Universal Sword Donor

I’ve already put my $.02 in here but her POV chapters make it quite clear that she’s fond of him but willing to do harmful things to him in the short term to protect LF and herself (since those go hand in hand for now). So she might do something that poisons him or or even kills him but it’s driven by self preservation vs any desire to kill the boy.

Ironically: The reason I am never specific about dates and distances is precisely so that people won't sit down and do this sort of thing. My suggestion would be to put away the ruler and the stopwatch, and just enjoy the story. https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Entry/Chronology_and_Distances Edit: To be clear, I find it frustrating too because I want to know *all* the details about the world and don't particularly care if they don't make sense.

He's gone on record saying he usually drops info in three hints: one very subtle, one more obvious, and the last basically telling you what happened. The catspaw employer is usually the example I see given.

If we believe Egg, then yes he was knighted. "I was supposed to squire for Daeron. He's my oldest brother. I learned everything I had to learn to be a good squire, but Daeron isn't a very good knight. He didn't want to ride in the tourney ... He's of an age where knighthood would be fairly common for nobility (see Waymar Royce, Tywin, Quentin, et al , let alone royalty, and his father clearly pushes for his sons to match Baelor's sons, of whom at least Valarr was a knight who rode as a champion in defense of the host.

So far. Every single bit of crawling he’d done since ASOS takes him back to the man he wanted to be versus the person he became. Maybe he makes it, might be he doesn’t. It’s a compelling journey whether or not he gets there

Jaime and Robert for all the wrong reasons.

They can be. Scipio, Alexander, and others easily negated their effects with rather mundane strategies desensitizing the horses and animals or opening ranks to let the elephants charge through

Right but they’d also marched like 10k km and hadn’t seen home in a decade (or whatever). Less about elephants — they didn’t a pretty good job of engaging them when they had to — and more about wanting to bang their wives and see their children

It’s literally in Jon’s quote: “The plan would have required the Watch to yield back a large part of the Gift, but his uncle Benjen believed the Lord Commander could be won around ….” There’s no one else to yield the land back to except for the lords who it was seized from in the first place. We don’t know exactly which ones but we can imagine it’s the closest houses / clans: Umber, Flint, Norrey, Wull, Karstark (?) and / or another house that was completely moved off the gift and given land elsewhere.

It is if it’s not the watch’s land, which is explicitly in the proposal

That's not Ned's proposal. You're not wrong about it being far superior, but that's not ned's proposal and not many lords are going to want to bring a group* of "rapists, murderers and thieves" onto their land. * obviously there are more than a few bad apples as we see but that characterization isn't super accurate

Other than grant the land -- meaning its no longer the NW's land -- to the lords, who obey WF, and pay their taxes to the NW, what other arrangements are possible?

The entire premise of the proposal was that the lords pay their fees to the NW but are loyal to WF

Hard to argue against this plan, given what we know of Quentyn's results and Oberyn's results.

The Starks need to ask the king for leave to follow through with Ned's plan: His lord father had once talked about raising new lords and settling them in the abandoned holdfasts as a shield against wildlings. The plan would have required the Watch to yield back a large part of the Gift, but his uncle Benjen believed the Lord Commander could be won around, so long as the new lordlings paid taxes to Castle Black rather than Winterfell. Ned cannot raise lords in his own right. That can only be done via king or descent. Jon might be referring to parceling out land for people to rule as landed knights or gentry, but that would leave the onus of traditional lordly duties (pits, gallows, law) in the hands of the woefully undermanned NW; the lack of resources of the NW being the primary driver in resettling the New Gift and making sure it has people to run it. Being realistic here, Robert and / or Jon Arryn would most likely rubber stamp any proposal because it's Ned and realistically who cares about that piece of land OTHER than the NW and the new settlers.

It says rattling off the armor in the middle of a schilltrom, men on horse, and men in plate, and men in chainmail. Nothing to be taken from that when the opening volley a page before shows men in chainmail charging and going down under the Lannister arrow volleys.

Medieval mail with a padded jack / aketon was great at stopping arrows. There are muslim and crusader accounts of men walking around with 20+ arrows in their armor fighting because they didn't know they'd been hit. Read more about the 3rd crusades march south to Jerusalem under Richard I -- battle of arsuf -- for more info.

I do think he was in love with her or in love with the idea of her because she reminded him of his first wife, Lynesse. We also see a Dothraki using a longsword in the FFG artwork. As we haven't seen either weapon wielded by a Dothraki across multiple Khalasars or multiple continents, it would be a stretch to consider them common weapons. We do see arakhs and recurve bows and whips through the series. This is the play for me. It could happen but have some patience.

So the first known SotM we know if isn't really useful in that context then. We know the most prominent SotM -- Ser Arthur -- was indeed a knight and dubbed Jaime in a sept in the super formal way.The best we can assume is that Arthur Dayne's practice is a continuation of what the Andals introduced, not that there were no "knights" of House Dayne before the Andals. We simply lack the information to compare, but someone like Maester Luwin might say it's a distinction without a difference since Dawn was probably, but not definitely, handled by the best warrior in House Dayne before knighthood came in a way that isn't too different from House Corbray and Lady Forlorn.

Right but Dawn and the House itself are 10K years old, and the sword was created by the founder of the house.

There are no conditions attached for a knight to make a knight. None, unless you think one can revoke a knighthood for not being a follower of the seven. There are plenty of examples to counter that. Glendon ball was knighted in a whore house by a poor knight,, pretty much the opposite of being honored in a religious ceremony. Even the lords at whitewalls granted him permission to joust when someone confirmed it. They treated him like the literal whoreson he was but he was still acknowledged a knight. a common joke here is “what do you call a doctor / lawyer who finished at the bottom of their class?” A doctor / lawyer or channeling pirates: you’re without a doubt the worst knight I’ve ever heard of ah but you called me a knight

We do not agree on that. It’s very possible given several passages we’ve seen that hundreds of knights were made w little to no ceremony. And by denying that one of them is a knight makes you doubt the word and knighthood of the dubbing knight. The warrior would frown upon that. there might well be social doubt a persons knighthood. We see it with glendon ball and Dunk and they end up having to prove it or be vouched for. That doesn’t mean they aren’t knights, though the irony in dunks case is thick.

Absolutely nothing puts their knighthood in limbo. They’re knights

Any knight can make a knight. mentioned several times in book by a variety of noble characters and confirmed in grrm in the SSMs. Beric actually gets criticized by clegane for knighting the bwb bc they haven’t earned it.

Right but that’s being described as a requirement to him, not him swearing to do it. And again we haven’t seen the entire process play out, merely a small portion. We know Glendon ball was dubbed but there’s no mention of swearing anything. And any knight can make a knight, so even if it’s supposed to happen it’s not a guarantee. knighthood irl took centuries to fully adopt all the religious accoutrement. edit: forgot about beric and gendry. Obviously beric isn’t a follower of the seven after his resurrection and he knights gendry naming the gods but not specifically the seven. So we have multiple knights who have either forsworn the seven or never swore to them at all.