#cappy's thoughts

[cappymightwrite]

Been feeling very appreciative of, and cheered by, the recent influx of notes, reblogs, mentions and comments I’ve been getting on my various jonsa/asoiaf writings lately. Thank you very much to all those still invested and interested in my silly scribblings. As I said, it’s very much appreciated ❤️

[cappymightwrite]

Gonna pipe down after this, but can I just say… those readers who “earnestly” say that well, Jon and Sansa were never close growing up and are actually likely to never be close because actually their relationship may never develop at all in the coming books (even though other characters relationships will develop and even be established) and you know, actually it’s likely that Jon’s parentage reveal will have nothing to do with her, and in fact definitely shouldn’t (because they were never close) irregardless of anything to do with any issues of inheritance or Robb’s will, because why would it have anything to do with someone that Jon was never close to, because, and I don’t know if you know this, but they were never really close and we shouldn’t twist canon into expecting anything more than them not being close in perpetuity. And if I can end on one final point… growing up, in their childhood home, in their life at Winterfell, Jon Snow and that other Stark girl, um Sansa is her name I think (it’s irrelevant dw), they were never close.

[cappymightwrite]

I think jonsas dismissing j+d as something a pure invention is dishonest. We know they're gonna have a connection with each other and if it's not romantic then GRRM shouldn't have made Val as a Daenerys stand in. There are grounds for their romantic entanglement.

We don't "know" anything. It's all theories and it's all differences of opinion and interpretation! Bar possibly R+L=J, I'll always bristle at any theory being proclaimed as "basically canon."

But I'll tell you, and I'm being honest here, the evidence I find most "compelling" re J+D is... it's just how fucking derivitive it is. Oh sure, there are grounds all right... derivitive grounds.

No, genuinely, that's what that theory rests on most of all... it's how expected it is—he's ice, she's fire, wink wink, nudge nudge. She's the hot dragon lady, he's the hot broody guy. She's a Targ, he's a Stark, rival houses but... oh, what if... what if love overcame and maybe, if just for one moment (before he nissa nissas her) they are infinite!!

Give me a break, give me something MORE! I'm putting Jonsa in the bin here and I'm talking from a narrative perspective! J+D is derivitive as hell and sure, people like derivitive things, I do too at times, but I think if GRRM really aspires to elevate his series to something more than your run of the mill fantasy he should also aspire to something more challenging and subversive in the romance department too.

Maybe I'm just being contrary, pushing up against the status quo opinion, but I think BNFs need to be far more rigorous with their analysis of their possible future dynamic, which, btw, I don't deny will be there, and actually, I'm looking forward to it because what I get from Val is far more foreboding, imo, than lovey-dovey romantic. Again, that's my opinion, which you can disagree with, that's not me being "dishonest" to myself, concealing some burden of J+D truth.

Look, if GRRM is a reductive, unimaginative writer when it comes to romance (this self professed Romantic btw) then yeah, maybe I'll eat my hat and he'll go there and we'll get a tarted up version of the dog's dinner we got on the show... riviting stuff, can't wait. I just think (again, my opinon here) that he'll be a lesser writer for it if he does.

Honestly, these BNFs love to throw about the Faulkner quote like it's going out of style, but I really do wonder how many of them have actually read him... hmm, could be something to do with agendas, but who am I to say! Thanks for the ask.

[cappymightwrite]

Yeah I watched some of that Alt-Shift X vid… it always makes me groan when theorists treat that pairing as a forgone conclusion and always on the most nebulous, surface level grounds.

I was also left particularly underwhelmed by the analysis of the potential circumstances surroundings Jon discovering his parentage… didn’t go nearly far enough, I feel, to hypothesise what exactly “the heart in conflict with itself” could mean in this context. Oh, he’s cut up about Ned not being his real dad, his Targ identity, and his lover being his aunt… where’s the real conflict there, where’s the complexity of emotions? There’s no conflict, imo, if the circumstances are only eliciting one kind of emotion, and as that vid sees it, it’s predominantly a negative and destabilising kind.

I’m of the persuasion, that to be truly compelling, and to pay homage to William Faulkner’s writing ethos, there has to be a double-edged sword element to the parentage reveal—it should be something that has both good and bad consequences for Jon and THAT’S the heart in conflict right there. Does that vid go anywhere near that, despite referencing Faulkner’s quote… no. I won’t even mention what I think that “good” thing will be (if anyone has read my fic Beneath My Bones that’ll give you the answer). I just think from an effective narrative standpoint… anything that doesn’t wholly tap into that is going to be way off the mark.

[cappymightwrite]

Bit of a questionnaire for the jonsa fic writers/readers…

Where do people stand on having them “hook up” prior to either knowing about Jon’s parentage? This is irrespective of what we theorise will happen in canon btw.

Some people don’t go there at all until after the parentage reveal

Others will toe the line keeping it all in the subtext, including longing looks plus a few unexplained brushes of the hand

Some will pass over it albeit just briefly, even somewhat innocently, before the shame/guilt consumes one or both

And some will simply go full throttle and unashamedly revel in the taboo of it, often tagging this as 'dark Jon' and/or 'dark Sansa'

I’m a bit undecided on how I want to take things in my current fic (likely what has been holding up ch.3)… it’s rather unchartered territory for me, so I’m genuinely interested in what others think and what their preferences are on this🤔

[cappymightwrite]

Been a bit out of the loop, but dipped my toe back in earlier and found out there's this new (old) affc outline??

Also dipping back into MMoS ch. 3. The thing is, I got a bit creatively derailed after watching The Godfather for the first time at the end of August, but as the weather turns colder I've been getting back in the MMoS mindset, listening to my playlist etc. Can't promise when, but it's now back on the horizon.

[cappymightwrite]

I'm ill off work this afternoon with a head cold — send me asks to entertain me, if you fancy. Topics I'm more than happy to discuss:

Jonsa (always)

ASOIAF's parellels to Norse Mythology

The music of Bruce Springsteen

Al Pacino circa the 1970s ONLY

Movies of the 1970s — does anyone have any recs?

[cappymightwrite]

An Unexpected Norse Detail in Winterfell

I was scrolling through tumblr yesterday, as you do, and suddenly paused on a gifset of the Lannister party in Winterfell during the early episodes of season 1. What caught my eye was this:

Behind the long table in Winterfell's great hall is some kind of large wooden screen/divider featuring some very interesting carvings. These carvings are near identical to those found on the Urnes Stave Church in western Norway, which dates from the 12th century:

I don't think we ever see this wooden screen in Winterfell again, but it's an interesting inclusion nonetheless, back when the show stuck more closely to the source material.

In The Vikings (Penguin, revised edition, 2016) Else Roesdahl talks a bit about this particular style of ornamentation:

The Urnes style is the last phase of the long development of Scandinavian animal ornament. This seems to have developed shortly before the middle of the eleventh century and was popular for nearly a century, that is into the early Middle Ages. After a final phase where it gave rise to details and influences in Romanesque art, now predominant in Scandinavia, it had died out completely before the year 1200. Many other forms of Viking Age followed the same course. The vigour and vitality of the Ringerike style gave way to this sophisticated, elegant, indeed almost decadent, style. It is named after the exquisite wood carvings that were re-used in Urnes Church in western Norway: a portal and a door, two wall planks, a corner post and two gable ends, one complete [...] The large, four-legged animal is still one of the main motifs, but it has become as slim as a greyhound. Snake-like animals with one foreleg, snakes and thin tendrils sometimes ending in a snake's head are also featured. The designs characteristic of this style form open, asymetric patterns, creating an impression of an undulating interweaving of animals and snakes. The large loops are often figures-of-eight and the shapes grow and diminish evenly; there are no abrupt transitions. The style is also used with virtuosity on brooches and on large numbers of rune stones in central Sweden, where the undulating ornament follows the shape of the stone and the long bodies of the snakes are used as rune bands [...] Several examples of the style have been found in England, and in Ireland it became as popular as the Ringerike style.

What's so intriguing about the original carving though is that it is depicting pagan symbolism... but on a Christian church. As mentioned above, the Ringerike style predate Urnes and was "roughly contemporary with the intial spread within Scandinavia of Christianity, and was the first to contain Christian iconography, although pagan symbolism was still present," notes Philip Parker (The Northmen's Fury, Vintage, 2014). By around 1050, it gave way to the Urnes style, named for the stave church shown above.

But what do these carvings mean? In Tree of Salvation: Yggdrasil and the Cross in the North (Oxford University Press, 2013), G. Ronald Murphy offers this explanation:

The door is simply surrounded with whorls of writhing snakes and vines. The tangle is so perfectly executed in a welter of animal elongation and plant reduction to vines, that it is difficult to identify where a head begins or where a tail finally ends, if at all, or to trace what seems like a joint to a neck or a leg or a vine. The main point seems to be the inter-twined-ness itself of all living things, animal or vegetable, in one huge tangle [...] Now as one looks at the left side of the doorway there is one animal standing on four legs [see above!] that is simply startling in the clarity of its depiction. It has been called a lion and explained as the Lion of Judah (Christ) fighting with evil. I think that such an interpretation makes the mistake of using an inappropriately biblical explanation when the artist, by his very Viking-like pictorial style as well as his tangle of animal and plants, tells you he is here using a Germanic one. If you look at the animal you can see that he is eating at the vine or branch which in turn is a serpent biting at him in the neck. Look at the animal's head and you can see two small horns protruding—that animal is a young male deer, a hart. Now it becomes clear it is not the Old Testament that is giving the context here for the meaning of the portal: this is an allusion to the Elder Edda and its description of Yggsdrasill as the suffering tree with many serpents forever biting on its twigs and branches, as those twigs and branches are also being devoured by a hart. The traditiona of the single deer may also come from a previous stanza in the Grímnismál where the hart is named: Eikþyrnir [Oak-thorn] is the hart's name, who stands on Father of Hosts' hall and grazes Læraðr's [kenning for Yggdrasill] branches; and from his horns liquid drips into Hvergelmir [seething cauldron], from thence all waters have their flowing (Poetic Edda 55 and 270n)

According to Murphy, "to enter the door of the Urnes stave church is to enter Yggdrasill." So, to bring this back to the world of asoiaf, it´s an interesting piece of set design to include this screen or divider in Winterfell, a place closely connected with the "old gods" of the north and that has its own world tree, in a sense: the weirwood tree, or heart tree, of the godswood. Moreover, beneath one of Yggdrasill's three large roots is the spring Hvergelmir (mentioned above, meaning 'seething cauldron'), beneath another is Mímisbrunnr ('Mímir's well) and beneath the third is Urðarbrunnr ('Well of Urðr'), this is interesting to note in parallel to the hots springs and ice-lidded pool in Winterfell's godswood, close to its heart tree.

In the Prose Edda, one of our foremost sources on Norse mythology, Yggsdrasill is also connected with Ragnarök, the doom of the gods. In chapter 54, it is told that Óðinn will ride to the well Mímisbrunnr and consult Mímir on behalf of himself and his people. After this, "the ash Yggdrasill will shake and nothing will be unafraid in heaven or on earth," and then the Æsir and Einherjar will don their war gear and advance to the field of Vígríðr. In asoiaf, the north has its own legend very reminiscent of Ragnarök, called the Long Night and I've written about their similiarities before and keep meaning to return to that.

Anyway, I just think it's pretty cool they included that detail of the Urnes style screen in Winterfell — I'm always putting Norse details into my fics wherever I can, most recently the Oseberg tapestry.