“I’ll be dead before the dawn.”
As Melisandre completed her story
at the Battle of Winterfell,
‘Game of Thrones’ subtly revealed the
answer
to a key question of this series:
what is the value
and purpose of prophecy?
“Prophecies are dangerous things.”
The Red Woman finally gets to play
an indispensable part in
helping fire prevail over ice,
just as she’s always longed to.
When she reunites with Arya
and reminds the girl
of her earlier prophecy,
“Brown eyes, blue eyes, green eyes.
Eyes you'll shut forever.”
“Brown eyes, green eyes
and blue eyes.”
this is the moment in which
the Battle of Winterfell
is decided in favor of the living.
Arya would never have
defeated the Night King
without the confidence
and sense of purpose
that Melisandre imparts to her here.
Yet Melisandre’s journey up to this point
has been long and rough,
full of missteps that
caused great suffering
and the loss of innocent lives.
“It will all be over soon,
Princess.”
And we can’t help but see
some morals in her tale
that speak to the ‘Game of Thrones’
fandom as well –
about our relationship to predictions
and our impulse to ‘see the future’
of what will happen in this very show.
“I have seen your path to victory
in the flames.”
So let’s look closer at
what the Red Woman’s journey
teaches us about the complex,
dangerous yet central role
that visions of the future play in our lives.
"The night is dark
and full of terrors, old man,
but the fire burns them all away.”
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As the army of the dead
comes to Winterfell,
Melisandre at long last
understands her purpose.
After the oft-resurrected Beric Dondarrion
meets his final end,
in a pose that might
remind us of a crucifix,
she realizes that the Lord of Light
brought Beric back
so he could help the Hound
usher Arya to safety.
“The Lord brought him back for a purpose.
Now that purpose has been served.”
Seeing this, she grasps why she’s truly
there,
“You said we'd meet again.”
“And here we are.”
and repeats the key part
of her earlier prophecy to Arya.
“…And blue eyes.”
Before this point, we see Arya
uncharacteristically losing her nerve.
Despite her training with
the faceless men of Braavos,
“He's got many faces.
I look forward to seeing this one.”
she's overwhelmed by staring
true death in the face.
But when Melisandre tells her with full faith
what is destined to happen,
backed by the proof of what her words
have already gotten right,
“You said I'd shut many eyes forever.
You were right about that too.”
Arya is invigorated by the knowledge
of what she must do and the trust
that she can do it.
Just as Melisandre once drew
on the words of a dead person
to thoroughly unsettle Jon,
“You know nothing Jon Snow.”
the Red Woman now uses her insight
to summon the magic words
that have the power to remind Arya
of who she truly is
and why she’s come all this way –
the motto of her teacher, Syrio Forel:
“What do we say
to the god of death?”
“Not today.”
“What do we say
to the god of death?”
“Not today.”
Melisandre wins this battle
for the side of Light,
because she is here at the right time
to repeat and interpret her prediction
to inspire the key warrior.
Yet if either woman
had truly grasped
her words' full significance
before this point,
that wouldn’t have helped anything.
After all, if we were meant
to understand a prophecy
in more literal detail when we first hear
it,
wouldn’t it then be delivered to us
in as much detail?
A prophecy is vague
and incomplete by design,
it reveals only as much
as it wants us to know.
“It's written that a warrior will draw
a burning sword from the fire.
And that sword shall be Lightbringer.”
So ultimately, this scene
reveals a key lesson
about the reason prophecies are given
to characters at all in Game of Thrones:
it’s not so that they can see the future,
but so that when the future comes
they will recognize it.
They must be ready to seize
on the crucial moment,
and have the conviction to do
what they’re meant to do.
"There is only one hell, Princess.
The one we live in now."
Melisandre’s problem for most of the show
is that she gives into the temptation
to fill in the blanks between
the fragments of what she knows.
“How do you know
what he commands?”
“I interpret his signs
as well as I can.”
She arrogantly attempts
to decipher the full picture,
like an omniscient god.
“You said you saw
my victory in the flames.”
Due to all her errors,
it may be easy to overlook that Melisandre
is right about a lot of things.
“The usurper Robb Stark is dead.
Betrayed by his bannerman.”
“And you take credit because
you dropped a leech into the fire?”
“The true war lies to the north, my king.”
It’s just that she proves the saying
‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’
–
as she supplements
what she’s foreseen,
like that there is a prince
who was promised,
“The prince who is promised
will bring the dawn.”
with big, baseless assumptions like that
Stannis Baratheon must be that prince.
“He’s the lord’s chosen.”
Melisandre's plot guiding Stannis
in his doomed bid for the Iron Throne
is a cautionary tale about
the perils not only of divination,
but also of certainty.
The story is deeply
reminiscent of Macbeth,
Shakespeare’s tale of an ambitious man
who trusts the prophecy of witches
who say he will be king,
but he misinterprets their words.
In this case, the witch
herself is responsible
for the misinterpretation.
“Stannis Baratheon, warrior of light,
your sword awaits you.”
Ignoring how much she doesn't know
in her fervor for serving her Lord,
she backs the wrong horse,
focuses on smaller details
while sidelining big ones,
“There is power in king’s blood.”
and rushes to sacrifice innocent people
on the chance that this might help.
“The fire cleansed them
of the sins of the world.”
She manipulates men to serve her aims
by preying on their powerlust,
and regular lust.
“Let me show you
what you have inside you.”
She’s a portrait of the extremist,
"Death by fire is the purest death."
who is so sure she’s doing right,
that she causes terrible damage.
“For you, we offer up this girl
that you may cleanse her with your fire
and that its light may lead our way.”
When it comes to Stannis, she’s wrong –
but the moral is that,
whether you may be right or wrong,
you should never be sure enough
to burn a small girl at the stake.
“Father, where are you?
Don't let her do this.”
“It’s what the Lord wants.”
“You were right all along.
The Lord never spoke to me.”
After Stannis loses,
Melisandre has a crisis of faith.
"The great victory I saw in the flames,
all of it was a lie.”
And in the episode titled ‘The Red Woman’
we see her true form.
The sight of this centuries-old woman
underneath the illusion,
reveals to us that hers has been
a very long journey.
“I've been ready to die for many years.
If the Lord was done with me,
so be it, but he's not.”
She’s been waiting to
realize her Lord’s will
for a far longer time
than we can even fathom.
“You talk about war as if you understand
it.”
“I've been fighting far longer than you.”
So we can sympathize with
why she was so eager
to bring the Prince that
was Promised prophecy to fruition,
and we might see why she doesn’t feel
the deaths of individuals as we do.
“They're in a better place now,
Princess.”
There’s a lot we don’t know a
bout Melisandre’s backstory –
“And you didn't have this.”
“No.
But I suffered in other ways,
sweet girl, believe me.”
but she was born a slave
and sold as a young girl
to the Temple of the Lord of Light,
where she became a Red Priestess.
“Bought and sold, scourged and branded,
until the Lord of Light reached down,
took me in his hand and raised me up.”
She comes from Asshai, a city in the far east
of the continent of Essos
that’s associated with magic.
According to ‘The World of Ice and Fire’,
Asshai is so old that nobody knows
how old or who built it.
We hear mention of the Shadow lands
beyond Asshai,
said to be the origin of Tyene Sand’s poison
and Daenerys’ dragon eggs.
“ln the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai,
they say there are fields of ghost grass
with stalks as pale as milk
that glow in the night.
lt murders all other grass…”
Melisandre -- and Quaithe,
another character we meet from Asshai,
are shadowbinders, meaning they can
direct shadows to do what they will.
We see this in action when Melisandre
gives birth to a Shadow Monster,
fathered by Stannis, to kill his brother,
Renly Baratheon.
“A shadow with the face
of Stannis Baratheon.”
According to ‘The World of Ice and Fire’,
shadowbinders are the most fearsome
of all magical people in Asshai,
the only ones who dare to venture
to explore the Shadow Lands.
They’re also the only ones
who eat the blind fish
that live in Asshai’s toxic river Ash,
which has made all of
the city’ residents sterile,
a fact that may relate to
Melisandre’s peculiar pregnancy.
The Lord of Light is also known
as the God of Flame and Shadow.
And as passionately as she serves fire,
Melisandre sees the shadow
as the necessary inverse of this,
just as she has no problem
with using dark methods
to aid her righteous purpose.
“Shadows cannot live
in the dark, Ser Davos.
They are servants of light,
the children of fire.
And the brighter the flame,
the darker they are.”
For all her dark powers
and knowledge, though,
when she learns that Beric
has been resurrected,
she’s stunned.
“That’s not possible.”
She doesn’t know what death is
and yearns to truly understand
what is on ‘the other side’.
“You've been to the other side.”
“The other side?
There is no other side.”
After her great failure,
the humbled and
nearly destroyed Melisandre
allows doubt in.
“You were right all along.
The Lord never spoke to me.”
Accepting how much she doesn’t know
makes her not only
a more likeable character,
but also a key player
on the team for the side of life.
It’s significant that the person
who comes to her
in her moment of despair
is the skeptic
who's fought to free Stannis
from her influence:
Ser Davos.
“She's a foreigner preaching
her foreign religion.
Some believe she whispers orders
in your ear and you obey.”
Davos rouses her out of her depression,
not by claiming to care about her god,
“I'm not a devout man, obviously.
Seven gods, drowned gods,
tree gods, it's all the same.”
but by acknowledging the power
he’s witnessed in her.
“I'm not asking the Lord of Light for help.
I'm asking the woman who showed me
that miracles exist.”
And indeed, in addition to her visions,
on the show we see her
perform blood magic,
pyrokinesis, resurrection,
glamour magic,
extreme longevity,
and resisting poison and cold.
“You’re not cold, my lady?”
“Never.
The Lord’s fire lives within me, Jon Snow.”
Despite his feelings about her,
Davos comes to Melisandre
because Jon Snow has been murdered
and only magic could possibly help."
”There's always the Red Woman.”
"What's one redhead going to do
against forty armed men?"
"You haven't seen her do
what I've seen her do."
This more lost and malleable Melisandre,
who is no longer so sure,
"If you want to help him,
leave him be."
is far more useful to the greater good;
her immense power can be called on
and directed where it’s most needed.
After this, she shifts to believing
Jon is the Prince who was Promised,
“Stannis was not
the prince who was promised,
but someone has to be.”
but she becomes
more measured in her faith.
She’s no longer such
a zealous proselytizer,
and accepts blame for her mistakes
"Ride South today.
If you return to the North,
I'll have you hanged as a murderer."
"If you ever come back this way,
I will execute you myself."
Her ability to admit complexity
into her worldview
makes her more powerful than she was
when she saw the world
in certain, simplistic terms.
“lf half an onion is black with rot,
it's a rotten onion.
A man is good or he is evil.”
In the Battle of Winterfell,
her Lord appears to answer her
by helping her deliver much-needed fire
in two key moments:
first when she lights
the dothraki swords,
and then when she lights the trenches.
And as we see the fire
reflected in her eyes here,
this appears to signal
that the battle fulfills a key vision
we’ve heard her speak of before.
Back in Season 2, we see similar flames
in Stannis’ eyes when Melisandre helps him
have a vision.
They both later refer to
what they saw in the fire.
“I saw a vision in the flames,
a great battle in the snow, I saw it.”
“You saw it yourself, my king,
when you stared into the flames.
A great battle in the snow.”
This victory in the snow
that they were seeing
was the Battle of Winterfell,
but their desire and self-interest
led them to misread what they saw
as Stannis’ triumph.
Only now, much later, does Melisandre
get the satisfaction of
piecing together the full picture.
So her story illustrates that being a believer
is a long, difficult road.
She wants to give everything,
do anything for her Lord,
but so much of a devout person's life
takes place in the dark,
not knowing what the point of it all is.
“I don’t understand our lord.”
When she at last gets the death
which she has also foreseen,
“I will return, dear spider.
One last time.”
"My lady-"
“I have to die in this strange country.”
this confirms that, like Beric,
she has fulfilled her Lord's purpose
and can go in peace.
In this story which is full of
cryptic words about the future,
Melisandre illustrates the power, limitations
and dangers of vision.
Without her words to Arya,
everyone at Winterfell
would be fodder for
the army of the dead.
And it’s significant that
two of her key relationships
turn out to be with Davos and Arya
who both hate her for most of the story,
“This woman is evil!
She's the mother of demons.”
“You're a witch.
You're going to hurt him.”
and both overcome inherent cynicism
to appreciate the role
of magic in their lives.
Yet , as much as prophecies
factor into this story,
almost everyone who believes
in one gets it wrong,
or feels trapped by
a fixed idea of the future.
“Everything she said came true.
You couldn't have stopped it.”
It’s human nature to twist
a fortune-teller’s words
to match what we hope for,
to count on a good thing
happening sooner than it will,
or deny that a bad thing
will come to pass.
“Everyone wants to know their future
until they know their future.”
As incredibly tempting
as it is to know the future,
our self-interest makes it impossible
for us to actually hear a prediction
with the objectivity
necessary to understand it.
Crucially, as we see in Melisandre,
even the desire to know before it’s time
is a self-interest that clouds our vision.
Melisandre isn’t alone
in putting great store in clues
about the future of Westeros.
The entire Game of Thrones
fandom has devoted ample time
to deciphering the story’s prophecies,
striving to know the ending in advance.
More often than not this has borne no fruit.
And one of the things many of us
love most about this show
is its ability to surprise us,
which can be one of the great beauties
of life as well.
“Life, ah,
life is full of possibilities.”
So viewers might learn from Melisandre,
we don’t need to be in such a rush
to see what will be, before it comes.
While we crave certainty
that things will turn out okay,
in our lives, and in Game of Thrones,
it’s our human lot not to know.
And in time, all will be revealed.
"I've brought ice and fire together."
