Red Hot Weirwoods and Wolves

[Phylum of Alexandria]

After re-reading GRRM’s werewolf story The Skin Trade, I found this blog post by melanielotseven analyzing the story with respect to ASOIAF:

https://melanielotseven.wordpress.com/2020/08/19/ive-got-you-under-my-skin-how-george-r-r-martins-the-skin-trade-influenced-asoiaf/

I was hoping to get some insights into skinchanging in ASOIAF, and perhaps how it relates to flaying and the face-stealing magic of the Faceless Men. The post does get into the former a bit, and not so much the latter.

But what really struck me is its section on elemental attributes in the stories: signifiers of coldness or heat in the various characters, attributes of ice or fire.

“The wolf’s hot red eyes met his cold blue ones and it was hard to tell which were more inhuman.” — The Skin Trade

GRRM writes wolves and many of his heroes as radiating fire and warmth, and he writes a select certain people (Roose Bolton in ASOIAF, Steve Harmon in TST) and creatures (the Others in ASOIAF, the Skinner in TST) as radiating icy coldness.

This observation doesn’t point to anything that seems out of the ordinary, at least as far as stories of the supernatural go. Direwolves, despite being of the North, are creatures who need heat and warmth to live. And doesn’t it makes sense that the most powerful wolves of the North would be associated with the family who helped keep the North safe from the Others?

Yes, of course it make sense. The Starks have been tied to signifiers of warmth through the cold since Catelyn’s first chapter in AGOT. Think of Winterfell’s natural hot springs, and their glass gardens. Not for nothing do the people of the North flock to the Wintertown in colder times. When the snow falls and the white winds blow, the pack bands together and survives. The wolf imagery reinforces this connection.

But also related to early-story Stark imagery is the weirwoods. The first one we see in the story is at the Winterfell godswood, which presumably thrives underground beside those natural hot springs. So perhaps its no coincidence that the trees sport ruby-red leaves and faces dripping with red sap. Obviously there’s a strong connection of the color red to blood, but it’s also strongly linked to fire. Just like the eyes of the werewolves in TST, and just like Jon Snow’s direwolf Ghost, these trees help to signify warmth against the cold.

Is this association more than just symbolic for the weirwoods? Does it reflect something more like elemental magic?

We know that the Others have an elemental ice magic that’s at the heart of their coldness and their manipulation of ice. They also bleed blue blood. Dragons and fire wyrms have fiery blood, and human dragon riders have hot blood as well. The parasitic baby fire wyrms of Valyria took advantage of that fact, as they burrowed into Aerea Targaryen and nourished themselves on her warm insides.

But weirwoods? Didn’t the First Men cut down and burn out the weirwood trees? Even the bronze axes and swords reflect fiery metallurgy. Isn’t fire bad for weirwoods?

I’m not going to say this story doesn’t hold some truth, but I think its relevance to weirwood magic might be overstated.

First off, weirwoods are not normal trees, if they are trees at all. Cutting them down might be undesirable, but they don’t seem to lose their magical function once cut down. The talking face on the Black Gate is a dramatic exhibit of what carved weirwood can do; and the weirwood bannisters of White Walls may have helped Bloodraven listen in on the mutinous plotting that took place among the Blackfyre supporters. Perhaps they are weakened in this timber-like state, but fire-forged blades don’t seem to be their end.

What about fire? They might not be impervious to strong flame, it’s true (neither is a human dragon rider, by the way). But the Children of the Forest don’t seem to fear fire the way the Others fear dragonglass. From Bran’s point of view, we see Leaf using a torch to burn the wights, and to warm the caves right by the weirwood. Whereas certain fiery weapons spell the immediate death of the icy Others. Speaking of dragonglass, it was the CotF who first began to use weapons made of frozen fire.

Furthermore, let’s consider the fire mages we know. Despite wanting to burn all the weirwoods, Melisandre’s magic actually gets more potent at the Wall. And Red-god convert Beric Dondarrion wields a true flaming sword while dueling near his weirwood throne. Maybe those are incidental details, but at the very least, fire magic can coexist pretty comfortably next to the weirwoods. Of course, I’m more interested in the possibility that they might be helping to catalyze such fire magic.

What about visions in the flames? There’s still a lot of mystery surrounding the magic there, but it’s significant that Mel was able to see Bran and Bloodraven through the flames. At the very least, she was able to peek into their astral plane space. It was already ironic that she regarded them as servants of the Great Other; it would be doubly so if the weirwoods she despises were actually sources of her fiery magic.

We still don’t know what the Essosi Shade trees were like before they were corrupted. We don’t even know what they looked like before they were corrupted. Maybe they were simply like Westerosi weirwoods. Even if they were black instead of white, Dany sees that the Shade heart in the HotU is “blue with corruption,” indicating that the Shade tree leaves were originally a different color. Given that dragons were originally birthed in Asshai, and that the forests near Asshai seem to be full of indigo Shade trees, perhaps wyrms and their fire power are somehow connected to these magical trees, either before their corruption or in the act that corrupted them?

My total-speculation-guess is that weirwoods are not quite trees, but an organism that adapts to its surrounding terrain. For a long time, and around much of the world, these sacred trees, which were nigh indistinguishable from the Essosi trees, enabled elemental magic of temperate climates: fertility, winds, water magic, warmth during the cold, etc. All in exchange for blood and life energy, of course.

But perhaps some cataclysm occurred, scorching a huge portion of the land, but then also ushering in a dark and cold impact winter (see: Moon Meteor Theory). Perhaps the scorching gave rise to fire magic at ground zero, now known as the Shadowlands, and the trees there have been corrupted ever since; near death, but still alive.

All this while, though, a cousin of the weirwood, a psionic entity that might resemble a weirwood, yet might resemble something else, had adapted to the frigidly cold climate of the Land of Always Winter. And upon the advent of the Long Night, it could send out its mobile bodies (the Others) far further into the world for more resources to consume, extinguishing the remaining pesky meat sacks of heat and warmth in the process.

Until the warm meat sacks effectively fought back. Some of them with this newly acquired dragon magic. Dragon magic that had been catalyzed by the trees we now call Shade of the Evening, but in an earlier time we may have called “weirwood.”

I know, I know, it’s tinfoily. But this coffee I’m drinking now just tastes so good! Like cinnamon and honey, like mother’s hugs, and Drogo’s seed.

Blame the coffee.

 

[Craving Peaches]

I always thought that Weirwoods could be linked to the more moderate/balanced 'green' faction, so it would make sense if they had a degree of tolerance for both ice and fire magic. I think Shade of the Evening trees are 'inverse weirwoods'.

[Phylum of Alexandria]

3 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

I always thought that Weirwoods could be linked to the more moderate/balanced 'green' faction, so it would make sense if they had a degree of tolerance for both ice and fire magic. 

Yeah, thematically, it seems to make sense for GRRM to argue in favor of some sort of balance and temperance, as opposed to the destructive extremes. I touched on this idea on an earlier topic post, but I'm trying to flesh out the notions more clearly (and not riddle the post with Captain Planet references that only 5% of readers will appreciate). 

5 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

I think Shade of the Evening trees are 'inverse weirwoods'.

Certainly they are presented that way. But what about before the Shade trees were corrupted? Dany does see the door in the HotU fashioned of weirwood and "ebony," with their grains "swirling and twisting in strange interwoven patterns." This could suggest that their differences are not so black and white, so to speak.

[Craving Peaches]

1 minute ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Certainly they are presented that way. But what about before the Shade trees were corrupted? Dany does see the door in the HotU fashioned of weirwood and "ebony," with their grains "swirling and twisting in strange interwoven patterns." This could suggest that their differences are not so black and white, so to speak.

Assuming enough time has passed both trees could have been part of the same strain which then diverged due to climate/environmental differences before any magic influence.

[Phylum of Alexandria]

2 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

Assuming enough time has passed both trees could have been part of the same strain which then diverged due to climate/environmental differences before any magic influence.

That's true, but the fact that the Shade trees have been presented as corrupted, and near death, but not dead, seems significant. Maybe the trees were naturally black with green leaves. To me that's not an important difference. The importance would lie in the magic (or elements) they cater to.

Do you think this divergence would be along those lines, different terrains they adapted to?

[Craving Peaches]

Just now, Phylum of Alexandria said:

That's true, but the fact that the Shade trees have been presented as corrupted, and near death, but not dead, seems significant. Maybe the trees were naturally black with green leaves. To me that's not an important difference. The importance would lie in the magic (or elements) they cater to.

I was having a think just now and if we take 'shade' as another word for 'spirit', I think the corruption of the SotE trees compared to the Weirwoods could be caused by how the spirit interacts with the tree. Supposedly the Greenseers' spirits reside in the trees. I think it's possible the Undying also have a spirit based connection but there is some difference that makes it corrupted/less pure compared to the Greenseer Weirwood connection. 

[Phylum of Alexandria]

1 minute ago, Craving Peaches said:

I was having a think just now and if we take 'shade' as another word for 'spirit', I think the corruption of the SotE trees compared to the Weirwoods could be caused by how the spirit interacts with the tree. Supposedly the Greenseers' spirits reside in the trees. I think it's possible the Undying also have a spirit based connection but there is some difference that makes it corrupted/less pure compared to the Greenseer Weirwood connection. 

Yeah, that makes sense. And my guess is that such a difference will be relevant for the shadowbinding magic that Mel learned from the Shadowlands of Asshai. Which itself is an enormous dark terrain of magical corruption.

[Phylum of Alexandria]

33 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

Assuming enough time has passed both trees could have been part of the same strain which then diverged due to climate/environmental differences before any magic influence.

It's certainly within the realm of possibility that there were two factions of people wedded to different trees. The BSE brought on the Long Night via a "blood betrayal," and the Ironborn mythology is full of "brother against brother" imagery that features some tree and green man symbolism. Notably, their are two Ironborn relics that might be linked to magical trees: one is black, the other is white. Nagga's bones may be petrified weirwood, formerly from a ship. And the Seastone Chair is made up of the same black oily stone that is found all over Asshai. Which resembles the black bark of the corrupted Shade trees, whose leaves are used for an oily drink tasting of ink and spoiled meat. 

Maybe this magical back-and-forth led to a ramping up of tree-induced "Hammer of the Waters" type attacks, which eventually culminated in a hella-cataclysmic "Hammer" upon Asshai that brought on the Long Night?