the Children, the ravens and the trees who are literally devouring the half-man/half-tree corpselike Lord in Bloodraven's case). Quote Left of the high seat stood a maester nigh as fat as the lord he served, a rosy-cheeked man with thick lips and a head of golden curls. Ser Marlon claimed the place of honor at his lordship's right hand. On a cushioned stool at his feet perched a plump pink lady. Behind Lord Wyman stood two younger women, sisters by the look of them. The elder wore her brown hair bound in a long braid. The younger, no more than fifteen, had an even longer braid, dyed a garish green. In this scene, some people are configured as predators and others as prey. For example, the 'rosy-cheeked' man and the 'plump pink lady perched' remind me of food, respectively an apple or plucked bird perhaps, while wilful Wylla with the 'long green braid' -- besides evoking the green men, 'braids' or 'coils' are symbols of power, e.g. Drogo's long braid; additionally, braiding like weaving is a magical symbol, as well as representing a trap, e.g. Dany's bloodrider's whip -- is the true greenseer figure and heir to the symbolic title of her ancestor Garth Greenhand, together with Lord Wyman himself who in his overflowing obesity is an ever-present symbol of the appetites which reign supreme. Quote None chose to honor Davos with a name. The maester was the first to speak. "You stand before Wyman Manderly, Lord of White Harbor and Warden of the White Knife, Shield of the Faith, Defender of the Dispossessed, Lord Marshal of the Mander, a Knight of the Order of the Green Hand," he said. "In the Merman's Court, it is customary for vassals and petitioners to kneel." The onion knight would have bent his knee, but a King's Hand could not; to do so would suggest that the king he served was less than this fat lord. "I have not come as a petitioner," Davos replied. "I have a string of titles too. Lord of the Rainwood, Admiral of the Narrow Sea, Hand of the King." More food imagery to pique a fertile imagination-- 'onion knight,' 'green hand,' 'white knife' ...Knives are used to slaughter, prepare and eat food...'white' reminds me of the weirwoods who are similarly predatory after a surprisingly carnivorous fashion, given the live sacrifices required to sustain their power. There is a plethora of people-as-food imagery to be harvested from this passage, which I won't fully elaborate here. Let's turn to wilful Wylla now, who is an interesting figure when contrasted with Sansa. Like Sansa, unpleasant wedding plans have been suggested without her consent, making her a kind of pie for the selling, yet unlike Sansa who suppresses her own voice Wylla has much to say -- you could say she's a pie who lets the birds out to sing to some consternation in the court (of course unbeknownst to the audience in court the whole spectacle is one of Manderly's 'mummer's farces' put on for the benefit of the Freys). Quote "Hush, child," said Lady Leona. "You heard your lord grandfather. Hush! You know nothing." "I know about the promise," insisted the girl. "Maester Theomore, tell them! A thousand years before the Conquest, a promise was made, and oaths were sworn in the Wolf's Den before the old gods and the new. When we were sore beset and friendless, hounded from our homes and in peril of our lives, the wolves took us in and nourished us and protected us against our enemies. The city is built upon the land they gave us. In return we swore that we should always be their men. Stark men!" The maester fingered the chain about his neck. "Solemn oaths were sworn to the Starks of Winterfell, aye. But Winterfell has fallen and House Stark has been extinguished The wolves generously taking them in and providing lands for them is an allusion to the myth of Romulus and Remus, the feral children suckled by wolves, to whom by legend the founding of the city of Rome is attributed. Thus, in an inversion of the usual expected predatory relations, wolves are associated with nurturing and feeding others, a debt which Manderly will shortly pay back to the Starks by paying back the Stark enemies with 'pain' in the form of his 'pork pies'. Incidentally, 'porky pies' is a Cockney rhyming slang wordplay meaning 'lies', which is particularly apt given that the Freys tell a lot of lies before the court (lies which Davos and Wylla both expose and challenge), and have 'lied' most egregiously in the sense of breaking guest right and betraying their oath to their liege lord. Thus, telling a lie may lead to being made to eat ones words -- by being eaten!" On 11/29/2016 at 7:24 PM, Seams said: On 11/25/2016 at 3:22 PM, ravenous reader said: Your ideas also tie into a connection made after reading another thread. (Unfortunately, I no longer remember which thread.) I think GRRM wants us to draw a connection between Bran's weirwood net, which is maintained by "singers" and which he taps into after eating a bowl of weirwood paste; and the bowls of brown that are the staple diet in Flea Bottom. Yes, I remember -- 'bole'/'bowl' -- I think it was on the 'Direwolves don't cry' thread. On 11/29/2016 at 7:24 PM, Seams said: On 11/25/2016 at 3:22 PM, ravenous reader said: I had already wondered about a leaf / flea wordplay connection, and I think the bowls of brown may be it. Tyrion calls the brown stew singer stew, because he tells Bronn to get rid of the body of the singer, Symon Silver Tongue, and jokes about selling it to a pot shop. So there is a singer in Flea Bottom, although he plays a slightly different role than the singers in Bran's cave. The dialectic is a 'two-way street', so that one may be killed either for 'singing' (as you mentioned, the foolhardy singer who dared to threaten Tyrion with extortion; then Tyrion himself who walks a knife's edge in this respect with his loose tongue inviting others to silence him) or because someone else 'sang' (e.g. the 'little bird' informants -- when the birds begin to sing? -- who lead Varys to his prey)! On 11/29/2016 at 7:24 PM, Seams said: On 11/25/2016 at 3:22 PM, ravenous reader said: Of our major POV characters, I know Arya eats brown. Does Tyrion? Probably Davos Seaworth also ate brown in his childhood. Davos then becomes the only POV character to eat a bowl of sister stew. So that brings us back to The Bite. The selfsame nest or pie nurturing him like a mother is also eating him! 'His body was so skeletal and his clothes so rotted that at first Bran took him for another corpse, a dead man propped up so long that the roots had grown over him, under him, and through him. What skin the corpse lord showed was white, save for a bloody blotch that crept up his neck onto his cheek. His white hair was fine and thin as root hair and long enough to brush against the earthen floor. Roots coiled around his legs like wooden serpents. One burrowed through his breeches into the desiccated flesh of his thigh, to emerge again from his shoulder. A spray of dark red leaves sprouted from his skull, and grey mushrooms spotted his brow. A little skin remained, stretched across his face, tight and hard as white leather, but even that was fraying, and here and there the brown and yellow bone beneath was poking through'(ADWD-Bran II). That's the point I meant to make about the bowls of brown: they nourish the people who eat them, but they also contain the flesh of Symon Silver Tongue and who knows what other dead bodies. GRRM is giving us these graphic examples of the cycle of carbon through the ecosystem, I think. The grave worm eats the skeletal face of The Kindly Man, but Arya tries to eat the grave worm. On 11/29/2016 at 7:24 PM, Seams said: On 11/25/2016 at 3:22 PM, ravenous reader said: But Bran can feel the presence of the CotF singer when he skin changes into a raven, and Bloodraven tells him that a little bit of the previous skinchanger stays in the bird. They also become part of the root system of the trees when they die. So the idea that there is a little singer in each bowl taken from the ever-simmering pots of brown seems to fit with the eternal consciousness of the weirnet. I like that. 'The ever-simmering pots of brown' and 'singer's soup' representing the eternal carbon cycle fits with GRRM's subliminal meditations on the collective (un)conscious and consciousness; Catholicism's sacrament of the Holy Communion; the mystery of mortality, including the contemplation of his own death as the author; and the power of art, via writing in his case, to afford a measure of immortality. Whenever we pick up a text we are partaking in someone else's life -- communing using language we are being transformed as we reciprocally transform others in a process similar to digestion, hence the idiom 'getting ones teeth stuck into' and 'digesting the material,' etc. -- giving rise to the peculiar paradox that the way we generate and conserve our memories is by consuming others as well as allowing ourselves to be consumed in turn, figuratively speaking for the most part, although GRRM lays this relation bare in grotesquely visceral terms. This is the message of 'going into the trees,' 'the trees remember,' 'the trees awaking ones gifts' following consumption of the bole/bowl etc. GRRM depicts the intricacies of this flow of knowledge in terms of 'food' literally and figuratively in a number of ways -- and he's a keen aficionado of both eating/cooking and reading/writing, two of his primary passions which I'm sure he'd agree are both indispensable for nourishing body and soul. This process is graphically depicted by Sam who is a voracious bookworm reading books by dead people about the dead (the Others) cloistered underground in the appositely-named 'wormways' of Castle Black housing the library, which is a kind of tomb/womb/cave/larder/cellar, etc. Like a predator, Sam can't get enough of the books; he devours one page after another, forgetting to eat 'normal food.' In fact, he seems addicted to books, the way a glutton might be to food. The only time he's reminded of eating 'normal food,' however, is when he sees a fellow ravenous reader and kindred spirit with whom he identifies, the book-eating mouse whom he's can't bring himself to harm even though he knows he should take action for the sake of book preservation. Quote A Feast for Crows - Samwell I His eyes were red and raw. I ought not rub them so much, he always told himself as he rubbed them. The dust made them itch and water, and the dust was everywhere down here. Little puffs of it filled the air every time a page was turned, and it rose in grey clouds whenever he shifted a stack of books to see what might be hiding on the bottom. Sam did not know how long it had been since last he'd slept, but scarce an inch remained of the fat tallow candle he'd lit when starting on the ragged bundle of loose pages that he'd found tied up in twine. He was beastly tired, but it was hard to stop. One more book, he had told himself, then I'll stop. One more folio, just one more. One more page, then I'll go up and rest and get a bite to eat. But there was always another page after that one, and another after that, and another book waiting underneath the pile. I'll just take a quick peek to see what this one is about, he'd think, and before he knew he would be halfway through it. He had not eaten since that bowl of bean-and-bacon soup with Pyp and Grenn. Well, except for the bread and cheese, but that was only a nibble, he thought. That was when he took a quick glance at the empty platter, and spied the mouse feasting on the bread crumbs. The mouse was half as long as his pinky finger, with black eyes and soft grey fur. Sam knew he ought to kill it. Mice might prefer bread and cheese, but they ate paper too. He had found plenty of mouse droppings amongst the shelves and stacks, and some of the leather covers on the books showed signs of being gnawed. It is such a little thing, though. And hungry. How could he begrudge it a few crumbs? It's eating books, though . . After hours in the chair Sam's back was stiff as a board, and his legs were half-asleep. He knew he was not quick enough to catch the mouse, but it might be he could squash it. By his elbow rested a massive leather-bound copy of Annals of the Black Centaur, Septon Jorquen's exhaustively detailed account of the nine years that Orbert Caswell had served as Lord Commander of the Night's Watch. There was a page for each day of his term, every one of which seemed to begin, "Lord Orbert rose at dawn and moved his bowels," except for the last, which said, "Lord Orbert was found to have died during the night." No mouse is a match for Septon Jorquen. Very slowly, Sam took hold of the book with his left hand. It was thick and heavy, and when he tried to lift it one-handed, it slipped from his plump fingers and thumped back down. The mouse was gone in half a heartbeat, skittery-quick. Sam was relieved. Squishing the poor little thing would have given him nightmares. "You shouldn't eat the books, though," he said aloud. Maybe he should bring more cheese the next time he came down here. He was surprised at how low the candle had burned. Had the bean-and-bacon soup been today or yesterday? Yesterday. It must have been yesterday. The realization made him yawn. Jon would be wondering what had become of him, though Maester Aemon would no doubt understand. Before he had lost his sight, the maester had loved books as much as Samwell Tarly did. He understood the way that you could sometimes fall right into them, as if each page was a hole into another world. I just adore this passage. I can really feel the author speaking to me in his own rare, quiet, private voice from the page and attests to his lifelong love of reading and writing books. Here we see the author who writes so ruthlessly about distasteful subjects like cannibalism, yet compassionately identifies with a book-loving mouse. Note once again the inversion of expected consumer and consumed relations, whereby the mouse eats the book but reciprocally can become the 'prey' as it were of its object of consumption, when the book is used by Sam in an attempt to squash it from which the mouse escapes (this subversion of the 'normal eating relations' is analogous to the revenge of the pie exacted against its would-be consumers). The holes into other worlds represented by the book (if the book is like a piece of cheese for the mouse, then is the book a Swiss cheese..?) are reminiscent of the fertile magical seams you discovered on your iconic 'seams and portals' thread followed up by @Wizz-The-Smith with his 'hollow hill' explorations. As you say, we ought to keep an eye out for 'mouths in the landscape' -- there are sure to be many variations on that theme. One would be 'the Neck', waiting to swallow and choke the unwary. GRRM is fond of sprinkling 'sinkholes' about, so perhaps we should investigate them, a 'sinkhole' like a 'neck' evoking a gullet. I still haven't covered all your points yet; however this banquet has been rich and I'm sure you have indigestion by now, so I'll serve you up the remaining procession of courses another day! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ravenous reader Posted December 5, 2016 Share Posted December 5, 2016 @Seams: please refresh your browser. The format got wonky, so I had to 'ETA' (hope indigestion not too bad...) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lost Melnibonean Posted January 4, 2017 Share Posted January 4, 2017 @Isobel Harper, Did you notice that Daven Lannisterwears fox fur? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Isobel Harper Posted January 4, 2017 Share Posted January 4, 2017 9 hours ago, Lost Melnibonean said: @Isobel Harper, Did you notice that Daven Lannisterwears fox fur? No. You have a quote? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lost Melnibonean Posted January 4, 2017 Share Posted January 4, 2017 1 hour ago, Isobel Harper said: No. You have a quote? Sorry, not handy... it's from when Jaime arrives at Riverrun, Feast 31, I believe. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seams Posted January 4, 2017 Author Share Posted January 4, 2017 1 hour ago, Isobel Harper said: No. You have a quote? "Jaime!" roared a shaggy man clad in gilded ringmail and a fox-fur cloak. "So gaunt, and all in white! And bearded too!" "This? Mere stubble, against that mane of yours, coz." Ser Daven's bristling beard and bushy mustache grew into sidewhiskers as thick as a hedgerow, and those into the tangled yellow thicket atop his head, matted down by the helm he was removing. Somewhere in the midst of all that hair lurked a pug nose and a pair of lively hazel eyes. "Did some outlaw steal your razor?" "I vowed I would not let my hair be cut until my father was avenged." For a man who looked so leonine, Daven Lannister sounded oddly sheepish. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Isobel Harper Posted January 4, 2017 Share Posted January 4, 2017 18 hours ago, Lost Melnibonean said: @Isobel Harper, Did you notice that Daven Lannisterwears fox fur? 6 hours ago, Seams said: It was Griff's "red wolfskin cloak" that I thought significant. How do you think foxes are significant? Only fox I can think of are Florys the Fox and House Florent. I forget if we discussed foxes upthread... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lost Melnibonean Posted January 4, 2017 Share Posted January 4, 2017 4 minutes ago, Isobel Harper said: It was Griff's "red wolfskin cloak" that I thought significant. How do you think foxes are significant? Only fox I can think of are Florys the Fox and House Florent. I forget if we discussed foxes upthread... I noticed it while flying on a plane and thought about your old thread and this one. I thought you might make something of it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Isobel Harper Posted January 5, 2017 Share Posted January 5, 2017 1 hour ago, Lost Melnibonean said: I noticed it while flying on a plane and thought about your old thread and this one. I thought you might make something of it. That reminds me. I was gonna repost that thread after it got deleted. One of like a dozen I've been meaning to post... Doesn't Sansa wear fox fur in the Vale?I'll do a search of fox-fur and see what I can find. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blue-Eyed Wolf Posted January 5, 2017 Share Posted January 5, 2017 1 hour ago, Isobel Harper said: Doesn't Sansa wear fox fur in the Vale?I'll do a search of fox-fur and see what I can find. Yes, she does. In the snow castle scene. White fox fur Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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