If conflict is a driver of stories, and it is, you know
that there's little that can match an apocalypse.
It destroys entire civilizations.
It changes everything. The very fabric of reality is
eviscerated and has to be rethought.
Moral boundaries are obscured and and recreated based on an
entire set of values. In fantasy, such events are
influenced by or outright created by supernatural means.
Long before fantasy authors were a thing, however, our own world
produced many such tales originating from cultures in all
corners of the globe. It's often said that even myths
have seeds of truth in them, and that's a lot of our focus today.
One of the most popular, most recent, and most grim examples
is Norse mythology. Actually, I could use that same
description of A Song of Ice and Fire.
It's one of the most popular. It's recent, historically
speaking, and very grim. Right?
And it checks out. George is undoubtedly heavily
influenced by Norse mythology. In this episode is also
dedicated to 1 notable aspect of that the wealth of parallels
between Ragnarok and the Long Night.
Both are ends of the world and so to speak, with the world
ringed in ice and fire. But there's also new beginnings,
a dream of spring if you will. Both involve A lasting darkness
coupled with extended winter. Massive final battle between
great heavenly powers, forces of nature and otherly beings.
They're even called the Others in both.
Yet we're not just concerned with the apocalypse itself, but
what comes before the signs and portents that tell us it's
coming. All that, and then the recovery
of civilization itself, making it all into a cycle.
In this one, we'll delve into how real world events transform
into myths, and in turn, how George has applied this concept
to A Song of Ice and Fire. We've got ice and fire giants,
flaming swords, world trees and heart trees, cirruses, serpents,
Ravens, wolves, and science, archaeology, volcanology,
language analysis, and scientific disciplines I don't
even know the names of. They're in there too.
All that and more on this episode of History of Westeros
podcast. Hello and welcome back
everybody. I am Aziz with me as a Shaya.
We have live streams almost every Sunday at Sunday on East.
What do I say every Sunday at 3:00 Eastern?
We're always on YouTube for those.
You can catch the edited version afterwards on Spotify or the
audio only version is available on all podcast platforms and
it's ad free if you listen on Patreon.
This episode is heavily influenced by the book A History
of the Vikings, Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price.
It's the main source other than all the Song of Ice and Fire
sources, other than a few random things I had to look up
definitions of stuff that you know, doesn't, doesn't really
need to be mentioned. But a huge thanks to regular
listener and probably in the chat right now.
Christina Kay gave me a ton of advice.
This is a top topic that touches very much on her professional
career and a lot of personal interest as well.
And her input was extremely valuable along the way here for
a lot of these things, things I didn't know about, extra details
added in, well, all sorts of good stuff.
This. Yeah, go ahead.
Kind of a fun fact about Christina Kay, you might also
have seen her contributions to the show in our Lomas
Longstrider episode, the latest Lomas one, where we featured her
art, she did a piece of the Long Bridge of Atlantis for us.
So anyways, I just thought that was a kind of fun bit of trivia
for y'all. A lot of our contributors rhyme
with Ina, Christina, Nina. That's it, really.
This is Topics Moot episode #12 of 2025.
Patrons chose 16 episodes during Topics Moot 2025, and this is
the 12th of those topics. If you have questions for us and
ask them live here in the chat or hit us up at
westeroshistory@gmail.com. And at the end of this episode,
I'll give you some other suggestions for our catalog that
have episodes that relate to this one.
And we'll start with a trivia question, the answer of which
will also be at the end. Who in Westeros history is
loosely or maybe more than loosely based on famous Viking
king Harold Hardrada? I will say the answer during the
episode as usual, and then specifically revealed at the
end. Here are the sections for
today's episode. This episode was originally
called Norse Myth and the Long Night.
But as we delved deeper into it, realized that that's too generic
of a title. We're really just focused on the
Ragnarok of it all. And so that provide just an
ability to come back and discuss some of these topics at another
time. So here's what we got for you
today. Beginning in blood Adrizil memes
bruner the others versus the others.
Ragnarok horns thimble winter like a Blackstone final battle
cultural memory societal reset the science of Ragnarok.
The real green seers, volcanic winters, plague of Justinian,
the Long night Westeros reset, the Old Gods of the North, the
Old gods of the South, and other Ragnarox versus other long
nights. To close it out, let's go.
We have a poll that Ishaya put up in the chat.
Which of these animals do you most associate with Norse myth?
Ravens and crows, wolves, Dragons or serpents or giants?
Those four tell us what you think.
Norse myth may be the most borrowed of the world's
mythologies when it comes to fantasy, at least in the English
language. More so even than Greek
mythology, which is probably Next up or loosely tied for
first. I don't know.
Those are probably the two most popular in the Western world.
Certainly in my lived experience they are.
We even have a few episodes that are dedicated to some Greek myth
parallels. One of them is called The Rage
of Heroes, and that's a good one.
Check it out. Tolkien of course loved it and
used it a lot, probably more than George RR Martin does.
And of course, a huge portion of all modern fantasy is inspired
by Tolkien, thus also inspired by Norse myth indirectly.
And of course, it'd be really hard to find a fantasy author
who hasn't read some things about Norse myth.
So it's like a double thing. And that's the case with George
as well, because George is heavily influenced by Tolkien
and Norse myth. So it's a definitely a double
whammy. I would have to go ahead and say
then that Norse myth is the most influential of all the myth
cycles on George RR Martin and A Song of Ice and Fire in
particular. That of course varies from topic
to topic, character to character, world building
location and world building location.
But overall, I'd say there's the most, the most meat on this
bone, the Norse bone, shall we say.
So we will absolutely return to this some other time with things
that aren't related to Ragnarok in the Long Night.
Today's challenge for us was to figure out where exactly to draw
those lines. What's actually relevant to the
Long Night, which is just a regular Westeros Norse
connection anyway? There is so much categorization
that needs to be done. It's a very deep well.
We always err on the side of more context, more immersion.
That's fun. Much is made of Viking influence
on the Ironborn, and for good reason.
But the North has more in common with the so-called Norse or
Viking culture, so much so that we are only covering a portion
of here, as I said, the end of the world part, but also the
beginning, as you'll see. So yeah, I think overall, and
that's something for another time, we'll go through that be
like, yeah, actually the North has more in common with Viking
Age culture than the Ironborn even do, which is probably a
surprise to hear. But yeah, something to think
about. So here's a good just a few
examples. Sacred Groves and Adrijazil,
that's similar to northern values or northern religion.
Prophecy in cirruses, that's a mother mole kind of thing.
Old Nan, even Old Nan isn't an actual prophetess.
She doesn't use magic, but in the story, that's the role she
plays. She tells us what's going to
come or what has come. You know, she's the the font of
that sort of information. Of course, both of them have
giants, Ravens, wolves and Dragons.
What's interesting about Norse myth, and I got a credit,
Christina, for this one, it's so common that you hear both in the
Song of Ice and Fire, both in the real world that, oh, the
Vikings didn't have writing. Even I fell into this trap.
But Christina pointed out that runes are writing.
Like, why don't we call that writing?
It is. These are characters that's
written down, right? It's not on paper, but it's a
symbol that means something just like a letter or a hieroglyphic,
A hieroglyph. So yeah, that's writing.
It's different kind of writing. It's a language we don't fully
know. We don't have a lot of context
for it, but that's writing. So that's cool.
That's definitely something I had to rethink, and I appreciate
that. And of course, to be fair, paper
didn't even come to Europe until the 11th century.
The Viking Age was, you know, roughly beginning around the 9th
century. So yeah, they did have papyrus
way before paper in Europe, but not in Scandinavia because that
comes from Cypress plants. They don't exist anywhere near
Scandinavia. So this wasn't like a lost
technology, which is a theme of the things that were lost and
that needed to be rediscovered or that came back in some other
way because of a big apocalypse. So this is not an example of
lost technology, but it is an interesting side note.
There's another big catch here, A Song of Ice and Fire, right?
We have bards all throughout A Song of Ice and Fire, and that's
a medieval thing. And in Norse mythology or Norse,
not mythology, but in the real Norse world, there were scalds,
poets basically. And that's how a lot of history
is maintained and remembered. And that's a connection to
cultural memory that we'll discuss.
The main source for basically everything myth wise in Norse
mythology is the Poetic Edda. It's a collection of poems in
Old Norse. It's anonymous, meaning that
they probably didn't all come from the same person, or if they
did, we don't know who that was, but probably many different
people. So there's a little bit about
sources and our approach today. Beginning in blood, the creation
of the Norse world is extremely violent and bloody.
It's the tale of how their gods murdered to create the world.
It's important for us to remember because what we're
focused on is the connection between myth and reality.
Not just the Viking age of Earth through Ragnarok, but Westeros's
equivalent along Night. As will show, the era in which
the North mists evolved to what we know of today was terrible.
It's one of the worst times to be alive, hence such a horrific
and brutal creation myth. Right it.
We are the product of our environment.
We are the nature nurture dichotomy.
I believe both of those apply the nurture aspect of living in
one of the worst time periods to ever exist for an entire society
or all of Europe or what have you is going to look bleak and
grim and, well, the world. We emerge from horrors to be
what we are today. It's not the same as, you know,
the earth was created in seven days.
Let there be light. That's a lot, you know, nicer.
It's a lot calmer. It isn't as violent.
So not that the Bible doesn't have lots of violence in it, but
the creation stuff, it's, you know, very different in that
sense and that vibe, right? So it's like, it's like thinking
of a child, you know, if you take an individual child and if
they're raised to be violent, they're taught violence or
violence is all around them, they'll be violent.
Civilizations work that way too, right?
If everything around them is violent, if you're born into
that, if they're a war-torn nation or multiple issues,
famine, war, all the things that that's defining, isn't it?
As we're going to see, that is overwhelming here.
It is a huge part of it. We're going to come back to it
from a lot of different angles, and it's really quite something.
Also consider how relatively new Norse mythology is.
How many other myth cycles were created less than 1500 years
ago? That's after Christianity, which
had already started dominating Europe well before the year 500
or so. Yet the Norse mythos evolved 5
to 600 years after the birth of Christ.
That's unusual, right? A new pantheon created at a time
when pantheons were fading out, right?
It was more of an era of monotheism that emerged, right?
This is very close to the beginning of Islam.
Muhammad was born in 570. So that's also the 6th century
or around the same same time we're dealing with here because
the real world events that we're going to be discussing that
helped shape the Norse world and appear in the North miss as
symbols and metaphor happened in the 6th century.
So we're going to get to that. It's really cool.
Let's start off though, with some basics of Norse myth and
cosmology in order to set up those parallels and comparisons.
Starting with Idrigisil. It's the world tree, the
universe tree. There are many realms in Norse
cosmology and the Idrigisil connects them all.
It's a path like an astral gate, lack of a better word, a
dimensional portal almost. Imagine a super heart tree, the
heart tree of heart trees, or just the entire weirwood
network, which enables some people, not not many green seers
really, to see future and past. So it is kind of a portal to
other worlds, right? And of course, a lot of you know
this already, but Bloodraven, who is of course, has a lot in
common with Odin, especially the lost eye, but also the
association with Ravens, the sorcery in when Brand meets
Bloodraven, he even has, you know, that missing eye has like
a root growing out of it now. So it's like the tree is right
there. It's he's part of the tree.
So very, very similar. Bloodraven's purpose is to stop
the next long night, which was Odin's purpose as well.
He was trying to stop Ragnarok. Of course, he stumbled into
another long standing fantasy parallel tropish kind of thing
that George loves to use. Which is when you learn of a
prophecy, you actually end up making it happen.
You self fulfill it. That happens a lot.
Just by trying to avert it, you actually cause it to happen.
And that's a very common interpretation of what Odin
ended up doing. The Adrasil, the tree is tended
by the Norns, and the Norns are like the Fates, the Destiny
creators, the shapers of Destiny.
They weave the threads of all humans.
And just as a little tidbit, George likes that naming
convention of the YG. It's very distinct, like YG.
How do you use that letter? How do you use those together?
But he is specifically YG IG. The demon tree appears in the
world of Ice and Fire as some ancient Ironborn story where the
first longboat was carved from it this demon tree that you
know, 8 people and demanded blood, which is probably a
metaphor for blood sacrifice, but it was definitely a weirwood
tree or a heart tree. So that's interesting.
Little side note there from the world of ice and fire, but also
just names like a grit YG writ right?
Yeah, Free folk names are often older.
They they go back to first man times.
They're not as merged with other cultures that came along
afterwards other different first man or even and all cultures.
There's a thing called Mimus Bruner, which is a pool that's
Mim's pool. Mim is a Mimir is a being.
So there's Werewood's flanking Blood Ravens cave, and this is
an Old Norse Toki and double influence here.
Toki and famously wrote of the Two Trees of Valinor, which were
originally part of the home of the gods for home of the elves,
you know, in Valanor. So those were eventually
destroyed by Morgoth and Mongolian.
But side note here, the similarity is the 2 trees on
either side. Now Tolkien himself drew trees
flanking the entrance to the entrance of Moria.
It's the only thing he ever drew for Lord of the Rings apart from
cover art. So that's kind of interesting.
So there's a wellspring beneath Idrizil.
That's me mirrors. It's a pool of wisdom.
This is how Odin got the wisdom that he sacrificed an eye to.
He sacrificed. He took his eye out and dropped
it into this wellspring, and that's how he got the ability to
drink out of it. And it gave him wisdom just as
Bran drinks weirwood paste to open his third eye.
So it's kind of like Odin gave up an eye.
Bran got an extra 1 because Odin's already covered with
blood. Raven right and he is the one
connecting it so Bloodraven sort of play it's like a step further
right instead of so you have Odin getting the knowledge from
Mimir Bloodraven getting the knowledge from the whereward
network passing that on to Bran the well of knowledge in Norse
mythology is located in the realm of the frost Yutnar, which
are pretty much giants. It's the whole concept of giants
in Norse mythology is confusing. I'm not going to get into it,
but let's just say there's some good parallels and the
understanding of giants in North mythology is very skewed, but
the influence is clear enough. George is drawing from that.
Even if the original giants were different.
Frost, yotinar frost giants, right?
Fitting enough parallel the lands beyond the wall, very cold
and the only place where giants still exist.
Well, at least in Westeros, the only place they still exist.
And again, through a Hartree's magic, you can see past and
future anywhere, right? This is going to be seen as the
well of knowledge like Mimus Bruner.
So Brand drinks from the where would paste bowl and gets a
similar intake of knowledge and and wisdom to carry forward
directly associated with the end of the world because that is
what Odin was looking for too. He wasn't just looking for
knowledge. He was looking for the knowledge
of the future. And that was the big thing you
know he learned. So Christina says you could make
Bran the head of Mim that Odin is talking to, because Odin is
talking to the head of Mim when Ragnarok breaks out.
So that's a, that's a possible parallel there, the Others
versus the Others. Again, Norse myth can be
confusing, not just about giants, but what is a God?
There's a lot of blurred lines there, and some of it's just
unknown. It's blurred because we don't
know, but some of it seems just blurred within itself.
There are beings that just don't fit neatly into categorization
in other myth cycles are in fiction as well.
But generally speaking in Norse mythology, if it's not human or
of the gods, it's the Others. And of course there Others are
way different. There Others are giants, elves,
dwarfs, seers, monsters, things like that.
The Others of Westeros are not such a broad category.
But they are mysterious, right? They're very specific White
Walkers. But there is a bit of comparison
to be made here with them and the Valkyries.
Now, we don't even know whether the Valkyries count as others or
as of the gods because they are servants of the gods.
But that doesn't mean they are. So it's see how that's
confusing? But that doesn't matter here.
What matters is you might be like Valkyries and the others.
The how do you how do you get there?
Well, first of all, the others are frightening and terrifying
to behold, right? Valkyries are too.
They are very commonly portrayed as beautiful or buxom women or
whatever, and that is just not at all accurate to Norse
mythology. They're terrifying.
They each are like the embodiment of things that happen
in battle. Like one of them is called spear
thrower. One of them is called battle
rage. You know, they have all these
just like spear scraper and shield biter, just all these
like small aspects of what happens during a battle or
during warfare. But here's where the comparison
gets stronger, right? What is the point of a Valkyrie?
They escort the souls of the brave that fall in battle to
Valhalla, right? Every That that part's well
known. But why?
To fight in Ragnarok? They're being saved like you're
one of the best. We're gonna we're gonna need you
later for that final battle. So what do the White Walkers do?
They raise the dead to fight in something like a last battle or
Battle for the Dawn. Well, for them, they don't want
it to end that way because they lose, but it's still a climactic
final battle between the great powers.
This is going to continue to be something we talked about
throughout the episode in in terms of the Westeros
equivalent, they're called the elder races.
So the Others are just the White Walkers, whereas giants are part
of the elder races. So are the children.
Skin changers fit pretty well in Norse mythology.
There are shape changers, especially wolf people, things
like that, as well as Ravens and other things.
There are elves and dwarfs in Norse mythology.
The dwarfs don't really have a great parallel in the Song of
Ice and Fire. The elves kind of do.
They're a little bit like the Children of the Forest in some
ways. It's also neat that there's dark
elves and light elves. That's that's where that came
from. And we don't know of different
species among the children like dark and light, children of the
forest, something along those lines.
But we have and others have theorized about factionalism
within the children. Like the big one would be those
who were pro creating and unleashing the others, whereas
there would have been maybe some children of the forest who were
against that. I'm like, no, we don't want to
do that. That's too devastating, too
destructive. Anyway, that might not have
happened at all, but it's a it's a great idea.
So that's a vivid picture, I hope, of the relevant era and
some important relevant aspects of the mythos is of course a lot
more to it, but we'd be getting off page or off topic with that.
So let's talk about how all that gets obliterated.
Ragnarok quote Wolves. Will swallow the sun and moon.
The white hot stars will sink into the sea and shroud the
world in steam. The powers of the night will
pour through a hole in the sky, and the gods will March to war
for the last time. There's various.
Translations of that. But one.
I like that. Could also be a title is
Twilight of the Gods. It sort of means to grow dark.
One interpretation is that. So growing dark is very fitting
here. Now it's a misconception to
think that Ragnarok is just a big battle.
Ragnarok includes all the events surrounding the big battle, the
build up to it and the afterwards.
It's all of that. It's the all the parts of the
end of the world. Yes, there is a big final boss
battle between all the bosses on either side, Acer, Vanier,
celestial objects, geographical events, you know, but it's not
everything. The whole thing is Ragnarok, can
I say. Aziz yeah.
When you said Twilight of the Gods, did you know there's an
animated Norse mythology show called The Twilight of the Gods?
Nope. That's neat.
It came out pretty recently. That's cool.
How about that last year? Makes sense that they would
choose that. It's a great title.
So just like what seems to be a slow burn of the new Long Night,
it's something that just drops all of a sudden.
It builds up. There's a prophecy, there's the
onset of winter, there's others appear.
It kind of goes from there. It isn't just as all of a
sudden. And that's true with Ragnarok as
well. Like the right, the white Raven
means winter, you know, the others themselves are probably
the worst omen. It's like, whoa, they're
actually here, and that means a mighty winter is coming.
And that also is the truth for Ragnarok.
There's lots of prophecy, as I told you.
Odin seeks foreknowledge and gets it and it messes him up a
bit, doesn't it? Horns, when the instruments like
horns or flutes are arguably the oldest musical instrument.
You can count banging rocks together as music though, so
that's just as old as hell. You can as as long as people
have been banging rocks together, you can call that
music, so whatever. Anyway, horns are really old.
That's good enough for us. The oldest instrument ever found
on Earth so far is the Neanderthal flute.
There's this, this one, this specific one that's super old,
60,000 years old. I don't know how, like there's
rocks older than that, but who knows whether they were banged
on other racks to make music. Didgeridoo of northern
Australian Aborigine people. There have, they've been, those
have been found. Some of the oldest one is 40,000
years old. It was made from hollowed out
eucalyptus, not hollowed out by people, but by termites.
King Tut's tomb had metal trumpets that were forged in
5000 BC, silver and bronze. So yeah, there you go.
Here we have Heimdall and the Night's Watch to compare.
Heimdall stands on the wall and watches for Ragnarok.
His job is the eternal watch person waiting for the end of
the world. The guy who warns everyone that,
hey, it's beginning. He is the brightest slash
whitest God. He has golden teeth.
So he's descriptively the opposite from the Night's Watch
in that sense with all the white and gold.
But that's the Kingsguard. So it's kind of an element of
both of those is here in Heimdall.
Basically, you could say they're both his children, Heimdall's
children, or the King's Guard in the Night's Watch.
And when Ragnarok comes, what does Heimdall do?
He blows his horn not three times, but someone else blows
them three times. So we'll get to that.
Next we have the Horn of Winter slash, Joraman's horn.
Let's hear about that quote the first.
King beyond the Wall, according to legend, was Joraman, who
claimed to have a horn that would bring down the wall when
it quote woke the giants from the earth.
Yorman or Jorman, which is one letter away from Jorman, just
put an A in the middle in Old Norse means something huge or
superhuman, which that's fairly fitting.
A horn that wakes the sleepers. Well, a horn that signals the
end of the world or raises or wakes the sleepers, in this case
the giants. Of course this is a metaphor for
an earthquake, but it can be taken literally and both work
because the long night maybe will be accompanied by natural
disasters. Ragnarok definitely was and in
this, so that's the horn waking the sleepers.
In terms of the giants are the earthquake that's rumbling.
They're the metaphor for that. But in terms of literal giants,
well, the giants are a big part of Ragnarok.
Them attacking, being part of the assault force against the
Norse gods is similar enough to the placement of the giants as
reappearing to, from human perspective, the humans, most
humans thought the giants had died out, but they are coming
back now as the long night is nigh.
And they're like, oh, but there's giants after all.
So the giants appear when these things are happening, which is
kind of similar, not quite as similar as some of these other
things. We could definitely see that
connection. So I think that it's more likely
a metaphor for earthquake, but it works both ways, you know,
And if it brings down the wall, if that is what happens, or if
some other horn or some other thing brings down the wall,
well, that's an obvious end of the world type event, you know,
apocalyptic type thing. The wall as massive structure
comes down and evil pours through.
The quote, as Shea read earlier, I meant to refer to the the
powers of the night will pour through a hole in the sky, the
powers of the night. Like you could absolutely call
the others powers of the night, right?
They only come at night. And so that's very fitting.
So that pouring through a hole in the sky could be taken as a
parallel to pouring through a break in the wall.
So the horn is just one of many portents of many in a Song of
Ice and Fire that shows the return of magic.
It's something that gets brought up a lot in the early books,
like Corin Halfan saying the trees have eyes again, Old Nan
saying what she says, OSHA saying what she says.
There's lots of these things, right?
They come up all over the place and that's pretty important.
Now, just as an aside, it's not as direct here, but I wanted to
mention it. Odin is also associated with the
Wild Hunt. The Wild Hunt isn't really a
Norse thing, kind of is, but it's really more of a Celtic
origin thing. But it's been adopted by a lot
of different mythologies or been associated with and it's a it's
a procession of the dead, which you could see that as something
other like they're leading the dead, you know, in a procession
through that any and anyone that's caught up in it is forced
to join them, which is it's very much like the others.
So at least one person in a song of Ice and fire sees the horn of
winter, the horn of Jorman. If if they're the same thing as
an artifact that would do more than Porten doom or the onset of
a long night, it would help 'cause it quote the.
Horn of Jorman Melisandre said no.
Call it the Horn of Darkness. If the wall falls, night falls
as well. The long night that never ends.
It must not happen, will not happen.
The Lord of Light has seen his children in their peril and sent
a champion to them. Azor Ahai reborn since we.
Don't know how all this turns out.
We don't know if trying to fulfill the prophecy like Odin
did and ended up making it happen, trying to avoid it and
making it happen. If Melisandre, if anyone is
guilty of that, it might be her of, of trying to make it happen
and actually contributing to it, but maybe not.
Maybe there's somebody else. Maybe we'll find out that
somebody kicked it off a while ago.
We don't know that, you know, we just haven't learned that yet.
So that is something that we can maybe think about later when we
have more information, but it seems like it's it's going to
connect even more when we when we get there thimble winter.
That means mighty winter. It's specifically 3 successive
winters without a summer. Specifically, a quote that says
black become the sun's beams in the summers that follow weathers
are treacherous, which is artificial sounding like the
others. Bringing it now funny, Fimble
Winter. There is of course, a black
metal band called Fimble Winter. Of course there is, right?
But Can you imagine being that band?
You're like, let's call ourselves Fimble Winter.
Another guy in the band's like, come on, that name's got to be
taken already. Nope, it was not, at least for
them, the one group that got it. So it has to be understood that
a mighty winter, a devastating winter is scarier to
Scandinavians and other people who live on the extremes because
they're barely making it. So if things get a little worse,
they can't make it anymore. That scraping out a living on
the extremes of society or extremes of climate, all of a
sudden you can't do that anymore.
It only needs to be a little bit colder to get rid of whatever
little bit of growth, little bit of sustaining life
sustainability that exists in this area is going to go, it's
going to be gone because it's a little bit colder.
That's all it takes. So of course, a culture that is
associated with that, that deals with that, that has that hanging
over their head at any time, it's going to be a great
concern. It's going to be a part of their
myths, their traditions, their everything.
It's connected to all of it because it's so vitally
important and to their society, to their existence.
Like think of a place like, I don't know the the tropics.
If it gets a little bit colder there, that does affect things.
Certain plants may not survive any anymore, but others will
replace it. There's still it's still a
fertile area, but it's still not super cold.
It's still warm enough to support life.
But again, in those areas where it's.
Barely warm enough to. Support life.
It gets a little bit colder. That's it.
If it gets a lot colder, well, I mean, it's just that much worse.
So this adds up to an event that's just scarier to imagine
than it would be elsewhere if you're a Persian.
And the Persians will come up a lot in this episodes.
Surprisingly, Iranians and the people of that area, they live
in deserts and steppes. They've in dry areas.
So their equivalence would be like a heat storm or
overwhelming heat, something like the the endless heat, you
know, fimble summer, something like that.
So to them, night actually has a positive association because
that's when it's not so hot. You know, they know darkness and
cold, but it's not nearly as a concern to them as heat.
The heat's the bigger worry for them.
So night even has a positive element to it.
So even that's completely flipped, Right.
And in Scandinavia, you're like, no, night is when it's just we
can barely get through this. We need fires, we need furs, you
know. Yeah, it's totally, totally
different views. So this is, it's important to
consider cultural relativity here.
And there's, there's a lot of that in this episode too.
And this is very similar to the North, right?
The North isn't all about thinking about the heat and
desert. They don't care about that.
All their cultural touchstones, all their mythology is about the
long night winters. It's all wrapped up in that.
And Dorn, though that's more like the Persians, the example
that we just gave, they're familiar with cold, but it's the
desert that defines their existence, like a Blackstone.
The Bloodstone Emperor famously worshipped a Blackstone that
fell from the sky instead of the traditional gods of his people,
whoever they were. Well, it would be the Maiden of
Light and the Lion of Night probably 'cause that's who
founded the the Gemstone Emperor dynasty.
And that is 1 tale of how the long Night started, one of many
that were given. And it's followed by torture,
the dark arts, necromancy, he enslaved his own people,
cannibalism, bestiality, a smorgasbord of the absolute
worst human behavior which emerges during the worst times.
Here's the Ragnarok equivalent of that quote.
Brothers will fight and kill each other.
Sisters, children will defile kinship.
It is harsh in the world. Whoredom rife An axe age, a
sword age Shields a riven a wind age, a wolf age.
Before the world goes headlong, no man will have mercy on
another. Now, to be clear, these quotes
are coming from a vulva, which is a rough word to be saying.
It's that's what it's the Norse word for seer.
Seer S Odin is speaking to this CRS.
I'll just say CRS and this is what she's telling him.
These are the words of that Cirrus telling Odin about
Ragnarok. Now of course, this is
translated and the translation requires some translation.
Let's look at it line by line to in order to point out how
similar it is to the case of the Bloodstone Emperor and other
similar ones. Brothers will fight and kill
each other. That's a pretty straightforward
metaphor for civil war or civil strife.
Sister's children will defile kinship.
That means incest. Resources are scarce, it's harsh
in the world whoredom rife, an axe age, a sword age.
It's people live only just like they're lust.
People do not see a future. There's no outlook, there's no
positive outlook. So it's just enjoy what you can
while you're alive, you know, fulfill your basest needs.
There is no civilization. Armies clash over limited
resources, which is the axe age. Swordage Shields a ribbon bit,
but in that only serves to quicken the downfall of society.
A wind age a wolf age humans behave increasingly like
predatory animals or not predatory animals who get preyed
on the no man will have mercy on another.
That's basically every man for himself kindness, compassion,
empathy. They're gone.
The most powerful positive human emotions are nowhere to be
found. They're they're a memory.
If that right, they're like who could have time for that?
You know, you're living through all that, like compassion, like
when that sounds so foreign empathy.
I can't, I could barely get by myself.
You know, I'm, I died almost three times last month.
Like, I don't have time for that.
I don't have, I don't have the ability to help other people.
Sad, right? Just so much of it's gone.
But this is not the end yet. That's building up to the end.
This is all a prelude to Ragnarok.
These things are happening to foreshadow it.
And then it comes. Christina says the cadence of
that, of these quotes from the CRS are similar to the Long
Night tales, right? So we'll, when we come back to
the Long Night, we'll get those quotes.
So let's have that Bloodstone Emperor quote in full.
The rest of it, which reflects on this almost exactly.
The time scale's a little different, but the point is the
same. I'm sure you'll get it quote.
The Jade Emperor. The Tourmaline Emperor, The Onyx
Emperor, The Topaz Emperor, and the Opal Emperor followed in
turn, each reigning for centuries.
Yet every rain was shorter and more troubled than the one
preceding it. Four wild men and baleful beasts
pressed at the borders of the Great Empire.
Lesser kings grew prideful and rebellious, and the common
people gave themselves over to avarice, envy, lust, murder,
incest, gluttony, and slaw basically.
A modified version of the Seven Deadly Sins.
There, There were seven of them exactly.
And this is a fitting parallel because the point is the same in
all these conditions with regard to humanity's fate, both before
and after Ragnarok or the Long Night.
When conditions are at the worst, people are at their
worst. They become capable of things
they would never have done. And those who are already
capable of doing the worst, you know, the psychopaths that exist
among us, well, it's like their time.
It's the brief time, because this is never going to last.
The end of the world is a good time to exist if you're a
murderous psycho because you never had that long anyway.
If you're going to go about murdering people, like, how long
are you going to do that? How long will you live if you're
doing that? But at a time like this, you
might get away with it for a while.
It's one of the best arguments to having the civilization in
the 1st place. Keep people like that in line.
You know, this is a fantastical thing, but societal breakdown, I
mean it, it really happened. Societal breakdowns have
happened all over the place in the real world.
So I love that description there.
It's not Westeros, but that's the point.
It's these things happened all around the globe.
Westeros was hit the hardest 'cause that's where the others
came. But the whole world had this
long winter, these darkness and. In the case of the gemstone
emperors, it was a much slower decline, or at least the the
legends tell us it was a slower decline.
Maybe each emperor didn't actually reign for centuries, or
maybe those were dynasties rather than individual rulers.
Regardless, those people descended from gods the maiden
made of light in the Lion of Night and ended up like this.
You know, they declined. It's like the beginning of their
cycle was the maiden made of light in the light of night,
forming the gods that was their creation, and this is them near
the end of that. And it is what happened because
this was pre the Long Night. This happened before the Long
Night and after it. Well, the Green Empire of the
Dawn wasn't even a thing after the Long Night, was it?
Maybe a portion of it survived in ETET might be like the
offshoot of it. Which makes sense.
The entire thing wouldn't be wiped out, right?
But it was a big reset, a complete start over with just
some few bits and pieces leftover from the previous.
A survival mechanism amongst people in times like this is
banded together, like community small, community small.
Just you need to help each other.
Not because it's a sympathetic thing.
It's not about sympathy necessarily, although it can be.
It's about we're not going to make it with without, without
helping each other. Like we need to divide up the
labor like I do this, you go chop wood, you go do that.
We we all need to help each other or none of it.
We can't survive individually. They're just, there's just no
basis for that. There's no markets to buy
things. There's no people to trade with.
You would just everybody's just back to basic subsistence.
You got to go fishing on your own, you got to go hunting on
your own. You got to make your own weapons
unless you can steal them, but there's nowhere to buy them
anymore for the most part. It's just everything's falling
apart. So rough, huh?
Final battle. Here's what actually happens in
the climax of Ragnarok. The actual battle part.
This comes from again, Poetic Edda, the Voluspa.
Again, this same CRS tells Odin quote it.
Sates itself on the lifeblood of fated men.
Paints red the powers. Homes with Crimson, gore, black.
Become the sun's beams in the summers that follow weathers all
treacherous. Do you still seek to know?
And what? Do you still seek to know That's
like the seer is saying, Are you sure you want to know the future
'cause you it's going to mess you up, you might self fulfill
it or whatever. The lifeblood of fated men,
Christina says that's men who are fated to die this way.
The the Vikings had a big thing for fate.
Fate was a understood often to be set woven by the norms,
right? So you can't really change it,
which is similar to this concept of Ragnarok's going to happen.
You can't stop it. And if you try to stop it,
you'll only make it happen sooner.
So after this, the beginning, that's the the opening quote,
but the actual kick off of Ragnarok is you have 3 Roosters
crowing. Remember before I said Heimdall
blows his horn, that's followed by three Roosters crowing.
So there's your three, right? The three horn blasts and the,
the Roosters are Crimson, gold and soot red.
So it's kind of like Crimson, gold and black.
And this is even cooler of a parallel if you think about it,
because yeah, the Night's Watch, they're crows, so they're also
burnt Roosters. Roosters crowing, crowing, 3
horn blasts. It's all very wrapped up
together. And we referenced this before,
but it bears repeating. Black become the sun's beams.
No light at all. Nope.
Just constant night. Straightforward, right?
Next up, a giant named Egg Fair sits and plays his harp
cheerfully, like to. He's like a Caligula of sorts.
Like. Or is it Nero?
Yeah, Nero. The one that fiddled on the roof
while Rome burns. That didn't really happen, but
it's a surviving, you know, image that works to be a
parallel here. Then the wolf Garmier, which is
probably Fenrir, but that's it's not my business to parse that.
We'll just say this giant wolf breaks his chains and escapes.
The sons of Mim are in play. That the one we talked about
with the wellspring earlier, Heimdall again blows that horn.
Odin talks to Mim's head and these prophecy things happen.
The tree, the world Tree itself shudders and groans.
So the whole fabric of existence shakes.
That's a big deal, right? Let's take the whole universe
shaking. A giant named Herm leads the
giants against the gods. He emerges leading this host of
giants and whoa, that's a big deal, right?
Yorman Gander writhes and separates himself.
Yorman Gander is the world serpent that surrounds the whole
globe, and he's the he's a symbol of Uroboros, a serpent
biting its own tail. At the point of Ragnarok, he
lets go of his own tail, which messes up the water situation
around the earth and causes tidal waves.
So there's one of your natural does that one of many natural
disasters, the wind, which is personified in Norse myth as a
yotun shaped like an eagle. A yotun's sort of like a giant,
but not any like I said, it's confusing.
He goes wild. So the that means the wind goes
wild. The nail ship sails.
This is Nagle far. This is creepy as hell.
The nail ship. You'd be like what?
What nails like from hammers and no human fingernails and
toenails. It's a ship entirely made out of
finger and toenails from the slain.
This sails. It's like a portent of doom.
I guess our closest parallel to that is is you're on silence.
Perhaps something like that. One of the worst ships that's
ever sailed, bringing some of the worst outcomes.
But the land of the Yoton is ready for a fight as well.
The gods are in council trying to decide what to do.
Search her. The fire giant fire Yoton
advances with a flaming sword as bright as the sun.
Hello, Lightbringer. Lightbringer's described as
bright as the sun a couple of times and it's obviously a
flaming sword. There's there's earthquakes as
well, although that was probably already covered with the
Jigrazil shuttering and Yorman gander writing.
But it's you know, let's clarify that.
And then the battle itself. Odin is swallowed whole by
Fenrir Frig. His wife is stricken by her
quote. Second sorrow, which reminds me
a bit of the second quarrel of Jaharis and Alison.
The first sorrow was the death of Frigg's son and Alison and
Jaharis quarreled over the succession after the death of
their first son. That was the first quarrel.
So that is loose parallel there. Vidar, son of Odin kills Fenrir
in revenge for Odin getting killed.
Now you got to kill that rampaging wolf no matter what,
but fittingly done by a son of Odin.
Thor fights Yorman ganders like whoa.
Thor fights the world serpent like what a thing to take on.
Thor actually wins too, like whoa.
But he dies. He takes 9 steps after winning
and then collapses from its venom. 9 is very important in
Norse mythology. And guess how many crown points
were on Rob's crown of the N 9? That's right.
Also you can sort of see this is a very loose symbology for
Robert and Rhaegar. Robert fighting Rhaegar.
Rhaegar is the world serpent, the one they are the ones that
had the world encircled because that's the the current dynasty
in power. And Robert is a big old
warhammer, right, That's Thor. Thor.
What's weird about Thor is he has that giant hammer.
He fights with warhammers and hammers were not weapons used by
Norsemen in battle. So it's a little, it's kind of a
kind of a quirk there. And then we have Robert's two
adult sons are right, Gendry and Edric.
Storm and Thor's two sons survive, which is, well,
Robert's dead. He's got those two sons.
Yeah. Freyr loses to Sirt, the fire
giant guy. And then shortly after, that's
pretty much all the fights. There's a few, probably some
more that just aren't described. But at the end of Ragnarok, the
world is engulfed in flame. The sun turns black, which maybe
kind of already happened. It's it's kind of, you know,
repeats itself, I guess. The earth sinks below the sea.
The stars vanish. Steam rises to cover all of
existence, of which there is what what existence is even left
at that point. So I guess we just have a world
of steam. And the dragon need hog flies
with corpses in its jaws. The dragon is something of a
herald of doom, or perhaps marking a transition point
between two epochs. Danny's Dragons are doing
something similar here. They came back, the Dragons came
back just in time to be part of this world changing event, this
ushering in of a new era perhaps.
And they're going to play a role in that.
So after Ragnarok, a new world emerges from the ashes.
The gods meet at a place called Ethavol, which is translates
loosely as a splendor plane. The gods meet there in the
beginning of the cycle too way, you know, as the last Ragnarok
ended, the beginning of the world happened.
They did this too. So they're doing it again.
This most recent Ragnarok. And the first one wouldn't have
been called Ragnarok, but it would have been a similar world
ending thing that kicked off the cycle that this newest Ragnarok
represents the end of. So those they meet and build
shrines and temples and forges and tools.
It's a whole new beginning, right?
And what, by the way, that's an, as an aside, a peculiar quirk of
Norse mythology, Norse gods, they're the only gods in any
pantheon we know of that build their own temples to worship
what, though? We have no idea.
So they're worshipping something even higher.
They're worshiping each other. They worship themselves.
It's so unusual, isn't it? No other myth cycle has anything
like that or, or anything that is so strict and complete like
that. So they meet again after
Ragnarok and build again, new city, all that.
So it's got a bit of an Isle of Faces vibe during the Pact,
right? The Pact comes after both
humanity and the children have torn each other to shreds in
endless warfare. Of course, the Long Night hasn't
happened yet by the time of the Pact.
The Long Night comes probably in part because of the breaking of
the Pact. That's not entirely sure.
But regardless, this works really well as a meeting of the
survivors to decide how to live from now on, how to rebuild the
world, and and what new rules we're going to live under.
And what's our new? What are our new principles?
What are our new cultural anchors?
What do we care about most? What are we going to make
traditional? What are we going to say?
Who are our new gods? What are we going to call them?
You know, things like that. Ragnarok itself, as we
described, you may not have caught it.
It begins in ice and ends in fire.
The rimble winter starts it and it ends with the world aflame.
And everything we know about it comes from poems, song form a
song of ice and fire. So it isn't an end of the world
so much as the end of an era and the beginning of a new world.
But the transition, of course, is apocalyptic.
The human survivors of Ragnarok will live in what is effectively
a new world. The new world, whatever it looks
like, won't be so bad for the new gods.
The very few who survived cause most of the gods die.
But the new gods are like, well, we're building a new, we get to
make a whole new world, you know?
But the humans that are that transition from this are living
in a desolate world where eking out a living eking out a
survival is extremely desperate. And this is going to be similar
to the long night, right? The few people who survived the
Long night, maybe it's more than a few, but whatever.
The survivors of the Long Night have to rebuild the world anew.
The others did so much damage to what we're told.
They overran the the seven kingdoms.
Well, there weren't 7 the 100 kingdoms back then and did so
much devastation. So it would have been a a long
rebuild. And yeah, I mean, the great evil
or apocalypse is over, but the rebuilding is a long process.
The sun isn't back right away. Even so, yeah, it gots the sun
gets darker during fimble winter, then it it's gone during
the final batter. And then at some point it comes
back. It's rebirth.
In fact, in North mythology, it's it's sometimes expressed as
the sun that went away. The one that got destroyed gave
birth to a new sun, even though it's a daughter.
In Norse mythology, the sun is female, which is unusual
considering most sun personifications are male,
overwhelmingly in world mythologies, and the moon is
usually female. The Norse flipped it.
That's cool. It's different another.
This is yet another thing that's different about their mythology
that that you can't find parallels anywhere else.
I think it's part of because it's newer, you know, it came
along so much later than a lot of these other religions did,
and in conditions that are so unique and different than any of
these other cultures developed, developed in.
Given that, it's easy to see why histories of such times are
rarely kept. Like, you can't eat, you have
barely enough food, There's no sunlight.
Who's writing things down? People might not even remember
how to write. That stuff gets lost.
Hence maybe some ruins that we can't even read in Westeros, not
even, I'm not even talking about the real world ruins that we
mostly can read even if we've lost some of the context.
So yeah, like, literally, the language that was spoken might
be lost, let alone having histories of what happened.
So the only memory of these things is through human memory
of telling the stories, of passing it down from 1 to
another. And as we know, when you pass
something down for countless generations, of course it gets
exaggerated, pumped up a bit more fantastical.
And in Westeros, making it more fantastical isn't necessarily
going to lose its credibility because some of that fantastical
nature can be real. Like you can believe that some
of those things happened. It's not.
We don't have to believe that Thor really fought Yorman
Gander, but Westerosi can't dismiss that.
And you have the similar thing where, yeah, the stories aren't
100% accurate and they probably weren't 100% accurate in the 1st
place. The people who were telling the
original stories, they couldn't interpret everything happening
around them. They had the POV of someone
living in the 6th century and all the knowledge that a person
in the 6th century would have, which is to say they, they don't
think of it as Norse mythology. It's just what is, it's just
their basic belief system. There's no challenging it.
There's no, what if there is no ode?
And what if there is no, no one's doing that.
It's just that that's like challenging the notion of, of
air, of water being wet. You know, it's just too
self-evident. We don't think that way
obviously, but you have to put yourself in their shoes.
You kind of got to do things like that.
What's kind of ironic about this too, is Ragnarok is more
fantastical than the Long Night, right?
It's George toned it down in a lot of ways.
There's no wolf going to eat the sun in his myths, but that's
what happens in Ragnarok, a wolf eating the whole sun.
What's a metaphor for that? What's the deep symbolic meaning
behind wolves eating the sun and the moon, really?
And Odin, you could get really deep.
Would it be like the Starks? They caused it all.
They're the ones who caused the others.
It's their fault. Hey, maybe, maybe.
But still, that's higher fantasy than White Walkers.
And this is how we should view the Long Night.
It's it's not recorded, it's remembered.
And the stuff that is written down, there is some things
written down, but it was written down way later.
That's also true for Norse myth. So much of what's written down
about Norse mythology, Norse culture, Norse history was
written down way after the fact, way later.
So it's all questionable. Well, not all.
A lot of it's questionable. And that's why scholars will
never stop researching and debating and having a great time
with it. George is crafting something
passed down from eons ago. So it has to go through that
same rigmarole, that same human cycle of well, we forgot a lot
of it. We don't remember some of it.
We some of it's been chained. We think we remember some of it,
but it's it's we're wrong about that, but we don't know we're
wrong about that. And in George's case, the time
scale is way longer, so more would be forgotten.
More would be mythologized. Mythologized, which I didn't
know was a word until I typed this episode out.
And yes, it is a word. So yeah.
Because in George's case, what is it?
8004 thousand to 8000 years or 46000?
Sorry, 6000 to 8000 years is a long night.
Apparently was the Norse Viking Age began 1500 years ago.
I guess technically they never did have their Ragnarok.
They only began in a Ragnarok. They never actually had one
right then. It never the end of the world
never came for them. Hey, I see, let's talk about
cultural memory. It's like societal karma again,
that nature nurture concept I talked about at the beginning.
So because they believe the world will end in a Ragnarok and
it's all a cycle, that again, that's what they think it
started with. It started like a Ragnarok,
something like that. It would have similar quality.
The beginning will have similar, and it's a complete reset.
The sun, the stars, the moon, gone, replaced with similar
versions of those, but not the same.
This is a kind of a neat thing that we can apply to A Song of
Ice and Fire, because if it's a cycle, well, think of a comet.
A comet goes in a very long. Well, it can go in a very long
cycle. Did you all know that comets can
have cycles as long as like a million or more years?
Obviously, that's outside of the span of human tracking.
You know, we're going to wait for that to come back around
again. Yeah, let me wait.
I'll be be waiting a while. Will you have some that, you
know, Haley's comet is like 104 years, something like that.
Some I don't remember exactly, but it's barely in the range of
of human lifespans enough to be written down and remembered by
other people. And of course, the red comet is
a big preview or omen, whatever your choice of words.
All of the above for the magic returning to the world, Dragons
returning to the world, the kicking off of a new age of
heroes, which climaxes with a a new long night or an attempt at
a new long night. That's kind of a reason why
comets are so great for myth and fantasy 'cause they represent
cycles and and changing of an era, things like that.
And it's the one thing that everyone on the globe can see.
There's no unifying message on a planet in a medieval setting or
no low tech setting. How does everybody get the
message? Well, celestial events, that's
the really the only option. So at the end of each cycle is a
Ragnarok. We said something like a
Ragnarok at the end of each cycle.
Here is a long night. We're having it come back again.
It's the reset. And maybe it's the, a good
example is the flood myths on the real world and the real
world, there's so many of them, right?
So many flood myths that are out there.
So many different cultures have one that it's LED people to
believe that there's something to it, right?
Like, well, what flood hit all these people at once?
Why do they all remember a flood?
Well, there would have, if it really happened, there would
have been survivors of that flood era and they would have
told their children who would have told their, it's too big of
a story to not pass down. It's one of the most exciting
things that ever happened in their lives.
It's terrible. Exciting doesn't mean good but,
and especially in this case, but it's impossible to forget
traumatizing, memorable as all the things.
So it won't be the same. Like there won't be Odin won't
be swallowed by Fenrir all over again, right?
But there will be, you know, an end to the sun and moon and the
celestial things. Odin won't even be called Odin.
Maybe he's got another name, or maybe he's just some other
being, or maybe he's the descendant of the original Odin
that survived the Ragnarok. We know this.
Odin didn't because he was eaten by Fenrir.
Christina adds that myth isn't just about cultural memory.
But that is a lot of that is a lot of where it gets well put
down. Recorded memory, memorized,
remembered. It's also about emphasizing
cultural values. You see within the stories what
matters, who are the heroes, who are the villains.
A good example it within just regular Norse history.
By looking at stories, we can see that berserkers, right?
You all have heard of berserkers.
You've seen them on TV. There's a it's a very debated
thing, like what their whole deal was.
They're not even sure what the word berserker means.
They're close to it. I think they think it means bear
shirt. But what does that mean Bear
like it literally could the same conundrum with English comes up
with that because they mean bear like bear shirt like bear skin
or bear shirt like the skin of a bear.
The same problem comes up in in Norse with that.
That's funny. So berserkers in the sagas are
almost always bad guys. That tells you that berserkers
weren't really considered good guys in, you know, in regular
times either. I was like, why would they all
be bad guys in the stories if they're usually good guys in
real life? That doesn't make much sense,
does it? So that's a big deal.
Now, something we'll expand on in another time is the idea of
guest right. We've talked about guest right
and how that's a big deal in Norse mythology as well.
Doesn't super relate to this, but I wanted to drop it just for
a minute. So to set it up for a future
time. Odin was big on it.
He would sneak around and one of his many disguises and just test
people. He'd just like show up, be like,
how do they treat me? You know they're going to host
me. Well, they're going to, they're
going to let me sit by their fire.
They're going to give me some food, let me sleep there.
Or are they going to be jerks about it and and violate
cultural norms because it is normal?
You should, according to their value system, you should let the
person in, give them shelter, give them food, treat them well
and not, you know, bring murder upon your host or your guest or
any of that stuff. Is is in there too.
Guest, right. Very big deal.
Then our. So, yeah, it's something to
delve deeper into another time. It doesn't have a whole lot to
do with the long night, but it's a good example of something that
might have been forgotten When when culture resets, there might
be a cultural memory of guest stripe being important.
Because it was so important, people might stick to it, but it
might have been forgotten. It might have been overdone.
There might have been too many red weddings for people to care
anymore. You know, like, well, that
that's out, that's clearly not a value.
You can't honestly say that's a value when people keep flouting
it and going directly against it.
But if it's stuck, it might be something that makes it through
the apocalypse to the other side.
It might look a little different on the other side, but the seed
of it's important to treat guests well matters.
And you can see why too, because it's a, it's a, it's a harsh
landscape to live in. People need to have need to know
that if you're in dire straits, you can find help at a nearby
home. And that needs to be everyone
needs to be on that same page. So we actually do have a list of
survivors of Ragnarok, like the the prophetess is pretty
specific. Vidar and Valley are both sons
of Odin and they survive. Valley is the son of Odin with a
giant, which is kind of a cool idea when we've thought about
that in Westeros with the possibility of human giant
mixing of someone who's half giant.
Thor has two sons that survive also Modi and Magny and they're
Modi means wrath and Magny means mighty.
So they're like in some interpretations they are aspects
of Thor 'cause he is wrathful and mighty.
Thor himself is the son of Odin, and Thor's mother was Yoro, the
personification of Earth. Whoa.
That's quite a mother to have. But Thor himself, of course,
does not survive. Baldur and Hodor.
Hodor. Yeah, also both sons of Odin.
They return. Well, Hodor emerges.
Baldur is resurrected for some reason 'cause he was killed long
before. He's the one of the sorrows, if
I remember correctly. But he comes back.
Now Hodor is blind, which is interesting, and I wonder about
the parallel to Hodor and Hodor. More on that in a little bit.
Let's stick with these survivors.
There's two humans who survive. They're leaf and Leaf Rassier.
Leaf is female and leaf Rassier is male.
They're basically the Norse Eve and Adam and Eve or even Adam,
or better yet, they're ask an embola, ash and Elm, because the
Norse believe that the first two people were carved from an ash
tree and an Elm tree. And ash was the guy, Elm was the
girl. There's actually a little bit of
a debate about the girl part, but whatever, outside of my
knowledge, this is just what I read.
And so, yeah, so that's that's another thing that you kind of
think about is like the first people, they the Norse think of
people as emerging from trees, which you could, I don't have to
explain that to see a parallel to A Song of Ice and Fire and
the where woods and heart trees, right?
They've got faces on them. You know, there's, there's brand
speaks through a tree. Other screens here speak through
trees. So there's, there's the idea
that there's people in there is well supported.
It's just not, they're not literal people, but they are the
spirits or souls or people or in, in Brand's case, it is a
literal person speaking through the tree.
So this is interpreted a couple different ways.
Maybe they survived Ragnarok by hiding within Idrijazil, within
the tree, that tree, the world Tree, that'd be the safe spot.
That's not actually mentioned in Ragnarok.
Adrijazil is only mentioned as maybe shaking and that's it.
Otherwise it doesn't come up. So that's interesting.
It could also mean though that they were re carved.
That's first. This next set of humans also
emerge from a tree. They're also people that turned
into trees that turned into people just like the the last
time. Now at the beginning of the
cycle here, Odin and his two brothers were there.
They're the bloody murderers who kill this giant and create the
world from it. It's kind of weird, but very
bloody. So that kind of tells you that
Odin didn't survive. He was there at the beginning of
this one. He must have survived the
previous Ragnarok, made it through this second one.
He didn't, but his sons did. So it's like Odin passed his
deity DNA down through the cycle here.
So his descendants, God like descendants exist, you know,
like a king passing the crown and his realm to his sons in
turn. A reign that spends time on a
godly scale. Maybe like the the gemstone
emperors in their centuries at a time.
Something like that. Time passes differently for the
gods, they perceive it differently.
The equivalent of a of a human generation or an era could be to
them's a lot shorter. Maybe a Ragnarok.
The cycle between Ragnarok's is to them roughly equivalent to a
generation for humans. Something like that.
Societal reset. I don't think Westeros will be
as stricken as Ragnarok. As we said, we don't need a
parallel for a pair of men and women survivors for that reason.
And now, other than what is retained through cultural
memory, you know, certain values, certain things will be
retained. There's a a reset, for lack of a
better word, entirely new social values, codes of ethics, new
religions and everything that goes with that.
Or maybe those religions are offshoots of previously existing
ones. But you got to redefine things.
You got new gods, you got new values.
You're in an entirely different environment.
The the gods of pre Ragnarok were built on a a society and
whose origin is different than the origin these people are
going through. There's there's similarities,
but it's definitely not the same.
And these things will be radically different in some
cases and very similar in others.
OK, let's look about incest for a second.
In this case, like nearly every culture that's ever existed has
some kind of shunning of it. But there's absolutely
exceptions. Lots of them, really.
Maybe I shouldn't have said nearly every, but there's just a
lot. There's there's enough
exceptions to make it seem like a lot, but what you consider a
lot in terms of incest may vary. And what counts as incest varies
in different societies. Is it first cousins in Westeros?
They don't really consider that incest.
Tywin and Joanna, Ned and and Brand and or Ned and Brandon and
Liana and Benjin's parents, Ricard and Liara, they were
first cousins too. And they don't think about that
as instance. Obviously the Targaryen version,
which is a lot closer, that is considered incest.
So do they really need to rethink that when the world
restarts? Yeah, they do.
But they'll usually arrive at the same conclusion because
there's a genetic component to it.
If you do that, your babies come out bad.
They usually figure that out. They don't always though,
because you know, in the amongst the nobility, you know, the
rules are different, etcetera. Yeah, so we can reconstruct it
now using archaeology and DNA. But another thing forgotten or
barely remembered will be where they migrated from.
People didn't just appear in Scandinavia right in beginning
of human history. It happened around a few
different river areas the most the cradles of civilization
where people came from. People knew humans when we were
infant as a species. We weren't rushing off to the
coldest regions to go live. That was something that came
later when, you know, other when people started to spread out
more and they needed more and more space to live.
People eventually say, hey, there's land up there.
It's going to be hard to live there, but we can do it.
So Scandinavians after in the Viking age, after the horrors of
the 6th century that we'll get deeper into later, they might
not know where they came from. They know they came maybe from
the South or maybe even from the east, which is a very
interesting quirk of Scandinavians.
They've some of them, some of their culture might actually
originate from the Far East, meaning like Indo Europe rather
than Europe itself. So like, OK, so an 800 AD, this
is an era during the Viking Age. They didn't probably know that
most of their ancestors came from what's now Germany.
Some of them might have known that, or they may have had an
inkling of it. They might have been able to
look at each other and see some physical similarities here, some
similarities in the language. They they both worship Odin,
different names for him. But there's things that would be
like that's similar, but they wouldn't necessarily know
exactly, right? They would have a basis for
that. Most people are like that.
You know, if you go back far enough and you don't know where
you came from, you can track your ancestry for quite a while.
But you eventually you reach a point where you're like, well, I
don't know what's beyond that. You, you, you don't get back to
the beginning. You don't get all the way back
to Adam and Eve. Some folks, some cultures have
done a really good job in the real world of keeping records,
like Jewish and Chinese, for example.
They have impressive records, but obviously those don't go
back all the way either. Compare that to the first men.
They migrated from Essos across the land bridge that no longer
exists. They know they came across from
the land bridge, that is fairly common knowledge in Westeros.
But they don't know where in Essos they came from.
Not a clue. Maybe they did at some point,
but that is long ago lost. The names of those people are
gone. Probably they don't exist
anymore. Whatever those cultures were
named, whatever towns and cities, maybe even empires long
gone. The names wouldn't mean anything
even if they knew them. This is of course maybe
shouldn't need doesn't need to be said.
But I'll, I'll say it. Just dozens if not hundreds of
different ethnic groups. Partly depends on what you
define an ethnic group as. But these can't even be defined
because they've all merged into one so long ago that until
Westeros has DNA, they won't be able to track that back when
they do get DNA testing, Oh boy, does that open things up.
Because in our world, man, we can do some amazing things that
once we get to the science section of this, we'll talk
about that. So think about this from the
great Empire, the dawn or Valyria, their perspective,
having a long night. Valyria came after the long
night, but just imagine that they didn't imagine that they
lived through it. Imagine they survived it or the
Great Empire. Imagine the great empire.
The dawn wasn't toppled by the long night.
There isn't a real world example of that.
From the Scandinavian perspective, Ragnarok happened
the pre Ragnarok that formed their world as it is in the 8th,
6th, 7th, 8th centuries, whatever Rome existed before
that and after that. And they knew that Rome would be
a common byword, no one, they wouldn't have forgotten it
'cause it still exists. But it's changed a lot.
The Rome that existed before the 6th century versus after these
calamitous events, it changed a lot, right?
The, it went from the, the, the Western Roman Empire fell
entirely. It didn't wasn't destroyed, but
it just shrunk down to a small, not very influential polity.
Whereas the Eastern Roman Empire became the Byzantine Empire,
which would have had a lot of influence on Scandinavia as the
biggest nearby European power, global power to their
perspective. But it's not that nearby.
They're not bordered, right? There's a lot of space between
them, the Byzantines on the Mediterranean and, you know, and
it's the Norse are way the heck up in Scandinavia.
But in later centuries, the Byzantine Empire started hiring
them. Some of the best and most
adventurous Norse warriors and some Saxons were hired as part
of the Virangian guard, who were imperial guards.
One example is Harold Hardrada, who, by the way, is a lot like
King Hardwin. Hardwin whore, AKA Hardhand.
Yeah. Hardrada hard hand, right?
He's the Conqueror of the Riverlands.
So the Norse peoples don't know where they came from, but they
know that there's some consistency in the world because
Rome exists before and after there's so at least something
they can point to that existed prior to the collapse of the
world as they know it. And that's interesting.
They would have local legends about Rome and they might also
have that about China. And that might reach them from
the Far East. You know, it's not as far as
it's farther away, but it's another like great power that
existed for a really long time that would have still been
there. You know, the dynasty names
would have changed. But it's still China, right?
Still the same culture, same people to some extent.
This was, as I said at the beginning of the episode, our
Patreon Topics moot #12 episode. You can join us on Patreon and
be a part of the choosing process, the selection process
for picking episodes we do at the beginning of the year around
February, March runs for a few weeks.
We do tournaments of polls, you know, poll style tournaments,
sort of like a elimination style top three advance, that kind of
thing. And it's super fun.
It gives me an opportunity to think about a wide variety of
topics and for you to let us know which kind of things you'd
like the most. We get a lot out of that.
We we helps us understand what types of topics are most
interesting to you as well when we look at these categories.
So that on top of the fact that we just rely on you all to exist
in the 1st place, not just with your help and topic selections,
we want to make our Patreon worthwhile.
We want it to be something that you can feel like you're
supporting us, but we want to give something back to.
And so that's one thing you get is the voting rights.
And at higher levels, you get multiple votes, but you also can
get access to the shout outs, script notes, and like you could
be looking at this script later if you were the $10 level, for
example. And of course, the biggest draw
most likely is our bonus episodes.
We got a big catalog of bonus episodes available to patrons.
You could listen to all the brand chapters in our Valeritas
in a row rather than having to find them individually through
the course of Valeritas, which is basically chapter by chapter.
So we kind of did them. We did them all combined as
POV's. I share re edited that.
So that's pretty cool. You can get that as a good
little perk of being a Patreon, a patron of ours, or a member of
our Patreon. You can go to
patreon.com/history of Westeros to sign up, and we hope to see
you there. Bryson Chung says Japanese myth
has a female sun goddess, Amaterasu, and the male moon
God, Siukomi no Mikoto. Oh, that's cool.
That's when I didn't know. And the sun is on the Japanese
flag due to their imperial line claiming direct descent from the
sun goddess. Yeah.
Isn't that wild how even modern dynasties do stuff like that?
Like, yeah, we just said from the sun goddess in the year
1950. Really.
Sun goddesses are still a thing? Yeah, yeah, I guess so.
The science of Ragnarok, this is one of the most fun parts for me
because this is what makes the myth.
This was what translates it into reality.
It supports the myth through real evidence.
It shows how the myths came to be in the 1st place.
We always kind of knew that because there's always a sense
of myths contain a grain of truth or several grains of
truth. That's that's a concept well
known, especially amongst historians and anyone who is
interested in the past. But that doesn't mean you know
what those things are. You know they're there, but you
might not be able to perceive them.
Technology has opened so much of that up.
Children of Ash and Elm was written in 2020 and it's drawing
on very, very recent discoveries, things discoveries
made since 2015 or 2010. So things that have happened in
the last 10 to 15 years. Technology has moved forward in
leaps and bounds, as you all know.
You don't have to tell me like we have in the last 30 years.
We've got the Internet, we have AI, we have all these other
things that are just massive leaps forward.
So you might easily be able to extrapolate that some of that
has applied to archaeology and associated scientists,
associated sciences rather. So that's really cool.
I'm just all about this, the real green seers.
And what I mean by that is the scientists of today are figuring
out the past in a way that to me can parallel how green seers
look into the past. And to a scientist in our world,
the idea of a where would network transmitting information
is bizarre and weird and and belongs in a fantasy story.
But if the real world stuff was in this fantasy story, they
would look at it as magic. They'd be like climate isotopes,
DNA. What is that?
You know, they would sound like magic.
It would just be gobbledygook. But the fact that it would
produce repeatable results and would lead to and have
conclusions that would be provable after the fact, it
would look, it would be demonstrably accurate.
And people would be like, how does that work?
So you see both sides of it. The magic is confusing.
The science can be confusing to people who don't know about it.
But let's get into it. Strontium and oxygen isotopes in
human teeth can identify where a person spent their early years.
Whoa, right. Christina said.
Yeah, this is huge, she said. We were able to in her
professional career, we were able to use all that data to
follow a particular woman in this one example, through
several towns. They were able to trace her
movement by what's in her teeth. They found out.
They figured out where she was born and figured out where she
was dyed by her teeth. Wow, You can see why someone in
a Westerosi setting would be like magic.
That's magic. You can't.
It's like you scry something from the teeth.
It's like that's, that's magic. It's but it goes beyond that.
The enhanced ability to just identify like molecules in trash
and highly degraded material Residue.
They can figure things out from residue.
In fact, Christina says. It might be the most prolific
source of ancient data, just residue and just left behind
little particles. That alone tells them so much
because nowadays they can parse on the molecular level, right?
Christina says. So many things are just found in
trees. Like you can find the OR not
just trees, but like wooden enclosures, like a house, like a
post hole that a house was built on.
You might find charcoal down there and that charcoal you can
date. Charcoal can be dated and and
hearths, of course, for the same reason.
You can find like ashes and embers and stuff and you can
date that stuff. You can do all sorts of tests on
it to find out how old it is. And that's just fascinating.
And that brings us to some of the honing in on the events that
really eerily match the descriptions of Ragnarok.
Going a little further with this, they can look at seeds.
Seeds survive really well. Surprisingly, seeds can survive
just a centuries, if not longer, as long as they don't sprout or
get destroyed or whatever. And of course, you can do things
like a sword. There's lots of what's
interesting. There's not a lot of helmets
found in graves because helmets are just too important, too full
of metal. But there's lots of swords found
in graves, which is interesting. They can take that sword,
analyze the metal and tell you which mine it came from, like
down to the location of that mine.
Because there's just, it's just they can get down on such a
granular level that it's like a fingerprint or, I don't know, a
ballistic record where, you know, I don't know if y'all know
how Ballistics works, but you can private or detectives and
police and FBI or whatever, they can figure out exactly which gun
a bullet came from based on just no two guns are identical, you
know, so there's like a spin and the way it leaves behind.
Yeah, I don't understand it, but they can very accurately do it.
So bone and fir, of course, it can be done to those things as
well. So there's so many things that
are not leftover, but there's so many things that are.
Even if it's just in residue form or ash form.
That's crazy, right? Tree rings can pinpoint precise
years, So you can first extrapolate the year and then go
consecutively and look at each year.
So this is this year, this is 505 O 15-O2.
And certain rings are bigger than others.
And the size of the rings can tell you, like, the amount of
carbon or sunlight that was available that year.
Like, the tree didn't grow that much this particular year
because there was less light or something like that.
And that's getting us even closer to our some of our
conclusions here. A direct quote from Children of
Ash and Elm is archaeologists can excavate A sunken ship in
Denmark and determine that it was built in Ireland.
Whoa, so cool. Volcanic winters.
Here we go. This is a concept we've
discussed in several different episodes, Valyria, Hardhome,
etcetera. But this is a much different
look at it. Let's talk briefly about the
Lalia, the late antique Little Ice Age LALIA.
This was only proposed in the year 2015 and confirmed
afterwards. So you look at any history book
before 2015, they don't have this.
Not at all. And that's most of them.
That's most history books, right?
It caused as much as a 2°C drop. It started in the year 536 and
lasted as long as until 660, but the early part was by far the
worst. It was characterized by up to
three huge volcanic eruptions relatively close together.
Here's the Roman historian Procopius in 536 AD during.
This year a most dread portent took place before the sun gave
forth its light without brightness, and it seemed
exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed
were not clear. Now modern times tell us that
ice cores taken from Antarctica show sulfate deposits somewhere
around 5:36, maybe earlier, but somewhere around 5:36, which is
evidence of a dust veil, the sort of which would be which
would originate from an ash cloud from a volcano.
Tang dynasty records China speak of great cold and famine in 536
AD. Book of the later Han, same
thing. XI Ji Tongjian, same thing.
Nanxi records yellow ash like substance from the sky snow.
In August in the Middle East there was a dense dry fog
drought in Peru. The Irish Annals of Ulster wrote
of a quote failure of bread in in 536 AD.
The Irish Annals of Innisfallen wrote of quote failure of bread.
From 536 to 539 AD there was using the tree ring analysis,
there was abnormally little growth of trees in 536 and then
little again in 542. So this is a tribute to a
volcano. They don't know exactly where.
They haven't figured out where these volcanoes were.
Might have been Iceland, might have been North America.
That's a pretty wide range moving forward a year.
The legendary Battle of Kamlin, as in the final battle of the
Arthurian cycle, Arthur versus Mordred, they both die, was in
537 AD. There's a scholarly tradition
that's somewhat new that's starting to parse this together
and realize that, yeah, big old wars happened because of the
depredations. It's the Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse, conquest, war, Famine, pestilence.
Well, there's different variations, but this is
happening here, right? People are fighting over the few
resources left and it causes great big battles like the
Battle of Kaimlin, which might not have happened, but there's
more and more reason to think something like it actually did.
There may have really been a King Arthur, not at all like the
stories tell us, but there's seeds of truth in there,
probably. Let's go forward one more year.
In 538 AD, the Roman scholar and writer Cassiodorus wrote of
quote Suns rays as bluish, no shadows visible at noon, frost
during harvest, souring grapes and hardening apples.
They had to use stored food. Famine was widespread.
The seasons quote seem to be all jumbled up together and quote a
winter without storms, a spring without mildness, and a summer
without heat. Jumping forward again to 539 or
40 AD, there's one more year. Children of Ash and Elm claims
the volcano Ilopango in El Salvador was the volcano here.
So there's three volcanic eruptions we're dealing with
five, 36540 and 547. Three volcanoes.
Remember what the Norse myth said?
Remember what Ragnarok said? Three winters without a summer.
Three. I mean, 3 is a small number.
It, it's a recurring number that comes up in a lot of prophecy
and just stories in general. But three winters without a
summer, 3 volcanoes at the exact right time that the Viking Age,
that creates the Viking Age just before this big, big deal.
So yeah. So they believe Children of
Ashenelm points to the Ilopango volcano in El Salvador as the
culprit for the second eruption. That's already been disproved
though. Remember, Children of Ashenelm
was published in August 2023. Months later, in August 2020,
they a study was done that proved the Ilopango eruption
happened in 431. So it was whole century plus
before that. So sciences, you know, always
discover new things. You got to keep up with the
changes in the new information. So whatever wherever it was, it
dropped global temperatures even more.
So you got the first volcano knocks the global temperatures
down. Before things clear up, another
volcano hits. Before that clears up, another
volcano hits. And these are just massive.
So you can see how this is painting the picture that I
referred to at the beginning. One of the worst times to be
alive almost anywhere on the globe.
But again, some places are worse than others.
The places that were already the hardest to live in, the places
that already were existing on the edge of human ability to
survive, were hit the hardest. Scandinavia is a bullseye for
that concept. It's very hard to survive there.
Norway, for example, only has 3% of its entire land is farmable.
What happens if it gets a little bit colder than it goes to?
0%? Right?
Lack of sunlight destroys grass, which makes it hard to feed your
livestock, so they die off too. Historians believe that
something like half the population of Scandinavia died
out in this time. That's worse than the Black
Death, or at least about the same, and hold that thought,
too. So one common feature of
calamity like this is migrations.
People go, well, we can't live here anymore And they move and
they bump into people who live wherever they're headed and they
fight and that's bad, obviously. And it just makes things all,
makes the whole situation all worse.
So yeah, I mean, a lot of the Mediterranean wasn't hit that
hard because, you know, they could import from Africa.
They can. The Mediterranean Sea still
provided a lot of fish, but even some fishing is affected by
these kind of things because with volcanic ash in the air,
you get acid rain. That'll mess up some fish, man.
Fish don't like acid. No living thing is big on acid,
right? So I don't know.
It's, it's, it's wild. So again, thimble winter
described as three winters without a summer.
We have 3 volcanic eruptions that are chronically,
chronologically aligned with the formation of the Viking Age
Scandinavia. It's crazy super lined up.
It blows my mind. It's unclear how this happened
with the doom. Like the doom was huge, blew up
all of the whole continent. It must have been something
different volcanically, like more sinking into the sea than
shooting up in the air because there was no global cloud that
we hear of. There's no mention of that, but
there is the century of blood that followed it.
So there's definitely the long period afterwards of unrest and
cultural reset that we talked about.
Hardhome miniature version of that small scale.
But it did shoot ash into the sky.
That is an example of of the sky being dark after a volcano.
Six months, not some huge length of time, but that's a long time.
So in summary, here's a quote from historian Michael
McCormick. He said it's the beginning of
the one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year.
Crop failures, famine, plague, warp.
There's their four horsemen again, millions of deaths.
So it's not just my opinion. I mean, you can you read that
off to me And that sounds like one of the worst times to be
alive. We have historians just flat out
saying it. So take their word.
You don't have to listen to me. And we're building up to the one
that we haven't talked about yet.
Plague, right? We haven't talked about plague.
That's going to happen too, of course, because that's what they
need, right? On top of everything else,
plague got to have plague, right?
A series of natural disasters without a disease or three is
considered a dull affair. The plague of Justinian, the
first outbreak ran from roughly 541 to 549 right around the time
of that second volcano and it continued past that third
eruption. It actually continued until the
seven 50s. It lasted for a long time and in
arguably you could say it just still continued because this is
Yersinia pestis. That's the Black Death y'all,
the earliest version of it. It's still not gone by the way.
That's what I'm saying. Continued until the seven 50s.
Well, the the Black Death of Europe, the big famous one, that
was the 13th or the 14th century and it still exists now.
Well, there's still 1 to 2000 cases a year globally of the
Yersinia pestis. It's much easier to treat now,
but still it, it, it also impacts non humans.
It impacts some other mammals, which is creepy.
So yet another awful world event at the same time that helped
shape the origin of the Norse world.
So put all that together, they had all those things.
No wonder Norse mythology about the origin of the world is so
brutal and dark because all that was happening, all this terrible
things were happening. The, the people that survived
that were like, how the hell did we survive that?
And it must have been traumatizing.
And the which was passed on like generational trauma from living
through that would have been passed on to the children of the
next generation who are still growing up in a bad time, not as
bad as their parents lived in. But it's, it's not like the
world's going to recover in one generation from such a horrible
series of events, especially considering what we were told
here, that the plague just kept going.
And, you know, you still got wars and migrations and all this
other stuff. And what do we have in Westeros
as an equivalent grayscale? Maybe other plagues too.
Bloody flux, just who knows. But the idea that grayscale is
coming is well supported. It's it's already there and it
just hasn't broken out or anything yet.
We've been beating that drum for a long time and the real world
science supports us in our theory quite well.
Cold weather. There's a lot of science that
supports the idea that cold weather increases the spread of
certain diseases, such as this particular one, Ursinia pestis.
Because cold reduces your immune system, so does lack of food.
So does stress. That's very straightforward.
So it is just huddling together for warmth.
If you're all packed around the fire, you're all sitting next to
each other. Well, it's easier to pass
disease to someone sitting next to you than someone in the next
house, right? So you, you, you huddle together
for warmth. That can actually help the
disease spread more. And that thing we talked about a
minute ago, human migrations, when one population mingles with
another, they share the diseases.
One population group may already have built up a herd immunity to
a certain disease that this new group they popped into does not.
And they transmit that. And meanwhile, they transmit
diseases back to the other way. It's like a microcosm of the
Spaniards going to South America and just obliterating huge
swaths of the natives by doing basically nothing.
Just have our diseases. You didn't develop immunity to
these things. We did 'cause our people have
been living amongst livestock for centuries and yours don't.
So you're screwed. Now, of course, people weren't
migrating to Scandinavia, and this time, when it was horrible,
when you couldn't even live there, but plague would have
been an issue, it certainly made getting help from elsewhere
harder, made everything. Yeah, just obviously that's
going to be bad. So this was called the Justinian
plague 'cause it happened during the time of Emperor Justinian.
But really, again, it's the Black, Black Death, just the
early version of it. A historian, David Keyes, wrote
that this plague actually is partially responsible for the
decline of the Avars, the migration of the Mongols, the
end of the Sasanian Empire, the collapse of the Gupta Empire,
the rise of Islam, the expansion of Turkish tribes, and the fall
of Teotihuacan. A lot of historians disagree
with that, though, so take that with a grain of salt maybe.
So maybe he's on to something, but he's gone a little too far
with some of the details. But it's not unthinkable or even
outrageous to think that a global 3 volcanoes covering the
earth with clouds could do serious damage to a lot of
different places all over. Maybe not certainly to cause the
collapse of something that you might need.
Other factors, they may have already been weak.
You know, it's hard to ever just attribute one thing to
civilization. You know, it's too complicated.
We're dealing with humans. So I'm just again, just so blown
away by how cool all that information is and how well it
supports a scientific basis for mythology, which is, you know,
growing up, the idea of science supporting mythology was just
like, no, those don't go together at all, you know, and
but nowadays that barrier is closing, that the space between
those two is evaporating. We, we can parse them as
different, but we see the connection at the same time.
Cultural memory and history, confluence of it with the latest
discoveries and what we are, what we've learned in the last
15 years. Long Night, let's get to
Westeros. A lot of parallels you've
noticed along the way on your own.
We've pointed out many others. Let's try to put it all together
while also pointing out a few key differences.
So now for most of the rest of the episode, if not the rest of
the episode, we have quotes from North instead of North mythology
quotes. We have The Song of Ice and Fire
and World of Ice and Fire and related quotes.
A long night quote from the World of Ice and Fire.
Here it is. As the First Men established
their realms following the Pact, little troubled them save their
own feuds in wars, or so the histories tell us.
It is also from these histories that we learn of the Long Night
when a season of winter came that lasted a generation.
A generation in which children were born, grew into adulthood
and in many cases died without ever seeing the spring.
Indeed, some of the old wives tales say that they never even
beheld the light of day, so complete was the winter that
fell on the world. While this last may well be no
more than fancy, the fact that some cataclysm took place many
thousands of years ago seems certain.
So it's kind of interesting to to compare this to the real
world. Only recently did we as a
society or as a people, as humans, figure out that these
things about the volcanoes and Ragnarok and the formation of
the Viking Age Norse world, Before that, it would have been
a lot of stuff, would have been doubted.
But here, the maesters, they often downplay magic, especially
the ancient mythical stuff, but they don't doubt that some
cataclysm. Cataclysm took place many
thousands of years ago. Seems certain is the word
attached to it. So that's pretty strong.
It's not enough to hear the Maeschly version though, because
Norse Smith is not delivered to us that way, though we do listen
to the scholars of Norse Smith in history.
Of course, that's a huge basis for where all this episode came
from. The Long Night really did
happen, though it was likely exaggerated.
Ragnarok is a much more heavily mythologized version, symbolic
version of real events. The the Long Night's a little
more literal, which is kind of funny to think about that The
fantastic version is, is more straightforward.
So both of them had, you know, winter and darkness and
starvation and famine and collapse of civilization.
Long Night had that too, but you know, there's not necessarily an
equivalent to Thor fighting the World Serpent.
You know, here that's I don't have a parallel for that other
than the Robert Rhaegar. Not during the Long Night,
though. So here's we had the Maestrol
version, Here's Old Nan's version.
It's equivalent again. She's not a literal serious, but
playing the role of 1 and very well.
Not long after Bran gets a lesson from his father about
fear, Old Nan knocks him right back down a peg, and fairly so.
So there. This is a slightly edited
version of the Old Nan's story here.
I just took out the parts where Bran is interrupting.
So this is just a all at once all of Old Nan in a row here.
Quote. Oh.
My sweet summer child, Old Nan said quietly, What do you know
of fear? Fear is for the winter, my
little Lord, when the snows fall 100 feet deep and the ice wind
comes howling out of the north. Fear is for the long night, when
the sun hides its face for years at a time and little children
are born and live and die all in darkness, while the direwolves
grow gaunt and hungry and the White Walkers move through the
woods. Thousands and thousands of years
ago, a winter fell that was cold and hard and endless beyond all
memory of man. There came a night that lasted a
generation, and kings shivered and died in their castles even
as the swine herds in their hovels.
Women smothered their children rather than see them starve, and
cried and felt their tears freeze on their cheeks.
In that darkness the others came for the first time.
They were cold things, dead things that hated iron and fire
and the touch of the sun and every creature with hot blood in
its veins. They swept over hold fasts and
cities and kingdoms, felled heroes and armies by the score,
riding their pale dead horses and leading hosts of the slain.
All the swords of men could not stay their advance, and even
maidens and suckling babes found no pity in them.
They haunted the maids through frozen forests and fed their
dead servants on the flesh of human children.
Bran's connection to Odin here rings very loudly through
Bloodraven, of course, and given it is Odin who speaks to the
Cirrus here just as Bran is speaking to Old Nan, Bran may in
fact probably will succeed. Cause again, I just don't see
how the full extent of the Long Night could actually happen in
the span of the series. It's if it's that long a
generation or even 10 years. The story is not going to cover
10 more years. You know what I mean?
So that's just right there, a logistical argument against the
long night being prevented. So the quote doesn't actually
end there, though it it continues with the description
of the last hero, which is interrupted George's famous
interruption style and is interrupted by Maester Lewin,
the representative of the of the academic side of things.
It's kind of fitting that he interrupts the the myth story to
be like, stop that, you know, And but with him is Hodor, who
opens the door, close, you know, hold the door, open the door,
close the door. He opens the door with a bang.
Of course, Hodor's likely to have a role in helping Bran.
He said he's wrapped up in the whole in all this stuff with
with the end of the world. And he's in The Cave with them.
And yeah, Bran is using him to see through his eyes and use
him, you know, might fight through his body or whatever.
So definitely important, but he probably won't make it through
the end like the Norse hoder God does.
A major difference though. A song of ice and fire is dark.
It's it's less dark than North myth.
Right? I keep saying that it's like man
George made it really dark. But Norse myth is worse because
of all the horrible things it was born out of as we keep
saying. And it's horrible both at the
beginning and the end of these epoch cycles.
The pre Ragnarok and the the whatever Ragnarok happened the
first time and then, you know, back before that, Apparently
there were more cycles even before that.
So the long night's impact, for example, isn't even as grim.
Let's hear a quote on that. How the Long Night came to an
end is a matter of legend, as all such matters of the distant
past have become in the North. They tell of a last hero who
sought out the intercession of the Children of the Forest, his
companions abandoning him or dying 1 by 1 as they faced
ravenous giants, cold servants and the others themselves alone.
He finally reached the Children despite the efforts of the White
Walkers, and all the tales agree this was a turning point.
Thanks to the Children, the First men of the Night's Watch
banded together and were able to fight and win the Battle for the
Dawn, the last battle that broke the endless winter and sent the
others fleeing to the icy north. What this sounds like is a
version of Ragnarok where the gods win and avert the
cataclysm. Like it's a lot of it's already
happened, but they stop the actual end of the world.
Still a great cost, but it's preserved.
You know things don't end it. You might still consider at the
end of an age, the beginning of a new one, but with a lot less
devastation and destruction, a lot easier of a transition.
Still hard transition, but it's not just like utterly devastated
humans crawling out of the ashes of a world that's been
incinerated and frozen. So that's a neat point here,
that the Norse world is like, not it's going to end.
It's going to be terrible. George is like the heroes,
bittersweet ending, but the heroes are going to stop it.
They won't. The worst won't happen.
Ragnarok, the worst happens. But even in Ragnarok, the world
rebuilds itself, nature heals, and the world begins anew.
So it's still not an end end, right?
There's equivalent stories all around, mostly Essos, which
speak of a great darkness that lasted these other versions of
it, and little tidbits of what they think.
This culture in each individual respective culture, what they
think ended it. The Crab King and the Old Man of
the River and other lesser gods, the Roynar believe they came
together and sang a secret song to bring back the day.
Obviously there's a Zora High, a shy, the Red Sword of Heroes and
this and this and all that business.
Yee Tee has their legend about a woman and a dude with a monkey's
tail helping her, which is a little obscure but certainly
belongs in this category. Again, I want to point out the
scale here because the 6th century on earth was only 1500
years ago. Long Night 6 to 8000 ago, maybe
4 at the least, but probably more like 6 to 8.
So that's just the span of lost information and myth turning
even more mythy would be a lot greater.
So of all the elements of Ragnarok, the biggest overlap
seemed to be the winter and the darkness.
Maybe the fire at the end, maybe.
And it's they come in the same order, first the winter, the
terrible winter, and then it lingers and lingers and then the
darkness and then the others. Now in Ragnarok, it's the the
final battle happens. And there's the but there's
also, but the human element is the same in both starvation,
fighting over diminished resources, descent into incest,
murder, lust, animal behavior. As mentioned earlier, this means
we should be considering, given that Ragnarok has all these
geological events as part of it, maybe that is something that
will happen during Westerosi Long Night.
Or maybe they won't be geological but they will be just
calamitous Eurons attacks which may be sorceress, maybe stealing
a dragon, The invasion of relorists alongside Danny who?
They believe she's the Princess that was promised, they believe
she's Azora High reborn. That could be a problem if they
arrive in hordes and even she can't control them.
So there's all these different elements, war like elements
descending on Westeros and which is already fighting amongst
itself as the Others approach from the North, Danny's army
coming from the West with Dothraki, Unsullied, etcetera.
Just a lot of different factions, a lot of different
peoples. Westeros.
Yeah. And there's Dragons and Others.
I mean, there's all these so much it's like, it is like a
last battle, everybody coming together.
A real kind of an inversion of the Others is that they hate
iron and fire, right? Supposedly Odin gives the power
to berserkers to be impervious to fire and iron.
The opposite there. Ice, spiders, undead horses, The
Walking Dead, those are the equivalent of the beings that
are unleashed during Ragnarok. And the raising of the dead is a
thing in Norse myth too. Not necessarily in this context.
Not the exact same way certainly, but it does happen.
I remember again, the White Walkers is male Valkyrie that
fits their escorting souls to battle.
They are rather than bringing the dead to battle.
And they're both terrible to behold.
One's masculine, one's feminine variant.
There's so the opposite, right? One of the one of them, the soul
bad. The souls are brought to fight
in the last battle for the bad guys and nor Smith they're
they're fought. They're bringing back the the
souls of the brave warriors of Valhalla to fight for the good
guys. I'm calling good guys humanity
because hey, we're all included in that, right?
And if we think about the prophesied heroes, the the huge
number, not necessarily some of these are prophesied to come
again. Some of them just were there the
first time. Azora, High, Yentar, Nefarion,
Eldrick, Shadowchaser here, Koon, the hero, the last hero.
Odin had so many different names.
Thor had multiple names. Fenrier, Some of these basic
monsters had multiple names. We're not even sure if some of
these other characters like might have had multiple names.
We're not sure if that's the case or not, right?
I mentioned Garmir the wolf, which is probably Fenrir.
Probably the same being, but not 100% sure about that since we
don't have active deities running around.
That's a major difference, right?
George doesn't have deities running around doing stuff.
We're not aware of them, we don't perceive them.
They don't have a personification in that way.
The people in the story believe in them.
They might even draw power from them, but they're not present in
a way that we can point directly to.
So the heroes in a Song of Ice and Fire are the gods in the in
in the Ragnarok, they're the equivalent.
It's the gods fighting this final battle along with the
raised heroes from Valhalla. There's there aren't like a
bunch of heroes. It isn't like there are Norse
heroes and myth, but those people aren't there.
Well, I guess they might be in the form of the souls of
Valhalla, but they're not named. It's not like cigarette the
dragon Slayer comes back and Ragnar Lothbrook and all these
other guys they're you know, they're not named specifically.
Kind of assume they made that list, but they're not named.
So we could think of it that way, right?
That that the the heroes, the last hero, specifically the Jon
Snow, whatever whichever 1 he is Danny, they are the equivalent,
the great heroes. They're somewhat supernatural in
themselves. John's a raised from the dead.
Danny's got dragon blood. She's the mother of dragon.
She's performed a miracle, should walk through fire, all
this other stuff. These are mythological deeds.
These would fit very well in a myth cycle.
And they probably will in Westeros, you know, 100 years
ago has passed and these things will start to become
mythologized. Mythologized.
That word is hard. So yeah, there's like instead of
deities, they're superhumans. They're like, it's a vaguely
like the ancient deities of Westeros, which we'll talk about
in a moment here. It's our last section.
So yeah, I do think that the as a semi conclusion here, I think
the events of Ragnarok are akin to the original Long Night,
which is that it will be prevented.
The original Long Night happened but got stopped before it could
be the worst. So they're similar in that
sense, but one of them is not going to be as devastating.
Long Night won't hit as hard, especially the new version.
I think that will be more averted.
We're certainly not going to see a generation of of Winter before
we get to some final battle. So it helps us to see here what
we're seeing, what is being averted, though, even though it
won't, it won't necessarily happen, but we would like to see
what these heroes are preventing.
What exactly is the fate that is being dodged here?
It's inevitable too, right? That's a thing in both cases.
It's not inevitable in that it will happen.
It's inevitable that it will come.
Ragnarok is like, you can't stop it.
That's kind of the way the prophecy works there.
But the prophecies in The Song of Ice and Fire, they don't
point to Ragnarok, the Last Night or the Long Night.
They point to the stopping of the Long Night.
The prophecies. We are delivered Princess again,
Princess that was promised, Azora High, all these other
things, Last hero, that's what we get.
We don't get some prophecy about, yeah, humanity's screwed,
everyone's going to die. That is what Ragnarok tells us.
So that's a difference. It's like, well, Westera, the
Song of Ice is hard. They're going to win.
It's going to be hard. But yeah, I love that.
So the survivors, which we might get like a footnote or a
epilogue type scenario where we see the state of Westeros as the
story's ending. And it might be kind of like it
won't be as bad as Ragnarok. It won't be like, man, there's
only like 2 people now. I don't think humanity will be
reduced to two souls, and I don't think we'll have a new
sun, a new moon. But it will be a situation where
good meaning humanity triumphs, but at heavy cost, and the
survivors will have a lot to deal with.
But they survived. Westeros reset.
What kind of things would change or what kind of things did
change in The Last Long Night? What were things that marked one
epoch from the next like in in the real world?
There's these celestial ages, the age of Aquarius, the age,
well, I don't remember the others, but they're connected to
the Zodiac. But it's, it's a matter of huge
time scale, like 1000 years or something like that.
When actually stars are different.
There's, there's enough time passes on Earth that the we're
in a different part of the Milky Way or the we're facing a
different part of the Milky Way and we can see different stars.
Takes a long time for that to happen.
But we're talking about a huge scale of time here in Westeros.
There's no Milky Way. They have the Westeros.
It's the Milky of the Poppy Way, right?
So it's a different set of consulate, but the same thing
happens. Like whatever stars, the people,
the great Empire of the Dawn we're looking at, it's different
now for the people in the current time, right?
The heavens seem fixed to any people that don't know what we
know about astronomy. And it seems like that's never
going to change, right? That's just how it always is,
always will be. But that is not true, right?
It's just such a huge time it takes for it to pass.
It's a great way to mark or to show a difference between 2
epochs. And that is what happens in
Ragnarok, right? The sun and the moon and the
stars all go away. They do come back, but are they
the exactly the same? Probably not.
They're probably different. Why would they be the same?
Why would they be exactly the same?
They might be, but I don't know why we would assume that George
RR Martin gave a change of the nature of seasons, length of
seasons, rotation cycles, celestial stuff as one of his
markers quote. Septon Barth appeared to argue
in a fragmentary treatise that the inconstancy of the seasons
was a matter of magical art rather than trustworthy
knowledge. Maester Nichols, The Measure of
the Days, otherwise a laudable work containing much of use,
seems influenced by this argument.
Based upon his work on the movement of stars in the
firmament, Nickel argues unconvincingly that the seasons
might once have been of a regular length, determined
solely by the way in which the globe faces the sun in its
heavenly course. The notion behind it seems true
enough that the lengthening and shortening of days, if more
regular, would have led to more regular seasons, but he could
find no evidence that such was ever the case beyond the most
ancient of tales. You really got to unpack this
one. This is a great example of the
opposite of what we saw before, where the maesterly take was,
well, yeah, the Long Night happened.
Something like that happened. We're not going to agree with
all these details and stories, but some sort of cataclysm
happened, Yes. That we can't deny.
In this case, they're like, Nah, Nah, no way, the guy says.
Nickel argues unconvincingly. Well, we know better.
Saptenbarth brought it up so automatically.
That gives it a lot of credibility.
And look at this last line. He could find no evidence that
such was ever the case. Beyond the most ancient hotel.
When else would there be sources?
This happened ancient in ancient times.
What other sources would there be?
That's the only source. The ancient tale, the ones who
lived through it would be the ones who could tell you about
it. But he's like, Nah, those don't
count. This was too long ago.
I can't believe it. So it's cultural memory, right?
The fact that people are trying to get at what life was like
thousands of years ago. They don't necessarily have
enough of a connection to the people that lived that long ago
to know, but they have an A seedling of that.
And the concept makes sense that the seasons could have been
even. Where did that ID even come
from? If you are born into a world
that's always had irregular seasons, would you even call
them a regular? You would just this is just how
it is. Winter is sometimes longer.
You know, you might, I guess you could call that a regular, but
the perception of it would be this is normal.
You might say inconsistent. The lengths change, but the
basic scenario is normal. That's that the seasons are
irregular or the seasons aren't equal.
We'll say it that way. So he doesn't say the most
ancient of sources, right? He says the most ancient of
tales because they wouldn't be written down.
He wouldn't have ancient. He don't have sources from the
prior to the first line. They don't have books that were
written during the great empire, the Dawn.
They don't have the equivalent of maesterly recordings from
that era. So, yeah, another example of
cultural memory, obscured cultural memory.
That's part true, part not. Or that you could see a grain of
truth in, but you can't get the whole picture.
Look at examples of long standing enmity.
Bolton and Stark have hated each other forever.
Why? We don't know Blackwood and
Bracken. They've hated each other even
more. And again, they don't know what
started it all. We've heard alternate versions
of what started it all. We have no way to know which one
of them is true. Or the idea that the Blackwoods
came from the North, That they were originally a house in the
North that got driven out by the Starks and then they settled in
the South. That's a theory.
There's some evidence to support it, but they don't know for
sure. Even the Blackwoods don't know
that. Probably.
So good example. They have a memory of it that's
been passed down, but they don't have the like, direct evidence.
They just, it's a story we've been told.
We have no reason to doubt it, but we can't.
We can't prove it, just like Barth and Nicole can't prove
their theory here, their postulation.
Here's another example from the world of Ice and Fire.
A really good one of what the ancient timeline is said to be
according to the Mace of the Citadel quote.
As Westeros recovered from the Long Night, a new power was
rising in Essos. The vast continent stretching
from the Narrow Sea to the fabled Jade Sea and faraway
Althos seems to be the place where civilization as we know it
developed. Now what he means or what they
mean is the place where civilization, as we know,
developed after the Long Night. It says as Westeros recover from
the Long Night, a new power is rising in Essos.
Now why did it take longer in Westeros?
Well, because they were hit harder.
We said that earlier. The Others didn't invade Essos,
they invaded Westeros. They didn't overrun holdfasts
and children dying. And their mothers are smothered
by their mother because they don't want them to freeze to
death. That wasn't necessarily
happening in Jade C and Alfos. They were experiencing crop
failures and probably other problems, but again, not as bad
as what Westeros felt. So it makes sense that Westeros
would lag behind the recovery of the rest of the world.
And that explains why some of these societies are much older
or at least seem like they're much older than current
Westerosi culture. So then of course, this is
Speaking of this quote continues to mention specifics like old
GIS and then Valyria. Valyria emerge from this, the
Ghiscari a little before that, but of course they emerge from.
Peoples that existed prior to the Long Night, whose names and
places and heroes and values have been lost.
But some of it carries over to the Ghiscari.
We just don't know what. We don't know which things came
from before, which things were new.
Yeah, similar to Ragnarok, the entire world was impacted by
those volcanoes and plague and the ensuing wars depredations.
But it was worse in Scandinavia because they had it harder in
the 1st place. The cold affected them more.
Life was already on the edge. So yeah, that's just makes a lot
of sense, doesn't it? I didn't bother with a full
quote of the week this time because we're just using this
Children of Ashton Elm book a lot today.
So that's my recommendation for sure.
I've gone through it three times, plus more than that for
the Ragnarok section of this episode.
Just other things that are in there that I want to just tease
you with or get you to interested in this book because
I just. It's so fun.
You'll love it. I think it talked about the
historicity of Odin, like as if Odin was a war chief from the
East. There's Indo European culture,
there's some, this is again, fairly new, but one point the
book makes is, I mean, what's fairly new is the idea that some
Scandinavian culture might be mingled with Indo European
influence, if not a major thing. Migrating from the steps.
OK, migrate from the steps, right.
So they would have migrated from the steps and you would, if
you're coming from that direction, you would, you would
pass through Scandinavia based on where some of the mountain
passes are, unless you go farther.
S there's just one place you could pass through the the
barrier between Asia and Europe is through Scandinavia's
mountains. There's a lot of places you
can't get through, kind of like the the bone mountains of Essos.
It's like only three ways through.
You can't crossover and just anywhere you got to go through
one of those passes. So here's a really interesting
tidbit from the book that just really struck me.
So horse sacrifice is a thing in the Viking world.
They would have sacrificed other things to other animals, people.
But usually and more than usually, the overwhelming amount
of time when something is sacrificed in any culture that
does sacrifice, it's something that is not necessarily rare,
but not common either. Like you might sacrifice a White
Horse, a white bull or a white dove, but you're doves are
common. Bulls are common.
Horses are not common in Scandinavia for the obvious
reason we talked about before. This is not not like grassland
where you get a pasture of these horses.
It just doesn't support that. So why do they sacrifice horses
which are extremely rare and expensive?
That doesn't make sense, does it?
It's just weird. It's a it's a quirk.
It's like, why would they? It's could just be that that's a
big deal to sacrifice that. But again, that is not well
supported by the history of sacrifice across lots and lots
of cultures that do sacrifice. What would make sense is if that
tradition started on the steps far to the east of Scandinavia,
where horses were plentiful, where horses are everything.
The earlier versions of the Avars, the Huns, the Tartars,
the Mongols, they were in some ways like the Dothraki, and
horse culture is everything to them, and they certainly were
plentiful. Sacrificing one horse?
No big deal, Not even close to a big deal.
Sacrificing several horses? Probably not a big deal to them,
but to Scandinavians, it's an extremely rare thing, hard to
give up on. You're not sacrificing your own
children, you're not sacrificing your closest things.
You're sacrificing stuff. You're sacrificing animals,
things that you own, but not things that are that you can't
live without or things that are extremely rare.
So that's it. Hmm right.
That makes you think it gives some strong evidence to maybe
they migrated from the east. Maybe Odin was an actual person
that later was deified. These are all things that are
valid and supported and mentioned in this book.
Children of Ashnell. Other things that come up,
graves, ships, day-to-day life, pushing back on far right
influence on Viking stuff like the Nazis.
They've tried to repurpose a lot of the stuff and that's just a
shame. But we can't let them take that,
right? The Norse view on gender is
really interesting. Like women could divorce a man
for just being bad in bed. Doesn't mean they had a lot of
rights in other ways, but they did have more rights than you
might guess. In some ways they had more
freedoms than a lot of European women, Southern European women
did. And it's just interesting.
And of course, all these wonders of modern science that I've
talked about a few of, there's a lot more of them in the actual
book. These, the things they can
reveal and open doors in the past are just mind blowing.
The author is Neil Price, he's a professional archaeologist of 30
plus years. Some of the famous digs and
finds described in the book were made by him.
I'm pointing at myself were made by him.
And the narrator is Samuel Ruken and he's awesome.
Great voice, great delivery, one of the better audio book readers
I've I've heard in a while. It's a must if you've enjoyed
this episode because I've probably only used about 10% of
it to source for Ragnarok stuff. It's it's, it's much wider
discussions than that. Obviously that book isn't just
about the end of the Norse world, but that's a big part of
it. If you want to get the book on
either Audible or the hard copy, go to historyofwesteros.com.
Shop through our Amazon links. Audible is owned by Amazon, so
that's the same thing if you're shopping through Audible, and we
get a little kickback for that so you can enjoy the book and we
can get a little hit. Everybody wins.
Hope you do. So really fun.
All right, the last little bit here, we've got something on the
Old God to the north and a little bit on the Old God to the
South. So a quick overview of some less
related but still related parallels and a few notable
major differences. Again, this serves as kind of a
dessert to the main course that we just had, but also it helps
us look forward to what some of the remaining subtopics are that
we didn't get fully into. Again, the the portrayal of
deities in George's world is imperceptible.
Whereas the North pantheon, they're among the most humanized
of gods. Like they, they behave like
people. They are the most resembling of
humans. They do crazy, impossible
supernatural things. But they, you know, they have
lust and love and live in dwellings that are like human
dwellings. You know, they have stables and
halls and yeah, there it's a lot of like, it's not at all like
heaven. You know, it's like the, the,
the images of Christian heaven, very celestial, very different.
It's not at all like earth. It's, it's very positive, but it
isn't it, it isn't earth like, right.
This is this the Norse Panthe is more grounded because probably
because it emerged from such rough circumstances and and
things like that cultural memory preserves things like the
stallion who mounts the world, the Princess that was promised
and Azora High long enough for it to be written down.
Azora High was predates the current written sources we have.
They just held on to that knowledge until it could be
written down again. And the stallion who mounts the
world. I mean, I don't know that that
prophecy existed the first time around because the Dithraki are
a relatively new people, but something like it might have
happened. You know, maybe the the existing
horse people of that time. The the joke was not.
Maybe they had a prophecy along those lines.
But also sticking with the Azora High story for a minute, what do
you get here? A guy repeatedly tries to forge
the Red Sword of Heroes. 30 days, tempered in water, it
shatters. Tries again. 50 days Lion's
heart, same result. 100 days, his wife Nisa, Nisa's heart.
It works. That's not just comparable to
North mythology, but a lot of other mythologies in terms of
just how fantastical it is. It's not that George doesn't use
high magic, it's that he doesn't use it a lot in the main series.
It's part of the backdrop, it's part of the setting.
That's where it's common right in the in the histories, in the
origins, the Grey King versus not a.
That could be a Norse story. That could be, I mean it's a sea
dragon being fought by a semi supernatural being.
That could be Thor versus Yorman Gander, and Yorman Gander has a
little bit of overlap with the storm God because his shaking of
his tail creates tidal waves and all that.
So yeah, that fits pretty well. Since the North saw their gods
as personifications of nature, which is fairly common for the
creation or personification of deities and across the world, we
can use similar logic to deconstruct the old gods of
Westeros. Now again, there's no tangible
individual deities. There's no wind God, storm God.
I mean the Aaron born have one, but the the Northerners don't.
There's no harvest God, but there are.
Those are all things associated with the children in the Green
Seer. Those are still their sphere in
some ways, and they have these grand magics that sound like
they could fit in Norse Smith or something else, like the Hammer
of the Waters, the breaking of the arm of Dorn.
Big global changes, right? Hardhome again comes up.
It's a lesser but far more recent example.
And magic and science can be combined, right?
George doesn't have to just say, here comes the grand enormous
darkness thanks to magic. Flip a finger.
No, he can describe the mechanism and make it partly
mundane. Like magic pushes small changes
in the tectonic plates or in the seas that lead to big things,
you know, conceptually small, that start a like an avalanche.
You know, like, the magic just starts that ball rolling and
then nature takes over once you kicked it off, that kind of
thing. And of course, plague, once
again, we got to bring that one up because that's definitely
going to happen in Westeros, if you ask me.
And Christina adds an interesting way to look at ghost
grass, which you could consider a plague of the land, which may
have originated in the first Long Night because, yeah,
whatever happened over there in the shadow, we've talked about
that in separate episodes, messed a lot of the earth up in
that region. And ghost grass is part of that.
It turns fertile land unfertile and is slowly creeping like
kudzu or bamboo over the rest of the world.
In terms of a parallel to Ajudrasil, Ajudrasil, Ajudrasil.
So hard to say during Ragnarok. Recall the human pair that lived
may have done so by hiding in the great tree.
Remember there's another version that they were like emerge from
it as the tree like they were ash and Elm or something.
But we that's what long been a theory about the children and
their deep caves. Remember how Bran describes how
it's cold down there, but not cold like outside?
The temperature is fixed far down under the earth like that.
It's just there's no wind and anything.
It just doesn't reach them down there.
That has led to theories that that's what the children's plan
was. Blast the outside world with
cold, let that linger and then re emerge when everything is
dead and you'll they'll be back to having the earth to
themselves. Westeros will be theirs again.
It'd be the time of when the the Children didn't have the First
Men on Westeros, it was only them and the giants.
That's kind of Ragnarok Y, isn't it?
You know, like everybody. People are hiding during the
calamity. It lasts a long time, and then
you emerge when it's over. Yeah, really similar.
Another kind of difference here that maybe we'll get into deeper
in another time is the the idea that both Westerosi, North and
South, care about bloodlines. Whether you're a worshiper of
the Old Gods or whether you're worshiper of the Andols or
descendant of the Andols worshiper the Seven.
I meant to say. Not that the Norse don't care
about that. They just cared less about it.
They don't care about bastardy hardly at all.
Mother like mothers having children with mother multiple
men, not that big a deal. Not widely accepted, but it
isn't some horrible thing like it is in Westeros.
There's less power in tracing your descent from gods and
kings. And again we we talked about the
the lack of a noble class. There isn't a noble class so
much in Scandinavia in the Viking Age, right?
There weren't like Dukes and barons and in the middle there's
kings, but not even early there weren't many kings.
Like later in the Viking age there started to be kings of
larger scale. Things like king the first king
of Norway came along later. But early in the Viking age the
kings were just local, they were petty kings, the equivalent of
that. For example, Ragnar Lothbrok,
famous Viking hero, legendary, partly real, whatever we don't
know but a lots of people that claim to be his sons that are
historical. Ivar the Boneless, Uba, a
cigarette snake in the eye, a Vitzerk or Hafdan Bjorn
Ironside. These were historical figures.
They all claimed to be descendants of Ragnar Lothbrook,
but they there's no house Lothbrook, there's no House of
Lothbrok. They're not all connected in
that way. They're just like, hey, I'm
cool, 'cause I'm connected to him, but they aren't connected
to the other people connected to him.
It's not a family thing like that.
They're not like we're all Lothbrooks.
We stick together. We worry about the, you know, we
have a sigil, we have certain things associated with our
house. We have certainly don't have a
motto. Yeah, none of that.
Viking Age Scandinavia didn't have that so much because it
wasn't you couldn't support it. It didn't work the land, the
geography didn't support that kind of system.
You can't have people that I'm the ruler.
I got all these serfs working the land.
There's just not enough land to work.
You'll have there definitely had slaves and they had they called
them thralls, which is and their rules were a little different.
It is like the Iron born version of thrall.
There's another sub topic we can get into some other time.
But yeah, they didn't. They just you couldn't have a
vast army of of workers 'cause there wasn't enough to do.
What would you have them doing? You have to feed them too.
The workers that are doing your work have to be fed.
There's just not enough food to have a huge workforce, to have a
huge slave population. There's definitely some, but not
a lot. And that's why there's no
barons, Dukes. There wasn't room for it.
There was that. It didn't, couldn't support that
level of hierarchy. So there's a big differences in
culture for that reason. Old Gods of the South, of
course, in ancient times there were hard trees everywhere down
there and up there all over. And there still are on the Isle
of Faces. Now the Seven don't have that,
but the ancient gods and myths of the South who predated the
seven, especially in the Reach, are more similar to the North
Pantheon and a lot of other pantheons in that there are
distinct individuals. It's like, yeah, there's a brand
in the builder, but like, who else is there?
Well, last hero. I mean, there's not a lot of
names. I mean, last year doesn't even
have a name, right? What's his, what was his name?
Joe? You know, Johnny a hero?
I mean, I would just it's just a title, right?
And again, they're less God like 'cause they're not like Heaven
or Asgard or Olympus or something like that.
These are, you know, Garth Greenhand existing in the Reach
and his descendants had God like traits, you know, Rowan, Golden,
Goldeneye, whatever. What is her name?
Golden Tree. Yeah, Rowan, Golden Tree.
And then the Harlan the Hunter and all this, you know, a couple
dozen of these characters, these figures, these semi deities.
And then, you know, there's others elsewhere like the Grey
King that we mentioned. And I feel like that, but the
majority of them are associated with the South and the Reach.
And that myself, it's kind of interesting.
I don't have a huge conclusion here, but it's something to
think about, something maybe to delve into later again.
And even Brandon the Builder is sometimes considered a
descendant of Garth. So yeah, it's like, it's like a
lot of Westerosi First Men sprang from Garth Greenhand and
these descendants. And maybe he was a leader who
brought. Maybe Garth wasn't a magical
being. Maybe he was a leader of men who
led people across the land bridge back in the day and he
was deified. Like that story we were just
telling about Odin about. Maybe Odin was a real war chief
who led his people from the steps to Scandinavia and it was
deified afterwards. Same idea, different territory,
different place, different time, different world, but similar
idea. Last but not least, other
Ragnarok's versus other long nights.
Just some similar events that are related.
Again, the Doom didn't create a Long night type scenario, but
the Century of Blood followed 100 years of societal reset.
It's pretty bad. Let that sink in.
It wasn't as bad as Ragnarok or the Long Night, but the Century
of Blood was bad. Like that's a weird thing to
say. The Century of Blood was really
bad, but it wasn't as bad as those.
Maybe there was a geological component outside of Valyria.
It's something that not really told, but it's probably a truth.
Like tidal waves must have emanated from there.
We know it wiped out the Isle of Cedars.
We just don't know about like what happened on the other side
of Slavers Bay, what happened in Sothorius?
They, they probably got hit by some waves too, because, well,
for example, there's a, you know, there's volcanoes or that
happened in Tonga that happened just two years ago, three years
ago that killed people in Chile, but the tidal waves hit people
in Chile crazy. And that reminds us of the flood
myths again and how there's so many flood myths in real in the
real world. And just like there's a lot of
Long Night tales in Essos and Westeros and probably beyond,
probably as we haven't been to yet, they must have Long Night
myths as well, because the Long Night had to impact them as
well. As long as their peoples and
their cultural memory goes back that far, they'll remember it in
some way or another. And they may have different
stories they tell. Some of those stories might be
kind of similar to what the Yitish or even the Westerosi
say, or anyone in between. One example is the Zoroaster.
Now this is important because Zoroaster, the Zoroastrian
religion comes from the area of Persia and Iran where a lot of
his Indo European origin might be rooted in.
There's a story called the Bundashan, I don't know if I'm
saying that right, which is the Zoroastrian creation story, and
it has some similarities to the Norse creation story.
There's a a story among those called Yima, which is where
Ahura Mazda, the chief God of Zoroastrian pantheon, warns of
the evil winters that are coming.
He pulls a Noah long before Noah.
He found a protected valley that was fertile and put two of every
animal there, including humans. And then of course, yeah, I say
long before Noah because this was long before Noah.
This is written down way before the Bible and could have relate
to that. That could have been a flood
myth. Some scholars think that it was
changed from an evil winter to a flood.
Yeah. There's something called the
fravashi in Zoroastrian worship or beliefs.
That's that are their spirits, their human spirits.
And one of their jobs, one of their duties, is to protect the
sun and the moon, which are threatened and destroyed during
Ragnarok. So you have the same concept of
making sure the sun and the moon don't go away.
We can't have that darkness again, can we?
And if we're going back to Tolkien one last time, his ages
are marked by that as well. Lord of the Rings takes place
during the Third Age. The end of Lord of the Rings
marks the beginning of the Fourth Age.
But some of the earlier ages had massive changes.
Illu Eru Illuvitar, who is the the chief God above all the
others. He's the only one in in
Tolkien's world who can create life.
Morgoth was jealous of that. Sorry, Morgoth.
He could he during at least one or two of the ages, he reshaped
the continents entirely. Like just not move that or he
move this over here. Just the kind of stuff that
can't happen that quickly. Like it would have to take
continental drift of millions of years.
But when you have a all powerful deed, he just move things
around. So that's the highest magic
version of that, I guess, of that concept.
But there's everything in between slow change to the
dramatic powerful deity and everything in between.
We hope you've enjoyed this deep dive into real life myths and a
song of Ice and fire. This type of episode is a
favorite of mine because I learned more doing these.
You know, obviously I know a lot about A song of Ice and fire.
I've been doing this a long time.
My challenge there is how to present it, how to choose topics
that are interesting for you all.
But I, I'm not as worried or working on how to grasp it.
I you know, I've been working on that such a long time this.
A lot of this is completely new to me.
I'm taking it on. I'm like trying to parse it.
Think about it. I'm probably in a week or two
going to be like, I should have said this and then I'll have
things I come up with that I should have put in this episode.
But hey, that's why we're going to have another episode of this
type, maybe a few over the years to come.
I'm not saying it'll be soon, but it will happen.
I mean, I don't even have 10% as much expertise in North
mythology as I do in A Song of Ice and Fire.
But maybe after this episode, maybe I can bump that up a
little. Maybe I went into this one with
10%. Now I'm at 15 or 20.
Anyway, the point is, I like to learn.
I like to learn about this kind of stuff, in particular history,
myths and the connection between the two and science, how that
all fits in. And this episode had all of
those. So thank you all for choosing
this one because I had so much fun with it.
And as with other historical topics, I encourage you to leave
comments or e-mail your thoughts to us for the same reason,
because it's newer to me, because I'm not as good at, I'm
no expert. There's things that you all can
say, hey, Azish, you missed this or maybe you didn't consider
this. And they're just things that I
that aren't mistakes or misses, just things that I couldn't
possibly be aware of, things that you might know.
So share that. That's how we learn from each
other. And again, I assume one of the
reasons you're here is you enjoy the material, but you probably
like learning too, especially about things like this.
So we'll, we'll come back to it, of course.
That's really interesting. But just a quick answer here, a
quick piece of trivia before our actual trivia answer is that
Russia just now, like within the last few days, had a volcano, an
ash plume of four miles high, almost.
Krashenenikov, which last erupted 600 years ago, just
happened. So weird coincidence there, huh?
It's our fault we kicked it off. Yeah, so trivia question.
Trivia answer. Who in Westeros history is
loosely based on famous Viking king Herald Hardrada, King
Harwin Hard, hand of the horror dynasty, the the Conqueror of
the Riverlands. It was his grandson that became
Heron the Black. Episodes that relate to this one
that couldn't keep you immersed. If you want to do that, highly
encourage it. Episodes like the Three Eyed
Blood Raven or Hardhome or our Weywood tours, a pair of
episodes there. The idea that people come from
trees in this one that is related to our idea that
weirwoods preserve the look. The Starks have looked the same.
They have a look, there's a Stark look that's been around
for so long. Maybe that maybe it's the
weirwoods that keep that imprint because it's just not all houses
have this, only some of them do. And it seems to be correlated to
houses that have a heart tree. So maybe there's a connection
there with the George. Got a little inspiration from
people coming from trees in the Norse mythology.
The doom of Valyria. Of course, that episode is very
relevant here. So is our Century of Blood
episodes. So is our episode on the Pact.
So is our episode on ancient Dorn, especially as it pertains
to the land bridge and the migrations over it.
Our Valeri Ridis brand chapters are big.
You can go to Patreon and get just the Valeridis brand
chapters, as well as all the other individual characters.
Rather than listening to Valeridis in the order of the
chapters, you can go character by character.
And of course, I mentioned The Rage of Heroes, the Greek
mythology related episode that we did a few years ago.
That's a long list. I hope you enjoy those or have
already enjoyed those. Maybe you want to check them out
again. And we'll keep them coming.
We got lots more to come this year.
We don't stop, can't stop, won't stop.
More episodes to come. Thanks.
Actually, can I say yeah, if you're.
In the Seattle area, we will be there at Seattle World Con
August 12th to 17th. We haven't talked about it a
whole lot, but we will be doing press.
We got press passes and we'll be attending and seeing BWB.
So, you know, if you're on the West Coast or in Seattle, hit us
up. Yeah, do that.
And or if you're hearing this later, consider looking us up
for World Con 2026 because that's going to be in LA.
We'll probably be at that one too.
Yeah, for our. West Coast folks.
Yeah, West Coast folks. Yeah.
People in the Southeast, we, as always go to Dragon Con every
year here in Atlanta, we will be at the World of Ice and Fire
shoot a Saturday of Labor Day weekend, so catch us there too
and that's. That goes for pretty much every
year also, not just 2025. Yeah, y'all.
Thanks again. Huge thanks to Christina Kay.
Just a lot of information came from her.
Clarifications, details, things I didn't know at all.
Thanks to you all for hanging out today, and thanks to Joey
Townsend for our intro music. Thanks to Michael Klarfeld for
the video intro and the maps you see behind us.
Check him out at Clair docs.de. Link in the description and you
know what to do. Until next time, Valerie Ritas.