Who is Bloodraven aka The Three-Eyed Crow?

Potential Spoilers Below

ASOIAF: Bloodraven described

Brynden Rivers aka Lord Bloodraven

“If they were wise, though, they did not say it loudly. How many eyes does Lord Bloodraven have? ran the riddle Egg had heard in Oldtown. A thousand eyes, and one.

Six years ago in King's Landing, Dunk had seen him with his own two eyes, as he rode a pale horse up the Street of Steel with fifty Raven's Teeth behind him. That was before King Aerys had ascended to the Iron Throne and made him the Hand, but even so he cut a striking figure, garbed in smoke and scarlet with Dark Sister on his hip. His pallid skin and bone-white hair made him look a living corpse. Across his cheek and chin spread a wine-stain birthmark that was supposed to resemble a red raven, though Dunk only saw an odd-shaped blotch of discolored skin. He stared so hard that Bloodraven felt it. The king's sorcerer had turned to study him as he went by. He had one eye, and that one red. The other was an empty socket, the gift Bittersteel had given him upon the Redgrass Field. Yet it seemed to Dunk that both eyes had looked right through his skin, down to his very soul.”

Iron Throne

King Aerys I

Fist of the First Men

Bloodraven - Shiera - Bittersteel
Love Triangle

“He had seen the man once with his own two eyes, back in King's Landing. White as bone were the skin and hair of Brynden Rivers, and his eye. . .he had only the one, the other having been lost to his half brother Bittersteel on the Redgrass Field. . .was red as blood. On cheek and neck he bore the winestain birthmark that had given him his name.”

“He was older than Dunk remembered him, with a lined hard face, but his skin was still as pale as bone, and his cheek and neck still bore the ugly winestain birthmark that some people thought looked like a raven. His boots were black, his tunic scarlet. Over it he wore a cloak the color of smoke, fastened with a brooch in the shape of an iron hand. His hair fell to his shoulders, long and white and straight, brushed forward so as to conceal his missing eye, the one that Bittersteel had plucked from him on the Redgrass Field. The eye that remained was very red. How many eyes has Bloodraven? A thousand eyes, and one.”

ASOIAF: The Three-Eyed Crow described

Bran and the Three-Eyed Crow

“One moment the flames burned orange and yellow, filling the cavern with a ruddy glow; then all the colors faded, leaving only black and white. Behind them Meera gasped. Hodor turned.

Before them a pale lord in ebon finery sat dreaming in a tangled nest of roots, a woven weirwood throne that embraced his withered limbs as a mother does a child.

His body was so skeletal and his clothes so rotted that at first Bran took him for another corpse, a dead man propped up so long that the roots had grown over him, under him, and through him. What skin the corpse lord showed was white, save for a bloody blotch that crept up his neck onto his cheek. His white hair was fine and thin as root hair and long enough to brush against the earthen floor. Roots coiled around his legs like wooden serpents. One burrowed through his breeches into the desiccated flesh of his thigh, to emerge again from his shoulder. A spray of dark red leaves sprouted from his skull, and grey mushrooms spotted his brow. A little skin remained, stretched across his face, tight and hard as white leather, but even that was fraying, and here and there the brown and yellow bone beneath was poking through.

“Are you the three-eyed crow?” Bran heard himself say. A three-eyed crow should have three eyes. He has only one, and that one red. Bran could feel the eye staring at him, shining like a pool of blood in the torchlight. Where his other eye should have been, a thin white root grew from an empty socket, down his cheek, and into his neck.”

TWOT: The Green Man/Someshta described

“A figure stepped out of the foliage, a manshape as much bigger than Loial as the Ogier was bigger than Rand. A manshape of woven vines and leaves, green and growing. His hair was grass, flowing to his shoulders; his eyes, huge hazelnuts; his fingernails, acorns. Green leaves made his tunic and trousers; seamless bark, his boots. Butterflies swirled around him, lighting on his fingers, his shoulders, his face. Only one thing spoiled the verdant perfection. A deep fissure ran up his cheek and temple across the top of his head, and in that the vines were brown and withered.

Loial the Ogier

“The Green Man,” Egwene whispered, and the scarred face smiled. For a moment it seemed as if the birds sang louder.

The Green Man

“Of course I am. Who else would be here?” The hazelnut eyes regarded Loial. “It is good to see you, little brother. In the past, many of you came to visit me, but few of recent days.”

Loial scrambled down from his big horse and bowed formally. “You honor me, Treebrother. Tsingu ma choshih, T'ingshen.”

Smiling, the Green Man put an arm around the Ogier's shoulders. Alongside Loial, he looked like a man beside a boy. “There is no honoring, little brother. We will sing Treesongs together, and remember the Great Trees, and the stedding, and hold the Longing at bay.” He studied the others, just now getting down from their horses, and his eyes lit on Perrin. “A Wolfbrother! Do the old times truly walk again then?”

Perrin

TWOT: Who is Someshta and what was his job?

“I am your friend,” Jonai replied sadly. He had not seen Someshta in years, but he had heard of this. Most of the Nym were dead, he had heard. “You rode me on your shoulders when I was a child. Do you remember nothing of it?”

“Singing,” Someshta said. “Was there singing? So much is gone. The Aes Sedai say some will return. You are a Child of the Dragon, are you not?”

“Someshta, we have a task for the last of the Nym, if you will do it. We have asked too much of you; now we must ask more.”

“The Eye of the World was beyond the high passes when I found it,” Moiraine said. “Better to cross the Mountains of Dhoom in full daylight, at noon, when the Dark One's powers in this world are weakest.”

The Dark One

“We have reached safety,” Moiraine said. “This is the Green Man's place, and the Eye of the World is here. Nothing of the Blight can enter here.”

“This place,” said a deep voice from the trees, “is always where it is. All that changes is where those who need it are.”

Someshta, also known as the Green Man, was the last of the Nym.  He was set to guard the Eye of the World until the Dragon was reborn.  Located there for safe keeping was a pool of pure, untainted saidin. There were also three physical items: Lews Therin Telamon's Dragon Banner, the Horn of Valere and a broken seal, one of seven, to the Dark One's prison.

Lews Therin Telamon

The Dragon Banner

The Horn of Valere

A broken seal to the Dark One's Prison

“With a groan like a limb breaking under too great a weight, the Green Man crashed to the ground. Half his head was charred black. Tendrils of smoke still rose from him, like gray creepers. Burned leaves fell from his arm as he painfully stretched out his blackened hand to gently cup an acorn.

The earth rumbled as an oak seedling pushed up between his fingers. The Green Man's head fell, but the seedling reached for the sun, straining. Roots shot out and thickened, delved beneath the ground and rose again, thickened more as they sank. The trunk broadened and stretched upward, bark turning gray and fissured and ancient. Limbs spread and grew heavy, as big as arms, as big as men, and lifted to caress the sky, thick with green leaves, dense with acorns. The massive web of roots turned the earth like plows as it spread; the already huge trunk shivered, grew wider, round as a house. Stillness came. And an oak that could have stood five hundred years covered the spot where the Green Man had been, marking the tomb of a legend.”

Some said the Nym never died, not so long as plants grew.

ASOIAF: Who is the Three-Eyed Crow and what was his job?

On the surface it appears that he is a guide to assist the next greenseer before he dies.  But from what I know about how character traits in how they relate to TWOT I would say it will be a 180 degree difference with a little of the same mixed in for good measure.

Where Someshta had forgotten so much, the last greenseer remembers all through the weirwood trees.  It appears he had a similar task but I don't believe it is for the good of the realm.  

Weirwood Tree

I am returning to my original premise that it was the the three-eyed crow who warged Ghost and directed Jon to the items that were found on/near the Fist of the First Men.  There were also three physical items: dragonglass knives and arrowheads, a horn all wrapped in a cloak of a man of the Night's Watch.  I believe the horn to be the Horn of Winter which I believe will serve a similar function to the Horn of Valere.  See my post:

Why "There must always be a Stark in Winterfell" and why "Winter is Coming"

for insight into the Horn of Winter.  Where the Three-Eyed Crow is enthroned in a tree and given a longer life the very nature of a Nym as he is a tree of sorts and has an extremly long life. The Green Man was over 3,000 years old when he died.

Jon Snow and Ghost

Fist of the First Men
It's description reminds me of the representation of the Dark One breaking free

Dragonglass knives and arrows, the Horn all wrapped in cloak of a member of the Night's Watch

Men of the Night's Watch practicing in the yard of Castle Black

Where the three items were used to help the Dragon Reborn in TWOT; I believe that the Three-Eyed Crow has been made a creature of the Children of the Forest.  I believe that if the items in question are to be used right now they will have the unintended consequence of defeating men if used without knowing what they truly are. Fortunately Sam is at the Citadel right now unravelling these mysteries.  The dragonglass has already been used to stir up a conflict between men and the Others.  I truly believe that the First Men and the Others were allies and they helped them build the Wall.  Hence why it is made of ice.  I also believe that the COTF sent the Night's King queen as a lure to convert him to their side and thus have an inside man to control them.  Time did the rest.  Over 8000 years the Others slept and men forgot.  The COTF planted false stories sent men visions of morrows to come.  Men built their religions around these visions and now everything has been prepped for a war on a global scale with the COTF having their fingers on the proverbial button.

Where The Eye of the World was a safe place as long as Someshta lived the same can be said of the cave where the Three-Eyed Crow resides.  The cave was warded so that the Wights and Coldhands could not enter.  Where it was said that the Nym never died, so long as plants grew; the same can be said of the greenseers.  The simply go into the trees and become part of the network.

Where it is said within ASOIAF "The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak" and "For the oak recalls the acorn, the acron dreams the oak, the stump lives in them both"; I believe those come from the Green Man's death and rebirth of sorts into an Oak tree.

TWOT: The Green Man had another gift

“When the Green Man noticed, he said, “Flowers are meant to adorn. The plants or humans, it is much the same. None mind, so long as you don't take too many.” And he began plucking one from this plant and one from that, never more than two from any. Soon Nynaeve and Egwene wore caps of blossoms in their hair, pink wildrose and yellowbell and white morningstar. The Wisdom's braid seemed a garden of pink and white to her waist. Even Moiraine received a pale garland of morningstar on her brow, woven so deftly that the flowers still seemed to be growing.

Rand was not sure they were not growing. The Green Man tended his forest garden as he walked, while he talked softly to Moiraine, taking care of whatever needed care without really thinking about it. His hazelnut eyes caught a crooked limb on a climbing wildrose, forced into an awkward angle by the blossom covered limb of an apple tree, and he paused, still talking, to run his hand along the bend. Rand was not sure if his eyes were playing tricks, or if thorns actually did bend out of the way so as not to prick those green fingers. When the towering shape of the Green Man moved on, the limb ran straight and true, spreading red petals among the white of apple blossoms. He bent to cup one huge hand around a tiny seed lying on a patch of pebbles, and when he straightened, a small shoot had roots through the rocks to good soil.

“All things must grow where they are, according to the Pattern,” he explained over his shoulder, as if apologizing, “and face the turning of the Wheel, but the Creator will not mind if I give just a little help.”

ASOIAF: Anyone with the Green Man's gift?

“The Tyrells rose to power as stewards to the Kings of the Reach, whose domain included the fertile plains of the southwest from the Dornish marches and Blackwater Rush to the shores of the Sunset Sea. Through the female line, they claim descent from Garth Greenhand, gardener king of the First Men, who wore a crown of vines and flowers and made the land bloom.”

Dornish Marches

Garth Greenhand

“Garth Greenhand, we call him, but in the oldest tales he is named Garth Greenhair, or simply Garth the Green. Some stories say he had green hands, green hair, or green skin overall. (A few even give him antlers, like a stag.) Others tell us that he dressed in green from head to foot, and certainly this is how he is most commonly depicted in paintings, tapestries, and sculptures. More likely, his sobriquet derived from his gifts as a gardener and a tiller of the soil—the one trait on which all the tales agree. “Garth made the corn ripen, the trees fruit, and the flowers bloom,” the singers tell us.”

Garth Greenhand's description sounds like Someshta

“Many of the more primitive peoples of the earth worship a fertility god or goddess, and Garth Greenhand has much and more in common with these deities. It was Garth who first taught men to farm, it is said. Before him, all men were hunters and gatherers, rootless wanderers forever in search of sustenance, until Garth gave them the gift of seed and showed them how to plant and sow, how to raise crops and reap the harvest. (In some tales, he tried to teach the elder races as well, but the giants roared at him and pelted him with boulders, whilst the children laughed and told him that the gods of the wood provided for all their needs). Where he walked, farms and villages and orchards sprouted up behind him. About his shoulders was slung a canvas bag, heavy with seed, which he scattered as he went along. As befits a god, his bag was inexhaustible; within were seeds for all the world’s trees and grains and fruits and flowers.”

I believe that Garth's crown of vines and flowers is real and Elayne will come into posession of it, as it will be found at Highgarden, and give it to Jon Snow. You can read more on my theory concerning this using the following link:

Highgarden

Jon Snow: Do the Prophecies Make the Man?

Comments encouraged.  Love to hear the idea’s of others.  Most believe that since I present my idea’s as “fact like” I’m not open to change my viewpoints which is far from the truth.  I simply look at the information presented and go from there.  If you can shine a light on another way of thinking that opens the door to debate.