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Heresy 225 and the Snowflakes of Doom


Black Crow

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2 hours ago, Brad Stark said:

Let's make it slightly more complicated.   We can use your math, but with an approximately correct order of magnitude.  Let's say there are 1000 Lord Commanders and each served 10 years.

Sam's list has 647 names, meaning it was written 3530 years ago.  An implausibly long time for a useless and already degraded piece of paper, which needed to have been written more than twice as far back as people actually had writing. 

It is implausibly long, which is why the point of the exchange is that Sam thinks there's something wrong [even if as was customary it was written not on paper but on parchment, which is well nigh indestructible*] and why elsewhere we get Rodrik the Reader and Hoster Blackwood casting doubt on the timelines

 

*British Acts of Parliament are still to this day copied out fair on parchment precisely for that reason

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1 hour ago, St Daga said:

Over on the Last Hearth I have discussed Ned's Osiris imagery, and also the idea of how falcon's and jackel's are tied to the idea of Osiris's wives and children, and how I think that could hint that wolf/jackel is a tie to being keepers of the underworld. It's scattered over several pages of posts, but if you are interested, I could try to link you to some of them.

Yes, please.

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You don't find anything 3530 years old unless it was intentionally kept and preserved, even random leftover lists are implausibly 353 years old.   How old is the oldest grocery list in your house?

Sam would not only suspect the list were fake, but it would be ridiculously obvious.   It would be like finding a book in your basement and claiming it was there before the pyramids were built - this might convince a very young child, but even the most gullible adult would not even seriously consider it. 

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15 minutes ago, Brad Stark said:

You don't find anything 3530 years old unless it was intentionally kept and preserved, even random leftover lists are implausibly 353 years old.   How old is the oldest grocery list in your house?

Sam would not only suspect the list were fake, but it would be ridiculously obvious.   It would be like finding a book in your basement and claiming it was there before the pyramids were built - this might convince a very young child, but even the most gullible adult would not even seriously consider it. 

Well you could have googled this, but the oldest paper-like document is a papyrus that is 4000 years old and it's a medical record for a gynecological exam! :lol:

Older accounts than this pelvic exam exist on cuneiforms and slabs of rock, but I thought you'd enjoy learning that the Egyptian doctors found the female womb so interesting.

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Jon recalls that he and Robb often play fought for Winterfell, and I think it's an important parallel to the ancient winner of an argument between a trueborn and bastard born brothers:

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Jon XII

Every morning they had trained together, since they were big enough to walk; Snow and Stark, spinning and slashing about the wards of Winterfell, shouting and laughing, sometimes crying when there was no one else to see. They were not little boys when they fought, but knights and mighty heroes. "I'm Prince Aemon the Dragonknight," Jon would call out, and Robb would shout back, "Well, I'm Florian the Fool." Or Robb would say, "I'm the Young Dragon," and Jon would reply, "I'm Ser Ryam Redwyne."

That morning he called it first. "I'm Lord of Winterfell!" he cried, as he had a hundred times before. Only this time, this time, Robb had answered, "You can't be Lord of Winterfell, you're bastard-born. My lady mother says you can't ever be the Lord of Winterfell."

I thought I had forgotten that. Jon could taste blood in his mouth, from the blow he'd taken.

 

 

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10 hours ago, Black Crow said:

Ah no. Sam said it was the oldest list that he could find, not the longest one. In fact it will be the shortest. Jon Snow will not feature because if anybody has had time to inscribe his name on a list it will be at the top [or bottom] not of the oldest list but the newest list

Also, if Jon were on such a list at the beginning of AFFC, and Jeor Mormont were listed right before him, Sam would know exactly when the list was made -- within the last few weeks! 

There'd be no mystery about it.

8 hours ago, Brad Stark said:

An implausibly long time for a useless and already degraded piece of paper, which needed to have been written more than twice as far back as people actually had writing. 

This is really easy to explain.  The oldest documents could have been copied over as soon as they began to degrade.

As for the part about writing -- the First Men had writing, via runes on rocks.  Such runes, in our world, often contain remarkably detailed information about battles, lords, dates -- events of all kinds.

Finally, of course, even if a list of LCs has 674 names... there is no way to know what period of time that list covers. Because the first name doesn't have to correspond to the first LC in Watch history. 

It's conceivable that the first LC on that list never lived until after the Andals showed up with their alphabet. 

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6 hours ago, Feather Crystal said:

Older accounts than this pelvic exam exist on cuneiforms and slabs of rock

Sure.  We've found stone documents of all kinds, going back five thousand years to Sumer.   There are arguments for Chinese documents being older yet.

But GRRM's also said in interviews that he just scales things up for his fantasy, including timeframes.

In a fictional world where the Winterfell heart tree has supposedly watched Winterfell grow around it for ten thousand years, I don't find a list of 674 LCs very surprising at all.

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6 hours ago, St Daga said:

we actually did see a form of a corporeal Other becoming his incorporeal form when Sam used the dragonglass dagger

In a sense, but that transformation clearly wasn't voluntary or under the Popsicle's control at all.  As GRRM said, the spell was broken.

6 hours ago, St Daga said:

The first men would try to avoid this if at all possible.

It's only kinslaying if kin is being slain. 

But we really have no way to know if the Stark in Winterfell was related to Night King... other than simply assuming Old Nan is correct.   And Heresy is constantly questioning the reality of folktales, such as the folktales that suggest the Wall is eight thousand years old.

I think it's best if we simply admit that all tales in these books are uncertain, and some may be completely wrong.

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4 hours ago, JNR said:

In a sense, but that transformation clearly wasn't voluntary or under the Popsicle's control at all.  As GRRM said, the spell was broken.

It's only kinslaying if kin is being slain. 

But we really have no way to know if the Stark in Winterfell was related to Night King... other than simply assuming Old Nan is correct.   And Heresy is constantly questioning the reality of folktales, such as the folktales that suggest the Wall is eight thousand years old.

I think it's best if we simply admit that all tales in these books are uncertain, and some may be completely wrong.

They could have been bastard brothers sharing a father, but different mothers, or simply shared the last name Snow like Jon and Ramsay.

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1 hour ago, Feather Crystal said:

They could have been bastard brother sharing a father, but different mothers, or simply shared the last name Snow like Jon and Ramsay.

Could be. 

Or based on the other tales Old Nan has heard, Night King might have been a Bolton, or a Magnar out of Skagos, or Umber, Flint, Norrey, or Woodfoot.  Or some other family entirely.   It's clear this story's been around a long, long time -- maybe longer than there have been family names in Westeros.

There might also never have been any historical figure on which the story was based... much as people think today that there was never really a Noah.

But if I had to put money on it?  Yeah, there was such a historical figure.  He's just not at all well understood, millennia later.

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13 hours ago, JNR said:

Could be. 

Or based on the other tales Old Nan has heard, Night King might have been a Bolton, or a Magnar out of Skagos, or Umber, Flint, Norrey, or Woodfoot.  Or some other family entirely.   It's clear this story's been around a long, long time -- maybe longer than there have been family names in Westeros.

There might also never have been any historical figure on which the story was based... much as people think today that there was never really a Noah.

But if I had to put money on it?  Yeah, there was such a historical figure.  He's just not at all well understood, millennia later.

The trouble with some of these arguments is that while we're pretty good at applying knowledge, logic and commonsense to the narrative and its clues, we also need to remember that its not simply a matter of piecing history together but listening to what GRRM is saying to us. When it comes to that list there are plenty of improbabilities, but what GRRM is telling we miserable readers is that the improbably inflated dates bandied about in the beginning are mince, and moreover he's been making a pretty concerted effort to do so. Sam starts off by discussing the King List and you don't need to get into the arithmetic and the other bits to hear him say that there's something wrong and that there are doubts about whether there really have been nigh on 1,000 Lord commanders. In fact what he's probably trying to say is not that the list was written, whenever, but that it was compiled then and is essentially a fake.

This is underlined when Jon asks him about the blue-eyed lot.

The whole raison d'etre of the Watch is supposed to be to guard the realms of men against them, yet he can find very little about them, which in turn raises or should raise questions as to what might really be going on.

Then turning to the Nights King. We can logically infer that he may have been a Bolton, a Norrey or Uncle Tom Cobley, but logic really doesn't come into it because if his story has any meaning at all, its not because he's going to be reborn, but because it suggests a connection between the Starks and the blue-eyed lot sundered by a family split and perhaps a bit of kin-slaying. The story can certainly be told with a Bolton as the principal, but that won't advance the solving of the Musgrave Ritual.

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On 7/21/2019 at 9:32 AM, alienarea said:

I know a wolf is not a jackal, but since it involves death rites, did we ever discuss an Anubis symbolism related to the Starks?

When I first write about gemstone emperors I mentioned Sphinx, it's relation  Anubis and the Wolf Lake and the resurrection cult of it actually, when I don't feel as lazy as now I will post the links here if anyone's interested. 

+ Related to the story of Abel and Cain, while their names are never mentioned in Qur'an the story is told in Maida and according to the chapter, God sent a raven/crow so Cain will learn how to hide the body of Abel. Interesting there are disputes when it comes to identity of the bird. 

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2 hours ago, Black Crow said:

When it comes to that list there are plenty of improbabilities, but what GRRM is telling we miserable readers is that the improbably inflated dates bandied about in the beginning are mince

A case like that -- that amounts to "I can read GRRM's mind, and here's what he's thinking" -- is always difficult to make. 

So let's stick to the canon instead.  The first three novels had a timeline that was consistent and fell logically into place.

In the fourth book, published about a dozen years after he started writing, he began to fuzz things up by having a few characters say (with varying language) "Of course nobody can be completely sure exactly what happened,when."  

Well, that's true, of course... but it doesn't mean the timeline is wrong.  It only means it's uncertain.

For it to be as wrong as is often proposed in Heresy would create numerous logical problems.  Completely different groups of people, all over Westeros, would all have to be wrong... and in some cases, they would have to be wrong by the same exact amount of time.   It's not plausible to me that this would be the case.

2 hours ago, Black Crow said:

In fact what he's probably trying to say is not that the list was written, whenever, but that it was compiled then and is essentially a fake.

Not at all.  Sam is basically just repeating what we hear elsewhere, that the history of Westeros is an uncertain matter, and so too the history of the watch.  Well, there's no doubt of that.

However, the concept that someone would go the trouble of writing up a list of 674 fake LCs... and then hide that list in the bowels of the Castle Black archives where no one would ever find it or read it... seems quite a doubtful one. 

There would be no apparent motive, especially since Westeros is not a place with high literacy, and the Watch is no exception.   Few black brothers can even read.  There would be literally no point.

So while we'd all like to know how Sam's logic would have proceeded, I don't think we should claim to know what it was.  Perhaps in due course, we'll find out.

3 hours ago, Black Crow said:

This is underlined when Jon asks him about the blue-eyed lot.

The whole raison d'etre of the Watch is supposed to be to guard the realms of men against them, yet he can find very little about them, which in turn raises or should raise questions as to what might really be going on.

This is really no mystery at all -- Jeor Mormont spelled it out in ASOS:

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The Wall was made to guard the realms of men . . . and not against other men, which is all the wildlings are when you come right down to it. Too many years, Tarly, too many hundreds and thousands of years. We lost sight of the true enemy. And now he's here, but we don't know how to fight him.

The Popsicles have literally never been seen, and certainly have never fought the Watch, in many thousands of years. 

That's why Sam can find very little about them.  It's the same reason there's nothing in British folklore about the time, some eight thousand years ago, when Britain was still physically connected to Europe.  People forget over a span of millennia, especially if writing history wasn't a priority when some ancient event took place.

3 hours ago, Black Crow said:

Then turning to the Nights King. We can logically infer that he may have been a Bolton, a Norrey or Uncle Tom Cobley, but logic really doesn't come into it because if his story has any meaning at all, its not because he's going to be reborn, but because it suggests a connection between the Starks and the blue-eyed lot

Oh... I think there's a little more room for interpretation than that.   Quite a few interesting possibilities suggest themselves to me.

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I think we can safely assume that any round number like 300, 3000, 8000, or 10,000 years ago are approximations. 

As early as AGOT, characters were saying it was 300 years since Aegon's Conquest, and the current calendar is based upon this event, yet Joffrey and Margaery's wedding didn't take place until the beginning of the new century in year 300 at the end of ASOS and beginning of Feast/Dance. Surely the five books encompass more than a single year? 

The Andals supposedly arrived en masse 3000 years ago, but it easily could have been 2592 years ago.

A thousand, thousand just means that there were really a lot or that it happened a long time ago.

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1 hour ago, Feather Crystal said:

I think we can safely assume that any round number like 300, 3000, 8000, or 10,000 years ago are approximations. 

Absolutely.  But if you try to cut those round numbers in half -- or more -- you can create serious contradictions or logical issues.

1 hour ago, Feather Crystal said:

The Andals supposedly arrived en masse 3000 years ago, but it easily could have been 2592 years ago.

Well, that's an interesting point.  The legends of the Arryns (Arryn being an Andal family) say it was six thousand years ago:

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So in death, the gods had decreed that she would know no rest until her weeping watered the black earth of the Vale, where the men she had loved were buried. Alyssa had been dead six thousand years now, and still no drop of the torrent had ever reached the valley floor far below.

But of course in ADWD, things are more complex:

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

So does this mean the timeline as it's presented in the first three books is definitely wrong? 

I think it just means what it says, twice, in boldface above: the timeline is debatable.  But frankly, given the way the maesters are routinely wrong all the way through the World book, I'm not inclined to think they have any idea what they're talking about.   Even Luwin, in AGOT, is just flat-out wrong on various topics.

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GRRM has weighed in semi-recently on timeline talk, specifically in regards to the timing of the GOT prequel show, which is supposed to be set during the Age of Heroes/Long Night:

https://ew.com/author-interviews/2018/11/19/george-rr-martin-interview/

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This book takes place hundreds of years ago and Westeros seems pretty different than in Thrones. I wonder, since HBO’s prequel pilot takes place 10,000 years before Game of Thrones, will that world even be recognizable to fans as Westeros since there’s such a huge time jump?

“10,000 years” is mentioned in the novels. But you also have places where maesters say, “No, no, it wasn’t 10,000, it was 5,000.” Again, I’m trying to reflect real-life things that a lot of high fantasy doesn’t reflect. In the Bible, it has people living for hundreds of years and then people added up how long each lived and used that to figure out when events took place. Really? I don’t think so. Now we’re getting more realistic dating now from carbon dating and archeology. But Westeros doesn’t have that. They’re still in the stage of “my grandfather told me and his grandfather told him.” So I think it’s closer to 5,000 years. But you’re right. Westeros is a very different place. There’s no King’s Landing. There’s no Iron Throne. There are no Targaryens — Valyria has hardly begun to rise yet with its dragons and the great empire that it built. We’re dealing with a different and older world and hopefully that will be part of the fun of the series. 

While this might suggest a shorter time line, it seems more like a thing he decided to start doing in AFFC for the sake of worldbuilding, and preempting pedantic questions at conventions from the "stopwatch and ruler" crowd. When he says "I think it's closer to 5,000 years," as though he himself is uncertain, I don't think that's an entirely tricky or coy answer--with the way he writes, I don't think he wants to be beholden to a meticulously specific set of dates.

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I think the series is also titled Blood Moon or Long Night.  So I'm not sure if this specifically about Old Nan's tale when a winter came that lasted a generation and the first time the Others came or about the Night's King.  Maybe even a conflation of the two.  But they are certainly talking about Brandon the Builder. and the Wall as well. 

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7 hours ago, Matthew. said:

GRRM has weighed in semi-recently on timeline talk, specifically in regards to the timing of the GOT prequel show, which is supposed to be set during the Age of Heroes/Long Night:

https://ew.com/author-interviews/2018/11/19/george-rr-martin-interview/

While this might suggest a shorter time line, it seems more like a thing he decided to start doing in AFFC for the sake of worldbuilding, and preempting pedantic questions at conventions from the "stopwatch and ruler" crowd. When he says "I think it's closer to 5,000 years," as though he himself is uncertain, I don't think that's an entirely tricky or coy answer--with the way he writes, I don't think he wants to be beholden to a meticulously specific set of dates.

Well this really goes back to what I was saying in my last post; namely that GRRM has been telling us for some time that the ancient timelines are mince, but at the same time they don't matter. Its ancient history, and its unreliable. Its there as world-building but we shouldn't take it as an immutable truth and the specific example of the question of when the Andals tooled up underlines this.

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