The true Voidbringers? The Shin?

[+Hoiditthroughthegrapevine he/him]

Ok, this might take a little bit of time, but it's worth the preamble I think.

Known facts:

• The Eile stella, written in dawn chant tells of the advent of the voidbringers, a people from a different planet whom the Gods of Roshar commanded the sentient beings who wrote the stella to take in.
• These voidbringers destroyed there home planet (most likely Ashyn) somehow through the use of the surges
• These people brought their god (Odium) with them.
• Humans are referred to by the stormfather as Sons of Honor (Kaladin, Dalinar, all very Alethi)
• There is an inworld myth told by Hoid about the origin of the Natan people's blue skin where a princess begets a child with Nomon, the blue moon associated with Honor. 
• The yellow void spren have shin like eyes or have strange eyes. (Yellow also being the trademarked color of Odium)
• The void spren that Kaladin talks to, Yixli, is always walking on stone. When she wants to get up to eye-level with Kaladin she pushes herself up on a column of stone.
• The shin are a peaceful people that keep to there own section of Roshar, and use humility like Herdazians use bragging. The most revered citizens in Shinovar are the farmers, the least revered are those who pick up weapons (pretty interesting taboo, this).
• Mentioned in the same breath by Gavilar at the feast where Dalinar meets Evi for the first time are Sadees the Sunmaker, hopeful Alethi uniter of all Roshar and Shubreth-son-Mashalan, which I am pretty sure is a shin name.

Now to add the suppositional meat to the known skeleton of the theory (the following is all total speculation):

• Suppose that when Honor and Cultivation invested Roshar, each brought their favorite form of life to this planet. Honor brought humans from Yolen, and maybe Cultivation used her investiture to create divergent forms of life (based loosely on humans) for Roshar. Honor is father to the humans and Cultivation created the Aimians, modified the human stock slightly to produce the Thaylens (might have a thing for long eyebrows) and the blue skinned Natans. The Singers were already on Roshar, they had been since the planet was created/formed by Adonalsium, but after the first influx of sapient higher forms of life, they interbred with the humans, resulting in Horneaters and Herdazians. The horneaters interbred with the original sons of honor (the alethi lets say) and you get the variety of life as it currently exists on Roshar.
• So, the humans and the Singers shared Roshar before the Voidbringers came, before the people of Odium who destroyed their own planet with powers they were unable to control, before the Shin came to Roshar.
• To accommodate the refuges from a broken planet, Cultivation carved out a special section of Roshar, and made it more like the planet that they fled, causing the Misted mountains to rise to block the force of the Highstorm, creating Shinovar.
• After resettling on Roshar, the Shin realized what their previous actions had done to their home planet and renounced the power of surges and instead developed a Pacifist religion, honoring mostly the shard of Cultivation, because her actions of Terra forming roshar (and creating Shinovar) saved her people.
• The shin, though, brought their god with them, and over time void spren began to develop as all cognitive thought on Roshar manifests as sentient beings. The voidspren realized that they could use the Gemhearts of the Singers to allow their god Odium to once again influence the world.
• Conflict always happens, borders are always disputed, ethnic diversity leads to ethnic clashing. War began to stir, and in this new war the Singers were granted forms of power by the now sapient voidspren. Honor saw what was at stake and splintered his power to create the honorblades for the heralds to marshal the forces of Roshar to stop the forces of Odium (at this point these would have probably been the Ancients of the Listeners and some secret Sect of Shin Odium worshipers, and maybe some secret Thaylen sect heavily into the Passions religion).
• Desolations come and Desolations go, the shin continue on in their pacifist non-interventionist mode (like switzerland, I wonder if there are nice places to ski in Shinovar), and the further removed they are from the initial planetary exodus, the more they begin to believe the lie that they are truly the peace loving people that tried to reforge themselves to be.
• What if Dai-Gonarthis, mentioned in the quote below:

  Quote

  If I'm correct and my research is true, then the question remains. Who is the ninth Unmade? Is it truly Dai-Gonarthis? If so, could their actions have actually caused the complete destruction of Aimia?

  Is really head of the supreme council of the shin? The plural their implies a group, but Dai-Gonarthis is probably a god spren, one of the 3 god sprens perhaps, and possibly this Odium god spren can only bond to a shin.

• This might be the possible positive side to what otherwise seems like a HORRIBLE 5th ideal for Szeth (his crusade ideal) to cleanse the Shin of their false leaders as long as Dalinar Kholin agrees.

 

There are a ton of unanswered questions after OB, but the shin have always struck me as, as Aragorn would say paraphrased a little, a people that look fair and feel foul. I have some ideas about how this all ties into the recreance, but want to see what you all think about this first.

 

[Egomere]

Sorry but Honour didn't bring Humans to Roshar. Odium did.

The recreance was due to the KR finding out that Human had invaded Roshar originally and had done so because they were brought along with Odium / 'the void' and that they switched to worshipping Honour after they'd arrived.

 

[+Hoiditthroughthegrapevine he/him]

Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think it has been explicitly stated that it was Humans that came to Roshar as voidbringers (bringing Odium). In the Eila Stele the people that came to roshar are referred to as "They" and as "a people", I do believe that this is a case where the wording is intentionally vague and that characters in the book assumed it referred to humans. The diversity of lifeforms on Roshar is as close to Mois Esly space station of any of the planets we have seen on in the Cosmere so far. This is meaningful I think. If you have a word of Brandon or direct textual proof (that isn't an assumption made by a current Rosharian) then I would love to see it. Otherwise, I think this is still valid speculation.

Also we know that Honor and Cultivation came to Roshar post shattering (so the Singers were the indigenous population at the time) but we also know that Odium came to Roshar after Honor and Cultivation. What were honor and cultivation doing with the Singers during this gap of time? Obviously not teaching them how to play cards (Squires can't capture reference).

[digitalbusker he/him]

We don't have explicit evidence that all the humans on Roshar are descended from those referred to in the Eila Stele, but the Eila Stele itself provides some pretty strong evidence that there weren't any humans on Roshar before the "Voidbringers" arrived:

These Voidbringers know no songs. They cannot hear Roshar, and where they go, they bring silence. They look soft, with no shell, but they are hard. They have but one heart, and it cannot ever live.

Edited November 29, 2017 by Ookla the Busker
spleling

[+Hoiditthroughthegrapevine he/him]

1 minute ago, digitalbusker said:

These Voidbringers know no songs. They cannot hear Roshar, and where they go, they bring silence. They look soft, with no shell, but they are hard. They have but one heart, and it cannot ever live.

That it is problematic to the point where this whole house of speculative cards topples. So poof goes another theory, you got an upvote for the effort.

I guess this is just an attempt to stitch some very peculiar things together, why does Odium appear to Dalinar as a Shin man? Why do the seeminly unbound void spren manifest as Shin? Why are the Shin a pacifist people when they have a known conqueror in their history? Why are the alethi so repetitively referred to as Sons of Honor/Tanavast? And really, what the heck is going on with their relationship to stone?

I thought this "the humans as voidbringers" revelation was a medium term obfuscation, giving a red-herring reason for the recreance and also hiding the real reason right in plain sight. Brandon excels at that, but is never predictable. He is, to be sure, a genius.

The reason for the recreance still rings false though.

[Maximus]

I figured the shin are just most like the original humans while other nations are the result of interbreeding and possibly some magical alterations.

[FollowYourMuse she/her]

We do not know the timing. We do know that Horneaters and Herdazians are genetically related to the Parshman and existed before Honor and Cultivation. I agree we now know that the Parshmen were originally on Roshar and that a group of Humans came and brought Odium with them. 

1. There must have been some upheaval after the shattering of Odium and the ascending of Honor and Cultivation, we also do not know the time between the shattering and when they arrived to "take over" on Roshar, or if they arrived together or not. 

33 minutes ago, Maximus said:

I figured the shin are just most like the original humans while other nations are the result of interbreeding and possibly some magical alterations.

The original Humans would have been from Yolen I beleive? Or based on the Yolens?  I think the only one we know of at this point would be Hoid? 

 

Quote

 

#13  Nov. 16, 2015 

HorseCannon

I didn't realize horneaters had parshmen blood, didn't even realize that was possible. How closely are humans and parshmen related, do they have a common ancestor? Or is one an artificially created version of the other?

Brandon Sanderson

There was intermixing long ago. Horneaters and Herdazians are both a result. (Signs of this are the stone carapace on Herdazian fingernails and the Horneater extra jaw pieces--in the back of the mouth--for breaking shells.)

Humans and parshmen don't have a common ancestor. And as a side note, both of these strains of humanoids predate the ascension of Honor, Cultivation, and Odium.

So for the first Voidbringers we do not know if that was the first Humans to Roshar, or the first migrants after Honor and Cultivation ascended. 

We also can not know how originally accurate or out of context the Eila Stela passages that were released are. I can believe that Taravangian would release only what he knew would be the most damaging. 

Quote

My scholars in Jah Keved have translated the passages we need, and we have the information from Malata’s spying. But we need some way to disseminate the information without compromising ourselves.”

“Assign it to Dova,” Taravangian said.

 

[digitalbusker he/him]

Alethi people think anybody with round eyes looks Shin. I suspect some of the worldhoppers who have gone unremarked are in disguise and some are from cultures that also have what we'd think of as Asian features.

It does look like the original group of human refugees had a sizeable contingent of people with what we would call Caucasian features, though the current level of diversity argues for the presence of other phenotypes as well.

[+Hoiditthroughthegrapevine he/him]

Another thought, that perhaps, keeps this theory alive.

The translations of the Elia Stele were prepared and released by Taravangian's people specifically to create an existential crisis. What if the stele was an artifact that was created after the humans and the singers were both on Roshar. The singers are an oral history people, they rely on the oral tradition (or sung tradition in their case) to transfer information from one generation to another. What if the dawnchant, the original written form of communication was brought with the humans that Honor brought to Roshar? The Stele could then just be a transcription of the history that the singers told to the humans, and the diagramatists organized the released bits to look as damning as possible (conflating the two extraplanetary exoduses into one single event).

 

The reasons for the recreance, as explained in Oathbringer feel wrong, there are an abundance of clues that link the shin to Odium, and there is a path where this all ties together. Please, again, show how this is wrong. But for now this is theory for me that ties as many of the loose ends together as possible, and provides the vacuum for the big Aha moment coming in book 4 where the REAL reason for the recreance is spelled out.

[Maxell he/him]

I'm not convinced that the Shin are the original voidbringers, we learn in the following WoB that the Shin share a language root with Horneaters and Listeners.

Quote

IneptProfessional

Since you mention languages on Roshar, are there any languages that are completely unrelated to any other on the planet?

Brandon Sanderson

Our basic language families are:

Vorin: Alethi, Veden, Herdazian, and more distantly Thaylen. Nathan is close to dead, but shares a root, and Karbranthian is basically a dialect. Other minor languages like Bav are in here.

Makabaki: Azish is king here, and most the languages around split off this. There are around thirty of these.

Dawnate: A varied language family with distant roots in the dawnchant. Shin, parshendi, Horneater. They share grammar, but they diverged long enough ago that the vocabulary is very different.

Iri: Iriali, Reshi, Purelake dialects, Riran, and some surrounding languages.

Aimian: These two are lumped together, but are very different. Probably what you were looking for.

That isn't counting spren languages, of course. I might have missed something. Typing on my phone without my wiki handy.

https://wob.coppermind.net/events/131-general-reddit-2016/#e3977

I'm writing this post with the assumption that even if the Aimians are not native to Roshar, they are not considered Voidbringers, and have their own special history. We know there are also many mass exodus and migration of peoples in the cosmere that have been alluded too, besides the voidbringers, and there could be a complex political climate that we're unaware of. The Threnodites suffered some kind of tragedy and had an exodus, Iri is on some kind of Holy Journey, the Long Path (and they're at 4 of 7), and the Voidbringers killed their planet. Could Cultivation have offered Roshar as a haven for refugees of the Shard War? The Shin cultivating the land that was given to these refugees as a form of custodians to help them get back on their feet?

The Languages WoB gives us 5 roots, Dawnate most aligns with Cultivation, and Aimian is a crapshoot. Vorin, Makabaki, and Iri are the main 'Human' roots. My pet theory of the Iri are that they are on the path to reform Ambition, collecting cognitive knowledge by living on 7 planets before you've experienced enough to reform your god is an ambitious plan, but that's the only parallel. They could be any shard, but they don't particularly seem Odious except for the fact that they sided with him during current era. Vorin could be the people who destroyed their planet and brought Odium to Roshar, it aligns with their Tranquiline Halls mumbo. Makabaki could be Honor's peoples, who he brought he either to defend Cultivation from Odium, or they were also unable to live on their original planet.

We don't really know if all of the 'humans' came to Roshar at the same time. The Vorins could have came first, as refugees, accidentally bringing Odium. Honor responds with bringing his own troops, the Makabaki. The Iri can show up anytime.

Ohh, and in a bout of even more wild speculation. Each peoples rode upon a moon to the planet.

 

 

[teknopathetic he/him]

It is also worth noting that we know the people of the Ire are refugees from another world as well, and their land is isolated and very close to the Shin Reservation. I wonder how many refugee groups made it to Rosahar? 

We know the Ire are a more recent addition because they both speak of it in lore, and the Nightwatcher found the people of the Ire to foriegn to grant wishes too. 

Edited November 24, 2017 by teknopathetic

[The One Who Connects he/him]

On 11/22/2017 at 7:17 PM, FollowYourMuse said:

The original Humans would have been from Yolen, I believe?

Not directly.

Quote

Argent

Wait, hold up. How can "soil" be a holdover from an earlier time if Roshar was always a rocky place? Or did you mean that it's one of those words that carried over from Yolish, or whatever other language people spoke before they migrated to Roshar (like "hound")?

Brandon Sanderson

It is similar to hound, which is one of the ones that Hoid pointed out as an oddity. But people did not migrate from Yolen to Roshar. Roshar was inhabited before the shattering of Adonalsium.

[FollowYourMuse she/her]

12 hours ago, The One Who Connects said:

Not directly.

Thanks, I had forgotten that. 

[Fulminato he/him]

On 23/11/2017 at 0:37 AM, hoiditthroughthegrapevine said:

The shin are a peaceful people that keep to there own section of Roshar, and use humility like Herdazians use bragging. The most revered citizens in Shinovar are the farmers, the least revered are those who pick up weapons (pretty interesting taboo, this).

Not alwasy true, there at least one shin warlod who try to conquerer roshar (and the event is enough recent to have clear record)

“No, his greed,” Gavilar said quietly. “What’s the point of conquering if you can never sit back and enjoy it? Shubreth-son-Mashalan, Sunmaker, even the Hierocracy … (chapter 19. The Subtle Art of Diplomacy)

[Fifth of Daybreak he/him]

1 minute ago, Fulminato said:

Not alwasy true, there at least one shin warlod who try to conquerer roshar (and the event is enough recent to have clear record)

Another example

Quote

Those possibilities intrigued Dalinar. Could men be trained to fire bows from horseback? How devastating would that be? What about a charge of horses bearing men with spears, like the legends spoke of during the Shin invasion?

OB 75 Only Red

 

[+Hoiditthroughthegrapevine he/him]

1 hour ago, Fifth of Daybreak said:

Those possibilities intrigued Dalinar. Could men be trained to fire bows from horseback? How devastating would that be? What about a charge of horses bearing men with spears, like the legends spoke of during the Shin invasion?

OB 75 Only Red

Interesting, had forgotten about that bit. Seems like being the world's only source of horses would be a convenient thing for a people who might want to conquer but who also can't step on unhallowed stone. Interesting indeed.

[teknopathetic he/him]

I think we need to remember that a culture isn't a monolith - a charismatic leader, and environmental pressure, or the introduction of new technology can leverage a culture to do almost anything in the right environment. We know nothing of their religion or what they think their role on this planet should be, so it is hard to judge. 

We also know that the Shin train at least some people with honour blades, so they aren't just cutie cuties sitting around raising chickens.

Edited November 25, 2017 by teknopathetic

[+Hoiditthroughthegrapevine he/him]

6 minutes ago, teknopathetic said:

We also know that the Shin train at least some people with honour blades, so they aren't just cutie cuties sitting around raising chickens.

This is a very funny way to put it (the bolded part). For some reason this made me think that Rockbud gardens in Roshar have cute little Shin statues (kind of like Lawn Gnomes) and people probably rub their cute little bald heads for good luck.

[animalia]

My thought was that the Shin abhor violence now BECAUSE they had been violent in the past. Sort of a culture wide “My god what have we done!”

Edited August 13, 2018 by animalia
Grammer

[RShara she/her]

Mmmmm delicious necro

[+Extesian he/him]

1 minute ago, RShara said:

Mmmmm delicious necro

Mmmmm questionable out of context screengrab.

[RShara she/her]

I live for such things.

[Jonathon]

2 hours ago, Extesian said:

Mmmmm questionable out of context screengrab.

Mmmmm lies...

[Julio]

Since this thread HAS been revived... 

I think it's worth noting that the Alethi are very likely to be descended from the Knights Radiant, what with Light Eyes being both a ubiquitous Radiant trait and a Vorin mark of prestige and divine right. The Knights Radiant, or at the very least the Windrunners, are (separately from the Alethi) also referred to as "Of Honor." 

That said, I do love this whole theory, it is quite intriguing. 

[RShara she/her]

Most lighteyes are descended from either Radiants or people who bonded Shardblades after the Recreance.

Quote

Questioner

My question has to do with the color of Shallan's eyes currently, because we've noticed over the books that Kaladin's eyes, as he's continued to use his Surge, changed to lighter and lighter blue. Whereas one could argue that Shallan is farther in her Ideals than Kaladin is, yet her eyes have not changed at all.

Brandon Sanderson

Right, 'cause they were already light.

Questioner

'Cause they were already light? So it only affects lightness or darkness in the eyes, not necessarily any other color?

Brandon Sanderson

It's not like it is-- It's not like it's saying "Light minus 50%".

Questioner

It's not like Honor is blue and--

Brandon Sanderson

No. It is not. It is just kind of the way that the changes the Stormlight is making the body and certain people are already descended from people who had repeated, over time, changes by the body which stopped physically... That's not to say that all lighteyes that's where they came from. There are some that are natural mutations.

source

Quote

Questioner [PENDING REVIEW]

So, I was curious if the Alethi were always-- like, if there was a time where there wasn't a segregation between lighteyes and darkeyes.

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

Yes, that did exist.

Questioner [PENDING REVIEW]

...How did the separation occur?

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

There are some clues in [Oathbringer] and in the last book. It has to do with Knights Radiant and Surgebinding and things like that. It's a part RAFO. It's pretty guessable. There's nothing--

source

 

Edited August 13, 2018 by RShara