Valar morghūlis, yn ābrar daor?
2021-11-20 02:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rodoSometimes, several creators working on the same thing and having nifty ideas means that these ideas interact with each other in even more interesting ways. This is the case when it comes to “Valar morghūlis”, the one bit of High Valyrian every Game of Thrones fan knows. It is also one of the few bits of High Valyrian that were created by GRRM, and thus one of the bits that David Peterson based his conlang on. And in creating his conlang, he put “Valar morghūlis” in a different light.
Originally, all we knew about the sentence was that “Valar morghulis” (spelled without a macron in GRRM’s books) means “All men must die”. An easy enough sentence with an easy enough meaning. After all, everyone dies eventually. When David Peterson created the grammar behind this sentence, he created the word “vala” and the word “morghūljagon”. “Man” and “to die”. “Valar” is the word “man” but in a different grammatical number – collective, a number English doesn’t have (it is restricted to singular and plural). “All men”, to make it clearer in the translation, although “Man must die” would work in English just as well. “Morghūlis” is the third person singular aorist – a tense English doesn’t have. In essence, it is used here to make statements that are unquestionably true. “All men die” would be an adequate translation as well. The “must” is added for emphasis, in this case.
Where it gets interesting is that when creating High Valyrian, David Peterson decided that unlike English and many other languages, High Valyrian doesn’t treat the male human as the default but the female one. Where the English “man” in “All men must die” is easily understood to mean that every human being eventually dies due to the laws of nature, the same isn’t the case in his High Valyrian. “Ābrar” would be the word used in that case. Since it isn’t the entire meaning changes.
Of course, this is probably all down to two different creators having two different ideas, but I’d like to talk about what it might mean from a worldbuilding perspective? Why is it that in this idiomatic phrase only men must die, not women, and what might it tell us about the culture?
For one, it makes me wonder about the Valyrian concept of “death”. Since it is more or less universally true that everything must die – and so far, the World of Ice and Fire hasn’t provided any evidence that it is not, only that dead things may not be as dead as they seem to be – does the Valyrian religion and the concept of the world develop from it have a different concept of what death means – one that only applies to men, not to women, as a category, at least?
One idea I had was reproduction. We like to say that parents live on in their children, but historically, people the world over had some strange ideas about reproduction that didn’t always mean both parents were considered to contribute equally to a child. In the not so distant past, for example, European scientists argued over whether the sperm contained a complete human being, with the woman merely being an incubator. Maybe in Valyria, they thought it was the other way around – that women could live on in their biological children, while men contributed little to nothing to their existence. Which might also explain one of the oddities of Valyrian culture, at least at the top: their penchant for extreme interbreeding. If they truly believed this, a man could only be sure that the children he raised shared his blood if he married a female relative.
Or maybe, men were considered more martial and more disposable than women. Considering how expansionist the Valyrian Empire was, this might very well be true – even if you have dragons, there is a certain risk associated with war.
Of course, this is just me reading far too much into it, but hey, wouldn’t it be neat?
Originally, all we knew about the sentence was that “Valar morghulis” (spelled without a macron in GRRM’s books) means “All men must die”. An easy enough sentence with an easy enough meaning. After all, everyone dies eventually. When David Peterson created the grammar behind this sentence, he created the word “vala” and the word “morghūljagon”. “Man” and “to die”. “Valar” is the word “man” but in a different grammatical number – collective, a number English doesn’t have (it is restricted to singular and plural). “All men”, to make it clearer in the translation, although “Man must die” would work in English just as well. “Morghūlis” is the third person singular aorist – a tense English doesn’t have. In essence, it is used here to make statements that are unquestionably true. “All men die” would be an adequate translation as well. The “must” is added for emphasis, in this case.
Where it gets interesting is that when creating High Valyrian, David Peterson decided that unlike English and many other languages, High Valyrian doesn’t treat the male human as the default but the female one. Where the English “man” in “All men must die” is easily understood to mean that every human being eventually dies due to the laws of nature, the same isn’t the case in his High Valyrian. “Ābrar” would be the word used in that case. Since it isn’t the entire meaning changes.
Of course, this is probably all down to two different creators having two different ideas, but I’d like to talk about what it might mean from a worldbuilding perspective? Why is it that in this idiomatic phrase only men must die, not women, and what might it tell us about the culture?
For one, it makes me wonder about the Valyrian concept of “death”. Since it is more or less universally true that everything must die – and so far, the World of Ice and Fire hasn’t provided any evidence that it is not, only that dead things may not be as dead as they seem to be – does the Valyrian religion and the concept of the world develop from it have a different concept of what death means – one that only applies to men, not to women, as a category, at least?
One idea I had was reproduction. We like to say that parents live on in their children, but historically, people the world over had some strange ideas about reproduction that didn’t always mean both parents were considered to contribute equally to a child. In the not so distant past, for example, European scientists argued over whether the sperm contained a complete human being, with the woman merely being an incubator. Maybe in Valyria, they thought it was the other way around – that women could live on in their biological children, while men contributed little to nothing to their existence. Which might also explain one of the oddities of Valyrian culture, at least at the top: their penchant for extreme interbreeding. If they truly believed this, a man could only be sure that the children he raised shared his blood if he married a female relative.
Or maybe, men were considered more martial and more disposable than women. Considering how expansionist the Valyrian Empire was, this might very well be true – even if you have dragons, there is a certain risk associated with war.
Of course, this is just me reading far too much into it, but hey, wouldn’t it be neat?
