okay so delusion incoming
there is an ancient Egyptian myth about sacred tree growing from the corpse of a god. i believe in general (especially after SOTE), that elden ring is heavily inspired by Egyptian mythology (could write an essay on it); moreover, the god in tree-out-of corpse in question is Osiris, who has multiple chapters dedicated to him in Frazer's The Golden Bough, which i also believe to be major ER inspiration
quick myth rundown for context
i have other reasons to try to apply this myth onto ER, but let's skip them because i don't want to write a lot of text. thing is when i found out about this tree part of the myth i tried to apply logic of it to ER lore: let's say, growing the sacred tree requires death of a god or their corpse
first let me argue a bit that death in general is associated with trees in elden ring
our runes left after death look like a sapling
Helphen's Steeple looks like a tree, as do Blue-Feathered Branchsword and Red-Feathered Branchsword talismans
in an area with giant dead trees we find ancestor spirit with sprouted horns and tons of lore about life-ripping and power growing from death
erdtree burial itself of course and also jars feeded to the minor erdtrees
first point is especially relevant for me here: if tarnished leaves a sapling when dies, the thought of a god too leaving some kind of tree after their death looks not so far fetched
we know marika and her children are sort of tree people with special flesh, but let's look at it from other pov: Marika is a god, and her children are demigods, presumably with some part of the godhood with them
if "you need death\ corpse of a god to grow a sacred tree" then Miquella's storyline makes even more sense. He tries to grow the sacred tree with his blood, because it's his life power; then he fails to grow it completely, maybe because as his death is incomplete \ impossible, the sacred tree, too, is arrested
with that, seemingly unconnected lore about Miquella mourning Godwyn not dying now may seem relevant to Miquella storyline more; if Godwyn has some kind of godly vigor and tree-from-god-death rule is true, then there is a chance Godwyn dying fully would have made Haligtree completion possible
if not Haligtree, Godwyn vigor could have been used to rejuvenate the Erdtree or to make minor erdtrees possible. We actually know Godwyn is very vigorous in that kind of sense, because he actively sprouts
DLC adds to some connections here i think. for example, new lore line reads:
These knights, once Godwyn's personal guard, quested to find their transfigured master's cadaver surrogate—for the coming age of the Duskborn.
It appears direct jp translation (source: Zayf the scholar) has a much less obscure meaning:
Funnily enough Osiris section of The Golden Bough references this legend:
Further, we read of a Norwegian king, Halfdan the Black, whose body was cut up and buried in different parts of his kingdom for the sake of ensuring the fruitfulness of the earth. He is said to have been drowned at the age of forty through the breaking of the ice in spring. What followed his death is thus related by the old Norse historian Snorri Sturluson: “He had been the most prosperous (literally, blessed with abundance) of all kings. So greatly did men value him that when the news came that he was dead and his body removed to Hringariki and intended for burial there, the chief men from Raumariki and Westfold and Heithmörk came and all requested that they might take his body with them and bury it in their various provinces; they thought that it would bring abundance to those who obtained it. Eventually it was settled that the body was distributed in four places. The head was laid in a barrow at Steinn in Hringariki, and each party took away their own share and buried it. All these barrows are called Halfdan’s barrows.” It should be remembered that this Halfdan belonged to the family of the Ynglings, who traced their descent from Frey, the great Scandinavian god of fertility.
There are theories out there about Ranni planning only incomplete death of Godwyn, as if there was some kind of original plan about Godwyn dying completely and Ranni sabotaged it to her benefit. Imo, trees-out-of-death gives it some more context\potential, because
if godwyn is a giant battery his murder suddenly gets much more weight because profit which plotters could have got out of it looks more simple and understandable
game text really like to point out a lot that a) you can't get boons from nothing, life comes from death, power comes from death b) erdtree turned out to not be eternal and perfect and everyone was freaked out by this
most popular theories about who could have sponsored ranni include of course marika and radagon. but no matter what exactly happened, we know miquella was very favored by his father
we had so much information about miq mourning godwyn that godwyn's death looks to me as something very relevan to miquella's plans, which in the base game were all tied up to growing the haligtree. he failed to grow the tree, he also failed to get the eclipse; he begged godwyn to dia a true death; it's tempting to say these facts are related to one another
there's this idea that we cannot get new era going on without enabling death first
This is all of course tinfoil hat stuff and has a lot of loose ends
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