Heresy 217 Dreams and Dust

[Janneyc1]

2 minutes ago, Matthew. said:

The Iron Islands, the Sisters, and the Stormlands all have their own local variations of storm and sea deities, with the former two laying in the theoretical blast zone for the Hammer of the Waters, and the latter in an area that would have presumably been hit by the tidal wave fallout from the Breaking of the Arm of Dorne. 

I disagree, I think that the Sisters are the ones that weren't involved in the Hammer of the Waters. That thing would be directional from the point of origin. There is land in between the Sisters and Dorne that isn't broken and drowned. 

We also have Weirwoods in the Iron islands that are petrified and the islands themselves are a broken place. To me, it makes more sense for the attempted Hammer on the Neck to originate there. 

[dialt]

My opinion - given the little we know - is that those are not “coloums” built by TCoTF.

I think they are roots that later on got petrified. 

What I find interesting, if so, is that untill now we read of faces carved into trunks. Looking outside. Not buried into the ground. In addition, we’ve read till now of one carved face only in each tree. Whereas the impression I’ve got  from Ariane’s pov (I may be wrong, but that’s how I take it)  is that she sees many faces in each root/coloum. 

If so, then it’s something new. Another kind of thing. Ritual, cult, whatever. 

 I also find less likely (not impossible, just less likely) in fact, that those faces are the petrified versions of the children tied to the roots that Bran sees inside BR’s cave. Because if so, then I guess she should see “skulls” not faces.

I am absolutely aware that this is just a take. And that I may be wrong.

But my bet, at moment, is that.

[Matthew.]

7 minutes ago, Janneyc1 said:

I disagree, I think that the Sisters are the ones that weren't involved in the Hammer of the Waters. That thing would be directional from the point of origin. There is land in between the Sisters and Dorne that isn't broken and drowned. 

We also have Weirwoods in the Iron islands that are petrified and the islands themselves are a broken place. To me, it makes more sense for the attempted Hammer on the Neck to originate there. 

I'd always imagined these events as two distinct attempts to stop man's advance--the first, earthquakes around the Arm of Dorne to cut Essos from Westeros, the second with earthquakes on either side of the area that eventually become the Neck, in an attempt separate north and south Westeros, with the "Hammer" being the tidal waves resulting from those earthquakes.

[Janneyc1]

4 minutes ago, Matthew. said:

I'd always imagined these events as two distinct attempts to stop man's advance--the first, earthquakes around the Arm of Dorne to cut Essos from Westeros, the second with earthquakes on either side of the area that eventually become the Neck, in an attempt separate north and south Westeros, with the "Hammer" being the tidal waves resulting from those earthquakes.

Agreed on the premise, but the second hammer appears to not have been as effective. I have an idea as to why, but it involves physics that GRRM probably doesn't feel like putting into his books lol. 

[Matthew.]

Just as an addition, it occurs to me that the columns and walls are possibly being viewed in too much of a vacuum, and the location of the cavern should be taken into account:
 

Quote

Dusk found them on the fringes of the rainwood, a wet green world where brooks and rivers ran through dark forests and the ground was made of mud and rotting leaves. Huge willows grew along the watercourses, larger than any that Arianne had ever seen, their great trunks as gnarled and twisted as an old man’s face and festooned with beards of silvery moss. Trees pressed close on every side, shutting out the sun; hemlock and red cedars, white oaks, soldier pines that stood as tall and straight as towers, colossal sentinels, big-leaf maples, redwoods, wormtrees, even here and there a wild weirwood. Underneath their tangled branches ferns and flowers grew in profusion; sword ferns, lady ferns, bellflowers and piper’s lace, evening stars and poison kisses, liverwort, lungwort, hornwort. Mushrooms sprouted down amongst the tree roots, and from their trunks as well, pale spotted hands that caught the rain. Other trees were furred with moss, green or grey or red-tailed, and once a vivid purple. Lichens covered every rock and stone. Toadstools festered besides rotting logs. The very air seemed green.

...

The wood was full of caves as well. That first night they took shelter in one of them, to get out of the wet. In Dorne they had often travelled after dark, when the moonlight turned the blowing sands to silver, but the rainwood was too full of bogs, ravines, and sinkholes, and black as pitch beneath the trees, where the moon was just a memory.

...

The cave proved much deeper than any of them had suspected. Beyond the stony mouth where her company had made their camp and hobbled their horses, a series of twisty passageways led down and down, with black holes snaking off to either side. Further in, the walls opened up again, and the searchers found themselves in a vast limestone cavern, larger than the great hall of a castle. Their shouts disturbed a nest of bats, who flapped about them noisily, but only distant echoes shouted back. A slow circuit of the hall revealed three further passages, one so small that it would have required them to proceed on hands and knees. 

 

[Wolfkin]

On ‎1‎/‎14‎/‎2019 at 9:02 PM, Brad Stark said:

 A tall lord with copper skin and silver-gold hair stood beneath the banner of a fiery stallion,

The banner reminds me of Bittersteel's sigil.

In his personal arms: a red stallion snorting flame with black dragon wings on a golden field. 

A combination of:
The red stallion is the sigil for House Bracken (mother was Barba Bracken)
The black dragon wings are from House Blackfyre

Ser Aegor Rivers/Bittersteel was also founder of the Golden Company, who Young Griff and company are now aligned with. 

Another Blackfyre Rebellion? 

[Melifeather]

16 hours ago, Janneyc1 said:

Agreed on the premise, but the second hammer appears to not have been as effective. I have an idea as to why, but it involves physics that GRRM probably doesn't feel like putting into his books lol. 

I believe the text only supports there being a single hammer of waters and it occurred at the Neck. The name "hammer" is not used in conjunction with the Arm of Dorne. If I remember correctly, the waters rose to wash away the Arm. The distinction in the text between the two events suggests that water was forcefully used at the Neck and Moat Caillin, while rising water suggests something else - perhaps tidal waves or a tsunami. Tsunamis are typically caused by earthquakes, whereas the "hammer" suggests an impact.

[Melifeather]

15 hours ago, Matthew. said:

Just as an addition, it occurs to me that the columns and walls are possibly being viewed in too much of a vacuum, and the location of the cavern should be taken into account:
 

 

The Rainwood isn't anywhere near the Neck. It's located south of Storms End and Griffin's Roost in the Stormlands. The Rainwood is part of the primeval forest that includes the Kingswood. It was once a forest inhabited by the Children. A woods witch known as the Green Queen reigned there for a generation, but after the Andal invasion the Children disappeared from that area. I'm assuming it's so wet and green, because it butts up against the red mountains of Dorne, causing any storms to drop their moisture before moving over the mountain range.

[Janneyc1]

9 minutes ago, Feather Crystal said:

I believe the text only supports there being a single hammer of waters and it occurred at the Neck. The name "hammer" is not used in conjunction with the Arm of Dorne. If I remember correctly, the waters rose to wash away the Arm. The distinction in the text between the two events suggests that water was forcefully used at the Neck and Moat Caillin, while rising water suggests something else - perhaps tidal waves or a tsunami. Tsunamis are typically caused by earthquakes, whereas the "hammer" suggests an impact.

 

Quote

 

ust beyond, through the mists, she glimpsed the walls and towers of Moat Cailin … or what remained of them. Immense blocks of black basalt, each as large as a crofter's cottage, lay scattered and tumbled like a child's wooden blocks, half-sunk in the soft boggy soil. Nothing else remained of a curtain wall that had once stood as high as Winterfell's. The wooden keep was gone entirely, rotted away a thousand years past, with not so much as a timber to mark where it had stood. All that was left of the great stronghold of the First Men were three towers … three where there had once been twenty, if the taletellers could be believed.

The Gatehouse Tower looked sound enough, and even boasted a few feet of standing wall to either side of it. The Drunkard's Tower, off in the bog where the south and west walls had once met, leaned like a man about to spew a bellyful of wine into the gutter. And the tall, slender Children's Tower, where legend said the children of the forest had once called upon their nameless gods to send the hammer of the waters, had lost half its crown. It looked as if some great beast had taken a bite out of the crenellations along the tower top, and spit the rubble across the bog. All three towers were green with moss. A tree was growing out between the stones on the north side of the Gatehouse Tower, its gnarled limbs festooned with ropy white blankets of ghostskin.

"Gods have mercy," Ser Brynden exclaimed when he saw what lay before them. "This is Moat Cailin? It's no more than a—"

 

Here is the Moat Cailin with the Hammer reference. 

Quote

 

Many maesters find Cassander's arguments plausible and have come to accept his views. But whether the Breaking took place in a single night, or over the course of centuries, there can be no doubt that it occurred; the Stepstones and the Broken Arm of Dorne give mute but eloquent testimony to its effects. There is also much to suggest that the Sea of Dorne was once an inland freshwater sea, fed by mountain streams and much smaller than it is today, until the narrow sea burst its bounds and drowned the salt marshes that lay between.

Even if we accept that the old gods broke the Arm of Dorne with the Hammer of the Waters, as the legends claim, the greenseers sang their song too late.

No more wanderers crossed to Westeros after the Breaking, it is true, for the First Men were no seafarers...but so many of their forebears had already made the crossing that they outnumbered the dwindling elder races almost three to one by the time the lands were severed, and that disparity only grew in the centuries that followed, for the women of the First Men brought forth sons and daughters with much greater frequency than the females of the elder races. And thus the children and the giants faded, whilst the race of men spread and multiplied and claimed the fields and forests for their own, raising villages and forts and kingdoms.

 

Here is a relation to Dorne. Both events look to have been caused by an earthquake, which caused a tsunami. I think that the "Hammer part was the use of water to impact on the earth and break it. 

[Black Crow]

I'm very much of the opinion that there was just the one Hammer. There are differing stories about it but not one suggestion that there were two.

[Matthew.]

1 hour ago, Feather Crystal said:

The Rainwood isn't anywhere near the Neck. It's located south of Storms End and Griffin's Roost in the Stormlands. The Rainwood is part of the primeval forest that includes the Kingswood. It was once a forest inhabited by the Children. A woods witch known as the Green Queen reigned there for a generation, but after the Andal invasion the Children disappeared from that area. I'm assuming it's so wet and green, because it butts up against the red mountains of Dorne, causing any storms to drop their moisture before moving over the mountain range.

I know it's not near the Neck--it is, however, near Cape Wrath and the Sea of Dorne, in the area that ostensibly faces the "sea god's wrath" that inspired the tale of Durran Godsgrief; regardless of whether or not they were separate attempts, the CotF's magic is still credited with breaking the Arm of Dorne, which is presumably the reason it had been floated on prior pages that that particular cave might be the aftermath of the "breaking of the Arm" ritual.

In any case, I was posting the fuller text to contextualize the comment that the place "belonged to the children of the forest;" for anyone who hadn't read that chapter recently (or read it at all) that comment becomes much more clear in relation to the area as a whole, rather than just the specific cavern in the quote.
 

1 hour ago, Janneyc1 said:

Here is a relation to Dorne. Both events look to have been caused by an earthquake, which caused a tsunami. I think that the "Hammer part was the use of water to impact on the earth and break it. 

This is the way I read it as well; 'singers of the song of earth,' using their magic to induce earthquakes, which in turn results in tsunamis.

[Melifeather]

1 hour ago, Janneyc1 said:

 

Here is the Moat Cailin with the Hammer reference. 

Here is a relation to Dorne. Both events look to have been caused by an earthquake, which caused a tsunami. I think that the "Hammer part was the use of water to impact on the earth and break it. 

I still am of the opinion that there was only one hammer. The two passages are for a single event. The Children could have called it down from Moat Caitlin with the intended target being the Arm of Dorne. 

The caves in the Rainwood as well as the Neck must have flooded from the after shock.

[Tucu]

Luwin and Theon make it sound like the sinking of the Neck was a separate event from the breaking of the Arm of Dorne:

Quote

"The histories say the crannogmen grew close to the children of the forest in the days when the greenseers tried to bring the hammer of the waters down upon the Neck. It may be that they have secret knowledge."

Quote

where legend said the children of the forest had once called down the hammer of the waters to break the lands of Westeros in two.

And this is the one from Yandel and the Arm of Dorne:

Quote

And so they did, gathering in their hundreds (some say on the Isle of Faces), and calling on their old gods with song and prayer and grisly sacrifice (a thousand captive men were fed to the weirwood, one version of the tale goes, whilst another claims the children used the blood of their own young). And the old gods stirred, and giants awoke in the earth, and all of Westeros shook and trembled. Great cracks appeared in the earth, and hills and mountains collapsed and were swallowed up. And then the seas came rushing in, and the Arm of Dorne was broken and shattered by the force of the water, until only a few bare rocky islands remained above the waves. The Summer Sea joined the narrow sea, and the bridge between Essos and Westeros vanished for all time.

One successful attempt to split Westeros from Essos and one failed attempt to split Westeros in two.

[Melifeather]

5 hours ago, Janneyc1 said:

 

Here is the Moat Cailin with the Hammer reference. 

Here is a relation to Dorne. Both events look to have been caused by an earthquake, which caused a tsunami. I think that the "Hammer part was the use of water to impact on the earth and break it. 

Is that second quote from the World Book?

[Melifeather]

3 hours ago, Tucu said:

Luwin and Theon make it sound like the sinking of the Neck was a separate event from the breaking of the Arm of Dorne:

And this is the one from Yandel and the Arm of Dorne:

One successful attempt to split Westeros from Essos and one failed attempt to split Westeros in two.

The first two quotes that you’ve attributed to Luwin and Theon are about the Neck, with the third from the World Book. 

I guess it depends upon if the reader accepts the World Book as canon, because the five books of ASOIAF appear to support only a single hammer of waters.

[Tucu]

18 minutes ago, Feather Crystal said:

The first two quotes that you’ve attributed to Luwin and Theon are about the Neck, with the third from the World Book. 

I guess it depends upon if the reader accepts the World Book as canon, because the five books of ASOIAF appear to support only a single hammer of waters.

Luwin talks about the breaking the Arm of Dorne; it doesn't call it the hammer of the waters but the description is similar to the one in the world book. This is from Bran VII in AGoT

Quote

"But some twelve thousand years ago, the First Men appeared from the east, crossing the Broken Arm of Dorne before it was broken. They came with bronze swords and great leathern shields, riding horses. No horse had ever been seen on this side of the narrow sea. No doubt the children were as frightened by the horses as the First Men were by the faces in the trees. As the First Men carved out holdfasts and farms, they cut down the faces and gave them to the fire. Horror-struck, the children went to war. The old songs say that the greenseers used dark magics to make the seas rise and sweep away the land, shattering the Arm, but it was too late to close the door. The wars went on until the earth ran red with blood of men and children both, but more children than men, for men were bigger and stronger, and wood and stone and obsidian make a poor match for bronze. Finally the wise of both races prevailed, and the chiefs and heroes of the First Men met the greenseers and wood dancers amidst the weirwood groves of a small island in the great lake called Gods Eye.

 

[JNR]

On 1/30/2019 at 11:49 AM, Matthew. said:

Unless we are setting the standard that the series has nothing further to elaborate upon regarding the CotF, despite there being at least two unpublished books, and living CotF only recently entering the narrative to expand our understanding of their culture, it seems flawed to dismiss new text instead of engaging with its potential implications.

Seriously, now.  When I say "never found elsewhere," what I mean is there is no instance of either

1) A stone column we know to have been made by the CotF, or

2) A decorative face carved into stone we know to have been made by the CotF

Certainly there's no instance of the combination.  The CotF seem to be all about nature, not architecture of this sort at all.

Of course some future book might suddenly reveal the CotF as having been interested in stone architecture, but only in such a limited way that it was never before brought up in canon.  Anything's possible.

Now, as to the idea that the stone columns are tree roots, and have faces put there by the CotF, here are my problems with that:

Quote

And all at once she found herself in another cavern, five times as big as the last one, surrounded by a forest of stone columns. Daemon Sand moved to her side and raised his torch. "Look how the stone's been shaped," he said. "Those columns, and the wall there. See them?"

"Faces," said Arianne. So many sad eyes, staring.

"This place belonged to the children of the forest."

"A thousand years ago."

First, I think Arianne and Daemon know a stone column when they see one.  They're not going to be fooled by tree roots into seeing stone columns unless by some miracle, those tree roots are perfectly straight and perfectly vertical and made of stone (as stone columns are).

Second, there's also a wall of stone.  That goes far beyond anything that could be explained as a weirwood or connected to a weirwood, as far as I can see, and is a great example of the sort of stone architecture we never see in Bloodraven's cave (though who knows what future books will include).

And finally, I am very skeptical that either Arianne or Daemon are any sort of authorities on the CotF or their places.  Especially given that remark that this place belonged to them "a thousand years ago," which I think we can all see is ludicrously recent to be true.

[JNR]

5 hours ago, Tucu said:

One successful attempt to split Westeros from Essos and one failed attempt to split Westeros in two.

I couldn't agree more.  I've been making this same point in Heresy for years.

[Tucu]

14 minutes ago, JNR said:

Seriously, now.  When I say "never found elsewhere," what I mean is there is no instance of either

1) A stone column we know to have been made by the CotF, or

2) A decorative face carved into stone we know to have been made by the CotF

Certainly there's no instance of the combination.  The CotF seem to be all about nature, not architecture of this sort at all.

Of course some future book might suddenly reveal the CotF as having been interested in stone architecture, but only in such a limited way that it was never before brought up in canon.  Anything's possible.

Now, as to the idea that the stone columns are tree roots, and have faces put there by the CotF, here are my problems with that:

First, I think Arianne and Daemon know a stone column when they see one.  They're not going to be fooled by tree roots into seeing stone columns unless by some miracle, those tree roots are perfectly straight and perfectly vertical and made of stone (as stone columns are).

Second, there's also a wall of stone.  That goes far beyond anything that could be explained as a weirwood or connected to a weirwood, as far as I can see, and is a great example of the sort of stone architecture we never see in Bloodraven's cave (though who knows what future books will include).

And finally, I am very skeptical that either Arianne or Daemon are any sort of authorities on the CotF or their places.  Especially given that remark that this place belonged to them "a thousand years ago," which I think we can all see is ludicrously recent to be true.

I picture the roots/columns as a subterranean (and magical) Angkor Wat. Here are a couple of photos so you can see what I am imagining:

Roots/Columns

Face in the roots

 

[Black Crow]

7 hours ago, Feather Crystal said:

The first two quotes that you’ve attributed to Luwin and Theon are about the Neck, with the third from the World Book. 

I guess it depends upon if the reader accepts the World Book as canon, because the five books of ASOIAF appear to support only a single hammer of waters.

I'm still with you on this one and I think that the apparent differences stem from the different viewpoints. There was no CNN in those days. When the cataclysm happened those in the south watched the breaching of the landbridge, while those in the north were far more concerned by the flooding of the Neck or what became the Neck. In the face of the catastrophe they naturally assumed it was directed at them and knew little or nothing of what else was happening.