Heresy 12

[Lykos]

Yeah ok, I just thought about it. Andal style culture started where I live less than 1000 years ago and I have no clue what was going on before that.

ETA: And Greenland was only settled by Norwegians in about 900 AD, before that it was only "Children of the Ice" / Inuit. I think the Norwegians had writing and steel though. Thinking that my swamp was settled by people with writing and steel 300 years later is really astonishing, and probably not true. (I based it on the founding dates of the first monasteries.)

[Lummel]

...3) On the Seven: we seem to discuss the magic a lot, but not the "Gods" behind it. Of all the Gods it seems that the only ones that really "exist" are: Old Gods, R'hllor, and the Many-Faced God. The Drowned God has some scraps of proof, but the Seven and the Mother of Mountains don't seem to have any founding. I've always wondered if the religion of the Seven isn't a false one made by the maesters to control the Andal warriors. Anyone one to challange with proof of their existance? My only theory concerning the Seven is that when Aegon got the "blessing" from the High Septon in Oldtown that that solidified the Targaryens as the rightful rulers of Westeros and it's why the other kings are dying when they hit the Iron Throne.

Also, I find it interesting that Catelyn says that Ice is a First Men name for their sword, that it's carried down, since the first men didn't speak Common, why would Ice be used to name a weapons since Ice is an Andal Common word? Just wondering if the word Ice isn't in the original Andal vocabulary and is a First men/ Winter concept...

Ice could just be the translation of what ever the Old Tongue word for ice was. I find it hard to imagine that the Andals from moderately northerly Andalos didn't have a word for ince themselves.

I don't think this will be a plot point because GRRM's attitude to other languages is a minimalist one - if he needs a word he makes it up, if you think about it it is pretty weird (ie doesn't match up with any real world example I can think of) that the north men all speak common tongue as their first language anyway when the only influx of non first men settlers we know about are the Manderleys a bare few hundred years before present.

I am agnostic about the existence of any gods in the GRRMiverse. OK the old gods - well if they are the consciousness of the greenseers locked in the weirwoods - ok, I'm prepared to believe. But as for the rest I feel no faith. Some are more sucessful on drawing on magical power than others - but that's no reason to believe that it comes from a god or supernatural consciousness of some kind.

Is it relevent if the Seven or Rh'llor actually exist? Isn't the importance that characters believe in them and allow that belief to shape their lives and activites?

[Uncat]

Uncat, do you live in Greenland? Where else did the bronze culture start at 200 AD.

And just in case you are tring to pin down sweet Umcat: I'm looking at a mountain where once a castle stood. The seat of a proud and noble family for over a thousand years.

[Lummel]

Yeah ok, I just thought about it. Andal style culture started where I live less than 1000 years ago and I have no clue what was going on before that.

ETA: And Greenland was only settled by Norwegians in about 900 AD, before that it was only "Children of the Ice" / Inuit. I think the Norwegians had writing and steel though. Thinking that my swamp was settled by people with writing and steel 300 years later is really astonishing, and probably not true. (I based it on the founding dates of the first monasteries.)

Hmm, one of the neue Bundeslander? Brandenburg mayhaps? Either that or the Baltic States with those dates and the marshes

And just in case you are tring to pin down sweet Umcat: I'm looking at a mountain where once a castle stood. The seat of a proud and noble family for over a thousand years.

Ireland?

[Darth Rivers]

OK, having a read a bit of your heresy, I think I will be honest here: you guys are reading far too deep. GRRM has often stated that his fans are prone to giving meaning to things he never intended. None of the stuff discussed here will ever feature in the story because too little is left for such radical changes, and so I suggest you stop this hypothesizing. Why? Because if you have such ridiculous expectations from the books, you'll face nothing other than dissapointment when the Others turn out to be just what they have been in the story so far, and the day is saved by killing them off.

I think if GRRM was shown this, he'd laugh and congratulate your efforts, but then he'd confirm my opinion - the endless hypotheses have sprung from minor details never intended to mean anything special.

Either that or the Baltic States with those dates and the marshes

Baltic States aren't marshes. It's predominantly woodland here, although by now it's been turned into masses of agricultural land - hell, even now Latvia has 44% woodland, yet only a few large marshes. As for culture before that, we have a pretty good idea of what was going on and how the people lived, so the point is false in itself - the culture wasn't too different from the earlier Celtic (and maybe Germanic) Europe, with small principalities, based in fortified towns and dominated by rich men with their warbands, ruling over a largely agricultural population. In 1000AD feudalism was already taking root here as well, without any German influence whatsoever.

[Lummel]

It is very kind of you Darth Rivers to be worried about our future disappointments and we give you our heartfelt thanks for your concern. But it gives us some small happiness and entertainment while we wait for the next Dunk and Egg story to be published. :)

[Eyron]

Orrin, I also don't see any major relevance of which gods are real or not. Magic does not have to come from the gods, it could be a force of nature just as well, so to me it's not important if they exist or not. We don't know where magic comes from or what it really is. There are a lot more gods in the story than those you mentioned, and they are all relevant to those who believe in them. The common theme of most is that the god/gods of a people is something/someone that is part of their environment, i.e. a force of nature that has impact on their lives. The Mother Rhoyne of the river people, the gods of the Jungle in Yi Ti, the Drowned god of the seafarers... The more modern ones are more anthropocentric, the Seven, the Manyfaced god...

As Lummel says, the Old gods could be just the greenseers spirits of thousands of years lingering in the trees. We have been discussing earlier if perhaps the Storm god and the Drowned god were also myths based on real live skinchangers, that turned into legend and religion over the years. This idea rhymes with the Thenns view on their magnar as a God more than a man, and that the Thenns are assumed to be very much like the First men originally were. The leader of the First Men could have been seen as their gods, perhaps because of abilities that seemed godlike, such as skinchanging. And there is a deep respect towards the skinchangers among the free folks too. Remnants of an earlier system of belief perhaps?

[Eyron]

Oh and I think I will change my profile name to Eyron, later on... Eiron is my RL nickname :D How perfect. I had forgotten about Eyron Stark...

[Artemis]

Hello everyone!

First and foremost, thank you to Black Crow and Lummel for answering my question about Old Nan referring to the Wildlings as "slavers" in AGoT.

I posted this in the Howl at the Moon thread yesterday and I felt that it might possibly fit into the Heresy thread as well. There was some speculation in that thread as to whether or not the weirwoods need the Moon to grow and I found one mention of someone bringing it up in one of the earlier Hersesies. In fact, I thought it seemed very plausible at first until I read this in ADwD:

“A man must know how to look before he can hope to see,” said Lord Brynden. “Those were 
shadows of days past that you saw, Bran. You were looking through the eyes of the heart tree in your
 godswood. Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a
 weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its 
flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They 
root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn 
is the oak. And the weirwood … a thousand human years are a moment to a weirwood, and through 
such gates you and I may gaze into the past.”


As Bloodraven is basically half weirwood right now and knows a bit more about weirwoods than the other characters, I'm assuming then that it's the Sun and not the Moon that weirwoods need for nourishment (and blood sacrifice seems to "activate" them).

I guess my next question would be how on earth would the weirwoods have survived during the Long Night then? If they truly need the Sun to live, then during the years of the Long Night, the weirwood trees must have been dying or dead from lack of sunlight. Futhermore, Jojen says:


“The singers of the forest had no books. No ink, no parchment, no written language. Instead they 
had the trees, and the weirwoods above all. When they died, they went into the wood, into leaf and 
limb and root, and the trees remembered. All their songs and spells, their histories and prayers,
 everything they knew about this world. Maesters will tell you that the weirwoods are sacred to the old 
gods. The singers believe they are the old gods. When singers die they become part of that godhood.”




This is what I've gotten out of the Bran chapters so far:


1) The CotF believe weirwoods are the Old Gods themselves


2) The CotF join with the weirwoods once they die


3) Greenseers of present day & yore can don the "faces" carved on the weirwoods to see into the past


4) Greenseers of present day & yore also join the godhood within the weirwoods once they die



If we can hold all of these observations taken from Bloodraven and Jojen to be true, then the Long Night might have served as an astronomical disadvantage to Greenseers, CotF, and the Old Gods alike.



We still do not know what wrought the Long Night upon Westeros and for what reasons. I just can't see the CotF as the source of the initial Long Night during the Age of the First Men.



Old Nan is also heard to have said in AGoT:

“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.”


We know that the Starks have "wolf blood" (simply put, they have "warg" blood) and that their sigil is the direwolf of the North. This lends credence to a strong affinity between Starks and direwolves. We clearly see this with the current generation of Stark children and their respective wolves. The Long Night also seemed to have taken quite a toll on direwolves themselves (without the Sun, slowly their prey die off). The direwolf species was/is also threatened if Old Nan can be believed (she's not exactly a connoisseur of facts) which many people have suggested already in the Howl at the Moon thread, are literal "moon singers" themselves.

I know it's been postulated that perhaps that CotF brought on the first Long Night but I'm still a bit apprehensive of accepting that idea. The Long Night seemed more of a punishment to many cultural aspects of the North. 


Sorry for the extremely long post! Please feel free to criticize it as much as you want. It's how theories/speculation are kept humble and true-to-the-story. :commie:

[Ser Leftwich]

Ice could just be the translation of what ever the Old Tongue word for ice was. I find it hard to imagine that the Andals from moderately northerly Andalos didn't have a word for ince themselves.

snip

Maybe the Old Tongue word for Ice is "Stark." A little crackpot, but couldn't resist.

[Orrin Storm]

@Artemis: Weirwoods can never die. They may grow dormant or stop growing for a time, but they're the only tree that doesn't "die". They don't experience rot, etc.... However, a Bracken did manage to poison one once and killed the Blackwood's Raventree so I guess their death is possible. I don't think a few decades without sunlight would kill them though.

@Ser Leftwich: I like it. :)

On the Seven post: I guess I should have worded it better. "Is there any power backing the faith of the Seven similar to how there is power in R'hllor/ or Fire Magic, or the Old Gods/ Earth or Greenseer/Warg magic?"

I tend to believe that the maesters invented the Seven in order to be a non-religion to control the Andals. If not the whole organization is against magic, at least in part. They go through a lot to humiliate and discourage learning the "Higher Mysteries".

[Lykos]

@Orrin Storm, in the "howl at the moon" thread we wonder if there is a connection between the Old Gods and the Maid, Mother, Crone and maybe the Stranger. The Smith seems to be influenced by R´hllor. The Seven are said to have walked the hills of Andalos in human form. The Faith of the Seven seems to be a very anthropocentric religion.

[Orrin Storm]

@Orrin Storm, in the "howl at the moon" thread we wonder if there is a connection between the Old Gods and the Maid, Mother, Crone and maybe the Stranger. The Smith seems to be influenced by R´hllor. The Seven are said to have walked the hills of Andalos in human form. The Faith of the Seven seems to be a very anthropocentric religion.

I figured at it's core it may be a deviation of the R'hllor religion since it is Seven aspects of one God. Most common day Westerosi forget that though and talk about the Seven like they're each a god of their own. It seems like all of the aspects except for the Stranger would fit in with R'hllor. I guess the Stranger is the "visitor" to the family. Kinda like the Great Other or something. I've thought a lot on the religions.

[alienarea]

I figured at it's core it may be a deviation of the R'hllor religion since it is Seven aspects of one God. Most common day Westerosi forget that though and talk about the Seven like they're each a god of their own. It seems like all of the aspects except for the Stranger would fit in with R'hllor. I guess the Stranger is the "visitor" to the family. Kinda like the Great Other or something. I've thought a lot on the religions.

The seven could be a mix of the seven days of the week (is that the same in Westeros?) and the Norse gods. If you look at the names of the days in English and German four of them still reference Norse gods (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday), two sun and moon, and Saturday is the odd one out (i.e. don't know where it's coming from without looking it up).

[Lummel]

...I guess my next question would be how on earth would the weirwoods have survived during the Long Night then? If they truly need the Sun to live, then during the years of the Long Night, the weirwood trees must have been dying or dead from lack of sunlight...

I don't know what the 'long night' was (is it literally a period of unending darkness or is it meant metaphorically?) and I don't see any reason to assume that it is the same as the mega winter that Old Nan describes in her story.

I'm not sure if the long night is in the books the event that is ended by the battle of the dawn remembered in the song at the harvest festival, in which case I don't think they are necessarily part of the same event, or is it part of the Azor Ahai story in which case it could well have at most an indirect relation to the events in westeros - for example being the Fire counterpoint in the East/South to the Ice event in the west/North.

Having said that it is an in-story myth, so it is perhaps as literally true as Ragnarok in the norse sagas - in which case seeking a practical horicultural answer isn't going to get you very far.

[Koekfabriek]

The seven could be a mix of the seven days of the week (is that the same in Westeros?) and the Norse gods. If you look at the names of the days in English and German four of them still reference Norse gods (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday), two sun and moon, and Saturday is the odd one out (i.e. don't know where it's coming from without looking it up).

The seven come from the Christian concept of the trinity. With one god with three different entities (father, son and holy spirit). GRRM said that in one of his interviews, i can look it up on youtube if you want.

[Lummel]

Tze has started an interesting thread about the Grey King and suggests that Nagga's bones might have been a weirwood grove, which has some interesting implications. Worth a look.

[Black Crow]

I meant to post this earlier, but life got in the way, so really it’s a matter of fleshing out what Uncat has already said about the timelines.

Those timelines at first sight appear straightforward, but a good deal less so on closer examination. According to Maester Luwin’s history lesson in AGoT the First Men came to Westeros 12,000 years ago and fought the original inhabitants, who as he tells it were the Children (the Giants and “other old races” are left out although Osha reminds him of them) until the Pact was agreed and they all lived in harmony, with the First Men even adopting some elements of the Children’s gods. This pact endured throughout the Age of Heroes and the Long Night, which came 8,000 years ago, until the coming of the Andals. This occurred according to legend as early as 6,000 years ago, but as the story has gone on we’ve been given progressively shorter dates, with 4,000 years and even 2,000 years offered in text. Uncertainty over the Andals’ arrival is compounded, as Sam explains, by a lack of proper written sources for pre-Andal history and his (and so GRRM’s) health warning that what has been written down is unreliable:

The oldest histories we have were written after the Andals came to Westeros. The First Men only left us runes on rocks, so everything we think we know about the Age of Heroes and 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. The old histories are full of kings who reigned for hundreds of years, and knights riding around a thousand years before there were knights. You know the tales, Brandon the Builder, Symeon Star-eyes, Knight’s King…we say that you’re the nine-hundred-and-ninety-eighth Lord Commander of the Knight’s Watch, but the oldest list I’ve found shows six hundred seventy-four commanders, which suggests that it was written during-“

“Long ago,” Jon broke in…

We’ve had a lot of discussion over the significance of those 674 Lord Commanders, but I think the most straightforward explanation is that it should be taken as GRRM has written it – the “oldest list” was written down 324 Lord Commanders ago, which even allowing for names carved on runes really puts the preceding ones into the “legendary kings” category.

As a general remark therefore, given the limitations of our own knowledge of British history before the Romans came just 2,000 years ago, the rather improbable dates bandied about by Maester Luwin have to be taken as metaphorical rather than accurate – a long time ago rather than literal.

That being said, the actual dates probably don’t matter; what’s important being the sequence of events, but even here there are a couple of problems.

What we can be reasonably sure of is that a long time ago the First Men came to Westeros where they and the original non-human inhabitants fought themselves to exhaustion and then agreed a Pact, leaving the woods to the Singers and the open lands to the 100 kingdoms of men. We think that the 100 pieces of dragonglass given to the Watch were first given at this time rather than later as they would correspond with those 100 kingdoms. The Pact according to Luwin endured through the Long Night, but initially at least was passive since we’re told the Last Hero took years to seek them out and beg assistance.

At this point, as discussed in the summary of what we now think we know about the Wall, that there’s a curious gap in the history.

Conventionally the Wall is said to have been raised by Bran the Builder after the Others were defeated in order to prevent their return, but here’s AGoT Bran 4:

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.

GRRM as we know has also stated that Bran building the Wall is mythology rather than history and what’s very conspicuously missing from that history is any explanation of how and when the Others were defeated and the Wall actually built. Hence the theory that having given the Last Hero refuge, the Children/Singers then brokered some kind of deal with the Others in which the boundary of their realm was marked by the Wall.

There then followed a period of consolidation. We now think that a number of the 100 kingdoms were lost beyond the wall, while the others were reduced by war and marriage to the seven we know. Then the Andals arrived and conquered everything south of the Neck. While none of the dates and times are reliable this seems to have been a fairly swift conquest and was probably aided by dissension among the new kingdoms, with kings-turned-lords resenting their being the lords (or commons) and not the kings their fathers had been – per the Blackwoods and Brackens.

Of itself that’s not significant. What is important is what happened to the Children. Maester Luwin’s history implies that the Andals killed them where they found them in the process of conquest but that doesn’t explain their disappearance from the North which was famously never taken by the Andals, hence the suggestion that the massacre and flight was the result of a pogrom after the conquest.

And this is where we get into real heresy, because scattered throughout the story so far are a number of individual references to something happening about 1,000 years ago; the flight of the Children, the Night that Ended Battle, the occupation of the Wall by the Nights watch (hence Jon’s reference to the horns being blown for returning rangers for “1,000 years or more” – tolerably vague but far removed from 8,000 years), there’s also the big battle involving Gorne and Gendel – and perhaps even Bran Stark the Night’s King and his brother Stark of Winterfell becoming the King in the North – rather than King of Winter.

In short the, while the many thousands of years bandied about, and hundreds of Lord Commanders, are probably mince, the problem is not with the dates, or the precise numbers of Lord Commanders (except insofar as some still take them as literally true), but rather with two important gaps in what’s presented as a seamless history.

How was the Long Night ended and who really built the Wall and how.

What happened about 1,000 years ago which seems to connect the expulsion of the Children, a battle with the Others, and the Watch taking over the Wall. There are all sorts of hints and clues about this event and frustratingly our characters seem to know a lot more about it than we’ve so far been told, but its fundamental to where we are now.

[DragonSpawn]

@ Black Crow

Have i missed a discussion around the 9 worlds of Norse Mythology?

I noticed (when brushing up on my mythology) that these two worlds: Svartalfheim and Hel don't really fit with GRRM's world - but wondered if that's maybe where the 7 came from?

Also 'Valknut' could explain the relationship between Ice / Fire and CotF - although i know you didn't like my concept of dying in Westeros and being reborn in land of always winter... but that seems to be what valknut suggests...

I know Jormungand has been mentioned although i don't really understand it...

and

Yggdrasil (Norse Tree of Life)

- any chance you can do a quick summary on these for me? You'd be a hero :)

ETA: On a funny side-note - just seen a great idea for a penis tattoo: the symbol for Gungnir! A magical spear that never misses it's mark... (sorry to drag tone down ... but thought that would be quite amusing!)

[Black Crow]

Alas no, I'm fine on Celtic mythology and the Sidhe but not on the Norse stuff, however I'm sure somebody else will chime in.