cgrav

LmL's essays/podcasts explain it. Search YouTube or wherever for Mythical Astronomy of Ice and Fire, or just go straight to lucifermeanslightbringer.com. Might seem far fetched at first, but it's meticulously researched and supported, as well as absurdly consistent within the text of the books. Good video introduction of the topic: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXNXT2MxtKPhsBmhFWE6xsg

yeah it's hard for these scenes not to echo season 1, and it would probably be even weirder if they never stopped to reminisce about the last time they were all together.

D&D explain in the post-video that those symbols were inherited from the Children of the Forest, as a consequence of having been created by them. The historical events depicted by those shapes have apparently been deduced as important within the ancient history and mythology of Ice and Fire, as they appear in scenes that are significant in terms of decoding those myths. In case you're not already familiar with the theory, it's basically that the Long Night was a consequence of some ancient sorcery that caused one of Planetos's two moons to be destroyed by a comet while it was in eclipse formation against the sun. That idea is represented visually by the circles with the lines drawn through them, and the smaller circle inside the larger circle. Respectively, those are images of the moon bisected by a stellar collision, and a sun with a moon eclipsing it, and a sun possibly radiating cosmic debris after the collsion. At the risk of over-nerding on book stuff in the TV thread, there is one particular scene in SoS in which Yoren draws a shape in the sand for Arya: That's the circle with the line through it that appears several times in the cave drawings, always next to a sun. Apparently D&D knew this image was significant from the outset, as the corpse arrangement in the Season 1 prologue scene shows.

@LmL @ravenous reader While I'm sure you're loathe to mingle book and show material, I think you'll be amused to see that tonight's episode features a whole bunch of Mythical Astronomy cave drawings! Many paired paired images of a sun and a "gods eye" eclipse-type shape, or a circle with a line through it (as drawn by Yoren in the sand next to the Gods Eye).

The c/horn thing actually came to me all of a sudden yesterday when I heard someone say "unicorn". Can't even remember why someone would have said unicorn, but it reminded me of the k/h alternation, and I guess I just had Ice and Fire on the brain. what really made it click for me was the text search. It wasn't until then that I saw how many times Mormont basically says "He doesn't really want corn", which is a bright red flag that the raven'a shrieks have some other meaning.

Has anyone pointed out that "horn" and "corn" are cognates? Has Mormont's raven been trying to tell everyone about the Horn of Joramun this whole time? only one instance of the two appearing close together, but there's no other reason for the raven to speak up at that moment: Plus a number of scenes in which the raven cries "Corn" at Jon right after Mormont has fed it. and then there's the "corn king" line, which now could be a double entendres hinting first at Jon's characters archetype, and also at Horn of Joramun belonging to a King. And here's a corn in a symbolic image: