#haggon

“The skinchanger stopped ten yards away. His monster pawed at the mud, snuffling. A light powdering of snow covered the boar's humped black back. He gave a snort and lowered his head, and for half a heartbeat Jon thought he was about to charge. To either side of him, his men lowered their spears.

"Brother," Borroq said.

"You'd best go on. We are about to close the gate."

“You do that," Borroq said. "You close it good and tight. They're coming, crow." He smiled as ugly a smile as Jon had ever seen and made his way to the gate. The boar stalked after him. The falling snow covered up their tracks behind them.”

Firstly, do you think Greenseers and/or those who experience green dreams (E.g. Jojen Reed and Bran Stark) are considered part of the sort of loose brotherhood of Wargs and Skinchangers, in Wildling cultures beyond the Wall, as depicted here between Jon Snow and Borroq? Secondly, what exactly is Borroq smiling about in this scene?

Our first introduction to Borroq is from a gathering of skinchangers and wargs recounted in Varamyr's memory. Why they have meetings and what they discuss is not really clear. But it does seem like those born in that one-in-a-thousand chance are in the club. In First Men cultures that are less impacted by the Faith/southern culture, skinchanging, green dreams, green seeing, and magic are simply understood to be a thing and the gifted are both feared and honored. Being occasionally hunted and killed out of superstitious fears is probably a reason why they do network from time to time, maybe to keep tabs on each other, even if there can be bad blood among individuals or even if they disagree on some fundamentals. As we can see in Varamyr's POV, not every skinchanger plays by the rules Haggon lays out. Most seem to do their own thing.

Any kinship that extends to people with other gifts seems to be looser still, but they do intersect with each other occasionally. Jojen was visited by a three-eyed crow as he lay near death from greywater fever and was given the gift of green dreams. After Jojen tells his father, Howland Reed (who is described as an adept mage, but does not have prophetic visions), about his green dreams, HR sends his children to Winterfell to guide Bran as much as they can as his powers awaken. They are able to offer Bran some general knowledge about green magic/skin changing like you can't get sustenance by eating in Summer's body; however, they still must deliver Bran to an actual greenseer that can train him in the gifts they don't have. And we expect HR to reveal himself in the third act to do whatever it is he's going to do. High chance a mage that went to Isle of Faces University doesn't just exist to deliver paternity info.

As for Borroq himself, we simply don't know enough about him to really know what his deal is, but we might be able to infer some things to speculate. Tormund obviously has some contempt for him. Maybe not as much as he had for Varamyr, but seems he would rather not keep his company. Boars were among the animals Haggon warned Varamyr not to skinchange into because of how they can change a person. With that said, Borroq's boar is absolutely massive ("twice the size of Ghost") with sword-like tusks as long as a man's arm, indicating this is a fully mature boar that's been well-fed for many a season. It also hasn't had any predators or habitat constraints to stop it from growing so abnormally large. A normal-sized boar can fuck you up. This one is practically a forest god and it could probably mow through its enemies like a combine harvester. So it's safe to say Borroq himself might be as dangerous as his boar.

I don’t particularly like the Jojen Paste theory either, no worries. And no, I don’t think there’s any kind of power transfer via cannibalism. Varamyr ate Haggon’s heart while skinchanged into a wolf, not as a human being.

Had he sunk so low as to hunger after human meat? He could almost hear Haggon growling at him. “Men may eat the flesh of beasts and beasts the flesh of men, but the man who eats the flesh of man is an abomination.”

Abomination. That had always been Haggon’s favorite word. Abomination, abomination, abomination. To eat of human meat was abomination, to mate as wolf with wolf was abomination, and to seize the body of another man was the worst abomination of all. Haggon was weak, afraid of his own power. He died weeping and alone when I ripped his second life from him. Varamyr had devoured his heart himself. He taught me much and more, and the last thing I learned from him was the taste of human flesh.

That was as a wolf, though. He had never eaten the meat of men with human teeth.

–ADWD, Prologue

I wouldn’t say so, no, sorry. Systematized magic is, well, you put 250 fluid ounces of water and 5 ounces of African sea salt in a silver beaker, add 10 drops of essence of wormwood with your right hand and then another 10 drops with your left hand, stir 10 times clockwise, heat at 200° for 15 minutes, etc, etc. If becoming a skinchanger required that a child from a certain race needed to be exposed to a certain animal by a certain age for a certain amount of time, with certain potions to drink to put him into the right state of mind for bonding, with specific magic words he needs to say to transfer into an animal’s head, with an established school that potential skinchangers were required to attend and read books about what animal should be assigned to which kind of person and learn the magic words and how to brew the skinchanging potions – and most importantly, if all these rules were not followed precisely, then skinchanging wouldn’t work – then, yes, it would be systemized.

Instead what we learn from Varamyr’s chapter is that a young boy from a wildling family started skinchanging with one of the family dogs by pure magical instinct, and after his abilities were discovered (after he used the dog to kill his little brother, and screamed when the dog was put down), he was abandoned by his parents and sent to a local warg, because he wasn’t fit for normal human society. The warg introduced him to other local wildling skinchangers, and endeavored to teach him what he knew about skinchanging by experience and lore: (a) what animals were easiest to bond with and which were the hardest, (b) that the animal you bond with affects your personality and therefore he didn’t think some animals were good to skinchange into, (c) the “abominations” that skinchangers hold are forbidden to do, and (d) what happens to skinchangers after they die.

But notably this is all custom and oral tradition, not rules. If a skinchanger does one of the abominations – say, stays inside their animal while it’s having sex – it’s not that skinchanging stops working, it’s that other skinchangers will think you’re a horrible person if they find out, and maybe the gods will think that too. Maybe it’ll affect your mind in some way, maybe you’ll change in ways you won’t like. (Maybe you won’t even realize how much you’re changing.) But the important word there is maybe. For all Haggon believed that skinchanging birds was the worst, that those who’d tried birds ended up staring at the sky all day only wanting to fly, we’ve encountered several bird skinchangers who appear to be quite centered and not “moony” at all.

There aren’t systemized rules for becoming a skinchanger – you don’t have to drink a potion or say magic words, you form a connection to an animal, feel their feelings (and they feel yours), and one day you just fall asleep and dream you’re the animal. And as you grow stronger, you can reach out and move into an animal’s mind deliberately, and later any animal, not just the one you originally bonded to. But how do you do it? You just do it. It just happens. It’s by acts of will and acts of instinct, not by a system. Some things make it easier – if an animal has been bonded before, if it’s a domesticated animal, if you have someone else guiding you and explaining things. But it could be someone would follow everything exactly and never be able to touch an animal’s mind, because they weren’t right for it, the magic wasn’t right for it, who knows. (And I wouldn’t doubt if some maester tried it and got nothing, and came away believing that skinchanging was never real in the first place.) It’s not a system, it’s not a science, it just is.

Hmm… I think the best comparison is to wizardry and witchcraft, per Terry Pratchett’s Equal Rites. Wizardry is very precise, very systemized, words and exact potions and stars and books and geometry, taught in a regimented hierarchal school with rules for entry. Witchcraft is instinctual, intuitive, emotive, recipes that are just a pinch of this and a drop of that (or just a colored water placebo), drawing on psychology and just knowing how people work, taught individually to an apprentice or just by picking things up all by yourself. (And notably, Granny Weatherwax’s “borrowing” is straight up skinchanging under a different name.) Skinchanging, all of the magic of ASOIAF, is far more like the latter than the former.