The Peaceful People of Na'ath

[The Commentator]

We know Missandei came from this island.  So did her brothers.  The island natives are said to be peaceful.  Peace is a good thing but usually it is achieved because someone's desires are suppressed.  In other words, some on the island make the sacrifice and give up what they want in order to maintain this peace.  Giving up personal desires and wants in order to avoid conflict is a price.  Unless they are hive minded, which they are not.  They have their own free will.  This is a fantasy work of fiction where lasting peace can exist in a place like Na'ath.  Maybe the humans on that island are genetically different.  I am more interested in Essos than I am in Westeros.  Na'ath and its people are atypical from other cultures.  I am curious what you make of this island and the natives.  

1. Missandei's eyes are yellow gold in color.  Any significance?
2. They are peaceful and therefore exploited.  Would they be better off taking up the sword and protecting themselves?

[Corvo the Crow]

At one point before a battle she offers to sing to Danaerys. One of her brothers thaught her to climb to trees.

Tree climbing, golden eyed peaceful people who are short and love singing? Missandei secret daughter of leaf confirmed!!!

[Seams]

Good topic. I'm newly intrigued by Na'ath as well.

I think a key to understanding the purpose of this land is the butterflies, and I think the Na'ath butterflies are linked to House Mullendore's sigil. The Mullendore butterflies are probably monarch butterflies, so they have something to do with which king will have power, in my opinion.

That's as far as I've gotten trying to sort out the subtext.

[Sigella]

1. Yes, it points to kinship with the Children.

2. Would be better for those who get enslaved but it would probably turn Naath-life as ugly as everywhere else for the rest of the Naathi, so... Depends on what you'd value higher.

[Lollygag]

I'm not sure if I believe that Missendei is a FM though I see how people made the connection. That said, the CotF references made me think of this.              

ADWD Bran II

The world moved dizzily around him. White trees, black sky, red flames, everything was whirling, shifting, spinning. He felt himself stumbling. He could hear Hodor screaming, "Hodor hodor hodor hodor. Hodor hodor hodor hodor. Hodor hodor hodor hodor hodor." A cloud of ravens was pouring from the cave, and he saw a little girl with a torch in hand, darting this way and that. For a moment Bran thought it was his sister Arya … madly, for he knew his little sister was a thousand leagues away, or dead. And yet there she was, whirling, a scrawny thing, ragged, wild, her hair atangle. Tears filled Hodor's eyes and froze there.

Everything turned inside out and upside down, and Bran found himself back inside his own skin, half-buried in the snow. The burning wight loomed over him, etched tall against the trees in their snowy shrouds. It was one of the naked ones, Bran saw, in the instant before the nearest tree shook off the snow that covered it and dropped it all down upon his head.

The next he knew, he was lying on a bed of pine needles beneath a dark stone roof. The cave. I'm in the cave. His mouth still tasted of blood where he'd bitten his tongue, but a fire was burning to his right, the heat washing over his face, and he had never felt anything so good. Summer was there, sniffing round him, and Hodor, soaking wet. Meera cradled Jojen's head in her lap. And the Arya thing stood over them, clutching her torch.

"The snow," Bran said. "It fell on me. Buried me."

"Hid you. I pulled you out." Meera nodded at the girl. "It was her who saved us, though. The torch … fire kills them."

"Fire burns them. Fire is always hungry."

That was not Arya's voice, nor any child's. It was a woman's voice, high and sweet, with a strange music in it like none that he had ever heard and a sadness that he thought might break his heart. Bran squinted, to see her better. It was a girl, but smaller than Arya, her skin dappled like a doe's beneath a cloak of leaves. Her eyes were queer—large and liquid, gold and green, slitted like a cat's eyes. No one has eyes like that. Her hair was a tangle of brown and red and gold, autumn colors, with vines and twigs and withered flowers woven through it.

 

[Dorian Martell's son]

5 hours ago, Widowmaker 811 said:

We know Missandei came from this island.  So did her brothers.  The island natives are said to be peaceful.  Peace is a good thing but usually it is achieved because someone's desires are suppressed.

Not true at all. conflict/war usually arises out of lack or resources. 

5 hours ago, Widowmaker 811 said:

In other words, some on the island make the sacrifice and give up what they want in order to maintain this peace.  Giving up personal desires and wants in order to avoid conflict is a price.  

Naath is described as a tropical paradise. If the island provides enough resources for the naathi people there is no reason for war. And even in times of peace, there can be personal conflict, but that can be resolved without violence.  

5 hours ago, Widowmaker 811 said:

 Unless they are hive minded, which they are not.  They have their own free will. 

why do you think war is a necessary part of free will? 

5 hours ago, Widowmaker 811 said:

  This is a fantasy work of fiction where lasting peace can exist in a place like Na'ath.  Maybe the humans on that island are genetically different.  I am more interested in Essos than I am in Westeros.  Na'ath and its people are atypical from other cultures.  I am curious what you make of this island and the natives.  

1. Missandei's eyes are yellow gold in color.  Any significance?

Not especially. She also knows a plethora of languages by 11 and is extremely mature. That is more significant than her eyes  

5 hours ago, Widowmaker 811 said:

They are peaceful and therefore exploited.  Would they be better off taking up the sword and protecting themselves?

Of course they would be but thousands of years of being protected by island diseases has meant they have no need for warfare. Cultures are very hard to change 

[Bitterblooms]

Golden eyes is a pretty rare trait. I can only think of themn in people connecting to another work entirely, Wheel of Time and the wolf talkers. 

In asoiaf 4 of the wolves and 2 of the dragons are described as having golden eyes. Shaggy, Drogon and Ghost do not. Do you think there is any significant link there? 

[ravenous reader]

Butterflies have compound eyes, made up of many eyes in one, as @Wizz-The-Smith has pointed out...how many eyes does a Naathi butterfly have?  Could it be 1000 eyes and one?!  Butterflies 'flutter' like moths and birds and hearts and heart trees...

Naathi...naughty greenseer 

[The Commentator]

20 hours ago, Corvo the Crow said:

At one point before a battle she offers to sing to Danaerys. One of her brothers thaught her to climb to trees.

Tree climbing, golden eyed peaceful people who are short and love singing? Missandei secret daughter of leaf confirmed!!!

Golden eyes can, but not necessarily, mean empathic abilities.  Missandei is uncannily perceptive of people's feelings.  

[The Fattest Leech]

Butterflies in to dragons. Stay too long and you get poisoned. All gifts are poisoned. 

[Wizz-The-Smith]

22 hours ago, ravenous reader said:

Butterflies have compound eyes, made up of many eyes in one, as @Wizz-The-Smith has pointed out...how many eyes does a Naathi butterfly have?  Could it be 1000 eyes and one?!  Butterflies 'flutter' like moths and birds and hearts and heart trees...

Yep, I think the butterfly and it's 'many eyes in one' is a hint at the Naathi magic/greenseer-CotF ancestry, as is the golden eyes. To support this idea the butterfly is also associated with physical transformation or shapeshifting which is essentially skinchanging.

In Celtic mythology [one of Grrm's inspirations] the magical otherworld or lands of the gods include caves/hollow hills [BR and Bran] the world beneath the oceans [In line with @ravenous reader's 'Under the sea/see' catch -- green sea/green see] and importantly for this line of inquiry islands.  Many of the islands on Planetos have these 'underworld/magic/greenseer' clues, think Leng, Lorath, Old Wyk and Iron Islands in general, Battle Isle, Misty Isle [House Fisher/Fisher King] Skagos, Isle of Toads etc....... All of which have subtle allusions to magic/greenseeing, Naath fits nicely into this idea.    

22 hours ago, ravenous reader said:

Naathi...naughty greenseer 

Nice!   

[ravenous reader]

On 4/30/2018 at 3:12 PM, Widowmaker 811 said:

The island natives are said to be peaceful...

1. They are peaceful and therefore exploited.  Would they be better off taking up the sword and protecting themselves?

Note the striking similarities between the Naathi and the Children/Crannogs in the following passages. What do you think it means?

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Dany had grown very fond of Missandei. The little scribe with the big golden eyes was wise beyond her years. She is brave as well. She had to be, to survive the life she's lived. One day she hoped to see this fabled isle of Naath. Missandei said the Peaceful People made music instead of war. They did not kill, not even animals; they ate only fruit and never flesh. The butterfly spirits sacred to their Lord of Harmony protected their isle against those who would do them harm. Many conquerors had sailed on Naath to blood their swords, only to sicken and die. The butterflies do not help them when the slave ships come raiding, though. "I am going to take you home one day, Missandei," Dany promised. 

 

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A Dance with Dragons - Bran III

"Gone down into the earth," she answered. "Into the stones, into the trees. Before the First Men came all this land that you call Westeros was home to us, yet even in those days we were few. The gods gave us long lives but not great numbers, lest we overrun the world as deer will overrun a wood where there are no wolves to hunt them. That was in the dawn of days, when our sun was rising. Now it sinks, and this is our long dwindling. The giants are almost gone as well, they who were our bane and our brothers. The great lions of the western hills have been slain, the unicorns are all but gone, the mammoths down to a few hundred. The direwolves will outlast us all, but their time will come as well. In the world that men have made, there is no room for them, or us."

She seemed sad when she said it, and that made Bran sad as well. It was only later that he thought, Men would not be sad. Men would be wroth. Men would hate and swear a bloody vengeance. The singers sing sad songs, where men would fight and kill.

Leaf -- Missandei

COTF -- Naathi

the True Tongue gifted to Bran -- gift for tongues

singing Songs vs. waging War

The Others -- the Butterfly spirits

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A Storm of Swords - Daenerys VI

Up here in her garden Dany sometimes felt like a god, living atop the highest mountain in the world.

Do all gods feel so lonely? Some must, surely. Missandei had told her of the Lord of Harmony, worshiped by the Peaceful People of Naath; he was the only true god, her little scribe said, the god who always was and always would be, who made the moon and stars and earth, and all the creatures that dwelt upon them. Poor Lord of Harmony. Dany pitied him. It must be terrible to be alone for all time, attended by hordes of butterfly women you could make or unmake at a word. Westeros had seven gods at least, though Viserys had told her that some septons said the seven were only aspects of a single god, seven facets of a single crystal. That was just confusing. The red priests believed in two gods, she had heard, but two who were eternally at war. Dany liked that even less. She would not want to be eternally at war.

 

Quote

A Storm of Swords - Bran II

"...he could breathe mud and run on leaves, and change earth to water and water to earth with no more than a whispered word. He could talk to trees and weave words and make castles appear and disappear."

"I wish I could," Bran said plaintively...

Making and Unmaking with a word (#killing word)

Hollow hill -- pyramid

Godswood -- Dany's garden

old gods/the Great Other -- Lord of Harmony

On 5/1/2018 at 4:30 PM, The Fattest Leech said:

Butterflies in to dragons. Stay too long and you get poisoned. All gifts are poisoned. 

What's the relation between butterflies and dragons? I suppose they're both worms, the archaic word for dragon being 'wyrm'.  The danger of staying too long reminds me of your thesis of Bloodraven's cavern as a Hypnos/Lethe trap, as exemplified by this following quote:

Quote

That was just another silly dream, though. Some days Bran wondered if all of this wasn't just some dream. Maybe he had fallen asleep out in the snows and dreamed himself a safe, warm place. You have to wake, he would tell himself, you have to wake right now, or you'll go dreaming into death. Once or twice he pinched his arm with his fingers, really hard, but the only thing that did was make his arm hurt. In the beginning he had tried to count the days by making note of when he woke and slept, but down here sleeping and waking had a way of melting into one another. Dreams became lessons, lessons became dreams, things happened all at once or not at all. Had he done that or only dreamed it?

 

16 hours ago, Wizz-The-Smith said:

Yep, I think the butterfly and it's 'many eyes in one' is a hint at the Naathi magic/greenseer-CotF ancestry, as is the golden eyes. To support this idea the butterfly is also associated with physical transformation or shapeshifting which is essentially skinchanging.

In Celtic mythology [one of Grrm's inspirations] the magical otherworld or lands of the gods include caves/hollow hills [BR and Bran] the world beneath the oceans [In line with @ravenous reader's 'Under the sea/see' catch -- green sea/green see] and importantly for this line of inquiry islands.  Many of the islands on Planetos have these 'underworld/magic/greenseer' clues, think Leng, Lorath, Old Wyk and Iron Islands in general, Battle Isle, Misty Isle [House Fisher/Fisher King] Skagos, Isle of Toads etc....... All of which have subtle allusions to magic/greenseeing, Naath fits nicely into this idea.    

Nice!   

I'm pretty sure that pun (NAATHI--NAUGHTY) will not make LmL the Dragon's book of acceptable puns and anagrams for normal people, but glad you like it! To paraphrase D&D, "you want a good woman, but you need a Naathi girl..." LOL 

[OtherFromAnotherMother]

10 minutes ago, ravenous reader said:

Leaf -- Missandei

COTF -- Naathi

the True Tongue gifted to Bran -- gift for tongues

singing Songs vs. waging War

The Others -- the Butterfly spirits

The "butterfly fever" being the "weapon" of the butterflies, of course!

World book:

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Yet none of these invaders survived, and the Naathi claim that none lasted more than a year, for some evil humor lurks in the very air of this fair isle, and all those who linger too long on Naath soon succumb. Fever is the first sign of this plague, followed by painful spasms that make it seem as if victims are dancing wildly and uncontrollably. In the last stage, the afflicted sweat blood, and their flesh sloughs from their bones.

 

The Naathi themselves are seemingly untroubled by the illness.

Sam, SoS

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The bear was dead, pale and rotting, its fur and skin all sloughed off and half its right arm burned to bone, yet still it came on. Only its eyes lived. Bright blue, just as Jon said. They shone like frozen stars.

Jon, Game

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Jon had only to close his eyes to see the thing staggering across the solar, crashing against the furniture and flailing at the flames. It was the face that haunted him most; surrounded by a nimbus of fire, hair blazing like straw, the dead flesh melting away and sloughing off its skull to reveal the gleam of bone beneath.

 

[The Fattest Leech]

1 hour ago, ravenous reader said:

Note the striking similarities between the Naathi and the Children/Crannogs in the following passages. What do you think it means?

 

Leaf -- Missandei

COTF -- Naathi

the True Tongue gifted to Bran -- gift for tongues

singing Songs vs. waging War

The Others -- the Butterfly spirits

I KNOW I will be flogged for this , but I am not so sure it has anything to do with greenseers. I was rereading a GRRM story last night and he has a race of peaceful humanoid critters with large eyes that develop unusual changes in their eye color (strange flecks of gold appear) as they *worship the (mind control) pyramids. These little peoplings even like to climb trees, like Missandei's brothers teach her to do. But, I could be wrong.

*clarifying this point: the pyramids use mind control to drive people to worship them and to prostrate themselves to it. As soon as the worshipper leaves the vicinity of the pyramid, the effect wears off and the person becomes temporarily confused for a time.

I also wonder if GRRM is using a double meaning of the historic tale that gold brought down the dragons. I don't know, just speculating for the hell of it.

Gold eyes are likened to coins:

• Nymeria nipped eagerly at her hand as Arya untied her. She had yellow eyes. When they caught the sunlight, they gleamed like two golden coins. Arya had named her after the warrior queen of the Rhoyne, who had led her people across the narrow sea.
• The wealth of the westerlands was matched, in ancient times, with the hunger of the Freehold of Valyria for precious metals, yet there seems no evidence that the dragonlords ever made contact with the lords of the Rock, Casterly or Lannister. Septon Barth speculated on the matter, referring to a Valyrian text that has since been lost, suggesting that the Freehold's sorcerers foretold that the gold of Casterly Rock would destroy them. Archmaester Perestan has put forward a different, more plausible speculation, suggesting that the Valyrians had in ancient days reached as far as Oldtown but suffered some great reverse or tragedy there that caused them to shun all of Westeros thereafter.

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What's the relation between butterflies and dragons?

It is a phrase that our favorite author used to describe how vastly different the show is from the source material. The small changes in the start of the series show have turned in to huge dragon sized changes- different and not the same at all anymore. However, it seemed an appropriate play on words here, as well; the pretty little Naathi island/people will grow to kill you. But yes, it could be a caterpillar/worm into a butterfly, the way the hypothesis goes that wyrms were turned into dragons.

• So when you ask me, "will the show spoil the books," all I can do is say, "yes and no," and mumble once again about the butterfly effect. Those pretty little butterflies have grown into mighty dragons. Some of the 'spoilers' you may encounter in season six may not be spoilers at all... because the show and the books have diverged, and will continue to do so.

Quote

 

I suppose they're both worms, the archaic word for dragon being 'wyrm'.  The danger of staying too long reminds me of your thesis of Bloodraven's cavern as a Hypnos/Lethe trap, as exemplified by this quote:

You have a great memory. I had almost forgotten that . But yes, another danger is staying too long on Naath is the illness that occurs:

• For the next three years the Rhoynar wandered the southern seas, seeking a new home. On Naath, the Isle of Butterflies, the peaceful people gave them welcome, but the god that protects that strange land began to strike down the newcomers by the score with a nameless mortal illness, driving them back to their ships.
• The Ghiscari seized the island thrice in the days of the Old Empire; the Valyrians erected a fort there whose walls of fused dragonstone can still be seen; a company of Volantene adventurers once built a trade town, complete with timber palisades and slave pens; corsairs from the Basilisk Isles have landed on Naath countless times. Yet none of these invaders survived, and the Naathi claim that none lasted more than a year, for some evil humor lurks in the very air of this fair isle, and all those who linger too long on Naath soon succumb. Fever is the first sign of this plague, followed by painful spasms that make it seem as if victims are dancing wildly and uncontrollably. In the last stage, the afflicted sweat blood, and their flesh sloughs from their bones.
  The Naathi themselves are seemingly untroubled by the illness.

[Darth Sidious]

On 4/30/2018 at 10:12 AM, Widowmaker 811 said:

• Missandei's eyes are yellow gold in color.  Any significance?
• They are peaceful and therefore exploited.  Would they be better off taking up the sword and protecting themselves?

Didn't Martin say he regretted emphasizing eye color?  It is always better to have the ability to defend yourself.  At least you will have a choice.  Helpless and waiting for a savior just makes you bait.