Hey there friends, it’s LucifermeansLightbringer, and I’m back with part 2 of our Euron extravaganza. If you haven’t watched part 1, I recommend pausing here and watching that one first, because we’re picking up right where we left off and there’s far too much to summarize in an intro here. That first video covered Euron as evil Azor Ahai reborn and aspiring king of the apocalypse, and today we are diving into the specific evidence suggesting he will become a new Night’s King figure and a leader of the Others in some capacity. I’d like to quickly say thank you to all of our patreon sponsors, and thanks to all of you watching right now for clicking the like button, subbing to the channel, leaving comments and sharing my videos. It really means a ton. All the links to support the channel are in the video description, so let’s get started!
Symbolic evidence comes in a lot of forms – sometimes it’s esoteric and complex, bouncing parallel symbols off of people’s faces and celestial objects alike while making use of abstract concepts from various world mythologies. Sometimes it’s just a mater of clever wordplay though, and I have found a few key instances of Martin using the very simple word “others” to refer to THE Others. For example, in the quote we read at the end of Euron Part 1, Tyrion asked Morqorro, “have you seen these others in your fires?” and he answers, “only their shadows, one most of all,” and then he describes Euron. Because we know the Others are often referred to as shadows, our eyebrows perk up here at seeing the words “other” and “shadow” together and wonder, is Martin trying to imply Euron as an Other, or more likely, a King of the Others?
This is hardly a counterintuitive hypothesis at this point, and of course Euron fits the symbolic archetype of Night’s King that we outlined in “A New Night’s King” – he has the blue version of one-eyed Odin wizard symbolism, and of course Euron is a kind of actual wizard, drinking warlock wine, using blood magic to control the winds, and even seeking ways to become a god-man.
As we saw in part 1, Euron is probably using the name “Urrathon Nightwalker” as his alias when he’s in Qarth playing with glass candles… and that’s like one letter away from Urrathon Whitewalker, so, you know, case closed.
And then there all of these… other quotes:
“On that we can agree.” Euron lifted two fingers to the patch that covered his left eye, and took his leave. The others followed at his heels like mongrel dogs.
Ah ha! I told you the Others should follow Euron. These mongrel dog others following him are actually his captains, and here they are again as the Others in Victarion’s internal monologue in AFFC:
Aye, he thought, a great victory for the Crow’s Eye and his wizards. The other captains would shout his brother’s name anew when the tidings reached Oakenshield.
Other captains can only sail Other ships, right?
When the Crow’s Eye took the fleet to sea Tris had simply lagged behind, changing course only when the other ships were lost to sight.
Those are Euron’s “other ships,” to be sure. Euron’s fleet is ready for war, as we know, and what kind of wars do Other captains fight with Other ships?
“The kingswood crowned his brother Euron, and the Crow’s Eye has other wars to fight.”
Yes, the Crow’s Eye has other wars to fight. Very interesting, Sounds like good material for The Winds of Winter.
It’s actually not just the captains on Euron’s ships who are the Others, check out the crew of The Silence:
On her decks a motley crew of mutes and mongrels spoke no word as the Iron Victory drew nigh. Men black as tar stared out at him, and others squat and hairy as the apes of Sothoros. Monsters, Victarion thought.
There are Others on Euron’s ship, which by now should come as no surprise. The Others came for the first time in the darkness of the Long Night, and here they are sailing a ship with a sail like a starless sky. Now the Others aren’t squat and hairy of course, but they are monsters, like the “others” on Euron’s ship, and the nickname of Gilly’s baby who was supposed to be turned into an Other is… Monster. And although the real Others aren’t quite mutes like Euron’s Others on the ship here, the Others do not break the snow when the walk and thus it is said of them that “the Others make no sound” (Will repeats these words to himself in the AGOT prologue).
Besides all these Others following Euron and sailing his ships, we also have the more obvious idea of the Ironborn warriors being called “Drowned Men” and being symbolically resurrected with the words “what is dead can never die, but rises harder and stronger.” Many have noticed that this slogan of the Drowned Men also pretty well describes the ice wights, who rise with ice-hard hands, unnatural strength, and unnatural life. In other words, Euron is leading dead people who have risen again in his conquest of Westeros, and that sounds like Night’s King business. Check out this quote from Aeron Greyjoy’s “The Prophet” chapter of AFFC as Aeron is greeted by one of the soft, mainlander Ironborn who were only ever sprinkled with a few drops of saltwater and not actually drowned and resuscitated like a real fanatic.
“Such tidings as we bear are for your ears alone, Damphair,” the Sparr said. “These are not matters I would speak of here before these others.”
“These others are my drowned men, god’s servants, just as I am. I have no secrets from them, nor from our god, beside whose holy sea I stand.”
It’s pretty great how they repeat it twice – these others are the drowned men. Now the Drowned Man credo makes them wights, and this wordplay calls them Others, but I think that’s okay – the point is that they represent the combined forces of Night’s King, the Others and their wights. There’s even more Drowned Men-as-Others wordplay in the chapter:
“You belong to the god now,” Aeron told him. The other drowned men gathered round and each gave him a punch and a kiss to welcome him to the brotherhood.
The Others are of course a brotherhood, being all male and many of them sons of the same man, be that Craster or the original Night’s King. And now we know what the white walker hazing routine is like! A punch and a kiss, that’s not too bad. A lot of people actually enjoy that kind of thing. Anyway… Just a moment before telling this newly drowned man that he belongs to the god now, Aeron thinks to himself “Another one returned,” and that “other priests lost a man from time to time,” but not Aeron of course.
Aeron himself makes a great Other priest, which makes sense because he’s the one “raising the dead,” so to speak. Check out this scene from AFFC where he walks into the cold sea to counsel with his god:
Aeron crept from his little shelter into the chill of the night. Naked he stood, pale and gaunt and tall, and naked he walked into the black salt sea. The water was icy cold, yet he did not flinch from his god’s caress.
So the sea from which the Drowned Men are reborn is icy cold, which makes you think of all the icy lake symbolism of the Others, such as their voices being like the cracking of ice on a winter lake or Milton’s notion of Lucifer the dragon being imprisoned in a frozen lake in the ninth circle of hell from Paradise Lost which Martin seems to be making good use of. Aeron himself is “pale and gaunt and tall,” which are all words used to describe the Others in the AGOT prologue, and then after emerging from the sea he is with his body steaming in the cold night air, like an Other with icy mists pouring off of him. The moment of his divine insight in the ocean comes with this line:
That man is drowned, and the god has made me strong. The cold salt sea surrounded him, embraced him, reached down through his weak man’s flesh and touched his bones. Bones, he thought. The bones of the soul.
The cold touch of Aeron’s god is reaching into his body and touching Aeron’s bones and soul as he is reborn – doesn’t this sound like an icy, Otherish transformation here? Now that’s he’s an icy Other priest, he can set about raising the dead into an army… only for Euron to sail in from Asshai and take control over it.
Euron steals control of the Drowned Men at the Kingsmoot of course, and check out the passage where the Damphair, standing beneath the arch of Nagga’s Bones, issues the summons for the Kingsmoot:
The drowned men took up their driftwood cudgels and began to beat them one against the other as they walked back down the hill. Others joined them, and the clangor spread along the strand. Such a fearful clacking and a clattering it made, as if a hundred trees were pummeling one another with their limbs.
Three uses of the word “other,” and the weirwood origins of the Others are even suggested as the Other-like drowned men’s clacking of their wooden cudgels is compared to trees – not just trees actually, trees that are “pummeling one another” as if they were tree warriors fighting. I’ll remind you again that there is an entire weirwood side of the symbolism of the “White Walkers of the Wood,” as they are known, which we will explore in a video very soon, but let’s stick to Euron’s Night’s King and Otherish symbolism for now.
In case the skeptically-minded amongst you are wondering if you can find this sort of pregnant use of the word “other” anywhere and use it to construe a theory about the Others if you smoke enough cannabis, the answer is no. There are only a small handful of scenes which repeatedly use the word other like this, and those scenes have a context in which the wordplay makes sense, as it does here to see the people following and serving Euron being suggested as Others. One of the next videos will be the Jon Snow Night’s King video, and he has a chapter at the Wall where the term is use no less than seven times alongside copious white walker symbolism of all kinds, and it’s going to make a damn lot of sense when I show it you, I promise. Those of you who watched my recent livestream called “Journey to the Heart of Winter” also saw the same wordplay trick used at Daznak’s pit to symbolically imply Dany and Drogon as fighting Others and wights instead of the slave masters of Meereen.
Another way in which Euron is suggested as an icy white walker king is through his Warlock and Shade of the Evening symbolism. Shade of the Evening is a third-eye-opening, psychotropic brew, so just like the weirwood paste, we can see this substance as a trigger for an Odin-like expansion of magical sight and consciousness – but one associated with darkness and nightfall, as implied by the name “shade of the evening.” That fits very well with the core of Euron’s character as expressed in the quote we opened the Euron part 1 video with – Euron sees himself as a god-king rising from the graves here at the end of days, and he’s opening his third eye with liquid darkness.
Better still, there are specific ice associations that come with this dark blue “warlock wine.” It leaves those who drink it with blue lips – and blue lips are normally seen on people who are extremely cold, who have caught frotbite. More specific is Dany’s nightmare of Hizdahr zo Lorak turning into a warlock:
Beneath her coverlets she tossed and turned, dreaming that Hizdahr was kissing her … but his lips were blue and bruised, and when he thrust himself inside her, his manhood was cold as ice. She sat up with her hair disheveled and the bedclothes atangle.
Yikes! Naughty bits are one thing, icy bits quite another (see what I did there). This may also be foreshadowing for Dany and Euron… ah.. well.. participating in a scene that will make us all very uncomfortable, let’s just leave it at that. We will talk about Dany’s relationship to Euron a different time, but as you can see here, this nightmare at the very least creates an association between blue-lipped people and… icy body parts.
As we discussed in the “Born to Burn the Others” video, the actual Undying Ones themselves seem like dead ringers for symbolic white walker stand-ins and they became this way by drinking the Shade of the Evening, which Euron is now basically doing kegstands with. I don’t want to cite all the quotes at length since we already did that, but you will recall that the Undying Ones are referred to as “no more than blue shadows” and “blue and cold” with blue skin, hair, and eyes, and “dry cold hands.” They gather around a floating corrupt blue heart, which I take as a symbol for the Heart of Winter and a reference to the Shade of the Evening trees as a kind of corrupted weirwood heart tree (and check out “Journey to the Heart of Winter for more on the Shade trees). Pyatt Pree even describes a meeting with the Undying as an honor “as rare as summer snows.”
That scene also describes the Undying Ones needing Dany’s fire and life, hinting at a desire to give Dany a cold transformation. If these Undying are representing the Others as they seem to be, then it could imply the Others would like to possess Dany, that they want to make Dany a Night’s Queen (video forthcoming) or perhaps just suck off of her life away like icy vampires. One of cold Undying shadows is even is even sucking or biting at one of Dany’s eyes, hinting at the idea of Odin-like magical transformation, but of course this would be the cold kind.
Needless to say, all of this could certainly end up dovetailing with Euron’s desire to marry / possess Dany as Euron draws closer to actual Night’s King status. Of course Drogon turns the blue shadows and the blue heart into kindling, and Dany is not possessed, which I’d also like to think is some kind of more hopeful foreshadowing.
So as you can see, the warlock / shade of the evening line of symbolism runs towards the icy end of things, and thus Euron drinking the warlock wine and acquiring blue lips casts him as an icy wizard who draws power from darkness. A new Night’s King to lead the Others and those can never die, having died already.
Now when we talk about the Undying wanting to take Dany’s life and fire, and how that foreshadows Euron and / or the Others wanting to do this, we have to talk about hands of white fire lady. Namely, I mean this shadow figure that appears alongside Euron in Damphair’s nightmare vision of enthroned Euron, the one where his face turns into a writhing mass of tentacles that we just read:
Beside him stood a shadow in woman’s form, long and tall and terrible, her hands alive with pale white fire. Dwarves capered for their amusement, male and female, naked and misshapen, locked in carnal embrace, biting and tearing at each other as Euron and his mate laughed and laughed and laughed …
There has been much speculation over the identity of this shadow lady with hands of white fire, and I’m honestly not sure who it will be – perhaps Melisandre or Dany, or maybe Cersei, or perhaps even Malora Hightower. Ba’al the Bard thinks the shadow may even represent Viserion, whose fires are described as pale, and who has some amount of ice dragon symbolism (we’ll cover that when we discuss Visenya & Vhagar, actually) and therefore seems like the one Euron will get, assuming he gets a dragon.
For the purposes of archetypal analysis however, hands of white fire lady – who is a tall shadow – sounds kinda like a Night’s Queen figure, doesn’t she? Perhaps a fiery woman like Melisandre or Daenerys becoming frozen, or turned into a shadow? Or perhaps it means this magical woman is a mother of shadows, like Melisandre and Night’s Queen. The white fire is the kind which could be revealed as the cold fire of the Others, so this shadow lady really could be just about anyone, ice or fire. One thing is clear though – she wields magical fire and has something to do with shadows, and the vision suggests her as Euron’s queen of the apocalypse. That pretty much makes her some kind of Night’s Queen figure, at the very least, so we will have to keep out eyes out for this person.
One person to keep an eye on is Cersei – even granted that there are huge differences between the show and the books where it concerns Euron and Cersei, it’s still pretty easy to see how she could rise to a level of villainy becoming of Euron’s mate. Cersei’s symbolism is a topic too big to open up here, but even at a quick glance, she appears to have some Night’s Queen clues – Jon sees her at WInterfell in AGOT and thinks “the queen seemed as cold as an ice sculpture,” for example, and she does a lot of ice transformation symbolism while imprisoned in the Sept of Baelor. She’s associated with green fire as opposed to white fire, but the potential for her to blow stuff up with wildfire in Kings Landing does seem high.
I might also mention that the name Euron seems drawn from Europa, which is an ice-covered moon of Jupiter and a Greek moon goddess. That reminds us of Night’s Queen, whose skin is as pale as the moon and as cold as ice. Euron is Night’s Queen confirmed – no no, of course the implication here is that Euron is a Night’s King who needs an icy, moon pale Night’s Queen standing at his side. The only question is who.
We can also find more clues about Euron becoming a new Night’s King when we look at his sigil again in the context of Night’s King ideas. We’ve already discussed the black crown as a Night’s King / king of a darkened sun symbol, but consider the fact that on Euron’s sigil, the black crown above the blood eye is held up by two crows – and Night’s King was supposedly a black crow of the Night’s Watch who declared himself king. A King Crow, in other words, and the wildlings to this day even refer to the Lord Commander of the Watch as “Lord Crow.” Of course it’s not just the crows holding aloft Euron’s black crown that says he’s a Crow King – his nickname is Crowseye, and after becoming King, he’s called “King Crowseye.” He’s already dressing all in black, although I’m definitely waiting for him to wear the Blacktyde sable cloak along with the Valyrian steel armor and the black iron sharkstooth crown to really cut a distinctive figure.
Crows are also eaters of the dead, and this is the sense in which Martin employs the word in the title “A Feast for Crows,” a book which chronicles the fallout of the War of the Five Kings. That certainly fits Euron as a king rising from the graves and charnel pits during a time of death and destruction, or even Euron as an avatar of the god of death. The crows who feast on the dead hold up Euron’s crown – thematically, this is clear enough. Euron is the King Crow, the blackest of the crows who’s feasting on the dead and growing fat more than any other.
As a matter of fact, the line in A Feast for Crows that spells out the meaning of the title actually refers to Euron:
“Carrion crows make their feasts upon the carcasses of the dead and dying,” said Grand Maester Pycelle. “They do not descend upon hale and healthy animals. Lord Euron will gorge himself on gold and plunder, aye, but as soon as we move against him he will back to Pyke, as Lord Dagon was wont to do in his day.”
“You are wrong,” said Margaery Tyrell. “Reavers do not come in such strength. A thousand ships! Lord Hewett and Lord Chester are slain, as well as Lord Serry’s son and heir. Serry has fled to Highgarden with what few ships remain him, and Lord Grimm is a prisoner in his own castle. Willas says that the iron king has raised up four lords of his own in their places.”
Indeed, Margarey is right – Pycelle is underestimating Euron here, clearly. Euron won’t be content to feed off of scraps, because ultimately, he’s no mere reaver, no common crow. Euron has much bigger ambitions – a dragon, all of Westeros, and maybe just maybe… and army of the undead.
I’ve said a few times now that Euron is very like an alt-Bloodraven, with both of them taking after Odin, but with Bloodraven having fiery red symbolism and aligning with the Night’s Watch and the armies of the living and Euron having the icy blue symbolism and aligning with the Others and the army of the dead. Bloodraven is the “three-eyed crow,” and Euron is a three-eyed crow too, since he’s called Crow’s Eye and is opening his third eye, like Odin. Euron opens his third eye with the Shade of the Evening trees, and Bloodraven with the weirwoods, so you can see that in all ways, they are similar, but inverted archetypes. I went into this idea at length in the “Feast for Krackens” livestream, where I talked about the potential for Euron to have a transcendent, obtaining-the-fire-of-the-gods seen at the top of the Hightower which parallels Bran’s experience climbing the tower of Winterfell and opening his third eye inside the coma dream, and I might come back to Euron’s alt-greenseer symbolism in the future.
We should have no doubt that some sort of actual magical transformation scene is coming for Euron, and I’d guess this should coincide with the fall of the Long Night. Old Nan says Night’s King “was only a man by light of day, but the night was his to rule,” which I’ve always taken as a clue about Night’s King transforming himself into something more than a man when the Long Night fell – and indeed, that’s exactly what Euron is set to do, likely near the conclusion of The Winds of Winter. I expect Euron to take Oldtown and declare himself king there, and probably set up shop for while, so he could well be atop the Hightower when the Long Night falls, which Is have to think will happen before the end of Winds.
There’s yet another Night King implication to be drawn from Euron’s one-eye sigil and the idea of his having a black “crow’s eye” which Theon thinks of as “a black eye shining with malice,” as well as Moqorro seeing Euron in his flame visions as “a tall and twisted thing with one black eye and ten long arms.” Namely, Melisandre thinks of the Great Other as having one black eye in this passage from ACOK. Davos is arguing theology with Melisandre – who is a red priest like Moqorro – and making the point that it was darkness hiding them from detection as they rowed beneath Storm’s End, saying:
The god of darkness protects us now, my lady. Even you.”
The flames of her eyes seemed to burn a little brighter at that. “Speak not that name, ser. Lest you draw his black eye upon us. He protects no man, I promise you. He is the enemy of all that lives.
Euron Crowseye, enemy of all that lives: yep, that checks out. The main point is that according to the R’hllorists, Euron just might be the Great Other, or perhaps an avatar of the Great Other.
So the final question is how: how can Euron become an actual Night’s King? How does he come to lead the Others? Well it could be that he doesn’t actually lead the Others, but that he’s simply the one to trigger the Long Night and the invasion of the white walkers by blowing his horn one too many times or performing some other powerful magic. Euron may be intending to bring about the apocalypse with such an action, or he could be simply trying to do something else and screw everything up accidentally, but either way he’s one of the few human beings capable of wielding apocalypse-level sorcery. But there are two general ways he could actually lead the army of the dead that I can see – and leave your ideas in the comments below, by all means.
First, it may be that some remnant of Night’s King / Azor Ahai’s spirit is alive somewhere on the ethereal plane, or inside the weirwoodnet, and that this spirit will take over Euron’s mind and effectively steal his body. Euron is fearless and heedless in his quest to become a god-man, and quite often in classic mythology, such figures usually get more than they bargained for. In particular, the works of H. P. Lovecraft often have ambitious people like this end up doormats and temporary host bodies for incomprehensible entities like the Great Old Ones. This “Night’s King snatches Euron’s body” idea would also be a very close parallel to what happens to Inneluki, the Azor Ahai / Night’s King figure of Tad Williams’s Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, who reemerges from the ethereal plane after being dead for centuries to become the villain of the story. I’ll again refer you both to Gray Area MS&T / ASOIAF playlist and a Between Two Weirwoods video I did with Gray on my channel for more on that, but the point is that George has named Tad Williams and MS&T as being highly influential on ASOIAF, so this potential parallel is something to keep an eye on.
Another thing to consider about Euron contacting the spirit of a dead person that’s trapped in the weirwoodnet or anywhere else is that in ASOIAF, there only seems to be one astral plane, no mater what magic is used to access it. Melisandre gazes into the flames and sees Bloodraven and Bran because they can project their spirits out of their bodies and on to the astral plane, even though they’re using weirwood magic and Melisandre fire magic. You saw in the passage we quoted earlier that Moqorro can see all kinds of important folks in shadow form when he looks into the fires, and I don’t doubt Bloodraven can see other magic users in a similar fashion if he puts his mind to it.
In other words, if Euron is using shade of the evening, glass candles, and whatever else, there’s no telling what kinds of spirit entities he could run into and interact with. They might give him power and knowledge, and they may well be seeking to use him for their own agenda. The most likely candidate would be the spirit of dead Azor Ahai-turned-Night’s King, which also be the entity people perceive as the great Other in my opinion. Perhaps Euron will open one door too many and zap – dead Azor Ahai takes over his mind like Bran takes over Hodor. This would be Azor Ahai reborn in a more literal sense, which would actually, at this point in the story, be a huge subversion of what we all expect that to mean.
But what about Night’s Queen? Might she still exist inside the weirwoodnet or on some sort of ethereal plane? Maybe that’s who ‘hands of white fire lady’ is; perhaps Night’s Queen has been tutoring Euron in the nether-realm this whole time in preparation to transform him into a new Night’s King. Probably not, but who knows – ‘hands of white fire lady’ is hard to figure out with what we know now. This would almost be like a weird version of the “alien spirit entity girlfriend” trope, and doesn’t Euron seem like the type..
The second option for Euron as an actual leader of the Others is kind of a more literal variation on the last idea, and basically I’m thinking, what if Euron sees the ice magic of the Others as a power he can grasp and directly attempts to do so? For example, there’s a theory out there that Jon blowing on the cracked horn he found at the Fist of the First Men actually called the Others to the Fist. If the dragonbinder horn makes dragons obey you, perhaps the “Horn of Winter” does the same with the Others or the wights. Sam has that horn in Oldtown, where Euron is attacking right now, so he could well get his hands on it.
Euron has also been gathering all manner of arcane knowledge, so it’s actually possible Euron knows more about the Others at this moment than we do. With or without Sam’s potential “horn of Winter,” Euron may think he has a way of controlling the Others through sorcery. Although I’ve never heard anyone suggest this, I think it’s possible that Euron may find a way to directly access ice magic and transform himself – just as Melisandre is in the process of transforming herself into an entity sustained by fire magic through her use of fire magic. It may be that he needs to go to the north to do this, or perhaps not – we don’t know if you have to live any specific place to worship R’hllor and access fire magic, for example. It’s worth noting that Melisandre calls the Wall a “hinge of the world” and says that it will amplify her fire and shadow magic, even though the Wall is made of ice and is in the north, so it may be that at a certain level magic is magic and the location doesn’t determine how a user may channel that magic.
In any case, it’s not impossible that Euron will literally replay the Waymar prologue of A Game of Thrones in some fashion, that he will physically journey north and attempt to confront the Others in a clearing of the Haunter Forest, but with more magical resources and bona fides than Waymar could ever dream of. Heck, riding a dragon is probably the fastest way to get north, so, maybe we will see the idea of Night’s King Euron and ice dragon Viserion all come together at once. It could even be that part of his wanting to acquire a dragon has to do with his ideas about commanding the Others.
So there you have it, several ways in which all of this Night’s King Euron symbolism could play out at the conclusion of the story. Again, I’d love to hear your ideas on this in the comments below – my main job is to point at and decode the symbolism and present it to you guys; drawing conclusions from the symbolism is a fun activity for all of us.
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