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Weirdwood tree seeds?


Falcon2909

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On ‎3‎/‎21‎/‎2019 at 2:46 AM, Falcon2909 said:

I've never seen it mentioned in the series but how do weirwood trees grow? Do they grow out of trees? Are the weirwoods part of a single organism spanning Westeros ? (they're all connected; i forgot what the word for this is)

 

On ‎3‎/‎21‎/‎2019 at 8:06 AM, Legitimate_Bastard said:

Here - they exist.

 

 

On ‎3‎/‎22‎/‎2019 at 1:54 PM, Three-Fingered Pete said:

 

Are you referring to a super-organism?

Like that giant fungus in the northwest?  There's a giant network of roots underground.  What shows on the surface is only a fraction of the organism.

And they don't require the light.  "Some of the strongest trees grow in dark places." 

 

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On 4/3/2019 at 10:30 PM, The Fattest Leech said:

Yeah, no, sorry. GRRM has been very clear about how HPL influenced him and why, and what he does and doesn't use. He is not writing 2 million+ wordcount precursor to the Yog-Sothothian mythos. Plus, are you familiar with the work of Zelazny, Tuttle, Tolkien, Heinlein, etc? Those authors also play huge roles in GRRM's influence, but I don't think he is plagerizing them- he is reworking his influences and using them as his own. Besides, why wouldn't GRRM just come out and tell us he is writing Yog-Sothothian mythos? That wouldn't be worthy of a secret. And why would it take 20+ years, especially if the groundwork is already established? And why would the HPL influences only show up in small doses in certain plotlines rather than all over? 

I did not say that I thought ASOIAF was a precursor to the Lovecraft mythos, but rather the true story behind what became the Lovecraft mythos (scraps and fragments of a real event turned into a mythology)

But, just for fun, lets run down the list--and while we do so lets ponder, if you or I wrote a novel with this many names and places from another author (e.g. from Tolkien), would readers be justified in thinking it was something beyond homage? 

In Lovecraft's The Whisperer in the Darkness and he is naming off the Old Gods and Bran is listed among them:

"Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, R’lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng, the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L’mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the Magnum Innominandum"

And right after Bran is the "Great Not-to-be-Named One"--and Melisandre believes Bran is the Champion of the Great Other--who cannot be named.

I have said before the Bloodraven in his cave parallels Akeley from the Whisperer in Darkness, Bran calls Bloodraven a "whisperer in darkness," and they want to put brains in jars, uploading your consciousness to the weirwood net is similar to putting a brain in a jar.  Akeley is dead and is replaced with a puppet to entrap the protaganist.

From The Hound, in Leng there is a corpse-eating cult is whose sigil is a winged canine (Jojen says Bran is the winged wolf),   In ASOIAF at Leng there are caves with what sound like greenseers in them, and CoTF-like people with cat eyes, and Bran eats corpses on his way to Bloodraven's cave.

 

The Weirwood is a combination of all the gods from Lovecraft:

From Call of Cthulhu, a polypous white god with luminous eyes being worshiped at a secret lake in a swamp, and bat-winged devils come out of caves at midnight to worship him, he communicates with people through dreams.  fungus islands

The First Men formed a secret cult that worshiped Cthulhu: 

Quote

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.

Cthulhu came down from dark stars, and lives "under the sea" (in the weirwood network?).  Riding on a comet's tail is mentioned.  Cthulhu is compared to Polyphemus, who was a one-eyed giant who lived in a cave and violated guest right and ate humans, Odyseus escaped him by being "no-one" and one of Polyphemus' sons is Illyrius.

In the opening chapter of Game of Thrones a man sees an eldritch horror (old/cold gods) and goes insane.

The concept of the Old Gods sleeping and waking when the "stars are right"--the weirwoods were sleeping and woke up when the Red Comet arrived. "Tell him that the old powers are waking, that he faces giants and wargs and worse. Tell him that the trees have eyes again."

Cthulhu is described as being half octopus, half dragon, and half human.  Bloodraven is a dragon/human, and the weirwood shares imagery with an octopus (Arya "A tangle of roots and limbs poked up out of the water as it came, like the reaching arms of a great kraken.") 

Cthulhu/Euron.  "Euron was no longer human. He seemed more squid than man, a monster fathered by a kraken of the deep, his face a mass of writhing tentacles." " A tall and twisted thing with one black eye and ten long arms, sailing on a sea of blood."

The Ironborn slogan "What is dead may never die" parallels the line from the Necronomicon "That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die."

Seastone chair is a Cthulhu idol

Secret/forbidden book held under lock and key at the university (Necromicon, Blood and Fire/Barth's books)

 

The creature from Colour out of Space, arrived as an asteroid and lives in a well and sucks the life out of living beings, and spreads a grey plague.  It has spread to the tree roots and causes the trees to sway ominously without wind.  (people named Bolton, Merwin, Gardner)

" Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. " directly parallels what Bloodraven says to Bran " "For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak. And the weirwood … a thousand human years are a moment to a weirwood, and through such gates you and I may gaze into the past."   The Black Gate is a weirwood, and other doors are made out of weirwood, the Moon Door, the door Drogon gnaws on in the House of the Undying, the doors of the House of Black and White.  The weirwood is literally the gate.

Already mentioned the Enchanted Forest with extraterrestrial proto-weirwoods that has a vast cave network underneath it, shade of the evening/weirwood paste drink.  In that story the bholes are essentially weirwood roots (white worm tentacles in the dark caves), the zoogs are CoTF, the night-gaunts are harpies (and they are faceless), the Shantak birds are dragons.

Black Goat of the Woods (depicted as a weirwood) and as a polypous carnivorous alien that lives in a cave and requires human sacrifice.  The Black Goat of the Woods in Qohor requires blood sacrifice and lives underground, ("cohors" means "attendants" in Latin, they are attending to the Black Goat) has albino children with red eyes.

In Dreams of the Witch House, Nyarlathotep is completely black and has goat hooves, he associates with a crone and a large predatory rat that eats children, both of whom visit people in dreams. 

Nyarlathotep in the Haunter in the Dark can only come out when it is pitch black and he is living in the steeple of the Church of Starry Wisdom.  ASOIAF has the Church of Starry Wisdom and they pray to something in the night sky, and their first priest caused the Long Night.

In The Shunned House, there is a giant/titan subterranean white tree root/fungus creature sucking the life out of people, mysterious white fungus that glows in the dark like the Black Gate, evil pale grass the parallels ghost grass, people receiving scary dreams that drain the life out of them.  Maybe greenseers are sickly and weak because the dreams are sucking their lifeforce out?  

In Beyond the Walls of Sleep, a immortal blue-eyed cosmic entity takes over people's bodies through their dreams in Dreamland.

Shadow over Innsmouth, and there is literally a Shadow over Asshai

In The Outer Gods, the gods appear as a mist, "And above the mists on Hatheg-Kla earth’s gods sometimes dance reminiscently; for they know they are safe, and love to come from unknown Kadath in ships of cloud and play in the olden way . . . The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth’s gods."  The white walkers appear as a mist, and the shadows come to dance when there is an eclipse.
 

In ASOIAF there is a destroyed magnificent kingdom of Sarnath of the Tall Towers.

In The Doom that Came to Sarnath, "Lofty and amazing were the seventeen tower-like temples of Sarnath, fashioned of a bright multi-coloured stone not known elsewhere. A full thousand cubits high stood the greatest among them, wherein the high-priests dwelt with a magnificence scarce less than that of the kings."

Huge walls, "Of polished desert-quarried marble were its walls, in height 300 cubits and in breadth 75, so that chariots might pass each other as men drave them along the top."

parallels the walls in Volantis "all contained within the great oval of the Black Walls raised by the Freehold of Valyria in the first flush of its youthful expansion. Two hundred feet tall, and so thick that six four-horse chariots can race along their battlements side by side"

Sarnath had roads paved with onyx, like Dragon Roads of Valyria?

In Lovecraft, the Grey stone city of Ib was inhabited by fish people.   In ASOIAF, in Ib "they make their homes in caves or houses of grey stone . .   Bold fishermen, they travel the northern seas widely in search of cod, herring, whitefish, and eel, but it is as whalers that they are best known in the wider world."

Nearby the Thousand Islands has real fish people, that Ib tried to colonize.

In ASOIAF, Ib fought Sarnor "and history tells of several Ibbenese attempts to seize control of the mouth of the Sarne, attempts that brought the hairy men into bloody conflict with the Sarnori sister cities Saath and Sarys."

After Sarnor is destroyed it becomes a swamp infested with water lizards, mysterious green statue of Bokrug the water lizard.

 

Kadath is in a region of permanent darkness, in the Cold Waste, in ASOIAF K'dath is in the Grey Waste, which I think is under the Shadow.  Riding zebras somewhere near Kadath, the Jogos Nhai ride zorses near K'dath.

Carcossa, "in the city Carcosa on the Hidden Sea, dwells in exile a sorcerer lord who claims to be the sixty-ninth yellow emperor, from a dynasty fallen for a thousand years."  King In Yellow/Yellow Silken mask guy from Kadath who dwells alone in a dark monastery in a dark city.

I think the colossal mountain with the onyx castle on top that is the home of the Great Ones from Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is the Mother of Mountains/the Shadow.

Leng/Leng

Yian/Yeen?

Rhinar/Rhonar?

Yig, the snake god from the Curse of Yig, weirwood roots are nest of pale snakes

Subterranean Stygian sea under polar icecap, from At the Mountains of Madness, underground Stygian sea in Bloodraven's cave in the polar north.

N'gai/n'kai--N'Kai was a subterranean realm in The Mound, home of the Toad God.  In ASOIAF "Nefer, chief city of the kingdom of N'ghai, hemmed in by towering chalk cliffs and perpetually shrouded in fog. When seen from the harbor, Nefer appears to be no more than a small town, but it is said that nine-tenths of the city is beneath the ground. For that reason, travelers call Nefer the Secret City. By any name, the city enjoys a sinister reputation as a haunt of necromancers and torturers."

Toad god on the Isle of Toads is Tsathoggua, and mysterious statues of bizarre forgotten gods
 

Church of Starry Wisdom = Cult of Starry Wisdom that worships the Shining Trapezohedron which is the Bloodstone

Nephren-Ka is the Bloodstone Emperor:

"The Black Pharaoh, an insane pharaoh who secured the Shining Trapezohedron for Egypt, but after being convinced by the resident Haunter of the Dark, he had a lightless temple created to hold the stone and the deity within. That temple became a center of abominable happenings, and the rites carried out there were so monstrous the temple was destroyed and the Pharaoh's name was struck from all records and monuments. The Pharaoh was controlled by the cruel god Nyarlathotep, of whom the Haunter of the Dark was likely an avatar"

Lightless temple is Stygai at the Shadow's heart

Bloodstone Emperor uses the Bloodstone to cause the Long Night, summons the Others to attack.

Nephren-Ka sounds like Neferion, who was involved in the Long Night somehow.

Nyarlathotep can only come out in complete darkness, can appear as a mist, sometimes has no face, assembles an army of followers and collapses civiliation.

Spoiler

 And shadowed on a screen, I saw hooded forms amidst ruins, and yellow evil faces peering from behind fallen monuments. And I saw the world battling against blackness; against the waves of destruction from ultimate space; whirling, churning; struggling around the dimming, cooling sun. . . .
PixelClear.gifI believe we felt something coming down from the greenish moon, for when we began to depend on its light we drifted into curious involuntary formations and seemed to know our destinations though we dared not think of them. Once we looked at the pavement and found the blocks loose and displaced by grass, with scarce a line of rusted metal to shew where the tramways had run. And again we saw a tram-car, lone, windowless, dilapidated, and almost on its side. When we gazed around the horizon, we could not find the third tower by the river, and noticed that the silhouette of the second tower was ragged at the top. Then we split up into narrow columns, each of which seemed drawn in a different direction. One disappeared in a narrow alley to the left, leaving only the echo of a shocking moan. Another filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad. My own column was sucked toward the open country, and presently felt a chill which was not of the hot autumn; for as we stalked out on the dark moor, we beheld around us the hellish moon-glitter of evil snows. Trackless, inexplicable snows, swept asunder in one direction only, where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls. The column seemed very thin indeed as it plodded dreamily into the gulf. I lingered behind, for the black rift in the green-litten snow was frightful, and I thought I had heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into the sightless vortex of the unimaginable.
PixelClear.gifScreamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.

"Nyarlathotep... from the world, of Seven Suns to his earth place, the Wood of N’gai, whither may come Him Who Is Not to be Named. . . . There shall be abundance of those from the Black Goat of the Woods, the Goat with the Thousand Young"

 

Guy named Stark (To Clear the Earth) or Starkweather (At the Mountains of Madness) exploring the polar icecap and discovering ancient horrors.

What the 3EC shows Bran in the heart of winter directly parallels this poem from Fungi of Yuggoth:

Spoiler

XV. Antarktos

Deep in my dream the great bird whispered queerly
Of the black cone amid the polar waste;
Pushing above the ice-sheet lone and drearly,
By storm-crazed aeons battered and defaced.
Hither no living earth-shapes take their courses,
And only pale auroras and faint suns
Glow on that pitted rock, whose primal sources
Are guessed at dimly by the Elder Ones.

If men should glimpse it, they would merely wonder
What tricky mound of Nature’s build they spied;
But the bird told of vaster parts, that under
The mile-deep ice-shroud crouch and brood and bide.
God help the dreamer whose mad visions shew
Those dead eyes set in crystal gulfs below!

 

Pnath/Naath

malevolent Fish people everywhere, they wear masks/waxen masks to hide their fishiness

Dagon and the Deep Ones

 

Strange black stone, possibly a planet built entirely of black stone, the Lion of Night who sits on an ebony throne. 

In Colour Out of Space he uses the phrase "strange stone" and "Strange Stone" is one of the Maester's books about fused black stone.

The Silver Key is how you get into dreamland, the weirwood is how you get into dreamland.

The concept of Black Fire (To Clear the Earth)

 

Body swapping sorcerer cheating death from The Thing on the Doorstep, that is what Varamyr tried to do

Crystal is ice that froze too hard, from The Challenge from Beyond, that story features a mind-swapping device that is launched out into space to take over alien planets, and that story also has a Red God

Reanimated dead used as slaves, from the Mound, people who broke their oaths being forced to be Sentinels for eternity--parallels the 79 Sentinels at the Wall.  Serpent people from destroyed Valusia = reptilian people from destroyed Valyria

Black Corpse city from He, parallels Asshai.

Using the word "charnal"

 

And I haven't even read half of Lovecraft's catalogue, let alone the expended universe. 

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On 3/23/2019 at 6:00 AM, Falcon2909 said:

What if Leaf was lying? (you know, cus its Jojen Paste)

Nope, Leaf speaks the True Tongue. CotF don't lie. They might omit information, keep secrets, but they won't lie. Notice, that Leaf does not comment on what the "blood" is though.

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On 4/5/2019 at 5:35 PM, White Ravens said:

I think that the weirwoods are definitely trees.  They have all of the classic attributes of a deciduous tree including broad leaves and they produce seeds.  The wood of the weirwood is prized for making bows and there are examples of it being used to make tables, chairs, beds, doors and rafters.  In my mind they are linked to fungus below ground but are still in fact trees.

Agreed. A symbiosis with fungi, I can see. That's to be expected. But roots, bark, a stem of wooden texture, leaves, seed producing that's "tree".

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On 6/1/2019 at 3:03 PM, By Odin's Beard said:

I did not say that I thought ASOIAF was a precursor to the Lovecraft mythos, but rather the true story behind what became the Lovecraft mythos (scraps and fragments of a real event turned into a mythology)

And like I said before, why wouldn't GRRM just come out and tell us he is writing Yog-Sothothian mythos? That wouldn't be worthy of a secret. And why would it take 20+ years, especially if the groundwork is already established? And why would the HPL influences only show up in small doses in certain plotlines rather than all over? 

On 6/1/2019 at 3:03 PM, By Odin's Beard said:

But, just for fun, lets run down the list--and while we do so lets ponder, if you or I wrote a novel with this many names and places from another author (e.g. from Tolkien), would readers be justified in thinking it was something beyond homage?

If I was an author is such a world, then I would have to have permission of the estate to add to the world mythology/storybuilding. And in that case it would be officially added in to the collective, not hidden away for 20+ years for no reason at all. And if I started writing in this other universe without permission, I would be risking the hell out of a large lawsuit for plagiarism, or some legal variant of.

How familiar with other GRRM works are you? I am sure you can tell by now how many other authors are influences on GRRM from minor details (florian the fool from There Were Doors) to Shakespeare, Tolkien, Heinlein, Zelazny, etc... Not to mention that actual real world events that GRRM said influenced his story. The real world global civilizations. Why are you ignoring these other authors and the fact that GRRM says they (and many more) are all his influence but he takes it and makes it his own?

Finding these details from other authors/stories is like finding the golden easter eggs. A reader does not have to know that Cthulhu is to understand his series. It is written for all to read and it pleases many. The fun is when a fan that knows more about Gene Wolfe, or The Grateful Dead, or whoever, when these fans come together and share what they know about the fringe influences.

Quote

And I haven't even read half of Lovecraft's catalogue, let alone the expended universe. 

I attended Miskatonic light-years before becoming a GRRMspreader. I am well aware of these other stories and the details within, but they are by far the only ones that are in the story.

Why would Martin be withholding this info?

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Jesus, O'Beard!   

I can't read and digest all of that in one day, nor am I able to quote parts it without the whole brick of text turning blue on me.  So this will be done with a bunch of "Re: _____"  headers.

 

Re: under the sea + fungus 

That's it!  I always felt a lil' silly imagining essosi black weir trees and westerosi white weirs growing their roots under the sea until they touched at the midpoint, but fungus growth can accomplish that much more realistically!   That's it.  Patchface is all fungussed.   The hammer of the waters could be the fungus contracting its ocean floor muscles to move earthquake plates and bring tsunami.  A leviathan could be zombified for the finale to rise upon Asha's command to take down Euron's flotilla, etc.  The fungus would just use the night king trick of raising the dead without a night king middle man is all. 

The midfloor of the narrow sea may contain a ridgeline of slapfighting weir fungusses from both continents that's inflamed and acts as the big mother brain, tearing it asunder may be like ripping a human's two brain hemispheres apart, perhaps crippling said weir entity.   An army of submerged dead on the seafloor may be capable of visiting such damage upon the true enemy, the fungus network.  Well?....Are you not fascinated???

 

So Beard you're saying that the trees = Ice.  (The victory of Fire's dragons would come from burning the weir forest in total?  The Others are merely the children's creation, and the children are deeply under weir influence, so it all comes back to the trees.  So in essence Melisandre was right to peg the greenseers as her main enemy, her opposite number on the Ice side).

In essos i can picture the weir turned dark from oily black stone contamination, our weirs broke the land bridge to quarantine essos & the spread of dark-barked warlock weirs, and then dragons did burn most of the trees on the eastern continent as part of the victory over weir/warlock/BSE tradition.  Part of the ascendence of more modern dragonlords.  (Not based on any evidence whatsoever, just fits as a historical streamlining!)

 

Re: Bran the lovecraft deity, eating Bran, praying to Bran, and Bran eating corpses- -

Hey, corpse eating may get real popular.  If the flash freeze comes and takes most of the population, and there's no food, those bodies are well preserved meals, the salvation of humanity during the long night maybe.  And Rickon will show people how to eat them and overcome the stigma.  Bran is just ahead of the trend is all.   My father worships bran, and eats him daily in the form of All Bran cereal.  He is a champion of bran because it returns his petrified weir bowels to life again.

 

Re:  brain jars, Merlin's Magic Prison, starry wisdom cult, 'The old ones are gone now into the earth and under the sea', and Bloodstone Emperor- -

What's so bad about your brain being immortalized in a jar by AT&T  DVR fungus?   That's hot.  Stop fighting it.

But if the fungus has everyone's echoes contained in it, including the wisdom of the ancients, and the fungus is most densely packed and exposed under the sea, then i can totally see why the starry wisdom cult has its temples by the shores to be close to that motherlode.  Do they do an equivalent of pearl diving, only for pearls of dark wisdom found in bundles of fungus, I wonder?  Also...   

 I've heard the theory that Ashara imprisoned Bloodraven in a tree ala Merlin, but what if Raven is fine with it and the real imprisoned Merlin of this story is the Bloodstone Emperor?!?!?!  Trapped in the heart of winter?  Or at the bottom of the sea?  And thanks to how The North Remembers but So Does the Fungus,  there's a real chance the starry cult could track down the Bloodstone Emperor node of the weir library and access, release, resurrect, or be demon possessed by his mind?!?!     And if Marwyn is one of these guys.... i hope he's just spying on them and not dreaming Emperor dreams!

 

Re:  grey plague & "maybe the greenseers are sickly because their dreams are the trees sucking the life out of them!"

So greenseeing isn't a gift so much as they were tree-infected from birth, and more and more people will become susceptible to tree-feeding as the trees grow in power, until in the end times everyone will be soul sucked like that.  To me, that makes more sense as a westeros plague than greyscale.  The extreme cold supposedly slows the weir , keeps their growth in check, right?   Then it should be the same for fungus-based greyscale now that all westeros is snow covered.

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11 hours ago, The Fattest Leech said:

And like I said before, why wouldn't GRRM just come out and tell us he is writing Yog-Sothothian mythos? That wouldn't be worthy of a secret. And why would it take 20+ years, especially if the groundwork is already established? And why would the HPL influences only show up in small doses in certain plotlines rather than all over? 

If I was an author is such a world, then I would have to have permission of the estate to add to the world mythology/storybuilding. And in that case it would be officially added in to the collective, not hidden away for 20+ years for no reason at all. And if I started writing in this other universe without permission, I would be risking the hell out of a large lawsuit for plagiarism, or some legal variant of.

How familiar with other GRRM works are you? I am sure you can tell by now how many other authors are influences on GRRM from minor details (florian the fool from There Were Doors) to Shakespeare, Tolkien, Heinlein, Zelazny, etc... Why are you ignoring these other authors and the fact that GRRM says they (and many more) are all his influence but he takes it and makes it his own?

Finding these details from other authors/stories is like finding the golden easter eggs. A reader does not have to know that Cthulhu is to understand his series. It is written for all to read and it pleases many. The fun is when a fan that knows more about Gene Wolfe, or The Grateful Dead, or whoever, when these fans come together and share what they know about the fringe influences.

I attended Miskatonic light-years before becoming a GRRMspreader. I am well aware of these other stories and the details within, but they are by far the only ones that are in the story.

Why would Martin be withholding this info?

All of Lovecraft's stuff is public domain, there are no copyrights on it. 

I have you to thank for turning me on to Dreamsongs, since you mentioned it to me it has become some of my favorite stuff.  I have read all of the 1000 worlds stuff (Laren Dorr, Sandkings, Greywater, Lya, Tuf, Dying of the Light, etc multiple times now, I have Windhaven, Fevre Dream, etc but haven't read them yet.  Just read Dying Earth (and some other Vance, Dragon Masters, Sons of the Tree) and Tarn House.  Started Silmarillion the other day.  Read Ellison's Deathbird last night (and I saw a lot of Bran in it).  Read a lot of mythology.  I have a mountain of books to read.  Read a lot of Shakespeare back in day, read some Heinlein.  

I have spent a lot of time recently just reading latin and gaelic translation dictionaries (I read your essay about Saagael, sgail means "shadow or eclipse" and I think they are worshiping the Others in Lys, and and Bakkalon is baculum means "staff, scepter, or penis bone" I think the Black Demon-Reaver Sword is Ice and pale child is an Other (Hother Umber is called Whoresbane, because of a giant metaphorical penis, and his brother is Mors = death, and Hother is another name for Hodr from Norse myth, and Hodor is a giant and "Between his legs, his manhood swung long and heavy" and Osha says about the giants' deadly penis: "It goes harder on the women they catch. The men are so big they'll rip a maid apart before they get her with child." and Hother was said to have disemboweled a whore.)). 

I was never really into fiction growing up so have a lot of catching up to do, give me some more recommendations, I am all ears.  I really need to read Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Wheel of Time, Dune, and Elric.

I had never read any Lovecraft til last year and I focused on it heavily because I kept finding more clues, (ipod says I have listened to The Doom that Came to Sarnath 21 times)

 

To answer your question, Lovecraft mythos is supposed to be set on our Earth in our timeline to add some magic/mystery/wonder to a dreary world, and that is the big reveal that George is keeping under wraps, that the events of ASOIAF are supposed to be in our timeline, it is just like in The Way of Cross and Dragon, George is a Liar like Lukyan.  He was slowly ramping up magic to make the world more realistic, just like Lovecraft does, for most of the story Cthulhu is asleep, dreaming, in the third act humans wake him up.  And the big reveal is that everyone dies in the end, magic and dragons are eradicated, global cataclysmic flood wipes out civilization, but a few people live to restart civilization without magic and god.  If we knew up front that everyone dies in the end, it might diminish engagement for some people.

For an upcoming post I have analyzed all the references to stars, constellations, and planets in the book and found that George literally describes images out the Audubon Field Guide of the Night Sky for his night sky constellation passages (and the guy who did the sky maps for it is named Tirion).  I have figured out why Mars is called the Thief, and it has to do with the apparent retrograde motion of Mars, Mars being further out from the sun and with a slower orbit than Earth as we approach Mars and pass by it, it does something odd, viewed over successive nights in the sky it appears to be going one direction, then halts, and reverses direction.  (What the astronomers used to describe as epicycles).  When this happens every 15 years or so with the constellation Virgo, Mars approachs her from the west, changes direction in her constellation and they move off together.  Mars “steals” her.  (With the other constellations you could say he looks like a pickpocket, who sneaks up and takes something and then runs away.).

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1 hour ago, By Odin's Beard said:

All of Lovecraft's stuff is public domain, there are no copyrights on it. 

The Lovecraft lore has two "lists". Those stories written by HPL, and those that aren't. Hardcore Purists only regard the HPL stories as canon. Less rigorous purists regard the stories written by HPL and his accepted authors as canon. Some still consider what Derleth contributed as simply semi-canon. Still some do not even want to recognize Cthylla as part of the lore or pantheon. It is tricky and while "anyone" can write in this open world, to be considered as part of canon lore, there are steps you should follow (to be brief about it). I find it hard to accept that someone like Martin, who created the Thousand Worlds universe and speaks against fanfiction, is taking so long to add almost 2 million words (by ASOIAF and all supplements end) to a universe not created by him.

I say this with nerd love, by the way. I do. During my measly amount of time on this forum I have seen crops of select fandoms come and go. There is the Norse brigade; this is all just a retelling of Ragnarok. The Poetically Historic coffee drinkin', finger snappers say this is strictly new Shakespeare, or new Edwardian, or new Rome, etc. And then there is the Egyptian side of it; not just the gods and myths of that culture, but that the incest makes it totes cool/acceptable (without asking why?). Then the Society of Secret SciFi'ers who claim this is all secret scifi because Martin once wrote a lot of scifi (and apparently can't write other sub-genres :dunno:) All make very good points (except the secret scifi'ers), but no one is totally correct. It is more of an overlapping quilt. Some here, some there, a little of each.

I tell ya. I think we need a magical, talking sorting-turtle to organize this fandom.

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I have you to thank for turning me on to Dreamsongs, since you mentioned it to me it has become some of my favorite stuff.  I have read all of the 1000 worlds stuff (Laren Dorr, Sandkings, Greywater, Lya, Tuf, Dying of the Light, etc multiple times now, I have Windhaven, Fevre Dream, etc but haven't read them yet.  Just read Dying Earth (and some other Vance, Dragon Masters, Sons of the Tree) and Tarn House.  Started Silmarillion the other day.  Read Ellison's Deathbird last night (and I saw a lot of Bran in it).

You are absolutely welcome.

That is a fantastic list of books you have read so far.

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  Read a lot of mythology.

This is also a great thing to have in general because it works across all fantasy (the entire genre and all its subs). Not just the myths themselves, but how or why they were created in the first place. How much are literal, how much are symbolic?

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  I have a mountain of books to read.

Same here. As much as I have read, and still read, the pile of "to read" grows exponentially faster than I can keep up with :)

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  Read a lot of Shakespeare back in day, read some Heinlein.  

I have spent a lot of time recently just reading latin and gaelic translation dictionaries (I read your essay about Saagael, sgail means "shadow or eclipse" and I think they are worshiping the Others in Lys, and and Bakkalon is baculum means "staff, scepter, or penis bone" I think the Black Demon-Reaver Sword is Ice and pale child is an Other (Hother Umber is called Whoresbane, because of a giant metaphorical penis, and his brother is Mors = death, and Hother is another name for Hodr from Norse myth, and Hodor is a giant and "Between his legs, his manhood swung long and heavy" and Osha says about the giants' deadly penis: "It goes harder on the women they catch. The men are so big they'll rip a maid apart before they get her with child." and Hother was said to have disemboweled a whore.)). 

Awesome. This is good stuff. Martin has a lot of penis playwords in several of his stories. Another example is Willie Flambeaux.

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I was never really into fiction growing up so have a lot of catching up to do, give me some more recommendations, I am all ears.  I really need to read Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Wheel of Time, Dune, and Elric.

You are working on it and that's what matters. Trust me, when you find that next book, and after all you have read so far, you will start to recognize the basic patterning of fantasy, and then you will start to question just how much of what Martin is trying to undo. It is like Tetris, but with with words, and sometimes in reverse.

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I had never read any Lovecraft til last year and I focused on it heavily because I kept finding more clues, (ipod says I have listened to The Doom that Came to Sarnath 21 times)

It's good shyte. I have the HPL stuff on audible by Finn J.D. John when I want a listen (and lots on the HPL and his real life itself), but I rather prefer the HorrorBabble narration style and voice. I think I have listened to Shadow over Innsmouth about ten++ times here.

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To answer your question, Lovecraft mythos is supposed to be set on our Earth in our timeline to add some magic/mystery/wonder to a dreary world, and that is the big reveal that George is keeping under wraps, that the events of ASOIAF are supposed to be in our timeline, it is just like in The Way of Cross and Dragon, George is a Liar like Lukyan.  He was slowly ramping up magic to make the world more realistic, just like Lovecraft does, for most of the story Cthulhu is asleep, dreaming, in the third act humans wake him up.  And the big reveal is that everyone dies in the end, magic and dragons are eradicated, global cataclysmic flood wipes out civilization, but a few people live to restart civilization without magic and god.  If we knew up front that everyone dies in the end, it might diminish engagement for some people.

Still, I disagree that ASOIAF is the origin story to the HPL world. There is an SSM or interview out there where Martin says that 'Planetos' is not our world. I can't find it, but only had a minute to look for it. What he does do in many other cases is he make sit apparent that our Earth and 'Planetos' are not one in the same (and Planetos is not part of Thousand Worlds universe, either;)).

Q: [What is the cycle of a year? Why do they count years when seasons are strange?]

GRRM: Twelve moon tuns to a year, as on earth. Even on our earth, years have nothing to do with the seasons, or with the cycles of the moon. A year is a measure of a solar cycle, of how long it takes the earth to make one complete revolution around the sun. The same is true for the world of Westeros. Seasons do not come into it.

Yes, Martin did say that magic will be increasing (but for how long?) and that women in power will also be increasing. Coincidence? Is this magic everywhere, or just in these powerful women? Only TWOW will tell.

ADDING: again, I cannot find the exact quote because I only had half a minute to search, but the premise about women he often states as noted here in this SSM comment:

  • He likes writing Arianne Martell and Asha Greyjoy and again made the "the women are taking over" statement.
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For an upcoming post I have analyzed all the references to stars, constellations, and planets in the book and found that George literally describes images out the Audubon Field Guide of the Night Sky for his night sky constellation passages (and the guy who did the sky maps for it is named Tirion).  I have figured out why Mars is called the Thief, and it has to do with the apparent retrograde motion of Mars, Mars being further out from the sun and with a slower orbit than Earth as we approach Mars and pass by it, it does something odd, viewed over successive nights in the sky it appears to be going one direction, then halts, and reverses direction.  (What the astronomers used to describe as epicycles).  When this happens every 15 years or so with the constellation Virgo, Mars approachs her from the west, changes direction in her constellation and they move off together.  Mars “steals” her.  (With the other constellations you could say he looks like a pickpocket, who sneaks up and takes something and then runs away.).

Do it. There have been many across forum time that have dabbled in the stars of ASOIAF and how they are drawn from our world.

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9 hours ago, The Mother of The Others said:

 An army of submerged dead on the seafloor may be capable of visiting such damage upon the true enemy, the fungus network.  Well?....Are you not fascinated???

I am.  I agree with almost everything you wrote, with one note, cutting down the trees doesn't actually kill the network.  They could cut down every tree and the network would survive.  There is something going on with wells of mystical power.  The Black Gate is down a well, in Norse mythology Yggdrasil has three magical wells that water the world tree, the creature in The Color out of Space lived in a well, and if Dorne is a metaphor for the weirwood network:

"Beneath the burning sun of Dorne, wealth was measured as much in water as in gold, so every well was zealously guarded. The well at Shandystone had gone dry a hundred years before, however, and its guardians had departed for some wetter place, abandoning their modest holdfast with its fluted columns and triple arches. Afterward the sands had crept back in to reclaim their own."

The castles are weirwood and they depend on a well, once the well dries up, the weirwood pulls up roots and flies away, like the creature from The Color out of Space.  When the Targs tried to invade Dorne all they found were empty castles with old people and children. 

From George's Guardians:

"the mud-pots, lying immobile in their great soft beds through the long slow centuries and, originally, the things you called Namorian men-of-war. The ancient native race has another term for those. They call them guardians."

Tentacled sea monster guarding a hive minded creature that lives for thousands of years that no-one recognizes as being sentient.

The flexing of weirwood roots can explain so much, earthquakes, tsunami, how to bring the wall down, I think the kraken will be weirwood roots that come to the surface, but I think Euron with control them. 

 

From the Queenmaker POV:

"Garin the Great," offered Drey, "the wonder of the Rhoyne."

"That's the one. He made Valyria tremble."

"They trembled."

garran means "grove" in Gaelic.  A grove of trees made Valyria tremble. (and Rhoyne is the river of time)

 

The World Book mentions three places that survived the Doom: Mantarys, Oros, and Tyria.

Mantari is Turkish for "mushroom, fungus" and whoever did the wiktionary entry (was it George?) posted a red and white mushroom picture for it.

Tyria in Finnish means "to screw up, to mess up"

And oro in Latin means "to pray, beseech" oros means "gold or worth your weight in gold"  Oreas is a mountain nymph, oris means "mouth" Ornus means "mountain ash tree" oros is also the name of a suit of cards from Spain depicted as a gold coin.  In swedish oro means "balance wheel for a clock, and worry, fear, unrest"

So, somebody (the faceless men) beseeched the fungus to mess up Valyria, and it collapsed/exploded into the sea.  The first letters from Mantarys, Oros, and Tyria, spell "Mot" the Semitic god of death.  And you know about my about the Mot/Mote/Motte in God's Eye theory. 

 

The shattering of the Arm of Dorne was the CoTF trying to stop the spread of contamination from Essos ("Above it floated a human heart, swollen and blue with corruption, yet still alive."), one of the islands in the Narrow Sea is Bloodstone.  And BSE is probably in Stygai a lightless temple with ghost grass growing in the Shadowlands nearby (metaphor for the Others)   .

 

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 6/3/2019 at 9:58 AM, TheThreeEyedCow said:

I think they're made out of people. :dunno:

 

I think each weirwood is physically a child of the forest.

-they're always described as blood and bone

-their leaves are described as hands. I've never seen a leaf that looked much like a hand.

-they have faces. They're assumed to be carved but nobody's ever carved a weirwood in the books(the free folk carved some other trees).

-though they're at the center of the religion of the old gods nobody's ever tried to replant them in the south

Concerning the "weirwood seed paste", if they're made of the children then their blood could be considered the seed of the trees.

My theory is that they transformed themselves into weirwoods when they got old.

Consider the hammer of the waters. There are conflicting myths that it was done at Moat Cailin or the Isle of Faces. They sacrificed a lot of humans or their own kind.

I think that on the Isle of Faces they "sacrificed" a lot of their own people, turning them into weirwoods prematurely because humans were cutting down a lot of the weirwood net and they needed to replenish it to have the power to break the arm. That's why there are now so many weirwoods there.

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11 minutes ago, namesarehard said:

I think each weirwood is physically a child of the forest.

-they're always described as blood and bone

-their leaves are described as hands. I've never seen a leaf that looked much like a hand.

-they have faces. They're assumed to be carved but nobody's ever carved a weirwood in the books(the free folk carved some other trees).

-though they're at the center of the religion of the old gods nobody's ever tried to replant them in the south

Concerning the "weirwood seed paste", if they're made of the children then their blood could be considered the seed of the trees.

My theory is that they transformed themselves into weirwoods when they got old.

Consider the hammer of the waters. There are conflicting myths that it was done at Moat Calain or the Isle of Face. They sacrificed a lot of humans or their own kind.

I think that on the Isle of Faces they "sacrificed" a lot of their own people, turning them into weirwoods prematurely because humans were cutting down a lot of the weirwood net and they needed to replenish it to have the power to break the arm. That's why there are now so many weirwoods there.

Could be.. George uses a lot anthropomorphism re the trees so yeah. I'm thinking they're not really trees at all. My guess would be that the children naturally go into this state when they die. 

In other works, GRRM has used telekinetic lures to ensnare characters so I would also guess that this is how the tree's reached out to humans (or at least the FM) to begin with. The paste... it feels as if George is about to inform us on the more advanced aspects of what it means to be a Greenseer and to merge with the WWNet. But right now, it just feels like a whole lot of fanfic. It looks like the Three-Eyed-Crow is about to make way for the Winged Wolf, so to speak. So Winds should tell us more. I hope. 

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13 hours ago, TheThreeEyedCow said:

In other works, GRRM has used telekinetic lures to ensnare characters so I would also guess that this is how the tree's reached out to humans (or at least the FM) to begin with.

Yes, in Lya, the fungus lured Lya with the promise of a second life within the collective, but it was a lie, it just wanted to assimilate her psi powers, and her consciousness was obliterated as soon as she joined.--it tricked her into killing herself.

The Undying tried to trick Dany into allowing herself to be drained of her lifeforce.  And greenseers are lured to the caves and ensnared with the roots while they dream.  But further than that I think the weirwoods have engineered humans and CoTF to care for them and to feed them.

In Guardians, the hive-minded mud-pots genetically engineered servitor species to care for them and protect them:

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“For millennia beyond counting they have dwelled in tranquility and peace beneath the seas of this world. They are a slow, thoughtful, philosophic race, and they lived side by side in the billions, each linked with all the others, each an individual and each a part of the great racial whole. In a sense they were deathless, for all shared the experiences of each, and the death of one was as nothing. Experiences were few in the unchanging sea, however. For the most part their long lives are given over to abstract thought, to philosophy, to strange green dreams that neither you nor I can truly comprehend. They are silent musicians, one might say. Together they have woven great symphonies of dreams, and those songs go on and on.


“Before humanity came to Namor, they had had no real enemies for millions of years. Yet that had not always been the case. In the primordial beginnings of this wet world, the oceans teemed with creatures who relished the taste of the dreamers as much as you do. Even then, the race understood genetics, understood evolution. With their vast web of interwoven minds, they were able to manipulate the very stuff of life itself, more skillfully than any genetic engineers. And so they evolved their guardians, formidable predators with a biological imperative to protect those you call mud-pots. These were your men-of-war. From that time to this they guarded the beds, while the dreamers went back to their symphony of thought."

Deathless, green-dreaming, hive-minded creatures who live beneath the sea (beneath the greensee) who are obsessed with "songs" and they genetically engineer servitors.

 

In the World Book it suggests that the First Men were descendants of the Fisher Queens, who lived in a floating castle on the Silver Sea:

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It was here amidst these grasses that civilization was born in the Dawn Age. Ten thousand years ago or more, when Westeros was yet a howling wilderness inhabited only by the giants and children of the forest, the first true towns arose beside the banks of the river Sarne and beside the myriad vassal streams that fed her on her meandering course northward to the Shivering Sea.
 
The histories of those days are lost to us, sad to say, for the kingdoms of the grass came and went in large measure before the race of man became literate. Only the legends persist. From such we know of the Fisher Queens, who ruled the lands adjoining the Silver Sea—the great inland sea at the heart of the grasslands—from a floating palace that made its way endlessly around its shores.

The Fisher Queens were wise and benevolent and favored of the gods, we are told, and kings and lords and wise men sought the floating palace for their counsel. . .  Some maesters believe that the First Men originated here before beginning the long westward migration that took them across the Arm of Dorne to Westeros. The Andals, too, may have arisen in the fertile fields south of the Silver Sea.

I think the Fisher Queens were greenseers and they selectively bred humans and created human civilization. (and there is a hint that the Great Empire of the Dawn bred Valyrians from Lemurs to create the "Second Men")

The Fisher Queens are a reference to the Fisher King in Arthurian myth who had possession of the Holy Grail, which is "a cup, dish or stone with miraculous powers that provide happiness, eternal youth or sustenance in infinite abundance"  The Fisher King has a leg or groin wound that makes him unable to walk or have children.  And he lives in a castle called Corbenic, (corbin means crow), the castle is guarded by a dwarf (CoTF?) and a flaming hand (weirwood leaves?).  Some think the myth of the Fisher King comes from Bran the Blessed and his magical cauldron that reanimates the dead.  The Holy Grail/Bran's cauldron is the weirwood and the Fisher King is a greenseer named Bran.   And the Fisher Queens were greenseers like Bran.

(the constellation Corvus the crow--which I think is the Crone's lantern, is next to Crater the cup, which is sometimes mythologized as the Holy Grail, and they are both next to the water serpent Hydra--the weirwood)

 

Also, in the Men of Greywater Station, the fungus has taken over all the living creatures to serve its needs and provide defense.

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In the chapter The Wayward Bride in ADWD:

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She thought back to a tale she had heard as a child, about the children of the forest and their battles with the First Men, when the greenseers turned the trees to warriors.

 

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On 3/27/2019 at 10:30 PM, LindsayLohan said:

Given the magical (blood magic) properties of the Weirnet, I've always thought Arya planted a Wierwood when they buried the sellsword on the way to the wall. He died, they dug a grave, then threw acorns on top of the body before burying him.

Nice theory, but seeds do exist.

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