Skinchanger Zombies: Jon, the Last Hero, and Coldhands

[Bluetiger]

On 24.12.2016 at 6:49 PM, ravenous reader said:

 

Dear Błękitny Tygrys 

Thank you for your good wishes.

I shall think of you in Poland -- is it snowing there?  While where I am it's raining turning the landscape into an ethereal soup as grey-green as the wintery sea of the Grey King's eyes!

Enjoy your special evening (the 12+1 arrangement of the dishes makes me think of the Last Hero/Stranger), appreciating the ritual all the more as you've been enriched by understanding the deeper resonances of its traditions.  Except yesterday I caught myself thinking about a tree on fire watching the Christmas lights twinkling, and more disturbing I started thinking about entrails adorning the tree observing the Christmas tinsel -- so perhaps there's such a thing as too much enlightenment for ones own good!  

Wesołych Świąt i Szczęśliwego Nowego Roku!  (...I am taking your word for it that what I just said is what I intended to say!!  Thank goodness for the swipe, copy and paste function; I couldn't have come up with that one my own!)

All my best,

Żarłoczny/Wygłodniały/Drapieżny Czytacz

(which one am I most suited to 'Żarłoczny' or 'Wygłodniały' or 'Drapieżny'..?  Maybe because I'm so 'ravenous,' I get three names to describe my 'ravenousness' instead of just one!)

 

Since you're so fond of the great cats (as am I) as evidenced by your avatar -- here are a few cute lion pictures for you to light up your Christmas eve.  They remind me of the twin moons, life's duality, paradoxical hearts and some of the other themes we've been discussing lately.

White lion and tawny cousin drinking together (I love the dusky reflection shimmering and rippling in the water)

And this one is a surprise (it's a mysteriously enchanting image; here you can read about how the photographer took the photo)

For unknown reasons since last evening I got 'Error 505' when I tried to open the forums, but fortunately now it works.

Thanks for wishes and pictures

It was snowing a bit during Christmas Eve' s afternoon, but today we had only rain.

Concerning 'ravenousnes':

The first word - 'wygłodniały' means very hungry

'Żarłoczny' would be used in sentences like these:

"Growing children have ravenous appetites."

"After spending the whole day walking we were ravenous."

'Drapieżny' is used to describe a predator

 

Anyway:

I've started reading Robert Ferguson's 'The Hammer and Cross: New History of the Vikings', and in one of the first chapters author discusses the legend of Odin sacrificing his eye to gain wisdom.

According to the book, this myth was a way to explain why there is only one sun and one moon in the sky... So Sun is the god's eye... God's Eye...

In the myth, Odin's second eye falls into Mimir's Well - just like in a way God's Eye is created by the 'second sun' - comet or 'second moon'

That Mimir is also referenced in the name of Hoddmímis holt - the wood where two last humans shall survive the Fimbulwinter.

Later he's beheaded, but Odin takes his friend's head, uses herbs and spells to stop it from rotting. Later the head gives advice to the god, just like the heads of the Whispers.

[LmL]

On 12/24/2016 at 7:59 AM, Blue Tiger said:

I just wanted to show something I've found:

So we have a band of undead warriors, waiting for Ragnarok and battle... and in Castle Black we have the Shieldhall:

This is actually the more obscure rainbow symbol to be found at the Wall. The Wall itself is described as crystalline and casting rainbows. So you're telling me Bifrost is a burning rainbow bridge? Now you have my attention. The Wall is Bifrost then, almost certainly. The idea of the Wall burning is to be found in the unity of symbol between he Night's Watch as a sword, the Wall and the Watch being the same thing, and the Wall being a sword. The NW is like a sword, the Wall is like a sword, and they are both shields - you get the idea. They are all part of a whole, which is very much a burning sword. I shall now have to go research Bifrost a bit. So how does Bifrost interact with the einherjar? This is pretty cool. My mythologies have a legend of dead heroes returning to fight at "Armageddon" or whatever, but naturally Martin is going to play with this trope, pull it down into the mud, and give us the grittiest, gnarliest version of this idea as he can imagine. 

Great finds... I always have the feeling that you are giving me so many interesting ideas that I am surely missing some of them. So be patient if you have to tell me something a couple of times before it sinks in. I intake a lot of information, as you can imagine, and sometimes the relevance of something doesn't jump out at first glance. But these are great finds here. 

On 12/24/2016 at 7:59 AM, Blue Tiger said:

 

Rainbow evokes Bifrost, the burning rainbow bridge of Asgard. Btw, some scholars belive that this mythical bridge represents the Milky Way.

The Wall more closely represents the hypothetical 'ice moon,' but milk is an important moon symbol, and icy things like the Others are also milky. The Mllkwater river is, I am pretty sure, being used as a Milky Way symbol in certain scenes, so there's a lot of overlapping symbolism here. But like I said, we need to dig into Bifrost and what it does to understand how Martin might be using it as part of the mythos from which he created the Wall. 

On 12/24/2016 at 7:59 AM, Blue Tiger said:

Anyway...

In Poland Christmas Eve is very important day, and its supper is the most important meal of Christmas.

The word for it - Wigilia - comes from latin 'vigilare'.

There are many traditions and customs connected with it (there have to be 12 dishes - for each month, the Midnight Mass, carols, one empty plate for the ancestors who passed away, etc.) - many of them seem to have very ancient origins, for example the supper is supposed to start when the first star appears at the sky - usually it's our good old friend Mornigstar/Evenstar Venus, sometimes Jupiter, Vega or Capella.

So, this special evening, I want to wish you all Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

If you don't celebrate Christmas, still, have fun and best wishes to you.

Let's hope 2017 is a good year.

Thanks to all of you, especially @LmL, @ravenous reader, @Pain killer Jane , @sweetsunray and many others. Good luck with all great things you do.

See you later, and one more time...

Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas and thanks for sharing all of that! So much fun to hear about different customs form around the world

[LmL]

9 hours ago, Equilibrium said:

@LmL Hey man,

I have missed this whole thing somehow, just got to reading it.

Great stuff, somewhat long winded,

You gotta remember you are advanced level man, you understand most of the things I am talking about even before I say it. This series in particular was written so that someone who has never read any of my stuff might be able to follow it, so I can understand how some parts seem like they could have simply been summarized. All of us hardcore freaks here on the board know the proposed mechanics of Jon's skinchanger resurrection in and out, but I wanted this series to be something even show watchers or people who've read the series only once a few years ago and who never go on the boards could understand... so I pulled the Varamyr quotes and went through the basics. I'm sure you understand. So far the feedback has been good - I've had a couple people tell me that some of my other stuff went over their head or was harder to follow, but that they enjoyed the green zombie series and found it much easier to follow. 

9 hours ago, Equilibrium said:

but it is maximally thorough. Some real gems there and prose that continues to improve, you should thank Martin for massive improvement in your writership level. I really can't cite all the thing that were great and I agree with

Thanks a lot, that means a great deal. This project - trying to follow what madden is doing, in other words - has very much been a master class for me on so many levels... chiefly writing and understanding symbolism and myth. I feel like that was a large part of Martin's intent, as you know, to encourage us all to read a bit more and stretch our brains to grasp symbolic artwork on a high level. It's really been a lot of fun to practice writing and speaking and all of that.. nice to hear you think I'm coming along.  Like half the people on the this board, I have plans to write my own fantasy fiction. I was working on it for about a year when I struck lighting with the dragons come from the moon / moon meteor myth and started analyzing ASOIAF, and I've basically had it on hold since then. I realized I was learning a ton about wiring and storytelling and all the rest by following George's work, much in the way a classical musician will spend time in music school breaking down and analyzing a major work of one of the great composers for weeks on end. Thinking back to where I was before this process vs. where I am now.. I mean it's a pretty big distance. I actually never went to college (shhh....) so I never had the chance to take a good college lit or mythology course. Martin is teaching a crash course in classic lit as well as mythology, so I have been vacuuming this shit up as go along. So yes, I thank Martin many times over for everything he has to teach us. He's not a perfect writer (whatever that means) but he's several things which are even more important. He's inspiring and teaching so many people so many wonderful things. 

9 hours ago, Equilibrium said:

Just small note, you should definitely think about Coldhands/Judas parallel, you were so close to making it in the essay, but you never stated it, it. If he was one of 12 companions of LH, and hanged himself, and got some penance (for treason?) it is pretty straightforward. 79 deserters confirm that eternal ranging is punishment for desertion or treason. NK could be like 13th of the party, 13th LC and possibly Coldhands.

haha, you know I think it actually occurred to me but for some reason I thought it was sidetracking... as you say, it was already long winded as it is.  But yeah, if you combined Herne the Hunter and Judas, you'd get this version Coldhands' story. As you will note, there is a lot of Garth on Garth violence, and a lot of betrayal involved in theses events, so I think we can assume there was something along these lines in the LH / War for the Dawn story. Some kind of kinslaying, I would guess. That's not even a surprise, really. 

9 hours ago, Equilibrium said:

When we are on the subject Roose is either great representation or potential candidate for NK in that story, as skinchanging and Judas parallels are abound, and he may very well be immortal zombie.

Yeah the skinner stuff seems to surely be a symbol of skinchanging, right? The Boltons and the Faceless Men are both clearly sharing the symbolism of the greenseers, but I have not been able to figure out what it means. 

9 hours ago, Equilibrium said:

As for NW being zombie skinchangers in the beginning, it would represent extremely good parallel of ravens (messaging), as mundane mimics the magic without full understanding, mostly just repeating the motions. 

If I think of something further constructive to add I sure will.

BTW You should put a word count in the beginning of the essays, it's super easy for you to do it, it is a really helpful and I would very much appreciate it.

Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas EQ, good to hear from you.  I am afraid that if I put a word count at the beginning, it would scare people away. 

[LmL]

9 hours ago, Blue Tiger said:

For unknown reasons since last evening I got 'Error 505' when I tried to open the forums, but fortunately now it works.

Thanks for wishes and pictures

It was snowing a bit during Christmas Eve' s afternoon, but today we had only rain.

Concerning 'ravenousnes':

The first word - 'wygłodniały' means very hungry

'Żarłoczny' would be used in sentences like these:

"Growing children have ravenous appetites."

"After spending the whole day walking we were ravenous."

'Drapieżny' is used to describe a predator

 

Anyway:

I've started reading Robert Ferguson's 'The Hammer and Cross: New History of the Vikings', and in one of the first chapters author discusses the legend of Odin sacrificing his eye to gain wisdom.

According to the book, this myth was a way to explain why there is only one sun and one moon in the sky... So Sun is the god's eye... God's Eye...

In the myth, Odin's second eye falls into Mimir's Well - just like in a way God's Eye is created by the 'second sun' - comet or 'second moon'

That Mimir is also referenced in the name of Hoddmímis holt - the wood where two last humans shall survive the Fimbulwinter.

Later he's beheaded, but Odin takes his friend's head, uses herbs and spells to stop it from rotting. Later the head gives advice to the god, just like the heads of the Whispers.

These are all bingos here. The God's Eye, according to me, refers to the junction of the moon and the sun, the eclipse where the moon wandered too close to the sun right before being cracked open by the Lightbringer comet. This makes the ye shape which I have been using as my avatar for a while now. The God's Eye lake mirror this celestial eye - the Isle of Faces is analogous to the moon, and the lake is the sun. Hence the many quotes about the lake being on fire or looking like a sheet of sun hammered metal. Also hence the many occurrences of eyes being torn out as a representation of pulling the moon out of heaven.

The Egyptians have a similar myth about Horus, where the sun and moon are his eyes, but his moon eye is gouged out by Set, then replaced by Thoth. This was their explanation for why the moon waxes and wanes, disappearing and reappearing. There are many other myths around the world which correlate the sun and moon to the eyes of god or a goddess. That's absolutely what is going on with ASOIAF and the God's Eye. 

So, Odin's eye going down the well... consider that in the Nightfort scene where Sam come sup out of the Wall talking of Coldhands, we saw the weirwood stringing up through the crack in the domes roof as it was trying to pull the moon down into the well. I've already identified that as a symbol of greenseers pulling down the moon, and Sam the Black Leviathan with Herne the Hunter symbolism absolutely represents AA reborn as a sea dragon and an undead green person... in other words, the moon falls into the well, then the black leviathan (sea dragon) or the undead stag man comes out of the well, rising form the depths harder and stronger and whatnot.  

Essentially, then the moon is plucked from the sky, it is the blinding of the God's Eye. Odin lost his eye to gain magical sight, and this is what the Bloodstone E / AA did, pull the moon down to gain the fire of the gods and become whatever kind of fiery transformed greenseer that he became. That's what this scene at the Nightfort is showing us - the weirwood straining through the broken dome (think hole in the sky) to pull down the moon, into the well to drown it. Down to the underworld, or down int the sea, whichever you like. Right at this moment, when Sam comes out of the well, Bran skinchanges Hodor and remembers the lightning strike at Queenscrown, supplying the thunderbolt symbol at the crucial time. To signify the idea of a person gaining access to greenseer magic when the moon is pulled down into the well and when the thunderbolt strikes, we have Bran skinchanging Hodor and wielding a sword. Becoming a giant in other words. 

Earlier in the day, the wierwood is stretching out and reaching for the sun, too, which always reminded me of the wolves which eat the sun and moon at Ragnarok. 

[Bluetiger]

I always had a strong feeling that Westeros' Nine Kingdoms (North, Vale, Westerlands, Riverlands, Stormlands, Dorne, Reach, Crownlands, Iron Islands) somehow connect it to the Nine Realms - branches of Yggdrasil.

But is this Yggdrasil upside down?

Is North the frozen Hellheim? Or should we exclude Crownlands as they were never independent and consider Beyond the Wall a kingdom? Is it the home of frost giants - Jotunheim?

Is Reach Asgard (home of Garth Allfather and his children?), is Dorne the fiery Muspelheim? 

If the Wall is indeed Bifrost, the burning rainbow bridge (actually it means shimmering path) than who is its Heimdall (Night's Watch?).

Bifrost is supposed to guard the realm of gods from the frost giants. The COTF? Others? Giants?

Who shall become Bifrost's destroyer, the flamimg sword-wielding Sudr? New Azor Ahai, who will burn entire world?

Or is Beyond the Wall Hell? I remember that in some supposedly original ASOIAF plot, Arya was supposed to go to the Wall. Is she Hel, as I've suggested last month? I think that before the ADoS ends we'll see her at the Wall.

And... Bifrost is the most famous bridge from the Norse Mythology... But there is another one, just as important - Gjallarbru - the bridge over the River Gjoll, which connects Underworld to other worlds. It's described as 'thatched with glittering gold'. Is the Bridge of Skulls, near Shadow Tower by the Gorge the westerosi equivalent of it?

So many questions, but I don't have answers... yet (I hope).

Quote

The candles within Renly's pavilion made the shimmering silken walls seem to glow, transforming the great tent into a magical castle alive with emerald light. Two of the Rainbow Guard stood sentry at the door to the royal pavilion. The green light shone strangely against the purple plums of Ser Parmen's surcoat, and gave a sickly hue to the sunflowers that covered every inch of Ser Emmon's enameled yellow plate. Long silken plumes flew from their helms, and rainbow cloaks draped their shoulders.

Renly and Brienne are connected to Bifrost... Is she Heimdall? Is he one of the Four Stags of Yggdrasil?

Quote

He took off his wet cloak, but it was too cold and damp here to strip down any further. Ghost stretched out beside him and licked his glove before curling up to sleep. Jon was grateful for his warmth. He wondered if the fire was still burning outside, or if it had gone out by now. If the Wall should ever fall, all the fires will go out. The moon shone through the curtain of falling water to lay a shimmering pale stripe across the sand, but after a time that too faded and went dark

You seem to be right, the Wall is Bifrost.

Quote

The real battle was on the steps. Noye had put spearmen on the two lowest landings, but the headlong flight of the villagers had panicked them and they had joined the flight, racing up toward the third landing with the Thenns killing anyone who fell behind. The archers and crossbowmen on the higher landings were trying to drop shafts over their heads. Jon nocked an arrow, drew, and loosed, and was pleased when one of the wildlings went rolling down the steps. The heat of the fires was making the Wall weep, and the flames danced and shimmered against the ice. The steps shook to the footsteps of men running for their lives.

And:

Quote

They tell me that you are the nine-hundred-ninety-eighth man to command the Night's Watch, Lord Snow. What do you think the nine-hundred-ninety-ninth might say about these castles? The sight of your head on a spike might inspire him to be more helpful." The king laid his bright blade down on the map, along the Wall, its steel shimmering like sunlight on water. "You are only lord commander by my sufferance. You would do well to remember that."

And:

Quote

Outside the day was bright and cloudless. The sun had returned to the sky after a fortnight's absence, and to the south the Wall rose blue-white and glittering. There was a saying Jon had heard from the older men at Castle Black: the Wall has more moods than Mad King Aerys, they'd say, or sometimes, the Wall has more moods than a woman. On cloudy days it looked to be white rock. On moonless nights it was as black as coal. In snowstorms it seemed carved of snow. But on days like this, there was no mistaking it for anything but ice. On days like this the Wall shimmered bright as a septon's crystal, every crack and crevasse limned by sunlight, as frozen rainbows danced and died behind translucent ripples. On days like this the Wall was beautiful.

And:

Quote

On either end of the long tunnel, gates swung open and iron bars unlocked. Dawn light shimmered on the ice above, pink and gold and purple. Dolorous Edd had not been wrong. The Wall would soon be weeping. Gods grant it weeps alone.

 

[Bluetiger]

3 hours ago, LmL said:

Like half the people on the this board, I have plans to write my own fantasy fiction. I was working on it for about a year when I struck lighting with the dragons come from the moon / moon meteor myth and started analyzing ASOIAF, and I've basically had it on hold since then. I realized I was learning a ton about wiring and storytelling and all the rest by following George's work, much in the way a classical musician will spend time in music school breaking down and analyzing a major work of one of the great composers for weeks on end. Thinking back to where I was before this process vs. where I am now.. I mean it's a pretty big distance. I actually never went to college (shhh....) so I never had the chance to take a good college lit or mythology course. Martin is teaching a crash course in classic lit as well as mythology, so I have been vacuuming this shit up as go along. So yes, I thank Martin many times over for everything he has to teach us. He's not a perfect writer (whatever that means) but he's several things which are even more important. He's inspiring and teaching so many people so many wonderful things. 

There are no perfect writers... There are critics who hate Frost, Shakespeare, Poe... Tolkien and Frost were close to Nobel Prize but they didn't get it... And if you asked me, the reasons given by the jury are laughable... But probably there are millions of people who'd agree.

To quote The Guardian's article:

Quote

The prose of Tolkien – who was nominated by his friend and fellow fantasy author CS Lewis – "has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality", wrote jury member Anders Österling. Frost, on the other hand, was dismissed because of his "advanced age" – he was 86 at the time – with the jury deciding the American poet's years were "a fundamental obstacle, which the committee regretfully found it necessary to state". Forster was also ruled out for his age – a consideration that no longer bothers the jury, which awarded the prize to the 87-year-old Doris Lessing in 2007 – with Österling calling the author "a shadow of his former self, with long lost spiritual health".

That's funny... And it's even more funny when you think what might have been the real reason... Critic named Osterling doesn't like LOTR... Totally not beacause the Easterlings are the villains.

Anyway, huge thanks for all your work... Thanks to GRRM and you I've noticed and understood the importance of symbolism.

I sensed that you have experience with writing and might be writing your own fantasy stuff for a long time, but now, when you confirmed this, I wish you good luck with it.

Fantasy gives so many opportunities to use symbolism and myths. I think that's why so many symbolic writers choose it... When reading fantasy, people naturaly assume that there is some hidden meaning, some mythical inspiration, they're looking for clues on their own.

When they see a tree, they think of Yggdrasil, of Garden of Eden, of druid oak.

When they see a wolf, they think of werewolves, of Fenrir, of Hati and Skoll, of Romulus.

Each snake might be alegory of evil, a demon, a god.

But when reading some other genre, the tree is just a tree, a wolf is just a predator - Canis lupus, snake is just exotic pet of the main hero. They won't search, they won't find, even if the hints are there. 

In fantasy it's easier to make a statement about our own world, of current politics etc. They won't feel so personal about it - after all it's just elves and orcs, isn't it?  

That's why I choose fantasy and writing in general... The power to create worlds with just a simple word. Each writer, (and artist and craftsman, in a way every human who creates something) has the power of gods, at least over his creations.  There's only one difference... The characters, however complex and belivable, always will remain puppets, dancing at the author's strings. According to GRRM's Tuf Voyaging, giving free will to others makes a god. And writer can't do it. It'll always be his thoughts.

That's beautiful, that's scary, that's important. And we can use this power to do whatever we want. There are books who lead to unimaginable evil and suffering, there are books that gave peace and hope to millions.

And it seems  GRRM uses his power to give us a lesson... About morality... We, as the readers, have to make the choices... Is human sacrifice a way to save all, or is it evil? Is Azor Ahai a hero or a villain? Or is he innocent? Is the world trurly grey? Can we explain everything with 'it was done for the greater good'? What is 'greater good'? Does it exist? Which king should sit the Iron Throne?  Who has the right to be the king? No one? Who has the right to take the place of god? Who is god? Is it all myth and legend? Is darkness the ultimate winner?

And one day, we'll have to face the consequences of our choices, at least morally... What if the 'true king' we chose is actually the usurper? What if the man we thought to be a hero is a villain? What if we were tricked into feeling sympathy for man responsible for genocide and numerous attrocities (so many feel sympathy for Ser Kevan because we had his POV, and forget this:

Quote

"Let them," Lord Tywin said. "Unleash Ser Gregor and send him before us with his reavers. Send forth Vargo Hoat and his freeriders as well, and Ser Amory Lorch. Each is to have three hundred horse. Tell them I want to see the riverlands afire from the Gods Eye to the Red Fork."

"They will burn, my lord," Ser Kevan said, rising. "I shall give the commands." He bowed and made for the door.

Was it justified? What is justice? Is it all just madness and stupidity? Is all life pointless? Is there only void after death?)

Will GRRM show us how easy it's to manipulate humans and how few words trick us? I bet that if we knew nothing of their crimes, and a skilled writer wrote his POV, even Goering, Stalin or Eichmann would seem to be 'nice people'.

Literature is so beautiful... So powerful. It gives us a chance to do what we'd never do otherwise... To look at the world via mind and thoughts of another human...

Good luck to all writers, both profesional and aspiring.

 

 

[Equilibrium]

@LmL

Yeah, I understand attention to detail, and quality of writing more than makes up for the length. You really did show magnificent improvement, I have read your essays since the beginning, and they were never by any means bad, but now they are great. I have to give the praise when praise is due. Looking forward to that fantasy series, if you write fantasy, novel series is the way to go, everything else is abomination 

Well put a word count on the bottom then and let me know where to find it

[Bluetiger]

20 minutes ago, Equilibrium said:

@LmL

Yeah, I understand attention to detail, and quality of writing more than makes up for the length. You really did show magnificent improvement, I have read your essays since the beginning, and they were never by any means bad, but now they are great. I have to give the praise when praise is due. Looking forward to that fantasy series, if you write fantasy, novel series is the way to go, everything else is abomination 

Well put a word count on the bottom then and let me know where to find it

Imagine the symbolism... It will take years to uncover it... Without LML who will analyse it? Let's hope we've learned enough from Mythical Astronomy, lol

So far, my own symbolism is pretty staightforward, and I think simple, probably even to simple. But it feel it gradually becomes better and deeper.

Shame I don't write in English, apart from essays for my course and school.

[Equilibrium]

32 minutes ago, Blue Tiger said:

Imagine the symbolism... It will take years to uncover it... Without LML who will analyse it? Let's hope we've learned enough from Mythical Astronomy, lol

So far, my own symbolism is pretty staightforward, and I think simple, probably even to simple. But it feel it gradually becomes better and deeper.

Shame I don't write in English, apart from essays for my course and school.

Well given that Martin used like all the symbolism, we will just have to extrapolate the parts and how they are woven into the narrative, LmL kinda showed his hand with the essays

So we will have new Sapkowski then. Don't sweat the issue, of course it seems straightforward to you, because you put it there. Authors are generally bad at judging their work by any metric. I periodically hammer some short fiction, to expand or polish later, and when rereading it I frequently come across lines that are very symbolic in meaning, but I certainly didn't write it as such.

I roll with it, am not one of the "it means sky was fucking blue" guys, I am aware of subconscious part of the creativity, so I embrace accidental symbolism. I have also come across lines and events I boosted (near verbatim) from something I read, and of course, I had no intention of doing that, it's all part of creative process.

[LmL]

You know, @Blue Tiger, I think @Equilibrium is right. Anyone who has read my ASOIAF analysis will inevitably have a head start on decoding my book, if it's ever published, god willing. That's OK though - the point is not be overly cryptic, but to inspire future generations to learn about the history of literature and myth and to weave your story into the fabric of human culture. Obviously I am going to have to do something other than a magic meteor strike, ha ha. I have ideas though. 

Since this is mine own thread, I think I can feel free to derail it for a moment. So. My basic idea is change the setting of standard fantasy.  Instead of alternative middle ages, I want to do pseudo Atlantis, a magical bronze age civilization. At some point it will become clear that this civilization is headed for Doom in a parallel of Atlantis (I'll have specific allusions to Plato and other Atlantis / Mu myths), but the question will be how and why. Much in the same way we know a confrontation with the Others is coming, but we don't really know how or why just yet. I like the idea of the audience know owing something good about the ending- much in the way we all knew what the general ending of Rouge One would be based on Stark Wars - "a lot of good people died to bring us these plans." We knew watching R1 that everyone would probably die, but that didnt harm the movie at all. So basically I want to take the Atlantis myth and the larger idea of civilization have periodic rises and falls and show a new advanced civilization which is different than our own. Typically fantasy writers have these types of civilizations as part of the backstory - Valyria or the GEOTD. Numenor. That sort of thing.  I want to wrote about the advanced civilization.  It's much closet to my own experience growing up in America - I am more in tune with living in an advanced technical metropolis than I am hunting and fishing and riding horses.  I am VERY familiar with the elucidation of the corruption of such a society, as all of my Facebook friends know.  At the same time, I also want the challenge of depicting what society might be like if people were a little more enlightened and conscious.  Not so much so that it is cheesy and hokey - possibly this pitfall is why nobody ever writes about the vanished high civilization - but I do often fantasize about living in a world that isn't quite so stupid and wonder if I could depict it.  Imagine a world where people are more intuitive, almost as if everyone is a low level psychic.  It's much harder to hide your feelings and thoughts, because people are more receptive and in tune with each other.  

Oh yeah and we will definitely be having magic that is based in the elements, only more so.  I am fascinated by ancient megalithic monuments, so my pseudo Atlanteans would be a rave of monument builders who use sound magic to levitate stone, something like that. Of course that spey of Maddox could also cause earthquakes if one is not careful.

[Bluetiger]

2 hours ago, LmL said:

You know, @Blue Tiger, I think @Equilibrium is right. Anyone who has read my ASOIAF analysis will inevitably have a head start on decoding my book, if it's ever published, god willing. That's OK though - the point is not be overly cryptic, but to inspire future generations to learn about the history of literature and myth and to weave your story into the fabric of human culture. Obviously I am going to have to do something other than a magic meteor strike, ha ha. I have ideas though. 

Since this is mine own thread, I think I can feel free to derail it for a moment. So. My basic idea is change the setting of standard fantasy.  Instead of alternative middle ages, I want to do pseudo Atlantis, a magical bronze age civilization. At some point it will become clear that this civilization is headed for Doom in a parallel of Atlantis (I'll have specific allusions to Plato and other Atlantis / Mu myths), but the question will be how and why. Much in the same way we know a confrontation with the Others is coming, but we don't really know how or why just yet. I like the idea of the audience know owing something good about the ending- much in the way we all knew what the general ending of Rouge One would be based on Stark Wars - "a lot of good people died to bring us these plans." We knew watching R1 that everyone would probably die, but that didnt harm the movie at all. So basically I want to take the Atlantis myth and the larger idea of civilization have periodic rises and falls and show a new advanced civilization which is different than our own. Typically fantasy writers have these types of civilizations as part of the backstory - Valyria or the GEOTD. Numenor. That sort of thing.  I want to wrote about the advanced civilization.  It's much closet to my own experience growing up in America - I am more in tune with living in an advanced technical metropolis than I am hunting and fishing and riding horses.  I am VERY familiar with the elucidation of the corruption of such a society, as all of my Facebook friends know.  At the same time, I also want the challenge of depicting what society might be like if people were a little more enlightened and conscious.  Not so much so that it is cheesy and hokey - possibly this pitfall is why nobody ever writes about the vanished high civilization - but I do often fantasize about living in a world that isn't quite so stupid and wonder if I could depict it.  Imagine a world where people are more intuitive, almost as if everyone is a low level psychic.  It's much harder to hide your feelings and thoughts, because people are more receptive and in tune with each other.  

Oh yeah and we will definitely be having magic that is based in the elements, only more so.  I am fascinated by ancient megalithic monuments, so my pseudo Atlanteans would be a rave of monument builders who use sound magic to levitate stone, something like that. Of course that spey of Maddox could also cause earthquakes if one is not careful.

That sounds interesting. I don't consider what I write to be fantasy, but I expect that most will think it's fantasy. I'd call it 'evolutional fiction' if such genre even exists.

Currently I have only one 13k words story fully completed, with few semi-planned and ideas for a dozen. They're all 'prequels', thirty years between 'the main series'. + I have maps and several notebooks and files of notes and plans.

I'm still torn between including some form of magic, but from what I was told, the world works just fine without it.

My goal is to get some of that published when I have enough stories for few hundred pages book. But recenty I started to give more attention to symbolism, myths and etc over the speed of writing. I have plenty of time.

Speaking of lost ancient civilzations... In my world, the civilization is at its prime. Some aspects are much more advanced than real world medieval technology, but that obviously varies between different regions.

When it comes to astronomy, as the links I've shared some time ago show, I'm very interested in the idea of planets with more than one moon, but I haven't decided yet.

I remember there was a thread called 'Boarders writing a novel' or sth like that, but I haven't read it in many months... somebody knows whether it's stil active?

[Equilibrium]

@LmL @Blue Tiger

Like apparently everyone here I have also tinkered with my own fantasy universe. It will also be set in ancient advanced fantasy magical civilization ™ , so new wave in fantasy looks imminent  

[Bluetiger]

@LmL 

You've asked about how Bifrost interacts with the Einheriar.

So, on some occasions, Bifrost's guardian god Heimdallr allows the warriors to cross from Valhalla to Midgard, for example if they have to fight some monster. But curiously, they're forbidden to talk to the living.

Some authors link them to the Wild Hunt (Night's Watch rangings?)

When they have nothing to do (saving the world etc.), the Eiheniar feast in Valhalla. They eat meat of some beast, that grows back every day. The meat is described as 'the finest pork'. But in another passage it's mentioned that no one really knows what is that meat... Just like Coldhands feeding 'pork' to Bran.

 

[ravenous reader]

On 12/24/2016 at 10:59 AM, Blue Tiger said:

So we have a band of undead warriors, waiting for Ragnarok and battle... and in Castle Black we have the Shieldhall:

@The Fattest Leech made the same connection of the Shieldhall as a kind of underworld portal, with specific reference to Jon's impending death and resurrection, here on Seams, portals and bridges the magical landscape of Westeros.

On 12/24/2016 at 10:59 AM, Blue Tiger said:

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blazoned in more colors than any rainbow ever dreamed of.

Rainbow evokes Bifrost, the burning rainbow bridge of Asgard. Btw, some scholars belive that this mythical bridge represents the Milky Way.

It's interesting that the word 'blazoned' conjures both the sense of a shield defense (from Old French 'blason') as well as something ablaze -- i.e. on fire.  

In support of the Bifrost as Milky Way possibly relating to Bran (I'll have more to say on the 'bridge to space' later):

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A Dance with Dragons - Bran III

The singers made Bran a throne of his own, like the one Lord Brynden sat, white weirwood flecked with red, dead branches woven through living roots. They placed it in the great cavern by the abyss, where the black air echoed to the sound of running water far below. Of soft grey moss they made his seat. Once he had been lowered into place, they covered him with warm furs.

There he sat, listening to the hoarse whispers of his teacher. "Never fear the darkness, Bran." The lord's words were accompanied by a faint rustling of wood and leaf, a slight twisting of his head. "The strongest trees are rooted in the dark places of the earth. Darkness will be your cloak, your shield, your mother's milk. Darkness will make you strong."

Paradoxically, darkness is mother's milk, in which Bran is encouraged to immerse himself.  

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Bifrost (pronounced roughly “BEEF-roast;” Old Norse Bifröst) is the rainbow bridge that connects Asgard, the world of the Aesir tribe of gods, with Midgard, the world of humanity. Bifrost is guarded by the ever-vigilant god Heimdall. During Ragnarok, the giants breach Heimdall’s defenses and cross the bridge to storm Asgard and slay the gods.

The etymology of the word is uncertain. The original form of the name seems to be Bilröst,^[1][2] which suggests a meaning along the lines of “the fleetingly glimpsed rainbow.”^[3] If Bifröst is correct, however, the meaning would be something akin to “the shaking or trembling rainbow.” In either case, the word points to the ephemeral and fragile nature of the bridge.

All rainbows, of course, are “fleeting.” In the pre-Christian Germanic worldview, the invisible, religious modality of existence doesn’t lie in a realm of absolute remove from the material world, as in monotheistic religions. Rather, it lies within or behind the everyday, material world. (See Myth, Pantheism, and Animism.) The mythological image of Bifrost expresses the existential meaning that the rainbow carries in this perspective, and, accordingly, Bifrost lies behind and within any and every visible rainbow, each of which is a transitory and quaking bridge between the sky and the earth, between Asgard and Midgard.

Taken from: http://norse-mythology.org/cosmology/bifrost/

If this etymological interpretation of the bridge as ephemeral and in particular 'shaking, quaking or trembling' is correct, then we can revisit the following of the Ghost of High Heart's prophecies:

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A Storm of Swords - Arya IV

Beside the embers of their campfire, she saw Tom, Lem, and Greenbeard talking to a tiny little woman, a foot shorter than Arya and older than Old Nan, all stooped and wrinkled and leaning on a gnarled black cane. Her white hair was so long it came almost to the ground. When the wind gusted it blew about her head in a fine cloud. Her flesh was whiter, the color of milk, and it seemed to Arya that her eyes were red, though it was hard to tell from the bushes. "The old gods stir and will not let me sleep," she heard the woman say. "I dreamt I saw a shadow with a burning heart butchering a golden stag, aye. I dreamt of a man without a face, waiting on a bridge that swayed and swung. On his shoulder perched a drowned crow with seaweed hanging from his wings. 

Here we have a precarious 'bridge that swayed and swung' which certainly sounds like the description given above of the 'Bifrost' to me.

The orthodox interpretation thereof, however, is that this is foreshadowing of Euron hiring a Faceless Man to kill his brother Balon, who was thrown off the literally swaying bridge at Pyke to his death.  Although this seems like the most likely explanation, the 'drowned crow' has also (there can be multiple coexistent valid interpretations of prophecies simultaneously) always made me think of Bloodraven and Bran, who with their crow associations together with their current location (both physical and metaphysical) being 'under the sea'  in the underworld cave venue, as I've previously argued, can both be thought of as drowned crows in a figurative sense as well.

Since I'm partial to punning 'sea' with 'see' in the context of greenseers, the 'seaweed' in question could also refer to a 'see weed' -- i.e. that substance of which they partake (almost like a hallucinogenic drug) in order to enable the greenseeing. Yes, I'm talking about the weirwoods as 'sea/see weeds', as if they were weeds like cannabis (often colloquially referred to as 'weed') or psilocybin (magic mushrooms which enable one to 'fly'; mushrooms of all sorts are basically weeds)!  

Moreover, the initiation into the higher powers afforded by this 'see weed' is termed a wedding:

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A Dance with Dragons - Bran III

Something about the look of it made Bran feel ill. The red veins were only weirwood sap, he supposed, but in the torchlight they looked remarkably like blood. He dipped the spoon into the paste, then hesitated. "Will this make me a greenseer?"

"Your blood makes you a greenseer," said Lord Brynden. "This will help awaken your gifts and wed you to the trees."

Bran did want to be married to a tree … but who else would wed a broken boy like him? A thousand eyes, a hundred skins, wisdom deep as the roots of ancient trees. A greenseer.

Weddings not only traditionally take place in front of weirwood tree; in a sense whenever one swears a vow before one, one is being wed to the tree itself in many instances as well.  So when Jon and the rest of the Night's Watch brothers say their 'words' in front of the weirwood, this represents a binding marriage to the Night's Watch and possibly originally the greenseer enterprise, in effect foreswearing undertaking a traditional marriage to a woman.  

The sea- or seeweed is 'hanging' from the crow's wings because the same 'weed' that allows the bird to fly also pinions its wings -- and hangs him on the tree like Odin.  Thus, we can say the marriage to the tree entails a death in addition to a (re)birth.  By the way, @LmL, I loved the pickup of the pun of 'mourning' on 'morning' in your observation in your latest essay that the Night's Watch wear 'mourning' and agree to sacrifice themselves in order to be 'the light that brings the dawn.'  In other words, instead of taking a woman as wife, they 'take the black' -- so the black garb is their funeral as well as wedding dress in one, the 'mourning' with the 'morning'!  (Also, many thanks for the generous shout-out to me in your essay!)

In Bloodraven and Bran's case, the greenseers wear magically-woven 'gowns of silver seaweed' when they are enveloped in the weirwood (described as silver in the moonlight)...I know you're not fond of entangling yourself in nennymoans and silver seaweed, but flip it to 'see-weed', and from there extrapolate to 'see-dragons' and see if perhaps you'll come round to my thinking in the end .  Another way of thinking about the weirwood 'sea/see weed' is as a net -- isn't that why we're intuitively referring to the 'weirnet,' although GRRM never used this designation explicitly in the text?  Under the sea, one may get entangled in seaweed, anchoring and dragging one down into the depths.  This relationship is analogous to how the weirwood throne pokes the greenseer in a rather sexual, what you termed 'sitter-sittee union' (representing the consummation of this particular alchemical wedding, and which is disturbingly reminiscent of the Japanese 'tentacle porn' manga genre), the connection or being 'plugged in' allowing certain possibilities while inviting and/or preventing others which may be less or more desirable respectively.  

Recall, the gowns of silver seaweed are 'woven' -- i.e. that's code for magic spells woven into the network, which also act as a net in which to trap the greenseers, visualised by the way for example Sam as undead greenseer-stand-in as well as magical moon meteor is netted by Meera when he emerges from the weirwood/well at the Night Fort.  'Weir' means fish trap or net as we've all emphasized.  The 'net' concept is also related to Sansa's silver hair net containing the Strangler crystals, introducing an element of poisoning oneself for power, as we've previously discussed -- I just believe the 'stones' or 'seeds' suspended in the net, the 'nennymoans,' are related to the amethysts, the Strangler as well as the weirwoods

Returning to the prophecy, if the crow overseer on the shoulder represents the greenseer overlord/s, then perhaps the 'man without a face' can represent whatever or whomever is skinchanged. The vehicle -- in Odin's case he rides up and down the bridge between all 9 worlds represented by the Yggdrasil tree on his horse.  Being skinchanged by a greenseer is a form of body- and mind-snatching as well as face-snatching, in which each party involved in the transaction (the 'snatcher' and the 'snatchee') becomes a faceless, nameless 'no-one'.  'No-one' is another wordplay of GRRM's indicating both the ensuing anonymity as well as the communal dimension of the transaction.  The parties can be thought of as 'no one' because they very literally are not one, constituting a union of 'more than one' and being mutually dependent in the act of skinchanging/greenseeing -- making 'the beast with two backs' as @Pain killer Jane has so evocatively referred to the dynamic.

Note, in the quote above in which Bran is expressing reluctance to be yoked to the tree in matrimony, he dwells on being 'broken' and how that precludes him from pursuing a more normal life in which he would have been able to make his own choices and decisions, for example to flee the cave.  Being broken however, Bran is at the mercy of those who wish to wed him, as well as being like a horse -- if we're going with the Odin analogy -- 'broken in' and therefore ready to be ridden by those wishing to harness his greenseeing talent, the way Bran himself is able to skinchange animals or humans who are physically and/or mentally susceptible in some way, and who've already been 'ridden' by other greenseers.  There's an unfortunate element of sexual coercion to all of this, which you've already hinted at elsewhere. 

Anyway, I interpret the drowned crow on the shoulder of the faceless giant as Bran skinchanging or riding Hodor, as if Hodor were his horse (the 'giant' in question may also include other giants such as weirwoods, dragons or meteors, etc.).  Whimsically, I imagine the silver seaweed hanging from his wings as the reins by which the rider is attached to the horse. So, if this is Bran-Hodor in the Ghost's prophecy crossing the bridge, to what could the bridge refer?

We've already been given a metaphor for what could be in store:

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A Dance with Dragons - Bran III

The moon was a crescent, thin and sharp as the blade of a knife. Summer dug up a severed arm, black and covered with hoarfrost, its fingers opening and closing as it pulled itself across the frozen snow. There was still enough meat on it to fill his empty belly, and after that was done he cracked the arm bones for the marrow. Only then did the arm remember it was dead.

Bran ate with Summer and his pack, as a wolf. As a raven he flew with the murder, circling the hill at sunset, watching for foes, feeling the icy touch of the air. As Hodor he explored the caves. He found chambers full of bones, shafts that plunged deep into the earth, a place where the skeletons of gigantic bats hung upside down from the ceiling. He even crossed the slender stone bridge that arched over the abyss and discovered more passages and chambers on the far side. One was full of singers, enthroned like Brynden in nests of weirwood roots that wove under and through and around their bodies. Most of them looked dead to him, but as he crossed in front of them their eyes would open and follow the light of his torch, and one of them opened and closed a wrinkled mouth as if he were trying to speak. "Hodor," Bran said to him, and he felt the real Hodor stir down in his pit.

The 'abyss' over which the stone bridge arches is a metaphor for space itself.  Just as the rainbow bridge of the Bifrost connects the world of men to the world of the gods, constituting a 'giant leap for mankind,' were they to make the crossing, Bran is navigating between worlds -- connecting life to death; earth to space; north and south; fire and ice; and more besides.

Of course, the crossing entails a sacrifice.  Hence, 'rainbows' have already been associated by GRRM with sacrifice, altars, corpses, and death in general.  For example, here:

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A Dance with Dragons - Jon XI

Outside the day was bright and cloudless. The sun had returned to the sky after a fortnight's absence, and to the south the Wall rose blue-white and glittering. There was a saying Jon had heard from the older men at Castle Black: the Wall has more moods than Mad King Aerys, they'd say, or sometimes, the Wall has more moods than a woman. On cloudy days it looked to be white rock. On moonless nights it was as black as coal. In snowstorms it seemed carved of snow. But on days like this, there was no mistaking it for anything but ice. On days like this the Wall shimmered bright as a septon's crystal, every crack and crevasse limned by sunlight, as frozen rainbows danced and died behind translucent ripples. On days like this the Wall was beautiful.

 

A Feast for Crows - Cersei II

Lord Tywin's eyes are closed forever now, Cersei thought. It is my look they will flinch from now, my frown that they must fear. I am a lion too.

It was gloomy within the sept with the sky so grey outside. If the rain ever stopped, the sun would slant down through the hanging crystals to drape the corpse in rainbows. The Lord of Casterly Rock deserved rainbows. He had been a great man. I shall be greater, though. A thousand years from now, when the maesters write about this time, you shall be remembered only as Queen Cersei's sire.

"Mother." Tommen tugged her sleeve. "What smells so bad?"

 

A Feast for Crows - Jaime I

Cersei wiped her tears away on a ragged brown sleeve. "Very well. If it is battlefields you want, battlefields I shall give you." She jerked her hood up angrily. "I was a fool to come. I was a fool ever to love you." Her footsteps echoed loudly in the quiet, and left damp splotches on the marble floor.

Dawn caught Jaime almost unawares. As the glass in the dome began to lighten, suddenly there were rainbows shimmering off the walls and floors and pillars, bathing Lord Tywin's corpse in a haze of many-colored light. The King's Hand was rotting visibly. His face had taken on a greenish tinge, and his eyes were deeply sunken, two black pits. Fissures had opened in his cheeks, and a foul white fluid was seeping through the joints of his splendid gold-and-crimson armor to pool beneath his body.

 

A Game of Thrones - Jon VI

Sam glanced about anxiously. "Is it time to go? I shouldn't be late, they might change their minds." He was fairly bouncing as they crossed the weed-strewn courtyard. The day was warm and sunny. Rivulets of water trickled down the sides of the Wall, so the ice seemed to sparkle and shine.

Inside the sept, the great crystal caught the morning light as it streamed through the south-facing window and spread it in a rainbow on the altar. Pyp's mouth dropped open when he caught sight of Sam, and Toad poked Grenn in the ribs, but no one dared say a word. Septon Celladar was swinging a censer, filling the air with fragrant incense that reminded Jon of Lady Stark's little sept in Winterfell. For once the septon seemed sober.

The high officers arrived in a body; Maester Aemon leaning on Clydas, Ser Alliser cold-eyed and grim, Lord Commander Mormont resplendent in a black wool doublet with silvered bearclaw fastenings. Behind them came the senior members of the three orders: red-faced Bowen Marsh the Lord Steward, First Builder Othell Yarwyck, and Ser Jaremy Rykker, who commanded the rangers in the absence of Benjen Stark.

Mormont stood before the altar, the rainbow shining on his broad bald head. "You came to us outlaws," he began, "poachers, rapers, debtors, killers, and thieves. You came to us children. You came to us alone, in chains, with neither friends nor honor. You came to us rich, and you came to us poor. Some of you bear the names of proud houses. Others have only bastards' names, or no names at all. It makes no matter. All that is past now. On the Wall, we are all one house.

Mormont is like the high priest preparing to sacrifice the recruits on the rainbow altar, for the good of the realm!  In terms of Catholicism (GRRM's family background), this is a representation of the ritual of the Holy Communion in which the blood and body of the host is sacrificed for the common good, and by partaking of the wafer and the wine (representing the body and blood of the god respectively) the congregation is made one with the Lord and with each other, being saved from their own sins in the process.  This is why Mormont and the other high officers are described as 'a body.'  They have been sacrificed to the community, just as the new Night's Watch recruits will shortly be.  He says that despite their diverse backgrounds that they are 'all one on the Wall,' just as the rainbow forms one beam of light, although it's refracted into many different component colors.

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"At evenfall, as the sun sets and we face the gathering night, you shall take your vows. From that moment, you will be a Sworn Brother of the Night's Watch. Your crimes will be washed away, your debts forgiven. So too you must wash away your former loyalties, put aside your grudges, forget old wrongs and old loves alike. Here you begin anew.

"A man of the Night's Watch lives his life for the realm. Not for a king, nor a lord, nor the honor of this house or that house, neither for gold nor glory nor a woman's love, but for the realm, and all the people in it. A man of the Night's Watch takes no wife and fathers no sons. Our wife is duty. Our mistress is honor. And you are the only sons we shall ever know.

So, it's a rather grim, though liberating marriage as well!  In addition to the Communion motif, it's also represented as a Baptism -- 'crimes will be washed away...here you begin anew.'  The recruits kneel in front of the weirwood, pledge themselves, and then rise 'harder and stronger' as if they had been immersed in a new fluid medium -- just like the sea (by the way, the walls of the well at the Night Fort representing a kind of birth canal are covered in 'niter' salt crystals, hinting that the element of night (pun on 'nitre' or 'niter' whose more commonly used name is 'saltpeter') might be the sea.

To get back to Bran and my theory of his spaceflight, I believe there have been several indications besides crossing the bridge in the cavern with Hodor that Bran is destined to, in Ned's words, 'bridge that distance':

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A Game of Thrones - Catelyn II

Sansa would shine in the south, Catelyn thought to herself, and the gods knew that Arya needed refinement. Reluctantly, she let go of them in her heart. But not Bran. Never Bran. "Yes," she said, "but please, Ned, for the love you bear me, let Bran remain here at Winterfell. He is only seven."

"I was eight when my father sent me to foster at the Eyrie," Ned said. "Ser Rodrik tells me there is bad feeling between Robb and Prince Joffrey. That is not healthy. Bran can bridge that distance. He is a sweet boy, quick to laugh, easy to love. Let him grow up with the young princes, let him become their friend as Robert became mine. Our House will be the safer for it."

He was right; Catelyn knew it. It did not make the pain any easier to bear. She would lose all four of them, then: Ned, and both girls, and her sweet, loving Bran. Only Robb and little Rickon would be left to her. She felt lonely already. Winterfell was such a vast place. "Keep him off the walls, then," she said bravely. "You know how Bran loves to climb."

I actually think Bran is rather fittingly going to combine bridging and climbing in his ultimate act -- i.e. otherwise stated, 'bridging and climbing' = 'flying'! 

In any case, Bran is destined to bridge something.  I'm just positing that bridge is space (call me 'crack pot' if you like, but a while ago when I was researching Euron I came across 'Nightflyer' the ship he took off Blacktyde after murdering him and further purloining his luscious black sable (a 'marten'/Martin) coat, as a reference to one of GRRM's own novellas 'Nightflyers,' which if you read a synopsis is pretty damn 'crackpot' and 'tinfoil' as they come, by any standards, but more importantly reveals GRRM's obvious penchant for hopping off to space, and doing a bit of bodysnatching and engaging in dubious sexual transactions on the way, at a moment's notice -- the whole quest is to seek out an ancient alien race, go figure...).

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A Game of Thrones - Bran I

Robb grinned and looked up from the bundle in his arms. "She can't hurt you," he said. "She's dead, Jory."

Bran was afire with curiosity by then. He would have spurred the pony faster, but his father made them dismount beside the bridge and approach on foot. Bran jumped off and ran.

By then Jon, Jory, and Theon Greyjoy had all dismounted as well. "What in the seven hells is it?" Greyjoy was saying.

I should acknowledge @TyrionTLannister for initially drawing this quote to my attention, particularly his excellent catch that Bran was 'afire', which he interpreted as foreshadowing for Bran's death by fire, in particular by Jon riding a dragon -- which I however have interpreted as Bran dying in fire by sacrificing himself skinchanging Drogon in an effort to take out the comet (@LmL has subsequently suggested Bran may skinchange the comet itself, which I also don't find that far-fetched!)

Crossing the Bifrost --a burning bridge into the frozen reaches of space -- is a good metaphor for what I had in mind for Bran.

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A Game of Thrones - Bran II

When he got out from under it and scrambled up near the sky, Bran could see all of Winterfell in a glance. He liked the way it looked, spread out beneath him, only birds wheeling over his head while all the life of the castle went on below. Bran could perch for hours among the shapeless, rain-worn gargoyles that brooded over the First Keep, watching it all: the men drilling with wood and steel in the yard, the cooks tending their vegetables in the glass garden, restless dogs running back and forth in the kennels, the silence of the godswood, the girls gossiping beside the washing well. It made him feel like he was lord of the castle, in a way even Robb would never know.

It taught him Winterfell's secrets too. The builders had not even leveled the earth; there were hills and valleys behind the walls of Winterfell. There was a covered bridge that went from the fourth floor of the bell tower across to the second floor of the rookery. Bran knew about that. And he knew you could get inside the inner wall by the south gate, climb three floors and run all the way around Winterfell through a narrow tunnel in the stone, and then come out on ground level at the north gate, with a hundred feet of wall looming over you. Even Maester Luwin didn't know that, Bran was convinced.

 

A Clash of Kings - Bran VII

"Aye, soon enough," Osha agreed, "but we need food, and there may be some survived this. Stay together. Meera, keep your shield up and guard our backs."

It took the rest of the morning to make a slow circuit of the castle. The great granite walls remained, blackened here and there by fire but otherwise untouched. But within, all was death and destruction. The doors of the Great Hall were charred and smoldering, and inside the rafters had given way and the whole roof had crashed down onto the floor. The green and yellow panes of the glass gardens were all in shards, the trees and fruits and flowers torn up or left exposed to die. Of the stables, made of wood and thatch, nothing remained but ashes, embers, and dead horses. Bran thought of his Dancer, and wanted to weep. There was a shallow steaming lake beneath the Library Tower, and hot water gushing from a crack in its side. The bridge between the Bell Tower and the rookery had collapsed into the yard below, and Maester Luwin's turret was gone. They saw a dull red glow shining up through the narrow cellar windows beneath the Great Keep, and a second fire still burning in one of the storehouses.

Like the Bifrost, the connection is tenuous and easily disrupted.

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A Storm of Swords - Sansa VII

She remembered a summer's snow in Winterfell when Arya and Bran had ambushed her as she emerged from the keep one morning. They'd each had a dozen snowballs to hand, and she'd had none. Bran had been perched on the roof of the covered bridge, out of reach, but Sansa had chased Arya through the stables and around the kitchen until both of them were breathless. She might even have caught her, but she'd slipped on some ice. Her sister came back to see if she was hurt. When she said she wasn't, Arya hit her in the face with another snowball, but Sansa grabbed her leg and pulled her down and was rubbing snow in her hair when Jory came along and pulled them apart, laughing.

What do I want with snowballs? She looked at her sad little arsenal. There's no one to throw them at. She let the one she was making drop from her hand. I could build a snow knight instead, she thought. Or even . . .

 

A Dance with Dragons - Bran II

The last part of their dark journey was the steepest. Hodor made the final descent on his arse, bumping and sliding downward in a clatter of broken bones, loose dirt, and pebbles. The girl child was waiting for them, standing on one end of a natural bridge above a yawning chasm. Down below in the darkness, Bran heard the sound of rushing water. An underground river.

"Do we have to cross?" Bran asked, as the Reeds came sliding down behind him. The prospect frightened him. If Hodor slipped on that narrow bridge, they would fall and fall.

Again, GRRM impresses upon us that the bridge spans the abyss or 'yawning chasm' -- another way of imagining the vastness of space.

Bran fulfils the archetype GRRM prefers of the reluctant, unlikely hero who does not actively court power, but who nevertheless is called upon to save the day.  Yes, Bran is going to have to cross a scary bridge.  He's already intuited that here:

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A Game of Thrones - Bran II

He knew two ways to get there. You could climb straight up the side of the tower itself, but the stones were loose, the mortar that held them together long gone to ash, and Bran never liked to put his full weight on them.

The best way was to start from the godswood, shinny up the tall sentinel, and cross over the armory and the guards hall, leaping roof to roof, barefoot so the guards wouldn't hear you overhead. That brought you up to the blind side of the First Keep, the oldest part of the castle, a squat round fortress that was taller than it looked. Only rats and spiders lived there now but the old stones still made for good climbing. You could go straight up to where the gargoyles leaned out blindly over empty space, and swing from gargoyle to gargoyle, hand over hand, around to the north side. From there, if you really stretched, you could reach out and pull yourself over to the broken tower where it leaned close. The last part was the scramble up the blackened stones to the eyrie, no more than ten feet, and then the crows would come round to see if you'd brought any corn.

OK -- here GRRM is feeding it to us...So, in addition to 'yawning chasm' and 'abyss,' we have 'empty space'.

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A Game of Thrones - Bran IV

In his dream he was climbing again, pulling himself up an ancient windowless tower, his fingers forcing themselves between blackened stones, his feet scrabbling for purchase. Higher and higher he climbed, through the clouds and into the night sky, and still the tower rose before him. When he paused to look down, his head swam dizzily and he felt his fingers slipping. Bran cried out and clung for dear life. The earth was a thousand miles beneath him and he could not fly. He could not fly. He waited until his heart had stopped pounding, until he could breathe, and he began to climb again. There was no way to go but up. Far above him, outlined against a vast pale moon, he thought he could see the shapes of gargoyles. His arms were sore and aching, but he dared not rest. He forced himself to climb faster. The gargoyles watched him ascend. Their eyes glowed red as hot coals in a brazier. Perhaps once they had been lions, but now they were twisted and grotesque. Bran could hear them whispering to each other in soft stone voices terrible to hear. He must not listen, he told himself, he must not hear, so long as he did not hear them he was safe. But when the gargoyles pulled themselves loose from the stone and padded down the side of the tower to where Bran clung, he knew he was not safe after all. "I didn't hear," he wept as they came closer and closer, "I didn't, I didn't."

He woke gasping, lost in darkness, and saw a vast shadow looming over him. "I didn't hear," he whispered, trembling in fear, but then the shadow said "Hodor," and lit the candle by the bedside, and Bran sighed with relief.

 

15 hours ago, LmL said:

This is actually the more obscure rainbow symbol to be found at the Wall. The Wall itself is described as crystalline and casting rainbows. So you're telling me Bifrost is a burning rainbow bridge? Now you have my attention. The Wall is Bifrost then, almost certainly. The idea of the Wall burning is to be found in the unity of symbol between he Night's Watch as a sword, the Wall and the Watch being the same thing, and the Wall being a sword. The NW is like a sword, the Wall is like a sword, and they are both shields - you get the idea. They are all part of a whole, which is very much a burning sword. I shall now have to go research Bifrost a bit. So how does Bifrost interact with the einherjar? This is pretty cool. My mythologies have a legend of dead heroes returning to fight at "Armageddon" or whatever, but naturally Martin is going to play with this trope, pull it down into the mud, and give us the grittiest, gnarliest version of this idea as he can imagine. 

The Shieldhall and the shield represented by the Wall are related concepts.  Previously, I wrote:

On 8/16/2016 at 2:57 PM, ravenous reader said:

Informative mythological background, Leech!  I definitely think the hall might be a locus of magic, particularly by the history you gave and in its very name 'Shield-hall.'  The 'shield' is reminiscent of that cyvasse players put up on the board in order to arrange their pieces for their opening formation in the game.  When the 'shield' comes down and is removed, the 'game' starts.  A shield is not only a barrier separating opponents, but serves as a liminal or transitional space -- a hall --both separating and connecting the realms of life and death, as you indicated.  Ultimately, the 'Shield-hall' is an integral representation of the 'Shield-wall,' the ice wall or magical 'hinge of the world' overshadowing the action there. Once the Wall comes down, the game will start in earnest!

And I've been telling you for some time now that Bran has to cross a burning bridge of no return...  Now I find out from @Blue Tiger that it represents the Milky Way (perfect! )

Somehow Jon's mission at the Wall parallels Bran's in space.  The way I see it, Jon must deal with the invasion of the Others on the ground, with the Wall representing the otherworldly bridge; whereas his brother Bran must deal with the invasion of the Other(s) represented by the comet with potentially devastating ice moon meteor shower, with whomever or whatever Bran has to skinchange in order to get there representing the bridge in his respective context.

There are several references linking Jon's Wall to Bran's bridge in the chasm.  In particular, the word 'abyss' is repeated to give this sense of a titanic confluence of the (under-, over- and other-)worlds:

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A Game of Thrones - Tyrion III

It was bitingly cold up here, and the wind pulled at his clothes like an insistent lover. The top of the Wall was wider than the kingsroad often was, so Tyrion had no fear of falling, although the footing was slicker than he would have liked. The brothers spread crushed stone across the walkways, but the weight of countless footsteps would melt the Wall beneath, so the ice would seem to grow around the gravel, swallowing it, until the path was bare again and it was time to crush more stone.

Still, it was nothing that Tyrion could not manage. He looked off to the east and west, at the Wall stretching before him, a vast white road with no beginning and no end and a dark abyss on either side. West, he decided, for no special reason, and he began to walk that way, following the pathway nearest the north edge, where the gravel looked freshest.

His bare cheeks were ruddy with the cold, and his legs complained more loudly with every step, but Tyrion ignored them. The wind swirled around him, gravel crunched beneath his boots, while ahead the white ribbon followed the lines of the hills, rising higher and higher, until it was lost beyond the western horizon. He passed a massive catapult, as tall as a city wall, its base sunk deep into the Wall. The throwing arm had been taken off for repairs and then forgotten; it lay there like a broken toy, half-embedded in the ice.

 

A Feast for Crows - Samwell I

"Lord Tywin will say it was too much."

"Stannis says it's not enough. The more you give a king the more he wants. We are walking on a bridge of ice with an abyss on either side. Pleasing one king is difficult enough. Pleasing two is hardly possible."

"Yes, but . . . if the Lannisters should prevail and Lord Tywin decides that we betrayed the king by aiding Stannis, it could mean the end of the Night's Watch. He has the Tyrells behind him, with all the strength of Highgarden. And he did defeat Lord Stannis on the Blackwater." The sight of blood might make Sam faint, but he knew how wars were won. His own father had seen to that.

The twist will be that instead of heralding the apocalypse, the destruction of the 'bridges' by Jon and Bran respectively is going to be necessary in order to save the planet.  Bridges are 'two-way streets' and if the ice moon meteor is on course, it's using that 'bridge' as well.  The only way to avert catastrophe is to 'destroy the highway', or alternatively block the road, which is representative in my mind of destroying the meteor or redirecting its course.  Bran will not survive the conflagration.  I'm not sure why it's necessary for the Wall to come down in Jon's context, however.  Perhaps @LynnS or @Black Crow have some ideas surrounding why that may be necessary and salutary, although counterintuitive?

This kind of 'bridge to space' trope, which the hero must navigate in the final hour, has been used by other fantasy writers before, most notably by Philip Pullman in 'His Dark Materials' trilogy (named for the classic quote by Milton from 'Paradise Lost' @Pain killer Jane has highlighted before, in which similarly a hero or rather anti-hero Satan must make the perilous crossing, traversing the 'wild abyss' via 'the narrow frith he had to cross' from Hell to the world of men):

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From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Dark_Materials

 

The title of the series, His Dark Materials, comes from 17th century poet John Milton's Paradise Lost, Book 2:

Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixt
Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while,
Pondering his Voyage; for no narrow frith
He had to cross.

— Paradise Lost, Book 2, lines 910–920

 

Pullman earlier proposed to name the series The Golden Compasses, also a reference to Paradise Lost,^[9] where they denote God's circle-drawing instrument used to establish and set the bounds of all creation:

God as architect, wielding the golden compasses, by William Blake (left) and Jesus as Geometer in a 13th-century medieval illuminated manuscript.

Then staid the fervid wheels, and in his hand
He took the golden compasses, prepared
In God's eternal store, to circumscribe
This universe, and all created things:
One foot he centered, and the other turned
Round through the vast profundity obscure

— Paradise Lost, Book 7, lines 224–229

Despite the confusion with the other common meaning of compass (the navigational instrument) The Golden Compass became the title of the American edition of Northern Lights (the book features an 'alethiometer', a device that one might label a "golden compass"). In The Subtle Knife Pullman rationalizes the first book's American title, by having Mary twice refer to Lyra's alethiometer as a "compass" or "compass thing."^[10]

If God is an architect who created the 'bridge', then the 'Azor Ahai/Lucifer/Last Hero' hero/anti-hero figures who dare to follow in his footsteps, constructing their own bridges to the stars are architects in his reflection, like Bran the Builder who 'learnt the song of stones' (the tale GRRM tongue-in-cheek proclaims 'not worth repeating'); and perhaps space engineers too, like our Bran.  In fact, now I come to think of it, the weirwood throne is a kind of cockpit in so many ways!

In 'The Northern Lights' or 'The Golden Compass' (its US title) the final chapter is entitled 'The Bridge to the Stars' and involves the heroine following after the anti-hero/villain through a superhighway tunnel to space, created by sacrifice and sacrilege.  It requires breaking through the Northern Lights, just as I have interpreted Bran having to break through the curtain of light at the end of the world:

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 Lyra hopes to find and save her best friend, Roger Parslow, who she suspects has been taken by the Gobblers. Aided by the exiled armoured bearIorek Byrnison and a clan of witches, the Gyptians save the kidnapped children, including Roger. Lyra and Iorek, along with the balloonist Lee Scoresby, next continue on to Svalbard, home of the armoured bears. There Lyra helps Iorek, who regains his kingdom by killing his rival, King Iofur Raknison. Lyra then carries on to find Lord Asriel, exiled to Svalbard at Mrs. Coulter's request. She mistakenly thinks her mission all along has been to bring Asriel her alethiometer, when in fact she was destined to bring him a child, Roger. Lord Asriel has been developing a means of building a bridge to another world that can be seen in the sky through the northern lights. The bridge requires a vast amount of energy to split open the boundary between the two worlds. Asriel acquires the energy by severing Roger from his dæmon, killing Roger in the process. Lyra arrives too late to save Roger. Asriel then travels across the bridge to the new world in order to find the source of Dust. Lyra and Pantalaimon follow Asriel into the new world.

May I remind you of this quote you mentioned the other day:

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The World of Ice and Fire - Beyond the Free Cities: The Shivering Sea

It has long been accepted amongst the wise that our world is round. If this is true, it ought to be possible to sail over the top of the world and down its far side, and there discover lands and seas undreamed of. Over the centuries, many a bold mariner has sought to find a way through the ice to whatever lies beyond. Most, alas, have perished in the attempt, or returned south again half-frozen and much chastened. Whilst it is true that the White Waste recedes during summer and expands again in winter, its very shorelines ever changing, no seafarer has succeeded in finding this fabled northern passage, nor the warm summer sea that Maester Heriston of White Harbor once suggested might lie hidden and entombed behind the icy cliffs of the far north.

Sailors, by nature a gullible and superstitious lot, as fond of their fancies as singers, tell many tales of these frigid northern waters. They speak of queer lights shimmering in the sky, where the demon mother of the ice giants dances eternally through the night, seeking to lure men northward to their doom. They whisper of Cannibal Bay, where ships enter at their peril only to find themselves trapped forever when the sea freezes hard behind them.

They tell of pale blue mists that move across the waters, mists so cold that any ship they pass over is frozen instantly; of drowned spirits who rise at night to drag the living down into the grey-green depths; of mermaids pale of flesh with black-scaled tails, far more malign than their sisters of the south.

A space ship is a kind of ship nevertheless.  And space is a treacherous and icy sea we enter at our own peril, yet in which we hope to catch a glimpse of ourselves.  Notice how the dawn lights in the sky luring the unwary are compared to sirens luring sailors ever northward to their doom, thereby establishing the metaphorical relation of sea and space.

The ultimate 'ice giant' according to your theory would be the ice moon meteor.  It's in accordance with what @Blue Tiger posted here:

3 hours ago, Blue Tiger said:

@LmL 

You've asked about how Bifrost interacts with the Einheriar.

So, on some occasions, Bifrost's guardian god Heimdallr allows the warriors to cross from Valhalla to Midgard, for example if they have to fight some monster. But curiously, they're forbidden to talk to the living.

Some authors link them to the Wild Hunt (Night's Watch rangings?)

When they have nothing to do (saving the world etc.), the Eiheniar feast in Valhalla. They eat meat of some beast, that grows back every day. The meat is described as 'the finest pork'. But in another passage it's mentioned that no one really knows what is that meat... Just like Coldhands feeding 'pork' to Bran.

I would posit 'the fabled northern passage' mentioned in the quote above might be the equivalent of the Bifrost!

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A Game of Thrones - Bran III

He lifted his eyes and saw clear across the narrow sea, to the Free Cities and the green Dothraki sea and beyond, to Vaes Dothrak under its mountain, to the fabled lands of the Jade Sea, to Asshai by the Shadow, where dragons stirred beneath the sunrise.

Finally he looked north. He saw the Wall shining like blue crystal, and his bastard brother Jon sleeping alone in a cold bed, his skin growing pale and hard as the memory of all warmth fled from him. And he looked past the Wall, past endless forests cloaked in snow, past the frozen shore and the great blue-white rivers of ice and the dead plains where nothing grew or lived. North and north and north he looked, to the curtain of light at the end of the world, and then beyond that curtain. He looked deep into the heart of winter, and then he cried out, afraid, and the heat of his tears burned on his cheeks.

Now you know, the crow whispered as it sat on his shoulder. Now you know why you must live.

He must live to cross the bridge to the heart of winter -- which is fire -- to die, so that others may live.

[Black Crow]

11 hours ago, ravenous reader said:

 I'm not sure why it's necessary for the Wall to come down in Jon's context, however.  Perhaps @LynnS or @Black Crow have some ideas surrounding why that may be necessary and salutary, although counterintuitive?

"You know nothing, Jon Snow. This wall is made o' blood"

Its a thing of evil, to which the only possible riposte must be Janet Clouston:

"Blood built it.

"Blood stopped the building of it.

"Blood will bring it down."

[Bluetiger]

Do you think that apart from being The Wicker Man, The Fisher King and Bran the Blessed, Bran might be the Corn King as well?

I've never noticed it before:

From Wikipedia: Bran

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Bran, also known as miller's bran, is the hard outer layers of cereal grain. It consists of the combined aleurone andpericarp.

So, in a way ,Theon sacrifices 'Bran' -miller's son. The miller's boys lived near the Acorn Water. And fReek mentions that their mother gave hay to Ser Rodrik's horses. Later Theon has them burned, just like the Wickerman would be set ablaze.

 

Bran is both raven and corn.

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Bran is present in and may be in any cereal grain, including rice, corn (maize), wheat, oats,barley, rye and millet. Bran is not the same aschaff, coarser scaly material surrounding the grain but not forming part of the grain itself

This is worrying, since we already know that Bran is firewood:

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The high oil content of bran makes it subject to rancidification, one of the reasons that it is often separated from the grain before storage or further processing. Bran is often heat-treated to increase its longevity.

Some quotes:

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Bran did his best, although he did not think he ever really fooled her. Since his father would not forbid it, she turned to others. Old Nan told him a story about a bad little boy who climbed too high and was struck down by lightning, and how afterward the crows came to peck out his eyes. Bran was not impressed. There were crows' nests atop the broken tower, where no one ever went but him, and sometimes he filled his pockets with corn before he climbed up there and the crows ate it right out of his hand. None of them had ever shown the slightest bit of interest in pecking out his eyes

 

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He looked at the words, but they didn't matter. Nothing mattered. Bran was going to live. "My brother is going to live," he told Mormont. The Lord Commander shook his head, gathered up a fistful of corn, and whistled. The raven flew to his shoulder, crying, "Live! Live!"

Bran wants to feed corn to the crows. He's a willing sacrifice.

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"I don't care whose stories they are," Bran told her, "I hate them." He didn't want stories and he didn't want Old Nan. He wanted his mother and father. He wanted to go running with Summer loping beside him. He wanted to climb the broken tower and feed corn to the crows. He wanted to ride his pony again with his brothers. He wanted it to be the way it had been before.

@ravenous reader, apart from actually meaning 'azul/marine tiger' , Bluetiger means Celestial Tiger, as 'Niebieski'=blue, but it also means celestial, as in 'ciało niebieskie' = 'celestial body'.

It all comes from 'niebo' = sky, heaven. Niebo comes from protoslavic nebo, and that word comes from proto-indoeuropean  *nébhos = cloud.

There are many reasons why I chose this nickname, but I think this interpretation really fits Mythical Astronomy (although I've started using it way back in 2011).

Edit: Wikitionary claims that in West Frisian brân means fire.

Apart from garth = fishing weird, garth is also:

1. A grassy quadrangle surrounded by cloisters

2. A close; a yard; a croft; a garden.

3 A clearing in the woods; as such, part of many placenames in northern England

4. (paganism) A group or a household dedicated to the pagan faith Heathenry.

5. (paganism) A location or sacred space, in ritual and poetry in modern Heathenry.

It seems that graveyard's original name was gravegarth.

In Welsh 'arth' means bear.

[LmL]

5 hours ago, Blue Tiger said:

Do you think that apart from being The Wicker Man, The Fisher King and Bran the Blessed, Bran might be the Corn King as well?

I've never noticed it before:

From Wikipedia: Bran

So, in a way ,Theon sacrifices 'Bran' -miller's son. The miller's boys lived near the Acorn Water. And fReek mentions that their mother gave hay to Ser Rodrik's horses. Later Theon has them burned, just like the Wickerman would be set ablaze.

 

Bran is both raven and corn.

Oh wow, I feel stupid that I did not connect "Bran" with grain and corn. That's awesome. You'll notice that I even did call attention to the Miller's children being children of someone who makes grain, who grinds corn, because Theon thinks to himself that if he had called them Ram's heads, people would have seen horns. But I missed the Bran thing, haha.

This is exactly why I have so little patience for the "a spade is just a spade" people when analyzing A Song of Ice and Fire. The name Bran refers to ravens, it refers to a burning brand, and it refers to bran as in corn grain. That's just fucking sweet man.

And I think you're right, grant himself is the sacrifice. He's definitely in line with the same king of winter symbolism that Jon is, but of course there could be a twist. In particular, I have sort of begun noticing signs that the resurrection process might be inverted for these two. Meaning, John might end up raised by ice at first, then cleansed by fire. Brand, however, he might burn - his physical boys flash that is - only to end up inside of a frozen giant, Hodor.

@ravenous reader, I've been thinking about that scene on the hill when Bran and company are fighting to get into Bloodraven's cave. When bran skin changes into Hodor, the tears in Hodor's eyes freeze, giving him eyes of ice. Then, right before Bran loses consciousness, he sees a burning wight standing in front of a tree, as I mentioned in part 3. The burning wight is giving us the Burning Tree motif, but right behind him, the tree is dressed in a frozen shroud - which it promptly burries Bran in. So another words, what we have is a burning tree, right before bran is buried in an icy shroud. That combined with Hodor's ice eyes could be a clue about bran inhabiting that ice giant we've been sort of talking about. Also, skinchanging an ice giant could be foreshadowing of skinchanging or "riding" the comet.

It's also worth noticing Bran's many connections with lightning, since lightning is directly connected to the Burning Tree idea and the fire of the Gods. We have the story you mentioned here with the bad little boy who was struck by lightning at the top of the tower - that is of course where bran fell from, symbolizing the moon's fall from the heavens which struck as a lightning strike, the Storm God's Thunderbolt. Then at Queen's Crown when bran inhabits Hodor, we have lightning again. When Sam comes out of the well, Bran skinchanges Hodor again, and even recalls the lightning strike at Queen's Crown at that moment. That makes a ton of sense, since I'm claiming that the fire of the Gods in part represents the weirwood connection. Bran is the one enjoying this fire of the Gods, so it is natural he would be associated with lightning - particularly with being struck by lightning. When he falls, he is the burning brand.

5 hours ago, Blue Tiger said:

This is worrying, since we already know that Bran is firewood:

Some quotes:

 

Bran wants to feed corn to the crows. He's a willing sacrifice.

@ravenous reader, apart from actually meaning 'azul/marine tiger' , Bluetiger means Celestial Tiger, as 'Niebieski'=blue, but it also means celestial, as in 'ciało niebieskie' = 'celestial body'.

It all comes from 'niebo' = sky, heaven. Niebo comes from protoslavic nebo, and that word comes from proto-indoeuropean  *nébhos = cloud.

There are many reasons why I chose this nickname, but I think this interpretation really fits Mythical Astronomy (although I've started using it way back in 2011).

Edit: Wikitionary claims that in West Frisian brân means fire.

Frisian?

5 hours ago, Blue Tiger said:

Apart from garth = fishing weird, garth is also:

1. A grassy quadrangle surrounded by cloisters

2. A close; a yard; a croft; a garden.

3 A clearing in the woods; as such, part of many placenames in northern England

This one seems particularly apt.

5 hours ago, Blue Tiger said:

4. (paganism) A group or a household dedicated to the pagan faith Heathenry.

And this too, I suppose...

5 hours ago, Blue Tiger said:

5. (paganism) A location or sacred space, in ritual and poetry in modern Heathenry.

Right, ok...

5 hours ago, Blue Tiger said:

It seems that graveyard's original name was gravegarth.

Ok, that's pretty on the nose... The weirwood trees are essentially the graves of the original horned people who went inside them.

5 hours ago, Blue Tiger said:

In Welsh 'arth' means bear.

Paging @sweetsunray!

I've been thinking about the weirwood trees as traps recently... And I've been wondering if they aren't perhaps traps for dragons. It's kind of related to the idea of the moon meteors seeding the weirwood trees - but think about it more like the weirwood trees trapping or containing the effects of the moon meteors. That might correlate to the idea of trapping Dragon people. These would of course be people from the great Empire of the Dawn, the first dragon people to come to Westeros. The fact that the most prominent greenseer in the story is a dragon blooded person who got trapped in the weirwood tree... well it makes you wonder.

[Bluetiger]

18 minutes ago, LmL said:

Frisian?

A Germanic language spoken in some regions of Germany and Netherlands. Closely related to Old English.

I'm not sure how GRRM would know Bran means fire in it - maybe he did some extra research about what the name of whom I consider to be one of the most important (perhaps the most) characters in ASOIAF) means in different langages. At least it's obvious he checked Welsh meaning.

 

[Bluetiger]

It's stunning how many things Bran's name means - if somebody ever claims that ASOIAF's langauge and symbolism is simple and straightforward show him this: 

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bran

Bran = 

In English

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From Old French bren, bran ‎(“bran, filth”), from Gaulish brennos ‎(“rotten”), from Proto-Celtic *bragnos ‎(“rotten, foul”) (compare Welsh braen ‎(“stench”), Irish bréan ‎(“rancid”), Walloon brin ‎(“excrement”)), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰreHg- (compare Latin fragrāre ‎(“to smell strongly”), Dutch brak ‎(“hound”)).

(...)

bran ‎(countable and uncountable, plural brans)

The broken coat of the seed of wheat, rye, or other cereal grain, separated from the flour or meal by sifting or bolting; the coarse, chaffy part of ground grain.

The European carrion crow.

In Breton:

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Etymology.

From Proto-Brythonic *bran, from Proto-Celtic *branos, from Proto-Indo-European *wer- ‎(“crow”).

Compare Tocharian B wrauña, Lithuanian várna.

Nou

crow, raven

In Cornish:

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Etymology

From Proto-Brythonic *bran, from Proto-Celtic *branos, from Proto-Indo-European *wer- ‎(“crow”).

Compare Tocharian B wrauña, Lithuanian várna.

Noun

bran m ‎(plural brini or briny)

crow

In Irish:

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Etymology 1

From Old Irish bran, from Primitive Irish ᚁᚏᚐᚅᚐ ‎(brana), from Proto-Celtic *branos, from Proto-Indo-European *wer- ‎(“crow”) (compare Tocharian B wrauña, Lithuanian várna).

Noun

bran m ‎(genitive singular brain, nominative plural brain)

1. (literary) raven

Synonyms

• fiach

Etymology 2

Noun

bran m ‎(genitive singular brain, nominative plural brain)

1. bream (Abramis brama)

Wow.... This one is interesting: Old French:

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Noun[edit]

bran m ‎(oblique plural brans, nominative singular brans, nominative plural bran)

1. Alternative form of branc

 

And branc itself means:

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From Old Frankish *brand, *brant ‎(“firebrand, flaming sword”), from Proto-Germanic *brandaz ‎(“firebrand, torch, sword”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰrenu- ‎(“to burn”). Cognate with Old High German brant ‎(“fire, firebrand, burning iron”), Old English brand ‎(“fire, flame, brand, torch, sword, weapon”), Old Norse brandr ‎(“fire, firebrand, sword”). More at brand.

Noun[edit]

branc m ‎(oblique plural brans, nominative singular brans, nominative plural branc)

1. blade of a sword  [quotations ▼]

Just wow...

In Old Irish bran = raven, crow

In Welsh it means corn:

Quote

Etymology[edit]

Borrowing from English bran.

Noun[edit]

bran m

1. bran (broken coat of the seed of wheat, rye, or other cereal grain), husks

Derived terms[edit]

• bran gwenith ‎(“wheat-bran”)

 

But when it's spelled brân:

Quote

Etymology[edit]

From Proto-Brythonic *bran, from Proto-Celtic *branos, from Proto-Indo-European *werneh₂-.

Compare Tocharian B wrauña, Lithuanian várna, Polish wrona.

Noun[edit]

brân f (plural brain)

1. crow; rook; raven

 

West Frisian[edit]

Noun[edit]

brân c ‎(plural brannen, diminutive brântsje)

1. fire (occurrence of fire)

 

However, we have to keep in mind his real name is Brandon. And now it gets complicated.

From Behind the Name:

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Brandon - From a surname which was derived from a place name meaning "hill covered with broom" in Old English. It is sometimes also used as a variant of BRENDAN.

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Brendan - From Brendanus, the Latinized form of the Irish name Bréanainn which was derived from a Welsh word meaning "prince". Saint Brendan was a 6th-century Irish abbot who, according to legend, crossed the Atlantic and reached North America with 17 other monks.

 

From Wikipedia again:

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The name originates from the English surname Brandon. This surname can be derived from any of the numerous placenames in England so-named which are composed of two elements derived from the Old English language. The first element means "broom", "gorse"; and the second means "hill". There are several variant spellings of the given name Brandon; there is also probably, a feminine variant of the name. Brandon is considered to be a masculine name; however, in the United States during the 1980s, the name cracked the top 1,000th names recorded for female births; the name has since then fallen out of the top 1,000 female baby names.

(...)

The given name Brandon originates from the English surname Brandon.[1] This surname is a habitational name, derived from any of the numerous places in England called Brandon. Such places can include: Brandon, County Durham; Brandon, Northumbria; Brandon, Suffolk; Brandon, Warwickshire; and other locations.[2] For the most part, the names of these places are derived from two Old English language elements: brōm, meaning "broom", "gorse"; and dūn, meaning "hill".[3] However, one location, Brandon in Lincolnshire, may be connected to the River Brant, which runs close by.[2] This river's name is derived from two Old English elements: brant, meaning "steep", "deep"; and dūn, meaning "hill".[4] The name of this location is probably in reference to the river's steep banks.[2]

In some cases, it is also possible that the given name Brandon is a variant form of the Irish given name Brendan.[1] This name is an Anglicised form of the old Gaelic language name, Bréanainn, which in turn is derived from a Celtic language element meaning "prince".[5] It is also possible that the given name Brandon has been influenced from the surname of the American actor Marlon Brando (1924–2004).[1] This surname is derived from the Lombardic language personal name Brando. This personal name was a short form of several personal names composed with the Germanic language element brand, meaning "sword".[6]

 

So, to conclude, Bran might mean: prince, sword, fire, hill covered in broom hedges, raven, crow, carrion crow, prince, rotten, hound, flaming sword, burning iron... and it all fits our Bran perfectly. He is the SWORD, He is the firewood, he is the RAVEN, he is BROOMSTICK.

And to finish this sounding completly insane:

Bran is a wooden sword made of wicker and broomsticks, that will burn while flying like a raven, to set the comet ablaze.

 

At least I'm nearly certain that GRRM knows that bran = broomstick meaning. As broom is often associated with swords:

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Beyond, in a clearing overlooking the river, they came upon a boy and a girl playing at knights. Their swords were wooden sticks, broom handles from the look of them, and they were rushing across the grass, swinging at each other lustily. The boy was years older, a head taller, and much stronger, and he was pressing the attack. The girl, a scrawny thing in soiled leathers, was dodging and managing to get her stick in the way of most of the boy's blows, but not all. When she tried to lunge at him, he caught her stick with his own, swept it aside, and slid his wood down hard on her fingers. She cried out and lost her weapon.

 

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Lord Renly stifled his laughter. "My brother is too kind. I can find the door myself." He bowed to Joffrey. "Perchance later you'll tell me how a nine-year-old girl the size of a wet rat managed to disarm you with a broom handle and throw your sword in the river." As the door swung shut behind him, Ned heard him say, "Lion's Tooth," and guffaw once more.

 

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By then Ser Gregor Clegane was in position at the head of the lists. He was huge, the biggest man that Eddard Stark had ever seen. Robert Baratheon and his brothers were all big men, as was the Hound, and back at Winterfell there was a simpleminded stableboy named Hodor who dwarfed them all, but the knight they called the Mountain That Rides would have towered over Hodor. He was well over seven feet tall, closer to eight, with massive shoulders and arms thick as the trunks of small trees. His destrier seemed a pony in between his armored legs, and the lance he carried looked as small as a broom handle.

So here Ned thinks about Hodor just before thinking about Gregor.

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To be sure, she was just as guilty. Dany found herself stealing looks at the Tyroshi when her captains came to council, and sometimes at night she remembered the way his gold tooth glittered when he smiled. That, and his eyes. His bright blue eyes. On the road from Yunkai, Daario had brought her a flower or a sprig of some plant every evening when he made his report . . . to help her learn the land, he said. Waspwillow, dusky roses, wild mint, lady's lace, daggerleaf, broom, prickly ben, harpy's gold . . . He tried to spare me the sight of the dead children too. He should not have done that, but he meant it kindly. And Daario Naharis made her laugh, which Ser Jorah never did.

 

And among rich The Princess and The Queen symbolism we get Ser Alfred Broome.

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Moondancer was much smaller than Sunfyre, but also much swifter and far more nimble, and neither the dragon nor the princess on her back lacked courage. The dragon swooped and clawed and snapped at Sunfyre, raking and tearing until at last a blast of flame blinded the beast. Tangled together, the two dragons fell, and their riders with them. Aegon II leapt at the last moment from Sunfyre's back, both legs shattering, while Baela remained with Moondancer to the bitter end. When Alfred Broome drew his sword to kill her where she lay broken and unconscious, Ser Marston Waters tore the sword from his grasp and carried her to the maester, saving her life.

 

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Her escort, forty strong, was commanded by Ser Alfred Broome, one of the men left behind when Rhaenyra had launched her attack upon King’s Landing. Broome was the most senior of the knights at Dragonstone, having joined the garrison during the reign of the Old King. As such, he had expected to be named as castellan when Rhaenyra went forth to seize the Iron Throne … but Ser Alfred’s sullen disposition and sour manner inspired neither affection nor trust, so the queen had passed him over in favor of the more affable Ser Robert Quince.

 

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When it came, the fall of Dragonstone took less than an hour. Men traduced by Broome opened a postern gate during the hour of ghosts to allow Ser Marston Waters, Tom Tangletongue, and their men to slip into the castle unobserved. While one band seized the armory and another took Dragonstone’s leal guardsmen and master-at-arms into custody, Ser Marston surprised Maester Hunnimore in his rookery, so no word of the attack might escape by raven. Ser Alfred himself led the men who burst into the castellan’s chambers to surprise Ser Robert Quince. As Quince struggled to rise from his bed, Broome drove a spear into his huge pale belly, the thrust delivered with such force that the spear went out Ser Robert’s back, through the featherbed and straw mattress, and into the floor beneath.

Quince is the moon here? Or the comet?

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Yet neither Waters nor any of the other knights and lords present in the yard spoke a word of protest as King Aegon II delivered his half sister to his dragon. Sunfyre, it is said, did not seem at first to take any interest in the offering, until Broome pricked the queen’s breast with his dagger. The smell of blood roused the dragon, who sniffed at Her Grace, then bathed her in a blast of flame, so suddenly that Ser Alfred’s cloak caught fire as he leapt away. Rhaenyra Targaryen had time to raise her head toward the sky and shriek out one last curse upon her half brother before Sunfyre’s jaws closed round her, tearing off her arm and shoulder.

He tries to stabb Rhaenyra (moon maiden and Amethyst Empress - her sigil has the Arryn moon and eagle, Targaryen dragon and Velaryon seahorse), but he catches fire... I don't get it - who is who here...

 

Also, again from Wikipedia:

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The Plantagenet kings used common broom (known as planta genista in Latin) as an emblem and took their name from it. It was originally the emblem of Geoffrey of Anjou, father of Henry II of England. Wild broom is still common in dry habitats around Anjou, France.

Charles V and his son Charles VI of France used the pod of the broom plant (broom-cod, or cosse de geneste) as an emblem for livery collars and badges.

Genista tinctoria (dyer's broom, also known as dyer's greenweed or dyer's greenwood), provides a useful yellow dye and was grown commercially for this purpose in parts of Britain into the early 19th century. Woollen cloth, mordanted with alum, was dyed yellow with dyer's greenweed, then dipped into a vat of blue dye (woad or, later, indigo) to produce the once-famous "Kendal Green" (largely superseded by the brighter "Saxon Green" in the 1770s). Kendal green is a local common name for the plant.

The flower buds and flowers of Cytisus scoparius have been used as a salad ingredient, raw or pickled, and were a popular ingredient for salmagundi or "grand sallet" during the 17th and 18th century. There are now concerns about the toxicity of broom, with potential effects on the heart and problems during pregnancy

In Welsh mythology, Blodeuwedd is the name of a woman made from the flowers of broom, meadowsweet and the oak by Math fab Mathonwy and Gwydion to be the wife of Lleu Llaw Gyffes. Her story is part of the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi, the tale of Math son of Mathonwy.

A traditional rhyme from Sussex says: "Sweep the house with blossed broom in May/sweep the head of the household away." Despite this, it was also common to include a decorated bundle of broom at weddings. Ashes of broom were used to treat dropsy, while its strong smell was said to be able to tame wild horses and dogs.

 

[LmL]

On 12/26/2016 at 2:59 PM, ravenous reader said:

Paradoxically, darkness is mother's milk, in which Bran is encouraged to immerse himself.

Darkness - the waves of night - comes form the moon when it is burnt, instead of milk. From the exploding moon comes two general things - blood and night. Bleeding stars and bloody stones, waves of night. Both are expressed in watery language many times, likely in part as a corruption of the idea of moon milk. So now that you point out this quote about darkness being mother's milk... it's like he is being told to embrace the meteor and the waves of night that it brings. The black sea (space / the void). 

 

On 12/26/2016 at 2:59 PM, ravenous reader said:

Taken from: http://norse-mythology.org/cosmology/bifrost/

If this etymological interpretation of the bridge as ephemeral and in particular 'shaking, quaking or trembling' is correct, then we can revisit the following of the Ghost of High Heart's prophecies:

What about the quaking, trembling bridge of the arm of Dorne? The idea of a bridge between heaven and earth, or between realms, is very similar to the lightbringer meteors which bring the heavens down to earth and allow man to become like gods. The Wall is compared to both swords and bridges, very interesting, and so are trees. Broken bridges and broken swords are likely to be related. 

 

On 12/26/2016 at 2:59 PM, ravenous reader said:

The twist will be that instead of heralding the apocalypse, the destruction of the 'bridges' by Jon and Bran respectively is going to be necessary in order to save the planet.  Bridges are 'two-way streets' and if the ice moon meteor is on course, it's using that 'bridge' as well.  The only way to avert catastrophe is to 'destroy the highway', or alternatively block the road, which is representative in my mind of destroying the meteor or redirecting its course.  Bran will not survive the conflagration.  I'm not sure why it's necessary for the Wall to come down in Jon's context, however.  Perhaps @LynnS or @Black Crow have some ideas surrounding why that may be necessary and salutary, although counterintuitive?

I believe that the Wall is first and foremost an analog to the Ice Moon, if such a thing exists, or to the moon, period, if there was only ever one. The destruction of the Wall should mirror the destruction of the ice moon - not the total destruction, but the breaking of its ice at least. It needs to come down because the enchantment of the ice moon must be broken, and on earth, the Others must be dealt with. 

Also, given that Jon represents the black meteor planted in the ice moon, the ice moon is kind of like his egg. If he is to "hatch" - i.e. be resurrected - his egg must crack open. We saw his blue rose in a chink in the Wall, suggesting a crack or weak spot vulnerable to cracking, and we see his rivers of black ice turning to red fire (a symbol of Jon) in the cracks in the Wall. Jon sees himself in the reflection of the ice cells, when he's under the Wall it feels like a tomb, and on and on with all the other foreshadowing of Jon being inside the Wall and inside the ice. 

My favorite Jon foreshadowing of the ice moon breaking that was promised is the chapter where he dreams of the white wolf running through the black wood with a moon that promises snow in a raven's voice. When he wakes, the real raven has landed on his chest, directly implying the snow meteor apocalypse that the raven was just promising. Then Jon hurls his feather pillow at the raven, but hits the "wall" of the room instead, bursting the white pillow and filling the air with a "flurry" of feathers. This all happens when he wakes from his dream, so it may be that his resurrection will coincide with some celestial fireworks. 

On 12/26/2016 at 2:59 PM, ravenous reader said:

If God is an architect who created the 'bridge', then the 'Azor Ahai/Lucifer/Last Hero' hero/anti-hero figures who dare to follow in his footsteps, constructing their own bridges to the stars are architects in his reflection, like Bran the Builder who 'learnt the song of stones' (the tale GRRM tongue-in-cheek proclaims 'not worth repeating'); and perhaps space engineers too, like our Bran.  In fact, now I come to think of it, the weirwood throne is a kind of cockpit in so many ways!

In 'The Northern Lights' or 'The Golden Compass' (its US title) the final chapter is entitled 'The Bridge to the Stars' and involves the heroine following after the anti-hero/villain through a superhighway tunnel to space, created by sacrifice and sacrilege.  It requires breaking through the Northern Lights, just as I have interpreted Bran having to break through the curtain of light at the end of the world:

That's really cool and and I enjoyed all of your bridge in space analysis. You really have to read my Tyrion Targaryen essay, I talked a lot about these very scenes and symbols! Some of the stuff I have in there might jog something loose for you as you ponder these connections. 

All of these journeys into no-man's land - the LH or the NW ranging into the cold dead lands, going under the sea or into the black sea of space - they all represent journeying into the underworld, into the death realm, beyond the realm of mortal man, however you want to say it. All of these characters are journeying beyond the grave to defeat the grave, in a sense. t's the wheel of the seasons got stuck, and to unstick it, someone has to go beyond death's door and make a deal with the devil. What it appears to be is a story about someone who first broke the cycle, then had to fix it - or possibly his son had to fix it. There's even a chance the son is the sinner and it is dad who had to fix it up, kind of like the 79 sentinels story, or Bael the Bard being unable to slay his son and sacrificing himself so his son might live. Either way, the cause and the solution are the same (albeit there is some transformation in between), which is what I have been saying about LB for a while. The morningstar and evenstar are the same star, just in different configurations.