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Heresy 197 the wit and wisdom of Old Nan


Black Crow

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1 hour ago, Black Crow said:

With the proviso that they are freakishly tall and deserving of the epithet of giants and as such are more likely to be the origin of Old Nan's tales about giants than those creatures found north of the Wall

Perhaps.  It's hard to say.

We know what Old Nan's giants look like (huge Umberish men)... but we also know what they act like (evil) and this doesn't fit very well with Umbers.  Whereas it might for true giants, whom we know had awkward relationships with the First Men from the start.

I do think the Umbers could logically have been connected to true giants in the dim past.  They could have been foreman responsible for overseeing giant labor on the Wall, for instance.  Or perhaps there came a time after the Long Night when giants south of the Wall were rounded up and enslaved and the Umbers played a role. 

Certainly it's been an incredibly long time since anybody south of the Wall has seen a giant, unless you count rare free folk like Osha.   Jon has been in the Watch for months and months by the time he sees giants in ASOS, and yet obviously no one ever told him what giants look like in advance.

Osha does have some interesting things to say:

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"Maester Luwin says there are no more giants. He says they're all dead, like the children of the forest. All that's left of them are old bones in the earth that men turn up with plows from time to time."

"Let Maester Luwin ride beyond the Wall," Osha said. "He'll find giants then, or they'll find him. My brother killed one. Ten foot tall she was, and stunted at that. They've been known to grow big as twelve and thirteen feet. Fierce things they are too, all hair and teeth, and the wives have beards like their husbands, so there's no telling them apart. The women take human men for lovers, and it's from them the half bloods come. It goes harder on the women they catch. The men are so big they'll rip a maid apart before they get her with child." She grinned at him. "But you don't know what I mean, do you, boy?"

The first boldfaced passage basically confirms giants are totally unknown and unseen south of the Wall.

The second one tells me the free folk have indeed encountered them north of the Wall.  She's accurate.  This report from her brother sounds legit.

The third boldfaced bit?  That sounds made up to me... not something her brother saw, presumably... but if it's possible for humans and giants to crossbreed I would certainly think the offspring would be sterile, like a mule.

On the other hand, this is GRRMworld, where genetics just make no sense (thousands of years of golden blonde Lannisters?!?).  So perhaps that's going too far.   Hrm.  I guess it's not impossible.

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If you approach Old Nan's tale about giants and compare the parallels to the Umbers, you could say the Umbers are nearly an inversion to giants. They're not really giants just really tall people with similar circumstances, but on a smaller scale. Really allot of the inversions are like that. Take the Reynes/Tarbeck massacres. Tywin exterminated two whole families, whereas King Aerys executed just two very important men. Or the Defiance of Duskendale where King Aerys was taken hostage versus Jon Arryn refusing to give up a teen-aged Robert Baratheon, who wasn't even a threat to the throne yet. The events are eerily similar, but the scale of one is larger than the other. The importance of the scale can be the other way around too, for example in the past the Free Folk united under Raymun Redbeard, scaled the Wall and attacked the north, and were defeated at the Battle of Long Lake. The parallel inversion to this on a much bigger scale is the return of white walkers at the very beginning of GoT.

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OSHA'S BROTHER: I killed a giant today.

OSHA: Really.

OSHA'S BROTHER: She was ten feet tall.  Covered with thick fur, she was, and gave off a stench that could kill a dog at twenty paces.

OSHA: Love affair gone sour?

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1 hour ago, Feather Crystal said:

Free Folk united under Raymun Redbeard, scaled the Wall and attacked the north, and were defeated at the Battle of Long Lake. The parallel inversion to this on a much bigger scale is the return of white walkers at the very beginning of GoT.

Clarifying what we know happened with a bit of speculation...Mance Rayder united the free folk, were allowed through the Wall after a battle, Mance Rayder went to Winterfell on a covert mission, and LC Jon Snow asked the wildlings to join him on an attack of Winterfell.  And...isn't Stannis currently stationed near Long Lake? Oh, and six white walkers have been sighted with one killed by Sam.

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5 hours ago, JNR said:

 

It's hard to imagine the canonical Umber sigil is so "stylized" that it could be either

1) a human being or

2) something that looks like this:

Unless the Umber sigil is a Rorschach inkblot, I guess.  :D

  I conclude the giant in the Umber sigil in no way resembles the above description.

 

You can't imagine a silhouette that is meant to be evocative of giants, yet is not anatomically accurate to the true thing? Again, I'm using both ASOIAF's own appendices and real world coats of arms as a point of reference when I imagine GRRM's coats of arms, and I don't have trouble imagining a sigil that fails to do justice to the real world giants, yet is still meant to depict them.

As you say, House Sigils are not an inkblot that everyone in Westeros is attempting to interpret--the Umber sigil is widely understood to be a giant, as opposed to, say, the Umbers claiming it depicts their ancient ancestor So-And-So Umber breaking his chains. So, has everyone in Westeros subsequently misremembered what House Umber's sigil is meant to represent, or does the discrepancy just reflect the fact that sigils, in general, are not striving for photorealism?

For that matter, we have no idea when the noble coat of arms came into fashion in Westeros; it may be that when House Umber's sigil was being designed, they were hundreds or even thousands of years removed from the last time anyone had seen a true giant.

To be clear, I'm not discounting the merit of the broader ideas being explored, I'm just questioning the chain of logic of
Jon is surprised by the appearance of the giants > House Umber's sigil is supposedly a giant, yet Jon would be familiar with their sigil > House Umber's sigil isn't a giant > the giants in Old Nan's tales aren't giants.

I mean...maybe, but it's not the only explanation, nor (IMO) even the most logical one.

Furthermore, even Old Nan's tales of evil giants have a couple potential contexts; it may be that her tales of evil giants are actually tales of outsized men, or it may be that the tales have no truth at their root, and it's just a case of the culture south of the Wall unfairly maligning the giants whose land they've stolen, in much the same way that Old Nan's tales about the Wildlings and skinchangers are unflattering.

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20 minutes ago, Matthew. said:

You can't imagine a silhouette that is meant to be evocative of giants, yet is not anatomically accurate to the true thing?

I think the sigil artist had no better idea what giants look like than anybody else south of the Wall. 

First, to be clear, this is what a giant looks like in these books.

So.  Is it possible a sigil artist had that idea in his or her head... but was so talentless as to draw, by accident, something that could interpreted as a big human being like the Greatjon instead?

Maybe. 

But let's bear in mind, giants obviously haven't been seen south of the Wall for thousands of years.   So how would the artist know?

It's plain that those south of the Wall don't even remember what giants look like... because Jon has lived in the North all his life, and he clearly had no clue.  Old Nan had no clue either.  What people have seen, according to Luwin, is ancient bones dug up by plows, and that's all.

So if you're a sigil artist, and an Umber says "I want you to draw a giant for our sigil" what do you imagine?  I think, just like Old Nan and Jon, you imagine a gigantic man.  And you draw a gigantic man. 

The only alternative to this scenario, as far as I can see, would be that the sigil is mind-bogglingly ancient -- many thousands of years old, and hailing from a time in which giants still lived south of the Wall, so that an artist might understand what a giant looks like.

But even then, it's surprising anybody would draw a giant in such a way that Jon could look at it, thousands of years later, and not realize it was nonhuman.

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Weirwoods are often referred to as 'giants':

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A Clash of Kings - Tyrion XI

He remembered their godswood; the tall sentinels armored in their grey-green needles, the great oaks, the hawthorn and ash and soldier pines, and at the center the heart tree standing like some pale giant frozen in time. 

 

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A Dance with Dragons - Bran II

The way the shadows shifted made it seem as if the walls were moving too. Bran saw great white snakes slithering in and out of the earth around him, and his heart thumped in fear. He wondered if they had blundered into a nest of milk snakes or giant grave worms, soft and pale and squishy. Grave worms have teeth.

Hodor saw them too. "Hodor," he whimpered, reluctant to go on. But when the girl child stopped to let them catch her, the torchlight steadied, and Bran realized that the snakes were only white roots like the one he'd hit his head on. "It's weirwood roots," he said. "Remember the heart tree in the godswood, Hodor? The white tree with the red leaves? A tree can't hurt you."

 

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A Dance with Dragons - The Turncloak

Snow was falling on the godswood too, melting when it touched the ground. Beneath the white-cloaked trees the earth had turned to mud. Tendrils of mist hung in the air like ghostly ribbons. Why did I come here? These are not my gods. This is not my place. The heart tree stood before him, a pale giant with a carved face and leaves like bloody hands.

 

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A Dance with Dragons - Bran II

Something about the way the raven screamed sent a shiver running up Bran's spine. I am almost a man grown, he had to remind himself. I have to be brave now.

But the air was sharp and cold and full of fear. Even Summer was afraid. The fur on his neck was bristling. Shadows stretched against the hillside, black and hungry. All the trees were bowed and twisted by the weight of ice they carried. Some hardly looked like trees at all. Buried from root to crown in frozen snow, they huddled on the hill like giants, monstrous and misshapen creatures hunched against the icy wind. "They are here."

The ranger drew his longsword.

 

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A Dance with Dragons - Theon I

Outside the snow still fell. The snowmen the squires had built had grown into monstrous giants, ten feet tall and hideously misshapen. White walls rose to either side as he and Rowan made their way to the godswood; the paths between keep and tower and hall had turned into a maze of icy trenches, shoveled out hourly to keep them clear. It was easy to get lost in that frozen labyrinth, but Theon Greyjoy knew every twist and turning.

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A Dance with Dragons - The Sacrifice

"Aye," said Big Bucket Wull. "Red Rahloo means nothing here. You will only make the old gods angry. They are watching from their island."

The crofter's village stood between two lakes, the larger dotted with small wooded islands that punched up through the ice like the frozen fists of some drowned giant. From one such island rose a weirwood gnarled and ancient, its bole and branches white as the surrounding snows. Eight days ago Asha had walked out with Aly Mormont to have a closer look at its slitted red eyes and bloody mouth. It is only sap, she'd told herself, the red sap that flows inside these weirwoods. But her eyes were unconvinced; seeing was believing, and what they saw was frozen blood.

"You northmen brought these snows upon us," insisted Corliss Penny. "You and your demon trees. R'hllor will save us."

 

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A Game of Thrones - Bran II

To a boy, Winterfell was a grey stone labyrinth of walls and towers and courtyards and tunnels spreading out in all directions. In the older parts of the castle, the halls slanted up and down so that you couldn't even be sure what floor you were on. The place had grown over the centuries like some monstrous stone tree, Maester Luwin told him once, and its branches were gnarled and thick and twisted, its roots sunk deep into the earth.

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A Feast for Crows - The Drowned Man

On the crown of the hill four-and-forty monstrous stone ribs rose from the earth like the trunks of great pale trees. The sight made Aeron's heart beat faster. Nagga had been the first sea dragon, the mightiest ever to rise from the waves. She fed on krakens and leviathans and drowned whole islands in her wrath, yet the Grey King had slain her and the Drowned God had changed her bones to stone so that men might never cease to wonder at the courage of the first of kings. Nagga's ribs became the beams and pillars of his longhall, just as her jaws became his throne. For a thousand years and seven he reigned here, Aeron recalled. Here he took his mermaid wife and planned his wars against the Storm God. From here he ruled both stone and salt, wearing robes of woven seaweed and a tall pale crown made from Nagga's teeth.

 

A clever man imprisoned in a weirwood (i.e. by giants in their 'castle') is a greenseer:

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A Dance with Dragons - Bran II

Before them a pale lord in ebon finery sat dreaming in a tangled nest of roots, a woven weirwood throne that embraced his withered limbs as a mother does a child.

His body was so skeletal and his clothes so rotted that at first Bran took him for another corpse, a dead man propped up so long that the roots had grown over him, under him, and through him. What skin the corpse lord showed was white, save for a bloody blotch that crept up his neck onto his cheek. His white hair was fine and thin as root hair and long enough to brush against the earthen floor. Roots coiled around his legs like wooden serpents. One burrowed through his breeches into the desiccated flesh of his thigh, to emerge again from his shoulder. A spray of dark red leaves sprouted from his skull, and grey mushrooms spotted his brow. A little skin remained, stretched across his face, tight and hard as white leather, but even that was fraying, and here and there the brown and yellow bone beneath was poking through.

 

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A Dance with Dragons - Bran II

The clothes he wore were rotten and faded, spotted with moss and eaten through with worms, but once they had been black. "I have been many things, Bran. Now I am as you see me, and now you will understand why I could not come to you … except in dreams. I have watched you for a long time, watched you with a thousand eyes and one. I saw your birth, and that of your lord father before you. I saw your first step, heard your first word, was part of your first dream. I was watching when you fell. And now you are come to me at last, Brandon Stark, though the hour is late."

Tricking the giants and escaping would be akin to the greenseer fleeing the clutches of the trees and/or Children.

Should Bran and co wish to leave Bloodraven's cavern, they would then risk being taken by the Others/wights waiting outside the cave.

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1 hour ago, JNR said:

I think the sigil artist had no better idea what giants look like than anybody else south of the Wall. 

Yes, a possibility that I raised in the post that you quoted. My point of contention is not about finding the "right" interpretation, merely to point out that there are multiple reasons why a sigil might not align with the real thing; in particular, I was agreeing with Brad that his initial gut reaction (using real world coats of arms as a reference point) was the same as mine.

I'll also say that I don't necessarily disagree with the premise that Old Nan's tales aren't about the giants at all--it has been suggested here in the past that the tale of "Hellhounds fighting at the Nighfort" might be the conflict between the NK and his brother (two direwolves/"hellhounds") presented as fable, and there may be something similar going on with Old Nan's "evil giants."

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29 minutes ago, Matthew. said:

there may be something similar going on with Old Nan's "evil giants."

I think so too, which is why I suggested earlier that

On 3/26/2017 at 11:41 PM, JNR said:

Perhaps all of Old Nan's tales about giants were, in fact, about men.

Black Crow goes a step further and guesses Umbers in particular.  Could be.

On a related topic, it's interesting how closely GRRM's giants resemble Gigantopithecus Blacki, a real species from our own world that died out about 100K years ago.

They were apparently about ten feet tall, had arms longer than legs, not much of a neck, were covered with fur, and on and on.

Here's a stylized set of silhouettes of G. blacki, H. sapiens, and another species

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The mythical Jack and the beanstalk giants could never exist physiologically,  you cannot just scale up a human being,  bones and musles would not be strong enough.  I suspect GRRM knows this and it was his basis for his giants, in contrast to his myths about giants based on our myths about giants. 

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Rather depends on how tall the giants in question are.

In very simple terms if the average height of a normal mediaeval peasant in a shade under 5 foot 6, then a 7 foot man will unquestionably be a giant

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4 hours ago, Black Crow said:

Rather depends on how tall the giants in question are.

In very simple terms if the average height of a normal mediaeval peasant in a shade under 5 foot 6, then a 7 foot man will unquestionably be a giant

Is it possible that old stories about evil giants weren't originally told by men but instead by the COTF? Men are giants to COTF, and lots of stories about evil giants could be describing regular sized men harassing the much smaller COTF. Assuming some sort of cultural exchange occurred following the pact/Long Night (not to mention consciousness-bending trees and magic mutating myth and memory for thousands of years) could men be inadvertently telling another species' stories about themselves?

Obviously giants do exist in this world, but their existence does not necessarily preclude these stories from originally referring to humans.

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12 hours ago, ravenous reader said:

Weirwoods are often referred to as 'giants

I wouldn't discount the greenseer/wierwood as the giants of legend either, since the Wall was raised by magic or the great lore as Melisandre describes.   Blood built the Wall or the blood of the First Men went into the sacrifices that build the Wall.

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Often, the ceremony involved the placing of offerings of grain, wine and oil on or under the stone. These were symbolic of the produce and the people of the land and the means of their subsistence. This in turn derived from the practice in still more ancient times of making an animal or human[1][2]sacrifice that was laid in the foundations.

Frazer (2006: p. 106-107) in The Golden Bough charts the various propitiary sacrifices and effigy substitution such as the shadow, states that:

Nowhere, perhaps, does the equivalence of the shadow to the life or soul come out more clearly than in some customs practised to this day in South-eastern Europe. In modern Greece, when the foundation of a new building is being laid, it is the custom to kill a cock, a ram, or a lamb, and to let its blood flow on the foundation-stone, under which the animal is afterwards buried. The object of the sacrifice is to give strength and stability to the building. But sometimes, instead of killing an animal, the builder entices a man to the foundation-stone, secretly measures his body, or a part of it, or his shadow, and buries the measure under the foundation-stone; or he lays the foundation-stone upon the man's shadow. It is believed that the man will die within the year. The Roumanians of Transylvania think that he whose shadow is thus immured will die within forty days; so persons passing by a building which is in course of erection may hear a warning cry, Beware lest they take thy shadow! Not long ago there were still shadow-traders whose business it was to provide architects with the shadows necessary for securing their walls. In these cases the measure of the shadow is looked on as equivalent to the shadow itself, and to bury it is to bury the life or soul of the man, who, deprived of it, must die. Thus the custom is a substitute for the old practice of immuring a living person in the walls, or crushing him under the foundation-stone of a new building, in order to give strength and durability to the structure, or more definitely in order that the angry ghost may haunt the place and guard it against the intrusion of enemies.[3]

 

 

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Definition of umber:

- a brown earth that is darker in color than ocher and sienna because of its content of manganese and iron oxides and is highly valued as a permanent pigment either in the raw or burnt state

Etymology of umber:

probably from obsolete English, shade, color, from Middle English ombre, umbre shade, shadow, from Anglo-French, from Latin umbra — more at umbrage

Definition of umbrage:

- shade, shadow

- shady branches

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On 4/18/2017 at 0:52 PM, LynnS said:

I wouldn't discount the greenseer/wierwood as the giants of legend either, since the Wall was raised by magic or the great lore as Melisandre describes.   Blood built the Wall or the blood of the First Men went into the sacrifices that build the Wall.

 

There's a possible reversion of legend here- [not to confuse things with Feather's inversion theory:

Folklore tells of Stonehenge and Hadrian's Wall [to name but two massive structures] being built by gods, giants, or magic but we in our wisdom know they were built by men.

Perhaps the Wall reverses this, because we have hints enough that it was built by magic and by blood magic at that, just as wholesale sacrifices were required to bring down the hammer of the waters and perhaps thereby trigger the dodgy seasons

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2 hours ago, Black Crow said:

There's a possible reversion of legend here- [not to confuse things with Feather's inversion theory:

Folklore tells of Stonehenge and Hadrian's Wall [to name but two massive structures] being built by gods, giants, or magic but we in our wisdom know they were built by men.

Perhaps the Wall reverses this, because we have hints enough that it was built by magic and by blood magic at that, just as wholesale sacrifices were required to bring down the hammer of the waters and perhaps thereby trigger the dodgy seasons

I agree.  I like the notion that the Umbers were chained giants at one point.  I could never imagine a scenario where the giants of Wun Wun's type were ever in conflict with the CotF.  It seems more likely to me that the conflict was always with the races of men and that the wildling population could be considered one of the old races.  The question is what price was paid for peace and how and when were the chains broken.

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2 hours ago, LynnS said:

I agree.  I like the notion that the Umbers were chained giants at one point.  I could never imagine a scenario where the giants of Wun Wun's type were ever in conflict with the CotF.  It seems more likely to me that the conflict was always with the races of men and that the wildling population could be considered one of the old races.  The question is what price was paid for peace and how and when were the chains broken.

Ah, well that's where I reckon that a blood price was paid for the peace; the Nights King "sacrificing to the Others" was the ongoing payment of that price, and the Umbers were freed from bondage when the Nights King was overthrown

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3 hours ago, LynnS said:

I agree.  I like the notion that the Umbers were chained giants at one point.  I could never imagine a scenario where the giants of Wun Wun's type were ever in conflict with the CotF.  It seems more likely to me that the conflict was always with the races of men and that the wildling population could be considered one of the old races.  The question is what price was paid for peace and how and when were the chains broken.

Leaf refers to the giants as "our bane and our brothers" so there was either a conflict or at least giants were a threat.  

Strange that we see "brothers" as I'd assume children and giants are as far apart as possible for humanoids and men would be closer to either than they are to eachother.

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6 hours ago, Black Crow said:

There's a possible reversion of legend here- [not to confuse things with Feather's inversion theory:

Folklore tells of Stonehenge and Hadrian's Wall [to name but two massive structures] being built by gods, giants, or magic but we in our wisdom know they were built by men.

Perhaps the Wall reverses this, because we have hints enough that it was built by magic and by blood magic at that, just as wholesale sacrifices were required to bring down the hammer of the waters and perhaps thereby trigger the dodgy seasons

Go ahead, embrace the reversals! :devil:

You know, maybe all the bones littering the caves are remnants of sacrifice? The Children believe that when they die they join the godhead, so keeping their bones near the heart tree would be indicative of their desire to be close. I'm thinking it took great numbers of Children in sacrifice to work their magics.

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