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Is it suspicious that Lord Leyton Hightower married his daughter to Jorah?


Tyrion1991

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It is the funny thing with noble families. They had a lot of children because the infant mortality was so high - and yet having too many children is a burden because then you need to find them suitable spouses. The heir, the spare and a few peacekeepers. If you have too many sons then you end up with a load of unlanded lads who are hard to find decent wives for because they're unlikely to inherit anything, and too many daughters equals too many dowries.

Leyton has a lot of children. Of them I believe Lynesse is one of the youngest (if not the youngest, I can't remember), which means that she's not all that great a catch for a ruling Lord. Jorah was of a suitable rank, had just won a notable victory in a tourney and had honored one of Leyton's lower-ranking daughters by naming her his Queen of Love and Beauty. Plus, in the greater scheme of things Jorah and Leyton aren't that different in the pecking order of Westerosi society and it's not like Leyton is a Great Lord or Lord Paramount. 

I don't think we'll ever see Lynesse as a character though her presence might be felt if she sends some assistance towards Oldtown, though I have hopes we'll see Malora.

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1 hour ago, Faera said:

It is the funny thing with noble families. They had a lot of children because the infant mortality was so high - and yet having too many children is a burden because then you need to find them suitable spouses. The heir, the spare and a few peacekeepers. If you have too many sons then you end up with a load of unlanded lads who are hard to find decent wives for because they're unlikely to inherit anything, and too many daughters equals too many dowries.

Leyton has a lot of children. Of them I believe Lynesse is one of the youngest (if not the youngest, I can't remember), which means that she's not all that great a catch for a ruling Lord. Jorah was of a suitable rank, had just won a notable victory in a tourney and had honored one of Leyton's lower-ranking daughters by naming her his Queen of Love and Beauty. Plus, in the greater scheme of things Jorah and Leyton aren't that different in the pecking order of Westerosi society and it's not like Leyton is a Great Lord or Lord Paramount. 

I don't think we'll ever see Lynesse as a character though her presence might be felt if she sends some assistance towards Oldtown, though I have hopes we'll see Malora.

 

I doubt there was a shortage of men in the Reach and Westerlands. You have to be scraping the barrel to look in Bear Island which is literally the most desolate and remote place in the continent. 

The Hightowers are implied to be a Great House in all but name. They have one of the largest cities in Westeros. They are meant to be rich of overseas trade and have a sizeable host. Not to mention their connection. Lord Leytons granddaughter is technically the Queen right now. Whereas the Mormonts are an absurdly small and impoverished house. They’re only Lords because the Starks consider them as such. George hasn’t broken down his noble ranks enough but it’s pretty clear they would not be the same class of nobility.

I personally think there’s a high chance of her showing up. She comes up quite a lot in various POV (Jon, Cat, Sam, Dany, Tyrion) and George is introducing the Hightower’s as a big deal. She’s in Lys with her brother ostensibly getting ships to help them from Euron. It is far from inconceivable that they would go ask Dany to help them. In fact, they may have went east under pretext; when in fact it’s to secure an alliance. 

In terms of drama. I think it would be interesting  because Dany asks herself if Jorah really thinks of her as a Queen or just as a woman he wants. The ultimate acid test of this is being tempted by another beautiful woman once he no longer desires Dany. Just, you know, it’s actually his wife who is the temptress :D. This would also let Jorah face the same challenge he failed at last time to put duty over love. Plus, Danys a bit short of female companions in her team. In a lot of ways she is very similar to Dany in of appearance and her situation as an exile in Essos. I think she could be a really interesting character to add and George could go a number of different ways with it. Especially depending on what happens at the Battle of Fire. 

Its killing me waiting for Winds. ;) 

 

 

 

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7 hours ago, Tyrion1991 said:

 

Sam talks to a guy in Oldtown who refers to her as the “whore of a sister”. But, isn’t that referring to her current status as chief concubine to a Lys merchant? As opposed to anything she did prior to meeting Jorah? 

I am speculating. 

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Does Leyton Hightower strike you as the most logical man?

 

Nonetheless, reducing his expenses, expanding his alliances, and connecting his family to other prominent families is what Lords do. Perhaps he had "Northern Ambitions"? ^_^

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25 minutes ago, nyser1 said:

Does Leyton Hightower strike you as the most logical man?

 

Nonetheless, reducing his expenses, expanding his alliances, and connecting his family to other prominent families is what Lords do. Perhaps he had "Northern Ambitions"? ^_^

House Mormont isn’t a prominent family outside of the North and even then this seems to only be for some kind of reputation and due to family bonds.

Quote

In Fire and Blood it’s revealed that a Lord of Winterfell married a Mormont and had a load of kids. So presumably the two houses have a history of intermarrying and are related distantly. It’s not hard to imagine that Stark women might have been going the other way as well at some point.

Also, inbreeding.

You only have to marry House Stark to do that because they’re all sheep and do whatever the Wolves tell them. Case in point, House Tully. Weak house in the riverlands itself but with their darling girl in Lord Starks bed they’ve got 20k Northern scum to hurl at anyone who attacks them. Otherwise no Northerner remotely cares about the Riverlands just like they don’t really care about anyone who isn’t part of their inbred clans. If a Stark told the Northerners to commit genocide they would do it without question.

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53 minutes ago, Tyrion1991 said:

House Mormont isn’t a prominent family outside of the North and even then this seems to only be for some kind of reputation and due to family bonds.

You only have to marry House Stark to do that because they’re all sheep and do whatever the Wolves tell them. Case in point, House Tully. Weak house in the riverlands itself but with their darling girl in Lord Starks bed they’ve got 20k Northern scum to hurl at anyone who attacks them. Otherwise no Northerner remotely cares about the Riverlands just like they don’t really care about anyone who isn’t part of their inbred clans. If a Stark told the Northerners to commit genocide they would do it without question.

To be fair, at the level of the Hightowers not many families could be considered worthy,

 

As for the Mormonts, we have a few of them playing roles and appearing in the story. I suspect that there might be to them.

 

The rest of the post is a rant.

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14 hours ago, Tyrion1991 said:

House Mormont isn’t a prominent family outside of the North and even then this seems to only be for some kind of reputation and due to family bonds.

Though Jorah's father was Lord Commander of Night's Watch, so maybe Leyton wanted to make connections with someone on The Wall, to have an ally there, when the Second Long Night will begin. He became LC in 288, one year prior that tournament.

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6 hours ago, Megorova said:

Though Jorah's father was Lord Commander of Night's Watch, so maybe Leyton wanted to make connections with someone on The Wall, to have an ally there, when the Second Long Night will begin. He became LC in 288, one year prior that tournament.

 

Why would he need to be secret? He could simply send men to the wall or keep an active correspondence with the LC. Are the Maesters going to kill him if he backs the NW?

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  • 2 weeks later...
On ‎7‎/‎29‎/‎2019 at 7:39 PM, Megorova said:

Lysa and Littlefinger. And then she married with the Lord of the Vale.

Marrying Lysa Tully was the price that Jon Arryn had to pay for getting House Tully on the side of the rebels during Robert's Rebellion. In normal circumstances he would have never married Lysa whom he regarded as soiled goods, and proud and prickly Jon Arryn resented her for that.

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1 hour ago, Tywin Manderly said:

Marrying Lysa Tully was the price that Jon Arryn had to pay for getting House Tully on the side of the rebels during Robert's Rebellion. In normal circumstances he would have never married Lysa whom he regarded as soiled goods, and proud and prickly Jon Arryn resented her for that.

I thought that House Tully was already in the Rebels’ camp because of Ned taking his brother’s place as Catelyn’s husband. Or did Hoster get greedy? 

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1 minute ago, Angel Eyes said:

I thought that House Tully was already in the Rebels’ camp because of Ned taking his brother’s place as Catelyn’s husband. Or did Hoster get greedy? 

The latter. Hoster Tully was quite the hard bargainer. 

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11 minutes ago, Tywin Manderly said:

The latter. Hoster Tully was quite the hard bargainer. 

Makes him no better than Walder Frey.

I’m of the opinion that the Jon-Lysa match was a mistake, since Hoster was already bound with the Rebels via Ned/Catelyn and Houses Tully, Stark and Arryn paid for it dearly, along with everyone within 2,000 miles. 

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On 7/30/2019 at 1:51 PM, Tyrion1991 said:

I doubt there was a shortage of men in the Reach and Westerlands. You have to be scraping the barrel to look in Bear Island which is literally the most desolate and remote place in the continent. 

It seems you’ve forgotten there had just been two wars, those tend to have a negative impact on the male population. And it’s not like the Hightowers were the only house needing to find spouses. 

On 7/30/2019 at 1:51 PM, Tyrion1991 said:

The Hightowers are implied to be a Great House in all but name. They have one of the largest cities in Westeros. They are meant to be rich of overseas trade and have a sizeable host. Not to mention their connection. Lord Leytons granddaughter is technically the Queen right now. Whereas the Mormonts are an absurdly small and impoverished house. They’re only Lords because the Starks consider them as such. George hasn’t broken down his noble ranks enough but it’s pretty clear they would not be the same class of nobility.

Margaery’s current status has exactly zero bearing on Jorah’s and Lynesse’s marriage, seeing as there was no marriage pact between the Tyrells and Baratheons at the time of the tourney, and anyone who was aware of the recent events between the two families wouldn’t think it would be forthcoming.

This current attempt to belittle the Mormonts is actually a point in favor of the match. As a lord with a lot of children, your best way to gain influence across the realm is to make a variety of matches, outside of your bannermen. Marrying your children to your bannermen doesn’t really increase your standing at all - in feudal systems, your bannermen are expected to be loyal to you simply by virtue of being your bannermen. By choosing to marry his daughter to a family the Starks hold in high regard, Lord Leyton is actually taking steps to strengthen ties between the Hightowers and the Starks. I am not saying this was his intention, since as others have stated it was probably just a convenient way to get rid of an inconvenient daughter, but it could have been turned into a perk, if events hadn’t transpired the way they did. 

29 minutes ago, Angel Eyes said:

Makes him no better than Walder Frey.

I’m of the opinion that the Jon-Lysa match was a mistake, since Hoster was already bound with the Rebels via Ned/Catelyn and Houses Tully, Stark and Arryn paid for it dearly, along with everyone within 2,000 miles. 

By the time the Lysa-Jon Arryn match was proposed, Jon had lost his last heir, and Lysa’s proven fertility was one of the reasons Jon agreed to the marriage. The marriage wasn’t an immediate disaster, Jon couldn’t have known Lysa would end up poisoning him...

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Actually there’s another fella he could have married Lynesse to. He could have married her off to Stannis before he married Selyse Florent. The Kings brother, Lord of Dragonstone and Commander of the Fleet. If you’re going to marry your beautiful daughter off to a miserable old man (actually is Stannis younger than Jorah?) on a dreary island it might as well be him. 

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1 hour ago, Tyrion1991 said:

Actually there’s another fella he could have married Lynesse to. He could have married her off to Stannis before he married Selyse Florent. The Kings brother, Lord of Dragonstone and Commander of the Fleet. If you’re going to marry your beautiful daughter off to a miserable old man (actually is Stannis younger than Jorah?) on a dreary island it might as well be him. 

Stannis is younger than Jorah since Stannis is two years younger than Robert, who was born in 262 AC. Jorah is mentioned as being about three times Daenerys’ age in 299 AC, when she was 15.

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1 hour ago, Tyrion1991 said:

Actually there’s another fella he could have married Lynesse to. He could have married her off to Stannis before he married Selyse Florent. The Kings brother, Lord of Dragonstone and Commander of the Fleet. If you’re going to marry your beautiful daughter off to a miserable old man (actually is Stannis younger than Jorah?) on a dreary island it might as well be him. 

Stannis married Selyse in 286/7, Jorah married Lynesse in 289, so no. 

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2 hours ago, Eden-Mackenzie said:

Stannis married Selyse in 286/7, Jorah married Lynesse in 289, so no. 

 

Thats very close.

Lynesse wasn’t born in 289 and Leyton doesn’t have to kept his daughter locked up until the Tourney of lannisport.

 “Yeah Bob, why don’t we marry that other Reach family who’s more important than the Florants and has nice looking daughters?” Objections should have been raised. I mean what did Stannis ever do to Robert?

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20 hours ago, Angel Eyes said:

Makes him no better than Walder Frey.

I’m of the opinion that the Jon-Lysa match was a mistake, since Hoster was already bound with the Rebels via Ned/Catelyn and Houses Tully, Stark and Arryn paid for it dearly, along with everyone within 2,000 miles. 

Hoster Tully and Walder Frey both did what a lord is supposed to do: leveraging a unique opportunity presenting itself to them into an advantuougeous marriage for one of their female descendants.

The one mistake Hoster Tully made was not dispatching Littlefinger in a more permanent manner by outright executing him or arranging an "accident", instead of sending him back to the Fingers, for the damage he had done to House Tully. That would have prevented a lot of misery.

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12 hours ago, Tyrion1991 said:

 

Thats very close.

Lynesse wasn’t born in 289 and Leyton doesn’t have to kept his daughter locked up until the Tourney of lannisport.

 “Yeah Bob, why don’t we marry that other Reach family who’s more important than the Florants and has nice looking daughters?” Objections should have been raised. I mean what did Stannis ever do to Robert?

No, she was born in 271/2, and if you think Stannis would have been interested in marrying a seemingly vain, shallow, selfish 14/15 year old, we clearly haven’t been reading the same books. 

I’m not sure Robert ever acted from a “let’s do something nice for Stannis” perspective, even naming him Lord of Dragonstone has some controversy surrounding it. If anything, Robert and Renly both seem to have enjoyed irking Stannis, so maybe the match was just one big joke to Robert. Or maybe Robert had absolutely nothing to do with the match, and it was arranged by Jon Arryn or even Stannis himself for reasons unknown.

Unless the next installment of supplemental material published includes a Westerosi gossip column covering the years since Robert’s Rebellion, we are likely never to know what led to a majority of the marriages. What we do know is proposed matches can be made and fall apart for a variety of reasons. Look at all the stories we do know the details of: Robert, Catelyn, Robb, Edmure, Sansa, basically all of the Martells, and so on. Who’s to say Lynesse didn’t have a string of failed betrothals behind her by the time she met Jorah? Maybe she was engaged to old Lord What’s It, who died of a cough, and then young Lord Who’s It, who was abducted by pirates, then Ser That Guy, who had always loved the miller’s daughter, and then, just as her father starts negotiating to marry her to the second son of Lord The Other Guy, he goes and dies storming the walls of Pyke. And who’s to say Lord Leyton didn’t just want her out of his hair? We simply do not have that information. What information we do have is the marriages Lynesse’s siblings, in particular her sisters, have made:

Baelor, the heir, who once hoped to marry Elia Martell, Princess of Dorne, is married to a Rowan, which is basically a lateral move. Two other brothers appear to be unmarried, and a fourth is married to a Green Apple Fossoway.

Malora is unmarried. Alerie is married to Mace Tyrell, and clearly wins the competition for best political match. Leyla is married to Ser Jon Cupps, Denyse is married to Ser Desmond Redwyne, and Alysanne is married to Lord Arthur Ambrose, who is at least a lord and not just a lord’s relative. So, all things considered, Lord Mormont is, on paper, one of the better matches made by the Hightower daughters, especially when you consider the extremely recent events of the Greyjoy Rebellion and tourney at Lannisport - Jorah looked to be the next big hero. 

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