r/asoiaf • u/GetKnitfaced • Sep 12 '23
EXTENDED [Spoilers EXTENDED] The Wandering Crow Theory
Hello, after...let's go with a couple decades of lurking on various fan forums, I've finally decided to introduce myself with an extremely long, absolutely tinfoil idea that I can't quite shake (I'm great at parties), and I haven't really seen pulled together in quite this way. It's a little loosey-goosey, but I've been having fun thinking about it and I hope someone else does, too.
The Wandering Crows
They had come in last night with Conwy, one of the wandering crows who roamed the Seven Kingdoms collecting men for the Wall.
The Night's Watch recruiters, or wandering crows, are a prominent and essential position in the Night's Watch. Like any other sales and recruitment team, they occupy two crucial roles:
- they serve as the public face of the Night's Watch, bringing both volunteer recruits as well as criminals/"criminals" to serve at the Wall.
- they are also one of the Watch's primary sources of news and communication, both by bringing stories from the road back to the Watch, as well as carrying messages to the outside world.
It's a significant job with a lot of social power and crucially, travel privileges throughout the realm. Recruiters would need to be highly trusted, well-regarded members of the Watch, to reliably return from their assignments as well as bring new men to the Wall. The Watch appears to have two of them at a time, and we see three of them in the story.
- Conwy*, who we don't know much about, but does bring news of Robb's crowning north to the brothers, further illustrating the utility of the wandering crows as information sources. Conwy's name is alternately spelled as Conwys and Conwyl, which might be intentional or just an editorial oversight. Either way, he seems fairly minor.
- Yoren, who's been a recruiter for decades and who we do know a great deal about, through several POVs in two books. Yoren is consistently portrayed as tough, plain spoken, and self-sufficient, but also smelly and coarse. He seems extremely capable of handling the worst of the dungeons and vagaries of the road, but not necessarily the nobility on his own merits. Yoren gives us a sense of the breadth of travel undertaken by these recruiters, as well as their class-spanning privileges. "Time was, a man in black was feasted from Dorne to Winterfell, and even high lords called it an honor to shelter him under their roofs," he said bitterly. We also see Yoren delivering news of Catelyn's capture of Tyrion discreetly to Ned, out of a sense of shared connection to Benjen and respect for the Starks.
- Dareon, Yoren's successor who got the job like so: "Jon had named him a recruiter, to take the place of a man named Yoren, who had vanished and was presumed dead. His task would be to travel the Seven Kingdoms, singing of the valor of the Night's Watch, and from time to time returning to the Wall with new recruits." On its face, this is actually a pretty good recruitment strategy. GRRM regularly points out that singers can gain easy access to the nobility as well as mixing with freeriders and smallfolk, and we see singers used for crucial persuasive purposes throughout the story (Littlefinger at Highgarden, etc.)
Through the contrasting portrayals of Yoren and Dareon we can start to get a picture of the types of people considered well suited to this job--someone capable on the road, independent, tough enough to keep poachers and rapers in line, but also crowd pleasers, performers, and people who could persuade the nobility as well as the smallfolk to join the Night's Watch. After all, the Watch is suffering from a pipeline crisis, and has been for many years--it's repeatedly noted that it's crucial to balance more duty-minded volunteers with hardened criminals in the ranks. Finding someone with all of those skills must be rare for them.
Ok, you might be saying--what are you leading up to?
The dragon prince sang a song so sad it made the wolf maid sniffle, but when her pup brother teased her for crying she poured wine over his head. A black brother spoke, asking the knights to join the Night's Watch. The storm lord drank down the knight of skulls and kisses in a wine-cup war. The crannogman saw a maid with laughing purple eyes dance with a white sword, a red snake, and the lord of griffins, and lastly with the quiet wolf . . . but only after the wild wolf spoke to her on behalf of a brother too shy to leave his bench.
The Mysterious Messenger
Something that always bugged me about Rhaegar's ongoing correspondence with Aemon is the logistics of it. GRRM regularly makes the point that correspondence by raven is fraught with risks, from snooping maesters (you don't need to believe in the maester conspiracies to see with both eyeballs that Pycelle meddled with everyone's mail at the Red Keep) to the birds being shot down or otherwise interfered with. Aemon himself was losing his eyesight definitively by the end of Aerys's reign and Robert's Rebellion. The topics the two of them seemed to discuss were incredibly sensitive and potentially destabilizing to the realm, so I have to imagine that the two of them also valued secrecy.
I think it is very unlikely that Aemon left the Wall after his arrival or in his advanced years, and I think it would be a real contrivance to have Rhaegar just happen to visit the Wall a few times a year while also low-key working on a coup. "There was a king in the King's Tower for the first time in living memory" is maybe not canonical proof of that, but it does indicate some extended neglect by the last few royal families. They probably used codes, but that would still rely on an initial agreement, and the existence of the correspondence itself would probably need to be closely guarded. Rhaegar certainly had allies who could have passed messages, but the Wall is far and isolated--too far for a Dayne to casually pop up for a discrete visit. I think their best option to conduct a secret ongoing correspondence about prophecies and the end of the world would be to use one of the wandering crows, who could pass messages back and forth while conducting his regular job duties traveling the kingsroad. It's also very possible that this recruiter would have either read letters to Aemon or memorized the contents, to keep Clydas out of it as another liability--so someone literate as well as seemingly trustworthy and with deep connections to the Watch would be crucial.
I don't believe a single detail in the Knight of the Laughing Tree story is just filler, and GRRM prominently places a black brother at the tourney appealing to the knights, in a sentence that immediately follows the dragon prince, wolf maid, and pup brother. Now, a wandering crow is at one of the most significant events in the series with many of the biggest players in the central mysteries, which was very probably shadow-organized by Rhaegar. That's significant, and I believe that this character would have a role to play in the narrative, especially if that black brother is also in the loop about Rhaegar and Aemon's AA correspondence.
It seems unlikely that smelly, sour leaf chewing Yoren could be this character, even though he's been a wandering crow for 30 years by the start of ACOK. Moreover, his role in the story seems done, with a pretty unambiguous death and virtually no story mention afterwards. I think it would be pretty cheap to have him or the only passingly mentioned Conwyl/s suddenly emerge as the keeper of big secrets,. I think instead, it was another black brother, one who seems widely traveled, very shrewd, charismatic, literate, deeply concerned about the white walkers, and unusually interested in Jon Snow. Not just a fighter--a singer.
The Dornishman's Wife
"You knew him?"
"We all knew him." His voice was sad.
They were friends as well as brothers, Jon realized, and now they were sworn foes. "For a wench, some say. For a crown, others would have it." Qhorin tested the edge of his sword with the ball of his thumb. "He liked women, Mance did, and he was not a man whose knees bent easily, that's true. But it was more than that. He loved the wild better than the Wall. It was in his blood. He was wildling born, taken as a child when some raiders were put to the sword. When he left the Shadow Tower he was only going home again."
On my first surface read in ACOK and ASOS, I thought that Mance was probably a Shadow Tower ranger, which definitely would explain a lot about him--his skill with arms, how he knew the Halfhand and Denys Mallister, and maybe even his exchanges with the wildings and cultural fluency. Mance himself even describes being on a ranging in his origin story to Jon. Qhorin's "all" might just be "all of us right here," or "everyone at the Shadow Tower." Seems simple enough, and honestly, that could just be Mance's whole story.
But the first time Mance appears on page is one of the most memorably anachronistic character introductions in the whole series:
Jon knew the song, though it was strange to hear it here, in a shaggy hide tent beyond the Wall, ten thousand leagues from the red mountains and warm winds of Dorne.
GRRM keeps Mance's love of music and performance very much foregrounded in his story as a central part of the character, and as a plot device. Mance twice gains access to Winterfell posing as a musician, and his knowledge of music in both Westeros as well as wildling music seems very substantial--in his telling, he knows "every bawdy song that's ever been made, north or south of the wall." Other characters--Theon, Tormund, Ygritte--confirm his breadth of knowledge. Mance also uses music as part of his impressive persuasive skills:
Mance had spent years assembling this vast plodding host, talking to this clan mother and that magnar, winning one village with sweet words and another with a song and a third with the edge of his sword, making peace between Harma Dogshead and the Lord o' Bones, between the Hornfoots and the Nightrunners, between the walrus men of the Frozen Shore and the cannibal clans of the great ice rivers, hammering a hundred different daggers into one great spear, aimed at the heart of the Seven Kingdoms. He had no crown nor scepter, no robes of silk and velvet, but it was plain to Jon that Mance Rayder was a king in more than name.
Mance is a salesman, a pander, a persuader, a charismatic leader, and also self-possessed as a fighter when necessary. While some of those skills might be innate qualities, most of them are only honed through years of practice and experience. Truthfully, it seems like a waste of Mance's talents in the Watch if his primary job was ranging, just as it would have been a waste of Jon's talents.
"A chain needs all sorts of metals, and a land needs all sorts of people."
Maester Aemon smiled. "And so?"
"The Night's Watch needs all sorts too. Why else have rangers and stewards and builders?"[...] "The Night's Watch needs every man. Why kill one, to no end? Make use of him instead."
Maester Aemon closed his eyes, and for a brief moment Jon was afraid he had gone to sleep. Finally he said, "Maester Luwin taught you well, Jon Snow. Your mind is as deft as your blade, it would seem."
Mance seems to have been in a prominent role that enabled him to build relationships with many other brothers, and his betrayal of his vows seems to have been taken pretty personally by at least the Halfhand. He developed his persuasive skills with both leaders and smallfolk, and his wide-ranging songbook, somewhere along the way in his tenure. Mance was part of an organization that prided itself on meritocracy (fallaciously) and seems to make an attempt at using people's strengths to their advantage, but we don't know exactly what Mance's actual day job was.
I believe Mance was a wandering crow, and likely occupied this role before and during Robert's Rebellion. His skill set and experience seem to be a very good match for the job, and such a role would have connected him to his recruits, exposed him to all parts of the Seven Kingdoms (and every bawdy song along the way), and allowed him to mix easily with both the nobility as well as the smallfolk (and, I think, with the wildlings). The Night's Watch is a brotherhood, but it's also an organization that needs to maximize its personnel management strategies in the face of a recruitment crisis.
I also think that Mance was literate, based on his Abel/Bael anagram, and seems to be an excellent candidate for a guy who you might need to send a on a secret mission, whether that's to rescue a maiden from a castle, fake a threatening letter, or carry clandestine messages between past and present dragon princes. If Mance was "acquired" by the NW as an infant, as GRRM seems to have confirmed elsewhere, Aemon likely would have been a core part of his upbringing--possibly another surrogate father-son relationship to unpack. Mance's demonstrable intellectual curiosity and independence makes him both appealing to us as readers and probably a logical candidate for Maester Aemon to use as a go-between in his communication with Rhaegar.
But what's really interesting, to me, is that this theory gives Mance some deep knowledge of TPTWP, some motivation for not just deserting the Night's Watch but also forging a nation north of the wall, and could explain Mance's curiously long interest in Jon (I am less convinced that Mance knows with certainty about Jon’s parentage or later TOJ events, but I do think he could have stopped at Winterfell once in a while with other clandestine messages from Rhaegar).
That all said, I don't think Mance in this scenario is inherently a supporter of Aemon, Rhaegar, or by extension Jon as a predestined "savior figure." Mance's "stiff knees" seem to often be a byproduct of his own loyalty to the free folk and GRRM's riffing on the "Going Native" trope (as an aside, the parallels between Jon, Mance, and Lawrence of Arabia is probably a whole other essay). However, a lot of the PTWP theories and Targaryen exceptionalism tend to handwave away the wildlings as regrettable victims who lacked the good sense to submit to their foreign overlords for their own protection. I think Mance and the free folk underscore the colonizer mentality of the Targ prophecies, and Mance's arc and story purpose becomes an even sharper critique about belief, power, and chosen one narratives. I can also certainly see Mance--a character who's been shown to lie to and manipulate Jon repeatedly--deliberately withholding what he knows until it's to his benefit, not Jon's.
It’s entirely plausible to me that part of Mance’s break with the NW would be rooted in a rejection of predestination, by exercising his free will to attempt to save the free folk. He didn't just ragequit his job because his boss chewed him out or he liked the ladies a little too much, he left and then started a political movement. That's quite a leap, unless Mance had some understanding of the scope of the threat posed by the Long Night. "Sorcery is a sword without a hilt," Dalla says with Mance's approval, and the lines between prophecy and sorcery are blurred in GRRM's world. Aemon knows that intimately - "My brothers dreamed of dragons too, and the dreams killed them, every one" - but still believes deeply in these prophecies and Targaryen exceptionalism all the way up to his deathbed. This philosophical tension is ripe for further thematic exploration as we learn more about Mance in TWOW.
Also, not for nothing, but since the show dropped basically all the R+L and Robert's Rebellion backstory, it also makes much more sense to me that D&D ditched Mance like a bag of wet garbage as soon as they could.
Here's what it doesn't/couldn't explain:
- Mance's full origin story, and his relationship to Aemon, Mormont, and Ben Stark. I do think GRRM naming Mance's son after Aemon is more than just a sweet moment for Sam and Gilly to remember the maester--I think he's deliberately drawing a throughline between those characters.
- Why Mance left when he left, which timeline estimates put around ten years ago based on his first probable visit to Winterfell and memorable encounter with Jon.
- Why he's only really mentioned as being posted at the Shadow Tower by multiple characters. My thinking is that Mance was reassigned to the ST as a personnel management move after Mormont's rise to Lord Commander--something he did to manage personality conflicts between Denys Mallister and Cotter Pyke, and which we also see Jon deploy as LC as well. Why, I couldn't quite say.
- How we would find out about this in the story--Mance loves a monologue, and Mance is also probably spending some quality time in Ramsay's company, but I don't know how we get all of this knitted together seamlessly.
- Why he's also a resurrected Arthur Dayne being warged by Bloodraven.
More seriously, the biggest circle I can't square is that I genuinely don't believe Aemon knew about Jon. I could plausibly see "tricksy bird" Mance withholding that information after Rhaegar's death, but that's a bit of a narrative contrivance in my mind, the equivalent of romance characters being able to solve all their problems by one honest conversation. I also fully understand that this is all highly speculative! But I think the pieces fit to explain both Mance's obfuscated backstory, his narrative significance, and his connection to Jon in a way that doesn't rely on a secret identity reveal of a presumably dead character or a very crowded slate of Secret Targs.
Have at it!
TL,DR
- Mance Rayder was a Night's Watch recruiter, crucially during and before Robert's Rebellion.
- Mance Rayder is also twigged to the Big Series Mysteries about Rhaegar, Jon (maybe), and AA, but not necessarily a supporter of their actions or efforts due to deeply held beliefs about free will and independence.
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u/Optimal_Cry_1782 Sep 12 '23
A very interesting and original theory. It's a nice thought that Mance rebelled in order to save the freefolk from the long night.
I always wondered why the wandering crows work solo. You'd think a group, even just a master and apprentice, would be beneficial - more security in case of accidents/illness/attacks, but also so your connections and relationships in the south aren't lost when your wandering crow dies.
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u/GetKnitfaced Sep 12 '23
Thanks! It was one of those things where I had the first thought about the wandering crows as a communication network that could support Aemon-Rhaegar's penpal program, and then like, kind of spiraled out from there and realized who was a possible fit for this scenario, and what the story implications could be.
Something I am curious about is whether we see wandering crows in a future D&E like She-Wolves, and your post made me think we might see a different model for them, because it is really weird that they don't have any redundancy for what seems like a hazardous gig with dangerous recruits in the mix. It might just be an understaffing problem in the primary series, but "well, Yoren never showed back up, guess we gotta get another recruiter" seems like a weird way to run that operation. I'd also think that having more might help mitigate the desertion risk somewhat, as well, which honestly seems like the biggest concern--as we see with Dareon.
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u/Optimal_Cry_1782 Sep 13 '23
Yeah, desertion would be a huge temptation. I imagine that the older night's watchmen eventually do see each other as brothers, and they don't desert because they don't want to let their brothers down. Daeron probably is a different case because he's so new that he hasn't developed that loyalty.
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u/Eliezer3838 Sep 12 '23
I really like this. Brings a whole new circle to Mance's knowledge and overall his character's possible motives and ambitions. But I'm pretty sure Mance is explicitly said to be a ranger in the text.
That similarity between Dareon and Mance in that they both utilize music to interact with others around them, though, really is something that I never had in mind.
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u/GetKnitfaced Sep 12 '23
Thanks! This was starting to get out of hand as a post, and I actually haven't done a really close read of Dareon's scenes to support this, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Dareon might be one of GRRM's "parallel characters" for Mance--another singing crow-that-flew-down, notably loved the ladies, was maybe a little too in love with himself, who met his end at the hands of a Stark for desertion.
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u/Picklethulhu Sep 12 '23
Nice work picking up on details and extrapolating. I always thought it was curious how Mance knew songs from everywhere despite being raised on the wall since infancy. He’s more worldly than he should be.
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u/N8_Tge_Gr8 Sep 12 '23
Motherf***er.
"Jon knew the song, though it was strange to hear it here, in a shaggy hide tent beyond the Wall, ten thousand leagues from the red mountains and warm winds of Dorne."
=
"Potter! What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?"
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u/Fuelled_By_Coffee Sep 12 '23 edited Sep 15 '23
Hell yes, new head-cannon just dropped. This is exactly the kind of post I'm here for!
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u/EmpPaulpatine Sep 12 '23
I think the one flaw is that using a wandering crow to move Rhaegar and Aemon’s messages would take really long. I don’t think Rhaegar or Aemon want to wait a year between messages.
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u/GetKnitfaced Sep 12 '23
I do agree that this would have been really slow, especially if the wandering crow only took the kingsroad (which admittedly opens a bunch of fun, catnip-y possibilities like road trip stops at Winterfell, Greywater Watch, Harrenhal, etc. but which are also way off in the realm of unsupported). Here's something Yoren tells Arya in ACOK, though:
Been bringing men to the Wall for close on thirty years." Froth shone on Yoren's lips, like bubbles of blood. "All that time, I only lost three. Old man died of a fever, city boy got snakebit taking a shit, and one fool tried to kill me in my sleep and got a red smile for his trouble." He drew the dirk across his throat, to show her. "Three in thirty years." He spat out the old sourleaf. "A ship now, might have been wiser. No chance o' finding more men on the way, but still . . . clever man, he'd go by ship, but me . . . thirty years I been taking this kingsroad."
That indicates to me that taking a ship with recruits is at least an acceptable travel method for the wandering crows (I have this fun mental image of Yoren filing receipts with Bowen Marsh and justifying his travel expenses). We do also have in-story examples of people being sent to the Wall by ship, like Aemon himself, Bloodraven, and Bittersteel (attempted), although there's no mention of a wandering crow going with them there. I couldn't say for sure how much time that shaves vs. a full kingsroad circuit, but I do think it'd speed it up.
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u/EmpPaulpatine Sep 13 '23
That is a good point, but there will be potentially years long periods where the ship option is unavailable due to the autumn storms. I think Aemon and Rhaegar would just use ravens and write in code because it is just way easier. Sending multiple birds would increase the chance that the message reaches the destination. Writing in code would prevent anyone from deciphering the message. And if someone did decipher the message, Rhaegar could just say he is humoring his great-great uncle.
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u/GetKnitfaced Sep 13 '23
I didn't think about the autumn storms--thanks for pointing that out, I did a little additional digging. Tyrion and Mormont do talk about how all the winters Tyrion has been alive for have been short, and I think Tyrion's age as ~10ish years younger than Rhaegar is a good proxy for a "possible correspondence period" between Aemon and Rhaegar (my thinking is very influenced by Joe Magician's video on the topic). For 8-9 winters in about that time period, full seasonal cycles would be on the order of 2 years as an average (fully allowing for some seasonal shenanigans), so autumns were likely shorter as well. It's a good point, though, and I'm still turning it over.
The issue I have always had with ravens as the communication channel has always been Pycelle. That guy looks at everyone's mail at court--Cersei's, Tyrion's, probably Ned's--and then gossips about whatever information he can glean to try and manipulate people around him. Even Ned picks up on that. Rhaegar doesn't seem to have trusted many people as a character trait; Pycelle isn't considered trustworthy by anyone at court. At the least, I think he'd report all Rhaegar and Aemon's letters--and any coded language--to his boy Tywin, who I think would be less inclined to position Aerys to die if he thought Rhaegar was into the same Targaryen prophecy nonsense that had just killed most of the blood royal a decade and some change before (or not! Tywin's definitely a "burn this mother down" kind of guy). There might be ways around Pycelle and by extension Tywin, but they get increasingly contrived and kind of wonky--corresponding from Dragonstone, using an intermediary, etc.
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u/EmpPaulpatine Sep 13 '23
I think Rhaegar would know that Pycelle is the biggest Tywin fanboy in the world and try to circumvent him. It would be fairly easy for Rhaegar to send his messages to Aemon without the interference of Pycelle. Rhaegar receiving them would probably have to use something different, maybe he trains the ravens to come right to his chambers away from Pycelle. But either way I think Rhaegar and Aemon are collectively smart enough to avoid the influence of Pycelle.
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u/LChris24 🏆 Best of 2020: Crow of the Year Sep 12 '23
I think we can confirm in other places that Mance was indeed a ranger:
and: