As of this writing, A Song of Ice and Fire fans have been waiting almost 13 years for author George R.R. Martin to finish The Winds of Winter, the long, long-awaited sixth book in his series. We've had three U.S. presidents in that time. Game of Thrones, HBO's adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire, aired in its entirety. It's nuts. We've all gone crazy waiting.
I'd like to demonstrate for you how that insanity manifests. The other day, Martin posted something new on his blog. The title of the post is "Words of Wisdom" and there's a small picture of a blue rose in the author profile section. The post is just a picture of the writer William Faulkner, the author of books like The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, with a caption: "Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely." Martin's mood is set to "comtemplative." He has tagged the post with the tags "dreams" and "writing."
Is this just an innocuous post where one author shares "words of wisdom" from another? At a glance you might think that, but you aren't peering through the looking glass. Allow me to decode this message for you:
- Look at the first letters of each word in the title of the post: "Words of Wisdom." "WoW." What else does "WoW" stand for? Winds of Winter, the next book in Martin's series. Pick up the chunks of your brain off the floor.
- Martin has an image of a blue rose as his profile picture? Rhaegar Targaryen gave Lyanna Stark a crown of blue roses when he named her the Queen of Love and Beauty at the Tourney at Harrenhal, an event that led into Robert's Rebellion. The blue rose has become a symbol Rhaegar and Lyanna's forbidden love. In The Winds of Winter, it's widely expected that Martin will reveal that Rhaegar and Lyanna are actually the parents of Jon Snow, as was already unveiled on the TV show Game of Thrones.
- The William Faulkner quote is about dreams, and Martin has included the tags "dreams" and "writing." The seventh and purportedly final book in the Song of Ice and Fire series is titled A Dream of Spring. Martin is still writing The Winds of Winter, but he's admitted in interviews that he's gotten ideas that pertain to A Dream of Spring as well.
So what does all this mean? Clearly, it means...SOMETHING. Something about The Winds of Winter. Something about A Dream of Spring. Perhaps a release date for Winds is forthcoming. Perhaps Martin has already made headway on A Dream of Spring. Perhaps I've been waiting to read the next book in this series for over a decade and my mind has become a shell of madness. Perhaps all of the above.
By the way, it's not just me overthinking this. I found a lot of these interpretations on a thread on the Song of Ice and Fire subreddit, which currently has over 250 comments. We're all in this together, until the bitter end.
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