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The Wall, the Nightfort, and the Night's King


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Others have noted that the Wall is based on the BifrostBridge from Norse Mythology, that is foretold to collapse at Ragnarok.  Despite the name the Bifrost, it has nothing to do with ice, it means "trembling way" and refers to the rainbow--but George has connected ice (and crystals) to rainbows because ice crystals are a prism that splits white light into rainbows--so the Wall is a rainbow bridge of sorts.  The Bifrost was made of three colors, one of which was burning red made to repel the Frost Giants (and the Wall was built to repel the Others).  The Bifrost was a rainbow bridge in the sky that lead to Asgard in the heavens, which was an invisible castle in the sky where the gods lived, and where Valhalla (also spelled Walhalla) was located where the honored dead awaited their return to fight in Ragnarok.  The gods would daily cross from Asgard over the Bifrost to hold court under the world tree Yggdrasil.  Heimdall the watchman stood sentry on the Bifrost, it was his task to blow the horn and wake the gods when Ragnarok begins.  The walls around Asgard were built by an ice giant, Hrimthurs. (whose stallion fathers Sleipnir, an eight-legged horse--or ice spider?)  The collapse of the Bifrost coincides with the sun going black. and the dead coming back to life at Ragnarok, and a Flaming Sword splitting the sky: the collapse of the Ice Wall will coincide with the sun going black and the dead coming back to life during the Long Night, and the Red Comet splitting the sky.  (red comet is horn-shaped and it woke up the sleeping weirwoods)

In the Stan Lee Marvel comics Asgard was depicted as a huge floating rock in space that was connected to Earth by a rainbow bridge (here Asgard is a huge space rock causing an eclipse).  In the Tales of Asgard, the Bifrost looks like an ice bridge connected to Valhalla, which is a big rock (ragna-rock, get it?).  And in the Stan Lee comics, the Asgardians are a super-technological race, and Asgard appears to be some sort of spaceship.

Now, imagine that there is a huge black "planet" or "moon" very near to Earth hovering over Asshai on the other side of the planet--so close to the Earth that it is almost touching.  This is the Shadow over Asshai.  From Winterfell you can see only the very topmost rim of the "planet" that stretches from horizon to horizon--it would look like a Wall.  It only appears as a shadow blocking out the stars along the horizon--and perhaps you can see a slight shimmering prismatic haze along the rim during the day.  Half of the top rim of the black planet was blown off at the end of the Long Night when the Red Comet hit it, so what remains is a jagged, crooked profile on the left horizon, and smooth on the right horizon, "the Wall was a sword east of Castle Black, but a snake to the west"  But it is not really a wall, it is a mythologized description of a floating castle were the God-King dwelt--and from which the God-on-Earth came--it is the ruins of the God-King's castle (see the section on Ibb in the World Book, where the ruins of the God King's Castle is mentioned along with The Shadow Council, and how condemned prisoners are dealt with). 

The Wall has castles all along its length, some of which are black, (ShadowTower, Nightfort, Castle Black), so it could be thought of as one huge continuous castle that stretches from horizon to horizon.  When the Night's King takes the Nightfort, he becomes a God-King during the Long Night.  The Wall is a metaphor for the Shadow, and the White Walkers and the dead are gathering underneath the Shadow awaiting the time of their return.

Think of Asgard as being a huge invisible floating rock tethered to Earth by a "bridge" of some sort, that would mess up the tilt of the Earth and cause irregular seasons.  The "bridge" is the weirwood. Yggrasil was a cosmic world-spanning tree that literally connected different worlds.  (in George's The Men of Greywater Station, the greywater fungus controlled the entire Fyndii empire across different planets telepathically--a cosmic world-spanning tree fungus that connected different worlds). 

And when Bran is at the Nightfort: "Pale moonlight slanted down through the hole in the dome, painting the branches of the weirwood as they strained up toward the roof. It looked as if the tree was trying to catch the moon and drag it down into the well."  [I will return to this later, but it suggests the idea that weirwoods can move a planetary body to suit their purposes, the weirwood punched a hole through the dome in the sky / dome of the sky and dragged down a "moon"]

Asgard or As-gardr means "the enclosure of the Aesir" as gardr means "wall, yard, garth, garden, stronghold" and Ass means "the gods" and it means "thick pole, mast, beam" and Norse gods was intertwined with tree-worship, Yggdrasil the cosmic world tree, Yggr's tree--Odin's tree.  And there is Odin is called Wodan (sounds like "wooden" and Bloodraven is a man with a "wooden face" --Wodan face), and Thor's Oak was a sacred oak. and germanic people worshiped at Irminsul (also called Jormunr--"great pillar"), which were tree trunks.  There is a huge tree growing up through Valhalla in Asgard, called Laeradr, which is assumed to be another name for Yggdrasil.  Yggdrasil grows out of Middle Earth and up into the sky and through Asgard, attaching Asgard to Earth. 

Asgard is a huge floating space rock pierced by the World Tree and held close to Earth. (The Mountain vs The Red Viper, the Mountain gets pinned to the Earth by Oberon's leafy Ash spear)

So I think George is imagining that the eclipse that happens at Ragnarok is cause by Asgard being moved to eclipse the sun.  Asgard is impaled on a huge mast, that can be moved, like a giant skull impaled on a spear.

 

 

There is a parallel between LoTR and Norse myth that I never realized, Valinor [val-in-nor ~ wall in the north?] (the realm of the gods/Valar) was originally part of Middle Earth (Midgard), but it was invisible.  Then Valinor was disconnected from Middle Earth and removed into the sky, so it was an invisible land in the sky, which the Elves could still reach by taking the "Straight Road" which was an invisible road in the sky, just like Asgard being connected by the rainbow bridge in the sky.   But the bridges are now broken and we can no longer reach Asgard/Valinor--because they have gone away into space.  Earendil takes a magic white ship to reach Valinor (and earend means "messenger") (and vali means "high, lofty" in hindi)

And of course, the fungus crab (craob = "tree") aliens from The Whisperer in Darkness came to Earth from the dark planet Yuggoth, and the ominous Dark Mountain in the background of this story is a stand-in for Yuggoth coming to Earth.  They live inside vast caves under the hills under the shadow of Dark Mountain, and worship the Black Goat of the Woods (which refers to both an alien tree and a dark planet that will cause a endless night on Earth).  The head crab is name Nyarlathotep, which means "mighty messenger," and he may have the ability to fly back and forth to Yuggoth. 

In Lovecraft's The Other Gods, there is a black planet so close to Earth that its gravity pulls a man off the surface of the Earth and it eclipses the moon. 

And in At the Mountains of Madness the Mountains of Madness are described as "like the serrated edge of a monstrous alien planet about to rise into unaccustomed heavens." and at the beginning of the story they see mirages of an alien civilization floating along the horizon:

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"On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these including a strikingly vivid mirage—the first I had ever seen—in which distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles. . .

Distant mountains floated in the sky as enchanted cities . . .

I had seen dozens of polar mirages during the preceding weeks, some of them quite as uncanny and fantastically vivid as the present sample; but this one had a wholly novel and obscure quality of menacing symbolism, and I shuddered as the seething labyrinth of fabulous walls and towers and minarets loomed out of the troubled ice-vapours above our heads.
The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie.

In the polar region there is a half-invisible ice mirage of floating mountains that is an ancient city of the alien gods--The Old Ones, who are hibernating underneath the ice in vast tunnel cities.  The Old Ones are telepathic tree-shaped winged crinoid starfish tentacled aliens.  It is said that this may be Leng, and in ASOIAF, The Old Ones in Leng are described as a weirwood cave.  (Leng means "long" in Old Norse, and the dictionary gives one of the examples of its usage as lengi naeter meaning "Long Night")  In the Hound, the sigil of the corpse-eating cult of Leng is a winged wolf.

And in the sequel To Clear the Earth, a man named Stark goes to Antarctica and wakes up a world-destroying floating dark sphere that shoots blackfire and turns everything to greasy black stone.

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Go to the Wall

I just reread The Time Machine, I learned that the phrase "go to the wall" means "to die, to be destroyed, or to fail" (and that story features a planet very close to Earth that causes an eclipse) 

In Norse mythology, Vahalla is where the honored dead go, and it is a golden hall, George inverted this, the Wall is where the dishonored go, and it is a black, bleak place.

The word wall comes from Latin vallo (meaning "fortified wall"),  valr means "the slain" in Old Norse, wael means "the slain" in Anglo-Saxon, and vallur means "nightfall" in dutch, vala means "high" in hindi, and  Old Norse val means "foreigner" and vallari "traveler in a foreign land" (synonyms of the Stranger, a wanderer from far places) (Morgoth was the dark lord in LoTR that caused the Long Night, and he was one of the Valar--Valar Morgoth, and he was a shadow that came from deep space)

And in ASoIaF, "Beyond-the-Wall" is a metaphor for death, and to go into the realm of the dead, you go into the mouth of the weirwood, or you pass through the Three-fold gate (the gate to hell in hindu myth) under the Wall.  In normal times only the Black Gate is one-way only, and the Night's Watch are guardians / psychopomps who can pass both ways to escort the dead and to make sure the dead stay on their side.  But in the Long Night, the Wall "falls" because the black planet moves, and the Black Gate opens and the Others and the undead can come back into the realm of the living.

Beyond-the-Wall, the Others live, in the darkness under the shadow, in the HauntedForest.   In Old Norse, Udr (sounds like Other) means "son of the Night" and urd ("weird" / "fate") was one of the Norns that live under Yggdrasil, urd and udr, the weirwoods and the Others.

 

The Lord Commander of the Night's Watch is a stand-in for Odin with his raven, and Lord Commander Bloodraven became Odin hanging from the world tree.  One of Odin's names is Val-Tamr--"tamer of the slain"--sounds like someone who skinchanges dead bodies.  The Night's Watch are Odin's einherjar that train for battle each day, and eat at the feasting hall at Valhalla (wall hall) each night.  Some of the Castles along the Wall have black names: ShadowTower, Nightfort, Castle Black.  And the Wall and shadows are frequently mentioned together.  The Night's Watch themselves are shadows.  The Night's Watch dress all in black, in funeral garb.  Blackguard means "untrustworthy scoundrel" and they are crows, who are all liars.  And the Night's King was Lord Commander of the Nights Watch, and he produced Others with his corpse bride (which I will get to later)

In Old Norse, rangr means "wrong" or "crooked"--They are lying about what their real mission is.  It is not to stop the White Walkers, but to contain them until the Long Night.  (One of the Mighty Thor plots is that Loki was trapped inside a tree for centuries, but tricks Heimdall into letting him out)

 

The Wall is a metaphor for the Shadow, and all the dead are gathering underneath the Shadow awaiting the time of their return.  Recall that Bran's Cauldron brings the dead warriors back to life--a large metallic hollow black vessel that brings the dead back to life, and Jon was chosen to be Lord Commander by a raven flying out of a cauldron.

And Brandon the Builder built the Wall, and Bran is a winged wolf chained to the Earth, and Fenrir was a winged wolf chained up in a cave on an island that breaks free to swallow the sun, and in Lovecraft's The Hound, the sigil of the corpse-eating cult of Leng was a winged wolf. and that story repeatedly mentions "the baying of some gigantic hound"

The mission of the Night's Watch is to watch for the fall of the Long Night.  So, the implication is that they can see the Long Night begin from the Wall.  The einerjar at Val-hall waited and watched for the appearance of the Fenris-wolf that signaled the beginning of Ragnarok. 

When asked why Odin gathers the greatest warriors to Valhalla instead of letting them stay in the mortal realm, Odin answers:

"Because no man knows, When gray wolf* so gory, His grisly maw shows, in Asgard's Abode" (*The Fenris-wolf)

And Fenrir is a gigantic wolf that swallows the sun.  (the significance of Fenrir being a grey wolf, a wolf is a canine, a hound, and in gaelic Luan, in addition to meaning "moon" and "doomsday" means "greyhound" and he was Bran's astronomy teacher that mapped "shadows")

 

And here is something, Odin's One Eye is a metaphor for the sun, and Fenrir is the wolf that is always pursuing him, at Ragnarok the grey wolf devours the sun, and then at the end of Ragnarok Odin's son (the sun's son) Vidarr rips open Fenrir's jaws--it is a metaphor for the end of an eclipse, the sun is reborn when Vidarr pries open the jaws of the grey wolf that ate the sun.  And here is the real shit, vidr means "to widen" (Vidarr widened Fenrir's jaws)--but vidr also means "forest, tree" so it could be interpreted as a tree that ended the Ragnarok eclipse--a weirwood rocket ends the Long Night eclipse.  The weirwood causes the long night and also ends it, it is the heart(tree) in conflict with itself.

Lml has pointed out that Euron is a metaphor for Odin's blue sky eye turning black during the Long night, and uran/vran is an alternate spelling of Bran.  Normally the black eye is hidden, but it is revealed during the Long Night, when the sun is eclipsed. 

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Sidebar on Bakkalon

Vidarr used a giant shoe to step on Fenrir's lower jaw to end the eclipse, and in gaelic bachall (as in Bakkalon) means "shoe" and "staff/penis" [as well as "an ill-shaped nose" and George hates his nose].  And the sun is the flaming heart of Bakkalon.--so if Bakkalon ends the Long Night eclipse, then that works, a "shoe" or "wooden staff" ends the Long Night.  Bakkalon defeated the hordes of Hranga who darkened the sky.

In gaelic lon means "blackbird," lonn means "rage, warrior frenzy," and lann means "sword"  and in hindi lon means "to reap" and his huge black sword is Demon-Reaver.

In hindi, bacca means "child, boy, infant" and "simple, thoughtless, inexperienced young boy" and "one who takes after his father" and Jon looks like Ned, and he is the pale child, and he knows nothing.  And the Stark's sword is a huge black sword.  And there is a Lon Snow--(bakka)Lon Snow who was the son of Wylla Fenn and who was the nephew of Jonnel One-Eye and Barth Blacksword.

In Old Norse, fenna means "to be covered in snow" and ylja (sounds like Wylla) means "to warm, heat" (also sounds like Elia)  So Wylla Fenn translates to "Ice and Fire" and fenna is directly above Fenrir in the dictionary, Fenrir means "fenn-reared"

[fionn/finn means "white";  feannog means "carrion crow, or Royston crow";  fian means "a band of warriors, composed of exiled tribesman";  feannaid means "cold";  feannaire means "flayer, scoundrel, villian" (Feanor from LoTR)]

If the Lord Commander of the Nights Watch is a metaphor for Odin; Mormont dies, and Jon takes over.  Jon is Mormont's son--after a fashion--(gion and giorra are right next to each other in the gaelic dictionary) and Jon gets the One-Eye symbolism because of his eagle scar.  Odin dies, but is reborn.  Jon is Vidarr, who is Odin's son--and Jon thinks about uprooting a weirwood tree to save Winterfell.  If Jon is half Dayne he can be the Sword of the Morning and bring Dawn.  If Jon is half Dayne and half Stark, he would be heir to a huge white sword and a huge black sword.

Jon Snow becomes Lord Commander of the Night's Watch and lets an army of Wildlings through the Wall--he lets an army of undead come back into the world of the living.  Bakklon's soldiers are called the Wolves of God.  And the river the Steel Angels live by is the White Knife.

 

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Starks are the Kings of Winter (Kings of the Long Night)

I just learned that Strangr means "strong" in Old Norse, and Stark / sterkr / styrkr means "strong" in Old Norse, and fort means "Strong" in Latin (as in Nightfort), and the Mountain/Robert Strong is a metaphor for the Second Moon.  The Nightfort is a metaphor for the Stranger/second moon, a huge all-black castle ruined castle.  Starks are synonymous with the Stranger, the god of death.

The Starks are the Kings of Winter, who parallel the Night's Watch in that it is their job to keep the dead, and make sure the Kings of Winter do not leave their graves.  But when the time is right, the Starks sweep down from the North and bring retribution and judgment.  Rob's invasion of the south was a trial run and foreshadowing, this time it will be for real.  In Old Norse, the word Nid is associated with "pitch-darkness" and the Night's King was likely a Stark.

 

"Winter is coming, and when the Long Night falls, only the Night's Watch will stand between the realm and the darkness that sweeps from the north."

"The men who formed the Night's Watch knew that only their courage shielded the realm from the darkness to the north"

There is a literal "darkness"/ Shadow in the north, that is coming south.

 

"And when night falls, there are said to be ghosts, cold vengeful spirits of the north who hunger for southron blood."

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"Then a long cruel winter fell," said Ser Bartimus. "The White Knife froze hard, and even the firth was icing up. The winds came howling from the north and drove them slavers inside to huddle round their fires, and whilst they warmed themselves the new king come down on them. Brandon Stark this was, Edrick Snowbeard's great-grandson, him that men called Ice Eyes. He took the Wolf's Den back, stripped the slavers naked, and gave them to the slaves he'd found chained up in the dungeons. It's said they hung their entrails in the branches of the heart tree, as an offering to the gods. The old gods, not these new ones from the south. Your Seven don't know winter, and winter don't know them."

And the King's of Winter sit in their stone vaults waiting for their return.

 

Jormun / Joramun
Jormun in Old Norse means "huge, vast, superhuman" and Jormungandr is a sea serpent that encircles the entire Earth, and Jormunr is one of the names of Odin (and an ox / bull / bole)--, and this is right above the word Jotunn, which means "giant" (ent means "giant" and they were animate trees), the Ice Giants were Jotunn. and Jormun is right above jostr which means "willow".

Jormun sounds like a weirwood root network that spans the entire globe, with Odin One-Eye at its center.  Jormungandr is a serpent grasping its own tail (metaphor for time) who lives under-the-sea (in the weirwood network) and he poisons the sky at Ragnarok.  And Jormungandr and Fenrir eclipse the sun, and fight together to kill the gods.

(I just learned that in Welsh, wyr means "to spread, reach out" and words beginning with gwery means "to cover the Earth" and "worm")

 

"The Horn of Joramun?" Melisandre said. "No. Call it the Horn of Darkness. If the Wall falls, night falls as well, the long night that never ends."

The fall of the Wall coincides with night falling.  Because when the Wall "falls", the Second Moon moves into eclipse causing the night to fall--vallur means "Nightfall" 

Horn is synonymous with antler, so the horn of Jormun could refer to a weirwood crown / weirwood circle.  But also the red comet is horn-shaped, and it is made out of weirwood, so it could be the Horn of Jormun.

 

Old Nan says that the Stark King of Winter and Joramun "brought down" the Night's King--what if that means that a Stark and the weirwood network literally brought down the Second Moon and therefore caused the Long Night?  And the Second Moon / Lion of Night is being called "the Night's King"  and I have mentioned before that I think the Night King's crown is the corona of solar eclipse.  Jon is already associated with the King's Crown celestial crown.

The World Book uses the same language, that Brandon and Joramun "brought down" the Night's King:

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Yet over the thousands of years of its existence as the chief seat of the Watch, the Nightfort has accrued many legends of its own, some of which have been recounted in Archmaester Harmune's Watchers on the Wall. The oldest of these tales concern the legendary Night's King, the thirteenth Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, who was alleged to have bedded a sorceress pale as a corpse and declared himself a king. For thirteen years the Night's King and his "corpse queen" ruled together, before King of Winter, Brandon the Breaker, (in alliance, it is said, with the King-Beyond-the-Wall, Joramun) brought them down. Thereafter, he obliterated the Night's King's very name from memory.

In the Citadel, the archmaesters largely dismiss these tales—though some allow that there may have been a Lord Commander who attempted to carve out a kingdom for himself in the earliest days of the Watch. Some suggest that perhaps the corpse queen was a woman of the Barrowlands, a daughter of the Barrow King who was then a power in his own right, and oft associated with graves. The Night's King has been said to have been variously a Bolton, a Woodfoot, an Umber, a Flint, a Norrey, or even a Stark, depending on where the tale is told. Like all tales, it takes on the attributes that make it most appealing to those who tell it.

(Joramun is King-Beyond-the-Wall--jormun is the weirwood, and "beyond the wall" is a metaphor for "the dead"--the weirwood is the king of the undead.)

He who would become the Night's King puts on the weirwood crown (wears the horn of Jormun, becomes a greenseer), weds the Corpse Queen (weds the weirwood) and brings down the Night's King (the second moon) and causes the Long Night.

The Night's King weds the embodiment of death--a woman who was pale as death / a corpse queen / a woman from the barrows / associated with graves.  The Night's Queen is the Weirwood.  Bran weds the weirwood, and the weirwood is the embodiment of death.  Brandon the Breaker: he breaks the Wall and breaks the world.

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"Some say he was a Bolton ," Old Nan would always end. "Some say a Magnar out of Skagos, some say Umber, Flint , or Norrey. Some would have you think he was a Woodfoot, from them who ruled Bear Island before the ironmen came. He never was. He was a Stark, the brother of the man who brought him down." She always pinched Bran on the nose then, he would never forget it. "He was a Stark of Winterfell, and who can say? Mayhaps his name was Brandon . Mayhaps he slept in this very bed in this very room."

Magna means "strong" and Skagos means "rock" and skygge means "shadow," (and they are associated with the Black Goat)  Umbra means "shadow," Flint is a black stone, Norrey means "northern"--blotan (anagram of Bolton) means "worship, sacrifice" and they are obsessed with skinning people and wearing their skins.  Old Nan is telling us that the Long Night was caused by a huge black rock, that shadows the Earth.

 

While I am thinking about it, in Welsh, ar Rhagori means "eclipse" and Rhaegar was a black dragon.  He fell in love with Lyanna, (In gaelic lige "liya" means "grave" and liana means "a climbing woody vine"--weirwood roots? and lion means "net" and lean means "sorrow, grief") Lyanna is a metaphor for the weirwood, who was Stark (white), and she and the black dragon eclipse get married.  If Jon is their baby, then he is the Night's King in this metaphor, and the Prince that was Promised is the prince of darkness.

The mystery about Jon's parentage could be a metaphor for Jon's struggle between the Dark Side and the Light Side.  If he is Lyanna and Rhaegar's, then he will be the new Night King.  But if he is Ned and Ashara's, (or Arthur and Lyanna's) then he could be the new Sword of the Morning and end the Long Night with Dawn.

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Broken Dome of the Sky

In Clash, Arya thinks "in the kitchens, a round stone building with a domed roof that was a world unto itself" (implies that the "domed roof" is a separate planet)

In Storm, Jon uses the phrase "Lightning shivered through the black dome of sky" (implies a beam of light breaking through the black dome)

Then a couple chapters later Bran is at the Nightfort:

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"There were trees growing where the stables had been, and a twisted white weirwood pushing up through the gaping hole in the roof of the domed kitchen."

and then again later:

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"The Reeds decided that they would sleep in the kitchens, a stone octagon with a broken dome. It looked to offer better shelter than most of the other buildings, even though a crooked weirwood had burst up through the slate floor beside the huge central well, stretching slantwise toward the hole in the roof, its bone-white branches reaching for the sun."

and then again later:

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"Pale moonlight slanted down through the hole in the dome, painting the branches of the weirwood as they strained up toward the roof. It looked as if the tree was trying to catch the moon and drag it down into the well."

The Broken Black Dome of the Nightfort represents a broken Black Dome in the sky.  And after bringing the possibility of a moon being pulled down to Earth, is when he mentions Summer coming down from the sky and eclipsing the moon:

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"A shadow detached itself from the broken dome above and leapt down through the moonlight."

 

The Night's King ruling from the Nightfort and wedding the Corpse Queen and sacrificing children to the Others is another metaphor for the events of the Long Night. 

It gives us insight in to how it started: the Night's King and his Corpse Queen pulled down the Second Moon.  And how it ended:  a weirwood burst up through the floor and broke the dome of the Nightfort--a weirwood burst out of the ground and put a hole in the dome (head) of the Second Moon--knocking it out of eclipse.

 

"Lion of Night" is a kenning of "Night's King"--meaning "the Ruler of Night."  (it occurs to me that "Lion of Night" could be interpreted as "Lion of the color of Night" meaning "Black Lion" and the mane of the Black Lion is the corona of the eclipse).  The Night's King is an "evil" greenseer (he may have good reasons for doing what he does, but from the outside, it appears antithetical to life, and therefore "evil")

The Corpse Queen is the embodiment of death--she represents the weirwood/white worm.  The Night's King weds Death--he weds the weirwood, and together they succeed in pulling down the Second Moon, and in the darkness under the eclipse, together they produce the White Walkers.  His castle becomes the all-black Nightfort--which is a stand-in for the Black Moon--the Black Dome of the Nightfort represents the black dome of the Black Moon; the black dome in the sky.  The Night's King was the Lord Commander of the Crows--King Crow.

There is a heavy presence of weirwoods / wells at the Nightfort, and that is where we get the Rat Cook story, the thing that came in the Night, etc, most of these stories are about the Others.

 

 

This series of events is being replayed through Stannis, who is the stand-in for the Night's King, and he has a shadow crown / bald dome of a head and later gets a crown of flame (corona of eclipse), and was previously stationed at Dragonstone, an all-black stone dragon.  The Baratheon's are metaphors for the green men / greenseers, and Melisandre is a metaphor for a weirwood, with red eyes and white skin, and a ruby third eye.   The greenman weds the weirwood and produces Others.  With Stannis' seed Mel produces Shadow Swords--cold shadows that murder people.  The Shadow Sword passes through a gate that is in the mouth of a cave, under the wall--just like the Black Gate.

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"Stannis had been a younger son living in the shadow of his elder brother, just as Jon Snow, bastard-born, had always been eclipsed by his trueborn sibling, the fallen hero men had called the Young Wolf."

The young wolf causes an eclipse.   Stannis and Jon both live under the shadow, under the eclipse.  They are both Night's King characters.

When Bran is at the Nightfort: "A shadow detached itself from the broken dome above and leapt down through the moonlight."

A young wolf is a shadow in the sky, and eclipses the moon and comes down to Earth.  The phrase "broken dome" is telling us something about the night sky, or about something in the night sky--The Shadow.

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51 minutes ago, By Odin's Beard said:

In hindi, bacca means "child, boy, infant" and "simple, thoughtless, inexperienced young boy" and "one who takes after his father"

In ASOIAF a deity named Bakkalon and the Pale Child and Bakkalon of the Sword, is a parallel to Rhaego, son of Khal Drogo, the Stallion that Mounts the World and is Khal of khals.

Compared to other Dothraki, Rhaego is a "pale" child, because his hair is lightly-colored, silver-gold like his mother's, while other Dothraki have dark-colored hair. There was a character during Aegon III's reign who was called Gaemon Palehair, because he had Valyrian looks and their brand of hair - pale.

So, the "one who takes after his father" is Rhaego who will be a great Khal like his father Drogo.

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On 7/8/2021 at 1:24 PM, Megorova said:

In ASOIAF a deity named Bakkalon and the Pale Child and Bakkalon of the Sword, is a parallel to Rhaego, son of Khal Drogo, the Stallion that Mounts the World and is Khal of khals.

I have found that many of the characters are parallel versions of the same story, so Rhaego might be another telling of Bakkalon/ PtwP / Last Hero.  (the sun dies, and the sun's son brings back the light) 

But check this out, in Norse mythology, Muspelheim is the night sky, and the stars and planets are the flaming sparks of the fire giants.  And at Ragnarok, the sun goes black and the stars fall from the sky, and the flaming sword of Surtr ("the Black") falls to Earth and destroys the Bifrost, and destroys civilization.  The Khalasar parallels the sons of Muspell ("world-destroyers"), the Dothraki destroy civilizations.  The flaming sword of Surtr is the Red Comet and/or Drogon.

Khal Drogo is the sun, and Dany is the moon, in Latin cael and caelistis* and caelis all mean "celestial" and the Khalasar is described as a parade of the sun (Khal), moon (Khaleesi), planets (Bloodriders), and stars (Khalasar) across the night sky.  And wandering behind the Khalasar is Viserys, who has no place in the night sky (viser means "shadow") and who later eclipses the sun and gets the "golden crown" / corona of eclipse when he dies. 

(*There was an astronomer named Flamsteed, who made a star atlas called Atlas Coelistis, and the Dothraki think the stars are flaming steeds-->Flam steed)

The silver moon had brothers, Rhaegar was a black dragon and ar Rhagori means "to eclipse" and viser means "shadow" and in Dany's dream Rhaegar rides a black horse in black shiny armor, and she lifts his visor and sees herself--a moon being eclipsed by a hollow black metal object.

 

In Latin de-rogo means "to take away"--the sun gets taken away and rogus means "funeral pyre, destruction, grave" (also where the word Balrog comes from: Old Norse bal = "flame and evil" and rog = "strife" and rogus means "flame, destruction, grave"

In hindi, khal means "vile, wicked, villian" and "moat / swamp" and "skin, hide, flay" (khal wears the lion pelt)  and various words beginning with khal mean "to destroy" (khalna, khalata, khalal [Kal-El?])

khalbalana means "to boil"

kal means "black" and means "time, fate, death" and is one of the titles of the Yama "King of the Dead, messenger of death" there is also the goddess Kali, who figures in here somewhere.  The black sun is the King of the Dead, the Night's King, the Lion of Night.

Many of the other references to the Second Moon describe black kettles, cauldrons, tubs, or boiling (Galadon, Cerwyn, Bran's cauldron, Stannis [stan means "tin vessel" and stanna means "vat, barrel" and stanad means "hammering" and stannum is latin for "tin" and is on the same page as "stag" and he is a Night's King figure]) .  And kaldrono means "cauldron"  The sun goes black because a hollow metallic vessel eclipses it.  And Khal Drogo uses a cauldron to give Viserys the golden crown of eclipse.

 

Khal Drogo was the sun, and he wore the white lion pelt of the solar lion.  Khal Drogo dies.  The sun dies (gets smothered to death by the moon).  And gets reincarnated as a Black Dragon that is an avatar of destruction and death.  It is a metaphor for the Long Night.  The Khalasar will invade Westeros in the absence of the sun, with a black sun instead.

 

khalis means "pure, genuine" and khalasi means "sailor"

Mirri Maz Duur tells Dany that Drogo (the sun) will come back to life:

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"When will he be as he was?" Dany demanded.

"When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east," said Mirri Maz Duur. "When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When your womb quickens again, and you bear a living child. Then he will return, and not before."

Sun rising in the west is a weirwood comet launching from Westeros, the Mountain blowing in the wind is the Second Moon.  She gives birth to a red dragon that ends the eclipse and the sun comes back to life. 

And rioghal means "princely" raigh means "he arose" and raighe means "ray" or "beam" and righad means "to tear asunder"  riagal means "to rule, religion" riagloir means "ruler"  rail means "oak" and reil means "star" --a tree that becomes a star.

Rhllor worship is all Red Comet worship.  Rhllor is the Red Comet that ends the Long Night.  Dany has dreams where she joins the comet in the sky.  And the Khals become comets when they die. 

rag means "nocturnal" and ragaire means "rogue, villain, deceiver" and riagaire means "hangman, executioner, torturer" and ragaideach means "night-rider" (in Jaime's dream Rhaegar is the leader of the Others)

 

And in hindi, rag means "red" and "song" and I think the song of ice and fire is the red comet.

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I don't know if LmL has covered this or if I have heard this elsewhere, but it just occurred to me that the fight between Jon and the Wighted Othor is a telling of the Long Night story.  The scene is set in a black solar (black sun), in total darkness Jon fights an undead Othor (Other) moon-faced hooded man who face fills up the entire world.  Jon leaves a cut across the face of the moon and he defeats it by grasping Mormont's lamp and throwing it and burning the wight.  Jon pulls the curtain down and reveals the real moon, making Othor the second moon.

The Red Comet is called Mormont's Torch, and Jon grasps the torch and launches it at the second moon.  One of the names of the god of death is the Hooded Man, and the sigil of House Banefort is a Hooded Man causing an eclipse.   And the soldier's of R'hllor are called the Fiery Hand.  Jon briefly has the Fiery Hand as he grasps Mormont's Torch and throws it.  And he brings back the light and warmth.  And Mormont [wormwood~weirwood] is the name of a comet from the bible that is supposed to fall to Earth at the End of Days.  (and weirwoods are giant stone fists, and if set on fire and turned into a comet they are Fiery Hands, and their leaves are fiery hands)

At Ragnarok the wolves Skoll and Hati eat the sun and moon, and Ghost was trying to eat the Hooded Man moon.

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Thinking about Dany's womb "quickening" corresponding with the sun rising in the West.  The forest fire at Wat's Wood was described as looking like the rising sun, and the Hardhome incident was like the sun rising in the North--both of which I think are describing weirwood launches.

The rowan-tree / mountain ash / witchwood / rounwood tree is called Quickbeam or the Quicken Tree.  (rowan / royne / reynir / roan all mean "to redden") 

In gaelic caor means "rowan tree" and refers its red round berries, and caor also means "thunderbolt, meteor, a round mass of flame; a red blaze" and caoir means "firebrand" and "red-hot iron"

So, the rowan tree can be a meteor, and a blazing red firebrand, and red-hot iron--all descriptions of the Red Comet, the Red Sword of Heroes known as Lightbringer.

caoirin-leanna is the "marsh valerian" or "dwarf valerian" and it has lilac light purple/pink flowers. (carth is a kind of valerian also, sounds like Qarth)  And common valerian is called St George's herb.

 

When a rowan grew on another tree it was called a "flying rowan" and was believed to be magical.  The red comet is a flying rowan tree.

In welsh caer means "castle", and Caer Arianrhod (castle of the silver wheel) was a round castle that was launched into space by a wizard and became the constellation Corona Borealis.  Weirwoods are silverish and they grow in circular formation, and they are castles of a sort, and they get launched into space.  Corona Borealis is the King's Crown, and the Cradle--the weirwood circle is a weirwood crown for the greenseer--a King's Crown of sorts, and Nagga's Cradle was a weirwood grove.

 

To quicken means "to get pregnant" but also means "to grow bright" and "to come to life" and "to go faster, to accelerate" (Dany's flying dream and the repetition of "going faster") 

quick comes from Anglo-Saxon cwic meaning "alive, intelligent" and cwician means "to come to life"--so a Quicken Tree is an intelligent tree that comes to life.

And the cosmic world tree Yggdrasil was a mountain ash tree.  Yggdrasil was Odin's horse, and roan is a kind of horse.  The Khals ride their horses into the night sky.  Perseus kills Medusa with a mirror shield and when she was beheaded the flying horse Pegasus and a golden sword sprang out of her neck--the Medusa is a weirwood tree, and when it is beheaded it erupts into a flying horse / golden sword. 

 

Quickbeam

Westeros is a huge continent-wide living creature--it has one eye--it is a cyclops (meaning "round-eyes"--Roun/rowan eyes?).  The God's Eye lake is a moat, and the island itself is a motte ("fortified hill"), and there is a motte ("grove of trees") on it, and the weirwoods are Mot, the god of death.  The green men hold a moot at the motte on the motte in the moat.

There is a passage from the bible about motes in eyes:

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1 Judge not, that ye be not judged.
2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

The word "beam" here meaning beam of wood / log / timber.  But I think George is doing a play on words, because the God's Eye can shoot beams (of light) and beams (of wood) into space. 

In celtic mythology, Balor of the Evil Eye had a huge eye that shot destructive beams.  

In Marvel comics, Cyclops shoots percussive red beams out of his eye(s).

In Greek mythology the cyclops made Zeus' thunderbolts, and made Poseidon's Trident.  Westeros is a huge living god, and it is armed with a gigantic Trident (the river).  It has an Arm of Dorne, and dorn means "thorn" and "fist" and Westeros is holding a Sunspear in its fist, on the Arm of Dorne, a Sunspear that is a thorn.  And a sunspear is a comet. 

In Norse mythology, the dwarves made Thor's hammer, and Thor's life was saved by a Rowan tree. and it is said that "The
mountain ash is the salvation of Thor."

 

Quickbeam was one of the Ents from Lord of the Rings.  So Quickbeam is associated with sentient magical walking trees.

The Witchwood was an alien telepathic subterranean tree that lives under the White Tower in Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (and the White Tower almost launched into space in that story)

The alien tree from deep space in Lovecraft's The Tree on the Hill, is described as having curiously round leaves (and the roundwood is the rowan/witchwood).   The tree on the hill is the Black Goat, and described as being a huge gnarled hand, and it tries to eat the protagonist and inside/underneath the tree is the gateway to hell.  And it is associated with bringing an endless night.  And it sends out psychic lures to attract people to be eaten.

 

 

The Womb of the World is a lake with crones in it, The God's Eye is a lake with crones in it.  The Womb of the World is bottomless, the God's Eye has a weirwood cave that is an abyss. 

At the Womb of the World: "A thousand thousand years ago, Jhiqui told her, the first man had emerged from its depths, riding upon the back of the first horse."

A horse and rider emerged from the Womb of the World, and I think a "flying horse" will emerge from the God's Eye. 

 

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I found more Mote in the God's Eye wordplay about Dany birthing a Red Dragon Comet out of the God's Eye:

In Hindi, dana means "speck, grain, single small object" which are synonyms of "mote"  and dhanni means "beam" and dahna means "to burn, to set fire to" and dan means "the sound of a shot, or of a gun being fired"  and dandandana means "to ring, to boom, to fire, to shoot off" and dhanu / dhanur / dhanus means "bow, bowman" (and dhani means "lady, young wife" and dan means "to be given as a gift in marriage") and dand means "stick, staff, rod, beam, mast"

--Dany at the Mote launches a burning beam projectile.

 

Mote wordplay: in Gaelic motach means "fertile, fruitful, pregnantmoth means "sex" and mota means "mount, moat, mound (in fortification), a moated dwelling" and mothar means "grove, cluster of trees, wooded swamp" as well as "loud or great noise"   miotag means "terror, fright"  moth means "fairy bewitchment"  mothrach means "damp woody place, woody swamp" and mothan means "bog violet"

A fortified mound in the middle of a moat, where there is a grove of trees in a swamp.  A woman associated with the color violet becomes fertile and pregnant there.  Dany is the mother/mothar of dragons.  Mota means "mount" and in the House of the Undying weirwood cave she is prophesied to light three fires, and ride three mounts.  And her son will be "The stallion who mounts the world,"

There is a dragon under Yggdrasil that gnaws on Yggdrasil's roots and it escapes at Ragnarok, and when Dany has her dragons chained up the the pit:

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The dragons craned their necks around, gazing at them with burning eyes. Viserion had shattered one chain and melted the others. He clung to the roof of the pit like some huge white bat, his claws dug deep into the burnt and crumbling bricks. Rhaegal, still chained, was gnawing on the carcass of a bull. The bones on the floor of the pit were deeper than the last time she had been down here, and the walls and floors were black and grey, more ash than brick. They would not hold much longer … but behind them was only earth and stone. Can dragons tunnel through rock, like the firewyrms of old Valyria? She hoped not.

Bull = bole, Rhaegal is gnawing at the bole, the walls and floors are Ash (tree) like Yggdrasil, and Viserion is hanging like a bat, and there are dragon skeletons in Bloodraven's cave hanging like bats.  Weirwood groves are prisons for dragons that won't hold much longer.   And recall that when the tower collapses when Winterfell burns, a dragon flies away into the sky.

 

In Dinneen's Gaelic Dictionary (the one I think George uses) the words "mot" and "mota" are on the same page as mormonta ("wormwood"--Lord Commander Mormont) and mornan ("milk-vessel, wooden dish"--Morna White Mask) and mors ("death"--Mors Umber).  And morgad ("morgu"--meaning decay, corruption) is on the facing page and that is where "Morgoth" and "morgul" comes from.

And baramotre means "wormwood" and mormont means "wormwood" which is the name of a comet, and the Red Comet is Mormont's Torch.  bara means "barrow, grave" and morb means "death"--and weirwood roots are wooden worms. so wormwood is weirwood. 

 

 

 

There is the scene where Doran Martell tells us about how the Water Gardens were built for Daenerys, and then immediately tells us about how Doran is the grass that hides the Red Viper Oberyn

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"Aye," the prince said. "I told the story to Ser Balon, but not all of it. As the children splashed in the pools, Daenerys watched from amongst the orange trees, and a realization came to her. She could not tell the highborn from the low. Naked, they were only children. All innocent, all vulnerable, all deserving of long life, love, protection. 'There is your realm,' she told her son and heir, 'remember them, in everything you do.' My own mother said those same words to me when I was old enough to leave the pools. It is an easy thing for a prince to call the spears, but in the end the children pay the price. For their sake, the wise prince will wage no war without good cause, nor any war he cannot hope to win.
 
"I am not blind, nor deaf. I know that you all believe me weak, frightened, feeble. Your father knew me better. Oberyn was ever the viper. Deadly, dangerous, unpredictable. No man dared tread on him. I was the grass. Pleasant, complaisant, sweet-smelling, swaying with every breeze. Who fears to walk upon the grass? But it is the grass that hides the viper from his enemies and shelters him until he strikes. Your father and I worked more closely than you know … but now he is gone. The question is, can I trust his daughters to serve me in his place?"

The Water Gardens is a metaphor for the Isle of Faces where the children (of the Forest) frolic and play, and it was built specifically for Daenerys.  The Water Gardens (Wat + Garth?) are pink marble (red + white).    The Isle of Faces is the grass that hides the Red Dragon, and shelters him until he strikes.  And Oberyn brings down the Mountain with a leafy ash spear when he launches himself into the air.

Oberon in other literature is the king of the fairies, and in Huon of Bordeaux, Oberon's castle is a living castle covered in eyes.  So Oberyn is a metaphor for a weirwood tree launched into the sky to bring down a Mountain.

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Broken Dome of the Sky: Dragonpit Edition

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The other dragons were all kept in the Dragonpit, the colossal structure that King Maegor the Cruel had built for just that purpose. Beneath its great dome, forty huge undervaults had been carved from the bones of the Hill of Rhaenys in a great ring. Thick iron doors closed these man-made caves at either end, the inner doors fronting on the sands of the pit, the outer opening to the hillside.

In Old Norse, reyni means rowan / mountain ash / witchwood tree.  On Rhaenys' Hill there is a great ring and a huge cave that contains dragons, and underneath the cave there is a hidden cache of wildfire.  The Dragonpit is associated with a great dome--the great dome of the sky, or great dome in the sky.

The Storming of the Dragonpit is a metaphor for the events of the Long Night.  Visenya's Hill has the Great Sept of Baelor, Aegon's Hill has the Red Keep, and Rhaenys' Hill has the Dragonpit.  All three of these locations are metaphors for weirwood hills.  On a black night a mob of mindless rabble led by the undead-looking Shepard (the wights and the Others) is sweeping the city and storming the metaphorical weirwood caves to destroy them.

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High atop Aegon’s High Hill across the city, the Queen watched the attack unfold from the roof of Maegor’s Holdfast with her sons and members of her court. The night was black and overcast, the torches so numerous that it was as if all the stars had come down from the sky to storm the Dragonpit.

. . .

The Stranger comes, he comes, he comes, to scourge us for our sins. Prayers cannot stay his wroth, no more than tears can quench the flame of dragons. Only blood can do that. Your blood, my blood, their blood.” Then he raised the stump of his right arm, and pointed at Rhaenys’s Hill behind him, at the Dragonpit black against the stars.    [huge black dome eclipsing the stars is the Stranger, and when the Stranger is in the sky, the undead army attacks]

. . .

Mushroom was not wrong: swarms of starving rats do indeed bring down bulls and bears and lions, when there are enough of them. No matter how many the bull or bear might kill, there are always more, biting at the great beast’s legs, clinging to its belly, running up its back. So it was that night. These human rats were armed with spears, longaxes, spiked clubs, and half a hundred other kinds of weapons, including both longbows and crossbows.

 . . .

Mayhaps the attackers hoped to take the dragons within whilst they slept, but the clangor of the assault made that impossible. Those who lived to tell tales afterward spoke of shouts and screams, the smell of blood in the air, the splintering of oak-and-iron doors beneath crude rams and the blows of countless axes. “Seldom have so many men rushed so eagerly onto their funeral pyres,” Grand Maester Munkun later wrote, “but a madness was upon them.” There were four dragons housed within the Dragonpit. By the time the first of the attackers came pouring out onto the sands, all four were roused, awake, and angry.

No two chronicles agree on how many men and women died that night beneath the Dragonpit’s great dome: two hundred or two thousand, be that as it may. For every man who perished, ten suffered burns and yet survived. Trapped within the pit, hemmed in by walls and dome and bound by heavy chains, the dragons could not fly away, or use their wings to evade attacks and swoop down on their foes. Instead they fought with horns and claws and teeth, turning this way and that like bulls in a Flea Bottom rat pit … but these bulls could breathe fire. The Dragonpit was transformed into a fiery hell where burning men staggered screaming through the smoke, the flesh sloughing from their blackened bones, but for every man who died, ten more appeared, shouting that the dragons must need die. One by one, they did.

. . .

Unable to flee, Dreamfyre returned to the attack, savaging her tormenters until the sands of the pit were strewn with charred corpses, and the very air was thick with smoke and the smell of burned flesh, yet still the spears and arrows flew. The end came when a crossbow bolt nicked one of the dragon’s eyes. Half-blind, and maddened by a dozen lesser wounds, Dreamfyre spread her wings and flew straight up at the great dome above in a last desperate attempt to break into the open sky. Already weakened by blasts of dragonflame, the dome cracked under the force of impact, and a moment later half of it came tumbling down, crushing both dragon and dragonslayers under tons of broken stone and rubble.

 . . .

A thousand shrieks and shouts echoed across the city, mingling with the dragon’s roar. Atop the Hill of Rhaenys, the Dragonpit wore a crown of yellow fire, burning so bright it seemed as if the sun was rising.

The dragons are compared to bulls / boles that breath fire, and they are trapped inside a metaphor for a weirwood cave that is on fire.  Dreamfyre gets the One-Eye stigmata of the God's Eye, and she flies straight up and breaks the dome in the sky, and the dome collapses, and then it appears as the sun is rising.  The Dragonpit being a huge black dome and it is wearing a crown of flame, is the corona of the Long Night solar eclipse.  When the dome in the sky is broken by a flying dragon, dawn breaks.

 

"You don't suppose there are any dragons about, do you?"  "Not unless you found one under the Dragonpit."

The highly explosive wildfire stored under the Dragonpit is foreshadowing of an eruption, as is the belief drinking the wildfire will cause a dragon to be born: "There was a prince who tried that once," said Tyrion dryly. "I haven't seen any dragons rising over the city,"  Drinking wildfire will make a dragon rise over the city.  (and the business with the wildfire explosion at Summerhall being a failed dragon hatching attempt, wildfire explodes a castle)  And I think wildfire is a secretion of the weirwood trees, and that is why it is kept in fruit-shaped jars, and the drunk who drank it thought it was wine. 

 

When Dany is in the House of the Undying weirwood cave, the Undying say that they sent the comet, and that they have magic weapons they want to arm Dany with.  The Red Comet is that magic weapon of the greenseers. 

 

Moth's Wing / Mote's Wing

Pyat tells Dany: "When you come to the chamber of the Undying, be patient. Our little lives are no more than a flicker of a moth's wing to them. Listen well, and write each word upon your heart."

And Bloodraven tells Bran: "A weirwood will live forever if left undisturbed. To them seasons pass in the flutter of a moth's wing, and past, present, and future are one."

More mote / moat / motte / mothar word play associating mot with weirwood caves.

And in Dany's wake the dragon dream:

"She saw his heart burning through his chest, and in an instant he was gone, consumed like a moth by a candle, turned to ash. She wept for her child, the promise of a sweet mouth on her breast, but her tears turned to steam as they touched her skin."
"… want to wake the dragon …"
 
Burning heart (tree), moth burning like a candle, and Ash (tree) on fire, and then a burning dragon wakes and takes wing.

 

 

 

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In Norse mythology god Frey(r) is associated with virility, peace and prosperity, with sunshine and fair weather, and with good harvest so houses Frey and Bolton will save the world from Others and Long Night when their armies will win Battle for the Dawn and break back of the winter:rofl:

My source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freyr 

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5 hours ago, Loose Bolt said:

In Norse mythology god Frey(r) is associated with virility, peace and prosperity, with sunshine and fair weather, and with good harvest so houses Frey and Bolton will save the world from Others and Long Night when their armies will win Battle for the Dawn and break back of the winter:rofl:

My source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freyr 

Thank you for oh so eloquently pointing out why the author often draws inspiration and parallels from other sources, sometimes it's best not to look too much into them.

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Broken Dome of the Sky: Rhoynar Edition

One of the alternate spelling of rowan is "royne" (and the rowan tree is the mountain ash / witchwood tree) and Chroyane on the Rhoyne is haunted by the Shrouded Lord, and they say that Garin the Great is the Shrouded Lord.  In gaelic, garran means "grove of trees" garrya "garth, garden, enclosure" and gar means "great"

The Shrouded Lord is a great white stone giant under the sea, reaching up with a great stone fist.  The Shrouded Lord was a stone statue that came to life--like the weirwood stone giants waking up.

And Tyrion's journey through Chroyane is telling us about weirwood hills and the events of the Long Night.  The Bridge of Dream leads to a symbolic weirwood hill (and you reach the weirwood through dreams), guarded by mists (White Walkers are mists), and a poisonous miasma that spreads a grey death (the stone men are compared to moths), and Mother Rhoyne protects her children.  And there are several mentions of broken spires and broken domes, and huge tree roots going through the broken dome (in the sky).  Stone Men fall from the broken bridge in the sky, and Griff's sword makes sparks when his chops off one of their arms (flaming sword + stone giant)

The third stone man is all black and grey and described as a castle wall and Tyrion jumps over Young Griff to thrust a flaming torch into the black stone face.  And Tyrion brings down the black stone giant.   (one of names of the Last Hero is Yin Tar ~ Tar Yin ~Tyrion)

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Beyond, half-seen, were other shapes: shattered spires, headless statues, trees with roots bigger than their boat.

. . .

All Tyrion could see was something massive rising from the river, humped and ominous. He took it for a hill looming above a wooded island, or some colossal rock overgrown with moss and ferns and hidden by the fog. As the Shy Maid drew nearer, though, the shape of it came clearer. A wooden keep could be seen beside the water, rotted and overgrown. Slender spires took form above it, some of them snapped off like broken spears. Roofless towers appeared and disappeared, thrusting blindly upward. Halls and galleries drifted past: graceful buttresses, delicate arches, fluted columns, terraces and bowers.
All ruined, all desolate, all fallen.
. . .

On the larboard side of the boat, a huge stone hand was visible just below the water. Two fingers broke the surface. How many of those are there? Tyrion wondered. A trickle of moisture ran down his spine and made him shudder. The Sorrows drifted by them. Peering through the mists, he glimpsed a broken spire, a headless hero, an ancient tree torn from the ground and upended, its huge roots twisting through the roof and windows of a broken dome. Why does all of this seem so familiar?

So, the Rhoyne is a metaphor for the weirwood network, that can move backwards and forwards in river of time, like Bloodraven tells Bran.  In the middle of the Rhoyne Tyrion sees what he thinks is a wooded island with a hill, but it is really a wooden keep with broken spears/spires, and towers that thrust blindly upward.  Around the island there is a stone giant under the water reaching up out of the water, the stone fist is a metaphor for a weirwood tree, which are themselves stone giants, and Tyrion sees another broken spire and an ancient tree that is torn from the ground, and upended, and its huge roots go through the roof of the broken dome (of the sky)/ broken dome (in the sky).

If you look up "spire" in the OED the first several definitions describe trees, e.g., "the tapering top of a tree; the main portion that shoots up above the branches"

The phrases "broken dome" and "headless" are almost synonymous, the Second Moon has a broken dome, and it is personified by the headless Robert Strong / the undead Mountain that Rides. 

 

 

Rhoyne and ChroyaneChroyane contains the word "Rhoyne" so all the rowan tree / river of time stuff applies to Chroyane

In gaelic cron means "time";  croinn means "tree";    crine/crion means "old, witherered, decayed, wizened" but also means "blast";  and crionach "decayed wood, withered tree, rotten";  crionachadh means "blasting or scorching with heat";  croinnt means "grey";  croine means "blackness";  croinreach means "swarthy one, name of a river";  cruan means "blood-red color";  several words beginning with cruinn mean "assembly, gathering, hoard" which are synonyms for "moot";  cruinneail means "act of meeting" (two rivers meet at Chroyane),

Chroyane starts with "cro" which means "death, eye, and prison"

crineam means "to fall" --and stone men fall off the bridge

cruinneach means "dew, mist, fog";  cruinne mean "round, circular, globe, earth";  creanna means "trade, merchant, seafaring"

And Chroyane is an old decayed grey place that was blasted by dragon fire, and is blanketed with fog. 

On the same page as several "cruinn" words, cruit /cruiteanna means "hunchback, little hill" and cruiteachan means "hunchback, dwarf" and cruitin means "hunchback, kingfisher bird"

The turtles are hunchbacks, turt means "dwarf" and turtair means "turtle"

Tyrion is a dwarf and he is Hugor of the Hill (hugor means "hill" in german, and hugr means "mind" in Old Norse) , and they meet the Kingfisher boat.

 

The Old Man of the River gigantic turtle with spikes on its back is a reference to the kraken, which was described as an island with trees on its back.  A living island with tree spikes on its back is a good description of the Isle of Faces.

 

 

Chroyane is called "forlorn" and in The Dying of the Light one of the Festival cities on Worlorn is called Kryne-Lamiya

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Another story was popular during the days of the Festival. A legend, say. It claimed that Darkdawn was a world always perilously close to the edge of sanity, and that the music of Lamiya-Bailis, the greatest of the Darkling dreamers, pushed the whole culture over into madness and despair. In punishment, they say, her brain was kept alive, and can now be found deep under the mountains of Worlorn, hooked up to the wind machines and playing her own masterpiece over and over, forever."

Under Kryne-Lamiya there is a Darkling dreamer that is a brain hooked up to machines playing a song forever.

 

The Palace of Love/ Palace of Sorrow is a reference to the Joyous Gard / Dolorous Gard castle that belonged to Brandin of the Isles.


 

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More Jon parallels with Odin's son Vidar who ends the Ragnarok eclipse, and who is essentially Lightbringer. 

Vidar's mother is Grid, and she "dwells in the wild" in a place between Asgard and Jotunheim.  Jotunheim is akin to north of the Wall, where the frost giants live.  So Grid is a wildling who lives in the frozen North.  Ygritte is a wildling who lives in the frozen North, and Jon is closely associated with her.  (Grid knows Thor, and Ygritte knows Tormund)  Vidar and Thor are brothers, when Tormund takes control of one of the castles on the Wall he becomes a brother of the Watch, so Jon and Tormund are now brothers.

Vidar is "the brother of the gods." and Jon is a Brother of the Nights Watch. 

Vidar was "surnamed the Silent"--Jon's spirit animal is Ghost and "He never makes a sound. That's why I named him Ghost".  And Jon has no surname.

Vidar's weapon at Ragnarok is an iron shoe (jarn skor--"jarn" sounds like "Jon") which he uses to pry Fenrir's jaws open.

Mel says to Jon: "A vow sworn to a tree has no more power than one sworn to your shoes"  Vidr means "tree" and Vidar's weapon is a shoe.  And bachall means "shoe" and "staff" and Jon is Bakkalon, and a tree is a kind of staff.

Vidar's destiny is to avenge his father's death, "He avenges his father in the final catastrophe, in Ragnarok", and Jon wants to avenge Ned's death.  "But it made no matter, so long as he lived long enough to take his place by his brother's side and help avenge his father."

After Ragnarok Vidar and Vale take over Odin's job: "There dwell Vidar and Vale in the gods' holy seats, When the fire of Surt is slaked."  And there is foreshadowing of a Jon and Val romance.

 

"Vidar is, then, imperishable and incorruptible nature represented as an immense indestructible forest, with the iron trunks of the trees rearing their dense and lofty tops towards the clouds."

Iron tree trunks that are indestructible rearing towards the sky--weirwood launch.  And Vidar is a tree that ends an eclipse at the End of Days.

(all quotes from Norse Mythology, by Rasmus Anderson)

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Just browsing the Old Norse dictionary and had a revelation, so recall that the Rangarok eclipse is caused when Fenrir swallows Odin (the sun), and Vidar (the sun's son) uses a giant shoe (skor) to widen Fenrir's jaws and rip its head apart freeing the sun--freeing himself from within Fenrir's jaws (and vidr means both "widen" and "tree"). 

Well I just found out that they have 3 different versions of the letter "o" and skór means "shoe", but skor means "notch, score, incision" and skör means "rim, edge"

It is a play on words, when Vidar ends the eclipse what he really does is that he first takes a notch out of rim of the eclipsing body, then he widens it, until the new sun is revealed.--it is literally just describing how an eclipse ends, and making a mythological story for it  (but interpreted another fantastical way, Vidar leaves a score/incision/scar across the moon, or takes a big chuck out of the rim with a tree that is launched at the moon to knock it out of eclipse) 

 

So, Jon is Vidar and Bran is Fenrir, and to end the Long Night Eclipse, Jon gets "eaten by the Second Moon"--maybe you could even say he becomes the Night's King, and then he explodes the eclipsing body from within.

In Celtic myth, Bran's Cauldron reanimates the dead, and it is destroyed from within, when Bran's half-brother Efnysien gets inside the cauldron and blows it up.

 

 

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Found another clue about ragnarok eclipse.  In Old Norse the word "ragnarok" comes from rogn or ragna meaning "the gods" and rokr meaning "twilight".  I found that rogg means "goat's hair, shaggy" and is right above rogn.  and right above rogg is rodull meaning "halo" and "sun"  and on  the same page rok means "sentence, judgment" and Rognir is a name of Odin--so Rognir+ Rok the "judgment/sentence/fate of Odin" and Odin is the sun that gets eclipsed.

In Old Norse rag means "to rove about" and in Gaelic uigean (where "Yuggoth" comes from) "fugitive, lonely wanderer" and Yog means "conjunction of planets" in Hindi.  And rafr ("amber") is directly above rag, an and the Black Goat is controlled by an amber-colored gem.

(the "stone goat" was one of the signs of the Norse zodiac, so a stone goat in space, and kol-mula means "black mouth / goat's mouth")

I think this is where Lovecraft came up withe the idea of the Black Goat causing an endless night his short story The Tree on the Hill (text audio), he is interpreting the phrase "Ragnarok" as a play on words, the "doom of the gods" is the cyclical arrival of the "rogg" the Black Goat / or "rag" the roving black planet.  The Black Goat will cause an Endless Night eclipse, and the Black Goat refers to both an alien tree and a black planetary body.  Lovecraft was obsessed with black planets and dark stars, and he mentioned wandering black planets in several stories.  Here is relevant passage from The Tree on the Hill

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“So in the year of the Black Goat there came unto Nath a shadow that should not be on Earth, and that had no form known to the eyes of Earth. And it fed on the souls of men; they that it gnawed being lured and blinded with dreams till the horror and the endless night lay upon them. Nor did they see that which gnawed them; for the shadow took false shapes that men know or dream of, and only freedom seemed waiting in the Land of the Three Suns. But it was told by priests of the Old Book that he who could see the shadow’s true shape, and live after the seeing, might shun its doom and send it back to the starless gulf of its spawning. This none could do save through the Gem; wherefore did Ka-Nefer the High-Priest keep that gem sacred in the temple. And when it was lost with Phrenes, he who braved the horror and was never seen more, there was weeping in Nath. Yet did the Shadow depart sated at last, nor shall it hunger again till the cycles roll back to the year of the Black Goat.”

Theunis paused while I stared, bewildered. Finally he spoke. “Now, Single, I suppose you can guess how all this links up. There is no need of going deep into the primal lore behind this business, but I may as well tell you that according to the old legends this is the so-called ‘Year of the Black Goat’—when certain horrors from the fathomless Outside are supposed to visit the earth and do infinite harm. We don’t know how they’ll be manifest, but there’s reason to think that strange mirages and hallucinations will be mixed up in the matter. . . .
There are entities we never dream of floating under our very noses. Modern science is thrusting back the borderland of the unknown and proving that the mystics were not so far off the track—”

 The Black Goat took many false shapes, and it is floating under out very noses, unnoticed until it causes an eclipse.  In ASoIaF, the Second Moon is described differently by different cultures (The Stranger, the Lion of Night, the Black Goat, the Great Stone Face, etc).   

Theunis sends the Black Goat back to interstellar space with the gem that controls the Black Goat.  (and the Shining Tetrahedron controls/summons the "Haunter of the Dark", and the Bloodstone controls the Lion of Night) 

ragna means "to use exorcism" and the Black Goat demon is exorcised with the gem and sent back into deep space.

Theunis ~ Theon, gryja means "dawn" and in Old Norse daunn (sounds like Dawn) means "to stink" and Theon is called Reek.  Thjan / thjon means "bondage, servant, to serve" and Theon was enslaved to Ramsey (a ram is similar to a goat, and ramr means "strong")

 

Here is something, if the Wall is a metaphor for the Second Moon, the Essos counterpart of the Wall is the Five Forts, a gigantic black stone fortress made out of a single piece of fused black stone.  Recall that fort means "strong" in Latin, and penta means "five" in Latin, the pentagram is the sigil of the Black Goat.  and the Five Forts are a Nightfort, built for the Long Night, they are associated with the Lion of Night:

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No discussion of Yi Ti would be complete without a mention of the Five Forts, a line of hulking ancient citadels that stand along the far northeastern frontiers of the Golden Empire, between the Bleeding Sea (named for the characteristic hue of its deep waters, supposedly a result of a plant that grows only there) and the Mountains of the Morn. The Five Forts are very old, older than the Golden Empire itself; some claim they were raised by the Pearl Emperor during the morning of the Great Empire to keep the Lion of Night and his demons from the realms of men...and indeed, there is something godlike, or demonic, about the monstrous size of the forts, for each of the five is large enough to house ten thousand men, and their massive walls stand almost a thousand feet high.

Yi Ti ~ E.T. ~ extraterrestrial.  The Five Forts are hulking, godlike, demonic, and associated with the Lion of Night and the Others, and perhaps the Black Goat.  And recall that Strangr means "strong" in Old Norse, and fort means "strong." 

 

So returning to the Black Goat (rogg) causing the Long Night (ragnarok):

Skegg means "shaggy, bearded" and it also means "beak, of a ship" and skeggi means "island shaggies, i.e., islanders"

skaga means "to jut out"

skygge/skuggi means "a shade, shadow, spectre" or "to block the light" or "cast something into darkness" or "a shady place"

skyggja means "to overshadow" skyggdr means "bright, polished" and skyggdir means "a sword"  (second moon, mirror shield, and a sword)

skukka means "a pot" and skukkr means "a hulk"

skogr means "wood"

skokkr means "trunk, chest"

skrogger means a "monster giant" some of the Gryla (the Gryla was a bugbear to scare children, Lamia)  Gryla sounds like "Grail"

skolli ("skulking, deceit"), and means "evil one"

skölli means "a name of the mock sun, supposed to run like a wolf behind the sun" (Fenrir)

sköll means "mockery, loud laughter"

sköllottr means "bald"

skol comes from "scull" meaning "dish" (also scull = skull, recall that Rahu is a skull that causes eclipses in Hindu mythology)

skolla means "to hang over"

These have all the building blocks of Lovecraft's Black Goat, which is mythologized as a shaggy black goat, but is really an interstellar boat of some kind (a pot, a hulk, a chest, an Ark, a hollow vessel of some sort), that can be steered to cause an extended eclipse on Earth.  This has happened in the past and has been incorporated into ancient mythology.

 

In the Old Tongue, Skagos means "rock" and they ride the Black Goat in Skagos, and Rickon takes his Shaggy Black wolf to Skagos,

 

 

 

(In Old Norse skraf means "chat, talk" and skrof means "snow-ice" and George has said that the speech of the Others is called Skroth)

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