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Craster's Sacrificial System is/was not Sustainable in the Long Run


Craving Peaches

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His daughters, and therefore wives, are gradually becoming more inbred as time goes by. I will assume that wife #1 was an unrelated women. Now the oldest women in the keep are grey haired and old so I think it's safe to say that wife #1 is amongst their number if she isn't already dead. Depending on when he had his first daughter she could also be that old. I will be generous and say that at least one of the daughters of the first wife is still of child bearing age. That means at best Craster is having children with someone who shares 50% of his genetics already. Daughters with this daughter will share ~75% of his genetics. And daughters with one of them will share even more and so on. It would reach the point where his daughters are so closely related to him that they cannot produce children together and so have no more sacrificial material for the Others, assuming Craster had lived that long.

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1 hour ago, Craving Peaches said:

His daughters, and therefore wives, are gradually becoming more inbred as time goes by. I will assume that wife #1 was an unrelated women. Now the oldest women in the keep are grey haired and old so I think it's safe to say that wife #1 is amongst their number if she isn't already dead. Depending on when he had his first daughter she could also be that old. I will be generous and say that at least one of the daughters of the first wife is still of child bearing age. That means at best Craster is having children with someone who shares 50% of his genetics already. Daughters with this daughter will share ~75% of his genetics. And daughters with one of them will share even more and so on. It would reach the point where his daughters are so closely related to him that they cannot produce children together and so have no more sacrificial material for the Others, assuming Craster had lived that long.

He is a Targ-Aryan bastard. Targ-Aryans have been able to sustain their disgusting practice of inbreeding for thousands of years, with some new blood added from time to time. Craster is himself new blooded, though I can see him mating with his own mother, taking the Targ-Aryanness to the extreme, so his daughters would also be his sisters so it may cause issues sooner rather than later.

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1 hour ago, Craving Peaches said:

His daughters, and therefore wives, are gradually becoming more inbred as time goes by. I will assume that wife #1 was an unrelated women. Now the oldest women in the keep are grey haired and old so I think it's safe to say that wife #1 is amongst their number if she isn't already dead. Depending on when he had his first daughter she could also be that old. I will be generous and say that at least one of the daughters of the first wife is still of child bearing age. That means at best Craster is having children with someone who shares 50% of his genetics already. Daughters with this daughter will share ~75% of his genetics. And daughters with one of them will share even more and so on. It would reach the point where his daughters are so closely related to him that they cannot produce children together and so have no more sacrificial material for the Others, assuming Craster had lived that long.

That and the more Others there are the more regular they come and the more he's to sacrifice his animals for them, while they wightify every wild animal and he cannot live from the forest anymore either. By the time the NW visits him in aCoK, he's out of sheep, but still has dogs and pigs. After the Fist, no more dogs and pigs around either. They would have starved before long. 

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4 hours ago, Craving Peaches said:

His daughters, and therefore wives, are gradually becoming more inbred as time goes by. I will assume that wife #1 was an unrelated women. Now the oldest women in the keep are grey haired and old so I think it's safe to say that wife #1 is amongst their number if she isn't already dead. Depending on when he had his first daughter she could also be that old. I will be generous and say that at least one of the daughters of the first wife is still of child bearing age. That means at best Craster is having children with someone who shares 50% of his genetics already. Daughters with this daughter will share ~75% of his genetics. And daughters with one of them will share even more and so on. It would reach the point where his daughters are so closely related to him that they cannot produce children together and so have no more sacrificial material for the Others, assuming Craster had lived that long.

 

3 hours ago, Corvo the Crow said:

He is a Targ-Aryan bastard. Targ-Aryans have been able to sustain their disgusting practice of inbreeding for thousands of years, with some new blood added from time to time. Craster is himself new blooded, though I can see him mating with his own mother, taking the Targ-Aryanness to the extreme, so his daughters would also be his sisters so it may cause issues sooner rather than later.

None of his children had the albino gene.  He was not fathered by a Targaryen.  Craster was fathered by a Stark.  The Starks have always had their men at the wall.  Only the Starks have the influence to sweep this indiscretion underneath the rug. 

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4 hours ago, Sydney Mae said:

 

None of his children had the albino gene.  He was not fathered by a Targaryen.  Craster was fathered by a Stark.  The Starks have always had their men at the wall.  Only the Starks have the influence to sweep this indiscretion underneath the rug. 

Uh-huh. Craster should be around the same age as Rickard (born in 230-250) Rickard had no siblings and his father only had a sister. 

As for albinism, I like how you immediately jump to Brynden as in your mind it would then make it impossible for him to be a Targ-Aryan. How do you know it wasn't maester Aemon? Going back to albinism, you need two copies and craster would only have one copy, which he may or may not pass on to his first generation of daughters who weren't fathered on daughters so they will never be albinos even if they received one. For the second generation, those who were fathered on daughters, Craster would have a copy and the mother may or may not have a copy, resulting in the daughter from possibly having:

0 copies from Craster who had 1 copy and 0 copies from a mother who had 0 copies resulting in 0 copies

0 copies from Craster who had 1 copy and 0 copies from a mother who had 1 copy resulting in 0 copies

1 copy from Craster who had 1 copy and 0 copies from a mother who had 0 copies resulting in 1 copy

1 copy from Craster who had 1 copy and 0 copies from a mother who had 1 copy resulting in 1 copy

0 copies from Craster who had 1 copy and 1 copy from a mother who also  had 1 copy resulting in 1 copy

1 copy from Craster who had 1 copy and 1 copy from a mother who also had 1 copy resulting in 2 copies and only then would she be an albino.

 

Gotta love the TargA thinking process.

 

 

 

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It doesn't matter who actually fathered him, just like it doesn't matter for the Night's King. Their choices weren't dictated by their genes, but because these characters are devoid of morals and empathy. That's why one's name was obliterated from history, and the other's name and deeds will not even go down into history to tell scary tales to children. George wrote in Chett as thinking Craster had a good thing going, and dreaming he might try to have a keep like that north of the Wall with a herald sign of leeches, a keep that Dolorous Edd claimed to have been built on shit. And Chett was a nobody from the Riverlands. 

The babies, sheep, pigs and dogs are food for the corpse queen in the Heart of Winter, not some special family line that is Otherized.

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8 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

It doesn't matter who actually fathered him, just like it doesn't matter for the Night's King. Their choices weren't dictated by their genes, but because these characters are devoid of morals and empathy.

I agree that ultimately everything boils down to the choices people make, but this is still a story with magical bloodlines.

The Valyrians and Targaryens did a lot of awful things for the sake of their dragon-bonding power. The reality of the magical ability doesn't excuse the horror of their actions on a moral level, but it explains a lot of it on a mechanical level.

Incest is a clear example of this. On one level, it demonstrates the monstrous lengths they are willing to preserve the magic of their line, but the practice does preserve their fire-blood genes, and so it can explain their gross behaviors on a pragmatic level.

There's no doubt that Craster is a human monster. Why does he rape his daughters? Because he's disgusting human filth, mostly. But notice too how Craster constantly goes on about how godly he is. Sure, it's partly for a sour irony, but as with a lot of old traditions in the story, this strange practice could indeed be rooted, perhaps blindly, in some older magical practices. And we do know that he serves some old, cold gods.

8 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

George wrote in Chett as thinking Craster had a good thing going, and dreaming he might try to have a keep like that north of the Wall with a herald sign of leeches,

I hadn't thought of Chett and his leeches, but I have recently written about leeches, in the context of Roose Bolton. This man longed to be the ruler of Winterfell, has a house tradition of flaying live men (I'm sure you know GRRM's past writing about flaying and skinchanging into wolves), and he recommends leeching in order to remove the bad blood from his hotheaded fire-coded son. This man with eyes the color of dirty ice wants to be a Stark, but not just any Stark. He wants to be an ancient King of Winter, with cold blood. I doubt Chett has any such conscious ambitions, but I'd wager this is GRRM connecting the two.

Craster has that cold blood. Not for nothing is his daughter named Gilly, or "hoary stock." His incest is awful, but it keeps this icy stock intact.

Unlike the Starks we see, who have wedded themselves to the warm-blooded weirwoods--tied as they are to underground hot springs--and intermarry with other families like the Tullys. 

8 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

The babies, sheep, pigs and dogs are food for the corpse queen in the Heart of Winter, not some special family line that is Otherized.

No doubt, frozen corpsemeat is better than nothing, but it's not everything. Most blood magic works best, or only works with, the fresh blood of the living.

As I mentioned to you in an earlier comment, think to Aerea Targaryen. Whether one thinks the worms inside of her were baby fire wyrms or developing dragons is immaterial. Her magical blood made such a horror possible. Anyone else would have perished long before. Her hot-blooded body made for the passable gestation of these fire-blooded creatures.

Maybe Craster's hoary stock is just livestock to the Blue Maw. But that would mean livestock that can enter the Heart of Winter and still have living, flowing blood for the taking. That's significant. 

Yet I do think it's possible that the ancient Kings of Winter constituted a magical ice-blooded people in the same way that the Valyrians constituted a fire-blooded people. Craster's worship of the Others as gods likely didn't start with him.

It's clear that the Starks we see in the story proper are mostly coded for warmth against the cold. But it's not like there aren't also a few signifiers of a colder heritage. Ned's sword is named after an older ancestral sword: Ice. Why would you use a sword of Ice to slay the Others, who themselves have swords of ice? The Wall is a stunning feat of ice magic. Could Brandon work with ice in the same way that the Others can? The Stark house words are often used as prudent words among friends, yet most house words are warlike threats. Seen that way, "Winter Is Coming" takes on more of a chilling air to it.

There is much that remains unknown, but I think there are plenty of clues hinting at this icy bloodline. Not least the secret parentage of Jon Snow, which if true would make Jon a genetic "song of ice and fire," which may have some important implications for the magical plot.

 

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16 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

No doubt, frozen corpsemeat is better than nothing, but it's not everything. Most blood magic works best, or only works with, the fresh blood of the living.

Ah, but the sheep, pigs, dogs and babies are kept alive until it is delivered to the maws' toothy mouth. Nightqueen Maws don't like frozen corpsemeat, just like Sandqueens don't.

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19 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

I hadn't thought of Chett and his leeches, but I have recently written about leeches, in the context of Roose Bolton. This man longed to be the ruler of Winterfell, has a house tradition of flaying live men (I'm sure you know GRRM's past writing about flaying and skinchanging into wolves), and he recommends leeching in order to remove the bad blood from his hotheaded fire-coded son. This man with eyes the color of dirty ice wants to be a Stark, but not just any Stark. He wants to be an ancient King of Winter, with cold blood. I doubt Chett has any such conscious ambitions, but I'd wager this is GRRM connecting the two.

Except that Chett isn't a Bolton, and thus Craster is no Stark.

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Just now, sweetsunray said:

Except that Chett isn't a Bolton, and thus Craster is no Stark.

Sorry, I don't understand your reasoning there. As Roose the Leech Lord wants colder blood, Chett wants to be leech lord of Craster's hoary hut.

Is Craster a Stark? No one can say for sure, there's no point in pretending otherwise. There's a lot that we don't know, and that's how GRRM wants it for now. But as I said, there are hints that he has an icy stock, and that the ancient Kings of Winter also had an icy ancestry. 

And Craster does suggest that he might be related to Jon Snow. The typical answer I get when I point out this stuff is that I'm falling for GRRM's "traps," but what would the trap be here, exactly? I agree that the Starks in our story are mostly coded as warmth against the cold. That is clear from the first few chapters of AGOT. But a deeper, forgotten heritage is something else altogether.

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37 minutes ago, sweetsunray said:

Ah, but the sheep, pigs, dogs and babies are kept alive until it is delivered to the maws' toothy mouth.

How could that be, when men freeze to death when the white cold comes upon them? The Others coming down for prey is cold enough; traveling with the Others into in the Heart of Winter would be a condition nigh-untraversable to all but a few special pieces (yes the cyvasse language is intended).

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13 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

How could that be, when men freeze to death when the white cold comes upon them? The Others coming down for prey is cold enough; traveling with the Others into in the Heart of Winter would be a condition nigh-untraversable to all but a few special pieces (yes the cyvasse language is intended).

Maybe the Others can regulate the cold they emanate up to a level. But we do have Old Nan claiming that Others took people's babies to "feed the wights". Except wights don't eat. So, they deliver them to the maw to feed her. They're probably in a hypothermic state.

But if a maw could eat frozen corpses, then Others wouldn't take just babies and small livestock to the maw. They'd take any dead there, instead of having them wightified. But no, they only take the smaller living meat there:

  • the maw can eat it in one setting before it freezes
  • it's too small to be of any potential danger to the Others or the maw
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2 minutes ago, sweetsunray said:

But if a maw could eat frozen corpses, then Others wouldn't take just babies and small livestock to the maw. They'd take any dead there, instead of having them wightified. But no, they only take the smaller living meat there:

  • the maw can eat it in one setting before it freezes
  • it's too small to be of any potential danger to the Others or the maw

I think your second point makes sense, but the first is only a Maybe, and I would argue a Probably Not.

Even if the Others can control the cold around them, are you saying they would raise the temperature of the Heart of Winter? No, just as any other human would burn up in the fires of Valyria except the blood of the dragon, I think that only the "hoary stock" can traverse certain icy terrains with living, flowing blood. The frozen livestock is a concession, but not what they truly need.

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48 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

But as I said, there are hints that he has an icy stock,

Both his wives and Craster are steeped in icy and cold wording, because they belong to the cold faction. Craster is a Night's Kingy figure, and all of his wives represent maws. Gilly in particular is a stand-in corpse queen time and time again, and her adversary a wolf. She offers to be his wife in an icy enchanted forest after the dawn (Corpse queen re-enactment after the LN) to get her south of the Wall, so she can deliver her son (an Other) south of the Wall. Jon's no Night's King so he refuses. Sam's the one to smuggle her south of the Wall into the Nightfort, with a son. Another parallel with the corpse queen. And as Sam and Gilly traverse the underground pathway to the well, Bran is utterly convinced the thing-that-comes-in-the-night is coming towards them (corpse queen was the thing-that-comes-in-the-night after the NK was defeated and she had no way to get north, until a normal gate was built). The well leads into the "kitchen" of the Nightfort, where the rat cook prepared the son of an Andal king into a meat pie (men are meat and tie to Andals combined with their children being food). Inside the rat cook's kitchen, Gilly nurses her son with her mother's milk. And finally, when Jon sends Gilly, maester Aemon and Sam away, they leave from the lichyard. Gilly gets a central conversational role with Jon here, affirming she's a mother (maw) a wife to a night's king figure (craster) instead of a lady. A lichyard is full of corpses, making her pretty much the corpse queen in that setting.  

Then there's all the mother's milk references. If she doesn't feed the babies, she's leaking milk. And several times adult men are featured metaphorically and in asoiaf reality as drinking her mother's milk. In other words, the maw feeds the Others by leaking a type of juice/sap - a maw's milk.

George uses Gilly and Craster to inform us about some physical aspects and needs of the Others and their corpse queen. He uses Mel to inform us about warding, glamoring and binding aspects. Shade via Euron informs us about the hivemind and vision implanting taking over the mind of the intended prey and victim to be turned into an Undying One.

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13 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Even if the Others can control the cold around them, are you saying they would raise the temperature of the Heart of Winter? No, just as any other human would burn up in the fires of Valyria except the blood of the dragon, I think that only the "hoary stock" can traverse certain icy terrains with living, flowing blood. The frozen livestock is a concession, but not what they truly need.

No, not saying that. I think the Heart of Winter is actually the whole monster maw. Those "spears" that Bran sees in his first dream in aGoT are not spears, but icy teeth. And just like the babies aren't taken to the monster frozen to death, nor are the livestock. It's "live" stock after all.

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1 hour ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Craster has that cold blood. Not for nothing is his daughter named Gilly, or "hoary stock." His incest is awful, but it keeps this icy stock intact.

I agree with the idea that Craster and his get is 'icy'.  Gilly also tells us "He’s come for the babe,” Gilly wept. “He smells him. A babe fresh-born stinks o’ life. He’s come for the life.”  According to Gilly, our only witness to the baby sacrifices, it's not the blood, but the 'stink of life'.

This could be an important clue, here is the full quote and it's very interesting.

Quote

 

Then, by the door, one of the shadows moved. A big one.

This is still a dream, Sam prayed. Oh, make it that I'm still asleep, make it a nightmare. He's dead, he's dead, I saw him die. "He's come for the babe," Gilly wept. "He smells him. A babe fresh-born stinks o' life. He's come for the life."

The huge dark shape stooped under the lintel, into the hall, and shambled toward them. In the dim light of the fire, the shadow became Small Paul.   SOS Samwell III

 

Could Craster's sacrifices be picked up by wights?  Why not as they are servants of the White Walkers, the Others?  Curiouser and curiouser.  

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22 minutes ago, LongRider said:

I agree with the idea that Craster and his get is 'icy'.  Gilly also tells us "He’s come for the babe,” Gilly wept. “He smells him. A babe fresh-born stinks o’ life. He’s come for the life.”  According to Gilly, our only witness to the baby sacrifices, it's not the blood, but the 'stink of life'.

This could be an important clue, here is the full quote and it's very interesting.

Could Craster's sacrifices be picked up by wights?  Why not as they are servants of the White Walkers, the Others?  Curiouser and curiouser.  

Yes, they could, as servants of the Others.

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57 minutes ago, sweetsunray said:

George uses Gilly and Craster to inform us about some physical aspects and needs of the Others and their corpse queen. He uses Mel to inform us about warding, glamoring and binding aspects. Shade via Euron informs us about the hivemind and vision implanting taking over the mind of the intended prey and victim to be turned into an Undying One.

I buy all of that, but his writing can, and often does, serve multiples purposes. None of what you say here contradicts the notion of an ice bloodline; it compliments it. 

But one would still need to explain why, for instance, Roose's desire for cold blood is paired with his desire to skinchange and to be ruler of the North. All signs point to the ancient kings of winter.

Why present us with the symbolic contradiction of a fiery Valyrian sword named "Ice," and add that it was named after an ancient ancestral sword now lost? The Starks don't seem to know the origin of "Ice," perhaps there are other ancient traditions lost to them. In any event, why seed the story with this detail?

Why is the wall that keeps out the Others a giant magical wall built from ice? Can the white and red weirwoods enable ice magic? My guess is no. Perhaps they enable the magic at the Wall that wards off the Others...but how was the Wall made?

And also: you seem to be against this notion of ice blood popping up in the story. Why? We have fire-blooded Valyrians. Why not ice-blooded humans as well? GRRM has already written Adara from The Ice Dragon. Her own family regarded her as somewhat cold and inhuman, but she wasn't. And neither was the ice dragon, despite the danger that it posed to most people it came near. What is it that you find problematic?

 

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1 hour ago, sweetsunray said:

No, not saying that. I think the Heart of Winter is actually the whole monster maw. Those "spears" that Bran sees in his first dream in aGoT are not spears, but icy teeth. And just like the babies aren't taken to the monster frozen to death, nor are the livestock. It's "live" stock after all.

This still doesn't convince me that a live sheep would survive the cold of the Land of Always winter, or any proximity to the Others, let alone the maw. It would be frozen meat, just like the men who die from the white cold. Someone like Adara would not have such a problem, however...

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1 minute ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

This still doesn't convince me that a live sheep would survive the cold of the Land of Always winter, or any proximity to the Others, let alone the maw. It would be frozen meat, just like the men who die from the white cold. Someone like Adara would not have such a problem, however...

Wildlings have survived for thousands of years in the Land of Always winter, including any animal they kept.

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