Heresy 194 Underworld

[ravenous reader]

5 minutes ago, PrettyPig said:

Not really....I meant that the NK - especially if a Stark (or another family that worshiped the Old Gods) - was influenced/persuaded by the corpse queen to give her his "seed"...meaning, somehow allow HER into the weirnet that he as a representative of this Old Gods family would be a 'guardian' of.     He is the personification of the weirwood - by giving her his seed, she became wedded to the trees in the way that Bran did when he ate the seed paste.    Obviously this was an abomination that could not be allowed.

Maybe the abomination involved is raising the dead.  The greenseer -- the Night's King here -- commits the abomination of animating a corpse by using the magical power of the weirwood.  If so, that means the Stark greenseers created the Others.

I do however believe that the gift of the 'seed' would entail both the weirwood seed as well as forfeiting his human capacity for procreation (both these connotations are symbolised when Bran falls from the tower, spilling his seed...the kernels of corn...to the ground).  Many shamen were castratees or infertile hermaphrodites and other intersex people, by tradition embodying the idea of sacrificing oneself in order to acquire power.  

[LynnS]

6 minutes ago, Brad Stark said:

The horn that wakes the sleepers, and the Giants woken by horn of winter.   Could these be either the dreamers BR refers to or the dead Kings of Winter?  We think of someone physically big as a giant,  but we also use the term for someone well known or accomplished,  couldn'ta powerful king or wizard be a giant, even if not large in stature?

I wonder if the weirwood itself is one giant organism with only it trees to hint at what lies beneath.  Something like the top of an iceburg with it's greatest mass hidden 'under the sea'..

[ravenous reader]

2 minutes ago, LynnS said:

I wonder if the weirwood itself is one giant organism with only it trees to hint at what lies beneath.  Something like the top of an iceburg with it's greatest mass hidden 'under the sea'..

I love the analogy!

[Black Crow]

43 minutes ago, Brad Stark said:

The horn that wakes the sleepers, and the Giants woken by horn of winter.   Could these be either the dreamers BR refers to or the dead Kings of Winter?  We think of someone physically big as a giant,  but we also use the term for someone well known or accomplished,  couldn'ta powerful king or wizard be a giant, even if not large in stature?

I think that there's some clarification here in that after Jon escapes to Castle Black and tells what he knows of what the Wildlings are up to, Maester Aemon speaks of the Horn of Winter with an air of knowing something about it. I think we can say that this is its correct title and that if there is a connection to Joruman it may be because he once blew it or otherwise had it; but the point is that its not a dragon-binding horn or any other of the theories aired; its the Horn of Winter and as such we can see immediate connections to both Winterfell and the Wall.

[Black Crow]

11 hours ago, LynnS said:

That's a interesting thought.  What if the White Walkers are not all male as we suppose them to be given the story about Craster's boys.  We know of 6 WWs from the Prologue of Thrones; but they aren't identified as male.  Only that they are twins of each other and they are shadows that reflect their surroundings.  Which lines up with 6 direwolves and 6 Cotf that Bran has met.  Also the Cotf are dappled like deer and wear clothing that could be described as (combat) camouflage.  At one time the NW traded with the CotF, so it may not be out of the question to think that the NK loved them or was perhaps even paired in a sense with one of them just as the current Stark kids might be paired with a WW, a direwolf and one of the CotF.

Oh very much so and given that we have the Mormont girls, Arya, Brienne and various other female characters dressing and acting as men this is something that occurred to me as well.

[Black Crow]

3 hours ago, LynnS said:

To clarify; I'm not talking about procreation in a literal sense.  I don't believe coitus was involved with the NK and his starry eyed lady especially if either or both of them wightified.  She's starting to sound like a WW to me and sacrificing his 'seed' sounds like a curse.  He may have been 'wed' in some sense to a weirwood and it doesn't appear that he was attached to it by the roots. Being wed to the godhood to use the Catholic parlance in other words.

It is perhaps worth pointing out that we need not be too literal. Giving her his seed may simply be doing a Craster and giving her his living sons, After all we're told later that he and his men were found to have been sacrificing to the Others.

[Kristerys Targaryen]

Is anyone else unsure that the Horn of Winter (Joramun's) will actually cause the wall to come down? The other Joramun tale we have is him working to defeat NK. Defeating the nights king and the desire to bring down the wall.. just don't seem like they would easily coexist in the same individual. It wouldn't be the first oft repeated westerosi tale that is misleading. Does the wall come down when the horn is blown, or does the horn need to be blown when the wall comes down? 

Not that I have a well thought out theory for what the hell The HoW *does* do, aside from waking old stark kings/lords by waking the sleepers.  That's my hunch anyway, though not a terribly original one I'm afraid. 

[Melifeather]

1 minute ago, Kristerys Targaryen said:

Is anyone else unsure that the Horn of Winter (Joramun's) will actually cause the wall to come down? The other Joramun tale we have is him working to defeat NK. Defeating the nights king and the desire to bring down the wall.. just don't seem like they would easily coexist in the same individual. It wouldn't be the first oft repeated westerosi tale that is misleading. Does the wall come down when the horn is blown, or does the horn need to be blown when the wall comes down? 

Not that I have a well thought out theory for what the hell The HoW *does* do, aside from waking old stark kings/lords by waking the sleepers.  My hunch is that 'waking the sleepers' refers to raising the lords & kings of Winterfell past from the crypts. 

I agree. It would be more useful to blow the Horn of Winter and bring back the dead Kings of Winter all at one time to fight against the Others. Maybe Jon's dream will come true?

[Brad Stark]

It makes sense to me that the horn would have the power to bring down the wall if the horn was what created the wall.  We were told Journamum used the horn to wake giants, and were told giants built the wall, so this isn't much of a stretch.  Otherwise the horn has to have 2 completely different purposes. 

[Matthew.]

I always thought we were supposed to interpret "woke giants in the earth" as a fancy way of saying that the Horn causes earthquakes; which is not to say that that's actually what the Horn does, just that that's what the in-world characters mean when they use that particular turn of phrase.

[LmL]

23 minutes ago, Matthew. said:

I always thought we were supposed to interpret "woke giants in the earth" as a fancy way of saying that the Horn causes earthquakes; which is not to say that that's actually what the Horn does, just that that's what the in-world characters mean when they use that particular turn of phrase.

Yes, for sure this is what we are supposed to understand as readers, at least as a baseline. In TWOIAF, it uses the same language - giants awoke in the earth - to describe the collapse of the arm of Dorne. No horns are mentioned, and they are clearly talking about earthquakes. 

 

[Black Crow]

7 hours ago, Kristerys Targaryen said:

Is anyone else unsure that the Horn of Winter (Joramun's) will actually cause the wall to come down? The other Joramun tale we have is him working to defeat NK. Defeating the nights king and the desire to bring down the wall.. just don't seem like they would easily coexist in the same individual. It wouldn't be the first oft repeated westerosi tale that is misleading. Does the wall come down when the horn is blown, or does the horn need to be blown when the wall comes down? 

Not that I have a well thought out theory for what the hell The HoW *does* do, aside from waking old stark kings/lords by waking the sleepers.  That's my hunch anyway, though not a terribly original one I'm afraid. 

Something to bear in mind here is Ygritte's assertion that the Wall is built of blood and the other hints we have that it was raised by magic and is evil.Hence the Heresy that it needs to come down. To return to Janet Clouston again:

Blood built it

Blood stopped the building of it

And Blood will bring it down

The Horn of Winter may have been used to build the Wall, Joruman stealing the Horn may have stopped the building of it, and now the Horn is needed to bring it down.

Don't ask me how...

 

Welcome to the forum - and to Heresy by the way 

[Brad Stark]

Earthquakes are also a good guess for the giants, both who built the wall and woken by the horn.  But I keep thinking this is connected to the horn that wakes the sleepers in the watch's oath.

This is GRRM,  so nothing is purely evil - very different from Tolkien.   At worst,  the wall (and the Others), were some sort of Faustian bargain.  The Wall was raised at great cost to protect the South side from White Walkers  (or to protect someone from something). 

[Brad Stark]

Defeating the nights king and the desire to bring down the Wall could easily coexist in the same individual.   It is possible the Nights King built the Wall, The Nights King could have really been the good guy, but was defeated and remembered as evil by history, or as Black Crow said,  the wall itself is evil.  

I think we all know a key part of this story has not been told to us yet.

[Matthew.]

9 hours ago, Black Crow said:

The Horn of Winter may have been used to build the Wall, Joruman stealing the Horn may have stopped the building of it, and now the Horn is needed to bring it down.

I suppose we'll have to wait and see whether or not it really is the case that the CotF created the white walkers, because I believe this could potentially re-contextualize things like the Wall, the early Watch, and even figures such as Joramun.

It's worth reiterating that, if we view a Westerosi map in Pact terms, the Haunted Forest is the most "untouched" of the deep forests that were supposed to belong to the CotF, and the forest's border is the Wall. With that in mind, if Joramun is a king beyond the Wall equivalent during the Age of Heroes, when the area beyond the Wall should rightly belong to the CotF, might we not infer that Joramun was representing the interests of the CotF?

As LmL points out, "woke sleeping giants in the earth" is the way the WB describes the breaking of the Arm of Dorne, so if Joramun had a horn that can cause a similar effect, whose magic is it utilizing, if not the magic of the CotF? Why would such a horn be known as the "Horn of Winter?"

If the Others were indeed created by the CotF, then I suspect that one possible purpose of the Horn would have been that it represents an implicit threat toward humanity: begin violating the Pact again, and the Horn will be sounded.

[Black Crow]

4 hours ago, Brad Stark said:

Earthquakes are also a good guess for the giants, both who built the wall and woken by the horn.  But I keep thinking this is connected to the horn that wakes the sleepers in the watch's oath.

This is GRRM,  so nothing is purely evil - very different from Tolkien.   At worst,  the wall (and the Others), were some sort of Faustian bargain.  The Wall was raised at great cost to protect the South side from White Walkers  (or to protect someone from something). 

There is a theory [not mine] which comes up from time to time that the Wall soaks up the Winter that would otherwise roll south over Westeros' green and pleasant land, ie; it is made not of ice but Ice and if you then accept the proposition that Ice is bad, then there's an awful lot of Bad concentrated in the Wall 

[Black Crow]

15 minutes ago, Matthew. said:

I suppose we'll have to wait and see whether or not it really is the case that the CotF created the white walkers, because I believe this could potentially re-contextualize things like the Wall, the early Watch, and even figures such as Joramun.

It's worth reiterating that, if we view a Westerosi map in Pact terms, the Haunted Forest is the most "untouched" of the deep forests that were supposed to belong to the CotF, and the forest's border is the Wall. With that in mind, if Joramun is a king beyond the Wall equivalent during the Age of Heroes, when the area beyond the Wall should rightly belong to the CotF, might we not infer that Joramun was representing the interests of the CotF?

 

Not necessarily. If the Haunted Forest belongs to the Children surely they should be more visible?

[Matthew.]

22 minutes ago, Black Crow said:

Not necessarily. If the Haunted Forest belongs to the Children surely they should be more visible?

This is what I'm suggesting, though--during Joramun's age they were more visible, more a part of the affairs of the Haunted Forest because that was the last section of land left to them. The reason they're not more visible now is because of 8,000 years of loss, combined with their low fertility. They can't afford to be visible.

The era of the NK may also represent important insight into why it became necessary for the CotF to become less visible. Why is the Stark of that era "Brandon the Breaker?" Was he Brandon the Pact Breaker? Did he later betray Joramun and steal the last trump card that the CotF held over humanity (the Horn), and take total control of the Watch?

I know you're not always receptive to the idea that the Horn is in the Crypts, but I think it's worth considering. Mance believes the tales of the Horn enough that he was willing to undertake his detour into the Frostfangs, even though it's not exactly a hospitable staging ground to prepare for their attack on the Wall.

At present, Mance is also displaying a keen interest in paying a visit to the Crypts. Having failed to find the Horn in the area where Joramun was supposedly buried, is he instead going to search the grave of the man that may have defeated Joramun?

[Brad Stark]

5 minutes ago, Matthew. said:

This is what I'm suggesting, though--during Joramun's age they were more visible, more a part of the affairs of the Haunted Forest because that was the last section of land left to them. The reason they're not more visible now is because of 8,000 years of loss, combined with their low fertility. They can't afford to be visible.

The era of the NK may also represent important insight into why it became necessary for the CotF to become less visible. Why is the Stark of that era "Brandon the Breaker?" Was he Brandon the Pact Breaker? Did he later betray Joramun and steal the last trump card that the CotF held over humanity (the Horn), and take total control of the Watch?

I know you're not always receptive to the idea that the Horn is the in Crypts, but I think it's worth considering. Mance believes the tales of the Horn enough that he was willing to undertake his detour into the Frostfangs, even though it's not exactly a hospitable staging ground to prepare for their attack on the Wall.

At present, Mance is also displaying a keen interest in paying a visit to the Crypts. Having failed to find the Horn in the area where Joramun was supposedly buried, is he instead going to search the grave of the man that may have defeated Joramun?

Why would Mance still want the horn?  

[Brad Stark]

The proximity of the Haunted Forest to the Wall and similar mention of giants breaking the arm is interesting.   Suppose we had a war between the Children and The First Men.   The Wall was raised by The Children with the same Earthquake/Giant/Hammer of waters that broke the arm of Dorne and flooded the neck, to protect the Children on the North side.  The Others were created as a weapon,  and all this use of magic brought about the Long Night.  Men won the war, or possibly the Last Hero really just sought out the children to surrender.  After the war, men staffed the wall, either to protect against Others, Children or wildlings living on the North side.