I recorded an audio reading of this chapter with my own voice just to try it. Here’s that.

They had left Winterfell on the same day as the king, amidst all the commotion of the royal departure, riding out to the sound of men shouting and horses snorting, to the rattle of wagons and the groaning of the queen’s huge wheelhouse, as a light snow flurried about them.

George R.R. Martin is a master speedpainter with words. It never ceases to amaze me how fast he can immerse me in this world.

I’m noticing a trend with this story in which many of the chapters are structured like an optical illusion. My first impression of a chapter will be one thing, and it tends to be a resilient impression that’s difficult for me to challenge. But after I’ve challenged it seriously, my new impression is opposite or nearly opposite to the first one, yet even more resilient.

The first impression that Tyrion and Jon’s conversation leaves me with is one of disillusionment. Jon is being disillusioned by Tyrion about the venerable Night’s Watch, the fabled monsters beyond the Wall, and ultimately about his lot in life as a bastard. But the Others in the prologue give the lie to Tyrion’s assertion that the monsters beyond the Wall are not real. So do the direwolves, which are monsters in their own right.

It suggests that, while Jon may have been harboring illusions that his noble uncle Benjen is representative of most of the men in the Night’s Watch, Tyrion is harboring illusions of his own.

Tyrion’s illusions are not simply pertaining to the threats beyond the Wall, but also to the very attitudes and impulses in Tyrion that compelled him to inflate the truth beyond the limits of his knowledge. Tyrion has no first-hand knowledge of what lies beyond the Wall, because he has never been beyond the Wall, so he has less credibility on the matter than characters like Benjen and the deserter, who have both traveled beyond the Wall and attested to the existence of the Others.

So in my new interpretation, I’m left with the faint impression that maybe it’s Tyrion, rather than Jon, who is more profoundly illusioned about the world.

Jon’s illusions will last only as long as it takes him to learn that the shabby and foul-mouthed thieves, rapists and murderers who populate the Night’s Watch are also capable of great feats of loyalty, bravery, valor and honor, recontextualizing even the worst lives that mankind has to offer as redeemable, and recontextualizing the Night’s Watch as the catalyst for that redemption, and therefore as a truly noble calling after all.

The illusion that causes Tyrion, on the other hand, to believe that it’s appropriate to propel other people toward cynicism and nihilism at the earliest opportunity, seems like the kind of illusion that will be more difficult to dispel than Jon’s illusions are. I think that impulse is rooted in a deep-seeded desire in Tyrion to prove to himself, through Jon’s false enlightenment and perhaps his development and life, that life is meaningless, thereby alleviating himself of his own responsibility to embody the hero. Because if life is fundamentally meaningless, then it’s meaningless no matter what you do. And then there’s no reason in particular to do anything other than to seek cheap self-gratification, which is exactly what Tyrion does with his life.

I think one way of thinking about what it means to embody the hero is that it involves a recognition that life is arbitrary, followed by a conscious decision to do everything in one’s power to impart meaning to life anyway. 

Suddenly, absurdly, Tyrion felt guilty. He took a step forward, intending to give the boy a reassuring pat on the shoulder or mutter some word of apology.

Tyrion’s guilt being sudden and absurd evokes the question of its explanation. I think Tyrion’s guilt comes from a perhaps subconscious recognition that there’s something about his message to Jon that misses the mark, and that therefore Tyrion isn’t fulfilling the second part of that description of being a hero.

Benjen Stark seemed to share his brother’s distaste for Lannisters,

I wonder if this is partly a situation where the little brother has adopted the views of his big brother. It’s possible that Ned’s distaste for Lannisters is partly misguided. Jaime later reveals that Aerys intended to burn King’s Landing, and that detail certainly stands in judgement of Ned’s distaste for Jaime. There are other reasons Ned dislikes House Lannister, but the kingslaying is one of them.

Then, since Benjen is the youngest brother, it seems likely that he would have looked up to Ned the way little brothers do. That usually includes adopting the older brother’s views and attitudes, often unchallenged and unexamined. Not that Benjen had any better access to Jaime’s side of the story than Ned did. 

Perhaps he had learned a lesson. The Lannisters never declined, graciously or otherwise. The Lannisters took what was offered.

These are a few peculiar little lines, aren’t they? It’s hard to be sure what prompted them in Tyrion. Perhaps it shows his awareness of the way House Lannister interprets and acts in the world. From an authorial point of view, it seems like these lines stake out the Lannister philosophy. I think it’s useful to examine the competition of characters and their Houses as a landscape of competing philosophies about life and how to behave in it. So the Lannister philosophy includes taking every advantage life offers you, as opposed to foregoing some advantages that could be taken.

It’s a philosophy that is already shown to be different than the Stark philosophy, even at this early stage in the story. For example, Ned Stark was hesitant to allow the kids to keep the direwolf pups, and he considered it carefully and listened to the opinions of people around him before making a decision.

The “learned a lesson” part could mean a few different things. On the surface, it seems like Tyrion is proud of at least this part of his Lannisterness, which would suggest that he agrees with the Lannister philosophy of opportunism.

But in consideration of the fact that Tyrion hates his family, maybe the tone of this line is disdainful of the Lannister philosophy, rather than proud, which would suggest that Tyrion doesn’t agree with the Lannister philosophy of opportunism.

So there’s a question of which tone is mostly at work, here, the prideful one or the disdainful one? And the answer may be demonstrated in Tyrion’s advising of Jon, as well as the guilt he feels after. Because Tyrion’s advising of Jon was an instance of Tyrion acting out the Lannister philosophy of opportunism by seizing the opportunity to proliferate his nihilism by attaching it to some useful lessons like a Trojan horse. I think he agrees with the Lannister philosophy consciously, but his guilt reveals a subconscious disagreement with it. 

As black as onyx, polished smooth, so the bone seemed to shimmer in the light of his torch. They liked the fire, he sensed. He’d thrust the torch into the mouth of one of the larger skulls and made the shadows leap and dance on the wall behind him. The teeth were long, curving knives of black diamond. The flame of the torch was nothing to them; they had bathed in the heat of far greater fires. When he had moved away, Tyrion could have sworn that the beast’s empty eye sockets had watched him go.

As with Viserys and Ned’s personifications of the dragon skulls, Tyrion’s personification has unique implications, too. There’s a strong sense of wonder, awe, and perhaps even longing in Tyrion regarding the skulls. Ned was discomforted by the gaze of the skulls, but Tyrion almost seems to like it. Tyrion’s earlier comment makes it clear why dragons appeal to him.

“Oh, yes. Even a stunted, twisted, ugly little boy can look down over the world when he’s seated on a dragon’s back.”

To Tyrion, a dragon’s back is a place from which to look down over the world, an ultimate way to correct for an inequality that he inherited at birth: His dwarfism. Not one man among the near four thousand men who burned on the Field of Fire would have been any less dead if the riders of Vhagar, Meraxes and Balerion had been dwarves.

It was the only time that Vhaghar, Meraxes, and Balerion were all unleashed at once. The singers called it the Field of Fire.

Near four thousand men had burned that day, among them King Mern of the Reach. King Loren had escaped, and lived long enough to surrender, pledge his fealty to the Targaryens, and beget a son, for which Tyrion was duly grateful.

In other words, if it weren’t for the subjugation of Tyrion’s ancestor King Loren, Aegon’s Conquest would have deprived Tyrion of his very existence. It’s a detail of Tyrion’s heritage that places his obsession with dragons in an ironic and self-destructive light. It suggests that he’s currently on a path that will ultimately end with him stuck at a crossroads, with subjugation on one hand and death on the other. 

References to Aegon’s Conquest throughout the story are accompanied by an air of reverence, both for Aegon himself and for his measured domination of the continent of Westeros.

For a few moments, the chroniclers wrote, the conquest was at an end . . . but only for those few moments, before Aegon Targaryen and his sisters joined the battle.

Aegon’s Conquest is presented by the chroniclers in the form of a narrative that paints Aegon as an underdog who won against the odds. However, an alternative picture of Aegon’s Conquest is hinted in the juxtaposition between Tyrion’s romanticized idea of dragons as symbols of his personal liberation, and the inescapably brutal reality of flesh-and-blood human beings having feebly burned to death in dragonflame by the thousands.

If that picture of Aegon’s Conquest happens to be a more truthful characterization of history than the perhaps romanticized version that the characters and readers are led to believe, then Tyrion’s apparent role in the story as a misunderstood good guy is hinted, here, to be incomplete, with the nature of his ending perhaps hinged upon the question of whether or not he will manage to dispel the illusions that blind him to the terrible alternative picture that the symbols of his personal liberation represent. The feeling I’m left with is that Tyrion’s apparent desire for personal liberation is really disguising a desire for existential revenge.

all that remained of the last two hatchlings born on Dragonstone. They were the last of the Targaryen dragons, perhaps the last dragons anywhere, and they had not lived very long.

Viserys and Dany foreshadowing?

Jon Snow’s albino direwolf pricked up his ears at the nightly howling, but never raised his own voice in reply. There was something very unsettling about that animal, Tyrion thought.

Another reminder that Ghost is a mute.

Ghost’s muteness stands in curious contradiction to the way in which Jon discovered Ghost. Jon discovered Ghost by hearing a noise which was presumably made by Ghost. But none of the other characters seemed to hear the noise. It’s the first and major hint that the direwolves have a psychic connection with the Starks.

What these reminders are saying to the reader is “Hey, there’s a mystery you missed.” Because when I read the direwolf chapter for the first time, I didn’t know that Ghost was a mute. And even after I know it, the noise and Jon hearing it seem easily explainable in mundane terms. Jon simply heard a faint noise that the other characters didn’t. It’s the kind of thing that happens in life once in a while, so it isn’t that strange.

But as the story goes on, the evidence of a psychic connection between direwolves and Starks gradually piles up. The greatest piece of evidence is that Ghost is a mute. If Ghost never ever makes a sound, then what did Jon hear in the first non-prologue chapter of the series? There are dozens of mildly strange situations throughout the story just like that first situation between Jon and Ghost. To name another that I saw in the reread so far, Nymeria acts out Arya’s subconscious desire to stay with Jon when she follows Jon and then turns around realizing that Arya is not following him.

Based on any individual strange event, it would be difficult to make a wholly convincing case that the direwolves have a psychic connection with the Starks. But as the little oddities pile up, the pile becomes so large that the intentions of the story and the author are revealed.

The biggest problem that deniers of the direwolf-Stark psychic connection will encounter in this discussion is that, while they may be able to explain each event individually using a variety of materialistic, non-magic, non-extraordinary reasons, they will corner themselves by shrinking the possible explanations for the pattern that exists across all the events, as well as the pattern that exists across an enormous portion of readers like me, down to one possible explanation.

The pattern that exists across all the events is that, in every event, there is structural and intentional ambiguity written into the event regarding the explanation for how the direwolf knows what it appears to know. IE. If the author didn’t want any ambiguity in the event, he could have written it a different way. He could have written it so that Bran and the other characters heard the noise, too.

The pattern that exists across the readers is that a large portion of the audience interprets the direwolves to clearly have some kind of psychic connection with the Starks. I would estimate no less than half of the audience is in agreement about that.

The singular explanation that the denier is forced to use at that point is that the pattern does not really exist in the story itself. It only exists in your head and the heads of half of the audience. He discredits his interpretation of the story by proving that his interpretation cannot account for the author’s repeated behavior of creating ambiguity around the issue, and cannot account for the match between half or more of the audience’s interpretations without calling them all crazy. 

Created Sep 8, 2021
Updated Sep 22, 2021 – Added Ghost
Updated Sep 24, 2021 – Added Benjen, Lannister

Here was something about Sansa and Joffrey that was neat.

“Send a dog to kill a dog!” he exclaimed.

“Winterfell is so infested with wolves, the Starks would never miss one.”

Tyrion hopped off the last step onto the yard. “I beg to differ, nephew,” he said. “The Starks can count past six. Unlike some princes I might name.”

Joffrey had the grace at least to blush. (AGOT 9 Tyrion I)

In passing, the line can be read as though Tyrion is making a baseless insult simply to hurt Joffrey’s feelings.

But upon further consideration, Tyrion is shown to be a witty character, and a baseless insult would not be very witty at all. Additionally, Joffrey is shown to be haughty and egotistical, which do not seem like characteristics of somebody who can be made to blush with a baseless insult. So the initial ‘baseless insult’ interpretation is not holding up to scrutiny.

The reader has just enough information to figure out that the baseless-insult interpretation actually makes less sense than if there exists some missing background information about Joffrey and Tyrion, in which Joffrey has shown himself to be incompetent with numbers, and Tyrion has noticed it. Over the years, an uncle might have overheard his nephew during lessons, from time to time, or heard reports from the Maesters who instruct Joffrey, or noticed the young prince’s ineptitude at counting during his day-to-day interactions with him.

So, hidden behind my initial interpretation, there was a more complex and colorful interpretation that makes more sense than my first one. It evoked my imagination, causing it to fill out the missing information with scenes and stories that give A Song of Ice and Fire depth and life. And it emerged out of mere suggestion — the subtle clues in the characters’ choices of words, their reactions, personalities and attitudes.

But there’s still more to see.

It hurt that the one thing Arya could do better than her sister was ride a horse. Well, that and manage a household. Sansa had never had much of a head for figures. If she did marry Prince Joff, Arya hoped for his sake that he had a good steward. (AGOT 7 Arya I)

Two chapters earlier, I learned from Arya that Sansa is not very good with numbers. Her thoughts draw attention to the potential for a minor comical tragedy if Joffrey is bad with numbers, too, because Sansa is supposed to marry Joffrey, and a household headed by two people who are bad with numbers might be in a lot of trouble. Hopefully they would have an honest and mathematically inclined steward around to do the numbers for them.

So the revelation that Joffrey is, in fact, bad with numbers is something funny for the reader to find. More than comedy, however, it might also be understood as foreshadowing that Joffrey will be a bad match for Sansa.

And of course, as you’ll already know from having read the story before, Joffrey turns out to be a horrible person who enjoys tormenting Sansa. Thus, the potential foreshadowing gets imbued with consequence, and we get to call it actual foreshadowing.

So, which interpretation did you like better? The one where Tyrion was making a baseless insult? Or the one that challenged us to interrogate the story, evoked our imaginations, created a funny irony in Joffrey and Sansa’s betrothal, and foreshadowed future events?

The degree to which the interpretation stimulates me, awes me, grows tendrils that reach into, enrich and illuminate other parts of the story is the strongest evidence that can exist that the interpretation is more correct than others.

That’s a fact about stories that is unbelievably difficult to teach to people who do not automatically understand it.

And that’s a difference between people that the story draws attention to all the time. I’ve taken to calling it the Story theme, though I haven’t worked out how to explain it very well yet. I guess this was practice.

The sellsword grew more serious. “There’s a moneylender from Braavos, holding fancy papers and the like, requests to see the king about payment on some loan.”

“As if Joff could count past twenty. Send the man to Littlefinger, he’ll find a way to put him off.” (ACOK Tyrion IV)

I found this quote in ACOK. I wonder if there’s some hidden greater significance to Joffrey’s ineptitude with numbers that I haven’t noticed yet…

The queen shuddered. “There is something unnatural about those animals,” she said. “They are dangerous. I will not have any of them coming south with us.”

Jaime said, “You’ll have a hard time stopping them, sister. They follow those girls everywhere.”

In light of future events, it seems like Cersei did actually manage to stop the direwolves coming south, in various ways. She definitely played a big role in stopping Summer, Lady and Nymeria from coming south. It doesn’t lead me anywhere, but it’s a neat bit of dramatic irony when a character says something early on that seems insignificant or unlikely, and then I don’t realize that it came true until I reread the story with the middle and end in mind. Same thing happened with Viserys’s comment in AGOT Daenerys I when he said Dany would learn to like Drogo in time.

But I should point out that I don’t take it as an indication that ‘The bad guys win in ASOIAF,’ as many readers seem to do. Nor as ‘The bad guys are really the good guys.’ They can be, but being right about something doesn’t necessarily mean they’re good, either. I take it as ‘The bad guys don’t have to be wrong about everything in ASOIAF.’ Sometimes they can be more right than the ‘good guys.’ And often the thing they’re right about goes overlooked by the good guy and the reader, specifically because I’m wearing blinders of one kind or another. And in many cases, the blinders are that I have prematurely decided that this is a good guy and that is a bad guy. George R.R. Martin is using his knowledge of us and our expectations about stories to surprise us, teach us, and also to explore the dilemmas in the story himself.

“The prince will remember that, little lord,” the Hound warned him. The helm turned his laugh into a hollow rumble.

“I pray he does,” Tyrion Lannister replied. “If he forgets, be a good dog and remind him.” (AGOT Tyrion I)

This is a great example of one of the ways Power Corrupts powerful people. Sandor points out that Tyrion is taking a big risk by slapping Joffrey. The implication is that one day Joffrey will be king, and he will remember how Tyrion treated him and then make Tyrion’s life a living hell in retaliation for it. Tyrion doesn’t seem very worried about it, which might be a little foolish considering how poorly behaved Joffrey is, but I think it’s more brave and wise than foolish.

The problems that the noble family invites upon themselves and all of Westeros by neglecting to discipline their future kings easily outstrips whatever Joffrey might do to Tyrion when he becomes king. Royal children being deprived of the harsher teachings they need in order to develop into strong people is a kind of corruption that occurs most severely in this environment of power.

I compare it to my own family or to the commoner families in Westeros, where children are not given authority over adults. I imagine how I would have acted as a kid if I had authority over adults who were too afraid to tell me no or punish me when I did something wrong. It would have utterly ruined the development of child and teenage me. The prince’s power and future power is what causes the adults around him to be too afraid to discipline him so that he can develop into the kind of person he, his family and the kingdom need him to be. 

It seems to me that the story is trying to expand and sophisticate our understanding of the corruption when we say that power “corrupts.” I often hear corruption discussed as though there’s some threshold of evilness that the ruler crosses by committing one atrocious deed or another, at which point he suddenly transitions from non-corrupt to corrupt. It’s a binary and simplistic view of corruption that squashes discussion of the wide array of nuanced and covert ways that power ruins the lives of powerful people. It’s a process that happens incrementally over time, usually beginning with the way the person is raised and the environment he was raised in. It is often produced by the beliefs and practices that are widely accepted in environments of power, taken for granted as normal and appropriate, such as giving royal children power over adults. 

Created Jun 9, 2021
Update Sep 11, 2022 – Bad with numbers, Tyrion ACOK