Heresy 200 The bicentennial edition

[PrettyPig]

1 hour ago, JNR said:

If it's valid, then the Starks and their crypts would already have been installed in Winterfell for several thousand years before Valyria emerged and warred with Ghis.

Also, I will add here that the Ghiscari Empire was only defeated after their FIFTH war with the Valyrians.   From the Wiki/TWOIAF:  "Exactly when the First Ghiscari War occurred is unclear, except that it was after the Long Night and the initial rise of Valyria."   Perhaps our current pack of wolves first fled to Westeros during one of the other four wars with the Valyrian Freehold, I don't know.  Just putting it out there.

[JNR]

2 hours ago, PrettyPig said:

I will add here that the Ghiscari Empire was only defeated after their FIFTH war with the Valyrians. 

And yet Dany was taught the Valyrian freehold was still fairly new to the world at that point:

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Old Ghis had fallen five thousand years ago, if she remembered true; its legions shattered by the might of young Valyria, its brick walls pulled down, its streets and buildings turned to ash and cinder by dragonflame, its very fields sown with salt, sulfur, and skulls.

The Starks, in the conventional timeline remembered by Catelyn, built the First Keep and crypts far earlier than that:

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The gods of Winterfell kept a different sort of wood. It was a dark, primal place, three acres of old forest untouched for ten thousand years as the gloomy castle rose around it.

But how accurate are such dates?  It's probably not something we'll ever learn in canon.  The best evidence for any timeline is still nothing like carbon dating in our world.  

At best, I think weirwood memories Bran accesses might establish that some events really happened, and really were incredibly ancient, and that they happened in a certain sequence.

[The Fattest Leech]

Yeah, the even the in-world timeline is all jacked up. We all know this scene:

A Feast for Crows - Samwell I, also, ADWD- Jon II

"Goat's milk might serve, until you do. It's better for a babe than cow's milk." Sam had read that somewhere. He shifted in his seat. "My lord, when I was looking through the annals I came on another boy commander. Four hundred years before the Conquest. Osric Stark was ten when he was chosen, but he served for sixty years. That's four, my lord. You're not even close to being the youngest ever chosen. You're fifth youngest, so far."

"The younger four all being sons, brothers, or bastards of the King in the North. Tell me something useful. Tell me of our enemy."

"The Others." Sam licked his lips. "They are mentioned in the annals, though not as often as I would have thought. The annals I've found and looked at, that is. There's more I haven't found, I know. Some of the older books are falling to pieces. The pages crumble when I try and turn them. And the really old books . . . either they have crumbled all away or they are buried somewhere that I haven't looked yet or . . . well, it could be that there are no such books, and never were. The oldest histories we have were written after the Andals came to Westeros. The First Men only left us runes on rocks, so everything we think we know about the Age of Heroes and the Dawn Age and the Long Night comes from accounts set down by septons thousands of years later. There are archmaesters at the Citadel who question all of it. Those old histories are full of kings who reigned for hundreds of years, and knights riding around a thousand years before there were knights. You know the tales, Brandon the Builder, Symeon Star-Eyes, Night's King . . . we say that you're the nine hundred and ninety-eighth Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, but the oldest list I've found shows six hundred seventy-four commanders, which suggests that it was written during . . ."

"Long ago," Jon broke in. "What about the Others?"

[JNR]

Oh, you wouldn't believe the back-and-forth about the list of LCs, for instance (or maybe you would, if you lurked in Heresy for a while).

Even this relatively innocuous line:

2 hours ago, The Fattest Leech said:

The First Men only left us runes on rocks, so everything we think we know about the Age of Heroes and the Dawn Age and the Long Night comes from accounts set down by septons thousands of years later.

If it was "thousands" of years later, that means Sam thinks multiple millennia went by between the Long Night and the coming of the Andals.

Well, that works fine for the traditional timeline, which says about two thousand years passed between those events.  It's not very convenient for the short timeline, or for a rearranged timeline.

On the other hand, just to play devil's advocate... 

It's easy to ask "How much of a timeline authority is Sam, anyway?  Why can't he be wrong?"

Because it's not like Sam has done any sort of scientific investigation.  He's just repeating what he's read, much as Catelyn is just remembering what she's been told about Winterfell, much as Dany is just remembering what she was taught about Valyria and Ghis.

I do think that certain tidbits are fairly self-evident.  For instance, the Andals would have had precious little combat advantage over the far more numerous, castle-equipped, terrain-knowledgeable First Men, unless it was really the case that they had far superior weapons: steel.  This tells me they really did bring steel to Westeros, as LC Jeor Mormont says.

[Black Crow]

While not wanting to delve into the particular intricacies of the timelines at this point, I do think its worth noting that GRRM is merely mirroring known problems with our own and reconciling say Egyptian and Biblical calendars and histories, and do indeed find kings supposedly ruling for hundreds of years through mistaken identity, fathers, sons and grandsons taking the same name and so on. Its a complete minefield which I won't trouble you with in detail, but suffice to say that I suspect a lot of GRRM's history doesn't matter and may never have been written to matter. As Jon says, it was long ago.

[JNR]

2 hours ago, Black Crow said:

I suspect a lot of GRRM's history doesn't matter and may never have been written to matter. As Jon says, it was long ago.

That's true, and in particular a lot of the World book history.  Ser Kermit and Ser Elmo, for instance.  I have my doubts. 

But I also suspect a lot of his recent history doesn't really matter either.    Example: Virtually everything to do with the Targs, post Aegon the Conqueror, as discussed so extensively in the fake-history novellas and the forthcoming book that's solely about Targs.  

I think GRRM just got personally interested in the Targs, more interested than in Dunk and Egg... but that stuff is not going to help us figure things out.  And if R+L turns out not to equal J, I'm not so sure it will continue to fascinate many of the fans, either.

Where I think you (Black Crow) and I are in alignment is in believing that the canonical myths are important clues to the various mysteries.   And the myths and the timeline bear only a loose relationship, obviously by GRRM's design.  

We see this visually demonstrated in Bran's weirwood visions.  They obviously go backwards in time, and there are certainly clues to be found, both subtle and plain -- but there's no way to quantify the amount of time that has passed from the first vision to the last.  We just have to understand, more broadly, that when GRRM says 

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The tree itself was shrinking, growing smaller with each vision, whilst the lesser trees dwindled into saplings and vanished, only to be replaced by other trees that would dwindle and vanish in their turn.

...the idea is that Bran is now going a long, long way back in time. Hundreds and thousands of years.  So far back in time that the heart tree itself is obviously shrinking, and Bran's POV is literally getting closer to the ground.

[Black Crow]

52 minutes ago, JNR said:

That's true, and in particular a lot of the World book history.  Ser Kermit and Ser Elmo, for instance.  I have my doubts. 

But I also suspect a lot of his recent history doesn't really matter either.    Example: Virtually everything to do with the Targs, post Aegon the Conqueror, as discussed so extensively in the fake-history novellas and the forthcoming book that's solely about Targs.  

Quite, the golden rule of writing mysteries is that it should be self-contained, ie; everything we need to know is in the core series. Anything we read in the D&E novels or even in the Ice Dragon is interesting and may or may not add to our understanding, but reading it is not a requirement and the answers will not be found there. A history of the Targaryens is nothing more than a spin-off, exploring an aspect of the story outside the core story.

[Melifeather]

Well I happen to disagree that the Targaryen histories bear no relevance. Au contraire, whatever happened to the Targaryens in the past will now happen to the Greyjoys. The outcomes may vary, but their historical events will replay. History is very important in the current and future story, because what happened before will happen again.

[LordBlakeney]

47 minutes ago, Feather Crystal said:

Well I happen to disagree that the Targaryen histories bear no relevance. Au contraire, whatever happened to the Targaryens in the past will now happen to the Greyjoys. The outcomes may vary, but their historical events will replay. History is very important in the current and future story, because what happened before will happen again.

I don't think the point being made is that Targaryen history, Dunk and Egg, the Worldbook, etc are unimportant; simply that any mysteries revealed to us in the core series will be answered in the core series. R+L=J won't be confirmed or denied by a Dunk and Egg novella; the answer will be presented in ASOIAF. These other books might contain hints and symbolic links to the main series, but you don't have to read The Silmarillion to get The Lord of the Rings.

[Black Crow]

1 hour ago, LordBlakeney said:

I don't think the point being made is that Targaryen history, Dunk and Egg, the Worldbook, etc are unimportant; simply that any mysteries revealed to us in the core series will be answered in the core series. R+L=J won't be confirmed or denied by a Dunk and Egg novella; the answer will be presented in ASOIAF. These other books might contain hints and symbolic links to the main series, but you don't have to read The Silmarillion to get The Lord of the Rings.

Exactly so.

I might even go so far as to suggest, that like most spin-offs these are looking at matters which although interesting in themselves are not relevant to the core story, and indeed the fact that the Targaryen history is to be dealt with in a different book suggests that they are not so central to the story as some readers believe. 

[Brad Stark]

3 hours ago, Black Crow said:

Quite, the golden rule of writing mysteries is that it should be self-contained, ie; everything we need to know is in the core series. Anything we read in the D&E novels or even in the Ice Dragon is interesting and may or may not add to our understanding, but reading it is not a requirement and the answers will not be found there. A history of the Targaryens is nothing more than a spin-off, exploring an aspect of the story outside the core story.

Everything needed will be in the full finished core series, assuming an optimistic life expectancy and writing speed for the author.  This does not imply important details in Winds of Winter or Dream of Spring won't also get hinted at in the spin offs.  I wouldn't expect major reveals, but if GRRM has been subtly foreshadowing something, he might do so in the spin offs too.  

I remember an interview with GRRM saying he hinted at a lot in the first book, and he wishes he could go back and make some of it less subtle and other things less obvious.  I don't know if that referred to events in Storm of Swords and Clash of Kings, or events in the series as a whole, but Dunk and Egg would be a great way to fix things he felt should be less subtle.  

[ravenous reader]

On 6/24/2017 at 11:40 AM, Frey family reunion said:

If this song of Ice and Fire and the prince that was promised is associated by Aemon and Rhaegar with "the dragon has three heads" (which I think may be a Targaryen or Valyrian idea) then this gives an interesting twist on the idea of waking dragons from stone.  Aemon and Rhaegar were trying to wake "the dragon" by translating runestones of the First Men.

That would be very ironic!

On 6/24/2017 at 2:19 PM, Frey family reunion said:

Considering that the Reeds swore an oath to the Stark kings which culminated in a vow to "ice and fire" it wouldn't surprise me if the runes on the Stark's crown has some connection to the Song of Ice and Fire, especially if that was a song passed down from the Children to the First Men.

If  the 'prince that was promised' is composed of more than one consciousness, then the stipulation that the prince that was promised would be born of the line of the Targaryens might just account for one of the consciousnesses making up the hybrid; and does not rule out other non-Targaryen consciousnesses being involved.  Should Bran, for example, succeed in skinchanging a dragon, he could very well be the promised prince.  In fact, Meera and Jojen frequently refer to him as their 'prince' after swearing an oath, or in other words, having 'promised' their allegiance to him:

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A Storm of Swords - Bran I

"The gods give many gifts, Bran. My sister is a hunter. It is given to her to run swiftly, and stand so still she seems to vanish. She has sharp ears, keen eyes, a steady hand with net and spear. She can breathe mud and fly through trees. I could not do these things, no more than you could. To me the gods gave the green dreams, and to you . . . you could be more than me, Bran. You are the winged wolf, and there is no saying how far and high you might fly . . . if you had someone to teach you. How can I help you master a gift I do not understand? We remember the First Men in the Neck, and the children of the forest who were their friends . . . but so much is forgotten, and so much we never knew."

Meera took Bran by the hand. "If we stay here, troubling no one, you'll be safe until the war ends. You will not learn, though, except what my brother can teach you, and you've heard what he says. If we leave this place to seek refuge at Last Hearth or beyond the Wall, we risk being taken. You are only a boy, I know, but you are our prince as well, our lord's son and our king's true heir. We have sworn you our faith by earth and water, bronze and iron, ice and fire. The risk is yours, Bran, as is the gift. The choice should be yours too, I think. We are your servants to command." She grinned. "At least in this."

 

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A Clash of Kings - Bran II

Bran had never asked to be a prince. 

 

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A Storm of Swords - Bran I

The ridge slanted sharply from the earth, a long fold of stone and soil shaped like a claw. Trees clung to its lower slopes, pines and hawthorn and ash, but higher up the ground was bare, the ridgeline stark against the cloudy sky.

He could feel the high stone calling him. Up he went, loping easy at first, then faster and higher, his strong legs eating up the incline. Birds burst from the branches overhead as he raced by, clawing and flapping their way into the sky. He could hear the wind sighing up amongst the leaves, the squirrels chittering to one another, even the sound a pinecone made as it tumbled to the forest floor. The smells were a song around him, a song that filled the good green world.

Gravel flew from beneath his paws as he gained the last few feet to stand upon the crest. The sun hung above the tall pines huge and red, and below him the trees and hills went on and on as far as he could see or smell. A kite was circling far above, dark against the pink sky.

Prince. The man-sound came into his head suddenly, yet he could feel the rightness of it. Prince of the green, prince of the wolfswood. He was strong and swift and fierce, and all that lived in the good green world went in fear of him.

 

 

Compare to this Dany paragraph:

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A Game of Thrones - Daenerys IX

"… wake the dragon …"

The door loomed before her, the red door, so close, so close, the hall was a blur around her, the cold receding behind. And now the stone was gone and she flew across the Dothraki sea, high and higher, the green rippling beneath, and all that lived and breathed fled in terror from the shadow of her wings. She could smell home, she could see it, there, just beyond that door, green fields and great stone houses and arms to keep her warm, there. She threw open the door.

 

 

Quote

 

Far below, at the base of the woods, something moved amongst the trees. A flash of grey, quick-glimpsed and gone again, but it was enough to make his ears prick up. Down there beside a swift green brook, another form slipped by, running. Wolves, he knew. His little cousins, chasing down some prey. Now the prince could see more of them, shadows on fleet grey paws. A pack.

He had a pack as well, once. Five they had been, and a sixth who stood aside. Somewhere down inside him were the sounds the men had given them to tell one from the other, but it was not by their sounds he knew them. He remembered their scents, his brothers and his sisters. They all had smelled alike, had smelled of pack, but each was different too.

His angry brother with the hot green eyes was near, the prince felt, though he had not seen him for many hunts. Yet with every sun that set he grew more distant, and he had been the last. The others were far scattered, like leaves blown by the wild wind.

Sometimes he could sense them, though, as if they were still with him, only hidden from his sight by a boulder or a stand of trees. He could not smell them, nor hear their howls by night, yet he felt their presence at his back . . . all but the sister they had lost. His tail drooped when he remembered her. Four now, not five. Four and one more, the white who has no voice.

These woods belonged to them, the snowy slopes and stony hills, the great green pines and the golden leaf oaks, the rushing streams and blue lakes fringed with fingers of white frost. But his sister had left the wilds, to walk in the halls of man-rock where other hunters ruled, and once within those halls it was hard to find the path back out. The wolf prince remembered.

 

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A Storm of Swords - Bran I

"And who is Summer?" Jojen prompted.

"My direwolf." He smiled. "Prince of the green."

"Bran the boy and Summer the wolf. You are two, then?"

"Two," he sighed, "and one." 

 

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A Dance with Dragons - Bran III

What was he now? Only Bran the broken boy, Brandon of House Stark, prince of a lost kingdom, lord of a burned castle, heir to ruins. He had thought the three-eyed crow would be a sorcerer, a wise old wizard who could fix his legs, but that was some stupid child's dream, he realized now. I am too old for such fancies, he told himself. A thousand eyes, a hundred skins, wisdom deep as the roots of ancient trees. That was as good as being a knight. Almost as good, anyway.

 

On 6/24/2017 at 9:24 AM, wolfmaid7 said:

 

Dany the Dragonlord and the dragonbond

Dany can and has melded her spirit with a dragon.The telepathy is also there.

Thanks for the link, wolfmaid -- nice thread!  

@Frey family reunion In wolfmaid's thread you said:

Quote

Posted March 18, 2013 

As for the warg/skinchanger debate, it's kind of like Kleenex, it's only one type of tissue paper, but through agressive marketing it is now a term that is used interchangeably with tissue paper.

As for the main debate, I've long thought that there is a connection with the magic that bonded the Valyrians with their dragons and the ability to skinchange. My guess is the magic requires a sacrifice of one with the blood of the First Man (or a common Essos ancestor of the First Men). I think Maegor's marriages ended not with executions but with sacrifices of "First Man" spouses (such as Jeyne Westerling) to bond new dragons with new riders.

Can you explain how you came to this reasoning?  It seems to be along the lines of what I suggested above that Rhaegar may have had in store for the wolfblooded one.  Should the sacrifice of 'first man' blood be required for the dragon hatching, perhaps it was actually Drogo or Rhaego via Drogo's blood that provided the magical 'skinchanging' ingredient, not Dany's Targaryen blood, as is commonly presumed!

[Black Crow]

And of course the Bible does tell us not to put our trust in princes...

But seriously, we do have a duality here with this business of waking dragons/princes from stone:

First and most obviously Danaerys does just that, so why the faithful tie themselves in knots trying to identify text which can be imaginitively interpreted as applying to Jon I don't know.

Secondly, however, if we accept Maester Aemon's proposition that dragons and princes are one and the same, then we have Bran; variously cited as a prince in Winterfell, the prince in the green and the wolf prince; who is also the winged wolf awoken from his chains of stone.

[Melifeather]

4 hours ago, Black Crow said:

And of course the Bible does tell us not to put our trust in princes...

But seriously, we do have a duality here with this business of waking dragons/princes from stone:

First and most obviously Danaerys does just that, so why the faithful tie themselves in knots trying to identify text which can be imaginitively interpreted as applying to Jon I don't know.

Secondly, however, if we accept Maester Aemon's proposition that dragons and princes are one and the same, then we have Bran; variously cited as a prince in Winterfell, the prince in the green and the wolf prince; who is also the winged wolf awoken from his chains of stone.

I would agree with all of this and add that the three heads of the dragon refer to three human sacrifices necessary to wake the dragon stones, and in Dany's instance she even has the "king" dying before the son.

[ravenous reader]

5 hours ago, Black Crow said:

And of course the Bible does tell us not to put our trust in princes...

But seriously, we do have a duality here with this business of waking dragons/princes from stone:

First and most obviously Danaerys does just that, so why the faithful tie themselves in knots trying to identify text which can be imaginitively interpreted as applying to Jon I don't know.

Secondly, however, if we accept Maester Aemon's proposition that dragons and princes are one and the same, then we have Bran; variously cited as a prince in Winterfell, the prince in the green and the wolf prince; who is also the winged wolf awoken from his chains of stone.

That's a good quote, which I forgot to include:

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A Clash of Kings - Bran IV

"My brother dreams as other boys do, and those dreams might mean anything," Meera said, "but the green dreams are different."

Jojen's eyes were the color of moss, and sometimes when he looked at you he seemed to be seeing something else. Like now. "I dreamed of a winged wolf bound to earth with grey stone chains," he said. "It was a green dream, so I knew it was true. A crow was trying to peck through the chains, but the stone was too hard and his beak could only chip at them."

"Did the crow have three eyes?"

Jojen nodded.

The crow chipping at the stone with its beak is very evocative of someone carving a runestone!

ETA: Crows use their beaks to break eggshells, and birds and dragons hatch from eggs (there's even the example of the raven at the Wall breaking into and eating an egg that way 'The raven was pecking at an egg, breaking the shell. Pushing his beak through the hole, he pulled out morsels of white and yoke.' AGOT -- Jon IX )  Famously, a crow used its beak to open Bran's third eye.  Symbolically, therefore, Bran has already been 'woken from stone.'

While I'm being whimsical, it occurs to me that knowing 'the song of stone' might come in handy if one wishes to 'wake dragons from stone'...

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The World of Ice and Fire - Ancient History: The Dawn Age

Their song and music was said to be as beautiful as they were, but what they sang of is not remembered save in small fragments handed down from ancient days. Maester Childer's Winter's Kings, or the Legends and Lineages of the Starks of Winterfell contains a part of a ballad alleged to tell of the time Brandon the Builder sought the aid of the children while raising the Wall. He was taken to a secret place to meet with them, but could not at first understand their speech, which was described as sounding like the song of stones in a brook, or the wind through leaves, or the rain upon the water. The manner in which Brandon learned to comprehend the speech of the children is a tale in itself, and not worth repeating here. But it seems clear that their speech originated, or drew inspiration from, the sounds they heard every day.

 

49 minutes ago, Feather Crystal said:

I would agree with all of this and add that the three heads of the dragon refer to three human sacrifices necessary to wake the dragon stones, and in Dany's instance she even has the "king" dying before the son.

No, I don't think Dany's instance qualifies for that part of the prophecy (is it part of the prophecy?).  Whichever 'instance' one uses, the son technically died before the father -- in the case of Rhaegar and Aerys; and Rhaego and Drogo, respectively.

In Bran's instance however, Ned died before Robb (both with kingsblood -- King of the North, King of Winter).

[JNR]

7 hours ago, Black Crow said:

First and most obviously Danaerys does just that, so why the faithful tie themselves in knots trying to identify text which can be imaginitively interpreted as applying to Jon I don't know.

Well, it stands to reason.  

Jon is the protagonist of the series, the meaning of its title, the Prince that Was Promised, Azor Ahai Reborn, the trueborn son of Rhaegar Targaryen, and therefore the heir to the Iron Throne.  In a book to be, he will also be revealed as Jon, the First of His Name, King of the Andals and the First Men and the Rhoynar and the Squishers and the Crannogmen, and Lord of the Seven Kingdoms.  No cushion shall he need for his throne. No jagged iron edge will dare gouge his holy arse.

And though it's not often acknowledged, he already, in so many minds, holds one of King Henry VIII's titles: Defender of the Faith.

7 hours ago, Black Crow said:

Secondly, however, if we accept Maester Aemon's proposition that dragons and princes are one and the same, then we have Bran; variously cited as a prince in Winterfell, the prince in the green and the wolf prince; who is also the winged wolf awoken from his chains of stone.

An interesting idea.  A slight rephrasing of an ADWD passage gives us:

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He chose one dragon, and then another, without success, but the third dragon looked at him with shrewd black eyes, tilted its head, and gave a quork, and quick as that he was not a boy looking at a dragon but a dragon looking at a boy.

 

[ravenous reader]

1 hour ago, JNR said:

An interesting idea.  A slight rephrasing of an ADWD passage gives us:

Quote

He chose one dragon, and then another, without success, but the third dragon looked at him with shrewd black eyes, tilted its head, and gave a quork, and quick as that he was not a boy looking at a dragon but a dragon looking at a boy.

The 'third (born) dragon' is Drogon.  The one who 'broke the world'.

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A Game of Thrones - Eddard V

Arya bit her lip. "What will Bran do when he's of age?"

Ned knelt beside her. "He has years to find that answer, Arya. [more years than Ned knows, LOL...] For now, it is enough to know that he will live." The night the bird had come from Winterfell, Eddard Stark had taken the girls to the castle godswood, an acre of elm and alder and black cottonwood overlooking the river. The heart tree there was a great oak, its ancient limbs overgrown with smokeberry vines; they knelt before it to offer their thanksgiving, as if it had been a weirwood. Sansa drifted to sleep as the moon rose, Arya several hours later, curling up in the grass under Ned's cloak. All through the dark hours he kept his vigil alone. When dawn broke over the city, the dark red blooms of dragon's breath surrounded the girls where they lay. "I dreamed of Bran," Sansa had whispered to him. "I saw him smiling."

"He was going to be a knight," Arya was saying now. "A knight of the Kingsguard. Can he still be a knight?"

 

[Melifeather]

5 hours ago, ravenous reader said:

That's a good quote, which I forgot to include:

The crow chipping at the stone with its beak is very evocative of someone carving a runestone!

ETA: Crows use their beaks to break eggshells, and birds and dragons hatch from eggs (there's even the example of the raven at the Wall breaking into and eating an egg that way 'The raven was pecking at an egg, breaking the shell. Pushing his beak through the hole, he pulled out morsels of white and yoke.' AGOT -- Jon IX )  Famously, a crow used its beak to open Bran's third eye.  Symbolically, therefore, Bran has already been 'woken from stone.'

While I'm being whimsical, it occurs to me that knowing 'the song of stone' might come in handy if one wishes to 'wake dragons from stone'...

 

No, I don't think Dany's instance qualifies for that part of the prophecy (is it part of the prophecy?).  Whichever 'instance' one uses, the son technically died before the father -- in the case of Rhaegar and Aerys; and Rhaego and Drogo, respectively.

In Bran's instance however, Ned died before Robb (both with kingsblood -- King of the North, King of Winter).

I agree I was a little hasty in asserting this. Technically Dany finished Drogo off with a pillow, but perhaps he was already dead - brain dead that is - by the time little Rhaego was taken? Or maybe Rhaego isn't dead yet?

[Black Crow]

2 hours ago, ravenous reader said:

The 'third (born) dragon' is Drogon.  The one who 'broke the world'.

 

Or it is indeed Jon and his role is to slay the princes of Ice [Bran] and Fire [Danaerys] thus breaking the cycle and bringing about the bittersweet ending

[Frey family reunion]

On 6/25/2017 at 3:30 PM, ravenous reader said:

That would be very ironic!

If  the 'prince that was promised' is composed of more than one consciousness, then the stipulation that the prince that was promised would be born of the line of the Targaryens might just account for one of the consciousnesses making up the hybrid; and does not rule out other non-Targaryen consciousnesses being involved.  Should Bran, for example, succeed in skinchanging a dragon, he could very well be the promised prince.  In fact, Meera and Jojen frequently refer to him as their 'prince' after swearing an oath, or in other words, having 'promised' their allegiance to him:

Compare to this Dany paragraph:

Thanks for the link, wolfmaid -- nice thread!  

Can you explain how you came to this reasoning?  It seems to be along the lines of what I suggested above that Rhaegar may have had in store for the wolfblooded one.  Should the sacrifice of 'first man' blood be required for the dragon hatching, perhaps it was actually Drogo or Rhaego via Drogo's blood that provided the magical 'skinchanging' ingredient, not Dany's Targaryen blood, as is commonly presumed!

As for your first thought, yes I think that's a possibility.  TPTWP may only have to be one part of the genetic soups to "wake the dragon".  But in the case of Bran, I'm not sure GRRM is going down that road, even though it's very possible.

It seems that Martin is setting up numerous parallels (or as Feather has pointed out, inversions).  We have weirwoods and those wedded to the weirwoods on one hand and dragons and those wedded to them on the other.  If Martin is planning on having some of his characters live a second life by being consumed by fire and their consciousnesses transferred into a dragon, he has already shown the parallel, of a character like Bloodraven being very slowly consumed by the Weirwood and we eventually assume that his consciousness will become part of the weirnet.  (Fire consumes, ice preserves).  Likewise, on the dragon side of the equation we have a Prince that was Promised, while on the weirnet side of the equation we may have Bran, the Prince of the green.  

As for the Prince (or Princess) that was promised, I think Dany definitely fits the bill, but my guess is Martin has at least one more trick up his sleeves and we'll find out that the real Aegon is actually alive and will perhaps become the main consciousness of one of the other dragons.  While it sounds a bit crackpot, we don't really have that many possibilities in the current story to choose from who is the right age.  My gut tells me (and yes this pun is intended) is that Samwell may be the "Dauphin"  or in this case the "Baleine", heh.  All credit (or blame) goes to Weasel Pie, (who I assume is probably serving another suspension from this forum), for coming up with this theory.  But if it's the case I think Martin may be playing a bit on a tale found in the Mabinogion, about a white dragon and red dragon who were changed into pigs (Sir Piggy) and trapped in a cauldron where where they fell into a mystical slumber.  They were then buried under an underground pond, where they would be found in another tale by a young Merlin.

As for your second question, let me get back with you on that one.  It's been four years ago, and I don't completely remember my reasoning on that one.  (Besides it may have been debunked a bit by the Worldbook).