Yes! I think if GRRM watched his videos he might get some of his excitement and passion for writing back, too. These videos always reignite my curiosity.
@@jazwhoaskedforthis I'm getting close to having more hours into watching these videos than I have into reading the books. But to be fair, I'm not making the same mistake I've made all my life anymore. I could have read all 5 books ages ago but I'm still in the beginning parts of book 3. I'm really savoring this book series, only reading a few chapters at a time. The reread will be very fun but it doesn't compare to that first read through.
for real this guy is the biggest ASOIAF nerd that i've ever seen, and around my hometown that is supposed to be my title. but hot damn does David really get deep in the lore, it's really great considering we've run out of material from George.
Watching these videos entirely sober still makes me feel like I'm uncovering arcane secrets. I can imagine how the psychedelic experience would make this stuff completely mind blowing. Probably how Bran felt after eating that "weirwood" paste
Fun fact: Here in Germany, there is the North Sea Island of Föhr, and it's main town is called Wyk, too. And guess what: The part of the German coast around Föhr was drowned in a storm surge in the 14th century, and what used to be part of the mainland became fractured and only islands like Föhr remained. Just google (Second) Saint Marcellus's Flood or Rungholt, the "Atlantis of the North Sea"! :)
Maybe Grrm was inspired by this. Just like he used the German word Stark which means strong when translated to English. So some people theorise that some ancient relatives of the disappeared House Strong (by the time of GoT) became the Starks. Like how other southern houses like the Manderlys and Brackens migrated north.
@@TheAstroWitchLux I would like to believe that. Sadly, the history of the North Frisian islands is hardly known even in other parts of Germany, so I'm not sure whether an American would know it. If yes, it would be by pure chance.
Yep. The Ironborn are more than just Westrosi Not-Vikings. It's another example of discussion I was in on a Discord about how Martin is great at not overwhelming the readers with worldbuilding details, but puts it there in background. It helps center his narrative on characterization, but makes rereads a joy, giving us more for our buck.
Yeah and he also world builds in different levels, he talks about distant history, aswel as recent history at the same time. It differs big time with some other writers
I absolutely love the idea of remembering that Andals wrote rhe history so therefore "First Men" arent a single ethnogroup so much as the people who were here when they got there.
I belief that the seastone chair was a sacrificial altar, of which the ironborn have forgotten it's function. Fits with the whole blood calling krakens from the deep thing going on in the story. Also it is deliberately called a chair, not a throne. Chair comes from cathedra, also the root word for cathedral, so a holy seat. The Lord Reaper sits on the sacrificial slab of the chair. This does fit in with theories that link blood magic/sacrifice and the oily black stone.
YES and also SSHHHH because this is one of my big reveals for video 3!! I absolutely think it was an altar where sacrifices to the Deep Ones were left the Greyjoys: "looks like a great place to sit my ass down" 😅😅
Lovecraft's creations are also eons in existence. To me, the way the Ironborn reads...they might be the FIRST of the "first men". They have that Lovecraftian ancient god cult-follower feel with a Hillbilly Pirate veneer.
"Hillbilly Pirates" is an image that's going to stay with me for life now: thanks... Something like Jed Clampett's overloaded truck full of cutlass-wielding characters wearing straw tricorn hats - The Crimson Permanent Assurance on moonshine...🤣
A three part video series about the Ironborn, with the first part already being more than one hour long, and maybe even an additional stream? Sounds like a true and proper... in-depth analysis...
I feel spoiled from all of the juicy world-building, symbolism, and theories in this one. I was completely enthralled throughout the entire video; well worth the wait and I'm so looking forward to the next two
I find the Ironborn and the Starks are from the same group of mainlanders at different emigration times. Much like the Normans and the Yorks were resettled Vikings from different invasions. I've also noticed Theon has some major Gollum/Smeagol parallels and wouldn't be surprised if he plays a key role in the finale.
I hope that he doesn't meet a similiar end; a very hot end. It's possible in the next book, but I want to see a complete redemption for Theon. He's suffered enough. He knows himself now.
@@Loreweavver I think that I know what you mean. It would be an interesting twist on the character arc. Like Gollum, Theon chooses his side; he makes his final decision and dies for it, but he dies for something worth all of the pain. His death could be an act of redemption instead of a regression. Please finish the book, George. We've been speculating on this stuff for years.
Well, considering Sméagol probably had similar torture to Theon if we ignore the setting and unsaid torturing it would be more plausible as what was done to him
Also , the Ironborn held Moat Cailin like a champ. Roose, Ramsey & the rest of the Northmen were sure that there was more of them than the few diseased, malnurished Ironmen that remainedthey were engineering and operating from those towers fiercely like it was in their blood (Pyke being peninsula & regulating shit).
the ancient disaster hunter series is quickly becoming one of my favorites! i wouldn’t stop talking about the release of this video to everyone around me! thank you for the amazing content!
I'm working on an embroidered map of Westeros rn, and the first thing I noticed about Wyk after I got it drawn on the fabric was that looks like a caldera. I was hoping you'd address it in this video. maybe the kraken or Deep Ones like to hang out in the heat from geothermal vents, or get stirred up to the surface by underwater eruptions?
I was just thinking the SAME thing!! It has to be a caldera. Clearly the ironborn archipelago has gone thru some violent tectonic actions. Makes sense that Pyke was once more complete, and some parts have since fallen into the sea. How much has fallen? This is far enough removed that an earthquake and tsunami at the Arm of Dorne wouldn't greatly affect it. (I doubt it would the Arm event would greatly impact even the Neck; it requires more than one turn and tsunamis don't do that.)
@burtan2000 I'm also struck by the phrase "boiling blood-red sea" from the Forsaken teaser chapter. if the Valyrians kept the 14 Flames under control with sorcery (blood magic?) and the mass sacrifice/murder of the mages resulted in the eruption of those volcanoes, could another sacrifice of priests unleash the old volcano under the Iron Islands? or if the Deep Ones are awakened by a massive sea battle, would that cause an eruption? maybe the volcano is/was a prison? of course, I could be thinking too deep and speaking out of my ass, but I think I'll contemplate it some more. LML always brings out the deep thinking in me! lol
Great vid. I think the ironborn took the drown god after their journey to westoros traumatized them, with mass death by starvation and drowning at sea, a worship of the tides as giver and taker of life. Which is why what is dead may never die, a lot of them drowned and they washed ashore, like patchface, where they found the seastone chair, which made the washing ashore seem destined or a gift from their drowned god.
My favourite response to "We do not sow." Is "do you _fish?"_ Also, the Iron Islands being full of iron but not good woods is hilarious considering *the Ironclad and the Cannon.* If they actually wanted, they could've been Bravos 2.0.
The last section's title "Cosmic Starfish and the Deep One Flavored Water" almost redeemed the existence of Fred Durst's career. Almost. I really enjoyed this video. I would love if the oily black stone is a combination of cosmic origin, arcane eldritch practices, and maybe even some good old human sacrifice. Blood drying black, caked over time, having a greasy consistency from human fat and blood letting over the stones, baked in with salt and flame...like the world's worst cast iron pan. Cast ironborn.
I pulled up RU-vid for something to listen to while I shower and get dinner ready and here's an over hour long video just waiting on tip for me! I yelped so loud my husband asked if I was ok 😂
... I was ready to call it a night... now I'm taking a gummie and getting back to work with arguably the best content in the fandom on in the background 🎨🖌😌🦑🌊
I watched this series In reverse and I just gotta say it’s excellent, you clearly put a lot of work into your produced videos and it shows. Tbh I have yet to read the books but I’ve watched you for years now cause your videos and streams are so good and teach you enough even if you don’t know the source material
You remind me of my relationship with Warhammer. I've never played the actual game but I'm fascinated by the macabre lore. I've spent hour upon hour listening to 40k lore videos while doing unpleasant tasks around my house. It's one of my favourite things to help me do stuff I have to do
Right around the hour mark, every time you say "Black Metal" I get this powerful flashbacks from my facepainted youth, raising my hands to the air, one in the sign of the horns, the other holding overpriced beer in a flimsy plastic cup, while screaming "MIGHTY RAVENDARK OF BLASHYRK!", while trying to peer through the glare of the stagelights bouncing off the wobbling cement nails attached to my leather bracers. I guess you'd have had to been a 90's Euro-BlackMetal kid listening to bands like Mayhem, Darkthrone, Immortal, Emperor, and such, to fully understand...
My theory is that the iron islands weren't islands, but all one solid chunk of land at one point. Similar to Valyria. Large volcanic eruptions are often paired with subsidence of the land around after as the pool of magma below shrinks, near a coastline this can mean sinking the land. All I know is something bad likes making islands.
Honestly since I've begun doing the Xothic Legend Cycle, where island nations like Indonesia, Micronesia, Hawaii and so on are all remains of a sunken continent in the Pacific, the idea of all these weird islands in ASOIAF once being parts of larger landmasses that got flooded start making more and more sense. Iron Islands, Thousand Islands, the Neck all seem like they were once connected to their resprctive mainlands and bigger, much like the Stepstones. Then for good measure George throws in the opposite like the Silver Sea receding and becoming the Great Grass Sea or the widespread desertification out East resulting in the Great Sand Sea and the Grey Waste. Climate change seems to be a huge focal point in the story with both massive flooding in some areas and massive drought in others, much like in the real world.
I love the intro to this video so much. The music, the atmosphere, the visuals they way you lay everything out and the Amaizing Lovecraft quote as the Cherry on top. More of this please. It's honestly based on just video making this might be your best work
Considering the hinge imposed by geography, it reasons that Battle Isle was established as a forward base to contest Wyk's aggression. Their command must have suffered no shortage of volcanic fire, captives, and foul practice to forge the arms necessary to threaten the Great Empire.
So excited! The iron born are such a mystery! I wanna know more about them and any magic accessible to them. They do seem devolved, but I find myself rooting for them!
I am naturally resistant to new (to me) content creators but the title and length of this one made me click anyway, and I’m super glad that I did. Good stuff.
I've often wondered when the Iron Island slogan "What is dead may never die, but rises again" was born, since it conjurs up the Others/wights image so much (for me, anyway). Given that I firmly believe that there were Long Nights before the one we know of, I wonder if it became a phrase after 'our' Long Night, or the previous one.
Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean. Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink .
Ok so this is my theory, the cataclysms in the past are from the second moon of Planetos being destroyed & pieces of it crashing down. A second moon would’ve, in theory stabilized the seasonal changes to be routine, predictable, & constant. In the books, the seasons are quite unpredictable, & uncertain. Could also explain dragons, as some extraterrestrial species that survived the second moon’s destruction, as believed by the Dothraki. In most fictional stories, any meteorite or extraterrestrial object is magical or used to imbue magic.
Your sense of humour is so funny and cheeky! You really should be on TV dude you've got this incredibly dry British-American sense of humour where you can never really tell if you're being sarcastic or not, until in retrospect when it's always clear you were indeed being positive and sincere... brilliant.
i learned from Monty Python and other Brits, haha. thanks very much I really appreciate it. You gotta throw in some laughs when you're going all symbolism and myth heavy
@@DavidLightbringer I just finished Nimble Dick's Squisher Hunt and it was glorious. Can't get that voice out my head haha! I just re-read AFFC a few weeks ago and that will be the last time I imagine Nimble Dick as anything other than machete toting redneck squishier vigilante
Ironborn have to be hard af. Hard place to live, hard way to survive. Any weakness would mean death, starvation, enslavement. The only food to be taken from the sea. They're my favorite.
The first men are the Firbolg the Iron Born and Merlings are the Fomorians and the Giants the Children Of The Forest and the Valarians are the three tribes of the Tuatha de Danann. It makes way to much sense when you know enough about Irish mythology.
I thought the children were like the fai? I can't recall how to spell it. GRRM has put so many direct references to Old World mythology all over. For example, Bloodraven, with his missing eye and being tied up to a tree, his ravens, his great wisdom, just evrything is obviously Odin. Jamie is Tyr who looses his hand when he betrays his bud - the youthful, but powerful and growing wolf. He betrays him by chaining him down. There's so much more Norse mythos in it, i can't recall at the moment, but he's brilliant in the way he weaves these various mythologies - and IRL history - into this story. I wish I knew more about irish mythology. The names and their spelling and hard to keep track of, for an english only speaker. Or i'm just an idiot, but i love Asian mythology and their lit, but again, not being able to readily track who is who makes it difficult. I've been hard on myself for focusing so much on Greek, Roman, and Norse/Germanic mythology but in our culture, they're the most well known and English being a Germanic language depicted in a Latin text, it makes those the easiest to follow. Celtic is i should more difficult for most Americans.
I mean if the island of Pyke was connected to the mainland, it would make sense with the name thing with both versions of naming being true. I mean with it connected one could say it looked like the "pike" of Westeros. So that stretch of land was called the "Pike" and the castle was called Pyke after the shape. Then the pike broke and now you have an island. What to name the island? Well, we have a castle called Pyke we'll call it that!
I feel like the word "first" in "First Men" is yet another hint that the name is a creation of the Andals, regardless of the language it's in. The first people to reach some land are unlikely to call themselves the "first", as by that point they're the only ones there, but a later culture would naturally look at them and call them that. Just like how "first nations" is a term used to refer to the people who were already living in the Americas when the Europeans arrived, but is not what they called themselves.
Very interesting! I’d love to know if you think Wyk could be a mirror of Dragonstone. Targs from the East plan their takeover of Rathe from Dragonstone (multiple times). So maybe the Iron Island ancestors did the same from the west - and continued rebelling over and over.
honestly there are several plausible scenarios and when I try to tie it all together I will likely present the best ones instead of trying to pick one, unless a single truth really jumps out at me. I have a pretty developed idea of the order of events which I haven't shared yet, but yes at several junctures there's an either / or that both make sense. It does seem like there is a lost GEOTD colony that is cut off from the empire and starts to do its own thing
Yaaaay! Here it is! The long awaited Ironborn video! Wuhoooo!!! Great work as always. Btw, I watched about 90% of your content already (still couple of reread chapters I need to catch up to). Always from beginning to end! Love your videos ❤❤❤ Keeping the ASOIF spirit alive👌 I'm always amazed that you can still come up with new solid theories 👏👏👏
I just watched another of your videos where you suggest that the Long Night is an Ice Age. This video really made me think that there once was a passage between Pyke and the mainland during the Long Night when the ocean would have frozen into glaciers and lowered the sea level. Very thought provoking
Here's a thought about Pyke being connected to mainland Westeros: The best way to defend a narrow piece of land is a shield wall. And those soldiers would be using what type of weapons to defend it with? Pikes! Thus, Castle Pyke!
@DavidLightbringer Another thought about the naming of the castle is its position as the foremost fortress thrusting out from the mainland through the isthmus, as a sort of "tip of the spear".
Also regarding Pyke.. the name itself... like the tip of a spear, outstreched from the mainland towards the sea, the other islands or whatever... like a forward, maybe first line of defence... just a thought ;)
Banefort also sounds like Dayne-fort which implies a common origin across the sunset sea. I.e. Dawn Empire folk, then of course they have a hooded seafairing necromancer as a progenitor which is another parallel to Nights King/Bloodstone Emperor/AA, along with their sigil which looks like a solar eclipse. It's describing the Long Night, but has an Azor Ahai flair to it, which makes sense.
I think the fact that oily black stone overlaps so much with both the Great Empire and the Deep Ones is meant to suggest that they may have had extended contact with each other, with the Iron Islands only being the most obvious point of this contact. Whether this contact was collaborative or combative is less clear, though it was likely both at various times, just as it was between the Empire and the first men as well as the children of the forest/ green men.
it's been a couple of months since i've watched one of your (non livestream) videos and HOT DAMN! not only imo the best content but also great visualisation? you spoil us LML ❤ can't wait for the next video
Two weeks ago I took my dog out for a walk and accidentally walked into a Devo show at the beach. I had just watched this episode, so I thought of you ✌🏼🐙
"Please! I want to be in the commercial!" 🤣 Reading Rhaegar has hopefully earned himself a place in all LML commercials. Although...I do think having his commercial king throne threatened by Nimble Dick at some point would be great!
OMG, I just paused the video to do some work and decided to like and comment. Then right after I comment, you mention the volcano potential in the video. If only I had waited and watched 'til the end. 😁
Yo, great video Dave. Worth the wait, man! I never thought to deep into the ironborn chapters, but this is some compelling stuff. I wonder how the deep ones might relate to the Others in a literal sense, like do their paths ever cross? Or are they completely dependent worlds that feed upon the living world in similar symbolic ways?
Hmm so is this why Theon is important? Cause he’s gonna face off against the Deep Ones instead of the Others and then rule the Iron Islands after their Spirit returns to the Sea?
Great video, it’s fun seeing updates to earlier theories. I’m happy you gave a fair shake to Volcano Wyk, even though it doesn’t fit as neatly with your unifying moon meteor theory. Basilisk Isles also have a suspiciously caldera-shaped island, so that could be where the Toad Stone came from. Naath looks like a caldera (but also like a sickle 🦋💀), Marahai seems like a big one. Maybe even Lys? Some speculation: moon meteors that fall in the sea incite volcanoes, but aren’t destroyed by the lava, so are just sitting there on the caldera afterwards Or the volcano summoning is done by the deep ones underwater, powered by the moon meteor, as an attack against the weirwoods, their rivals in human-farming. They could have carved it underwater as part of the ritual
and yeah I am increasingly coming to present multiple possibilities where I can instead of trying to settle on one idea. it leaves more for everyone else to try to think about and do
Wyk, alternate form of “wikke”, meaning wicked, evil, sinful, destructive. From Old English “wicca”, meaning witch, necromancer, sorcerer. The Proto-Indo-European root is “weyk”, to contain or overcome. On Wyk we have names which include shatterstone, hammer, delve, and corpse. Just south of Wyk, on Saltcliffe, the ruling family is called Sunderly. So there’s a pretty good chance an eruption, earthquake, or tsunami broke apart the land where the islands are now located. Perhaps the Children caused the volcano under Wyk to erupt in their unsuccessful attempt to cut Westeros in half by flooding The Neck. Until that happened, the entire island chain was probably a solid land mass connected to Westeros.
i totally agree, and thanks so much for adding that translation to the convo, that's very apt and of course old English is a place we should look for translations in general with ASOIAF
