Post by Maester Sam on Dec 21, 2018 0:10:20 GMT
As to the defining a heart tree by being the heart of a castle, that honestly makes the most sense. But when Jon takes his vow, Mormont tells him where to find a heart tree, which is in that grove north of the wall. No castle there, so that definition doesn't work. Unless there once was some type of structure at that spot which has been long destroyed, or Mormont just misspoke to call those weirwoods a heart tree.
You have a point. If those weirwoods are called heart trees, then it can't refer to the heart of a castle. Similarly at High Heart, the heart trees stand without a castle.
I am not sure if that is really how it works, but the salmon returned to where it was born is exactly what comes to mind. Except Salmon do this near the end of their lives, to lay their eggs. That doesn't seem to be the impetus with the dragons. Unless we will find that Drogon laid a clutch of eggs in the Dothraki Sea and Balerion laid some eggs in Valyria. Perhaps I am taking the salmon idea too far?
This image truly made me laugh out loud!!
I wonder at what age dragons start laying eggs? I also wonder why the Targaryens didn't seem to keep track of which eggs came from which dragon (in other words, we never hear that Silverwing is the offspring of Vaghar, for example). I wonder why? It seems the dragons laid the eggs in a centralized place (at least most of the time), so it should be possible to determine who laid what egg, no?
Well, the wild dragons are interesting, for certain. Does this indicate that they were hatched on Dragonstone by the Targaryen's, but always resisted being claimed and ridden, therefore making them wild. Or were they laid and hatched in the wild? If that is the case, then I think that dragons can hatch on their own, under the correct circumstances. That is actually my gut feeling on all of this, but people messed with nature, tried to help or hurry the process, and some how think that it's up to them to hatch eggs now, instead of letting time and nature do it. It's not unlike a chicken egg. If left alone, a hen will brood the egg and it will hatch, but a human can also incubate the egg and hatch it without the brooding process.
Yeah, I wish we knew how old they are. If they were hatched while the Targaryen family was still small, there may simply have been no one to claim them. No rider can ride two dragons.
Maybe this is foreshadowing Viserion and Rhaegal, dragons that were hatched "in captivity" but when no rider claimed them they just made a lair and hunted for themselves.
I had always just assumed dragons can lay eggs and hatch them on their own - but I can't think of a single example of a dragon hatching without human involvement. If they could reproduce on their own, wouldn't we expect the wild dragons to lay eggs too that hatch into more wild dragons? Similarly in the days of Valyria, wouldn't we expect that occasionally a dragon would roam free (for example after its rider died) and lay eggs somewhere? The fact that only the Valyrians had dragons, and we had neither wild dragons nor dragons hatched by other peoples over a span of millennia, seems to suggest that some element of human (dragonrider) involvement may be needed for a successful hatching.
But maybe a mother dragon is needed too? I don't know that they would brood the eggs like a chicken (I think the volcano provides the warmth), but maybe their presence is necessary somehow? Baby dragons are extremely fragile right after hatching, so it would be a disaster if eggs hatched without a mother around to look after the young.
After the Dance, only Morning was left alive IIRC, and she was very young. Maybe the remaining eggs didn't hatch b/c there was no mother dragon around?
Daenerys, being the blood of the dragon, was able to fill in for a mother dragon and thus became the mother of dragons.