Last time we discussed zombies in A Song of Ice and fire, specifically how some of them can give us insight into the mechanism of the foreshadowed resurrection of Jon Snow.
In particular, we discussed my theory on how I think Mirri Maz Duur purposefully killed the horse of Khal Drogo in order to prevent the Khal from entering the red stallion and starting his second life. By doing this, when he died his soul either faded away, or (if you believe Glidus’s tinfoil) was captured by MMD when the Khal’s body died. She then resurrected his body with blood magic, but with no trace of the man inside, due to her prior, premeditated actions.
That scene was in the first volume of ASoIaF, A Game of Thrones, but to truly grasp the theory, we really need to understand the concept of a second life, as described in the POV of Varamyr Sixskins in A Dance with Dragons, book five of A Song of Ice and Fire. Varamir, the most powerful warg among the freefolk, suffers a mortal wound and attempts a body snatching, ultimately failing to steal the body of the woman Thistle, whom he’d chosen as the vessel for his second life. In the end he does achieve a second life when his own body dies, but it is inside his wolf, One-Eye, not inside a body-snatched human. The mechanism for that soul transfer is described in the following passage.
The white world turned and fell away. For a moment it was as if he were inside the weirwood, gazing out through carved red eyes as a dying man twitched feebly on the ground and a madwoman danced blind and bloody underneath the moon, weeping red tears and ripping at her clothes. Then both were gone and he was rising, melting, his spirit borne on some cold wind. He was in the snow and in the clouds, he was a sparrow, a squirrel, an oak. A horned owl flew silently between his trees, hunting a hare; Varamyr was inside the owl, inside the hare, inside the trees. Deep below the frozen ground, earthworms burrowed blindly in the dark, and he was them as well. I am the wood, and everything that’s in it, he thought, exulting. A hundred ravens took to the air, cawing as they felt him pass. A great elk trumpeted, unsettling the children clinging to his back. A sleeping direwolf raised his head to snarl at empty air. Before their hearts could beat again he had passed on, searching for his own, for One Eye, Sly, and Stalker, for his pack. His wolves would save him, he told himself.
That was his last thought as a man.
True death came suddenly; he felt a shock of cold, as if he had been plunged into the icy waters of a frozen lake. Then he found himself rushing over moonlit snows with his packmates close behind him. Half the world was dark. One Eye, he knew. He bayed, and Sly and Stalker gave echo.
– A Dance with Dragons – Prologue
To summarize, just before the moment of his death, he basically flits around the world from being to being (briefly residing in or perhaps pulled into, almost becoming, the weirwood net) until landing in the wolf with which he had the closest bond. Speaking of wolves, Summer, Bran’s wolf, is clearly the direwolf that snarls at him in the scene. Learn all about their bond in my Direwolves of Winterfell series. The premise of my theory is that GRRM knew this mechanism of soul transfer in AGoT, three books before he wrote ADwD. My faith that he did understand this part of his magical world so early is due to his having written The Glass Flower earlier in his career. That short story is all about the consciousness shifting from vessel to vessel, not all of them human.
To me that’s enough to justify the theory, but the bigger takeaway in relation to Jon Snow’s resurrection is that the body can be brought back from death with magic, blood magic in the case of the Khal, though with Melisandre (fire magic & blood magic), Patchface and Shireen (water magic, maybe stone magic), and Bloodraven (greenseer magic, natural / tree magic) lingering in Jon’s story there are all sorts of magical mechanisms at hand, so we can’t really be sure how his body is resurrected. We can be sure that it will come back, though. What we hope is that he comes back into a fully functional body with precious little of his mind lost to his premature death, though with his magical ability likely heightened. We’ve already looked at the extreme where all of the mind is lost but the body remains functional with Drogo. Now, we’ll consider another extreme case, with a body that is partially decayed and a consciousness that is nigh unrecognizable, Lady Stoneheart.
A Trout into the River
By way of Contrast to what we want with Jon, Cat’s resurrection definitely suggests that she lost a lot of herself to death. Indeed, Thoros of Myr tells us that she had been dead for three days when the brotherhood found her, and Beric Dondarrion resurrected her.
“She is,” said Thoros of Myr. “The Freys slashed her throat from ear to ear. When we found her by the river she was three days dead. Harwin begged me to give her the kiss of life, but it had been too long. I would not do it, so Lord Beric put his lips to hers instead, and the flame of life passed from him to her. And . . . she rose. May the Lord of Light protect us. She rose.”
– A Feast for Crows – Brienne VIII
That’s a long time to be gone. We learn from Beric that a piece of himself is lost each time he dies. While he died numerous times, all of them were relatively brief deaths, none approaching 3 days.
It shows too. Catelyn as Lady Stoneheart has more the aspect of a phantom, a wraith, than that of a Lady. Definitely, a fair bit of her was lost during this long period on the dark side of death. One might suggest that this is mainly due to the decay of her body, but my focus is more on her mind.
With that, there is a huge issue with Cat’s resurrection. Where was her consciousness while her body was dead? She never had a skinchanger bond with a beast, so no likely horse or wolf was at hand. Is it possible that her consciousness just flitted around as Varamyr’s did, but for three days? This is possible with someone who is dead for a short period, like Beric, but with Cat, I find this highly unlikely, especially given the contrast to how how quickly Varamyr finds his host body in One Eye.
I suppose that she could have gone into the weirwood net as Varamyr briefly did, but I find 2 problems with this, as well, 1) the length of time, again, and 2) that the definition (from merriam Webster) of a weir is “a fence or enclosure set in a waterway for taking fish.” That probably means that the weirwood net is a net in two separate ways, first in the way we typically think, a network of trees, somewhat akin to a computer network, like the internet. Certainly, Bloodraven is teching Bran to learn from the memories stored in the trees just like we use the internet as a host of knowledge. However, it is also literally a net, a net for catching souls. This is a concept that LML has fleshed out a number of times in his material, so I’ll refer you there for more proof. While clearly a soul can elude it, as happens with Varamyr, but after staying in there for three days I would think that the net will not release such a soul easily or at all.
So, against those two unsatisfying possibilities, I have a third idea, one that is fully in line with Varamyr’s concept of a second life. What if she was not waiting in a weirwood or in the ether, but in a trout, specifically a brook trout. I know, that sounds kind of ridiculous. It is ridiculous, or at least I meant it that way when I suggested it in a recent reddit post … but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. The more and more I think about it, a trout may very well be the vessel where Cat resided for three days.
Now, obviously there is not a lot of evidence for this theory, more a hypothesis, but there is some supporting evidence, though most of it falls in the category of symbolism and imagery. Her sigil is obvious but there is more. Her body is also flung into the river by the Freys in a mockery of the Tully funeral rites. That ritual, though, may be a modern echo of a more ancient first men rite symbolizing the passage to the second life. Also, she is physically close to the fish, which is circumstantially convenient to the theory. Then, there is her appearance, which is … well … fishy, very fishy, in fact. Let’s consider it from Brienne’s POV:
Lady Stoneheart lowered her hood and unwound the grey wool scarf from her face. Her hair was dry and brittle, white as bone. Her brow was mottled green and grey, spotted with the brown blooms of decay. The flesh of her face clung in ragged strips from her eyes down to her jaw. Some of the rips were crusted with dried blood, but others gaped open to reveal the skull beneath.
– A Feast for Crows – Brienne VIII
Consider each of the aspects of her appearance that are reminiscent of a fish, or trout.
- Her Hair – “dry and brittle, white as bone” – is exactly what the dorsal fin of a fish would be once out of water.
- Her cheeks – “rips” “crusted with dried blood” – are described almost as if they are gills. There can be no mistaking this if you re-read the passage with that idea in mind. As Egg would say, it’s “right there,” and it is there, right down to the crusted blood giving them a deep red color.
- Her skin coloring – “mottled green and grey, spotted with brown blooms of decay” – is almost directly an amalgam of what you might read in sportfishermans almanac’s description of a brook, brown or rainbow trout.
I will point out a drawback; Varamyr doesn’t seem to think that he’ll ever get out of One-eye, so how can Cat get out of her fish? I’ll point out that she’s not actually bonded with these fish, so the pull to them might not be that strong, and they have small brains, so she may not truly fit inside them anyway, which might mean she’s actually bouncing around from fish to fish for those 3 days. Ugh, my head is starting to hurt. I’ll stop here.
Since there’s not a lot more to this theory, now I want to talk a bit about GRRM’s aims with the character. First, I think that regardless of whether my theory is right, it’s clear that a lot of the character that was Catelyn is missing in Lady Stoneheart, who seems to exist only for revenge against Freys and Lannisters, although she may also be trying to retrieve her girls. Someone who was once so dynamic is now nothing more than these single minded goals. This is somewhat parallel to how Beric Dondarrion continued to lead his band of outlaws in the single purpose that Ned gave him, to deliver the king’s justice, even though that king was long dead.
This might be seen as a pattern that Jon Snow would follow, though I would caution against adopting it as a conclusion. Cat seems to have lost a lot of herself due to time dead, either by decay of her body or waning of her soul’s essence. Similarly, Beric has died seven times, and he is resurrected by Thoros . After the sixth resurrection, Thoros says “And each time is harder.” In response, Beric confirms the extent of the his degradation:
“Can I dwell on what I scarce remember? I held a castle on the Marches once, and there was a woman I was pledged to marry, but I could not find that castle today, nor tell you the color of that woman’s hair. Who knighted me, old friend? What were my favorite foods? It all fades. Sometimes I think I was born on the bloody grass in that grove of ash, with the taste of fire in my mouth and a hole in my chest. Are you my mother, Thoros?”
– A Storm of Swords – Arya VII
Later, Beric says:
“Fire consumes.” Lord Beric stood behind them, and there was something in his voice that silenced Thoros at once. “It consumes, and when it is done there is nothing left. Nothing.”
– A Storm of Swords – Arya VIII
It’s fair to say that Beric feels a bit of himself was consumed each time. I surmise that in her one death, a large bit of Catelyn was consumed. It’s clear from the overall read of their stories, that Beric and LSH are both quite degraded from their original selves, either by that repeated fire magic or the effect of time dead. My main point in this discussion is that Beric and Lady Stoneheart and Beric are cautionary tales that in GRRM’s world a resurrected human shouldn’t be expected to come back “normal.”
Now, with Jon Snow, the situation may be a bit different. He has a better vessel to dwell in with Ghost, and while fire consumes, cold preserves . . . but we’ll discuss that another time.
Either way, what I’ve been trying to say here is that Cat is a fish. Err, she is a catfish… Uhh, did the author intend that terrible pun, or is it all my own? Surely he did, In honor of that realization I’ve written a red-wedding themed version of the Old Tyme American folk song “Fishing Blues.” I’ve also make a separate Direwolf cover Youtube vid for the entire recording. Enjoy!
The Green Bard 