Weddings, Lightbringer, Animal Familiars, and Character Arcs

[hiemal]

6 hours ago, Unchained said:

Exactly, have you read it yet?  I talk about Drogo's smoky, grey, psychopomp, Sleipnir, Stallion who mounts carrying him to the comet and then find a few more places where the same thing is happening with other animals.  Sometimes they are white rather than grey, which I feel like works because rather than ash trees(grey columns of ash) who are world trees in this universe we have white weirwood trees.  Either color the message is the same.  

I have always liked the two-headed water horse as a psychopomp stand-in and the dothraki as confused vikings confronting Valkyries, "forget the chubby wing-head girls, grab the horses!"

[LmL]

6 minutes ago, hiemal said:

I have always liked the two-headed water horse as a psychopomp stand-in and the dothraki as confused vikings confronting Valkyries, "forget the chubby wing-head girls, grab the horses!"

That water horse is cool because The Hound's Stranger makes the third, for a three headed horse / dragon / cerberus. That scene has a great "storm of swords" quote if I recall...

 

[hiemal]

7 minutes ago, LmL said:

That water horse is cool because The Hound's Stranger makes the third, for a three headed horse / dragon / cerberus. That scene has a great "storm of swords" quote if I recall...

 

Exactly! What do you think about Theon's Smiler?

[LmL]

1 hour ago, hiemal said:

Exactly! What do you think about Theon's Smiler?

Oh, you mean the burning horse? Theon's knocked off his high horse, literally and metaphorically. I'd have read the scene again but I recall going through it once. 

[Seams]

On 2/25/2017 at 1:31 AM, Unchained said:

The Red Wedding

The first two scenes involve huge fires.  This one is a wedding.  How can a wedding serve as a lightbringer forging?  Here are two quotes I used before but with different parts bolded. 

And now the flames reached her Drogo, and now they were all around him. His clothing took fire, and for an instant the khal was clad in wisps of floating orange silk and tendrils of curling smoke, grey and greasy. Dany's lips parted and she found herself holding her breath. Part of her wanted to go to him as Ser Jorah had feared, to rush into the flames to beg for his forgiveness and take him inside her one last time, the fire melting the flesh from their bones until they were as one, forever.    –AGoT Dany X 

There is a “combining of two people into one” aspect to the creation of Lightbringer.  They are “melted” together.  That is why a wedding is such a good metaphor for it. ...  Lightbringer is a combination of Azor Ahai and Nissa Nissa in one.  They are interchangeable.  That is why we sometimes see kings playing the Nissa Nissa role and being the sacrifice who dies and goes into Lightbringer. 

I meant to share one other likely piece of the "forging" of Bran as Lightbringer, inspired by your OP. Apropos of the melting of flesh from bones, Jon has the following dream after he returns to Castle Black and receives the news that Winterfell has been burned and that Theon killed Bran and Rickon:

"Drink this." Grenn held a cup to his lips. Jon drank. His head was full of wolves and eagles, the sound of his brothers' laughter. The faces above him began to blur and fade. They can't be dead. Theon would never do that. And Winterfell . . . grey granite, oak and iron, crows wheeling around the towers, steam rising off the hot pools in the godswood, the stone kings sitting on their thrones . . . how could Winterfell be gone?

When the dreams took him, he found himself back home once more, splashing in the hot pools beneath a huge white weirwood that had his father's face. Ygritte was with him, laughing at him, shedding her skins till she was naked as her name day, trying to kiss him, but he couldn't, not with his father watching. He was the blood of Winterfell, a man of the Night's Watch. I will not father a bastard, he told her. I will not. I will not. "You know nothing, Jon Snow," she whispered, her skin dissolving in the hot water, the flesh beneath sloughing off her bones until only skull and skeleton remained, and the pool bubbled thick and red.

(ASoS, Jon VI)

 

We know from the later wedding of Ramsay and fArya that wedding ceremonies occur under the heart tree at Winterfell. The main pool under the heart tree is cold, but the surrounding pools are hot and Jon is dreaming of himself and Ygritte together in one of the hot pools.

 

So this may be yet another of the missing elements for the "wedding feast" where Bran dies / is reforged.

 

Or maybe it's a scene where the necessary elements don't quite fit the pattern: Ygritte sheds her skins (and her flesh) but there is no apparent skinchanging. She tries to give Jon a "kissed by fire" kiss, but Jon won't allow it while his "father" (the Winter King) watches - the opposition of ice to fire.

 

On the other hand, Ygritte dissolves into the hot pool, which is part of the heating system of Winterfell. So maybe she is "married" to Winterfell even if Jon refused to consummate their union at that moment. Or maybe she goes into the possible ice dragon hidden within Winterfell just as Khal Drogo goes into the hatching of Dany's Drogon in the pyre.

 

An aside: I am struck by the details that Gren gives Jon a drink (presumably dream wine or some other sleeping potion) and by the hot pool becoming like a giant bowl of stew with Ygritte providing the meat. In ACoK, Jon IV, Jon gives Gren his bowl of stew. (Gren seems to embody some aspect of Jon, and fills in for him sometimes when Jon is not physically present, talking with Sam, etc. I suspect Pyp and others in Jon's close circle of Night's Watch brothers also do this.) The stew connection is what interests me, though. I think it may be another element of the pattern of "reforging" at the wedding feast.

 

[Springwatch]

13 hours ago, hiemal said:

Exactly! What do you think about Theon's Smiler?

For ordinary horses, the idea of a centaur works well surprisingly often - the horse is an extension of the human, and may say something about the rider. Riders are compared to centaurs a couple of times, I think.

Off the top of my head, these pairs would make a good centaur:

• Dany & the Silver (unusual hair colour: the colour of swords & chains)
• The Hound & Stranger
• Brienne & the plain yet classy mare
• Bran & Dancer (clever and very young)
• Joffrey & the blood bay

So Smiler would have be that part of Theon like the Smiling Knight, and the fire was a spiritual cleansing. This works with Dany's feeling of fire as a cleansing force.

On the downside, the Winterfell fire was not a magical event; but maybe this doesn't matter - maybe all fires have a magical quality, and it's just waiting to be used.

[hiemal]

1 hour ago, Springwatch said:

For ordinary horses, the idea of a centaur works well surprisingly often - the horse is an extension of the human, and may say something about the rider. Riders are compared to centaurs a couple of times, I think.

Off the top of my head, these pairs would make a good centaur:

• Dany & the Silver (unusual hair colour: the colour of swords & chains)
• The Hound & Stranger
• Brienne & the plain yet classy mare
• Bran & Dancer (clever and very young)
• Joffrey & the blood bay

So Smiler would have be that part of Theon like the Smiling Knight, and the fire was a spiritual cleansing. This works with Dany's feeling of fire as a cleansing force.

On the downside, the Winterfell fire was not a magical event; but maybe this doesn't matter - maybe all fires have a magical quality, and it's just waiting to be used.

Another centaur with a twist I pitched briefly i different thread would be Lady Dustin nee Ryswell, whose fiery mane evokes Smiler and whose marriage into the House of the once Barrow Kings could make her an undead centaur- I see her as a cross between Lyanna and Nessus and a gift poisoned by tainted blood in someone's future- unless it's viewed in reverse and her maiden's blood (bloodcurse?) counts as Brandon's doom?

Just spitballing.

 

[Springwatch]

59 minutes ago, hiemal said:

Another centaur with a twist I pitched briefly i different thread would be Lady Dustin nee Ryswell, whose fiery mane evokes Smiler and whose marriage into the House of the once Barrow Kings could make her an undead centaur- I see her as a cross between Lyanna and Nessus and a gift poisoned by tainted blood in someone's future- unless it's viewed in reverse and her maiden's blood (bloodcurse?) counts as Brandon's doom?

Just spitballing.

Her sigil is a horse, so yes, a centaur is fitting. But there's something more about horses I can't quite grasp. Mirri sacrificed one of Drogo's horses and bathed him in its blood - and he was cured, but lost his mind. Tainted blood perhaps. Or blood magic using horses is indeed evil to horsemen like the Dothraki.

[hiemal]

1 hour ago, Springwatch said:

Her sigil is a horse, so yes, a centaur is fitting. But there's something more about horses I can't quite grasp. Mirri sacrificed one of Drogo's horses and bathed him in its blood - and he was cured, but lost his mind. Tainted blood perhaps. Or blood magic using horses is indeed evil to horsemen like the Dothraki.

I would like to think that his soul is riding that stallion through the Nightlands as Dany fondly imagines, but I strongly suspect that his soul is bound up in Dany's dragons in some way. I'm betting that it was horse's blood that was used in the ritual because he was Dothraki and horse were what he prized. Perhaps if MMD had been performing this abomination on one of her own people she would have used a lamb?

[ravenous reader]

Hi @Unchained, I've happened on two further potential 'lightbringer wedding ceremonies' which I'll leave for you to unpack!

First, Tommen and Margaery's wedding, culminating in Cersei burning the Tower of the Hand (a kind of tall, wooden funeral pyre, as you've identified), musing to herself that she is being reborn, coming into her own, usurping the power of all those preceding her who have thwarted her indomitable will.  Interestingly -- this made me think of you and @LmL -- Cersei and Tommen observe that the wildfire flames are 'dancing'!  Initially I had thought the burning of the Tower of the Hand filled with Tyrion's possessions combined with his flight from King's Landing made him a contender for the 'beast breathing shadow fire' as well as Lightbringer embodiment, according to LmL's theory of the 'alchemical wedding'.  However, now I wonder if this wasn't possibly Cersei's own Lightbringer moment?

The second example is the wedding of Alys Karstark and Signorn Magnar of Thenn, in which similar elements may be identified (the couple has to leap over a burning ditch for example).  Who do you think the 'Lightbringer' is in this case?

The part of your theory I had difficulty mapping onto the examples is the grey, white or black familiar.  Perhaps you have some good ideas of who or what may be fulfilling the representative psychopomp function in each case?  Perhaps the mention of a shadow?

Quote

A Feast for Crows - Cersei III

Dark and forlorn stood the Tower of the Hand, with only gaping holes where oaken doors and shuttered windows had once been. Yet even ruined and slighted, it loomed above the outer ward. As the wedding guests filed out of the Small Hall, they passed beneath its shadow. When Cersei looked up she saw the tower's crenellated battlements gnawing at a hunter's moon, and wondered for a moment how many Hands of how many kings had made their home there over the past three centuries.

['gnawing at a hunter's moon'...you've seen this one @LmL?]

A hundred yards from the tower, she took a breath to stop her head from spinning. "Lord Hallyne! You may commence."Hallyne the pyromancer said "Hmmmmmm" and waved the torch he was holding, and the archers on the walls bent their bows and sent a dozen flaming arrows through the gaping windows.

The tower went up with a whoosh. In half a heartbeat its interior was alive with light, red, yellow, orange . . . and green, an ominous dark green, the color of bile and jade and pyromancer's piss. "The substance," the alchemists named it, but common folk called it wildfire. Fifty pots had been placed inside the Tower of the Hand, along with logs and casks of pitch and the greater part of the worldly possessions of a dwarf named Tyrion Lannister.

The queen could feel the heat of those green flames. The pyromancers said that only three things burned hotter than their substance: dragonflame, the fires beneath the earth, and the summer sun. Some of the ladies gasped when the first flames appeared in the windows, licking up the outer walls like long green tongues. Others cheered, and made toasts.

It is beautiful, she thought, as beautiful as Joffrey, when they laid him in my arms. No man had ever made her feel as good as she had felt when he took her nipple in his mouth to nurse.

[note the sexual/reproductive trope always inherent in any 'alchemical wedding']

Tommen stared wide-eyed at the fires, as fascinated as he was frightened, until Margaery whispered something in his ear that made him laugh. Some of the knights began to make wagers on how long it would be before the tower collapsed. Lord Hallyne stood humming to himself and rocking on his heels.

[that's part of the grotesque song and dance of the greenseers]

Cersei thought of all the King's Hands that she had known through the years: Owen Merryweather, Jon Connington, Qarlton Chelsted, Jon Arryn, Eddard Stark, her brother Tyrion. And her father, Lord Tywin Lannister, her father most of all. All of them are burning now, she told herself, savoring the thought. They are dead and burning, every one, with all their plots and schemes and betrayals. It is my day now. It is my castle and my kingdom.

[in order for one person to gain power and have his or her day, others must be sacrificed -- a common theme in these events]

The Tower of the Hand gave out a sudden groan, so loud that all the conversation stopped abruptly. Stone cracked and split, and part of the upper battlements fell away and landed with a crash that shook the hill, sending up a cloud of dust and smoke. [this is the 'cry of agony and ecstasy', etc,. that always punctuates these forging events, like the orgasmic cry, birthing scream, death throes, or widow's wail...note especially the word 'crack' -- significant GRRM 'code']

As fresh air rushed in through the broken masonry, the fire surged upward. Green flames leapt into the sky and whirled around each other. Tommen shied away, till Margaery took his hand and said, "Look, the flames are dancing. Just as we did, my love."

"They are." His voice was filled with wonder. "Mother, look, they're dancing."

[in case we missed the significance of the dancing flames the first time, GRRM repeats it a second...surely there's a third on the way?  ]

"I see them. Lord Hallyne, how long will the fires burn?"

"All night, Your Grace."

"It makes a pretty candle, I grant you," said Lady Olenna Tyrell, leaning on her cane between Left and Right. "Bright enough to see us safe to sleep, I think. Old bones grow weary, and these young ones have had enough excitement for one night. It is time the king and queen were put to bed."

"Yes." Cersei beckoned to Jaime. "Lord Commander, escort His Grace and his little queen to their pillows, if you would."

"As you command. And you as well?"

"No need." Cersei felt too alive for sleep. The wildfire was cleansing her, burning away all her rage and fear, filling her with resolve. [Bingo -- sounds almost verbatim like Dany's or Melisandre's fire-scouring rituals]

"The flames are so pretty. I want to watch them for a while."

Jaime hesitated. "You should not stay alone."

"I will not be alone. Ser Osmund can remain with me and keep me safe. Your Sworn Brother."

"If it please Your Grace," said Kettleblack.

"It does." Cersei slid her arm through his, and side by side they watched the fire rage.

 

Quote

A Dance with Dragons - Jon X

R'hllor," sang Melisandre, her arms upraised against the falling snow,

"you are the light in our eyes, the fire in our hearts, the heat in our loins. Yours is the sun that warms our days, yours the stars that guard us in the dark of night."

"All praise R' hllor, the Lord of Light, " the wedding guests answered in ragged chorus before a gust of ice-cold wind blew their words away. Jon Snow raised the hood of his cloak.

The snowfall was light today, a thin scattering of flakes dancing in the air, but the wind was blowing from the east along the Wall, cold as the breath of the ice dragon in the tales Old Nan used to tell. Even Melisandre's fire was shivering; the flames huddled down in the ditch, crackling softly as the red priestess sang. Only Ghost seemed not to feel the chill. Alys Karstark leaned close to Jon. "Snow during a wedding means a cold marriage. My lady mother always said so."

He glanced at Queen Selyse. There must have been a blizzard the day she and Stannis wed. Huddled beneath her ermine mantle and surrounded by her ladies, serving girls, and knights, the southron queen seemed a frail, pale, shrunken thing. A strained smile was frozen into place on her thin lips, but her eyes brimmed with reverence. She hates the cold but loves the flames. He had only to look at her to see that. A word from Melisandre, and she would walk into the fire willingly, embrace it like a lover. Not all her queen's men seemed to share her fervor. Ser Brus appeared half-drunk, Ser Malegorn's gloved hand was cupped round the arse of the lady beside him, Ser Narbert was yawning, and Ser Patrek of King's Mountain looked angry. Jon Snow had begun to understand why Stannis had left them with his queen.

"The night is dark and filled with terrors," Melisandre sang. "Alone we are born and alone we die, but as we walk through this black vale we draw strength from one another, and from you, our lord." Her scarlet silks and satins swirled with every gust of wind. "Two come forth today to join their lives, so they may face this world's darkness together. Fill their hearts with fire, my lord, so they may walk your shining path hand in hand forever."

[her scarlet skirts are the dancing flames symbolically]

"Lord of Light, protect us, " cried Queen Selyse. Other voices echoed the response. Melisandre's faithful: pallid ladies, shivering serving girls, Ser Axell and Ser Narbert and Ser Lambert, men-at-arms in iron mail and Thenns in bronze, even a few of Jon's black brothers. "Lord of Light, bless your children. "

Melisandre's back was to the Wall, on one side of the deep ditch where her fire burned. The couple to be joined faced her across the ditch. Behind them stood the queen, with her daughter and her tattooed fool. Princess Shireen was wrapped in so many furs that she looked round, breathing in white puffs through the scarf that covered most of her face. Ser Axell Florent and his queen's men surrounded the royal party. Though only a few men of the Night's Watch had gathered about the ditchfire, more looked down from rooftops and windows and the steps of the great switchback stair. Jon took careful note of who was there and who was not. Some men had the duty; many just off watch were fast asleep. But others had chosen to absent themselves to show their disapproval. Othell Yarwyck and Bowen Marsh were amongst the missing. Septon Chayle had emerged briefly from the sept, fingering the seven-sided crystal on the thong about his neck, only to retreat inside again once the prayers began. Melisandre raised her hands, and the ditchfire leapt upward toward her fingers, like a great red dog springing for a treat. A swirl of sparks rose to meet the snowflakes coming down. "Oh, Lord of Light, we thank you,"she sang to the hungry flames. "We thank you for brave Stannis, by your grace our king. Guide him and defend him, R'hllor. Protect him from the treacheries of evil men and grant him strength to smite the servants of the dark."

"Grant him strength, " answered Queen Selyse and her knights and ladies. "Grant him courage. Grant him wisdom. "

Alys Karstark slipped her arm through Jon's. "How much longer, Lord Snow? If I'm to be buried beneath this snow, I'd like to die a woman wed."

"Soon, my lady," Jon assured her. "Soon."

"We thank you for the sun that warms us, " chanted the queen. "We thank you for the stars that watch over us in the black of night. We thank you for our hearths and for our torches that keep the savage dark at bay. We thank you for our bright spirits, the fires in our loins and in our hearts. "

And Melisandre said, "Let them come forth, who would be joined."

The flames cast her shadow on the Wall behind her, and her ruby gleamed against the paleness of her throat.

Jon turned to Alys Karstark. "My lady. Are you ready?"

"Yes. Oh, yes."

"You're not scared?"

The girl smiled in a way that reminded Jon so much of his little sister that it almost broke his heart. "Let him be scared of me." The snowflakes were melting on her cheeks, but her hair was wrapped in a swirl of lace that Satin had found somewhere, and the snow had begun to collect there, giving her a frosty crown. Her cheeks were flushed and red, and her eyes sparkled.

"Winter's lady." Jon squeezed her hand.

The Magnar of Thenn stood waiting by the fire, clad as if for battle, in fur and leather and bronze scales, a bronze sword at his hip. His receding hair made him look older than his years, but as he turned to watch his bride approach, Jon could see the boy in him. His eyes were big as walnuts, though whether it was the fire, the priestess, or the woman that had put the fear in him Jon could not say. Alys was more right than she knew.

"Who brings this woman to be wed?" asked Melisandre. "I do,"said Jon. "Now comes Alys of House Karstark, a woman grown and flowered, of noble blood and birth." He gave her hand one last squeeze and stepped back to join the others.

"Who comes forth to claim this woman?" asked Melisandre. "Me."

Sigorn slapped his chest. "Magnar of Thenn."

"Sigorn," asked Melisandre, "will you share your fire with Alys, and warm her when the night is dark and full of terrors?"

"I swear me." The Magnar's promise was a white cloud in the air. Snow dappled his shoulders. His ears were red. "By the red god's flames, I warm her all her days."

"Alys, do you swear to share your fire with Sigorn, and warm him when the night is dark and full of terrors?"

"Till his blood is boiling." Her maiden's cloak was the black wool of the Night's Watch. The Karstark sunburst sewn on its back was made of the same white fur that lined it.

[the boiling blood reminds me of the 'melting' aspect of the forging where two are cooked together and melted into one]

Melisandre's eyes shone as bright as the ruby at her throat. "Then come to me and be as one." As she beckoned, a wall of flames roared upward, licking at the snowflakes with hot orange tongues. Alys Karstark took her Magnar by the hand.

Side by side they leapt the ditch. "Two went into the flames." A gust of wind lifted the red woman's scarlet skirts till she pressed them down again. "One emerges." Her coppery hair danced about her head. "What fire joins, none may put asunder."

"What fire joins, none may put asunder, " came the echo, from queen's men and Thenns and even a few of the black brothers. Except for kings and uncles, thought Jon Snow.

Cregan Karstark had turned up a day behind his niece. With him came four mounted men-at-arms, a huntsman, and a pack of dogs, sniffing after Lady Alys as if she were a deer. Jon Snow met them on the kingsroad half a league south of Mole's Town, before they could turn up at Castle Black, claim guest right, or call for parley. One of Karstark's men had loosed a crossbow quarrel at Ty and died for it. That left four, and Cregan himself. Fortunately they had a dozen ice cells. Room for all.

Like so much else, heraldry ended at the Wall. The Thenns had no family arms as was customary amongst the nobles of the Seven Kingdoms, so Jon told the stewards to improvise. He thought they had done well. The bride's cloak Sigorn fastened about Lady Alys's shoulders showed a bronze disk on a field of white wool, surrounded by flames made with wisps of crimson silk. The echo of the Karstark sunburst was there for those who cared to look, but differenced to make the arms appropriate for House Thenn.

The Magnar all but ripped the maiden's cloak from Alys's shoulders, but when he fastened her bride's cloak about her he was almost tender. As he leaned down to kiss her cheek, their breath mingled. The flames roared once again. The queen's men began to sing a song of praise. "Is it done?" Jon heard Satin whisper.

"Done and done," muttered Mully, "and a good thing. They're wed and I'm half-froze." He was muffled up in his best blacks, woolens so new that they had hardly had a chance to fade yet, but the wind had turned his cheeks as red as his hair. "Hobb's mulled some wine with cinnamon and cloves. That'll warm us some."

"What's cloves?" asked Owen the Oaf.

The snow had started to descend more heavily and the fire in the ditch was guttering out. The crowd began to break apart and stream from the yard, queen's men, king's men, and free folk alike, all anxious to get out of the wind and the cold. "Will my lord be feasting with us?" Mully asked Jon Snow.

"Shortly." Sigorn might take it as a slight if he did not appear. And this marriage is mine own work, after all. "I have other matters to attend to first, however."

Jon crossed to Queen Selyse, with Ghost beside him. His boots crunched through piles of old snow. It was growing ever more time-consuming to shovel out the paths from one building to another; more and more, the men were resorting to the underground passages they called wormways.

"... such a beautiful rite," the queen was saying. "I could feel our lord's fiery gaze upon us. Oh, you cannot know how many times I have begged Stannis to let us be wed again, a true joining of body and spirit blessed by the Lord of Light. I know that I could give His Grace more children if we were bound in fire."

To give him more children you would first need to get him into your bed. Even at the Wall, it was common knowledge that Stannis Baratheon had shunned his wife for years. One could only imagine how His Grace had responded to the notion of a second wedding in the midst of his war. Jon bowed. "If it please Your Grace, the feast awaits."

The queen glanced at Ghost suspiciously, then raised her head to Jon.

"To be sure. Lady Melisandre knows the way."

The red priestess spoke up. "I must attend my fires, Your Grace. Perhaps R'hllor will vouchsafe me a glimpse of His Grace. A glimpse of some great victory, mayhaps.

"Oh." Queen Selyse looked stricken. "To be sure ... let us pray for a vision from our lord ..."

"Satin, show Her Grace to her place," said Jon.

I should make his head a wedding gift for Lady Alys and her Magnar, Jon thought, but dare not take the risk. The Night's Watch took no part in the quarrels of the realm; some would say he had already given Stannis too much help. Behead this fool, and they will claim I am killing northmen to give their lands to wildlings. Release him, and he will do his best to rip apart all I' ve done with Lady Alys and the Magnar. Jon wondered what his father would do, how his uncle might deal with this. But Eddard Stark was dead, Benjen Stark lost in the frozen wilds beyond the Wall. You know nothing, Jon Snow.

"Never is a long time," Jon said. "You may feel differently on the morrow, or a year from now. Soon or late King Stannis will return to the Wall, however. When he does he will have you put to death ... unless it happens that you are wearing a black cloak. When a man takes the black, his crimes are wiped away." Even such a man as you. "Now pray excuse me. I have a feast to attend."

After the biting cold of the ice cells, the crowded cellar was so hot that Jon felt suffocated from the moment he came down the steps. The air smelled of smoke and roasting meat and mulled wine. Axell Florent was making a toast as Jon took his place upon the dais. 

...

The queen's men outnumbered the queen's ladies three to one, so even the humblest serving girls were pressed into the dance. After a few songs some black brothers remembered skills learned at the courts and castles of their youth, before their sins had sent them to the Wall, and took the floor as well.

[so that's some actual wedding dancing, in addition to the symbolic kind!]

That old rogue Ulmer of the Kingswood proved as adept at dancing as he was at archery, no doubt regaling his partners with his tales of the Kingswood Brotherhood, when he rode with Simon Toyne and Big Belly Ben and helped Wenda the White Fawn burn her mark in the bu**ocks of her highborn captives. Satin was all grace, dancing with three serving girls in turn but never presuming to approach a highborn lady. Jon judged that wise. He did not like the way some of the queen's knights were looking at the steward, particularly Ser Patrek of King's Mountain. That one wants to shed a bit of blood, he thought. He is looking for some provocation. When Owen the Oaf began to dance with Patchface the fool, laughter echoed off the vaulted ceiling. The sight made Lady Alys smile. "Do you dance often, here at Castle Black?"

"Every time we have a wedding, my lady."

 

[Seams]

This thread, and the idea that certain elements repeat in a pattern that leads to the forging of Lightbringer, reminds me of a thread by @Kingmonkey from a little while back:

There are several posts that together present the theory and a number of examples, and they are lengthy, but this quote and the bulleted  and numbered points get at the main ideas for anyone who wants a tl;dr:

Quote

There is a pattern of events that can be found repeated in ASOIAF, and whatever it means, it seems to be connected to the core mysteries of the series. I suspect it is the core mystery of the series. These echoes may be a purely literary device, a use of paralleling to bring together shared ideas. It may be something rather more. A ritual that people stumble upon, more or less accidentally, more or less knowingly. Or it may be one of these events created magical ripples in the river of time, making the event replay as echoes before and after. Or perhaps it's a story desperate to be told, leaking out into the narratives of many characters and shaping their stories to its own. Perhaps it's a mixture of these. Each time we see these events echoed, some of the details are shared, and some changed. It's as if the story is struggling to be completed, the ritual never quite being fulfilled. Amidst the personal struggles of the characters we read about is a greater struggle they are fighting unaware, a fate that tugs their puppet strings and makes them dance to the song of ice and fire.

• A lot of these events concern the birthing of dragons.
• There's a strong thread of blood magic running through these echoes.

 

1. Seven against three.
2. Three Kingsguards, or some equivalent / cloaked figures.
3. Event takes place at sunset with a blood-red sky.
4. Ghost / wraith imagery.
5. A tower long fallen / destroyed at the end of the event.
6. A parley before the battle.
7. Promises and vows.
8. A refusal to flee.
9. A great red stallion / stallion on fire.
10. A notably martial woman.
11. The sign of the falling star / red comet.
12. Animal totems.
13. Bloody walls.
14. Eight deaths.
15. A maegi or possibly similar wise/magical figures.

Your thread, @Unchained, sees the specific blood magic as King's blood, and the outcome as the forging of Lightbringer (or an echo / foreshadowing of that forging). Kingmonkey saw the pattern leading to the hatching of dragons. I see these two outcomes as completely compatible, with the comet -  and the many ways people interpreted it - as the unifying evidence that dragons and flaming swords are the same thing.

Some of the very specific elements in the 2015 post probably don't match all the specifics of the wedding patterns you analyzed, but I bet we could learn by comparing the pattern you laid out with the elements Kingmonkey identified. The differences in the posts may tell us some important things about seemingly disparate characters, or allow us to make predictions.

For instance, I just did a close reading of Arya VIII in ACoK for the Direwolf Re-read. I find that a lot of the elements are the same as Joffrey's wedding feast, with Weese dying at the end of the Arya POV and Joffrey, of course, dying at his own wedding feast. The author seems to be comparing and contrasting Arya and Sansa's roles in the two chapters, the key difference being that Arya is the active murderer (enlisting Jaqen to kill Weese) while Sansa is the unwitting wearer of the poisoned hairnet. I'm still thinking through the question of why GRRM would want us to compare Weese's broken promise to give Arya part of a roasted chicken with Joffrey's broken betrothal to Sansa, but the pattern with lots of surrounding details seems pretty clear. I don't see the Arya chapter leading to the forging of Lightbringer (or a symbolic substitute for Lightbringer) but she does visit the work area of the smiths at Harrenhal, and she does handle a sword. This could also be a story like Bran's "wedding," discussed earlier in this thread, that is split over a couple of chapters.

[Unchained]

16 hours ago, ravenous reader said:

Hi @Unchained, I've happened on two further potential 'lightbringer wedding ceremonies' which I'll leave for you to unpack!

First, Tommen and Margaery's wedding, culminating in Cersei burning the Tower of the Hand (a kind of tall, wooden funeral pyre, as you've identified), musing to herself that she is being reborn, coming into her own, usurping the power of all those preceding her who have thwarted her indomitable will.  Interestingly -- this made me think of you and @LmL -- Cersei and Tommen observe that the wildfire flames are 'dancing'!  Initially I had thought the burning of the Tower of the Hand filled with Tyrion's possessions combined with his flight from King's Landing made him a contender for the 'beast breathing shadow fire' as well as Lightbringer embodiment, according to LmL's theory of the 'alchemical wedding'.  However, now I wonder if this wasn't possibly Cersei's own Lightbringer moment?

The second example is the wedding of Alys Karstark and Signorn Magnar of Thenn, in which similar elements may be identified (the couple has to leap over a burning ditch for example).  Who do you think the 'Lightbringer' is in this case?

The part of your theory I had difficulty mapping onto the examples is the grey, white or black familiar.  Perhaps you have some good ideas of who or what may be fulfilling the representative psychopomp function in each case?  Perhaps the mention of a shadow?

 

 

It seems I totally missed a few big ones.  That is not surprising, I have no impulse control when I think I have an idea and I always want to get it out ASAP, but this needs correcting.  I'll start with Cersei, but back at Cersei 1.  

Quote

 

She dreamt she sat the Iron Throne, high above them all.

The courtiers were brightly colored mice below. Great lords and proud ladies knelt before her. Bold young knights laid their swords at her feet and pleaded for her favors, and the queen smiled down at them. Until the dwarf appeared as if from nowhere, pointing at her and howling with laughter. The lords and ladies began to chuckle too, hiding their smiles behind their hands. Only then did the queen realize she was naked.

Horrified, she tried to cover herself with her hands. The barbs and blades of the Iron Throne bit into her flesh as she crouched to hide her shame. Blood ran red down her legs, as steel teeth gnawed at her buttocks. When she tried to stand, her foot slipped through a gap in the twisted metal. The more she struggled the more the throne engulfed her, tearing chunks of flesh from her breasts and belly, slicing at her arms and legs until they were slick and red, glistening.

And all the while her brother capered below, laughing.

His merriment still echoed in her ears when she felt a light touch on her shoulder, and woke suddenly. For half a heartbeat the hand seemed part of the nightmare, and Cersei cried out, but it was only Senelle. The maid's face was white and frightened. --AFfC, Cersei 1

 

 

That sounds a lot like Dany's 'wake the dragon' dream with a touch of Melisandre's vision in the flames with the blood running down her leg.  They come before a ritual event and bring to mind the two-way consumption idea, the dreamer is set free and consumed, empowered and destroyed, the sacrifice and the reborn product.  It sounds like Cersei is being consumed by the bloodthirsty tree throne of the (greenseer) king.  Tyrion capering around fills the fool's role that Patchface and Jinglebells fill at other ritual scenes.  The kingsguard that wakes her has hair that is black and oily like Drogo's and I'm told the moon meteor stones.  After waking, she checks to see if all her fingers are there, I do not really understand the 'chopped off fingers' motif of the Halfhand, Davos, and the Greatjon, but it is here.  She suspects that the dream happened because she drank too much just like Tyrion wants to drink fire wine to induce dragon dreams.  Wine may be a stand-in for blood and seems to be a psychedelic drink like shade of the evening and Jojen Paste.  

 

Quote

When the magister drifted off to sleep with the wine jar at his elbow, Tyrion crept across the pillows to work it loose from its fleshy prison and pour himself a cup. He drained it down, and yawned, and filled it once again. If I drink enough fire wine, he told himself, perhaps I'll dream of dragons.  --ADwD, Tyrion 2

 

She drinks lemon water, which seems to represent her bitterness, and a moth gets in Ser Boros' lantern casting large shadow wings on the wall further connecting this scene to Dany and Drogon.  In case we need more Dany/Cersei connetions, Cersei thinks that Tywin's death means the 'bright star of the west' has fallen and the nights will be darker now.  At the dragon hatching, the comet is the bright star in the west.  When it falls, according to a crackpot theory I read, the nights will indeed be darker.  

    

Quote

 

No, that cannot be. That is not the way a lion dies. The queen felt strangely calm. She remembered the first time she had lost a tooth, when she was just a little girl. It hadn't hurt, but the hole in her mouth felt so odd she could not stop touching it with her tongue. Now there is a hole in the world where Father stood, and holes want filling.

If Tywin Lannister was truly dead, no one was safe . . . least of all her son upon his throne. When the lion falls the lesser beasts move in: the jackals and the vultures and the feral dogs. They would try to push her aside, as they always had. She would need to move quickly, as she had when Robert died. This might be the work of Stannis Baratheon, through some catspaw. It could well be the prelude to another attack upon the city. She hoped it was. Let him come. I will smash him, just as Father did, and this time he will die. Stannis did not frighten her, no more than Mace Tyrell did. No one frightened her. She was a daughter of the Rock, a lion. There will be no more talk of forcing me to wed again. Casterly Rock was hers now, and all the power of House Lannister. No one would ever disregard her again. Even when Tommen had no further need of a regent, the Lady of Casterly Rock would remain a power in the land.

 

    Holes want filling and someone is reborn to replace every ruler who dies, Cersei wants to be this one.  I see two ways to read the 2nd bolded quote.  Either she is afraid of 'no one', a nameless greenseer/faceless man which is sort of the same thing in some way, or she has no fear like the Night's King and is ready to shatter taboos in the pursuit of power.  

 

Quote

The rising sun had painted the tower tops a vivid red, but beneath the walls the night still huddled. The outer castle was so hushed that she could have believed all its people dead. They should be. It is not fitting for Tywin Lannister to die alone. Such a man deserves a retinue to attend his needs in hell.

 

Another theme I do not understand is the quiet, Euron's ship and crew, Ghost the mute direwolf, Ilyn Payne the mute executioner, but it is present as well.  Tywin needing people to die with him makes me think of the terracotta warriors of China, and other similar death rituals that provide people to serve the dead king in the afterlife.  I think there were Viking kings that had there wife burned alive with them on there funeral pyres (like Dany at the dragon hatching and a greenseer king being set on fire with his tree wife?!?).  I will come back to the idea of people dying alongside AA later in this meandering post.  

 

Quote

The hall was full of fools speaking in whispers, as if Lord Tywin were asleep and they were afraid to wake him. Guards and servants alike shrank back before her, mouths flapping. She saw their pink gums and waggling tongues, but their words made no more sense than the buzzing of the moth. What are they doing here? How did they know? By rights they should have called her first. She was the Queen Regent, had they forgotten that?    

 

   Waking sleeping dead kings is probably a risky adventure.  Cersei also thinks that the moth in the lantern should just fly into the flame and be done with it already.  

 

Quote

Morning light slashed through the shutters to paint golden bars upon the rushes strewn across the floor of the bedchamber. Her uncle Kevan was on his knees beside the bed, trying to pray, but he could scarcely get the words out. Guardsmen clustered near the hearth. The secret door that Ser Osmund had spoken of gaped open behind the ashes, no bigger than an oven. A man would need to crawl. But Tyrion is only half a man. The thought made her angry. No, the dwarf is locked in a black cell. This could not be his work. Stannis, she told herself, Stannis was behind it. He still has adherents in the city. Him, or the Tyrells . . .

 

       

  Morning (mourning?) light slashed through (like a cruel dagger of light?).  

 

Quote

For a moment she did not recognize the dead man. He had hair like her father, yes, but this was some other (Other, as in yet another fiery person becoming a Kingsguard or general Other symbol) man, surely, a smaller man, and much older. His bedrobe was hiked up around his chest, leaving him naked below the waist. The quarrel had taken him in his groin between his navel and his manhood, and was sunk so deep that only the fletching showed. His pubic hair was stiff with dried blood. More was congealing in his navel.

 

Quote

The smell of him made her wrinkle her nose. "Take the quarrel out of him," she commanded. "This is the King's Hand!" And my father. My lord father. Should I scream and tear my hair? They said Catelyn Stark had clawed her own face to bloody ribbons when the Freys slew her precious Robb. Would you like that, Father? she wanted to ask him. Or would you want me to be strong? Did you weep for your own father? Her grandfather had died when she was only a year old, but she knew the story. Lord Tytos had grown very fat, and his heart burst one day when he was climbing the steps to his mistress. Her father was off in King's Landing when it happened, serving as the Mad King's Hand. Lord Tywin was often away in King's Landing when she and Jaime were young. If he wept when they brought him word of his father's death, he did it where no one could see the tears.

This a straightforward connection to the Red Wedding, hearts bursting (Nissa Nissa?), and a mistress.  Tywin used another woman besides the one Robb was supposed to marry to bring him down and he got taste of his own medicine here.  It just now occurs to me that Tytos was married to another Jeyne.   

 

Quote

The queen could feel her nails digging into her palms. "How could you leave him like this? My father was Hand to three kings, as great a man as ever strode the Seven Kingdoms. The bells must ring for him, as they rang for Robert. He must be bathed and dressed as befits his stature, in ermine and cloth-of-gold and crimson silk. Where is Pycelle? Where is Pycelle?" She turned to the guardsmen. "Puckens, bring Grand Maester Pycelle. He must see to Lord Tywin."

  There are those damn bells I do not understand.  Also, he will be dressed as a fiery dancer in yellow and gold silk.  

 

Quote

He has only one hand, she wanted to shout at them. One of you should have gone. He has no business climbing ladders. The men who murdered Father might be down there, waiting for him. Her twin had always been too rash, and it would seem that even losing a hand had not taught him caution. She was about to command the guards to go down after him and bring him back when Puckens and Shortear returned with a grey-haired man between them. "Your Grace," said Shortear, "this here claims he was a maester."

Jaime has no fear like Cersei and the Night's King.  

 

Quote

"Girl?" Cersei had overlooked the second body. She strode to the bed, flung aside the heap of bloody coverlets, and there she was, naked, cold, and pink . . . save for her face, which had turned as black as Joff's had at his wedding feast. A chain of linked golden hands was half-buried in the flesh of her throat, twisted so tight that it had broken the skin. Cersei hissed like an angry cat. "What is she doing here?"

Maybe some mythical astronomy darkening of the moon's face by the sun?  Inversion of lunar revenge?

 

Quote

My lord father had no use for whores, she thought. After our mother died he never touched a woman. She gave the guardsman a chilly look. "This is not . . . when Lord Tywin's father died he returned to Casterly Rock to find a . . . a woman of this sort . . . bedecked in his lady mother's jewels, wearing one of her gowns. He stripped them off her, and all else as well. For a fortnight she was paraded naked through the streets of Lannisport, to confess to every man she met that she was a thief and a harlot. That was how Lord Tywin Lannister dealt with whores. He never . . . this woman was here for some other purpose, not for . . ."

Obviously foreshadowing, but maybe more?  Cersei going through the same penance s her symbolic grandmother makes me think of Dany being her own mother in a way after she is reborn from Drogo's funeral pyre.  

 

Quote

"That's so." Cersei seized on the suggestion eagerly. "He was questioning her, to be sure. There can be no doubt." She could see Tyrion leering, his mouth twisted into a monkey's grin beneath the ruin of his nose. And what better way to question her than naked, with her legs well spread? the dwarf whispered. That's how I like to question her too.

More Tyrion (Targaryen) monkey stuff, unrelated to this, but I am just pointing out everything I see.

 

Quote

"Feed her to your dogs. Keep her for a bedmate. What do I care? She was never here. I'll have the tongue of any man who dares to say she was. Do you understand me?"

Feeding to dogs after death is the same as feeding to crows after death.  I think both are a symbol for going into the WWnet upon death.  

 

OK I lied, I am not going to bring up everything I think I may have seen in this chapter, but only most of it (its getting late and I'm tired).  At the end of the chapter Cersei talks about making the sleeping guards sleep forever (79 sentinels?), and thinks Tyrion's hands are closing around her neck, which screams of the ending to the AGoT prologue.  I will have to go over the rest of this tomorrow or a later day, but it is now at the top of my list.  

 

Edit:   Ok, I found what I was thinking about when I said Viking Kings had their wives burnt with them on their funeral pyres.  It was the account of a chieftain's funeral by Ahmad ibn Fadian, who is like a Middle Eastern Marco Polo who went west, and there are a few parallels between it and these rituals.  It is an interesting read on wikipedia despite being horrible even by ASoIaF standards.  The chieftain gets put on a boat, his thrall woman is given a bunch of psychedelic drinks, all the men have sex with her, horses are sacrificed, then finally the thrall woman is killed on the boat in a tent with the chieftain.  The ship is set on fire because they believe the fire facilitates the journey to the afterlife.  The whole thing is overseen by a master of ceremonies who is an old woman they call the 'angel of death'.    

 

Also, I just realized I never got back to what Cersei said about how Tywin should not die alone.  I want to jump ahead to something that jumped out at me in @ravenous reader's post.  Hallyne the pyromancer (master of ceremonies) with his dozen archers looks like it may be 'Last hero math'.  If it is, that is potentially an important point because here they are serving as the helpers in the ritual.  If the Last hero and his followers are AA's minions that imo makes them good candidates to be the same thing as the AA people @LmL was talking about who are in the trees on the Isle of Faces.  I am imagining the Last Hero and his people doing whatever they did to end the long night, then sacrificing themselves to the trees on the Isle of Faces to help maintain what they did.  Tywin like whoever was defeated and/or sacrificed himself to end the long night who should not die alone.  He needs his followers to sacrifice themselves to travel to the afterlife with him.                 

[Unchained]

3 hours ago, Seams said:

This thread, and the idea that certain elements repeat in a pattern that leads to the forging of Lightbringer, reminds me of a thread by @Kingmonkey from a little while back:

There are several posts that together present the theory and a number of examples, and they are lengthy, but this quote and the bulleted  and numbered points get at the main ideas for anyone who wants a tl;dr:

• A lot of these events concern the birthing of dragons.
• There's a strong thread of blood magic running through these echoes.

 

1. Seven against three.
2. Three Kingsguards, or some equivalent / cloaked figures.
3. Event takes place at sunset with a blood-red sky.
4. Ghost / wraith imagery.
5. A tower long fallen / destroyed at the end of the event.
6. A parley before the battle.
7. Promises and vows.
8. A refusal to flee.
9. A great red stallion / stallion on fire.
10. A notably martial woman.
11. The sign of the falling star / red comet.
12. Animal totems.
13. Bloody walls.
14. Eight deaths.
15. A maegi or possibly similar wise/magical figures.

Your thread, @Unchained, sees the specific blood magic as King's blood, and the outcome as the forging of Lightbringer (or an echo / foreshadowing of that forging). Kingmonkey saw the pattern leading to the hatching of dragons. I see these two outcomes as completely compatible, with the comet -  and the many ways people interpreted it - as the unifying evidence that dragons and flaming swords are the same thing.

Some of the very specific elements in the 2015 post probably don't match all the specifics of the wedding patterns you analyzed, but I bet we could learn by comparing the pattern you laid out with the elements Kingmonkey identified. The differences in the posts may tell us some important things about seemingly disparate characters, or allow us to make predictions.

For instance, I just did a close reading of Arya VIII in ACoK for the Direwolf Re-read. I find that a lot of the elements are the same as Joffrey's wedding feast, with Weese dying at the end of the Arya POV and Joffrey, of course, dying at his own wedding feast. The author seems to be comparing and contrasting Arya and Sansa's roles in the two chapters, the key difference being that Arya is the active murderer (enlisting Jaqen to kill Weese) while Sansa is the unwitting wearer of the poisoned hairnet. I'm still thinking through the question of why GRRM would want us to compare Weese's broken promise to give Arya part of a roasted chicken with Joffrey's broken betrothal to Sansa, but the pattern with lots of surrounding details seems pretty clear. I don't see the Arya chapter leading to the forging of Lightbringer (or a symbolic substitute for Lightbringer) but she does visit the work area of the smiths at Harrenhal, and she does handle a sword. This could also be a story like Bran's "wedding," discussed earlier in this thread, that is split over a couple of chapters.

Hey Seams, 

 

You have been throwing a lot of great stuff my way recently and I am slow to comprehend it all, I have a list of things I want to get back to you on, but am not ready for yet.  I have not seen the thread you mention, but I saw a similar thread on a different forum about "Tower of Joy" parallel scenes.  Some preceded Lightbringer scenes, but a lot of Lightbringer scenes seem to lack them.  The actual ToJ fight precedes Jon's birth, and includes a death of the white bull Ser Hightower which LmL points out as a Mithras reference.  The birth of Dany's dragons has another scene like this before it with the fight outside Drogo's tent.  There is another one outside Littlefinger's brothel with Ned in the opposite role as he  was at the ToJ before King Bob's death.  The mystery of these scenes is tied up with the Lightbringer scenes, I agree, but I have no idea how.  The red horses get my attention, they remind me of Drogo's fiery smoky horse and I wonder if the red horse riders are not the main sacrifices at these rituals.        

[GloubieBoulga]

5 hours ago, Unchained said:

Another theme I do not understand is the quiet, Euron's ship and crew, Ghost the mute direwolf, Ilyn Payne the mute executioner, but it is present as well.

There are also Varys' little birds (who "whisper") and the ravens and the crows who were supposed to really speak in the past, if we believe Leaf in BR's cave. For me they all symbolize a voluntary privation to never speak truly : the only story permitted is a lie, as it happen during Joffrey's wedding, where singers are concurring singing storie that are all lies or "deformed truth" (as Sansa expresses). For example, Ilyn Payne has lost his tongue after he has told that Tywin was the real king and not Aerys II. Now, his voice is croacking like a crow. (crows at the Wall => is the wall a gag ?). Forging a Lightbringer is a manner to bring the light and enlightening the truth; as a sword, it can also cut a veil and reveal what is hidden beyond the veil.

 

There are also others "speaking hability privation" : Patchface who has no more his own speach, and Tyrion after the Blackwater, dreaming he has no more mouth; or Brienne after she was "killed" by Biter, dreaming that she cuts her own tongue (I think that here, we can specifically make a link with Varamyr trying to skinchange Thistle (she cuts her tongue), and that's a clue to indicate a temporaly "possession" by a greenseer - probably in the case of Tyrion, Brienne and Patchface to make them survive)

 

6 hours ago, Unchained said:

 At the end of the chapter Cersei talks about making the sleeping guards sleep forever (79 sentinels?), and thinks Tyrion's hands are closing around her neck, which screams of the ending to the AGoT prologue.

I like the link you make here !

 

6 hours ago, Unchained said:

More Tyrion (Targaryen) monkey stuff, unrelated to this, but I am just pointing out everything I see.

There is a people (in TWOIAF) who tells that the one who put an end to the "Long Night" was a woman with a monkey's tail. Could it be a little joke to speak about the couple Sansa-Tyrion ?

6 hours ago, Unchained said:

She drinks lemon water, which seems to represent her bitterness, and a moth gets in Ser Boros' lantern casting large shadow wings on the wall further connecting this scene to Dany and Drogon.

I think lemon play the opposit part of the mint : it is a solar fruit, strongly associated with summer and warmth, and the rebirth of the dragons is very similar as the phoenix rebirth. In the saga, the lemon take the place of myrrha, thym aso of the antic versions of the myth. 

The mint is associated with LF, who plays with Sansa and the Tully girls the part of a king of the underworld (that's explicite when he wants to share a pome-granate with Sansa in Sansa VI ASOS)

To resume, I think there is a hidden story in this serie, and the "wedding" is a part of this untold story. A wedding at Winterfell ? 

[Praetor Xyn]

On 2/26/2017 at 11:32 AM, GloubieBoulga said:

(Funny because I just discovered a ancient and popular tradition in England (more particulary in Wales and Ireland) who was called "bundling" : when two young people were interested by eachother, their parents could organize a "bundling" before an eventually marriage : the parents of the young woman invited the young man in their house. Then, he was bundled in a sack and put in the bed with the young woman. The two had the night for them. This practice is attested in 17e and 18e centuries, but during victorian period was abandonned. We know it because chistians predicators and priests were strongly against this tradition.

She gained apparently some new interest in 60's but it seems ot was more fokloric than a real return of ancient tradition. And in a society who permit relation without being married, it has less justification.) 

Just wanted to point out that in the movie The Patriot, there's a part where a bundling occurs. The father doesn't like it but is courteous to the suitor. He and the mother are in bed discussing it, and she says something along the lines of "Just be thankful I sew better than my mother did." which I thought was a great line.

[Seams]

8 hours ago, Unchained said:

She drinks lemon water, which seems to represent her bitterness, and a moth gets in Ser Boros' lantern casting large shadow wings on the wall further connecting this scene to Dany and Drogon. ...

Another theme I do not understand is the quiet, Euron's ship and crew, Ghost the mute direwolf, Ilyn Payne the mute executioner, but it is present as well.  

The bells must ring for him, as they rang for Robert. He must be bathed and dressed

as befits his stature, in ermine and cloth-of-gold and crimson silk.

There are those damn bells I do not understand. Also, he will be dressed as a fiery dancer in yellow and gold silk.

I don't think the lemon is about Cersei's bitterness - or not entirely about that, at any rate. It has to do with dental hygiene, apparently. Teeth come up a lot in the books and GRRM seems to want to call attention to Cersei's teeth - including the reference to the missing tooth - at this point when she feels her opportunity to assume leadership. The other person who uses lemon for dental health is Lord Commander Mormont, who takes lemon in his morning beer but never in his spiced wine. (Has there been a thread devoted to teeth, biting, wooden teeth = practice swords, mouths of caves, The Black Gate, Lion's Tooth, the Frost Fangs, etc.?)

The muteness may start to become clearer as part of a larger set of symbols involving the five senses. For instance, Maester Aemon is blind but he sees and understands things that no one else perceives. Jaime's missing fingers sometimes tingle. Deaf Dick Follard can't hear, but is able to read lips. Bran eating the weirwood paste and Dany drinking the shade of the evening taste a lot of different things within one bowl or glass. There are a number of references to people being able to smell lies (Weese, The Hound) or cold (Dywen, Jon Snow) and, of course, Tywin's corpse and Reek are extremely stinky. Cersei seems to feel alive in King's Landing, where she describes the smells in the streets as she begins her naked walk from the Sept to the Red Keep. By contrast, Ned feels alive in the gods wood, where it tends to be quiet. Tyrion loses a nose to a sword; Myrcella loses an ear, Jaime loses a hand, Ser Ilyn loses a tongue. Which Lannister supporter or ally will go blind, I wonder.

The point of the mute characters is that these are people to whom we should be listening, or who have been silenced for telling truths. The Manderly group teaching Wex Pyke to write is going to help us understand this symbol better, I think. There seems to be a lot of wordplay around the sword / words pun, with one great example being Joffrey destroying a book with a sword. It is not a coincidence that Wex uses a knife to carve his letters after he is taught to write.

Bells really do seem to be associated strongly with Robert because of the Battle of the Bells, his daughter Bella and Patchface's antler bucket / helmet with bells attached. Part of me is tempted to say that GRRM is making a joke about Gendry or Renly being a "dead ringer" for Robert. There may be other wordplay around the word "ring" - something to do with Ilyrio's rings or with the links on a maester's chain or the zillions of other rings that seem to appear throughout the books.

But our other major bell clue is the fool called Jinglebell, whose real name is Aegon Frey. Catelyn takes him with her when she dies, of course. We believe that Cersei helped to kill Robert (by encouraging his squire to get him drunk while he was hunting) and we know that Catelyn kills "Aegon," making them both kingslayers in an indirect and symbolic sense. I also think the name Jinglebell is intended to evoke a secular Christmas theme, which is associated with the pagan Boar's Head Festival, which relates to Robert and his death as well as Robb and his death and beheading.

Chances are that Cersei's insistence on bells for Tywin is her way of demanding that he be treated like a king.

The clothes Cersei orders for the dressing of Tywin's body are similar to the clothes he wore when he departed Harrenhal to do battle with Robb Stark's army in ACoK. (I would cite the passage but I'm at work and the ASOIAF search site doesn't seem to work on these computers.) That she specifies ermine is particularly interesting: this is the white, winter version of the coat of a stoat, a type of weasel. Wearing a fur in ASOIAF often symbolizes skinchanging - why would Tywin be turning into a stoat or weasel? Arya is known as weasel at one point (in fact, she is the POV that reports what Tywin was wearing when he departed Harrenhal) and she asks Jaqen to kill her boss, Weese, but realizes too late that she should have asked him to kill Tywin. Furthermore, when Daven Lannister is told that he must marry a Frey for diplomatic reasons, he obediently agrees to wed and bed his "stoat," indicating that he thinks the Freys tend to look like weasels. Jaime thinks that Daven looks like a lion, so this seems to be a lion - stoat hybrid in the making.

Maybe the weasel symbolism and the stench of Tywin's body are related: he has done a lot of lying, cheating and deceiving in his life. Weese says that he can smell a lie; maybe the odor of Tywin's corpse is a symbol of how many lies he has told over the years. As he teams up with the Freys to catch and kill Robb Stark, he becomes a weasel like his new allies, "skinchanging" into their ermine coats and taking on a new layer of deception and subterfuge.

Further complication: ermine is also the name for a species of moth. You mentioned the doomed moth trapped in a lantern as Cersei climbs the stairs to her father's bedchamber. What layer of meaning is GRRM implying here with Tywin compared to a moth? Did Cersei secretly wish he would hurry up and die? (Maybe Cersei's insistence on tolling bells is an "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee" allusion, indicating that she predicted/wanted the doom of both Robert and Tywin.) In keeping with GRRM's cyclical view of death and rebirth, after his death, will Tywin be reborn as a caterpillar?

[ravenous reader]

18 hours ago, Unchained said:

Cersei thinks that Tywin's death means the 'bright star of the west' has fallen and the nights will be darker now.  At the dragon hatching, the comet is the bright star in the west.

At the dragon hatching, the comet was in the east, not west (not sure it changes the symbolism though):

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A Game of Thrones - Daenerys X

When a horselord dies, his horse is slain with him, so he might ride proud into the night lands. The bodies are burned beneath the open sky, and the khal rises on his fiery steed to take his place among the stars. The more fiercely the man burned in life, the brighter his star will shine in the darkness.

Jhogo spied it first. "There," he said in a hushed voice. Dany looked and saw it, low in the east. The first star was a comet, burning red. Bloodred; fire red; the dragon's tail. She could not have asked for a stronger sign.

Come to think of it, symbolically perhaps it's important here that the comet rises in the east not west, since it means that Dany has not yet fulfilled Mirri Maz Duur's prophecy, in which the sun (basically a 'star' or comet) will rise in the west:

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A Game of Thrones - Daenerys IX

"When will he be as he was?" Dany demanded.

"When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east," said Mirri Maz Duur. "When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When your womb quickens again, and you bear a living child. Then he will return, and not before."

 

18 hours ago, Unchained said:

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Horrified, she tried to cover herself with her hands. The barbs and blades of the Iron Throne bit into her flesh as she crouched to hide her shame. Blood ran red down her legs, as steel teeth gnawed at her buttocks. When she tried to stand, her foot slipped through a gap in the twisted metal. The more she struggled the more the throne engulfed her, tearing chunks of flesh from her breasts and belly, slicing at her arms and legs until they were slick and red, glistening.

And all the while her brother capered below, laughing.

His merriment still echoed in her ears when she felt a light touch on her shoulder, and woke suddenly. For half a heartbeat the hand seemed part of the nightmare, and Cersei cried out, but it was only Senelle. The maid's face was white and frightened. --AFfC, Cersei 1

 

 

That sounds a lot like Dany's 'wake the dragon' dream with a touch of Melisandre's vision in the flames with the blood running down her leg.  They come before a ritual event and bring to mind the two-way consumption idea, the dreamer is set free and consumed, empowered and destroyed, the sacrifice and the reborn product.  It sounds like Cersei is being consumed by the bloodthirsty tree throne of the (greenseer) king.

Good catch on this example of the two-way consumption motif we've identified with the weirwood elsewhere.  The 'slick and glistening' blood is reminiscent of 'moon [i.e. menstrual and meteoral] blood' and the 'bed of blood' of the birthing bed, particularly the slimy sheen covering any newborn. 

18 hours ago, Unchained said:

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He has only one hand, she wanted to shout at them. One of you should have gone. He has no business climbing ladders. The men who murdered Father might be down there, waiting for him. Her twin had always been too rash, and it would seem that even losing a hand had not taught him caution. She was about to command the guards to go down after him and bring him back when Puckens and Shortear returned with a grey-haired man between them. "Your Grace," said Shortear, "this here claims he was a maester."

Jaime has no fear like Cersei and the Night's King.

Bear in mind that viewpoint is filtered through Cersei's warped perspective.  Actually, it's the other way around -- Cersei has always been more fearless than her twin:

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A Dance with Dragons - Cersei II

Even so, she was afraid. On the day Myrcella sailed for Dorne, the day of the bread riots, gold cloaks had been posted all along the route of the procession, but the mob had broken through their lines to tear the old fat High Septon into pieces and rape Lollys Stokeworth half a hundred times. And if that pale soft stupid creature could incite the animals when fully clothed, how much more lust would a queen inspire?

Cersei paced her cell, restless as the caged lions that had lived in the bowels of Casterly Rock when she was a girl, a legacy of her grandfather's time. She and Jaime used to dare each other to climb into their cage, and once she worked up enough courage to slip her hand between two bars and touch one of the great tawny beasts. She was always bolder than her brother. The lion had turned his head to stare at her with huge golden eyes. Then he licked her fingers. His tongue was as rough as a rasp, but even so she would not pull her hand back, not until Jaime took her by the shoulders and yanked her away from the cage.

"Your turn," she told him afterward. "Pull his mane, I dare you." He never did. I should have had the sword, not him.

Also, note Cersei is lumped in with the 'caged lions' which evokes the greenseers in their 'birdcages' or 'ribcages (like Nagga's)' -- (have you read my original thoughts on that? -- read here; scroll down to section entitled in purple 'Deconstructing the Birdcage').

18 hours ago, Unchained said:

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"Girl?" Cersei had overlooked the second body. She strode to the bed, flung aside the heap of bloody coverlets, and there she was, naked, cold, and pink . . . save for her face, which had turned as black as Joff's had at his wedding feast. A chain of linked golden hands was half-buried in the flesh of her throat, twisted so tight that it had broken the skin. Cersei hissed like an angry cat. "What is she doing here?"

Maybe some mythical astronomy darkening of the moon's face by the sun?  Inversion of lunar revenge?

I'm sure @LmL can dissect the mythical astronomy aspects of the scene better than I can.  I would have thought Tyrion played the role of 'naughty greenseer' starting out from his 'imprisonment' in the 'hollow hill' represented by the Red Keep dungeon, then, unchained, ascending to wreak havoc, punching a hole in the ceiling=celestial dome, as it were, via the secret trapdoor in the hearth; and then playing the role of 'comet' first bringing down a moon (Shae) which always explodes, undergoing a color change from fiery red to burnt-out black; and secondly proceeding to darkening a sun (Tywin).  Had Shae not been there (the moon wandering too close to the sun), it's possible Tyrion may not have been emotionally roused to kill Tywin.  The sun suffered by its conjunction with the moon (a bit like Rhaegar's conjunction with Lyanna, which led to the horned lord Robert killing him).  In the Tywin-Shae scenario, Tyrion is the horned lord with his greenseer imagery (the capering fool imagery is greenseer imagery...remember Patchface's 'clever bird, clever man, clever fool') as well as the fact that he has literally been cuckolded (i.e. 'given horns') by Tywin and Shae in their traitorous tryst.  The greenseer-controlled comet and the moon wrestle, culminating in the moon's death and unleashing the fired-up comet from the encounter, who goes on to poison the sun (who is not the 'son' but the father, ha ha...).  

Later on, Tyrion significantly muses that some part of himself died in King's Landing, leaving only his vengeful 'revenant' -- a revenant is something or someone that returns, with ghostly connotations of 'haunting' someone, so that would correlate with Oathkeeper and the second half of the broken comet, with the part which died representing Tyrion's humanity which arguably died when he murdered his nearest and dearest (he had murdered other people before, e.g. the singer who got turned into a euphemistic bowl of brown, but never someone close to him, so I think that deadened something in his psyche), correlating with Widow's Wail (AA killing his wife) and the first half of the comet.

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A Dance with Dragons - Tyrion V

The sudden cold hit Tyrion like a hammer. As he sank he felt a stone hand fumbling at his face. Another closed around his arm, dragging him down into darkness. Blind, his nose full of river, choking, sinking, he kicked and twisted and fought to pry the clutching fingers off his arm, but the stone fingers were unyielding. Air bubbled from his lips. The world was black and growing blacker. He could not breathe.

There are worse ways to die than drowning. And if truth be told, he had perished long ago, back in King's Landing. It was only his revenant who remained, the small vengeful ghost who throttled Shae and put a crossbow bolt through the great Lord Tywin's bowels. No man would mourn the thing that he'd become. I'll haunt the Seven Kingdoms, he thought, sinking deeper. They would not love me living, so let them dread me dead.

When he opened his mouth to curse them all, black water filled his lungs, and the dark closed in around him.

 

18 hours ago, Unchained said:

After waking, she checks to see if all her fingers are there, I do not really understand the 'chopped off fingers' motif of the Halfhand, Davos, and the Greatjon, but it is here.

Nor do I really comprehend it.  Perhaps it has to do with the pervasive 'sacrificing oneself for power' motif we've identified?  In Norse Mythology, Odin sacrificed himself by hanging himself on the tree, stabbing himself and putting out one of his own eyes for knowledge.  In recompense, he received the gift of the runes -- the gift of poetry!

Why hands?  Because eyes and hands are the most important faculties for all primates, including humans.  They are also disproportionately represented on our cerebral hemispheres, together with our lips/tongues/mouths.  Hence, the loss of such an important body part and essential function represents the exaction of a steep price.  People tend to lose parts of their hands before gaining power.  Pardon me for mixing my metaphors, but it's a case of 'cutting off ones nose to spite ones face'...personal loss as the price to be paid for any pursuit of power, posing the inevitable question, 'was it worth it?'  For example, Jon also burns his hand shortly before receiving Lightbringer and being promoted by LC Mormont.  Jaime loses his hand before attaining moral enlightenment.  Bran loses legs instead of hands as his rite of passage as a greenseer. Theon suffers castration and penectomy as the foreplay for his redemption, etc.

18 hours ago, Unchained said:

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No, that cannot be. That is not the way a lion dies. The queen felt strangely calm. She remembered the first time she had lost a tooth, when she was just a little girl. It hadn't hurt, but the hole in her mouth felt so odd she could not stop touching it with her tongue. Now there is a hole in the world where Father stood, and holes want filling.

If Tywin Lannister was truly dead, no one was safe . . . least of all her son upon his throne. When the lion falls the lesser beasts move in: the jackals and the vultures and the feral dogs. They would try to push her aside, as they always had. She would need to move quickly, as she had when Robert died. This might be the work of Stannis Baratheon, through some catspaw. It could well be the prelude to another attack upon the city. She hoped it was. Let him come. I will smash him, just as Father did, and this time he will die. Stannis did not frighten her, no more than Mace Tyrell did. No one frightened her. She was a daughter of the Rock, a lion. There will be no more talk of forcing me to wed again. Casterly Rock was hers now, and all the power of House Lannister. No one would ever disregard her again. Even when Tommen had no further need of a regent, the Lady of Casterly Rock would remain a power in the land.

 

    Holes want filling and someone is reborn to replace every ruler who dies, Cersei wants to be this one.  I see two ways to read the 2nd bolded quote.  Either she is afraid of 'no one', a nameless greenseer/faceless man which is sort of the same thing in some way, or she has no fear like the Night's King and is ready to shatter taboos in the pursuit of power.  

The loss of the tooth, which since it's Tywin's is a lion's tooth, is reminiscent of Arya disarming Joffrey by 'pulling [the] Lion's Tooth' and tossing it in the river.  The canine tooth represents power, so its loss represents a fear of powerlessness, Cersei's motivating principle.  

Good catch with 'no one frightened her'.  As we know, Cersei is indeed frightened of someone -- the unidentified spectre and looming threat of the mysterious 'valonqar'.  Could this prove to be Arya, and not either Jaime or Tyrion, as we've been led to expect?  Alternatively, one may read that equivocal statement as an indication of Cersei's growing paranoia.  People who are paranoid usually pursue fears that are groundless-- fear of no one -- from the vantage point of the outside observer.  Arguably, much of Cersei's downfall is of her own making -- making mountains out of molehills, someone out of no-one.

18 hours ago, Unchained said:

Another theme I do not understand is the quiet, Euron's ship and crew, Ghost the mute direwolf, Ilyn Payne the mute executioner, but it is present as well.  

I don't have a grip on that one either.  GRRM seems to be keen on exploring alternative 'languages,' including silent yet potent 'dialects'.  Thus, Ilyn Payne lets his sword do the talking!  (remember, he who passes the sentence must swing the sword; thus the swinging of the sword is a sentence, not only in the sense of a punishment, but in its linguistic sense, as an expression of language!)  

12 hours ago, GloubieBoulga said:

There are also Varys' little birds (who "whisper") and the ravens and the crows who were supposed to really speak in the past, if we believe Leaf in BR's cave. For me they all symbolize a voluntary privation to never speak truly : the only story permitted is a lie, as it happen during Joffrey's wedding, where singers are concurring singing storie that are all lies or "deformed truth" (as Sansa expresses). For example, Ilyn Payne has lost his tongue after he has told that Tywin was the real king and not Aerys II. Now, his voice is croacking like a crow. (crows at the Wall => is the wall a gag ?). Forging a Lightbringer is a manner to bring the light and enlightening the truth; as a sword, it can also cut a veil and reveal what is hidden beyond the veil.

Sometimes the sword speaks more truly than the word!  Seams' sword/word pun again.

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There are also others "speaking hability privation" : Patchface who has no more his own speach, and Tyrion after the Blackwater, dreaming he has no more mouth; or Brienne after she was "killed" by Biter, dreaming that she cuts her own tongue (I think that here, we can specifically make a link with Varamyr trying to skinchange Thistle (she cuts her tongue), and that's a clue to indicate a temporaly "possession" by a greenseer - probably in the case of Tyrion, Brienne and Patchface to make them survive)

You think they were possessed by greenseers as a form of resuscitation?  I have been having an argument with Dorian over on @Cowboy Dan's thread on 'light warging' about such subtle forms of greenseer possession.  He contends it's impossible for someone to be possessed by a greenseer without realising it.

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Tywin needing people to die with him makes me think of the terracotta warriors of China, and other similar death rituals that provide people to serve the dead king in the afterlife.  I think there were Viking kings that had there wife burned alive with them on there funeral pyres (like Dany at the dragon hatching and a greenseer king being set on fire with his tree wife?!?).  I will come back to the idea of people dying alongside AA later in this meandering post.

By all indications, some sort of mass sacrifice was enacted in the past -- and presided over by the greenseers -- in order to achieve some objective (appeasement of the gods, bringing down a moon..?)

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The World of Ice and Fire - Dorne: The Breaking

The children fought back as best they could, but the First Men were larger and stronger. Riding their horses, clad and armed in bronze, the First Men overwhelmed the elder race wherever they met, for the weapons of the children were made of bone and wood and dragonglass. Finally, driven by desperation, the little people turned to sorcery and beseeched their greenseers to stem the tide of these invaders.

And so they did, gathering in their hundreds (some say on the Isle of Faces), and calling on their old gods with song and prayer and grisly sacrifice (a thousand captive men were fed to the weirwood, one version of the tale goes, whilst another claims the children used the blood of their own young). And the old gods stirred, and giants awoke in the earth, and all of Westeros shook and trembled. Great cracks appeared in the earth, and hills and mountains collapsed and were swallowed up. And then the seas came rushing in, and the Arm of Dorne was broken and shattered by the force of the water, until only a few bare rocky islands remained above the waves. The Summer Sea joined the narrow sea, and the bridge between Essos and Westeros vanished for all time.

Or so the legend says.

 

18 hours ago, Unchained said:

This a straightforward connection to the Red Wedding, hearts bursting (Nissa Nissa?), and a mistress.  Tywin used another woman besides the one Robb was supposed to marry to bring him down and he got taste of his own medicine here.  It just now occurs to me that Tytos was married to another Jeyne.   

Tytos's heart 'bursting' has always struck me as suspicious.  Perhaps someone aided that heart to burst in some way?  Tywin perhaps?  Interestingly, Cersei's heart is said to 'flutter' (a dangerous, often fatal heart murmur) as she climbs the stairs.  Is that foreshadowing that her heart like her grandfather's will also oneday 'burst', perhaps with the assistance of another (the 'valonqar' perhaps?)  Cersei's fluttering heart is like the fluttering moth flying into the flame (Shae's hands trying to fend off Tyrion at her death are also described as 'fluttering moths beating at his face'; the weirwood's leaves are described as 'a thousand fluttering bloodstained hands'; and when Sansa thinks of Littlefinger or Joffrey she feels bats 'fluttering' in her belly).

 

18 hours ago, Unchained said:

Feeding to dogs after death is the same as feeding to crows after death.  I think both are a symbol for going into the WWnet upon death.  

That's interesting.  Did you catch the bit about the burning wood releasing a hungry, red, fiery dog in the passage I quoted above?

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 Melisandre raised her hands, and the ditchfire leapt upward toward her fingers, like a great red dog springing for a treat. A swirl of sparks rose to meet the snowflakes coming down. "Oh, Lord of Light, we thank you,"she sang to the hungry flames.

The red dog is dancing (leaping, springing, swirling)!  

So Unchained, I ask you this -- once the greenseer is in the weirnet, does he represent a chained or unchained dog, or both?!

8 hours ago, Seams said:

I don't think the lemon is about Cersei's bitterness - or not entirely about that, at any rate. It has to do with dental hygiene, apparently. Teeth come up a lot in the books and GRRM seems to want to call attention to Cersei's teeth - including the reference to the missing tooth - at this point when she feels her opportunity to assume leadership. The other person who uses lemon for dental health is Lord Commander Mormont, who takes lemon in his morning beer but never in his spiced wine. (Has there been a thread devoted to teeth, biting, wooden teeth = practice swords, mouths of caves, The Black Gate, Lion's Tooth, the Frost Fangs, etc.?)

@Lost Melnibonean gives a good summary re: the bitterness of lemons symbolism.

12 hours ago, GloubieBoulga said:

I think lemon play the opposit part of the mint : it is a solar fruit, strongly associated with summer and warmth, and the rebirth of the dragons is very similar as the phoenix rebirth.

You might say the lemon 'bursts' with juice and flavor!

I think citrus in general -- including lemons (e.g. lemon cakes and pies), limes (e.g. the limewash used in the preparation of the Strangler crystals) and oranges (e.g. Doran's blood-oranges) -- represents the double-edged sword of power.  In other words, the power of preservation (e.g. keeping ones teeth, and using magical means of assuring immortality) combined with the power of destruction (including self-destruction and death).  

Some substantiating quotes:

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A Storm of Swords - Samwell II

"The m-maesters think not," Sam stammered. "The maesters say it comes from the fires of the earth. They call it obsidian."

Mormont snorted. "They can call it lemon pie for all I care. If it kills as you claim, I want more of it."

 

A Clash of Kings - Tyrion V

And Cersei began to cry.

Tyrion Lannister could not have been more astonished if Aegon the Conqueror himself had burst into the room, riding on a dragon and juggling lemon pies. He had not seen his sister weep since they were children together at Casterly Rock. Awkwardly, he took a step toward her. When your sister cries, you were supposed to comfort her . . . but this was Cersei! He reached a tentative hand for her shoulder.

"Don't touch me," she said, wrenching away. It should not have hurt, yet it did, more than any slap. Red-faced, as angry as she was grief-stricken, Cersei struggled for breath. "Don't look at me, not . . . not like this . . . not you."

 

A Dance with Dragons - The Ugly Little Girl

Still as stone, she thought. She sat unmoving. The cut was quick, the blade sharp. By rights the metal should have been cold against her flesh, but it felt warm instead. She could feel the blood washing down her face, a rippling red curtain falling across her brow and cheeks and chin, and she understood why the priest had made her close her eyes. When it reached her lips the taste was salt and copper. She licked at it and shivered.

"Bring me the face," said the kindly man. The waif made no answer, but she could hear her slippers whispering over the stone floor. To the girl he said, "Drink this," and pressed a cup into her hand. She drank it down at once. It was very tart, like biting into a lemon. A thousand years ago, she had known a girl who loved lemon cakes. No, that was not me, that was only Arya.

"Mummers change their faces with artifice," the kindly man was saying, "and sorcerers use glamors, weaving light and shadow and desire to make illusions that trick the eye. These arts you shall learn, but what we do here goes deeper. Wise men can see through artifice, and glamors dissolve before sharp eyes, but the face you are about to don will be as true and solid as that face you were born with. Keep your eyes closed." She felt his fingers brushing back her hair. "Stay still. This will feel queer. You may be dizzy, but you must not move."

 

A Clash of Kings - Tyrion V

Tyrion remembered the red priest Thoros of Myr and his flaming sword. Even a thin coating of wildfire could burn for an hour. Thoros always needed a new sword after a melee, but Robert had been fond of the man and ever glad to provide one. "Why doesn't it seep into the clay as well?"

"Oh, but it does," said Hallyne. "There is a vault below this one where we store the older pots. Those from King Aerys's day. It was his fancy to have the jars made in the shapes of fruits. Very perilous fruits indeed, my lord Hand, and, hmmm, riper now than ever, if you take my meaning. 

...

. "These, ah, fruits of the late King Aerys, can they still be used?"

"Oh, yes, most certainly . . . but carefully, my lord, ever so carefully. As it ages, the substance grows ever more, hmmmm, fickle, let us say. Any flame will set it afire. Any spark. Too much heat and jars will blaze up of their own accord. It is not wise to let them sit in sunlight, even for a short time. Once the fire begins within, the heat causes the substance to expand violently, and the jars shortly fly to pieces. If other jars should happen to be stored in the same vicinity, those go up as well, and so—"

 

The World of Ice and Fire - The Targaryen Kings: Aerys II

Henceforth, His Grace told Pycelle, the realm would know for a certainty that the man who wore the crown also ruled the Seven Kingdoms.

Aerys Targaryen and Tywin Lannister had met as boys, had fought and bled together in the War of the Ninepenny Kings, and had ruled the Seven Kingdoms together for close to twenty years, but in 281 AC this long partnership, which had proved so fruitful to the realm, came to a bitter end.

 

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The muteness may start to become clearer as part of a larger set of symbols involving the five senses. For instance, Maester Aemon is blind but he sees and understands things that no one else perceives. Jaime's missing fingers sometimes tingle. Deaf Dick Follard can't hear, but is able to read lips. Bran eating the weirwood paste and Dany drinking the shade of the evening taste a lot of different things within one bowl or glass. There are a number of references to people being able to smell lies (Weese, The Hound) or cold (Dywen, Jon Snow) and, of course, Tywin's corpse and Reek are extremely stinky. Cersei seems to feel alive in King's Landing, where she describes the smells in the streets as she begins her naked walk from the Sept to the Red Keep. By contrast, Ned feels alive in the gods wood, where it tends to be quiet. Tyrion loses a nose to a sword; Myrcella loses an ear, Jaime loses a hand, Ser Ilyn loses a tongue. Which Lannister supporter or ally will go blind, I wonder.

Skinchanging accentuates certain senses over others and makes the world come vividly alive, as you noted:

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A Clash of Kings - Bran I

It was dark amongst the trees, but the comet lit his way, and his feet were sure. He was moving on four good legs, strong and swift, and he could feel the ground underfoot, the soft crackling of fallen leaves, thick roots and hard stones, the deep layers of humus. It was a good feeling.

The smells filled his head, alive and intoxicating; the green muddy stink of the hot pools, the perfume of rich rotting earth beneath his paws, the squirrels in the oaks. The scent of squirrel made him remember the taste of hot blood and the way the bones would crack between his teeth. Slaver filled his mouth. He had eaten no more than half a day past, but there was no joy in dead meat, even deer. He could hear the squirrels chittering and rustling above him, safe among their leaves, but they knew better than to come down to where his brother and he were prowling.

He could smell his brother too, a familiar scent, strong and earthy, his scent as black as his coat. His brother was loping around the walls, full of fury. Round and round he went, night after day after night, tireless, searching . . . for prey, for a way out, for his mother, his littermates, his pack . . . searching, searching, and never finding.

 

A Dance with Dragons - Bran I

Behind the ranger, Meera Reed wrapped her arms around her brother, to shelter him from the wind and cold with the warmth of her own body. A crust of frozen snot had formed below Jojen's nose, and from time to time he shivered violently. He looks so small, Bran thought, as he watched him sway. He looks smaller than me now, and weaker too, and I'm the cripple.

Summer brought up the rear of their little band. The direwolf's breath frosted the forest air as he padded after them, still limping on the hind leg that had taken the arrow back at Queenscrown. Bran felt the pain of the old wound whenever he slipped inside the big wolf's skin. Of late Bran wore Summer's body more often than his own; the wolf felt the bite of the cold, despite the thickness of his fur, but he could see farther and hear better and smell more than the boy in the basket, bundled up like a babe in swaddling clothes.

Seams, I also thought you'd be interested in the latter quote, particularly in light of your 'bundle' research.

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Bells really do seem to be associated strongly with Robert because of the Battle of the Bells, his daughter Bella and Patchface's antler bucket / helmet with bells attached. Part of me is tempted to say that GRRM is making a joke about Gendry or Renly being a "dead ringer" for Robert. There may be other wordplay around the word "ring" - something to do with Ilyrio's rings or with the links on a maester's chain or the zillions of other rings that seem to appear throughout the books.

'Dead ringer' -- that's a good one!    I also like the idea of 'for whom the bell tolls-- it tolls for thee...'

There might also be a religious aspect, considering GRRM has a Catholic background.  Notably, the bells are rung at key points in the Catholic mass, particularly to signal the 'transubstantiation' of the bread and the wine via which they are transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ, according to Catholic belief.  Thus, the bells accompany a sacrifice embodying redemption.

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But our other major bell clue is the fool called Jinglebell, whose real name is Aegon Frey. Catelyn takes him with her when she dies, of course. We believe that Cersei helped to kill Robert (by encouraging his squire to get him drunk while he was hunting) and we know that Catelyn kills "Aegon," making them both kingslayers in an indirect and symbolic sense. I also think the name Jinglebell is intended to evoke a secular Christmas theme, which is associated with the pagan Boar's Head Festival, which relates to Robert and his death as well as Robb and his death and beheading.

Chances are that Cersei's insistence on bells for Tywin is her way of demanding that he be treated like a king.

The clothes Cersei orders for the dressing of Tywin's body are similar to the clothes he wore when he departed Harrenhal to do battle with Robb Stark's army in ACoK. (I would cite the passage but I'm at work and the ASOIAF search site doesn't seem to work on these computers.) That she specifies ermine is particularly interesting: this is the white, winter version of the coat of a stoat, a type of weasel. Wearing a fur in ASOIAF often symbolizes skinchanging - why would Tywin be turning into a stoat or weasel? Arya is known as weasel at one point (in fact, she is the POV that reports what Tywin was wearing when he departed Harrenhal) and she asks Jaqen to kill her boss, Weese, but realizes too late that she should have asked him to kill Tywin. Furthermore, when Daven Lannister is told that he must marry a Frey for diplomatic reasons, he obediently agrees to wed and bed his "stoat," indicating that he thinks the Freys tend to look like weasels. Jaime thinks that Daven looks like a lion, so this seems to be a lion - stoat hybrid in the making.

Maybe the ermine is part of the 'sable/martin' group -- biologically, sables, martins, weasels, minks, stoats, ferrets, badgers, otters and wolverines are all related as members of the Mustelidae.  Arya is associated with a number of these -- among them, weasels, otters and wolverines.

The rotting corpse of Lord Tywin draped in the snowy ermine clearly signals that 'Winter has come' for Tywin at last.  What Cersei fails to realise is that it has come for House Lannister at large -- and is coming in a big way for her.

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A Storm of Swords - Tyrion VII

.It was not enough, though. He had wrapped his cloak around her shoulders and sworn to protect her, but that was as cruel a jape as the crown the Freys had placed atop the head of Robb Stark's direwolf after they'd sewn it onto his headless corpse. Sansa knew that as well. The way she looked at him, her stiffness when she climbed into their bed . . . when he was with her, never for an instant could he forget who he was, or what he was. No more than she did. She still went nightly to the godswood to pray, and Tyrion wondered if she were praying for his death. She had lost her home, her place in the world, and everyone she had ever loved or trusted. Winter is coming, warned the Stark words, and truly it had come for them with a vengeance. But it is high summer for House Lannister. So why am I so bloody cold?

 

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Maybe the weasel symbolism and the stench of Tywin's body are related: he has done a lot of lying, cheating and deceiving in his life. Weese says that he can smell a lie; maybe the odor of Tywin's corpse is a symbol of how many lies he has told over the years. As he teams up with the Freys to catch and kill Robb Stark, he becomes a weasel like his new allies, "skinchanging" into their ermine coats and taking on a new layer of deception and subterfuge.

Further complication: ermine is also the name for a species of moth. You mentioned the doomed moth trapped in a lantern as Cersei climbs the stairs to her father's bedchamber. What layer of meaning is GRRM implying here with Tywin compared to a moth? Did Cersei secretly wish he would hurry up and die? (Maybe Cersei's insistence on tolling bells is an "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee" allusion, indicating that she predicted/wanted the doom of both Robert and Tywin.) In keeping with GRRM's cyclical view of death and rebirth, after his death, will Tywin be reborn as a caterpillar?

That's a good point -- in her all-consuming penis-envy ('I should have had the cock...should have carried the sword'), Cersei desired to usurp her male relatives (including Tywin and Jaime).  She's the inversion of the Bloodstone Emperor.

12 hours ago, GloubieBoulga said:

I think there is a hidden story in this serie, and the "wedding" is a part of this untold story. A wedding at Winterfell ? 

A secret wanted wedding, like perhaps Rhaegar and Lyanna -- or a public unwanted wedding, like Ramsay and FArya (Jeyne Poole) in which even the weirwood tree is presented using a 'rape trope':

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A Dance with Dragons - The Prince of Winterfell

Above their heads the trees were full of ravens, their feathers fluffed as they hunched on bare brown branches, staring down at the pageantry below. Maester Luwin's birds. Luwin was dead, and his maester's tower had been put to the torch, yet the ravens lingered. This is their home. Theon wondered what that would be like, to have a home.

Then the mists parted, like the curtain opening at a mummer show to reveal some new tableau. The heart tree appeared in front of them, its bony limbs spread wide. Fallen leaves lay about the wide white trunk in drifts of red and brown. The ravens were the thickest here, muttering to one another in the murderers' secret tongue. Ramsay Bolton stood beneath them, clad in high boots of soft grey leather and a black velvet doublet slashed with pink silk and glittering with garnet teardrops. A smile danced across his face. "Who comes?" His lips were moist, his neck red above his collar. "Who comes before the god?"

What is your hypothesis about the dirty secret at the heart of House Stark, Gloubie?

[hiemal]

9 hours ago, Seams said:

 

The muteness may start to become clearer as part of a larger set of symbols involving the five senses. For instance, Maester Aemon is blind but he sees and understands things that no one else perceives. Jaime's missing fingers sometimes tingle. Deaf Dick Follard can't hear, but is able to read lips. Bran eating the weirwood paste and Dany drinking the shade of the evening taste a lot of different things within one bowl or glass. There are a number of references to people being able to smell lies (Weese, The Hound) or cold (Dywen, Jon Snow) and, of course, Tywin's corpse and Reek are extremely stinky. Cersei seems to feel alive in King's Landing, where she describes the smells in the streets as she begins her naked walk from the Sept to the Red Keep. By contrast, Ned feels alive in the gods wood, where it tends to be quiet. Tyrion loses a nose to a sword; Myrcella loses an ear, Jaime loses a hand, Ser Ilyn loses a tongue. Which Lannister supporter or ally will go blind, I wonder.

The point of the mute characters is that these are people to whom we should be listening, or who have been silenced for telling truths. The Manderly group teaching Wex Pyke to write is going to help us understand this symbol better, I think. There seems to be a lot of wordplay around the sword / words pun, with one great example being Joffrey destroying a book with a sword. It is not a coincidence that Wex uses a knife to carve his letters after he is taught to write.

 

That's well put- and I would like to further complicate this theme by separating those who were born in this state, Wex, and those who lose a body part later in life, such as Ser Ilyn (in what I believe is an analog of a shamanistic "sacrifice" relating to the organ in question. The obvious example is Bloodraven's eye.) and I would like to also spice up the mix by mentioning those who are "faking" a lost organ- Ser Turnberry who wears a patch over a good eye and

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Euron who does likewise to hide his heterochromia as revealed in The Forsaken chapter of TWoW.

That might be a topic for another thread, though. Pretty big topic.

[Seams]

8 minutes ago, hiemal said:

That's well put- and I would like to further complicate this theme by separating those who were born in this state, Wex, and those who lose a body part later in life, such as Ser Ilyn (in what I believe is an analog of a shamanistic "sacrifice" relating to the organ in question. The obvious example is Bloodraven's eye.) and I would like to also spice up the mix by mentioning those who are "faking" a lost organ- Ser Turnberry who wears a patch over a good eye and

  Reveal hidden contents

Euron who does likewise to hide his heterochromia as revealed in The Forsaken chapter of TWoW.

That might be a topic for another thread, though. Pretty big topic.

Good idea! Will you start the thread? Sounds as if you have put some thought into this already.

[hiemal]

58 minutes ago, Seams said:

Good idea! Will you start the thread? Sounds as if you have put some thought into this already.

Bring your ideas.It's all pretty vague and haphazard. It's how I roll.