And so we reach the peak of Tyrion’s Dance storyline: the trip through the Sorrows and a mighty important game of cyvasse! Many apologies for the delay; this is some intimidatingly dense material, and required a couple rewrites.
(Image by marcsimonetti.deviantart.com)
The Sorrows are ruin, museum, and leper colony all in one, and GRRM masterfully moves among multiple tones to collapse the setting’s history into its present. Even as the author ratchets up the unease leading to the stone men attacking the Shy Maid, Tyrion’s fifth Dance chapter consistently captures the melancholia of passing the charred remains of something so beautiful.
All Tyrion could see was something massive rising from the river, humped and ominous. He took it for a hill looming above a wooded island, or some colossal rock overgrown with moss and ferns and hidden by the fog. As the Shy Maid drew nearer, though, the shape of it came clearer. A wooden keep could be seen beside the water, rotted and overgrown. Slender spires took form above it, some of them snapped off like broken spears. Roofless towers appeared and disappeared, thrusting blindly upward. Halls and galleries drifted past: graceful buttresses, delicate arches, fluted columns, terraces and bowers.
All ruined, all desolate, all fallen.
The essence of great worldbuilding is that it is compelling on its merits while also reflecting and developing character traits. Think of Brienne’s gorgeous detour to Crackclaw Point, marinated in delightfully weird local history while furthering her storyline’s interrogations of loyalty, trust, and killing, or the way Davos’ mission to White Harbor allows him to reflect (quite movingly) on his pre-ascension days there, and so measure the gap between his past and present, even as GRRM is feeding us a ton of information about the city, the Manderlys, and their place in the wider plot. I’ll be talking about this double-sided approach a lot when we get to Volantis, believe you me, but the Sorrows equally exemplifies the elegant, exquisite method by which GRRM drew us deeper into both his world and his characters in Feast/Dance.
After all, Tyrion’s in a pretty sorrowful place himself right now, and the remains of the great Rhoynar cities can be thought of as an externalized self-image unfolding in front of him: the ruins of his soul. That’s why he associates the Shrouded Lord with Tywin; who else would rule a map of his psyche but his father’s ghost? One of the many delights of Tyrion’s Clash arc was how well his ever on-the-move mind fit the bustle of the capital city around him. The tortured drift of his Dance plot finds its proper analogue here, among the dead.
RFTIT Tumblr Backup 