Waves of Night and Moon Blood: Mythical Astronomy of Ice and Fire podcast, episode 3

[hiemal]

And you know I'm digging on the eclipse and solar/lunar king theme, right?

Like Mike and Ike on a lot of this, LML.

[Daendrew]

11 hours ago, LmL said:

Thanks Daen! There's actually a lot more to the bull sacrifice stuff... Samwell tells Jon his dad made him bathe in bull's blood to make him more manly, for example. But Sam has a complex web of personal symbolism which I want to deal with by itself, so I didn't use that. Also, although I've been talking about "lunar figures" and "solar figures," in terms of the lion and dragon being solar animals, but George also has a strain of figures which represent both. That's because the second moon eclipse which happened at the time of collision is so important, and the configuration creates the image of horned lord or a horned animal. Look at my avatar picture - the black circle in the middle is the soon to be destroyed second moon, making the God's Eye eclipse image. Above is the surviving moon, which would appear as a crescent from the planet's point of view and thus crate the image of the horned lord. That's why the distinctly horned animals - the bulls and stags particularly - seem to represent a sun / moon conjunction. I'm going to get into that soon... which is why I didn't include all the throat slitting and sacrifices. Renly's murder is particularly instructional. 

Yep. That's one of the reasons why Sam will be one of the biggest heroes in the series. 

 

[Durran Durrandon]

So, I might have mentioned this before, but Beric and company aren't undead. 

[LmL]

59 minutes ago, Durran Durrandon said:

So, I might have mentioned this before, but Beric and company aren't undead. 

I'm using the term n a more general sense to mean "died and resurrected." I know you did an excellent thing about the technicalities of the states of undeath. I simply mean "resurrected in some fashion."

[Jak Scaletongue]

So I just noticed something - you keep saying Aeron "damfair" but I was under the impression his name was Aeron "damp-hair" - like wet=damp.

I know the "ph" is there - but this *is* the English language...we all know how consistent those rules are!

[Durran Durrandon]

9 minutes ago, Jak Scaletongue said:

So I just noticed something - you keep saying Aeron "damfair" but I was under the impression his name was Aeron "damp-hair" - like wet=damp.

I know the "ph" is there - but this *is* the English language...we all know how consistent those rules are!

I did not notice that. but yes, I always took it as damp-hair.

[Durran Durrandon]

43 minutes ago, LmL said:

I'm using the term n a more general sense to mean "died and resurrected." I know you did an excellent thing about the technicalities of the states of undeath. I simply mean "resurrected in some fashion."

I'm mostly just giving you a hard time. However, if you say "fire wight" you are dead to me, or undead to me? Okay, at minimum posthuman, flesh-made-fire to me.

[LmL]

1 hour ago, Durran Durrandon said:

I did not notice that. but yes, I always took it as damp-hair.

That's how Dotrice says it, so that's just how I hear it I guess. I'm really not sure what George was intending. "The Damp Hair" just sounds kind of stupid to me, I think. I figured it was just a sly play on words, but that it is pronounced "Damfair" but who knows.

 

[LmL]

45 minutes ago, Durran Durrandon said:

I'm mostly just giving you a hard time. However, if you say "fire wight" you are dead to me, or undead to me? Okay, at minimum posthuman, flesh-made-fire to me.

Remember: just because I'm undead to you doesn't mean I'll leave you alone. 

[LmL]

13 hours ago, hiemal said:

And you know I'm digging on the eclipse and solar/lunar king theme, right?

Like Mike and Ike on a lot of this, LML.

I thought you might, fellow eclipse brother.

[Jak Scaletongue]

7 minutes ago, LmL said:

That's how Dotrice says it, so that's just how I hear it I guess. I'm really not sure what George was intending. "The Damp Hair" just sounds kind of stupid to me, I think. I figured it was just a sly play on words, but that it is pronounced "Damfair" but who knows.

 

I don't listen to the audiobooks - while I like the idea of getting stuff done while listening to stuff, I find it's just not the same with a book!  But that's me!

And like I said before, it's just my impression but the "damp hair" just seemed so appropriate for a Drowned God priest!  And I did know who exactly you meant when you said "damfair" - that's not an issue.  I'd read a thread about how people pronounce some of the names, and "Damphair" came up a few times, but I'd never actually *heard* it that way.  I'd seen people say that they said it "damfair" but reading and hearing it are two different things!!  It just threw me off, is all.

[Durran Durrandon]

13 minutes ago, LmL said:

Remember: just because I'm undead to you doesn't mean I'll leave you alone. 

If you didn't eat or sleep, your podcasts would come out faster.

[LmL]

2 hours ago, Durran Durrandon said:

If you didn't eat or sleep, your podcasts would come out faster.

Being undead: surprisingly practical. 

[Lady Fishbiscuit]

Only listened to the first 30 mins of the podcast, but I had to stop and ask... Several times Damphair has been pronounced Dam-phair (like dam-fair).  Isn't it Damp-Hair? Because his hair is always damp?  Sorry, a very minor and irrelevant point, I know, but it was distracting me!   I'll try to come back with something more high-brow when I've finished listening .

[LmL]

9 minutes ago, Lady Fishbiscuit said:

Only listened to the first 30 mins of the podcast, but I had to stop and ask... Several times Damphair has been pronounced Dam-phair (like dam-fair).  Isn't it Damp-Hair? Because his hair is always damp?  Sorry, a very minor and irrelevant point, I know, but it was distracting me!   I'll try to come back with something more high-brow when I've finished listening .

Oh boy I've ripped the scab off of this one....

I have no idea what the right pronunciation is but Roy Dotrice says Damphair and that's stuck in my head. I know he says Brienne and Petyr wrong so he might be wrong about Damphair too. 

Has George ever pronounced his name?

And how about some applause for my drowned prophet voice? Thought I nailed that. 

[Lady Fishbiscuit]

1 hour ago, LmL said:

Oh boy I've ripped the scab off of this one....

I have no idea what the right pronunciation is but Roy Dotrice says Damphair and that's stuck in my head. I know he says Brienne and Petyr wrong so he might be wrong about Damphair too. 

Has George ever pronounced his name?

And how about some applause for my drowned prophet voice? Thought I nailed that. 

*applauds* you completely nailed it!

[LmL]

1 hour ago, Lady Fishbiscuit said:

*applauds* you completely nailed it!

I'd like to think that even if I don't know how his name is supposed to sound, I know how HE is supposed to sound

[LmL]

22 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

LmL,

Another great podcast and essay... again it's so rich. I really loved how you now applied your ideas on several concrete scenes from several characters. And glad that the quotes I mentioned to you about Sansa on the roof on the eve of her menarche, once you told me you were working on that, were of great use to you. And thank you very much for the reference

Yeah, pretty awesome how much more was there! the scene you pointed me at had a crescent moon being hidden by greasy smoke - pretty amazing. And that in turn led me to more stuff with her and the Hound. As you saw, all of these scenes are related and use the same symbols and symbolic associations. Pretty cool. I love how it all came together... and of course there's more there in the original chapter of the riot, which I have taken a look at before. I am thinking to do that chapter as a stand along episode, something I am going to start doing more of now that I have laid out the foundations of the theory. 

22 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

A short nitpick: There is a mistake you seemed to make. Sandor does not place Sansa on his black stallion Stranger. In fact, he double rides the chestnut, reddish mare with her back to the Red Keep, having lost complete sight of Stranger. He even asks his colleagues and Tyrion about the whereabouts of his stallion, Stranger, swearing he'll make them pay if something happened to his horse. The news comes that a fire broke out in Flea Bottom and that it must be put out, and Sandor agrees to go back out there, to look for his horse. Of course, Sandor does drag another Stark daughter onto his black stallion - namely Arya

Ah, thanks for the catch. I'll look at those scenes too and see what George is doing there. Of course Sandor and Arya riding the same horse kind of emphasizes the idea that the moon becomes AA reborn, and that those meteors which fell to earth contained the essence of the moon. She falls from her horse, depicting the moon's fall, then becomes a part of AA reborn. 

Anyway, I'll do a correction to straighten it out, thanks very much. I'm going to pull all the black horses together at some point, maybe we can talk horses together. 

22 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

Loooooove the voice impersonation. Several of them made me smile. And I already watch the Dayne youtube videos from History of Westeros as well, which I absolutely enjoyed from start to end!

Awesome, just trying to keep people from falling asleep any way I can. Been having a lot of fun with them though. Going on HoW makes me want to do some youtube videos too, that was a blast. I was thinking maybe short little bit and summaries of parts of my stuff. 10 - 15 minutes or so... I don't have the video editing skills for anything more than that. 

HoW are going to do the joint episode on the Great Empire of the Dawn stuff, that's going to be a hum-dinger. Hopefully we can set the internet on fire with the Dawn Age dragonlords stuff... I think it was the biggest bombshell in TWOIAF

22 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

I loved the connection you made of Sansa as moon mother singing the mother song and wishing to temper the fierceness and anger of the Hound as AA reborn. With him twice preventing the maiden from falling, I've been wondering whether he might represent the AA archetype changed for the good,instead of the corrupted Blood Emperor.

At the least, we are seeing an inner conflict of some kind, aren't we? @Evolett pointed out to me that Sandor is also reborn as the gravedigger, fitting the resurrection part of the AA archetype. I do think that the various incarnations of AA reborn are all giving us different aspects or parts of the character, or perhaps stages of his life. I'm only just starting to put that together, and this is the first time I have noticed AA reborn "saving" the moon or avenging the moon. So now I need to go back and look for other instances of this occurring, see if it's a thing. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead passage I read, there was something about the narrator - a Egyptian pharaoh seeking resurrection in the heavens -  talking about burning away his father's iniquity in the underworld. 

I've mentioned that AA reborn can be either resurrected AA or the child of AA, and there seems to be a redemption arc in the son of AA manifestations sometimes. Kind of like Davos Dayne the SOTM supplanted the dastardly Vorian "Sword of the Evening" Dayne after Nymeria's consolidation. Of course, if the black Lightbringer sword became the Last Hero's sword - and I'm not sure if the LH had Dawn or AA's black sword - then the sword itself, which is one manifestation of AA reborn, had a redemption arc. So it could be an uncorrupted AA reborn, or perhaps a redeemed one. 

[sweetsunray]

3 hours ago, LmL said:

Yeah, pretty awesome how much more was there! the scene you pointed me at had a crescent moon being hidden by greasy smoke - pretty amazing. And that in turn led me to more stuff with her and the Hound. As you saw, all of these scenes are related and use the same symbols and symbolic associations. Pretty cool. I love how it all came together... and of course there's more there in the original chapter of the riot, which I have taken a look at before. I am thinking to do that chapter as a stand along episode, something I am going to start doing more of now that I have laid out the foundations of the theory.

The rooftop scenes are massively loaded with AA symbolism - the swarming soldiers with their torches and moving like ants. But I think that also may be a reference to a parallel scene in the Vale when the mountain clans and the Burned Men swarm the Gates (the Bloody ones and the Moon ones), since George already called the people below in the Gates of the Moon being like ants from Sansa's POV at the Eyrie. 

Quote

Ah, thanks for the catch. I'll look at those scenes too and see what George is doing there. Of course Sandor and Arya riding the same horse kind of emphasizes the idea that the moon becomes AA reborn, and that those meteors which fell to earth contained the essence of the moon. She falls from her horse, depicting the moon's fall, then becomes a part of AA reborn. 

Anyway, I'll do a correction to straighten it out, thanks very much. I'm going to pull all the black horses together at some point, maybe we can talk horses together. 

Oh, yes... horses, lol! There are plenty of horses I still have to cover, but I do that arc by arc, related to the POV they show up in. Sansa's chestnut mare is intruiging. It's a red horse, but it's also a mare, and not exactly a red stallion. However, perhaps it's important that we see Sansa on the chestnut mare in Tyrion's POV. After all, he marries Sansa a book later for the WF claim and hoping that in time she might change her mind about bedding him. But Sansa's the mule who carried the poison that kills Joffrey onto the purple wedding, and he ends up found guilty for the murder, while she left him behind. She was the wrong 'horse' to bet on for Tyrion's arc. Sandor who also rides the red mare, runs out on him during the battle because of the fire, and well since they double ride and there is the Unkiss stuff, it shows how they as a pair together may ruin his intentions and plans perhaps in one of the still to be published books. 

Quote

HoW are going to do the joint episode on the Great Empire of the Dawn stuff, that's going to be a hum-dinger. Hopefully we can set the internet on fire with the Dawn Age dragonlords stuff... I think it was the biggest bombshell in TWOIAF

Get hype! Lol Joking aside. I am very much looking forward to it!

Quote

At the least, we are seeing an inner conflict of some kind, aren't we? Evolett pointed out to me that Sandor is also reborn as the gravedigger, fitting the resurrection part of the AA archetype. I do think that the various incarnations of AA reborn are all giving us different aspects or parts of the character, or perhaps stages of his life. I'm only just starting to put that together, and this is the first time I have noticed AA reborn "saving" the moon or avenging the moon. So now I need to go back and look for other instances of this occurring, see if it's a thing. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead passage I read, there was something about the narrator - a Egyptian pharaoh seeking resurrection in the heavens -  talking about burning away his father's iniquity in the underworld. 

Yup, that's what startled me too within the AA symbolism of those scenes: a shadow hand reaching out, saving her, twice. Yes, we have the stabbing and pinching sensation, the rain of blood and sword, but he pulls her back and keeps her from falling. Huh? And of course Sandor saves Arya at the Twins too. 

Quote

I've mentioned that AA reborn can be either resurrected AA or the child of AA, and there seems to be a redemption arc in the son of AA manifestations sometimes. Kind of like Davos Dayne the SOTM supplanted the dastardly Vorian "Sword of the Evening" Dayne after Nymeria's consolidation. Of course, if the black Lightbringer sword became the Last Hero's sword - and I'm not sure if the LH had Dawn or AA's black sword - then the sword itself, which is one manifestation of AA reborn, had a redemption arc. So it could be an uncorrupted AA reborn, or perhaps a redeemed one

Exactly! The Davos Dayne versus Vorian Dayne of the podcast-youtube you did with Aziz was what made me think whether George is using Sandor saving Sansa in the midst of AA imagery as "redemption arc". He is the sole male character of those who start out dark that I consider to actually be on a redemption arc.

[LmL]

2 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

The rooftop scenes are massively loaded with AA symbolism - the swarming soldiers with their torches and moving like ants. But I think that also may be a reference to a parallel scene in the Vale when the mountain clans and the Burned Men swarm the Gates (the Bloody ones and the Moon ones), since George already called the people below in the Gates of the Moon being like ants from Sansa's POV at the Eyrie. 

Yeah I thought about you when I wrote that part. The Eyrie scene is an ice version of this... I re-read the snow castle chapter the other day and it is LOADED. Sansa as the Ice Queen, really hard.

2 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

Oh, yes... horses, lol! There are plenty of horses I still have to cover, but I do that arc by arc, related to the POV they show up in. Sansa's chestnut mare is intruiging. It's a red horse, but it's also a mare, and not exactly a red stallion. However, perhaps it's important that we see Sansa on the chestnut mare in Tyrion's POV. After all, he marries Sansa a book later for the WF claim and hoping that in time she might change her mind about bedding him. But Sansa's the mule who carried the poison that kills Joffrey onto the purple wedding, and he ends up found guilty for the murder, while she left him behind. She was the wrong 'horse' to bet on for Tyrion's arc. Sandor who also rides the red mare, runs out on him during the battle because of the fire, and well since they double ride and there is the Unkiss stuff, it shows how they as a pair together may ruin his intentions and plans perhaps in one of the still to be published books. 

Really liked your red stallion essay, terrific stuff. Looking forward to the next one.

2 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

Get hype! Lol Joking aside. I am very much looking forward to it!

Yup, that's what startled me too within the AA symbolism of those scenes: a shadow hand reaching out, saving her, twice. Yes, we have the stabbing and pinching sensation, the rain of blood and sword, but he pulls her back and keeps her from falling. Huh? And of course Sandor saves Arya at the Twins too. 

Like I siad, I'll have to look for more instances of this pattern.

The parallel might be Jon Snow redeeming Lyanna in some way. Perhaps just her Stark lineage. 

Also, "three heads has the dragon" dictates that there could be as many as three children of AA, and perhaps they did different things. I mean... on eperson can't do EVERY frickin thing. One person has to become the Grey King, another Durran Godsgrief, etc. 

2 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

Exactly! The Davos Dayne versus Vorian Dayne of the podcast-youtube you did with Aziz was what made me think whether George is using Sandor saving Sansa in the midst of AA imagery as "redemption arc". He is the sole male character of those who start out dark that I consider to actually be on a redemption arc.

Depends on what you mean about redemption... Jamie and Theon might apply.