The other three I slew, when they made it plain they’d sooner fight than follow.” When I left the Shadow Tower there were five men making noises about how they might be the stuff of kings. The free folk won’t follow a name, and they don’t care which brother was born first. You don’t become King-beyond-the-Wall because your father was. I am my own champion, my own fool, and my own harpist. “My birth is as low as a man’s can get, no septon’s ever smeared my head with oils, I don’t own any castles, and my queen wears furs and amber, not silk and sapphires.
“I’ve never had a crown on my head or sat my arse on a bloody throne, if that’s what you’re asking,” Mance replied. … “Are you a true king?” Jon asked suddenly. Mance Rayder gives us a first-hand look at a different angle of the free folk attitudes towards birth and “rightfulness”. Mad Axe had once walked these yards and climbed these towers, butchering his brothers in the dark.īut when you really compare, the first men/Free Folk do not think lower of those born out of wedlock. This was the castle where King Sherrit had called down his curse on the Andals of old, where the ‘prentice boys had faced the thing that came in the night, where blind Symeon Star-Eyes had seen the hellhounds fighting. This was where the Rat Cook had served the Andal king his prince-and-bacon pie, where the seventy-nine sentinels stood their watch, where brave young Danny Flint had been raped and murdered. It was here that Night’s King had reigned, before his name was wiped from the memory of man. The Nightfort had figured in some of Old Nan’s scariest stories. “There’s nothing here to hurt us, Your Grace.”īran wasn’t so certain.
Jojen gazed up at him with his dark green eyes. The skinchangers are known to hold “gatherings”, which in GRRM-world, gatherings are big orgies that spread genetic material all over.
Garth the Green was renowned for spreading his “seed” all over. The first men/free folk are about spreading their genes through “stealing”, which is just a mating ritual (that Andal-descent, or southroners, have corrupted in name and practice). Much of this goes hand in hand with how GRRM repeatedly favors “mutts and mongrels” as his story heroes, which is the anti-elitism of incest. And this is really another “follow the money” situation with the Andals who brought the Faith of the Seven (fire associated), and the financial benefits they receive, which is why it is important to them that people believe in the Faith and its tenets rather than the “free” animism of the old gods. Everything from wars, to burning trees, to King Sherrit, to the other Andal oppression against the First Men/Free Folk. It really seems that the custom of bastards being less than everyone else comes from the Andals, and we know that the Andals and the first men do not have a good history with each other.
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