Anthropological insights into the origins of Ironmen faith

[hnv]

Ethnography and anthropology give us insights into the origins of religious or "magical" norms and beliefs.

The faith of the seven makes perfect sense when you consider its origins as the established faith of an early iron age agricultural culture. Andal culture probably had something similar to the Roman paterfamilias which explain the hegemony of the Father within their pantheon. The origin of the rest of the seven can also be rationally reconstructed through their roles in Andal culture, and it could even be speculated that they began with a smaller amount of gods - the father, the mother, the smith, and the warrior - and their numbers expanded with time until they reached the salient figure of seven. At some later time, decedents of Hugor of the Hill sought legitimization for their rule by collecting folk beliefs about the seven into the corpus of the Seven-Pointed Star. That's also a pretty common occurrence in our world. And we can continue with this analysis with other institutions of the Faith.

 

The faith in the old gods was taught to the old men, and they probably enacted all sorts of customs and beliefs in the process of turning it into a human religion.

 

But I'm trying to find a way to rationally reconstruct the Ironmen faith. Some things are pretty straightforward, they are seafarers so the ocean and its behavior play a pretty big role in their culture. It is quite common for Ur-cultures to anthropomorphize natural forces. The odd thing is their form of reverence for death. Now all religions must grapple with the fact of human death. Some even develop mortuary cults and monuments. But I know of none, at least not in ultra-tribal culture, that fetishizes death as a core tenant. Ironmen kill one another and then perform resuscitation. That's perplexing, and in Planetos we have another example of such religion - the Red faith...

Now we know the red faith has its origins in the long night. I speculate that the cult of the drowned god might have similar origins. There's a massive global environmental calamity, the early Ironmen see men brought back from the dead, and perhaps emerging from the sea? Now for some perplexing reason, they began to view this fact positively. Perhaps they began to offer blood sacrifices to the ancient others, like Craster, and to reason and justify this practice to their people the ancient Ironmen elite constructed the myth of the drowned god?

 

 

Thoughts? objections? corrections? refinements?

[James Arryn]

It’s possible that it originated as human sacrifice, and along the way…possibly due to sacrifices being too common or perhaps in better times when the need seemed less extreme, either by accident (by the actions of distraught family or similar) or deceit it was discovered that if you acted quickly enough after death, some could be resuscitated. There may have been a transitional period where whether or not the person was brought back to life indicated the god’s favour or approval, either of the sacrificial victim or the group performing the sacrifice. And over time that gave way to ~ the present where deaths are more the exception. 

[hnv]

52 minutes ago, James Arryn said:

It’s possible that it originated as human sacrifice, and along the way…possibly due to sacrifices being too common or perhaps in better times when the need seemed less extreme, either by accident (by the actions of distraught family or similar) or deceit it was discovered that if you acted quickly enough after death, some could be resuscitated. There may have been a transitional period where whether or not the person was brought back to life indicated the god’s favour or approval, either of the sacrificial victim or the group performing the sacrifice. And over time that gave way to ~ the present where deaths are more the exception. 

Interesting. My mine objection will be that human sacrifices are transactional in nature, you offers the god\s your firstborn in return for bountiful harvest\safe journey etc. Even the more socially complex human sacrifices were transactional in nature but simply move the individual consideration to the societal level. So you'd want to make sure the sacrifice was actually complete otherwise you wouldn't get your end of the deal and risk upsetting the gods.

But it could have emerged from something like the fire ordeal. You'd drown someone and if he came back he was innocent

[Hugorfonics]

1 hour ago, hnv said:

But I'm trying to find a way to rationally reconstruct the Ironmen faith. Some things are pretty straightforward, they are seafarers so the ocean and its behavior play a pretty big role in their culture. It is quite common for Ur-cultures to anthropomorphize natural forces. The odd thing is their form of reverence for death. Now all religions must grapple with the fact of human death. Some even develop mortuary cults and monuments. But I know of none, at least not in ultra-tribal culture, that fetishizes death as a core tenant. Ironmen kill one another and then perform resuscitation. That's perplexing,

I don't think your looking at it properly. To me, the drowned gods religion isn't about death, it's about rebirth. What is dead may never die but comes back stronger. 

Aeron is the best example I think, a snot nosed punk who lived the life of a rambunctious teenager until his near death experience changed the way he looked at life. God gave him a second chance to live a holy life. It's like being baptized, pretty Christian, but in asoiaf fashion it's pushed to the limit in a fucked up way 

Eta. Baptism 

Edited May 23, 2023 by Hugorfonics

[James Arryn]

1 minute ago, hnv said:

Interesting. My mine objection will be that human sacrifices are transactional in nature, you offers the god\s your firstborn in return for bountiful harvest\safe journey etc. Even the more socially complex human sacrifices were transactional in nature but simply move the individual consideration to the societal level. So you'd want to make sure the sacrifice was actually complete otherwise you wouldn't get your end of the deal and risk upsetting the gods.

But it could have emerged from something like the fire ordeal. You'd drown someone and if he came back he was innocent

Yeah, that was my thinking, that it transitioned from traditional/transactional to a kind of judgment made manifest stage…thinking Minoan bull-dancing or trial by combat or ordeal, though I agree the former is disputed and the latter a divergence from sacrifice, but anyways that type of concept, then further into the present. 

[hnv]

6 minutes ago, Hugorfonics said:

I don't think your looking at it properly. To me, the drowned gods religion isn't about death, it's about rebirth. What is dead may never die but comes back stronger. 

Aeron is the best example I think, a snot nosed punk who lived the life of a rambunctious teenager until his near death experience changed the way he looked at life. God gave him a second chance to live a holy life. It's like being baptized, pretty Christian, but in asoiaf fashion it's pushed to the limit in a fucked up way 

Eta. Baptism 

This is a very very late take of it coming after thousands of years brushing off with other faiths and kingdoms. It is very unlikely to be anything similar to the original tenants, same as the northmen faith in the old gods.

[astarkchoice]

It may be linked to the old ones. We know all over planetos that there are hints of some scary beneath the sea monsterous beings  that may have left oily stone and left an  impression on the humans that were subjected to them preying on them for food (and/or their women). Long dead though (or not?) 

The ironborn of course took the seastone chair as the symbol of leadership, they too come from the seas  to land and see it as their right to take by force slaves and breeding wives ! They see the salty sea being mixed with their human blood  as a source of strength (we can asume the beasts where strong)   and their strongest house symbol is the krakken.....a beast we now know not only exists in planetos but ancients may have even controlled it (celtigars krakken horn) 

The primative peoples of the iron islands may have formed this religion as they emulated the strange beings who utterly dominated them just as the 1000 island people and others . We know they warred, traded and interbred with other  westeros peoples  for generations so the idea of gods from the sea may have merged with the greenlanders  to become a single god mythology and/or taken from the northerners worship of nature (the sea/sea god  replacing trees).

We see the isle of toads also has a oily black stone idol and its people have an sort of fish like appearance (interbreeeding with old ones? ),  the 1000 islanders also look fishlike but are terrified of the sea (memory and stories of what happened before?) And worship fish like gods ! We know many in westeros speak of old myth of half man half fish  'squishers' killing and eating men and raping women OR merlings which are possibly  linked to the ironborn faith .  The lorath  mazemakers may have been them or humans killed by them too.

We know theres one city made of oily blackstome in yeen (maybe the brindled ghoul half men monsters are related to these old ones?) And of course in the island of  leng giant underground sealed off cities suposedly by the old ones again who  supposedly took an empress as their bride there and the tradition stayed, the old ones apparently telling her to kill amd murder outsiders. 

[Hugorfonics]

11 minutes ago, hnv said:

This is a very very late take of it coming after thousands of years brushing off with other faiths and kingdoms. It is very unlikely to be anything similar to the original tenants, same as the northmen faith in the old gods.

Maybe. Like the Faith you were alluding to in the OP (there was a thread here about the origin of the god Warrior by @sweetsunray and basically the run and short of it was in all likelihood a knight is a first men construct that the faith took and turned into their defender) definitely took some stuff

 

The original tenants? Ok, I mean it's just guess work, but yea they're probably the same tenants right? The bones of Nagga were stumbled upon by some iron wielders with their thralls in line and decided that I guess what is dead may never die but comes back stronger, for thousands of years...

Yea I see how that sounds, and although there are island cultures that pretty much stay them for eons it's due to their distance from other cultures that's not what the Iron Islands are. They're as much of a Sunset Kingdom as you can possibly get and their thralls becoming Ironborn in one generation kinda screams the need for dramatic cultural shifts.

But that doesn't happen, so my answer to why what is dead may never die is the same as why Stark has been ruling since Brandon the Builder made his first snow fort, magic. Euron and his ilk leave a mark

[hnv]

I'd like to add that I think the very term "Ironmen" is a late moniker they adopted. We know the First Men wielded bronze, and the First Men\Ironmen are either of the same group or they arrived at Westeros around the same time and before the Andals arrived.

We know the Andals wielded Iron, while the First Men they defeated had only bronze. So it's a fair assumption the pre-Andal conquest Ironmen had no notion of iron or of its significance. It was simply another element of nature they could not harness to their use. They could not have developed the myth that they are Ironmen due to their fierceness before the Andals came wielding iron...They probably got their name by the Andals who discovered the Iron ores in the islands.

So as we see, by the time of 0 AC the ironmen had an image of themselves that was already heavily shaped by the image other groups had of them. Accordingly, their myths and folklore was also by then heavily influenced by others.

Imagined communities all around...I think we tend to take the myths from the books at face value though they are all probably heavily distorted

[Craving Peaches]

Maybe the death aspect of the god came first and then water was added after the pre-Ironborn came to the islands/the sea?

[Hugorfonics]

1 hour ago, hnv said:

I'd like to add that I think the very term "Ironmen" is a late moniker they adopted. We know the First Men wielded bronze, and the First Men\Ironmen are either of the same group or they arrived at Westeros around the same time and before the Andals arrived.

We know the Andals wielded Iron, while the First Men they defeated had only bronze. So it's a fair assumption the pre-Andal conquest Ironmen had no notion of iron or of its significance. It was simply another element of nature they could not harness to their use. They could not have developed the myth that they are Ironmen due to their fierceness before the Andals came wielding iron...They probably got their name by the Andals who discovered the Iron ores in the islands.

So as we see, by the time of 0 AC the ironmen had an image of themselves that was already heavily shaped by the image other groups had of them. Accordingly, their myths and folklore was also by then heavily influenced by others.

Imagined communities all around...I think we tend to take the myths from the books at face value though they are all probably heavily distorted

The Andals came with steel, which is thousands of years after the first men came with their sticks and stones.

When whomever discovered Nagga, I guess it's feasible that they were rocking flint weapons like the lady from Brans vision but that they're called the iron Islands makes it seem that iron was in abundance on the islands thusly the Ironborn were uh, born, in iron. 

Although, I guess the current Ironborn are Andals? Although that's maybe through assimilation with their thralldom style 

.

"The Andals were the first, a race of tall, fair-haired warriors who came with steel and fire and the seven-pointed star of the new gods painted on their chests. The wars lasted hundreds of years, but in the end the six southron kingdoms all fell before them. Only here, where the King in the North threw back every army that tried to cross the Neck, did the rule of the First Men endure. The Andals burnt out the weirwood groves, hacked down the faces, slaughtered the children where they found them, and everywhere proclaimed the triumph of the Seven over the old gods. So the children fled north—"

[chrisdaw]

They particularly worked out how to skin change/second life ocean life where everyone else would not be able to breathe when they tried. The key was drowning, flat out drowning and dying would allow for a second life and drowning and resuscitating as humans probably cheated the whole system and allowed for skinchanging. Obviously some would not survive the process, but what is dead may never die.

More than one soul can fit into being, and all the Ironborn who were drowned or drowned and resuscitated during their life and die at (or near enough to the) sea will find a second life in something in the ocean. The drowned God is the representation of a drowned human spliced with a leviathan, it represents a second lifed leviathan. The Drowned God's watery hall is symbolic of a leviathan's innards.

The precise knowledge has been lost but the customs and beliefs endure.

To reverse engineer the Ironborn the way the author thought it up the logic would go;

• People in my universe can skinchange, so should I let them skinchange fish? Hmmm no, because they can't breathe underwater.
• I want a character to become a whale and also a kraken so lets make a crazy work around and imbed it into my viking adjacent culture.

The Forsaken chapter leans into it all very heavily and sits just on the edge of reveal, with Euron calling the Drowned God a lie and stating that if he drowned Aeron that Aeron would just die. The point will be brought full circle, no the Drowned God isn't a lie, it represents something very real, Aeron is not forsaken and his faith shall be rewarded, when Aeron drowns he will not stay drowned but rise again harder and stronger, he the faithful will be called to the Drowned God's watery hall, he will second life a leviathan, and eventually the Drowned God will have his revenge on Euron.

[hnv]

10 hours ago, Hugorfonics said:

The Andals came with steel, which is thousands of years after the first men came with their sticks and stones.

When whomever discovered Nagga, I guess it's feasible that they were rocking flint weapons like the lady from Brans vision but that they're called the iron Islands makes it seem that iron was in abundance on the islands thusly the Ironborn were uh, born, in iron. 

Although, I guess the current Ironborn are Andals? Although that's maybe through assimilation with their thralldom style 

.

"The Andals were the first, a race of tall, fair-haired warriors who came with steel and fire and the seven-pointed star of the new gods painted on their chests. The wars lasted hundreds of years, but in the end the six southron kingdoms all fell before them. Only here, where the King in the North threw back every army that tried to cross the Neck, did the rule of the First Men endure. The Andals burnt out the weirwood groves, hacked down the faces, slaughtered the children where they found them, and everywhere proclaimed the triumph of the Seven over the old gods. So the children fled north—"

Why would an early bronze race of humans know what iron or iron ores are? They can't melt and use them. It's just grey rocks for them.

[Craving Peaches]

4 hours ago, hnv said:

Why would an early bronze race of humans know what iron or iron ores are? They can't melt and use them. It's just grey rocks for them.

To be fair, real life bronze age societies, though they could not smelt Iron, could occasionally use it if it came from a meteor. That was supposedly the 'source' of iron before smelting.

[hnv]

57 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

To be fair, real life bronze age societies, though they could not smelt Iron, could occasionally use it if it came from a meteor. That was supposedly the 'source' of iron before smelting.

It's possible yes, there are also late bronze age societies with limited capabilities in smelting iron. But early Ironmen were fairly primitive, and even if they had some vague notion of what iron is, they probably wouldn't have given it that much weight in their cosmos and self-image until the Andals came with steel. They could have easily been Rockmen if the point was to emphasize how strong and hard they are.

 

But we're drifting a bit...my main point is that most fables about the age of heroes are that, fables, that were altered and manipulated through constant brushing-off with other cultures and real world events. We tend to take them at too much face value in this board, that's why the anthropological analysis of myths and beliefs is fruitful.

[sweetsunray]

On 5/23/2023 at 6:48 PM, hnv said:

I'd like to add that I think the very term "Ironmen" is a late moniker they adopted. We know the First Men wielded bronze, and the First Men\Ironmen are either of the same group or they arrived at Westeros around the same time and before the Andals arrived.

We know the Andals wielded Iron, while the First Men they defeated had only bronze. So it's a fair assumption the pre-Andal conquest Ironmen had no notion of iron or of its significance. It was simply another element of nature they could not harness to their use. They could not have developed the myth that they are Ironmen due to their fierceness before the Andals came wielding iron...They probably got their name by the Andals who discovered the Iron ores in the islands.

So as we see, by the time of 0 AC the ironmen had an image of themselves that was already heavily shaped by the image other groups had of them. Accordingly, their myths and folklore was also by then heavily influenced by others.

Imagined communities all around...I think we tend to take the myths from the books at face value though they are all probably heavily distorted

You express a misconception about bronze age versus iron age. People in the bronze age knew what iron was, and could mine it just as well as the copper and tin for the alloy bronze. And when you can smelt metal to make the alloy bronze, then you can smelt iron too. That's not the issue for people of the bronze age. The issue was that pure iron is brittle and erodes from oxidation worse than bronze, and thus was in their eyes an inferior product. The compound containing iron needs to be improved to make it less brittle as well as specific techniques needed to be developed. Meteorites with iron for example were naturally of far better composition, so that forging from meteorites would render a superior product than bronze, and thus much of the iron forged tools during the bronze age tended to be from meteorites.

So, nope, your assumption that First Men would have no notion of iron or its significance is wrong. The legends of the Others, the mention of dragonsteel show that FM knew iron as a metal and its significance. But Dawn's forging from a meteorite also shows that FM did not yet know how to improve mined iron by themselves to match the composition of meteorite iron so that it would be superior to bronze. Hence, as in real world history, most FM preferred the overall superior bronze with the techniques and raw iron available.

[Terrorthatflapsinthenight9]

9 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

You express a misconception about bronze age versus iron age. People in the bronze age knew what iron was, and could mine it just as well as the copper and tin for the alloy bronze. And when you can smelt metal to make the alloy bronze, then you can smelt iron too. That's not the issue for people of the bronze age. The issue was that pure iron is brittle and erodes from oxidation worse than bronze, and thus was in their eyes an inferior product. The compound containing iron needs to be improved to make it less brittle as well as specific techniques needed to be developed. Meteorites with iron for example were naturally of far better composition, so that forging from meteorites would render a superior product than bronze, and thus much of the iron forged tools during the bronze age tended to be from meteorites.

So, nope, your assumption that First Men would have no notion of iron or its significance is wrong. The legends of the Others, the mention of dragonsteel show that FM knew iron as a metal and its significance. But Dawn's forging from a meteorite also shows that FM did not yet know how to improve mined iron by themselves to match the composition of meteorite iron so that it would be superior to bronze. Hence, as in real world history, most FM preferred the overall superior bronze with the techniques and raw iron available.

Yes, and the Ironborn may have picked up and learned how to forge iron and make weapons superior to bronze of it, because it was so abundant on their isles and far more available to them than bronze.

[Craving Peaches]

23 hours ago, hnv said:

It's possible yes, there are also late bronze age societies with limited capabilities in smelting iron. But early Ironmen were fairly primitive, and even if they had some vague notion of what iron is, they probably wouldn't have given it that much weight in their cosmos and self-image until the Andals came with steel. They could have easily been Rockmen if the point was to emphasize how strong and hard they are.

 

But we're drifting a bit...my main point is that most fables about the age of heroes are that, fables, that were altered and manipulated through constant brushing-off with other cultures and real world events. We tend to take them at too much face value in this board, that's why the anthropological analysis of myths and beliefs is fruitful.

I see a few possibilities for the Ironborn faith.

1. Pre-Ironborn had certain aspects of faith/mythos already which they then 'modified' to fit their new home.

2. Pre-Ironborn adopted the faith/mythos of earlier residents of the Islands (But who? Builders of the Seastone Chair?)

3. Faith/Mythos was spread by wandering prophets

4. Mix and match any of the above.

It does not seem likely the Ironborn were the original inhabitants of the Islands, the myth of them coming from the Drowned God's halls to me suggests they migrated from somewhere else, and this seems to be backed up by in-world academic consensus. In addition, the supposed presence of the Seastone Chair being already there when the Ironborn got there suggests someone else was there before them.

Overall, I think a combination of option 1 and 2 from above seems most likely. I can see them adopting relics such as the Seastone Chair as part of their own legends after coming to the islands. So I agree that iron probably wasn't always very important to them.

[Craving Peaches]

10 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

The issue was that pure iron is brittle and erodes from oxidation worse than bronze, and thus was in their eyes an inferior product.

Does this not prove hnv's point a bit though? Why would you want to associate your group with a worse metal? To me that makes it more likely that the 'iron' part came after, when those techniques to make it better were there.

[sweetsunray]

1 hour ago, Craving Peaches said:

Does this not prove hnv's point a bit though? Why would you want to associate your group with a worse metal? To me that makes it more likely that the 'iron' part came after, when those techniques to make it better were there.

The ironborn are pretty much portrayed overall as scavengers and opportunists: example Nagga's bones and Driftwood Crown. As iron was abundant and copper and tin much less so, and they lived isolated on islands, they were forced to experiment with the metal that was abundantly available. They would have developed and acquired some forging skills that improved the iron, but never enough to be any threat to Westeros, beyond raiding peasants that had nothing more than sticks and stone to defend themselves. It was the lesser early iron that stayed their expansion in the mainland.

The Daynes obviously knew how to make steel (carbonisation process): hence Dawn. But they must have guarded this technique as some family secret. They did not share it with other petty kings, because obviously that gave them their ultimate advantage.

So, basically the Ironborn had rudimentary techniques to improve iron for everyday use and weapons early on because of circumstances (abundant iron, isolated on island), but not to make steel and thus never had this as advantage over mainland Westeros. So they didn't succeed at anything else beyond "raids" until the Andals arrived and knowledge to make superior steel spread. Meanwhile, the inferiority of Ironborn tools never convinced the First Men that iron could be better than bronze, and they did not fear every (petty) king would ever have something akin to Dawn, which was an unique sword.

This also brings to mind the Starks and the swords in the crypts. They were always iron swords in the laps of the dead kings, never bronze ones. Because it served as a reminder that their founder Brandon once wielded Dawn, and there was no waste of the resources for bronze by making iron grave swords.

Other clues that iron had some use for the mainland FM can be seen with the crown of winter for the Starks (combo of iron and bronze) and the arms of house Royce (bronze shield with iron studs). The last implies it was used as an additional strengthener, but was too inferior a product for swords and axes.

 

Edited May 25, 2023 by sweetsunray