This episode gives detail on every weirwood in Westeros while adding new theories and background. Apart from the Heart Trees, there’s a lot on Ravens, the Others, the magic of genetics and the weather, the Children of the Forest and the Nightfort. Throughout the tour, Ashaya and Aziz make several predictions and point out some eerie parallels. Be sure to watch our first episode on weirwoods.
The episode features themes of blood and ancestry, as weirwoods tend to be inextricably tied to the surrounding area, both physically and culturally. Given the broad scope of this topic, quite a variety of related subjects come up. Heart tree-murdering Melisandre makes an appearance or two, the Wall is discussed as well as several members of House Stark and some very out of the way places you’ve barely heard of.
We go from Beyond the Wall to the far south, considering not just where the weirwoods are, but where they might have been in the past. Given that there are so many places left unseen in the story, we make educated guesses where other trees might be. This isn’t just about where the trees are, though…the absence of weirwoods can be as conspicuous as the most grotesque Heart Tree face.
When they died, they went into the wood, into leaf and limb and root, and the trees remembered. All their songs and spells, their histories and prayers, everything they knew about this world.
Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come. Certain moths live their whole lives in a day, yet to them that little span of time must seem as long as years and decades do to us. An oak may live three hundred years, a redwood tree three thousand. A weirwood will live forever if left undisturbed. To them seasons pass in the flutter of a moth’s wing, and past, present, and future are one.
There were nine, all roughly of the same age and size. Each one had a face carved into it, and no two faces were alike. Some were smiling, some were screaming, some were shouting at him. In the deepening glow their eyes looked black, but in daylight they would be blood-red, Jon knew. Eyes like Ghost’s.
You…. guys…. rock.
It’s funny. For some reason the first thing that came to my mind about the thin weirwood with no face growing next to the well was that it was the top of an underground heart tree. The face being the Black Door. I need to reread that chapter again to see why I thought that.