The High Magic of Moat Cailin

Episode Transcript
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(00:48):
George R Martin is a writer of both fantasy and sci-fi, and he
has a similar approach in both genres in terms of how they're
presented. He's excellent at keeping both
the mystery and the explanation to said mysteries tantalizingly
just out of reach. Whether it's a scientific
explanation, A fantastical explanation, maybe somewhere in

(01:09):
between, we can't always be sure, and it allows us to
imagine both or either together or separately.
And it's because it's not so farinto the zone of mystery that we
can't narrow it down or have theories with a solid
foundation. I mean, without enough
information, the guesswork just gets too wild, too varied.

(01:31):
A lot of times we're talking to each other and this, your theory
and my theory, they just aren't that close.
They just based on different things.
That's not as fun. It's not not fun.
But I think it's more fun when we reach similar conclusions
based on similar information. You know, if, if the information
takes us different places, then so be it.
But if we independently come up with similar theories, well, I

(01:53):
think that says something, doesn't it?
And this is the kind of skill that a good author has, being
able to narrow it down enough sothat we have that appropriate
space for theorizing and imagining without it being too
explained. Because if it's too explained,
then it's not exactly a mystery,is it?
So it's very hard to quantify this skill, but it's definitely

(02:16):
a skill that authors need. From where we're sitting, it
sure does seem like George is excellent at achieving and
maintaining that balance of keeping the mystery within his
world building and in the storytelling of balancing the
magical and the mundane. Mysteries don't always require
magic, but they can be enhanced by such, and in this world we
have to always consider whether magic is involved, sometimes

(02:38):
more than others. George does this by giving us
just enough, but not too much, while leaving us room to fill in
the gaps and encouraging us to do so.
He likes when we theorize. He doesn't always love
responding to random theories, but the fact that we're taking
time to think about it, engage with his work, of course, and
the author's going to be pleasedwith that.
So topics that are under the theumbrella of supernatural very

(02:59):
clearly fit under this because they can never be fully
understood. Same goes for ancient history,
right? For different reasons.
It can't be fully understood because we don't have witnesses
or evidence or records or what have you.
So it's it's opaque or somewhat opaque for that reason.
Yet because of the supernatural,we have a grand mixture of all

(03:21):
of the above, supernatural and ancient, yet we still have
enough to work with and think about, which is what touches on
what I was saying about George giving us just the right amount
of detail, insight, knowledge, etcetera.
It's a fun sandbox, extremely fun sandbox.
That sandbox has endless mystery, but it does have
tangible elements. Without it, it would be so much

(03:41):
less compelling. MO Kalin's our subject today.
It's a place of high magic, according to the legends anyway.
The Children of the Force, perhaps working with the First
Man, at times working against them, but in this case maybe
with them they may have tried tochange the very landscape of
Westeros in an attempt to preserve their way of life and
their lives. Is the Hammer of the Waters

(04:05):
magic, nature, or both? If it's truly magic, what does
it imply about the powers of theChildren and the Old Gods?
It's maybe a bit more than we thought.
What other events could we potentially ascribe to the
supernatural then? If we're thinking along those
lines? For example, giant earthquakes
and floods sound suspiciously like the sort of magic that

(04:25):
could throw off the seasons. The magic of nature, when the
natural goes supernatural. But it could just be natural
without any of the Super. We will examine the high magic
and its implications. For then and now, we're mostly
interested in the magic than themundane.
The mundane is there. It's sitting there pointing at
us going, hey, you guys might bewrong, but that's not as fun, is

(04:46):
it? So we're going to delve into the
supernatural big time. Today.
We'll imagine what the neck was like before it was flooded.
We'll consider why, when, how, and of course, who, because
there's some uncertainty about the children, as I said, and
their relationship with the First Men, those First Men who
adopted the Old Gods. That is, it's a little easier to

(05:06):
understand how it went when it was First Men versus children,
right? Even that, there's still
obviously a lot of questions there, but there's bigger
questions as to how they work together.
To me, that's more compelling. What do they do to make to work
against the end dolls for example, or the First men that
didn't adopt the Old Gods? Like how did that work?
Did they team up against that? If they did, this is one of the

(05:26):
best examples we might have for that Moat Kalin.
So let's delve deep into the lore.
As deep as the caverns of the Children who sing the songs of
Earth and have been doing so since time's undreamed of.
Though maybe, just maybe Bran aswell will dream of such.
All that and more on this episode of History of Westeros

(05:46):
Podcast. Hello and welcome everybody.
It's another Sunday. We're here with another live
stream. This topic was voted on by our
patrons in Mini Moot 2025. Just a quick note, Topics Moot
2026 is available to anyone who is a patron and we will be doing

(06:07):
that. I believe it starts the
beginning of March. Well, right after Night of the
Seven Kingdoms Season 1 is complete.
We'll delve into topics, mute 2026, pick topics for the
following year through voting. It's a lot of fun.
Every episode we record goes up on Spotify and every podcast
platform after. It's here live on YouTube.

(06:28):
You can also catch it ad free ifyou listen on Patreon.
Thanks to our good friend Nina Krusling.
Her blog is at good queenalley.tumblr.com and her
latest blog post is about Aegon the 4th and the Brackens and the
Blackwoods and a lot of that business.
It's pretty cool. It's an interesting question
about why Aegon behaved the way he did and why the Brackens did

(06:50):
and a lot of side questions as well.
It's a multi purpose question and Nina's answer is very good.
If you have questions for us, well, hit us up at
westeroshistory@gmail.com. If you're catching this later,
If you're catching it live, welldrop your question right in the
comments box. At the end of this episode.
I'll mention some more episodes that have overlap topics and

(07:10):
we'll start with the trivia question.
This one is not in a Song of Iceand Fire topic question is a
regular Earth question, though it certainly relates, as you'll
see, what is the most common of volcanic rock on Earth.
So probably the most common volcanic rock on planet toast
too. Of course we call it Planet
toast because we don't know whatelse to call it.
If I'm calling our planet Earth,I can't call it Earth as well,

(07:32):
even though they do call it the Earth in world anyway.
Answer at the end, but also answered during the episode if
you're paying close attention. Or maybe you already know.
For those of you watching live and for those of you who catch
the episode on Spotify, you've got a poll you can respond to.
The poll on Spotify will run forlike more than a year.
The poll on YouTube will one forthe length of this episode and

(07:53):
will tell you how the voting went at the end.
It's the two chances to vote. The the poll is, did the
children of the forest and the first men work together to flood
the neck? Yeah.
The answers are yes, children and first men.
No children only. No first men only or no neither.
So 4 answers. One yes, three no's and I'll

(08:14):
give you the results at the end.Let's start off with Moat Kalin
and a description. Actually let me run through the
the sections real quick. Moat Kalin is the first one, but
the other sections are the neck.Now and then two hammers are
better than one. The unbowed, unbent, unbroken
arm of Dawn Age Dorn. Why so late?
The Northern bubble children's tower, the room where it

(08:36):
happened. Blood in the bogs, power of the
neck, necessity is the Mother Earth of invention.
High magic. What else is high magic?
And we'll finish off with Planetos goes on tilt yes, a
poker reference meant to be taken literally yes, the tilt of
the planet is what I'm referringto there.

(08:57):
So let's start with a quote about Moat Kalin right here.
The description. Where once a mighty curtain wall
had stood, only scattered stonesremained, blocks of black basalt
so large it must once have taken100 men to hoist them into
place. Some had sunk so deep into the

(09:19):
bog that only a corner showed. Others lay strewn about like
some gods, abandoned toys, cracked and crumbling, spotted
with lichen. Last night's rain had left the
huge stones wet and glistening, and the morning sunlight made
them look as if they were coatedin some fine black oil.

(09:44):
That quote certainly has some people confused as to the
strange stone, the oily Blackstone that appears in
Ashrae and yen and on the basil skiles and the sea stone chair,
the base of the high tower, etcetera, etcetera.
This is only looks like that because it's wet.
It is maybe a clue, but it's definitely not the same thing.
These don't look like that when they're dry.

(10:06):
That's what we're told. Now, of course, they often look
wet and glistening because it's going to rain a lot there.
It's a humid place. But this, don't let this overly
fool you. Now, that doesn't mean those
other black stones, the oily black stones that were are like
that all the time. This doesn't mean that they
aren't basalt. It might mean that they were

(10:26):
altered. They may have started as basalt
and then magically altered, maybe even non magically altered
something that makes them oily looking all the time.
I would suspect it is magical innature.
But yeah, we'll throw the possibility out there.
So the size of them is highly notable, right?
These are, this is supposed to be an ancient fortress at these
giant blocks, which also remindsus of Yean and Ash Eye and

(10:47):
things like that. So it is a little.
But once again, that connection seems to be not complete.
It's it's maybe similar rather than something that is a direct
connection. But the the construction in
ancient time to something like this with huge blocks is
definitely curious but also not unheard of.

(11:07):
We have the Old Town and Winterfell, the wall, we have
very large structures built in very ancient times in Westeros.
So by itself Mokalen isn't special in that regard, but it
does deserve to be included on medium sized, shortish, medium
sized list of buildings that aremaybe hard to source time wise

(11:30):
because of the construction style and sort of indicates some
advanced skills. But clearly it happened a long
time ago. Just the question is how long
ago. So yeah, that's something to
keep in mind is the is the consideration there of the of
the stones and how large they are.
But again, I think that could beeasily explained with just good

(11:51):
construction techniques. But maybe giants were used.
That's definitely possible. Now that's the wall of MO Kale.
And here's the main attraction, the Towers quote.
Beyond stood the towers. The Drunkard's tower leaned as
if it were about to collapse, just as it had for half 1000
years. The children's tower, thrust

(12:13):
into the sky as straight as a spear, but it's shattered top
was open to the wind and rain. The gatehouse tower, squat and
wide, was the largest of the three, slimy with Moss, a
gnarled tree growing sideways from the stones of its north
side. Fragments of broken wall still

(12:34):
standing to the east and West. With blocks that size, you can
understand why there's fragmentsstill here and there and who's
going to clean that up. You might have needed giants to
build it. You would need them to clean it
up too. Even the maesters believe the
north was the last Kingdom settled out of the known
kingdoms. The major areas, obviously
there's places around, you know,like for example an episode we

(12:57):
did recently on the far winds. Not all the Iron Islands was was
colonized then, just like not all the north was.
But generally speaking, it's theKingdom people moved into the
last for obvious reasons. It's colder and farther to the
north of where they would have crossed over on the land bridge.
Which argues Moe Kalin was not built super early on.
So if people weren't moving to the north, why would it be there

(13:19):
until later? And if people weren't being kept
out of the South or kicked out of the north, if you didn't have
a compelling reason to stop people from coming N then you
wouldn't have built it either. So the Moe Moe Kane was built.
I think it seems to, and it stands to reason because of
people coming from the South that they didn't want, whether
it was earlier First Men or and Oslater or both.

(13:42):
Well, that's probably what we'rehere to discuss.
It certainly argues that the region has power, supernatural
power, perhaps, definitely strategic power as a choke point
from north to South. That's kind of straightforward.
But let's not forget that we're talking ancient times before the
neck was flooded, so wasn't quite as narrow of a way

(14:03):
through. It's not exactly great territory
before the flooding. It's barren hills and places
near the coast which you know, beaches and drive.
Not good territory for growing crops or grazing horses.
It it got maybe worse with the flooding, but also became more

(14:23):
filled with life because of swamps and bogs.
They do have a lot of life, evenif it's not the best for humans.
So that's something to keep in mind is that there might be
magic in the place and that it was very different before it was
altered, whether by humans, children or nature, or some
combination of the above. MO Kalin was probably built by
the Marsh King, the one who was eventually the the dynasty that

(14:46):
was eventually overthrown by theStarks.
Some Rickard Stark married a Kranigman's, the Marsh King's
daughter. We assume the Marsh King was a
Kranigman. Maybe not Probably though.
But that's yet another thing to interestingly consider is that
before the flooding of the neck,well, there wouldn't have been
Kranigman, would there? These are people who have
adapted and evolved to live in the swamps.
Well, that's certainly what wasn't what they were before the

(15:07):
swamp was there, is it? It might be the same people like
the Kranigman descended from theancestors who lived there before
it was flooded, but they obviously had to do a lot of
adapting post flood. The Marshmen.
The Marshmen. Seriously, what do you call
them? Before it was flooded?
Neck men. Necklanders.
That's a weird words. Like, I can kind of get why that

(15:29):
name isn't used, you know? So let's discuss a little more
of that. The neck now and then.
Martians. Martians.
Well, that's after, right? And that's.
Yeah. But still, I love that.
Martians. That's great.
So we don't know when it was flooded, but we don't need to
know when it was flooded to imagine what it might have
looked like. A big question with regards to
timing is who was living there at the time?

(15:50):
That's that's important. Most likely when it flooded,
whether for natural or supernatural means it was
sudden. It was a flood.
You know, it came on quickly. So a lot of people probably lost
their homes, if not their lives might have flooded some of the
children's caves. They probably were aware of it
and, you know, got out of the way in advance if they were the
ones responsible. So I doubt any of them got
harmed, but it, you know, might have caused them to have to

(16:12):
relocate some things. Now, it's important to
understand. Let's get a little bit sciencey
here, just for a minute. The neck is swamp and bog with
some Fens near the sea. What does all that mean?
What's the difference between swamp and bog and Fen?
Well, let me try to describe it as briefly as possible.
Bogs are more of a cold climate thing which so that fits and so

(16:34):
that's why the northern neck, well the southern neck is more
the swampy. Bogs are low oxygen, no fish,
lots of peat. Peat is build up of dead Moss
and other plant matter. Of course it's usable as a fuel
and that is surely what the Kranigman do now.
Bogs and swamps and Fens and marshes and all that.

(16:55):
They also have different combos of fungus, animal and plant.
Interesting thing about bogs is cold.
Well as you might suspect cold makes plant growth slower but it
makes decay even slower. So lots and lots of slow
decaying or not decaying matter happens in bogs along with all

(17:15):
that peat build up because peat is dead matter as well.
So meanwhile, a Fen is more of asalt water or brackish type of
bog. You could call it like the
combination of it's kind of likea bog, like I said, but higher
alkalinity and often Fens come from groundwater and runoff,

(17:38):
whereas bogs are more fed by rainwater and other small
differences that we don't need to get into.
But a swamp is a forest that's awetlands.
So that's the point there. Is that OK?
The children of the forest, that's their spot.
The forests are their home. When they arranged the pact with

(17:58):
the First Men, that was the deal.
Humans get most of the terrain, but the children get the
forests. Now, neither In that
description, it didn't really say who gets the swamps.
No, neither humans or children. Maybe we're all that excited
about that, but if you're going to say this, deep forests go to
the children, well, I'm kind of going to assume the swamps are
included in that cause swamps are very unappealing to most

(18:20):
humans and that again, they are a type of forest, a wetland
forest. So I also question similar
questions here. The second hammer of the waters
is supposedly what flooded the Neck.
So that would be high, any high magic that came in this area
before, because there's some rumor as we'll get to that.
The first hammer of the waters, the one that broke the armor of

(18:41):
Dorn that was also cast at MO Kalin, Some traditions say it
was done at the Isle of Faces. Both of those make sense, but
you might have guessed the aislefaces more certainly because
it's just more distinctly associated with magic and the
old gods and the children, whereas MO Kaelin, it's a little
more uncertain, right? Is it the place of the children?
Is it a place of the first Men? Is it both?

(19:02):
Yeah. What's going on there?
Right. It's not as it's not as certain.
So one question I would have there is where woods were there
any where woods, hard trees in the neck that got flooded or
submerged? Because there don't appear to be
any there. Now, we've been to MO Kalen a
few times. We went there through Catlin's
POV and A Game of Thrones when the war was starting.

(19:23):
We went there with Theon in the last book when his father wanted
to get through the neck without any casualties.
And and Ramsey pulled his whole maneuver there with getting
Theon to bring the Ironborn out of the castles by trickery and
then, you know, flaying them all.
Ramsey doing his thing. I can't recall any weirwoods in
any swamps anywhere. That doesn't mean they don't

(19:45):
exist. But the fact that we have 0
examples is like maybe that's not their where they can grow.
Maybe weirwoods can't live in swamp.
So you can maybe understand why that might not be a great place
for the children. They might not love swamps
because there's no. Weirwoods there, but if any of
the wetland types have weirwoods, it would be swamps

(20:06):
because those are the ones that are forested.
Bogs don't have trees, Marshes don't really either.
And Fens also, yeah, some of them have trees a little bit,
but it's the it's the swamps that have the significant amount
of trees. Let's move on to two hammers are
better than one. To be very clear, the Hammer of
the Waters is the name given to the spell that caused the

(20:27):
separation of Essos and Westeros, IE the breaking of the
arm of Dorn. The second incident of the
Hammer of the Water is less certain, but it's supposedly
resulted in the flooding of the Neck.
This is sometimes meant to, we're meant to believe that the
first one worked, even though, Imean, the spell worked even

(20:47):
though it didn't accomplish necessarily what it was set out
to accomplish, which was to stopkeep the First Men from over
running Westeros. Well, that's that happened
anyway. You know, even cutting them off
the land bridge. Well, there's too many humans
already. They're breathing really fast.
Yeah, it's too late. So later in the episode, we'll
consider maybe that wasn't the purpose because, yeah, it's
like, well, why? Why did they do that?
It was too late. Well, maybe they had a different

(21:09):
reason. Anyway, we also have to question
whether we're told the Neck, theflooding of the Neck was maybe
not what they intended. They were like they tried to do
something like the breaking of the Arm of Dorne and it didn't
quite take. It was only a half the spell,
only half worked. It flooded the Neck, but it
didn't shatter the land bridge. You could still cross.
It's a lot harder to cross, but you can still do it.

(21:30):
You don't need a boat. Whereas you know from Essos to
Westeros you need a boat. So that is curious, right?
Maybe the goal was to separate the North and South entirely to
make a N throws. Northwester Rose, for lack of a
better term, to separate them. A little more on that later.

(21:51):
But we can't assume that it was a spell that just came up short,
that maybe the intent was to flood the neck and not to just
destroy it. We, we are told sort of given
this assumption, but we should question that assumption at
least a little bit. So maybe so.
The conventional wisdom says thefirst hammer worked.
The second one, not quite. But yeah, that's the kind of

(22:12):
thinking we need to like, turn over and examine and maybe
consider that it might not be accurate.
But why mode Kaylin? Why did they do it there?
Why even expect it to work? Did the children perform such
magics before? I'm going to guess no.
After all, why before any humanscame to Westeros, why would they

(22:34):
be delving into earthquake magicor blowing up continents and
causing volcano? What would be the purpose?
They don't have some species that's driving them to the point
of extinction. The giants were not that big of
a threat to them. They were able to coexist with
the giants for thousands of years without being 00.
They're going to kill us all right.

(22:54):
But when humanity came along, they were like, oh, oh, not only
might they kill us all, they're killing our gods.
The giants weren't a problem in that regard.
And in fact, they were probably on the same team if anything.
So that is something to really consider.
Why Moat Kalin? My first instinct as well.
There might have been Maybe it'sa hinge of the world.
Maybe it's a magical place. Maybe there's caves underneath

(23:16):
the children lived in. You know, there's a lot of hills
around that area. It's possible.
And even if we don't have the wecan't pinpoint it, There might
be some other reason that we just haven't considered.
Point being, the location is interesting.
Why that spot? It's it's come up for a bunch of
it's a defensive point. It's a magical spot.
It's a question of who did what there a lot of questions, but so

(23:38):
one of which is why, why did it start there?
Apart from the choke, the fact that it's a choke point, why
would the breaking of the arm ofDorn have been cast there?
Well, because there's magic there.
There must be something about the location.
There must be something inherentabout the terrain, a place
that's close to some sort of energy sort.

(23:59):
I don't know, like it's hard to put into words, but I think you
get the gist of what I'm saying here.
And as we go through this, it's always important to remember who
our main source is. Not our only source, Our main
source, The maesters, right? We're getting, we get a lot of
this from the World of Ice and Fire.
We get a lot of this from maesters.
Throughout the course of A Song of Ice and Fire, throughout the
story, we hear Bran and other people talking about what about

(24:22):
this ancient history. Some of what they're repeating
is what was told to them by maesters.
Some of it was told to them by old man or other people.
So there's a little of both thrown in there, which this is a
nice way that George balances out the the legends with the
academics. And it's another thing where you
don't, you can't quite get all the way there to combine them,
but you've got this room to imagine how they might connect

(24:43):
and room to play and and theorize without it being too
wide open. And Speaking of Bran, well, he
is the one chance we have to maybe really get some solid
answers on this. What if Bran just casts his gaze
back in time to the breaking of the arm?
We could see that through his mind.
I wouldn't get my hopes up on that, but it's absolutely

(25:04):
possible, right? He might even get answers as to
why. I mean, the First Men were told
they came in force. It wasn't just a trickle.
It was a sudden surge of migrations which could imply
they were driven out. A lot of migrations, especially
mass migrations, happened because of some disaster or soon

(25:27):
to be disaster or a threat, right?
The free folk right now are fleeing the North because of the
others. They're trying to migrate beyond
into the other side of the wall because of a bigger threat,
right? The Andols, explicitly, a lot of
their migrations were because the Valyrians were dominant and
way more powerful than them. If you look at and all values

(25:50):
and Valyrian values, they're almost exactly the opposite.
Valyrians are like enslaved the weak.
The Andals are like knighthood, protect the weak.
Yeah, they don't live up to those values, but that's what
the idea was initially, right? Valyrians are like, yeah,
incest, that's fine. Andals hate incest.
There's no culture that hates incest more than the Andals.
So you can see how these things are directly opposed.
Like so many Andal Andal cultural touchstones are anti

(26:15):
Valyrian because that's who their big enemy was.
Even though this was thousands of years ago, those things
remain those same kind of touchstones as those echoes from
the past are visible here, even if we can't quite touch them.
We know they're there, we just don't know exactly what we're
looking for. The Rhinar too, another example.
The Rhinar fled the Valyrians and had to migrate, and their

(26:36):
migration was more of an odyssey, but it certainly falls
into this category. The Children of the Forest might
have been thinking along similarlines with with this magic of we
want to cut ourselves off. You know, we want to first,
we're trying to cut the humans off from coming to our
continent. When that didn't work, well,
maybe we'll just cut part of thecontinent off and the part they
least want, the North, the one that they migrated to last.

(26:59):
Well maybe we can keep that for ourselves.
Whether or not we include other humans there is part of the
question we have to answer this episode, or at least delve into.
Did the children and the humans who worship the old gods work on
this together to separate from non God non old gods
worshippers? Or was it just a function of the
children? Or was it just the first men who

(27:20):
worship the old gods and the children were out of the
picture? Is it similar to the Paul we
started this episode with? All these?
Are these multiple permutations that seem to follow the same
pattern? Children, Children, First men,
or just first Men? Or neither?
There's four options to keep repeating themselves here.
The unbowed, unbent, unbroken arm of Dawn.
Age Dorn. So to help us understand and

(27:42):
theorize and imagine what happened at Moat Kalin in the
neck, we should examine what happened with the first hammer
of the waters. Is it a natural starting point?
Well, unnatural starting point maybe.
Or maybe both. Let's hear what the World of Ice
and Fire has to say about the older of the two Hammers.
According to the most well regarded accounts from the
Citadel, anywhere from 8000 to 12,000 years ago, in the

(28:07):
southernmost reaches of Westeros, a new people crossed
the strip of land that bridged the Narrow Sea and connected the
eastern lands with the land in which the children and giants
lived. It was here that the first men
came into Dorn via the broken arm, which was not yet broken.

(28:28):
Why these people left their homelands is lost to all
knowing, but when they came, they came in force.
Thousands entered and began to settle the lands, and as the
decades passed they pushed farther and farther north.
Such tales as we have of those migratory days are not to be

(28:52):
trusted, for they suggest that within a few short years the
First Men had moved beyond the Neck and into the North.
Yet in truth it would have takendecades, even centuries, for
this to occur. What does seem to be accurate
from all the tales, however, is that the First Men soon came to

(29:14):
war with the Children of the Forest.
That maesterly point there that it would take decades, if not
centuries for humans to migrate to the north of Westeros to
think is pretty well supported by what we know about the
movement of ancient peoples on Earth.
And I'm talking about like prehistoric man precisely in the
same manner. We have a very similar example.

(29:38):
Humanity migrated across the Bering Strait into North
America, right? There were no truly indigenous
people in the Americas. There were the first peoples
that came over and well, they, they were the first ones to get
here besides the animals. So that's fair to call them
indigenous because they were first.
But you know, technically speaking, it's very similar to

(29:58):
this. There were no people in Westeros
until people walked over that land bridge similar to the real
world. And so we can, as modern science
is able to track the migration of those peoples with date
carbon dating and analyzing sites and seeing how far out
they go and and where they started, where they ended,
things like that. And note the consideration that

(30:19):
we mentioned earlier here that the first men were fleeing
something. They came in force, it says, and
you don't. Large migrations don't just
happen. People just pick up.
Like, giant communities don't just pick up and leave without
some very compelling reason. People came to Westeros and
began moving in. Remember, one of the first
things that happened was they saw the heart trees, and they
were like, whoa, that's scary. Where do these trees with faces

(30:39):
come? There's no people here, but
there's trees with faces. Whoa.
Yeah, that would be scary, wouldn't it?
But it's an important chronological detail that the
trees had faces before humans arrived.
So there's some thinking, some theorizing that maybe to make a
heart tree, you have to engage in sacrifice.
Well, if that's true, it doesn'thave to be human sacrifice
necessarily, because the children clearly didn't activate

(31:01):
these ancient heart trees with people when there were no
people, right? That's impossible.
Maybe they were sacrificing eachother.
Maybe they sacrificed the occasional giant.
I don't know how they could, youknow, hold them down like that.
Maybe you get them, drug them orsomething, or maybe just other
animals. You know, it's an ancient
foreign. It's not, it's not what we call
blood magic, but it might kind of fit there in a sense because

(31:22):
it's involves blood sacrifice and the killing of other beings
to create magic or to create a result.
Just like we don't assume the first men are a monolith or the
end alls are a monolith, or hopefully we don't consider that
about real world groups or characters or people or
countries. The children are not a monolith.
They they didn't all agree on everything.

(31:43):
At least we have no reason to assume that it's not the
default, right? You don't default believe.
Well, they're a culture, so of they're a civilization, so they
must have been on the same page about most things.
No civilization has ever been like that.
Oh, there's always huge disagreements.
Sometimes there's the, the people that are in charge are
the the good ones. And the disagreements go well

(32:04):
because you've got the, the people in power are the good
people. But that's usually not how it
goes either. It's usually more of a mix,
right? And that's probably true with
the children. You, you might have had some,
they might have, some of them have been pretty high minded,
but some of them it might have been just really bloody about
like no, kill all humans. That's it.
We're like, it's like Bender from Futurama is the only,
that's the only answer. There's no, there's no
compromise here. That's it.

(32:24):
You know, kill them all. That's the only thing.
That's the only thing we can do because they are a existential
threat to us. It's us or them, you know,
that's how some of them might have seen it, and likewise some
of the humans would have seen itthat way too.
They're like, well, these guys are a threat to us.
We want to live here. Our families are in danger
because of them. It's them or us.
Obviously that's not how it worked out in the long run.
They, the children, and the First Men did eventually learn

(32:45):
to coexist. It took the pact potentially and
maybe thousands of years of worrying.
Maybe not quite that long, but maybe.
And after the pact, things were good for a while at least
between humans and and children for the most part.
Again, not a monolith. There would have been some
exceptions, but until the end, all's came.
Or maybe other waves of First Men who weren't part of the

(33:06):
group that became Old Gods worshippers.
Because again, the First Men is not one culture.
It's an amalgam of cultures thatwe can't name because we don't
know anything about them. We don't know the differences
between all these people that migrated from Essos.
All we know is First Men. But there would have been
differences. We have to assume that those
differences equate to not agreeing about everything,

(33:26):
right? It's a very basic thing to
imagine so, but from the children's perspective, because
the early first men probably weren't that magical or if they
were, they weren't working with magic on the level the children
that may have come later, but itcertainly didn't happen at the
start. So the early children, they're
seeing these humans come over and a lot of them are panicking
or worrying or looking into the future, even potentially with

(33:48):
their green seer magic and seeing a dark, a dark cloud, so
to speak. Maybe they don't know exactly
what to do, but it's going to cause a, you know, a ripple
through their society, whatever society may be, for lack of a
better word, their civilization.So we don't know that the
children can cause earthquakes or make volcanoes go off.

(34:11):
But they again, they are the those who sing the song of
earth, Earth magic. That's their Forte.
Earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, that is all earth magic.
I mean, the flooding is water, but you cause a flood by
breaking the land and the water rushes in.
You're not actually controlling the water, you're controlling

(34:32):
the land. And the water does its own
thing. The water goes where it goes.
Just let it do its thing, let itgo where it wants to go, and
it'll. Yeah, you don't need to control
it, just unleash it. So it really does.
There is a lot of crossover there.
And you can understand why thesebeliefs are persistent, because
it's the type of magic the children already are associated
with. It's like, yeah, they they have
control over nature and, and geology.

(34:54):
Those kind of things that we're thinking about in scientific
terms, that's their that's theirscientific area of expertise.
Thinking about it in magical terms, yeah, it's Earth.
They have Earth magic. They don't, they don't have air
magic. They don't have water magic.
They don't have fire magic necessarily.
Maybe there's a little overlap there.
But Earth magic, yeah, that seems to be their domain.
But going farther with that, before there were any humans, we

(35:17):
I mentioned this earlier, why would they delve into destroying
land bridges? They there was no reason to,
they had no compelling need for that.
But they might have started to learn new magic, like, hey, we
have a new threat. It's like it's like war, right?
Real World War, when you have two nations go to war and it's

(35:41):
similar level of kill or be killed, like one of us is going
to end here. Half of the society is working
on innovations to better war machines, better defenses
against war machines, better medical things, you know, better
ways to heal people. So war is awful, but there are a
tiny few good things that come out of it.

(36:02):
These innovations in health and not the weapons of war are not
good innovations, but the the health and the healthcare,
things like that, the better. I mean, you take for example,
someone loses an arm or a leg. If you're a doctor, how many
times you have to deal with that?
Every once in a while, I guess. But during war it's like
constant, right? Like it's a day-to-day, like
multiples per day or if not more.

(36:23):
So you just in sheer practice, it's gruesome to think about.
But like that is that's the truth.
The more practice you have with something, the better you're
going to get at it. So what I'm getting at here is
the children would have started to delve into new potential for
their own magic. OK, We're earth magic people,
how can we use this as a weapon against these foes that we've

(36:47):
never had to deal with before? They probably hadn't didn't use
it as a weapon very much at all 'cause their only real foe is
the giants, right? And they didn't need to use
grand magics to deal with them. They're just not that dangerous
of a foe. They could outsmart them, you
know, like the giants aren't, aren't big thinkers, you know,
they're not building cities or designing weapons of their own.

(37:07):
They're not advancing. So when the but when humans
come, the children are like, OK,we got to figure out how to do
big Matt. We got to figure out how to get
more out of our own sorceress abilities.
We got to figure out how to use this as weapons.
We got to turn this. We got to militarize what we
know. Why would they have done a mass
sacrifice to cause some big spell had no reason to, but now

(37:28):
they do. This is an era where they were
exploring the dark limits of their own potential places they
didn't want to go, but now they are compelled to because it's
kill or be killed time. So this, I figure, is when they
learned how to do some of these grand epic magics that they just
had no reason to do before. It's even possible the children

(37:51):
learn this from someone else, right there is that story in the
World of Ice and Fire or that allusion to the possibility that
Old Town is so, so old that in really ancient times there were
like magical trading going on, like swapping sorceress secrets
is what's alluded to there. It sounds like really high

(38:12):
magicky. But hey, that's the territory
we're working with today. And this is supported.
This isn't something I'm pullingout of my butt.
It's it's in the World of Ice and Fire.
There is some talk of that that Old Town, you know, it was a
place of sorceress exchange, like people trading secrets
about magic, whether the great Empire, the dawn was involved,
whether Valyria didn't exist yetor whether they did, whether

(38:33):
there's other cultures that are long gone.
If the children, the children are delving into magic, Why not
learn from other people? Why not trade?
Why not swap that? It isn't just goods and and
services that get traded betweendifferent cultures.
Why not magic? So this could be where they get
some of those ideas like, well, we know that the the people from
the great Empire, the dawn, they'd have their own word for
that. Did you know the shadow?

(38:56):
Where did that come from? That's some grand sorcery,
probably maybe an accident or maybe not.
And then much later, more recently, we have things like
the Doom, right? So these are all all these
things have the smell of sorceryover them, whether it's the
faceless men killing the sorcerer's that held back the 14
flames that allowed it to finally be unleashed, whether

(39:16):
it's the Roynar supposedly casting waterspouts to bring
down Dragons or causing, you know, grayscale, the rising of
the Roin to flood cities, thingslike that.
High magic is supported. It's not common, but it's there,
right? It's there.
It's absolutely there. There's plenty of examples of
it. In fact, at the end of this
episode, near the end of this episode, we're going to go

(39:37):
through a few things that we think are of a similar level,
power level or related in in terms of concept.
So, yeah, I wonder, did the hammer, the waters, did the
maybe they learned that from theRoynar?
Like that's water magic, right? I mean, it could be water magic.
I I've already said that I thinkit could be explained as earth
magic. You blow up the land, the water
floods in. But we can't be too strict with

(39:59):
that interpretation. I can't be like, yeah, that's
definitely how it works. That's definitely it.
There could be overlap. Maybe the the Roynish, maybe
it's maybe it was rising the water rather than lowering the
land, you know, so that. Who knows?
We don't exactly know the mechanism here.
We know there's water and land involved, we know the end
result. But yeah, in between, what made

(40:20):
it happen what, what specific hand gestures or blood sacrifice
or what regions were used to cast this spell?
Who knows? So we're always on the lookout
for magical overlap, things likethis, where what one culture has
done with magic is similar to some other version, right?
For the simplest example that I've used repeatedly is

(40:40):
foretelling green seers flame reading blood magic like Maggie
the frog takes, you know, sips on your fingers blood and tells
you your future foretelling. And and since Maggie was
accurate with that, we have to take it.
We have to believe that that's athing, right?
So there's multiple types of foretelling in this world,
multiple types of foretelling, and there's probably multiple
types of most magics, right? Or at least it's something

(41:02):
that's worth considering. It's a idea that we can't
dismiss. Yeah.
So children would never have sacrificed humans before if they
do that. I mean, there's lots of
allusions to this. And as well as humans
sacrificing other humans, whether there's any real power
in that, I tend to believe thereis.
We've seen even singular examples of that.
Like maybe Mary Mazdoor is an example of that.

(41:24):
Certainly Macoro kills that maester and the the wind gets
better, you know, So these it's definitely real.
What isn't necessarily real is killing 100 people to get a
massive spell. We don't know if that's true,
but if killing one person can get you a little bit of wind,
why not killing 100 people getting you a lot of wind?

(41:45):
Maybe a hurricane. Isn't that possible?
It doesn't. It's not that much of A leap
logic wise. It's just a matter of like
intensity or of scale. Like killing one guy to get a
little bit of wind is 1, killingten guys to get ten wins is 10.
You know how high does this go? How can you kill 1000 people and
get a wind 1000 times more intense?

(42:07):
And now consider that is for earth magic.
If you can kill one person and get a little tiny tremor,
assuming that's how it works, sacrificing 1000 people might
shatter the armor Dorn. And this is alluded to.
Even the World of Ice and Fire considers this as a possibility.
Even the maesters are like, yeah, that could be what
happened. Because the maesters, even as
much as they downplay magic, they don't go so far as to say

(42:32):
it never existed. They in fact come right out and
say there's no doubt. Magic used to be a big deal.
It doesn't seem to be anymore. Now They seem to be missing the
whole ebb and flow of it that we're made aware of as, as
readers, that it can come and goand that the right now it's
coming. And before it went, you know,
maybe, maybe because of the Dragons dying out, it went, but
it's coming back now. And it was never fully gone,

(42:54):
right. So take a few 100, maybe
decades, centuries, maybe not even that long of war between
the children and the humans. Each capture some of the others.
Maybe the children are slowly capturing enough humans to cast
some big old spell. They're like, once we have 1000
human captives, we can pull thisoff, cast this big old spell.

(43:17):
And it took them a while. It took them a while to gather
all those captives. Meanwhile, the opportunity, the
window maybe has closed. They're like, yeah, there's too
many humans have crossed over. But maybe they don't know.
Maybe they don't have all the information we have.
They might think, yeah, OK, there's a lot of humans here and
they breed really fast, but still, there's value in cutting
more of them off. Like maybe they're going to
expand rapidly, but they'll expand more rapidly if there's

(43:41):
more of them here to begin with.There's still value in slowing
the trickle of humanity, even ifit's not a full solution.
No one ever said the Hammer of Waters was supposed to be the
end of it. You know, we, we couldn't know
even if it was right. And we don't know anything about
what happened then. So I think about this a lot,
though. What wouldn't to to George has
always been very clear that magic should have a cost.

(44:04):
So if you're going to cast a bigold spell like earth shattering
magic, that cost has to be enormously high.
It might be a cost paid for by sacrificial victims.
It might be a cost paid for by the spellcaster.
It might be both the person who cast the the green seer at this
point, we're we're going super ancient.
So we're, we're considering a child of the Forest Green seer

(44:26):
or several green seers who were children of the forest.
Maybe casting the spell killed them or messed their brain up,
you know, made them go insane orsomething like that, or who
knows, just cause them great suffering, you know, permanent
damage, something like that. Maybe they can't cast spells
anymore after that. Maybe it burned them out.
They can no longer touch the, the energies, right?

(44:47):
Something like that. You know, we're trying to try
not to go too far with this, butwe we're, it's very fertile
ground for imagination, especially if we're talking
about the fact that they're trying to deal with new, if
they're trying to come up with new sorceries, they're trying to
come up with, as I used the termbefore, to weaponize the magic
they already had. Well, that's not just gonna
sounds like a switch you flip, right?

(45:07):
Especially in George's world where magic has a high cost,
where it's dangerous. If you're experimenting with
magic, dangerous magic, violent magic, earth shattering magic.
What are we supposed to imagine that it just went well the first
time? No, of course not.
There's got to be mistakes, accidents, misinterpretations.
Yeah, just things going wrong, you know, whatever, whatever

(45:28):
that might mean. Here's an informative bit that
alludes to the children having to adapt, as we're saying, at
need due to the threat of humanity.
This is a little more mundane. Not sorceress, but it gets at
the point I'm saying quote. The first men, who had brought
with them strange gods, horses, cattle, and weapons of bronze,
were also larger and stronger than the children, and so they

(45:52):
were a significant threat. The hunters among the children,
their wood dancers, became theirwarriors as well.
But for all their secret arts oftree and leaf, they could only
slow the first men in their advance.
The Green Seers employed their arts, and tales say that they

(46:13):
could call the beasts of marsh, forest and air to fight on their
behalf. Dire wolves and monstrous snow
bears, cave lions and eagles, mammoths and serpents and more.
But the first Men proved too powerful, and the children are

(46:34):
said to have been driven to a desperate act.
Legend has it that the great flood that broke the land bridge
that is now the broken arm was the work of the green seers who
gathered at the place that is now MO Kaelin.
Take note of that wording. The place that is now MO Kaelin,

(46:55):
because of course there wouldn'thave been a castle there when
the children, the children didn't build a castle there and
they're trying to break the broken arm.
Yeah, even the the First Men wouldn't have built a castle all
the way up there that early either, most likely.
And if they had, then why then how can the children even be
there to cast a spell if there'salready First Men castle there?
That's an enemy of them. Yeah.
It doesn't really add up, does it?

(47:16):
So that's why it says the place that is now Mote Kalin, the
Neck. It's the neck, northern part of
the Neck, I suppose. And again, no flooding was there
at that point either. So it was really just hills and
barren landscape. There may have already been a
little bit of a salt marsh type of situation there because it's
close to the close to the coast on the east side there.

(47:37):
And eventually you get to the coast on the West side too.
So we got a couple of different oceans poking in on the other
side there. So it does sound incredibly
powerful, that spell the breaking the hammer of the
waters. So being dubious is fair about
it, but we have to remember our source that the world of ice
would fire. It downplays magic and still is
pretty open to this, even thoughthey downplay they're like,

(47:58):
yeah, this this really could have happened.
I mean, and again, we keep I keep coming back to this.
But those who sing the song of Earth, it's their domain.
And the deep forests and caves like the deep, the the deep
forest, yeah, this doesn't have as much to do with it.
But the caves, that's where under the ground, that's where
the the volcanic activity is, where the tremors are, where the

(48:20):
tectonic plates would be rubbingagainst each other.
I mean, you got to go really deep for that.
But if anyone has access to that, it's the children.
Consider what Leaf told Bran. And I guess JoJo and Mira were
listening to that. The caves that they live in are
so vast. They haven't explored them all
the children haven't. And they have lived there for,

(48:42):
according to Leaf, a thousand 1000 years, which is 100,000
years, which is kind of a scale time that's difficult to fathom.
But if they haven't explored allthat in 100,000 years, then
yeah, it kind of implies that those caves go real, real deep.
And if you can, if you're a person with sorceress power and

(49:06):
you can do things below the Earth, well, it would have an
effect on above the earth where where these things are more
unstable. These instability of below the
Earth via the volcanic activity,the magma, this and that.
If you mess with that, it causesbig things to happen on the
surface. It really just, it just fits so
well. Now, again, just briefly, the

(49:30):
the the association of forests and flooded forests.
This is something that I'm like,well, if they flooded the neck
and that was their intent, like they weren't trying to shatter
it like they were the the arm ofDorn.
Well, it would fit somewhat because of their association
with swamps, right? Swamps are forested wetlands,

(49:50):
like I said, which by the way, as an aside, it's why there's
such a real world aside. This is why there's such a push
among certain groups to save thewetlands.
Wetlands are healthy. You think of some of these
swamps and Fens as like a sourceof disease, and sometimes that's
true. But wetlands, the plants that

(50:11):
exist in wetlands, are vital to absorbing bad things.
They suck up toxins, ammonia andother bad things.
It's basically at the heart of all nature, the the symbiosis
between humans and plants. They, their ex, their waste is
our food and our, our waste is their food, that kind of thing.

(50:31):
So. And wetlands are usually at the
dividing point between land and sea or land and lake or land and
ocean. Yeah.
So, yeah. Anyway, the children would want
to protect these two. The children would have a
natural understanding of this, even though it's a real world,
modern understanding kind of thing.
You know, ancients kind of had an understanding of some of
that. They understood that cleaner
water came from wetlands, then from a lot of other places.

(50:54):
That's that's a very observable thing.
You don't need special science or knowledge to do that.
Like, this water is clean. I can tell because of how it
tastes and because it doesn't make me sick.
You know, let's all drink from this, you know, And then if
someone comes in and destroys it, it's like, hey, where did
our clean water go? That's a very observable thing.
And yeah, so you can think all along the same lines that

(51:15):
children have this, this association, this closeness with
nature. They would they would understand
a lot of these things too. Now, another reason the children
would maybe want to cut off the North and only the North,
besides the fact that it was toobig of a thing to keep the First
Men out of all of Westeros. Like that's just a too tall of
an order. But maybe we can keep them out

(51:35):
of the North. It worked for the end all.
I kept the end alls out of the North.
So maybe that was their goal. Maybe they weren't trying to
keep the First Men out the only the end alls because by then
enough of the First Men were worshipping the same gods they
weren't at anymore. The pack was long, was far in
the past and things were copacetic.
The reason the Children might prefer the North and prefer to

(51:55):
cut access off is because again,their territory is the deep
forests. By far overwhelmingly the
biggest forest in Westeros is the Wolfswood.
It is not close. Obviously if we're thinking 1012
even more years ago the sizing could be different, but I'd see
even then. I doubt any forest was as big as

(52:17):
the Wolf's would. It's just so big.
And the north is the biggest of the regions too, so it's the
biggest forest and the biggest region.
I think the Wolf's would might even be larger than most of the
stormlands, and the stormlands might be the most the next most
forested because of its it's theRainwood.
The ancient rainwood may have been huge, but the ancient
rainwood may not have existed atall in this this form or

(52:40):
fashion, because the ancient rainwood was different.
The terrain was different because of the broken arm.
There was the sea of Dorn didn'teven exist then.
So everything was different downthere.
It's it's hard to understand thegeology of something that's
12,000 years gone or whatever. So it's a pattern that repeated.
In other words, the children fled to the Neck and some of
them to the Wolfswood because, hey, that's the best place to be

(53:01):
if, if there's going to be FirstMen everywhere.
And then the First Men did this to the children, and then the
and dolls did this to the First Men and the children.
History repeating itself as it tends to do.
Why so late? Again, there's this question of
if they couldn't cut First Men off, why did they even bother?
What was the point of shatteringthe arm if it wasn't going to

(53:23):
fundamentally change the population of First Men?
It wasn't going to solve the problem.
I did allude to the fact that, well, maybe it helped a little
bit. It doesn't have to be a full
solution. There wouldn't be a full
solution. So they'd already been forced to
live differently by only forestsand caves and swamps.
Now they can't live, you know, in the fields and meadows.

(53:43):
That's the purview of the humans.
Now, this might affect their ability, their societies greatly
in there. They might not be able to
communicate as easily as they used to.
Maybe they can though because ofmagic.
So 1 theory and I like it a lot when this comes from the World
of Ice and Fire. This isn't like a fan theory is
that the pact only happened because the children were a big

(54:06):
enough threat. If the First Men were like, well
we're winning, why would we cometo the negotiating table if
we're just winning? Tyrion makes the same point to
the Lannister meeting that his his fought Tywin's like yeah,
you were right about that. But Tyrion's like they're not
going to make peace with us. First of all, we just killed
Eddard Stark. Second of all, they're winning.
At that point, they were the Starks were winning.

(54:27):
So like, why would they say, yeah, let's been, you know,
let's wake out a peace deal? No, Usually the people who are
you do that when it's a stalemate or when you're losing.
If you're winning and winning handily, you don't go, hey,
let's make peace. Now.
That's usually not how it works.Usually you just keep pushing,
like we're winning, let's win more.
Yeah, like that's that's how it goes, Right.

(54:48):
So what the the point being is like, hey, look, they show they
demonstrated to the First Men. Look what we can do.
We can blow up a whole land bridge.
It's the point wasn't to say, hey, we can.
We're stopping more of you from migrating.
Maybe that's a nice side effect.The point is to show their
power, to demonstrate their power to scare the First Men
into negotiate. Look, if we can do that, if we

(55:08):
can shatter the Armadorn, what else can we do?
We don't want to do it, but we'll do it.
We'll capture 100 of you guys, sacrifice you to the old gods
and we'll drop some other huge spell on your head.
You got the hammer of the waters.
Next is the screwdriver of the volcano.
I don't know, some other tool with some other natural, natural

(55:30):
feature, right. So it that and that's a
legitimate threat. I think you know, you prove it.
It's not just a hey, we can we'll we'll cast a big spell.
They don't believe that. But if you actually cast a big
spell and say, hey, the next oneis going to hit you more
directly. All right, Well, that's
something that is that is a legitimate threat.
That might be something that would bring the first men to the
negotiating table and say, all right, we're both slaughtering

(55:53):
each other. It's a stalemate.
Let's stop this. That's a good reason to stop a
war when you're not, when you'renot, when you're not winning and
you're also not really losing. Well, that argues that you're
both losing, you know, from likea human humanity perspective,
not humans as in humans versus children.
I mean, like humane perspective,like you're both losing when

(56:13):
you're just killing each other. And it's the same line of
thinking that takes us to the others.
If the flooding of the hammer ofthe waters didn't work, if the
threat of the hammer of the waters didn't work, if a second
hammer of the water still didn'twork, or if it didn't work
because the end alls came and the threat reemerged, well, you
got to go farther, don't you? The others kind of feel like

(56:35):
that ultimate threat. They're like, well, we didn't
want to do this because it hurtsus too, but it's our only
choice. So they create the others.
The others are capable of killing everything with their
intense cold that they bring, apparently.
So the idea is we'll hide in ourcaves and while the others just
destroy everybody. And once the others have killed,

(56:55):
all humanity will come back up and they'll be very, there'll be
fewer of us. It hurts us a lot too, but it
hurts them more. It kills all of them and only
kills some of us. That's not a solution you want
to you want to implement unless you have to because, well,
you're killing a lot of your ownpeople to do it.
It's a natural defense mechanismof bees.
We've seen this in nature quite a bit like a Hornet will come
into a bee's nest and the, the Hornet is just like a tank.

(57:17):
The bees can't do anything to it.
It's just like a a tank amidst abunch of toy soldiers, but they
have one defense mechanism. They can swarm the wasp and rub
their wings together really fast, and it creates friction,
which creates heat and it raisesthe temperature.
The bees can survive a slightly higher temperature than the
Hornet can. So as soon as the Hornet dies of

(57:38):
heat exhaustion or whatever the correct terminology is here for
what kills it. Some of the bees die too doing
this, but it saves the hive, right?
It's the same logic. You got this.
The human, the humans are the wasp in this.
And instead of extreme heat, we're talking about extreme
cold. So some of the children might
die either casting the spell or from the actual effects of the

(58:01):
spell itself that it's so cold that it's some of them die
because of it or the spell requires sacrifice.
Like some of them have to die tomake the spell happen.
So that's even more straightforward as to why they
wouldn't want to take this step initially.
They might be willing to suffer greatly after they've already
suffered greatly. They're like, well, let's not
let's try to beat them. We're not just going to start

(58:22):
off by sacrificing half of ourselves.
Let's see if we can have a better result than that.
Centuries go by. Maybe they're like, yeah, this
isn't working. We're going to we're going to
have to be desperate. We're going to do something a
little bigger. And that may be where the others
came in. It's kind of like another
another explanation for that. It's like chemotherapy, you
know, a treatment that causes harm to the patient but causes
more harm to the disease. And the disease in this case is

(58:43):
humanity from the perspective ofthe children.
Now there's a permutation of this.
Was it the all humans that are the enemy here?
Or was it just the humans that don't worship the old gods?
Or was it some of both ancient times it was just the children?
After some time passes, enough of the first men worship the old
gods. They're on the same side as the

(59:04):
children vis A vis a humanity destroying heart, trees and and
all the other stuff. Well, we worship that too.
We don't want you. We're helping you.
But not all of our humans, none of our fellow humans are not not
all on board with this. So yeah, we have to consider the
possibility that it wasn't a mistake, that the Hammer of the
waters was. Maybe they did want to fully
separate the North, but maybe they just wanted a swamp.

(59:25):
Maybe that's actually what they wanted because the swamp gives
them power. The swamp might create sorceress
energy for them, especially if there's already magic in that
place. Why?
Again, why did they cast the spell from Moat Kalin from that
place that became Moat Kalin in the 1st place?
Well, our best guess is because there's something magical about
that spot. Maybe he's flooding it, made it

(59:48):
more magical, made the energy more powerful, because it added
life, because it added more nature to it.
I don't know. I mean, if it was a barren land
and they added a bunch of swamp creatures and you know.
Bacteria. This the amount of life in the
area after the flooding of the neck increased a lot.

(01:00:08):
Obviously in in the arm of Dorne, it decreased because the
the entire landscape sunk under the water.
Yeah. So the only thing living on
there now are sea creatures. That's an entirely different
thing, but they create. This is creating a biosphere
that didn't exist at all. Not a biosphere, but a Biome
that didn't exist at all. And it's one that contains a lot
more life than it did. So if we're talking, you know,

(01:00:31):
the children are creators of nature, then there is kind of an
argument there for that. It's both a barrier to humanity
and a way to add more life to the region.
Now, a question I have is, OK, so this is a recurring question
or a question that comes up a few times about the children
casting the spell from Moe Kalinfrom the Children's Tower.

(01:00:53):
It's called the Children's tower.
So we're going to get back to that briefly, but I want to set
that question. Plant that seed.
As to why? Why would the children cast a
spell from within a castle at all?
And if it's because it gives them a benefit, well, what
benefit is that? Why?
What does the castle do? To enhance the magic?

(01:01:14):
Or maybe it wasn't the children at all.
Maybe it was First Men, old gods, worshippers that had
nothing. The children had very little or
nothing to do with it. It was all mankind.
That's possible too. That would make sense because we
don't have, we wouldn't have a question about why do it in a
castle. If it's humans, that makes
sense. Humans do things in castles.
But the children, we have like no examples of them ever doing

(01:01:36):
anything in a castle that I can think of.
Usually I have a pretty comprehensive knowledge of this
stuff, right? Maybe tell me if I'm wrong, but
I can't. I don't have an example like
that. So that in general, when the
magic is sourced from the Old Gods, it is sometimes tricky to
tell whether it's children or early first men or or both.

(01:02:00):
And that gets us to the Kranigman, right?
The Kranigman didn't exist before the neck was flooded.
And the Kranigmen, according to the Kranigmen, are the closest
to the children. They're the most related in that
sense. They're the closest to nature
partly because of that. And there might actually be like
a biological connection. But they're definitely those who

(01:02:21):
live closest to Earth, right. The children of those who sing
the song of Earth where the Kranigman live in the swamps.
Like they live the closest to nature.
And they're remember their theirvow that they gave to Bran or
water to Earth, Earth to water, you know, combining those
things. Well, swamp earth to water,
water to earth. Yeah.
You're living amidst both and maybe that was a long game of

(01:02:43):
the children. Where else is there a big swamp
in all of Westeros? There's some, but there's no
huge 1. You know, there's some a little
bit over in the in the crack claw point area.
I believe there's some bogs and Fens there, certainly, but
there's lots of a lot of trees and, and solid ground.
So the the neck is, I believe, by far the largest swamp in all
of Westeros. And it might have been created

(01:03:04):
rather than something that occurred completely naturally.
The long game I'm referring to here is the Kranigman exist
because of the flooding, and theKranigman are the closest to the
children. Maybe that's what they were
aiming for. Like hey, if we build a huge
swamp, the people that live herewill have a better connection to
us. They created a human subspecies,

(01:03:28):
a human subculture that they canrelate to more than any of the
other humanity human cultures. It's a little out there is an
idea, but it's it's got a littlesomething to it.
It's got to lose a little leg tothat.
I think a little momentum there.It it's it's a pretty grand idea
that it's pretty big thinking you know a lot very long term

(01:03:49):
planning. But the children live hundreds
of years. This is this is falls in line
with the way they strategize. You don't have our species
doesn't generally enact plans that take hundreds of years to
come through because we won't see the end of that.
But even that isn't without without precedent.
A lot of modern cathedrals took over 100 years to build.

(01:04:09):
I mean modern, you know, cathedrals, just a lot of
cathedrals took 100 years or more to build.
So, yeah, the people that started that cathedral did not
see it finished. Kind of an act of faith, right?
Or an act of humanity to to you care about your descendants,
whether they're your personal descendants or just descendants
of your community. Yeah, high minded, different
from high magic, high minded, right.

(01:04:29):
And some of the children would would have that level of wisdom.
Maybe they are more of a connected culture, more of a
network, more of a what happens to me happens to all of us kind
of, you know, like they're more like that than than humans are.
You know, there's also a slim possibility that the neck was
already swampy and they just increased the swampiness of it.

(01:04:50):
But that seems less likely. It's not as interesting.
I think George is going to pick the more interesting version
when he has options like that. Now, here's another.
Here's a detail. It'll bring us back to some more
solid ground, which is ironic because I'm talking about a
swamp. But anyway, here we go quote.
It was the North and the North alone that was able to keep the

(01:05:10):
Andols at Bay, thanks to the impenetrable swamps of the Neck
and the ancient keep of Moat Kalin.
The number of Andol armies that were destroyed in the Neck
cannot be easily reckoned, and so the Kings of Winter preserved
their independent rule for many centuries to come.

(01:05:33):
We've also seen the children andtheir people's minds.
We know that can happen with glass candles and the Valyrians
and maybe some other examples, but we've seen it with brands.
Comadrine right there was definitely the three eyed Crow
was in there, probably blood Raven.
It doesn't matter who it was for, for our purposes, it was
something, it was a being, it was a consciousness, a

(01:05:56):
something, an entity that wasn'tin Bran's mind.
I mean wasn't a figment of his imagination is what I mean to
say. So if they can get into people's
heads that way, then maybe thereis something to them affecting
human leaders. Maybe the Kings of Winter were
influenced and their dreams wereinfluenced by high magic, by

(01:06:17):
green seers. You get the humans, get the
humans that are somewhat on yourside to enact your will, enact
something that you think is necessary to for your survival
right now. During the end all invasion, the
first men usually lost, right? The end alls were too strong,
kind of like how the the children were too weren't able
to handle the first men militaristically.

(01:06:38):
Like they have they're bigger, they're stronger, they have
bigger weapons. They have, even though they
didn't have steel. Well the children didn't even
have any form of metal. Obsidian versus steel is a
problem. So when the end alls come along
and they actually have actual steel and bigger horses and are
even more warlike and they neverturn to the old gods, well
that's obviously a bigger problem.

(01:07:00):
So for centuries if not longer, MO Kalin did its thing holding
back end alls. Whether it also held back
earlier first men cultures is upfor debate or up for question,
but we should assume that the and dolls never faced the neck
in an unflooded state. By the time the and dolls came

(01:07:21):
along, the the flooding had already happened.
So they never got they never gotthe easier, quote UN quote
easier version of it. It was never easy, but it became
really hard after so hard that they never even succeeded.
Right. And this gets back to my bubble
thing. The idea of a bubble, right,
which we're coming to next that they were trying to create a
only like a kind of cut off state from everyone else.

(01:07:44):
If you have the north isn't doesn't have a lot of places to
land, you know, with with ships.So more than that in a SEC.
But let me get back to the the armies dying in the in the
swamp, because that's interesting too.
If there's power in death, if the death may pay for life, if
bodies and blood, there's power in that sorceress energy, for

(01:08:05):
lack of a better word. Well, this is kind of why I
explained the underlying scientific principles behind a
bog. And I pointed out that the
decomposition is very slow in bogs.
Bodies can be very well preserved in bogs.
There is a body that scientists have in this world right now, in

(01:08:28):
our world right now, that dates to 8000.
BCA preserved body 8. That's more than 10,000 years
old, y'all, and it's mostly preserved, or at least preserved
substantially. It's called the Kelberg.
Man. I probably said that wrong.
It's Danish. That's where it was found.
Was found in Denmark. Most of the bog bodies is what

(01:08:52):
they're called. Are found in Denmark, Germany,
the Netherlands, also UK, Ireland and Scotland.
Also Florida. Yeah, Florida.
So you get all these northern European places and also
Florida. Yeah, well, bogs happen where
they happen. You know, obviously they've
warm. Why the cold bog thing isn't a
thing in Florida, but they do have them there.

(01:09:14):
So the Florida one is kind of fascinating because it's
explicitly not cold. It's it's wind over is what it's
called the location. But there's even even older one,
even older bog bodies found in aplace called warm Mineral
Springs, Florida. And it's called there you go
warm and mineral springs that tells you it's not cold.
The actual water coming up from the ground is warm.

(01:09:35):
That's abnormal. It's called warm mineral Springs
because it's the only warm sinkhole in the entire state of
Florida, which has a lot of sinkholes.
My mother goes swimming in sinkholes all the time.
Well, not all the time, but frequently.
So it's kind of funny that the bog bodies discovered in the
only warm sinkhole when normallybodies, bogs are associated with
cold. But also it's not just burials,

(01:09:57):
it's not just bodies, it's artifacts from Paleo Indians.
What's a Paleo Indian? Paleo Indian is a concept we
discussed earlier without using the term.
It's those first people that migrated into North America from
over the Bering Sea, from eastern side.
Well, what's now Siberia, I suppose so.

(01:10:18):
I don't know if the others will get going to get to Moat Kalin,
but if they do, there's a lot ofbodies in there.
Probably. George could easily write it
that way, that a bunch of and all bodies can be pulled out of
the swamps by the others. And that would be pretty cool in
a creepy way. So this kind of, this is the
kind of real world science that George could use to greater
impact. Like he could do his thing where
he turns it up to 11 just. OK.

(01:10:39):
Yeah. So every once in a while, a body
is preserved in a bog. Well, let's just say a lot of
bodies were preserved in this particular bog because that's
fun. Yeah, we could very much use
your support on Patreon these days.
The the fandom is doing pretty well, but it's not at its peak,
you know what I'm saying? We've got some exciting things
coming next year. We're not going to slow down.

(01:10:59):
Our show is going to keep going.But we've also got some TV shows
coming next year, which should, you know, boost engagement.
We'll see. There'll be a lot more
discussions online. The fandom should have a nice
kick in the butt twice next year, which is nice.
But we need support all the time, right?
We do this for a living. So we can't just have this
seasonal thing. We got to, you know, we got to
have our bottom line taken care of.
So if you're able to, we would very much appreciate the

(01:11:20):
support. And of course, just we also very
much appreciate the word of mouth.
There's nothing like that in in this world.
That's the best way to spread the word about any show you care
about. If you listen to any podcast or
radio program or whatever, have you author that you support, any
creator that you support, if youengage with them a lot,
especially this time of year, ifyou're American, especially when

(01:11:40):
we're thinking about Christmas and all that.
One, it's not just Americans to celebrate Christmas, obviously,
but it is this time of year where we think about giving and
being thankful. It is, it is an American
holiday, Thanksgiving that's coming up soon.
So that's what I always try to do, any podcast or YouTube that
I engage with a lot, that's a good reason for me to hit them
up with a little support. And if you feel the same way,
then maybe we deserve that. If not, consider a different

(01:12:03):
supporter, a different creator that you do engage with a lot
and maybe hook them up, give them a little help.
Another way you can help out is by going to our website and
using our links. We have different shopping links
there, all of which do not cost you additional.
For example, use our Amazon links.
Doesn't cost you any additional money, but anything you buy, we
get a little cut of. And Amazon's a pretty good place

(01:12:25):
to shop for during the holidays because of how quickly they
deliver things and how they're able to manage to keep so many
things in stock at a time when it's really hard to do that.
That's one advantage of being sogigantic, I suppose.
So yeah, go to historyofwesteros.com and Peru's
what we have going on there shopping.
We've got a lot of cool fantasy items and books and different

(01:12:46):
things that are able to be foundthere.
Plus our website is just fun. It's cool we got to get
different things to find there. Besides that you can see our see
all the patron names and fun things like that.
A lot of y'all have who signed up to be a member of gotten a
cool nickname and title. So anyway, yeah, hopefully that
is encouraging and we'll we'll keep it going folks.

(01:13:06):
Well, we're not, we're not goinganywhere, but we would love to
have your support. Darwonka sends a super chat and
says thank you for all you do. Well, we appreciate that
Darwonka. And like I said, we'll keep it
coming. Christina Kay.
Hey, how's it going? Christina says maybe the stumps
are under the water and that's why the Krannick men get green
dreams seemingly more often thanthe That's a good idea because

(01:13:28):
it does seem weird that there's no wherewoods there at all.
So the a very good explanation could be that they were chopped
down and that might be that's fitting.
They're like, well, we this is the this is the line in the sand
slash the swamp that we're drawing.
The hard trees north of here do not get chopped down.
We're we can't save the ones South of here.
So this is we're going to, we'regoing to focus on what we can

(01:13:48):
save. Christina also said Stonehenge
and Gobekli Tepe are are old like that.
Yeah, that's true. Gobekli Tepe is something like
maybe 13,000 years old. It might only be, might only be
10,000 years old, but they're, Imean, we're still learning about
it. Is it?
It's not exactly something that we've known about for a long
time in terms of historical timelines.

(01:14:09):
Christina says humans do be making big things from rock if
they care enough. Can't argue with that.
Damn. True, Liat says.
What was the relationship between the children and the
Dragons? Oh, that's a tough one.
Yeah. Because we are told that Dragons
did live in Westeros or there's evidence for them bones before

(01:14:29):
before the Valyrians even. It's a really good question.
I assume these Dragons that werein Westeros were wild Dragons.
Maybe they escaped from a nursery or a hatchery.
Or maybe they are truly prehistoric Dragons that were
never part of any lineage of being tamed.
Or maybe they were engineered inthe 1st place.

(01:14:49):
But if who cares if they were engineered 10,000 years prior,
then there's no reason why they couldn't have spread all over
the globe. They fly, you know, So it's
interesting. It's very interesting to
consider what because the children, their relationship
with regular animals is a littleeasier to fathom.
You know, they they're close to nature, but the Dragons might be

(01:15:11):
supernatural creatures themselves.
In fact, we we're pretty sure they are, which, yeah, can they
have a relationship in the same way for with an unnatural
species? I don't know.
I don't, I'm not sure they can. I don't know if we can go so far
as them skin changing into Dragons because we definitely
have tales of them skin changinginto snow, bears, direwolves,

(01:15:33):
eagles and all these other sort of mundane animals.
There's no stories of Dragons being skin change into which
just could be something George doesn't want to get into because
it's a plot point that's coming.Bran could maybe control a
dragon and he doesn't. George would want that to be
maybe more of a surprise. Wouldn't be a huge surprise to
us because we've been talking about it for a long time.

(01:15:55):
But it. But if he shows that it's
possible, then it would we we'd be all over that.
We're like, oh, look, skin changers can control Dragons.
Well, that's clearly going to happen.
Yeah, a guilty undertaker has a great theory here.
They maybe those were Dragons. Maybe they were just prehistoric
fossils, because that's what humans in the real world
thought. When they found dinosaur bones,

(01:16:16):
they were like Dragons. When they found giant bones,
they're like giants. These weren't giants, they were
just, they're just big bones. Sometimes it's like elephants or
something like that. You know, like the elephants.
Elephants skulls are where we get the legends of Cyclops
because the elephant the IT looks like one eye the way their
skulls are when there's no skin.Tony sled 6796IN reference to

(01:16:37):
necessity being the mother of invention in war disagrees isn't
healthcare suffers the triage effects of scarcity are brutal.
The soldiers don't get treated to heal.
They get hacked up for the moment depending on their value
and social status. But innovation does come in all
environments and war associates some.
Yeah, I don't disagree with thatand I wasn't trying to make a
point otherwise during war. Yeah, it's, I'm talking about
after once you once, once you'reable to apply what they learned

(01:17:00):
during those awful times at a time that's not so nearly as
stressful when it's normal. Like, yeah, we learned a little
bit more about triage and stopping the flow of blood from,
you know, battlefield amputations because we had to do
it so much during that. Yeah, it's still awful because,
like you said, the resources arescarce.
But after the war is over and some of that knowledge carries
over, I think. I think we agree on that much.

(01:17:22):
Braggle Fraggler, a great name, says jets, rockets and computers
were all wartime inventions thatwent on to define the 20th
century. Yeah.
Good point. Yeah.
Especially at rockets. Jets like for Wernher von Braun.
Yeah, that was definitely a World War 2 impetus, right.
The Nazis were like, yeah, let'sbuild rockets that go farther.
Yeah. Yeah.
True, True, true. Tony SLED 6796 also says it

(01:17:43):
could be an earthquake, a perfectly timed natural currents
like the tsunamis that protectedJapan from the Mongols.
Absolutely. Yeah.
We don't need to delve into thatpossibility.
We just need to agree that it's true as a possibility because
it's if it's a natural explanation, we don't really
have much more to say. I was like, yeah, well, it was
an earthquake. Done.

(01:18:03):
That's the explanation. However, even a natural
occurrence can have a supernatural impetus, right?
For example, I made the point earlier, like, what if they just
moved the land a little bit and the flood happened because of
just a little tweak? What if just a little bit more
heat under a volcano causes the whole thing to go off a little
more pressure? Most of that pressure was
natural, but then they just, youknow, turned the dial a little

(01:18:24):
bit with some supernatural energy.
You don't necessarily need the whole thing to be supernatural.
That's kind of what I was getting at earlier with the
whole. George has does such a good job
of allowing real logic, real rational thinking and science to
fit with magic in ways like this.
It's like, yeah, what if the magic just gave the the science
a push, right? What if the what if the flooding

(01:18:47):
was already close to happening? What if the neck was going to
flood 1000 years from when it did flood and the children just
gave it a little push? It was already going to happen
but they made it happen sooner right?
These are all these are all reasonable possibilities Clan
Bourbon says. I would suggest the ability to
warg a dragon already exists andis a component of the Targaryen
and dragon symbiosis. It's possible like a milder

(01:19:09):
version of that cause Georgia said it's not the same, but he
also didn't say it's completely different.
He kind of alluded to there's a maybe a vague similarity there.
So yeah, a milder form of that connection, something that's a
little bit unique. The dragon being able to maybe
sense a little bit what's going on with the owner or the rider
and maybe vice versa. Definitely not as intense as a

(01:19:30):
skin changing thing where they can see through each other's
eyes. But maybe such magic did exist
long ago or and maybe it's waiting to be rediscovered.
Maybe you just take someone powerful enough.
Let's go to the northern bubble.I have a fun theory on why they
might have called down the hammer even knowing it wouldn't
stop the first men because, and there's two variations here. 1

(01:19:53):
is children working with humans and one is without or humans
working without children. All these the different 4
possibilities that we started that poll with.
So let's say the children or whoever did the first hammer and
they learned from that. They're like, OK, well that did
a certain thing. It worked.
It worked and it didn't. Let's do it again, but with a
different goal in mind. Yeah, we can't stop humanity,

(01:20:17):
but we can slow them down. Maybe we can carve out our own
Kingdom that they don't care about.
Maybe we can make them leave us alone.
We can't stop them. We can't beat them at war.
But maybe we can reach some sortof equilibrium.
Better to accomplish that by making it more difficult for
them. Like, yeah, we don't want them
to move, nor if they move N OK, but let's not make it so worth

(01:20:40):
their while. Let's make this forest gigantic.
Let's have direwolves. Let's have real cold.
Let's have a swamp on the way. Let's have it just be
unappealing to humanity. You know?
It it that? If so, it didn't really work
that well. But the children didn't have a
lot of options, did they? Maybe they yeah, again.

(01:21:02):
Maybe they thought they were creating a subcontinent for
themselves. Maybe they again North Steros,
you got the the wall block in the north part and the Mokalin
and this new swamp slash waterway on the South.
It's a pretty contained region, right?
It would be not a complete bubble, but I call it a bubble

(01:21:23):
because it would have magical things on both ends, keeping
people out. Even if it's not like airtight
people would still come and go, but it would be the progress
would be greatly slowed. It would, you know, there's not
a lot of people sailing there and things like that.
They might be able to coexist with the few people that do live
there. So it's, it's like, it's like

(01:21:44):
they lower their expectations atfirst.
They're like, let's beat humans and they're like later, well, we
can't do that. So let's, let's just try to live
later. They're like, OK, we can't even
live away from humans. Let's try to live with fewer
humans. You know, their goal, The bar
got lower and lower as their options shrank.
It might have had better resultsfor them, right.

(01:22:06):
If there's no, like, remember, there's no White Harbor back
then. There might not have even been a
brand in the ship right Yet. So they just.
It might have really seemed doable because of how the North
isn't that well set up for shipscoming and going, you know, and
they might have. Yeah.
Just make it more hospitable, make it colder, make it Wilder.
A giant swamp isn't desirable, right.

(01:22:26):
I mean, that who wants to live there?
Oh well, the Kradigman do, but even that was by necessity
probably. So the bubble is only it isn't
keep out humans, it's keep out people who don't worship the old
gods. That's the bubble.
It's in the bubble for worshippers of the old gods
containing that which is dying out but still has some power,

(01:22:48):
enough power to keep itself alive.
So it could have worked, but it doesn't appear to have.
Maybe it's like a a micro version of Skaggos.
Skaggos is still kind of a land before time.
It's like a time capsule of sorts.
North of the wall sort of is too.
But Skagos is kind of different that way because it is actually
South of the wall. It is part of the north.
So it isn't, it isn't directly apart of these older kingdoms,

(01:23:11):
these Wilder places. It is part of the north, which
is itself a bit Wilder than the rest of the kingdoms, especially
when you consider the old gods. So maybe that's what they were
going for. They're going for like a a
Skagos type separation by blowing up the neck.
But as we said before, maybe there's a lot of the children
weren't on board. Maybe that's why the spell
didn't work, because there weren't enough of them willing

(01:23:33):
to participate. You need like a bunch of
children, a bunch of green searswith a bunch of sacrifices and
they just didn't have enough. They didn't have the juice for
it. And that's, and that's because a
lot of the children disagreed with implementing it or they
just didn't think it would work.And they're like, why?
Why should we put all this effort and energy and sacrifice
into something that's not going to work?
Children's Tower, The room whereit happened.

(01:23:55):
Yes, that is a Hamilton reference.
Let's get a description quote. To Westeros, the musical
reference. Yes, I prefer that.
The tall, slender children's tower, where legend said the
Children of the Forest had once called upon their nameless gods
to send the Hammer of the Waters, had lost half its crown.

(01:24:19):
It looked as if some great beasthad taken a bite out of the
crenellations along the tower top and spit the rubble across
the bog. In addition to the magic and
mystery and all that, George wants to throw some some imagery
at us here. There's this great beast taking
a bite out of the crenellations along the tower top and spit the

(01:24:39):
rubble across the bog. What could have caused that?
I mean, that's not just wear andtear, that's not just the, the
top of the tower fell down 'cause it's strewn really far.
It didn't just fall. It's not like right there below
it says strewn across, across the bog.
What did that? A catapult, a lightning sorcery.

(01:25:03):
I mean, in terms of this episode, that's more like what
we should be considering. I think we talked about the
basalt blocks. Basalt is the most common
volcanic rock on Earth by a widemargin. 90% of all volcanic rock
on Earth is basalt, probably thesame on planet.
So that all operate under that assumption.
For now, it's just hardened lava.
If there's power in Obsidian frozen fire, why not some power

(01:25:27):
in basalt? Not as much maybe, but hey,
Obsidian frozen fire, It's it's,it's a product of volcanoes,
it's a product of volcanic gardening and all that.
It's the same source. So if they can, if Valyrians and
fire magicians can draw power out of Obsidian, maybe they can
draw it out of basalt. Maybe that's why the blocks are

(01:25:48):
so huge, because each block onlyhas a little bit of magic in it,
so you need a lot of it to actually matter.
And this sounds far fetched, butyou got to you got to keep in
mind what we're trying to reach here.
We're told that the children mayhave cast this grand spell from
this tower. Why?
Why from this tower? So that's why I'm examining and

(01:26:11):
theorizing about basalt. And that's why we brought it up
as a relationship to the strangestone so early.
Because, yeah, something's got to explain why they picked this
spot to cast this big spell, youknow, assuming that's what
happened. So if it's that, to me, that's a
reasonable idea that, hey, frozen fire basalt has is frozen

(01:26:34):
fire too. It's just weaker, you know, more
common. Obsidian just has more silica.
You know, in terms of science, that's the biggest difference.
Basalt isn't sharp. Obsidian is extremely sharp.
There's other differences, but that's like one of the main
differences there. Maybe it's relates to blood
sacrifice. We keep coming back to that and
it could always be a combination, right?
Maybe you, you, you the blood's is the the blood's the reason

(01:27:01):
why the basalt blocks are oily. You know, not like currently in
in not MO Kalin anyway, but maybe some sort of blood magic
that causes them to be that way.Maybe that's what makes them
oily permanently rather than just temporarily cause of
moisture. I'm really getting out here with
these ideas. But again, it's it's got to be
something could be a combination.

(01:27:21):
Here's a different account. This one's from Rule of Ice and
Fire and it gets into some of the really creepy deep options.
But it does give voice to them, which is why we're able to play
with these ideas without acting like it's something that we came
up with out of nowhere. Quote.
Gathering in their hundreds, some say on the Isle of Faces,

(01:27:43):
and calling on their old gods with song and prayer and grisly
sacrifice, 1000 captive men werefed to the weirwood, one version
of the tale goes, whilst anotherclaims the Children used the
blood of their own young. And the old gods stirred and
giants awoke in the earth, and all of Westeros shook and

(01:28:06):
trembled. Great cracks appeared in the
earth, and hills and mountains collapsed and were swallowed up,
and then the seas came rushing in, and the arm of Dorne was
broken and shattered by the force of the water until only a
few bare rocky islands remained above the waves.

(01:28:28):
The Summer Sea joined the NarrowSea, and the bridge between
Essos and Westeros vanished for all time, or so the legend says.
There's certainly an argument against MO Kaelin is that the
Isle of Faces is more explicitlyand obviously a place of the Old
Gods. It has heart trees all over it

(01:28:50):
and you know, there's this association with the pact and
the Green Man. So this it's a little more
explicit I think than than MO Kaelin.
But nevertheless, MO Kaelin is mentioned an awful lot as a
possibility here. It's probably the second it's by
#2 behind the Isle of Faces in terms of allusions to a place of
power that the old gods wieldersor the children or both can make
use of. Again.

(01:29:11):
MO Kalen no heart tree. Christina Kaye brought up the
possibility that there's stumps under the under the water.
Very good idea beneath that muckbodies and stumps could be down
there. All sorts of sorceress energies
waiting to be tapped into. So that quote is real creepy.
The children sacrificing their own young and or sacrificing

(01:29:32):
captives. Yeah, I say and or because it
could be both and and this is also why this this children's
tower, the idea of a tower that the children use their magic in.
This is why we keep coming back to the idea that they may have
worked together with other humanold gods worshippers.
That would help explain why the children cast a spell from
someone's castle. Like again, that just is that

(01:29:54):
does not track children casting spells and castles only if
they're working with humans. Would that seem to make sense?
Which does make sense. Humans and children working
together. There's plenty of examples of
that. The whole hero, the whole story
of the last hero was there humans getting 100 Obsidian
blades a year from the children of the night, the Nights watch
receiving that. I mean, same difference.
Those are humans. But yeah, so there's there is

(01:30:18):
interplay and work and and exchanges between humanity and
the children. And not not all of its
sorceress, but most of it is. And this, this phrasing, giant
cracks, great cracks appeared inthe earth.
Giants awoke from the earth. Giants awoke from the earth is
that phrase is used more often than earthquake.
In fact, the word earthquake appears once in all of the

(01:30:42):
books. Once.
And it's not about an earthquake.
It's about an overweight man. Tyrion's being thinking
sarcastically about this big manis like whenever he moves it's
like an earthquake. I think it might be Yazan
Zoukegaz who is a very large man, but I don't remember.
Anyway, the point is it's not about an earthquake.
That said, for Tyrion to joke about an earthquake

(01:31:03):
sarcastically, in his mind he has to know what an earthquake
is. That said, it really does seem
like, and I didn't know this until this episode till thinking
about this episode, researching this episode, earthquakes are
lacking in Westeros and Essos. There are not a lot of them in
the real world. A lot of castles built in the

(01:31:24):
medieval period or whenever weredestroyed by earthquakes.
There is not a single castle in Westeros that's destroyed by an
earthquake, or if it has, it's been rebuilt.
There is not a single ruin. That's a ruin because of an
earthquake, right? That's odd.
Not odd in like that's bad worldbuilding.
No, it might mean the supernatural, the the high magic

(01:31:44):
goes farther than we think. What I mean is that maybe the
Earth, the tremors, the tectonicplates, whatever scientific
underpinning you want to put behind it, the children have
done something to still that thefact that earthquakes are so
rare could be an argument for the ones that happened being
supernatural, or it could work against that.

(01:32:05):
I was like, well, earthquakes are so rare, how can we say
they're supernatural when they're so rare?
Well, that. Yeah.
So that argument can go both ways.
I prefer the more interesting supernatural version.
But yeah, the giants from the Earth phrasing, that's the that
term is used more often than earthquake because like I said,
earthquake isn't used really at all.
And it's aligned with the concept of the Horn of Jorman,
an item that supposedly can create earthquakes because

(01:32:27):
that's what giants from the Earth means.
Earthquake. Big ones, right?
So that that's curious, isn't it?
You know that I think it's pretty neat with some of these
things that we might not have thought about unless we get
really deep into this rabbit hole or this hole generated by
an earthquake. So if we consider other
potential violence, this next section is called Blood in the

(01:32:49):
Bogs. If they didn't work with
humanity to cast a spell from Moat Kalin, then they must have
killed the humans that were there, which doesn't sound like
the kind of things the children do, like sneak into a castle and
kill everyone there. That would does exactly have a
lot of precedent. Does it?

(01:33:09):
But why is it called the children's tower then?
You know, like it's it. There's just no way around that,
you know. So I I do think that this is
possible that the children attacked the first men that
lived there and cast some spell.But more I think it's more
likely that old gods worshippinghumans worked with the children
to keep out the non worshippers,which would mostly have been and

(01:33:31):
all's probably. But but is it's possible that
there were earlier era first menthat that were not on board with
the old gods that needed to be dealt with or kept out?
Shared enemy, right? You got it.
We have the same religion and wehave the same enemy, the
children and humans working sideby side.
Very easy to imagine that given those circumstances.
So maybe, yeah, maybe it's a hinge of the world.
The hinge of the world like likethe wall or the place where the

(01:33:54):
wall is built. It's not really clear on which
is which, whether the the wall creates the hinge or the wall is
there in part because the hinge was already there.
We don't really have a great understanding of what Melisandre
meant by hinge of the world other than that's a place of
greater power. Her magic is going to work
better there. That's pretty explicit.
She's not a weasel wordy with that.

(01:34:15):
She's very clear in her thoughtswith that.
So that could be what's going onhere and that would be really
interesting. Again, considering the northern
bubble theory, I proposed that two that it's two hinges of the
world are the the crux of how this continent is able to stay
separate. You got a wall, the wall and the
the area South of Mokalin and perhaps magic making all that

(01:34:38):
happen. Another reason not maybe being
high up. Maybe there's something about
being high up in the air on a tower that helps the magic work
better. Or yeah, throwing bodies down
into the bog from a high. I I just kind of making things
up. I really don't know.
But just as a reminder, here's what it's like now.
Quote. How many of the Garrison are

(01:35:01):
left? Some.
Said the Iron Man. I don't know.
Fewer than we was before. Some in the Drunkard's tower
too, I think. Not the children's tower.
Dagon Cod went over there a few days back.
Only two men left alive, he said, and they was eaten on the
dead ones. He killed them both, if you can
believe that. House Cod's motto is, though all
men do despise us, these cannibal guys were even worse.

(01:35:24):
A a Cod who is despised by all killed these two 'cause even the
Ironborn are like cannibalism. Nah, that's too far.
Even the Ironborn, but I'm not sure the children in the first
manner have those same restrictions.
You know what I mean? Like the children.
I mean, it's, it's not cannibalism to eat a person.

(01:35:45):
It it is cannibalism is to eat another child of the forest.
But they don't necessarily have the same view on cannibalism.
Cannibalism being, you know, oneof the worst things.
These are chants. They do cause a lot of values
that first men have kind of comefrom old God's worship.
Not all of it, but things like guessed right and kin slang.

(01:36:06):
A lot of that is comes from thatsame origin.
Not only was there no Kings Roadand no swamp, there may have
just been a dirt path back in the day, which reminds us that
assault would have been easier with no swamp there.
But since no end alls ever got through and it's kind of why I
lean towards the flooding happened well before the end

(01:36:29):
alls came, which which is prettywell supported, which gets to
the heart of the matter. It it was relatively easy to
cross the neck. Not to say that it was some sort
of Hwy. but we're talking night and day in terms of how easy it
is to cross now versus how easy it was to cross then, even
without a King's Road, right? So that says a lot.
If they were like, we need to make this barrier harder to

(01:36:50):
cross, we need to make it unappealing, then you could
understand why they might have altered it because there would
have been other ways through, right?
Right now there's like Rob tellsGalbert Glover and Jason
Mallister to go into the neck and how you don't need to find
your way through. They'll find you and help you

(01:37:10):
find the way through. There are ways through that the
chronic men know before the chronic men, there would have
been ways through that would have been a lot easier to find,
a lot simpler. Just passes through the hills.
And in fact, it might have been so easy that just a person that
never been there before could find their way through.
Just keep going north, you know?Which again is the point.
They didn't want it to be so easy to get N if they're trying
to protect the north, cut it offwell that the the the state it

(01:37:34):
was in back then was not going to cut it.
Let's see here, necessity is themother Earth of invention.
That's our next section. Now part of the trope George is
using here. It's a well trod fantasy trope,
not only just fantasy because it's a thing that happens in the
real world, which is humans arriving and ruining things for
an elder race, sometimes other humans.

(01:37:55):
That's usually the real world version, but humans came to rest
Ros and you can pretty much trace the decline of the
children to starting with the arrival of the First Men.
Tolkien uses this arguably multiple times.
First there were the Valar and the Mayar, who are the Ainuer
combined as as a whole they're called the Ainuer.
When the elves awakened and became a species in in Arda,

(01:38:20):
some of the Ainuer weren't happyabout it.
And then the the elves eventually took white ships to
Middle Earth. The white ships, keep in mind.
And then the humans came along and the elves weren't happy
about that. So it's like, well, we were here
first. No, we were here first.
No, we were. Yeah.
Yeah. And, and by the way, elves and
humans are grouped together as the Children of Oluvatar.
So children, Yes. Very interesting, George.

(01:38:41):
Obviously massive Tokian fan, massively influenced by Tokian.
So when when Tokian calls some ancient beings the children of a
Lubitar, children of a Lubitar, you say, yeah, a Lubitar is God
in, in Lord of the Rings. Basically it's the God, the
creator God is in. In the Witcher universe, it's
really similar. Elves were there first and

(01:39:03):
humans arrived on white ships and the elves were like, Dang
it, Elves thought humans were a short term problem in the
Witcher verse that they die out like a disease.
Like we just have to last. We just have to outlast them and
then we'll be fine. Of course, they did not outlast
them. Humans just kept growing and and
spreading. And that might be how the
children saw it. They're like, yeah, we'll

(01:39:23):
outlast them. They'll die off.
And then, you know, we'll go back to the way it was.
Maybe that's what they thought in in the real world.
There's other similarities too. Obviously.
You can think about it as, you know, Western colonists coming
to North America basic or going old, going older, the Romans and
the Druids. The Romans were just kind of
wiped out. All knowledge about the Druids.
That's A and the Druids were natives and the Romans were

(01:39:46):
colonizers. There's a lot of the story of a
lot of colonization is destruction of the lore and
culture that had been there before.
When nations in the real world go to war, the all or nothing
kill or be killed nature of it. Yeah, at least of those
innovations that we talked aboutbefore.
In terms of medical, it's not just medical.
It's usually weapons that get innovative on which, as I said,

(01:40:08):
that doesn't have a good effect in the long term.
So this brings back to somethingI touched on before.
The children hadn't weaponized alot of their magic early on.
They didn't have a reason to. So this not only were was the
arrival of humanity the beginning of the end or their
decline because humans were justkind of stronger and took over a

(01:40:31):
lot of things, but because it made the children more violent,
they had to become more violent to save themselves.
So that had a ripple down effecton their entire culture.
Before that they were they stillhad to fight against the giants
and all that, but this is such alighter scale.
It's like early humans having todeal with wild animals, which is

(01:40:53):
a real danger, but it's not likeearly humans having to deal with
invading armies, which is way more dangerous and more akin to
what we're Speaking of here. The children only had to deal
with wild animals, which they were probably better at dealing
with than early humans because of their closeness to nature,
their magic and proximity to allthat.
They're all, they're 100,000 years of experience with that.

(01:41:17):
So yeah, 100,000 years of being who they were.
And then the humans arrive and the children have to go down a
military evolution path. That's a big change.
That's a huge change because they probably didn't have an
existential crisis before this that that drove them to make
these innovations. Now, one thing that's missing,
not missing but not very well explored in George's world is

(01:41:41):
runes. He says they're there.
There's runes all over the placeon rocks.
And as Christina Kay pointed outa few months ago, that's
writing. Yeah.
The, the, you can't say the First Men didn't have writing.
They didn't have paper. They did have writing.
Runes are writing just like hieroglyphics are writing.
It's not an alphabet necessarily, but sometimes it

(01:42:01):
is. Sometimes they use characters
that mean letters and those leadto things.
Other times it's a shorthand forsome.
Either way it's writing runic, alphabetic, doesn't matter.
Or both still. So I don't think that the first
man who worshipped the old gods and ever went to war with the

(01:42:22):
children. I think it was non old gods
worshipping First Men that fought the children.
And by the time of the pact it started to change or it already
started to change that a lot of First Men were adopting the old
gods. I don't think those ever went to
war with each other. I could be wrong.
Obviously this is not something I could say with a lot of
confidence. Earlier I referred to the
tradition of the children giving100 Obsidian dagger to the watch

(01:42:44):
every year. Is this benevolence, you know,
helping, just helping out Like, hey, you know, we want to, we're
both, this is our common enemy. So let's give you a little help
dealing with it. Or is it some sort of recurring
apology? It's like, hey, we made the
others our bad, you know, it didn't quite go the way we
wanted. Sorry we unleashed these beings

(01:43:05):
on you, but at least we'll help you fight back.
Hi, Magic. It's our next section.
And that is, I hope, well set upby what we just talked about
with the children and the others.
We're exploring the idea of the highest possible magics,
manipulation of the earth in ways that requires, well, a lot.

(01:43:27):
Knowledge, ability, sacrifice. We're not talking about, you
know, those St. performers that can draw small amounts of fire
out of Obsidian, as as Quaithe put it, we're talking about huge
amounts of magic, possibly involving lots of people or lots
of children, or both. So if we're all aware of the
possibility that this is a big exaggeration, that these were

(01:43:49):
mostly natural phenomena that the children had nothing to do
with or very little to do with, but we should, if we're being
thorough, explore the reverse possibility that in fact they've
done bigger, grander things or are capable of that.
Yes, the breaking of the arm wasprobably high magic, but maybe
this relates to the seasons being out of whack or came from

(01:44:10):
the same magics. Again, that's earth magic
earthquake again, hardly used inthe in the term, but the concept
is there. Maybe the again, maybe the
children are the reason there's not so many earthquakes now.
They stilled the place. If that sounds far fetched to
you, well, it shouldn't no offense, because that's what the

(01:44:31):
Valerians did with the 14 flames.
They controlled the volcanoes. They held back that power and
drew on it like a like wind turbines or water wheels, like
the rushing water turns the wheel faster and they draw
energy from that. That's not sorceress, but the
concept is is right there. They're drawing energy from
those volcanic energies that fire magic.

(01:44:52):
And then one day, whoops, it gotout of hand and the doom
happened. The doom didn't happen because
pressures from the beneath earthbecame too great.
It happened because the Valyrians lost control over it,
right? I mean, it's kind of saying a
little 6 of 1/2 a dozen of the other.
But the but probably the Valyrians losing it was what
happened. It would have been lost long
before those volcanoes would have gone off a lot sooner if

(01:45:14):
not for the Valyrians and that would have been more natural.
The Valyrians keeping it from going off is a similar version
of magic to them making it go off sooner, which might be what
the children did at Hardhome. We talked about Hardhome.
I'm not sure we talked about thepossibility that the children
responsible for it. I think maybe we did.
Either way, it should be mentioned because again, it's
the magic of the earth. They could just tweak a little

(01:45:36):
something, something to change the pressure under a volcano.
Boom, there it goes. Especially if it's already close
to going off. They probably can't take a just
a a hill, a mountain that's got no volcanic activity and cause
it to blow up. But if it's already got some
magma building up under it, theycould give it a little push,
give it a little help, give it aboost.
And that's why I brought up the possibility that the neck maybe
would have flooded anyway. Maybe give another thousand

(01:45:58):
years and the same result would have happened without magic.
But the children made it happen sooner.
So working on this episode has made me think about some other
possibilities, like what are theother examples of high magic
that maybe fall into this category or in some sort of a
parallel category. The horn of winter is very
similar because the horn of Winter is supposedly capable of
waking giants from earth which is a metaphor for earthquakes.

(01:46:20):
So if if the horn of winter can cause earthquakes then that is a
very similar form of magic to the breaking of the arm of Dorne
and maybe the flooding of the neck.
It's the non literal version of the Kraken horn.
The Kraken horn that summons monsters from the deep that's
supposedly actually summoning krakens.
Whereas the horn of winter doesn't actually summon giants.
It's a metaphor for giants rumbling the earth from beneath.

(01:46:43):
Maybe the Kraken horn is supposed to be metaphorical,
That it can cause tsunamis or earthquakes below the sea.
I kind of prefer that it summonskrakens though.
The long Night. If the long night is partly
volcanic or otherwise caused by partly natural phenomena, that

(01:47:03):
it was helped by magic, well, there you go, that's related.
The shadow, I don't know how it relates or doesn't but that
seems like a big ol thing of magic because it's a semi
permanent condition that's existed over a wide geographical
range for 10,000 years or more. The magic of the wall, what's up
with that? I mean that is a huge edifice

(01:47:25):
isn't it? Brandon the builder supposedly
put spells in there. It absolutely does have some
effect on the others. Cold hands can't cross the
whites had to be like asleep to be to be able to cross it.
You know they woke up on once they're on the other side.
John has struggles to connect with ghosts when they're on
opposite sides. I don't know if that's high
magic. It's definitely magic.

(01:47:47):
Hard home again, I mentioned hard home that volcano there is
that high magic or is that just a giving a tweak to the natural
forces already there? The sorrows, That's a big one.
If Karen the Great caused a permanent condition on a wide
stretch of Mother Roy that causes grayscale, and that's a
big deal. And fog and and time, like

(01:48:09):
chronological anomalies. When they cross the same bridge
twice, that's high magic. What about the creation of the
Others? We've talked about that as a
potential parallel, as the ultimate revenge of nature.
The cold that wipes it all out. The big reset.
Yeah, that could be their originstinks of high magic, right?

(01:48:33):
They are very explicitly magical.
They're the most explicitly magical beings there are in the
store. The children are pretty magical,
but they're not fundamentally magical, I don't think.
I'm not sure that every single child of the forest has magical
aptitude, but the others, every single one of them, is a
unearthly spirit that walks on snow and melts when stabbed with

(01:48:54):
Obsidian and things that just aren't of this world really.
Except they are of this world somehow anyway.
Is the Hammer of Waters that farbeyond a shadow baby or seeing
the future? Am I just injecting my own
opinion as to what is high magicand what isn't I I would love
your feedback here. This is a wide open topic and

(01:49:14):
there isn't anyone that can be like oh this is how it works.
This is definitive because George isn't even going to do
that. George isn't going to.
George doesn't want it to be that nailed down.
That doesn't mean we can't have fun imagining what it might be.
He likes that too. He wants us to do that because,
and that's why he doesn't nail it down, because if he nails it
down, then we're not going to think about it as much.
We're not We, we have an answer.We have no reason to imagine or

(01:49:35):
less reason to imagine. Planetos goes on tilt.
This is the idea that if these high magics caused earthquakes,
and I think maybe they, it had an unintended effect of causing
change on an astronomical scale,a magical accident that leads to
seasonal inconsistency. Let's look at a little of the

(01:49:58):
science behind that because it'svery compelling and very in line
with what we've discussed so far.
By the way, planet toast goes ontilt.
That's a reference to poker or gambling.
When you are playing mad, that'sbeing on tilt.
In this case, I'm taking it literally.
We're talking about a planet actually tilting.
OK, here's a little science for you.

(01:50:21):
If Earth has axial tilt, it's, Ithink it's like 23 1/2°, but
that varies based on gravity of other bodies like the moon and
the sun. So if the Earth didn't have an
axial tilt, if it was straight up and down and just rotated
this way and then around the sun, there would be no seasons.

(01:50:42):
The sun would always be right over the equator.
Temperatures would be consistent, but not in a good
way. There'd be parts of the world
that we're always cold and partsof the world that we're always
hot, at least, you know, at least not compared to what we're
used to. A not so intuitive part of this
would be the massive wind because of the extreme
difference in the heat in one place and the cold in another

(01:51:04):
place because there's no sun here and there's lots of sun
here. This is the essence of what
causes pressure changes when temperatures vary so that and
pressure changes causes movementof air, which causes wind.
So there would be huge amounts of wind.
It would be a very windy, it would be wind to toasts the
planet would be called. But Wind Haven is one of
George's books. It would be like that.

(01:51:25):
And these are permanent imbalances.
This isn't something that would work itself out.
No, unless the planet tilted, this would happen forever.
Honestly, if the children reallywanted to mess things up, they
would have. They could have done that.
They could lock the planet in notilt rather than more tilt,
because it seems like that is what happened.
More tilt is why the seasons areirregular.
A little bit of tilt creates regular seasons.

(01:51:45):
A lot no tilt is no seasons. Lots of tilt is inconsistent
seasons, and that's what we have.
We have inconsistent seasons with Westeros.
Earth has the, well, it has regular seasons, semi regular
anyway. And that tracks though, because
in general, intuitively it's easier to destroy than create.
So it's easier to make the tilt of Earth worse than it would be

(01:52:07):
to like slow it down or hold it in place or whatever, or move it
one way or the other. It's easier to blow things up
than it is to just grasp the whole planet and move it.
You know, so that that's actually the scientific
explanation for the summer that never ends the the, the, the
heaven, the heaven on earth viewheld by the relorists is that no

(01:52:28):
one dies and the summer never ends.
Well, that's kind of like no axial tilt.
The summer would never end. But we even without the whole
planetary aspect, we know that'sa bad thing.
You know, we don't want that might sound good to the
relorist, but those of us who know better, no, that's not
good. So it's, it's pretty cool the

(01:52:51):
way this lines up where you can play with the science and you
can put the magic and, and in between you get theories.
And this reminds us of how it really works on Earth and how it
would work on Westeros too. Millions of years of evolution,
every form of life, sea creatures, forest creatures,
desert creatures, all of them, us, them, every single thing,

(01:53:12):
hibernation, migration, mating season, all these things are
evolutionary answers to the seasons.
If we had no seasons, we wouldn't have these things.
They wouldn't animals wouldn't hibernate.
They wouldn't migrate as much. Maybe they because they, they
wouldn't have a reason to migrate because if the
temperature isn't changing, likelet's hot here.

(01:53:34):
Well, it's cold there. Well, it's always how it is, you
know, like you might birds migrate because it was warm and
now it's cold. So they go where it's still
warm, and then when it gets too hot, you go back to the place
where it's moderately warm. You can't do that on a planet
like with no seasons because there's no consistency.
Or there's rather there's too much consistency.

(01:53:55):
Yet Westerosi animals haven't evolved around inconsistent
seasons. They seem to be relatively like
Earth animals. That's not an oversight by
George. That implies the seasons were
thrown off relatively recently. Because evolution is real, real
slow. If this happened 10,000 years

(01:54:17):
ago, that's not enough time for evolution.
It's plenty of time for adaptation, but it's not nearly
enough time for evolution. You will not see like a lot of
new species or massive animal change, massive change in animal
behavior because of 10,000 years.
Because what they were, what they've been doing is for

(01:54:39):
millennia, 10,000 years in on this kind of scale we're talking
about isn't all that much when you're talking about behaviors
and and life scale patterns thatdeveloped over millions of
years, right? It's 10,000 is a drop in the
bucket compared to that sounds like a long time and it is in
most considerations, but not when you're talking about things

(01:55:00):
like evolution and planetary movement and things like that.
Bringing it back to A Song of Ice and Fire to a character we
haven't gotten to talk with about too many characters this
episode because this is this is very much world building,
ancient world stuff. But the one character or one of
the few characters that keeps coming back up, one who can give
us answers is of course, Bran. Here's a conversation where

(01:55:24):
Jojen tells him he's going to know thing.
He's going to learn things that he doesn't know yet.
And Bran's like, well, what do you mean?
Here's the quote. What will I know?
Bran asked the Reeds afterward, when they came with torches
burning brightly in their hand, to carry him back to a small
chamber off the big cavern wherethe singers had made beds for

(01:55:47):
them to sleep. What do the trees remember?
The secrets of the Old Gods. Said Jojen Reed.
Food and Fire and rest had helped restore him after the
ordeals of their journey, but heseemed sadder now, sullen with a
weary, haunted look about the eyes.

(01:56:09):
Truths the First Men knew, forgotten now in Winterfell, but
not in the wet wild. We live closer to the green in
our bogs and krannigs, and we remember earth and water, soil
and stone, oaks and Elms and willows.
They were here before us all, and will still remain when we
are gone. We definitely want Bran to
become familiar with these truths again, even just for our

(01:56:30):
own satisfaction. Just because, you know, we're
invested in him as a character, but whoa, what does that mean?
Secret to the old gods? What, what exactly is he gonna
learn? Like the, the limits of his
power or what are the greatest magics?
These things that I listed off earlier, are these some of these
related to that, or are there things we haven't heard of yet?

(01:56:50):
Among the many gaps in our knowledge Bran might fill in by
simply thinking about it. Again, this isn't 1 to pin our
hopes on. But yeah, George could have Bran
cast his mind back to pre human times to see like what started
all this. Maybe he maybe he wants to look
at the origin of the others. Or maybe it's important for
George to have Bran look back far enough to see regular

(01:57:10):
seasons and go, well, they may not seem regular to him, but he
might because he doesn't understand that concept.
To him, the seasons are just what they are, you know?
But if he were introduced to theidea of, hey, what if they were
just, you know, 90 days every year where it was a certain
amount of temperature and this and that, and that was kind of
predictable, mostly predictable.And be like, whoa, well, that
would make life easier, wouldn'tit?

(01:57:31):
Why is it like this now? Oh, there's a magical reason.
Isn't that interesting? He might decide to look into the
history of the Kradigman just tobe able to give Jojen and mirror
some information 'cause he's, he's, he's, that's his friends.
And he would want to, you know, tell them stories, 'cause they
each, they've told each other stories.
That's part of what they do. They're it's part of their
friendship. Leaf again claims the children

(01:57:53):
have lived in those caves for 100,000 years.
Even without magic, that's enough time for constellations
to change in the sky, for the axial tilt to change a little
bit, for rivers to change, for mountains to change.
That's enough time you could actually note the movement of
continents like continental drift would be visible over that

(01:58:15):
scale. Like for in our lifetimes as
hell no. Australia moves about 7
centimeters a year, 100,000 years.
That's four. That's over 4 miles, 4 miles of
that. You would notice that.
I mean, you wouldn't live 100,000 years.
But if the children have this collective memory of it, they'll
be like, yeah, you know, this island used to be right there.
Now it's like you can barely seeit.

(01:58:35):
So that's what we're talking about here with scale and and
with little tiny changes in nature are played out over a
very long period of time. This is the kind of this is the
world the children lived in. Maybe if you go back far enough
we'd find out one of these otherlegends is also true.
Like the the the story of I think it comes from the Carthene
that there was a second moon that one day collided with

(01:58:57):
planet 2. That's a thing from the real
world too. Maybe George is borrowing it, or
maybe he's not aware, but the current dominant theory about
the formation of our solar system is that Earth collided
with another protoplanet called Athea and absorbed it.
Like kind of like Maely's the monstrous absorbing his twin in

(01:59:21):
the womb 'cause this was the solar system's nursery period
when the sun existed, or when there was just a bunch of matter
and it was all coalescing and still swirling around.
And after a long time, those coalescing bodies became more
solid enough and we're swirling around each other and starting
to form the orbits they have now.

(01:59:43):
And before those orbits were setand before everything was all,
you know, worked itself out the way it is now, those large
forming, forming bodies could hit each other.
And that's what again, the greatit's called the the giant impact
hypothesis. So there's a lot like you, you
could do a lot of that, a lot with that in terms of like an

(02:00:04):
ancient history from a supernatural perspective, like
yes, our planet combined with another like ancient celestial
bodies merged and from them. From that other moon, we got
this, and that was added to our world.
Like maybe that's where the magic came from.
Maybe that's where some of this stuff happened.
This happened 4 1/2 billion years ago.
So if we're imagining that it happened on Planet Toast, even

(02:00:26):
the children wouldn't have been around for that.
They wouldn't have a memory of it.
But they might be aware of it because they can maybe look into
the past like other green seers can.
Maybe they could see the events through their through their
mind, even if they weren't thereto witness it.
Yeah, just for time scale, 4 1/2billion years ago, The oldest
dinosaurs are about 230 million years ago.
So there's still 4.3 billion years to go after that.

(02:00:49):
So yeah. Yeah, we're talking about a
quite a different era here. Just for fun too.
Thea was a Greek Titan, sister of Hyperion, which, by the way,
one of the greatest sci-fi novels of all time, Hyperion by
Dan Simmons. And Hyperion.
Yep, incest Back in the day eventhe planets engaged at incest
apparently. Cause yeah, Hyperion and Thea

(02:01:11):
were married and their children were Celine or their child was
Celine. Who's the moon goddess.
You would maybe be more familiarwith the Roman name of Celine,
which is Luna, which is one of the most popular names for pets
and children these days. That's not a complaint.
I think it's a great name, but Icertainly have noticed that I
know a lot of cats named Luna, alot of them, quite a few good

(02:01:35):
name, I guess, as I said anyway,folks, this is a great topic
that, as you know, cannot be fully explored given how much
mystery surrounds it. It's ancient, it's magical.
Those are two things that are always rife with mystery and
when they're combined that it's like synergy.
It's even more mysterious, but also I think just as the not of

(02:01:59):
it's just that more compelling too.
It's just as much as the mysteryis magnified.
So is this the the draw of it? A base of solid info that George
has created with all this room to imagine on top, It makes it
all more entertaining and compelling.
If every topic was this wide open, it wouldn't be as fun.
So I'm glad that we have it, butI'm glad we don't have too much

(02:02:21):
of it. I think George is given it just
there. It's like seasoning the meal
properly. Too much salt.
Yeah, too little salt, too bland.
Right. Though we can never expect full
information, especially about the supernatural.
That goes double for this, if not more for ancient
supernatural. But again, Bran, we do have
mechanisms to learn more, and they might be story related.

(02:02:44):
So George would have a good reason to tell us beyond our
curiosity. And this, as I said, we love to
focus on characters. It's the number one thing we
like to do with this show. But this kind of episode shows
that we can have a really awesome topic with very little
talk about characters. We talked about Bran, Mira,
Jojen, Leaf. Not a whole lot though, right?

(02:03:07):
We talked about characters, unspecific people, first men and
all's like groups of people. Same with the children.
More, more amalgams rather than individuals.
But it's a really fun exercise of the imagination, fertile
ground for theorizing. Generally speaking, the less we
can be sure about, the more we can be sure magic is involved.
But that's both a barrier to ourunderstanding and a tease for

(02:03:30):
our curiosity. Trivia answer.
What is the most common volcanicrock on earth?
And probably planet has two basalt y'all yes not BA pepper
basalt. 90% of all volcanic rockis basalt on earth.
Kaidil Kristina Kay Rather says,which is why it's weird that

(02:03:51):
there aren't more black castles because of all these black
rocks. You know, there's so much.
There's so much basalt. There should be more black
castles. Good point.
Good point. Yeah, there are a good number of
black castles and there's also alot of castles we just haven't
seen. But you're right, there's not.
There's a quite a few, not even half, probably.
She also adds strong selective pressure works quickly, like the
moths in the Industrial Revolution.

(02:04:13):
That's a good point. So what she means by that is the
industrial Revolution created just.
It was a huge uptick in the ability for mankind to make
textiles like we used machines instead of humans sewing by
hand. Well, well, they're still both
going on, but the, the big change was the machines and, and
moths all of a sudden were like,there's just that many more

(02:04:36):
textiles for us to eat. This was great for them.
The moths were the unintended beneficiary of the textile
industry's relation to the industrial revolution.
They're like, oh, look at all this food.
Actually goes further than that that I'd like to talk about.
Oh, go for it. Really what she's talking about
is, is the the peppered moth specifically, which is how moths

(02:05:00):
evolved to be darker because of pollution and because all
because there's so much soot that were that was darkening
things. And so the moths did evolve very
quickly and change, you know, from lighter colored to darker
colored. And then after pollution was was
dealt with and controlled a little better it the lighter

(02:05:23):
moths became more popular again,or more common rather.
That's a question I have about science and what count what.
Where are the difference betweenadaptation and evolution comes
along? Because I, I wouldn't have
thought of changing color as an evolution or anything.
I would think of that as an adaptation.
But I'm, again, I'm not an expert here, so just I've
learned something. Perhaps here it bears further

(02:05:44):
reading. Guilty Undertaker says the Thea
theory is about the Earth moon system, not the whole solar
system. Oh, OK.
Well, I my description of the early planetary bodies forming
in the solar system is still accurate.
But yeah, yeah, I guess you're right.
Technically speaking, it's just the Earth moon situation, not
Thea wouldn't have had impact elsewhere because it, well, it
only combined with Earth. I think that's what you mean by

(02:06:05):
that. Anyway, yes, thanks for the
clarification. The pole did the children of the
forest and the first men work together to flood the neck. 52%
of you said children only 39% said yeah, both.
So most of you all think it was children only or or both. 8% of
you thought neither and only 1% think first men only.

(02:06:26):
Which honestly that's roughly how I would assign the
percentages too. I think children only is the
most likely, but I'm very open to children and first men
together. Children.
I'm a little more open to first men only than 1%.
I think because they would they would have a reason to keep the
end alls back too. But they're also less likely to
have the ability to cast big spells like that.

(02:06:49):
So I understand why that number is very low.
Anyway, thank you all for participating in the poll.
Thank you all for participating in the episode, for being here.
And actually, I see now that there's more comments.
Christina Kay says I think the flooding was incidental and
relating to the breaking of the arm of Dorm.
Cool. OK.
So yeah, so whether there was a magical push behind that or not,

(02:07:09):
the main thing was natural, which I can certainly get behind
that idea. Cannibal the Dragon says, I
think the children broke the hammer of the waters to stop the
White Walkers getting to S S notto stop the First Men.
Hadn't thought of that. I love it.
That's a great idea. They were like, it's our fault
we created these. We want them to destroy the
humans here, only we don't want them to go over there.

(02:07:32):
We don't have we don't care about them messing with Essos.
So there's a lot of reasons why they wouldn't want them to cross
to Essos. That's a very good idea.
I like that a lot. I'm a little disappointed in
myself for not thinking of it. It's a good job Cannibal the
dragon pulled pork sandwich saysthe Storrega slide, which was a
huge landslide in North Atlanticdrowned Doggerland in the real
world. And the the the Nick the neck

(02:07:54):
does seem to be in a very low lying area.
So a huge tsunami is very plausible.
Yeah. Doggerland used to connect
England to Europe. It's it's it's it's a it was a
continent kind of it's sort of the inspiration to for Valerian,
the continent that sank in Lord of the Rings and first age.
I think it sank maybe the secondage, definitely not the third.
I think the first age. And so I think that's where

(02:08:17):
Tolkien was inspired for Doggerland by Doggerland.
And George is certainly aware ofDoggerland.
I would I would think. And yeah, the neck does seem to
be low lying area. That would be why it flooded and
the why like the twins didn't and why north of Ocalan didn't
because the area was lower land between.
So yeah, that's cool. Thank you for that comment.

(02:08:39):
Pulled Porg and everybody else who commented.
These were some really good comments today.
Episodes that relate to this one.
We had an episode on ancient Dorn that we had Elio Garcia
Junior as a guest for that was very fun.
We have an episode on Chronic Men in the Neck.
We have an episode on the pact. We have an episode on the great
empire, the Dawn, which gets into the ancient civilizations

(02:09:00):
that may have been involved in some of this old stuff and may
have dealt with the children in a different way.
We have our series on the Roinarin Nymeria, Mother Roin.
We mentioned the the them being refugees fleeing from the
Valyrians. So we've got that all the
different places that they lived.
Three-part episode and our episodes on House Blackwood and
House Manderley have some relationship here as well

(02:09:21):
because both House Blackwood andHouse Manderley moved probably
from their original founding locations.
House manually moved to the north and House Blackwood moved
from the north. Of the two, it's probably more
relevant than House Blackwood because House Blackwood may have
been kings of the Wolfswood. The Wolfswood may have been
called the Blackwood. So that is very related to this.

(02:09:44):
So check those out or check out some of the rest of our catalog.
We sure do have a big one. That's what she said.
Until next time. Thanks to Nina for her great
takes. We she and I specifically talked
about the earthquake thing, among other things.
She's hard at work on some Targaryen episodes for us to do
during Duncan Egg season and around then.
Excited for that. Thanks to Joey Townsend for our

(02:10:07):
music. Thanks to Michael Klarfeld for
our videos. Don't forget to check out our
website and engage with whateveraspects there are most suited
for you. It'll be helping us out in
whatever way you do that. And on behalf of Ashea, I'm
Aziz. We'll see you next time, Valar
Riritas.

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