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The Will to Change: Rereading Sandor II


Milady of York

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On 12/02/2016 at 2:10 PM, Ragnorak said:

I really like your thoughts on the Knight Errant archetype though most of reflections on that topic jump ahead to comparing and contrasting Sandor and Brienne. Sandor is much more the Clint Eastwood style character in the American Western treatment of the archetype while Brienne is closer to the black and white hat wearing John Wayne style.

Speaking of, did you notice that in "For a fistful of dollars," Clint says something similar to Sandor’s “where the heart is”? The context is different, but that leapt at me because Eastwood’s character taunts Ramon to kill him by aiming at his heart and since Ramon is too . . . literal, he fails and that saves his life. Not to mention that the mule that can’t be laughed at is pretty much his Stranger. And, since we’re in the topic of archetypes, I learnt that the film is a remake of a samurai tale by Akira Kurosawa ("Yojimbo")  in which the protagonist, bodyguard Sanjuro, is meant to be depicted as a masterless dog: he’s a wandering ronin, a samurai without an overlord, who has doglike habits. Which reminds me, there’s one interesting parallel to House Clegane in historical records from feudal Japan that it's best to elaborate on when we’ve gone into AFFC.

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On 09/02/2016 at 9:04 PM, Ragnorak said:

Sandor kills Polliver and Arya kills the Tickler and mortally wounds the squire. This time Sandor lets Arya give the gift of mercy he taught her earlier. Arya helps the wounded Sandor onto Stranger and they make their way towards Saltpans. Sandor’s wounds are too severe to go on even after Arya tries to treat them. He asks Arya for the gift of mercy and even lashes out with his deathbed confession to try and provoke her to do it. She denies him on the grounds that he doesn’t deserve mercy. This has a double edged meaning since in the First Men tradition of justice not deserving the gift of mercy can mean not deserving death. This is somewhat reinforced by Arya leaving the Hound out of her nightly prayer.

In the two essays you linked, I focused on his psychological evolution from his desertion to this last fight, and didn’t touch much on the physical aspect. But since then I’ve had this question in mind: what exactly was it that did Sandor in?

 

Over the years, the answers in discussions ranged from “gangrene” to “fever,” and some even seem to understand both interchangeably. But to me, the gangrene interpretation is the one that doesn’t have a textual basis and hinges solely on a single line by Arya, who doesn’t know enough and is therefore not quite reliable on this, that describes a “funny” smell, which seems to be taken to mean his wound was gangrenous already, despite details during and after this scene that indicate that it wasn’t the case, as well as in-chapter evidence that explains much better what Arya means by “smelled funny.” And that he had a fever is rather generic to me, as it can come from common wound infection and plain wound inflammation.

 

My own conclusion as to the physical cause for Sandor ending up like he did, almost dying, is simple: blood loss. Major blood loss.

 

The evidence I can give is mainly the placement of his wounds. See the first wound that Polliver gave him:

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Sandor gave a grunt of pain. The burned side of his face ran red from temple to cheek, and the stub of his ear was gone. That seemed to make him angry. He drove back Polliver with a furious attack, hammering at him with the old nicked longsword he had swapped for in the hills.

Now the second one from the Tickler:

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And then the Tickler leapt over a bench quick as a snake, and slashed at the back of the Hound’s neck with the edge of his short sword.

And the third wound:

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Polliver and the Tickler had driven the Hound into a corner behind a bench, and one of them had given him an ugly red gash on his upper thigh to go with his other wounds.

 

So he got three wounds, placed one on the earlobe stump, one on the back of his neck, and one on his thigh. Now look at the anatomy of these body parts: here for the back of the neck, here for the ear, and here for the leg.

 

All those places are full of blood vessels and major arteries all over, so any cut and even superficial scratches will result in copious bleeding due to this overabundant blood flow. If this haemorrhage isn’t stalled, it’s bad news. And Sandor didn’t stop his bleeding for hours and hours, he kept bleeding profusely as they rode away from the inn. See what he says:

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“Anyone wants to find us, all they need to do is follow my blood. Water and wood. But bring me that wineskin first.”

 

That indicates he left a visible trail of blood. Needing to lean on Arya, needing her help to mount onto Stranger, supporting himself on a tree so as not to fall when he dismounts, and his reeling on the saddle, are usually taken as a sign of pain from his leg wound or of a fever. But blood loss is weakening and can lead to swooning, so I believe that’s rather a result of the haemorrhage. In fact, I would say that when he finally fell from his horse, it was that he was close to fainting from the weakness resulting from this blood loss. And on top of all, we have to add that he’d not eaten anything for hours either, probably nothing for near two days, and when you lose this much blood, you need to nourish yourself as soon as possible.

 

Which brings me to why Sandor didn’t take care of his wounds for so long, as he’d be aware of what unchecked haemorrhage could do. He is no stranger to wounds. And the answer is: plot necessity, for all this was arranged so Sandor would be temporarily put out of combat, because Martin needed to separate him from Arya so both would continue their respective arcs and she move to Braavos. And how do you bring down a superb fighter still in his prime, healthy, and physically fit, without actually killing him? Easy: make him drink a tad too much by giving him bad news about his girl, make him fight with two sober soldiers with no compunction about using dirty tricks, give him 3 conveniently-placed wounds that cause him to bleed like slaughtered cattle, make him forget to stop his bleeding immediately before moving on, and give him a nonsensical notion as to how to treat his wounds by burning them with boiling wine later, all of which shall result in weakness and fever probably from infection rather quicker than otherwise it’d have. And you have him safely knocked out for the time being.

 

How else would it be explainable that Sandor didn’t make the innkeeper clean his wound and sew him up then and there? Wouldn’t have taken long. He needed to get away right that moment, lest more of Brother Dearest’s men were to appear. But if the hurry was so great, why not instead tell Arya to ask the innkeeper for needle (not that one!) and thread to sew him up (not that kind of sewing!) and clean bandages, instead of telling her to fetch only wine? Because if treated immediately, Sandor would heal and be all right again after rest and food and keeping his wound clean, and that’s not what the plot needed.

 

The wound in the leg tells me something more: Gregor’s men weren’t fighting fair and were using foul trickery. Arya describes that the Tickler was angling to position himself behind Sandor, for what? To stab him in the back, and in fact he did stab him in the back of the neck, which could’ve been fatal had Sandor not shifted aside so suddenly. It’s fittingly ironic that the man attempting to stab his opponent treacherously in the back got himself killed precisely by being stabbed in the back by Arya. Talk about cosmic retribution. These non-squires of non-knights do have their uses; the same thing was done by Pod, who knocked senseless from behind the Bloody Mummer that was sneaking on Brienne to stab her in the back.

 

I suspect the wound to the leg was also a result of a dirty trick like the one in the neck, and I’d not be surprised if it was the Tickler again; he was chief torturer and would know where to strike for maximum damage, and slashing at Sandor’s leg can only have one purpose: make him lose his footing and fall. Sandor is very tall, much taller than both Polliver and the Tickler, so that’d make it more difficult for them to hit on his head and chest for a quick kill, both shorter men having a shorter reach, and besides Sandor was defending well his vital parts. But higher height also means you have more body mass exposed, and your longer legs are a tempting target. Watching live action re-enactments once, I witnessed a little trick by a re-enactor playing a Roman legionary fighting a “Barbarian” who was played by a taller re-enactor; they were fighting all slow and choreography-like and suddenly the Roman dodged a sword strike by ducking low with his shield as if to kneel before the Barbarian, and chopped at his leg below the knee from back to front, causing him to buckle down and fall on his back, and once on the ground, the Roman “killed” the Barbarian with a strike to the chest. The explanation was that they trained to strike at unprotected body parts, and those Barbarians didn’t wear greaves protecting their legs. I saw that similar methods exist in swordfighting from later epochs, too, although not in the Middle Ages with longswords, the type they’d use in Westeros. Not to mention that this wasn’t chivalrous, despite its usefulness.

 

So, my contention is that one of them, Polliver or the Tickler, resorted to an unchivalrous trick by slashing at Sandor’s leg whilst the other kept Sandor busy by hacking at him higher up, with the intention to make him fall and finish him off whilst stumbling or fallen. And that’s how he got his third wound. Two wounds out of three were inflicted on him through foul play.

 

And, because of course the Hound can’t catch a break, things get worse. This man is one of the best fighters in Westeros and should know to treat battle wounds much better than by pouring hot wine on his open wound, for the love of the old gods! Sew them up, or cauterise them with a hot knife would be much better than pour boiling wine and then bandage them with wet cloth. Other readers have already explained it’s not something to be done, with more medical knowledge than I possess, and there was a nice thread discussing this that I lost the bookmark of, but here is a blog post that sums up well the reasons why Sandor shouldn’t have been using boiling wine. From a historical perspective, it’s not accurate either, mind you.This is Martin’s mistake, however, not Sandor’s. And furthermore, considering that Sandor is afraid of being burnt, that he’d willingly go for being burnt with boiling wine also doesn’t make sense from a characterisation standpoint. Sure, he’s not so afraid that he’d freak out at the slightest burn, so then why not use a hot knife to cauterise and then disinfect the wound and keep it dry and clean? Plot, plot, plot, and the Others take accuracy.

 

And so the wound got inflamed (the description Arya gives makes me think of that), and weak from blood loss as he was, it’d have been easy for him to have an infection-induced fever. But gangrene he definitely didn’t have. Again, the only “proof” is what Arya says, but take into account three things for the smell: the bandages were wet, stale wine stinks (have you cleaned after-party rests of wine with a sponge? It smells funny), and body sweat plus caked blood. That accounts for the smell. Arya doesn’t know enough to diagnose gangrene, she was far from being Maester Luwin’s best pupil. And the final bit of proof for me that Sandor didn’t get gangrene is the Elder Brother. He told Brienne that he gave Sandor “a poultice for his wound.” If you’re the great healer you’re made to be, you won’t be treating gangrene with a mere poultice! It’s for a reason that it was also known as “blood poisoning.” In Westeros, you won’t cure gangrene without extirpation if your name isn’t Moqorro. Remember that Jaime actually did get gangrene and that creep Qyburn said he needed extirpation of his arm, which he refused. So, if Jaime survived days and days with actual gangrene without antibiotics, for plot’s sake, and was cured without extirpation . . . I’m suspicious of Qyburn’s “healing.”

 

In sum, I think Sandor was too weak from major haemorrhage and thus vulnerable to a high fever from wound inflammation or wound infection, one of which he must’ve gotten due to that bad idea of a treatment that favoured that outcome, and both of which are treatable and that don’t necessarily devolve into gangrene every time so long as treated within a reasonable timeframe (and the Elder Brother did), although both can take time to heal depending on a number of factors such as damage, location of the wound, treatment, overall health, etc., etc.

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Whoa, it's been a while :) Thanks to Milady of York for restoring the missing content and I hope we see some familiar faces again soon. 

Rag, really excellent work on your analysis! I loved your discussion on the fire vs. mud symbolism and what it could signify for Sandor's development going forward. This chapter underscores just how much Sandor's life has become structured by the interests of the Starks, especially the two sisters with whom he has forged profound, yet unstable connections. Despite all the violence and disturbing content included here, there's a depth of poignancy that Martin keeps reaching for, especially as it relates to Sandor's feelings for Sansa and his later deathbed confession. The theme of appearance vs. reality stands out from their first entrance into the Inn, where what could appear as a regular tableau of medieval life is quickly shown to have all the ingredients of a powder keg waiting to explode. As the information on what has been happening during the war is revealed, the dynamics of the situation change subtly, and none more so than what we see happening to Sandor, as he digests the news of Sansa's marriage and escape. What appears to Arya to be his terrible similarity to Gregor's men, is in reality his utter dismay over this revelation. Arya's true identity is another way in which Martin teases out the theme, as readers are privy to the fact that she has not actually been sent to the North as a bride for Ramsay, and Sandor's secret mirth over this precipitates the vicious fight. Looking ahead, we're going to see the explorations of this theme play out in ways that oscillate between damnation and deliverance for Sandor. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I'll be putting up the ASOS wrap-up post in a couple of days, but before I wanted to comment on the epilogue chapter, in which Sandor is only mentioned, and that contains a passage that to me is the clue as to why his brother, Gregor, has those terrible headaches that have made him into a poppy milk addict.

You probably are familiar with the "explanation" that's most accepted in the fandom, that Gregor's headaches are due to a pituitary gland tumour. And it does sound plausible, coupled with seeing how extremely tall he is. But, to be honest, it's never been a satisfactory explanation to me; neurology is one field that's familiar enough for me to know that if it were merely a case of a tumour, Gregor would present other accompanying symptoms that he absolutely doesn't, and whilst we can argue that Martin doesn't possess professional knowledge as to include those as well, they're not exactly a matter of needing specialised knowledge to spot either. Any common medical encyclopaedia for consultation by laypeople will have an accurate list of symptoms for pituitary tumours, even Google will list them all, and there you'll see other symptoms like vision loss, muscle trouble, impotence, etc., which would be easy for Martin to add. Does Gregor present any of those? No, not that we've seen. His sight is fine, he's described as moving rather fast for his huge size so no muscle trouble, and given the number of rapes he's committed, infertile he might be but impotent he isn't, and so on.

 

So, if huge height + headache = pituitary gland tumour doesn't apply, what then? The answer was under our very noses in the ASOS epilogue, it's surprising that I hadn't singled it out before, because it's so simple and makes perfect sense.

Here's the passage:

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I once hoped to be the greatest knight who ever couched a lance. The gods took that away from me. Why shouldn’t I have a cup of wine from time to time? It helps my headaches. Besides, my wife is a shrew, my father despises me, my children are worthless. What do I have to stay sober for?

He was sober now, though. Well, he’d had two horns of ale when he broke his fast, and a small cup of red when he set out, but that was just to keep his head from pounding. Merrett could feel the headache building behind his eyes, and he knew that if he gave it half a chance he would soon feel as if he had a thunderstorm raging between his ears. Sometimes his headaches got so bad that it even hurt too much to weep. Then all he could do was rest on his bed in a dark room with a damp cloth over his eyes, and curse his luck and the nameless outlaw who had done this to him.

Note that Merrett says he drinks to calm his headaches. And now, see the reason for having those horrible migraines:

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As a boy he’d been packed off to Crakehall to serve his mother’s family as a page. When old Lord Sumner had made him a squire, everyone had assumed he would be Ser Merrett in no more than a few years, but the outlaws of the Kingswood Brotherhood had pissed on those plans. While his fellow squire Jaime Lannister was covering himself in glory, Merrett had first caught the pox from a camp follower, then managed to get captured by a woman, the one called the White Fawn. Lord Sumner had ransomed him back from the outlaws, but in the very next fight he’d been felled by a blow from a mace that had broken his helm and left him insensible for a fortnight. Everyone gave him up for dead, they told him later.

Merrett hadn’t died, but his fighting days were done. Even the lightest blow to his head brought on blinding pain and reduced him to tears. Under these circumstances knighthood was out of the question, Lord Sumner told him, not unkindly.

So, Merrett Frey suffers from insufferable headaches as a result from a blow to the head as a squire, and since then he drinks to calm the pain.

I think that's exactly what happens with Gregor. At one point he suffered a blow to the head, a result from a fall whilst riding on horseback, or a mélée, or a fall at a tourney. Why not? He's said to favour bad-tempered horses, which he obviously cannot always control (remember the Hand's Tourney), and if it wasn't in a mélèe or tournament, then in battle, either the King's Landing sack or the Greyjoy uprising. And if it wasn't that, then whilst training as a squire or later. Of course he has to train often, or he'd not be fit for combat nor tourney, and in martial sports blows to the head are very frequent as the head is one favoured target in swordfighting, mace-fighting, hammer-fighting. It could've have been merely a fall from his horse whilst travelling or whilst hunting even, or if we're going to get creative with ways to bump his head, why not cracking his skull against door frames or low ceilings. He's so tall!

Anyhow, the point is that regardless of how he got it, that blow to the head left scarred tissue or some sort of injury that causes terrible headaches, to combat which he took to poppy milk the same way Merret took to his cups. But as Gregor is one large man, the usual sensible small doses of milk of the poppy wouldn't do him any favours, so he'd have taken a large dose since the beginning, and as time went on, he'd kept ingesting larger and larger doses, "gallons" of milk of the poppy as his squire said, and no Maesters would ever dare tell him to be careful if they valued their life. Consequently, Gregor became a drug addict the same way Merrett became a drunkard.

Whilst that doesn't rule out any hormonal cause for Gregor's large size, I am convinced that this is the in-universe explanation for his headaches as GRRM intended it to be. And even out of universe, in real life, it´s a very plausible explanation that actually does happen. My brother is one such case, he often experienced blinding headaches for years and his eye often twitched oddly during those migraine bouts, and when examined he was told by the doctor that it was due to scarred tissue on the  brain cortex resulting from a blow to the head whilst playing football (the European variety) in his youth. 

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As a person with a real pituitary disease, I would agree with the above, a blow to the head seems more likely.  Not every pit disease creates growth of the body (mine doesn't) but headaches, yes.  GRRM has put other very tall people in his book who don't have headaches and I would call a very tall Gregor a product of GRRM's creativity. 

Head injuries can be common from horse falls and Westeros doesn't have modern equestrian helmets which are designed for protecting a riders head.  We have also seen in the Hand's tourney how the helmets of Renly and Jaime took quite a bit of damage, so they aren't that protective either. Yes, a blow to Gregor's thick head seems most likely.

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Yay! We are up and running again (and have been for some time, apparently)!. Milady, thank you so much for restoring all of the lost content. Certainly that must have been tedious. I probably would have crawled under a rock while tearing out my hair after the first few attempts. You are appreciated, to be sure. 

Ragnorak, such a brilliant analysis of a very meaty chapter, and probably my favorite of the entire series! You really peeled back the layers. I especially enjoyed the comparison of Sandor's standoff with Gregor's men to a "grey" western classic, something I hadn't considered before. So spot on (I now wish Quentin Tarantino had directed the scene for AGoT). GRRM's skill as a writer is on full display here--the building tension is palpable all through the point of view of a child. While Sandor and Arya's entry into the inn immediately establishes tension, the fight itself is probably one of the best fight scenes in the series, forcing the reader to the edge of their seat (I've read this countless times, and I still find myself anxious), aside from Sandor's duel with Beric Dondarrion. (To be fair, Oberyn vs. Gregor wasn't bad either.)

Your analysis of fire vs. mud is something else I hadn't considered before, so thank you for peeling that layer back for me, as well. It certainly highlights Sandor's journey and his befitting situation as the gravedigger on the Quiet Isle. It also underscores how he must face his own personal demons to be able to move forward, overcoming his hatred and fear of his brother and embracing his own self worth so he can truly establish a deep connection with others, culminating in finding genuine love and a place he can proudly call home. 

I agree with you that Sandor's heavy drinking at the inn, knowing full well the situation will erupt in violence, has everything to do with Sansa. Throughout this entire reread, Sandor's extreme discipline has been highlighted. It doesn't make sense that he would all of a sudden get sloppy without a meaningful reason. That reason is the devastating news he's just received. The subtly in which GRRM conveys Sandor's reaction is  incredibly profound and resonates deeply to the careful reader. 

Milady, great job arguing that Sandor's careless attention to his wounds amounts to plot. I initially assumed Sandor was so fearful of being captured by his brother's men that he raced off. But the way in which the wound was cared for solidifies the necessity of a plot device. Great sleuthing, as usual. 

 

 

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Thank you, DogLover.

This chapter is one of many that demonstrates GRRM's masterful use of the POV structure. We see everything through Arya's eyes and perceptions and that childhood fear, reticence, and ignorance is what helps pull off the Western saloon feel so well. He uses her limited understanding to convey more to the reader than Arya could possibly understand herself. When Sandor and Gregor's men start talking she thinks that Sandor is one of them. As readers we know this is entirely false but her incorrect observation hints at the nature of Sandor's past and his familiarity with being around such men while at the same time alluding to the philosophical idea that outlaws and lawmen are two sides of the same coin. The limits of what Arya can convey from her perspective actually adds to the sum of information her POV conveys to the reader.

Using ignorant POV's is common in storytelling because it is a simple way to build mystery and suspense. Even though LotR is a third person omniscient POV, the unnamed narrator only treats us to the most ignorant member of the fellowship's perspective. We don't get Legalos or Aragorn's perspective on the Paths of the Dead, only Gimli the dwarf's. Other than that it is mostly the hobbits. We get Merry and Pippin splitting up to give us a sympathetic and ignorant set of eyes in Rohan and Minas Tirith and as Frodo's perspective under the weight of the Ring would make his perspective more knowledgeable we begin to be limited entirely to Sam's view.

George goes far beyond just using the limits of various characters' knowledge as a storytelling tool for drama, suspense, and an air of mystery and Sandor might be one of the most interesting cases in this regard. All of his POV characters have an arc except for poor Areo who is confessed to be just a set of convenient eyeballs with his chapter title "The Watcher" (though with that axe I wouldn't tell him so to his face.) While GRRM has a fascinating cast of minor characters who are dearly loved-- or hated-- with good reason, I'm not sure many of them could really be said to have "an arc."

Mance is great and fascinating character, but he is an archetypal appeal to freedom more than a man on an inner journey. Chained by a cloak? Become King of the Wildings and sneak into Winterfell to play Bael the Bard. Shackled by an undead fire mage's glamour? Play Bael the Bard and sneak into Winterfell. Bowen Marsh is character who impacts the story precisely because he doesn't have an arc. He is the refusal to change and the refusal to travel on an inner journey is what makes him stab the element of change. I think there's an excellent case to be made for Stannis as a non-POV character with an arc, but even in his case it isn't nearly as explicit and thoroughly explored as it is with Sandor. It is one of the things that stands out about Sandor as a character and the various ways that GRRM pulls off the storytelling are all tied to his incredibly adept use of the POV structure in his storytelling.

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On 05/03/2016 at 8:34 PM, LongRider said:

Head injuries can be common from horse falls and Westeros doesn't have modern equestrian helmets which are designed for protecting a riders head.  We have also seen in the Hand's tourney how the helmets of Renly and Jaime took quite a bit of damage, so they aren't that protective either.

Indeed, that’s so. Historical battle and tourney helms were sturdier than the fancy yet impractical animal-shaped helms GRRM invented for the books, but nonetheless head injuries were still possible, from hard enough blows in combat or an unfortunate angle when falling off the horse.

Now that you bring them up, those two cases from the Hand’s Tourney I think happened like that also to showcase the degree of physical strength on Sandor’s part in preparation to explain without spelling it out how come he can step in unhesitant to deflect Gregor’s attack a little later. The Cleganes are described similarly in terms of jousting performance, but it’s Sandor that the text zooms in on. We intuit by his size and his reputation that the man must be a Hercules, but we’d not seen him demonstrate it yet and so this jousting is the perfect opportunity. The combined strength of any average man and average horse plus speed are enough to send an opponent tumbling off the horse into the ground if the aim is right, but Sandor does more than unhorse his rivals: he is described sending them “flying” like birds to fall far off with an audible plonk! to enhance the visuals. And the opponents he sent to experience the joys of flying and the misfortunes of a bone-cracking landing aren’t small younglings; both Renly and Jaime are tall men and trained. That considered, it makes sense that he could withstand the same kind of brutal sword stroke from his brother that beheaded a horse.

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Now that with the last ASOS chapter we’ve covered all of Sandor’s fights, I’m noticing that there’s one unifying theme for all of his three individual duels.

Gregor is a perpetual presence in every one of them, from the first fight to the last fight. The first time Sandor engages in one-to-one combat in the series is with his brother at the Hand’s Tourney, making Gregor’s presence literal this time. Then, for his second duel with Beric, Gregor’s spectre looms large, because Sandor is put on trial as much for having been a Lannister liegeman as for being a Clegane, a lot of the crimes the Brotherhood accuse him of are Gregor’s, and Thoros even spells it out clear that Sandor is in for being the Mountain’s brother when he brings up the killing of the Targaryen babies that cannot be blamed on him. And at the Crossroads inn, it’s Gregor’s men fighting on Gregor’s behalf that he must face; it’s them who make it all about Gregor by assuming Sandor can be there only to kill their Ser, and it’s the prospect of being rewarded by their Ser that mostly motivates their initiating the fight as well.

 

And another thing all three fights have in common is that they’re defensive on Sandor’s part. He is never the aggressor in any of them but the defender, the protector. In the first one, he’s protecting Loras (Sansa’s crush), the second time, he’s protecting and defending himself (from charges by Sansa’s sister), and the last time again protecting himself and Arya (after hearing of Sansa’s marriage). So, all three fights are provoked or influenced directly or indirectly by his brother in person or “in spirit,” all three place him in the role of defending someone from Gregor’s threat, and over all three hovers the figure of Sansa opposing the omnipresence of Gregor. These two opposite poles that pull Sandor towards either revenge or peace, are personified in two figures who are always present every time Sandor has a crucial and life-changing fight.

Another detail I’ve been observing that pops up in Sandor and Gregor’s deeds of arms is their respective use of the sigil and colours of House Clegane. Each of the brothers is curiously fixated on favouring one aspect of their House external identifiers only. Let’s start with their helms: Sandor’s helm doesn’t need another repeated description, we all know it’s dark and shaped as the head of a snarling hound, but what about Gregor’s? It's described as a heavy great-helm made of plate with a stone fist on top.

 

So it’s a great-helm, all right. It makes sense that he’d choose this model of helmet, it’s a big-sized one fit for his big head. But . . . why the stone fist? What does a fist have to do with House Clegane symbolism-wise? Why does Gregor not use something else that alludes to House Clegane, like a hound’s head, a full-body hound, or dog fangs for that matter? Or why not something that represents himself or his nickname, the Mountain? Why a fist of all things?

 

Then let’s look at their colours. Gregor wears a surcoat with the symbols and colours of House Clegane, autumn yellow and black, both at tourneys and in war. But Sandor doesn’t. He never uses a surcoat with the Clegane colours in the books (there’s art official and fan-made that has him wearing it, including our B&B poster, but that’s simply creative licence), and whilst that can easily be explained saying that it’s to differentiate himself from Gregor, it still doesn’t explain it all. Like, why does Sandor never wear House Clegane colours in his clothing, then? Don’t tell me it’s because he prefers dark colours, because he occasionally wears bright colours, so it cannot be that, and besides there’s sober ways to combine black and yellow in clothes. He is a trueborn child, so he has as much right as Gregor to wear his House sigil and colours on his clothes and on a surcoat, intact or modified. Yet he refuses to.

 

So, we have an elder brother who wears the House sigil and colours, but doesn’t use the animal sigil as identifier, and a younger brother who doesn’t wear the House sigil nor colours, but does use the animal sigil as identifier.  It’s like one said let me have this for myself, and you can keep the rest for yourself.

 

My take on why this happens is that it has to do with embracing the founding values of House Clegane. Gregor doesn’t give a drowned rat’s corpse for what the founding story of their grandfather represents, all he cares for and needs is what House Clegane means in terms of social standing and power: the knighthood and lands and men-at-arms under his banner. It’s the knighthood he murdered their father for, it’s to keep the knighthood that he is “loyal” to House Lannister, it’s the knighthood that irreparably damaged his brother. It’s the “ribbons” he needs to be able to wield the “sword” with impunity, so it’s the ribbons—that is, the colours and sigil of House Clegane, the nobiliary trappings and frippery—which he uses as external representations, like a pretty dressing that covers the bad taste of the cake. He adopts the fist as his identifier because that’s the true symbol of what he is: the fist of the Lannisters, with which they can pound their enemies to a bloody pulp.

 

Given that in Westeros all nobles are obsessed with wearing their colours everywhere and have brooches and helms and sword pommels shaped after their sigils, it would be expected that it be Gregor the one wearing a hound’s head helm. It’d make more sense for the eldest son and head of the House to have a nickname like The Hound, wouldn’t it? Because it’s the outstanding members of a family who get the honour of being known as and remembered for all posterity by their nicknames alluding to their Houses or regions of birth. The Young Wolf, the Young Dragon, the Longthorn, the Falcon Knight, the Dragonknight . . .

 

And yet, it’s Sandor, the runt of the litter, who self-identifies with the values that their totemic animal embodies. And true to his beliefs, he rejects the “ribbons” by not using the sigil and colours on his clothing nor surcoat. The only thing where he does have his House sigil and colours is on his shield, which again is the true symbol of what he is: the shield of House Lannister, the protector and guardian. And, although we’re accustomed to splitting him in two and identifying everything that’s negative about his character with The Hound whereas Sandor is the positive human side of the character, it’s always seemed to me that The Hound was supposed to be a positive means of identification. For Sandor, “The Hound” wouldn’t have to be negative, he himself says he loves dogs and is sincere in that love, and he admires his kennelmasters' background, he thinks dogs are loyal and true and don’t lie, all positive traits, so it’d not be a surprise if it was he who chose that nickname for himself if it wasn’t given him by others. But it got corrupted, warped and twisted into a negative in time, through Sandor’s deeds in service to his lieges, his anger, and his harsh way of dealing with things and people, and some aid from the bad rep of his brother and the Lannisters at large, so it no longer has a positive connotation as it may have begun.

It didn’t help any that symbols are powerful in people’s minds, more so negative ones. If Gregor is the one wearing the House’s symbols whilst committing his atrocities, that’ll stay in the consciousness of the commonfolk, who on seeing anywhere the banner of the three black hounds will automatically think “Clegane” . . . and Clegane means Gregor.

 

That their respective ends are parallel re-enactments of the House Clegane founding story also illustrates their opposite choices as to what part of the legacy each embraces. Sandor made the hound choice and ends up “dying” like the hounds of his sigil, fighting “lions” to defend himself and a Stark lord's daughter. He’s the hound who survives to have another chance at creating his own home where these values can be preserved. And Gregor made the ribbons choice and ends up dying contrary to the hounds of his sigil, fighting for the lioness to kill the lord, as Ragnorak put it. He is resurrected to be now a literal Fist for House Lannister, he has no mind of his own and can only be a robotic killer. I suspect that concerning the Cleganes, Martin is playing with the same legacy theme he’s exploring with Ned and Tywin and their respective children, as we’ll discuss next in AFFC, and it’s clear to me who of them may be the chosen one to rebuild the legacy of the House that came into existence thanks to hounds.

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Very interesting thoughts, Milday.

Before jumping into that I'd like be a little more explicit regarding GRRM demonstrating Sandor's strength beyond just the jousting helm damage. George teases a lot with regard to swordsmen and their relative skill. It is one of the reasons the board is infected with "Who would win in a fight?" threads. He does it to great effect and one of my personal favorites is Oberyn. Oberyn talks like a braggadocios blowhard to Tyrion from their first meeting with his "all flowers bend before the sun" line. The man has a fearsome reputation and a past that indicates he is not wholly without skill but Oberyn's boasting tends to be of the over the top variety that begs a reader to doubt. It isn't until Ellaria Sand who just moments before said "You're going to fight that?" says that he's just toying with The Mountain that we really know Oberyn is as good as his reputation. That is all intentional on GRRM's behalf to create and draw out the dramatic tension.

Jon is another case. Jon Snow has been training since the opening of GoT. He's been training for five straight books-- far more than any other character in the series. He's given a signature gesture of opening and closing his wounded hand in anticipation of a fight. George has built up the case to make Jon the single best fighter in Westeros with all his training-- or Jon could be kind of mediocre. We don't really have any way to tell because we're deprived of context (outside of a berserker moment or two.) Ok, he was better than Robb at Winterfell but Robb is of complete unknown skill with a sword. With all that build up Jon's story in Dance ends with what we all ought to have anticipated was going to be the reveal of just how all that training paid off and-- nothing... This again is intentional on our evil author's behalf. The unknown skill level adds to the tension of Jon's last chapter and leaves the anticipation of 5 straight books of training still hanging in the air along with Jon's fate.

He does mostly the opposite with Sandor. Sandor goes toe to toe with Gregor on Gregor's own terms fairly close to the opening of the series. Our first real insight into Sandor as a fighter is the information that "Yes, he is that good." Later we get both Oberyn and Bronn explaining how to fight Gregor that gives us the context to understand the magnitude of Sandor's matching him in a straight on bout of strength. Jaime thinks of Gregor's strength as being "nothing human" while he believes he could have beaten either Sandor or Gregor, but within that thought is the information that Sandor matched that inhuman strength.

So with Sandor GRRM has given us the material to know that he is of incredibly profound skill, but then gives us battles and fights that pit Sandor against fire or where he's drunk. Rather than keep us in the dark about his true potential as a swordsman, he reveals the potential first and then adds in external factors that prevent that full potential from manifesting. It is a very different dramatic build up but one that seems just as likely as Jon or Oberyn to have a pay off at some future point in the plot.

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Milday, your comment about the Hound as a nickname having potentially once been positive before taking on a negative connotation struck a chord.

GRRM has dozens if not hundreds of great nicknames throughout the series and there is a great deal of meaning that can be drawn from his use of nicknames. The Sam POV in Craster's Keep in the chapter where Mormont dies contains a bit of a philosophical discussion between Grenn and Sam on the use and meaning of nicknames mostly centered around Sam's new nickname "Slayer." It is a curious bit of in-story commentary on nicknames from an author who uses them so prolifically. They discuss how the same nickname can be used in a complimentary fashion or as an insult depending on the addresser, but Grenn seems to believe that if you "came by it fairly" your nickname can't be used as a term of disparagement. There is an emphasis on the importance of "earning" your nickname as opposed to having one bestowed upon you-- metaphorically defining yourself as opposed to being defined by others.

That ties into Tyrion's advice to Jon Snow about armoring himself in his bastard identity so that it can't be used against you. Sandor has done this quite literally, armoring himself in his Hound identity. We know he has done this and internalized it because he tells Sansa so when she asks why he lets people call him "dog" but not "Ser." This is a very significant point because we are approaching the Quiet Isle where the Elder Brother will declare the Hound dead and Sandor at rest. The Hound identity has been stolen and the helm donned by men who go forth and essentially do Gregor's work-- the very thing the Hound nickname and identity was forged to avoid. It is a curious thing that the chapter with the parting of Arya and Sandor that sends them both to very different places of religious reflection and contains the element of someone "stealing their faces" that seems likely to be a dramatic element to pull them back into the main tale.

I have long believed that the central morality metaphor of the series is Aemon's Ravens and Doves speech to Jon. Aemon implies that the "hated and misunderstood" raven is the superior choice to the publicly perceived purity of the dove. In this light it makes the "hated and misunderstood" perception of the Hound as a nickname or identity a rather significant point. Aemon also counsels Jon not on a specific course of action but rather to make the choice he can live with for all the rest of his days. There are few perfect choices, oaths conflict, heart strings pull in different directions and the "proper" course of action is the one whose consequences we can best live with in the aftermath of the choice.

In some ways this view of morality can best be summed up by the philosopher Ser Clint Eastwood in his most well known non-Western persona "A man's got to know his limitations."-- both in what he can and can't do and what he can and can't live with.  Most all of Ned's choices can be described in these terms from protecting the infant Jon Snow to resigning as Hand over the Dany assassination. Oberyn's death is not the tragedy or failure it might have been with a different character because dying to obtain justice for Elia is the choice a man like Oberyn can "live" with. Jaime's tale is one of making choices he couldn't live with and the weight of those poor past choices haunting and influencing what he can live with in the present. For all his defiance to Cat in the dungeon at Riverrun he essentially confesses to Tywin that he can no longer live with women kicking buckets of shit at him. Stopping a Gregor Clegane is the "right" choice, but somewhat beyond the scope of capabilities of an 11 year old boy and 11 year old boys need to know their limitations too. Sandor's whole story can be described in terms of "making the choice he can live with" based on knowing his limitations starting with his fleeing to Casterly Rock upon the death of his father.

In pondering Sandor from this angle I think the most informative comparison is Jaime especially with the Sansa/Rhaella kingsguard parallel. While Sandor clearly regrets some of his past choices, they were the one's he could live with given his limitations at the time he made them. Jaime seems to be someone who made choices he couldn't live with in the moment and choices that he believes were not because of his limitations. Sandor did something to protect Sansa even while his last memory of Robb was playing with wooden swords before the Young Wolf started vexing the lion on the battlefield. While it is doubtful a boy so young had the wisdom to do anything to help poor Rhaella Jaime could certainly have offered himself as Aerys's champion against Brandon in place of fire.

Jaime's choice to kill Aerys seems to be emotionally motivated by his inner guilt and frustrations over having sat by doing nothing while Rhaella was raped, Rickard burned, and Brandon was strangled to death. Unlike Sandor who confesses his true crimes to Arya down to lying about the song, Jaime obfuscates his crimes of doing nothing in the supposedly noble deed of slaying Aerys to save Kings Landing. While this may intellectually justify his kingslaying, it really serves as a mechanism for Jaime to avoid facing his own inactions. If saving Kings Landing were truly his motivation in killing Aerys he would have mentioned the caches of wildfire that still lurk beneath the city.

Instead, Jaime's past actions still haunt him just as those jars of wildfire haunt Kings Landing and his past is going to burn him in the future as sure as the wildfire is going to burn Kings Landing. Jaime's "journey into the underworld" of Riverrun's dungeons saw an unrepentant confession to Cat of killing Bran and was followed by a false confession to Brienne about killing Aerys. His future is alluded to as one of condemnation in his dream beneath Casterly Rock where all the elements of his past return to condemn him. Sandor's "journey into the underworld" has a sincere confession to Arya as a prelude with an absolution of sorts from Arya with his removal from her list followed by the upcoming absolution of sorts from the Elder Brother on the Quiet Isle. His journey is one of putting his past behind him and freeing him of its shackles.

Sandor and Jaime are also thematically tied through the inversions of Beauty and the Beast that play out through Sandor/Sansa and Jaime/Brienne. There are probably elements of the Brienne and Jaime reunion that are worth exploring in the future relative to the path Sandor might follow upon his departure from the Quiet Isle. It is curious that Brienne tells Jaime that the Hound has Sansa given that Sandor's stolen identity and Sansa are the two most likely things to draw him away from the Quiet Isle. Looking forward into the speculative paths of The Winds of Winter, while both the Kingslayer and Hound nicknames bear Aemon's "moral" traits of being hated and misunderstood, the Hound nickname seems to be on a very different redemptive path both publicly and privately.

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On 10/03/2016 at 9:24 PM, Ragnorak said:

This chapter is one of many that demonstrates GRRM's masterful use of the POV structure. We see everything through Arya's eyes and perceptions and that childhood fear, reticence, and ignorance is what helps pull off the Western saloon feel so well. He uses her limited understanding to convey more to the reader than Arya could possibly understand herself.

Excellent point, Ragnorak. I would add that, whilst using the least knowledgeable narrator is indeed frequent and a very effective writing technique, the use of child points-of-view isn't as frequent. Not as the sole narrator or the main narrator at least. Probably because, although it's a wonderful tool, it has a level of challenge hard to rise up to and that requires a degree of writing skills that few writers can match. In all my reading experience, I have encountered several very young narrators but can recall only one other example of a female child telling the story of an adult male, but in that case the impression of such a literary feat was diminished by the fact that she wasn't the only narrator for his story in the way Sansa and Arya are for Sandor, but shared the task with a cast of other adult and more knowledgeable characters, and eventually the man got his own POV, and all that resulted in some cracks in the narrative consistency wall. Whilst it lasted, seeing the adult male through the female child's POV was very entertaining, though, because she starts off wanting his head on a platter, and her eyes guide us towards embracing a certain image of him that's just the child's own conviction, and when much latter finally the man's POV rolls in, the shock of the contrast is big.

 

For Sandor, although he can also be seen through adult POVs, none of them is telling his story, as are the girls, instead they're adding details here and there, so although we're treated to adult perspectives on him we don't have an adult narrator for him to date. Yet what stands out is the coherence and consistency in his characterisation and personality despite the POV differences and despite their opposite feelings towards him. For example, Sansa's POV is favourable to him but despite that, Sandor's harshness still comes across as if to balance that, and Arya's POV is unfavourable to him, but still his gentler side can be seen through her as counter-balance. That consistency across disparate POVs is what I admire most from GRRM's writing of the Hound, because there's the certainty that the Sandor we're seeing through all those eyes is Sandor, individual POV biases aside. It's not so in my other unnamed example, where we already know from the other adult POVs that the girl is very wrong in her perception of the protagonist male, and when we have his own POV, it turns out the other adults are also wrong to varying extents, some more than others. It's like that man has different hats to wear for each, and whilst it can be explained away with "character growth," "masks he wears for a purpose," and similar reasons, this inconsistency across POVs is perceptibly there.

 

The challenge, therefore, is to be able to pull out showing a different layer of the same person through each POV, instead of showing a different character with the same name through each POV and call it POV-structure bias or blame it on unreliable narrator like less competent writers may do.

 

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George goes far beyond just using the limits of various characters' knowledge as a storytelling tool for drama, suspense, and an air of mystery and Sandor might be one of the most interesting cases in this regard.

That Sandor is such an unique case of a secondary character will an arc can be ascribed to two circumstances, I'd believe. First, that he was tied to House Stark at the very beginning, and this family at large are the heroes in this tale as per Martin's own words ("To me, the Starks are heroes"), regardless of whether their individual endgames land in the "bitter" or the "sweet" portion of bittersweet. He was introduced in Winterfell, he was given Northern and Ned imagery in subtle and blatant ways despite working for their enemy, he was tied to Sansa with a heavy love/marriage foreshadowing corpus despite working for her abusers, he was tied to Arya with father/tutor imagery despite being her kidnapper, etc., etc. He has been there from the beginning being pulled out of House Lannister towards the North, and his fate no longer can be divorced from the Starks after five books of Martin slipping in these connections; so, his importance for the different arcs of the protagonist House influences and determines his own importance as a character as well.

 

Secondly, it's a matter of themes. We know GRRM loves to use a certain character or set of characters to explore a theme in particular, and with Sandor it's a theme that's near and dear to GRRM's little heart, if we go by his outspoken love for Faulkner's "heart at conflict with itself" philosophy of writing. It's honour and redemption that he's exploring with Sandor, through the theme of knighthood, which his whole arc is based on. True, he's using Jaime and Brienne for the same theme, but . . . both are latecomers to the party. Brienne appeared in ACOK and it wasn't clear what arc she'd have yet nor did we know she'd be a POV, and Jaime came later as well. So what both can do is serve GRRM to expound on other angles for the theme, with variations in evolution and outcome, but not have their whole stories be based on that in the same way as Sandor's in a full arc from start to finish. There's also Duncan the Tall, yet another latecomer to the party, and again he doesn't present the same storytelling potential regarding the question of what a true knight is that Sandor does, especially not the redemption bonus.

With his terrible origins story, the Hound was set in the very first book on the path to become the man Martin would use to tell his take on knighthood with a start, a middle point and an end, and he's placed in the perfect position for uniting both sides of the theme, the realistic of his "knights are for killing" belief and the idealistic chivalry figure he's being pushed towards. And, because he's of the "original crop" (characters who were there since AGOT), such a story can be developed at a credible pace over a period of time, as his struggles with honour or lack thereof have in effect been in for five books, his change is slow and gradual, like real people change, neither flashy nor spectacular, all of which has given Martin plenty of time and opportunity to explore the theme without a need for extremes in timelines or methods.

So, that's it: long-term ties with Starks and series-length overarching theme.

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Oh, great work with sorting out all the old posts Milady. The new quote function is indeed troublesome and almost unworkable.

 

On 2016-01-13 at 8:04 PM, Milady of York said:

 

I'm late in my reply to you on Ivanhoe parallels, Lyanna. Clever points, you added further details I'd not noticed myself.

 

 Or Sicily! All three faiths could live and thrive there with reasonable tolerance unheard of elsewhere, and even one of their kings got into a liaison with a Muslim woman. Likewise for Spain. I almost forgot, there's a bit of historical fun I caught: whilst Richard the Lionheart is playing true knight in fiction, his own brother-in-law King Alfonso VIII of Castile was playing Bois-Guilbert in real life. He's said at the time to have had an affair with a Jewish beauty called Rachel. I wonder if Scott knew about that.

I'm glad we got started on the Ivanhoe discussion! It is such rich source material to look into, and so many things stand out as obviously "inherited" into ASOIAF. The Tourney at Ashford de la Zouche is definitely the most obvious one, but there are so many others. :) I don't know if Scott knew about the affair of the Spanish king, but it is certainly not impossible, and perhaps Scott made a moral/class commentary in his version, while GRRM made his own variety thereof with Jenny of Oldstones and the prince of Dragonflies. Going against the social order has a cost.

 

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By the way, this also reminds me that Scott evades writing Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert in a clash on equal footing and without advantages or impediments. In the Ashby joust, Wilfred is able to unseat Sir Brian not so much due to the impact of his lance as because the latter's saddle unluckily slid off and he fell, and in the second one-on-one (the third encounter between them, globally) there's not even as much as a bumping of shields! I've remarked before that something similar happens with Sandor, that Martin avoids showing off his skills at full capacity during duels (battles are another matter), and there's always an impediment of some sort reining him in. But we can expect this holding back could be due to reserving him for a crucial moment where he'll have to exert himself to maximum point. We've discussed here Ragnorak's idea on whether Sandor might have to actually champion Sansa in a trial by combat at one point if such a trial were to take place, and if he's going to be the answer to Sansa's plea to be sent "a true knight (. . .) someone to champion me" in the godswood as well as fulfil his own promise to be her protector when he left her, then the ground would be set up for a parallel of some sort to Ivanhoe championing Rebecca to happen.

Indeed. Especially since Rebecca's plea is quite similar to Sansa's. She is specifically after someone to champion her cause. It's also interesting as Rebecca is presented as a genuinely good person, almost a uniting person, fairly clever about the ways of the world, yet strident in arguing for what is right and good. Some of her discussions with Bois-Guilbert about chivalry are extremely interesting compared to Sansa's discussions with Sandor, I think. The development of Bois-Guilbert vs Sandor are different, of course, as Sandor is an efficient but not blustering or gilded hot-head, unlike Bois-Guilbert. However, there is consternation in both when their "lady love" doesn't acknowledge their heroics. Sandor admonishes Sansa for not thanking him after the bread riots, and Bois-Guilbert, being Bois-Guilbert, has at least one good rant about how he protected Rebecca with his shield during the flight from Torquilstone, at great risk to his own life, how he meant to champion her, etc etc.

We also have them both aligned with the ladies' respective captors. Sandor is a Lannister man and Joffrey's dog, Bois-Guilbert is a Templar Preceptor and answers to Lucas de Beaumont, the Templar Grand Master. Both Sandor and Bois-Guilbert also directly disobey their masters and offer Sansa and Rebecca a way out, which both ladies decline.

 

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I like your idea of someone royal exerting meddling rights and giving him the means to acquire a new position that'd allow him to get the lady, as this was of much import in the day, for men would either postpone marriage or never marry for this very reason, not having means nor lands; even Bois-Guilbert lost his first girl precisely because his pouch was empty. I've argued before that Sandor's wish to reach Robb had that flavour, reinforced by his offhand "make me a lordling" comment. Worthy of note, too, is that King Richard doesn't simply make Cedric reinstate his disinherited son out of the goodness of his heart or because he was moved to tears by the lovers' trials and tribulations. No, the Lionheart did it as recompense for Ivanhoe's role in the whole conflict between the factions, that is, for his deeds. So, the Hound will have to earn his position from whatever new regime ends up on top. And this is now a necessity given how badly his reputation was ruined because of the Blackwater slanders and Saltpans.

 

Ivanhoe has a lot of commentary on how loyalty in the game of politics can earn you favour, what with the Templars and de Bracy backing Prince John, and then when King Richard comes back, his supporters gain influence, lands etc. Coeur de Lion certainly rewarded Ivanhoe for his bravery, but very likely also supported him since he created a nice bridge between the bickering Normans and Saxons. Politicking! :)

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 A Littlefinger equivalent, do you think? De Bracy kidnapped Rowena with the sole object of using her for his political ambitions, and planned to force her into a marriage that she didn't want, to himself, roughly the same motivations Baelish has for kidnapping Sansa, minus the mother factor.

It's interesting to contrast his motivations with those of Bois-Guilbert for kidnapping Rebecca, which are devoid of political schemes and ambition. De Bracy wants to strong-arm Rowena into marriage regardless of love, Bois-Guilbert wants to win Rebecca's love. And both fail because of the same man. Incidentally, another familiar motif you will recognise is that when de Bracy abducts Rowena, he ignores that she's been for years in love with Wilfred, and that's what in the end earns him a rejection.

 

Indeed, I think de Bracy is a fairly LF like figure. I was surprised on reading the original version of Ivanhoe for the first time that de Bracy is a pretty funny guy, he quips and cracks jokes and is far more realistic in some ways than the hot headed, acerbic and passionate Bois-Guilbert or the brutish Front de Boeuf. While de Bracy has obvious designs on Rowena's "great tracts of land" (I do believe those are the exact words he uses! I can almost see him making the pause between "great" and "tracts" ;) ) he is obviously enchanted by her looks as well, but monetary concerns is foremost in his mind, not unlike LF, who quips and help scheme, and have large...monetary concerns, too.

 

 

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Had Sir Brian not been like he was and more like his chum de Bracy, it's also true that he could've kept her as his mistress against her will instead of seeking her willingness, and nobody would lift a finger in the Jewish girl's favour, and Bois-Guilbert would probably not be punished either, as he'd not be the first monk-knight to keep a mistress and he was valuable to the Templars. The offers he made her is, through a practicality lens, advantageous to someone in Rebecca's position; especially the second time, when he is offering her to be his wife, which elevates her to the nobility with all its privileges, but she doesn't want him.

If we are looking at the themes of knighthood, which I think is central to Sandor's arc, and Ivanhoe as an inspiration for ASOIAF, then GRRM is making his own commentary on knighthood and chivalry, just like perhaps Scott did with Wilfred of Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert. Strangely, back then Wilfred of Ivanhoe was probably the best example of the "perfect" knight, while today, we might find Bois-Guilbert more interesting since he encompasses far more contradictions of knighthood, which GRRM takes an even closer look at.

Bois-Guilbert has grasped completely that a knight is a man with a sword and a horse, and he is, like Sandor, extremely good at his job. This makes him valuable. While Sandor chooses not to be a knight because he sees the falsehood in the concept, Bois-Guilbert takes a different, but somewhat similar approach: he embraces that it is a corrupted concept and uses the fact. He balances his skill and how valued he is, against the vice he can engage in; so that he can drink, get rich, dress lavishly and have whatever mistresses on the side he wishes, should he choose to. He also within the story comments on the hypocrisy and seems to think it's ridiculous that these rules are trotted out every now and again, but that most of the time, people turn a blind eye. Not far of Sandor's scathing remarks on knighthood.

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"Lucas Beaumanoir!"—said Bois-Guilbert reproachfully—"Are these your precautions, Malvoisin? Hast thou suffered the dotard to learn that Rebecca is in the Preceptory?"

"How could I help it?" said the Preceptor. "I neglected nothing that could keep secret your mystery; but it is betrayed, and whether by the devil or no, the devil only can tell. But I have turned the matter as I could; you are safe if you renounce Rebecca. You are pitied—the victim of magical delusion. She is a sorceress, and must suffer as such."

"She shall not, by Heaven!" said Bois-Guilbert.

"By Heaven, she must and will!" said Malvoisin. "Neither you nor any one else can save her. Lucas Beaumanoir hath settled that the death of a Jewess will be a sin-offering sufficient to atone for all the amorous indulgences of the Knights Templars; and thou knowest he hath both the power and will to execute so reasonable and pious a purpose."

"Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!" said Bois-Guilbert, striding up and down the apartment.

 

Even when he lays out his proposition to Rebecca, he also has the time to share his views on his small-minded compatriots and colleagues:

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"No, damsel!" said the proud Templar, springing up, "thou shalt not thus impose on me—if I renounce present fame and future ambition, I renounce it for thy sake, and we will escape in company. Listen to me, Rebecca," he said, again softening his tone; "England,—Europe,—is not the world. There are spheres in which we may act, ample enough even for my ambition. We will go to Palestine, where Conrade, Marquis of Montserrat, is my friend—a friend free as myself from the doting scruples which fetter our free-born reason—rather with Saladin will we league ourselves, than endure the scorn of the bigots whom we contemn.—I will form new paths to greatness," he continued, again traversing the room with hasty strides—"Europe shall hear the loud step of him she has driven from her sons!—Not the millions whom her crusaders send to slaughter, can do so much to defend Palestine—not the sabres of the thousands and ten thousands of Saracens can hew their way so deep into that land for which nations are striving, as the strength and policy of me and those brethren, who, in despite of yonder old bigot, will adhere to me in good and evil. Thou shalt be a queen, Rebecca—on Mount Carmel shall we pitch the throne which my valour will gain for you, and I will exchange my long-desired batoon for a sceptre!"

While Bois-Guilbert is about a hundred times more proud of himself than Sandor, there are the similarities that

a. his reputation and skills would earn him a welcome to serve another master (although one may think Bois-Guilbert is perhaps aiming a bit too high :P )

b. he would do this to switch to a more traditional life, with a family

c. which means he is full willing to leave the order of the Templars. Like Sandor, he joined a knightly order not because he always dreamt of it. in Bois-Guilbert's case he was too poor and not famous enough, and when he got to that point, his lady love had abandoned him for another. In Sandor's case, he was haunted by Gregor and his own scars. Neither of them had any ambition for settling down with a family, up until the plot of the novels.

 

When it comes to character growth and change, there is certainly that dynamic between Brienne and Jaime and between Sansa and Sandor. Their interactions bring them to that crossroads of "oaths, so many oaths" and all the conflicting pressures of knighthood. Bois-Guilbert and Rebecca also address this, to a degree.

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"Thus," said Rebecca, "do men throw on fate the issue of their own wild passions. But I do forgive thee, Bois-Guilbert, though the author of my early death. There are noble things which cross over thy powerful mind; but it is the garden of the sluggard, and the weeds have rushed up, and conspired to choke the fair and wholesome blossom."

"Yes," said the Templar, "I am, Rebecca, as thou hast spoken me, untaught, untamed—and proud, that, amidst a shoal of empty fools and crafty bigots, I have retained the preeminent fortitude that places me above them. I have been a child of battle from my youth upward, high in my views, steady and inflexible in pursuing them. Such must I remain—proud, inflexible, and unchanging; and of this the world shall have proof.—But thou forgivest me, Rebecca?"

 

Interesting words, considering how Jaime thought he wanted to be Ser Arthur Dayne, but ended up more like the Smiling Knight. Also, while Bois-Guilbert claims he must remain as he always was, his actions belie his words, especially if the screenwriter ending can be seen as a reasonable interpretation. Even so, he dies of "conflicting passions". Perhaps in a way, Bois-Guilbert's death is one example of the conflicting pressures of knighthood. Which master to serve, to be just a killer with a sword and a horse, or something else, but in that case what?

 

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Thank you, Lyanna! Always a pleasure when you join the discussion, and this one about Ivanhoe has been so interesting, I suspect we're not done yet. Have you not thought of combining all our observations into a nice little write-up to put here perhaps? There's no detailed analysis of the parallels that I know of.

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However, there is consternation in both when their "lady love" doesn't acknowledge their heroics. Sandor admonishes Sansa for not thanking him after the bread riots, and Bois-Guilbert, being Bois-Guilbert, has at least one good rant about how he protected Rebecca with his shield during the flight from Torquilstone, at great risk to his own life, how he meant to champion her, etc etc.

This part made me smile, because they both are unwittingly undermining their opportunity to obtain what they want from their ladies. Sandor is fishing for a compliment at the same time he's ruining Sansa's attempts at complimenting him, and Bois-Guilbert is more direct and desperate in his pleas to be acknowledged whilst not realising that those feats are offset in Rebecca's eyes by the fact that it was him who put her in those situations. She was at peril in Torquilstone because Sir Brian aided de Bracy to kidnap her, and she was going to be burnt at the stake because Sir Brian took her to the lion's den, placing her at the mercy of his Templar brothers. But what they do have in common is the motivation for these admonitions: their feelings for the ladies; there's no vanity in that wish for recognition, it's not about their prowess but about what they can do with such prowess to the benefit of the ladies. Another thing in common relating to this desire for a kind word of acknowledgement is that they really did get it, though not in the way they'd have hoped for. Both are basically advertising their bravery, their capacity to protect the ladies. Sandor did in fact get his compliment, when Sansa called him brave, and previously she'd complimented him on his jousting performance, because that's what "you rode gallantly" meant. The problem with Sandor is that he's distrustful and suspicious of anything complimentary which he deems as mere examples of courtly flattery that he loathes, he reacts poorly to compliments not because he thinks he doesn't deserve them but because he mistrusts the motives, likely because he's usually not complimented with sincerity if not by admiring fellow swordsmen who know talent when they see it. But as a man? Even Sansa's compliments are worded as if it's about him as a warrior rather than as a person, and on the rooftop of Maegor's what he's asking for is exactly that. 

 

Bois-Guilbert's case is more complicated: Rebecca is proud yet, as the quote you provided of their last discussion before the trial, she is willing to acknowledge something good about the Templar despite that from her standpoint it's all his fault that this is happening to her in the first place; she compliments him acknowledging there's something noble in him. But, probably the biggest difference between Sandor and Sir Brian, he doesn't respect her decision. He keeps insisting and insisting about the sincerity of his feelings until the very end at the stake, arguing back and forth with her, defending himself from her accusations, selling himself as a good mate, offering her the moon and the stars; all the while not being able to get it into his lovely hot skull that this woman simply doesn't reciprocate his feelings. Yes, this is what men passionately in love do, and in a way his persistence is commendable in view of the huge social and religious differences they'd have to battle against and the things both would have to sacrifice to be together, but it's also troublesome for a woman to be pursued so obsessively, especially one as firm as Rebecca, who's not playing hard to get but being honest in her refusal. But, if we accept the interpretation of the trial by combat's alternative outcome in the films, that he would've been willing to allow himself be either defeated or killed so she'd be declared innocent, then perhaps he finally did learn to be willing to let her be and live happily without him in the middle, although too late.

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Strangely, back then Wilfred of Ivanhoe was probably the best example of the "perfect" knight, while today, we might find Bois-Guilbert more interesting since he encompasses far more contradictions of knighthood, which GRRM takes an even closer look at.

I told the friend who introduced me to ASOIAF more or less the same, and that although Scott did his best to make Wilfred the likable hero to cheer for, everyone these days prefers Bois-Guilbert over Ivanhoe anytime, in the book and in the films, and that the only person I'd seen that "ships" Rebecca/Wilfred instead of Rebecca/Brian was William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair. Her answer: "That's just because he's dead and has not watched Ciarán Hinds."

Seriously, it's partly that Ivanhoe is a product of the Victorian romanticisation of the Middle Ages and partly that he's been a victim of the Milton Syndrome. Reading the Victorians' opinions on the medieval period and mores, you'd be forgiven for suspecting they swallowed all that courtly love literature the way Sansa gobled up her songs of chivalry and thought them true, because their conception of the medieval world is . . . rosy, to put it kindly. The perfect knight, he is, too much so, because he has practically no flaws, nothing to reproach him for, a role model who makes no mistakes. Even the very medieval people managed to give us a flawed knight in Lancelot, for example, and yet Scott gave us someone in dire need of growing a pimple. Ivanhoe isn't someone relatable, perfection isn't relatable, although he could've been if not for the characterisation.

 

Which brings me to the second reason, the Milton Syndrome. One would believe that liking anti-heroes and flawed characters is a thing of our time, what will grimdark, likable villains, redemption arcs by the dozen, POV manipulation and et cetera, and that our great-great-grandparents would piously only cheer for someone like Wilfred, the good and moral character. And yet, it's not so. Some authors in the past have been so good with characterisation that they actually made the Baddies sympathetic and the Goodies insufferable, albeit unintentionally. Shakespeare has a few under his belt, but the name-giver example for this phenomenon is John Milton with his Paradise Lost, in which Lucifer is the sympathetic one without the author intending him to be because, you see, he is the Devil. Closer to Scott's time, we have Samuel Richardson, of Clarissa, who had every intention to make his hero be the one good example of a gentleman and was surprised that people actually loved the villain, Lovelace, and preferred him instead. Something similar happens with Wilfred and Bois-Guilbert. The former is more an archetype and the latter feels more like a real human being, not to mention that he appears on page for longer than Wilfred and is given more layers, both good and bad. GRRM also goes for this, if you look at any Favourite Character ranking, it's dominated by the more flawed characters in the series.

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Been thinking some more about what you highlighted above, Ragnorak, and this stood out:

 

On 12/03/2016 at 1:38 PM, Ragnorak said:

While it is doubtful a boy so young had the wisdom to do anything to help poor Rhaella Jaime could certainly have offered himself as Aerys's champion against Brandon in place of fire.

Or, realistically, offer Rhaella moral support. It doesn't cost anything and can have meaningful impact on the morale of the abused, who often are beaten into believing they don't matter to anyone. It's not always the grand gestures and heroic stands that qualify as "doing something" but also the small gestures. Sandor started out like that, not by heroically standing up to Joffrey to protect Sansa but by giving her advice, talking to her consistently until he could do something more later.

 

Jaime didn't do even that much. Whilst his memories condemn the Kingsguard for their inactivity, they're also self-accusatory because there's no memory of him trying to do anything for Rhaella beyond protesting to the likes of Jonothor Darry; he doesn't have a memory of comforting Rhaella behind everyone's back or having a kind word with her apart from that one last time he saw the queen before she left. For an event that he frames as the start of his disillusionment, he gave in to bitter acceptance of his elders' adminishing words without at least passive resistance. And, worse still, he was given a second opportunity that his fellow Kingsguard never had besides Selmy, to protect a second queen from a second abusive king, that'd have helped to come to terms with the guilt of failing Rhaella if with nothing else, and he didn't do it right this time round either.

 

About his colleagues of the Kingsguard doing nothing, his memories gave way to this doubt nagging at me: did really none of them do anything? Nothing at all? To hear him, Jaime talks like he's founding member and president and publicist of the Arthur Dayne Memorial Foundation and you won't hear a single negative word about Ser Arthur from him. Nor from Ned, nor Ser Barry, nor from allergic-to-knights Sandor, nor from anyone who's not Darkstar and of the night. So, what did or didn't the great Sword of the Morning do about this? Because obviously the abuse was no secret within the Red Keep, there are no secrets for the Kingsguard, there cannot be because doing their job properly can depend on them knowing all these secrets. He would've known, and if he stayed quiet and frozen-faced it would be a shock; this is the man whose conception of honour wouldn't allow him to finish off an unarmed criminal and murderer, the man who got Aerys to back his peasant-friendly campaign against the Brotherhood over whatever else Tywin the Hand might have suggested, someone who died protecting a baby and whose killer has an almost reverential kind of respect towards him. How could he have not done anything, then, if he was such a paragon? Would his Lannister admirer still want to be like his idol if Arthur Dayne had been passive about the same thing that haunts him? Martin promised to tell us more in future books when a fan asked him how could honourable men be serving a king as mad and cruel as Aerys, so we'll eventually find out the answer. Provisionally and until then, I lean towards considering that all we know of his character points the arrow on the "doing something" option, even if it was ineffectual long-term as Aerys became madder and crueller, the way Sandor couldn't stop the beatings despite all he did. It's possible that there was a backstory of oaths & obedience vs honour struggles going on that we don't know details of yet, and the fact that The Ned served a king like Robert, by no means comparable to Aerys yet nevertheless apt to test a decent man's morals and conscience, could also work as sort of anticipatory clue into what kind of answer GRRM will eventually give. The dilemmas of "good men serving a bad cause" and "worthy servant to unworthy master" are his type of story to tell, quite within his Faulknerian literary credo.

 

Story-wise, there's also inner thematic coherence to back up this conjecture. Every queen subjected to the abusive whims of her husband has had a champion in the Kingsguard: the Dragonknight for Naerys, Jaime for Cersei, Sandor for Sansa, and Margaery was going to have Loras had Joff lived. Is there a plot reason why Rhaella should be the exception? I try and cannot see any. That Darry, Selmy and Jaime were inactive doesn't necessarily have to mean that the rest were just the same, especially when Selmy and Jaime don't imply such a thing: they instead focus on themselves and their perceived failures first and foremost. And, if not Arthur or another of the remaining Kingsguard members, there's always Rhaegar, who's also not easy to picture turning a blind eye to his mother's misery.

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Hmm... a very interesting bit of conjecture, Milady. It also seems rather obvious now that you've pointed it out.

We have numerous examples of good men serving or being subordinate to a morally challenged man and they all include measures of resistance if not an outright rebellious course in some shape. The first that comes to mind is Davos. His initial rebellion to Edric Storm being burned consisted rather simply of saying the boy's name before it eventually grew to an arguable treason for which he immediately confessed. Ned and Robert contains numerous examples as well, and even Jon Snow has his rebellious acts towards Stannis. Mercifully killing "Mance" with arrows stands in possibly deliberate contrast to Jaime's passively watching Rickard burn. The Baratheon rulers are a bit different as they all seem to have an admirable side to some degree. Neither Ned nor Jon found Robert or Stannis wholly unworthy and Davos even less so when it comes to Stannis. Joffrey is another matter and he is often outright compared to the Mad King.

You are quite correct. It does not even require any great deal of risk or even courage to show some kind of moral support. In Sansa's POV we get the Redwyne twins reaction to her on the way to meet Joffrey's wrath:

The Hound snorted. “They trained you well, little bird.” He conducted her to the lower bailey, where a crowd had gathered around the archery butts. Men moved aside to let them through. She could hear Lord Gyles coughing. Loitering stablehands eyed her insolently, but Ser Horas Redwyne averted his gaze as she passed, and his brother Hobber pretended not to see her. A yellow cat was dying on the ground, mewling piteously, a crossbow quarrel through its ribs. Sansa stepped around it, feeling ill.

Simply making eye contact would have been a form of support. In Sansa's POV we're clued into the effectiveness of these small gestures from Sandor just as we are with Davos and his insistence on repeating the name Edric Storm.

“Sire, about Edric Storm. .”
Stannis made a sharp gesture. “Spare me.”
Davos persisted. “Your daughter takes her lessons with him, and plays with him every day in Aegon’s Garden.”
“I know that.”
“Her heart would break if anything ill should -
“I know that as well.”
...
“You are making me angry, Davos. I will hear no more of this bastard boy.”
“His name is Edric Storm, sire.”
“I know his name. Was there ever a name so apt? It proclaims his bastardy, his high birth, and the turmoil he brings with him. Edric Storm. There, I have said it. Are you satisfied, my lord Hand?”

Whether it is fear of becoming Joffrey's next focus or simply the shame of doing nothing as a defenseless girl is beaten we can be certain that the Imp's rescue was humiliating for these twins given Tyrion's pathetic martial stature just as an Arthur Dayne's hypothetical actions would have been a source of admiration for the young Jamie-- it is easier to stomach falling short of the Sword of the Morning than it is The Imp. I could speculate about Rhaegar deliberately removing Arthur from the Red Keep following Ashara's death for fear of his reaction, but that takes us far afield from the reread and the implications for Sandor's character. What we do have is the irony of Tyrion acting the knightly protector toward Sansa because he wants to be like Jaime in the face of Sandor's action as a protector demonstrating Jaime's prior shortcomings.

One of the things I find interesting in this whole Kingsguard set of parallels is the unconditional loyalty we saw from the three at the Tower of Joy which more resembles Sandor's mindset, compared to the more circumstantial adaptation we see in Jaime and saw in Barristan prior to his time with Dany. Sandor serves the Lannisters with a loyalty that is immune to circumstances right up until he chooses not to anymore. The military circumstance Sandor surveys from the rooftop before the Blackwater are the same circumstances that caused Vargo Hoat to switch sides. They are bleak to hopeless for the Lannister camp and Sandor repeatedly rushes into wildfire to battle these knowingly hopeless odds. Once he leaves their service he shows the same degree of loyalty to his newfound mission of seeking service amongst the Starks. Even after the Red Wedding and the Stark fall to the Boltons, he never thinks of Arya as a political tool beyond what he might benefit from as her rescuer. He never even inquires about the new political player in Joffrey's marriage nor does he think to gain advantage from holding the true Arya and possibly seeking out the Bolton convoy carrying the false one. He is loyal indifferent to likely winners and losers even in the face of his own possible or probable demise.

Barristan seems to have learned from his past experiences. His Arstan disguise is as much born of a desire to assess Dany as someone who is or isn't worthy of his service as it is to travel in secrecy. Prior to that he blindly followed Aerys indifferent to his own sense of honor. He never broke from that service as Sandor chose nor did he find a place in the faction of the Kingsguard that chose Rhaegar as a more worthy master. For all his blind following of Aerys he accepted Robert's pardon and accepted a continued place in that order with the Kingslayer as a brother. With Dany he seems to have found his hill to die on and now seems more aligned with his brothers at the Tower of Joy in her service.

Jaime in his "redemptive" arc seems to be splitting the difference. He rescues Pia, but accepts the service of Gregor's men that raped her. I suspect that an Arthur Dayne's reaction would have much more resembled a Ned Stark's. He wants to honor his vow to Cat to not raise arms against the Tullys but is willing to threaten Edmure with the pure Rivermen assault. It is a rather dishonorable way of honoring his vow as the undead Catelyn seems likely to remind him. He turns down Margaery and Tywin's restoration of him as heir to the Rock (not that Mace would ever consent to his daughter not being queen nor would Olenna ever consent to making Margaery a Queen of Thorns the Second) for the opportunity to write a new future for himself in the White Book. Yet he wants to confess his relationship with Cersei but continues in the ruse and continues to reap the benefits of the lie. He continues to choose "honor" within the limits of it not costing more than he is personally willing to pay. His "honor" is bound by the limits of self service.

Much of this overlaps with the idea of facing one's past as part of a redemptive arc, but it also touches on a more philosophical treatment of the idea of honor. Martin directly poses this question to Jon through Qhorin of the half a hand more than Jaime.

“Our honor means no more than our lives, so long as the realm is safe. Are you a man of the Night’s Watch?”
“Yes, but—”
“There is no but, Jon Snow. You are, or you are not.”

Jaime is a character with a lot of "buts" in his honor and this seems to be because his honor is entirely self-contained. In order for honor to mean more than one's life it must be stored safely outside of the self. The concept of storing one's heart or soul outside the self to obtain immortality is common in mythology and it finds a certain metaphorical truth with the concept of honor and service. In knightly tales the receptacle for the heart is typically a feminine figure and often a love interest, but not always as we see with Barristan and Dany or Ned sacrificing his personal honor for Sansa.

Sandor must have always had some external sense of a higher purpose outside the self for him to have held back killing blows for Gregor at the Hand's Tourney. His tale is of the tension between finding a role to embody that higher purpose and being consumed by vengeance. It is somewhat similar to the dramatic tension in Arya's arc and a failure on Sandor's part would resemble something like Jaime's killing of Aerys. There are a number of parallels between Sandor and Jaime thematically mostly centered around the Kingsguard circumstances, but also in elements like a stolen identity in the form of Sandor's helm and Jaime's sword hand. Still, Jaime finds an overall closer parallel in Theon, who also chose very selfish paths over an internal sense of honor and is left broken and pathless in a sea of his own consequences. That difference is just as informative for Sandor's arc as are the parallels.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 19/03/2016 at 7:24 PM, Ragnorak said:

Simply making eye contact would have been a form of support. In Sansa's POV we're clued into the effectiveness of these small gestures from Sandor just as we are with Davos and his insistence on repeating the name Edric Storm.

Good points, all. The quoted paragraph led to a bit of an analysis, hopefull of some use, added to the ASOS wrap-up I'm posting in a few minutes.

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ASOS Recap

 

 

“Redemption is something you have to fight for in a very personal, down-dirty way.

Some of our characters lose that, some stray from that, and some regain it.”

     JOSS WHEDON.

 

 

The Riverlands Chronicles: The Lion, the Wench and the War Dogs

 

The third book treats us to the largest number of chapters featuring appearances by Sandor Clegane or involving him through mentions and comparisons in several POVs, a precious opportunity to delve deeper into his character to uncover new details in a new environment, observing his struggles the further up he climbs in the character evolution curve. Yet it’s not just in quantity where the difference lies in but also in the quality, because we have a new POV that’s opposite to the one we’d mostly known him through.

 

In the introduction to the reread, we’d noted the importance of being aware of the uses and limitations of third person POV and the influence that Martin’s restricted slice-of-the-whole writing structure for each character has on the readership’s opinions and perceptions of them, especially on controversial acts, and the need this raises for positioning oneself outside this personalised eyeview in order to produce a character analysis as balanced and complete as possible. Upon arriving to a huge POV switch in Sandor’s arc, it’s worth bringing this up into our analysis again, as this affects the way his story is told as well as brings forth a contrary yet complementary angle to the main themes in it, such as redemption and mercy, for compare/contrast is one of the methods that work as counterpoint to the restrictions imposed by POV structure. Of the two major differences between the Stark girls’ chapter structure that directly influence Sandor’s portrayal in ASOS, one is the storytelling focus in their arcs: in Sansa’s POV, when he comes onto the page, he’s comparatively less the focus of the chapter, mostly because Sansa is tied to a larger political plotline and has more topics to deal with that mayn’t involve him whilst with Arya, due to the story narrated therein as well as their 24-hour companionship, Sandor is usually the entire focus of her chapters. The second is the pro/contra duality in the girls’ POVs: with Sansa, we had a sympathetic lens through which to parse his admitted failures and frailties as a man and as a knight in all but name, which was necessary at that time because the compassionate and supportive reaction would work as a catalyst for change; and with Arya we have a unsympathetic and uncompromising lens through which to condemn his accomplishments and triumphs as a man and as a non-knight because, again, it is absolutely necessary at this precise time to haul him into facing and making amends for the ugliest side of his past, without which his redemptive journey would be incomplete.

 

Redemption is arguably the main theme and the whole literary point of the Hound’s travel across the Riverlands with the little wolf pup, and it wouldn’t be possible to frame it devoid of this theme in any shape that wouldn’t make the entire arc utterly irrelevant otherwise. It’s a long journey towards completing his character change that the Hound embarks on with Arya, so it’s quite fitting that the first mention of him should be in the context of another trip that’ll also mean a significant turnaround in terms of character growth and that also basks in the theme of redemption: that of Jaime and Brienne, who’s intentionally likened to Sandor in the first ASOS chapter, on which Brashcandy further comments in SANDOR I that:

 

It's very interesting for the purposes of our analysis into the Hound's role as a protector and a shield, that the first mention of him after he has deserted the battle of Blackwater would come via a comparison with a character who defines herself by this very purpose, and is in the process of carrying out a solemn duty to Catelyn Stark to secure the eventual release of her daughters. That Sandor actually tried to effect his own rescue of Sansa (and later will with Arya) prior to departing the city further deepens the parallel, and the "fierceness" that leads Jaime to make the comparison of the Hound to Brienne was echoed in the emotionally laden vow that Sandor made to Sansa on the night of Blackwater: "They're all afraid of me. No one would hurt you again, or I'd kill them." The chapter also contains a description of Brienne being "as dogged as a hound."

 

Such an explicit character comparison by the author so early in the book is practically an invitation to drawing a thematic comparison between the respective Riverlands experience of the two duos travelling in parallel but towards opposite directions, both literal in destination as figurative in mindset at the beginning and at the outcome; which is what this wrap-up will strive for. They start off quite differently, Jaime going back to King’s Landing, to his old life as a Lannister and a Kingsguard, to Cersei, with no intentions to change anything in his lifestyle and no regrets; and on the opposite corner, although still offstage, Sandor’s change of heart has already taken him away from King’s Landing, to abandon his old life as a Lannister and a Kingsguard, to leave Cersei, and is reintroduced seeking a way to change his lifestyle driven by his regrets. In due course, both men will experience a crisis of the self, a crisis of conscience forced on them by their respective righteous judges incarnated in Arya and Brienne, who confront them for their past transgressions.

 

 

A Lannister always remembers his pets

 

Next, the narrative focus moves towards the House the Hound had served all his life, showing the disparate responses his abandonment elicits from its members—with Joffrey’s missing; and the only thing Tyrion, Tywin and Cersei’s reactions have in common is the failure to grasp the true implications of what they’ve really lost with their loyal man’s departure, and worse, that it heralds in their downfall. Tyrion, who happens to be the only Lannister aware of Sandor’s real motive for leaving, is too caught up in his own worries over the rivalry with his sister and more concerned about his loss of personal power and armed supporters to cool-headedly assess the consequences this desertion might have for him as regards to his fraught relationship with the Queen, the King and the Hand. His first reaction mostly serves to showcase the origins of the rumour about the Hound’s cowardice that’ll be the “official” version of his desertion, which he doesn’t bother to dispel either: it was the mutinous Gold Cloaks who, Bronn dixit, started it all; the same people engaged in murdering officers and then deserting due to cowardice like they accuse Sandor of. It’s interesting to note that, although Tyrion and Arya and Thoros might guess that Sandor is terrified of fire as it’s rather obvious when you look at his burnt face, only Sansa knows and truly understands his reasons because he tells her before going; same as Brienne is the one aware of the order to utilise the wildfire caches from Jaime’s confession, something not even Cersei knows.

 

There’s also another probable point of comparison between Sandor keeping his mouth shut about his true reasons for deserting the wildfire-lit battlefield and allowing himself be branded a coward without any explanation to safeguard his reputation, and Jaime’s silence on the wildfire caches after murdering Aerys that gave way to his sobriquet of Kingslayer without an effort on his part to contradict public judgment that’s worth noting. Yet, aside the matter of personal conscience vs public perception/duty to distinguish one from the other, what stands out is the marked opposition in outcome for both Kingsguard men: for Sandor, his silence is the beginning of the end for the Hound as he leaves his morally-challenging service, and it’s a choice he’s internalised into a matter of how he perceives himself instead of how others see him, compared to Jaime, whose silence is the beginning of the Kingslayer and a transfer from one morally-challenging service to another that doesn’t usher in much improvement. And this is when one ironic ripple effect of Jaime’s silence touches Sandor directly: by never revealing the existence of the caches of wildfire, those stayed hidden only for some of it to be discovered in present time to the advantage of Jaime’s family, when Tyrion and Cersei made use of the wildfire from Aerys’ days at the Battle of Blackwater; a wildfire that helped to keep Joffrey—whom the text compares to Aerys—on the throne; a wildfire that earned a pyromancer (Hallyne) a lordly title under the Lannisters as it had earned another pyromancer a Handship under Aerys; the same wildfire that caused the Hound to leave.

 

In the meeting between Tyrion and Tywin after their victory, it’s made very obvious by the head of House Lannister that they’ve chosen Gregor over Sandor as the useful “beast,” to the point of protecting him against reclamations from Dorne, for a second time now, disowning the promise of justice that Tyrion had made to the Dornish when in office, and dismissing Sandor as an expendable dog that can be substituted by any other dog that can hunt as good as the Hound, a fateful choice for his House short and long-term, because, as Milady of York explains:

Sandor was their shield (for the House, for Cersei) and Gregor their sword, but in this specific case Tywin chooses Gregor as a shield against the Dornish intentions to seek justice for past crimes committed; and because of Gregor being a “beast” Oberyn will be able to get the confession that’ll bring about the ruin of the Lannisters eventually. Sandor had been one to help rein in to the best of his abilities some of the excesses of the House, especially where Joffrey was involved, and from that angle, he functioned as the guardian dog that protects the master even from going completely over the cliff, and it’s revealing that in the very moment Tywin reacts so dismissively to his absence, he is writing letters that readers believe have to do with the Red Wedding, arguably the lions’ point of no return in terms of enormities.

As we shall see for the rest of the book and the fourth, it’s Cersei who will be the biggest loser from the Hound’s desertion and Tywin’s legacy of embracing all that the elder Clegane stood for and his misplaced trust in Littlefinger, who planted the Kettleblacks she replaced Sandor with, as Ragnorak explains through the metaphor of a fairy godparent’s role:

 

The fairy godfather offers protection in the absence of the actual father and "gifts" that the young heroine is supposed to internalize to be able to manifest her own protection one day. In the first chapter we saw how Cersei has failed to internalize those gifts. She values Sandor's fierceness only on a level that parallels his older brother. She fails to understand as Tywin does that these are two different beasts that serve different purposes. Cersei grasps neither the gifts from her actual father nor the gifts from her fairy godfather. Sandor offered the Lannisters a gift of loyalty akin to what we'll see much later in the Mountain Clans and "The Ned's girl" and they spurned it both while they had it and after it is gone.

 

But prior to Cersei, the brutal impact of the wave of consequences from this choice is going to be felt by her twin. The tune for Jaime’s fall in the hands of the wolves isn’t too different to the tune for Sandor’s desertion where reactions of the family are concerned: more aware of what they’ve lost with him, Tyrion and Cersei react with dismay, but Joffrey blames him for his fate, and Tywin vows to not allow the enemy to get at him through his son, whom he “replaces” with the Imp, and further endangers his life by going full on to fight the Starks with Gregor as his spearhead and planning the Red Wedding whilst Jaime is still a prisoner. When maimed, Jaime will say to Brienne that losing his hand is for kingslaying, for child-murdering and for the incest, but in reality it’s a direct result from his father’s awful decision to side with the Gregor choice, because it’s the same principle that made him pick the elder Clegane what made him bring the Bloody Mummers to Westeros, to be his savage “dogs” as they’re actually described just as Gregor is called “Lord Tywin’s mad dog.” Sandor and Jaime are thus united in being the recipients of the consequences of the ill choices in protégés made by the patriarch of the Lannisters. Choose the wrong beast as your pet, and your family pays the price; that seems to be the moral of the tale the author is insinuating.

 

 

One kiss, good knight

 

If his masters failed to comprehend his value when they still had him, it won’t be so for Sansa, who is aware of all she’s lost and misses his counsel and protection now that Sandor is no longer available, and unlike Cersei’s conformity with the Kettleblacks and Gregor as replacements, she doesn’t think herself better off with Dontos and Littlefinger, the aspiring substitutes in his place. In SANDOR II, Brashcandy notes the new turn that the Stark girl’s feelings towards the Hound take, as she realises how mistaken her impression about Loras’ feelings for her was, and from comparing the Hound to him, with results unfavourable to the latter based on looks, she comes to appreciate that the meaningful relationship in her life is the absent figure whose bloody cloak she’d kept. Then, as she goes over her recollections of their last encounter, the UnKiss makes its appearance after a careful build-up:

 

This is a radical introduction of a new detail to that night, and readers are aware that no such kiss took place between them. So, from whence did “the unkiss” emerge? Sansa certainly presents and appreciates it as a true memory, but how should we as readers categorise it? In considering what we learn in Sansa I pertaining to her missing the Hound, her realisation of the futility of her attraction to Loras, and her own direct comparison of the two men, the unkiss holds the attributes of a traditional fantasy. It is, in other words, Sansa’s unconscious desire becoming conscious, appropriately revealed to readers in a setting where other girls of her age are also sharing and indulging in their own fantasies.

 

Her comparison of Loras to Sandor is the first time Sansa ever thinks of any man in a sexual manner, and it inaugurates a tradition of making compare & replace mental assessments between the Hound and other men that cross her path that will continue well into the end of her arc to date. When she’s married to Tyrion, her unwanted husband is quickly pitted against Clegane during the wedding by her reluctance to the marriage cloak she initially refuses to kneel for and then the kiss that should seal their marriage, making it clear by her reaction that any feelings for him are totally absent. Just as her desire is also, as evidenced by her revulsion and pity, which again are asking to be contrasted with her reaction several chapters later when she re-enacts this scene in a dream, and replaces Tyrion with Sandor. This recurrent emphasis on the Hound could only reveal, as Brashcandy continues, “the development of significant romantic feelings on Sansa’s part for Sandor, which do not resemble the kind of giddy infatuation she displayed for Loras or the hopeful daydreams for Willas. Although her feelings are coming to the fore in his absence, they are based on deep, meaningful, and honest interactions between them.” In this context, the Hound’s desertion has one positive if not ideal outcome for the Starks like it doesn’t for his ex-masters.

 

No such equivalent to the UnKiss exists for Jaime/Brienne at this stage in their travel to draw a direct parallel, but there are some aspects that are comparable. Such as the songs of Florian and Jonquil, the title of one of which and its first verse is revealed by Jaime at Maidenpool, where the legend originated, and this same “Six Maids in a Pool” song is one of those Tom o’ Sevens was singing at the Peach inn when Sandor reappears, thus tying him back to his last scene in ACOK when he wanted this song, the one he will soon enough start to tell Arya her sister gave him before parting; an untruth he’ll confess to by the end of their adventure. Another comparison is to be found in the context in which the change in feelings happens: when Sansa thinks of the absent Hound prior to the imagined kiss, the first thing she remembers is that he saved her life at the bread riots, where the odds were all against him and he came out wounded (although we aren’t told the severity of his arm wound). Whilst saving her life isn’t the point when Sansa’s feelings towards the Hound start to change from the initial fear of him but dates from far back, for Brienne that Jaime protected her is indeed the point where her feelings veer towards respect for this man she’d been so hostile to. The bear pit might be a more spectacular rescue, more showy heroics, but Jaime’s intervention to save her from rape by the Bloody Mummers reads as worthier on the text as it’s selfless and the risk is more real. At Harrenhal, he has Steelshanks’ archers ready to feather the bear, which takes care of the risk factor, and he’d initially abandoned Brienne knowing her fate would be unpleasant before coming back with his conscience pricked by his past’s ghosts. Here, however, he’s unarmed, chained, and his interlocutors are all enemies, which makes it all the braver to intervene. And he does end up paying with his hand for that. Martin makes sure that when the girls’ romantic emotions are finally made explicit in their POVs, with Sansa fantasising with kisses and marriage beds in this book and Brienne having dreams of Jaime in the next, these feelings have been solidly grounded on these disgraced knights’ good deeds of which the women were main beneficiaries, and over shared tragedies. 

 

 

The mercy of wolves

 

As SANDOR III rolls in, another Stark girl is about to have her feelings towards the Hound refined by a trial by fire. When Arya re-enters the pages, there is our man also, present in her accustomed nightly prayer peopled almost exclusively by Lannisters—members of the family and vassals alike. The context of this reappearance is very significant, because it touches on the theme of mercy that’s a major narrative thread in both man and girl’s Riverlands arc, as Arya discovers the men dead and dying in the crow cages, punished for war crimes a Northerner shouldn’t have to commit, which provokes inner conflict for demonstrating that her “wolves good, lions bad” worldview isn’t as clear-cut as believed. In what’s the first association of a drink of water to the gift of mercy in her story, she advocates for ending those men’s suffering after they’ve drunk, unaware that she’ll later be required to repeat this gesture with an enemy. An enemy that’s caught soon afterwards and brought to justice by the same captors as hers in what she’s convinced is a divine answer to her prayers.

 

The ways of the Lord of Light are inscrutable, as are those of the Old Gods, and prayers can be answered in a manner the devout disagree with. When Sandor is brought to the cave to stand trial for crimes against the Riverlands population and nobility in the name of House Lannister, both deities of fire and ice are present: the former both symbolically in the fire imagery surrounding the Hound, and literally in the fire magic of Thoros that keeps Beric alive of sorts; and the latter also symbolically in the weirwood stump and roots that harken back to Bloodraven’s throne as well as Beric’s appearance that’s reminiscent of the same, and perhaps also literally if we recall the weirwood’s memory can be tapped into and activated by the greenseers and that this cave had formerly been an Old Gods place.

 

For the first time, Sandor is judged by the ghost of his past incarnated in the Brotherhood, a while before he has to confront that ghost again in the shape of Arya. The Brotherhood without Banners mimics Sandor’s own tale in that they are like he was, weak and abused and persecuted by the beasts of Tywin Lannister, and now have grown strong and are defending the abused and innocent, the same way Sandor grew up to become one of the best warriors to protect himself and can now protect someone weak and innocent. And they also mimic knighthood without the formality of possessing the rank, save for their leader, in that they protect the weak and the innocent as well as feed and shelter them, as per the mandates of the knightly oath,  but they are prone to the corruption of power and human moral weaknesses and they’ve become a tool to abuse power much like Sandor was the Lannister’s tool to abuse power.

 

Ragnorak argued that they differ from the Hound the most in that he hasn’t allowed his desire for revenge against Gregor to lead him to commit an unlawful deed, as they have succumbed to such a desire, because Gregor's actions are used by them to try and justify killing Sandor. In a trial that opposes the guilty by association and collective guilt mentality of the accusers to the defiance and irreverent counterarguments to their procedure and claims by the accused, Sandor and his brother aren’t differentiated one from another but lumped together when the endless list of crimes is recited, and even before the judgment has started, there’s a visual clue that the trial will be a dubious one, as DogLover observes, because a previous remark by Anguy reveals that:

 

The judgment is always a foregone conclusion, and appears to be so with the Hound, considering they had a noose draped around his neck as they took him to Beric for judgment.

 

But not a charge of all listed is admissible for Lord Beric to condemn Sandor to death by hanging, until Arya steps forward to call him a murderer and demand his head for the death of her friend Mycah. On this point, OldGrimletEye specifies that:

 

Sandor admits what he did to Mycah and then gives a rationalization for doing that act. Upon hearing Sandor's admission, Beric doesn't decide to proceed with an immediate execution. In fact, Beric seems unsure what to do. He confers with Thoros and they decide to give Sandor a "trial". In short, it seems that Sandor had pled a prima facie valid defense in Beric's view. If Sandor had not done so, then it seems that an immediate execution of him would have been warranted.

 

Obedience to orders is part and parcel of a soldier's existence. This of course is not to advocate "just following orders" as a complete defense to all acts committed by soldiers, and I do not think that such a defense is unconditional in Westeros, as Ned Stark, for instance, passes judgment upon Gregor Clegane for his crimes upon the people of the Riverlands. However, a soldier cannot be expected to break an order if it is not sufficiently apparent that the order violates a fairly clear societal normative standard. That Beric isn't sure what to do exactly with Sandor Clegane suggest that it isn't clear whether Sandor had violated any Westerosi normative standard.

 

Regarding Arya’s accusation, because the hard facts stay unchallenged as the Hound admits to have killed Mycah and that although he didn't see the butcher’s boy hit the crown prince, he heard it from Joffrey and that Sansa testified at a hearing judicially presided over by Robert confirming that account, Ragnorak points out that the reason for the trial to be carried out shift from a matter of legality to one of morality:

 

There isn't an actual legal issue to have a trial by combat over. The uncontested facts at Beric's disposal are that a peasant was accused of striking a royal and that royal's accusation was backed up by a highborn lady witness who is Sandor's accuser's sister.  The accusing Arya freely admits that her highborn sister bore witness to the attack. She only contests the veracity of her sister's testimony, which at best might be cause for Beric to put Sansa on trial but has no bearing on Sandor's culpability.

 

Trials by combat are supposed to allow gods to determine the truth of a legal matter when men cannot.  No such obfuscated legal truth exists here.

 

Essentially Beric is declaring, "You, Sandor Clegane, stand accused of immorally abiding by the law."

 

The trial is an emotional and moral one held by the Lord of Light over the morality of a perfectly legal killing. It is even presented by Beric as a trial for the gods to decide morality and not one of men, through the lawful power of a King aided by the gods, to decide truths for the rule of law.

 

Sandor wins the hard-fought duel with Dondarrion, despite his anger first at being expected to fight a fully-armed opponent whilst unarmoured himself and then at the unfair use of flame and his ever-present fear of fire. This, as Lady Gwyn commented, in the framework of divine judgment under which Beric placed this combat can only mean one thing:

 

(. . . ) in addition to meta-analytical discussions of his personal or legal culpability, from a literary point of view it seems clear by the end of this chapter that the gods have deemed him innocent. Arya thinks these gods are stupid, but it must be noted that one by one, all of the guilty parties on her list are meeting retribution, with or without her aid. Sandor is the only one who has faced the (literal) fire of judgment and come out on the other side.

 

And so Arya decides to run past this ruling and kill Sandor, but after managing to steal a dagger to carry out her unilateral sentence, she’s stopped by the sight of a burnt Sandor crying for help “like a baby,” and this momentary pang of pity serves to demonstrate to her that her black and white perception of him is up for recalibration. This is the first of several such instances where, given the opportunity to end his life, she will show hesitation in delivering the killing blow to the Hound, and that eventually will be the equivalent of absolution in the Northern conception of justice, according to which if after confession and looking the condemned in the eye there’s still doubts to execute him, that indicates the accused probably doesn’t deserve death. Still intent on hearing him confess to murdering Mycah, despite his open admission before, Arya hears surprise additional details in Sandor’s repetition of the confession, deeds for which he’d not been held responsible by anyone: the beatings of Sansa and the beheading of Eddard. Lady Gwyn explains he did that because:   

  

Although he did not personally perpetrate the latter two acts, he confesses to the three things that violate his sense of honor that in his capacity as a pseudo-knight for House Lannister he has been called upon to participate in: killing a child, and witnessing the beating of a child-woman and the killing an unarmed man who has been offered clemency. His failures to prevent these acts seem to weigh upon him, and cement his bitter disillusionment with knighthood and the lions he once served.

 

His desire, like in another future time he’ll face her condemnation again, is to goad her into putting an end to his suffering and exact on him the revenge she so craves. But a disarmed Arya cannot do it, and ends up wishing him to burn in hell.

 

Similarly to Arya, Brienne takes upon herself this same duty when she’s trying to bring Jaime to task for his shortcomings as a knight and as a Kingsguard, although at that point she doesn’t succeed as there’s no immediate admission of guilt on his part, and so no absolution either. It’s a more limited role for her, however, because forgiveness in any way, shape or form for the murder attempt on Bran isn’t really Brienne’s responsibility on the same level as championing Mycah does belong to Arya. But Catelyn can take it upon herself as the mother. In this context, Jaime’s flippant response stands out in stark contrast to the Hound’s confession, and whilst it can be argued that he was just posturing when he reacted with a lack of guilt and victim-blaming to Catelyn’s question in the dungeon, when ASOS gives us his point of view, the attitude is still there in his inner thoughts when Brienne as Catelyn’s surrogate challenges him over Bran again, as will be elaborated on ahead. The trial of Sandor had evidenced the outside distinction of legality and moral unjustifiability that separates his own deed from Jaime’s, and that the latter reacts the same way to every person who challenges him about Bran now uncovers an internal difference, as the opposed attitudes between these men driven to commit a crime against a child by the same woman, Cersei, and Jaime holding back from owning up responsibility during confession time underline that there’s a deeper distinction of a moral nature running throughout their respective travels that’s related to self-integrity. It’s also an issue of taking the raw honesty approach what is at the root of Sandor and the Brotherhood following two opposite paths once he’s released by them; he’d said at his trial that he and them were the same with the difference that he didn’t lie about what he was, and as posited above by Ragnorak, when they allow themselves be fuelled by the fire of vengeance, they start to stray and eventually fall from knightly grace all the while they’re still telling themselves it’s not happening, which leads to precisely their state when they’re revisited again from the epilogue of ASOS onwards to the rest of the fourth book and beyond. Sandor, on the other hand, will take up their knightly oath for himself and choose to protect Arya over vengeance on Gregor with no outward pretensions to doing it virtuously, and so continues his progress towards purpose to find a better life for himself.

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In the name of the Mother

 

In SANDOR IV, when he reappears to demand the devolution of the gold the Brotherhood took from him and is refused, he takes the girl off their hands in place of the yellow metal. The frame of reference this happens within is very significant due to the overarching theme of redemption through the context of knighthood that moves Sandor’s arc forward, because this will mean he once more gets to play a role like in a traditional knightly story without being one. The oath-taker here is real knight Dondarrion, who in an effort to calm Arya’s worries promises her on his honour as a knight that he’ll hand her over safely to Lady Catelyn in Riverrun. Connecting this to a similar oath to her elder sister by another dubious knight, Brashcandy says that:

 

These two men are strange ones to be swearing on their knighthood, as Dontos had recently been demoted to a court jester and Beric is literally a dead man walking, having been resurrected six times by Thoros. As we discussed concerning Sansa and Dontos during the Clash portion of the reread, the Florian wannabe is disingenuous about his motives and cannot guarantee Sansa true protection; rather, it is Sandor Clegane who offered her sincere security, even though he later bungles the rescue attempt during the Blackwater battle. It’s an important contrast that further defines the Hound as a protective figure, even in volatile relationships like the one he shares with Arya, and diffuses the threatening implication of the question: “Do you know what dogs do to wolves?”

 

Sandor confronts Beric after he’s vowed this, and their discussion over the knighting of Gendry again underlines how diverse their views on honour are as well as the inherent hypocrisy of the knighting precedes that his oath won’t be fulfilled, as Gendry doesn’t meet the criteria for acquiring a knighthood from whichever angle one looks at it. So when Beric tells Arya they won’t go to Riverrun because the Starks are on the move to the Twins and there’s impending danger, in her eyes it’s a breach of promise. Her knight has failed her, and she runs away to be caught by Sandor. This way, he practically takes over Beric’s vow and makes it his own without intending to, and Arya will come to hold him to the lightning lord’s promise to deliver her to her mother.

 

So both Sandor and Jaime are sent towards the Twins and the Red Keep respectively with the figure of Catelyn Stark as the starting point. Sandor had previously abandoned his job with the Mother’s Mercy song by Sansa on his behalf, and ended up encountering the mercy of wolves that Arya brings upon his head. Both Mother’s Mercy and Wolf’s Mercy represent two sides of the same purpose in his case, to go find a better way first with the aid of the Mother’s gentle push and then the Wolf’s hard shove.

 

Above, we’ve seen how on abducting Arya he burdened himself with Beric’s vow, but when we compare him to Jaime we could argue that he’s also carrying out the Kingslayer’s vow—or at least part of the vow, as he only has one daughter—to Catelyn to do everything so her girls are delivered back to her. It’s Catelyn’s maternal love that made her risk high treason to free Jaime, so that further solidifies the argument that both men are in the Riverlands largely as a result of the Mother’s Mercy, a meta-textual reading that evidences a thematic thread in common rather than being a hard-facts parallel. Interestingly, the theme of knightly oaths is also a theme in common in both men’s circumstances, because the wording of a portion of the oath Lady Stark got out of Jaime is similar to the one Beric gave Arya:

 

Swear on your honor as a knight, on your honor as a Lannister, on your honor as a Sworn Brother of the Kingsguard.”

 

The way both men relate to the Mother’s Mercy motif is of interest within this meta-analysis, for Jaime’s mercy isn’t based on any perceived worthiness of his own but instead is earned vicariously through Catelyn’s trust in his brother Tyrion. The Mother here thinks he has “shit for honour,” and so Jaime exteriorises the Mother’s Mercy as a matter of public perception of his behaviour and decides to honour his vow to Catelyn because he’s fed up with buckets of shit being kicked at him. As for Sandor, the Mother’s mercy was earned by the things he did right for Sansa and in spite of his shortcomings, like when he botched everything so badly during Blackwater, and he’s internalised it as a matter of how he perceives his own actions separate from external condemnation or even if nobody holds him accountable, which is why he confessed to stealing the Mother’s Mercy song, which Arya never believed he got willingly anyway, so he could’ve kept it to himself had not the lie bothered his conscience.

 

Catelyn had motherly faith that a Lannister would send her daughters safely back, but neither the Beric who’d sworn as a knight nor Tyrion that had promised in public and Jaime who’d taken an oath could honour the promise for this or that reason, so although the story isn’t over yet and surprises might occur in a future book, from Catelyn’s standpoint with what information she had up to the moment she died at the Red Wedding, everyone who pleaded on knightly honour did, in the end, break their vow whilst she was alive. Literary ironies of Martin; she died ignoring that a renegade Lannister with no vows and nothing owed to her did effectively bring one of the daughters inches close to her and would’ve handed her over but for the Freys.

 

 

The Tales of Ser Sandor & Squire Arya

 

The road trip towards The Twins that the Hound and Arya embark on in SANDOR V is shrouded in knight-errantry imagery and symbolism, which once more place him in the role of a knight against his conscious will that rejects such a role. The whole Riverlands experience is essentially him playing the knight questing for the ultimate goal in the career of a chevalier in traditional chivalric literature, as Milady reiterates:

 

… the now masterless Hound’s sublimated motivation lying under his more outward reasons, the fractious and ever-shifting relationship with his captive, his deeds and practical life lessons that go both ways, are staples of chivalric errantry that would suffice to qualify the adventures of the non-knight of the burnt countenance as belonging in this narrative type. But, most striking amongst all these elements is that the Hound did, in the end, factually succeeded in taking Arya to her family—that the Freys chose the moment of his victory for slaughter is another matter—and so for the first time symbolically fulfils the oath of a knight he’d not even made.

 

Although the basic hallmarks, like a lady-love, bandits, a fractious companion, duels, seeking a king, adventures with the peasantry, and ultimately success at the end of the quest  are present, it’s not a straight retelling but a subversion of the knight errant archetype, and ironies are found aplenty. The spotless honourability of the knight errant of legends would be one example, for whilst the Hound does generally avoid employing damaging methods if he can, he leans towards the pragmatic rather than the strictly honourable, and fights “down-dirty” to reach his destination with so little at hand and opposition behind and in front. Like when he tricks the cheat-minded ferryman by offering “knight’s honour” as assurance to be ferried across to the other bank of a dangerous river. And one new role we’d not have expected from the Hound is also adopted in order to reach his destination alive and in one piece, when he “plays the fool” by disguising himself as a peasant farmer to infiltrate the castle and meet the Starks with his grumbling charge in tow.

 

In this “little game” lasting for three chapters until it abruptly ends in the Red Wedding, a theme quite prominently interwoven into the pages is, as Ragnorak points out, the conflicting purposes that pull the Hound towards the South (revenge against Gregor) and towards the North (a desire for home). That he’s taking her to the North indicates he’s opted for the latter, for although he’s doing it officially for a ransom, the more he talks the more apparent it becomes that Arya’s monetary worth is enhanced by the prospect of her working as a figurative recommendation letter to obtain a position in the Northern forces and a new liege lord to serve, a purpose that long-term has higher value than an immediate necessity to replenish his purse with gold or seek his brother, and that would be more easily achieved through her than with only information and his skills as assets to offer.

 

To add to the contradictions gnawing at their respective armours of wary attitude towards each other until cracks appear, Sandor rather quickly evolves from purely a captor’s role to a protector’s role, just as Arya also evolves from captive to squire, when she starts . . .

 

 . . . doing work that is traditionally a squire’s. There are several assignments for them, but the three most important tasks a squire has to perform for a knight are to take care of his horse, take care of his armour, and assist him before, during and after combat. With that in mind, it now seems fitting that Arya was the one to reveal the name of the Hound’s courser and not another POV, for now she has to get acquainted with it as part of her tasks.

 

Despite the hostility floating in between them, they do fit instinctively into this faux knight-squire relationship dynamics, as each seems to understand what to do almost without a need to repeat stuff. The time when Arya does outright disobey Sandor’s orders is at the gates of the Twins, when he pleads for her to come with him and leave the place before more Freys come for them, and in her innocent despair she refuses to listen and he has to hit her with the back of an axe to get them both out quickly without a fuss. Her emotional state in such a bleak situation explains it all, for the next time they need to collaborate for their mutual safety, she intervenes on her own as his squire, in a fashion evocative of how Podrick would for Tyrion first and Brienne later.

 

This traumatic experience meant a subtle yet significant shift in their relationship, specifically evidenced in Arya’s attitude. Previous to this, she had solidly resented him and reacted hotly at stuff like being cast as Sandor’s child very explicitly, the second time he’s mistaken for the father of a Stark girl in the series, once more connecting him to the ruling family of the North as well as providing a contrasting point of view to Sansa’s evolution in attitude towards him. Following the shock of the slaughter, an new stage follows where Arya begins to separate the man from the monstrous persona worn by her travelling companion, and the manner in which this change is made obvious is very telling: she starts to use his first name, Sandor.

 

Their post-Red Wedding stage mirrors the post-mutilation stage for Jaime and Brienne, where the captives have sustained a life-shattering blow from which they’ll never emerge as the same people again, and it’s up to the former captors-turned-companions-of-misfortune to drag them back into life. Arya is profoundly depressed, so apathetic and dejected, thinking only of curling up to sleep forever; and Jaime is also depressed to the point of suicidal and seeking to be killed. Sandor and Brienne, also deeply shaken by the tragic events and in low spirits themselves, do nevertheless find a way to be supportive in a blunt yet effective manner: they don’t allow their charges to give up, one by physically forcing the girl to get up and move even if he has to pour cold water over her, and the other by telling the man it’s craven to lie down and let oneself die. Both Sandor and Brienne are alluding after a fashion and without spelling it out that Arya and Jaime still have family to live for; the Stark needs to let go of the dead mother and brother to focus on the living family to keep going, to admit it’s not craven to refuse taking unnecessary risks for a fool hope of finding them alive, and the Lannister has to remember he has family waiting for him to regain the will to live. Mercy also resurfaces in these circumstances, as it’s during this time when Arya learns the gift of mercy when the Hound puts a dying soldier out of his suffering with an efficient stab to the heart, a valuable lesson as much symbolically as for its practical uses, that she doesn’t fully grasp, adding yet more to the imagery of knight tutoring a squire. To this, there’s a way to look at Jaime’s provoking the Bloody Mummers into putting a sword through him as vaguely evoking an act of asking the gift of mercy to end his pain and being denied it, getting more abuse instead, with the caveat that his case wasn’t so hopeless as to merit mercy and his stated intention is to be killed fighting instead of staying so helpless. That could be another comparison between Sandor and Jaime, in that both sought mercy through taunting their respective interlocutors, and both being denied it by them; but the similarity is pretty superficial: there’s a confession and an absolution the Northern way for one and not even the consolation of a drink of water for the other, and both are eventually cured by men who couldn’t be more opposite embodiments of mercy: the Elder Brother with his rehabilitative kind philosophy of rebirth that buried the Hound, and Qyburn with his immoral science philosophy of creating undead beings that resurrected Gregor.

 

The ghost of his past, always impossible to disconnect from Gregor, also resurfaces as an obstacle to the Hound’s desire to settle down and find a place to call home in the small village he helps build the wall to defend, in SANDOR VI, a chapter that, as Brashcandy expounds, is riddled with the:

 

… theme of the conflicts and consequences of the past vs. the possibilities and potential that the future could hold for Sandor. As you noted in your analysis, we see that he can't escape his notorious role as the Lannister dog, and this is the deciding factor that makes the villagers turn him out from their community. We're treated to Arya's feelings about the village and she wastes no time in hating the quiet peacefulness there, yet a simple life of honest work and protecting others is clearly something that appealed to Sandor, and informs his suggestion to Arya that they stay there for a while to rest up and help out in case of raiding from the clansmen. Despite the "bloody" reputation that follows him, Sandor is interested in once again acting as a shield, and it's significant that in the village he's involved in building one for the villagers.

 

So, once more his past sends him back to the road. His new destination still points to the Starks, still to the choice of home over revenge, as initially he considers going to their kinsman by marriage Brynden Tully and later at the Crossroads inn he asks about ships at Saltpans, that’d indicate a route to follow leading to either the Vale/Lysa or the Wall/Jon. Ironically, he’ll stumble again into the omnipresent obstacle of his brother, when he stumbles into his men at an inn; the persistence of such a hindrance emphasises on the necessity to put a very final and brutal end to it, as it’s become too clear that it’s working like the proverbial millstone hung round Sandor’s neck, truncating every effort to start anew.

 

As mentioned already, by now Arya has started to refer to him by his name in addition to calling him “the Hound” or using his full name. The use of the first name here is a literary technique to convey that a change of heart or of opinion has taken place without spelling it out loud. If we recall the phrasing of Arya’s death prayer, she never included “Sandor Clegane” in it, not even once, not even by accident, and she cannot possibly ignore what his full name is because she does use it often, nor can we pretend she just chose to use his nickname given that she’s included Gregor with both his name and his nickname in her prayer, and Raff as well. It’s a curiously careful choice by the author to make Arya never use “Sandor.” Only the Tickler is included in such a fashion in her prayer, with just his nickname, and he’s a placeholder character that has no other name in the text, so it’s hardly a valid similarity. That this is an exteriorisation of her seeing him as a person whose good side she can now acknowledge however reluctantly is further reinforced by the timeline of this happening: it occurs after the Hound has saved her life in the Red Wedding. She starts to think of him as Sandor at the village in the Vale, where, funnily, she also takes to defending him by mentally berating the villagers for their cravenness in refusing to look him in the eye. And she’ll continue referring to him as Sandor in their last chapter together, up to the moment she leaves him alone to die. Considering that “Sandor” will survive, although we don’t know it for sure going just by ASOS, it’s also an authorial method of introducing an actual and palpable difference between the man he was in the past versus the man he will become, between his past and his future, in a way more obvious and identifiable than simply showing us Sandor Clegane has a good side and a bad side. The bad side needs to disappear, or at the very least be divorced from the original character, and what better way than to have the Hound die, and all his equipment and imagery be separated from the man who’ll re-emerge?

 

The example of Jaime and Brienne also supports this interpretation of Arya’s use of Sandor’s name as an indicator of a positive change in attitude towards him. From the start of their trip, Brienne refuses him the courtesy of calling him by his name, or at least by a formal “Ser Jaime” as is proper for his rank. She is outright offensive calling him Kingslayer instead, a nickname he loathes because he’s never “come by it fairly” and because it represents a past he’s never dealt with; and to rub salt on it, she adds the insult of “monster.” Jaime takes his revenge as well as covers up for his wounded pride by behaving as rudely in return and calling her “wench” despite seeing she’s a noblewoman and that’s not how you address the highborn ladies. Both hate being addressed as Wench and Kingslayer, sobriquets representative of their struggles with knighthood, and so their endless “my name is Brienne”/“my name is Jaime” exchanges are born, both vying for the same goal: get respect. A respect that only comes after they face a life-or-death situation like Sandor and Arya. Although he’d called her by her name in his second POV already, Brienne only starts to call him by his name after he’s been maimed in trying to distract the Bloody Mummers from raping her, using “Jaime” for the first time when she tries to help him to keep on living. That’s the moment when the wench starts to see him differently, when feelings of gratitude for what he’s done in her favour cause her to readjust her initial assessment of him. No such feelings of gratitude exist in Arya, not explicitly, but she definitely has also readjusted her opinion of Sandor after that long time together and two situations where they had to save each other, and so she’s no longer able to kill “Sandor,” whom she takes out of her list temporarily before putting him back again as “the Hound.” Yet that brief apparent lapse plus the distinction she’s made between Sandor and the Hound already has spoken volumes.

 

 

I will hear you say his name!

 

As we’ve now ascertained, Sandor’s entire ASOS arc is about facing his past deeds both literally in his actual trial by combat and personally through bonding with Arya Stark; and it’s on his arrival to the aptly-named Crossroads inn when his crossroads-like state of uncertainty is solved, leaving him with one single path to follow thenceforward. He’d already had to do battle against allies of his former overlords at the Red Wedding to protect a Stark and himself, but killing his brother’s soldiers, all direct vassals to the Lannisters, definitely severs with a sword blow any tenuous lifeline still attaching him to his old loyalties. Here, he not only symbolically but in effect does become the “lion-killing dog” of the founding story of House Clegane and of Arya’s wishful longings, in a sequence of scenes that are reminiscent of classic Western showdowns in film and literature, as Ragnorak argues in the corresponding analysis for SANDOR VII. After breaking the non-aggression tacit pact that seemed to exist between Gregor & Co. and Sandor by the will of their mutual liege lord, he can hardly expect to still have the remotest chance of making amends with them even if he wished, even less so when Gregor has chosen to go fight for Cersei, a service likely to be rewarded by the family, whereas he’s siding with a different lord’s daughter, a punishable decision for the Lannisters. He’d for a while already made up his mind to not go back anyhow, as it’s evident by his lack of interest in taking advantage of the much sought-after Arya Stark, an important political pawn, to cater to any of the factions at war that pays him best or makes the most attractive offer, like the Tyrells or the Boltons, and, above all, by his unchanging decision to keep seeking the Starks and their Tully relatives to deliver the girl to, long after her monetary value for him has faded.

 

This is also the time when, like on his reintroduction when he was caught drunk, he uncharacteristically allows wine to obfuscate his mind somewhat after he is told of the marriage of Sansa to Tyrion, which although not enough to knock him out, affects him just enough for Polliver and the Tickler to manage to wound him three times. Wounds that are treated rather inadequately, leading to a high fever that forces him to take refuge under a tree, so severely in pain that it’s apparent he may die from his wounds. And as he is convinced of his impending death, a full confession comes from deep inside; the confession that Arya Stark had been looking for all along and that she needed to execute him for murdering Mycah.

 

In ASOIAF, there’s a certain pattern in the manner those appointed as champions of the weak, the innocent and the helpless try to get the victimisers to admit to their wrongdoings. The two benchmark examples would be that of Davos Seaworth championing Edric Storm before Stannis:

 

“You are making me angry, Davos. I will hear no more of this bastard boy.”

His name is Edric Storm, sire.”

“I know his name. Was there ever a name so apt? It proclaims his bastardy, his high birth, and the turmoil he brings with him. Edric Storm. There, I have said it. Are you satisfied, my lord Hand?”

 

. . . and the most well-known example of all, that of Oberyn Martell championing Elia of Dorne before Gregor:

 

I am Oberyn Martell, a prince of Dorne,” he said, as the Mountain turned to keep him in sight. “Princess Elia was my sister.”

Who?” asked Gregor Clegane.

Oberyn’s long spear jabbed, but Ser Gregor took the point on his shield, shoved it aside, and bulled back at the prince, his great sword flashing. The Dornishman spun away untouched. The spear darted forward. Clegane slashed at it, Martell snapped it back, then thrust again. Metal screamed on metal as the spearhead slid off the Mountain’s chest, slicing through the surcoat and leaving a long bright scratch on the steel beneath. “Elia Martell, Princess of Dorne,” the Red Viper hissed. “You raped her. You murdered her. You killed her children.”

Ser Gregor grunted. He made a ponderous charge to hack at the Dornishman’s head. Prince Oberyn avoided him easily. “You raped her. You murdered her. You killed her children.”

“Did you come to talk or to fight?”

I came to hear you confess.”

 

. . .

 

You raped her. You murdered her. You killed her children.” Gregor tried to bull rush, but Oberyn skipped aside and circled round his back. “You raped her. You murdered her. You killed her children.”

Be quiet.” Ser Gregor seemed to be moving a little slower, and his greatsword no longer rose quite so high as it had when the contest began. “Shut your bloody mouth.”

You raped her,” the prince said, moving to the right.

Enough!” Ser Gregor took two long strides and brought his sword down at Oberyn’s head, but the Dornishman backstepped once more. “You murdered her,” he said.

SHUT UP!” Gregor charged headlong, right at the point of the spear, which slammed into his right breast then slid aside with a hideous steel shriek.

 

. . .

 

But the Red Viper of Dorne was back on his feet, his long spear in hand. “Elia,” he called at Ser Gregor. “You raped her. You murdered her. You killed her children. Now say her name.”

The Mountain whirled. Helm, shield, sword, surcoat; he was spattered with gore from head to heels. “You talk too much,” he grumbled. “You make my head hurt.”

I will hear you say it. She was Elia of Dorne.”

 

. . .

 

The point punched through mail and boiled leather. Gregor gave a choked grunt as the Dornishman twisted his spear and yanked it free. “Elia. Say it! Elia. Of Dorne!” He was circling, spear poised for another thrust. “Say it!

 

 

Now, what do these scenes have in common? The names. The use of first names is important for the champions of justice to exact a confession of guilt from the wrongdoers, who’re intent on refusing to use the victims’ first names. Stannis by referring to Edric as “this bastard boy,” to which Davos counters reminding him the boy is no nameless face but has a name, Edric Storm, and he’s a friend to his daughter. Oberyn by stating his name and rank to remind Gregor he’s not just “some dead man” without a name or a cause, and then shouting the name of Princess Elia in conjunction with Gregor’s crimes against her to get him to realise his victims were a woman and a child with a name and a family.

 

Why do this, though? Because it’s a countermeasure to the “a million deaths is a statistic” phenomenon we discussed here before by showing the face of that single death that will make it feel like a tragedy. It’s an established fact in human psychology studies that the degree of closeness or distance between the killer and the killed affects the ease or difficulty to kill and what emotional consequences will be like for the killer. The more distant the person is, the easier it’s to kill and no remorse is likely to arise, for you don’t see the faces, don’t hear the voices, don’t know the names. But if the person is close, if you can see them, listen to them, know their face, or hear their name, then it’ll be more difficult and guilt and trauma will be unavoidable. That’s the reason why traditionally men in the infantry/cavalry units in armies as well as men in positions where it’s a job requirement to shoot or kill at close quarters are more prone to PTSD and guilt than other units that kill at a distance, like machine-gunners, tankmen and pilot bombers. Even when it’s not done as part of the job, it’s still quite difficult to kill someone who’s close and vivid in front of you. There are techniques soldiers are taught to cope with this that won’t be touched here as they fall outside the thematic scope; suffice to note instead that, as a flexible rule, there are four defence mechanisms that have been historically used to make it easier to kill, or at least not to experience/soften the resulting guilt. All those are essentially just a series of justifications that’ll let the killer achieve the emotional distance necessary for the deed, that range from cultural (they’re not like us), to the social (our  side’s better than them and theirs is lesser), the moral (they’re bad or wrong), and the technical (this toy can blow them up from this far before they know what hit them). For the purposes of this analysis, the one that matters and that’s at play here is a mixed derivative of the cultural and social justifications, which is basically dehumanising the opponent by denying them their identity. The most extreme case of this is the concentration camps, where interns were denied their names and turned into numbers tattooed on their arms; just statistics. On a more individual level, a killer that denies his victim’s personhood, refuses to acknowledge their name, is also “dehumanising” the victim by turning him into just a statistic with no name to remember and be haunted by.

 

Hence Davos’ and Oberyn’s attempts to “humanise” the victims who are being denied their personhood by invoking their names to their victimisers’ faces. And that’s also why it’s so important for Sandor’s character growth and eventual redemption that he’s faced so relentlessly by Arya reciting the name of his victim until he confesses; and why it matters that Sandor, who in  the past had referred to the child as Arya’s “little pet,” comes to acknowledge Mycah’s personhood, thus acknowledging him as the victim of an unjust death that, albeit legal, is morally indefensible:

 

“You are a murderer!” she screamed. “You killed Mycah, don’t say you never did. You murdered him!”

The Hound stared at her with no flicker of recognition. “And who was this Mycah, boy?”

“I’m not a boy! But Mycah was. He was a butcher’s boy and you killed him. Jory said you cut him near in half, and he never even had a sword.”

. . .

“The girl has named you a murderer. Do you deny killing this butcher’s boy, Mycah?”

The big man shrugged. “I was Joffrey’s sworn shield. The butcher’s boy attacked a prince of the blood.”

“That’s a lie!” Arya squirmed in Harwin’s grip. “It was me. I hit Joffrey and threw Lion’s Paw in the river. Mycah just ran away, like I told him.”

. . .

You killed Mycah,” she said once more, daring him to deny it. “Tell them. You did. You did.”

I did.” His whole face twisted. “I rode him down and cut him in half, and laughed. I watched them beat your sister bloody too, watched them cut your father’s head off.”

. . .

Why don’t you just kill me like you did Mycah?” Arya had screamed at him. She was still defiant then, more angry than scared.

He answered by grabbing the front of her tunic and yanking her within an inch of his burned face. “The next time you say that name I’ll beat you so bad you’ll wish I killed you.

. . .

“No,” Arya spat back at him. “I’d like to kill you.”

“Because I hacked your little friend in two? I’ve killed a lot more than him, I promise you. You think that makes me some monster. Well, maybe it does, but I saved your sister’s life too. (…)”

 

And finally in the last confession of all sins, big and small, when he’s dying:

 

When Arya did not move, he said, “I killed your butcher’s boy. I cut him near in half, and laughed about it after.” (. . . ) “. . . avenge your little Michael . . . ”

Mycah.” Arya stepped away from him. “You don’t deserve the gift of mercy.”

 

As you see, Sandor starts to admit he has murdered Arya’s friend when she uses his name, a name he seemingly either didn’t know or forgot if he did know because he doesn’t  immediately link the name Mycah to the boy he killed for Cersei and has to ask who this person was. And once he connects name and face with the murder, his emotional distance is shattered and ceases to exist. Now his victim is someone he “knows” and as if it weren’t enough, he has to carry everywhere with him the living and breathing embodiment of the consequences of that murder, so if his conscience were to go dormant Arya will kick it awake by shouting the name at him. All his confessions of guilt in ASOS are prompted by “Mycah,” and when he tries to defend himself, he has to refer to him as “the butcher’s boy.” But it doesn’t work, because he’s already used the name Mycah at the trial, and by that act he confesses his guilt fully and without buts, and again he uses the name mispronounced (Arya hadn’t been rubbing it in his face for a while) when he believes he’s dying and there’s no sense in denying anything bad he’s ever done. Davos in the end was key in convincing Stannis out of any idea of burning Edric, and Oberyn got Gregor’s unrepentant admission at the cost of his life that damned the Lannisters with its ripple effects, thus proving how effective this humanising of victimhood truly is, regardless of repentance or unrepentance, because some will confess and atone or make amends, and others will simply carry on guilt-free. Arya was invaluable in this regard, because without her, Sandor would never attain his purpose of changing his life for the better, because without a confession and without regret there’s no atonement, and without atonement there’s no redemption to speak of.

 

In contrast to the Hound’s confession of guilt, there’s Jaime’s attitude to being confronted by his crippling of Bran, which is interesting as it unfolds in the same “say the name” manner as with Davos, Oberyn and Arya, but the outcome is different. That during ASOS he’s faced with this past crime three times is indicative that this parallel was written consciously, because it’s hard to imagine GRRM would casually have two travels so heavily inlaid with the theme of redemption in the same book and not draw some intentional parallels and counter-parallels. Before getting his own POV, this is how it went with Jaime’s admission to Catelyn in ACOK:

 

How did my son Bran come to fall?”

“I flung him from a window.”

The easy way he said it took her voice away for an instant. If I had a knife, I would kill him now, she thought, until she remembered the girls. Her throat constricted as she said, “You were a knight, sworn to defend the weak and innocent.”

“He was weak enough, but perhaps not so innocent. He was spying on us.”

“Bran would not spy.”

“Then blame those precious gods of yours, who brought the boy to our window and gave him a glimpse of something he was never meant to see.”

“Blame the gods?” she said, incredulous. “Yours was the hand that threw him. You meant for him to die.”

His chains chinked softly. “I seldom fling children from towers to improve their health. Yes, I meant for him to die.”

“And when he did not, you knew your danger was worse than ever, so you gave your cat’s-paw a bag of silver to make certain Bran would never wake.”

“Did I now?” Jaime lifted his cup and took a long swallow. “I won’t deny we talked of it, but you were with the boy day and night, your maester and Lord Eddard attended him frequently, and there were guards, even those damned direwolves… it would have required cutting my way through half of Winterfell. And why bother, when the boy seemed like to die of his own accord?”

 

Catelyn is invoking a truthful confession by using the name of her son, Bran. And Jaime refuses to use the name and calls him “the boy” instead, same as he refuses to feel regret. In all the chapter, he continues refusing to name Bran by referring to him as “your precious urchin” and “your boy.” And in addition to this dehumanising coping mechanism, he resorts to questioning Bran’s innocence by saying he was spying on them intentionally in his own home. For this lack of repentance is that Catelyn cannot absolve him, and kicks a bucket of shit at him instead.

 

In ASOS, it is Brienne’s turn to make him face this deed, albeit she doesn’t use Bran’s name, and the same unrepentance and refusal to acknowledge the name is present, internally:

 

 “A man who would violate his own sister, murder his king, and fling an innocent child to his death deserves no other name.”

Innocent? The wretched boy was spying on us.

 

Unfortunately, Brienne doesn’t possess the same unfailing sense of justice that Arya does, and never raises the subject again, thus failing in the role of talking conscience to Jaime for this crime specifically. And without anyone taking him to task for this, Jaime continues to circumvent using the name of his victim for the rest of the book, always alluding to him as “the boy” or “the Stark boy,” and avoid facing his guilt. Curiously, the only times he’s completely sincere is when he’s speaking to Cersei, his partner and co-perpetrator in this crime, as he remembers twice in ASOS:

 

If truth be told, Jaime had come to rue heaving Brandon Stark out that window. Cersei had given him no end of grief afterward, when the boy refused to die.

. . .

“I’m not ashamed of loving you, only of the things I’ve done to hide it. That boy at Winterfell . . . ”

“Did I tell you to throw him out the window? If you’d gone hunting as I begged you, nothing would have happened. But no, you had to have me, you could not wait until we returned to the city.”

 

The only time the name Brandon Stark appears in his POVs isn’t even in conversation or in his inner monologue but when recollecting what Cersei’s reaction was like. It’s a ping-pong blame game the twins are engaged in over Bran’s crippling, as both try to dodge responsibility in different manners: Cersei blames 100% of it on Jaime alone, accusing him of being such an unreflective hothead and never listening to her who only wanted the boy scared into silence, all the while overlooking the plain truth that nobody dragged her kicking and screaming to that tower to have adulterous sex with her brother at risk of discovery, so she’s guilty as well. And Jaime tries to make it a fifty-fifty responsibility in common with his part of the blame somewhat attenuated by his love for her, claiming the crimes committed to hide an original crime aren’t as shameful as the original crime itself, which makes as much sense as saying the illegal activity you are involved in doesn’t shame you as does the illegal activities you have to do in order for the police not to catch and make you pay for said illegal activity. Furthermore, right after it was confirmed Bran would live and in the same conversation the twins had in which they have their spat over Bran, Jaime again “convinces” Cersei to have sex with him, whilst still in Winterfell and still at risk of discovery as it’s Stark territory; which severely undermines his claim that he did it to protect Cersei, as he’s repeating the act that put them both in danger in the first place. In total, Jaime’s been talking about his guilty deed with three people (four if we count Ilyn Payne in AFFC), and none of them has to date truly made him face them in a bare-souled confession as an Arya would have.

 

So, when ASOS draws to an end, we have two Lannister men with a desire to change but that despite their similarities are actually in opposite camps when the book finishes. For Sandor, another stage in a very long road of progressive change concludes, every stage of which always propelled him up towards the next stage. When AGOT concluded, he’d started to break away from the Lannisters towards Sansa’s side, but was still their man and had accepted to be their non-knightly Kingsguard. When ACOK concluded, he’d left his masters and the city to look for a new and better life. And here, all that gradual breaking with his past fuelled by love and a desire for a home ends with his death. Putting aside what we know from the fourth book, it would appear that by placing such a definite-looking “The End” to the Hound’s arc, Martin is trying to justify an incoming more profound change in character or in arc through a literary metaphor akin to the biblical metaphor that describes a major transformation occurring in a person as a result of a positive influence as the “death of the old self.”

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A very thought inspiring summary, Milady.

I especially enjoyed the last section on names and their use in confronting the guilty. Identity themes run deep in this series and we have names for all of our chapter titles with the recent addition in the last two books of more thematic identifiers that are akin to nicknames. It occurs to me that names play an interesting role internally for at least two of our characters whose arcs are being presented in a redemptive style-- Jaime and Theon.

One of the key points in Jaime's tale is his reading of the White Book as he ponders his past and decides that he can write his own future. He engages in this process largely through the use of nicknames.

That boy had wanted to be Ser Arthur Dayne, but someplace along the way he had become the Smiling Knight instead.

Later when talking with Loras who he has come to see as resembling his younger self he again turns to nickname "Kingmaker" to make his point.

“He can’t have been very good.”
“Good enough. He died, but his king lived. A lot of brave men have worn the white cloak. Most have been forgotten.”
“Most deserve to be forgotten. The heroes will always be remembered. The best.”
“The best and the worst.” So one of us is like to live in song. “And a few who were a bit of both. Like him.” He tapped the page he had been reading.
“Who?” Ser Loras craned his head around to see. “Ten black pellets on a scarlet field. I do not know those arms.”
“They belonged to Criston Cole, who served the first Viserys and the second Aegon.” Jaime closed the White Book. “They called him Kingmaker.”

Theon has a much more explicit and far more consuming battle of his own with the name as Reek and he shares his lesson from this struggle with his sister Asha, “Theon,” he repeated. “My name is Theon. You have to know your name.”

Both of these men entertain fantasies of the nicknames they'll bear in the glory that they'll win, but all their musings of glory are tied to external perceptions and not born of the sense of self (though once Theon endures the Reek transformation his struggle is almost entirely about the self.)

No Wodes appeared, nor any of their smallfolk, though some outlaws had taken shelter in the root cellar beneath the second brother’s keep. One of them wore the ruins of a crimson cloak, but Jaime hanged him with the rest. It felt good. This was justice. Make a habit of it, Lannister, and one day men might call you Goldenhand after all. Goldenhand the Just.

It is curious that the measure of their respective needs for redemption is essentially the difference between their fantasy names and their earned nicknames-- Kingslayer and Turncloak. They also each earned these names in a similar mix of the pursuit of glory combined with a desire for affection and approval from family that led them into circumstances that ran counter to their inner sense of morality resulting in an emotional outlash against those circumstances. Jaime sought the glory of being the youngest of the Kingsguard and affection from Cersei. Theon sought the glory of being a king and the approval of his father. Both took actions and inactions that were offensive to their inner sense of morality and then exacerbated that moral conflict with an emotional lashing out that earned them their respective nicknames-- killing Aerys and sacking Winterfell.

In contrast we have our most honorable and moral candidate for the series, Ned Stark, who is essentially without a nickname. When one is needed the Mountain Clans simply call him, "The Ned." Jon Snow gets the mocking nickname "Lord Snow" that coincidentally becomes his official title and identity. Both of these men make morally conflicted decisions but they seem to be in line with Aemon's advice about making the decision you can live with. Ned is haunted by the lies he tells for love, but those lies were the imperfect choice he could live with. He is plagued with the lack of honesty to Cat, but is never remotely concerned with his external reputation for supposedly having fathered a bastard. He is perfectly content with being the "hated and misunderstood" raven. Much the same is true for Jon Snow.

Circling back to Sandor, he seems to be a mix. We can't know for sure because we lack his inner monologue, but he seems perfectly contented with being called The Hound and Dog as he explains plainly to Sansa. The killing of Mycah is closer to the type of conflict we see in Jaime and Theon. We see him disdain the Tourney of Gnats for lack of competition and every one of those contenders was a better warrior than Mycah. While technically his task is defending the royal person from attack it is hardly a real threat and far more Gregor's role of the sword than the shield that he has chosen to embody and it is this out of character act that he is called to account for by Arya.

I find it curious that his Hound identity is stripped, both through the stealing of his helm and through the upcoming declaration of The Hound's death by the Elder Brother, given the role that nicknames play for Theon and Jaime with regard to morality and identity. GRRM could chose to strip that identity completely (which seems to be the course at this point) or choose to reform or reshape that identity. If a Jaime had killed the tyrant Joffrey the Kingslayer name could take on a whole new meaning. If under different circumstances Theon had helped the North retake Moat Cailin through similar treachery, even Turncloak could also be redefined in spirit. Apple Martini has a thread about how The Queen of Thorns was likely once an insult hurled at Olenna for her lost royal marriage that she has redefined and made her own over time. The choice to strip the defining nickname of The Hound from Sandor may point to a far more significant transformation when he emerges from the Quiet Isle-- or perhaps reclaiming it may be his redefining task upon leaving.

The nexus between nicknames and morality/redemption is not universal so it may not be such a significant point in Sandor's arc, but GRRM does use the humanizing aspects of names with accusers as you point out, in character's inner thoughts as we see with Arya's use of Sandor, and in most POV characters' identity journey's so I doubt it is meaningless.

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