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In A Clash of Kings, Bran VII, the chapter begins from the point of view of a direwolf! I frickin love direwolf POVs.
In this one, Bran and friends are hidden away in the Winterfell crypts. Bran is warged inside of his direwolf Summer to see if it’s safe for the group to come out of hiding. Summer is watching Winterfell from a safe distance as the castle burns, and that’s when it happens!
Yet as one smell drew them onward, others warned them back. He sniffed at the drifting smoke. Men, many men, many horses, and fire, fire, fire. No smell was more dangerous, not even the hard cold smell of iron, the stuff of man-claws and hardskin. The smoke and ash clouded his eyes, and in the sky he saw a great winged snake whose roar was a river of flame. He bared his teeth, but then the snake was gone. Behind the cliffs tall fires were eating up the stars. (ACOK Bran VII)
A great winged snake whose roar was a river a flame.
Is George RR Martin having fun with his descriptions of fire and smoke? Or did Summer just witness a dragon escaping from the Winterfell inferno?
These are hotly debated questions, and it’s no wonder why. As with so many instances of magic and fantasy in this story, the Winterfell dragon straddles the line between evidently real and evidently not.
If the dragon is real, then Bran saw it too. Why didn’t Bran, an eight-year-old boy, say anything about a dragon to his companions? I don’t know. I think that’s the single strongest point against the dragon being real, and I have no idea how to go about investigating that. What’s the deal, Bran?
Still, there are plenty of other reasons the dragon can’t be real, so let’s investigate those.
Why didn’t anybody else see the dragon?
He bared his teeth, but then the snake was gone.
Because it left quickly. The dragon left the scene just as quickly as Summer could bare his teeth.
Where was the dragon hiding all this time? It’s a “great” winged snake, so that means it’s a lot bigger than a regular snake.
The vault was cavernous, longer than Winterfell itself, and Jon had told him once that there were other levels underneath, vaults even deeper and darker where the older kings were buried. (AGOT Bran VII)
The dragon was living in the Winterfell crypts.
But dragons need to eat. What was he eating all this time?
Sansa kept looking at the stubby little candle, anxious that it might go out. Old Nan had told her there were spiders down here, and rats as big as dogs. Robb smiled when she said that. (AGOT Arya IV)
The dragon was eating rats as big as dogs.
But that’s just a story. Old Nan is always making up stories.
Old Nan’s stories seem to be coming true.
But how did the dragon get into the crypt in the first place? Dragons don’t just appear out of nowhere.
We can dismiss Mushroom’s claim in his Testimony that the dragon Vermax left a clutch of eggs somewhere in the depths of Winterfell’s crypts, where the waters of the hot springs run close to the walls, while his rider treated with Cregan Stark at the start of the Dance of the Dragons. As Archmaester Gyldayn notes in his fragmentary history, there is no record that Vermax ever laid so much as a single egg, suggesting the dragon was male. The belief that dragons could change sex at need is erroneous, according to Maester Anson’s Truth, rooted in a misunderstanding of the esoteric metaphor that Barth preferred when discussing the higher mysteries. (TWOIAF, The North: Winterfell)
Maybe Mushroom was right.
But dragons are noisy! Wouldn’t somebody have heard it moving around, hunting giant rats and growling and stuff?
Robb smiled when she said that. “There are worse things than spiders and rats,” he whispered. “This is where the dead walk.” That was when they heard the sound, low and deep and shivery. Baby Bran had clutched at Arya’s hand. (AGOT Arya IV)
They heard it.
Let’s analyze the direwolf Summer a bit. One of the cool things about the POV structure of the narrative is that we get to see how the characters think. In Summer’s POV, the author is showing us that Summer thinks about things in terms that he already knows.
No smell was more dangerous, not even the hard cold smell of iron, the stuff of man-claws and hardskin. The smoke and ash clouded his eyes, and in the sky he saw a great winged snake whose roar was a river of flame.
Summer thinks of swords as man-claws, and that makes a lot of sense because he’s a wolf. He’s familiar with claws in himself and other animals. Certainly many of the animals he has fought and eaten throughout his life had claws. So when he encounters humans wielding swords it makes a lot of sense that he would think of them as man-claws.
Summer is familiar with skin too. Animals have skin, and some animals have harder skin than others. It’s reasonable to assume a direwolf who has lived in the wild has encountered a variety of animals with different types of skin. So when Summer encounters a human wearing armor and he tries to take a bite out of him, he will quickly learn that some humans have hardskin.
Summer knows what a rock is because he has encountered rocks before. When Summer encounters a castle he calls it man-rock.
Beyond the open fields he could see the great piles of man-rock stark against the swirling flames.
The story has established this interpretive pattern to help us figure out whether or not the “great winged snake whose roar was a river of flame” is a real dragon.
Summer knows what a snake is because he has probably encountered a snake in the wild before. Summer knows what wings are because he has probably encountered birds before. Summer knows what a river is because he has certainly encountered a river before. And Summer knows what flames are because he’s looking at flames. And he already knows how dangerous they are.
No smell was more dangerous
But there is no reason that Summer should know what a dragon is, because there’s no reason to think that Summer has encountered a dragon before. And because Summer doesn’t know how to read stories.
So now, the ambiguous description of the dragon doesn’t seem ambiguous at all! It matches perfectly with the way the direwolf thinks, what he knows and doesn’t know. The man-claws are real swords, the hardskin is real armor, the man-rock is a real castle, and the great winged snake whose roar was a river of flame is a real dragon.
—
As Bran and the group exit the crypt, Hodor uses his strength to open the heavy wooden door. And Osha says:
“We made noise enough to wake a dragon,” Osha said, “but there’s no one come. The
castle’s dead and burned, (ACOK Bran VII)
George RR Martin is a sly devil.
In The World of Ice and Fire, I think Martin might be poking fun at the non-believers.
We can dismiss Mushroom’s claim in his Testimony that the dragon Vermax left a clutch of eggs somewhere in the depths of Winterfell’s crypts, where the waters of the hot springs run close to the walls, while his rider treated with Cregan Stark at the start of the Dance of the Dragons. As Archmaester Gyldayn notes in his fragmentary history, there is no record that Vermax ever laid so much as a single egg, suggesting the dragon was male. The belief that dragons could change sex at need is erroneous, according to Maester Anson’s Truth, rooted in a misunderstanding of the esoteric metaphor that Barth preferred when discussing the higher mysteries. (TWOIAF, The North: Winterfell)
The line “we can dismiss” rubs me the wrong way, because I don’t like being told what to think. And I think that’s exactly what it’s meant to do. It’s meant to cause me to be skeptical of this Maester who presumes to draw my conclusions for me.
I think the name of the book Truth is Martin’s way of meta-textually poking fun at the non-believers. Haha, you take things at face value. You’re on the side who thinks a book named Truth is the truth.
Update May 15, 2024
Maester Luwin to Bran:
“Perhaps magic was once a mighty force in the world, but no longer. What little remains is no more than the wisp of smoke that lingers in the air after a great fire has burned out, and even that is fading. (ACOK 28 Bran IV)
Apr 29, 2024
There are a lot of reasons we can assume Vermax didn’t lay eggs down there. Septon Barth wrote that there is no evidence that Vermax laid a single egg. The crypts are too small to house a dragon. There’s nothing down there for a dragon to eat. Without a mother to warm the eggs, they could not have hatched. Somebody would have heard noises. Somebody would have seen it fly out when Winterfell burned.
But did you notice that every single one of those points has been sneakily rebutted in the story?
- The crypts go so deep that Jon doesn’t even know how many levels there are and nobody has been down that far in ages. Jon said so to Bran. Plenty of space for a dragon to roam undetected. (AGOT Bran VII)
- There are hot springs running under Winterfell that could have kept the egg warm. Catelyn and many others tell us so. (AGOT Catelyn I)
- In the crypts there are spiders, rats and rats as big as dogs that the dragon could have eaten. Old Nan tells us so. (AGOT Arya IV)
- When the Starks were playing in the crypt they heard a mysterious loud noise. Arya tells us so. (AGOT Arya IV)
- When Winterfell burned the direwolf Summer saw “a great winged snake whose roar was a river of flame” that came out of the fire and flew away. Sounds like a perfect description of a dragon. (ACOK Bran VII)
So, there is actually a massive amount of evidence that there is a living dragon in the crypts of Winterfell born from a clutch of eggs laid by Vermax. It’s just narrative evidence. It may be easy to counter these points one at a time. ‘We don’t know if a hot spring is warm enough to hatch an egg.’ ‘We don’t know if rats are enough food to sustain a dragon.’ ‘We don’t know what the Stark kids heard down there. It could be anything or nothing.’ But it isn’t really possible to counter the whole set because the whole set originates from the same person and that person is George R. R. Martin. And at the end of all the argument about what may be happening in the story, we’re left staring at the obvious and unavoidable fact of what is happning out of the story.
GRRM is quietly and tacitly addressing every conceivable counterpoint to a Winterfell dragon’s existence and littering those across many books with a great distance of text between them to prevent readers from detecting and correlating them easily. That way, when a dragon we’ve never seen before shows up to a battle because he smelled the blood and he does something important, nobody gets to call it a deus ex machina, because the clues were there all along. The readers just didn’t find them, didn’t correlate them, and chose not to believe them.
Created Oct 2019
Updated May 15, 2024 – Added Luwin
Updated Oct 9, 2024 – Added comment short version
Apples and Dragons 