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Why are the bones of the dead so important to Northerners?


The Twinslayer

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The bones of the dead seem to be important to Notherners in a way that they aren't for other people. Not only do we get a scene early in Game of Thrones showing that the Stark dead are all assembled in a crypt, but Ned sends Lady's bones home, Rickard Karstark talks about taking his sons' bones home like it is a matter of course, and Tyrion sends Ned's bones back as a show of respect after Robb indicates that it is important that his "father's bones will be returned to us, so he may rest beside his brother and sister in the crypts beneath Winterfell, as he would have wished." And, Robb wants more: "The remains of his household guard who died in his service in King's Landing must also be returned." We also have a vivid scene of the Barrows of the First Men, where bodies are apparently buried.

And, of course, Ned brought Lyanna's bones home ("She was a Stark of Winterfell... This is her place...She wanted to come home, to rest beside Brandon and Father." He could hear her still at times. "Promise me..."). Which seems to have upset Lady Dustin: "Ned Stark returned the horse to me on his way back to Winterfell. He told me that my lord had died an honorable death, that his body had been laid to rest beneath the red mountains of Dorne. He brought his sister's bones back north, and there she rests ... But I promise you, Lord Eddard's never will. I mean to feed them to my dogs." Regardless of whether she means it or not, it is a chilling image -- especially if returning bones is sacred to Norrherners.

Southern rituals seem different. We learn in Game of Thrones that the Tullys burn their dead, and later we see it happen to Hoster. Targaryens apparently burn their dead, too.

Apart from that, the Dothraki seem to use funeral pyres and the Ironborn apparently bury at sea.

This seems strange, because of the White Walkers. If the Norrhern Lords, and the Starks in particular, were the ancient enemies of the White Walkers, wouldn't they burn their dead?

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The Others are or were a long dead threat for millenia. The Northerners simply bury their dead. They can't transport corpses without risking disease drawing flies and crows. The stench would be awful too. Bones are simply more practical. Besides, people have been treating bones as such throughout human history.


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I'm not sure how easy it is to make useful deductions from funerary differences.

The western Chinese and the Slavs both thought it was important to bring the corpse home. What's similar about them, but different from, say, the Jews or ancient Greeks (who wanted to reside in a sanctified place, and ideally the one of highest honor they qualified for), the Mongols (who wanted to be buried/exposed in their place of greatest glory during life), the Jain or the Manchu (who wanted to be cremated in a holy place, and it didn't matter much what happened to the body afterward)? Obviously I'm overgeneralizing ("the western Chinese" or "the Greeks" means dozens of different cultures over thousands of years...), but you get the point.

Some cultures had specific religious beliefs that constrain their choices pretty strongly (e.g., Egyptian transmigration requiring the body to be whole and viewable long after death), but for the most part it seems like if it wasn't just random cultural drift, it was cultures deliberately trying to be different from their neighbors to avoid assimilation or to demonize a potential enemy, from the Israelites condemning cremation as human sacrifice to a pagan fire god to the Manchu describing Han burial as a form of cannibalism.

So, it could well just be a First Men vs. Andals/Old Gods vs. Faith thing that has no real meaning beyond being distinctive from their rivals. We can't make peace with those savages, they don't even burn their dead!

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So, it could well just be a First Men vs. Andals/Old Gods vs. Faith thing that has no real meaning beyond being distinctive from their rivals. We can't make peace with those savages, they don't even burn their dead!

Maybe. That fits with the cultural prejudices we've seen in the novels.

But two things: first, Starks have a tradition of burying in a specific, ancient crypt where the Lords and Kings have iron swords--very specific. Could just be a tie to the old gods via the weirwood's roots coming down into the crypt.

But with the wights--there's a scene when Ghost is eating a wighted bone and the narration says something like the bone remembered its life until Ghost broke it with his jaws (bad paraphrase). Am wondering if the ancient history of wights is part of why the northerners, especially the Starks, want the bones in special crypts (or barrows) with iron over them--sounds like they may be tying back to not wanting the wights to rise. Maybe--a compromise between burning and burial--burial in specific crypts following specific rituals. Maybe.

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I'm not sure how easy it is to make useful deductions from funerary differences.

The western Chinese and the Slavs both thought it was important to bring the corpse home. What's similar about them, but different from, say, the Jews or ancient Greeks (who wanted to reside in a sanctified place, and ideally the one of highest honor they qualified for), the Mongols (who wanted to be buried/exposed in their place of greatest glory during life), the Jain or the Manchu (who wanted to be cremated in a holy place, and it didn't matter much what happened to the body afterward)? Obviously I'm overgeneralizing ("the western Chinese" or "the Greeks" means dozens of different cultures over thousands of years...), but you get the point.

Some cultures had specific religious beliefs that constrain their choices pretty strongly (e.g., Egyptian transmigration requiring the body to be whole and viewable long after death), but for the most part it seems like if it wasn't just random cultural drift, it was cultures deliberately trying to be different from their neighbors to avoid assimilation or to demonize a potential enemy, from the Israelites condemning cremation as human sacrifice to a pagan fire god to the Manchu describing Han burial as a form of cannibalism.

So, it could well just be a First Men vs. Andals/Old Gods vs. Faith thing that has no real meaning beyond being distinctive from their rivals. We can't make peace with those savages, they don't even burn their dead!

Aztecs burned them And added them to their meals. Answering to the OP. Southerners care about the bones also like Loras burrying Renly in a place he told him as a kid.
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Maybe. That fits with the cultural prejudices we've seen in the novels.

But two things: first, Starks have a tradition of burying in a specific, ancient crypt where the Lords and Kings have iron swords--very specific. Could just be a tie to the old gods via the weirwood's roots coming down into the crypt.

But with the wights--there's a scene when Ghost is eating a wighted bone and the narration says something like the bone remembered its life until Ghost broke it with his jaws (bad paraphrase). Am wondering if the ancient history of wights is part of why the northerners, especially the Starks, want the bones in special crypts (or barrows) with iron over them--sounds like they may be tying back to not wanting the wights to rise. Maybe--a compromise between burning and burial--burial in specific crypts following specific rituals. Maybe.

But then why even compromise? If this really is a rational cultural response to a threat of undeadness, wouldn't burning have been the much better solution?

For example, imagine that the Chinese superstition were right, and if you let a corpse get homesick it'll wake up, hop home, and start sucking out people's chi while for some reason dressing like a Qing government official until you put the magic words in yellow on its head somehow. While you could deal with that by coming up with a tradition of bringing the corpses to a battlefield and exposing them like the Mongols but making sure to staple the yellow words to their foreheads first so they can't rise, it seems like it would be a lot easier to bring the corpses home to be buried.

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The implication is that because the Starks do NOT burn their dead (their servants are buried in the lichyard), they might be up to something creepy, like creating Others.



Suddenly Arya remembered the crypts at Winterfell. They were a lot scarier than this place, she told herself. She’d been just a little girl the first time she saw them. Her brother Robb had taken them down, her and Sansa and baby Bran, who’d been no bigger than Rickon was now. They’d only had one candle between them, and Bran’s eyes had gotten as big as saucers as he stared at the stone faces of the Kings of Winter, with their wolves at their feet and their iron swords across their laps. Robb took them all the way down to the end, past Grandfather and Brandon and Lyanna, to show them their own tombs. Sansa kept looking at the stubby little candle, anxious that it might go out. Old Nan had told her there were spiders down here, and rats as big as dogs. Robb smiled when she said that. “There are worse things than spiders and rats,” he whispered. “This is where the dead walk.” That was when they heard the sound, low and deep and shivery. Baby Bran had clutched at Arya’s hand. When the spirit stepped out of the open tomb, pale white and moaning for blood, Sansa ran shrieking for the stairs, and Bran wrapped himself around Robb’s leg, sobbing. Arya stood her ground and gave the spirit a punch. It was only Jon, covered with flour. “You stupid ,” she told him, “you scared the baby,” but Jon and Robb just laughed and laughed, and pretty soon Bran and Arya were laughing too. The memory made Arya smile, and after that the darkness held no more terrors for her. (AGOT, ARYA)



"Othor,” announced Ser Jaremy Rykker, “beyond a doubt. And this one was Jafer Flowers.” He turned the corpse over with his foot, and the dead white face stared up at the overcast sky with blue, blue eyes. “They were Ben Stark’s men, both of them.” My uncle’s men , Jon thought numbly. He remembered how he’d pleaded to ride with them. Gods, I was such a green boy. If he had taken me, it might be me lying here


[...]

Last night he had dreamt the Winterfell dream again. He was wandering the empty castle, searching for his father, descending into the crypts. Only this time the dream had gone further than before. In the dark he’d heard the scrape of stone on stone. When he turned he saw that the vaults were opening, one after the other. As the dead kings came stumbling from their cold black graves, Jon had woken in pitch- dark, his heart hammering. Even when Ghost leapt up on the bed to nuzzle at his face, he could not shake his deep sense of terror. He dared not go back to sleep. Instead he had climbed the Wall and walked, restless, until he saw the light of the dawn off to the east. It was only a dream. I am a brother of the Night’s Watch now, not a frightened boy. (ACOK, Jon)


Amongst the stream of warriors were the fathers of many of Jon’s hostages. Some stared with cold dead eyes as they went by, fingering their sword hilts. Others smiled at him like long- lost kin, though a few of those smiles discomfited Jon Snow more than any glare. None knelt, but many gave him their oaths.

[...]

After the riders came the men of the Frozen Shore. Jon watched a dozen of their big bone chariots roll past him one by one, clattering like Rattleshirt. Half still rolled as before; others had replaced their wheels with runners. They slid across the snowdrifts smoothly, where the wheeled chariots were foundering and sinking. (ADWD. Jon)


The Other slid gracefully from the saddle to stand upon the snow. Sword-slim it was, and milky white. Its armor rippled and shifted as it moved, and its feet did not break the crust of the new-fallen snow.

[...]

The wights had been slow clumsy things, but the Other was light as snow on the wind. It slid away from Paul’s axe, armor rippling, and its crystal sword twisted and spun and slipped between the iron rings of Paul’s mail, through leather and wool and bone and flesh. (ASOS, Sam)
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The bones of the dead are important to most cultures, I think we see that in play with the Starks because most of the POV's (and most of the really important deaths) come from that family, and they happen far away from Winterfell.


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I think it kind of makes sense.

First of all, having the remains of a dead person at a certain location (a grave) makes sense for a number of reasons. The friends and relatives of the deceased want a place where they can visit him/her. They're not actually visiting him/her, of course, but I can see that it feels more like visiting a person if ypunhave their actual remains in front of you, rather than just a tombstone. Furthermore, these people probably believed in the soul, and might have thought (as many Christians do) that the soul won't find rest unless you bury the body in holy ground, or something along those lines. Thirdly, if you have a body, you have evidence that the person is dead. That might be necessary to provide closure for the friends and relatives of the deceased, and can also be important from a legal point of view.

So why "bones" instead of "corpse"? My guess is that that's just because bones last far longer, which is good if the body needs to be transported long distances.

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I think it kind of makes sense.

First of all, having the remains of a dead person at a certain location (a grave) makes sense for a number of reasons. The friends and relatives of the deceased want a place where they can visit him/her. They're not actually visiting him/her, of course, but I can see that it feels more like visiting a person if ypunhave their actual remains in front of you, rather than just a tombstone. Furthermore, these people probably believed in the soul, and might have thought (as many Christians do) that the soul won't find rest unless you bury the body in holy ground, or something along those lines. Thirdly, if you have a body, you have evidence that the person is dead. That might be necessary to provide closure for the friends and relatives of the deceased, and can also be important from a legal point of view.

So why "bones" instead of "corpse"? My guess is that that's just because bones last far longer, which is good if the body needs to be transported long distances.

Nothing you said has anything to do with Asoiaf they have scientific proof of souls in the North. They might not know it anymore but their ancestors fighting skin changers did and those in contact with the Cotf would of as well.

But again rendering your relatives down to their bones so they don't rise up as a monster to kill you would be kind of important. They unlike us have or had proof of supernatural events.

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I'm not sure how easy it is to make useful deductions from funerary differences.

The western Chinese and the Slavs both thought it was important to bring the corpse home. What's similar about them, but different from, say, the Jews or ancient Greeks (who wanted to reside in a sanctified place, and ideally the one of highest honor they qualified for), the Mongols (who wanted to be buried/exposed in their place of greatest glory during life), the Jain or the Manchu (who wanted to be cremated in a holy place, and it didn't matter much what happened to the body afterward)? Obviously I'm overgeneralizing ("the western Chinese" or "the Greeks" means dozens of different cultures over thousands of years...), but you get the point.

Some cultures had specific religious beliefs that constrain their choices pretty strongly (e.g., Egyptian transmigration requiring the body to be whole and viewable long after death), but for the most part it seems like if it wasn't just random cultural drift, it was cultures deliberately trying to be different from their neighbors to avoid assimilation or to demonize a potential enemy, from the Israelites condemning cremation as human sacrifice to a pagan fire god to the Manchu describing Han burial as a form of cannibalism.

So, it could well just be a First Men vs. Andals/Old Gods vs. Faith thing that has no real meaning beyond being distinctive from their rivals. We can't make peace with those savages, they don't even burn their dead!

I think the direct precedent for this particular westerosi custom is in the real world Middle Ages. During the Crusades, people tried to return the bodies of the fallen warriors to be buried back home (at least the nobles), but the corpses were always bones by the time they arrived, so, since they would root and become bones anyways, they exposed them to the elements so they would decompose and become easy to transport bleached bones (easier to move around, cheaper to ship than coffins, and they don't stink).

The next step was to boil the corpse to speed the process. They boiled the body, extracted the bones and let the flesh root. The Church forbade it, but it was done anyways. That custom convinced the muslims that the crusaders ate their own dead.

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Evolett has some really interesting ideas about bones of Starks in connection to the Others.

The implication is that because the Starks do NOT burn their dead (their servants are buried in the lichyard), they might be up to something creepy, like creating Others.

I like this a lot. It explains many elements like "There must always be a Stark in Winterfell", "Winter is coming" or the idea of the Night's King as a Stark.

That the Starks created and/or control Others is not that much of a stretch. And it opens up a lot of avenues for the future books.

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Here is a little more information on the Starks. At one point, Catelyn says about Ned that he "was a Stark, and his bones must be laid to rest beneath Winterfell." Ned says that Lyanna's place was in the Winterfell crypts because "She was a Stark of Winterfell." And, although it was part of a prank, Robb told Sansa, Arya and Bran that there were already tombs waiting for them in the crypts.



There is at least one reference to Southerners returning bones to their homes. After the Rebellion, Jon Arryn took Prince Lewyn's bones back to Dorne. So customs in the South seem to vary.


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Not sure whether it's related, but we know the Starks are some of the oldest families around - First Men and Old Gods. And the North also has barrows all over the place. In bronze age and beaker-period times in Europe (proto Celtic so to speak), people still needed to move around in the area... not by season but every generation or so (to give the used up land time to rest and so on). And the ancestral bones and burrials were used as a territorial marker. If you stood on a hill with a barrow of a certain Clan, it meant that all the land that you could see from that hill as far as the horizon was that clan's land. And if you crossed an area (as a stranger) and could see a barrow, you knew you were in a certain Clan area for as long as you could see the barrow. In a way the ancestors were guarding and watching and protecting the Clan area.



I think the line of thought of "having the bones" instead of a burrial of a corpse in relation to the Others and wights is a good question. After all, it seems an important thing to all men of the North, not just Starks, to have the bones back, and they follow the old ways that survived the Long Night 1.0 and would have accomodated it.



But it's not just about having your loved ones returned. Which Stark alive cares about some obscure Stark King of say 600 years before that. So, there must be a high value or belief in the potency of ancestors right under and around the keep, as well as territorial claim as I described of the bronze age. But then why must there always be an "alive Stark" at WF?



A crypt is like a chtonic underworld. In such religions and beliefs, there is no real afterlife, except in a type of Hades (Christianity made it synonym to the Christian Hell, but it was just the common - where the dead go live, under the ground). A crypt is kindof like making your own underworld that you might have control over, so you don't need to go begging a death-god or goddess for the return of some unfortunate dead relative (like in mythology), or at least have some power of negotiation. You basically have your personal entrance into the Greek Hades/ Norse Hel, etc, heck even your own plot and territory there. If the dead somehow would return, at least you could claim to be their master or something. Kindof like saying: you're my blood, and on our land, so you answer to me, not some Other.



????? Just brainstorming here a bit.


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I don't think that bones of the dead are important to Northerners. Its the remains of the person that's important and not just to Northerners but to Westerosi at al. Westerosi are burying their dead - in crypts and in graves. Only Targaryens - using Valyrian burial rites burn their dead. I am pretty sure it mentioned in either one of ASOAIF books, Egg & Dunk books or in the world book.



Separating bones from flesh by boiling the body, looks to be only done in situations where the body is not immediately buried onsite but expected to be moved long distances, it prevents spoilage/decomposition. Furthermore, I remember that its Silent Sisters who take care of this procedure and are carrying Ned bones to the North. Silent Sisters = The Faith of the Seven, not part of Old Gods tradition that North and Ned are following.



In one of Barristans chapters read by GRRM for AWOW, he said that Quentin remains are boiled and his bones are going to be carried to Dorne

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