![]() ![]() This is a mythology that drives its believers to look backwards, always backwards and yet feel a deep continuity with the past. Then the Dragons came and the Holy Isles at last lost their independence. But the Ironborn were still free and the priests able to defend the faith and keep it alive. Then the Andals came and with them false gods, tyrannical kings, and tremendous deviation from the Old Way. Civil wars and defeats followed in the wake of King Urron, yet all of the islands remained under the true faith. But this age faded and faltered as well and ended when Urron Redhand slaughtered the last Kingsmoot and established a dynasty that lasted one thousand years. These mighty men faded away in time as well, but next the prophet Galon Whitestaff brought the Ironborn together under a great Kingsmoot, beginning an age of unified expansion. The glory of the godly kingdom faded, but this was still an age of unstoppable and nightmarish warriors, who the First Men could not resist. The Grey Kings one hundred children slaughtered one another and divided the islands among themselves. The constant of Ironborn myth is now degeneration from the original perfect state, with each age bringing more deviations and lessening power. It was the Drowned Gods right hand, the Grey King, who established the first kingdom, taught his people to make nets, won them fire, built the first longship, killed Nagga the sea dragon, and fathered the sons who would found the Iron Island’s great houses.Īfter the Grey King’s one thousand and seven year rule come to an end a deep current enters Ironborn myth, one that can only be described as Old Testament. ![]() So freed, upon their deaths they shall enter their god’s watery halls and be feasted and honored for all eternity. He established his islands and his tenets to make his people strong so they might free themselves from all worldly labor and vanity. But he is also extremely generous he drowned for his people, filled the seas with his fish, and made it so all their hardships and suffering would ultimately be for their benefit. The Drowned God is a fearsome, warlike, and jealous deity who will have no idols placed before him. It is our intent to sympathetically delve into their mythology and history so that we might understand how they might have come about as a people, how they came to their current tormented condition, and where they seem to be headed.Īccording to the mythology of the Ironborn they were a chosen people, specially created by one of the two gods (the good one) and given dominion over the Holy Isles “and all the waters of the earth” (World Book 175). This results in either a kind of misguided sympathy or the wholesale writing off of all sympathy, as well as a one note narrative presence for the reader. Both explanations are unsatisfactory in their own right, but have an additional problem in that they both reduce the Ironborn to a people who cannot change and are stuck as they are. Poverty doesn’t lead to robbery and wealth virtue. There’s also the fact that very wealthy places like the Free Cities and Qarth regularly steal through their trade wars and fleets of pirates. The Bear Islanders and the Northern Clans are also poor and they simply do not reave. The Sistermen, the Wildlings, the Vale Clans, and the Skagosi are also peoples with a warrior and robber culture, but they don’t fight and steal in ways that are quite so counterproductive to their own self interests. Geographic determinism, the argument that the Iron Islands are so poor that it’s no wonder reaving is important to their culture, is equally simplistic. The Northmen no longer sacrifice people to weirwoods after all, while the Dornish openly disregard many elements of the Faith of the Seven that they disapprove of. This is a viewpoint that utterly ignores social and religious change. Regardless of how many caveats one adds, this is how their culture is and has always been and always will be. What went wrong with Ironborn society that led to its current arrested state? Why the unceasing belligerence and inability to forge real, lasting compromises with the present? To simply accept the purely religious explanation is to ultimately accept the viewpoint of the Ironborn’s own fundamentalist party. ![]()
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