Post by Maester Sam on Sept 13, 2016 0:56:14 GMT
It isn't at all silly. The timelines may yet prove to be wrong, propagandized, or incomplete. You have much brilliant company, and people I greatly admire in SlyWren , LmL , Black Crow, and prestonjacobs among others who think I'm barking up the wrong tree.
My views have often been a bit too heretical for Heresy when it comes to the Long Night and the Others, and my trust in Old Nan may one day wind up making me look quite foolish. LOL
Lol. I do think she is right more often than not. It's not that I don't consider the timelines to be somewhat flexible, but I don't think there is any way that the Yi Ti emperors were visiting Westeros and building black stone structures after the First Men had already arrived. That would have to be in the records somewhere, if it had happened, and it isn't. Those structures are older than the FM, so unless the timelines are off by over 2,000 years, BSE wasn't involved. And if he never set foot in Westeros, he didn't cause the Long Night.
But that's ok, I can live with it. Lol. On to better explanations that at least roughly fit the timelines we are given!
I need to reread that chapter. I never got the impression that the Nightfort's weirwood was particularly small. And I pictured the domed chamber to be quite large.
If any castle along the Wall were to have a dedicated solar constructed around a weirwood, I'd wager it would be the Nightfort.
While I completely agree with the bolded part, the text doesn't seem to support it. Here are the descriptions we get of it, from Bran, ASOS:
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 burned kitchen. Even Summer was not at ease here.
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.
Skinny and faceless - the tree reminds me a bit of Arya. Lol.
So while I was perusing around in this chapter, this Black Gate description really stood out to me:
The Black Gate, Sam had called it, but it wasn’t black at all.
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. “Who are you?” the door asked, and the well whispered, “Who-who-who-who-who-who who.”
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. “Who are you?” the door asked, and the well whispered, “Who-who-who-who-who-who who.”
First, it's interesting that the white wood seems to give off a glow - this is the exact opposite of the black stone that drinks the light.
Also, the face is blind. To me, this suggests the gate is not connected to the weirnet; otherwise it should be able to see.
LOL! My daughter read it. She asked me to read it at least a year ago. I never did. It sits here under a pile of papers on my desk to this day.
That is an awesome parallel though! One cold next to three hot...Ice+Fire=Puddles. Makes a lot of sense given Samwell's close encounter, and Winterfell's name.
I highly recommend reading it. It's not long, it'll take an hour or two, tops. And it has a number of very interesting parallels/similarities to ASOIAF - almost to the point that one could wonder if the story took place at Winterfell before there was a castle, and before there were COTF, and at a time when fire dragons still lived in Westeros. In fact, this could be a story from that ancient civilization I believe lived there before the Dawn Age, the one that somehow went completely extinct (or nearly completely, as the Daynes probably descend from them, along with some others).
Just do it - you won't regret it.
Yes. Old Nan said that "even maidens and suckling babes found no pity in them. They hunted the maids through frozen forests, and fed their dead servants on the flesh of human children.”
Dead men don't seem to require food, though, so it's hard to say how accurate that part of the story is.
Well the wights did rip apart Sam and Gilly's garron, and IIRC they were eating its entrails. But I do agree that this part could be inaccurate, as Dany is also accused of feeding babies to her dragons, and in her case we know this is a gross exaggeration and misrepresentation of one accidental child eating incident that she had nothing to do with and in fact went out of her way to prevent in the future.
We've yet to see a baby/toddler wight, so I'm thinking they use the babes for other purposes.
Old Nan might have been conflating ice spiders with "dead servants." Or, perhaps ice spiders are made from "dead servants." Mother spiders typically nest their eggs someplace with food...or even...nest them within food... so perhaps babes suit that purpose.
(Sorry to go there, but I'm trying to work Ice Spiders in somehow. LOL)
Yuck! Lol. I do agree that Craster's babies are most likely not being eaten by wights. At this point, I can't even speculate on what they are for. The neverborn dragonlord babies are much more interesting to me.