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The Will to Change: Rereading Sandor II


Milady of York

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11 hours ago, Ragnorak said:

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.

Definitely not meaningless. Aside the two main uses of Sandor's name mentioned, there's a third use of his name not discussed yet and which we can elaborate on later by the end of AFFC, that further demonstrates Martin is employing naming/forms of addressing literary techniques that classic writers used to know and make use of more frequently and better.

 

You brought up the Mountain clans refer to their former lord as "The Ned," which is a very curious way of address. GRRM is going by the example of the Scottish clans for this, whose heads of clan formally bear the definite article "the" before their surnames and/or territorial titles, and not just casually because it's a duly recognised heraldry practice. Thus, if an English noble would have a sir or a lord before a name when formally addressed, they have The McDonald, The Campbell, The Douglas, The Buchanan . . .  There's even a king, Robert the Bruce, who kept it even after he became royalty. Little sassenach that I am, at first my Norman-centric thinking led me to mispronounce it as "Robert de Bruce" where it stands for "of Bruce," until they told me it's supposed to be as in "Le Bruce." And the custom is supposed to allude to the fact that you represent a clan, a people, you're "the" Bruce that represents and leads other Bruces. Within this frame of reference, we'd expect that Eddard would be called "The Stark" instead, and whilst in the books "The Stark in Winterfell" is used in relation to the ruling lord of the North, that the mountain folks opted for a very personal and specific "The Ned," using what'd be an affectionate nickname admissible only for family and friends instead of Eddard or Stark is, I believe, another way to convey that these people are being loyal to the man for the man himself as much as to the House.

 

Sandor is very particular about his name, like probably no other character is. On one hand, he doesn't allow anyone to call him ser and, on the other hand, doesn't get offended if he's called dog. Sansa had a point when asking him why he allowed it, because addressing a nobleman like that is fair grounds to get your nose bloodied for you. Nobles in medieval times were fastidious about their dignity and the style of address was way more formal and dignified than it is in Westeros, with a long list of how to call and not to call anyone according to rank and position, all of which GRRM has simplified. And here's where Sandor strays from the norm: he never cares when he's called by his name with zero formality; the people who call him "Sandor" in-story aren't his friends nor related to him, so they'd not theoretically be entitled to first-name basis treatment. In Britain, it used to be very poor manners to address someone by their first name if you're not close to them in some manner; that's why in some of the classic novels of the 1700s and 1800s the characters don't take it well when called by their names so informally; to call someone by their surname was what passed for good etiquette.

 

It's Sandor's fault for barking at everyone that calls him ser, but that'd not have to mean they have his permission to start calling him plain Sandor instead. And yet, that's what happens, and he accepts the informality with no protest. He's rather quite liberal about how each chooses to address him, too liberal for a nobleman. So long as it's not ser, they can call him Sandor, dog, Hound, Clegane, and one would think it's all the same to him judging from his reaction, because he never demands to be addressed in any specific manner, doesn't dictate to people what to call him, only what not to call him. The explanation for this liberality and nonchalant acceptance so uncharacteristic for his social class, besides what you noted about internal perception of oneself vs the outside, would be his declared loathing for the ribbons of knighthood, the frippery and artifice of the nobility. That's given him a funny veneer of irreverence also, because of how he proceeds with everyone at court: just to name some examples, he addresses Joffrey in the proper protocolary manner as "Your Grace," and next he calls him Joffrey or Joff like he's just one of the family; he calls his boss "the queen" formally, and next she's plain old sweet Cersei; Ned he calls "Hand" without a "the" or "my lord," and next he's "Lord Eddard Stark of Winterfell," and Sansa he's called everything: girl, little bird, Lady Sansa. It's interesting that the Lannisters give him ample leeway to do this, to the point that it could be said they indulge him, although Joff is mostly because he's too dim to notice he's being mocked.

 

 

 

 

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Redemption through the journey of a knighthood archetype is a particularly significant point for Sandor's tale and one of two puzzle pieces within the overall series. Sandor is a secondary character and despite having been provided an arc by the author, his story is more subtle by the very nature of the POV structure and from a literary standpoint serves the purpose for being a background measuring stick or commentary for other redemptive arcs and the institution of knighthood in general.

Stannis as a secondary character serves a similar purpose in terms of ruling. For the most part, Stannis is the rightful heir to the Iron Throne. Not because I have a 90 page legal treatise to prove it, but simply because virtually all of our in story characters believe that he is. Everyone in the story (except Dany, Varys, and Doran) embraces the Baratheon Dynasty as the rightful legal framework and either knows or comes to know that Stannis is truly the lawful heir of that dynasty.

At times various historical precedents of inheritance are brought up or the right of conquest, but no one is actually looking at those in terms of a legal precedent to adjudicate the issue of the throne within the confines of the rule of law. They are looking to shroud their self serving agendas in the rule of law indifferent to its demands. Any king who wishes to sit the throne as the "lawful king" needs a lawful pretext. Tywin acknowledges Balon's right of conquest to Mace while he is secretly planning to violate guest right to kill Robb Stark because he refuses to acknowledge Robb's right of conquest. In neither case does he remotely care what the law demands and his indifference to the law is shared by virtually all other contenders.

Stannis serves as a similar measuring stick for all of our Iron Throne contenders as Sandor does for knights and redemption. It is no coincidence that his defining characteristic is a near blind adherence to the rule of law. Dany is a curious outlier who believes she has a lawful claim to the throne and she also parallels Stannis in ways no other contenders do. With the help of Davos, Stannis comes to realize that a king protects his people or he is no king at all and Dany is the only other monarch in contention to embrace this fact. Dany's tale actually follows the very path of the creation of kingdoms. She starts as conqueror and then transitions into ruling that which was conquered. Hers is the origin tale of the thousands of petty kingdoms of Westeros that grew into seven and then into one.

Astapor and its aftermath is the turning point for Dany. She left "wise men" in charge of that city but they failed. While there are many reasons for that failure all of them fall under the umbrella of the use of force. Governments hold a monopoly on the lawful use of force and Dany took her army with her. The wise man had no ability to enforce their wisdom whether or not it would have been wise in the end.

In Westeros, knights (or their un-anointed Northern counterparts) are the government's monopoly on the use of force making the knightly code essentially the rule of law. The alternative to the rule of law is "might makes right" also known as the Gregor Clegane school of governance. That naïve belief in noble knightly stories is also a belief in the rule of law. Power resides where men believe it resides and at the end of this tale that will metaphorically either be with Sandor or Gregor Clegane. That final determination will in no small part be decided by the eventual winners and losers in the Game of Thrones.

While we are given plenty of compare and contrast material with our various POVs, the major secondary characters also serve as a baseline for the POV perspectives. The three most significant secondary characters seem to be Sandor, Stannis and Doran and all of them have a very distinct tie to major thematic issues of morality, justice and the law. Each has also suffered an injustice of some sort that motivates him through the series and all three serve to provide baselines for comparing our various POV characters. Of the three Sandor stands out in many ways. He has more time on the page, he has been there since the beginning unlike the others, but most importantly his involvement is almost purely personal. Doran and Stannis have their personal stories tied up in the Game of Thrones while Sandor's is purely about the personal level. He may have indirect political consequences to his acts but they are all personal acts not political ones and from an author whose paramount tale is the human heart in conflict with itself this seems to make Sandor the one to pay the closest attention to.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'll come back to your points later; now I just wanted to revisit a line I'd not thought about much before that's in Tyrion's first ASOS chapter, when he's informed of Sandor's absence:

Quote

“Who else was lost?”

“The Hound,” said Bronn. “Not dead, only gone. The gold cloaks say he turned craven and you led a sortie in his place.”

It seems a fairly innocuous line with no other purpose than to deliver a good, suspicion-free bit of information, yes?

 

So, why I'm bringing this up? That line acquires another layer of meaning when taken whole-picture style with AFFC. For a start, readers already know Sandor is gone from the city, Sansa had told us that already in ACOK, so it's not for the benefit of informing the reader about the Hound's whereabouts that the line is there. For Tyrion's benefit, then? Sure, sounds like it . . . until you note the phrasing.

 

"Not dead, only gone." That's some Jedi mind-tricking level of careful wording if I've ever seen one, on par with the Elder Brother's "he is at rest" obtuse reply to whether Sandor was really dead, tot, mort, muerto. By itself, it doesn't have any other value than as a simple answer, but together with the Elder Brother's words, these would show a reluctance to straight-up state that Sandor Clegane is dead on the part of GRRM, probably because at that stage he already knew he'd have to put him out of commission for a while but not literally kill him. He has a way of making the confirmation of someone's "demise" be vague enough, in the sense that he leaves plenty of room to speculate about a probable survival, when he's planning to bring that character back, and that accounts for the verbal gymnastics he's made Bronn and the Elder Brother engage in by telling technical truths that'd make Varys proud.  And by their technical truth quality, both lines lend themselves to be "completed" with the on-page information that comes alongside; one can practically hear the continuation: "Not dead, only gone" (. . . to the Starks), "He is at rest" (. . . here).

 

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AFFC-ADWD SANDOR I

 

Dead and at rest

 

 

  • Brienne I (Ch. 4)

  • Brienne III (Ch. 14)                                       

  • Brienne VI (Ch. 31)                                       

  • Brienne VII (Ch. 37)

  • Brienne VIII (Ch. 42)

  • Davos II (Ch. 15, ADWD)                         

     

     

    Two Knights in a Mirror

     

    On a first read of A Song of Ice and Fire, it would seem that Sandor Clegane is as left behind by the tale as he was by Arya under the tree, left out of the story as he was out of her prayer. On a closer inspection, we can deduce that he made it to the Quiet Isle, but both his absence and the journey that leads us to his anonymous cameo are important parts of his arc. With Sandor’s absence Martin is deliberately teasing readers with his death. While that is partly and quite deliberately for dramatic effect, it is also a literary technique that allows him to substantially evolve the character in that absence without having to craft it gradually on the page. Without a sixth book to read, our task can only be to speculate how.

     

    The missing part of Sandor’s tale is the journey to the Quiet Isle, but we have another tale in Brienne that is also a journey to the Quiet Isle that we do see. A close reading of Brienne’s chapters brings up a number of parallels, references, and contrasting material that makes it a bit of a vicarious journey for Sandor’s, at least from a literary point of view. The primary commentary seems to be one on the notion of the “true knight” and honor, and one that meshes well with the thematic content in the rest of the series.

     

    The author makes it quite clear that Brienne is being compared to the Hound. Some of the comparisons are subtler, but that parallels are being drawn is quite explicit as we see in Jaime’s first POV:

     

    “My name is Brienne,” she repeated, dogged as a hound.

    She’s the Hound with teats, he thought.

     

    And Martin even goes so far as to give Brienne Sandor’s signature line, “I am no Ser.”, when she drops her horse off in a stable. We are being given an open invitation to explore the similarities and differences in these characters’ stories. One easily recognizable aspect is the Beauty and the Beast motif and its inversions. Jaime and Brienne is one such treatment and Sandor and Sansa is another, with Sansa having Beauty and the Beast themes with Joffrey and Tyrion as well. But Beauty and the Beast is a relationship story and we’re more focused on the individual’s arc in a reread. Relationships color the individual, but they are not the core theme. For Sandor that theme is redemption and it is told through the out of focus lens of the Knight Errant, and this is our main focus in looking at the Brienne parallels as well.

     

     

    Foundations in Metaphors:

    Ravens, Doves and One Man’s (or woman’s) Honor

     

    Honor, conflicting oaths, incompatible loyalties, love vs. duty, mercy, justice and judgment have been with us from the opening of the series, and explored from many angles through every POV and many secondary characters and in-story background tales. It is a thought-provoking maze made far harder to navigate by the fog of sympathy, but the author does provide us with a compass to help navigate the way.

     

    The central morality metaphor of the series is Aemon’s ravens and doves speech to Jon.

     

    “A craven can be as brave as any man, when there is nothing to fear. And we all do our duty, when there is no cost to it. How easy it seems then, to walk the path of honor. Yet soon or late in every man’s life comes a day when it is not easy, a day when he must choose.”

     

    Choice is the central theme of Aemon’s speech and Jon is currently facing the choice to stay or go. That idea of choice is represented metaphorically in the ravens and doves and spelled out by Aemon as love vs. duty and love vs. honor specific to family, conflicting loyalties, and romance. Importantly, the wise and sagely figure has no specific counsel for Jon’s actual dilemma of staying or going. He simply advises to make a choice and counsels that the consequences last all our days. The archetypal figure of wisdom holds no magic answer for the merits of love vs. honor, only to cease ambivalence, choose and be prepared for the consequences. Choice is also both the ultimatum delivered to Brienne by Lady Stoneheart and the hidden answer to the mystery of Sandor’s post-Quiet Isle fate.

     

    In the explanation of the doves and ravens metaphor given by Aemon, one key aspect is public perception vs. pragmatics of survival and the ability to accomplish the ultimate goal.

     

    “Doves and pigeons can also be trained to carry messages,” the maester went on, “though the raven is a stronger flyer, larger, bolder, far more clever, better able to defend itself against hawks... yet ravens are black, and they eat the dead, so some godly men abhor them. Baelor the Blessed tried to replace all the ravens with doves, did you know?”

    “The crow is the raven’s poor cousin. They are both beggars in black, hated and misunderstood.”

    The Night’s Watch prefers ravens.

     

    The ultimate purpose for these birds is to deliver messages, and what matters is their ability to accomplish their primary task and not whether or not “some godly men abhor them.” It is better to be hated and misunderstood and succeed in delivering the message than to be publicly perceived as honorable and yet fail in that core mission. So the right and wrong nature of love vs. honor really depends upon the core mission. In fact, choosing love over honor or vice versa makes that choice the core mission and the true betrayals are in choosing incorrectly.

     

    love is the bane of honor, the death of duty

    the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy

     

    The glory or the tragedy comes with the choice and the bane of honor and the death of duty are not always bad things. Davos and his choice to save Edric Storm was the death of duty and even a man with the revered honor of Barristan the Bold wonders if his honor and duty would have been better served with a seasoning of bane and death. These choices of love, duty and honor are all prominently at play in the choices facing both Sandor and Brienne, and Sandor is one of our most blatant examples of choosing the death of duty for love as he turns his back on the Lannisters and his Kingsguard oath.

     

    The consistent image in the background is Jon serving up the feast for crows with blood on his hands up to his wrists. There will always be consequences. Few choices are black and white and even those that are come with bloodstains. Perhaps the only consistent theme in Martin’s series-long love vs. honor exploration is that it is never the morally correct choice to choose one’s own honor over anything else. It is from this angle that it seems best to approach the notion of heroes and “true knighthood.”

     

    Inherent in the raven and dove metaphor is the black and white nature of good guys and bad guys down to the colors of the birds and the cowboy hats. The classic tale of a hero is much like the songs children admire so much in ASOIAF. The heroes are pure and white, the villains are vile and black. Our storybook Knight Errant never soils his honor whether he’s wearing a great helm or a cowboy hat, and this is the primary divergence Martin takes in his heroic acts. The heroes and the heroic acts in ASOIAF involve choosing something over one’s own personal honor.

     

    Davos with Edric Storm, Ned with claiming Jon as his bastard, Ned with falsely confessing to save Sansa, even the dramatic heroic appeal of Manderly’s “the North Remembers” is rooted in his self-deprecating act as a lickspittle and embracing every dishonorable aspect of his mocked obese stereotype. For Sandor, these imperfect choices have been as ever-present as his burned face, but with Brienne they are absent until her Lady Stoneheart sentencing. The nature of this type of choice is most clearly explained in Jon.

     

    “Our honor means no more than our lives, so long as the realm is safe. Are you a man of the Night’s Watch?”

     

    The core purpose of the Night’s Watch is to protect the realm. What does Jon’s personal honor mean so long as the core purpose is fulfilled? More importantly, what does Jon’s personal honor mean if that personal honor is purchased at the cost of failing in his core mission? Jon returns to the Night’s Watch bearing the hated and misunderstood burden of choosing the raven’s path over the dove’s. This lesson comes up again with his sending Val after Tormund. He deliberately breaks his sworn word to Stannis, knowing that it not only stains his honor but may well mean his life—even if Val succeeds.

     

    “Do I have your word that you will keep our princess closely?” the king had said, and Jon had promised that he would. Val is no princess, though. I told him that half a hundred times. It was a feeble sort of evasion, a sad rag wrapped around his wounded word.

     

    I am the sword that guards the realm of men, Jon reminded himself, and in the end, that must be worth more than one man’s honor.

     

    The classic storybook hero is the dove who never has a wounded word. The path of the hero’s personal honor and the path of morality are indistinguishable. There is never a dilemma over the hero’s honor vs. the right thing, never a Catch-22 scenario where the hero will emerge with blood on his hands no matter the choice. Sandor Clegane is clearly established as the “true knight” to answer Sansa’s prayer in the godswood as far back as the Serpentine Steps in Clash of Kings, and he is clearly from the raven school of heroes. He is a knight for the storybooks, but not a knight out of the storybooks. Brienne is a Knight Errant on the dove’s path right out of the storybooks. The parallels between her and Sandor run deep and their paths intersect and overlap geographically and thematically. GRRM is clearly contrasting the nature of their heroic journeys, and analyzing them more closely reveals much regarding Sandor Clegane and Martin’s treatment of heroes.

     

    Brienne’s journey starts with reversing the trail she took with Jaime and ends with reversing the steps of the Hound. In between, she has her fight with Shagwell that is nearly a direct parallel to Arya and Sandor’s fight in the Crossroads Inn. Sandor starts with his trial by the BwB, makes his way to the Crossroads Inn and ends up on the Quiet Isle. Brienne starts with seeing Sandor at the Quiet Isle, makes her way to the Crossroads Inn, and is then taken to the BwB and put on trial. Each starts where the other ends. They are opposite journeys, and that serves to highlight the contrasting elements more so than the similarities.

     

    Brienne is still completely innocent, naïve, and idealistic at the start of her journey from King’s Landing. These aspects are so prevalent that her initial POVs might read like a parody were it not for her traumatic recollections from her earlier journey along this same road. It gives the opening of her quest a certain fairytale quality. Brienne starts out by asking everyone, literally everyone, whether or not they’ve seen her highborn sister of three-and-ten with blue eyes and auburn hair.

     

    As Brienne mounted up again, she glimpsed a skinny boy atop a piebald horse at the far end of the village. I have not talked with that one, she thought

     

    The irony is that this is Podrick Payne, who will be stalking her the whole way and is on a not dissimilar quest of his own, but it also shows that Brienne is simply asking every single person she meets because they happen to currently be on the shortest road to Duskendale with absolutely no discriminating factors whatsoever.

     

    Initially, this creates that fairytale feel of the young naïve quester asking all the simple village folk like the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker if they’ve seen the lost magic swan. It is such a simplistic form of interrogation that she may as well be asking all the animals or the moon and the sky and the stars for the lost magical MacGuffin. At first, this is a bit of a nod to the classic white hat-wearing Knight Errant archetype. This feel continues for quite a while and is further fostered by the characters of the two comical hedge knights she meets on the road, who are so colorfully full of similar fantastical clichéd notions and exaggerated storybook courtesies, but it is also undermined from the outset by answers like “The younger wanted to know if the girl had that auburn hair between her legs as well.” The gallantry of the feel of the fairytale persists for some time, but the realism demonstrating folly combined with Brienne’s own memories of the horrors of this road is there in equal measure.

     

    Brienne’s POV lends its own sympathy to the storybook aspect, but the actual content on the page favors the harsher reality. Her two noble in spirit hedge knight companions are soon contrasted with the Mad Mouse, who is a far more cunning, pragmatic and more importantly capable character. His pragmatism and implied skill and mercenary attitude are contrasted with the parodied hedge knights’ over-the-top courtesies and Ser Creighton’s absurd battle with the monstrous red chicken shield. Most importantly, it is this Mad Mouse, who also admits that he’s questing for Sansa Stark, that actually finds Sansa Stark in the chapter immediately preceding Brienne’s trial before Lady Stoneheart.

     

    This effectiveness of pragmatism over storybook gallantry continues with Randyll Tarly and Maidenpool. Brienne is repeatedly shocked by the degree of rebuilding that has taken place and the contrast to the chaos and desolation that ruled on her previous trip through this land.

     

    When last she had seen Maidenpool, the town had been a desolation, a grim place of empty streets and burned homes. Now the streets were full of pigs and children, and most of the burned buildings had been pulled down. Vegetables had been planted in the lots where some once stood; merchant’s tents and knight’s pavilions took the place of others. Brienne saw new houses going up, a stone inn rising where a wooden inn had burned, a new slate roof on the town sept. The cool autumn air rang to the sounds of saw and hammer. Men carried timber through the streets, and quarrymen drove their wagons down muddy lanes. Many wore the striding huntsman on their breasts. “The soldiers are rebuilding the town,” she said, surprised.

     

    Randyll Tarly is an oft hated if not actually misunderstood man. Readers are more than predisposed to dislike him for his treatment of Sam, and that backstory makes it perfectly clear that he is no gallant storybook knight. In fact, Randyll Tarly is best described as the quintessential dog of war. He is the soldier unleashed on the uncivilized enemies who does what is needed to allow smallfolk to keep their fanciful delusions of storybook knights. Yet this is the man rebuilding and restoring the civilized society of Westeros and not the inept storybook hedge knights Brienne met on the road.

     

    Brienne’s near scuffle with the guards at the gate was not as close of a thing as it may have seemed. Hyle Hunt is Tarly’s and he had command of the gate likely for exactly the type of encounter Brienne had. The others were clearly Lord Mooton’s, and they were hours away from learning how close they came to castration or far, far worse. Brienne is immediately taken to see Tarly, who is dispensing justice, and one of those men on trial was Lord Mooton’s who had been cheating a sailor at dice and that sailor had stabbed him through the hand.

     

    “For theft, I will take a finger. Lie to me and I will hang you. Shall I ask to see these dice?”

    “The dice?” The archer looked to Mooton, but his lordship was gazing at the fishing boats.

    Tarly had heard enough. “Take his little finger. He can choose which hand. A nail through the palm for the other.”

     

    Randyll Tarly is explicitly addressing the misbehaviors and abuses in Lord Mooton’s men. The sailor stabbed Mooton’s archer in the hand, and in addition to the finger for stealing, Tarly orders a nail through the hand which mimics the actual act of the sailor stabbing the guard. The look to Mooton clearly shows that this lord used to condone this behavior and Tarly is having none of it. He is sending a crystal-clear message by reenacting the sailor’s stabbing in the sentencing, and an equally clear message by passing this sentence in front of Lord Mooton so there can be zero doubt amongst his men about who is in charge and how things will work from this day forward. Hyle Hunt was at that gate and given charge over Mooton’s men to prevent just such an occurrence as Brienne’s encounter. After word in the barracks spreads about the cheating archer, there will never be a molestation at the gates of Maidenpool again until well after Randyll Tarly has departed.

     

    Through the POV structure, our surface presentation is the classic Knight Errant or cowboy standoff with villainous men over an innocent woman’s honor as Brienne draws her sword to protect the smallfolk. In reality, these are guards and Brienne would logically be pitted against the whole garrison of the town for drawing blood at the gates. It is Tarly’s name, Tarly’s harsh justice, and Tarly’s school of pragmatic leadership that prevents the rape and not the heroic storybook approach, just as Tarly has rebuilt the town and restored order and not the gallantry from the pages of fables. This idealism vs. pragmatism theme permeates the entirety of Brienne’s arc and it is at the core of her comparisons to the Hound and the notion of “true knights.”

     

     

    The Pink Shadowcat

     

    There is no kind way to describe Brienne’s detective skills. She is, much as her likely ancestor used to describe himself, as thick as a castle wall—and not just any castle, Storm’s End or even The Wall. The items on the list of Brienne’s investigative failures are legion. Would Sansa have worn a hood to cover her hair? Would Sansa be travelling in a manner that would make her appear highborn? Couldn’t she be travelling in a wagon such that she didn’t appear on the road at all? Dressed as a boy as Arya and even Brienne herself do? Brienne has no cover story to hide behind. This is a girl accused of murdering the king, a king she was formerly betrothed to before being forced to marry the monstrous Imp, his uncle with whom with she’s supposedly plotted the murder. This is the follow-on drama to her father supposedly betraying his best friend and being executed for treason. This is a tale that has spread beyond the shadows of Asshai. It would take a miracle for Brienne to find even a hermit who didn’t know she was asking about Sansa Stark.

     

    Brienne soon realizes her folly when questioned by the Mad Mouse.

     

    Ser Shadrich laughed. “Oh, I doubt that, but it may be that you and I share a quest. A little lost sister, is it? With blue eyes and auburn hair?” He laughed again. “You are not the only hunter in the woods. I seek for Sansa Stark as well.”

    “I know no Sansa Stark,” she insisted. “I am searching for my sister, a highborn girl . . .”

    “. . . with blue eyes and auburn hair, aye. Pray, who is this knight who travels with your sister? Or did you name him fool?” Ser Shadrich did not wait for her answer, which was good, since she had none. “A certain fool vanished from King’s Landing the night King Joffrey died, a stout fellow with a nose full of broken veins, one Ser Dontos the Red, formerly of Duskendale. I pray your sister and her drunken fool are not mistaken for the Stark girl and Ser Dontos. That could be most unfortunate.”

    Even Jaime Lannister had seldom made Brienne feel such a fool.

     

    Yet after being made to feel so foolish, she does nothing to rectify it. She doesn’t reconsider her story or even ponder any further flaws it might have. This very quickly becomes apparent.

     

    I must ask after Sansa. How else will I find her?

    ...

    “Goodwife,” she said to the woman on the turnip cart, “perhaps you saw my sister on the road? A young maid, three-and-ten and fair of face, with blue eyes and auburn hair. She may be riding with a drunken knight.”

    "...Does the poor girl have a name?”

    Brienne’s head was empty. I should have made up some name for her. Any name would do, but none came to her.

    “No name? Well, the roads are full of nameless girls.”

    “The lichyard’s even fuller,” said his wife.

     

    In fact, Brienne’s investigative skills are so awful that it is hard to imagine that there isn’t some intentional allusion at play, specifically the famous French detective Inspector Clouseau. Sansa as the precious jewel stolen from the impregnable keep and Brienne the unlikely detective stumbling after her. The amount of irony surrounding her investigation supports the reference, since Brienne actually tends to stumble upon on all the answers.

     

    Brienne had asked along the docks, but no one could remember a ship leaving on the night King Joffrey died. A few trading ships were anchoring in the bay and off-loading by boat, one man told her, but more were continuing up the coast to Duskendale, where the port was busier than ever.

     

    This is the very answer as to how Sansa escaped King’s Landing, it just never occurs to Detective Brienne that it was a possibility. Her discovery that the Hound had “Sansa” is also the byproduct of considerable investigative bumbling. She is looking for a fool because she suspects Sansa fled with Dontos, not knowing that Dontos sleeps with the fishes. She follows the wrong lead to a thirty-year-old abandoned smuggling cove used in a deserter’s con job. This is not exactly the most probable location to find clues as to the whereabouts of missing Stark daughters, and yet she does, which is a hallmark of the irony surrounding our bumbling French detective.

     

    Upon her return to Maidenpool, she can’t find an inn so she takes Pod up on his suggestion to find a ship to sleep in for the night and nearly stumbles upon the Titan’s Daughter while it is carrying Arya Stark to Braavos. Of course, Brienne could have slept on the Titan’s Daughter in the same room as Arya and she wouldn’t have recognized her, as she’ll later realize in trying to puzzle out whether Jeyne Heddle is or isn’t Arya Stark. Brienne then stumbles on Sandor while looking for the Hound when he throws a shovel full of dirt at her feet and she never notices him. Her finding or nearly finding the targets of her investigation and completely missing them is frequent enough to wonder at our author’s intentions.

     

    Part of this seems aimed at the naïveté at play in Brienne’s story, and there is a definitive aspect of GRRM lampooning the traditional Knight Errant-style tale and its traditional hero even with Brienne as a highly sympathetic character. Unlike Sandor, Brienne is a knight right out of the tales and she plays directly into our expectations of the classic hero.

     

    Yet this classic image of a knightly hero is the mechanism Martin chose to deliver the hidden aspects of Sandor’s tale during his on-page absence. It is Sandor “Don’t Call Me Ser” Clegane that actually succeeds in finding and protecting Arya, and who protected Sansa at King’s Landing. It is Sandor who rides into the Frey fray and kills three Frey knights breaking his sword, but not a sweat. This bit of heroics is so easily overlooked through the combination of Arya’s unsympathetic POV and the dramatic unfolding of the Red Wedding. This is the road Sandor travelled to get from his BwB trial to the Quiet Isle, and this is the same road that Brienne follows in reverse toward her own BwB trial and we are being invited by the author to explore the differences.

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Fire vs. Mud

 

We first took a closer look at the fire and mud imagery in Arya’s Crossroads Inn POV chapter, but the theme goes back much earlier than that. It stretches back to the beginning of Arya’s POV and was especially prevalent throughout her rain-filled Riverlands travels with Sandor. Mud represents childlike innocence and fire, at least in one of its aspects, anger, vengeful wrath, and the willingness to destroy. That fiery path is one that if fully embraced will consume, but a vital survival tool nonetheless. The two are in tension and need balance, and too much of one or the other will eventually kill you. Perhaps nowhere is this made clearer than in Arya’s Red Wedding chapter during Sandor’s knightly heroics.

 

Arya upended the sack and tossed it to him. He snatched it one-handed from the air and lowered it over his head, and where the man had sat only a steel dog remained, snarling at the fires.

“Stupid little bitch.” Fires glinted off the snout of his helm, and made the steel teeth shine.

She retreated, darting across the muddy ground on the balls of her feet, putting the wayn between them once more. The knight followed at a trot, only darkness behind his eyeslit. She hadn’t even dented his helm.

...

The black sky wept, the river grumbled, men cursed and died. Arya had mud in her teeth and her face was wet. Rain. It’s only rain. That’s all it is.

...

I have to run faster. The mud slowed her, though, and then the water. Run fast as a wolf. The drawbridge had begun to lift, the water running off it in a sheet, the mud falling in heavy clots.

 

The last thing that happens in that chapter is that Sandor tells Arya to choose, and she chooses incorrectly—mud over fire.

 

This fight is also the first of two parallels to the Brienne and Shagwell fight. Sandor also faces three-to-one odds and he too has a rock-throwing squire to assist. But Sandor was disguised as a peasant and expecting a wedding feast, and Brienne was wielding a magic sword and expecting trouble. Brienne’s thoughts go back to her master-at-arms lessons about not hesitating over killing while we already know Sandor’s philosophy that a knight is a sword with a horse and swords are made for killing. He doesn’t hesitate to engage as Brienne did and he most certainly doesn’t hesitate to kill, and the imagery used to show that knights are for killing is the fire glinting off his steel helm.

 

The fire vs. mud theme in Brienne is curious when compared to Sandor, because fire is almost entirely absent. This is true in the religious themes as well. Brienne’s travels with Nimble Dick to Crackclaw Point are filled with Old Gods imagery, with the most obvious being Nimble Dick’s weirwood grave. Brienne then travels with Septon Meribald where the imagery of the Faith prevails including bumping into the Mother, Maiden and Crone along the road. Both characters have plenty of these in-story religious references and symbolism to the Old Gods and the Seven, but the Red God is essentially absent from Brienne’s chapters until she meets Lady Stoneheart.

 

Brienne leaves King’s Landing and never succeeds in making a fire her entire POV. There are fires at the inns where she stops, the fire Sers Creighton and Illifer share with her, and the hearthfire at the Quiet Isle, but Brienne never succeeds in making a fire herself a single time in her own POV.

 

Brienne tied her mare to a wall sconce, took off her helm, and shook out her hair. She was searching for some dry wood to light a fire when she heard the sound of another horse, coming closer.

 . . .

It was cold and wet on Crackclaw Point as they retraced their steps. Some days it rained and some days it threatened rain. They were never warm. Even when they made camp, it was hard to find enough dry wood for a fire.

 . . .

The rocks at least would keep the wind off. “Best we keep a watch tonight, m’lady,” Crabb told her, as she was struggling to get a driftwood fire lit. “A place like this, there might be squishers.”

The wood was too damp to light, no matter how many sparks Brienne struck off her flint and steel. The kindling sent up some smoke, but that was all.

 

This inability to make a fire is also surrounded by the imagery of mud.

 

It rained all that day. The narrow track they followed soon turned to mud beneath them. What trees they saw were naked, and the steady rain had turned their fallen leaves into a sodden brown mat.

 

Brienne’s meeting up with Pod is also filled with imagery of mud.

 

Somehow Brienne had taken a wrong turn. She found herself in a dead end, a small muddy yard where three pigs were rooting round a low stone well.

Brienne turned to retrace her steps, and walked headfirst into someone hurrying round the bend. The collision knocked him off his feet, and he landed on his arse in the mud.

The horse reared, and the skinny boy went flying, his cloak flapping like a pair of wings. He landed in the mud and came up with dirt and dead brown grass between his teeth to find Brienne standing over him.

“Not puh-puh-please.” He stuck a finger in his mouth, and flicked away a clump of mud, spitting. “Puh-puh-Pod. My name. Puh-puh-Podrick. Puh-Payne.”

 . . .

The boy looked at the bare brown trees, the wet leaves, the muddy road ahead. “I have a longsword. I can fight.”

 

This mud imagery combined with a complete lack of fire seems to point toward the naiveté surrounding her more classical white hat wearing heroic tale. The author’s take on this is spelled out by Septon Meribald to Podrick.

 

It’s only mud,” insisted Podrick.

Until it fills your mouth and starts creeping up your nose. Then it’s death.”

 

And this is exactly the image we get in Brienne’s Crossroads Inn battle:

 

... and Biter crashed into her, shrieking.

 He fell on her like an avalanche of wet wool and milk-white flesh, lifting her off her feet and slamming her down into the ground. She landed in a puddle with a splash that sent water up her nose and into her eyes. All the air was driven out of her, and her head snapped down against some half-buried stone with a crack. “No,” was all that she had time to say before he fell on top of her, his weight driving her deeper into the mud.

 

This stands in contrast to the Elder Brothers statement on Sandor that:

 

“Yet that was the bread that nourished him, the fuel that kept his fires burning.”

 

There is also an important parallel in the Shagwell fight compared to the Arya and Sandor Crossroads Inn battle. Sandor is our stand-in knight and Arya the squire, yet Brienne the knight’s killing of Shagwell parallels Arya the squire’s killing of the Tickler.

 

She knocked aside his arm and punched the steel into his bowels. “Laugh,” she snarled at him. He moaned instead. “Laugh,” she repeated, grabbing his throat with one hand and stabbing at his belly with the other. “Laugh!” She kept saying it, over and over, until her hand was red up to the wrist and the stink of the fool’s dying was like to choke her. But Shagwell never laughed. The sobs that Brienne heard were all her own. When she realized that, she threw down her knife and shuddered.

 . . .

 

Is there gold hidden in the village?” she shouted as she drove the blade up through his back.

“Is there silver? Gems?” She stabbed twice more. “Is there food? Where is Lord Beric?” She was on top of him by then, still stabbing. “Where did he go? How many men were with him? How many knights? How many bowmen? How many, how many, how many, how many, how many, how many? is there gold in the village?”

Her hands were red and sticky when Sandor dragged her off him. “Enough,” was all he said. He was bleeding like a butchered pig himself, and dragging one leg when he walked.

 

It’s another sign of an innocence that runs counter to what Sandor says and all our in-story knights do—knights are made for killing. Brienne’s fights are all against men who make the most vile threats of rape against her, men of whose past evil deeds she has intimate knowledge, and her killing blows are marked by words of personal payback like that one was for Jaime, Laugh, Sapphires. She never fights the nameless impersonal morally average opponent who just happens to be on the other side of the battlefield. She fights on mud each time, manages to summon the fire of revenge in the moment, and then is haunted by the death in the aftermath. It mirrors her personal oaths to Renly and Cat rather than picking a House and fighting for it in all its good and bad aspects as with other knights.

 

The thematic treatment of ravens vs. doves and mud vs. fire continues with Brienne and Nimble Dick’s rather comical in-story who would beat who in a fight superhero debate between Ser Clarence “Crackbones” Crabb and Ser Galladon “Perfect Knight” of the Morne.

 

Crabb thought that was hilarious. “The Perfect Knight? The Perfect Fool, he sounds like. What’s the point o’ having some magic sword if you don’t bloody well use it?”

“Honor,” she said. “The point is honor.”

That only made him laugh the louder. “Ser Clarence Crabb would have wiped his hairy arse with your Perfect Knight, m’lady. If they’d ever have met, there’d be one more bloody head sitting on the shelf at the Whispers, you ask me. ‘I should have used the magic sword,’ it’d be saying to all the other heads. ‘I should have used the bloody sword.’”

Brienne could not help but smile. “Perhaps,” she allowed.

 

Even Arthur Dayne never failed to use his magic sword even if he did allow the Smiling Knight to fetch a fresh blade for honor’s sake. The humorous ending to their debate makes a point as well. Brienne allowed that her Perfect Knight unsheathed his magical Just Maid to slay a dragon and Nimble Dick retorts:

 

Nimble Dick was unimpressed. “Crackbones fought a dragon too, but he didn’t need no magic sword. He just tied its neck in a knot, so every time it breathed fire it roasted its own arse.”

 

Aside from the hero using the symbolic fire, this is an example of using an enemy’s tactic against him. If the enemy resorts to a certain weapon or tactic, you do not cling to notions of “honor” but rather serve him the same in turn. This is exactly what we begin to see from the “honorable” Northmen in the form of Frey Pies and empty oaths of fealty to the Boltons. The Perfect Knight is one of Baelor the Blessed’s doves. Ravens are stronger, bolder, more clever, and better able to defend themselves against hawks, Freys, Boltons, and Lannisters.

 

We continue to see the classic knightly hero lampooned in favor of a more pragmatic approach in line with the harsh realities of life and war consistent with our in-series morality metaphor. Again, we see the knight and fool pairing, but the nature of the fool is different here. Our in-story Florian was a fool when it came to love and in that he was willing to engage in self-deprecation at the expense of his own honor, not because he followed the letter of some code of honor to a fault. All of this reflects on Sandor as he has been established as the “true knight” of the story early on in Sansa’s arc, even if he is still a “true knight” in hiding at this point in the story.

 

Yet Brienne’s story of the Perfect Knight is a good parable, a good child’s tale that holds some of what Martin calls Bard’s Truths. If the point of not drawing the sword is “honor” then it follows that setting the sword aside on those three occasions was the equivalent of setting aside honor. What is a Perfect Knight’s honor worth if the dragon lives to terrorize the innocent? It is an echo of our main morality metaphor. Additionally, knights are the government’s monopoly on the use of force, and if a knight in full plate confronts a member of the smallfolk he may as well be wielding an unbeatable magical sword from the gods given the disparity of power. There is a lesson on restraint in this tale that is tied to honor and one that speaks to Sandor’s killing of Mycah as well as the House he originally served.

 

Honor in a knight is a public trust and not a matter of pride or a celebrity popularity contest. Knights represent the rule of law and the population’s faith in knights’ honor is pragmatically indistinguishable from their faith in their government and its rule of law. Laws must be knowable and predictable and have a spectrum of reasonably known consequences that are commensurate with the offense. A knight’s honor draws the line between Cicero’s age old distinction of the rule of law and the rule of venal men and the parable of the Perfect Knight and his Just Maid speaks to this.

 

An eye for an eye is not a prescription for vengeance, it is a limit placed on responses and repercussions in the spirit of the rule of law and commensurate punishments and offenses. Taking an eye is the limit in response to the offense of having an eye taken. After all, the rest of the phrase is “a tooth for a tooth,” and playing dentist hardly qualifies as Old Testament-caliber vengeance. The Perfect Knight’s withholding of his magic sword speaks to this limit. The tale of the Rat Cook has a similar message—a man is entitled to his revenge, but only within limits. Our in-story violation of the prescription set forth by an eye for an eye is the Rains of Castamere and its in-story opposite seems to be the North’s First Men tradition of justice.

 

Sandor Clegane’s first military campaign was the sack of King’s Landing, which was Tywin’s Rains of Castamere on House Targaryen. In that campaign his brother Gregor, known to his men by the knighthood-embodying title “Ser,” slaughtered the family of Rhaegar Targaryen, the man that knighted him in the first place. Sandor’s slaying of Mycah was technically lawful based on Joffrey’s lie, but was in truth Cersei’s Rains of Castamere response. It is under the shadow of this offense, a Rains of Castamere, an unleashing of the Just Maid on an unworthy opponent, a punishment not commensurate with the offense, which Sandor undergoes his redemption.

 

Sandor’s redemptive journey for Rains of Castamere offenses also moves him closer to First Men justice. He goes from serving House Lannister to House Stark. He re-enters the story after the Blackwater in the chapter that opens with Arya giving the Gift of Mercy to the men in the cage caught by the same Huntsman who finds Sandor. Beric wields the sword himself against Sandor, Arya looks in his eyes when she holds the dagger and stays her hand. He asks Arya to wield the blade herself at the end after the Crossroads Inn. Our “true knight” moves away from the Rains of Castamere and toward First Men justice while the knights of the BwB who initially tried imperfectly to emulate First Men justice move towards the Rains of Castamere. A Rains of Castamere upon House Frey is the form of justice being carried out by these Knights of the Hollow Hill when Brienne arrives for her own trial.

 

Even in such small humorous anecdotes, Martin has carefully crafted his knightly theme comparing the classic heroic tale to his own and he has done so within the overall theme of the series as a whole. Another aspect of a knight’s honor being a public trust and not simply a personal matter involves oaths and the giving of one’s word. Knights pledge their lives and their undying loyalty to fulfill their obligations, and in this it is the external perception of faith in honor that matters. Oaths of loyalty are the fabric from which the civilized society of a feudal culture is woven. It is the fulfillment of those oaths that allows a kingdom to defend itself and its people from external threats and to maintain law and order from internal ones. Oathkeeping is not about personal pride but about maintaining the public faith in the institutions of governance and justice.

 

One of the consequences of the Red Wedding is the deterioration of one of the primary institutions for allowing the resumption of peace—Guest Right. At the core of an oath is trust. For any oath to matter there must be a plausible belief that the words are not wind. Being a knight means being a member of an institution that has a public trust, and even knights with no reputation for truth and veracity of their own may borrow from the trust inherent in the institution so long as the institution remains respected. The Lannister and Frey violation of the laws of hospitality have imperiled institutions of trust. If there is ever going to be a peace in this saga, that institutional trust must be repaired, the violators of the institution must be annihilated or achieve total domination, or honorable men must stand where institutions have fallen.

 

Brienne experiences this deterioration first-hand and witnesses it consequences. The choice imposed upon Brienne is in many ways the direct result of the deterioration of institutions of trust.

 

“Guest right don’t mean so much as it used to,” said the girl. “Not since m’lady come back from the wedding. Some o’ them swinging down by the river figured they was guests too.”

 . . .

There was only one woman that the Maid of Tarth had ever sworn to serve. “That cannot be,” she said. “She’s dead.”

“Death and guest right,” muttered Long Jeyne Heddle. “They don’t mean so much as they used to, neither one.”

 

Compare Brienne’s oath to two strangers on the road over whether or not she had a role in the now purely irrelevant dead traitor king Renly’s death to Sandor Clegane’s upon entering the most prestigious and esteemed order of knighthood ever known in Westeros.

 

Brienne:

“By the Seven, then. I did no harm to King Renly. I swear it by the Mother. May I never know her mercy if I lie. I swear it by the Father, and ask that he might judge me justly. I swear it by the Maiden and Crone, by the Smith and the Warrior. And I swear it by the Stranger, may he take me now if I am false.”

“She swears well, for a maid,” Ser Creighton allowed.

 

Sandor:

“Why not?”

 

In fact, Sandor flat out refuses to take any “knightly vows” and no one balks. Boros whines about it as a membership requirement, but never as a question of Sandor’s word. No one doubts Sandor and he never needs to swear an oath to be taken seriously. He blows off Tyrion’s order after the bread riot and says he’s only going to look for his horse, but Tyrion accepts without question that Sandor will get the job done. More importantly, his enemies trust in Sandor’s honor as well:

 

“No.” Lord Beric had sheathed his sword. “Sandor Clegane would kill us all gladly, but not in our sleep."

 

Brienne stakes her own life in oaths with words to try and sway others, but Sandor’s enemies stake their own lives on a faith in Sandor’s deeds. They have robbed Sandor of a fortune, put him on trial for Gregor’s crimes and thus given him cause to strike at them and kill them. They believe he has murderous intent towards them, believe he had nothing left in this world but the gold they stole, and yet still they trust in his honor without a single oath. Amongst the heroic qualities that will be needed from a “true knight” in the coming books is a bond of honor even his enemies can respect to stand where the institutions of trust have fallen. Beric’s trust in Sandor at the end of his BwB trial and the start of his journey to the Quiet Isle stands in sharp contrast to Lady Stoneheart’s lack of trust in Brienne at the end of her BwB trial at the end of her backtracking journey from the Quiet Isle.

 

 

One Road, Two Paths

 

Brienne’s backtracking journey along the Hound’s course starts and ends with a choice. The first one is posed by the Elder Brother in front of a hearthfire and the second is imposed by Lady Stoneheart and a very different kind of fire. Sandor’s journey started with the choice imposed by fire and the BwB and ends with his yet to be posed on the page choice of the Quiet Isle. Brienne starts off sworn to an individual Stark and then becomes sworn to an individual Lannister, without consciously believing she’s switched sides or has conflicting oaths or interests. Sandor starts off sworn to House Lannister and his loyalty is written in the blood of Eddard’s household. He ends up seeking service to House Stark and again writes that loyalty in Lannister blood without ever even taking an oath.

 

The hearthfire is what Sandor desired and did not believe to be obtainable, which is why he accepted the Kingsguard position. The desire for the hearthfire is why he asked Sansa to leave with him and also why he took Arya after his BwB trial. And the hearthfire is what he stared into while sitting at his Crossroads. Given this build-up and the parallel nature of their mirrored journeys, it seems likely that the hearthfire is also Sandor’s metaphorical choice posed at the Quiet Isle.

 

It is easy to mistake the two choices for direct parallels given that the hearthfire for Sandor points to Sansa and Brienne explains her hearthfire choice to the Elder Brother as a promise to Jaime. Sandor is near the end of a journey of reclaiming innocence and Brienne is near the start of a journey to shed it. Sandor is moving from fire to mud and Brienne is moving from mud to fire. Every knightly quest has a temptation to fall from the path. For Sandor and his battle with fire, this temptation was to give into vengeance and be consumed by his desire to kill Gregor. For Brienne and her struggle with mud, her naïve notions of what Jaime symbolizes as a romantic interest are a temptation to fall from the quest to save Sansa.

 

For Brienne, the hearthfire was always a choice and one offered to her mostly as an insult many times before. The Elder Brother’s counsel prior to her reversing the Hound’s path is the first time it was posed sincerely and the first time Brienne truly ponders that choice or reveals her thoughts about what it means to her. It is the choice she confesses to wanting but for her inability to emotionally cope with her sense of failure and her sense of inadequacy relative to what she feels her father deserves. As she backtracks along Sandor’s road, she too will end up at the Crossroads Inn and she also stares into the hearthfire there as Hyle Hunt makes his less-than-romantic marriage proposal. Brienne’s story is her own, but the literary parallel seems to confirm last chapter’s speculation that Sandor was indeed thinking of Sansa as he stared into the hearthfire there.

 

Brienne, like Sandor, is wounded at the Crossroads Inn and needs to be carried to the end of the journey. Brienne’s inner torments on her way to the BwB offer further speculative material as to the haunting nature of Sandor’s fever dreams that would have accompanied him to the Quiet Isle. Sandor’s path to the Quiet Isle saw him shedding the identity of the Hound in both the loss of the helmet whose mantle was taken up by others and in the Elder Brother’s declaring that identity dead and the man Sandor at rest. As Brienne arrives at the Hollow Hill for her trial, we see the two parallel entities to Sandor donning the Hound identity that he has shed. Brienne in the form of her new facial scar that makes her more resemble the Hound and his terrible burned face and Lem who actually takes the Hound’s helm for himself.

 

The BwB and its origins parallel Sandor’s own story. They were once innocent and defenceless, and after having been abused by Gregor Clegane’s monstrous nature grew into something capable of defending themselves. Unlike Sandor the BwB seems to have been consumed by the fire of the vengeful path, as Thoros laments to Brienne, and their donning the Hound’s helm in following that path points to Sandor having forsaken it along with the helm.

 

Thoros sucked in his breath in dismay. “Is this true? A dead man’s helm? Have we fallen that low?”

The big man scowled at him. “It’s good steel.”

“There is nothing good about that helm, nor the men who wore it,” said the red priest. “Sandor Clegane was a man in torment, and Rorge a beast in human skin.”

“I’m not them.”

“Then why show the world their face? Savage, snarling, twisted . . . is that who you would be, Lem?”

“The sight of it will make my foes afraid.”

“The sight of it makes me afraid.”

 

Aside from this, we have the Elder Brother’s take on the Hound identity that Sandor has shed and in some part Brienne and the BwB have taken up.

 

“I will not call them wolves. Wolves are nobler than that . . . and so are dogs, I think.”

“I know a little of this man, Sandor Clegane. He was Prince Joffrey’s sworn shield for many a year, and even here we would hear tell of his deeds, both good and ill. If even half of what we heard was true, this was a bitter, tormented soul, a sinner who mocked both gods and men. He served, but found no pride in service. He fought, but took no joy in victory. He drank, to drown his pain in a sea of wine. He did not love, nor was he loved himself. It was hate that drove him. Though he committed many sins, he never sought forgiveness. Where other men dream of love, or wealth, or glory, this man Sandor Clegane dreamed of slaying his own brother, a sin so terrible it makes me shudder just to speak of it. Yet that was the bread that nourished him, the fuel that kept his fires burning. Ignoble as it was, the hope of seeing his brother’s blood upon his blade was all this sad and angry creature lived for . . . and even that was taken from him, when Prince Oberyn of Dorne stabbed Ser Gregor with a poisoned spear.”

 

Both men make comparisons to humans acting worse than beasts and the Hound as an identity in torment. It would seem that at least one aspect of Sandor’s post-Quiet Isle story will be that he has left the inner torment behind. We are also given further evidence that Sandor made a choice at the Crossroads Inn.

 

“Why indeed?” He glanced at the candle, as if he could no longer bear to look at her. “You fought bravely at the inn, they tell me. Lem should not have left the crossroads. He was told to stay close, hidden, to come at once if he saw smoke rising from the chimney . . . but when word reached him that the Mad Dog of Saltpans had been seen making his way north along the Green Fork, he took the bait. We have been hunting that lot for so long . . . still, he ought to have known better.

 

Lem, the man who donned the Hound Helm, had been tasked with being the protector, the shield, as was always Sandor’s traditional role. The desire for revenge made him abandon the role of protector at the Crossroads Inn to go forth and seek his long-burning desire for vengeance. Sandor made a very different choice at the Crossroads and we have an implied reason.

 

“Some call her that. Some call her other things. The Silent Sister. Mother Merciless. The Hangwoman.”

“My lady,” Thoros said, “I do not doubt that kindness and mercy and forgiveness can still be found somewhere in these Seven Kingdoms, but do not look for them here

 

The seeds of mercy planted in both of the Stark girls’ POVs seem to have borne fruit. The place Sandor’s shed identity ends is a place without the Mother’s Mercy that was prayed for and without the forgiveness his travels with Arya had earned him.

 

Here, for the first time in Brienne’s story, she is described in terms of fire and it is an inner fire:

 

“Might I feel your brow, my lady?” Her gaoler’s hand was scarred and hard with callus, yet strangely gentle. “Your fever has broken,” he announced, in a voice flavored with the accents of the Free Cities. “Well and good. Just yesterday your flesh felt as if it were on fire. Jeyne feared that we might lose you.”

 …

“She did what she could for your face as well, washing out the wounds with boiled ale to stop the mortification. Even so . . . a human bite is a filthy thing. That is where the fever came from, I am certain.”

 

The process through which Brienne obtains her more Hound-like visage is the same process that spawned an inner fire, the thing she was lacking throughout her entire POV. There are multiple ways to read this for Brienne, but the implied Sandor parallel is that he has achieved the inner balance with the symbolic mud. The Quiet Isle, the place where his parallel journey ended, is a place reached by crossing the mud.

 

 

Broken Man or a broken man?

 

The fate of Broken Men as we’re told through Septon Meribald seems to be to end up as Holy Men on the Quiet Isle, and some are tempted to see this in Sandor’s future. Sandor’s tale is quite different from that of Meribald’s Broken Man even if their paths cross at the Quiet Isle and in some regards Sandor was in fact a broken man. Sandor’s idealism was shattered and shattered by his brother, he did not seek glory in war with his brother and have that quest end in his disillusionment. Sandor was well trained in battle and would have had among the best equipment from his earliest days in Lannister service. He knew quite well which lord he served and why, and as he told Arya his belly for fighting was just fine. It was not the taste of battle that broke him as in Meribald’s tale. His origin is quite different from the Broken Man and so is his likely fate.

 

Additionally, before we meet Meribald and hear his story, Brienne has already crossed paths with a Broken Man by the name of Nimble Dick. We have already been subtly told that not all Broken Men meet the same fate and in Nimble Dick’s case he avoided banditry by heeding the call of home, a call that led him to come to rest beneath the weirwood of the old gods. So before Martin tells us a tale of a Broken Man, he shows us the tale of a Broken Man. The innkeeper at the Stinking Goose is also surprised by Nimble Dick’s fate, so Martin might be having a little bit of layered fun surrounding his teasing of the Sandor in hairshirt ending. An overwhelming amount of textual evidence points against Brother Sandor, but it is discussed often enough to address it. Aside from everything else, it just wouldn’t be consistent for the embodiment of the hated and misunderstood raven to suddenly adopt the dove path by literally following in the footsteps of Baelor the Blessed.

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Trial by Oaths

 

Brienne is under the impression that she is on the true hero’s path, that her oath to Catelyn and her oath to Jaime to save Sansa Stark are not in conflict. She thinks she can fulfill both oaths with the single act of finding Sansa, and she is very wrong. Jaime serves a king, his own usurping bastard child, who has given Sansa’s home of Winterfell to men who slaughtered almost everyone Sansa grew up with and imprisoned raped and tortured the few he spared. That same usurping bastard king that is Jaime’s son also sent Sansa’s best friend who had been raped into submission to impersonate her thought to be dead younger sister to help legitimize the theft of her home. That Tommen has no idea what he is signing and only thinks he’s playing with crayons makes it worse, not better, as it makes those acts more Jaime’s choice and responsibility and not less. If she fulfills her oath to Jaime, will he depose the Boltons and restore Sansa’s home to her? Will he bring justice to the Freys for the Red Wedding and the murders of Sansa’s family and the families of every Northern House that would owe her fealty upon that restoration? Merely keeping Sansa alive is a hollow act as Mirri Maz Duur has already explained, and the code of knighthood and the oath to Catelyn Stark demands far more than the preservation of vital signs.

 

Brienne’s own thoughts demonstrate an evolution of her own notion and purpose of her oath to save Sansa. She starts off wondering if Jaime has played her and concludes that it doesn’t matter since she is sworn to Cat to save Sansa anyway.

 

Jaime would not do that. He was sincere. He gave me the sword, and called it Oathkeeper. Anyway, it made no matter. She had promised Lady Catelyn that she would bring back her daughters, and no promise was as solemn as one sworn to the dead.

 

In her travels, initially this inner pledge of fealty to Cat grows even stronger:

 

She had spoken of Arya too, her younger daughter, but Arya was lost, most likely dead by now. Sansa, though . . . I will find her, my lady, Brienne swore to Lady Catelyn’s restless shade. I will never stop looking. I will give up my life if need be, give up my honor, give up all my dreams, but I will find her.

 

Yet this fervor fades and the oath to Jaime begins to creep up in importance. By the Quiet Isle, we have this breakdown that leads to her choice:

 

All of it came pouring out of Brienne then, like black blood from a wound; the betrayals and betrothals,(...)

Renly dying in her arms, Riverrun and Lady Catelyn, the voyage down the Trident, dueling Jaime in the woods, the Bloody Mummers, Jaime crying “Sapphires,” Jaime in the tub at Harrenhal with steam rising from his body, the taste of Vargo Hoat’s blood when she bit down on his ear, the bear pit, Jaime leaping down onto the sand, the long ride to King’s Landing, Sansa Stark, the vow she’d sworn to Jaime, the vow she’d sworn to Lady Catelyn, Oathkeeper, Duskendale, Maidenpool, Nimble Dick and Crackclaw and the Whispers, the men she’d killed . . .

“I have to find her,” she finished. “There are others looking, all wanting to capture her and sell her to the queen. I have to find her first. I promised Jaime. Oathkeeper, he named the sword. I have to try to save her . . . or die in the attempt.”

 

There is a great deal of Jaime in her breakdown to the Elder Brother, and not a whole lot of nothing more sacred than oaths sworn to the dead. She is now willing to die for the oath to Jaime, but the thoughts of losing her honor, life, happiness, and dreams to fulfill the promise to Catelyn’s restless shade are no more. In fact, the thoughts of Jaime seem to be very specifically the breaking her inner promise to give up all her dreams. And after a few of those not so given up fever dreams following the Crossroads in Biter fight, Catelyn has all but vanished:

 

It was a sword she wanted. Oathkeeper. I have to find the girl. I have to find his honor.

 

Finding Sansa Stark has become synonymous with finding Jaime Lannister’s honor. Our in-story morality metaphor is what is one man’s honor worth so long as the realm is safe. That should translate into what is Brienne of Tarth’s honor worth so long as Sansa Stark is safe. Yet Brienne is concerned with Jaime’s honor and not Sansa’s safety, much less the earth-shattering incompatibility of the implications of Sansa experiencing safety within the notion of Jaime’s honor. Earth-shattering may in fact be quite literal given the soon to be alleviated amnesia of the über-magical crippled boy Jaime tossed out a window, who happens to be Sansa’s younger brother and is quite tied to her oath of fealty to Catelyn Stark’s shade.

 

A surface-level reading of Brienne’s POV doesn’t relay these full implications. Brienne is a sweet well-intentioned girl who defends children and feels remorse for even the monsters she kills. She honestly and sincerely wishes to find Sansa, a girl she’s never met and whose life she has no personal stake in, to keep her safe simply because she gave her word. In return for her efforts and hardships in both seeking out Sansa and nearly dying in defense of the members of the BwB, an undead vengeful psychopath leading the BwB seems bent on forcing her to commit murder by threatening to kill her and her companions.

 

Jaime Lannister swore an oath to never take up arms against the Tullys again. He used the threat of taking up arms to get Edmure to relent, and then imprisoned Edmure in a Lannister dungeon as a means of technically fulfilling the letter of that oath to satisfy his own sense of personal honor. The only beneficiary of that legalistic oath-keeping is Jaime Lannister. The Tullys were Lords Paramount of the Riverlands when he made his oath and the owners of Riverrun. The last of the Tullys is in a Casterly Rock dungeon, Riverrun is owned by a Frey/Lannister marriage, both Red Wedding perpetrators, and the Riverlands have been given to Littlefinger, who then murdered Cat’s sister among a long list of other offenses to Houses Stark and Tully. All of this was done in the name of Jaime’s illegitimate usurping son through his playing with crayons, while Jaime has chosen the path of the Kingsguard and protecting this very king in whose name all that was done as the means of restoring his lost honor.

 

Jaime Lannister is playing at honor and naming horses to appease the restless voices inside himself, but he is not forsaking a single solitary benefit that he or his House have reaped from their cataclysm of dishonorable acts. He is like a man who stole millions, bought everything he ever wanted and tithed ten percent of what was left after his spending spree to the Church to declare himself forgiven.

 

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.

 

He hangs a single deserter in a Lannister cloak and he thinks it is justice. Tywin would have hanged him too, he deserted. This is after Jaime takes Gregor’s men into his service knowing the kind of men they are, knowing what they’ve done to the Riverlands he must now set to peace, knowing that they are Tywin’s raping dogs and having Pia and her shattered face right there to drive that point home. These are the men who went Iron Chef Vivisectionist on Vargo Hoat, and Jaime’s thoughts when Bonnifer Hasty won’t have them are:

 

“Very well. I’ll take Gregor’s lot off your hands.” He could always find a use for fighters. If nothing else, he could send them up the ladders first, should he need to storm the walls of Riverrun.

 

That puts the degree morality played in his golden-handed justice of hanging a man who couldn’t fight into perspective. He even frames the usefulness of Gregor’s men in terms of breaking his oath to Catelyn about taking up arms against the Tullys.

 

Brienne knows this man’s sins. This is a man she once named “monster:”

 

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

 

So the heartless sentencing by the undead psychotic revenant is not as wholly unreasonable as it seems on a first reading. From a literary standpoint, in fact, what unCat is doing is imposing a non-bloodless choice upon the classical hero.

 

“She says that you must choose. Take the sword and slay the Kingslayer, or be hanged for a betrayer. The sword or the noose, she says. Choose, she says. Choose.”

 

Less grandfatherly, but the same words Aemon spoke to Jon.

 

"Yet soon or late in every man’s life comes a day when it is not easy, a day when he must choose.” ... "You must make that choice yourself, and live with it all the rest of your days. As I have.” His voice fell to a whisper. “As I have...”

 

And just as Jon had blood on his hands during his choice Brienne’s choice is marked with blood as well.

 

In the dream she had bitten off her tongue. My mouth was full of blood. She took a ragged breath and said, “I will not make that choice.”

 

But when it comes to actual blood she chooses.

 

There is an enormous amount of layered symbolism and irony in this exchange between Lady Stoneheart and Brienne, and it is important to recall the circumstances of Brienne entering Cat’s service. Brienne intended to kill Stannis.

 

“You mean to kill Stannis.”

Brienne closed her thick callused fingers around the hilt of her sword. The sword that had been his. “I swore a vow. Three times I swore. You heard me.”

“I did,” Catelyn admitted.

 

And right before entering Cat’s service Brienne’s condition is that Cat not hold her back from killing Stannis in revenge for Renly’s death.

 

“…And I think, when the time comes, you will not try and hold me back. Promise me that. That you will not hold me back from Stannis.”

Catelyn could still hear Stannis saying that Robb’s turn too would come in time. It was like a cold breath on the back of her neck. “When the time comes, I will not hold you back.”

 

Brienne entered Cat’s service seeking a vendetta for Stannis killing Renly, and it is somewhat safe to say that the Red Wedding is at least as bad if not a worse affront to Cat than Renly’s death was for Brienne. These are two women who met and bonded over vengeance for lost loved ones. There is also the ironic persuasion Cat uses to get Brienne to stay given her lack of a pulse:

 

“Then fight... but for the living, not the dead. Renly’s enemies are Robb’s enemies as well.”

 

But those enemies she spoke of were strictly the Lannisters and not Stannis.

 

“He wouldn’t . . . you’d never make a peace with Stannis, would you? Bend the knee? You wouldn’t . . .”

“I will tell you true, Brienne. I do not know. My son may be a king, but I am no queen . . . only a mother who would keep her children safe, however she could.”

 

So looking back to the origins of Brienne entering Cat’s service, it isn’t clear that a living Catelyn with a heart would have taken a much more sympathetic view than her undead counterpart. Brienne agreed to fight Lannisters, accepted that the North and Stannis might make a peace, and was promised that Cat would not hold her back from vengeance even if that happened. The safety of Cat’s children was the known paramount concern when Brienne took her oath, and vengeance through murder was an inherent part of that oath. False Friend is an appropriate title upon revisiting their history, and unCat is asking no more of Brienne than Brienne asked of her soon-to-be liege lady when entering her service. Brienne heard Jaime confess to throwing Bran out the window. She knows his guilt, and even if Jaime is to be forgiven, his own words regarding his own desire for vengeance for his lost hand condemn him:

 

“If they made sincere repentance for their sins . . . yes, I would embrace them all as brothers and pray with them before I sent them to the block. Sins may be forgiven. Crimes require punishment.” Hasty folded his hands before him like a steeple, in a way that reminded Jaime uncomfortably of his father. “If it is Sandor Clegane that we encounter, what would you have me do?”

Pray hard, Jaime thought, and run.

 

In neither Jaime or unCat’s cases are forgiveness and punishment at play. It is pure revenge in the spirit of the Rains of Castamere. Lady Stoneheart is holding Robb’s crown, the ultimate symbol of authority from the one place where First Men justice still holds sway. She also has Oathkeeper, a piece of Ned’s sword Ice, sitting in front of her and she still chooses hanging over beheading in her sentencing.

 

Behind it sat a woman all in grey, cloaked and hooded. In her hands was a crown, a bronze circlet ringed by iron swords. She was studying it, her fingers stroking the blades as if to test their sharpness. Her eyes glimmered under her hood.

 . . .

The woman in grey gave no answer. She studied the sword, the parchment, the bronze-and-iron crown. Finally she reached up under her jaw and grasped her neck, as if she meant to throttle herself. Instead she spoke... Her voice was halting, broken, tortured. The sound seemed to come from her throat, part croak, part wheeze, part death rattle.

 

It’s as if Lady Stoneheart is studying the authority and means to carry out First Men justice and is choosing the noose anyway. It is a reversal of Jon and “Edd, fetch me a block.” Part of Ice is missing and that part is named Widow’s Wail. Lady Stoneheart is an Alyssa Arryn figure, the woman cursed for never crying for her dead children. The remorse, mercy and redemption inherent in those tears, and in wielding the sword yourself in First Men justice are missing and the vengeance and easy killing of the headsman are filling that void. In fact, the noose is exactly the weapon of choice for Cat’s revenge fantasies.

 

“Every morning, when I wake, I remember that Ned is gone. I have no skill with swords, but that does not mean that I do not dream of riding to King’s Landing and wrapping my hands around Cersei Lannister’s white throat and squeezing until her face turns black.”

 

This is our literary parallel for the absent Sandor Quiet Isle choice. The theme and choice of vengeance is clear and that choice is being imposed by Mother Merciless.  In contrast, we have Sansa’s Gentle Mother prayer for Sandor that launched his Riverlands tour and a strong implication from the Elder Brother that Sandor has made a peace with his own vengeance and received the mercy that Brienne did not. Inherent in the peace with vengeance is a moving away from the Rains of Castamere philosophy and towards First Men justice, away from his prior Lannister service and toward service with the Starks. This is also represented in the symbols of Northern authority unCat has before her. We also have the explicit problem with oaths and trusting in words. It is flat out stated to Brienne that words are wind and deeds are required as proof. In addition, and in accordance with the traditions in Westeros, Pod and Hyle remain as hostages to her good behavior.

 

All of these themes fall directly under the main conflict between House Stark and House Lannister. There is the ruling through love and ruling through fear philosophies on display. We also have vengeance vs. mercy, indiscriminate punishment vs. justice, self-serving interests vs. loyalty— all of the facets of the Tywin vs. Ned legacy contrast are on display here in this cave. With Brienne we seem to be seeing the Lannisters reaping the harvest sown by Tywin and his children, and it seems likely that our absent camera at the Quiet Isle would be showing the Starks reaping the fruits of Ned and his children’s labors with Sandor.

 

Our first glaring sign that Sandor is not destined to dwell on the Quiet Isle is Stranger and his reaction to being stabled with draft animals. His reaction to the gelding attempt and trying to be turned into one of the pack animals of this monastic island only strengthens it. Sandor himself seems well on his way to being fully healed as he’s engaged in manual labor. Importantly, Sandor the Gravedigger is burying the dead from Saltpans. One of the things that might pull Sandor away from the Quiet Isle is the men killing “in his name” by wearing his helmet. If he is digging the graves for the victims and not riding off after the man with his helm, this makes his Hound identity far less likely to be his reason for leaving.

 

Brienne had brought fresh news of the outside world with her, but we have also learned that the Quiet Isle has ravens. So whether or not anything Brienne shares might serve to motivate Sandor isn’t that important. Any event that would reasonably spread by raven could easily become known by Sandor given the ravenry here. What those events might be is unknown, but we are given at least one clue. Stranger’s name on this island is Driftwood, after the “gifts” that wash up on shore. When the Elder Brother, also a former warrior and knight, is asked about Saltpans he is bitterly angry with its ruling knight for abandoning the smallfolk:

 

“Ser Quincy is an old man,” said Septon Meribald gently. “His sons and good-sons are far away or dead, his grandsons are still boys, and he has two daughters. What could he have done, one man against so many?”

He could have tried, Brienne thought. He could have died. Old or young, a true knight is sworn to protect those who are weaker than himself, or die in the attempt.

“True words, and wise,” the Elder Brother said to Septon Meribald. “When you cross to Saltpans, no doubt Ser Quincy will ask you for forgiveness. I am glad that you are here to give it. I could not.” He put aside the driftwood cup, and stood.

 

A cup is a metaphor for fate, and to drink from the driftwood cup is the fate of those who end up on the Quiet Isle. To set aside the driftwood cup is to leave the Quiet Isle and take up another role. The phrase “true words and wise” can be read in response to Meribald as they were spoken, or to Brienne’s unspoken thoughts as written on the page. The former involves a knight seeking forgiveness and the latter a knight seeking to protect the innocent. Either could apply to Sandor and they are not mutually exclusive. Both point toward Sansa.

 

There is also the future the Elder Brother predicts to Brienne as part of his counsel to set down her sword that never comes to pass.

 

“The wars are ending, and these outlaws cannot survive the peace. Randyll Tarly is hunting them from Maidenpool and Walder Frey from the Twins, and there is a new young lord in Darry, a pious man who will surely set his lands to rights.”

 

The wars are not ending, and soon both Aegon and Dany will land and Dorne will enter the fight as well, aside from the Ironborn who will begin warring under Euron even before that. Randyll Tarly will abandon Maidenpool over Margaery’s imprisonment, the young lord of Darry will abandon his wife and lands for the Faith, and it seems the Freys are the ones who cannot survive in this false peace rather than the outlaws. It is difficult enough to believe that this man made to break bones will sit idly by sipping from his sworn cup playing one of Baelor’s doves as the ravens bring more news of more Ser Quincys letting the world burn around them, much less that he would try and force that cup onto Sandor. When his reason for leaving will wash up on the Quiet Isle and when those tides will carry him back into the story are still in question, but that Sandor will set aside his driftwood cup and horse’s name in favor of true wine and set out in search of a hearthfire is not.

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Excellent analysis, Ragnorak! It's nice to see just how much you could dig up from this small amount of material.

Comparisons between these two "true non-knights" always seem incomplete when only including their similarities both regarding the knighthood theme as their relationships, but parallels and similarities are only 50% of literary analysis, and when you add contrast/counterpoint, you have the other half necessary for a literary analysis as complete as possible. Yours does highlight that these two are really more different than their surface similarities would indicate as well as that these differences run quite deep. There's so much to comment on, let's see where to begin...

On 04/05/2016 at 8:46 PM, Ragnorak said:

Two Knights in a Mirror

 

 

The missing part of Sandor’s tale is the journey to the Quiet Isle, but we have another tale in Brienne that is also a journey to the Quiet Isle that we do see. A close reading of Brienne’s chapters brings up a number of parallels, references, and contrasting material that makes it a bit of a vicarious journey for Sandor’s, at least from a literary point of view.

 

This is one instance where, I believe, the author can trust readers to fill in the blank with a mix of imagination and educated guessing, although the possibility is still up in the air for GRRM to address how Sandor arrived to the Isle once he reappears in next book. Which isn't really necessary, because we already know enough of Westerosi geography and should be used to reading between the lines in Arya's last chapter combined with Brienne's here to make a reasonable guess.

 

It's not that difficult to figure out what might have happened. For a start, the Elder Brother must've found Sandor within hours of Arya abandoning him, because he had a high fever and was too weak from blood loss to survive that day without care in a credible manner. A major clue as to the Elder Brother finding Sandor within a couple hours or so, is that he also mentions that Sandor was screaming for help, which indicates that he was conscious when he was found, so he had either not yet passed out again from fever and blood loss or was coming out of fainting.

 

There is when the Elder Brother had to take care of the wounded Hound. I'm quite sure he omitted part of the tale, because it's doubtful that giving Sandor a poultice for his wound was all he did like he told Brienne. He must've taken Sandor's armour off to bathe his body and cool it off, to combat the fever, then given him a concoction to drink, for the pain and/or the fever, and then re-bandaged his wound with a fresh poultice, probably after cauterising it and repairing the damage added with the stupid boiled wine "cure." After that, he'd have waited for Sandor's fever to break, because in that state it was too dangerous to move him. So he probably arranged for him to comfortably sleep under the tree, as the fever wouldn't have gone in a matter of hours.

Next, how to move Sandor? That's also fairly easy to figure out. The Elder Brother, as superior of the QI monastery, is their link with the outside, the one that goes in and out as needed, and so he must've been out on business, either to bring care/provisions to people needing it near the area or gone to bring necessary stuff for the monastery that they don't produce and need yet can't get because their usual source (Saltpans) is burnt. Going out on errands means he had transportation, possibly a cart. So, once Sandor's fever breaks, he could place him on the cart, tie Stranger to the side, and start moving towards the QI at a slow pace, minding the wounded man. There's the possibility also that he might have taken Sandor to a refuge nearby in order for him to recover a little more before going to the Isle. Why not? Nobody is going to bother a humble monk with an infirm person to take care of, and Sandor no longer has his armour, helm or anything identifiable. Facial scars can be covered with bandages or a hood.

If the Elder Brother didn't have a cart, the other possibility is a makeshift stretcher, like those used by military surgeons and nurses to carry the wounded out of the battlefield, made of entwined branches with a blanket thrown over. It's not complicated to make, even I can do one. And tie the stretcher to Stranger for him to pull like a sled pulled by dogs. That Stranger is a pain and wouldn't allow the Elder Brother to do anything without aiming at his ears first? True, but Master Sandor is there, and the horse would only need to smell and hear Master in order to cooperate; the warhorse is not going to behave insufferably if it's Sandor giving the orders as the Elder Brother guides him, which is another clue that he cooperated in moving to the QI willingly enough. A third possibility is that Sandor might have gone on horseback after a couple days of rest, still weak and pained, so it'd have to be a slow ride and with frequent stops to rest, take whatever medicines he was being given to drink, and change his bandages. In any of these scenarios, it'd have to have been a slow journey anyway; the QI isn't that near the spot he "died" but days away, and it'd make sense if it were during those days of travelling together that both men talked the most and that's how the Elder Brother got most of his knowledge on the Hound's life and character.

 

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The author makes it quite clear that Brienne is being compared to the Hound. Some of the comparisons are subtler, but that parallels are being drawn is quite explicit as we see in Jaime’s first POV:

 

“My name is Brienne,” she repeated, dogged as a hound.

She’s the Hound with teats, he thought.

 

And Martin even goes so far as to give Brienne Sandor’s signature line, “I am no Ser.”, when she drops her horse off in a stable.

I'm not sure it was the right choice to have Brienne share Sandor's signature line; lines that are signature lines or identity lines work within their proper context better. There are other characters who also don't know a thing and would use being told so, but "You know nothing, Jon Snow" works perfectly only for Jon Snow and in Jon Snow's context, for example. 

 

For Sandor, the context is double. The in-story one is self-explanatory: he hates knights and knightly hypocrisy, so his angry "I am no ser" retorts are as much a statement of rebellion and protest against the system as a statement of the personal philosophy that guides him in life. And in addition to that, the line fits in the string of ironies that surround Sandor's story that conspire to make him the knight for the songs but not out of the songs as you put it, because he is, in the end, a knight in every sense of the word but lacks the "ointments" on his forehead to be officially one. People do instinctively see him as a knight because of his appearance (by rank and by training, he'd have to walk round carrying himselff like a nobleman and a warrior) and his armour, and call him ser out of habit or out of respect because he's a figure of authority like knights are supposed to be. Even out of fear. If one looks closer to the scenes where Sandor utters his famous "I'm no ser" line, one will notice that he does so in determined contexts only, to make a point, and doesn't spew it right, left and centre, everywhere or at all times. It'd be exhausting to be perpetually correcting people, especially when it's the commonfolk, who address nobles with a ser or m'lord automatically all the time, and Sandor knows that.

 

Besides that, there's the out-of-story context that inspired GRRM to give this line to Sandor in the first place, which is to pay homage to the signature line by Beast in the Beauty and the Beast tale, on which I wrote long ago. The perfect literary homages are those which keep the original scene's theme or metaphor intact, and so Martin did, because there's a reason for why Beast reacts so violently when he's called "my lord" and retorts that he's no lord and that flattery won't work on him that he's kept for ASOIAF. It happens that, in the original tale by Madame de Villeneuve, the reason for Beast's "I'm no lord" reply is that the evil fairy who transformed him from prince into beast as punishment for not accepting her Littlefinger-like groping and sexual abuse (the fairy was previously in love with Beast's father, to boot), she told him to be careful about flattery and interested gallantry because the day he listened to flattery he'd be lost. And as Beast has a gorgeous castle and bottomless sources of gold and riches, anyone could overlook his beastliness, his ugliness and unpleasantness and sell their daughters or themselves to him as reasonably-prized love; but Beast needed the genuine kind and genuine acceptance or he'd be stuck in his form forever, hence the fairy's warning not to mistake faked love and faked acceptance delivered through flattery and hypocrisy. Beast had never known the genuine kind, so he's afraid he'll not know fake from true, and reacts the same way always, even when it's just respect that impels someone to call him "my lord."

 

The thematic and metaphorical value is exactly the same for Sandor. Is there anyone more immune to false honeyed words than him in ASOIAF? One would have worse chances with him than with Stannis and his horse, because at least Stannis' horse is possible to seduce as per sweet Cersei, but not even the famous Varys-Littlefinger-Tyrion scheming trinity have ever tried to bribe or flatter Sandor and Stranger has such a bad case of like master, like pet that to flatter it is suicide. So, like Beast, Sandor has become incorruptible as a direct result of the trauma that originated the Hound. But it's not just to adulation and bribery that he's resistant, because he's also untouched by the other side of the coin, disrespect. Tyrion talks of armouring oneself in what one is so people won't use it to hurt you, and that's what he's done to the point Sansa wonders that he's so nonchalant about being called dog, and we've seen he's not fussy about being addressed with condescending familiarity either. From his comment to Sansa on people's speculations about how he got his burns, we can guess he's heard unkind comments on his face, perhaps been taunted with "was it a dragon that burnt you?" type of silly questions, and mocked for his face like the Imp did once, yet he seems casual about them, he even is able to make fun and joke about his scars. See when he jokes with Beric that he's now uglier than himself, and when he asks Arya what she thinks of his face and Arya replies insultingly, but he only gives her more cheese as if he's rewarding her for that and hasn't heard anything bad. It doesn't appear people can hurt him by getting at his ruined face or by name-calling just like they can't get at him by adulation.

 

Yet that's not the case for Brienne. The in-story context for "I am no ser" doesn't work so well in her context because, for one, in her case it's true: she's not a ser and wouldn't be even if knighthood accepted women formally. There's no "knight who denies the rank" paradox here. It's a Captain Obvious moment when she tells that stableboy what's plain to see, and since the boy obviously called her that just out of habit and probably made a honest mistake seeing her dressed as a man and with knightly weaponry, no disrespect is meant. What purpose does that line serve in Brienne's scene therefore, aside showing her as unnecessarily rude? The nature of her struggle with knighthood isn't the same as Sandor's struggle, so the superficial "knight in all but name" doesn't quite fit as an explanation either. Sandor is against knighthood as an institution and rejects them, yet he is one without the title and tries to follow the code despite not belonging to the caste. Brienne is a vehement believer in knighthood as an institution and desperately wants to belong in the caste, but her gender is the obstacle, and she tries to follow the code to a fault as it exists in songs but not as it is in reality.

 

Besides, she hasn't armoured herself in what she is as a protection and isn't immune to flattery or hurt. Unlike Sandor, she has had to deal with misogyny and patriarchal notions of a female's proper place besides. On top of all that, she's an ugly woman, so her appearance is another sensitive point. For all this, she has more cause than Sandor to learn to deal with and live with social mockery and taunting and mean jokes like the bet on her virginity, and so it'd be expected that she'd have found a way to not allow mockery of her looks get her down even though the issue isn't with her but with people and society. But that's not the case. Jaime could hurt her rather easily and saw her hurt on her face also very easily, and that despite he refrained from telling her his most unkind thoughts and kept them to himself, like the "cow in silks" one. When we get her POV, we realise that Jaime hurt her more deeply with his taunting than he suspected, and that again stresses on how unprepared Brienne is for the path she wants to follow. Why does the Kingslayer's mockery matter this much? He's the Kingslayer to you, after all, so from that angle, his insults would be of the "take them as from whom they come" sort, i.e. judge them according to the source, for they don't have to matter because his opinions on you shouldn't matter when you're sure you're better than what he thinks. But Brienne is affected by external assessments of herself because she's never dealt with her own sense of inadequacy and she's left vulnerable to both flattery and disrespect, to both of which she's very responsive; what others think of her matters a lot to her even when they're not right about her. It's the internal vs external, raven vs dove duality all over again.

 

So, I can see the line as another attempt to link Sandor with Brienne textually alongside the Hound imagery that passed from him on to her during this journey, and also as an attempt to surround Brienne with more of the same "Beast" imagery Sandor has had since AGOT. But thematically, I still think it wasn't the most optimal choice.

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On 5/4/2016 at 8:47 PM, Ragnorak said:

<snip>

 

There is also the future the Elder Brother predicts to Brienne as part of his counsel to set down her sword that never comes to pass.

 

“The wars are ending, and these outlaws cannot survive the peace. Randyll Tarly is hunting them from Maidenpool and Walder Frey from the Twins, and there is a new young lord in Darry, a pious man who will surely set his lands to rights.”

 

The wars are not ending, and soon both Aegon and Dany will land and Dorne will enter the fight as well, aside from the Ironborn who will begin warring under Euron even before that. Randyll Tarly will abandon Maidenpool over Margaery’s imprisonment, the young lord of Darry will abandon his wife and lands for the Faith, and it seems the Freys are the ones who cannot survive in this false peace rather than the outlaws. It is difficult enough to believe that this man made to break bones will sit idly by sipping from his sworn cup playing one of Baelor’s doves as the ravens bring more news of more Ser Quincys letting the world burn around them, much less that he would try and force that cup onto Sandor. When his reason for leaving will wash up on the Quiet Isle and when those tides will carry him back into the story are still in question, but that Sandor will set aside his driftwood cup and horse’s name in favor of true wine and set out in search of a hearthfire is not.

 

Rag, congrats on such a comprehensive analysis of Brienne's chapters and how they provide intriguing comparison and contrast for Sandor's story. It really made for enjoyable and informative reading! The fire vs. mud imagery struck a cord, especially in how fire has been  a destructive element in Sandor's life and now we have mud providing a healing and hospitable respite for him from the war. However, as your conclusion indicates, this respite looks to only be temporary, and both Sandor and the EB are likely to have strong reasons to depart the QI and re-engage in the conflicts still impacting Westeros. Martin could have kept the lens off Sandor for a while longer; he didn't have to take us there and show us what became of the Hound, in addition to giving such tantalising clues that his fate is not in becoming a humble monk who lives out his days on the Isle in peaceful contemplation. As much as mud now symbolises his daily existence, it is the act of flinging it at Brienne and company that heralds his re-appearance to viewers and signals a man who still has a fire (of a different kind) left in him that may be cooled but cannot be extinguished. If these Brienne chapters emphasise anything at all, it is that Sandor's role in the story in general, and in Sansa's life specifically, is still very much relevant and badly needed. 

 

Edit: I hope to have the next chapter analysis for AFFC up in another week! Bear with me, kind readers :)

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Back to your analysis whilst we wait for the next, Ragnorak:

On 04/05/2016 at 8:46 PM, Ragnorak said:

One easily recognizable aspect is the Beauty and the Beast motif and its inversions. Jaime and Brienne is one such treatment and Sandor and Sansa is another, with Sansa having Beauty and the Beast themes with Joffrey and Tyrion as well. But Beauty and the Beast is a relationship story and we’re more focused on the individual’s arc in a reread. Relationships color the individual, but they are not the core theme.

 

There’s lots more talk of Beauty and the Beast in the fandom now compared to how it was a few years back, but as your bolded line highlights, the emphasis on this particular point invites a fuller elaboration that I’d like to add.

 

"Beauty and the Beast" isn't a romance nor a love story, it's a bildungsroman. A coming of age story, and from a female perspective, something infrequent in literature of the time. It's always been a coming of age story since its very origins in the myth of Cupid and Psyche, a Heroine Journey from Classical Antiquity, and when Madame de Villeneuve made it into the tale we know in the 1700s, it was still a bildungsroman. The “bridge” story between the folktale and Villeneuve’s literary fairy tale, the tale of Laidronette and the Green Serpent by Madame d’Aulnoy, is also a bildungsroman. So, to define it a romance is rather reductionist and doesn't make the tale justice. Definitions of it as merely a romance or a relationship story are focusing on one aspect at the expense of the whole, too close to the proverbial missing the wood for the trees.

 

It happens that the perception of B&B as "a romance" is posterior to the original and comes from Madame de Beaumont and that is the version popularised by Disney as well as the version told in Cocteau's film that GRRM loves. Beaumont summed up the original tale by Villeneuve into a few pages, and as a result of that huge summation, she got rid of many parts and turned it into a romance, a very simple and very archetypal one, because by eliminating a lot of the original plot and elements, she focused on the romance between Beast and Beauty above all else that was there in the story also, and unfortunately hers is the version that has given the tale its reputation as a mere romance that wasn't supposed to be the initial message. Beaumont had an agenda with her version of the tale to educate well-to-do girls about arranged marriages, which shows in her version. So, when you speak of this tale in relation to "sexual awakening" and "female choice," you could hardly support that interpretation with her version, you'd have to look at the original by Villeneuve, or even the one by d’Aulnoy to back it. Much of the criticism the B&B tale has received from feminist thinkers has to do with precisely this ideological agenda by Beaumont as well.

 

As the original goes, the romance is just part of the plot because sexuality and sexual maturation are part of normal growing up, but it is not the plot itself. Beauty’s and Beast’s love story isn’t even the only one in the tale, as there are two more: the one between Beauty’s real parents, an Aragorn/Arwen-like liaison in which her mother gets a Choice of Lúthien resolution imposed on her and renounces fairyhood for love, and the other between Beast’s parents, a Littlefinger-Catelyn-Brandon type of triangular mess in which the evil fairy falls in love with a king and when she’s given a little prince to protect and raise in hiding, she ends up replaying her twisted attraction to the king on the boy, fondling him—uncomfortable to read, and toned down with euphemisms—and when he grows up into a good-looking young man, she demands her due, asking him to become her husband, is rejected and revenges herself by turning him into a hideous beast. The focus on Beauty and Beast's relationship here comes in the form of it being the one that happens in real time, the one that we see start and develop slowly, and it serves as the “scaffold” or framework to support and build the plot and the themes on, like the skeleton for the body if you will, and the unifying thread for the themes in development in the storytelling, which are somewhere in the vicinity of a half a dozen to seventeen major themes depending on which scholar you ask, and that’s why it comes together at the end, when all the growing up and recovery is done and completed.

 

It works the same way for Sandor and Sansa: their relationship is important to their arc, but this relationship is not their core story. Their stories are not all about their relationship but instead go beyond their relationship. One of the things that make GRRM’s writing of this so strong is precisely this very thing, that neither her nor him work as co-dependent or accessories to each other but each has their own arcs separated from the one they share. And they also absorb the other love/obsession storylines from the Beauty and the Beast tale into their own, for Sansa is getting Beast’s parental plotline with Littlefinger, and if you squint a wee bit perhaps you can argue for Sandor getting Beauty’s parental plotline with his giving up everything he ever had/knew in the world to pursue a new life in the North, although a similar kind is also a possible choice for Sansa later ahead. It's also the presence of separate full arcs of their own that single them out within the larger ASOIAF story, for in traditional romances neither the hero nor the heroine have usually any stories of their own save for the story of their love, which is all by itself the whole “story.” And that’s exactly what Beaumont & Disney achieved: neither Beauty nor Beast have any story of their own in this version, it’s all just their romance, and it's poorer thematically and storytelling-wise. Therein lies the storytelling superiority of Villeneuve’s tale; which although a bit long and in need of some major editing and despite sporting storytelling choices that are frankly objectionable, especially by the end, is literarily a richer story and with more depth than the Beaumont/Disney one.

 

As ASOIAF pairings go, Sandor/Sansa is closer to a B&B tale retelling and Jaime/Brienne is instead a B&B archetype. There are countless B&B variations, mash-ups and subversions, and all can be loosely divided into two kinds: B&B tale/retelling and B&B archetype. The difference between both is that the B&B stories that are B&B tales/retellings follow the plot of the tale or use all the major elements, and archetypes refer to the ugly-beautiful romantic pairing motif, that is: it's the members of the couple themselves. And in ASOIAF only Sandor/Sansa are the pairing that follows the tale itself, it has all its key elements, including the major one for Beast, being the victim of a horrendous injustice that’s the cause of his “beastliness” (his burning for Sandor, sexual abuse for Beast) and, more importantly, it is encased within a feminine bildungsroman because it’s centred on Sansa's growth, whom we see maturing physically, mentally and sexually on page in present time from the first book onwards. Like the original heroine, she's the one telling almost all their shared story as well. Jaime/Brienne don't have all that, some key elements of the tale are missing in their arc, and there's no coming of age narrative going on either, because Brienne’s age is past the mark and because of the late introduction of their relationship midway through the overall story that leaves less room to develop it more; both tell their sides, both are already grown up and so their relationship follows a traditional romance more than a B&B one and besides they have subplot elements that are foreign to the tale. Theirs qualifies as a B&B romance because they fall within the archetype. A B&B archetype is any pairing of beautiful/ugly or normal/disfigured-beastly, and may or mayn't follow the plot of the tale, may or mayn't take elements from the tale, etc. In fact, B&B archetypes can be anything in terms of plot or genre: parody, comedy, tragedy, drama, tragicomedy, adventure, mystery; and can have any sort of ending: happily ever after, happy for now, tragic, bittersweet, married, separated, dead . . . Practically anything, because they’re not constrained by following the plot beats of the story and so writers have complete freedom to do anything and write whatever they fancy. That's how there are B&B romances that end with Beauty married to someone else or Beast dead, for example, and they’re no less B&B for that. The Beauty and the Beast TV show GRRM wrote for is one such case, it had the Beauty figure die tragically, and the plot was playing all along with the archetype for the Vincent/Catherine relationship, not the tale’s plot itself.

 

With B&B tale retellings, there's a bit less freedom for tweaking and twisting the plot because a writer is using content and themes from the original and so has to work closer to the bildungsroman structure. Twists and subversions are possible and perfectly doable in this case as well, but the writer has to mind the overall themes much more and that’s a restriction of sorts that works the same way literary genre rules work. And for Sandor and Sansa, in addition to adhering to the major milestones of the B&B tale, GRRM also has to mind the self-imposed restrictions of five books of already told plotlines that demand coherence and consistency in future developments. I’ve sometimes wondered if, aside his obvious lifelong love for the tale, the freedom to play with the B&B theme with Jaime/Brienne without the story constraints and plot handicaps that Sandor/Sansa have might have been another enticement for GRRM to insert a second B&B story in ASOIAF, exploring the theme from other angles and with other settings and different outcomes, in a way similar to how he introduced other knighthood and redemption themes after starting with Sandor first.

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Very interesting analysis, Milday.

 

Aside from Sandor, Sansa has a Beauty and the Beast dynamic with Joffrey, Tyrion and Littlefinger. Martin repeatedly plays with a few key aspects of the tale. There is the beauty or beastly visage of the physical appearance and the beauty or beastly aspects of a character’s inner self. Then there is the duality of the beastly aspect. On one hand we are treated to men who are beasts in human skin as the Elder Brother calls them, and on the other we have an admirable identification with beastly totems that coincide with the sigils of Houses. In Sansa’s own case the direwolf sigil goes a step further in the beastly direction with her being an actual warg.

 

These aspects are played with in each in-story tale. Joffrey is outwardly handsome but inwardly a beast in human skin. Tyrion has a beastly appearance, but is written with a deliberate sympathy that is designed to evoke the idea of an inner beauty. Littlefinger is a supposedly handsome man, but one with an inner beast as ugly as Joffrey’s. Sandor knows all three of them, but there have only been on page interactions between Sandor and the first two. Despite living at Court with Littlefinger for years and numerous opportunities for them to have interacted on the page, GRRM seems to have deliberately deprived us of any exchanges between Littlefinger and Sandor. We don’t even get any historical exchanges, rumors, or references to off the page encounters between the two.

 

Sansa’s rite of passage starts with Joffrey and moves to Tyrion, both of whom have a substantial history with Sandor. It then moves on to Littlefinger who ought to have a substantial history with Sandor except we never see or hear about it. If Littlefinger and Sandor encounter each other, any exchange on the page will be as if it were the first they had. This seems a curious point from a literary perspective. Sansa is evolving through Beauty and the Beast archetypal inversions under the greater shadow of the Sansa and Sandor Beauty and the Beast tale and Sandor is connected to all three of them but his connection to Sansa’s final coming of age beast has been intentionally obfuscated.

 

The animal aspects of the beasts are also quite curious. Most of the beasts are Lannisters (Joffrey, Tyrion, Jaime) and their beastly sigil is lion. The lion at Casterly Rock is caged and locked in the bowels of the castle. It is a possession and a thing that is feared by those claiming it as their totem.

 

The dwarf tore a loaf of bread in half. “And you had best be careful what you say of my family, magister. Kinslayer or no, I am a lion still.”

That seemed to amuse the lord of cheese no end. He slapped a meaty thigh and said, “You Westerosi are all the same. You sew some beast upon a scrap of silk, and suddenly you are all lions or dragons or eagles. I can take you to a real lion, my little friend. The prince keeps a pride in his menagerie. Would you like to share a cage with them?

The lords of the Seven Kingdoms did make rather much of their sigils, Tyrion had to admit. “Very well,” he conceded. “A Lannister is not a lion. Yet I am still my father’s son, and Jaime and Cersei are mine to kill.”

 

 

Cersei paced her cell, restless as the caged lions that had lived in the bowels of Casterly Rock when she was a girl, a legacy of her grandfather’s time. She and Jaime used to dare each other to climb into their cage, and once she worked up enough courage to slip her hand between two bars and touch one of the great tawny beasts. She was always bolder than her brother. The lion had turned his head to stare at her with huge golden eyes. Then he licked her fingers. His tongue was as rough as a rasp, but even so she would not pull her hand back, not until Jaime took her by the shoulders and yanked her away from the cage.

“Your turn,” she told him afterward. “Pull his mane, I dare you.” He never did. I should have had the sword, not him.

 

Both Sandor and Sansa have an affinity with their totemic sigils. The animals they identify with are allies and positive figures that are not feared by those identifying with them. In Sandor’s case it is largely because he identifies with a domesticated beast and in Sansa’s case there is the magical connection with her having literally internalized her totemic beast according to the information provided by Varymyr Six Skins. Of all the Beauty and the Beast inversions surrounding Sansa, only she and Sandor have a positive association with actual beasts.

 

Another facet from the tale that shows up is the wealth and castle. All of the beasts except Sandor are focused on obtaining a castle. Joffrey is obsessed with the Iron Throne, Tyrion’s fixation is forever on Casterly Rock, and Littlefinger seems just as obsessed with finding a castle.

 

“And there it stands, miserable as it is. My ancestral home. It has no name, I fear. A great lord’s seat ought to have a name, wouldn’t you agree? Winterfell, the Eyrie, Riverrun, those are castles.

 

Lord of Harrenhal now, that has a sweet ring to it, but what was I before? Lord of Sheepshit and Master of the Drearfort? It lacks a certain something.” His grey-green eyes regarded her innocently. “You look distraught. Did you think we were making for Winterfell, sweetling?

 

These three beasts hunger for a castle, but not for a home. The castle is a trapping of power just as the wealth associated with it is. They all seek an external validation of the self through the elements that represent the Beast’s cursed state. In fact their desired end states are the Beast’s cursed existence with Tyrion and Littlefinger also seeking to possess a Beauty as an object having failed with their original Beautys in the past. In contrast both Sandor and Sansa very much want a home, but both emotionally reject the wealth and castle existence that these other beasts crave. Sandor could have tried to kill Gregor at the Hand’s Tourney to become the heir to House Clegane, but his holding back shows the castle is not his true desire. Sansa quite clearly expresses the desire to be loved for herself and not her claim. So even through the Beauty and the Beast lens it still returns to the choice of the hearthfire.

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You've got some ideas on Beauty & the Beast that I'd not considered before, Ragnorak. Those I'll revisit another day.

On 22/05/2016 at 0:49 AM, Ragnorak said:

Despite living at Court with Littlefinger for years and numerous opportunities for them to have interacted on the page, GRRM seems to have deliberately deprived us of any exchanges between Littlefinger and Sandor. We don’t even get any historical exchanges, rumors, or references to off the page encounters between the two.

 

 

 

Yes, this caught my eye as well, and we did an extensive mini-project dedicated to the Littlefinger/Sandor indirect rivalry for the PtP. The conclusions on to the reasons for this can be read here.

 

What'd have interested me the most is to know what exactly Sandor thinks of Littlefinger, which is sadly missing in the books. Brashcandy has this idea that we could indirectly surmise what his thoughts on the Mockingbird are from what he told Sansa in ACOK at the end of the Serpentine sequence, when he tells her that “they’re all liars here… and every one better than you.” If I recall correctly, the reasoning goes like this:

They’re all liars here.

“Here” is the court at King’s Landing.

As a member of the Council, Littlefinger lives at court.

Ergo, Sandor is indirectly calling Littlefinger a liar.

 

This syllogism exercise is fun when put like that, but it does make sense. And fits with Sandor’s perception skills, because he spots fakes like hounds spot scents, so he’d be aware of Baelish’s double-faced nature. Following this, we also have another indirect condemnation of Baelish in his words to Arya saying he “hates liars” and “gutless frauds.” Might sound curious given that it was Sandor the one who told Sansa to lie and give Joffrey what he wanted, in other words, he was her original tutor for the “lies and Arbor gold” method that’s credited to Littlefinger, but… we already covered this in the reread, it’s worth repeating there’s a distinction that makes all the difference: the lying Sandor told Sansa to resort to was of the Ned sort, the sort he referred to as “the lies we tell for love” and told Arya were “not without honour,” because it’s for protection and survival whereas Baelish’s school of lying is self-serving and for personal profit at the expense of others.

 

As for Baelish’s thoughts on Sandor, we do have more to infer them as per his comments at the Hand’s Tourney about the Hound not biting the hand that fed him, and that comment with other passing remarks to Ned on Sandor and Cersei give a clear idea of what Littlefinger thinks of Sandor. He’s essentially written the Hound off as just a Lannister lackey with no initiative of his own and who’ll do anything his lieges say unquestioningly, and he seems to still stick to that notion despite his own eyes proving that’s not the case when Sandor unashamedly knocks Jaime into the dust during the jousting, not just defeating him but also humiliating him and making him the laughingstock of the event. And did Sandor suffer the consequences of doing this to his superiors' brother and son? No. And he wouldn’t have in any case, plus Jaime is too proud of his own prowess and would’ve been offended if anyone let him win only because he’s a Lannister, which is exactly what Littlefinger was saying Sandor would do.

 

Next time Littlefinger comments on the Hound, it’s when he tells Ned that Sandor wouldn’t thank him for attainting Gregor and flippantly says he wished he were a fly in the wall to hear how Cersei would tell her loyal dog about that. Again, that also demonstrates a misreading of the Hound’s character by Littlefinger. He starts by parroting what everyone in court knows: Sandor hates Gregor; no secret there, even Ned knows already. Then he goes on to say Sandor wants to be the one to off Gregor and would resent anyone else doing it… This comes off as short-sighted when you consider Littlefinger saw with his own eyes how Sandor let pass a golden opportunity to kill Gregor with the law and public and royal support on his side, because who in the Seven Kingdoms would blame Sandor for killing the Mountain in legitimate defence of Loras, preventing a murder and thus avoiding the diplomatic crisis for Robert and for Ned and for Tywin that would result from a Lannister bannerman killing the son of a Great House? Littlefinger’s reaction is cynical, and if one were to want to speculate a bit we could even wonder if he said this out of spite because Sandor’s action prevented chaos that’d have benefitted Littlefinger, who was trying to stir the pot and cause a confrontation between the Great Houses. This passage also highlights one more thing: that Littlefinger doesn’t seem to have bothered to investigate why the Cleganes hate each other so much, curious oversight considering his modus operandi is to exploit family conflict, and doesn’t seem to have considered the justice angle as explanation for Sandor’s otherwise exceptional restraint. Eddard, on the contrary, has actually wondered about this, although he doesn’t pursue the topic further; he instinctively puts two and two together in his inner thoughts and hits the mark unknowingly when he mentions Sandor’s burning, his father’s and sister’s deaths and the boy fleeing home in the same sentence where he muses over Gregor’s terrible reputation. If Ned had thought this through a bit more, he might have realised Sandor doesn’t kill Gregor because this is beyond purely vengeance or Gregor would be dead already.

 

It’s the lack of justice what fuelled Sandor’s hate, that his brother wasn’t punished but was rewarded instead. And lack of justice, seeing the culprits prosper, leads to vengeful feelings that take over.

 

You once mentioned how Bruce Wayne never gets closure for the murders of Thomas and Martha, his parents, killed by an unknown common street thief for a pearl necklace, and it’s this grief and anger at the injustice of it all, the lack of punishment for the murderer, whose face remains forever unknown, what impels him to make a promise to the memory of Mr and Mrs Wayne to fight to rid the city of crime, thus becoming Batman. And you also mentioned how the first film adaptation messed up badly with this by making the mysterious thief be Jack Napier, a.k.a. the Joker, Bruce's arch-nemesis, and by finding and punishing the Joker, Bruce gets a closure of sorts. He punishes his parents’s killer, Thomas and Martha can now rest in peace, and Bruce experiences a measure of satisfaction from taking justice in his own hands, all of which misses the narrative purpose of the murder of the Waynes and the psychological consequences for their son.

 

For Sandor, the principle works the same way: he never gets closure so long as justice is denied and Gregor lives and prospers. Unlike Bruce, he knows full well the face of the murderer and it’s his own brother, and so closure was within hand’s reach had Gregor been punished for his first crime, it’d have allowed Sandor to heal from the burning trauma. Instead, privileges and rewards rained upon Gregor’s head: knighting by Rhaegar, a rare honour even for nobles higher-ranking than the Cleganes, becoming a close bannerman to their overlord, which means more gold and privilege heaped on him for doing Tywin’s dirty work. That alone is bad enough already, but then Gregor became head of House Clegane through kinslaying, the one crime up there with guest right violation in the list of ultimately unforgivable sins in Westeros, and yet what do the people do? Do they punish the kinslayer Gregor? No, he keeps on living, enjoying the family wealth, and even can marry several times. Gregor has the lands, the home and the wife that Sandor only wishes he could have. Sure, his brother is a brute and destroys everything he touches, including his wives, but that’s not the point. The point is that the kinslayer brother has everything and he victimised brother has to scratch his way to the top alone and unavenged. And what’s more, when Gregor murders the Targaryen heir, who’d be the de jure king upon Rhaegar and Aerys’ deaths, he’s pardoned by Robert through the blanket pardon to House Lannister, which is again another reward for a crime quite close to kingslaying. Wasn’t Jaime forever branded as a kingslayer and is still haunted by the ghost of Rhaegar for that sort of act? And didn’t the Elder Brother say that kinslaying is so horrendous it doesn’t bear thinking of? Yet, here you have Gregor, a kinslayer and a royal baby slayer, prospering fine and well, with no godly punishment in sight. No wonder Sandor thinks that there are no gods.

 

It’s seeing all this what keeps the wound in the Hound’s soul fresh and bleeding for decades the same way the anonymity and non-punishment of the pearl-robber keeps Bruce from achieving closure. For someone who’s come to know more of Sandor’s inner workings well, the Elder Brother doesn’t seem to fully grasp this aspect, because he’s scandalised by the fact that Sandor would want to kill his brother, but you don’t hear a word on the understandability or validity of the cause and you don’t hear either any word of commendation for Sandor being able to never stoop to his brother’s level, for living all those years looking into the abyss and yet managing not to fall into it and join his brother in the gutter. Like Bruce, the Hound cannot do anything because the monster is protected as the other man cannot because the monster is faceless, and so vengeance might look like the alternative resolution, and resisting giving in to this desire becomes part of their internal conflict. So they have to find some form of an outlet for this lack of closure and its effects: one ends up embracing his grandfather as a role model, going back to the origins before things went foul with his father and his brother deviating from those ideals, and the other decides to fight crime and thus prevent others from experiencing the same pain. Moreover, the Elder Brother talked of Oberyn taking even the right to retribution from Sandor, but Gregor’s death wasn’t earthly justice nor some divine retribution as much as a consequence of Lannister inside struggles and Oberyn’s cheating with poison, therefore it mightn’t have brought any closure to Sandor either. It was to his benefit that he’d abandoned the vengeance path whilst Gregor still lived and can now pursue closure on his own terms regardless of what befalls his brother.

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The animal aspects of the beasts are also quite curious. Most of the beasts are Lannisters (Joffrey, Tyrion, Jaime) and their beastly sigil is lion. The lion at Casterly Rock is caged and locked in the bowels of the castle. It is a possession and a thing that is feared by those claiming it as their totem.

 

That all the “beast” figures in the Beauty & Beast stories are Lannisters is an intriguing coincidence I’d not delved deeper into. If you think about it, Sandor also counts as a Lannister beast by virtue of serving them and growing up with Tywin’s children, and also because the origins of the Hound is linked to his lieges. Of the Lannisters by blood that fit as Beast figures, Tyrion is the one that comes closest to the essence of the archetype, not only because he had the potential for positive transformation before the confluence of circumstances, a messed-up family and his own foibles sent him rolling downhill the opposite side but also because his “origin story,” so to speak, lies alongside the tale’s Beast thematically.

 

One of my biggest objections to the Disney retelling of “Beauty and the Beast” is that they, in typical Hollywood fashion, ruined Beast’s origin story and its metaphor whilst at the same time pretending the rest of the tale still worked fine and unaffected the same as in the original fairy tale. I mentioned above that in Villeneuve’s original, Beast becomes so due to an injustice, he’s the victim of a sexual predator and lives caged in a castle and punished with monstrosity for rejecting his groomer, but in the Disney animated film the prince is transformed into Beast because he treated an old woman poorly, and this old woman who happened to be a fairy, transformed him into a horrific beast as punishment. In other words, the poor boy prince that had to endure a lecherous fairy is turned by Disney Studios into a haughty royal jerk who slams the doorin a poor old woman's face and thus is deservedly punished for his superficiality. It’s a “let’s teach this idiot a lesson not to judge people by their appearances” scenario, that doesn’t exist in and is alien to the original tale, and so they made the victim of sexual grooming into someone who brought his own disgrace on himself due to his shallowness. Nowadays this kind of victim-blaming and victim-negation raises eyebrows, but not many call Disney out on this, perhaps because the original tale is largely forgotten compared to the predominance of the film; and to see arguments that there are Sandor/Sansa endgame clues in the show through coincidences with Disney’s film is quite curious to say the least, and more so considering that the show shares with Disney the mishandling of sexual victimisation but with the Beauty storyline.

 

I figure Martin knows the original tale perfectly, and it shows in his choice for best depiction: his favourite Beauty and the Beast isn’t Disney’s but Jean Cocteau’s version. The French film also has its own original content as any retelling would but has been more faithful to the essential themes and metaphors. Regarding the Beast’s origin story, Cocteau changed the fairy’s reasons but not the action: the punishment is maintained as still undeserved, unfair and draconian, which is the important element so the rest still works the same thematically. That’s what Disney could’ve done, change the origins if they must but keep the essence. Or, since the film was meant for all ages, they could’ve done like Madame de Beaumont, on whose summed-up version they based the film (largely): Beaumont discreetly mentioned what had happened when Beast tells Beauty why he is like that, and left out the dirty-laundry details.

 

So that’d be the literary reason for why Tyrion could’ve been a Beast figure in the traditional mould: the external and internal components are there. As much as he deludes himself with his everyone hates me because I’m a dwarf mantra, there’s a basis in reality for this. He was born a deformed dwarf, thus having the external component already set up, but Lannister gold and privilege could’ve brought him a fairly contented life and he’d have grown up well-adjusted as this gold and privilege would’ve sheltered him from social rejection and mockery for the most part, so he’d have learnt to live without defining himself as a dwarf. If not for Tywin. Tyrion is very intelligent, and any loving father would’ve done his best to encourage that, for his mind could be a great asset to the House, teach him, train him, show him he can be better than most men, that dwarfism is a disgrace, but that’s on the gods, etc. Instead, Tywin grooms the child to never think of himself as anything but a dwarf, a monster, going as far as crushing others’ efforts to have Tyrion see he is more than just a dwarf. Aunt Genna doesn’t give a fig that Tyrion’s a dwarf? Cease to speak to her for half a year. Uncle Gerion doesn’t care that Tyrion’s a dwarf and applauds his antics? Humiliate the kid publicly to counter his uncle’s praise of his innocent fun. Brother Jaime loves him despite his deformity? Poison their brotherly love by making Jaime be complicit in Tysha’s misfortune. With such a father, it’s understandable that Tyrion is unable to take the dwarfism lens off his eyes to look at everything differently and can never think of himself outside the frame of his deformity. He was created a Beast, not just born one, and the “evil fairy” stand-in responsible for his inner beastliness was Tywin.

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  • 2 months later...

Speaking of how there's some untapped potential in terms of Sandor's perspective on the world around him, it's fun to think about how he would have viewed the Tyrell's rise in Kingslanding. Sandor's the one with the "wrap a sword in pretty cloth and it'll kill you just the same" line, which is one of the best analyses of chivalry in the series, and he'd probably uunderstand exactly why the Tyrells would be suspects in Joffrey's murder.

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Thank you, Houndbird, nice to hear from you. And welcome to the reread, Duranaparthur.

23 hours ago, Duranaparthur said:

Speaking of how there's some untapped potential in terms of Sandor's perspective on the world around him, it's fun to think about how he would have viewed the Tyrell's rise in Kingslanding. Sandor's the one with the "wrap a sword in pretty cloth and it'll kill you just the same" line, which is one of the best analyses of chivalry in the series, and he'd probably uunderstand exactly why the Tyrells would be suspects in Joffrey's murder.

An interesting angle to ponder on. I'd say that, despite GRRM depriving us of Sandor’s POV that’d allow us to know what exactly his thoughts are, we’re not lacking in clues from the text that are sufficient to surmise what he’d think of the Tyrells. One of these clues is more or less direct, and two are by juxtaposition.

 

Sandor knows first-hand that at least one Tyrell is dishonest for a certainty: Loras. And the precise circumstance in which he’d have found out is tied to knighthood, Sandor’s sore spot. I’m referring to the Hand’s Tourney, when Loras cheated with a mare in heat to win over Gregor. If Renly and Littlefinger were able to guess what Tyrell’s dirty trick had been from afar in the stands, then it’s a no-brainer that Sandor would’ve known as well from his closer position. Why not? He’s extremely observant; he noticed a small detail such as that Ser Hugh of the Vale’s gorget was ill-adjusted; he noticed that Jaime had tried the saddle-swerve trick to unseat him during their tilt; he noticed quicker than everyone else that Gregor intended to murder Loras and reacted. Besides, he’s no newcomer to tourneys, so it’s a given that he knows all the tricks under the sun related to horsemanship and weaponry. From this perspective, that he was laughing his head off at Gregor’s fall can also be seen as that he’s finding it quite amusing that his big brother should be defeated by unclean methods by a “true knight,” considering he believes Gregor was unjustly rewarded with knighthood and its honours. So, from this he definitely knows Loras Tyrell isn’t spotless—he who cheats at highly-competitive and highly-prized sports will cheat at other things in life—yet he jumped in to save his life, so that would hint despite knowing about the cheating he wouldn’t consider it deserved his brutal killing.

 

The first of the indirect clues comes from what he told Sansa in the Serpentine steps scene: “They're all liars here . . . and every one better than you.” And that “here” encompasses the entire population of the Red Keep, all the courtiers, whom Sandor is convinced are frauds and with reason since court politics is the realm of lies and Arbor gold. Juxtaposing those words to a hypothetical meeting of the Hound with the Tyrells, it does look evident that he’d smell the roses and not find their scent very . . . rose-y, let’s say. If Loras cheats at something as grand as the Hand’s Tourney, building up a reputation as a great knight by means of cheating to win the big events (think of what doping and forbidden tricks can do to the reputations of Olympic champions), then why not extend it to the rest of the clan? Honest behaviour is learnt at home, with your family, and Sandor knows full well how screwed-up family dynamics and dynastic ambitions can do for the members of a family. He has his own, and his adoptive pride of lions, as good examples of the price and consequences of unbound familial ambition. I can’t imagine why he wouldn't be able to peg every Tyrell rose’s hidden thorn down to a T.

 

And, finally, we have Dontos’ words to Sansa. In this reread, we’ve alluded a number of times to the False Florian vs Real Florian imagery, how Sandor is symbolically the fool-knight of songs he rails so much against whereas Dontos is the actual fool-knight that stands in as his contrasting doppelgänger. When Sansa tells Ser Dontos that she no longer needs his “rescuing” because she’ll go to Highgarden to marry Willas, the drunk ex-knight is alarmed and tells her to have a care because “these Tyrells are only Lannisters with flowers.” So! And who knows the Lannister bunch better, much better than Dontos ever could? Sandor Clegane. Oh, probably the Lannisters are his measuring yardstick for screwed-upness in families of the nobility, for all we know. We can imagine his judgment of the Tyrells wouldn’t be any kinder than Dontos’ was, just phrased more . . . um, colourfully, and with the difference that Sandor would actually mean whatever he said, and not have hidden motivations such as being bribed by someone else to dupe Sansa.  

 

In sum, he wouldn’t have had any difficulty in seeing through the thick bushes to the Tyrells’ true selves. How that’d play out had he stayed in court is one too wildly speculative road for me to venture walking in. All I can say is that I’m not even sure Joffrey could’ve been poisoned as easily as he was, when I remember that Sandor was able to guess Sansa’s intentions to push him from the castle’s battlements before she could even reach the king, so who’s to say what he’d have noticed at the banquet? And it’s for one good reason that even Tyrion wanted Joff’s dog to be somewhere else before he could use him or Tommen in his plans that isn't just because he'd tell Cersei.  Ragnorak elaborated earlier here on his idea that the Hound’s departure is the trumpet call heralding the fall of House Lannister, and considering that his charge Joff’s death functions as a sort of “beginning of the end” for the House in the sense of pushing downhill the snowball that’ll soon bury their patriarch Tywin, one could argue that Sandor’s huge potential as a spanner to be thrown into the rose-adorned wheelworks made his absence narratively necessary for the Tyrells’ rise to power to evolve the way it happened.

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I also think that Sansa's experience with both the Hound kind of prepared her for the Tyrell's style and chivalric cover, and you can see her applying his lessons even more around them, though not with 100% effectiveness. She's definitely cautious around them, and not just out of a fear of the Lannisters; she's probably realized that if a knight is a pretty cloth wrapped around a sword, there's no cloth prettier than Tyrell green, and there's no sword bigger than the 100 thousand bannermen back No that cloth up.

And if Clegane noted anything different about the Tyrells, it would probably be how much better they are at throwing on knightly masks for the same ambition the Lannisters have had. The duplicity of Westerlands knighthood is kind of open and obvious, considering Tywin's MO, but he might get even more dark laughter out of seeing the Tyrell's bannermen maintain their cover and reap the rewards of such. Heck, I could kind of see Sandor pointing them out specifically to Sansa as being perfect liars.

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10 hours ago, Duranaparthur said:

And if Clegane noted anything different about the Tyrells, it would probably be how much better they are at throwing on knightly masks for the same ambition the Lannisters have had.

Tyrells are striving for power that Lannisters already have, so they try to make the best impression. I bet Tywin was the sweetest person in Westeros dealing with Robbie B during and after the rebellion. I guess Sandor would loath Loras Tyrell in the KG and jape about Sansa's fascination of him.

I hope we will see Sandor Clegane's POVs in the future book, if he return (nad I'm almost sure he will) that will reflect his inner changes after the QI therapy.

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Welcome to the reread, Ashes of Westeros. It's always nice to see new people share their opinion here.

 

On 24/08/2016 at 7:43 AM, Ashes Of Westeros said:

Tyrells are striving for power that Lannisters already have, so they try to make the best impression. I bet Tywin was the sweetest person in Westeros dealing with Robbie B during and after the rebellion. I guess Sandor would loath Loras Tyrell in the KG and jape about Sansa's fascination of him.

 

That much is true. Also, GRRM has written the Reach to be the cradle of chivalric culture and the amour courtois tradition in Westeros, much like the region of Languedoc/Aquitaine was the place where courtly love and troubadours thrived during the Middle Ages. Knights from the Reach and their nobles in general would be more inclined to adhere to chivalric pageantry and customs than the rest of Southron kingdoms.

 

We know the Hound was aware that Sansa tended to become enamoured of gallant knights, so it’s possible he would know of her infatuation with Loras if he witnessed that rose he gave her at the Hand’s Tourney; and probably also knew she favoured Arys Oakheart a bit over the other Kingsguard because he would courteously give her his arm to escort her round the Red Keep like a knight escorting a lady rather than a captor herding a captive and he’d hit her less brutally. It’s not inconceivable that Sandor might've known Loras was gay, because that doesn’t seem to have been that big a secret at court, going by Tyrion’s teasing and Jaime’s taunt to Loras on his return to King’s Landing about finding holes that Renly wouldn’t. I operate under the assumption that whatever knowledge Jaime possesses on the court and the nobles is also available to Sandor, because both live, work and move in exactly the same Baratheon-Lannister circles. Ergo, all Jaime knows, Sandor knows as well, bar some stuff he wouldn’t be present at to hear.

 

But teasing Sansa about her crush? It’s interesting that Sandor never singles out anyone in particular whenever he mocks her love for pretty knights; he only mentions unspecified knights and her infatuation with them in a general manner whenever they have their disputes over knighthood, like that one atop Maegor’s Holdfast. The only man Sandor singles out to mock her about is Joffrey. Clearly because he knows Joff since he was born, knows his true nature, his cruel propensities, and also because she’s betrothed to him and expected to spend her entire life with him as his queen, so it’s to her benefit to open her eyes and see the truth there and then. Harmless crushes that don’t go anywhere wouldn’t give him any reason to tease her about them specifically, but potential risks would.

 

On 24/08/2016 at 7:43 AM, Ashes Of Westeros said:

I hope we will see Sandor Clegane's POVs in the future book, if he return (nad I'm almost sure he will) that will reflect his inner changes after the QI therapy.

 

We’re not likely to get a Sandor POV this late in the story, sadly. But a POV isn't eseential to see what changes are taking place since he’s arrived to the QI. That’s the entire purpose of the Brienne chapter in AFFC, not just for letting us know Sandor is alive; when one pays attention, it's not hard to see what has changed and what has remained the same regarding his character. There’s the Elder Brother’s and Narbert’s testimonies, there’s Stranger’s ongoing one-horse war with the brothers, there’s showing us Sandor as a gravedigger, with all the symbolism it carries, etc., etc.

 

One little detail that gets overlooked in favour of the more obvious clues I just mentioned, and that is my favourite little snippet in the QI sequence, is this:

 

By the time the readings were completed, the last of the food had been cleared away by the novices whose task it was to serve. Most were boys near Podrick’s age, or younger, but there were grown men as well, amongst them the big gravedigger they had encountered on the hill, who walked with the awkward lurching gait of one half-crippled.

 

The Hound has been raised by the Lannisters since boyhood, and Lannister + humble = oxymoron, plus the family have indulged Sandor’s ways, so although arrogance isn’t amongst his traits he is definitely cocky and irreverent in behaviour, accustomed to speaking on equal footing to people higher and lower in social status. That passage shows Sandor is being taught a lesson in humility at the Quiet Isle that he probably never got before: he’s serving and clearing the table for mere monks, people who are below him in status.

 

Now, bear in mind two things: Sandor is a noble, and as such never has done any menial labour; at his family’s castle, there’d be servants for everything, same at Casterly Rock. Secondly, he doesn’t shirk manual work at all, just recall what he was doing at that village in the Vale, but all manual labour he’s done is part of what noble children learn to do when training for a career in the feudal military or as part of training to become knights: as squires, boys have to do stuff like horse grooming and shovelling manure at the stables, polish boots, mend tunics, surcoats and cloaks, learn to shave and cut Ser’s hair, clean and polish armour and weaponry, sometimes even do the laundry, especially during campaigns when servants aren’t always at hand. As pages, they also have to serve wine and food at their lord’s table, help him dress, go on errands, and so on. They do a lot of tasks that are usually a servant’s responsibility, like apprentices learn a trade. And when they begin swordfighting and tactics instruction, more heavy manual labour piles up.

 

Since Sandor left his masters, he’s been engaging in manual labour out of necessity, but also as an imposition by circumstances and people he finds. And it’s quite interesting that such manual labour is framed positively for his character evolution, as necessary lessons even. Let’s start with the first time: At the Vale village, he was building a wooden wall encircling it for protection from the Clans, that’s something he’d have learnt during his knightly education, but we don’t know if he ever built one with his own hands before. The imagery here is that he’s for probably the first time using knowledge acquired from the “killing school” of knighthood for the benefit of the civilian population, and he does it in person. There’s Jaime for contrast, who also knows how such a protective wall should be built to protect a camp, but never engages in manual labour himself, just gives the order to his soldiers thinking unironically that he’s sticking to the Arthur Dayne philosophy.

 

Then there’s the gravedigging. This we can be sure Sandor has never done before. Burying the dead from battles is a job for the rank and file, for common soldiers or camp-followers and scavengers searching for bits of armour and clothes, not for knights and definitely not for nobles. Besides the symbolical value of Sandor being made to bury the dead when he used to argue that he was the butcher and teaching him the consequences of that past attitude, there’s the underlying idea that Sandor has accepted to be humbled and accepted to perform the humblest of tasks at the monastery.

 

That he's serving at the table stands out as the best example to me. Food serving as well as the position one's sitting in at a table are matters of honour in the three Abrahamic religions as well as in chivalric culture. There's the infamous dispute amongst Jesus' disciples over precedence at the Last Supper that he settled by calling those who serve at the table the greatest rather than those who occupy the traditional "place of honour", and King Arthur's wise decision to make the Round Table round to forestall possible disputes over precedence amongst his knights as literary examples of how seriously people took this issue. When the host, or someone of higher rank, chose to serve at the table, it was a means of honouring the person being served, because usually it's a chore left to those below.

 

There’s a “new beginning from a low standing point" imagery in that he’s serving the table to the brothers that I’ve never seen anyone remark on. In the passage itself, it’s said that serving and clearing the table is only for the novices, which in the monastic ladder are the lowest of the low in status, because of the “humility comes before honour” Biblical idea that to rise high you must start low. Similarly, only when they’re pages and squires do noble boys work at the table, serving, clearing and cleaning, because they’re lowest in rank at a household or court and therefore must serve regardless of whether one’s a duke on his own right or another is the king’s son. Sandor was a squire at Casterly Rock, so that’d probably be the only time he’s done this kind of serving if ever. Once he rose in status to Cersei’s shield and the king’s bodyguard, it’d be other people serving him, not he them, it’d be beneath him to serve at the table. Yet, here in this scene, he’s doing precisely that, a task for a beginner, and it's a nice imagery that further cements what we’ve concluded that his abandonment of King’s Landing meant wiping the slate clean for him.

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On 5/27/2016 at 3:25 PM, Milady of York said:

For Sandor, the principle works the same way: he never gets closure so long as justice is denied and Gregor lives and prospers. Unlike Bruce, he knows full well the face of the murderer and it’s his own brother, and so closure was within hand’s reach had Gregor been punished for his first crime, it’d have allowed Sandor to heal from the burning trauma. Instead, privileges and rewards rained upon Gregor’s head: knighting by Rhaegar, a rare honour even for nobles higher-ranking than the Cleganes, becoming a close bannerman to their overlord, which means more gold and privilege heaped on him for doing Tywin’s dirty work. That alone is bad enough already, but then Gregor became head of House Clegane through kinslaying, the one crime up there with guest right violation in the list of ultimately unforgivable sins in Westeros, and yet what do the people do? Do they punish the kinslayer Gregor? No, he keeps on living, enjoying the family wealth, and even can marry several times. Gregor has the lands, the home and the wife that Sandor only wishes he could have.

Been loving this thread and first time posting in it! :D

I think with Sandor, there's a blurred line where his anger is righteous and where his anger is consuming his life.  I can completely understand and sympathize with "the system" (including his own father) failing him.  His anger at the institutions of nobility. knighthood, and religion is justified.  As in real life, however, I don't think "closure" is always attainable or necessary for his well-being.  The time for justice/closure has passed somewhat, as Gregor is dead and whatever Robert Strong is, may not be his actual brother anymore.  His horrific scars have no doubt enormously effected his social development in a superficial culture, compounding his rage against society.  Even if Gregor were to be appropriately punished for his crimes it would be cold comfort for Sandor, as he still must live in a world that is not kind to deformity or physical ugliness regardless if he received justice.  There's an inversion with Sansa, who is considered conventionally beautiful by society, and her beauty and budding sexuality has done nothing for her but reduced her to an object.  Sandor is likewise objectified as a tool of violence and terror.  Sansa seems to be the only one who regards him as a human with feelings, which is why (I'm sure to his surprise) he immediately latches on and spills his deepest secret of the source of his trauma.  There comes a threshold though when consuming anger has gone beyond lack of justice and just colors everything in his world to the point it's beyond the system fixing.  This is the point (and I can't say exactly where it is) that Sandor is responsible for the lack of love and honor in his own life.

There's only so far that "blaming the system" can get you.  That's exactly the point that Sansa challenges him on.  "Does it bring you joy to scare people?"  The fact that society is repulsed by his scars is out of his control and is hurtful.  If he postures and goes full Hound mode, he's got a reason to be feared and that is under his control.  Defaulting to this crude and scary persona is a shield to protect a very scared and vulnerable little boy, but at the price of denying himself what he desires most: intimacy and connection.  The wife and home is not something that justice can provide to him.  That's all on him.  Righteous anger or not, it has not brought one ounce of joy into his life.  Sansa makes attempts to reach him as a person and he lashes out at her.  One of the most beautiful parts (even though it was overall scary and way out of line) of the BotBW scene between the two of them is that she doesn't give him what he wants.  She gives him what he needs.  Despite subconscious sexual attraction, Sansa cares about his psyche and his soul with her choice of song.  Sansa wants to be closer to him, but it's his all-consuming anger that stands between them.  One cannot stress enough that is the Beauty that saves the Beast.

So with Gregor dead and his ability to get closure snuffed out, what does that mean for Sandor?  His redemption cannot be based on justice, because that's long gone.  The system isn't going to change no matter how much hate he harbors or how irreverent he is.  He's been burning in a fire of his own creation for years.  Sandor's redemption rests on being at peace with himself no matter what else happens.  Compare that to Sansa who even at her forced and joyless marriage, can't help herself when the music starts and desires to dance for her own pleasure.   

                          

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This is also my first time posting in this thread, but I have been a long time lurker ;)

For me, this spoke to me that Sandor "the Hound" was not just misunderstood from the beginning, but also that he would be all right in the end. Oh, and it also set up the Quiet Isle transformation.

Sandor has someone looking out for his well-being and praying for him. Sansa prays for a lot of people, including Jon, but goes into more details about Sandor. In a way Sansa's prayers are being answered.

  • A Clash of Kings - Sansa V

Across the city, thousands had jammed into the Great Sept of Baelor on Visenya's Hill, and they would be singing too, their voices swelling out over the city, across the river, and up into the sky. Surely the gods must hear us, she thought.
Sansa knew most of the hymns, and followed along on those she did not know as best she could. She sang along with grizzled old serving men and anxious young wives, with serving girls and soldiers, cooks and falconers, knights and knaves, squires and spit boys and nursing mothers. She sang with those inside the castle walls and those without, sang with all the city. She sang for mercy, for the living and the dead alike, for Bran and Rickon and Robb, for her sister Arya and her bastard brother Jon Snow, away off on the Wall. She sang for her mother and her father, for her grandfather Lord Hoster and her uncle Edmure Tully, for her friend Jeyne Poole, for old drunken King Robert, for Septa Mordane and Ser Dontos and Jory Cassel and Maester Luwin, for all the brave knights and soldiers who would die today, and for the children and the wives who would mourn them, and finally, toward the end, she even sang for Tyrion the Imp and for the Hound. He is no true knight but he saved me all the same, she told the Mother. Save him if you can, and gentle the rage inside him.
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