Garth of the Gallows (Mythical Astronomy of Ice and Fire)

[LmL]

8 minutes ago, Durran Durrandon said:

Oooh, new crackpot. The Seastone Chair is actually the petrified roots of one of the inverted Weirwood trees we see outside of the House of the Undying.. Euron is drinking the Shade of the Evening, made from their blue leaves, to activate its power.

Holy cap is that potent tinfoilery! Wow! It's just perfect because it kind of winks at book canon while sailing straight on into crazy town. Delicious! I bet you can sell @ravenous reader on it, she loves this kind of thinking. =P

[Durran Durrandon]

1 minute ago, LmL said:

Holy cap is that potent tinfoilery! Wow! It's just perfect because it kind of winks at book canon while sailing straight on into crazy town. Delicious! I bet you can sell @ravenous reader on it, she loves this kind of thinking. =P

It's certainly a deviation from my staple crackpot: the Seastone Chair is the fallen space stone of the Bloodstone Emperor.

[LmL]

3 minutes ago, Durran Durrandon said:

It's certainly a deviation from my staple crackpot: the Seastone Chair is the fallen space stone of the Bloodstone Emperor.

Well that is not crackpot in the slightest. that's by far the object which is the most likely to turn out to be a meteorite, with the exception of Dawn.

[Durran Durrandon]

9 minutes ago, LmL said:

Well that is not crackpot in the slightest. that's by far the object which is the most likely to turn out to be a meteorite, with the exception of Dawn.

I know. I call it crackpot, because I can't back it up.

[LmL]

My general thinking on the  oily and greasy black stone is that it is burned, poisoned, or otherwise transformed by a falling black meteor. In either scenario, it figures that this early Blackstone probably has some magical effects or magical potential. So whether or not the seastone chair is a meteorite proper or not, I do think it could be used for magic, and if anyone were to do so, the likely candidate would be Euron.

[Durran Durrandon]

Just now, LmL said:

My general thinking on the  oily and greasy black stone is that it is burned, poisoned, or otherwise transformed by a falling black meteor. In either scenario, it figures that this early Blackstone probably has some magical effects or magical potential. So whether or not the seastone chair is a meteorite proper or not, I do think it could be used for magic, and if anyone were to do so, the likely candidate would be Euron.

I a not sure that it is ever described as oily or greasy outside of TWOIAF in a section where glassy black stone and oily black stone are being conflated, so I don't feel that it is confirmed which of these it is, if either.

 

[LmL]

4 minutes ago, Durran Durrandon said:

I a not sure that it is ever described as oily or greasy outside of TWOIAF in a section where glassy black stone and oily black stone are being conflated, so I don't feel that it is confirmed which of these it is, if either.

 

 yes, it is, the very first time we ever see it in a Clash of Kings. An oily black stone carved in the shape of a kraken.

[Unchained]

23 minutes ago, Durran Durrandon said:

It's certainly a deviation from my staple crackpot: the Seastone Chair is the fallen space stone of the Bloodstone Emperor.

@Darry Man actually has a very detailed thread mostly about those black trees.  I just finished it.  Not a ton of conclusions, but a large amount of connections concerning potential lines of symbolism around the black trees, ironwoods, ebony, silver, and of all things Persimmons.  I am not sure what to make of most of it right now, but I could see a lot of it being important as we go forward.     

 

 

[Durran Durrandon]

6 minutes ago, Unchained said:

@Darry Man actually has a very detailed thread mostly about those black trees.  I just finished it.  Not a ton of conclusions, but a large amount of connections concerning potential lines of symbolism around the black trees, ironwoods, ebony, silver, and of all things Persimmons.  I am not sure what to make of most of it right now, but I could see a lot of it being important as we go forward.     

 

 

Cool, and thank for the catch fro Clash.

[Darry Man]

1 hour ago, Durran Durrandon said:

Oooh, new crackpot. The Seastone Chair is actually the petrified roots of one of the inverted Weirwood trees we see outside of the House of the Undying.. Euron is drinking the Shade of the Evening, made from their blue leaves, to activate its power.

I'm sold. 

[Pain killer Jane]

14 hours ago, Durran Durrandon said:

Oooh, new crackpot. The Seastone Chair is actually the petrified roots of one of the inverted Weirwood trees we see outside of the House of the Undying.. Euron is drinking the Shade of the Evening, made from their blue leaves, to activate its power.

Lol that sounds like something I throw out. Nah if he he believed the chair to be the roots of a weirwood then he would take all that holy blood his brother has and pour it on the chair. 

17 hours ago, LmL said:

Thanks a lot, I knew I was fouling those up. It's tedious to figure out pronunciation and sometimes I get last. The proper pronunciation is better for ASOIAF too - it sounds like a combination of Duran and Baratheon kinda.

Glad you're enjoying the most recent podcasts, and thanks for saying so and for helping with the pronunciation

Oh and I love your idea about the roots and the Kraken! That makes a ton of sense. There is a line somewhere in the third or fourth book I think about some trees which have been overturned, and now their roots are sticking up out of the river and reaching for the sky - I'll have to try to look for that quote and post it a bit later. It also fits with the idea of the great king being a former green person who became transformed and more aligned with winter and death as they came to sit underneath the trees. It fits with the nidhogg dragon underneath the roots. @Blue Tiger, @ravenous reader, @Pain killer Jane, what do you think?

I like this a lot. It explains House Rowan's sigil beyond the story of Rowen Gold-tree. 

Kudos @Darry Man

Also @ravenous reader that is a fantastic find. Visually amazing with the understanding that it is a kraken. 

 

[LmL]

26 minutes ago, Pain killer Jane said:

Lol that sounds like something I throw out. Nah if he he believed the chair to be the roots of a weirwood then he would take all that holy blood his brother has and pour it on the chair. 

I like this a lot. It explains House Rowan's sigil beyond the story of Rowen Gold-tree. 

Hey PKJ, any chance you'd like to explain what you mean? I mean really - are you trying to be amusing? Just because we tease you about never explaining yourself doesn't mean you have to do that every time just to maintain your rep. 

26 minutes ago, Pain killer Jane said:

Kudos @Darry Man

Also @ravenous reader that is a fantastic find. Visually amazing with the understanding that it is a kraken. 

 

Hey I get partial credit! I lazily suggested such a quote existed, that counts for something. Ha!

Kidding aside that is what makes the forums great, collaboration. Smarter together!

[ravenous reader]

15 minutes ago, LmL said:

 Hey I get partial credit! I lazily suggested such a quote existed, that counts for something. Ha!

Kidding aside that is what makes the forums great, collaboration. Smarter together!

Yes dragonous one, I was going to say it was your idea (until you hastily beat me to it).  The image sparked in your mind and then I scurried off to the bottom of the see to retrieve it for you.  Think of me as the devil's secretary (an irreverent one who gives you a hard time at times, but then that would be the devil's hiring criteria...)!  

 

ETA:  Actually, I prefer to think of myself as a 'muse' rather than a secretary -- but then again, maybe one and/or both of us has delusions of grandeur!  

 

[LmL]

38 minutes ago, ravenous reader said:

Yes dragonous one, I was going to say it was your idea (until you hastily beat me to it).  The image sparked in your mind and then I scurried off to the bottom of the see to retrieve it for you.  Think of me as the devil's secretary (an irreverent one who gives you a hard time at times, but then that would be the devil's hiring criteria...)!  

 

ETA:  Actually, I prefer to think of myself as a 'muse' rather than a secretary -- but then again, maybe one and/or both of us has delusions of grandeur!  

 

No you are more muse than secretary; it just so happens that your attention to detail and knowledge of the books comes in handy. I actually was not being lazy, I was just on the go and wasn't able to pull it, so we'll call it teamwork. 

As to the idea itself, it makes a ton of sense. Of course the roots and branches of the tree are like mirror images of one another: https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/226/469135712_6d9ff46cf0_b.jpg

So now we are being shown a literal inversion with the trees, and Warlock trees are inverted in color to weirwoods. This should be easy to figure out! lolol

Seriously though, maybe we should re-center the discussion on the Warlock trees. Euron is like a weird alt-Bloodraven, but he's obviously tied to warlock trees instead of weirwoods. He's got the kraken face in Aeron's nightmare in the new TWOW chapter, and he's a seeming Bloodstone Emperor parallel. He's got the ten long arms Moqorro sees - he's definitely the kraken. Then we have the faceless man with a drowned crow with seaweed image - the faceless men have infinite parallels with the greenseers and weirwoods, and a drowned crow is a crow under the see, chomping down seeweed. 

So, what is the meaning of the black wood as a symbol? That is the question I have. Because it's not just the warlock trees - we have Ironwoods used in symbolically interesting ways, ebony doors to oppose the weirwood ones on the HOBAW, and House Blackwood itself, with their dead weirwood and connection to greenseers. Lightning blackens wood, as does fire, and the weirwoods look to on fire. I have begun to think about them as pictures of burning trees frozen in time, like Moses' burning bush. But if that fire went out, if time was unfrozen, they'd end up black trees. 

In a loose sense, I think of the black wood as representing dead or corrupted greenseers, but's that's pretty vague. I guess my point is that the seastone chair is black, Euron's dream arms and face tentacles are black. They represent the roots of a magical tree that pulls things down.. but is this kraken = roots thing meant to be applied to all the trees? Just the black ones? It makes sense for the weirwoods too, so I would think both. 

Oh, the kraken-summoning horn makes more sense now too. The horn summons dragons, actually, but you need a kraken to pull down the moon to get them. Or you might say that the horn brings down moons, and kraken tentacles bring down moons. Or perhaps the sequence is important - the horn is first, bringing down the moon. The kraken tentacles are more like the smoke clouds reaching up to blot out the sun and stars. When those columns of smoke are named as ash, they represent the column of ash / Yggdrasil image. But when they are dark, coiling, twisted, snake-like pillars of darksmoke, that's more like those kraken tentacles. 

The burnt sea dragon ships / dead leviathans can be like kraken tentacles too:

Quote

 

They are children, Sansa thought. They are silly little girls, even Elinor. They've never seen a battle, they've never seen a man die, they know nothing. Their dreams were full of songs and stories, the way hers had been before Joffrey cut her father's head off. Sansa pitied them. Sansa envied them.

Margaery was different, though. Sweet and gentle, yet there was a little of her grandmother in her, too. The day before last she'd taken Sansa hawking. It was the first time she had been outside the city since the battle. The dead had been burned or buried, but the Mud Gate was scarred and splintered where Lord Stannis's rams had battered it, and the hulls of smashed ships could be seen along both sides of the Blackwater, charred masts poking from the shallows like gaunt black fingers. The only traffic was the flat-bottomed ferry that took them across the river, and when they reached the kingswood they found a wilderness of ash and charcoal and dead trees. But the waterfowl teemed in the marshes along the bay, and Sansa's merlin brought down three ducks while Margaery's peregrine took a heron in full flight.

 

Tyrion, in dream form, seeing the same scene:

Quote

The sun was a hot white penny, shining down upon the grey river as it rushed around the charred bones of sunken ships. From the pyres of the dead rose black columns of smoke and white-hot ashes. My work, thought Tyrion Lannister. They died at my command.

And along the Rhoyne, where Garin's folk live beneath the water, we have something similar, and oh look, here is some mocking talk and curses and mists and things for @ravenous reader:

Quote

 

"This is no common fog, Hugor Hill," Ysilla insisted. "It stinks of sorcery, as you would know if you had a nose to smell it. Many a voyager has been lost here, poleboats and pirates and great river galleys too. They wander forlorn through the mists, searching for a sun they cannot find until madness or hunger claim their lives. There are restless spirits in the air here and tormented souls below the water."

"There's one now," said Tyrion. Off to starboard a hand large enough to crush the boat was reaching up from the murky depths. Only the tops of two fingers broke the river's surface, but as the Shy Maid eased on past he could see the rest of the hand rippling below the water and a pale face looking up. Though his tone was light, he was uneasy. This was a bad place, rank with despair and death. Ysilla is not wrong. This fog is not natural. Something foul grew in the waters here, and festered in the air. Small wonder the stone men go mad.

"You should not make mock," warned Ysilla. "The whispering dead hate the warm and quick and ever seek for more damned souls to join them."

 

Can't help but notice that creepy two-finger thing that Quaithe and Jaquen and whoever else does. Two of cat's fingers won't bend all the way, so she has it too. Anyway. This feels like the same theme. 

[Pain killer Jane]

4 hours ago, LmL said:

Hey PKJ, any chance you'd like to explain what you mean? I mean really - are you trying to be amusing? Just because we tease you about never explaining yourself doesn't mean you have to do that every time just to maintain your rep. 

Hey I get partial credit! I lazily suggested such a quote existed, that counts for something. Ha!

Kidding aside that is what makes the forums great, collaboration. Smarter together!

Yup yes you do. Sorry.

Look at the sigil of House Rowen. I noticed that it is one of the few tree sigils with both leaves and roots. The other one is House Appleton. The tree is completely golden even the acorns and with the golden branches it belongs to the branch/antler crowns. But now in light of arms of the kraken, it seems to allude to Viserys and Drogo. You expounded upon the roots of weirwood a being a trap so why wouldn't golden roots be a trap as well. We know that Illaryio was setting a trap for both Viserys and Dany but instead of becoming villains, Viserys was given a golden crown.

[Jon Ice-Eyes]

I have some thoughts on the black/corrupted weirwoods vs. white/benevolent weirwoods. It all relates to stuff in my thread, The Duality of Fire. I just suck shit at tagging and linking. Take a look! Please!

[Darry Man]

4 hours ago, Pain killer Jane said:

I like this a lot. It explains House Rowan's sigil beyond the story of Rowen Gold-tree. 

Oh yeah. Nice catch.

[Darry Man]

3 hours ago, LmL said:

Kidding aside that is what makes the forums great, collaboration. Smarter together!

Absolutely. I should've started doing this a few years ago already.

[Darry Man]

2 hours ago, LmL said:

So, what is the meaning of the black wood as a symbol? That is the question I have. Because it's not just the warlock trees - we have Ironwoods used in symbolically interesting ways, ebony doors to oppose the weirwood ones on the HOBAW, and House Blackwood itself, with their dead weirwood and connection to greenseers. Lightning blackens wood, as does fire, and the weirwoods look to on fire. I have begun to think about them as pictures of burning trees frozen in time, like Moses' burning bush. But if that fire went out, if time was unfrozen, they'd end up black trees. 

In a loose sense, I think of the black wood as representing dead or corrupted greenseers, but's that's pretty vague. I guess my point is that the seastone chair is black, Euron's dream arms and face tentacles are black. They represent the roots of a magical tree that pulls things down.. but is this kraken = roots thing meant to be applied to all the trees? Just the black ones? It makes sense for the weirwoods too, so I would think both. 

This is the thought I was developing with my ebony/persimmon hypothesis. I really wanted to capture the relationship between those two black-tree symbols and concluded that they were one and the same. However, I wanted to explore the purposes of the black trees in the story on a different thread through a separate examination of the text and researching this forum.

I speculated that shadowbinders were an opposite or alternate version of greenseers, featuring pitch-black skin to mark them, but that they were simply sorcerers who took a different path than greenseers somehow. So maybe they are corrupted greenseers, like a burnt weirwood. 

Think Neil Young's burning out versus fading away; shadowbinders versus greenseers.

[Pain killer Jane]

5 hours ago, LmL said:

Hey PKJ, any chance you'd like to explain what you mean? I mean really - are you trying to be amusing? Just because we tease you about never explaining yourself doesn't mean you have to do that every time just to maintain your rep.

I have more for you about Lord Rowan

1 hour ago, Darry Man said:

Oh yeah. Nice catch.

Thank you 

Look at what Renly says

Quote

"Do you think a few bolts of cloth will make you king?"

"Tyrell swords will make me king. Rowan and Tarly and Caron will make me king, with axe and mace and warhammer. Tarth arrows and Penrose lances, 

Tyrell brought the swords 

Tarth brought the arrows

Penrose brought the lances (spears) (@Ravenous Reader, this house is the embodiment of your Killing Word)

GRRM doesn't say this specifically but in terms of listing and equalvance than we have

Rowan brought the axe (to me this screams the Mormonts since House Rowan is descended from a woman that skinchanged a tree and it whispers the ash and iron wife of Aero Hotah. Ash being used to whitewash. Gilding an iron blade is being used as whitewash as well. So a gilded tree is like an ash tree)

Tarly brought the mace (a hunter green man with a mace/morningstar)

Caron brought the warhammer  (their House words are No song so sweet combined with the warhammer screams of song that brought down the Hammer of Waters)

And look at this 

Quote

The lords and ladies in the gallery were as engrossed in the melee as the men on the ground. Catelyn marked them well. Her father had oft treated with the southron lords, and not a few had been guests at Riverrun. She recognized Lord Mathis Rowan, stouter and more florid than ever, the golden tree of his House spread across his white doublet. Below him sat Lady Oakheart, tiny and delicate, and to her left Lord Randyll Tarly of Horn Hill, his greatsword Heartsbane propped up against the back of his seat. Others she knew only by their sigils, and some not at all.

In their midst, watching and laughing with his young queen by his side, sat a ghost in a golden crown.

This a great 3D image if we think about it. 

The lords and ladies are above like gods watching common men watch fighting. 

Lord Mathis Rowan is stouter (meaning fat) and florid (it means to have a red flush like say being drunk) 

If we take the description of his tree sigil to be representative of him than Lady Oakheart sitting below him is her sitting in his golden roots like a greenseer and to her left, like a husband, also sitting at Lord Rowan's golden roots is Randyll Tarly with his Valyrian steel blade, Heartsbane. Which is interesting because House Tarly is descended from green men that achieved immortality by wedding/bedding a woodswitch aka a female greenseer. And here he is sitting next to a woman who is an Oakheart. Very AA and NN right there. And while Heartsbane is sitting propped up against the back of the seat may make you think as it were stabbing him in the back, I interpret it to be representing the Iron Throne. And having it hidden behind him makes it a hidden dagger. 

Even though I know that Renly as king would never be seated beneath Lord Rowan, that isn't how the scene is relayed to us by Cat. Renly is only said to be in their midst. I take that to mean that he is among the other lords and ladies that are below Lord Rowan sitting at his golden roots. And he is a ghost with a golden crown like Viserys, who was given a golden crown and was 'less than a shadow of a snake'.