A Fevre and a Cold

[Phylum of Alexandria]

"Men who fall in battle against the Others must be burned, or else the dead will rise again as their thralls." -- Samwell V, AFFC

I've been contemplating the connection between Ironborn thralldom and the thralldom of the wights to the Others (perhaps for another post), when I started thinking about thralldom as it's depicted in GRRM's vampire novel Fevre Dream.

The most prominent human thrall to the vampires in that novel is the POV character Sour Billy Tipton, who serves the formidable Damon Julian in the hopes that his master will follow through on his promise to make him immortal.

Spoiler

The thing is...Damon Julian's promises are complete bullshit. He allows Sour Billy to believe the myths and legends about humans being made into vampires, because such lies make Sour Billy an extremely useful servant for someone who can't go out into the day. But the fact is that "the night people" are simply a distinct species. They are incapable of breeding with humans (who they regard as "the cattle"), let alone transferring their qualities and powers to them. Sour Billy's "thralldom" to Julian is really just an exploitative social contract built entirely upon a lie.

Sour Billy is a despicably cruel man who dreams of asserting dominance over all of the people who look down upon him. He looks to the immortal predators in his midst as his gods, and he wishes to become one of them. 

I can't help thinking of Craster as ASOIAF's Sour Billy Tipton. Like Billy, Craster is a sickening tribute to human pettiness and pathology, particularly in its "lower," unrefined state, as opposed to the lordly cruelty of Tywin Lannister and Roose Bolton. Or the elegant, dispassionate cruelty of the Others, Craster's cold gods.

Craster was useful to the Others in some way (exactly how we don't really know, except that it involves sheep and sons). So they kept him alive.

Spoiler

Obviously the thralldom of the wights to the Others is a fantasy version of GRRM's "teki" from Nightflyers and his corpse handler trilogy. But these ice demons also seem to operate as Damon Julian does, to use humans as the Fevre Dream vampires sometimes use living "cattle" when it suits them.

Not exactly a world-shaking revelation. It's just nice to see the echoes of GRRM's earlier work emerge in ASOIAF.

...And it lets me think back and savor the pathetic deaths of two absolutely horrible people, in concert! Ah, such a beautiful harmony...

[Phylum of Alexandria]

Also, specifically related to the psychic thralldom of the wights, do you think there is something to the notion of "fire consumes, cold preserves" with respect to the memories of the dead?

Would Othor's memories stay intact over time, whereas Beric's and LSH's memories are doomed to eventually fade? Does this speak to how GRRM conceives of minds? Is a soul, a life fire and the will it brings, distinct from cold circuitry and its encoded information?

And how does Coldhands fit in with this idea? We still don't know the nature of his resurrection, though he certainly has maintained a sense of himself despite being dead for decades or centuries. Is that via the cold of the North, via the magic that resurrected him, or both?

Just some random stuff to consider.