The Voiceless

[The Sleeper]

There are numerous examples of various mutilations and a lot of discussion about their symbolism and further significance in the story. This is a thread to invite discussion about those who have in one way or another been rendered mute.

The first example is the wights the Others raise. One might argue that they are mindless undead but there strong indications that it is not so simple. We have seen folks who have come back from the dead. Coldhands, Lady Stoneheart and Beric Dondarrion, who both talk and reason fully. I would also say that they have their own agency, but that may be debateable. There are hints about the wights themselves that they do have minds. As it is deduced the two who were brought in through the Wall at least enough memory and awarness to seek leading members of the Watch; Thistle, the spearwife Varamyr tried to possess saw him after she died in the skin of his wolf. In any way muteness is not a requirement of undeath.

The other example is of course Euron's crew. We get no more than a general description of them, they appear interchangable with one another and are seen collectively as Euron's. The guy who blew the horn died without question and the dusky woman is viewed as a sex object.

Then we have Varys' little birds, children whose entire lives are reduced to being ears and eyes and die most of the time without seeing the sun.

I am going to add the Silent Sisters. Taking a vow of silence they deal exclusively with the dead, they go about hooded and cowled. The brothers at the Quiet Isle would go in there as well.

As for individual cases there is sir Illyn Payne, the series scariest prop. Bitter barely seems human. The only character of any exposure that seems somewhat normal is Wex Pyke.

The association with death is clear. The dead are silent after all, well mostly. Our voices are our main means of expressing ourselves and connect with other people, so the lack of one causes isolation and even a denial of personhood. As such it is connected with the most extreme cases of subjugation and submission seen in the books, of people reduced to their functions.

Other ideas?

 

[cgrav]

I will elaborate later, but I've been thinking about the recurring theme of silence for a while. I think a major component is its function as a pass between the realms of life and death. The silent sisters are similar to the Valkyries, who shepherd spirits to Valhalla. The ship Silence has silent sailors because it went to the Shadow - another death-ish realm - and are not supposed to talk about it. Lady Stoneheart returns from Death but is silent. 

The idea seems to be that if you want to visit Death and come back, you had best keep your mouth shut. Knowledge such as prophecy is highly privileged, and can't be let into the world all willy nilly. In fact, the first silence outside the prologue comes when the execution party sees a real life prophecy in the dead stag and direwolf: "A sudden silence descended over the party. The men looked at the antler uneasily, and no one dared to speak... [Ned's] voice broke the spell."

Ned, as a symbolic gatekeeper for Death, kinda let it slip here, and ominously just after receiving another piece of privileged information from Gared, who was fleeing death's northern territory. Gated, too, saw something that the living are not meant to see and died because of it (also possible the Others let him go intentionally). Knowledge of the Others' return, the direwolf itself... the realm of icy death has a problem with leaks.

[LiveFirstDieLater]

Ghost is notoriously silent...

[Lollygag]

@LiveFirstDieLater beat me on Ghost! He is also mute except in this one case. Not entirely sure why. It’s right after he’s met Ygritte and when Bran contacts him through the weirwood in the wolf dream. He’s mourning Lady and being separated from his remaining littermates.

ACOK Jon VII

When he closed his eyes, he dreamed of direwolves.

There were five of them when there should have been six, and they were scattered, each apart from the others. He felt a deep ache of emptiness, a sense of incompleteness. The forest was vast and cold, and they were so small, so lost. His brothers were out there somewhere, and his sister, but he had lost their scent. He sat on his haunches and lifted his head to the darkening sky, and his cry echoed through the forest, a long lonely mournful sound. As it died away, he pricked up his ears, listening for an answer, but the only sound was the sigh of blowing snow.

Jon?

The call came from behind him, softer than a whisper, but strong too. Can a shout be silent? He turned his head, searching for his brother, for a glimpse of a lean grey shape moving beneath the trees, but there was nothing, only . . .

A weirwood.

ASOS Jon XII

It was a long moment before he understood what was happening. When he did, he bolted to his feet. "Ghost?" He turned toward the wood, and there he came, padding silently out of the green dusk, the breath coming warm and white from his open jaws. "Ghost!" he shouted, and the direwolf broke into a run. He was leaner than he had been, but bigger as well, and the only sound he made was the soft crunch of dead leaves beneath his paws. When he reached Jon he leapt, and they wrestled amidst brown grass and long shadows as the stars came out above them. "Gods, wolf, where have you been?" Jon said when Ghost stopped worrying at his forearm. "I thought you'd died on me, like Robb and Ygritte and all the rest. I've had no sense of you, not since I climbed the Wall, not even in dreams." The direwolf had no answer, but he licked Jon's face with a tongue like a wet rasp, and his eyes caught the last light and shone like two great red suns.

Red eyes, Jon realized, but not like Melisandre's. He had a weirwood's eyes. Red eyes, red mouth, white fur. Blood and bone, like a heart tree. He belongs to the old gods, this one. And he alone of all the direwolves was white. Six pups they'd found in the late summer snows, him and Robb; five that were grey and black and brown, for the five Starks, and one white, as white as Snow.

He had his answer then.

ASOS Sansa VII immediately follows Jon XII and I consider them companion chapters. Here, Sansa is wearing white fur like Ghost and her red hair would make her also look like a weirwood.  It seems especially to emphasize the connection between weirwoods, silence and  winter (death?). Some of the terminology strongly invokes death: she’s surrounded in ghostly silence, she stops breathing, there’s no color, she drifts as she walks and makes no sound, wonders if she’s dreaming, she falls and doesn’t remember. If you’re from a cold climate then you know that there’s a very unique silence to a snowy winter.

ASOS Sansa VII

Sansa left the shutters open as she dressed. It would be cold, she knew, though the Eyrie's towers encircled the garden and protected it from the worst of the mountain winds. She donned silken smallclothes and a linen shift, and over that a warm dress of blue lambswool. Two pairs of hose for her legs, boots that laced up to her knees, heavy leather gloves, and finally a hooded cloak of soft white fox fur.

Her maid rolled herself more tightly in her blanket as the snow began to drift in the window. Sansa eased open the door, and made her way down the winding stair. When she opened the door to the garden, it was so lovely that she held her breath, unwilling to disturb such perfect beauty. The snow drifted down and down, all in ghostly silence, and lay thick and unbroken on the ground. All color had fled the world outside. It was a place of whites and blacks and greys. White towers and white snow and white statues, black shadows and black trees, the dark grey sky above. A pure world, Sansa thought. I do not belong here.

Yet she stepped out all the same. Her boots tore ankle-deep holes into the smooth white surface of the snow, yet made no sound. Sansa drifted past frosted shrubs and thin dark trees, and wondered if she were still dreaming. Drifting snowflakes brushed her face as light as lover's kisses, and melted on her cheeks. At the center of the garden, beside the statue of the weeping woman that lay broken and half-buried on the ground, she turned her face up to the sky and closed her eyes. She could feel the snow on her lashes, taste it on her lips. It was the taste of Winterfell. The taste of innocence. The taste of dreams.

When Sansa opened her eyes again, she was on her knees. She did not remember falling. It seemed to her that the sky was a lighter shade of grey. Dawn, she thought. Another day. Another new day. It was the old days she hungered for. Prayed for. But who could she pray to? The garden had been meant for a godswood once, she knew, but the soil was too thin and stony for a weirwood to take root. A godswood without gods, as empty as me.

————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

I’d also consider in addition to death, that it seems linked to knowledge, specifically hidden, forgotten, secret, or inaccessible (maybe frozen or preserved?) knowledge. These types of knowledge land especially within the wheelhouse of the dead. I believe @ravenous reader noted that books are dead trees which are silent yet hold knowledge.

I suspect it’s an aspect of the broader theme of only death (or sacrifice) can pay for life (special ability). I elaborated on how I think only death may pay for life is a more commonly used theme than it seems at first in the post below. People who lose an eye or are scarred near the eye are especially observant. Euron’s mutes hold a great deal of locked knowledge. Jaime uses Ilyn as a therapist and I doubt he’s the only one. The Others no doubt hold some type of the above knowledge and aren’t telling. Stoneheart is now mostly mute. She disappears for long periods of time and sometimes spending time near Howland Reed’s area, so I really wonder at what she might now know.

I’ve also thought of the KG as sort of mutes. They’re expected to shut up and follow orders, not thinking. Barristan and Jaime are both struggling to find their voice now that they're out of the KG (Jaime is now out more or less). And it seems like both might know things that they don’t know that they know and it’s really a matter of connecting the dots.

 

Edit: Forgot the Stranger! I don't believe it's in the text, but my impression of the Stranger is that of silence.

Drago fell silent as he grew sicker and after Mirri, wouldn’t speak at all.
AGOT Daenerys VIII 

Every morning her eyes found fresh lines of pain on his face when he woke from his troubled sleep. And now this silence. It was making her afraid. Since they had mounted up at dawn, he had said not a word. When she spoke, she got no answer but a grunt, and not even that much since midday.

 

 

[cgrav]

@Lollygag

That instance of Ghost howling takes place during a wolf dream, and Bran recognizes him through the warg-wood bond, so I'd say it's more like Jon howling. Ghost himself is bound to silence, but Jon has the "authority" to cross between realms and can give Ghost a voice. 

[The Prince Of Tatters]

Ser Robert Strong, too is silent

[Lollygag]

4 minutes ago, cgrav said:

@Lollygag

That instance of Ghost howling takes place during a wolf dream, and Bran recognizes him through the warg-wood bond, so I'd say it's more like Jon howling. Ghost himself is bound to silence, but Jon has the "authority" to cross between realms and can give Ghost a voice. 

I believe this is the only time it's mentioned that Jon has unlocked Ghost's voice. If lack of voice is connected to inaccessible knowledge, and Ghost is linked to weirwoods in this passage and indirectly in the following chapter, then Ghost may be the key to "dead" knowledge about weirwoods.

[The Sleeper]

I thought of Ghost after finishing the post, but I think in some ways he fits with the theme. He is disconnected never being seen to interact with the other direwolves or other wolves like Nymeria and Summer do. He is associated with death, in numerous ways and I think, by some of his actions that he may be suborned into service by Bloodraven occasionally.

Lady Stoneheart speaks. Her voice is broken, but she does speak.

To connect those subjugated with those who are silent for other reasons, it is as if they are like the dead losing individuality and choice.

[The Sleeper]

19 minutes ago, The Prince Of Tatters said:

Ser Robert Strong, too is silent

Good point. And as he appears to be following Qyburn's commands, he would fit with the ice wights.

[LiveFirstDieLater]

 

Quote

 

The look Ned gave her was anguished. "You know I cannot take him south. There will be no place for him at court. A boy with a bastard's name … you know what they will say of him. He will be shunned."

Catelyn armored her heart against the mute appeal in her husband's eyes. "They say your friend Robert has fathered a dozen bastards himself." 

"And none of them has ever been seen at court!" Ned blazed. "The Lannister woman has seen to that. How can you be so damnably cruel, Catelyn? He is only a boy. He—"

 

You know... Ghost...

Quote

Farther on she came upon a feast of corpses. Savagely slaughtered, the feasters lay strewn across overturned chairs and hacked trestle tables, asprawl in pools of congealing blood. Some had lost limbs, even heads. Severed hands clutched bloody cups, wooden spoons, roast fowl, heels of bread. In a throne above them sat a dead man with the head of a wolf. He wore an iron crown and held a leg of lamb in one hand as a king might hold a scepter, and his eyes followed Dany with mute appeal.

 

 

[cgrav]

7 minutes ago, The Sleeper said:

 

Lady Stoneheart speaks. Her voice is broken, but she does speak.

And what she can communicate results in suffering and death. She's like a halfway example, a broken gate, so to speak. Through her some of death's horrors escape into the realm of the living. 

[The Sleeper]

1 hour ago, cgrav said:

And what she can communicate results in suffering and death. She's like a halfway example, a broken gate, so to speak. Through her some of death's horrors escape into the realm of the living. 

Hardly. She hangs legitimate targets using guerilla tactics. The rows of hanged men Brienne and co encountered were those who had raided the Saltpans. With them being mostly deserters they would have met the same fate had they fallen into the hands of any lord.

Many living men have done far worse. Vargo Hoat and the Mountain for instance.

[cgrav]

@The Sleeper I'm not claiming she's unjust, only that her "word" means death.

I don't see the motive or righteousness  being consequential to the Silence theme. The point is that she "speaks" death. If silence is death's hall pass, LS is playing hooky. She breaks the rule and by acting as a conduit of death.

Obviously many people are killers, but with Cat in particular her post-death turn to vengeance brings her into the consistent theme of silence and death.

One interesting thing I noticed is that only two characters in Dany's HotU vision are able to appear "present": Rhaegar and Robb. Both of whom were noted to have died quietly. 

[The Sleeper]

@cgrav You kind of missed the point. She is not the only undead/resurrected character who speaks. Both Beric and Coldhands speak as well. Which demonstrates that the ice wights silence or inability to speak is not due to their resurrection. The silence is part of their servitude to the others.

As to the other, I wasn't speaking about righteousness either. Dead men and living kill. And silent and speaking men kill. There is nothing that sets her apart in that regard.

As for your assertion that Euron's crew is muted because they went to the Shadow, that is unsupported by the text. Euron has claimed to have travelled to Asshai. It's a port, people travel there all the time. People also live in the Shadow and come out of it to trade. Dany has encountered them both in Vaes Dothrak and in Qarth.