Heresy 16

[Tyryan Lannister]

on the topic of snow/winter entering people;

in the final Dance Jon chapter:

"He thought of Robb, with snowflakes melting in his hair... Of Sansa, brushing out Lady's coat and singing to herself. You know nothing, Jon Snow."

Two things from this: One, Robb was destined to die... when he left, Winter left him. For Sansa, it's further reinforcement that she is no longer the innocent little child he once knew, but instead a brave, intelligent warrior of sorts who would possibly remind him of Ygrette... you would think that he would relate Arya with Ygrette, but instead he relates her to Sansa.

[Ser Leftwich]

On the GoHH, with the number of people in Westeros, there has to have been more greenseers over the years between BR and Bran. And also likely, not all of them were found and/or trained by BR or the CotF.

The GoHH is described as a woods witch, possibly from the Oldstones area, or Jenny of Oldstones met her elsewhere. If she is a greenseer, maybe she is self-trained, but figured out that weirwoods help. She is just not physically connected to a weirwood, but can still use them.

And it seems that greenseers live a long time. BR is around 125 years old or so and between the fact that GoHH was at court in KL more than 40 years ago and her gnarled look, she has got to be old.

[7V3N]

The fact that cold weather adds to the Wall's defensibility makes me think it was there to oppose forces of Winter. With each snow, the Wall grows higher and thicker. So over time, the Others trying to fight the Wall's defenders would simply make the Wall's defenses stronger. I want to see Mel (or somebody) shoot a fireball at it and see if it is at all affected.

[Black Crow]

IIRC the cave entrance was quite a long way up the hill. I don't remember now how deep they went. But yeah, there seems to be a difference between the Fist (and similar hills, if there are any more) and the hills of the CotF. But I'm not sure I understand, do you mean that Bran's cave is one of those hollow hills originally belonging to the Others (sorry, I refuse to call the Sidhe...), or if not then could you give an example? Winterfell? Maybe I'm just not seeing the obvious, but have to rush off now...

No the point I'm making is that the rabbit hole where Bran and Co. enter the world of the Singers is quite high up a proper hill; Coldhands refers to a rear entrance through a sinkhole some miles away. Its a natural feature with tunnels and caverns below it. The barrow-like hills, such as the Fist, appear to be something different.

What I'm suggesting that the Children/Singers' natural habitat is in the forest, but in times of need or in Winter they can retire into the caves and tunnels until Spring. The hollow hills, the fells rising above the trees are something different and may therefore be associated with the Aos Sidhe rather than the Singers.

[alienarea]

A few thoughts on the Last Hero story:

In addition to needing years to find the children his sword breaks when he wants to use it. Against whom? This is not written. Only after this the Others and the spiders come tracking for his hot blood. That reminds me a lot of the behavior of the wights.

There is nothing heroic in that story, it is a total defeat. The only heroic thing could be that he volunteered for this - like a sacrifice. Can this be linked to either the captive being killed in Bran's weirwood session and/or Ramsay's hunting?

[Black Crow]

Breaking his sword certainly sounds like Ser Waymar Royce. The whole scenario as presented by Old Nan sounds suspiciously like he got into a fight with the Sidhe, lost his sword and then ran for his life. Bran remembers that the Children saved him, but the fact there are no details attached suggests that's all they did. As I've suggested before it sounds like Leaf popping up to take Bran and Co. into the cave, rather than anything more elaborate.

That's not to say the Sidhe and their dogs weren't enjoying the chase...

[Darth Rivers]

The Song of Ice and Fire is rightly acclaimed as a masterpiece, not just of fantasy but as a work of classic literature destined to rank with and, in the opinion of many of us, surpass Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings.

That will never, ever happen. While ASOIAF is a million times better as far as story goes, literature critics will always scorn it because it is badly written. In 30 years (10 years after ADOS gets released), ASOIAF will be forgotten.

But the story itself is, as I said, much better. Mainly because LotR doesn't really have a story. It's just "good guys beat bad guys because they are good".

[alienarea]

Breaking his sword certainly sounds like Ser Waymar Royce. The whole scenario as presented by Old Nan sounds suspiciously like he got into a fight with the Sidhe, lost his sword and then ran for his life. Bran remembers that the Children saved him, but the fact there are no details attached suggests that's all they did. As I've suggested before it sounds like Leaf popping up to take Bran and Co. into the cave, rather than anything more elaborate.

That's not to say the Sidhe and their dogs weren't enjoying the chase...

Agree in general, but if Old Nan tells the truth, the Others came after the sword broke. A hint that the WW are not the Others, just a prelude?

Or, the Others got the Last Hero, wightified him, and left him to wander around. The Children saved him and now he is Coldhands.

[Black Crow]

That's an interesting thought, but I still get the impression his sword was broken in a fight and they got on his trail after he had fled. While wev don't get Old Nan's actual ending I do get the impression that they did literally pop up and save him before the Sidhe caught and killed him.

[7V3N]

Or, the Others got the Last Hero, wightified him, and left him to wander around. The Children saved him and now he is Coldhands.

I like this idea, a lot.

[nanother]

No the point I'm making is that the rabbit hole where Bran and Co. enter the world of the Singers is quite high up a proper hill; Coldhands refers to a rear entrance through a sinkhole some miles away. Its a natural feature with tunnels and caverns below it. The barrow-like hills, such as the Fist, appear to be something different.

What I'm suggesting that the Children/Singers' natural habitat is in the forest, but in times of need or in Winter they can retire into the caves and tunnels until Spring. The hollow hills, the fells rising above the trees are something different and may therefore be associated with the Aos Sidhe rather than the Singers.

Oh, OK, I was just confused by the bit about letting the Children plant trees on them. I agree that the Fist is very different from the Children's hills, but part of the reason it's so distinctive that it has a ringfort on it...also, it's on the border of the woodland and the woodless mountains so it's quite possibly not habitable for trees at all:

Clambering atop the piled rocks, Jon gazed off toward the setting sun. He could see the light shimmering like hammered gold off the surface of the Milkwater as it curved away to the south. Upriver the land was more rugged, the dense forest giving way to a series of bare stony hills that rose high and wild to the north and west.

And the Fist might be easy to spot, but we don't know what's inside, if anything, and where the entrance might be...

But in any case, Martin uses the term 'hollow hill' for the types the Children live in, with the natural caves and tunnels. IMO the only candidates we saw for non-natural hollow hills are the barrows Ned and Robert talked about. Possibly the Fist, but I'm not entirely convinced about that.

[Katerrinah]

That will never, ever happen. While ASOIAF is a million times better as far as story goes, literature critics will always scorn it because it is badly written. In 30 years (10 years after ADOS gets released), ASOIAF will be forgotten.

But the story itself is, as I said, much better. Mainly because LotR doesn't really have a story. It's just "good guys beat bad guys because they are good".

ASOIAF is badly written? Really? Its not the immaculately crafted work that Tolkiens's work was, but I wouldn't go as far to call it badly written. The story is certainly richer and more gripping. I think I read a Tolkien quote where he said he knew the ring had to be destroyed but he didn't initially know the in in between bits. Reading tolkien is safe because you know the outcome. Reading ASOIAF isn't because anything could happen. Good and bad are blurred shades of grey - characters we were lead to see as "bad" show us (through their perspectives) that there is no good or bad, just people making mistakes. Whether the greyness of the people is leading up to humans vs Others (or whatever you want to call them) or simply being a case of everything being a matter of perspective (Others view themselves as the good guys)... I don't know. I get the feeling it could go either way. I do very much want it to be more than good vs bad because that is boring in this series.

[7V3N]

Uh oh. I see this going bad, so I say we avoid the topic of judging the quality of GRRM's writing. Everyone has their opinion, no need to try and press it on anyone else.

[Katerrinah]

I wasn't trying trying to do that, but agreed.

Back to the heresy!

[hotweaselsoup]

@Hotweaselsoup

Still squeezing my brain on that SSM. Can't argue it away. I really thought, I had it.

Btw. I'm starting to get back to the Wall being the work of the CotF. If the brockered an agreement, they may have installed the main means to secure, that everybody keeps to his side. Kind of Bluehelms of Westeros.

And then I remembered your idea (or was it Eira?) of the Wall starting out as a weirwood hedge. That my take a hundred years of gardnering and then comes the snow raising it ever higher.

Of one thing, I'm sure anyhow. It was not build. It was raised in some way, but not by cutting blocks of ice in midwinter some frozen lakes hundreds of leagues away

Ah yeah, it's a conundrum. The Wall must have been pretty pitiful as a physical barrier at least, for the first few hundred years of its existence. But it's possible that it could have been completed as a magical barrier much more quickly, I suppose. Maybe, as has been suggested, there already existed a line of weirwoods - or just plain trees, even - whose roots were already interconnected below ground, and could function as a ready-made conduit for whatever magic spells or wards that were needed to create the magical foundation of the Wall? (It's possible that it was all forest up there in the beginning, before the land was cleared in the Gift and north of the Wall, so chances are the trees stretched from west to east already.) And I suggested before that maybe the Wall functioned as some sort of magic "magnet", or repository, wherein it acts to collect/absorb magic from the world - which may partially explain why magic seems to be stronger at the Wall - but also might explain, albeit in a rather abstract, loosey-goosey way, why magic cannot seem to pass through the Wall. That is, it gets sucked in and trapped - preserved in the ice. Also, it gives another thought about why the Wall has grown so ridiculously large: not because of any initial design or desire to make a wicked high wall, but simply as a side-effect of the magic that has been absorbed over the millennia. Like the mineral accretions of stalactites, if that makes any sense? (Or an upwardly growing glacier, for that matter! :) )

Anyway, the thought is that as the Wall melts, magic leaches back into the world, and an especially long summer with a copiously weeping Wall might give rise to more adept pyromancers, and dragons and such.

I dunno, sounds a little (okay, a lot!) crackpotterish upon reflection. But the height of the Wall seems so grotesque, I can't help but think that it was perhaps an unintended consequence of the Wall's original purpose. But I still don't understand the purpose of the Black Gate, or why the damn thing seems to be buried so deep underground. (When I read about Bran's encounter with the Black Gate, I always imagined the mouth stretching open into a giant, black maw, with a dark tunnel on the opposite side. I think of them as being quite far underground, so once they go through the Gate, I seem them traversing a long, sloping tunnel to the surface somewhere north of the Wall. Do others read it as the mouth opening directly onto the other side? I think it was Lummel who envisioned the Nightfort as being situated on a hill or rise a few hundred feet above the ground level north of the Wall, so that the Black Gate would open at the base of the Wall.)

ETA: we already have an in-world example of magic being trapped, or frozen, into dragonglass, and possibly the same type of thing is at work with the magical gemstones (rubies, moonstones*) floating around - so I wonder if it's unreasonable to think that something of a similar nature is happening, albeit on a really large-scale, with the Wall?

* the Romans thought that moonstones were the solidified rays of the moon, so frozen moonbeams

[Sword Of Mid Afternoon]

@Hotweaselsoup

Still squeezing my brain on that SSM. Can't argue it away. I really thought, I had it.

Btw. I'm starting to get back to the Wall being the work of the CotF. If the brockered an agreement, they may have installed the main means to secure, that everybody keeps to his side. Kind of Bluehelms of Westeros.

And then I remembered your idea (or was it Eira?) of the Wall starting out as a weirwood hedge. That my take a hundred years of gardnering and then comes the snow raising it ever higher.

Of one thing, I'm sure anyhow. It was not build. It was raised in some way, but not by cutting blocks of ice in midwinter some frozen lakes hundreds of leagues away

A few things.... mostly wall related...

I too think the Children had a hand in building the wall.... and I go back to my original evidence of their connection : Coldhands.

-The Cave was protected (warded) by CotF/Old gods...

-Coldhands could not pass the threshold of the Cave.

-Coldhands could not pass through the Wall. (I think it was the wall that prevented him, as we're told the wall itself is said to have similar 'warding' magical properties.... or combination of wall/weirwood passage, if you insist on bringing the Nightfort Mouth Door into the mix)

Thus it stands to reason that if the CotF are protecting the cave, that same magic is protecting the Wall. Not concrete evidence, but highly suggestive. That's usually as good as it gets in this business. I'll take it.

As for building the Wall, and the logistics of it... I am confident that magic did play a role in its construction, BUT I don't think we should automatically consider all/any anthropogenic origins as proposterous. I'm trying to think of a way it could've been built... I looked at other man made monoliths to try and establish comparables....

***I started out with the intent of proving my pet theory that humans could very well have built the Wall.... but well, see for yourself...

Consider the following, if you will:

If the longer timeline is correct, and we're looking at thousands of years of history, with roughly the same First Men civilization in place in the North, with the slow infusion of Andals...

(SIDEBAR - I am hopeful that the forthcoming Lands of ASOIAF map/history entry shall clear this up once and for all. I recall reading that it will shed quite a bit of light on Westerosi history)

... it would not be unreasonable to suggest that the wall was built over the course of 1000 years, or even more.

Also consider, my comparable monolith of choice, the Great Pyramid of Giza - most readily recognized monolithic man-made structure - was constructed in about 20 years... and all of the construction materials were transported 600 miles from quarry to build site.

*** It was here where I had hoped to say, if Egyptians built the great pyramid in 20 years, why not the wall in 1000+? Then I did my first basic calculations .... and there's no way people built the wall. No way at all..... Which is aggravating because my pet theory lies in tatters.****

Even if 1000 years was dedicated to building the Wall... if we transposed that to Egyptian building, we'd have 50 pyramids worth of construction. It was at this point that I realized that even if you lined up 50 pyramids, it wouldn't even cover 8 miles... even if you account for total mass & the variance in dimensions, and generously double that length.... its still only a little more than 5% of the length of the wall...

So, my theory is a bust.

But... perhaps men built a shorter, smaller wall.... and it was somehow exponentially expanded?

One way or another, it was expanded in a supernatural manner. With the manpower & technology available, it could not have been built by traditional construction methods, even if all 8,000 years were dedicated to its construction.

[Black Crow]

...Reading ASOIAF isn't [safe] because anything could happen. Good and bad are blurred shades of grey - characters we were lead to see as "bad" show us (through their perspectives) that there is no good or bad, just people making mistakes. Whether the greyness of the people is leading up to humans vs Others (or whatever you want to call them) or simply being a case of everything being a matter of perspective (Others view themselves as the good guys)... I don't know. I get the feeling it could go either way. I do very much want it to be more than good vs bad because that is boring in this series.

I don't want to re-open the comparison between GRRM and Tolkein because that's a different question entirely, but I do think this passage by Katterinah is important and underpins a lot of the Heresy. ASOIAF is told through individual POVs by an author who delights in the unreliable narrator technique. Detail aside the whole story has started off with what we thought were comfortable assumptions about what was going on and who was good and who was bad, but as its progressed those certainties have steadily been eroded and overturned - a good example being Jamie Lanister the wicked Kingslayer revealed as the saviour of King's Landing.

This is also why I still think these repeated references to things happening 1,000 years ago are going to turn out to be significant as relating to a single historical event from different POVs - and yes while 1,000 years ago isn't a precise one its not necessarily a metaphorical one either since the Gorne and Gendel story supposedly happened 3,000 years ago.

[Black Crow]

A few things.... mostly wall related...

I too think the Children had a hand in building the wall.... and I go back to my original evidence of their connection : Coldhands.

...One way or another, it was expanded in a supernatural manner. With the manpower & technology available, it could not have been built by traditional construction methods, even if all 8,000 years were dedicated to its construction.

While I agree with the warding, I don't think that necessarily means it was the Children/Singers who did it, magic being magic whoever uses it. There are a couple of wrinkles to this which I'll discuss later today once I get back, but in the meantime and without in any way being mischeivous, does acceptance that the Wall couldn't have been built by men even with 8,000 years to play with, alter your stance on the truth of that supposed 8,000 year history?

Actually come to that, although the Watch have been carting barrels of gravel up there for as long as they can remember, they haven't had the manpower for large scale works for a very long time.

[7V3N]

CP: Others were captured and used to keep the cold in the area for the Wall to be built. It allowed the Wall to stay cold enough to survive and grow. So many of these Others-captives were trapped inside the Wall somewhat like a permanently locked ice cell. So the Others attack the Night's Watch to destroy the Wall and free their kin.

[DragonSpawn]

Thats why i think its important that the last hero set out to win back what the armies of men had lost with the aid of the cotf. Not to defeat the others... What would happen if he came across a wight-version of his sister? Would he have to slay her again too? So i think it would be futile to try and fight them... Meaning the CotF probs just took pity and helped form the pact... Allowing the WW to get involved in helping. CotF get deep woods, WW get the deep Winter etc...

LF could probably get the Wall up fairly quick. With all the snow around post-long night he would offer a penny per slab of snow? To be delived to Nightfort for building? :) wouldnt fancy digging around in snow though!

One of the things about the POV style of writing that i like is its a bit like warging into different characters... I even toyed with the idea at one point that every POV is someone Bran eventually wargs... But then i sobered up!