Winterfell Dragon

[ravenous reader]

4 hours ago, Lost Melnibonean said:

Jon is the dragon that will be woken from stone. Here we see a dragon waking from the stone of Winterfell, like when Daemon saw a dragon bursting from an egg in the pale white castle of Whaitewalls, which turned out to be Aegon. 

Or, the dragon glimpsed issuing forth out of Greyjoy and Bolton assault -- i.e. 'born amidst salt and smoke' respectively --could also represent Bran himself.  Foreshadowing of Bran skinchanging a dragon, perhaps.  It's notable that at the time Summer sees the dragon, Bran is the one who is being liberated from Winterfell's confines -- or in other words, symbolically 'hatched' from Winterfell.  The shattered building from which Bran makes his exit is even compared to an eggshell on several occasions.  This is not by accident.

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A Dance with Dragons - The Turncloak

The snow was coming down heavier than ever when they left the hall, with Lady Dustin wrapped in sable. Huddled in their hooded cloaks, the guards outside were almost indistinguishable from the snowmen. Only their breath fogging the air gave proof that they still lived. Fires burned along the battlements, a vain attempt to drive the gloom away. Their small party found themselves slogging through a smooth, unbroken expanse of white that came halfway up their calves. The tents in the yard were half-buried, sagging under the weight of the accumulation.

The entrance to the crypts was in the oldest section of the castle, near the foot of the First Keep, which had sat unused for hundreds of years. Ramsay had put it to the torch when he sacked Winterfell, and much of what had not burned had collapsed. Only a shell remained, one side open to the elements and filling up with snow. Rubble was strewn all about it: great chunks of shattered masonry, burned beams, broken gargoyles. The falling snow had covered almost all of it, but part of one gargoyle still poked above the drift, its grotesque face snarling sightless at the sky.

This is where they found Bran when he fell. Theon had been out hunting that day, riding with Lord Eddard and King Robert, with no hint of the dire news that awaited them back at the castle. He remembered Robb's face when they told him. No one had expected the broken boy to live. The gods could not kill Bran, no more than I could. It was a strange thought, and stranger still to remember that Bran might still be alive.

Like a dragon, Bran is someone assumed to be dead and gone, never to return again.  Significantly, the spot where Bran fell is also the selfsame spot where, against all odds, Bran emerged from the crypts to pursue his greenseer journey -- rebirth imagery.

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A Clash of Kings - Bran VII

The sky was a pale grey, and smoke eddied all around them. They stood in the shadow of the First Keep, or what remained of it. One whole side of the building had torn loose and fallen away. Stone and shattered gargoyles lay strewn across the yard. They fell just where I did, Bran thought when he saw them. Some of the gargoyles had broken into so many pieces it made him wonder how he was alive at all. Nearby some crows were pecking at a body crushed beneath the tumbled stone, but he lay facedown and Bran could not say who he was.

The First Keep had not been used for many hundreds of years, but now it was more of a shell than ever. The floors had burned inside it, and all the beams. Where the wall had fallen away, they could see right into the rooms, even into the privy. Yet behind, the broken tower still stood, no more burned than before. Jojen Reed was coughing from the smoke. "Take me home!" Rickon demanded. "I want to be home!" Hodor stomped in a circle. "Hodor," he whimpered in a small voice. They stood huddled together with ruin and death all around them.

"We made noise enough to wake a dragon," Osha said

Recently @LynnS and @hiemal made the point that the image of Bran after his fall, as manifested in the coma dream, all leathery skin and bones, evokes a bat.  My response was that this could just as well suggest a skinchanger ('skinny...skin stretched taut over bones') skinchanging a dragon.

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A Game of Thrones - Bran III

There are different kinds of wings, the crow said.

Bran was staring at his arms, his legs. He was so skinny, just skin stretched taut over bones. Had he always been so thin? He tried to remember. A face swam up at him out of the grey mist, shining with light, golden. "The things I do for love," it said.

Bran screamed.

Elsewhere, supporting this line of thought, bats are compared to dragons.  For example, Viserion, the one possibly destined to being wighted, is likened to a bat (as @Darry Man has highlighted with the 'hoar(frost)/whore' pun, a 'hoary' white dragon is most likely to be an 'ice dragon'):

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A Dance with Dragons - The Dragontamer

"I thought there were two," the big man said.

Viserion. Yes. Where is Viserion? The prince lowered his torch to throw some light into the gloom below. He could see the green dragon ripping at the smoking carcass of the sheep, his long tail lashing from side to side as he ate. A thick iron collar was visible about his neck, with three feet of broken chain dangling from it. Shattered links were strewn across the floor of the pit amongst the blackened bones—twists of metal, partly melted. Rhaegal was chained to the wall and floor the last time I was here, the prince recalled, but Viserion hung from the ceiling. Quentyn stepped back, lifted the torch, craned his head back.

For a moment he saw only the blackened arches of the bricks above, scorched by dragonflame. A trickle of ash caught his eye, betraying movement. Something pale, half-hidden, stirring. He's made himself a cave, the prince realized. A burrow in the brick. The foundations of the Great Pyramid of Meereen were massive and thick to support the weight of the huge structure overhead; even the interior walls were three times thicker than any castle's curtain walls. But Viserion had dug himself a hole in them with flame and claw, a hole big enough to sleep in.

A Dance with Dragons - The Dragontamer

"More meat," Quentyn said. Once the beasts were fed they will become sluggish. He had seen it work with snakes in Dorne, but here, with these monsters … "Bring … bring …"

Viserion launched himself from the ceiling, pale leather wings unfolding, spreading wide. The broken chain dangling from his neck swung wildly. His flame lit the pit, pale gold shot through with red and orange, and the stale air exploded in a cloud of hot ash and sulfur as the white wings beat and beat again.

The 'dragon in the cave' should remind us of the greenseers 'nesting' in the hollow hill.  In fact, 'dragon' is code for 'greenseer', if one extends the symbolism.

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A Dance with Dragons - Bran III

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.

Who else hangs upside down, just like Viserion and the 'gigantic bats' in the cave..?

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A Game of Thrones - Bran II

"All this talk is getting very tiresome, sister," the man said. "Come here and be quiet."

Bran sat astride the gargoyle, tightened his legs around it, and swung himself around, upside down. He hung by his legs and slowly stretched his head down toward the window. The world looked strange upside down. A courtyard swam dizzily below him, its stones still wet with melted snow.

Bran looked in the window.

Bran has already had experience skinchanging a 'giant' of sorts -- first Hodor, then the weirwood, from which the next step would be a dragon, and then onto...well, 'the sky's the limit,' isn't it? 

23 hours ago, Ckram said:

According to a SSM, in november 2001, Martin was asked if this sight was "a dragon, a vision of a dragon, or something else entirely, say Summer's misinterpretation of the comet in the sky". GRRM answered: "No comment. I like it to my readers to make sense of signs and portents."

"Signs and Portents" is the book of visions written down by Daenys Targaryen (the maiden who predicted the doom of Valyria), which existence and status (thought to be lost) we first heard of in AFFC - The Kraken's Daughter.

In november 2001, Martin was already working on AFFC.

Just saying.

Ha ha.  Typical.  The more I engage with the slippery underbelly of his work, the more convinced I am that GRRM is unwilling to give a straight answer to any direct question.  He hates tying up loose ends and therefore won't clarify the boundary between the literal and the metaphorical in any given scenario to our satisfaction (the 'Winterfell dragon' apparition being a case in point), thus ensuring our eternal fascination.  I also believe he will never conclude the series for the same reason.

[Lady Dacey]

12 hours ago, ravenous reader said:

  I also believe he will never conclude the series for the same reason.

I was enjoying this thread so much until I was reminded of this :'( 

[LynnS]

13 hours ago, ravenous reader said:

Like a dragon, Bran is someone assumed to be dead and gone, never to return again.  Significantly, the spot where Bran fell is also the selfsame spot where, against all odds, Bran emerged from the crypts to pursue his greenseer journey -- rebirth imagery.

There is also the imagery of opening the third eye like an egg - compare Mormont's Raven breaking into an egg and pulling out bits of yolk and the 3EC pulling out bits of tissue from Bran's forehead.   I still question whether the dragon with three heads is Bloodraven and his three eggs are represented by Bran, Jon and Arya. 

[Rondo]

A dragon isn't really a winged snake.  Dragons do not look like winged snakes.  They look like a Tyranosaurus Rex with wings and a hotter breath than red hot chili peppers. 

The wolf saw smoke, nothing more than that.

[Lost Melnibonean]

50 minutes ago, Tourbillon Mechanism said:

A dragon isn't really a winged snake.  Dragons do not look like winged snakes.  They look like a Tyranosaurus Rex with wings and a hotter breath than red hot chili peppers. 

The wolf saw smoke, nothing more than that.

The dragons are referred to as snakes in the text more than once, and they are mostly neck, tail, and wings. 

[Damsel in Distress]

4 hours ago, Tourbillon Mechanism said:

A dragon isn't really a winged snake.  Dragons do not look like winged snakes.  They look like a Tyranosaurus Rex with wings and a hotter breath than red hot chili peppers. 

The wolf saw smoke, nothing more than that.

 

3 hours ago, Lost Melnibonean said:

The dragons are referred to as snakes in the text more than once, and they are mostly neck, tail, and wings. 

What Summer saw would be put into the context of the animal world.  Smoke rises because it is lighter than air but a wolf would not know that.  So the description that it is flying upwards is consistent with how it looks in the mind of a canine.