The Children of the Forest - The Neverborn

[LynnS]

Eureka!  I've done it!  I've come up with the wackiest tinfoil ever!  The product of late nights and too much coffee:  What do we know about the origins of the weirwood and their semi-alien tree-keepers, the COTF, besides nothing?  How do they procreate for example and for that matter;  why haven't we heard more about the fruit of the weirwood tree and how that organism spreads?  Why do the COTF seem like an amalgamation of various life-forms: nocturnal slitted cat eyes, sharp carnivorous teeth, three fingers with claws like a bird's foot, dappled skins like baby deer; diminutive size like a human child and a basic human form.  They live long lives and procreate slowly.  Do they have a gender?  They are one of the old races.  Just how old?

Recently, I've been wondering if Martin is playing with the notion of panspermia and extremophiles; that the building blocks of life are extraterrestrial in origin and delivered by comets.  Only in Martin's world, the life they deliver is more alien with a magical component.

Did Comets Bring Life to Earth? | Astronomy.com

In this scenario, The God's Eye is an old comet impact crater.  The life form it delivered was the pre-cursor of the weirwood tree.  A semi-intelligent organism that collects and stores DNA from other life forms and repackages it to evolve and serve it's needs.  A kind of reverse body-snatcher.  It encounters early human life forms and adapts to a more efficient form of life creating a symbiotic relationship, eventually producing the COTF in their current form.    

The weirwood organism itself produces it's own children to carry out various function, not unlike a hive.  It is not only a biological computer, that stores data/memories, but literally the mother of the COTF producing offspring through it's own nuts/fruit or biological process.  The COTF are not born, so much as they are grown.  Martin's Neverborn. 

OK, gimme your wildest tinfoil about the origins of the COTF and Weirwood.

 

 

[LynnS]

Quote

A Dance with Dragons - Prologue

The things below moved, but did not live. One by one, they raised their heads toward the three wolves on the hill. The last to look was the thing that had been Thistle. She wore wool and fur and leather, and over that she wore a coat of hoarfrost that crackled when she moved and glistened in the moonlight. Pale pink icicles hung from her fingertips, ten long knives of frozen blood. And in the pits where her eyes had been, a pale blue light was flickering, lending her coarse features an eerie beauty they had never known in life.

She sees me.

Shouldn't this be: The Shee/Sidhe sees me.

Quote

Martin calls them sidhe made of ice. Quote The Sidhe (shee) are considered to be a distinct race, quite separate from human beings yet who have had much contact with mortals over the centuries, and there are many documented testimonies to this.

Sounds like the COTF to me whether they are in icy form or otherwise.

 

[Fun Guy from Yuggoth]

Check out the Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven, it features little aliens that are dappled and have big eyes and claws, and they have a secret super-soldier warrior class that are Whites (like the Others).  Mot is the god of death, and motte means "mound" and "grove of trees" --There is literally a Mot/motte in God's Eye.  The moties pretend to be benevolent but are actually super dangerous, and their entire solar system needs to be quarantined so they don't spread.

In the Men of Greywater Station they mention hive-minded water jellies of Noborn.  And in Guardians, the mudpots genetically engineered /bred other creatures of the sea to serve them. 

And the Greywater Fungus enslaves all life on Greywater, and it landed on that planet and spread from that central location, taking over all life.  Just like in Who Goes There?  and The Thing.

[LynnS]

1 hour ago, By Odin's Beard said:

Check out the Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven

I have both The Mote in God's Eye and the Gripping Hand.  Great stories.

[Fun Guy from Yuggoth]

11 hours ago, LynnS said:

A semi-intelligent organism that collects and stores DNA from other life forms and repackages it to evolve and serve it's needs.  A kind of reverse body-snatcher.  It encounters early human life forms and adapts to a more efficient form of life creating a symbiotic relationship, eventually producing the COTF in their current form.   

This is the exact plot of John Campbell's story Who Goes There?  An organism that is hive-minded, lands on Earth (in Antarctica) and takes over living creatures and replaces them with itself--it is a body-snatcher.  In the 1950s movie version of the story, called the Thing from Another World, it is a plant-based creature that is hive-minded. 

See also Heinlein's Puppet Masters, about parasitic body snatchers from outer space, which George has said is one of his favorite stories.

Sturgeon's The Cosmic Rape, the Medusa creature was a telepathic hive-minded polyp that spanned several galaxies and tried to take over Earth with mind-control.  Its spores looked like raisins, and if you ate the spore it would take over your mind.

All of which inspired George's story The Men of Greywater Station, where the fungus controlled the entire Empire of the Fyndii, telepathically across the galaxy and wanted to take over the humans as well, and Westeros just happens to have a Greywater Castle, that is a magic floating castle in the swamp with little magic CoTF people who live there. 

In the DC comics in the 60s there was a creature called Starro, that was a telepathic starfish alien, his powers included absorbing the minds of people, telepathic control via spores (like the greywater fungus), regenerative ability (if you cut him in half, you would have two of him), but he was vulnerable to extreme cold--and in Sandkings, extreme cold put the maws (psionic hive-minded weirwood-like creatures) into hibernation. 

Oh, also Sandkings, there were gelatinous telepathic alien hive-minded creatures called Maws, and they had bug-like servitors that were telepathically controlled by the Maw and they built little castles for the Maw, and brought it meat, and carved faces of their god on the little castles they built.  The weirwood is the Maw in its tree/castle with a face carved on it, and humans and CoTF in ASOIAF are the creatures serving and feeding it.

 

[LynnS]

2 minutes ago, By Odin's Beard said:

Oh, also Sandkings,

And I thought I had an extensive sci-fi library.  LOL!  I read the Sand Kings when it was first published in Omni magazine.  I still have it.  

[MaesterSam]

2 hours ago, By Odin's Beard said:

Check out the Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven, it features little aliens that are dappled and have big eyes and claws, and they have a secret super-soldier warrior class that are Whites (like the Others).  Mot is the god of death, and motte means "mound" and "grove of trees" --There is literally a Mot/motte in God's Eye.  The moties pretend to be benevolent but are actually super dangerous, and their entire solar system needs to be quarantined so they don't spread.

Nice catch!! There are parallels indeed - also the immortal weirwoods with their eternal memory potentially serving a role similar to the moties' museums: facilitating re-civilization after periodic (and expected) societal collapse. [Like Bran the Builder somehow finding the knowledge of how to build Storm's End after the Long Night].

I've seen the idea proposed of a cyclical sequence of events on planetos; basically that every X years a Long Night wipes everything out and a small handful of people/other humanoids start over from scratch. It may not be a coincidence that the "start" of the world is referred to as the Dawn Age. Dawn comes after night. Furthermore, some ruined cities - most notably Asshai - may in fact be older than even the Great Empire of the Dawn, since it is not known who built it. 

The quarantine of the moties' solar system makes me wonder if the God's Eye island is so difficult to access because it protect itself... or because it prevents escape of something dangerous that is trapped there? (Or knowledge humans aren't supposed to have access to? Like a museum not meant for them to see???)

[Fun Guy from Yuggoth]

1 minute ago, MaesterSam said:

Nice catch!! There are parallels indeed - also the immortal weirwoods with their eternal memory potentially serving a role similar to the moties' museums: facilitating re-civilization after periodic (and expected) societal collapse. [Like Bran the Builder somehow finding the knowledge of how to build Storm's End after the Long Night].

I've seen the idea proposed of a cyclical sequence of events on planetos; basically that every X years a Long Night wipes everything out and a small handful of people/other humanoids start over from scratch. It may not be a coincidence that the "start" of the world is referred to as the Dawn Age. Dawn comes after night. Furthermore, some ruined cities - most notably Asshai - may in fact be older than even the Great Empire of the Dawn, since it is not known who built it. 

The quarantine of the moties' solar system makes me wonder if the God's Eye island is so difficult to access because it protect itself... or because it prevents escape of something dangerous that is trapped there? (Or knowledge humans aren't supposed to have access to? Like a museum not meant for them to see???)

Yes, and the Hightower at Oldtown is a metaphor for a weirwood tree (red and white tower raised by Brandon the Builder)--Bran raises castles and weirwoods--he literally rises as a weirwood in Jon's dream.

Underneath the Hightower, the Citadel is a repository of all human knowledge, founded by a crippled boy.  And I think the intention was for it to be used to rebuild after the collapse of civilization, like the Encyclopedia Galactica in Azimov's Foundation Series.

The Hightower is built on the ruins of a much older civilization, which is not a coincidence.

[MaesterSam]

12 hours ago, LynnS said:

The weirwood organism itself produces it's own children to carry out various function, not unlike a hive.  It is not only a biological computer, that stores data/memories, but literally the mother of the COTF producing offspring through it's own nuts/fruit or biological process.  The COTF are not born, so much as they are grown.  Martin's Neverborn. 

Wow. I can honestly say this is not one I've ever heard before. Congratulations! 
It's actually not that tinfoil, IMO. I could see it. It would certainly give a different meaning to "children of the forest" if the forest (trees) were literally the "parents", lol! It was right under our noses the whole time. (But for real - the reader is encouraged to dismiss much of what the First Men believed as superstition when it turns out they were right about the faces in the trees, and we are similarly encouraged to think that it was ignorance that led to the COTF name. They go by a different name, after all. But perhaps the FM knew more than we give them credit for, and had a reason for choosing this particular name???)

As already mentioned by Odin's Beard, GRRM's Guardians explores a similar/related idea of seemingly simple organisms secretly being in charge of other life on the planet and even shaping it to their needs. Not to mention the mass mind control we saw in And Seven Times Never Kill Man. 

So where do the giants fit in? Are you suggesting ALL the "old races" were shaped by the trees, or only the COTF? 

[MaesterSam]

1 hour ago, By Odin's Beard said:

Oh, also Sandkings, there were gelatinous telepathic alien hive-minded creatures called Maws, and they had bug-like servitors that were telepathically controlled by the Maw and they built little castles for the Maw, and brought it meat, and carved faces of their god on the little castles they built.  The weirwood is the Maw in its tree/castle with a face carved on it, and humans and CoTF in ASOIAF are the creatures serving and feeding it.

YES!!! George already gave us a parallel in the House of the Undying: we have the immortal "maw" being served by small creatures (dwarves in this case). It's unclear if the actual Undying are the equivalent of the maw or if they were humans who also serve it, in which case the blue heart is the maw. I would guess the latter b/c in the case of weirwoods it would clearly be the tree, not the greenseer, who is served and fed, though the greenseer helps communicate the tree's wishes. In both cases the 'maw' (alien/magical being) offers knowledge as a lure to unsuspecting victims, until it's too late and they are trapped!

[MaesterSam]

20 minutes ago, By Odin's Beard said:

Yes, and the Hightower at Oldtown is a metaphor for a weirwood tree (red and white tower raised by Brandon the Builder)--Bran raises castles and weirwoods--he literally rises as a weirwood in Jon's dream.

Underneath the Hightower, the Citadel is a repository of all human knowledge, founded by a crippled boy.  And I think the intention was for it to be used to rebuild after the collapse of civilization, like the Encyclopedia Galactica in Azimov's Foundation Series.

I love this!! It's humans trying to mimic what is happening with weirwoods and greenseers - a red and white tree on top and knowledge underneath. [GRRM does this in The House of the Worm too, with a devolved and hopeless society performing pointless rituals that mimic their long-lost abilities (I'm keeping it vague so as to not spoil it; the twist/reveal is pretty great)].  

I have long wondered about the name of the Citadel. Normally this is a defensive fortification to fall back to in case a city or castle is overrun. Places like Maegor's Holdfast or the old part of Volantis inside the black walls are referred to as citadels. The "university" we see doesn't fit. It would make far more sense if originally the name had referred to the black fortress on Battle Isle, as this is where local residents would take shelter in case of attack. Perhaps this is where some knowledge survived the Long Night (or a previous LN or other cataclysm, maybe for many cycles), and discovery of this sparked the idea of having a repository of knowledge for "next time". (It would make perfect sense that a Hightower would be the one to discover this). The name Citadel kind of stuck as that's what the "library"/museum (black fortress) was called before.

28 minutes ago, By Odin's Beard said:

The Hightower is built on the ruins of a much older civilization, which is not a coincidence.

Exactly. It fits perfectly. 

I also wonder about the COTF caves. Leaf says they go to the center of the planet and that not even her people have explored them all, despite having lived there for "a thousand thousand" years. This suggests the COTF did not build them... so who did? 

[Fun Guy from Yuggoth]

50 minutes ago, MaesterSam said:

YES!!! George already gave us a parallel in the House of the Undying: we have the immortal "maw" being served by small creatures (dwarves in this case). It's unclear if the actual Undying are the equivalent of the maw or if they were humans who also serve it, in which case the blue heart is the maw. I would guess the latter b/c in the case of weirwoods it would clearly be the tree, not the greenseer, who is served and fed, though the greenseer helps communicate the tree's wishes. In both cases the 'maw' (alien/magical being) offers knowledge as a lure to unsuspecting victims, until it's too late and they are trapped!

If you like maws, the word craos / craosta in Gaelic means "glutton, open maw," kraz means "crow" (crastinus in Latin means "of tomorrow" and Craster gives away all his male heirs--he gives away his future)

Craster is a bastard born of a man of the Nights Watch and a woman from Whitetree (named after a massive weirwood with a huge open maw).  A man who lives in hovel on a hill in the Haunted Forest, whose name means "crow" and "open maw" and is the son of a crow and a symbolic weirwood woman, he has many wives, and his sons become White Walkers--and the one that escapes is called "Monster".  Craster compares himself to a tree: "My roots are sunk deep."  He parallels a greenseer sitting a throne in a weirwood hill with all female CoTF, and all the boys are given to become White Walkers.  

He makes a point of saying that he has nothing to fear from the Others because of his offerings, but then he is killed by crows in the end--a greenseer killed by his own creations?

 

 

The green men on the Isle of Faces have "antlers" which refers to the weirwood trees above their heads when they are seated on their weirwood throne in their weirwood cave, they wear the ring of weirwoods like a crown.  

The Baratheons are a metaphor for these Antlered Green men, and barathrum means "abyss / maw" in Latin, and rabarta mean “storm” and “a burst of anger, fury”  They wear the Antler crown and antler helms, and he is the Storm Lord.

Renly wore forest-green armor, had green eyes, and wore an antler helm, he was a green man. 

Storm's End is a round, totally smooth castle raised by Bran the Builder (+ the CotF) and its Tower is a spiked stone fist, it is a metaphor for a weirwood with the Green Man horned lord living in the abyss / maw underneath it.

 

This all part of a larger theme of many people and places being metaphors for weirwoods, check out my thread Castles are Weirwoods for some more info.

[LynnS]

5 hours ago, By Odin's Beard said:

Check out the Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven, it features little aliens that are dappled and have big eyes and claws, and they have a secret super-soldier warrior class that are Whites (like the Others).  Mot is the god of death, and motte means "mound" and "grove of trees" --There is literally a Mot/motte in God's Eye.  The moties pretend to be benevolent but are actually super dangerous, and their entire solar system needs to be quarantined so they don't spread.

This reminds me that the Moties had a Mediator class and that puts me in mind of the Pact and the Wall acting as a blockade.  The God's Eye itself is outside the blockade but protected by Sentinel trees and Soldier pines and/or green men.

2 hours ago, MaesterSam said:

I've seen the idea proposed of a cyclical sequence of events on planetos; basically that every X years a Long Night wipes everything out and a small handful of people/other humanoids start over from scratch

I wonder what we would find deep down in the caves.  If there is a generation of COTF waiting to be 'born'.

Quote

A Dance with Dragons - Bran III

The caves were timeless, vast, silent. They were home to more than three score living singers and the bones of thousands dead, and extended far below the hollow hill. "Men should not go wandering in this place," Leaf warned them. "The river you hear is swift and black, and flows down and down to a sunless sea. And there are passages that go even deeper, bottomless pits and sudden shafts, forgotten ways that lead to the very center of the earth. Even my people have not explored them all, and we have lived here for a thousand thousand of your man-years."

Though the men of the Seven Kingdoms might call them the children of the forest, Leaf and her people were far from childlike. Little wise men of the forest would have been closer. They were small compared to men, as a wolf is smaller than a direwolf. That does not mean it is a pup. They had nut-brown skin, dappled like a deer's with paler spots, and large ears that could hear things that no man could hear. Their eyes were big too, great golden cat's eyes that could see down passages where a boy's eyes saw only blackness. Their hands had only three fingers and a thumb, with sharp black claws instead of nails.

I don't know about Jojen paste, but Weirwood nuts?

Quote

A Dance with Dragons - Bran III

Bran ate with Summer and his pack, as a wolf. As a raven he flew with the murder, circling the hill at sunset, watching for foes, feeling the icy touch of the air. 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.

 

[LynnS]

10 minutes ago, By Odin's Beard said:

Craster is a bastard born of a man of the Nights Watch and a woman from Whitetree (named after a massive weirwood with a huge open maw).  A man who lives in hovel on a hill in the Haunted Forest, whose name means "crow" and "open maw" and is the son of a crow and a symbolic weirwood woman, he has many wives, and his sons become White Walkers--and the one that escapes is called "Monster".  Craster compares himself to a tree: "My roots are sunk deep."  He parallels a greenseer sitting a throne in a weirwood hill with all female CoTF, and all the boys are given to become White Walkers.  

Excellent!

[LynnS]

3 hours ago, MaesterSam said:

So where do the giants fit in? Are you suggesting ALL the "old races" were shaped by the trees, or only the COTF? 

Sure, potentially if you go back far enough in our own archaeological record; there were many branches of humanoids.

Hobbits Were Once Real. These tiny humans walked the Earth… | by Sam Westreich, PhD | Sharing Science | Medium

Gigantism is a genetic disorder or in Martin;s world maybe a genetic manipulation.

Quote

A Dance with Dragons - Bran II

The light dwindled again. Small as she was, the child-who-was-not-a-child moved quickly when she wanted. As Hodor thumped after her, something crunched beneath his feet. His halt was so sudden that Meera and Jojen almost slammed into his back.

"Bones," said Bran. "It's bones." The floor of the passage was littered with the bones of birds and beasts. But there were other bones as well, big ones that must have come from giants and small ones that could have been from children. On either side of them, in niches carved from the stone, skulls looked down on them. Bran saw a bear skull and a wolf skull, half a dozen human skulls and near as many giants. All the rest were small, queerly formed. Children of the forest. The roots had grown in and around and through them, every one. A few had ravens perched atop them, watching them pass with bright black eyes.

Quote

A Dance with Dragons - Bran III

And they did sing. They sang in True Tongue, so Bran could not understand the words, but their voices were as pure as winter air. "Where are the rest of you?" Bran asked Leaf, once.

"Gone down into the earth," she answered. "Into the stones, into the trees. Before the First Men came all this land that you call Westeros was home to us, yet even in those days we were few. The gods gave us long lives but not great numbers, lest we overrun the world as deer will overrun a wood where there are no wolves to hunt them. That was in the dawn of days, when our sun was rising. Now it sinks, and this is our long dwindling. The giants are almost gone as well, they who were our bane and our brothers. The great lions of the western hills have been slain, the unicorns are all but gone, the mammoths down to a few hundred. The direwolves will outlast us all, but their time will come as well. In the world that men have made, there is no room for them, or us."

Potentially the giants hunted the COTF to keep the population in balance.

[MaesterSam]

1 hour ago, By Odin's Beard said:

If you like maws, the word craos / craosta in Gaelic means "glutton, open maw," kraz means "crow" (crastinus in Latin means "of tomorrow" and Craster gives away all his male heirs--he gives away his future)

Craster is a bastard born of a man of the Nights Watch and a woman from Whitetree (named after a massive weirwood with a huge open maw).  A man who lives in hovel on a hill in the Haunted Forest, whose name means "crow" and "open maw" and is the son of a crow and a symbolic weirwood woman, he has many wives, and his sons become White Walkers--and the one that escapes is called "Monster".  Craster compares himself to a tree: "My roots are sunk deep."  He parallels a greenseer sitting a throne in a weirwood hill with all female CoTF, and all the boys are given to become White Walkers.  

Wow, I definitely never thought of it this way before. It certainly is suspicious that we don't see male COTF! 

1 hour ago, By Odin's Beard said:

Storm's End is a round, totally smooth castle raised by Bran the Builder (+ the CotF) and its Tower is a spiked stone fist, it is a metaphor for a weirwood with the Green Man horned lord living in the abyss / maw underneath it.

 

This all part of a larger theme of many people and places being metaphors for weirwoods, check out my thread Castles are Weirwoods for some more info.

I will definitely check it out! 

I would also be interested in your opinion of those stone columns with faces in them that Arianne finds in the cave in the Rainwood. She immediately assumes those were made by the COTF but they don't normally work stone so something is clearly off here...

[MaesterSam]

1 hour ago, LynnS said:

This reminds me that the Moties had a Mediator class and that puts me in mind of the Pact and the Wall acting as a blockade.  The God's Eye itself is outside the blockade but protected by Sentinel trees and Soldier pines and/or green men.

This reminds me of a tinfoil idea that sometimes resurfaces in my mind. It's somewhat based on LmL's theory that Azor Ahai caused the Long Night when he killed Nissa Nissa, as we are told this "split the moon". The Qartheen also believe there was once a second moon, and Benerro (in a Tyrion chapter in ADWD) points at the remaining moon, makes a fist, then spreads his hands as if mimicking an explosion. One or more moon fragments could have impacted Planetos as the Hammer of the Waters, and major impacts could have sent enough debris into the atmosphere to cause the equivalent of a nuclear/volcanic winter. 

So anyway, in LmL's theory AA is "bad". But what if he caused the moon to break intentionally, because he needed to break the land bridge between Westeros and Essos? Because there was something in Westeros that couldn't be stopped? Something that took control of other life forms and got them to worship it and obey it? AKA weirwoods. I'm sure it's no coincidence that there are none in Essos...

[MaesterSam]

1 hour ago, LynnS said:

I wonder what we would find deep down in the caves.  If there is a generation of COTF waiting to be 'born'.

That would be SO CREEPY!! 

1 hour ago, LynnS said:

A Dance with Dragons - Bran III

Bran ate with Summer and his pack, as a wolf. As a raven he flew with the murder, circling the hill at sunset, watching for foes, feeling the icy touch of the air. 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.

These shafts sound like air/ventilation shafts to me, or possibly for heating. (Or old elevator shafts like in the House of the Worm!). Someone also built a slender stone bridge across this abyss hundreds of feet below ground. Why???

Could this be an abandoned mine? Is that what all those underground tunnels are all over the planet - mines?

 

[Fun Guy from Yuggoth]

7 minutes ago, MaesterSam said:

I would also be interested in your opinion of those stone columns with faces in them that Arianne finds in the cave in the Rainwood. She immediately assumes those were made by the COTF but they don't normally work stone so something is clearly off here...

My hunch is that it is a million year old weirwood grove that has been buried by the years (and/or catastrophic global flood), to illustrate how long they have been here.  But also it is a Lord of the Rings reference, as in Khazad-dum, the Second Hall "Down the centre stalked a double line of towering pillars.  They were carved like boles of mighty trees whose boughs upheld the roof with a branching tracery of stone."

Huge subterranean trees in a cave.  And that is where the Balrog lives.

Also, Arianne is a variation of the name Ariadne, and there is a whole Minotaur's maze thing going on, with a white bull/bole at the center of the maze.  Maze in Lorath, maze in Highgarden, hidden causeway maze that Bran navigates, etc. and I think there is a maze under the God's Eye that leads to the Isle of Faces.

 

[MaesterSam]

33 minutes ago, LynnS said:

Gigantism is a genetic disorder or in Martin;s world maybe a genetic manipulation.

Yes, probably a genetic manipulation in this world. Something is definitely off about the giants. The tales have them trapping princesses in castles, but when we meet them they aren't very bright and barely even use tools. Exactly what you'd want if you could design a being to work for you. 

36 minutes ago, LynnS said:

Potentially the giants hunted the COTF to keep the population in balance.

Ah, but we are told the giants are vegetarians. They would have had no reason to hunt the COTF. In fact, it makes no sense that Leaf would call them their "bane". Giants don't seem violent if you don't provoke them, and they were sharing a large, mostly empty continent with only the COTF. Why would the two races ever fight? Over what??