Kingsblood IV - A Primer on Zombies - Undead Khal Drogo - Halloween Post, The Bard's Truth 7.1

[The Green Bard]

Kingsblood IV - A Primer on Zombies - Undead Khal Drogo - Halloween Episode, The Bard's Truth 7.1 T covers zombies in general and Khal Drogo in particular. Prepare for horror. 

 

The various resurrected humans in ASOIAF give us a lot of insight into what will become of Jon Snow. Next time we tackle Catelyn, Lady Stoneheart, Mother Merciless.

 

YT VID: https://youtu.be/AJnwmXd443g

 

The essay:

So, I’ll do a quick Halloween post here, about one of the most important subjects in A Song of ice and Fire, the undead … zombies … err, really, though, I want to talk about resurrection in a more general case. And there are lot’s of them lurking in every corner of Westeros and Essos in our story, They are fascinating, too, because in what @The Fattest Leech of A Song of Ices and Fire calls “Martinworld,” GRRM repeats themes but never exactly, always with a new flourish.

 

That pattern is no different withe GRRM’s zombies. It starts in the very first chapter, first with the dead wildlings presumably getting up and walking away, and culminating with the wight-ing of Ser Waymar Royce. It sets up the wights as the model for zombies in the story, zombies controlled by the others, the white walkers, a concept very reminiscent of the ideas GRRM wrote about in his corpse handler trilogy. The mystery of what the others and their undead wight slave army are up to, and where and when and how they will strike, is certainly one of the most horrifying underpinnings of our story.

True to form, though, GRRM then goes on to create all sorts of other undead people for our story who don’t quite fit that prototype. I think it is worth trying to make a list of them here, though I’ll almost certainly fail miserably in this endeavor. Off the cuff:

 

1. Khal Drogo
2. Patchface
3. Lord Beric Dondarrion
4. The physical bodies of the undying of Qarth
5. Lady Stoneheart (Catelyn Tully)
6. Ser Robert Strong (Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane)
7. Coldhands

 

Then there are the presumably dead, or at least nearly dead and undeniably transformed people, kept alive by some form of magic:

 

1. Melisandre
2. Aeron “The Damphair” Greyjoy
3. Moqorro
4. Victarion Greyjoy
5. Sandor Clegane
6. Lord Bloodraven and the other Children of the Forest (CotF) that Bran finds while exploring the cave while inside Hodor’s body

Quote

As Hodor he explored the caves. He found chambers full of bones, shafts that plunged deep into the earth, a place where the skeletons of gigantic bats hung upside down from the ceiling. He even crossed the slender stone bridge that arched over the abyss and discovered more passages and chambers on the far side. One was full of singers, enthroned like Brynden in nests of weirwood roots that wove under and through and around their bodies. Most of them looked dead to him, but as he crossed in front of them their eyes would open and follow the light of his torch, and one of them opened and closed a wrinkled mouth as if he were trying to speak. “Hodor,” Bran said to him, and he felt the real Hodor stir down in his pit.

A Dance With Dragons – Bran III

We also have those who have suffered Greyscale, whom some, like Val, would describe as being dead:

 

1. The Shrouded Lord
2. Shireen Baratheon
3. Jon Connington (and whoever he will infect next)

 

What’s more, we have skinchangers living their second lives inside beasts:

 

1. Orell
2. Varamyr Sixskins
3. The CotF inside the Ravens that Bran Skinchanges
4. Roose Bolt-On (if you subscribe to that theory)

 

The related concept of skinchanging is similar to the topic of telepathic mind control, featured in Fevre Dream, while the concept of a second life is somewhat based upon the ideas about soul transfer, explored in Nightflyers and The Glass Flower. One related final category is the concept of collective consciousnesses, where potentially, the essences of many souls in our story come to rest at the end of their mortal lives. These include:

 

1. The corrupt blue heart of the undying of Qarth
2. The Weirwood network
3. Maybe something associated with the Faceless Men / House of Black and White.
4. Are there more? Probably … some of the legends in Essos as discussed in The World of Ice and Fire suggest it, anyway.

 

These collective consciousnesses are reminiscent of other collective consciousnesses that GRRM has written about in his past works, such as the Greeshka in “A Song for Lya,” the Fungus in “The Men of Greywater Station,” the Mudpots of “Guardians,” the Sandkings, of “Sandkings,” and whatever it is that is going on with the Jaenshi in “And Seven Times Never Kill Man.”

 

So that’s a pretty extensive list, though certainly not exhaustive. So why do we want to talk about this? Why is it so important? Well, George has suggested in interviews and other word of mouth accounts that some of these resurrections are foreshadowing events to his most important resurrection in this series … that of Jon Snow.

 

Obviously, the topic of Jon’s impending book resurrection is one of the most popular subjects in this fandom. My second ever post on Reddit was about it, and it kind holds up. You can read it here is you want, but I’d prefer you keep reading / listening here first:

Now, my thoughts about Jon Snow’s resurrection have evolved since writing that, but those thoughts are what this series and my Direwolves of Winterfell series are working up to.

 

I believe that each entry on that list of undead can inform us a bit about what Jon is doing right now, and about what he will become. It is part of my Kingsblood series because I think that to be resurrected as a whole human being, to be mostly yourself and not just a mindless wight, you need to have “the gift” as Varamyr calls it in the ADwD prologue. My interpretation is that Kingsblood and the gift are the same thing, magical power in your blood that enables you to take part in the supernatural, whether or not it ever actually manifests during you mortal lifetime.

So, to start, I want to discuss 2 zombies in particular that I think there is ample evidence that they possess Kingsblood: Khal Drogo “Aegon the Dragonlord Come Again” and Catelyn Tully, “Lady Stoneheart,” “Mother Merciless,” “The Hangwoman.”

Now I have already covered some of why I think Drogo is exceptional, that I think he has kingsblood, in earlier kingsblood episodes and in my Dany’s Dragon Bonds series. I encourage you to watch those videos, but I’ll make a bit more of the case here. While certainly not limited to this, there are 3 main legs to the argument:

 

1. Horsemanship, especially that of Lyanna Stark, is integral to our tragic backstory, and I surmise that it is how her skinchanging ability manifests itself. Drogo is none other than the most gifted horsemen ever among the most gifted horselords in the world. I think the idea quite logical that he had a skinchanging bond with his red stallion.
2. Drogo seems intent on combining his exceptional genes with the Kingsblood of the last dragon-riding family of old Valyria, to birth the Stallion who Mounts the world. Viserys allows it, while proclaiming him “Aegon the Dragonlord come again.”
3. The way in which Mirri Maaz Duur first kills his horse, the beast to which he’d be bonded if truly a skinchanger, before proceeding on with a ritual that leaves him brain-dead, but with a living body. We’ll discuss this ritual more now.

 

In this scene, the Dothraki describe MMD as a maegi, performing blood magic. While they are prone to hyperbole, I don’t think the Dothraki wrong here.

But what is “Blood Magic.” Well who really knows, other than the fact that blood and sometimes death (only death can pay for life) seem to be important aspects of it. Let’s try to understand the mechanism of this particular blood magic with a bit of fun tinfoil. Imagine that that the central aspect of the “Blood magic” is a transfer, call it a spell, the “transfusion spell”. Sounds a bit scientific you say? Yeah, are you aware that for most of his carer GRRM has been a SciFi writer?

 

Mirri says “only death can pay for life”, but I think really it’s just blood that’s required for on the person to be saved. The connection: The loss of blood usually ends in death, especially in a world without actual modern medicine and the “magic” of blood transfusions.

Drogo was dying of an infection, so in the eyes of modern medicine he really needed his blood cleaned of bacteria and their associated toxins (similar to dialysis). Let’s imagine her plan was to drain a bunch of bad blood (think the leaching of Roose Bolton) then to replace it with healthy blood. This certainly wouldn’t be the horses blood, putting the horses blood into Drogo’s veins would kill him, (any doctor would tell you that) although draining his blood probably killed him anyway. Her magic would be to revive him with the blood from the babe.

The key point here, regardless of my tinfoil, is that when Drogo dies at this point, if things were left to nature, his soul would have entered his red stallion, but it can’t because Mirri killed it first. In doing so she doomed him to his first death being his final death. When she brought his body back with blood magic, it was an empty vessel.

 

One last argument in favor of my tinfoil Now, the babe was described as having graveworms and being a monstrosity. Well, if she had siphoned off all it’s blood in the ritual, I would think that it would be a shriveled monstrosity, in any case.

 

So, in summary here’s the mechanism I propose for Drogo’s death and resurrection:

 

1. Before she did any blood magic, she allowed him to become brain dead.
2. She wanted this outcome, her procedure never went awry.
3. She purposefully killed his horse so that he couldn’t “warg” into him for a second life.
4. Once the horse was dead, his consciousness was trapped in his own body.
5. She drained his blood enough to cause the brain death, his soul dissipated, with nowhere to go
   • Note that the Youtuber Glidas suggest that she somehow bound his soul to herself. Is this shadowbinding? Perhaps. Either way, I think it fully fits with my theory.

1. She then magic’ed enough blood into him to heal his body, killing the babe.

 

So, I know you are all going to say: “What’s this BS about transfusions and replacing blood? This is magic! Red priests and maegi aren’t surgeons, they’re wizards!”

 

A: Well, I am not trying to denying magic here, only attempting an explanation of the mechanism of the magic. GRRM has stated many times that he writes about a fantasy world that is more like real life. Take for example the interview where he gives a tour of his house and tells the interviewer that his dragons don’t have fore-paws, so they’re anatomically correct when compared to dinosaurs, reptiles, or birds found on earth. We know that his writing employs telepathy and telekinesis extensively, but I think he tries to be as consistent as possible as well with nature in his magic. I am not going to explain this much further, but in a nutshell, he supports E=mc2. The blood to save Drogo’s body wasn’t conjured out of thin air because that would take a tremendous amount of energy; it was moved from place to place; it came from somewhere; it was not conjured from nothing. The magic is in how it was transported to where it was needed.

 

Secondly, I liken the healing to be more like real medicine because of Mirri’s association with Marwyn. Mirri studied under Marwyn as did who else? Qybyrn! Qybyrn, who was kicked out of the citadel for opening the bodies of living men to study the mysteries of life. One might call what he did “surgery” (though also not with the intent to heal that specific subject, clearly). Certainly, Marwyn, being the free thinker that he is, would have learned from Qybyrn’s experimentation, and why would he not share whatever healing knowledge he gleaned from it with future pupils. It’s also possible that he secretly continued the study of living flesh behind closed doors. Either way, I think the association with Marwyn suggests that MMD has strong knowledge of human anatomy and physiology to go with her other healing arts and any magic learned in Asshai.

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Sooo… That’s it for the zombie Drogo, whose essence was no longer there inside his empty vessel of a body when MMD was finished with him. Next we tackle Cat, but this episode is already too long, so we’ll have to wait for that for next time!