Stark men are not so Stark

[Corvo the Crow]

Bloodlines are very important in ASOIAF and we see that they are somehow preserved over the generations as evidenced by certain familes having certain phenotypes that pass over the generations and even though the lords marry the daughters of other phenotype preserving lords and sometimes their children take on their mothers' looks, the family features are preserved.

But is it always the case? From Bran chapters Stark men and Karstark men don't look similar at all, same goes for Kings of Winter, who don't look like the current Starks either.

 

This is how Karstark men look

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Lord Rickard himself led them, his sons Harrion and Eddard and Torrhen riding beside him beneath night-black banners emblazoned with the white sunburst of their House. Old Nan said they had Stark blood in them, going back hundreds of years, but they did not look like Starks to Bran. They were big men, and fierce, faces covered with thick beards, hair worn loose past the shoulders.

And these are the Kings of Winter

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After that the glimpses came faster and faster, till Bran was feeling lost and dizzy. He saw no more of his father, nor the girl who looked like Arya, but a woman heavy with child emerged naked and dripping from the black pool, knelt before the tree, and begged the old gods for a son who would avenge her. Then there came a brown-haired girl slender as a spear who stood on the tips of her toes to kiss the lips of a young knight as tall as Hodor. A dark-eyed youth, pale and fierce, sliced three branches off the weirwood and shaped them into arrows. The tree itself was shrinking, growing smaller with each vision, whilst the lesser trees dwindled into saplings and vanished, only to be replaced by other trees that would dwindle and vanish in their turn. And now the lords Bran glimpsed were tall and hard, stern men in fur and chain mail. Some wore faces he remembered from the statues in the crypts, but they were gone before he could put a name to them.

 

This doesn't apply to their women, however. They look very much like each other as evidenced by Alys looking like Arya and Arya looking like Lyanna. Here's Alys, Lyanna is already included in the quote with the Kings of Winter.

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She looked enough like Arya to give him pause, but only for a moment. A tall, skinny, coltish girl, all legs and elbows, her brown hair was woven in a thick braid and bound about with strips of leather. She had a long face, a pointy chin, small ears.

But she was too old, far too old. This girl is almost of an age with me

 

What gives?

 

It just so happens we know of a certain story suggesting that Stark Male line isn't an unbroken one. The story of Bael the Bard.

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"The Stark in Winterfell wanted Bael's head, but never could take him, and the taste o' failure galled him. One day in his bitterness he called Bael a craven who preyed only on the weak. When word o' that got back, Bael vowed to teach the lord a lesson. So he scaled the Wall, skipped down the kingsroad, and walked into Winterfell one winter's night with harp in hand, naming himself Sygerrik of Skagos. Sygerrik means 'deceiver' in the Old Tongue, that the First Men spoke, and the giants still speak.

North or south, singers always find a ready welcome, so Bael ate at Lord Stark's own table, and played for the lord in his high seat until half the night was gone. The old songs he played, and new ones he'd made himself, and he played and sang so well that when he was done, the lord offered to let him name his own reward. 'All I ask is a flower,' Bael answered, 'the fairest flower that blooms in the gardens o' Winterfell.'

Now as it happened the winter roses had only then come into bloom, and no flower is so rare nor precious. So the Stark sent to his glass gardens and commanded that the most beautiful o' the winter roses be plucked for the singer's payment. And so it was done. But when morning come, the singer had vanished . . . and so had Lord Brandon's maiden daughter. Her bed they found empty, but for the pale blue rose that Bael had left on the pillow where her head had lain.

This was Brandon the Daughterless,

Lord Brandon had no other children. At his behest, the black crows flew forth from their castles in the hundreds, but nowhere could they find any sign o' Bael or this maid. For most a year they searched, till the lord lost heart and took to his bed, and it seemed as though the line o' Starks was at its end. But one night as he lay waiting to die, Lord Brandon heard a child's cry. He followed the sound and found his daughter back in her bedchamber, asleep with a babe at her breast.

They had been in Winterfell all the time, hiding with the dead beneath the castle. The maid loved Bael so dearly she bore him a son, the song says . . . though if truth be told, all the maids love Bael in them songs he wrote. Be that as it may, what's certain is that Bael left the child in payment for the rose he'd plucked unasked, and that the boy grew to be the next Lord Stark

Thirty years later, when Bael was King-beyond-the-Wall and led the free folk south, it was young Lord Stark who met him at the Frozen Ford . . . and killed him, for Bael would not harm his own son when they met sword to sword.

So the son slew the father instead,

but the gods hate kinslayers, even when they kill unknowing. When Lord Stark returned from the battle and his mother saw Bael's head upon his spear, she threw herself from a tower in her grief. Her son did not long outlive her. One o' his lords peeled the skin off him and wore him for a cloak."

 

Two genetical information is always passed on to offspring, a father's chromosome Y to a son and a mothers Mitochondrial DNA to all her children. All the others, including a father's mtDNA have a random chance of passing on to the children (In humans, father's mtDNA has a very small chance of passing on though in theory it never does because even were all the mitochondria from the sperm were transmitted to egg, it would be ~100 for some 100 000 in the egg)

My Conclusion: Current Starks are descended matrilineally from Brandon the Daughterless' single daughter so they have taken their Y chromosome from Bael the Bard but since their mother is a Stark by birth and Planetosi noble bloodlines are somehow preserved, their females look just like each other even after hundreds of years.

 

What are your ideas?

[Adam Yozza]

The current Stark's don't look like Stark's because all three of the male Stark heirs and the eldest daughter look like Cat instead of Ned.

[Corvo the Crow]

What about Eddard himself? Does he not look like a Stark too?

[Faera]

It is a little bit of a stretch to expect a family to remain looking exactly the same over thousands of years of history, regardless of whether the line was unbroken or not. Karstarks not looking like Starks isn't too surprising as the cadet branch was formed one thousand years ago and, while there might have been some intermarrying between the two, it hasn't happened in recent history.

Given that Bael the Bard is a legendary character, I doubt there is much credence there. It is entirely possible that there was a "Brandon the Daughterless" who had to marry his daughter off to someone willing to take the family name. However, after all this time, I don't think it's fair to say that the "Starks don't look like Starks" when this happened before the chronicles began if it happened at all. Not least because what is thought of as a family's "iconic" features can be defined in a single generation.

The typical look of a Stark appears to be seen as having dark-brown hair, long faces and grey-blue eyes. Eddard had these features, as did all of his siblings, traits he passed down only to Arya among his children with Cat. Jon Snow also has this look about him, resembling Ned more than any of his trueborn children.

Anyway, as the House Stark is pretty bottlenosed now, Bran knows exactly three Stark-looking Stark men - his father Ned, his uncle Benjen and his brother, Jon. Bran himself has auburn-hair inherited from his mother, Catelyn Tully, as do most of his full-siblings save for Arya.

[Daemon Blackfyre IV]

I think the grandson of Brandon the daughterless died without issue but I'd have to check.

The Starks have long horsey faces, this gene is strong as the Waynewood boys carry this look which they received through a female Jocelyn Stark who was the sister to Rickards father 

[Фейсал]

If you look at the family tree it's actually pretty funny how many Starks die without off springs. Being a younger brother seems to really get you places in the north.

But I doubt that's anything more than a legend. The Karstarks are a cadet branch - of course they would not look similar. 

[Corvo the Crow]

12 hours ago, Faera said:

It is a little bit of a stretch to expect a family to remain looking exactly the same over thousands of years of history, regardless of whether the line was unbroken or not. Karstarks not looking like Starks isn't too surprising as the cadet branch was formed one thousand years ago and, while there might have been some intermarrying between the two, it hasn't happened in recent history.

Given that Bael the Bard is a legendary character, I doubt there is much credence there. It is entirely possible that there was a "Brandon the Daughterless" who had to marry his daughter off to someone willing to take the family name. However, after all this time, I don't think it's fair to say that the "Starks don't look like Starks" when this happened before the chronicles began if it happened at all. Not least because what is thought of as a family's "iconic" features can be defined in a single generation.

The typical look of a Stark appears to be seen as having dark-brown hair, long faces and grey-blue eyes. Eddard had these features, as did all of his siblings, traits he passed down only to Arya among his children with Cat. Jon Snow also has this look about him, resembling Ned more than any of his trueborn children.

Anyway, as the House Stark is pretty bottlenosed now, Bran knows exactly three Stark-looking Stark men - his father Ned, his uncle Benjen and his brother, Jon. Bran himself has auburn-hair inherited from his mother, Catelyn Tully, as do most of his full-siblings save for Arya.

But Karstark females, look exactly like the Stark ones, it is the male Starks and Karstarks that don't look like each other and even then there are some similarities between members. Alys looks like Arya who looks like Lyanna, Arya and Jon, presumably son of Lyanna, look like each other too which means Jon and Alys may also look like each other and their description makes me think they do.

What Bran sees as the old kings of winter in his dream doesn't match any Starks in the story (well Brandon the Burned was also tall but it's only that) but what few things we see in both POVs suggests Karstarks are closer to Kings of Winter in appearance than the Current Starks are.

 

It is also entirely possible that if the story of Brandon the Daughterless had any truth to it, whether it was Bael who fathered his grandson or some other, Starks now carry prominent features from both sides. Edric Storm is one such example in the story.

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Devan was the oldest of the three children at the table.

Yet Edric Storm was three inches taller and broader in the chest and shoulders. He was his father's son in that; nor did he ever miss a morning's work with sword and shield. Those old enough to have known Robert and Renly as children said that the bastard boy had more of their look than Stannis had ever shared; the coal-black hair, the deep blue eyes, the mouth, the jaw, the cheekbones. Only his ears reminded you that his mother had been a Florent.

 

Some more genetics information,

While a son, having gonosomes XY takes his Y from father and his only X from his mother, a daughter, having gonosomes XX takes one X from the father and one from the mother. Only one of these Xs are used though, the other one is "silenced", which is called lyonization.

 

In light of this and the earlier information, assuming "line" defining features are passed on through gonosomes only for simplification (taking autosomes into account would complicate things even more) Starks would now lack their line defining Y because of a broken male line but if lucky they may still be able to retain their line defining Xs from Brandon's Daughter Karstarks, however, may have an unbroken line and this is why their men look like the Kings of Winter from the few descriptions we get on them both.They may also retain the line definng Xs.

Line defining Xs would only be passed on to daughters but there is also a solution for that; cousin marriages aren't uncommon in Westeros (Rickard Stark, Tywin Lannister, Wyman Manderly proposing for Donella). A lord marrying a cousin every few generations may bring back the line defining X back into the family with some "luck".

For Starks and Karstarks this could be;

-Lyanna, and Arya looking like eachother would be from the X Lyanna share with Eddard

- Jon, Eddard, Benjen looking alike assuming R+L = J, Eddard and Benjen shares an X through their mother and Lyanna passed the same X  she had from her mother to Jon. Eddard and Benjen also shares a Y but is irrelevalnt for looking like Jon who got his Y from Rhaegar.

- Jon and Arya looking alike would be from the X Lyanna shared with Arya being passed to Jon.

- Karstark men and Kings of Winter  looking alike would be unbroken line of Y

- Arya and Alys looking alike would be the relevant X being reintroduced into both lines, Arya's would be Rickard cousin marriage and Alys' could be from her mother or his father's mother.

 

This is of course a simplification with gonads only, bringing autosomes also into play would change it greatly.

Going simply for gonosomes also mean that Stark and Karstark female looking alike could mean nothing of Stark defining X but a more recent introduction of another X to both lines.

 

Bringing autosomes also into play, the family defining features could just be selfish DNA, having more chance to be passed on than their allelles.

 

I'm studying medicine so while I know some genetics obviously someone who is studying genetics would have more knowledge than me and I'd be happy to learn more if anyone here with more knowledge than me is willing to share theirs.

 

One tinfoily idea: Considering how there's magic in the series, selfish genes of the series may not just be acting selfish during reproductional activities but they may also be something like midichlorians from star wars and also have effects outside the body they are in. This could be how appearances are preserved; carriers of the contender genes are eliminated so those with the proper copies continue to rule. Robb dying and Bran becoming a cripple, leaving only baby Rickon behind in an out of reach place would be an example. With the three brothers removed from the succession, whether they are still alive or not, Jon now has a higher place in succession then he currently did, in fact he's at the top if Robb has legitimized him and Stannis also wanted to place him on Winterfell. With a R+L revelation, he can go all Rickard-Arya on Sansa to merge the lines.

Another possible example could be from the Reach: Tyrells placing a distant Garth cousin when Manderly and Peake fought to place their wives on the throne. Selfish genes acted their subtle magic and wives, presumably with children carrying their father's genes  were prevented from gaining the throne.

Another one from the Reach Tyrells were an Andal family at sometime in history a Tyrell married a Gardener princess. All the Tyrells we know currently have Brown hair, which we usually see with first men, this Gardener could be where they got the Brown hair. If it is so then Aegon giving the Reach to Tyrells instead of some other family like Hightowers who haven't raised an army against them could be the selfish genes placing themselves as the rulers of the Reach

[Philokles]

Almost every male Stark till Robb and Bran did look the old Starks and Karstarks other than personal grooming (which is hardly genetic). Even Bran looks Stark enough to confuse himself with young Benjen. 

[The Sunland Lord]

We know that some of the kids have the Tully looks. So nothing surprising. 

[TheThreeEyedCow]

I like the way the OP thinks and I enjoyed reading the theory. Overall though it feels like overkill. If the Westerossi had any understanding of DNA I'd agree that this observation would be pertinent. However, we're talking about a very simple people in a very confusing time so I'd say the fact Jon looks and acts like a King of Winter is sufficient by itself. If/when the Northmen are looking for a Stark, they'll look to Jon. In fact, they probably already have. And it's easy to imagine Jon stood there, looking like a true Northman, sounding every bit like dutiful Ned with a Direwolf by his side. That'll be good enough. 

The story of Bael exists as a parallel to R+L=J. It's a nudge from the author to think outside the box and when we look at the situation the Starks are in it's undeniably relevant. I suppose the big shock is something about the male line being irrelevant, and it is their matrilineal line that determines legitimacy. Which is at odds with feudal society. Maybe consider Nymeria and her 'Sandy Dornish kin' in contrast to the Andal 'stony Dornish'? 

I think that given Barbery Dustin's original grievance of being denied a betrothal to her liege lord to be, Brandon, with Rickard more in favor of a political marriage with the Tully's from the Riverlands - we can speculate that this mingling of the bloodlines is very new to the nobility in the North, who've done an excellent Job of keeping to themselves prior to Rob's Rebellion. With this in mind, features and appearances would of been far less diverse and families would have a very strong resemblance to one another. 

The Frey's by comparison seem to have a very stubborn set of genetics passed down from Walder. It doesn't seem to matter how many different women bare his children, they are all doomed to look like him. Male and female. It certainly makes Lady Stoneheart's job a lot easier. 

[Corvo the Crow]

One example from my family: I am a male with one sibling, female. We look exactly like eachother both facially and in body type with only minor differences ( my nose is bigger and my hair is more dense). Neither of us look nothing like our mother. I also look somewhat similar to my father when he was my age and my sister looks like my aunt (father side) when she was her age. My father also looks very much like his father but it is less relevant. My aunt, however, also looks nothing like her mother but looks exactly like her aunt (from the mother side) when she was her age. My grandmother and greataunt look nothing like eachother but looks somewhat like my greatgrandmother, which my greataunt doesn't.

 

Edit: just scrapped it altogether, may add it later on in another post.

[Reekazoid]

I think  this amalgam of hybrid IRL and fantasy genetics  suffers from an painfully small sample size.

If we apply IRL rules to a fantasy environment in which inheritance already behaves differently, and use a tiny sample size to support the theory, we run the risk of arriving at faulty conclusions.

What do the two women from Bran's vision have in common with Lyanna, Alys, and Arya apart from brown hair and a slender build?

Do The Ned and the current generation of Karstarks have a more recent common ancestor than the old Kings of Winter? Probably, because as we know ,prior to the Southron Ambitions project, Starks married their children to their vassals.

As far as Bran's narration, he is a young boy seeing his ancestors in living color in their full glory.  They don't look like Starks to him because they are fierce, savage  warrior kings from leaner times, resembling more the old Starks he saw in the crypts, than the civilized relatives he grew up around.

He says more about their armor and beards than he does about their features.

Other than that though,  it's an entertaining thought.  If current Starks were less Starky than what they ought to be, that would raise all sorts of interesting possibilities for prophetic / mystical / political shenanigans. 

 

 

 

[Banner Without Brothers]

2 hours ago, Reekazoid said:

Do The Ned and the current generation of Karstarks have a more recent common ancestor than the old Kings of Winter? Probably, because as we know ,prior to the Southron Ambitions project, Starks married their children to their vassals.

There's a Jon line somewhere where he thinks about the validity of a Karstark claim to Winterfell. He says something like All the houses of the North have been married to the Starks so many times that any of their claims woulds be just as valid. 

Personally I think it shows that all the stuff about bloodlines is a load of misdirection and people put way too much stock in those ideas. Just think about the author, he's a hippy. The two ideologies that stand out to me that would care about bloodlines would be feudalism and nazism. Two ideologies that I suspect the author doesn't have too high an opinion of.

[Corvo the Crow]

2 hours ago, Reekazoid said:

I think  this amalgam of hybrid IRL and fantasy genetics  suffers from an painfully small sample size.

If we apply IRL rules to a fantasy environment in which inheritance already behaves differently, and use a tiny sample size to support the theory, we run the risk of arriving at faulty conclusions.

What do the two women from Bran's vision have in common with Lyanna, Alys, and Arya apart from brown hair and a slender build?

Do The Ned and the current generation of Karstarks have a more recent common ancestor than the old Kings of Winter? Probably, because as we know ,prior to the Southron Ambitions project, Starks married their children to their vassals.

As far as Bran's narration, he is a young boy seeing his ancestors in living color in their full glory.  They don't look like Starks to him because they are fierce, savage  warrior kings from leaner times, resembling more the old Starks he saw in the crypts, than the civilized relatives he grew up around.

He says more about their armor and beards than he does about their features.

Other than that though,  it's an entertaining thought.  If current Starks were less Starky than what they ought to be, that would raise all sorts of interesting possibilities for prophetic / mystical / political shenanigans. 

 

 

 

Well we don't know whether if the inheritance behaves differently or not if we don't have a bigger sample, it is not uncommon for children to take after one parent and looking nothing like the other. As I said earlier, I am not stıdying genetics so my limited knowledge comes from medicine, but if Lyonization or something similar also applies for autosomes, then what we see in ASOIAF is just real life genetics at work; Five Stark kids would have a random chance of using the mother's or father's gene for their prominent phenotypical features, that is if they can't use both unlike in the case of Edric Storm. Passing of the defining features of the phenotype  to offspring is easily explained with real life genetics; the genes related to these features would just need to be selfish genes, genes that have more than %50 chance to be transmitted to the offspring (it is considered both of the  allelles usually have a %50 chance to be passed on). These Westerosi genes just need to be very selfish / have a very high transmission rate so they will almost always pass on to the offspring and familial features will be established over time.

What is problematic is preserving of these featuers over generations because westerosi nobles aren't marrying off to some nobody commoner who may or may not have selfish genes of their own, they are marrying into other noble houses who also have their own selfish genes which will try to pass itself on to the future offspring, whether it determines the current offsprings' appearance or not. If parents have selfish genes for different features or are affecting the same feature but their effect is the same, then it is no problem,

 

Edric Storm example again for Prominent features

Ear: Florents have prominent ears, there's no such thing as a Baratheon Ear

Eyes: Baratheons have blue eyes no Florent Eye

Jaw: Baratheons likely have square jaws (only Stannis' is described) no Florent Jaw

Cheekbones: No Florent Cheekbone, Baratheon Cheekbone is a thing but not described

Mouth: No Florent mouth but Selyse is said to have a stern mouth, perhaps other Florents too? Baratheon mouth is a thing but  not described

Body type: Not sure if there's a Florent body type, Baratheons are broad chested and broad shouldered.

Height: Baratheons are tall, Florents are generally tall(Ser Axell is short but the others are tall), perhaps even taller, with Selyse, a women ( women are ~13 cm shorter than men, give or take 1 cm.) being as tall as Stannis (well perhaps not because Stannis is a bit shorter than Robert.

Of the 8 features above, 7 of them are only familial features for one house and the last familial feature is affected in a similiar way by both houses genes, so impossible to determine which one is used. When Edric marries he will pass on the familial features (selfish genes) whether his wife also has different selfish genes for these features doesn't matter, his children will carry these selfish genes even if they aren't in the phenotype and if his wife has no selfish genes for these features than his grandchildren will also carry the genes whether they show it in their phenotypes or not.

For another Baratheon-Florent child, Shireen has Stannis' jaw and Selyse's ear.

 

Now for Starks and Tullys, I will keep this shorter and  will only add the features for the same part, may expand upon it later.

Hair: Starks have Brown hair, Tullys have Brown (Hoster) or Auburn hair (Edmure, Catelyn, Lysa, Brynden)

Eyes: Tullys have blue eyes, Starks have grey.

With the selfish westerosi genes, parents will pass on their familiar features whether they appear in children or not. After that, however, which selfish gene will prevail? Which one will be passed on to the grand children?

 

Bonus familial feature: Whents: Minisa Whent passed her jaw and high cheekbones to Catelyn, who passed the high cheekbones to Sansa

[Loose Bolt]

Could that auburn hair be part of "Lothston genes" inherited via Minasa Whent. After all we know that Danelle Lothston had red hair. Besides Sansa seems to have connections to bats.

[Corvo the Crow]

8 minutes ago, Loose Bolt said:

Could that auburn hair be part of "Lothston genes" inherited via Minasa Whent. After all we know that Danelle Lothston had red hair. Besides Sansa seems to have connections to bats.

Hoster Tully has brown hair but Brynden shares the hair color of his nephew and nieces.

Also interesting, little robin seems to have taken his grandfather's hair.

My sister and I both have brown hair, mine is so dark it mostly looks black, so is my beard but with some light my beard has many reds among those browns. My sister's hair is usually seen in it's brown color and rarely looks like black but with some light it looks auburn. Same could apply for Tullys.

[Colonel Green]

34 minutes ago, Loose Bolt said:

Could that auburn hair be part of "Lothston genes" inherited via Minasa Whent. After all we know that Danelle Lothston had red hair. Besides Sansa seems to have connections to bats.

1)  Auburn hair is said to be a longstanding Tully trait.

2)  The Starks don't have Lothston ancestry, that we're aware of.

3)  How does Sansa have connection to bats?  There was one instance where a story told about her involved her having bat wings, nothing more.

[The Knight of Flours]

10 minutes ago, Colonel Green said:

3)  How does Sansa have connection to bats?  

Well, bats were her maternal grandmother's sigil

[Colonel Green]

21 minutes ago, The Knight of Flours said:

Well, bats were her maternal grandmother's sigil

That applies to all the Stark kids.

On the subject of the potential Stark connection to Harrenhal being important, the clearest indication that it isn't is that the Starks' Whent ancestry has never once even been mentioned in ASOIAF itself, even in situations where it would make sense to do so.  I'm pretty sure that GRRM just made Catelyn's mother a Whent because they were an extinct house and wouldn't bring any troublesome minor relations into play, and never thought any more about it.

[falcotron]

On 10/9/2017 at 1:54 AM, Фейсал said:

If you look at the family tree it's actually pretty funny how many Starks die without off springs. Being a younger brother seems to really get you places in the north.

I've been wondering whether that's intentional.

In medieval Europe, the idea of primogenitive inherited kingship was justified by two sources: the Old Testament, and the Roman Empire. And yet, if you look at both of those sources, they're almost 100% exceptions. The major biblical succession stories are David inheriting as Saul's son-in-law, and Solomon as David's seventh son. And in reference to Solomon, we're reminded that important patriarchs like Jacob and Joseph weren't firstborn either. The only definite firstborn succession in the House of David is Solomon's successor, who immediately drives the realm into civil war and loses half the kingdom (Israel, aka Samaria). In Rome, only 2 of the first 20 successions went to sons or grandsons. And the second of those, Commodus, ruined the era of Five Good Emperors (who were all adoptive sons placed above actual lineal descendants). Meanwhile, at least in England, there were long stretches where the crown didn't pass through firstborn sons, and chroniclers sometimes compared, e.g., William II to Solomon for an example of why that wasn't actual a problem.

So, the fact that the Starks have a lot of second sons inheriting may be intended as a realistic depiction of the way things were before the late middle ages, or it may be intended to highlight Ned as a Solomon figure who ruled more wisely than Brandon would have.