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Does TWOIAF give us clues as to whom was the three eyed crow before Lord Bloodraven?


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In classical HR terms Lord Bloodraven has head hunted Bran Stark , exactly what he has been recruited for I am not entirely sure, but nevertheless, it seems fairly certain a recruitment process has occurred. Do any off my learned colleagues have  any idea who could have recruited Lord Bloodraven into team Greenseer. I have had to base my search on a couple of assumptions (yes i know) namely;

1. that it is probably someone somehow known to us historically

2. who pre-dates Bloodraven

3. this person went missing from the historical records

4. controversially I have assumed that greenseers are not immortal so i have tried to search from approx 100 AD onwards

 

Aside from that I have left my mind open and to date have yet to find a suitable candidate. I am hoping if I can find a candidate then I can reverse engineer a possible theory as to what Lord Bloodraven may be up to as I suspect he might be the key to the riddle of how the prophetic/magical aspects of the story fit with the marshal/political aspects of our story.

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If there was someone before him who recruited him into the fight against the others I'd lean towards Daemon Targaryen. Assuming he really did survive and lived out the rest of his life with the Green Men. But that's a pretty big if.

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22 hours ago, RumHam said:

If there was someone before him who recruited him into the fight against the others I'd lean towards Daemon Targaryen. Assuming he really did survive and lived out the rest of his life with the Green Men. But that's a pretty big if.

That would be a very long time. The battle over God's Eye took place something like 40 years before Bloodraven was even born. Daemon couldn't have lived long enough to teach Brynden unless the former had been kept alive by weirwood life support or had gone up into the trees.

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There may not be another human greenseer. As Bran (in Hodor) and Meera went exploring the rest of the cave of the Greenseers they saw older and older Children of the Forest entwined in pale Weirwood roots, but I don't remember them seeing any other humans. Perhaps with the demise of the COTF they also saw a complete depletion of their Greenseers. And they only resorted to humans when the last of their Greenseers was about to expire. Bloodraven may have been the first and (as of yet) only human one.

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  • 2 months later...

The Children of the Forest captured or convinced him, or he looked out for them.

In "The World of Ice and Fire" it is said, that when Bloodraven joined the NW, he finally become First Ranger and then got lost during a range north of the Wall. Maybe he knew about how to find them and even about his destiny/assignment, due to his wizard like knowledge and his spying capabilites he had proven during his time as Hand of the King. Or the Children of the Forest took him by force and/or convinced him of his new purpose.

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  • 4 months later...

Well obviously any greenseer would be a first man or have that connection.  So look for families who worship the Old gods - Stark, Royce, Mormant Blackwood, Crabbe, Mudd etc. Given the time lines it could well have been someone BEFORE the invasions ie pre targ, although someone who disaapaeared just after the Conquest is likely.

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On 29.7.2016 at 6:55 AM, CrypticWeirwood said:

That would be a very long time. The battle over God's Eye took place something like 40 years before Bloodraven was even born. Daemon couldn't have lived long enough to teach Brynden unless the former had been kept alive by weirwood life support or had gone up into the trees.

The idea there is that the Green Men are actually immortal, too, or at least very long-lived. Think about them as an institution. Nobody goes on the Isle of Faces save Howland Reed (and possibly some other crannogmen in the past). Now, if they are mortal men their order would have died out centuries or millennia ago. But since George has long ago hinted at the fact that they will show themselves eventually we have to assume they still exist. That makes more sense if they are either immortal or very long-lived, so that they perhaps only need to recruit and train a new Green Man every few centuries or so. That way they could keep up their numbers and still remain invisible to the outside world.

But in Bloodraven's case I'd say he only realized what was going on/was the true threat until after he had reached the Wall. And how he got in to the cave then is as of yet completely unclear. He his party could have been ambushed by some wildlings, and the Children could have saved him from certain death, only explaining to him what he was after he was in the cave, he could have chanced upon them in the wild, he could have been contacted in his dreams, or he could have figured things out all by himself (at least partially).

Who Bloodraven's predecessor as greenseer of the Children was is completely unclear. It could have been another human, then either a wildling or another former man of the Watch. But it could also have been a Child of the Forest, or even a giant. We don't know yet. And we only will learn the truth there if Bloodraven's story - at least insofar as it connects to him being a greenseer - is going to come up in his future conversations with Bran. Brynden could tell Bran how he got into the cave, and whether he, too, was trained by the former greenseer just as Bran is right now trained by Bloodraven.

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As others have mentioned, the "Thre eyed raven/crow" is not a positions that has existed for a long time, it`s just Bloodraven. Think of it like a nickname, nothing more. I assume that he dabbled in some magic, or had the gift of greensight, and seeing how he is mentioned to be the last greenseer maybe the cotf decided to contact him in some way so he would join them?

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