The were-wood hypothesis

[Ckram]

4 hours ago, By Odin's Beard said:

I think you are on the right track but reverse that, the Old Gods are the weirwood and they absorbed men.

That's the popular idea.

[Fun Guy from Yuggoth]

This is a bit off topic and sorry for posting a book report but I have more to add about the fungus from The Men of Greywater Station.  In that story a small research station has recently been established in a swamp on a planet dominated by a mysterious fungus.  That fungus has mind-control abilities, and it has essentially skin-changed all of the animal life on the planet to serve it.  The men are trying to figure out how to weaponize the fungus for military purposes, but the fungus sees them and their facility as a threat and is determined to destroy them and/or absorb them into the collective. 

The humans continually underestimate the intelligence of the fungus and it ends up getting them to kill themselves through an ingenious combination of false prophetic dreams, weather control, strategy, deception, and skin-changing a few people as pawns.

They don't know where the fungus came from, or if it is native to this planet, but during the course of the story they mention that they found spores all the way up in to the highest parts of the atmosphere--suggesting that the spores might be carried from one planet to another by the spores catching a ride on the solar wind or a meteor or comet.

Also, it is suggested that the fungus might be a tree.  At one point the characters are setting booby-traps by cutting most of the way through tree trunks so that they could be used to crush the enemy.  There is one weird tree:

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The fifth tree was giving him trouble. It was a different species from the others, gnarled and overhung with creepers and rock-hard. He was only halfway through, and already he’d had to change the blade twice. That made him edgy. One slip with the blade, one slash in the skinthins, and the spores could get at him.
“Damn thing,” he said, when the teeth began to snap off for the third time. “It cuts like it’s half petrified. Damn.”

Someone on youtube suggested that the tree was only making him think it was difficult to cut through to protect itself and get him to stop.

The main character has a dream before the attack on the base where he sees the base far in the future and it is destroyed and overrun with fungus, and it may be that either the fungus sent this dream to demoralize them and weaken their resolve or it actually can see into the future.

There is a suggestion that the fungus can control the weather, as a particularly strong storm blows in just as the fungus begins its attack and clears just as soon as the attack is over. 

The fungus gets the men to kill each other through deception, by making faction 1 think that faction 2 have already been absorbed into the collective and are fighting for the fungus, when in reality the fungus only had a couple men under its control and they had no weapons and were no threat at all. 

 

The Greywater fungus is a hive-minded, skin-changing/mind-controlling/telepathic, false dream sending/greenseeing, weather-controlling, malevolent, expansionist, planet-hopping, interstellar fungus.  The Greywater fungus is essentially a different type of weirwood.

 

 

[Rosetta Stone]

22 minutes ago, By Odin's Beard said:

This is a bit off topic and sorry for posting a book report but I have more to add about the fungus from The Men of Greywater Station.  In that story a small research station has recently been established in a swamp on a planet dominated by a mysterious fungus.  That fungus has mind-control abilities, and it has essentially skin-changed all of the animal life on the planet to serve it.  The men are trying to figure out how to weaponize the fungus for military purposes, but the fungus sees them and their facility as a threat and is determined to destroy them and/or absorb them into the collective. 

The humans continually underestimate the intelligence of the fungus and it ends up getting them to kill themselves through an ingenious combination of false prophetic dreams, weather control, strategy, deception, and skin-changing a few people as pawns.

They don't know where the fungus came from, or if it is native to this planet, but during the course of the story they mention that they found spores all the way up in to the highest parts of the atmosphere--suggesting that the spores might be carried from one planet to another by the spores catching a ride on the solar wind or a meteor or comet.

Also, it is suggested that the fungus might be a tree.  At one point the characters are setting booby-traps by cutting most of the way through tree trunks so that they could be used to crush the enemy.  There is one weird tree:

Someone on youtube suggested that the tree was only making him think it was difficult to cut through to protect itself and get him to stop.

The main character has a dream before the attack on the base where he sees the base far in the future and it is destroyed and overrun with fungus, and it may be that either the fungus sent this dream to demoralize them and weaken their resolve or it actually can see into the future.

There is a suggestion that the fungus can control the weather, as a particularly strong storm blows in just as the fungus begins its attack and clears just as soon as the attack is over. 

The fungus gets the men to kill each other through deception, by making faction 1 think that faction 2 have already been absorbed into the collective and are fighting for the fungus, when in reality the fungus only had a couple men under its control and they had no weapons and were no threat at all. 

 

The Greywater fungus is a hive-minded, skin-changing/mind-controlling/telepathic, false dream sending/greenseeing, weather-controlling, malevolent, expansionist, planet-hopping, interstellar fungus.  The Greywater fungus is essentially a different type of weirwood.

 

 

I read that short story.  Delvecchio is the main character.  Only some of the people were hallucinating.  The ones who left to rescue the fallen ship.  The fungus can't attack through the walls of the station.  I think it can only affect those who get exposed.  

 

[Fun Guy from Yuggoth]

8 hours ago, Rosetta Stone said:

I read that short story.  Delvecchio is the main character.  Only some of the people were hallucinating.  The ones who left to rescue the fallen ship.  The fungus can't attack through the walls of the station.  I think it can only affect those who get exposed. 

I think you are mis-remembering.  Only Reyn goes to rescue the fallen ship and we never get any indication that he has hallucinations.  The men assume that the fungus can't attack through the wall, that as long as they are not exposed to the spores they are safe from the fungus, but that is only a guess, and as they say repeatedly they do not know what the fungus is capable of:

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“Somehow the fungus guessed what we were up to. It’s smarter than we gave it credit for.” . . .

“You’re not merely assuming the fungus is very intelligent, Jim” Granowicz said. “You’re assuming it’s very devious as well.”
“No,” said Delvecchio. “I’m not assuming anything. I’m merely pointing out a possibility. A terrible possibility, but one we should be ready for. For over a year now, we’ve been constantly underestimating the fungus. At every test, it has proven just a bit more intelligent than we figured." . . . .

“We underestimated it again."

 

There is no indication that the force field can block psionic powers

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The field wasn’t built to take screechers or laser explosives. Just to keep out insects and flying animals.

 

I forgot to put this in my previous post

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 A total assault, with the life of a planet working for our destruction. It’s the fungus…a total ecology, as Ned likes to call it. A classic case of the parasitic collective mind. . . .  As far as I can tell, Greywater, the fungus, is a single all-encompassing mass, which took over this planet starting from some single central point.”

I think the Isle of Faces is the central point where a meteor (a piece of the Red Comet) landed carrying the weirwood to Planetos, and it has spread from that central location.  If they destroy the central hub, they will kill all the weirwoods. 

Also check out the starfish aliens trope, and there was a DC comics villain called Starro the Conqueror from the 1960s

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Starro is an intelligent alien lifeform resembling a giant starfish with a central eye and prehensile extremities. The entity visited Earth and empowered three starfish, the creatures wreaking havoc (exploding an atom bomb and absorbing its energy; kidnapping scientists and absorbing their brain power and placing the residents of Happy Harbor and Rhode Island under mental control) until stopped by heroes . . .

Starro eventually reappeared, and forced humans to nurture it until it was able to assume its former proportions. Being able to asexually spawn, Starro created millions of miniature duplicate "spores" of itself, which attached to the faces of the entire population of New York and rendered them under his mental control. Starro used these spores to control several members of the Justice League until defeated by extreme cold.

Lovecraft's Elder Things (also called the Old Ones) also were starfish-like.  Starfish turn to stone when they die. 

[ravenous reader]

On 8/31/2018 at 4:25 PM, Ckram said:

@SiSt, @The Weirwoods Eyes, @kissdbyfire, thanks for the answers. I was well aware of the meaning of "weir" as in "dam." In the books translated into my language the name wierwood is something like damwood, and I consider it a successful translation case.

However, I am trying to focus on the other meaning of the expression, in the sense that "weirwood = werewood" would imply that white trees could have shapeshifting habilities, such as a werewolf or lychanthrope.

As a non-native speaker, I do not usually bet that the solutions to the book mysteries are hidden behind English ambiguities, wordplays, and puns. They may be, I just do not like the idea they are - especially since foreign versions would never succeed make a satisfactory translation. However, in this case, the unfolding is indeed interesting, regardless of the linguistic question.

When it comes to unpicking GRRM's wordplay, it's important to realize that equivocation is the name of his game (as evidenced by the fact that when asked a direct question, he inevitably gives a non-committal answer) -- i.e. all meanings of any given word or phrase may apply at once; in other words, the meaning is overlayed. So, posters getting their knickers in a twist, self-righteously insisting on one meaning over another, or rigidly privileging a literal in favor of a metaphorical interpretation, or vice versa, are usually missing the plot. 

That said, I think the weirs are first and foremost a nod to Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead. I am also convinced the direwolves, the crown of ice blue roses, the ripples on a windless night, the turtle/terrapin mythology, Dark Star, etc. are all Grateful Dead-inspired references. 

GRRM admits to listening to their albums a lot, and concedes he always has lyrics/songs of theirs 'rattling around his head', so I imagine when he has writer's block, he pops on one of their records in the background, and the vivid images inevitably seep out onto the page, albeit in GRRM's reworked form!

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In fact, if weirwood are lycanthrope plants, it would mean that they once had the human form, or even that it has the ability to take human form even now.

As for the first scenario, I have in mind a South American indigenous legend about a species of tree that would have first sprouted from the body of a woman murdered for having relations with a warrior from an enemy tribe.

As for the second scenario, I imagine that a weirwood that takes the human form would be a kind of monstrous hecatoncheir, or a single human body with thousands of minds.

Following this same line of thinking, I wonder if martial pines and sentinel trees also would not be plants capable of assuming a mammalian form, or even if they were people in the past and now are "resting" in a tree shape.

In short, it leads me to think the Old Gods may actually have existed and become trees. And that the green men of the Isle of Faces may have turned into the very weirwoods on the island, but can come back to human if somebody or something "wakes" them.

That South American legend you mentioned sounds interesting. Can you tell us more about the one you have in mind? 

It's possible that, as @LmL and his fellow 'mythheads' have suggested, Nissa Nissa may have been a Child of the Forest, whose sacrifice to the trees served as a door or portal, facilitating access to the weirwood magic by 'man' -- by which is meant humans in general, starting with a very specific human greenseer, whom we may interpret as the Azor Ahai figure, the treacherous lover-warrior from another tribe.

The signature of this pivotal relationship Ur-drama is everywhere in ASOIAF. GRRM has said that ultimately he is writing about the human heart in conflict, so while fungi, meteors, aliens, and the like are undoubtedly of interest to explore, the importance of the human relationships for setting things in motion should not be overlooked. The central dialectic for GRRM in my opinion revolves around betrayal (oathkeeping vs. oathbreaking).

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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. 

As I and other theorists such as @Voice have noted, 'speech' or 'song' of the children is a euphemism for magic spells, so this passage is referring to the acquisition of magic by the progenitor of House Stark (song of stone, wind, and water covers three of the four elemental magics).  

What would you say was 'the manner' via which he gained access to the magic? And why is this manner 'not worth repeating'?

[Fun Guy from Yuggoth]

On 9/9/2018 at 11:14 AM, ravenous reader said:

GRRM has said that ultimately he is writing about the human heart in conflict, so while fungi, meteors, aliens, and the like are undoubtedly of interest to explore, the importance of the human relationships for setting things in motion should not be overlooked. The central dialectic for GRRM in my opinion revolves around betrayal (oathkeeping vs. oathbreaking).

I don't like that "the human heart in conflict" quote--it is merely saying "I like to write about people making difficult decisions" which is what every author of fiction since the beginning of time has done. 

I think one of the main themes of ASOIAF is "does unlimited power cause you to be evil?"  It is a take on the Ring of Gyges thought experiment from Plato's Republic--if you had a ring of invisibility that would allow you to commit any crime and get away with it--it would cause you to become evil.  The One Ring from Tolkien is inspired by this, and I think the Weirwoods are also, they even grow in rings.  They are a source of almost unlimited magical power that Bran is learning to use, and the question is what will Bran do with this power?  Will he use his powers for good or evil? 

The obsession with what the weirwoods are and where they came from is because George has outlined only half of the plot and we are trying to guess the other half in order to predict where the story will go.  I think the Weirwoods are foreign to Planetos and are rewarding humans for being evil, and granting magical favors in exchange for blood sacrifice, and generally causing mayhem and warfare and suffering--it has corrupted mankind.  I think Bran will figure this out and use his powers for good: he will send his consciousness back in time and change history, and eradicate the weirwood (destroy the ring and its maker), and give humans a second chance to do things right.   What makes this a difficult decision is that he will also erase everyone he knows from existence.  It will literally be the Heart(tree) in conflict with itself, because Bran will use the weirwood to destroy the weirwood. 

This is essentially the same plot as in George's short story Under Siege, in which a cripple sends his consciousness into the past and prevents nuclear war and gets to live a second life as a regular person.  

While we are talking about nuclear war, Dany's dragons are also a source of almost unlimited military power, and will this cause her to become a tyrant?  I think it will. 

The main theme in the Tuf Voyaging series was that Tuf essentially became a god when he acquired the Ark, and he brought death and devastation to the immoral and irresponsible people of the galaxy.   He believed he was in the right, and was acting morally, but "everyone is the hero of their own story."

 

[300 H&H Magnum]

On 8/31/2018 at 1:49 AM, Ckram said:

I was doing a search about language in ASOIAF when I came across this:

"The mysterious ‘Weirwood trees’ are at the heart of the religion (known as ‘the Old Gods’) still present in the north of Westeros with their sap-bleeding faces linking them to the supernatural or religious. The weir- prefix could be an echo of weirwolf (an alternate spelling of werewolf, dating back to 1818)" -- https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/04/03/the-language-of-game-of-thrones/

I did some research and found that the "were" on "werewolf" is old english for "man" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/werewolf).

So, dear native english speakers: Is this a thing? Or would it be nonsensical to even wonder if the weirwood could be some kind of "lycanthrope" trees (grammatically speaking, of course)?

You mean something akin to man tree?  It's not far off base.  People who die pass their spirit to the trees.  They are made of men.  White for the bones and red leaves for the blood.  They feed on human blood.

[Fun Guy from Yuggoth]

On 9/9/2018 at 11:14 AM, ravenous reader said:

That said, I think the weirs are first and foremost a nod to Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead. 

Another possible source for "weir" is "Weyr" from Anne McCaffrey's books--Weyr Search and Dragonsong in particular, in which dragon riders are telepathically bonded with their dragons and weyrs are where the dragons are raised.  Every few hundred years a rogue proto-planet called the Red Star passes by and silver threads of deep-space fungus that have hitched a ride on the Red Star try to land on their planet and the dragon riders have to burn all the fungus threads.  The intervals between Red Star flybys are so long that it has passed into myth and defenses have been neglected--does this sounds familiar?  This story is also a sci-fi/fantasy crossover in which humans have expanded to other planets and this one has deliberately chose to stay at medieval technology levels (is space luddites an oxymoron?)  The character Lessa can essentially glamor/faceswap via telepathy.

[Fun Guy from Yuggoth]

30 minutes ago, 300 H&H Magnum said:

White for the bones and red leaves for the blood.

I was flipping through my fungus field manual and I happened across Amanita muscaria or fly agaric.  It is the famous red and white mushroom that is featured in Mario Bros and Alice in Wonderland and in ceramic garden decorations.  As the story goes, it was important for religious ceremonies in Siberia and the shaman who collected it wore red and white outfits and the mushrooms grow symbiotically with pine tree roots, so it was found under pine trees, and they put the mushrooms in a sack, and this is where the Santa Claus myth comes from, also reindeer like to eat them.  Amanita muscaria is a mild type of psychedelic mushroom, and people who took it had vivid hallucinations and reported feeling like they were flying--hence the flying santa and reindeer.  

"You will never walk again, Bran," the pale lips promised, "but you will fly."  Bran is tripping on shrooms. 

Amanita muscaria also grows in fairy rings, circles of mushrooms, just like High Heart and the weirwood grove of nine where Jon said his oath.

[Ckram]

On 9/9/2018 at 1:14 PM, ravenous reader said:

That South American legend you mentioned sounds interesting. Can you tell us more about the one you have in mind? 

It's an amazonian legend. Watch a brief video about it here.

On 9/9/2018 at 1:14 PM, ravenous reader said:

As I and other theorists such as @Voice have noted, 'speech' or 'song' of the children is a euphemism for magic spells, so this passage is referring to the acquisition of magic by the progenitor of House Stark (song of stone, wind, and water covers three of the four elemental magics).  

What would you say was 'the manner' via which he gained access to the magic? And why is this manner 'not worth repeating'?

That's nice.

On 9/11/2018 at 12:29 AM, 300 H&H Magnum said:

You mean something akin to man tree?  It's not far off base.  People who die pass their spirit to the trees.  They are made of men.  White for the bones and red leaves for the blood.  They feed on human blood.

I meant it like in 'they can take human form'.