Uncovering the redacted text in GRRM's original treatment.

[Jez Targaryen]

(Sorry - - tried to edit my post and must have hit 'quote' instead).

[Lord Varys]

Actually, I'd not worry about HBO spoilers 'to the end of the series', as the show clearly seems to be more or less a 'loosely inspired by' now, and cannot possibly spoil us in any meaningful way about the subtleties of the books.

Reading an outline about the series before actually reading the chapters also does not really trouble me, unless we would talk about a very detailed outline covering nearly every plot development in advance. That's clearly not the case with the redacted parts here, and even if we can deduce some spoilers for the next book (or the one after that), we would never know for sure if this is actually going to happen until we have read it in the book.

I think the last paragraph was redacted because this actually touches upon stuff that has not yet been covered by the published books (or had not been covered by the-then published books when the redaction was made). But clearly a very big spoiler was not redacted, namely the fact that Jon Snow and Arya Stark are apparently indeed not half-siblings. That was a pretty big revelation...

The redacted portion cannot contain spoilers of the very of the series, as it seems clear that George is only speaking about 'the second volume of the trilogy, 'A Dance with Dragons' in that paragraph, not about whatever was supposed to happen in 'The Winds of Winter'.

[sj4iy]

Eh, I don't mind people doing some detective work. If you don't want to know what it could say, you can always ignore these threads, imo. This isn't piracy. If they didn't want anything to 'get out', then they would have never put it up in the first place.

[Le Cygne]

From a writing standpoint you can start a sentence with an 'And' however it isn't common at all.

GRRM does in the books, I just found several instances, now finding a bunch more. Here's an example:

Ghost had shared his cell before the ranging, warming it against the chill of night. And in the wild, Ygritte had slept beside him.

[PopMelon]

GRRM does in the books, I just found several instances, now finding a bunch more. Here's an example:

Thanks!

[Moondancer]

You're doing gods' work, bless you. :D

How does "c" fit in front of "lad"?

(I can't help but giggle at the sight of Dany's nicknames EVEN in the synopsis. :D If anything is amiss in a pitch... Anyways! I followed GRRM's ornate line and thought that the word could be descriptive as well, hence something-clad.)

Also, if Jon has a bitter enemy, mayhaps Tyrion/Mance would find their place in the paragraph as well.

(apologies if this was mentioned before, but I skimmed through the thread and went straight to the link.)

[Ghost's Shadow]

The missing comma foreshadows that Sansa will marry Samwell Tarly because although he can write, his punctuation needs work.

It is known!

:lol:

Punctuation FTW. :P

[Jaime FTW]

can't wait for the result

[Gendry_Goldeneyes]

i wonder if tyrion is jon snow's bitter enemy, which would be ironic since they started as besties

i guess he steals sansa from him in the end

Jon Sansa and Arya as the new Aegon, Visenya, and Rhaenys

[Ser Pounce FTW]

Welcome! I've been checking your progress on reddit.

You're doing gods' work, bless you. :D

This comes to mind for me as well :bowdown:

I'm wondering if you've tried Tyrion Jaime in the sentence of "Jon Snow is his bitter enemy" since they've been named in the outline? Any way, may you have an unlimited amount 5 hour energy .

[PopMelon]

I keep on wondering when they'll put a comma after 'Thrones'. :P

Will do in the next update.

[WeaselPie]

edit

[shadow282]

Searching for where your parents hid a few presents before Christmas is one thing, but grabbing your parents' social security cards (or international equivalent) and calling up their credit card companies to ask for complete receipt purchase histories is another. It would make for a rather lame Christmas.

We all search, discuss, and debate theories here because its exciting, but keeping some surprises in the last few books is a very good thing. I'm not saying that letter holds all the keys, I'm sure it doesn't, but if that letter was totally cracked then it would do more harm than good. It wouldn't be something to christen people as heroes of the fandom. Regardless of whether or not only some people wanted to discover things that way, the information would seep out to the rest of the internet savvy portion of the fandom through osmosis.

Personally, I think you guys looking to crack the letter should form a secret society and swear to keep it away from the rest of the fanbase for it's own good, but that's just my opinion. The real "heroes" aren't those that are able to crack something and reveal it, but those who would hold that sort of thing back on their own volition to preserve the grand spectrum of GRRM's writing in the way he intended, or at least. one that didn't involve details of the ending leaking out to his fans through a post on flipping twitter.

Well that's certainly not being way too dramatic.

In three years the entire ending is going to be spoiled by the tv show. Since being able to avoid spoilers for years seems incredibly hard these days odds are very few people are actually going to read the last book fully unspoiled. One paragraph written 20 years ago continuing from a letter that is clearly vastly different from the current story is essentially harmless compared to that.

[Skull of the Greatjon]

Questions:

1. Has anyone tried aligning the image with a grid to make sure our perspective is exactly perpendicular to the page? It might be that the ascenders in certain letters would fall probabilistically within a slightly different area of the letterblock (allowing for fax, photocopy, and photographic distortions).

2. *There are no hyphens!* we know the length of a line in letters, so if the redacted line ends before that expected length, we know that the first word of the next line should be at least n-plus-one characters long.

3. I expect that the remaining text will most resemble the language of the prophecies in AGOT.

[PopMelon]

Questions:

1. Has anyone tried aligning the image with a grid to make sure our perspective is exactly perpendicular to the page? It might be that the ascenders in certain letters would fall probabilistically within a slightly different area of the letterblock (allowing for fax, photocopy, and photographic distortions).

2. *There are no hyphens!* we know the length of a line in letters, so if the redacted line ends before that expected length, we know that the first word of the next line should be at least n-plus-one characters long.

3. I expect that the remaining text will most resemble the language of the prophecies in AGOT.

1. Yup that I was the first thing I did when we started this format. The current version has been rotated and slightly distorted to account for the slight bend in the centre of the page.

2. I don't exactly understand what you're saying here, all of the lines that we've guessed visibly end with a letter and weren't 'over-redacted'.

[Facebookless Man]

What would be the point of editing out this crap?

[Skull of the Greatjon]

I mean that GRRM's word processor wraps words that won't fit at the end of a line instead of hyphenating them. If a line ends before the right margin, it's because the next word was too long to fit. So if you look at the longest line (in number of characters) in this letter, you can determine the minimum length of the first words in lines 2, 3, 4, 6, and 7. (Line 4 looks like it might be full.) Which is not a lot, but it might help rule out some candidates.

[WeaselPie]

I mean that GRRM's word processor wraps words that won't fit at the end of a line instead of hyphenating them. If a line ends before the right margin, it's because the next word was too long to fit. So if you look at the longest line (in number of characters) in this letter, you can determine the minimum length of the first words in lines 2, 3, 4, 6, and 7. (Line 4 looks like it might be full.) Which is not a lot, but it might help rule out some candidates.

Actually, it looks like he used an old school typewriter.

And a lot of the work looks pretty great so far. Though I don't have much hope for the first 2 lines.

[Lady Blizzardborn]

What would be the point of editing out this crap?

To make it look really important maybe.

Keep in mind that even with the most brilliant people working on this (you guys are doing an awesome job!) we're still not going to be sure that what they come up with is what's actually on there. And since we know quite a few things have changed in the writing, what's under there might have as well.

[PopMelon]

I mean that GRRM's word processor wraps words that won't fit at the end of a line instead of hyphenating them. If a line ends before the right margin, it's because the next word was too long to fit. So if you look at the longest line (in number of characters) in this letter, you can determine the minimum length of the first words in lines 2, 3, 4, 6, and 7. (Line 4 looks like it might be full.) Which is not a lot, but it might help rule out some candidates.

I suppose you are correct however there is no indication that this has happened elsewhere in the text so I think we can rule it out for this paragraph.