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Post by Ser Duncan on Feb 21, 2016 22:45:46 GMT
Every once in a while I step back from reading into the text and looking at the overall lay of the land kinda thing. And that's when some things suddenly strike me as -- Hmm, I wonder if there's more to that?
So here's one that struck me recently.
The Others are called by two names in the books; the Others and white walks. Two names for the same thing.
Obsidian is known by two names in the books; obsidian and dragonglass. Two names for the same thing.
What destroys the Others/white walkers? Obsidian/dragonglass.
Now, is it just me, or does it seem strange that the two things most prominent to the overall arc of the story of these books, should both go by two different names?
Anyone else notice little things, or big things, like this?
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Post by Melifeather on Feb 21, 2016 22:59:55 GMT
Perhaps. I've theorized before that the Children's greenseers turned to fire magic to end the Long Night, thus causing an imbalance between the two sides.
The Others encompass more than white walkers . It includes the people using ice magic to make them.
Obsidian is a natural substance...igneous rock or previously molten rock. Dragonglass is a nickname, because it was discovered to have the ability to dispel ice magic, thus the connection to fire and thinking it's frozen fire, but maybe there's more to just simply mining obsidian out of the ground?
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Post by Ser Duncan on Feb 22, 2016 2:04:31 GMT
The Others encompass more than white walkers . It includes the people using ice magic to make them. Heh, even there I've just realised that obsidian has a third name in the books too, 'frozen fire'. So even if you group them as Others = white walkers and their makers, you still have obsidian = dragonglass and frozen fire. Still equal in the beings vs what destroys them. It's just too strange to be coincidental I think.
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Post by snowfyre on Feb 22, 2016 14:22:33 GMT
Now, is it just me, or does it seem strange that the two things most prominent to the overall arc of the story of these books, should both go by two different names? Not just you. Though I tend to take this in a slightly different direction. I've long been fascinated by Maester Aemon's comment about the " translation error" committed by those studying the "Prince that was Promised" prophecy. And I expect that observation... that prophecies, myths, and histories are handed down in different languages, translated and retranslated back and forth along the way... might be suggestive in other ways. For instance, I wonder how concepts might be substituted or interchanged, one for another, through translational decisions. Consider how certain words and ideas might reflect common underlying concepts: Term | Element 1 (FLAME/BURNER) | Element 2 (FROZEN /HARDENED)
| Element 3 (BLADE/WARRIOR) | Reference | Source | dragonglass | dragon | glass | -- | Common tongue name for obsidian | ASOS | frozen fire | fire | frozen | -- | Old Valyrian word for obsidian
| ASOS
| glass candle | candle | glass | -- | obsidian artifact; burns but is not consumed | AFFC | stone dragon | dragon
| stone
| -- | Mel's obsession (wake dragons from stone) | ASOS; ADWD | Dragonstone | dragon | stone | -- | Seat of House Targaryen | AGOT-ADWD | ice dragon | dragon | ice | -- | Old Nan's tales ("cold as the breath of") | ASOS; ADWD | glass sword
| -- | glass | sword | Luwin's metaphor for magic spells / Obsidian weaponry | (AGOT | burning sword
| burning
| -- | sword
| Lightbringer, AA's blade (per S. Saan) | (ACOK | dragonsteel
| dragon
| -- | steel
| Last Hero's blade (by one account) | AFFC/ADWD | sword of fire | fire | -- | sword | Lightbringer, per Mel | ACOK | fire knight
| fire
| -- | knight
| Warriors of the Red Temple (Fiery Hand) | ADWD |
And that doesn't even touch on the particular "error" Aemon was interested in... i.e., that "dragon" could be mistranslated to mean "ruler" (or, more specifically in the case of the PtwP prophecy... "prince/princess"). Or certain other connotations and meanings regularly associated with fire, such as life or love or passion. So we might work some other ideas into the chart, somehow. Living sword. Living ice. Living Wall. Stoneheart. Heart of stone. King of Winter. Ice that burns. Etc., etc... ad nauseum. Is there something beneath all this that comprises a recognizable pattern? What's Martin doing?
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Post by Ser Duncan on Feb 22, 2016 15:43:55 GMT
Heh, looking at that chart snowfyre it just struck me that if you apply the translating of dragonglass to frozen fire, assuming Valyrian works like most Europoean languages in comparison to English, were they have the noun first, with the adjective after, you would get fire that is frozen. Based on this, you could interpose the word 'fire' for dragon, seeing as how dragon can be representative of quite a few things, and dragonsteel would translate into steelfire, or fire that is steel. Or conversely, firesteel, steel that is fire. So, it could be that Valyrian steel has more fire in it than common steel. Or perhaps the Valyrians used dragon flame in the smelting process and therefore has magical fire put into it at the stage in which it changes its chemical properties, going from ore to metal. Mind you, I'm not a proponent of Valyrian steel being dragonsteel, but it seems to fit the naming scheme.
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Post by Melifeather on Feb 22, 2016 16:13:26 GMT
I also believe that the original Nights Watch were actually burning, flaming meteors that fell from the sky after the comet struck the/a moon. The meteors would have looked like fiery swords. Add to that the belief that dragons came from this same moon cracking, and you have the connection between blades, fire, and dragonglass, and obsidian if obsidian is fallen molten meteorite.
Edited to add: I believe the fiery meteors are dragonsteel.
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Post by snowfyre on Feb 22, 2016 16:45:26 GMT
Mind you, I'm not a proponent of Valyrian steel being dragonsteel, but it seems to fit the naming scheme. Neither am I. And for good reason. Sam mentions that particular account of the Last Hero and his "dragonsteel" blade (against which the Others "could not stand") almost immediately after he tells us that all the histories of that time period (Age of Heroes, Long Night, etc.) were set down by Andal septons thousands of years after the events themselves are supposed to have taken place. After all, he says... the First Men only left us "runes on rocks." Well, the First Men didn't have steel either. Steel apparently came to Westeros with the Andals... no more than 6,000 years ago, at most. So the word " steel," in the context of a story about the Last Hero and the Long Night presents another likely "translation error." As I read it, anyway. The Last Hero, if he wielded an actual sword... cannot possibly have had a Valyrian steel blade, as it's hard to imagine he could have put his hands on any steel at all during the Long Night. (Setting aside the fact that Valyria itself would not arise for another ~2,000 years.)
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Post by Melifeather on Feb 22, 2016 17:02:25 GMT
That is why I am a proponent that both the Last Hero and Azor Ahai stories are about a celestial event and not about people. It goes back to Black Crow's In the Heart of Darkeness parallel in that the darkness of the Long Night was actually the condition of the human hearts of the First Men.
The Children viewed the First Men as being evil all the time, and needed to be wiped out. So their greenseers turned to fire magic to send a comet (Lightbringer) into the moon and the resulting meteor shower (Nights Watch) fell down upon Westeros in the Battle for the Dawn. Nearly all human life would have been wiped out. The survivors in Westeros retold the story using the Last Hero as a metaphor, and the people of Essos tell it as Azor Ahai.
The shards of black meteor are the source of obsidian, and are the dragon's steel (fiery blades). I also believe that the Starks original sword Ice is made from the original meteor.
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Post by Melifeather on Feb 22, 2016 18:57:13 GMT
It would be interesting to go through Old Nan's tale with a deliberate slant that it is about the CotF.
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Post by Ser Duncan on Feb 22, 2016 19:02:06 GMT
The Last Hero, if he wielded an actual sword... cannot possibly have had a Valyrian steel blade, as it's hard to imagine he could have put his hands on any steel at all during the Long Night. (Setting aside the fact that Valyria itself would not arise for another ~2,000 years.) Exactly. Add to that the belief that dragons came from this same moon cracking, and you have the connection between blades, fire, and dragonglass, and obsidian if obsidian is fallen molten meteorite. And by combining the events and the birth of dragons, you get to where I think dragonsteel actually is. The blade wielded by the Last Hero was most likely made of dragon bones. We have the description of how they were made up of iron. And we have that SSM saying that Westeros had it's own dragons. Naga's bones shows that the bones of long dead creatures have been used for ages in Westeros. So who's to say if someone found a rather sharp dragon's tooth and decided to make it into a weapon?
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Post by Ser Duncan on Feb 22, 2016 19:10:35 GMT
The Children viewed the First Men as being evil all the time, and needed to be wiped out. So their greenseers turned to fire magic to send a comet (Lightbringer) into the moon and the resulting meteor shower (Nights Watch) fell down upon Westeros in the Battle for the Dawn. Nearly all human life would have been wiped out. The survivors in Westeros retold the story using the Last Hero as a metaphor, and the people of Essos tell it as Azor Ahai. My problem with this, is the story of Azor Ahai forging a steel weapon. The two could not be contemporary. The LH story takes place at time before there was steel in Westeros at least. The Andal invasion, with their weapons of steel didn't happen for another 4,000 years. It's too much to expect that the Andals or even other parts of Essos had steel in only limited places for that long without the news spreading that steel is better than bronze. A few hundred years for the spread of new technology, I'll buy, but thousands? Not so much.
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Post by Melifeather on Feb 22, 2016 19:10:50 GMT
And by combining the events and the birth of dragons, you get to where I think dragonsteel actually is. The blade wielded by the Last Hero was most likely made of dragon bones. We have the description of how they were made up of iron. And we have that SSM saying that Westeros had it's own dragons. Naga's bones shows that the bones of long dead creatures have been used for ages in Westeros. So who's to say if someone found a rather sharp dragon's tooth and decided to make it into a weapon? It could very well be dragon bone, but I am leaning towards it being made from the actual meteorite.
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Post by Ser Duncan on Feb 22, 2016 19:26:09 GMT
And by combining the events and the birth of dragons, you get to where I think dragonsteel actually is. The blade wielded by the Last Hero was most likely made of dragon bones. We have the description of how they were made up of iron. And we have that SSM saying that Westeros had it's own dragons. Naga's bones shows that the bones of long dead creatures have been used for ages in Westeros. So who's to say if someone found a rather sharp dragon's tooth and decided to make it into a weapon? It could very well be dragon bone, but I am leaning towards it being made from the actual meteorite. I wasn't discounting that either, sorry if it sounded that way. After all, we do have a rather important sword in the series that's made from the heart of meteorite. There's no reason why there couldn't have been another, earlier one. They did know how to work metals, they just hadn't discovered steel yet. Whatever was blasted and essentially smelted by it's fall to GRRearth, would already be metal. What I was thinking is, if there were dragons bones and teeth laying around, they don't rot, and just fashioning a handle onto a tooth or a sharp rib would be easier.
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Post by Melifeather on Feb 22, 2016 19:29:39 GMT
What I was thinking is, if there were dragons bones and teeth laying around, they don't rot, and just fashioning a handle onto a tooth or a sharp rib would be easier. Oh definitely easier, but the connection between dragons and the moon cracking seems to imply that they associate dragonsteel with flames and/or burning moon-meteors.
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Post by Some Pig No Doubt on Feb 23, 2016 2:45:15 GMT
I had a nutty (and I mean nutty) idea about diamond possibly being the mystery material behind one of these ancient swords - got caught up in the mechanics of formation, particularly impact and Carbonado diamonds. Probably nothing, but it was interesting to look at the properties/appearance of diamond in juxtaposition to obsidian.
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