R+L=J v.16

[SFDanny]

So Rhaegar was so obsessed with the prophecy that his son with Lyanna was the true heir? that's why he sent the kingsguard there? but kingsguard are sworn to defend the king, right? can the prince (Rhaegar) commanded them to protect an unborn child?

The KG protect the royal family. http://awoiaf.wester....php/Kingsguard

The Kingsguard protects the king, and if the king wishes others. Both Selmy and Jaime tell us this. Yes, if Aerys allowed, which seems almost certain he did, other members of the Royal Family could give orders to the Kingsguard and they would follow them, including protecting an unborn child. BUT none of that overrides their first duty to protect the king. Which is why the presence of all three remaining free and loyal members of the Kingsguard (Ser Barristan is wounded and either a prisoner of Robert or has already gone over to the rebels, and Jaime has killed Aerys and is obviously a traitor) at the Tower of Joy so strongly points to the heir - either a legitimate Jon or Aegon - being there.

As a side note, Rhaegar need not have thought Lyanna's child was his true heir. He thought there had to be "three heads of the dragon" which doesn't mean he thought Aegon and Rhaenys weren't as crucial or even more so than Lyanna's yet unborn child.

[Whatever]

Which is why the presence of all three remaining free and loyal members of the Kingsguard (Ser Barristan is wounded and either a prisoner of Robert or has already gone over to the rebels, and Jaime has killed Aerys and is obviously a traitor) at the Tower of Joy so strongly points to the heir - either a legitimate Jon or Aegon - being there.

excuse me, i missed the last couple of RL threads.. but why do you guys think Aegon was at the ToJ?

[The Great Cornholio!]

It doesnt seem like anyone has added anything new to this thread. It just keeps going and going.

[SFDanny]

excuse me, i missed the last couple of RL threads.. but why do you guys think Aegon was at the ToJ?

So did I, and I certainly can't speak for others, but I don't think Aegon was at the Tower of Joy. The actions of the Kingsguard point to the heir to the Targaryen throne being there, and that really boils down to a legitimate Jon or Aegon as the most likely candidates. I think Aegon is dead and Young Griff is a young man raised by Varys through surrogates to believe he is Aegon, but that is a subject for a different thread.

[Rickon is FIERCE]

Assuming you subscribe to the R+L=J theory, when was your moment of revelation? What tipped you off and set the wheels in motion?

For me it was Ygritte's tale of Bael the Bard- of the Stark daughter who lived and loved in the crypts of Winterfell, complete with the blue rose imagery. For the first time it occured to me that perhaps Lyanna went with Rhaegar willingly...

Then all at once I got smacked in the face: Ned by her side as she lay dying with the rose petals, "Promise me, Ned," the bed of blood... what if she died giving birth to Rhaegar's illegitimate child? It would have to be kept secret... Ned must have promised to take the child and keep it safe...who could it be... Daenaerys?

I pondered the Dany question for a few minutes :blushing: , until the bulb finally lit. Jon!!! Of course... the curiosity of the stain on Ned's honor solved... of course Jon's not his, he would never cheat... that's the cover story! Oh, man, the irony! Great stuff! And all the more reason for Ned to have made such an issue of Robert's planned assassination of Dany for being the Targaryen heir, he knew his nephew could end up on the hit list, too!! And... etc., etc...

[Danyl Stark]

A combination of these things:

• Rhaegar's "kidnap" of Lyanna
  
• Lyanna's bloody death in the ToJ & Ned's Promise --> Childbirth *
  
• The fact that three members of the kingsguard were at the ToJ --> Royalty-->Lyanna's child is Heir
  
• When it becomes apparent that Robert wants all the Targs dead *
  
• Ned's reluctance to talk about Jon's origins
  
• Ned's Honour
  

*these two in particular

[Asturias]

unfortunatley, my lightbulb moment came from reading the forums, not on my own lol

[Jem]

I became suspicous of Jon's true parentage way back in my first reading of AGOT, however I thought his parents were Robert and Lyanna.

You know the part where Ned is in KL and he is hot on the trail of tracking down Robert's bastards to prove Cersei's children are not Baratheon? Well someone (I can't remember who) says about Ned "He's got the book and he has got the bastard" meaning that he was very close to putting the evidence together. "The book", obviously, is that long and boring tome that lists nobility through the ages tracking their births, deaths and marriages and how they look. "The bastard", I realise now, was Gendry. But at the time I thought it was the bastard, as in Jon. So I thought that Ned would somehow reveal Jon to be Robert's son, remove the Lannisters, and install Jon as heir to the throne. Obviously that didn't work out!

My husband was a book or so ahead of me and I kept nagging him "you can tell me, I've worked it out, I know Jon is the son of Robert and Lyanna". My husband was "huh? what are you talking about, Jon is Ned's son, duh!"

Eventually, as I worked my way through the series and realised that Ned dies and Robert dies and eventually no one would even care if Jon was Robert's bastard. Besides which Robert has heaps of bastards and Jon isn't even the eldest of them, so really, it wouldn't be a very significant revelation.

However, I couldn't shake the feeling that Jon was Lyanna's son. I didn't even think of Rhaegar as the father because I didn't understand the timeline. When Robert said Rhaegar kidnapped, raped and murdered Lyanna, I thought that happened in a timeframe of a couple of days, not many many months. I thought that she must have gotten pregnant and given birth at some stage before she was kidnapped, so that is why I thought Robert because that it really the only other man she was linked with.

[Ser Elfor the Landstander]

When Ned was remembering Lyanna's last words ("Promise me..." or something to that effect).

He was talking to Robert at the time, and the narrative leads us to believe it was about Lyanna's bones. But something about that explanation didn't work for me. Why would Lyanna waste her last breath on something so obvious? Of course Ned would bury her in Winterfell's crypt, so she didn't need to remind him.

That, coupled with Ned's reluctance to talk about Jon's mother even to the poor guy, made me think something was up.

And AGOT made it clear that Arya and Jon share a close resemblance, mostly from Arya's POVs. Considering Ned's comment that Arya looks more like Lyanna, the connection became evident.

I wasn't sure if Rhaegar was the father, but I couldn't see any other alternative. So there you go.

[kephv]

Well the whole 'Promise me, Ned" thing was suspicious from the start (they were really well placed) but the ToJ scene did it (Lyanna's bed of blood and at the beginning it mentions that Ned came home from the north with Jon). It sort of just clicked after that. Everyone's always talking about when GRRM will reveal Jon's parents but for most, if you've payed attention in AGoT, he did from the start. I mean I suppose he could always come up with something else, but I think he placed too much there for it not to be true.

[dobegrrrl]

"Promise me" + "Bed of Blood" is when I knew Lyanna was his mom, but it made no sense to me that Ned would cheat, under any circumstances as Ned's charactor developed. So I'll say I knew from the beginning that he wasn't Ned's kid.

I too was confused by the timeline as far as Rhaegar's kidnapping, but it never occurred to me it was Robert...and I don't recall an exact moment when I figured out it was Rhaegar but it was not during my first reading of GoT.

[secretTysha]

My first read of GoT

"Bed of blood"- Lyanna had a baby

"Promise me Ned"- we know Lyanna is in the crypts, plus for me it would be a given to have my body taken back by my brother

rose petals clutched in her hand- Rhaegar; if someone had been raped and kidnapped, the last thing being clutched would be a semblance to a gift the perp had given

We know Ned comes home with baby Jon

[Rickon is FIERCE]

Rhaegar; if someone had been raped and kidnapped, the last thing being clutched would be a semblance to a gift the perp had given

You'd be surprised how many people ignore that. There are active discussions regarding kidnap/rape vs. love affair (vs. weird amalgamation of the two with prophecy obsession thrown in the mix)...

[Jenny of Oldstones]

It wasn't a particular passage in the book or anything that tipped me off. Sometimes I just get really bored and daydream about things that interest me. At the time I was burning through ASOIAF as fast as I could, and since I have a bit of an addictive personality when I couldn't read I thought. In the middle of A Clash of Kings I started wondering what it might be like to grow up with Jon Snow and if he ever took a guess who his mom might be (Cat certainly does; surely Jon must have heard rumors). And then I started wondering if anyone at Winterfell had postulated that maybe Jon was Lyanna's son because of the timing. Then I started realizing that it was totally within the realm of possibility that Lyanna could have gotten pregnant while missing, and that was what she was making Ned promise. I felt like I had been punched by logic because everything fit with Ned's character (he really didn't seem the sort to father a bastard) and the timing of Jon's appearance at Winterfell.

Then I wondered if anyone else had ever considered what seemed so subtle, yet elegant. I quickly discovered that I was not a revolutionary genius and that this is a quite popular theory. That just made me love it more for figuring it out myself but having it validated by a large number of my peers.

[God of Angst]

As soon as Ned started thinking about the Tower of Joy and remember Lyanna saying "Promise me..." It seemed so obvious.

I actually was really excited because the identity of Jon's mother was a huge mystery for me as the idea of Ned having an affair seemed so out of character. I thought it was a relatively original idea...until I saw this forum.

[VivaVictarion2]

unfortunatley, my lightbulb moment came from reading the forums, not on my own lol

same here, i wish i was as perceptive as i make myself out to be

[zmflavius]

For me, it was when I read both the Mirri Maz Duur chapter where she mentions off-hand that she is skilled in the bed of blood, referring to possible hemorrhaging during birth, and when I noticed how Lyanna was lying in a bloody bed when Ned found her. I ended up wondering, and then scoured AGOT, the only book I had at the time, for references to Lyanna and Rhaegar, and was firmly convinced of R+L=J. Then, I went online, and found that the same theory had appeared here and on Tower of the Hand. Shortly thereafter, I got around to buying the rest of the books up to AFFC, and found the rest of the references, though this was after finding them online.

[LadyoftheNorth72]

My first inkling that something was not rigjt was Ned's reaction to Catelyn's perfectly natural questioning about the boy. Ned was never cruel to Cat and keeping that silence all those years was cruel, unless there was more behind it.

Second thing was that by the time Cat got to Winterfell with baby Rob, Jon and his wetnirse were already living there. HUH? Ned would have had to knock up the first woman he met after leaving Cat's side for that to make sense.

Ned's agreement to send Jon to the wall also struck as odd. Take him from his mother , raise him as your own, and then ... Pack him off to the Night's watch? I did not buy the idea that he did not want Jon at court bc he was natural born. The court is crawling with people of baser birth. There seemed a bigger reason for him to want Jon as far from court as possible. Asshai would probably have sounded great too.

When the notice of Arya's resemblance to Lyanna was remarked upon, and how Jon favored the Starks more than Cat's kids, I realized Lyanna might be the mother, given her deathbed scene as described above.

I realized Rhaegar was the father when Dany went into the warlock's house, and saw the visoon of her brother with Elia and newborn Aegon, and said to Dany, "there must be one more, the dragon has three heads.". It was the only way I could see for there to be another surviving Dragon. It is also why I believe that Young Griff is truly Aegon. With him, Jon and Dany, there are again three Targs, three riders, three dragons. It may also be (hopefully) why Jon will have proved somewhat difficult to kill, despite the Caesar-esque stabbing at the end of ADWD.

[assjfjgjsgjljljglgjfjsduar]

I figured out pretty easily that Lyanna had died in childbirth, just from the imagery in AGOT. I read and reread Ned's encounter with the Kingsguard (his memory of it), and couldn't get past the idea that something important was being said there. I also thought it was odd that Ned didn't think of Jon as his son in his own mind, and knew that Lyanna wouldn't have begged him to bury her in the damn crypt. So I suspected as much after AGOT. The clincher was the blue rose in the ice wall in Dany's vision in ACOK. That was just so blindingly obvious.

ETA: Also, what other people have said about Ned. There is no way at all that he would cheat. It's not in him.

[assjfjgjsgjljljglgjfjsduar]

I can't really add anything that hasn't already been said, but my perspective is this:

-Jon is Rhaegar and Lyanna's son.

-He is legitimate through polygamy, and was the rightful king/heir at the time of the ToJ altercation, as evidenced by the Kingsguard's presence.

-Wylla was the wet nurse and midwife for Lyanna, and is in on the entire thing. She, Howland Reed and Ashara Dayne (if she's alive) know the truth about Jon. Ashara's "suicide" may even be related to keeping the secret, as is Reed's self-imposed exile at Greywater Watch.

-Jon is, even now, the actual Targaryen heir. Young Griff is a Blackfyre fraud, and Jon would come before Dany in the succession.