Milady of York

What an excellent idea, MOIAF!    This resource collecting all the rereads on the board will hopefully make it much easier to locate each for reference and linking. And I'd like to thank you for including The Will to Change: Rereading Sandor and the Rereading Sansa section of From Pawn to Player, it's much appreciated.

Some more I found out recently: There's a shout-out to Beauty and the Beast, the film and the original French fairy tale, in Sandor's negative to be addressed as a ser and his attitude towards flattery. And there's also a faint resemblance to the poem Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman in his description of the coat of arms of House Clegane (The three dogs that died in the yellow of autumn grass).

The fact is, we don't know for sure if Alexander the Great did untie the Gordian Knot in this manner. The Knot was made of cornelwood cord and tied a yoke to a wagon; and there are 2 versions of the incident in the ancient sources: the first you mentioned (striking it with his sword to cut it loose), and the second one, according to which the King pulled out the pin of the wagon-pole, which was a wooden peg driven righ through it, holding the cord together, and having done this he drew out the yoke from the wagon pole. Not even the most accurate of his biographers -Arrian of Nicomedia- is 100 percent sure which account is the correct one, although he seems to have favoured the latter account because it was recorded by an eyewitness of Alexander's campaigns.