First Men: Difference between revisions

The First Men do not have a written culture. They do leave certain runes on stone when marking the landscape, however they should be understood as primarily an oral culture. This is by no means to say that their culture is lesser - for memory is highly prized, which in many ways leads to some highly skilled individuals within the culture. Leaning is embodied not by books, but by sharing of traditions and word of mouth, a far more social and less restrictive form than that hoarded by the septons of the Andals. Women too have a role in embodying learning amongst the First Men, which gives them prestige and an air of wisdom in First Men society.

Unlike the Andals, who have lived more or less as one people in one land for many centuries, the First Men have spread out across Westeros, living far away from one another in greatly different environments. As a result - they too have diverged greatly in their beliefs. The majority of First Men who live in mainland Westeros revere the Gods of the Weirwoods, nameless spirits of rock and stream, bird and beast. These were the gods of the Children of the Forest first, but were adopted by the First Men following the signing of The Pact thousands of years ago. Worship of the Old Gods is a combination of personal oaths, relating to First Men conceptions of honour, with deference and protection of sacred natural sites, and even offering them blood sacrifices. Weirwoods and their groves are seen as sacred, and any desecration of them is a crime on a par with kinslaying or breaching guest right.

Nonetheless, not all First Men have adopted the worship of these gods. The First Gods, the gods the First Men carried with them when they first came to Westeros, endure still in certain pockets of Westeros. In Dorne, where weirwoods never grew and the Children never roamed, the First Men kept their old beliefs in their truest form, recognising the true gods of the world to be the forces of nature; the sun, the winds, the earth, and the seas. What aspect of these the First Men of Dorne focus primarily upon depends on their environment. In the Red Mountains, the earth and its powers and riches are of chief concern. In the dread deserts, the sun alone holds sway. Along the Greenblood, it is the waters that give the life to the earth to grow their precious crops. To these men still, the Gods of the Weirwoods are strange, sinister, and foreign. In other isolated places where Weirwoods have not taken root, these gods survive as well. The Sistermen revere the sea as their mother, and the sky their father. The Ironmen speak of a God in his Watery Halls beneath the waves, and the dread forces of the Storm God. The Gods of the storm are recalled within the ancient traditions of the Stormlanders as well, even if most of them have long since turned away from their fearful worship.