Craster's Black Blooded Curse (or WTF happened to Benjen)

[Tijgy]

Going further on Craster as a "godless" place (or at least in the eyes of the believers of the old gods), I do think the old gods where present at few moments of the crimes which were committed at that place. 

While there might not have a heart tree or godswood there, you have at least the Raven's little eyes watching the death of Mormont, ...  So the old gods might have seen some things (if you do believe the Raven has to do something with the old gods or Bloodraven). 

[sweetsunray]

5 minutes ago, Tijgy said:

Going further on Craster as a "godless" place (or at least in the eyes of the believers of the old gods), I do think the old gods where present at few moments of the crimes which were committed at that place. 

While there might not have a heart tree or godswood there, you have at least the Raven's little eyes watching the death of Mormont, ...  So the old gods might have seen some things (if you do believe the Raven has to do something with the old gods or Bloodraven). 

Yes, those are the sole eyes there. Things were seen away from Craster's regarding Jafer and Othor and Craster's involvement, certainly near the weirwood grove or Whitetree, etc, and that's why Raven does his "Old Bear skull on the Wall" thingy with his black wings behind Jeor while croaking "Wall!" Raven is trying to give a hint.

[LmL]

Hey there my dear @sweetsunray, I finally came over and read your proper essay after you laid out then basics to me in message. I have to say, it's a little weird for me to do the symbolism thing without thinking stars and planets, but by the end of your essay I was able to see the overall picture you are seeing and the parallels between the scenes that you mention. 

I really, really feel you've nailed the bear and sheep skulls and the sheepskin Craster wears, or at least caught hold of the thread of symbol going on here. Let me ask you: what do you think of Jon wearing sheepskin when he was with the Wildlings? Just your standard "wolf in sheep's clothing" joke?  

Thhe idea of equating Craster's sons with lambs is perfect and tightens your thinking here. The sheep and Craster's sons are directly compared to one another by characters in the book and by both being sacrificed to the Others, and that does make Craster the ram. So, why the ram skull next to the bear skull? He turns on the bear, but he's a ram... and yet both skulls are up there. How do you interpret that? 

I often run into grey area when someone kills an animal and wears it as a skin - does that make them an enemy of that animal, the way the enemies of the Starks always swear to make cloaks of their wolves like a trophy, or does wearing a wolf skin make you a wolf yourself, symbolically? Sometimes the context makes it clear (someone threatening to kill Starks is anti-wolf) but other times not. 

Bannon waking in the fire sounds an awwwwwfful lot like my repeated examples of fiery sorcerers waking from Lightbringer-symbolic fires. There's a strong connection between fire sorcerers and the original NW, as I mentioned while talking about the Quorin / Jon wood burning scene. Jist fwiw. 

I totally agree with how you interpret Dywen and Ed to be pro-weirwood or pro-Old Gods, as opposed to Thoren SMALLwood who is pro-Craster and anti-weirwood. The lines are drawn so clearly in all of these chapters north of the Wall. Everything Dwyen and Ed say is gospel. For example, when Ed talks about being dead and still manning the Wall - yeah, that's EXACTLY the right idea. In the same chapter(?).. we saw a burning NW brother appear to rise from the pyre. That's the deal. The LH's 12 dead companions were 12 undead companions, and the first NW were something like Coldhands, through perhaps animated by fire instead of frozen. Like Beric, but not mentally deteriorated. They were skinchangers, like Jon, and like (I think) Coldhands is. Skinchangers make the best zombies because the animal preserves the spirit like a soul jar for a time, and then could theoretically be put back in a resurrected body, whether that body be resurrected by ice or fire or greenseer magic. That's what we are about to see woth Jon - a resurrected skinchanger whose animal acted as a soul-jar until the body could be raised. This kind of being, a soul in possession of a corpse body, is uniquely suited to journeying into the frozen, dead lands, because he doesn't have to eat or sleep or stay warm. Think about - the ultimate weapon. The original NW were undead skinchangers - that's my theory. That's what Ed is talking about. 

Sorry, bit of a tangent there. Fun stuff though. 

The black sausages - so you're saying those are blood sausages? That's what makes the black, there is some amount of 'pig' blood in them? That's perfect for George, with all that's he's doing with black blood. That's interesting, because the Nights Watch brothers are euphemistically said to bleed black blood. Black blood sausages... they might be something we need to worry about (see what I did there, chuckle chuckle). 

So, Banon is compared to bacon. The sausages and black blooded, like the NW. Ser Piggy has sausage fingers somewhere, I believe. The rebel NW brothers Bran and company are were passed off as pig meat. Those all tie cannibalism to the NW specifically, which supports your idea. 

I want to believe "but not Benjen!", but the "I never missed him once myself" line really sucks. That's the kind of shit George likes to do. 

I know the black steel axe wasn't Valyrian steel or dragonglass, however, black steel IS symbolic of those two things and Lightbringer the theoretically black steel sword which was theoretically made from a black moon meteor   It is the right weapon to fight the Others with, though the wights are not vulnerable to fire magic weapons like the Others are. They reference Gared's beheading by Ned - and Ned used his almost black sword called Ice, or as I like to say, Black Ice. That's very like frostbite, when you think about it (black steel that has bite and is named ice) and parallels the black steel axe with bite that, if Ed is lucky, will only take off an ear when Craster turns it against them. Black Ice the sword is Valyrian steel, which is another type of "frozen fire" in that it was once a molten sword which cooled and hardened into black steel, and like obsidian, it most likely kills Others. 

Think about it : it's cold that burns (the Others) vs. frozen fire (obsidian and probably V steel). That's what Martin has done, just to confuse everyone. Fire gets frozen and ice burns. 

So about the sheep vs. goat symbolism. I understand both male sheep and male goats are rams, but when I look at Vargo and Craster, I see key differences along with the parallels you highlighted. Morally, they are similar, committing many of the same sins as you say. But look at their symbolism - Vargo Hoat is black everything. Black armor, black horns on his helm, etc. Craster wears white sheepskin and has white hair on his body, arms and head and everything. What do you make of that? Vargo was killed in his own home too, wasn't he, just like Craster? 

 

[sweetsunray]

9 minutes ago, LmL said:

what do you think of Jon wearing sheepskin when he was with the Wildlings? Just your standard "wolf in sheep's clothing" joke?  

Yup! Totally!

 

13 minutes ago, LmL said:

So about the sheep vs. goat symbolism. I understand both male sheep and male goats are rams, but when I look at Vargo and Craster, I see key differences along with the parallels you highlighted. Morally, they are similar, committing many of the same sins as you say. But look at their symbolism - Vargo Hoat is black everything. Black armor, black horns on his helm, etc. Craster wears white sheepskin and has white hair on his body, arms and head and everything. What do you make of that? Vargo was killed in his own home too, wasn't he, just like Craster? 

It's the Pan dualism. Pan is a hunter god, but also a fertility god. His two sons represent only one of the two aspects, though they're still Pan reincarnations

 

15 minutes ago, LmL said:

So, why the ram skull next to the bear skull? He turns on the bear, but he's a ram... and yet both skulls are up there. How do you interpret that? 

This is the scapegoat symbol. Bear hunts were traditionally performed by 3 hunters. When they carry the dead bear back home, they do this in a parade, pretending the bear is still alive and a groom to be married to a maiden in the village. They don't want the bear spirit to find out that he was killed, nor who killed him. So, they pretend and proclaim to be someone else than the actual people they are as they parade the dead bear. Finnish bear hunters would say they were Swedish or English. They would "scapegoat" someone else as the killer, and pretend to be innocents, who merely found the bear dead.

That's why the bear-maiden song talks of 3 boys and a goat going to the fair with the bear. Boys sounds innocent. And if the bear realizes he's actually dead, they can all point to the goat and say "He did it! Not us!" And that's why the ram's skull is on the gate. When the spirit of the bear (whose skull is on the gate) realizes he's dead the first thing he'll see is the ram skull and think that ram killed him, not Craster.

[sweetsunray]

1 hour ago, LmL said:

I often run into grey area when someone kills an animal and wears it as a skin - does that make them an enemy of that animal, the way the enemies of the Starks always swear to make cloaks of their wolves like a trophy, or does wearing a wolf skin make you a wolf yourself, symbolically? Sometimes the context makes it clear (someone threatening to kill Starks is anti-wolf) but other times not.

George tends to give hints for this. But Old Bear is killed by a bear-character Lophand, a corrupted predatory bear imo, while Dirk is a shadowcat killing the ram (see the chapter where Jon climbs the mountain to kill watchers of the wildlings and almost kills Ygritte with a dirk). But some characters are killed by their fellow animal-character.

Freys are weasels, and weasels are like goats: greedy. They're as much the scapegoats and unloved by either side of a war as rams and goats are. Several knights at the Wall are "sables"... they're fierce and brave knights but euhm well not on the uptake. They all die charging an opponent they cannot take on: Waymar, Jaremy, Thoren.

I'm not completely sure yet what to make of the Boltons. Chett's like Gregor, with his Bessa and Gregor's abuse of Pia. But then there's also a leech connection - Chett's father gathered leeches to sell them, and Chett thinks of being a lord and make a banner with leeches and pink. Meanwhile Pia is given to Jaime after Qyburn leeched Jaime and Jaime makes a remark on that. Of course Roose is the leech lord, to "purify" blood, and the "flaying" is like "skinning a bear". So there's a bear connection with the Boltons, but haven't fully figured that out yet.

Now I'm wondering whether you could leech a wight? And I still haven't figured out yet what the hints are about Craster's soil. Edd makes a comment about wondering whether it's shit, and Sam's boot is sucked up by it at a moment. There is some emphasis made about the ground and soil Craster's Keep (hovel) is built on, so it must be important, just don't know what yet.

I'm pretty sure you can indeed make something out of that black axe gleaming gold in torchlight, and skulls Although the best scene involving an actual bear and mythological astronomy is that of the wighted snow bear at the Fist taking Thoren's head off in aSoS, Samwell I

[sweetsunray]

Another few lines in Craster's chapter in aCoK that gets a whole new meaning:

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So this is a wildling. Jon remembered Old Nan's tales of the savage folk who drank blood from human skulls. Craster seemed to be drinking a thin yellow beer from a chipped stone cup. Perhaps he had not heard the stories.

"I've not seen Benjen Stark for three years," he was telling Mormont. "And if truth be told, I never once missed him." (aCoK, Jon III)

 

 

 

There is also a line from Arya about leeches that is interesting:

this is what Roose Bolton has to say about leeching:

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"Frequent leechings are the secret of a long life. A man must purge himself of bad blood." (aCoK, Arya X)

"I know." Lord Bolton sighed. "His blood is bad. He needs to be leeched."(aDwD, Reek III)

 

 

Taking the black blood from the wights, including the marrow, would purge them of the necromanccy power the Others have over them. 

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"Maybe you should get leeched too. There's leeches in the Neck as big as pigs."(aCoK, Arya X)

 

So the black blooded sausages are like leeches.

[Schwarze Sonne]

Craster taught us how to survive the Long Night and how the people back then survived such a long winter.

Eat wight meat! Benjen sausage! Wildling bacon!

Grain might be kept indefinitely if properly stored, but meat would rot. However, wight won't rot so protein and fat source remain safe.

[Flavia Gemina]

36 minutes ago, Schwarze Sonne said:

Craster taught us how to survive the Long Night and how the people back then survived such a long winter.

Eat wight meat! Benjen sausage! Wildling bacon!

Grain might be kept indefinitely if properly stored, but meat would rot. However, wight won't rot so protein and fat source remain safe.

So if he gives his sons to the WW they become WW not wights. Then he can eat wights and know they aren't his sons? 

 

No wonder the wildlings hate him.

 

i remember Sam referring to his keep as a midden heap. Life for his daughters must have been rather unpleasant.

[sweetsunray]

27 minutes ago, Flavia Gemina said:

So if he gives his sons to the WW they become WW not wights. Then he can eat wights and know they aren't his sons? 

 

No wonder the wildlings hate him.

 

i remember Sam referring to his keep as a midden heap. Life for his daughters must have been rather unpleasant.

Craster's sons aren't wights, otherwise we'd have seen wighted babies crawling and attacking. Craster's sons therefore must indeed be Othered.

[Flavia Gemina]

1 hour ago, sweetsunray said:

Craster's sons aren't wights, otherwise we'd have seen wighted babies crawling and attacking. Craster's sons therefore must indeed be Othered.

I'm most curious as to how this arrangement began. 

[LmL]

Another few lines in Craster's chapter in aCoK that gets a whole new meaning:

Quote

 

So this is a wildling. Jon remembered Old Nan's tales of the savage folk who drank blood from human skulls. Craster seemed to be drinking a thin yellow beer from a chipped stone cup. Perhaps he had not heard the stories.

"I've not seen Benjen Stark for three years," he was telling Mormont. "And if truth be told, I never once missed him." (aCoK, Jon III)

Wow, yeah that one is nice for your theory. Jon thinks about wildlings drinking blood, and then Craster is all like "yeah I never missed him once, but my axe is dull."  Hmmm...

4 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

So the black blooded sausages are like leeches.

Yep, I follow that train of thought. One question: Roose says getting leeched is the secret to long life, but leeching a wight, so to speak, kills them for good. That seems to conflict. Also, Roose is a bloodless, ice-eyed vampire type... sounds like an Other, right? Could he be talking about the process of creating an Other, removing the blood from a human, or turning it to ice blood? Are the Others stripped of their humanity (their blood) when they are created? The wights and Others are kind of like a pairing. The wights are the corpses, the Others are the spirits. The wights have black blood and they are dry as old wood and old parchment, while the Others have blue ice-blood and are wet as can be. Wights burn, Others do not. In some form or another, I do think the Others are human spirits (or human/tree spirits) who have been shadow-bound to their icy forms, so they are like a disembodied ghost perhaps, while the wights are the opposite, bodies with no spirit or ghost to inhabit them... just the Others' necromantic remote control. So, Roose would be the Other, the one whose bad blood is removed, and the bad blood issued into sausages... into wights. Sausages are consumed by Night's Watch brothers, who are crows, and wights and corpses are consumed by crows. Corpses and wights are also consumed by fire, and that's what the NW brothers originally were - people who used fire magic. Fire consumes, cold preserves... to the wights are like preserved torches, waiting to be consumed by fire, or preserved sausages, ready to be consumed (again, I recommend fire, eating them is worrisome)(see what I did there).

One of my ideas for making Others is like an altered version of Jon's expected resurrection. What we think will happen is that Ghost will be Jon's should jar, preserving his soul and merging with it slowly while Jon's body is dead. When Jon's body is resurrected, his soul will be put back in the undead body, perhaps merged with Ghost's spirit (this is my guess). Jon will be a conscious wight, with no need for food or sleep or warmth, like Coldhands: ideally suited to journey into the frozen dead lands if need be. Using a greener or skinchanger to make a zombie works well because the soul does not deteriorate like Beric or Cat's souls do, thats the idea. CH is an undead skinchanger or greenseer, Jon will be one soon, and I think the Last Hero and his party were also such. 

Now, take this process, and swap Ghost for a weirwood tree, and Jon for a greenseer hooked up to the tree. Kill the greenseer, his soul goes into the tree. Resurrect the body... or perhaps fashion an icy body out of magic somehow, or perhaps take the male offspring of the Night's Queen who has transformed herself with ice magic, and now we take the merged tree-greenseer spirit and body snatch the resurrected corpse or icy baby, and presto, you have trees body snatching people. That's what I think the Others are - tree spirits. Once again @Voice has written an excellent theory about this, and I was thinking along these lines too, for the evidence tying the Others to the weirwoods is abundant. Point is, if a skinchanger's soul can be stored in the animal and then put back into a body, a greenseer's spirit could be stored in a tree and then put back into a body. Except, if the timing is done right, the tree spirit will merge with the greenseer and then we have a tree person.

Recall that the ravens perch on Coldhands every night as if he were a tree. 

I'm also thinking of the horned lords here, the antler men / green men.  The are defenders of the greenwood, like bears, so they could be looked at as tree spirits. I definitely think they were greenseers. Perhaps joined to tree in a slightly different fashion... in any case I suspect Coldhands to be one of these (perhaps he's lost his antlers so he just rides the elk for memory's sake). This is what I think Azor Ahai was, a horned lord greenseer fellow, and I suspect the Others were related to these folks as well. 

I think these body-snatching related ideas tie into the original meaning of skinchanging, which leads back to bears and skinned bears looking like people. Bran is really just skinchanging the tree, you know?

[LmL]

4 hours ago, Schwarze Sonne said:

Craster taught us how to survive the Long Night and how the people back then survived such a long winter.

Eat wight meat! Benjen sausage! Wildling bacon!

Grain might be kept indefinitely if properly stored, but meat would rot. However, wight won't rot so protein and fat source remain safe.

I like this idea - it's just twisted enough to be GRRM - but wights do smell like rotten meat, per Ghost's pov near Coldhands. 

[Flying Cat]

Hey, sorry if this has been asked before, but the thread has grown long even while I was reading. So, do you think Benjen could have been taken captive by the Others? The Essay you linked to at the beginning  about Royce sugests that this is what the others wanted, a captive with Stark blood. Craster wouldn´t know that, so if he sees  the Other taking Benjen, he might naturally assume that the guy is toast, hence the "I nevver missed him once" line.

I just don´t think that George would set Benjens gun to have him killed off-page before we even know he is missing. From a Doylist perspective also I think we need a character disclosing more about the Others, their culture, their motifs, etc. So, sort of a Mr. Exposition. It could be Bran, of course, but I still think Benjen is alive fwiw.

Great essay btw

Cheers

[Schwarze Sonne]

3 hours ago, LmL said:

I like this idea - it's just twisted enough to be GRRM - but wights do smell like rotten meat, per Ghost's pov near Coldhands. 

That was why Craster made sausage and bacon with garlic, to cover the rotten smell. The actual meat wasn't completely rotten anyway. Maybe Craster used curing or culturing techniques so that they were edible like ordinary pork.

[ravenous reader]

5 hours ago, LmL said:

Roose says getting leeched is the secret to long life, but leeching a wight, so to speak, kills them for good. That seems to conflict. Also, Roose is a bloodless, ice-eyed vampire type... sounds like an Other, right? 

Are wights killed by bloodletting?  I thought they could only be consumed by fire.  I was also under the impression that the humans, after having been killed 'conventionally,' were the ones most likely turned into black blood sausages, not the wights.  Maybe I missed something?  However, I'll go with the wights as leeches as sausages analogy -- after all, we learned from Melisandre and Stannis that leeches sizzle and pop like pork sausages on a brazier!

Leeching or bloodletting is a way of 'otherizing,' i.e. externalizing the anathema that already exists within.  According to this metaphor, Roose Bolton turns himself into an 'Other' by making an other [deliberate lower case] of someone else.  He's both the leech feeding on others rather vampirishly (objectifying and exploiting others for his own benefit and to their possible detriment; significantly, Chett who plans his brothers' deaths is a 'leech man's' son ...reminiscent of 'lynch man') as well as the one who feeds the leech (it's like Tywin rewarding his 'catspaws' -- his disembodied hands -- to whom he has 'outsourced,' as it were, the realization of his most violent urges).  Similarly, Bran and Bloodraven are both feeding and fed upon in a dubious 'symbiotic' relation to the weirwood.  Deconstructing self and other; inside and outside; leech, leecher and the leeched; hunter and the hunted; master and servant, etc. is one of GRRM's main themes.

Outsourcing your own violence -- relegating others to the status of bloody, blood-thirsty, -lusty 'other' while simultaneously elevating oneself to the status of bloodless grand-'Other' -- is integral to 'the original sin.'  It's trying to be God, thinking one is better than ones fellow human beings, and maybe even as good if not better than God.  Hubris.  This is why Ned Stark impresses that he who passes the sentence should swing the sword, lest he forget the gravity of killing and dying in the blithe convenience of outsourcing ones duty to executioners (which is precisely the blasphemy Tywin committed by outsourcing Ice to Ilyn Payne).  It's important to look in the man's eyes, see his humanity, see the blood, in order not to become 'bloodless' oneself.  It's also why the Kindly Man reprimands Arya for the murder of Dareon, the 'justice' she took upon herself, presuming to judge others and play god in her vengeful wrath.

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Could he be talking about the process of creating an Other, removing the blood from a human, or turning it to ice blood? Are the Others stripped of their humanity (their blood) when they are created?

 

In support of being stripped of humanity, the saying 'bloodless' as applied to Roose for example indicates a singular lack of conscience or any other bonds of affection.  Being 'bloodless' implies that one is lacking in human warmth, both literally and figuratively.

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The wights and Others are kind of like a pairing. The wights are the corpses, the Others are the spirits. The wights have black blood and they are dry as old wood and old parchment, while the Others have blue ice-blood and are wet as can be. Wights burn, Others do not.

That's an interesting breakdown.  It reminds me of your meteor duality (tree vs. sea dragon), whereby the tree might be the dry flammable equivalent of the wight (although weirwood trees oozing weirwood sap are definitely not bloodless or dry...so maybe the wights are analogous to dead trees!), whereas the sea dragon would be immersed in the ocean and therefore not flammable, despite breathing flame. 

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In some form or another, I do think the Others are human spirits (or human/tree spirits) who have been shadow-bound to their icy forms, so they are like a disembodied ghost perhaps, while the wights are the opposite, bodies with no spirit or ghost to inhabit them... just the Others' necromantic remote control.

That's a good way of putting it.  The disembodied ghosts and ghostly bodies working in tandem.

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So, Roose would be the Other, the one whose bad blood is removed, and the bad blood issued into sausages... into wights. Sausages are consumed by Night's Watch brothers, who are crows, and wights and corpses are consumed by crows. Corpses and wights are also consumed by fire, and that's what the NW brothers originally were - people who used fire magic. Fire consumes, cold preserves... to the wights are like preserved torches, waiting to be consumed by fire, or preserved sausages, ready to be consumed (again, I recommend fire, eating them is worrisome)(see what I did there).

To reiterate, the 'bad blood' that is removed is not the 'bad blood' per se.  Rather, the 'bad' which invokes the curse (e.g. Craster's as well as Harren's black curse) is the act of spilling blood and manipulating nature.  What's your evidence for the Night's Watch brothers originally being people who used fire magic, besides the symbolism of 'fire consumes' like crows consuming wights, corpses and sausages?  What's the difference between fire and ice magic anyway?  Ice burns; ice is frozen fire.  In other words, ice is fire in suspended animation. Reanimation -- whether by 'ice' or 'fire' --always requires fire magic, doesn't it, according to your Greenseer/Azor Ahai paradigm?  I used to think they were separate modalities until I read your 'burning tree' piece.  As an example, when Bran eats the weirwood paste there is an intermingling of soothing, 'cool' tastes: snow, the last kiss his mother gave him; and warm to 'fiery' tastes: honey, pepper, and cinnamon (even the name 'bole' is ambiguous connoting a red dye while simultaneously appearing white).  Likewise, Dany's shade of the evening experience combined ice and fire tastes:  

Ice imagery: the name ‘shade of the evening’, ink, spoiled meat, cream, mother’s millk;

Fire imagery: fingers of fire coiling, honey, anise, Drogo’s seed, red meat, hot blood, molten gold.

I'm led to believe the weirwood and ebony are two sides of the same coin as you've intimated in your discussion on the weirwood/seastone symbolism.

3 hours ago, LmL said:

wights do smell like rotten meat, per Ghost's pov near Coldhands. 

25 minutes ago, Schwarze Sonne said:

That was why Craster made sausage and bacon with garlic, to cover the rotten smell.

Note, Dany identifies 'rotten meat' masked by other more pleasant flavors as an integral ingredient of 'shade of the evening' which fulfils the same prophetic function as the weirwood paste, the latter which was also rumored by many to contain traces of 'Jojen.'

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One of my ideas for making Others is like an altered version of Jon's expected resurrection. What we think will happen is that Ghost will be Jon's should jar, preserving his soul and merging with it slowly while Jon's body is dead. When Jon's body is resurrected, his soul will be put back in the undead body, perhaps merged with Ghost's spirit (this is my guess). Jon will be a conscious wight, with no need for food or sleep or warmth, like Coldhands: ideally suited to journey into the frozen dead lands if need be. Using a greener or skinchanger to make a zombie works well because the soul does not deteriorate like Beric or Cat's souls do, thats the idea. CH is an undead skinchanger or greenseer, Jon will be one soon, and I think the Last Hero and his party were also such. 

Perhaps that's the key to the ice magic.  It somehow gets away from the problem of burning-- the body requires fuel and is therefore vulnerable to scarcity of food, warmth, sleep, etc.  One burns energy in order to keep on burning, getting burned by oneself in the process.  While 'wightification' might get around the problem of burning oneself up by living, one might still be vulnerable to being burnt by others.

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Now, take this process, and swap Ghost for a weirwood tree, and Jon for a greenseer hooked up to the tree. Kill the greenseer, his soul goes into the tree. Resurrect the body... or perhaps fashion an icy body out of magic somehow, or perhaps take the male offspring of the Night's Queen who has transformed herself with ice magic, and now we take the merged tree-greenseer spirit and body snatch the resurrected corpse or icy baby, and presto, you have trees body snatching people. That's what I think the Others are - tree spirits. Once again @Voice has written an excellent theory about this, and I was thinking along these lines too, for the evidence tying the Others to the weirwoods is abundant. Point is, if a skinchanger's soul can be stored in the animal and then put back into a body, a greenseer's spirit could be stored in a tree and then put back into a body. Except, if the timing is done right, the tree spirit will merge with the greenseer and then we have a tree person.

Recall that the ravens perch on Coldhands every night as if he were a tree. 

This whole section is wonderfully argued.  I've been puzzling about the relation between the old gods (whom I equate with the trees) and the Others (whom I equate with the cold) for a while now.  The point about the ravens perching on 'Coldhands' is a lovely catch!  This provides a nice contrast with the burning hands of the weirwoods.  How do you see the cold hands and hot hands, as it were, intersecting?  How do you unite ice and fire in the context of the trees specifically?  Thanks for the link; I will read it.

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I'm also thinking of the horned lords here, the antler men / green men.  The are defenders of the greenwood, like bears, so they could be looked at as tree spirits. I definitely think they were greenseers. Perhaps joined to tree in a slightly different fashion... in any case I suspect Coldhands to be one of these (perhaps he's lost his antlers so he just rides the elk for memory's sake). This is what I think Azor Ahai was, a horned lord greenseer fellow, and I suspect the Others were related to these folks as well. 

I think these body-snatching related ideas tie into the original meaning of skinchanging, which leads back to bears and skinned bears looking like people. Bran is really just skinchanging the tree, you know?

For sure -- Bloodraven tells him to do as much.

'Riding the elk' is a metaphor for skinchanging, as is 'climbing,' 'flying,' 'slipping,' 'swimming,' and all the rest.

Finally, although we're primed by GRRM to favor the Starks in all they do, and to empathize with and defend Bran, even when he does questionable 'naughty greenseer' things like skinchanging Hodor in full consciousness that this is something unpleasant and involuntary on Hodor's part; nevertheless a central message is the shame attached to all these antics of ice and fire (the thralldom, the sacrifice).  Eating from the tree of knowledge -- let alone sausages -- is a bittersweet experience, one which is hard to swallow.

On 9/4/2016 at 1:04 AM, Tijgy said:

Going further on Craster as a "godless" place (or at least in the eyes of the believers of the old gods), I do think the old gods where present at few moments of the crimes which were committed at that place. 

While there might not have a heart tree or godswood there, you have at least the Raven's little eyes watching the death of Mormont, ...  So the old gods might have seen some things (if you do believe the Raven has to do something with the old gods or Bloodraven). 

In the ASOS prologue to which @sweetsunray has drawn our attention:

Quote

 “Chett,” said Small Paul as they trudged along a stony game trail through sentinels and soldier pines, “what about the bird?”

They're being watched by 'sentinels' (who keep guard) and 'soldier' pines (who might attack).  @sweetsunray identifies these trees, along with weirwoods, oaks, and ironwoods as chthonic underworld presences, which I would associate with the 'old gods.'  In keeping with the dialectic of the hunters becoming the hunted, the 'watchers' (of the Night's Watch) are becoming the watched!  Note, it's a 'game trail' -- in this 'game,' who are the players and whom is played?  The trees and the raven(s) listen and watch, and are about to witness some black-blooded blasphemy:

Quote

    “What bloody bird?” The last thing he needed now was some mutton-head going on about a bird.

'Mutton head'...is Paul a sheep/ram/scapegoat figure (like the head nailed up at Craster's)?

They ought to heed that 'bloody bird'=Blood+Raven...and treat it with some respect; I've been told it knows 'a murderer's song'...

Quote

 “The Old Bear’s raven,” Small Paul said. “If we kill him, who’s going to feed his bird?”

Maybe the bird has a taste for 'black blood sausages'...GRRM really has a sick sense of humor.  Ravens eat meat.  Men are meat.  Don't the ravens end up feeding on Paul and the other traitors,  when the flock of ravens descends on the wights to rescue Sam and Gilly at Whitetree?

Quote

   “Who bloody well cares? Kill the bird too if you like.”

    “I don’t want to hurt no bird,” the big man said. “But that’s a talking bird. What if it tells what we did?”

Ah, now we're talking...

Quote

   Lark the Sisterman laughed. “Small Paul, thick as a castle wall,” he mocked.

'Reek Reek it rhymes with beak'!  These kinds of flippant, dismissive, mocking rhymes are a corruption of language, a numbing device that people use not to remember something but rather to forget.  In Reek's case, he's not trying to remember his name is Reek as he claims; on the contrary, he's trying to forget the trauma that's been done to Theon.  In this case, by mocking Paul they are perpetuating their own ignorance and denial of the implications of what they are planning.  They are talking openly about a murder of one of their own brothers -- in effect a kind of kinslaying -- and shrugging off any residual sense of conscience by laughing about it using silly rhymes.  

Quote

    “You shut up with that,” said Small Paul dangerously.

    “Paul,” said Chett, before the big man got too angry, “when they find the old man lying in a pool of blood with his throat slit, they won’t need no bird to tell them someone killed him.”

There is a lot of talk about talking birds, 'shutting up' and silencing others.  Slitting someones throat is a way of silencing them. To your point about 'godlessness,' 'the gods are listening' to the plots of the godless, and end up turning the tables on the conspirators, who are eventually silenced themselves, when they are killed and turned into wights ('dead men sing no songs').  Wights have no breath, and therefore no voice (except for Coldhands).

Quote

    Small Paul chewed on that a moment. “That’s true,” he allowed. “Can I keep the bird, then? I like that bird.”

    “He’s yours,” said Chett, just to shut him up.

    “We can always eat him if we get hungry,” offered Lark.

Considering it's a talking bird, and language and talking is what differentiates humans from other animals, therefore this should be taboo.  There are strong hints of cannibalism in this last remark 'we can always eat him if we get hungry', and may also provide a clue to what happened at Crasters.

Quote

    Small Paul clouded up again. “Best not try and eat my bird, Lark. Best not.”

    Chett could hear voices drifting through the trees. “Close your bloody mouths, both of you. We’re almost to the Fist.”

It's ironic how 'Lark' is advocating eating birds, while a 'lark' is a type of bird, hinting that sanctioning the killing and eating of birds might be tantamount to cannibalism, inviting the same fate on himself in his blasphemy.   Here again GRRM plays with figurative and literal meanings of 'bloody'...They've been uttering black-blooded blasphemies, so their mouths are 'bloody' and in a short while their mouths will indeed weep blood after they are slaughtered.  The last statement 'we're almost to the fist' sounds like an ominous warning for the conspirators, signifying the waiting 'fist' of judgment and retribution of the old gods of the first men, about to descend on them for their blasphemy.

Quote

    They emerged near the west face of the hill, and walked around south where the slope was gentler. Near the edge of the forest a dozen men were taking archery practice. They had carved outlines on the trunks of trees, and were loosing shafts at them. “Look,” said Lark. “A pig with a bow.”

 Sure enough, the nearest bowman was Ser Piggy himself, the fat boy who had stolen his place with Maester Aemon. Just the sight of Samwell Tarly filled him with anger. Stewarding for Maester Aemon had been as good a life as he’d ever known. The old blind man was undemanding, and Clydas had taken care of most of his wants anyway. Chett’s duties were easy: cleaning the rookery, a few fires to build, a few meals to fetch . . . and Aemon never once hit him. Thinks he can just walk in and shove me out, on account of being highborn and knowing how to read. Might be I’ll ask him to read my knife before I open his throat with it. 

Here, Sam is dehumanized by Lark as a 'pig,' with disturbing cannibalistic undertones.  Again, someone desires to silence someone else.  Turning someone into a sausage is essentially the same as cutting out their tongue.

On 9/4/2016 at 2:49 AM, LmL said:

The black sausages - so you're saying those are blood sausages? That's what makes the black, there is some amount of 'pig' blood in them? That's perfect for George, with all that's he's doing with black blood. That's interesting, because the Nights Watch brothers are euphemistically said to bleed black blood. Black blood sausages... they might be something we need to worry about (see what I did there, chuckle chuckle). 

No I don't see what you did there.  Must be an inside joke!

Quote

So, Banon is compared to bacon. The sausages and black blooded, like the NW. Ser Piggy has sausage fingers somewhere, I believe. The rebel NW brothers Bran and company are were passed off as pig meat. Those all tie cannibalism to the NW specifically, which supports your idea. 

So, Sam is a fat pink pig, with a fat pink mast and sausage fingers, a pig with a bow who is also a bowman.  The 'mast' and 'bow' imagery combine tree and ocean metaphors in line with your tree/leviathan duality.  A 'mast' can refer to the mast of a ship as well as a tree trunk out of which a mast is fashioned.  In addition, it's an obvious phallic symbol, and cutely GRRM gives Sam his first 'pink mast' while he is on board a ship with Gilly-- two masts in one!  Black blood sausages and pink masts, also swollen with blood, are both associated with breaking taboos (Sam broke his Night's Watch vows by exercising his 'pink mast' and 'sailing' with Gilly...you could say he 'overreached'...).  Similarly, a 'bow' is the forwardmost-pointing hull of a ship and a 'bowman' a sailor, in addition to the archery connotations.  Again, trees and sea are both involved in that a bow in both senses is fashioned from wood. Previously, I identified the 'green sea' and 'green seer' pun in this respect.   @Wizz-The-Smith has recently drawn our attention to the hollow hills connection with both weirwood and water, and to Sam and Horn Hill in particular:

Quote

A Feast for Crows - Samwell II

Sam tried to keep a brave face on him, for Gilly's sake if little else. She had never seen the sea before. When they were struggling through the snows after fleeing Craster's Keep, they had come on several lakes, and even those had been a wonder to her. As Blackbird slipped away from shore the girl began to tremble, and big salt tears rolled down her cheeks. "Gods be good," Sam heard her whisper. Eastwatch vanished first, and the Wall grew smaller and smaller in the distance, until it finally disappeared. The wind was coming up by then. The sails were the faded grey of a black cloak that had been washed too often, and Gilly's face was white with fear. "This is a good ship," Sam tried to tell her. "You don't have to be afraid." But she only looked at him, held her baby tighter, and fled below.

Sam soon found himself clutching tightly to the gunwale and watching the sweep of the oars. The way they all moved together was somehow beautiful to behold, and better than looking at the water. Looking at the water only made him think of drowning. When he was small his lord father had tried to teach him how to swim by throwing him into the pond beneath Horn Hill. The water had gotten in his nose and in his mouth and in his lungs, and he coughed and wheezed for hours after Ser Hyle pulled him out. After that he never dared go in any deeper than his waist.

The Bay of Seals was a lot deeper than his waist, and not so friendly as that little fishpond below his father's castle. Its waters were grey and green and choppy, and the wooded shore they followed was a snarl of rocks and whirlpools. Even if he could kick and crawl that far somehow, the waves were like to smash him up against some stone and break his head to pieces.

As someone who relentlessly pursues knowledge, Sam, like Bran, is an overreacher, in danger of being smashed to pieces for his hubris (the last image of the stone breaking his moony head in pieces certainly accords with your meteor obsession and will likely appeal to you).  He is potentially greenseer material.  One can even find similarities of Sam's imagery with Harren the Black, of all people. While you characterize Sam as the black Leviathan, Harren built his own 'black Leviathan' to rival 'the God's Eye'-- namely the fortress of Harrenhal (a 'hal' is a hall, so it wouldn't surprise me if this is another site of the cavernous hollow hills).  As the story goes, Harren would not yield.  As a result, his pride-and-joy, his hubris became his tomb, when 'the black line' was roasted like so many black-blood sausages in the towers, also shaped like five obscene black sausages themselves, or fingers -- a disembodied hand -- or phallic 'masts' pointing skyward like antennae receiving and transmitting that 'naughty' lightning...(It's like the archetypal scene on the Sistine Chapel ceiling of God reaching out to touch Adam, similarly reaching out with his finger.  It's interesting that Michelangelo chose not to depict the two fingers actually touching.  A warning?)

[Voice]

1 hour ago, ravenous reader said:

Are wights killed by bloodletting?  I thought they could only be consumed by fire.  I was also under the impression that the humans, after having been killed 'conventionally,' were the ones most likely turned into black blood sausages, not the wights.  Maybe I missed something?  However, I'll go with the wights as leeches as sausages analogy -- after all, we learned from Melisandre and Stannis that leeches sizzle and pop like pork sausages on a brazier!

Leeching or bloodletting is a way of 'otherizing,' i.e. externalizing the anathema that already exists within.  According to this metaphor, Roose Bolton turns himself into an 'Other' by making an other [deliberate lower case] of someone else.  He's both the leech feeding on others rather vampirishly (objectifying and exploiting others for his own benefit and to their possible detriment; significantly, Chett who plans his brothers' deaths is a 'leech man's' son ...reminiscent of 'lynch man') as well as the one who feeds the leech (it's like Tywin rewarding his 'catspaws' -- his disembodied hands -- to whom he has 'outsourced,' as it were, the realization of his most violent urges).  Similarly, Bran and Bloodraven are both feeding and fed upon in a dubious 'symbiotic' relation to the weirwood.  Deconstructing self and other; inside and outside; leech, leecher and the leeched; hunter and the hunted; master and servant, etc. is one of GRRM's main themes.

Outsourcing your own violence -- relegating others to the status of bloody, blood-thirsty, -lusty 'other' while simultaneously elevating oneself to the status of bloodless grand-'Other' -- is integral to 'the original sin.'  It's trying to be God, thinking one is better than ones fellow human beings, and maybe even as good if not better than God.  Hubris.  This is why Ned Stark impresses that he who passes the sentence should swing the sword, lest he forget the gravity of killing and dying in the blithe convenience of outsourcing ones duty to executioners (which is precisely the blasphemy Tywin committed by outsourcing Ice to Ilyn Payne).  It's important to look in the man's eyes, see his humanity, see the blood, in order not to become 'bloodless' oneself.  It's also why the Kindly Man reprimands Arya for the murder of Dareon, the 'justice' she took upon herself, presuming to judge others and play god in her vengeful wrath.

In support of being stripped of humanity, the saying 'bloodless' as applied to Roose for example indicates a singular lack of conscience or any other bonds of affection.  Being 'bloodless' implies that one is lacking in human warmth, both literally and figuratively.

That's an interesting breakdown.  It reminds me of your meteor duality (tree vs. sea dragon), whereby the tree might be the dry flammable equivalent of the wight (although weirwood trees oozing weirwood sap are definitely not bloodless or dry...so maybe the wights are analogous to dead trees!), whereas the sea dragon would be immersed in the ocean and therefore not flammable, despite breathing flame. 

That's a good way of putting it.  The disembodied ghosts and ghostly bodies working in tandem.

To reiterate, the 'bad blood' that is removed is not the 'bad blood' per se.  Rather, the 'bad' which invokes the curse (e.g. Craster's as well as Harren's black curse) is the act of spilling blood and manipulating nature.  What's your evidence for the Night's Watch brothers originally being people who used fire magic, besides the symbolism of 'fire consumes' like crows consuming wights, corpses and sausages?  What's the difference between fire and ice magic anyway?  Ice burns; ice is frozen fire.  In other words, ice is fire in suspended animation. Reanimation -- whether by 'ice' or 'fire' --always requires fire magic, doesn't it, according to your Greenseer/Azor Ahai paradigm?  I used to think they were separate modalities until I read your 'burning tree' piece.  As an example, when Bran eats the weirwood paste there is an intermingling of soothing, 'cool' tastes: snow, the last kiss his mother gave him; and warm to 'fiery' tastes: honey, pepper, and cinnamon (even the name 'bole' is ambiguous connoting a red dye while simultaneously appearing white).  Likewise, Dany's shade of the evening experience combined ice and fire tastes:  

Ice imagery: the name ‘shade of the evening’, ink, spoiled meat, cream, mother’s millk;

Fire imagery: fingers of fire coiling, honey, anise, Drogo’s seed, red meat, hot blood, molten gold.

I'm led to believe the weirwood and ebony are two sides of the same coin as you've intimated in your discussion on the weirwood/seastone symbolism.

Note, Dany identifies 'rotten meat' masked by other more pleasant flavors as an integral ingredient of 'shade of the evening' which fulfils the same prophetic function as the weirwood paste, the latter which was also rumored by many to contain traces of 'Jojen.'

Perhaps that's the key to the ice magic.  It somehow gets away from the problem of burning-- the body requires fuel and is therefore vulnerable to scarcity of food, warmth, sleep, etc.  One burns energy in order to keep on burning, getting burned by oneself in the process.  While 'wightification' might get around the problem of burning oneself up by living, one might still be vulnerable to being burnt by others.

This whole section is wonderfully argued.  I've been puzzling about the relation between the old gods (whom I equate with the trees) and the Others (whom I equate with the cold) for a while now.  The point about the ravens perching on 'Coldhands' is a lovely catch!  This provides a nice contrast with the burning hands of the weirwoods.  How do you see the cold hands and hot hands, as it were, intersecting?  How do you unite ice and fire in the context of the trees specifically?  Thanks for the link; I will read it.

For sure -- Bloodraven tells him to do as much.

'Riding the elk' is a metaphor for skinchanging, as is 'climbing,' 'flying,' 'slipping,' 'swimming,' and all the rest.

Finally, although we're primed by GRRM to favor the Starks in all they do, and to empathize with and defend Bran, even when he does questionable 'naughty greenseer' things like skinchanging Hodor in full consciousness that this is something unpleasant and involuntary on Hodor's part; nevertheless a central message is the shame attached to all these antics of ice and fire (the thralldom, the sacrifice).  Eating from the tree of knowledge -- let alone sausages -- is a bittersweet experience, one which is hard to swallow.

In the ASOS prologue to which @sweetsunray has drawn our attention:

They're being watched by 'sentinels' (who keep guard) and 'soldier' pines (who might attack).  @sweetsunray identifies these trees, along with weirwoods, oaks, and ironwoods as chthonic underworld presences, which I would associate with the 'old gods.'  In keeping with the dialectic of the hunters becoming the hunted, the 'watchers' (of the Night's Watch) are becoming the watched!  Note, it's a 'game trail' -- in this 'game,' who are the players and whom is played?  The trees and the raven(s) listen and watch, and are about to witness some black-blooded blasphemy:

'Mutton head'...is Paul a sheep/ram/scapegoat figure (like the head nailed up at Craster's)?

They ought to heed that 'bloody bird'=Blood+Raven...and treat it with some respect; I've been told it knows 'a murderer's song'...

Maybe the bird has a taste for 'black blood sausages'...GRRM really has a sick sense of humor.  Ravens eat meat.  Men are meat.  Don't the ravens end up feeding on Paul and the other traitors,  when the flock of ravens descends on the wights to rescue Sam and Gilly at Whitetree?

Ah, now we're talking...

'Reek Reek it rhymes with beak'!  These kinds of flippant, dismissive, mocking rhymes are a corruption of language, a numbing device that people use not to remember something but rather to forget.  In Reek's case, he's not trying to remember his name is Reek as he claims; on the contrary, he's trying to forget the trauma that's been done to Theon.  In this case, by mocking Paul they are perpetuating their own ignorance and denial of the implications of what they are planning.  They are talking openly about a murder of one of their own brothers -- in effect a kind of kinslaying -- and shrugging off any residual sense of conscience by laughing about it using silly rhymes.  

There is a lot of talk about talking birds, 'shutting up' and silencing others.  Slitting someones throat is a way of silencing them. To your point about 'godlessness,' 'the gods are listening' to the plots of the godless, and end up turning the tables on the conspirators, who are eventually silenced themselves, when they are killed and turned into wights ('dead men sing no songs').  Wights have no breath, and therefore no voice (except for Coldhands).

Considering it's a talking bird, and language and talking is what differentiates humans from other animals, therefore this should be taboo.  There are strong hints of cannibalism in this last remark 'we can always eat him if we get hungry', and may also provide a clue to what happened at Crasters.

It's ironic how 'Lark' is advocating eating birds, while a 'lark' is a type of bird, hinting that sanctioning the killing and eating of birds might be tantamount to cannibalism, inviting the same fate on himself in his blasphemy.   Here again GRRM plays with figurative and literal meanings of 'bloody'...They've been uttering black-blooded blasphemies, so their mouths are 'bloody' and in a short while their mouths will indeed weep blood after they are slaughtered.  The last statement 'we're almost to the fist' sounds like an ominous warning for the conspirators, signifying the waiting 'fist' of judgment and retribution of the old gods of the first men, about to descend on them for their blasphemy.

Here, Sam is dehumanized by Lark as a 'pig,' with disturbing cannibalistic undertones.  Again, someone desires to silence someone else.  Turning someone into a sausage is essentially the same as cutting out their tongue.

No I don't see what you did there.  Must be an inside joke!

So, Sam is a fat pink pig, with a fat pink mast and sausage fingers, a pig with a bow who is also a bowman.  The 'mast' and 'bow' imagery combine tree and ocean metaphors in line with your tree/leviathan duality.  A 'mast' can refer to the mast of a ship as well as a tree trunk out of which a mast is fashioned.  In addition, it's an obvious phallic symbol, and cutely GRRM gives Sam his first 'pink mast' while he is on board a ship with Gilly-- two masts in one!  Black blood sausages and pink masts, also swollen with blood, are both associated with breaking taboos (Sam broke his Night's Watch vows by exercising his 'pink mast' and 'sailing' with Gilly...you could say he 'overreached'...).  Similarly, a 'bow' is the forwardmost-pointing hull of a ship and a 'bowman' a sailor, in addition to the archery connotations.  Again, trees and sea are both involved in that a bow in both senses is fashioned from wood. Previously, I identified the 'green sea' and 'green seer' pun in this respect.   @Wizz-The-Smith has recently drawn our attention to the hollow hills connection with both weirwood and water, and to Sam and Horn Hill in particular:

As someone who relentlessly pursues knowledge, Sam, like Bran, is an overreacher, in danger of being smashed to pieces for his hubris (the last image of the stone breaking his moony head in pieces certainly accords with your meteor obsession and will likely appeal to you).  He is potentially greenseer material.  One can even find similarities of Sam's imagery with Harren the Black, of all people. While you characterize Sam as the black Leviathan, Harren built his own 'black Leviathan' to rival 'the God's Eye'-- namely the fortress of Harrenhal (a 'hal' is a hall, so it wouldn't surprise me if this is another site of the cavernous hollow hills).  As the story goes, Harren would not yield.  As a result, his pride-and-joy, his hubris became his tomb, when 'the black line' was roasted like so many black-blood sausages in the towers, also shaped like five obscene black sausages themselves, or fingers -- a disembodied hand -- or phallic 'masts' pointing skyward like antennae receiving and transmitting that 'naughty' lightning...(It's like the archetypal scene on the Sistine Chapel ceiling of God reaching out to touch Adam, similarly reaching out with his finger.  It's interesting that Michelangelo chose not to depict the two fingers actually touching.  A warning?)

 

 

I look forward to hearing your thoughts, @ravenous reader. And might I just say that your username would really fit in nicely at the Hearth. I hope you join our forum so that we might discuss the Weirwood Ghost theory in detail.

[ravenous reader]

1 hour ago, Voice said:

I look forward to hearing your thoughts, @ravenous reader. And might I just say that your username would really fit in nicely at the Hearth. I hope you join our forum so that we might discuss the Weirwood Ghost theory in detail.

Thanks for the invite.  I will look into it after I catch up on your theory!

[sweetsunray]

@ravenous reader It's not just the sentinels etc watching and listening to that conversation. They start talking at the track of that wighted snow bear. If there's a track, there is a bear in the vicintiy. And the dogs wanting to get back to the Fist implies they are lurking nearby, as does the mention that the ice on the brook they pass is growing on the surface. Bears can understand human speech in folklore. And what are they talking about? They're talking about "murdering an old bear in his sleep". They give all the particulars: when and how. They name each other twice, and a 4th man of the conspiritors - Softfoot. The attack on the Fist starts with snow and so on, but well before the intended 3rd watch, and a wighted snow bear leads the wight charge basically. And they end up being hunted. Many died at the Fist, but Chett, Lark, Small Paul and Softfoot (and Maslyn) were amongst those killed and hunted down. The rest of the conspiritors, aside from Maslyn survive as far as Craster's, and so do most of the targets. Not one of the targets is confirmed dead, though of 2 we don't know their fates.

Chett tells them they should shut up when they arrive at the Fist, lest they're overheard. But they should have shut up in the Haunted Forest too. They did everything wrong in order to hunt a bear: they revealed who they were, what their intentions were, when and how.

Now I don't think that wighted snow bear actually did some telepathy to the Others and argued: we attack early this night, because they're going to murder an old bear in his sleep. It's more like a meta-fairytale rule. Come across a beggar and scoff at them, and you'll break your neck on your horse around the bend. Share your food or your purse with the beggar and it turns out they are the gamechanging benefactor who gives you some magic item, 3 wishes or a word of wisdom. A motif is different from a trope. The motifs are story-rules/laws. And in this case it's don't talk about murderous intents towards a bear with a bear listening in and reveal who you are or bad stuff will happen to you. 

 

[Flavia Gemina]

5 hours ago, Voice said:

 

 

I look forward to hearing your thoughts, @ravenous reader. And might I just say that your username would really fit in nicely at the Hearth. I hope you join our forum so that we might discuss the Weirwood Ghost theory in detail.

I read your theory. It brings to mind, first the philosophy of Rene Girard know as mimetics.

Secondly, the widespread use of human  body parts for Westeros place names. The fingers, the neck, the reach, the broken arm...add in a person named The Mountain.

 

The Weetetosi ecosystem is like one being. All parts interdependent, yet unwell. It is consuming itself.

 

[sweetsunray]

12 hours ago, LmL said:

Roose says getting leeched is the secret to long life, but leeching a wight, so to speak, kills them for good. That seems to conflict. Also, Roose is a bloodless, ice-eyed vampire type... sounds like an Other, right? Could he be talking about the process of creating an Other, removing the blood from a human, or turning it to ice blood? Are the Others stripped of their humanity (their blood) when they are created? The wights and Others are kind of like a pairing. The wights are the corpses, the Others are the spirits. The wights have black blood and they are dry as old wood and old parchment, while the Others have blue ice-blood and are wet as can be. Wights burn, Others do not. In some form or another, I do think the Others are human spirits (or human/tree spirits) who have been shadow-bound to their icy forms, so they are like a disembodied ghost perhaps, while the wights are the opposite, bodies with no spirit or ghost to inhabit them... just the Others' necromantic remote control. So, Roose would be the Other, the one whose bad blood is removed, and the bad blood issued into sausages... into wights. Sausages are consumed by Night's Watch brothers, who are crows, and wights and corpses are consumed by crows. Corpses and wights are also consumed by fire, and that's what the NW brothers originally were - people who used fire magic. Fire consumes, cold preserves... to the wights are like preserved torches, waiting to be consumed by fire, or preserved sausages, ready to be consumed (again, I recommend fire, eating them is worrisome)(see what I did there).

He calls it a purification process that takes the "bad blood" and all the anger and hatred away, which otherwise completely "consumes" a person and makes them destructive. Chett is consumed by hatred and anger, so much that his wens and boils grow red with angry bad blood. Ramsay's blood is beyond leeching - his blood would just poison the leeches. Gregor is indeed poisoned and his blood turns black, and is beyond leeching (and he wasn't a nice guy to begin with).

Lady Dustin points out how Roose is without emotions anymore to whom everyone else are mere things, how it's a game to him.

So, yeah I like the analogy of Roose-Other with Chett-wight.

Hehhehe, Craster worries on his black sausage.

12 hours ago, LmL said:

Now, take this process, and swap Ghost for a weirwood tree, and Jon for a greenseer hooked up to the tree. Kill the greenseer, his soul goes into the tree. Resurrect the body... or perhaps fashion an icy body out of magic somehow, or perhaps take the male offspring of the Night's Queen who has transformed herself with ice magic, and now we take the merged tree-greenseer spirit and body snatch the resurrected corpse or icy baby, and presto, you have trees body snatching people. That's what I think the Others are - tree spirits. Once again @Voice has written an excellent theory about this, and I was thinking along these lines too, for the evidence tying the Others to the weirwoods is abundant. Point is, if a skinchanger's soul can be stored in the animal and then put back into a body, a greenseer's spirit could be stored in a tree and then put back into a body. Except, if the timing is done right, the tree spirit will merge with the greenseer and then we have a tree person.

I agree that greenseeing is essentially skinchanging a tree (though BR says that eventually you don't even need to see through a tree's eyes anymore, and seems to suggest you can just end up seeing wherever you wish in the far past or the future). And that Coldhands was saved in this way. Not sure though if that the Others are that though, because Coldhands looks like a wight, except for the blue starry eyes (which he does not have). I'll read Voice's theory first.