Seven years into Game of Thrones, one of its most pivotal couples is one we’ve never actually met. Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark lived before the events of Season 1, episode 1, but we’ve picked up enough pieces over the course of the series to create a compelling picture of the people who turned out to be Jon Snow’s parents.
A wonderful thing Game of Thrones did, particularly in its early seasons, was to assume an intelligent audience. We wouldn’t be up to our eyes in Reddit theories in 2017 if we hadn’t fallen for the characters and world of Westeros in 2011 (or earlier, for book readers) and decided to do some research to stick with it.
With Jon Snow at the center of Westeros’ greatest war and uniquely qualified to sit on the throne, let’s take a closer look at the duo who brought him into this world and changed the course of Westerosi history forever.
Back in the day, when Westeros wasn’t in a constant state of open warfare, Aerys Targaryen (the erstwhile Mad King) was in power, and his son Rhaegar married in a strategic alliance to Elia Martell of Dorne. You’ll remember Elia’s name for how many times her brother Oberyn repeated it in Season 4; Elia was murdered by the Mountain, as were her children. But before that, the powerful royals were married, amicably if not lovingly, and had a daughter and son together.
Meanwhile, up North, Ned Stark’s sister Lyanna was set to marry his best friend Robert, promising the kind of love and joy that no Northerner has known in the entirety of Game of Thrones. It was during that time that the Starks visited Harrenhal for a tourney in which Rhaegar competed against Ser Barristan Selmy, the old dude who later pledged allegiance to Daenerys.
Rhaegar won, but instead of offering his wife Elia a crown of winter roses (as was tradition for the victor, to crown a “Queen of Love and Beauty”), he rode right past her and gave the prize to Lyanna. The two wouldn’t see each other for a year, but from that moment, seeds of mistrust and infidelity were sown in several powerful houses.
Everything fell to shit when Rhaegar either abducted or ran away with Lyanna (more on that later); a lot of today’s chaos in the seven kingdoms can be traced back to this shocking event, including Robert’s Rebellion, which overthrew Aerys and put the Baratheons on the Iron Throne.
Lyanna’s brother and father both went to King’s Landing in the process of negotiating her return, which should have been the Starks’ first clue to never go south; both Brandon and Rickard Stark were sentenced to death by the Mad King, prompting the rebellion led by Ned, Robert, and Jon Arryn.
Rhaegar left the pregnant Lyanna to join the fray and ended up dying in the rebellion at Robert’s hand, after which the Mountain murdered his family and Lyanna gave birth at the Tower of Joy. She made Ned promise her on her deathbed to protect the child, and to raise him as a bastard Stark to protect him from enemies of the Targaryen family (including Robert Baratheon).
There are couple of key things missing from this story. First, it’s not clear why Rhaegar ran away with Lyanna in the first place and if they shared a romantic connection; while it’s tempting to see Harrenhal as the start of a whirlwind romance, Game of Thrones isn’t exactly a fairy tale. But if not love, what was it? Did Rhaegar just experience an anarchic temptation to throw Westeros off balance? Seems unlikely, given that there was some speculation in the books that Rhaegar was growing concerned with his father’s increasingly erratic behavior, and may have even organized the Tourney at Harrenhal as pretext for a meeting with the other noble lords to overthrow the Mad King.
There are references made by Robert in the show and books to Rhaegar raping and abducting Lyanna, but take those with a grain of salt, since the man spreading those rumors loved Lyanna and hated all Targaryens as a rule.
Cersei says something to the same effect, but she also has reason for sour grapes — Tywin initially tried to forge an alliance with the Targaryens by offering Cersei as a wife for Rhaegar, but Aerys chose Elia Martell instead. Far from admiring Robert, Cersei was also infatuated with Rhaegar and believed that their marriage might have kept him from straying toward the “wolf girl” (classy).
Those who knew Rhaegar, like Ser Barristan, tell Daenerys that her brother was a sensitive, artistic soul, and that there may have been more to him than the belligerence history remembers; in the books, Lyanna wept openly when she first heard Rhaegar sing and play the harp.
In Season 7, we learn from Gilly’s bedtime story that Elia and Rhaegar’s marriage was annulled and that he almost immediately married someone else — three guesses who. With Season 7’s finale titillatingly titled “The Dragon and the Wolf,” we may learn more yet about Rhaegar and Lyanna — and about the dragon and wolf who came to follow.
Game of Thrones Season 7 concludes August 27 on HBO.
Source: Mashable
