Even setting aside the issue of Azor Ahai, the greenseer / weirwood relationship functions this way: the weirwood is the host, and the greenseer the invader. The greenseer sacrifices his physical body to the tree, either by allowing it to slowly consume his or her flesh as Bloodraven is being consumed by the trees, or by our hypothesized scenario where the first seers to enter a weirwood were actually killed in order to go inside it, with the heart tree drinking and tasting the blood as Bran does in his last vision through Winterfell’s heart tree in ADWD.  The greenseer allows himself to be consumed by the tree, but in doing so actually invades the tree’s consciousness and becomes reborn inside the weirwoodnet, a part of the godhood. The greenseer, in general, represents the fire animating the weirwood and the heart in the heart tree, but he essentially has to die to get in there.

The symbol that best depicts this is that of the “ember in the ashes.” Mel compares Azor Ahai’s rebirth to an ember in the ashes which can spark a great blaze, like a kind of hell phoenix. However, the idea of Azor Ahai lurking inside the ashes turned out to also be a play on the fact that Yggdrasil is an ash tree, thus implying Azor Ahai as being inside the symbolic ash tree, which are the weirwoods. He’s the ember in the ashes and the ember in the ash tree, just as the greenseer is the fire or heart in the heart tree.

Mel’s wording is also suggestive of Azor Ahai being reborn from the ash tree and emerging to start a great fire, completing the in and out again journey of Azor Ahai and the weirwoodnet. He seems to undergo death transformation to get in, as Odin did, and is born again when he reemerges, as Odin fell from the tree after hanging in a trance for nine days and finally spying and seizing up the runes. Thus, you can see that the weirwoods and Yggdrasil both play the role of a tree tomb and womb which allows sorcerers to transcend death and experience some sort of magical rebirth, and this tree womb idea will be the focus of today’s episode.

Yggdrasil isn’t only a vehicle for Odin’s rebirth – the idea of old Yggy as a more literal tree womb is actually a prominent part of its lore, as it happens. The only two people who survived Ragnarok did so by hiding inside Yggdrasil’s trunk, then reemerging after a time to restart civilization. From tree-tomb to tree-womb. This would seem to correlate well to our ideas about greenseers being reborn through the weirwoodnet, since the mythical ash tree is both eating people and acting as a womb from which people can be reborn.  In a more general sense, it also seems similar to the idea of the children and their greenseer magic being needed to ensure the survival of humanity after the Long Night. The Long Night borrows a lot from Ragnarok as a catastrophic event that ends one world age and gives birth to the next, so to the extent that the greenseers preserved that flame of life to take root again in the spring, they are playing that same protective womb role for humanity. Plus, they might have literally hidden the First Men in their caves, for a more literal depiction of this theme.

Now, it turns out this tree-womb and tree-woman stuff in relation to the ash tree is not limited to Yggdrasil and Norse myth. Rather, I have found that the tree lore that has grown up about the ash tree is pretty amazing, and goes well beyond its identity as Odin’s cosmic world tree. For example, according to Celtic druid traditions, the ash tree is seen as the world-mother tree, the feminine counterpart to the masculine oak tree, the all-father tree. This has a lot to do with the bark of the two trees – oak tree bark is heavily gnarled and ridged, while ash trees are comparatively smooth. The title of this essay – Venus of the Woods – is one of the well-known names given to the ash tree. It’s hard to determine exactly why this is so, apart from its general beauty and smooth bark – the best answer I can find is that because it is last to get it’s leaves in the Spring and the first to drop them in the Fall, the tree is often naked… naked and tall and beautiful, like a Venus. I myself wonder it has something to do with one of its most distinctive features: the tips of its branches always curl upward at the end, no matter how low the rest of the branch might droop. So, like Venus, there is a distinct falling and rising action.

Whatever the reason, the ash tree as a Venus sure fits well with the idea of the weirwood as a burning tree that is created when a falling Evenstar lands on it. It sure jumped off the page at me when I read it, I can tell you that! Our theory holds that the Nissa Nissa moon turns from moon maiden to falling Evenstar after it ingests the comet, and back to morningstar again when she rises from the ashes. This rising ash creates the image of the ash tree, the Venus of the woods. And that’s just the point of this episode – the tree in the pyre is in many ways synonymous with Nissa Nissa, the fallen and reborn Venus.

One of our Guardian of the Galaxy patrons and Westeros.org chat buddies gets a large hat-tip here, and that would be the afore-mentioned Lady Jane of House Celtigar, the Emerald of the Evening and captain of the dread ship Eclipse Wind, Guardian of the Crone’s Lantern. She brought the following to my attention, and an additional hat-tip to Unchained, for reminding me about this after I had forgotten about Lady Jane’s hat tip a couple months earlier.  In Greek mythology, there is a variety of tree nymph called the Meliae or Meliai who are tied to ash trees – they are essentially  like dryads, like a spirit of the ash tree. They supposedly gave birth to one of the older races of man, the bronze generation, who were a warlike people that the Meliai tree nymphs armed with spears of ash wood from their ash trees. The Meliai also nurtured their bronze children with the honey from their trees, and elsewhere, it was some Meliai who nurtured Zeus on the same nectar when he was an infant.

As it happens, the origin tale of the Meliai actually overlaps with that of Aphrodite, also known as Venus –  she who was born in the seafoam from the severed testicles of Ouranos, a legend we discussed at the beginning of Garth of the Gallows. It turns out that while the seed from Ouranos created Aphrodite, the blood from his castration wound created a few other beings, among them the Meliai. It’s not hard to see how this translates into ASOIAF – the falling blood of a wounded god would be our rain of ‘moon blood’ and bleeding stars which were the pieces of the slain moon goddess, and instead of that blood giving birth to tree nymphs, it created the burning tree. What we are going to see here today is that the burning tree and Nissa Nissa have an awful lot of overlap, so it’s pretty great to know there is a precedent for divine blood falling from the heavens and giving rise to magical ash tree women.

The ash tree has specific associations with burning. It’s most likely that it’s name was chosen in part because it makes for such excellent firewood – it’s able to burn as soon as it is cut down, even while still ‘green,’ and the resulting flame is bright and hot. The traditional yule log was supposed to be of ash wood, and as it happens, one of Odin’s many names is “Yule Father.” Odin was one with his ash tree Yggdrasil, so this makes sense.

We also need to consider the rowan tree, because rowan trees are also known as mountain ash (although they are actually not related to the ash tree – they  just look somewhat similar and so are both called ash).  Martin has made specific reference to both rowan trees and mountain ash trees in the story, and as you will see, it would appear that he is incorporating some of the folklore around these trees as well. The rowan is widely known in Europe as the “witch tree,” for several related reasons having to do with supposed magical properties and the fact that its red berries appear to have a five pointed star – like a pentacle – on their underside. Rowan trees and ash trees were both among the top choices for magic wands, were thought to convey magical protection, and that sort of thing. Ash wood in particular was the choice for making runestaffs in Norse mythology, and that is almost certainly why J. R.R. Tolkien chose to make Gandalf’s staff one of ash wood (f un fact!)

And lest I fall down on my job, I should point out that the five pointed stars on the red rowan berries also suggests red stars in the canopy of the the world ash tree. The red, five-pointed weirwood leaves serve much the same purpose.

We’re going to explore some of this tree folklore a bit further as we go along, but already you can see some of the pieces we are working with in the ash and the rowan: a Venus of the woods tree and a witch tree; runestaffs and red star fruit; ash trees that give birth to humans and ash trees that are tied to tree nymphs who dole out ash wood spears. And did I mention that the druids were said to have burned rowan branches before a battle to invoke the aid of the sidhe? That’s significant because George has referred to the Others as a kind of icy sidhe. We already suspect that the Others are tied to the weirwoods, the symbolic burning ash trees, so… we’ll have to follow up on that.

With that short introduction into the relevant tree lore out of the way, let’s dig into some ASOIAF and watch moon maidens turn into weirwoods before our very eyes.

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A Treed Cat

This section is brought to you by Lord Brandon Brewer of Castle Blackrune, Sworn Ale-smith to House Stark, Grand Master of the Zythomancers’ Guild, Keeper of the Buzz, and earthly avatar of Heavenly House Sagittarius

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Sooooooooo……. Is Nissa Nissa a weirwood tree?

Well… Yes!.. and… no.  They do seem to correlate to each other, just as Nissa Nissa correlates to the moon.  However I think Nissa Nissa does kind of have to have been a real woman in some sense, because reproduction is probably the most important manifestation of this whole business about cycles and transformations, and Azor Ahai really can’t pass on his magical genetics to anyone unless he reproduces with Nissa Nissa.  So she’s definitely a woman on some level.

But like Nissa Nissa, and like the moon which gave birth to dragons, the weirwood tree also seems to play the role of a fiery womb which gives birth to Azor Ahai reborn. Before you can give birth to Azor Ahai reborn, you have to wed Azor Ahai, that is indeed the case with the moon, which was wed by the sun, and with Nissa Nissa, supposedly the wife of Azor Ahai, and it’s the case with the weirwoods, wed by Azor Ahai when he theoretically became a greenseer. That’s the kind of thing which is probably not a coincidence.

Then there is the fact that most of our prominent Nissa Nissa moon maidens in the story… well, they sort of look like weirwoods to some degree, with pale skin and red, ‘kissed-by-fire’ hair. Namely, Melisandre, Lady Catelyn, Sansa, Ygritte, Daenerys when her hair catches on fire, and a few other minor characters. A tree’s leaves are like its hair, and the red leaves of the weirwoods are described as “a blaze of flame,” so Nissa Nissa moon maidens with red, kissed by fire hair are already off to a good start to looking like a weirwood… and then Martin seems to contrive ways for them to acquire the symbolism of bloody hands, bloody or red eyes or tears, and a bloody mouth. These “weirwood makeovers” will of course always take place in the middle of a Lightbringer forging scene, as you might expect. In particular, they will happen in scenes where people are usually attacking these weirwood moon maidens with Lightbringer weapons in a recreation of the comet hitting the moon, the thunderbolt hitting the tree, and the greenseer going into the wierwood.

You remember that movie Stigmata? The movie isn’t important, it’s the concept – the stigmata is when someone, usually a Christian believer, manifests the wounds of Christ – nail marks in the hands and feet, the wound in the side, and the cuts on the brow from the crown of thorns. These weirwood makeovers are kind of like the stigmata – our Nissa Nissa moon maidens seem to manifest the signature wounds of the heart tree while being symbolically stabbed or impregnated by a comet or Lightbringer symbol. We will check out some great ones today and save a couple others for the future, after we have introduced the next concept. It’s pretty startling how consistent it is – once you notice the pattern, it really stands out.

Excepting Daenerys, who we will be setting aside until the next episode, Lady Catleyn and Melisandre seem to be the two best and most detailed examples of Nissa Nissa moon maidens manifesting this weirwood stigmata, so we will be spending the most time with them. First comes Lady Catelyn. She has two scenes that work together: the catspaw assassin’s attempted murder of Bran, and the Red Wedding, and these two scenes together layout the complete set of weirwood maiden symbols. We’ll also wave a quick hello to Lady Stoneheart, since she is so fond of hanging people, and since her character is basically a continuation or reverberation of the Red Wedding.

The catspaw scene starts with the catspaw assassin himself, who is a great symbol that we will see repeatedly in the various scenes we will examine today. The catspaw assassin was sent by Joffrey, a solar character, so his catspaw nickname is actually an identification of his symbolic role – he is acting as the paw and claw of the sun, as the sun’s weapon or executioner. That is pretty easy to identify as the comet which struck the moon, which can also be though of as the sun’s sword or the sun’s “long claw.”

Now, we’ve talked a few times about the idea of the original comet being white and silver, like normal comets, perhaps suggested by the the description of Lightbringer being “white hot” and “smoking” before stabbing Nissa Nissa and being turned red. The catspaw assassin seems to fit this description, being described as “gaunt, with limp blond hair and pale eyes deep-sunk in a bony face.” His knife, however, is dark Valyrian steel with a black dragonbone hilt. That’s very like a black comet core with a white tail, exactly how regular comets look, with the dragon associations of the hilt and steel making this an especially terrific symbol of a dragon comet.  Ghost and Jon combine to form a similar image as they rush the weirwood grove – Jon is a black sword with a white shadow at his side, as Ghost is called in that scene. Jon’s spirit inside Ghost is more of the same – a black sword brother inside a streaking white shadow. Jon’s sword, Longclaw, shows us a similar pattern, with a black blade and white wolf head pommel.

Returning to the catspaw assassin, we see that he’s also remarked upon to be a “stranger” at Winterfell, and the Stranger of the Faith of the Seven is known as “the wanderer from far places,” which I’ve always thought of as a perfect description of a comet (a wandering star from far places).  The assassin is a stranger with a dragon-tipped claw, sent by the sun to kill – that’s the comet.  Jon too is called a stranger and has Stranger symbolism, and he is a comet person in many scenes.

In Weirwood Compendium 4, In a Grove of Ash, I asserted that comets and meteors that penetrate moons and trees are symbolic of skinchangers, who insert their spirits into animals and trees.  The catspaw should therefore show us skinchanger symbolism as well, and here’s what we find: he slept in the stables with the horses and reeks of the stables, and we know that Yggdrasil can be a horse.  His horsey smell and origin from the stables also makes him a kind of horse comet, and we know that the Dothraki interpret stars and comets as fiery horses, so that’s a good fit for both skinchanging and comet implications. The folks at Winterfell also found “ninety silver stags in a leather bag buried beneath the straw” where the assassin was hiding, which sounds like sacrificed stag-man symbolism.  The stags are buried in a leather sack, meaning inside a skin, and buried like a dead body, reinforcing the sacrificed stag symbolism.  One thinks of the hanged men outside the Inn at the Crossroads, a.k.a. the Gallows Inn, a.k.a. the inn that symbolizes a weirwood, and we think of the young inkeep Jeyne Heddle demanding a ‘sacrifice’ of silver stags to get in to the inn.

We’re actually going to return to that inn in a bit for a *weirwood makeover, as a matter of fact, but the point is that stags or green men must be sacrificed to enter the weirwood. It’s almost as if the buried sack of stags is like the sacrificed body of the skinchanger, and the assassin is like his spirit, going into the trees.

Cat is of course the Nissa Nissa figure and the weirwood figure. As Cat sees the assassin and turns to the window to scream for help, we see her acquire two main parts of the weirwood makeover in quick succession: the bloody hands and bloody mouth. We’re also going to see the important cannibalism symbolism, which I would say alludes to the weirwoods consuming the bodies and spirits of the greenseers strung up in their roots, and also to the general practice of human sacrifice to weirwood trees.

She reached up with both hands and grabbed the blade with all her strength, pulling it away from her throat. She heard him cursing into her ear. Her fingers were slippery with blood, but she would not let go of the dagger. The hand over her mouth clenched more tightly, shutting off her air. Catelyn twisted her head to the side and managed to get a piece of his flesh between her teeth. She bit down hard into his palm. The man grunted in pain. She ground her teeth together and tore at him, and all of a sudden he let go. The taste of his blood filled her mouth. She sucked in air and screamed, and he grabbed her hair and pulled her away from him, and she stumbled and went down, and then he was standing over her, breathing hard, shaking. The dagger was still clutched tightly in his right hand, slick with blood. “You weren’t s’posed to be here,” he repeated stupidly.

Alright, a lot just happened. Catelyn gets the bloody hands symbolism when she reaches up to pull the assassin’s knife from her throat and cuts her hand. Next she bites down hard on the flesh of the assassin’s hand and gets the taste of his blood in her mouth, giving her the bloody mouth of a heart tree with a side of flesh-eating weirwood symbolism. When a weirwood / moon figure like Cat eats a comet symbol like the assassin – his hand at least – that is a depiction of Azor Ahai going into (being eaten by) the trees, and this of course parallels the moon swallowing the sun’s comet. It’s just like when the woods swallowed the last slice of sun, all that stuff we talked about last time. Accordingly, the comet / assassin figure has the bloody hand symbol too now – he is symbolically merging with the weirwood / moon figure and so is sharing the same weirwood bloody hand symbolism. We are going to see that pattern throughout this episode.

Just to get extra tricky, consider this: the catspaw is like the solar lion’s hand – his paw – and Lady Cat is, in a manner of speaking, ‘eating’ the hand of the catspaw.  That would be the paw of the paw of the king lion, eaten by another cat, like some sort of macabre Russian doll trick. In turn, the catspaw assassin also sliced up Cat’s hand – her paw – so you could say that the catspaw bit Cat’s paw and then Cat bit the catspaw’s paw right back. At least, that’s the kind of thing you’d say if you were raised on Dr. Seuss as I was. And that is what I call fractal symbolism.

Notice the line about the assassin cursing in Cat’s ear – it might be nothing, or it might imply the comet and meteors cursing the things they struck, which does make  a certain amount of sense.

A moment later the assassin’s blade is clutched in his hand, now covered in Catelyn’s blood, in order to give us the idea of Lightbringer turned red by Nissa Nissa’s blood. We’ll see that type of symbol in most of the scenes we look at – either the weirwood moon maiden reddening a sword with her blood, or else a sword being taken from the weirwood moon maiden like Gram being pulled from the Brandstokr tree. We saw it at the burning of the Seven on Dragonstone when Stannis pulled Lightbringer from the burning wooden chest of the Mother’s statue. And don’t forget that the catspaw assassin’s blade is Valyrian steel, spell-forged in dragonfire, and blood-soaked Valyrian steel is about as close to actual Lightbringer as we get. Also, Catleyn has fallen to the floor, which of course depicts the fall of the moon maiden from heaven after her encounter with the comet.

Next up in terms of symbolism, we have the rising smoke. Bran’s wolf, Summer, is elsewhere described as looking like “silver smoke,” so when he rises from the ground level to the tower chamber to rip out the assassin’s throat, we can see that as the rising smoke cloud which blots out the face of the sun:

Catelyn saw the shadow slip through the open door behind him. There was a low rumble, less than a snarl, the merest whisper of a threat, but he must have heard something, because he started to turn just as the wolf made its leap. They went down together, half sprawled over Catelyn where she’d fallen. The wolf had him under the jaw. The man’s shriek lasted less than a second before the beast wrenched back its head, taking out half his throat.

Summer is a shadow made of silver smoke, which is the rising smoke and ash. It would be nice if Joffrey, the sun person who sent the comet assassin, were here in person to have Summer rip out his throat, but since that’s impossible, the assassin would seem to play the sun role too when he’s killed by the smoke and shadow wolf. Of course Joffrey’s solar face is eventually darkened at the Purple Wedding by Cat’s daughter Sansa, with her moonlight-drinking, poison black amethysts, seen by the Ghost of the High Heart as “a maid at a feast with purple serpents in her hair, venom dripping from their fangs.” Not only do those dark purple gems turn Joff’s face a purple to match their own coloring, they are actually linked back to smoke and ash, because the poison at work, “The Strangler,” is from Ash-shai, and is itself made by a process which involves being thickened by ash, according to the late, great Maester Cressen. You can see how tightly the symbolism correlates here – ash and smoke are what kill the sun, whether it’s a silver smoke shadow wolf or the ashy poison from Asshai.

The idea that the smoke and ash which swallowed the sun can be associated with a wolf like Summer makes for a nice callout to the norse myth of Skoll and Hati, the wolves who swallow the sun and moon at Ragnarok and cause the lights to go out, a myth I probably should have mentioned by now (Norse mythology buffs have probably been cry out “what about Skoll and Hati?!” for at least a couple of podcasts now, so here you go).  Smoke-dark Grey Wind sends the same message as a wolf made of sun-darkening smoke, and as we discussed extensively last time, Ghost is a weirwood wolf that will swallow Jon the sun king, just as the woods swallowed the sun in the weirwood grove of nine scene. There’s even a forest called the Wolfswood that does the sun-swallowing trick too, but we’ll quote that scene in a bit. You see the point though – a wood named after a wolf is getting to the same idea as a wolf the color of a weirwood tree, and everybody is hungry for a piece of the  sun.

Returning to the Catleyn scene, right after the line about the wolf “taking out half his throat,” it says that “his blood felt like warm rain as it sprayed across her face.” That gives us two symbols we know well – the red rain of bleeding stars meteor shower, and the bloody face to suggest the bleeding face of the heart trees.  Perhaps most importantly, it continues the symbolism of Cat as a blood-drinking, flesh-eating weirwood, as the assassin’s blood is offered to her like the captive before the heart tree.  I believe this would also be a Meliai reference – weirwood Cat is created the blood that falls like rain, just as the Meliai were created by the blood of the sky god Ouranos, which fell from heaven like rain. Afterwards, Catelyn’s scalp is left raw and bleeding where the assassin ripped out a hank of hair – that’s kissed by fire hair, which is now blood and fire hair to match red blood and fire canopy of the weirwoods.

Cat’s makeover is complete – bloody hands. Bloody mouth. Blood and fire hair. It’s the portrait of the burning tree I was talking about. She doesn’t cry bloody tears – that comes at the Red Wedding – but her face is covered by the assassin’s blood, giving her the bloody face of a weirwood.

The other ‘Catleyn as a weirwood’ clues here have to do with her speech: when she first sees the assassin, her words stick in her throat, “the merest whisper,” like a whispering weirwood, and when they find her later, her laughter “dies in her throat.”  Some of the faces on the wierwood heart trees appear to be laughing, as we saw in the grove of nine, but more important is the silent scream of the weirwood – the weirwood bark, if you recall. It’s the sound that Ghost makes, the one that only Jon heard when he went back and found newborn Ghost by himself in the snow. The silent scream implies someone who cannot speak, and the bloody mouth might suggest someone whose tongue has been torn out, which overlaps nicely with cutting the throat of a sacrifice.

You will recall that cutting someone’s throat is sometimes referred to as giving them a “red smile,” just like a laughing weirwood has a red smile, and just like bloody-mouthed Cat with her mad, dying laughter. Additionally, the assassin tried to cut Cat’s throat and nearly succeeded, which also works to imply the weirwood figure having their throat cut and thus being given a red smile.

It’s almost as if both the sacrifice and the weirwood itself have their throats cut, as if both are sacrificed to create the burning tree person – you’ll notice that the catspaw assassin, the comet person trying to merge with the weirwood by giving it a face, has his throat torn out by the wolf. Just as both Cat and he have the bloody hand, they both get the throat-cutting / red smile symbolism – because the are symbolizing the merging of the greenseer and weirwood. Again we might see a parallel with Ghost and Jon, as Jon had his throat cut and his spirit sent into his weirwood-colored wolf, who already has a red smile, just like a greenseer dying to go into his tree. Also, Ghost and Jon may both ultimately end up dying to create the merged wolf-man skinchanger zombie Jon. Of course, all of this draws a broader parallel to the sun and moon which destroy each other to create Azor Ahai reborn meteors.

Now, you can’t really cut a weirwood’s throat, but think about the symbol of the red smile: for a human, it means a throat cutting, but for a weirwood, a red smile is just a part of its face. Thus, cutting a weirwood figure’s throat is like to giving a weirwood a red smile, and that probably equates to giving a weirwood a face, complete with bloody red smile. We’re going to see a lot of throat cutting today, so I want to lay this out right at the beginning.

There’s another great weirwood symbol present here at Winterfell, and this great find comes to us courtesy of Ravenous Reader, the Poetess. It has to do with the library. Following the incident, the catspaw assassin is immediately believed to have set fire to the library tower as a distraction before his main attack.  Whether he did or not, a library is made of paper – meaning wood – and is a repository of knowledge. Thus, it makes an outstanding symbol of the weirwoodnet, which is basically a library made of wood (and just fyi, the library / weirwood symbolism does seem to be expressed elsewhere – take a look at the scrolls or books in any scene where they are discussed prominently and see what you find). Check out this quote from Jojen to Bran in ADWD:

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies,” said Jojen. “The man who never reads lives only one. 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.”

The weirwoodnet is directly compared to a library here, and thus the comet assassin figure setting the library tower on fire creates the burning tree symbol, and works in parallel to him wounding Cat and transforming her into a bloody weirwood.  Cat sees the burning library, and it says “long tongues of flame shot from the windows,” a familiar symbol in ASOIAF which is also a symbol of the Biblical Holy Spirit, which is nothing if not a representation of the fire of the gods that can live inside the hearts of men. Then “she watched the smoke rise to the sky” – in other words, the smoke is rising from the burning tree, a parallel to the silver smoke wolf rising to Bran’s bedchamber when the fire is set.

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The Red Wooding

This section is brought to you by the Patreon support of one of our high priests of starry wisdom, the Black Maester Azizal, Lord of the Feasible and Keeper of the Records, whose rod and mask and ring smell of coffee.

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Next we come to the Red Wedding. We are not going to do a breakdown of the entire Red Wedding, because that’s a huge undertaking –  we’re just going to address Lady Catelyn’s weirwood makeover. We’ll join the action in progress, just after the killing has started. The first thing we will make note of is that Cat takes a projectile wound:

She ran toward her son, until something punched in the small of the back and the hard stone floor came up to slap her.

That turns out to be no ordinary projectile, because a couple of sentences later, it says “Catelyn’s back was on fire.” This might seem like par for the course by now – the moon is set on fire by a projectile – but remember that Cat is also acting out the role of a transformed weirwood being struck by lighting and set afire, so the reference to fire here is doubly important. It helps make her the tree struck by lightning. The spine is also the part of a human which is analogous to a tree’s trunk, so setting Cat’s back on fire is a good depiction of the burning tree. The arrow itself was fired by the musicians in the upper gallery, which makes us think of greenseers who sing magical songs to call projectiles down from the heavens, a la the Hammer of the Waters fable.

Next, Cat gets the bloody mouth:

Her limbs were leaden, and the taste of blood was in her mouth.

Leaden limbs are stiff limbs, kind of like a tree perhaps, but more importantly, lead implies poisoning, which is an aspect of the lightbringer comet (think of the black amethysts snakes, or Oberyn’s poison-tipped sunspear). The meteors are a toxic presence on the earth, it would seem, and I think part of the pain and rage on the faces of the trees might indicate a reaction to this toxic presence. I suggested last time that the association with graveworms and maggots that the weirwood roots have might be meant to imply that weirwoods are mitigating and transmuting this toxic effect, and this also works in harmony with the notion of weirwoods as a trap that is restraining a dangerous, minotaur-like monster. I am not set on this but the idea keeps popping up so we will have to keep it in mind. In any case, Cat seems to have a case of lead poisoning and stiff limbs to go with her burning spine and bloody mouth, so let’s keep going.

Next, as Robb is shot with crossbow bolts and many Starks and friends are cut down, Catleyn takes Walder Frey’s lackwit grandson Jinglebell hostage, and there’s a direct tie made to the first scene with the catspaw assassin.

When she pressed her dagger to Jinglebell’s throat, the memory of Bran’s sickroom came back to her, with the feel of steel at her own throat.

I believe this link is created between the two scenes because the two scenes are similar, and express the same ideas involving Cat turning into a weirwood. Now when Robb is killed, Cat cuts Jinglebell’s throat, and it says that “the blood ran hot over her fingers.” That’s a case of the bloody hands to go with the bloody mouth, the makings for a solid case of weirwood stigmata. Just as when Summer tore out the Cat’s paw assassin’s throat and the blood was like warm rain on Cat’s face, this is a depiction of human sacrifice to the weirwood trees.

As for Jinglebell, he’s playing the role of sacrifice, and his real name is… Aegon, actually. You can’t say the name Aegon without thinking of Aegon the Conqueror, who rode a black dragon, Balerion, and wielded the sword Blackfyre.  Aegon the Conqueror is a pretty clear dark solar Azor Ahai reborn figure, and therefore what we are seeing with Jinglebell Aegon’s sacrifice to Cat the weirwood goddess is yet another implication of Azor Ahai being sacrificed to the weirwood. Immediately following this sacrifice, Cat will be give the “bloody face” part of the wierwood makeover, which seems to be the right sequence – a greenseer is sacrificed, the tree is given a face, and the spirit of the greenseer enters the tree. We will see this depicted in a moment by Catleyn losing her wits after killing Jinglebell, as if she is absorbing his fool’s spirit.

So right after she cuts his throat is grisly fashion, cutting down to the bone, it says “finally someone took the knife away from her.” This is showing us the ‘Lightbringer being pulled from the burning tree’ symbol which we introduced a few moments ago, which I told you would appear in most of these scenes. Next, Catelyn goes mad and rakes her own face with her fingernails:

The tears burned like vinegar as they ran down her cheeks. Ten fierce ravens were raking her face with sharp talons and tearing off strips of flesh, leaving deep furrows that ran red with blood. She could taste it on her lips.

This sounds very much like a face being carved in to the weirwood tree! Her face is literally being carved here, the blood running through furrows on Cat’s face. The word “furrow” is suggestive of planting and sowing, as if the moon blood were about to grow something, and again, this is as literal a face-carving as any human undergoes in ASOIAF. The word furrow is also notable because the phrase “furrows of Odin” is a phrase which means “runes.” In Norse languages, there exists something called a kenning spelled the same way as House Kenning of the Iron Islands) which is defined as a circumlocution (an ambiguous or roundabout figure of speech) used instead of an ordinary noun. Instead of saying rune in a poem, the writer might say “furrows of Odin” and everyone would understand that he meant rune. A rune is carved in wood or stone – again, ash trees are the best choice for rune-staffs – which is why it can be a furrow.

In other words, I think Martin is drawing a link here between face carving and Odin’s runes, which of course makes a ton of sense, since the wedding of a greenseer to a weirwood is the ASOIAF equivalent to Odin’s hanging on the tree. We’ll see another kenning referenced in Cat’s death in just a moment, actually.

As for the sharp implements doing the face carving – the black ravens- they are black meteor symbols, so that’s probably why George chose to use them as a metaphor here. It’s another way to show the moon meteors setting the tree on fire, and specifically in conjunction with it receiving a face. As Ravenous Reader points out, it also makes her a better weirwood tree – she has ravens perching on her!

Our poor treed Cat has a bloody mouth again too, this time viscerally tasting it on her lips in a way that reminds us of Bran watching the human sacrifice through Winterfell’s heart tree, where it said that “Brandon Stark could taste the blood.”

Then we get the bloody tears image and mercifully, Cat’s death:

The white tears and the red ones ran together until her face was torn and tattered, the face that Ned had loved. Catelyn Stark raised her hands and watched the blood run down her long fingers, over her wrists, beneath the sleeves of her gown. Slow red worms crawled along her arms and under her clothes. That made her laugh until she screamed. “Mad,” someone said, “she’s lost her wits,” and someone else said, “Make an end,” and a hand grabbed her scalp just as she’d done with Jinglebell, and she thought, No, don’t, don’t cut my hair, Ned loves my hair. Then the steel was at her throat, and its bite was red and cold.

Here we see the mutual throat cutting of greenseer and weirwood, just as we saw when both Cat and the catspaw got the throat cutting symbolism in Bran’s sickroom. Just like in the sickroom, we find Cat with the mad laughter again, as her laughter mixes with her screams, thereby also suggesting the agony and ecstasy of Nissa Nissa. This is the part I mentioned a moment ago about Cat losing her wits, signifying that she is symbolically absorbing Jinglebell’s fool spirit. We are going to see this a bunch of times today – the tree and greenseer sharing the same symbolism in the moments that they are depicted as merging. Last time it was a Cat and a catspaw, both with bloody hands and throat cutting symbolism, and this time we have two lackwits getting their throats cut in identical fashion.

Most notable are Cat’s bloody tears, which run together with her white tears, thus completing the basic part of the weirwood makeover, Twins Edition. Usually the ‘bloody tears of the weirwood’ symbolism is achieved symbolically, with eyes red from crying or some such, because Martin can’t literally carve out a moon maiden’s eyes every time he wants to symbolize the weirwood stigmata. This, however, is one of the instances of real, genuine bloody tears, so together with the real, genuinely painful sounding face-carving, this one of the very best examples of a Nissa Nissa moon maiden getting a weirwood makeover.  Note also that her tears burn like vinegar, creating the burning tears / burning blood symbolism.

When Cat raises her bloody hands, she’s essentially striking a tree pose, as if she is actually turning into a tree in that moment – the moment just before she is given her red smile. Martin serves us up a juicy one next and turns the blood into worms crawling along her arms and under her clothes, which certainly reminds us of the graveworm-like weirwood roots that do the exact same thing to Bloodraven, weaving over, around and through him.

But wait! There’s more. When we talk about bloody red worms, we must mention the only red dragon in all of ASOIAF – Caraxes, the Bloodwyrm, ridden by that same Daemon Targaryen who took Bloodstone Island for his seat. A red dragon is of course primarily a symbol of Lightbringer the red sword or red comet, and that fits perfectly with what is going on here at the Red Wedding: as Cat transforms into a weirwood, we see a symbol of Lightbringer created from the blood of the dying moon maiden, just as it should. At the same time, it also depicts the weirwood moon maiden merging with Lightbringer the red dragon, which was kind of the theme of the last episode. This is just the same as cat becoming a fool to symbolize her as a weirwood absorbing Jinglebell’s spirit – he’s also an Aegon, and so she is manifesting red dragon symbolism!

The blood worm lines is actually the other kenning I mentioned – “blood worm” is a kenning which means “sword.” We already thought Caraxes the Bloodwyrm was symbolizing the red sword of heroes, so take that as confirmation. This also means Cat’s blood is in a sense turning into swords as she dies, just as the moon explodes and becomes bleeding stars which looks like flaming swords.

If I may say so, this is expert-level symbolism here – Martin has skillfully woven together the moon maiden symbols and wierwood symbols all throughout this scene, with no better example than the blood worm symbol. Dragons, swords, bloody hands, and weirwood roots are all implied by one densely-packed line. The most important take-away here is that Cat is symbolically turning into a weirwood tree, having her face carved, and manifesting Lightbringer and dragon symbolism all in the same moment.

This image is followed up on by the final bit of weirwood stigmata, as Cat is given her red smile. The knife that gives Cat her red smile has a bite that is red and cold, which is interesting. A red bite makes sense as a symbol of the comet striking or biting the moon maiden and of the moon meteor striking the tree, but isn’t Lightbringer supposed to be hot? Yes, it is, but frozen fire is both hot and cold, as is Valyrian steel, which is forged in dragonfire but is repeatedly noted to be very cold to the touch. Comets are the same, appearing to burn hot – but of course comet tails are not made of fire and comets themselves usually contain a lot of ice. Cold red blood also makes us think of the frozen weirwood sap which looks like frozen blood, and that’s a great fit with what is going on in the scene. It’s implying Cat’s red smile is red and cold, like the frozen blood of the weirwood smile, in other words.

The cold red bite of the dagger also reminds me of Mel’s repeated attempts to warn Jon about his own impending red smile (meaning his throat cutting by Wick Whittlestick): “Ice, I see, and daggers in the dark. Blood frozen red and hard, and naked steel. It was very cold.” It’s the cold / frozen red blood symbol again, and as I said, this alludes to Jon’s red smile. And that name, whittle-stick: it’s implying wood carving, with Jon’s neck as the wood. That fits, because Jon is simply taking on the weirwood symbolism of his wolf in the moment he’s about to merge with his wolf, being given a red smile likened to wood-carving.

Ned’s Ice is perhaps the best Lightbringer symbol in the story, and it kind of combines all of these cold red blood ideas we just mentioned – it’s directly compared to the comet, it’s Valyrian steel, it’s named Ice and is the sword most often remarked upon as being cold, and finally, it is soiled with Ned’s blood, reforged, and then appears to have the color of blood frozen in the ripples of its steel. As much as I love Oathkeeper, I don’t want to get too sidetracked here, but I did want to note that the cold red bite of the Frey knife that cuts Cat probably plays into this line of ice and fire / frozen blood symbolism. The broader point is that Cat is wounded by weapons with Lightbringer symbolism in both of the scenes of hers we’ve examined today: first by the catspaw’s Valyrian steel knife, and then by the Frey knife with a cold red bite. Taken with the idea of raven meteors carving her bloody face, and all the bloodworm stuff, I think it’s clear we are being shown that Cat is simultaneously playing the role of Nissa Nissa being stabbed by Lightbringer and the role of a weirwood being entered by Azor Ahai and having its face carved. The basic implication seems clear: the forging of Lightbringer and the carving of the faces seem to be related events.

This idea finds a companion in a description of the red comet that comes to us in Catelyn’s inner monologue. It’s from ACOK to be specific, and here she is speaking with her uncle Brynden Blackfish:

She followed him out onto the stone balcony that jutted three-sided from the solar like the prow of a ship. Her uncle glanced up, frowning. “You can see it by day now. My men call it the Red Messenger . . . but what is the message?”

Catelyn raised her eyes, to where the faint red line of the comet traced a path across the deep blue sky like a long scratch across the face of god.

When we consider that the faces in the weirwoods are the faces of the so-called “Old Gods,” the blades that carve those faces would then be scratching the face of god, as the comet is here. The comet certainly was a scratch across the face of the moon, which can be regarded as a goddess. The weirwoods seem to parallel the moon, and we keep seeing clues about Lightbringer type weapons carving the faces. I think this means the same thing as the story about the thunderbolt setting fire to the tree – something about the meteor impacts and the presence of Azor Ahai and his cronies in Westeros seem to have caused the face carving. In a perfect world, Azor Ahai or Garth the Green or someone like that used a knife made from a black meteor to carve the first face, so add that to the wishlist of things I hope to see in a Bran weirwood vision of the past. But there are actually several ways I can think of that the “Lightbringer and Azor Ahai carving the faces” idea could play out.

Setting aside that literal of an interpretation, meteors are typically used to work magic in Lovecraft stories, or else have their own inherent magical effects (usually magically toxic effects), so it’s more likely than not that the Bloodstone Emperor used his black meteor to work dark magic. Perhaps this had something to do with his ability to enter the trees and set the weirwoodnet ‘on fire.’ The other obvious possibility, which I have mentioned, is that the meteors themselves landed on Westeros and caused a magical reaction from the weirwoodnet, and something about this reaction is tied to the ability of greenseers to enter the weirwoodnet. This would also make sense as the meteor ‘setting the weirwoodnet on fire.’

I’m open to suggestions here – I feel confident that the meteors are linked to the carving of the faces and the greenseers entering the weirwoodnet, but the specifics are more murky. One of the main reasons I think this is because the legend of the Storm God’s thunderbolt setting the tree ablaze and thereby allowing man to possess the fire of the gods strongly implies that the meteors somehow enabled the first greenseers to enter the weirwoodnet. The burning tree fire of the gods is the weirwoodnet, and Grey King couldn’t possess this fire until the thunderbolt struck, so there you go. You see what I mean. He didn’t possess the living fire of the sea dragon until after he slew her, which conveys the same idea.

One final word about kennings: Odin in particular is tied to kennings. He is famous for having over 200 names in kenning form, many of which have obvious implications for ASOIAF such as the Hanged God, Lord of the Gallows, Raven God, Lord of Battles, High One, Battle-Wolf, Grey Beard or Hoary Board, Barrow Lord, Yule-Father, Mask, Hooded One, Wanderer, Father of Magical Songs, Flaming Eye, Shaggy Cloak-Wearer, Wagon God or God of Riders, God of Runes, Mover of Constellations, and many more. That last one is a reference to Yggdrasil as a cosmic axis celestial world tree, I’d like to point out.

So, I mentioned there is a House Kenning – two actually, House Kenning of Harlaw on the Iron Islands, and a splinter branch in service to House Lannister on mainland Westeros called House Kenning of Kayce. You know how the sigil clues work, so I will just give them to you. House Kenning of Harlaw’s sigil is “the storm god’s cloudy hand, pale grey, yellow lightning flashing from the fingertips, on black.” House Kenning of Kayce, meanwhile, has a sigil of “four sunbursts counterchanged on a quartered orange and black field,” meaning two black suns and two orange ones. I’m not sure about the math, but we recognize the black sun symbol as the dark solar king and the Lion of Night, so it’s nice to see a visual confirmation that Martin is indeed thinking about black suns as a general concept.

Now House Kenning of Kayce was founded by an Ironborn warrior known as Herrock Kenning, from the original Harlaw Kennings. His story involves a horn called “the horn of Herrock” which we actually see in the main story, as a Ser Kennos of Kayce accompanies Jaime in the Riverlands and blows the horn at a few crucial times. The horn, weirdly, is described an awful lot like the dragonbinder horn and the supposedly fake horn of Joramun that Melisandre burned: “black and twisted and banded in old gold.” One they blow it to enter Raventree Hall, home of the Blackwoods and their huge, dead wierwood tree.

In other words, all the symbolism attached to either House Kenning leads back to Azor Ahai the dead greenseer and the events of the Long Night. We have the Storm God’s thunderbolt-hurling hand, a horn seemingly meant to remind us of the more significant magical horns in the story, and the black sun symbol. House Kenning of Kayce on the mainland could be seen as kind of turning their cloak from the original Kennings, since they are now loyal to the Lannisters, and this is probably the meaning of their orange sun / black sun sigil – it’s showing us a bifurcation or transformation of the sun.

Anyway, let’s keep it moving.

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The Silent Sister

This section is generously sponsored by Direliz of Heavenly House Aquarius, the Alpha Patron, a direct descendent of Gilbert of the Vines, the son of Garth the Green who founded House Redwyne.

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You know we can’t talk about Lady Cat without mentioning Lady Stoneheart, as much as she enjoys hanging people. She has some great nicknames: The Silent Sister. Mother Merciless. The Hangwoman. Lady-freaking-Stoneheart. Here is Brienne’s encounter with her in Beric’s old cave in AFFC, which serves as a chilling introduction to this character who was just a little too terrifying for HBO :

A trestle table had been set up across the cave, in a cleft in the rock. Behind it sat a woman all in grey, cloaked and hooded. In her hands was a crown, a bronze circlet ringed by iron swords. She was studying it, her fingers stroking the blades as if to test their sharpness. Her eyes glimmered under her hood.

Grey was the color of the silent sisters, the handmaidens of the Stranger. Brienne felt a shiver climb her spine. Stoneheart.

In other words, Cat has become a rather unfriendly psychopomp, who is primarily interested in “feeding the crows,” as one of the Brotherhood says. By the way, the kenning for warrior is “feeder of ravens,” something Martin may have been inspired by. Essentially, Stoneheart is handing out one-way tickets to hell. If the entrance to the weirwoodnet is the entrance to a kind of realm of the dead, then undead Cat is acting as the gatekeeper. Here is a physical description of Stoneheart, a few pages further on:

Lady Stoneheart lowered her hood and unwound the grey wool scarf from her face. Her hair was dry and brittle, white as bone. Her brow was mottled green and grey, spotted with the brown blooms of decay. The flesh of her face clung in ragged strips from her eyes down to her jaw. Some of the rips were crusted with dried blood, but others gaped open to reveal the skull beneath.

Lady Stoneheart still has weirwood symbolism, but it is kind of post-weirwood transformation – she’s no longer such a good fit for the weirwood portrait of the burning tree, having lost the red hair and white skin thing. Her red hair has turned white as bone – which does match the bone white branches and bark of the weirwood – and her pale skin has turned grey and green, a color pairing which has been used to symbolize grey king type undead greenseers. She lives underground in the cave like a greenseer – and symbolically, in the underworld, where a zombie belongs. The words mottled and ragged are used, likening her to the undead scarecrow line of symbolism which also involves fools (who wear motley), thus making a straight line of foolishness and madness symbolism that runs through the scene in Bran’s sickroom, the red wedding, and now here in the cave.

In other words, Stoneheart is more like a tree ghost within the weirwood at this point, much like the Ghost of High Heart or Bloodraven, the latter of which also has that problem with the skull showing through holes in the face-skin that Stoneheart has. Note also that the Ghost of High Heart and Bloodraven both have white hair like Stoneheart, despite having red eyes that still match a weirwood. Catleyn actually does get the red eyes of a weirwood along with her fiery resurrection, and this quote is from that same Brienne chapter:

The woman in grey hissed through her fingers. Her eyes were two red pits burning in the shadows. 

Drogon’s eyes are like burning pits and red pits, while the weirwoods have “deep-carved” red eyes which are functionally red pits. This seems like the ember in the ashes / last coal in a dead fire symbolism we examined in the last episode, alluding to an internal fire within Stoneheart, and indeed, Thoros speaks of Beric passing the flame of life into Cat in order to resurrect her. Cat kinda sorta whispers here too – the word used is hissing – and she’s doing so “through her fingers,” almost like a weirwood whispering through it’s branches. Elsewhere in this chapter, her speech is called “halting, broken, tortured” and as “part croak, part wheeze, part death rattle.” That reminds us a bit of Coldhands rattling voice, and plays into the larger theme of having your throat cut and losing your voice that seems to be implied by the weirwoods’ bloody mouths and silent screams.

Then there’s this quote from Lem Lemoncloack in the epilogue of AFFC, the hanging of Petyr Pimple:

“She don’t speak,” said the big man in the yellow cloak. “You bloody bastards cut her throat too deep for that. But she remembers.“

She doesn’t speak, but she remembers – isn’t that a perfect description of  the weirwoods?

The other line of symbolism that plays into our line of research here is what happens with Stoneheart’s burning red eyes when she sees Oathkeeper:

He slid the sword from its scabbard and placed it in front of Lady Stoneheart. In the light from the firepit the red and black ripples in the blade almost seem to move, but the woman in grey had eyes only for the pommel: a golden lion’s head, with ruby eyes that shone like two red stars.

Cat has eyes only for the pommel – actually, she has eyes which are like the red stars eyes on the pommel, which are also a cat’s eyes, since the pommel is a lion head. It’s Dr. Seuss land again – a Cat with burning red eyes has eyes only for a cat with burning red eyes. Oathkeeper is a comet symbol, analogous to the catspaw figures and their Lightbringer-esque weapons, and Cat and the Brotherhood even name the sword and the bearer as a kind of catspaw of the Lannister King. Jack-Be-Lucky the one-eyed man says they should hang all three of them because “they’re lions,” Lem Lemoncloack says to Brienne that “there’s a stink of lion about you, lady,” and then they read the letter Brienne carries, which puts the nail in the coffin:

“There is this as well.” Thoros of Myr drew a parchment from his sleeve, and put it down next to the sword. “It bears the boy king’s seal and says the bearer is about his business.“

Lady Stoneheart set the sword aside to read the letter.

“The sword was given me for a good purpose,” said Brienne. “Ser Jaime swore an oath to Catelyn Stark . . .”

“. . . before his friends cut her throat for her, that must have been,” said the big man in the yellow cloak. “We all know about the Kingslayer and his oaths.”

That’s a nice one because in addition to naming Brienne and Oathkeeper as a catspaws of the Lannisters – “the bearer is about his business,” it doesn’t get any more catspaw than that – in addition to that, it also names the Freys who killed Cat as catspaws of the Lannisters, doing Jaime’s bidding. That means that both of Cat’s weirwood transformations were triggered by catspaws, by agents of the sun, which we interpret as the comet, and that lines up perfectly with all the weapons that attack Cat having Lightbringer symbolism. As I mentioned, Oathkeeper is also a great comet and cat’s paw symbol.

The point of the clever wordplay around Cat having eyes for and like the red stars on the lion pommel of Oathkeeper is the same as Melisandre having eyes like red stars, or Ghost having eyes like embers. It indicates a moon / weirwood symbol that has ingested the fire of the sun. Indeed, Oathkeeper’s ‘cat’ pommel and Catelyn-turned-Lady Stoneheart are parallel symbols. Oathkeeper’s lion pommel is the cat that has swallowed a red star, and the black and red blade would symbolize the comet that the lion swallowed. Longclaw, Jon’s sword, is just like Oathkeeper: the red-eyed wolf pommel is Ghost, who swallows Jon, and because Jon is a black brother and a sword in the darkness, Jon parallels to Longclaw’s black blade. It’s like the wolf pommel is swallowing the black sword and reflecting that internal fire in its eyes, just as with the red star-eyed lion pommel on Oathkeeper, and just as with Cat being attacked, throat slashed, and face-carved by Lightbringer symbols of various types, only to rise from the dead with burning red eyes.

All of this symbolism is bolstered by Cat’s new name – Stoneheart. She has a stone in her heart, like a tree person that swallowed a stone – or like Oathkeeper’s lion pommel that swallowed a bloody dragon blade. Weirwood trees get set on fire by the dragon meteors and by the greenseers who play the role of meteors (the thunderbolt meteor, to be exact). Think of Bloodraven like the dragon Nidhog, sitting beneath the magical tree and animating it with his life fire. Bloodraven is like the meteor, like the stone which becomes the heart of the tree. So, the name Stoneheart implies a tree woman with a meteor stone heart, someone who swallowed a red star or red sun.

We’ve also likened the King of Winter to a burning tree person – that’s essentially what he is, a wicker man made of dead greenery who is waiting to be burned in the spring. That obviously has overlap with the idea of Nissa Nissa becoming a burning tree, so what’s the deal with that? Well, it’s important to remember that gender doesn’t really exist with most trees and certainly not with moons and suns and comets – nor with dragons, for that matter. I talked about this last episode when I tried to explain that Nissa Nissa reborn and Azor Ahai reborn are really just gender appropriate versions of the same archetype.

For example, Cat has everything she needs to play King of Winter here except for a direwolf – she is sort of fiddling with Rob’s King of Winter crown, and now has Ned’s old sword too. And at the Red Wedding, Robb was actually acting in parallel to Cat: when he was first hit by an arrow, it says that he “staggered suddenly as a quarrel sprouted from his side,” which creates the image of a stag man growing wooden quarrels like tree limbs (hat-tip to my forum friend Unchained for that great observation). Cat thinks that if he screamed, she did not hear it because the music was too loud – making it a silent scream – and a second later, his voice is “whisper faint,” like a whispering weirwood (and remember that Robb won his most famous battle at the Whispering Wood).

Finally, we have Roose Bolton saying the infamous words “Jaime Lannister sends his regards” and then thrusting the longsword through Robb’s heart and twisting, making Robb and by extension the King of Winter some kind of Nissa Nissa moon figure. Like Nissa Nissa, and like the moon, the King of Winter parallels the tree, in other words – it’s a thing waiting to be set on fire. That’s also the case in real green man king of winter folklore: the king of winter is a green man made of dead garden shoots waiting to be set on fire at the changing of the season.

One other note on Roose stabbing Robb: by declaring himself to be a messenger of Jaime Lannister at the moment he stabs Robb, Roose is identifying himself as yet another catspaw assassin, and this creates another parallel between Robb as the King of Winter and Catelyn as a weirwood goddess, as both are killed by catspaws figures.

As kind of an adjunct to Catelyn, we’ll now return to the Inn of the Crossroads – also called the Gallows Inn – for a weirwood stigmata involving the death of the original owner, Masha Heddle. She is primarily mentioned in Catleyn’s chapters, so she fits in well here with all the Catelyn and lady Stoneheart stuff. Even though she is a minor character, her weirwood makeover scene unites much of the symbolism we’ve discussed here in the last three episodes. This from AGOT, when Tyrion meets his father there after coming down from the Mountains of the Moon:

The inn and its stables were much as he remembered, though little more than tumbled stones and blackened foundations remained where the rest of the village had stood. A gibbet had been erected in the yard, and the body that swung there was covered with ravens. At Tyrion’s approach they took to the air, squawking and flapping their black wings. He dismounted and glanced up at what remained of the corpse. The birds had eaten her lips and eyes and most of her cheeks, baring her stained red teeth in a hideous smile.

Masha Heddle is famous for her sourleaf-stained mouth, which is referred to many, many times in the first book. It’s called a “ghastly red smile,” a “hideous red smile,” and a “bloody horror,” so you get the idea. It’s a creative way of giving someone the weirwood bloody mouth symbolism, and it works quite well because of the vivid descriptions. Of course, the her red smile symbolism ties into the throat-cutting motif which is shared by the red smile of the weirwoods, and being hanged amounts to the same thing. Notice that the crows eating her face compare well to Catelyn’s fingernails being described as ten ravens when they disfigured her face, and of course to Bran’s eyes being pecked out by the Three-Eyed Crow. It’s also worth noting that she was hanged at the command of a solar king, Tywin, just as Cat was wounded and then killed by people doing the bidding of Lannisters. More catspaw symbolism, in other words.

Overall, what we can say about Masha Heddle is that she is the lady of the gallows inn, hung on the tree and given a weirwood transformation by the ravens and sourleaf: carved out bloody eyes, and a bloody smile. The blackened stone and ruined houses all around the inn and its gibbet help to lend the vibe of charred, smoking, ground-zero type wasteland. The gallows inn itself represents a weirwood as we saw in Garth of the Gallows, and the gibbet or gallows tree in the yard does the same. Of course we expect to see burning tree and weirwood symbolism at ground zero, so that all checks out and works in support of Masha’s weirwood transformation.

Now the configuration here is slightly different, because although her bloody eyes and red smile cast her in the role of the tree itself, usually it is Azor Ahai who is hung on the tree. This might suggest that perhaps Nissa Nissa was a woman who was sacrificed to open up the heart tree for Azor Ahai; perhaps she went in first and became part of the tree, only to have Azor Ahai then wed the tree and bond with it… or her, as it might be. Tywin, a solar character, hanged Masha Heddle and then takes up temporary residence in her inn, which kind of fits that pattern, so we’ll keep this possibility in mind. Tyrion is an Azor Ahai reborn figure, and he comes down the Mountains of the Moon (like a moon meteor) and also enters the weirwood symbol of the gallows inn, passing by the hanged and weirwooded Masha Heddle.

There’s one other honorable mention weirwood maiden that belongs with Cat, and that is Brienne, who I said is like a moon character that turns into an Evenstar Morningstar character. The Venus of Tarth, Brienne the Beauty. We talked about her hanging on the tree in Garth of the Gallows, and about how she is repeatedly struck by lightning, so to speak, in various scenes. After she has the horrific fight with Rorge and then Biter, she is patched up a bit by the Brotherhood without banners and taken to Lady Stoneheart, and for a time, she floats in a world of hazy half-dream. One of those dreams is worth a quick mention here. It’s the one where she dreams of the time that Red Ronnet Connington, he of the fire-red hair and beard, came to Evenfall hall to officially court her – except in the dream, Ronnet becomes Jaime part-way through.

The main noteworthy thing is that when Ronnet / Jaime gives her the rose, she opens her mouth and blood pours out – “she had bitten off her tongue while she waited.” A rose from a sun character would be a stand-in for the comet, and to confirm this, we get the following lines from Brienne on a different occasion when she recalls facing Red Ronnet on the tourney ground and exacting her revenge for his ‘courtship,’ and the cruel prank he participated in with the other knights:

In the mêlée at Bitterbridge she had sought out her suitors and battered them one by one, Farrow and Ambrose and Bushy, Mark Mullendore and Raymond Nayland and Will the Stork. She had ridden over Harry Sawyer and broken Robin Potter’s helm, giving him a nasty scar. And when the last of them had fallen, the Mother had delivered Connington to her. This time Ser Ronnet held a sword and not a rose. Every blow she dealt him was sweeter than a kiss.

It’s the kissing and killing, sex and swordplay theme between these two, and the rose is now a sword. Then during Brienne’s hazy half-conscious nightmare dream on the way to Stoneheart’s lair, we get this:

“He will bring a rose for you,” her father promised her, but a rose was no good, a rose could not keep her safe. It was a sword she wanted. Oathkeeper. I have to find the girl. I have to find his honor.

In other words, Oathkeeper is be likened to the rose – and indeed, it was Jaime who gave her Oathkeeper, just as he gave her the rose in the dream. The sun gives his fire to the moon maiden, which means that Brienne must be playing the moon maiden in this dream, at least. Brienne having revenge on Red Ronnet would equate to the moon meteors killing the sun with meteor smoke – the lunar revenge motif – and the same is true when she battles Jaime, a scene we will break down another time. Earlier in AFFC, Brienne dreams of her revenge on Red Ronnet, and we see that Jaime and Ronnet share another familiar symbol:

Ronnet had a rose between his fingers. When he held it out to her, she cut his hand off.

The last detail has to do with Brienne’s dress, made out like the sigil of House Tarth: “a quartered gown of blue and red decorated with golden suns and silver crescent moons.”  It’s pretty great ice and fire unity symbolism, and more importantly, sun and moon unity symbolism. The merging of sun and moon is what converts Brienne from moon maiden to falling Evenstar, after all. And finally, and this will be a preview of the next episode, Brienne has her second-hand shield painted to look like that of her ancestor, Ser Duncan the Tall: a falling green star and an elm tree on a field of sunset. That’s basically a diagram of the thunderbolt meteor about to strike the tree, and right at sunset (when the sun is swallowed by the trees).

Alright, so that’s our first batch, with Lady Catelyn and Masha Heddle being vivid and precise depictions of women turning into weirwoods, and Brienne being a less complete echo with only the bloody mouth – although she is hanged, rhetorically struck by lightning several times, and given a sword with Lightbringer symbolism. We will also catch Brienne in another scene later on.

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Antler-Eater

This section is brought to you by Ser Imriel of Heavenly House Orion, spinner of the great wheel, formerly of House Jordayne of the Tor and now the earthly avatar of the Sword of the Morning

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Up next we have Melisandre of Asshai, whom we have talked about a fair amount in the last episode and in previous episodes. She’s well-established as a Nissa Nissa fiery moon maiden figure, and we will come across those familiar symbols even as we primarily focus on the way that Melisandre plays into the idea of Nissa Nissa representing a weirwood. Just as with Catleyn, the moon maiden and weirwood maiden symbolism will appear side-by-side and intertwined with one another.

Melisandre actually starts off looking the most like a weirwood of all the moon maidens – she has skin as pale as cream, while everything else is red. Of course she has that red hair that is like blood and flame, which is comparable to Cat, Sansa, Ygritte, and a few others, but she also has the red eyes to better match a weirwood. She also wears red robes that are meant to look like shifting flame, with some layers looking like blood instead, so in basically every sense, she already looks like she is perpetually bleeding and burning, like the weirwood.

Here’s a good example, from the beginning of the burning of the seven scene in ACOK:

Melisandre was robed all in scarlet satin and blood velvet, her eyes as red as the great ruby that glistened at her throat as if it too were afire.

The weirwood blood sap that crusts their eyes and mouth can look like ruby as well, as we see in a line from AGOT that takes place inside the weirwood grove of nine:

The wide smooth trunks were bone pale, and nine faces stared inward. The dried sap that crusted in the eyes was red and hard as ruby.

In ADWD, Mel’s ruby was called “a third eye glowing brighter than the others.” This is directly suggestive of third eye vision, a la Odin and the greenseers – in fact, the third eye phrase is used seven times in the series proper, and all of them refer to Bran’s greenseer abilities, except this one here with Mel’s ruby. This is why the weirwood having ruby eyes is such great symbolism – it implies a link or similarity between Mel’s ruby third eye vision and the ruby eyes through which a greenseer looks when he opens his metaphorical third eye. Please remember, I am not suggesting that Melisandre is necessarily a greenseer, though that is not impossible if she is the daughter of Bloodraven and Shiera Seastar, as Radio Westeros theorizes. The point is that Melisandre is symbolizing the archetypal burning weirwood which Azor Ahai entered.

That leads to our next point: Melisandre shows the signs of having swallowed the red fire of the sun. In the last episode, we discussed how Mel’s eyes like red stars and Ghost’s eyes like embers both allude to the concept of moons and weirwoods swallowing the fire of Azor Ahai, and today we’ve roped Lady Stoneheart and her burning eyes like red pits into this symbolism (get it… roped… it’s a hanging joke. Call it gallows humor.) Melisandre’s red eyes are also described as candles and torches, which is more of the same, as well as hot coals, which matches the description of Drogon’s eyes right after he is born in the pyre of Khal Drogo .

You’ll recall her famous lines from her fire vision in ADWD: “Blood trickled down her thigh, black and smoking. The fire was inside her, an agony, an ecstasy, filling her, searing her, transforming her.” She also weeps, and it says “her tears were flame.” This is great weirwood portrait stuff – the weirwood is a picture of a bloody and burning moon, and Melisandre is having her blood burned and seared by some kind of magical fire, which has gotten inside her. The same thing happened to Dany at the alchemical wedding when she had the fire inside her, and like Dany, Mel is clearly playing the Nissa Nissa role here, with the ‘agony and ecstasy’ being a clear callout to the original moon maiden.

She’s definitely got the fire inside her, it’s safe to say, just like Dany. We see this not only in her eyes, but in the fact that she is, well, shagging a dude with a flaming red sword whom she thinks is Azor Ahai reborn. Melisandre speaks often of having red R’hllor’s fire inside her as well, and R’hllor is a god, so that is quite specifically the fire of the gods which Mel has swallowed. She is therefore a wonderful match to the trees and wolves that swallow the dying sun fire. That’s a description of Stannis if I ever heard one – he’s a solar king, kinda, but really he’s a solar king who is being overtaken by shadow and who is turning into the dark solar king, the dying sun fire. That’s an archetype which overlaps with the Night’s King, whom Stannis shows signs of paralleling.

Consider the new sigil Stannis devises after taking up R’hllor worship: a crowned stag enclosed within a flaming red heart. When Mel carries this banner in ACOK, it’s called “the great standard of the fiery heart with the crowned stag within. As if it had been swallowed whole,” which makes the point nicely. The burning heart has swallowed the stag just like the burning heart tree – the weirwood – swallows the stag man (the garth or horned lords that went inside the trees). I mean, just listen to the similar wording – a fiery heart, or a fiery heart tree. Both swallowed a stag! At the Battle of the Blackwater, we get another depiction of this idea, as Davos muses that “the fiery heart was everywhere, though the tiny black stag imprisoned in the flames was too small to make out.”

Now we’ve pointed out the great wordplay with this banner before – a stag is also called a hart, so this banner is actually a fiery hart inside a fiery heart. Another Russian doll trick! But think about that word, ‘imprisoned’ – the idea of the stag being imprisoned in the burning heart has to remind us of the weirwood heart trees as being garth traps, as prisons for greenseers. Melisandre is playing the role of the the burning heart tree, and Stannis is the black solar stag, the dying garth, who is imprisoned in her flames. In order to make the shadow babies, Melisandre swallowed Stannis’s life fires – no dirty jokes please – and this is mirrored by the banner, with its burning heart that swallowed the Baratheon stag, imprisoning it. The burning heart – or burning heart tree – is the antler-eater.

Even better – and you know it always gets better as we follow these bread crumb trails – Melisandre is a couple of times remarked upon as having a “heart shaped face.” A heart-shaped face with eyes like rubies – that compares well to the heart trees with faces and red eyes like ruby. Heart-shaped face, face-shaped heart tree. Radio Westeros pointed out that only Melisandre and Shierra Seastar get this description, so we know that the heart face is uncommon – it’s specifically chosen as a defining element of Melisandre and her potential mother. I would say it’s also another tree-woman clue. Consider this quote from ASOS, as Davos lies delirious and stranded on one of the small rocky atolls in the Blackwater Bay known as the Spears of the Merling King, and pay attention to all the uses of the word heart in close proximity:

“It was her!” Davos cried. “Mother, don’t forsake us. It was her who burned you, the red woman, Melisandre, her!” He could see her; the heart-shaped face, the red eyes, the long coppery hair, her red gowns moving like flames as she walked, a swirl of silk and satin. She had come from Asshai in the east, she had come to Dragonstone and won Selyse and her queen’s men for her alien god, and then the king, Stannis Baratheon himself. He had gone so far as to put the fiery heart on his banners, the fiery heart of R’hllor, Lord of Light and God of Flame and Shadow. At Melisandre’s urging, he had dragged the Seven from their sept at Dragonstone and burned them before the castle gates, and later he had burned the godswood at Storm’s End as well, even the heart tree, a huge white weirwood with a solemn face.

So, to help us piece this together, in rapid succession we get Mel robed in fire with her heart-shaped face, then the fiery heart sigil and fiery heart of R’hllor as an abstract concept, and finally a reference to the burning of the heart tree with a face at Storm’s End, a literal burning heart tree. Four different takes on a burning heart, but on a deeper level, they are really all talking about the same thing. Melisandre is an embodiment of the burning tree, with her heart face, ruby eyes, her robes that swirl like living flame. When she sets weirwoods on fire, it’s like looking in a mirror for her.

One last note on that fiery heart banner, with Melisandre’s burning heart swallowing Stannis’s crowned stag – it’s compared to the red comet by a fervent Queen Selise:

“There is another way.” Lady Selyse moved closer. “Look out your windows, my lord. There is the sign you have waited for, blazoned on the sky. Red, it is, the red of flame, red for the fiery heart of the true god. It is his banner—and yours! See how it unfurls across the heavens like a dragon’s hot breath, and you the Lord of Dragonstone.”

Stannis’s banner is already R’hllor’s banner, and here that fiery stag banner is being compared to the red comet. The red comet, according to our theory, would correlate to the greenseer, the stag man, who is swallowed in the fire of the burning heart tree, just as the comet is swallowed by the moon. What’s interesting is that when Selyse says “there is another way,” and points to the comet, she’s actually trying to make the case to burn Edric Storm – another stag man – in order to wake a dragon from stone. That’s more of the same symbolism – imprison the stag man inside the flames, and on other side, you get the birth of a dragon.

So, a quick word about the symbolism of the heart in general. The heart as a symbol is quite flexible. The Dawn meteor is called the heart of a fallen star, so we know a meteor can be a heart. But if that meteor came from a moon, then it’s the heart of a fallen moon, so the moon must have a heart. And R’hllor himself is the heart of fire – what does that mean?

Well, it means that he is the essence of fire itself, and that everything that is fiery is channeling his power. Melisandre, praying to R’hllor, says “you are the light in our eyes, the fire in our hearts, the heat in our loins. Yours is the sun that warms our days, yours the stars that guard us in the dark of night.” So when Mel speaks of R’hllor as the heart of fire, it means the source of fire. Whatever R’hllor touches then becomes a fiery heart, in possession of the fire of the gods and capable of touching others and spreading the fire – just as real fire spreads. Mel speaks of people having their hearts “bathed in god’s holy fire,” or hearts that burn “with the shining light of R’hllor,” and that means they’ve been touched by R’hllor and now posses the fire of the gods.

So now think about the astronomy – the sun is the source of fire in the sky, the best incarnation of the fiery heart of R’hllor. The comet itself it a slice of the sun, a bit of fire that looks like a fiery heart according to Selyse, and it sets the heart of the moon on fire. Now the moon has been touched by R’hllor and has a burning heart, and when it sheds the fiery meteor dragons, those too are like fallen star hearts that carry with them the fire of the gods and can in turn catch more things on fire, just as the thunderbolt carried the fire of the gods to earth and set the heart trees ablaze – so now the trees have fiery hearts too. In other words, the heart is not like a sword, which can only symbolize a meteor, but rather a dynamic symbol that represents the transfer of the fire of the gods from one thing to another. George does love the human heart in conflict after all, and the same holds true for heart of stars and suns, it would seem.

The important thing here is Melisandre – like the weirwood, she is a portrait of the burning moon, perpetually frozen in that moment of its incineration. She always appears in the moment of being caught on fire, the moment when the fire touched the “secret hearts” of the logs in Drogo’s pyre, the moment when the thunderbolt meteor set the tree ablaze. She never shows us the after phase of the moon, when it turns to black meteors – that role is played by her shadowbabies, or her black leeches, or even her blackened blood. Now she may well be hiding her true nature with illusion, so who knows what she really looks like, but as far as we see, Mel herself always looks to be on fire, as the weirwood does.

Alright, so Melisandre the burning heart tree woman swallows stags for breakfast – and not just Stannis either. Of course you remember Cressen’s ACOK prologue chapter, where he tries to kill Melisandre by drinking poisoned wine with her. That wine contains the strangler – the same poison from Asshai made with ash that kills Joffrey in ASOS. It’s a memorable scene, but there’s an important detail that is easy to overlook:

Patchface danced closer, his cowbells ringing, clang-a-lang, ding-ding, clink-clank-clink-clank. The maester sat silent while the fool set the antlered bucket on his brow. Cressen bowed his head beneath the weight. His bells clanged. “Perhaps he ought sing his counsel henceforth,” Lady Selyse said.

That’s right, Cressen is wearing the antlered fool’s helm when he offers himself up like a sacrifice to Melisandre the burning tree woman. Calling him a singer adds the connotation of those who sing the song of earth, the children of the forest, and of course we suspect that if the green men are some sort of elvish humanoid race, they would be something like taller children of the forest. But the antlers are the main thing – it makes him a sacrificed stag man. Here are the lines right before his death:

She met him beneath the high table with every man’s eyes upon them. But Cressen saw only her. Red silk, red eyes, the ruby red at her throat, red lips curled in a faint smile as she put her hand atop his own, around the cup. Her skin felt hot, feverish. “It is not too late to spill the wine, Maester.”

“No,” he whispered hoarsely. “No.”

Melisandre is given a hint of a red smile here to go along with her red eyes, as it says “red lips curled in a faint smile,” and of course she is drinking the blood-red wine like a weirwood drinking blood. The wine is twice noted to be sour (and reds are frequently described as sour in ASOIAF), linking it to the sourleaf which also makes people look as though they have been drinking blood.

The fact that Melisandre speaks of fire cleansing and is able to transmute the poison is yet another suggestion of the weirwoods being able to transmute the poison of the moon meteors and perhaps Azor Ahai himself. Symbolically, she’s drinking Cressen’s offered blood, as Cat tasted the blood of the catspaw assassin. Cressen and the catspaw assassin’s symbolism compares well, actually – that catspaw assassin had horse symbolism about him, if you recall, and here Cressen whispers hoarsely. The catspaw had sacrificed stag symbolism via the leather sack of silver stags he buried in the stables, and here Cressen dies with antlers on his head.

In fact, this scene with Cressen and Mel compares to the other of Catelyn’s weirwood stigmata scenes, because Cressen is wearing a fool’s stag helm when he is sacrificed to Melisandre, just as the fool Jinglebell Frey is sacrificed to Cat. Here are the last lines of Cressen’s prologue chapter:

Cressen tried to reply, but his words caught in his throat. His cough became a terrible thin whistle as he strained to suck in air. Iron fingers tightened round his neck. As he sank to his knees, still he shook his head, denying her, denying her power, denying her magic, denying her god. And the cowbells peeled in his antlers, singing fool, fool, fool while the red woman looked down on him in pity, the candle flames dancing in her red red eyes.

Notice the text just says the cowbells peeled in his antlers, omitting mention of the helm and thereby making it really sound as if Cressen has antlers growing out of his head. But the point of comparison to Jinglebell is of course the fool character and the bells, which ring and sing while Cressen dies and the signature ground zero fiery dancers appear in Melisandre’s eyes. Thus you can see that, as I said, both Cat’s weirwood scenes are paralleled in Cressen’s death scene. The catspaw assassin actually has weak fool symbolism too, because Catelyn thinks that he’s is repeating himself “stupidly” when he says “you weren’t s’posed to be here,” over and over.

There’s one other instance of a fool being slain before a heart tree – this time a real heart tree instead of a symbolic one, and it too parallels Cressen’s death. We don’t have time to cover that whole scene in depth at the moment as it’s a bit off topic, but I do have to mention that Brienne kills Shagwell the fool before the weirwood at the Whispers, and in fact, Shagwell is hiding in the weirwood canopy when they approach. He drops down from the weirwood armed with a triple morningstar. This is a great symbol of the ‘three heads of the dragon’ meteors coming from the moon tree and the celestial canopy, and identifies this fool as someone attempting to climb the tree, which means wedding the tree in order to climb the heavens.

The sum of it is that Brienne uses a Valyrian steel sword to effectively make blood offering to the weirwood, shedding the blood of the mummers with Oathkeeper, then burying Dick Crabb in a grave directly beneath the weirwood. Brienne seems to be playing a gatekeeper role here, like Stoneheart, sending people ‘to the other side’ via use of the weirwood and a black dragon sword. Brienne and Shagwell both get bloody hands here – Shagwell from digging Dick Crabb’s grave with his bare hands, and Brienne when she stabs Shagwell repeatedly in the gut. Brienne screams at Shagwell to “laugh!” as she is stabbing him with her dagger, but it says that “Shagwell never laughed. The sobs that Brienne heard were all her own. When she realized that, she threw down her knife and shuddered.” That’s interesting because it gives Brienne tears to go with bloody hands, and it creates the agony / ecstasy dichotomy with laughing and crying.

Finally, Brienne tosses two golden dragons into the grave with Nimble Dick in order to keep her promise to him, but of course that simply implies dragons in the roots of the magic tree, just like Yggdrasil and Nidhogg or like Bloodraven the dragon under his weirwood. It also implies planting the dragons like seeds, which reminds us of the idea of meteors as star seeds. On a basic level, it’s showing dragon meteors landing on the tree, as per the thunderbolt / burning tree myth.

But we still aren’t done with parallels to Cressen and Melisandre’s scene. Now because Cressen is a maester, we also find a parallel with Maester Luwin’s death before the Winterfell heart tree. This is after Bran, Rickon, Hodor, Jojen, Meera, and Osha the wildling have come out of hiding in the Winterfell crypts after Ramsay’s sack of Winterfell, and they find a nearly-dead maester Luwin in the godswood:

On the edge of the black pool, beneath the shelter of the heart tree, Maester Luwin lay on his belly in the dirt. A trail of blood twisted back through damp leaves where he had crawled.

The idea of Luwin as a sacrifice to the heart tree is clearly implied when Luwin finishes instructing the rest of the party on what to do and where to go:

“Good,” the maester said. “A good boy. Your . . . your father’s son, Bran. Now go.”

Osha gazed up at the weirwood, at the red face carved in the pale trunk. “And leave you for the gods?”

“I beg . . .” The maester swallowed. “. . . a . . . a drink of water, and . . . another boon. If you would . . .”

Luwin is also coughing up blood in this scene, with the red spittle on his lips getting a specific mention. But the best part of all of this is who finally kills him – Osha. Osha, whose name sounds a lot like ash. We’re going to talk about Osha and Asha Greyjoy in a minute because of that very fact… and because they have tree woman symbolism. And let’s not forget, Martin is already using the ash play on words to imply an ash-tree woman in the name of Melisandre of Asshai, so it shouldn’t surprise you that he might do the same with Osha and Asha. Osha does the same thing Mel does, executing a maester in front of a weirwood symbol. It’s worth noting that both times, the maester brought death upon himself, since Luwin asked the gift of mercy from Osha, and Cressen resigned himself to dying in order to kill Melisandre.

We are going to talk more about Osha and her tree symbolism in a bit when we talk about Asha, but by way of example, consider that she sometimes carries Bran around, just like Hodor does, and Hodor is playing the role of wicker basket and weirwood tree when he carries Bran around or when Bran skinchanges into his body (Hodor carrying Bran’s spirit around). Osha is twice called wiry strong, so she’s got a basket-kind of vibe going on.

So, getting back to Melisandre, you can see that Cressen’s sacrifice of himself to Melisandre is playing into a group of scenes which all seem to do with sacrificing people to weirwood trees. The dominant theme seems to be horned lord figures being sacrificed, but we need to follow up and figure out how maesters and fools play into the symbolism here. Cressen is all three – maester, fool, and stag man, and his life is given to the weirwood goddess is some sort of blood drinking ritual. This also works as a foreshadowing of Melisandre playing the role of succubus to Stannis, siphoning off his life fires for her magical procreation. More antler-eating, in other words.

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Blood Shadow Sex Magic

This section is made possible by the steadfast support of Fire Wren, Pie Master of Pie Island and High Priestess of the Church of Starry Wisdom.

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When Melisandre swallows Stannis’s life fires in a kind of sex-magic version of the fiery-heart-swallowing-the-stag banner, they produce one of the more twisted versions of Azor Ahai reborn – or perhaps one of the most revealing. The shadow assassins are black meteor symbols, like the dragons and like the ravens and like the Night’s Watch brothers, and carry their own dark messages.  The process works like this: Melisandre peels a slice off a slice of Stannis’s fire, and with it, she makes the shadowbaby assassins… which look like Stannis. It’s a perfect depiction of Azor Ahai the dark solar king being reborn through Nissa Nissa, being reborn through the burning moon, and being reborn through the weirwood, all in one. Check out this quote from ASOS which describes the process:

“No.” Perhaps he should have lied, and told her what she wanted to hear, but Davos was too accustomed to speaking truth. “You are the mother of darkness. I saw that under Storm’s End, when you gave birth before my eyes.”

“Is the brave Ser Onions so frightened of a passing shadow? Take heart, then. Shadows only live when given birth by light, and the king’s fires burn so low I dare not draw off any more to make another son. It might well kill him.” Melisandre moved closer. “With another man, though . . . a man whose flames still burn hot and high . . . if you truly wish to serve your king’s cause, come to my chamber one night. I could give you pleasure such as you have never known, and with your life-fire I could make . . .”

“. . . a horror.” Davos retreated from her.

There you go – I just wanted you to get it straight from the books. This is the same idea we’ve been talking about, with the woods swallowing the last slice of the sun. But people and trees and moons who get this fire inside them only seem to birth shadows – Davos call Mel the mother of darkness, and that’s right on so many levels. The moon gave birth to the black meteors and the darkness, and the wierwoodnet seems to give birth to Azor Ahai reborn. If the Others came from the weirwoods in some sense, as many suspect, then the trees might have given birth to those shadows too.

The scene where Mel births the shadowbabies takes place in a dark cave beneath Storm’s End, with its very old and massive weirwood tree above. It’s actually warded by magic:

” …this Storm’s End is an old place. There are spells woven into the stones. Dark walls that no shadow can pass—ancient, forgotten, yet still in place.”

At the risk of stating the obvious, that compares pretty well to Bloodraven’s cave underneath the weirwoods, which Coldhands says is “warded” so that the wights cannot enter. This might imply a symbolic link between Mel’s birthing of the shadowbabies beneath Storm’s End and the greenseers wedding the trees in their caves beneath weirwood groves, and I believe the rest of Storm’s End’s symbolism supports this.

In Weirwood Compendium 3, Garth of the Gallows, we saw that the castle of Storm’s End is like the upthrust fist which blots out the stars, a version of the rising column of smoke and ash which caused the Long Night. Beneath this cloud of smoke symbol, we should find symbols of weirwoods and meteor impacts – and boy howdy do we ever. We already talked about the Durran and Elenei stuff last episode, and about how Storm’s End is the place where the goddess landed, if you will, where she symbolically came down to earth. We saw Renly put on his green stag man armor only to be sacrificed in that same scene where Storm’s End was a deeper darkness through which no stars could shine. We mentioned the huge old weirwood in the godswood there, and how Mel eventually has Stannis burn it, which nicely places the burning tree symbol under the smoke cloud symbolism of the castle, where it belongs. Note also that Mel doesn’t actually burn the weirwood: she has Stannis do it, and the same is true for the burning of the Seven on dragonstone. Why? Because it’s better symbolism: Azor Ahai is supposed to be the one who sets the tree on fire.

Of course the point of all this is that Melisandre’s shadow birthing will be another display of burning tree and burning moon symbolism beneath Storm’s End. So now, check out the lines from ACOK as Melisandre and Davos row towards the mouth of the cave beneath the castle:

The seaward side of Storm’s End perched upon a pale white cliff, the chalky stone sloping up steeply to half again the height of the massive curtain wall.  A mouth yawned in the cliff, and it was that Davos steered for, as he had sixteen years before.  The tunnel opened on a cavern under the castle, where the storm lords of old had built their landing.

It’s tempting to see the tall, pale white cliff below the castle as the weirwood trunk, seeing as how it has a “yawning mouth” which is about to eat the black ship and its fiery cargo.  In fact, consider me tempted! The cave’s ‘mouth’ is remarked upon a second time as they navigate through the jagged rocks of the entrance, and the idea of a ‘yawning mouth’ implies sleeping and dreaming. The cave mouth is also eating people in this scene, which correlates to human sacrifice to weirwoods as well as greenseers’ bodies being slowly eaten by the trees. This cave mouth in the pale white cliff is also where the Storm Lords of old built their landing – much like King’s Landing, this would seem to be a clue about meteors landing and perhaps about Storm Lords going into the weirwoodnet.  Into the mouth of the tree, that’s how you get there.

Once inside, Melisandre plays the role of Nissa Nissa weirwood: she shrugs out of her smothering robe and her pale-as-cream skin shines, a light in the darkness – think of the Black gate weirwood face, glowing faintly like milk and moonlight. Mel’s eyes are like hot coals, and her blood is black again, presumably from the burning effect of fire magic. We also get the line “her cry might have been agony or ecstasy or both,” one of those easy to spot Nissa Nissa symbols.  Then the arrival of the dark child, who takes the form of a tower of smoke and darkness: “the whole of the shadow slid out into the world and rose taller than Davos, tall as the tunnel, towering above the boat.”

We’ve talked about these shadow babies many times – they represent the black meteor dragon children of the second moon. But now that we have identified some sort of weirwood symbolism with the Nissa Nissa characters, we should consider how the black shadow children might be related to the weirwoods. I mentioned that the black ravens that like to erupt in clouds are terrific black meteor symbols, and that’s true, but there is something more here, and I think it has to do with the Night’s Watch.

When the Ghost of High Heart speaks of the shadowbaby, she describes it as “a shadow with a burning heart.” That reminds me of the scene with Stannis, Melisandre, and the leeches, when Mel speaks of needing “men whose hearts are fire” to fight the Others and the Long Night. The Night’s Watch, those shining, fiery swords in the darkness, fit this description: Jon is with the line “all in black, he was a shadow among shadows” in ACOK, and you will recall the rangers in the grove of nine scene being “carved from shadow.” They’re black shadows, but they fight the Others and the wights with fire and frozen fire.

We also saw the embers in the ashes of Mel’s fire vision turn into the Night’s Watch brothers at the Fist of the First Men, one of many instances of the Night’s Watch being associated with symbolism that relates to Azor Ahai (the embers in the ashes symbol in this case, as well as things like the symbolism of the burning scarecrow Night’s Watch brothers that relates to Beric, Bloodraven, and the King of Winter that we’ve examined in the past). So if anyone fits Mel’s description of men whose hearts are fire to fight the Others, it’s the Night’s Watch, the fire that burns against the cold.

Consider the Black Gate once again – I just compared shining Melisandre in the cave beneath Storm’s End to the Black Gate weirwood face beneath the Nightfort (‘shining cream’ vs ‘glowing milk,’ if you will). The comparison is more than that though, and speaks to functionality. Melisandre acts as a gateway for black shadows to enter the world, and so does the Black Gate, because it only lets Black Brothers pass through. That’s probably the reason it’s called the Black Gate, despite being white, incidentally, because it only opens for men in black who recite their vows.

The shadowbabies are assassins, murderers – and a gathering of crows is of course called a murder of crows.  Additionally, many refer to the Night’s Watch as a group of thieves, rapists, and murderers, and more than a few them are in fact murderers. Finally, the mythical astronomy also lines up here, as I mentioned: the shadowbabies and black brothers are both black meteor symbols, and they both issue forth from moon symbols: the Black Gate, and Melisandre’s dark womb.

In other words, the shadowbabies with burning hearts seem to parallel the Night’s Watch in many ways. This is where the green zombie idea fit in: if the original Night’s Watch, likely the last hero’s twelve, were resurrected skinchangers and greenseers as I propose, then they would have been reborn through the fiery womb of the weirwoodnet. I keep saying how the Night’s Watch swearing their vows to the heart trees might be a reenactment of greenseers being resurrected as the first black brothers, the first crows. They would have been black shadows with burning hearts, reborn from the weirwood goddess.

That is what I think happened, and I think that is the basic message of all of these scenes with Melisandre playing the role of weirwood goddess: she swallows the life fires of stag men, just as I believe the original twelve Night’s Watch gave their lifeblood to the heart trees. Then she gives birth to black shadows with burning hearts, deathly versions of the living stag man she swallowed, and this correlates to the the weirwood heart trees giving birth to reborn, undead stag men who were Night’s Watch brothers, carved from shadow. Here I will remind you that when we saw the shadowbaby murder Renly, it was twice remarked upon to be wielding a shadowsword – a black sword, in other words, just as the black brothers are swords and wield black knives of obsidian (or ideally, smoke-dark Valyrian steel swords).

Essentially, I have already suggested the last hero’s twelve were undead greenseers or skinchangers, so the likeness between Mel’s shadow killers and the black brothers carved from shadow seems like a further corroboration of this. And because we all like corroboration – the more, the merrier –  I will unleash a juicy bit of symbolism I have been squirreling away for a special occasion which again seems to reinforce the idea of the last hero and his twelve being sacrificed to heart trees in order to be resurrected as green zombie Night’s Watch brothers. The weirwood goddess in this scene will be not a woman, but Nagga herself, the mighty sea dragon. I am just going to let Mr. Martin Lewis read it for you and see what you can make of it. This is from TWOIAF, concerning the end of the tradition of Kingsmoots and driftwood crowns:

The final, fatal blow against the power of the captains and the kings assembled was dealt when Urragon IV himself died, after a long but undistinguished reign. It had been the dying king’s wish that the high kingship pass to his great-nephew Urron Greyiron, salt king of Orkmont, known as Urron Redhand. The priests of the Drowned God were determined not to allow the power of kingmaking to be taken from them for a third time, so word went forth that the captains and kings should assemble on Old Wyk for a kingsmoot.

Hundreds came, amongst them the salt kings and rock kings of the seven major isles, and even the Lonely Light. Yet scarcely had they gathered when Urron Redhand loosed his axemen on them, and Nagga’s ribs ran red with blood. Thirteen kings died that day, and half a hundred priests and prophets. It was the end of the kingsmoots, and the Redhand ruled as high king for twenty-two years thereafter, and his descendants after him. The wandering holy men never again made and unmade kings as they once had.

Thirteen kings, sacrificed to the weirwood ribs of the sea dragon, making the white wood run red with blood. The killer? A man named red-hand, like the bloody red hand-shaped weirwood leaves. His other name, Urron, naturally makes us think of Euron Crow’s Eye – ‘pirate Odin on bad acid,’ as I call him – a man who bears similarities to Bloodraven and the Bloodstone Emperor, with all kinds of twisted, corrupt greenseer symbolism. Elsewhere in TWOIAF, speaking of the demise of the driftwood crown tradition, it says:

That era ended with Urron Redhand and the slaughter on Old Wyk. Henceforth the crown of the Iron Islands would be made of black iron and would pass from father to son by right of primogeniture.

This black iron crown is far more appropriate for an undead, Lord of Death figure like Urron Red hand, Euron Crow’s Eye, whose TWOW spoiler chapter reveals a similar crown, or to the King of Winter and his black iron crown of swords. This sounds like the transformation of a greenseer, who would wear a weirwood ‘crown’ so to speak, into the undead, corrupted greenseer figure reborn through the weirwoodnet we’ve been catching signs of.

The thirteen he sacrificed to Nagga’s ribs would be the last hero and his twelve, and there is a hint of green men rising to take revenge on Urron Redhand. TWOIAF notes that Urron Redhand faced half a dozen rebellions, two thrall uprisings, and this:

The most telling blow was struck by King Garth VII, the Goldenhand, King of the Reach, when he drove the ironmen from the Misty Islands, renamed them the Shield Islands, and resettled them with his own fiercest warriors and finest seamen to defend the mouth of the Mander.

Make what you will of that last bit; the main part is the sacrifice of thirteen kings that made Nagga’s ribs run red, slaughtered by Urron Redhand. Nagga’s ribs as introduced thusly in AFFC: “four-and-forty monstrous stone ribs rose from the earth like the trunks of great pale trees,” and since they are almost surely petrified weirwood as the line implies, they function like a weirwood circle (recall also the weirwood circles on Sea Dragon Point which work as a complimentary clue). So in terms of symbolism, this sacrifice is being done inside the ‘sacred grove,’ if you will, and thus I think it’s pretty good evidence supporting the idea of the last hero and his companions as intentionally sacrificed skinchangers and greenseers. The driftwood kings and Drowned Priests the Redhand killed weren’t resurrected, however the drowned priests are basically famous for their drowning-and-cpr resurrection ritual, something Patchface the stag-man fool  experiences the real version of. Thus, the implication of resurrection is there, and this is a pretty good potential echo for the hypothesized ritual killing of the last hero’s companions.

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Asshai Maiden

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So far, our study of the Nissa Nissa moon maiden archetype as a burning tree woman has centered around the weirwood stigmata symbolism that literally makes some of our moon maidens look like weirwood trees. We have more stigmata to come, including one which is as good or maybe even better than Cat’s transformation at the Red Wedding, but now I want to bring in a separate but related layer of the Nissa Nissa archetype which also depicts a burning tree woman: that of the shy maiden. Don’t be fooled, this monicker is not what it seems. It has every thing to with woman who have burning ash tree symbolism and nothing to do with women who are shy, who are ‘shrinking violets,’ if you will. Melisandre is the first example of an Asshai maiden, and she’s obviously neither shy nor a maiden. It’s wordplay!

Think of the shy maiden character as a sub-archetype of Nissa Nissa, in the way that the ‘black dragon’ is a sub-archetype of Azor Ahai reborn. What we are about to see is that the shy maiden is associated with three of our favorite things: trees, fire, and the moon. More specifically, it will be ash trees, burning trees, and shy flames that are like women, with moon references worked in. As you might guess, we will also see signs of weirwood stigmata present at the same time, which is why I decided to bring up the shy maiden at this point – so we can get a more complete picture of Nissa Nissa as a burning tree moon maiden.

The shy maiden archetype seems to be heavily based on those Greek ash tree nymphs I mentioned at the beginning, the Meliai, born from the shed blood of the sky god, Ouranos. The basic connection is apparent – the Meliai are female spirits of the ash tree, and the weirwoods which our moon maiden keep turning into are based on the ash tree Yggdrasil, making them ash tree maidens of a sort already. Recall also that the Meliai ash tree nymphs or dryads are associated with spears, arming their human offspring with spears made from their ash trees – and in turn we find that many of our shy maidens will be Wildling spearwives: Osha, Rowan, and Ygritte. These spearwives all worship the old gods – the weirwood trees and the greenseer spirits inside them, in other words, making them excellent devotees of the burning ash tree that the weirwoods symbolize.

Melisandre the Asshai not-quite-a-maiden, meanwhile, dreams repeatedly of the eyeless, severed heads of Garth Greyfeather, BlackJack Bulwer, and Hairy Hall which Jon and Mel find mounted atop the infamous ash wood spears to make that clever weirwood diagram. So while Mel isn’t a spearwife, the spears and the black and bloody heads are very important to Melisandre’s personal symbolism and character arc, something we took a close look at in Bloodstone Compendium 3, Waves of Night and Moon Blood. It may or may not be coincidence, but “Meliai” does sound a bit like “Mel from Asshai” or “Melony,” Melisandre’s original name. Mel obviously does not worship the weirwoods – the demon trees as the R’hllorists call them – instead she sets them on fire. This is antagonistic in terms of the main plot, but in terms of symbolism, setting the weirwoods on fire simply makes them a more literal symbol of the burning tree which they are meant to represent.

We will pick up the trail of the shy maiden with a really cool scene involving Osha, and then we will quickly incorporate Asha Greyjoy and Rowan the spearwife, with Theon running in and out of all of their scenes. Most of this will take place at Winterfell, although we will pay a quick visit to a riverboat on the Rhoyne and a lonely campfire in the Frostfangs.

Earlier, we saw Osha mercy kill Maester Luwin beneath the heart tree, and she kills another person in an interesting way when she helps Bran, Rickon, Hodor, and the Reeds escape Winterfell. It’s one of Theon’s Ironborn guards, Drennan. He has a lot in common with all the other people we have seen sacrificed to weirwood tree figures and weirwood trees here. For starters, Drennan and the other guard were previously whipped by Theon, which Theon referred to as “having a little skin off their back,” which sounds like a potential allusion to skinchanging; Theon calls Drennan a fool, like Jinglebell and Cressen with Patches’ fool’s helm; “his throat had been opened ear to ear,” meaning that he got a red smile like so many others; and he wears a ragged tunic, tying him into the straw man / scarecrow symbolism like the catspaw assassin and the Night’s Watch brothers.

Because of all these matches, Osha is again placed in the role of the tree woman receiving a sacrifice, with the sacrifice here being a ragged fool with a red smile and a slipped skin. Osha kills him after seducing him – he’s caught dead with his pants around his ankles, actually – so it’s also a great example of sex and swordplay. Theon summarizes:

“I’d say Drennan was pulling down his breeches to stick it in the woman when she stuck it in him.”

It speaks of mutual destruction, and of the moon revenging herself by killing the sun. A moment later, Theon hears that Osha is among the missing, and we get this bit of his inner monologue:

Osha. He had suspected her from the moment he saw that second cup. I should have known better than to trust that one. She’s as unnatural as Asha. Even their names sound alike.

That makes for a good excuse to bring Asha into the mix, whose name does indeed sound like Osha and like Asshai. That bit about Theon thinking Osha and Asha are unnatural is actually referring to an earlier scene from ACOK when Theon first returns to the Iron Islands and failed to recognize Asha, leading up to her punking him big time at the dinner feast:

He could feel the flush creeping up his cheeks. “I’m a man with a man’s hungers. What sort of unnatural creature are you?”

“Only a shy maid.” Asha’s hand darted out under the table to give his cock a squeeze. Theon nearly jumped from his chair. “What, don’t you want me to steer you into port, brother?”

“Marriage is not for you,” Theon decided. “When I rule, I believe I will pack you off to the silent sisters.” He lurched to his feet and strode off unsteadily to find his father.

This seems like a foreshadowing of Theon’s castration, but setting that aside (poor choice of words perhaps), there are three lines of symbolism I want to focus on here: the unnatural woman, the silent sisters, and of course the shy maid.

The “unnatural” descriptor is not only applied to Osha and Asha, but also to Sansa in a scene we will quote next episode, and also to Cat, who thinks to herself during her downward spiral that “Bran and Rickon must surely think me a cold and unnatural mother.” This too would seem to refer to the transformed, undead moon maiden figure, the Nissa Nissa reborn archetype, or simply to the idea of moons and trees undergoing alchemical weddings and magical childbirths as being freaky, unnatural mothers. It’s not a big thing but since its applied to Sansa, Cat, Asha, and Osha, I though I’d mention it.

Next, the silent sister remark. We know “the silent sister” is a component of the Nissa Nissa tree-woman archetype, because Lady Stoneheart is called “The Silent Sister.” The silent sisters are called the handmaidens of the Stranger – in other words, they are psychopomp figures, or at least, they play a role in that process, helping the living transition into the realm of the dead. They are, of course, silent, like the weirwoods – you can see how all of that fits Stoneheart as well as the general notion of a weirwood death goddess. Thus, even though Asha is obviously quite outspoken, this comment by Theon serves as a clever way to show that Asha is playing into the silent sister line of symbolism.

As for the shy maid remark, obviously it’s sarcastic – Asha is no more shy than she is silent.  I made the joke earlier about Melisandre being an ‘Asshai maiden’ or being ‘made in Asshai,’ but it’s actually not my joke. This is from ADWD:

Snow wrenched his arm away. “I think not. You do not know this creature. Rattleshirt could wash his hands a hundred times a day and he’d still have blood beneath his nails. He’d be more like to rape and murder Arya than to save her. No. If this was what you have seen in your fires, my lady, you must have ashes in your eyes. If he tries to leave Castle Black without my leave, I’ll take his head off myself.”

Melisandre from Asshai has ashes in her eyes. It’s a bit of wordplay to prompt us to think about the face that Asshai sounds like ashes. And what’s great about this quote is that Jon says “if this is what you have seen in your fires,” Mel must have ashes in her eye – but the “this” Jon is referring to is Mance Raydar’s plan to use the wildling spearwives, including Rowan, to rescue who they think is Arya from Winterfell. In fact, the paragraph preceding this one mentions Melisandre, Ygritte, Arya, and the spearwives which will include Rowan. Those are all Nissa Nissa moon maidens, leading up the “ashes in your eyes” wordplay. Ygritte, by the way, is a shy maiden too – after Jon gives Ygritte his “Lord’s Kiss” down in the cave near the Wall, it says “afterward, she was almost shy, or as shy as Ygritte ever got.”

Again, the point of labelling the Nissa Nissa figures as shy maidens is to imply them as ash tree maidens, as weirwood women. It’s also done to imply the the Nissa Nissa figure as a burning tree woman, because as I am about to show you, Martin appears to have a habit of describing flames as shy maids. A woman made of fire, in other words – that’s the shy maiden archetype. Melisandre is a living incarnation of this idea, and all the shy maiden symbolism will come back to her. Many of the weirwood goddess figures manifest the shy maiden symbolism or bear witness to the phenomena, but it will kind of all being bouncing off of Melisandre’s symbols. Check out this quote from Asha’s ADWD chapter titled “The Sacrifice,” and this comes right as the R’hllorists in Stannis’s army are set to burn a few people they caught eating human flesh… and yes, I do think Martin is making an ‘eating steak’  / burning at the stake / canninalism joke here:

“Lord of Light, accept this sacrifice,” a hundred voices echoed. Ser Corliss lit the first pyre with the torch, then thrust it into the wood at the base of the second. A few wisps of smoke began to rise. The captives began to cough. The first flames appeared, shy as maidens, darting and dancing from log to leg. In moments both the stakes were engulfed in fire.

The shy fire maidens sound a lot like the trademark fiery dancers here, and that makes sense, because the fiery dancers seem to overlap or be the same as the fiery sorcerers that often appear in the flames of Lightbringer bonfires, and Melisandre the Asshai maiden is a fiery sorcerer. She doesn’t dance herself, but you’ll recall the candle flames dancing in her eyes as Cressen took his final breath, so she has that symbolism too. I probably don’t need to point this out, but obviously there is human sacrifice via fire going on here in this scene with the R’hllorists burning people at the stake, and that compares well with Dany’s alchemical bonfire which also had human sacrifice and fiery dancers and sorcerers. Finally, Asha herself is threatened several times as being the next one they will burn at the stake, further implying a symbolic correlation between Asha the shy maid who may be burned and the shy maiden flames in the R’hllorist pyre.

Speaking of Lightbringer bonfires and fiery dancers, do you recall that Lightbringer bonfire Jon Snow and Qhorin Halfhand whip up the night before they are captured by wildlings? That was the one where the tree that “had been dead a long time,” but “seemed to live again in the fire, as fiery dancers woke within each stick of wood to whirl and spin in their glowing gowns of yellow, red, and orange.” Very poetic, I know, but the point is that at the very beginning of the chapter, earlier that night, we saw the flames appearing as shy maidens, and take note of the fact that it is the first flames which are shy maidens, just as it was in the last scene with the R’hllorists:

When Qhorin Halfhand told him to find some brush for a fire, Jon knew their end was near.

It will be good to feel warm again, if only for a little while, he told himself while he hacked bare branches from the trunk of a dead tree. Ghost sat on his haunches watching, silent as ever. Will he howl for me when I’m dead, as Bran’s wolf howled when he fell? Jon wondered. Will Shaggydog howl, far off in Winterfell, and Grey Wind and Nymeria, wherever they might be?

The moon was rising behind one mountain and the sun sinking behind another as Jon struck sparks from flint and dagger, until finally a wisp of smoke appeared. Qhorin came and stood over him as the first flame rose up flickering from the shavings of bark and dead dry pine needles. “As shy as a maid on her wedding night,” the big ranger said in a soft voice, “and near as fair. Sometimes a man forgets how pretty a fire can be.”

What we are really talking about is an ashy tree maiden on her alchemical wedding night, when she will swallow the fire of the solar king from Asshai and become a burning tree. You will notice that Ghost the is prominently featured as John hacks at the dead tree, preparing it to be burned and to “live again in the flames.” Ghost is a silent watcher, just like the weirwood he resembles. Then Jon thinks about his death in the next line, even as the sun sets in the back ground. The moon is rising though, just as the shy maiden flame is, and indeed, the moon is kind of the original shy fire maiden, and of course all of weirwood women here are also moon maidens. The whole scene is good nature mythology – solar Jon thinks about his death and hacks apart dead trees for firewood as the sun sets, and the moon rises, so too does our fiery dancing shy moon maiden.

There’s a great quote from a Jaime chapter of ASOS which equates the constellation called the Moonmaid with our shy maiden archetype while also casting her as a tree nymph associated with stars:

Jaime lay on his back afterward, staring at the night sky, trying not to feel the pain that snaked up his right arm every time he moved it. The night was strangely beautiful. The moon was a graceful crescent, and it seemed as though he had never seen so many stars. The King’s Crown was at the zenith, and he could see the Stallion rearing, and there the Swan. The Moonmaid, shy as ever, was half-hidden behind a pine tree. How can such a night be beautiful? he asked himself. Why would the stars want to look down on such as me?

“Jaime,” Brienne whispered, so faintly he thought he was dreaming it. “Jaime, what are you doing?”

“Dying,” he whispered back.

Jaime is a fallen solar character, beaten up by the Bloody Mummers in this scene and forcibly amputated in a previous one. Even without the bonfire, this scene still correlates to the ground zero Lightbringer bonfire in the sense that we have a dying sun figure laid out on the ground, while the crescent moon adds to the sacrifice symbolism and may be meant as a callout to Bran’s vision of human sacrifice through the eyes of the heart tree, which featured the crescent moon being like the blade of a knife and a curved sacrificial sickle. But ‘as the sun sets, the moon maid rises,’ and so we get the appearance of the Moonmaid constellation. She’s posing as the shy maiden, peeking out from behind a tree, like a tree nymph. That’s a pretty nice one; yet another connection between the moon maiden and the idea of a tree woman. A starry tree woman, to boot.

Brienne is a moon maid of course, and here she’s whispering to Jaime to live – whispering so faintly he thought he was dreaming the voice. A moment later, a Bloody Mummer comes over to tell Brienne to “shut her bloody mouth,” giving her a bit of weirwood stigmata symbolism as she dream whispers to the dying solar figure, trying to will him to life. Finally, Brienne herself happens to be a moon maiden who is actually both shy and a maiden –  in AFFC, she reflects that “Even as a girl she had been shy. Long years of scorn had only made her shyer.”

This scene finds a companion with one involving Jamie’s brother Tyrion, while he is on the Rhoynish riverboat called… the Shy Maid. That would be Yandy and Yasilla’s riverboat that Young Griff a.k.a. fAegon Blackfyre was hiding out on, the one they sailed down the Rhoyne with Tyrion on board in ADWD. That’s already a great moon parallel for the Shy Maid – she’s hiding black dragon cargo, and that’s referring to both fAegon Blackfyre and  theoretical secret Targaryen, Tyrion Rivers. In any case, it’s just one line, but Tyrion is dozing off while sleeping on the roof of the Shy Maid and we get this:

A full moon floated above the mast. It is following me downriver, watching me like some great eye.

Hey, the moon is an eye – that reminds us of all the stuff with Bloodraven and the Nightfort moon. But the moon can of course also be seen as a face, and often is, and here the moon floats above the mast of the Shy Maid – the mast of the ship is the tree part of the boat, and the moon is acting like the head, like a stick figure. It’s very like the Moonmaid constellation being half-hidden behind a tree – the shy maid archetype seems to involve both tree and moon. And since the moon is called an eye here, you could also interpret the mast of the shy maid and the moon eye to imply trees with eyes, which is of course a thing in ASOIAF.

And now back to Osha – she has a scene that matches the last three we just looked at, and that comes in ACOK as she hides in the Winterfell crypts with Bran, Rickon, Hodor, Jojen, and Meera.

Bran heard fingers fumbling at leather, followed by the sound of steel on flint. Then again. A spark flew, caught. Osha blew softly. A long pale flame awoke, stretching upward like a girl on her toes. Osha’s face floated above it. She touched the flame with the head of a torch. Bran had to squint as the pitch began to burn, filling the world with orange glare. The light woke Rickon, who sat up yawning.

When the shadows moved, it looked for an instant as if the dead were rising as well. Lyanna and Brandon, Lord Rickard Stark their father, Lord Edwyle his father, Lord Willam and his brother Artos the Implacable, Lord Donnor and Lord Beron and Lord Rodwell, one-eyed Lord Jonnel, Lord Barth and Lord Brandon and Lord Cregan who had fought the Dragonknight.

In the last scene, the mast of the shy maid was like the body, and the moon its head, and here we get something similar: Osha’s face floats above like the moon, and the long, pale flame girl on her toes acts as the fiery body under her floating head. Take a picture everyone – that’s our Asshai maiden, the lady of the burning ash tree. She is a moon figure, a living flame, and an ash tree all in one. She may be a shy maiden, but you’ll notice that she’s “filling the world with orange glare.” The fiery weirwood woman does that by lightning up in fiery dragon childbirth, and by facilitating the rebirth of Azor Ahai, the ember in the ashes waiting to spark the great conflagration. For example, the shy maid first flame in Jon and Qhorin’s pyre eventually led to the big fire where the tree that had been dead a long time seemed to live again, which we take as a symbol of Azor Ahai the reborn greenseer, the fire-starter.

Returning to the scene in the crypts, we find that the dead are rising as Osha the moon maiden kindles her light in the darkness and makes the shadows move. This quote is talking about the statues of the Kings of Winter and Kings in the North, which are shifting in the light of the torch and appearing to rise. This is the green zombie theory again – when Osha appears as the fiery moon maiden who is also a burning tree woman, she fills the world with glare and causes the dead to rise. But not just any dead – Stark dead work very well as stand-ins for the last hero and his twelve dead companions. In particular, there are thirteen Stark names listed here, as we mentioned in the green zombie series, so this is probably ‘last hero math.’

In fact, check out some of those names of the Stark dead. One-eyed Lord Jonnel Stark, very interesting. Lord Donnor, like Donnor the flying reindeer whose name means thunder, and right after him, lord Beron, perhaps to remind us of Beric Dondarrion, the bearer of thunder. Lord Barth has a nickname not mentioned here – Barth Blacksword. The fact that he is ‘Lord’ Barth and not King Barth means he lived in the last 300 years, after Aegon’s conquest when the Kings in the North became simply Lords of Winterfell, and that means that he must have wielded the same Valyrian steel Ice that Ned does, which the Starks have supposedly have for at least four hundred years. That means the “black sword” nickname is referring to Ned’s ice, and this just goes to show I am right to call the “smoke dark” Valyrian steel swords “black swords.” It’s close enough, guy that emailed be about that one time!  chuckles Anyway, these are the types of guys you want to fight the Others. One-eyed thunder people with black swords. The children of the shy maiden!

In other words, think of this scene in the Stark crypts as parallel to the idea of Night’s Watch brothers being resurrected to swear their oaths inside a weirwood grove, with fiery Osha as the weirwood and the thirteen shifting Stark shadows as the last hero and his twelve. Needless to say, it’s highly suggestive that Jon once played the role of a dead spirit emerging from one of these crypts and has reoccurring dreams of the Stark dead waking from their slumber.

Now when Melisandre is like a light blooming in the darkness beneath Storm’s End and its soon-to-be-burned weirwood tree, she gives birth to the shadows with burning hearts which seem to parallel the Night’s Watch. That too is basically the same thing that happens here in the crypts – a moon maiden lights up in the darkness, “filling the world with orange glare,” and then we see symbols of the Night’s Watch being reborn as shadows. If Melisandre helps to facilitate the resurrection and rebirth of Jon, then we will have come full circle. And in fact, there’s a foreshadowing of that very thing in ADWD in the scene where Ghost comes to Mel’s beckon and won’t come back to Jon:

“I can show you.” Melisandre draped one slender arm over Ghost, and the direwolf licked her face. “The Lord of Light in his wisdom made us male and female, two parts of a greater whole. In our joining there is power. Power to make life. Power to make light. Power to cast shadows.”

“Shadows.” The world seemed darker when he said it.

“Every man who walks the earth casts a shadow on the world. Some are thin and weak, others long and dark. You should look behind you, Lord Snow. The moon has kissed you and etched your shadow upon the ice twenty feet tall.”

Jon glanced over his shoulder. The shadow was there, just as she had said, etched in moonlight against the Wall.

Mel is speaking of making a shadowbaby with Jon, but when it speaks of Jon’s shadow upon the ice and etched against the Wall, this seems more like a foreshadowing of Jon’s body being stored in the ice cells, as is foreshadowed elsewhere. Mel is talking about having sex with Jon, but the moonlight kissing Jon to cast his shadow as a giant sounds more like Melisandre the fiery moon woman giving Jon’s corpse the kiss of life, as Thoros does to Beric, and thereby raising Jon’s shadow as the new last hero. This is also the scene where Jon notices that Ghost’s eyes shine like Melisandre’s when they catch the light a certain way, and Mel even drapes her arm around Ghost as she speaks here, further emphasizing the similarity between Mel and the weirwood-colored wolf. She speaks of her and Jon joining to cast shadows, but what will happen is that Jon and Ghost will join together to make a shadow, which will be reborn Jon, or Ghost-Jon we might say. Man and wolf wed for life, as Varamyr’s teacher Haggon says. Mel however will almost certainly play a role in the process, a role we’ve been defining this whole time – the role of the shy maiden, the burning tree woman who gives birth to Azor Ahai reborn. It may be that Mel will play something of a midwife role for the rebirth of RLJazor Ahai.

There’s one other time Asha Greyjoy calls herself a shy maid, and it has more to say about Winterfell and greenseers. We’re going to talk Theon for a minute, but he’ll be interacting with weirwood maidens in every scene. This first is from ACOK when Asha visits Theon during his reign as the short-lived Lord of Winterfell:

Asha snorted back a laugh. “This Ser Rodrik may well feel the same manly need, did you think of that? You are blood of my blood, Theon, whatever else you may be. For the sake of the mother who bore us both, return to Deepwood Motte with me. Put Winterfell to the torch and fall back while you still can.”

“No.” Theon adjusted his crown. “I took this castle and I mean to hold it.”

His sister looked at him a long time. “Then hold it you shall,” she said, “for the rest of your life.” She sighed. “I say it tastes like folly, but what would a shy maid know of such things?” At the door she gave him one last mocking smile. “You ought to know, that’s the ugliest crown I’ve ever laid eyes on. Did you make it yourself?”

Winterfell is a stone tree and a labyrinth, as we know, so setting fire to it makes it a burning tree labyrinth – of course Asha the shy maid thinks that’s a great idea! Theon is choosing to be stuck in this stone tree labyrinth however – he always wanted to be a Stark, as Lady Barbrey Dustin observes. The Grey King is a man associated with living inside stone trees – stone weirwood ribs, to be exact – and as I mentioned, Theon transforms into a Grey King character after his stay at Chateau Ramsay. You can clearly see that in this description of him in ADWD at Ramsay’s wedding before the Winterfell heart tree:

Theon wore black and gold, his cloak pinned to his shoulder by a crude iron kraken that a smith in Barrowton had hammered together for him. But under the hood, his hair was white and thin, and his flesh had an old man’s greyish undertone. A Stark at last, he thought. 

The Grey King had grey flesh and lived to be a thousand years and seven, and Theon his descendant has become an old man with grey flesh – like I said, that’s pretty clear. His black iron kraken was hammered together in Barrowton – home of the possible grave of Garth the Green, who may have also been known as the Barrow King. The Barrow King is a dead Garth symbol, a winter king figure, as is the Grey King and of course the King of Winter, so this is all really consistent. Grey King’s beard was “as grey as a winter sea,” just as grey old man Theon is a Stark at last, one of the ghosts in Winterfell as he says.

What we are seeing here is a clear conflation of the Grey King and the idea of being the Lord of Winterfell, with Theon becoming a Stark by virtue of his Grey King-like grey flesh, and of course earlier Theon tried to play Lord of Winterfell.  There’s another description of Theon as the Grey King when Asha sees him in the snowstorm outside Winterfell, after Theon escaped with Jeyne Pool:

The old man … no one would ever think him comely. She had seen scarecrows with more flesh. His face was a skull with skin, his hair bone-white and filthy.

Theon the Grey King now has the scarecrow symbolism of the Night’s Watch and the King of Winter, so he is definitely sounding like an undead skinchanger or greenseer Night’s Watch figure. As it happens, there is also plenty of symbolism to suggest Theon being sacrificed to a heart tree. It’s suggested in ADWD, when Rowan the red-headed spearwife and her fellow spearwives catch Theon praying to the heart tree and contemplating his sins – they pull a knife on Theon, and despairingly he says to go on and kill him. Rowan herself promises Theon a nice quick death – again, this is in  front of the heart tree – and Theon actually pictures “his blood soaking into the ground to feed the heart tree” in that moment. I swear I don’t make this stuff up, it’s all right there in the book. Once again, it’s the same pattern, a burning ash tree woman is set to sacrifice a certain type of figure in front of a heart tree. According to our theory, the Grey King was an undead greenseer who was indeed sacrificed to a weirwood tree in order to become and immortal greenseer zombie, and that’s what Theon is showing us. The first part at least – it’s doubtful Theon will become an immortal zombie.. but who knows.

I probably should mention that Theon contains the root word theo, which means god, such as in the words theocracy or atheist. There is something godly about Theon, so perhaps a stunted form of immortality shall be his after all. All I have to say is that if zombie Theon rules the Iron Islands for a thousand years and seven after the story’s conclusion, you heard it here first.

Rowan also later threatens to rip Theon’s tongue out, and Theon, in that same conversation, says that there is blood on his hands, giving Theon weirwood stigmata symbolism that might also foreshadow his being sacrificed to the tree. Asha dubs Theon “the Prince of Fools,” so if he’s sacrificed, he will line up with all the sacrificed fools as well.

There’s a more symbolic foreshadowing of this that takes place at Winterfell during Theon’s short reign there. Theon had a nightmare – the one about the feast of the dead, actually, with dead Robert and Ned and pale Stark wraiths in the background and finally bleeding Robb and Grey wind storming through the doors with eyes burning. He wakes in fright, a drinks some wine to steady him- meaning he has a red mouth. The wine brings no solace however, and so he goes to the inner ward and starts loosing arrows at the archery butts until his fingers bleed. Then we get this quote, and recall that the broken tower at Winterfell is broken because it was struck by lightning, and therefore it can be used to represent  a burning tree:

Behind him the broken tower stood, its summit as jagged as a crown where fire had collapsed the upper stories long ago. As the sun moved, the shadow of the tower moved as well, gradually lengthening, a black arm reaching out for Theon Greyjoy. By the time the sun touched the wall, he was in its grasp. If I hang the girl, the northmen will attack at once, he thought as he loosed a shaft. If I do not hang her, they will know my threats are empty. He knocked another arrow to his bow. There is no way out, none.

I thought that was a pretty nice one – the black shadow arm of the crowned and lightning-blasted tower reaching for Theon is sweet, and of course it grasps him when the sun is about to set – because the Grey King and other winter king figures are like dead solar kings who get turned into shadows by the weirwood tree. The talk of hanging poor Beth Cassel, horrific in terms of the plot, is nevertheless a good bit of symbolism. House Cassel’s sigil has ten white wolves on a grey field, so Beth is something of a white wolf girl, a parallel to Ghost the direwolf who looks like a weirwood. If Theon were to hang such a girl, it will mean his own death as well he realizes, and that’s in keeping with all the mutual-death symbolism we have seen.

Now, I cannot avoid a very small Winds of Winter spoiler here. I’m not going to quote anything or give away anything major, so I really don’t think this is the type of thing where you need stick your fingers in your ears – it’s a ridiculously small spoiler, and it’s from the very first spoiler chapter he released, several years ago at this point… but fair warning. Basically, the foreshadowing of Theon being sacrificed to a heart tree continues, and there is some hinting that it could be at the heart tree growing on a wooded island a few miles from Winterfell, at frozen lake where Stannis’s army is camped.

Ok, wave goodbye to Theon – what’s he doing in our weirwood goddess essay anyway, right? Let’s finish this section with Asha Greyjoy, who has a bit of symbolism in the well-travelled Wayward Bride chapter that applies here. Our beloved author pretty much dedicated this entire chapter to finding different ways to personify trees as human.  We had Northmen dressed as trees, trees that hated the Ironborn in the wooden hearts, trees whispering to one another in some secret language, Asha’s recollection stories about that time “when the greenseers turned the trees to warriors,” which is one of the better clues in favor of my theory about resurrected skinchanger Night’s Watch brothers. But perhaps best of all is this bit:

The trees were huge and dark, somehow threatening.  Their limbs wove through one another and creaked with every breath of wind, and the higher branches scratched at the face of the moon.

There’s another great line about the trees that’s a lot like this, which, upon further review, has a new tidbit for us:

“West first,” Asha insisted. “West until the sun comes up. Then north.” She turned to Rolfe the Dwarf and Roggon Rustbeard, her best riders. “Scout ahead and make sure our way is clear. I want no surprises when we reach the shore. If you come on wolves, ride back to me with word.”

“If we must,” promised Roggon through his huge red beard.

After the scouts had vanished into the trees, the rest of the ironborn resumed their march, but the going was slow. The trees hid the moon and stars from them, and the forest floor beneath their feet was black and treacherous.

A dwarf and a guy with red hair and beard “vanish into the trees,” upon which time the trees hide the moon and stars. That sounds like Azor Ahai as the fiery bearded guy, and the dwarf as a children of the forest also involved in the sacrifice somehow – both went into the trees.

There’s also a line to match Jon’s scene in the weirwood grove of nine:

The sun was sinking behind the tall pines of the wolfswood as Asha climbed the wooden steps to the bedchamber that had once been Galbart Glover’s. She had drunk too much wine and her head was pounding.

The sun sank behind the wolfswood – again we are given an echo of Skol and Hati, the wolves that ate the sun and moon. The Wolfswood is a place that still has weirwoods growing wild, it should be noted, so it’s definitely a good union of Ghost swallowing sun king Jon and the idea of the trees swallowing the sun. At the moment the sun sinks, Asha the shy moon maiden’s head is pounding – she drank too much wine.  But what she actually had is too much sun king blood – this is simply another instance of the weirwood moon maiden drinking the blood of a sacrificed solar person, as we have seen many times today.

Now most of the trees in this chapter are out to get Asha – she’s not on team tree, in other words. She represents the moon pulled down by the greenseers – that’s why the trees are out to get her and why she has all the drowning / sacrificed moon symbolism. But at the end of the chapter, she nearly gets sacrificed to a tree and is treated like a tree in the process, which seems like a depiction of Asha as a moon maiden-turned falling moon meteor who strikes the tree, sets it on fire, and merges with it. She’s fighting her last foe of the battle, a bald and bearded Northman, and…

His axe was shivering her shield, cracking the wood on the downswing, tearing off long pale splinters when he wrenched it back. Soon she would have only a tangle of kindling on her arm. She backed away and shook free of the ruined shield, then backed away some more and danced left and right and left again to avoid the downrushing axe.

Alright, so her shield is being chopped like a tree, pale splinters flying, and then it’s described as kindling to make us think of burning wood, and tangled to make us think of tree roots. She’s dancing like our fiery dancers, and then..

And then her back came up hard against a tree, and she could dance no more. The wolf raised the axe above his head to split her head in two. Asha tried to slip to her right, but her feet were tangled in some roots, trapping her. She twisted, lost her footing, and the axehead crunched against her temple with a scream of steel on steel. The world went red and black and red again. Pain crackled up her leg like lightning, and far away she heard her northman say, “You bloody cunt,” as he lifted up his axe for the blow that would finish her.

This one is pretty vivid – she’s back hard against the tree, her feet are tangled in the roots, trapping her, and then she’s struck by an axe which makes pain crackle up her leg likelightning as the world goes red and black and red again.  The bloody cunt language, as we have noted before, is a call-out to the bloody birthing bed and the symbolic moon blood that came with the moon meteors. Asha is kindling, being axe-chopped like a tree, and struck by lighting, all of which makes her the tree, but she is also sacrificed to a tree and trapped in the roots like a greenseer would be.

Like I said, she seems to playing the role of tree and sacrifice, like Cat or Masha Heddle, and the meaning of this could be that Nissa Nissa was at first a woman who sacrificed to the trees as part of the ceremony to give it a face.  This would allow Azor Ahai to then wed the tree and enter it. I really try not to get too specific with these kinds of details, at the risk of over-interpreting… I prefer to focus on getting the main idea and presenting a range of options, leaving the rest for everyone to interpret as they will. You can see what is going on here – the moon maiden sacrifice and tree struck by lightning ideas are happening at the same time.

As Asha loses consciousness, we get the last line of the chapter, which now hits like a ton of bricks: “She dreamt of red hearts burning, and a black stag in a golden wood with flame streaming from his antlers.”

Struck by lightning, the Ash-a moon maiden dreams of burning hearts and a flaming black stag in a golden wood. The fiery black stag is inside the wood, giving it a burning red heart and setting it on fire, and this happens only as the ash tree / moon maiden is sacrificed and struck with lightning.  Of course, this is not just a burning stag symbol that appears, it’s Stannis, second-rate Azor Ahai reborn impersonator, complete with flaming sword. That’s pretty much the whole sequence right there!

Before we leave this scene, there’s a little bonus weirwood maiden, a fearsome young Ironborn woman known only as Hagen’s daughter:

Behind her Grimtongue shouted, “Nine, and damn you all.” Hagen’s daughter burst naked from beneath the trees with two wolves at her heels. Asha wrenched loose a throwing axe and sent it flying end over end to take one of them in the back. When he fell, Hagen’s daughter stumbled to her knees, snatched up his sword, stabbed the second man, then rose again, smeared with blood and mud, her long red hair unbound, and plunged into the fight.

Naked and bloody, much like Melisandre giving birth, kissed by fire hair like so many others, and wielding a sword like Nissa Nissa reborn the vengeful tree spirit. She bursts from “beneath the trees,” and you know that means. You do, right? Ok. Sweet.

Alright, we’re all done with shy maidens for now, and for those of you who have stuck with us this far, we have a special treat for you. There is one final, spectacular weirwood stigmata, just for you.

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Very Near a Seventh Skin

This final section is brought to you by the generous support of Sir Cozmo of House Astor, High Priest of the Church of Starry Wisdom, whose House Words are ‘We Walk at Dawn.’

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A little book we call A Dance with Dragons begins with a prologue from the perspective of one Varamyr Sixskins, a naughty skinchanger if there ever was one. And by the way, we want you as our Patreon patron, but it’s also a good idea to throw Radio Westeros a couple of bucks, because then you will get access to their patron-only episode all about the Varamyr prologue, and it’s one of the best ones they’ve ever done, actually.

In any case, as you might guess, this is going to come down to the end of the prologue when Varamyr attempts to leap into the skin of Thistle the Spearwife. The body-snatching. Obviously, since Varamyr is the skinchanger attempting to invade someone else, he’ll be playing the role of the comet (or more precisely, we can say that his invading spirit is like the comet), and Thistle is set up to be the tree woman. But there’s one passage from the beginning that we can’t skip, because we have some symbols that we recognize well: a dead or dying fire, and an ember in the ashes:

That was when he noticed that his fire had gone out.

Only a grey-and-black tangle of charred wood remained, with a few embers glowing in the ashes. There’s still smoke, it just needs wood. Gritting his teeth against the pain, Varamyr crept to the pile of broken branches Thistle had gathered before she went off hunting, and tossed a few sticks onto the ashes. “Catch,” he croaked. “Burn.” He blew upon the embers and said a wordless prayer to the nameless gods of wood and hill and field.

Consider what Varamyr is doing here: he’s praying to the Old Gods.. to help him start a fire.. with the ember in the ashes.  “Even an ember in the ashes can still ignite a great blaze,” as the saying goes.  So check out the clever wordplay in the very next paragraph:

The gods gave no answer. After a while, the smoke ceased to rise as well. Already the little hut was growing colder. Varamyr had no flint, no tinder, no dry kindling. He would never get the fire burning again, not by himself. “Thistle,” he called out, his voice hoarse and edged with pain. “Thistle!”

He would never get the fire burning, by himself – he needs dry kindling, and Thistle! But Thistle’s name is practically synonymous with dry kindling already, and indeed, she is about to play the role of the ash tree woman. Varamyr will be trying to become the ember in her ashes, and together, they will make a fairly horrific version of the burning tree. Near the beginning of this prologue, she’s described as “a spearwife tough as an old root, warty, windburnt, and wrinkled.” The things that jump out to us here, of course, are the ideas of her being burnt, or being like an old root.

Varamyr’s voice yields up a couple of clues here – its hoarse, and this gives him a bit of horse symbolism, like many of the people playing the skinchanger comet role (Martin used the ‘hoarse voice’ description on Cressen in his final moment as well). His voice is also ‘edged with pain,’ making it sword-like. Here I simply have to recommend an outstanding essay on Westeros.org called “The Killing Word: A Reexamination of the Prologue.” I keep mentioning this person called Ravenous Reader who has been serving up some great observations and catches to the podcast lately, and this essay is one of hers, so check it out. It has to do with the link between songs and spells and magic words and implements of killing like knives and swords. It goes well with the end of this essay, because the AGOT prologue that she is looking at and the ADWD prologue with Varamyr are linked in many ways.

Back at the scene with Varamyr, he leaves the hut and, seeing a weirwood tree, walks over to it and finds himself a weirwood crutch.   I would take as a symbol of a greenseer using a weirwood to spirit walk, or perhaps more simply a sign to indicate that Varamyr is playing the symbolic role of a greenseer when he invades Thistle, who is acting like the tree.

The snow had stopped falling, but the wind was rising, filling the air with crystal, slashing at his face as he struggled through the drifts, the wound in his side opening and closing again. His breath made a ragged white cloud. When he reached the weirwood tree, he found a fallen branch just long enough to use as a crutch. Leaning heavily upon it, he staggered toward the nearest hut. Perhaps the villagers had forgotten something when they fled … a sack of apples, some dried meat, anything to keep him alive until Thistle returned.

He was almost there when his crutch snapped beneath his weight, and his legs went out from under him. How long he sprawled there with his blood reddening the snow Varamyr could not have said.

Wouldn’t ya know it, his crutch breaks – giving him a weirwood version of the broken branch symbolism of a dead greenseer or a corrupted greenseer. He falls to the snow, with his legs being mentioned as having went out from under him, reminding us of another crippled skinchanger we know well. Then we see Varamyr’s blood reddening the snow, the familiar solar blood sacrifice on the snow symbol we examined last time at the grove of nine and elsewhere, and this helps to confirm Varamyr as a solar character or comet character. Varamyr also has a “wound in his side,” perhaps a callout to Christ’s spear-wound in the side and Odin’s very similar impalement on Yggdrasil. A couple of lines later, as Varamyr thinks about dying, he recalls Haggon’s words, which serve to reinforce the sacrificed skinchanger theme: “South of the Wall, the kneelers hunt us down and butcher us like pigs.”

Varamyr sees the weirwood watching him and weighing him, as if he has been sacrificed in front of the tree and is now standing in final judgement.  He briefly loses consciousness and dreams of one of his deaths inside his animals, and then, as he is on the brink of death – and symbolically, he is dead, having been sacrificed in front of the tree – we get a depiction of his spirit leaving his body and going in to the tree, which means into Thistle:

Varamyr woke suddenly, violently, his whole body shaking. “Get up,” a voice was screaming, “get up, we have to go. There are hundreds of them.” The snow had covered him with a stiff white blanket. So cold. When he tried to move, he found that his hand was frozen to the ground. He left some skin behind when he tore it loose. “Get up,” she screamed again, “they’re coming.”

Thistle had returned to him. She had him by the shoulders and was shaking him, shouting in his face. Varamyr could smell her breath and feel the warmth of it upon cheeks gone numb with cold. Now, he thought, do it now, or die.

He summoned all the strength still in him, leapt out of his own skin, and forced himself inside her.

Thistle arched her back and screamed.

I’ll just cut in here to point out that Thistle is arching like a crescent moon, or like the arch of a doorway.  She’s also emitting what would seem to be the Nissa Nissa cry as the invading spirit enters her like Lightbringer entering Nissa Nissa.  Next we will get a vivid depiction of the merging and the weirwood transformation:

Abomination. Was that her, or him, or Haggon? He never knew. His old flesh fell back into the snowdrift as her fingers loosened. The spearwife twisted violently, shrieking. His shadowcat used to fight him wildly, and the snow bear had gone half-mad for a time, snapping at trees and rocks and empty air, but this was worse. “Get out, get out!” he heard her own mouth shouting. Her body staggered, fell, and rose again, her hands flailed, her legs jerked this way and that in some grotesque dance as his spirit and her own fought for the flesh. She sucked down a mouthful of the frigid air, and Varamyr had half a heartbeat to glory in the taste of it and the strength of this young body before her teeth snapped together and filled his mouth with blood. She raised her hands to his face. He tried to push them down again, but the hands would not obey, and she was clawing at his eyes. Abomination, he remembered, drowning in blood and pain and madness. When he tried to scream, she spat their tongue out.

Alright, a lot just happened – she’s staggering and going mad and doing a grotesque dance.  Varamyr was “staggering” too with the weirwood crutch, and all this mad dancing is Odin’s shamanic dancing and also a nod to all the fiery dancers we keep seeing at Lightbringer forging parties, which notoriously go on and on till the break of dawn.  The line about her twisting violently is notable, as it’s a match for the twisted weirwood at the Nightfort.  Then she bites “their” tongue, filling their mouth with blood and eventually spitting it out after clawing out their eyes.  I’m sorry to keep quoting all these super violent scenes, but Odin symbolism (and much of mythology in general) is very violent.  In any case, the symbolism is the thing here, and we cannot ask for a more vivid example of a woman being invaded by a dying skinchanger’s spirit and turning into a freaking wierwood death goddess of some kind.

Just to make things even more clear, behold the very next paragraph:

The white world turned and fell away. For a moment it was as if he were inside the weirwood, gazing out through carved red eyes as a dying man twitched feebly on the ground and a madwoman danced blind and bloody underneath the moon, weeping red tears and ripping at her clothes.

First Varamyr goes inside a woman and turns her into a weirwood, then he goes into the weirwood and regards himself.  The dancing and madness are re-emphasized, and the red, bloody tears are mentioned specifically. Thistle dances underneath the moon, which reminds me of the scene where the moon is the head of the Shy Maid’s mast body and Osha’s head floats above the flame that is like a girl on her toes. Beyond that, the moon simply adds the extra witchy vibe to this haunting scene. I’m not going to pull the quote, but Varamyr’s spirit ends its trip on the cold wind in the body of one of his wolves… One-Eye.  That’s right… he becomes a one-eyed man-wolf.  Just to make sure you know we are talking about Odin stuff when we see greenseers and skinchangers merging with trees and undergoing death transformations.

Did you notice how it said “the white world fell away”?  In the Asha scene where she is quasi-sacrificed before the tree and struck with a lightning-like blow, it said “the world went red and black and red again” – I mean maybe it’s a coincidence, but it seems like something traumatic is happening to the world in these moments. And when Varamyr finally finds himself inside of One-Eye, it says “half the world was dark,” and when they watch the advance of the army of the dead a moment later, it says “Below, the world had turned to ice.” Osha’s torch like a lady on her toes fills the world with orange glare. Something along the same lines happens twice when Bran skinchanges Hodor climbing the hill to Bloodraven’s cave: it says “Bran felt the world slide sideways as the big stableboy spun violently around,” and a moment later “The world moved dizzily around him.”  I mean it’s not breaking news that I something bad happened to pretty much the whole world, but the point is that it happens when the sacrificed greenseer enters the tree. I would say that this is a corroboration of my hypothesis that Azor Ahai entering the weirwoodnet was an important part of the Long Night chain of events.

There is a lot more going on in this prologue, specifically having to do with the Others all things related to ice magic.  Thistle ends her life as a blue eyed corpse, with her frozen blood like ten pink knives hanging from her fingers, and the weirwood itself in this scene is “a pale shadow armored in ice,” which is language that evokes the Others and Jon Snow both. Varamyr has a death transformation experience inside a weirwood maiden, and then experiences something like plunging through the surface of an icy lake, which could be symbolic of crossing the Wall and battling the Others, or even turning into an Other, armored in ice. We really can’t go there right now, because we haven’t even begun to talk about the Others yet. But we shall return to solve the mysteries of ice, have no fear. First we need to finish with this weirwood compendium, and we have a couple more episodes planned in this series.

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Until next time…

 

So according to our interpretation of the myth, the sun and moon are in conjunction when the comet hits – the forbidden eclipse alignment – and that’s more or less what is happening here with Jaime and Cersei being “on top of one another,” as it were, when Bran climbs up like the comet to intercept. Think about it as a three-way conjunction at that point, of sun and moon and now, the comet. The comet can be seen as the interloper in the solar system, the wanderer who disrupts things, just as Bran interrupts Jaime and Cersei.

Then, after they have a short interaction, Bran falls. He now represents burning brand, the lightning bolt, and various other forms of the fiery moon meteors. Bran as the rising comet is Bran as the Morningstar, and Bran as the falling moon meteors is Bran as the Evenstar. At each pivot point, there is a transformation, naturally. As a plot point, Bran’s fall from the tower pretty much sets off a cascade of transformations for basically every character in the book, and it also the starts the wheels in motion on the War of the Five Kings, so it makes for a perfect analog to the comet striking the moon and setting of a series of chain reactions.

We ended the last episode talking about hanging, and I actually found a nice confluence of hanging and the red comet and Bran in that very scene where he falls from the tower. First of all, George uses hanging words to describe Bran twice while he’s outside of Jaime’s window. As soon as he hears their voices, it says:

Bran hung, listening, suddenly afraid to go on. They might glimpse his feet if he tried to swing by.

And then again a short moment later while ‘riding’ the gargoyle:

Bran sat astride the gargoyle, tightened his legs around it, and swung himself around, upside down. He hung by his legs and slowly stretched his head down toward the window. The world looked strange upside down. A courtyard swam dizzily below him, its stones still wet with melted snow.

The top of the tower is where Bran is symbolically struck by lightning, like the bad little boy who climbed too high, and this represents his transformational moment where he reaches for the fire of the gods. In his dreams of falling, his fall is associated with the crows pecking his eyes out, another reference to death transformation by way of Odin losing his eye to gain cosmic wisdom. Therefore it makes sense to show Bran hanging like Odin here – it’s just another symbol of Bran transcending death and opening his third eye through self-sacrifice. He’s hanging from the tower in order to see – that’s kind of the fundamental thing about being hung on the weirwood tree; it enables you to see. Notice that it’s again implied that Bran is hanging up in the heavens as it says “the world looked strange upside down.”

This is all taking place at the top of the First Keep, the oldest part of Winterfell which is directly above the entrance to the crypts, and the thing is… we saw the red comet hanged here too in another Bran chapter of AGOT:

He could see the comet hanging above the Guards Hall and the Bell Tower, and farther back the First Keep, squat and round, its gargoyles black shapes against the bruised purple dusk. Once Bran had known every stone of those buildings, inside and out; he had climbed them all, scampering up walls as easily as other boys ran down stairs. Their rooftops had been his secret places, and the crows atop the broken tower his special friends.

And then he had fallen.

The comet is hanging above the First Keep and its gargoyles, and Bran hung from the the gargoyles of the First Keep. Bran looks at the comet hanging there, and thinks about how he used to climb up in the same place. At the beginning of the chapter where he falls from the tower, Bran is thinking generally about climbing the towers of Winterfell, he recalls Maester Luwin referring to the castle as a ‘stone tree,’ evoking the idea of a petrified weirwood tree. Just as with the scenes in the Riverlands we looked at last episode, we see again that Martin likes to present several death transcendence metaphors in a cluster, presumably to clue us in to the idea that they are related to one another. The top of the First Keep is exactly where we should see various symbols of death transformation, so I’m inclined to see an intentional parallel between Bran and the comet, with both being hung like Odin from the ‘stone tree’ that is Winterfell.

So, sorry everyone, upon further review, Bran does not appear to be a moon. I got that one wrong. I am sure it will happen again, and I won’t hesitate to tell you when it does.  Thanks to all the collaborators on the forums for steering me straight here and elsewhere and thereby improving the podcast for everyone. 🙂 As I’ve said many times, Mythical Astronomy is much the better for your collaboration, so cheers. While I’m at it, I should probably also mention that I was pronouncing the word ‘Yggdrasil’ incorrectly last time, so we’ll get that right going forward. Now let’s get married to trees!

As always, we owe our thanks to Martin Lewis of the Echoes of Ice and Fire blog and the Amethyst Koala for their fine vocal performances, to Animals as Leaders for allowing us to use their music, to all of our lovely Patrons in the starry host, and to GRRM for writing these wonderful novels. Oh, and, we’ve put our podcasts up on youtube, so check out the lucifermeanslightbringer channel on youtube.

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The Arboreal Wedding

This section comes to you courtesy of our newest Zodiac patron, Lord Starfoot, the Last Shepherd of Valyria, earthly avatar of Heavenly House Capricorn and Capturer of the Horn 

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In the last episode, Garth of the Gallows, we saw that the Yggdrasil tree is in one sense Odin’s horse that he can ride to travel through the nine realms of the Norse universe, but in another sense also a part of Odin. Odin’s physical body is hanged upon his own tree, “sacrificing himself to himself,” but his spirit can use the tree to traverse the cosmos – because remember, celestial world trees represent a framework of the entire universe, so if you’re able to ride that sort of tree and merge with that sort of tree, it follows that you will have access to the entire cosmos, as Odin does. We talked about how well this compares to the way that a greenseer’s physical body is strung up in the weirwood roots to enable his spirit to travel, and how the greenseer and weirwood form a symbiotic relationship reminiscent of Yggdrasil and Odin. It should be noted that a skinchanger and their animal function the same way – it’s a symbiotic relationship.

We’re going to have another packed episode today where we talk about a lot of things, but the overarching topic will be this relationship between the greenseer and the tree, and more specifically we’ll be talking about Azor Ahai going into the weirwoodnet. Let’s start off by looking at the quotes which establish symbiotic relationships of the greenseers, beginning with the skinchangers and their animals. Jojen tells Bran what the deal is in ACOK:

“Part of you is Summer, and part of Summer is you.  You know that, Bran.”

Jojen again in ACOK:

“The wolf dreams are no true dreams. You have your eye closed tight whenever you’re awake, but as you drift off it flutters open and your soul seeks out its other half. The power is strong in you.”

And here’s Jon Snow in ADWD:

Ghost was closer than a friend. Ghost was part of him. 

Ok, so we got that; they are two halves of a whole, and it is the same with the greenseers and the trees.  Bloodraven uses the metaphor of a marriage to describe the greenseer – weirwood relationship when he refers to eating the weirwood paste as being wedded to the tree in ADWD:

“Your blood makes you a greenseer,” said Lord Brynden. “This will help awaken your gifts and wed you to the trees.”

Bran did not want to be married to a tree … but who else would wed a broken boy like him? A thousand eyes, a hundred skins, wisdom deep as the roots of ancient trees. A greenseer. He ate.

When two hearts beat as one, they wed, even even it’s a human heart and a heart tree.  Wedding the trees means becoming part of a symbiotic relationship, and it’s this merger of greenseer to tree that constitutes the burning tree symbol, which is one form of the fire of the gods. It’s just like when the sun and moon combine to make Lightbringer, the other form of the fire of the gods. The wedding of the greenseer to the trees is an alchemical wedding of a different type – an arboreal wedding, you might say, especially if you are someone who has a podcast and you need to come up with passingly clever section titles – but both of these magical weddings involve two becoming one, and in more than the typical sense of a man and wife.

Take a look at the specific lines which have lead to me dub Dany’s dragon-hatching as “the alchemical wedding,” so you have it fresh in your mind to compare to the wedding of the greenseers and the trees:

She had sensed the truth of it long ago, Dany thought as she took a step closer to the conflagration, but the brazier had not been hot enough. The flames writhed before her like the women who had danced at her wedding, whirling and singing and spinning their yellow and orange and crimson veils, fearsome to behold, yet lovely, so lovely, alive with heat. Dany opened her arms to them, her skin flushed and glowing. This is a wedding, too, she thought.

It’s a wedding in a funeral pyre, attended by the familiar fiery dancers, and it’s a wedding that produces various symbols of Lightbringer. One of the main takeaways from the last episode concerning Odin’s hanging on Yggdrasil is that it is a metaphor to express the idea of transcendence and transformation through death, and that this compares to a greenseer sacrificing his physical body to gain access to the weirwoodnet and outliving his mortal years once inside. The alchemical wedding scene gives us the same theme, as Drogo dies but appears to be reborn, and Dany symbolically dies, miraculously transcends death, and is reborn in character and spirit.

As I said, it’s not only a death transformation for our solar and lunar characters, it’s also a merging of the two, a wedding. A moment earlier in that same chapter, Dany’s inner monologue spells out the fusing-as-one concept which is the main point here:

And now the flames reached her Drogo, and now they were all around him. His clothing took fire, and for an instant the khal was clad in wisps of floating orange silk and tendrils of curling smoke, grey and greasy. Dany’s lips parted and she found herself holding her breath. Part of her wanted to go to him as Ser Jorah had feared, to rush into the flames to beg for his forgiveness and take him inside her one last time, the fire melting the flesh from their bones until they were as one, forever.

Returning to Bran’s ADWD chapter in Bloodraven’s cave, we see that wedding the trees also involves two merging as one:

“Close your eyes,” said the three-eyed crow. “Slip your skin, as you do when you join with Summer. But this time, go into the roots instead. Follow them up through the earth, to the trees upon the hill, and tell me what you see.”

Bran closed his eyes and slipped free of his skin. Into the roots, he thought. Into the weirwood. Become the tree. For an instant he could see the cavern in its black mantle, could hear the river rushing by below. Then all at once he was back home again.

That’s pretty clear – skinchanging and greenseeing means that the greenseer becomes one with the animal or tree they are wedding.  Forging Lightbringer means the same, and you guys know the basic formula by now: sun + moon = Lightbringer. It’s the bastard brother of R+L=J, S+M=L.  The idea is that the sun impregnates the moon with its comet seed, which carries its fiery essence. Although it’s the comet that physically merges with the moon, the eclipse language of the moon “wandering too close to the sun and cracking from its heat” when it gave birth to the dragon meteors provides a visual reinforcement of the main theme: sun + moon = Lightbringer.

Notice all the language at the alchemical wedding that describes Dany as being penetrated by the fire: she wants to rush into the flames and take Drogo inside her; she famously declares that she “has the fire inside her” as she walks into the pyre; and one of her her nicknames is “the bride of fire.” When she was giving birth to Rhaego the lizard baby and having her wake the dragon dream, it says that “she could feel the heat inside her, a terrible burning in her womb.” What this is showing us is that the solar king’s fiery seed sets the moon maiden on fire, and again this equates to the sun appearing to set the moon on fire with his dragon seed comet.

The sun weds the moon by sending its fire into it… the greenseers wed the trees by sending their spirits into them. Both weddings produce a symbol of the fire of the gods.

I think you might be able to see where this is going. There’s a pretty great as above, so below thing developing here with these two forms of godly fire, which I have nicknamed ‘meteor fire’ and ‘weirwood fire.’

Up in the sky, the sun transforms itself by sending its ‘dragon seed’ into the moon via the original comet, setting the moon on fire. The comet and moon merge and consume each other (and again, visually, it looks as though the sun and moon are merging and consuming each other), and the end results are symbols of Lightbringer: a darkened sun, a reborn red comet, and fiery dragon meteors.

Down on the earth, the dragon greenseer transforms himself by sending his consciousness into the weirwood, setting the tree ‘on fire’ and activating it for use. The greenseer and weirwood merge, consuming each other, and the end result is the other symbol of Lightbringer and the fire of the gods: the burning tree.

In other words, just as I said that I think Bran is playing the role of the comet in his scene with Jaime and Cersei atop the tower, it seems that the greenseer or skinchanger usually plays the role of the sun – or more often, its comet. Perhaps the best way to say it is that the body of the greenseer can be the sun, and the comet represents his spirit, his dragon consciousness, which he can project into other things. The weirwoods, meanwhile, would seem to represent the moon, the recipient of the fiery dragon. The latter is no breaking news; the weirwood / moon associations are reinforced throughout the series, and I bet you can name a couple off of the top of your head. We first saw it at the moon door in the Eyrie in AGOT:

A narrow weirwood door stood between two slender marble pillars, a crescent moon carved in the white wood.

Arya sees weirwood moons on the carved wooden doors of the House of Black and White in ASOS:

The left-hand door was made of weirwood pale as bone, the right of gleaming ebony. In their center was a carved moon face; ebony on the weirwood side, weirwood on the ebony. The look of it reminded her somehow of the heart tree in the godswood at Winterfell. The doors are watching me, she thought.

It’s a weirwood and ebony moon-face yin-yang!  That pattern is repeated with the chairs in the House of Black and White: black ebony chairs with white weirwood moon faces and weirwood chairs with ebony moon faces. And then of course we have the weirwood face known as the Black Gate beneath the Nightfort, an old friend to us by now, which emits a soft glow “like milk and moonlight.”

I think it’s clear that the weirwoods are playing the lunar role, being impregnated by a fiery dragon seed, someone like Brandon the burning brand or Brynden the dragon-blooded greenseer or the original Azor Ahai himself. The result of this wedding, this joining of two hearts that beat as one, is ‘Lightbringer the burning tree,’ if you will.

And yes – I realize the weirwood is starting to sound a lot like Nissa Nissa.  I did just say that it correlates to the moon impregnated by the comet, and that when this happens, it produces a version of Lightbringer. And indeed, there are some very important symbolic overlap between the weirwoods and the idea of Nissa Nissa, as they both wed Azor Ahai and become mothers of different versions of Azor Ahai reborn and Lightbringer. First we will talk about the idea of Azor Ahai going into the tree and setting it on fire, and then we’ll talk about Nissa Nissa and weirwoods as the grand finale…. because it’s really cool.

Ok, check this out.  Consider the weirwood tree. In fact, to set the mood, here’s the very first description we get of one, the heart tree in the Winterfell Godswood from AGOT:

At the center of the grove an ancient weirwood brooded over a small pool where the waters were black and cold. “The heart tree,” Ned called it. The weirwood’s bark was white as bone, its leaves dark red, like a thousand bloodstained hands. A face had been carved in the trunk of the great tree, its features long and melancholy, the deep-cut eyes red with dried sap and strangely watchful.

It’s red leaves look like “a thousand blood-stained hands” and elsewhere its canopy looks like “a blaze of flame.” It has a face carved into its bone-white trunk, usually unpleasant or angry looking, and that face weeps bloody tears and appears to have a mouth full of blood as well. Basically, it looks like a bloody, burning tree person whose flesh has melted off, just like Dany imagines “the fire melting the flesh from their bones until they were as one, forever” as she goes into the pyre.

Here’s the point: I believe that we can essentially consider the weirwood as a portrait of the burning moon, as if it had been frozen in the moment of its incineration.

Recall the description of the weirwood as a “a pale giant frozen in time.”  It’s actually more like a giant burning tree frozen in time, forever burning but not being consumed. It would seem to be George R. R. Martin’s own version of Moses’s burning bush which was not consumed, in which a terrifying angel appeared and spoke to Moses with the voice of god. Indeed, this may be an important part of the mix in terms of weirwood symbolism – the burning bush is a well known symbol of the spirit of God incarnating on earth, and that seems to be exactly the role played by the animated weirwoods, which essentially look like eternally burning trees and act as the repository for the collective consciousness referred to as “the Old Gods.”

The weirwoods as trees that burn without being consumed also make a great analog to a glass candle, which “burns but is not consumed” according to Marwyn the Mage in AFFC.  The candles can be used to see over long distances and enter people’s dreams and god knows what else, and the weirwoods can do very similar things for a greenseer. I’m sure we’ll eventually do a side by side comparison of the two here at some point, but you can see the parallels right away. Now that we have linked the weirwoods with a certain kind of fire – what I am calling ‘weirwood fire’ is really more of a spiritual fire, like the idea of the Holy Spirit – these parallels stand out all the more.

I’ve made a pretty big to-do about black moon meteors – I think that’s safe to say. If the weirwoods represent the moon at the moment of its incineration, we need some black meteor symbols, don’t we? That role is played by the black ravens, which perch on the branches of weirwoods “like black leaves,” as it says in AFFC. You may recall the scene with Coldhands where the ravens “descend in black clouds” and blot out the moon and sky, or when they “erupt” from the trees on “night-black wings” with sharp cries and sharper beaks, or the symbolism of the dark messenger that brings dark words and how that also applies to the comet, the red messenger and the harbinger of doom. And the people who send those night-black-winged attackers into battle are the greenseers, just as… well you know.  Just as the greenseers broke the moon and called down the moon meteors, according to some theory I heard on the internet somewhere.

I would actually say that ravens are among the most vivid and important symbols of the black moon meteors –  they erupt from the burning moon tree in black clouds which are capable of blotting out the heavenly lights. Each different thing used to symbolize the moon meteors represents some unique aspect of them, and one of the main things the ravens emphasize are the black clouds which blotted out the sun. The Valyrian steel swords accomplish the same thing by virtue of being called “smoke-dark,” and the same goes for Robb’s direwolf Grey Wind, who is also called “smoke-dark.” Black ravens, black dragon swords, and dark hellhounds are all attacking, biting projectile symbols which do a great job of showing a striking meteor, so it makes sense to also wrap them in the symbolism of the clouds of darkness the meteor impacts caused. Plus when they move, they look like a meteor trailing dark smoke.

Thus, returning to our burning moon weirwood portrait, it seams to have three components. First, the pale wood of the tree simply serves to suggest the idea of a standard, whitish-silver looking moon. The fact that weirwood wood petrifies in place and turns to pale stone also encourages us to connect its white wood with pale moon stone.  Second part, the blood and flame colored, hand-shaped leaves and bloody eyes and mouth show us the moon in the moment of fiery impregnation, when it had ‘the fire inside her,’ as they say, and here the bone white wood may also be implying a moon stripped of its skin. Third, the black ravens show us the black meteors that erupt from the burning moon and black clouds of darkness that they caused.

The blood and fire, hand-shaped leaves also give us the familiar symbolism of the ‘fiery hand of god’ (the one that flings the meteors). You remember the sock puppet analogy, right? The moon is like a sock puppet that the sun animates with its fiery comet, and together they creates the burning hand symbol. This is exactly the same as Azor Ahai slipping his fiery dragon consciousness inside the weirwoodnet to create the burning tree symbol. The weirwood is like a big wooden hand puppet that the greenseer can use to reach out with, which he does by slipping inside it and making it do things. The moon is like a closed stone fist that the sun can use to reach out with, which it does by slipping a little bit of its fire inside it and making it.. ‘do things’… things like flinging a handful of burning meteors on to the Planetos.

We have discussed the red-to-black color shift of the blood of people who undergo fire transformation many times – we dedicated a whole episode to the idea of the moon having its symbolic ‘moon blood’ burned black by the comet, and how that is paralleled by Daenerys and Melisandre and several others who have their blood turn black when they have the fire inside them. This important red to black blood transformation is twice hinted at with the bloody hands and face of the weirwood, first in this scene from ACOK with Arya in the Harrenhall godswood:

The light of the moon painted the limbs of the weirwood silvery white as she made her way toward it, but the five-pointed red leaves turned black by night.

We even get the moon painting the weirwood as a bonus, and we saw much the same language at the nightfort scene as the weirwood reached up for the moon and was painted in silver moonlight. Even better to see the weirwood-moon connection here in this Arya scene alongside the leaves turning black by night as it encourages us to think about red moon blood turning black. We’ll come back to this very rich scene and Harrenhall in general in the future, have no fear.

The weirwoods have their blood turn black again in ADWD when Jon Snow and a handful of Night’s Watch brothers and recruits come to the weirwood grove of nine to have the recruits say their vows. This is actually a great scene to illustrate the idea of Azor Ahai going into the weirwood and the moon at the same time, so let’s go ahead and make this its own section.

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A Moon Shaped Grove

This section is sponsored through Patreon by the mysterious Wyrlane Dervish, woods witch of the Wolfswood, Earthly Avatar of Celestial House Scorpio

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Once again we return to one of our favorite places: the weirwood grove of nine. What we are going to see here are weirwoods that individually symbolize a burning moon, as we have just proposed, as well as an entire weirwood grove that collectively paints the portrait of a burning moon. The grove will be penetrated by Jon and his Night’s Watch brothers, and Lightbringer things will happen inside. All of these quotes will be from ADWD unless otherwise indicated, and we’ll start with the quote that shows the red-to-black blood transformation we just saw with Arya in the Harrenhall godswood:

The weirwoods rose in a circle around the edges of the clearing. There were nine, all roughly of the same age and size. Each one had a face carved into it, and no two faces were alike. Some were smiling, some were screaming, some were shouting at him. In the deepening glow their eyes looked black, but in daylight they would be blood-red, Jon knew. Eyes like Ghost’s.

First of all, we have nine weirwoods, perhaps a nod to the nine days Odin spent hanging on Yggdrasil. The nine weirwoods are in a circle, creating a nice round full moon shape, which will soon be penetrated by Jon and his fellow swords in the darkness.  Jon is the key here of course, as one of the two main incarnations of Azor Ahai reborn, and he’s armed with Valyrian steel. As they rush the clearing, we see the general theme of the scene presented to us, the weirwoods swallowing the sun:

Night was falling fast. The shafts of sunlight had vanished when the last thin slice of the sun was swallowed beneath the western woods. The pink snow drifts were going white again, the color leaching out of them as the world darkened. The evening sky had turned the faded grey of an old cloak that had been washed too many times, and the first shy stars were coming out.

Night was falling fast – did you catch that? One thinks of the Valyrian steel sword Nightfall, with its moonstone pommel, and the concept of falling moon meteor swords that caused the Long Night. There’s also a nice little call out to the starry cloak of Mithras which Beric Dondarrion also wears (and I like to imagine the Bloodstone Emperor running around in a starry cloak too for what it’s worth). The sky throws on this old starry cloak right after the woods swallow the sun, which is a nice depiction of Azor Ahai transforming into his darker alter ego, the Bloodstone Emperor, by being swallowed by the weirwoodnet. It’s also just a plain old good illustration of how nature mythology and mythical astronomy works: the myths are simply supposed to describe what happens in the cycles and seasons of the earth. Some cultures perceived the night sky as a kind of dark sun, so saying that the solar king turns dark and throws on his starry cloak when the world darkens is really just simple nature mythology. But it also makes for the seeds of a fantastic story about a solar king turning to darkness as he immerses himself in starry wisdom!

Of course the main event here is the symbol of the trees swallowing the sun. The sun is actually described as a slice, which nicely implies a solar sacrifice (like a sun king sliced open) as well as the idea of a sliced off piece of the sun, which is kind of how we talk about the comet when we describe it as the sun’s dragon seed or his dragon consciousness. That is the part swallowed by the trees and by the moon, and by Nissa Nissa.  Jon, by the way, is a Morningstar / Evenstar figure and a comet person, like Bran. As we’ve said before, the Morningstar is often regarded as a son of the sun in world mythology, most notably with Christianity, which aligns God the Father with the sun and Jesus, the son of God, with the Morningstar. In ASOIAF, the morningstar is the comet, and the comet can be regarded as a sliced off piece of the sun, a bit of the sun’s essence, as his dragon seed or his dragon consciousness. This is what goes into the moon and into the weirwoods.

In other words, the trees swallowing the last slice of the sun works in parallel to Jon slipping inside the weirwood grove. The circular grove also symbolizes the moon, and as a matter of fact we have seen the moon swallow the sun before in much the same language. This comes from a Tyrion chapter of ADWD:

Only the brightest stars were visible, all to the west. A dull red glow lit the sky to the northeast, the color of a blood bruise. Tyrion had never seen a bigger moon. Monstrous, swollen, it looked as if it had swallowed the sun and woken with a fever. Its twin, floating on the sea beyond the ship, shimmered red with every wave.

We’ve seen more than one weirwood described as monstrous, which is what happens when you swallow the sun’s fire. The moon appears red and fevered, and this compares well with the weirwoods looking anguished, bleeding, and burning. It also compares well with the moon maidens who die giving birth to Lightbringer children like Jon Snow, Tyrion, and Daenerys. And while we’re here, say hello to the drowned moon, swimming in the sea with her living fire, as well as the clue about the moon once having a twin.

Now of course all this stuff about the trees and moon swallowing the sun is talking about Azor Ahai wedding the trees and going into the weirwoodnet, and back in our Jon chapter, we find what appears to be a clever depiction of Azor Ahai stuck inside the weirwoodnet and staring back out at us. This takes place just before the brothers reach the grove:

Jon glimpsed the red wanderer above, watching them through the leafless branches of great trees as they made their way beneath. The Thief, the free folk called it. The best time to steal a woman was when the Thief was in the Moonmaid, Ygritte had always claimed. 

One of the reasons why it’s so much fun to study the symbolism and metaphor in ASOIAF is because once you pick on one of George’s many threads, you find that George has left an extensive and well-marked trail of breadcrumbs to lead us through the woods. This is a great example – once you pick up on the thread of the sun figure going into the weirwood, you find these juicy nuggets all over the place, and specifically, you find the same idea repeated throughout the a chapter. Sometimes you really have to smile at George’s cleverness and sense of humor. The red wanderer is watching them through the leafless branches of the tree, you say? He might as well say that Azor Ahai was watching them through the trees, as much as he has associated the red wanderer with the red comet and Azor Ahai reborn. Oh and lest we forget these associations, the very next sentence reminds us that Mr. RLJayzor Ahai reborn himself, Jon Snow, was like the red wanderer that one time when he stole Ygritte the Nissa Nissa moon maiden. Very nice, very nice.

Translation: the red wanderer stole a moon maiden, and now the red wanderer watches them through the trees. Jon Snow stole a moon maiden, and soon he’ll be looking out at the world through his weirwood-colored direwolf. In this scene, he’s about to enter the moon-shaped weirwood grove, which is the same idea.

There’s one more instance of this line of symbolism before Jon and crew approach the grove:

Half a mile from the grove, long red shafts of autumn sunlight were slanting down between the branches of the leafless trees, staining the snowdrifts pink.

Here, right before that slice of sun is swallowed, we see the red shafts of sun staining the snow pink, almost as if it were bleeding on the snow. They slant down between the branches, as if their red blood fire were being offered to the trees. I tend to think this might be meant as a parallel to the first chapter of AGOT, when Gared, the terrified runaway Night’s Watch ranger who had escaped the Others in the prologue, was executed on an Ironwood stump at Winterfell and stained the snowdrifts red. The line about the blood was “the snows around the stump drank it eagerly, reddening as he watched.”  Something similar happened in the prologue of AGOT when Ser Waymar was killed: referring to his falling blood, it says “It steamed in the cold, and the droplets seemed red as fire where they touched the snow.”

So here in this Jon scene in the weirwood grove, which seems to be about Azor Ahai penetrating the moon and the weirwoodnet, we have the sun staining the snowdrifts and then being swallowed by the trees. Think of the slain captive in the Bran vision of human sacrifice in front of Winterfell’s heart tree, where Bran can taste the blood of the victim as it runs into the pond beneath the tree – the tree is swallowing the victim’s blood, and thus his fire. Was this merely a sacrifice? Or was this part of a ceremony to send a greenseer into the tree? It may be that the very first greenseers to enter the weirwoodnet had to themselves be sacrificed to the tree – that’s what is being implied about Azor Ahai.

With the benefit of hindsight after finishing book 5, I think we can say that solar sacrifice symbolism like this in Jon scenes can also be taken as foreshadowing Jon’s own death, where he took his turn at staining the snow red. Jon will then presumably be swallowed by his wolf, who, again, just happens to be compared to a weirwood tree several times, as we saw at the beginning of this section. This will be another manifestation of the idea of the weirwoods swallowing a slice of the sun, with the slice being Jon’s spirit. There’s a line in the lead up to the grove that says “of late, Jon Snow sometimes felt as if he and the direwolf were one, even awake.”

The very same Bran chapter in ADWD which gave us the vision of the human sacrifice before Winterfell’s heart tree also gives us clues about the resurrection of a red solar king. Check this one out:

The moon was a black hole in the sky. Wolves howled in the wood, sniffing through the snowdrifts after dead things. A murder of ravens erupted from the hillside, screaming their sharp cries, black wings beating above a white world. A red sun rose and set and rose again, painting the snows in shades of rose and pink.

I’ve pointed out before that the language of a red sun that set and “rose again” is suggestive of a resurrection, and now we recognize the symbol of the dying sun staining the snow red and pink like a sacrifice. There’s one other instance of similar language about the red sun in that Bran chapter, and it too implies sacrifice:

The moon was a crescent, thin and sharp as the blade of a knife. A pale sun rose and set and rose again. Red leaves whispered in the wind. Dark clouds filled the skies and turned to storms. Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled, and dead men with black hands and bright blue eyes shuffled round a cleft in the hillside but could not enter. Under the hill, the broken boy sat upon a weirwood throne, listening to whispers in the dark as ravens walked up and down his arms.

The knife shaped crescent moon language is important because it links to the scene of human sacrifice at the end of the chapter, where “a white-haired woman stepped toward them through a drift of dark red leaves, a bronze sickle in her hand.” A crescent moon is also called a sickle moon, making the connection between the moon and the sacrificial sickle in this chapter apparent. So right after the line about the curved knife blade moon, we get the line about a pale sun that rose and set and rose again, and I think these ideas are intended to go together. Perhaps we are supposed to think about sacrificing someone to the weirwoods in conjunction with a red sun dying and rising again. The rest is talk of the living dead, lightning, and a greenseer on a weirwood throne, which all seems to relate to the general themes we are following here about Azor Ahai the solar king being sacrificed to enter the weirwoods.

Once again I am left thinking that Jon’s resurrection, his rebirth from inside the weirwood colored wolf, really needs to take place in the weirwood grove of nine, as Radio Westeros has predicted. I am also left increasingly suspicious that Ghost’s weirwood-colored wolf body may need to be set on fire to create undead wolfman Jon. But again, in this scenario, the spirit of Ghost would likely travel with Jon’s spirit into the resurrected body, so Ghost should still be with us.

Ok, so let’s jump back over to the Jon chapter and see Jon and the Night’s Watch rangers penetrate the weirwood circle. And don’t blame me for all the penetration and insertion language – this is Lightbringer stuff we’re talking about, and Lightbringer is always a little bit about… well you know.

Ahead he glimpsed a pale white trunk that could only be a weirwood, crowned with a head of dark red leaves. Jon Snow reached back and pulled Longclaw from his sheath. He looked to right and left, gave Satin and Horse a nod, watched them pass it on to the men beyond. They rushed the grove together, kicking through drifts of old snow with no sound but their breathing. Ghost ran with them, a white shadow at Jon’s side.

And then the next paragraph is when we get the reference to the weirwood’s bloody visage turning black by night – as Jon is inserting himself into the circle of trees (chuckle chuckle). Jon came in here with his dragonsteel wolf-sword and seems to have turned the moon’s blood black. This is the forging of Lightbringer we are talking about here, the transformation of Azor Ahai the fiery greenseer – so I have to look at that weirwood crowned with a head of dark red leaves as a great symbol of that very man, the newly crowned king of the burning tree. In a different light, those leaves can look like a blaze of flame, so it’s also implying the idea of a fiery crown, such as Stannis wears.

Now recall the iron crown / wooden crown dichotomy of the Ironborn. Grey King had a weirwood crown or a driftwood crown in some tales and later Ironborn wore wooden driftwood crowns, while Nagga’s hill itself is said to be “crowned” with weirwood ribs – but then we have the Iron Kings who wear crowns of black iron, something Balon Greyjoy imitates. The Gardener Kings echo this wood-or-iron crown pattern, wearing a type of laurel crown of leaves and vines when at peace, and a crown of bronze and later iron when at war. Then over in the North, we have the King of Winter’s crown with its nine black iron swords mounted on a bronze circlet… and then we have this very ancient and very sacred grove of nine weirwoods where the Night’s Watch have been swearing their vows to the Old Gods for centuries, perhaps even going back to the formation of the Night’s Watch. You can see how this grove of nine could be seen as a kind of weirwood version of the King of Winter’s crown, and this idea is reinforced by Jon seeing one of the weirwoods in the sacred grove as wearing a crown. Consider this line as the rangers step into the grove:

By then the grove was ringed by rangers, sliding past the bone-white trees, steel glinting in black-gloved hands, poised for slaughter.

The rangers are black swords in a manner of speaking, so they are essentially creating the King of Winter’s crown overtop the weirwood circle by forming a ring of steel and black clad “swords in the darkness.” It’s almost like the weirwood circle is putting on the King of Winter’s crown here, which could make sense in terms of the King of Winter being Azor Ahai after being transformed through the weirwood. It also creates a nice parallel between the black crown of swords and the weirwood grove.

Now when they slide past the perimeter of the circle, they are symbolizing the comet penetrating the moon, yes, but also the moon meteors setting fire to the tree, and thus Azor Ahai entering the weirwoodnet. I have to mention again that the frequent description of the weirwood bark as “bone-white” works to reinforce the idea that the sea dragon “bones” are weirwood, and thus a weirwood ribcage. Inside a ribcage is the heart, and bone white weirwood trees are called heart trees only when they have a bloody face carved in them – when they are inhabited by the spirit of a greenseer. The greenseer is the heart, the fire, the thing that pumps hot blood and life into the system. The Night’s watch is the sword in the darkness, the fire the burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, and they are bringing all those things into the moon-shaped grove.

At the same time, Jon and his black sword brothers are bringing slaughter to the grove, because this is a death transformation – the comet set the moon on fire, and the meteors set the tree on fire. At Old Wyk, we find the idea of fire inside the weirwood implied in the name – old wick, as in ‘the place which caught on fire that one time’ – and in the tale of the Grey King warming his weirwood ribcage hall with the living fire of the sea dragon. But at the same time, he also slew the sea dragon, and the weirwood ribs are dead and petrified, and Grey King himself became corpse-like and probably undead, so again, this is all fiery death transformation symbolism.

By the way, there is one other really cool connection between the weirwood grove of nine and the sea dragon, which is that fact one of the few places where we hear that weirwood circles still exist is on Sea Dragon Point.This encourages us to think of the Nagga’s bones as being similar to a weirwood circle, and to this grove of nine which is the main weirwood circle in the story.

This scene wouldn’t be complete without some sort of explosive grand finale of symbolism to show us the moon explosion and the awakening of the dragons, but that’s going to lead to a slightly different topic and a new line of symbolism, so… we’ll make it a new section.

And before we cover that more explosive and violent manifestation of Lightbringer’s birth, I actually want to mention the more subtle one, which is the new recruits swearing their Night’s Watch vows to the heart trees. This is another kind of marriage, where the Night’s Watch foreswear all others and pledge fealty to the greenseers who inhabit the trees. Just as Jon will go inside Ghost, and just as Jon mentions thinking that lately, he and the Ghost seemed to be as one, the Night’s Watch pledging their lives, giving their lives really, to the weirwoods.

The text says they “knelt before the the weirwood,” and it also says that “with their black hoods and thick black cowls, the six might have been carved from shadow.” The carved language equates them with the carved tree, and this would be because they are symbolizing those 12 undead skinchangers or greenseers resurrected to fight alongside the last hero. Calling them shadows makes them sound like ghosts, as if their physical bodies had just been sacrificed. We saw similar implications when Sam and Jon swore their vows in this grove, as Jon killed the green boy and became a man of the Night’s Watch as his eventual killer, Bowen Marsh, guided him in his vows. Recall the lines used after the pledge is complete: “rise now as men of the Night’s Watch” – as in rise harder and stronger and the Long Night’s Watch of resurrected greenseers, the brotherhood of the gallows tree.

Ok, now for the promised Lightbringer action!

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They Might be Giants

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Here is the grand finale of the grove of nine scene, picking up right after the last line we quoted about the rangers being poised for slaughter:

The giant was the last to notice them. He had been asleep, curled up by the fire, but something woke him—the child’s cry, the sound of snow crunching beneath black boots, a sudden indrawn breath. When he stirred it was as if a boulder had come to life. He heaved himself into a sitting position with a snort, pawing at his eyes with hands as big as hams to rub the sleep away … until he saw Iron Emmett, his sword shining in his hand. Roaring, he came leaping to his feet, and one of those huge hands closed around a maul and jerked it up.

That’s clear enough – a boulder came to life.  That’s the birth of a meteor if I ever heard one, and it’s even roaring for us like a dragon.  But because weirwoods are “pale giants frozen in time,” as Tyrion describes the Winterfell heart tree, an awakening giant can also be used to symbolize an awakening weirwood. And it’s not only that one quote likening weirwoods to giants – in ADWD, Theon comes upon the Winterfell heart tree and it says “The heart tree stood before him, a pale giant with a carved face and leaves like bloody hands.” Now, an awakening weirwood is exactly what we should see here in the weirwood grove, now that Azor Ahai has arrived inside the wood with his fire and buddies with shining swords. I believe that’s what’s happening here – the giant is simultaneously depicting the awakening of the moon and a weirwood. That should come as no surprise – we’ve seen the moon compared to giants, so if the weirwoods can in some sense symbolize the moon, it follows that they might be giants as well. Ha! See what I did there.

One other clue about the giant representing the moon: in that earlier quote with the red wanderer watching them through the trees and Ygritte’s advice about stealing a woman when the red wanderer – The Thief –  was in the Moonmaid, Jon goes on to think to himself “she never mentioned the best time to steal a giant,” which equates the giant with the stolen moon maiden. Jon does in fact steal the giant and the other wildlings there and bring them back to Castle Black.

There’s more from the giant:

The giant bellowed again, a sound that shook the leaves in the trees, and slammed his maul against the ground. The shaft of it was six feet of gnarled oak, the head a stone as big as a loaf of bread. The impact made the ground shake. Some of the other wildlings went scrambling for their own weapons.

When giants awaken in the moon, the earth shakes, because moon meteors came crashing down to the planet. The moon meteor impacts are what made the ground shake, and they are also what created the earthly version of the burning tree. Here that is depicted by the giant awakening (the moon) and then slamming the ground with the stone head of his maul (the moon meteors), and not only does this make the earth shake – you’ll notice that this also shakes the leaves in the trees, a potential reference to greenseer speech through rustling and whispering weirwood leaves.

One of the most memorable examples of a giant playing the moon role also used the language of an earthquake – recall Ser Gregor’s symbolism of being a stone giant and also a moon warrior, and how Tyrion made a remark about the ground shaking when he walks. We also saw the weirwood symbolism there with the spear of ash wood planted in the Mountain’s fallen body. These are the same ideas being expressed in the weirwood grove – the waking of the moon giant leads to giants waking in the earth, earthquakes, and weirwoods being set on fire and awakened.  In fact, the legend of the Hammer of the Waters involves both waking giants in the earth and making blood sacrifice to weirwoods – which we think is one part of awakening a tree.  With that in mind, let’s jump over to the account of the Hammer of the Waters from TWOIAF:

And so they did, gathering in their hundreds (some say on the Isle of Faces), and calling on their old gods with song and prayer and grisly sacrifice (a thousand captive men were fed to the weirwood, one version of the tale goes, whilst another claims the children used the blood of their own young). And the old gods stirred, and giants awoke in the earth, and all of Westeros shook and trembled. Great cracks appeared in the earth, and hills and mountains collapsed and were swallowed up. And then the seas came rushing in, and the Arm of Dorne was broken and shattered by the force of the water, until only a few bare rocky islands remained above the waves. The Summer Sea joined the narrow sea, and the bridge between Essos and Westeros vanished for all time.  

Or so the legend says.

The legend has a lot of things that seem right: blood sacrifice to weirwood trees involving the Isle of Faces and thus the green men, giants awakening in the earth, and the Hammer of the Waters. Now although a weirwood may symbolize the moon, it is first and foremost a tree that grows in the earth – so to the extent that weirwoods are giants, they certainly can be regarded as ‘giants in the earth.’ So again, what I think is going on here is that when the moon meteor fell, it awoke giants in the earth in the sense of causing earthquakes and the collapse of the Arm of Dorne, and it awoke the weirwood giants in the same sense that the thunderbolt meteor set fire to the tree and the weirwoodnet.

Something about the moon meteors affected the weirwoodnet, although we don’t know exactly what this means yet. I do think it is serving as a metaphor to describe Azor Ahai as perhaps the first person to go into the weirwoodnet, opening it up for use by other greenseers, but I think the meteors also have something more literal to do with the process as well. They could have had a toxic effect on the entire continent, as they appear to have done at Asshai, or it could be that the dark magic that seems to be attached to the black meteors helped to facilitate Azor Ahai’s entrance into the weirwoodnet. If I am right that “waking giants in the earth” in part alludes to weirwoods being awoken (and I’m not the only one to think of this by any means), then this would further corroborate my growing suspicion the meteor impacts had something to do with the carving of the faces in the trees.

Consider this passage from ADWD, when Jon is on his way to Molestown to feed some wildlings like a good corn king and comes upon the last of three trees which the Wildlings have given faces:

Just north of Mole’s Town they came upon the third watcher, carved into the huge oak that marked the village perimeter, its deep eyes fixed upon the kingsroad. That is not a friendly face, Jon Snow reflected. The faces that the First Men and the children of the forest had carved into the weirwoods in eons past had stern or savage visages more oft than not, but the great oak looked especially angry, as if it were about to tear its roots from the earth and come roaring after them. Its wounds are as fresh as the wounds of the men who carved it.

Note the emphasis on the men who carved the faces in the trees have wounds that are just like the tree’s wounds – this likens the wounds of the carver and carvee, implying that the greenseer carving the face must also be carved up and sacrificed, presumably to enter the tree. Now that the huge oak tree has a face, it’s angry, and wants to literally wake from the earth and “roar” like a dragon, just like the giant in the weirwood grove. It’s also worth noting that Jon explicitly talks about children AND First Men carving faces in the trees thousands of years ago… it’s commonly thought that only children carve faces. Not only did men of old carve faces in weirwoods, I suspect that only men (or horned lords) carved the faces, despite what our eight-thousand year old oral history tells us. Or perhaps the children did carve them, but only after the meteors landed, and perhaps with the intent of trapping humans inside.  I’m not 100% about this, but I have always doubted the idea of the children carving the faces before the First Men arrived, as we are told.

Now in the paragraph prior to seeing this freshly carved oak tree, Jon thinks about the wildlings who carved these faces and recalls Mance telling him that some wildlings are shadowcats, and some are stones – meaning some are aggressive and dangerous, while others are stubborn and intransigent – but shadowcats play into the Lion of Night symbolism, and stones are stones. Saying that stones carved the tree is just another way of talking about the thunderbolt meteor which set fire to the tree, and the Lion of Night carving the face in the tree equates to Azor Ahai as the dark solar figure carving the faces.

We should also mention the symbolic import of this being an oak tree – that’s the tree of the Summer King, so this is implying a summer king / Garth figure becoming a weirwood monster. Oaks are also strongly associated with Zeus, the Greek storm god who, like Thor, is famous for his lightning. There’s a similar clue to be found on the great ranging which we quoted in the green zombie series; that was the one in which the ranger named Bedwyck, also called Giant, “crammed himself inside the hollow of a dead oak” and said “How d’ye like my castle, Lord Snow?” We saw Giant scramble up the weirwood like a squirrel at Whitetree village, and the message would appear to be the same both times – it’s showing a Night’s Watch ranger becoming a tree-giant by going inside of a tree. In one scene, Giant is inside a dead oak, and in another scene he’s inside the weirwood or climbing the weirwood, and that would equate the dead oak with the weirwood. This makes sense because oaks symbolize the summer king, while weirwoods are aligned with the winter king. A dead oak is a summer king turning into a winter king, and that’s the same idea we saw expressed by a Garth figure turning grey, such as Garth Greyfeather.

As for the parallel between weirwoods and giants, a lot of it really revolves around Hodor. Just as Ghost will play the role of a weirwood in which Jon’s spirit can go, Hodor serves the same role for Bran. He doesn’t look like a weirwood as Ghost does, but he is a giant that Bran skinchanges into. The wicker basket formerly used for hauling firewood which Hodor uses to carry Bran serves to make Hodor the wicker cage, the same role played by the weirwoods. Hodor is also a wicker cage in that he sometimes contains Bran’s spirit, as as the weirwood will contain Bran’s spirit. There’s a great quote from AGOT about Bran hanging from the wicker cage as Hodor carries Bran into the Godswood:

Hodor made his way through the dense stands of oak and ironwood and sentinels, to the still pool beside the heart tree. He stopped under the gnarled limbs of the weirwood, humming. Bran reached up over his head and pulled himself out of his seat, drawing the dead weight of his legs up through the holes in the wicker basket. He hung for a moment, dangling, the dark red leaves brushing against his face, until Hodor lifted him and lowered him to the smooth stone beside the water.

Hodor and the wicker basket combine to symbolize the weirwood, and here Bran is hanging and dangling from the basket like a hanged man. Having the weirwood leaves brush his face in this moment simply serves to further mingle Hodor and wicker basket with the weirwood they symbolize. It’s implying Bran as dangling on the weirwood tree, and telling us that that is comparable to being inside a wicker cage. Again, it’s all death transformation stuff – Martin is mixing these metaphors to show that they are speak of the same thing.  Bran with weirwood leaves around his face could also be seen as simply foreshadowing Bran becoming the face inside the heart tree, and it may also be meant to imply Bran as having a sort of weirwood leaf crown here, just as the one weirwood in the grove of nine did. It also seems like the weirwood reaching out with a bloody hand and marking Bran, smearing him with blood – it works on a lot of levels, though the hanging thing is what I want to draw attention to.

We see a similar quote with Bran hanging from the basket in ACOK:

“Hodor, stand still.” Bran grasped a wall sconce with both hands and used it to pull himself up and out of the basket. He hung for a moment by his arms until Hodor carried him to a chair.

Despite the fact that Maester Luwin admonishes Bran that Hodor is not a mule to be beaten, Hodor does has extensive horse symbolism, smelling like horses and working in the stables, and most of all, having Bran ride him like a horse. This is where the fact that Yggdrasil can be a type of horse for Odin to ride comes in. Hodor is a wicker giant Bran can slip inside or hang from, and he’s also a horse Bran can ride by merging his spirit with him. These quotes that have Bran hanging from Hodor’s basket is just a sneaky way of bringing Odin’s hanging on Yggdrasil into the mix.

We noticed how Hodor always gets super riled up whenever lightning strikes, and that Bran’s skinchanging into Hodor is frequently linked to lightning… what is happening is that Hodor is serving as a stand-in for a weirwood giant, being struck by lightning and possessed by a greenseer and awakening as a mighty warrior. Bran serves as the lightning bolt which strikes the tree, and again this shows us that the greenseer is the fire that sets the tree ablaze. Hodor also has two instances of one-eye symbolism, plus the sword-and-torch Mithras symbolism in the scene where Hodor was wandering through the caves with a sword and torch – or was it Bran wandering, the text asks us.  The reason why I am sort of breezing through the Hodor and Bran giant thing is because we are going to discuss Hodor and Bran further when we talk about Sleipnir, another sort of horse that is not really a horse that Odin can ride. For now, I simply want to introduce to you that there is a whole line of symbolism comparing weirwoods to giants, and that this has a lot to do with waking giants in the earth and whatever occurred on the Isle of Faces.

To wrap up this section, I want to address what could potentially be a point of confusion in regards to the trees correlating to the moon. In the sky, the comet impregnates the moon, a parallel to the greenseer’s spirit going into the tree.  But then the cycle repeats as the moon meteor lands on earth and sets the tree on fire, and this too represents a greenseer sending his spirit into the tree. The greenseer’s spirit is always the projectile it seems – the comet that strikes the moon, or the thunderbolt which strikes the tree. The confusion arises when we have a place like the Weirwood Grove of Nine, because it’s simultaneously representing the moon struck by the comet as well as the tree on earth which is struck by the thunderbolt. The giant waking there depicts both giants waking in the moon in the sense of giant meteor mountains that ride coming from the moon, and giants waking in the earth in the sense of the meteor impacts triggering earthquakes and setting fire to the weirwoodnet in some sense, waking the weirwood giants.

It’s very similar to the sun + moon = Azor Ahai reborn cycle.  An Azor Ahai reborn character will have parents that symbolize the sun and moon, but they in turn will go back to square one and act like a sun or moon that will repeat the cycle with their own partners. That’s one reason why we see all the characters transform from one thing to another. As always, I tend to rely on the text of a given chapter to indicate what a given character is symbolizing at any given moment.  When Gregor fights Oberyn, he’s showing us the moon becoming falling moon mountains. But when Gregor strikes Beric’s ribs with his lance and leaves a crater, as we saw in the last episode, his lance is playing the role of the falling meteor, and Beric is playing the role of the tree set on fire by a meteor impact. Beric’s burning sword, however, can symbolize a fiery moon meteor or comet in its own right, and when it does, Martin will give us the clues to show us that’s what’s happening.

Bran is a great example, as I mentioned – when he climbs up to where the sun and moon and making love, he’s acting like the comet.  When he falls, he’s acting like the thunderbolt.  When he possesses Hodor, you could see him as the comet getting inside the moon, or as the lightning getting inside the tree. So, the comet sets the moon on fire, the moon meteor sets the tree on fire – it’s a cycle.  That’s why I often call ASOIAF a fractal story. It can be a little confusing, but it’s really cool, and hopefully I am explaining it in a way that makes some amount of sense.

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The Grove at Ground Zero

This section is sponsored by our first Guardian of the Galaxy, the Shadowcat Patron, and he is Ser Harrison of House Casterly, the Noontide Sun, whose words are “Deeper than did Ever Plummet Sound”

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We’ve studied a lot of Lightbringer bonfires by now – scenes which depict the forging of Lightbringer – and we’ve seen many times that a burning tree symbol is created right in the thick of things. There is a simple, yet profound truth being expressed here: the burning tree is created at the same place Lightbringer is forged. The same location which depicts the landing of a moon meteor also depicts a burning tree. We just saw that with the weirwood grove of nine, and it’s the same with the weirwood ribs of the sea dragon on Old Wyk, which symbolize both the landing of a sea dragon meteor and the arrival of a greenseer who possess godly fire and lives inside the weirwoods. At the end of Weirwood Compendium One, the Grey King and the Sea Dragon, we looked at most of the major Lightbringer forgings scenes and saw some kind of burning tree or weirwood symbolism. We saw that over and over again, burning wood of symbolic import gives birth to fiery dancers and sorcerers, and most importantly, Azor Ahai reborn as a being of living fire.

This is the crux of the story about the thunderbolt striking the tree and setting it ablaze. This is ground zero of the meteor impact, and that is where we find the origins of the burning tree which transfers the fire of the gods to man. This is where Azor Ahai is reborn, and this is where Lightbringer is forged. This is the spot where Azor Ahai enters the weirwoodnet. It all happens here.

We will refresh our memory with the two most important examples of Lightbringer bonfires.

At Stannis and Melisandre’s staged Lightbringer ceremony, the weirwood / burning tree symbols were the wooden statues of the Seven. The are carved wooden gods, like the weirwoods, and they used to be the masts of the ships which carried the first Targaryens to Dragonstone, which makes them sea dragon trees – recall that the petrified weirwood ribs of the “sea dragon” are compared to white trees and the masts of huge ships both. So again, suggestive of weirwoods.

Here is the operative quote where they are set on fire:

The morning air was dark with the smoke of burning gods.

They were all afire now, Maid and Mother, Warrior and Smith, the Crone with her pearl eyes and the Father with his gilded beard; even the Stranger, carved to look more animal than human. The old dry wood and countless layers of paint and varnish blazed with a fierce hungry light.
. . .
The burning gods cast a pretty light, wreathed in their robes of shifting flame, red and orange and yellow. 

The carved wooden sea dragon gods “blaze with a fierce hungry light” and “cast a pretty light,” but they also make the morning air “dark with the smoke of burning gods.”  This is a perfect model of the ground zero impact zone of the Lightbringer meteors – they blaze with light, but fill the air with darkness. Like the flames of Stannis’s sword in this scene, they soon die and leave behind a “burnt” sword. And all that smoke. But again, the point is that we see a burning tree symbol here in the middle of the pyre.

At Dany’s alchemical wedding in AGOT, some amount of care was used in the placement of the logs – the are laid north to south, ice to fire, and east to west, sunrise to sunset. The payoff quote come when they are lit on fire, naturally :

And there came a second crack, loud and sharp as thunder, and the smoke stirred and whirled around her and the pyre shifted, the logs exploding as the fire touched their secret hearts.

That’s the thunderbolt dragon egg, followed by logs with secret hearts being touched by fire – that’s pretty explicit. The weirwoods were struck by lightning and had their hearts touched by fire directly in connection with the moon dragons hatching. The rising smoke symbol we saw at Dragonstone with the smoke darkening the morning air is depicted here as well – the pyre collapses with a “belch of flame and smoke that reached thirty feet into the sky,” Drogo is “clad in wisps of floating orange silk and tendrils of curling smoke, grey and greasy,” and the smoke is remarked upon as driving the Dothraki away.

So, burning trees produce the rising smoke, and so do meteor impacts. In some sense, the weirwood is a burning tree that was set on fire by the meteor impacts.  But here’s the thing: the rising smoke symbol is frequently accompanied by a cloud of rising ash, and in the scenario of a meteor impact, you’d get a lot of both. The column of rising ash emerging from moon meteor impacts is a symbol which is significant in its own right, because I believe that it is serving as another reference to Yggdrasil, which is an ash tree.

That’s right.  Weirwoods look like burning trees, and the burning tree is a symbol of a weirwood.  Weirwoods are heavily inspired by Yggdrasil, and although Yggdrasil is not a burning tree, it is an ash tree. I feel like blowing a trumpet or something – this is kind of a big deal. Martin is getting good mileage out of the wordplay here: an ash is of course a type of tree with light grey bark which happens to be excellent for making things like spear shafts or bass guitars (such as my own ’75 reissue Fender Jazz bass),
but a burning tree will also produce ash, will be transformed into ash – and thus, a burning tree can be considered an ash tree, in a manner of speaking. Weirwoods are both burning trees and Yggdrasil trees, so… you begin to see how this works. Ash trees can be used to symbolize Yggdrasil, and thus a weirwood. When we see ash trees in suspicious places in ASOIAF, we should think about Yggdrasil and the weirwoods.

For example, when Beric is dealt his first mortal wound, that impalement by the Mountain’s lance which left the crater wound, he was taken to a grove of ash trees to die… and then to be resurrected by Thoros. That’s why we get this line from Beric which we quoted in the green zombie series:

Sometimes I think I was born on the bloody grass in that grove of ash, with the taste of fire in my mouth and a hole in my chest.

Sometimes I think Azor Ahai was reborn in that symbolic grove of ash known as the weirwoodnet. I think that a lot lately, because that is what is being implied here and elsewhere with fiery sorcerers emerging from Lightbringer bonfires, burning sea dragons, burning wooden gods, and other symbols of the burning tree. Beric is pretty well-established as a resurrected greenseer symbol and an Odin figure, so this talk of him being reborn in a grove of ash cannot be coincidence.  Rather, the ash trees here are simply another Odin reference which enhances the message – Azor Ahai was reborn through the weirwoodnet, just as Odin was reborn on an ash tree.

The idea of the grove of ash trees rising all around him makes him sound like he is in the middle of a bonfire or a smoking crater with ash rising in columns all around him. But because those ash trees also symbolize Yggdrasil and thus weirwoods, the scene here also evokes the weirwood grove of nine we just hang out in. Inside Beric’s grove of ash we have the resurrection of an Azor Ahai figure who represents a burning tree sorcerer and a moon meteor, and inside the weirwood grove of nine we saw symbolic depictions of the weirwood net awakening and the moon meteors being born. This grove of ash is another version of ground zero, in other words, and we can see how the ash trees do double duty by depicting the rising ash as well as the presence of magical trees.

Beric’s mortal lance-in-the-chest wound, meanwhile, is very suggestive of the spear which impaled Odin on Yggdrasil – recall that Arya says that the lance went through him and left a scar on both sides of his ribs. Arya also describes Gregor’s lance as having left a crater in Beric’s ribcage, which means that Beric’s wound is suggesting both a meteor impact crater and Odin’s impalement on the tree. In other words, this scene in the grove of ash seems to be primarily showing us the terrestrial version of setting the tree on fire – Beric is playing the tree struck by lighting here, with the Mountain’s lance as the moon meteor which set the tree on fire. This is another message to us that the landing of the moon meteor and the creation of the burning tree sorcerer are connected.

The breast wound also suggests Beric as a Nissa Nissa figure – one who obviously transforms to Azor Ahai reborn, akin to Daenerys. Beric does light his blade on fire with his own blood, just as Nissa Nissa lights Lightbringer on fire with her blood.

Gregor is also the one who put out Beric’s eye, and this would be more of the celestial version of events, where Beric’s eye is playing the moon role and the knife is acting like the comet. Again this alludes to the comet-moon explosion event leading to an Odin like transformation for… someone.  We’ve seen both sun and moon characters get it, which I suppose makes sense – the moon meteors can be seen as a resurrected sun or a resurrected moon character. Also, because the sun and moon were in alignment, the eye-blinding analogy can be applied to sun and moon people alike. Perhaps the simplest way to say it is that the eye-blinding represents the conjunction of sun and moon, just as the burning tree does. Both sun and moon have to be sacrificed in order to be transformed, and both greenseer and tree were transformed when the first greenseer carved the first faces and wedded the trees.

Martin has left us yet another clue that we should connect Beric’s rebirth in the grove of ash to Odin, and that’s the parallel this scene has to Bloodraven’s loss of his eye at Redgrass field. Redgrass Field was of course named for the blood shed there when Bloodraven’s armies and other fought against those of the Blackfyres. Bloodraven received his Odin makeover on the bloody grass, in other words, just as Beric speaks of having been born on the bloody grass, and in this way, Bloodraven’s and Beric’s Odin transformations are linked to one another. Blades of grass stained red by blood are of course also suggestive of Lightbringer, the bloody red blade, and this analogy was also implied in that song about “the last of Darry’s ten” that Brienne and Catelyn hear in ACOK, a song about red grass, red banners, a red setting sun, and a thirsty sword.

So, once again, in the same place we find Lightbringer symbolism, Azor Ahai reborn symbolism, and lots of weirwood, greenseer, and Odin symbolism. Most importantly for out purposes at this moment, the grove of ash is simultaneously depicting rising columns of smoke and ash as well as the idea of a magical tree.

But wait… there’s more.  You will recall that most of the spears which symbolize Lightbringer are made of ash wood. There is Oberyn’s ‘sunspear’ that he used in his fight with the Mountain, the one with a steel blade coated in oily black poison. We spent a lot of time talking about the ash wood spears topped with the severed heads of the Night’s Watch brothers that Jon and company find north of the Wall in ADWD, staring out through black and bloody eye sockets.  All of those ash spears served to create the image of a trail of ash behind a smoking meteor or comet: the bloody Night’s Watch brothers’ heads are like the head of a bleeding star, and the oily black blade topping Oberyn’s spear is a great callout to the oily black stone.

Now we can see that these ash wood spears can do double duty once they are planted in the ground, creating the image of an ash tree, and thus a weirwood tree… especially when you stick a bloody, eyeless head on them! I mean, these REALLY create the image of a heart tree, with the severed, eye-gouged heads mimicking a heart tree’s carved bloody face and bloody tears and the ash wood spears providing the tree trunk and the reference to Yggdrasil.

And look, I don’t want to blow your mind or anything here, but duty compels me to mention that one of those decapitated rangers was named Garth.  That’s right, it was Garth Greyfeather, as a matter of record. He’s now become an ash-wood Garth tree with a bloody, carved face, a terrific clue about Garth people – horned lords – going into the weirwoods, and again I wonder if the implication is that they were the first, the ones who gave the trees faces. In any case, we’ve been saying how the words ‘weir’ and ‘garth’ are in some cases interchangeable, and here you see a vivid example of Martin making use of this: garth head + ash wood = a weirwood symbol. The name “Garth Greyfeather” implies a green Garth type turning into a Grey King / Azor Ahai type, from summer to winter king, which makes a lot of sense, since that is what seems to be going on at this moment of the horned lord being sacrificed and entering the weirwood.

The other two heads belong to Hairy Hal and Black Jack Bulwer. In the green zombie series, we said the name “Hairy Hal” was probably a nod to the wild man of the woods, a variety of green man folklore, and Black Jack Bulwer…. well. That guy is loaded with symbolism. House Bulwer was founded by a son of Garth the Green, Bors the Breaker, who “drank so much bull’s blood he grew a pair of shiny black horns.”  In other words, this is blood-drinking, dark horned lord stuff – I believe this is more like who the horned lord became after entering the net, more akin to Gendry’s fiery bull symbolism. The idea of a bull horned person being trapped in the weirwoodnet again brings up the notion of Winterfell as a labyrinth and a stone tree which might contain some sort of Minotaur, a monstrous bull man, and that’s a topic we will return to another time. Calling him “black jack” is a nice way to imply someone who used to be green, like a jack in the green figure, but  who has turned black. It’s very similar to the idea of a Garth turning grey.

Taken together, these three Night’s Watch rangers-turned-weirwood symbols are all depicting the idea of green men and horned lords who have been sacrificed to become part of the tree, who have even become the faces on the trees.

Let’s return to the other main ash wood Lightbringer symbol, Oberyn’s spear. There are two symbols of rising smoke and ash at that trial by combat – the first is Gregor’s bloody and smoking rising fist that ruined Oberyn’s solar face, and the second has to do with Oberyn’s spear. Remember when The Red Viper pinned the moon-mountain that rides to the ground with his spear? I pointed out that the broken off ash-wood shaft sticking up out of Gregor’s chest makes a nice image of the column of ash rising from the site of the meteor impact, but now that we are thinking about Yggdrasil as a column of ash – an ash tree – we can see that this wooden column of ash is also likely meant to symbolize the ash tree Yggdrasil. Once again, a weirwood symbol appears at the exact spot of a fallen moon meteor.

The reason why this works so well is because Azor Ahai the moon meteor is reborn on earth at the site of the impact, and Azor Ahai the person or group of people were reborn by entering the burning tree, which is the weirwoodnet. Another reason why this works is because the falling meteor represents one form of the fire of the gods, and the burning tree the other. And finally, the rising smoke and ash clouds are what darkened the sun, swallowing it and transforming it into the dark sun, and the “ash” tree weir-drasil is what transformed Azor Ahai into the dark solar king figure, swallowing the sun king’s life fires. The last one is important, so I’ll say it again: the ash and smoke of the meteor impact is what eats the sun, just as the weirwoodnet “eats” Azor Ahai. Thus it makes sense to have the rising ash cloud symbolize a weirwood tree.

Another high profile ash wood weapon is Areo Hotah’s longaxe, whose shaft is called “mountain ash,” which we took as a clue about Ser Gregor the Mountain being like a falling meteor trailing ash. Mountain Ash is a variety of ash tree also called a Rowan, and “Rowan Gold-Tree” happens to be the name of another one of the children of Garth the Green. That’s worth noting in and of itself – one of Garth’s children was a tree woman named after the ash tree. One of Mance’s six spearwives that come with him to Winterfell in ADWD was named Rowan – naturally, she has flaming red, kissed-by-fire hair, just to encourage us to connect the idea of an ash tree woman to that of a burning tree woman. She also tries to seduce Theon, who is playing some kind of Grey King role at that point in the story, and that makes sense because we believe that the Grey King wedded the burning tree.

As for Areo Hotah, calls his axe his “ash and iron wife,” implying Hotah as someone who has wed the ash tree, and can use it as a weapon. When he touches it in AFFC, it says “the ash felt as smooth as a woman’s skin against his palm.” All of these ideas, from the maidens named Rowan to Areo’s ash and iron wife, help to associate the weirwoods with women, which make sense because Azor Ahai has to marry them. Of course, Hotah’s ash and iron wife is surmounted by a wicked sharp blade, and this represents the moon meteor trailing ash, just like the severed heads of the Night’s Watch brothers and the blade on the end of Oberyn’s spear.

Speaking of falling stars and ash trees… remember that tomb of King Tristifer the Hammer of Justice at Oldstones? The place where they hanged Merrit Frey and Petyr Pimple?  Robb sees it a bit earlier in ASOS:

Yet in the center of what once would have been the castle’s yard, a great carved sepulcher still rested, half hidden in waist-high brown grass amongst a stand of ash.

Dun dun dun!  This Tristifer – or should we call him Lucifer? – dropped the hammer of Justice… or perhaps we might say the hammer of just-ICE, as in icy comets and Ned’s sword Ice which is compared to the red comet. The Hammer’s dead body is surrounded by columns of ash, just as Beric’s was, and this encourages us to think about this as ground zero, and of the dead hammer king as a symbol of Azor Ahai. There are of course more clues to reinforce the symbolism here, to be found on the tomb:

The stone itself was cracked and crumbling at the corners, discolored here and there by spreading white splotches of lichen, while wild roses crept up over the king’s feet almost to his chest.

It’s white and red, in other words, with white lichen and wild roses, presumably red ones. Weirwood coloring! The plants growing over his tomb have to remind us of the weirwood roots that grow over an enthroned greenseer – the are swallowing the tomb like the trees swallow the greenseer. And although the ash trees surrounding the tomb show us the rising ash symbol, we got a more direct representation of a smoke cloud rising the from this tomb that wants to be a burning tree as Grey Wind famously leaps atop the tomb and growls when the conversation becomes heated between Robb and Catelyn. That’s Grey Wind the “smoke dark” direwolf, leaping atop the weirwood-colored sepulcher to completing the diagram of the burning tree in which the hammer dropper rests. Perhaps most importantly, let’s talk about the carved face:

The lid of the sepulcher had been carved into a likeness of the man whose bones lay beneath…

The weirwoodnet is like a sepulcher for greenseers, and like Tristifer’s sepulcher, the faces carved on the weirwoods probably express the likeness of the man (or woman) who’s bones lie beneath the tree and whose spirit lies within… you’ll recall that Theon momentarily perceives the Winterfell heart tree as having Bran’s face, or Jon’s dream of seeing a weirwood with Bran’s face who helps him to open his third eye by poking him in the forehead, just as the Three-Eyed Crow did to Bran. In the first description of the Winterfell tree from AGOT, which we quoted earlier, the face was described as long and melancholy, which are both words often used to describe the signature Stark look. The implication is that the Stark weirwood tree contains more than a few dead Starks and therefore looks a bit like one, and more broadly that the faces on the weirwood are indeed the face of the greenseers inside them. To the extent that the weirwoods are traps like a fishing weir or fishgarth, the face on the tree is the face of a prisoner trapped inside, like a horror movie where the monsters are trapped behind the walls but try to push through. That’s the face of the red wanderer, Azor Ahai the horned lord, looking back at us I think.  A former Garth who went into the trees.

The other thing to note about the idea of Tristifer the hammer dropper trapped in the weirwoodnet is that there is symbolism here which places Jon inside the sepulcher, likening him to King Hammer and Beric and the general idea of Azor Ahai trapped in a weirwood tomb. First, this is the place where Robb has the conversation with Catelyn about making Jon Snow his heir as King in the North – that’s really the primary thing that happens in this scene by Tristifer’s tomb – they talk about Jon Snow.

Second, the “white lichen” on the sepulcher may well be meant to imply the white wolf of that same Lord Snow, because of the potential lichen / lycanthropy wordplay, based on the Greek word for wolf, lukos. Think of the the Underworld movies, where the werwolves are called lycans. The phrase ‘white lichen’ may be meant to suggests a white werewolf, or wolfman, in other words, drawing a parallel between Ghost and the the sepulcher, with both symbolizing weirwood tombs. I should also point out that the word “weir” is very similar to the word were, as in werewolf. The were in werewolf means ‘man’ – so, “man-wolf” – and this would make the trees – the ‘werewoods’ – man-trees. That’s probably something Martin intended, since wolf skinchangers are Martin’s version of werewolves, and greenseers are just skinchanging the weirwoods.

Tristifer and Beric both lay dead in a grove of ash, though of course Beric rose again. Tristifer is called the Hammer of Justice, Beric is called the Lightning Lord. I think you can see where this is headed: it’s another clue about the hammer of the waters and the Storm God’s thunderbolt being part of the same event. The guy buried in the grove of ash – inside the weirwoodnet – is the guy who called down the Hammer of the Waters and the thunderbolt. Again I offer the usual caveats: we speak of an individual, but we are really talking about Azor Ahai and his crew, his group of horned lords, or we may be talking simply about a group or tribe of Azor Ahai type horned lords. All of this about Azor Ahai going into the weirwoodnet could essentially be referring to the group of original greenseers who went into the trees. Pretty soon we will follow up on the Long Night’s Watch episode and return to the topic of the last hero’s twelve and discuss this further. But before we get to that, we need to stick with the basic idea of Azor Ahai going into the weirwoodnet.

We’re going to visit some of our favorite Lightbringer bonfires, yet again, and we’re going to uncover entirely new symbolism which has been under our nose the whole time.

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An Ember in the Ashes

This larger than average section is brought to you by the faithful Patreon support of two priestesses of the Church of Starry Wisdom: Ennovy, Shadowbinder from the Eastern Mountains and Lakes, and Lord Commander Daenyra Flint of the Nightfort, who is also LC of the HoW Night’s Watch, whose words are “avenging the memory of Brave Danny”

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Let there be no doubt: Azor Ahai is in the weirwoodnet.  This is directly alluded to by Melisandre in ASOS when she is preaching the good word about our lord and savior Azor Ahai reborn:

It is night in your Seven Kingdoms now,” the red woman went on, “but soon the sun will rise again. The war continues, Davos Seaworth, and some will soon learn that even an ember in the ashes can still ignite a great blaze.

An ember in the ashes you say? That’s Azor Ahai, waiting to be reborn from the weirwoodnet. If you think about it, this is imply saying the same thing we have already concluded – Azor Ahai is the ember in the ash tree, the fire inside the weirwood. He’s the snake under Yggdrasil, he’s the thunderbolt that set the tree on fire. He’s the comet that impregnated the moon. He’s the face on the weirwood tomb, the red wanderer watching us through the branches. The slice of the sun swallowed by the trees, or by the moon. Given what we’ve seen Martin do with the ash tree as a symbol uniting weirwoods and Yggdrasil, can this language about Azor Ahai as an ember in the ashes really be coincidence?

I mean you know how this is going to go. Yes, it could be coincidence, but I am implying that it is not and now we are going to spend the next twenty minutes taking a look at all the reasons why I think it is intentional and meaningful.  I will do this while trying to be amusing and maybe even impressing you with the occasional rhetorical flourish or show of wit, which may or may not be successful. So let’s do this!

The most vivid fulfillment of Azor Ahai reborn as an ember in the ashes comes from one of the most important manifestation of Azor Ahai reborn, Daenerys Targaryen, at one of our most familiar Lightbringer forging scenes, the alchemical wedding. We already saw the logs with secret hearts touched by fire when the second egg cracked like thunder, so we know there is “weirwood being set on fire” action here. Now take a look at the aftermath:

The third crack was as loud and sharp as the breaking of the world.

When the fire died at last and the ground became cool enough to walk upon, Ser Jorah Mormont found her amidst the ashes, surrounded by blackened logs and bits of glowing ember and the burnt bones of man and woman and stallion. She was naked, covered with soot, her clothes turned to ash, her beautiful hair all crisped away … yet she was unhurt.

The cream-and-gold dragon was suckling at her left breast, the green-and-bronze at the right. Her arms cradled them close. The black-and-scarlet beast was draped across her shoulders, its long sinuous neck coiled under her chin. When it saw Jorah, it raised its head and looked at him with eyes as red as coals.

Dany and Drogon match here – Dany is covered in soot, and therefore blackened, like Drogon, and like black moon meteors. Her clothes, however, have been turned to ash, suggesting her as clothed in ash or formerly clothed in ash. Earlier, as she walked into the firestorm, it said “bits of burning wood slid down at her, and Dany was showered with ash and cinder,” which again gives us the idea of Dany being covered in ash, as if she were inside an ash tree – and right next a burning tree symbol (the burning wood). More obviously, reborn Daenerys and the coal-eyed Drogon are quite literally sitting amidst the ashes of Drogo’s pyre with the other coals and embers, a vivid depiction of Melisandre’s promise of Azor Ahai and Lightbringer being reborn like an ember in the ashes ready to spark a great conflagration. If there is anyone ready to start a big fire, it is Drogon being ridden by a wrathful Daenerys. Seems like a safe bet that we’ll get more of that in the last two books.

In the last quote, did you notice Drogon’s “long, sinuous neck” coiled under Dany’s chin like a noose? That serves nicely to liken her rebirth and transcendence of death here amidst the ashes to Odin’s hanging on the ash tree. Yggdrasil can also be a stallion, and here in the ashes we see the bones of a burnt stallion, which translates to a burning / burnt tree, and the blackened logs and burning embers reinforce the burning tree motif.  Drogo also appeared to ride a smoky stallion out of the pyre and into the stars, encouraging us to connect the idea of being reborn and riding horses to the stars. Those are just the things Odin does on his gallows horse Yggdrasil, which allows a  sacrificed and reborn Odin to traverse the nine realms.

So – besides the other allusions to weirwoods like the logs with secret hearts, we have three possible Yggdrasil references here: the ash, the hanging, and the riding-a-horse-to-the-stars idea. As a preview of an upcoming episode, I will just briefly mention that Odin has another horse involved with astral travel, the famous Sleipnir. We’ll be coming right back to this very scene to delve into the connection between astral travel and riding horses, and that’s going to be a lot of fun.

Alright, Dany and Drogon are reborn as embers in the ashes. Next up, the other most important manifestation of Azor Ahai reborn, Jon Snow. We’ve been talking about how Jon is almost certainly within Ghost the weirwood-colored direwolf at this very long minute that we all live in, suspended between novels. Jon should be an ember in the ashes too, and I believe we see this in the form of the eyes of Ghost. In Book 1, Ghost is described as having “eyes like embers” in one scene and eyes that “burned red as embers” in another.  In ASOS, when Ghost reunites with Jon after their long separation, it says “his eyes caught the last light and shone like two great red suns.” Essentially, I am suggesting that Jon will be the ember inside Ghost, the dying and reborn red sun alluded to in Bran’s chapter – the one which ends in the sacrifice to the weirwood. The line about Ghost’s eyes looking like two red suns is followed by this bit of Jon’s inner monologue:

Red eyes, Jon realized, but not like Melisandre’s. He had a weirwood’s eyes. Red eyes, red mouth, white fur. Blood and bone, like a heart tree. He belongs to the old gods, this one.

Ghost has eyes like red suns, and the weirwoods have eyes like Ghost, and I would say this indicative of the idea of the weirwoods swallowing the sun, as they did Jon’s weirwood grove of nine scene. It’s the same when Ghost has eyes like embers – Ghost symbolizes a weirwood, and the ember in the weirwoods is Azor Ahai, played by Jon in this instance. Like the slice of sun swallowed by the trees and like the red wanderer watching us from the trees, Jon will be the ember inside his weirwood wolf, waiting to be reborn and ignite a great blaze.

The distinction between Ghost and Mel is drawn here, I believe, because this is the moment Jon is trying to decide whether or not to burn the Winterfell heart tree and take Stannis’s offer to become Jon Stark, Lord of Winterfell, and Ghost reminding Jon of the weirwoods is what helps him decide not to accept. However, in another scene, it’s just the opposite – instead of a distinction between Ghost and Mel, we see a similarity and an affinity.  That would be the very strange scene in ADWD where Ghost comes to Melisandre’s beckon, but won’t come back to Jon when called:

Jon let out a white breath. “He is not always so …”

“… warm? Warmth calls to warmth, Jon Snow.” Her eyes were two red stars, shining in the dark. At her throat, her ruby gleamed, a third eye glowing brighter than the others. Jon had seen Ghost’s eyes blazing red the same way, when they caught the light just right. “Ghost,” he called. “To me.”

The direwolf looked at him as if he were a stranger.

Indeed, Ghost and Melisandre do have a lot of symbolic overlap, because Melisandre represents the Nissa Nissa moon, and Ghost represents a weirwood, and we have seen that they play much the same role: swallowing the sun and acting as a fiery womb for Azor Ahai’s rebirth.  I just proposed that Ghost has eyes like embers to symbolize the idea of him swallowing Jon’s spirit, his life fires, and more broadly, because the weirwoodnet swallowed Azor Ahai. Mel has red stars in her eyes for much the same reason: because the Nissa Nissa moon swallowed a comet, and Nissa Nissa the woman swallowed Lightbringer the red sword.

Moving right along, but sticking with the same idea… Remember that quote from ADWD about Tyrion seeing the giant, monstrous red moon that looked as though it had swallowed the sun and taken a fever? The embers in the ashes symbolism makes a notable appearance in the line which immediately preceded it:

Amidships Moqorro sat by his brazier, where a few small flames still danced amongst the embers.

Here we have a black fire sorcerer staring at fiery dancers and embers (which would presumably be resting amongst ashes) while the moon looks to have swallowed the sun – and did I mention they are sailing by Valyria? We always see the fiery dancers appear with some kind of weirwood symbolism, and here they are dancing around the embers, almost as if to resurrect them or aid Azor Ahai’s passage into the trees, and this would work in parallel to Tyrion that the sun has been swallowed by the moon. (Shoutout to Unchained on the Westeros.org forums, whose done some great writing on this topic lately which has been of use here). Now on the subject of dancers, you’ll note that the tale of blood sacrifice on the Isle of Faces to call down the hammer speaks of “song and dance and grisly sacrifice,” a clue that the dancing and weirwood sacrifice go together. We’ll have to talk about dancing and singing another time – probably when we talk about horn-blowing – but of course it does remind us of Odin and shamanic ecstasy, always accompanied by singing, chanting, dancing, and drumming.

Next up, we have Bloodraven, who is our most physical and literal manifestation of a blood of the dragon greenseer person living inside the trees. He too shows us the language of an ember or coal in a dead fire:

Seated on his throne of roots in the great cavern, half-corpse and half-tree, Lord Brynden seemed less a man than some ghastly statue made of twisted wood, old bone, and rotted wool. The only thing that looked alive in the pale ruin that was his face was his one red eye, burning like the last coal in a dead fire, surrounded by twisted roots and tatters of leathery white skin hanging off a yellowed skull.

A ghastly statue made of wood and bone, of tree and greenseer… and just a tiny bit of fire. The only part of Bloodraven that appears alive at this moment is his red eye, described here as the last coal in a dead fire. That’s very similar to the quote from the alchemical wedding, where Dany and baby Drogon, with his “eyes red as coals,” were found “when the fire had died at last.” That dead fire is “not quite dead,” however, and it’s ready to ignite a great blaze. Essentially, it’s an allusion to a red sun which sets but rises again.

There’s a matching quote to this one about the last coal in a dead fire from the weirwood grove of nine scene. In the moment before the giant wakes, we read:

The fire in the center of the grove was a small sad thing, ashes and embers and a few broken branches burning slow and smoky. Even then, it had more life than the wildlings huddled near it. Only one of them reacted when Jon stepped from the brush. That was the child, who began to wail, clutching at his mother’s ragged cloak. The woman raised her eyes and gasped. By then the grove was ringed by rangers, sliding past the bone-white trees, steel glinting in black-gloved hands, poised for slaughter.

On the way out of the grove, that same fire is called “the faint red glow of a dying fire in the center of the grove.” It makes sense to equate the alive-but-dead fire in Bloodraven’s eye with this ‘ashes and embers’ dying fire here in the grove because they are both representing the scrap of sun fire smoldering inside the weirwood, animating it with its life fire. And because this weirwood grove of nine containing the dying fire is playing the role of the moon, it also links Bloodraven’s eye with the moon, just as we saw with ‘Maynard Plumm’s’ moonstone broach and the scene at the Nightfort with the weirwood pulling the moon down into the well.

Also appearing in this quote – Nissa Nissa’s wail, though placed in the child’s mouth, which is fine, it doesn’t have to be exact every time or it would be too robotic. Mirri Maz Duur gave it to us at the Alchemical Wedding instead of Dany, which is fine too. It’s enough to place it in the same place at the right moment, as it is here – remember that the child’s wail seems to be what awoke the giant, just as Nissa Nissa’s cry is said to have broken the moon.

I also want to call attention to the symbol of the broken branch – the fire here is “ashes and embers and a few broken branches.” I believe the broken branch is similar to the broken sword symbolism. Recall Ser Waymar’s broken sword from the AGOT prologue – it was twisted and splintered like a tree struck by lightning, which unites the broken sword symbol and the lightning-struck burning tree symbol, and in the hands of someone who is acting a lot like the last hero, as Ser Waymar does. Furthermore, I would say that the broken branch generally refers to the idea of Azor Ahai the dead greenseer. For example, one of the best fiery dancers scenes was from Jon’s chapter in ACOK where he and Qhorin Halfhand build a fire the night before being caught by the Wildlings, and the broken branches feature prominently:

Jon went to cut more branches, snapping each one in two before tossing it into the flames. The tree had been dead a long time, but it seemed to live again in the fire, as fiery dancers woke within each stick of wood to whirl and spin in their glowing gowns of yellow, red, and orange.

The broken branch is the dead greenseer in need of fiery resurrection, that’s what I am seeing. The broken branch is like a dead tree that lives agin in the fire as a fiery dancer, and elsewhere (such as at the alchemical wedding) those fiery dancers are also fiery sorcerers. At the end of this chapter, Qhorin’s body is burned on on a pyre made from more broken branches, which encourages us to draw a link between the the fire at the beginning of the chapter with the resurrected wood and Qhorin’s funeral pyre. This suggests the fire-undead greenseer as a Night’s Watch brother, an idea we’ve had already. This would be the last hero we are talking about. Now think about the dying fire in the weirwood grove, made of broken branches and ashes and embers, and you can see a possible foreshadowing of a pyre for Jon inside the grove that will be involved in his resurrection.

One last note on the broken branch – it could be a hint about a branching of a family tree, as in the naughty greenseers who split off from the green men to become Azor Ahai people. They would be like the broken branch of the family tree, perhaps.

Ok, moving along, it turns out that Kings Landing is a great place to find Azor Ahai reborn amidst the ashes, which is fitting, because the phrase “king’s landing,” which describes the landing of Aegon the Dragon on Westeros, serves as a perfect metaphor for the landing of Azor Ahai reborn the black dragon meteor. You will recall the scenes there during the Battle of the Blackwater with Tyrion and Stannis filling the air with the smoke of burning trees to the extent that the moon and stars cannot be scene, and how Sansa piled on to that symbolism when she burned her moon-blood soaked sheets and mattress and filled her chamber with smoke. That’s a big part of the symbolism of King’s Landing – it’s a major symbol of meteor impact ground zero.

Thus it is fitting that we will see resurrected Renly, Tyrion, and Robert all get the ember in the ashes treatment here, with a special guest appearance by the Red Viper of Dorne, Oberyn Martell. We’ll start with Ser Dontos’s account of “Resurrected Renly’s Ride” at the Battle of the Blackwater:

They came up the roseroad and along the riverbank, through all the fields Stannis had burned, the ashes puffing up around their boots and turning all their armor grey, but oh! the banners must have been bright, the golden rose and golden lion and all the others, the Marbrand tree and the Rowan, Tarly’s huntsman and Redwyne’s grapes and Lady Oakheart’s leaf.

He also says “They came up through the ashes while the river was burning,” just to make it clear.  The knights, described as “howling like demons in steel” and led by fiery, demonic resurrected Renly, came “up through the ashes” of the trees burned by Stannis, as if they had come up from hell or the underworld. Take note of the banners: Rowan, meaning Mountain Ash, and Marbrand, whose sigil is a burning tree, orange and smoke, whose lords wear flaming tree logos and capes of grey smoke, and who live inside a castle called Ashemark… naturally. That’s a great indication that Martin wants us to think about burning trees in conjunction with people who live inside of ashes. We also get a Tarly Huntsman to reinforce the horned lord ideas, and a couple of fertility symbols from Houses descended of Garth in the Redwine grapes and Oakheart leaf.

Above all, this is a depiction of resurrected Renly as a fiery, demonic horned lord being reborn through ashes and burning trees.

In ASOS, Tyrion and Pod Payne and a few others are greeting the Dornish company and welcoming them to Kings Landing, and the Dornish ride through the same burnt section of the Kingswood:

He could see their banners flying as the riders emerged from the green of the living wood in a long dusty column. From here to the river, only bare black trees remained, a legacy of his battle. Too many banners, he thought sourly, as he watched the ashes kick up under the hooves of the approaching horses, as they had beneath the hooves of the Tyrell van as it smashed Stannis in the flank.

This is all about the Red Viper Oberyn Martell, a well-known incarnation of Azor Ahai with an emphasis on the snake and spear symbolism of the comet. He emerges from the green of the living wood and passes into the “wilderness of ash and charcoal and dead trees,” as Sansa refers to it in another chapter. That sounds like the backstory of Azor Ahai, who started out as a greenseer and possibly a green man, but entered the ash tree and emerged transformed. The Martell troops are compared to ‘Resurrected Renly’s’Tyrell troops, who also showed us green man and burning tree symbolism with their banners.

Take note of the confluence of horse riding and kicking up ash: that’s a clever way of symbolizing Yggdrasil, the ash tree which is also a gallows horse. When Oberyn arrives,  he’s riding “a stallion black as sin with a mane and tail the color of fire,” and even more tellingly, it says Oberyn “sat his saddle as if he’d been born there..” He was born on a flaming horse, in other words. That is simply Oberyn’s version of the “Azor Ahai reborn through the burning tree” symbol, to go along with the fiery horse kicking up clouds of ash.

Right after this passage about Oberyn’s dusty troops kicking up ash, Pod describes the Martell banners: “a red sun on orange, with a spear through its back.” Given what we have seen of the red sun symbolism, being swallowed by trees and direwolves alike, and given everything we’ve discussed regarding Azor Ahai being the solar king who is sacrificed or sacrifices himself to enter the tree… we can only see this red sun impaled by a sun-spear as alluding to Odin’s hanging and impalement on Yggdrasil – especially in conjunction with Oberyn’s army emerging from the green of the living wood into the wasteland of ashes and burnt trees. It seems like yet another message about Azor Ahai being a solar king who experiences an Odin-like transformation by entering the weirwoods. As a final clue about this, we see that George has given Oberyn a kind of third eye, as “his high gilded helm displayed a copper sun on its brow.” 

Next up, Tyrion. After the Battle of the Blackwater, Tyrion finds himself unconscious and dreaming, wandering “through a world without color” outside of King’s Landing, and he sees the trademark column of rising ash. We’ll see that in a second, but there’s a lead up to set things up. The landscape is littered with corpses and pyres of the dead, and we read:

Ravens soared through a grey sky on wide black wings, while carrion crows rose from their feasts in furious clouds wherever he set his steps. White maggots burrowed through black corruption.

The idea is that the corpses serve to symbolize the fallen meteors, and from that spot we will get rising clouds of crows and in a moment, rising clouds of smoke and ash, which work as parallel symbols. The white maggots burrowing through the black corruption of the dead reminds us of the graveworm weirwood roots, and might imply the idea of the meteors as toxic (which we think they are) and the weirwoods as being able to transmute or neutralize their poison. We’ll follow up on that idea soon, but here’s the rising ash, a couple of lines later:

The sun was a hot white penny, shining down upon the grey river as it rushed around the charred bones of sunken ships. From the pyres of the dead rose black columns of smoke and white-hot ashes. My work, thought Tyrion Lannister. They died at my command.

Tyrion sees the rising ash coming from the corpse pyres, a depiction of the ash tree growing at the spot that the meteors struck. He looks at the dead causing the ash and smoke and thinks that it was his work. This is essentially like Azor Ahai entering the weirwood after just having broken the moon and reflecting on the nature of his deeds. There’s a funny line where Tyrion thinks to himself: “Why did I kill them all? He had known once, but somehow he had forgotten.” You’d like to think Azor Ahai had a good reason for breaking the moon, but who knows. Maybe he forgot. Anyway, the point is that Tyrion is a demonic sort of half gargoyle, half monkey-demon version of Azor Ahai reborn, and he’s created the column of white hot ash. In fact, I believe that this entire liminal dream landscape where Tyrion’s spirit wanders as his body hangs balanced between life and death is representative of the weirwoodnet.

To reinforce the weirwood symbolism of the white ash column and this weird dreamscape in general, we have a sea dragon sighting.  The “charred bones of sunken ships” line reminds us of the sea dragon bones, because of the analogy drawn by Theon in ACOK upon seeing wrecked ships at Lordsport: “the skeletons of burnt longships and smashed galleys littering the stony shore like the bones of dead leviathans…”  Sansa sees those too shortly after the battle, describing “charred masts poking from the shallows like gaunt black fingers.” Sea dragon boats represent weirwoods, and in particular the idea of a dragon-blooded greenseer using the weirwoods, and so the ships looking like fingers compares well to the twisted Nightfort weirwood, with its “bone-white branches reaching for the sun.” That’s a line, which, upon further review, also wroks to suggest the weirwoods swallowing the sun, as we saw in the weirwood grove of nine.

The grey river again makes us think of the river styx, a crossing-over point to the realm of death.  During the Battle of the Blackwater, Davos’s chapter closes with the line “the mouth of the Blackwater Rush had turned into the mouth of hell,” which is about as vivid a depiction of the idea of a river acting as a gateway to hell as you can get. This is a scene we need to revisit when talking about weirwoods as bridges, as the chain boom creating the mouth of hell out of the river mouth is acting like a weir in this scene, catching all the burning ships and burning men.

Some of the sigils Tyrion sees in this shadow world are interesting: “black hearts, grey lions, dead flowers, and pale ghostly stags.” It kinda sounds like a fucked up version of Lucky Charms, right? “Mommy, there’s dead flowers in my cereal…” Kidding aside though, a grey lion implies a corpse-like sun, which is exactly what the Grey King character shows us with the idea of a fertile, solar figure turning into a grey, death figure. Black hearts equate to black-blooded hearts of fallen stars and and ghostly stags, those go without saying – dead or undead horned lords. All these things and more can you find inside the ash tree weir-drasil.

Speaking of ghostly stags and resurrected Renly reborn in the ashes, King’s Landing has one more juicy nugget for us which paints Renly’s brother Robert as a stag man reborn in the ashes. It’s the account of Mad King Aerys threatening to burn King’s landing, and it comes from two sources – Dany’s vision in the House of the Undying in ACOK and Jaime’s retelling of the event to Brienne of Tarth in ASOS . In Dany’s vision, she sees a pair of bronze doors open, and then:

Beyond loomed a cavernous stone hall, the largest she had ever seen. The skulls of dead dragons looked down from its walls. Upon a towering barbed throne sat an old man in rich robes, an old man with dark eyes and long silver-grey hair. “Let him be king over charred bones and cooked meat,” he said to a man below him. “Let him be the king of ashes.” Drogon shrieked, his claws digging through silk and skin, but the king on his throne never heard, and Dany moved on.

King Aerys is talking about Robert Baratheon here – Robert is a horned lord about to become a kind of dragon, sitting in the throne of the dragon kings. He’ll be the king of ashes, living in a burnt city – or perhaps we might say that symbolically, he’ll be living in a burning ash tree. Drogon shrieks right after the king of ashes line, as if Drogon is the king of ashes, which makes sense because Drogon is a type of Azor Ahai reborn with eyes like hot coals. Or maybe he’s encouraging Aerys, like “yeah, make that stag man the king of ashes!”

Now here’s Jaime’s recounting of the event:

“The traitors want my city, I heard him tell Rossart, but I’ll give them naught but ashes. Let Robert be king over charred bones and cooked meat. The Targaryens never bury their dead, they burn them. Aerys meant to have the greatest funeral pyre of them all. Though if truth be told, I do not believe he truly expected to die. Like Aerion Brightfire before him, Aerys thought the fire would transform him . . . that he would rise again, reborn as a dragon, and turn all his enemies to ash.

Robert is his enemy, so he’s talking about turning Robert the horned storm lord and into ash by roasting him with dragonfire – second reference to Robert as the king of ashes in conjunction with his taking Kings Landing from the Targaryens. Aerys also imagines himself doing the exact thing we are talking about – being reborn as a dragon in the ashes of the greatest funeral pyre of them all. Symbolically, we can call this the “King’s Pyre” motif, and it’s the same pyre Drogo was burnt in, where we found Daenazor Ahai reborn as an ember in the ashes. It’s the place we’ve been referring to as ground zero. It’s definitely the pyre of the burning sea dragon gods on Dragonstone, and as a matter of fact, that’s the next Lightbringer bonfire we need to visit.

When we look at that familiar passage again, we see that Lightbringer too can be found born amidst the ashes:

Stannis peeled off the glove and let it fall to the ground. The gods in the pyre were scarcely recognizable anymore. The head fell off the Smith with a puff of ash and embers. Melisandre sang in the tongue of Asshai, her voice rising and falling like the tides of the sea. Stannis untied his singed leather cape and listened in silence. Thrust in the ground, Lightbringer still glowed ruddy hot, but the flames that clung to the sword were dwindling and dying.

The smith’s decapitation produces the requisite puff of ash and embers alongside Lightbringer being thrust into the ground, showing us the clouds of ash that rise from the landing of Lightbringer meteors.  We see the dying / dead fire symbolism again as the flames that clung to the sword were dwindling and dying.  And when you hear “ashes and embers” and then “Asshai,” you can’t help but notice that Asshai contains the sound of the word “ash.” It’s the place where Azor Ahai comes from, of course it symbolizes ash. Running through the city is the River Ash, a black river that shines with green phosphorescence at night. In it swim blind white fish… just like we find in the black river in Bloodraven’s cave. Follow the Ash upriver and you come to Stygai, a city whose name is a version of the word stygian, which derives from the same phonetic root as the word stix. Anyway, the scene at Dragonstone continues:

By the time the song was done, only charwood remained of the gods, and the king’s patience had run its course. He took the queen by the elbow and escorted her back into Dragonstone, leaving Lightbringer where it stood. The red woman remained a moment to watch as Devan knelt with Byren Farring and rolled up the burnt and blackened sword in the king’s leather cloak. The Red Sword of Heroes looks a proper mess, thought Davos.

In his seminal essay, R+L=Lightbringer, Schmendrick pointed out that Lightbringer is being treated like a newborn baby here, looking a bloody mess and being rolled up in a cloak.  It’s cradle was the burning wooden statue of the mother, with her moon-like eyes of pearl, as Stannis first pulled the sword from her chest earlier in the scene. We talked earlier about how these wooden gods symbolize weirwoods by 1.) having begun their life as the masts of Targaryen ships, making them sea dragons, and 2.) by having been transformed into wooden gods with carved faces.  Now they are burning, making them burning tree symbols, a third symbolic representation of the weirwoods.  Stannis pulling the sword from the statue of the mother, therefore, is not also like Azor Ahai pulling Lightbringer from Nissa Nissa’s chest, it’s also very like Sigmund pulling Gram from the Brandstokr tree.

You’ll notice we have a female goddess – the mother – playing the role of weirwood tree. This gets back to what I have been saying about Nissa Nissa and the weirwoods both being impregnated by Azor Ahai’s fire, and about both acting as a sort of fiery womb from which Azor Ahai can be reborn, rising from the ashes like the phoenix. The statue of the mother is showing us how this works, sharing her wisdom with us as she acts as a sort of crucible from which Lightbringer will emerge.

Continuing with Stannis, we find that Stannis himself is depicted as the ‘King of Ashes’ in ASOS when he speaks to Davos of having seen a vision in the flames:

Your Grace,” said Davos, “the cost . . .”

“I know the cost! Last night, gazing into that hearth, I saw things in the flames as well. I saw a king, a crown of fire on his brows, burning . . . burning, Davos. His own crown consumed his flesh and turned him into ash. Do you think I need Melisandre to tell me what that means? Or you?”

Um, Mr. Stannis, over here… I can tell you what it means… Mr. Stannis… Now in this conversation, they’re speaking of sacrificing Edric Storm to wake the dragon. When Stannis is saying “I know the cost,” he’s actually making a more general reference to knowing the cost of using magic, or perhaps more specifically to the use of Melisandre’s magic. He’s already created two shadowbabies with her at this point, and the experience has drained his life fires down low, as Melisandre says. Then he mentions his dream, which depicts a king taking on the crown of fire – the fire of the gods, in other words – but being consumed by it. Stannis interprets this as the cost of taking on the mantle of Azor Ahai reborn, and it speaks to a certain aspect of Stannis’s character that he is willing to do what needs to be done to fight the Others, even though it may cost him all.

So, the themes of the vision here speak of death transformation through fire for Azor Ahai, that’s clear enough.  The king in the vision is transformed to ash, and we know what that means.  He’s becomes an ash tree, the ember in the ashes. The crown of fire reminds us of the weirwood crowned with a head of dark leaves in the weirwood grove of nine, again because blood and fire are so often synonymous.  White tree that looks like a man with a crown of blood leaves vs. an ash-tree man with a crown of fire, they may be implying the same thing.

In ADWD, Jon is at the Wall and speaking with Val about keeping Mance and Dalla’s child safe from Melisandre, and they have an interesting exchange. Val tells Jon to keep the baby away from Mel, because “she sees things in her fires.” Jon remarks, sarcastically, “ashes and cinders,” as if to say ‘that’s all she sees, ashes and cinders.’ But Val corrects him, replying “kings and dragons.” Mel’s fire is just a window into ground zero: it’s the King’s Pyre symbol. We already know what we will find there: an ember amidst the ashes – an ember which represents a reborn dragon king. Thus, Jon and Val are both right. Ashes and cinders, kings and dragons.

We’ll close this section with another glimpse in Melisandre’s fires, so you can see what I mean when I say that they are a window into ground zero. It comes in ASOS, but we’ll start the quote with a little bit of lead in to make the context apparent:

“It is the great battle His Grace is speaking of,” said a woman’s voice, rich with the accents of the east. Melisandre stood at the door in her red silks and shimmering satins, holding a covered silver dish in her hands. “These little wars are no more than a scuffle of children before what is to come. The one whose name may not be spoken is marshaling his power, Davos Seaworth, a power fell and evil and strong beyond measure. Soon comes the cold, and the night that never ends.” She placed the silver dish on the Painted Table. “Unless true men find the courage to fight it. Men whose hearts are fire.”

Stannis stared at the silver dish. “She has shown it to me, Lord Davos. In the flames.”

I’ll cut in quickly here to point out the covered silver dish – that’s an obvious moon symbol. A full moon, fat and pregnant. Inside are the leeches – “three large black leeches, fat with blood.” And not just any blood – Davos thinks to himself that it is so-called ‘kingsblood’ from Edric Storm. These three black and bloody leeches are like Dany’s three dragons – they represent the meteor shower as three dragons, which we see fairly often (it’s either a thousand meteor things or three of them). They are waiting inside the silver moon dish, waiting to spring loose and take fire.  When they are burnt, the first leech “curled up like an autumn leaf amidst the coals,” a nice quick nod to the burning weirwood leaves and the burning King of Winter idea. The second leech “split and cracked,” and “the blood burst from it, hissing and smoking,” which just kind of generally sounds like dragon hatching language (this is ‘kingsblood’ we are burning, after all).

Melisandre represents that same moon, and her black shadow children are analogous to these black leeches. She sends the black shadows to kill, and that’s also the purpose of these leeches. She makes the shadowbabies with King Stannis’s seed and life fire, and she makes the leeches with Edric Storm’s Kingsblood. Most importantly, Melisandre sets the moon dish down on the painted table, which is in the shape of Westeros.

In fact, what happens is that she says “Soon comes the cold, and the night that never ends,” and then she sets the moon down on top of Westeros. That’s how you bring a Long Night alright!

The other thing to notice is that they are telling us what the subject matter inside the fire vision is going to be about – the great battle. The War for the Dawn, or the War for the Dawn 2.0, or both. So let’s continue.

“You saw it, sire?” It was not like Stannis Baratheon to lie about such a thing.

“With mine own eyes. After the battle, when I was lost to despair, the Lady Melisandre bid me gaze into the hearthfire. The chimney was drawing strongly, and bits of ash were rising from the fire. I stared at them, feeling half a fool, but she bid me look deeper, and . . . the ashes were white, rising in the updraft, yet all at once it seemed as if they were falling. Snow, I thought. Then the sparks in the air seemed to circle, to become a ring of torches, and I was looking through the fire down on some high hill in a forest. The cinders had become men in black behind the torches, and there were shapes moving through the snow. For all the heat of the fire, I felt a cold so terrible I shivered, and when I did the sight was gone, the fire but a fire once again. But what I saw was real, I’d stake my kingdom on it.”

Stannis looks into the hearthfire, and see white ashes rising from the fire – a great depiction of the burning ash tree. We’ve noted the similarity between weirwoods and fire in that they both grant psychic abilities like astral travel and remote viewing, and that’s nicely expressed here as the rising ash itself acts like a viewing portal through which Stannis can see things happening far away.  The rising ash turns to falling snow, and the embers became the Night’s Watch, arrayed in a ring of torches – a burning moon shape, perhaps. The black brothers are the embers in the ashes, which speaks to the last hero’s twelve companions, the original Night’s Watch, who may also be Azor Ahai’s brethren.

In other words, Stannis is looking through the burning ash tree and seeing more embers in the ashes and burning moon symbols, but the embers are Night’s Watch brothers and the ash is now snow. They interpret what they see as some part of the new War for the Dawn, and they are not wrong. In fact, everything here is like a cold version of the usual imagery – the ash has become snow, and Stannis feels a terrible cold despite all the fire, implying the notion of cold fire and thus to the Others and the cold burning blue star eyes. The Others are indeed sending their dead servants against the Night’s Watch at the Fist of the First Men, and that is why Stannis feels the cold. All of this leads me to believe the symbolism here refers to the impending moon disaster as opposed to the one in the past. We’ll get into this more when we start the Moons of Ice and Fire series, but I have mentioned that I tend to associate the moon which blew up already with fire, and the one we have left with ice.

One way or another, Stannis is glimpsing the future, essentially, and he’s doing it by looking through the symbolic ash tree that was created in the fire. And in this vision, Stannis sees his destiny – he has to go and lead those black brothers with torches with his burning stag man prowess and help them fight the cold. If we were to interpret this in terms of what it means for the original Azor Ahai and / or the last hero, I am seeing Azor Ahai being reborn through the burning tree, and then heading north to confront the Others… or become the Night’s King… or both, or however that works. Stannis has to wear the fiery crown and be transformed into the King of Ashes to fight the Others, and I would guess that it was the same for the original last hero.

To sum up what we’ve just seen, Azor Ahai is an ember in the ashes – and so is Dany, and Drogon, and Jon, and Bloodraven, and resurrected Renly, and Oberyn, and Tyrion and Stannis and Stannis’s fake Lightbringer and the Night’s Watch itself. Basically, all the most prominent symbols of Azor Ahai reborn and Lightbringer appear with the ember in the ashes symbolism.  Toss in Beric’s resurrection in a grove of ash and the tomb of ‘Tristifer the MC Hammer of Justice’ in a grove of ash, plus the ash woods spears decorated with the carved, bloody heads of horned lords… and I think we can safely say that Martin is indeed using the symbolism of Yggdrasil as an ash tree to further imply Azor Ahai and his ilk as having gone into the trees, and indeed, as being the faces in the trees.

So, the trees are like a womb – a fiery womb, as I’ve said over and over.  Wombs belong to women, and Azor Ahai wedded Nissa Nissa as well as the weirwood tree. It’s time to talk about Nissa Nissa’s apparent symbolic overlap with the weirwoods – but, gosh, look at the time. Originally this was a section at the end of this episode, but I chopped it off for its own episode, researched it a bit further, and it turns out that there was more there than I originally thought. So, you can look forward to an entire episode dedicated to the Nissa Nissa moon maidens who seem to transform into symbolic weirwoods in what I am calling “the weirwood stigmata.” You’ll have to tune in to see what the hell I mean by that.

Before we go, a word about our Patreon. Although we still have one more to announce, we have filled up all of our zodiac slots, which was our top Patron level. And so, we’ve created a group of “Guardian of the Galaxy” patrons based on the constellations that are specifically named in ASOIAF. We divided them into two tiers, based on the relative stature in the narrative. The first tier is the Galley, the Ghost, the King’s Crown (which is the cradle North of the Wall), the Shadowcat (whom I introduced earlier) and the Sow. The second tier, slightly more prestigious, consists of the Crone’s Lantern, the Stallion (who is the Horned Lord north of the Wall),  the Ice Dragon, and the Moon Maid. If you’d like to support the podcast and increase your celestial stature, go to lucifermeanslightbringer.com and click on the Patreon tab for more info! Until next time…

Since we’ve talked quite a bit about horned lords, the first thing we need to do is to analyze Elenei, so let’s talk goddesses for a minute.  Besides, we’ve been a little heavy on the male characters and we need to balance things out a bit.  Elenei is an aquatic goddess, being born of the wind and the sea.  A paragraph later in Catelyn’s recounting of the tale, we learn that when the gods continued to send storms and crush Durran’s efforts at rebuilding, Durran’s people begged him to give Elenei “back to the sea,” again implying that she is an aquatic figure.  That means that she can probably be thought of as a mermaid goddess.  Can an aquatic goddess be a moon goddess?  Yes, absolutely; the relationship between the moon and the tides has been known for eons, and has spawned many myths, and we already know that part of the cracked open moon falls into the sea and becomes a kind of drowned goddess, that might be the kind of figure we are talking about here with Elenei.  As I like to say, mermaids are just goddesses that go swimming.  I mentioned that there is a Greek Okeanid water nymph named Nyssa, so the name Nissa Nissa may be in part chosen to give us the idea mermaid goddess.  It seems likely, with all the emphasis on moon drownings that we have seen.

Elenei’s fall from heaven is implied by the idea that she gives up her status as an immortal god to wed the Godsgrief, dooming herself to a mortal’s death.  She’s going from the realm of heaven to the realm of earth, in other words.  Durran’s love for Elenei will ultimately kill her, just as Azor Ahai supposedly slew his wife, though he loved her “best of all that is in this world.”  We have reason to doubt the truth of that, but the themes of the myths match – a love that kills… something I referred to a sex and swordplay way back in episode one.

Elenei sounds like a variation on Helen, and is most likely a reference to the Greek goddess Helen, a.k.a. Helen of Troy.  Helen is variously thought to mean “bright,” “shining one,” “torch,” and a few other derivative ideas,  which makes you think of a star or moon, and indeed Helen is usually, but not always, associated with the moon (some scholars think Helene is phonetically related to Selene, the primary Greek moon goddess).   Helen is the most beautiful woman in the world, famously referred to as “the face that launched a thousand ships,” a reference to the Trojan War being fought over her abduction to Troy by Paris.  Daenerys is also called the most beautiful woman in the world, and she is of course the prime example of our fallen moon maiden. The thousand Greek ships launched by the abduction of Helen the moon maiden seem to have incarnated into ASOIAF as the hundred ships of the Ironborn fleet that is sailing to Slaver’s Bay to bring Daenerys back home.  In Mythical Astronomy terminology, it’s easy to see that the face that launched a thousand ships translates to the moon face that launched a thousand thousand meteor dragons.  I’ll also point out that the Dornish seem to refer to the Milky Way as Nymeria’s ten thousand ships, so the idea of the stars as a fleet of ships is already alive and well in the story.

There’s a fabulous quote from AFFC which ties together these two manifestations of Helen’s moon fleet, the Iron fleet and the moon meteors.  Fittingly, it comes from Victarion’s “The Iron Captain” chapter, and of course Victarion is the man who leads the Iron Fleet to bring the most beautiful moon maiden back home.  Vic is walking along the strand with his niece, Asha Greyjoy:

Outside the tent the wind was rising. Clouds raced across the moon’s pale face. They looked a bit like galleys, stroking hard to ram. The stars were few and faint. All along the strand the longships rested, tall masts rising like a forest from the surf. Victarion could hear their hulls creaking as they settled on the sand. He heard the keening of their lines, the sound of banners flapping. Beyond, in the deeper waters of the bay, larger ships bobbed at anchor, grim shadows wreathed in mist. 

You’ll notice that the actual ships are described like clouds –  grim shadows wreathed in mist – while the clouds themselves are described as ships.  This is to make it clear that the ships sailing across the moon symbolize the Iron Fleet which will be launched to ‘rescue’ Daenerys.  The stars are also mentioned right after the cloud ships to help us draw that association, and of course we see the familiar “ships as trees” symbolism of the sea dragon.

Another good correlation to the ASOIAF fallen moon goddess archetype is found in Helen’s birth – the story is that Zeus, while in the form of a swan, seduced the queen of Sparta, Ledo, resulting a magical egg which gives birth Helen and various brothers and sisters, depending on the myth.  According to Qarthine legend, the falling moon meteors hatched from a lunar egg, and here we find that Helen hatched from an egg… so you can see why Martin would use this myth as part of the inspiration for his own abducted moon maiden ideas.  Zeus is of course a storm god, meaning that Helen and Elenei can both claim the storm god as their father.  Finally, the swan heritage of Helen also adds a bit to the aquatic ideas around Elenei.

Bright, shining Helen also reminds us of the translation of lucifer as “shining one,” “light-bringer,” etc., and accordingly, Helen is actually sometimes associated with the goddess Aphrodite, the Greek forerunner to the Roman Venus, being depicted in similar fashion.  Helen was not regarded as Aphrodite, but as being Aphrodite-like, like a part of Aphrodite reborn on the earth, you might say.  This is important, because as we have seen, George has shifted the Lightbringer / Morningstar symbolism of Venus onto the moon meteors and the comet.  Essentially, in ASOIAF, the moon transforms from a moon goddess to a falling Venus or a falling Evenstar when the moon explodes and becomes falling meteors.  That’s why most of our moon maidens, such as Daenerys, draw from both moon goddess and Morningstar goddess mythology.

Aphrodite slides right into this picture, as she is already a fallen star goddess.  Her name translates to “foam born,” because Aphrodite was born in the foam of the sea after the sky god Ouranos was castrated and his holy seed fell from heaven and landed in the sea.  You can see the clear mythical astronomy here – Venus descends to the horizon every night when it is in the Evenstar position, seeming to sink into the sea for anyone living on a westward-facing coastline.  The Greeks saw Venus sinking into the ocean and imagined her life beginning as a fallen star seed, with her subsequent birth from the foam represents Venus rising again from the horizon as the Morningstar.  Thus, Aphrodite is a natural fit for George’s idea of a moon maiden that turns into a falling star and is then reborn.  It’s just a more elegant version of the sea dragon myth, on other words.  That’s why he hangs this excellent Aphrodite reference on beautiful Daenerys in ADWD:

“..send Irri and Jhiqui, if you would be so good.  And Missandei.” I need to change, to make myself beautiful.

She said as much to her handmaids when they came.  “What does Your Grace wish to wear?”

Starlight and seafoam, Dany thought, and a wisp of silk that leaves my left breast bare for Daario’s delight. Oh, and flowers for my hair.

I’m not the first one to catch this – the phrase “sea foam” jumps out to anyone familiar with the Aphrodite myth, and calling Dany beautiful in the same passage reinforces the idea.  And remember, its when Euron is sending Victarion and the Iron Fleet to go ‘rescue’ Daenerys that he calls Dany “the most beautiful woman in the world,” just to make sure we get the idea.  And when I talk about beautiful Venus falling as the Evenstar, some of you may think of Brienne “the beauty,” who comes from Evenfall Hall and whose father is called the Evenstar.  That’s another Venus / Aphrodite reference for a moon maiden who, like Dany, turns into a falling star / Evenstar character.  Or perhaps you might be thinking of the fabled beauty of Ashara Dayne, who leapt from a tower into the sea at a place called Starfall.  If she survived with a secret identity, then she would have been reborn by falling in to the sea.  I wouldn’t wager on this being the case, but cross your fingers because it would be great symbolism, and just plain old fun to have a Dayne around to talk to.

This, then, is how we should view Elenei, I believe – the moon goddess, plucked from the heavens and fallen into the sea, where she becomes Durran’s aquatic goddess.  The picture snaps into place when you consider Durran Godsgrief again – he stole Elenei from the gods, from the heavens, and brought her down to earth and to mortal existence.  Again we are reminded of Helen of Troy, the beautiful daughter of the Storm God whose abduction at the hands of a hubristic mortal man provoked a devastating war and the fall of Troy.  Even though both Elenei and Helen came willingly – though I cry foul on Paris using an all powerful love goddess to help him seduce a woman, which is what he did –  it still serves the same function as stealing the fire of the gods or pulling the moon down.  Grey King stole the fire of the Storm God, Durran stole the daughter of the Storm God – but they’re really the same thing.  Don’t forget that one of the meanings of Helen is “torch,” aligning her with the burning brand symbol which has been used to describe the fire that falls from heaven, and sometimes lands in the sea.

Therefore, we can say that in the Durran story, the moon is a goddess, and she is stolen and possessed by a horned lord figure – a very good match to the ‘greenseers pulling down the moon’ monomyth that we are tracing out, both in deed and in theme.  Once again it would appear that pulling down the moon was an act of defiance and hubris against the gods, a theft committed by a horned lord or greenseer.

And what happens when the moon goddess falls to earth and lands in the sea?

Why, horrific storms and floods and a body count to match, and this is exactly what happens in the Durran Godsgrief story.  When it says that the sea and wind gods sent winds and waters to batter Durran’s hold, that means it was more than just a storm.  It was a storm and a flood, an attack by the wind and the sea.  Just as the sea dragon drowns whole islands in her wroth, the descent of Elenei to the earth brings a flood and tempest.  The same passage from ACOK also says that “gale winds came howling up Shipbreaker Bay, driving great walls of water before them,” and where I come from, great walls of water racing towards your home are called a tsunami.  In 2004, we saw what kind of horrendous damage and loss of life that a 100 foot wall of moving water can bring when an offshore earthquake triggered a tsunami that hammered Indonesia and the rest of the Indian Ocean.  Even tsunami waves of much less than 100 feet high can cause tremendous damage and death.

The flood aspect of the Durran Godsgrief story is important, because I believe this myth is actually a memory of the breaking of the arm of Dorne, or at least a memory of the fallout of the Breaking.  Any kind of sizable land collapse triggered by an earthquake or meteor strike along the narrow land bridge that was the Arm of Dorne would almost certainly have sent massive tidal waves racing up the newly created Narrow Sea, and I think this is the best candidate to explain the storms and floods of Durran’s tale.  There’s an additional clue about this at the end of the story, after Durran builds his seventh castle, supposedly the current keep of Storm’s End:

No matter how the tale was told, the end was the same. Though the angry gods threw storm after storm against it, the seventh castle stood defiant, and Durran Godsgrief and fair Elenei dwelt there together until the end of their days. Gods do not forget, and still the gales came raging up the Narrow Sea. Yet Storm’s End endured, through centuries and tens of centuries, a castle like no other.

In other words, the story is implying a permanent change in the weather pattern of the area.  Ever since this one dramatic event, this combined flood and superstorm, ever since then, we have had gales and storms raging up the Narrow Sea.  This new weather pattern is nicely explained by the hypothesis that the flood of the Durran Godsgrief story is in fact a mythicized account of the breaking of the arm of Dorne.  Whenever and however it happened, the breaking of the arm and the joining of the Shivering Sea to the Summer Sea would have completely changed the ocean currents, which would in turn have had all kinds of affects on climate, both regionally and globally.  The temperature of the seas themselves would change, and although I am not anything remotely close to a climatologist or meteorologist, I do know that ocean temperatures and air temperatures are primary factors in the precipitation of storms.

The breaking of the arm of Dorne, according to our research, was accomplished by greenseers pulling down the moon, and that’s essentially the story that the Durran and Elenei legend tells.  Durran pulled down the moon maiden, and this pissed off the powers that be big time.  This means that the Storm King who steals the moon goddess is yet another aspect of the Azor Ahai archetype, or of the Azor Ahai people as we have come to say.  Once again, we find a horned lord playing the Azor Ahai role of moon-breaker and stealer of godly things.  Once again, we find this overlap between Garth people – horned lords – and Azor Ahai people, who we think of as the first dragonlords.  As we have seen, the Garth side of things tends to line up with the summer king / fertility god symbolism, while the Azor Ahai reborn side of things tends to line up with the winter king / death god symbolism, and it seems that this translates on the ground as horned green men undergoing some kind of fiery death transformation and emerging as Azor Ahai people.  In turn, I do suspect the dragon bond and the blood of the dragon phenomena to be a mutation of greenseer abilities, but that is a subject for another day.

It should not be strange to think of Azor Ahai as a storm figure or storm king, because we’ve shown that the undead stag man figure is a very important aspect of Azor Ahai reborn, and the Storm Kings are definitely OG stag men.  The Grey King possessed the Storm God’s thunderbolt, and this can be seen as endowing the Azor Ahai figure with that same power of thunder and lightning. You could also simply say that Azor Ahai called down the thunderbolt when he broke the moon, and that this makes him the master of the storm, the Storm King.  His hand is the fiery hand that flings the meteors, and he’s the one that can call down the storm of swords.  You may also remember all the way back to Bloodstone Compendium 2, where we talked about Bloodstone’s associations with lightning and thunder, and how Beric is an Azor Ahai character who is called “the lightning lord.”  Thus, everything about the Storm King mythology fits in nicely with that of the Grey King and Azor Ahai.

Consider the two high-profile infusions of dragonblood into the line of Storm Kings: once at the inception of House Baratheon, and again two generations before the main story.  We are told in AGOT that King Robert’s grandmother was a Targaryen – Rhaelle Targaryen, the daughter of Aegon the V (Egg from Dunk and Egg) and Black Betha Blackwood –  making Robert a horned god with a bit of dragon blood.  After Robert defeats Rhaegar, he does become more dragon-like, sitting on the throne of the dragon kings in the castle of the dragon kings and even wondering on his deathbed if he’s been as bad as Aerys.  Ned puts a finger on this when he stands up to Robert’s order to kill Daenerys and asks why they deposed Aerys, if not to end the killing of children and innocents.

The line of Baratheon is actually founded by a bastard dragon, Orrys Baratheon, who was thought to be a bastard brother to Aegon the Conqueror.  Orrys defeated the last Storm King Argilac the Arrogant during the Conquest, and afterward, he took Argilac’s daughter Lady Argella to wife and adopted the Storm Kings’ stag sigil and antlered crown and helm.  His grandson Robar Baratheon married the dowager queen Alyssa Velaryon after Aenys Targaryen died, and their daughter married back into the Targaryen line.  On a basic level, all this intermingling of stag man blood and dragon blood serves to reinforce my basic premise that Garth people and Azor Ahai people are related to one another, and more specifically, it’s showing us the cycle of one turning into the other.

Now think about the fact that wooden fish trap over a river can be called either a fishing weir or a fishgarth, and how that alludes to the weirwoods as a kind of “garth tree,” an idea reinforced by the fact that green man figures from world mythology can have either antlers or branches on their head.   With that in mind, compare the Durran Durrandon myth to the scene at the Nightfort.  The twisted, faceless Nightfort weirwood tree pulling down the moon seems to symbolize naughty sorcerers using greenseer magic to pull down the moon, and that is the same thing expressed by Durran the horned lord pulling down Elenei.  We could say that the weirwood represents the greenseer himself, but I think it’s probably more accurate to say that the weirwood acting like a person is telling us about people using weirwoods to work sorcery.

Finally, take note of the detail in the legend of when the deadly storm and flood comes – it comes at Durran and Elenei’s wedding.   This reminds us of the Alchemical Wedding of Daenerys Targaryen which symbolizes the birth of the dragons in a firestorm of destruction, and of the greater concept of the sun and moon as a husband and wife whose copulation produces the Lightbringer meteors.  This is the crux of the Godsgrief myth – horned lords stole the moon.  Greenseers brought down the hammer of the Waters on the Arm of Dorne, but they did so by pulling the moon down to earth.

And they may not have been children of the forest greenseers.

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A Memory of Merlings

This section brought to you by the support of our new Zodiac patron, The Mystery Knight known only as Rusted Revolver, the Lilith-Walker, Great Dayne-friend and earthly avatar of Heavenly House Pisces

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Now as it happens, there are a lot of direct comparisons to be drawn between the Grey King and Durran Godsgrief, and between the Ironborn and people of the Stormlands.  Let’s compare the legendary monarchs first, and then the cultures they gave rise to.

First off, you’ll notice that like Durran Godsgrief, the Grey King is also said to have “taken” a mermaid to wife… ah ha.  I didn’t dwell on the mermaid part of the Grey King story previously because I wanted to save it for when we talked about Elenei, and here we are.  The Ironborn folklore seems to recall a moon meteor impact, imagined as a mighty thunderbolt or an island-drowning sea dragon or a Drowned God – and I somewhat jokingly said that we ought to consider the Drowned God a drowned goddess, because they are really just talking about the fallen moon goddess.  The Grey King’s ‘taking a mermaid to wife’ communicates the same idea – an aquatic moon goddess wife, risen from the depths.   Aeron calls the Drowned God “Lord God who drowned for us,”  thus equating the drowned moon deity as a sacrifice, just as Nissa Nissa can be viewed as a sacrifice.  The slain sea dragon Nagga – a female dragon, you’ll note –  passed on her living fire to the Grey King, and this also implies a moon sacrifice to transmit the fire of the gods into the hands of the moon breaker.

That means that there are actually three Grey King myths which  could refer to him pulling down the moon: slaying the sea dragon and stealing her fire, calling down the thunderbolt and possessing the fire of the burning tree, and now taking a mermaid to wife.

Next up in the Grey King / Storm King comparison, the spiky wooden crowns of the Ironborn, both driftwood and weirwood, vs. the stag crowns and antlered helms of the Storm Kings.  We just mentioned the interchangeability of wearing horns or branches on your head in regards to green man folklore, and that means that the Grey King and Driftwood Kings of the Ironborn AND the antler-hat wearing folk of the Stormlands are both drawing from horned nature god mythology.  This raises the obvious possibility that both are “Garth people,” of the same line of horned figures that gave rise to the legend of Garth and the green men, or perhaps we might say it strengthens our existing hypothesis about that being the case.  I also highly recommend reading an essay on Westeros.org by my good friend Crowfood’s Daughter regarding the Grey King and Garth being brothers who represent the winter king / summer king cycle.  She has some really great insight into the story of House Goodbrother, supposedly descended from the leal elder brother of the Grey King.  Consider it required reading, in fact.

We have found both summer / oak king / life-associated symbolism and the opposite death / winter / holly king symbolism with the Baratheon brothers, and the same is also true to a lesser extent with the Grey King.  That is because all of these horned figures are representing different parts the cycle, and the figures themselves are not static, but depict the transitions.  Although the Ironborn primarily express the death / reaping / killing side of things, the Grey King is said to have left a hundred sons behind him (who, admittedly, did promptly engage in “an orgy of kinslaying” which left only 16 survivors), and as Crowfood’s Daughter points out in her essay, House Goodbrother shows a consistent expression of summer king and fertility ideas, punctuated by the occasional opposite kind of “BadBrother” figure.  We aren’t told how many offspring Durran Godsgrief left, but we are told that everyone else in the immediate vicinity was killed during the great storm and flood at their wedding, with Durran and Elenei presumably repopulating the Stormlands with their progeny and establishing a line of kings that lasted eight thousand years.

To put it simply, we might say that both the Grey King and Durran Godsgrief were remembered as the originators a new and long-lasting culture, and in doing so are giving us the fertility ideas to go along with their antler hats and wooden hats.  The Storm King kind of shows us the moment of transition between green summer king to a dead winter king (think of the black stag sigil’s implication of a dark stag figure).  The Grey King primarily shows us the aftermath of the transition, where he has taken possession of the fire of the gods but has turned grey and corpse-like.

Third point of comparison: we have the fact that Durran Godsgrief is the only other man in Westeros besides the Grey King who was said to live for a thousand years – Durran is called “The King of a Thousand Years,” while the Grey King was said to rule for a thousand years and seven.  This long life could be exaggeration, or it could be a clue about someone who has extended their lifespan through greenseer magic and / or undeath transformation.

Fourth, we have the floods, as I mentioned a moment ago – the Grey King fought against the island-drowning sea dragon, which sure sounds like a story about a flood, and Durran provoked the flood and storm by opposing the wind and sea gods.  It is also said that the Storm God drowned Nagga’s fire after the Grey King died, which is another hint about a flood associated with the Grey King, and like the Godsgrief tale, tells the story of a man who battled against storms and floods sent by an angry god he had stolen from.

Finally, we have the idea of the fallen moon providing shelter – Elenei sheltered Durran from the storm and flood which killed everyone else, and the Grey King fashioned a longhall from the bones of Nagga the sea dragon.  That reminds us of the Biblical leviathan, whose skin God will use to make a covering of light over the world in the end times, something we looked at while examining sea dragon and sea serpent myths.

The idea that the legends of the Grey King and Durran Godsgrief are referring to the same person or group of moon-antagonizing people is strengthened by the extensive correlations between the Ironborn and the people of the Stormlands, which many in the fandom have picked up on.  Let’s broaden the comparison to the two cultures that the Grey King and Durran Godsgrief gave rise to and you’ll see what I mean. There is dorky stuff like the reversed sigils – a black stag on gold for Baratheon and Durrandon, and a golden kraken on black for the Greyjoys.  Uber-nerds have spotted the Thor’s hammer connection – Thor is the Norse storm god, whose hammer shoots thunderbolts, and on one hand we have Robert the Storm Lord with a mighty hammer, and on the other have a Storm God shooting thunderbolts at the Grey King, and the Drowned God speaking in the language of leviathan, which turns out to be the “hammering” of the waves.

The most important and obvious parallel, however, is found in the pantheons of the two cultures.  They both see two gods in the world – a sea god and a storm / wind / sky god.  In the Stormlands mythology, they are simply called “the sea god and the goddess of the wind,” while the Ironborn famously have the Drowned God and the Storm God.  That’s pretty darn similar.

It could be a case of mutual invention of people who live by the stormy sea, but we actually see a very similar set of beliefs elsewhere – most notably with the occasionally web-fingered folks on the Three Sisters, which in case you forgot are those three small islands north of the Vale of Arryn which Davos stops at on the way to White Harbor.  They speak of the the Lady of the Waves of the Lord of the Skies – and sky gods, storm gods, and wind gods are all in the same general vein, so this is really another match for this sea / wind god dichotomy of the Stormlands and Iron Islands.  When the Lady of the Waves and the Lord of the Skies mate, they give birth to storms, and this suggests Elenei, the child of wind and sea gods, may be seen as the storm herself, just as Daenerys is the Stormborn and just as the moon meteor children arrive in the form of a firestorm of steel rain or a mighty thunderbolt.

To this I will also add that the Tullys, a House descended from the First Men, speak of sending their dead to “the watery halls where the Tullys held eternal court, with schools of fish their last attendants.”  Compare that to the “Drowned God’s watery halls,” where the dead of the Ironborn go to feast and be attended by mermaids, and consider the Tullys’ love of dressing up in fish-people armor… and the stuff from the Three Sisters… and you can start to see the remnants of a very old aquatic-based religion stretching across the middle of Westeros from the Iron Islands in the west to the  Stormlands and Three Sisters in the east.

We might also think of the Velaryons on the nearby Isle of Driftmark, because the Velaryons are said to have a driftwood throne from the Merling King.  The Merling King seems to have been regarded as a god, due to the presence of a Merling King statue in the House of Black and White, which is a home of all the various death gods in the world.  This implies that the Merling King is a death god or underworld deity in addition to his obvious identity as an underwater deity.  Merling King definitely sounds like a Poseidon figure, and Poseidon is also seen as an underworld figure in some instances, as the sea is often regarded as a kind of underworld, for obvious reasons.  The Merling King is also the name of the boat that Petyr Baelish uses to snatch Sansa the moon maiden away from King’s Landing, which fits the pattern of death figures stealing moon maidens .  But setting aside the symbolism, it’s simply another sign of an aquatic religion across the middle of Westeros – one that might have connected people on both coasts of ancient, pre-Long Night Westeros.

You know how we are told that the First Men adopted the religion of the children of the forest after they signed the Pact, which followed shortly after the Hammer of the Waters?  This raises the interesting question of what religion the First Men might have followed before the Hammer fell and the Pact was signed.  Well, we can probably answer that now – this aquatic based, sea and sky god religion was one, and the other major one would be the worship of Garth the Green.  These two may have even overlapped, given what we have seen of horned people wrapped up in legends with sea and storm gods.  These two ancient religions or belief sets linger on, underneath the heavy layer of thousand of years of First Men worshipping the Old Gods and thousands more worshipping the Seven.

In fact, let’s talk timeline for a quick second, because that is a very important component of the Hammer of the Waters event.  By now we have laid out enough evidence to show that the Hammer of the Waters might have been a moon meteor that it’s appropriate to consider the major adjustment to the timeline of ancient Westeros it would necessitate, if true: namely, that the Hammer of the Waters fell at the time of the Long Night, with the famous Pact between First Men and children of the forest likely being signed during or after the Long Night.  If this is the case, the mystery of why the First Men signed the Pact and switched religions when they were clearly winning the greater struggle for domination of Westeros is solved – the children helped to save mankind from the Long Night and the Others, as the story of the last hero suggests.  The Long Night disaster provided the cultural reset button and clean slate that would certainly have helped to facilitate a group of people taking up the religion of their former enemy en masse, and the help the children provided supplies the motivation.  As I speculated in the Green Zombies series, the forming of the Night’s Watch, who originally swore their Night’s Watch vows to the greenseers, would likely have been a part of this Pact, a debt of gratitude and honor paid to the greenseers who helped the last hero win the War for the Dawn.

According to this alternate timeline, most of the legendary conflicts between children and First Men would have probably occurred before the Long Night, with a period of cooperation coming after the Long Night.  I don’t want to get too dogmatic about this, because we surely had some cooperation / interbreeding before the Long Night, and eventually some conflict afterward as humans began to forget or dishonor the Pact, but we do see this idea of fighting before the Long Night and cooperation afterward in the mythical early history of Durran Godsgrief, as it happens.

We see it in the Durran tale itself, where Durran breaks the moon and causes all hell to break loose, but then gets help from the children to rebuild.  We also see it in the Father to son lineage of the the first Durrandon, as Durran Godsgrief, the moon breaker and naughty greenseer, is said to have taken the Rainwood from the children of the forest, but his son Durran the Devout returned it to them.  If the first Durran lines up with the moon-breaker figure, he would have been the guy who took the greenseer magic of the children and did something extremely naughty with it, causing the Long Night, so it makes sense he might be seen as hostile to the children, perhaps even sacrificing them to work blood magic as some legends of the Hammer of the Waters suggest.  Durran’s ‘devout’ son, meanwhile, would be the one to live immediately after the Long Night – and after the Pact, according to my timeline, when the First Men were newly devoted to the religion of the children.  Accordingly, Durran the Devout, son of the Godsgrief, was remembered as being friendly with the children, returning to them the Rainwood which his father had taken.

The Starks show us the same thing – Bran the Builder was friendly with the children and even learned their language, but his father might have been…

Brandon of the Bloody Blade, who drove the giants from the Reach and warred against the children of the forest, slaying so many at Blue Lake that it has been known as Red Lake ever since.

..according to TWOIAF.  Brandon’s father was… Garth the Green, a fertility god who planted the three weirwoods at Highgarden known as the Three Singers.  It’s a cycle, like I said, from summer king to winter king to summer king again.  Brandon of the Bloody Blade sounds like our naughty greenseer figure, the moon breaker, and slaying all those children might have been the same slaughter that was associated with calling down the Hammer of the Waters.  Bran the Builder, if that’s his son, would correlate with the last hero, potentially, which makes a great deal of sense.

This alternate timeline means that Durran Godsgrief would have lived at the time of the Long Night, and he was the first Storm King anyone remembered.  This makes sense to me, because I believe the Long Night should be viewed as a cultural bottleneck through which very little in the way of established order would have survived.  Right after the Long Night is when mankind would have been establishing new centers of power and new royal lineages, and that’s what we see from Durran’s children.  It’s the same story on the Iron Islands, where the moon breaker figure is the father of their nation and basically the oldest legendary character in their cultural memory.

That brings us right back to Brandon of the Bloody Blade and Bran the Builder.  Bran the Builder is remembered as having founded House Stark, but if Brandon of the Bloody Blade lived earlier as the legends suggest, then we could see him as the first Stark, and thus again we see the moon breaker is the oldest remembered ancestor of the great house founded in the aftermath of the Long Night.  The Durran tale actually has a connection to Bran the Builder, and to strange building techniques:

A seventh castle he raised, most massive of all. Some said the children of the forest helped him build it, shaping the stones with magic; others claimed that a small boy told him what he must do, a boy who would grow to be Bran the Builder.

I’ve mentioned that shaping stone with magic is not something we’ve associated with the children, but it is the hallmark of dragonlord construction.  Storm’s End isn’t made with fused stone – at least not on the outside – but it is still interesting that the folktale here mingles dragonlord building techniques with ideas about the children building with magic.  Could the truth here have involved not children using dragonlord construction, but horned lords who are not quite human and not quite elf, people who have some sort of overlap with the fused stone builders?  That is who I have pegged Durran Godsgrief as, and he is the one said to have built Storm’s End, so I am not proposing anything too crazy when I propose that horned lords or green men built Storm’s End.  I also look at this idea of the children helping Durran (or perhaps his offspring) to rebuild after the great flood as a possible allusion to the idea of the children helping mankind after the Long Night, and that’s also the context in which I see Bran the Builder’s myth, which has the child-like Bran running around ancient Westeros helping great houses build their first castles and also learning the language of the children of the forest.  The children pretty clearly helped mankind get up off their ass after the Long Night.

It’s also worth drawing a comparison between Storm’s End and Castle Pyke on the Iron Islands.  As we discussed in our episodes with History of Westeros about the Great Empire of the Dawn, the maesters say that round towers were only built more recently, some time after the Andals came over to Westeros, and thus the older structures should not have round tower construction.  For the most part this seems to be true, but the exceptions are notable.  Storm’s End is one giant round tower, and the Towers of Castle Pyke, including the main keep, is a round tower design.  Pyke is almost certain to date back to the remotest antiquity, eons before the arrival of the Andals, and Storm’s End may well be the same story, so what we have here are two round tower castles of impressive engineering existing when they shouldn’t, according to the maesters.  The First Keep of Winterfell, the oldest part of the castle supposedly built by Bran the Builder, is also a round tower design, for what it’s worth.

I think it’s easy to see the hypothesis that is presenting itself: these horned Garth people seem to have been a builder culture.  They are also the primary suspect for the creation of the Wall, in my opinion.  Recall that the Wall is said to have been built perhaps by giants or with the help of the children of the forest – the truth may be these horned lords, who may be some sort of race of tall elvish people.  Don’t forget that Bran is supposedly descended from Garth, and is said to have visited the reach to help Uthor Hightower, a man who married a daughter of Garth, with the construction of the final version of the Hightower at Oldtown.  There is some sort of intersection between House Stark and Bran the Builder and the horned green men, and this surely goes right to the heart of the mystery of the origins of House Stark and the creation of the Wall.

I’ll finish this section by mentioning the symbolism of Storm’s End itself.  Storm’s End is a place whose legend is all about the moon goddess falling to earth and the chaos it caused, as we have seen with the storm and flood sent by the angry gods.  As a compliment to this, Storm’s End also gives us the rising fist symbolism of the smoke, ash and debris which would have risen in a huge column from the impact locations – the King’s Pyre symbol tower, if you will.  We haven’t focused on the rising smoke and ash symbol as much as some others, but it is of course very important, because it is that actual thing that blotted out the sun.  We saw it with the Mountain’s smoking fist, rising up to break the face of the sun figure, Oberyn Martell, and we’ve seen more straightforward columns of smoke rising from places where meteor impacts are symbolized.  So here is the description of Storm’s End from the chapter where Cat inner monologues the story of Durran and Elenei:

Of towers, there was but one, a colossal drum tower, windowless where it faced the sea, so large that it was granary and barracks and feast hall and lord’s dwelling all in one, crowned by massive battlements that made it look from afar like a spiked fist atop an upthrust arm.

Later in ACOK, right before Renly is murdered, we see Renly’s soldiers described as dead trees and shadow knights, and check out the description of Storm’s End:

The long ranks of man and horse were armored in darkness, as black as if the Smith had hammered night itself into steel. There were banners to her right, banners to her left, and rank on rank of banners before her, but in the predawn gloom, neither colors nor sigils could be discerned. A grey army, Catelyn thought. Grey men on grey horses beneath grey banners. As they sat their horses waiting, Renly’s shadow knights pointed their lances upward, so she rode through a forest of tall naked trees, bereft of leaves and life. Where Storm’s End stood was only a deeper darkness, a wall of black through which no stars could shine…

These dead tree shadow knights armored in darkness used to be the knights of summer, but when their horned lord Renly dies, they transform with him it seems.  After this, they are possessed by a dead horned lord figure, Stannis, as the troops go over to Stannis’s side in the aftermath of this event.   Stannis’s new army is like night itself hammered into steel by a divine smith – this is Lightbringer, the black weapon of Azor Ahai that we are talking about.  And right on cue, there’s Storm’s End, the rising fist of a castle now become a deeper darkness through which no stars could shine – it’s the cloud of darkness rising from the meteor impacts, the meteors which are like night itself hammered into steel.  This is the place where Durran is remembered as having ‘pulled down the moon goddess,’ an event which caused not only storms and floods, but a deeper darkness through which no stars could shine, a.k.a. the Long Night.

The next morning, it says that:

The nightfires had burned low, and as the east began to lighten the immense mass of Storm’s End emerged like a dream of stone.

Referring to Storm’s End as a dream of stone may be a hint about it being built by dreamers, as in greenseers.   That seems to be the case, as Durran’s horns and moon-goddess-theivery already identify him as a greenseer and a horned lord.

Alright , that will do it for our introduction to the Storm Kings and their horned lord symbolism, and for our introduction to moon maidens as mermaids, a topic we will return to when we focus on moon goddesses more specifically.  You can see that the Storm King archetype is a part of the “naughty greenseer” archetype, and this is a subject we will return to when we discuss Mr. “I am the storm” Euron Crow’s Eye, whom I like to call “creepy pirate Odin on bad acid.”  We are going to switch over to discussing Yggdrasil and Odin and their influence on the weirwoods and greenseers, but that trail will lead us back to the idea of Azor Ahai as a storm lord in a major way, and I needed to explain the Storm God mythology first to set that up.  So now, without further ado, let’s go inside the magical white tree, Weir-drasil.

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Bearer of Thunder

The section is sponsored by our newest Zodiac patron, Ser Cletus Yronwood reborn of the Never-Lazy Eye, wrestler of bulls and earthly avatar of Heavenly House Taurus

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In Weirwood Compendium 2, A Burning Brandon, we popped the cork on the correlations between ASOIAF and Odin and his magical tree, Yggdrasil.  I say pop the cork because we’ve only just begun sipping on this shamanic brew that is Mimir Brand sparkling well water.  We’ll be going back to this well often throughout the weirwood compendium, because you really can’t understand the context of the weirwoods without talking about Yggdrasil and Odin.

We started with the Nightfort scene and the idea of the moon representing the eye of Odin, plucked out to gain cosmic wisdom and cast down into the well.  Odin’s one-eyed status is his most recognizable trait, so it was a logical place to begin.  It’s also a very easy symbol to spot, and Martin has hidden one-eyed people, horses, mules, wolves, dogs, and even a one-eyed dragon (bonus points if you know the dragon) scattered about the story. Bloodraven is of course the primary manifestation of this idea, and really, unravelling the importance of Odin to ASOIAF begins with the correlations between Bloodraven and Beric Dondarrion, which also happens to be one of the best symbolic pieces of evidence in support of my hypothesis that Azor Ahai was a greenseer, because Beric’s symbolism practically slaps us in the face with the idea of “Azor Ahai the fiery undead greenseer.”

We’ve talked about Beric a few times, so we are familiar with the basics – as an undead person resurrected through fire magic who lights a sword on fire with actual blood magic, Beric is a terrific Azor Ahai reborn echo.  He’s from a black castle – Blackhaven – just as Azor Ahai was from Asshai a.k.a. the largest city in the history of the world which also happens to be built completely from light-drinking oily black stone, and just as other Azor Ahai characters like Jon and Stannis are the lords of black castles.  Beric even has red, kissed-by-fire hair!

Now that we’ve put out the Great Empire of the Dawn episode, I can point to the fact that Beric set to marry a Dayne before he ‘died’ – Allyria – as another potential Azor Ahai parallel, as we have speculated that the Daynes may partially descend from the Great Empire of the Dawn people from which Azor Ahai probably comes.  Allyria / Valyria?  Hmm.  Beric also has Edric Dayne, the young lord of Starfall, as his squire, making Beric something of a father figure for Edric, and this could be a potential echo of Azor Ahai or his son marrying a native Westerosi woman to found House Dayne.  Oh and by the way “Eldric Shadowchaser” is supposedly another name for Azor Ahai, and a very Westerosi-sounding one at that, so… Eldric, Edric?  I’ve always sort of thought about “Eldric Shadowchaser” as a good name for the last hero – shadowchaser and all – and I find it highly suspicious that the two houses most directly associated with the last hero, House Stark and House Dayne, have variants of the name Eldric.   Yes, that’s right, there’s a “King Edric Snowbeard” Stark and an “Elric” Stark to go along with Edric Dayne, the Lord of Starfall and Ulrick Dayne, a previous Sword of the Morning.  Highly suspicious, if you ask me.

George has also given the name ‘Edric’ Storm to one of Robert’s bastards, a boy who was nearly sacrificed for his ‘king’s blood’ in order to wake a dragon.  In fact, all of Robert’s true children exemplify Azor Ahai reborn and horned lord ideas – Edric Storm, Mya Stone (who says her father must have been a goat, a.k.a. a horned person, and whose hair is as “black as a raven’s wing”) and most of all, Gendry.   For this reason, I tend to think the names Edric Storm and Edric Dayne are clues about the offspring of Azor Ahai, and therefore when I see Edric Dayne squiring for resurrected Beric… well it looks like something of a family portrait to me.

Alright, now besides his excellent Azor Ahai impersonation, Beric also gives us a fairly strong whiff of greenseer, and of Bloodraven.  The one-red-eye thing is kind of a red flag, if you know what I mean, and when we meet him, Beric is in a cavern not unlike Bloodraven’s, “seated amongst the weirwood roots halfway up the wall.”  Both Beric and Bloodraven are compared to being talking corpses or corpse lords, and both are tied to the burning Night’s Watch scarecrow symbolism.

So, Beric is like Azor Ahai reborn, and Beric is like Bloodraven… and Bloodraven completes the triangle by sharing symbolism with Azor Ahai and the last hero.  He’s a dragon-blooded greenseer, he commanded the Night’s Watch, he disappeared into the north to fight the Others (possibly/hopefully with a black sword, Dark Sister) and he loves to pull moon meteor symbols down into wells and privy shafts alike.  We also saw all that copious sea dragon / weirwood serpent symbolism in Bloodraven’s cave, a great tie to Grey King and the idea of greenseer dragons.

Now if the Grey King overlaps with Azor Ahai in some sense as I propose, we should also see Grey King symbolism with Beric – and indeed we do, though it is not as obvious as the flaming sword-Azor Ahai thing.  Beric is called the “Lightning Lord,” with the forked lightning sigil of House Dondarrion etched on his cloak.  Calling an Azor Ahai reborn type the “lightning lord” makes perfect sense for all the same reasons it makes sense to call Azor Ahai reborn a Storm King: the thunderbolt was a moon meteor and Azor Ahai both called down and possessed the moon meteors.

The Grey King took possession of fire through the thunderbolt of the Storm God – in other words, the Grey King gained god-like or lord-like status through lightning, and this is paralleled again in the backstory of House Dondarrion.  Their house was established when a messenger of the Storm King riding through the Dornish Marches was saved by a fortuitous forked lightning bolt that struck two Dornishman that were about to kill him, with the Storm King elevating him to a lordship for his service.  A messenger of the Storm God is another way to describe lightning itself – it’s a message sent from the Storm God.  Accordingly, the Dondarrion’s become the Lightning Lords, wearing the lightning on their sigil.

Even better, this first Dondarrion was in such dire straights because he fell from his horse and broke his sword, giving us the familiar broken sword motif shared by the last hero’s frozen and broken sword, Ned’s split sword, Waymar’s broken sword, Bran Stark the broken sword, and of course by Beric Dondarrion himself, whose flaming sword is sheared in half by the Hound’s “cold” one.  We saw the broken sword symbolism at the Iron Islands with broken sword point of land on which Pyke sits, which was the first place we started getting clues about the sea dragon and Storm God’s thunderbolt being a meteor-sword.  The symbol of the forked lighting suggests sword splitting by its very nature – if the thunderbolt is the comet or meteor, it’s branching and splitting.

The name Dondarrion suggests thunder too – some of you may know that the original name of Santa’s reindeer ‘Donner’ was ‘Dundar,’ and that both words mean ‘thunder’ (with donner being the German word and dundar being the Dutch).  Blitzen is the German word for lightning, and the Dutch version is Blixem, so two of Santa’s reindeer were named ‘thunder’ and ‘lightning.’  This is a reflection of the tie between horned animals and divine thunder which we see here and there in world mythology and which Martin is drawing from.  Anyway, the name ‘Dondarrion’ implies thunder, and thus the name Beric Dondarrion could be translated as “Bearer of Thunder,” which is just another way of saying “the Lightning Lord.”  It’s also kind of like naming Beric after a flying reindeer, and thus a horned lord (or flying horned lord?)  We’re going to talk about flying a great deal pretty soon so stick a pin in that.

Beric’s weirwood ‘throne’ is of course a parallel to the Grey King’s hypothetical weirwood throne, which was positioned inside of the petrified weirwood beams known as “Nagga’s ribs.”  Recall all the weirwood cage symbolism applied to Bran – he rides in a wicker cage, ends up in a cage of weirwood roots, and his “frail cage of shattered ribs” was seemingly used to symbolize Nagga’s ribs as a ribcage a greenseer lives inside – and now check out this quote from ASOS when Beric takes off his breastplate:

Lord Beric’s ribs were outlined starkly beneath his skin.  A puckered crater scarred his breast just above the left nipple, and when he turned around, Arya saw a matching scar on his back.  The lance went through him. 

There’s a crater in his ribs where Ser Gregor’s lance – the Giant’s Lance in other words – went through him.  That’s a nice clue about a moon meteor impact taking place at the Iron Islands – where we find Nagga’s ribs and tales of fire falling from the sky.  And did you catch the clue about Azor Ahai being a Stark?  Beric’s ribs were outlined ‘starkly’ beneath his skin.  It’s neither here nor there but we already think there is some crossover between Azor Ahai people and House Stark anyway, so there you have it.  At the least, calling Beric’s ribs ‘stark’ may be serving to tie Beric’s ribcage to Bran Starks’s ribcage, with both serving as symbols for the weirwood cages they end up sitting in.

The whole point of the metaphor of the weirwoods as a wicker cage to be set on fire by the lightning bolt is that the greenseer, in one sense, is the lightning bolt.  Even though the weirwoodnet transfers the fire of the gods to man when it is set on fire, the thing that sets it on fire is the thunderbolt – and that is the falling dragon meteor, the burning brand sometimes  known as Azor Ahai reborn.  Bran symbolizes that falling fire brand, and he enters a variety of wooden cages.  I believe that the weirwoodnet is not activated, or “set on fire” until a face is carved on it and a greenseer’s consciousness enters it.   One hypothesis we have put forward about the Grey King is that he was a dragon person come from Asshai by way of the sea, and that he essentially landed at Old Wyk and then became the beating, fiery heart inside the weirwood cage of Nagga’s ribs.  The crater in the ribs symbolism of Beric’s chest shows us the same thing, an impact to the ribs taken from the lance of Ser Gregor the Moon Mountain that rides, who we already know can play the role of a falling moon meteor, such as sets fire to the tree.  We’ll talk more about the act of entering the weirwoodnet, and for now its a good way to show that Beric is expressing the symbolism of the Grey King and the Sea Dragon with his ribcage.  Plus, the word crater always makes me happy. 🙂

Finally, Beric’s semi-corpse status is another thing he may share with the Grey King and his grey flesh.  That’s hardly unique, but it is a defining element of the Grey King, being a part of his name and all.  Unfortunately, Beric doesn’t seem to be any good at making longships or weaving nets, and he doesn’t marry a mermaid – although we did mention that Ashara Dayne’s leap from a tower into the sea is symbolic of the moon drowning and becoming a drowned goddess or mermaid, and Ashara was the sister of Beric’ betrothed, Allyria Valyria (that’s what we are calling her now… sounds like a new hit show!)  Primarily, the parallels between Beric and the Grey King really revolve around the greenseer imagery, the lightning and sea dragon symbolism, and the death / undeath symbolism…. but those are the things we are primarily concerned with for the moment.

So that’s Beric – he nicely ties together the important symbolism of Azor Ahai, Bloodraven, and the Grey King.  More than anything, he is undead Azor Ahai sitting in a weirwood cave, a terrific clue that Azor Ahai was a greenseer, and a fiery undead one it would seem.   But let’s go back to that whole missing eye thing which Beric and Bloodraven share, because as we’ve mentioned, magicians with missing eyes are all more or less cast in the image of Odin.  If we want to understand why Martin is showing us all of these one-eyed sorcerers, we must dig further into Odin himself.  I’ve been sort of leading up to what you’re about to hear for a couple episodes now, so… it’s a big moment.

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A Grey Gallows Horse

This section is brought to you by our newest priest of the Church of Starry Wisdom, Patchface of Motley Wisdom, “The Sanguine,” also known as “He Who Has Come Out of Asshai“

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Odin is one of the most important gods of Germanic folklore, and of Norse folklore, which is something of an offshoot of Germanic folklore.  He goes by many names all over Europe – in Old English it’s Wōden, in Old Saxon, Wōdan, and in Old High German he is Wuotan or Wōtan.  Not Wu-Tang, Wōtan.  These words translate to ‘seer’ or ‘prophet,’ and words with the same phonetic root  translate to “madness, frantic, furious, possessed,” etc.  Think of the madness of shamanic ecstasy and you can see how these ideas all relate.  Shamans, of course, are well known for wearing animal pelts and reindeer and elk antlers on their heads, so you can see how this dovetails nicely with the horned nature figure who is often associated with magic himself.   Odin is many things and has many names, but above all, Odin is the god of magic and many of his stories have him questing for increased magical knowledge.  As with ASOIAF, Norse myth places a heavy emphasis on the cost of obtaining magic or power, and like some others we know, Odin always pays his debts, usually in dramatic fashion – such as cutting out your own eye.

You might remember from the Green Zombies series that Odin or Woden overlaps a bit with the family of horned nature gods.  His shamanic madness is similar to the uncontrollable wild man of the woods or the wildness of Pan or Bacchus, and European versions of Woden place him as the leader of the wild hunt, the classic role of the horned nature death and resurrection god.  Herne the Hunter leads a kind of wild hunt, a processions of dead and / or enthralled figures, which is sometimes even seen as flying through the sky – this is the inspiration for Santa’s sleigh and reindeer, actually.  It’s a celestial wild hunt – that’s why another of the reindeer’s names is comet, to go with Donner and Blitzen.  Ha!  Two Santa mentions in one episode.  I kid, but once again we see the confluence of horned lord and storm god mythology, as we see with Durran Godsgrief and elsewhere.

Odin is also the father of Thor, the official Norse storm god (though Odin can be stormy too) and of course Thor is a heavy influence on the Durrandon and Baratheons, Robert in particular.   Robert also loves to hunt – in fact he was out hunting when Bran had his fall from the tower at Winterfell, and out hunting when he was gutted by the tusk of the black devil boar, and out hunting every time Cersei delivered one of Jaime’s children, and thus ‘giving him horns,   ‘ as they say.  The wild hunt gets a direct callout in Beric’s story in the form of one of the members of the Brotherhood, a fellow called the Mad Huntsman (again think of madness and shamanic ecstasy).  The Mad Huntsman is sent to Oldtown with a dude named Greenbeard to buy supplies at one point, thus fulfilling the green man role of providing the bounty of the harvest, as you would expect from these two obvious green man figures.

In other words, Odin lore already comes with a side of horned lords, which is part of the reason why Martin can so easily unite one-eyed people, greenseers, and people who wear antler hats.

Recall that in order to gain the knowledge of Mimir’s well, Odin had to imbibe it’s waters (after he had thrown his eye in there, for what it’s worth).  Imbibing a substance which expands your consciousness and gives you access to cosmic knowledge?  The weirwood paste could easily be a stand-in for the psychedelic water of Mimir’s well.  Mimir’s well is located in one of the underworld realms usually depicted as being beneath the roots of Yggdrasil, just as Bloodraven’s cave where Bran eats the weirwood paste id strewn through with weirwood roots and lies under a weirwood tree .  There’s also that black river down in the abyss in the Bloodraven’s cave, adding to the Mimir’s well symbolism.  As we saw last time, Bran himself went down the Nightfort well on the way to Bloodraven’s cave to eat the paste of knowledge, a fairly on the nose journey into Norse mythology.  Additionally, the first time Bran “opened his third eye,” as he refers to consciously skinchanging into Summer, it took place while Bran was hiding in the crypts beneath Winterfell, so again, an underworld location.

Odin is also well known for his animals – he has two ravens on his shoulder, Huginn and Muninn (“thought” and “memory/mind”), and two wolves,  Geri and Freki (both words mean “ravenous” or “the greedy one”).  As you can see, Martin has adapted these ideas to northern culture, as the the two most common animals for skinchangers to use are wolves and ravens.  Jon in particular is working on a nice Odin Halloween costume, as he has one wolf and Mormont’s raven and that pesky scar over one eye; and of course Bran, whose name means “raven” in Welsh, skinchanges wolves and ravens both.  Odin’s ravens fly around the world to bring him information and speak in human language, so the parallels here are pretty striking.  One thing Bran and Jon need for their Odin costume is a beard and a floppy hat – trademark Odin chic –  but those are like the easiest things in the world to get at Party City on your way home from work, so no biggie.  Kidding aside, Odin does have a long beard and a hat, and we see that Bloodraven is certainly rocking the beard.  A floppy hat would really have seemed out of place, so I am glad Martin didn’t try to shoehorn that part in.  Sam does have a floppy hat at one point, for what it’s worth.

Odin is closely tied to Yggdrasil, as you’ll see, and there are other notable animals living “in” Yggdrasil, such as the squirrel Ratatöskr who runs up and down the tree.  That has to remind us of the children of the forest, who are called “the squirrel people” by the giants and who live both below the trees in caves and previously, in the canopies of the forest in what were called tree towns, as we hear from Old Nan in AGOT:

They lived in the depths of the wood, in caves and crannogs and secret tree towns.

The idea of the squirrel being able to transit between the realms of Yggdrasil places it in the role of a walker between worlds, a navigator who can carry communication between realms.  The children play something of this role for humans, acting as a sort of usher or facilitator for Bran and presumably Bloodraven and many others to gain access to the various realms of the cosmos.  We saw a humorous version of this on the Great Ranging when the Night’s Watch ranger Bedwyk, who is very short and is facetiously called ‘Giant,’ climbs up and down a weirwood tree like a squirrel to gather information.

There are also four stags – harts actually, male red deer –  that hang around Yggdrasil, as it happens: Dáinn (“The Dead One”), Dvalinn (“The Unconscious One”), Duneyrr (“Thundering in the Ear”), and Duraþrór (“Thriving Slumber”, perhaps referencing snoring).  There’s not a lot said about them other than that they consume the upper leaves of Yggdrasil, but the presence of stags is nonetheless pretty cool, and those names – one has a name that sounds like Dayne – the dead one, wouldn’t you know it, like a dead star – and another sounds like the Duran, as in Duran Godsgrief.  A thundering stag has our attention too of course, but nobody really understands what these stags by Yggdrasil are about, so I don’t want to make too much of it.

The most important correlation between Odin and greenseers is not the ravens, wolves, squirrels, or stags, nor even the water of Mimir’s well, though that’s getting closer. The main thing is Odin’s relationship to his tree, Yggdrasil.  I say “his tree,” because one translation of Yggdrasil is “Odin’s horse,”  Ygg being one of the many names of Odin, and drasil means “horse,” among other things.  You’ll recall the Grey King legend of carving the first longship “from the hard pale wood of Ygg, a demon tree who fed on human flesh,” and that in ADWD, one of Stannis’s soldiers calls the weirwoods “demon trees,” which, taken together, shows us that Martin wants us to associate the weirwoods with Yggdrasil.  And demons!

As for the horsey end of Yggdrasil’s translation as “Odin’s Horse,” thats where we enter the realm of metaphor.  Yggdrasil is a type of horse that Odin rides, but it’s not a horse horse, it’s actually a gallows tree, which is called “the horse of the hanged.”  The idea is that the hanged man rides the gallows tree by being hanged upon it.   That’s right, Odin rides his gallows horse Yggdrasil by being hanged upon the tree.  As with the story of Odin sacrificing his eye to gain knowledge, he’s again sacrificing his physical self to gain something divine.  Last time he was after sacred knowledge, this time it is the ability to ‘see the runes.’  And yes, this is the type of thing which is the topic of black metal bands from Sweden.

Odin wasn’t merely hanged with a noose on Yggdrasil – he was pierced by his own blade and thereby sort of impaled on the tree for nine days… all in order to show himself worthy of obtaining the fire of the gods by means of self-sacrifice, just as he did with his lost eye.  After hanging from the tree suspended between life and death for nine days, Odin at last spies the runes, which can be seen in the depths of the bottomless well of Urd from which Yggdrasil grows.  This is a different magical well that Mimir’s well, mind you, and in a different part of the underworld.  The runes themselves are actually a magical system of great power, and once they reveal themselves to Odin, he becomes one of the most powerful beings in the universe, capable of altering fates and destinies.  As a side note, they seem to have very good well water in Iceland.

Now Yggdrasil isn’t just Odin’s horse, it was regarded as a part of Odin – very like the way a greenseer and his tree or a skinchanger and his animal are one.  Thus, Odin says that he “sacrificed himself to himself” by hanging himself on his own tree.  Just as with his giving up of one physical eye to open his third eye, here he is again speaking of sacrificing his lower self to his higher self by being willing to suffer physically to gain expanded consciousness and knowledge of the cosmos.  We got a healthy dose of this idea in the Bran-tastic episode that was Weirwood compendium 2, so I know you guys and gals know what I am talking about.

It’s easy to see how this mythology has influenced the greenseer wierwood relationship.  Bloodraven and the others singers enthroned in the cave are pinioned through by the wierwood roots, for all intents and purposes hung on the tree – only they’re in the underworld part of the tree, instead of hanging from its branches or tied to its trunk.  Odin is pinioned to the tree by a spear as well as tied, and Bloodraven is actually pierced through by the snake-like weirwood roots as well as wrapped up in them.  As a matter of fact, the idea of a snake or dragon in the roots of Yggdrasil is part of the Yggdrasil mythology… I think you’re going to like this.

Underneath Yggdrasil, there is a snake / dragon called  Nidhogg – at least, that’s my mispronunciation of the anglicized version of his Norse name Níðhöggr.  This snake dragon gnaws at one of the roots of Yggdrasil, and rules over a place called Náströnd, where the souls of the damned who have committed the most egregious sins in Norse society  – murder, adultery, and oath-breaking – go to be tortured to pay for their crimes.  In some cases the dragon is perceived as being trapped by the roots, although it does of course escape at Ragnarok (the great last battle of Norse myth) to cause trouble.

A dragon caught up in the roots of Yggdrasil really, really makes us think of Bloodraven, a dragon-blooded person who is literally trapped in the roots of the weirwood.  He doesn’t gnaw on the roots, presumably, but he does eat the weirwood paste.  We quoted that scene last time – you’ll recall that the wierwood roots that have grown over, around, and through Bloodraven are described as coiling like “white wooden serpents,” a line which also evokes the weirwood ribcage of the ‘sea dragon.’  As Bran is first entering the caves in ADWD, we also get this paragraph:

The way the shadows shifted made it seem as if the walls were moving too. Bran saw great white snakes slithering in and out of the earth around him, and his heart thumped in fear. He wondered if they had blundered into a nest of milk snakes or giant grave worms, soft and pale and squishy. .

You can see that the idea of a biting snake living amongst the roots is strongly depicted here, following up on the idea of Bloodraven himself as a dragon living amongst the roots.  Also emphasized in this last quote via the grave worms reference is the connection to a chthonic underworld realm, which is the realm of the dead, and of course Bloodraven’s cave itself is full of skulls and bones to continue this symbolism.

Also noteworthy is the fact that Snorri Sturluson, author and stenographer of the Prose Edda and most of the other main Norse sagas, uses Níðhöggr, the name of the snake, as a word for ‘sword.’  That means that this dragon of the underworld is also associated with swords, very convenient for Martin’s purposes.

We can see what Martin has done – he has taken Odin’s hanging on the world tree Yggdrasil and moved it downstairs, combining it with the idea of the dragon amongst the roots.  Thus emerges the picture of a dragon-blooded greenseer hung and pinioned on the tree, but beneath it, in the snake-like roots.  He’s sacrificed his physical self to look out of the eyes of a god.  And though his body may be trapped beneath, the tree does allow Bloodraven to gain magical awareness of time and space, as Yggdrasil does for Odin.

Martin has also realized the dragon beneath Yggdrasil idea in the form of Azor Ahai going into the weirwoodnet, becoming a greenseer hanged on the tree roots.  When I said before that the lightning setting the tree on fire represents Azor Ahai the dragon going into the weirwoodnet, this is what I mean.  Bloodraven represents the dragon that landed on the tree, set it on fire, and entered it by sacrificing himself to it, thereby gaining accessing the fire of the gods.  Bloodraven and Azor Ahai are also the ones who called down the moon meteor, so if one were to try to imagine it as a sequence, it could be that Azor Ahai found a way to break the moon, then was able to use the magic power of the fallen meteorite to help facilitate his entrance into the weirwoodnet.  One imagines human sacrifice and blood magic might have been involved.  We’re only beginning to piece this part together, so there’s no rush to form conclusions.  I just don’t want to speak entirely in metaphor – there is a real thing here involving the moon meteors and the weirwoodnet, and more importantly, between Azor Ahai and the weirwoods.

Although Odin is not technically hanged on the tree with a noose, the idea of his death transformation on Yggdrasil being thought of as riding the gallows tree horse does create a potential metaphor out of a person being hanged, which can now be used to imply transcendence, magical awakening, and greenseer status through death.  Spoiler alert: it has been used extensively to imply transcendence, magical awakening, and greenseer status through death in ASOIAF.  This fits very well with the themes Martin is working regarding death and resurrection as a means for gaining power (“rising harder and stronger,” I believe it’s called).  Again we will draw from the well of Beric’s symbolism to demonstrate: not only does he have the one eyed wound of Odin – Beric has also been hanged!  And by the Gods Eye, no less.  When Lem and Arya and company are seeking Thoros in ASOS, a maester in a small keep tells them them:

I fear you seek a ghost.  We had a bird, ages ago.  The Lannisters caught Lord Beric near the Gods Eye.  He was hanged. 

Beric’s weirwood throne and one-eyed status already reminded us of Bloodraven, so it seems likely his hanging wound – a black ring around his neck – is intended to play into the Odin / Yggdrasil mythology, as Bloodraven’s symbolism does.  Beric’s death and resurrection transformation is very similar to Odin’s because it can be said that a part of Odin dies on the tree, while the other part of him is reborn as a more powerful being.  Looking again to Dany’s rebirth in Drogo’s funeral pyre and Jon’s impending and long-awaited resurrection, we can see that the idea of a transformed and resurrected Azor Ahai who emerges more powerful is spelled out again and again.  Resurrected Beric has gained the magical ability to light his sword on fire, and no longer needs to eat or sleep.

It’s also worth pointing out the obvious – Beric’s Brotherhood is known for preferring the noose as their weapon of execution.  In other words, the lightning lord, wearing his flaming sword and one-eyed symbolism, wanders through the woods with folks called  Greenbeard and the Mad Hunstman and One-Eyed Jack-be-Lucky hanging people.  Any knight can make a knight, and any hanged man can make a hanged man, it would seem.

Finding these kinds of specific and detailed references to Odin and Yggdrasil in Beric’s story is yet another confirmation that Azor Ahai is an Odin figure and a greenseer.  You have to admit, the first time you heard me say that Azor Ahai was a greenseer, it sounded wacky and you wondered if your old pal Lucifer Means Lightbringer has jumped from the wrong tall tower.  Nope!  Azor Ahai the greenseer is spelled out again and again, as I hope I have shown by now.

Ok, so you remember how one of the islands in the broken Arm of Dorne is called Bloodstone, which I took as a clue about the Hammer of the Waters that fell there having something to do with the Bloodstone Emperor and the bleeding stars he called down?  About how Daemon Targaryen, rider of the red dragon Caraxes the Bloodwyrm, temporarily set up a royal seat on Bloodstone?  How could you forget, I mention it at least once an episode.  Well, at long last, I can tell you that the only other named island in that chain is called “Grey Gallows,” so named because the Grey King is an aspect of Azor Ahai who rode the gallows tree horse – a greenseer.   The Grey King was the Bloodstone Emperor riding the gallows tree, you might say.  We’ve ever got a Sunspear right there to pin the Bloodstone Emperor to the gallows tree.

Ta-da!

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Time-Out for Some Public Executions

This larger than average section is brought to you by our newest acolyte of the Church of Starry Wisdom, Ser Gribbons of the Godswood, the Anteater, and  one of our original Priestesses of Starry Wisdom, The Duchess of Tillymage, keeper of the two-headed sphinx

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We’re by no means finished with Odin and Yggdrasil, but let’s pause the Norse analysis and take a moment for a couple of hangings from ASOIAF to illustrate the points we have made so far.  This will take us to the end of this podcast, and we’ll pick up right where we left off with the next one.  There is so much Odin stuff that is important to ASOIAF that it became apparent the best strategy was to break off one idea at a time and then show how it correlates to the books before moving on to the next thing.  If we tried to lay out all the Odin and Yggdrasil ideas at once, we’d just be talking about Norse myth for three hours and hardly mentioning ASOIAF.  As always, the intent of our podcast is to explore these external myths which Martin seems to be incorporating to the extent that it furthers our understanding of ASOIAF, and we do not and cannot hope to provide a comprehensive summation of these extensively developed and complex real-world mythologies.  I hope that you all will be inspired to do further reading on your own to gain a better understanding of the source mythology, and I have to believe that is part of Martin’s intent in incorporating so much classic literature and folklore into his story.  I’d love to just talk mythology for hours, but I try very hard to keep everything tightly confined to the things which ASOIAF specifically makes reference to.

So with that said, let’s get a rope and string us up some greenseers.

There’s a great chapter from AFFC that seems to be largely about hanging as a metaphor.  It’s a chapter we’ve quoted from before  – it’s the one where Brienne, Pod, Ser Hyle Hunt, and Septon Meribald (and his dog, Dog) are making their way back to the Inn at the Crossroads after returning from Crackclaw Point, ending with Brienne having her fateful encounter with Biter and the remnants of the Brave Companions.  As they make their way to the inn, they come across a number of hanged men, the nasty fellows who raided, raped, and murdered at Saltpans who have presumably been hanged by the Brotherhood without Banners.  Brienne is reflecting on the fact that once a corpse is more than a few days old, it’s very hard to tell one from another or to recognize anyone’s features. She thinks:

On the gallows tree, all men are brothers.

One is reminded of a certain theory about the original Night’s Watch being undead greenseers, a brotherhood of dead men who ride the gallows tree weir-drasil.  As a matter of fact, the chapter opens with what seems to be a vivid declaration of its metaphorical theme: the gallows tree.  And not just any old gallows tree – one struck by lightning.  This is the first paragraph of the chapter:

They came upon the first corpse a mile from the crossroads. He swung beneath the limb of a dead tree whose blackened trunk still bore the scars of the lightning that had killed it. The carrion crows had been at work on his face, and wolves had feasted on his lower legs where they dangled near the ground. Only bones and rags remained below his knees … along with one well-chewed shoe, half-covered by mud and mold.

Ok, this is quite a find – the ‘hanged man on a tree’ symbolism of Odin and Yggdrasil crossed with the lightning-blasted tree of the Grey King myth.  That’s what you call a home-run for symbolism!  I think it’s a clear message that the lightning-struck tree is indeed the ASOIAF version of Odin’s gallows tree.  Now take a look at the hanged man riding the gallows.  He is wearing rags, like the scarecrow Night’s Watch brothers, Coldhands, and Bloodraven, a reference to the burning scarecrow / King of Winter idea.  The wolves have eaten his legs and the crows his face, and both of these seem like callouts to the sacrifices Bran has made to obtain the fire of the gods.  Bran lost the use of his legs when he fell from the tower, and since we know the crows go for the eyes first when eating someone’s face, this seems like a reference to Bran’s dream of the crows pecking out his eyes and to the bad little boy who was struck down by lightning and had his eyes eaten by crows.  Basically, this is a pretty good portrait of Bran riding the gallows tree.  

The chapter continues with the party observing this first hanged man in more detail:

“What does he have in his mouth?” asked Podrick.

Brienne had to steel herself to look. His face was grey and green and ghastly, his mouth open and distended. Someone had shoved a jagged white rock between his teeth. A rock, or …

“Salt,” said Septon Meribald.

First thing to notice here is that the dead man riding the lighting blasted gallows tree has grey and green skin, giving us the grey skin of the Grey King and the green skin of green men (‘green boys and greybeards,’ remember).  And by the way, I think I forgot to mention this, but what if the Sacred Order of Green Men is really called that because they are all undead greenseers or skinchangers, with their green skin being the green skin of corpses?  Again, reanimated corpses are good for very long and repetitive guard duty.

But getting back to the grey and green hanged man in this scene, the salt rock in the mouth has a clear purpose in terms of the main plot – these are the men who raided Saltpans, and the salt signifies this.  It surely has symbolic meaning too, although we have several choices which could work.  It may be part of a smoke and salt Azor Ahai rebirth thing, because these men burned Saltpans, burning the entire town except for the stone keep which would not catch on fire.  As we’ll see momentarily, Saltpans seems to be an analog for the moon which was burnt, and these men who burned it have a piece of salt in their mouth, almost as if they had all taken a bite out of the moon.  Or perhaps its meant to make us think of someone eating white weirwood paste, as a greenseer must do to mount the gallows tree.  It also makes for another potential reference to the Ironborn and the Grey King, because they think the salt is a rock for a moment – and the Ironborn for a long time had a salt king and a rock king on each island.

The second hanged man they come to had been torn down by predators, and the interesting thing to note is that his helmed head had rolled into the bushes, only to be recovered by Meribald’s dog, and turns out to contain a skull, along with worms and beetles.  Ser Hyle offers the cracked helm to Pod, but he objects on account of it being wormy (besides being too big).  Hyle says he’ll grow into it… so what we might be talking about is a hanged man who had worms growing through his skull, and who lives under the bushes, and again reminding us of Bloodraven and the ‘graveworm’ weirwood roots that grow through his skull.  Even better, the helm bears a Lannister lion upon it, but the lion, like the corpse, has lost its head.  A decapitated lion is a pretty good way to depict the death of the sun during the Long Night, and the death transformation of solar king Azor Ahai into a dark solar king.

After a remark about how the noose is Lord Beric’s preferred method of execution and how Lord Beric might well be near, there are some very suggestive lines from Ser Hyle Hunt regarding the hanged men they have been seeing.  Take a look and see what you think we can learn about men who ride the gallows tree:

Dog barked, and Septon Meribald glanced about and frowned. “Shall we keep a brisker pace? The sun will soon be setting, and corpses make poor company by night. These were dark and dangerous men, alive. I doubt that death will have improved them.”

“There we disagree,” said Ser Hyle. “These are just the sort of fellows who are most improved by death.” All the same, he put his heels into his horse, and they moved a little faster.

We were just talking about the idea of people being reborn harder and stronger, awakening transformed with new knowledge and abilities after a death and rebirth experience.  They were just talking about how Beric might be close by.  Beric happens to be a hanged man who was improved by death, however, and I think the message here is that Azor Ahai was a dark and dangerous man when living, and he and his brotherhood of the gallows tree may well have been improved by death after the sun set for the Long Night.

Meribald’s line about corpses making poor company at night is also rather suggestive of the hanged men coming to life at night.  When they reach the inn later in the chapter and balk at the price of rooms, the girl at the door says she’ll have silver stags  “or else you can sleep in the woods with the dead men.”  Those dead men were the hanged ones, and now they are sleeping and dreaming in the woods, as in ‘inside the wood.’  That is of course how you mount the gallows tree that is the weirwoodnet, by dreaming.  By joining the brotherhood of the gallows tree and going into the wood.

I mentioned that the raid in Saltpans by these hanged men might be symbolizing the destruction of the second moon, which firms up their connection to Azor Ahai, and here’s what I meant.   Saltpans is a white city set on fire, like a moon which starts out white but is burned by wicked folk.  When Brienne and company stopped there, they “found only death and desolation,” a “corpse of a town” where “the air still smelled of smoke.”  The supposed leader of the raid at Saltpans was the Hound, (although it was really Rorge wearing the Hound’s helm), and the Hound is a burned and reborn moon meteor / hellhound version of Azor Ahai reborn.  The people in the Riverlands start calling him “The Mad Dog of Saltpans,” while a knight reporting to Cersei blames the sack on “Clegane and his mad dogs” and someone else says that “Saltpans was the work of some fell beast in human skin.”

Rorge-as-the-Hound supposedly killed a dozen men at Saltpans, naturally, and the Brotherhood has put out word that it wants to make him a hanged man in return.  The Elder Brother tells a particularly horrific tale of a woman at Saltpans who was raped a dozen times and whose breasts had been eaten as if by a beast.  I didn’t even really want to include that, but the breast is the place where Nissa Nissa was stabbed with Lightbringer, with the ravenous beast language referring to the dragon comet that destroyed the moon, and all of this makes the raid on Saltpans a metaphor for the collision of the comet and moon and makes the perpetrators hanged on these trees symbolic of Azor Ahai’s henchman, the beasts in human skin.

Now let’s talk about the crossroads inn itself, because it’s a very important symbol.   The name implies the inn as a crossing over point to the realm of the dead, and that is one of the symbolic roles that the weirwoods often play, both in the form of death-associated weirwood doors like the Black Gate below the Nightfort, the Moon Door, and the weirwood and ebony doors of the House of Black and White as well as the general concept of a greenseer transcending death through wedding the trees.  There’s a reason I am comparing the inn to a weirwood, and that would be that the inn is symbolizing a gallows tree, and thus a weirwood. Septon Meribald, take it away:

“The smallfolk call it the crossroads inn. Elder Brother told me that two of Masha Heddle’s nieces have opened it to trade once again.” He raised his staff. “If the gods are good, that smoke rising beyond the hanged men will be from its chimneys.”

“They could call the place the Gallows Inn,” Ser Hyle said.

So, two clues here.  One, it’s dubbed the gallows inn, because it’s the place where everyone gets hanged (it even has a gibbet right in the yard).  It’s the crossing over point – it even used to be built on the river Trident before the course of the river shifted, and this conjures to mind the River Styx and the general mythological notion of crossing a river being used to symbolize death.

Second clue about the inn being a weirwood symbol is the tricky wording from Meribald: “if the gods are good, that smoke rising beyond the hanged men will be from its chimneys.”  In other words, the smoke rises from behind the hanged men, as if their gallows trees were burning.  The gallows tree and the lightning-blasted burning tree are both symbols of weirwoods, and since we saw those two paired together at the opening of the chapter with the lightning-blasted gallows tree, I’m inclined to see this as a reinforcement of the same idea.

I just mentioned that the girl at the door of the inn asks for silver stags to let them in – it’s almost as if she is demanding a sacrifice of stags to let them enter.  This makes a ton of sense if the inn is a weirwood symbol, and if entering it is akin to dying, to being hung on the tree.  The girl’s name is Willow, which makes her a tree woman, and Brienne herself will be hanged on a willow tree later in the book.  It’s also worth noting that the inn is now entirely populated with children – Brienne thinks it could also be the Orphan Inn.  If this inn is a weirwood symbol, then those would be a nod to the children of the forest.

Picking up where we left off with the line about the Gallows Inn, we get a good description of the inn itself.  Just a boring old daube-and-wattle affair, nothing particularly remarkable about its description…  oh wait, this is ASOIAF:

By any name the inn was large, rising three stories above the muddy roads, its walls and turrets and chimneys made of fine white stone that glimmered pale and ghostly against the grey sky. Its south wing had been built upon heavy wooden pilings above a cracked and sunken expanse of weeds and dead brown grass. A thatch-roofed stable and a bell tower were attached to the north side. The whole sprawl was surrounded by a low wall of broken white stones overgrown by moss.

It’s made of “ghostly white stone” – that sounds innocuous, right?  Ha, not likely; rather it makes us think of ghosts trapped in pale white weirwoods and dead weirwoods turning to pale stone.  It also reminds us of the moon, and if you think about it, we’ve seen weirwood and moon symbolism together a few times.  More about that in the next episode.

One of my favorite discoveries about the Crossroads Inn is that George has apparently made it into a larger than life fishing weir!  As the company is approaching the inn, Septon Meribald is telling stories about the inn’s origin and he mentions that it was for a time called the River Inn.

“In those days, the Trident flowed beneath its back door, and half its rooms were built out over the water. Guests could throw a line out their window and catch trout, it’s said. There was a ferry landing here as well, so travelers could cross to Lord Harroway’s Town and Whitewalls.”

I thought this was really terrific – we’ve been talking about the fishing weir / fish garth thing for a while now, and that’s not just our show – it’s an idea that has been floating around in the fandom.  In any case, before the river changed its course, the part of the inn built out over the water was functioning as a fishing weir, being a wooden structure built out over a river which can be used to catch fish.  I think this is simply a clever way of telling us that the inn is representing the weirwoods.  The inn is a fishing weir, it’s a gallows inn with gallows trees, it demands a sacrifice of stags, it glimmers ghostly white, it sits at the crossroads used to have a ferry to bring you across the river, it’s inhabited by children…

Ok hold on, there’s another layer to the fishing weir thing.  We have to put this chapter on pause for just a second to take a very short journey in distance and time over to Jaime’s chapters at Riverrun, which take place at about the same time as Brienne’s chapter.   So, the Gallows Inn is a weir that catches trout… how about an actual gallows that catches a trout?

The boom across the river and the three great camps of the besieging army were just as his cousin had described. Ser Ryman Frey’s encampment north of the Tumblestone was the largest, and the most disorderly. A great grey gallows loomed above the tents, as tall as any trebuchet. On it stood a solitary figure with a rope about his neck. Edmure Tully. Jaime felt a stab of pity. To keep him standing there day after day, with that noose around his neck . . . better to have his head off and be done with it.

A great grey gallows has caught itself a fine fat trout.  We don’t have time to go into all the Tully symbolism, but we have mentioned the symbolic ice and fire duality of having red, kissed-by-fire hair and deep blue eyes, and their sigil too divides red and blue as a background for their silver fish.  For now, let’s just observe that Martin has drawn another link between the gallows tree symbol and the fishing weir symbol – we just saw a gallows inn that is a weir, and now we have a great grey gallows that catches fish.  The “grey gallows” term is used again in the next Jaime chapter too, so it seams like an intentional reference to Grey Gallows Island, and thus to the Bloodstone Emperor and the greater concept of Azor Ahai riding the gallows and being caught in the weirwoodnet.

A couple of other clues lurk in this passage: Edmure is made to stand there with a noose around his neck, day after day, never knowing when he might die.  It reminds us of Odin hanging on the gallows tree, balanced on the precipice between life and death for nine days.  And finally… what was all that in the beginning of the paragraph about a boom across the river?  It’s explained a bit earlier in the chapter, and this is Ser Daven Lannister speaking to Jaime:

Mine own camp is between the rivers, facing the moat and Riverrun’s main gates. We’ve thrown a boom across the Red Fork, downstream of the castle. Manfryd Yew and Raynard Ruttiger have charge of its defense, so no one can escape by boat. I gave them nets as well, to fish. It helps keep us fed.”

Alright, so not only did they build a boom across the river – a wooden structure to trap anyone trying to flee the castle – they also fish from it.  Just to make it extra clear, one of the men in charge of the weir is named after a tree – the yew tree.  House Yew has an interesting sigil as well – its a curved white hourglass shape on a red background, with a golden longbow in the center (yew being a popular wood for longbows).  But the white hourglass shape looks a lot like a white tree on a red field – I’m not sure this is intended by any means, but take a look and see what you think.  If you are going to put a tree person in charge of manning the weir, you might as well hide weirwood symbolism in his sigil.  The name Manfred means “strength and peace” or “hero’s peace,” for what it’s worth.

The other fellow – Ser Raynard Ruttiger – has a name which is a variation of the German Rüdiger, the equivalent to the english name Roger, and the meaning comes from Old High German: hruod (fame) and ger (spear).  We’ve seen the spear-holding seventy-nine sentinels used as symbols for undead green men who have become tree people, and indeed, in the Brienne chapter, they refer to the gallows they see as “grisly sentinels.”  And perhaps it goes without saying, but Mr. Ruttiger’s name sounds like the word ‘root,’ leaving us with the idea of someone taking root in the middle of the weir.  Most of all, Odin is impaled on his gallows tree with a spear – Grey Gallows Island, Bloodstone Island, and Sunspear, remember –  so what we have here with Ser Raynard Ruttiger and Ser Manfred Yew is a tree person and a famous spear person manning the weir and fishing from it… just downstream of Edmure, the fish caught on the great grey gallows.

In his report, Ser Daven also informs Jaime that the men fishing from the boom will keep the army from starving, but that many of the foragers they send out to look for food are found “ripening under trees, with ropes about their necks.”  Jaime’s scout, Adam Marbrand (whose sigil is a burning tree on a field of smoke grey) came across some on the way to Riverrun, “hanging black faced from beneath a crabapple tree.”  They had been stripped naked – they slipped their skin, in other words – and each man had a crabapple shoved in their mouth, “like suckling pigs.”  To me this seems like a nod to the Adam and Eve story, essentially combining the “taking a bite of the apple” symbolism with Odin’s hanging.  And then Ser Addam Marbrand walks up, with all of his burning tree symbolism, just so he can be like “hey, what do we have here?  It looks like a collection of death transcendence metaphors, mind if I join in?”  ..and of course this whole story is relayed to Jaime as they discuss the weir they’ve built over the river, so the gang’s all here.

There’s a great observation about Bran to insert here as well that comes from my good friend Ravenous Reader, and that is that Bran, being a Tully who has lost the use of his legs, is symbolically a merman.  Mer-MAN!  Thus we can see another layer to the fishing weir metaphor and another layer to Bran’s symbolism.  In fact, there is a really good reason why we see an intermingling of fishy ideas and greenseer ideas, but it’s a very big topic on its own and it will have to wait a couple of episodes.  At the least, we already know that Bran is a fish in the sense that he is caught in the weir, which is a nice parallel to his uncle on the grey gallows here.  His other uncle, Brynden Blackfish Tully, actually slips through the Lannister boom, which could have implications for the idea of someone escaping out of the weirwoodnet… another topic for another day.

Returning to the Gallows Inn and the Brienne chapter, we left off where Meribald was telling stories about the inn and how it used to be built over the Trident.  That’s when Meribald gives us the story of the Clanking Dragon, which suddenly means a lot more than it ever did before:

Later it passed to a crippled knight named Long Jon Heddle, who took up ironworking when he grew too old to fight. He forged a new sign for the yard, a three-headed dragon of black iron that he hung from a wooden post. The beast was so big it had to be made in a dozen pieces, joined with rope and wire. When the wind blew it would clank and clatter, so the inn became known far and wide as the Clanking Dragon.”

 It’s a freshly forged iron dragon, hung from a wooden post – a black dragon hung on a gallows, in other words, and it even makes noise in the wind like a weirwood tree.  Long John Heddle the crippled smith is a good example how of how much symbolism martin can cram into a name and a three sentence story: ‘Long John’ obviously suggests Long John Silver, a famous pirate with a wooden leg, and the crippled smith status suggests Hephaestus, the crippled smith of the Greek gods who made basically every famous weapon of power in Greek mythology.  So, interpreting the symbolism, the man who created and hung the black iron dragon was a magical pirate smith who became crippled.  That sounds a lot like Azor Ahai as the Grey King, a pirate from Asshai who knows how to smith magical black swords from sea dragon meteorite ore, and who was in all like likelihood hung on the tree himself.

Now eventually the sign was cut down after the Blackfyres took the black dragon as their sigil, and then it was thrown into the river to give us the sea dragon imagery.  Just as we suggest that some amount of sea dragon meteorite may have been recovered somehow – to make those black swords and the lovely oily black squid throne known as the Seastone Chair – we see that one of the heads of the clanking dragon and six pieces in total have washed up on the Quiet Isle.  Also notable is the fact that the dragon is made from a dozen pieces.  Is the plus one the entire dragon?  This may or may not be intended as ‘last hero math’, but it is definitely a black dragon hung on a kind of gallows.

Next we need to talk about Gendry.  At the end of this chapter comes the famous scene with Brienne battling Rorge, who has that Hound’s helm, and Biter, who has Biter’s big ugly face.  I’ve quoted from that scene before, with the main thing I want to remind you of here being the clever wording where Gendry walks out to see why Brienne is raising the alarm, and one line ends with “..his hammer in hand” and the next begins with “lightning cracked to the south as riders swung down off their horses.”  It’s a clever way to tie the hammer to the lightning, and to Gendry.  It seems he’s inherited his father Robert Baratheon’s Thor symbolism, and now that we have covered the horned lord stuff, I can point out that Gendry wears a horned bull’s helm, in a kind of unintentional imitation of Robert’s stag helm.  It’s also a symbolic callout to Ba’al, the bull-headed fertility god who may be the oldest corn king in collective human memory.

When they approached the inn, they heard Gendry hammering away at his forge, and we get this:

Even before they reached the gate, Brienne heard the sound: a hammering, faint but steady.  It had a steely ring.

“A forge,” Ser Hyle said.  “Either they have themselves a smith, or the old inkeep’s ghost is making another iron dragon.”

That ghost smith is Gendry, and there is more hammering when Brienne lays eyes on Gendry for the first time a moment later, and again he is called a ghost:

“Thieves,” said a boy’s voice from the stables, “Robbers.”

Brienne turned, and saw a ghost.  Renly.  No hammerblow to the heart could have felled her half so hard.   “My lord?” she gasped.

“Lord?”  The boy pushed back his lock of black hair that had fallen across his eyes.  “I’m just a smith.” 

Oh yes, he’s just a smith – a ghost smith horned lord who hammers the heart  of Brienne the moon maiden and likes to make iron dragons, and who reminds Brienne of Renly, another ghostly green horned lord.  He’s from a long line of Storm Kings, and in one scene at Harrenhall, it says that his “hammer was a part of his arm” (hat-tip Ravenous Reader).  Interesting fellow right?  That last one was great – the hammer being  a part of his arm conjured the image of the hammer falling on the arm of Dorne and becoming a part of it – a hammer that was really an iron dragon made by a horned lord like Durran Godsgrief, Gendry’s ancestor.  Brienne even calls Gendry “lord” to get the horned lord thing in full effect.

We mentioned Brienne’s basic symbolism earlier:  she’s another moon maiden-turned-Evenstar / Morningstar character, although she’s primarily expressing icy versions of those archetypes –  she is Brienne the Blue from the Sapphire Isle after all.  So when she speaks of Gendry the ghostly horned lord felling her heart with a hammerblow, well… that’s how you turn  a moon maiden into a falling star, and it’s also a terrific way to make iron meteor dragons.  The talk of Gendry making another iron dragon kind of sounds like foreshadowing of a future meteor event, or perhaps the new rebirth of Azor Ahai reborn in the form of RLJayzor Ahai and Daenazor Ahai.  One of my favorite tinfoils is that Tobho Mott taught the secret of reworking Valyrian steel to Gendry and that he is going to reforge Ned’s sword, but I’m not holding my breath.  The main thing is that the last Iron Dragon was hanged and then thrown in the river, and would seem to correlate to the previous Long Night event, which inclines me think that this talk of making another iron dragon  is foreshadowing of the next dragon that needs to be hanged on the tree.

This inn of many names used to be owned by the Heddles, and you may recall that Black Tom Heddle of the Mystery Knight novella has a black demon helm – so calling Gendry the ‘old inkeep’s ghost’ effectively makes him a Heddle and blends the symbolism of Black Tom’s demon mask with Gendry’s bull helm.  This gives us the sort of dark, demonic horned lord symbolism we are seeing elsewhere with Azor Ahai reborn.  It’s Black Goat of Qohor, Baphomet type of stuff we are talking about here –  that’s whose smithing the meteor dragons.  Gendry’s lightning hammer, horned helm, and Baratheon associations give us the Storm King symbolism to go along with that, and were he ever to be acknowledged as Robert’s bastard and end up as the only potential heir to House Baratheon, then he’ll be a full fledged horned lord.

The idea of Gendry as a fiery bull version of Azor Ahai was also suggested in the scene where Yoren and Arya the other Night’s Watch recruits were besieged in the abandoned holdfast near the Gods Eye.  During the fight – the one where we saw the burning tree wearing the robes of living orange – it describes “the fire shining so bright on his polished helm that the horns seemed to glow orange.”  In mythical astronomy terms, we see the sun turn into a pair of fiery bull’s horns during the phase of a solar eclipse when the moon is just above the center of the sun’s disc.   In mythology, bulls can be both solar and lunar, and in this case, the fiery bill image is created only during an eclipse, when the sun and moon come into conjunction.  Thus it makes sense to see Azor Ahai reborn as a fiery bull – he’s only created during the eclipse.

We’ll actually come back to the inn of the crossroads a bit later for more gallows humor at the end of the next episode, but we aren’t finished with Brienne.

…because at the end of her last POV chapter in AFFC, Brienne herself is actually hanged – and there’s a one-eyed man, Jack be Lucky of the Brotherhood Without Banners, on hand to help execute her.  The name Jack is probably a reference to Jack in the Green, adding an extra layer of green man symbolism.  Brienne thinks to herself, “If this is another dream, it is time for me to awaken.  If this is real, it is time to die,” a poetic way to tie dreaming and awakening to dying on the tree.

Brienne is also struck by lightning a few times.  We mentioned it a few episodes, so here’s a quick recap in lieu of the full quotes.

As the Bloody Mummers climb off their horses to attack Brienne, lightning flashes and makes their weapons gleam silvery blue, equating the weapons (which will strike Brienne) with lightning.  As she battles Rorge, who’s wearing the Hound’s helm, this is reinforced as his axe was “a brutal black shadow that turned silver every time the lightning flashed.”  Recall that Rorge-as-the-Hound is also called  “the Mad Dog of Saltpans” and played the moon-burner role at Saltpans; so here we can see his black weapons are like lightning.

After she dispatches Rorge and is bum rushed by Biter, her head is slammed against the ground and it says “the lightning flashed again, this time inside her skull.”  It also says “Brienne’s chest was burning, and the storm was behind her eyes, blinding her.”

She takes the Hammer of the Waters injuries next – a literally broken arm and Biter attempting to choke her and tear her head off her shoulders.  Later, when she relives this horrific experience in a fevered nightmare, it says “the pain crackled up her arm like lightning,” a terrific reinforcement of the idea that the Storm Gods thunderbolt and the Hammer of the Waters that broke the Arm of Dorne are related to one another.

So, she’s all kinds of struck-by-lightning, in other words.  Thus her hanging on the tree is only a completion of this symbolism.  Just as we saw at the opening of the chapter that began with the lightning blasted gallows tree, these two symbols are both talking about the same concept – weirwoods as a vehicle for transformation through transcendence of death.

Ser Hyle Hunt and young Podric Payne are also hanged alongside Brienne, and they make a nice trifecta of symbolism.  The sigil of House Hunt is a dead, trussed-up brown dear – the wiki of ice and fire page on Westeros.org shows the deer as an antlered stag, though that is not strictly canon.  House Hunt are in service to House Tarly, with its Herne the Hunter symbolism, so it seems their sigil is a continuation of the stag man symbolism of House Tarly.  I also can’t help but notice “Hyle Hunt” is very, very close to “wild hunt.”  He’s the sort of fellow to ride the horse of the hanged, for sure.

As for Pod and House Payne, their sigil is a purple and white checkerboard with gold coins in all of the squares.  In Westeros, gold coins are called dragons , while purple and white are the colors of House Dayne, and purple the color of the eyes of dragon-blooded people, and of course, some members of House Dayne.  A bunch of dragon symbolism, in other words.  Ilyn Payne carries on more of the same: as the King’s Justice or executioner, he is very like a weapon in the hand of the king, which is the role the Lightbringer meteors play.  He is the one who kills Ned and then claims blood-soaked Ice for a short time.  The executioner and the executioner’s sword are symbolically identical, meaning that Ilyn Payne is essentially a meteor sword symbol, and this of course matches well with the implied dragon symbolism of House Payne.  Ilyn Payne is later given a new sword to replace Ice, and it has a grinning dragonglass skull with ruby eyes on the hilt, and needless to say, this only enhances the dragon sword symbolism of the House of Payne.  (get outchya seat and jum-paround! jump!)  The silvered runes on Ser Ilyn’s new blade add the suggestion of a magic sword, perhaps one tied to the First Men.  Not Payne’s actual sword, which is probably just fancy looking, but rather the concept of a much older dragonsword which Ser Ilyn might be symbolizing.

In other words, Pod Payne is bringing the dragon symbolism to the hanging party, Hyle Hunt is laying on thick with stag man symbolism, and Brienne brings the Evenstar and moon maiden symbolism.  It’s like one of those stupid hanging models of the universe you make in second grade with coat hangers and styrofoam balls, and we’ve got everything we need for the solar stag man to stick his dragon inside the moon maiden and make an Azor Ahai rebornling.

Ok, so one more quick hanging.  It’s a Frey, so I am sure you won’t mind.   We’ll make this a speed round – call it a lightning round even, heh heh (Walder Frey laugh).  Ok, epilogue of ASOS, Merrett Frey is going to meet the Brotherhood Without Banners at Oldstones to pay a ransom of 100 golden dragons for Petyr Pimple, who has been captured by the Brotherhood.  And to get played like a sucker, because that’s what Freys are good for.  One-eyed Jack-be-Lucky is there again with the noose, and this time he claims to be Beric for a moment.  He’s the one who ties the noose around Merritt at the end of the chapter.

Merritt is the one hanged, so let’s talk about him.  Disguised beneath his weasel-faced Frey meat sack, he’s actually got a ton of great symbolism going on. Because he has residual headaches from a head trauma injury suffered in the past, and because he is a raging alcoholic, he suffers from frequent blinding headaches, and as he climbs the hill to Oldstones, he knows that he will soon have “a thunderstorm raging between his ears.”  After a passing squirrel startles Merrett enough to make him draw his sword, he chides himself, and it says “his heart was thumping in his chest as if he were some green boy on his first campaign.”  When he considers running away with the gold and abandoning Petyr Pimple to the outlaws, he thinks to himself “Let them hang him, he brought this on himself.  It’s no more than he deserves, wandering off with some bloody camp follower like a stag in rut.”  Since Merrit is related to Petyr, that makes Merritt a stag man too, and this idea is reinforced elsewhere in the chapter.  Right before the line about his having a thunderstorm between his ears, it said that he was mostly sober, save for the two horns of ale he drank when he woke up – that’s perfect, because two horns is how many you need to make a good horned lord costume.  A bit later, as the headache builds, he feels as though “an aurochs was thundering through” his head, a second instance of Petyr having a horned head, and the horned symbolism is tied to thunder.

So, Petyr Pimple, despite his fairly pathetic outward existence, has green man symbolism, horned man symbolism, and thunderstorm symbolism.  He’s still a lowly, no good, weasel-faced Frey traitor, but symbolically, that’s all a good fit -a horned green man with a thunderstorm between his ears is exactly the right person to be hanged on the tree.

When he reaches the crown of the hill at Oldstones, whose ringwall is compared to the crown on a king’s head, we find Tom Sevenstrings sitting on the tomb of King Tristifer the IV, the Hammer of Justice.  Just to, you know, give us yet another hammer reference here – and paired together with a singer, as in those who sing the song of earth, and elsewhere Tom is called “you old goat.”  The brotherhood does actually go into the godswood to hang Merritt and Petyr before him, although they don’t hang either on a weirwood.

When he is finally hanged, it says “his feet left the ground,” and then “up into the air he jerked, kicking and twisting, up and up and up.”  The language is very suggestive of flying.  We’ve seen that there is something about hooking up to the weirwoodnet that is akin to flying – this is a theme of Bran’s dreams of awakening his third eye, and Bloodraven promises Bran both in dream form and in person that ‘although he will never walk again, he will fly.’  Flying is very exciting and we are going to get to that, but like young Brandon Stark, we must have patience.  Before we can fly, we have to wed the tree.

…and that’s exactly what we will do next time, as we search for the entrance to the weirwoodnet.  We have more hanging scenes coming up, but we need to go back Yggdrasil lore for the next concept before we exact more hangman’s justice.  I hope you’ve enjoyed analysis of Durran and Elenei, which I have been meaning to get to for a while, and I hope you have gotten a taste for the Yggdrasil stuff – as you can already see, the weirwood and greenseer ideas draw a lot from Odin and his gallows horse.  Being hanged on the tree and being struck by lightning are both metaphors for death transformation and acquisition of the fire of the gods, and in the next episode, we will try to drill down into just what it means for Azor Ahai to be a greenseer, and just what it means for a tree to be given a face and to have a greenseer’s consciousness slip inside.

Let’s start by recalling one of the central outlandish claim I made in Weirwood Compendium 1: that the Grey King and Azor Ahai might be the same dude in some sense.  While it’s perhaps too much of an oversimplification to just say “they were the same person,” there does seem to be a common story and figure behind both myths.  As we discussed in our Great Empire of the Dawn podcast, there is good reason to conclude that the dragonlords from Asshai and the Far East came to Westeros before the Long Night, specifically to Oldtown and the Iron Islands.  Thus, there is a plausible way for the legend of Azor Ahai and the Grey King to have a common origin.  The two legends would have evolved differently according to the different cultures that nurtured them, but beneath it all we seem to have this figure of a sorcerer who challenges the gods and steals their fire by slaying the moon, and I have begun to lay out the evidence indicating that this figure was a greenseer, or perhaps a group of greenseers.

That’s actually several claims:

1. Azor Ahai and the Grey King were the same person or were from the same group of people
2. Azor Ahai and the Grey were moon-breakers
3. Azor Ahai and the Grey King were greenseers
4. Azor Ahai and the Grey King possessed and utilized Lightbringer meteors

To that I would add that they were both transformed by their possession of the fire of the gods, and both in all likelihood were undead or resurrected.

We are well familiar with the idea that Azor Ahai had something to do with breaking the moon – that one is right there in the fable after all: Nissa Nissa’s death cry left a crack across the face of the moon when Azor Ahai stabbed her with Lightbringer.  Similarly, the meteor-worshipping Bloodstone Emperor, whom I believe is another name for Azor Ahai, is held responsible for bringing on the Long Night through his use of blood magic and his usurpation and murder of the Amethyst Empress.  A primary aspect of my original theory is that Azor Ahai possessed the fire of the gods that was the black moon meteorite and made from it the sword known as Lightbringer.

We believe the Grey King to be a moon-breaker because he is remembered as having taunted the Storm God into striking the tree with his divine thunderbolt, which we take for an account of a moon meteor impact, and because he is remembered as having slain the island-drowning sea dragon, which we take for an account of a meteor impact near the ocean or in the ocean that triggers tsunamis.  The Grey King is said to have possessed the fire of the gods which the thunderbolt carried down to earth and to have possessed the living fire of the sea dragon, implying his harvesting of the meteorite and its fiery power in some way, whether it be making weapons from it as the tales of the ancient Ironborn possessing soul-drinking black weapons suggest, or something more magical.  The Seastone Chair may well be a meteorite.

Most importantly, the Grey King is an active participant in the acquisition process – he tricks the Storm God into striking with his thunderbolt and he slays the sea dragon.  This is paralleled in the Azor Ahai and the Bloodstone Emperor myths, both of which depict them as actors who trigger a chain of cataclysmic events through the use of blood magic.

That covers moon-breaking and possessing the fire of the gods in terms of possessing meteorites.  But we have also seen that the fire of the gods can refer to a greenseer accessing the weirwoodnet.  That claim is based on two things: the red weirwood leaves that are more often called bloody hands are also called “a blaze of flame,” implying the presence of blood and fire in the canopy of the weirwood; and more importantly, because the fire of the gods has always been a metaphor for the knowledge and powers of the gods, and nothing epitomizes the knowledge and power of the gods in ASOIAF like the powers bestowed upon the greenseer by the weirwood.

The fire of the gods can be lightbringer the meteor or access to the weirwoodnet –  dragonfire or weirwood fire, if you will – and the two Grey Kings myths express this perfectly.  The thunderbolt of the Storm King is a moon meteor symbol, but the burning tree is a weirwood symbol, due to the “blaze of flame” description of the weirwood canopy.  Possessing fire through the burning tree makes the Grey King a greenseer. Then we have the horrifically violent, island-drowning sea dragon event, which seems to be talking about a meteor impact in one sense, but the “ribcage” now known as “Nagga’s Bones” on Old Wyk is almost certainly made of petrified weirwood.  This implies that the Grey King’s throne and crown were made of weirwood, once again identifying him as some sort of greenseer.

The idea of Azor Ahai as a greenseer was first broached in Weirwood Compendium One, when we saw that in most of the major Lightbringer forging metaphor scenes, fiery sorcerers and dancers would emerge from the pyre of burning wood, usually wood with heavy symbolism attached to it.  We developed the idea further in the green zombie series when we saw that the fiery undead Azor Ahai archetype seems to overlap strongly with the King of Winter, who is himself symbolic of a burning green man or wicker man.  We saw that many characters like Stannis, Renly, Beric, Bloodraven, Jon, and Robb show us three lines of symbolism simultaneously – undead symbolism, burning man symbolism, and greenseer symbolism.  Beric in particular strongly suggests the idea of Azor Ahai the greenseer, due to his combination of Azor Ahai and Bloodraven / greenseer symbolism.

So there you have it: the Grey King and Azor Ahai, fire-stealing moon breakers, and quite possibly the same fire-stealing moon-breaker. We will talk more about the transformation process of possessing the various kinds of divine fire – dragonfire and weirwood fire – as we go.

Before we dive into the main section, I want to briefly add a couple of observations about the Grey King in light of what we have learned during the Sacred Order of Green Zombies series.   We saw that some versions of the green man fertility god have antlers or horns, while others have tree branches on their head in place of antlers.  In this way, we can see that the weirwood crown of the Grey King and the later driftwood crown of the Ironborn both play into a type of green man symbolism.  You can really see it in the TV show when Euron dons the driftwood crown – he looks like a horned Pan.  But in keeping with the petrified weirwoods and death symbolism of the Grey King, it would be a dead green man / dead greenseer symbolism, much as we see in the northern mythical figures like the King of Winter, Barrow King, and Night’s King.

If the Grey King is a greenseer with death symbolism, is there a chance he could have been an undead greenseer?  If he was Azor Ahai or one of his companions, then he may well have been, right?  Well, we are told the Grey King lived for a thousand years and seven, during which time his skin grew to be as grey as his eyes and beard.  That sounds more than a little bit corpse-like, and being a functionally immortal skinchanger zombie like Coldhands could potentially explain his supposed thousand year reign.

Grey King does seem to fit very will into the burning man / undead Lord of Death archetype that the Barrow King and King of Winter play into, and there is extensive grim reaper symbolism to be found on the Iron Islands.  The Lord of Pyke is styled “the Lord Reaper,” and of course the words of House Greyjoy are “we do not sew,” a kind of opposite to the idea of Garth the Green and fertility gods (shoutout to my Westeros forum friend Crowfood’s Daughter!).  On the Island of Harlaw, we find the scythe-based sigils of the Harlaws and their offshoot houses, again suggesting reaping.  This is very consistent cycle of the seasons stuff: the men from the green lands plant and celebrate summer and fertility, the men from the Iron Islands do not sew, they reap – and plunder, and kill.  According to TWOIAF, the Grey King’s “hair and beard and eyes were as grey as a winter sea,” so there’s even a winter association built in to his description.

We are going to be delving into a lot of Odin and Yggdrasil ideas in the Weirwood Compendium going forward, because Odin and Yggdrasil are a huge influence on Martin’s ideas about greenseers and weirwoods, and on all the one-eyed folks in the story in particular.  I’ll go ahead an pop the cork on that one now and mention that one of Odin’s many, many names is Harbard, which means ‘hoary beard’ or ‘grey beard.’  Hoary is kind of an antiquated word, so for anyone who does not know what it means, it means “ancient, grey, white, silvery, or snowy looking.”  Thus Grey King’s beard being as grey as a winter sea may well be an Odin reference, which is exactly what we should see if the Grey King is a greenseer.  And now we think back to the oft-repeated phrase “green boys and grey-beards” which is frequently applied to the Night’s Watch, and we can see that both of these terms relate to greenseers, with grey beards implying old, undead greenseers as a counterpoint to green men or children of the forest.  Odin is also a type of death / resurrection god, and three of his other names are “Father of the Slain,” “The Slain God,” and “Chooser of the Slain.”

There’s also a bit of zombie symbolism floating around on the Iron Islands, (pun intended).  House Drumm has an association with necromancy, having a skeletal-hand-on-red sigil and a legendary hero called Dagon Drumm the Necromancer.  The Lord of House Drumm is called “The Bone Hand” and “The Lord of Old Wyk,” giving him a direct association with the Grey King, who ruled from Old Wyk in a longhall made of Nagga’s “bones.”  The Drumms possess a Valyrian steel sword, Red Rain, and like all nearly-black, dragon-forged Valyrian swords, Red Rain is a symbol of a black moon meteor, with the name “Red Rain” alluding to the meteors as a rain of bleeding stars. The current Lord Drumm, Dunstan, comes to the Kingsmoot on a ship called “the Thunderer,” giving us another Grey King association as well as a possible reference to Odin, because among Odin’s many, many names is “Thunderer.”  Essentially, House Drumm shows us a necromancer lord from Old Wyk who wields black swords, bleeding stars, and thunder as a weapon.

There’s also an Ironborn hero named Balon Blackskin, so-called for his hard black skin which weapons supposedly could not penetrate.  Could this refer to the hard black hands of a wighted person, or even a fire-tranformed person like supernatural red priest Moqorro, whose “burnt” black skin seems like it might be more than just dark skin pigment?  Most of all, we have the words which are sacred to all Ironborn – what is dead may never die, yet rises harder and stronger.  Many have noticed that this sounds like a perfect description of the wighting process, which raises very hard and strong walking corpses who will essentially never die until they are burned or have had their bones broken.  The famous  “drowning” ritual of the Ironborn mimics a death and rebirth process, and that is of course when they say the famous and slightly phallic words about rising harder and stronger.  You can see what’s going on here – this is all about death and resurrection.  And dicks – it’s a little bit about dicks.  Lightbringer stuff always is.

Now the first Drowned Prophet was Galon Whitestaff, so-called for his tall staff of weirwood.  Even though today’s Ironborn hate the trees and the Old Gods, it may be that this was not always the case if the Grey King himself was a greenseer.  Thus Galon Whitestaff’s weirwood staff might be more than a cool staff carved from weirwood just for the heck of it – it could be a clue that he was a greenseer, perhaps raising drowned men from the dead in the true version of the water magic resurrection, something akin to what happened to Patchface.  It’s highly speculative to link Patchface’s resurrection and water resurrections to greenseer magic, but we do have the first “drowned priest” walking around with a weirwood staff,  so there maybe a connection of some kind.  Returning to the idea of weirwood and driftwood crowns being similar to having antlers, we can see that Patchface the drowned stag man is actually a very good likeness of the Grey King, an undead greenseer who came from the sea and wore a wooden crown.

Then we have the Drowned God to consider – he is by definition a dead god, but one who is still active and powerful.  It’s an undead god, in other words, just the sort of thing we are looking for.  When a slightly kooky Ironborn king tried to assimilate the Drowned God into the Faith of the Seven, he eventually identified him with the Stranger, seeing the Drowned God as a death god, just as we do.  The Drowned God is said by Damphair to have first emerged from the sea with a burning brand, beginning the long association between the Ironborn and the idea of drowned fire and showing us the Drowned God as a resurrected figure in possession of fire.  Again this fits the mold we are finding elsewhere in the North, and with the Grey King and Azor Ahai – a resurrected death god figure who possess fire.

To cap off this introduction, let’s return to the logical angle on the hypothesis that Azor Ahai and the Grey King were the same person in some sense..  Although I prefer to spend the most of out time on symbolic analysis, we do of course have to line up any symbolic interpretations with the facts and logistical evidence that we have to consider.  First of all, I notice that the Grey King is recorded in Ironborn mythology to sound very much like a Quetzalcoatl type figure who comes from a foreign land and teaches the primitive natives advanced knowledge of science, astronomy, and the like.  Many cultures all around have some version of this myth, which is one of the reasons why Atlantis-type theories are so popular (that and the fact that they’re so much fun!)  Besides the more famous stealing of fire from the Storm God…

The Grey King also taught men to weave nets and sails and carved the first longships from the hard pale wood of Ygg, a demon tree who fed on human flesh.  

Perhaps the Grey King was some sort of Albert Einstein of the Ironborn, inventing every aspect of their sea-craft himself, or perhaps this is simply the exaggeration of myth and fable.  This makes more sense, however, if the Grey King was a foreigner from an advanced civilization who simply brought already-developed knowledge and technology to the Iron Islands.  In TWOIAF, much discussion is made over the mystery of the Ironborn’s seafaring skill, which is completely unique among all the First Men in Westeros.  It is held up as one of the pieces of evidence that the Ironborn do not descend from First Men, along with mysterious, inexplicable origins of the Castle Pyke and the Seastone Chair.  I would agree, and the fact that the Grey King is said to have taught the Ironborn how to build boats and fish really jibes well with this idea, and so to does the idea that he founded bloodlines which rule the Iron Islands to this day.  He was said to “come from the sea,” but that could just mean coming from the sea as in coming from a distant land in boats.

The ancient Ironborn are remembered by some of the green lands as having black weapons which drank the souls of those they slew, which I have suggested matches well with the idea of Lightbringer swords made from black meteors, and this technology would have had to come from the east.  Since the sea dragon is in one sense a reference to a moon meteor landing in the sea, possessing the fire of the sea dragon could be interpreted as making weapons from sea dragon meteorite, and all of this lines up with Azor Ahai or his kin coming to the Iron Islands with their ancient sword making technology and habit of making them from meteoric iron.  This could be a satisfying answer to the question of why the Ironborn maintained a huge advantage in iron-smithing over the rest of Westeros until the Andals came.  It’s the same answer as the question of their advanced nautical skill: they are in part descended from an advanced civilization which had contact with ancient Westeros.

Finally, in terms of logistical evidence, I will again highlight the fact that the Seastone Chair is made of oily black stone, a material only found for sure on the Isle of Toads, the city of Yeen on Sothoryos, and of course at Asshai, where the entire city is made of oily black stone.  Moat Cailin may or may not be made of oily stone, as we have discussed, but the point is – this material seems like a probable link to Asshai.  It was supposedly found on the beach of Old Wyk by the first First Men to come to the Islands, and even the Ironborn who claim a non-First Men descent do not know how the Seastone Chair came to the Iron Islands.

Likewise, the Castle Pyke, with its anachronistic round tower design that First Men were supposedly not capable of, was found as-is by the first people remembered as having come to the islands of Pyke.  In fact, not only was Pyke supposedly built before anyone we know of came there, it also seems to have partially collapsed before being rediscovered as well.  I believe this fits with the evidence at Moat Cailin, a structure which is far beyond the building capabilities of the First Men as we know them and which seems to have suffered a violent trauma thousands of years in the past.  This trauma would likely be one of the meteor impacts and / or the earthquakes and floods they would have triggered, events which occurred at the time of the Long Night.  That would explain why nobody remembers who built these structures – the Long Night was a huge cultural reset button during which time much knowledge and technology would be lost.   Places like Castle Pyke, Moat Cailin, and the Wall that cannot be explained by the First Men’s capabilities and whose origins are basically unknown are best explained by the possibility that they were built before the Long Night with knowledge that was lost during the Long Night.  That certainly seems to be the case at Castle Pyke and the Iron Islands, where abundant evidence points towards the idea of ancient mariners from a far away land contributing to the gene pool and culture of the Ironborn.

And now back to some mind-bending symbolism!

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Ride the Lightning

This section is dedicated to our two newest avatars of one of the twelve houses of heaven, BlueRaven of the lightning peck, earthly avatar of Heavenly House Gemini, whose words are “the way must be tried”, and Ser Brian the Returned, Knight of the Last House, Wielder of the Valyrian Steel blade Red Song, and earthly avatar of Heavenly House Ophiuchus the Serpent-Bearer.

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Just as we are going to be talking more and more about Yggdrasil and Odin in our quest to understand the mysteries of the weirwoods, we are also going to begin talking about Bran in earnest.  If a greenseer hooked up to the knowledge and power of the weirwoodnet represents man’s possession of the fire of the gods, then Bran, our only main character who is a bona-fide greenseer, and who already seems to be the most powerful greenseer alive, should surely manifest the symbolism of one who is in possession of that godly fire.  Sure enough, that’s exactly what we find.  So let’s begin Weirwood Compendium 2 by taking a look at young Brandon Stark.

Thankfully, we are not starting from scratch.  We’ve already broached the topic of Bran’s symbolism in our Tyrion Targaryen episode where we took a look at Bran’s dream of falling from the tower amongst animated, fiery gargoyles that appear outlined against the moon.  We identified Bran as a moon child, primarily due to the conspicuous fact that he is pushed out of the tower by a golden lion man, Jamie Lannister, who seems like a straightforward symbol of the sun at this point in the story.  Bran wanders too close to Jamie’s sun fire, and is cast out of the heavens and broken.  But just as those moon meteors which drank the fire of the sun represent the rebirth of Azor Ahai, so too does broken Bran represent Azor Ahai reborn as a reborn moon character, just as Daenerys does.

In other words, Bran is a dynamic character who represents both the moon and what the moon turns into, and this is true of most of our main characters, who all show a transformation process along these lines, from either sun or moon or comet to falling meteor or reborn comet or darkened sun.

It’s widely known that Bran means crow or raven in Welsh, and obviously Bran is lined up to take over for the three-eyed crow, Bloodraven, so that makes a lot of sense.  We’ve seen that crows and ravens make excellent black meteor symbols, with the ravens being dark messengers and and the crows of the Night’s Watch being the black-clad swords in the darkness who fight with fire.  Therefore Bran’s status as a kind of crow or raven also implies Bran as a moon meteor.  Jojen refers to dreaming of Bran as a winged wolf, and of course his coma dream is mostly about trying to fly, which he eventually does on “wings unseen.”  If Bran ever skinchanges a dragon – you’ll recall him straddling the gargoyles atop the keep right before falling – then he will have achieved peak meteor symbolism status.  The fiery gargoyles made very good moon meteor symbols, having woken from stone with fire in their eyes, and because gargoyle mythology has its origins in dragon lore, and in fact, Bran’s fall from the First Keep is also equated with the gargoyles which later fell from the First Keep and landed in the same place Bran did, broken like Bran was.

One of Bran’s most important symbolic identities comes from a story Old Nan tells him to scare him out of climbing the walls and towers of Winterfell, which Bran recalls to himself as he climbs toward his fateful encounter with Jamie:

Old Nan told him a story about a bad little boy who climbed too high and was struck down by lightning , and how afterward the crows came to peck out his eyes.  Bran was not impressed.  There were crows’ nests atop the broken tower, where no one ever went but him, and sometimes he filled his pockets with corn before he climbed up there and the crows ate it right out of his hand.  None of them had ever shown the slightest bit of interest in pecking out his eyes. 

This is an central aspect of Bran’s symbolic identity, because it connects the idea of challenging the heavens and stealing the fire of the gods – a bad little boy who climbs too high – with being struck by lightning.  Just as the fire of the gods was possessed for mankind by the Grey King when a thunderbolt set fire to a tree, Bran’s climbing too high and being struck down from the tower is what triggers the opening of his third eye.  Later in this episode, we’ll take a look at a couple of complementary Bran scenes which show an association between lightning and Bran using his greenseer abilities, such as the scene at Queenscrown with Hodor and the lightning.

As for the crows pecking out the eyes of the bad little boy after he was struck down by the lightning, we see that the opening of Bran’s third eye is accomplished by the crows pecking his eye – his third eye – at the end of his coma dream, just before he wakes:

“I’m flying!”  He cried in delight.

I’ve noticed, said the three-eyed crow.  It took to the air, flapping its wings in his face, slowing him, blinding him.  He faltered in the air as its pinions beat against his cheeks.  Its beak stabbed at him fiercely, and Bran felt a sudden blinding pain in the middle of his forehead, between his eyes. 

So, Bran was cast down after climbing too high, and the crows did peck his eyes.  In addition to the crow pecking in between Bran’s eyes here, we also notice that the word “blinding” is used twice.   However, it turns out that all that eye pecking and being struck by lightning is merely a euphemism for gaining access to the weirwoodnet.  Check out this absolutely frightening passage from ACOK, a dream Bran has early on in the book before he has really come to terms with being a warg:

That night Bran prayed to his father’s gods for dreamless sleep. If the gods heard, they mocked his hopes, for the nightmare they sent was worse than any wolf dream. “Fly or die!” cried the three-eyed crow as it pecked at him. He wept and pleaded but the crow had no pity. It put out his left eye and then his right, and when he was blind in the dark it pecked at his brow, driving its terrible sharp beak deep into his skull. He screamed until he was certain his lungs must burst. The pain was an axe splitting his head apart, but when the crow wrenched out its beak all slimy with bits of bone and brain, Bran could see again.

What Bran sees terrifies him – he’s climbing the tower, and reliving the moment Jamie pushed him from the window.  He had been blocking out this traumatic memory until this point, and the crow pecking open his third eye allows Bran to fully come to grips with these events so he can move on and continue to develop his greenseer power.  The idea of Bran losing sight in his physical eyes and gaining sight in his third eye is another Odin idea, one which we will dive into fully in the next section when we got back to the Nightfort.

Now just as Bran is both the moon and the reborn moon, he is also the lightning bolt which struck the tree – a falling moon meteor – and the tree which was set on fire by the Storm God’s thunderbolt.  The falling fire of the gods becomes a part of the burning tree in other words, and Bran the falling moon is reborn as a burning tree, as a greenseer.  Here is where Bran’s wicker man / burning man symbolism comes in – surprise surprise, Bran the Prince of Winterfell also plays into the King of Winter burning wicker man symbolism that Jon and Robb and Eddard manifest.

I’d like to pause a moment for a tip of the hat to my good friends and research buddies on the Westeros.org forums Ravenous Reader, Wizz-the-Smith, and Blue Tiger, who contributed greatly to this next bit.  Blue Tiger also runs a Polish ASOIAF website and fan forum called OGIEŃ I LÓD, where he has actually posted polish translations of my first two essays.  These folks are three of the biggest and most frequent contributors to Mythical Astronomy, so all praises and thanks to them.  So, Bran as a wicker man.  Let’s pull the quote from AGOT when Jon goes to visit comatose Bran before heading to the Wall and the Night’s Watch, where he is greeted by an unfriendly Lady Catelyn:

She was holding one of his hands.  It looked like a claw.  This was not the Bran he remembered.  The flesh had all gone from him. His skin stretched tight over bones like sticks.  Under the blanket, his legs bent in ways that made Jon sick.  His eyes were sunken deep into black pits: open, but they saw nothing.  The fall had shrunken him somehow.  He looked half a leaf, as if the first strong wind would carry him off to his grave. 

Bones like sticks, aye?  Looks like a leaf, you say?  When Bran wakes from his coma dream to Summer’s bright golden eyes, it says that “he reached out to pet him, his hand trembling like a leaf.”  He’s also being described like a bird: he has a claw here, and a moment later when Jon holds his hand, Bran has “fingers like the bones of birds.”  Elsehwere, Bran “perches” atop Winterfell’s towers, as just another one of the birds which are his only company, and even falls asleep high in a tree on time.  Bran is a raven and a crow, so that makes sense, but when you combine the stick bones and leaf hands with the bird symbolism, you get a scarecrow – but a scarecrow who is also a crow, just as the Night’s Watch scarecrows are also crows as all Black Brothers are.  The scarecrows ultimately burn in Jon’s Azor Ahai dream, just as the Wicker Man / King of Winter is fated to burn in the spring, and so I give you the mother of all Bran wicker man quotes, courtesy of Blue Tiger:

A series of chisel-cut handholds made a ladder in the granite of the tower’s inner wall. Hodor hummed tunelessly as he went down hand under hand, Bran bouncing against his back in the wicker seat that Maester Luwin had fashioned for him. Luwin had gotten the idea from the baskets the women used to carry firewood on their backs; after that it had been a simple matter of cutting legholes and attaching some new straps to spread Bran’s weight more evenly.

This wicker basket may seem innocuous, but it’s actually loaded with symbolism, even before Bran climbs inside it.  It’s made of wicker of course, and since it used to be a basket for carrying firewood, we can see that the idea of burning wicker is implied.  More specifically, it implies that Bran is firewood, which makes sense because Bran is the wicker man here.  You’ll recall Julius Caesar’s claim that the druids would place sacrificial victims inside person-shaped wicker cage before burning him alive – that seems to be what martin is calling out to here with Bran climbing into a wicker basket of the type used for carrying firewood.  Bran as a burning wicker man completes the picture began with the ‘boy who struck down by lightning’ monicker – Bran is a burning tree figure, in possession of the fire of the gods.

The King of Winter Wicker man burns in the spring, which I have correlated to the last hero working to bring the spring through sacrifice and transformation.  I linked this to Jon, as a King of Winter / new last hero figure, and I have also noted that Bran is the other person who looks most like a new last hero figure, so… you can see how this all fits together.  Bran and Jon both have last hero and King of Winter / burning wicker man symbolism, and both will be sacrificing themselves in some respect and transforming in order to bring the end of the new Long Night which seems about the fall.

Bran’s bird symbolism is also continued by the wicker basket, as wicker was often used to make small bird cages in times past.  The thing is, it’s a cage which also allows freedom – and this correlates to Bran’s ultimate wooden cage, the weirwood throne, a cage which also sets Bran free.  A similar paradox is going on with Hodor, who at first carries Bran’s wicker cage on his back, and then later becomes Bran’s new cage when Bran begins to skinchange Hodor’s body.  Hodor is Bran’s cage, but Hodor is also put in a cage when Bran takes over – he refers to Hodor stirring “down in his pit” when this happens.

There’s a really great quote about Bran and cages in the scene where Jon’s visit’s his sleeping body:

Yet under the frail cage of those shattered ribs, his chest rose and fell with each shallow breath. 

This cage of ribs that belongs to a broken moon character has to remind us of Nagga’s ribs, the supposed rib cage of the sea dragon.  That’s a really nice way of lining things up – if Bran plays the role of a tree person struck by lightning, he might as well show some sea dragon symbolism.  The weirwood ribcage of Nagga’s ribs correlates quite well with the weirwood cage Bran will ultimately end up in, since they both contain greenseers and are both made of weirwood, and this is yet another link between the Grey King and greenseers.  Now, inside a person’s ribcage, we find the heart, and thus the greenseer in the weirwood cage may be intended to play the role of the heart of the heart tree.

A couple other good Bran as a wicker man quotes, both from AGOT:

Hodor lifted Bran as easy as if he were a bale of hay, and cradled him against his massive chest.

And a similar quote when Robb carries Bran to his bedchamber:

His brother was strong for his age, and Bran was as light as a bundle of rags, but the stairs were steep and dark, and Robb was breathing hard by the time they reached the top.

So far Bran is made of sticks, hay, rags, and firewood. There’s also a roundabout straw man symbol hung on Bran: at Winterfell, he fights Tommen with wooden swords, where Bran is “Bran was so heavily padded he looked as though he had belted on a featherbed,” and then in ACOK, Tommen rides against a padded quintain stuffed with straw.  Beds are generally stuffed with either straw or feathers, and feather mattress Bran and the straw man quintain are both Tommen’s opponents, so it seems that the straw man might be functioning as a parallel to Bran.  Here’s the quote:

The master of revels bowed, but Prince Tommen was not so obedient. “I’m supposed to ride against the straw man.”

“Not today.”
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They set up the quintain at the far end of the lists while the prince’s pony was being saddled. Tommen’s opponent was a child-sized leather warrior stuffed with straw and mounted on a pivot, with a shield in one hand and a padded mace in the other. Someone had fastened a pair of antlers to the knight’s head. Joffrey’s father King Robert had worn antlers on his helm, Sansa remembered . . . but so did his uncle Lord Renly, Robert’s brother, who had turned traitor and crowned himself king.

Tommen’s opponent is a straw man with antlers on his head… That’s pretty easy symbolism to recognize.  The straw knight is a leather warrior, which also calls to mind the idea of wearing skins and skinchanging as well as Bloodraven’s leather like skin, and the “child sized” description suggests children of the forest and Bran the child greenseer.  The fact that Tommen is also supposed to be thought of as part Baratheon, and is yet fighting an antlered opponent, gives us a horned lord / brother against brother thing going on here, and this is emphasized by the reference to  Renly as a stag man who turned traitor.

Alright, so Bran’s wicker man symbolism is well in order, and the implication of Bran as firewood gives us burning wood.  There is other fire symbolism around Bran, beginning with the fact that he has that kissed by fire hair that Robb and Sansa and the Tullys have.  Not exactly earth-shattering, but worth noting.  Let’s take a look at some hard evidence though, and this first one comes from the beginning of AGOT, courtesy of Westeros.org forum user TyrionTLannister:

Robb grinned and looked up from the bundle in his arms. “She can’t hurt you,” he said. “She’s dead, Jory.”

Bran was afire with curiosity by then. He would have spurred the pony faster, but his father made them dismount beside the bridge and approach on foot. Bran jumped off and ran.

By then Jon, Jory, and Theon Greyjoy had all dismounted as well. “What in the seven hells is it?” Greyjoy was saying.

Bran is afire with curiosity to see their new hellhound direwolves, with Theon’s “what in the seven hells is it” line implying the hellish origin of the direwolves’ symbolism. And then there is of course the famous scene in the crypts, also from AGOT, where Shaggy and Rickon are hiding in Ned’s tomb:

The darkness sprang at him, snarling.

Bran saw eyes like green fire, a flash of teeth, fur as black as the pit around them. Maester Luwin yelled and threw up his hands. The torch went flying from his fingers, caromed off the stone face of Brandon Stark, and tumbled to the statue’s feet, the flames licking up his legs.

Not only is this a possible foreshadowing of Bran catching fire in some sense, it also neatly equates the sacrifice of Bran’s legs with his possession of the fire of the gods.   It’s a particularly apt metaphor.  Also noteworthy is Shaggydog playing the perfect hellhound, guarding the entrance to the grave with eyes of fire.

Turning once again to the name of young Brandon Stark, it would seem that it goes deeper that the fact that Bran means raven is Welsh.  For example, Bran is also a food: bran, or miller’s bran, is the hard outer portion of a cereal grain. Because of it’s high oil content, it is subject to rancidification, and is therefore usually separated and heat-treated to keep it from spoiling and rotting.  In other words, it’s another implication of Bran being burned – again, in some sense.  We haven’t looked at enough Bran scenes to begin to speculate about exactly what this means for him, how exactly it will play out.  For know, I am primarily concerned with highlighting his corn king / wicker man King of Winter symbolism, and perhaps at some point we can deduce how symbolic or literal this idea of burning Bran might be.

And speaking of corn kings, miller’s bran is a cereal grain, like corn, which means that Bran is indeed a corn king, a hero made of vegetable material.  That’s pretty funny since he loves to feed corn to the crows… actually, what we are being shown here seems to be Bran feeding himself to the crows.  That’s kind of what the corn king does, sacrifice his body to feed the people, and that’s the main symbolism of the communion ritual practiced by Christians the world round – bread and wine are eaten to symbolize that Jesus’s body and blood are given to nourish and sustain mankind.  We see this kind of relationship with Bloodraven and his weirwood – it’s a symbiotic relationship where the tree is sort of absorbing or eating Bloodraven, even as he wears the tree’s skin.  Bran feeding himself to the crows would therefore seem to suggest Bran will be a corn-king style sacrifice.

When Theon and the Ironborn take over Winterfell, Black Loren carries Bran down to the high seat of the Starks in the great hall and it says that “the black-bearded man dumped Bran onto the stone as if he were a sack of oats.”  Oat-bran, I guess it would be in this instance.  Somebody needs to drown Bran in  bowl of milk already and be done with it!  Who’s hungry for cereal?

Now the english word bran goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, often abbreviated PIE, which seems to be the oldest traceable common language ancestor of most European and west Asian languages.  It’s original meaning seems to be rotten, stinky, or rancid.  That’s why the bran part of the grain got that name – it’s the part that goes rancid if you don’t roast it a bit.  Similarly, bran means raven or crow in welsh because ravens and crows are carrion eaters – they eat spoiled meat.

That’s all really interesting, especially the corn king connections, but the reference to fire is only implied in a round-about way.  However, the etymology of Bran is not nearly done giving up the goods.  The name Brandon contains the word brand – hence my burning Brandon joke.  But if it’s a joke, it’s likely to be an intentional one, because the burning brand is an important symbol of the moon meteor fire of the gods falling to earth, and we know that that’s the role Bran plays when he falls from the tower.  The burning brand is a great meteor symbol for Bran because it shows the light-bringing aspect of a torch, and because a burning brand is burning wood, it suggests the burning tree, a symbol of the weirwoods.

In Old French, bran is the alternate form of the word branc, and branc means ‘firebrand, flaming sword, or torch.’  It comes from a Proto-Germanic word brandaz, which has the same meanings – flaming sword, torch, firebrand – and there is an older PIE word behind that.  This is where the modern English word brand comes from, and the Norse equivalent is brandr, and again it means flaming sword or torch.  So yeah – that burning Brandon thing is no joke after all!  It’s easy to see now why George chose the burning brand as one of the symbols for lightbringer – because bran can literally mean “flaming sword,” and it’s a great way to signify Bran as a Lightbringer child, one who has possessed the fire of the gods for mankind… for better or worse.

With this flaming sword symbolism in mind, consider all the broken sword symbolism associated with Lightbringer: the first two unsuccessful attempts to temper Lightbringer, the last hero’s broken sword, Beric’s broken sword, the broken sword sigil of the Second Sons, the broken sword point of land at castle Pyke which thrust like a longsword into the bowels of the sea, and the splitting of Ned’s Ice.  Even the magic meteor sword Dawn has breaking in pied in its name, due the habit of describing dawn as “breaking” in the sky when the sun rises.  In his darker moments, Bran thinks of himself as “Bran the Broken,’ and in his better moments, defiantly thinks “I’m not broken!”  It seems well possible that Bran’s broken man symbolism correlates to this broken sword aspect of Lightbringer, and there’s a clue about this in the prologue:

Royce’s body lay facedown in the snow, one arm outflung. The thick sable cloak had been slashed in a dozen places. Lying dead like that, you saw how young he was. A boy.

He found what was left of the sword a few feet away, the end splintered and twisted like a tree struck by lightning. Will knelt, looked around warily, and snatched it up. The broken sword would be his proof.

Ser Waymar is something of a last hero figure, being a First Man who journeys into the cold dead lands and crosses swords with the Others, and perhaps Waymar’s dozen wounds stand for the last hero’s twelve companions.  But the important link to the last hero is the broken sword, snapped by the cold of the Others just as the stories of the last hero suggest.  That broken sword is like a tree struck by lightning – another fabulous connection between lightbringer and the burning tree struck by the Storm God’s thunderbolt.  And here we can see how Bran’s symbolism lines up – he is the stick boy struck by lightning, but also a broken (yet fiery) sword.   The Burning Brandon.

What’s more, the place where Bran goes to feed the crows is called the Broken Tower.  Even though he falls from the First Keep, he was in fact on his way to the broken tower when he overheard Jamie and Cersei.   And how did the Broken Tower become broken?  From AGOT:

His favorite haunt was the broken tower.  Once it had been a watchtower, the tallest in Winterfell.  A long time ago, a hundred years before even his father was born, a lightning strike had set it afire.  

Inside the broken remnants are charred and rotten beams, giving us the suggestion of burnt wood and rotten wood, both of which are appropriate if the broken tower is serving as an analog to Bran, since Bran means rotten and burning wood equates to burning trees.  This is the place where Bran goes to feed corn to the crows, symbolic of Bran sacrificing himself to obtain the fire of the gods.

I simply cannot wrap this up without mentioning another mythical tree of Norse mythology, that of barnstokkr or branstokkr., whose tale comes to use from the Volsung Saga.  This tree grows in the center of the palace of mighty King Volsung, it’s arms and branches growing through the roof and windows.  The story goes that at the wedding of his daughter Signy and King Siggeir, Odin enters the feast disguised as a one-eyed old man, grey with age and wearing a mottled hood and cape, and bearing a special sword called Gram.  Odin buries it hilt-deep in the barnstokkr tree and decrees that he who can pull it forth from the tree will receive it as a gift and will never have a better sword than it.  Siggeir and all the other guests try and fail, but Sigmund, son of King Volsung and sister to Signy, succeeds and possesses Gram, much to the dismay and jealousy of King Siggeir.  Siggeir eventually kills Volsung and imprisons Sigmund and his eight brothers.  The brothers are killed, Sigmund escapes, and Signy secretly gives Gram back to Sigmund.  They conceive an incest baby together, and Sigmund and his son grow rich as outlaws and actually become werewolves.  Eventually Sigmund kills Siggeir with Gram.

Still with me? The important thing here is that Gram is very much a parallel to Lightbringer.  Sigmund eventually comes against Odin himself in battle, though Odin is disguised, and Odin breaks Gram in half.  The two halves are kept by Sigmund’s wife – not his sister Signy, but a different woman – and she fathers Sigmund’s son Sigurd, eventually giving him the two pieces of the broken sword.  One day Sigmund hears of the dragon Fafnir, and needs a sword capable of slaying it, so a Dwarven smith named Regin makes three attempts to forge such a sword.  The first two attempts end up with inferior swords which are broken, but on the third attempt, Regin reforges the two halves of Gram and bingo, we have a dragon-slayer sword which Sigurd does eventually use to slay Fafnir.  Reforged Gram is “all decked with gold and gleaming bright,” and seems to have a dragon emblazoned on it, depending on how the text is translated.

Recall that brandr is the Norse word for flaming sword and torch or burning brand.  Jesse Byck, a professor of Old Norse and Medieval Scandinavian Studies at UCLA who also serves as the director of the Old Norse Studies Program and who has written several books on Norse mythology, is of the opinion that the original name of barnstokkr was branstokkr or brandstokkr, as brandr is also synonymous with “hearth,” and Volsung’s mighty hall was notable for being lined with blazing hearts on either side, much like the kitchen at the Nightfort or Harrnehall’s Hall of the Hundred Hearths.  Additionally, Gram the gleaming dragon sword comes from Branstokkr, so it makes sense that the root word of Branstokkr or Brandstokker would be brandr, a word for a flaming sword.  Obviously, the myth of a tree named Bran which is tied to a lightbringer-like sword works tremendously well as a part of Bran’s mythological influences.  Bran is both a flaming sword and a burning tree, the two forms of the fire of the gods in ASOIAF.  This is the same meteor fire / weirwood fire dichotomy we found with the Grey King’s possession of the fire of the gods, and that is not an accident of course.

Professor Byck also suggests that Branstokkr is simply another form of Yggdrasil, being a magical tree growing in the center of a sacred courtyard, among other reasons, further tying this myth to weirwoods, greenseers, and Bran.

We’ just about finished, but I wanted to say one more thing about Bran having some of the King of Winter symbolism so strongly exemplified by Jon.  Jon is born during the winter, and given the name Snow, and there’s really not much summer to him at all, it would seem. He’s the quintessential black sword in the darkness.  But Bran is different – he was born after the last winter ended, and therefore begins the story being labelled “summer child” over and over, most memorably as Old Nan lectures him about fear being for the Long Night when the Others comes and all the rest. His wolf is named Summer, and has glowing golden eyes.  In other words, Bran seems to be the type of corn king figure who transform between summer and winter king, as opposed to being the winter king in a pair of opposites.  That’s my initial take, anyway, and I reserve the right to refine this analysis as we go along.  The symbolism of Summer the wolf going underground with Bran suggests the season of summer going into hibernation, so we’ll have to explore that line of symbolism another time.

Bran has other lines of symbolism – namely, that of Bran the Blessed and the Fisher King, as well as an apparent symbolic tie to bridges and a few other things – but we will get into those in due time.  For now, we’ve rounded out the introduction to Bran’s symbolism, and we can rip into one of the best chapters in the series: Bran’s chapter at the Nightfort.  Yes, I know – we just went to the Nightfort in the last episode, talking about the seventy nine sentinels and the army of dead leaves and Coldhands.  This is, as much fun as we had there already, we actually haven’t even made it to the best symbolism in the chapter: the weirwood, the well, and the moon.

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The Weirwood and the Well

This section is brought to you by the Patreon support of Shiera Luin Elen, the Blue Star of Heaven, resident linguist of the podcast and acolyte of the Church of Starry Wisdom

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We spent a fair amount of time at the Nightfort in the Green Zombie series, showing that everything in the entire chapter seems to be about undead skinchangers, leading up to Sam’s account of Coldhands which prompts Bran to ask if he is a green man with antlers on his head.  We talked about how Sam coming back through the Black Gate and up the well symbolizes a return from the grave, which is a match for the undead horned  figure / Herne the Hunter symbolism of House Tarly.  We showed how the dead, rattling leaves which marched around like a dead army reinforced this dead greenseer Night’s Watchmen symbolism throughout the scene.  We mentioned that Bran tells the story of the seventy nine sentinels, which are terrific symbols of undead green men Night’s Watch brothers.  But the best parts are yet to come.  We needed to go over all that stuff about horned lords and undead greenseers first, but having done so, we can now return to this awesome chapter from ASOS and ponder the mystery of the twisted weirwood that wants to attack the sun and moon.  It’s one of the best pieces of evidence that the greenseers brought down the moon, which in turn supports the ideas that the Hammer of the Waters was a moon meteor and that Azor Ahai was a greenseer.

We’ll begin with the weirwood tree:

The yards were small forests where spindly trees rubbed their bare branches together and dead leaves scuttled like roaches across patches of old snow. There were trees growing where the stables had been, and a twisted white weirwood pushing up through the gaping hole in the roof of the domed kitchen.

Any time you see the word dome, you should check to see if we might be talking metaphorically about the dome of the sky – Martin actually uses that phrase, “the dome of the sky,” in a line we are going to quote later on.   This particular dome in the Nightfort kitchen is likely to represent the sky because we have a weirwood growing in the middle of the room.  The weirwoods draw their primary influence from Yggdrasil, the world tree of Norse myth, and as we mentioned a moment ago, Yggdrasil grows up in center of the courtyard of Vahalla in a similar fashion to this weirwood at the Nightfort.  The important thing to understand is that mythical world trees such as Yggdrasil serve as something of a model of the framework of the universe, with their trunks depicting the idea of a celestial axis on which our planet and the canopy of stars seems to turn, and this is called the axis mundi.  Yggdrasil connects the nine realms of the Norse universe to one another, with upper realms in the branches generally correlating to what we would think of as the heavens and the roots representing the underworld or underworlds.

In other words, the presence of a cosmic axis tree in the middle of the room makes it likely that this dome is indeed meant to be the dome of the sky.  And wouldn’t you know it – there’s a gaping hole in the dome, which the “twisted” weirwood is “pushing up through,” almost as if the weirwood itself had torn a hole in the sky.  I probably don’t have to tell you that I believe this is a metaphor depicting the greenseers bringing down the moon and causing the Long Night.  It’s very like the scene from the Wayward Bride chapter which we looked at in the Grey King and the Sea Dragon, a scene which introduced us to the idea of human-like trees standing in as symbols of greenseers:

Tall soldier pines and gnarled old oaks closed in around them. Deepwood was aptly named. The trees were huge and dark, somehow threatening. Their limbs wove through one another and creaked with every breath of wind, and their higher branches scratched at the face of the moon.

We also got the line, “The trees hid the moon and stars from them, and the forest floor beneath their feet was black and treacherous,” as well as one about “the trees were whispering in some language that she could not understand.”  There was also that one about the greenseer turning the trees into warriors, as well as the warriors of the Mountain Clans dressing up like trees, and lots of moon drowning and sea dragon references.  You remember all of that, right?

Anyway, the idea of a trees symbolizing a greenseers is pretty easy to grasp, especially when they are doing human-like things of symbolic import, such as scratching at the face of the moon, shutting out the moon and stars, turning into warriors, and the like. In the Nightfort scene, it’s not just any old tree, but a “twisted” weirwood, and it’s pushing up against the cracks in the dome of the sky – and there’s more of this to come. Calling the weirwood twisted seems apt, because the greenseers that brought down the moon and caused the Long Night would be the ones I have nicknamed “naughty greenseers.”

A bit later in this chapter, the party returns to these kitchens again:

The Reeds decided that they would sleep in the kitchens, a stone octagon with a broken dome. It looked to offer better shelter than most of the other buildings, even though a crooked weirwood had burst up through the slate floor beside the huge central well, stretching slantwise toward the hole in the roof, its bone- white branches reaching for the sun. It was a queer kind of tree, skinnier than any other weirwood that Bran had ever seen and faceless as well, but it made him feel as if the old gods were with him here, at least.

Now the weirwood is bursting through the slate floor as well as pushing through the gaping hole in the domed ceiling.  Such a violent, disruptive tree!  Earlier it was called “twisted,” now it is called “crooked” as well, adding to the naughty greenseer vibe.  The “faceless” description could be a reference to the Faceless Men and the God of Death, Him of Many Faces, although the Old Gods are also referred to as “the old ones, the nameless, faceless gods of the greenwood” way back in the beginning of AGOT.  There are actually many symbolic parallels between the Faceless Men and skinchangers, so more exploration will have to be done here to suss out the meaning of this connection.

Alright, our twisted and crooked weirwood bursts through the floor and…  it reaches for the sun with bone white branches.  That’s a line which really gives the image of the skeletal hand of a dark greenseer reaching up to blot out the sun.  We mentioned the skeletal-hand-on-red sigil of the House Drum and Dagon Drumm the Necromancer, and when we consider that the weirwoods are often described as bone white, it seems possible that the common symbolism here may be intentional, and that the bone white branches reaching for the sun are meant to suggest an undead greenseer who dabbles and necromancy and wields thunder.  That is of course right in line with the themes of this chapter, which pertain to undead greenseers, and right in line with my theory about the Grey King and Azor Ahai legends referring to a greenseer or group of greenseer who brought down the moon and became undead.  Whether the correlation to House Drumm is intended or not, the crooked and twisted tree is now reaching for the sun as well as pushing through the gaping hole in the dome, and it is not finished yet, so you can more or less see what is happening here.

The Nightfort weirwood is growing next to the well, and since there is an underground living weirwood face known as the black gate in a side tunnel off of the well, it seems likely that this weirwood is a growth generated from the root network which the weirwood gate is a part of.   As we saw with Coldhands the pyschopomp escorting Sam back from the other side, the Black Gate represents a threshold, a place symbolic of the crossing over to the underworld or the afterlife.  This means that the crooked Nightfort weirwood is literally growing up from the realm of the dead and bursting through the floor into the realm of the living.  It’s a vivid depiction of a greenseer coming back from the dead – to crack a hole in the sky.  As we noted previously, the weirwood face that is the black gate is described as looking dead or like a man who lived for a thousand years, descriptions which could also apply to the Grey King, and we will see more associations between this tree and the Grey King later in the chapter.

The coupling of the weirwood and the well is a very clear reference to Yggdrasil, which happens to have a couple of very important wells beneath it.  We’ll come back to this idea in a moment , but for now consider that the weirwood, in its capacity as a cosmic world tree, represents the celestial axis – and here, the tree grows slantwise towards the hole in the roof, which is apparently not directly overhead of the weirwood.  The implies a tilted cosmic axis, which could be seen in one of two ways.  The axis of the earth is indeed slanted, which is a very good thing for life on earth, so a slanted tree-axis might not be anything bad at all.  Even the twisted description of the tree could simply refer to the spin of the axis.  Alternatively, you could take the crooked and slantwise descriptions and infer a cosmic axis which is in some sense askew, and this would be copacetic with the idea of the Long Night as an upheaval of the heavens and the cycles of nature.  Fun to muse on, but not crucial to the action, so let’s keep going.

The wierwood is hardly done grasping at the heavens, and here’s the best line in the chapter.  As Bran tries to go to sleep, listening to the army of dead leaves scuttle about and thinking of the seventy nine sentinels, we read that:

Pale moonlight slanted down through the hole in the dome, painting the branches of the weirwood as they strained up toward the roof. It looked as if the tree was trying to catch the moon and drag it down into the well. Old gods, Bran prayed, if you hear me, don’t send a dream tonight. Or if you do, make it a good dream. The gods made no answer.

lt looked as if the tree were trying to catch the moon and drag it down into the well. Well, you don’t say.  The weirwood tree is the old gods, as Bran says, and the Old Gods are really the greenseers – and now we can see that the greenseers apparently like to bring down the sun and the moon, to reach up from the underworld and break a hole in the dome of the sky.

The greenseer who broke the moon, the person or group of people behind the legends of Azor Ahai and the Grey King, did so in part to obtain the fire of the gods of course – and here we see that the weirwood is painted in the light of the moon, even as it reaches up for the moon to pull it down.  It’s a two way connection, with the moonlight representing the light or moon-fire of the gods coming down the greenseer.  It’s like Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel… but it’s also something like Adam and Eve eating from the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil, with greenseers reaching up to steal the fire of the gods and breaking the heavens to do so.  Chew on that for a second!

Most importantly, this is pretty much as obvious a clue as George can give us that the greenseers pulled down the moon.  This is how they caused the hammer of the waters, but it wasn’t done to stop the immigration of the First Men.  It seems to be about possessing the fire of the gods, of course, and I’ve also said many times that I suspect the primary blame should be placed on human greenseers (or perhaps green men greenseers, if they are a different species of humanoid) rather than the children of the forest.

Bran lays eyes on this scene with the weirwood and the moon and asks the Old Gods not to send him a dream, or failing that, to send him a pleasant dream.  The thing is, Bran IS the boy who climbed too high, and he very much plays into this archetype of the naughty greenseer who possesses the fire of the gods, so unfortunately bad dreams are the kind he’s likely to get.  Bran’s foreboding at the sight of the twisted, grasping weirwood, and his subsequent desire for the Old Gods not to send him a dream may be a subtle hint that it was naughty greenseers dreaming (i.e. using their greenseer powers) which caused this whole moon disaster.  The tree is like a reminder: here’s what can happen with the power of dreaming.  This chapter is filled with ominous foreboding, even though nothing bad actually happens here at all – quite the opposite.  The chapter opens with Bran thinking to himself “no, it is the Nightfort, and it is the end of the world.”  A bit later, Bran thinks to himself that Old Nan had always said that the Wall was the end of the world.  That’s the idea – when the greenseers pull down the moon, it’s the end of the world as we know it, and nobody feels fine.

As for the idea of pulling the moon down into the well.. well, two things.  This is an expression of the sea dragon idea – the drowning of the moon in the ocean – and it’s also a reference to Mimir’s well that lies beneath Yggdrasil.  We’ll start by talking about Mimir’s well and then come back to the sea dragon, since we basically know what the sea dragon is about already.  This Yggdrasil stuff is really important, and we are going to be getting into more and more of it as the Weirwood Compendium goes along, so listen up everyone.

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I Was Up Above it (Now I’m Going Down In It)

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Mimir’s well is first and foremost a terrific source of knowledge and magical power – the things Odin is always craving – and this leads Odin to sacrifice one of his eyes to gain permission from the giant Mimir to drink from his well of knowledge.  The idea is that Odin is sacrificing one of his physical eyes to open his third eye, and this is often a theme of Odin stories – the idea of personal pain and sacrifice to gain magic and knowledge.  It’s easy to see how this translates to ASOIAF – greenseers must sacrifice their physical bodies for access to the weirwoodnet and all that it brings.  Bran loses his legs and Bloodraven loses an eye, in an obvious parallel to Odin, and you’ll recall that Bran dreamed of specifically having his physical eyes pecked out so that his third eye could see – that’s basically taken right from the pages of Norse mythology.  Call it the Odin makeover.  Here’s a quote from AGOT where Bran sees Bloodraven in his dream as the three-eyed crow:

Bran looked at the crow on his shoulder, and the crow looked back. It had three eyes, and the third eye was full of a terrible knowledge.

That terrible knowledge is the knowledge of the gods which mankind may not always be prepared to deal with, if you know what I mean.  That’s why it’s called the fire of the gods – it’s powerful, but dangerous and costly.  It’s playing with fire!

Now the important part of the Mimir’s well story in regards to correlating it to the Nightfort scene is the way Odin gives up his eye as a sacrifice – Odin actually throws his eyeball into the well, just as the weirwood is trying to pull the moon down into the well.  The well in the Nightfort already works well as a symbol of Mimir’s well simply because it is under the weirwood, as Mimir’s well is in a sense ‘under’ Yggdrasil.  The idea of a ‘source of divine knowledge’ being found inside Mimir’s well is represented at the Nightfort by the living weirwood face inside the well, because the weirwoodnet is the ultimate source of divine knowledge in ASOIAF.

The moon works as a symbol of the eye of Odin, not only because a grasping weirwood wants to pull it into a well, but because Odin sacrificed his eye to gain divine knowledge, just as Azor Ahai seems to have sacrificed the moon to gain access to the fire of the gods.  Even better, the moon is many times equated with an eye or described as “peering” or “peeking” in ASOIAF, and although we will go through many of those examples when we get to our God’s Eye episode, right now I will pull a moon-eye quote which involves Bloodraven, since he is basically a fairly straightforward adaptation of Odin.  It comes from the Dunk and Egg novella “The Mystery Knight.”  There’s an awesome scene where Bloodraven’s eye is equated with the moon… and it too takes place by a well:

Dunk whirled.  Through the rain, all he could make out was a hooded shape and a single pale white eye.  It was only when the man came forward that his shadowed face beneath the cowl took on the familiar feature of Ser Maynard Plumm, the pale eye no more than the moonstone brooch that pinned his cloak at the shoulder.

Ser Maynard Plumm is of course Bloodraven in disguise, and this bit about his moonstone brooch appearing as a pale white eye is a big clue to readers that Maynard Plumm is in fact Bloodraven.  This is an Odin trick, actually – he appears in disguises of all sorts, even animals, but always with one eye.  Most importantly, equating the pale eye of a greenseer to a moonstone gives us the crucial reinforcement of the scene at the Nightfort, where the moon seems to be playing the role of the eye of Odin as it falls into the well beneath the sacred tree.  The Dunk and Egg scene shows us that a greenseer’s eye is like the moon, and the Nightfort scene shows us the moon going into the well in an imitation of Odin’s eye.  The weirwood pulling the moon down into the well is a great clue about greenseers bringing down the moon as it is, and connecting this to the eye of Odin and Mimir’s well reinforces the ideas that greenseers were involved and that the moon was pulled down to gain magical power and knowledge.  Finally, Bloodraven’s correlations to the Nightfort scene also suggests the idea of a greenseer pulling down the moon who is also the blood of the dragon, and that is of course the big idea here about Azor Ahai and the Grey King.

Maynard Plummraven’s pale eye is actually a moonstone, and the idea of the moon becoming a stone when it falls into the well is reinforced in both scenes.  When Dunk sees this illusion with Bloodraven’s brooch, he is standing in front of a well down which he has just thrown Alyn Cockshaw.  Cockshaw meant to throw Dunk down the well – to dunk Dunk, if you will? – but instead Dunk “fed him” a stone, breaking his teeth, and then turned the tables by sending Alyn down the well. Cockshaw’s sigil is a night black field with red, white, and gold feathers, so perhaps you could interpret that as a fiery bird that ate a stone and fell down the well, but the stone is the main thing.  If you prefer, you could also interpret falling Lord Cockshaw as a flaming penis (which his what Lightbringer is, more or less).

Dunk himself was almost thrown down the well, and his symbolism is too splendid to even get into right now as an aside, but consider his sigil with the falling star and the elm tree.  A tree, and a falling star.  And isn’t his horse named Thunder?  He’s also thick as a castle wall making him a stone, and the name “Dunk” even suggests that he be thrown in a body of water.  Anyway…

Now right before Dunk throws Alyn down the well, he begins to threaten the Fighting Cockshaw by saying “if you’ve thrown Egg down the well…”  Naturally, a dragon child named “Egg” works quite well as a moon symbol, since the moon cracked like an egg to birth dragon meteors, as everyone knows.  In fact, at the end of this affair, Bloodraven interprets John the Fiddler’s dragon dream of a dragon waking at Whitewalls to have been referring to Egg coming into his own as Aegon Targaryen, so Egg is indeed the egg which gave birth to a dragon at Whitewalls and thus an A1 prime example of the second moon.  It’s also yet another example of how a character can play the role of moon and dragon-child-of-the-moon, transforming from one to the other.

The pattern of pulling moon symbols down into wells continues with the real dragon’s egg at Whitewalls, which was smuggled out of Lord Butterwell’s solar by Bloodraven’s dwarves, who snuck it down the privy shaft.  A privy shaft is basically a shitty kind of well, so I think you’ll agree it serves the purpose in terms of symbolism.  The fact that it is the privy shaft of Lord Butterwell also enhances the well symbolism.  It’s the same idea once again: a greenseer stealing a dragon’s egg / moon symbol and pulling it down into the depths of the well.

The egg being in Butterwell’s solar is a nice callout out to the second moon which wandered too close to the fire of the sun before giving birth to dragons, because this egg was literally in the solar.  The dwarves who helped Bloodraven probably parallel the children of the forest who may have assisted the naughty human greenseers who pulled down the moon.  Given what we seen of sinister dwarves in dream visions in ASOIAF, might the dwarves symbolize some rebel faction of naughty children of the forest?  Just thought I would throw that idea out there.

Jumping back to the Nightfort, you will probably remember Hodor dropping the stone into the well in a nod to the scene in the Lord of the Rings where Pipin foolishly drops the stone down the well in the Mines of Moria and awakens the orcs and the balrog. Here is the passage from the Nightfort chapter, after Hodor has been hodoring into the well, and picks up a piece of slate to throw down into it:

“Hodor, don’t!” said Bran, but too late.  Hodor tossed the slate over the edge.  “You shouldn’t have done that.  You don’t know what’s down there.  You might have hurt something, or woken something up.”

Hodor looked at him innocently. “Hodor?”

Far, far, far below, they heard the sound as the stone found water. It wasn’t a splash, not truly. It was more a gulp, as if whatever was below had opened a quivering gelid mouth to swallow Hodor’s stone. Faint echoes traveled up the well, and for a moment Bran thought he heard something moving, thrashing about in the water. 

Essentially, each one of these little tidbits about the well and the weirwood and the moon are telling a piece of the story.  The twisted weirwood comes up from the underworld and pushes through the sky, reaches for the sun, and pulls the moon down into the depths of the well.  Now the stone Hodor drops takes over, showing the moon falling into the well like a stone – a moon stone.  It’s worth noting that the piece of slate came from the roof – in other words, if fell down from the hole in the dome… and now it’s going into the well.  A moment earlier, Bran speculated that the well might not have a bottom, but here we see that there is water down there, not to mention a strong implication of some sort of sea monster, thrashing about in the water and opening its quivering gelid, squisher mouth.  Disgusting, but still better than a privy shaft.

Now as I mentioned, the moon drowning in a body of water is easily recognizable to us as a sea dragon symbol – and so it makes a ton of sense to see the implication of a sea monster down in the well after the moon falls into it.  Of course, the story doesn’t end there – the sea dragon rises from the depths after all, and Azor Ahai is a hero prophesied to be reborn from the sea.  Something has woken up down there.

That was only a story, though. He was just scaring himself. There was no thing that comes in the night, Maester Luwin had said so. If there had ever been such a thing, it was gone from the world now, like giants and dragons. It’s nothing, Bran thought.

But the sounds were louder now.

It’s coming from the well, he realized. That made him even more afraid. Something was coming up from under the ground, coming up out of the dark. Hodor woke it up. He woke it up with that stupid piece of slate, and now it’s coming. It was hard to hear over Hodor’s snores and the thumping of his own heart.

As we saw when we looked at this scene in the Green Zombie series, the scuffling sounds Bran begins to hear a moment earlier are compared to a variety of things: the rattling and rustling of the dead leaves, the seventy nine sentinels, various other ghosts of the Nightfort like Mad Axe or the thing that came in the night.  These were all ideas which implied undead greenseers – the thing that came in the night, by the way, leads the dead ‘prentice boys behind him in imitation of something called the “Wild Hunt” which is strongly associated with the horned nature god figure, a subject we will expand upon another time.  In any case, now we can see that these rustling sounds are tied to the mysterious sea monster in the depths of the well, awakened by Hodor’s dropped stone…

…and of course the terrible sea monster of the abyss turns out to be Sam.  Samwell Tarly, whose face is compared to a moon no less than four times in the series, far outpacing anyone else.  Sam IS the man in the moon, the man with the moon face, and that makes him the perfect person to represent whatever the moon turned into after it fell into the well.  And although Sam has that undead stag man symbolism of Herne the Hunter which lines up with the other undead skinchanger symbols here, he also has sea monster symbolism, courtesy of Lazy Leo Tyrell, who calls Sam a “black-clad whale” and a “leviathan” in AFFC… and again I will point out that the term ‘leviathan’ can be a general term fro any large sea creature like a whale or it can refer to the specific leviathan of mythology, a multi-headed dragon that lives in the sea.  To make Sam’s fishy symbolism clear, Martin hangs a couple of fishy metaphors on him as soon as he comes out of the well.  This quote begins with Bran having just skinchanged into Hodor, stood up, and drawn his sword… and then:

From the well came a wail, a piercing creech that went through him like a knife. A huge black shape heaved itself up into the darkness and lurched toward the moonlight, and the fear rose up in Bran so thick that before he could even think of drawing Hodor’s sword the way he’d meant to, he found himself back on the floor again with Hodor roaring “Hodor hodor HODOR,” the way he had in the lake tower whenever the lightning flashed. But the thing that came in the night was screaming too, and thrashing wildly in the folds of Meera’s net. Bran saw her spear dart out of the darkness to snap at it, and the thing staggered and fell, struggling with the net. The wailing was still coming from the well, even louder now. On the floor the black thing flopped and fought, screeching, “No, no, don’t, please, DON’T …” 

Meera stood over him, the moonlight shining silver off the prongs of her frog spear. “Who are you?” she demanded. 

“I’m SAM,” the black thing sobbed. “Sam, Sam, I’m Sam, let me out, you stabbed me …” He rolled through the puddle of moonlight, flailing and flopping in the tangles of Meera’s net. Hodor was still shouting, “Hodor hodor hodor.” 

There’s a lot going on here, but the first thing to notice is the flailing and flopping language as Sam “rolled through the puddle of moonlight.”  The puddle of moonlight is itself a moon blood / moon flood symbol, which should come along with the island-drowning sea dragon, here played by Sam the black leviathan. The other big clue about Sam being a sea monster is that he is quite comedically caught in Meera’s net like a fish.

I even wonder if Martin isn’t intending a double meaning with the line “from the well came a wail” – although ‘wail’ spelled to refer to a wailing sound, Sam is a whale coming from the well.  “From the well came a whale,” lol.  Widow’s Wail becomes Widow’s Whale, a sea dragon sword that brings waves of night and blood.  The Ibbenese whalers, hunting whales with Lightbringer since 8,000 BC…. well maybe not.  The wailing sound is also a piercing creech that went through Bran like a knife, and it turns out that creech is an Anglo-Saxon word which refers to a sharply pointed hill.  We know that moons and mountains have a strong symbolic connection, so a sharply pointed, piercing hill that turns into a knife sounds a lot like a falling moon mountain, the type we see with the symbolism of Gregor Clegane, the Moon Mountain that Rides. And later in the paragraph, Samwell the creech is screeching, another clue to associate the piercing creech with Sam. the wailing whale.  That’s a lot of wordplay!  It makes sense though, as a piercing moon mountain and an island drowning sea dragon are really the same thing, and we will actually see Sam depicted as a  slumbering mountain that wakes when horns blow in another scene later on.

The other thing that probably jumped out to you was the reference to lightning right in the middle of the action.   This is an immensely clever way of bringing the thunderbolt symbol into a metaphor where it otherwise wouldn’t exist.  He can’t actually make lightning strike every time he wants to make a Storm God’s thunderbolt reference, so in this scene the memory of a previous lightning bolt suffices.  The reason to do so is obvious – George is giving us both Grey King symbols at the same time; the thunderbolt and the sea dragon.  In other words, the moon is pulled down into the well by a crooked greenseer, then the sea dragon and thunderbolt appear simultaneously. Also at this moment, we see the bad little boy who was struck by lightning open his third eye and skinchange a giant.

To add to Sam’s sea dragon symbolism in this scene, his breathing is referred to as being “as loud as a blacksmith’s bellows” as he comes out of the well, a huge black shape,  and then a moment later it says “the fat man was still breathing like a bellows.”  As I said many times in the Grey King and the Sea Dragon, the sea dragon fable is partly about moon meteorite material and making swords from moon meteorite ore, and on a symbolic level, the entire thing can be seen as a meteor dragon sword being tempered in the cold sea and coming out frozen fire, black steel, etc.  You will recall all the suggestions of the Ironborn bringing fire out of the ocean – that’s what I am referring to here.

Thus, Sam is the moon-turned-black-leviathan rising from the depths of the sea, and he breathes like a bellows to remind us that we are supposed to forge swords from sea dragon material.  Of course the black brothers vow to be a “sword in the darkness, the fire that burns against cold, and the light that brings the dawn” – flamings swords in the darkness, in other words.  If the black brothers, who dress in black from head to heel, are to be thought of as swords, they must be black swords, just as the white-clad Kingsguard are called “the white swords.”  Therefore, it’s all pretty consistent – Sam is a black leviathan and a huge black shape who immediately presents us with the symbolism of a black sword and a bellows after he rises from the depths, accompanied by a reference to lightning (or perhaps we might poetically call it “a memory of lightning,” R.I.P. Robert Jordan).

I also neglected to mention last time that the Tarlys, in addition to their flagrant Herne the Hunter symbolism, also possess a conspicuous Valyrian steel sword, Heartsbane.  When you think about Nissa Nissa being stabbed in the heart by Lightbringer, you can see that Heartsbane makes a terrific parallel to Lightbringer.  Sam is actually named after an ancestor of his, ‘Savage’ Sam Tarly – boy that’s a good wrestler name, isn’t it? – who fought the Vulture King in the Red Mountains of Dorne when Aenys Targaryen was king.  Heartsbane was said to have been red from hilt to point with the blood of Dornishmen, just to drive the point home for us about it being an entirely red sword, turned red with blood just as Lightbringer was.  And heck – the idea of it being Dornish blood which colored the sword red could line up with the idea of the Daynes being descended from the Amethyst Empress, who may also be Nissa Nissa.

Thus we can see that Heartsbane compliments the undead stag man symbolism of House Tarly, and now makes them a terrific match for the symbolism of Stannis – undead stag man with a Lightbringer sword.  That’s the exact same symbolism shown to us in House Drumm, the necromancer Lords of Old Wyck who wield Red Rain.  Sam is mockingly called “the Slayer,” and though he’s no Savage Sam Tarly, he does nevertheless carry this House Tarly symbolism with him into his scenes, particularly when he’s joining the brotherhood of the black swords, breathing like a bellows, representing a piece of fallen moon, rising from the depths like the sea dragon, and being the thirteenth Night’s Watch brother to make it back from the great ranging.  And don’t forget, Sam is the only person we’ve seen kill an Other.

Alright, so that’s all pretty sweet, but you might be wondering how many different kinds of symbolism Sam can have.  He has a moon face, he’s a sea dragon / leviathan, AND he’s an undead horned green man?  Well, yes, and this isn’t such a train-wreck of symbolism as it appears, because the sea dragon is not only the black meteor that landed in the sea and drowned islands, it’s also a reference to weirwood, vis-a-vis the bones of the sea dragon on Old Wyk which are really petrified weirwood.  So in actuality, both of Sam’s prominent line of symbolism suggest an undead greenseer. Herne the Hunter IS an undead horned green man figure, and one aspect of the riddle that is the sea dragon involves the Grey King sitting on a weirwood throne and living for a thousand years with grey flesh.

In other words, Sam’s flopping fish, whale, and leviathan symbolism is just that – symbolic references to the sea dragon, which is really talking about greenseers and moon meteors.  So no, these are not clues about the last hero being a merling.  I don’t want to give the wrong idea.

Now the idea of the moon being down in the well is not only expressed by Samwell of the moon face coming out of it, but also by the weirwood door itself.  Here is the quote about the door, known as the Black Gate:

It was white weirwood, and there was a face on it. A glow came from the wood, like milk and moonlight, so faint it scarcely seemed to touch anything beyond the door itself, not even Sam standing right before it. The face was old and pale, wrinkled and shrunken. It looks dead. Its mouth was closed, and its eyes; its cheeks were sunken, its brow withered, its chin sagging. If a man could live for a thousand years and never die but just grow older, his face might come to look like that. The door opened its eyes. They were white too, and blind.

Just like the weirwood door in the Eyrie known as the moon door, and just like the half-weirwood moon-faced door on the House of Black and White, this weirwood door is moon-associated, glowing with milk and moonlight.  It is blind, emphasizing the ‘moon as an eye which as been torn out’ symbolism of Odin and Mimir’s well, and the white eye description matches that of Bloodraven’s illusory moonstone brooch pale eye.   It’s almost as if the weirwood upstairs is the before and the one down in the well is the after.  The one above is a young and faceless weirwood, reaching for the moon – but down in the well, we have the only weirwood with a moving face, and it glows with moonlight, as if it has now pulled down the moon and possessed its light, becoming an animated tree-person.  This is exactly our interpretation of the thunderbolt setting fire to a tree Grey King fable – that it produced a tree-man in possession of the fire of the gods, the Grey King – and of course we’ve mentioned that the wrinkled thousand-years aged, dead-looking weirwood face sounds very like the description of the Grey King.  I’m not saying that the Grey King literally became the weirwood door, but rather that the door’s symbolism depicts a corpse-like yet animated weirwood person who dragged the moon down into the underworld and possessed its light.

Finally, consider that Bran, a symbol of a falling moon carrying the fire of the gods, will now descend the well himself, just as the weirwood was trying to pull the moon down into the well.  And who is pulling Bran down the well and down into Bloodraven’s cave?  Bloodraven, of course, who is a dragon-blooded greenseer.  Now in the Odin story, the eye plucked out belonged to the sorcerer himself, so in some sense the moon should be the eye of the weirwood tree.  We saw the moon associated with Bloodraven’s eye, which qualifies, and the blind white eyes of the weirwood door look exactly like the pale moonstone eye which was really his brooch, and both of these things work to suggest the moon as the eye of the weirwood.  But consider Bran.  He represents the moon when he falls from the tower or goes down the well shaft, but he also represents the naughty tree sorcerer who pulled it down and was struck by lightning when he climbs too high and later awakens from his coma with his third eye open.  Thus, in a roundabout way, the greenseer represented by the weirwood tree at the Nightfort is putting out his own eye when he pulls down the moon, and clearly the overall theme of the greenseers paying a heavy price to possess the fire of the gods is implied throughout these myths.

In fact, it seems that this weirwood might be meant to represent Bran – it really should, since Bran is playing the role of the bad little greenseer boy who climbed too high.  You’ll recall that it’s called a young and skinny wierwood, and of course twisted and crooked.  Now compare that to the scene with Jon saying farewell to comatose Bran, a  stick-thin young boy with legs that bent at angles that made Jon sick.  Consider the fact that Bran is so young that he does not fully understand the moral component of skinchanging into Hodor’s body, and seems to be breaking many of the taboos set out for skinchangers, usually motivated by his very understandable desire for mobility and wholeness.

Nevertheless, he is very much set up to be the bad little boy who climbed too high, and he’s still climbing and reaching for the lightning of the gods… and it’s an open question as to how that will turn out for everyone.  It could be that Bran will break a taboo, such as attempting to raise the dead, that absolutely has to be broken in order to save the day, and Bran will be left to pay the price for his necessary, but “wrong” action, much in the way that Jon had to break many of his Night’s Watch vows to go undercover with the Wildlings and ultimately work for the good of the Watch, or like when Ned decided to lie and say he tried to usurp Robert in order to save his children’s lives.

So there you have it – in a chapter saturated with undead greenseer ideas, we also get a vivid depiction of the greenseers bringing down the moon and tearing a hole in the heavens to gain some new level of magical power and knowledge, and we also get a direct callout to the two most important Grey King myths.  Both the weirwood face down in the well and undead horned lord and sea dragon Sam Tarly coming out of the well depict the Grey King in the role of the drowned and resurrected moon.  That is simply one manifestation of Azor Ahai reborn, although more technically, a reborn moon character could also be considered “Nissa Nissa reborn.  However you want to slice it, the point is that Azor Ahai is both a reborn sun and a reborn moon character.  You’ll recall that tasty line from Damphair about making a godly king when the moon drowns and comes again – that’s our man, Azor Ahai reborn from the sea.

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Would You Believe They Put a Sam on the Moon?

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Now, as I was saying, you might not think of Sam the Slayer as a powerful undead greenseer figure or an Azor Ahai reborn type of person, but hey!  When was the last time you killed an Other with dragonglass?  Thats’s a distinctly Azor Ahai / last hero type of thing to do.  He also has the power to cast lightning, something like the WIzard Tim from Monty Python’s Holy Grail movie, as we see in AFFC:

Wordless, Sam staggered up onto the deck to retch, but there was nothing in his belly to bring up. Night had come upon them, a strange still night such as they had not seen for many days. The sea was black as glass. At the oars, the rowers rested. One or two were sleeping where they sat. The wind was in the sails, and to the north Sam could even see a scattering of stars, and the red wanderer the free folk called the Thief. That ought to be my star, Sam thought miserably. I helped to make Jon Lord Commander, and I brought him Gilly and the babe. There are no happy endings .

“Slayer.” Dareon appeared beside him, oblivious to Sam’s pain. “A sweet night, for once. Look, the stars are coming out. We might even get a bit of moon. Might be the worst is done.”

“No.” Sam wiped his nose, and pointed south with a fat finger, toward the gathering darkness. “There,” he said. No sooner had he spoken than lightning flashed, sudden and silent and blinding bright. The distant clouds glowed for half a heartbeat, mountains heaped on mountains, purple and red and yellow, taller than the world. “The worst isn’t done. The worst is just beginning, and there are no happy endings.”

Alright, so first Sam identifies with the red wanderer (meaning Mars), known as the Thief, just as Jon has – and this further identifies Sam the Slayer as an Azor Ahai reborn figure, which is what the sea dragon greenseer figure represents.  The idea of this red star being a thief and a wanderer works especially well for the idea of the Grey King as an Azor Ahai figure, since the Ironborn take pride in stealing, and because the Grey King would have been a wanderer from very far off places –  namely, Asshai.

Then comes Daeron the singer with some vivid mythical astronomy: the stars are ‘coming out,’ as in coming out of the sky, and who knows!  Maybe we’ll get a bit of moon – as in a falling bit of moon, a star coming out of the sky after the moon is impregnated by the comet, also a type of red wanderer.  That’s precisely when Sam does his wizard impression and seems to reach out with his stormy finger and strike the cloud mountains with lightning.   Of course, I believe the lightning bolt is a symbol for falling stars and falling bits of moon, which is why we get a lightning bolt right after the lines about the stars coming out and getting a bit of moon.

As we were just discussing at the end of the last section, Azor Ahai is a reborn moon character as well as a reborn sun character, and Sam is of course one of these reborn moon figures.  When he comes out of the well a the Nightfort, he was like a drowned moon reborn as a sea dragon rising from the depths, and here in this scene on the ship, Sam is like the Grey King, possessing the fire of the Storm God and using it himself to throw thunderbolts, a power which he gains after the stars come out and a bit of moon falls to the earth.  This equates Sam with the burning tree, just as the Grey King is equated with the burning tree once he possess the fire of the Storm God.  Sam’s Herne the Hunter symbolism makes him an undead horned lord symbol, and this is reinforced in this scene on the ship by the line “Sam staggered up onto the deck,” a stag-man play on words we’ve seen elsewhere.  This scene on the ship would therefore seem to be be showing us an undead horned greenseer figure casting the lightning bolts.  That’s exactly who we think the Grey King was, an undead greenseer / horned lord.  We are also going to follow up on this idea when we get into the Storm Kings of Durrandon, horned lords with clear associations to Thor’s lightning hammer, Mjolnir.

In a scene in ASOS, the prologue from Chett’s point of view, Chett stops to watch Sam’s woeful attempts at archery, and Sam is playing the role of a fiery red moon which is shooting arrows at tree.  Sam is labelled as the moon when Chett sees him:

He watched from the trees as the fat boy wrestled with a longbow as tall as he was, his red moon face screwed up with concentration. Three arrows stood in the ground before him. Tarly nocked and drew, held the draw a long moment as he tried to aim, and let fly. The shaft vanished into the greenery. Chett laughed loudly, a snort of sweet disgust.

Sam is a red moon, so imagine his arrows as the meteors being shot at the planet. He’s trying to hit a tree, so that would be the Storm God’s thunderbolt which set fire to the tree.  Although the arrows here are not lit on fire, the Night’s Watch does of course use fire arrows against the wights.  After Sam misses with his second moon arrow, Edd offers up some of his trademark sarcasm:

“I believe you knocked a leaf off that tree,” said Dolorous Edd. “Fall is falling fast enough, there’s no need to help it.” He sighed. “And we all know what follows fall. Gods, but I am cold. Shoot the last arrow, Samwell, I believe my tongue is freezing to the roof of my mouth.”

Knocking things out of the canopy of a tree is a good symbol for knocking a meteor out of the celestial tree, and of course weirwood leaves can be symbolic of the blood and fire hand of god which flings the moon meteors, or which is the explosion of the moon meteors, however you want to say it.  After the leaf falls, Ed gives his line about helping fall fall faster, and thus bringing the arrival of winter, and that is exactly what the moon meteors did, bring the winter.  Inother words, Sam is playing the role of a horned fertility god, helping to turn the seasons with moon meteor arrows.  If only he could hit that tree!

Ser Piggy lowered the bow, and Chett thought he was going to start bawling. “It’s too hard.”

“Notch, draw, and loose,” said Grenn. “Go on.”

Dutifully, the fat boy plucked his final arrow from the earth, notched it to his longbow, drew, and released. He did it quickly, without squinting along the shaft painstakingly as he had the first two times. The arrow struck the charcoal outline low in the chest and hung quivering. “I hit him.” Ser Piggy sounded shocked. “Grenn, did you see? Edd, look, I hit him!”

“Put it between his ribs, I’d say,” said Grenn.

Sam hit the charcoal outline of a person, hanging on a tree – this implies the tree as a person, and the charcoal implies a tree person that is ready to get on fire.

“Did I kill him?” the fat boy wanted to know.

Tollett shrugged. “Might have punctured a lung, if he had a lung. Most trees don’t, as a rule.” He took the bow from Sam’s hand. “I’ve seen worse shots, though. Aye, and made a few.”

Ser Piggy was beaming. To look at him you’d think he’d actually done something. But when he saw Chett and the dogs, his smile curled up and died squeaking. “You hit a tree,” Chett said. “Let’s see how you shoot when it’s Mance Rayder’s lads. They won’t stand there with their arms out and their leaves rustling, oh no. They’ll come right at you, screaming in your face, and I bet you’ll piss those breeches. One o’ them will plant his axe right between those little pig eyes. The last thing you’ll hear will be the thunk it makes when it bites into your skull.”

As you can see, there is a lot language here which turns trees into people, from the idea of trees with lungs to Chett’s sarcastic description of soldiers standing still like trees with their arms out and leaves rustling.  Instead he says the soldiers will plant an axe in his skull and describes the thunk of the axe biting into his skull – but if we imagine a tree-soldier planting a weapon in a moon face, we can think of a greenseer like Bloodraven, whose face is pierced by weirwood roots.  And if we think about a tree-person’s weapon biting a moon face, that sounds like Azor Ahai the greenseer (a tree person) biting the moon with a comet dragon.  ‘Right between the eyes’ is also where Bran felt the crow pecking his third eye open, so planting an axe right between the eyes of a moon face gives a pretty clear implication of moon death leading to the awakening of a greenseer, as we have seen elsewhere.

It’s also important to remember that comets are sometimes called “star seed,” and that’s what’s being implied here – the comet is like a seed, planted in the moon, just as Chett speaks of an axe being planted in his red moon face.  What grows from the destroyed moon is our fiery greenseer, Azor Ahai reborn, who is synonymous with a burning tree, the weirwoodnet inhabited by a greenseer.  We’ll follow up on this idea in the future, have no fear.

Sam’s moon symbolism continues – after his shot, he is “beaming,” like a moon shooting moon beams.  A smile on a moon face like Sam’s represents a crescent moon (think of the smiling “cheshire cat” moon), and here we see Sam’s smile curling up and dying, so more lunar death symbolism.  A bit later in the chapter, right before the horn sounds to warn of the wight attack which falls on the brothers here at the Fist, Chett comes upon a sleeping Sam, planning to kill him, and Sam is described as a moon mountain, and there is more death symbolism:

Tarly was buried beneath a mound of black wool blankets and shaggy furs.  The snow was drifting in to cover him.  He looked like some kind of soft round mountain.

There is an allusion here to the Barrow Kings – Sam is buried under a mound.  That makes perfect sense, since Sam has the undead horned god symbolism – it corroborates our identification of the Barrow King as being of the line of Garth (or Garth himself), but transformed into a deathly version of the fertility god, the opposite of the summer king / Oak King that Garth represents.   What George is doing here is showing us that the horned lord that awakens from the moon mountain is a death god figure, a Barrow King type.

As for Sam the moon mountain, this symbolism is similar to Gregor’s symbolism of a moon mountain which turns into stone fists, a moon mountain that rides (flies, falls to earth).  Gregor the Mountain is symbolically linked to the huge mountain the dominates the Eyrie, called the Giant’s Lance, which is covered in snow like Sam the moon mountain is here.  Now it’s really quite interesting what awakens the slumbering moon mountain…  Chett is sneaking up to kill Sam, edging quietly past the ravens, and here is the description:

He edged past them placing each foot carefully. He would clap his left hand down over the fat boy’s mouth to muffle his cries, and then…

Uuuuuuuhooooooooo.

He stopped midstep, swallowing his curse as the sound of the horn shuddered through camp, faint and far, yet unmistakable.

So the shuddering sound of the horn comes right as the moon is to be killed, and right as the moon mountain is about to wake.  This is the horn that wakes the sleepers, waking the barrow king king / dead horned man that slumbers in the moon mountain, and it is also the shuddering cry of anguish and ecstasy which cracks open the moon to birth dragons, also known as “the sound that cracked the moon.”  As Sam the moon man awakens from the horn blast, he sees Chett and says:

“Was it two?” he asked.  “I dreamed I heard two blasts…“

“No dream,” said Chett.  “Two blasts to call the Watch to arms.  Two blasts for foes approaching.  There’s an axe out there with Piggy writ on it, fat boy.  Two blasts means wildlings.”  The fear on that big moon face made him want to laugh.

The second appearance of the moon face description in one chapter really emphasizes that we are supposed to think of him as a moon character here.  Not only was the “man in the moon” slumbering, he was dreaming of horn blasts – and here we are perhaps being given a link to green-dreaming and horn-blowing.  And of course, there’s never just two of anything, so just like there is three arrows fired earlier from Sam the red moon, we get the fateful third blast a moment later which announces the presence of the Others, whereupon Chett wets himself, ha ha.  The more important thing that happens is that the Night’s Watch proceeds to fight the Others and their undead cold servants with fire – fire arrows to be specific, showing us some kind of War for the Dawn type of battle and reinforcing the idea of Sam’s moon arrows being associated with fire.

Just to make sure I am being clear, when I talk about a dead horned lord figure slumbering inside the moon mountain and being awakening when it explodes, what I am really talking about is the potential to make an undead greenseer, a burning tree.  It’s just like saying dragons are sleeping in the moon and are awoken when it cracks open – the dragons aren’t really created until the comet brings the sun’s fire into the mix and the moon explodes to create meteor dragons.  The undead horned lord figure is not created until the meteor strikes the tree and sets it on fire, so Sam carries both the symbolism of a moon and the resurrected horned god and sea dragon figures that arise when the moon meteors land.  It’s very similar to Bran, who symbolizes both the falling moon thunderbolt and the boy / tree struck by lightning, or Dany who is a moon maiden and also the dragon it becomes.

Ok, just one more Sam scene, we’ll make it quick.  It’s from a Jon chapter of ACOK which also takes place in the Fist of the First Men, but before the attack and before Jon splits off with Quorin Halfhand.  The chapter opens with a horn blast:

The call came drifting through the black of the night.  Jon pushed himself onto an elbow, his hand reaching for Longclaw by force of habit as the camp began to stir.  The horn that wakes the sleepers, Jon thought. 

This horn actually announces the arrival of the Halfhand and his Shadow Tower men, and a page or two later, Jon goes to bring Lord Commander Mormont’s orders to the other brothers:

He found Dolorous Edd at the fire, complaining about how difficult it was for him to sleep when people insisted in blowing horns in the woods. Jon gave him something new to complain about.  Together they woke Hake, who received the Lord Commander’s orders with a stream of curses, but got up all the same and soon had a dozen brothers cutting roots for a soup. 

Sam came puffing up as Jon crossed the camp.  Under the black hood his face was as pale and round as the moon.  “I heard the horn.  Has your uncle come back?”

“It’s only the men from the Shadow Tower.”

A dozen and one brothers cutting roots for a soup has to remind us the idea of making wierwood paste, which comes in a weirwood bowl with twelve faces on it.  That’s another important last hero math symbol I didn’t mention last time – the weirwood bowl Bran drinks from does indeed have twelve weirwood faces on it, and this is highly suggestive of the twelve companions of the last hero being greenseers and tree people.  Thus twelve plus one Night’s Watch brothers making food from plant material after the horn that wakes the sleepers blows strikes me as a correlation to the weirwood bowl and weirwood paste.  The line here from Dolorous Edd complaining about people blowing horns in the woods again suggests a link between greenseers and the magical horns in the story, an idea we’ve seen a few times now.

This horn that Jon associated with waking the sleepers instead brought Shadow Tower men, and that’s really tremendous symbolism.  Black brothers are already black meteor symbols, and the shadow tower symbolism suggests a place where man can go up to the heavens and obtain powers of darkness.  It’s a symbol of the destroyed second moon, from whence the black shadow meteors come.  As for Qhorin Halfhand himself, he is “tall and straight as a spear,” his braid is touched with hoarfrost, and his blacks have faded to greys.  Best of all, when he took the blow to his hand that gave him his nickname, “he stuck his maimed gist into the face of the axeman so the blood spurted into his eyes, and slew him while he was blind.” That’s a great bloody hand symbol, coupled with a figure who is blinded and slain.

And of course, we find Sam with a moon face once more, and he’s puffing again like the bellows he symbolized in the Nightfort.  He’s come puffing along because he heard the horn that wakes the sleepers, naturally.

There are more good symbolism scenes with Sam, but I don’t want to let Ser Piggy hog the entire episode, and we have other topics to cover.  I bet you didn’t think he would have such exciting symbolism, but there you have it.  Sam is a total badass!

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The Warg Prince and the Dark Tower

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Right before Bran and company arrive at the Nightfort, they wait out a storm in the tower house at Queenscrown, which is on an island in the middle of a lake.  The scene is especially memorable because it overlaps with the following Jon chapter, with Bran and Jon’s POV’s combining to give us the story inside and outside of the tower.  This scene seems to be written in parallel to the Nightfort scene, and we’ve referred to it once already with the quote about Bran remembering the lightning which struck the tower at Queenscrown during the middle of the action at the Nightfort.  Like the Nightfort scene, the events at Queenscrown also draws parallels to Bran’s fateful fall from the tower in AGOT…. so let’s take a look!  The parallels begin with the ruined inn:

No one had lived in the village for long years, Bran could see. All the houses were falling down. Even the inn. It had never been much of an inn, to look at it, but now all that remained was a stone chimney and two cracked walls, set amongst a dozen apple trees. One was growing up through the common room, where a layer of wet brown leaves and rotting apples carpeted the floor.

Alright, so we have a common room with no roof to compare to the kitchens at the Nightfort which have a gaping hole in the roof, and the obvious similarity is that they both have trees growing through the floor – the apple tree here and the weirwood at the Nightfort.  The apple tree as a symbol evokes the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden, which is usually depicted as an apple tree.  Needless to say, this Biblical tree is very much in the tradition of the cosmic world tree that Yggdrasil comes from, and the apple itself expands mankind’s consciousness and makes them “like gods,” very like the weirwood paste or the water of Mimir’s well.  In other words, while an apple tree isn’t a weirwood, it’s still pretty apt in terms of symbolism and very much ties into the idea of man stealing the fire of the gods to become god like himself.

The profusion of wormy apples on the ground hint at a poisoned or corrupted gift, and there’s also a celestial metaphor going on with the apples.  Anything in the upper canopy of a world tree represents the heavens and heavenly bodies – we’ve seen that with the ravens and bloody / burning hand weirwood leaves, both excellent meteors symbols which appear in the canopy of the weirwoods.  That’s why the Adam and Eve myth slides so nicely into George’s Azor Ahai the moon-stealer mythos, because the apple simply becomes the moon, and plucking it from the celestial  canopy to gain the the knowledge and consciousness of the gods is akin to plucking the moon from the sky to gain access to the fire and power of Lightbringer.  This act of original sin in the Garden of Eden triggered mankind’s fall, just as the moon-stealing did, and the angel who guards the entrance to Eden ever after even carries a flaming sword, so really, the myth is a great match for what Martin has going on.

You can also see the similarities to the Odin myth, and this is basically what Martin does – if he wants to create a story about a cosmic tree and stealing the fire of the gods, he will pull from many relevant mythologies form the real world and mix them in however it makes the most sense to him for his story.   That’s how we get this expertly-woven synthesis of the Garden of Eden and Yggdrasil ideas underlying the mythology of Azor Ahai, the greenseers, and Hammer of the Waters.

So getting back to the wormy apples, if the apple is a moon, a worm in the apple could symbolize a dragon inside a moon, waiting to break out.  There is some good apple symbolism along these lines in the prologue of AFFC where Alleras the Sphinx is shooting apples at Oldtown which we don’t have time to get into, and the really great clue about wormy apples comes in this line from Princess Arianne Martell in AFFC as she ponders the mystery of who betrayed her plot to crown Myrcella:

But it made no sense for Dayne to be the traitor.  If Ser Gerold had been the worm in the apple, why would he have turned his sword upon Myrcella?

We’ve looked at Darkstar’s symbolism before: he’s a black hole, the result of the sun and moon coming together to cast the world in darkness, the black meteor stars which are ironically named Lightbringer.  These dark stars bleed waves of night and black moon blood, and they are analogous to the black shadowbaby assassins and Drogon the Winged Shadow.  They are the worms that came from the moon apple, and Darkstar Dayne himself is thoroughly rotten, just the apples that cover the ground of the inn at Queenscrown.

There’s no well in the common room, but Martin sneaks a well reference in in Jon’s chapter, as he stares into the eyes of the old man whom the Magnar has commanded Jon to kill:

The man kept staring at him, with eyes as big and black as wells. I will fall into those eyes and drown.

We saw the moon go down the well at the Nightfort, which I interpreted as a version of Odin’s eye going into Mimir’s well, and here we again have the suggestion of eyes down in the well as the Old Man’s eyes themselves look like wells.  I just love how Martin does this.  If he had put a real well in the common room by the apple tree, it would be too obviously similar to the Nightfort, so instead the man’s eyes are wells which Jon could fall into and drown.  It’s similar to when memory of the lightning at Queenscrown sufficed to insert the lighting symbol into the scene at the Nightfort.  Now Jon Snow, as an Azor Ahai reborn / Lightbringer character with black sword and black ice symbolism, is a fine representation of a moon meteor.  Thus his falling into the black wells is very similar to the idea of Bran going down the well at the Nightfort.  Finally, Jon imagines he will drown in the wells of the old man’s eyes, giving us a drowning moon meteor / sea dragon meteor symbol.  Elsewhere in the chapter, Jon notes that he is a very good swimmer, for what it’s worth.

The other main feature of Queenscrown is of course the tower on the island in the lake.  Lakes with islands in the middle of them make us think of The God’s Eye lake and the Isle of Faces, especially since there is greenseer activity on the island once Bran gets there.  There is actually a mention of the green men on the Isle of Faces in the Jon chapter as Grigg the Goat – a wildling with clear horned symbolism – tells Jon he hopes to one day visit the green men on their sacred isle.  It’s also interesting to note that people north of the Wall have heard of the green men and the Isle of Faces, and even aspire to go there.

Just as Jon thinks of drowning, Bran thinks of drowning in the lake as they cross the hidden causeway, and look out for the sly reference to drowning in a well:

The hidden stones were slimy and slippery too; twice Hodor almost lost his footing and shouted “ HODOR! ” in alarm before regaining his balance. The second time scared Bran badly. If Hodor fell into the lake with him in his basket, he could well drown, especially if the huge stableboy panicked and forgot that Bran was there, the way he did sometimes. Maybe we should have stayed at the inn, under the apple tree, he thought, but by then it was too late.

He could well drown – did you catch that?  Well drown?  Martin is a sneaky bastard, I hope you all appreciate that by now.  Now anytime I see things happen “under the tree” or “under the trees,” I take a look to see if we are talking about greenseers, who live under trees.  In this case, since we are talking about Bran staying under a tree, I think this is likely an intended allusion to Bran living under the weirwood trees in Bloodraven’s cave.  It also works to associate the apple tree with weirwoods as trees people can live under.

As for Bran falling into the lake, it’s notable that lightning also strikes the lake, and this is from the Jon chapter as he is telling Ygritte about the hidden causeway:

She pulled back and gave him a look. “Walk on water? What southron sorcery is that?” “No sorc—” he began, as a huge bolt of lightning stabbed down from the sky and touched the surface of the lake. For half a heartbeat the world was noonday bright. The clap of thunder was so loud that Ygritte gasped and covered her ears. 

This is a sly job of implying that the lightning bolts come from sorcery, very like when Sam the Magic Man casts thunderbolts with his finger, or, if you’ll hearken all the way back the Mountain the Viper episode, you’ll recall Gendry clasping his hammer in hand – end sentence – and then ‘lightning flashed’ to begin the next sentence, a direct allusion to Thor’s hammer which throws bolts of lightning.  In any case, lightning hitting the lake is symbolically the same thing as falling Bran hitting the lake and drowning, because falling Bran is like a lightning bolt.

Let’s move to the tower proper.  Inside, it bears a resemblance to the well shaft:

Steps built into the inner wall of the tower curved away upward to their left, downward to their right, behind iron grates.

Spiral stairs in both directions, just like the well shaft… very cool.  At the top, there’s also a privy shaft the drops straight to the lake to suggest the well, just as the privy shaft at Whitewalls did.  Nothing goes down the shaft here at Queenscrown that we hear of, but it is there.

On the outside, the Queenscrown tower is a fairly ordinary watchtower with gold-painted crenelations… at least during the day.  It gets more grim-sounding descriptions at night however, such as when the text refers to Bran and company huddling in the “dark tower” during the storms (think of the Shadow Tower symbolism), or like this passage from the Jon chapter:

“Some o’ the Thenns are saying they heard noises out there. Shouting, they say.”

“Thunder.”

“They say shouting. Might be it’s ghosts.” The holdfast did have a grim haunted look, standing there black against the storm on its rocky island with the rain lashing at the lake all around it.

They’re talking about Hodor’s shouting, so what they’ve just done is equate Hodor’s yelling with thunder and Hodor with a ghost.   There’s another clue about the towers in this general area earlier in the Jon chapter as he refers to there being “a few scattered roundtowers poking the sky like stone fingers,” giving us very similar language to the trees reaching for the sun and scratching at the moon, as well as the tower at Hammerhorn Keep on the island of Great Wyk which claws at the moon.

The point of all of this tower stuff is that the tower, like the pinnacle of a mountain or pyramid, represents the place where man can commune with the gods.  In the case of ASOIAF, it’s the place where our naughty greenseers reached up into the heavens.   We are basically spoon-fed this idea in AGOT:

And the tall, slender Children’s Tower, where legend said the children of the forest had once called upon their nameless gods to send the hammer of the waters, had lost half its crown.  It looked as if some great beast had taken a bite out of the crenelations along the tower top, and spit the rubble across the bog. 

Now that we suspect the hammer of the waters event as being a moon meteor, this story starts to sound like it’s talking about greenseers sitting in a dark tower using sorcery to break the moon and steal the fire of the gods.  When Theon return to Moat Cailin in ADWD, we get another clue along these lines:

The Children’s Tower thrust into the sky as straight as a spear, but its shattered top was open to the rain. 

These two quotes depict the two-way street that is communication with the heavens.  The tower thrusts into the sky like a spear, but then a beast came down and savaged it.  It’s written to sound like a dragon attacking the top of the tower, which is simply giving us the dragon version of the Lightbringer meteors instead of the lightning bolt version.

In fact, the broken Children’s Tower compares very well the ‘broken tower’ of Winterfell which was struck by lightning.  The lightning bolt which broke the broken tower is the same thing as the hammer that fell on the Neck and broke Moat Cailin – a moon meteor –  and Bran’s climbing too high and being cast down from the tower is analogous to the greenseers climbing the Children’s tower at Moat Cailin and breaking the moon, thereby calling down the hammer of the waters.

The link between lightning and greenseeing is suggested yet again back at the Queenscrown scene when lightning strikes the tower itself while Bran is inside it, skinchanging into Summer to attack the wildlings and help his brother Jon:

The Magnar said something in the Old Tongue. He might have been telling the Thenns to kill Jon where he stood, but he would never know the truth of that. Lightning crashed down from the sky, a searing blue-white bolt that touched the top of the tower in the lake. They could smell the fury of it, and when the thunder came it seemed to shake the night.

George sure does have some awesome ways to describe lightning!  This is kind of the point of the correlations between this chapter and the Nightfort scene and Bran’s fall from the tower: the thunderbolt of the storm god.  Bran climbed the tower as the bad little boy who got struck by lightning, and here he is atop the tower when lightning strikes – using his greenseer abilities.  He’s doing the same the when the thunderbolt and sea dragon symbols show up at the Nightfort, skinchanging into Hodor.  His original fall from the tower spurred on the opening of his third eye.  All of this is telling us that the thunderbolt striking the tree myth does indeed have to with creating or empowering greenseers.

The tower itself is sort of obliquely compared with a tall tree earlier in the Bran chapter when they reach the top and take in the view:

Meera spun in a circle. “I feel almost a giant, standing high above the world.”

“There are trees in the Neck that stand twice as tall as this,” her brother reminded her.

“Aye, but they have other trees around them just as high,” said Meera.

So, climbing the tower is kind of like climbing a tree, or kind of like being a giant.  Bran is repeatedly becoming a giant at the moment of truth in these scenes, so perhaps there is a link between giants and weirwoods.  This is from ACOK:

He remembered their godswood; the tall sentinels armored in their grey-green needles, the great oaks, the hawthorn and ash and soldier pines, and at the center the heart tree standing like some pale giant frozen in time. 

Recall, if you will, that a fish garth or fishing weir is a wooden trap design to catch fish on a river, and that this might be an implication that Garth people – horned lords –  are some how stuck inside the weirwoodnet, being perhaps the first greenseers to go into the trees or carve faces in the trees.  They would be the giants frozen in time, perhaps.  Thus it makes sense to think of Bran skinchanging a giant (Hodor) as a prelude to skinchanging the frozen giant of a weirwood tree.  Climbing the tower and skinchanging the tree seem to be the same thing, and the tree does indeed allow Bran to fly and soar above the world.  This is an important topic which we will discuss in our next Weirwood Compendium episode, actually, so I will leave it at that for now.  We also haven’t really gotten into Hodor’s symbolism, a fun and exciting romp will well undertake another day.

Now go back to the quote about the lightning bolt that struck the tower at Queenscrown, the one whose fury could be smelled by Jon and the others.  It came right after Jon refused to kill the old man, and right after Ygritte did it for him, flinging the knife at Jon’s feat.  After the searing white bolt of lightning crashed down from the sky, shaking the night, the next line is:

And death leapt down amongst them.

The lightning flash left Jon night-blind, but he glimpsed the hurtling shadow half a heartbeat before he heard the shriek. The first Thenn died as the old man had, blood gushing from his torn throat. Then the light was gone and the shape was spinning away, snarling, and another man went down in the dark. There were curses, shouts, howls of pain. Jon saw Big Boil stumble backward and knock down three men behind him. Ghost, he thought for one mad instant. Ghost leapt the Wall. Then the lightning turned the night to day, and he saw the wolf standing on Del’s chest, blood running black from his jaws. Grey. He’s grey. Darkness descended with the thunderclap.

Try to picture what is going on here.  Bran is sitting in the dark tower as it is struck by lightning, thereby signifying that Bran possesses the fire of the gods. He’s controlling a direwolf outside the tower, leading an attack on the wildlings.  When we read about the Warg King of the ancient past going to war with his beasts and greenseers, this is the kind of thing you should imagine, but on an order of magnitude greater.  TWOIAF also tells us about the Andal King Erreg the Kinslayer who surrounded the High Heart whilst warring upon the children of the forest, whereupon the greenseers among the children called down “clouds of ravens and armies of wolves,” though their efforts were in vein.  We also hear of “the night in the White Wood, where supposedly the children of the forest emerged from beneath a hollow hill to send hundreds of wolves against an Andal camp, tearing hundreds of men apart beneath the light of a crescent moon.”  The crescent moon is a nice touch there, and you more or less get the idea.  Bran is showing us a glimpse of the awesome power of greenseers in combat.

In terms of symbolism, Summer leaping down among the wildlings as death incarnate in unison with the terrifying thunderbolt strike is basically the expression of the wolf as a meteor.  The direwolves play the fiery hellhound role in general, and here Summer literally leaps down in the momentary flash of light from the lightning, a grey shadow with black blood dripping from his fangs.  Stepping back to examine the combined mythical astronomy of the greenseers that we have seen so far, we can see that the ravens and wolves seem to be meteor symbols which can be sent by the greenseers, just as the greenseers broke the moon and sent down the moon meteors.

Summer’s leap through the lightning flash is actually paralleled at the Nightfort scene, though the symbolism is a bit different.  This quote comes from near the end of the chapter, after Samwell has explained all about Coldhands.

A shadow detached itself from the broken dome above and leapt down through the moonlight. Even with his injured leg, the wolf landed as light and quiet as a snowfall. The girl Gilly made a frightened sound and clutched her babe so hard against her that it began to cry again. “He won’t hurt you,” Bran said. “That’s Summer.”

Given what we’ve seen of this hole in the dome, this scene is pretty stunning.  Summer leaps through the moonlight, showing us that Summer is indeed a type of moon meteor – but this time, the landing is as light and quiet as a snowfall.  To me, that could indicate one of two things, besides some sort of joke about summer snows: a meteor impact from the past, or possibly a foreshadowing of a future impact.  If this could be a depiction of one of the meteors that landed in the ancient past, the “snowfall” language could be meant to signify a meteor impact up here in the north, where it would have landed in snow covered lands or even on a glacier.  Or perhaps it’s simply done to signify that the fiery hellhound meteors in the end did trigger the snowfall and winter of the Long Night.

Alternately, if this a foreshadowing of the meteor impact, it could be signifying that this time the meteors will be “ice dragons”in some sense, perhaps from the remaining moon which I theorize to be associated with ice and ice magic, as opposed to the one which gave birth to dragons in the ancient past which seems clearly associated with fire.  There are other scenes which I do believe are foreshadowing a meteor impact yet to come, and I would expect this new wave of meteor impacts to trigger the fall of the new Long Night which we all expect is coming, and we will get around to talking about those one day – definitely before TWOW is released, because I have a feeling the meteors might fall near the end of the book.

Setting aside prophecies of doom – my own prophecies this time – this is a really nice parallel between Summer leaping down through the lightning flash at Queenscrown and through the moonlight and the hole in the dome at the Nightfort.  Remember how I said Martin uses the expression “dome of the sky” to refer to the canopy of stars?  That actually comes as Jon is fleeing Queenscrown:

Lightning shivered through the black dome of sky, and thunder rolled across the plains.

And then a moment later, the last line of the chapter:

He rode till dawn, while the stars stared down like eyes.

Just to, you know, drive the point home.  It’s one more link between eyes and stars or falling stars, and one final link between this Queenscrown chapter and the one at the Nightfort.

King of the Long Night

This section brought to you by Starry Wisdom acolyte Macias the Dreamer, spotter of comets, master of hindsight, and loyal bannerman to whoever wins the Game of Thrones

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What about Night’s King, you might be asking.  I’ve linked Coldhands to all of this undead greenseer business because Sam comes out of the well talking about Coldhands having sent him, whereupon Bran famously asks if Coldhands is an antler-headed green man.  I’ve also linked all this naughty greenseer symbolism to Bran, the bad little greenseer boy struck down by lightning, for all the reason outlined in this podcast so far.  But this all takes place at the Nightfort, so shouldn’t this be telling us something about the Night’s King?  To be more specific, Bran’s recounting of the Night’s King story is immediately followed by the description of the weirwood growing slant-wise towards the hole in the dome and reaching for the sun, and this makes it tempting to draw a connection between Night’s King and the portrait created of this twisted greenseer pulling down the moon and sun.

Well, I’ve mentioned a couple of times now that Stannis seems to combine the ‘burning stag man wielding Lightbringer’ symbolism of Azor Ahai with that of Night’s King.  As my friend from the Westeros.org forums Durran Durrandon wrote in his essay “One God Two Gods, Red God, Blue God: Melisandre and the Night’s Queen,” Stannis’s relationship with Melisandre is a fiery version of the Night’s King and his icy, moon-pale Corpse Queen.  Mel taking Stannis’s seed and soul to birth black shadows serves a alternative-temperature parallel to the Night’s King giving his seed and soul to the Corpse Queen and sacrificed to the Others, which probably means giving their children to the Others to enable the creation of new Others, who are called white shadows.  Fiery moon queen, black shadows, icy moon queen, white shadows – see?  Stannis really clinches it by taking the Nightfort as his seat – that’s pretty unambiguous.  So what is a burning stag-man, half-corpse, lightbringer-wielding Azor Ahai person like Stannis doing impersonating Night’s King?

The logical answer is that Azor Ahai became Night’s King, perhaps at the end of his life, and this too I have suggested before.  Again we must give caveats – we do not know how many people are behind the myth of Azor Ahai, just as we are told that it could be many Brandons building structures in ancient Westeros who contributed to the now-combined myth of one magical boy named Brandon the Builder.  It seems a bit much for one person to be Azor Ahai and the Night’s King and the Grey King – I mean dude really gets around, doesn’t he?   Dany is the best example of a character who, centuries from now, might be mythicized in the local folklore of many places across a broad span of the globe, so this isn’t impossible.  The legends of her told in Qarth or Meereen will be different from those told of her in Westeros, centuries and eons from now.  But just as several people seem to be playing the role of Azor Ahai reborn – Dany and Jon at the least, and I’d argue many others too – it seems more likely Azor Ahai refers to a group of people or clan or family line or type of sorcerer.

That’s how I think about it anyway, and I don’t get too hung up on trying to figure out the specifics of the events of ten thousand years ago.  Following the symbolism, what we see is repeated depictions of this character or type of character who is a fiery undead greenseer, and this is the type of person or group of people who broke the moon.  Azor Ahai is at the center of all of that of course, and the Grey King is wrapped up in this too, as is the King of Winter… and I do believe that Night’s King belongs in this category.   After all, Night’s King was supposedly thrown down by Joramun the King Beyond the Wall and Brandon the Breaker, King of Winter and possible brother of Night’s King, implying that Night’s King was a Stark, as Old Nan says.  If the Kings of Winter have an origin tied up in these fiery undead “descendants of Garth,” if you will, then Night’s King would have that same origin.

Let’s consider the figure remembered as Night’s King.  He was said to be “only a man by light of day,” according to Old Nan, “but the night was his to rule.”  Now, it doesn’t take a huge leap of intuition to wonder if the night he was ruling was the Long Night.  He’s the Night’s King, after all, shouldn’t he be king during the Long Night?  We’ve seen that a large part of the Azor Ahai reborn archetype is that of the dark solar figure, the Lion of Night or the black shadow dragon, that sort of thing, and the Night’s King works very well as another manifestation of that symbolism.  As the Bloodstone Emperor, Azor Ahai was remembered as being an emperor during the Long Night – the King of the Long Night, and perhaps the Night’s King.

But for that to be so, Night’s King has to live at the time of the Long Night, which brings up the issue of chronology, the first obstacle to the idea that Night’s King was in some sense the same person as Azor Ahai.

The accepted chronology has the Night’s Watch forming at the time of the War for the Dawn, and Night’s King is said to be the 13th Lord Commander, which would place his life about 200 years or so after the Long Night.  That’s by no means set in stone however, for several reasons.  First, we are talking events from 8,000 years ago or more, and even we with our modern science don’t know a terrible lot about specific human history from that far back.  Second, thirteen commanders could have died fighting the others during the War for the Dawn, which could have lasted… well we have no idea.  Could have been several years. The chain of command can transfer several times on a battlefield during a ferocious battle if the leaders are leading from the front, as the Lord Commanders of the first Night’s Watch surely would have been, so the War against the others needn’t have even been that long.

The third reason that being the 13th Lord Commander doesn’t necessarily mean that Night’s King lived long after the Long Night is that some in the fandom have quite reasonably suggested that the last hero might have named himself the 13th Lord Commander after the War for the Dawn was over in honor of the twelve fallen companions.  This notion has sentimental appeal, and I think it makes a certain amount of sense as well.  It also leads to the conclusion that the last hero became Night’s King, and because Azor Ahai and the last hero seem to have a lot in common, being heroes who are said to have fought the Long Night with magic swords, saying the last hero might have been the same person and Night’s King isn’t much different from my suggestion that Azor Ahai and Night’s King may be the same person.  It’s easy to see how that sort of part hero / part villain type of character fits with everything we have seen of Azor Ahai and George’s self-professed love of grey characters with conflicted hearts.  And heck, if Azor Ahai is primarily a villain as I originally claimed, why not the Night’s King as an under-appreciated hero?  It’s certainly on the table.

The idea here is that the various deeds performed by one man might have eventually led to the creation of two different tales – one about a hero, and one about a villain. Or perhaps a group of similar sorcerers – the Azor Ahai people, for lack of a better word –  split into two factions, or simply two rival magicians, one the last hero and the other Night’s King.  I’ve also suggested many times that the relationship between the last hero and Azor Ahai could be a father – son one, so it could be that Azor Ahai senior eventually becomes the Night’s King, and his son plays the last hero, cleaning up dad’s mess.  We’ve seen fathers cleaning up after their sons too, though, so it could be the other way around.

There are many variations of these scenarios which could have played out, but as always I am content to highlight a range of possibilities and let you lovely people decide what makes the most sense.  I can’t help but notice the thirteen year reign of Night’s King and think that that might be a good number for the duration of the Long Night.  It was said to last “a generation,” which is pretty vague, but any longer than a dozen years and it’s hard to imagine how anyone would have survived the extreme famine.

I hope I have convinced you that the Night’s King living during the long Night is at least a possibility worth considering.  So what else do we know about him that could indicate that he is an Azor Ahai type?  I’ll actually quote a bit from the Night’s King story as relayed to us in Bran’s inner monologue during this Nightfort chapter:

He had been the thirteenth man to lead the Night’s Watch, she said; a warrior who knew no fear. “And that was the fault in him,” she would add, “for all men must know fear.” A woman was his downfall; a woman glimpsed from atop the Wall, with skin as white as the moon and eyes like blue stars. Fearing nothing, he chased her and caught her and loved her, though her skin was cold as ice, and when he gave his seed to her he gave his soul as well. 

Alright, Night’s King was a warrior who knew no fear – that fits in with the idea of Azor Ahai as a man who challenged the heaven and grasped for the cup of immortality, the fire of the gods; as well as with Bran’s identity as the bad little boy who climbed to high and got struck by lightning.    And look!  He has a thing for moon women.  Certainly not the fiery, mother of dragon type of moon woman – she’s icy cold to the touch and she’s got a case of the cold blue star eyes.  But still, we’ve been talking about Azor Ahai and Nissa Nissa as a sun – moon relationship from day one, and here we find Night’s King having a thing for lunar women.  The Night’s King fell under the sway of sorcery after taking his moon woman to wife, much as Azor Ahai was transformed by the forging of Lightbringer and the pulling down of the moon.

I would call this an expression of my theory about there having been a fire moon and and ice moon, with the fire moon having been the “second moon” of the Qarthine legend that cracked open to birth dragons in the ancient past and the ice moon being the moon we still have in the sky.  Fiery moon women like Daenerys, the mother of dragons, and Melisandre, who has eyes like red stars and skin warm to the touch, would be depictions of the fire moon which gave birth to dragons, and icy moon women like the Corpse Queen or Lyanna of the blue winter rose would symbolize the ice moon which we still have in the sky. We’ll talk more about that when I start my Moons of Ice and Fire series in the near future, but for now we can simply say that Night’s King’s loving of a moon woman is a good comparison to Azor Ahai.  If Azor Ahai ended his life as Night’s King, then perhaps Nissa Nissa would have been his first “fire moon” bride, with the icy, moon-pale Corpse Queen as his second, ice moon bride.  The sun and moon and husband and wife, so, two moons, two wives, and that’s a pattern we see quite often in the book.

If we are thinking about this more conventionally in terms of cultural dispersion, as one folktale which has travelled and adapted to the local culture, it could simply be that in the north, the moon woman is cold, while in the eastern version, her blood is fiery.  In the east, the meteors are associated with the local monsters – flying, fire-breathing dragons, and in the north, they are associated with the hordes of ice demons with eyes that burn like blue stars.

So Night’s King is a warrior without fear who takes a moon woman to wife – that checks out for Azor Ahai so far.  We also know that he bound his brothers to his will with dark sorcery, and although there’s not really anything about ensorcelling brothers or kin in the Azor Ahai or Bloodstone Emperor story, Azor Ahai was practicing blood magic when he harnessed the power of Nissa Nissa’s sacrifice and lifeblood to create Lightbringer, so he’s no stranger to dark sorcery.  If my hypothesis that Azor Ahai and the Bloodstone Emperor are the same person is true, then we have more dark sorcery, because the Bloodstone Emperor’s story is full of dark magic and even places an act of human sacrifice, the Blood Betrayal, as the cause of the Long Night.  “Binding” the brothers to the Night’s King will could also refer to shadowbinding, especially if we are talking about undead brothers.

Finally, it is said (by Old Nan at least) that Brandon the Breaker, the King of Winter who combined with Joramun to throw down Night’s King, was a brother to Night’s King, as I mentioned.  If Night’s King ruled during the Long Night as I suggest, then Brandon the Breaker may very well be the last hero.  The clues about the last hero basically point in two directions, in terms of Westerosi bloodlines – the Starks, and the Daynes.  The Starks for obvious reasons – they are the main protagonists of the story, the home team, among other things.  As for the Daynes, their Sword of the Morning symbolism is more or less synonymous with the idea of the last hero and the Night’s Watch, being the light that brings the dawn and the sword in the darkness and so on, with the exception of the black sword / white sword and color contrast between the two.  The sword of the Morning and the black sword brothers who wear black mourning clothes, you remember that right?   A Dayne gone bad is a Darkstar or a Sword of the Evening like Vorian Dayne, and that’s closer to Night’s King in terms of symbolism. Anyway, the idea of the Starks and Daynes sharing some ancient blood connection to the last hero and Azor Ahai is generally in line with my notion that the last hero represents some kind of mingling of the bloodlines of dragonpeople from the east and native Westerosi greenseers.  Night’s King is most likely wrapped up in this as well.

Once again I will refrain from trying to get too specific, but I have been sniffing at the general idea that the lineage of the Starks and Daynes goes back to this intermingling of the blood of dragon people from the east and greenseers from Westeros for a long time now.  Just about as long as my good friend from the Westeros.org forums “Lord Martin,” whose essay “The Starks Are Not First Men” came out in March of 2015 when I was releasing my first mythical astronomy essay, a few months after TWOIAF had come out and we in the fandom had begun obsessing over the stranger details about eastern Essos.  Lord Martin hit on some of the same things I did in my early essays, and in fact I’ll quote the first paragraph so you can see what I am talking about, and since he did such a nice job writinga short summary of the theory:

My theory, after several reads of the World Book, is that the most ancient roots of House Stark do not lie with the First Men. Rather, the earliest humans in Westeros crossed the Sunset Sea during the Dawn Age stopping in the Iron Islands before settling in the North. These people were related to the ancestors of the Valyrians were as terrible and supernatural as their counterparts back in Essos. It was these ancestors who created the Others and caused the Long Night and their blood line lives on in House Stark as the blood of Valyria lives on in the Targaryens.

Pretty great, right?  Lord Martin speculates an “east-from-Asshai” route over the Sunset Sea, which I think it possible but probably not as likely as the route used today through the Summer Sea, though really that’s an unimportant detail. More generally, I think Lord Martin has the key points here.  The important thing is the idea of a race of dragonlords who predate Valyria coming to ancient Westeros, and this being the link between Azor Ahai and Westeros.  Thus, the appearance of Azor Ahai / undead greenseer symbolism with Night’s King and the King of Winter makes sense to me and can still live in harmony with the idea of the Night’s King and last hero being a Stark.

It’s probably a bit of an overstatement to say the Starks are not First Men, because their house would have been founded by dragon-people intermarrying into the native Westerosi population, and then marrying into the other First Men houses in the North for thousands of years.  They are for all intents and purposes First Men, but they very well might have this bit of ancient dragon ancestry, and of course that lineage would be partially magical in nature and therefore possibly still present.  This gets to the heart of the potential connection between greenseer and skinchanger magic on one hand and the dragonbond and the idea of people who are the “blood of the dragon” on the other, but that is a topic we aren’t quite ready to get to the bottom of just yet.

We also need to figure out how we should think of people and houses descended from Garth the Green.  Is he to be thought of as the father of the First Men, or should we consider Garth and his horned folk to be foreigners, of a bloodline apart from the main body of First Men?  It’s hard to separate him from the First Men, because so many southern Houses, and even the Starks and Lannisters too, perhaps, claim to descend from Garth the Green.  He is supposedly the first man in Westeros, so I think his origin story has to be wrapped up with the origins of the First Men, but we also have to consider that Garth is a green man, and that green men are some sort of elvish race apart from humans.  They could have contributed their genes to the great houses in the Reach and elsewhere, just as we suspect the children of the forest must have done to account for the presence of skinchanger and greenseer abilities amongst the First Men.

I do want to re-emphasize that Stannis is a burning stag man playing the role of Night’s King.  We’ve been focusing on the implication that Night’s King was Azor Ahai, but Stannis also implies that Night’s King was a greenseer, an antler-headed stag man.  The picture painted here suggests a fiery greenseer type creating Others by planting his dragon seen inside the cold womb of the Corpse Queen.  This might explain why the Others seem to posses a cold internal fire, almost as if the hot fire of stars and dragons was turned cold in the creation of the Others.  That’s how I think about them, and I am definitely looking forward to explaining why in the Moons of Ice and Fire series.

Let’s finish by returning to the question we opened this section with, in respect to all the undead greenseer symbolism at the Nightfort: what about the Night’s King?  Well, I would say the answer is yes. Yes, the weirwood reaching for the sun and moon and pushing up through the dome of the sky does apply to Night’s King.  In my estimation, he is either another name for Azor Ahai or the last hero, or he descended from them and their magical legacy.

You can kind of see how these ideas all come together in the North – Azor Ahai and the magic sword to fight the Long Night, Night’s King and the Starks, the Others and the last hero… and the center of it all, or perhaps behind it all, are the greenseers, both of mankind and of those who sing the song of earth.  At the center of it all is the fire of the gods come down to earth, and all the ‘trouble’ it caused once in the hands of mankind.  Bran is the bad little boy who climbed too high and was struck down by lightning, but he now possesses the fire of the gods.  It’s quite possible the only way to fix the trouble started by the fire of the gods WITH the fire of the gods – you have to fight fire with fire, so to speak.  Our beloved Burning Brandon may be just the man to do something no one else can…

So tune in next time for Weirwood Compendium three, where we will get caught up in the tangled limbs of Yggdrasil for real and begin to talk about just how it is that greenseers can bring down a moon.

 

That doesn’t sound like the last hero wandering alone in the wilderness, and it doesn’t even sound like the Last Hero setting out with twelve companion to seek out the children of the forest for advice.  It sounds like the badass Night’s Watch, armed and ready, courageously riding out to face the Others!  We know that the Last Hero is the one credited with defeating the Others, and his deeds are recorded in the annals of the Night’s Watch, so it is overwhelmingly likely that this tale of the Night’s Watch riding out to fight the War for the Dawn is a story about the Last Hero leading the first Night’s Watch.  But how is this possible if his companion died?  Are these new companions?  Or just the same old companions, risen from the dead?

Similarly, Stannis tells Jon that “even Azor Ahai did not win his war alone.”  We are not told who it was that fought with Azor Ahai, but there’s a terrific hint about Azor Ahai reborn leading an army of zombies in a familiar passage from ADWD.  That is the one where Haldon Half-Maetser and Tyrion overhear Benerro, the High Priest of R’hllor, prophesying about Daenerys Targaryen being the fulfillment of the Azor Ahai reborn prophecy.  He says something about smoke and salt, a summer that never ends, and then he says “death itself will bend its knee, and all those who die fighting in her cause shall be reborn.”  (thanks to Redactor Gangreen424 for reminding about this passage).  We are being told two things here.   The first is that Azor Ahai is someone who triumphs over death, who resists and defeats death – this certainly sounds like a resurrected character to me, in a literal sense, and from a thematic standpoint, it lines up with the idea of the last hero’s journey into the cold dead lands to defeat the Others as a symbol of journeying into the realm of the dead to defeat the grave itself.  The second thing we are told is that those who die fighting in his cause will be reborn.  Sound like a typical promise of a heavenly afterlife for being one of God’s ‘chosen’ warriors, but it might mean something more literal, an actual rebirth as a zombie warrior to fight at Azor Ahai’s side.

Although we don’t know if Azor Ahai and the last hero are the same person or related to one another, the chances are good that they are connected somehow, and at the very least, they are parallel figures of myth who supposedly fought the Long Night with a magical sword associated with dragons – and they did not win their war by themselves.  Who went to battle with them against the Others?  It has to be the Night’s Watch, right?

I think that this would actually be the last hero’s group of thirteen freshly minted skinchanger zombies, beings capable of confronting the Others.  Think of twelve people like Coldhands or like improved, skinchanger versions of Beric, with a resurrected Azor Ahai-type leading them with dragonsteel – that’s the idea.  I am more concerned with what Coldhands is than who, but if I had to make a bet on exactly who Coldhands is, my guess would be that he was one of the last hero’s party.  Whether he is or not, I think he serves as a good example of what they would have been like according to my theory – functionally immortal skinchanger zombies.

I have already explained why it would make sense for the last hero to be a skinchanger zombie – because zombies don’t feel cold or hunger or fatigue, and because skinchangers theoretically make for the best zombies – and the same logic applies to the last hero’s companions, the original Night’s Watch brothers.  If they were undead skinchangers, they would be really be prepared to take on the Others – by day or by night.  For this to be true, we need to find clues that the original Night’s Watch were both skinchangers and zombies, and that is precisely what we will be doing today.  I briefly considered separating these two ideas into separate sections, but the clues for both seem to come together in the same scenes, so you will have to put up with a bit of wandering back and forth between the idea of the Night’s Watch rangers being skinchangers and their being undead people.

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The Graveyard Shift

This section is sponsored by Patreon supporter Ser Therion Black, The Justiciar, bearer of the Valyrian steel sword Altarage and acolyte of Starry Wisdom Church

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I believe there is a lot to suggest the concept of the undead Night’s Watch.  To begin with, the Night’s Watch is already something of a death sentence as it is.  Many people join the Watch to avoid a death sentence, and an instant death sentence hangs over the head of all the Brothers, activated as soon as they try to leave the Wall without express permission.  Mormont tells the Night’ Watch pledges that their “old life has ended,” which I am suggesting used to be literally true.  Everything about the Watch is bare, bleak, cold, and devoid of life.  That is why Bran’s vision of Jon “growing pale and hard as all memory of warmth fled him” works equally well as a description of the wighting process or as a description of regular life at Castle Black.  One of the first quotes from a Jon chapter at Castle Black in AGOT is:

The chill was always with him here.  In a few years he would forget what it was like to be warm. 

This is a perfect companion to Bran’s vision, and similarly, it works equally well as foreshadowing or as a simple description.  The next lines continue the idea:

He sat on a bench, his fingers fumbling with the fastenings on his cloak. So cold, he thought, remembering the warm halls of Winterfell, where the hot waters ran through the walls like blood through a man’s body.  There was scant warmth to be found here in Castle Black; the walls were cold here, and the people colder. 

Cold, like corpses, wights, and Coldhands.  And notice that the series of analogies here which help create the image of cold people:  Winterfell’s warm water is equated with blood, then Jon calls Castle Black’s walls cold, implying cold blooded walls; then he says that the people are colder than the walls – thereby implying the people with cold blood.  This calls to mind the cold-flowing blue blood of the Others or the wights’ dry and frozen black blood.

And it’s not only warmth that is forgotten – the black brothers swear off the joys of sex, fine cuisine, and freedom, and the only fellowship they have is with other condemned criminals.  Thematically, they are already half-dead.   If the original black brothers were undead, it would kind of make sense.

When we examined the idea of an undead King of Winter, we saw how winter corresponds to the death phase of the corn king and seasonal cycle, and it’s the same for nighttime.  It ain’t called working the graveyard shift for nothin!  The Night’s Watch is defined by their nocturnal activity, and they operate in a land which  constantly in the grips of snow and winter, their castle literally embedded in a Wall of ice.  People who work in darkness and in the worst of winter – this is the place to look for zombies and undead green men.

Just in terms of general symbolism, black is the color of death.  It’s what you wear to a funeral, you know?  Damned if it doesn’t make you look half a corpse when you wear it, for that matter, as we hear in AFFC:

“Your lord father would want you to look a proper king at his wake.  We cannot appear at the great sept wet and bedraggled.”  Bad enough I must wear mourning again.  Black had never been a happy color on her.  With her fair skin, it made her look half a corpse herself. 

What makes me think that Martin might be working a pun here and not just making an off-hand remark about Cersei’s complexion is the idea of wearing black as wearing mourning.  The black brothers are the light that brings the dawn, a.k.a. the morning, and also the sword in the darkness, but they paradoxically always wear black, from head to heel.  This seems odd because we are given a prominent figure called the Sword of the Morning who has a white sword named Dawn, wears white, and lives in a white tower named after a white sword (where it’s the ‘Palestone Sword’ tower at Stafall or the ‘White Sword tower’ in which Arthur Dayne lived as a KG).  The color of the sword of the morning is white, right?  But on the Wall, we have black brothers with black dragonglass weapons playing the role of the sword which shines in the darkness and brings the dawn – and now it makes sense.  They are wearing mourning!  They are black swords of mourning, I guess you could say.  I am suggesting they were zombies, and here we learn from Cersei that indeed, wearing black mourning clothes makes you look half a corpse.

Now, the potential double meaning in the quote above could easily be coincidence and not be meant to have a double meaning at all, but it’s far from the only thing suggesting the undead Night’s Watch.  Mostly, I found that last one a bit amusing.  But let’s get down to business and consult one of the more underrated oracles of ASOIAF, Dolorous Edd.  He’s creeping up on Old Nan and Septon Barth as a font of wisdom, and he has a couple of clues for us about the undead Night’s Watch.  This is from ASOS, when Edd is talking to Samwell at Craster’s after they burn the body of one of the black brothers, Bannen:

“We ride at first light, did you hear?  Sun or snow, the Old Bear tells.”

Sam glanced up anxiously at the sky. “Snow?” he squeaked. “We … ride? All of us?” 

“Well, no, some will need to walk.” He shook himself. “Dywen now, he says we need to learn to ride dead horses, like the Others do. He claims it would save on feed. How much could a dead horse eat?” Edd laced himself back up. “Can’t say I fancy the notion. Once they figure a way to work a dead horse, we’ll be next. Likely I’ll be the first too. ‘Edd,’ they’ll say, ‘dying’s no excuse for lying down no more, so get on up and take this spear, you’ve got the watch tonight.’ Well, I shouldn’t be so gloomy. Might be I’ll die before they work it out.” 

Might be we’ll all die, and sooner than we’d like, Sam thought, as he climbed awkwardly to his feet. 

This is a great one, pretty much a dead give-away if my theory is right – dead Night’s Watch brothers, manning the Wall.  I mean, it’s right there.  Ed said it, so don’t forget it (#dolorouswisdom).   It’s actually right in the Night’s Watch vows, too – “I shall live and die at my post.”  But dying at your post is no excuse, so get back up there and stand the watch, dead man!  Notice also that the brothers will be riding out at first light – at dawn – further emphasizing the role of the black brothers who wear mourning as the ones come with the dawn.  They’ll be riding six dead horses when they come, yee haw!

We also find that there is idle of talk of dead things manning the various Night’s Watch fortresses, and this is from that Jon chapter in AGOT where he is just coming to realize what the Night’s Watch is like.  Jon names the three manned castles out of the nineteen on the Wall, and the thinks to himself that:

The other keeps, long deserted, were lonely, haunted places, where cold winds whistled through black windows and the spirits of the dead manned the parapets. 

This could easily just be an innocuous quote to build up the abandoned, deathly atmosphere of the Night’s Watch, but when you consider that it comes in the first Castle Black chapter, which sets the tone for his arc there – an arc which ends with his death and hopefully resurrection – it seems more ominous and literal.  Jon himself will become a ghostly spirit manning the parapets, after all.  Similarly, this is the same chapter that we find Jon thinking  that “In a few years he would forget what it was like to be warm,” a callout to Bran’s vision of Jon seemingly turning into a corpse, so I tend to look at a line like this one about the haunted spirits manning the parapets as fitting in with the other clues in this chapter which are all about Jon becoming an undead Night’s Watchman.

In fact, there are dead Night’s Watch brothers manning their post on the Wall in death, for all eternity – the seventy nine sentinels.  And not coincidentally, we get their story in the chapter where Bran and company meet Samwell at the Nightfort, hear about Coldhands, and confuse him for a green man.

“There are ghosts here,” Bran said. Hodor had heard all the stories before, but Jojen might not have. “Old ghosts, from before the Old King, even before Aegon the Dragon, seventy- nine deserters who went south to be outlaws. One was Lord Ryswell’s youngest son, so when they reached the barrowlands they sought shelter at his castle, but Lord Ryswell took them captive and returned them to the Nightfort. The Lord Commander had holes hewn in the top of the Wall and he put the deserters in them and sealed them up alive in the ice. They have spears and horns and they all face north. The seventy- nine sentinels, they’re called. They left their posts in life, so in death their watch goes on forever. Years later, when Lord Ryswell was old and dying, he had himself carried to the Nightfort so he could take the black and stand beside his son. He’d sent him back to the Wall for honor’s sake, but he loved him still, so he came to share his watch.”

Very touching, very touching.  But it’s also just another way of depicting the same idea – dead and frozen Night’s Watch brothers, manning the Wall against the forces of the north for all time.  Additionally, calling them “sentinels” gives them the symbolism of trees – sentinel trees, which Martin uses to imply double meanings about tree warriors in many places, in my opinion.  These sentinel tree soldiers are even planted in the wall just like a seed – a hole is dug, they are put in alive, then covered over.  The point of equating them with trees, of course, is to imply them as greenseers, as tree-people.   Their spears also work to suggest trees, being long vertical wooden poles, and finally… they all have “horns.”  Horns, like the green men Bran talks about in this same scene.  Because don’t forget – warhorns are made from animal horns.

And yes, the green men have antlers, not horns – but they are essentially the same thing, as we see when Robert is called ‘a horned god’ while wearing the antlered helm.  Additionally, I should point out that many depictions of the green man in the real world use branches on his head in place of antlers – you’ll notice that antlers and tree branches simply look very similar, and the stag-man is the guardian of the forest, so there’s a certain unity of symbol here.  That is why Garth’s crown of vines and flowers and even the driftwood crown of the Ironborn (and especially the hypothetical weirwood crown of the Grey King) play into the horned man symbolism.  Thus, tree people and horned people are very similar, and they are probably the same thing in ASOIAF in that the green men – the horned stag people – are also greenseers – tree people.  The Seventy-Nine Sentinels are a good example, having pretty thorough tree symbolism – I really love them being planted in little holes like saplings, that’s hilarious –  but then also having the ghostly horns.

This is also probably a good time to pass along a really cool bit of etymology which was shown to me by Westeros.org forum users Isobel Harper and Giant Spyder, as well as my friend Voice of the First Men form the Last Hearth forum (nice work, everyone!)  Ok, so the “weir” in weirwood.”  A weir is one of two things: 1.) a fence or enclosure set in a waterway for taking fish, or 2.)  a dam in a stream or river to raise the water level or divert its flow.  The origins of the word go back to Middle English and has equivalents in Old Norse (ver, meaning ‘fishing place’) and Old High German (werien, which means ‘to defend’).  There are several interesting implications of this having to do with time being like a rivers flow which the weirwoods are outside of, or of the weirwood as a kind of gate or regulation tot growth of mankind… but he interesting thing for our purposes here is that another name for a fishing weir, a trap to catch fish, is a ‘fishgarth.’

That’s right.. a weir is a garth, and a weirwood tree is a Garth tree. This may be the singular reason George chose to name his greenman / horned god fellow Garth, quite frankly, so he could make this exceedingly clever joke.  Martin simply has a habit of reinforcing an idea in as many ways as he can – we’ve found a ton of clues tying Garth and horned folk to weirwoods already, so this is simply a very amusing log to go on the pile.  And yes, that was a firewood joke.

To be honest, that Bran chapter at the Nightfort is pretty much all about the undead Night’s Watch. We’ve just pulled the story the Seventy-Nine Sentinels from there, a vivid depiction of undead greenseer Night’s Watchmen, and of course this is where Bran learns of Coldhands the undead Night’s Watchmen… and to build on to this, there’s also a really outstanding running metaphor with the leaves in that scene.  Yes, that’s right, the leaves.  The important thing to remember about rustling leaves is that rustling leaves are the communication of the greenseers through the weirwood, as we have seen many times, so with that said, here’s Bran starting to get the heebie-jeebies at the Nightfort:

Bran forced himself to look around. The morning was cold but bright, the sun shining down from a hard blue sky, but he did not like the noises. The wind made a nervous whistling sound as it shivered through the broken towers, the keeps groaned and settled, and he could hear rats scrabbling under the floor of the great hall. The Rat Cook’s children running from their father. The yards were small forests where spindly trees rubbed their bare branches together and dead leaves scuttled like roaches across patches of old snow. There were trees growing where the stables had been, and a twisted white weirwood pushing up through the gaping hole in the roof of the domed kitchen. Even Summer was not at ease here. Bran slipped inside his skin, just for an instant, to get the smell of the place. He did not like that either.

Rustling of the leaves in the branches of the weirwood is standard greenseer communication, but here we have a dead version of this – spindly trees rubbing bare branches together.  Where did their leaves go?  Well, they’re still rusting, but they are dead and on the ground, “scuttling” like roaches.  Best of all, there is an actual weirwood here to anchor the symbolism – meaning, the wierwood is like a sign saying “this is what we are talking about here.”  In similar fashion, the paragraph ends with a bit of actual skinchanging.

Then a bit later,  Bran says that “There are ghosts here,” and proceeds to tell the story of the seventy nine Night’s Watch brothers who once broke their vows and now keep eternal watch in the ice, which we quoted already.  That is another very large sign to tell us what we are really talking about in this chapter – undead Night’s Watch brothers who are like trees and who have horns.  And then…

As the sun began to set the shadows of the towers lengthened and the wind blew harder, sending gusts of dry dead leaves rattling through the yards. The gathering gloom put Bran in mind of another of Old Nan’s stories, the tale of Night’s King. He had been the thirteenth man to lead the Night’s Watch, she said; a warrior who knew no fear.

And then we get the entire Night’s King story.   The Night’s King is supposedly a magic-using, oath-breaking Lord Commander who gave his seed and soul to the Corpse Queen in a similar fashion as Stannis does to Melisandre.  Thus it’s possible that the Night’s King became a “half-a-corpse” in some sense, like Stannis.  Many have connected the Night’s King to the last hero in some way – that number thirteen thing kind of jumps out at you –  and I am open to that possibility.  I don’t want to dwell on the Night’s King but he sort of fits in with the rest of the ghost stories Bran tells in this chapter, and as we mentioned last time, his Corpse Queen is believed by some to be a daughter of a Barrow King, whose legend is connected to that of Garth the Green, so that may be an additional implication of dead green men to go with the others in this chapter.

That main thing I want to draw attention to are the leaves, which are now rattling gusts of dry dead leaves.  Rattling and rustling leaves are greenseer talk, so once again dead leaves imply dead greenseers, and the word rattle implies a deathly sort of whisper (think death rattles, Coldhands’s rattling voice, and Robert’s rattling laughter in the crypts).   As everyone settles into sleep for the night, Bran cannot sleep, and the truth of the leaves is revealed, so to speak:

Bran wriggled closer to the fire. The warmth felt good, and the soft crackling of flames soothed him, but sleep would not come. Outside the wind was sending armies of dead leaves marching across the courtyards to scratch faintly at the doors and windows. The sounds made him think of Old Nan’s stories. He could almost hear the ghostly sentinels calling to each other atop the Wall and winding their ghostly warhorns.

Now the dead leaves which were already depicting dead greenseer activity have become a marching army.  Even better, they are immediately compared to the seventy-nine sentinels, who are the undead Night’s Watch.  Like the army of dead leaves, those sentinels are an undead army who are named after trees, and of course they have those horns to remind us of green men.   The wind is what sends the army of dead leaves marching, and wind is what powers the ghostly warhorns – note the phrase “winding their ghostly warhorns.”  And then a moment later, Bran begins to hear the sounds of Sam and Gilly coming up the well:

Then he heard the noise. His eyes opened. What was that? He held his breath. Did I dream it? Was I having a stupid nightmare? He didn’t want to wake Meera and Jojen for a bad dream, but … there … a soft scuffling sound, far off … Leaves, it’s leaves rattling off the walls outside and rustling together … or the wind, it could be the wind … The sound wasn’t coming from outside, though. Bran felt the hairs on his arm start to rise. The sound’s inside, it’s in here with us, and it’s getting louder. He pushed himself up onto an elbow, listening. There was wind, and blowing leaves as well, but this was something else. Footsteps. Someone was coming this way. Something was coming this way. 

It wasn’t the sentinels, he knew. The sentinels never left the Wall. But there might be other ghosts in the Nightfort, ones even more terrible.

Here again the rattling and rustling leaves are mixed up with the idea of ghosts that inhabit the Nightfort and the Seventy-Nine Sentinels – is the scary sound the army of leaves, or is it the Seventy-Nine Sentinels?  They are both the same answer, really – undead green man Night’s Watch brothers.  Of course the noise turns out to be Sam, a black brother, tying the idea of the Nightfort ghosts to Night’s Watch brothers, just as the story for the seventy nine sentinels does.  And Sam, of course, is no common Night’s Watch brother – you’ll recall the Herne the Hunter symbolism of his ancestors, Harlon the Hunter and Herndon of the Horn, twin children of Garth the Green who married a woods-witch and built the castle on Horn Hill.  Herne the Hunter is a ghost version of the horned nature god, so Sam is indeed completely the metaphor in spectacular fashion – just like the army of whispering dead leaves and the Seventy-Nine Sentinels, he is very much depicting undead green man as Night’ Watch brothers.  In a chapter where Coldhands is compared to a green men by Bran.

Even better, Sam later recalls to himself that Coldhands had required him to swear to never reveal Bran’s existence, saying “swear it for the life you owe me.”  Coldhands is playing the horned god role of psychopomp here – that’s the term used to a deity who causes souls to transition from life to death and sometimes, back again.  Mithras is a psychopomp, and so is Jesus and Osiris.  Coldhands is implying that he gave Sam his life back, and symbolically, coming up out of the well is indeed like coming back from the underworld, the realm of dead.  That’s what a psychopomp does, and this little tidbit here reinforces the idea of both Sam as resurrected and Coldhands as a horned god – pretty sweet huh?   You’ll recall that the horned god is called “the Lord of Death and Resurrection,” and this is why, because he aids the death and resurrection process.  (A  hearty tip of the hat to Patreon supporter Lord Brandon Brewer of Castle Blackrune, one of our twelve earthly avatars of the Houses of Heaven, himself being the Lord of House Sagittarius.  He pointed out this quote with Sam owing his life to Coldhands.)

I should probably clarify this, actually: how can a god associated with death be a nature god?  Well, a certain aspect of the horned god represents the component death plays in the cycle of life.  He’s the defender of the woods, and he can kill, as nature can.  But death always feeds the life cycle, and that is why he is a lord of resurrection.  Some versions specifically identify the green man with sort of safeguarding the essence of the green, of life, through the winter months so it can be reborn in spring – Jack in the Green is a great example of this.

Throughout all of these quotes, what we see is the dead leaves personified as scuttling creatures, a ghostly army, and finally Night’s Watch brothers.  They rattle and whisper like the communication of living wierwood leaves, but they are dead.  The stars of this chapter are the ghost stories, the talk of Coldhands, and the weirwood gate, but the running imagery with the leaves make a nice compliment and reinforces the idea of undead skinchanger Night’s Watch brothers.

And speaking of the weirwood gate – recall the definition of weir which places on emphasis on being a gate which regulates flow.  Here, we have a weirwood gate which literally regulates the flow of people through the Wall- this is the kind of thing that says to us, “yes, Martin understands the various meanings and implications of the words he’s using.”  I would also add that the weirwood gate not just any gate, it is essentially symbolizing the gates of the afterlife, of the transition between life and death.  It is the point through which Coldhands cannot pass, because he is quite literally dead.  Sam’s return through the Black Gate, however, symbolizes someone who has returned from the “the other side,” if you will.

And what’s with naming a white weirwood gate “the Black Gate?” Just as the brothers who shine in the darkness and bring the dawn are somewhat counterintuitively dressed in black, the “black gate” is a white weirwood face.  If it was the case that the Last Hero’s “dragonsteel” was a black, dragon-forged sword, the true sword that brings the morning, or if it turns out that Jon will be fighting the new War for the Dawn with a black Valyrian steel sword, think of the word play around mourning  clothes being black and the black gate being white and just remember that Martin likes to twist these things around a bit.  It’s tempting to think he’s just messing with us, but of course there is a lot more intention in his writing than that.  He might be messing with us, but he has a plan in mind, have no doubt.

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Corpse Lord Commander

This section is sponsored by Patreon supporter and Starry Wisdom acolyte Silas the Red Beard, Chief of the Redsmiths

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Dolorous Edd has one other really good tip hidden in his sarcastic banter, and it comes right after Mormont contemplates the skull in the weirwood’s mouth at Whitetree and wishes it could speak.  The line there was “The children of the forest could speak to the dead, but I can’t.”  Ed has something to say about that, and this will send us on an exploration of the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch as an archetype in light of our theory.

Two men went through each house, to make certain nothing was missed. Jon was paired with dour Eddison Tollett, a squire grey of hair and thin as a pike, whom the other brothers called Dolorous Edd. “Bad enough when the dead come walking,” he said to Jon as they crossed the village, “now the Old Bear wants them talking as well? No good will come of that, I’ll warrant. And who’s to say the bones wouldn’t lie? Why should death make a man truthful, or even clever? The dead are likely dull fellows, full of tedious complaints— the ground’s too cold, my gravestone should be larger, why does he get more worms than I do …” 

As we said last time, the simplest explanation for the idea of talking to the dead is the ability of greenseers to hear the voices of the dead from the past, but that it could also hint with a more direct contact with the dead.  So what do we make of the Lord Commander wanting to be able to speak with the dead?  Is this a hint about the Lord Commander being a greenseer or a necromancer?

Consider the Lord Commander as an archetype, a classic role with a prototypical mold set out in the ancient past.  The first Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch would have been the last hero – if he led the fight against Others in the War for the Dawn, it’s hard to see how he wouldn’t be thought of as the commander of the Night’s Watch.  As we have seen, there is abundant evidence pointing towards the idea of the last hero being a skinchanger or green man, and a resurrected one at that, so speaking to the dead would have been well within his purview.  Heck, he could just have a conversation with himself and be speaking with the dead.

We don’t even have to comb through the text for symbolic evidence about the last hero being a skinchanger to show that the Lord Commander is supposed to be a skinchanger  – the idea of the Lord Commander as a skinchanger is directly implied by the raven we always see on his shoulder.  Think about it – usually, we only see maesters or greenseers with ravens on their shoulders.  All of the maesters, and all the greenseers we’ve seen so far… and the Lord Commanders of the Night’s Watch, both Geor Mormont and Jon Snow.  Why the Lord Commanders?

The maesters have ravens on their shoulders because they tend to and train the ravens, but Lord Commanders do not do this.  Bran, Bloodraven, and theoretically Coldhands have ravens perching on them because they are greenseers or skinchangers who occasionally inhabit ravens and are friendly with ravens.  So why does Martin give us this very memorable picture of the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch again and again, the king crow dressed in black fur and wool with a black raven perched in his shoulder?  I say it is done because the classic role of the Lord Commander of the Nights Watch was that of a skinchanger or greenseer.  Thus, talking to the dead might have been something he could do.  Again, this could mean simply accessing the weirwoodnet, or it could imply some kind of divination or even necromancy.

One has to think of the Night’s King, a Lord Commander who dabbled in dark magic and sacrificed to the Others…  was he a skinchanger or greenseer to begin with?  Could he raise wights from the dead, or did he have something to do with creating the Others who could?  As I mentioned before, there are ample clues that greenseer magic was involved in creating the Others, so any kind of skinchanger or greenseer ability in the Night’s King might explain it.

Mormont himself, though not a skinchanger, does really believe in the Old Gods, and his house is rumored to be a house of skinchangers – we hear the humorous story of Mormont women turing into bears to mate with real bears, no doubt a legend based on an original truth of skinchanger magic.

Here’s a very important point to make which is overlooked by most, and it suggests a direct connection between the origin of the Night’s Watch and greenseers.  We already know that in ancient days, the Night’s Watch used to regularly trade with the children of the forest to receive dragonglass weapons, presumably so they could fight the Others if need be.  We also know that every other black brother who still worships the Old Gods takes their Night’s Watch vows before the heart trees.  But consider this: before the Andals came to Westeros with their faith, every single person who joined the Night’s Watch would have been an Old Gods-worshipping First Man, and would have sworn their sacred Night’s Watch vows to a weirwood tree – and thus, to the greenseers.  Let that sink in for a minute: the original members of the Night’s Watch all gave their oathes to the greenseers, a tradition kept up for thousands of years.  This is a stunning fact which has been sitting right in plain sight since book one.

This connection between the greenseers and the Night’s Watch is further corroborated when Sam opens the weirwood face known as the Black Gate under the Nightfort by reciting a stripped down version of his Night’s Watch vows, as if they were some sort of magic spell.

If you think about it, there are heavy implications here – the Night’s Watch oath seems to represent some sort of agreement between the Night’s Watch and the weirwoodnet, which is the greenseer godhood.  It probably means that the greenseers had a large part to play in founding the Night’s Watch to begin with.  And when we also take into consideration that the Last Hero’s story involves both the children of the forest and the Night’s Watch and that the children provided dragonglass to the ancient Night’s Watch, we can see that the founding of the Night’s Watch pretty much has to be intertwined with the children of the forest and with the greenseer magic of the weirwoods.

There’s also a conclusion to be drawn from examine that stripped down version of the oath, which I believe we can take for being the original version, since that is the one accepted by the eight thousand year weirwood face.  All the restrictions about holding no land and fathering no children  are gone, and the bit about my watch not ending until my death is also not present here.  Sam only says six things – he is the sword in the darkness, the watcher on the walls, the fire that burns against cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of men.  Basically, all the parts of the oath which have to do with fighting the Others.  This agreement is the charter of the Night’s Watch, the oath they swore to the greenseers, so we can conclude that the greenseers were somehow demanding of the Watch that they always dedicate their lives to fighting the Others – that is what the greenseers wanted out of this agreement.

What did they offer in return?  What could have compelled such an oath from the Night’s Watch brothers?  Presumably it had something to do with providing assistance necessary to defeat the Others – that is the great motivating factor to force the children and the greenseers as well as mankind to do difficult things and make difficult choices.  Of course I would suggest that assistance might involve their resurrection.

This may have been the actual truth behind the legend of “The Pact” between the children and the First Men, whereupon they agreed to a truce and the First Men stopped cutting down the weirwoods, eventually taking up the religion of the children (meaning they became greenseers and skinchangers).  I’ve long argued that the children saving mankind’s bacon during the Long Night is the most likely explanation for the First Men taking up a new religion en masse, that of their former enemy.  The pact was supposedly signed on the Isle of Faces thousands of years before the long Night, but the supposed timeline of event before the Long Night isn’t worth the paper it’s not printed on, in my opinion, so this really isn’t a problem.  Additionally, the idea of the Isle of Faces being involved simply drags the green men back into it.  The first Night’s Watchmen may have been freshly resurrected green men, giving their oaths to the greenseer who raised the from the dead.

Recall also that there is a separate rumor of massive blood sacrifice being done on the Isle of Faces to call down the Hammer of the Waters… its possible the legends could be mixed up and the idea of blood magic on the Isle of Faces actually refers to raising the dead, or even intentionally sacrificing green men just so they could be raised from the dead.  This event could have been the founding of the Night’s Watch as well as the the signing of the real Pact between humans and children, or perhaps a second Pact if indeed there had already been one in the ancient past.

However this played out in the specifics, it is safe to say that the origins of the Night’s Watch are rooted in this pact with the greenseers which their oath represents.  I believe all of this fits well with the idea of the classic role of the Lord Commander being a skinchanger, and thus the raven on Mormont and Jon’s shoulder… makes a lot of sense.  The raven would have potentially been a way for the Lord Commander – or the last hero – to keep in contact with the greenseers hooked up to weirwoodnet, just as Coldhands likely does with his ravens.

That very thing may be going on already – many think Bloodraven is skinchanging Mormont’s raven, with the big giveaway being that the raven shouts “burn” to Jon when the wights attack Mormont in his chambers in AGOT.  It’s pretty clearly a suggestion from the raven to burn the wights, which is exactly what Jon needs to do, and does – and there was nobody in the room was saying ‘burn’ for the raven to have copied.  Thus the idea of Bloodraven skinchanging the Lord commander’s raven and giving him advice is directly suggested here, way back in book one, and therefore any unusual or poignant speech from Mormont’s raven is likely to be Bloodraven talking.

A great example is Jon’s choosing, which was heavily influenced when Mormont’s raven flew out of the kettle, landed on Jon’s shoulder, and then said “kettle,” calling for the vote which of course went for Jon in a landslide of arrowhead tokens.  This is most likely Bloodraven taking a hand in the section of the next Lord Commander, something Bloodraven would indeed be highly motivated to ensure went to Jon.  In symbolic terms, it’s another sign of the greenseers having influence over the Night’s Watch.  Perhaps that’s how it was done in the old days – the choosing was guided by the the favor of the Old Gods, as shown by ravens or other animals inhabited by greenseers.

So, the ancient men of the Night’s Watch swore their vows to the greenseers, and I believe the older Lord Commanders were skinchangers who stayed in touch with the weirwoodnet.  The last hero would have been the first such.  That is why I believe Martin create such an iconic figure out of Mormont as a raven-perch, and why he continued the tradition over to Jon Snow in such memorable fashion, so that we would always strongly associate the idea of the Lord Commander with having a raven.  Eventually we would figure out that apart from maesters, people who have ravens are usually skinchangers.

Naturally – or perhaps unnaturally – we should expect that there would be clues about the Lord Commander being dead to be found.  First, there is the fact that both Jon and Mormont are treacherously killed by their own men, and there’s also this nice joke in ACOK:

“I know the penalty for desertion my lord, I’m not afraid to die.”

“Die!” the raven cried.

“Nor live, I hope,” Mormont said, cutting his ham with a dagger and feeding a bite to the bird. “You have not deserted— yet. Here you stand. If we beheaded every boy who rode to Mole’s Town in the night, only ghosts would guard the Wall. Yet maybe you mean to flee again on the morrow, or a fortnight from now. Is that it? Is that your hope, boy?” Jon kept silent. “I thought so.” Mormont peeled the shell off a boiled egg. “Your father is dead, lad. Do you think you can bring him back?”

“No,” he answered, sullen.

“Good,” Mormont said. “We’ve seen the dead come back, you and me, and it’s not something I care to see again.”

We’ve seen the dead come back, you and me – because of the wording, you could read this to say that Mormont and Jon are the dead coming back – and of course, Jon is dead and will be coming back.  Mormont doesn’t want to see that again, because being a zombie is no fun, as we discussed.  The Old Bear saw a wighted bear a the Fist of the First Men, and that was no fun either.  Also notable is the line, “only ghosts would guard the Wall,” building on the other instances of dead Night’s Watch brothers, and of course a little casual talk of resurrecting Ned, the very first incarnation of the King of Winter that we see.  Bran talks of raising Ned, of course, and there is one more “undead Ned” scene we will quote from at the end of this episode.

Continuing with the comparison of the Lord Commanders to the last hero, let’s consider the idea of leading a ranging into the cold dead lands.  Mormont’s decision to lead the Great Ranging into the frozen lands to see what exactly the fuck is going on with wighted corpses and wildlings and maybe the Others might be a sort of echo of the last hero leading the original ‘ranging’ in to the frozen dead lands.  If there is to be one more “ranging” into the north, I think resurrected skinchanger Jon Snow is the man to lead it.  With apologies to Patchface, who offers to lead the ranging to Hardhomme.

Actually… we haven’t talked about Patchface, but he is probably another undead person, though seemingly resurrected by means of some very mysterious water magic. The relevant thing here is Patchface wears the antler helm, suggesting green men again, and he is probably undead… and he offers to lead a ranging into the north. Patchface’s skin is tattooed with red and green motley, the two colors of the eyes of greenseers, and it’s said that before he died, he was a child who could sing in many languages and perform magic.  He’s a child, like the children of the forest, he’s a singer like those who sing the song of earth, i.e. the children of the forest, and he can do magic, which yes, applies to a lot of people, but a singing child who does magic is a child of the forest, and that is what is being suggested here.  Taken with the antlers and the red and green motley, it all seems pretty consistent.  Patchface is like a drowned and resurrected green man, a topic which is slightly outside the purview of this essay, but again, the idea of an undead horned fellow leading the ranging in to the North is entirely in keeping with the larger pattern established by everything we have seen so far having to do with the last hero and the Lord Commander being an undead skinchanger or horned person.

One other note on Patchface: he’s something of a strange take on Santa Claus, who of course derives from certain horned god / wild man of the woods mythologies. I mentioned in Part 1 that Santa and Satan are both variants of the Holly King, the winter-specific personification of the horned god, though obviously taken in different directions.  Santa’s trademark “ho ho ho” actually originated as something called “the devil’s bluster,” which is the way the devil character would enter the stage in German and  European plays in the middle ages. The figure of the wild man of the woods, a specific version of the green man mythology, was very popular in those days, and the church had to incorporate him in to their mythology (the church was responsible for putting on plays at that time, which if course were used to issue propaganda).  The eventual creation of St. Nicholas, the kind old Santa Claus we know and love, represents the church attempting to take this forest man figure whom they could not repress, and instead baptize him.  Indeed, the German name for the wild man of the woods was “old Claus” or “furry Claus,” and the Germans to this day call the devil “Old Nick.”  The church fathers split off the nastier, more carnal elements of the wild man in the goat-horned image of Satan, and sanctified Saint Nicholas as their acceptable version of this mythology.

So when Patchface, a fairly creepy and disturbed horned figure with jingling bells and red and green motley says “oh oh oh,” we ought to hear “ho ho ho,”but recognize it as the “devil’s bluster.”  And next time you look at that creepy photo your parents made you take with the drunken old grifter dressed as Santa at the Mall 30 years ago (children of the 80’s will know what I mean here), try to be glad it wasn’t Patchface.  Essentially, Patchface belongs to a darker tradition behind jolly old St. Nick which includes such figures as Krampus, the wild man of the woods or “woodwose,” and even the Norse / Germanic god Odin or Woden.  (Hat-tip to Paterson supporter Lady Jane of House Celtigar, the Emerald of the Evening and captain of the dread ship Eclipse Wind, earthly avatar of Heavenly House Cancer, as well as Westeros.org forum user Ravenous Reader, one of the preeminent minds of the forums.)  If you are curious to read more about this, check out Phyllis Siefker’s Santa Claus: Last of the Wild Men: the Origins and Evolution of Saint Nicholas Spanning 50,000 years. The Santa mythology is really interesting, and he’s a part of the King of Winter side of the Horned God, and since it is Christmas-time and all, I figured you’d enjoy that little deviation.

So Patchface the deranged Santa is probably not leading a ranging into the frozen dead lands, but Jon might.  Mormont leads a ranging, and so too did another very famous Lord Commander – Ser Brynden Rivers, known as Bloodraven – that’s actually the ranging he was lost on, when he disappeared from history and became the three-eyed crow, the ‘last greenseer’ as he is called.  As a contributor to the body of symbolism that makes up the Lord Commander archetype,  Bloodraven hits all the marks – he is a dragon-blooded greenseer who became the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch,  and he eventually became half a corpse.  Some think he might have brought Dark Sister with him to the Wall and even to that cave, which could serve as a stand-in for the last hero’s dragonsteel and complete the symbolic parallel.  Bloodraven, like all the other Azor Ahai and last hero parallels, seems to be occupied with fighting the Others.  Even his House, Blackwood, reinforces Bloodraven’s dead greenseer symbolism – the great weirwood tree at Raventree Hall is dying, and eventually it will turn into a stone tree.

As adjunct to this idea of the Lord Commander as a skinchanger with a raven who may be a zombie, let’s talk about the wighted corpse of Small Paul.  Paul is no Lord Commander, but he is many times linked to Mormont’s raven, culminating in the scene when Sam is attacked by Paul’s wighted corpse, who has a raven on his shoulder at the time.  The raven is eating Small Paul, presumably in an attempt to aid Sam and Gilly, but the portrait remains of Paul as a zombie skinchanger Night’s Watch brother with a raven on his shoulder.

Now as I said, before Small Paul dies, quite a bit is made about him wanting to claim Mormont’s raven after the mutineers, of which Paul is a part, kill Mormont.  He says he’s always wanted a talking bird and asks Chett if he can keep Mormont’s raven, to which Chett says yes.  Then Lark the Sisterman teases Paul by saying maybe they can eat bird if they get hungry, to which Paul becomes angry and threatening.  And later when Paul is trudging away from the fist with Sam, he is still muttering about how he was supposed to get Mormont’s raven.  So when he appears dramatically in undead form with the raven on his shoulder… it seems significant.  He’s been linked to that raven multiple times, and in the scene where he finally gets it to sit on his shoulder like a raven bonded to a skinchanger, he’s a corpse.  This would appear to be a symbolic clue about undead skinchangers as Night’s Watch brothers, and in that same scene, we find several other clues to this effect.  Sam defeats Small Paul by shoving a hot coal in his mouth, only to discover more wights outside their tent:

She stood with her back against the weirwood, the boy in her arms. The wights were all around her. There were a dozen of them, a score, more … some had been wildlings once, and still wore skins and hides … but more had been his brothers. Sam saw Lark the Sisterman, Softfoot, Ryles. The wen on Chett’s neck was black, his boils covered with a thin film of ice. And that one looked like Hake, though it was hard to know for certain with half his head missing. They had torn the poor garron apart, and were pulling out her entrails with dripping red hands. Pale steam rose from her belly.

The first clue is in the description of the wights: some ‘wore skins and hides,’ a possible allusion to skinchanging.  Many of them are brothers, suggesting zombie Night’s Watch.  Put them together, and you get zombie skinchanger Night’s Watch brothers. You’ll notice the word ‘dozen’ is used, perhaps to suggest the last hero’s twelve, although that could just as easily be coincidence.  But the best clue comes at the end with the description of the wights as having dripping red hands, bloody from the horse they killed.  Of course, the five-pointed red leaves of the weirwood are described as looking like bloody hands on more than one occasion, and the red leaves of the weirwood are mentioned one paragraph after this quote to remind us of them.  So what we have here is a group of wights with hands like weirwood leaves, implying the idea of greenseer wights – some of whom are black brothers and some of whom wear skins.

And don’t forget, this scene is right when Coldhands appears, an undead Black Brother who is, according to me, an undead skinchanger.  Just as with the Nightfort scene, we can observe that scenes that feature Coldhands or talk of Coldhands is where we find clues about undead skinchanger Night’s Watchmen.

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The Green Rangers

This section is sponsored by Lord Leobold the Victorious, the Firelion of Lancasterly Rock and Earthly Avatar of the Celestial House Leo

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I’ve noticed that a suspiciously high number of the Night’s Watch brothers can be traced back to the Reach or to horned god or greenseer symbolism, so in this section, we are going to run through all of those examples of green rangers and see what there is to find.  Of course we have talked about Jon the corn king and Samwell Tarly’s Herne the Hunter Symbolism and House Tarly’s descent from Garth, but there are many, many more.

For a start, there are no less than three Garth’s in the Night’s Watch – Garth of Oldtown, Garth Greyfeather, and Garth Greenaway.  I’ve actually spent time tracing out the action of these three to see if there is a correlation to the three Baratheon brothers, who impersonate Garth with their stag-man imagery, and there are signs that this is the case, but this series is running long as it is, so I will just mention a couple of tidbits.

First the names: “green-away” is suggestive of a green man dying or losing his green, “grey-feather” could imply death, as grey is the color of corpses, with the feather supplying the nature association, and Garth “of Oldtown” might be a reference to the reach in general or to the notion of horned lords at Oldtown, which could have something to do with the Great Empire of the Dawn and the ancient fortress they built there.  Whether or not those interpretations hold water, the fact that there are three Garths in the Watch is highly suggestive of horned people joining the watch, and the three Garths do do some interesting things.   All three go on the Great Ranging, and all three survive the Fist of the First Men – which is statistically unlikely, since more than two-thirds of the brothers on the ranging died at the Fist.  That’s notable for a different reason, though – the Great Ranging seems like a parallel to the last hero’s journey, and we can see that Martin wants us to notice the three Garths, as all escape the Fist.

After the Fist, it turns out that Garth of Greenaway was a mutineer, and he even specifically helped kill Mormont – he and Ollo Lophand confronted Mormont together with bared steel, and Ollo was the one to stab him.  Given that Mormont, as Lord Commander, is a type of dead green man figure, this probably speaks of the cycle of green men killing one another.  During the madness of the mutiny, Garth Greenaway kills Garth of Oldtown, and that definitely speaks of the cycle of horned gods killing one another – it’s explicit Garth-on-Garth violence, and I believe it is placed alongside Mormont’s murder to help us associate his death with the corn king / garth mythology.  It’s very similar to when we saw Argilac Durrandon, that last storm king, slain alongside Dickon Morrigan at the battle known as The Last Storm.   The members of House Moriggen of the black crow on storm green sigil were playing the role of green man last hero as a Night’s Watch brother, and so we saw the death of Argilac the horned lord placed alongside Dickon Morrigen’s death to reinforce House Morrigen’s green man status, just as placing Garth of Oldtown’s death alongside Mormont’s reinforces Mormont’s death as part of the green man cycle.

Just as Argiliac, the old Storm Lord, is killed by Orrys Baratheon, the new storm lord, Garth of Oldtown is killed by another Garth.  Of course, the idea of one Garth killing another reminds us of Stannis killing Renly, one of the first things that jumped out to me as a parallel between the Garths and the Baratheons.  (shout-out to Westeros.org forum user Equilibrium).

So what about Garth Greyfeather?  Well, he turns up in a last hero metaphor.  When Jon finally makes it back to Castle Black after escaping from the the group of Wildlings who he climbed over the Wall with, he learns about the mutiny at Craster’s and that only a dozen faithful brothers are initially thought to have survived and made it back to Castle Black, one of whom is… Garth Greyfeather.   So that’s our dozen true brothers to symbolize the last hero’s twelve, coming back from this ranging which symbolizes the last hero’s journey, so where is the last hero, the plus-one to this dozen?

Why it’s Sam, who, at the time Jon learns of these dozen survivors, is thought to have died there – he was stuck weeping over the Lord Commander like a son weeping for his father, actually, and couldn’t be roused to flee with the dozen – although he does of course eventually make it back to the Wall.  Not only does Sam make an excellent last hero because of his Herne the Hunter symbolism, his possessing a horn which may or may not be a magical horn of great significance, and his having been metaphorically escorted back from the underworld by Coldhands the psychopomp – I can’t help but notice that Sam has smuggled back a male baby who was supposed to become an Other, and a woman who gave birth to him.

If I were to look at this as a parallel, I would see a possible corroboration for the idea that the Starks have something icy about their bloodline – that the last hero might have brought back some icy Other genetics that became a part of House Stark.  This theory has been proposed before, and more or less revolves around the idea that  one of the icy children of the Night’s King and the Corpse Queen might have been smuggled south instead of being turned into an Other, thus instilling some measure of “ice blood” into House Stark, a kind of opposite to the blood of the dragon, if you will.

As I have said before, I think it is pretty clearly implied that the Night’s King and Corpse Queen were creating Others by giving their male babies to be made into Others, and I would further suggest that they might have been the first people to actually create the Others.  In other words, the Night’s King story may have taken place during the Long Night, and not after, and it may be a story about how the Others were created.  If this is the case, then the idea of the last hero or some ancient Stark connected to him returning to Winterfell with one of these cold babies would be plausible, and we might be seeing an echo of that event with Sam smuggling Gilly’s “monster” through the Wall.  We are told the baby’s “brothers” (meaning the Others) will come for him, so I sometimes wonder if this will trigger an attack on Castle Black by the Others, or if perhaps bringing Gilly’s babe south of the Wall will break the warding spell of the Wall and allow the Others to pass, but that’s just a little speculation.

The so-called Corpse Queen was a moon-pale woman with cold skin and blue star eyes – I think about her as an ice priestess, a cold version of Melisandre. She gave birth to babies who became Others, so Gilly is a kind of parallel for her as a “mother of the Others.”  But unlike Gilly, the Corpse Queen was already a magical being, transformed somehow through ice magic, so it may be that she was simply spitting out Others herself, or that she was capable of transforming her human children into Others in the way that the Others presumably do to Craster’s male children.

The fact that Sam, a last hero figure, has taken a Corpse Queen, mother-of-the-Others figure south of the Wall with him could be an echo of the last hero becoming the Night’s King as well.  Some have speculated that the Night’s King used the Black Gate to smuggle his babies though the Wall and deliver them to the Others a la Craster, and Sam does the opposite, smuggling a male baby (appropriately nicknamed ‘Monster’) who was meant to be an Other through the Black Gate, but in the opposite direction.

Anyway, that’s enough about the Night’s King.  The relevant thing is Sam the not-so-striding huntsman is playing the last hero, and one of his party is a Garth – Garth Greyfeather.  We were already looking at the Great Ranging as parallel to the last hero’s journey, and finding this terrific last hero math here at the end of it really goes a long way to strengthen this theory.  So now, think back to the fact that one Garth killed the other at Craster’s – seeing this fraternal Garthicide play out as a part of the ranging seems like a strong clue that killing the horned god is a major part of the last hero story.

There’s more to say on Garth Greyfeather, too.  Much is made of Jon Snow the corn king using grey goose feathers for his arrows – that’s how he knows the arrow that killed Ygritte wasn’t his.  Therefore, grey-eyed Jon Snow is a grey-feathered Garth, you might say.  If the grey in Garth’s name is meant to connote death as in the grey of corpses, Jon might well qualify as a grey Garth.

Then In ADWD, Jon sends out three groups of three rangers each into the north, with one group being made up of Black Jack Bulwer, Garth Greyfeather, and Hairy Hall – that was the group that ended up a heads on poles with their eyes cut out by the Weeper.  I’ve noted that the sacrificed “bull” here is a nod to Mithras’s slain bull, so now we can see that Martin is showing us two sacrificed deity mythologies at one time, both of which are a part of Jon’s makeup: the slain bull of Mithras and the slain horned nature figure.  House Bulwar also descends from a child of Garth, which itself is another clue about Garth people joining the Watch.  The third decapitated head from that scene was Hairy Hall, who sounds like a hairy wild man of the woods, reinforcing the idea of dead green men in the Watch.

Moving right along, we have a ranger named Tom Barleycorn, a clear allusion to John Barleycorn, an English folk character.  He’s not a horned god, but he is a corn king – his story basically imitates the cycle of the barley plant, with his death and resurrection doing the standard thing of symbolizing the the cycle of the seasons.  Appropriately, Tom Barleycorn is a scout, someone skilled with woodscraft.  Jon smells him before he sees him emerge from the wood, perhaps that’s a fermenting barley / beer joke.

It’s also worth noting that when the blue-eyed corpses of Jafer Flowers and Othor were brought back to Castle Black, they were put in the ice cells – the same ice cells which are foreshadowed to hold Jon’s corpse.. and when safer and Other are put in there, it describes the ice cell as “a dark cold cell chiseled from the ice and used to keep meat and grain and sometimes ever beer.”  Grain, as in corn grain and corn kings; beer, as in fermented barley and Tom Barleycorn; and meat, as in dead meat like those wights and Jon’s corpse.  Jon will be representing all of them together, however, being the resurrected corn king figure.  Also note that Jafer “Flowers” has a nature based name, and he also comes from the reach, home of Garth and houses founded by his children.  Othor, meanwhile, is found with a hunting horn, evoking Herne the Hunter, a dead horned figure, just like poor Othor here. We’ll actually return to Othor’s corpse in minute for some more forensic examination.

There are certainly some horned fellows in the Watch: there’s a fellow named Jarman Buckwell, whose house sigil sports a rack of golden stag’s antlers.  He has a distinctive horn which Mormont can recognize upon hearing – and ‘Jarman’ sounds a lot like Joramun, the OG horn-blower himself.  That’s a great example of Martin showing us that we are to associate musical horns and stag antlers, as I claimed he did with the seventy nine sentinels and their horns.  Next we have Gren, who is called “aurochs” because he is as big and shaggy as an aurochs – and an aurochs is a horned animal similar to a hairy bull or a bison.  Grenn is also one of the twelve loyal brothers to survive Craster’s and make it back to castle Black.  Winton Stout comes from House Stout, who actually live at Barrowton, evoking the dead Garth idea of the Barrow Kings.  Ulmer, formerly of the Kingwood brotherhood, deserves a mention, because the Kingwood brotherhood are a Robin-Hood like group that lives in the woods and protects the people, and Robin Hood is very much a descendent of the green man / protector of the forest mythology.  In the appendix of ACOK, George even hid an Elron in the Night’s Watch – like Elrond of Rivendell, the ruler of the Rivendell elves in Lord of the Rings.  Very sneaky.  Garrett Greenspear is suggestive of a green warrior, with Garrett being potentially derivative of Garth.  The same may be true of Gared, the ranger spooked by the Others whom Eddard executed at the beginning of AGOT.

Kedge Whiteeye doesn’t have green man symbolism, but his one blind eye reminds us of Bloodraven, a greenseer.  Similarly, Todder, known as Toad, reminds us of the frog-people that live in the Neck and frequently manifest the green gifts.  Daeron is a “singer,” as in those who sing the song of earth, and he’s from the Reach.  Toad likes to sing as well, though his voice isn’t quite as good as Daeron’s (‘like piss poured over a fart,‘ I believe the description was.) There was a Lord Commander called the Black Centaur, which is certainly suggestive of skinchanging in a symbolic sense since a centaur is a combination of man and animal.

There are several Night’s Watchmen associated with wood, like Dywen, who has wooden teeth and can smell the wights coming on the Fist.  Leathers and Jax, two wildlings who join the Watch, are called “sons of the haunted forest” by Jon.  The name Jax may be an allusion to Jack in the Green, a character related to Tom Barleycorn who keeps the green areas alive in the winter to be reborn in the spring, and a man called leathers who is from the Haunted Forest might remind us of Bloodraven, who’s only remaining skin is described as white leather.  Leathers the wildling is also known for being ferocious and a little bit terrifying, evoking the scary wild man from the woods idea.

Then we have Wick Whittlestick, one of the a-holes that murdered Jon.  ‘Whittelstick’ is wood symbolism, and the word ‘wick’ adds the idea of fire to the mix.  Now we can also see that Jon Snow plays into the pattern of Azor Ahai / green man people being killed treacherously by other green man / Azor Ahai people – Wick Whittlestick is a burning tree person, which is essentially the same as a burning stag person.  Another a-hole is Ser Alliser Thorne, a man named after a prickly plant.  In the Nightfort chapter, it mentions that a huge thorn bush had taken over the training ground where brothers used to fight, a hilarious parallel to Alliser Thorne training the brothers in the training yard at Castle Black. This also equates the thorn bush to black brothers with swords, thereby implying the brothers as plants who fight, building on the symbolism of Ser Alliser and our other plant-people warriors.  Ser Alliser adds a dragon element, because he came to the Wall as the price for being loyal to the Targaryens when Tywin sacked King’s Landing.

Big Liddle comes from the Liddles of the Mountain Clans of the North, and their sigil is a green and white tree line pattern with three pinecones – the pine tree is a distinctly winter-associated tree, it should be noted, because it is an evergreen (pine trees can be a symbol of immortality, actually, as they can live an extremely long time – up to 5,000 years at least).  The mountain clans dress up as trees and bushes when they attack Deepwood Motte under the command of a fiery stag Azor Ahai person, Stannis Baratheon, giving us tree people connection to Azor Ahai and stag-men.  And while we’re mentioning Stannis, Stannis does in fact come to the Wall and in a way take over the Night’s Watch, flying his fiery heart banner over Castle Black, leading the fight against the Watch’s enemies, and forcing the Brothers’ hand in many things.  Stannis is also a tremendous Night’s king parallel, as we have discussed many times… and I even found a line the other day where Stannis jokes about taking the black.

Thoren Smallwood’s name evokes a wooden person, and may be a nod to Thoren the dwarf from Lord of the Rings.  The Smallwoods come from Acorn Hall, which happens to be the location of heavy Arya-as-a-children-of-the-forest symbolism.  Arya is dressed up in an green dress with acorns, to which she says “I look like an oak tree,” reminding us of tree-people in general and Garth the Green in particular, he who planted the Oakenseat and personifies the Oak King, ruler of summer and green things.  Quite memorably, Arya is called ‘skinny squirrel’ by a fellow named Greenbeard. The children of the forest are called “squirrel peole” by the giants, and the the child known as Leaf is many times compared to Arya by Bran.  There’s more to the Arya / children thing, but I digress.

There is also more squirrel – children symbolism in the Night’s Watch, as we find a ‘Geoff the Squirre’l hidden in the appendix of AFFC, and then there is Bedwyck, called “Giant,” and here I have to pull from ACOK:

Jon hear a rustling from the red leaves above.  Two branches parted, and he glimpsed a little man moving from limb to limb as easily as a squirrel.  Bedwyck stood no more than five feet tall, but the grey streak in his hair showed his age.  The other rangers called him giant. 

Bedwyck is a ranger who both old and child sized, just as the children of the forest are a very old race who are called children because of their small size; Bedwyck is a squirrel person, just as the children were called squirrel people, and he’s inhabiting weirwood tree, like a greenseer.  He’s even making the leaves rustle like a greenseer(!) He’s climbing the tree in a quest to see better and gain knowledge, a symbolic match for the weirwood-greenseer bond.

Now w hen the brothers are sheltering from the rain outside of Craster’s in ACOK, Bedwyck the Giant “crams himself inside the hollow of a dead oak,” and ask Jon how he likes his castle.  A dead Oak King is a dead Garth of a fashion, so Bedwyck is kind of skinchanging a dead Garth here.  Living in a dead tree, at the very least, is evocative of a dead greenseer.  Bedwyck’s name also intrigues; it unites the idea of fire via the word wyck and dreaming via the word bed.  Thus he’s a fiery greenseer living in a dead Garth tree, something like that.  It should also be noted that Bedwyck was one of the twelve faithful and true brothers who made it back to Castle Black after the mutiny.

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Kill the Green Boy, Let the Green Man Be Born

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To finish up on green men in the Night’s Watch, let’s talk about green boys in the Night’s Watch.  “Green boy” is essentially a combination of “green man” and “child of the forest,” and I believe Martin is using “green boy” in metaphors to symbolize greenseers, green men, and children of the forest.  Most often, this description is applied to Starks – Robb, Bran, and most of all, Jon.  Sometimes it’s other Night’s Watch brothers, and when it’s not a Stark or a black brother, it’s generally being used in some kind of metaphor related to the same subject matter.  I don’t want to get lost following every green boy pun out there, but let’s tackle one – the action around Jon taking his Night’s Watch vows in the grove of nine and finding the wighted corpses of Jafer Flowers and Othor on the way back, and then the following night where Jon battle the wighted corpse of Othor in Mormont’s solar, all of which stretches across two consecutive Jon chapters of AGOT.

First, Ser Alliser gives about the most backhanded promotion ever, telling Jon, Pip, and the rest that they “are as hopeless as any boys he’s ever met,” that their hands were made for manure shovels, and so on.  He explains that despite their manifest unfitness to serve, new recruits are coming and so he has “decided to past pass eight of you on to the Lord Commander to do with as he pleases.” His final warning is a memorable one, and one which the TV show used because it’s simply awesome in its transcendent grumpiness:

Pep let fly a whoop and thrust his sword into the air.  Ser Allliser fixed him with a reptile stare.  “They will call you men of the Night’s Watch now, but you are bigger fool than Mummer’s Monkey here if you believe it.  You are boys still, green and stinking of summer, and when the winter come you will die like flies.”

Ah, good old Ser Alliser.  I think his translation of “How to Win friends and Influence People” might be off a bit.  English-to-Westerosi common tongue translations are notoriously unreliable. Jokes aside though, he’s laying it out pretty starkly – you are green boys, you smell like summer, and in the winter, you will die.  That’s what the green man does, what corn king does, what horned god does.  Some those myths move the dates around a bit, but that is the general idea – a summer king or summer phase in the cycle, and a winter phase or winter king.

When Jon goes to say his vows, all of this becomes more apparent.  He starts by recalling the last words Benjen Stark ever spoke to him before leaving on his fateful ranging;

You’re no ranger, Jon, only a green boy with the smell of summer on you.

This line is repeated twice: once when Benjen says it, and once here in Jon’s memory, which tends to make me think it’s an important line. As the ice alf Night’s Watch recruits as green boys is emphasized elsewhere by Ser Alliser and others, I think it’s safe to say it’s something we should pay attention to. Jon is a green boy – especially before he says his vows.

A page later, as Jon actually does go to say his vows, he goes through the icy tunnel under the Wall, and feeling the vast weight of the ice pressing down on him, he thinks to himself that “The air was colder than a tomb, and more still.”  When they emerge from the “cold dark walls” of the tomb-like tunnel, the light is a “sudden glare” which causes Sam to blink – it’s the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel!  This is pretty obvious death and rebirth symbolism, and reinforces the idea that only dead or undead brothers should really journey north of the Wall, which Jon thinks of as having “ridden past the end of the world.”

They reach the weirwood grove of nine,  and “as the last light faded in the west and grey day became black night,” Jon and Sam say their vows.  Then we have an important pronouncement:

The woods fell silent.  “You knelt as boys,” Bowen Marsh intoned solemnly.  “Rise now as men of the Night’s Watch.”

So now the green boys are… green man, right?  Dead green men is more accurate – remember again that all the original Night’s Watch brothers would have journeyed through the icy tunnel-tomb and come beyond the end of the world to swear oaths to the greenseers in their weirwoods.  Green boys go beyond the grave, and come back men of the Watch, symbolically reborn with their green sucked away.

Interestingly, and probably not by accident, the man who tells Sam and Jon to rise as men of the Watch – Bowen Marsh – is one of the four people who will betray and murder Jon.  So, in a time-loop kind of way, Jon’s death is symbolized here as he rises from the snowy ground under the watchful eye of his killer, no longer a green boy.  Bowen Marsh’s nickname is the Old Pomegranate, and pomegranates are of course a symbol of being abducted to the underworld, as in the Persephone myth, so even before we knew Marsh would kill Jon, his pomegranate nature lends an element of coming to and from the underworld to this scene.   Again, I would not be surprised if this ends up being where Jon is resurrected.

As soon as they finish swearing their vows and make to leave, Ghost appears between two weirwoods holding a dead hand.  This leads the brothers to the wighted corpses of Jafer Flowers and Othor, when Jon faces a reality check:

My uncle’s men, Jon thought numbly. He remembered how he’d pleaded to ride with them.  Gods, I was such a green boy. If he had taken me, it might be me lying here..

When green boys go north of the wall, they end up as walking corpses, I believe that is again the message here.  That’s what Jon just did, symbolically.  As usual, Martin reinforces an important theme all throughout a chapter, and so we find that not even one page after Jon thinks of himself as a green by who could have become a wight, he recalls the nightmare he had the previous night:

It is only a wood , Jon told himself, and they’re only dead men. He had seen dead men before …

Last night he had dreamt the Winterfell dream again. He was wandering the empty castle, searching for his father, descending into the crypts. Only this time the dream had gone further than before. In the dark he’d heard the scrape of stone on stone. When he turned he saw that the vaults were opening, one after the other. As the dead kings came stumbling from their cold black graves, Jon had woken in pitch-dark, his heart hammering. Even when Ghost leapt up on the bed to nuzzle at his face, he could not shake his deep sense of terror. He dared not go back to sleep. Instead he had climbed the Wall an d walked, restless, until he saw the light of the dawn off to the east.

Don’t forget that Jon himself once played the role of a ghost waking from the crypts of the Kings of Winter when he played that prank on the younger Stark children by covering himself in flour and hiding in the crypts – this dream of the Kings of Winter waking is kind of like a companion to that scene.  So, in this chapter, what we have is Jon imagining himself as a green boy-turned-corpse, followed immediately by a recounting of a dream of the Kings of Winter waking from the dead a dream which also foreshadows Jon’s resurrection as the new King of Winter.

The final line about Jon restlessly walking the Wall until he can see the light of dawn is a nice poetic touch that just sort of encapsulates Jon’s purpose in the story as the ultimate personification of a watcher on the walls.  It’s also a nice bit of Venus / Morningstar action here.  Venus is called the light-bringer, the dawn-bringer, and the son of the morning because it rises low in the sky in the pre-dawn hours and shines brightly, an usher and a herald to the coming dawn.  Jon, who is a morningstar figure, replicates this by climbing to the top of the Wall, putting him low in the sky, and then awaiting the first rays of dawn, which Jon greets with relief.

This is probably a good time to point out a bit of last hero math that can be found in the crypts of Winterfell – on two occasions, actually.  Put put a pause button on Jon – he’s standing in the haunted forest, looking at the wighted corpses of Jafer and Othor while remembering his dream of the kings of Winter waking from their crypts – we are going to bounce over to the crypts for a minute and then comeback to Jon in the woods here.

Alright, so in AGOT, Bran and maester Luwin and Osha and Hodor go down into the crypts after Bran had the dream of Ned’s ghosts in the crypts.  They pass eight statues of Kings of Winter and Kings in the North and Stark Lords, then Rickard, Brandon, and Lyanna to make nine, ten and eleven, and then they come at last to Ned’s empty tomb, making dead Ned the twelfth member.  Luwin takes his torch and “thrust his arm into the blackness inside the tomb, as into the mouth of some great beast,” almost as if to set Ned’s ghost on fire or something, and then out pops Rickon and Shaggydog as the last hero, “plus one” figure.  Shaggy has “eyes like green fire” his fur “as black as the pit around them,” so he is giving us the associations of green magic mixed with fire, as well as shadow and darkness.  He fights with his brother, a wolf named summer with golden eyes, so we can see even in the wolves a kind of fratricidal rivalry of light and darkness.  We’ve seen the last hero and his group of twelve killed by an AA figure many times, so here it seems like Luwin’s torch and Summer the wolf would be playing that role, bringing fire against the last hero.  The torch is dropped at the feet of Ned’s brother Brandon, giving us a fiery Brandon Stark, which I take as an allusion to a fiery King of Winter, and / or as an allusion to Bran losing the use of his legs to gain access to the “fire of the gods.”

The second last hero math starring the Kings of Winter comes in ACOK, just after Bran wakes from warging into Summer.  Bran was in Summer, surveryingthe damage to Winterfell left by Ramsay’s burning and sacking.  Interestingly, this is the scene where Summer and Bran see the infamous Winterfell dragon, the “great winged snake whose roar was a river of flame.”  Bran also kills an elk while he is in Summer, so we have a horned figure dying and a dragon being born… and when Bran wakes, we get last hero math.  Asha lights a torch, “filling the world with orange glare,” waking a sleeping Rickon, and then it says “when the shadows moved, it looked for an instant as if the dead were rising as well,” meaning the dead Kings of Winter were rising too, just like Rickon – who played the last hero in the last scene.  The Bran proceeds to name off thirteen Stark Lords, ending with the line “this was where they came when the warmth had seeped out of their bodies; this was the dark hall of the dead, where the living feared to tread.” The last one listed is Cregan Stark, who fought Aemon the Dragonknight – there is our suggestion of the last hero fighting against a dragon / Azor Ahai character.

Ok, so now let’s go back to Jon in the haunted forest with Jafer and Othor.  The two corpses of the brothers are taken back to Castle Black and put into one of the ice cells – along with the grain and beer and meat, as we noted a moment ago.  This is another likely  foreshadowing of Jon’s own corpse being put in the ice cells to go along with Jon seeing is own reflection in the wall of the ice cell in ADWD as Wick Whittlestick, the man who will kill Jon, opens the door so Jon can “slip inside.”  When Jon gets back to Castle Black, he learns that King Robert is dead and that Ned has been thrown in a cell, yet another foreshadowing of Jon being thrown in the ice cell.  After hearing this very bad news, he leaves Mormont’s solar, and…

Outside one of the guards looked at him and said, “Be strong boy.  The gods are cruel.”

They know , Jon realized. “My father is no traitor,” he said hoarsely. Even the words stuck in his throat, as if to choke him. The wind was rising, and it seemed colder in the yard than it had when he’d gone in. Spirit summer was drawing to an end. The rest of the afternoon passed as if in a dream. Jon could not have said where he walked, what he did, who he spoke with. Ghost was with him, he knew that much. The silent presence of the direwolf gave him comfort.

Earlier in the chapter, we get a definition of spirit summer: it’s when the summer season is “giving up its ghosts at last.”  Everything here is about the death of the green man, the summer king – Jon went out and did his death and rebirth ritual with his Night’s Watch vows only to come back and learn Robert the Horned God was dead – and right as summer is giving up its ghosts.  This is yet another reminder that Robert is the summer king whose death heralds the onset of winter – and out in the yard, we have cold winds rising.  This is when the king of Winter must be reborn, in the winter – and it’s even noted in this chapter that “Jon had been a babe” when the last winter began.

This appears to be some very specific foreshadowing of Jon’s death and sojourn in Ghost’s body here – Jon’s words, one of which is traitor, “stuck in his throat, as if to choke him,” very like the traitor’s knife which will kill him.  After this symbolic death, the rest of the afternoon passes as if in a dream – Jon is now dead, and passed into he limbo realm.  He doesn’t know here he is, who he is speaking with, what he is doing… because he’s in the limbo realm, which is basically the in-between place.   But hey!  All he knows is that Ghost is with him, and that gives him comfort.  That’s about as good as foreshadowing gets, quite franky – when Jon is walking in limbo, the one thing he knows is that Ghost will be there with him.

Not only that, but there is more venus symbolism here as Jon descends from Mormont’s solar like Venus descending from the heavens as the Evenstar, choking on his words to simulate death, then walks around in a dream with Ghost, simulating the soul in limbo… but then at the end, he and Ghost ascend back up to Mormont’s solar, just like Venus rising as the Morningstar, whereupon Jon and Ghost play the hero and fight the wights with fire and sword, tooth and claw. You’ll notice that Jon is given a new Valyrian steel sword for this act, too, showing us the last hero acquiring his dragonsteel through some act of valor.  In fact, Jon’s previous sword was taken from him only hours before, after Jon lost his tempter and attacked Alliser Thorne for insulting his father, showing us the last hero losing his sword before gaining dragonsteel.  This idea is repeated when Jon pulls one of the swords from the dead guards to use against the wights, only to lose it in the fight.  That dang old last hero, always losing his sword!

As for Longclaw, the dragonsteel Jon wins from this fight, was pulled from the fire of the Lord Commander’s “solar” – form the fire of the sun, in other words –  just as Lightbringer is supposed to be.  That doesn’t make Longclaw Lightbriger, but it does mean that it is symbolizing Lightbringer, or whatever we are supposed to call the last hero’s sword.   The main point I want to drive home is that this chapter shows us, again and again, that Jon will die and be reborn to become the new last hero, the new King of Winter.  It’s even emphasized when Jon is sort of placed in house arrest in his room right before waking to fight the wights – he wakes in darkness “shivering uncontrollably” and slowly pushes himself to his feet… as if rising from the dead.  He rises as a frozen person, but is burned while playing the hero, perhaps indicating the process for Jon.  Perhaps his body will first be cold-wighted, then cleansed with fire, as we suggested in part one.  That seems to be a popular choice from the feedback I have received so far – ice first, then fire, with an assist from the greenseer magic of his bond with Ghost and possibly Bran.

Saving the best for last, there is one very clear example of the idea of undead Night’s Watch which I believe is the most important of all.

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The Scarecrow Brotherhood

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In ASOS, the Night’s Watch brothers of Castle Black are preparing for the wildling attack that is coming first from the south and then from north of the Wall, and they do an interesting thing.  They make scarecrows.

Men in black cloaks were visible on other roofs and tower tops as well, though nine of every ten happened to be made of straw. “The scarecrow sentinels,” Donal Noye called them. Only we’re the crows, Jon mused, and most of us were scared enough.

Whatever you called them, the straw soldiers had been Maester Aemon’s notion. They had more breeches and jerkins and tunics in the storerooms than they’d had men to fill them, so why not stuff some with straw, drape a cloak around their shoulders, and set them to standing watches? Noye had placed them on every tower and in half the windows. Some were even clutching spears, or had crossbows cocked under their arms. The hope was that the Thenns would see them from afar and decide that Castle Black was too well defended to attack. Jon had six scarecrows sharing the roof of the King’s Tower with him, along with two actual breathing brothers.

There are a couple of things that make this relevant to our quest for knowledge and understanding.  The first is that the scarecrows come to be associated with missing black brothers:

The brothers had even started wagering as to which of the straw sentinels would collect the most arrows before they were done. Dolorous Edd was leading with four, but Othell Yarwyck, Tumberjon, and Watt of Long Lake had three apiece. It was Pyp who’d started naming the scarecrows after their missing brothers, too. “It makes it seem as if there’s more of us,” he said. “More of us with arrows in our bellies,” Grenn complained, but the custom did seem to give his brothers heart, so Jon let the names stand and the wagering continue.

The scarecrows are already honorary black brothers, and here they associated with specific Night’s Watch brothers who are absent.  Grenn adds the connotation of death, saying that the scarecrows only make it seem like there are more dead Night’s Watch brothers with arrows in their bellies.  That’s the thing I want to hone in on here – the scarecrows represent dead brothers.

More specifically, they represent undead brothers.

Remember when I mentioned that Beric Dondarrion is called a scarecrow knight?  It happens three times actually, and like the quotes about the scarecrow brothers, they are all in ASOS:

 A scarecrow of a man, he wore a ragged black cloak speckled with stars and an iron breastplate dinted by a hundred battles.

Note the use of the word ‘ragged,’ it adds to the scarecrow symbolism because scarecrows were often stuffed with rags. The word ragged is also quite often used to describe the blacks of the Night’s Watch, probably to emphasize the link between scarecrows and the black crows of the Watch. .

“Any knight can make a knight,” said the scarecrow that was Beric Dondarrion, “and every man you see before you has felt a sword upon his shoulder.  We are the forgotten fellowship.”

Not only is he a scarecrow, he’s a scarecrow who is a member of a brotherhood of knights.

“The king is dead,” the scarecrow knight admitted, “but we are the king’s men, though the royal banner we bore was lost at the Mummer’s Ford when your brother’s butchers fell upon us.”  He touched his breast with a fist.  “Robert is slain, but his realm remains.  And we defend her.” 

The ramifications of this are pretty obvious: Beric is a fire undead person in a black cloak, and he’s a scarecrow.  Therefore, those scarecrow brothers the Night’s Watch make might be symbolizing undead Nights Watch – fire resurrected scarecrows, like Beric.  And we get a big, giant, flaming clue that we are indeed supposed to associate the scarecrow brothers with fire undead people in Jon’s dream of wielding a burning red blade, one of the most important scenes in the series:

Burning shafts hissed upward, trailing tongues of fire.  Scarecrow brothers tumbled down, black cloaks ablaze.  “Snow,” an eagle cried, as foemen scuttled up the ice like spiders.  Jon was armored in black ice, but his blade burned red in his fist.  As the dead men reached the top of the Wall he sent them down to die again.

In other words, the only brothers Jon has in this scene are the scarecrow brothers, and they are on fire.  Burning scarecrows, just like Beric, a scarecrow knight with a black cloak who is animated by fire magic.  And we can take this as a clue about the original last hero and the original Night’s Watch because Jon is mimicking Azor Ahai and the last hero in this dream.  He’s playing the role of Azor Ahai by wielding the burning red sword and slaying his love, Ygritte (as he does later in this dream), just as Azor Ahai slew his love, Nissa Nissa, with Lightbringer.  He’s paralleling the Last Hero by defending the Wall by himself against the forces of the north who sound like ice spiders and wights.  But again, he’s not completely alone, because he has the burning scarecrow brothers.  A dozen Beric’s perhaps, instead of a dozen Coldhands.

I want to emphasize again that Lord Beric might be one of the most important characters in the book, purely in terms of symbolism.  Beric combines the flaming sword and fire-resurrection symbolism of Azor Ahai reborn with a not-so-subtle Bloodraven impersonation – the one red eye, the wierwood throne in a cave full of weirwood roots, the Lord of Corpses title, and so on.  In other words, Beric implies a Lightbringer-wielding, fire-undead scarecrow brother who is also greenseer, and that is a big fat bingo.  Now we can see that his scarecrow associations are no accident – they are done specifically so that we might decode the meaning of the scarecrow brothers manning the Wall, particularly when you take Jon’s dream of wielding Lightbringer alongside burning scarecrows into account.  And that meaning is clear now – the last hero’s companions in the War for the Dawn were undead Night’s Watch brothers, mostly likely fire undead ones.  The scarecrow brotherhood, everyone.

You’ll recall that during Beric’s fight with the Hound, Beric’s sword breaks – just as the last hero’s sword was said to break from the cold.  And twice in that fight, the Hound’s sword is referred to as cold – once it says “the flaming sword leapt up to meet the cold one,” and as the Hound is about to break Beric’s sword, it says “Lord Beric blocked the cut easily, but the burning sword napped in two, and the Hound’s cold steel plowed into Lord Beric’ flesh where his shoulder joined his neck and clove him down to the breastbone.  The blood came rushing out in a hot black gush.”  Thus we are given a pretty strong impression of our undead greenseer Azor Ahai person having his sword broken by a cold sword, just as the last hero’s sword snapped from the cold, and just as we saw Ser Waymar’s sword snapped by the Other’s crystalline ice swords.

You’ll also notice in of the passages we just read that Beric mentions being loyal to King Robert, who is dead, and Sandor even calls Robert the King of Worms while in Beric’s cave.  In other words, Beric serves a dead horned god, and this of course goes along with all the other references to undead horned gods around the Night’s Watch and the last hero.  That same idea pops up again in one of the quotes about the scarecrow brothers:

The west had gone the color of a blood bruise, but the sky above was cobalt blue, deepening to purple, and the stars were coming out. Jon sat between two merlons with only a scarecrow for company and watched the Stallion gallop up the sky. Or was it the Horned Lord?

The Horned Lord is a constellation named after a King Beyond the Wall called the Horned Lord who lead an attack on Westeros, as we mentioned last time.  We don’t know if he was a horned green man or more likely a wildling chieftain playing into this power line of symbolism, but of course the point here is to continue to draw associations between the Night’s Watch and horned folk – specifically, to dead horned folk.  Here we see Jon, who will probably end up as some sort of burning scarecrow himself, standing next to one of his scarecrow brothers, looking up at their horned lord together.

There’s a nice companion to this scene in ADWD when Bran wargs into Summer and sees the dead Night’s Watch brothers which Coldhands slaughtered with his ravens:

The direwolf’s pale yellow eyes drank in the scene around them.  A nest of entrails coiled through a bush, entangled with the branches.  Steam rising from an open belly, rich with the smells of blood and meat.  A head staring sightlessly up at horned moon, cheeks ripped and torn to bloody bone, pits for eyes, neck ending in a ragged stump.  A pool of frozen blood, glistening red and black. 

A paragraph later, the ripped black clothing of the slain brothers are called “ragged cloaks.”  We just saw Jon staring at the horned moon with his scarecrow brothers, and now we have dead brothers staring at the horned moon, so let’s consider these dead brothers as a symbol of Jon.  They are ragged, and the one has a ragged stump for a neck – note the use of stump to imply tree people, people made of wood.  The scarecrows brothers are stuffed with rags and straw, with straw being similar to wood (especially wicker), so we find these brothers implying rags and wood, specifically, dead brothers mad of rags and wood.  That ties in nicely to both the scarecrow brother idea as well as the wicker King of Winter idea.

The fact that these dead brothers end up inside of a wolf – Summer and the other wolves are actually eating them in this scene – probably correlates to Jon going inside of his wolf when he dies.  Hopefully his spirit will not be “eaten” by Ghost – it wouldn’t really make much sense of that to happen, so I assume it won’t.  But it is a nice way to show the dead NW brothers who seem to parallel Jon being both dead and “inside a wolf.”

The dead brothers also manifest some snaky dragon symbolism – their steaming entrails coil through the bush, like a snake ensnared in a tree- like Bloodraven perhaps, a white dragon ensnared in the roots of the weirwood.  The pool of red and black frozen blood is an interesting symbol – red and black are Targaryen colors, but here they are frozen, just as Jon is a cold version of a Targaryen.  The brothers of the watch are euphemistically said to ‘bleed black blood,’ so the frozen black blood coming from the veins of black brothers creates a black ice symbol which is specifically tied to the Night’s Watch.  It also reminds us of Melisandre’s death warning to Jon:

“Ice, I see, and daggers in the dark. Blood frozen red and hard, and naked steel.  It was very cold.”

The black and red frozen blood also remind us of the current state of Ned’s black Ice sword – it now shows “waves of night and blood,” or another time, it’s “blood and black the ripples shone.”  Black ice, turned the color of blood and darkness – that’s what we see in this puddle.  Mel is implying it too – ice, she sees, and daggers in the darkness, frozen blood – but that’s really just a description of Ned’s sword.  Read the line again – “Ice she’s sees” – it’s even a capital “I” Ice, because it’s the first word of the sentence.   She sees Ice –  a sword in the darkness, represented by frozen red and black blood.  Waves of blood and night, seen in a sword formerly called Ice.

As I mentioned in part 2, the twin concepts of black ice and frozen fire basically symbolize Jon, who wields Lightbringer in his dream armored in black ice, and who arms his brothers with frozen fire.  His hunger for Winterfell is once described as being as sharp as a dragonglass blade, and there’s also a line from ASOS where Stannis says to Jon “I have found you here, as you found the cache of dragonglass beneath the Fist, and I mean to make use of you.  Even Azor Ahai did not win his war alone.”  It’s direct comparison between Jon and his dragonglass, and it is implying Jon as a weapon in the hands of Azor Ahai – Jon himself is the weapon, the sword in the darkness – a sword of black ice, burning red.  I know these symbolic merry-go-rounds get a bit confusing sometimes, so I want to be clear – Jon and Ned’s sword are both “black ice” and “frozen fire,” representing a certain kind of unity of ice and fire.  The red and black frozen blood puddle and Mel’s vision of daggers int he dark and frozen blood are referring to the same thing – Jon Snow, a weapon of black ice who who is, in my opinion, destined to wield black Ice, now known as Oathkeeper.  We just need to get it to the Wall, but we have two books. 🙂

So, this puddle of black ice blood and frozen red blood evokes Jon in several ways, and it’s coming from a dead tree-man brother wearing scarecrow rags who stares at the horned moon, like Jon did in his scene with a scarecrow brother.  The horned moon ties these scenes together, and when we recall that the horned moon was used to foreshadow the death of another King of Winter, Robb, we can see that the horned moon in these scenes is also foreshadowing Jon’s death and transformation into a burning scarecrow, in emulation of the resurrected horned god and the King of Winter.

One final note on this grisly tableau as a symbol of Jon Snow’s death and resurrection, it’s worth noting that the entrails coiled through the bush reminds us of the First Men sacrificing people and stringing their entails up in the weirwood branches, which is something they used to do.  I’m not sure if Coldhands did this intentionally, or if it’s merely a nod to the reader to think about weirwoods and human sacrifice in conjunction with these dead Night’s Watch brothers, but it’s worth pointing out.

Returning to the topic of scarecrows, we see that they are also tied to the seventy nine sentinels who wind their ghostly warhorns.  Not only are they called “scarecrow sentinels“and “straw sentinels,” we also get this line as Jon and Donal Noye ascend the Wall in the winch cage after hearing two horn blasts from atop the Wall:

The wind was whipping at the black cloaks of the scarecrow sentinels who stood along the ramparts, spears in hand. “I hope it wasn’t one of them who blew the horn,” Jon said to Donal Noye when he limped up beside him.

The scarecrow sentinels stand with spears in hand, just like the seventy nine sentinels, and now they might be winding their horns too?  If they are trying to wake the sleepers, they might be waking themselves.  Kidding aside, this is a pretty clear association between the seventy nine sentinels with their ghostly warhorns and the scarecrow brothers with their newfound habit of blowing horns.  This is makes sense, because both are giving us clues about undead green men Night’s Watch brothers.  Interestingly, one group is frozen and the other is burning.

Now that we have examined the King of Winter ideas related to the wicker man, we can see that these burning scarecrows actually fit right into green man mythology.  They are the spitting image of the King of Winter burning at the end of his reign, and these fiery scarecrow brothers are in service to Jon Snow, the probably future King of Winter.  It makes sense that the King of Winter symbolism is extended to the Night’s Watch, because the Night’s Watch serves that same role of bringing the spring.

This is the kind of corroboration from multiple angles that we should find whenever we uncover a mythological influence behind ASOIAF.  Martin always leaves multiply references for us to find – for example, we might see that Martin has chosen the title ‘King of Winter’ for his ruler of the North and wonder if he intends a reference to the wicker man King of Winter, but when we see the burning scarecrows serving the probable King of Winter Jon Snow, we can be sure that is what is going on.  Then we look at the theme of the Night’s Watch – bringing the spring and ending the Long Night – we see that also lines up with the purpose of the wicker man perfectly.

There’s actually even one more line of corroboration of these ideas pertaining to the King of Winter as a burning wicker or straw man, and that can be found in two scenes where we see wights being set on fire.

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A Burning Wreath for the King of Winter

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Fittingly, the first involves Coldhands.  It’s the scene where Bran’s company is fighting its way up the hill to get to the safety of Bloodraven’s cave.  Amazingly, this scene is actually a perfect parallel to the scene at the end of Game of Thrones where Mirri Maz Dur performed her blood magic on Drogo.   We discussed that scene in the first zombie episode as a potential parallel to Jon’s resurrection, highlighting the fact that we saw dancing shapes silhouetted inside the tent, “the shadow of a great wolf and a man wreathed in flames.” Now listen to this scene from ADWD, which takes place as Bran has already skinchanged into Hodor’s body and killed a wight with Hodor’s sword:

Up above them, flaming figures were dancing in the snow. The wights, Bran realized. Someone set the wights on fire. Summer was snarling and snapping as he danced around the closest, a great ruin of a man wreathed in swirling flame. He shouldn’t get so close, what is he doing?

Then he saw himself, sprawled facedown in the snow. Summer was trying to drive the thing away from him. What will happen if it kills me? the boy wondered. Will I be Hodor for good or all? Will I go back into Summer’s skin? Or will I just be dead?

That’s pretty much the same language – ‘a man wreathed in swirling flame‘ versus ‘a man wreathed in flames.‘  Summer is the great wolf, and both the burning wights and Summer are specifically described as dancing, just like the dancing shadow figures in Mirri’s tent.  That’s about as clear a sign as we are going to find that these two scenes are somehow meant to be linked to one another, so the important question to ask is why?

Well, I suggested that Drogo’s botched resurrection ceremony may be a parallel to Jon’s resurrection, so consider the subject matter of this scene with that in mind.  Bran is talking about what happens when a skinchanger dies, where his soul goes.  That is again what I like to call, ‘a big fat bingo.’  Also featured in this scene about one paragraph later: a skinchanger getting kicked out of a body he was inhabiting (Bran is kicked out of Hodor), and that too is a bingo.  This is all stuff that relates to Jon’s resurrection, something which Bran himself may take part in.

The important things in this scene are the dancing great wolf and man wreathed in flame.  The wolf clearly signifies Starks and skinchanging in this scene, as we claimed it did in the scene with Mirri Maz Dur and Drogo, since Summer is literally a wolf skinchanged by a Stark.   So what about the burning man?  In the tent scene with Mirri, we interpreted that as the fire side of Jon’s heritage, his Targaryen ancestry – the idea of a flaming person lines up with Dany calling herself fire made flesh when she wakes the dragons.  But here in this scene with Bran and Coldhands, the man wreathed in flame is a burning wight.  What does this mean?

Well, taken with all the previous information about burning scarecrows and the King of Winter, I’d say this still represents Jon’s fiery side, although this time it would be his future as a fiery undead person.  There’s a clue about what kind of fiery undead person Jon will be in Bran’s scene a paragraph later, as Bran returns to his body lying in the snow and we read “The burning wight loomed over him, etched tall against the trees in their icy shrouds.”  By superimposing the burning wight over a tree, Martin has created the image of the burning wight as having branches over his head, like a green man with branches in place of antlers.

He’s also created the image of a burning tree – and the flames of this wight cause the tree to lose its icy shroud, which it dumps on top of Bran.  If we look at the tree itself as a greenseer symbol, we can see it transforming – it’s a frozen, white tree, but then it throws off it’s icy shroud – think funeral shroud – and turns into a burning tree, as if it were coming back to life.  That’s also why George used the expression ‘”wreathed in flame” in both this scene and the one in Mirri’s tent of dancing shadows – a wreath is a green thing associated with Christmas and winter.  A flaming wreath implies a fiery green winter-associated thing, which is what the King of Winter is exactly.

Those of you who read or listened “The Grey King and the Sea Dragon” will know that the red leaves of the weirwood which are usually described as bloody hands are once described as “a blaze of flame among the green,” and thus we have an analogy of the weirwood as a burning tree.  There’s a lot more to it including the Grey King’s burning tree and the fire of the gods, so I recommend checking that out, but take my word for it that Martin is indeed using the buring tree as a symbol of the weirwoods – think of Moses and the burning bush, where the burning bush was the voice of God’s knowledge and wisdom, just as the weirwood, a burning tree in a manner of speaking, bestows the power of the old gods on the greenseer, and the knowledge and power of the gods is of course often described as “the fire of the gods.”

Thus, it is no accident that the dancing wight wreathed in flame in this scene is showing us a burning tree image.  It’s merely another greenseer clue, but attached to a burning undead person.  Essentially, there is a synergy between the King of Winter and the weirwood – they are both burning tree people.

Additionally, Bran is thinking about using Hodor as a potential new host body if he dies, putting slightly different take on the idea of a skinchanger being reborn – that’s more along the lines of theories about the Boltons being bodysnatching skinchangers.  Interestingly, one paragraph after this quote, right before Bran is booted from Hodor by the sheer disorientation of the fight, “tears filled Hodor’s eyes and froze there.”  If Hodor inhabited by Bran represents some kind of resurrected skinchanger, he now has ice eyes, which done to imply one of two things: the icy blue eyes of a cold wight or an Other, or the icy eyes of the Starks, such Brandon “Ice Eyes” Stark, a King of Winter, and all of the statues in the crypts, which are described as watching “with eyes of ice.”  I’ll probably write something specifically about body-snatching at some point, but the idea of Hodor having icy eyes in that scene seems meaningful and I wanted to point it out.  Also recall that Garland Tyrell wearing Renly’s armor showed us a kind of body snatching version of Azor Ahai reborn, so this might be a thing.

The second scene with burning wights reinforces the interpretations of the first scene, as well as showing us the burning wicker man as the King of Winter with amazing clarity.  This is Jon, recalling the burning of the wight in Mormont’s chambers as he is being given Longclaw for saving the Old Bear’s life.  Leading up to this quote, Jon thinks to himself that he sometimes dreamed of somehow earning his father’s sword Ice, through some act of valor, even saving Lord Eddard’s life.  Now he saved the life of a kind of father figure, Lord Commander Mormont, and he is being given the sword meant for Mormont’s son.  That is pretty cool because it conflates Eddard, a King of Winter symbol, with the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, and we’ve already seen they both overlap with the last hero to some extent.  Keep that in mind, and check out this scene, which opens with Mormont speaking:

“I would not be sitting here were it not for you and that beast of yours. You fought bravely … and more to the point, you thought quickly. Fire! Yes, damn it. We ought to have known. We ought to have remembered . The Long Night has come before. Oh, eight thousand years is a good while, to be sure … yet if the Night’s Watch does not remember, who will?”

“Who will,” chimed the talkative raven. “Who will.” Truly, the gods had heard Jon’s prayer that night; the fire had caught in the dead man’s clothing and consumed him as if his flesh were candle wax and his bones old dry wood. Jon had only to close his eyes to see the thing staggering across the solar, crashing against the furniture and flailing at the flames. It was the face that haunted him most; surrounded by a nimbus of fire, hair blazing like straw, the dead flesh melting away and sloughing off its skull to reveal the gleam of bone beneath.

Breaking in again for a moment, so far we have Mormont remembering that the Night’s Watch is supposed to fight with fire, which lines up well with the idea of the last hero’s twelve being burning scarecrows, fiery undead.  Even better is the description of the wight.  His hair is like straw, just like a scarecrow, and his bones are like old dry wood, which make us think of a burning tree person again – just like the burning wight etched against the trees in the scene in front of Bloodraven’s cave, and just like the wights in the Coldhands scene with Sam and Gilly, where they had bloody red hands to symbolize the weirwood leaves, and of course, most of all, like the burning scarecrow brothers mounted on wooden poles.  The corpse of Jafer had the same “hair like straw” description as well, strengthening the idea of the wights as straw men.

The corpse also “staggers” across the room – is that a playful double usage of the word stag to make us think of a burning stag man?  I’d have to say probably so, because we already know the burning stag man and the burning scarecrow ideas go together.  Don’t forget, this is Othor’s corpse, the guy with the hunting horn – he’s already showing us Herne the Hunter stag man symbolism, so why not have him stagger a bit?

A strong evocation of the wicker man actually comes in the description of the wight’s hair blazing like straw.  By calling the wight old wood and straw, we are really being given the picture of a wicker man.  If only this burning wicker man were somehow associated with the King of Winter in this scene.  If only.

Ahh, Mr. Martin Lewis, if you would do the honors please?

Whatever demonic force moved Othor had been driven out by the flames; the twisted thing they had found in the ashes had been no more than cooked meat and charred bone. Yet in his nightmare he faced it again … and this time the burning corpse wore Lord Eddard’s features. It was his father’s skin that burst and blackened, his father’s eyes that ran liquid down his cheeks like jellied tears. Jon did not understand why that should be or what it might mean, but it frightened him more than he could say.

Oh holy hell.  It’s the King of Winter as a burning corpse.  This dream has never made any sense as anything other than Jon’s subconscious generating scary things for a nightmare, but now we can se it makes wonderful sense.  Depicting Eddard as a flaming corpse, once which was just associated with being made of straw and old wood, is.. is… well, I’m out of superlatives, but it’s the King of Winter is what it is.  His destiny is to becoming a burning corpse, likely for the good of all humanity – at least, everyone who likes it when winter eventually gives way to spring.

That’s why this dream terrifies Jon, on a deep level – he’s staring at his destiny as a fiery undead King of Winter, a skinchanger zombie corn king extraordinaire.

And just to top all that off, the original scene in which Jon and Ghost fought the wight in Mormont’s solar contains yet another echo of the dancing pair of the great wolf and the burning man, though it is not spelled out as clearly.  It doesn’t have the tight, matching language, but it is nevertheless a scene with a great wolf and a burning wight fighting one another, a scene in which Jon symbolically comes back to life and becomes the hero, wining himself a new sword of dragonsteel… while burning himself in the process.

And that is what we call foreshadowing.

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Bonus Round: Trees Bodysnatching People

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So, I’ve mentioned the idea of undead greenseers a few times, but what exactly does that mean?  How would that work?  We’ve talked extensively about the idea of resurrected skinchangers and the process by which you make one: the human spirit is stored in the animal, the human body is resurrected by some means, and the either the human spirit or the merged human – animal spirit is somehow put back in the resurrected body.  But what happens if you swap out the skinchanger in this process for a greenseer… and swap out an animal for a weirwood?

It would look like this.  A greenseer who is wedded to the trees is somehow killed, and his spirit goes into his home weirwood, or perhaps just into the weirwoodnet as a whole. But before his spirit could completely dissolve into the green godhood, someone comes along and resurrects the greenseer’s corpse.  Is there a way for the greenseer spirit lurking in weirwood to take possession of his old body again?  Now consider the skinchanger example, where the skinchanger’s spirit merges with his animal and the combined spirits are put back into the resurrected corpse… and again swap in a weirwood tree for the animal.  What if some part of the tree, some piece of the weirwoodnet intelligence, came along with the greenseer spirit when it was put back into the reanimated corpse?

This would be like trees bodysnatching people, in a sense.  Pretty freaky, right?  Instead of a wolfman zombie, it would be a treeman zombie.  That would actually be a more perfect incarnation of the wicker man King of Winter.  Best of all, because Ghost the direwolf has the same blood and bone coloring of the weirwoods, which Jon remarks upon multiple times, Jon’s resurrection process using Ghost’s body as a storage vessel basically symbolizes the weirwood process I am talking about.  Jon won’t be a weirwood zombie, but he is symbolizing one, which makes us wonder about the original last hero or King of Winter… or maybe the Night’s King or Azor Ahai… I’d throw the Grey King and his weirwood throne in there too…  And what about Bran?  Could his boy’s flesh die, only to have his spirit go into the weirwoodnet… and then, I dunno, bodysnatch Hodor for good and all?  Or Hodor’s corpse, if Hodor dies and George doesn’t want to make Bran quite such an evil bodysnatcher?

There are countless examples of trees being personified as human.  Take a look at the prologue from AGOT for example, which is stuffed full of trees having clutching fingers or human emotions.  It goes through every book – we have burning, drowned, and frozen trees, all acting like people, again and again.  My favorite example of this comes when Asha is fighting the Moutain Clans, who dressed up in tree camouflage, at Deepwood Motte – she recalls to herself the stories she’s heard about the children fighting the First Men, and how they “turned trees into warriors.”  I don’t think George is going to give us Tree Ents, like Lord of the Rings, but trees bodysnatching people might be his macabre version of it.

There’s a great clue about making soldiers form trees in ADWD, actually, and I will just read this one myself.  Dany is speaking with Xaro Xhoan Daxos, discussing the evils of slavery, and she asks Xaro if he knows how unsullied are made.  He says “Cruelly, I have no doubt.  When a smith makes a sword, he thrusts the blade into the fire, beats on it with a hammer, then plunges it into iced water to temper the steel.  If you would savor the sweet taste of the fruit, you must water the tree.”  To which Dany says, “this tree has been watered with blood,” and Xaro replies, “how else, to grow a soldier?” There are obvious parallels between the Unsullied and zombies – they have had their personalities almost completely destroyed and erased and turned into basically mindless zombies who do whatever they are told by their master.  Here we learn that to make soldiers like this, you must water trees with blood.  That’s exactly what people did with heart trees in the distant past, and the occasionally not-so-distant past, and I have already suggested ways in which blood sacrifice to trees might create zombie soldiers.  The meaning of this passage, therefore it may be that the idea of the children “turning the trees into warriors” might mean making undead greenseer tree-man zombies.

Or how about this – what if it’s not really the weirwood consciousness trying to bodysnatch people, what if there is some old greenseer stuck in the weirwoodnet, trying to get out?  Is there some old green man in the weirwoodnet, like Job from the Lawnmower Man? (a great movie everyone should watch they haven’t already) The word weir refers to a wooden fish trap set up on a river or stream, remember, so are the weirwoods in some sense a trap?  They do store consciousness, the souls of the deceased greenseers, so that lines up, but is the implication that someone is stuck in there against their will?  Since a fishing weir is also a fishgarth, might the weirwood be some kind of trap for garth people?

Let’s set aside the idea of the weirwood trapping people against the will and just think about trap as in repository.  We are told all of the trees on the Isle of Faces were gives faces to witness the Pact, and it is somewhat implied that blood sacrifice might be a part of “giving a heart tree a face” and “opening the tree’s eyes” so greenseers can look through them.  My guess is that if human sacrifice is involved, it might be the greenseer who wants to enter the tree who is sacrificed.  When we are told of the trees in the Isle of Faces being given faces – and separately told about blood magic sacrifice of either humans or children the forest, on the Isle of Faces, as I mentioned – what we might really be hearing about is the story of green men being sacrificed so they can enter the trees and give them faces and eyes.  It might have been the initial entry on mankind (or green man kind) into the weirwoodnet, or even the creation of the weirwoodnet in the sense that we know it.   It may also be that these sacrificed green men might have been made into tree-man zombies, using the process I just described.

There’s something unpleasant about the weirwoods – perhaps it’s the fact that are always screaming or angry looking, weeping blood, or maybe it’s the bloody mouth and leaves like bloody hands.  These trees do not look happy – are they being tortured?  Are they being skinchanged against their will?  It’s a question I have always wondered about.  I mean, do they like having bloody faces carved in them, and do they like humans and children of the forest and green man wearing their skins?  Or are they perhaps performing some kind of awful sacrifice for the good of mankind, with their suffering etched on their faces to remind us?  Did they trap evil garths, or did they allow their skins to be shared so that mankind might survive or achieve some important goal?

Is their face the face of Garth and his green men, making their garth-trees for real?  That is my guess, as of right now.  I’ve thrown out a lot of questions and speculation here at the end, so as to provide some food for thought.  I like to confine my speculation to the things we have seen in the book, and the whitings which can be logically deduced from adapting what we have seen in the book.  The skinchanger resurrection process is laid out pretty clearly, so swapping a tree for an animal is simply logical deduction.  If a skinchanger’s animal can be used as a temporary storage vessel, then a tree should work too, perhaps even better.  We’ve been shown all manner of tree-people and people trees – that’s what the wields are, on a most basic level, trees with hands and faces – and here, using the magic we have been shown in the books and a little logic, we can see a way in which a tree consciousness can inhabit a person, or an undead corpse… or maybe a golem body made of ice, who knows.  The world is full of possibilities when people can bodysnatch animals, people, corpses, and trees.  If the trees can bodysnatch back, well… that’s what I call dark fantasy.  Part of me thinks that having created all the mechanisms needed for this to occur, George might be unable to resist.  We’ll have to wait and see what kind of zombies we get.  One thing is for sure – the Winds of Winter are sure to bring us plenty of walking corpses.

Now, we have already found a smattering of horned lord ideas north of the Wall in wildling culture, and I have also proposed a tenuous link between Coldhands and the green men – or at least, I stole the idea from Bran and attempted to provide supporting evidence.  But we haven’t dealt with the real heavyweights of the North – the Starks –  so let’s turn our focus northward, towards the bright blue star that is the eye of the Ice Dragon – or the eye of the rider, tales vary.

As always, we are fuel by the support of our Patreon supporters, and we thank you sincerely.  Researching all of this takes quite a bit of time, as you might guess, and like most of you, I was not born the heir to a Lannister fortune, so it really is the support of you generous patrons who which enables me to spend the time it takes to make Mythical Astronomy happen.  And here’s something you can do to help the podcast which doesn’t cost a dime – leave a little review on iTunes.  It really helps increase the visibility of the podcast on all places where podcasts are listed, so if you have a couple minutes for that, I will be most grateful.

Thanks to Animals as Leaders for providing the music for our podcast, and thanks to Mr. Martin Lewis of the  Echoes of Ice and Fire Facebook page for his excellent vocal performances.  Last but definitely not least, I know I speak for everyone when I say thanks to a Mr. George R. R. Martin for writing these wonderful novels.

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Garth’s Wheelbarrow

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We’ll begin by examining two of the major mythical figures of the north which may relate to Garth and the horned folk: the King of Winter and the Barrow King.  I know the King of Winter is the one you really want to hear about, so naturally we will start with the Barrow King, because that’s how these things are supposed to work.  The Barrow Kings are cool too, however, so we got to got to give them their due.

It begins with a possible direct connection between Garth the Green and the northern legend of the “First King” and the subsequent Barrow Kings of House Dustin.  In TWOIAF it says that Garth the Green was “High King of the First Men,” and that he might have been  the first lord or chieftain to lead the First Men across the Arm of Dorne and into Westeros.  His line of Gardener kings similarly claim to have been the high kings of the First Men thereafter.  But up in the Barrowlands in the North, we hear of the Barrow Kings who rivaled the Starks in ancient days, and they “styled themselves Kings of the First Men and claimed supremacy over all First Men everywhere.”  This claim was based on their supposed ancestry from someone called “the First King,” who is said to have “once ruled supreme over all the First Men.”  Now, any number of First Men kings could have claimed to be the “king of all First Men everywhere” or even to have descended from the ‘first great king’ of some portion of Westeros, but there is a very strong indication that the First King and Garth legends are actually talking about the same fellow.  It comes in ADWD, when Theon sees the Great Barrow at Barrowton:

Some claimed that it was the grave of the First King, who had led the First Men to Westeros.  Others argued that it must be some King of the Giants who was buried there, to account for it’s size.

So there you go.  It’s all ancient legend, but when they speak of the “First King” who lead the First Men across Westeros, they are talking about Garth the Green, or said another way, these appear to be two versions of the same myth, grown apart through time and circumstance.  Or perhaps it’s a literal connection – maybe old Greenhands ended his life up north, and he’s actually buried in this barrow.  Either way, the emphasis in the southern legend is on Garth’s life and fertility, while the emphasis in the northern myth is on Garth’s death and burial.  This generally lines up with the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of the nature god – winter represents the death state, the stage after the fertility god’s death where he await resurrection, so it make sense on a basic level to see a myth about a dead nature god in a place that is defined by winter.  Lots more of this to come!

As an aside, I must point out that the part of the Barrowton legend about the great barrow being the final resting place of a King of the Giants may have truth in it as well, if it does indeed refer to Garth, because there are a couple of clues about Garth being a larger than average dude.  When Robert dons his antlered helm so he can look like a horned god, Ned says that “he became a veritable giant,” and Renly’s antlered helm is said to add a foot and a half to his height.  Garth himself was said to sire John the Oak on a giantess, so maybe he was a larger than average dude to begin with, the kind a giantess would go for (and the kind who could survive the encounter, for that matter).  There are scattered stories about taller than average people around the world in TWOIAF, so perhaps Garth and the green men are some sort of very tall humans or humanoids.  The nice thing about theorizing about the green men is that we should find out the truth, because Howlands Reed has been to the Isle of Faces and potentially has told Jojen and Meera what he saw there, and Bran and Bloodraven can surely see what’s there though the weirwoodnet.  Perhaps we will learn the truth of these green men.  If they are tall stag-man humanoids, you heard it here first.

But getting back to the point, we have this possible link between Garth and the First King of the Barrow Kings via the shared claim of being the King of the First Men and the first to lead them across the Arm of Dorne.  We might be able to corroborate this by taking a look at the theme of the Barrow King myth and seeing if it lines up with the greater corn king mythology that defines Garth the Green.

As I began to say a moment ago, winter is the death stage in the cycle of nature and resurrected nature gods.  The idea of a Barrow King is precisely that of a King of Death, a King over Death, or a King of the Dead.  Barrowton, the seat of the Barrow Kings, is built at the foot of a huge grave – that’s a symbol which isn’t exactly what you would call cryptic.  Well, I mean, it’s about crypts, yes, but it’s not cryptic in that it’s not hard to understand…  anyway.  😉  Building your fortress over someone else’s grave is unquestionably bad luck and certainly in poor taste, but building a fortress over the grave of your greatest ancestor is something altogether different – it signifies the use of death and the grave as a foundation, as a source of power and authority.  If that ancestor is Garth, then the Barrow Kings are drawing authority and power from Garth’s death.

The descendants of the Barrow Kings and the First King are of House Dustin, and their sigil includes a rusted iron crown to pay tribute to the First King.  Compare that the Garth’s line of Gardener Kings, who wore a crown of vines and flowers in peacetime and a crown of bronze and later iron thorns when at war – it’s almost like Garth put on his metal crown and went to war in the north, then died, and his crown rusted to reflect his death.  But he’s still the king – the Barrow King, the Lord of Death, and so he still has a crown – but a rusted one to reflect his death state.  The Barrow King, in other words, sounds a lot like undead, zombified Garth.

There are more zombie clues to be found lurking about the First King of the Barrow Kings.  TWOIAF tells us that supposedly, there is a curse laid on the Great Barrow which

“would allow no living man to rival the First King.  This curse made the pretenders to the title grow corpse-like in appearance as it sucked away their vitality and life.”  

The idea of a curse this powerful seems a bit fanciful for Martin’s type of fantasy in my opinion, but the idea that the First King possessed magic that could turn people into walking corpses is an idea that has our attention.  Martin is certainly simulating the degradation and evolution of myth and folklore in ASOIAF, so when we look at myths like these, we are really looking at the base elements of the myth.  Here we have a dead Garth, reaching out from the grave to turn people corpse-like in a thematic inversion of Garth’s classic role as a bringer of fertility.  Instead of a curse, might this be another clue about greenseers raising the dead?  Green men or descendants of Garth who turned their magics in a darker direction?

In TWOIAF, the maesters suggest that the Barrow Kings who descend from the First King are themselves generally associated with corpses, saying that that is why it’s thought that the Corpse Queen of the Night’s King might have been a daughter of a Barrow King.  That’s another suggestion of the Barrow Kings being a magical bloodline, as the Corpse Queen was certainly a magical being who may have been involved in making Others with the Night’s King.  There are ample clues about greenseer magic being involved in the creation of the Others, so perhaps the Corpse Queen was using greenseer magic inherited from her green ancestors in her icy endeavors.  Similarly, many have suggested that the raising of the cold wights is a mutated form of greenseer magic, something like skinchanging the dead., an idea which I think has a lot of merit.

So the story here at Barrowton, overall, is about Garth the stag man / fertility god coming up north and dying, but establishing a line of kings who are the opposite of Garth – they celebrate death, building their fortress at the Great Barrow, and they might have the capability of turning people corpselike somehow or making zombies.  Whether or not Garth himself is in that barrow, his myth seems to have travelled, in all probability carried here by people who considered Garth their ancestor and who eventually came to believe he was buried in the Great Barrow.  If Garth was a green man – and again, we don’t know what green men really are – then we have a possible account of green men coming north and becoming associated with death.

To sum up, the Barrow King is a Lord of Death figure who represents the the death / winter cycle of the corn king process.  The corn king is killed in the fall and resurrected in the spring – but for a time, he’s the lord of the dead, like the Barrow Kings, and like the Corpse Queen and Night’s King for that matter.  In the Holly King / Oak King, brother vs. brother version of this type of myth, consider that each god takes a turn being dead for six months, or you might say in hibernation for six months.

If we think about, this death / winter stage of the corn king cycle is very, very important for ASOIAF, because it is during the merciless winter of the Long Night that the hard work must be done to turn the seasons.  That’s precisely when we need our heroes.  That’s why it makes so much sense for the last hero to be a zombie – winter is the death stage of the corn king cycle.  A corn king figure in winter kind of HAS to be dead in some sense – you’ll recall that Herne the Hunter, a horned god associated with the guarding the woods in wintertime, is a ghost.

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The King is Dead

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The King of Winter may play into the idea of a dead corn king representing the winter stage of the cycle of the seasons as well, as I am sure you realize by now.  The Kings of Winter are heavily associated with the crypts, where they all have their life-like statues whose eyes always seem to follow people who pass by.   The crypts are essentially the heart of Winterfell, in fact, and Ned has many parallels to Hades, the Greek god of the underworld (and that makes three times I have to tell you to go read Mythological Weave of Ice and Fire, where sweetsunray has Ned as Hades on lockdown).  Hades has Cerberus the hellhound, and the Starks have their direwolves, who are likened to hellhounds in symbolic fashion.  Thus we can see that the Starks are very much lords of the dead, the keepers of the gates to the underworld –  just as the name ‘King of Winter’ implies.

As we heard last time, the Starks may descend from Garth the Green via Brandon of the Bloody Blade who may have been an ancestor of Bran the Builder.  That kind of goes together with the idea that the Barrow Kings descend from Garth, because if Garth and his descendants came north, it is very likely that traces of them could be seen in more than one House.  I didn’t mention this before, but there is other evidence of Stark activity in the south in the time before the Long Night.  Brandon the Builder is associated with building or designing two of the greatest castles in southern Westeros – the final version of the Hightower of Oldtown as well as great keep of Storm’s End.  In other words, whomever or whatever was behind the northern myth of Bran the Builder travelled around quite a bit.  Perhaps the myth itself originated in the south and travelled north with the descendants of Bran the Builder and Brandon of the Bloody Blade, or perhaps Bran or the group of people collectively remembered as ‘Bran the Builder’ made their first constructions in the south before migrating northward.  Either way, it can be taken as strong evidence of Stark activity in the South in ancient day, and as possible corroboration for a southern origin for House Stark as well.

Those two locations where Bran was said to have helped a great lord build his mighty keep – Oldtown and Storm’s End – are of course noteworthy in their own right for their connection to horned folk.  Oldtown is in the Reach and not far from Highgarden, home of Garth the Green, the horned green god, and the man whom Bran would have been helping to build the Hightower was Uthor of the Hightower, who was also said to have taken a daughter of Garth the Green to wife, Marris the Most Fair.  At Storm’s End, Bran would have been giving architectural advice to Durran Godsgrief, and Durran is a horned lord in his own right as we have seen, founding a line of stag-men who wear antlered crowns and antlered helms.

In other words, Bran the Builder’s ties to these two southern places and their horned god legends lines up well with the idea of Brandon of the Bloody Blade being a son of Garth and an ancestor to House Stark.  If that is the case, the story of their house is very similar to the Barrow Kings.  Descendants of the First Green Man King, come to the north to become the lords of death and winter.  It makes sense in terms of Westerosi cultural history, because both the Starks and the Barrow Kings might descend from Garth and therefore share a common origin for their myth, a green man story adapted to the more northern themes of winter and death. .

The idea of a green horned lord coming north to die and become the King of Winter is actually depicted at the very beginning of Game of Thrones, when Robert the Green Horned God King comes north to Winterfell and heads straight for the crypts!  When Robert arrives, Ned in fact acknowledges Robert’s dominion over Winterfell with his very first words spoken to Robert, greeting him with “Your Grace. Winterfell is yours.”  They head down into the crypts, and Robert wages a one-man contest to see how many times he can foreshadow his own death in one scene, including the not-very subtle example of Robert saying that sometimes he wishes he had lost at the Trident, or when King Bobby B speaks of drinking himself into an early grave.  That’s pretty much asking for it, in retrospect.  In particular, there’s something going on with Robert’s laughter I want to key in on:

Robert laughed, the sound rattling among the tombs and bouncing from the vaulted ceiling.  His smile was a flash of white teeth in the thicket of the huge black beard.

The word rattle evokes a death rattle, especially when it echoes amongst the tombs.  Martin pulls a similar trick in the scene where Bran and Jojen and Meera realize Coldhands is a corpse.   Coldhands’ speech is described with the line “his voice rattled in his throat, as thin and gaunt and he was.”  Coldhands voice is a death rattle, and here in the Winterfell crypts, Robert’s laughter is too.  A bit later in the crypt scene with Ned, Robert tells the infamous ‘the king eats, the hand takes the shit’ joke and laughs:

He threw back his head and roared his laughter.  The echoes rang through the darkness, and all around them the dead of Winterfell seemed to watch with cold and disapproving eyes.

Finally the laughter dwindled and stopped.  Ned was still on one knee, his eyes upraised.  “Damn it Ned,” the king complained. ” You might at least humor me with a smile.”

“They say it grows so cold up here in the winter that a man’s laughter freezes in his throat and chokes him to death,” Ned said evenly.  “Perhaps that’s why the Starks have so little humor.”

And now we know how Coldhands died – one to many jokes on the Wall.  Dolorous Edd better be careful, he could kill everyone.  Kidding aside though, Ned is pretty clearly turning Robert’s rattling laughter around and warning him that it can cause death and freezing, and his message is punctuated by the cold, disapproving glare of the stone Kings of Winter around him. There’s even a match for this at Renly’s death, which Brienne describes in the immediate aftermath by saying “He was laughing one moment, and suddenly the blood was everywhere.”

Robert goes on to talk of how Ned and he should have been brothers by blood if he had married Lyanna, and that’s actually what is going on here, with Ned and Robert playing the ‘summer king / winter king as brothers who kill each other’ version of the corn king cycle.  In truth, Robert and Ned love each other of course, but their actions cause each other’s death, as prophesied in the opening chapter of AGOT when they find the clear omen of the direwolf mother killed by a stag antler.  Robert enters the crypts as the summer king, talking of the bounty and fertility of the south, and he names Ned the Winter King with his words of greeting, telling Ned how good it is to see “that frozen face of yours.”  The entire chapter consists of a kind of tug of war, with Ned saying “you should really come see the Wall and the Night’s Watch, and try not to laugh so much because it can kill you,” and Robert is constantly trying to get Ned to laugh and talking of teaching him to laugh again by showing him the rich fruitfulness of the south, and then finally taking Ned south to help him rule.

So in terms of depicting the cycle of the seasons as a fraternal affair, Ned and Robert are separate people, one symbolizing the winter stage of the cycle and one the summer.  But in many versions of the corn king mythology, all the stages of the cycle are represented by one deity, and in that context, the Winter King is actually a foreshadowing of the fate of the Summer King, and vise versa.  Ned’s King of Winter role is simply the death and winter phase of the corn king cycle, as with the Barrow King, while Robert’s is the summer and vitality stage.  That’s why it makes sense to depict Robert as the honorary lord of Winterfell while foreshadowing his death in Winterfell’s crypts – a dead horned god is analogous to the winter king, or this case, the King of Winter.

There’s even a line in the crypts where Robert is telling Ned that he wants him at his side again because he is surrounded by traitors and false flatterers, and then it says “Robert looked off into the darkness, for a moment as melancholy as a Stark.”  In other words, when Robert gazes in the darkness of the tomb and stares at his own death, he look like a Stark.

In  fact… Martin may very well have taken the title “King of Winter” from a specific bit of green man folklore also known as “the wicker man.”  A few of you might be familiar with a British cult horror movie from the 70’s of the same name, the plot of which RadioHead actually just recreated in their music video for “Burn the Witch” as a matter of fact… but the wicker man is originally a Celtic druid practice.  According to Julius Caesar in his Commentary on the Gallic War, the druids built man-shaped wicker cages in which they burnt people alive.  Historians doubt the human sacrifice aspect of this however, as there is really no other evidence to support it.  What has survived of the wicker man tradition is the burning of wicker man effigies at various neb-pagan festivals.  (This is actually where the idea of burning a large wooden man at the Burning Man festival in Nevada came from.)

In particular, there is a practice of making a small green man with extra shoots and leaves from your garden in the fall.  You are supposed to keep it through the winter as the greenery dries out and dies, and during this time the wicker man is called “the King of Winter.”  It’s a green man, but it’s dead – and it’s the King of Winter.  It’s more like a straw man, a wicker man, or a wooden man.  In other word, when I tell you that the King of Winter was a formerly green man of some kind, it’s actually not the slightest bit tinfoily or far-feteched – indeed, it’s clearly suggested by the title “King of Winter.”

So you save your King of Winter all winter long, and then the spring comes, and with it, Beltane… what do you do with your dead green man, now that his winter reign is over?  You burn him, of course.

That’s pretty interesting – burning a green man when spring arrives?  Spring is usually when the corn king is resurrected, but we can quickly see that in ASOIAF, burning and resurrecting a corn king can be the same thing, particularly if Jon the dead corn king is resurrected by fire magic to help end the Long Night and bring the spring or if the same was true of the last hero.  A burning, resurrected green man is also exactly what we see in our fiery undead stag men, resurrected Renly with the ghostly green armor and antlers of golden flame, and half-a-corpse Stannis of the fiery hart and the fiery heart.

Now because King Robb Stark made Jon his heir in a will which may or may not surface in TWOW, resurrected Jon may well become the actual King in the North, and King in the North is just the more modern version of the King of Winter title.  Jon is already “Lord Snow,” which is just another way of saying King of Winter, if you think about it.  So, if Jon is resurrected by fire and becomes the King of Winter and helps to bring the spring time… he’ll be a stunningly accurate incarnation of the King of Winter.  Jon isn’t a green man or made from garden shoots, but he is a corn king and a skinchanger, and skinchanger magic is just a part of greenseer magic.  Thus we can see Jon the undead skinchanger will make an excellent King of Winter, and at the same time, he’ll actually be becoming his own version of Azor Ahai reborn as a fiery undead King of Winter.  As they say… “titles, titles.”

What’s this now?  Azor Ahai reborn as the King of Winter?  Well, look – we don’t know know how many different people contribute to the combined myth of the magic sword hero who defeats the Long Night, just as we don’t know how many ‘Bran’s are a part of the Bran the Builder legend or how many Durrans there were and which did what.  But yes – the King of Winter is like a frozen, dead Azor Ahai, but one who also burns in the spring.  It’s some kind of ice and fire duality – surprise surprise.  Consider the first King in the North we see in the books, Robb Stark.  He has the Tully looks – kissed by fire red hair, and striking blue eyes that could remind us of the Others, and of course there is a long history of associating the eyes of Starks with ice, including a Brandon Ice Eyes Stark, an ancient King in the North, and all of the stone kings of winter who are described as having “eyes of ice.”  Stannis shows us similar imagery when Dany sees him in her House of the Undying vision as a “blue-eyed king with a red sword.”  If we had more time we could also mention Jon Connington, the ‘Red Griffen Reborn’ who also has eyes of ice and kissed-by-fire red hair, and who wears a red wolf pelt to combine the symbolism of fire and the Starks… he’s also known for keeping the night watch while they are on the riverboat on the Rhoyne… but we don’t have time for that, so let’s talk about Robb, the actual King in the North / King of Winter that we see in the books.

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Dark and Strong to Fight the Cold

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Robb Stark is indeed meant to show the archetype of the King of Winter, have no doubt.  All the kings of Winter in the Winterfell crypts are in the same distinctive pose – enthroned, with a wolf at his side and an iron longsword across his lap.  The sword are supposedly to keep the vengeful Stark spirits in their grave, but they might also be a warning to trespassers.  The latter is the modern accepted meaning of a Stark lord laying open steel across his lap – “everyone knew what that meant,” as Bran says when Robb does it to Tyrion in AGOT.  It’s a denial of hospitality, the opposite of invoking guest right.  The point is that Robb appears this way to us twice – once in AGOT, as I said, and more impressively in Catelyn’s first chapter of ACOK, the first time we see Robb crowned as the King in the North.   It’s a longer quote, but worth considering.  He is greeting us exactly the way a King in the North should.  This is the opening of the chapter:

Her son’s crown was fresh from the forge, and it seemed to Catelyn Stark that the weight of it pressed heavy on Robb’s head. The ancient crown of the Kings of Winter had been lost three centuries ago, yielded up to Aegon the Conqueror when Torrhen Stark knelt in submission. What Aegon had done with it no man could say. Lord Hoster’s smith had done his work well, and Robb’s crown looked much as the other was said to have looked in the tales told of the Stark kings of old; an open circlet of hammered bronze incised with the runes of the First Men, surmounted by nine black iron spikes wrought in the shape of longswords. Of gold and silver and gemstones, it had none; bronze and iron were the metals of winter, dark and strong to fight against the cold.

This is a big hint that the King of Winter is someone who fights against the cold.  As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, such as in the Tyrion Targaryen episode, Winterfell is indeed an oasis of heat and warmth in the frozen north, a bulwark of heat against the cold.  You could read “King of Winter” as implying a king who uses the forces of winter, like the original king of the Others or something, just as you could interpret “Winterfell” to mean the place from which Winter falls, the source of winter, and just as you could interpret “winter is coming” as a threat – the King of Winter is coming to kill you.  But you can also interpret ‘the King of Winter’ as the king over winter, the king who defeated winter – and that’s what is implied here by his having dark and strong metals to fight the cold.  You could likewise interpret Winterfell to mean “the place where winter was felled,” as in defeated, and “winter is coming” as a warning to prepare to fight the winter.

These two ideas are not even mutually exclusive, as often times a victorious warrior will take on the trappings of the one he defeated, such with Orrys Baratheon becoming the new storm lord after defeating the old one.  The idea is that by defeating something powerful, you gain its power, and that is really what I think is up with the King of Winter.  It ends up as an ice and fire duality, where the King of Winter is a chilly dude who uses various forms of fire to master the forces of winter.  Recall Stannis as the blue-eyed king wielding a red sword, Robb as a blue-eyed king with kissed-by-fire red hair, and recall Jon dreaming of wielding a burning red sword while armored in “black ice.”

Ned is introduced to use with a sword called Ice which is named after the original sword of the King of Winter, and that makes us think of the King of Winter or the Lord of Stark as an icy fellow, but the sword ‘Ice’ is actually a smoke dark, nearly-black Valyrian steel blade forged in dragonfire with Valyrian magic.   Again, it’s the ice and fire unity idea.  It seems odd at first to see a dragon sword in the hands of the champion of the North, but again – dark metals to fight the cold.  In fact, Ned’s sword is more properly named “black Ice,” since it’s a nearly-black sword called Ice, and this causes us to wonder if Jon’s black ice armor is actually a clue about him needing some Valyrian steel armor, if any such thing happens to be lurking around somewhere.

If the symbol of “black ice” refers to Valyrian steel, then I would suggest that obsidian, which the Valyrians called frozen fire, is playing in to the black ice symbolism as well.  Obsidian actually look like black ice, and Martin is already telling us that it is frozen.  It can be called frozen fire because it is literally cooled magma, just as steel swords are created in a molten state before hardening or “freezing” in place.  Most importantly, Valyrian steel probably kills Others, and dragonglass definitely does.  If Valyrian steel is black ice that kills Others, then dragonglass must surely be black ice as well, at least that’s my thinking.

Frozen fire is actually the best way to summarize all of this ice and fire mixing with the King of Winter – he has an element of fire, but it’s frozen and black, just like cooled and hardened Valyrian steel or dragonglass.  Valyrian steel, obsidian, and the King of Winter – all dark and strong and fighting  the cold.

The scene with Robb continues:

When the guards brought in the captive, Robb called for his sword. Olyvar Frey offered it up hilt first, and her son drew the blade and laid it bare across his knees, a threat plain for all to see. “Your Grace, here is the man you asked for,” announced Ser Robin Ryger, captain of the Tully household guard. “Kneel before the king, Lannister!” Theon Greyjoy shouted. Ser Robin forced the prisoner to his knees.

It’s a threat plain to see, and it’s the exact pose of a King of Winter.  Next, pay attention to his sword:

“Rise, Ser Cleos.” Her son’s voice was not as icy as his father’s would have been, but he did not sound a boy of fifteen either. War had made a man of him before his time. Morning light glimmered faintly against the edge of the steel across his knees. 

Oh my, it’s a sword of the morning gleaming with dawn light.  In the hands of the King of Winter.  Some of you may be familiar with the theory that Dawn is actually the original Ice of House Stark, which I personally think is likely to be the case, and even if not, we can see a general symbolic overlap between the King of Winter and the last hero and using a sword to bring the morning.  We have yet to figure out how House Dayne and House Stark both figure into the last hero story in terms of bloodlines, though we may not ever be able to beyond a general association.  Nevertheless, the sword shining with morning light is a pretty good clue about the King of Winter having something to do with the last hero and ending the Long Night.

And lest we think that’s simply a poetic description and not a double meaning, here is Tyrion describing his memory of Robb meeting him with steel across his lap from the throne of the Kings of Winter:

He remembered Robb Stark as he had last seen him, in his father’s high seat in the Great Hall of Winterfell, a sword naked and shining in his hands. He remembered how the direwolves had come at him out of the shadows, and suddenly he could see them again, snarling and snapping, teeth bared in his face. 

This time the sword is naked and shining – that’s pretty powerful imagery, and it starts to become hard to explain as a coincidence.  Robb’s hellhounds emerge from the shadows, and the same thing happens in the scene with Robb holding court at Riverrun:

Yet it was not the sword that made Ser Cleos Frey anxious; it was the beast. Grey Wind, her son had named him. A direwolf large as any elkhound, lean and smoke-dark, with eyes like molten gold. When the beast padded forward and sniffed at the captive knight, every man in that hall could smell the scent of fear. Ser Cleos had been taken during the battle in the Whispering Wood, where Grey Wind had ripped out the throats of half a dozen men. 

Here’s the thing about Cleos being afraid of the beast and not the sword: the beast IS the sword, in a manner of speaking.  Grey Wind is described as “smoke dark,” and of course “grey wind” is a good way to describe billowing smoke clouds, but what it is important is that “smoke-dark” is also the description of Valyrian steel.  The very first one, in fact, when we see Ned’s Ice: it’s called “spell-forged and dark as smoke.”  When Jon Snow examines Longclaw with Sam in AFFC, it’s more of the same as Longclaw is described as “smoke-dark metal.”  Longclaw is of course ornamented with a pale stone pommel in the likeness of Ghosts’s head, again drawing an analogy between the Valyrian steel sword and the direwolf.  In addition to being the color of Valyrian steel, Grey Wind’s eyes are molten gold, adding to the general fiery symbolism present here and the idea of a fiery hellhound, and the notion of molten metal adds to the picture of Grey Wind as a sword.  To punctuate this, one of the first things Robb demands of Cleos and the Lannisters after setting Grey Wind loose is that they return his father’s sword, ‘black Ice.’

As for that sword… well, Robb wasn’t getting it back, as it was instead split in two and made into a pair of Lannister swords.  Funny thing, though, when Joffrey is given one of those swords at his wedding, Widow’s Wail, we read that “red and black ripples in the steel shimmered in the morning light” – just like Robb’s sword did when he was playing the role of King of Winter, and that’s no accident.  Robb’s sword at Riverrun represented the sword of the King of Winter, and Widow’s Wail used to be the actual sword of the Starks, ‘black Ice.’

There is only one other time in the entire series that a sword glimmers or shimmer with morning light, and unsurprisingly, the culprit is Longclaw, where Lord Commander Jon Snow is “watching the play of the morning light across the ripples” of its blade in ADWD as he contemplates executing Janos Slynt.  Just to make things abundantly clear, it happens again at the end of that same Jon chapter when he actually executes Janos; “pale morning sunlight ran up and down his blade” as he raises it high to strike the killing blow.  This is yet another confirmation that Jon is fated to wield a sword which brings the morning, which may or may not be Dawn – two of the three swords that shine with morning light are made of dark Valyrian steel, after all. That’s a debate we can’t get caught up in right now, and I really could see it going either way, but the point her is the very clear association between the King of Winter and a sword which shines with morning light.

One last note on that Joffrey scene with Widow’s Wail – there is last hero math here.  When he is looking for a name for the sword, he calls out for suggestions, and it says that “Joffrey dismissed a dozen before he heard one he liked,” which makes ‘Widow’s Wail’ the thirteenth member added to a group of twelve and thus symbolic of the last hero.  That fits with my notion of the last hero or King of Winter as sort of frozen fire, a mix of fire and ice which can fight the cold, and further associates Valyrian steel with the last hero.

Like his sword, Joffrey too gets the last hero math in Jamie’s weirwood stump dream  – that was the dream where Jaime found himself in the bowels of casterly Rock, wielding a silvery-blue flaming sword with Brienne and being confronted by various ghosts and spectres.  He sees his son Joffrey, and behind him “a dozen more dark shapes with golden hair” – again, it’s one thing leading group of twelve, and “dark shapes” makes them sound like ghosts or dead things.

Jaime himself, Joff’s true father, was in turn prodded down the hallways of Casterly Rock in this dream by “a dozen tall dark figures in cowled robes that his their faces” who all hold spears, which puts Jaime in the last hero role, and this just emphasizes the idea of the last hero / Azor Ahai relationship as some sort of cycle or father / son type of thing.  Those twelve nodded dream figures are pretty creepy, I have to say, and they remind me of Coldhands, whose face is also hidden by his cowl when Sam meets him.

Now it must be said, Joffrey makes for a shitty last hero, but I think the thing to focus on is his symbolism.  Although Joff isn’t really Robert’s son, he wears a stag crown and claims Baratheon descent, making him a type of solar horned lord.  On the day he is given the former sword of the Starks, gleaming with morning light, he dies.. which makes perfect sense if you subscribe to my awesome theory about the last hero becoming an undead skinchanger and then going out to fight the Others.  Joff dies of strangulation, too, like so many other sacrificed figures with neck or throat wounds such as Jon, Renly, Beric, Robb (beheading counts as a throat wound, I’d say), and probably Coldhands.  Even Cressen is wearing Patchface’s mockery of an antlered helm when he dies by ‘the Strangler,’ the same poison used on Joffrey.

Hearkening back to the last episode when we discussed the pattern of green horned folk and red horned folk killing each other, it’s worth noting that Joffrey’s death fits the pattern.  The person who everyone thinks killed Joff is Tyrion, with his possible secret Targaryen lineage and copious demon and gargoyle imagery (you’ll recall the armorer in King’s Landing offering to make Tyrion a ferocious demon helmet, complete with horns, for example).  Joffrey was actually killed  by Lady Olenna, or perhaps you might say House Tyrell as a whole, and of course the Tyrells are the current occupants of Highgarden, the place associated with Garth and his Gardener kings.

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The Supper After the Last Supper

This section brought to you by Direliz, the Alpha Patron, the earthly avatar of heavenly House Aquarius the Water-Bearer. A descendent of Garth the Green by way of Gilbert of the Vines, founder of House Redwyne.

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Let’s actually talk about Robb’s death for a moment, and get these stupid Lannisters out of our King of Winter section.  Robb dies tragically at the Red Wedding, and naturally, his death fits the same pattern.  First of all,  he was remotely “killed” by Mel and Stannis’s burning of the leeches, meaning that in a certain sense, he was killed by Stannis, a burning stag, half-corpse blah blah blah you know the drill.  The actual killing blow came from Roose Bolton, who as we all know is an immortal skinchanging bodysnatcher.

Say what now?  You haven’t heard of the Bolt-on theory that says that the spirit inhabiting the body of “Roose Bolton” is actually an eight thousand years old skinchanger who simply bodysnatches a new body when the current one gets old?  Do yourself a favor and google that one when you are done with this.  It sounds crazy, but there is just enough evidence to drive you mad thinking about it… but whether or not it’s true, it’s easy to see that the Boltons, who flay their enemies and are said to “wear their skins,” including the skins of a few Starks, can at the very least symbolize vampire skinchanger people.  Additionally, Ramsay Snow has a weird kind of matching symbolism to Jon Snow.  The other people responsible for killing Robb would be the Freys, and I actually am not sure if they fit the pattern, as they have no horns or skinchanging symbolism.  We’ll just have to let Martin off the hook for that one, what can I say.

Robb wasn’t burned, as the wicker man King of Winter is, however in the same sense that he was killed by Stannis, you could also say he was killed by fire magic.  When news of his death and the grisly stunt with the wolf head reaches Stannis, Melisandre, and their supporters, Axel Florent says that “it was the Lord’s wrath who slew him,” suggesting Robb’s death by fire in a symbolic sense.  Just as beheading surely counts as a neck or throat wound, I’d have to say the being killed by a fire god counts for being burned.

The cool thing about dead Robb is that he is loaded with symbolism.  Robb appears to us twice in vision form as a living corpse – once in Dany’s House of the Undying vision and once in a nightmare of Theon Greyjoy’s – and both times he appears as part of a feast of the dead.  In the House of the undying, Dany sees Robb as “a dead man with the head of a wolf,” sitting on a throne and presiding over a feast attended only by corpses, like some grisly, beyond-the-grave version of the Last Supper of Jesus and the twelve disciples.  And yes, that’s last hero math for Jesus, which at this point should not surprise you.  In another podcast, I will explain how all of this relates to the zodiac, which is really the source of all of these twelves.  The thirteenth in that case is usually the Morningstar, Venus, and accordingly, Jesus is a Morningstar deity, which we covered in our Lucifer means Lightbringer episode.

In any case, this vision of dead, wolf-headed Robb is a fairly clear foreshadowing of the barbaric stunt the Freys pull by mounting the head of Grey Wind on Robb’s headless corpse after the Red Wedding.  But you know what else it might be foreshadowing?  Undead Jon, the King of Winter, as a wolf-man, perhaps in the sense that we proposed in the last episode where Jon’s spirit merges with Ghost’s and the merged wolf/man spirit is what is returned to Jon’s body.  At the very least, this vision of dead, wolf-headed Robb suggests an undead skinchanger, a part-wolf, part-man who is a walking corpse.

Robb also wears the black iron crown of the King of Winter in this vision probably just to make sure we know who we are talking about here.  One other note on that crown of the King of Winter, which is nine iron longswords on a bronze circlet – it sounds a lot like the wartime crown of the Gardener Kings,  even more than the rusted crown of the Barrow Kings does.  The crown of the Gardener Kings was wrought in the shape of bronze and later iron thorns, and there is ample symbolism comparing swords and thorns in the series, so the two crowns really are a pretty good match.  You’ll also note that the Gardener’s crown of thorns is very suggestive of the mocking crown of thorns that Jesus was made to wear at his crucifixion.

The other vision of Robb as a corpse King of Winter comes to Theon in a nightmare, and like Dany’s vision of corpse Robb Stark, it too comes in ACOK, before Robb’s actual death, and is thus a foreshadowing of his death.  Theon’s dream starts with a memory of the feast thrown for Robert when he came to Winterfell, tying this scene to that chapter with Robert in the crypts telegraphing his own death.  But then the music and wine turn sour, and Theon sees that the is dining with the dead – linking this scene with Dany’s HOTU vision of corpse Robb at a feast of the dead.  Dead wolfman Robb was at the head of the table in that vision, but here it is dead king Robert, emphasizing the link between the horned god (Robert) and the King of Winter (Robb).  Robb is of course named after Robert, which now earns a little chuckle from you and me.  Here is the corpse feast from Theon’s dream Winterfell:

King Robert sat with his guts spilling out on the table from the great gash in his belly, and Lord Eddard was headless beside him. Corpses lined the benches below, grey-brown flesh sloughing off their bones as they raised their cups to toast, worms crawling in and out of the holes that were their eyes. He knew them, every one…

It then lists all the people Theon had a hand in killing, plus a few he didn’t such as Lyanna and Brandon Stark, Ned’s siblings.  Which reminds me – the grisly murder of Rickard and Brandon… well, Rickard is burned like a true King of Winter, and Brandon is strangled, like all of the other throat-wound sacrificial victims.  But continuing with Theon’s nightmare of the corpse feast:

Along the walls figures half-seen moved through the shadows, pale shades with long grim faces. The sight of them sent fear shivering through Theon sharp as a knife. And then the tall doors opened with a crash, and a freezing gale blew down the hall, and Robb came walking out of the night. Grey Wind stalked beside, eyes burning, and man and wolf alike bled from half a hundred savage wounds.

This terrifying vision of a corpse King of Winter again unites fire and ice – the cold winds swirl about Robb, but his wolf, Grey Wind, has eyes which are burning like a true hellhound.  We hear that half the hells are frozen in Westerosi folklore, so perhaps the King of Winter simply has all the powers of hell behind him, of both ice and fire.  And boy does he look pissed.  Great Caesar’s Ghost!  That’s what you get for having a corpse feast without inviting the King of Winter.

So why the corpse feast associated with the King of Winter?  Well, two reasons, I believe.  The first is to show an inversion of the bounty and vitality of the fertility god, as with everything else about the King of Winter and the Barrow King – that seems straightforward enough.

The second would be to specifically invoke the Last Supper, which was the final meal Jesus had with his twelve disciples before he was betrayed by one of them, arrested, tried, and crucified… and then, famously, resurrected.  The parallels between Jesus and our image of the last hero are really apparent, so casting the corpse King of Winter as Jesus is essentially a clue about the King of Winter having something to do with the last hero and ending the Long Night.

As I mentioned, Jesus is a Morningstar figure, and like the various corn king figures, Morningstar deities are killed and resurrected, just not in conjunction with the cycle of the seasons.  Jon and the last hero are thoroughly draped in Morningstar symbolism, just as they are with corn king symbolism, so what we are seeing here with dead Robb and the last supper for the dead is the King of Winter joining the club.  The King of Winter is already a resurrected green man figure, and now he has Morningstar symbolism to go along with it.  We actually saw Morningstar symbolism with the King of Winter already with all the shining swords glimmering with morning light.  Once again, all of this is basically telling us that this figure of the undead King of Winter is a weird kind of savior figure, and that’s more or less the premise of this series about skinchanger zombies.

We are almost done with Robb, but this Theon chapter with the corpse feast does end with a nice clue about Starks and horned people which I cannot pass up:

On their iron spikes atop the gatehouse, the heads waited. Theon gazed at them silently while the wind tugged on his cloak with small ghostly hands. The miller’s boys had been of an age with Bran and Rickon, alike in size and coloring, and once Reek had flayed the skin from their faces and dipped their heads in tar, it was easy to see familiar features in those misshapen lumps of rotting flesh. People were such fools. If we’d said they were rams’ heads, they would have seen horns.

These heads are not really Starks, but they are representing Starks, and we are given three pieces of information about these heads – and they are all clues in the same direction.  They have been skinned, suggesting skinchanging (and of course Bran and presumably Rickon are skinchangers anyway); they are actually the children of a miller – think of milling as in milling corn, creating a corn king association with ‘dead’ Bran and Rickon; and of course the final line about them having horns like a horned lord.

Robb actually gets a horned reference too in a less direct fashion.  In AGOT, as he awaits to cross the Twins, he agrees to the marriage pact with an unspecified Frey girl in order to cross, and we have this:

They crossed at evenfall as a horned moon floated upon the river.  The double column wound its way through the gate of the eastern twin like a great steel snake, slithering across the courtyard, into the keep and over the bridge, to issue forth once more from the second castle on the west bank.  Catelyn rode at the head of the serpent, with her son and her uncle Brynden and Ser Stevron Frey. 

Try to picture this scene from the river: the reflected image of the horned, crescent moon appears to float on the surface of the river, and at this moment, a steel snake slithers across the river.  The image we get is of a horned serpent, which is of course another way of saying “dragon.”

The more important thing here though is the foreshadowing.  The horned moon connotes sacrifice, being compared to sickles and curved knives, especially in Bran’s last chapter in ADWD where the moon is four times described as “a crescent, thin and sharp as the bade of a knife,” and don’t forget that the chapter ends with a human being sacrificed in front of the heart tree with a sickle shaped blade.  Not only do the crescent moon and horned moon resemble the curved blades often used in ritual sacrifice, they also resemble the horned animals who are sacrificed, like stags, bulls, goats, and rams.  You’ll notice the classic horned god figure is the embodiment of all of this, having horns and also being ritually sacrificed.  And although he’s a solar figure himself, he is often pictured at night with a crescent moon floating above his head, in between his antlers.

So now that we’re all up to speed on sacrificial aspect of the horned moon symbolism, we can see that this is indeed an omen, a bit of foreshadowing – it’s not a good sign that he horned moon appears on the river as Robb’s army crosses the river.  As we all know, Robb and his army will indeed be slaughtered when they returns here to the Twins for the Red Wedding.  There’s other death foreshadowing in this scene too – as they pass through the castles on either end of the bridge, the glittering eyes of Walder Frey and his Frey-folk peer down at the Starks through the ‘murder holes.’

I am proposing that the dead King of Winter is a personification of the winter and death phase of the horned god resurrection cycle, so it’s really quite nice to see the horned moon used to foreshadow Robb’s death.   I mean it’s not nice nice, but it fits the symbolism we find elsewhere, which is always a good thing.

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Whispers in the Wood

This section is brought to you by Patreon supporter Ser Imriel of Heavenly House Orion, earthly avatar of the Sword of the Morning and spinner of the great wheel 

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So far, Robb Stark has given us a ton of information about the King of Winter, tying him to the last hero, the sword that brings the morning, the horned god ideas, and to being a zombie wolfman skinchanger.  To this I would add the suggestion of the King of Winter as a greenseer, and that comes at the scene of Robb’s greatest victory, the battle of the Whispering Wood.  That chapter opens with “the woods were full of whispers,” and the very idea of a whispering wood is simply a clever way of referencing greenseers and weirwoods, because whispering is the communication of the weirwood, as we have seen many times. The wood that is full of whispers is the weirwoodnet, and that is precisely where we find the King of Winter, fighting a battle.  Hmm, this is starting to sound like The Matrix or Lawnmower Man or something.

The first thing that stands out is the whispering wood seems to be attacking along with Robb as if they are one.  As the battle begins, Robb’s soldiers conceal their weapons under the thick carpet of dead leaves which covers the ground, and his bowmen let loose while hidden in the trees.  The exact line as they spring their trap was “the whispering wood let out its breath all at once, as the bowmen Robb had hidden in the branches of the trees let fly their arrows..” In other words, the exhalation of the whispering wood is the storm of arrows.

We saw the same thing when the mountain clans dressed up as trees and shrubs and attacked the Ironborn at Deepwood Motte under the command of Stannis, who is of course an undead horned god / Azor Ahai figure.  When Asha Greyjoy realizes why the trees seem to be creeping closer, she remarks..

Oho, these mountain goats have cloaked themselves in pine boughs.

Goats are of course a prime horned animal often chosen for sacrifice, so the implication here is of Stannis’s army of tree people as horned folk. That’s pretty explicit – people that are like horned animals and walking trees, and again, fighting for Azor Ahai reborn as a corpse-like  burning stag.  And remember Renly’s knights of summer?  Consider this passage as Catelyn approaches the tent right before Renly’s murder:

The long ranks of man and horse were armored in darkness, as black as if the Smith had hammered night itself into steel. There were banners to her right, banners to her left, and rank on rank of banners before her, but in the predawn gloom, neither colors nor sigils could be discerned. A grey army, Catelyn thought. Grey men on grey horses beneath grey banners. As they sat their horses waiting, Renly’s shadow knights pointed their lances upward, so she rode through a forest of tall naked trees, bereft of leaves and life. 

Renly is a sacrificed green man, and his army is a shadow army of dead trees.  I actually forgot to mention this last time, but right after Renly dies, his green tent catches on fire, giving us the image of a burning green horned god, as resurrected Renly does at the Blackwater.  Taken with Stannis’s army of tree-wearing northmen and Robb’s army attacking from inside the Whispering Wood, we can see that the dead horned god is supposed to lead an army of tree people in some fashion, quite possibly dead tree people.

Death symbolism abounds at the whispering wood as well.  We mentioned that the weapons are concealed under a thick carpet of dead leaves, and as Robb marshaled his forces to deploy for this battle, we read that..

It was dark among the trees where the moon did not reach.  When Robb turned his head to look at her, she could only see black inside his visor. 

That’s pretty creepy, I have to say, and it’s a good way to reinforce this idea of the King of Winter as a dead person even while Robb is still alive.  As the horns sound the attack of the Northmen, Grey Wind’s howling fills the whispering wood, and Catleyn thinks to herself “so this is what death sounds like.”  Robb is like a grim reaper with a hellhound tolling the sound of doom, more or less.  In other words, to the extent the King of Winter, the lord of the whispering wood, is a greenseer, he’s one associated pretty strongly with death.  I would explain this by suggesting that he is simply a resurrected greenseer or skinchanger.

The idea of the King of Winter as a greenseer is also suggested in Bran’s vision of Ned which he sees through the eyes of there Winterfell heart tree while in Bloodraven’s cave hopped up on weirwood paste:

Lord Eddard Stark sat upon a rock beside the deep black pool in the godswood, the pale roots of the heart tree twisting around him like an old man’s gnarled arms. The greatsword Ice lay across Lord Eddard’s lap, and he was cleaning the blade with an oilcloth. “Winterfell,” Bran whispered. His father looked up. “Who’s there?” he asked, turning … 

… and Bran, frightened, pulled away. His father and the black pool and the godswood faded and were gone and he was back in the cavern, the pale thick roots of his weirwood throne cradling his limbs as a mother does a child. A torch flared to life before him.

Notice the parallel here – Bran’s weirwood throne cradles him like a mother does a child, while the weirwood at Winterfell cradles Ned with an old man’s arms.  This places Ned in the role of a greenseer, and I believe this is suggestive of the latent greenseer / skinchanger ability in the Stark bloodline.   It also speaks of the King of Winter as an archetype: one who has weirwood branches wrapped around him.  When he wakes, he tells Bloodraven that Ned could hear him, and Bloodraven responds that “he heard a whisper on the wind, a rustling amongst the leaves.”  It’s the whispering wood motif again, a whispering to one descendent of the King of Winter from another descendent of the King of Winter.

There’s also a nice metaphor in a Bran chapter of AGOT.  It may simply be poetic description, but Winterfell is described as a “grey stone labyrinth” which “had grown over the centuries like some monstrous tone tree.”  Of course a stone tree is exactly what weirwoods become if they are killed – after a few centuries, they essentially petrify in place and turn to stone.  The best example of that is with Nagga’s Ribs which are almost certainly petrified weirwood – I believe they are actually the ribbing of an overturned ship’s hull made from weirwood – but which are taken as the rib cage of a dead sea monster by the Ironborn.  I wrote about that extensively in my Grey King and the Sea Dragon episode if you are curious, but the point here about Winterfell is simple.  A dead weirwood tree is synonymous with a dead greenseer, because a greenseer becomes one with his weirwood tree.  Winterfell being symbolized as a dead, stone weirwood fits perfectly with the idea of the dead greenseer King of Winter, a personification of the death phase of the corn king cycle.

Again, it may be nothing, but calling the stone tree of Winterfell a “labyrinth” may be a nod to the myth of the Minotaur, a bull-man monster who lived in side of the labyrinth.  That’s a totally different line of horned symbolism from the corn king ideas, but I thought I would mention it.  Is Martin trying to suggest a monstrous, horned, half-human / half-animal being inside of Winterfell, or inside its trees (as in ‘in the weirwoodnet’)?  Does this have something to do with the seemingly magical truism that there “must always be a Stark in Winterfell?”

Here I will throw out one of my favorite little speculative predictions: there could be a weirwood throne underneath Winterfell’s heart tree, perhaps accessible through the crypts.  If Bran ever leaves Bloodraven’s cave, this would be the logical place for him to end up, the true “Ghost in Winterfell.”  Perhaps Jon might see it if he can ever carryout his dream of walking through the crypts to its full extent. This will no doubt allow the Stark sitting in this throne to wake all the Stark dead in the crypts and the lichyards and form an army of the dead to fight the Others.

It may be tinfoil, but there is ample foreshadowing of the spirits of the Kings of Winter rising somehow, including one of Jon’s dreams where they are literally walking out of their tombs.  I would draw your attention back to Ned’s line in AGOT which is taken as a foreshadowing of Jon Snow as a King.  Robert Baratheon says “I’ve never seen such a vast emptiness, where are all your people,” and Ned says they are likely too shy to come out, and that kings are a rare sight in the north, to which Robert famously responds “More likely they were hiding under the snow.  Snow, Ned!” which is taken as a double meaning to refer to kings being under the snow, as in Jon Snow.

Robert’s intend meaning, however, is that Ned’s people are hiding under the snow, which suggests Ned’ s people as wights, who lie under the snow under nightfall.  The Kings of Winter actually did bury their “faithful servants” in a lichyard in the shadow of the First Keep, as we learn in AGOT.  So… if the undead King of Winter Jon Snow needs an army of the undead for some reason… I mean it’s right there is all I’m saying.  We have dead winter kings and faithful servants both, ready to go.

Now even if none of that ever happens and the corpses stay in their graves and crypts, the repeated emphasis on the dead of Winterfell in general and the crypts in particular do effectively convey the idea of the Kings of Winter as the lord of death.  Consider our very first glimpse of Ned – as an executioner, passing the sentence and swinging the sword… and teaching his children to do the same.

It must be said that just because the king of Winter is a death figure and a lord of the dead does not make him a villain by any means.  Osiris and Hades are two well known “Lord of the Dead” figures, and they definitely would not be called villains.  Mythology is full of resurrected heroes, even beyond the corn king traditions, as we saw in our Lucifer means Lightbringer episode where we examined the phenomena of Morningstar deities.  And remember, we are actually looking for a zombie hero to save us from the zombie apocalypse.  I think that man will be GhostJon, the fiery undead wolfman, corpse-king and corn king, Azor Ahai reborn as the King of Winter, the light that brings the dawn.  As they say, titles, titles.

But he’s gonna need some help, he can’t do it on his own, can he?  And neither did the last hero or Azor Ahai win their war alone, so it’s time to talk about the Night’s Watch and the last hero’s twelve companions.  I hope you enjoyed that unpacking of the Barrow King and King of Winter mythology, and I am actually saving some of the best King of Winter material for the third head of this green zombie dragon, so we aren’t through yet.  At the end of it all, I think it makes sense from a narrative point of view to use the mythologies of the the various houses in the North to tell us about the northern part of the War for the Dawn business, as seems to be the case.   And what we see so far is a story about dead green men, in one sense or another.

 

As for Melisandre, she’s another unusual case.  I tend to think the signs point to her undergoing a transformation process, as I’ve said before, as opposed to a death and resurrection process, but we cannot know for sure and some people do think she has died and been resurrected.  If so, it would have been with fire magic.  We’ll talk more about her later as well.

The third kind of “zombie,” to use that as a catch-all term, would be Franken-Gregor, or un-Gregor as he is called. This is the one we know the least about – Qyburn seems like a fairly straightforward Dr. Frankenstein parallel, using some kind of fantasy pseudo science to reanimate the dead based on his knowledge gained from vivisection and other twisted pursuits… but it’s pretty vague. There is no sign of any kind of elemental force at work, no icy clouds wafting out of Qyburn’s laboratory or sulphur and brimstone stink, nothing like that. Un-Gregor himself doesn’t give us many clues as to his nature except that he seems to be even stronger than before, and he might not be able to speak – he might not even have his own head, actually. Our main clue as to what Qyburn is up to comes from a comment he made to Cersei about blood magic being the most powerful type of sorcery, and the seemingly implied possibility that he is using the blood sacrifice of the people delivered to him in the dungeons to work some kind of blood magic, but that’s about all we can say. Gregor is not the type of zombie we are interested in anyway, so we won’t have too much more to say about him.

One final outlier – Patchface. He does seem to have drowned, but we can’t say for sure. If he has undergone a death and resurrection process, which does seem like the most probable scenario, then it would have been accomplished through some freaky kind of water magic. This magical process might even be the origins of the Ironborn’s drowning-and-CPR ritual. Like Gregor, Patchface isn’t really the kind of zombie we are looking for, so we’ll only mention him in passing.

We also have other sorts of magical beings who have extended their lifespan and become something other than human, such as the Undying of Qarth, who have become mostly shadow; or the Others, who are god-only-knows how old and appear to be vaguely human-like, with icy bones and blood. This is also the category I believe Melisandre probably belongs in – magically transformed humans – and the point is that these creatures are something more than resurrected human corpses. As such, they aren’t quite what we are talking about. We are talking only about human beings who die and are then resurrected, and really what we care about are the fire undead people and Coldhands.

There’s some dispute about what has raised Beric and Stoneheart, so let me pull the quote from ASOS, and this is Thoros speaking:

 I have no magic child.  Only prayers.  That first time, his lordship had a hole right through him and blood in his mouth, I knew there was no hope. So when his poor torn chest stopped moving, I gave him the good god’s own kiss to send him on his way.  I filled my mouth with fire and breathed the flames down into him, down his throat to lungs and heart and soul.  The last kiss, it is called, and many a time I saw the old priests bestow it upon the lord’s servants as they died.  I had given it a time or two myself, as all priests must.  But never before had I felt a man shudder as the fire filled him, nor seen his eyes come open.  It was not me who raised him, my lady.  It was the Lord.  R’hllor is not done with him yet.  Life is warmth, and warmth is fire, and fire is God’s and God’s alone.

Again, it is certainly a mystery as to why this last kiss suddenly was able to bring a dead man or woman back to life, but I think it is should be beyond dispute that it is primarily what we would call fire magic that is at work here.  The two main candidates for explaining this sudden potency would be the birth of the dragons, which seems to have made all magic stronger throughout the world, or something having to do with the magic of the weirwoodnet.  There are some weirwoods and weirwood stumps in the Riverlands, such as the High Heart and in Beric’s cave (which may well be below the High Heart).  However Thoros is not a greenseer and no greenseers are present at any of Beric’s many resurrections, so all we can speculate on is some sort of regional effect, perhaps something like the Wall being a hinge of the world which makes magic stronger in its vicinity.

One bit of speculation I will throw out here – what if the original purpose of the ‘last kiss,’ which is given to people as soon as they die, was to resurrect people?  Similar to the way the Ironborn CPR ritual may have an origin in a real water magic resurrection, it could be the same for the last kiss of the R’hllorists.  As I’ve mentioned before, the R’hllorists do seem quite fixated on becoming fire people, wearing robes meant to look like shifting flames and tattooing flames on their faces.  It’s not really hard to picture ancient R’hllorists making fire undead people like Beric.

The thing I want to focus on here is Beric’s quality of life and state of being.  He’s much better off than the cold wights, completely different in fact, because Beric has free will and conscious thought, whereas the wights seem enslaved and retain very little of their original consciousness or memory.  Beric even has a measure of vital function – his black blood still flows, and he can eat and drink, and presumably digest.  At the same time,  Beric also lost quite a bit of himself, as he tells Thoros in ASOS:

“Can I dwell on what I scarce remember? I held a castle on the Marches once, and there was a woman I was pledged to marry, but I could not find that castle today, nor tell you the color of that woman’s hair. Who knighted me, old friend? What were my favorite foods? It all fades. Sometimes I think I was born on the bloody grass in that grove of ash, with the taste of fire in my mouth and a hole in my chest. Are you my mother, Thoros?” 

It seems that Beric is losing something of himself each time he comes back.  Later in ASOS, we have the following quote from Beric to Thoros, right after Thoros admits that lighting his tourney blades on fire wasn’t a good way to treat a sword.  Beric walks up unannounced and sort of kills the vibe with:

“Fire consumes.”  Lord Beric stood behind them, and there was something in his voice that silenced Thoros at once. “It consumes, and when it is done there is nothing left. Nothing.”

“Beric. Sweet friend.”  The priest touched the lightning lord on his forearm.  “What are you saying?”

“Nothing I have not said before.  Six times, Thoros?  Six times is too many.”  He turned away abruptly. 

Beric doesn’t even have it as bad as Lady Stoneheart, who was dead for three days before she was resurrected.   Her physical state is decomposed, and it seems her mental state may be as well.  While Beric rides around and employs strategy and thinks about logistics and feeding people and so on and so forth, while Stonehart simply gazes with malice and condemns people to die – her other names are “Mother Merciless” and “The Hangwoman”).  She can speak, albeit in a strangled fashion, so some part of herself does remain… but she seems like further decomposed than Beric in every way.  Thoros actually refused to give her the kiss, in fact, because she had been dead so long, but for some reason Beric chose to give up his burden and pass the flame of life along to Lady Catleyn-turned-Lady Stoneheart.

If I had to characterize the state of existence of Beric and Stoneheart, I would compare it to the way ghosts are portrayed in pop culture and myth.  The most prevalent belief about ghosts is that they linger on the earthly plane clutching at something – some grievance or tragedy or remorse or other form of unresolved attachment to their life.  It is almost always tied to whatever they were doing and however they were feeling when they died, and they key to helping set a ghost free to move on to the next realm generally has to do with bringing resolution to whatever the ghost is fixated on.

The last thing Beric was doing when he died was attempting to bring Gregor Clegane to justice and defending the Riverlands – and this becomes his sole motivation for existence after he is resurrected.  He stays loyal to the mission he was sent on by Ned in the name of King Robert even after Robert and Ned are both dead.  In similar fashion, Stoneheart is completely consumed with revenge for the Red Wedding, which is classic ghost material – a tragedy so heinous and unjust that there is no way the victim’s shade can find rest.  She is a spectre who haunts the Riverlands, taking revenge on Freys and and anyone else connected to the Red Wedding.

I think all of this is indicative of Beric and Stoneheart as remnants of their former selves, not the complete soul returned to the body.  They seem more like ghosts inhabiting their own reanimated corpses.  We can’t hope to be too technical here about what is a soul and what is a shade, but the point is that Beric and Cat are both significantly deteriorated…

…and we don’t want that to be true of Jon Snow.  That’s really what this comes down to – Jon is dead, and we don’t want to see him turn up like Beric or Stoneheart.  This has led people to try to rationalize a way that Jon didn’t actually die there in the snow, because they just can’t accept the idea that Martin is going to turn the beloved Jon Snow into a Beric.  Well, I am pretty sure Jon is dead – bleeding out from a neck wound so fast he loses consciousness in less than a minute – but take heart. I don’t think he’ll be a Beric, a remnant who can barely remember his former life or where his castle is.  I don’t think that resurrected Jon will be obsessed with avenging his death on his conspirators, and if he does return to the last thing he was doing – planning an assault on Ramsay at Winterfell – I would expect that to not be the end of the line fore Jon.  No, I think there is very good reason to think that Jon will turn out to be the optimal type of ‘zombie,’ the kind who can help save us from the Long Night.

The key is that Jon is a skinchanger.

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Jon of the Dead

This section is brought to you by Patreon supporter and newest claimant to one of the 12 houses of heaven, Wyrlane Dervish, woods witch of the Wolfswood, Earthly Avatar of Celestial House Scorpio

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With his dying words, Jon calls out to Ghost.  And we know from the Varamyr prologue of ADWD that when a skinchanger’s human body is killed, his spirit goes into his animal, there to linger for an unspecified amount of time before it eventually fades away into the beast spirit – this is known as a skinchanger’s “second life.”  We hear the same thing from Bloodraven as he and Bran are chatting after Bran’s first successful attempt to skinchange a raven in ADWD:

“Someone else was in the raven,” he told Lord Brynden, once he returned to his own skin.  “Some girl.  I felt her.”

 “A woman, of those who sing the song of earth,” his teacher said. “Long dead, yet apart of her remains, just as a part of you would remain in Summer if your boy’s flesh were to die upon the morrow.  A shadow on the soul.  She will not harm you.”

While this spirit of this singer is no threat to Bran, something of the original skinchanger does linger inside the animal and can have an effect on any new skinchanger tp take possession of that animal  .  When the wildling skinchanger Orell is killed by Jon Snow, his spirit lives on inside his eagle with a fierce hatred for Jon.  Later, Varamyr Sixskins takes possession of Orell’s eagle and says to Jon:

“Once a horse is broken to the saddle, any man can mount him,” he said in a soft voice. “Once a beast’s been joined to a man, any skinchanger can slip inside and ride him. Orell was withering inside his feathers, so I took the eagle for my own. But the joining works both ways, warg. Orell lives inside me now, whispering how much he hates you.

We get the most information about this in Varamyr’s prologue of ADWD, which practically seems like it is designed to function as a kind of skinchanger 101 for the reader:

“They say you forget,” Haggon had told him, a few weeks before his own death. “When the man’s flesh dies, his spirit lives on inside the beast, but every day his memory fades, and the beast becomes a little less a warg, a little more a wolf, until nothing of the man is left and only the beast remains.” Varamyr knew the truth of that. When he claimed the eagle that had been Orell’s, he could feel the other skinchanger raging at his presence. Orell had been slain by the turncloak crow Jon Snow, and his hate for his killer had been so strong that Varamyr found himself hating the beastling boy as well.

In fact, this process of a skinchanger merging with his beast can happen even without death being involved, as Jojen warns Bran in ASOS when Bran is gone too long in Summer’s skin:

“Bran the boy and Summer the wolf.  You are two, then?”

“Two,” he signed, “and one.”  He hated Jojen when he got stupid like this.  At Wintefell he wanted me to dream my wolf dreams, and now that I know he’s always calling me back.

“Remember that, Bran.  Remember yourself, or the wolf will consume you.  When you join, it is not enough to run and hunt in Summer’s skin.” 

Jojen’s point is punctuated  by just how wolfish Bran acts when in Summer – he thinks and acts like a wolf, more or less.  Jojen asks him to mark trees  as a means of exercising his human thought while in the wolf, but Bran fails.  This shows us that the beast presence is very strong and is always trying to take over the human presence, given enough time.  It is no wonder that upon entering second life, a skinchanger would begin to become beast-like before too much time goes by.

So, getting back to Jon Snow’s body, lying in the bloody snow… Jon is dead and his spirit has almost certainly gone into Ghost.  It will almost certainly be put back into Jon’s body somehow, lest we have only wolf-POV’s from Jon for the rest of the series, but we know there is a limited time in which to do so.  This is probably the meaning of a vision Melisandre sees of Jon in the flames in ADWD:

The flames crackled softly, and in their crackling she heard the whispered name Jon Snow . His long face floated before her, limned in tongues of red and orange, appearing and disappearing again, a shadow half-seen behind a fluttering curtain. Now he was a man, now a wolf, now a man again. But the skulls were here as well, the skulls were all around him. Melisandre had seen his danger before, had tried to warn the boy of it. Enemies all around him, daggers in the dark . He would not listen. Unbelievers never listened until it was too late.

A man, and then a wolf, and then a man again – that seems pretty straightforward as far as prophecy goes.  Almost everyone takes this to mean that Jon’s spirit will “go into” Ghost for a time and then eventually be returned to his body – a man and then a wolf and then a man again.  In this scenario, Ghost is essentially acting as a soul-jar for Jon’s spirit, a storage vessel to keep it protected from dissolution until it can be put into a new host body… or a resurrected host body.  This is a common trope in fantasy stories, the ancient wizard who keeps coming back no matter how often he is killed because he has a soul jar hidden somewhere which he returns to upon death, only to have his acolytes bring him a new host body so he can reincarnate.

Although I doubt Martin is imagining anything quite so fantastical as that, Ghost is in fact serving as a protective vessel for Jon’s soul – that is likely the meaning behind Martin’s choice to name the wolf ‘Ghost.’  This is the main reason why Jon will not be a Beric or a Stoneheart – his spirit will not dissolve into the ether upon death.  When a normal person like Beric is called back, even right after his death, we’ve seen that large part of the self is already gone.  But from everything we know about skinchnagers and second life, the human soul goes into the animal, and I think we are talking about the whole thing here.  He will start to merge with Ghost and become more wolf-like, but assuming that someone can act in time, I believe that we have hope of getting a resurrected Jon who can still remember where his castle is, what fired bread dipped in bacon grease tastes like, and how to crack dick jokes with Tormund.  And that is the beginning of why skinchangers make the best zombies, because their animals can act as storage vessels for a short time.

Sounds great, but there are three major obstacles.

First, his dead body will need to be reanimated or resurrected.  That’s actually the least difficult problem, as we have multiple means by which this could occur.  Jon is in the north, so ice magic is a possibility, and Melisandre is nearby, so fire magic is in play as well.  It may even be possible that there is a way to resurrect people with greenseer magic, primarily based on this line from ADWD which comes after Bran wakes from his first round of greenseer visions through Winterfell’s heart tree and reports back on what he saw:

Bran’s throat was very dry. He swallowed. “Winterfell. I was back in Winterfell. I saw my father. He’s not dead, he’s not , I saw him, he’s back at Winterfell, he’s still alive.”

“No,” said Leaf. “He is gone, boy. Do not seek to call him back from death.”

It’s an odd line, because Bran isn’t even talking about attempting some sort of resurrection magic or anything, and Leaf just volunteers that a greenseer should not try to raise people from the dead.  The only reason to really warn Bran against resurrection would be if it is indeed possible for a greenseer to raise the dead, and presumably this would have dire consequences.  I tend to think greenseers can and have raised the dead, and we will talk about that more later, but for now we can simply say that there are multiple avenues to raise Jon’s body, be it a process based in ice or fire magic, or even a more theoretical greenseer-based process involving Bran and/or Bloodraven.

Jon’s body will be preserved from decomposition by the extreme cold – likely inside an ice cell – so the method of resurrection will determine the state of Jon’s physical body when he is returned to live.  A fire resurrection seems to have a chance to restore some manner of vital processes like flowing blood and the ability to eat and drink, so I tend to favor that over ice, but who knows, maybe Jon doesn’t need to eat or drink to make for an interesting POV.  Bran does see Jon in his coma vision “sleeping alone in a cold bed, his skin growing pale and hard as the memory of all warmth fled from him,” which could certainly be foreshadowing to Jon’s dead body becoming pale and hard like an ice wight or like Coldhands.

Now If Jon’s body is raised by cold magic, that means his body will have been wighted, and that presents the additional problem of having to drive the wight spirit out of the body so Jon can repossess it – that could make for some interesting drama, certainly.  This may have happened to Coldhands, a cold wight who is not possessed by the Others’ blue-star-eyes magic, so we have to say this is a possibility for Jon too.

Old Nan had told her there were spiders down here, and rats as big as dogs. Robb smiled when she said that. “There are worse things than spiders and rats,” he whispered. “This is where the dead walk.” That was when they heard the sound, low and deep and shivery. Baby Bran had clutched at Arya’s hand. When the spirit stepped out of the open tomb, pale white and moaning for blood, Sansa ran shrieking for the stairs, and Bran wrapped himself around Robb’s leg, sobbing. Arya stood her ground and gave the spirit a punch. It was only Jon, covered with flour. “You stupid ,” she told him, “you scared the baby.”   

This is one of the well-known foreshadowings of Jon’s death and resurrection – Arya’s punch mimics Bowen Marsh stabbing of Jon in the gut, which was also described as a punch.  Jon is a pale white spirit with a shivery sound, so you could lean towards interpreting Jon as a cold resurrected being, but it’s not what I would call conclusive.  His ghost could be pale white with red eyes, like his wolf Ghost, after all.

Consider also that if he is to wield a burning red sword, being an ice-wight might pose a problem – Coldhands stays well away from the fire, indicating that he is as vulnerable to fire as other ice wights are.  And although I am probably biased in the way of fire, I really do like the idea that Ghosts’s red eyes are a foreshadowing of what Jon’s ghost will look like – pale white with eyes like two red suns.  The second sun, if you will.

Heck, maybe Jon’s body will be raised by the Others ice magic and repossessed with the aid of Melisandre’s fire magic.  I am trying to keep our speculation grounded in the examples of magic that we have already been given in the books, but we also do not know what limits of any magic are, so I am also suggesting things that may be one step further that what we have seen.  Common fire breaks the spell over the wights by destroying them, perhaps fire magic could be used to simply break the hold of the Others on the corpse, whereupon can be repossessed by the original skinchanger spirit.

We don’t have any idea what a theoretical greenseer resurrection might look like, so that option is pretty much wide open.  It may well be the best way, since both ice and fire resurrections seem to have certain limitations.  A greenseer resurrection could be the ticket to getting a resurrected Jon that is basically whole, one that could perhaps sire children on a certain thought-to-be-infertile-but-maybe-isn’t Silver Dragon Queen.

The second obstacle to achieving resurrected skinchanger Jon is that we don’t know how long we have to get Jon’s spirit out of Ghost before his memories fade and he begins to merge with Ghosts’s spirit.  If Jon is only in Ghost for a day or three, perhaps the human spirit can be separated from the wolf spirit and returned to his body.  This leads to the third problem, which is ‘how do you put a skinchanger’s soul back into his resurrected body after he’s already begun his second life,’ but assuming that can be managed, this would be the more straightforward of the resurrection scenarios that we can imagine with the information we have.  Ghost keeps Jon’s soul safe for just a couple of days, then it is somehow returned to his body, more or less intact.

But if he is in there longer… it’s possible his spirit could have merged with Ghost’s to the point where they can no longer be separated.  In this scenario, the only way to get Jon back in his body would be to bring the wolf spirit along too, to put the merged man / wolf spirit back into the human body.  This would make for some kind of badass wolfman zombie, the kind of dude I can see whooping ass on the Others or anyone else who gets in his way…. that’s pretty cool.  The downside to this is that the wolf body would have to die, because if the merged wolf  / man spirit is going back to Jon’s body, there is nothing left in the wolf.

This would actually line up very well with Jon’s many parallels with Mithras, because as we know, the white bull who is a friend to Mithras and even a part of Mithras in a sense has to be sacrificed so that Mithras can be reborn.  In our other podcasts, we have seen that Ghost has several scenes of foreshadowing involving bulls and sacrifice, so I feel like there is a good chance this will happen.  In this case we could look at the idea of a merged wolf-man spirit going back into Jon as a silver lining, because Ghost won’t really be dead – just his wolf body.  Ghost will live on in Jon… with Jon’s ghost.

The third problem, which I already mentioned, is how to get Jon’s spirit or the merged Jon / Ghost spirit out of the wolf and into the man again.  A skinchanger cannot do this himself – once he begins second life in his animal, he cannot then skinchange other animals or a new human body.  Someone is going to have to help, and I think were got a likely foreshadowing of this in ASOS when Orell recalls being kicked out of his eagle:

One moment, he had been soaring above the Wall, his eagle’s eyes marking the movement of the men below.  Then the flames had turned his heart into a blackened cinder and sent his spirit screaming back into his own skin, and for a little while he’d gone mad. Even the memory was enough to make him shudder. 

This isn’t exactly like Jon’s scenario will be, because Orell is not dead, merely inhabiting his eagle when the eagle is killed, but if we look at this as potential literary foreshadowing, what we just saw was Melisandre use fire to drive a skinchanger’s spirit from his animal.  It could be a similar scenario with Ghost being burned to send the wolfman spirit back into the reanimated Jon body.

Another potential foreshadowing of Jon’s resurrection comes from Mirri Maz Duur’s attempts to save Drogo’s life.  Consider Mirri’s words as she sacrifices the stallion:

“Strength of the mount, go into the rider,” Mirri sang as horse blood swirled into the waters of Drogo’s bath. “Strength of the beast, go into the man.”

If Drogo had been a skinchanger, this ceremony might have actually worked.  Drogo’s body wasn’t quite dead, but it was slipping into a coma and his spirit could easily have been beginning to separate from his body – we don’t know the theoretical rules of magic in this fictional universe.  But the point is this – if Drogo was a skinchanger, this whole thing would have made a lot of sense.  His spirit would have gone into that horse as he died, and therefore killing the horse in such a way as to have the strength of the horse go into the rider would be akin to returning Drogo’s spirit from his horse back to his body.  Mirri’s leaf-shaped bronze knife, engraved with runes, almost reminds us of a First Men type of blood sacrifice ritual.

And just to tell you, there is a really cool theory that the Dothraki bond with their horses – they let other share their wives but not their horses, for example, and their horse are slaughtered when they die – is a leftover remnant of a time when Dothraki actually skinchnaged their horses.  This is speculative, but not impossible, because in TWOIAF we learn of the Ifequevron, the Woods Walkers, who sound more or less exactly like cotf – and they live in a forest just north of the Dothraki sea and were revered by the Dothraki.  There are tales of centaurs in the ancient past in that area, which could be accounts of horse skinchangers.  If that’s the case, Mirri might well have been using a skinchanger resurrection ceremony quite intentionally, knowing it would not work on Drogo and produce a vegetable.  Now, regardless of whether any of that is true, I do think this botched resurrection involving the horse and Drogo might be serving as a loose parallel to the resurrection process for Jon.

George has also given us a Biblical zombie reference here, as Mirri is of the people known as the Lhazar, a seeming variant of Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead.

Thinking again of Qyburn and un-Gregor, it may be that Qyburn was somehow using blood magic to send the strength or life force of the various torture victims into Gregor’s corpse to animate it, just as Mirri tried to send the strength of the horse into the rider.

It’s pretty interesting to note that both Qyburn and Mirri are practicing what we would call blood magic, and both studied magic in Asshai. But while Qyburn’s blood magic has neither fire or ice involved, Mirri’s blood magic performed on Drogo gives us a whiff of both, and here we find another parallel between this ceremony and Jon Snow’s potential resurrection.  This is Dany’s inner monologue from AGOT:

Inside the tent the shapes were dancing, circling the brazier and the bloody bath, dark against the sandsilk, and some did not look human.  She glimpsed the shadow of a great wolf, and another like a man wreathed in flames.

Jon Snow, being the son of Rhaegar and Lyanna, of dragon and dire wolf, is very much a representation of the unity of ice and fire.  Sometimes I like to call him ‘Azor Ahai reborn in an icy sheath’ – consider his dream in ADWD where is manning the Wall alone, armored in black ice with a sword that burns red in his fist.  So when we consider the man wreathed in flame and the great wolf in Mirri’s tent, we can see a personification of Jon Snow.  The flaming man can represent his Targaryen side – dragons are fire made flesh, Dany proclaims herself fire made flesh when she wakes the dragons, and Azor Ahai reborn is the “warrior of fire.”  The great wolf, on the other hand, seems like an obvious callout to the dire wolf of House Stark.

Why would there be parallels to Jon’s resurrection here at Drogo’s botched resurrection?  For one, simply as a means to foreshadow the animal sacrifice component of Jon’s resurrection in a clever way; two, equating Jon with Drogo , Dany’s husband, may serve to foreshadow a union between Dany and Jon; and three, because both Jon and Drogo play into the larger “solar king” archetype which is a part of the Azor Ahai character.  Regular listeners and readers of Mythical Astronomy will know what I am talking about here, and if you’re curious about this, simply check out the first episode of the Bloodstone Compendium, our very first podcast.  The main point is that the death of the solar king is the first part of the Azor Ahai reborn process.  In Dany’s case, Drogo the solar king dies at the same time Daenerys rises as Azor Ahai reborn, the new solar king.  She takes his place as Khalessi and wears the lion pelt to signify to all that she “has Drogo’s strength inside her.”  In Jon’s case, he is both the dying solar king and the reborn Azor Ahai.  Dany had a symbolic rebirth in the pyre, and Jon will have a more literal resurrection, becoming Azor Ahai reborn the zombie, which is kind of what we are getting at here.

So let’s return to the matter at hand, which is how to get Jon’s spirit or a combined Jon / Ghost spirit back into Jon’s resurrected body.  So far, it doesn’t look good for Ghost’s wolf body surviving, and we aren’t done yet.  We have other examples of skinchangers being forced out of their animal by pain – it happens to Bran in ACOK when he tries to climb a tree in Summer’s body as the Ironborn are invading – Summer falls and Bran is forced out by the pain.  It also happens to Jon and Ghost in the skirling pass – Jon is forced out of Ghost in ACOK when Ghost is viciously attacked by Orell’s eagle.  And in A Storm of Swords, Bran’s wolf Summer takes a wound while saving Jon’s life from the wildling party, and when Bran tries to reach out to Summer afterward, we read that:

Bran had reached out for Summer time and time again, but the pain he found drove him back, the way a red hot kettle makes you pull your hand back even when you mean to grab it.

Pain seems to be a pretty reliable way to force a skinchanger out of an animal, and here the pain is even compared to a red hot kettle, another potential allusion to the idea of burning Ghost.

Approaching this problem from the opposite end, how else might we accomplish the moving of Jon’s soul back into his body?  Well, we have one other example of how this might be done, and I’m happy to say that it actually gives Ghost a chance to live!  Wouldn’t that be nice.  It comes from Varamyr’s prologue in ADWD:

None of them had been as strong as Varamyr Sixskins though, not even Haggon, tall and grim, with his hands as hard as stone. The hunter died weeping when Varamyr took Greyskin from him, driving him out to claim the beast for his own.  No second life for you, old man.

Again, the important difference between this example and Jon’s resurrection scenario is that Haggon was simply driven out of his wolf and back into his still living body; what we need to do with Jon is going to be harder, because we need to put the spirit back into a reanimated corpse, and because Jon’s spirit may have merged with Ghost’s to some extent.  Nevertheless, this is the only other precedent for forcing a skinchanger spirit out of an animal, so it is worth considering.

The obvious candidates for a skinchanger powerful enough to pull off something like this would of course be Bloodraven or Bran.  I’d like to give a shout-out to radio Westeros here, whose episode “Jon Snow: Only the Cold” suggests Bran’s involvement in Jon’s resurrection, perhaps in the Weirwood ‘Grove of Nine’ where the Night’s Watch brothers say their vows in front of heart trees.  They also suggested the idea of a merged Jon-Ghost which produces a more wolfish Jon, which I obviously think is a terrific idea with a good chance of shaking out to be true.

Alright, so we’ve presented multiple ways by which Jon might be resurrected, and two different ways he might be sent out of Ghost and back into his body.  Let’s say that some combination of these possibilities works out, and now we’ve raised Jon from the dead.  His skinchanger status has hopefully preserved his spirit more than other zombies we have met.  Maybe he’s a wolfman, maybe it’s mostly same old Jon, but either way, he’s a skinchanger zombie, and he’s the best zombie we ever met.  He’s got to be handsome enough to woo Daenerys, after all.

So what’s the point of killing Jon and raising him from the dead, other than a dramatic narrative cliffhanger where we all think Jon is dead for five years while George writes the next book?  I’ve made this point elsewhere in passing, but it really deserves it owns time in the sun, and that’s why I made this stand along episode about zombies.  This is the ultimate purpose of not only Jon’s resurrection, but of the general increase in zombie activity in the story which admittedly, strikes some people as out of place or odd.

So what’s all this zombie stuff about?

This is about the last hero.  The old last hero and the new last hero.

This is about creating the ideal person to journey into the cold, dead lands and confront the Others.  We don’t know if that means fighting the Others or something more complex, some kind of negotiation, trade, or sacrifice; but the main thing we do know is that the last hero journeyed into these “cold dead lands” and confronted the Others, and this is thought to have somehow brought about the end of the Long Night.  We’ll talk about all that, but just think for a moment about the skill-set offered by a fully conscious resurrected person.

“There’s been too much going around,” Meera insisted, “and too many secrets. I don’t like it. I don’t like him. And I don’t trust him. Those hands of his are bad enough. He hides his face, and will not speak a name. Who is he? What is he? Anyone can put on a black cloak. Anyone, or any thing . He does not eat, he never drinks, he does not seem to feel the cold.”

It’s true. Bran had been afraid to speak of it, but he had noticed. Whenever they took shelter for the night, while he and Hodor and the Reeds huddled together for warmth, the ranger kept apart. Sometimes Coldhands closed his eyes, but Bran did not think he slept.

He doesn’t need to eat.

He doesn’t need to sleep.

He doesn’t need to seek warmth or shelter.

Like I said, pretty much the ideal skill set to survive north of the Wall, right?  Those are the major problems – food, shelter, warmth, and all solved by zombie-hood.  This is exactly what is going on with Coldhands, who has been ranging the frozen dead lands beyond the Wall for God-only-knows how long.  I’m not saying Coldhands is the original last hero – though it is possible – but what I am proposing is this: both Coldhands and the last hero have something in common with Jon Snow, and that is being a resurrected skinchanger or greenseer.  I am proposing that only a resurrected skinchanger can ultimately face down the Others and their cold winds and that Jon is going to become a resurrected skinchanger precisely because he will be the man to confront the Others, the new last hero for a new Long Night which is surely coming.

We have a lot less to go on with the last hero, so we will start with him and then go on to Coldhands, one of the best mysteries in ASOIAF… I have been waiting since like forever to talk about Coldhands, and he might be my favorite character, as odd as that sounds.  Talk of Jon will be woven throughout, and we might see some little Green Men pop up here and there.

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The Last Hero Was a Zombie

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This is the theory in a nutshell – the Last Hero was a skinchanger or greenseer who became a zombie in order to defeat the Others.  Again, we don’t know how exactly this was done – the annals of the Night’s Watch speak of the Last Hero slaying Others with a blade of Dragonsteel, so fighting is probably involved, but in a story like AOSIAF, it’s also unlikely that the fate of the world will come down to just sword fighting.  That’s not really important for the matter at hand though – however he confronted the Others, being a skinchanger zombie is what made it possible in my opinion.  Jon will be called upon to do the same, and he is about to be a skinchanger zombie.

That’s actually one of the best supporting pieces of evidence for this theory – Jon IS in fact going to be a resurrected skinchanger, and we are left to ask why.  I believe this theory provides compelling reason for it, and I cannot think of any other reason for him to be undead other than ‘it uniquely prepares him to journey into the cold dead lands,’ as Coldhands does now and as the Last Hero once did.

Alright, so let us consider the last hero.  We are told of him in AGOT by none other than Old Nan:

“So as cold and death filled the earth, the last hero determined to seek out the children, in the hopes that their ancient magics could win back what the armies of men had lost. He set out into the dead lands with a sword, a horse, a dog, and a dozen companions. For years he searched, until he despaired of ever finding the children of the forest in their secret cities. One by one his friends died, and his horse, and finally even his dog, and his sword froze so hard the blade snapped when he tried to use it. And the Others smelled the hot blood in him, and came silent on his trail, stalking him with packs of pale white spiders big as hounds—”

The idea that the last hero might have been a Stark, together with the dog in this story, have been taken by many as clues that the last hero was a skinchanger.  We generally associate the First Men with skinchanging and the Starks with being wargs, so it just kind of feels right.  The tradition of creating stone effigies of the Kings of Winter with a wolf at their side which goes back eight thousand years in the past or more speaks of a family that has always been a family of wargs.  When you consider that Bran and Jon, the characters who most closely parallel the last hero, are both skinchangers, it starts to seem more and more likely.

In any case, we are all familiar with the basics: twelve companions who died, a dog and horse who also died, a sword broken from the cold, the Others and their ice spiders… and then there’s a gap in the story, as Martin interrupts Old Nan with other events in the chapter.  But later in the chapter, Bran and the rest receive news from Yoren that BenJen Stark has not been seen in a while, and we get a clue about the resolution of the last hero’s story:

All Bran could think of was Old Nan’s story of the Others and the last hero, hounded through the white woods by dead men and spiders a big as hounds.  He was afraid for a moment, until he remembered how that story ended.  “The children will help him,” he blurted, “The children of the forest!”

Theon Greyjoy sniggered, and Maester Luwin said “Bran, the children of the forest have been dead and gone for thousands of years. All that is left of them are the faces in the trees.”

“Down here, might be that’s true, Maester,” Yoren said, “but up past the Wall, who’s to say?  Up there, a man can’t always tell what’s alive and what’s dead.”

Truer words were never spoken – north of the Wall, it’s hard to tell what is alive and what is dead.  Lots of foreshadowing in this passage, which is why I quoted a bit more of it than necessary.  The key point is the last hero’s story – at some point after the death of his twelve companions, his horse, and his dog, he receives some kind of aid from the children of the forest that allows him to triumph.

That’s pretty wide open – we don’t know what kind of help he received or how that enabled him to win.  We can immediately speculate that they might have sheltered him from the Others, because we have seen the children do that for Bran in Bloodraven’s hollow hill, which is warded by spells that the wights cannot break.  (Those same spells keep Coldhands out as well, confirming that Coldhands is basically similar in nature to the cold wights except for not being possessed.)  But sheltering the last hero from the Others doesn’t defeat Others or win the War for the Dawn, so there must be a few more pieces to the puzzle.

The only other clue about the last hero comes in AFFC when Sam reports back to Jon his findings in the annals of the Night’s Watch.  It’s short, so we’ll just quote it to be exact:

“I found one account of the Long Night that spoke of the last hero slaying Others with a blade of dragonsteel.  Supposedly they could not stand against it.”

Somehow, the last hero goes from cold and alone and chased by the Others to possessing this mysterious sword of dragonsteel which the Others could not stand against.  That is all we have to go on regarding the last hero, and it leaves a lot of questions.  The children in ancient day provided dragonglass weapons to the Night’s Watch, so if dragonsteel is simply a big, sword-sized hunk of dragonglass, then maybe the children gave him the sword and that is that.  But if it is something more, some kind of metal, then it’s hard to see how the children could have provided it.

Aziz from History of Westeros suggested on our recent collaborative episode on the Great Empire of the Dawn that the rumors of the children trading with seafaring traders in the Dawn Age at Battle Isle could account for the children somehow coming into possession of an advanced steel weapon that they could have later provided to the last hero.  That is one possibility, and otherwise it’s hard to see how the children could have provided the last hero with a sword.

The other possibility is that they didn’t – perhaps they provided him some other kind of help crucial to defeating the Others. .

Perhaps they raised the last hero from the dead.

If the Last Hero was an undead skinchanger as I suggest, then someone has to raise him from the dead.  It could have been anyone, someone not pictured in the story, but the children are the obvious candidate.

“Do not seek to call him back from death.”

So you’re saying there’s a chance… ha ha.  There’s another clue about the children being able to interact with the dead in ACOK, when Lord Commander Mormont leads the ranging into the haunted forest and they come upon Whitetree and its monstrous weirwood.  Mormont is contemplating a human skull found in the maw of the weirwood like some kind of barbarian Hamlet:

“Would that bones could talk,” the Old Bear grumbled.  “This fellow could tell us much. . How he died. Who burned him, and why.  Where the wildlings have gone.”  He sighed.  “The children of the forest could speak to the dead, but I can’t.”

For what it’s worth, Martin did create a “Yorick Yronwood” who apparently joined the Night’s Watch sometime in the past, so the odds are good that this scene is a humorous nod to Hamlet.  In any case,  this idea that the children could speak to the dead could be a garbled account of greenseers “speaking with the dead” in the sense that they can hear the words spoken in the past by people who are now dead.  But from what we have seen so far, the most greenseers seem to be able to do is to rustle their leaves a bit for the person in the past or breathe a word on the wind in the present time, as Bran does by making the Winterfell heart tree whisper Theon’s name.  That’s not really speaking with the dead though, so perhaps this is a clue about the children being able to actually interact with deceased souls – and maybe, just maybe, call them back.

A slight variation on this idea would be the possibility that the last hero was killed by the Others and wighted, and the children helped him by driving out the Other’s magical possession, freeing his soul and making him a conscious cold wight.  This may be how Coldhands was created, and it could happen to Jon, as I mentioned.   If the last hero was a skinchanger, then the same logic applies to him that applies to Jon – his soul might have been stored in an animal until his body could be freed of Other-possession, and the children are a likely candidate to have helped accomplish this.

Once again, on the most basic level, Jon will be an undead skinchanger, so his parallels to the last hero – which we will discuss in more detail as we go – demand that we consider the possibility that the last hero might have been an undead skinchanger, however he might have been resurrected.   If we look at the last hero story as a fable, we can see that his very act of journeying into the “dead lands” is thematically symbolic of someone journeying into the realm of death, into the grave, and seeking for a way to defeat it.    Thematically, it’s about defeating death, and thus, resurrection, and it may well be literally about those things too.

Jon parallels the last hero, but he also parallels Azor Ahai, a character who is, as it happens, fundamentally about being reborn.  He ain’t called Azor Ahai reborn for nothin, right?  Jon is about to become Azor Ahai reborn as a zombie, so again, we must consider it possible that the original Azor Ahai was a zombie.

If you know anything about Mythical Astronomy of Ice and Fire, you know that I believe the concept of ‘Azor Ahai reborn’ does not apply to merely one person, that it is more like an archetypal role which multiple characters play into.  Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen are the two most obvious and important manifestations of the idea of ‘Azor Ahai reborn,’ but other characters seem to parallel Azor Ahai as well, such as Beric Dondarrion and Stannis Baratheon, two people who wield flaming swords in the series. That does not mean that every single person who echoes some part of the Azor Ahai symbolism will play a part in ending the Long Night as we expect Jon and Dany to.  Beric, for example, is already dead – dead as in permanently dead – so we know that his echoes of Azor Ahai are probably meant to be symbolic in nature.  Stannis is basically an imposter Azor Ahai with a fake Lightbringer, and he too I tend to view as a symbolic echo, meant to inform us about the nature of Azor Ahai.

With that brief explanation of archetypes and how there are used in mind, consider Beric and Stannis, two of our flaming sword wielders, because both give us clues about an undead skinchanger or greenseer version of Azor Ahai.  Stannis is an obvious Azor Ahai parallel by virtue of being called Azor Ahai reborn and wielding a flaming sword called Lightbringer, but it goes further.  Stannis heads north to the Wall and he is primarily concerned with facing the threat of the Others, just like the last hero.  And wouldn’t you know it, Stannis is often described as half a corpse.  He’s apparently been  drained by making shadow babies with Melisandre, as Davos observes in ACOK:

Now that Stannis Baratheon had come into his power, the lordlings buzzed around him like flies round a corpse. He looks half a corpse too, years older than when I left Dragonstone.

Half-corpse Azor Ahai, in other words.  He also keeps a fire-magic user at his side and even practices a bit of fire magic as well, seeing a vision or two in the flames in his own right.

As for clues about skinchanging or greenseeing, we must look to his House.  Stannis is a Baratheon, whose sigil is the stag (Stannis’s is a burning stag enclosed in a fiery heart) and the Baratheons typically wear helms with antlers on them.  The ancient Storm Kings of Durrandon also wore “the stag crown,” which is more of the same symbolism.  Naturally, this reminds us very much of the green men on the Isle of Faces who are said to either have antlers on their heads or to wear antlered head gear, and who are likely to be greenseers of some fashion or another.  Thus, Stannis is a half-corpse stag man who carries Lightbringer.  Apologies for just dropping something tasty like the Green Men in there offhandedly, but we’ll talk about green men quite a bit in just a minute.

Then we have Beric, owner of perhaps the largest inventory of meaningful symbolism in the entire series.  He’s got the flaming sword, and he’s a resurrected corpse, and he’s strongly tied to fire magic, so like Stannis, he implies Azor Ahai the fiery half-corpse.  Beric has weaker parallels to the last hero in that he heroically leads a noble brotherhood against long odds and wears a black cloak, although admittedly Beric’s black cloak is speckled with stars and that is clearly against the Night’s Watch dress code.

Beric isn’t a stag man, but he is sworn to one – King Robert, in whose name he fights on.  Beric also has several clear parallels with Bloodraven which I am sure most of you are familiar with which work to imply Beric as a stand-in for a greenseer.  When we first see resurrected Beric, he’s in a cave threaded through with weirwood roots, just like Bloodraven’s cave, and he is seated in a tangle of weirwood roots, very like Bloodaven and the other greenseers in the cave who sit in weirwood thrones.  Beric had one eye put out, just like Bloodraven.  Beric is called “a scarecrow knight” while Bloodraven is the three-eyed crow and was once a crow of the Night’s Watch.  Beric is also called “the lord of corpses,” while Bloodraven is called the corpse lord in a Bran chapter of ADWD.  Beric is called the “wisp o’ the wood,” and wisp means ghost, while Bloodraven is essentially a ghost turning into a tree.

All of which is to say, Beric is showing us the symbolism of a resurrected greenseer or skinchanger who wields Lightbringer, just like Stannis, and just like Jon.  And perhaps, just like the last hero.

Jon and Stannis also have the blood of the dragon in their veins, while Beric parallels someone who does, Bloodraven.   The notion of the last hero being a resurrected skinchanger with the blood of the dragon meshes well with the idea of the last hero being connected to Azor Ahai, who almost certainly had the blood of the dragon in his veins.  Once again, Jon seems to be the culmination of all of this, uniting greenseer blood and dragon blood, wielding a burning red sword (only in his dreams so far, but you know it is coming in real life too), becoming a resurrected person, leading the fight against the Others…  And if you are curious about hearing some of the other evidence for the idea of Azor Ahai being a greenseer, check out my episode called “The Grey King and the Sea Dragon” if you haven’t already.  This is my current hypothesis about Azor Ahai, that he was a greenseer, and that’s irrespective of whether or not he is the hast hero, although obviously I think there is some sort of close connection.

It’s also worth noting that fire magic is the key to the transformation process of both Stannis and Beric.  Beric is resurrected by fire magic, and Stannis has been drained and turned corpse-like though the use of Melisandre’s fire magic.  This may be another clue about Jon’s resurrection coming via fire magic, and / or a clue about the last hero being raised with such, though I want to stay open minded about that.  I am holding out hope for a greenseer resurrection, if only to see what happens.

Alright, I think our theory makes sense.  A skinchanger zombie is ideally suited to face the cold dead lands, and that is what the last hero did.  Jon will be a skinchanger zombie, and he’s probably fated to journey into those same cold dead lands.  Several major characters who parallel Azor Ahai reborn to some extent suggest the idea of a resurrected skinchanger or greenseer.  But Jon hasn’t been resurrected yet, and we may have already seen a resurrected skinchanger… so let’s talk about Coldhands.

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Hands of Cold are Always Old

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“Brother!”  The shout cut through the night, through the shrieks of a thousand ravens.  Beneath the trees, a man muffled head to heels in mottled blacks and greys sat astride an elk.  “Here,” the rider called.  A hood shadowed his face. 

He’s wearing blacks.  Sam urged Gilly toward him.  The elk was huge, a great elk, ten feet tall at the shoulder, with a rack of antlers near as wide.  The creature sank to his knees to let them mount.  “Here,” the rider said, reaching down with a gloved hand to pull Gilly up beside him.  Then it was Sam’s turn.  “My thanks,” he puffed.  Only when he grasped the offered hand did he realize that the rider wore no glove.  His hand was black and cold, with fingers hard as stone.

And with that memorable scene from ASOS, Coldhands rides into our imagination, giving rise to a thousand fan theories and one.  First off, I have to say that I do not think Coldhands is being skinchanged by Bloodraven, a theory which is out there.  I think this is apparent from the way that Coldhands speaks and acts, as we will see in our analysis here.  No, I believe Coldhands is his own man – his own dead man, rather.  I am proposing that is an undead skinchanger or greenseer.  Not only that, but he seems to still be in possession of his greenseer magic, which is a good sign for resurrected Jon being able to use magic.  It probably couldn’t be any other way, if you think about it – it doesn’t make much sense to take away Jon’s magic before the conclusion of the books.  If anything, I am expecting resurrected Jon to potentially have more access to magic, not less.  So let’s start there, with why I think Coldhands is a skinchanger or greenseer, and why I think he is still in possession of his magic.

The first clue is that the great elk which Coldhands rides is not terrified of him, as animals usually are of the corpse stink of the wights, which Coldhands definitely has.  We are introduced to the idea that animals are not keen for the smell of wights in AGOT, when Jon and the Night’s Watch discover the corpses of Jafer Flowers and Othor in the haunted forest.  None of the dogs will go near the corpses, no matter if they are kicked and dragged by mean old Chett.   Even when the corpses are wrapped up in cloaks, they cause the horses to go mad when the brothers try to put the corpses on their back.  The horses kick and scream and bite to the point where the black brothers had to rig up sleds to drag the bodies back to Castle Black themselves.

The direwolves are not quite as terrified of the cold wights – recall that it was Ghost who found the corpses and tore off a hand to bring back to show Jon.  But they still smell the peculiar cold corpse stink of the wights and they  do not like it.  This is from the first Bran chapter of ADWD when the party is starting north with Coldhands:

The elk stopped suddenly, and the ranger vaulted lightly from his back to land in knee deep snow. Summer growled at him, his fur bristling.  The dire wolf did not like the way Coldhands smelled. Dead meat. dry blood, and a faint whiff of rot.  And cold, cold all over. 

Notice that there’s only a faint whiff of rot – the cold and or the cold magic seems to preserve the wighted bodies.  It was the same when Jon and company found Other and Jafer Flowers – they did not smell like decomposing bodies.  So the smell of these icy undead is different than a dead body, and presumably not as bad – nothing is as bad as decomposing flesh, after all.  Despite this, normal animals are terrified of them, and even direwolves are not too keen on them.  There is something about their smell which is just plain old wrong, and thematically, this makes sense because the wights are essentially an abomination of natural life.

The great elk, however, shows no signs of being troubled by Coldhands ‘wrong’ smell, permitting Coldhands to ride on its back as if it were a horse or a mule.  The only explanation is magic, of one sort or another.

Even without the corpse-stink problem, riding a great elk is basically a miracle.  How many of you know what a great elk actually is?  It’s a real thing, and it’s absolutely terrifying.  Do yourself a favor, right now if you can, and look up ‘irish elk skeleton’ or ‘monoceros skeleton’ and take a look at these beasts.  Ten feet tall at the shoulder is not an exaggeration, and a rack of antlers the same distance across is no lie either.

And saying “rack of antlers” doesn’t really do it justice – they look like two five foot dragon wings made of bone with swords attached to them.  Take a look and tell me if you have a better description, because that’s pretty much whether look like.  The muscle necessary to lift a head with those giant multi-pronged man-skewers must’ve been stupendous – this was an immensely powerful, truly terrifying creature if angered.  Normal stags are symbolic of wild male virility, the ultimate untamable animal, and this is basically like a stag reimagined in some sort of demonic alternate universe.  Dragon wings, with swords sticking out, made of bone, I’m telling you.  You don’t want nunna this.

I’ve been meaning to rant about irish elk for a while now, but the point is that this is a wild beast, not a mule, and the only way anyone could ride one is through greenseer magic.  Additionally, and of course this is the point, Coldhands isn’t just any old person, he’s an icy undead, with his unnatural smell that animals really do not like – so Coldhands is not only taming a fearsome wild beast, but he’s somehow overcoming the fear of wighted corpses which all animals seem to share.  It’s a mystery deserving of an answer.

Perhaps more inexplicably, the elk seems to obey Coldhands’ commands even after he separates from the party to go after the rogue Night’s Watch mutineers.  The elk carries the children to a pre-designated spot, or at least very close to it, which is the little abandoned wildling village by the lake.  On the way, Bran thinks how he cannot tell from the snow-covered landscape where the lake ends or begins but that the elk seemed to know the way – and indeed it did.  This is highly intelligent, coordinated, cooperative behavior between the elk and Coldhands, and again it really doesn’t make any sense without greenseer magic as an explanation.  And on the flip side, greenseer magic very neatly explains what we see – except that Coldhands is dead.

Here we come upon a problem with the idea that Bloodraven is skinchanging Coldhand’s corpse – if he is inhabiting Coldhands’s body, who is working magic on the elk?  It seems unlikely Bloodraven is doing all of that at once – we’ve never been shown a skinchanger who can split his consciousness and inhabit two beings simultaneously – much one less one who can simultaneously inhabit something that is dead and something that is living.  It make more sense that the relationship between the elk and Coldhands is more typical of a skinchanger and his animal, as it appears to be.

Skinchangers do not need to literally inhabit an animal to control it.  Varymyr Sixskins is able to ride his snow bear without actually skinchanging it for example – the mere fact that he has established a skinchanger bond with the bear is enough to control it.  We are told the bear hated Varamyr’s bonding with it, so we know that when Varamyr rides it, he is in fact using his skinchanger magic to control a wild beast without actually inhabiting its consciousness from moment to moment.  Otherwise, he’d be in a dream state on top of the bear and he would fall off.  It just wouldn’t work, you know?

We could also look to the Starks and their wolves as examples – the wolves are fearsome deadly beasts, but never hurt the Stark children, and the Stark children don’t need to be skinchanging their wolves from moment to moment to make it so.  What we can say from all of this is that if Coldhands has access to skinchanger magic, it explains the problem of the elk very well.

The one major possibility are those children of the forest greenseers Bran sees in Bloodraven’s cave.  They seem pretty far gone, but who knows, maybe they reforming the elk to carry a corpse on its back against its will.  The main argument I have against this is that there are signs of a personal relationship between Coldhands and the great elk which smacks of a typical human – animal bond or a skinchanger – animal bond. I am mentioning it in the interest of good scholarship, but I think this option unlikely, as you will see.

The next sign of Coldhands using skinchanger magic that we need to discuss is his communication with ravens.  Although we associate the idea of using ravens to communicate with the maesters, this practice actually originated with skinchangers, as we learn from Lord Brynden Rivers a.k.a. the three-eyed crow in ADWD:

“Do all the birds have singers in them?”

“All,” Lord Brendan said.  “It was the singers who taught the First Men to send messages by raven… but in those days, the birds would speak the words.  The trees remember, but men forget, and so now they write the messages on parchment and tie them round the feet of birds who have never shared their skin.” 

The last line makes it clear that the original practice was to share the skins of the birds being used to communicate, not just a matter of training the ravens to speak or even understanding the speech of ravens, though the children are also said to be able to understand animal speech.  But here Bloodraven is specifically indicating that human skinchangers in ancient day used ravens communicate with each other by means of sharing their skin.  Right after this quote, Bran thinks that Old Nan had told him similar stories, and in TWOIAF the maesters also refer to the idea that children of the forest “could speak with ravens and make them repeat their words,” and that the children   taught this “higher mystery” as they call it to the First Men so they might use ravens to communicate.  In other words, the idea is out there, but Bloodraven has the insider information – it was originally skinchangers, first children the forest and then First Men –  who used their magic to communicate via raven.

And so, in the first Bran chapter of ADWD, we see Coldhands… well let’s just read it:

From a nearby oak a raven quorked, and Bran heard the sound of wings as another of the big black birds flapped down to land beside it. By day only half a dozen ravens stayed with them, flitting from tree to tree or riding on the antlers of the elk. The rest of the murder flew ahead or lingered behind. But when the sun sank low they would return, descending from the sky on night-black wings until every branch of every tree was thick with them for yards around. Some would fly to the ranger and mutter at him, and it seemed to Bran that he understood their quorks and squawks. They are his eyes and ears. They scout for him, and whisper to him of dangers ahead and behind .

If Bloodraven was  skinchanging Coldhands, there would be no need for Coldhands to  use the ravens for scouting, because Bloodraven can already see anything he wants through the weirwoodnet.  But if we look at Coldhands as a greenseer or skinchanger, this scene makes perfect sense – he’s communicating with the ravens just like an ancient First Man skinchanger would.  If it weren’t for the fact that he is dead, he would be easy to recognize as a greenseer or skinchanger.

In fact, we might even recognize him as a green man, as in the Sacred Order of Green Men that keep watch on the Isle of Faces.  When Samwell emerges for the well at the Nightfort to the great surprise of Bran and company in ASOS, he begins to tell them about Coldhands:

“He said.” Jojen frowned. “This … Coldhands?”

“That wasn’t his true name,” said Gilly, rocking. “We only called him that, Sam and me. His hands were cold as ice, but he saved us from the dead men, him and his ravens, and he brought us here on his elk.”

“His elk?” said Bran, wonderstruck.

“His elk?” said Meera, startled.

“His ravens ?” said Jojen.

“Hodor?” said Hodor.

“Was he green?” Bran wanted to know. “Did he have antlers?”

The fat man was confused. “The elk?”

“Coldhands, ” said Bran impatiently. “The green men ride on elks, Old Nan used to say.  Sometimes they have antlers too.” 

We do not really know what the green man are – humans, or elves, or something in between –  but it is worth noting that Coldhands seems to be imitating one by riding the elk and keeping watch over the deep wood… except that he’s a dead man in blacks instead of a living one in green.  Whatever the green men are, they are certainly associated with greenseeing and the children of the forest, as we know they are said to “keep their silent watch” on the Isle of Faces, one of the only places in the south where the weirwoods were not cut down.  The story goes that in the Dawn Age, the children of the forest and the First Men gathered on the Isle of Faces to sign the Pact.  Maester Luwin picks up the story on AGOT:

So the gods might bear witness to the signing, every tree on the island was given a face, and afterward, the sacred order of green men was formed to keep watch over the Isle of Faces. 

Personally, I think it would make sense that the people stuck on the Isle of faces with nothing but trees with faces would be able to… you know, use the trees with faces.  Bran thinks to himself in ASOS that “All the tales agreed that the green men had strange magic powers,” and the most likely magic to associate with green men on an island full of weirwood trees would be greenseer or skinchanger magic.  I definitely think we can take the association drawn between Coldhands and the green men as another clue about Coldhands having something to do with greenseers and their magic, if nothing else.  We are going to find more signs of green men as we go, however, so there may be something more specific to green men going on here.

Turning back to evidence that Coldhands currently uses skinchanger magic, we find that he seems to have a great deal of remote knowledge.  This is  most likely though the scouting of the ravens, as we’ve seen, but it’s not impossible that he has some more direct connection to the weirwoodnet and / or Bloodraven.  Just because I do not think Bloodraven is skinchanging Coldhands doesn’t mean they can’t have a method of communication.  Perhaps Bloodraven speaks to Coldhands through the ravens, or perhaps he can send Coldhands occasional visions as he does to Bran.

The picture being painted here is that the ranger Coldhands has the haunted forest on lockdown.  Not only does Coldhands detect the Night’s Watch mutineers from Craster’s keep and go back to slaughter them – with great savagery, it would seem – he also knows that Bran and company are waiting for Sam at the top of the well at the Nightfort, as Sam tells us in ASOS:

“He said there would be people,” he huffed.  “People in the castle.  I didn’t know you’d be right at the top of the steps, though.” 

Coldhands even knows what is going on south of the Wall, it would seem.  Again the choices seem to be that his ravens flew over the Wall to the Nightfort and reported back to Coldhands, or that he has a link to either Bloodraven, or most ambitiously in terms of Coldhands’ power, perhaps he can directly access the weirwoodnet itself.

And don’t forget, the ravens don’t just talk to Coldhands and act as his eyes and ears.  They also attack in coordinated fashion with Coldhands when he saves Sam and Gilly from the wights.  It’s quite dramatic – they descend on the wights in “angry clouds,” tearing them apart and filling the sky to the point where Sam cannot see the moon.  Then one of the ravens tells Sam to go, go, go, and Coldhands appears and whisks them away.  This is less conclusive that Coldhands talking to the ravens, because the ravens certainly seem intelligent enough to attack wights on their own, or it could be Bloodraven sending the ravens to attack.  However, it fits with all the other Coldhands scenes in which he works together with the ravens and the elk in a highly coordinated fashion, and all of it is very neatly explained by the possibility of Coldhands being a greenseer or a skinchanger.  Except that he’s dead.

A final clue about Coldhands having access to magic lies in the fact that Coldhands seems to be able to detect the presence of the wights.  At the start of the chapter where Bran, Coldhands, Jojen, Meera, and Hodor fight their way up the hill to enter Bloodraven’s cave, Coldhands reaches the base of the hill and simply announces “they’re here.”  It’s almost like he can smell them, but Coldhands has no flowing blood or appetite, and therefore it’s unlikely that he has a  functioning olfactory system.  There was no raven talking to Coldhands here either, so it wasn’t like he was warned by them.  I think the only explanation can be that Coldhands can use magic.

I think the one of the main narrative purposes of Coldhands is to tell us about Jon, and by extension, the last hero.  I could be totally wrong about this – maybe he’s Bloodraven’s meat suit after all.  Maybe the children are controlling the elk and Coldhands is just a corpse with no magic.  But I don’t think so, for all the reason I’ve laid out and for more yet to come.  In particular, I return to the argument that it makes no sense for Jon Snow to be resurrected and lose his magic.  And if Jon’s going to retain his magic or better yet, gain new magic, that means that resurrected people can do magic.  Beric proves it as well when he lights his sword on fire with his own blood.  It’s a small magic, but it’s definitely magic.  Therefore the idea of Coldhands having access to magic is not only reasonable, it has precedent.  And Beric wasn’t even a skinchanger!

Here’s what I think: just as Varamyr’s prologue is there in large part to inform us about what will happen to Jon when he dies, Coldhands is there to show us a bit about what’s going to happen when he’s resurrected.  Coldhands is primarily here to show us that a skinchanger can be resurrected and still retain his magic, and that when this happens, what we get is an immortal zombie impervious to cold, hunger, fatigue, and other human failings that can whoop ass on the Others by day or by night.

Did I just say immortal?  Well, some qualifications.  First, I assume Coldhands can be killed, or re-killed you might say, just as any other wight can be.  He stays well away from the fire, as I mentioned.  But who knows how long a zombie lives, if undisturbed?

…what is dead, may never die, after all…

…and if a skinchanger’s soul is preserved in its animal and thus is in a more intact state than other souls when it is put back in its body, who’s to say how long the resurrected person can ‘live?’

The famous line about Coldhands’ age comes from Leaf, when she says “they killed him long ago,” seemingly referring to the wights and the Others killing Coldhands long ago.  The thinking is that “long ago” to the children of the forest, who live for several centuries, must be long ago indeed.  There’s another clue that Coldhands is very, very old which comes when they are forced to butcher the elk, after it finally collapses:

It had been twelve days since the elk collapsed for the third and final time, since Coldhands had knelt beside it in the snowbank and murmured a blessing in some strange tongue as he slit its throat. 

That “some strange tongue” is likely to be the Old Tongue.  There are some wildlings north of the Wall who speak the Old Tongue, particularly the Thenns, but it is not common at all for a member of the Night’s Watch to speak it… not for thousands of years, at least.  Even if it was something other than the Old Tongue – what language would we be talking about?  Everyone in Westeros now speaks the common tongue, so whatever the language here that Coldhands is speaking, it is still an indicator of a Coldhands having knowledge that does not belong in modern Westeros.

It’s also worth noting that Coldhands’ behavior here does not speak of being skinchanged by Bloodraven, but rather of having a personal set of beliefs.  There’s an elegant, sad beauty to the description of Coldhands kneeling in the snow and uttering a prayer of blessing for his loyal steed as he puts it out of its misery.  It seems ritualistic, perhaps consistent with older beliefs about hunters who respect the forest and the animals they take from it that we see in hunter-gatherer societies all around the world.  This could be consistent with Coldhands being a green man or simply a First Man in tune with the forest and the mindset of the greenseers, and it is also suggestive of a bond between Coldhands and the elk.

Put it all together, and I think they killed Coldhands very long ago indeed.  A greenseer or skinchanger who speaks the Old Tongue, rides a great elk, is attended by flocks of ravens with which he communicates, and who joined the Night’s Watch at some point – Coldhands seems like something from the ancient past.  In fact, I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that Coldhands may literally be eight thousand years old.

Think about it.  Even if he has only been a zombie ranger for eight hundred years, or even just eighty years – it indicates that zombies do not wear out on their own, at least not very quickly, when in the frozen North.  Aging has to do with cell growth and cell death, but Coldhands is already dead.  There is nothing to wear out.  The cold magic apparently preserves his body, and if his spirit isn’t fading out like Beric’s because he is a resurrected skinchanger… there is potentially no limit to how old he is.

It’s worth noting that Coldhands seems much more agile than other cold wights as well – in the first Coldhands quote that we pulled, Coldhands “vaulted lightly” off the back of the ten-foot-tall-at-the-shoulder great elk.  It’s quite the contrast to the wights, which Sam noted to be clumsy things (though strong and persistent).  Coldhands, on the other hands, is limber and lithe, and he also seems a good fighter – he made short work of the rebel Night’s Watch brothers, although he was probably aided by the ravens; and if he fights wights or Others with any regularity and has ‘lived’ to tell the tale… it bodes well for resurrected Jon Snow’s potential physical abilities.  I would suggest that something about being a skinchanger is what explains Coldhands’ un-zombie-like physical and mental capabilities and his ability to persist for however long he has.

Think about the possibility of a merged Ghost / Jon spirit returning to Jon’s body – might not resurrected Jon inherit a bit of Ghosts’s quick reflexes or wolfish instinct?  Perhaps a resurrected skinchnager created in this way, with a merged human animal sprint, is actually stronger than a regular human.  The wights are very strong as it is; perhaps Coldhands has some sort of animal spirit inside him giving him strength or skill.  You need every advantage you can get in the cold dead land, after all.

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The King of Corn and the Green Monster 

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Meera’s gloved hand tightened around the shaft of her frog spear. “Who sent you? Who is this three-eyed crow?”

“A friend. Dreamer, wizard, call him what you will. The last greenseer.” The longhall’s wooden door banged open. Outside, the night wind howled, bleak and black. The trees were full of ravens, screaming. Coldhands did not move.

“A monster,” Bran said.

The ranger looked at Bran as if the rest of them did not exist. “Your monster, Brandon Stark.”

“Yours ,” the raven echoed, from his shoulder. Outside the door, the ravens in the trees took up the cry, until the night wood echoed to the murderer’s song of “Yours, yours, yours.”

“Jojen, did you dream this?” Meera asked her brother. “Who is he? What is he? What do we do now?”

“We go with the ranger,” said Jojen. “We have come too far to turn back now, Meera. We would never make it back to the Wall alive. We go with Bran’s monster, or we die.”

Here in Bran’s first chapter from ADWD, we can really see Martin’s love of horror writing come through – the wind blowing the door open, the tree full of a murder of ravens screaming, Coldhands watching implacably with his black eyes as they realize he’s a walking dead man… yeah.  That’s the stuff.  In any case, the thing I want to zero in on is Coldhands as Brandon Stark’s monster.  Because of the wording, it is initially unclear if Bran is calling Coldhands a monster or the last greenseer a monster, but Jojen makes it clear when he says “we go with Bran’s monster” in response to a question about whether or not they should follow Coldhands.  Coldhands belongs to Bran in some sense.

A few people have speculated that this is because of a time loop – Bran at some point went back into the past and helped create Coldhands, something like that.  The idea of a greenseer creating a zombie is obviously something I consider a reasonable possibility, but I am generally hesitant to use time travel as a way to explain mysteries in the books.  I believe Martin maybe involving a bit of that, but I feel strongly that he’s going to strictly limit the sort of time travel paradoxes more common to science fiction.  Basically, it’s something we can’t completely rule out, but it’s also a bottomless can of worms which quickly turns into wild conspiracy and tinfoil which attributes everything that ever happened to time-traveling Bran.  My approach is to look for more logical answers that do not involve time travel first, and if and when Martin shows us Bran affecting the past or skinchanging Bran the Builder, we can draw conclusions based on what we see in regards to how limited time travel is in ASOIAF.

So setting aside the time-travel interpretation of Coldhands being Bran’s monster, what could this mean?  I think the most logical answer is that Coldhands is bound to the Stark bloodline in some way, and perhaps to Bran in particular if he is some sort of special chosen one.  Most people think the last hero was a Stark in some sense, and probably the Night’s King too, so if Coldhands does go back to the time of the founding of the Night’s Watch and the Long Night, he may well have been created by a Stark or had a duty laid upon him to wait for the promised Stark to come along.  If anything like this is true, then Coldhands would be like 8,000 years old, which… kinda makes you feel sorry for the guy.

When I look at Coldhands, what I see is someone who is under some sort of eternal obligation, someone who is in a sense condemned to literally wander the frozen lands for hundreds or even thousands of years waiting for Bran Stark to show up, or perhaps guiding the occasional choices for the new ‘greenseer of the north’ to Bloodraven’s cave to assume the position.  Recall that Bloodraven was the Lord Commander when he was supposedly lost on a ranging – perhaps Coldhands had a hand in that.

Think about what it would be like to be Coldhands – it would pretty much suck, right? I mean riding the great elk was cool at first, but really, there isn’t a whole lot to keep you busy with north of the Wall.  Coldhands has not been seen by any wildlings that we know of, so he must keep a low profile.  What is he doing?  I mean again they killed him long ago, and even if long ago is only 80 years ago… that’s 80 years of wandering the tundra, staring at snow.  And don’t forget, you’re dead.  The savor of food, of sex, of laughter and fellowship – all gone.   I have to think Coldhands could put himself out of his misery any time by simply walking into a fire.  And yet, he doesn’t.  Coldhands persists, faithful as ever, solely dedicated to his mission.

To me, this speaks of either sacrifice or punishment on Coldhands’ part.  He’s either condemned to this boooorrrring-ass mission as a way of atoning for some great sin, or he’s the most self-sacrificing dude who ever lived.  Speaking in terms of atonement, perhaps he is the Night’s King, chastened and humiliated, somehow compelled by guilt or other means to serve out this lonely watch as recompense for his crimes.  My big theory about Azor Ahai is that he was a villainous type – he broke the moon when he forged Lightbringer, according to the legend, and I believe this was responsible for meteors which caused the Long Night.  Perhaps that’s who Coldhands is – Azor Ahai the fallen, penitent zombie.  I have speculated that Azor Ahai may have even become the Night’s King himself – I’m by no means sold on that, but their symbolism overlaps in some areas and Stannis seems to be impersonating both of them at once, a possible clue about Azor Ahai becoming the Night’s King…. any maybe that’s who Coldhands is.

It’s hard to say for sure without more information, but Coldhands’ current mission could be consistent with someone who has brought low and made to atone for their evil deeds, and the two likely suspects in that scenario would the Night’s King or Azor Ahai.   This idea of atonement also fits into the larger theme of the Night’s Watch itself – in fact it is the theme of the Night’s Watch, as they are exiled criminals who atone for their sins by guarding the realms of men.  Coldhands has kind of taken this duty to the next level.

The other possibility here is sacrifice, and that’s actually the one I want to focus on.  Essentially, if Coldhands is not on his crappy, cold mission because of some evil he himself committed, then he is absolutely making a sacrifice of himself.  He’s given up almost everything it means to be human for his eternal, lonely ranging.  In this case, he might be connected to the last hero – either the last hero himself or one of his party of O.G. Night’s Watch brothers – because there are thematic clues about the last hero being something of a sacrifice, and because self-sacrifice is perhaps the ultimate in heroic virtue.  Jon and Bran are the two characters who parallel the last hero most closely, and both have obviously sacrificed a lot, and probably are not done sacrificing either.

The fact that Coldhands keeps the scarf over his mouth and speaks with a raspy voice could indicate that Coldhands’ has a neck or throat wound of some kind, consistent with a sacrifice.  Jon takes a throat wound as well, it should be noted.  It’s the classic way to sacrifice animals or even people, as we see in Bran’s weirwoodnet vision of human sacrifice at Winterfell.

In fact, George has made a fairly direct allusion to Jon Snow as a ‘corn king,’ which is a term used to describe the very common mythological archetype of a sacrificed male god or king whose death brings about the turning of the seasons – typically they are sacrificed in the autumn, mimicking the death of the leaves and greenery, and are resurrected in the spring, bringing with them the return of fertility and fecundity.  The corn king concept is very important to understand if we want to know what is going on with zombies and resurrection, and with Jon and the last hero and quite possibly Coldhands.  That is why George gives us a direct reference to it, one of the most direct shout-outs to external mythology anywhere in ASOIAF.  It comes in ADWD, out of the mouth of Mormont’s raven:

He rose and dressed in darkness, as Mormont’s raven muttered across the room.  “Corn,” the bird said, and, “King,” and “Snow, Jon Snow, Jon Snow,”  That was queer.  The bird had never said his full name before, as best Jon could recall. 

Jon’s Snow’s corn king status is pretty straightforward – Jon is the corn king whose death and resurrection will hopefully turn the seasons and bring the end of the Long Night, which seems to be about to fall.  His death comes right as winter falls, and of course we hope his resurrection will bring a dream of spring.  Before we go any farther with this line of analysis, I just want to stress how heavy a bit of foreshadowing this is: George is telegraphing to us that Jon will be resurrected and that that resurrection will help to bring the spring.   I mean it’s not a big shocker – most people think Jon is a hero, the special Snowflake – but as corn king, he’s a specific type of hero who is defined by the death and rebirth cycle.

Another role of the corn king is to promote the fertility of the land – his death is a sacrifice which literally causes the earth to be fertile so it can feed the people.  That’s something of the role Jon plays with the wildlings in ADWD, where he lets them through the Wall to find food and shelter – and this quote with the raven saying ‘corn king Jon Snow‘ is in fact the beginning of that chapter.  The act of feeding the wildlings is the very act he is killed for, so he is indeed sacrificing himself to feed thousands of people.  Earlier in ADWD, in the chapter where Jon is laying out his plans to let the wildlings through, the raven also says “Corn. King,” though without Jon’s name added on just yet.  In other words, it’s no coincidence the two ‘corn king’ references come in conjunction with Jon’s act of feeding the wildlings… and thus eventually sacrificing himself.

As you can see, the last hero could very easily be a corn king figure, since he brought about the turning of the seasons after they had been a bit stuck for a while, particularly if he died in the process as I am proposing.  As a matter of fact, there is big giant flaming red clue encouraging us to associate Jon’s corn king status with the last hero and Azor Ahai – that’s really why I brought this up in the first place.   That chapter where Jon lets the wildlings through the Wall, the one where the raven says “corn king Jon Snow,” well, it actually begins with Jon’s Azor Ahai dream, the one where he is defending the Wall alone against the forces of the north which include dead men who scuttle up the ice like spiders, armored in black ice with his Valyrian steel blade burning red in his fist.

This dream is remarkable because it foreshadows Jon’s impending role as some kind of Azor Ahai reborn figure – he has a burning red sword, and later in the dream, he slays his love, Ygritte, just as Azor Ahai slew Nissa Nissa.  But it’s also remarkable because it unites the roles of Azor Ahai with that of the last hero –  Jon is the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, abandoned and alone, fighting the forces of the North, which parallels the idea of the last hero’s companions, dog, and horse dying while he sought for ways to defeat the Others in the cold dead lands.

The potential implication is clear – Azor Ahai and the last hero might be the same person, or closely linked to one another.  At the very least, we already know they are parallel legends, stories of a hero who fought of the darkness of the Long Night with a magic sword.  So what we have here is Jon dreaming of being some combination of Azor Ahai and the last hero, then waking to be labelled a corn king as goes about doing corn king things, feeding the people and eventually getting himself killed.  Most importantly, the corn king’s resurrection brings the spring, just like the last hero and Azor Ahai did in ancient day, and just as our Azor Ahai reborn characters like Jon and Dany are expected to do.

This is why I say it’s critical to understand the basics of the corn king – because George has based his Long Night savior figures at least in part on the various corn king figures in world mythology.  As an aside, I will just tell you that there are many, many myths and legends based around the turning of the seasons, and since George has chosen to make the cycle of the seasons a focal point of his world building and storyline, he is in fact incorporating elements of many of these world myths, of which the corn king ideas are but one.  Another great one is tale of the abducted moon maiden Persephone, and you can read all about that on my friend sweetsunray’s blog, Mythological Weave of Ice and Fire.

All this corn king stuff might seem like a bit of a side-track from zombies, but it’s actually just the opposite – this is the deeper context in which we must think about resurrected people in the story, particularly Jon and my idea of the zombie last hero.  Usually a corn king figure is reborn afresh in the spring, however, George has given us a literally resurrected corn king instead.  Using a zombie in place of the reborn corn king is a kind of a dark twist on the classic tale, but then, that’s George R. R. Martin.  Instead of looking for a hero to save us from the zombie apocalypse, we are actually looking for a zombie hero to save us from the apocalypse.  We need Ghost-Jon, the King of Corn.

So the corn king relates to zombies and Jon Snow and the last hero; does it relate to Coldhands, Brandon Stark’s monster?  I believe it does, whether or not he is the last hero or one of the last hero’s party.  We mentioned the possibility that Coldhands is a green man – an undead one, of course – due to the connection of elk riding and generally being a protector of the forest.  Well, the green men are based on a particular type of corn king, the archetype known as the “horned god” whose examples include the Celtic Cerrunos, the English Herne the Hunter, the ubiquitous Green Man (who sometimes has branches on his head in place of horns), the Greek Pan, and many others.  As far away as India we find him – his name in the Rig Veda is Pashupati, a testament to the proto-indo-european roots of the horned nature god idea.  All of these figures have horns or antlers or sometimes branches on their heads, some have green skin or some kind of leafy decoration, they all have something to do with the spirit of male virility and fertility, they are usually thought of as “solar” deities, they all bring fertility to the land and  act as protectors of the wood and of nature.  Many can speak with animals.  Most of all, they are killed and resurrected to bring about the turning of the seasons, because what they are is more or less a personification of the cycle of nature

Essentially, the stag-man is a forest-centric version of the corn king.  There are other forest-dwelling or fertility based corn kings which match up most or all of this, but do not have the horns, such as Jack in the Green, Jon Barleycorn, the green-skinned Egyptian death and resurrection god Osiris, who is also a corn god, the Greek Dionysus (who is followed by satyrs, which are always some kind of goat-horned human).

As you can see, some of that is consistent with the little we know of the Sacred Order of Green Men, who are said to have antlers on their heads, green skin or green clothing, and who are said to keep eternal watch over the Isle of Faces.  I mean the green man is pretty famous, whose green, leafy face can be found decorating cathedrals and old buildings all over Europe, so calling these folks “green men” is basically not all that subtle.  The children of the forest wears vines and leaves, and they certainly seem to have a strong connection to the green men on the Isle of Faces.

Like the rest of the corn king lore, the horned god ideas are also consistent with the idea of a last hero who is resurrected to end the Long Night and bring the spring.  Said another way, both the last hero and the green men seem to be drawing from related mythology, and this has to make us wonder about a connection between the last hero and the green men.  I would suggest that Coldhands may be the confluence of these ideas.  I believe he is at the very least a prototype for making a last hero, a skinchanger zombie, and he reminds Bran, and us, of the green men in certain ways.   Coldhands rides his elk and keeps eternal watch over the frozen north kind of like a green man exiled to the frozen dead lands.

The entire thing is like an twisted version of the story of the fertility god wandering a fertile land; Coldhands is like a corpse version of a fertility god wandering the cold and almost-dead lands.  He still protects the woods that remain, however, and is obviously in communion with the animals that remain as well.  He’s also dedicated to fighting the Others, so we know he is still on team green, deep down.  This is actually pretty close to the English folktale of Herne the Hunter, a ghost version of the horned god who rides a horse and guards the woods in spectral form.  In fact, if Martin is intending Coldhands to play into the green man / horned god ideas as I propose, then Herne the Hunter is the figure we should look to – he’s the clearly undead version of the horned god.

Besides being dead, Herne is associated with midnight and winter, which is another good match for Coldhands.  If Coldhands’s mission is one of atonement as we speculated a moment ago, this would be highly consistent with Herne the Hunter, whose tale has him committing some great sin and then hanging himself from an oak for fear of shame and disgrace, only to become a ghostly guardian of the woods after his death.  I mentioned before that Coldhands may have a neck or throat injury based on the scarf he wears and his voice – the exact description was “his voice rattled in his throat, as thin and gaunt and he was.”  Coldhands is dead, so it makes sense his voice would ‘rattle,’ like a death rattle, and it could be yet another match for Herne and his strangulation form the oak tree.  Finally, we know Martin is thinking about Herne the Hunter, because Herne gets a clear shout-out in the form of a Westerosi legend about a pair of brothers called Harlon the Hunter and Herdon of the Horne who took to wife a woodswitch and built the castle at Horn Hill in the Reach.  That’s why their descendants, House Tarly, have a striding huntsman, red on green, as their sigil.  Naturally, the first person to meet Coldhands, our Herne the Hunter impressionist, is Samwell Tarly –  it’s almost like he is meeting his ancient ancestor.   And the first word Coldhands says to Sam is “brother!”

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Party on, Garth… Party on, Bobby B

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There’s actually an even more prominent allusion to Cerrunos and his horned cousins than the green men in ASOIAF, and it too is specifically associated with the theme of sacrificing the horned god to turn the seasons, and therefore may have something to do with the last hero and the Long Night.  Here I speak of Garth the Green, the legendary founding father of many lineages in the Reach (and perhaps even the Starks, according to some tales).  He’s also called Garth Greenhand, or Garth Greenhair, or the Green God, and much like the Green Men, he too is thought in some tales to have a stag’s antlers on his head, as well as green skin.  He is actually a perfect incarnation of the horned god, causing maidens and the land alike to be fertile and fruitful in an almost over-the-top way – Garth is said to have made even barren women or old crones fertile with a touch.

Garth’s royal line of Gardener kings wore crowns of vines and flowers and sat in a living tree throne called the Oakenseat, which supposedly grew from an oak Garth the Green himself planted.  To me, that sounds suspiciously like greenseer activity.  The Oakenseat was destroyed in the ancient past, so we have no way of knowing the truth of the matter, but the general idea of a living wooden throne certainly has our attention.  Garth also supposedly planted the three intertwined weirwoods in the godswood at Highgarden known as “The Three Singers,” which is a clue linking Garth to greenseers and their magic.  Garth is referred to as a god in some tales, and in TWOIAF we read that:

A few of the oldest tales of Garth Greenhand present us with a considerably darker deity, one who demanded blood sacrifice from his worshippers to ensure a bountiful harvest.  In some stories the green god dies every autumn when the trees lose their leaves, only to be reborn with the coming of spring.  This version of Garth is largely forgotten.

This version of Garth this largely consistent with the horned god archetype, is what he is.  He’s a signature corn king, proving beyond a doubt that the horned god and corn king mythology is woven into the fiber of the story.  We can’t help but notice that Garth is more or less indistinguishable from the green men and wonder if perhaps Garth was a green man, or if perhaps the green men descend from him.  The stories of both Garth the Green and the Sacred Order of Green Men are dated back to the time before the Long Night, so they could well be connected.

The corn king idea of sacrificing and resurrecting Garth to turn the seasons, given to us so clearly here, causes us to wonder again if Garth and the green men have some connection to the last hero.  The story of Garth’s sacrifice and resurrection may be telling us a story about horned people having something to do with ending the Long Night – specifically, a story about horned people being sacrificed to help end the Long Night.

My notion of skinchanger zombies fits nicely here, explaining just how human sacrifice might actually lead to the capability to defeat the Others.  Instead of sacrificing humans to harvest their magic as we have seen elsewhere, this could have been more like volunteerism – green men volunteering to become skinchanger zombies.  Elsewise, someone might have raised green men slain in battle with the Others.  If Coldhands were to be a green man, his origin story might be something along these lines.

In fact… we just talked about Sam Tarly’s ancestors, Herndon of the Horne and Harlon the Hunter, as a clear shout-out to Herne the Hunter, but what I didn’t mention is that in TWOIAF, we learn that Herndon and Harlon were one of the “twelve notable descendants” of Garth the Green.  That’s right, the Herne the Hunter ideas which fit Coldhands so well are directly tied to an ancestry from Garth the Green, the horned god who is sacrificed to turn the seasons.  Herne the Hunter was also associated with a particular oak tree, called “Herne’s Oak,” just as garth was associated with a specific oak tree, the Oakenseat.  My my my.  Finally and somewhat humorously, we find that the greatest Gardener King in the history of the Reach was named Garth Goldenhand.  Much ado is made about “hands of gold are always cold,” if you recall, so perhaps George is making a hands of gold / hands of cold joke here if Coldhands is descended from Garth or the Green men.  Golden hands comes from Garth, in other words, so perhaps Coldhands does too.

There might be a clue about a connection between green men and the last hero to be found in the idea of Bran the Builder having possibly descended from Garth the Green.  Another one of those twelve notable children of Garth the Green is someone called “Brandon of the Bloody Blade,” who according to some legends in the Reach may be an ancestor of Brandon the Builder.  It’s all very old folktale and legend of course, but the suggestion here is of a connection between House Stark and Garth the Green, who might have been a green man.  If the last hero was a Stark, he may be descended of the green men too.  We’ll have more to say about his in part 2 of our zombie extravaganza, where will we will have a look at the myth of the King of Winter.

In fact, many of the Houses of the Reach and even the Lannisters are thought to descend from Garth, and thus potentially from green men.  If only we knew what green men are!  Are they closer to humans, children of the forest, or something else entirely?  Do they really have horns on their head like a satyr or a stag man, or just very creative hats?  Or are they perhaps skinchangers who ride elk, like Coldhands?  Could they have been some of the first First Men to whom the children taught their magic?

If I were to try to narrow it down a bit, I would say that they are probably not children, or else they wouldn’t use the word “men” to  them.  If they are a cousin to the children, a different type of elf species, perhaps taller, that would really be something.  I really want to believe in some sort of awesome Cerrunos-like beings, but the more conservative or skeptical option would be that the green men are human skinchangers or greenseers.  However, the idea that they have lived essentially isolated and self-sufficient on the Isle of Faces for 8,000 years or more would make a bit more sense if they were long-lived beings like the children who did not breed very often or in large numbers.

Here’s the thing: memories of the stag-man are to be found all throughout Westeros, even as far north as the lands beyond the Wall!  As Jon is letting the wildlings through the Wall, doing his corn king thing, he sees the fearsome men of the frozen shore riding bone chariots with hounds as big as dire wolves – a bad lot, those, Tormund says – and we get these lines:

Some of the men wore antlers on their hats, and some wore walrus tusks.  The two sorts did not love each other, he soon gathered. 

It could be nothing, or it could be something done in memory of horned green men.  Additionally, there was a wildling King Beyond the Wall in ancient day called “the Horned Lord.”  He led an attack on Westeros, allegedly using sorcery to pass by the Wall.  He’s also the guy who gave us the famous ASOIAF-truism “sorcery is a sword without a hilt. There is no safe way to grasp it,” so it seems that the “Horned Lord” was associated with sorcery and magic, which is consistent with the idea of the green men being able to use magic.  The Wildlings named a constellation after him, The Horned Lord (which is called “the Stallion” in Westeros), so he must have been an important dude… or perhaps the idea of horned lords was important, and he was just playing into a powerful idea which already existed.

The wildlings live in something of a cultural time capsule north of the Wall, so any cultural beliefs they have in common with people from Westeros proper most likely originated before the Wall was built.  The horned lord ideas fit this pattern – they are found in the very oldest legends from the Reach, and so even though the Reach is very far away from the Frozen Shore, this could be one of the old First Men cultural ideas carried over into wildling culture, dating back to a time before the Wall cut off the wildlings from the rest of Westeros. That’s about the approximate time when the Sacred Order of Green Men was established and when Garth was said to live.

By the way, “The Horned Lord” is also the particular name that practitioners of Wicca use to name their version of the horned god – the full title is “the Horned Lord of Death and Resurrection” – so we can see that what George is doing is referencing various types of horned gods and corn kings in various places… and there’s more to come!

Now if Coldhands or the last hero is connected to the green men, it could mean the green men actually came north and left a more direct impression on the people there.  Osha the wildling does say that the children and the giants “and the other old races” are still alive north of the Wall, and we know she is right about children and giants.  Other old races?  Could these include green men?

Of course, we’ve actually been seeing horned folk front and center from day one – or at least, people who have a strong recollection of horned folk.  I mean, it’s a fact that somebody with antlers on their head sure made a big impression on the Durrandon Storm Kings, who have been wearing antlered helms and antlered crowns for thousands of years.  The Storm Lords of House Baratheons picked up this habit when Orys Baratheon defeated the last Storm King Argilac Durrandon, took his daughter to wife, and took on all the trappings of the Storm Kings.  That’s why we see Robert and Renly gallopping around in antlered helms, and why Stannis has a black stag in his sigil.  Renly goes further, wearing green armor – he’s called “the green knight” when he is first introduced to us in AGOT.

Where did they get this image?  The Stormlanders don’t have any references to Garth the Green in their folklore, but they have the same taste in headgear, it would seem.  And they are definitely cut from the same mythological cloth: Martin hangs an allusion to the horned god mythology on Robert in AGOT as Ned lies delirious in the dungeons of King’s Landing:

He found himself thinking of Robert more and more.  He saw the King as he had been in the flower of his youth, tall and handsome, his great antlered helm on his head, his warhammer in hand, sitting his horse like a horned god.  He heard his laughter in his eyes, blue and clear as mountain lakes.

The idea of sacrificing the horned god at the end of summer is present with the Baratheons too, as Robert and Renly are both associated with being summer kings who are sacrificed as winter draws close.  Robert’s reign consists of a long summer and he comes to Winterfell talking of the rich fertility of the south, from the food to the wine to the women – a scene which is broken down in detail by sweetsunray in her chthonic cycle essays.  Robert is also mimicking the fertility aspect of Garth and the horned god, spreading his royal oats everywhere he can.  Meanwhile, Renly’s warriors are literally dubbed “the knights of summer” by Catelyn, and Renly’s armor is described thusly before he is killed: “a deep green, the green of leaves in a summer wood, so dark it drank the candlelight.” That’s a nice way of evoking summer while also perhaps foreshadowing something darker.  This description also associates Renly the green knight with the woods… just where a green man belongs.

Robert’s and Renly’s deaths are, of course, both laden with appropriate symbolism.  Just before he is killed by the boar, Robert is hunting a white hart – a stag – in the Kingwood.  The idea of hunting the symbol of your own house symbolizes Robert’s own self-destruction, which he achieved by getting himself too drunk to survive the encounter with the boar and by essentially ignoring the ills of the kingdom and outsourcing the duty of governance irresponsibly.  Ned remarks on this upon leaving Robert’s death chamber, saying:

“Even the truest knight cannot protect a king against himself.”  

Robert aims to sacrifice a stag and becomes the sacrificed stag himself, in other words.  After he does, summer is over, the good times are over, and everyone starts dying, burning and starving.  Robert was also wearing green clothing – his hunting greens – when he was wounded, and wore them until his death.

Renly’s death is even more apropos of the horned god, because he is slashed across the throat like a sacrifice right at the the moment that he is putting on his green armor and antlered helm.   All the lights gutter out, and Renly’s last word is “cold…” which could be to put us in mind of the end of summer and the Long Night, the appropriate time to sacrifice the horned god.  Similarly, as Robert lay dying in a very warm room, he says “Gods, why is it so cold in here,” and of course Jon the corn king never felt the fourth knife, only the cold; so this looks like a depiction of winter’s onset at the death of the horned god or corn king, as the legend demands.

Adding to this imagery, Catelyn thinks to herself in the aftermath of Renly’s murder that “Death came in that door and blew the life out of him as swift as the wind snuffed out his candles,” which is a nice way to tie Renly’s death to the fall of an evil darkness.  He was killed by a shadow-being with a “shadowsword,” after all.  Recall his armor being a green so dark it drank the candle light – everything about this death scene is associated with snuffing out light and bringing darkness.  Recall also that the stag man is typically a solar character – note that Renly is all green and gold –  so killing the sun is implied here anyway just by killing the stag man.  And killing the sun, of course, is more or less the theme of the Long Night.

This is one of my favorite scenes in the books, as dark as it is, because the way Martin worked the sacrifice of the horned god scene into his fiction here is absolutely stupendous.  This is a scene that people alive on earth four thousand years ago would understand in a visceral, intrinsic way, and that’s not an overstatement.

The Baratheons are proving to be excellent horned gods so far, and don’t think resurrection is left out of the mix – oh no, not by a long shot.  See, I told you this green man / horned god stuff had something to do with zombies!  Here is Robert’s death scene, from AGOT:

“By rights, he should be dead already. I have never seen a man cling to life so fiercely.” 

“My brother was always strong,” Lord Renly said. “Not wise, perhaps, but strong.” In the sweltering heat of the bedchamber, his brow was slick with sweat. He might have been Robert’s ghost as he stood there, young and dark and handsome. “

It’s almost like Renly is showing us Robert’s ghost leaving his dying body and standing over his own corpse.  And in ACOK, after Robert is safely in the grave, we get this description of King Renly from Catelyn when she finds him holding a tourney on the road to King’s Landing:

In their midst, watching and laughing with his young queen by his side, sat a ghost in a golden crown. Small wonder the lords gather around him with such fervor, she thought, he is Robert come again.

So twice now we have seen Renly called a ghostly version of Robert the Horned God, and here in this quote he is specifically associated with a resurrected Robert.  He’s a ghostly, resurrected horned god, just the fellow we are after.  He even allies with Highgarden, the former seat of Garth’s royal line of Gardener Kings, now ruled by House Tyrell, and his stag crown is worked in the colors of Highgarden to symbolize his union with Margarie Tyrell.  In other words, the ghostly green resurrected horned god Renly is specifically tied back to Garth by his union with Highgarden.

Best of all, after Renly dies in his “emerald castle,” he himself is “resurrected,” in a manner of speaking.  You’ll recall that Garlan Tyrell dons Renly’s green antlered armor at the Battle of the Blackwater and saves the day masquerading as Renly’s Ghost.  Davos hears the story of the end of the battle in ASOS:

“The Lannisters had taken him from the flank, and his fickle bannermen had abandoned him by the hundreds in the hour of his greatest need. “King Renly’s shade was seen as well,” the captain said, “slaying right and left as he led the lion lord’s van. It’s said his green armor took a ghostly glow from the wildfire, and his antlers ran with golden flames.” 

Alright, that’s cool, now he really is a resurrected green horned god.  And consider who is in side the armor: Garlan, a Tyrell whose name is derivative of Garth (Garlan, Garth).  This simply adds to the horned god symbolism and anchors resurrected  Renly back to Garth the Green once again.  It also implies using skinchanging to bodysnatch, like Bran does with Hodor, as we have one person wearing another’s “skin” and masquerading as them.  That could be trouble.  But what’s with those fiery golden antlers?  Is this going to turn into an Azor Ahai thing again?

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Garth Vader

This section is brought to you by Patron supporter and newly minted priestess of Starry Wisdom Church, Kristin House – Lord Commander Daenyra Flint of the Nightfort, LC of the Night’s HoWatch and avenger of Brave Danny

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This is Ser Dontos recounting the tale of resurrected Renly to Sansa in ACOK:

They plunged through Stannis like a lance through a pumpkin, every man of them howling like some demon in steel. And do you know who led the vanguard? Do you? Do you? Do you? ”

“Robb?” It was too much to be hoped, but …

“It was Lord Renly! Lord Renly in his green armor, with the fires shimmering off his golden antlers! Lord Renly with his tall spear in his hand! They say he killed Ser Guyard Morrigen himself in single combat, and a dozen other great knights as well. It was Renly, it was Renly, it was Renly! Oh! the banners, darling Sansa! Oh! to be a knight!”

A fiery warrior leading an army of demons conforms very well with my interpretation of Azor Ahai as a villain who brought on the Long Night.  Most importantly, this resurrected burning stag man which Renly has become is simply a mimicking of the burning stag symbolism of Stannis, who is of course playing the role of Azor Ahai.   There’s actually a clever pun to be found in Stannis’s sigil, because a stag can also be called a hart, and therefore his sigil is actually saying the same thing in two different ways: it’s a fiery hart, and a fiery heart.  It’s clever wordplay, to be sure, but it’s sending us a very, very important message – the burning stag man fiery hart is intrinsically connected to the fiery heart of R’hllor, symbol of fire magic and Azor Ahai.

The image that Renly and Stannis are showing us is a fiery horned lord version of Azor Ahai, but one who is a corpse in some sense.  Again I say this makes perfect sense in terms of mythology – the Azor Ahai and Last Hero stories are all about the fixing the broken cycle of the seasons, and that’s exactly what horned god and corn king mythology is about – turning the seasons.  The horned god does this by dying and being resurrected, and thus we see all of this resurrection and zombie action around the last hero and Azor Ahai.  Now that we have a better idea of what the stag-man implies, we can see that this is another clue about Garth and / or the green men being wrapped up in this whole Azor Ahai / last hero / ending the Long Night business.

I believe that’s also why George makes such a big deal of the dragon’s horns, even showing us musical horns made from dragon horns, just as other animals’ horns are.  Azor Ahai is strongly tied to dragons, and so I think the idea of Azor Ahai the fiery horned lord basically overlaps with the idea of a horned dragon person.

George is also taking advantage of the fact that the modern Christian image of Satan as a goat horned or goat-legged devil is essentially a corrupted version of the classical horned god idea, and this was done primarily as a way to tarnish pagan religions with evil in the eye of believers.  Eli Levi’s baphomet, created in 1855, is another example of a darker, more occult twist on the horned god archetype, and I believe George is dipping into some of this mythology to create Azor Ahai.  Baphomet is actually not as nefarious as he looks, and there’s a lot of interesting ideas there about balance between male and female, higher awareness, knowledge, and learning. That’s a subject which we shall have to expand on another time, but it’s useful to point out that there is plenty of precedent for a darker or even demonic version of the horned god, as we see with Stannis and resurrected Renly (and there are plenty of references to Stannis worshipping a demon god as well to complement this idea).

Returning to that scene from the Battle of the Blackwater we just quoted, we have last hero symbolism!  Consider the deeds of fiery resurrected Renly – he slew Guyard Morrigen in single combat and a dozen other great knights.  Guyard is leading a group of twelve, plus one, just like the last hero and his twelve.  Guyard himself would be the last hero then, and his symbolism lines up.  He is called Guyard the Green, a former member of Renly’s own rainbow guard, meaning that he’s a green knight too, like Renly was before he was killed.  House Morrigen’s castle in the Stormlands is named Crow’s Nest, and their sigil is a black crow in flight on storm green.

In other words, Guyard is a green knight and a black crow who leads a group of twelve like the last hero, very suggestive of a green man joining the Night’s Watch and becoming a crow last hero.  Unfortunately, the last hero dies, oh no!  What to do! Time to make a green man zombie.

At this point, the idea of Coldhands being an undead green man isn’t looking so far-fetched, huh?

This grouping of twelve things being led by a thirteenth thing is what I like to call ‘last hero math’ – Guyard is a great knight, worth of Renly’s Rainbow Guard, and his died along with a dozen other ‘great knights.’  This math is always around the last hero character in a given metaphor, as we see with Guyard the Green in this battle.  We see the same thing thing when Renly is playing the role of green man to be sacrificed – you’ll recall the line from that scene “Death came in that door and blew the life out of him as swift as the wind snuffed out his candles.”  By ‘his candles,’ Cat is referring to the twelve   iron braziers in Renly’s tent which transformed it into an “emerald castle, alive with light.”  Renly’s death is specifically likened to the snuffing out of a candle, and then compared to twelve other candles, so it’s the same thing – a group of twelve, lead by a thirteenth, who all die.  As a further reading exercise, look for any example you can find of twelve things with a thirteenth thing that is somehow set apart.  The word “dozen” is thrown around a lot, but it’s that extra thirteenth thing which makes the pattern.

So, Guyard and Renly are both playing the role of green man last hero when they die, surrounded by a dozen companion of a sort.  Who kills the last hero?  It’s the same person in both scenes – someone playing the role of a demonic, undead Azor Ahai.  You’ll recall that it was Stannis’s shadow, complete with a shadowsword version of lightbringer, who murdered Renly when Renly was playing the role of green man.  Guyard the Green is killed by resurrected Renly, a fiery horned god with a demonic host who, again, is just mimicking the burning stag symbolism of Stannis, a clear Azor Ahai symbol.

What does this tell us?  Well, Azor Ahai and the last hero seem to be fighting or killing each other, and there might be some kind of cycle going on, because we see Renly play both roles, a last hero being sacrificed and an undead Azor Ahai killing the last hero.  I have proposed that the connection between Azor Ahai and the last hero might have been a father-son or brother-brother relationship, and an adversarial one at that where the one opposes the other, which might be what we are seeing here.

Robert’s death actually plays into the pattern of the green horned man being killed by a horned Azor Ahai too – he’s wearing green when he dies, and he is killed by a “black devil” of a boar which Robert says must’ve been sent by the gods to punish him.  Azor Ahai the wild boar?  One thinks of TV-show Renly’s joke about Azor Ahai’s smoke and salt making him sound like roast ham, and chuckle all you want (it’s a good joke), but the key thing here is the idea of the “black devil sent by the gods” killing the green man, with the boar’s tusk being similar to a horn.

House Morrigen from which Guyard hails is a great example of how George uses the sigils and history of each House to support important metaphors in the story.  The entire history of House Morrigen is built around this moment when Guyard plays the last hero in a metaphor, a black and green crow leading group of twelve, only to be killed by an Azor Ahai figure.  To whit: the only two historical members of House Morrigen that we know of get killed by things which symbolize Azor Ahai – dragons and people who are the blood of the dragon.  Dickon Morrigen was killed by Queen Rhaenys’s dragon Meraxes at the battle known as “The Last Storm.” That’s also where Argilac, the last of the Durrandon Storm Kings, met his fate, reinforcing the metaphor of a dying stag man at that scene.  Argilac was in turn slain by a dragon-blooded person, the Targaryen bastard Orrys Baratheon, who then became a stag man himself… only, he would be a dragon-stag man at that point.

Then we have a Morrigen who left his name behind to become Ser Damon the Devout of the Warrior’s Sons, only to be killed in a trial of the seven going against Maegor I Targaryen, called Maegor the Cruel.  All together, we have three dead crows of House Morrigen, killed by demonic fiery stag Renly, actual golden dragon Meraxes, and the most monstrous Targaryen in history, Maegor the Cruel.  All of this history only serves to reinforce the idea that the last hero is apparently supposed to be killed by Azor Ahai.

But here’s the important part – the last hero is famous for winning, not losing.  All of these scenes with the green man last hero being butchered signaled a loss for their side – they are not heroic sacrifices to achieve victory. I believe the answer is simple: the death of the last hero is merely one of the first steps in his quest to end the Long Night.  According to my theory, the last hero has to die so he can become a skinchanger zombie, and only then is when he can face the others and end the Long Night.  It’s the resurrection of the horned god and the corn king that bring the spring.

In fact, what best describes what we are seeing here with a horned Azor Ahai killing the green last hero is a cycle of two horned gods killing one another, and that’s no accident.  Some versions of the horned god see him as a pair of brothers or a father and son who kill each other every six months – the most famous version of this is the Oak and Holly King.  You could write a whole essay on those two, but the point is that they are like two aspects of the same god, and yet also like rival brothers, with the Holly King representing winter and the Oak King summer.  Their cycle of fraternal deicide is yet another depiction of the cycle of the seasons by means of a dying god.

It plays out nicely with Stannis and Renly – fiery, demonic Stannis kills green Renly, and then fiery “resurrected Renly” returns with a host of steel demons to defeat Stannis’s forces at the Battle of the Blackwater.  It goes both ways, too – Robert the Horned God killed the dragon man, Rhaegar, on the Trident.  Robert was called the “demon of the trident however,” so the green horned people can be demons too.  At the Blackwater, the wildfire unleashed by Tyrion – who is on the same side as resurrected Renly – was called the “jade demon” which seemed to have hands and whips of green fire, which is the same idea.  All of this points towards a cycle, with both types of horned gods being killed and resurrected.  It’s ASOIAF, folks: everyone dies.  The important part is that a lot of things rise harder and stronger afterward.

I’ll have more to say about this idea of rival horned gods in the future, but for now the thing to take away here is that the last hero and Azor Ahai are both tied to this collective horned god mythology, and that the events which surrounded their deaths and resurrections seem to be right at the heart of the story of the Long Night and the War for the Dawn.

To sum up what we’ve just learned, we can see that Martin is working the theme of the horned god and the corn king in to the story in several intertwined ways.  The idea of the turning of the seasons being personified as a dying and resurrected fertility god is a natural match for Martin’s world, where the turning of the seasons is kind of a big fucking deal, to quote Joe Biden.  It make sense to align the sacrificed fertility god who is resurrected to bring the spring with characters who undergo a death and resurrection process in the process of bringing an end to the Long Night  such as the last hero and presumably Jon Snow.  While it’s not conclusive, Coldhands does seem to fit into this line of symbolism as well, which is why I think he might be a green man, or one of the last hero’s party or both, and at the very least, a resurrected skinchanger or greenseer who ranges the haunted forest.

So  what about those twelve companion of the Last Hero?  What about the original brothers of the Night’s Watch?  Could they have been zombies too?

But of course…   But we are out of time for today, so in three days this topic will rise from the dead and give birth to another podcast, titled “Sacred order of Green Zombies 2: The Undead Night’s Watch.  It’s already written and recorded, and was original part of this script, but instead of releasing a three-hour plus podcast, I took out my zombie-slaying sword and cut it in twain.  Part 2 will actually be a lot shorter, so look out for that by moonrise on the third day.

I originally set out to write about zombie skinchangers only, not green men, but I kept running into green men and horned god references, as you’ve seen, and there are more yet to come in the next episode .  I even tried to split it into a zombie episode and a green men episode, but there was no keeping them separate – their spirits had co-mingled too long.  As I said, I believe the resurrected fertility god ideas are the lens through which we must view Jon’s resurrection and impending zombie-hood, and the context in which we must understand the last hero and the problem of ending the long night.  And that’s why I’ve given you my thoughts on zombies and the last hero AND the Sacred Order of Green Men at the same time – because they belong together.

See you in three days, and if any crows ask you for corn, don’t give them any.

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As always, a deep debt of gratitude is owed to our Patreon supporters who fuel the fires of Mythical Astronomy. We’ve started having pre-episode chats on the topics for upcoming podcasts and it’s been a lot of fun, so that’s one of the things you can look forward to if you choose to join our patreon campaign.  As always, thanks to Animals as Leaders for providing the music to our show – their new album The Madness of Many just came out, and it’s awesome, of course, so go check it out.  A huge thank you to Martin Lewis, who did the vocal performances podcast version of this episode, with an assist from the Amethyst Koala.  Martin is currently performing chapters from the first novel, A Game of Thrones, on his Facebook page, “Echoes of Ice and Fire,” so check that out, and you will recognize him from our joint podcast with History of Westeros on the Great Empire of the Dawn, which he did the vocals for as well.

The most important aspect of the Grey King story, however, is that he stole the fire of the gods and possessed it for mankind, like Prometheus and Lucifer and so many others. We have identified this as a major, defining theme of the Azor Ahai story, and it’s certainly got our attention that this idea is prominently featured in the Grey King folklore. The Grey King was actually said to posses divine fire by two different methods: by taunting the Storm God into setting a tree ablaze with a thunderbolt, and also by slaying the sea dragon Nagga. Aaron Damphair gives us the quick summary of the sea dragon slaying in A Feast for Crows:

Nagga had been the first sea dragon, the mightiest ever to rise from the waves. She fed on krakens and leviathans and drowned whole islands in her wrath, yet the Grey King had slain her and the Drowned God had changed her bones to stone so that men might never cease to wonder at the courage of the first of kings. 

And then a bit, later, we hear about the Grey King’s possessions of the Sea Dragon’s fire:

The hall had been warmed by Nagga’s living fire, which the Grey King had made his thrall.

Somehow not satisfied with making the living fire of the sea dragon his thrall, The World of Ice and Fire tells us that the Grey King also obtained fire from the Storm God’s thunderbolt:

The deeds attributed to the Grey King by the priests and singers of the Iron Islands are many and marvelous.  It was the Grey King who brought fire to the earth by taunting the Storm God until he lashed down with a thunderbolt, setting a tree ablaze.

According to our theory, both the Storm God’s thunderbolt legend and the slaying of the sea dragon legend are mythicized descriptions of moon meteor impacts – fire from heaven, in other words. Both legends imply the Grey King as essentially calling down that fire from heaven, and then somehow possessed that fire. That… sounds a lot like someone else we know, right?  Azor Ahai called down the fire from heaven by breaking the moon, and he possessed this fire of the gods by making Lightbringer the sword out of the fiery moon meteors. That’s practically the same story!

Furthermore, I suspect that just as Azor Ahai possessed the fire of the gods in the form of black weapons made from the moon meteorite, the Ironborn may have also quite literally possessed black moon meteor material.  Consider this quote from The World of Ice and Fire which I left you at the end of chapter three, Waves of Night and Moon Blood:

“And when battle was joined upon the shores, mighty kings and famous warriors fell before the reavers like wheat before a scythe, in such numbers that the men of the green lands told each other that the Ironborn were demons risen from some watery hell, protected by fell sorceries and possessed of foul black weapons that drank the very souls of those they slew.”  

Lightbringer supposedly drank Nissa Nissa’s blood and soul when it slew her, and I’ve been proposing that Lightbringer was a black steel sword made from a moon meteor from the very start, so it’s quite tempting to draw a connection between Azor Ahai’s dark Lightbringer sword and these sorcerous, soul-drinking black weapons in the hands of the Ironborn. Lightbringer was the fire of the gods, and I believe it was a black weapon. The Grey King and the Ironborn possessed the fire of the gods, and they also had these suspicious black weapons.

The Ironborn also have that big, mysterious Seastone Chair, carved in the shape of a kracken from an oily black stone.  As we examined in The Mountain vs. The Viper, there is abundant evidence tying the oily or greasy black stone to moon meteors – I have proposed that the oily black stone is either moon meteorite material or earth stone burnt black by the toxic magical fire of the moon meteors. The fact that the Ironborn possess the fire of the gods AND an oily black stone tends to make me wonder if that wasn’t the truth of those soul-drinking black weapons – that they were weapons made from oily black stone, the fire of the gods which was pulled down to earth. Perhaps the Seastone Chair used to be a couch before they carved so many swords off of it.

So the slaying of the Sea Dragon and the Storm God’s Thunderbolt – two myths about moon meteor impacts. Also, two myths about weirwoods. That’s right! For example, the means by which the Grey King took possession of the Storm God’a fire was the burning tree, set ablaze by the divine thunderbolt. As we mentioned at the end of the Mountain vs. the Viper essay, the weirwood tree is a symbolic depiction of a burning tree. Its five pointed red leaves are frequently described as “bloody hands,” when Theon sees the rising sun hitting the tops of the trees in the Winterfell godswood, “the red leaves of the weirwood were a blaze of flame among the green.” Together with the screaming face weeping blood, it’s basically the image of a tree person burning alive. Intense, I know. Burt the point is – when we hear about this special burning tree which brings the fire of the gods to earth, we should think of the weirwood tree, which looks like a burning tree and… well, it can impart the power of the Old Gods to man, can’t it?

Yes! The “fire of the gods” as a general concept represents the knowledge and power of the gods, and this is exactly what the weirwood bond bestows upon the greenseer. Furthermore, and as we’ll see in future Weirwood Compendium episodes, the Yggdrasil / Odin mythology behind the weirwoods and greenseers is absolutely saturated the notion of obtaining the fire, magic, and knowledge of the gods. So – a burning tree that imparts the “fire of the gods” to man? That’s probably a weirwood tree, especially when we think of the obvious parallel here with the burning bush that spoke to Moses with Gods voice.

The Sea Dragon myth is also related to weirwood trees, because the arching pillars of pale stone know as Nagga’s Ribs are almost certainly made of petrified weirwood. Weirwood trees, once cut down or killed, will turn into pale stone after thousands of years, and there is abundant evidence that’s exactly what the pale stone “ribs” of Nagga are made of, petrified weirwood.

A third Grey King myth also seems to involve weirwood – this one has him making the first longships of the Ironborn from the “hard pale wood of Ygg, a demon tree who fed on human flesh.”  The name Ygg is a pretty blatant call-out to Yggdrasil, the mythical world tree on which the weirwood ideas are heavily based, and weirwoods are pale trees that occasionally receive human sacrifice – feeding on human flesh, if you will – so the implication here is that the Grey King was making boats out of weirwood. As it happens, there’s a good theory we will talk about today that the pale stone pillars that are seen as the ribcage of the sea dragon may actually be the upside-down frame of the hull of a large boat made of weirwood! I mean, the Worldbook is suggesting the Grey King built ships from weirwood – or more likely ships with keels and ribbing made from weirwood – and if one were beached and flipped over, the weirwood portion would indeed turn to stone after thousands of years and look something like a ribcage. More on this in a moment.

So, in our first foray in the stormy world of Ironborn theology, we’ll answer the question of why the Sea Dragon, Storm God’s thunderbolt, and the other elements of the Grey King mythology seem to reference both meteors and weirwoods. As strange as it sounds, there is a very logical and clear answer, and it reveals a dramatic truth about Azor Ahai, perhaps the most important thing I’ve told you about him since I first told you he was a bad guy who broke the moon and caused the Long Night. But you’ll have to wait till the end of the episode for that one 🙂

Let’s get this weirwood compendium underway!

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The Sea Dragon

This section is brought to you by the Long Night’s Watch: Charon Ice-Eyes, Dread Ferryman of the North, Wielder of the Staff of the Old Gods, a weirwood staff banded in Valyrian steel; Cinxia, Frozen Fire Queen of the Summer Snows and Burner of Winter’s Wick; Antonius the Conspirator, the Red Right Hand of R’hllor, Knower of the Unknowable, Dispenser of Final Justice, and BlueRaven of the Lightning Peck, the frozen thunderbolt, whose words are “the way must be tried”

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The first thing I need to do is convince you that the Grey King’s slaying of the sea dragon is in fact an account of a moon meteor impact.  We’ve already talked about the thunderbolt a bit in the Mountain vs. the Viper essay, and we’ll certainly come back to it, as well as to the idea of burning trees.  But we’ve been mentioning the sea dragon in passing all throughout the Bloodstone Compendium, and I haven’t really given you my full body of reasoning and evidence for the sea dragon being a moon meteor, so let’s start with that.

It begins with very basic logic: if the mythical idea of “dragons coming from the moon” really refers to falling meteors, then a “sea dragon” is probably nothing more than a dragon meteor which fell into the sea. We’ve seen that the Chinese have been keeping track of comets for thousands of years and have a history of depicting comets and falling meteors as fire-breathing dragons… but not just any old fire-breathing dragons – the Chinese always depict their dragons as water dragons and sea serpents. This is almost certainly the result of the Chinese having dealt with tsunamis brought on by the landing of dragons in the Pacific Ocean. The sea dragon Nagga was noted to “drown whole islands in its wroth,” and this is an excellent description of the enormous tsunamis which do indeed accompany the oceanic impact of a fair-sized meteor.

The Hammer of the Waters, another likely moon meter impact story, also involves drowning a lot of land: the formerly-whole-and-now-broken Arm of Dorne.  I mentioned that Thor’s lightning hammer suggests a connection between the Storm God’s thunderbolt and the Hammer of the Waters, and the drowning of land involved in both tales sounds similar too.  As we examine the sea dragon ideas here, watch out for hammers and hammering waves. When George references one moon meteor symbol, he usually finds a way to reference others as well. We’re going to see a lot of that today!

By tracing out the “moon blood” symbolic motif in past episodes, we have seen that floods are a major fallout of the Long Night / moon explosion disaster.  George is doing a pretty clever, if uncouth, wordplay thing by using the phrase “moon blood” as a reference to the real floods of the Long Night that would have been triggered by moon meteor impacts, as well as to the meteors themselves. Remember that meteors can be called bleeding stars, so a storm of bleeding stars flooding the sky is like a tide of blood coming from the moon. As always, it’s a symbolic meaning piggybacking on a literal meaning – we have a metaphorical “flood” of bleeding stars that causes literal floods when they lands near or in water.

As we know, our earthly moon is the cause of the ocean tides, but this takes it to a new level – moon meteors causing titanic flood tides. To get a bit more scientific, a planet with multiple moons that lost one of them, even a small moon, would have some pretty serious issues with irregular tides. Scientists, correct me if I’m wrong, but the moon meteors wouldn’t even have to hit the ocean to cause flooding. Regardless, the Ironborn legends aren’t just about a flood, but a great, fiery thing falling from the sky, so it seems like someone around here actually saw something fall from the sky.

Turning from science to pseudo science (which is bad for people but good for folklore), consider also that in ancient times, the moon was (wrongly) believed to trigger a woman’s menstruation cycle, which is why menstrual blood is referred to as ‘moon blood.’ Since Martin is imagining a moon goddess dying while giving birth to bleeding stars and floods, the “moon blood” metaphor really does work well. It captures the sacrificial aspect of Lightbringer’s forging as well as the reproductive aspect, and we know both are important parts of the Lightbringer myth. It’s also a call-out to the tale of Mithras and his slaying of the white lunar bull whose blood flowed over the entire world and transformed it… that’s right, he slew the moon bull and the world was flooding with moon bull blood.

The description of Oathkeeper and Widow’s Wail’s black and red rippled steel as “waves of night and blood crashing upon some steely shore” was so important that I used for the title of an episode, and it happens to contain one of our first hints about the sea dragon aspect of Lightbringer. Lightbringer is a sword which brought darkness (waves of night) and flood tides from pieces of drowned moon (waves of blood), and that entire story is told right there in the folds of the swords formerly known as Ice.

The likely truth here is fairly simple – a moon meteor probably impacted on or near the Iron Islands, drowning the land and probably collapsing some of the land too, such as the area around Castle Pyke. The second Theon chapter of A Clash of Kings, which serves as our introduction to the Iron Islands, is some one the most vivid examples of mythical astronomy in the entire series, and it tells the tale in fairly clear language, all while the red comet hangs in the sky above the castle in typical menacing fashion:

The point of land on which the Greyjoys had raised their fortress had once thrust like a sword into the bowels of the ocean, but the waves had hammered at it day and night until the land broke and shattered, thousands of years past.  All that remained were three bare and barren islands and a dozen towering stacks of rock that rose from the water like the pillars of some sea god’s temple, while the angry waves foamed and crashed among them. 

Castle Pyke is a part of a point of land which thrust into the bowels of the ocean like a sword, and then broke. We took a long look at broken swords in the Tyrion Targaryen essay, and we saw that the broken sword is an important symbol which refers to the splitting of the Lightbringer comet, and to a long list of Azor Ahai / Last Hero figures with broken swords. Here in this quote, we read about a broken sword which was thrust into the bowels of the ocean thousands of years in the past: that’s our island-drowning sea dragon, thrusting into the ocean like a sword at the place where the waves hammer the land.

The castle Pyke itself seems to be a part of the broken sword land, as is noted several times in the chapter, and in the very next paragraph, we see that the Sea Tower at the point of the broken sword peninsula sounds a lot like Lightbringer:

The Sea Tower rose from the outmost island at the point of the broken sword, the oldest part of the castle, round and tall, the sheer- sided pillar on which it stood half- eaten through by the endless battering of the waves. The base of the tower was white from centuries of salt spray, the upper stories green from the lichen that crawled over it like a thick blanket, the jagged crown black with soot from its nightly watchfire.

A jagged black crown which lights on fire at night? You don’t say. Remember that the golden crown worn by kings was originally meant as a depiction of the sun’s rays which signifies that the king has the divine authority of the sun god.  A black crown inverts this symbolism and implies a dark sun, or perhaps one who has taken his divine authority through force.  The Ironborn kings sometimes wear a black iron crown such as Balon Greyjoy speaks of, and of course there are a lot of black crowns in A Song of Ice and Fire – and I believe they all refer to the idea of a darkened sun or an illegitimate sun king, the two things that define Azor Ahai. Thus, for the black tower at the tip of the broken sword to have a flaming black crown… well… let’s just say ‘that’s our man.’  Salt and smoke are here too – the soot which darkens the top of the tower, and the salt which turns the base of it white. I’ll quickly point out that the colors here – white, green, and black – mirror the colors of Dany’s dragons.

Only two paragraphs later, the red comet itself, infamous symbol of Lightbringer, makes an appearance to clue us in to what kind of dragon sword falls into the sea:

Theon had never seen a more stirring sight. In the sky behind the castle, the fine red tail of the comet was visible through thin, scuttling clouds. All the way from Riverrun to Seagard, the Mallisters had argued about its meaning. It is my comet, Theon told himself, sliding a hand into his fur-lined cloak to touch the oilskin pouch snug in its pocket. Inside was the letter Robb Stark had given him, paper as good as a crown. 

So we have a castle with a very Lightbringer-like tower that sits on a point of land which thrusts into the bowels of the sea like a longsword or a sea dragon, and right behind it, like a red flag calling our attention to it all, we have the red comet, Lightbringer symbol par excellence.

Theon has a crown too; the parchment from Robb that was “as good as a crown.” It ends up mirroring the black, fiery crown of the Sea Tower when Balon casually tosses it in the fire upon receiving it later in the chapter.  The parchment crown “curled, blackened, and took flame,” a good match to the curved Sea Tower with its black crown of flame. Before it is burnt, we see that Theon’s paper crown is kept in an oilskin pouch, perhaps to symbolize the oily black stone of the Lightbringer comet and the moon meteors. Theon is fingering the paper crown in the oilskin pouch as looks up and thinks that the comet belongs to him. And yes, all the wording in that last sentence was intentional.

In other words, the symbolism here paints Theon as a man with a flaming black crown to whom the Lightbringer comet belongs. We know who that is, right?

There’s actually one other Ironborn story about how they came to posses fire, and it leads right back to the conclusion that this fire we are talking about was Lightbringer.  This is also from A Clash of Kings, and begins with Aeron Damphair speaking to Theon:

“Every morning brings a new day, much like the old.” 

“In Riverrun, they would tell you different.  They say the red comet is a herald of a new age.  A messenger from the gods.”

“A sign it is,” the priest agreed, “but from our god, not theirs. A burning brand it is, such as our people carried of old. It is the flame the Drowned God brought from the sea, and it proclaims a rising tide.  It is time to hoist our sails and go forth into the world with fire and sword, as he did.” 

The red comet is like a burning brand, and proclaims a rising tide, which in retrospect, is pretty straightforward. The red comet = a time for floods. It also proclaims the time to go out with fire and sword… or perhaps with a “fiery sword?” It’s interesting that the Drowned God brought this fiery brand from the ocean – how did fire get in the ocean, I wonder?  We think we know the answer – a fiery & wrathful sea dragon-comet-sword was thrust into the bowels of the ocean, shattering the land. Aeron directly compared the red comet to the burning brand the Drowned God brought from the see, so it seems we are to imagine a god emerging from the waves wielding the red comet as a fiery sword. This lines up well what the Ironborn say about themselves and their origins: the Iron Islands are named for their people, who are like iron, and that the Ironborn themselves come from the sea. Iron people that emerge from the sea with burning brands who will go forth with fire and sword, in other words. As we will begin to see, bringing fire out of the sea is an important aspect of the Ironborn mythos, starting here with the tale of the Drowned God carrying the burning brand from the sea.

As for the burning brand as a symbol, Aeron directly compares it to the red comet, but there’s actually another famous scene where the burning brand is used to symbolize the fallen star fire that is Lightbringer. This is from a Jon chapter of Clash, as Jon and Stonesnake prepare to climb up to the pass in the Frostfangs:

They could see the fire in the night, glimmering against the side of the mountain like a fallen star.  It burned redder than the other stars, and did not twinkle, though sometimes it flared up bright and sometimes dwindled down to no more than a distant spark, dull and faint.  {…} 

“The wolf will remain with us,” Qhorin said. “White fur is seen too easily by moonlight.” He turned to Stonesnake. “When it’s done, throw down a burning brand.  We’ll come when we see it fall.” 

A “stone snake” will throw down a burning brand when he climbs high enough to reach the flaring bright red fallen star fire suspended in the night.  Got it.

Taking a look at the major events of this chapter, we see that a stone snake (comet) collides with a red star fire (the fire moon), blood is spilled (three people at the fire for the three dragon meteors), Azor Ahai reborn-symbol Jon Snow does a Lightbringer forging scene with kissed-by-fire moon maiden Ygritte, and then the burning brand is thrown down to the earth below. That burning brand symbolizes the dragon meteors which fell from the moon, one of which became the sea dragon meteor which was thrust into the bowels of the sea at the Iron Islands, and that’s why we see it falling from the red star fire in the sky after a Lightbringer forging goes down.

Thus we see that the story of the Drowned God carrying the burning brand out of the sea is the same story as the Grey King possessing the fire of the sea dragon – that burning brand and the sea dragon’s fire represent moon meteors that fell into the sea and are then brought out of the sea by either the Grey King or the Drowned God.  Even better, one of the wildlings Jon fights against at the fire actually uses the burning brand as a weapon before they thrown one down the cliff, drawing a connection between the burning brand symbol and the idea of fiery weapons that come from a fallen red star.

And who is the Drowned God anyway?  Remembering that the moon is a goddess, the “woman wife of the sun,” the pieces of moon which drowned in the ocean as sea dragons would be pieces of a drowned moon goddess.  In other words, what we really have here with the sea dragon is a Drowned Goddess, not a drowned god.

I’d also like to point out that burning brands, such as the Drowned God carried from the sea, are burning wood, and of course a burning tree represents fire of the gods in the myth of the Grey King and the Storm God’s thunderbolt. The burning brand is therefore connected to the fire of the gods concept in three ways: it’s burning wood like Grey King’s burning tree, it’s directly compared to the red comet, and it is the form of fire which the Drowned God carried from the sea, making it the fire of the sea god.  You’ll recall that the pillars of the broken sword of land on which Pyke sits are described as the pillars of a sea god’s temple.

Putting it all together, we have a series of mythical metaphors, both in the main text of the story and in Ironborn folklore, which seem to be describing a meteor plunging into the ocean near the Iron Islands at the time of the Long Night and causing deadly floods. And lo and behold, all throughout those paragraphs we quoted concerning Theon’s arrival at Pyke, we have a ton of references to island-drowning waves, as well as a lot of hammering connected to waves to call us to mind of the hammer of the waters. We’ve seen it said of the broken sword of land that “the waves had hammered at it day and night until the land broke and shattered, thousands of years past,” and that “the angry waves foamed and crashed” among the remaining pieces of the peninsula, which are “like the pillars of some sea god’s temple.” We saw that “the sheer- sided pillar” on which the sea tower stood was “half- eaten through by the endless battering of the waves.” There’s more I could quote, but you get the idea.

Could these angry waves that did so much damage in the ancient past be the ones generated by the sea dragon’s fall from the heavens? The same event which was remembered as a Hammer of the Waters breaking the land and drowning islands? Aaron Damphair, from A Feast for Crows:

Outside, beneath the snoring of his drowned men and the keening of the wind, he could hear the pounding of the waves, the hammer of his god calling him to battle.

The same waves which “hammered” the land of Pyke are described here as God’s hammer. I would say that the sea dragon, a fallen moon goddess, was itself the hammer which broke the land and brought the drowning waves. This is a delightful parallel to the Hammer of the Waters drowning and breaking the land of the arm of Dorne. At the same time, the sea dragon meteor hammer is also the Storm God’s thunderbolt, which lines up well with Thor being a Storm God who hurls thunderbolts from his hammer. Again we are left with the idea that the hammer of the waters, the island drowning sea dragon, and the Storm God’s thunderbolt all refer to the same thing: moon meteor impacts.

Let me say this: although the Hammer of the Waters seems to refer to an impact on the Arm of Dorne and the sea dragon and thunderbolt myths seem to refer to an impact on or near the Iron Islands, both meteors would be from the same moon explosion, and therefore George has chosen to weave all the moon meteor symbols together.  Thus the Ironborn myths have a ton of hammer references, and hammer of the waters scenes have dragons and spears and lightning and so forth.

A great example of this kind of parallel between different meteor myths are the waves of night and blood that appear to crash onto the steely shore of Oathkeeper and Widow’s Wail and their parallels to the scene at Pyke. Pyke sits on a point of land which is a broken sword, one which was washed over by the moon blood flood of the sea dragon, and in similar fashion, Ned’s split or broken swords have waves of blood washing over them. The bloody sea dragon flood came during the Long Night, and Ned’s swords have the waves of night to symbolize the Long Night. In turn, Aeron sees pounding and crashing waves as the hammer of his god, creating the image of a divine hammer pounding the steel of the broken sword peninsula at the Iron Islands. That broken sword of land thrusts into the bowels of the ocean, and thrusting swords into the ocean is how you get hammering sea dragon waves, the waves of moon blood which came in the Long Night and which are alluded to in the folds of Widow’s Wail and Oathkeeper. Back before Ned’s Ice was split and reforged, we saw it being dipped into the night-black waters of the pond in the Winterfell godswood while still bloody from the execution in A Game of Thrones, creating very miniature waves of night and blood.

The idea of god’s hammer being the one to smash the Iron Islands is reinforced all through this chapter via references to Robert Baratheon’s attack on Pyke during the Greyjoy rebellion.  As I mentioned before, King Robert and his hammer are a rather clear manifestation of Thor and his mighty hammer mjolnir, and Robert’s entire attack on the Iron Islands is replaying the Storm God’s thunderbolt strike, the sea dragon landing, and the Hammer of the Waters… all at the same time.

It was nigh on sunset when they reached the walls of Pyke, a crescent of dark stone that ran from cliff to cliff, with the gatehouse in the center and three square towers to either side. Theon could still make out the scars left by the stones of Robert Baratheon’s catapults. A new south tower had risen from the ruins of the old, its stone a paler shade of grey, and as yet unmarred by patches of lichen. That was where Robert had made his breach, swarming in over the rubble and corpses with his warhammer in hand and Ned Stark at his side. Theon had watched from the safety of the Sea Tower, and sometimes he still saw the torches in his dreams, and heard the dull thunder of the collapse.

Pyke’s walls of dark stone are called a crescent, which puts in mind of the lunar crescent that was broken to create the sea dragon meteor, as well as all the related sickle / curving knife / crescent moon symbolism.  Robert hurled stones at this crescent, then came through with his war hammer. As you’ll notice, Theon’s reference to thunder gives us the thunderbolt idea to go along with Storm King’s Robert’s hammer.

Continuing the pattern of weaving hammer ideas in with flaming sword ideas, we find that there was a flaming sword on the scene at the Battle of Pyke as well!  Like I said, the gang is all invited. This is Gendry talking to Arya in A Storm of Swords:

“He liked feasts and tourneys, that’s why King Robert was so fond of him.  And this Thoros was brave.  When the walls of Pyke crashed down, he was the first man through the breach.  He fought with one of his flaming swords, setting Ironmen on fire with every slash.”

“I wish I had a flaming sword.  I can think of a few people I’d like to set on fire.”

The Ironborn were “set on fire” by a flaming sword, the one which crashed through the breach in the crescent of dark stone along with the thunderous hammer.  That’s our sea dragon meteor, ‘giving the Ironborn fire,’ just as the Grey King was said to posses the sea dragon’s fire.  Setting the Ironborn on fire serves as a nice metaphor for giving them fire, in this case the fire of a flaming sword in service to the Storm King Robert Baratheon. The flaming sword also parallels the Storm God’s thunderbolt which gave the Grey King fire as it “gives fire” to the Ironborn here.

Moving away from that Theon chapter of Clash, we find more confirmation that the idea of hammering waves can be connected to the sea dragon when Aeron prays to the Drowned God in A Feast for Crows:

My god, he prayed, speak to me in the rumble of the waves, and tell me what to do. The captains and the kings await your word. Who shall be our king in Balon’s place? Sing to me in the language of leviathan, that I may know his name. Tell me, O Lord beneath the waves, who has the strength to fight the storm on Pyke?

The word leviathan has a couple of meanings: it can refer to any large sea creature, particularly whales, and sometimes large people are derisively called leviathans.  Sam is called a grey leviathan by Lazy Leo Tyrell, for example, while Yezzan the Yunkish slave master is called a yellow leviathan.  But Leviathan is actually a well known mythological sea creature with a very specific description: it’s a monstrous, multi-headed sea dragon.  That’s right, we’re talking about a multi-headed, fire-breathing dragon which lives in the ocean – a real sea dragon.  So when Aeron is praying for the drowned god to speak to him through the waves in the language  of leviathan, it’s simply another clue that that the Drowned God is actually the island drowning sea dragon, and that the hammering waves come from the sea dragon. The language of the sea dragon is the flood, the one which hammers and drowns the land.

While we are defining words that mean sea monster, we should briefly talk about the name which George gave the sea dragon – Nagga.  Although the word nagga had sort of become a common word for snake in many fantasy universes, it is actually a specific word – ‘naga’ is the Vedic Sanskrit word for “cobra,” and the same word is used to refer to a specific type of deity or being which incarnates as a great snake – usually a king cobra (which is native to India), although it can sometimes be other snakes.  In the Mahabharata, nagas are beings with both human-like and snake-like attributes.

The myth of the naga evolved as it travelled from India and sees other forms in nearby mythology, most of which show various forms of the snake-man idea.  In Hindu myth, they are more like nature spirits which can bring fertility or sometimes floods and storms, and most notably, they are said to posses the elixir of immortality – the fire of the gods, in other words. In Buddhist mythology, naga became merged with myths of wise dragons and dragon men, and is frequently depicted as a man with multiple snake or dragon heads above him, or just as a multi-headed dragon or snake. The emphasis here is on a transcendent being who has gained the knowledge of heaven and attained enlightenment, which they specifically associated with a dragon’s fire. There are versions of naga in Laos, Thailand, Java, and Indonesia, and many of those are assorted with lakes or rives or oceans, but my favorite is the Cambodian idea of nagas: they were thought to be a reptilian race of beings under the King Kaliya who possessed a large empire or kingdom in the Pacific Ocean region until they were chased away to India by the Garuda, a phoenix-like incarnation of Lord Vishnu.  The daughter of these lizard people married a brahmin from India and from their union sprang the Cambodian people. Thus, the Cambodian people have a saying which means “born from naga.”

So if we were to sum up the body of ideas which George may be implying by naming his sea dragon ‘nagga,’ we would include beings who are both snake and man or even dragon and man, multi-headed snakes or dragons, beings who posses magic and the knowledge and fire of the gods, and frequent associations with water. I think it’s easy to see how these ideas are generally in sync with George’s own dragon mythology, which encourages us to draw a link between the sea dragon ideas and the rest of his dragon lore – Azor Ahai, the three-headed dragon, people that are the blood of the dragon, and so on.

Next I’d like to turn our attention to the leviathan whose voice Aeron was seeking in the hammering of the waves, and also to the broader real-world phenomena  of dragon-slayer myths where the slaying of the dragon results in a transformational global flood.

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The Language of Leviathan

This section is brought to you by Visenya Ice Eyes, Starry Jewel-Queen of the Frozen Veil of Tears and Ser Brian the Prodigal Stark, the Good Other, Knight of the Last House, Wielder of the Valyrian Steel blade Red Song, two members of the Long Night’s Watch… and also by Ser Imriel Jordayne of the Tor, Spinner of the Great Wheel and Guardian of the Sword of the Morning, and Ser Harrison of House Casterly, the Noontide Sun, whose words are “Deeper than did Ever Plummet Sound,” Guardian of the Shadowcat

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“Leviathan” is a Hebrew word meaning “twisted, coiled,” or “that which gathers itself into folds,” referencing the way that snakes coil up and fold in on themselves.  The biblical sea dragon leviathan was probably based on similar, older ideas in the same region; specifically, that of “ocean of chaos” dragons Tiamat and Lotan (or his Greek incarnations Ladon and the Hydra ), all of whom were slaughtered to effect some kind of creative process on the world, usually accompanied by floods and storms.  The legend of the island-drowning sea dragon Nagga and it’s associations with the fallen moon maiden myth we’ve been tracing out in all of the previous episodes could fit right in with this mythological family, which includes a long line of myths about dragon-slaying and world-transforming cataclysms, and thus I think it is appropriate to view it in that context.

As for Biblical leviathan, a true sea dragon, we read that in the beginning, Yaweh (who was originally a Storm God akin to the Canaanite Yam) created two leviathans, but he killed the female and neutered the male.  Since we have one moon which gave birth to dragons as it died, and one moon that still survives, it’s tempting to draw a correlation.  Many of these types of myths have one big dragon-slaying in the past and one big one prophesied yet to come…. exactly like the Qarthine moon dragons myth, which speaks of a second moon that perished in the past and a surviving moon that will crack in the future.  I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag, but there is some potential  foreshadowing that the red comet will return and crack open that remaining moon.  That’s a subject we’ll dig into when we start our upcoming series called “Moons of Ice and Fire.”

Even more interesting is the association with the skin of the Leviathan and light-bringing: Yaweh makes clothes of light from the skin of the slain female leviathan.  That’s a very close match to the idea of making the sword Lightbringer from the moon meteors, and it also reminds us of the Grey King making a longhall from the skeleton of the sea dragon.  Supposedly Yaweh will make an illuminating cover for the entire sky out of the skin of the male leviathan at the end times, showing us the “dragon slaying yet to come” idea I just referred to.

George seems to referencing these ideas, but inverting certain aspects, as he does with his inspirations – darkness covers the sky when the sea dragon was slain instead of light, and the body of the slain sea dragon seems to drink the light instead of giving it off as the Biblical leviathan’s skin does.

Returning to the idea of a leviathan or sea dragon being slaughtered to effect some huge transformation upon the world, let’s take another look at Persian and Vedic mythology.  We’ve seen that much of the Lightbringer mythology comes from Persian Zoroastrianism, as well as Roman Mithraism, which itself was at least partially based on Persian ideas of Mithra (though there are many important differences and scholars dispute the level of connection).  The loose translation of Azor Ahai as “fire dragon” derives from Avestan (which is an older dialect of Persian) and Vedic Sanskrit phonetic roots, and here I’ll actually clarify what was a bit of an oversimplification from the first essay.

The “Middle Persian” word for fire is ‘ādur,’ while the Avestan form is ‘ātar,’ and the modern version of the word is ‘āẕar.’  That’s where we get the similarity between Azor and “fire.”  Meanwhile, ‘aži‘ is the Avestan word for “serpent” or “dragon.”  For example, in Zoroastrian myth, there’s an evil three-headed dragon (or perhaps a dragon-man, the tales are not clear) named Aži Dahāka or sometimes ‘Aždaha’ who is chained up but is prophesied to burst his bonds at the end of the world and ravage the earth, Lion-of-Night-style.  There’s another dragon that was apparently in need of slaying called ‘Aži Sruuara,’ the poisonous horned dragon.  ‘Aži’ is a cognate to the Vedic Sanskrit word ‘ahi,’ which also means “snake” and sometimes “dragon.”  The name of the big bad serpent-dragon villain of the Rigveda is usually named Vritra, but he is also called Ahi, and he’s a snake who has to be slaughtered by the hero, Indra, an act that unleashes a global flood.  The Rigveda also speaks of the “dragon of the deep,” called ahi budhnya, who is said to dwell at the bottom of the heavenly rivers.

So, to sum up our loose translation of the name Azor Ahai, “Azor” is similar to the old Persian and Iranian words for fire, and Ahai is very similar to the Vedic Sanskrit word ahi, which means dragon or snake.  The Avesta form of ahi is azi, which reminds us of the az- in ‘Azor.’

And then we have the fire dragon Gōčihr, who comes to us from Zoroastrian and Manichean astrology.  Manicheanism was a highly dualistic religion that sprang up in Persia around 200 AD which was in part based on the Book of Enoch, and it has much in common with early Christian Gnosticism and the later gnostic beliefs of the Cathars of southern France, and the Cathars are another self-acknowledged point of inspiration for George R. R. Martin.  The Manichean cosmology tells of two dragon monsters which are the enemies of the sun, moon, and stars, Gōčihr and Mūšparīg, who are chained to the sun so as to prevent them from causing harm.  They are placed opposite of one another in the sky and are made to turn the celestial wheel of the sky.  Mūšparīg may be the original demon responsible for lunar eclipses, which are of course know as “blood moons,” while Gōčihr seems to be associated with constellations and comets both.  Here I will quote from the Encyclopedia Iranica’s summary of a work called the Bundahišn, which is a compilation of Zoroastrian cosmology derived from two older codices from the 8th and 14th century AD.

At the end of time Gōčihr will fall down on the earth, which it will terrify like a wolf does a sheep; its fire and halo will then melt the metal of Šahrewar in the hills and mountains, thus providing the river of molten metal necessary for the purification of men.  At the end, after Ohrmazd himself has come down to earth to send Āz and Ahriman back to the Darkness whence they had come, Gōčihr the serpent burns in the molten metal and the pollution of Hell burns and Hell becomes pure (Bundahišn TD1, pp. 193.11-16, 195.17-196.2; TD2, pp. 225.3-8, 227.12-15; tr. Anklesaria. pp. 288-91; tr. West, pp. 125f., 129).

Gōčihr, as I said, is not an actual dragon, but a comet; or said another way, a stars which fell from a constellation to the earth. You remember when I said that many people all around the world have mythicized comets and meteors as fiery dragons, right? Well here you go, this is a pretty fantastic one. The comet dragon falls from heaven and melts the metal of the earth for means of purification, which is right in line with all the myths of dragons being slain to transform the world through floods as well as our own theory about the Long Night. A world-transforming comet dragon impact connected with rivers of molten metal has to remind us of the of making of Lightbringer from the moon meteor dragons, and also of the idea that George sometimes symbolizes the storm of falling stars as wave of blood in the sky – waves of “bleeding stars” or “bloodstones.”  The idea of two dragons chained to the sun reminds us of the idea of the comet being split in two as it orbited the sun, creating two dragon comets; and the fact that one of these Manichean celestial fire dragons also causes eclipses of one sort or another is obviously something that makes me take notice.  My point isn’t to say “Ah ha! George got all of this from the Gōčihr story! I’ve solved the puzzle!” but rather to point out that associating comet impacts with dragon slaying and world-changing cataclysms is a tradition which George is participating in with his own myth-making. He’s speaking the common language of myth and building off of established symbolism.

You can see the clear echoes of the Gōčihr story in the Tauroctony, Mithras’s slaying of the white lunar bull which was a part of himself. Mithras sacrifices the white bull, and the bull’s blood flows out into the world and triggers a regeneration of life. One of the differences between Roman Mithraism and its Persian ancestors is that dragons are pretty much always evil in Persian myth, while the same is not true for Roman Mithraism. In the Tauroctony, the white bull plays the role of the slain dragon, but the white bull is a friend to Mithras, just as dragons are seen as a source of knowledge and enlightenment by the initiates of the Mithraic Mysteries, as the Roman adherents to this secretive religion were named.

Part of the point of bringing all of this up is to speak of one of the common universal myths which can be found from the Middle East to India to the far east – that the slaying of the dragon to transform the world. The oldest version of this story may be the Babylonian myth of Tiamat and Marduk, as I alluded to at the beginning of this section.  Tiamat is a symbol of the chaos of primordial creation, originally a shining mother goddess embodying femininity. When her children kill her husband, however, she incarnates in the form of a monstrous sea dragon, only to be was slain by Marduk, who used her divided body to form the heavens and the earth. She also gives birth to dragon children, monsters with poison instead of blood. The tale of Yaweh slaying the leviathan is thought to have been a version of this Babylonian myth, and it’s certainly very similar.

I would suggest that all of these dragon-slayer myths, many of which are derivative of one another, are playing into the same ideas and themes: death and resurrection, and word-changing natural and celestial disasters being personified as the wroth of dragons and sea dragons.

We can see many parallels to Martin’s own version of this myth – a sea dragon who makes or remakes the world, a dragon being slain to effect a creative act, a being who is a mother of dragons, etc.  Marduk is actually a storm god, as is Yaweh, so we can see that the idea of a storm god slaying a sea dragon has ample mythological precedent.  One thinks of Robert Baratheon slaying Rhaegar in the river Trident, a scene we’ve examined a couple of times now, which gives us an incarnation of the Norse storm god slaying a black dragon who falls into the water.  We had hammers and falling rubies that flashed like fire in that scene as well. This slaying of the dragon and its line ushered in a new dynasty, with Robert reigning over a long summer of bounty and fertility.

In Ironborn myth, the Storm God hurls the thunderbolt moon meteor, while it is the Grey King who slays the sea dragon meteor, but since both myths are referring to the slaying of the moon and the hammering of its meteor children, they amount to the same act. Slaying a sea dragon (or more accurately, slaying a moon which becomes a sea dragon) and hurling down the divine thunderbolt are essentially the same act, and that’s also the same thing as swinging the hammer of the gods. The point is – all of these Westerosi fables are derivative of the dragon slayer myths from the real world, and in many myths, it is the Storm King or Storm God who slays the dragon.

For further reading, I recommend this fantastic analysis of dragons in Persian mythology from the Encyclopedia Iranica. It’s their entry on aždaha.

I have a really awesome leviathan quote that I’ve been saving which gives us Robert the hammer-wielding Storm King creating dead leviathans. This is from that first Theon chapter of A Clash of Kings that we’ve been pulling from, the one with the repeated references to Robert’s storming of Pyke.  As Theon is sailing to Pyke, he passes by the ruins of Lordsport and we get this:

When last he’d seen Lordsport, it had been a smoking wasteland, the skeletons of burnt longships and smashed galleys littering the stony shore like the bones of dead leviathans, the houses no more than broken walls and cold ashes. After ten years, few traces of the war remained. The smallfolk had built new hovels with the stones of the old, and cut fresh sod for their roofs. A new inn had risen beside the landing, twice the size of the old one, with a lower story of cut stone and two upper stories of timber. The sept beyond had never been rebuilt, though; only a seven- sided foundation remained where it had stood. Robert Baratheon’s fury had soured the ironmen’s taste for the new gods, it would seem.

Theon was more interested in ships than gods. 

Remember how I said that the bones of Nagga might actually be the flipped-over hull of a weirwood boat? Well here we have a direct comparison between the wooden ships and sea dragons – in this case, burnt and smashed ships are compared the bones of dead leviathans.  Theon is thinking of leviathans as in dead whale skeletons, but the hint here is about leviathan the sea dragon. Shortly thereafter, Theon compares the ships to gods, completing the circle and bringing us back to the notion of the leviathan as a fallen god or goddess. We’re going to get down to the “sea dragon as a boat” thing in a moment, so file that one away for now.

Let’s take a quick look around at the scene here at “Lordsport,” starting with the name.  This is the place where the gods come into port. That’s our sea dragon goddess, coming in to port with  her heavenly cargo. The name is similar in nature to the name “King’s Landing,” which symbolically refers to the landing of King Azor Ahai reborn the moon meteor, and the same is true of the name “Lordsport,” though it might have more literal implications since we think a meteor actually landed at the Iron Islands,

As for Storm King Robert Baratheon, he landed here with his hammer and his wrath, and he transformed it into what Theon remembers as “a smoking wasteland” littered with burnt sea dragon bones. In his attack, he’s reenacting the Hammer of the Waters, the striking of the Storm God’s thunderbolt (setting fire to wooden boats instead of trees), and the slaying of the sea dragon (leaving the burnt bones of leviathans laying around.) Toss in the other references to this battle, and we have the hammer cracking open the crescent of dark stone as well as Thoros’s flaming sword coming through the breach, giving us references to the Lightbringer myth and the Hammer of the Waters again. In fact, you could say that the entire reason the Iron Islands rebellion exists is so that Martin can depict Storm King Robert Baratheon repeatedly striking them with his hammer.

Just as we see Robert hammering away on the Iron Islands to suggest a link to the hammer of the waters and the thunderbolt of the Storm God, we have dragon attacks on the Iron Islands to suggest the sea dragon and flaming sword symbols. The first one involves House Volmark of the Iron Islands, whose sigil is a black leviathan on grey, which certainly invites further scrutiny.

Geroge R. R. Martin is a well known lover of heraldry, and I believe he often makes use of heraldry to drop massive clues about the mysteries of the series. It turns out that the only significant member of the House of the Black Leviathan in history besides the young Lord Volmark in the main story is Quorin Volmark. He was a distant relation to King Harwyn “Hardhand” Hoare who briefly claimed the Seastone Chair in 2 AC after King Aegon the Conqueror roasted Black Harren Hoare and all his sons at Harrenhall. Quorin Volmark then declared himself the rightful heir of “the black line,” referring to the supposedly “black-blooded” members of House Hoare. Of course we’ve seen that black blood is a very important motif in our collection of moon death symbolism – having the”fire inside you” turns your blood black – so this detail stands out as significant.  Quoin Volmark is a black-blooded, black leviathan, and we know what that’s all about. A black ‘bloodstone’ meteor – turned – sea dragon.

The crux of Quorin’s story is this, from The World of Ice and Fire:

“Other claimants soon arose on Great Wyck, Pyke, and Orkmont, and for a full year and a half their followers fought each other by land and sea. Aegon the Conqueror put an end to that fighting in 2 AC when he and Balerion descended upon Great Wyck, accompanied by a vast war fleet. The Ironmen collapsed before him.  Qhorin Volmark died at the Conqueror’s own hand, cut down by Aegon’s Valyrian steel blade, Blackfyre.  

Aegon wields the sword Blackfyre, while his dragon Balerion breathes black fire – they are matching symbols. Balerion descends upon Old Wyck, the exact location of “Nagga’s bones” – this is reenacting the sea dragon’s landing on the Iron Islands, perhaps on Old Wyk itself, where it might have created the crescent-shaped bay now know as “Nagga’s Cradle.” Meanwhile, Aegon kills Qhorin the black leviathan with Blackfyre the sword. The Grey King slew Nagga, and possessed her fire – and here that is represented by Aegon slaying the black leviathan and also possessing black fire in the form of a sword. Although technically he didn’t actually get the black fire from Quorin, nevertheless the symbolism is there. Aegean slew the sea dragon by slaying the black leviathan, and he possessed black fire in the form of a sword. This would seem a match for the idea of the Grey King and the ancient Ironborn fashioning black, soul-drinking weapons from the sea dragon meteor. It also equates the Grey King with our black dragon / Azor Ahai archetype, an idea we had as soon as we heard that the Grey King was a stealer of heavenly fire. More on this to come.

As a side note, the vast war fleet accompanying the black dragons would represent the meteor shower. This is yet another connection between sea dragons and ships – these ships are owned by a Targaryen, and thus they are dragon-ships, ocean-going dragons… sea dragons, after a fashion. We are totally going to talk about boats in a minute, I promise.

Aegon’s sacking of the Iron Islands is referenced in A Feast for Crows at the Kingsmoot by Eric Drum, wielder of the Valyrian sword Red Rain, and remember that when he refers to the black line being ended, he’s talking about Aegon’s slaying of Quorin Volmark:

“When the black line was consumed by dragon-fire, the ironborn gave the primacy to Vickon Greyjoy, aye … but as lord, not king.”  

I’ve included this quote because its phrasing about the bloodline of the black leviathan being consumed in dragonfire suggests the idea of the moon’s blood being incinerated and blackened by the comet’s impact and the resulting explosion (the dragon fire).  A black-blooded leviathan, burning with black dragon fire – it fits our picture of Lightbringer perfectly.  I mean, that’s it, exactly, and I think the message is that the leviathan or sea dragon meteor was the same kind of black moon meteor from which Lightbringer was made.

There’s a nice companion to Aegon and Balerion’s attack on the Iron Islands to be found in A Dance with Dragons, as Daenerys rides her black dragon, Drogon.  This too reinforces the idea of the Iron Islands having been shaped by the fire of sea dragon, the black leviathan:

In a dozen heartbeats they were past the Dothraki, as he galloped far below. To the right and left, Dany glimpsed places where the grass was burned and ashen. Drogon has come this way before, she realized. Like a chain of grey islands, the marks of his hunting dotted the green grass sea.  

A chain of grey islands in a green sea burnt by black dragonfire – pretty nice, huh?  These grey islands are all places where the dragon landed. It may also be a reference to the chain of islands known as the Stepstones, the former Arm of Dorne, which has a Bloodstone Island and a Grey Gallows island. Grey Islands chains in the sea…

There’s another nice clue about black fire and black weapons on the Iron Islands at the time of the Long night to be found in House Harlaw and their Valyrian steel sword, Nightfall.  House Harlaw’s sigil is the silver scythe, indicating the harvest season and perhaps a bit of grim reaping – as we know, the Ironborn do not sew, they’re all about reaping.  The silver scythe evoke a lunar crescent, and one that has turned into a deadly weapon.  The lord of the Iron Islands also styles himself “Lord Reaper,” for what it’s worth.  The sword Nightfall itself has a moonstone pommel, as we’ve talked about before, which is a nice clue about moon-stones causing the nightfall of all nightfalls.  Nightfall was taken for House Harlaw by the Red Kracken Dalton Greyjoy.  Nobody knows how the sword came in the possession of House Harlaw, but the Red Kracken himself is an Azor Ahai / Bloodstone Emperor symbol who will receive further analysis in the future – take my word for it, he’s the right guy to be associated with the moonstone Valyrian sword Nightfall.  It’s also worth mentioning that House Volmark of the black leviathan sigil lives in the the Island of Harlaw and takes their lead from House  Harlaw, like a kind of bannerman.

The parade of Ironborn sigil-based symbolism continues on Great Wyck, in the Hardstone Hills, at the Hammerhorn Keep of House Goodbrother, and here we’ll spice our discussion of black swords sea dragons with a bit more hammer of the waters flavor.  House Goodbrother draws their wealth from their mines, which produce iron and other minerals.  Their sigil is a gold-banded black warhorn on a field of red, which bears an uncanny resemblance to Euron’s dragonbinder horn (which “split the air” as “sharp as a sword thrust” when it is sounded) as well as the “fake” horn of Joramun that Melisandre burns at the Wall in A Dance with Dragons.  These horns are associated with dragons and earthquakes, respectively, both of which come together at the Iron Islands, where the sea dragon caused an earthquake.  The description of the breaking of the Arm of Dorne with the Hammer of the Waters – “giants awoke in the earth, and all Westeros shook and trembled” – matches the description of the horn of Joramun’s supposed effects, and here we find a “Hammerhorn” keep. If that weren’t enough, cadet branches of House Goodbrother are found at places with such symbolically rich names as “Crow Spike Keep,” “Downdelving,” “Corpse Lake,” and “Shatterstone.”

• Crow Spikes – a reference to the the black meteors, which are described as crows and ravens and of course sharp pieces of iron
• Down-Delving – literally a reference to the mines where they mine black iron, perhaps that of the sea dragon’s corpse, and it may symbolically refer to the downward trajectory of the falling meteors
• Corpse Lake – a reference to the corpse of the moon goddess / sea dragon landing in the water
• Shatterstone –  a reference to Pyke’s broken sword of land which shattered

To reinforce these ideas, here’s a quote from the very first Ironborn chapter A Feast For Crows, where Aeron Damphair is coming up to Hammerhorn Keep after casually drowning some fanatics:

It was long after dark by the time the priest espied the spiky iron battlements of the Hammerhorn clawing at the crescent moon. Gorold’s keep was hulking and blocky, its great stones quarried from the cliff that loomed behind it. Below its walls, the entrances of caves and ancient mines yawned like toothless black mouths. The Hammerhorn’s iron gates had been closed and barred for the night. Aeron beat on them with a rock until the clanging woke a guard.
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The hall was dank and drafty, full of shadows. One of Gorold’s daughters offered the priest a horn of ale. Another poked at a sullen fire that was giving off more smoke than heat.

If we were wondering whether the name “Hammerhorn” was supposed to be a clue about the Hammer of the Waters, the Hammerhorn’s spiky iron is clawing at the moon, connecting the idea of the moon being attacked and pulled down with hammers and horns and iron claws.  The idea of the celestial horn plays on both the horns of the dragon comet which clawed the moon as well as the sound of the horn, which, again, in the case of dragonbinder, “split the air like a sword thrust.”   I believe the horn and other references to loud sounds and screams refer to Nissa Nissa’s cry of anguish and ecstasy – that’s the sound which is actually said to break the moon in the Lightbringer story.  In other words, the comet pierced the moon with its dragon horn, and the sound of the moon’s scream – of the impact – was like the sound of a screaming hell horn.  These horns brought down the hammer of the waters.  And yes, I think the implication here is that the horn of Joramun and dragonbinder may be the same thing, or the same type of thing, and one such horn may have even been involved in bringing down the moon… though that’s a subject for another day.

Returning to the scene, Aeron beats on the iron gate of the keep with a stone, creating a sound that “wakes the sleepers,” if you know what I mean, and I know you do.  George often gives us a metaphor in more than one form in the same scene just to drive the point across.  Aaron being offered a “horn” of ale after he wakes the sleeping folk of the Hammerhorn keep is an example of this technique.

Inside the keep itself, it’s full of shadows, and lit by a fire that gives off more smoke than heat, which is more or less how I have been describing the magic of the R’hllorists for a long time – more shadow than light.  This “fire which does not give off much light or heat” is a reoccurring motif which always seems to apply to the shadowy, corrupted fire magic that we see throughout the series.

Finally, we saw the caves to the mines yawning like toothless black mouths, perhaps the place where they mine the sea dragon bones, or perhaps just symbolic of the general concept.  The Grey King was said to have made a throne from Nagga’s fangs, so perhaps these toothless mouths refer to the defanged sea dragon, although that could certainly be a coincidence.  Said another way, the Ironborn bring black iron out from the inside of the “black mouths” of the mountain’s mines, while the black bloodstone comes from the insides of the sea dragon.

Finally, there’s a sneaky clue about the Hammer of the Waters being connected to leviathan in The World of Ice and Fire.  In the section on the breaking of the Arm of Dorne, which Maester Yandel rightly calls “the single most important event in Dornish history, and mayhaps the history of all Westeros,” they speculate about what real cause of the breaking might have been, given that the maesters reject the magical explanations.

“Archmaester Cassander suggests elsewise in his “Song of the Sea: How the Lands Were Severed,” arguing that it was not the singing of the greenseer that separated Westeros from Essos but rather what he calls the Song of the Sea – a slow rising of the waters that took place over centuries…”

But Aeron Damphair already told us that the Drowned God sings through the waves in the language of leviathan, and so we can see that the song of the sea – at least, the one which drowned the Arm of Dorne –  is really the song of the island-drowning sea dragon whose language is the flood.  Additionally, the lord of House Harlaw of the silver scythe has a boat named “Sea Song,” linking the hammer of the waters with the Ironborn and silver moon scythes, and to the idea of sea dragons as boats… which is what we will discuss next.

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Some Smelly Fish

Mnemosyne, the poem on two feet, mother of muses, rider of the dragon Saga and Guardian of the Swan; Nienna the Wise, the Persephoenix, Guardian of the Ice Dragon, whose words are “from sorrow, wisdom”; Daphne Eversweet, Queen Bee of the Red Poppy fields, Guardian of the Crone’s Lantern, and keeper of the Black Rabbit with big, pointy, nasty teeth who can leap about… and Manami of the Jade Sea, the Merry Deviant, Keeper of Winter Roses, and Guardian of the Celestial Ghost

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Ok, let’s talk about boats!  Like most myth, I believe that the sea dragon and other Grey King mythology does refer to historical events – at least one, if not more. The first would be the moon meteor which seems to have fallen near or on the Iron Islands – the sea dragon as a falling meteor. The second may be a story about a foreign people who possessed fire in in some sense coming to Westeros in boats – sea dragons as boats carrying fire-associated people. What I can say for sure is that the boat is an important part of the sea dragon symbolism, so we’ll follow this line of symbolism and you can decide what you think it means. We are going to work our way to the idea of Nagga’s ribs being a boat, but first I want to break down two scenes involving Targaryens and their boats, because Targaryen boats work fantastically as symbol of the sea dragon as a boat.

We’ll begin with a lovely passage from A Storm of Swords when Daenerys is – and you’re going to like this – sailing to Slaver’s Bay on three ships named after Aegon’s three dragons. That’s right – not only do the boats belong to a dragon, they are actually named after dragons. This chapter begins by introducing the idea that Daenerys loves the sea, and builds on the sea dragon idea through the naming of the ships and finally the activity of the dragons themselves. Picking things up near the beginning of the chapter:

Her Dothraki called the sea the poison water, distrusting any liquid that their horses could not drink. On the day the three ships had lifted anchor at Quarth, you would have thought they were sailing to hell instead of Pentos. Her brave young bloodriders had stared off at the dwindling coastline with huge white eyes, each of the three determined to show no fear before the other two, while her handmaids Irri and Jhiqui clutched the rail desperately and retched over the side at every little swell. 

Three ships for the three dragons of Aegon and Daenerys, and more importantly, for three primary dragon meteors coming from the moon. The three bloodriders play into the symbolism as well – I’ve mentioned before that the term bloodrider builds on the Dothraki’s interpretation of stars as horses by adding blood, creating the symbol of the bloodriders as bleeding stars, and here they have huge white eyes to remind us of the moon.

No squall could frighten Dany, though. Daenerys Stormborn, she was called, for she had come howling into the world on distant Dragonstone as the greatest storm in the memory of Westeros howled outside, a storm so fierce that it ripped gargoyles from the castle walls and smashed her father’s fleet to kindling.

Daenerys, a symbol of both the moon which was the mother of dragons and the reborn dragon herself, is called Stormborn because Azor Ahai was born during the storm that ravaged Planetos and caused the Long Night, you guys know about that.  We saw in the Tyron Targaryen episode how the black stone gargoyles have a heritage involving stone dragons and therefore make tremendous fiery black meteor symbols.  Describing the boats – the Targaryen boats – as kindling evokes the idea of burning wood, just as we saw with the burnt ships of Lordsport which resembled the bones of leviathans.  The sea dragon brings fire to the earth of course, so burning ships fits right in, and also refer to the tree set ablaze by the Storm God’s thunderbolt.

The narrow sea was often stormy, and Dany had crossed it half a hundred times as a girl, running from one Free City to the next half a step ahead of the Usurper’s hired knives. She loved the sea. She liked the sharp salty smell of the air, and the vastness of horizons bounded only by a vault of azure sky above. It made her feel small, but free as well. She liked the dolphins that sometimes swam along beside Balerion, slicing through the waves like silvery spears, and the flying fish they glimpsed now and again. She even liked the sailors, with all their songs and stories. Once on a voyage to Braavos, as she’d watched the crew wrestle down a great green sail in a rising gale, she had even thought how fine it would be to be a sailor. But when she told her brother, Viserys had twisted her hair until she cried. “You are blood of the dragon,” he had screamed at her. “A dragon, not some smelly fish.”

He was a fool about that, and so much else, Dany thought.

I’ll cut in here to have a laugh at Viserys’s expense. We’ve already seen that Viserys isn’t too good with symbolism and metaphor – he got burned by that whole “I am the dragon, and I will be crowned!” thing, after all. We, however, pay much closer attention, and we cannot fail to miss all the dragon-fish comparison going on here.

The three ships are named for Aegon’s three dragons, and the narrative weaves the ships and Dany watching her dragons fly through the air together in the very first paragraph.  Dany herself is a kind of sea-dragon, the blood of the dragon who loves the water and the sea.  She’s at one with the storm, unafraid, the Stormborn.  She’s born on a dragon-stone in the middle of the sea (itself a clue about dragons which are stones landing in the ocean), during the worst storm in memory.  Of course, the only memories we have of the actual worst storm in history, one which also raged around dragon stones in the ocean, are hidden under layers of myth… but that’s why we are doing what we are doing, after all.  Chasing down the worst storm in history.

The dragon – fish comparison take flight in the next paragraph with flying fish and dolphins like silvery spears that swim alongside Balerion the dragon-boat.  There’s more talk of Dany herself loving everything about the sea, and then a direct comparison between dragons and fish as Viserys says that a dragon is not a fish.  The next words are “He was a fool about that, and so much else.”  That’s clear enough.  The only way it could be any more clear is if Old Nan showed up with a copy of Septon Barth’s Dragons, Wyrms, and Wyverns: Their Unnatural History to read us a bedtime story about sea dragons.

Actually, is does get a bit more clear, as someone does directly compare the comet to a fish in A Clash of Kings:

Catelyn raised her eyes, to where the faint red line of the comet traced a path across the deep blue sky like a long scratch across the face of god.  “The Greatjon told Robb that the old gods have unfurled a red flag of vengeance for Ned.  Edmure thinks it’s an omen of victory for Riverrun— he sees a fish with a long tail, in the Tully colors, red against blue.”  

So far, there seems to be a bit of truth to be found in every single thing the comet has been directly compared to, although the “fish with a long tail” description was one of the last ones to make sense.  Returning to the scene with Dany and her sea dragon boats…

The captain appeared at her elbow. “Would that this Balerion could soar as her namesake did, Your Grace,” he said in bastard Valyrian heavily flavored with accents of Pentos. “Then we should not need to row, nor tow, nor pray for wind.”  

 The symbolic association between the boats and the dragons continues all throughout these paragraphs, as Dany and the captain compare dragons and ships to each other as a means of crossing the sea.  And then… we get a more literal manifestation of the sea dragon idea:

Viserion’s scales were the color of fresh cream, his horns, wing bones, and spinal crest a dark gold that flashed bright as metal in the sun. Rhaegal was made of the green of summer and the bronze of fall. They soared above the ships in wide circles, higher and higher, each trying to climb above the other.

Dragons always preferred to attack from above, Dany had learned. Should either get between the other and the sun, he would fold his wings and dive screaming, and they would tumble from the sky locked together in a tangled scaly ball, jaws snapping and tails lashing. The first time they had done it, she feared that they meant to kill each other, but it was only sport. No sooner would they splash into the sea than they would break apart and rise again, shrieking and hissing, the salt water steaming off them as their wings clawed at the air. Drogon was aloft as well, though not in sight; he would be miles ahead, or miles behind, hunting.

He was always hungry, her Drogon. Hungry and growing fast. Another year, or perhaps two, and he may be large enough to ride. Then I shall have no need of ships to cross the great salt sea.

But that time was not yet come. Rhaegal and Viserion were the size of small dogs, Drogon only a little larger, and any dog would have out-weighed them; they were all wings and neck and tail, lighter than they looked. And so Daenerys Targaryen must rely on wood and wind and canvas to bear her home.

There’s nothing I love better a good dragon eclipse.  It comes as the dragons try to get between each other and the sun (creating an eclipse) before dive-bombing, just as the moon was in eclipse position before it sent its moon dragon dive-bombing.  At the moment of the dragon eclipse, we get our sea dragon meteor, plummeting towards the ocean, which is really a terrific confirmation of the eclipse idea and a good match for all the times Drogon’s wings passed before the sun and “darkened the world,” as we’ve seen in previous essays.

The falling dragons splash into the water in a scaly ball and then “break apart” (like the broken sword of land and all the broken sword symbols) and “rise again” – harder and stronger, perhaps?  According to Ironborn theology, the sea dragon rose from the sea, as did the Grey King and the Drowned God himself, and the Ironborn conduct ritual drowning-and-resurrection ceremonies.  As I mentioned, carrying fire from the sea is an important aspect of this combined myth, and that’s what we may be talking about here – harvesting sea dragon material from the sea.

In fact, the hissing and steaming as the dragons plunge into the water and fly back out reminds me of a sword being tempered in cold water, or  a hot meteor stone landing in the ocean, the same idea on a large scale. This idea is directly implied by the choice to describe the dragons as metal – Rhaegal’s dark golden spinal crest, horns, and wing bones “flashed as bright as metal in the sun.” I mean, it really is like dragon metal dropping out of the sky from an eclipse and becoming the sea dragon, landing in the ocean and then rising from the waves. The folded wings of the soon-to-be sea dragon may be meant as callout to leviathan, whose name, of course, means “that which is gathered into folds.” And for what it’s worth, there’s a funny line where Jorah talks about Westerosi tales of dragons big enough to snatch krakens from the sea, reminding us of the idea that the sea dragon Nagga fed on krakens. At the least, it serves a s clue to make us think about sea dragons and Ironborn myth.

I just love the double metaphor in this scene – sea dragon as ships and sea dragons as metal dragons falling into the sea.  Throw in the eclipse, and I’m a happy camper.

This scene is actually quite reminiscent of another dragon attack scene which we examined in the Mountain vs. the Viper episode, and that one also features both a dragon eclipse and a sea dragon symbol, although it is sadly lacking in boats.  I’m speaking of the dragon-on-dragon battle between Daemon Targaryen riding Caraxes “the Bloodwyrm” and Aemond-One Eye riding Vhaegar above the God’s Eye during the Dance of the Dragons, a battle recounted to us in The Princess and the Queen.  The first relevant line was:

The attack came sudden as a thunderbolt. Caraxes dove down upon Vhagar with a piercing shriek that was heard a dozen miles away, cloaked by the glare of the setting sun on Prince Aemond’s blind side. 

In this scene, we have a dragon eclipse to symbolize the moon which wandered too close to the sun, a dragon attack from the eclipse to symbolize the moon dragons, a comparison of the dragon attack to a thunderbolt to remind us of the Storm God’s thunderbolt, and there’s an off-the-charts ear-piercing shriek to remind us of the sound which broke the moon, Nissa Nissa’s cry of anguish and ecstasy.  The sea dragon image comes as the dragons lock together – much like the scene with Viserion and Rhaegal – and plunge into the water:

Half a heartbeat later, the dragons struck the lake, sending up a gout of water so high that it was said to have been as tall as Kingspyre Tower.

There’s also a couple of clues about recovering the sea dragon meteor from the water here, because Caraxes, though mortally injured, managed to crawl back on to land beneath the walls of Harrenhall before expiring, while years later, Vhagar’s body was “found,” and we know that at least his skull was recovered, because we supposedly see it beneath King’s Landing in the current story.  Also recovered was the Valyrian steel sword Dark Sister, which Daemon had jammed into Aemond’s blind eye before hitting the water.  I’m not sure if they hired some merlings or squishers to go down there with a bone saw and recover this stuff or what, but somehow they did.  So, recovered from the water, we have a red dragon, a black dragon sword, and at least the skull of another dead dragon, all of which are terrific Lightbringer symbols. It may be that these are metaphors referring to the Ironborn recovering sea dragon material, as their mythology would suggest.

Ah but where were we?  Boats, that’s right, boats.  Ships is really the correct word, but saying boats is more fun.  In any case, the second major scene with Targaryen “ships” involves the burning of the Seven on Dragonstone, a famous scene where the forging of Lightbringer is reenacted literally and symbolically.  This is a really creative one by George, I think you’re going to get a kick out of this.

So, burnt and broken ships can be like the bones of a leviathan, and ships owned by Targaryens are like sea dragons – dragons that swim or sail.  Naming the ships after dragons is one better, especially when those dragons were themselves named after old gods of Vayria.  The sea dragon is a drowned goddess, and the dragonships are named for gods and dragons both.  Well.  What if we could turn those sea dragon boats back into gods, and then.. I don’t know…  set them on fire?  That’d be some pretty cool symbolism…

The morning air was dark with the smoke of burning gods.

They were all afire now, Maid and Mother, Warrior and Smith, the Crone with her pearl eyes and the Father with his gilded beard; even the Stranger, carved to look more animal than human. The old dry wood and countless layers of paint and varnish blazed with a fierce hungry light. Heat rose shimmering through the chill air; behind, the gargoyles and stone dragons on the castle walls seemed blurred, as if Davos were seeing them through a veil of tears. Or as if the beasts were trembling, stirring…  {…}

The burning gods cast a pretty light, wreathed in their robes of shifting flame, red and orange and yellow. Septon Barre had once told Davos how they’d been carved from the masts of the ships that had carried the first Targaryens from Valyria. Over the centuries, they had been painted and repainted, gilded, silvered, jeweled. “Their beauty will make them more pleasing to R’hllor,” Melisandre said when she told Stannis to pull them down and drag them out the castle gates.  

Pulling down the true gods to make a bonfire to forge Lightbringer in – who would do such a thing? Azor Ahai impressionist Stannis Baratheon, that’s who. The wooden sea dragon ships which brought the Targaryens to Dragonstone became wooden gods, and then they became burning wooden gods. The fact that it was the masts of the ships – the part that still looks like a tree – that became the burning gods brings us right back to the burning tree motif, the one from the story of the Storm God’s thunderbolt setting a tree ablaze. That means that the burning wooden gods represent both the sea dragon AND the burning tree, and those are both mediums by which the Grey King obtained the fire of the gods. And what does Stannis pull from this burning tree which is also a piece of sea dragon? Why, Lightbringer, which is also the fire of the gods.

This lines up with what I have been saying all along: the sea dragon and the thunderbolt, both of which gave the Grey King divine fire, are in fact two halves of the same story. They represent different aspects of the same event, and that event is the landing of a black moon meteor near the Iron Islands and the making of evil black swords from its meteoric metal…. and perhaps an invasion of proto-Valyrian dragon people from Asshai.

There are two more quotes from the burning of the Seven scene on Dragonstone I want to pull, as they connect to Ironborn mythology:

 Melisandre lifted her hands above her head. “Behold! A sign was promised, and now a sign is seen! Behold Lightbringer! Azor Ahai has come again! All hail the Warrior of Light! All hail the Son of Fire!” A ragged wave of shouts gave answer, just as Stannis’s glove began to smolder. Cursing, the king thrust the point of the sword into the damp earth and beat out the flames against his leg. “Lord, cast your light upon us!” Melisandre called out. 

They are standing on the beach, and Stannis Ahai shoves his flaming sword in the damp earth… it’s not quiiiiite a sea dragon, but it’s close, and honestly, if the Ironborn somehow harvested the meteorite, then it probably landed close to shore or even right on the shore.  You can’t rule out those Deep Ones recovery units, but still.  The sequence here is great: Stannis is angry, and even curses as he jams Lightbringer into the earth, and then Melisandre says “Lord, cast your light upon us!”  That about sums it up – angry, wrothful sea dragon meteors and a cursed Lightbringer – the light of the lord, everyone.  Soak it in.

Next we have an appearance of the unholy tide:

Melisandre sang in the tongue of Asshai, her voice rising and falling like the tides of the sea. Stannis untied his singed leather cape and listened in silence. Thrust in the ground, Lightbringer still glowed ruddy hot, but the flames that clung to the sword were dwindling and dying. By the time the song was done, only charwood remained of the gods, and the king’s patience had run its course. 

Melisandre is a prime fire moon symbol, and her song brings the tides.  We know which tides those are – tides of moon blood.  Meanwhile, Lightbringer is cooling in the wet ground where it landed. The sea dragon gods are now charwood, much like the burnt  ships at Lordsport which were like the bones of dead leviathans.

As I said a moment ago, the sea dragon and the thunderbolt stories both refer to falling moon meteors and the fire of the gods, but represent two different aspects of this event.  We’ve got a pretty good idea about what the sea dragon is – a black moon meteor – and what its fire was – the black meteorite metal to make magic swords with, the kind Azor Ahai used to make Lightbringer.  As for the Storm God’s thunderbolt, the fire from the sky aspect is easy to understand, and we’ve caught on to the connection to the hammer of the waters via the incorporation of Thor’s lighting hammer symbolism, but what exactly is the meaning of this burning tree?  I’ve suggested that the symbol of a burning tree refers to wierwood trees, with the red hands of blood and flame, and that is where the bones of Nagga and the idea of a weirwood boat come in.

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A Fishy Rack of Ribs

This section is sponsored by the Patreon support of Han Never-Solo, the Scorpion Mind, Cyber-Pincher of the Weirwoodnet and Guardian of the Celestial Stallion and the Horned Lord; Direliz, the Alpha Patron, a descendant of Gilbert of the Vines and Garth the Green, earthly avatar of Heavenly House Aquarius; Lord Leobold the Victorious, the Firelion of Lancasterly Rock, earthly avatar of the Heavenly House Leo; Wyrlane Dervish, Woods Witch of the Wolfswood, earthly avatar of Celestial House Scorpio

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Let’s talk about those ribs, shall we?  This is the full run down on the Grey King and the sea dragon from Aeron’s “The Prophet” chapter of A Feast for Crows:

On the crown of the hill four- and- forty monstrous stone ribs rose from the earth like the trunks of great pale trees.  The sight made Aeron’s heart beat faster.  Nagga had been the first sea dragon, the mightiest ever to rise from the waves.  She fed on krakens and leviathans and drowned whole islands in her wrath, yet the Grey King had slain her and the Drowned God had changed her bones to stone so that men might never cease to wonder at the courage of the first of kings.  Nagga’s ribs became the beams and pillars of his longhall, just as her jaws became his throne.  For a thousand years and seven he reigned here , Aeron recalled.  Here he took his mermaid wife and planned his wars against the Storm God.  From here he ruled both stone and salt, wearing robes of woven seaweed and a tall pale crown made from Nagga’s teeth.  But that was in the dawn of days, when mighty men still dwelt on earth and sea.  The hall had been warmed by Nagga’s living fire, which the Grey King had made his thrall.  On its walls hung tapestries woven from silver seaweed most pleasing to the eyes. The Grey King’s warriors had feasted on the bounty of the sea at a table in the shape of a great starfish, whilst seated upon thrones carved from mother- of- pearl.  Gone, all the glory gone.  Men were smaller now.  Their lives had grown short.  The Storm God drowned Nagga’s fire after the Grey King’s death, the chairs and tapestries had been stolen, the roof and walls had rotted away.  Even the Grey King’s great throne of fangs had been swallowed by the sea.  Only Nagga’s bones endured to remind the ironborn of all the wonder that had been.  

Before we discuss the ribs themselves, there’s a couple of tasty “sea dragon as a piece of drowned moon” clues I want to point out. The notion of the Grey King’s throne being made from Nagga’s fangs introduces the idea of furniture made of sea dragon, and the table made in the shape of a starfish and mother-of-pearl thrones actually play into this idea as well. By now we know what kind of star becomes a fish – a moon which turns into a sea dragon. The mother-of-pearl thrones suggest same thing, because pearls have always been associated with the moon due to their clear resemblance, and pearls are also found in the ocean, as our sea dragon meteorite was. The point is that all of the “furniture” in this scene is made of things which symbolize the sea dragon.

Now to the important stuff: the bones of the sea dragon look like the trunks of great pale trees. Most people believe that’s exactly whether are – petrified weirwood. They are used in place of beams and pillars, things normally made of wood.  We are given the exact same analogy by Victorian in his “The Iron Captain” chapter of Feast:

The wind was blowing from the north as the Iron Victory came round the point and entered the holy bay called Nagga’s Cradle. Victarion joined Nute the Barber at her prow. Ahead loomed the sacred shore of Old Wyk and the grassy hill above it, where the ribs of Nagga rose from the earth like the trunks of great white trees, as wide around as a dromond’s mast and twice as tall. 

It seems that George really wants us to think of those ribs in relation to weirwood trees.  Best of all, there’s a direct comparison drawn between the sea dragon’s ribs, white trees, and the masts of ships, which does a splendid job of firming up our interpretation of the sea dragon / boat symbolism in the burning of the Seven scene.  Recall that it was the masts of the Targaryen ships that became the burning gods, and so it seems we are indeed meant to associate the masts of ships with the trunks of trees, or burning trees when they are on fire.  Masts are after all made from the trunks of trees, so we are not really talking about anything super esoteric here.  As an aside, this is a really big ship we are talking about if Victarion’s estimation of size is anywhere close to accurate.  This thing is like the Ironborn version of Noah’s arc.

There’s yet another thinly-veiled reinforcement of the idea that Nagga’s bones are made of weirwood in The World of Ice and Fire:

The power wielded by these prophets of the Drowned God over the Ironborn should not be underestimated.  Only they could summon kingsmoots, and woe to the man, be he lord or king, who dared defy them.  The greatest of the priests was the towering prophet Galon Whitestaff, so-called for the tall, carved staff he carried everywhere to smite the ungodly.  (In some tales his staff was made of weirwood, in others from one of Nagga’s bones.)  

Nagga’s bones and weirwood are interchangeable because they are the same thing – that’s the clear implication here.  As for weirwood turning to stone, we learn from Lord Tytos Blackwood that the maesters say that weirwood trees turn to stone after a thousand years or so – they apparently never rot.  Never rotting is a good thing for making boats, but turning to stone is not.  Remember to not skimp on the 500 year warrantee for your weirwood boat – make sure to get at least go with the 1000 year option, you know?  Of course, if your boat does turn to stone, you can always make a building out of it.  Petrifying pale trees give us pale stone, naturally, which is how Nagga’s bones are described.  Also noteworthy is the fact that weirwood trees are repeatedly referred to as “bone white” or “blood and bone.” The trees are like bones… and the bones are like trees.

George has given us a sigil-based hint about this too: there’s a House Stonetree who, like  House Volmark of the Black Leviathan, does fealty to House Harlaw of the silver scythe.  The sigil of House Stonetree is, predictably, a grey stone tree on a field of black.  What is this sigil even supposed to mean?  ..and I’m talking about inside the context of the story, not symbolic meaning.  There must be some idea about stone trees floating around out there.  Get it?  Stone trees, floating around? It’s a sea dragon joke… anyway. When Asha comes to Ten Towers, the seat of Rodrick the Reader Harlaw, she sees the stone tree and black leviathan sigils amongst those gathered, which is a nice pairing of sea dragon symbols ready to serve the grim reaper and his moon sickle.  The black leviathan and stone tree are like parallel symbols, each representing one aspect of the sea dragon – the black sea dragon meteorite, and the petrified stone trees remembered as Nagga’s bones.

I think the evidence is overwhelming – Nagga’s ribs are made of petrified weirwood.  I used to think about them as a dead weirwood circle, such as we find on a place called Sea Dragon Point (as a matter of fact), but History of Westeros forum user Vaxis convinced me otherwise with his excellent arguments, pointing to this quote from A Feast for Crows regarding the Damphair:

It was there beneath the arch of Nagga’s ribs that his drowned men found him, standing tall and stern with his long black hair blowing in the wind.

So they aren’t just pillars or tree trunks – they apparently form an arch.  This is what would make them look like ribs – if they weren’t arched together, they would just look like pillars.  The Grey King was said to have built a longhall “about her bones, using her ribs as beams and rafters” in the Worldbook, meaning that he built around the “skeleton” as is, as opposed to sawing the bones into boards and beams and then building out of them. He couldn’t have used the ribs as rafters unless they curved together to make a roof.  No, I think we are to imagine something that really looks like a rib cage – or more likely, the overturned hull of a boat made from weirwood.

As I said at the top, this is exactly what the Grey King was said to do:

The Grey King also taught men to weave nets and sails and carved the first longship from the hard pale wood of Ygg, a demon tree who fed on human flesh. 

As I mentioned, the weirwood trees and the greenseer bond are heavily based on Yggdrasil and Odin, making this talk of Ygg a clear reference to weirwood, and thus to making a boat of weirwood. The reference to feeding on human flesh would seem to refer to the ancient Northman custom of human sacrifice in front of heart trees, again pointing to Ygg as a weirwood. I think it all fits together pretty nicely – the Grey King was said to have made a boat from weirwood, and there it is, flipped upside down and used for a longhall. Very utilitarian of Grey King – waste not, want not, after all. The next question is where the boat was made – locally, as the myth implies, or is this the boat of of an immigrant people sailing to Westeros? It’s certainly big enough to be the sort of ocean-going vessel need for long distance sea travel. Perhaps when they arrived they used the frame of the boat hull for a longhall because it was simply all they had.

The giveaway clue about about the Grey King’s hall being a flipped over boat hull can actually be found when the wildlings attack the Wall with something they call a turtle in ASOS. It says “The turtle had a rounded top and eight huge wheels, and under the hides was a stout wooden frame. When the wildlings had begun knocking it together, Satin thought they were building a ship. Not far wrong. The turtle was a hull turned upside down and opened fore and aft; a longhall on wheels.” And there you have it – the hull of a boat, flipped over, is like a longhall. It’s even named after a sea creature! I know a turtle isn’t quite as impressive as a sea dragon, but then again the turtle god of the Rhoynish, the Old Man of the River, does make quite an entrance in ADWD. He’s even got a mean pair of horns and a fearsome bellow! Anyway, you see the point: if a boat were made of weirwood, and the frame of it flipped over, it would look like a Longhall. After a few centuries, the weirwood would turn to pale stone, everything else would rot away and disappear, and you’d have something that might look like the huge stone skeleton of a sea monster.

Figuring out that Nagga’s “ribs” is actually the hull of giant boat made of weirwood tells us a couple of things.  First, it corroborates the legend of the Grey King making weirwood boats, making his overall legendary status just a bit more historical.  It opens up the question of foreign immigrants to the Iron Islands, or rather adds fuel to that fire which was already burning.  We will return to the discussion about the possible foreign origins of the ancestors of the Ironborn another time, but now I want to focus on the other implication of Nagga’s bones being made of weirwood, and that’s the persistent and seemingly inexplicable involvement of weirwood in Ironborn myth.

I mentioned weirwood circles at a place called Sea Dragon Point a moment ago – you know there’s bound to be some good sea dragon clues at a place called Sea Dragon Point, right?  To begin with, it has weirwood circles, which makes perfect sense when you figure out that Nagga’s bones were once weirwood.  Consider the name, Sea Dragon POINT – sea dragon has a point like a sword because the sea dragon meteor was the sword which plunged into the bowels of the ocean.  That’s a nice one, right? There’s more Sea Dragon point goodness in Asha’s “the Wayward Bride” chapter of A Dance with Dragons, one of my very favorite chapters, and it’s there that we’ll find our next clues about the mysterious presence of weirwoods in Ironborn myth.

“And there is still Sea Dragon Point … if I cannot have my father’s kingdom, why not make one of my own?” Sea Dragon Point had not always been as thinly peopled as it was now. Old ruins could still be found amongst its hills and bogs, the remains of ancient strongholds of the First Men. In the high places, there were weirwood circles left by the children of the forest.

“You are clinging to Sea Dragon Point the way a drowning man clings to a bit of wreckage. What does sea dragon have that anyone could ever want?”
. . . 
“What’s there? I’ll tell you… tall pines for building ships.”

There’s the line about weirwood circles at Sea Dragon Point. Asha thinking about setting up a new kingdom there make me think of the first Ironborn, perhaps setting up a new kingdom at the place where the sea dragon landed, the Iron Islands.  Also found at Sea Dragon Point – tall trees to build ships with, a great sea dragon-as-a-boat clue.  Trisitifer Botley says that Asha clings to Sea Dragon like a drowning man clings to a bit of wreckage, creating the image of sea dragon as the wreckage of a boat in similar fashion to Theon calling the broken hulls of the boats at Lordsport leviathans.

One of the primary conclusions to draw from this repeated association between weirwood and the sea dragon has to do with the hammer of the waters: the greenseers were said to be the ones who called down the hammer. Weirwoods and greenseers go hand in hand, so associating weirwood with the sea dragon makes sense if the sea dragon and the Hammer of the Waters were both moon meteors, as I propose. To support this idea, I will return to the Wayward Bride chapter. By the way, Asha herself is the wayward bride, as she has fled her arranged marriage to Eric Ironmaker, and the phrase more broadly refers to a moon goddess who has wandered out of course.

She wondered who was in command of her foes. If it were me, I would take the strand and put our longships to the torch before attacking Deepwood . The wolves would not find that easy, though, not without longships of their own. Asha never beached more than half her ships. The other half stood safely off to sea, with orders to raise sail and make for Sea Dragon Point if the northmen took the strand. “Hagen, blow your horn and make the forest shake. Tris, don some mail, it’s time you tried out that sweet sword of yours.” When she saw how pale he was, she pinched his cheek. “Splash some blood upon the moon with me, and I promise you a kiss for every kill.”

We have some ship burning being suggested, giving us the burning wood / burning sea dragon idea again, and then talk of the moon maiden’s fleet descending on sea dragon point to represent the fall of the sea dragon moon meteors. Then comes a rapid fire sequence of symbolic references: the sea dragon, then a horn blowing that makes the forest shake – think of the celestial tree shaking here as well as the earth as the horn sounds – then moon maiden Asha wants to see Tristifer’s sweet sword, and finally, there’s talk of splashing blood on the moon amidst some sex and sword play language – “a kiss for every kill.” There’s a line from earlier about killing moons and kissing moons at the same time:

Asha took Tris Botley by the ears and kissed him full upon the lips. He was red and breathless by the time she let him go. “What was that?” he said. “A kiss, it’s called. Drown me for a fool, Tris, I should have remembered— ” She broke off suddenly. When Tris tried to speak, she shushed him, listening. “That’s a warhorn. Hagen.” 

This time Asha the moon maiden says “drown me” right after kissing Tristifer means Lightbringer— I mean Tristifer Botley.  And then, a horn sounds. The wording here is exceedingly  clever – the moon maiden “breaks off suddenly” when the horn sounds. The moon.. breaks off suddenly…  I’ve actually read this passage many times but I only just recently noticed that line. The allusion to the Qarthine lunar origin of dragons myth is clear: the moon wandered too close to the sun, kissed it, and was cracked; when Asha the Wayward moon bride is kissed, she breaks off suddenly and commands people to drown her.

The symbolic references to the idea of greenseers calling down the Hammer of the Waters by breaking the moon gets really thick a bit later in this chapter:

Tall soldier pines and gnarled old oaks closed in around them. Deepwood was aptly named. The trees were huge and dark, somehow threatening. Their limbs wove through one another and creaked with every breath of wind, and their higher branches scratched at the face of the moon. The sooner we are out of here, the better I will like it , Asha thought. The trees hate us all, deep in their wooden hearts.

Just as we saw the spiky iron battlements of the Hammerhorn keep clawing at the moon, here we have the finger-like tree branches scratching the face of the moon. Now that’s what I call threatening. This chapter is full of personification of trees as human, including the Northmen who actually dress as trees. The trees seem to whispering to each other in a secret language, Asha thinks to herself, and we know that whispering leaves is the communication of the weirwoods. Later, Asha thinks that “the trees will kill us if they can.” That’s pretty great – they’ll kill everyone by scratching the moon and bringing it down. Asha represents the moon, so it makes sense that the trees have antipathy for both Asha and the moon. To be clear, I am interpreting the personified trees here as greenseers, people who have symbiotic relationships with trees, and the clues about them scratching the moon as referring to the idea of greenseers bringing down the moon.  There’s another line about this:

The trees hid the moon and stars from them, and the forest floor beneath their feet was black and treacherous. 

The treacherous forest hides the moon and stars because treacherous greenseers brought down the hammer of the waters, and the hammer was a moon meteor which brought on the Long Night. That’s my theory, anyway. There’s a wonderful companion line back in Feast, from the Damphair as he calls for the Kingsmoot, an idea he got while listening to the language of leviathan in the surf:

“Seek the hill of Nagga and the bones of the Grey King’s Hall, for in that holy place when the moon has drowned and come again we shall make ourselves a worthy king, a godly king.” He raised his bony hands on high again. “Listen! Listen to the waves! Listen to the god! He is speaking to us, and he says, We shall have no king but from the kingsmoot! ” 

The moon drowns at the place where the sea dragon died, because the sea dragon was a piece of dead moon.  That’s when we will make a new godly king, or perhaps god-king is the right expression. That would be Azor Ahai reborn, who symbolizes the reborn sun and moon. Azor Ahai reborn is the drowned moon come again – it’s the same thing as saying Azor Ahai reborn can also be considered Nissa Nissa reborn. Damphair may be prophesying the rebirth of Azor Ahai and another moon disaster right here!

In support of the connection between Azor Ahai reborn and a drowned moon which rises again from the sea, I have found a little-noticed line in A Storm of Swords which suggests that Azor Ahai reborn may indeed have some kind of oceanic origin:

His hand swept across the Painted Table. “How many boys dwell in Westeros? How many girls? How many men, how many women? The darkness will devour them all, she says. The night that never ends. She talks of prophecies … a hero reborn in the sea, living dragons hatched from dead stone … she speaks of signs and swears they point to me.” 

Reborn in the sea, you don’t say. Apparently Stannis has heard a slightly different version of the Azor Ahai reborn prophecy than we have, presumably from Melisandre. This seems like a total throw-away line when you first read it, as there’s no immediately obvious way to connect Azor Ahai with being reborn in the sea… but now that we know that the sea dragon is one aspect of Azor Ahai being reborn, we can connect the idea of the Ironnborn bringing the sea dragon’s fire out of the ocean with Azor Ahai being reborn in the sea. We can also take that as further corroboration that the fire of the sea dragon which the Ironborn possessed is directly related to Lightbringer and the moon meteors, and to the idea that Azor Ahai was reborn as a merling. Ha, just checking to see if you were paying attention. I will also mention that Daenerys was reborn in the Dothraki Sea, and was of course born on Dragonstone, a rock in the middle of the sea associated with dragons.

So, after exploring the weirwood symbolism of the sea dragon, we have several parallels emerging between the Grey King, Azor Ahai, and greenseers, and they raise some interesting questions. First and foremost, who broke the moon?

If the sea dragon was a moon meteor, and the Grey King slew the sea dragon, then doesn’t that make the Grey King the moon breaker? He also called the fire down from heaven in the Storm God’s thunderbolt story, again putting him in the position of moon breaker.

But if the Hammer of the Waters was a moon meteor called down by some group of treacherous greenseers, that means that greenseers broke the moon too…

…and then there’s that fellow Azor Ahai who also has a thing or two to say about breaking the moon.  What’s the deal here?  Who actually performed this dastardly deed?

The point of stealing the moon seems to have been possession of the fire of the gods, and all three of these do indeed possess that very fire.  The Grey King stole the fire of the gods twice over, Azor Ahai stole the fire of the gods in the form of Lightbringer and the black meteor, and the burning tree represents a weirwood, whose power also represents the fire of the gods, and is possessed by the greenseers! How does this all fit together?

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The Weirwood Crown

This section is brought to you by our newest member of the Long Night’s Watch: The Smiling Wolf, Lord Steven Stark of the Broken Tower, Jedi of Just-Ice, he who awaits the Corn King; our newest zodiac Patron, Durran Durrandon, the red fish blue fish, earthly avatar of Heavenly House Pisces whose eyes are ruby and sapphire and whose sword is pale fire, and our beloved Mallory Sand, Storm Witch, the Hand of the Dragon, Rider of Zulfric the Black Beast, and Guardian of the Celestial Galley (a.k.a. The Weirwood Submarine)

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So how does all of this fit together?  Well for starters, I think there is a good case to be made for the Grey King being a greenseer at one point.  That’s one way the stories can begin to line up – if the Grey King was a greenseer, then both greenseers and the Grey King can be said to have called down the meteor fire from heaven.

As to Grey King’s greenseer status, consider the three things that he supposedly had that were made from Nagga’s bones: besides the longhall he made from her ribs, we have the throne made from her jaws and the pale crown made from her teeth.  All of these make a great deal more sense when thought of as being made of weirwood, and since Nagga’s “rib bones” turned out to be made of weirwood, let’s consider the throne and crown in that light. The Grey King’s pale crown, instead of being made of sea dragon teeth, becomes a weirwood crown – this would have perhaps been the model for the driftwood crowns later worn by the Driftwood Kings of the Ironborn. In fact, The World of Ice and Fire also talks of the Grey King being remembered in some tales as having worn the first driftwood crown, which would indicate some kind of pale wooden crown is likely to be the truth here, not a crown of teeth.

There’s a clue about this in the paragraph we already cited where Aeron describes Nagga’s Hill:

On the crown of the hill four- and- forty monstrous stone ribs rose from the earth like the trunks of great pale trees.

It’s a weirwood crown, get it?  The weirwood ‘ribs’ rise from the ‘crown’ of the sea dragon hill, giving the hill a weirwood crown.  I thought that was a pretty nice one.  The name of the island – Old Wyk – could be intended to suggest fire, as in a candle wick, so the idea of a burning weirwood crown may be here as well.

Grey King’s throne, instead of being fashioned from jaws of a sea monster, becomes a weirwood throne, and this too would make more sense than a throne made from a sea dragon skull, as metal as that would be. A weirwood throne would also make Grey King sound an awful lot like a greenseer – sitting in a weirwood throne in a weirwood hall with weirwood branches wrapped around his head. I mean, shit, he sounds just like Bloodraven:

Before them a pale lord in ebon finery sat dreaming in a tangled nest of roots, a woven weirwood throne that embraced his withered limbs as a mother does a child. His body was so skeletal and his clothes so rotted that at first Bran took him for another corpse, a dead man propped up so long that the roots had grown over him, under him, and through him. What skin the corpse lord showed was white, save for a bloody blotch that crept up his neck onto his cheek. His white hair was fine and thin as root hair and long enough to brush against the earthen floor. Roots coiled around his legs like wooden serpents.

The corpse lord sits in a weirwood throne, wrapped in weirwood – famously, one goes through his blind eye. Coiled around his legs are white wooden serpents, a perfect companion to the idea or a weirwood boat remembered as a sea dragon. White weirwood sea dragon, white weirwood serpents – it’s a nice match. Bloodraven himself is a white weirwood dragon, for that matter, combining both dragon and weirwood symbolism, just as the sea dragon does. We also need to remember one other detail about the Grey King: he was something of a corpse lord too.  From The World of Ice and Fire:

From there he ruled the Iron Islands for a thousand years, until his skin had turned as grey as his hair and beard.

Aeron Damphair is more specific, saying that the Grey King reigned for “one thousand years and seven.”  The point is – he had an unnaturally long life span, like Bloodraven (and then some), and turned grey, which I would call corpse-like.  In fact, we’ve seen a thousand year old face before, and it resembles a corpse:

It was white weirwood, and there was a face on it. A glow came from the wood, like milk and moonlight, so faint it scarcely seemed to touch anything beyond the door itself, not even Sam standing right before it. The face was old and pale, wrinkled and shrunken. It looks dead. Its mouth was closed, and its eyes; its cheeks were sunken, its brow withered, its chin sagging. If a man could live for a thousand years and never die but just grow older, his face might come to look like that.

That was from A Storm of Swords, at the Black Gate below the Nightfort. “If a man could live a thousand years and never die but just grow older…” …well that’s what the Grey King was said to have done. We’ve found a match for Grey King’s description as a thousand year old man, and it’s a dead-looking weirwood face that talks. You can see how this begins to come together: when we read about Grey King living a thousand years and growing grey and corpse-like and when we realize that his throne and crown were probably weirwood, he really begins to sound a lot like some sort of greenseer.

Here’s where the fire of the gods stuff comes in again. Our pal the Grey King possessed the fire of the gods in two forms: he possessed the “living fire of the sea dragon” and he stole fire from the Storm God via the burning tree. Both of those myths have a laying of meaning which points to weirwood, as we have seen – the “sea dragon” bones are really weirwood, so possessing the sea dragon’s fire could imply possessing the power of the weirwoods… which you do by sitting in a weirwood throne, as the Grey King may have done. The burning tree, on the other hand, is a symbol for a weirwood, and possessing the the fire of the gods through the burning tree again sounds like the Grey King was sitting under a ‘burning tree’ and possessing its fire.

Therefore, I think we have every reason to believe he was a greenseer in one form or another.

Just as we’ve seen that the sea dragon seems to refer to both white weirwood and black meteors, we find the same dichotomy expressed in the crowns and thrones of the Ironborn. As an opposite to the Grey King’s white weirwood throne, supposedly made of sea dragon jaws, we have the Seastone Chair, a throne carved from an oily black stone. But if the oily black stones are meteorites as I suggest, then this too is sea dragon furniture. As an opposite to the Grey King’s weirwood crown, we have the black iron crown worn by the iron kings and more recently Balon Greyjoy. It isn’t said to be made of oily black stone, but it is simply the familiar black iron crown symbol which signifies an inverted solar king, and black iron was taken from the meteorites to make swords with.

Recall Theon carrying Robb’s letter which he thought of as being as good as a crown, because it fits the pattern too. The white parchment crown is a clever way of alluding to a pale wooden crown, since parchment is made from trees or plants, and of course it later turns black, curls up, and catches on fire, making it a perfect match to the round tower top of Castle Pyke which is blackened by soot from the nightfires.

Throughout all of its symbolism, the sea dragon continues to show us black meteors and white weirwood trees.  The big question is, how do those two things come together?  What is the link between weirwoods and the moon meteors?

The first part of the answer I’ve already suggested: the greenseers were said to have called down the hammer of the waters, and the hammer of the waters was a moon meteor. The Grey King called down moon meteors in two different stories, so this would all make a lot more sense if the Grey King is a greenseer – one of the ones who was somehow responsible for bringing down the moon. As to how you steer a comet into a moon… well more on that in a future episode.

As I’ve said before, I’ve never bought the idea that the children of the forest were the greenseers who broke the Arm of Dorne and called down the hammer; rather, I’ve always thought it more likely that human greenseers were the ones who abused their access to magical power and caused this great disaster. I’m thinking that eventually, all deeds ever committed by greenseers of any kind probably came to be attributed to the children of the forest, because the memory of human greenseers has almost completely faded. I believe human greenseer kings were a thing in the Dawn Age, to say the least.

I’ve also jokingly called these potential greenseers who broke the moon “naughty greenseers,” because I believe they were doing something quite naughty, for lack of a desire to use a more serious word. These would have been treacherous, rebel greenseers who were violating the natural order. Stealing from the gods, breaking the cycles of nature – that’s the idea. The children of the forest are content to pass quietly into the night, having elapsed their given time on the earth, but the anyone who tries to gain the cup of immortality is defying the life and death cycle. The Grey King seems like such a figure, potentially, a greenseer who called down the black moon meteors in order to possess the fire of the gods.

It’s probably also pretty obvious to you that Azor Ahai fits this description as well, someone who brought down the moon goddess to possess her fire. It could be that Azor Ahai and Grey King are completely separate dudes on separate continents whose mythology both sprang up around becoming a powerful king at the time when the black meteors fell. But as I’ve said before, I think the Azor Ahai story has to end in Westeros, or else it’s simply hard to see how it’s relevant to the main story, and we’ve spent way too much time on it in the books for it to be irrelevant.

I’ve found many clues indicating that Azor Ahai did indeed come to Westeros, by dragon and by boat, and therefore it is entirely possible, and I’d even say probable, that the Grey King mythology does in part refer to the deeds of Azor Ahai, perhaps transposed on top of a more local hero or heroes who established the Ironborn fishing and sea going culture – making the first boats, being the first great king who founded a dynasty there, etc. The sea dragons as boats idea also suggests a storm of invading sea dragon boats – fiery people from over the sea, immigrating to or invading Westeros, which could be Azor Ahai’s fleet of “pirates from Asshai,” as I like to call them. As we have seen in our study of the Great Empire of the Dawn and Asshai with History of Westeros, there is credible reason to think that some sort of Asshai-to-Westeros contact did occur around or before the time of the Long Night, and thus there may be a plausible mechanism to explain how the matching mythologies of Azor Ahai and the Grey King may be referring to the same events and people, at least in some cases.

Now, if the Grey King and Azor Ahai are in some sense the same person or at least, if their stories refers to the same deeds and events, and if the Grey King was one of these naughty greenseers, does it follow that Azor Ahai was a naughty greenseer?

Yes, absolutely, that’s exactly the point. Azor Ahai was a greenseer! – a naughty one who transformed himself with fire magic through the stealing of the moon. It’s the same logic here as with the Grey King – if the greenseers had something to do with calling down the hammer, and if the hammer was a moon meteor, and if Azor Ahai broke the moon as his legend says he did, then it is possible that the answer to these seemingly conflicting tales is that Azor Ahai was a greenseer who broke the moon. I think that’s the case, and there’s a quite a bit of really excellent symbolism to support this idea. It begins with the burning tree symbol.

The central aspect of the Lightbringer forging metaphor is transformation. Nissa NIssa and the moon she represents were transformed when they were stabbed by Lightbringer, and Azor Ahai and the sun he represents were transformed and turned dark through the dark deeds that went down during the Long Night. We’ve talked about the moon transformation quite extensively, and here I’d like to focus on Azor Ahai’s transformation, which mirrors that of the sun. The smoke and ash from the moon meteor impacts are what clouded the sky and darkened the sun, transforming it into the night sun, and in parallel fashion, I think the black meteors were used by the Bloodstone Emperor Azor Ahai to work dark magic that had a transformative effect on himself. That’s how he became the Bloodstone Emperor, after all. This transformation act was a result of his taking possession of the fire of the gods.

This exact idea is also found in the Grey King myth, I believe. If the tree set ablaze by the thunderbolt represents a weirwood, the Grey King must have bonded with it, thereby transforming himself to obtain the fire of the gods, just as Azor Ahai did. He may have even had to die and be resurrected at some point, and the same is true of Azor Ahai.

Similarly, we might also interpret the lighting of the tree on fire as the activation of the weirwood bond – before the tree was ablaze, it wouldn’t look like a weirwood, after all. Without the weirwood bond, a human cannot access the god-like power of the weirwoodnet. The powers of astral projection, limited time travel, unlimited peeping tom-ability, and long life which the weirwoodnet connection offers IS the fire of the old gods, the knowledge and magic of the old gods. If the thunderbolt set the tree on fire, it might mean that the meteor strike triggered some sort of change to the weirwoods, perhaps activating them or corrupting them or allowing humans access to the weirwoodnet. These are all ideas we will follow up on in the future.

And now it’s time to get to the really really good part of this episode, something I’ve been working to get to for a long time now.  Thus it is my pleasure to present to you…

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Greenseers of Fire

This final section is brought to you by these redoubtable zodiac patrons: Ser Dionysus of House Galladon, wielder of the milkglass blade the Just Maid, earthly avatar of Heavenly House Virgo and Libra; Turin the Elf, Tavernkeep of the Winespring Inn, Master of the Abyss, earthly avatar of Heavenly House Cancer; Sarah Stark of the Wolfblood, the shining hand of Phaesphoria and earthly avatar of the Heavenly House Sagittarius; Queen Cameron, Lady of the Twilight, Keeper of the Astral Cats, earthly avatar of Heavenly House Aries; and Melanie Lot7, a.k.a. The child of the forest known as FeatherCrow, the Weircat Dryad, earthly avatar of Heavenly House Capricorn

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Alright friends, we’ve got one section left and it’s a really important section.  I almost broke it off into its own little podcast, but it’s really the cherry on top of everything we’ve established so far in this episode.  Having just presented you with the theory that the Grey King and Azor Ahai stories are both referring to a greenseer (or group of greenseers) who pulled down the moon and transformed himself or themselves through the fire magic of the moon meteors, I feel the need to provide some supporting evidence, beyond what we have laid out already.  Obviously we are near the end of the episode here so we’re only just going to scratch the surface, which is why I’m calling this episode the start of a new compendium based around weirwood and greenseers – subsequent episodes will build on these ideas.

Right now we are going to tie a bow on this episode by examining the all-important burning tree symbol and how it relates to the idea of a fiery greenseer.

Azor Ahai is a fiery sorcerer.  He’s a magician and a warrior of fire, and he seems to have transformed himself through he use of fire magic and blood magic, and possibly a bit of “meteor magic.” The thing is, there is a persistent connection between burning trees – especially burning weirwoods – and fiery sorcerers. Many times, we find burning wood present at Lightbringer forging scenes, and from those symbolic bonfires, we see descriptions of fiery sorcerers waking and emerging.  We’ve actually been seeing them for five books now, and I think you’ll be surprised to see all these quotes that have them hidden in plain sight.  This will be kind of like a Where’s Waldo-style hunt for fiery sorcerers that runs through many of the best Lightbringer forging reenactment scenes in the series.  We are going to take a look at six such scenes where the fiery sorcerers appear:

• Arya and the Night’s Watch recruits the abandoned holdfast near Harrenhall
• the scene at the Red Temple where Benerro pantomimes the destruction of the moon
• the burning of the Seven on Dragonstone
• the Alchemical Wedding
• the dragon-on-dragon battle between Moondancer and Sunfyre from the Targaryen civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons
• Jon and Quorin in the Frostfangs right before Jon is forced to kill Quorin

The premise is this: the burning tree symbol represents the weirwoods, and more specifically, it represents the weirwoods as a source of divine power that man can tap into. The burning tree is set ablaze by the thunderbolt strike of the Storm God, which represents a meteor strike, and thus we can say that the burning tree seems to exist at the location of a moon meteor impact, or perhaps more generally that the burning tree and the moon meteors landing on the Planetos are somehow linked. What we will see in the following scenes are depictions of fiery sorcerers waking and emerging from burning wood at the same time and place that the forging of Lightbringer or the landing of one of the Lightbringer meteors is symbolized. What exactly this means, we will try to discover as we go, but right at the start I am asserting that these fiery sorcerers are representative of a greenseer transforming himself through fire, and that this seems to have been made possible by the moon meteors and / or the events of the Long Night. This, I believe, is the truth behind the myths of the Grey King and Azor Ahai.

The first scene we will take a look at is the scene from A Clash of Kings where Arya, Yoren and the Nights Watch recruits are trapped in the small abandoned holdfast near Harrenhall. The star of the scene is an actual burning tree, but the set up to that is important. Yoren’s company are besieged by Ser Amory Lorch, whose sigil contains a black manticore and three golden coins (gold coins being dragons in Westeros). As we are about to see, Ser Amory’s attack is very much a reenactment of the attack of the dragon meteors on Planetos:

For a moment she thought the town was full of lantern bugs.  Then she realized they were men with torches, galloping between the houses.  She saw a roof go up, flames licking at the belly of the night with hot orange tongues as the thatch caught.  Another followed, and then another, and soon there were fires blazing everywhere.  Gendry climbed up beside her, wearing his helm.  “How many?” 

Arya tried to count, but they were riding too fast, torches spinning through the air as they flung them.  “A hundred,” she said. “Two hundred, I don’t know.”  Over the roar of the flames, she could hear shouts.  “They’ll come for us soon.” 

“There,” Gendry said, pointing.  A column of riders moved between the burning buildings toward the holdfast.  Firelight glittered off metal helms and spattered their mail and plate with orange and yellow highlights.  One carried a banner on a tall lance.  She thought it was red, but it was hard to tell in the night, with the fires roaring all around. Everything seemed red or black or orange. The fire leapt from one house to another.

There are two ideas in those quotes which work as a set-up to the payoff line in this scene: the flames personified as a living thing, and the living soldiers personified as beings of fire. These are two sides of the same coin which work to show us beings made of fire – the fire is described like a person, and the people are described like flame. Starting with the anthropomorphized fire, we see flames lick at the belly of the night with orange tongues and leap from one house to another, like some kind of wild animal, and twice the fire is also roaring like an animal, as if the fire has become some kind of beast.

More importantly, we have the fiery soldiers.  Ser Amory’s men with torches are first equated with lantern bugs – flying things associated with fire. The fire reflects off their helms and armor, making them look as if their armor were made of fire. These fiery lantern bug knights send their torches spinning through the air like spinning meteors. There’s a line a bit further on that says “A torch sailed spinning above their heads, trailing fingers of fire as it thumped down in the dirt of the yard,” after which which Yoren immediately shouts  “Blades!”, which I take for a clue to associate the spinning torches with blades, as in the flaming swords of the moon meteor shower. Notice that the torch trails “fingers of fire,” almost as if the lantern bug men had thrown their fiery hands at Arya and company – this is a representation of the fiery hand of R’hllor symbol which we know and love. Like the fiery tongues, “fingers of fire” also works to create the image of a being made of fire.

We also get spears being hurled from out of “the fire-bright shadows,” reminding us of the meteors-as-sun-spears symbolism and the idea of fire shadows – Melisandre’s shadow babies born of Stannis’s life fires, or Drogon the Winged Shadow who spits black fire, both of which are prime black meteor symbols.  After the soldiers get inside the holdfast, there’s a line where they are described as “steel shadows” with “flames shining off their mail and blades,” meaning that our steel shadows have fiery swords now as well as fiery armor.  Recall that when the Ghost of High Heart sees the shadowbaby assassin in a vision as “a shadow with a burning heart.”

Finally, there are two references to storms: right before the spinning torches that make Yoren say “blades” comes flying over the wall, Ser Amory says “storm the gates,” so that’s a storm of meteor torches or fiery knights with fiery blades or however you want to say it.  Right before they storm the the castle, there’s a long discussion about whether or not Yoren’s group of Night’s Watch pledges might not be serving the rebel Lord Beric, the Lightning Lord with a flaming sword, and this serves to remind us of the connection between lightning and flaming swords.  There’s a terrific line where the sarcastic Yoren says “Are you blind man?  You see a bloody lightning bolt?”  That’s a tasty one because it links thunderbolt idea with blood, which is convenient if you have a theory about the Storm God’s thunderbolt being a bleeding star or a bloodstone moon meteor.

And then we get the payoff line:

 Arya saw a tree consumed, the flames creeping across its branches until it stood against the night in robes of living orange. 

In the center of it all, we have the burning tree, set ablaze by one of these twirling meteor-torches in a terrific echo of the Storm God’s thunderbolt meteor setting the Grey King’s tree ablaze. The burning tree here is rendered in grandiose fashion as it “stands against the night in robes of living orange,” almost like some kind of fire priest…  actually, just like a fire priest.  We are going to see that robes of flame are the hallmark of these fire sorcerers, beginning here with this burning tree.  This entire scene with Arya and the burning tree specifically evokes the symbols of the temple of R’hllor, so let’s take a look at our actual fire priests next.

This is the scene in Dance where Benerro pantomimes the moon destruction with his fist, a scene we’ve dissected several times.  I won’t quote it all – suffice to say it is a scene with heavy lightbringer forging and moon destruction symbolism going on.  There are many symbols in common with the Arya scene we just read, including fiery spears, the fiery hand, fiery knights, and those fiery robes.

The acolytes were clad in robes of pale yellow and bright orange, priests and priestesses in red.

Benerro’s high voice carried well.  Tall and thin, he had a drawn face and skin white as milk.  Flames had been tattooed across his cheeks and chin and shaven head to make a bright red mask that crackled about his eyes and coiled down and around his lipless mouth. “Is that a slave tattoo?” asked Tyrion.

The knight nodded. “The red temple buys them as children and makes them priests or temple prostitutes or warriors. Look there.” He pointed at the steps, where a line of men in ornate armor and orange cloaks stood before the temple’s doors, clasping spears with points like writhing flames. “The Fiery Hand. The Lord of Light’s sacred soldiers, defenders of the temple.” 

Fire knights. “And how many fingers does this hand have, pray?” 

“One thousand.” 

And then comes the moon destruction pantomime. This time we are focused instead on the fiery people and their fashionable attire. The burning tree in the last scene wore robes of living orange, and here we see robes of pale yellow and bright orange and red – it seems clear that the fire priests of R’hllor are trying to look as though they were robed in fire. Benerro and the other high priests of fire, such as Moqorro, take it one step further with their masks of writhing flame – they are tattooed to look like they literally made of living fire. I’ve speculated that this might be done in remembrance of some lost art of fire transformation, one which Melisandre may have rediscovered – and perhaps Moqorro too, since he survived ten days floating in the ocean without drowning or freezing. The idea of people made of fire is also represented in the fire knights, who are counted the fingers of R’hllor’s fiery hand, making them meteor symbols. The fire knights actually make a nice parallel to the knights with flames reflecting on their armor and swords in the last scene.

Melisandre, our first example of a fire priestess, has robes which are often described in similar terms: Davos recalls her in A Storm of Swords with the line “..her red gowns moving like flames as she walked, a swirl of silk and satin.” That compares very well with our tree wearing fiery robes of living orange. Melisandre, of course, burned the wooden statues of the Seven-Who-Used-To-Be-Sea-Dragon-Boats on Dragonstone. We’ll revisit that scene to observe the fire sorcerers woken there in a moment, but first there are some storm clues to clean up from the Benerro scene.

For a while Tyrion could still hear Benerro’s voice growing fainter at their back and the roars his words provoked, sudden as thunder.

Thunder, you don’t say?  That was the guy just hollering about the moon breaking into fiery fingers, right?  In the very next line after the thunder reference, we get a hammer reference:

They came upon a stable. The knight dismounted, then hammered on the door until a haggard slave with a horsehead on his cheek came running.

The hammering brings a horsehead, reminding us of the Dothraki custom of perceiving stars as horses, and what the horsehead person brings is yet another meteor symbol:

The manacles were black iron, thick and heavy, each weighing a good two pounds, if the dwarf was any judge. The chains added even more weight. “I must be more fearsome than I knew,” Tyrion confessed as the last links were hammered closed. Each blow sent a shock up his arm almost to the shoulder. “Or were you afraid that I would dash away on these stunted little legs of mine?”

Another hammering, and this time it sends a shock – think lightning and electricity – up his arm.  Think about an arm shocked by a hammer, and you’ll have it.  It’s that bloody lightning bolt Yoren was talking about, hammering the Arm of Dorne.  You’ll recall Tyrion’s arm-wounding scene from the Battle of the Green Fork which we examined previously, where he was hit by the Morningstar of a “white star wolf” (a Karstark), a scene which also symbolized the Hammer of the Waters breaking the arm of Dorne. The chain of black iron that sends hammer shocks up Tyrion’s arm is also a clue about the arm of Dorne, which, thanks to the hammering  of black iron thunderbolt meteorites, is now a chain of islands.  I don’t have time to break down this whole chapter, but right after this, Mormont and Tyrion cross the long bridge of Volantis – a bridge made of fused black stone with the aid of dragonfire and sorcery.  The black iron chain of the “bloody” manacles, as Tyrion calls them, is a perfect miniature symbolic companion to the black dragon stone bridge.  Jorah and Tyrion even cross  this bridge from East to West, just as the First Men would have crossed the Arm of Dorne from east to west in the Dawn Age before it became a chain of islands burnt by dragonfire.

Our next scene with fiery sorcerers and burning trees is the burning of the Seven on Dragonstone. Again we don’t need to quote very much of it, just the relevant lines. Remember that these burning gods represent both sea dragons, by way of their being Targaryen ships, as well as burning trees, because they are wooden masts, which are symbols of tree trunks, and also because what are thought of as the “bones” of the sea dragon are actually dead trees.

In any case, these burning gods apparently bought their outfits at the Red Temple outlet store in Asshai:

The morning air was dark with the smoke of burning gods.

They were all afire now, Maid and Mother, Warrior and Smith, the Crone with her pearl eyes and the Father with his gilded beard; even the Stranger, carved to look more animal than human. The old dry wood and countless layers of paint and varnish blazed with a fierce hungry light.
. . .
The burning gods cast a pretty light, wreathed in their robes of shifting flame, red and orange and yellow. 

It’s those same fiery robes of red and orange and yellow. They are blazing and shining, but their smoke darkens the morning sky. Those are the burning sea dragon gods, and they are dressed like our fiery sorcerers. They were set on fire by Lightbringer, in a manner of speaking, or at least we can say that they burned while pierced with Lightbringer. Lightbringer is the fire of the gods come down to man, and it comes when the gods are set ablaze. This may support the idea that the thunderbolt-burning-a-tree-with-godly-fire idea translates to the weirwoodnet being made accessible or altered in some way by the impacts of the moon meteors.

There’s an additional tie to wierwood here as the wood of the statues of the gods of the Seven is called “old ,” like the Old Gods.  Melisandre proceeds to burn the Seven on Storms End shortly after this, and this time she also burns a giant weirwood from the Storm’s End godswood – what was in all likelihood at an 8,000 year-old tree at the least, from the days of Durran Godsgrief, the first Storm King.

All in all, this scene is tremendous and continues to yield up valuable clues: the fiery sorcerers emerge from the fire of the burning wooden sea dragon gods, a fire which also produces Lightbringer.

Let’s now take the search for fiery sorcerers to the Alchemical Wedding.  If the fiery sorcerers are an important part of the Lightbringer forging chain of events, then they will surely put in an appearance at the Alchemical wedding… and indeed they do.

The flames writhed before her like the women who had danced at her wedding, whirling and singing and spinning their yellow and orange and crimson veils, fearsome to behold, yet lovely, so lovely, alive with heat. Dany opened her arms to them, her skin flushed and glowing. This is a wedding, too, she thought. 

The flames were so beautiful, the loveliest things she had ever seen, each one a sorcerer robed in yellow and orange and scarlet, swirling long smoky cloaks. 

Once again, fiery sorcerers dressed in fiery robes of red, orange, and yellow are awakening from the bonfire of lightbringer’s cradle, just as they did at the burning of the Seven on Dragonstone. The language is quite explicit here – they are fiery sorcerers, and they come to life along with the moon dragons at lightbringer’s forging. You can see that George is really sticking to the same language – fiery robes and cloaks, red, orange and yellow… and perhaps a bit of smoke.

We also see the inclusion of fiery dancers waking from the flames, and actually I think these are the same people, because there’s a whole line of symbolism about dancing and the horned moon that we’ll get into eventually. Consider the dragon known as Moondancer, whom we hear about the The Princess and the Queen – moon dancer is a green dragon with pearl horns and claws.  She’s actually set on fire by a dragon named Sunfyre in a reenactment of — oh what’s that, you want to hear the quote?  That’s terrific, because there is more fire-masquerading-as-clothing going on, and because this is just as sweet paragraph of hot dragon-on-dragon action:

They met amidst the darkness that comes before the dawn, shadows in the sky lighting the night with their fires. Moondancer eluded Sunfyre’s flames, eluded his jaws, darted beneath his grasping claws, then came around and raked the larger dragon from above, opening a long smoking wound down his back and tearing at his injured wing. Watchers below said that Sunfyre lurched drunkenly in the air, fighting to stay aloft, whilst Moondancer turned and came back at him, spitting fire. Sunfyre answered with a furnace blast of golden flame so bright it lit the yard below like a second sun, a blast that took Moondancer full in the eyes. Like as not, the young dragon was blinded in that instant, yet still she flew on, slamming into Sunfyre in a tangle of wings and claws. As they fell, Moondancer struck at Sunfyre’s neck repeatedly, tearing out mouthfuls of flesh, whilst the elder dragon sank his claws into her underbelly. Robed in fire and smoke, blind and bleeding, Moondancer’s wings beat desperately as she tried to break away, but all her efforts did was slow their fall.

Pretty epic, right?  This is really fantastic mythical astronomy here – sun and moon colliding and destroying each other, exactly the picture of the eclipse followed by the explosion which the Qarthine myth describes as the moon “wandering too close to the sun and cracking from thereat.”  The thing that falls out of the sky represents the Lightbringer meteor, and it is made of the sun and the moon, just as I’ve been saying, and it is a bloody and flaming dragon ball that is like a second sun, reinforcing the idea of Lightbringer as a second sun.  Moondancer is blinded, representing the torn-out-moon-eyes symbolic motif we’ve talked quite a bit about…

…but more importantly, Moondancer is gloriously robed in fire – the line is, “robed in fire and smoke” –  just like the fiery dancers that woke from Dany’s Lightbringer forging ceremony and just like all the fiery sorcerers we have seen so far waking from Lightbringer wood-burning incidents. The fact that these signature fiery robes are worn by a moon-dancing green dragon is rich with symbolic import, and all of it corroborates our theory about these fire sorcerers: they were greenseers and dragon people (green dragons) awoken in the fires which forged Lightbringer. I’d also add that some part of their magic may involve dancing and singing, just as the children of the forest’s true name is “those who sing the song of earth.” When Dany’s dragons hatch, it says that the night came alive with the music of dragons. Those are actually the last words of A Game of Thrones.

As an aside, let me say that I love that he took the time to write such epic metaphor and symbolism in even his supplementary A Song of Ice and Fire material such as The Princess and the Queen and the The World of Ice and Fire.

Now that we have introduced fiery moon dancers to the family of fire people, there’s actually a pair of loose details to clean up from the Alchemical Weding scene which relate the Ironborn mythology:

And there came a second crack, loud and sharp as thunder, and the smoke stirred and whirled around her and the pyre shifted, the logs exploding as the fire touched their secret hearts.

This entire solar pyre is made of carefully arranged pieces of wood, and the reference to secret hearts certainly seems like a reference to the heart trees, trees which appear to be on fire and harbor basically every secret there is. Secret hearts, know what I mean? Their hearts are set on fire when the dragon’s lunar egg cracks open with a thunderous sound, just as the thunderbolt moon meteor / sea dragon set the tree ablaze. This is the second egg, which means Rhaegal, the green dragon, for what it’s worth, reminding us of moon dancer the green dragon, and of greenseers who were dragon people.  When I see the thunderous green dragon touching the secret wooden hearts with fire, I am again seeing a possible suggestion that the weirwoodnet was activated or altered (‘set on fire’) by the meteor strike.

To conclude the Alchemical Wedding scene, I’ll note that Drogo too wears the fiery garments:

And now the flames reached her Drogo, and now they were all around him. His clothing took fire, and for an instant, the khal was clad in wisps of floating orange silk and tendrils of curling smoke, grey and greasy.

The reason I point this out is because Drogo is the dying solar king here, and he wears the robes of the fire sorcerer. He represents the death of the sun and Azor Ahai, while his perceived resurrection as the red comet parallels the waking of the dragons and the rebirth of Azor Ahai as a dark solar king. That’s why the inclusion of “greasy” smoke and oil to light the wood a bit earlier. The point is – the fiery sorcerer woken from the Lightbringer pyre is none other than the reborn Azor Ahai. This is the burning tree we have been tracking down – it’s Azor Ahai, the greenseer who transformed himself through fire magic by cracking open the moon and waking the stone dragons. Drogo is consumed in the fire here, but in a moment he appears to rise from the flames, mounted on a smoky stallion, just as the tree was consumed in the fire of the Storm God’s thunderbolt and gave birth to a Grey King who was now armed with the fire of the gods.

Basically any time we find burning weirwoods, we have Azor Ahai making an appearance. Melisandre the fire sorceress has all the wildlings burn a piece of weirwood as they cross through the Wall and enter the Seven Kingdoms – and look who’s standing there, none other than Azor Ahai impressionists Stannis Baratheon and Jon Snow. That was the same fire in which they burned the horn that bears an uncanny resemblance to dragonbinder but was called the horn of Joramun. Hell, even almost-weirwood burnings are linked to Azor Ahai figures – when Jon Snow is offered Winterfell and the Stark name by Stannis, it comes with the condition of having to burn the heart tree in the Winterfell godswood, which Jon simply cannot do. While he’s considering this choice, however, he does  dream of swimming in the black pond before the weirwood tree with fiery moon maiden Ygritte , showing us the drowning of a fiery moon in yet another iteration. Remember also that that is the same pond Ned sticks his bloody dragon sword into, as we examined in “Waves of Night and Moon Blood.”

Sticking with Jon Snow, we find more fiery sorcerers woken by Azor Ahai burning some wood, and this is from A Clash of Kings:

“I’ll do as you say,” Jon said reluctantly, “but … you will tell them, won’t you? The Old Bear, at least? You’ll tell him that I never broke my oath.” 

Qhorin Halfhand gazed at him across the fire, his eyes lost in pools of shadow. “When I see him next. I swear it.” He gestured at the fire. “More wood. I want it bright and hot.” 

Jon went to cut more branches, snapping each one in two before tossing it into the flames. The tree had been dead a long time, but it seemed to live again in the fire, as fiery dancers woke within each stick of wood to whirl and spin in their glowing gowns of yellow, red, and orange. 

“Enough,” Qhorin said abruptly. “Now we ride.” 

“Ride?” It was dark beyond the fire, and the night was cold. 

Oh man, that’s a great one – I told you you would be surprised by how flagrant these quote pulls are, right? The tree had been dead a long time but seemed to live again as it gave birth to fiery dancers wearing the familiar uniform of red, orange, and yellow clothing… I mean that one was pretty on the nose. This comes as Jon is about to commit a blood betrayal of sorts, as he is forced by circumstance to turn his sword on his brother. That fight occurs by a dead tree – the one the eagle perches on when they emerge from the cave.

There’s an additional tie between the dead tree that was resurrected in the fire and the Night’s Watch, because at the end of this chapter, Quorin’s body is burned on a wooden pyre made of broken branches, mirroring the earlier fire of broken branches from which the fiery dancers emerged.  This is important because the Night’s King and the Last Hero were members of the Night’s Watch, and I suspect that one of those peoples either Azor Ahai or his offspring.  Linking Quorin’s burning corpse to the fire in which the dead tree lived again is suggestive of Night’s Watch brothers as fire sorcerers.  As you may recall, we’ve seen other evidence suggesting that the original Night’s Watch may have been fire-undead people, perhaps even greenseers and skinchangers who were resurrected in a similar manner to Azor Ahai or the Last Hero or the Grey king or however many people are behind the truth of these myths.

In conclusion… I give you Azor Ahai the greenseer in the form of Beric Dondarrion.  He wields a flaming sword: check. Reference to lightning: check. Resurrected through fire magic and bleeds black blood: check. Sits on a wierwood throne: actually, yes, check. Not a live greenseer throne such as Bloodraven sits in, but as we have seen before when we have quoted the scene this scene, Beric sits in a tangle of weirwood roots in a cave full of weirwood roots, just like Bloodraven. He’s called the “Lord of Corpses” by the Ghost of High Heart, while Bloodraven is called the “corspe lord”in the scene where Bran first meets him (we quoted that one earlier). Beric has a missing eye, just like Bloodraven. Both wear black cloaks, though Bloodraven’s does not have the stars and lightning.

Many have noticed the parallels between Beric and Bloodraven, but I am not sure that anyone has known what to make of it. I would submit that the likeness is there to tell us something important about Azor Ahai: he was a resurrected and transformed fiery sorcerer who sat in a weirwood throne and wielded a flaming sword, like Beric.  He was a greenseer, as Bloodraven is, and also someone with the blood of the dragon in his veins, as Bloodraven has, being that Azor Ahai comes from the original race of dragon riders from Asshai (according to my theories about the Great Empire of the Dawn which we discussed with History Westeros).  \He was a Night’s Watch brother in some fashion, like Bloodraven and Jon Snow.

In fact, Jon Snow is where a lot of these ideas lead. He matches the sketch of Azor Ahai we’ve just laid out very well. First of all, Jon has the blood of the dragon in his veins through his genetic father, Rhaegar (#Nedwillalwaysbehisrealdad). Jon is a skinchanger instead of a greenseer, but I think the two are basically the same thing, since all Bran is really doing is skinchanging a tree. Jon is killed and soon to be resurrected, he dreams of wielding a flaming sword, he has a wound in one eye (the eagle attack from Clash), and he has associations with weirwood through his Stark lineage and through his wolf, who has the coloring of a weirwood and is compared to one by Jon. The biggest thing I am curious about is what magic Jon will be resurrected with: fire magic, ice magic, or weirwood magic? What I am sure of is that his status as a skinchanger will enable a full resurrection, as opposed to Beric, who is more like a remnant of his former self. I think it’s very likely that Azor Ahai’s theoretical status as a greenseer enabled him to be resurrected in whatever terrible form he happened to take.

We find a very similar story when decode the Ironborn mythology: the Grey King sat on a weirwood throne, transformed himself through taking possession of the fire of the gods in the forms of the burning tree – weirwood magic – and the black sea dragon meteorites, such as the Sea Stone Chair. It’s taken me a long time to sort through all the layers of this Ironborn folklore, but I believe that is what is at the heart of it: fiery greenseers. Naughty ones who broke the moon in order to steal the fire of the gods for their own, and in doing so transformed themselves and the entire world.

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This was a really densely-packed episode with a lot of interwoven ideas, and it has certainly raised a whole host of new questions.  Questions about these naughty greenseers – who they were, where they come from, what exactly they became and what they did afterward.  Questions about the timeline and human access to the weirwoodnet, and what change the meteors might have wrought on the weirwoods. Questions about ancient migrations patterns from east to west and the questions about who came to Westeros and the Iron Islands and when and how these peoples might have integrated their cultures and left behind a tapestry of mythology woven together from different peoples and different places of origin.  Questions about how it is that a magician of any variety takes a hand in steering a comet into a moon.

Stay tuned to the mythical astronomy of ice and fire and we’ll explore these questions together, and many more besides.  We still have to talk about the Others, after all, and they have an icy body of symbolism every bit as rich as that of the dragons and dragon people..

Most of you are familiar with the idea that Venus is sometimes called the Morningstar.  This is because it appears low in the horizon in the hours just before sunrise, like a kind of herald for the dawn.  Indeed, the Latin word for the ‘Morningstar’ is ‘Lucifer,’ and it also translates to “dawn-bringer,” “son of the morning,” and… “light-bringer.”  That’s the reason why I took the name “Lucifer means Lightbringer,” because this fact is the tip of an iceberg of important and inflammatory mythology (multiple puns intended).  Because Venus is the brightest star in the sky, its rise just before the sun was something that all cultures took note of, and as a result it features prominently in most world mythology.

The thing is, Venus doesn’t always rise in the morning.  Venus also can appear as the Evenstar, the first star which rises at sunset and heralds the coming of nightfall.  How can this be?  Well, the reason is that Venus’s orbit is smaller than Earth’s, and therefore closer to the sun.  Because of this, Venus will never appear too far from the sun when viewed from earth, meaning that it will always appear near sunrise or sunset, and always in the approximate part of the sky the sun is entering or leaving.  The Earth rotates counter-clockwise, so we’ll either see Venus right before we see the sun, to the cosmic right of the sun in other words, and in this case we call it the Morningstar.  When it’s to the cosmic left of the sun, we see it right after the sun passes out of view at sunset, in the same general direction as the sunset, and we call it the Evenstar.

Let’s do a fun little experiment in your house right now.  It you’re driving, don’t worry about it, come back to it later, but for everyone else, here’s what I want you to do.  Pick an object on the far side of the room .  You are the Earth, and that object is the sun.  Then pick an object a couple of feet to the right of your sun object, and that will be Venus.  Now, face away from the ‘sun’ (it’s nighttime on your personal earth), close your left eye, and then slowly turn to your left, like the earth turning counter-clockwise on its axis.  The bridge of your nose will act as earth’s horizon line.  As you turn, you will see your Venus object come into view first out of the left side of your field of vision, rising from your nasal horizon before your sun object is visible.  This is Venus appearing as the Morningstar, rising into view in the east just before the sun does.  You can see why it is called the dawn-bringer, right?  It comes just before the sunrise and lets us know the sun is on its way, like an usher or herald of daybreak.  As you continue to turn, you will see your sun object rise into view, and in real life, its brightness causes the stars to no longer be visible, including Venus.

From earth, what you will see is Venus literally rising up from the eastern horizon like a spirit rising to heaven, at which point, Venus gradually fades into the daytime sky.  It really does look like a star that ascends to heaven!  To make it really come together for you at home, you’d have to do this experiment with your head tiled to the right side, but that would make you look ridiculous and I wouldn’t ask that of you.

Now just to finish off the experiment, let’s illustrate how Venus appears as the Evenstar.  This time I want you to pick an object a couple of feet to the left of your ‘sun,’ and make that Venus.  Start by facing the sun object, but this time close your right eye,  and then continue to turn to your left.  As long as the sun is in your field of view, it’s ‘daytime,’ meaning that you wouldn’t be able to see lovely Venus, but just as the sun begins to slip out of your field of view on the right side at what would be sunset, Venus will still be visible for a few moments longer in the western sky.  With that big, rude sun exited stage right, Venus has a couple of hours to reign supreme as the brightest star in the sky, the Evenstar, before it too passes from view, falling back towards the western horizon (your nose) as Earth turns its face further from the sun.

What we see from earth is a bright star gradually becoming visible in the west as the sun sets and before the other stars appear.  This bright star pops into view about a third of the way up into the sky, and then over the course of the next few hours, it falls toward the horizon and disappears, just like a being falling from heaven to earth.  The fire of the gods comes down to man, everyone.  Blow your trumpets of doom.

Venus alternates between these two positions on a regular cycle based on the speed of orbits of the Earth and Venus.  For 263 days, Venus appears to the cosmic left of the sun from the perspective of earth, ushering in the night as the Evenstar.  It begins this part of its cycle at its maximum distance from Earth and gradually gets closer, and therefore brighter, over the course of those 263 days.  Every night, the Evenstar falls to earth, and every night, its peak altitude also decreases, adding to the impression of a star gradually falling from heaven as it approaches its transformation point.  Eventually Venus begins to cross over the face of the sun – to move in between the earth and sun – on its way to its Morningstar position on the sun’s right.  For those eight days of solar transit, Venus is not visible from Earth with the naked eye.  Then it emerges on the right side of the sun, reborn as the Morningstar where it shines the brightest of any point in its orbit.  Over the next 263 days of nightly ascension into the heavens, it gradually gets farther away from Earth, and therefore dimmer, until it passes ‘behind the sun’ from the perspective of earth.  Being farther away, it takes Venus 50 days to emerge again on the left, reborn as the Evenstar.  And on and on it goes, 263 days as the Evenstar, 8 days of invisibility and transformation, 263 days as the Morningstar, then 50 say of invisibility and transformation.

For this reason, almost all Morningstar deities such as I listed above are killed and resurrected.  Specifically, they come down from heaven or bring something down from heaven or both, mimicking the way that Venus seems to fall from the sky.  Sometimes these figures are killed, and then descend to the underworld, eventually becoming reborn as a lord of the afterlife – the Evenstar, the Lord of Night.  It’s not just reborn the same as before, but reborn and transformed as well, just as Venus transforms.  Osiris becomes the lord of the afterlife and the underworld after being resurrected by Isis, and Jesus is reborn and ascends to heaven to rule the happier side of the Christian afterlife.  Lucifer, who is associated by some with the Christian devil, was evicted from heaven only to become the king of Hell, the darker side of the Christian afterlife.  All of these are different interpretations of Venus’s mystifying switch between Morningstar and Evenstar, and of the way it appears to ascend and descend from heaven.

I should briefly point out that most of these characters I’m referring to as “Morningstar deities” are really “Morningstar / Evenstar deities,” but that’s just a little clunky to say a bunch of times.  In casual conversation, people frequently just use the word ‘Morningstar’ to refer to Venus in general, and although it’s not very polite go around to playing astronomy snob at parties and correcting people, it is important for our purposes here to keep the correct terminology in mind.

Perhaps one of the best examples of a deity who is a vivid and details personification of Venus is the famous Quetzalcoatl of Mesoamerican myth, who also has equivalent figures with different names all through the Mexican subcontinent and South America.  Quetzalcoatl is a hugely important figure in the native mythology of this region, and his importance and cultural relevance persists to this day.  Now it must be said, no matter which part of the Morningsta-Evenstar cycle a myth-maker chooses to start with, mythical figures based on the planet Venus tend to undergo transformation and resurrection, and Quetzalcoatl is a great example of this.  They saw his life beginning as the Evenstar, when Venus was at its farthest and dimmest, like a young child being born.  As Venus gets brighter, it was perceived as Quetzalcoatl growing into manhood… at which time he is, rather inevitably, sacrificed.  He disappears for eight days – four where he is dead and four where he is emaciated – and then reappears, reborn as the Morningstar in all his splendor, whereupon he ascends to rule heaven.  He’s prophesied to return one day, naturally, and his return will supposedly be heralded by a comet, just as Jesus’s birth was.  As just as Drogon’s birth and Dany’s rebirth was!  What a coincidence.

I want to draw attention to the fact that the eight day period of Quetzalcoatl’s sojourn in the underworld exactly matches the eight-day transition period between Venus’s Evenstar and Morningstar alignment, when it passes before the sun and is hidden from view.  This is what detailed mythical astronomy is all about, folks.  Encoded within the Quetzalcoatl myth, we find basic astronomy and science – this is Joseph Campbell’s “cosmological function” of mythology, that of a proto-science.  These observations of the cycles of nature and of the heavens form the skeleton and the backbone of the myth.  But also encoded into the myth are the defining virtues and spiritual beliefs of the culture, and these are the ‘meat on the bones’ of the legend.  This is the societal and religious function of myth.  Quetzalcoatl’s transformative journey through the underworld simultaneously expresses defining cultural ideas and detailed observation of the heavens, nicely wrapped up in the form of an esoteric fable.  The fable then acts as a vehicle to transmit those ideas and observations down through time.  As long as the important facts of the myth are not changed, the astronomical message remains intact, even if other details evolve over time.  Numbers tend to be one of the aspects of myth which survive the longest, because they are not subjective like descriptions.

What’s cool is that hundreds of years later, disconnected in time and space from the original authors of the myth, we can nevertheless determine that Quetzalcoatl is a personification of Venus because his actions match that of Venus.  We can then in turn deduce that the ancient people of the Americas observed the heavens with some level of detail (a fact also corroborated by celestial alignments in their monuments) and then passed on this information encoded in myth and fable.  Along the way, the story has no doubt been carried along and retold by people who did not understand the astronomical truths behind the story, but they remained there intact nevertheless, surviving nestled amongst the folds of the myth awaiting their chance to be recognized for what they are – basic astronomy and scientific observation.

On the other side of that coin, the realization that the ancients were doing a lot more than telling goofy fables might inspire a bit more respect from modern man for our ancestors’ understanding of the human condition and our place in the universe.  Hopefully, this renewed sense of awe and respect on our parts can lead to people learning more about the context and history that goes along with the myth, and to a better understanding of the cultures which wrote them.  In other words, the power of myth can be transformative if we open ourselves up to it.

I mentioned a moment ago that the Romans called Venus ‘Lucifer’ when it appeared as the Morningstar, and to this I will add that when it was in the Evenstar position, they called it ‘Vesper.’  In Greek, the word for Morningstar is ‘Eosphorus’ or ‘Phosphorus,’ and the word for the Evenstar is “Hesperus.”  There’s an old philosopher’s riddle about semantics and naming known as Frege’s Puzzle, which ponders the potentially confusing reality that although ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ have different qualities, such as one appearing at dawn and the other at nightfall, they are in fact the same thing.  Hesperus IS Phosphorus, because they are both Venus.  However, you cannot always equate Hesperus and Phosphorus – for example if you are instructing someone when to look for the Morningstar, the instructions are different than one would give to find the Evenstar.  In some senses, they are the same thing, and in others, not.

It’s very like the minefield comparative mythology is doomed to walk – we can compare myths which have common elements and figures and say they are in some ways telling the same story, but we must also never lose sight of the very important differences.   We have to hold different ideas and contexts in mind simultaneously, thinking of both the specific, personalized details that make each myth unique and also the more universal themes and archetypes which bind us all together to a common humanity.  It’s quite an engaging and enjoyable challenge which I am sure you all have a taste for, either one which you brought with you to the podcast or one which may be budding and growing as we speak.  🙂

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Are you… THE DEVIL?

Most people are familiar with the concept of Lucifer as being another name for Satan, the devil of the Christian religion.  However, this is a recent association and the concept of Lucifer goes much further back into history.  The Hebrew word translated as Lucifer, הֵילֵל בֶּן-שָׁחַר (Helel ben Shaḥar), is simply the Hebrew word for Venus as the Morningstar – just like the Latin word ‘lucifer,’ it also translates to “light-bringer,” “shining one,” “son of the morning,” etc.   Helel ben Shaḥar actually only appears once in the Old Testament of Bible (the New Testament, including Revelation, was written in Greek), and most scholars agree that it was being used metaphorically to refer to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, who conquered Jerusalem, but then suffered great setbacks – he rose and fell like Venus, in other words.  The word ‘lucifer’ was only later associated with Satan as a fallen angel by Pope Gregory the Great (540-604 AD), an idea which was then popularized by John Milton in ‘Paradise Lost.’  Here’s the verse:

Isaiah 14:12: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!  How art thou cut down to the ground, thou which didst weaken the nations!”

Saying that Satan’s name is “Lucifer” is no different than saying his name is “Phosphorus,” except that ‘Lucifer’ is much catchier.  As I mentioned before, Lucifer is a Latin word much older than Pope Gregory or John Milton, and it simply refers to the planet Venus when it appears as the Morningstar.  Pope Gregory wasn’t mad, however – in fact, he had very good reason to make the association between Satan and Venus.  The fable of a high angel who challenges god and is thrown out of heaven to become the king of hell is one interpretation of the universal mythological archetype known as the Morningstar deity.

But then again, so is the story of Jesus Christ, who is named the Morningstar in the New Testament book of Revelation, chapter 22, verse 16:

“I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star.”

Now at first glance, it certainly seems confusing that both Jesus and lucifer would be described as the Morningstar in the bible.  I mean it doesn’t get much more opposite than Jesus and Lucifer, right?  Allow me explain.  Many cultures saw Venus, the brightest star in the night sky who rises just before the sun, as a kind of usurper, a kind of wanna-be sun.  He rises from the horizon in the early morning, trying to get the jump on the sun, and tries to shine bright enough bring the day… but before Venus can rise very high, the real king of the sky – the sun – rises and basically erases Venus from the sky.  As a result, we see some Morningstar figures try to usurp the high god, just as the Biblical Lucifer does when he challenges God and loses.  Lucifer’s Morningstar status is glorious – he’s the high angel of music, the most beautiful of the angels, you get the idea.  Conversely, his Evenstar version is rather un-glorious: cast out of heaven to live forever in hell until God drags his ass back up to earth for Armageddon and one final butt-kicking.

Jesus too descends from heaven – but significantly, he incarnates on earth willingly, to save mankind, a gift from the high god to man.  This is the Evenstar as the son of god, the son of the sun.  It’s still the same idea, however – a luminous being descending from heaven to earth, which is what Venus appears to do every night as the Evenstar.  Myth makers can say it was kicked out of heaven or that it descended from heaven as a gift, as they see fit, but they are both describing the same astronomy.

Another facet of Venus which both Jesus and Lucifer share is that of light-bringing- specifically, the transmission of the power or knowledge of the gods to mankind.  This is a major feature of the Morningstar / Evenstar deity archetype, whether his descent from heaven is depicted as a tumultuous fall or a divine landing.  Quetzalcoatl supposedly taught  the natives almost everything they know of farming, husbandry, astronomy, mathematics, etc., while Prometheus is famous for stealing the fire of the gods for mankind.  Jesus descends from earth to give man a path to salvation and heavenly righteousness, literally bestowing upon man the gift of the Holy Spirit, a kind of godly presence which is thought to reside in men’s hearts.

So what about Lucifer, the supposed devil? Well, think back to the Garden of Eden.  The serpent is trying to convince Eve and Adam to eat of the fruit of something called “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” which the serpent says will make them like gods, having awareness of good and evil.  Presumably, this implies that man was previously in some sort of more innocent, animal-like state where he was unaware of the possibility of choosing evil… although choosing to eat of this fruit was itself supposedly a sin, which is basically a paradox.  But setting that aside, the serpent did in fact bring the knowledge of the gods to man as his Morningstar status requires.

Thus, you can see why Pope Gregory might have seen the Biblical tale of Lucifer the fallen angel as a villainous incarnation of the Evenstar figure, a kind of dark-lightbringer.

It’s worth noting that the serpent gave his gift of terrible knowledge to man from the branches of a mythological world tree, much like Yggdrasil, whose upper branches and their contents representing the celestial realm. I’ve said before that this is a well-worm mythological concept, and the Bible is no exception.  The fruit of knowledge and the serpent itself come from the divine realm into the hands of mankind, bringing enlightenment, for better or worse.

The idea of the Morningstar deity challenging god can be found everywhere – there’s the Canaanite deity Attar, who attempted to steal the heavenly throne of Ba’al, failed, and became the ruler of the underworld.  There’s an older Caananite myth of a lesser god, Helel, who tried to overthrow the high god El, who lived on top of a mountain (this is a version of the same word we encountered earlier, “Helel ben Shaḥar,” literally “day-star, son of the morning”).  He failed too, and descended to the underworld.   The Chaldean myth of Ishtar and Inanna is similar – deities associated with the morning star descending to the underworld.  The Babylonian myth of Etana and Zu tells the same tale – you get the idea.  When Venus changes from appearing before dawn to appearing after sunset, it was seen as being resurrected as the “lord of the underworld,” or “lord of night.”  This resurrected deity now has power over death.  For what it’s worth, even the Morningstar figures who don’t challenge God but rather have his blessing, like Jesus or Mithras, still gain power over death after their resurrection.

Speaking of having divine blessing… there’s a strong correlation between solar deities and Morningstar deities, especially when Venus is depicted as the son of the morning, the son of the sun.  God almighty is almost always the sun, and this is the role which the Christian God plays.  His son, Jesus, is the Morningstar, the son of god who is also a part of the Trinity which IS God.  Jesus is like a smaller piece of the sun, the son’s sun, the avatar of his solar father on earth.  Mithras plays this role as well – he’s the avatar of the sun on earth, just as Azor Ahai is the “champion of R’hllor.”  These Morningstar figures are often “solar champions,” so while they are distinct from the almighty “father god,” they carry their essence and power.  Sometimes they are even reborn as the new high god, taking their father’s place – the lines are blurry, in other words.

I often speak of Azor Ahai Reborn and Lightbringer as being both the offspring of the sun in one sense and a reborn sun in another.  This is very much like Jesus being the Morningstar and the sun of God in one sense, but also a part of God who ascends to heaven in another sense.  It seems that George is showing us something similar with the transformation of the sun and Azor Ahai.  It can be seen in two ways: a sun figure who dies, falls to earth, and is reborn, or a sun figure who gives birth to Morningstar children which fall to earth.

So let’s review what we’ve learned so far about this nor star fellowthe Morningstar deity fellow.   He’s known for bringing the fire and knowledge of the gods to mankind, sometimes by stealing from the gods and sometimes because he is a child of god himself (or herself).   He falls to earth like a star, he’s resurrected, and his name means “Lightbringer” and “son of the morning.”  If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the previous podcasts, you will already be seeing that all of these ideas are present in the Azor Ahai myth and the prophecy of his return.  He’s originally painted as a savior of man, while our research indicates more of the opposite.  Thing is, either idea can fit the Morningstar archetype.

The big question we have to ask about Azor Ahai is this: is he the devil? Or is he the savior?

Or perhaps both?

Returning to the idea of the Venus being both Hesperus and Phosphorus, both Vesper and Lucifer, Evenstar AND Morningstar, consider the implications for Azor Ahai and the flaming sword of legend which symbolizes him called Lightbringer.   Could he have transformed from Evenstar, the herald of the night, to the Morningstar, the herald of dawn?  A similar scenario which also matches this symbolism would be Azor Ahai the father as the herald of night and his son as the Last Hero, the herald of dawn.

This actually gets down to an even deeper question about the swords and the moons: one thing with two halves or two things which are a pair?  Meaning, were there two swords, as I suggest – a black sword made from a moon meteor with blood sacrifice by Azor Ahai and the white sword know as Dawn – or was it one sword which was transformed from black to white somehow?

The same question applies to the moon – I tend to lean towards their actually having been two moons, with one being destroyed in the Dawn Age, as opposed to one moon which has transformed, but I can’t be certain.  I have an essay coming which explores the moon question specifically, and what I see are moon maidens which seem to be associated either with fire or ice, suggesting we may have had an ice-associated moon and a fire-associated moon.  But it’s possible that we had a fiery moon which was not destroyed, but instead took damage during the Long Night and was transformed into the current, ice-associated moon whose cold light the Others seem to like so well.  The ice and fire moon maidens could be showing us a process instead of a pair, though I think the pair makes more sense.

I also think it makes sense to have two opposite “Lightbringer” swords, because you can’t have a good fight with only one magic sword, you know?  Similarly, I favor the Last Hero as Azor Ahai’s son – the sword of the morning and evening as two different people.  Though I do think it could be twisted and interesting if resurrected, zombie Azor Ahai turns out to be the do-gooder and his son became the Night’s King or whatever.

So are these pairs of heroes, swords, and moons two stages in a transformation, or a pair of opposites?  Hesperus IS phosphorus, in a sense, because they are both Venus, but hesperus is also not phosphorus, because those two words describe different configurations of Venus which do very different things.

Sorry to leave you dangling with a riddle there, but that’s what we have.  Unravelling A Song of Ice and Fire isn’t a case of putting together the clues and crying  “ah ha! The butler did it!” and then we all go home.   No, the mystery of Lightbringer and Azor Ahai and the Last Hero is a bit more subtle and complex than that.  But now that we have a working understanding of the Morningstar / Evenstar mythology and how it can manifest as different kinds of figures, we can at least place the riddles Martin is giving us in some kind of context.  We all know Martin loves grey area and tends to frown on binary, black or white thinking, and I believe that’s why he found this Morningstar / Evenstar mythology so appealing to work with – it’s full of seeming paradoxes.  In order to prevents his or her story from becoming shallow, robotic, predictable, or pedantic, a writer must have the ability to create what I would call ‘meaningful ambiguity,’ and this is an area in which Martin clearly excels.  A good writer doesn’t always give the reader clear answers, but invites them to ask questions and make judgement calls, so that the reader has a level of participation in the story.

At the root of all storytelling, Martin often says, is the human heart in conflict.  If we apply the lessons of Venus to the heart in conflict, we see that in every man and woman there is the potential for darkness and light, evil and good, yin and yang, or whatever pair of opposites you like, and whatever qualities you ascribe to them – every person has the potential to be a Morningstar or an Evenstar.

Or as Davos would say, we’re all a buch of half-rotten onions!

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A Three-Headed Morningstar

I mentioned at the top that there are three key elements of the story which are infused with Morningstar mythology: the Night’s Watch, House Dayne and Dawn, and of course Azor Ahai and Lightbringer.  We’ve already pretty well covered Azor Ahai and Lightbringer, but before we move on to Dawn and the Night’s Watch, there is one more aspect of Lightbringer we need to quickly cover, and that’s the red comet.

THE SWORD OF THE EVENING

In the main plot of A Song of Ice and Fire, the Lightbringer comet is playing the role of Morningstar and Evenstar.  In other words, George has transferred the mythology of Venus on to the comet.  He’s telling us as much by calling his red sword “Lightbringer” and then introducing the red comet to us as a symbol of Lightbringer.  When Dany first sees the comet, on the night she burns Drogo, wakes the dragons, and generally re-enacts the destruction of the second moon, she sees the red comet as the first star of the evening – the Evenstar.  This is the first in a long line of Venus associations laid on to the red comet.  This is from the climax of A Game of Thrones:

“Jogo spied it first. “There,” he said in a hushed voice. Dany looked and saw it, low in the east.  The first star was a comet burning red, blood red, fire red. The Dragon’s tail. She could not have asked for a stronger sign.”  

It’s interesting to note that the wandering star that supposedly led the three magi to Bethlehem and Jesus’s birth was also said to have been sighted in the east.  Although it is merely conjecture, one of the ideas about this star is that is was a comet.  In any case, there’s another reference to Daenerys sighting the red comet as the Evenstar at the very beginning of the very first Dany chapter of A Clash of Kings:

The Dothraki named the comet shierak qiya, the Bleeding Star. The old men muttered that it omened ill, but Daenerys Targaryen had seen it first on the night she had burned Khal Drogo, the night her dragons had awakened. It is the herald of my coming, she told herself as she gazed up into the night sky with wonder in her heart. The gods have sent it to show me the way.

I sometimes talk about Azor Ahai’s theoretically black meteor sword as an opposite of Dawn, a kind of “Sword of the Evening.”  I believe George is introducing it to us in just this fashion – the red comet is literally playing the role of the Evenstar and heralding the coming of Daenerys, who has become Azor Ahai reborn, as we discussed at the end of the first podcast.  The Evenstar heralds the coming of night, and Azor Ahai reborn is, according to me, an inverted solar king and an Evenstar figure.  A ruler of night, a night sun, a lion of night.  A black dragon.  And this is exactly what we see – the Evenstar in this all-important scene is the red comet, it heralds the coming of a black dragon (Drogon) and a dark solar queen – Daenerys as Azor Ahai reborn.  This scene is also re-encating the events which brought us the original Long Night, so basically everything about it screams out “Herald of Nightfall” …and this is exactly what the Evenstar is, just as the Morningstar version of Venus is the dawn-bringer and light-bringer.

Consider this: the Evenstar is famous for falling from the sky every night, as I mentioned, and so aligning the comet with the Evenstar in this scene implies the idea of bleeding stars descending from heaven.  That, of course, is exactly what we think the original cause of the Long Night was, so we are right back to the red comet heralding the nightfall of nightfalls.

The entire scene, in other words, is consistent – consistent with Evenstar mythology.  This shows us the truth about Lightbringer and reveals the lies lurking within the myth.  Daenerys is Azor Ahai reborn, and she’s re-encarting the events of Lightbringer’s forging, but nothing about this ceremony says “Morningstar” or “light-bringing,” and I think that is a clear message that the original forging of Lightbringer was the same.  Azor Ahai’s “Lightbringer” was a sword of darkness, and the red comet which symbolizes Lightbringer was responsible for turning out the lights on Planetos.

Stepping away from the alchemical wedding scene and looking more broadly at the red comet, I think the clues point in the same direction.  We don’t need actually pull all the quotes of the various things people associated the red comet with, as we’ve done so before, but a quick glance at them shows that they all point to our proposed scenario of the original Lightbringer comet and as being the destroyer of the moon, the bringer of dragon meteors, and the herald of the Long Night.   It’s called the red messenger which portends fire and blood, and it apparently – according to Old Nan – smells like dragons.  It’s called the father’s scourge, the dragons tail, a red hot sword or a bloody sword.  It’s a wound across the sky, or even a scratch across the face of god one time in A Clash of Kings.  It’s even called “Joffrey’s Comet” – how much more proof could you need?! 😉

It’s the Evenstar, the herald of the night.  The Long Night, which was caused by bleeding stars that fell like flaming swords and landed like dragons.

One last note on comets and dragons and Venus.  As I mentioned before, originally ‘lucifer’ is the Latin word for Venus as the Morningstar, and was only later associated with Satan in 600 AD.  But for what it’s worth, Satan is called the “Great Dragon” in the Bible many times, and he takes the form of a talking serpent in the Garden of Eden scene.  Lucifer is regarded by occultists as a primary source of magic, even THE source of magic, and in A Song of Ice and Fire… it is said by some that DRAGONS are the cause of magic’s return to the world.  Or perhaps it’s the red comet, or maybe the red comet had something to do with the dragons waking so they can return magic to the world… the point is, dragons may be the source or a source of magic in A Song of Ice and Fire, and Lucifer is associated with dragons and with being the source of magic.  These are all Venus-related ideas.  In particular, Satan represents the Evenstar aspect of this figure, just as Azor Ahai, bringer of fire and dragons and black swords and the Long Night, seems to be an incarnation of the Evenstar, the herald of nightfall.

THE SWORD OF THE MORNING

And now on the other side, we have Dawn.  The “Sword of the Morning.”  I mentioned that Lucifer also means “son of the morning,” which sounds a damn lot like “sword of the morning.”  The son of the morning (Venus) brings dawn as in sunrise, and the Sword of the Morning brings Dawn the sword.  To top it off, Dawn is rather famous for its status as a star-sword.  The sword of the morning carries star of dawn – it’s really laid on pretty thick here.

It’s important to note that we are talking about a star that fell from heaven, just as all Venus-related deities descend from heaven to bring the fire of the gods… which in this case was a meteor to make swords with.  This is another confirmation of something I’ve said many times: the ‘fire of the god’s in our story is represented by the moon meteors and the swords and magic they gave birth to.  The Grey King was said to have stolen the fire of the gods from the Storm God’s thunderbolt and the Sea Dragon, and I believe that the fire these stories are referring to is the moon meteors, their magic, and the swords people made from them.  And by the way, yes, I believe this might indicate that the Ironborn have some connection to Azor Ahai’s contact with Westeros.

To sum up, both Lightbringer as a concept and the moon meteors and comet in particular represent the fire of the gods, and Lightbringer the sword is, according to me, made from comet-fertilized moon meteors.  Lightbringer is named after the Morningstar, and Morningstar deities are notorious for bringing the fire of the gods to earth.

You can see how this all fits together, right?

I must say, many people have noticed the correlations between Dawn and the Morningstar mythology – it’s laid on pretty thick, as I said – and as a result, have come to believe that Dawn is Lightbringer.  According to my thinking, Dawn is one half of a pair of “Lightbringer swords.”  I would say that it is likely to be the sword which brought the dawn and ended the Long Night – I mean it’s right there in the name, right? – but I do not think that it is the sword that Azor Ahai made with blood magic in Asshai or wherever.  So I would say that it’s a Lightbringer sword, but probably not the Lightbringer sword, as far as my theorizing goes.

One intriguing possibility is that Dawn and this hypothetical black sword of Azor Ahai represent the same ancient technology, but with some key difference.  Perhaps Azor Ahai’s sword was made with blood magic, while Dawn was not.  I think this idea makes a certain amount of sense, as I am pretty certain that Martin is showing us that blood magic is simply evil.

A variation of this idea is the possibility that the two swords were made from two different types of meteors.  Dawn is a white sword supposedly made from a pale stone, and the meteor the Bloodstone Emperor worshipped was said to be black.  These stories are impossibly old, so grain of salt and all that, but it would seem we have a accounts of two different kinds of meteors.  If I am right that greasy black stone has something to do with the moon meteors, that would corroborate the existence of black meteors.  Dawn on the other hand is the sword we actually have to examine, and it is distinctly white, which would seem to corroborate the existence of at least one white meteorite.  Like I said before, either we found a way to turn black meteor swords into white meteor swords, or we had two kinds of meteors and two kinds of meteor swords.

Any of these possibilities would be a legit interpretation of the Morningstar / Evenstar dichotomy, but I really think the one that makes the most sense that somehow the same catastrophic event gave us the material to make two kinds of swords, just as one star gives us both Morningstar and Evenstar.  Despite the fact that the name Lightbringer means Morningstar, all of the symbolism we’ve examined pertaining to Azor Ahai and his sword seems to shout “Evenstar,” herald of nightfall, etc., while everything about Dawn says “Morningstar,” “herald of the day,” and so on.

One other thing about Dawn to consider is its symbolic link to things which relate to ice and to the moon.  For example, the bones of the Others are described pale and shiny like milkglass, while Dawn is of course described as “pale as milkglass, and alive with light.”   That’s a whole ‘nother tangent which I will explore fully in a future podcast, but it lends credence to the idea proposed by myself and others such as my friend Voice of the First Men, which is that the big, conspicuously white sword might have been originally called “Ice,” that it might have been the original sword of House Stark and the King of Winter.  This doesn’t preclude Dawn having a meteoric origin, either – comets carry ice, and Dawn really need not be made of ice to be associated with icy magic.  The fiery dragon people have black swords… might not the King of Winter look good wielding a white sword called Ice?  It makes a certain amount of sense.

Whatever the case, if Dawn does have some connection to the North, then it is almost certainly not the sword that came from the east and was associated with Azor Ahai.  I like the dichotomy this sets up – a white icy swords that burns, and a black fiery sword made of frozen metal and perhaps a bit of frozen fire, meaning dragon glass.  North vs. South.  Ice vs Fire, but burning ice and frozen fire.  Call me a lover of symmetry, but it makes a lot of sense to me, and it might be what Martin is building up to by constantly describing ice as having burning properties and making such a big deal out of the idea of “frozen fire.”  It’s much more interesting than portraying ice vs. fire as just hot vs. cold.  I think each side of the ice and fire split has frozen and burning qualities, and each seems have have light and shadow aspects as well.

Yet another version of the idea that Dawn and the black sword which I believe Azor Ahai possessed represent the same technology with some important difference is the idea that both swords originally came from the east, and represent the same technology.  This based primarily on the vision Daenerys sees in A Game of Thrones which seems to show the gemstone emperors of the Great Empire of the Dawn, the vanished high civilization of legend from the Far East whom I believe were the common ancestor of both Valyria and House Dayne, and probably a few others.  Here’s the quote, and this is from her “wake the dragon” dream she has while giving birth to dead lizard baby Rhaego:

“Ghosts lined the hallway, dressed in the faded raiment of kings.  In their hands were swords of pale fire. They had hair of silver and hair of gold and hair of platinum white and their eyes were Opal and Amethyst, Tourmaline and Jade. “Faster,” they cried. “Faster, faster!”

  She raised her feet, melting the stone wherever she touched.

  “Faster!” The ghosts cried as one, and she screamed and threw herself forward.”

  A great knife of pain ripped down her back and she felt her skin tear open, and smelled the stench of burning blood, and saw the shadow of wings.

  And Daenerys Targaryen flew.

  “Wake the dragon.”

These kingly ghosts rooting for Daenerys to wake her inner dragon have gemstones for eyes, and those gemstones – opal, amethyst, tourmaline, and jade – just so happen to match 4 of the 8 listed “gemstone emperors” of the Great Empire of the Dawn.  They all have silver-gold hair that matches the description of Valyrian hair, but most notable is the one with eyes of amethyst.  This person with purple eyes and silver-gold hair would seem to be a Valyrian, but the Great Empire of the Dawn is remembered as having collapsed during the Long Night, while Valyria arose after the Long Night.  There’s a lot more to theory that this vanished Great Empire was the predecessor to Valyria in terms of magical and genetic lineage, and we will be exploring that theory in detail in our upcoming collaboration with History of Westeros.  But setting aside the question of whether these Valyrian looking kingly ghosts were just Dany’s ancestors from Valyria or a vanished fore-runner of Valyria, the point is – they hold swords of pale fire.

Even according the myth which paints Azor Ahai as a hero, Lightbringer burns with red fire, and we have seen ample to evidence to suggest the metal itself was black.  These ancestors of Dany, whom I believe lived before the Long Night, hold swords of pale flame.  The description of the flame could be nothing, but I think it might indicate a commonality with Dawn, the pale sword which glows a bit.  If Dawn were to take fire, I think “pale flame” or “white fire” would make a lot of sense.  Perhaps these swords of pale fire represent the original flaming sword technology, and perhaps Dawn is like the one remaining vintage model in the world.  The Bloodstone Emperor, whom I believe to be Azor Ahai, seems to have completely defiled the magic and knowledge of the GEotD, so perhaps his black sword is basically the corrupted version of Lightbringer tech, while Dawn is the original version.  This idea has appeal because it might give us a way to have a flaming sword without human sacrifice, and wouldn’t that be nice.

Again, we’ll go into more detail on this idea in the future, but for now I just wanted to mention it as a possibility relating to the “two lightbringer swords” theory.

Another note on Dawn and House Dayne, and this is something I mentioned our appearance on History of Westeros’s House Dayne Part 2 episode:  although House Dayne is famous for producing the white knights of virtuous repute who are deemed worthy of the title “Sword of the Morning” and of carrying Dawn, it also produces the opposite sort of character.  We have three known Swords of the Morning – Arthur Dayne, Davos Dayne who married Nymeria, and Ulrick Dayne, known only as a remarkable swordsman – but then we have these other rotten fellows which seem drawn up as polar opposites to the white knights.  Ser Gerold Dayne, known as Darkstar, who is willing to kill little children to start wars in which thousands of people will die… quite possibly for the simple reason that he is bored and suffering from a neglected ego.  We have Vorian Dayne, who was actually called “The Sword of the Evening.”  He was the Lord of Starfall when Nymeria landed, and he opposed her, lost, and was sent to the Wall.  Darkstar and the Sword of the Evening Dayne – these two stand in direct contrast to the Sword of the Morning archetype, and they are a good match for what we think about Azor Ahai, darkener of stars and bringer of the swords of nightfall.  We’ve also got a fellow named Ser Davos Dayne who sacked and burned Oldtown.  He’s not as clearly associated with darkness, but Oldtown is the city which represents the light of knowledge, and has a white lighthouse as its defining feature.  Burning it is pretty metaphorically significant – snuffing out the light, if you will.

In other words… the same house gives us both Morningstars and Evenstars, both bright stars and dark ones.  It’s oh so very Venus.

One final point on the Sword of the Morning: it’s also a constellation – Orion, I’m almost certain – and here I get sneak attack you with the first zodiac patron mini-essay!  Haha! All thanks to Imriel of Heavenly House Orion, earthly avatar of the Sword of the Morning, whose patronage and timely choice of Orion has brought this next bit to you.   For starters, there’s a notable scene in A Storm of Swords where the Sword of the Morning constellation acts kind of like the Morningstar:

Ghost was gone when the wildlings led their horses from the cave. Did he understand about Castle Black? Jon took a breath of the crisp morning air and allowed himself to hope. The eastern sky was pink near the horizon and pale grey higher up. The Sword of the Morning still hung in the south, the bright white star in its hilt blazing like a diamond in the dawn, but the blacks and greys of the darkling forest were turning once again to greens and golds, reds and russets. And above the soldier pines and oaks and ash and sentinels stood the Wall, the ice pale and glimmering beneath the dust and dirt that pocked its surface.

It seems like the Sword of the Morning is the last constellation visible in the southern sky, and this is indeed indicative of Orion, which is visible in the southern sky just before dawn when it first appears in the fall (and that’s when Orion is viewed from the northern hemisphere, because in the southern hemisphere it look upside down).  Orion lies on the celestial equator, so it will always be near the horizon, much like Venus.  Because of this fact, the Greek legend about Orion had him as the lover of the Goddess of the Dawn, Eos.  You’ll note that “Eos” is  part of third “Eosphorus,” which is the Greek word for Morningstar.

The line in this passage about ‘the bright white star in its hilt blazing like a diamond in the dawn’ reminds us quite a lot of Venus as the Morningstar, the bright white star which blazes in the dawn sky.  This makes a lot of sense with all the Venus imagery that has been woven into the Sword of the Morning ideas, such as the fact that the ‘Sword of the Morning’ Dayne carries a star sword called Dawn.  This passage with the constellation of the same name acting like and being described like the Morningstar simply adds to this line of symbolism.

Although I am positing that George’s Sword of the Morning constellation is Orion, it also seems that some bits of Orion mythology have been used in the fashioning of Azor Ahai, Sword of the Evening.   As we just discussed, Azor Ahai as the Sword of the Evening and the Last Hero as the sword of the Morning are like two opposite sides of the same coin, and House Dayne in particular can also give us darkstar and evening sword Daynes.  For example, the myth of Orion is one of a great hunter and subduer of beasts.  He was a warrior who knew no fear or respect, and in this he has to remind us a bit of both the Night’s King, supposedly a “warrior who knew no fear,’ and of Azor Ahai, who challenged the gods.

The Last Hero, too, was certainly a brave warrior, setting off into the cold dead lands to try to save mankind, persevering even when his twelve companions had perished.

Orion is a legendary blacksmith… and if you think about, that’s basically what Azor Ahai is: an extremely famous blacksmith.

Sky maps of Orion usually depict him as a hunter facing off against Taurus, the bull, which certainly reminds us of the ‘Mithras slaying the bull’ ideas Martin has translated in the story as Azor Ahai slaying the moon with the Lightbringer comet.

Returning to Orion’s Last Hero / Sword of the Morning correlations, we find that seemingly invincible Orion was finally brought low by a scorpion’s poisonous sting in one tale.  He was stung on his ankle in a somewhat Achilles-like incident, and the scorpion eventually became the zodiacal constellation Scorpio.  This reminds us of the Sword of the Morning, Arthur Dayne, who perished in Dorne, a land infested with and associated with scorpions.  If Howland Reed perhaps finished Arthur with a poisonous weapon of some kind, we may have a further correlation between poisoned Orion and the Sword of the Morning.  There’s an additional ramification to the idea of Orion being felled by a scorpion which correlates to Arthur’s death at the Tower of Joy, but I will have to save that for the Scorpio zodiac essay lest I give away the good Scorpio stuff, which is one of the best ones.  hint hint  One of the reasons why the Greeks imagined Scorpio and Orion to be enemies is the fact that they appear on opposite sides of the celestial equator, and therefore never appear in the sky at the same time.  The story goes that Scorpio and Orion were placed on opposite sides because they are such bitter rivals.  That’s a pretty cool bit of myth based on astronomy.

Astronomers group several constellations together with Orion and call them the Orion family of constellations, and those are Lepus (the hare), monoceros (the unicorn), and more interestingly, Canis Minor and Major, the little and big dog.  You’ll recall that the Last Hero set out with a dog and horse along with his twelve companions, and Orion has himself two dogs and unicorn-horse.  Coincidence perhaps, but taken with everything else, we can see that Orion is a nice fit for the Sword of the Morning constellation.

So, Orion is the Sword of the Morning, and the the Sword of the Morning is probably the Last Hero, in some sense.  The Last Hero had twelve valiant companions who died, likely the first rangers of the Night’s Watch, so does Orion have twelve companions, perhaps that died nobly?

Well yes, he does: as I mentioned, Orion is just below the path of the ecliptic, making it oh-so-very close to being a member of the zodiac.  The thing about the constellations of the zodiac is this: with the exception of Libra, they are all people or animals who died nobly and were rewarded by being placed in the sky as one of the twelve constellations of the zodiac.  They are twelve dead heroes, in other words.  And that is one part of how the Sword of the Morning and Orion has been roped into the zodiac ideas in ASOIAF, with the rest of that explanation coming when I introduce the general concept behind the zodiac in A Song of Ice and Fire.

Saving the best link between Orion and Morningstar mythology for last, I’d like to tell you about something called Venus’s mirror. This is an asterism – that’s a small grouping of stars within a constellation – inside the constellation of Orion. It’s a diamond-shaped mirror with a handle made up of Orion’s belt stars as the top of the diamond and Orion’s sword as the handle of the mirror. In other words, there is already a direct correlation between Orion’s sword and Venus, one which Martin surely discovered with a cry of ‘Eureka!’ You can really see why Orion was a natural fit as the Sword of the Morning. The most important takeaway from all of this is that the Venus mythology is the cradle from which George birthed the ideas of Lightbringer, Dawn, the Sword of the Morning.

That about does it for Orion and the Sword of the Morning.   Thanks again to Ser Imriel for choosing Orion, may you represent his heavenly light justly, and may you always hold divine Venus’s mirror with a steady hand.

So we’ve talked about Azor Ahai, Lightbringer, and the comet; we’ve talked about House Dayne and Dawn; now, let’s talk about the Night’s Watch.  That’s a pretty easy transition to make, because the Night’s Watch leads right back to both House Dayne and Azor Ahai, wouldn’t you know it.

THE NIGHT’S WATCH

The Night’s Watch vows contain a clear reference to Venus when they say that they are “the light that brings the dawn.”  As we’ve seen, words which translate to Morningstar also translate to “light-bringer” and “dawn-bringer,” and Venus is indeed the herald of the dawn, the bright star which brings the dawn.  The Night’s Watch is also a sword in the darkness, and we’ve seen that in George’s world, the Morningstar ideas have been grafted on to swords in a major way.  A sword in the darkness that brings the dawn – are we talking about the Night’s Watch here or Lightbringer?  It could just as easily be a description of the Sword of the Morning and the Dawn.  The fact that they all draw from Venus mythology is no coincidence – on the contrary, it tells us that all of these things are connected:  Dawn, Lightbringer, the Night’s Watch, and the Last Hero’s blade of dragonsteel.

They kind of have to be connected, don’t they?  If Dawn is the sword that brings the morning, it had to have been used by the Last Hero, right?  The thing is, we are missing huge pieces of the puzzle.  For example, if Dawn is Lightbringer, either THE Lightbringer or one of a pair, how did Azor Ahai and his sword from the east get wrapped up in Westeros history?

As we’ll discuss in that joint podcast with history of westeros on the great empire of the dawn, there are two important things which seem to indicate the migration of dragonlords from the far east to southern Westeros in the Dawn Age, and those would be the occasionally purple-eyed and silver-haired members of House Dayne and the fused stone fortress at Oldtown that serves as the base of the Hightower which we learn about in The World of Ice and Fire.  In other words, I definitely believe that there is a connection between east and Westeros which has something to do with Azor Ahai, Lightbringer, and House Dayne.  But there are a lot of gaps in the story, as I said – was this an invasion of some kind, or a migration, or both?  What happened, and what does it have to do with the Long Night?  The place in Oldtown where the fused stone fortress stands is called Battle Isle – was there a historic battle here, as the Wordbook suggests?  Did we have some kind of epic magic-sword fight?  Was the this the opening salvo of the War for the Dawn?  How did the action eventually get up north?

If Dawn the sword is connected to the North, perhaps the original Ice… well what’s the deal with that?  And why does George introduce us to the King of Winter archetype in the form of Ned with the noticeably smoke-dark dragon-forged sword?  The Starks, whose stone kings rule the crypts with hellhound guardians at their side, seem like more of Evenstar / lord of the afterlife figures to me, so it makes sense for them to have a black sword, “Black Ice” as it were. The Starks are also somewhat sneakily associated with fire and hell, as I mentioned in the Tyrion Targaryen episode.  Whatever the mysterious link is between ice and fire is involving Azor Ahai and the Last Hero, it no doubt runs through Winterfell and House Stark, and we still have some deep mysteries to uncover there.

The children of the forest, too, might be involved in all of this, as the story of the Last Hero talks about him being protected and rescued by the children of the forest, so again, there are a lot of pieces of the puzzle missing.  We still don’t know who built the Wall, when it was built, or why, and surely that has something to do with all of this.  We probably won’t be able to really make a good solid dedicated guess at the original events of the Long Night and the War for the Dawn until the books are finished and we can see how the conclusion parallels what we have reconstructed of the Dawn Age / Long Night events.

One caveat: I do think we can get closer to the truth than we are now, and we will definitely be working on that in future podcasts.  The upcoming pod with History of Westeros will attempt to highlight the evidence for migration by sea and by dragon from the Far East to Westeros in the Dawn Age, and as we pivot to the topics of weirwoods, greenseers, and the Others, we’ll try to pin down the Last Hero / frozen North side of things.

Now, to wrap this up, let’s dig a little deeper into just exactly why Lucifer, the light-bringer of man, was remembered as a bad guy by the Christian religion.

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A TALE OF TWO DEITIES

Everyone knows the Garden of Eden story: Adam and Eve are in a state of paradise, without knowledge of good or evil.  They literally cannot choose evil – they don’t even realize it exists.  God gives them only one commandment, saying ‘whatever you do, don’t eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.’  Along comes the snake, our buddy Lucifer in this interpretation, and convinces them to eat of the fruit, saying they can become like gods – that is, having the knowledge of good and evil, also known as ‘free will.’  They eat and become aware of right and wrong, and are ashamed.  God kicks them out of paradise, and life gets much harder for mankind thereafter.  The Garden of Eden is even guarded against reentry by an angel with a flaming sword!

Flaming swords aside though, this is a pretty weird story, if you think about it .  Paradise is depicted as an animal-like, automaton state.  The Jehovah God of Genesis wants to keep man in this state of blissful ignorance, while Lucifer, the “light-bringer,” wants to bring us the knowledge of higher consciousness.  So who’s the good guy here, exactly?

George has said that he drew influence from (among a million other things) the Gnostic Cathars of medieval France, and the Gnostics have an interesting interpretation of the Garden of Eden story: Jehovah is an evil demon (a demiurge) who wants to keep man as unthinking worshippers of himself, and the snake is the one trying to help mankind, encouraging him to eat the fruit out of the gods and expand his consciousness – bringing the light of heavenly knowledge.  This ability to conceive of abstract concepts like morality is one of the defining elements of human consciousness, one of the main things that separates us from our ancestors who were stuck on using the same stone tools for over a million years with little progress.  Mankind is surely still leaning to wrestle with this great responsibility that comes with the gift of consciousness, but in order to have any hope of progressing to the next level, we must do just that – we must master ourselves.  This cannot happen if we were to remain in an animal-like state of awareness.  ‘Ignorance is bliss,’ perhaps, but free will is a necessary step on the road to progress, and Lucifer is remembered for bringing us the light of free will.  The gnostics view Jehovah, therefore, as a demon, a ‘demiurge.’

In the couple of centuries following the emergence of Christianty, there were many different versions and sects, some differing greatly from one another. The original Gnostics were one such, and they considered themselves Christians. After 300AD, the Catholic Church began to crystallize something resembling the modern  Bible and doctrine of Christianity beginning with the council of Nicaea in 325AD, and taking final shape by 397AD at the council of Carthage, and the Gnostics and other sects were deemed heretics.  By 600AD, lucifer, the bringing of light and free will, was a bad guy.

If you are a group of religious leaders that wish to turn a religion towards authoritarianism, control by fear and shame, moral puritanism, and suppression of the divine feminine spirit, then this free will stuff isn’t such a good thing.   This could explain why a mythological figure like that of Lucifer may have been viewed as “the bad guy” by those who wanted to take Christianity in that more authoritarian and patriarchal direction.  One of the things Lucifer is typically associated with is androgyny, or at least balance between the masculine and em feminine.

In the Old Testament, we get another great example of a potential deity confusion. There are actually two very different Canaanite (Phoenician) deities who have been mixed up together and remembered as the same guy.  Originally, we had El, or Elohim, who is more of a standard “Father God” deity – the “creator of creatures,” “father of the gods,” “King,” “God eternal,” “father of wisdom,” etc.  El is basically the oldest Caananite deity anyone knows of, the original bull deity and father of Ba’al, who’s actually the most famous of all bull-gods.

A quick aside: Ba’al is perhaps the original resurrected deity tied to the cycle of the seasons, who are sometimes called Corn Kings because their death is associated with the harvest season, and their resurrection is associated with the return of spring.  We will return to take a closer look at Ba’al and Corn Kings when we get to the section about Garth the Green, but I will mention that George makes a clear reference to Jon Snow as a Corn King in A Dance with Dragons, and this has been caught by many attentive readers familiar with the Corn King mythological archetype:

Mormont’s raven muttered across the room. “Corn, ” the bird said, and, “King, ” and, “Snow, Jon Snow, Jon Snow.” That was queer. The bird had never said his full name before, as best Jon could recall.

Many Corn King figures are also Morningstar figures, such as Tammuz and Osiris, and resurrection always features prominently in both.  Fitting then, that the father of sacrificed and resurrected Ba’al is El, the high father god who is equated with the sun, just as the father of Jesus the Morningstar is a solar god.

So that’s El – he’s the sun god and the all-father.

Then we have this other fellow named Jehovah or Yaweh, who was originally the Canaanite storm god, similar to the god Yam.  Typical of a storm god, Yaweh is the jealous and angry god, the guy who killed everyone on earth who wouldn’t obey him with a flood.  He’s the guy that demanded Abraham be willing to sacrifice his own son to “please God,” and the guy who didn’t want us to posses the knowledge of good and evil.  Storm gods are always seen as wrathful because they are really just a personification of the forces of the storm, which are turbulent, merciless, and deadly.

Worship of Jehovah / Yaweh, which had been around for a millennia or more already as part of a pantheon of Caanaanite deities, began to replace worship of El throughout Canaan between 1000BCE – 600 BCE, as his followers began to asset his primacy over El, Ba’al, Asherah, and other Caananite deities.  The followers of Yaweh became increasingly intolerant of the existence of other deities, eventually asserting that no other gods existed at all, attributing all divine attributes of the other gods to Yaweh.  This was a conversion from decentralized pantheism to hierarchical monotheism, which is quite significant as these are basically opposing worldview.  At least, we can say that monotheism and hierarchy or authoritarianism have no tolerance for pantheism and decentralized authority.  A clash was inevitable, and the results did a lot to shape the world going forward.

Now, because the Old Testament is composed of various books that were written hundreds and even thousands of years apart, Yaweh and El have been written and interpreted as being the same god, even though they were originally very different gods who had very different characteristics.  Modern Christians use Yaweh and El and their variations interchangeably as simply being different names for god, but if you go through the Old Testament and separate out the references to El and Yaweh, you begin to the two personalities emerge.  Sometimes the Christian God is portrayed as loving and merciful, the god who takes care even the tiniest birds and insects, as Jesus points out, and sometimes he is portrayed as a wrathful and terrible god whose judgement is awesome to behold.  He’s not schizophrenic, he’s two different people zipped up into one.

This is what happens with religion and mythology over time. ‘Mythology’ is really just very old religion – there’s essentially no difference.  Stories of gods and heroes are symbols crafted by man, and then later re-crafted and shaped, and sometimes twisted outright to serve an agenda of a given group of people.  The same symbol can be used by people committing great acts of evil and by people committing great acts of love, even.  At times, these stories are passed down by people who have forgotten the original meaning – this is actually very common, and we’ve got a lot of it going on in A Song of Ice and Fire in my moon disaster theory is at all close to the truth.  As we consider the mythology of Planetos, we must consider these phenomena and how legends like that of Azor Ahai or the Night’s King may have been altered over time, either intentionally or accidentally.  Intentionally is far more interesting, so we’ll keep an eye on that one.  Personally, I think the Church of Starry Wisdom created R’hllorism as a PR campaign for their lord of darkness, Azor Ahai a.k.a. the Bloodstone Emperor, but I’ll save that bit of Ice and Fire conspiracy theory for another time.

Kidding aside, history is written by the victors, and so is theology.  If the gnostic view of the Bible has won out… well, the world would be a different place.  All of this is interesting to ponder on its own, but what I am really trying to do here with his little foray into the history of the Bible and Canaanite deities is to provide a bit of context in which to view the Azor Ahai myth and the other myths of heroes and villains in A Song of Ice and Fire.  The question of who is the hero and who is the villain is a question people have been asking about gods and heroes for eons, and it’s a damn good question to ask.  Under no circumstances should we simply accept that Night’s King was a villain and Azor Ahai a hero without question.

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The Morality of A Song of Ice and Fire

I’d also like to say something about the idea of evil and good in A Song of Ice and Fire, lest I give the wrong impression here.  It’s well known that Martin has a fondness and a skill for creating morally grey characters who, like real people, have the capacity to do right or wrong, and who find themselves in situations where right and wrong become very difficult to see clearly.  This is good storytelling, and George talks about this idea openly, as well as his tendency to eschew the Sauron-esque “dark lords” which are typical of fantasy.  However, some people have gone too far with this and come away with he impression that there is no right and wrong in A Song of Ice and Fire.  I would strongly disagree with that sentiment.  People themselves are usually a shade of grey, but right and wrong definitely do exist as abstract concepts.  The reason people are thought of as “grey” is because they are a mix of black and white, of good and evil.  No good and evil, and everybody is like fuchsia or turquoise or something.  You get the idea.

When we consider whether someone like Azor Ahai is a “villain” or a “hero,” we speak not of their entire personality and character, but of their defining actions.  The heroes of legend are created around important deeds which echo out into history.  Someone who builds something great, wins a great war, negotiates a great treaty, or establishes a House, tribe, or nation.  Over time, many details of the story turn from truth to fiction, but at the center of it will be that one, momentous deed.  When we ask whether or not Azor Ahai was a villain, we are asking what he defining action was.  Whoever it was that brought down the moon is a “villain” as much anyone can be.  We can talk about whether the dedd was done intentionally, through hubris, or accidentally through playing around with the wrong magic, but bottom line, they fucked up.  As we’ve discussed, we remain open to a redemption arc, carried out by Azor Ahai the villain himself or perhaps his son who may be the Last Hero, and in this case we’d have a figure who was first villain and then hero.

The point I am making is this: the first deed was in fact evil and villainous, and whatever was done to restore the sun to the sky must be regarded as heroic.

The story of or Ahai presents us with a moral conundrum: in order to save the world, Azor Ahai had to do something horrible.  It’s the height of Machiavellian logic – it’s the same logic which seeks to justify the red wedding because it ended the war, and thus ultimately may have saved  lives in sum total.  The same logic which says Daenerys was justified in sacrificing Mirri Maz Dur to work blood magic.  Martin is asking us to choose what to believe.  Are we machiavellians?  Can the abomination of blood magic and human sacrifice be justified it is used to “save the world?”

I’ve always been one to reject Machiavellian logic, and in general, I tend to believe in process-oriented thinking over results-oriented thinking.  The right process will tend to yield the right results – that’s the idea.  It’s always been very hard for me to accept that Martin is telling a story about how sometimes you just have to use a bit of human sacrifice to save the day.  I could be wrong about this, admittedly, but that’s always been my take.

But guess what!  I think the mythical astronomy has something to say on the matter.  We see that at the moment Azor Ahai stabs Nissa Nissa, the moon cracks.  The mythical astronomy shows us that the cracking moon is what lead to the Long Night – yet in the Azor Ahai tale, the Long Night has already fallen, which is why he has to sacrifice Nissa Nissa to make Lightbringer in the first place.  In other words, the mythical astronomy indicates that this deed which caused the moon to crack was in fact the deed that caused the Long Night.  That scenario makes Azor’s Ahai’s act of human sacrifice and blood magic an evil deed of great magnitude, and doesn’t that make more sense?  The story of the Bloodstone Emperor lines up with this – he kills his sister, the Amethyst Empress, in what was surely an act of dark magic – a deed was so foul that it was called “the Blood Betrayal” and was remembered as having caused the Long Night.

There’s an oft-quoted passage from A Game of Thrones where Syria Forel is telling Arya the story of how he became the first sword of Bravos.  The Sealord, who kept a menagerie of exotic animals, is interviewing swordsman for the newly vacated post of First Sword.  In his lap is an ordinary tomcat, but the sealed has apparently been telling all the potential First Swords that the cat was a rare beast “from an island beyond the sunrise.”  Syria was the only one to say “that’s just an ordinary tomcat,” and was thus named the first sword.  Syria punctuates the lesson to Arya by explaining that the others saw what they expected, and not what was actually there.

What I think we have with the Azor Ahai fable, on a surface level at least, is a story of a horrific act of human sacrifice and blood magic being sold to us as an act of heroism and valor.  It’s a test, basically, to see if we are suckers for extreme machiavellian thinking.  I’d go out on a limb for the rejection of machiavellian thinking anyway, but I am glad that the mythical astronomy supports this conclusion as well.

As for the idea of Nissa Nissa as a heroic but tragic figure, it is still there, but we have to look to a deeper layer of meaning – that’s the interpretation of the Lightbringer story as an act of procreation which we’ve talked about many times.  When a woman goes through pregnancy and risks her own life to bring another human being into the world, it is one of the greatest acts of love and sacrifice in all of human existence. This was even more true before the advent of modern medicine, and George draws attention to this fact with many examples of women who die in childbirth in the story.

To me, it makes a lot more sense to match the concept of a brave woman’s sacrifice with the act of procreation, of creating life, than to making swords with blood magic.  This is another reason why I favor the scenario where the Last Hero is the son of Azor Ahai and Nissa Nissa.   Azor Ahai may have killed her to work blood magic and make his evil sword, but she must have given birth at some point before she died, and this son, also representative of the concept of “Lightbringer,” would be the one to actually bring the dawn as the Sword of the Morning and the Last Hero.

If you think about it, our probable three heads of the dragon all have terrible fathers: Daenerys has mad King Aerys, Tyrion probably has Mad King Aerys as a biological father and Tywin as his father in a functional sense, and Jon has Rhaegar, who pretty much started a war by running off with Lyanna.  Brandon gets blame to, as does Aerys; and there are redeeming qualities to Rhaegar… but bottom line, he started a war with politically reckless behavior.  Not only that, he was well aware of his father’s madness and cruelty, and was basically dragging his heels on doing something about it… until it was too late.  Rhaegar, as the abductor of moon maidens and the black dragon, is an strong Azor Ahai / Bloodstone Emperor figure, and was indeed a major part of starting the war.  Jon’s real father was of course Ned, because Ned raised him, but the point here is that the terrible fathers of these three heads of the dragon may parallel the idea that the Last Hero had a terrible father known as Azor Ahai, bringer of the Long Night.

I think one of the other lessons here concerns the fire or knowledge of the gods, so to speak, and the knowledge of the gods in this case really means any kind of power.  The knowledge of the gods can be obtained by man, but it has to be earned, slowly, and treated with respect.  It is a dual edged sword which can also be quite deadly when in the hands those who do not treat it with respect, who have not slowly built up knowledge and ability.  Stealing it, as the Bloodstone Emperor did – that’s definitely a recipe for disaster.

Even those who have “earned it,” so to speak,” must always be held account able by themselves and others, and must maintain the high level of respect and mindfulness at all times, or else it can be disaster.  Think of technology in this sense – bioengineering can produce super-viruses.  Nuclear power can be nuclear meltdowns or even nuclear weapons.  I mean, take one of the first human inventions, actual fire – a fairly good stand in for the fire of the gods if there ever was one.  Fire can cook and keep warm and bring life, and it can also burn and kill on a tremendous scale if vigilance slips even a little bit.  That’s really what I think George is telling us about power, and that’s more or less what I take from the Garden of Eden story.  The awareness of god and evil may be a burden of consciousness, but it’s one we have to accept and master in order to keep evolving.

This line from A Dance with Dragons seems relevant:

He turned back to the red priestess. Jon could feel her warmth. She has power . The thought came unbidden, seizing him with iron teeth, but this was not a woman he cared to be indebted to, not even for his little sister. “Dalla told me something once. Val’s sister, Mance Rayder’s wife. She said that sorcery was a sword without a hilt. There is no safe way to grasp it.”

“A wise woman.” Melisandre rose, her red robes stirring in the wind. “A sword without a hilt is still a sword, though, and a sword is a fine thing to have when foes are all about.

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Astronomy as Mythology – the Book of Revelation

Before we get out of here, I’d like to quote a couple of verses from the Biblical book of Revelation.  I’m grabbing verses from several chapters somewhat out of context; the point is not to follow the narrative of the apostle John’s vision, but rather to look at some of these verses as metaphors for astronomy-related disasters and to illustrate the myth-makers have been working with these elements in conjunction for quite some time now.  I definitely, definitely think George was drawing on some of the ideas in these verses, as they intersect with his “comet, dragons, and flamings swords” motifs that he already had going.  Take a look and see how these verses read, with what we have learned about mythology and astronomy in mind…  (A huge hat-tip and thank you to pal Westeros.org forum user and Equilibrium.)

The Biblical Book of Revelation

Ch. 1 14The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. 15His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. 16In his right hand he held seven stars, and coming out of his mouth was a sharp, double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance.

Ch. 2 26The one who is victorious and keeps My works to the end: I will give him authority over the nations– 27and he will shepherd them with an iron scepter; he will shatter them like pottery — just as I have received this from My Father. 28I will also give him the morning star.

Ch. 6 ¹²Then I saw Him open the sixth seal. A violent earthquake occurred; the sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair; the entire moon became like blood; ¹³the stars of heaven fell to the earth as a fig tree drops its unripe figs when shaken by a high wind; ¹⁴the sky separated like a scroll being rolled up; and every mountain and island was moved from its place.

Ch. 8 ⁵The angel took the incense burner, filled it with fire from the altar, and hurled it to the earth; there were rumblings of thunder, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake. ⁶And the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared to blow them. ⁷The first angel blew his trumpet, and hail and fire, mixed with blood, were hurled to the earth. So a third of the earth was burned up, a third of the trees were burned up, and all the green grass was burned up. ⁹a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed. ¹⁰The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from heaven. It fell on a third of the rivers and springs of water. ¹¹The name of the star is Wormwood, and a third of the waters became wormwood. So, many of the people died from the waters, because they had been made bitter. ¹²The fourth angel blew his trumpet, and a third of the sun was struck, a third of the moon, and a third of the stars, so that a third of them were darkened. A third of the day was without light, and the night as well.

Ch. 9 ¹The fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from heaven to earth. The key to the shaft of the abyss was given to him. ²He opened the shaft of the abyss, and smoke came up out of the shaft like smoke from a great furnace so that the sun and the air were darkened by the smoke from the shaft.

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As you can see, much of Revelation could serve as Long Night meteor-impact mythology.  Now I am not claiming that Revelations is actually referring to a specific disaster in Earth’s history, particularly because Revelations is supposedly a vision of the future.  Let us draw this conclusion instead: when ancient peoples imagined and wrote about the most terrible divine apocalypse event that might ever befall the earth, they could only describe it terms of celestial catastrophe and astronomical calamity.

Whether you go forwards or backwards in time, the idea of things called “gods” which live in the heavens or the celestial realm has always been based on the luminous bodies which streak across the sky in a cosmic dance of interlocking orbits and cycles.  When something appears to fall from heaven, as Venus does, or actually falls from heaven, as meteors do, you better believe that ancient man interpreted it as an act of the gods.  When ancient man spoke of fearing the gods, they spoke of the same fear that one has for floods, fires, earthquakes, or god forbid, meteor strikes.  There’s not much you can do with earthquakes, but the rest – fire, flood tides, and meteorites – contain power that can be harnessed by man, but this power must always be feared, lest it turn to destruction.  Thus we can see that the personalities of many or even most ancient gods and goddesses are actually artistic and mystical personifications of thee forces of nature and the universe, and that is what Mythical Astronomy is all about.

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If you’re a fan of the HBO show, be sure to check out History of Westeros end of season book-to-show Q&A episode, where I was grateful to appear as guest.