The Wall, the Watch and a heresy

[Black Crow]

Sorry if I misinterpreted your views. I thought your theory was based on the premise that the Wall was erected to keep Men in the South, rather than the Others in the North.

But I admit I may have lost the plot through this winding thread of very interesting views and theories.

No probs. :cool4:

I tried to explain that a few posts back. I'm surprised you're not interested in why the Children and the other Old Races fled or were forced north because I believe that this movement - and their taking refuge behind the Wall - is fundamental to what's going on. Its a magical barrier as much as a physical one and I believe was intended to hold back not men but whatever magical forces the original Azor Ahai could command. The Children were certainly allied with the First Men - latterly at least - against the Andals and I'm much inclined to think that the Andals and the original forces of Aazor Ahai are (or were) one and the same and that this is a large part of the legends which are all we have to go on.

This comes back to what I was saying about the Children, Bloodraven and Bran being important to the story as the antithesis of Mel and the Red lot, whereas the White Walkers are peripheral to it. They may turn out to be a hitherto unexplored set of characters, but I still think its far more likely that they are as I suggested, Bogeymen - being used to scare people.

Hotweasel mentioned Mance and the fact that he spent years binding all the Free-folk to him - except Craster - and persuading them to move south and over or through the Wall in order to escape a threat so secret nobody knew anything about it, and then when he got them moving the White Walkers appeared very briefly to clear the Nights Watch out of his way, before disappearing again, except to occasionally nip at the heels of his trek, just to keep it moving. Likewise the progress of Bran's party to the caves and what looks suspiciously like a minefield protecting the entrance.

Essentially what all of this boils down to is that aside from Bran and Jon the important protagonists on and north of the Wall are the Children, Bloodraven and Mance. Far from being a threat to all life on Westeros the White Walkers are bogeymen, somebody's monsters.

[Free Northman]

No probs. :cool4:

I tried to explain that a few posts back. I'm surprised you're not interested in why the Children and the other Old Races fled or were forced north because I believe that this movement - and their taking refuge behind the Wall - is fundamental to what's going on. Its a magical barrier as much as a physical one and I believe was intended to hold back not men but whatever magical forces the original Azor Ahai could command. The Children were certainly allied with the First Men - latterly at least - against the Andals and I'm much inclined to think that the Andals and the original forces of Aazor Ahai are (or were) one and the same and that this is a large part of the legends which are all we have to go on.

This comes back to what I was saying about the Children, Bloodraven and Bran being important to the story as the antithesis of Mel and the Red lot, whereas the White Walkers are peripheral to it. They may turn out to be a hitherto unexplored set of characters, but I still think its far more likely that they are as I suggested, Bogeymen - being used to scare people.

Hotweasel mentioned Mance and the fact that he spent years binding all the Free-folk to him - except Craster - and persuading them to move south and over or through the Wall in order to escape a threat so secret nobody knew anything about it, and then when he got them moving the White Walkers appeared very briefly to clear the Nights Watch out of his way, before disappearing again, except to occasionally nip at the heels of his trek, just to keep it moving. Likewise the progress of Bran's party to the caves and what looks suspiciously like a minefield protecting the entrance.

Essentially what all of this boils down to is that aside from Bran and Jon the important protagonists on and north of the Wall are the Children, Bloodraven and Mance. Far from being a threat to all life on Westeros the White Walkers are bogeymen, somebody's monsters.

No probs. :cool4:

I tried to explain that a few posts back. I'm surprised you're not interested in why the Children and the other Old Races fled or were forced north because I believe that this movement - and their taking refuge behind the Wall - is fundamental to what's going on. Its a magical barrier as much as a physical one and I believe was intended to hold back not men but whatever magical forces the original Azor Ahai could command. The Children were certainly allied with the First Men - latterly at least - against the Andals and I'm much inclined to think that the Andals and the original forces of Aazor Ahai are (or were) one and the same and that this is a large part of the legends which are all we have to go on.

This comes back to what I was saying about the Children, Bloodraven and Bran being important to the story as the antithesis of Mel and the Red lot, whereas the White Walkers are peripheral to it. They may turn out to be a hitherto unexplored set of characters, but I still think its far more likely that they are as I suggested, Bogeymen - being used to scare people.

Hotweasel mentioned Mance and the fact that he spent years binding all the Free-folk to him - except Craster - and persuading them to move south and over or through the Wall in order to escape a threat so secret nobody knew anything about it, and then when he got them moving the White Walkers appeared very briefly to clear the Nights Watch out of his way, before disappearing again, except to occasionally nip at the heels of his trek, just to keep it moving. Likewise the progress of Bran's party to the caves and what looks suspiciously like a minefield protecting the entrance.

Essentially what all of this boils down to is that aside from Bran and Jon the important protagonists on and north of the Wall are the Children, Bloodraven and Mance. Far from being a threat to all life on Westeros the White Walkers are bogeymen, somebody's monsters.

Here's a part of the timeline which I don't dispute, and which makes your theory problematic.

I believe that the Children predate the First Men.

And I believe the First Men predate the Andals.

I know you don't disagree with the above two statements. But here's the one which you seem to ignore:

The Others first came during the time of the First men. And this was LONG before the Andals arrived. The Wall was therefore also erected long before any Andal threat appeared on the horizon.

Hence, any theory involving the Others being used to repel Andal aggressors falls flat because of this timeline discrepancy. Furthermore, the Andals never conquered the North. They were repeatedly thrown back at the Neck. Hence, the Wall is located about a thousand miles too far North to have been any use against the Andals.

The Children didn't have to worry about the Andals. The Starks took care of that little problem for them.

As for the South: Well, the Others don't threaten the South, and the Wall has no impact on the South, so if the motivation of the Children was to repell the Andals, then they were wasting their time up North. In fact, then the Wall should have been at Moat Cailin.

[Free Northman]

Where I share some questions with you is the reason why the Children abandoned the North. After all, the First Men retained the Pact, and the First men ruled in the North until the arrival of the Targaryens.

So surely the Children should have remained across the entire North then.

A partial answer to this may be found in the legend of the Last Hero. It is said that even at the time of the Long Night, the Last Hero had to go on an epic quest to find the Children. Meaning that as far back as 8000 years ago, the Children had apparently already dwindled and all but disappeared. Which is very interesting. Because surely the Pact should have allowed them to live safely across the entire Westeros at this time.

So it appears that PRIOR to the arrival of the Long Night, something other than the First Men caused the Children to disappear - whether gradually or suddenly. And I wonder whether this was not perhaps linked to the coming of the Others - and perhaps the Dragons.

[nygyg]

I think it was BR who told Bran that the children were given long lives but small numbers to keep them from overpopulating the world.

They went to war with the first men but were loosing, so if they were few in numbers to begin with then they could have been close to extinction when the pact was made with the first men.

If the spells that ward the wall was the magic of the children then them settling north of the wall would be the ideal place for them to go. They can protect themselves from the walking dead and for the most part would be fairly safe from man. This is assuming tho that the wall and the magic inside it was put in place to keep the WW confined to the north of the wall.

Hopefully we'll learn the truth in one of the Bran chapters in the next book.

[fassreiter]

Hotweasel mentioned Mance and the fact that he spent years binding all the Free-folk to him - except Craster - and persuading them to move south and over or through the Wall in order to escape a threat so secret nobody knew anything about it, and then when he got them moving the White Walkers appeared very briefly to clear the Nights Watch out of his way, before disappearing again, except to occasionally nip at the heels of his trek, just to keep it moving. Likewise the progress of Bran's party to the caves and what looks suspiciously like a minefield protecting the entrance.

Essentially what all of this boils down to is that aside from Bran and Jon the important protagonists on and north of the Wall are the Children, Bloodraven and Mance. Far from being a threat to all life on Westeros the White Walkers are bogeymen, somebody's monsters.

Here we go again, Black Crow. The threat of the wights was neither 'secret' nor not existant. In fact, people left Mance because he did NOT go south, and did apparently not even announce his intention to do so anytime soon when the wights appeared in greater numbers. This is, after all, why Osha and her small band left and did not think to go back even with their super-hostage Bran. Osha even says Mance has no idea what he is up against and that it is a batshit crazy idea to fight the white walkers, one that can only be explained by his crow childhood. While she knows about them not from Mance, but from her mother and grandmother. How do you explain that?

There must have been small amounts of wights around all the time. Craster has been sacrificing his male children to them for a long time (many of his wives are OLD!), and Mormont tells Sam that the wildlings have always burned their dead, and he wished he had asked them why. And if the wights were just some old narrative tradition without any real danger that got turned into a propaganda move by Mance, why fight them at all, why not just go through with the plan to storm the Wall?

And if Mance had planned to fight the NW all along, why didn't he prepare better? When Osha was captured, there was no plan to move south that anyone of the wildlings knew of. Elsewise she wouldn't have tried to get Robb to march north. Except you believe she wanted to see the north wipe out her people. When Jon sees the wildling camp at the source of the Milkwater, he sees people training for battle against armed riders. Little good it did them, because they didn't have time to learn it, as we saw. And apparently they all met in a really bad place because they thought to find the Horn of Joramun there while doing their preparations. If Mance had had some super secret plan to get past the Wall with the help of tricking his people into thinking the wights would get them, why didn't he at least take his time to train them properly to fight against men on horseback? And why did he take them to a place and on a march where their little children all died? And why would they follow him to that place if there wasn't a real threat? After the battle, the place is full of free folk who have no idea where to go, but they would rather die of starvation or exposure than to go back to their villages. It's just silly to assume that Mance and a small bunch of wights could trick this badass kind of people, including Thenns and freaking giants, into that kind of terror.

Sam as well as Tormund saw the dead wake up in different places, Sam at Craster's, when he thought the dead black brother was sitting up and beating at the flames, and Tormund's son woke up after having frozen to death without having even been hurt by a wight. The whole wildling community knows that everyone who dies around them comes back as a wight, whether they die fighting wights or not. This is why Ygritte wants Jon and Qhorin to burn those that they killed. The free folk are able to cope with that by burning the dead if they are found by daylight. But by night, they come back, and then they kill their former families if they are not killed first. So the threat is not just the wight army. The threat is also that every single person who dies beyond the Wall comes back as a zombie.

I agree there are not many Others. But this is not important. Because you need only a small group of Others to start the whole thing. Just kill enough people to make a small army, and then they will multiply on their own, and include wightified animals, by the way. So after a while the wildlings can't stay in their villages without getting wiped out in one stroke, but if they move, they will die of cold and hunger and will be wightified one after another. The only reasonable strategy was to try to destroy the dead before they get too numerous. That didn't work, as Mance and Tormund admitted. So the next reasonable thing to do was to get behind the Wall, and the only way to get there was to bring all wildlings together and have them surrounded by guards with torches at night (this was how Mormont and his remaining NW survived, too). Because there are not 30 000 wights, not yet. But now there are at least about 20 000 scattered wildlings for them to wightify, and when they have accomplished that, they are numerous enough to attack the Wall. This is what has to happen, or the story that has been built up goes nowhere.

It would be poor story telling if it turns out the free folk was just a bunch of idiots that could be played with the help of a tiny zombie horde. Especially because no King-beyond-the-Wall before Mance needed any fake zombie armies to convince people of a conquering trip south. Especially with a bad winter coming, the Starks and their armies gone south, and the whole realm in disarray. If Mance had wanted to lead an army of warriors south to invade the land, he could have convinced them easily enough to follow him. And then he wouldn't have brought along all those children, old people, and other stuff that made them vulnerable on their march. The wildling warriors would have brought their families and treasures after the Wall had fallen and it would have been much easier to storm the Wall. The only reason that a whole people is on the march together is because no one can stay behind because of the wights.

I am sure that the wights will attack, and this will bring the evil dragonlady down on the north, and then the 'real' problems will start. But first we get to see some zombie action, this is what we deserve and have waited for for years and years. Doesn't mean this is where the story ends, though, and I think this is the surprise GRRM has planted for us. After the fight against ice, there is one to fight against fire, and the greed for power.

[Black Crow]

Here's a part of the timeline which I don't dispute, and which makes your theory problematic.

I believe that the Children predate the First Men.

And I believe the First Men predate the Andals.

I know you don't disagree with the above two statements. But here's the one which you seem to ignore:

The Others first came during the time of the First men. And this was LONG before the Andals arrived. The Wall was therefore also erected long before any Andal threat appeared on the horizon.

Hence, any theory involving the Others being used to repel Andal aggressors falls flat because of this timeline discrepancy. Furthermore, the Andals never conquered the North. They were repeatedly thrown back at the Neck. Hence, the Wall is located about a thousand miles too far North to have been any use against the Andals.

The Children didn't have to worry about the Andals. The Starks took care of that little problem for them.

As for the South: Well, the Others don't threaten the South, and the Wall has no impact on the South, so if the motivation of the Children was to repell the Andals, then they were wasting their time up North. In fact, then the Wall should have been at Moat Cailin.

Not ignoring that timeline, just distrusting it. We are after all dealing with several thousand years in the past and I'm also mindful of AppleMartini's theory that Azor Ahai was actually the Nights Watch. I'm not sure I want to buy into it, but it is exactly the sort of distortion of history you'd expect when dealing with somethimg which happened so log ago - especially when GRRM has so explicitly warned us that the "official" timeline may be mince.

[Black Crow]

Here we go again, Black Crow. The threat of the wights was neither 'secret' nor not existant. In fact, people left Mance because he did NOT go south, and did apparently not even announce his intention to do so anytime soon when the wights appeared in greater numbers. This is, after all, why Osha and her small band left and did not think to go back even with their super-hostage Bran. Osha even says Mance has no idea what he is up against and that it is a batshit crazy idea to fight the white walkers, one that can only be explained by his crow childhood. While she knows about them not from Mance, but from her mother and grandmother. How do you explain that?

There must have been small amounts of wights around all the time. Craster has been sacrificing his male children to them for a long time (many of his wives are OLD!), and Mormont tells Sam that the wildlings have always burned their dead, and he wished he had asked them why. And if the wights were just some old narrative tradition without any real danger that got turned into a propaganda move by Mance, why fight them at all, why not just go through with the plan to storm the Wall?

Paradoxically this is why I have my suspicions about what's supposedly going on. In the first place the White Walkers have clearly been around for some time and haven't as some people seem to think only just woken up after thousands of years asleep under the ice. That being said, they're little seen as Osha includes them with the Children as people she's heard of but not actually seen. I should have made myself clearer in talking about a threat "nobody has ever heard of", in that what I actually meant was nobody on the Wall - which given what Mance said about the amount of interaction between the Watch and the Free Folk (hence his finding out about the King coming to Winterfell etc.) seemed odd.

In order to convince all those people that there was a threat, years before AGoT opens and the red comet approaches, what did Mance know? What turned something nasty in the woodpile which people hadn't seen much of, but knew of and burned their dead accordingly, into a threat which required them to prepare for a great migration? And why did they want to find the Horn if, as we think, it is a key to unlocking the magic in the Wall rather than physically tumbling it down?

Craster's Sons unquestionably exist, kill people and raise them again as Wights, but I just can't shake off this very strong suspicion that they are bogeymen, diverting attention away from what the Children, Bloodraven and Mance are really up to.

[fassreiter]

The people on the Wall knew exactly what to think when they found the first two wights, even before they woke up. They were also afraid in the prologue, but didn't want to speak of it. Even Catelyn knows, it's one of the first things she says to Ned after the execution of the NW deserter of the prologue. It's Ned who insists that it would be Mance who scared and killed the NW into deserting, but we already know it's the Others. Mormont knows it, too. Tyrion feels it on the Wall. Remember Thorne with his jar of crumbling wight hand? He was laughed at and ridiculed in the south. This is not how you build up a story if in fact those ominous threats and feelings were not true in some way. Why stop writing about the wights, instead present the wildlings as the bogeymen to the reader, and then turn everything around oh so slowly - in order to turn everything around again with a boom? That's bad writing.

Mormont and Osha as well as Craster's wives talk about 'cold winds rising' - this coldness (the 'white cold') is probably what turns the dead into wights. Wildlings and crows share this half-known 'knowledge'. There is a whole 'Others'-discourse that could not have come into being by Mance spreading information. It's just that the wildlings know more about it than the crows because they live where the cold winds actually are.

Osha talks about a well known threat that can become invincible fast, and according to her, it's Mance who didn't believe that the white walkers couldn't be defeated. Turns out she was right and he was wrong, so what could have been gained by talking the free folk into fighting the wights and then lose spectacularly? Apart from the risk of being killed off for making a wrong decision? If you want to use the wights for propaganda tactics, you should make sure they don't spoil your whole campaign by defeating you and merrily killing your people in front of you.

And Osha HAS seen the wights. Here is the quote again, in full length:

Giants and worse than giants, Lordling. I tried to tell your brother when he asked his questions, him and your maester and that smiley boy Greyjoy. The cold winds are rising, and men go out from their fires and never come back . . . or if they do, they’re not men no more, but only wights, with blue eyes and cold black hands. Why do you think I run south with Stiv and Hali and the rest of them fools? Mance thinks he’ll fight, the brave sweet stubborn man, like the white walkers were no more than rangers, but what does he know? He can call himself King-beyond-the-Wall all he likes, but he’s still just another old black crow who flew down from the Shadow Tower. He’s never tasted winter. I was born up there, child, like my mother and her mother before her and her mother before her, born of the Free Folk. We remember.” Osha stood, her chains rattling together. “I tried to tell your lordling brother. Only yesterday, when I saw him in the yard. ‘M’lord Stark,’ I called to him, respectful as you please, but he looked through me, and that sweaty oaf Greatjon Umber shoves me out of the path. So be it. I’ll wear my irons and hold my tongue. A man who won’t listen can’t hear.”

The free folk knew they had to burn the dead because they had to avoid 'making' wights at all times. But I guess there are times when there are no cold winds and no wights. They only come in winter, and presumably only in bad winters. But they do appear often enough so the generation before will remember. Most likely they don't last that long, or are not 'used' or roused to full extent by the Others. We don't even know if or how the comet, the dragons and the Others are connected. But the 'cold winds' are a phenomenon of Winter, and maybe the Others could have used it (or roused it) in every winter, but chose not to because of reasons of their own. Now they have 'activated' it, in any case, and now everyone that dies comes back zombie fashion. I think it takes a while to gain momentum. Also it comes with a direction: The threat comes from the fringes of wildling society (giants, Thenns, Ice river clans having been attacked first) and turns on the center last, and last of all it turns on the Wall. It's a slow process, as the wight army itself is slow in building up. But they don't need to hurry, by the way, because winter is on their side. It's like an ice age building up, starting slow, but gaining more speed in the process. Wightifying has an exponential effect. It will soon get worse. GRRM wanted it to be a slow build-up, and the inner logic of narrative matches this pace. What's wrong with that?

And about the wights attacking the Fist of the First Men: If that was a strategy to help Mance bring his people to the Wall, why didn't they kill Mormont and the rest before he could reach the Wall and start the alarm? Shouldn't they have tried to bring down the Lord Commander of all people? He was killed by his own people, not by wights, they didn't care about him. And many brothers came back to the Wall alive, this was because they used torches to ward off the wights, same as Mance's host. It's something that works. We don't know why the wights attacked. Maybe they wanted to shoo the NW away from the cask of dragonglass weapons. Maybe they attacked just because they could. The NW was trapped inside the ring wall. As soon as they were walking though, and with torches around them, they were relatively safe. The trick is to keep moving instead of staying in one place, and to have fires around you. We know that from zombie movies: never let them chase you into a building (be it a mall or a pub, it never works), never allow them to surround you, never close off your retreat.

And next to being on the move, fire is important. Tormund confirmed as much, and he even said that the cold winds were sometimes able to quench the fires. So fire is indeed what keeps the wights away. So I do think that dragons will be helpful agains the wights. This is their whole point: GRRM needs something to make Dany appear as the promised one. Let's see what happens after they beat the Others, though.

[Free Northman]

The people on the Wall knew exactly what to think when they found the first two wights, even before they woke up. They were also afraid in the prologue, but didn't want to speak of it. Even Catelyn knows, it's one of the first things she says to Ned after the execution of the NW deserter of the prologue. It's Ned who insists that it would be Mance who scared and killed the NW into deserting, but we already know it's the Others. Mormont knows it, too. Tyrion feels it on the Wall. Remember Thorne with his jar of crumbling wight hand? He was laughed at and ridiculed in the south. This is not how you build up a story if in fact those ominous threats and feelings were not true in some way. Why stop writing about the wights, instead present the wildlings as the bogeymen to the reader, and then turn everything around oh so slowly - in order to turn everything around again with a boom? That's bad writing.

Mormont and Osha as well as Craster's wives talk about 'cold winds rising' - this coldness (the 'white cold') is probably what turns the dead into wights. Wildlings and crows share this half-known 'knowledge'. There is a whole 'Others'-discourse that could not have come into being by Mance spreading information. It's just that the wildlings know more about it than the crows because they live where the cold winds actually are.

Osha talks about a well known threat that can become invincible fast, and according to her, it's Mance who didn't believe that the white walkers couldn't be defeated. Turns out she was right and he was wrong, so what could have been gained by talking the free folk into fighting the wights and then lose spectacularly? Apart from the risk of being killed off for making a wrong decision? If you want to use the wights for propaganda tactics, you should make sure they don't spoil your whole campaign by defeating you and merrily killing your people in front of you.

And Osha HAS seen the wights. Here is the quote again, in full length:

The free folk knew they had to burn the dead because they had to avoid 'making' wights at all times. But I guess there are times when there are no cold winds and no wights. They only come in winter, and presumably only in bad winters. But they do appear often enough so the generation before will remember. Most likely they don't last that long, or are not 'used' or roused to full extent by the Others. We don't even know if or how the comet, the dragons and the Others are connected. But the 'cold winds' are a phenomenon of Winter, and maybe the Others could have used it (or roused it) in every winter, but chose not to because of reasons of their own. Now they have 'activated' it, in any case, and now everyone that dies comes back zombie fashion. I think it takes a while to gain momentum. Also it comes with a direction: The threat comes from the fringes of wildling society (giants, Thenns, Ice river clans having been attacked first) and turns on the center last, and last of all it turns on the Wall. It's a slow process, as the wight army itself is slow in building up. But they don't need to hurry, by the way, because winter is on their side. It's like an ice age building up, starting slow, but gaining more speed in the process. Wightifying has an exponential effect. It will soon get worse. GRRM wanted it to be a slow build-up, and the inner logic of narrative matches this pace. What's wrong with that?

And about the wights attacking the Fist of the First Men: If that was a strategy to help Mance bring his people to the Wall, why didn't they kill Mormont and the rest before he could reach the Wall and start the alarm? Shouldn't they have tried to bring down the Lord Commander of all people? He was killed by his own people, not by wights, they didn't care about him. And many brothers came back to the Wall alive, this was because they used torches to ward off the wights, same as Mance's host. It's something that works. We don't know why the wights attacked. Maybe they wanted to shoo the NW away from the cask of dragonglass weapons. Maybe they attacked just because they could. The NW was trapped inside the ring wall. As soon as they were walking though, and with torches around them, they were relatively safe. The trick is to keep moving instead of staying in one place, and to have fires around you. We know that from zombie movies: never let them chase you into a building (be it a mall or a pub, it never works), never allow them to surround you, never close off your retreat.

And next to being on the move, fire is important. Tormund confirmed as much, and he even said that the cold winds were sometimes able to quench the fires. So fire is indeed what keeps the wights away. So I do think that dragons will be helpful agains the wights. This is their whole point: GRRM needs something to make Dany appear as the promised one. Let's see what happens after they beat the Others, though.

All of this. Totally agree.

Fire and Ice at war. With the Children and their Old Nature Gods the ancient, neutral observers.

[MtnLion]

All of this. Totally agree.

Fire and Ice at war. With the Children and their Old Nature Gods the ancient, neutral observers.

They may participate by singing a song of Ice and Fire, in the end. That may be the only way to achieve balance for the world that Westeros is part of.

[Capon Breath]

I think its also worth remembering that very few people can read & write and there is no access to so many of the things that we take for granted that go into making a recorded history so as Fassreiter says it would only take 1 generation of no significant Other / WhiteWalker / Wight activity for a lot of the impact of thier existance to be lost. Also the reproductive cycyle of westeros is quicker than modern society so a generation is perhaps only 15 yrs vs say 25 in the modern day. All points that make the fact that they are known of but not at the forefront of peoples minds more beleivable

[TheMtThatRides...Your Mom]

So, I had mentioned this before but I never really got a response out of anyone. Seems that it would be appropriate to talk about here what with people talking about the Children being in league with the Others and what not.

Now...does it not strike anyone else as odd that the whole of the prologue is spent giving us what is basically a "rules of warging(skin-changing)but when Bran hooks up with Blood Raven he doesn't seem to learn about any of this? I don't recall BR ever telling Bran that its wrong to warg other sentient creatures, eating human flesh or mating while inside an animal--please correct me if Im wrong. Now, Im not saying that this automatically makes BR and the Children evil or anything, but it IS a bit fishy...

[Lady of Long Lake]

So, I had mentioned this before but I never really got a response out of anyone. Seems that it would be appropriate to talk about here what with people talking about the Children being in league with the Others and what not.

Now...does it not strike anyone else as odd that the whole of the prologue is spent giving us what is basically a "rules of warging(skin-changing)but when Bran hooks up with Blood Raven he doesn't seem to learn about any of this? I don't recall BR ever telling Bran that its wrong to warg other sentient creatures, eating human flesh or mating while inside an animal--please correct me if Im wrong. Now, Im not saying that this automatically makes BR and the Children evil or anything, but it IS a bit fishy...

In the Bran chapter, page 448 in the hard cover, that chapter covers a few moon cycles. He begins that chapter with ," The moon is a crescent..." and he repeats that a few more times in the next 10 pages. So I am guessing that there is a boatload of knowledge that Bran is learning during those months that we aren't privy to. Martin is only showing us what Bran is doing for 5 minutes when the moon is full, when the moon is a crescent and when the moon is a black hole in the sky. Just little peekaboos into Bran's life in the cave over the 3 months that chapter is covering.

P.S. I have a feeling that ADWD's prologue is more for Jon's story than Bran's. :(

[Lady of Long Lake]

No probs. :cool4:

I tried to explain that a few posts back. I'm surprised you're not interested in why the Children and the other Old Races fled or were forced north because I believe that this movement - and their taking refuge behind the Wall - is fundamental to what's going on. Its a magical barrier as much as a physical one and I believe was intended to hold back not men but whatever magical forces the original Azor Ahai could command. The Children were certainly allied with the First Men - latterly at least - against the Andals and I'm much inclined to think that the Andals and the original forces of Aazor Ahai are (or were) one and the same and that this is a large part of the legends which are all we have to go on.

I just read something that might explain this. Let me copy and paste it from the asoiaf wiki:

"The Andals, invade Westeros through the arm of drone with steel weapons and their new religion of the Faith of the Seven. They fight both the First Men and the children of the forest, sweeping the land much as the First Men did thousands of years before and finally extinguishing the latter everywhere south of the Wall. After centuries of fighting, the Andals establish six kingdoms in the south, while the north remains in the hands of the First Men, due in large part to the strategically located fortress of Moat Cailin resisting multiple attempts to take it and thereafter serving as the door between North and South."

That says that 6000 AL, theAndals extinguished the COTF everywhere south of the Wall. But then goes on to say the Andal army couldn't take Moat Caillin. How were the COTF killed if the Andal army couldn't get into the North? Perhaps they used small assassin groups, like Tywin used Gregor Clegane for. I suppose the COTF wouldn't have been hard to find if the Andals knew they only lived in forests.

[kissdbyfire]

Hi everyone

So, I've been driving all day, a pain. Only it was really not such a pain because I was listening to some specific ADwD chapters (Roy Dotrice, brilliant). And that has led me to my 'crackpot theory du jour'. I'm knackered, so I won't elaborate - I also need to think a bit before trying to take this any further, so I'll just post the gist of it now.

I think the White Walkers from the Battle for the Dawn WERE First Men.

I realise I must elaborate further, and I'll do it tomorrow. Just wanted to get the idea out there...

[Abdo]

I just spent all my night reading this instead of studying for finals and I think I have a few thoughts which may not be terribly important but might make sense.

In terms of Bran not learning "warg rules" it seems like the whole concept of "warg rules" would be something created by men who somehow got the power to warg, not by the children (just seems like their culture wouldn't construct that type of morale code.) It was mentioned earlier in the thread but it doesn't make them evil, it makes them a kind of alien and neutral which seems to be a pretty strong theory for what they represent. Does anyone else get a kind of LoToR elves vibe from the CotF, in the sense that they're a dying race who don't agree with men or trust them fully but understand that they're dying and that they need to do something. Obviously a huge aspect of these books is critiquing that type of clean moral concept so however it ends up working for them will be distorted by the failings of men (and possibly the failings of CotF) but it seems like kind of an analogous concept that might be used as one more example of "if the world was perfect this would happen, but its not..." Its late so I don't really know where the rest of this is going.

Final Question: Do we ever see if Mel's magic can go beyond the wall? Can she use her sense power to sense beyond it or send shadow stuff beyond it, I don't remember it being talked about but I read ADWD really quickly and right when it came out so I've forgotten a surprising amount.

[TheMtThatRides...Your Mom]

In the Bran chapter, page 448 in the hard cover, that chapter covers a few moon cycles. He begins that chapter with ," The moon is a crescent..." and he repeats that a few more times in the next 10 pages. So I am guessing that there is a boatload of knowledge that Bran is learning during those months that we aren't privy to. Martin is only showing us what Bran is doing for 5 minutes when the moon is full, when the moon is a crescent and when the moon is a black hole in the sky. Just little peekaboos into Bran's life in the cave over the 3 months that chapter is covering.

P.S. I have a feeling that ADWD's prologue is more for Jon's story than Bran's. :(

While that's true, we do get him thinking about warging Hodor after meeting BR, right? Why wouldn't we get a "and even BR would be really pissed," or something?

[Black Crow]

On another thread we've been looking at how closely Norse mythology (Odin, Loki etc.) is influencing what's happening north of the Wall. I'd be wary of expecting to see the whole thing pan out that way with only the names changed to protect the guilty but its very instructive to look at the Wiki article on Odin/Wotan to see just how many variations and varying interpretations there are to the story - which is why we shouldn't necessarily take the "received" version of Westeros mythology as gospel

[Free Northman]

On another thread we've been looking at how closely North mythology (Odin, Loki etc.) is influencing what's happening north of the Wall. I'd be wary of expecting to see the whole thing pan out that way with only the names changed to protect the guilty but its very instructive to look at the Wiki article on Odin/Wotan to see just how many variations and varying interpretations there are to the story - which is why we shouldn't necessarily take the "received" version of Westeros mythology as gospel

I happened to see a documentary on Greek mythology in passing yesterday, and was struck by the story of Hercules - who I always just saw as some He-Man like demigod of great strength.

Some attributes of his ring quite familiar to a certain Ice and Fire character:

He was the illegitimate son of Zeus, and Zeus's wife Hera hated him for that, constantly putting difficulties in his path as a consequence. Sound familiar?

Hercules eventually dies and is burned on a pyre.

Instead of dying permanently, however, the fire merely cleanes away his mortal flesh and facilitates his rebirth as a trueborn son of Zeus.

Well, dead people at the Wall are burned.

Jon is supposedly dead.

Mellisandre and the fire priests do a lot of burning.

Jon is supposedly an illigitmate child, and Catelyn has hated him as a result, making his life difficult and ultimately resulting in him ending up at the Wall.

We expect Jon to have to be reborn in some way, for various reasons, including getting free of his oath.

If instead of dying in his funeral pyre, he is actually reborn in "salt and smoke", to be revealed as the trueborn heir to the Iron Throne, and the warrior Hero who has to save the entire world, well, that would be quite a correlation to the Hercules story, wouldn't you say?

[Free Northman]

I happened to see a documentary on Greek mythology in passing yesterday, and was struck by the story of Hercules - who I always just saw as some He-Man like demigod of great strength.

Some attributes of his ring quite familiar to a certain Ice and Fire character:

He was the illegitimate son of Zeus, and Zeus's wife Hera hated him for that, constantly putting difficulties in his path as a consequence. Sound familiar?

Hercules eventually dies and is burned on a pyre.

Instead of dying permanently, however, the fire merely cleanes away his mortal flesh and facilitates his rebirth as a trueborn son of Zeus.

Well, dead people at the Wall are burned.

Jon is supposedly dead.

Mellisandre and the fire priests do a lot of burning.

Jon is supposedly an illigitmate child, and Catelyn has hated him as a result, making his life difficult and ultimately resulting in him ending up at the Wall.

We expect Jon to have to be reborn in some way, for various reasons, including getting free of his oath.

If instead of dying in his funeral pyre, he is actually reborn in "salt and smoke", to be revealed as the trueborn heir to the Iron Throne, and the warrior Hero who has to save the entire world, well, that would be quite a correlation to the Hercules story, wouldn't you say?

Hercules's wife also happens to be Deianira. Sound familiar?