In Season 5 of Game of Thrones, Tyrion Lannister
and Jorah Mormont are attacked by stone men in the ruins of Valyria. Stone men
are people with a disease called greyscale, which makes the skin “grey and cracked and
hard” and “stiff and dead” like stone, eventually causing madness then death. The disease develops slowly, usually starting on a finger or toe then spreading across the skin. There are said to be “three good cures for greyscale: axe and sword and cleaver.
Hacking off afflicted parts … sometimes stop[s] the spread of the disease … but
not always”. Greyscale is highly contagious – just touching a stone man can spread the
sickness, and this is what happens to Jorah in the show, and Jon Connington in the books.
George R. R. Martin describes this as a “death sentence”, but a slow one – you can survive
years with greyscale, but death is inevitable. There are other forms of greyscale, though,
one of which is often seen in children, who may actually survive the disease but be left
disfigured, which is what happens to Shireen Baratheon. Surviving childhood greyscale is
said to protect you from getting it again, though in the books the wildling Val says
that “The grey death sleeps, only to wake again”, which kinda implies that the disease
can come back. In any case, greyscale is pretty rare in Westeros,
but it’s apparently more common in Volantis and the cities of the Rhoyne, who send people
with greyscale to “the ruins of Valyria” in the show, and to the Sorrows in the books,
where the stone men wander “through the fog until they die”. Some believe that
the stone men of the Sorrows are ruled by someone called the Shrouded Lord who gives
“grey kiss[es]” and resides over a “stony court”. One story says this Lord was once
a statue, until “a grey woman came out of the fog and kissed him with lips as cold as
ice”. Which sounds kinda like the white walkers and wights. Might there be a connection
between the zombies of ice and the zombies of stone? For now we don’t know.
What we do know is that the stone men are people with greyscale, which Shireen had,
and Jorah slash Jon Conn now has – making him a dying man with nothing to lose.
Thanks for watching. There’ll be more theories and analyses ahead, but let me know if you’d
like to see more of these little explanations too.
