Heresy 209 Of Ice and of Fire

[Brad Stark]

4 hours ago, JNR said:

Actually, the canon doesn't suggest a connection between the Pact and the daggers.  

It simply says that in the Age of Heroes, the CotF gave the Watch a hundred daggers a year.  

Since the Age of Heroes lasted thousands of years, we can't be sure when this ritual began or why... but given what obsidian does, it certainly seems likely it began after the Long Night, and if so, it had no relationship to the Pact (which was far earlier).

As to why a hundred a year would be helpful, the Watch may have had thousands of men at this time, and obsidian, though it can form a very sharp blade, is a brittle material, prone to shattering.  If you use an obsidian dagger for routine cutting, you're going to break it sooner or later. 

This always struck me as a rather literal interpretation of Old Nan's offhand remark that there were a "hundred kingdoms" of the First Men, constantly embroiled in conflict.  

In reality there would have been many dozens of petty kingdoms... but the exact number would constantly have shifted as one fought and conquered another, or was in time conquered itself.  She just said "a hundred" arbitrarily.

And the number 100 re the daggers seems likely to me to have been a round-number request by the First Men... because, of course, they counted in base ten, like most human cultures do, which in turn is likely derived from finger count.  So they perceived 100 as a round number.  

Whereas the CotF, who don't have ten fingers, most likely also don't use base ten.

I don't think the specific number of daggers is necessarily important or accurate,  just that the volume is unusually high if this practice went on for many years.  100 daggers a year for 100 years is 10,000 which should be enough for everyone to have one.  From the way this was given,  it seemed to me like this went on 1000 years or more.  If the gift was symbolic, why not 7 daggers or 13 or 3?   Why so many?

Yes, the daggers would be brittle and could break, but they weren't primary weapons or tools, and wouldn't have any use outside combat with Others.  I don't see 10,000 Watch men carrying around a dagger their whole lives 'just in case'.

[Black Crow]

But yet Mormont insists [correctly] that the Watch has forgotten its true purpose and the reference or references which Sam finds regarding the gift doesn't explain why or say why it stopped. Seemingly there are stray mentions of fighting the Others and to dragonsteel but it all sounds very bitty, and rather like the encounters we've actually seen, rather than one big climactic battle for the dawn or anything else 

[Matthew.]

2 hours ago, Brad Stark said:

I don't see 10,000 Watch men carrying around a dagger their whole lives 'just in case'.

I disagree. The Night's Watch (particularly Age of Heroes era) having a "just in case" policy regarding Other encounters seems a sound approach.

To reiterate, the significance of such preparedness doesn't just relate to surviving Other encounters, but having the Watch represent a credible deterrent to the Other threat growing entirely out of hand. If the Watch is well manned, well armed, and regularly ranging in the Haunted Forest, then it becomes difficult for the Others to build a wight horde, especially if the Others themselves exist in very small numbers.

[Brad Stark]

3 hours ago, Matthew. said:

I disagree. The Night's Watch (particularly Age of Heroes era) having a "just in case" policy regarding Other encounters seems a sound approach.

To reiterate, the significance of such preparedness doesn't just relate to surviving Other encounters, but having the Watch represent a credible deterrent to the Other threat growing entirely out of hand. If the Watch is well manned, well armed, and regularly ranging in the Haunted Forest, then it becomes difficult for the Others to build a wight horde, especially if the Others themselves exist in very small numbers.

The Watch remembers 3 horn blasts for Others.  Why would they stop carrying the daggers?  Certainly,  some, or most, would not survive.   But you'd think Sam would find caches of them at Castle Black, if not rangers carrying them or remembering them being carried. 

[Tucu]

5 hours ago, Brad Stark said:

The Watch remembers 3 horn blasts for Others.  Why would they stop carrying the daggers?  Certainly,  some, or most, would not survive.   But you'd think Sam would find caches of them at Castle Black, if not rangers carrying them or remembering them being carried. 

The datapoint is from the Age of Heroes; if there is a stash of obsidian at the Wall they should be looking in the Nightfort not in Castle Black.

[SirArthur]

1 hour ago, Tucu said:

The datapoint is from the Age of Heroes; if there is a stash of obsidian at the Wall they should be looking in the Nightfort not in Castle Black.

What makes you think an over and over rebuild castle will have historic weapons ? If there are weapons, they are more likely in the grave hills around Winterfell.

 

And waking giants out of earth can quite literally mean, waking the soul of giants of old, bound within those stone weapons. Or whatever is within the daggers, after they are used. That is also a speculation point of mine about Sam's dagger: it is already inhabited and thus did not work.

[Melifeather]

I think the reason why the Watch stopped carrying obsidian blades was because the numbers of white walker encounters had diminished. The less a weapon is needed would naturally lead to the user to stop including it in their personal arsenal. 

[Tucu]

5 hours ago, SirArthur said:

What makes you think an over and over rebuild castle will have historic weapons ? If there are weapons, they are more likely in the grave hills around Winterfell.

 

And waking giants out of earth can quite literally mean, waking the soul of giants of old, bound within those stone weapons. Or whatever is within the daggers, after they are used. That is also a speculation point of mine about Sam's dagger: it is already inhabited and thus did not work.

Why Winterfell?

For waking giants of the earth, I am going with the mythological reference to volcanoes and earthquakes, not living giants.

[Tucu]

26 minutes ago, Feather Crystal said:

I think the reason why the Watch stopped carrying obsidian blades was because the numbers of white walker encounters had diminished. The less a weapon is needed would naturally lead to the user to stop including it in their personal arsenal. 

I like to think that the answer is in the construction method of the Wall. How do you build a 700 feet tall, 300 miles long magical wall? You capture the white shadows with your dragonglass weapons and store their souls/essence in the Wall. Sooner or later you run out of WW to capture and you stop carrying the tools needed to deal with them.

[Brad Stark]

1 hour ago, Feather Crystal said:

I think the reason why the Watch stopped carrying obsidian blades was because the numbers of white walker encounters had diminished. The less a weapon is needed would naturally lead to the user to stop including it in their personal arsenal. 

That's my point.   If we had 10,000 men armed with daggers and a fight with an Other once every 5 years, they were already carrying weapons they wouldn't use.

[JNR]

20 hours ago, Brad Stark said:

Yes, the daggers would be brittle and could break, but they weren't primary weapons or tools, and wouldn't have any use outside combat with Others.

Well, obsidian blades would have been the sharpest, by far, that the Watch would have had at that time.  Bronze and possibly iron blades would be nowhere close.

So yes, I think they could well have been used as primary tools.  

Even now, in our own culture, there are obsidian scalpels that surgeons use for medical purposes.

"The biggest advantage with obsidian is that it is the sharpest edge there is, it causes very little trauma to tissue, it heals faster, and more importantly, it heals with less scarring."

-- Dr. Lee Green, professor and chairman of the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Alberta

We aren't told why the CotF supplied a hundred daggers a year, so it might have involved the Popsicles and I suspect it did... but I certainly think such blades would have had endless uses outside combat. 

[Matthew.]

16 hours ago, Brad Stark said:

The Watch remembers 3 horn blasts for Others.  Why would they stop carrying the daggers?

Horn blasts still have regular usage within the Watch, so the three blasts thing has probably remained a part of their oral knowledge.

Though, to some extent, I think this is an attempt to find in-world logic for one of GRRM's storytelling conceits: the selective, plot-convenient ignorance of his characters. It served the narrative tension for Chett to know what three blasts means, just as it served the narrative tension for Sam to have no idea what would happen when he stabbed the Other with obsidian. 
 

3 hours ago, Brad Stark said:

That's my point.   If we had 10,000 men armed with daggers and a fight with an Other once every 5 years, they were already carrying weapons they wouldn't use.

JNR already elaborated that obsidian has practical value, but I cannot emphasize how much this premise just doesn't ring true to me; I feel like, for a man of the Night's Watch, carrying an Other-slaying weapon is the ultimate "better to have it, and not need it..." scenario. 

Potentially important here is the manner in which encounters with the Others have become scarce. Have the Others been a steady presence, infrequently encountered, or did Other encounters cease entirely for thousands of years? I'm strongly inclined toward the latter read, so in my mind, this isn't a scenario where a member of the Watch might need to slay a white walker every five years, I think this is a scenario where the Watch hasn't had to fight the Others in ages--before even the Andals came and brought their writing system, IMO.

I'm not unwilling to play devil's advocate here, I'm just saying that I find the "mundane" interpretation of the gift of the daggers acceptable, and I'm not clear as to what the alternative interpretations would be.

[Black Crow]

In this context the best we've got is Sam's conversation with Jon, which uniquely [?] is told in both their POVs a book apart, which suggests its significant.

As I said earlier it sounds like the Others were few and far between, rather like the present, and that far from being defeated in a climactic battle the threat faded away, gradually, a long time ago leaving the obsidian blades to gradually fall out of use.

While, as JNR noted they can be incredibly sharp they are also very brittle. The Aztecs, who used the stuff certainly had obsidian knives for carrying out open heart surgery, but for fighting they used wooden swords with multiple flakes of obsidian set into the blade, simply because the stuff was too brittle to be used in combat on its own - as Sam discovered when he tried to ventilate Small Paul.

 

“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…

“The Others come when it is cold, most of the tales agree. Or else it gets cold when they come. Sometimes they appear during snowstorms and melt away when the skies clear. They hide from the light of the sun and emerge by night… or else night falls when they emerge. Some stories speak of them riding the corpses of dead animals. Bears, direwolves, mammoths, horses, it makes no matter so long as the beast is dead. The one that killed Small Paul was riding a dead horse, so that part’s plainly true. Some accounts speak of giant ice spiders too. I don’t know what those are. Men who fall in battle against the Others must be burned, or else the dead will rise again as their thralls.”

“We knew all this. The question is how do we fight them?”

“The armor of the Others is proof against most ordinary blades, if the tales can be believed,” said Sam, “and their own swords are so cold they shatter steel. Fire will dismay them, though, and they are vulnerable to obsidian” He remembered the one he had faced in the haunted forest, and how it had seemed to melt away when he stabbed it with the dragonglass dagger Jon had made for him. “I found one account of the Long Night that spoke of the last hero slaying Others with a blade of dragonsteel. Supposedly they could not stand against it.”

“Dragonsteel?” Jon frowned. “Valyrian steel?”

 

[Brad Stark]

2 hours ago, Matthew. said:

Horn blasts still have regular usage within the Watch, so the three blasts thing has probably remained a part of their oral knowledge.

Though, to some extent, I think this is an attempt to find in-world logic for one of GRRM's storytelling conceits: the selective, plot-convenient ignorance of his characters. It served the narrative tension for Chett to know what three blasts means, just as it served the narrative tension for Sam to have no idea what would happen when he stabbed the Other with obsidian. 
 

JNR already elaborated that obsidian has practical value, but I cannot emphasize how much this premise just doesn't ring true to me; I feel like, for a man of the Night's Watch, carrying an Other-slaying weapon is the ultimate "better to have it, and not need it..." scenario. 

Potentially important here is the manner in which encounters with the Others have become scarce. Have the Others been a steady presence, infrequently encountered, or did Other encounters cease entirely for thousands of years? I'm strongly inclined toward the latter read, so in my mind, this isn't a scenario where a member of the Watch might need to slay a white walker every five years, I think this is a scenario where the Watch hasn't had to fight the Others in ages--before even the Andals came and brought their writing system, IMO.

I'm not unwilling to play devil's advocate here, I'm just saying that I find the "mundane" interpretation of the gift of the daggers acceptable, and I'm not clear as to what the alternative interpretations would be.

I don't see any practical value to obsidian for any culture with Bronze, except for magic.   Sharp but brittle is mostly useless as a tool or weapon. 

If Sam found the 100 daggers reference written down,  either the Watch still recieved daggers after the Andals arrived,  or at least were aware they did in the past.  

Two alternative interpretations I suggested are 1) Others aren't easy to kill and while the daggers defend against them, daggers do not permanently kill Others

2) The current Watch is not continuous from the Watch that was there when the Andals arrived 

[SirArthur]

The annals that are most likely written in andal and contain words like steel. I would buy Sam's stuff as reports from the Watch over the centuries, if he would not drop the Long Night in the end. 

I mean it would be a nice story about obsidian as earth stone and the stone the fyreworms eat. (thus Dragonstone) But the steel part is just weird. 

[Matthew.]

39 minutes ago, Brad Stark said:

I don't see any practical value to obsidian for any culture with Bronze, except for magic.   Sharp but brittle is mostly useless as a tool or weapon. 

It's not an either/or scenario, though; one can carry a bronze or iron sword for mundane encounters, and an obsidian dagger just in case you happen to encounter a white walker--and even if you don't, it's still a good tool for, say, butchering game. 

And I feel that I really must reiterate that carrying obsidian, especially in the decades most immediately following the Long Night, seems highly practical.

 

39 minutes ago, Brad Stark said:

If Sam found the 100 daggers reference written down,  either the Watch still recieved daggers after the Andals arrived,  or at least were aware they did in the past.  

Two alternative interpretations I suggested are 1) Others aren't easy to kill and while the daggers defend against them, daggers do not permanently kill Others

2) The current Watch is not continuous from the Watch that was there when the Andals arrived 

To make a comparison to a different account Sam presents, the reference to dragonsteel would either have been transcribed from the oral history of the Watch, or they set down runic accounts of their early days--either way, a certain amount of pre-Andal information has been maintained, and I suspect that the accounts of obsidian killing WWs, as well as the information about the 100 daggers fall under that category. 

However, I agree that there may have been a point where the Watch was shifted dramatically, perhaps in both lore and purpose; in line with the other discussions in this thread of obsidian having magical functions beyond its effect on the Others, it may be the case that the Watch used dragonglass for some magical purpose other than just slaying the Others.

[Melifeather]

Maybe over the hundreds of years the new recruits dismissed the threats of white walkers and wights as being grumpkins and snarks and viewed the obsidian blades as stupid superstitious relics?

[Matthew.]

43 minutes ago, Feather Crystal said:

Maybe over the hundreds of years the new recruits dismissed the threats of white walkers and wights as being grumpkins and snarks and viewed the obsidian blades as stupid superstitious relics?

This is exactly what I think happened, which is why I suggest that how we interpret the scarcity of the Others is potentially important.

The way I've read the story, the Others haven't been seen since the Age of Heroes (perhaps haven't even been seen since the Long Night, or the era of the Night's King at the very latest); accordingly, the annual gift of one hundred daggers, carrying obsidian, and three horn blasts are things that were only happening for a relatively small fraction of the NW's overall age, especially if we assume they've been around for ~8,000 years. Accordingly, the story would be very far removed from an era in which carrying obsidian would be practical, rather than superstitious.

[Brad Stark]

1 hour ago, Matthew. said:

It's not an either/or scenario, though; one can carry a bronze or iron sword for mundane encounters, and an obsidian dagger just in case you happen to encounter a white walker--and even if you don't, it's still a good tool for, say, butchering game. 

And I feel that I really must reiterate that carrying obsidian, especially in the decades most immediately following the Long Night, seems highly practical.

 

To make a comparison to a different account Sam presents, the reference to dragonsteel would either have been transcribed from the oral history of the Watch, or they set down runic accounts of their early days--either way, a certain amount of pre-Andal information has been maintained, and I suspect that the accounts of obsidian killing WWs, as well as the information about the 100 daggers fall under that category. 

However, I agree that there may have been a point where the Watch was shifted dramatically, perhaps in both lore and purpose; in line with the other discussions in this thread of obsidian having magical functions beyond its effect on the Others, it may be the case that the Watch used dragonglass for some magical purpose other than just slaying the Others.

So 10,000 years ago, they received 100 daggers a year for only a few decades.   For 9000 years, the oral tradition survived to be written down by the Andals, only to be forgotten in the past few hundred?

Dragon steel is also an anachronism,  in more ways than one.  Not only did the first men not have steel,  but the Valarians didn't have dragons yet.

Either the Battle for the Dawn during The Long Night was fought by someone other than simple Bronze age people,  or the Others have been fought more recently,  or the history of the Watch is fiction.   I suspect all three.

[Tucu]

18 minutes ago, Brad Stark said:

So 10,000 years ago, they received 100 daggers a year for only a few decades.   For 9000 years, the oral tradition survived to be written down by the Andals, only to be forgotten in the past few hundred?

Dragon steel is also an anachronism,  in more ways than one.  Not only did the first men not have steel,  but the Valarians didn't have dragons yet.

Either the Battle for the Dawn during The Long Night was fought by someone other than simple Bronze age people,  or the Others have been fought more recently,  or the history of the Watch is fiction.   I suspect all three.

Edmund Blackwood gives us a good explanation on why history is hazy and a good motive for manipulating the history of the relationship with the CoTF/Weirwoods/Others:

Quote

"Five hundred years before the Andals. A thousand, if the True History is to be believed. Only no one knows when the Andals crossed the narrow sea. The True History says four thousand years have passed since then, but some maesters claim that it was only two. Past a certain point, all the dates grow hazy and confused, and the clarity of history becomes the fog of legend."

Tyrion would like this one. They could talk from dusk to dawn, arguing about books. For a moment his bitterness toward his brother was forgotten, until he remembered what the Imp had done. "So you are fighting over a crown that one of you took from the other back when the Casterlys still held Casterly Rock, is that the root of it? The crown of a kingdom that has not existed for thousands of years?" He chuckled. "So many years, so many wars, so many kings … you'd think someone would have made a peace."

"Someone did, my lord. Many someones. We've had a hundred peaces with the Brackens, many sealed with marriages. There's Blackwood blood in every Bracken, and Bracken blood in every Blackwood. The Old King's Peace lasted half a century. But then some fresh quarrel broke out, and the old wounds opened and began to bleed again. That's how it always happens, my father says. So long as men remember the wrongs done to their forebears, no peace will ever last. So we go on century after century, with us hating the Brackens and them hating us. My father says there will never be an end to it."