Have we got The Others all wrong?

[Buried Treasure]

 

 

10 hours ago, House Cambodia said:

 I asked above in this thread, why don't wildlings give the Others a few babies every year and live untroubled north of the Wall? Wasn't Mance and Della's boy good enough? Seems to me, only Craster's sons fit whatever bill the Others want. What's that about?

But Craster's sheep are also an acceptable sacrifice. What's that about? 

I've offered the argument that the Others accepted Craster's sacrifices because it amused them. I say that in their cruelty and disdain for humans a sheep is as good as a human.

 

As for the rest of the Free Folk, they are a proud people who value strength, and value taking what you want rather than begging for scraps or mercy. Probably sickly or deformed infants are sometimes left exposed, but healthy infants are a prize and for anybody thinking long term a future strength.

 

Craster wasn't thinking trying to build a legacy, his holdfast existed only to serve him, and was never going to outlast him. His sons were only a resource drain and future threat to him. He benefited from getting rid of them and as he was doing it for decades probably the wolves and scavengers got free meals long before the Others took interest.

[Club-foot cleft-lips]

11 hours ago, House Cambodia said:

I don't think Craster can be regarded as a 'regular guy'. We have these hints that in ancient times CotF sacrificed their children to the weirwoods, and that northerners/Starks practised human sacrifice, yet oddly, there are no references to wildlings sacrificing their babies (or any humans). I asked above in this thread, why don't wildlings give the Others a few babies every year and live untroubled north of the Wall? Wasn't Mance and Della's boy good enough? Seems to me, only Craster's sons fit whatever bill the Others want. What's that about?

I could buy into this, but I have trouble seeing any good reason Craster is special besides the overused one. He's what 60-80 years old? has white hair (silver turning white). Marries his kin. What clan does that describes? and while I cant firmly place any Starks on the wall during his estimated time of birth, we can put Bloodraven there. 

but that is all circumstantial. Yeah his mother is from white tree, and i wouldn't be surprised if bloodraven checked it out as a Ranger, hes got his own familial great weirwood. Yeah his name means crow, but lots of crows on the wall. its not like he resembles him in any other way.

So maybe Craster is building the other army on behalf of his dad, the champion of the great cold god, but at the same time, if every bloodraven parentage theory is correct, we would all be bastards of great bastards.

Maybe there is something special about Craster, but if it isnt for something that has been foreshadowed already, than it just seems too... deus ex. 

 

[Club-foot cleft-lips]

1 hour ago, Buried Treasure said:

But Craster's sheep are also an acceptable sacrifice. What's that about? 

I've offered the argument that the Others accepted Craster's sacrifices because it amused them. I say that in their cruelty and disdain for humans a sheep is as good as a human.

"Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."

Some users point at Jon as a sort of in-Universe Corn King. perhaps the willing self sacrifice of Jon to the others will appease them and end the war. Who else is ready for some Jon centric christianity?

[House Cambodia]

BT - I don't think the Others were actually "laughing" - that was an anthropomorphised interpretation of the sound they made. Therefore, I also don't see the sheep-taking as a "joke". So what's going on there? Did the running out of sons and substitution of sheep coincide with the killing of Waymar and the earlier ambushing of Benjen's rangers? Now Craster is dead and can't give the Others any more babies, that does up the stakes. So long as the Others are 'awake', they need human babies of some kind - not regular wildling ones, as I've explained.

Wild speculation here, in complete contradiction to the point of this thread, but let me just throw it out for sh...s and gigg..s: Jojen was bled - alive - to make the  'paste' for Bran to eat. He was then handed over to the Others as a sacrifice. I think this actually has legs - see below.

Club - the specific date of Craster's birth isn't particularly significant; it's the time from which he started producing sons that matters, but it is a potentially very intriguing prospect indeed if he turns out to be a son of Bloodraven. Yet more speculation, of course, but I like it - it would explain a lot.

Further, it would not be impossible if before Craster's mother, BR had been knocking up wildling ladies from the time he crossed the Wall, if he had become aware of the Wakening of the Others when he was Lord Commander, if he wasn't responsible for that himself. It would suggest that the Others specifically need the blood of male greenseers - not that the babies or father need be greenseers themselves. With Howland Reed potentially being a greenseer or of greenseer stock and Jojen having green dreams, it adds credence to my thought re sacrificing Jojen to the Others.

 

In brief, I'm making the new suggestion here that whilst Bloodraven may have been responsible for Waking Up the Others after 8000 years of sleep (Boo!), an alternative reading is that through his green dreams he became aware that the Others had woken for some other reason, and he defected from the NW for the express purpose of producing acceptable babies to sacrifice in order to keep the Others quiet and the realm safe (Hooray for BR!)

If my new theory has legs (wait for it...), it adds a new twist to the story; BR's successor is a crippled boy whose tackle doesn't work - i.e. he can't produce offspring. Therefore, out of biological necessity, Bran (the three-eyed crow) will have to find a whole different solution to managing the Others than Bloodraven did.

Edited April 10 by House Cambodia

[Nisachar]

Excellent Topic.

I have been thinking about the role of Others for a while now, and have come to the conclusion that while they might indeed be some kind of existential threat, their purpose is to serve as a mirror to mankind. I guess thematically they also serve to highlight the idea of othering that is as much a cause of human suffering as anything else.

Power as a theme is very much in play in the story. Almost all struggles seem to revolve around having-not having power and all the antics that go into wielding it. One of the underlying truths is that you cannot wish it away. It’s fundamental to human nature and as such wishy-washy pacifism is as ridiculous (Baelor?) as is gravitating to the other extreme (Maegor/Tywin/Insert fav punching bag?)

Arya keeps insisting ‘it’s not fair’ and goes to great lengths to obtain what she sees as justice but the process of obtaining it involves injustice in some cases. 

Magic is a highly potent power. Like magic, there’s no safe, foolproof way to wield power. Power has a good side, yes but also a dark side.

Perhaps the battle will end with some kind of truce with the restoration of balance to the seasons. It is possible magic will be taken away, the genie put back into the bottle, and a lesson for mankind not to mess with things they do not understand nor control AKA magic. No matter how much of a big fish you are, there’s always a bigger fish out there. However, I hope Martin keeps magic as a lingering force and doesn’t do away with it altogether by the end.

But all this is subjective philosophy. I am unclear how George wants to conclude, except perhaps to suggest that we are our own worst enemies, that instead of fighting the evil in others, it might serve us better if we fight the evil within.

I do not have an answer to the mystery of the Others and so will try to keep my comments around observations and questions because one of the best ways to figure out the clues is hinted by the author in the form of a wise dancing master’s advice to a wolf pup, which I think is a foolproof way to ferret ideas contained in the texts - namely trust only what the five senses of a given character report while considering their feelings and thoughts as, at best, half-truths/half-lies. It follows then that the Andal Septons‘ books on Westerosi history are not exactly correct records of events. But since the best lies contain some kernel of truth, let’s not completely dismiss them either.

 
On to the more juicy topic of what the Others are, how they operate, and ponder what they might be up to. More on this in a short while.

Edited April 10 by Nisachar
grammar

[House Cambodia]

^ A very warm welcome to you. Great post, fully in accordance with my thoughts. I look forward to hearing more from you when you're ready.

[House Cambodia]

How about this:

We're told the CotF created the Others with a huge sacrifice of hundreds of their own young. It all got out of hand, but the Others did stop the genocidal program of the humans and retreated behind the Wall and seemingly 'deactivated' for 8000 years.

Bloodraven 'reactivated' them. How? See all those bones of greenseers and Children in his cave? Maybe he did that. In a repetition of the original mass-sacrifice, he brought The Others back. To sustain them, he had to produce a steady stream of greenseer-blood (i.e. his) babies to feed to the Others. Once he got old, he kept back one of his sons, Craster, to nurture and succeed him.

Of course, many of the greenseers in his cave are not dead - they are embedded, as he now is, in the weirwoods. That's very unnatural - greenseers should not be in weirwoods. Do we know how long weirwood leaves have been red? Naturally, they'd be green. When did they change?

What we're given no hint of, as far as I can see, is WHY Bloodraven is doing this. Wouldn't it be fascinating if it turns out Egg - Aegon V had a role in all this by sending BR to the Wall. I'm thinking Ye Wenji in The Three-Body Problem, who came to the conclusion that humans were so irredeemably corrupt, that they couldn't save themselves, so she called in aliens to conquer.

I'm thinking Bloodraven with his green dreams could foresee the Blackfyre failures, madness of Aerys II, the anarchy of the War of the 5 Kings, the worse that was to follow and concluded the only way to restore sanity to the realm was to force the humans to unite behind an existential threat. Maester Aemon likely knew all this - he was taken from us too soon.

[Nisachar]

Let’s examine some reports and stories to see if we can glean some idea about the Others and perhaps ferret a very interesting discrepancy between the accepted information and events witnessed by present-day characters. We can start with everyone’s favorite bard' - Old Nan - and her story about the Others and the last Hero as narrated to one of the main characters - Bran.

Quote

“I could tell you the story about Brandon the Builder,” Old Nan said. “That was always your favorite.” Thousands and thousands of years ago, Brandon the Builder had raised Winterfell, and some said the Wall. Bran knew the story, but it had never been his favorite. 

• Bran doesn’t like the story of Brandon the builder who built Winterfell, a castle Bran knows like no one else, and who - this is interesting - some said also raised the Wall. 
  •  Why include this ambiguity about the Wall’s creation?

Quote

“Oh, my sweet summer child,” Old Nan said quietly, “what do you know of fear? Fear is for the winter, my little lord, when the snows fall a hundred feet deep and the ice wind comes howling out of the north. Fear is for the long night, when the sun hides its face for years at a time, and little children are born and live and die all in darkness while the direwolves grow gaunt and hungry, and the white walkers move through the woods.”

• Bran has named his Direwolf Summer and is himself a summer child. He’s a summer knight, a summer wolf.
• the ice wind comes howling out of the north
  • The Ice Wind’s point of origin is in the north, it comes howling as if it was a wolf.
  • If Bran is the summer wolf, a sweet summer child then who represents the opposite - the winter wolf, the bitter winter child?
    • Sweet Summer Child also recalls the Hound’s words to Beric: “I hope your god’s a sweet one, Dondarrion. You’re going to meet him shortly.”
• The sun hides its face for years at a time
  • Shouldn’t it be sun hid its face since by all accounts the long night was a solitary event?
• the white walkers move through the woods.
  • They move through the woods, yes but seem to do naught else. Also just like the sun hiding its face multiple times, they too seem to occasionally appear during harsh winters even after the Long Night was over.
    • Do they roam the wolf’s wood as well, south of the wall, considering dire wolves are mentioned just a bit before? According to Theon, the wolves roamed south of the wall till about 200 years ago.

 

Quote

“You mean the Others,” Bran said, querulously. “The Others,” Old Nan agreed.

• Here we are meant to treat the Others and the White Walkers as the same.
  • I’ll leave it at that. I have no evidence to suggest otherwise.

 

Quote

“Thousands and thousands of years ago, a winter fell that was cold and hard and endless beyond all memory of man. There came a night that lasted a generation, and kings shivered and died in their castles even as the swineherds in their hovels. Women smothered their children rather than see them starve, and cried, and felt their tears freeze on their cheeks.” Her voice and her needles fell silent, and she glanced up at Bran with pale, filmy eyes and asked, “So, child. This is the sort of story you like?”

• Thousands and thousands of years ago, a - get this - winter fell.
  • Winter Fell?. The same term is used just a few paragraphs before to describe the period when Brandon ‘raised’ Winterfell. 
  • Winterfell… Hmmmm… Winter Rose. Blue rose. Blue petals, the eyes of death. We’ve quite a few Stark Kids and Baratheons with blue eyes. There’s even a maid Knight of Tarth from the Sapphire Islands. Her house is the Evenstar. Wonder what’s the common link.
  • Cold and hard also recalls the Starks.
  • Martin loves his wordplay.
• a night that lasted a generation
  • A generation would be about 15-16 years considering that’s the age when they call a male child a man grown or 13 years if we consider a girl.
  • 13 seems to suit better because it also recalls the 13 who set out to find the COTF as also the 13-year reign of the 13th LC of the NW - the NK.
    • Was he killed because he and the NQ had a child - a female child - who had matured in her 13th year?
  • Admittedly this is speculation based on a duration whose number isn’t specified.
• felt their tears freeze on their cheeks
  • This is the opposite of Bran’s burning tears when he saw the Heart of Winter during his first - and most tantalizing - vision. 
  • One would think the White Walkers/Others might feature in that crucial vision if Bran’s role was to live because of something he saw in the Heart of Winter.
  • Heart of Winter can also mean the Heart Tree of Winterfell. I understand it’s flimsy but mentioning it here just the same.  

 

Quote

“Well,” Bran said reluctantly, “yes, only …”

• Frustratingly, we get no information about what Bran wanted to say. 

Quote

Old Nan nodded. “In that darkness, the Others came for the first time,” she said as her needles went click click click.

• Stopped… then resumes weaving the story…
• The first time suggests they were visible during later times as well which tracks with the earlier portion of Nan’s narration.
  • However there seems to be no record of them devastating mankind as they are said to have done for the first - and by all accounts - the last time during that Long Night, even if there have been mini-long nights later.
    • Food for thought. I mean if they were so rabidly antihuman, you’d think their subsequent appearances would also involve wreaking havoc on man. 
    • This suggests the pact worked. Assuming the pact involved solving the issue of the Others that is.

Quote

“They were cold things, dead things, that hated iron and fire and the touch of the sun, and every creature with hot blood in its veins. They swept over holdfasts and cities and kingdoms, felled heroes and armies by the score, riding their pale dead horses and leading hosts of the slain. All the swords of men could not stay their advance, and even maidens and suckling babes found no pity in them. They hunted the maids through frozen forests, and fed their dead servants on the flesh of human children.”

• Dead things?
  • The author himself said they aren’t dead but a different form of life, like say the Sidhe. 
    • Sidhe is pronounced as ‘She’. 
    • Considering Martin’s penchant for wordplay in the books, that is likely not a coincidence - or if it is, it’s a wonderful coincidence.
    • This also recalls ‘Shae’, Tyrion’s lover who then betrayed him for Tywin, his father, and who Tyrion ends up killing.
  • She = female?
    • This might be a possible explanation for the sacrifice of Craster’s male kids.
    • Though .. Sacrificing Sheep and potentially dogs .. Haha.. Not sure what that means. And no I don’t think the sacrifices are for amusement. Martin rarely wastes words. It’s part of the reason why the story is so dense and thick with intrigue.
    • I will leave this as an open-ended mystery for now. A musing for later.
• Hated iron and fire and the touch of the sun, and every creature with hot blood in its veins.
  • We have seen that their swords can shatter even castle-forged steel. The Other’s sword penetrates Waymar’s mail as if it were silk. It’s safe to say that iron isn’t quite something that they need to hate or fear.
  • When the Other ‘attacked’ Sam and company, it sliced through Grenn’s torch easily with its sword.
  • However, we never saw its sword come in contact with the fire itself. An interaction between ice magic and fire would have told us a lot.
  • The fire at the fist of the first men didn’t stop the wights who - as we have seen - catch fire easily. Fire can be overcome by sheer numbers.
  • Hating iron and fire corresponds to the concerns of trees who are, like the Others a different form of life (and the COTF who use them for green seeing), suggesting some common nemesis between the Other and Trees + COTF
    • But hating the sun doesn’t correspond to trees, the COTF, or Giants. All need the sun.
• Riding their pale dead horses
  • Ah. Pale dead horses. Horses aren’t necessarily pale even when dead. What’s the hint here? What are pale dead horses? Put differently when are dead horses pale? Nevertheless, unless it means something different, horses suggest they were available 8000 years ago (or 5000 years ago. Doesn't matter)
• Host of the slain = wights is plain enough.
• They hunted the maids through frozen forests. 
  • Why? Why hunt maids? Who are these ‘the’ maids? Shouldn’t it be hunted maids, not hunted the maids?
• Fed their dead servants on the flesh of human children.
  • We haven’t seen any Wights feeding on corpses yet, children or not. Dead servants’ bodies are well and truly dead and as such don’t require nourishment, and thus, unless the magic involves feeding via wights, whatever is controlling them doesn’t need flesh or blood.
    • unlike Bran tasting blood through the earth and tree through the mist of centuries from a different location and time than where - and when  - the sacrifice took place (the Winterfell heart tree in the distant past)
  • So this part seems false. Or we haven’t encountered it yet unless it means Craster’s male babies are meant to be a kind of food. Too meager, too infrequent to satisfy the food angle.
    • But again… Baaaaa sheep! And potentially dogs too. So it’s a highly skeptical detail unless it points to something else… something even darker.

Quote

Her voice had dropped very low, almost to a whisper, and Bran found himself leaning forward to listen.
“Now these were the days before the Andals came, and long before the women fled across the narrow sea from the cities of the Rhoyne, and the hundred kingdoms of those times were the kingdoms of the First Men, who had taken these lands from the children of the forest. Yet here and there in the fastness of the woods, the children still lived in their wooden cities and hollow hills, and the faces in the trees kept watch.

• This here seems to address some readers’ suggestion that the long night occurred after the invasion of the Andals.
  • Old Nan, as far as we can tell isn’t partial to Septons and Maesters. 
• BUT… why do they hate iron if the first men used only bronze and if iron came to Westeros via the Andals?
  • Does iron refer to iron in the blood?
  • Or does it hint something about the Ironborn words: What is dead may never die, but rises again harder and stronger = the Ironborn had the means to resurrect the dead?
    • Why it sounds just like wights. Or is that ‘fire-wight’?
    • The ‘fire wight’ Beric doesn’t fear the sun, iron, or fire. Fire powers his life and his ‘iron’ sword. He does not seem to have any limitations like the Others/wights who can function only during the night and in the absence of the sun.
    • Was the last hero a fire-wight? Were the original NW resurrected as fire-wights to fight the Others? Was that the solution to bring the Others/COTF/Men/Giants to the table for the pact?
    • Was there some kind of stalemate after the initial onslaught with neither side willing to give or able to take ground? Meanwhile, the sun was missing and its absence was affecting the COTF/Trees too so it follows that both sides needed a solution.
      • The Beric vs the Hound trial by combat in a hollow hill cave gives strong vibes of a likely reenactment of the last hero’s encounter with the COTF. Arya, the vengeful squirrel girl with her accusation plays the COTF part. Give it a read from the last hero angle. It gels.
• The COTF Wooden cities might be like the tree village Arya saw before she entered Beric’s hollow hill.
• The faces in the trees kept watch…
  • Watchers like the prologue’s Others.
  • Watchers on the wall.
  • The City Watch. 

Quote

So as cold and death filled the earth, the last hero determined to seek out the children, in the hopes that their ancient magics could win back what the armies of men had lost. He set out into the dead lands with a sword, a horse, a dog, and a dozen companions. For years he searched until he despaired of ever finding the children of the forest in their secret cities.

• What did the armies of men lose? Land?
  • Win back suggests re-obtaining something. And the solution, at least in the mind of the last hero, involved the ancient magics of the COTF.
• It’s difficult to see how he and his dozen companions would have survived the dead lands for years without a food supply that could last that long. The gender (if human) and nature of these companions aren’t mentioned. Some readers employ symbolism to the horse, dog, etc and perhaps it may be true. Nevertheless, I remain non-committed to that idea.
  • Years also suggest the COTF weren’t easy to find, perhaps they had retreated and hid while the ‘trees’ kept watch’. But since the Last Hero thought they had a solution, and if they indeed had a solution, it follows that they would have the ability to protect themselves. Also, Westeros is dotted with hollow hills. Did they not live there during the Long Night?
    • One possibility presents itself. Ships. It’s unclear if the Long Night completely froze the seas. If not, traveling over water, they could have scouted various points and retreated to the ship to sail to a different location to begin the search anew. Years traveling over land without provisions or games… it’s rather dubious that they managed to survive for so long without being killed by the Others. 
    • We do have long descriptions of sea travel by two principal characters - Sam and Tyrion. We also have a rather fierce group of seafarers called the Ironborn (with their ominous words) + a smuggler named Sea worth
      • BTW I vote for Davos as the last hero this time around.
    • However, there’s no mention of ships by Nan so this mode of travel must remain in the realm of speculation.
• Perhaps the upcoming Long Night might involve retreating across the narrow sea and the adjoining islands from the mainland - a reverse Nymeria, led by Arya. But that’s a humungous task. I think pockets of humans might survive, holed up in various places on the mainland. Perhaps the long night never really covered all of Westeros.
  • But this will mean the wall has fallen.

Quote

One by one his friends died, and his horse, and finally even his dog, and his sword froze so hard the blade snapped when he tried to use it. And the Others smelled the hot blood in him, and came silent on his trail, stalking him with packs of pale white spiders big as hounds—”

• These companions were his friends.
  • Did they die of starvation? Did he eat them? His horse and his dog too?
    • Cannibalism is very much hinted at in the books esp Bacon and human meat.    
• Frozen sword snapping suggests an encounter with an Other (the Prologue demonstrates this). 
  • But If he has encountered an Other already and broke his sword fighting it, how’d he escape? Why does Nan (say after his sword broke) that the Others smelled the hot blood in him and came silent on his trail?
  • The way it is narrated, suggests the Others weren’t the cause of his sword breaking. It’s unclear what he used his sword for. And if it became so cold that it broke, why wasn’t he dead yet? 

Edited April 12 by Nisachar
Formatting, cleanup

[House Cambodia]

^ A lot to chew over here, but my first thought is that this is the first time I've come across a suggestion that the (contemporary) Others are all female!

[GiantLannister]

I’ll be reformatting the post soon for better readability and remove some redundant points.

I get that it’s a rather long post, but wanted to get as much information out there before posting other observations.

I get the ‘female’ Others is a bit jarring and very likely untrue, but I wanted to cover as many possibilities hoping it might point to things that might be flying under the radar.

[House Cambodia]

8 minutes ago, GiantLannister said:

I’ll be reformatting the post soon for better readability and remove some redundant points.

I get that it’s a rather long post, but wanted to get as much information out there before posting other observations.

I get the ‘female’ Others is a bit jarring and very likely untrue, but I wanted to cover as many possibilities hoping it might point to things that might be flying under the radar.

That's fine. I like the possibility of The Others being female - 'jarring' works for me. Not so keen on your multiple personas though - I might get paranoid and feel you're ganging up on me!

[LynnS]

I wouldn't want to shake hands with the undead.  You might come away with more fingers than you started out with.

Martin said very early on that the Others were living, a form of life.  He described them as beautiful.  That does not fit with the tv shows treatment of them.  Because they certainly weren't beautiful.

It's not really clear what they look like from the prologue and if they would be beautiful without the horror attached to them.  Mel tells us that they are made of snow and cold and ice.  So then a crystalline life form that reflects its surroundings?  Rather than a glamour which has been suggested before?  They have a soul of ice, a term Mel uses to describe the Great Other.  Thay are individuals who communicate with voices that sound like ice cracking.  They can skinchange or extend their souls to animate the undead wights.

[House Cambodia]

4 minutes ago, LynnS said:

I wouldn't want to shake hands with the undead.  You might come away with more fingers than you started out with.

Martin said very early on that the Others were living, a form of life.  He described them as beautiful.  That does not fit with the tv shows treatment of them.  Because they certainly weren't beautiful.

It's not really clear what they look like from the prologue and if they would be beautiful without the horror attached to them.  Mel tells us that they are made of snow and cold and ice.  So then a crystalline life form that reflects its surroundings?  Rather than a glamour which has been suggested before?  They have a soul of ice, a term Mel uses to describe the Great Other.  Thay are individuals who communicate with voices that sound like ice cracking.  They can skinchange or extend their souls to animate the undead wights.

Let me stress again - I am in no way suggesting they're 'nice guys'. They just want to be left alone - have all humans clear off out of their land.

In terms of their appearance - yes, I think you're about right. Ice crystals are beautiful, and that's kind of what they're made of. They're not 'glamours' but I think they might be some kind of ice equivalent of Mel's 'shadow babies' - they took form fully enough to kill humans, but then dissipated into the air. The Others are pretty much invisible in their homeland of ice, so long as they remain still. When they move, the light reflects off them, giving a shimmering sensation.

[LynnS]

38 minutes ago, House Cambodia said:

Let me stress again - I am in no way suggesting they're 'nice guys'. They just want to be left alone - have all humans clear off out of their land.

I was just joking. 

[John Suburbs]

On 4/3/2024 at 7:26 AM, House Cambodia said:

I've had a thought that's so outrageous I must have forgotten something obvious, but let me spit it out so you can shoot me down.

There have been heretics who've voiced the idea that The Others aren't quite the pantomime baddies POV characters in ASOIAF present them as, but I want to go further. They're doing nothing wrong; they're not a threat to the Seven Kingdoms, and they're the ones being wronged.

Let's start with The Wall. Built by ice magic. Only one kind of being practices ice magic - yup, The Others. Seems to me, they built the Wall - to keep humans out.

All's been well for the last 8,000 (?) years.

Now, has this been explained? - if the Wall was built to keep The Others and humans separate, why were the wildlings allowed to stay north of it? Did that respect the pact, or did humans undermine it from the start?

Were giants and Children part of the deal, allowed to remain north of the Wall?

Whilst giants appear to have been living alongside wildlings (not unmolested, as the name Tormund Giantsbane indicates), what about the Children? Did humans in the form of wildlings drive them to near extinction, or are there vast populations of them underground?

Anyway, it seems wildlings were free to prosper and populate the lands north of the Wall for 8000 years, but for some reason Mance Rayder deemed there was a sudden existential threat to the wildlings - and giants, and so organised them all to get south of the Wall. What that suggests is that, if he was right - and he may not have been, The Others had begun to 'cleanse' their lands of humans (and giants?).

In the meantime, the Nights Watch has been persistently breaking the long-standing agreement by sending Watchmen ranging beyond the Wall to hunt wildlings. The story opens with one Watchman, Waymar Royce confronting and challenging an Other to a fight to the death. We assume The Other instigated the confrontation because we learn about it from the point of view of humans, but should we trust the testimony?

BUT, and here's the rub, I know of no clear, independent evidence that The Others were or are trying to cross the Wall themselves. If they were to be simply left alone to exist in their own lands free of humans (other than Craster - they like Craster; oh dear, killed by the damned Watch), maybe they'd mind their own business.

I don't know if it's entirely clear that Mance sought to unite the wildlings because he saw an existential threat from the north. It seems he sought to unite them to overpower the Night's Watch and carve out new lands in the 7K. The Others might not have shown up until after Mance defected, and that's what finally prompted the wildlings to unite. And might Mance have been the unwitting catalyst of that, maybe by despoiling the graves in the Frostfangs?

In any event, the Others do not seem overly interested in the Wall or anything to the south. And so far we have seen them kill a grand total of two crows. There isn't even much hard evidence that they are the ones raising and controlling the wights.

Couple this with the fact that Martin has provided a readily available means to dispatch of the Others easily, and he has said on numerous occasions that he's not doing the whole evil dark lord thing and his evil minions, nor the final armageddon battle between the forces of good and evil, and it seems that the resolution to the Others' arc will be a lot less than what most readers are expecting.

[House Cambodia]

7 minutes ago, John Suburbs said:

I don't know if it's entirely clear that Mance sought to unite the wildlings because he saw an existential threat from the north. It seems he sought to unite them to overpower the Night's Watch and carve out new lands in the 7K. The Others might not have shown up until after Mance defected, and that's what finally prompted the wildlings to unite. And might Mance have been the unwitting catalyst of that, maybe by despoiling the graves in the Frostfangs?

In any event, the Others do not seem overly interested in the Wall or anything to the south. And so far we have seen them kill a grand total of two crows. There isn't even much hard evidence that they are the ones raising and controlling the wights.

Couple this with the fact that Martin has provided a readily available means to dispatch of the Others easily, and he has said on numerous occasions that he's not doing the whole evil dark lord thing and his evil minions, nor the final armageddon battle between the forces of good and evil, and it seems that the resolution to the Others' arc will be a lot less than what most readers are expecting.

Good points. I think it's been mentioned in the thread that Mance looking for the Horn of Jorumun  in the barrows might have been the catalyst that activated The Others. It's one possibility among many.

I would personally be disappointed if the Others turn out to be a mere sideshow, but I do think it's entirely plausible that they may be of minor relevance to Westeros as a whole and still be an existential threat to the Stark line and all their mysterious millennia-long secrets.

[Nisachar]

1 hour ago, House Cambodia said:

I think it's been mentioned in the thread that Mance looking for the Horn of Jorumun  in the barrows might have been the catalyst that activated The Others. It's one possibility among many

Nan's story about the Long Night and the arrival of the Others for the first time suggests they have been coming during winters after the Long Night too. As such, Mance may have something to do with some of the mess that's been going on, but activating the Others doesn't seem to be one of them.

Edited April 11 by Nisachar

[Nisachar]

In a previous post on this thread, I covered Nan’s narration about the Long Night and the Last Hero’s quest to find the COTF hoping that their magic might win back what the armies of men have lost.
There’s some poetic wording in that story but according to Ygritte’s claim, a bard’s truth is different. Nan is a bard of sorts, even if her style is prose much like the books themselves, which should tell us the kind of truths the author is trying to portray.

In this one, we will cover the reputed ‘objective’ records by the Septons regarding the Others, as researched by Sam based on Jon’s orders to find as much as possible about the Others. It raises even more questions but we will take what meager evidence we get, even if they might be tainted by institutional motivations.  

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“The Others.” Sam licked his lips. “They are mentioned in the annals, though not as often … The annals I’ve found and looked at, that is. There’s more I haven’t found. 

• While Sam hasn’t gone through all of the books and scrolls, it’s still remarkable that the Others are mentioned less often in the ones he has gone through, a curious shortage considering that Martin planted their ‘threat’ right at the start of the story.
• Mirroring Sam’s remark, the Others appear less often in the story we are reading than we might expect.
  • This can be explained by the Author’s well-established coyness about the history and back story but perhaps the sparse sightings should tell us something about the nature and role of the Others in the saga.

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Some of the older books are falling to pieces. The pages crumble when I try and turn them. And the really old books … either they have crumbled away or buried somewhere or … well, it could be that there are no such books, and never were. 

• Very much a possibility. Yet it’s interesting again that the author mentions the possibility of books(stories, records, songs) that ‘never were’
  • Arya witnesses Roose burning some books at Harrenhall.
  • Sam, in this very chapter sees that mice have been eating away pages.
  • Dolorous Edd doesn't approve of reading old books.
  • The Winterfell library was burning when the assassin came in to kill the comatose Bran.
  • if indeed time and vested interests have destroyed books, even if we consider them as unreliable based on the institution to whom the authors belong to, Sam has access to a Time Machine that goes back to the age of heroes … that will definitely come into play. 
    • yes, Giant. You might be right. What a tree would Sam’s tree be indeed!
       

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The oldest histories we have were written after the Andals came to Westeros. The First Men only left us runes on rocks. Everything we think we know about the Age of Heroes, the Dawn Age and the Long Night comes from accounts set down by septons thousands of years later. 
There are archmaesters at the Citadel who question all of it.
Those old histories are full of kings who reigned for hundreds of years, and knights riding around a thousand years before there were knights. … Brandon the Builder, Symeon StarEyes, Night’s King … 

• I have a simple idea for this, perhaps others might have had similar ones, considering the long history of speculation the fandom has…but it’s a different topic.
  • Be that is may, Bran the builder, Symeon StarEyes, and the Night’s king are all recorded and accepted as knights by the Septons but the Archmaesters question it.
  • Well not all, as we know - which leads credence to some characters’ suspicion about the role of the maesters themselves in the grand scheme of things.
  • We don’t know if Old Nan ever read books, and if not, it suggests her source regarding the legends are word-of-mouth stories, passed down over millennia.
• This tells us that the books are records after the Long Night, Age of Heroes and the Dawn age. The ones who wrote - the Septons - weren't witnesses to these events.

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we say that you’re the nine hundred and ninety-eighth Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, but the oldest list I’ve found shows six hundred seventy-four commanders, which suggests that it was written during …”

• Written during… what? A king’s reign? A historical event?
  • How does the oldest list of 674 commanders lead to Sam concluding the list was written during… whatever it is? 
  • The arrival of Andals?
    • but then how can the 13th LC’s name be struck from the records if the first men only carved runes on rocks?
    • did they have a means of recording names of LCs as runes on stone tablets?
    • or commit them to memory ?
    • is there a Rosetta Stone somewhere… perhaps the citadel?
• Sam then briefly dwells into the youngest NW LC list and strangely, all the youngest ones are Starks/Stark blood, some as old as 10! 
  • All were sons and bastards of the Stark kings.
• Right on cue Jon conveniently cuts him off and shifts the topic back to the Others which is a shame because the truth of the Others lies in several histories and legends, especially the NW and Starks themselves.
  • Martin tends to club his clues together so finding the youngest LCs as all Starks + truncated list of NW LCs in a conversation about Others is not a random coincidence since both segues relate to Jon Snow, who’s a Stark bastard and the current young LC of the NW and who received/discovered a cache of dragonglass.
    • His direwolf belongs to the old gods. Jon thinks he and Ghost are one.
      • Ghost seems like a direwolf green seer.
        • His mother, if she’s Lyanna, was said to have wolf’s blood according to her father Rickard Stark.

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I found mention of dragon glass. The children of the forest used to give the Night’s Watch a hundred obsidian daggers every year, during the Age of Heroes.

• According to established history, the Long Night came after the Age of Heroes. 
  • So what’s with the dragon glass and the Night’s Watch existence DURING the Age of Heroes? 
  • Why have a Night’s watch if there are no Others?
    • The TWOIAF mentions the events in the following order:
      • the Dawn Age
      • the Age of Heroes 
      • and then the Long Night
  • Yet if the Obsidian glass’s main use is in killing the Others, why was the NW established before the Long Night? What were the obsidian glasses used for?
• Sam does mention Bran the builder so perhaps it covers the creation of the Wall but as we saw in Old Nan’s tale, it isn’t a persistent attribution.
• Does this also mean the cache of dragonglass we see at the fist of the first men was retrieved from some obscure place at the Wall?

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The Others come when it is cold, most of the tales agree. Or else it gets cold when they come. Sometimes they appear during snowstorms and melt away when the skies clear.

• By pointing to ambiguous connections, the Author invites us to scrutinize the legends closely. 
• Either way, the Others appear in very cold conditions and have been doing it for a while it seems. 
  • This tracks with Old Nan’s story of Others coming regularly - perhaps during periodic conditions similar to the Long Night when the sun hides its face for years - much after that main devastating phenomenon was over. 
  • The Prologue demonstrates that deep cold is possible much before the arrival of Winter. 
    • It’s almost 3 years since that encounter and it’s only towards the end of ADWD that winter is said to have well and truly arrived. 
• If they came on a fairly regular basis in the past why do we - the readers - associate them with old powers waking, trees having eyes, etc…that so far as we can tell, is happening after a long, long time? 
• Sometimes they appear during snowstorms and melt away when the skies clear. 
  • Again a fairly regular phenomenon.Nothing to do with the long night. Snowstorm suggests they can come even during the daytime, so long as the sun isn’t directly shining on them, and melt away when the skies clear = the sun shines through. That’s how I Am reading it. 
    • But this implies that while the night is the best time to manifest when they won’t need the cover of snow storms, that doesn’t mean they are connected to night. It’s only the sun they cannot seem to withstand.
      • However, we haven’t seen them in action during the daytime yet.
  • Craster has been sacrificing for a while now. It seems they have been coming even during summertime (else we would have seen some young boys in his keep). The previous summer lasted for over a decade. So why was Craster sacrificing if the Others are creatures of Winter, the Long Night?
  • This follows that while they may have ice attributes, winter is not a condition for their appearance although it can be said it’s a season that suits them best.
  • Arya (or was that Sansa) remembers snow ball fights. Arya is a summer kid = snow storm perhaps = Other’s prowled around north of the wall?

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They hide from the light of the sun and emerge by night … or else night falls when they emerge.

• Night doesn’t fall when they emerge. 
  • In one of Bran in BR chapter, we see that it’s mentioned that the day and night follow each other in an iron circle. There’s been no anomaly mentioned in the day-night cycle. 
• Only seasons are out of whack. 

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Some stories speak of them riding the corpses of dead animals. Bears, direwolves, mammoths, horses, it makes no matter, so long as the beast is dead. The one that killed Small Paul was riding a dead horse so that part’s plainly true.

• Some. Not all.
  • The prologue didn’t have them riding horses. They seem to emerge from the trees… can they use the tree network to hide during the day and emerge from them during the night? 
• Also, Sam’s Other’s dead horse wasn’t pale as Nan claimed.
  • What happens to their dead mounts? How do the Others travel long distances that take longer than a night? Do their dead mounts they just stay there, frozen in daylight, waiting for night to arrive?
    • Where do the Others disappear in the meanwhile?
• Are they all shadows emerging from the trees?
  • We are given that impression. Jeor Mormont - a bear figure - the LC of the NW emerges from the trees at Carter’s Keep, Jaqen, a follower of the many-faced god, ‘emerges from the trees’ when Arya - a Stark - prays to the Wierwood at Harrenhall…
• They do not seem to control the elements, or else the snowstorms wouldn’t go away.

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Men who fall in battle against the Others must be burned, or else the dead will rise again as their thralls.”

• Interesting use: Thralls = slaves = the larger motif of slavery and by extension an even larger motif of power.
  • This suggests Othor and Jeremy Flower (if the latter was animated) were killed by Others.
• But so far we have seen no direct visual indication of an Other creating wights anywhere in the texts. 
• In the Prologue and elsewhere wights and the Others are not seen together in the same location at the same time except in one instance: Sam, Green, and Small Paul vs an Other on a dead horse. 
  • So there IS a link. 
    • The horse cannot be walking all by itself unless the rider is controlling it. If not then there are wider implications and complications.
• However, the paucity of direct evidence in the other encounters but for that one instance is… telling.
• But Alliser seems to have a different idea:
  • He threatens Jon by asking him to pray that he (Alliser) is killed by a wildling else if he’s killed by an Other, he’ll come back as a wight.
  • This seems to confirm the report except it is simply not true. 
    • We have seen a wight created that wasn’t killed by an Other: Thistle.
    • Ygritte also wanted to be burnt if Jon beheaded her.
      • What does that tell us?

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“The armor of the Others is proof against most ordinary blades, if the tales can be believed,” said Sam, “and their own swords are so cold they shatter steel. Fire will dismay them, though, and they are vulnerable to obsidian.” He remembered the one he had faced in the haunted forest, and how it had seemed to melt away when he stabbed it with the dragonglass dagger Jon had made for him. “I found one account of the Long Night that spoke of the last hero slaying Others with a blade of dragonsteel. Supposedly they could not stand against it.”

“Dragonsteel?” Jon frowned. “Valyrian steel?”
“That was my first thought as well.”

• Information about ordinary steel and draginglass/Obsidian is supported by witnessed events.
• the last hero slaying Others with a blade of dragonsteel. Supposedly they could not stand against it.
  • Interesting, it seems we are getting a part of what we missed when Maester Luwin interrupted Nan’s tale. How he obtained this dragonsteel blade and whether it means Valyrian steel is not clear, but methinks it’s Dawn.
    • And if Dawn is Azor Ahai’s legendary blade Lightbringer, it connects the Last Hero to AA though I do not think they are the same person.  
• This dragonsteel implies that the Last Hero did succeed in obtaining a magical solution - whether through the COTF, AA, or other means -  vs the Others. But we already had that in the form of Obsidian. Why include this blade?

Edited April 12 by Nisachar

[Nisachar]

So I posted two expositions about the Others as contained in the text from two different types of sources, Storytellers who pass down stories from generation to generation and the more institutional type: Septons.

Some things they have in common, some things not.

However, there's one thing we, the readers have witnessed - in almost all cases - that is glaringly missing in these two accounts. 

Can you guess what that is?