"Stone kings looked down on her from their thrones..." - A Game of Thrones - Daenerys IV

[Bael's Bastard]

While reading AGOT again I came across a sentence which struck me as peculiar in Daenerys IV, in which "stone kings looked down on her from their thrones" as she rode her silver past plundered gods and stolen heroes at Vaes Dothrak.

"Beyond the horse gate, plundered gods and stolen heroes loomed to either side of them. The forgotten deities of dead cities brandished their broken thunderbolts at the sky as Dany rode her silver past their feet. Stone kings looked down on her from their thrones, their faces chipped and stained, even their names lost in the mists of time. Lithe young maidens danced on marble plinths, draped only in flowers, or poured air from shattered jars. Monsters stood in the grass beside the road; black iron dragons with jewels for eyes, roaring griffins, manticores with their barbed tails poised to strike, and other beasts she could not name. Some of the statues were so lovely they took her breath away, others so misshapen and terrible that Dany could scarcely bear to look at them. Those, Ser Jorah said, had likely come from the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai." - A Game of Thrones - Daenerys IV

The words "stone kings" seem to appear together ten times in all the books and TWOW chapters released so far. This is the first of those ten appearances, and the only appearance in AGOT. All of the other appearances of "stone kings" in the books, beginning with Arya IV in ASOS, refer to the rulers in the Stark crypts.

"The smallfolk hereabouts shunned the place, Tom told her; it was said to be haunted by the ghosts of the children of the forest who had died here when the Andal king named Erreg the Kinslayer had cut down their grove. Arya knew about the children of the forest, and about the Andals too, but ghosts did not frighten her. She used to hide in the crypts of Winterfell when she was little, and play games of come-into-my-castle and monsters and maidens amongst the stone kings on their thrones." - A Storm of Swords - Arya IV

"In legend, Brandon the Builder had used giants to help raise Winterfell, but Jon did not want to confuse the issue. "Men can build a lot higher than this. In Oldtown there's a tower taller than the Wall." He could tell she did not believe him. If I could show her Winterfell . . . give her a flower from the glass gardens, feast her in the Great Hall, and show her the stone kings on their thrones. We could bathe in the hot pools, and love beneath the heart tree while the old gods watched over us." - A Storm of Swords - Jon V

"Drink this." Grenn held a cup to his lips. Jon drank. His head was full of wolves and eagles, the sound of his brothers' laughter. The faces above him began to blur and fade. They can't be dead. Theon would never do that. And Winterfell . . . grey granite, oak and iron, crows wheeling around the towers, steam rising off the hot pools in the godswood, the stone kings sitting on their thrones . . . how could Winterfell be gone?" - A Storm of Swords - Jon VI

"He dreamt he was back in Winterfell, limping past the stone kings on their thrones. Their grey granite eyes turned to follow him as he passed, and their grey granite fingers tightened on the hilts of the rusted swords upon their laps. You are no Stark, he could hear them mutter, in heavy granite voices. There is no place for you here. Go away. He walked deeper into the darkness. "Father?" he called. "Bran? Rickon?" No one answered. A chill wind was blowing on his neck. "Uncle?" he called. "Uncle Benjen? Father? Please, Father, help me." Up above he heard drums. They are feasting in the Great Hall, but I am not welcome there. I am no Stark, and this is not my place. His crutch slipped and he fell to his knees. The crypts were growing darker. A light has gone out somewhere. "Ygritte?" he whispered. "Forgive me. Please." But it was only a direwolf, grey and ghastly, spotted with blood, his golden eyes shining sadly through the dark . . ." - A Storm of Swords - Jon VIII

""What everyone knows is that Ser Alliser is a knight from a noble line, and trueborn, while I'm the bastard who killed Qhorin Halfhand and bedded with a spearwife. The warg, I've heard them call me. How can I be a warg without a wolf, I ask you?" His mouth twisted. "I don't even dream of Ghost anymore. All my dreams are of the crypts, of the stone kings on their thrones. Sometimes I hear Robb's voice, and my father's, as if they were at a feast. But there's a wall between us, and I know that no place has been set for me."" - A Storm of Swords - Samwell IV

"You can't be the Lord of Winterfell, you're bastard-born, he heard Robb say again. And the stone kings were growling at him with granite tongues. You do not belong here. This is not your place. When Jon closed his eyes he saw the heart tree, with its pale limbs, red leaves, and solemn face. The weirwood was the heart of Winterfell, Lord Eddard always said . . . but to save the castle Jon would have to tear that heart up by its ancient roots, and feed it to the red woman's hungry fire god. I have no right, he thought. Winterfell belongs to the old gods." - A Storm of Swords - Jon XII

"Winterfell, she might have said. I smell snow and smoke and pine needles. I smell the stables. I smell Hodor laughing, and Jon and Robb battling in the yard, and Sansa singing about some stupid lady fair. I smell the crypts where the stone kings sit, I smell hot bread baking, I smell the godswood. I smell my wolf, I smell her fur, almost as if she were still beside me. "I don't smell anything," she said, to see what he would say." - A Feast for Crows - Arya II

"Lady Dustin's serjeant raised the lantern. Shadows slid and shifted. A small light in a great darkness. Theon had never felt comfortable in the crypts. He could feel the stone kings staring down at him with their stone eyes, stone fingers curled around the hilts of rusted longswords. None had any love for ironborn. A familiar sense of dread filled him." - A Dance with Dragons - The Turncloak

There is also another example in one of the chapters released for TWOW.

Obviously Starks need not be the only rulers who have ever represented their kings in stone. And what are the odds of any of the stone Starks from Westeros ending up in the possession of Dothraki in Essos? Nevertheless, it is interesting that this combination of words does occur about ten times, and is otherwise uniform in the "stone kings" they refer to.

Anyone have any ideas about this? Do you think it might have any significance?

[LiveFirstDieLater]

I would imagine that the Starks aren't the only ones with a crypt... Also, I always thought that the Stark Crypt and the Starks' dreams of said crypts was eerily similar to:

Ghosts lined the hallway, dressed in the faded raiment of kings. In their hands were swords of pale fire. They had hair of silver and hair of gold and hair of platinum white, and their eyes were opal and amethyst, tourmaline and jade.

[Bael's Bastard]

There are definitely other kings described as having statues, such as Baelor I and Daeron II, and no doubt others throughout the series. I just find it interesting that the exact combination of "stone kings" is only used for the stone representations of the deceased Starks and in this one case. The scene you bring up is an interesting one that I don't think I ever really paid much attention to until LmL's recent thing on the GEotD.

[cgrav]

What if the statues Dany sees in Vaes Dothrak were taken from the now-collapsed part of the Winterfell crypt? Did the GEOTD store their dead kings at Winterfell so they could be resurrected later?

I think it's obvious the phrase doesn't just mean a king's likeness carved in stone. "Stone King" equally means a ruler that is strongly identified with stone. 

For example:

-Winterfell is German-ish for "stone of winter", so a king seated in Winterfell would be a "stone King"

-The king of the Iron islands sits on the Seastone throne

-There is the ancient Bloodstone Emporer

-After the Bloodstone were kings identified by precious gem stones

 

My guess is that all these Stone Kings share a lineage descended from the Bloodstone Emporer and the idea of deriving power from a heavenly "stone" is what survived the generations. The idea of casting one's self in stone may be an imitation of the Weirwood, which petrifies instead of rotting. And the weirwood of course represents divine knowledge and power.

[estermonty python]

I think we can appreciate the nuance here without being entirely dismissive or totally wacko tinfoil (no comment on which of the previous posts fall into which category).  First, I think that's a neat bit of literary and linguistic parallelism between Dany and Arya - stone kings on their thrones, monsters, and maidens.  That's neat, and suggests that he may have written those chapters close together; I don't think they have any PLOT significance, but may well have some thematic significance, as far as the character of the two heroines.  

That said, it seems that the conquered gods of Vaes Dothrak foreshadow the battles Dany will win herself, based on what we know now.  The manticore represents her assassins (don't forget Barristan saved her from a manticore already), the griffin obviously hearkening to JonCon, and the black dragon sure sounds like a Blackfyre to me - could be Faegon, could be someone entirely different.

That raises the question of whether Dany will "conquer" Winterfell with its stone kings, or whether GRRM was simply making an Ozymandias reference.  My bet would be on the latter.

[Seams]

23 hours ago, Bael's Bastard said:

While reading AGOT again I came across a sentence which struck me as peculiar in Daenerys IV, in which "stone kings looked down on her from their thrones" as she rode her silver past plundered gods and stolen heroes at Vaes Dothrak.

"Beyond the horse gate, plundered gods and stolen heroes loomed to either side of them. The forgotten deities of dead cities brandished their broken thunderbolts at the sky as Dany rode her silver past their feet. Stone kings looked down on her from their thrones, their faces chipped and stained, even their names lost in the mists of time. Lithe young maidens danced on marble plinths, draped only in flowers, or poured air from shattered jars. Monsters stood in the grass beside the road; black iron dragons with jewels for eyes, roaring griffins, manticores with their barbed tails poised to strike, and other beasts she could not name. Some of the statues were so lovely they took her breath away, others so misshapen and terrible that Dany could scarcely bear to look at them. Those, Ser Jorah said, had likely come from the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai." 

- A Game of Thrones - Daenerys IV

The words "stone kings" seem to appear together ten times in all the books and TWOW chapters released so far. This is the first of those ten appearances, and the only appearance in AGOT. All of the other appearances of "stone kings" in the books, beginning with Arya IV in ASOS, refer to the rulers in the Stark crypts.

...

Obviously Starks need not be the only rulers who have ever represented their kings in stone. And what are the odds of any of the stone Starks from Westeros ending up in the possession of Dothraki in Essos? Nevertheless, it is interesting that this combination of words does occur about ten times, and is otherwise uniform in the "stone kings" they refer to.

Anyone have any ideas about this? Do you think it might have any significance?

I suspect that GRRM definitely wants the reader to link the Vaes Dothrak setting to the Winterfell setting, but these are not literally statues depicting Stark ancestors. (Especially because, we have been told, Dothraki warriors generally don't travel on ships.) This is the only Dothraki city, and its buildings and statues have all been taken from other communities, raided by the Dothraki, and transported with slave labor to this location. So the range of statues Dany is seeing have come from many places.

My sense of the meaning behind this scene is that Dany has reached an ancient place where history and legend are represented in the statuary. Even though the statues probably don't literally represent Kings of Winter or Alyssa's tears or the griffin of the Connington family sigil, the author is hinting about things to come in Dany's arc and/or alluding to historical figures that have gone through events similar to Dany's story. We know that she will survive an attack by a manticore in the Vaes Dothrak marketplace, right? Her baby will be a misshapen and terrible monster that she never gets to see. So the stone kings on thrones may show that, for some reason, the Stark ancestors are watching her with interest. Why would that be?

Ah. I see @estermonty python has already made several of these points, after I started typing. The monsters and maidens parallel is excellent, e.p.

I give you credit for catching the reference in the first place, Bael's Bastard. Nice catch.

2 hours ago, King Merrett I Frey said:

 

Your comment is rude and not funny. If you have nothing constructive to say, there is no reason to participate in the discussion.

[cgrav]

21 minutes ago, Seams said:

 So the stone kings on thrones may show that, for some reason, the Stark ancestors are watching her with interest. Why would that be?

 

That similarity, along with the other strong evidence in the story's myth, are back up the idea of the Starks and Targs sharing ancestry in the distant past. 

It's a huge stretch to think the statues in Vaes Dothrak actually came from Winterfell. But it's fun to think about. My first realistic guess would be that they came from Asshai or Qarth. We do see other statues there that match the description of the fish in the rivers of Asshai. Wherever they came from, they do point to a shared tradition spanning civilizations a world apart, which in turn points to a shared heritage.

[estermonty python]

39 minutes ago, Seams said:

I suspect that GRRM definitely wants the reader to link the Vaes Dothrak setting to the Winterfell setting, but these are not literally statues depicting Stark ancestors. (Especially because, we have been told, Dothraki warriors generally don't travel on ships.) This is the only Dothraki city, and its buildings and statues have all been taken from other communities, raided by the Dothraki, and transported with slave labor to this location. So the range of statues Dany is seeing have come from many places.

My sense of the meaning behind this scene is that Dany has reached an ancient place where history and legend are represented in the statuary. Even though the statues probably don't literally represent Kings of Winter or Alyssa's tears or the griffin of the Connington family sigil, the author is hinting about things to come in Dany's arc and/or alluding to historical figures that have gone through events similar to Dany's story. We know that she will survive an attack by a manticore in the Vaes Dothrak marketplace, right? Her baby will be a misshapen and terrible monster that she never gets to see. So the stone kings on thrones may show that, for some reason, the Stark ancestors are watching her with interest. Why would that be?

Ah. I see @estermonty python has already made several of these points, after I started typing. The monsters and maidens parallel is excellent, e.p.

I give you credit for catching the reference in the first place, Bael's Bastard. Nice catch.

Your comment is rude and not funny. If you have nothing constructive to say, there is no reason to participate in the discussion.

I hadn't thought of the misshapen monster bit, good catch!

I'm not entirely convinced that he's trying to draw a specific connection between Dany and the Starks, per se.  Rather, it may be more of a "history has its eyes on you" moment for both Dany on one continent and the various Starks on the other.  If we're being pedantic about it, I would think that if the old Stark kings wanted to keep an eye on a Targaryen it would have been Rhaegar, since he was the one to finally make good on the Pact of Ice and Fire that Cregan brokered way back when.  I'm not sure I can think of a compelling reason for the Starks to be all that interested in Dany (other than dragons to fight the Others, i guess).  I DO think the poetry of it is quite nice and extremely thoughtful, however.  I guess I just look at this as a beautiful bit of symmetry and poetry without some kind of deeper plot significance.  That doesn't make it unimportant, just important in a different way, I think!

[Jon Fossoway]

4 hours ago, Seams said:

I suspect that GRRM definitely wants the reader to link the Vaes Dothrak setting to the Winterfell setting, but these are not literally statues depicting Stark ancestors. (Especially because, we have been told, Dothraki warriors generally don't travel on ships.) This is the only Dothraki city, and its buildings and statues have all been taken from other communities, raided by the Dothraki, and transported with slave labor to this location. So the range of statues Dany is seeing have come from many places.

My sense of the meaning behind this scene is that Dany has reached an ancient place where history and legend are represented in the statuary. Even though the statues probably don't literally represent Kings of Winter or Alyssa's tears or the griffin of the Connington family sigil, the author is hinting about things to come in Dany's arc and/or alluding to historical figures that have gone through events similar to Dany's story. We know that she will survive an attack by a manticore in the Vaes Dothrak marketplace, right? Her baby will be a misshapen and terrible monster that she never gets to see. So the stone kings on thrones may show that, for some reason, the Stark ancestors are watching her with interest. Why would that be?

Ah. I see @estermonty python has already made several of these points, after I started typing. The monsters and maidens parallel is excellent, e.p.

I give you credit for catching the reference in the first place, Bael's Bastard. Nice catch.

Your comment is rude and not funny. If you have nothing constructive to say, there is no reason to participate in the discussion.

I am not trying to be funny at all. A writer isn't a limitless fountain of metaphors - GRRM definitely isn't- when describing similar objects and George DO have the tendency of iteration. 

[sweetsunray]

Agree with what others said. Those stone kings on thrones are not so much a literal evidence of "Stark crypt statues in Vaes Dothrak!", but more a symbolical link to Starks, and not just the ones in the crypts.

In my analysis of chthonic references, which starts by building a lexicon of words that George typically ties to the "death-theme" over and over is "stone" (aside from snow, frozen, nameless, blind, mute, echo, shadow, very old, treeroot-like, red-bloody smile of sourleaf or blood etc). So, when George uses combinations of those materials and colors and images, he's making the scene "underworldly". And he definitely makes the Starks "Kings of the underworld" not just inside the crypts, but the living ones too, in so much that while they're actually alive, many do believe them to be dead. And all of them get in touch with their "power" or abilities when they go "underground" or in "hiding" while pretending to be dead. One of the emblematic images of how Starks are the rulers of this concept of an underworld is that of the stone statues with their swords in their laps, and how they watch and see and listen with "blind eyes". Even Ned Stark's last chapter is one where he basically transforms into such a stone statue (without the sword though): he can't see a thing in the black cell, he's alone, he has no idea of time anymore, he sees ghosts, he even loses his smell, and he becomes immbolized like a stone statue (because of his leg).

Not only does the Vaes Dothrak passage refer to events to come. We can also see them as referring to those who defined the past from before she was even conceived that eventually leads her to Vaes Dothrak:

• the broken thunderbolt => Baratheon (rebels)
• the stone kings => Starks (rebels)
• flower maiden => Lyanna (while the flowers link to Persephone, the jars refer to Pandora, who's a humanized chthonic goddess)... the woman over whom the spark of the rebellion is ignited
• black iron dragon => Rhaegar (the kidnapper)
• griffin => Jon Con (who fails the Targs at Stoney Sept by not burning Robert out of hiding)
• monster => Gregor (several times referred to as such by both Arya and Sansa. He killed Elia Martell and Aegon)
• manticore => Ser Amory (he killed Rhaenys)

[estermonty python]

5 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

Not only does the Vaes Dothrak passage refer to events to come. We can also see them as referring to those who defined the past from before she was even conceived that eventually leads her to Vaes Dothrak:

• the broken thunderbolt => Baratheon (rebels)
• the stone kings => Starks (rebels)
• flower maiden => Lyanna (while the flowers link to Persephone, the jars refer to Pandora, who's a humanized chthonic goddess)... the woman over whom the spark of the rebellion is ignited
• black iron dragon => Rhaegar (the kidnapper)
• griffin => Jon Con (who fails the Targs at Stoney Sept by not burning Robert out of hiding)
• monster => Gregor (several times referred to as such by both Arya and Sansa. He killed Elia Martell and Aegon)
• manticore => Ser Amory (he killed Rhaenys)

Interesting thought.  I REALLY like the Amory Lorch connection, but I have to admit I'm less convinced by the others.  Why does a thunderbolt represent Robert?  Wouldn't it represent Beric Dondarrion, if anyone?  

[Bael's Bastard]

Some interesting ideas being posted, thanks everyone. I have no theory or even ideas really, it just stuck out to me, especially since the next reference is not until well into the third book, the reference with Dany occurring well before the nine examples which are explicitly in reference to the Starks.

[Jon Fossoway]

3 hours ago, estermonty python said:

Interesting thought.  I REALLY like the Amory Lorch connection, but I have to admit I'm less convinced by the others.  Why does a thunderbolt represent Robert?  Wouldn't it represent Beric Dondarrion, if anyone?  

Surely because Bob's ancestral castle is the one of those who in the past beat the Storm God. 

[sweetsunray]

8 hours ago, estermonty python said:

Interesting thought.  I REALLY like the Amory Lorch connection, but I have to admit I'm less convinced by the others.  Why does a thunderbolt represent Robert?  Wouldn't it represent Beric Dondarrion, if anyone?  

He was lord of Storm's End, and a descendant of the Durrandons (the first Baratheon wed the Durrandon daughter). The Durrandons built the castle to challenge the storm gods (thunder and lightning), and won. In a meta-sense Robert is pretty much a Zeus (thunderbolt and king of the gods) or a Thor (war hammer), Beric Dondarrion also serves such a role, is an echo of it, but his bolt sigil is called a lightning bolt, and he's called the lightning lord. The paragraph in question does not say "lightning bolt" but a "thunderbolt" and it's a broken one... In other words alluding to a man of a bloodline who "broke" the storm.

Does that rule out Beric? No. George uses echoes. We often get scenes and events that are echoes of the past, or each other, as if it's all repeating itself. Beric calls himself a King's Man, still doing Robert's work, after Robert has died. Beric is an echo of Robert who is an echo of etc.