Butterbumps IS Tyrion. Or is he Sansa?

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I was very grateful that Lost Melnibonean recently provided a definitive analysis and synthesis of hard boiled eggs. But I want MORE egg analysis, including greater insight into the egg laid by Butterbumps during Sansa's supper with Olenna Redwyne Tyrell (the Queen of Thorns) and Margaery in ASoS. But this Butterbumps scene goes well beyond egg symbolism (Chicks! Cheese! A Spoon! A Bear and a Maiden Fair!) so I felt it might warrant its own discussion thread.

As I re-read the Butterbumps luncheon scene, I noticed interesting parallels to the crab feast at Castle Black where Tyrion challenges Alliser Thorne to a duel with a crab fork. On LM's "Peeling Another Egg" thread, I already noted the similarity of Lord Commander Mormont cracking a hard-boiled egg in his fist (in a scene cited in the OP) and cracking a crab claw in his fist in the feast scene with Tyrion. I'm not sure what it means that Mormont's bare hands (or bear hands) are equally adept at opening both kinds of shells. As further noted in my comment on that thread, I haven't put all the piece together, but I think GRRM is drawing a comparison between eggs and heads, especially heads that get cracked open (like the infant Aegon or Oberyn Martell killed by Gregor Clegane, or like the heads of dwarfs sent to Cersei Lannister when she offers a reward for Tyrion's head after his escape from King's Landing). LM saw something similar, organizing part of his analysis of a trio of hard-boiled eggs using "the dragon has three heads" symbolism.

I am having bad luck with quote formatting since the forum changed software, so I will try to use a color code for comparing the two scenes - Lannister red for excerpts and details from Tyrion's crab feast, and Garth green for the supper seduction of Sansa by the Tyrells.

Thorns Present at the meal

Alliser Thorne and The Queen of Thorns

Failing to suffer fools gladly

Ser Alliser Thorne was the only man at table who did not so much as crack a smile. "Lannister mocks us."

...he pays more heed to Butterbumps than he does to me. (Lady Olenna)

Creepy hands

"Pale and cold, with black hands and feet. I brought Jared's hand, torn from his corpse by the bastard's wolf." (Alliser Thorn on the Others, ACoK, Chapter 25)

Her gaunt thin fingers were pinching her wrist. (Olenna's hand on Sansa's)

Pomegranates

"Not so," objected the Lord Steward, Bowen Marsh, a man as round and red as a pomegranate. "You ought to hear the droll names he gives the lads he trains."

No, don't blush, with your hair it makes you look like a pomegranate. (Olenna to Sansa)

Note: Pomegranates are characterized by tough skin, juice and seeds. Tyrion refers to the fresh seafood as succulent. Lady Olenna mentions the seed of Garth Greenhand growing to become the noble houses of the Reach. Butterbumps will eat an orange and expel the seeds through his nose. Sansa is often associated with fruit (a blood orange thrown at her by Arya, lemon cakes, a pear eaten at breakfast with Littlefinger, etc.).

A bunch of birds

"Crows" of the Night's Watch and

"It is so kind of you to sup with me and my foolish flock of hens." (Lady Olenna)

...a dozen yellow chicks escaped and began running in all directions. (From the egg "laid" by Butterbumps and opened by Sansa)

Cutlery as weapons

"Why, I have steel in my hand, Ser Alliser, although it appears to be a crab fork. Shall we duel?" (Tyrion)

"As to your father, would that I'd been born a peasant woman with a big wooden spoon, I might have been able to beat some sense into his fat head." (Lady Olenna)

Sansa's fingers tightened round her spoon. The truth? I can't. (Sansa's thoughts as she tries to avoid describing Joffrey)

Swords

"Come and make your japes with steel in your hand." (Ser Alliser)

The old woman's eyes bore into her, sharp and bright as the points of swords. (Lady Olenna, looking at Sansa)

He'll kill me for certain then, or give me to Ser Ilyn. (Sansa, worrying about her punishment for criticizing Joffrey. She is thinking of being executed, but keep in mind that Ned Stark's sword, Ice, was given to Ser Ilyn.)

Fools

I have explained elsewhere the extensive imagery of Tyrion as a fool. Tyrion has told Jon Snow, "Never forget what you are," and we assume Tyrion is using his experience as a little person to advise Jon about his situation as an illegitimate son. But I think Tyrion has forgotten that he is truly a fool (as defined by GRRM), witty and wise, magically insightful, and the center of attention. There are early scenes where Tyrion plays the fool, including outside the feast for King Robert at Winterfell and during the crab feast at Castle Black. But he really comes into his full foolish glory after he kills Tywin, who has repressed Tyrion's fool behavior, and makes his voyages to Essos like his uncle Gerion, who encouraged Tyrion's fool behavior as well as his knowledge of the wonders of the world.

He hopped up on his chair and began poking at Thorne's chest with the tiny fork. Roars of laughter filled the tower room. (Tyrion)

Wear motley and stand upon your head to amuse the spice lords and the cheese kings. (Tywin to Tyrion at age 16, ADwD, Chapter 8)

Shall I sing it standing on my head, my lady?"

"Will that make it sound better?"

"No."

"Stand on your feet, then. We wouldn't want your hat to fall off. As I recall, you never wash your hair."

"As my lady commands." (exchange between Butterbumps and Lady Olenna)

 

Quote

His uncle had taught him a bit of tumbling when he was six or seven. Tyrion had taken to it eagerly. For half a year he cartwheeled his merry way about Casterly Rock, bringing smiles to the faces of septons, squires, and servants alike. Even Cersei laughed to see him once or twice.

All that ended abruptly the day his father returned from a sojourn in King’s Landing. That night at supper Tyrion surprised his sire by walking the length of the high table on his hands. Lord Tywin was not pleased. “The gods made you a dwarf. Must you be a fool as well? You were born a lion, not a monkey.” (Tyrion in ADwD, Chapter 14)

...he came cartwheeling into the hall, vaulted onto the table... (Butterbumps)

"...You know, child, some say that you are as big a fool as Butterbumps here, and I am starting to believe them." (Olenna to Sansa)

Bears

Old as he was, the Lord Commander still had the strength of a bear.

The old woman called to Butterbumps. "Fool! Give us a song. A long one, I should think. 'The Bear and the Maiden Fair' will do nicely."

There is great analysis in this forum of ancient Scandinavian traditions around bear hunting, and the tradition that one is not hunting a bear but bringing it to town for its wedding to a fair maid. I buy it - this strikes me as a perfect explanation of the symbolism or double meaning of GRRM's Bear and the Maiden Fair song throughout the ASOIAF books. In the supper scene with the Tyrells, the song serves as a backdrop to the Tyrells gradually getting Sansa to agree to go to Highgarden and marry the disabled heir, Willas Tyrell. In this scenario, Sansa may be both the bear being hunted / entrapped and the maiden fair who expected a knight but instead got a bear. The bait in Olenna and Margaery's trap is not a maiden fair, but a visit to Highgarden, then a vision of union with the adored Ser Loras, then a marriage to a grandson Sansa hasn't met yet and who is not a knight and who is disabled. Gradually, she agrees to all of these steps as the Tyrells lure her into this vision of deliverance from her imprisonment at King's Landing.

Tyrion is also described with bear imagery, particularly during his visit to The Wall and Castle Black. Benjen Stark gives him a bearskin cloak to wear, and Tyrion is described as a small bear when he wears it. Sansa stops being The Hound's little bird and becomes Littlefinger's bear cub while in residence at the Eyrie. She wears bear skins when she descends from the Eyrie to the Moon Gate.

Back to the Egg

 

His uncle had taught him a bit of tumbling when he was six or seven. Tyrion had taken to it eagerly. For half a year he cartwheeled his merry way about Casterly Rock, bringing smiles to the faces of septons, squires, and servants alike. Even Cersei laughed to see him once or twice.

All that ended abruptly the day his father returned from a sojourn in King’s Landing. That night at supper Tyrion surprised his sire by walking the length of the high table on his hands. Lord Tywin was not pleased. “The gods made you a dwarf. Must you be a fool as well? You were born a lion, not a monkey.” (Tyrion in ADwD, Chapter 14)

 

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When I tried to fix a messed up quote box, the edited version of this post cut off the quote and my entire conclusion. This is the second time this new forum software has done this to me! So aggravating. Where you see the duplicate quote under "back to the egg," that is not the content I wrote. I may come back tomorrow to try to reconstruct the lost post but it's too late tonight. Very frustrating.

[Seams]

Here is a reconstruction of my conclusion for Butterbumps post, such as it is.

Back to the Egg

Butterbumps arrived before the food, dressed in a jester's suit of green and yellow feathers with a floppy coxcomb. An immense round fat man, as big as three Moon Boys, he came cartwheeling into the hall, vaulted onto the table, and laid a gigantic egg right in front of Sansa. "Break it, my lady," he commanded. When she did, a dozen yellow chicks escaped and began running in all directions. "Catch them!" Butterbumps exclaimed. Little Lady Bulwer snagged one and handed it to him, whereby he tilted back his head, popped it into his huge rubbery mouth, and seemed to swallow it whole. When he belched, tiny yellow feathers flew out his nose. Lady Bulwer began to wail in distress, but her tears turned into a sudden squeal of delight when the chick came squirming out of the sleeve of her gown and ran down her arm.

Why does Butterbumps lay an egg, and why does he ask Sansa to break it open?

I don’t think GRRM is directly comparing Dany’s successful use of the funeral pyre to hatch her dragon eggs with Sansa’s opening of the fool’s egg in this scene.

The common denominator for both scenes is that egg hatching represents birth or, for GRRM’s characters, a symbolic rebirth. Sansa had been Joffrey’s fiancé, then a hostage, and now she will be something else. It appears that she is getting out of the Lannister frying pan and into the Tyrell fire in this moment of rebirth. The rebirth isn’t about marrying Willas Tyrell, however, but about turning Sansa into the unwitting drug mule who will carry the poison into Joffrey and Margaery’s royal wedding. I believe the critical detail that points in this direction is the nature of the birds in this scene.

Bird imagery is complex in ASOIAF, but I see a link between the chicks in Butterbumps’ egg and the Crone, represented in this chapter by Lady Olenna. With regard to the New Gods, we learned in one of Catelyn’s POVs “the Crone… had let the first raven into the world when she peered through the door of death” (ASoS, Chap. 2). Early in this chapter, Lady Olenna had matter-of-factly informed Sansa that her husband had died in a hawking accident when he didn’t notice where he was going and rode off a cliff. Not long after this revelation, she asks Sansa whether she likes to go hawking. This may be a hint that Olenna is a crone who is not afraid to use death for her own purposes, inviting death-birds through that door as she deems necessary.

More importantly, the chicks in Butterbumps’ egg also foreshadow the birds that fly out of the wedding pie at the Purple Wedding just about the time that Joffrey drinks the poison that kills him. This link between Butterbumps and the chick-filled egg, with its similarity to the bird-filled pie, may lend credence to the theory that Butterbumps played a role in delivering the poison to Joffrey. And Sansa is cast in the unwitting role of Pandora, opening the egg that is set in front of her but having no idea what will come out of it. The dish Sansa eats during her supper with Lady Olenna and Margaery is leek and mushroom soup: the leek represents a “leak”: the information Sansa reveals about Joffrey; the mushrooms, as in Tyrion’s upcoming meal with Illyrio, represent poison or suspected poison.

(In further food symbolism at this meal: Lady Olenna does not want the leek and mushroom soup and she skips several courses – including a planned main dish of boar – demanding that cheese be brought to the table right away. There are many different uses of cheese in ASOIAF, but there are several scenes where cheese is used to symbolically bait traps one character plans for another. For instance, Tyrion serves cheese to Ser Janos Slynt as he elicits Slynt’s confession to having killed King Robert’s child and lover, springing the trap by sending Slynt to take the black after his admission. Olenna may be baiting the trap for Sansa as poisoner or for Joffrey as dead body.)

So the meaning of this egg has become clearer, but why the comparison between Lady Olenna, the Queen of Thorns, and Ser Alliser Thorne? I don’t know yet what role Ser Alliser will play in the battle with the Others, or even what side he will be on, but both Olenna and Alliser seem to be strongly linked to death. Sansa walked into Olenna’s trap, agreeing to everything the older woman proposed to her. Tyrion, by contrast, refused Ser Alliser’s invitation to step outside and fight with swords, but accepted the challenge in a joking way involving a duel with crab forks. In spite of his refusal, however, my suspicion is that Tyrion will end up in a version of that fight at some point, or manipulated by Ser Alliser into doing something he doesn’t want to do. (For the feast at Castle Black, the crabs emerge from a barrel of snow, similar to the way that the chicks emerge from the egg Butterbumps sets before Sansa. There was a good thread that theorized that crabs represented different types of Others, based on the types of crabs in Sister Stew. I can't find it, but I hope it's still in the archive. Tyrion himself is later reborn or hatched from a barrel upon his arrival in Essos, so the barrel/egg parallel seems clear.)

Olenna touched Sansa with her gaunt thin fingers; Slynt carried a pale, cold, black corpse’s hand. Slynt’s monster hand stopped moving before he could show it to Tyrion but the reader knows that hand was real. He may have bought some time, but Tyrion ignoring the hand doesn’t make the threat less urgent.

[RenlyIsNotRight]

Nope. He's Axell Florent.

[Lord Greenhood]

No Tyrion is the incarnation of the fool Mushroom

[7-KG]

What if he's just a random fool?

[DarkSister1001]

I just came upon this.  Not sure if I agree 100% but I love the dedication and the parallels you made.  Nice job!

[Lady Blizzardborn]

Well he can't be Sansa, because Butterbumps is there singing when Sansa is being grilled by Tyrell women about Joffrey's true nature.

I can't recall if Butterbumps and Tyrion are ever in scenes together. But it's just occurred to me to ask (apologies if you've covered this, I've only scanned the posts but will come back for an in-depth read after spring break is over)...might Butterbumps have a connection to Patchface? I doubt there's a Westeros-wide fool's guild or anything, but the death connections remind me greatly of the creepiness that surrounds Patches.

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5 hours ago, DarkSister1001 said:

I just came upon this.  Not sure if I agree 100% but I love the dedication and the parallels you made.  Nice job!

Thank you! I'm honored that you took the time to read it. I welcome feedback and revised viewpoints, but I realize that literary analysis is not everyone's cup of tea in this forum.

5 hours ago, Lady Blizzardborn said:

Well he can't be Sansa, because Butterbumps is there singing when Sansa is being grilled by Tyrell women about Joffrey's true nature.

I can't recall if Butterbumps and Tyrion are ever in scenes together. But it's just occurred to me to ask (apologies if you've covered this, I've only scanned the posts but will come back for an in-depth read after spring break is over)...might Butterbumps have a connection to Patchface? I doubt there's a Westeros-wide fool's guild or anything, but the death connections remind me greatly of the creepiness that surrounds Patches.

Thanks for the feedback. I hope you will have time to read the substance of the post after spring beak. I have learned that people now often post a "too long/didn't read" summary at the end of long posts. Here is my attempt to offer one:

tl/dr: There are many similarities between the crab feast at the Wall with Tyrion as guest (AGoT) and Sansa's supper with Margaery and Olenna Tyrell (ASoS). Because GRRM often portrays Tyrion as a fool, he can be compared with Butterbumps, the fool at the Tyrell supper. In the supper scene with Sansa, Butterbumps also plays out symbolic behaviors that may foreshadow Sansa's unwitting role in carrying the poison into the wedding feast for Joffrey and Margaery.

(I do not think that Sansa or Tyrion is literally doing double duty as a fool for the Tyrell household. My title for this thread is all about literary allusion and parallel construction.)

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Sansa saved Ser Dontos Hollard, Barristan Selmy saved Ser Dontos Hollard. Why the parallel between Sansa and Selmy?

Instead of starting a new thread, I thought I'd just tack this fool-related idea onto this related topic.

Part of the explanation for Sansa's connection to Ser Dontos might be that he, like other fools, represents Tyrion.

Dontos shows up stinking drunk at Joffrey's Name Day tournament, half-dressed (naked?) and with only his breastplate and helmet. Feeling insulted, Joffrey orders that Ser Dontos be drowned in a barrel of wine. (Tangent: Drowning is a favorite form of murder for Lannisters, with Tywin using it at Castamere and with the three-year-old Tarbeck heir being drowned in a well; Cersei's friend Melara drowns in a well the night she hears Cersei's fortune told by Maggie the Frog.) Sansa saves Ser Dontos by proposing that Joffrey make him a fool instead of killing him. We often see Tyrion donning armor or being assisted in getting into his armor. More often, though, Tyrion is drinking wine to excess. Joffrey also dumps wine on Tyrion and insists that Tyrion serve him (Joffrey) wine at the wedding reception, essentially attempting to turn Tyrion into a fool in front of the 1000 assembled guests. I don't think that Tyrion poisons Joffrey but many people believe he slips something into Joffrey's cup. There is greater consensus that the poison was brought into the wedding feast by Sansa, carrying a fake "gem" in the hairnet provided to her by Ser Dontos. So Joffrey ends up suffocating (much like drowning) after drinking wine. The tables are turned: Ser Dontos the fool drowns the king instead of the king drowning the fool.

It's also interesting to note that Tyrion could not put the cloak around Sansa's shoulders at their wedding until he used Ser Dontos as a stepstool. So Dontos was instrumental in bringing about the union of Tyrion and Sansa. The protection associated with the groom cloaking the bride could not have happened in this case without Dontos enabling it. (Perhaps the shooting of Dontos by Petyr Baelish's hired fighters is a sign that Tyrion's protection of Sansa has come to an end.)

Sansa and Dontos have been meeting in the godswood, planning Sansa's escape from King's Landing, and jokingly comparing themselves to Florian and Jonquil. (I can't turn off my "Puns and Wordplay" mindset, so I have to wonder whether Florian is also "far lion," and whether Jonquil has something to do with Jon Snow? A quill would represent writing, probably, so Jonquil might be a name that has to do with writing?)

So the symbolic link between Dontos and Tyrion seems pretty clear. What I didn't quite connect, though, is why we would hear about Ser Barristan also having saved Dontos' life. Here's my crackpot theory:

Ser Barristan is sworn to the King's guard. That's all he does and he is super good at it.

Because he single-handedly saved King Aerys from Duskendale, Ser Barristan was granted his wish of having the life spared of the young boy Dontos Hollard, whose family had been involved in the Defiance of Duskendale.

Why would Ser Barristan care about this one kid? What does it have to do with his central purpose in life of guarding the king?

Because he lived, Ser Dontos was able to play an instrumental role in the death of Joffrey the usurper (from Aerys' perspective) and pretender (from the perspective of people who know that Joffrey was a bastard). He also rids Tyrion of the horrible nephew who has been making his life miserable. He has also protected Sansa, just as Tyrion promised to do with his cloak.

I think this little circle of symbols may also strengthen the accumulating evidence that Tyrion is actually the son of King Aerys. I've seen convincing arguments that Ser Barristan miraculously undermined Tywin's careful plot to have King Aerys die during the Defiance of Duskendale. Saving Ser Dontos may have been Ser Barristan's last "Hail Mary" (in the U.S., a long pass in gridiron football at the last second of the game is called a "Hail Mary," using the name of the prayer to show how desperate and slim the chances are of winning the game) to ensure that a son of Aerys survived. Once a King's Guard, always a King's Guard.

Or will Sansa be the one to take the throne . . .