The Ghost of High Heart and the Children of the Forest
re: the Ghost of High Heart not being a child of the forest. She is described as having red eyes and white hair, which is like Brynden Rivers when he’s in the tree. I sort of assumed she was a child of the forest who was also a greenseer. (Since the weirwoods are all white with red eyes, I assumed all greenseers looked like this.) I guess this is just a theory…
Well, I can see why you’d think that-- it actually was often theorized by fans that the Ghost of High Heart was one of the Children of the Forest.
When we meet her in ASOS, her appearance is very unusual:
Beside the embers of their campfire, she saw Tom, Lem, and Greenbeard talking to a tiny little woman, a foot shorter than Arya and older than Old Nan, all stooped and wrinkled and leaning on a gnarled black cane. Her white hair was so long it came almost to the ground. When the wind gusted it blew about her head in a fine cloud. Her flesh was whiter, the color of milk, and it seemed to Arya that her eyes were red, though it was hard to tell from the bushes.
Arya even wonders if the Ghost is one of the Children -- and though Tom Sevenstrings tells her that she’s only “an old dwarf woman”, some fans took this to be a red herring to throw us off the track of her actual origins.
But then we did finally meet actual Children of the Forest in ADWD:
It was a girl, but smaller than Arya, her skin dappled like a doe’s beneath a cloak of leaves. Her eyes were queer—large and liquid, gold and green, slitted like a cat’s eyes. No one has eyes like that. Her hair was a tangle of brown and red and gold, autumn colors, with vines and twigs and withered flowers woven through it.
Though the men of the Seven Kingdoms might call them the children of the forest, Leaf and her people were far from childlike. Little wise men of the forest would have been closer. They were small compared to men, as a wolf is smaller than a direwolf. That does not mean it is a pup. They had nut-brown skin, dappled like a deer’s with paler spots, and large ears that could hear things that no man could hear. Their eyes were big too, great golden cat’s eyes that could see down passages where a boy’s eyes saw only blackness. Their hands had only three fingers and a thumb, with sharp black claws instead of nails.
That tells us that the CotF aren’t just small humans, they’re a distinctly different species with distinct non-human features. So, if in addition to her other characteristics, the Ghost had four fingers with claws, large ears, dappled skin, and cat’s eyes, then Arya’s narrative would have certainly mentioned it. And as it didn’t, she doesn’t have them, and therefore the Ghost is not one of the Children of the Forest.
And based on her actual characteristics -- three feet tall, white hair, white skin, red eyes -- we can understand what the Ghost of High Heart actually is: an old human woman, a dwarf, an albino. And not even that old; if she were 30ish when she came to court with Jenny of Oldstones, she’d be in her 90s now. Perhaps somewhat older, as old as Old Nan or Maester Aemon, but nothing requiring “immortality magic” or the longevity of the CotF.
Now, you also mentioned Brynden Rivers and the CotF greenseers and weirwoods. Interestingly, they all may be relevant to the Ghost of High Heart in some way. Bloodraven is also an albino, which apparently has some kind of magical significance in the world of ASOIAF:
The direwolf had no answer, but he licked Jon’s face with a tongue like a wet rasp, and his eyes caught the last light and shone like two great red suns.
Red eyes, Jon realized, but not like Melisandre’s. He had a weirwood’s eyes. Red eyes, red mouth, white fur. Blood and bone, like a heart tree. He belongs to the old gods, this one. And he alone of all the direwolves was white. Six pups they’d found in the late summer snows, him and Robb; five that were grey and black and brown, for the five Starks, and one white, as white as Snow.
Arya’s narrative even draws a connection between the Ghost and Ghost:
The firelight made her eyes gleam as red as the eyes of Jon’s wolf. He was a ghost too.
--ASOS Arya VIII
And as for the CotF greenseers, while we don’t know if any were albino, some did have red eyes:
“Those you call the children of the forest have eyes as golden as the sun, but once in a great while one is born amongst them with eyes as red as blood, or green as the moss on a tree in the heart of the forest. By these signs do the gods mark those they have chosen to receive the gift. The chosen ones are not robust, and their quick years upon the earth are few, for every song must have its balance. But once inside the wood they linger long indeed. A thousand eyes, a hundred skins, wisdom deep as the roots of ancient trees. Greenseers.”
So while the Ghost of High Heart may not be one of the Children of the Forest (though who knows if she ever met any, like Leaf who traveled the realms of men for centuries), she does have characteristics in common with their greenseers... both their own and the human Last Greenseer, Brynden Rivers.
Now, venturing into speculative theory territory -- I think it’s possible that the Ghost may have one more thing in common with Bloodraven, a Targaryen bastard. In The Princess and the Queen, GRRM’s novella detailing the story of the Dance of the Dragons civil war, there’s a certain unresolved plot dangler. Prince Aemond Targaryen, during the time he had control of Harrenhal, took a lover, Alys Rivers. And we’re told that Alys could see visions of the future (in a cloud, in a pool of water, in fires). When Aemond goes off for his fatal duel with Daemon Targaryen in the skies over the God’s Eye, he leaves behind a very pregnant Alys... and then she’s never mentioned in the story again. We don’t know what became of her, but if Alys had Aemond’s child, I think it’s possible that the Ghost could be that child’s descendant. (Probably not the child herself, as she would be 170 years old, which is a bit much.) Whatever Alys’s talent was, mixed with the Targaryen blood that sometimes gives prophetic dreams... that could explain the Ghost’s own powerful talent of prophesy. And in addition to being marked as chosen by the Old Gods... well.
“The old gods stir and will not let me sleep,” she heard the woman say.
