#then its also interesting to think of what other parts of valyrian culture were lost

[tweedfrog]

Interesting how so many Valyrian steel swords were lost during the dance of the dragons (Lamentation, Orphan-Maker - although it reappeared, and Vigilence, and Dark sister although it was recovered a few years later). So not only were the last of the dragons killed but other important Valyrian artefacts were lost too. 

[joannalannister]

I'm not sure who to ask this question, and I tried Googling, but came up with no answers. Why is it that iron is so prominent in ASoIaF? There's the Iron Throne, Iron Islands, Ironborn, Iron Price, Iron Bank, Ironwood, etc. So just curious why that's the element GRRM chose to use/focus on so much. BTW, I love all your lovely blogs! 😊

Thank you so much! I love these kinds of questions! We would probably have to ask GRRM to know for sure why iron inspired him in ASOIAF, but we can speculate!

Iron features prominently in folklore, including in-world westerosi folklore: “A child’s rhyme echoed in his head. Oak and iron, guard me well, or else I’m dead, and doomed to hell.” Interestingly, this rhyme is not invoked by any highborn POV, only by Dunk. And Davos remembers something similar: “A knife in the heart, though…even demons can be killed by cold iron, the singers say.” Even lowborn Will of the Night’s Watch, from the AGOT prologue, takes comfort in cold iron.

Perhaps it’s only a smallfolk superstition, but I’m inclined to believe the smallfolk remember a truth the nobility have forgotten. Whether they remember or not, lords often build their gates and doors of oak and iron. For example, one enters the Great Hall of Winterfell by “wide oak-and-iron doors,” big enough to ride a horse through. More importantly, Winterfell is guarded by “massive oak-and-iron gates” though by the end of ACOK they’re hanging “charred and askew”. Combine this with @racefortheironthrone​‘s idea that Winterfell was built as an engine to fight the Others, and I think GRRM’s grand design might be getting a little clearer. All the stuff listed here is going to be important in the War for the Dawn:

“Winterfell…grey granite, oak and iron, crows wheeling around the towers, steam rising off the hot pools in the godswood, the stone kings sitting on their thrones…how could Winterfell be gone?” 

Winterfell isn’t gone. Just dormant. 

Winterfell lies dreaming, waiting to be reborn in oak and iron and granite. There’s magic in Winterfell’s walls. (More about Winterfell here.) 

I know you didn’t ask this part, but I think we need to explore the question of “Why oak?” before we tackle “Why iron?” Oak trees represent strength and steadfastness, endurance and long life. The oak is considered a holy tree, closely associated with pagan gods of Northern Europe, and GRRM is aware of this association. In King’s Landing, “The heart tree was an oak, brown and faceless, yet Ned Stark still felt the presence of his gods.” The Ghost of High Heart also associates oak with the old gods. 

“Oak-trees have always been regarded as great protectors and guardians of the virtuous.” A fitting tree for Duncan the Tall to be invoking. Arya herself is called an oak tree. The oak has a duality to it, with “deep roots [that] penetrate as deep into the Underworld as its branches soar to the sky.”  

“The Sanskrit word, ‘Duir’, gave rise both to the word for oak and the English word ‘door’, which suggests that this tree stands as an opening into greater wisdom, perhaps an entryway into the otherworld itself.” [x]

I don’t know if there will be a connection between oak and the Others, or if oak is just symbolically important in the War for the Dawn, but it will be interesting to find out. 

“Of all the trees in Britain and Ireland the oak is considered king” and we know what GRRM thinks of kings: “a king protects his people, or he is no king at all.” Oaks are a popular fantasy element. C.S. Lewis used oaks and other trees to fight alongside the Narnians in Prince Caspian and of course Tolkien had the Ents, some of which resembled oaks. I don’t think GRRM’s trees are going to get up and start walking around, but I think ASOIAF themes support the idea that even the trees oppose those who would seek dominion over you. The Others are certainly seeking dominion over the earth. The walls of Winterfell are going to fight against them, oak and iron and granite, and protect people. 

So, what about iron? Because you’re completely right to pick up on the iron motif. GRRM references iron from the very beginning. In the prologue of AGOT, when Wymar Royce battles the Other while Will climbs a tree (not an oak but something GRRM calls a sentinel … which is not a real type of tree but GRRM’s own fantasy brand of evergreen) … Will is mentioned to have “cold iron”. 

He whispered a prayer to the nameless gods of the wood, and slipped his dirk free of its sheath. He put it between his teeth to keep both hands free for climbing. The taste of cold iron in his mouth gave him comfort.

He’s unwittingly invoking oak and iron. And remember, the Others leave Will to be killed by wight!Wymar. Could the Others have killed Will? Did Will’s iron make any difference? idk, GRRM isn’t saying, but I hope we get more definitive information in future books. “Cold iron” in literature has historically meant any weapon designed to draw blood, but I don’t know if GRRM is making a distinction between iron and steel. 

*****

ASIDE: What is the difference between iron and steel? I didn’t know so I had to look it up: 

Steel is a mixture of several metals (this is called an alloy) but most of it is iron and often some carbon. Steel is harder and stronger than iron. Steels are often iron alloys with between 0.02% and 1.7% percent carbon by weight. Alloys with more carbon than this are known as cast iron. Steel is different from wrought iron, that has little or no carbon.

Something made of pure iron is softer than steel because the atoms can slip over one another. If other atoms like carbon are added, they are different from iron atoms and stop the iron atoms from sliding apart so easily. This makes the steel stronger and harder.

Changing the amount of carbon added to steel will change its properties:

Hardness

How easily it bends

Ductility: can it be made into thin wires

Strength

Is it magnetic

Will it rust (or corrode)

Steel with more carbon is harder and stronger than pure iron, but it also breaks more easily (brittle).

Iron is an element and a metal. It is the second most common metal on Earth, and the most widely-used metal. It makes up much of the Earth’s core, and is the fourth most common element in the Earth’s crust.

***

I’m out of my depth here, but I would like a chemist or metallurgist to discuss the potential carbon-content of Valyrian steel and relate that to the fact that all known life on Earth (and probably Terros - with the exception of the Others, probably) is carbon-based, and then tie that into ASOIAF’s life-affirming themes in the War for the Dawn. 

something something carbon as a life force in the Valyrian steel being anathema to the Others something something steel made with human blood sacrifice something something…

Has someone already written an essay about this? If so, please link me. 

*****

In the meantime, we can consider iron in folklore. Iron is believed to repel fairies. GRRM has said that the Others are like “the Sidhe made of ice” and the Sidhe are the fairy folk of Ireland. So when Westerosi invoke “oak and iron" to guard them, I think this is a remnant of the cultural memory of the Long Night. (I’ve talked about the Others here and in my tag for #the Others.)

(There are other scraps of cultural memory that recall the Others. For example, in TSS, Egg hears vicious rumors about Rohanne Webber from the smallfolk:

“Four,” said Egg, “but no children. Whenever she gives birth, a demon comes by night to carry off the issue. Sam Stoops’ wife says she sold her babes unborn to the Lord of the Seven Hells, so he’d teach her his black arts.”

Obviously these rumors about Rohanne were not true, but demons coming by night to carry off babies is eerily similar to the deal Craster has with the Others in exchange for protection.) 

What’s special about iron? Pliny the Elder, who lived in the first century, believed that iron could protect and heal people, and some of these ideas persisted well into the 20th century. 

I don’t know if the potential magnetism of iron is important but idk, the heroes probably have to go to the North pole, that might be important. 

Also, “iron can attract and conduct electricity, focus and release it, store it as magnetic energy, or disperse it by returning it to the earth. Iron can change form. It can be made molten, fluid, and malleable, and then set into unbending forms of our design.” Considering that ASOIAF is about rebirth and duality and transformation and shapeshifting (please see this post about Tyrion - please click), iron is thematically important to ASOIAF, to our malleability, our rebirth. 

Victorians believed that the first iron found was in meteorites. “Of course, even today, iron still seems magical in many respects. It is the most plentiful metal in the universe. All iron was initially forged in the hearts of stars, and only gifted to the cosmos when they exploded in supernovae. This stardust is in each of us; it is what makes our blood red.”

Consider:

Dawn, forged from the heart of a fallen star. 

The Daynes of Starfall are one of the most ancient houses in the Seven Kingdoms, though their fame largely rests on their ancestral sword, called Dawn, and the men who wielded it. Its origins are lost to legend, but it seems likely that the Daynes have carried it for thousands of years. Those who have had the honor of examining it say it looks like no Valyrian steel they know, being pale as milkglass but in all other respects it seems to share the properties of Valyrian blades, being incredibly strong and sharp.

The iron content in Dawn is probably important. 

***

(GRRM has said that, while the Daynes share the violet eyes of the Targs, they’re not the same ancestry. I’m guessing that Dawn and Valyrian steel are like that too, parallel in their formation but different. (There is a term for parallel evolution in biology but from completely different ancestors. Biologists, help me out!))

EDIT: @victorvontooms supplied the term I was looking for: convergent evolution. That’s how I think of Daynes vs Targs and Dawn vs Valyrian steel, both made to fight the Others but forged completely differently.

***

Also, Tyrion tells us:

Dragonbone is black because of its high iron content

(No one shows the dragon bone in ASOIAF as black!! But it is!! Dragonbone is black!!! 

^^Detail of art I commissioned from @bidonica, showing the dragonbone as black!! Will I ever stop screaming about this? No!! It’s my desktop, it’s so important to me!!! Not that I ever see my desktop through my tab forest but it’s the principle of the thing…)

Anyways, “Dragonbone is black because of its high iron content”. If that doesn’t set off the Others’ alarm bells, it should. I really think the Others dislike iron, not just Valyrian steel, and we have these giant high-iron content, fire-breathing beasts coming for them. 

In terms of the setting, I think GRRM might be invoking a lot of iron imagery to suggest humanity’s Iron Age, a period that extended into the early Middle Ages in Northern Europe. All this iron carries connotations of a time long, long ago.

TV tropes actually has a great little article on cold iron, suggesting that iron is part of some magic vs technology symbolism.

The Iron Age is generally understood as the period during which the technology to make iron items — particularly weapons — spread from the Hallstatt culture in western and eastern Europe during the 8th century BCE. […]

Clearly, the peoples of this extended period did not one night go to sleep in the Bronze Age and awaken the next morning in the Iron Age. There were considerable overlaps as the technology of iron developed and travelled throughout the European continent by way of trade. This also appears to coincide with a violent period of history, with hill forts springing up all across the British Isles, particularly in the southern regions. […]

The Britons had a reputation for being small in stature yet fierce warriors, and possibly adept at magic. They seemed to be able to appear and vanish at will from among the trees of the forests and among the hills. According to some early Roman accounts, the Britons would spike their hair with white lime and cover their bodies in swirling patterns of blue woad for battle, possibly to enable them to vanish into the pattern of clouds in the sky or reflected on the surface of lakes. This resulted in a belief that they could appear out of thin air and make their getaways via ‘portals’ in lakes and rivers. Some have suggested that this is where the myth of the fairy folk began. These ‘fairy folk’ who used ‘magical’ tactics were armed with bronze, which was no match for the iron blades of the invaders. Therefore, iron became known as the enemy of the ‘fairy folk.’ [x]

I’m not sure that the magic vs technology war applies to ASOIAF (idk maybe it does!) but what I would say applies to ASOIAF is a war between the Old Way and the New, obviously a reference to Ironborn culture, but something I think applies much more broadly to ASOIAF as a whole. 

Right now in ASOIAF there is a war between the Old Way of doing things by dehumanization, led by men like Tywin and Randyll and Roose, and the New Way of doing things by valuing people’s humanity, spearheaded by people like Jon and Dany and Brienne. 

So people paying the iron price in blood, sitting the iron throne … I think that’s all representative of the Old Way, something outdated and tired and without forward motion or progress. Something that is (hopefully) on its way out. 

Just as the early Britons’ bronze swords yielded to iron, I think we’re witnessing in ASOIAF the iron Old Way (metaphorically) yielding to … I don’t know yet…kindness? valyrian steel? idk, ask me when the books are done. 

Whatever it is, we have to be careful. Iron can be a force of good (repelling the Others), but it can be terrible too. We have to be careful. Because the iron is in our blood. The potential to dehumanize is inside all of us; as Professor Moody would say, “Constant vigilance!” Or as GRRM might say, the war is inside us. We’re all capable of great acts, and terrible ones. We have to choose. And we have to be careful. 

*****

“There are more esoteric explanations, like iron being seen as the lifeforce of the earth, or associated with lifeforce because blood smells like iron.“

“All iron was initially forged in the hearts of stars, and only gifted to the cosmos when they exploded in supernovae. This stardust is in each of us; it is what makes our blood red.”

The War for the Dawn is a war between life and death … a war between life and something worse than death. 

It’s a war for our humanity, it’s a war for the earth itself. It’s a war for our flesh and blood and bone. 

I said … way up above now … I said the trees are fighting for us against the Others’ dominion. Not the way Tolkien’s trees fight, but still they’re fighting. 

GRRM likes to trick casual readers into thinking his world is nihilistic … but deep down, it’s not. The Magic wouldn’t have saved Daenerys from the flames if it was truly uncaring. 

In this war, (almost) everyone’s pulling for us, I think. We’re all in this together. The weirwoods and the ravens and the Children of the Forest and all the elements of life, all the way down to the iron in our blood … it’s all rooting for us. Winterfell is rooting for us, with its fires deep within the earth and its life-giving waters rushing through its walls “like blood through a man’s body” and the earth is rooting for us, lending us its lifeforce of iron to oppose the Others. 

But we have to stand. We have to fight for it. 

*****

So there’s lots of possibilities right now in terms of what Iron means as a motif. Ask me again when we have more books and maybe I can talk more. 

PS - I think those bankers are gonna fuck people over in twow. Watch out for them. This might be my Lannister bias tho. 

EDITED TO ADD: 

@essayofthoughts replied to your post:

Iron swords were the first really meaningful weapons (bronze dulled too quickly) and would sometimes by ritually broken and sacrificed due to their value. An iron or steel sword that has been used and let get rusty, when polished will “bleed” the bloodiron back out. 

Oak and Yew have significance as life/death dichotomies in tree folklore. Without English Oak the British Empire and Navy wouldn’t have happened. Oak mistletoe is sacred bc Oak as a hardwood would almost never grows mistletoe, also ties into its status as kings of the forest. Oak once cut and aged is one of the hardest woods out there and even a modern steel knife can’t easily cut aged oak (speaking from experience; my home is made with century old oak beams). Oak also ties to dryads and hamadryads - life from trees in myth -and technically all dryads are of oaks. idk why but the dryads thing makes me think of the children of the forest

@nobodysuspectsthebutterfly replied to your post:

re the first war against the Others– the First Men didn’t have iron as such, they were bronze users. Iron and steel only came to Westeros in sufficiency with the Andals. (Possible proof of the theory that Ironborn are not First Men, but from somewhere else? As their islands are a great source of ore.) What little iron the First Men had was rare and treasured, almost magic to them probably. See Jon’s description of similar among the wildlings today (including the bronze-working Thenns).

Think of the First Men fighting the Others with their bronze, failing. Except for the few who have help from the CotF and are using dragonglass too. And the very few with their rare iron, they must have considered it magic– no wonder it became part of a crown! And then the Last Hero somehow got a sword of dragonsteel– even more magic–and saved the world.

Though interestingly the Others may hate cold iron, but it can’t kill them. See them checking out Waymar Royce’s sword before approaching him, it’s only regular steel. Iron defends, but dragonsteel, Valyrian steel, that’s the game-changer.

[i-just-like-commenting]

Final Thoughts While Reading “The World of Ice and Fire” (part 6)

"Some of that is, Here there be dragons," Martin cautioned. "It's beyond the world they know."

Once you get beyond Westeros, the tenor of the book starts to change. You get a lot more talk about things being “exotic” or bizarre or mysterious. Martin himself has said that the further you get from Westeros, the less seriously you should take what the book says, because the more Yandel is relying on hearsay and third- or fourth-hand accounts. You wind up with different levels of knowledge:

The six coastal Free Cities, Braavos, Pentos, Lys, Myr, Tyrosh, and Volantis, all of which have extensive trade and interaction with Westeros directly

The three interior Free Cities, Lorath, Navros, and Qohor; the Summer Islands; and Ib, which while they trade with Westeros are much more reclusive and harder to reach

Central Essos and the Basilisk Isles, which Westeros is more likely to trade with via intermediaries

East of the Bones, and Sothoryos, which are mostly rumor and speculation

Also, this section of the book can be hard to follow unless you have a nice big map of the Known World that came with The Lands of Ice and Fire, which a certain someone just so happened to get for Christmas:

…so let’s started.

How many weird-ass societies can you come up with?

There are a ton of orientalist overtones in this section of The World, but that is, I think, intentional. It is imitating the tone of European works on “the East” for the presentation of Essos. Within the books, too, there tends to be a POV-derived sense of things being mysterious/exotic/bizarre. The characters who are just sojourners there, like Tyrion in Volantis and Dany in Qarth very much have these ideas in their minds. In contrast, Braavos (though not the Faceless Men) becomes more and more ordinary the longer that Arya lives there. I’m looking forward to her reverse culture shock when she comes back to Westeros.

What I do find impressive about this description of Essos is how Martin, for the most part, tries to avoid doing direct one-to-one parallels with real-world cultures. Especially with the Free Cities there’s a strong sense of their situatedness within his own universe and history that defies attempt to make them perfect analogs of anywhere in Europe or the Middle East. The Summer Islands, Sarnath, Ib, Hyrkoon, Qarth, the Dothraki…they all take cues from cultures in real life, but are so mish-mashed that they don’t feel like fantasy counterparts of anywhere real. Some are problematically culturally monolithic (especially with the Dothraki), but at least this particular snarl is avoided.

The one major exception is Yi Ti, which is China. Or rather Cathay, the Medieval image of China as it was received passed down and exaggerated by travelers. Setting aside the fabulous extravagances, there are similarities to Chinese history with its periods of long dynastic stability interrupted brutally by civil war. The monosyllabic nature of most names and words hints at a tonal language ala Chinese (though the consonants, with the inclusion of non-nasal final consonants, are very different from modern Chinese). It’s not a particularly offensive fantasy-China, however, so I’ll let this one slide.

The oddest culture is Hyrkoon, dominated by women who supposedly castrate all men but a handful they use for breeding. It would be great to know more about their history and how much of these tales is true, but unfortunately Yandel’s only real source is Addam of Duskendale (the Marco Polo of Westeros), who

instead spends most of its time finding ways to remind readers that the warrior women walk about barebreasted and decorate their cheeks and nipples with ruby studs and iron rings.

In other words, rather than give cultural background and history, he was too obsessed with just talking about the sexy~~~ bits and I think this might be Martin throwing some shade on the show, especially since this was written around the same time that the notorious Dorne arc happened in seasons 5.

Where do dragons (and other creatures) really come from?

The Valyrians say that dragons were born naturally out of fire and that they were the first to tame them. In Asshai it is said that some pre-Valyrian people tamed them in “the Shadow” and later taught the Valyrians. The maesters assert that there were dragons of some kind in Westeros long before they were tamed in Valyria. And Septon Barth says that dragons were created by Valyrians using fire magic out of the monstrous but not particularly supernatural wyverns that live in Sothoryos.

A good rule of thumb is that Septon Barth is probably right, but that means having to figure out how all the other pieces fit together. Some can be dismissed as self-aggrandizement, but there seems to be a common root in several of the stories, namely the importance of fire magic. Asshai is a major source of fire mages; if they had worked with Valyrians to create the first dragons, it could have served as the basis of their respective myths.

But that leaves the question of whether there were really dragons in Westeros before the Valyrians created them. I can come up with three major possibilities:

Septon Barth is wrong and there have always been fully functional dragons all over the place. I think we can dismiss this one out of hand.

The maesters correctly attribute things like knighthood or seven references to anachronism, but don’t with dragons. In reality dragons only appeared in Westeros as strays from Valyria much later in history.

The “dragons” from ancient Westeros were very different from Valyrian dragons – maybe related to the wyverns of Sothoryos, maybe even “feathered” to give rise to the idea of griffins. These extinct creatures took on the attributes of Valyrian dragons by later singers.

I’m partial to the third idea, because it would take care of multiple questions, and the best theories are usually the ones that explain the most data points.

Of course, griffins and wyverns are far from the only mythical creature that one finds in Essos. There are also mentions of centaurs, which are dismissed with the same argument given in our world, namely that people who didn’t know about horse riders got the wrong idea. Whether or not ice dragons in the North are real remains to be seen, but it would be interesting if “cold” became another element in the magical universe – it would certainly fit the Others more than the elements of earth or water. The brindled men of Sothoryos (who are seen in the fighting pits in Meereen so they’re definitely real) seem like another surviving hominid offshoot like the Ibbenese (who are clearly Neanderthals). Shrykes and winged men are probably mythical, given how far east they are. Tiger-men sound like skinchangers. The Jhogwin and Ifequevron may be proof that giants and the children of the forest were native to more places than just Westeros.

Indeed, a lot of what this does is put the local history of Westeros into a global scale, and on that note…

…let’s see if we can catch all the Lovecraft references!

The Deep Ones and the Drowned God’s famous words are really obvious Lovecraft references, so obvious that most people quickly notice them. There are others here in The World – lots of them, in fact, some of them fairly obscure.

BUT GUESS WHO’S GOT TWO THUMBS AND A SERIOUSLY PROBLEMATIC FAVE! I’ve added numbers on them, see if you can figure out why before the end. (cw: racism/anti-semitism/xenophobia on all these links, because it’s Lovecraft and he was a bigot)

Church of Starry Wisdom: originating in Yi Ti (4) but found throughout the world, including in Braavos (1), it originates in Lovecraft’s The Haunter in the Dark

The Black Goat of forested Qohor (2) seems a pretty clear reference to one of the titles of Shub-Niggurath (don’t think too hard about how that name is pronounced), “The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young”

“Ib” (2) references “Ib” in The Doom that Came to Sarnath

The idol of “a gigantic toad of malignant aspect” on Toad Isle (3) is a shout-out to Lovecraft’s version of Tsathoggua, an “amorphous toad-like god” dwelling in N’kai

The lizard men of Sothoryos (4) are a possible nod to the inhabitants of The Nameless City, though lizard people have a long history elsewhere

The lost city of Sarnath (3), as in The Doom that Came to, from above

The people of the Thousand Islands (4) worship “squamous, fish-headed gods,” included because nobody uses the word “squamous” unless they are doing Lovecraft pastiche, even though he only used the word once

N’ghai (4) might refer to N’kai, since N’kai is an underground city like Nefer

Carcosa (4) with its yellow emperor is an obvious nod to the pre-Lovecraft stories An Inhabitant of Carcosa and The King in Yellow that is sometimes used in Cthulhu mythos stories (though not by Lovecraft himself)

K’dath (4) is Kadath from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and if you have not read that novella, it is bizarre but one of my favorite Lovecraft tales and reads a lot like an RPG campaign

Leng (4) reference the Plateau of Leng, which is also in The Dream-Quest, but appears in At the Mountains of Madness and The Hound as somewhere in the waking world, in Antarctica or Central Asia. The people of Leng revered the Old Ones in ages past, a very obvious reference to the Great Old Ones, extremely powerful and long-lived aliens that serve the Outer Gods

I may have missed a few in the weirder names, too, since a few of these have messed up spellings. Now, with this many references, man, it might seem that this is straight-up part of the Cthulhu mythos, but there’s a reason I have those numbers. They correspond to the concentric rings of knowledge I started this entry out with, and as you can see, the references get more and more common the further you are away from Westeros and the closer you are to “here there be dragons.”

And on closer look, a lot of these references don’t amount to much more than name-drops. The exact nature of the Black Goat in Lovecraft is unclear, and was probably him ripping off another story called The Great God Pan; Qohor’s religion owes as much to ideas of Baphomet and Satanism as it does to Lovecraft. The Cult of Starry Wisdom didn’t worship a fallen asteroid, as they do in Essos, but rather a device they could use to see between worlds. Tsathoggua didn’t preside over merrow-human hybrids as on Toad Isle. The Neanderthal Ibbenese in no way resemble the green-skinned, bug-eyed, voiceless Ib. Sarnath’s doom is from a very mundane Dothraki invasion rather than being transformed into monsters. Carcosa should be a lost ruin. Leng is a cold barren plateau populated either by people with horns and hooved feet or by “a corpse-eating cult,” not a tropical island with tall beautiful humans. Kadath exists only in the dream lands – and the dream cycle is also where you find Sarnath, Ib, and sometimes Leng, all explicitly imaginary places in a string of Dunsany-esque fantasy stories with minimal connection to the rest of the Cthulhu Mythos.

The only real exception are those Old Ones in Leng, trapped beneath the earth in sealed underground caverns. One of the reasons I doubt the show’s explanation of the origin of the Others is the one from the books is that it’s so local, entirely driven by the children vs First Men conflict, whereas in the books the Long Night was worldwide. I don’t know how the show intends to reconcile this provincialism with the prophecies of Azor Ahai; how could Asshai care about this if it happened on the other side of the world? And it’s far from the only culture with Long Night myths. Yi Ti has a fairly elaborate one, and the book gives many names for Azor Ahai: Hyrkoon the Hero (Hyrkoon), Yin Tar (Yi Ti, and a woman), Neferion (N’ghai?), and Eldric Shadowchaser (Andal? First Men? The name is a Michael Moorcock reference so who knows); we can probably add the last hero of Nan’s tales to that list.

That there might be another sealed evil in a can under Leng doesn’t seem impossible, but the series already indicates what they might be: the Others. It is entirely possible that the Wall is not the only barrier keeping whatever caused the Long Night from once again covering the earth; it may simply be the most vulnerable because Westeros no longer believes in magic and myth as it used to, and everyone is too busy with local politics to care about another hibernal apocalypse. Martin has created his own strange mythos, with giants that are radically different from our own legends, monstrous merfolk, the strange child of the forest that rather than elves, and the unearthly and ethereal white walkers with their armies of undead and giant ice spiders. Frankly it would be a disappointment if he grafted on someone else’s stories.