targaryen – Apples and Dragons

Chapter 14 – The She-wolf

Three Kingsguard

One of the long lasting questions about the Tower of Joy is ‘Why were there three Kingsguard, as opposed to one, two or four?’ It seems overkill for Rhaegar to have so many of his deadliest fighters devoted to guarding a 14 or 15-year-old girl and a tower in the middle of nowhere, especially while those Kingsguard could have been the difference between victory or defeat at the Battle of the Trident, as Ned and Oswell point out in Ned’s Tower of Joy dream.

“I looked for you on the Trident,” Ned said to them.

“We were not there,” Ser Gerold answered.

“Woe to the Usurper if we had been,” said Ser Oswell. (AGOT 39 Eddard X p354)

Ned’s line suggests that Ned was expecting more Kingsguard at the Battle of the Trident, and Oswell’s line suggests that Oswell would have preferred fewer Kingsguard at the Tower of Joy and more at the Battle of the Trident. So these lines steer me away from the questions “Why not four?” and “Why not more?” and toward the questions “Why not two? Or one? Or none?” What’s so important at the Tower of Joy that Rhaegar thinks two Kingsguard are not enough to guard it?

If the baby Lyanna is birthing at the Tower of Joy is Jon Snow and Rhaegar is Jon’s father, then maybe Rhaegar wanted to protect Lyanna and his son Jon. But since Rhaegar’s first son and heir (Aegon) was still alive in King’s Landing at the time, it may not make sense for Rhaegar to have placed the three Kingsguard at the Tower of Joy rather than at King’s Landing. So maybe Jon isn’t the reason. On the other hand, the Tower of Joy is more vulnerable than the Red Keep, so it might make sense after all.

The Number Three

In November 2012, a mobile phone application was released by the name of George R. R. Martin’s A World of Ice and Fire — A Game of Thrones Guide (henceforth AWOIAF). AWOIAF provided new tidbits of information that can’t be found in any of the previously published books. The information in it is considered semi-canon, because it was written by Martin’s co-authors from The World of Ice and Fire, Elio Garcia and Linda Antonsson, with input from Martin himself.

In the Rhaegar Targaryen section of AWOIAF, we learn that, after the Targaryen defeat in the Battle of the Bells, King Aerys sent his Kingsguard commander Ser Gerold Hightower from King’s Landing to find and retrieve Rhaegar. Though Rhaegar returned to King’s Landing, Gerold did not. Gerold was next seen at the Tower of Joy in Dorne, with Arthur Dayne and Oswell Whent, guarding Lyanna Stark.

To judge by this information, it seems that when Gerold found Rhaegar at the Tower of Joy, Rhaegar told Gerold to stay and help guard it, and then departed for King’s Landing himself.

It’s a little strange that the commander of the Kingsguard obeys a command that keeps him far away from the king he’s sworn to protect, and during dire times such as these. It seems even stranger considering that the command comes from Rhaegar, who the king believes is trying to usurp the throne from him. Though, it doesn’t seem much stranger than Oswell Whent and Arthur Dayne doing the very same thing.

Whatever is really going on here regarding these characters’ true loyalties and motivations, I notice that this new crumb of information has the effect of highlighting a familiar-looking intrigue about the Tower of Joy: When Gerold arrived, Rhaegar left. In other words, when three guards became two, Rhaegar made it three again. Yet again, the Tower of Joy clues lead us to a question about the number of guards.

What’s so important about the number three guards? What can three guards do that two can’t?

Now that we know Lyanna was a skinchanger, we can tie a bow on this mystery, too. Three is the minimum number of guards needed to guard a skinchanger.

Think about it. Whenever a group of two or more travel companions go to sleep in dangerous territory, what do they do? One person stays awake to keep watch while the rest of the group sleeps. Halfway through the night, the watcher wakes a second person and they switch places so the watcher can get some sleep too. The purpose of this is to make sure there is always somebody keeping watch and the guards get enough sleep to function the next day.

If the group is guarding a prisoner day and night, two guards is enough guards to ensure there is always one person watching the prisoner, and each guard has a chance to sleep if they take turns. But if the prisoner is a skinchanger, two guards isn’t enough anymore. While Guard-A sleeps, the skinchanger can take the body of Guard-B, use it to kill Guard-A, then open any prison doors and manacles, and then manacle or kill himself before returning to her own body. With three guards, that won’t be possible because two can stay awake and watch each other for suspicious behavior.

So, when the third guard arrived (Gerold Hightower) that freed up Rhaegar to leave the Tower of Joy and bring battle to the Trident.

Now recall the “strange chill” that Ned felt on the way to visit the dying Robert Baratheon. It becomes even more understandable. The three Kingsguard Ned passed reminded him that Lyanna skinchanged Oswell Whent, but it did more than that. It also reminded Ned why the number of Kingsguard at the Tower of Joy had to be three. Two was not enough guards to guard a body snatching prisoner. Like so, the implicit question in Ned’s Tower of Joy line “I looked for you on the Trident” receives an answer. ‘Where were you on the Trident?’ asked Ned. ‘I was stuck here,’ each of the three kingsguard men could have answered, ‘because two isn’t enough guards to guard your sister.’

The Queen of Love and Beauty

If there is one single moment in ASOIAF that comes to readers’ minds more than any other when the phrase “Central mysteries” or “mysteries” is uttered, then I think it must be the image of Rhaegar placing the queen of love and beauty’s crown of pale blue roses in Lyanna’s lap at the Tourney of Harrenhal.

Yet when the jousting began, the day belonged to Rhaegar Targaryen. The crown prince wore the armor he would die in: gleaming black plate with the three-headed dragon of his House wrought in rubies on the breast. A plume of scarlet silk streamed behind him when he rode, and it seemed no lance could touch him. Brandon fell to him, and Bronze Yohn Royce, and even the splendid Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning.

Robert had been jesting with Jon and old Lord Hunter as the prince circled the field after unhorsing Ser Barristan in the final tilt to claim the champion’s crown. Ned remembered the moment when all the smiles died, when Prince Rhaegar Targaryen urged his horse past his own wife, the Dornish princess Elia Martell, to lay the queen of beauty’s laurel in Lyanna’s lap. He could see it still: a crown of winter roses, blue as frost.

Ned Stark reached out his hand to grasp the flowery crown, but beneath the pale blue petals the thorns lay hidden. He felt them clawing at his skin, sharp and cruel, saw the slow trickle of blood run down his fingers, and woke, trembling, in the dark. (AGOT 58 Eddard XV p526)

‘Why did he do it?’ we all want to know. Did Rhaegar fall in love with Lyanna because of her selfless deeds as the Knight of the Laughing Tree? Did Rhaegar know how insulting this would be to his wife Elia Martell? That it would be received as such a scandal? That it would start a civil war? Was Rhaegar just so obsessed with prophecy and getting his “third head of the dragon” prophecy baby that he calculated those risks and damages were worth it to, ostensibly, save the world from the Others and the Long Night?

As with the mystery of the three guards, the mystery of the queen of love and beauty can now be solved by applying what we learned in our Tower of Joy investigation. The reason Rhaegar Targaryen rode past his wife Elia Martell and laid the crown of blue roses in Lyanna’s lap was because, for that moment, Rhaegar was not Rhaegar. He was Lyanna Stark.

Lyanna reached out with her psychic skinchanging power and took control of Rhaegar’s mind and body. She jousted in the tournament, won the crown of blue roses and the opportunity to bestow it upon the loveliest woman present. Then Lyanna, as Rhaegar, rode past Rhaeger’s wife Elia Martell and laid the crown of blue roses in her own lap. Now having awarded herself with a public display of affection from the crown prince, Lyanna returned to her own body to receive her reward in full, leaving the prince atop his horse feeling “love struck” indeed.

I use the phrase “love struck” because I’m referring to GRRM’s answer to a fan question in 2016 at an International Book Fair in Guadalajara, Mexico.

u/dyhtstriyk

88 pts 2016

So my question was: Why do you think the political institutions in the Seven Kingdoms are so weak? His [GRRM’s] answer: the Kingdom was unified with dragons, so the Targaryen’s flaw was to create an absolute monarchy highly dependent on them, with the small council not designed to be a real check and balance. So, without dragons it took a sneeze, a wildly incompetent and megalomaniac king, a love struck prince, a brutal civil war, a dissolute king that didn’t really know what to do with the throne and then chaos. Interesting answer. [reddit]

Lyanna skinchanging Rhaegar is a resolution to the Queen of Love and Beauty mystery that will undoubtedly cause much of the ASOIAF subculture to shift uncomfortably in their seats, because it comes during the 28th year of a tradition of heaping most of the blame onto Rhaegar, and of enshrining Lyanna as simultaneously empowered and helpless, woman and child, hero and victim.

u/Salem1960s

625 pts 2023

(…) Rhaegar Targeyen was a cunt. Who looks up from a book and says: ”It seems I must be a warrior.”? That’s a fucking pompous statement, isn’t it? Forget for a moment that Lyanna was a dumb teenager in love, who may not have not known any better, essentially groomed by an adult male. Forget that for a moment. Forget about the prophecies for a moment. Let’s imagine for a moment that prophecies, or at least, that prophecy were absolute and utter bullshit. Let’s look at this in practical terms: This guy was, in all honesty, a massive fucking idiot: Reckless, impulsive, heedless, irrational, and frankly, selfish and narcissistic. He threw everything aside for a fucking prophecy that he was narcissistic enough to think was about him. And one could argue that that “prophecy” was an excuse to bang a young girl. Didn’t seem to care that his actions got his new side piece’s dad and brother killed. Oops! (…) [reddit]

A teenage girl’s desire for the most desirable man in the kingdom, in and of itself, should not be surprising. Rhaegar has the good looks, athleticism, authority, money, and prestige that has always attracted women. Yet it still surprises us, and one major reason is because it’s a reversal of our modern expectations. Wherever a man and woman are found cohabiting a scandal, our collective tendency is to assume the man is the predator and the woman is the victim. But as every sufficiently attractive, successful, and prestigious man can tell you, the truth is often quite the reverse — that the woman is the predator and the man is the object of her predation.

Sadly, most of us will never experience what it’s like to be Rhaegar-Targaryen levels of desirable to women, leaving us with little cause to consider that a woman’s desire for a man, even a 14- or 15-year-old “child-woman of surpassing loveliness” as Ned Stark puts it, is the smoking gun in a long beloved and belabored mystery. With this acknowledgement, I can see that this old mystery owes much of its fortitude to its audience’s protectiveness of women and jealousy of men alike.

In a Tower of Joy parallel at the Whispers, Brienne’s hatred of men resulted in the death of an innocent man named Nimble Dick Crabb, symbolizing that if the ASOIAF audience wants to solve the Tower of Joy mystery, we need to notice how our own hatreds of men are preventing us from discovering what happened at the Tower of Joy. In the fog of the Rhaegar and Lyanna mystery, jealous men and man-hating women have found a common cause. As one commenter all too aptly said it:

u/Usual_Jackfruit

7 pts 2023

All this subreddit do is trash on Rhaegar like he is a real person [reddit]

A New Whisper

Once more, we’ve come upon a compelling partial answer to the question of what the whispered promises were that Lyanna asked of Ned in her dying moments. ‘Promise me, Ned, that you won’t let anyone know that I skinchanged Rhaegar and crowned myself the queen of love and beauty.’

A Fledgling Philosophy

To echo something I said in Chapter 7, the first time you solve a big mystery you have your first complete model of how ASOIAF’s symbolic revelations work from bottom to top, and the things you can learn from that model will generalize to the rest of the story’s mysteries, setting in motion a gradually snowballing effect of mystery solving by improving your understanding of the story’s philosophy and your educated guesses.

We’ve got our snowball rolling at a good pace now and we have knocked down a handful of the big mysteries at the center of ASOIAF, so now is a good time to stop and ask, what do you think is the story’s philosophy? To put it another way, what attitudes in the audience are the story’s revelations consistently subverting?

Nimble Dick Crabb was being a good guide when we thought he was being a bad guide.
Brienne was being a bad knight when we thought she was being a good knight.
Rhaegar was a victim when we thought he was being a predator.
Lyanna was being a predator when we thought she was a victim.

The pattern will become easier to see if I rewrite them this way.

A man was being good when we thought he was being bad.
A woman was being bad when we thought she was being good.
A man was being good when we thought he was being bad.
A woman was being bad when we thought she was being good.

The philosophy that’s guiding all of these revelations is about men characters being better than the audience thought and women characters being worse than the audience thought. The story is implicitly suggesting that its audience, on the whole, is overcritical of men characters and undercritical of women characters. To put it another way for those who don’t like the notion that a story makes suggestions, George R. R. Martin is suggesting that his audience, on the whole, is overcritical of men characters and undercritical of women characters.

It is a simplistic philosophy, to be sure, but just like when defining a symbol, when defining a philosophy it’s good to start with a simple and straight-to-the-point description and then refine it as you go. The implicit prescription, then, is that we should become less critical of men characters and more critical of women characters, if we want to solve more ASOIAF mysteries. Because of its repetition, we can expect this philosophy to generalize to the rest of the story.* In the next chapter we’ll apply this understanding to the mysteries of Rhaegar Targaryen. “It seems I must be a warrior” the mysterious boy prince enigmatically said.

[[ * While 2-4 repititions are enough to warrant this conclusion, if tentatively, in practice I didn’t notice the philosophy until I saw it repeated across many mysteries. So admittedly I am jumping the gun with this conclusion for the sake of demonstrating an advanced stage of symbolic interpretation while constraining myself to information we’ve covered in this Whispers≈TOJ symbol investigation. A sad side effect of doing this is that I’m spending revelations that would have been more satisfying by booting up a new symbol and working up to them incrementally like we did in this essay series. For instance, a Prologue≈TOJ symbol could have taught us some of the same things we learned from Whispers≈TOJ, like that Gerold’s sword broke (like Waymar Royce) and one of Ned’s seven men did not fight (like the six Others). This would have been our predicament no matter which TOJ parallel I chose to investigate, so it was unavoidable, but hopefully the Whispers was a good choice and the surprises will still be satisfying. ]]

Next: Chapter 15 – The Dragon Prince

Beginning: Chapter 0-4 – Introduction

Created Dec 6, 2024
Updated Dec 12, 2024
Updated May 17, 2025 small fix
Updated June 2, 2025 small change