Winter is Coming: Symbols and Hidden Meanings in A Game of Thrones (2 page)

• Over the centuries, the White Walkers have faded until they’re only legends. Likewise, over the centuries, the dragons diminished in size and power, and no one remembered their original importance. They are clearly tied together.
  
• As described in Martin’s short stories, “The summers have been shorter since the last dragon died, and the winters longer and crueler.”
  ⁶
  Are the Targaryens and their dragon powers holding back the winter merely by living and ruling?
  
• In the House of the Undying, Pyat Pree explains that the dragons have returned and brought magic back to the world. “It is strongest in their presence,” he says, “and they are strongest in yours” (2:10). Daenerys apparently is magic incarnate. Though Pyat Pree doesn’t know it, the White Walkers too have returned. Perhaps this magic freed them as well.
  
• Thoros of Myr (traveling with the Brotherhood without Banners in season three) is a red priest of R’hllor. He came to Westeros to convert Aerys Targaryen, after learning of his obsession with fire. Later, as he fought in the Riverlands, true powers awakened in him. Since Melisandre the Red Priestess is first seen in
  A Clash of Kings
  , a stranger to all in Westeros, her powers may be just as new, brought with the birth of dragons and the return of magic to the land. Like the Maesters, who try and fail to light dragonglass candles, the Maegi may have practiced the rituals with little or no power behind them, until recently. Also like the Maesters, the Maegi seem to know hidden lore about magic and the ancient enemies in the North. R’hllor’s religion may carry the truth of the upcoming battle against the Other, just as the Old Religion has true knowledge of Heart Trees.
  
• Everyone associates the red comet of
  A Clash of Kings
  with their own rise to power: King Joffrey sees Lannister red; Edmure Tully, Tully red. Brynden Tully, Aeron Greyjoy, and Osha all see an omen of war and bloodshed. Old Nan, whose ancient stories prove true, senses the coming of dragons. Certainly, the comet appears when Daenerys enters the fire and brings her dragons to life. But as it begins the second book, it also warns readers of the arrival of R’hllor, the god of fire, and his Red Priestess Melisandre. With her, magic arrives at Westeros. Her prophecies as she leads troops in the name of fire, against the mysterious Other, may be the best magic to battle the ice.
  

• Asshai-by-the-Shadow is the source of the world’s cruelest sorcerers, who deal in fire magic and death magic: Melisandre, Mirri Maz Duur, Quaithe of the Shadow. (Mirri casts the death-spell that kills Dany’s child, while Quaithe is the mysterious masked advisor living in Qarth).
  

  To go to Asshai can be described as to “pass beneath the shadow.” Though the “Shadow” has not been defined, it’s the origin of the three dragon eggs. Asshai is also an exporter of dragonglass, and is the most likely to have the lost dragonlore. Since they still have magic, they may still have living dragons (which Bran Stark
  sees there in a vision
  ).
  

  All three of these sorcerous ladies seem to have a piece of the puzzle: Life must pay for life to hatch the dragons. The prince of prophecy must wield Lightbringer. And Quaithe’s prophecies of the book may prove the most important:
  

  “To go north, you must go south. To reach the west, you must go east. To go forward you must go back, and to touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow.”
  

  Asshai, Daenerys thought. She would have me go to Asshai. “Will the Asshai’i give me an army?” she demanded. “Will there be gold for me in Asshai? Will there be ships? What is there in Asshai that I will not find in Qarth?”
  

  “Truth,” said the woman in the mask. And bowing, she faded back into the crowd. (II.426)
  

  Apparently, to reach Westeros in the northwest, Daenerys must journey to Asshai in the southeast to find magic, dragonlore, or perhaps Lightbringer. It is a land of magic and lost knowledge, called “beside the shadow,” indicating it has a knowledge of darkness but is not a source of darkness itself.
  

  Another possibility is that one of the Maegi from Asshai, like Quaithe, will teach her what she needs. The “light” may be Lightbringer or enlightenment or goodness, and the shadow suggests the land near Asshai, or perhaps the shadow of danger and death. Melisandre births shadows and uses them to kill, but she comments that they need light to be cast—they represent magical strength, but not pure darkness.
  

  Mirri Maz Duur is Daenerys’s first magical mentor, Quaithe is the second. Though Melisandre has devoted herself to naming Stannis the prophesized prince, her lore is valuable and will apply to Daenerys, whether or not Melisandre becomes her third tutor. For indeed, “the dragon has three heads,” and much of Daenerys’s life is measured in threes.
  

• The nastiest weapon anyone has is “wildfire” so vicious it can burn armies at a distance and won’t go out… sort of a chemical substitute for dragons. The chief pyromancer on the show notes, “After the dragons died, wildfire was the key to Targaryen power… the substance is fire given form” (2.5). This suggests that the Targaryens who ordered wildfire made are the protectors of the realm, using the most powerful flames, whether dragonfire or wildfire, to destroy the Others. Neither was meant to be used for civil war.
  
• Lost in the North long ago, the fabled Horn of Joramun, or Horn of Winter, can allegedly bring down the Wall or awaken “giants from the earth” (II:276). Is it a tool of aid for the rangers or only a source of devastation? (If it’s the horn Sam unearths, it was logically left by rangers for other rangers to find). Bran sees “the curtain of light at the end of the world,” which might be shattered as easily as the Wall with the rangers’ horn (I: 136-137). Is this its intended target? What giants is it meant to awaken? Could it wake dragons? Or the ice dragons of Nan’s tales?
  
• At the other end of the world, in Old Valyria, Theon’s uncle discovers a mysterious horn of fire called Dragonbinder that’s fabled to control dragons. Black with red gold and Valyrian steel, it feels warm to the touch. (Maester Aemon is suspicious of Stannis’s Lightbringer specifically because it doesn’t feel warm.) Its inscription of “
  Blood for Fire, Fire for Blood”
  matches the Targaryen motto, “Fire and Blood” and also the concept that life must pay for magic.
  
• This introduces odd paralleling: one horn can bring down the Wall and the other controls dragons? What if the Horn of Winter could bring down the Wall
  by awaking the dragons, wyrm, or ice dragon buried beneath it?
  
• By contrast, what if the other horn can control dragons, but it or many dragon horns were used to bring about the
  Doom of Valyria
  , blowing so hard they exploded the volcanoes? Could this also be what happened at Hardhome? Or Summerhall?
  
• What if the two horns are blown together? And is this how the series will end, with the world destroyed in ice and fire?
  

• Dragonglass can slay the corpselike wights. Many speculate that it’s created by dragons. Whether or not this is true, it is clearly associated with them. Dragon fire was used to create “dragonsteel,” Valyrian steel apparently. Clearly dragons and their fire are the best weapon to destroy the evil.
  
• On the show, dragonglass is positively identified as obsidian, volcanic glass. Old Valyria, filled with dragons, Valyrian steel, magic, and other lost secrets, was destroyed in the Doom of Valyria, a great explosion of a volcano chain. Are volcanoes the source of fire magic in the world?
  
• The rangers once knew dragonglass could defend them, as shown by the small stockpile someone buried in the north, which Sam discovers at the Fist of the First Men. A small horn is also apparent in the box. The rangers also once worked closely with the Targaryens, who visited them and granted them lands and honors. Perhaps the dragon riders advised them to use dragonglass in battle.
  

• It’s said Dragonstone Isle has a stockpile of dragonglass, left from the Targaryens. For some reason, they colonized Dragonstone, but not Westeros before Old Valyria was destroyed —perhaps the single island had the volcanoes they needed. “Odd, that,”
  Tyrion the scholar thinks. “Dragonstone
  is no more than a rock. The wealth was farther west, but they had
  dragons. Surely they knew that it was there”
  (V:76). What made Dragonstone so terribly important?
  

  Dragonstone may still hold its secrets. Martin comments, “If you look at how the citadel of Dragonstone was built and how in some of its structures the stone was shaped in some fashion with magic… yes, it’s safe to say that there’s something of Valyrian magic still present.”
  ⁷
  

• Tyrion scrutinizes the Targaryen dragon skulls and sees each is “black as onyx due to its high iron content.” The teeth are “long, curving knives of black diamond” (I:121). Dany’s eggs too “shimmered like polished metal” and are heavy as stone (I:104). Are dragonbones and dragon eggs the source of dragonglass? Or merely similar in makeup?
  
• The children of the forest used to give the Night’s Watch a hundred dragonglass daggers each year—they supplied them and worshipped in the weirwoods (V:100). Clearly, the children of the forest knew much about combating the Others.
  
• “The world the Citadel is building has no place in it for sorcery or prophecy or glass candles, much less for dragons” (IV.683). Like many, the Maesters have become obsessed with a new age of politics rather than the older truths of the Wall. Yet, as Martin tells it, “Oldtown =is= old, thousands of years old as opposed to King’s Landing, which is only three hundred. Until Aegon’s coming, it was the major city of Westeros. The Hightowers are one of the oldest families in the Seven Kingdoms.”
  ⁸
  Perhaps they hold the missing knowledge our heroes need.
  

• In their Citadel, the Maesters test their students by having them light a dragonglass candle. All fail, perhaps because they’re not the Chosen One or because until recently magic had faded from the world. “All Valyrian sorcery was rooted in blood or fire. The sorcerers of the Freehold could see across mountains, seas, and deserts with one of these glass candles. They could enter a man’s dreams and give him visions, and speak to one another half a world apart, seated before their candles” (IV:682). We’ve seen the horrors the Maegi can inflict with their magic of blood and sacrifice of the innocent. The other source of magic in the world is that of fire, the nobler tool.
  

  Quaithe tells Daenerys “the glass candles are burning” (V:152-153). This indicates the return of magic, since for centuries the Maesters couldn’t make them light. With magic comes the dragons, the Others and all the rest. But there may be more—if the Others are vulnerable to obsidian, these candles may be a warning system to defend against them.
  

• Men of the Night’s Watch have always guarded the Southern lands, not from wildings, but from White Walkers. The oath on the show leaves out one line from the books, possibly for time:
  

  Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls.
  I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of men.
  I pledge my life and honor to the Night’s Watch, for this night and all the nights to come. (I:522)
  

  While the horn part is literally true, the Watch is supposed to fight White Walkers with fire and light, though they’ve only just started remembering that. This may foreshadow that Jon will
  hold
  the sword in the darkness,
  Lightbringer
  , and bring the fire that will heal the world. Likewise, Sam’s mysterious horn from the dragonglass cache may wake much more than sleeping men.
  

• The Wall itself has the ancient magic of the Wierwoods, allowing none but rangers to pass. Rangers are sworn to fight the Others, though their mission lapses as the Others vanish. Now that they’ve returned, the Wall’s powers may be waking as well.
  
• Melisandre’s magic is stronger at the Wall (V:411). Daenerys’s dragons and the Stark shapeshifting may gain strength there as well. Certainly Jon is closer to his wolf and wolf magic than Arya, Rickon, or Robb, though the pair’s day-to day partnership and perilous conditions may be responsible.
  
• Former Night’s Watch Ranger Mance Rayder has made himself King-Beyond-the-Wall and united all the wildings into a single army. It seems that when he saw White Walkers, he realized the time had come to form an alliance of fighters. Westeros must do the same… once they find a strong ruler.
  

One assumes an alliance of fire and ice characters will be needed to stop the war. Many believe Dany’s three dragonriders will mix these characteristics, with perhaps northern Jon, dragon-riding Daenerys, and a child of south and north combined, like Bran. All the Stark children, raised at Winterfell, come from a red-haired mother from warmer climate. Robb, Sansa, Bran, and Rickon share her red hair and blue eyes. They also bridge the Old Religion and the New, the long Summer and coming Winter.

Other ice and fire symbolism:

• Wierwood trees are white with red leaves. Jon thinks that Ghost with his white fur and red eyes has similar coloring (V:466). These colors suggest a balance between the elements.
  
• The Lannister-Stark conflict that could be said to have begun the war is fought between the icy gray and white bannered north and the red and gold bannered south. Proposed matches from Sansa and Joffrey to Sansa and Tyrion echo this conflict.
  
• R’hllor is the god of fire and light; his devilish counterpart is a spirit of cold and darkness.
  
• Most of the Targaryen swords (above) are swords of either ice or fire.
  
• Gilly’s son and foster-son. Jon comments, “You saved your own boy from the ice. Now save hers from the fire” (V:97).
  
• Griff (from the fifth book) has red hair dyed blue and wears the hide of a red wolf of Rhoyne. His eyes are “eye-blue, pale, cold” (V.120). “Young Griff,” his foster son also dyes his hair blue, but claims a fiery parentage.