The Three-Eyed Raven's Visions
Not prophecy exactly ÔÇö the past, present and future seen at once by a boy who can no longer be surprised.
The prophecy
Everything else in this collection is a message: somebody saw something and told somebody else, and the trouble began with the telling. Bran StarkÔÇÖs case is different in kind. Nobody hands him a riddle. He is given, slowly and at considerable cost, the ability to go and look ÔÇö and what he looks at is not the future but time itself, from a position slightly outside it. Calling it prophecy is a convenience. It is closer to an archive that has learned to open.
It begins with an accident and a dream. A boy of seven or eight is thrown from a tower window at Winterfell and lies broken and senseless for a long while, and during that sleep something comes to him: a crow with a third eye that will not leave him alone, that tells him he must fly or die, and that keeps returning long after he wakes to find his legs will not work. His family put the dreams down to the fall. They are wrong, and the story is unusually direct about it ÔÇö the boy dreams things he has no way of knowing, and they turn out to have happened.
What the sight actually consists of has three parts, and they arrive in order. The first is the wolf: he can slip into the mind of his direwolf while he sleeps and run in its body, which is called skinchanging in the north and is not rare among the free folk beyond the Wall. The second is the greensight ÔÇö dreams that are not dreams, coming with a weight and a clarity ordinary dreams do not have, and often carrying knowledge of things happening elsewhere or not yet happened at all. The third and rarest is the one the crow is calling him north to learn: the ability to enter the weirwoods, the ancient white trees with faces cut into them, and to see through them.
That last is the thing that makes this entry a prophecy at all, because the trees do not observe from where they stand. They remember. A greenseer joined to the weirwood network can look through any tree with a face, anywhere it stands or has stood, at any point since it was carved ÔÇö which in the north means thousands of years and thousands of eyes. The promise made to the boy is not that he will be told the future. It is that he will never again be limited to one place, one body or one moment, and that in exchange he will not get to keep the ordinary life he was going to have. Nobody tells him the price up front. Nobody ever does.
Where it comes from
This is the oldest tradition in Westeros and the only wholly native one. The children of the forest were in these lands before the First Men came across the arm of Dorne with bronze and horses, and the weirwoods were their gods, their libraries and their instrument. Their greenseers cut faces into the trees, and the histories the maesters admit to say the children could see through the eyes of animals and read what the trees had seen. What broke it was the arrival of the Andals, who cut down the weirwoods wherever they took land, so that the trees survive in numbers only in the north and past the Wall.
The First Men adopted the gods of the people they had been fighting ÔÇö an unusual outcome for any conquest ÔÇö and the old gods have no scripture, no priesthood and no doctrine. What they have is trees with faces, and the northern habit of saying serious things in front of them, on the theory that they are being heard. There is no liturgy to get wrong, which is one reason this tradition has produced no zealots.
The Citadel regards greensight as folklore and skinchanging as peasant superstition, and the maesters have a professional stake in that verdict. The order dislikes magic on principle, teaches that the children of the forest were a real people who left no supernatural inheritance, and treats direwolves the way it treats dragons ÔÇö as fauna that has had the decency to go extinct. The free folk beyond the Wall, who have no maesters, take skinchangers entirely for granted and are frightened of them, which given the state of the evidence is the more empirical position.
How often has it appeared? Rarely, and the story is careful about the ratio: many people have a touch of wolf-dreaming, a small number can truly enter a beast, and a greenseer proper is spoken of as one in a great many thousands. There has been at least one in living memory in the south, and the northern histories carry a scatter of others, always at the edge of the record and usually spoken of afterwards as sorcerers rather than seers.
How it has been read
The first argument is whether this is prophecy or merely surveillance. A greenseer looking through a tree at something happening a thousand leagues away is not foretelling anything; he is watching. The greensight proper ÔÇö the dreams that arrive unbidden and turn out to concern things not yet done ÔÇö is a different faculty, and the books are not clear about whether it is a separate gift or the same gift working in an unfamiliar direction. The distinction matters enormously, because information about the present can be acted on, and information about the future in this world has never once been acted on successfully.
The second is the question of time, and it is genuinely open. If the trees hold every moment they have witnessed, and a greenseer can move among those moments, then in what sense is the past over? Bran is repeatedly warned that the past cannot be altered and that what he is seeing is fixed, and the warnings are notably insistent ÔÇö insistent in the way people are when the thing they are forbidding is possible. Several readers have observed that the story keeps arranging scenes in which somebody in the past appears to hear something. Whether the sight is a window or a door is the largest unanswered question attached to this entry.
The third is about the price, and here the story is unusually blunt for a fantasy. Every warning Bran receives about the weirwoods is a warning about being consumed: that the trees do not merely lend their eyes, that a man who spends long enough in them stops being a man, and that the thing at the end of the training is not a wiser boy but something else wearing his name. A skinchanger who dies inside his beast leaves part of himself there permanently. A greenseer who roots himself in a tree may be doing the same thing at a much greater scale and much more deliberately.
The fourth reading concerns what the gift is for. One view holds it is a weapon ÔÇö that the whole northern apparatus of Wall, Watch and weirwood exists as a defence against the cold, and that a greenseer is the northÔÇÖs answer to it. Another holds that it is a memory rather than a weapon: that the point of a network of trees which forgets nothing, in a world where the maesters control the written record and every noble house lies about its own history, is simply that somewhere there is an account that cannot be edited. The two readings imply very different endings, and the books have not chosen.
It should be stated plainly that almost nothing about the mechanics here is confirmed. The characters explaining it to Bran are old, strange, dying and possibly interested parties, and there is no second source anywhere in the story to check them against.
The problem with prophecy
The difficulty here runs opposite to every other entry in this collection. Elsewhere the problem is too little information delivered too obscurely to use. Here the problem is total information delivered to somebody who can do almost nothing with it. A boy who cannot walk, sitting in a cave or a godswood, can see the murder of his own family from six angles and reach none of them. Certainty without capability is not power. It is a much more refined form of helplessness, and the story treats it that way.
There is a second cost, subtler and probably worse. Knowing everything is corrosive to being anybody. A person is partly made of what they do not know ÔÇö of surprise, of hope, of getting things wrong in the ordinary way. A boy who has watched every moment of his own familyÔÇÖs history, including the moments they lied about, cannot be a member of that family in the way he was. The books and the show both understand this and go about it very differently, but neither pretends the exchange is a good deal for the boy.
And there is the question the sight raises that no other prophecy in the story does. If the past can be seen, it can perhaps be spoken into. If it can be spoken into, then some of the tragedies the reader has already watched may not have been accidents at all, and the person responsible may not have been born yet when they happened. The books have raised this possibility deliberately, have declined to resolve it, and have quietly made it the most unsettling idea in the series.
How it has played out ÔÇö open at your peril
The teacher under the hill
The crow of the dreams turns out to be a man, and in the books he is a very specific one: Brynden Rivers, a royal bastard of the last century who was Hand of the King and Lord Commander of the NightÔÇÖs Watch and vanished ranging beyond the Wall. Bran finds him in a cave under a hill north of the Wall, kept alive past any reasonable term by the roots of a weirwood that have grown through him, attended by the last handful of the children of the forest. He is not kind, he is not entirely honest, and he is teaching a child to replace him.
The show compressed this. Its three-eyed raven is an unnamed old man played first by one actor and then, after a recasting, by another, and the characterÔÇÖs identity as Bloodraven is never established on screen. The cave, the roots and the children are all present; the century of Westerosi politics behind the man in the tree is not.
The tower in the Dornish marches
The single most consequential thing BranÔÇÖs sight has produced, and it exists in full only on screen. There he looks back at the fight outside the tower where Ned Stark found his sister, sees the duel end in a way that does no credit to anybodyÔÇÖs legend, and then goes back a second time and follows Ned up the stairs into the room. Lyanna Stark is dying in a bed of blood and hands her brother a newborn, and the show cuts from the childÔÇÖs face to Jon SnowÔÇÖs. The parentage the first book asked about is confirmed by a boy watching a tree.
On the page none of this has happened. Bran has not been shown the tower, the reader has never been given the answer in plain words, and the whole matter rests on inference from a dream Ned Stark had in a black cell. It is the clearest case in the entire adaptation of the screen resolving something the page has kept closed.
Whether he can be heard
The books put the question on the table without answering it. Looking through the heart tree at Winterfell, Bran watches his own father years earlier, sitting beneath that tree with a sword across his knees, and calls out to him ÔÇö and Ned lifts his head as though something has spoken. Bran also finds he can speak through the tree in his own present, and does so, to a broken man in the godswood who has every reason to think he is going mad.
The show took this idea and built a set piece out of it. Its version of Hodor is revealed to have been a stable boy called Wylis whose mind was destroyed in a single moment ÔÇö a moment caused by Bran reaching back through time from the far future while the boy was standing in the past, tying the manÔÇÖs whole life to the instruction that killed him. It is a closed loop, and it means Bran made the servant who would carry him. The books have not written this and have never explained Hodor. Readers should treat the sequence as the adaptationÔÇÖs own answer to a question the novels have merely raised.
What the sight cost him
On screen the boy does not come back. What returns south of the Wall calls itself the Three-Eyed Raven, speaks of Brandon Stark in the third person, greets his sisters without warmth and tells his brother the truth about his birth as though reading it off a page. He then allows himself to be used as bait: the enemy is drawn to Winterfell because the memory of the world is sitting in its godswood, and everything that follows on that night is arranged around keeping him breathing.
The ending the show chose for him is the most argued-over decision in the series. With the throne melted and the great houses reduced to a council in a ruin, Tyrion Lannister proposes that a realm should be ruled by the best story rather than the best claim, and the lords elect Bran king of the six kingdoms ÔÇö a man with no heirs, no ambition and total recall. It is presented as the argument for memory over blood, and a great many readers have never accepted it.
The books have gone somewhere stranger and are nowhere near an ending. Bran is still under the hill, still learning, and has already begun to be worried by how much of himself the trees are keeping. Nothing about a throne, a council or a return south has been written. Anyone reading the showÔÇÖs ending back into the novels is guessing.