Meteoric iron

[LynnS]

This is a fascinating discussion.  I'm intrigued by the notion that the dawn sword is made of meteoric iron.  The description of the sword, alive with light is the opposite of valyrian steel; which is described as smokey and dark, drinking in the sun rather than reflecting light. 

I've wondered what a sword made of meteoric iron might look like:

https://cnet1.cbsistatic.com/img/v5xvmyNqv8U9r_RUP_DjdlxyAlI=/0x131:892x557/fit-in/970x0/2015/05/17/3a8cc23d-ec57-42a2-99bd-788ea7b084bd/swordofheaven.jpg

I imagine that the Sword of Heaven is much more reflective than the photo allows.  There is a notion that the Dawn sword is a white blade or similar to palestone; although upon searching the text; all the Kingsguard are referred to as white swords.  The sword isn't necessarily 'palestone' but rather kept in a tower made of palestone.  A reference to Excalibur drawn from stone or a smith who draws a sword from a stone casing when casting the iron.

I'm guessing that the last hero was a smith who forged the sword rather than the CotF.  If he received aid from them; I think it likely that he was given armor or armored in ice to withstand the cold.   The price for such magic is steep and I'm guessing that his heart was forged into ice.  

[YOVMO]

12 hours ago, falcotron said:

You're asking how iron swords could survive in a semi-open crypt for 8000 years without magic, right? I think you're right, they probably wouldn't, so magic could well be involved, and Torrhen kneeling could fit the timeline for breaking that magic. I don't really have much more to say on that, but I do have some comments on the rest of your point.

Thank you. And to me the timeline seems to be a very big cherry. We have the bookends of some major things. The long night on one side and the return of the others on the other. There is roughly 8000 years there. There are some other things bookended here. On the one side there is Brandon of the Bloody Blade and his all out assault on the children then his son (I strongly Believe) Bran the builder bringing an end to the long night, raising winterfell and the wall...supposedly with some kind of magic. The others at gone for 8k years (at least from the realm). Then with our story we see they are back -- the other end.

I will need to do a re-read and plan on doing so soon, but it seems to me that Ned takes special note of the disrepair of the crypts and the rusted to nothing but red stain swords which would say that the level of decay has been awfully fast...in his own lifetime. If there is a magic which keeps the wall standing and the crypts together (it is commented on how they are unnaturally big and to think they are holding some 900 generations of starks and it is said they are bigger than winterfell itself) I do not feel it is a far leap to say that the magic has been rescinded. We are told time and time again that there is power in kings blood and it is a very vague idea to say the least. However, there has not been a King to sit the high seat of Winterfell since Torhen. There was Robb but with Rickard and Brandon both dying in the red keep it is possible that the secret passed from generation to generation died.

If there was a deal to end the long night made with Bran the Builder and it involved a kingsblood sacrifice each generation then that pact was broken when Torhen knelt which explains a lot of things including the return of the others, the slow decline of the wall, the falling apart of the crypts and the rusting into nothing of the iron swords holding in the spirits of the kings of winter in Ned's lifetime. It also answers why the Kings of Winter were buried in crypts as first men didn't entomb their dead but put them in barrows to allow them to decay and their souls become one with the collective. It would be a cruel fate for someone who worshipped the old gods to keep them entombed after their death...no different than burning an Egyptian Pharaoh...and finally it would explain why those spirits would be so "vengeful" 

12 hours ago, falcotron said:

Remember that Old Nan told Bran that the Others hate iron. I think that's a clue to… something, although I'm not sure what.

The First Men fought the Andals with bronze rather than iron. So those old iron swords probably were as blunt, weak, and clumsy, as you'd expect from a bronze-age culture trying to make swords out of iron ore. (I doubt they used to know how to make steel but then forgot—that wouldn't fit with them continuing to make iron swords for 8000 years to bury with their dead, would it?)

So, why even make them, much less bury themselves with them? Presumably because the Others hate iron.

There is a LOT of meat on this bone in the prologue to GOT and I have long considered it. The word Iron appears several times in very interesting ways in this prologue. Allow me:

First Will reports back to Wymar Royce after his scouting. He says what he say including

Quote

Some swords, a few bows, One man had an axe. Heavy-looking, double-bladed, a cruel piece of iron. It was on the ground beside him, right by his hand.

But when Wymar checked it out all was gone....all but the iron axe

Quote

Royce did not move. He looked down at the empty clearing and laughed. "Your dead men seem to have moved camp, Will."

Will's voice abandoned him. He groped for words that did not come. It was not possible. His eyes swept back and forth over the abandoned campsite, stopped on the axe. A huge double-bladed battle-axe, still lying where he had seen it last, untouched. A valuable weapon …

So when the bodies presumably rose as wights they left with everything but the one thing that was made of Iron. There are several mentions of the fact that this is happening at an Ironwood tree, Gared makes claims with "iron certainty" and Will claims he wouldn't give an "iron bob" for Wymar's life if he had to fight Gared and also while climbing with his dirk in his teeth says the taste of iron in his mouth gave him comfort. We are clearly being lead to iron in the very first words of our tale as something that is antithetical to the others.

The wights in the ice cells at castle black to not reanimate until their iron shackles are taken off later on.

 

Now lets bring this back to our world. Rudyard Kipling has a poem called Cold Iron about how cold iron is the master of all men...it holds in spirts you see. It is from his book Rewards and Fairies and cold iron is used in one sense as a weapon....gold for a king but cold iron is the master as in the king may be killed (actually @ravenous reader may enjoy this if it hasn't already pinged the radar) but also holds back ghosts and witches and other supernatural things including a mans soul and it is for these reasons that an iron horseshoe is nailed to a door to ward away or create a barrier against malicious spirits as well as why the fences around cemetaries are made of iron...to keep in the dead spirits (remind you of any crytpy customs?) and one burries iron knife at the house to ward from witches.

 

So if Iron acts as a ward or seal against the undead (even if it doesn't destroy them) and if the long night is ended with a pact made with Brandon for the imprisonment of stark kings in perpetuity it would make sense that the line of Stark Kings starting from Brandon would perform some kind of ceremony where they would become an other but be bound to their throne by an iron longsword....the entire show...swords, crypts, statues and all being enchanted to remain forever...with the kneeling of Tohren the pact is broken and sure enough 300 years later we see normal decay of the crypts and swords and simultaneously the others have returned.

 

 

Quote

 

12 hours ago, falcotron said:

 

 

Or some other spirits that they associate with the Others? That could be the vengeful Starks themselves, but it could also be to protect the Starks against the spirits, or so the Starks can protect something important from them. I don't know if they're supposed to literally rise up and fight like Aragorn's army of the dead, or just scare spirits away, or engage in some kind of spirit-world conflict that's only represented by their tombs. And if the swords are more symbolic than directly useful, why iron? Because they symbolize a meteoric iron sword (Ice) or an anachronistic (Valyrian) steel one (Lightbringer), or because they actually used clumsy iron swords to fight the Others?

I have thought about it protecting the Starks from the spirits just in the way you say, but I think it unlikely they would be vengeful spirits...more stoic spirits. Protectors aren't vengeful. Funny on the Aragorn's army bit though cringe worthy painful thinking of Jon in the crypts saying "fight for me"

Quote

12 hours ago, falcotron said:

Also, what does it mean that the Others "hate iron" in the first place? When I first read that, I assumed it was like the standard fantasy pseudo-Celtic faerie thing, but obviously Waymar's prologue disproves that. Once they realized his sword was just plain old steel, they didn't fear it, and it wasn't useful. So, what would they hate and fear? Could it be something to do with Beric's blood-magic flaming sword trick not working with bronze? (There are associations between blood and iron—I don't think ancients knew that iron is the reason blood is red, but they did know that dried blood looks like rust.)

There are myths that suggest that Iron is the blood of the earth or the life force of the earth. In asoiaf the smell of iron is commonly used for blood as well as other organic material. If the others hate life and if iron has the smell of life or blood it would make sense for them to hate it...but why fear? If they hated it and didn't fear it they would just destroy it, discard it or avoid it.  The best I can come up with, since we know iron doesn't slay them, is that somehow the power involved with being undead revolves around electromagnetic activity and Iron could be used as a ground to drain the power from them. In this way they would not want to be close to Iron but at the same time, being hit with it would not have the destructive force that sams dragonglass has on them which doesn't repel them but has some magic that...well....unmakes them

Quote

12 hours ago, falcotron said:

This all seems to fit with the fact that the Northerners don't seem to have the same ambivalent attitude toward iron as the Jews, Egyptians, Germans, or other people who historically did better than anyone should expect using bronze against an iron-equipped enemy. Iron is not a metal they traditionally considered impure and useless but later grudgingly learned how to use, it's important to them.

But I realize this is all a lot of "could" and "maybe" without even a real story, much less evidence for it. Hopefully someone else can take my tangled mess of ideas in this post and make something coherent out of it.

We can all just poke around until we get more material and then poke around some more

[falcotron]

I'm going to reread the prologue and do a couple searches before responding to the rest, but on this one bit:

15 hours ago, YOVMO said:

There are myths that suggest that Iron is the blood of the earth or the life force of the earth. In asoiaf the smell of iron is commonly used for blood as well as other organic material. If the others hate life and if iron has the smell of life or blood it would make sense for them to hate it...but why fear? If they hated it and didn't fear it they would just destroy it, discard it or avoid it.  The best I can come up with, since we know iron doesn't slay them, is that somehow the power involved with being undead revolves around electromagnetic activity and Iron could be used as a ground to drain the power from them.

This feels too "pseudosciencey" for GRRM's wights, but it reminds me of something else:

Are there any mentions of magnets, directly or indirectly?

A lot of medieval fantasy series have wizards using lodestones as mystical artifacts,* and meanwhile, there's some fun stuff from Chinese mythology** that seems ripe for someone to borrow to make their world not quite bog standard pseudo-medieval-Europe-fantasy. But I don't remember them coming up anywhere in ASoIaF.

---

* Why that is looks like an interesting story in itself. My guess is that it started because historians used to think Europeans got compasses from the Chinese and probably believed they were magic until the Renaissance. Of course we now know that navigators were using water compasses routinely in the early 13th century, and understood them well enough that they could have explained why Insane Clown Posse are idiots, and Thales of Miletus was writing about them almost 2000 years before that. But most fantasy writers are just ripping off earlier fantasy writers rather than doing their own research, so they still have their magic lodestones that do the exact same thing as non-magic lodestones in the real world but are magic.

** The luopan disc used is the familiar descendant, but Han geomancy is to Ming feng shui as Greek/Egyptian elementalism is to medieval alchemy.

[YOVMO]

7 hours ago, falcotron said:

I'm going to reread the prologue and do a couple searches before responding to the rest, but on this one bit:

This feels too "pseudosciencey" for GRRM's wights, but it reminds me of something else:

I certainly understand what you mean by pseudosciencey not fitting GRRM's wights....there is a history of it in fantasy writing however as well as in Scottish and Irish folklore (though spoken about in different terms). Still, you are probably right.

7 hours ago, falcotron said:

Are there any mentions of magnets, directly or indirectly?

As for a direct mention of a magnet there is none. An indirect one, I can't really say but nothing I can think of. Might be a rich vein though.

 

[AlaskanSandman]

On 10/18/2017 at 6:55 PM, falcotron said:

In the real world, "ironwood" is kind of a generic name for a wide range of unrelated trees that are exceptionally hard and/or brittle, from Australian acacias to Persian witchhazel to California rosewood. And the fact that there's a house named Yronwood all the way across the continent from Winterfell makes me think the same could be true on Westeros.

That being said, it seems like using ironwood in the doors to the crypt is meant to highlight some association with iron at least out-of-universe, and maybe in-universe as well. The only question is whether that association is just "ironwood is kind of like iron, hence the name" or whether there's more to it than that. (We know the Others don't seem to have a problem with it—but as I mentioned a few replies back, they also don't have a problem with Waymar's sword, so "hate iron" isn't as simple as it sounds.)

 

Those trees those might also be the same ones found in Qarth. We havnt been told the color of the leaves yet, but that Iron wood burns blue when on fire. Which seems like a nod to the Black Barked Trees in Qarth. Seems likely they're the same trees, just opposites for what ever reason and why they make up doors like the one in the Hotu.

[OtherFromAnotherMother]

@falcotron

I dig it. Nice work.

I think the Daynes were fortunate by seeing and finding a meteorite with the perfect combination of elements to create the best sword imaginable. You know, less nickel, more magic.

It is interesting to note that of the meteorites classified as "falls" (seen falling from the sky), only 4% are considered "iron", while the others are considered "stony". In the U.S., "finds" (found, not seen falling) are more likely to be "iron" than "falls" are. This is probably explained by iron catching a person's eye when on the ground. 

The Daynes saw a special meteorite fall, named the place where it fell Starfall, and built a B.A. sword from a stony/magical meteorite. Actually, now that I think about it, depending on your definition of "magic", I don't really have to call Dawn magical. Perhaps it is just made from elements in George's world. Unless that is considered magic. Sorry for the tangent.

 

[The Weirwoods Eyes]

just so I can find it later