Chapter 8 – Nimble Dick Crabb
Previous: Chapter 7 – He Would Have Killed Me But For Howland Reed
Beginning: Chapter 0-4 – Introduction
For this essay chapter, I recommend re-reading the ASOIAF chapter that we’re looking at, AFFC 20 Brienne IV (p280), in order to reacquaint yourself with it so you can get the most out of the essay. AFFC 20 Brienne IV is very enjoyable as a standalone story.
At the end of chapter 5 we learned that Brienne’s engagement with the Ser Galladon story is symbolizing our engagement with the Brienne story. Brienne improved her situation in the Whispers fight by noticing the commonalities between herself and a character in a story (Galladon), by taking feedback from Nimble Dick about what that story means (there’s something wrong with honor and don’t hold back your power when it counts), and changing her mind about not using her own magic sword before entering a dangerous situation at the Whispers. If Brienne is symbolizing us and Brienne had to change her mind to stop being wrong, it bears asking, how do we have to change our minds to stop being wrong? That’s the question we’re going to answer in this essay chapter.
Brienne’s last minute choice to use Oathkeeper was a moment of great character progression for her. For the duration of the whole chapter, Brienne was very mistrustful of Nimble Dick, and then at the end she finally trusted him in a big way by letting him use her steel sword. Brienne was taking a big risk by arming Nimble Dick, because he could have used the sword to backstab her at a moment when she’s vulnerable, such as during the fight. Brienne’s mistrust is understandable when you consider her life experiences of being tormented and looked down upon by men. Because of Brienne’s past, her character progression here is all the more impressive and meaningful. Due to Brienne’s trust in Nimble Dick, Nimble Dick had the means to protect himself in what Brienne correctly thought could be a dangerous situation. So, contrary to Nimble Dick’s criticisms that Brienne is too mistrustful, Brienne proved him wrong by trusting him when it really counts. In the end, it was the “mistrustful maid’s” trust that saved Nimble Dick’s life.
. . . It makes for a heartwarming interpretation. Perhaps in a more conventional series, that would be the deeper meaning behind this sequence of events. But in our story, Nimble Dick’s life was not saved. Conventional storytelling wisdom suggests that GRRM should have written the story so that Nimble Dick was saved. Conventional storytelling wisdom says that GRRM should have written the story so that Nimble Dick uses the sword Brienne lent him to help Brienne win the fight. Better yet, Nimble Dick rather than Podrick Payne should have been the one to save Brienne, with the sword instead of a stone. That way, Brienne’s survival would have been a direct consequence of her moment of character progression. But in our story, Nimble Dick died horribly before he even got to use the sword.
‘So what does that mean about the other stuff?’ I hear you wondering. ‘Are you suggesting all that was wrong?’ No, every sentence was true except the last one or two.
But, there are two basic categories of possibilities for why the story is written this way. The first is that Nimble Dick’s death is meant to convey a theme or lesson about the harshness of life. Though the thematic progress before Nimble Dick’s death was building up to a wholesome message, Nimble Dick’s death afterwards seems to sabotage that message in a strong way that’s hard to ignore. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the point is that bad things happen and we shouldn’t let that ruin the good things. In this category, readers are likely to remind us that GRRM is notorious for killing off his characters in order to depict the harshness of life alongside the beauty of life. In this category, we’ll hear readers say things that sound much too glad about meaninglessness. ‘Humans are crazy apes on a swirling ball of mud in a void of empty space, so you better wise up to the meaninglessness of life and learn to like it, because that’s the hard truth.’ If that is not a part of ASOIAF’s philosophy, GRRM sure does a good job of making it seem like it is sometimes.
The second category of possibilities is that Nimble Dick’s death, or more specifically the shock of it for the reader, indicates that the wholesome message contained in the build-up was not as wholesome as it seemed, and that we’re profoundly wrong about something in our interpretation of the build-up. Readers who agree with this category of possibilities are likely to draw attention to the tragedy of Nimble Dick’s death, as though a side character should be treated with that much importance. They may seem confused, as though they don’t really know what their main point is. They’re easy to push from one weakly argued point to another, and they can’t really say what it is that we’re all supposedly so wrong about. After listening to these readers long enough, they may seem driven by a shallow desire to be different for the sake of being different.
Which category of possibilities do you find yourself agreeing with more? Is Nimble Dick’s shocking death conveying a lesson about the harshness of life? Or is Nimble Dick’s shocking death showing us that there’s something in our interpretation of the story that we’re getting wrong?
It’s possible to agree with both, because the first one could fairly be a subcategory of the second one. After all, not already knowing that life is harsh could be the thing in our interpretation that we were getting wrong. But, when you try to keep the two possibilities separate, it’s worth noticing which one resonates with you more than the other.
For me, the second one resonates more. One reason is that one of the most thoroughly established ideas in ASOIAF is that perspective is everything. The chapters that make up the entire series are all written from the characters’ perspectives, after all. Learning and remembering that everything written is subject to the narrator’s unreliability is an omnipresent challenge in ASOIAF. When I hear the “harsh reality” possibility and its supporters treating Nimble Dick’s perspective dismissively because he’s not important enough, it’s as if red lights and sirens begin flashing and blaring in my mind, saying ‘Look over here!’
Granted, Nimble Dick Crabb is not a POV character, but at minimum he is a perspective. He has a particular personality, past, and motivational frame that cause him to see situations differently from the way, say, Brienne is seeing them. And since Brienne is the POV character of this chapter, we probably saw situations the same way Brienne did the first time around. ASOIAF has taught me that almost every perspective matters, no matter how unimportant the character seems. With great frequency, the key insights that the reader needs in order to make progress on whatever mystery is at hand are found by looking closely at a perspective that the readers dismissed as unimportant.
So, the more the readers treat Nimble Dick Crabb’s perspective as unimportant, the more I suspect that Nimble Dick Crabb’s perspective is important. This essay chapter is about putting ourselves in Nimble Dick Crabb’s shoes to see what the story looks like to him, and comparing that to what the story looked like to Brienne and ourselves the first time we read it.
This Brienne chapter’s dramatic through-line is the tense relationship between Brienne and Nimble Dick Crabb. Though their relationship is relatively straightforward, it’s crucial to the Whispers≈TOJ parallel because it provides the biggest cues as to what the ever-so-elusive “moral of the story” is, and how we should try approaching the symbols. In the recipe of symbolic interpretation, if the symbols that we’ve been establishing thus far are the ingredients, then the moral of the story is the oven. So let’s take some time to build our oven so we can put our ingredients inside and let them cook.
As Brienne and the gang travel to the Whispers, the reader comes to trust Nimble Dick less and less. Before we meet him, we already know that he tricked somebody (“fooled a fool”). We also know his name, and his name sounds unsavory enough to inspire mistrust, too — Nimble Dick Crabb. When we meet him, his personality inspires mistrust, too. He avoids answering questions, he speaks crudely, he’s proud of swindling the fool by selling him an unhelpful map, and he withholds the information Brienne wants so he can get some money out of her. We mistrust Dick because he apparently tries to steal money from Brienne’s bag while she’s away. We mistrust him because he tries to scare Podrick with a horror story. We mistrust him because the journey is taking too long. We mistrust him because Brienne thinks the reason there’s a badge torn off his clothes is because he’s probably a deserter. We mistrust him because he wants to sleep in the same places where Brienne and Podrick sleep. We mistrust him because he’s the only person in the group who knows the way in and out of this forest. We mistrust him because Brienne mistrusts him.
Maybe you didn’t mistrust Dick for all of these reasons, but Brienne did. Since we received this chapter through the POV of Brienne, we tend to feel the same way about things that she does.
The scene where Brienne and the reader are introduced to Nimble Dick for the first time immediately depicts Nimble Dick as an unseemly man.
Someone was coming down the cellar steps. Brienne pushed her wine aside as a ragged, scrawny, sharp-faced man with dirty brown hair stepped into the Goose. He gave the Tyroshi sailors a quick look and Brienne a longer one, then went up to the plank. “Wine,” he said, “and none o’ your horse piss in it, thank’e.” (AFFC 14 Brienne III)
Nimble Dick is a ragged man with dirty hair who enters the tavern demanding wine and insulting the innkeeper. Right away, we’re given only reasons to dislike him. Brienne feels the same way.
Brienne did not like the way his fingers played with that gold coin. Still … “Six dragons if we find my sister. Two if we only find the fool. Nothing if nothing is what we find.”
Crabb shrugged. “Six is good. Six will serve.”
Too quick. She caught his wrist before he could tuck the gold away. “Do not play me false. You’ll not find me easy meat.”
When she let go, Crabb rubbed his wrist. “Bloody piss,” he muttered. “You hurt my hand.”
“I am sorry for that. My sister is a girl of three-and-ten. I need to find her before—”
“—before some knight gets in her slit. Aye, I hear you. She’s good as saved. Nimble Dick is with you now. Meet me by east gate at first light. I need t’ see this man about a horse.” (AFFC 14 Brienne III)
Nimble Dick’s introduction in AFFC 14 Brienne III ends with Nimble Dick crassly evoking the image of Sansa being raped by a knight. With these words, Nimble Dick burns the image of sexual violence into our minds, establishing him as a man of questionable character (at best). If that wasn’t enough, in the same breath Nimble Dick offends the ideal of knighthood by suggesting that a knight would commit rape. This is the Brienne chapter just before the one with the Whispers fight, so this is what sets the tone about who Nimble Dick is. He’s an uncouth, opportunistic scoundrel. Even before he stepped onto the stage, one of the few things we knew about him was his name, and his name is Nimble Dick Crabb, for crying out loud. It sounds like the name of a C-list male porn star who has a reputation for pinching girls.
Bear in mind that we hardly know anything for certain about Nimble Dick’s character yet. Most of what we know about him is superficial in nature — concerned only with appearances. In our logical minds, we will know that a person having dirty hair doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a bad person. We will know that a person having a sketchy name and nickname doesn’t necessarily mean he has to be sketchy. Dick is short for Richard, which is a perfectly ordinary name. We will know that his regular patronage at a tavern that serves wine doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a drunkard. Having a drink or two every day doesn’t cause drunkenness. We will know that jibes like the one Nimble Dick made to the barkeeper about her wine tasting like horse piss can be part of a friendly rapport rather than an insult, and that bartenders and their regular patrons often develop such a rapport. And we will probably be familiar with the old adage that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, at least not too strongly. People deserve a fair chance. But of course, our logical minds were not in charge the first time we read this chapter, because neither is Brienne’s. First impressions last. Thus, in Nimble Dick Crabb, GRRM has created the perfect disguise for a hustler with a heart of gold.
Brienne spends almost the entirety of this long chapter trusting Nimble Dick as little as possible. To be fair to Brienne, Nimble Dick is rough around the edges. But if you reread the chapter with a critical eye and a mind to defend Nimble Dick, what you may see is that Nimble Dick had more cause to mistrust Brienne than Brienne had to mistrust Nimble Dick.
From the first moment Nimble Dick agreed to be Brienne’s guide, she grabbed his hand threateningly and hurt him.
Crabb shrugged. “Six is good. Six will serve.”
Too quick. She caught his wrist before he could tuck the gold away. “Do not play me false. You’ll not find me easy meat.”
When she let go, Crabb rubbed his wrist. “Bloody piss,” he muttered. “You hurt my hand.” (AFFC 14 Brienne III)
Keep in mind that this is an old man who Brienne described in her thoughts as “scrawny.” Though old age and small size don’t necessarily mean he’s harmless, rereading this chapter leaves me thinking ‘Come on, Brienne. Get real.’ The extent of her mistrust of Nimble Dick is absurd, and it’s inappropriate from a warrior of her size and ability.
At first, Brienne told Nimble Dick that she was looking for her sister. After Nimble Dick said the fool had two girls with him instead of one, Brienne changed her story and said the other girl is her sister, too.
“Those two girls are my sisters.”
“Are they, now? Poor little things. Had a sister once meself.” (AFFC 14 Brienne III)
From Nimble Dick’s point of view, Brienne’s sisters apparently changed from a singularity to a plurality in the space of a minute. Based on this, Nimble Dick could probably tell that Brienne was lying to him about something regarding her relationship to the girls. In contrast, Nimble Dick was upfront about the fact that he never saw the girls himself.
“Two girls?” Could the other one be Arya?
“Well,” the man said, “I never seen the little sweets, mind you, but he was wanting passage for three.” (AFFC 14 Brienne III)
At every turn of this journey, Nimble Dick told stories and sang songs. When the eeriness of the forest became overwhelming and nobody felt like singing, Nimble Dick sang anyway, apparently in an attempt to raise the group’s spirits. It didn’t work, but he tried.
Nimble Dick told about the histories of every rock and hill, and he shared the stories of them because this is his homeland. A person could hardly ask for a better guide than this.
Nimble Dick made every effort to be friendly with Brienne, but nothing could soften her heart. He cooperated with her demands even when he disagreed, he suffered the greatest discomforts, risks and privations out of anybody in the group, and he may very well have been telling the truth in the moments when Brienne was certain that he was lying. For instance…
Thiefy McFlour Hands
Crabb showed his true colors the next day, when they stopped to water the horses. Brienne had to step behind some bushes to empty her bladder. As she was squatting, she heard Podrick say, “What are you doing? You get away from there.” She finished her business, hiked up her breeches, and returned to the road to find Nimble Dick wiping flour off his fingers. “You won’t find any dragons in my saddlebags,” she told him. “I keep my gold upon my person.” Some of it was in the pouch at her belt, the rest hidden in a pair of pockets sewn inside her clothing. The fat purse inside her saddlebag was filled with coppers large and small, pennies and halfpennies, groats and stars … and fine white flour, to make it fatter still. She had bought the flour from the cook at the Seven Swords the morning she rode out from Duskendale.
“Dick meant no harm, m’lady.” He wriggled his flour-spotted fingers to show he held no weapon. “I was only looking to see if you had these dragons what you promised me. The world’s full o’ liars, ready to cheat an honest man. Not that you’re one.”
Brienne hoped he was a better guide than he was a thief. “We had best be going.” She mounted up again. (AFFC 20 Brienne IV)
While Brienne was away from her horse, Nimble Dick took the opportunity to reach a hand into a coin bag in her saddlebag. Podrick saw him and called out. When Brienne returned, she found Nimble Dick with his hand covered in flour, marking him for a thief. Nimble Dick explained that he was only checking to make sure Brienne had the gold she promised.
I can see that Brienne doesn’t believe him, because in her thoughts she calls him a thief.
Brienne hoped he was a better guide than he was a thief. (AFFC 20 Brienne IV)
Brienne’s thoughts explain the flour like this:
“I keep my gold upon my person.” Some of it was in the pouch at her belt, the rest hidden in a pair of pockets sewn inside her clothing. The fat purse inside her saddlebag was filled with coppers large and small, pennies and halfpennies, groats and stars … and fine white flour, to make it fatter still. She had bought the flour from the cook at the Seven Swords the morning she rode out from Duskendale. (AFFC 20 Brienne IV)
Based on Brienne’s thoughts here, we can see that Brienne foresaw the possibility that her guide might try to steal from her, even before she met him. She bought the flour the morning when she rode out from Duskendale, but at that point she hadn’t met Nimble Dick yet. Still, she bought the flour as a protective measure against her guide’s thievery. After she met Nimble Dick and bought his guidance to the Whispers, she poured the flour into the coin bag. She kept her least valuable coins in the bag and her most valuable coins on her person.
Because of Brienne’s foresight and preparation, the reader comes away with the impression that Brienne has good judgement about Nimble Dick — he’s an untrustworthy, selfish, sneaky, perverted creep who’s willing to lie, cheat, and steal when he thinks he can get away with it and when there’s something for him to gain. But when you look at the situation from the standpoint of Nimble Dick, his explanation may have actually been the truth. After all, Nimble Dick doesn’t know if Brienne is good for the gold she promised him, because she never showed it to him. It’s a lot of gold to him, and this is a long and uncomfortable journey, so his concern about payment is totally reasonable. Brienne has already paid him two silver and one gold coin for information, but one gold coin is a far cry from six.
Granted, reaching into her coin bag was the wrong way for Nimble Dick to go about learning if Brienne has the gold. He probably should have asked her politely to show him the gold she promised him.
But, imagine that he did. Imagine that Nimble Dick had approached Brienne respectfully and directly asked her to show him the gold to prove her ability to pay him. How do you think Brienne would have responded? Well, probably in the same ways that she responded to everything else Nimble Dick asked of her: By being snappy, short-tempered, prickly, suspicious, and altogether more unpleasant than she was to begin with. It’s no wonder why Nimble Dick thought it would be better to simply check her coin bag while she’s away. That way, she never has to know about it, and he can have peace of mind, knowing that he is not investing himself into a days-long trek through the woods just to be cheated out of payment at the end. She lied about her sisters already, she could lie about gold, too.
Brienne’s line that she “hoped he was a better guide than he was a thief” convicts Dick of attempted thievery. But the equally viable flipside of that observation is that if Dick were truly trying to steal from her, he probably would not have been stupid enough to do it the way he did, in broad daylight while both group members were awake. That Dick checked Brienne’s coin bag in the day time in full view of Podrick Payne while Brienne was awake and within shouting distance may demonstrate that Nimble Dick was not overly concerned with getting caught because he was not intending to steal in the first place. Additionally, inasmuch as getting caught reaching into Brienne’s saddlebag could have resulted in costs of various kinds to Nimble Dick, the fact that he did it anyway can suggest that a counterweighing cost of greater proportion was at stake for Nimble Dick, which alludes to the points I made about six gold coins being a lot more money to Nimble Dick than it is to Brienne of Tarth, and about a days-long trek through the woods being a great investment of time, resources, energy, and opportunity cost for Nimble Dick.
The scene illustrates a problem with being too mistrustful. You can’t learn if a person is trustworthy if you won’t trust him with anything. Dick did everything a person in his situation could have done to assuage Brienne’s worries about him, short of cowtowing, groveling, or flattering. But as a self-respecting man, he simply wouldn’t be cowed. And as the ending shows, nothing except dying could earn him Brienne’s trust. A lot of good her trust did him then!
An Honorable Gesture
Brienne sheathed Oathkeeper, gathered up Dick Crabb, and carried him to the hole. His face was hard to look on. “I’m sorry that I never trusted you. I don’t know how to do that anymore.” (AFFC 20 Brienne IV)
After the fight, as Nimble Dick lay dead, Brienne insisted upon burying him out of respect. Her thoughts show that she finally realized that he was trustworthy after all, even though he died before he could do anything in the fight to prove his trustworthiness further than he already had. Dick’s brutal death shocked Brienne into sympathy for him and finally forced her feelings about him to be rejoined with reality.
Podrick helped her lower Nimble Dick into his hole. By the time they were done the moon was rising. Brienne rubbed the dirt from her hands and tossed two dragons down into the grave.
“Why did you do that, my lady? Ser?” asked Pod.
“It was the reward I promised him for finding me the fool.”
Laughter sounded from behind them. She ripped Oathkeeper from her sheath and whirled, expecting more Bloody Mummers … but it was only Hyle Hunt atop the crumbling wall, his legs crossed. “If there are brothels down in hell, the wretch will thank you,” the knight called down. “Elsewise, that’s a waste of good gold.”
“I keep my promises. What are you doing here?” (AFFC 20 Brienne IV)
Brienne tossed two gold coins into Nimble Dick’s grave in order to keep her part of the bargain (“Two if we only find the fool.”). It’s a sentimental thing to do. Hyle Hunt laughed at the gesture and said it’s a waste of gold because Nimble Dick can’t use it now. This exchange highlights that Brienne came to her senses about Nimble Dick too late. The futility of the gesture shows that it has nothing to do with helping Nimble Dick and everything to do with making herself feel better. This gesture tracks with the thematic question about honor. Because, while the gesture is undeniably good in spirit, it is useless or counter-productive in practice. So, too, goes the criticism against honor, that’s made by Nimble Dick Crabb and by many readers.
Brienne channels the feelings that scare her through her honor. It’s her way of avoiding processing her emotions so that she doesn’t have to confront them. She feels romantic love for Renly but she fears it will never be returned because she’s outwardly ugly, so she channels her love through honor and commits to protecting him for life. Similarly, she feels romantic love for Jaime but she fears it will never be returned, so she channels it through honor. Brienne swears to redeem Jaime’s honor by finding Sansa and Arya. As with Renly and Jaime, with Nimble Dick Brienne feels a feeling that scares her — guilt for mistrusting Nimble Dick and getting him killed — so she channels that feeling through honor by giving due payment to his corpse. But obvious to most people, protecting Renly will never make Renly love her, redeeming Jaime’s honor will never make Jaime love her, and giving two gold to a corpse she created is no real payment at all.
Brienne knows deep down that she killed Nimble Dick as much as Shagwell did, and that’s what scares her. Had she seen Nimble Dick for who he really is, she would have recognized that rather than giving him a sword so that he can help in the fight, she should have protected him by entering the Whispers alone.
Brienne is not a knight, but inasmuch as she wants to be one, she should have remembered that knights protect the weak and innocent, no matter if the knight doesn’t personally like that person. This was not Nimble Dick’s fight to fight, it was Brienne’s. Nimble Dick promised to take her to the Whispers, and that’s what he did. Brienne did the right thing by sending Podrick away, but she failed to recognize that she needed to protect Nimble Dick, too. Brienne should have sent Nimble Dick away with Podrick, set Nimble Dick to guarding the entrance, the horses, or instructed him to stay out of the fight. What Nimble Dick would have done after that is Nimble Dick’s prerogative, but Brienne needed to try to protect him in one of those ways.
Had Brienne not used her magic sword, Nimble Dick never would have known that she had a second sword, and Nimble Dick being unarmed would have been a great pretext for Brienne to use as the reason why he should not enter the Whispers with her. In this way, the magic sword had the power to save a life if only its owner had restrained herself from using it, like her childhood hero Ser Galladon.
Nimble Dick’s presence in the fight did nothing to help Brienne win it. Shagwell killing Nimble Dick didn’t buy Brienne time to fight someone else, because Brienne didn’t spend that time fighting anyone else. After Shagwell killed Nimble Dick, everybody stood around talking for a while before the fight began. Nimble Dick’s knee and face didn’t damage Shagwell’s morningstar. Nimble Dick’s dead body didn’t even obstruct the bad guys from reaching Brienne. The entire situation and fight scene is written in such a way that it renders Nimble Dick’s death absolutely unhelpful in any way to Brienne’s victory. Yet, except for Podrick’s stonethrow, Brienne won the fight by herself anyway. One potential meaning of all this is pretty straightforward in retrospect: Nimble Dick should not have been in the fight to begin with.
A Sword Too Many
It rained all that day. The narrow track they followed soon turned to mud beneath them. What trees they saw were naked, and the steady rain had turned their fallen leaves into a sodden brown mat. Despite its squirrel-skin lining, Dick’s cloak soaked through, and she could see him shivering. Brienne felt a moment’s pity for the man. He has not eaten well, that’s plain. She wondered if there truly was a smugglers’ cove, or a ruined castle called the Whispers. Hungry men do desperate things. This all might be some ploy to cozen her. Suspicion soured her stomach.
For a time it seemed as though the steady wash of rain was the only sound in the world. Nimble Dick plowed on, heedless. She watched closely, noting how he bent his back, as if huddling low in the saddle would keep him dry. This time there was no village close at hand when darkness came upon them. Nor were there any trees to give them shelter. They were forced to camp amongst some rocks, fifty yards above the tideline. The rocks at least would keep the wind off. “Best we keep a watch tonight, m’lady,” Crabb told her, as she was struggling to get a driftwood fire lit. “A place like this, there might be squishers.” (AFFC 20 Brienne IV)
Throughout this chapter, we see Brienne see Nimble Dick shivering in the cold, sleeping in the cold, sleeping in the rain, going hungry, and slumping over pitifully in his saddle. Instead of thinking he’s hurting, hungry, and tired, she seems to think he’s stupid.
Feelings of pity for Nimble Dick begin to creep into Brienne’s heart, telling a story of a cold and hungry old man who has been pushed to the limit of what his body can tolerate. But immediately after her pity, it’s as if some hateful propagandist steps into her thoughts to rewrite the story of what’s obviously happening with Dick. Nimble Dick’s shivering, slumping, and hunger are evidence of some great deception he’s doing against her, she thinks. He must be very devoted to the ruse in order to go to all this trouble without complaint, but hungry men do desperate things, after all.
Many of the discomforts Nimble Dick suffered were unnecessary, and they were consequences of Brienne not trusting Nimble Dick enough to let him sleep in better conditions. Despite that, Nimble Dick managed to maintain enough good will to entertain the group with a spooky campfire story about a local monster called squishers. Still, it wasn’t enough to charm Brienne or move her from her mistrust. If anything, the lie of the fable only made her more mistrustful.
Though Brienne finally trusted Nimble Dick at the end in a big way (she gave him a sword at a risky moment), all the mistrust that preceded that moment can cause a discerning reader to wonder if Brienne was really moved by trust at all, or by something else. Perhaps a self-interested wish not to face the danger alone.
I think the right answer is something inbetween. I think trust was not really what moved Brienne to give Nimble Dick the sword, and that Brienne also did not want to face the danger alone. It seems to me that most of the explanation for what happened is that after deciding to wield Oathkeeper, Brienne realized that she had a spare sword, and she saw no reason not to put the spare sword to use by putting it into the hands of Nimble Dick, who by all rights is a man grown.
In that interpretation, the availability of a spare sword is much of what caused Brienne’s misstep. And Brienne’s decision to use Oathkeeper is what created the availability of a sword. So, Nimble Dick’s death relates to what we explored earlier from this chapter involving honor and Ser Galladon of Morne’s magic sword. In a perverse way, it could be said that Nimble Dick sowed the seeds of his own death when he mocked Ser Galladon for not using his magic sword. If only he had known that Brienne would be so easily influenced by his comments. Uprightly, perhaps I should say instead that Brienne should not have been so easily affected by a little bit of mockery. The ease at which she was influenced to abandon her lifelong ideal of honor is constant with what I said about honor being a tool for self-comfort to Brienne.
Yet, there’s another attitude in Brienne that’s impossible to ignore because it features so prominently in this and many of Brienne’s chapters, and I think it was at play in this situation, too. Nimble Dick is not merely a person who Brienne mistrusts, he’s a person who belongs to an identity that Brienne mistrusts collectively.
If Brienne’s encounter with Nimble Dick had been an encounter with Nimble Dick moreso than an encounter with a man, she might have seen him for who he really is — a personable, well-meaning, and amusing old coot who tells it like it is. True enough, some knight getting in Sansa’s slit is an accurate summary of the horrors that can visit a highborn maid who doesn’t have sufficient protection on the road, no matter how offensive Nimble Dick’s language or chivalrous the knight’s vows.
As if to dispel the last doubts about whether Brienne’s adventure with Nimble Dick Crabb is meant to portray Brienne’s mistrust of Nimble Dick Crabb alone or of Men The Collective, Brienne’s mistrust of Nimble Dick Crabb licenses a simple description of this adventure that can scarcely be a coincidence on the part of the author: Brienne doesn’t trust Dick.
In true fantasy form, through Nimble Dick Crabb’s name the voice of the story cheekily transforms into the voice of the author. It’s as if GRRM is claiming the last word in the argument about what this part of the story is really about between Brienne’s mistrust of one man and Brienne’s mistrust of all men. “Dick” can refer to Nimble Dick Crabb, or to men collectively, or to the male sex organ. The sentence remains true no matter which meaning we use. This relates to Brienne’s sexual repression that I alluded to when I said Brienne’s feelings scare her. The underlying recognition is that the author could have chosen any name imaginable for the character who guides Brienne to the Whispers after making a dick first impression of himself, yet he chose Dick, and he nimbly hid it between a Nimble nickname and Crabb — an animal as offputting as the offspring of a tarantula and a scorpion.
In contrast to GRRM’s alleged tropebreaker habits, a surprising element of this recontextualization is that Martin adheres to the fantasy tradition of naming characters what they are, reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s rabbit White Rabbit, C.S. Lewis’s beaver Mr. Beaver, and J.K. Rowling’s werewolf Professor Lupin.
Helpful Hand Or Murderous Mitt?
When Brienne approached a cliff to look over the edge of it, Nimble Dick walked over to point something out to her.
“That’s the old beacon tower,” said Nimble Dick as he came up behind her. “It fell when I was half as old as Pods here. Used to be steps down to the cove, but when the cliff collapsed they went too. The smugglers stopped landing here after that. Time was, they could row their boats into the cave, but no more. See?” He put one hand on her back, and pointed with the other.
Brienne’s flesh prickled. One shove, and I’ll be down there with the tower. She stepped back. “Keep your hands off me.”
Crabb made a face. “I was only …”
“I don’t care what you were only. Where’s the gate?” (AFFC 20 Brienne IV)
This touch caused Brienne’s flesh to prickle, and she thinks to herself “One shove, and I’ll be down there with the tower.” This shows us in certain terms that Brienne thinks Nimble Dick may want to kill her.
Who am I to question Brienne’s intuition? I’m not the one living out her scenario, she is. Surely that makes her a better judge of Nimble Dick than I am.
While that’s a reasonable assumption in general, it’s also reasonable to say that murder is far beyond anything Nimble Dick has done so far. Based on the sum of everything Nimble Dick has yet shown himself to be, Brienne’s fear that he may want to murder her is paranoid. Maybe if Brienne hadn’t treated him so poorly for the whole journey, she wouldn’t have given him as much reason to resent her, and she wouldn’t feel the need to worry so much.
There are two viable interpretations of Nimble Dick that are running through this whole chapter — the one in which Nimble Dick seems suspiciously like he’s trying to lull Brienne into a sense of false security for some nefarious purpose, and the one in which Nimble Dick is genuinely trying to be helpful and friendly but Brienne’s mistrust is inconsolable. The first interpretation is the one a first-time reader will have. The second interpretation may only become visible on a second or later reading, once the reader knows that the chapter ends with the murder of Nimble Dick and Brienne’s guilt about not trusting him.
Brienne The Maid
Brienne paid the villagers a few coppers to allow them to bed down in a hay barn. She claimed the loft for Podrick and herself, and pulled the ladder up after them.
“You leave me down here alone, I could bloody well steal your horses,” Crabb called up from below. “Best you get them up the ladder too, m’lady.” When she ignored him, he went on to say, “It’s going to rain tonight. A cold hard rain. You and Pods will sleep all snug and warm, and poor old Dick will be shivering down here by myself.” He shook his head, muttering, as he made a bed on a pile of hay. “I never knew such a mistrustful maid as you.”
Brienne curled up beneath her cloak, with Podrick yawning at her side. I was not always wary, she might have shouted down at Crabb. When I was a little girl I believed that all men were as noble as my father. (AFFC 20 Brienne IV)
Brienne’s mistrust of men the collective is neither entirely misguided nor unsympathetically earned. She had a traumatic experience when Hyle Hunt and his friends played a cruel joke on her, for one thing. And as Nimble Dick himself implied, there are enough bad men in the world that even an elevated class of men who swore vows to protect women and the weak has its share of would-be rapers.
But at the end of the day, those are exceptions to the rule. Much of Brienne’s internal struggle is that she needs to find the balanced medium between fully trusting and fully mistrusting every man she meets. She needs to learn discernment. Until she can do that, the blind spot that’s being portrayed in Brienne in the situation where she got Nimble Dick killed will continue to characterize her experiences wherever they involve men.
A silver lining is that Brienne’s contempt for men does not seem to automatically apply to young men such as her teenage squire Podrick Payne. Maybe, like Howland the shady crannogman and Ned the honor obsessed snow paladin, Podrick Payne will be the unlikely friendship formed that provides the falsification Brienne needs of the misandrist outlook she’s flirting with.
Galladon’s Honor, Tower of Joy Cues
To summarize what we’ve covered so far, let’s put it all together as it relates to the Whispers≈TOJ parallel we’re working on.
- Brienne’s contempt for Nimble Dick prevents her from having compassion for him.
- Brienne’s contempt for Nimble Dick prevents her from being honorable.
- Being a man and named Dick, Nimble Dick is symbolic of men collectively.
- Therefore, Brienne’s contempt for Nimble Dick is symbolic of Brienne’s contempt for men collectively.
- Because we agreed with Brienne at first, Brienne is symbolic of the audience.
- Therefore, Brienne’s contempt for Nimble Dick is symbolic of the audience’s contempt for men collectively.
Because the reader didn’t notice the first time around that Brienne’s mistrust of Nimble Dick comes from her hatred of men, it can fairly be said that what the story is suggesting is that, like Brienne, the audience has a deeply ingrained hatred of men, and that that’s what prevents us from noticing that Nimble Dick is a trustworthy fellow, from making progress on the Tower of Joy mystery, and perhaps from making progress on other mysteries, too. Likewise, the story is suggesting that our hatred of men is what prevents us from understanding what’s wrong with honor in the hypothetical match-up between Ser Galladon of Morne and Ser Clarence Crabb.
It’s time we tie a bow on a thread we wove in Chapter 5. ‘What’s the matter with honor, then?’
The problem with Ser Galladon’s honor is that, actually, there is nothing wrong with Ser Galladon’s honor. Rather, there is something wrong with Brienne’s (and the reader’s) understanding of Ser Galladon’s honor.
When Nimble Dick challenged Brienne about Ser Galladon not using his magic sword, Brienne answered “honor.”
Crabb thought that was hilarious. “The Perfect Knight? The Perfect Fool, he sounds like. What’s the point o’ having some magic sword if you don’t bloody well use it?”
“Honor,” she said. “The point is honor.” (AFFC 20 Brienne IV)
Honor is the correct answer, so Brienne’s intuition is good. But describing how the answer is correct is more difficult. Like Brienne, we may have a sense of certainty that honor is a good and worthwhile thing to strive for and that ultimately it pays off well, even for the person who’s being honorable, but we may not be able to persuasively describe how that happens in a given situation.
To describe it, I’ll draw from my background of video gaming. Indeed, I think much of my ability to work the literary puzzles in ASOIAF was developed when I was playing video games through my childhood and teens, and most people are familiar with video games these days, so I may as well do homage to the hobby.
Some video games allow you to select the difficulty level of the game. Typically, these difficulty levels are called Easy Mode, Normal Mode, and Hard Mode. Some games expand these options to four, five, or more, but these three are enough to make my point. Ser Galladon’s decision to not use the Just Maid against mortals is like Ser Galladon choosing to play the game on Hard Mode. What do you think will happen to Ser Galladon’s fighting skills when he gets used to playing on Hard Mode? Probably the same thing that happens to my skills when I change the difficulty level of a video game from normal to hard — his skills will improve in order to win.
As the tale goes, Ser Galladon of Morne is depicted as a world class fighter in his time. Needless to say, becoming a world class fighter is hard, and you know you’re never going to do the things you need to do in order to achieve it unless you have to. So, if you’re wise, you arrange your circumstances so that you have to. That’s what Galladon was doing when he decided never to use the Just Maid against mortals.
Increasing the difficulty of anything can be dangerous if it isn’t done selectively. After all, if Galladon were to restrain himself from using his magic sword while his opponent is an immortal, Galladon would surely be killed. Almost by definition, a fight against an immortal is not a winnable fight for a mortal. So, the principle should only be applied in situations that pose a survivable amount of danger. The risk of misusing the principle this way is why the principle tends to be intuitive to men and unintuitive to women. Men on average are more willing to take risks than women on average. But, when the principle is applied with wisdom, it is greatly productive. By neglecting to use his magic sword against mortals, Ser Galladon subjected himself to the maximum amount of danger that mortals can pose. Because of that, the only thing left to protect Galladon from defeat was his will to win and live. That’s how Galladon’s honor was the source of Galladon’s valor, and that’s one mechanism by which honor pays off in the end despite its cost early on.
This description of honor fits well with other details of the Ser Galladon story. In Ser Galladon’s story, the Maiden fell in love with Galladon for his valor and rewarded him with the Just Maid. To put it another way, the reason Galladon received a magic sword was not that the Maiden fell in love with him, it was that he had valor. The Maiden just happened to be attracted to valor. Once he received the magic sword, he knew its potency would degrade his valor if he became dependent on it, so that’s why he refused to use it except against immortals.
The lesson Brienne took from the Ser Galladon of Morne story was approximately ‘Forget honor, don’t hold back your power when it really counts.’ The irony of the situation is that if Brienne had not allowed herself to be persuaded off the code of honor that made her hero Ser Galladon honorable, then Ser Galladon’s story would have prevented Brienne from getting Nimble Dick killed by giving him a spare sword.
Recall the story of Ser Goodwin’s lesson to Brienne.
It may be that I will need to kill him [mysterious follower Hyle Hunt], she told herself one night as she paced about the camp. The notion made her queasy. Her old master-at-arms had always questioned whether she was hard enough for battle. “You have a man’s strength in your arms,” Ser Goodwin had said to her, more than once, “but your heart is as soft as any maid’s. It is one thing to train in the yard with a blunted sword in hand, and another to drive a foot of sharpened steel into a man’s gut and see the light go out of his eyes.” To toughen her, Ser Goodwin used to send her to her father’s butcher to slaughter lambs and suckling pigs. The piglets squealed and the lambs screamed like frightened children. By the time the butchering was done Brienne had been blind with tears, her clothes so bloody that she had given them to her maid to burn. But Ser Goodwin still had doubts. “A piglet is a piglet. It is different with a man. When I was a squire young as you, I had a friend who was strong and quick and agile, a champion in the yard. We all knew that one day he would be a splendid knight. Then war came to the Stepstones. I saw my friend drive his foeman to his knees and knock the axe from his hand, but when he might have finished he held back for half a heartbeat. In battle half a heartbeat is a lifetime. The man slipped out his dirk and found a chink in my friend’s armor. His strength, his speed, his valor, all his hard-won skill … it was worth less than a mummer’s fart, because he flinched from killing. Remember that, girl.”
I will, she promised his shade, there in the piney wood. She sat down on a rock, took out her sword, and began to hone its edge. I will remember, and I pray I will not flinch. (AFFC 20 Brienne IV)
Brienne’s memory of Ser Goodwin’s lesson served as a tie-breaker opinion on whether Ser Galladon is honorable or foolish to not use his magic sword against mortal men. So, Ser Goodwin is one reason Brienne didn’t get the “good win.” She won the fight, but it was a bad win because she got an innocent killed and she betrayed the ideal that her hero Ser Galladon stood for.
‘But aren’t you being too hard on Brienne?’ I hear you saying. Indeed, Brienne was against three enemies at the same time. They were armed with some serious weaponry such as the spear and morningstar. They even had some scraps of armor. These three men are battle hardened from their time in the War of the Five Kings, so they probably have experience fighting. Additionally, the “magic” of Brienne’s magic sword made a difference in the fight. As we can see in Brienne’s attack against Pyg, Oathkeeper’s exceptional sharpness is what allowed Oathkeeper to bite through all of Pyg’s protection.
He jerked his broken blade up to protect his face, but as he went high she went low. Oathkeeper bit through leather, wool, skin, and muscle, into the sellsword’s thigh. Pyg cut back wildly as his leg went out from under him. His broken sword scraped against her chain mail before he landed on his back. Brienne stabbed him through the throat, (…) (AFFC 20 Brienne IV)
And as we can see in Brienne’s fight against Timeon, Oathkeeper’s exceptional sharpness is what allowed Oathkeeper to pierce Timeon’s chain mail byrnie, and maybe his spear head, too.
She flew at Timeon.
He was better than Pyg, but he had only a short throwing spear, and she had a Valyrian steel blade. Oathkeeper was alive in her hands. She had never been so quick. The blade became a grey blur. He wounded her in the shoulder as she came at him, but she slashed off his ear and half his cheek, hacked the head off his spear, and put a foot of rippled steel into his belly through the links of the chain mail byrnie he was wearing.
Timeon was still trying to fight as she pulled her blade from him, its fullers running red with blood. He clawed at his belt and came up with a dagger, so Brienne cut his hand off. That one was for Jaime. “Mother have mercy,” the Dornishman gasped, the blood bubbling from his mouth and spurting from his wrist. “Finish it. Send me back to Dorne, you bloody bitch.”
She did. (AFFC 20 Brienne IV)
Brienne didn’t use her sword against Shagwell, she killed him with a dagger, so there’s no sword magic to see there.
So there! Oathkeeper’s magical sharpness had a verifiable effect on the outcome of at least three things: The attacks against Pyg’s leather, Timeon’s chain mail, and Timeon’s spear head. Oathkeeper’s magical speed also certainly had an effect on the outcome of every swing, making each attack faster than it would have been if Brienne had used the sword made of regular steel.
However, at the end of all these Valyrian steel observations, the pertinent question is not really answered, is it?
The pertinent question is ‘Would Brienne have won the fight without permanent injury if she had used the regular steel sword instead of the Valyrian steel sword?’ I don’t know the answer to that. And more to the point, neither does Brienne. The only way to know was to try it, and Brienne didn’t try it.
Like my feelings about myself after I beat a video game on Normal Mode, a careful examination of Brienne’s victory in the Whispers fight leaves me with the feeling that Brienne probably could have won reasonably well on Hard Mode, too, if she had tried. Thus, the victory loses some of its savor.
How much more skillful, knowledgeable, faster and precise do I become at a video game after I played it on Hard Mode compared to after I played it on Normal Mode? The difference in my abilities is quite noticeable when I do it, but that does require me to actually do it. Likewise, how much faster, stronger, knowledgeable, precise, and dare I say “valiant” would Brienne become if she were not using her magic sword against mortal foes? As in Galladon’s irresistible valor, the difference is probably quite noticeable when she does it… but that does require her to actually do it.
‘But aren’t you being too hard on Ser Goodwin?’ I don’t hear you saying. Indeed, Ser Goodwin was probably not trying to teach Brienne a cynical lesson that brutality is a virtue in men. He was probably trying to scare her away from what he considers a young Tarth princess’s foolish fixation on becoming a warrior. The intended message of Ser Goodwin’s story may likely have been as straightforward as ‘War is nasty business. You think you want to be a warrior, but you don’t.’ But as we acknowledged earlier about honor, describing the mechanism by which something is good and right is sometimes more difficult than knowing deep down that it is. With things as old and important as war and honor, the knowing is often within us long before a description arrives to justify it.
The Moral of the Story
In the end, Brienne should not have used her magic sword in this fight, after all. She failed to uphold the knightly oath to protect the weak and innocent when she included Nimble Dick in the fight, because since Nimble Dick was a man and she didn’t like him, she didn’t recognize that he’s somebody she ought to protect. Being no knight, it’s an oath she never swore, so her hands are technically clean. Still, it’s enough to render Lord Randyll Tarly’s words prophetic by mortal standards.
“I have been sent to look for … for …” She hesitated.
“How will you find him if you do not know his name? Did you slay Lord Renly?”
“No.”
Tarly weighed the word. He is judging me, as he judged those others. “No,” he said at last, “you only let him die.” (AFFC 14 Brienne III)
In essay chapter 5, I said well-done symbolic interpretation is uniquely marked by its explanatory power over not just the things in the story but also the story’s effect on its audience. Symbolic interpretation’s explanatory power over the story is not unique. Other kinds of interpretation can explain things in the story just fine. But there are some questions only symbolic interpretation can answer, and those tend to be the questions the audience is mostly asking. They’re the story’s mysteries, like “What do the Others want?”, “Who is Azor Ahai?”, and “What’s up with Rhaegar?” So what really distinguishes symbolic interpretation from other kinds of interpretation is its explanatory power over the story’s effect on the audience. It explains the story through its explanation of the audience.
For each reader, the most accessible part of the audience is him or her self. I have a depth of access to what I’m thinking and feeling that I can never have to what another person is thinking and feeling. The value of this access can be sabotaged, however, by not paying attention to myself or not being honest with myself. Accessing the answers to ASOIAF’s most famous mysteries demands an amount of attention to and honesty with oneself that is rare, and that usually takes a long time to cultivate.
For instance, Brienne first told Dick that she was looking for her sister, and then after Dick said there were two girls instead of one, Brienne changed her story so that she’s looking for her two sisters. Ask yourself if you noticed before I pointed it out that Brienne changed her story. Don’t answer me, answer yourself. Did you really notice that? I didn’t notice it until I reread these chapters with the specific goal in mind to look at situations from Dick’s perspective instead of Brienne’s. If you didn’t notice it, are you able to admit that to yourself? Does your mind try to deny that you didn’t notice it? Is it grasping for a rationalization? Is it making up a story or an excuse? Those are all things that my mind likes to do when it learns that it’s guilty of some oversight or misapprehension, especially if the oversight reflects poorly on my values.
To find the answers to ASOIAF’s mysteries, at minimum you have to be the kind of person who can admit to himself when his thoughts, feelings or expectations about the story were wrong. For better results, you also have to actively seek evidence in the story that you’re wrong. For even better results, you have to do that when you’re mostly right and only a little wrong. Your interpretive errors are perhaps your most potent clues about what the “moral of the story” might be, and that applies no matter how big or small the piece of the story you’re handling is — one little sentence or the whole kit and caboodle.
After noticing that Brienne’s easily detectable lie was probably noticed by Nimble Dick, too, and how it gives Nimble Dick reason to mistrust Brienne, and that I failed to notice it the first time around, that’s enough of a cue from the story for me to start considering that this chapter’s lesson to me, or “moral”, has something to do with my failure to notice that Nimble Dick has good reason to mistrust Brienne. In a chapter that seems like it’s about Brienne having good reasons to mistrust Nimble Dick, Nimble Dick having a good reason to mistrust Brienne is quite the reversal of my first impression. For a reader who’s actively seeking evidence that he’s wrong about something, this stands out in a big way. For a reader who isn’t, it’s easy to write it off.
‘Maybe Brienne learned just now from Nimble Dick that her second sister is missing, too. Nimble Dick wouldn’t be able to know she’s lying.’ Perhaps not, but then again, how could Brienne know the second girl is her sister too if she had no reason to think her second sister was lost before now? If before now Brienne apparently thought her second sister was safe and accounted for, wouldn’t she have wondered at the identity of the girl her sister is traveling with? Some companion chance met on the road, most like. No matter how we look at it, Brienne’s change of story should be more than a little fishy from the perspective of Nimble Dick.
Symbols Preserved in the Crypt: Nimble Dick Crabb≈Lord Dustin
Since this interpretation recontextualizes Brienne as less heroic than we thought, (which is another way of saying more villainous than we thought), and since Brienne is symbolic of Ned in the overarching Whispers≈TOJ symbol, this suggests that our feelings about Ned will be recontextualized the same way when we learn all there is to learn about the Tower of Joy.
As if to hint of a villainous recontextualization of Ned’s actions at the Tower of Joy, Barbrey Dustin’s anger toward Ned for getting her husband killed at the Tower of Joy became observable to the reader in ADWD, during her conversation with Theon in the Winterfell crypt.
“Ned Stark returned the horse to me on his way back home to Winterfell. He told me that my lord had died an honorable death, that his body had been laid to rest beneath the red mountains of Dorne. He brought his sister’s bones back north, though, and there she rests … but I promise you, Lord Eddard’s bones will never rest beside hers. I mean to feed them to my dogs.” (ADWD 41 The Turncloak)
This recontextualization of Ned is also present in this Whispers situation with our Ned symbol, Brienne. Just as Barbrey’s perspective rubs against the reader’s admiration of Ned for including someone in the fight at the Tower of Joy who died and was buried there, so does Nimble Dick’s perspective rub against the reader’s admiration of Brienne for including Nimble Dick in the fight at the Tower of Joy symbol, the Whispers, who died and was buried there.
In this way, our TOJ symbols successfully predicted the story again. And my analysis of it too, it would seem. I did not notice this connection to House Dustin until I was writing this essay chapter. Before then, Barbrey Dustin was the furthest character from my mind while handling the Whispers and Tower of Joy parallel. The frequency at which connections like this one occur to me used to shock me. But now, a couple of years after I’ve worked out most of ASOIAF’s philosophy and mysteries, they occur to me almost every time I read a chapter. They’re bound to occur to you more frequently too if you continue studying the story. But as you may now understand better from this essay chapter, you won’t like everything you learn. My only promises are that my analysis and the answers therein will be true, will give you a greater understanding of the story, will accurately predict the future of the story, and will stand the test of time. I make no promise that they will be popular.
In my original interpretation, Brienne’s decision to give Nimble Dick a sword was her moment of character progression. Ostensibly, Brienne had overcome her mistrust of men the collective and finally trusted man an individual. She was able to put aside the hatreds and resentments that cause her to see a collective when looking at an individual, and that’s why she was able to see the individual for who he really is. But now that I know Brienne’s decision was a failure of honor, which resulted in Nimble Dick’s death, it puts a major damper on the character progression interpretation. By now we should be questioning if putting aside her hatred for men was really what caused Brienne to give Nimble Dick a sword at all.
Did Brienne really see Nimble Dick for the disagreeable yet ultimately trustworthy individual he is? Or was she compelled to give him a sword by some other reason?
There are two other main possibilities that I see for why Brienne gave Nimble Dick the sword. The first possibility is that Brienne was compelled to give him the sword by her fear of facing a scary situation alone. Descriptions of fear setting into Brienne are readily available to suit this possibility. For example, she begins to imagine that the eerie sounds that are coming from beneath the ground are indeed the severed heads from the Ser Clarence Crabb story, despite the fact that she invalidated those same fears when Podrick Payne voiced them. For another example, she gets a creepy feeling that causes her to hesitate just before she enters the Whispers.
The postern door resisted for a moment, then jerked open, its hinges screaming protest. The sound made the hairs on the back of Brienne’s neck stand up. She drew her sword. Even in mail and boiled leather, she felt naked. (AFFC 20 Brienne IV)
The second possibility is that Brienne was compelled to give Nimble Dick the sword because she considered him too weak to be able to harm her much with it anyway. I think this possibility is closer to the truth, because the order of events suggests that Brienne did trust in something about Nimble Dick. After all, Brienne gave him the sword before Podrick Payne had arrived with Oathkeeper. That means that Brienne gave Nimble Dick a sword while she was not yet armed with a sword of her own. What Brienne trusted in was Nimble Dick’s weakness or incompetence with a sword — that he wouldn’t be able to hurt her even if he wanted to and even while she’s swordless. If that’s the right explanation for why Brienne gave Nimble Dick a sword even before she had Oathkeeper in hand, then her size, strength, armor, and dagger may likely have factored into her decision, too.
Still, if Brienne thought Nimble Dick was so weak and useless with a sword, it’s a wonder what she expected him to contribute in a fight. Because of this contradiction, Brienne appears to have little regard for Nimble Dick’s life, because she’s willing to put him in a great amount of danger for a small amount of advantage. What’s more, because a sword is as much for self defense as for attack, she can comfortably deceive herself by telling herself that she’s doing it to protect Nimble Dick.
If the lesson Brienne needs to learn is to overcome her hatred of men, and Brienne is symbolic of us, maybe we need to learn the same lesson to make progress on the Whispers≈TOJ parallel and then the Tower of Joy mystery.
However, you don’t have to take that lesson. You could take a different lesson entirely. You could say it’s not your fault that you didn’t consider Nimble Dick’s perspective because GRRM tricked you by writing the story a certain way. You could even say you disagree with my interpretation, denounce me as a fraud, and swear to never read my work again. That’s all perfectly good and well.
One of the brilliant features of this chapter’s design is that because the shock of Nimble Dick’s recontextualization from creepy betrayer to tragic victim happens to the reader through Brienne, there is never a moment in the audience when readers are especially split between those who trash Nimble Dick and those who defend him. It’s a rare monster who would speak ill of the innocent dead. Because we never had to confront the fact that we were wrong about Nimble Dick just like Brienne was, our wrongness is never exposed to other people, and we can hide it even from ourselves. In this way, the secrets that the situation has to teach us about ASOIAF are reserved for those rare readers who are genuinely seeking how the story got them to be wrong, in order to retrieve a moral of the story.
But independent of me, the fact remains that if you can’t take a lesson from a story, and more specifically the right lesson, you’re unlikely to ever solve its mysteries. And the degree to which an idea can imply accurate predictions about the story, particularly its future such as in answers to unresolved mysteries, is the degree to which the idea is right. That’s all just a fancy way of saying I expect my analysis to mold in obscurity for a long time before the accuracy of the predictions contained within them are measured against the events in The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring and found to be majorly correct.
For those who are still reading, we know enough now about the moral of the chapter’s story to return to applying our symbols between the Whispers and the Tower of Joy, and to learn much of what happened in the Tower of Joy fight. That’s up next.
Next: Chapter 9 – The Fight and Fighters II
Beginning: Chapter 0-4 – Introduction
Acclaim
Thank you for these valuable deep dives! I wish we had a devoted ASOIAF subreddit for this kind of stuff, as it can get lost among the memes and griping on here.
It’s a lot to digest, but worth it. —u/4thBG
Created Jul 18, 2024
Updated Aug 24, 2024 – minor changes, additions
Updated Aug 30, 2024 – changes and adds
Updated May 17, 2025 – small changes
Updated Jul 1, 2025 – small add, like galladon
Apples and Dragons 