“Ah, Arya. You have a wildness in you, child. ‘The wolf blood,’ my father used to call it. Lyanna had a touch of it, and my brother Brandon more than a touch. It brought them both to an early grave.” Arya heard sadness in his voice; he did not often speak of his father, or of the brother and sister who had died before she was born. “Lyanna might have carried a sword, if my lord father had allowed it. You remind me of her sometimes. You even look like her.”

Arya made a face. “Not if Joffrey’s his father,” she said. “He’s a liar and a craven and anyhow he’s a stag, not a lion.”

Sansa felt tears in her eyes. “He is not! He’s not the least bit like that old drunken king,” she screamed at her sister, forgetting herself in her grief.Father looked at her strangely. “Gods,” he swore softly, “out of the mouth of babes . . . ”

She whined and looked at me and I felt so ‘shamed, but it was right, wasn’t it? The queen would have killed her.”

“It was right,” her father said. “And even the lie was . . . not without honor.”

 “If the queen had a role in this or, gods forbid, the king himself . . . no, I will not believe that.” Yet even as he said the words, he remembered that chill morning on the barrowlands, and Robert’s talk of sending hired knives after the Targaryen princess. He remembered Rhaegar’s infant son, the red ruin of his skull, and the way the king had turned away, as he had turned away in Darry’s audience hall not so long ago. He could still hear Sansa pleading, as Lyanna had pleaded once.

 Ned thought, If it came to that, the life of some child I did not know, against Robb and Sansa and Arya and Bran and Rickon, what would I do? Even more so, what would Catelyn do, if it were Jon’s life, against the children of her body? He did not know. He prayed he never would.

 Cersei could not have been pleased by her lord husband’s by-blows, yet in the end it mattered little whether the king had one bastard or a hundred. Law and custom gave the baseborn few rights. Gendry, the girl in the Vale, the boy at Storm’s End, none of them could threaten Robert’s trueborn children.

 “I see no babes. Only dragonspawn.” Not even Jon Arryn had been able to calm that storm. Eddard Stark had ridden out that very day in a cold rage, to fight the last battles of the war alone in the south. It had taken another death to reconcile them; Lyanna’s death, and the grief they had shared over her passing.

 “He thought of the promises he’d made Lyanna as she lay dying, and the price he’d paid to keep them.”

 “Before,” Dany said to the ugly Lhazareen woman, “I heard you speak of birthing songs . . . “

“I know every secret of the bloody bed, Silver Lady, nor have I ever lost a babe,” Mirri Maz Duur replied.

 “The Lamb Woman knows the secrets of the birthing bed,” Irri said. “She said so, I heard her.”

 That was the way of this cold world, where men fished the sea and dug in the ground and died, whilst women brought forth short-lived children from beds of blood and pain. […]]No woman could defeat him, not even Asha; women were made to fight their battles in the birthing bed.

Having established Lyanna as Jon’s mother, we immediately have a candidate for Jon’s father. For a start, Lyanna became pregnant after her abduction. This doesn’t conclusively limit the possible fathers to the men we know were involved with that abduction, but anything else would take some explaining. Rhaegar was the one who decided to abduct her, and most people seem to be under the impression he wanted to get into her knickers. Robert believes Rhaegar raped her; Viserys told Dany that Rhaegar died “for the woman he loved”. We heard that in chapter 2, far too early for it to mean anything to us at the time, but if we go back and look things over, it’s hard to see how the woman he died for could have been anyone but Lyanna. He certainly didn’t die for Elia. Before a debate starts – we don’t actually have to believe that Rhaegar & Lyanna fell in love. As it happens I suspect that they did, but the evidence is not certain, and more importantly irrelevant to the discussions. We are given two contrary stories – the woman he loved or the woman he raped – and both can result in pregnancy. As could something in between.

From a pure story-telling perspective, we’ve seen Lyanna associated with Rhaegar from the beginning, and we’ve already seen a number of hints that point to Rhaegar. There’s the “Even more so” example of Jon vs. Cat during the Ned/Cersei exchange discussed above. There’s Sansa’s pleading, which reminds Ned of Lyanna’s pleas when he thinks of the death of Rhaegar’s children, and that one’s worth repeating:

It’s good, but it’s not enough. Let’s look for more. Ned’s visit to the brothel, to see one of Robert’s bastards, is a particularly interesting scene.

“Barra shall not go wanting”, Ned promises, and the promise he makes here remind him of his promises to Lyanna. The next thing Ned thinks of is Jon Snow. Jon, of course, is (at least so we are told) a bastard, so surely it’s not too surprising that he’d think of Jon in the context of visiting Robert’s bastard. Is it just a coincidence that Martin puts it right after Ned making a promise to protect someone else’s bastard though? Ned thinks of Jon while “riding through the rainy night”. We might expect that previous line about the mother’s smile to be in the previous paragraph, allowing the paragraph break to take us through this jump forwards in the narrative, yet it does not. The mother’s smile, which “cut the heart out of him” remains in his thoughts after he’s left the brothel, and leads him to think about Jon Snow. Why would that smile have such an effect on Ned?

Ned and Littlefinger have a discussion about Robert’s bastards, and then we have a sudden segue in his thoughts to Rhaegar. Some use this line to object to R+L=J. Why, if he’s raising Rhaegar’s son, would Rhaegar not enter his thoughts in years? Wrong question.

As it turns out, Ned last remembered Rhaegar in his previous chapter. How on earth can we make sense of this? I don’t think that we are supposed to believe that Ned’s so traumatised by Rhaegar that he suffers some kind of fugue-state amnesiac episodes. Possibly we’re seeing something that Martin would have preferred to reword in his draft revisions, but missed it. The similarity to the phrase in the previous chapter makes me think that Martin had thought up a nice way to express a particular idea, and decided to move it from one place to another where it would serve a better purpose, but accidentally left it in both. Regardless, there are three things that we clearly can take away from this.

1. Ned doesn’t have Rhaegar on the brain.
2. Ned suddenly thinks of Rhaegar in the context of his brothel visit.
3. Ned does not associate Rhaegar with brothels.

What would trigger Ned to think of Rhaegar if he doesn’t think of him often and he wouldn’t associate him with brothels? Something else must bring Rhaegar to mind, and the other things that Ned has been thinking about are royal bastards, Lyanna, and Jon Snow. Let’s put it the other way around. Ned is thinking about Robert’s bastard, and the mother, who he has just visited. The promise he made to the mother reminds him of the promise he made to Lyanna. He thinks about Jon (Lyanna’s child and the subject of Lyanna’s promise). He thinks about Robert, the bastard’s father. What’s missing? The father of Jon Snow. Who else is mentioned, and directly compared to Robert, as if playing the Robert role in that alternative narrative? Rhaegar.

So what we have here with this replay of the promise is an echo of Ned’s visit to the Tower of Joy, where he made the promise to Lyanna, right? Right. More right than just the echo of a promise. As it turns out, this entire chapter is a peculiarly distorted echo of the events at the ToJ.

Just after thinking about Rhaegar, Jaime shows up, and we have a similar part-echo of the other half of the ToJ scene. “Ned’s men had drawn their swords, but they were three against twenty” – a familiar turn of phrase. In Ned’s very next chapter we have the ToJ dream, with “Ned’s wraiths moved up beside him, with shadow swords in hand. They were seven against three.” The numbers are inverted, but that’s not the only inversion. Jaime’s men are “phantoms in red cloaks” as Ned’s at the tower were wraiths. The inversion is obvious when we consider the reason for Jaime to accost Ned. Jaime has come to demand the return of his sibling, who was abducted on the road near Harrenhal. Ned went to the ToJ to demand the return of his sibling, who was abducted on the road close to Harrenhal.

The similarities I’ve listed here aren’t the only similarities between the two scenes, and nor is this the only echo of the ToJ scene. This is a point I originally intended to expand on considerably, but it grew in the telling, until it needed an essay of its own.

When you start observing the pattern of Tower of Joy dream echoes, you find it shows up very clearly in a number of places, for example in Cersei’s dream, at White Walls and at Ashford in the Dunc & Egg stories, and Mirri Maaz Duur’s ritual in the tent. There are elements that come again and again: three kingsguards, cloaks, a red stallion, a shooting star, wraith imagery, and more. The pattern isn’t exact; each echo has it’s own distortions, and its own connections. It’s hard to unsee when you see it, and it explains a lot of odd points where there’s a focus on some detail which makes little sense in the immediate context, but much more when you realise it’s an echo of events elsewhere.

MMD’s tent ritual ends with the miscarried birth of Dany’s mutant half-dragon child. Ashford and White Walls both deal with the revealing of a hidden Targaryen, Egg – who’s mother has the curiously familiar sounding name Dyanna. Cersei’s dream deals with her asking about the children she will have with Rhaegar. The events of the Tower of Joy fit into a pattern. What exactly that pattern is, what it represents, whether it’s a literary device or some magical ritual, there’s a link to Targaryen children. The sense of some kind of quest or mystery achievement runs through many of the echoes, and that achievement seems to be about the hatching of a dragon – the birth, symbolically or otherwise, of a Targaryen.

At MMD’s tent, Dany saw shadows dancing. She “glimpsed the shadow of a great wolf, and another like a man wreathed in flames.” In Dany’s next chapter, she has a dream where all the Targaryens are on fire. Thus the man wreathed in flames is likely a Targaryen, while the great wolf is surely a Stark. Dany’s stillborn child was literally half-dragon. I think it’s not much of a jump to suggest that at the Tower of Joy, a great wolf (Lyanna) and a man of fire (Rhaegar) danced, and a half-dragon was born.

You can find the full write-up of this in my essay The Puppets of Ice and Fire over in Another Place.

Are we convinced yet? Not quite? Let’s talk about blue roses. A lot of the symbolism associated with blue roses (unattainable love, grasping thorns, chinks in a wall of ice) skates too close to the interpretive stuff I’m trying to keep out of this essay, though let’s be honest, when Rhaegar puts the crown in Lyanna’s lapfrom the tip of his lance, that’s some pretty obvious symbolism right there. Let’s stick to the facts though. Rhaegar gave Lyanna a crown of blue winter roses. Lyanna died clutching roses. When Cersei tells Ned that Robert never loved her, only Lyanna, Ned thinks of blue winter roses. Lyanna’s statue wears blue winter roses. Lyanna loved roses, Rhaegar gave blue winter roses to her. The main place that we see blue winter roses apart from the story of Rhaegar & Lyanna is the story of Bael the Bard.

Bael, with his oddly Targaryen-sounding “ae” name, was a harpist. He was offered the fairest rose in Winterfell as a reward for singing, but he interpreted that differently to Lord Stark. He returned the blue winter rose he’d been given, and instead took Lord Stark’s daughter. The image this story gives us is one of exchange – a blue winter rose for the maidenhead of Lord Stark’s daughter. Bael hid away in a crypt with the Stark maiden, and almost a year later the maiden was found by Lord Stark with a new baby.

Rhaegar is the only other person we see giving blue roses to Starks. He was also a harpist. He also abducted a Stark maiden, hid away with her, and almost a year later she was found by Lord Stark with a new baby. Given the similarities here, surely that same exchange – blue rose for Stark Maiden’s maidenhead, and a bastard fathered on her – is a more than reasonable assumption to make in Rhaegar’s case, too.

To cap it all, let’s remember that Ygritte tells this story to Jon Snow immediately after asking Jon Snow who his mother, and tells him this story specifically as an illustration of Jon’s true parentage.

So the story of Bael the Bard, with its very obvious parallels to the story of Rhaegar and Lyanna, is told in the context of Jon’s parentage, and the question of who he is unknowingly related to. Jon’s not listening though, he’s got a new family now, and he’s stopped thinking about his mother. He doesn’t even recall that that he heard the “Some woman” line from Tyrion any more. He doesn’t believe any of it.

You know nothing, Jon Snow.

Here’s the optional appendix that explains in detail what I discussed about the “first act” of AGoT. The essay is more than long enough as it is, so I separated this out for people to ignore if they want to.

The first chapter introduces us to Ned and his sons (and ward), and the direwolf pups. Although it’s from Bran’s viewpoint it’s really about Jon, and the main thing we learn is that he’s different, just as his wolf is different. This is more than just the bastardy.

This reflects something that we hear again and again. Jon Snow may be a bastard, but Ned treats him equally. Jon isn’t doing what’s expected of him here – Bran, Ned, and the other men all see that Jon is making a sacrifice by representing himself as being simply a bastard. He emphasises that difference more than most other people do, yet the albino pup sets him apart. Bran thinks it “…curious that this pup alone would have opened his eyes while the others were still blind.” This is a very traditional piece of imagery relating to secret knowledge.

In chapter 2, Catelyn gives us a little background on the North, usefully from a southern perspective; like us, she’s an outsider. We’ll see this technique of introduction followed by reinforcement from a different perspective in GRRM’s writing technique again and again. She mentions the three children we haven’t yet been introduced to, and then talks about Jon Arryn and Robert. After Ned as the distant authority-figure in chapter 1, we get a much more intimate view of him here. Following a break for Dany in chapter 3, we then get Ned’s own PoV for an even closer look at him. We meet Robert, and hear more about Jon, and about Lyanna and Rhaegar. Then we get a Jon chapter, with more of Jon as outsider (though revelling in it), as he sits aside from the family at the feast, and gets the opportunity to describe them to us one after the other. Then another Cat chapter, with plenty of talk of the children, and some more background on the mystery of Jon Arryns’ death and Jon Snow’s birth. Then an Arya chapter, where we get to meet the two daughters properly for the first time, and a bit more about the other children, particularly Jon.

Think back to the first time you read this, with this large cast of characters being thrown at you. Remember what it’s like trying to make sense of who is who, and think about what Martin is trying to do here. We see characters at a distance, then up close. We see people mentioned and then introduced. We are given ideas, and then have those ideas reinforced. This is how GRRM constructs a story and introduces key characters. It’s absolutely classic storytelling, almost a by-the-book example of the writer’s craft. There is one notable exception in chapter 2, and that’s Jon Arryn. Right after introducing one character called Jon, Martin introduces another. Either this is a very uncharacteristic piece of clumsiness, or Martin is priming the reader, using that initial unfamiliarity a first-time reader has to create a subtle association between Jon Arryn and Jon Snow.

One thing we learn about John Arryn here is that he was Eddard’s “second father”. Martin uses this phrase twice in as many paragraphs, which tells us that he’s trying to prime the reader with this piece of information too. Thus, as early as chapter 2, Martin is subtly planting a connection in the reader’s head between Jon Snow and “second fathers”. The two Jons are also a the heart of the two mysteries that Martin is introducing us to. We are told outright that there is a mystery, a “whodunnit” about Jon Arryn. There’s also a “whodunnit” question about Jon Snow – the question of his parentage.

Chapter 3 shifts focus to a new character and new place. Danaerys, a young deposed princess who, so far, we have no reason to see as anything other than an innocent victim. We learn of “Her brother Rhaegar battling the Usurper in the bloody waters of the Trident and dying for the woman he loved” and how this usurper was aided by the lords Lannister and Stark. Hang on, Stark? Aren’t they the good guys? And didn’t we just learn in the previous chapter that Lord Stark does not like Lannisters? We’ll learn more about Rhaegar over the next few chapters, but it will be some time before we are given reason to see him in the same light that Dany sees him, as a romantic figure.

In chapter 4, Robert arrives and immediately asks to go down to the Winterfell crypts. Here we hear the back-story of Jon Arryn, which sets up the main action of the book. We also hear of Rhaegar and Lyanna. If you’re following the pattern, you’ll notice that same thing about an introduction followed by detail from another perspective. Rhaegar must be an important character for the author to be using this same priming technique. This is still very early in the book. This is where we expect to be introduced to important information, and everything about this chapter tells us the Rhaegar and Lyanna story is important. This is the very first thing that Robert does. His queen objects, but Jaime leads Cersei away, telling us this is something important enough that everyone knows the queen will lose this argument.

It is Lyanna, not Jon Arryn, who is first discussed after the initial small talk is done. It might at first be considered part of that small talk, yet what we are presented with is a mystery.

It’s easy, as a first time reader, to gloss over much of this because we don’t really understand it. We are given a promise that is never voiced, a room of blood and roses with no explanations, and a peculiar amnesia. We have no idea what’s going on, and Martin’s language highlights the fact. Again, we are being primed – we want to know what’s being referred to, why these things happened. We are being given a mystery to solve.

Chapter 5 returns us to Jon, and spends more time emphasising the idea that Jon is different from the other Stark children. His conversation with Tyrion returns us to the question of his parentage. It also contains an interesting detail that again the informed reader might ignore, but is striking to the first-time reader. Up to this point, the Targaryens appear to have been the bad guys, from the Stark perspective. Suddenly we learn that a Targaryen is one of Jon’s heroes. We also get an important exchange:

Again we see Jon emphasise his lack of Starkness more than other people. We’re also given reason to think about Jon’s mother. Cat’s chapter emphasised her foreignness, that she is from the south. When we read Tyrion’s words, the obvious calculus is that Jon’s mother, unlike the other Stark children’s, must have been from the North.

Chapter 6 is where we learn that Jon Arryn’s death is more than it seems, and Lysa’s letter blames the Lannisters (who we previously have negative thoughts about from Ned, more of Martin’s front-load-then-reveal technique). This is interesting because it gives us a reinforcement straight after a contradiction. When we met Tyrion in the previous chapter, he seemed more sympathetic than we were anticipating from a Lannister. This is not the only contradiction of that Tyrion encounter.

The calculus of Jon’s birth, that his mother must have been a northerner, seems to be very quickly contradicted. Jon’s mother, this seems to imply, was a southerner after all. Unless, of course, his mother was a northerner who was for some reason in the south.

Here we have another reinforcement about the contrast between Jon’s difference and his acceptance. Jon’s position in the Stark household is not normal.

This seems to answer the puzzle. Why would Ned react in that way if Ashara Dayne was not Jon’s mother, if he did not feel shame about her? Obviously this must mean a lot to Ned, as it’s the only time he’d ever frightened Cat. Yet this leaves us with nagging questions. If Jon, like the other kids, has a southern mother, why has he got more of the North in him? If we’ve really been given the answer already, why is it still perpetuated as a mystery well after this answer is given?
There’s another important observation to be made about this passage. We all know who Arthur Dayne is. When we first read this, we did not. At this point, there is no inkling that Arthur Dayne was so involved in Lyanna’s story. In chapter 4 we got our first details of Lyanna’s story. We don’t know it yet, but we’ve just been given more details of Lyanna’s story, and in the context of Jon’s parentage. GRRM is giving us clues that we won’t recognise as clues until we have more of the story; a jigsaw-puzzle piece we’ll have to come back to before we can fit it. GRRM is a sneaky writer though, so he does give us one call back.

Eddard does not seem to love easily. He loves Robert as a brother, and he’s obviously grown to love Cat, even though we’re told in this chapter that he married her for duty, not love. He undoubtedly loves his children, but he’s far more pragmatic about them than Cat is. What kind of a woman would inspire a fierce, protective love in Ned? Actually we’ve already been told back in chapter 4, in the same place that this mention of Arthur Dayne is a hidden call-back to.

Chapter 7 gives us our first proper look at Arya and Sansa, and we are instantly presented with differences. Arya’s stitches are crooked, Sansa’s exquisite, a neat metaphor that instantly tells us about the characters. Sansa is discussing Joffrey, who she’s very taken by. Arya’s immediate response:

Arya is very protective of Jon here, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a bit of a left-over from GRRM’s initial plan to have Arya and Jon eventually fall in love. On the other hand, we will find out as the books go on that Arya bears a lot of similarities to Lyanna – and indeed acts as a kind of stand-in for Lyanna in several places. Wouldn’t Lyanna be very protective of her son? What remains is a matter of comparisons.

Then a little later,

Arya is connecting Sansa to Joffrey, and herself to Jon. Life is not fair to Jon or herself. Arya even used to wonder if she was a bastard like Jon. We have some more similarities. They both look like their father, a fact that’s mentioned twice in the chapter, a sure sign of significance. More subtly, we learn that Arya is good at riding. In Jon’s last chapter, he told us “Hullen says I sit a horse as well as anyone in the castle.”

Chapter 9 gives us lots of little hints about the Jon Arryn mystery, and one little reminder of the importance of Lyanna: “Having Stark beside him will only make him worse. He’s still in love with the sister, the insipid little dead sixteen-year-old. How long till he decides to put me aside for some new Lyanna?”

Chapter 12 sees Ned on the road south, talking with Robert, and it’s a bit of an info-dump. We very quickly move onto the question of Jon’s mother.

We know that Ned doesn’t like lying, and if we look through Ned’s chapters, we can see that he is very careful with his wording. He deceives by omission, rather than lie. When Robert asks Ned to look after his children for him, Ned remembers Robert’s bastards, and words his reply so that what he says is no lie; he will look after Robter’s children, but means something different by that than Robert did. Ned is doing the same thing here. We may at first think that he’s telling Robert the name of Jon’s mother, but he is not. Robert asks “what was her name, that common girl of yours”. He only then adds, as a qualifier, “You know the one I mean, your bastard’s mother?” If Wylla is not Jon’s mother, then Ned isn’t lying to Robert here at all. He does know the one Robert means, but he’s omitting to correct Robert’s qualification

There’s an interesting contrast between this and the last time we heard of Ned being asked about Jon’s mother. Previously we have been told that Ned would say “not so much as a word” about Jon’s mother, and when pressed his reaction frightened Cat. Here, he responds with a few words, and with cool courtesy. It’s hard to refuse a king, of course – but Ned is the one person who would refuse Robert. The fact that he’s talking with the king doesn’t stop him becoming angry when the question moves away from Jon’s mother to the specific of Ned’s honour.

The conversation moves on to Danaerys, and the potential threat she represents. Ned immediately thinks of Rhaegar’s children, and we learn that this is the one really serious dispute between them.

There’s some language here reminiscent of the passage when Cat asked Ned about Jon’s mother. The “Cold rage” reminds us of Ned replying “cold as ice” (we might think this is an obvious way to describe Ned’s anger, but these are the only two times we’ve had that usage so far), and “to fight the last battles of the war alone in the south”, while Cat had thought about “…Ned off at war in the south” when Jon was conceived. Like the hint we had with Jon having a Targaryen hero, this passage tells us that the Starks just aren’t as anti-Targaryen as Robert is.

Ned clearly has good reason to hate the Targaryens, who killed his brother and father. At last we get to learn what Rhaegar’s crime was, too. This is the sister who Ned “loved fiercely”, dead and apparently raped hundreds of times by Rhaegar. Yet Ned is fiercely protective of Targaryen children, so angered by Robert’s belief that their death was a necessity that it almost destroyed their friendship.
Chapter 13 turns from Ned’s journey south to Jon & Tyrion’s journey north. The main thrust of this chapter is Jon learning that joining the Night’s Watch is essentially an exile. Ned and co. are heading towards exciting adventure in the south, and he’s off North to defend the world from snarks and grumkins amongst a brotherhood of scum. Poor Jon. We also get another comment about Jon’s looks.

This expands on Tyrion’s comment in chapter 5. Again we see Martin’s reinforcement technique at work. It ostensibly gives an explanation to that question raised in the reader’s mind of a northern mother – he has more of the North than his brothers, because he’s undiluted Ned. So why has GRRM set this whole puzzle for us, hinted, reinforced and primed us to pay attention to Jon’s appearance, if that aspect of the puzzle is going to be dismissed so fast? We’re not meant to have the solution to this yet, but we’ll come to realise something about Tyrion. He’s extremely observant, but often misses the correct interpretation of his observation. It’s worth noting that just before this latest observation, Tyrion guesses Jon’s age wrong.