How did they know it was Rhaegar who kidnapped Lyanna?

[purple-eyes]

Rhaegar is not a teenager like robb. He is 24 years old when he died and this is like middle-aged man in westeros. If he is as good as we were told, I highly doubt he did both crowning and eloping for his personal desire in lyanna. 

Why did he want to do this? Both are obvious scandals and political failure. 

I still think he did both for the sake of prophecy. Of course he may love lyanna, but this is probably like what Ned or barristan had in ashara. Nothing will grow out of this love if Elia can have one more child with him. 

 

 

 

 

 

[Sly Wren]

If the bard and the warrior are separate, and Rhaegar is only the bard, then who is the warrior, a follower / devotee of the bard, I wonder?  Shall we imagine him with a sword in his hand?

Guilty. We need a sheepish emoji. But it is odd that while in the Bael the Bard story, the king is the Bard and the lover, we haven't seen that in parallels with real Stark maidens in the books so far. Not yet anyway.

Bael the bard was also a warrior though and a king. (So is Mance, of course.) Ygritte is a warrior, but she also has some aspects of a bard: she tells Jon the story of Bael and the winter rose, and she occasionally sings. She is also associated with fire, just like Rhaegar, who was also both a (royal) warrior and a bard. Perhaps Mance's role in this is to make the reference to Rhaegar a bit more obvious, as it may be obscured by the gender reversal. Mance symbolically "stands behind" Ygritte as a reminder that we should recall a certain "bard - warrior - prospective king" associated with fire when we look at this young wildling woman. 

 Very workable. Though, again, the bard leader isn't the instigator of the kidnapping.

And I agree on Ygritte's singing. But it's at best a trace of bard-i-ness. . . And thinking that although the above could work, might work better if Ygrite was Mance's lover. . . 

I'm not sure how to interpret the Marrillion motif. It does sound like a Rhaegar / Lyanna or Bael the bard reference, but the characters seem to be ... false. Actually that may be the point here.

I agree--the echo is skewed. And that is the point--no evidence I can see that Rhaegar was innately skeevy, like Marillion. But Marillion is never the instigator of trouble. He's the follower of the crazy leader: Cat's fury; Lysa's Lysa-ness. Lysa's irrationality with Sansa has an Aerys-like quality to it. Paranoia, seeing conspiracies, blaming the wrong people. Jut, per the OP--if we are looking for evidence of what happened, seems like the Bard doing the bidding of the crazy leader might have taken the fall for something he didn't instigate. . . .