The Winterfell Huis Clos

THE IMMORTALS



Das Himmel über Winterfell. In their more benevolent aspects, the old gods of Westeros are alike Wim Wenders' angels, in Roger Ebert's words:
The angels in "Wings of Desire" are not merely guardian angels, placed on Earth to look after human beings. They are witnesses, and they have been watching for a long time--since the beginning.
They understand the souls of mortals and provide hope and comfort to those who despair.

Given the absence of priesthood, the faith in the old gods should have given way everywhere to the faith of the Seven, which is a militant, organized religion. How could it have persisted if the power of the gods is not real?

And the old gods were asked to witness the Winterfell wedding: The usurpation of the seat of the most beloved family in the north, the imposture of the bride, the monstrous bridegroom, the false male relative, himself accursed as a kinslayer, and complicit with the usurper in the downfall of House Stark, the depraved and bestial bedding, and, to complete the picture, the human flesh served to the guests at the feast.

Has a wedding ever been more abominable? The Red Wedding had mass murder, violation of guest's right and kingslaying.

Are the gods offended? Here is what Theon perceives of the heart tree during the wedding.
The weirwood’s carved red eyes stared down at them, its great red mouth open as if to laugh.
(Theon, ADwD)
For other characters, the blizzard over Winterfell has a more sinister meaning.
“The gods have turned against us,” old Lord Locke was heard to say in the Great Hall. “This is their wroth. A wind as cold as hell itself and snows that never end. We are cursed.”
(A Ghost in Winterfell, ADwD)
We need to have a better grasp of the nature of the old gods, which is not immediately apparent.
“What do the trees remember?”
“The secrets of the old gods,” said Jojen Reed.
(Bran III, ADwD)

Beside the view of the gods as distant judges of mortal souls, it's not clear that it is correct to involve a single collective denomination: there might be several sets of old gods. For instance, the old gods of Winterfell, the old gods of Craster, the old gods of the Wolf's Den etc.

Of course no one ever speaks in those terms. Are the old gods partisan actors in human affairs or impartial observers? Have the Starks buried under Winterfell simply joined the multitude of spirits that watch over Westeros. Or do they watch over their descendance? Is there something special to the Winterfell heart tree and the crypts that makes the Stark lineage a special set of old gods, a congress of skulls that is the very reason why the Starks have endured over the millenia?

A congress of skulls.

Let's examine the very residence of the old gods in Winterfell: the godswood, of rather, as we will see, the system formed by the heart tree and the graveyard, and by extension the crypts.

Perhaps GRRM conceived such a system after being impressed by certain graveyards along the Atlantic Coast.


Contents
  1. Sansa's Winterfell
  2. The Cave of the Children
  3. The Winterfell Godswood
  4. Oaths
  5. Prayers
  6. Transgressions
  7. Dreams
  8. Sacrifices
  9. The First Night
  10. The Crypts and Jon's Dreams
  11. The Stark Dynasty and the missing Swords
  12. The Shadow out of Time
  13. The Pool and the hot Springs
  14. The Weirwood Face
  15. The Agency of the old Gods


1. Sansa's Winterfell


The fact that the graveyard, and by the extension the crypts, are connected to the heart tree is not immediately apparent in Winterfell.

But Sansa gave us a clue.

When Sansa opened her eyes again, she was on her knees. She did not remember falling. it seemed to her that the sky was a lighter shade of grey. Dawn, she thought. Another day. Another new day. It was the old days she hungered for. Prayed for. But who could she pray to? The garden had been meant for a godswood once, she knew, but the soil was too thin and stony for a weirwood to take root. A godswood without gods, as empty as me.
She scooped up a handful of snow and squeezed it between her fingers. Heavy and wet, the snow packed easily. Sansa began to make snowballs, shaping and smoothing them until they were round and white and perfect. She remembered a summer’s snow in Winterfell when Arya and Bran had ambushed her as she emerged from the keep one morning. They’d each had a dozen snowballs to hand, and she’d had none. Bran had been perched on the roof of the covered bridge, out of reach, but Sansa had chased Arya through the stables and around the kitchen until both of them were breathless. She might even have caught her, but she’d slipped on some ice. Her sister came back to see if she was hurt. When she said she wasn’t, Arya hit her in the face with another snowball, but Sansa grabbed her leg and pulled her down and was rubbing snow in her hair when Jory came along and pulled them apart, laughing.
What do I want with snowballs? She looked at her sad little arsenal. There’s no one to throw them at. She let the one she was making drop from her hand. I could build a snow knight instead, she thought. Or even...
She pushed two of her snowballs together, added a third, packed more snow in around them, and patted the whole thing into the shape of a cylinder. When it was done, she stood it on end and used the tip of her little finger to poke holes in it for windows. The crenellations around the top took a little more care, but when they were done she had a tower. I need some walls now, Sansa thought, and then a keep. She set to work.
The snow fell and the castle rose. Two walls ankle-high, the inner taller than the outer. Towers and turrets, keeps and stairs, a round kitchen, a square armory, the stables along the inside of the west wall. It was only a castle when she began, but before very long Sansa knew it was Winterfell. She found twigs and fallen branches beneath the snow and broke off the ends to make the trees for the godswood. For the gravestones in the lichyard she used bits of bark. Soon her gloves and her boots were crusty white, her hands were tingling, and her feet were soaked and cold, but she did not care. The castle was all that mattered. Some things were hard to remember, but most came back to her easily, as if she had been there only yesterday. The Library Tower, with the steep stonework stair twisting about its exterior. The gatehouse, two huge bulwarks, the arched gate between them, crenellations all along the top...
And all the while the snow kept falling, piling up in drifts around her buildings as fast as she raised them. She was patting down the pitched roof of the Great Hall when she heard a voice, and looked up to see her maid calling from her window. Was my lady well? Did she wish to break her fast? Sansa shook her head, and went back to shaping snow, adding a chimney to one end of the Great Hall, where the hearth would stand inside.
Dawn stole into her garden like a thief. The grey of the sky grew lighter still, and the trees and shrubs turned a dark green beneath their stoles of snow. A few servants came out and watched her for a time, but she paid them no mind and they soon went back inside where it was warmer. Sansa saw Lady Lysa gazing down from her balcony, wrapped up in a blue velvet robe trimmed with fox fur, but when she looked again her aunt was gone. Maester Colemon popped out of the rookery and peered down for a while, skinny and shivering but curious.
Her bridges kept falling down. There was a covered bridge between the armory and the main keep, and another that went from the fourth floor of the bell tower to the second floor of the rookery, but no matter how carefully she shaped them, they would not hold together. The third time one collapsed on her, she cursed aloud and sat back in helpless frustration.

(Sansa VII, ASoS)

The choice of material of Sansa is significant: all her castle is made of dead snow, except the graveyard and the godswood, both made out of wood. If that means anything, we can understand that those parts of the castle are alive and possibly organically connected.

A few things are interesting. The initiative to build a snow replica of Winterfell is a sudden inspiration for Sansa. Is it related to the first snows? Sansa has lost her wolf, Lady, who lies now in the Winterfell graveyard, by Ned Stark's deliberate decision.

Shortly, Jory brought him Ice.
When it was over, he said, “Choose four men and have them take the body north. Bury her at Winterfell.”

(Eddard III, AGoT)

We can imagine that Sansa still has a bond with her dead (or maybe not completely dead) direwolf. Being in the graveyard, and perhaps among the old gods, Lady is at the right place to suggest the relation between the graveyard and the heart tree.

A dream of Jon Snow suggests that Lady is alive in the crypt.

He dreamt he was back in Winterfell, limping past the stone kings on their thrones. Their grey granite eyes turned to follow him as he passed, and their grey granite fingers tightened on the hilts of the rusted swords upon their laps. You are no Stark, he could hear them mutter, in heavy granite voices. There is no place for you here. Go away. He walked deeper into the darkness. “Father?” he called. “Bran? Rickon?” No one answered. A chill wind was blowing on his neck. “Uncle?” he called. “Uncle Benjen? Father? Please, Father, help me.” Up above he heard drums. They are feasting in the Great Hall, but I am not welcome there. I am no Stark, and this is not my place. His crutch slipped and he fell to his knees. The crypts were growing darker. A light has gone out somewhere. “Ygritte?” he whispered. “Forgive me. Please.” But it was only a direwolf, grey and ghastly, spotted with blood, his golden eyes shining sadly through the dark...
The cell was dark, the bed hard beneath him. His own bed, he remembered, his own bed in his steward’s cell beneath the Old Bear’s chambers. By rights it should have brought him sweeter dreams. Even beneath the furs, he was cold. Ghost had shared his cell before the ranging, warming it against the chill of night. And in the wild, Ygritte had slept beside him. Both gone now. He had burned Ygritte himself, as he knew she would have wanted, and Ghost... Where are you? Was he dead as well, was that what his dream had meant, the bloody wolf in the crypts? But the wolf in the dream had been grey, not white. Grey, like Bran’s wolf.

(Jon VIII, ASoS)

Indeed, Bran's wolf is grey is with golden eyes. Lady is described thus just before her death.

She looked at him with bright golden eyes, and he ruffled her thick grey fur.

(Eddard III, AGoT)

This is only a suggestion predicated on certain properties of the Winterfell godswood and graveyard, that we are going to examine.


2. The Caves of the Children

The second hint of a connection between the weirwood and the crypts comes to us with the visit to Lord Brynden's cave beyond the Wall. It seems that the cave is just one among many that exists, or have existed. For instance, the lair of the Brotherhood without Banners in the Hollow Hill seems like a former cave of the Children of the Forest. Moreover, Lord Beric recalls strikingly Lord Brynden.The place could be under High Heart. (Indeed Arya and Gendry are blindfolded when they are guided to the cave. It could be that they just have run in circle and been tricked into believing having covered much distance.)

The next day they rode to a place called High Heart, a hill so lofty that from atop it Arya felt as though she could see half the world. Around its brow stood a ring of huge pale stumps, all that remained of a circle of once-mighty weirwoods. Arya and Gendry walked around the hill to count them. There were thirty-one, some so wide that she could have used them for a bed.
High Heart had been sacred to the children of the forest, Tom Sevenstrings told her, and some of their magic lingered here still. “No harm can ever come to those as sleep here,” the singer said. Arya thought that must be true; the hill was so high and the surrounding lands so flat that no enemy could approach unseen.

(Arya IV, ASoS)

Here is the appearance of Beric.

In one place on the far side of the fire, the roots formed a kind of stairway up to a hollow in the earth where a man sat almost lost in the tangle of weirwood.

(Arya V, ASoS)

“When we left King’s Landing we were men of Winterfell and men of Darry and men of Blackhaven, Mallery men and Wylde men. We were knights and squires and men-at-arms, lords and commoners, bound together only by our purpose.” The voice came from the man seated amongst the weirwood roots halfway up the wall. “Six score of us set out to bring the king’s justice to your brother.” The speaker was descending the tangle of steps toward the floor. “Six score brave men and true, led by a fool in a starry cloak.” A scarecrow of a man, he wore a ragged black cloak speckled with stars and an iron breastplate dinted by a hundred battles. A thicket of red-gold hair hid most of his face, save for a bald spot above his left ear where his head had been smashed in. “More than eighty of our company are dead now, but others have taken up the swords that fell from their hands.” When he reached the floor, the outlaws moved aside to let him pass. One of his eyes was gone, Arya saw, the flesh about the socket scarred and puckered, and he had a dark black ring all around his neck. “With their help, we fight on as best we can, for Robert and the realm.”

(Arya V, ASoS)

The entanglement in the weirwood roots and the missing eye (and the ragged black cloak, though not the stars) are all hallmarks of Lord Brynden.

But, the cave of Lord Brynden has a feature we didn't see under the Hollow Hill.

“Bones,” said Bran. “It’s bones.” The floor of the passage was littered with the bones of birds and beasts. But there were other bones as well, big ones that must have come from giants and small ones that could have been from children. On either side of them, in niches carved from the stone, skulls looked down on them. Bran saw a bear skull and a wolf skull, half a dozen human skulls and near as many giants. All the rest were small, queerly formed. Children of the forest. The roots had grown in and around and through them, every one. A few had ravens perched atop them, watching them pass with bright black eyes.

(Bran II, ADwD)

We subsequently learnt that the memories of the dead, and the living greenseers, go into the tree.

It seems customary to bury the deceased under the heart tree. This is the Stark custom. The Boltons bury their dead under the Dreadfort. The Blackwoods bury theirs under their (dead) heart tree.

So it seems that the crypts of the Starks were built in what was once a cave of the Children of the Forest.

The fact that Bran opens his third eye while he is in the crypt is another hint of the similarity between Winterfell and Brynden's cave.


3. The Winterfell Godswood


It is evident for everybody that the godswood is the essential part of Winterfell.

Catelyn had never liked this godswood.
She had been born a Tully, at Riverrun far to the south, on the Red Fork of the Trident. The
godswood there was a garden, bright and airy, where tall redwoods spread dappled shadows across tinkling streams, birds sang from hidden nests, and the air was spicy with the scent of flowers.
The gods of Winterfell kept a different sort of wood. It was a dark, primal place, three acres of old forest untouched for ten thousand years as the gloomy castle rose around it. It smelled of moist earth and decay. No redwoods grew here. This was a wood of stubborn sentinel trees armored in grey-green needles, of mighty oaks, of ironwoods as old as the realm itself. Here thick black trunks crowded close together while twisted branches wove a dense canopy overhead and misshappen roots wrestled beneath the soil. This was a place of deep silence and brooding shadows, and the gods who lived here had no names.
But she knew she would find her husband here tonight. Whenever he took a man’s life, afterward he would seek the quiet of the godswood.
Catelyn had been anointed with the seven oils and named in the rainbow of light that filled the sept of Riverrun. She was of the Faith, like her father and grandfather and his father before him. Her gods had names, and their faces were as familiar as the faces of her parents.
Worship was a septon with a censer, the smell of incense, a seven-sided crystal alive with light, voices raised in song. The Tullys kept a godswood, as all the great houses did, but it was only a place to walk or read or lie in the sun. Worship was for the sept.
For her sake, Ned had built a small sept where she might sing to the seven faces of god, but the blood of the First Men still flowed in the veins of the Starks, and his own gods were the old ones, the nameless, faceless gods of the greenwood they shared with the vanished children of the forest.
At the center of the grove an ancient weirwood brooded over a small pool where the waters were black and cold. “The heart tree,” Ned called it. The weirwood’s bark was white as bone, its leaves dark red, like a thousand bloodstained hands. A face had been carved in the trunk of the great tree, its features long and melancholy, the deep-cut eyes red with dried sap and strangely watchful. They were old, those eyes; older than Winterfell itself. They had seen Brandon the Builder set the first stone, if the tales were true; they had watched the castle’s granite walls rise around them. It was said that the children of the forest had carved the faces in the trees during the dawn centuries before the coming of the First Men across the narrow sea.
In the south the last weirwoods had been cut down or burned out a thousand years ago, except on the Isle of Faces where the green men kept their silent watch. Up here it was different. Here every castle had its godswood, and every godswood had its heart tree, and every heart tree its face.

(Catelyn I, AGoT)

Tyrion seems to have the same impression about the inalterable Starkness of the place.

He remembered their godswood; the tall sentinels armored in their grey-green needles, the great oaks, the hawthorn and ash and soldier pines, and at the center the heart tree standing like some pale giant frozen in time. He could almost smell the place, earthy and brooding, the smell of centuries, and he remembered how dark the wood had been even by day. That wood was Winterfell. It was the north. I never felt so out of place as I did when I walked there, so much an unwelcome intruder. He wondered if the Greyjoys would feel it too. The castle might well be theirs, but never that godswood. Not in a year, or ten, or fifty.

(Tyrion, ACoK)
Bran's visions gives a glimpse of the history of the godswood.
... but then somehow he was back at Winterfell again, in the gods-wood looking down upon his father. Lord Eddard seemed much younger this time. His hair was brown, with no hint of grey in it, his head bowed. “... let them grow up close as brothers, with only love between them,” he prayed, “and let my lady wife find it in her heart to forgive ...”
“Father.” Bran’s voice was a whisper in the wind, a rustle in the leaves. “Father, it’s me. It’s Bran. Brandon.”
Eddard Stark lifted his head and looked long at the weirwood, frowning, but he did not speak. He cannot see me, Bran realized, despairing. He wanted to reach out and touch him, but all that he could do was watch and listen. I am in the tree. I am inside the heart tree, looking out of its red eyes, but the weirwood cannot talk, so I can’t.
Eddard Stark resumed his prayer. Bran felt his eyes fill up with tears. But were they his own tears, or the weirwood’s? If I cry, will the tree begin to weep?
The rest of his father’s words were drowned out by a sudden clatter of wood on wood. Eddard Stark dissolved, like mist in a morning sun. Now two children danced across the godswood, hooting at one another as they dueled with broken branches. The girl was the older and taller of the two. Arya! Bran thought eagerly, as he watched her leap up onto a rock and cut at the boy. But that couldn’t be right. If the girl was Arya, the boy was Bran himself, and he had never worn his hair so long. And Arya never beat me playing swords, the way that girl is beating him. She slashed the boy across his thigh, so hard that his leg went out from under him and he fell into the pool and began to splash and shout. “You be quiet, stupid,” the girl said, tossing her own branch aside. “It’s just water. Do you want Old Nan to hear and run tell Father?” She knelt and pulled her brother from the pool, but before she got him out again, the two of them were gone.
After that the glimpses came faster and faster, till Bran was feeling lost and dizzy. He saw no more of his father, nor the girl who looked like Arya, but a woman heavy with child emerged naked and dripping from the black pool, knelt before the tree, and begged the old gods for a son who would avenge her. Then there came a brown-haired girl slender as a spear who stood on the tips of her toes to kiss the lips of a young knight as tall as Hodor. A dark-eyed youth, pale and fierce, sliced three branches off the weirwood and shaped them into arrows. The tree itself was shrinking, growing smaller with each vision, whilst the lesser trees dwindled into saplings and vanished, only to be replaced by other trees that would dwindle and vanish in their turn. And now the lords Bran glimpsed were tall and hard, stern men in fur and chain mail. Some wore faces he remembered from the statues in the crypts, but they were gone before he could put a name to them.
Then, as he watched, a bearded man forced a captive down onto his knees before the heart tree. A white-haired woman stepped toward them through a drift of dark red leaves, a bronze sickle in her hand.
“No,” said Bran, “no, don’t,” but they could not hear him, no more than his father had. The woman grabbed the captive by the hair, hooked the sickle round his throat, and slashed. And through the mist of centuries the broken boy could only watch as the man’s feet drummed against the earth ... but as his life flowed out of him in a red tide, Brandon Stark could taste the blood.
(Bran III, ADwD)

All visions are in reverse order. I'll leave aside the identification of the characters in the first visions. Everything was witnessed by a single weirwood, a tree that can live thousands of years. We see other trees dwindlings and being born. Common trees can live for hundreds of years. So I suppose the last vision predates the Conquest by far. Perhaps it goes back to the age of heroes. It might even depict be the foundation of Winterfell.

The human sacrifice had the visible effect of nourishing the heart tree. So weirwoods do benefit from being fed human blood. That reminds me of dragons who grow by eating flesh. It seems the woman in the vision claimed the heart tree with blood. Just like Moqorro advised Victarion to claim Euron's horn with blood.

If the godswood is the essential part of Winterfell, the buildings should not be neglected. Indeed, the fist stone of the castle has been set by Bran the Builder, a legendary Stark, according to Catelyn Stark.

Bran the Builder has been attributed other famous constructions. Storm's End.
A seventh castle he raised, most massive of all. Some said the children of the forest helped him build it, shaping the stones with magic; others claimed that a small boy told him what he must do, a boy who would grow to be Bran the Builder. No matter how the tale was told, the end was the same. Though the angry gods threw storm after storm against it, the seventh castle stood defiant, and Durran Godsgrief and fair Elenei dwelt there together until the end of their days.
(Catelyn III, ACoK)
The Wall itself.
Thousands and thousands of years ago, Brandon the Builder had raised Winterfell, and some said the Wall.
(Bran IV, AGoT)

Of course, the Wall, Winterfell, and Storm's End are among the wonders the Seven Kingdoms, I suppose. Brandon the builder might never have existed. However, naming him as the builder in all three cases would seem to put the Wall, Winterfell, and Storm's End in the same league, so to speak. We know that Storm's End and the Wall are warded barriers, as Melisandre came to realize. (Melisandre could not have made her sorcery if Davos had not smuggled her inside Storm's End. She thinks plainly that her magic is more powerful because of the Wall. Moreover, the Wall seems a barrier for warging and wolf dreams.) So it follows logically that Winterfell's walls are warded in a similar way. In some sense, we have a direct support for the notion, since Melisandre seems unable to see inside Winterfell with her flames.
“And what of Mance? Is he lost as well? What do your fires show?”
“The same, I fear. Only snow.”
(Jon X, ADwD)

Winterfell has two defensive walls. The inner wall one is higher and in poorer shape than the outer wall. So the inner wall could be the one which is warded. No explanation of how the warding works seems given in the text.

Did the warding protect the godswood of Lord Brynden?

If Winterfell is similar to Brynden's cave, one can ask what is to be found deep in the crypts. Did greenseers take up residence in the caves? Could there be still greenseers in the tombs?


4. Oaths

Theon notes during the wedding the absence of priesthood in the north.
Quick as that, it was done. Weddings went more quickly in the north. It came of not having priests, Theon supposed, but whatever the reason it seemed to him a mercy.
(The Prince of Winterfell, ADwD)

The old gods have the role of witnesses in the north. Consider, the dialogue between the Old Bear and Jon Snow in Whitetree.
Jon said, “My lord father believed no man could tell a lie in front of a heart tree. The old gods know when men are lying.”
“My father believed the same,” said the Old Bear.
(Jon II, ACoK)

The Men of the Night's Watch who follow the old gods swear in front of a heart tree. Wedding vows are said in front of heart trees, not priests, in the north. When Stannis is uncertain of the loyalty of the Umbers, Jon suggests.
“Your Grace should have him swear an oath before his heart tree.”
(Jon IV, ADwD)

Even Jaqen H'Gar, a pantheist, like the Faceless Men profess to be, knows the power of heart trees a keeper of oathes.
“By all the gods of sea and air, and even him of fire, I swear it.” He placed a hand in the mouth of the weirwood. “By the seven new gods and the old gods beyond count, I swear it.”
(Arya IX, ACoK)
A marriage is a form of oath. Consequently the vows are said in front of a heart tree.

Certain experiments in psychology suggest that the mere feeling of being watched has a positive influence on moral behaviour, and societies could benefit from creating a mere impression of supervision. However, the old gods do not merely create an impression of supervision. They have power over the lives of mortals.

Their power might not be tangible though. They seem to send dreams. Ned Stark, Theon and Jon Snow all experience dreams about the crypts of Winterfell. It's apparent that the dreams are sent by the old gods.


5. Prayers

The northmen go routinely to the godswood to pray. We see Eddard Stark doing so early in the books after executing the deserter. Ned's prayer might only serve to appease his soul after every execution.

The old gods seem to answer request formulated in prayers. In four instances at least, we see a seemingly miraculous apparition following a prayer. The first is in this scene with Arya and Jaqen.
Help me, you old gods, she prayed silently. Help me get those men out of the dungeon so we can kill Ser Amory, and bring me home to Winterfell. Make me a water dancer and a wolf and not afraid again, ever.
Was that enough? Maybe she should pray aloud if she wanted the old gods to hear. Maybe she should pray longer. Sometimes her father had prayed a long time, she remembered. But the old gods had never helped him. Remembering that made her angry. “You should have saved him,” she scolded the tree. “He prayed to you all the time. I don’t care if you help me or not. I don’t think you could even if you wanted to.”
“Gods are not mocked, girl.”
The voice startled her. She leapt to her feet and drew her wooden sword. Jaqen H’ghar stood so still in the darkness that he seemed one of the trees. “A man comes to hear a name. One and two and then comes three. A man would have done.”
(Arya IX, ACoK)
In the story of the knight of the laughing tree, a prayer to the old gods is answered.
 The quiet wolf had offered the little crannogman a place in his tent that night, but before he slept he knelt on the lakeshore, looking across the water to where the Isle of Faces would be, and said a prayer to the old gods of north and Neck...”
“You never heard this tale from your father?” asked Jojen.
“It was Old Nan who told the stories. Meera, go on, you can’t stop there.”
Hodor must have felt the same. “Hodor,” he said, and then, “Hodor hodor hodor hodor.” “Well,” said Meera, “if you would hear the rest...”
“Yes. Tell it.”
“Five days of jousting were planned,” she said. “There was a great seven-sided melee as well, and archery and axethrowing, a horse race and tourney of singers. ..”
“Never mind about all that.” Bran squirmed impatiently in his basket on Hodor’s back. “Tell about the jousting.”
“As my prince commands. The daughter of the castle was the queen of love and beauty, with four brothers and an uncle to defend her, but all four sons of Harrenhal were defeated on the first day. Their conquerors reigned briefly as champions, until they were vanquished in turn. As it happened, the end of the first day saw the porcupine knight win a place among the champions, and on the morning of the second day the pitchfork knight and the knight of the two towers were victorious as well. But late on the afternoon of that second day, as the shadows grew long, a mystery knight appeared in the lists.”
Bran nodded sagely. Mystery knights would oft appear at tourneys, with helms concealing their faces, and shields that were either blank or bore some strange device. Sometimes they were famous champions in disguise. The Dragonknight once won a tourney as the Knight of Tears, so he could name his sister the queen of love and beauty in place of the king’s mistress. And Barristan the Bold twice donned a mystery knight’s armor, the first time when he was only ten. “It was the little crannogman, I bet.”
“No one knew,” said Meera, “but the mystery knight was short of stature, and clad in ill-fitting armor made up of bits and pieces. The device upon his shield was a heart tree of the old gods, a white weirwood with a laughing red face.”
“Maybe he came from the Isle of Faces,” said Bran. “Was he green?” In Old Nan’s stories, the guardians had dark green skin and leaves instead of hair. Sometimes they had antlers too, but Bran didn’t see how the mystery knight could have worn a helm if he had antlers. “I bet the old gods sent him.”
(Bran II, ASoS)
And Sam prays to the old gods just before being attacked by the wights and saved by Coldhands.
“Old gods, hear my prayer. The Seven were my father’s gods but I said my words to you when I joined the Watch. Help us now. I fear we might be lost. We’re hungry too, and so cold. I don’t know what gods I believe in now, but... please, if you’re there, help us. Gilly has a little son.” That was all that he could think to say. The dusk was deepening, the leaves of the weirwood rustling softly, waving like a thousand blood-red hands. Whether Jon’s gods had heard him or not he could not say.
(Samwell III, ASoS)
Here is Theon turning to the old gods the night before the escape.
Death was the sweetest deliverance he could hope for.
In the godswood the snow was still dissolving as it touched the earth. Steam rose off the hot pools, fragrant with the smell of moss and mud and decay. A warm fog hung in the air, turning the trees into sentinels, tall soldiers shrouded in cloaks of gloom. During daylight hours, the steamy wood was often full of northmen come to pray to the old gods, but at this hour Theon Greyjoy found he had it all to himself.
And in the heart of the wood the weirwood waited with its knowing red eyes. Theon stopped by the edge of the pool and bowed his head before its carved red face. Even here he could hear the drumming, boom DOOM boom DOOM boom DOOM boom DOOM. Like distant thunder, the sound seemed to come from everywhere at once.
The night was windless, the snow drifting straight down out of a cold black sky, yet the leaves of the heart tree were rustling his name. “Theon,” they seemed to whisper, “Theon.”
The old gods, he thought. They know me. They know my name. I was Theon of House Greyjoy. I was a ward of Eddard Stark, a friend and brother to his children. “Please.” He fell to his knees. “A sword, that’s all I ask. Let me die as Theon, not as Reek.” Tears trickled down his cheeks, impossibly warm. “I was ironborn. A son ... a son of Pyke, of the islands.”
A leaf drifted down from above, brushed his brow, and landed in the pool. It floated on the water, red, five-fingered, like a bloody hand. “... Bran,” the tree murmured.
They know. The gods know. They saw what I did. And for one strange moment it seemed as if it were Bran’s face carved into the pale trunk of the weirwood, staring down at him with eyes red and wise and sad. Bran’s ghost, he thought, but that was madness. Why should Bran want to haunt him? He had been fond of the boy, had never done him any harm. It was not Bran we killed. It was not Rickon. They were only miller’s sons, from the mill by the Acorn Water. “I had to have two heads, else they would have mocked me ... laughed at me ... they ...”
A voice said, “Who are you talking to?”
Theon spun, terrified that Ramsay had found him, but it was just the washerwomen—Holly, Rowan, and one whose name he did not know. “The ghosts,” he blurted. “They whisper to me. They ... they know my name.”
“Theon Turncloak.” Rowan grabbed his ear, twisting. “You had to have two heads, did you?” “Elsewise men would have laughed at him,” said Holly.
They do not understand. Theon wrenched free. “What do you want?” he asked.
“You,” said the third washerwoman, an older woman, deep-voiced, with grey streaks in her hair. “I told you. I want to touch you, turncloak.” Holly smiled. In her hand a blade appeared.
I could scream, Theon thought. Someone will hear. The castle is full of armed men. He would be dead before help reached him, to be sure, his blood soaking into the ground to feed the heart tree. And what would be so wrong with that? “Touch me,” he said. “Kill me.” There was more despair than defiance in his voice. “Go on. Do me, the way you did the others. Yellow Dick and the rest. It was you.”
Holly laughed. “How could it be us? We’re women. Teats and cunnies. Here to be fucked, not feared.”
“Did the Bastard hurt you?” Rowan asked. “Chopped off your fingers, did he? Skinned your widdle toes? Knocked your teeth out? Poor lad.” She patted his cheek. “There will be no more o’ that, I promise. You prayed, and the gods sent us. You want to die as Theon? We’ll give you that. A nice quick death, ’twill hardly hurt at all.” She smiled. “But not till you’ve sung for Abel. He’s waiting for you.”
(A Ghost in Winterfell, ADwD)

In every case the prayer is answered by an uncommon character, who might of might not be a knowing agent. Jaqen is probably not a follower of the old gods, but prayers are answered in the House of Black and White (a place quite similar to the cave where Brynden has taken root). Abel's washerwomen are devoted followers of the old gods, as the faces drawn on the trees around Mole Town show. Coldhands is Brynden's friend, and perhaps his servant. The knight of the laughing tree proclaimed the weirwood faces of the old gods on his shield.

There are cases of prayers answered by the red god.



6. Transgressions

Certain taboos are taken most seriously in Westeros and condemned by new gods and old gods alike: kinslaying, violation of guest rights, incest, oathbreaking, perhaps cannibalism, kingslaying, slavery and bestiality.

The old gods seem to punish transgressors. We saw already what happened to Theon. Here is another story of kinslaying.
The smallfolk hereabouts shunned the place, Tom told her; it was said to be haunted by the ghosts of the children of the forest who had died here when the Andal king named Erreg the Kinslayer had cut down their grove.
(Arya IV, ASoS)
We have the story of the Rat Cook.
“It was not for murder that the gods cursed him,” Old Nan said, “nor for serving the Andal king his son in a pie. A man has a right to vengeance. But he slew a guest beneath his roof, and that the gods cannot forgive.”
(Bran IV, ASoS)

So murder and cannibalism are not in themselves transgressions. Another taboo is incest, according to Ygritte.
Women who bed brothers or fathers or clan kin offend the gods, and are cursed with weak and sickly children. Even monsters.
(Jon III, ASoS)
Catelyn Stark reports the same aversion.
Bastards were common enough, but incest was a monstrous sin to both old gods and new, and the children of such wickedness were named abominations in sept and godswood alike.
(Catelyn IV, ACoK)
However, Craster professes to be a godly man.
“We’ve had no such troubles here... and I’ll thank you not to tell such evil tales under my roof. I’m a godly man, and the gods keep me safe. If wights come walking, I’ll know how to send them back to their graves. Though I could use me a sharp new axe.”
(Jon III, ACoK)
Incest is not a sin for Craster. But fathering a child out of wedlock is.
“A bastard, is it?” Craster looked Jon up and down. “Man wants to bed a woman, seems like he ought to take her to wife. That’s what I do.”
(Jon III, ACoK)

I wonder who is witness to Craster's weddings. There is no weirwood at Craster's Keep. And Craster is from Whitetree, the village with the largest, and possibly oldest, weirwood tree we have seen up to now. Does Craster worship the old gods? Mormont is ambiguous on the subject.
But the wildlings serve crueler gods than you or I. These boys are Craster’s offerings. His prayers, if you will.
(Jon III, ACoK)
But Osha says clearly.
“They are my gods too,” Osha said. “Beyond the Wall, they are the only gods.”
(Bran VI, AGoT)

So Craster worships the old gods. But somehow his values are different from those of other wildlings. Indeed Craster alone among the Free Folk did not join Mance Rayder. Moreover, Ygritte says of him.
Craster’s blood is black, and he bears a heavy curse.
(Jon III, ASoS)
So Craster is so odd that it is not clear what to make of his beliefs.

Perhaps, it's appropriate to recall the three abominations of the skinchanger, according to Varamyr's mentor.
To eat of human meat was abomination, to mate as wolf with wolf was abomination, and to seize the body of another man was the worst abomination of all.
(Prologue, ADwD)

Varamyr perpetrated all three abominations, and kinslaying. So cannibalism and bestiality are taboos of skinchangers. However, they do not seem forbidden by the old gods. Bran does break at least two of those taboos, while being in search of his mentor Lord Brynden, who doesn't seem to forbid Bran to seize Hodor's body.

Is that taboo related to the prohibition on slavery in the Seven Kingdoms?
“My queen,” said Arstan, “there have been no slaves in the Seven Kingdoms for thousands of years. The old gods and the new alike hold slavery to be an abomination. Evil. If you should land in Westeros at the head of a slave army, many good men will oppose you for no other reason than that. You will do great harm to your cause, and to the honor of your House.”
(Daenerys II, ASoS)

Bloodraven himself is known as a kinslayer, for havind killed his half-brother with an arrow, and was rumored to have taken his half-sister as a lover, breaking thus two taboos of the old gods. So, Bloodraven's old gods might be different from the old gods of Winterfell, and might be different from Haggon's old gods.

Brynden is half a Targaryen, and might consider himself above the laws of lesser men. In any case, it is barely comprehensible that such a character has been chosen by the gods to be the last greenseer.


7. Dreams

The old gods are able to send dreams, sometimes of a prophetic nature: the phenomenon of greendreams. We see it with the Ghost of High Heart.
“The old gods stir and will not let me sleep,” she heard the woman say. “I dreamt I saw a shadow with a burning heart butchering a golden stag, aye. I dreamt of a man without a face, waiting on a bridge that swayed and swung. On his shoulder perched a drowned crow with seaweed hanging from his wings. I dreamt of a roaring river and a woman that was a fish. Dead she drifted, with red tears on her cheeks, but when her eyes did open, oh, I woke from terror. All this I dreamt, and more. Do you have gifts for me, to pay me for my dreams?”
(Arya IV, ASoS)

It's not certain the dreams come from the trees themselves. However, the Ghost of High Heart lingers where a weirwood grove was once.

Jojen has greendreams too, and makes a distinction with the power of greenseers.
“It is given to a few to drink of that green fountain whilst still in mortal flesh, to hear the whisperings of the leaves and see as the trees see, as the gods see,” said Jojen. “Most are not so blessed. The gods gave me only greendreams. My task was to get you here. My part in this is done.”
(Bran III, ADwD)
Bran and Rickon both report dreaming of their father's death to Maester Luwin.
“-too young, and-ooh, seven hells, that burns, no, don’t stop, more. Too young, as I say, but you, Bran, you’re old enough to know that dreams are only dreams.”
“Some are, some aren’t.” Osha poured pale red firemilk into a long gash. Luwin gasped. “The children of the forest could tell you a thing or two about dreaming.”
(Bran VII, AGoT)
Osha's remark is intriguing. It seems she refers to the greenseers. Here is another interesting conversation.
“All creatures dream, I think, yet not as men do.”
“Do dead men dream?” Bran asked, thinking of his father. In the dark crypts below Winterfell, a stonemason was chiseling out his father’s likeness in granite.
“Some say yes, some no,” the maester answered. “The dead themselves are silent on the matter.”
“Do trees dream?”
“Trees? No...”
“They do,” Bran said with sudden certainty. “They dream tree dreams. I dream of a tree sometimes. A weirwood, like the one in the godswood. It calls to me. The wolf dreams are better. I smell things, and sometimes I can taste the blood.”
(Bran I, ACoK)

Bran makes a distinction between the dreams inspired by the Three-Eyed-Crow and the wolf dreams (warging). Here is the Three-Eyed Crow in Bran's dream.
Now you know, the crow whispered as it sat on his shoulder. Now you know why you must live.
“Why?” Bran said, not understanding, falling, falling.
Because winter is coming.
(Bran III, AGoT)

Can the Three-Eyed Crow enter any mortal's dream? Or is the dream related to Bran's special gift? Or to his near-death experience? Or to his direwolf?

The power to enter dreams was a prerogative of the sorcerers of Old Valyria, according to Archmaester Marwyn.
The sorcerers of the Freehold could see across mountains, seas, and deserts with one of these glass candles. They could enter a man’s dreams and give him visions, and speak to one another half a world apart, seated before their candles.
(Samwell V, AFfC)
Do the glass candles play the role of the weirwoods?

Ned, Jon Snow, and Theon all dream of the crypts of Winterfell. We are going to look at this in our examination of the crypts. However, they do not seem to have the gift of greendreams. It would seem their dreams are sent by the spirit in the crypts.

Recall that Theon is a kinslayer and has conquered Winterfell, and therefore is the legitimate lord, since Bran has yielded the castle. Here are his dreams just after the miller's sons deaths.
All his dreams had been cold of late, and each more hideous than the one before. Last night he had dreamed himself back in the mill again, on his knees dressing the dead. Their limbs were already stiffening, so they seemed to resist sullenly as he fumbled at them with half-frozen fingers, tugging up breeches and knotting laces, yanking fur-trimmed boots over hard unbending feet, buckling a studded leather belt around a waist no bigger than the span of his hands. “This was never what I wanted,” he told them as he worked. “They gave me no choice.” The corpses made no answer, but only grew colder and heavier.
(Theon V, ACoK)
The night before, it had been the miller’s wife. Theon had forgotten her name, but he remembered her body, soft pillowy breasts and stretch marks on her belly, the way she clawed his back when he fucked her. Last night in his dream he had been in bed with her once again, but this time she had teeth above and below, and she tore out his throat even as she was gnawing off his manhood. It was madness. He’d seen her die too. Gelmarr had cut her down with one blow of his axe as she cried to Theon for mercy. Leave me, woman. It was him who killed you, not me. And he’s dead as well. At least Gelmarr did not haunt Theon’s sleep.
(Theon V, ACoK)
The third dream clearly comes from the crypts, and we will return to the recurring them of crypt dreams.
That night he dreamed of the feast Ned Stark had thrown when King Robert came to Winterfell. The hall rang with music and laughter, though the cold winds were rising outside. At first it was all wine and roast meat, and Theon was making japes and eyeing the serving girls and having himself a fine time . . . until he noticed that the room was growing darker. The music did not seem so jolly then; he heard discords and strange silences, and notes that hung in the air bleeding. Suddenly the wine turned bitter in his mouth, and when he looked up from his cup he saw that he was dining with the dead.
King Robert sat with his guts spilling out on the table from the great gash in his belly, and Lord Eddard was headless beside him. Corpses lined the benches below, grey-brown flesh sloughing off their bones as they raised their cups to toast, worms crawling in and out of the holes that were their eyes. He knew them, every one; Jory Cassel and Fat Tom, Porther and Cayn and Hullen the master of horse, and all the others who had ridden south to King’s Landing never to return. Mikken and Chayle sat together, one dripping blood and the other water. Benfred Tallhart and his Wild Hares filled most of a table. The miller’s wife was there as well, and Farlen, even the wildling Theon had killed in the wolfswood the day he had saved Bran’s life.
But there were others with faces he had never known in life, faces he had seen only in stone. The slim, sad girl who wore a crown of pale blue roses and a white gown spattered with gore could only be Lyanna. Her brother Brandon stood beside her, and their father Lord Rickard just behind. Along the walls figures half-seen moved through the shadows, pale shades with long grim faces. The sight of them sent fear shivering through Theon sharp as a knife. And then the tall doors opened with a crash, and a freezing gale blew down the hall, and Robb came walking out of the night. Grey Wind stalked beside, eyes burning, and man and wolf alike bled from half a hundred savage wounds.
(Theon V, ACoK)

I am inclined to believe in the interpretation that the dead in the crypts inflict on Theon, the Prince of Winterfell, nightmares for being a kinslayer. Whether Ramsay, as the punisher of Theon, is the old gods' instrument is an interesting question.

The terrible dreams in Winterfell seem to be the reason for Theon's sleeplessness, and endless wanderings in the castle when he returns there.
But he was cold and tired, his head was pounding, he had not slept in days.
(Theon, ADwD)

8. Sacrifices

The importance of sacrifice is clearly established in the Song of Ice and Fire. Mirri Maz Durr tells Danaerys emphatically that only blood can pay for blood. But it appears only gradually that the old gods do accept sacrifices.

First we see the village of Whitetree.
And above them loomed the pale limbs and dark red leaves of a monstrous great weirwood.
It was the biggest tree Jon Snow had ever seen, the trunk near eight feet wide, the branches spreading so far that the entire village was shaded beneath their canopy. The size did not disturb him so much as the face... the mouth especially, no simple carved slash, but a jagged hollow large enough to swallow a sheep.
(Jon II, ACoK)
He knelt and reached a gloved hand down into the maw. The inside of the hollow was red with dried sap and blackened by fire. Beneath the skull he saw another, smaller, the jaw broken off. It was half-buried in ash and bits of bone.
When he brought the skull to Mormont, the Old Bear lifted it in both hands and stared into the empty sockets. “The wildlings burn their dead. We’ve always known that. Now I wished I’d asked them why, when there were still a few around to ask.”
(Jon II, ACoK)

The weirwood of Whitetree is the largest tree we see in the story, and, we can presume, the oldest. So it seems the wildlings offered human sacrifices to the tree. The unique feature of the place is the use of the mouth of the tree as an oven.

Then, we see Craster, himself originating from Whitetree, sacrificing his sons. Whether the recipients of the sacrifice are the old gods in a form or the other is still an open question.

Then we have the stories of Ser Bartimus at the Wolf's Den.
“Then a long cruel winter fell,” said Ser Bartimus. “The White Knife froze hard, and even the firth was icing up. The winds came howling from the north and drove them slavers inside to huddle round their fires, and whilst they warmed themselves the new king come down on them. Brandon Stark this was, Edrick Snowbeard’s great-grandson, him that men called Ice Eyes. He took the Wolf’s Den back, stripped the slavers naked, and gave them to the slaves he’d found chained up in the dungeons. It’s said they hung their entrails in the branches of the heart tree, as an offering to the gods. The old gods, not these new ones from the south. Your Seven don’t know winter, and winter don’t know them.”
Davos could not argue with the truth of that. From what he had seen at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, he did not care to know winter either. “What gods do you keep?” he asked the one-legged knight.
“The old ones.” When Ser Bartimus grinned, he looked just like a skull. “Me and mine were here before the Manderlys. Like as not, my own forebears strung those entrails through the tree.”
“I never knew that northmen made blood sacrifice to their heart trees.”
“There’s much and more you southrons do not know about the north,” Ser Bartimus replied.
(Davos IV, ADwD)

Brienne might have unknowingly enacted a blood sacrifice at the Whispers with Nimble Dick. Nimble Dick was himself a Crabb which might have given a validity to the sacrifice, since the Whispers were the ancestral seat of House Crabb. And it seems Clarence Crabb was once a greenseer.
Together, they shoved the dirt on top of Nimble Dick as the moon rose higher in the sky, and down below the ground the heads of forgotten kings whispered secrets.
(Brienne IV, AFfC)
There is the strange story of Whoresbane who has eviscerated a prostitute in Oldtown.
Jon regarded him coolly. “You might say so. A whore who tried to rob him, fifty years ago in Oldtown.” Odd as it might seem, old Hoarfrost Umber had once believed his youngest son had the makings of a maester. Mors loved to boast about the crow who took his eye, but Hother’s tale was only told in whispers ... most like because the whore he’d disemboweled had been a man. “Have other lords declared for Bolton too?”
(Jon IV, ADwD)
One wonders whether Whoresbane gave the entrails to the weirwood in the Isle of Ravens.

The final vision of Bran in Brynden's cave is clearly a blood sacrifice.
Then, as he watched, a bearded man forced a captive down onto his knees before the heart tree. A white-haired woman stepped toward them through a drift of dark red leaves, a bronze sickle in her hand.
“No,” said Bran, “no, don’t,” but they could not hear him, no more than his father had. The woman grabbed the captive by the hair, hooked the sickle round his throat, and slashed. And through the mist of centuries the broken boy could only watch as the man’s feet drummed against the earth ... but as his life flowed out of him in a red tide, Brandon Stark could taste the blood.
(Bran III, ADwD)

What is the purpose of these sacrifices? Do the old gods answer prayers when they come with a payment in blood? Let's return to the answered prayers above. Arya had her wish fulfilled, but she gave herself to the Faceless Men. Theon would have his death as Theon, but not before he had served the old gods. It is not clear at all that Sam and Howland Reed have sacrificed anything to have their wishes fulfilled.

An ancient custom of the north goes well with the notion of sacrifice.

Some northmen have in mind another sacrifice.
“What has your southron god to do with snow?” demanded Artos Flint. His black beard was crusted with ice. “This is the wroth of the old gods come upon us. It is them we should appease.”
“Aye,” said Big Bucket Wull. “Red Rahloo means nothing here. You will only make the old gods angry. They are watching from their island.”
The crofter’s village stood between two lakes, the larger dotted with small wooded islands that punched up through the ice like the frozen fists of some drowned giant. From one such island rose a weirwood gnarled and ancient, its bole and branches white as the surrounding snows. Eight days ago Asha had walked out with Aly Mormont to have a closer look at its slitted red eyes and bloody mouth. It is only sap, she’d told herself, the red sap that flows inside these weirwoods. But her eyes were unconvinced; seeing was believing, and what they saw was frozen blood.
(The Sacrifice, ADwD)

So the idea that winter can be appeased by blood sacrifices is part of the culture in the north.


9. The first Night

Here are a few interesting bits about old traditions for getting rid of unwanted children in Westeros.

Here is Davos and Lord Godric.
“When there were kings on the Sisters, we did not suffer dwarfs to live. We cast them all into the sea, as an offering to the gods. The septons made us stop that. A pack of pious fools. Why would the gods give a man such a shape but to mark him as a monster?”
(Davos I, ADwD)

So giving unwanted children as offering to the gods was once a common practice, later abolished by the church of the Seven.

Here is Tyrion thinking about the Westerlands.
The countryside had no grotesqueries or mummer shows ... though it did have wells aplenty, to swallow up unwanted kittens, three-headed calves, and babes like him.
(Tyrion II, ADwD)
He invents a little story for Duck.
“You are not the first to try and drown me,” he told Duck, as he was pouring river water from his boot. “My father threw me down a well the day I was born, but I was so ugly that the water witch who lived down there spat me back.”
(Tyrion IV, ADwD)

I suspect there is a continuity from the practices of offering children to the gods of the sea and to the custom of throwing malformed babies and bastards into wells.

Here is now Roose Bolton about Ramsay's birth.
A year later this same wench had the impudence to turn up at the Dreadfort with a squalling, red-faced monster that she claimed was my own get. I should’ve had the mother whipped and thrown her child down a well.
(Reek III, ADwD)

Why is Ramsay undesirable? Is it because he is a bastard born of the Lord's right to the First Night? The notion of throwing such a child down a well seems natural to Roose. But which well? After all, nobody wants to drink corpse water.

Let's turn to the Nightfort. The most remarkable building there is, in my opinion, the kitchen.
The Reeds decided that they would sleep in the kitchens, a stone octagon with a broken Dorne. it looked to offer better shelter than most of the other buildings, even though a crooked weirwood had burst up through the slate floor beside the huge central well, stretching slantwise toward the hole in the roof, its bone-white branches reaching for the sun. It was a queer kind of tree, skinnier than any other weirwood that Bran had ever seen and faceless as well, but it made him feel as if the old gods were with him here, at least.
That was the only thing he liked about the kitchens, though. The roof was mostly there, so they’d be dry if it rained again, but he didn’t think they would ever get warm here. You could feel the cold seeping up through the slate floor. Bran did not like the shadows either, or the huge brick ovens that surrounded them like open mouths, or the rusted meat hooks, or the scars and stains he saw in the butcher’s block along one wall. That was where the Rat Cook chopped the prince to pieces, he knew, and he baked the pie in one of these ovens.
The well was the thing he liked the least, though. It was a good twelve feet across, all stone, with steps built into its side, circling down and down into darkness. The walls were damp and covered with niter, but none of them could see the water at the bottom, not even Meera with her sharp hunter’s eyes. “Maybe it doesn’t have a bottom,” Bran said uncertainly.
(Bran IV, ASoS)

We'll return to the design of the kitchen later. Let's turn now to the well inside. The stair inside leads to the Black Gate. It's said that the Nightfort is the oldest castle on the Wall. It might even predate the Wall. It's likely that the Black Gate had once been used to communicate with the other side before the various tunnels were digged.

Some of the little legends attached to the Nightfort are dark stories about the death of son: the seventy nine sentinels (Lord Ryswell burying his own son in the ice of the Wall), the Rat Cook (who has served to the Andal King his own son). Most interesting is the story of Night's King.
The gathering gloom put Bran in mind of another of Old Nan’s stories, the tale of Night’s King. He had been the thirteenth man to lead the Night’s Watch, she said; a warrior who knew no fear. “And that was the fault in him,” she would add, “for all men must know fear.” A woman was his downfall; a woman glimpsed from atop the Wall, with skin as white as the moon and eyes like blue stars. Fearing nothing, he chased her and caught her and loved her, though her skin was cold as ice, and when he gave his seed to her he gave his soul as well.
He brought her back to the Nightfort and proclaimed her a queen and himself her king, and with strange sorceries he bound his Sworn Brothers to his will. For thirteen years they had ruled, Night’s King and his corpse queen, till finally the Stark of Winterfell and Joramun of the wildlings had joined to free the Watch from bondage. After his fall, when it was found he had been sacrificing to the Others, all records of Night’s King had been destroyed, his very name forbidden.
“Some say he was a Bolton,” Old Nan would always end. “Some say a Magnar out of Skagos, some say Umber, Flint, or Norrey. Some would have you think he was a Woodfoot, from them who ruled Bear Island before the ironmen came. He never was. He was a Stark, the brother of the man who brought him down.” She always pinched Bran on the nose then, he would never forget it. “He was a Stark of Winterfell, and who can say? Mayhaps his name was Brandon. Mayhaps he slept in this very bed in this very room.”
(Bran IV, ASoS)

We don't know what was sacrificed to the Others. But, under all likehood, the sacrifices were offered through the Black Gate. A most interesting detail concerns the list of possible origins for Night's King according to Old Nan (Bolton, Skagos, Umber, Flint, Norrey, Woodfoot, Stark). Let's return to Roose Bolton and his account of the First Night custom.
The maesters will tell you that King Jaehaerys abolished the lord’s right to the first night to appease his shrewish queen, but where the old gods rule, old customs linger. The Umbers keep the first night too, deny it as they may. Certain of the mountain clans as well, and on Skagos ... well, only heart trees ever see half of what they do on Skagos.
(Reek III, ADwD)

The lists match, if one considers that House Woodfoot is extinct and we accept that the certain mountain clans designate Norrey and Flint. Of course the coincidence proves nothing, but it is quite suggestive.

Perhaps it's worthwile to mention a remark made by Ronnel Harclay (Harclay is a mountain clan).
“His roof, his rule,” the ranger Ronnel Harclay had reminded them. “Craster’s a friend to the Watch.”
(Samwell II, ASoS)
Two remarks about Old Nan's list of suspects (Woodfoot, Bolton, Umber, Flint, Norrey, Skagos, and Stark):
  • Note that these houses are precisely those who reside at the closest proximity to the Wall, and suffer the most from winter.
  • Many of them do not have maesters or have difficulties with maesters.
So there seems to be a relation between: the First Night, sacrifices of unwanted children and the Nightfort. One wonders if the practice of the First Night was not, in fact, a way of producing children to be sacrificed to the gods, through the Black Gate. Had Roose the well of the Nightfort in mind when he considered throwing Ramsay?

Perhaps the most important conclusion to be drawn from this analysis, is that Bran's story is exactly the story of a crippled child sacrificed at the Black Gate. Sam officiated the sacrifice by opening the gate, like brothers of the Watch used to do in the old days. Coldhands took the offering like he might have done so many times in the past. Moreover Bran was King in the north at the time he passed the gate.

Recall how many northmen thought Bran should have given up on life.
Harrion Karstark, the oldest of Lord Rickard’s sons, bowed, and his brothers after him, yet as they settled back in their places he heard the younger two talking in low voices, over the clatter of wine cups. I’ll... sooner die than live like that,” muttered one, his father’s namesake Eddard, and his brother Torrhen said likely the boy was broken inside as well as out, too craven to take his own life.
(Bran VI, AGoT)

It's interesting that the opinion comes from the Karstark household. It is tempting to see in the Karstarks an echo of what the Starks were before the branches separated, a thousand years ago. However House Karstark is not rumored to continue the custom of the first night. This seems confirmed by the choice of the name of the daughter of the house: Alys (which seems to refer to queen Alysanne).

The notion that unneeded mouthes are unwelcome in the north are stressed several times. Old people go "hunting" in winter.

But the Nightfort has been closed for two hundred years. Let's recall the circumstances:
“Twice as old as Castle Black,” Bran said, remembering. “It was the first castle on the Wall, and the largest.” But it had also been the first abandoned, all the way back in the time of the Old King. Even then it had been three-quarters empty and too costly to maintain. Good Queen Alysanne had suggested that the Watch replace it with a smaller, newer castle at a spot only seven miles east, where the Wall curved along the shore of a beautiful green lake. Deep Lake had been paid for by the queen’s jewels and built by the men the Old King had sent north, and the black brothers had abandoned the Nightfort to the rats.
(Bran IV, ASoS)

The Old King, Jaehaerys brought a long peace to the seven kingdoms thanks to an agreement with the Church of the Seven and the governance of his Hand, Septon Barth. Barth is a fascinating character. Whatever role he played in the reform of the north is unclear. I suspect he was himself a northman. In any case, not long after Barth's tenure as Hand, a lord Stark was named Barth, as Bran saw in the crypts.
When the shadows moved, it looked for an instant as if the dead were rising as well. Lyanna and Brandon, Lord Rickard Stark their father, Lord Edwyle his father, Lord Willam and his brother Artos the Implacable, Lord Donnor and Lord Beron and Lord Rodwell, one-eyed Lord jonnel, Lord Barth and Lord Brandon and Lord Cregan who had fought the Dragonknight. On their stone chairs they sat with stone wolves at their feet. This was where they came when the warmth had seeped out of their bodies; this was the dark hall of the dead, where the living feared to tread.
(Bran VII, ACoK)

So Barth Stark was a brother of Cregan Stark, himself a contemporary of the Dragonknight, brother of Aegon the Unworthy, and born around one hundred and sixty years ago. Tyrion recalls that Barth's tenure gave the realm forty years of peace. So it's likely that Barth was still Hand of the King at the end of Jaehaerys' reign.

Queen Alysanne has played a major role in the reform of the Night's Watch. The visit of the royal couple, with half the court and six dragons seems like an intimidation. Jaehaerys and Alysanne (and probably Barth as well) appear to have been close to the church of the Seven, since a peace was reached between the militant orders and the Iron Throne during their reign. So the abolition of the First Night in the north fits well with the abolition of child sacrifices by the sistermen.

It's interesting to look at a few details of the Nightfort. First, the story of the rat cook involves explicitly the Andal King (I don't know whether the definite article has a meaning here. If it has one, it might refer to the King who led the Andals to Westeros.) The story might encapsulate well the horrors of the Nighfort for the Andals.

Now let's look at the kitchen.
There were trees growing where the stables had been, and a twisted white weirwood pushing up through the gaping hole in the roof of the burned kitchen.
(Bran IV, ASoS)
And later.
The Reeds decided that they would sleep in the kitchens, a stone octagon with a broken Dorne. it looked to offer better shelter than most of the other buildings, even though a crooked weirwood had burst up through the slate floor beside the huge central well, stretching slantwise toward the hole in the roof, its bone-white branches reaching for the sun. It was a queer kind of tree, skinnier than any other weirwood that Bran had ever seen and faceless as well, but it made him feel as if the old gods were with him here, at least.
That was the only thing he liked about the kitchens, though. The roof was mostly there, so they’d be dry if it rained again, but he didn’t think they would ever get warm here. You could feel the cold seeping up through the slate floor. Bran did not like the shadows either, or the huge brick ovens that surrounded them like open mouths, or the rusted meat hooks, or the scars and stains he saw in the butcher’s block along one wall. That was where the Rat Cook chopped the prince to pieces, he knew, and he baked the pie in one of these ovens.
The well was the thing he liked the least, though. It was a good twelve feet across, all stone, with steps built into its side, circling down and down into darkness. The walls were damp and covered with niter, but none of them could see the water at the bottom, not even Meera with her sharp hunter’s eyes. “Maybe it doesn’t have a bottom,” Bran said uncertainly.
(Bran IV, ASoS)

The design of the kitchen is odd. Why would the well be in the middle of it? Why would the Black Gate arrive in a kitchen? The kitchen has a dome, a very rare feature in Westeros. (They are to be found at the Citadel, in the Dragonvault in King's Landing, at tower of the Sun, in Sunspear, and in certain septs. Domes are more common across the Narrow Sea.) So, in Westeros, a dome indicates a building of an extraordinary nature or a sept.

A sept would have a dome and seven sides. But the kichen has eight sides, seemingly a blasphem for the septons (and by extension the Old King etc). And the Nightfort had no sept, indicating thus that followers of the Faith of the Seven did not accomplish their Watch at the Nightfort.

At this point, I understand the dark practices as a mean to repeal or appease the forces of Winter.

If the sacrifices stopped two hundred years ago, there must have been some retribution for the north. I can see two.

I suppose that at that point men like Craster began to emerge, and they were tolerated, even supported, by the Watch. Here is Mormont, who has respect and even deference for Craster.
“You think I ought to stop him. Kill him if need be.” The Old Bear sighed. “Were it only that he wished to rid himself of some mouths, I’d gladly send Yoren or Conwys to collect the boys. We could raise them to the black and the Watch would be that much the stronger. But the wildlings serve crueler gods than you or I. These boys are Craster’s offerings. His prayers, if you will.”
(Jon III, ACoK)
Craster seems well respected by the rangers.
Thoren Smallwood swore that Craster was a friend to the Watch, despite his unsavory reputation. “The man’s half-mad, I won’t deny it,” he’d told the Old Bear, “but you’d be the same if you’d spent your life in this cursed wood. Even so, he’s never turned a ranger away from his fire, nor does he love Mance Rayder. He’ll give us good counsel.”
(Jon III, ACoK)
In the first chapter of the book we read.
Theon Greyjoy said, “There’s not been a direwolf sighted south of the Wall in two hundred years.”
(Bran I, AGoT)

Alysanne's reform happened at about the same time than the disappearance of direwolves south of the Wall. In the crypts, all statues of the Lords and Kings of Winterfell were represented in company of direwolves. We can guess that direwolves stopped coming to the Lords of Winterfell as a mark of a loss of support from some force beyond the Wall. Two hundred years is also Leaf's age. What did Leaf do south of the Wall during those years?

No castle on the Wall has a godswood, especially not a weirwood. Indeed the brothers who follow the old gods need to go beyond the Wall to say theirs vows. Considering that all castles in Westeros have a godswood, and most places in the north have a weirwood as heart tree, how is it that the old gods are absent from the Wall? There is a sept at Castle Black. I guess that the magic of the Wall prevents weirwoods to grow near the castles… except in the kitchen of the Nightfort. As if the kitchen were a sanctuary. That would make sense since the well in the kitchen leads to a weirwood door, obviously the magic of the Wall does not quite apply in this special passage.

In Winterfell, Ramsay brings up the first night for no apparent reason.
“Does she make your cock hard, Reek? Is it straining against your laces? Would you like to fuck her first?” He laughed. “The Prince of Winterfell should have that right, as all lords did in days of old. The first night. But you’re no lord, are you? Only Reek. Not even a man, truth be told.”
(The Prince of Winterfell, ADwD)

It seems that Ramsay, the bastard born of the first night, wants to savour his revenge over the trueborns.



10. The Crypts and Jon's dreams

There seems to be no runes in the upper level of the crypts, the only one we ever saw.

The entrance to the crypts is in the oldest part of the castle at the foot of the First Keep, now a ruin. The lords of Winterfell are buried in the crypts, whether they were Kings in the North or mere lords. It seems that the direwolves were buried with them, but not their family. But no direwolf has been seen south of the Wall for two hundred years. It's a mystery why Brandon and Lyanna were buried along their father under the crypts. It's a decision of Ned Stark. As Bran reflects.
 “And there’s my grandfather, Lord Rickard, who was beheaded by Mad King Aerys. His daughter Lyanna and his son Brandon are in the tombs beside him. Not me, another Brandon, my father’s brother.
They’re not supposed to have statues, that’s only for the lords and the kings, but my father loved them so much he had them done.”

(Bran VII, AGoT)

It's unlikely that Ned Stark had a deep reason to bury Lyanna and Brandon with their father. Indeed, he is not even aware of why the statues are to be given iron swords, as we will see.

We first saw the crypts at King Robert's initiative.
“Your Grace,” Ned said respectfully. He swept the lantern in a wide semicircle. Shadows moved and lurched. Flickering light touched the stones underfoot and brushed against a long
procession of granite pillars that marched ahead, two by two, into the dark. Between the pillars, the dead sat on their stone thrones against the walls, backs against the sepulchres that contained their mortal remains. “She is down at the end, with Father and Brandon.”
He led the way between the pillars and Robert followed wordlessly, shivering in the subterranean chill. It was always cold down here. Their footsteps rang off the stones and echoed in the vault overhead as they walked among the dead of House Stark. The Lords of Winterfell watched them pass. Their likenesses were carved into the stones that sealed the tombs. In long rows they sat, blind eyes staring out into eternal darkness, while great stone direwolves curled round their feet. The shifting shadows made the stone figures seem to stir as the living passed by. By ancient custom an iron longsword had been laid across the lap of each who had been Lord of Winterfell, to keep the vengeful spirits in their crypts. The oldest had long ago rusted away to nothing, leaving only a few red stains where the metal had rested on stone. Ned wondered if that meant those ghosts were free to roam the castle now. He hoped not. The first Lords of Winterfell had been men hard as the land they ruled. In the centuries before the Dragonlords came over the sea, they had sworn allegiance to no man, styling themselves the Kings in the North.
(Eddard I, AGoT)
For a moment Eddard Stark was filled with a terrible sense of foreboding. This was his place, here in the north. He looked at the stone figures all around them, breathed deep in the chill silence of the crypt. He could feel the eyes of the dead. They were all listening, he knew. And winter was coming.
(Eddard I, AGoT)

Robert and Ned had a long conversation in the crypts. Here is the most salient moment.

“Lord Eddard Stark, I would name you the Hand of the King.”
Ned dropped to one knee.
(Eddard I, AGoT)
Compare with Lady Dustin's contempt at the sight of Torrhen Stark's sepulcher.
“Once ... but that was a long time ago.” Theon pointed. “The ones on this side were Kings in the North. Torrhen was the last.”
“The King Who Knelt.”
(The Turncloak, ADwD)

The scenes strikingly echo each other. At least, King Torrhen bent the knee south of the Neck, but Lord Eddard is in the emblematic Stark place, as he is aware that all the Stark dynasty is watching.

Later Rickon takes refuge in the crypt.

His baby brother had been wild as a winter storm since he learned Robb was riding off to war, weeping and angry by turns. He’d refused to eat, cried and screamed for most of a night, even punched Old Nan when she tried to sing him to sleep, and the next day he’d vanished. Robb had set half the castle searching for him, and when at last they’d found him down in the crypts, Rickon had slashed at them with a rusted iron sword he’d snatched from a dead king’s hand, and Shaggydog had come slavering out of the darkness like a green-eyed demon.

(Bran VI, AGoT)

At Ned Stark's death, both Rickon and Bran dream of their father in his tomb. Hodor refuses to go in the crypts.

He wished they were here now; the vault might not have seemed so dark and scary. Summer stalked out in the echoing gloom, then stopped, lifted his head, and sniffed the chill dead air. He bared his teeth and crept backward, eyes glowing golden in the light of the maester’s torch. Even Osha, hard as old iron, seemed uncomfortable. “Grim folk, by the look of them,” she said as she eyed the long row of granite Starks on their stone thrones.
“They were the Kings of Winter,” Bran whispered. Somehow it felt wrong to talk too loudly in this place.
Osha smiled. “Winter’s got no king. If you’d seen it, you’d know that, summer boy.”
“They were the Kings in the North for thousands of years,” Maester Luwin said, lifting the torch high so the light shone on the stone faces. Some were hairy and bearded, shaggy men fierce as the wolves that crouched by their feet. Others were shaved clean, their features gaunt and sharp-edged as the iron longswords across their laps. “Hard men for a hard time. Come.” He strode briskly down the vault, past the procession of stone pillars and the endless carved figures. A tongue of flame trailed back from the upraised torch as he went.
The vault was cavernous, longer than Winterfell itself, and Jon had told him once that there were other levels underneath, vaults even deeper and darker where the older kings were buried. It would not do to lose the light. Summer refused to move from the steps, even when Osha followed the torch, Bran in her arms.
“Do you recall your history, Bran?” the maester said as they walked. “Tell Osha who they were and what they did, if you can.”
He looked at the passing faces and the tales came back to him. The maester had told him the stories, and Old Nan had made them come alive. “That one is Jon Stark. When the sea raiders landed in the east, he drove them out and built the castle at White Harbor. His son was Rickard Stark, not my father’s father but another Rickard, he took the Neck away from the Marsh King and married his daughter. Theon Stark’s the real thin one with the long hair and the skinny beard. They called him the ‘Hungry Wolf,’ because he was always at war. That’s a Brandon, the tall one with the dreamy face, he was Brandon the Shipwright, because he loved the sea. His tomb is empty. He tried to sail west across the Sunset Sea and was never seen again. His son was Brandon the Burner, because he put the torch to all his father’s ships in grief. There’s Rodrik Stark, who won Bear Island in a wrestling match and gave it to the Mormonts. And that’s Torrhen Stark, the King Who Knelt. He was the last King in the North and the first Lord of Winterfell, after he yielded to Aegon the Conqueror. Oh, there, he’s Cregan Stark. He fought with Prince Aemon once, and the Dragonknight said he’d never faced a finer swordsman.” They were almost at the end now, and Bran felt a sadness creeping over him. “And there’s my grandfather, Lord Rickard, who was beheaded by Mad King Aerys. His daughter Lyanna and his son Brandon are in the tombs beside him. Not me, another Brandon, my father’s brother.
They’re not supposed to have statues, that’s only for the lords and the kings, but my father loved them so much he had them done.”
“The maid’s a fair one,” Osha said.
“Robert was betrothed to marry her, but Prince Rhaegar carried her off and raped her,” Bran explained. “Robert fought a war to win her back. He killed Rhaegar on the Trident with his hammer, but Lyanna died and he never got her back at all.”
“A sad tale,” said Osha, “but those empty holes are sadder.”
“Lord Eddard’s tomb, for when his time comes,” Maester Luwin said. “Is this where you saw your father in your dream, Bran?”
“Yes.” The memory made him shiver. He looked around the vault uneasily, the hairs on the back of his neck bristling. Had he heard a noise? Was there someone here?
Maester Luwin stepped toward the open sepulchre, torch in hand. “As you see, he’s not here. Nor will he be, for many a year. Dreams are only dreams, child.” He thrust his arm into the blackness inside the tomb, as into the mouth of some great beast. “Do you see? It’s quite empt-”
The darkness sprang at him, snarling.
Bran saw eyes like green fire, a flash of teeth, fur as black as the pit around them. Maester Luwin yelled and threw up his hands. The torch went flying from his fingers, caromed off the stone face of Brandon Stark, and tumbled to the statue’s feet, the flames licking up his legs. In the drunken shifting torchlight, they saw Luwin struggling with the direwolf, beating at his muzzle with one hand while the jaws closed on the other.
“Summer!” Bran screamed.

(Bran VII, AGoT)

Rickon showed the crypts to the Walders.

With Rickon by their side, the Walders plundered the kitchens for pies and honeycombs, raced round the walls, tossed bones to the pups in the kennels, and trained with wooden swords under Ser Rodrik’s sharp eye. Rickon even showed them the deep vaults under the earth where the stonemason was carving father’s tomb. “You had no right!” Bran screamed at his brother when he heard. “That was our place, a Stark place!” But Rickon never cared.

(Bran I, ACoK)

The next visit is when Bran, Rickon and their friends hide from the ironmen. Here is what they see when a torch is lit.

When the shadows moved, it looked for an instant as if the dead were rising as well. Lyanna and Brandon, Lord Rickard Stark their father, Lord Edwyle his father, Lord Willam and his brother Artos the Implacable, Lord Donnor and Lord Beron and Lord Rodwell, one-eyed Lord jonnel, Lord Barth and Lord Brandon and Lord Cregan who had fought the Dragonknight. On their stone chairs they sat with stone wolves at their feet. This was where they came when the warmth had seeped out of their bodies; this was the dark hall of the dead, where the living feared to tread.

(Bran VII, ACoK)

We have already seen Theon's nightmares while he was Prince of Winterfell. Here is Ned's dream, while in the Red Keep.
He was walking through the crypts beneath Winterfell, as he had walked a thousand times before. The Kings of Winter watched him pass with eyes of ice, and the direwolves at their feet turned their great stone heads and snarled. Last of all, he came to the tomb where his father slept, with Brandon and Lyanna beside him. “Promise me, Ned, “ Lyanna’s statue whispered. She wore a garland of pale blue roses, and her eyes wept blood.
(Eddard XIII, AGoT)
Jon Snow had recurrent dreams of the crypts. Here is one he confided to Sam.
“Sometimes I dream about it,” he said. “I’m walking down this long empty hall. My voice echoes all around, but no one answers, so I walk faster, opening doors, shouting names. I don’t even know who I’m looking for. Most nights it’s my father, but sometimes it’s Robb instead, or my little sister Arya, or my uncle.” The thought of Benjen Stark saddened him; his uncle was still missing. The Old Bear had sent out rangers in search of him. Ser Jaremy Rykker had led two sweeps, and Quorin Halfhand had gone forth from the Shadow Tower, but they’d found nothing aside from a few blazes in the trees that his uncle had left to mark his way. In the stony highlands to the northwest, the marks stopped abruptly and all trace of Ben Stark vanished.
“Do you ever find anyone in your dream?” Sam asked.
Jon shook his head. “No one. The castle is always empty.” He had never told anyone of the dream, and he did not understand why he was telling Sam now, yet somehow it felt good to talk of it. “Even the ravens are gone from the rookery, and the stables are full of bones. That always scares me. I start to run then, throwing open doors, climbing the tower three steps at a time, screaming for someone, for anyone. And then I find myself in front of the door to the crypts. It’s black inside, and I can see the steps spiraling down. Somehow I know I have to go down there, but I don’t want to. I’m afraid of what might be waiting for me. The old Kings of Winter are down there, sitting on their thrones with stone wolves at their feet and iron swords across their laps, but it’s not them I’m afraid of. I scream that I’m not a Stark, that this isn’t my place, but it’s no good, I have to go anyway, so I start down, feeling the walls as I descend, with no torch to light the way. It gets darker and darker, until I want to scream.” He stopped, frowning, embarrassed. “That’s when I always wake.”
(Jon IV, AGoT)
A second dream is mentioned.
Last night he had dreamt the Winterfell dream again. He was wandering the empty castle, searching for his father, descending into the crypts. Only this time the dream had gone further than before. In the dark he’d heard the scrape of stone on stone. When he turned he saw that the vaults were opening, one after the other. As the dead kings came stumbling from their cold black graves, Jon had woken in pitchdark, his heart hammering. Even when Ghost leapt up on the bed to nuzzle at his face, he could not shake his deep sense of terror. He dared not go back to sleep. Instead he had climbed the Wall and walked, restless, until he saw the light of the dawn off to the cast. It was only a dream. I am a brother of the Night’s Watch now, not a frightened boy.
(Jon VII, AGoT)

Jon Snow appeared to have no crypt dream while he was beyond the Wall. We can conjecture that the connection was cut off, just like Jon was cut off from Ghost when they were on separate sides of the Wall. The dreams seem to return when Jon is south of the Wall.

He dreamt he was back in Winterfell, limping past the stone kings on their thrones. Their grey granite eyes turned to follow him as he passed, and their grey granite fingers tightened on the hilts of the rusted swords upon their laps. You are no Stark, he could hear them mutter, in heavy granite voices. There is no place for you here. Go away. He walked deeper into the darkness. “Father?” he called. “Bran? Rickon?” No one answered. A chill wind was blowing on his neck. “Uncle?” he called. “Uncle Benjen? Father? Please, Father, help me.” Up above he heard drums. They are feasting in the Great Hall, but I am not welcome there. I am no Stark, and this is not my place. His crutch slipped and he fell to his knees. The crypts were growing darker. A light has gone out somewhere. “Ygritte?” he whispered. “Forgive me. Please.” But it was only a direwolf, grey and ghastly, spotted with blood, his golden eyes shining sadly through the dark...
The cell was dark, the bed hard beneath him. His own bed, he remembered, his own bed in his steward’s cell beneath the Old Bear’s chambers. By rights it should have brought him sweeter dreams. Even beneath the furs, he was cold. Ghost had shared his cell before the ranging, warming it against the chill of night. And in the wild, Ygritte had slept beside him. Both gone now. He had burned Ygritte himself, as he knew she would have wanted, and Ghost... Where are you? Was he dead as well, was that what his dream had meant, the bloody wolf in the crypts? But the wolf in the dream had been grey, not white. Grey, like Bran’s wolf. Had the Thenns hunted him down and killed him after Queenscrown? If so, Bran was lost to him for good and all. Jon was trying to make sense of that when the horn blew.

(Jon VIII, ASoS)

As we discussed already, the wolf seems to be Lady.

“I don’t even dream of Ghost anymore. All my dreams are of the crypts, of the stone kings on their thrones. Sometimes I hear Robb’s voice, and my father’s, as if they were at a feast. But there’s a wall between us, and I know that no place has been set for me.”

(Samwell IV, ASoS)

The previous dream of Jon Snow did not seem to involve the dead kings, or the crypts. But, considering all dreams of Jon Snow involved Ghost or the crypts.

A cup of dreamwine did help, as it happened. No sooner had he stretched out on the narrow bed
in his cell than sleep took him. His dreams were strange and formless, full of strange voices, shouts and cries, and the sound of a warhorn, blowing low and loud, a single deep booming note that lingered in the air.

(Jon IX, ASoS)

We keep in mind that this last dream might be about the crypts.


11. The Stark Dynasty and the missing Swords


The role of the swords in the crypts in underlined by Ned Stark.

By ancient custom an iron longsword had been laid across the lap of each who had been Lord of Winterfell, to keep the vengeful spirits in their crypts. The oldest had long ago rusted away to nothing, leaving only a few red stains where the metal had rested on stone. Ned wondered if that meant those ghosts were free to roam the castle now. He hoped not.

(Eddard I, AGoT)

Even Ned Stark doesn't know the reason for the ancient custom. When Theon and Barbrey descend into the crypts, they notice missing swords.

“That king is missing his sword,” Lady Dustin observed.
It was true. Theon did not recall which king it was, but the longsword he should have held was gone. Streaks of rust remained to show where it had been. The sight disquieted him. He had always heard that the iron in the sword kept the spirits of the dead locked within their tombs. If a sword was missing ...

(The Turncloak, ADwD)

Theon would think several times about the swords. First when he wanders in the castle.

He was trapped here, with the ghosts. The old ghosts from the crypts and the younger ones that he had made himself, Mikken and Farlen, Gynir Rednose, Aggar, Gelmarr the Grim, the miller’s wife from Acorn Water and her two young sons, and all the rest. My work. My ghosts. They are all here, and they are angry. He thought of the crypts and those missing swords.

(A Ghost in Winterfell, ADwD)

Then when he is summoned to Roose's solar.

He wondered if Lady Dustin had told them about the crypts, the missing swords.

(A Ghost in Winterfell, ADwD)

Later, Theon would warn Asha about the ghosts.

He told her how he bedded down with Ramsay's bitches, warned her that Winterfell was full of ghosts. "The swords were gone. Four, I think, or five. I don't recall. The stone kings are angry."

(Theon, TWoW)

It's not clear how seriously Theon's superstition is to be taken. But the collective anger of the dead Starks (The stone kings are angry) is mentioned, not just the anger of the particular kings and lords who have lost their personal swords.

Let's return to the disappearance of the swords.

Rickon is found in the crypt playing with a sword.

His baby brother had been wild as a winter storm since he learned Robb was riding off to war, weeping and angry by turns. He’d refused to eat, cried and screamed for most of a night, even punched Old Nan when she tried to sing him to sleep, and the next day he’d vanished. Robb had set half the castle searching for him, and when at last they’d found him down in the crypts, Rickon had slashed at them with a rusted iron sword he’d snatched from a dead king’s hand, and Shaggydog had come slavering out of the darkness like a green-eyed demon.

(Bran VI, AGoT)

After Rickon, Bran and co left the crypt, they took swords from the tombs.

Osha carried her long oaken spear in one hand and the torch in the other. A naked sword hung down her back, one of the last to bear Mikken’s mark. He had forged it for Lord Eddard’s tomb, to keep his ghost at rest. But with Mikken slain and the ironmen guarding the armory, good steel had been hard to resist, even if it meant grave-robbing. Meera had claimed Lord Rickard’s blade, though she complained that it was too heavy. Brandon took his namesake’s, the sword made for the uncle he had never known. He knew he would not be much use in a fight, but even so the blade felt good in his hand.

(Bran VII, ACoK)

It would appear later that another sword has been taken.

The stableboy had forgotten about his sword, but now he remembered. “Hodor!” he burped. He went for his blade. They had three tomb swords taken from the crypts of Winterfell where Bran and his brother Rickon had hidden from Theon Greyjoy’s ironmen. Bran claimed his uncle Brandon’s sword, Meera the one she found upon the knees of his grandfather Lord Rickard. Hodor’s blade was much older, a huge heavy piece of iron, dull from centuries of neglect and well spotted with rust. He could swing it for hours at a time. There was a rotted tree near the tumbled stones that he had hacked half to pieces.

(Bran I, ASoS)

The sword is again mentioned beyond the Wall.

One gloved hand still clutched the rusty iron longsword he had taken from the crypts below Winterfell, and from time to time he would lash out at a branch, knocking loose a spray of snow. “Hod-d-d-dor,” he would mutter, his teeth chattering.

(Bran I, ADwD)

Let's accept the notion that the sword prevents the ghost from wandering. We have a theory about non corporeal life after death.
“Once, at the Citadel, I came into an empty room and saw an empty chair. Yet I knew a woman had been there, only a moment before. The cushion was dented where she’d sat, the cloth was still warm, and her scent lingered in the air. If we leave our smells behind us when we leave a room, surely something of our souls must remain when we leave this life?” Qyburn spread his hands. “The archmaesters did not like my thinking, though. Well, Marwyn did, but he was the only one.”
(Jaime VI, ASoS)
We are given no idea of what a ghost could accomplish, except perhaps in the Nightfort tales, and in Harrenhal.

Let's try to determine which king has lost his sword. We have a first sample of the occupants of the tombs.
He looked at the passing faces and the tales came back to him. The maester had told him the stories, and Old Nan had made them come alive. “That one is Jon Stark. When the sea raiders landed in the east, he drove them out and built the castle at White Harbor. His son was Rickard Stark, not my father’s father but another Rickard, he took the Neck away from the Marsh King and married his daughter. Theon Stark’s the real thin one with the long hair and the skinny beard. They called him the ‘Hungry Wolf,’ because he was always at war. That’s a Brandon, the tall one with the dreamy face, he was Brandon the Shipwright, because he loved the sea. His tomb is empty. He tried to sail west across the Sunset Sea and was never seen again. His son was Brandon the Burner, because he put the torch to all his father’s ships in grief. There’s Rodrik Stark, who won Bear Island in a wrestling match and gave it to the Mormonts. And that’s Torrhen Stark, the King Who Knelt. He was the last King in the North and the first Lord of Winterfell, after he yielded to Aegon the Conqueror. Oh, there, he’s Cregan Stark. He fought with Prince Aemon once, and the Dragonknight said he’d never faced a finer swordsman.” They were almost at the end now, and Bran felt a sadness creeping over him. “And there’s my grandfather, Lord Rickard, who was beheaded by Mad King Aerys. His daughter Lyanna and his son Brandon are in the tombs beside him. Not me, another Brandon, my father’s brother.
(Bran VII, AGoT)

The order might be chronological: Jon, Rickard, Theon, Brandon the Shipwright, Brandon the Burner, Rodrik, Torrhen.

A second sample of kings came when Bran and co have taken refuge in the crypts as they leave.
The shadows behind them swallowed his father as the shadows ahead retreated to unveil other statues; no mere lords, these, but the old Kings in the North. On their brows they wore stone crowns. Torrhen Stark, the King Who Knelt. Edwyn the Spring King. Theon Stark, the Hungry Wolf. Brandon the Burner and Brandon the Shipwright. Jorah and Jonos, Brandon the Bad, Walton the Moon King, Edderion the Bridegroom, Eyron, Benjen the Sweet and Benjen the Bitter, King Edrick Snowbeard. Their faces were stern and strong, and some of them had done terrible things, but they were Starks every one, and Bran knew all their tales. He had never feared the crypts; they were part of his home and who he was, and he had always known that one day he would lie here too.
(Bran VII, ACoK)

That does not confirm the previous order, not even in reverse form: Theon is after Brandon the Shipwright (chronologically) not before as it was in the first visit.

One could think of this list as an unbroken enumeration of seventeen Kings in the North in reverse order from Torrhen to Edrick. But, what we know about Edrick would put him far in the past. Indeed, Edrick reigned for a hundred years, before the Wolf's Den was given to the Manderlys, which happened nine hundred years ago. At least seven hundred years elapsed between the the beginning of Edrick's reign and the Conquest, three hundred years ago. There must have been more than seventeen Kings in the North in more than seven hundred years. Unless, like Edrick Snowbeard, the kings of old had very long reigns. Did they linger long on this earth?

However, Edrick Snowbeard is not the most ancient King of the upper level. Indeed, there is Jon Stark who founded White Harbor. The foundation of White Harbor goes back thousands of years.
Ser Bartimus had no interest in the world outside, or indeed anything that had happened since he lost his leg to a riderless horse and a maester’s saw. He had come to love the Wolf’s Den, however, and liked nothing more than to talk about its long and bloody history. The Den was much older than White Harbor, the knight told Davos. It had been raised by King Jon Stark to defend the mouth of the White Knife against raiders from the sea. Many a younger son of the King in the North had made his seat there, many a brother, many an uncle, many a cousin. Some passed the castle to their own sons and grandsons, and offshoot branches of House Stark had arisen; the Greystarks had lasted the longest, holding the Wolf’s Den for five centuries, until they presumed to join the Dreadfort in rebellion against the Starks of Winterfell.
After their fall, the castle had passed through many other hands. House Flint held it for a century, House Locke for almost two. Slates, Longs, Holts, and Ashwoods had held sway here, charged by Winterfell to keep the river safe. Reavers from the Three Sisters took the castle once, making it their toehold in the north. During the wars between Winterfell and the Vale, it was besieged by Osgood Arryn, the Old Falcon, and burned by his son, the one remembered as the Talon. When old King Edrick Stark had grown too feeble to defend his realm, the Wolf’s Den was captured by slavers from the Stepstones. They would brand their captives with hot irons and break them to the whip before shipping them off across the sea, and these same black stone walls bore witness.
(Davos IV, ADwD)

So the Wolf's Den has been given to the Manderlys nine hundred years ago. It has been held for at least eight centuries before that (by the Greystarks, Flints, Lockes), an for much more probably (by the Slates, Longs, Holts, Ashwoods, Starks), before the Wolf's Den has been founded by Jon Stark.

So Jon Stark lived at least two thousands years ago, if the history is reliable. King Edrick Snowbeard came after the rule of all the houses mentioned above, except the Manderlys. So at least one thousand years elapsed between Jon and Edrick. But none of the kings from that period seems mentioned.

And we see also certain lords.
When the shadows moved, it looked for an instant as if the dead were rising as well. Lyanna and Brandon, Lord Rickard Stark their father, Lord Edwyle his father, Lord Willam and his brother Artos the Implacable, Lord Donnor and Lord Beron and Lord Rodwell, one-eyed Lord jonnel, Lord Barth and Lord Brandon and Lord Cregan who had fought the Dragonknight. On their stone chairs they sat with stone wolves at their feet. This was where they came when the warmth had seeped out of their bodies; this was the dark hall of the dead, where the living feared to tread.
(Bran VII, ACoK)

The list of lords in the north seems straightforward. It is in reverse chronological order, and commas separate siblings. Lord Cregan fought the Dragonknight, Aemon Targaryen, brother to Aegon the Unworthy who dies 184 years after the Conquest. So the list of lords stops much short of the last King in the North, Torrhen. In the story of Bael the Bard, there is a Lord Brandon, which have ruled in the meantime.

During the visit of Barbrey and Theon, we have yet another glimpse.
Their footsteps echoed through the vault as they made their way between the rows of pillars. The stone eyes of the dead men seemed to follow them, and the eyes of their stone direwolves as well. The faces stirred faint memories. A few names came back to him, unbidden, whispered in the ghostly voice of Maester Luwin. King Edrick Snowbeard, who had ruled the north for a hundred years. Brandon the Shipwright, who had sailed beyond the sunset. Theon Stark, the Hungry Wolf. My namesake. Lord Beron Stark, who made common cause with Casterly Rock to war against Dagon Greyjoy, Lord of Pyke, in the days when the Seven Kingdoms were ruled in all but name by the bastard sorcerer men called Bloodraven.
“That king is missing his sword,” Lady Dustin observed.
(The Turncloak, ADwD)

Theon's order (Edrick, Brandon the Shipwright, Theon, Beron) could be chronological and is compatible with Bran's first list, but not with the second. (They would all be compatible if Bran had put Theon before Brandon the Shipwright the second time.)

Of course, neither Bran nor Theon claims to list the kings in order. So this speculation might be groundless. But one has the feeling that the lists are at least roughly in order.

King Edrick Snowbeard is the last king seen by Bran and the first mentioned by Theon, which suggests that he is near the entrance.

Since Theon does not recall the name of the king who lost his sword, the king missing his sword can not be any of those he named in the crypts. Hence it's not Edrick Snowbeard, not Brandon the Shipwright (whose tomb is empty, in any case), probably not Brandon the Burner, who is closely associated to the Shipwright, not Theon Stark, not Torrhen Stark.

Edwyn the Spring King, Jonah, Jonos, Brandon the Bad, Walton the Moon King, Edderion the Bridegroom, Eyron, Benjen the Sweet, Benjen the Bitter, Jon (who founded White Harbor), Rickard (who took the Neck from the Marsh King) and Rodrik (who gave Bear Island to the Mormonts, perhaps also the Wandering Wolf) remain as possible candidate. We know too little of them to make a guess.

However, the sword taken by Hodor is dumb and rusted but still functional. And we know that the swords in the older tombs have rusted to nothing. I suppose we have to look among the later kings.

We heard of other Stark kings: Dorren (an archaic form of Thorren?), Jon (who founded the Wolf's Den), Rickard (who defeated the Marsh King), Brandon (the vengeful one known as Ice Eyes). But they seem to have lived a thousand years ago or more. King Harlon (who besieged the Dreadfort) live a few centuries ago and might fit.

Is there a ghost in Winterfell? What could a ghost do? The stories of the Nightfort mention several ghosts that wander in the castle at night: Mad Axe etc.


12. The Shadow out of Time

So far, among all the kings mentioned in the upper level of the crypts, the oldest seems to be Jon Stark, founder of the Wolf's Den. Thousands of years have passed since then.

The histories of Westeros we have are hardly trustworthy. However, the Wall is said to be eight thousand years old, and Jon Snow is supposed to be the nine hundred and ninety-eighth Commander of the Night's Watch. If the story of Night's King is accurate, there was a Stark in Winterfell in the time of the thirteenth commander.

This Stark lord, perhaps a king of Winter, is under all likehood buried in the deeper levels of the crypts. What about his brother, Night's King himself?

Old Nan tells the story of Night's King.

“Some say he was a Bolton,” Old Nan would always end. “Some say a Magnar out of Skagos, some say Umber, Flint, or Norrey. Some would have you think he was a Woodfoot, from them who ruled Bear island before the ironmen came. He never was. He was a Stark, the brother of the man who brought him down.” She always pinched Bran on the nose then, he would never forget it. “He was a Stark of Winterfell, and who can say? Mayhaps his name was Brandon. Mayhaps he slept in this very bed in this very room.”

(Bran IV, ASoS)

Old Nan is not always consistent in her storytelling, even about the events she witnessed. She is not even sure for which Brandon Stark she came as a wetnurse for in Winterfell. The origin of Night's King is controversial, but Old Nan is certain he was a Stark. Why? The proof might simply be that Night's King is buried deep under Winterfell with all the stone kings. Bran has probably never been so deep, but Old Nan might have at some point of her long life. Perhaps she has simply been told so by a previous lord of Winterfell before so many things were forgotten. Didn't Dalla say:

We free folk know things you kneelers have forgotten.

(Jon X, ASoS)

Indeed, Old Nan insists that all records of Night's King have been destroyed. So it is not clear how she would have known. It is clear why Old Nan did not tell Bran that Night's King is buried in the crypts. Bran is already terrified by the idea that he might have lived in Winterfell.

Sam has found a list of commanders made of more than six hundred names. The Andals came to Westeros two thousand years ago or four thousand years ago depending on the source.

Jon Stark built White Harbor to protect the north from raiders from the sea, at least two thousand years ago. It's possible that the raiders were the Andals, who once landed in the Vale. A long enmity ensued between the Vale and the north, as Lord Godric told us.

The maesters say the Rape of the Three Sisters was two thousand years ago, but Sisterton has not forgotten. We were a free people before that, with our kings ruling over us. Afterward, we had to bend our knees to the Eyrie to get the northmen out. The wolf and the falcon fought over us for a thousand years, till between the two of them they had gnawed all the fat and flesh off the bones of these poor islands.

(Davos I, ADwD)

Whatever the truth. Jon Stark's reign might have coincided with the arrival of the Andals, who were the first to work iron in Westeros. I suppose that the First Men adopted the techniques of the Andal smiths.

The kings before the Andals probably did not have iron swords to ward their tombs. It's perhaps useful to remember a tomb of the First Men we saw via Catelyn Stark in Oldstones.
They reached Oldstones after eight more days of steady rain, and made their camp upon the hill overlooking the Blue Fork, within a ruined stronghold of the ancient river kings. Its foundations remained amongst the weeds to show where the walls and keeps had stood, but the local smallfolk had long ago made off with most of the stones to raise their barns and septs and holdfasts. Yet in the center of what once would have been the castle’s yard, a great carved sepulcher still rested, half hidden in waist-high brown grass amongst a stand of ash.
The lid of the sepulcher had been carved into a likeness of the man whose bones lay beneath, but the rain and the wind had done their work. The king had worn a beard, they could see, but otherwise his face was smooth and featureless, with only vague suggestions of a mouth, a nose, eyes, and the crown about the temples. His hands folded over the shaft of a stone warhammer that lay upon his chest. Once the warhammer would have been carved with runes that told its name and history, but all that the centuries had worn away. The stone itself was cracked and crumbling at the comers, discolored here and there by spreading white splotches of lichen, while wild roses crept up over the king’s feet almost to his chest.
(Catelyn V, ASoS)

Most interesting is the suggestion: Once the warhammer would have been carved with runes that told its name and history, but all that the centuries had worn away. I wonder whether Catelyn knows this because she has seen certain of the tombs under Winterfell, implying thus that certain of the tombs in the crypts bear runic inscriptions. She seems to imply that some people, maesters perhaps, know how to read runes. Otherwise how could she know what the inscriptions are about?

In any case, the warhammer is of stone. So we shall not expect iron swords in the lower levels. That raises the question of what plays the role of the swords down there. Runes? We have one instance of seemingly magical runes on the horn burnt by Melisandre at the Wall. Perhaps the graves should be compared to the graves Mance searched in the Frostfangs.



13. The Pool and the hot Springs

The godswood in Winterfell contains element that appears non standard. First there is the deep Pool, whose water is often described as black, suggesting mysterious depths. Indeed, Osha tries unsuccessfully to swim to the bottom.
Hodor knew Bran’s favorite place, so he took him to the edge of the pool beneath the great spread of the heart tree, where Lord Eddard used to kneel to pray. Ripples were running across the surface of the water when they arrived, making the reflection of the weirwood shimmer and dance. There was no wind, though. For an instant Bran was baffled.
And then Osha exploded up out of the pool with a great splash, so sudden that even Summer leapt back, snarling. Hodor jumped away, wailing “Hodor, Hodor” in dismay until Bran patted his shoulder to soothe his fears. “How can you swim in there?” he asked Osha. “Isn’t it cold?”
“As a babe I suckled on icicles, boy. I like the cold.” Osha swam to the rocks and rose dripping. She was naked, her skin bumpy with gooseprickles. Summer crept close and sniffed at her. “I wanted to touch the bottom.”
“I never knew there was a bottom.”
“Might be there isn’t.”
(Bran II, ACoK)
Note the coldness of the water, and it's early autumn.

Bran sees a scene at the pool as well.
Now two children danced across the godswood, hooting at one another as they dueled with broken branches. The girl was the older and taller of the two. Arya! Bran thought eagerly, as he watched her leap up onto a rock and cut at the boy. But that couldn’t be right. If the girl was Arya, the boy was Bran himself, and he had never worn his hair so long. And Arya never beat me playing swords, the way that girl is beating him. She slashed the boy across his thigh, so hard that his leg went out from under him and he fell into the pool and began to splash and shout. “You be quiet, stupid,” the girl said, tossing her own branch aside. “It’s just water. Do you want Old Nan to hear and run tell Father?” She knelt and pulled her brother from the pool, but before she got him out again, the two of them were gone.
(Bran III, ADwD)

The scene involves certainly Lyanna and Benjen, almost certainly not many years before the Harrenhal tourney, when Lyanna was fourteen, the year of the false spring. So it was still the cold season, winter or autumn. It's probably the reason why Benjen was so dismayed. But for Lyanna it's only water: she doesn't seem adverse to cold.

The "bottomless" pool reminds me of the black water in the river underground at Brynden's cave.
“The river you hear is swift and black, and flows down and down to a sunless sea. And there are passages that go even deeper, bottomless pits and sudden shafts, forgotten ways that lead to the very center of the earth. Even my people have not explored them all, and we have lived here for a thousand thousand of your man-years.”
(Bran III, ADwD)

It made me think of the river that flows from the Isle of Faces: the Blackwater Rush. It's as if the power of the weirwood made the water black. The cold water of the pool is complemented by the hot springs, that flow nearby and heat the castle.
Of all the rooms in Winterfell’s Great Keep, Catelyn’s bedchambers were the hottest. She seldom had to light a fire. The castle had been built over natural hot springs, and the scalding waters rushed through its walls and chambers like blood through a man’s body, driving the chill from the stone halls, filling the glass gardens with a moist warmth, keeping the earth from freezing. Open pools smoked day and night in a dozen small courtyards. That was a little thing, in summer; in winter, it was the difference between life and death.
(Catelyn II, ADwD)

The hot springs do not seem to flow near the heart tree, and do not seem to flow into the godswool pool. There are no other signs of geothermal activity that I am aware of in Westeros, except perhaps in Dragonstone.


14. The Weirwood Face

The godswood of Winterfell is described by Theon in every chapter in Winterfell.

Let's look at the face on the heart tree. Those faces are expressive. But the understanding of their expression is subjective. 

We first see it through the eyes of Catelyn Stark.
A face had been carved in the trunk of the great tree, its features long and melancholy, the deep-cut eyes red with dried sap and strangely watchful. They were old, those eyes; older than Winterfell itself.
(Catelyn I, AGoT)

During the wedding, Theon perceives something very different.

The weirwood’s carved red eyes stared down at them, its great red mouth open as if to laugh.

(The Prince of Winterfell, ADwD)

Then the face becomes more solemn.

The heart tree stood before him, a pale giant with a carved face and leaves like bloody hands.

(The Turncloak, ADwD)

Later the heart tree would take a much more personal appearance.

And in the heart of the wood the weirwood waited with its knowing red eyes. Theon stopped by the edge of the pool and bowed his head before its carved red face. Even here he could hear the drumming, boom DOOM boom DOOM boom DOOM boom DOOM. Like distant thunder, the sound seemed to come from everywhere at once.
The night was windless, the snow drifting straight down out of a cold black sky, yet the leaves of the heart tree were rustling his name. “Theon,” they seemed to whisper, “Theon.”

(A Ghost in Winterfell, ADwD)

And a moment later.

A leaf drifted down from above, brushed his brow, and landed in the pool. It floated on the water, red, five-fingered, like a bloody hand. “... Bran,” the tree murmured.
They know. The gods know. They saw what I did. And for one strange moment it seemed as if it were Bran’s face carved into the pale trunk of the weirwood, staring down at him with eyes red and wise and sad. Bran’s ghost, he thought, but that was madness. Why should Bran want to haunt him?

(A Ghost in Winterfell, ADwD)

So Bran is plainly inhabiting the tree.

But on the next day, as Theon and the washerwomen are regrouping for the escape, the heart tree shows an inexpressive face, and does not manifest anything for Theon.

Even the godswood was turning white. A film of ice had formed upon the pool beneath the heart tree, and the face carved into its pale trunk had grown a mustache of little icicles.

(Theon, ADwD)


15. The Agency of the old Gods

Let's look briefly at the invocations of the old gods by the guests of Winterfell. Theon hopes they will give him the gift of death as he attends the wedding.

It would mean her death, of course, and his own as well, but Ramsay in his wroth might kill them quickly. The old gods of the north might grant them that small boon.

(The Prince of Winterfell, ADwD)

He wonders again about the old gods.

Theon found himself wondering if he should say a prayer. Will the old gods hear me if I do? They were not his gods, had never been his gods. He was ironborn, a son of Pyke, his god was the Drowned God of the islands ... but Winterfell was long leagues from the sea. It had been a lifetime since any god had heard him. He did not know who he was, or what he was, why he was still alive, why he had ever been born.
“Theon,” a voice seemed to whisper.
His head snapped up. “Who said that?” All he could see were the trees and the fog that covered them. The voice had been as faint as rustling leaves, as cold as hate.

(The Prince of Winterfell, ADwD)

And now at the feast.

No longswords had been allowed within the hall, but every man there wore a dagger, even Theon Greyjoy. How else to cut his meat? Every time he looked at the girl who had been Jeyne Poole, he felt the presence of that steel at his side. I have no way to save her, he thought, but I could kill her easy enough. No one would expect it. I could beg her for the honor of a dance and cut her throat. That would be a kindness, wouldn’t it? And if the old gods hear my prayer, Ramsay in his wroth might strike me dead as well. Theon was not afraid to die. Underneath the Dreadfort, he had learned there were far worse things than death. Ramsay had taught him that lesson, finger by finger and toe by toe, and it was not one that he was ever like to forget.

(The Prince of Winterfell, ADwD)

Theon asks the old gods the gift of mercy.

The night was windless, the snow drifting straight down out of a cold black sky, yet the leaves of the heart tree were rustling his name. “Theon,” they seemed to whisper, “Theon.”
The old gods, he thought. They know me. They know my name. I was Theon of House Greyjoy. I was a ward of Eddard Stark, a friend and brother to his children. “Please.” He fell to his knees. “A sword, that’s all I ask. Let me die as Theon, not as Reek.” Tears trickled down his cheeks, impossibly warm. “I was ironborn. A son ... a son of Pyke, of the islands.”
A leaf drifted down from above, brushed his brow, and landed in the pool. It floated on the water, red, five-fingered, like a bloody hand. “... Bran,” the tree murmured.
They know. The gods know. They saw what I did. And for one strange moment it seemed as if it were Bran’s face carved into the pale trunk of the weirwood, staring down at him with eyes red and wise and sad. Bran’s ghost, he thought, but that was madness. Why should Bran want to haunt him? He had been fond of the boy, had never done him any harm. It was not Bran we killed. It was not Rickon. They were only miller’s sons, from the mill by the Acorn Water. “I had to have two heads, else they would have mocked me ... laughed at me ... they ...”

(A Ghost in Winterfell, ADwD)

The next day, the heart tree is indifferent.

Even the godswood was turning white. A film of ice had formed upon the pool beneath the heart tree, and the face carved into its pale trunk had grown a mustache of little icicles. At this hour they could not hope to have the old gods to themselves.

(Theon, ADwD)

Nevertheless, Theon had found enough encouragement with the old gods.

Reek might have done it. Would have done it, in hopes it might please Lord Ramsay. These whores meant to steal Ramsay’s bride; Reek could not allow that. But the old gods had known him, had called him Theon. Ironborn, I was ironborn, Balon Greyjoy’s son and rightful heir to Pyke. The stumps of his fingers itched and twitched, but he kept his dagger in its sheath.

(Theon, ADwD)

Theon thinks of the auspices of the old gods twice more during the escape.

Theon stopped so suddenly that Willow almost plowed into his back. The door to Ramsay’s bedchamber was before him. And guarding it were two of the Bastard’s Boys, Sour Alyn and Grunt.
The old gods must wish us well.

(Theon, ADwD)

Theon clapped one hand around Jeyne’s mouth, grabbed her about the waist with the other, and pulled her past the dead and dying guards, through the gate, and over the frozen moat. And perhaps the old gods were still watching over them; the drawbridge had been left down, to allow Winterfell’s defenders to cross to and from the outer battlements more quickly.

(Theon, ADwD)

Theon had taken no interest in the religion when he was a ward of the Starks. After having suffered so much, and having no friend to turn to in Winterfell, it's interesting that he found comfort, help and hope with the old gods.

Besides Theon's arc, the old gods are thought responsible of the storm in Winterfell.

“The gods have turned against us,” old Lord Locke was heard to say in the Great Hall. “This is their wroth. A wind as cold as hell itself and snows that never end. We are cursed.”
(A Ghost in Winterfell, ADwD)

Why does Lord Locke utter such a pronouncement? Is it because the wedding is a sham? Is it because the strength of the storm is so unusual?

Roose Bolton is not shy of invoking the old gods to rally his allies.

“The gods of the north have unleashed their wroth on Lord Stannis,” Roose Bolton announced come morning as men gathered in Winterfell’s Great Hall to break their fast. “He is a stranger here, and the old gods will not suffer him to live.”

(The Turncloak, ADwD)

The Queen's men around Stannis do think alike Roose Bolton.

And Godry the Giantslayer said, “The old gods of the north have sent this storm upon us. Only R’hllor can end it. We must give him an unbeliever.”

(The King's Prize, ADwD)

The clansmen with Stannis think alike, but from the opposite point of view.

“What has your southron god to do with snow?” demanded Artos Flint. His black beard was crusted with ice. “This is the wroth of the old gods come upon us. It is them we should appease.”
“Aye,” said Big Bucket Wull. “Red Rahloo means nothing here. You will only make the old gods angry. They are watching from their island.”

(The Sacrifice, ADwD)

So many characters agree that the old gods are responsible for the snowstorm.

Barbrey Dustin's view might not be different, but what she expresses is more prosaic.

“Lord Stannis is lost in the storm,” said Lady Dustin. “He’s leagues away, dead or dying. Let winter do its worst. A few more days and the snows will bury him and his army both.”
And us as well, thought Theon, marveling at her folly. Lady Barbrey was of the north and should have known better. The old gods might be listening.

(A Ghost in Winterfell, ADwD)


The Winterfell Huis Clos