Man who gave blackberry to Bran

[Prince Yourwetdream Aeryn]

Quote

Yet now that the last day was at hand, suddenly Bran felt lost. Winterfell had been the only home he had ever known. His father had told him that he ought to say his farewells today, and he had tried. After the hunt had ridden out, he wandered through the castl with his wolf at his side, intending to visit the ones who would be left behind, Old Nan and Gage the cook, Mikken in his smithy, Hodor the stableboy who smiled so much and took care of his pony and never said anything but “Hodor,” the man in the glass gardens who gave him a blackberry when he came to visit . . .

Who is this man?

Blackberry's color is purple. Purple is Targaryen eye color. Does it mean that he is Rhaegar?

[Seams]

Two possibilities, as far as I can see:

1) Yes, the man was Rhaegar. He was resurrected as a gardener at Winterfell, going deep undercover in a remote location, sort of like the witness protection program.

2) Each of the people in these last Winterfell encounters is symbolic of something meaningful to Bran. The glass garden is symbolic of warmth and life at Winterfell, and we later learn that it has been destroyed after Ramsey burns the castle. Instead of Rhaegar, the man is more likely a symbol of Garth Greenhand, as he is associated with the nurture of green things. There is a great deal of fruit symbolism throughout the books (Dany associated with plums, Sansa with lemons and melons and a pear and blood oranges, various characters eating apples, etc.). Perhaps blackberries have a special meaning for Bran.

[Dorian Martell's son]

2 hours ago, Grazdan zo Azer said:

Who is this man?

Blackberry's color is purple. Purple is Targaryen eye color. Does it mean that he is Rhaegar?

Rhaegar, who is mance who is ned who is Tywin who is tansy who is jason mallister who is Irri who is haldon who is cat who is jory who is benjen who is illyrio who is euron who is mance again who is tyrion who is Robb who is dany who is Rhaegar 

[Lost Melnibonean]

No. I have tried to figure out an association with Bloodraven, though. 

[BalerionTheCat]

Just a gardener. Is that strange?

[Springwatch]

A gardener is not strange, but the incident is - mainly because it would be more natural for Bran to give a name, or say 'the gardener'. A gift of a single blackberry is a bit unusual too. Full marks to the OP for spotting an oddity.

[Prince Yourwetdream Aeryn]

13 minutes ago, BalerionTheCat said:

Just a gardener. Is that strange?

 

Bran knows Mikken and Hodor with name. He visits gardener many times but he doesn't know gardener's name. And it was the first and the last time gardener was mentioned in the books. What happened to him during Theon's and Ramsay's attacks? We don't know.

[zandru]

4 hours ago, Dorian Martell's son said:

Rhaegar, who is mance who is ned who is Tywin who is tansy who is jason mallister who is Irri who is haldon who is cat who is jory who is benjen who is illyrio who is euron who is mance again who is tyrion who is Robb who is dany who is Rhaegar 

Now you've got the hang of it!!

1 hour ago, Springwatch said:

A gift of a single blackberry is a bit unusual too.

Seriously? This isn't at all strange. I've often been gifted with a single raspberry - or single strawberry, or similar. Maybe it's one of the first blackberries of the season. And Bran is just a small child (albeit one who thinks he's almost "a man grown") - giving the little guy a single ripe blackberry as a taste of what's forthcoming makes more sense than the anonymous gardener (probably The Smith incarnated, wink wink) dropping everything to pick a bucket load for the little lord who's just walking through.

It's probably some big symbolic deal, of course. The berry, so dark in color as to look black, is the symbol of Euron (Crow's Eye - and crows are black!) Greyjoy (joy is always tinged with grey, rather than being black & white), who will eventually conquer Winterfell riding on his undead Ice Dragon. And grey is a mixture of black (like the berries and the Night's Watch and the 3eye Crow which Bran will train under) and white (a predominant color of winter, thus Winterfell, and also sounds like "wight"). Then again, the very term "Blackberry", a pre-smartphone communication device, is a foreshadowing of Bran's future high speed network connection to the Weir Cloud.

This much is obvious, otherwise we'd have been told it was a blueberry, or a strawberry, or even a boysenberry.

Or a macintosh (apple).

[John Suburbs]

9 hours ago, Grazdan zo Azer said:

Who is this man?

Blackberry's color is purple. Purple is Targaryen eye color. Does it mean that he is Rhaegar?

This would have been about the time that Mance was at Winterfell, no?

 

 

[Unchained]

9 hours ago, Seams said:

Two possibilities, as far as I can see:

1) Yes, the man was Rhaegar. He was resurrected as a gardener at Winterfell, going deep undercover in a remote location, sort of like the witness protection program.

2) Each of the people in these last Winterfell encounters is symbolic of something meaningful to Bran. The glass garden is symbolic of warmth and life at Winterfell, and we later learn that it has been destroyed after Ramsey burns the castle. Instead of Rhaegar, the man is more likely a symbol of Garth Greenhand, as he is associated with the nurture of green things. There is a great deal of fruit symbolism throughout the books (Dany associated with plums, Sansa with lemons and melons and a pear and blood oranges, various characters eating apples, etc.). Perhaps blackberries have a special meaning for Bran.

 

It does seem significant now that it has been brought up.  Let's check witchipedia...

 

Blackberries are part of the rose family and have the characteristic flowers, leaves and thorns similar to those found on wild rose bushes.

 

Blackberries = roses and blue roses come from the glass gardens.  Rhaegar gives Lyanna blue roses probably from the same garden so it turns out this is Rhaegar.  Good call @Grazdan zo Azer.  But wait there's more.  

 

Another tale says that Lucifer landed in brambles when he was cast down from heaven and thus he cursed them so that they would be ugly.

 

Bran, the naughty boy who climbed to high, who challenged the gods, and fell is like Lucifer.  The blackberry foreshadows his fall as we would expect this chapter to be about.  Who does that make the man who gave him the berry? (Other than Rhaegar of course).  He lacks a name, so probably some sort of The Stranger character.  However, he is the guy in charge of plants like Seams points out, so also a Garth of some kind as well.  In some of the stories of Garth he dies in the winter.  Maybe he is a dead Garth of Winterfell person.  

[Beautiful Bloody Sword]

No, I don't think it could be Rhaegar, but could the glass garden guy be the Hooded Man in Winterfell? That is, since we don't know his name, nor did we learn of his fate. Maybe he hid out in the glass gardens during the sack.

[Makk]

22 minutes ago, Unchained said:

Another tale says that Lucifer landed in brambles when he was cast down from heaven and thus he cursed them so that they would be ugly.

 

Bran, the naughty boy who climbed to high, who challenged the gods, and fell is like Lucifer.  The blackberry foreshadows his fall as we would expect this chapter to be about.  Who does that make the man who gave him the berry? (Other than Rhaegar of course).  He lacks a name, so probably some sort of The Stranger character.

I like this. Also in Celtic mythology Blackberries were fae fruit and it brings bad luck to eat them, which Bran certainly got. I doubt GRRM will come back to this. Just the symbolism of Bran visiting the stranger and almost dying.

[Unchained]

49 minutes ago, Makk said:

I like this. Also in Celtic mythology Blackberries were fae fruit and it brings bad luck to eat them, which Bran certainly got. I doubt GRRM will come back to this. Just the symbolism of Bran visiting the stranger and almost dying.

 

The Fae are the same as the Sidhe, which GRRM has compared the Others to.  I am not saying that the man represents an Other exactly, but I believe they are dead Green Men in winter as well and they certainly bring death and are Strangers in a way.  I was only half joking about the Rhaegar thing.  No one who gets a thorny plant from the glass garden survives the consequences intact.  It is a death marker too.    

 

 

Quote

 

A Clash of Kings - Bran VI 

The sound was the faintest of clinks, a scraping of steel over stone. He lifted his head from his paws, listening, sniffing at the night.

The evening's rain had woken a hundred sleeping smells and made them ripe and strong again. Grass and thorns, blackberries broken on the ground, mud, worms, rotting leaves, a rat creeping through the bush. He caught the shaggy black scent of his brother's coat and the sharp coppery tang of blood from the squirrel he'd killed. Other squirrels moved through the branches above, smelling of wet fur and fear, their little claws scratching at the bark. The noise had sounded something like that

 

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[Lollygag]

5 hours ago, Unchained said:

Another tale says that Lucifer landed in brambles when he was cast down from heaven and thus he cursed them so that they would be ugly.

Bran, the naughty boy who climbed to high, who challenged the gods, and fell is like Lucifer.  The blackberry foreshadows his fall as we would expect this chapter to be about.  Who does that make the man who gave him the berry? (Other than Rhaegar of course).  He lacks a name, so probably some sort of The Stranger character.  However, he is the guy in charge of plants like Seams points out, so also a Garth of some kind as well.  In some of the stories of Garth he dies in the winter.  Maybe he is a dead Garth of Winterfell person.  

I agree that this may be about Bran's diverted path. The paragraphs before and after are about Bran's simultaneous excitement about his future and mourning for his soon-to-be past. Just me, but when I have similar moments being on the cusp on leaving a past and embarking on a new future, it's always a feeling of being suspended in time. Because Bran's past and never-to-be future bridge this passage, I do think the fact that his path was diverted is important.

AGOT Bran II

Two of the Kingsguard had come north with King Robert. Bran had watched them with fascination, never quite daring to speak to them. Ser Boros was a bald man with a jowly face, and Ser Meryn had droopy eyes and a beard the color of rust. Ser Jaime Lannister looked more like the knights in the stories, and he was of the Kingsguard too, but Robb said he had killed the old mad king and shouldn't count anymore. The greatest living knight was Ser Barristan Selmy, Barristan the Bold, the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard. Father had promised that they would meet Ser Barristan when they reached King's Landing, and Bran had been marking the days on his wall, eager to depart, to see a world he had only dreamed of and begin a life he could scarcely imagine.

Yet now that the last day was at hand, suddenly Bran felt lost. Winterfell had been the only home he had ever known. His father had told him that he ought to say his farewells today, and he had tried. After the hunt had ridden out, he wandered through the castle with his wolf at his side, intending to visit the ones who would be left behind, Old Nan and Gage the cook, Mikken in his smithy, Hodor the stableboy who smiled so much and took care of his pony and never said anything but "Hodor," the man in the glass gardens who gave him a blackberry when he came to visit …

But it was no good. He had gone to the stable first, and seen his pony there in its stall, except it wasn't his pony anymore, he was getting a real horse and leaving the pony behind, and all of a sudden Bran just wanted to sit down and cry. He turned and ran off before Hodor and the other stableboys could see the tears in his eyes. That was the end of his farewells. Instead Bran spent the morning alone in the godswood, trying to teach his wolf to fetch a stick, and failing. The wolfling was smarter than any of the hounds in his father's kennel and Bran would have sworn he understood every word that was said to him, but he showed very little interest in chasing sticks.

 

 

[Prince Yourwetdream Aeryn]

10 hours ago, zandru said:

Maybe it's one of the first blackberries of the season.

Probably you aren't reading the text. Text says that Man gave blackberry for every visit of Bran. This event happened many times.

[Prince Yourwetdream Aeryn]

12 hours ago, BalerionTheCat said:

Just a gardener. Is that strange?

 

12 hours ago, Springwatch said:

A gardener is not strange, but the incident is - mainly because it would be more natural for Bran to give a name, or say 'the gardener'. A gift of a single blackberry is a bit unusual too. Full marks to the OP for spotting an oddity.

 Man in glass gardens doesn't mean that he is gardener. I also made the same mistake.

[Prince Yourwetdream Aeryn]

7 hours ago, John Suburbs said:

This would have been about the time that Mance was at Winterfell, no?

 

 

I liked it. Also he could be assassin who wanted to kill Bran.

[zandru]

3 hours ago, Grazdan zo Azer said:

Probably you aren't reading the text.

You're right, and thanks. I still maintain that giving a child a single blackberry is really typical, not some bizarre occurrance. AND that Winterfell could have more than one of its serfs working in the glass gardens, and Bran may not have known everybody's name.

But it probably was Lucifer. If not, then Jesus Christ. Blackberry -> thorns -> sacrifice: no?

[Philokles]

15 hours ago, Grazdan zo Azer said:

Bran knows Mikken and Hodor with name. He visits gardener many times but he doesn't know gardener's name. And it was the first and the last time gardener was mentioned in the books. What happened to him during Theon's and Ramsay's attacks? We don't know.

Rhaegar fakes his death, smuggles himself North, manages to find employment in Winterfell but is foiled by the inability to come up with a pseudonym.

There is plenty of possible symbolism in the blackberry, but the gardener is just a gardener invented to facilitate it.

[Seams]

If we're going to entertain a discussion of deeper underlying meaning (and I am always on board for such a discussion), one possibility is to follow the wordplay.

berry / bury

garden / dragon

the man in the glass gardens who gave him a blackberry when he came to visit

Jon Snow will find dragon glass buried in black (a Night's Watch cloak) shortly before his adventures with the wildlings begin. If GRRM is signaling that Jon and Bran are beginning adventures that cross over to a new world, he may be using similar elements to mark the point of departure.

The "glass garden" could also tie in with the Alice through the Looking Glass and Alice in Wonderland imagery that GRRM has used throughout the books. In ACoK, Jon III, Jon Snow wakes up in Craster's Keep and finds the "forest turned to crystal." He uncovers the dragon glass cache in his next POV, Jon IV.

There is odd dialogue in Jon's obsidian cache chapter, with Jon and Sam asking whether the other "fared well" that day. Here we see Bran shedding tears (in ASOIAF the "tear / tear" pun may signal the tearing of the fabric that separates the mainstream world from the underworld) and then finding himself at "the end of his farewells." We know that Bran will eventually descend into a deep well at the Night Fort / Black Gate with the help of - ta da! - Sam Tarly.

The additional context provided by @Unchained and @Lollygag, above, is also helpful in showing that the blackberry represents Bran's broken dream of becoming a knight: he is at the turning point of giving up his pony and acquiring a horse BUT the blackberries are later seen broken on the ground. (In the scene where Robb finds the direwolf pups, the author notes that the mother direwolf is bigger than a pony. So the idea of Bran moving from a pony to a larger horse is an echo of that scene.)

The idea of Bran and Jon reaching a point of crossing into a new world may be reinforced by other imagery in the "buried black" and "blackberry" scenes: for Bran, the symbol is a stick, which he cannot train Summer to fetch in spite of the direwolf's clear intelligence. In Sansa's snow castle scene, Littlefinger shows Sansa how to use snow-covered sticks to make the bridges in her Winterfell model. Sansa recalled Bran standing on the roof of one of the covered bridges, watching Arya chase Sansa, during a childhood snow fight. Maybe Summer's failure to retrieve a stick is a way of showing that Bran will not be able to return once he has crossed a bridge into another world? He is also able to observe his siblings but is not in a position to join in the chasing game. The Stark children are also associated with the used of wooden swords so the detail about failiing to fetch a stick could tie into that.

The symbol of Jon's crossing may come when he crosses a stream in the forest. I don't recall strong stick imagery, although the obsidian cache was buried next to a fallen tree. The author makes a point of showing the direwolf Ghost leading Jon out from the Fist of the First Men, across the stream (where the direwolf pauses to drink) and then back toward the ring fort to the spot where the obsidian is buried. The direwolf doesn't take Jon straight to the cache, but seems to make a deliberate route to the stream crossing and only then back to the dig site.

If the comparison between Bran's blackberry and Jon's obsidian cache is correct, it's interesting that Bran's magical item is food and Jon's magical item is a weapon and/or a glass candle. Bran eats blackberries and later we will see him become a powerful, magical visionary who can see into the past (and future?). Jon shares the obsidian with his mentor and his friends, empowering Sam to become the Slayer.

I think GRRM is deliberately playing with ideas about what the quasi-medieval fantasy version of the Internet would look like - the weirnet is not an accidental parallel to our world wide web. So it would not surprise me at all if he deliberately chose the BlackBerry as a symbol of Bran's transition to a new world - this is the brand name of a smart phone.

It will be interesting to see what else happens with the obsidian and the broken war horn Jon found in the cache. Will Jon discover the glass candle power of the obsidian, as well as its function as a weapon? With its connection to the Others, maybe the obsidian represents the android operating system? The central tragedy of ASOIAF may be that two brothers adopt mutually exclusive operating systems.

P.S. The anonymity of the man in the glass garden might be similar to the anonymity of the man at the ruined inn near the Queenscrown. The wildlings try to make Jon kill the silent man as a further show of loyalty to the wildling mission. Jon refuses and the moment marks his crossing back to the Night's Watch and life south of the Wall. I bet there could be an interesting thread about anonymous people encountered by POV characters - farmers along the road encountered by Arya and the Hound, the stableboy that looks lustfully at Sansa, a woman at a well passed by Brienne during her quest, etc. I bet a lot of these bit players mark turning points for the major characters. I recently speculated that Lyanna is represented by the silent sister who stands by Ser Hugh's body as Ned and Ser Barristan discuss the death of the young knight.