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Tag Archives: sandor clegane

The Wages of Sin: The Religious Imagery of Forgiveness in The Hound’s Last Scene

20 Tuesday Apr 2021

Posted by miladyofyork in General ASOIAF

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asoiaf, rereading sandor, sandor clegane, the elder brother, the hound

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A Brother’s Mercy by Allnamesinuse

The present essay is a Feature Commentary corresponding to the AFFC/ADWD portion of “The Will to Change: Rereading Sandor.”


The Hound is dead and Sandor Clegane is at rest, were the words the Elder Brother chose to eulogise our favourite non-knight in what was seemingly the end of the road for him. The interpretation some see here is that this is as close as GRRM can come to a “happy ending” for a character; a retirement to a quiet life at a place where he’s not likely to be disturbed isn’t a bad outcome for someone with a story tragic until the very end, they argue. Another popular interpretation is that reborn Sandor will become a warrior for the Faith of the Seven in some capacity, for which his last scene could be laying out the groundwork to build a Warrior’s Son storyline on later.

But neither fits in with his character growth arc nor with what his potential future role linked to the Starks could be. Sandor doesn’t have it in him to become a Lancel 2.0 and neither does he have it in him to be Elder Brother 2.0. It’s hard to imagine a man who refused all his life to take an oath of knighthood doing a complete U-turn and taking a religious oath. And yet, the imagery for his rebirth being a spiritual one is so overwhelming. How do we interpret this imagery without making it about the possibility of him becoming permanently tied to the Faith Militant?

As they say, the Devil is in the details. Or, in this case, in the details in the Elder Brother’s words. Hound: dead. Sandor: resting. It sounds like the good old Brother is speaking of two different people, and not about the same man with different names. Why this specificity in separating him in two different halves at this precise stage, though? If he wanted finality, he would pronounce both Sandor and the Hound dead instead of engaging in wordplay that allows him to circumvent the Thou Shalt Not Lie commandment and keep plausible deniability if he ever were to be confronted with accusations of playing loose with the truth.

Whilst reading the story of Miyamoto Musashi, Japan’s most celebrated samurai, it caught my attention that there’s another way to look at Sandor’s last appearance, one more fitting into the redemption theme that runs throughout his storyline: forgiveness in the religious sense of the word. Miyamoto Musashi stood out as a larger-than-life figure amongst numerous other famous warriors not just because he had the skills with steel of an Arthur Dayne but also because he saw swordsmanship as a way of life, a path to walk in to achieve one’s best self, improving oneself along the way through combat and hardship. In the Way of the Sword, as he called it, knights are indeed not for killing, an idea Sandor would’ve scoffed at. But there’s a catch: in his beginnings, Musashi is like Sandor. To him, samurai are for killing.

Or at least that’s how the story goes in the most famous novel about him, Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa, which has one striking parallel that provides a different reading of Sandor’s death. The novel doesn’t cover all of Musashi’s life, only his youth, since he was a feral child with rage issues and suffering from family-related trauma up until his late 20s when he finally becomes the sword-saint of Japanese legend with a myriad duels to this name. The manner in which this change occurs is what caught my eye, because initially it looks so blatantly obvious that Takezo, as he was called then, is destined to be a brute samurai with excessive rage and aggressiveness that stays alive only because he’s too good with a weapon to die. He had no formal training by a sensei, no Martial Arts style, no self-control, no philosophy, nothing. Just plain ol’ fight and kill, all instinct, all impulse, which lands him in several clashes with the villagers and the law. Orphaned at 7, he grew up fostered at a temple, learning the handling of weapons more by himself than with an instructor, killing his first man at 13, slaying a giant in his early teens, going to fight at and lose a big battle, and ending up outlawed for killing his way back to his town from there.

So we have our first parallel with Sandor: highly effective and talented swordsman, big and incredibly strong, temperamental and mouthy, traumatised and in love with a woman he can’t have. An emotionally-damaged ball of destruction. It couldn’t go but from bad to worse from here onwards.

Then enters salvation in the form of eccentric Buddhist monk Takuan Soho, who looks more fit for breaking skulls than healing souls and stops Takezo in his tracks from going even further down this destructive path. Takezo is being hunted down by the local lord’s soldiers for trespassing the barrier set up on the road to catch fugitives from the recent Battle of Sekigahara that decided who would be Japan’s shogun, and for killing soldiers to return to his home village to deliver news to family about his missing best friend that’d gone to Sekigahara with him. The soldiers can’t catch him for dear life, so Takuan strikes a deal with the officer in charge: if he catches Takezo by himself, he’ll earn the right to decide what to do with him, deal? Deal!

The too-clever monk devises a way to use Takezo’s childhood friend, the girl Otsu, as bait to lure the boy into showing himself at the woods he’s hiding in. It works. Takezo is captured, and as per the agreement now Takuan can decide his fate. Ignoring everyone’s bloodthirsty demands for his head, Takuan decides to hang the boy from a tree by the waist:

He took hold of the rope after freeing it from the railing and dragged Takezō, like a dog on a leash, to the tree. The prisoner went meekly, head bowed, uttering not a sound. He seemed so repentant that some of the softer-hearted members of the crowd felt a bit sorry for him. The excitement of capturing the “wild beast” had hardly worn off, however, and with great gusto everyone joined in the fun. Having tied several lengths of rope together, they hoisted him up to a branch about thirty feet from the ground and lashed him tightly. So bound, he looked less like a living man than a big straw doll.

The punishment is to leave him hanging like a Christmas decoration from the monastery’s tall tree until he dies, so everyone thinks. But Takuan has ulterior motives, and whilst Takezo is playing the part of the loudest tree decoration in history, the monk indulges in philosophising and verbal sparring with him:

“I would’ve been better off letting the villagers catch up with me. At least they’re human.”

“Was that your only mistake, Takezō? Hasn’t just about everything you’ve ever done been some kind of mistake? While you’re resting up there, why don’t you try thinking about the past a little.”

“Oh, shut up, you hypocrite! I’m not ashamed! Matahachi’s mother can call me anything she wants, but he is my friend, my best friend. I considered it my responsibility to come and tell the old hag what happened to him and what does she do? She tries to incite that mob to torture me! Bringing her news of her precious son was the only reason I broke through the barrier and came here. Is that a violation of the warrior’s code?”

“That’s not the point, you imbecile! The trouble with you is that you don’t even know how to think. You seem to be under the misconception that if you perform one brave deed, that alone makes you a samurai. Well, it doesn’t! You let that one act of loyalty convince you of your righteousness. The more convinced you became, the more harm you caused yourself and everyone else. And now where are you? Caught in a trap you set for yourself, that’s where!” He paused. “By the way, how’s the view from up there, Takezō?”

“You pig! I won’t forget this!”

“You’ll forget everything soon. Before you turn into dried meat, Takezō, take a good look at the wide world around you. Gaze out onto the world of human beings, and change your selfish way of thinking (…).”

Takezo is too combative for the monk’s lesson to easily penetrate his thick skull, so the back-and-forth continues for a good while:

“Just wait, Takuan, just wait! If I have to chew through this rope with my bare teeth, I will, just to get my hands on you and tear you limb from limb!”

“Is that a promise or a threat? If you really think you can do it, I’ll stay down here and wait. Are you sure you can keep it up without killing yourself before the rope breaks?”

“Shut up!” Takezō screamed hoarsely.

“Say, Takezo, you really are strong! The whole tree is swaying. But I don’t notice the earth shaking, sorry to say. You know, the trouble with you is that, in reality, you’re weak. Your kind of anger is nothing more than personal malice. A real man’s anger is an expression of moral indignation. Anger over petty emotional trifles is for women, not men.”

. . .

“It’s the same with your so-called courage. Your conduct up till now gives no evidence that it’s anything more than animal courage, the kind that has no respect for human values and life. That’s not the kind of courage that makes a samurai. True courage knows fear. It knows how to fear that which should be feared. Honest people value life passionately, they hang on to it like a precious jewel. And they pick the right time and place to surrender it, to die with dignity.”

Still no answer.

“That’s what I meant when I said it’s a pity about you. You were born with physical strength and fortitude, but you lack both knowledge and wisdom. While you managed to master a few of the more unfortunate features of the Way of the Samurai, you made no effort to acquire learning or virtue. People talk about combining the Way of Learning with the Way of the Samurai, but when properly combined, they aren’t two—they’re one. Only one Way, Takezō.”

Then, in pain and fearing that this torture will last much longer, Takezo finally sees the light. He declares to have understood how wrong he was, and begs to be taken down:

“Takuan! Save me!” Takezō’s cry for help was loud and plaintive. The branch began to tremble, as though it, as though the whole tree, were weeping.

“I want to be a better man. I realize now how important it is, what a privilege it is to be born human. I’m almost dead, but I understand what it means to be alive. And now that I know, my whole life will consist of being tied to this tree! I can’t undo what I’ve done.”

“You’re finally coming to your senses. For the first time in your life, you’re talking like a human being.”

“I don’t want to die,” Takezō cried. “I want to live. I want to go out, try again, do everything right this time.” His body convulsed with his sobbing. “Takuan . . . please! Help me . . . help me!”

Takuan refuses. However, he unwittingly makes it possible for Otsu to cut the rope and free Takezo. Boy and girl flee together, but become separated, and Takezo is caught by soldiers of the daimyo and taken before his lordship. Takuan interferes again by telling the daimyo that he was promised he’d decide Takezo’s punishment. Takezo is taken to a dungeon-like haunted room in the castle, where he’ll spend 3 years in solitary confinement, devoted to reading books on worthy subjects, a decision made by Takuan as part of his scheme to reform Takezo from the inside out:

“Think of this room as your mother’s womb and prepare to be born anew. If you look at it only with your eyes, you will see nothing more than an unlit, closed cell. But look again, more closely. Look with your mind and think. This room can be the wellspring of enlightenment, the same fountain of knowledge found and enriched by sages in the past. It is up to you to decide whether this is to be a chamber of darkness or one of light.”

When he reemerges from his confinement, Takezo is truly changed. He’s no longer full of rage and ready to kill anyone on sight, and tells Takuan he finally gets what he was trying to imprint on him when hanging from the tree: he was like a wild beast and now he’s human, and wants to be the best human possible. Takuan decides it’s time to release him:

“Even though you’ve had no one to converse with but yourself, you’ve actually learned to speak like a human being! Good! Today you will leave this place. And as you do so, hug your hard-earned enlightenment to your bosom. You’re going to need it when you go forth into the world to join your fellow men.”

In his solitude, Takezo has acquired a keen sense of self-awareness, recognising he’s still full of rough edges that he needs to smooth out in order to better himself. He declares he will take to wandering through the country to learn the Way of the Sword and reach enlightenment and perfection as a swordsman. Pleased, Takuan and the daimyo tell him he’s been reborn and that, to befit his rebirth, he should leave his old identity behind:

“It’s all right for him to roam about while he’s still young,” said Terumasa. “But now that he’s going out on his own—reborn, as you put it—he should have a new name. Let it be Miyamoto, so that he never forgets his birthplace. From now on, Takezō, call yourself Miyamoto.”

Takezō’s hands went automatically to the floor. Palms down, he bowed deep and long. “Yes, sir, I will do that.”

“You should change your first name too,” Takuan interjected. “Why not read the Chinese characters of your name as ‘Musashi’ instead of ‘Takezō’? You can keep writing your name the same as before. It’s only fitting that everything should begin anew on this day of your rebirth.”

Thus Shinmen Takezo dies and Miyamoto Musashi is born. His is a spiritual rebirth, like Sandor’s, and it’s also very explicitly stated in the novel, with the priest present to pronounce Takezo dead and Musashi born, just like the Elder Brother pronounced The Hound dead and Sandor at rest.

“Now there’s only this sword,” he thought. “The only thing in the world I have to rely on.” He rested his hand on the weapon’s handle and vowed to himself, “I will live by its rule. I will regard it as my soul, and by learning to master it, strive to improve myself, to become a better and wiser human being. Takuan follows the Way of Zen, I will follow the Way of the Sword. I must make of myself an even better man than he is.”

Thenceforward, the new Miyamoto Musashi, once called a wild beast, a raging tiger, a demon, hated and feared by everyone for his viciousness and physical invincibility, travels across Japan following in the steps of a Hero’s Journey quest, dueling the baddies and the goodies, helping distressed damsels, old ladies, and children, learning various arts, carving statuettes of a goddess, opposing worthy and unworthy rivals, saving villagers from bandits, tilling the land… All the things you’d expect of a knight-errant or a lone gunslinger if this were a Western tale. He matures, his temper mellows, he masters his impulses, sheds his selfishness, and becomes a man admired and followed, and envied, too. All of which was only possible because one day a perceptive priest looked into his soul and, like a sword-polisher, took it unto himself to polish the rust off it by teaching him the meaning of compassion, of forgiveness, of second chances. It isn’t merely a symbolical transformation; it’s a literal one and very faith-driven.

Sandor Clegane may not change his name, or at least it doesn’t look likely that he would, but The Hound has been written like a separate identity that no longer belongs to him. There’s already been two Hounds since the original “died”: Rorge and Lem Lemoncloak. Can we interpret that becoming just Sandor Clegane is his “Miyamoto Musashi” moment? Indeed, there are enough clues to contend that the Quiet Isle story for his baptismal-like death & rebirth is meant to be interpreted through the lens of sacramental forgiveness.

The imagery is there, uncharacteristically obvious for an author prone to keeping readers stumbling in the fog through subtlety and writerly sleights of hand. It’s the Catholic rite of pardon for one’s sins whose elements and symbology Martin has borrowed for Sandor, namely: conversion, confession, penance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. They don’t necessarily follow in this order, as it depends on individuals, but they all are present in whichever order an individual case unfolds, and Martin, a cultural Catholic, is certainly familiar with the rite, not to mention that the Faith of the Seven is just Fantasy Catholicism with fewer bells and whistles.

Let’s start with conversion. Generally, this refers to baptism, a step necessary to become a Christian since the dawn days of the religion, but in terms of purely referring to the act of committing a sin or a crime this is about the realisation that what you have done has unjustly visited harm on others. Essentially, the first step towards forgiveness is acknowledging you did wrong and you are the one that must pay for. Conversion is the will to break the cycle and make amends.

When did Sandor “convert”? Though it came from a longer process of chipping away at his self and not an overnight decision, it was the moment he decided to cut cleanly and irrevocably with his former life as a Lannister strongman at the Battle of Blackwater. He had risen high in his liege’s household, benefitted from it financially and socially, and was allowed the lifestyle of a foster Lannister. In sum, even though he never embraced the Lannister ethos, he was nevertheless part of and participant in their morally-challenged sphere. He had, to use the Biblical phrase, “reaped the wages of sin.” Both his and the sins of his masters’ House. To illustrate this point, just one example: he accepts the cloak of a Kingsguard, a position only made possible because of Jaime and Cersei’s sin in having a bastard child to illegitimately place on the throne with the full backing of their House.

But there’s two major differences between the Foster Lannister and the True Lannisters: participation in the cycle and forgoing the fruits of one’s sins.

On the first point, we have Cersei and Tyrion. Each one has deeply felt personal wounds often viewed as having been inflicted by another Lannister, their father Tywin. But instead of breaking the cycle, seek personal happiness outside Tywin’s sibling rivalry dynamic used to manipulate and control his children, or take any of thousands of other possible paths, the only thing Cersei and Tyrion (and to a lesser extent Jaime) do is perpetuate more of the same in an ever-escalating conflict destined to end in a self-inflicted Rains of Castamere on their own House. If Sandor were to act as a True Lannister, he would be involved in a Cersei/Tyrion-like struggle with Gregor. He’d burn larger villages than Gregor, rape more and younger women than Gregor, etc. He’d do this in an effort to gain Tywin’s favour as a means of destroying his brother just as the Lannister sibling dynamic plays out. But Sandor never entered this spiral of destruction despite his fratricidal hate for Gregor. He never identified with the aggressor and became an instrument of perpetuating the cycle in his heart. He accepted that the world was brutal and unfair, that it wasn’t a song, and did what he had to do to survive. He sinned in service to House Lannister, but there was punishment and suffering for him in those sins for his whole life.

On the second point, not a single True Lannister entertains giving up the spoils of sin. Giving up worldly possessions, paying restitution above and beyond what was stolen, exceeding the threshold of one’s wrongs in repenting—these are the core of every religious form of sin and forgiveness. But what do the Lannisters do? Cersei uses her own children to grab power that doesn’t belong to her or her House and allows the realm to be drowned in blood for the prize of having a Lannister on the throne; Jaime is all “I’ll confess to the incest and then marry Cersei while Tommen rules,” showing a willingness to be originator, enabler, and beneficiary of his family’s machinations; Tyrion the circus clown in exile wants to ravage Westeros with dragonfire, to rape his sister and become Tywin 2.0 in Casterly Rock. There is nothing but pure obsession with the spoils of sin amongst Tywin’s offspring.

On the other hand, the Foster Lannister took the first and mandatory step as well as the second on the Blackwater when he broke away and gave up all claim to Lannister spoils. He gave up a comfortable lifestyle and a plum position, and took nothing with him that he earned through the Lannisters. True, he did have the gold from the Hand’s tournament, but that was his outside of Lannister service and legitimately earned, and even that was taken away, too. His break is thus absolute, he can’t look back.

Confession comes next. We don’t know what Sandor told the Elder Brother, but it’s not that hard to guess the things he may have said in confession at the Quiet Isle. How? By looking at what he tells Arya at the cave after winning his trial by combat against Beric:

“You killed Mycah,” she said once more, daring him to deny it. “Tell them. You did. You did.”

“I did.” His whole face twisted. “I rode him down and cut him in half, and laughed. I watched them beat your sister bloody too, watched them cut your father’s head off.”

It’s curious that, of all horrible things he must have witnessed in his former life, it’s these three specific crimes that torment Sandor: killing an innocent boy, and standing by as an innocent man was executed and an innocent girl was abused. All these three crimes sprout from Lannister sins.

In the Catholic rite, penance is the repudiation of one’s own sin and an acknowledgement that one must satisfy for them. It won’t do to go about it in a spread-out evenly and generalised way but accepting that it’s been you who sinned. Sandor is judged guilty by association by the Brotherhood Without Banners and he rejects the more outrageous attempts by them to make him pay in Gregor’s stead, but he does accept the sins he feels were his, too, not just his former masters’. Killing Mycah wasn’t his idea, but he was the executioner. Beheading Ned wasn’t his doing, but he had a role in the downfall of House Stark. Beating Sansa black and blue he never did, but he witnessed it and couldn’t save her like he thinks he should have. How can he make amends and give satisfaction for them, then?

It’s at this point when the road to redemption becomes even more blatantly religious in-world. For his sin of killing an innocent boy on royal orders, Sandor is judged by the faith of Rh’llor. Note that, in spite of the dozens of charges the BwB hurl at him, it’s Mycah the only accusation that sticks and that Sandor must make amends for with his own life were he to perish in the trial by combat he’s sentenced to. And also note that the accuser who is able to bring him to task where the others have failed is Arya.

Arya is the recipient of Sandor’s confession to his three crimes. Arya is friend, daughter, and sister to all three victims. And so Arya is the one to figuratively throw the gauntlet at Sandor and demand satisfaction. But, for all she tries her damnedest to be his judge, jury, and executioner at once, she ends up becoming Sandor’s act of public penance.

Lem grabbed her wrist and twisted, wrenching the dagger away. She kicked at him, but he would not give it back. “You go to hell, Hound,” she screamed at Sandor Clegane in helpless empty-handed rage. “You just go to hell!”

“He has,” said a voice scarce stronger than a whisper.

The trial was meant to punish Sandor for the sins of House Lannister undistinghsably from who committed which. But Sandor had lived his life already under penalty for those very sins. In Catholic theology, the wages of sin are death—as in damnation—and suffering. When Thoros says he’s a man enduring Hell, he’s referring to this suffering. Sandor’s face is a punishment. Serving those who enable Gregor to continue perpetrating the same crimes he’s done to Sandor has been a punishment.

Look at it like this: what’s more important to the three True Lannisters? Beauty, sword, Casterly Rock. Cersei, Jaime, and Tyrion each define themselves by these things respectively, which they have by birth or think are theirs by birth. And what happens? GRRM plays God, and Cersei ends up fat, shaven, and walking her sagging naked body through the streets, Jaime ends up a one-handed cripple, and Tyrion ends up a destitute slave in Essos. Some readers see in this a punishment for their sins, Jaime even says at one point that the loss of his hand is retribution for tossing Bran from the tower. But the Lannisters still cling to the spoils earned with the crimes of their House: As of ADWD, Cersei is most likely far from humbled by her experience and may stage a vengeful comeback, the supposedly on a path to redemption Jaime is still serving as (and reaping the benefits of being) Lord Commander of his bastard’s Kingsguard even as he severs ties with Cersei, and Tyrion is most definitely scheming a vengeful comeback. They want to claim the whole kingdom as a reward for confessing their sins, they want others to suffer as a result of their supposedly redeeming confessions.

So it can be said that the Lannisters aren’t being punished so much as suffering the natural consequences of their choices. Unrepentant is the key difference. While one is unrepentant there is no punishment, just suffering. Suffering ought to lead to reflection. Reflection to an understanding of cause and effect and a sense of humility and responsibility. Reflection then leads to being repentant for one’s role. Only afterwards is suffering really punishment from one’s own POV. The only other way it can be punishment is when it is imposed by an authority and proclaimed punishment.

What about Sandor? How does he define himself? Strength. Outwardly, he boasts to Sansa that all he needs is a longsword, that strong arms rule the world, the weak should just give up and go belly up, et cetera. All bravado, but this holds a seed of truth inside for him, given that he was burnt young, innocent, and powerless, and only survived because he grew up tall as a tree and made himself useful to Lord Lannister… and his penance hits him right in the core. How so? Because he’s made to use his strength to serve the purpose of paying back his debt.

In ASOIAF, the ultimate forgiveness mechanism for crimes is the Night’s Watch. The entry fee is giving up all claims to anything of worldly value, all allegiances and connections and riches, and the post entry reward is selfless service. So, following this in-world model, we already have established that Sandor met the first requisite (give up anything of value) when he broke away at Blackwater, so the forgiveness implied by the results of the trial by combat and Arya’s choice there was earned well before their last scene at the Trident plays out. So, what remains is the second requirement to reach forgiven status.

The Hound goes thus to protect Arya to make up for the sin of his role in Ned’s downfall, and by extension his role in Sansa’s abuse as well because House Stark’s downfall left her defenceless under the grip of Sandor’s masters. Granted, it didn’t start as selfless service, because he did kidnap her in retaliation for his gold and had intentions to ransom her to her family, but the pragmatics of that are self-evident: he clearly couldn’t just show up at Robb’s camp to offer his services and expect to be taken seriously without a bargaining chip the Northerners won’t ignore. Arya became truly his penitent service when she lost her bargaining chip value to him courtesy of the Red Wedding and he still continued to protect her until he can’t go on anymore due to the wound to his leg.

On the surface, you could argue his is the same kind of punishment as Jaime’s loss of a hand: cut him at the leg and he’s no longer the Hound. But it goes beyond such a superficial reading, because if for Jaime it’s merely the start of a path he may or mayn’t ultimately walk to completion, for Sandor dispossessing him of the last vestige of his past life at the hands of current liegemen of his former masters inflicting a crippling blow to the physical strength he so much relies on is the end of the road (for now, at least). By the time he is abandoned on the banks of the Trident, he’s been surrounded in the imagery of forgiveness of two of the three main religions in ASOIAF plus one:

  • As per Beric and Thoros, the Lord of Light has given him back his life, which implies forgiveness because the crime he was tried for was of the a life for a life, blood for blood sort.
  • As per Lord Eddard’s beliefs, Arya’s refusal to carry out Northern justice after hearing his confessions and looking him in the eye implicitly lays out that the Old Gods also give him back his life.
  • We could argue there’s a fourth religion involved: the Faceless Men, because by taking him off her prayer, Arya extended forgiveness in the name of the God of the Many Faces.

Now it’s time for the Faith of the Seven to have their turn at placing Sandor’s soul on the measurement scales and deciding whether he’s forgiven or condemned, and here subtlety goes out the window. GRRM lays out the religious imagery of forgiveness and redemption rather thick on the entire Quiet Isle sequence, starting well before we see the place, well before we find out there’s a Gravedigger there. Just look at these lines from the conversations that Brienne and Septon Meribald have on the road:

“Why do they call it the Quiet Isle?” asked Podrick.

“Those who dwell here are penitents, who seek to atone for their sins through contemplation, prayer, and silence. Only the Elder Brother and his proctors are permitted to speak, and the proctors only for one day of every seven.”

A vow of silence is an act of contrition, a sacrifice by which we prove our devotion to the Seven Above. For a mute to take a vow of silence would be akin to a legless man giving up the dance.”

. . .

“Faith,” urged Septon Meribald. “Believe, persist, and follow, and we shall find the peace we seek.”

Penitence, atonement, finding peace… All the elements of being granted forgiveness. Martin couldn’t have made it clearer if he had placed a Here Be Redemption neon sign at the entrance to the Quiet Isle.

We can infer that Sandor confessed to the EB, either as he lay dying on the Trident or once he arrived to the QI, for otherwise the EB wouldn’t know all he knows about his life and in such detail. It’s relevant to highlight how the Elder Brother refers to the Hound as he pronounces him dead in contrast to how Brienne refers to him:

“I know a little of this man, Sandor Clegane. He was Prince Joffrey’s sworn shield for many a year, and even here we would hear tell of his deeds, both good and ill. If even half of what we heard was true, this was a bitter, tormented soul, a sinner who mocked both gods and men. He served, but found no pride in service. He fought, but took no joy in victory. He drank, to drown his pain in a sea of wine. He did not love, nor was he loved himself. It was hate that drove him. Though he committed many sins, he never sought forgiveness. Where other men dream of love, or wealth, or glory, this man Sandor Clegane dreamed of slaying his own brother, a sin so terrible it makes me shudder just to speak of it. Yet that was the bread that nourished him, the fuel that kept his fires burning. Ignoble as it was, the hope of seeing his brother’s blood upon his blade was all this sad and angry creature lived for . . . and even that was taken from him, when Prince Oberyn of Dorne stabbed Ser Gregor with a poisoned spear.”

“You sound as if you pity him,” said Brienne.

“I did. You would have pitied him as well, if you had seen him at the end. I came upon him by the Trident, drawn by his cries of pain. He begged me for the gift of mercy, but I am sworn not to kill again. Instead, I bathed his fevered brow with river water, and gave him wine to drink and a poultice for his wound, but my efforts were too little and too late. The Hound died there, in my arms.

“It is true, then,” she said dully. “Sandor Clegane is dead.”

“He is at rest.” The Elder Brother paused.

So here we have a figure of authority from the Faith describe Sandor Clegane (notice that this is how he calls him) as a “sinner who mocked the gods” and therefore in need of repentance and atonement, in contrast to how Brienne calls the Hound (also notice that this is how she calls him) a criminal she must execute, as she explicitly tells Brother Narbert. The law of men (the Crown) that Brienne represents has condemned Sandor, but the law of the gods (the Seven) that the EB represents has declared him “at rest.” And by this pronouncement of peace, we can only conclude that Sandor has met the confession requirement.

And the EB does have the authority to pronounce ego te absolvo. Traditionally, the Father Superior of a Catholic monastery can hear confession and absolve people same as an ordained priest, and the EB is just a Father Superior with a Fantasy name. That alone would give him the authority. The arrival of Septon Meribald to the QI for specific confession purposes is intriguing, because it seems to imply that in-world only Septons can hear confession:

He turned to Septon Meribald. “I hope that you have time to absolve us of our sins. Since the raiders slew old Septon Bennet, we have had no one to hear confession.”

That is true in real-life Catholicism, too, because not every priest has the authority to hear confession. However, Catholic canon law says that although only authorised priests can administer the sacrament of confession & absolution, any priest can hear the confession of a dying person because the danger of dying unconfessed trumps canon law. Sandor was dying (he thought) when the EB found him, so to consider the EB hearing his “final words” a valid confession is reasonable. And in any case, Meribald’s presence in the QI for the specific purpose of absolving the monks of their sins extends to Sandor in his capacity as a novice monk. The wording in the above passage is specific about absolution for this very reason.

Also, although we don’t know if Sandor and Meribald ever talked off-screen, we can’t ignore the symbolism of Meribald’s companion, Dog, being present when the good Septon hears confession:

“I shall make time,” said Meribald, “though I hope you have some better sins than the last time I came through.” Dog barked. “You see? Even Dog was bored.”

We can infer what penitence was imposed on Sandor after confession by looking at what he wears when he reappears on the QI. Would someone like him agree to wear monastic clothes if he’d not been talked into it? It had to be willing. His stay at the monastery itself is, going by my Miyamoto Musashi parallel, like staying secluded in the dungeon to study and reflect. His true penance is what he’s learning to do there: he’s been made a gravedigger.

… and higher still they passed a lichyard where a brother bigger than Brienne was struggling to dig a grave. From the way he moved, it was plain to see that he was lame. As he flung a spadeful of the stony soil over one shoulder, some chanced to spatter against their feet. “Be more watchful there,” chided Brother Narbert. “Septon Meribald might have gotten a mouthful of dirt.” The gravedigger lowered his head. When Dog went to sniff him he dropped his spade and scratched his ear.

“A novice,” explained Narbert.

Sandor Clegane, the man who lived by the sword and who left the dead to be food for dogs and wolves, is taught to give people humane burial. Let’s have a closer look at who the first grave he’s seen digging is for:

“Who is the grave for?” asked Ser Hyle, as they resumed their climb up the wooden steps.

“Brother Clement, may the Father judge him justly.”

“Was he old?” asked Podrick Payne.

“If you consider eight-and-forty old, aye, but it was not the years that killed him. He died of wounds he got at Saltpans. He had taken some of our mead to the market there, on the day the outlaws descended on the town.”

“The Hound?” said Brienne.

“Another, just as brutal. He cut poor Clement’s tongue out when he would not speak. Since he had taken a vow of silence, the raider said he had no need of it.

Sandor Clegane, the old Hound and the first of them all, is burying a victim of the new Hound. This is extremely significant, and from what the EB says, burials are Sandor’s primary occupation at the monastery:

“Too many corpses, these days.” The Elder Brother sighed. “Our gravedigger knows no rest. Rivermen, westermen, northmen, all wash up here. Knights and knaves alike. We bury them side by side, Stark and Lannister, Blackwood and Bracken, Frey and Darry. That is the duty the river asks of us in return for all its gifts, and we do it as best we can. Sometimes we find a woman, though . . . or worse, a little child. Those are the cruelest gifts.”

We don’t know if Sandor participates in the preparation of bodies for burial, but it wouldn’t be out of bounds to assume that it may very well be a part of his duties as gravedigger. If so, then the idea of this being his penance picks up steam. He does have other humble duties, too, like serving at the table:

The last of the food had been cleared away by the novices whose task it was to serve. Most were boys near Podrick’s age, or younger, but there were grown men as well, amongst them the big gravedigger they had encountered on the hill, who walked with the awkward lurching gait of one half-crippled.

He’s counted amongst “the novices whose task it was to serve.” Service is, indeed, what the Seven have imposed on Sandor via the Elder Brother as the way to make up for his sins, and his primary duty is laying to rest all those who this war has taken away, impartially and humanely, regardless of allegiance. Why this specific service, though? The EB’s words summing up Sandor’s former life illustrate the motive:

“I know a little of this man, Sandor Clegane. He was Prince Joffrey’s sworn shield for many a year, and even here we would hear tell of his deeds, both good and ill. If even half of what we heard was true, this was a bitter, tormented soul, a sinner who mocked both gods and men. He served, but found no pride in service. He fought, but took no joy in victory. He drank, to drown his pain in a sea of wine. He did not love, nor was he loved himself. It was hate that drove him. Though he committed many sins, he never sought forgiveness. Where other men dream of love, or wealth, or glory, this man Sandor Clegane dreamed of slaying his own brother, a sin so terrible it makes me shudder just to speak of it. Yet that was the bread that nourished him, the fuel that kept his fires burning. Ignoble as it was, the hope of seeing his brother’s blood upon his blade was all this sad and angry creature lived for . . . and even that was taken from him, when Prince Oberyn of Dorne stabbed Ser Gregor with a poisoned spear.”

Ser Kevan’s snarky words to Cersei about rabid dogs being the fault of their masters is precisely why Sandor felt no pride in serving House Lannister. Thoros and the EB coincide in considering this service his personal Hell, which only prolonged his childhood suffering well into adulthood. But he’d never sought—or found—atonement for his sins by breaking clean with his lieges, settling instead for stubbornly adhering to his own moral code and refusing to give in to the toxic dysfunctionality of Lannister dynamics. The Hound wouldn’t have sought forgiveness, that man had to die, and so he did:

That was another shock. “How did he die?”

“By the sword, as he had lived.”

There’s a very unsubtle baptism imagery wrapped around the Hound’s death: that of rebirth by water. In Catholic theology, the whole point of using water is to signify purification from evil, the cleansing of our outward actions, and the passage to spiritual rebirth:

Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”

Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.

(John 3:3-5)

According to the EB himself, this is what he did first when he found a dying Sandor:

“I came upon him by the Trident, drawn by his cries of pain. He begged me for the gift of mercy, but I am sworn not to kill again. Instead, I bathed his fevered brow with river water, and gave him wine to drink and a poultice for his wound, but my efforts were too little and too late. The Hound died there, in my arms.”

The good Brother isn’t lying when he says the Hound died there, he’s simply speaking in religious metaphor. Circling back to Catholicism as our model for understanding the Faith of the Seven, this religion considers the act of baptism the birth of a “new man” to replace the “old man,” and goes as far as actually using death as a metaphor for this transformation, as this Biblical passage shows:

Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.

For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection:

Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.

(Romans 6:4-6)

Thus, baptism by water is the symbol of the death and burial of the old man who led a past life without forgiveness. Which also explains why the Elder Brother tells Brienne he personally “buried” the Hound:

“I buried him myself. I can tell you where his grave lies, if you wish. I covered him with stones to keep the carrion eaters from digging up his flesh, and set his helm atop the cairn to mark his final resting place.”

And it also explains why the EB chose to bury the Hound’s “flesh” (his armour, sword, possessions, probably some of his literal flesh if he cut or cauterised his leg wound) and erect a grave. He wanted to make it as literal and irreversible as humanly possible that the Hound was well and truly dead, and have the fact sink in both into Sandor’s mind as well as the mind of anyone who ever came asking. And to drive across the point that he’s talking about a rebirth, the EB also tells Brienne about his own transformation after he “died in the battle of the Trident” fighting for Rhaegar:

“Instead I woke here, upon the Quiet Isle. The Elder Brother told me I had washed up on the tide, naked as my name day. I can only think that someone found me in the shallows, stripped me of my armor, boots, and breeches, and pushed me back out into the deeper water. The river did the rest. We are all born naked, so I suppose it was only fitting that I come into my second life the same way.”

He underwent the same process of being bathed in river water and ending up half-dead on the same isle where he’d be saved and given a second chance at life. He’s now in a position to give Sandor the same opportunity, and did so doubly, saving both his physical body by healing him from a wound that, as per his reputation, not even maesters would’ve healed, and most likely his soul too, by pushing Sandor towards a path of atonement that would lead to reconciliation. His involvement in the man’s rebirth makes it possible to pronounce Sandor Clegane finally at peace instead of dead like he didn’t hesitate to do for the Hound:

“It is true, then,” she said dully. “Sandor Clegane is dead.”

“He is at rest.”

The Elder Brother is simply following the “old man” vs “new man” religious phraseology when he makes this Sandor vs Hound distinction that Brienne doesn’t grasp. With the inclusion of this scene between the EB and Brienne that serves no other purpose than to let readers know the fate of Sandor Clegane, Martin has written him to be the only character in ASOIAF that is surrounded by the imagery of forgiveness from three major religions, a fact that isn’t accidental but has to serve a plot purpose. You don’t simply have a character be forgiven by Rh’llor, the Old Gods, and the Seven (and the God of Many Faces for additional pathos) for no reason and no future completion at all. We don’t know yet whether Sandor’s story will ultimately have him serve a new master or continue as a freelance non-knight, his own dog as he put it, but one thing this theme of tripartite forgiveness makes clear is that he won’t serve a bad cause ever again. Forgiveness, for Sandor Clegane, means service, specifically service that he can take pride in and pay it forward, just as the Elder Brother has found pride in being a healer famous for saving hopeless cases, making use of an ability he’d not have been able to if not for his second life. Clegane’s redemption arc is one of service and protection, one that makes use of his natural talents, so it makes literary sense that henceforward there’d be a continuation of this pattern but with the inclusion of a worthwhile cause.

What’s in a Name: Naming as a Technique in Sansa and Sandor’s Relationship Arc

19 Thursday Nov 2020

Posted by miladyofyork in General ASOIAF

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sandor clegane, sansa stark, the hound

To B.,

for the souls in blackberry pies,

and all the stories that can’t be lies.

by Milady of York

Sandor Clegane is called by his first name by only a few characters in the books, most always preferring to call him by his nickname, The Hound, or by his surname. But there’s one glaring omission amongst the very few on first-name terms with him: Sansa.

Given the story they share, this omission is intriguing and invites scrutiny to find an explanation to this. Because it has to be more than just an omission, and it hardly could be an authorial oversight. It eventually became apparent to me that there was a literary technique at play, but which one it might be wasn’t clear from the get-go, and merited a long search for hard proof. In trying to find a literary theory that would explain and exemplify what GRRM was doing, I was reminded of another very complex series, The Lymond Chronicles by late Scottish author Dorothy Dunnett, whose protagonist, Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny, exhibits some startling similarities to Sandor.

Bold claim, I know. But do read on and see the evidence to support my point. To begin with, look at these coincidences between the two characters:

  • Both have a surname the authors invented based on real surnames: Dunnett said in a 1990 talk that she made up Lymond from an acquaintance’s surname of Lamont, and although GRRM hasn’t said so, we can guess Clegane comes from a similar real-life surname, such as perhaps the still existing Cleggan.
  • Both are second sons, and for a while heirs to their noble houses: Francis and Sandor each have one brother and one sister—though one more sibling to the former appears—and are heirs to the Baron of Culter and House Clegane respectively, for a time, due to their brothers’ childlessness.
  • Both were victims of childhood abuse and fled their homes: Francis was whipped by Lord Gavin, his father, and Sandor was burnt by his brother with the complicity of his father.
  • Both have a Cain-and-Abel dynamic with their elder brothers: Although not for the same reason, as Richard Crawford of Culter is the good egg of the Crawfords as opposed to Gregor being the rotten egg in the Clegane basket.
  • Both have a sister deceased before the series’ start, of whose death one of the brothers is thought to be the culprit: Gregor is a suspect in the Clegane sister’s death and Lymond is a suspect in the death of his sister, Eloise.
  • Both have a badass but sadly interrupted swordfight with their brothers: Francis duels Richard in The Game of Kings, and Sandor duels Gregor in A Game of Thrones. Even the books’ titles coincide!
  • Both débuted in battle at a tender age: When they were squires aged 12 and 14 respectively; Francis at the Battle of Solway Moss, and Sandor most likely at the Sack of King’s Landing going by the books’ timeline.
  • Both spent their boyhood in the court of an ironfisted ruler and fell in the schemes of power-hungry and seductive older noblewomen related to them: Francis with King Henry VIII’s niece Margaret Lennox, and Sandor with Lord Tywin’s daughter Cersei.
  • Both have similar paths to ennoblement: Saving a high-ranked noble’s life from a feline at a hunt, with a hound as the hero, led to getting a nobiliary title in each case. Francis saved Queen Mary of Scots from a cheetah at a hunt by sacrificing his wolfhound in the fight, which weighed in getting the title of Comte de Sevigny, and Sandor’s grandfather got a knighthood and lands for saving Lord Tytos from a lion with the sacrifice of his three hounds.
  • Both men serve child monarchs and their mothers: Francis goes on missions for Dowager Queen Mary of Guise and her child Mary, Queen of Scots, and Sandor guarded Cersei before he went on to guard Joffrey.
  • Both own a hot-tempered and combative animal blasphemously named after a deity, who also shares their same colouring: Blond Lymond has the golden eagle Slata Baba, named for a Slavic goddess, and dark-haired Sandor has the black warhorse Stranger, named for one of the Seven.
  • Both will eventually fall in love with much-younger women that grow up before their eyes in the course of the series: Lymond is 11 years older than Philippa, and Sandor is 15 years older than Sansa.
  • Both men’s first meeting with these women was when they were very young girls, practically still children, and their first scene together involves scaring the sweet Jesus out of the poor girls: Lymond, aged 21 at the time, sneaked into 10-year-old Philippa’s farmhouse at Flaw Valleys to force information out of her father by using her against him, frightened her and made her cry; and Sandor, aged 26 at the time, scared 11-year-old Sansa and got growled at for it by her direwolf at the Trident.
  • Both men give their ladies an animal nickname: Francis calls Philippa “Yunitsa” = heifer in Russian, Sandor calls Sansa “little bird.”
  • Both men have very characteristic and distinctive voices: They can be recognised merely by describing their voices without having to name them, and they have to disguise their voices to not be recognised, too. Lymond’s countertenor and Sandor’s rasp are impossible to misidentify.
  • Both are masters at disguise, from clothes to masking their speech, when in need of passing through enemies undetected: Lymond has several instances of disguising himself, the most hilarious is when he impersonates a pretty prostitute to fool the commander of an English garrison. Sandor has the Twins incident when he fooled the Bolton soldier about his identity to reach the castle.
  • Speaking of disguises, both have had to pass as clerics out of necessity: Francis did it twice, first as a priest and then as a Cardinal, and Sandor is currently passing for a novice monk at the Quiet Isle.
  • Both men are unjustly accused and sentenced by the Crown for crimes they didn’t commit: Lymond served time in the galleys for treason and is put on trial for treason again in the first book, and Sandor is attainted for treason and pillaging.
  • Both men’s arc is haunted by the appalling choices they made because of a boy that’s the product of brother/sister incest, in different contexts: Francis is haunted by what he is goaded into doing for Khaireddin “Crawford” and Sandor by what he is ordered to do in the service of Joffrey “Baratheon.”
  • Both men have a brave but suicidal last charge/last stand spurred on by dispiriting news about the real or perceived violation of their ladies, which nearly puts an end to their lives due to injuries sustained: Francis sets off a kamikaze explosion at a river mill a while after he learns what happened to Philippa with Bailey, and Sandor fights drunk and outnumbered at the Crossroads Inn after he learns what happened to Sansa with Tyrion.
  • Both men try and fail to goad someone else into mercy-killing them when gravely wounded: A wounded Lymond tries it with his brother in The Game of Kings, a wounded Sandor tries it with Arya in A Storms of Swords. Both are denied their wish.

These are too many coincidences to not wonder if GRRM has read Dunnett’s saga and drawn inspiration from it, a question an enterprising fan asked him once and, according to this SSM from 2001, Martin hasn’t read The Lymond Chronicles, but according to comments by Elio Garcia on westeros.org, he knows about Dunnett and has read her other series, The House of Niccolò, whose protagonist is an ancestor to Lymond, although that series is very different and doesn’t lend itself to be a supporting example for the case I’m building in the present essay. Hard to say if Martin read more of Dunnett’s books since the SSM, but my object here isn’t to prove any derivations or coincidences between ASOIAF and The Lymond Chronicles, and neither is it to prove that Lymond and Sandor are similar characters, which would be too long a shot anyways.

Instead, the intention is to prove that The Lymond Chronicles contains a story arc that can be extrapolated to ASOIAF: the relationship between Francis Crawford and Philippa Somerville—its beginning, development, and conclusion—can be used to theorise on the still unfinished story of the relationship between Sansa Stark and Sandor Clegane, specifically to provide answers to the puzzling matter of Sansa never using Sandor’s first name even in her own headspace, what it may mean now, and what it may mean for the future.

WHEN YOUR NAME WAS JUST ANOTHER NAME THAT ROLLED OUT OF MY TONGUE . . .

Like Sansa, little Philippa Somerville never addresses, or even thinks of addressing, Lymond as anything but “Mr Crawford” as she grows up under his nose. It’s Mr Crawford here and Mr Crawford there, everywhere and most of the time, in her inner monologue and when speaking.

This doesn’t stand out initially in the first book, The Game of Kings, half because nobody calls him “Francis” besides his mother, the Dowager Lady Culter, his brother, Lord Culter, and the femme fatale who seduced him as a boy, the Countess of Lennox—everyone else calls him by his title of Lymond, or “the Master” for his title of Master of Culter, or Crawford of Lymond, or simply Crawford. And the other half because Philippa hates him passionately after his break-in and cross-questioning at Flaw Valleys, so it looks like she’s justified in addressing him in this frosty manner.

But why “Mr Crawford” specifically? Probably it was influenced by the impression left by their first meeting, for in that meeting she learnt his name and heard how he’s called by Gideon Somerville as he’s interrogated:

“Then ask me anything you want. I can assure you that till the ridiculous performance tonight I’ve had no enmity for you, and have never, to my knowledge, done you an injury. I don’t even know your name.”

“My name is Lymond.”

It was unknown to them. “Well, Mr. Lymond—”

“Lymond is a territorial name. My family name is Crawford.”

“Then, Mr. Crawford—” said Gideon patiently, and broke off, for the yellow-haired man was looking beyond him.

“Philippa!” said Lymond.

And so this way of calling him must’ve stuck with her. But in this book, she doesn’t even want to call him anything at all; she’ll later settle for his surname and also his full name plus title in the second book whenever she has to mention him, but never his Christian name. You can detect a comical passive-aggressive ring to her stubborn refusal to name him in light of her family’s forgiving Lymond for Flaw Valleys and the fact that Gideon and Kate Somerville become friends with him. In the same vein, we could easily explain why Sansa never uses the Hound’s name based on this scene in A Game of Thrones, the first and only time she has called him “Sandor,” in which  he doesn’t allow her to use his first name because it’s preceded by “ser”:

Sansa could not bear the sight of him, he frightened her so, yet she had been raised in all the ways of courtesy. A true lady would not notice his face, she told herself. “You rode gallantly today, Ser Sandor,” she made herself say.

Sandor Clegane snarled at her. “Spare me your empty little compliments, girl … and your sers. I am no knight. I spit on them and their vows. My brother is a knight. Did you see him ride today?”

With their on-the-wrong-foot beginning as well as 16th century social conventions that discouraged first-name treatment and familiarity with your elders and social superiors, it’s easy to dismiss Philippa’s “Mr Crawford” as just following an ordinary custom dictating proper ways to address people one isn’t on intimate terms with, just like it’s easy to write off Sansa’s not using Sandor’s name because of the impression from the Hand’s Tourney incident that left her with no other option but call him The Hound or by his full name because he loathes “Ser Sandor,” and she can’t call him Ser Clegane because it’s incorrect: you never use a knight’s last name before the title, only the first.

This omission soon becomes a characteristic behavior for both girls in their respective series. With Philippa, it stands out big time from the second book on, as in Queens’ Play a larger number of characters begin to call him Francis: five other people call him so, when it was only three in the first book. But not Philippa. And in the third book, The Disorderly Knights, the total number of people calling him Francis is raised to nine. But still not Philippa . . .

It’s in The Disorderly Knights when the author brings attention in a deliberate, very obvious manner to Philippa’s refusal, and we first notice the hint that there’s more than her self-confessed grudge holding her back from the laid-back treatment the rest of her family engage in (her mother calls Lymond “my dear,” for example). It’s been years since Flaw Valleys, Philippa has been absent from the second book, and reappears as a 13-year-old girl still very much hostile to “Lymond,” as she calls him now, like she confides to Joleta Reid Malett in one scene:

She asked Philippa directly, at last, why she disliked Lord Culter’s younger brother and Philippa, hot-cheeked under three years’ silence, told of the wartime raid when Lymond had broken into the house and had questioned her, a child of ten, against her parents’ wishes.

Turns out she hasn’t upgraded him to the more respectful-sounding “Mr Crawford” yet. For the first half of the book, she’ll be calling him “Lymond” and thinking of him as “Lymond,” up until they meet again three years later, in inconvenient circumstances: at a ditch, on a pitch-dark night, and with a corpse in the midst, and she’ll then be calling him by his full name and title, which she’ll later shorten to just “Francis Crawford”:

Philippa turned to address him, the yellow flame bright on her thirteen-year-old face, and his horse stirred a bit, and was quiet. Then, before she could even speak, he said mildly, ‘Why, the heir of the Somervilles, with attendant. You have a problem, I see. May we help you? Is that your old lady, or someone else’s?’

She knew who it was before he rode forward; before the light fell on his hated face. His skin was dark brown, she saw, so that all its lines were imprinted in white, and his eyes and teeth shone as he smiled.

Philippa’s eyes filled with angry tears. He was Francis Crawford of Lymond, the only man who could airily jest about an old woman battered to death in a ditch.

By this time he’s been made a Count in France, and characters now address him as “M. le Comte,” “M. le Comte de Sevigny,” or more sarcastically “M. le bloody Comte,” including Lymond’s one-time lover and the men of his mercenary company, so Philippa’s emphasis on his Scottish title instead of his French one also makes her way of addressing him stand out from the crowd. And in case we needed further clues that Dunnett is doing this intentionally, it’s made explicit that Lymond doesn’t like to be called by his name by just anyone (sounds familiar?) when Sir Graham Reid Malett, a new character trying to ingratiate himself to him, asks for permission:

(…) ‘I desire,’ he said abruptly to Lymond, ‘to call you Francis. Is that permitted? It is out of affection and a … purely spiritual love.’

At the unexpected half-tone of mischief, even Lymond’s blue stare relaxed. ‘Of course,’ he said.

Without realising it, the Reid Maletts kickstart a new phase in Philippa and Lymond’s relationship. Sir Graham, alias Gabriel, is a Knight Hospitaller and a devious bastard well cloaked by the aura of an angel, and in his desire to have Lymond on his side to spearhead his ambitious schemes for the Hospitallers and grand-scale politics, his beautiful sister is the bait he uses to lure him with lust if persuasion fails. Philippa discovers a crucial aspect of this scheme by accident whilst Joleta is a guest at her farm, but being young and hating Lymond so much, she reacts to the Joleta/Lymond affair in a manner that might read like jealousy:

Philippa’s eyes were suddenly shining. ‘How nice,’ she said genteelly, ‘if your sister and Mr Crawford were married. Love often begins with a show of hate, doesn’t it?’

‘Only common mortals like the Somervilles have good old rotten hates, dear,’ said her mother. ‘Sir Graham manages to love everybody and wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. Have a bun.’

.  . .

Tact was not yet Philippa’s strongest point. ‘But Mr Crawford kissed her!’ she said.

‘Philippa!’ Kate could hardly keep the satisfaction out of her voice.

This is the time she finally moves to calling him Mr Crawford, and it’s fitting that she does it in front of Sir Graham, because everything happened due to this newcomer drawing her in as a subsidiary pawn in his games for the entrapment of Lymond. Readers familiar with The Lymond Chronicles will know that the Reid Malett siblings bring into existence one of the biggest—if not the biggest—tragedies of Lymond’s life in the form of Khaireddin “Crawford” and that Gabriel eventually becomes Lymond’s arch-nemesis. Philippa has a significant role to play in this tragedy. She learns early the truth about Joleta, but naïvely spills to Sir Graham her secrets and all she knows about his sister in confession, believing him a trustworthy man of the Church; and allows her hatred of Lymond to overpower her common sense and, to teach him a lesson, withholds crucial information passed on to her that Lymond badly needed to know, a decision that will enable the murders of certain characters and very nearly cost Lymond his own life. She does reveal the truth in the end, saving his life nigh on time as he’s tied to a post and whipped to bloody shreds by Gabriel, but that won’t be enough to appease her guilty conscience. And finally, she stops Lymond from killing Gabriel when he had the opportunity:

‘No, Mr Crawford!’ cried Philippa forbiddingly, and ducking under the snatching arms that tried to prevent her, she ran forward. ‘No! What harm can Sir Graham do now? What might the little boy become?’ And sinking on her knees, she shook, in her vehemence, Lymond’s bloodstained arm.

Her merciful intervention does lead to a lot of harm. So when Sir Graham’s escape sends Lymond on a prolonged wild goose chase across the Mediterranean coasts of Europe, Asia, and North Africa seeking punishment for the ex-knight and salvation for his alleged son, she flees her home with only a maid for company to impose herself on his mission. Convinced of her own usefulness by a guilty conscience and deaf to reasonable rejection, she follows the trail of Khaireddin on her own when Lymond turns her away. She does find Khaireddin “Crawford” all right—she’s the one to give him the surname without asking first—, but Gabriel’s scheme is so truly diabolical that it takes years for the chase to come full cycle and for everyone involved to meet at last in the palace of the Sultan in Constantinople, where the quarrel is settled by a high stakes human chess game (I highly encourage you to read the series to find out how this was possible).

By the end of the fourth book, Pawn in Frankincense, the now seventeen-year-old girl becomes Mistress Philippa Crawford, Comtesse de Sevigny. Love match, that? No. You see, she had travelled abroad unchaperoned and been in the company of men all this time, which in the 16th century meant a ruined reputation and unmarriageable status for a woman. And for Philippa, there’s the extra complication of having lived in the Sultan’s harem with his concubines. So Lymond, in a terrible state of mind after the horrendous experience of the past years, offers to make her his wife in name only so she can have the protection of his titles and his fortune if he didn’t get out of Constantinople alive due to the Sultana’s rancour. It’s significant that, when he’s asking for her hand in marriage, he doesn’t utter any of the conventional phrases a man would when asking a woman to marry him. Instead, he talks of “offering her his name”:

‘Philippa?’ said Francis Crawford. And this time, the tawny silk unrumpling slowly, she rose to her feet.

She had grown. Kate’s vicious friend, once so elevated, was taller by little more than a head. She drew her brows together, and studied the circles under his eyes. He said lightly, ‘My dear girl; it’s Almoner’s Saturday. With six frails of figs and a sackful of almonds, I am offering you my name.’

And it’s also significant that, whilst contemplating whether to accept or turn down his offer, she’s still thinking of him as “Mr Crawford”:

He had foreseen a difficulty, which was undeniable, although she could not see it as pressing. He had further felt he owed her a duty. He had talked of the benefits to her; he had not spoken of what he might be sacrificing. Was there some woman waiting, at home or in France, who might be mortally hurt by this gesture? What indeed would his mother, Sybilla, say? And what, oh, what, would Kate? … Dear Kate. You will be pleased to learn that my hand in marriage has been sought and received by Mr Crawford, and I am happy to inform you that you are now his …

In the course of this adventure, she has come to know him much better, more intimately, and has seen him at his worst, too, sharing experiences to break any man’s soul, and surviving enough misfortune to form a bond not dissimilar to that of comrades in arms. She has come to respect him, so obviously it’s now a respectful naming in her mind. And she accepts his proposal, showing she doesn’t find the idea of him as a husband repugnant. But she’s not calling him Francis.

And then it all changes.

Philippa Somerville by Unknown

Back to King’s Landing, how it’s going for Sansa since that “Ser Sandor”? Events in ASOIAF move slower than in the tighter-plotted and less peopled The Lymond Chronicles and the Philippa/Lymond relationship evolves over a longer period of time—a decade, thus the age gap is bridged in a timely fashion, all of which doesn’t occur with the other pair. For Sansa, it doesn’t stand out as particularly strange that she won’t use his name again in A Game of Thrones, where only two characters call him Sandor, the first one in AGOT Tyrion I:

“A voice from nowhere,” Sandor said. He peered through his helm, looking this way and that. “Spirits of the air!”

The prince laughed, as he always laughed when his bodyguard did this mummer’s farce. Tyrion was used to it. “Down here.”

It shouldn’t be surprising that it’s a Lannister who first uses his name. All three Lannister children call him Sandor—Tyrion in AGOT, Jaime & Cersei in AFFC—, and it makes perfect sense that they should given his pseudo-family status in the household. It’s the other character calling him Sandor who is the surprise, in AGOT Eddard VII:

Ned seldom put much stock in gossip, but the things said of Ser Gregor were more than ominous. He was soon to be married for the third time, and one heard dark whisperings about the deaths of his first two wives. It was said that his keep was a grim place where servants disappeared unaccountably and even the dogs were afraid to enter the hall. And there had been a sister who had died young under queer circumstances, and the fire that had disfigured his brother, and the hunting accident that had killed their father. Gregor had inherited the keep, the gold, and the family estates. His younger brother Sandor had left the same day to take service with the Lannisters as a sworn sword, and it was said that he had never returned, not even to visit.

.  . .

The Mountain pivoted in wordless fury, swinging his longsword in a killing arc with all his massive strength behind it, but the Hound caught the blow and turned it, and for what seemed an eternity the two brothers stood hammering at each other as a dazed Loras Tyrell was helped to safety. Thrice Ned saw Ser Gregor aim savage blows at the hound’s-head helmet, yet not once did Sandor send a cut at his brother’s unprotected face.

Ned has no love for The Hound, so it’s a meaningful switch that he is calling him by his first name instead of by his nickname or his full name, like he’s done up to this chapter, precisely when Sandor is doing a good, honourable deed. We have to keep this key detail in mind to better appreciate what’s going to happen in the rest of the books with regards to the use of Sandor’s name by the Starks, because how/when they use it differs from how/when others use it, and adds to the case this essay is building. Next, have a look at the following scene where he’s called Sandor in a Stark POV, Eddard XII, but this time by Littlefinger:

“Oh, returned with Joffrey, and went straight to the queen.” Littlefinger smiled. “I would have given a hundred silver stags to have been a roach in the rushes when he learned that Lord Beric was off to behead his brother.”

“Even a blind man could see the Hound loathed his brother.”

“Ah, but Gregor was his to loathe, not yours to kill. Once Dondarrion lops the summit off our Mountain, the Clegane lands and incomes will pass to Sandor, but I wouldn’t hold my water waiting for his thanks, not that one.”

So, we notice a certain pattern:

  • Tyrion calls him Sandor when he is making fun of the Imp to entertain Joffrey (negative), and Littlefinger refers to him as Sandor when he’s reminding the Hand of the King of The Hound’s desire to kill his brother (negative).
  • Ned calls him Sandor when he’s defending an unarmed knight from Gregor’s murderous rage (positive), and Sansa refers to him as Sandor, with a courtesy Ser added, in praise of his performance at the jousts (positive).

See the difference? GRRM establishes a positive spin for “Sandor” being used by House Stark members he interacts with early on, and will continue to develop it further in later books.

In A Clash of Kings, as their dynamic changes and she starts to lose her initial fear of him, Sansa struggles to find an acceptable way to call him, and falls short of it again. Naturally, she does try to call him something that doesn’t include ser, and tentatively addresses him as “my lord” instead, as seen in the scene where she’s returning from the meeting with Dontos at the godswood. But he hates it just as much as “Ser Sandor” for the same reason:

“It’s a long roll down the serpentine, little bird. Want to kill us both?” His laughter was rough as a saw on stone. “Maybe you do.”

The Hound. “No, my lord, pardons, I’d never.” Sansa averted her eyes but it was too late, he’d seen her face. “Please, you’re hurting me.” She tried to wriggle free.

.  . .

“The g-g-godswood, my lord,” she said, not daring to lie. “Praying . . . praying for my father, and . . . for the king, praying that he’d not be hurt.”

“Think I’m so drunk that I’d believe that?” He let go his grip on her arm, swaying slightly as he stood, stripes of light and darkness falling across his terrible burnt face. “You look almost a woman. . . face, teats, and you’re taller too, almost . . . ah, you’re still a stupid little bird, aren’t you? Singing all the songs they taught you . . . sing me a song, why don’t you? Go on. Sing to me. Some song about knights and fair maids. You like knights, don’t you?”

He was scaring her. “T-true knights, my lord.”

“True knights,” he mocked. “And I’m no lord, no more than I’m a knight. Do I need to beat that into you?” Clegane reeled and almost fell.

However, later in this chapter, when he’s taking her to her bedchamber, he lets her know he doesn’t mind to be called by his nickname when she asks him about it:

The Hound escorted her across the drawbridge. As they were winding their way up the steps, she said, “Why do you let people call you a dog? You won’t let anyone call you a knight.”

“I like dogs better than knights (…).”

This is quite likely why “The Hound” is the name for him Sansa prefers: she calls him that seventy-three times from AGOT to AFFC, most frequently in her ACOK chapters. This indicates that she listens and respects that he loathes to be called a certain way as well as that he doesn’t mind to be called another way. “Sandor Clegane” is the second most common way she has of referring to him. Her least favourite is “Clegane,” which she uses only eight times in all, and it’s noteworthy that she refers to him as plain Clegane most repeatedly in the scene atop Maegor’s Holdfast, when they have a spat over gods & knighthood, the first time she stands up to and talks back at him. This fits with what people often say in real life that when they hear themselves be called by their surnames (or even their actual names for those accustomed to nicknames), they know for sure some serious talk is coming.

But all this she does only when thinking of him, talking about him to others, and describing him in her POVs; never to his face. Unlike Philippa, who actually does call Francis “Mr Crawford” to his face, Sansa can’t call him “The Hound” or ”Sandor Clegane” to his face. With Ser Sandor and my lord deemed unacceptable, whenever she talks to him for the rest of the book until he departs after Blackwater, she calls him you.

English lacks the formal/informal distinction of the personal pronoun you like it once had, so we don’t have the tú/usted, vous/toi, Sie/du differentiation of languages like Spanish, French, and German, etc., that denote the degree of formality and familiarity between two people. Because of this, we’re deprived of verifying whether Sansa is using the formal you or the informal you. We’re supposed to infer it is the formal you, her courtesy and her personality taken into account, and so translators of ASOIAF to other languages seem to understand it, too: my foreign language copies of ASOIAF show Sansa using the formal you when talking with Sandor. Also, although some authors have chosen faux-Medieval speech to mimic past times, Martin chose not to reflect Medieval speech, that was still very much employing the formal (you) and the informal (thou) pronouns, so we cannot see a case here like in James Clavell’s Shōgun either, where Blackthorne and Mariko use thou as their private byword for love.

It’s less complicated for the men, although not devoid of a wee dash of subtlety. Neither Lymond nor Sandor have any trouble calling the girls Philippa and Sansa respectively, but they do follow a pattern, too, one that’s complementary to the girls’ pattern as you will see. Lymond’s case is simpler: he’s always called her “Philippa” from day one. Nothing to raise an eyebrow at, really, he can do that as per the social norms of the period: he’s of higher status, over a decade older, and a nobleman talking to a commoner country gentry girl. And he will call her only Philippa for the longest time, until the fifth book, except for that time he patronisingly calls her “my dear child” when she attempts to join him to help with Khaireddin, and that other time he calls her “my dear girl” in a gentler mood when he proposes to safeguard her reputation.

With Sandor, it isn’t so simple. He famously flouts court conventions whenever he feels like it, regardless of the other person’s status. Ned was his superior, but he calls him “Hand;” Tyrion is his liege’s son and so his superior, but he calls him “Imp,” Joffrey is his king, but he refers to him as merely “Joff,” and so on. He addresses people by their titles and proper rank—ser, Your Grace, etc.—, just as he addresses them by their first names with the same ease. When approaching Sansa, despite knowing she’s higher-ranked and the Hand of the King’s daughter, he chooses informality to talk with her for the first time:

Strong hands grasped her by the shoulders, and for a moment Sansa thought it was her father, but when she turned, it was the burned face of Sandor Clegane looking down at her, his mouth twisted in a terrible mockery of a smile. “You are shaking, girl,” he said, his voice rasping. “Do I frighten you so much?

For the rest of AGOT, he will call her “girl,” or that one “pretty little talking girl,” with only two exceptions in a couple of emotionally-charged scenes. First when he tells her about his deepest secret:

She found his massive shoulder with her hand. “He was no true knight,” she whispered to him.

The Hound threw back his head and roared. Sansa stumbled back, away from him, but he caught her arm. “No,” he growled at her, “no, little bird, he was no true knight.”

And the next one when Joffrey goes to fetch her from her bedchamber to see her father’s head on the castle battlements, the only time Sandor calls her child in a compassionate attempt to steer her away from provoking the king:

“If you won’t rise and dress yourself, my Hound will do it for you,” Joffrey said.

“I beg of you, my prince …”

“I’m king now. Dog, get her out of bed.”

Sandor Clegane scooped her up around the waist and lifted her off the featherbed as she struggled feebly. Her blanket fell to the floor. Underneath she had only a thin bedgown to cover her nakedness. “Do as you’re bid, child,” Clegane said. “Dress.” He pushed her toward her wardrobe, almost gently.

Once we move on to A Clash of Kings, we have the first and only time The Hound calls her by her first name to her face:

The king was shaded beneath a crimson canopy, one leg thrown negligently over the carved wooden arm of his chair. Princess Myrcella and Prince Tommen sat behind him. In the back of the royal box, Sandor Clegane stood at guard, his hands resting on his swordbelt. The white cloak of the Kingsguard was draped over his broad shoulders and fastened with a jeweled brooch, the snowy cloth looking somehow unnatural against his brown roughspun tunic and studded leather jerkin.  “Lady Sansa,” the Hound announced curtly when he saw her.

I find it hilarious that the only times they call each other by their first names it had to be so formal and polite and . . . courtly. “Ser Sandor.” “Lady Sansa.” The knight and the lady. The visuals are there, out of one of Sansa’s songs, and knowing GRRM is playing with the knighthood theme, you know this was written intentionally. Were this another couple in a different series, you could almost visualise her curtseying and him bowing in return. But this being ASOIAF, the knight reacts with an infuriated snarl and the lady is so fearful of offending the king that she barely registers his words.

So, if the men using the names of their girls isn’t the way in which the genesis of a deep emotional connection will be made obvious, there has to be another.

. . . NOW, I CAN’T LOOK AT YOUR NAME WITHOUT AN ABUNDANCE OF SENTIMENT.

It was by observing the evolution of the ways characters talked to each other as their relationship progressed that I discovered a naming pattern that revealed the changes in their feelings towards each other, that worked like granite markers along the path. Because of seniority and their bolder, take-charge personalities, these markers appear on the men’s path first, by way of a nickname they bestow on the women.

This sees the light in Sandor’s arc before Lymond’s. ACOK is the book where the dynamic with Sansa takes shape over the course of her year as prisoner of the crown, and throughout the book whenever he steps forward to help her, we see he hasn’t stopped calling her “girl.” Except that . . . Look at their first private scene with no witnesses:

She was racing headlong down the serpentine steps when a man lurched out of a hidden doorway. Sansa caromed into him and lost her balance. Iron fingers caught her by the wrist before she could fall, and a deep voice rasped at her. “It’s a long roll down the serpentine, little bird. Want to kill us both?” His laughter was rough as a saw on stone. “Maybe you do.”

The Hound. “No, my lord, pardons.”

. . .

“And what’s Joff’s little bird doing flying down the serpentine in the black of night?” When she did not answer, he shook her.“Where were you?”

“The g-g-godswood, my lord,” she said, not daring to lie. “Praying . . . praying for my father, and . . . for the king, praying that he’d not be hurt.”

“Think I’m so drunk that I’d believe that?” He let go his grip on her arm, swaying slightly as he stood, stripes of light and darkness falling across his terrible burnt face. “You look almost a woman . . . face, teats, and you’re taller too, almost . . . ah, you’re still a stupid little bird, aren’t you? Singing all the songs they taught you . . . sing me a song, why don’t you? Go on. Sing to me. Some song about knights and fair maids. You like knights, don’t you?”

. . .

“Gods,” he swore, “too much wine. Do you like wine, little bird? True wine? A flagon of sour red, dark as blood, all a man needs. Or a woman.” He laughed, shook his head.  “Drunk as a dog, damn me. You come now. Back to your cage, little bird. I’ll take you there. Keep you safe for the king.

. . .

He cupped her under the jaw, raising her chin, his fingers pinching her painfully. “And that’s more than little birds can do, isn’t it? I never got my song.”

Then look at what he says after he rescues her from the bread riots in King’s Landing:

Clegane lifted her to the ground. His white cloak was torn and stained, and blood seeped through a jagged tear in his left sleeve. “The little bird’s bleeding. Someone take her back to her cage and see to that cut.”

Next, look at their second scene of a private nature:

She grabbed a merlon for support, her fingers scrabbling at the rough stone. “Let go of me,” she cried. “Let go.”

“The little bird thinks she has wings, does she? Or do you mean to end up crippled like that brother of yours?”

Sansa twisted in his grasp. “I wasn’t going to fall. It was only . . . you startled me, that’s all.”

“You mean I scared you. And still do.”

She took a deep breath to calm herself. “I thought I was alone, I . . .” She glanced away.

“The little bird still can’t bear to look at me, can she?” The Hound released her. “You were glad enough to see my face when the mob had you, though. Remember?”

. . .

“Aren’t you afraid? The gods might send you down to some terrible hell for all the evil you’ve done.”

“What evil?” He laughed. “What gods?”

“The gods who made us all.”

“All?” he mocked. “Tell me, little bird, what kind of god makes a monster like the Imp, or a halfwit like Lady Tanda’s daughter? If there are gods, they made sheep so wolves could eat mutton, and they made the weak for the strong to play with.”

. . .

Sansa backed away from him. “You’re awful.”

“I’m honest. It’s the world that’s awful. Now fly away, little bird, I’m sick of you peeping at me.”

Now, look at their exchange right before Sansa is beaten in public and he tries to stop Joff and give her his cloak to cover her nudity:

 “Tell me what I’ve done.”

“Not you. Your kingly brother.”

“Robb’s a traitor.” Sansa knew the words by rote. “I had no part in whatever he did.” Gods be good, don’t let it be the Kingslayer. If Robb had harmed Jaime Lannister, it would mean her life. She thought of Ser Ilyn, and how those terrible pale eyes staring pitilessly out of that gaunt pockmarked face.

The Hound snorted. “They trained you well, little bird.”

. . . and finally look at their last scene together:

Sansa opened her mouth to scream, but another hand clamped down over her face, smothering her. His fingers were rough and callused, and sticky with blood. “Little bird. I knew you’d come.” The voice was a drunken rasp.

. . .

“If you scream I’ll kill you. Believe that.” He took his hand from her mouth. Her breath was coming ragged. The Hound had a flagon of wine on her bedside table. He took a long pull. “Don’t you want to ask who’s winning the battle, little bird?”

“Who?” she said, too frightened to defy him.

. . .

“He’s dead, they say.”

“Dead? No. Bugger that. I don’t want him dead.” He cast the empty flagon aside. “I want him burned. If the gods are good, they’ll burn him, but I won’t be here to see. I’m going.”

“Going?” She tried to wriggle free, but his grasp was iron.

“The little bird repeats whatever she hears. Going, yes.”

. . .

“Why did you come here?”

“You promised me a song, little bird. Have you forgotten?”

. . .

 “Still can’t bear to look, can you?” she heard him say. He gave her arm a hard wrench, pulling her around and shoving her down onto the bed. “I’ll have that song. Florian and Jonquil, you said.” His dagger was out, poised at her throat. “Sing, little bird. Sing for your little life.”

. . .

Some instinct made her lift her hand and cup his cheek with her fingers. The room was too dark for her to see him, but she could feel the stickiness of the blood, and a wetness that was not blood. “Little bird,” he said once more, his voice raw and harsh as steel on stone. Then he rose from the bed. Sansa heard cloth ripping, followed by the softer sound of retreating footsteps.

What do you notice these five scenes have in common? The Serpentine steps, Maegor’s Holdfast, and the Battle of Blackwater are all emotionally-charged conversations they had alone and that left an impact on their relationship, and in all three milestones—just like in the Hand’s Tourney when he reveals a secret only she will know—he’s calling her “little bird.” The other two, the beating in front of the court and the King’s Landing riots are scenes in which he publicly and voluntarily stepped in to protect her, and there he’s also calling her “little bird,” one time even publicly. Why does he use her pet name specifically in these situations?

To answer this, let’s focus on his behaviour in these scenes: in the Serpentine, he’s flirting in an awkward manner, making it obvious through his observations on her maturing from child to woman that he’s attracted, but she’s so young and oblivious that he has to rein himself in and laugh it off when it flies over her head. Atop Maegor’s Holdfast, he’s contemplating life over a looming big battle and having a back-and-forth clash of worldviews with this girl he considers naïve but can’t help caring for, all permeated with a subtle erotic imagery. And in the Blackwater, he’s finally broken away from his masters, and is offering himself as a protector and potential partner to her. The other scenes are self-evident and need no further elaboration.

Like this article explains, “a relationship is like a ‘mini-culture’ unto itself reinforced by rituals and private language” that a couple create only for themselves, the most common and significant part of this so-called idiosyncratic communication being pet names, which “connote a special intimacy that’s reserved for” the significant other. Going by this, you don’t give a pet name to someone you wouldn’t care deeply for, and after judging the entirety of their scenes thus far, the existence of a pet name connotes all on its own that feelings have moved to the next level. In other words, a pet name is the literary equivalent of a neon sign that screams I have feelings for this person, a signpost commemorating these “micromoments that create relationships.”

Francis Crawford of Lymond by Unknown

Lymond is a more straightforward example of using nicknames to mark the moment a character’s feelings do a 180º turn, aided by the bridging of the age gap and the longer time the saga gives characters to grow. In the fifth book, The Ringed Castle, he’s gone sell his services to Ivan the Terrible in Russia and reforges his life as Frangike Gavinovich, the tsar’s hyper-competent mercenary commander, away from the shadow of Gabriel, away from Philippa, his family, his past. He’s doing as well as he could with a madman for a boss, and, never the one-woman type of man, he takes a lover, too. Nothing could be further from his mind than falling in love. But the past has a built-in GPS and an annoying tendency to catch up with you wherever you go, and one day the woman he sardonically calls “dear wife” writes to remind him that he promised a divorce once there was a good second marriage prospect, now she needs he sign the papers. Oh, and she also discovered some interesting tidbits about his bastardy, so come back, mon cher Comte, come back.

And come back to England does the dear Comte, finding Philippa Crawford of Lymond in a plum position as lady-in-waiting at the Tudor court. He does his best to interact with her as little as possible, but circumstances throw them together often, and, after a few adventures investigating Lymond’s true parentage plus a failed attempt at reconciling with the mother he’s avoiding to confront, the change of heart ambushes Lymond at a place called the Hall of Revels, where Philippa and friends go looking for material for upcoming royal festivities. They have such a good jolly time there that, coming out of the Hall carrying an unconscious Philippa in his arms, Lymond does something he hasn’t done before: take a good, hard look at her:

She was a quick-witted child. From Kate, of course. He stirred back the brown hair which had caught in her lashes. And that was Kate’s too. What did she take from Gideon? Honesty. That both her parents had. And courage. Riding through the night once, into unknown country, to find him, and pay some sort of debt she thought she owed to him, or her parents. And, of course, following him for the sake of the child. In spite of a good deal of uncivilized behaviour, he recalled clearly, on his part.

Courage from both parents, too. You would go far to find a woman braver than Kate. And music—from Gideon? Yes. Both studied and felt—that furious display on the harpsichord at Lady Mary’s, defiant though it had been, had been more than plain pyrotechnics. But then, she was no longer ten, and had put to use the years of study and practice. How old, then, was she?

The year he fought his brother, they had met. The year of Pinkie, or the spring just after. Which made her … nearly twenty.

He was aware of deep surprise. But of course, the mind which had comprehended and discussed with him all the intricacies of the present blunderings of nations was not, could not be a child’s. The loving spirit which could serve Queen Mary, seeing clearly all her weakness, had nothing immature about it, or the wit which Ascham had found worthy to teach.

Unlike Kate, this girl had broken from her setting. All that Kate was, she now had. And standing on Kate’s shoulders, something more, still growing; blossoming and yet to fruit.

All that he was not. He looked at her. The long, brown hair; the pure skin of youth; the closed brown eyes, their lashes artfully stained; the obstinate chin; the definite nose, its nostrils curled. The lips, lightly tinted, and the corners deepened, even sleeping, with the remembrance of sardonic joy.… The soft, severe lips.

You could say that this is Lymond’s “you are almost a woman” moment, the moment he realizes the child he knew has grown into a woman without him paying attention, and now that he finally does pay attention, he finds his feelings along the way. Feelings that hit him like a hammer:

And deep within him, missing its accustomed tread, his heart paused, and gave one single stroke, as if on an anvil.

Always prone to too much subtlety to the point of obscurity, Dunnett tosses it away here to instead wham readers with the fact that Lymond has fallen in love, using an anvil to describe the force of his epiphany. It’s Melodramatic with a capital M. But Lymond has always been so fond of theatrics that Melodramatic should be his middle name. The dramatic epiphany fits his personality, it fits his intensity.

Despite the Anvil Epiphany, he still insists in leaving for Russia again, believing the marriage dissolution is going to be dealt with just fine and, his feelings now threatening to become a torment, he wants to stay away for her own good. Before he departs, he gives her a pet name he’s just devised:

Francis Crawford stood with his back to the doorpost and said,‘Yunitsa, forgive me. My ailment will be the worse for it, and so shall I, but I am going to leave you.’

She had seen him look like that before once, at Volos, and she made no move to stop him. Only, ‘Yunitsa?’ she said.

He smiled, a glimmer in his darkened blue eyes. ‘What, after all Best’s Russian teaching? It means heifer,’ he said. ‘

. . .

He said again, without the smile, ‘Goodbye, Yunitsa,’ and turning walked out of the room.

Ludovic d’Harcourt, come to take his wistful leave, stood beside Philippa, as Lymond vanished. ‘Yunitsa?’ he queried.

She smiled, bringing her gaze back to her hand as he lifted and kissed it. ‘A stupid joke. It means heifer, he tells me.’

‘It means heifer,’ d’Harcourt agreed; and, since the others were becoming impatient, pressed her hand and abandoned the subject without informing her how much more it meant.

To Lymond this is what “little bird” is to Sandor, with larger implications than the literal meaning. It also means a young married woman who isn’t yet a mother, a maiden-wife figure from Russian mythology. Thus Philippa is associated with a divine Maiden figure like Sansa is, even though she’s currently married in name only and raising a child not her own, a situation that also sounds like Sansa’s.

But what does Philippa feel? Does she reciprocate? Now we arrive to the central point of this essay: the fact that when the same change befalls her, Dorothy Dunnett makes Philippa’s realisation and conscious acknowledgment of her newfound love for Lymond all obvious and evident by calling him by his first name for the first time ever.

She’s the sensible one, so no anvil-to-the-head moment of realisation for her. It evolves over months of living in a singular married-but-not-really situation in France, where Lymond was taken by friends with wifely support via the swift method of a blow to the head to thwart his return to Russia and the danger of one day the tsar’s axe connecting with Lymond’s head. Working in the French court, he finds time amidst numerous adventures serving the crown for yet another new lover, still intending to divorce Philippa, who stubbornly follows him there for her own reasons. Meeting him again in the sixth and last book, Checkmate, she asks if it’s finally time to call him by this name:

Trotting behind, Philippa found that her eminent escort was making better speed than she was; opened her mouth; closed it, and touched up her horse as soon as she could, to jog alongside him. She said peevishly, ‘Do you consider I’m old enough to stop calling you Mr Crawford?’

‘No,’ said Mr Crawford shortly. ‘What alternatives would you suggest? Master? Uncle?’

‘That would certainly unsettle the Maréchale, for one,’ said Philippa more cheerfully. ‘I shall call you “mon compère”, as the King does the Constable. You haven’t enough artillery, have you?’

So she’ll stick with “Mr Crawford” for a little while more. Philippa’s reasons for coming to France include to continue pursuing the truth about her husband’s parentage, against his wishes, and along the way she’s dragged into conspiracies against Lymond. One night, they’re followed and attacked by assassins in the fog-covered streets of Lyon, and have to fight back to escape, an exhilarating experience teaming up for survival that becomes a turning point for her. At the end of this, she impulsively calls him Francis:

Whooping, Lymond sprang to his feet and in his face was child and man; Kuzúm and Francis Crawford; triumph and mischief and a ridiculous, thoughtless delight that made her seize his hands and fling them apart and say, ‘Francis! Francis, you fool. This is what you should be!’

Again, Dunnett makes it clear that, right after this, Philippa becomes fully conscious of her feelings:

For a girl of twenty to fall in love with an experienced dilettante ten years her senior was nothing out of the way. It was perhaps rarer for such a girl to make up her mind, as did Philippa in Lyon in one night of bitterest soul-searching, that such a relationship was out of the question, and that henceforth his life and hers must lie in different directions.

I’m not fond of the soap-operatic drama the author turned their romance into from here onwards by making both sides deny their feelings and deem their relationship impossible, each thinking they don’t deserve the other and that the other is too good for them. But that’s how the last portion of their relationship is written, so melodramatically it’d make a telenovela proud. Anyhow, after deciding on self-restraint as the best course, Philippa attempts a return to the formal “Mr Crawford” of old.

But once you cross the Rubicon, there’s no going back. Philippa struggles, and struggles hard, to not call him by his name, making a conscious effort to rein herself in whenever she catches her self-control slipping. “Francis . . .no. . . Mr Crawford,” that sort of self-control, like it can be seen in these quotes:

Philippa, who was rarely favoured with the more dramatic ailments of this world, had a head cold of historic virulence.

It assailed her the morning after Francis … Mr Crawford had proposed in public to catalogue the bodily features of his Russian mistress; and by the time she reported for duty had thickened into a turgid, throat-rasping affair which recalled all Gideon used to say, cheerfully, about avoiding claret if your name began with a letter of the alphabet. Madame de Brêne quite rightly turned her away from the little Queen’s chamber, and she returned to blow her nose in her room, where Adam Blacklock presently found her.

. . .

Francis … Mr Crawford, she thought. No. Madame de Brêne would have told her. Not Kate, either: that would have to come to her direct. Then someone else from the Séjour du Roi: Marthe? Jerott? Danny? Or Austin …?

. . .

‘I know your upbringing,’ Adam said. ‘And I know something else. Francis has his divorce and his freedom in prospect, but the headaches have come back. Archie was worried last night. Philippa, this family business has to be laid bare and thrashed out with Sybilla. Not before Richard in a storm of stripped nerves, but with Sybilla, in calm and in privacy.’

‘He won’t,’ Philippa said. ‘And I can’t help. I don’t know the truth and I can’t see any way of finding it. I think F … Francis has reached it by guesswork and it is quite unacceptable. All I can suggest is that with time, the unacceptable usually becomes accepted.’

. . .

Célie called, ‘Madame! You have walked past the turning!’ and she saw, looking round, that she had. She also saw, discreetly strolling behind them, the red-headed bodyguard she had stopped once before. His name, she knew now, was Osias. He shared his duties with another man of Applegarth’s with a scarred cheek. Célie or her serving man took them in occasionally and gave them something hot in a cup if she had kept them out unduly in bad weather. It reminded her, in case she forgot from time to time, that Francis—Mr Crawford—felt that her association with him might bring danger to her.

. . .

The man—the person—the shapeless vessel of envy and malevolence seated opposite her believed that Francis … Mr Crawford … had learned the truth at Flavy, and had imparted it to her. Whereas what Lymond had written was that Béatris and Gavin Crawford were now proved his parents, and Béatris’s daughter Marthe his full sister.

The ‘Francis . . . no . .  Mr Crawford’ conflict continues up until a time when, prodded on by other characters that noticed the feelings are mutual, Lymond has to confess. And the moment couldn’t have been more inconvenient: they’re four weeks away from their divorce becoming official, he’s already promised to another girl, whose mother is his current lover, and Philippa is under the mistaken impression that Lymond is in love with Kate, her own mother. Melodrama, as I said. Lymond has to disabuse her of the latter notion by revealing it’s her he loves:

 ‘Kate loves you,’ Philippa said. ‘It’s all right. She has always …’

‘Philippa, no,’ he said. He stood in an island of space, as isolated as he must have been, directing his forces in Guînes or in Calais. ‘You were right to ask, and wrong only in your conjecture. Kate is my friend. That is true. But the songs were for her daughter. And the passion, for ever. That is why we are parting.’

The words reached her, without bringing the sense any nearer. He would think her very slow: even in the middle of the night; even with undried tears bloating her eyes and her cheeks. She appeared to be on her feet, facing him. ‘But I am her daughter,’ Philippa said.

Like some obscure and difficult text, the look in his eyes was too complex to read at a distance. She said, ‘You can’t mean …?’ and then, as he did not speak, answered herself. ‘No.’

In this chapter, just moments before the confession, she’s calling him Francis without immediately scolding herself. And right after, she’ll keep calling him Francis until the end of the book. This turning point holds additional significance because she’ll learn from his own lips all his secrets, from his early years to the present. But despite this proof of trust he’s not given anyone else, even his beloved mother, he’s still determined to free her from the marriage and leave, arguing he is “a warped hunchback whelped in the gutter,” too damaged by his past and his tragedies to be worthy of her. Philippa, however, is stubborn, and whilst Lymond is distracted by a court procession, decides to do him a favour by buying from greedy Bailey the documents he claims prove Lymond is illegitimate. Bailey demands more than just money, and Philippa, out of love for Lymond, pays him his price: her body.

This has tragic ramifications: she ends up with the same PTSD of rape victims, and, unable to annul their marriage absent the virginity requisite, Lymond is saddled permanently with a traumatised Philippa, whom he sends to his family in Scotland to recover. He stays behind to fulfill duties as marshal in the French king’s army during the war with Spain, and leads a brilliant but suicidal raid to blow a bridge. He’s looking for death at this point, knowing his wife is safe and taken care of through letters they exchange—which he signs I am thou thy selfe, Francis—and he would’ve got his wish if not for his mother’s interfering care as he lay dying of injuries. He recovers, and after a few extra complications and a dash of extra melodrama, goes back to Scotland, where Philippa all of a sudden decides she wants to sleep with him that very day, moments after he arrives, no matter that her third-wheel beau and Lymond’s half-sister have been killed in front of them just minutes ago (I did say it was melodramatic, didn’t I?), and the whole long saga ends with the Dowager Lady Culter listening happily to Lymond and Philippa playing music and singing and telling I love you to each other.

Sansa Stark by Elia-Illustration

Having this example all laid out and extrapolating it to ASOIAF, it dawned on me that Martin is doing this very thing with Sansa in relation to Sandor. How else could it be explained satisfactorily that she’s not called him by his name to date? All readers acquainted with her arc up to the last published book know that Sansa is missing his presence and inventing in her head a kiss Sandor never gave her, as seen in these passages from ASOS:

I wish the Hound were here. The night of the battle, Sandor Clegane had come to her chambers to take her from the city, but Sansa had refused. Sometimes she lay awake at night, wondering if she’d been wise. She had his stained white cloak hidden in a cedar chest beneath her summer silks. She could not say why she’d kept it. The Hound had turned craven, she heard it said; at the height of the battle, he got so drunk the Imp had to take his men. But Sansa understood. She knew the secret of his burned face. It was only the fire he feared. That night, the wildfire had set the river itself ablaze, and filled the very air with green flame. Even in the castle, Sansa had been afraid. Outside… she could scarcely imagine it.

. . .

 Sansa wondered what Megga would think about kissing the Hound, as she had. He’d come to her the night of the battle stinking of wine and blood. He kissed me and threatened to kill me, and made me sing him a song.

. . .

 The memory of her own wedding night with Tyrion was much with her. In the dark, I am the Knight of Flowers, he had said. I could be good to you. But that was only another Lannister lie. A dog can smell a lie, you know, the Hound had told her once. She could almost hear the rough rasp of his voice. Look around you, and take a good whiff. They’re all liars here, and every one better than you. She wondered what had become of Sandor Clegane. Did he know that they’d killed Joffrey? Would he care? He had been the prince’s sworn shield for years.

She even dreams of him in her bed in ASOS:

Sansa heard the soft sound of steel on leather. “Singer,” a rough voice said, “best go, if you want to sing again.” The light was dim, but she saw a faint glimmer of a blade.

The singer saw it too. “Find your own wench—” The knife flashed, and he cried out. “You cut me!”

“I’ll do worse, if you don’t go.”

And quick as that, Marillion was gone. The other remained, looming over Sansa in the darkness. “Lord Petyr said watch out for you.” It was Lothor Brune’s voice, she realized. Not the Hound’s, no, how could it be? Of course it had to be Lothor…

That night Sansa scarcely slept at all, but tossed and turned just as she had aboard the Merling King. She dreamt of Joffrey dying, but as he clawed at his throat and the blood ran down across his fingers she saw with horror that it was her brother Robb. And she dreamed of her wedding night too, of Tyrion’s eyes devouring her as she undressed. Only then he was bigger than Tyrion had any right to be, and when he climbed into the bed his face was scarred only on one side. “I’ll have a song from you,” he rasped, and Sansa woke and found the old blind dog beside her once again. “I wish that you were Lady,” she said.

And in her AFFC chapters, she’s still comparing people to him, and imagining the kiss and the marriage bed:

Last of all came the Royces, Lord Nestor and Bronze Yohn. The Lord of Runestone stood as tall as the Hound

. . .

Before she could summon the servants, however, Sweetrobin threw his skinny arms around her and kissed her. It was a little boy’s kiss, and clumsy. Everything Robert Arryn did was clumsy. If I close my eyes I can pretend he is the Knight of Flowers. Ser Loras had given Sansa Stark a red rose once, but he had never kissed her . . . and no Tyrell would ever kiss Alayne Stone. Pretty as she was, she had been born on the wrong side of the blanket.

As the boy’s lips touched her own she found herself thinking of another kiss. She could still remember how it felt, when his cruel mouth pressed down on her own. He had come to Sansa in the darkness as green fire filled the sky. He took a song and a kiss, and left me nothing but a bloody cloak.

. . .

“Oh, yes. He died on top of me. In me, if truth be told. You do know what goes on in a marriage bed, I hope?”

She thought of Tyrion, and of the Hound and how he’d kissed her, and gave a nod. “That must have been dreadful, my lady. Him dying. There, I mean, whilst . . . whilst he was . . .”

In other words: there’s copious instances of Sansa daydreaming with and fantasising with kissing the man . . . and she still cannot bring herself to call him Sandor even in the privacy of her own head. It’s not embarrassment, as it’s not like someone’s going to spring out of nowhere to berate her for it or read her thoughts and make fun of her for her choice of dream lover. It isn’t like she has trouble calling people by their first names, either. She does it with Joffrey, Tyrion, Willas, etc., even with Baelish, for whom she also makes a devil-angel separation of his two personae. Something is quite definitely going on here with Sansa’s inability to call him anything but The Hound during these milestone scenes.

My theory is that Martin is doing just what Dunnett did: he’s deliberately writing Sansa holding back from calling him Sandor at least in her thoughts and dreams until the moment he chooses to make it obvious by having her say his name, outwardly or inwardly. And until the moment Sansa acknowledges her feelings in a conscious manner, he’ll be The Hound in her mind, a name she knows he doesn’t mind. For now, Sansa hasn’t made the conscious admission of her feelings, it’s still very much restricted to the fantasising and dreamlike realm.

This possibility isn’t unlikely to happen. Because GRRM already has done it in the books: he has used the technique of a first name to mark a change of heart from one character towards another twice already, so there’s proof in the books that he’s not only familiar with the technique but makes use of it, too.

Our first strong supporting example are Jaime and Brienne, whose relationship mirrors in many ways Sandor and Sansa’s. Brienne, another firm believer in true knights, begins her acquaintance deeply loathing Jaime for his soiled reputation and allegiance to his usurping House; she doesn’t deign to call him Ser Jaime but hurls at him his sobriquet of Kingslayer like an insult, as can be seen in their first conversation in ASOS:

She scowled again, her face all horse teeth and glowering suspicion. “You’ll wear your chains, Kingslayer.”

“You figure to row all the way to King’s Landing, wench?”

“You will call me Brienne. Not wench.”

“My name is Ser Jaime. Not Kingslayer.”

“Do you deny that you slew a king?”

“No. Do you deny your sex? If so, unlace those breeches and show me.” He gave her an innocent smile. “I’d ask you to open your bodice, but from the look of you that wouldn’t prove much.”

Convinced he’s an irredeemable rascal and no true knight, she denies him a respectful treatment by using his knightly title, or even addressing him with a frosty “Lannister,” and continually reminds him of his fallen status by only calling him Kingslayer during their trip back to King’s Landing. Until they’re captured by the Bloody Mummers and he loses his hand. In this situation of utter humiliation, she witnesses another side of the man she didn’t allow he possessed, and this pushes her towards a kinder disposition. She finally calls him by his name in an attempt to fish him out of his misery:

“Jaime,” Brienne whispered, so faintly he thought he was dreaming it. “Jaime, what are you doing?”

“Dying,” he whispered back.

“No,” she said, “no, you must live.”

From then on, you can see a change in the way Brienne treats him—and the way he treats her and calls her Brienne instead of “wench”—as well as the way she calls him: although she will still refer to him as Kingslayer occasionally, she starts using his title and talks to him in a more polite and respectful manner. It’s the effect of their shared experiences as much as her learning about his service under Aerys II. He becomes Ser Jaime, recovering his knightly status and his dignity in her eyes. And not only that, this change isn’t limited to only regained respect but also ushers in feelings of a romantic nature she starts to develop towards him. Which are evidenced in all her AFFC chapters, where she’s always thinking of him as Jaime or Ser Jaime. She even calls him by his name in her feverish dream in AFFC Brienne VIII whilst lying semi-conscious due to wounds from her fight with Biter:

She dreamt she was at Harrenhal, down in the bear pit once again. This time it was Biter facing her, huge and bald and maggot-white, with weeping sores upon his cheeks. Naked he came, fondling his member, gnashing his filed teeth together. Brienne fled from him. “My sword,” she called. “Oathkeeper. Please.” The watchers did not answer. Renly was there, with Nimble Dick and Catelyn Stark. Shagwell, Pyg, and Timeon had come, and the corpses from the trees with their sunken cheeks, swollen tongues, and empty eye sockets. Brienne wailed in horror at the sight of them, and Biter grabbed her arm and yanked her close and tore a chunk from her face. “Jaime,” she heard herself scream, “Jaime.”

So, we have an undeniable example of the technique’s use in ASOIAF, though Jaime and Brienne move faster because they have less time to grow as characters alongside each other than Sansa and Sandor. For them, the Kingslayer-to-Jaime and Wench-to-Brienne switches happen in approximately one month together, spread across a small handful of chapters. And, although the age gap is the same for the two couples, Brienne is older and doesn’t start off her story as a child growing up under Jaime’s nose, making it possible for GRRM to be more straight and obvious with her feelings, so they aren’t written as subtly or evolve as slowly as plot necessity requires for Sansa.

Sandor Clegane by Bubug

It should be noted that this technique isn’t used only for marking the passage from platonic to romantic feelings. In truth, as the second example will prove, it also works as a marker for a change of attitude from negative to positive, from hate or disrespect to respect and appreciation, without the presence or implication of romantic love.

Arya is the most important and best written example of the technique’s use by Martin, because it directly involves Sandor instead of just providing a mirror story and because it’s better fleshed out and with a better background, as well as fitting quite smoothly with the established precedent that the Stark family use “Sandor” in a positive manner, like I argued earlier in the essay.

Sandor is in her kill list not with his name but with his sobriquet, a sobriquet embodying what he is for the younger Stark daughter: the murderous Hound of the Lannisters who cleaved her friend Mycah in two. She doesn’t know the family history that paints the sobriquet with a veneer of honourability in Sandor’s estimation; for her it doesn’t have the same ring as for her sister, because she doesn’t know him for anything besides his crime and his allegiance to the House with the higher number of people she wants to kill: nearly everyone in her list is a Lannister or connected to the Lannisters in some fashion. The man Sandor is an unknown to Arya, only The Hound exists.

Arya is the only other Stark besides Ned that hears people call him by his name, before and after her own change of heart. The “before” occurs following the famous trial by the Brotherhood without Banners at which Clegane won his freedom and lost his gold:

Anguy strung his bow. Notch was doing the same. “Do you wish to die so very much, Sandor?” asked Thoros. “You must be mad or drunk to follow us here.”

The “after” happens in ASOS Arya XIII, when they run into Gregor’s men at the Crossroads Inn:

“Looking for your brother, Sandor?” Polliver’s hand was down the bodice of the girl on his lap, but now he slid it out.

“Looking for a cup of wine. Innkeep, a flagon of red.” Clegane threw a handful of coppers on the floor.

. . .

The Tickler leaned forward. “Would you put to sea without bidding farewell to your brother?” It gave Arya chills to hear him ask a question. “Ser would sooner you returned to Harrenhal with us, Sandor. I bet he would. Or King’s Landing . . . ”

“Bugger that. Bugger him. Bugger you.”

Like with the Lannister siblings, it makes sense that he’d be addressed familiarly by these people: Thoros lived at court for years and was King Robert’s drinking chum, so he’s known The Hound probably since adolescence; and Polliver and Tickler are in Gregor’s retinue, quite likely hail from the Clegane fief and know him since forever. The technique isn’t at play with Tyrion, Jaime, Cersei, Thoros, Polliver and the Tickler calling him Sandor, because it’s the acquaintanceship of years that entitles them to first name terms with Sandor, and, besides, they’re aware of how he reacts to “ser.”

It takes a tragic episode to turn Arya’s opinion of The Hound upside down and make her say his name at last. After his plan to ransom her to her family is drowned in blood at the Red Wedding, Arya doesn’t forgive him for fighting his way out of the Twins with her knocked out insensible, but it’s clear the experience has irreversibly changed their dynamic. No clearer evidence of it than her transition from calling him “The Hound” or “Clegane” or “Sandor Clegane” to calling him “Sandor”  right after the Twins. In ASOS Arya XII, she calls him by his name in her thoughts several times:

They had two now, Stranger and a sorrel palfrey mare Arya had named Craven, because Sandor said she’d likely run off from the Twins the same as them. They’d found her wandering riderless through a field the morning after the slaughter. She was a good enough horse, but Arya could not love a coward. Stranger would have fought.

. . .

They had passed a small pond a short ways back. Sandor gave Arya his helm and told her to fill it, so she trudged back to the water’s edge. Mud squished over the toe of her boots. She used the dog’s head as a pail. Water ran out through the eyeholes, but the bottom of the helm still held a lot.

. . .

 “Why?” Sandor said. “He don’t care, and we’ve got no spade. Leave him for the wolves and wild dogs. Your brothers and mine.” He gave her a hard look. “First we rob him, though.”

. . .

When morning came, the Hound did not need to shout at Arya or shake her awake. She had woken before him for a change, and even watered the horses. They broke their fast in silence, until Sandor said, “This thing about your mother . . . ”

“It doesn’t matter,” Arya said in a dull voice. “I know she’s dead. I saw her in a dream.”

. . .

Sandor’s mouth tightened. “So you do know who I am.”

“Aye. We don’t get travelers here, that’s so, but we go to market, and to fairs. We know about King Joffrey’s dog.”

“When these Stone Crows come calling, you might be glad to have a dog.”

“Might be.” The man hesitated, then gathered up his courage. “But they say you lost your belly for fighting at the Blackwater. They say—”

“I know what they say.” Sandor’s voice sounded like two woodsaws grinding together. “Pay me, and we’ll be gone.”

Sandor took it off the stick, ripped it apart with his big hands, and tossed half of it into Arya’s lap. “There’s nothing wrong with my belly,” he said as he pulled off a leg, “but I don’t give a rat’s arse for you or your brother. I have a brother too.”

There it is, the prelude to taking him off her list. How could you restore someone his humanity and his dignity by using his name and simultaneously keep him in your murder list? The entirety of ASOS Arya XIII is a testament to this The Hound/Sandor conflicting duality that is tearing at Arya’s insides:

“You know how long it’s been since I had a cup of wine?” Sandor swung down from the saddle. “Besides, we need to learn who holds the ruby ford. Stay with the horses if you want, it’s no hair off my arse.”

. . .

 “What if they know you?” Sandor no longer troubled to hide his face. He no longer seemed to care who knew him. “They might want to take you captive.”

. . .

The innkeep came scurrying back with two stone cups and a flagon on a pewter platter. Sandor lifted the flagon to his mouth. Arya could see the muscles in his neck working as he gulped. When he slammed it back down on the table, half the wine was gone. “Now you can pour. Best pick up those coppers too, it’s the only coin you’re like to see today.”

. . .

 “So Gregor took Harrenhal?” Sandor said.

“Didn’t require much taking,” said Polliver. “The sellswords fled as soon as they knew we were coming, all but a few. One of the cooks opened a postern gate for us, to get back at Hoat for cutting off his foot.” He chuckled. “We kept him to cook for us, a couple wenches to warm our beds, and put all the rest to the sword.”

Sandor said, “The Blackfish is still in Riverrun?”

“Not for long,” said Polliver. “He’s under siege. Old Frey’s going to hang Edmure Tully unless he yields the castle. The only real fighting’s around Raventree. Blackwoods and Brackens. The Brackens are ours now.”

. . .

The Tickler shrugged, straightened, and reached a hand behind his head to rub the back of his neck. Everything seemed to happen at once then; Sandor lurched to his feet, Polliver drew his longsword, and the Tickler’s hand whipped around in a blur to send something silver flashing across the common room. If the Hound had not been moving, the knife might have cored the apple of his throat; instead it only grazed his ribs, and wound up quivering in the wall near the door. He laughed then, a laugh as cold and hollow as if it had come from the bottom of a deep well. “I was hoping you’d do something stupid.” His sword slid from its scabbard just in time to knock aside Polliver’s first cut.

. . .

Polliver was a grim, methodical fighter, and he pressed Sandor steadily backward, his heavy longsword moving with brutal precision. The Hound’s own cuts were sloppier, his parries rushed, his feet slow and clumsy. He’s drunk, Arya realized with dismay. He drank too much too fast, with no food in his belly. And the Tickler was sliding around the wall to get behind him. She grabbed the second wine cup and flung it at him, but he was quicker than the squire had been and ducked his head in time. The look he gave her then was cold with promise. Is there gold hidden in the village? she could hear him ask. The stupid squire was clutching the edge of a table and pulling himself to his knees. Arya could taste the beginnings of panic in the back of her throat. Fear cuts deeper than swords. Fears cuts deeper . . .

. . .

Sandor gave a grunt of pain. The burned side of his face ran red from temple to cheek, and the stub of his ear was gone. That seemed to make him angry. He drove back Polliver with a furious attack, hammering at him with the old nicked longsword he had swapped for in the hills. The bearded man gave way, but none of the cuts so much as touched him. And then the Tickler leapt over a bench quick as a snake, and slashed at the back of the Hound’s neck with the edge of his short sword.

. . .

Polliver and the Tickler had driven the Hound into a corner behind a bench, and one of them had given him an ugly red gash on his upper thigh to go with his other wounds. Sandor was leaning against the wall, bleeding and breathing noisily. He looked as though he could barely stand, let alone fight. “Throw down the sword, and we’ll take you back to Harrenhal,” Polliver told him.

“If you want me, come get me.” Sandor pushed away from the wall and stood in a half-crouch behind the bench, his sword held across his body.

. . .

Her hands were red and sticky when Sandor dragged her off him. “Enough,” was all he said. He was bleeding like a butchered pig himself, and dragging one leg when he walked.

. . .

 “Good.” Sandor’s voice was thick with pain. “If these three were whoring here, Gregor must hold the ford as well as Harrenhal. More of his pets could ride up any moment, and we’ve killed enough of the bloody buggers for one day.”

It’s the effect of the “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic” phenomenon. Give your intended target a name and a face and a backstory, and you can no longer kill him in cold blood. You’ve humanised him. This is precisely what happens to Arya, who, although she still uses his sobriquet, can no longer use the sobriquet to keep him at arm’s length as “a statistic.” When caring for his wounds before she leaves him, it’s Sandor the man she’s seeing. She practically has to force herself back into seeing him as The Hound in order to restore him to her list:

When he got the fire going, Sandor propped up his helm in the flames, emptied half the wineskin into it, and collapsed back against a jut of moss-covered stone as if he never meant to rise again. He made Arya wash out the squire’s cloak and cut it into strips. Those went into his helm as well. “If I had more wine, I’d drink till I was dead to the world. Maybe I ought to send you back to that bloody inn for another skin or three. “

. . .

Sandor laughed at the fear on her face. “A jest, wolf girl. A bloody jest. Find me a stick, about so long and not too big around. And wash the mud off it. I hate the taste of mud.”

. . .

Sandor moaned, and she rolled onto her side to look at him. She had left his name out too, she realized. Why had she done that? She tried to think of Mycah, but it was hard to remember what he’d looked like. She hadn’t known him long. All he ever did was play at swords with me. “The Hound,” she whispered, and, “Valar morghulis.” Maybe he’d be dead by morning . . .

. . .

I need silver. The realization made her bite her lip. They had found a stag and a dozen coppers on Polliver, eight silvers on the pimply squire she’d killed, and only a couple of pennies in the Tickler’s purse. But the Hound had told her to pull off his boots and slice open his blood-drenched clothes, and she’d turned up a stag in each toe, and three golden dragons sewn in the lining of his jerkin. Sandor had kept it all, though. That wasn’t fair. It was mine as much as his. If she had given him the gift of mercy . . . she hadn’t, though. She couldn’t go back, no more than she could beg for help. Begging for help never gets you any. She would have to sell Craven, and hope she brought enough.

“Sandor” never made it to Arya’s list, “Sandor” got The Hound off Arya’s list. Such is the humanising power of using a first name in literature.

It must be stressed that the strength of the emotional connection in this technique comes not from merely using someone’s first name but from two characters experiencing shared tragedies. It’s shared tragedies that create the bond, that forge and mould and refine the feelings of love or respect. It’s the same bond of deep comradeship that’s created in combat situations, when men have to go through hell and survive it, and the experience makes the connection between survivors of a Band of Brothers unique, a bond different than in any other relationship, different to that of friends who went to school together or that of sweethearts that have been together since school. It’s the outcome of shared tragedies that upset the balance towards a new understanding of the other in all literary examples listed. For Philippa, it was the grueling search for Khaireddin; for Brienne, it was the Bloody Mummers; for Arya, it was the Red Wedding; for Sansa, it was Joffrey’s brutal abuse. Sometimes it’s one big tragedy, other times it’s a string of tragic events as a whole.

That’s behind my choice of The Lymond Chronicles for my comparative analysis of the technique, whose name in formal Literature studies I am not aware of—I call it with a simple descriptive label: marking characters’ emotional bonding through the use of first names. Because characters go through these requisite shared experiences that shape their relationship, because it has the same level of complexity and subtlety in interpersonal dynamics that ASOIAF does, and because of similarities in key points between the main characters. GRRM doesn’t have to have read Dunnett’s historical epic to be acquainted with the technique. Because the technique isn’t unknown or of recent creation, much less began with Dorothy Dunnett.

It’s centuries old. You can find it in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (the “Miss Bennett” to “dearest, loveliest Elizabeth” switch on Darcy’s part that express his feelings towards Lizzy) and in other novels from the period and earlier, and in several 20th century classics by authors that influenced Dunnett, like Georgette Heyer’s Arabella and Those Old Shades or Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries. For more recent examples, it’s a trope in Japanese manga and anime that a character starting to use another’s first name signifies intimacy and romance. I don’t even need to elaborate on how common it is in contemporary romance novels.

But no other so perfect an example as The Lymond Chronicles can be found, not just because of the requisite elements I already mentioned but also because it’s not always possible to clearly distinguish if the Mister-to-First Name switch is done following the technique’s pattern to indicate feelings, and when it’s merely due to social conventions. For example, in Austen’s time, society deemed it bad manners to call someone by their first name if one wasn’t related and/or well-acquainted with them. And this social norm has to be respected in historical romance and historical fiction, too, because social customs of the past were different and you couldn’t simply start addressing any person by their name whenever you wanted. Our modern informality wouldn’t have been acceptable in polite society. In some cultures it still isn’t, like for the Japanese, which might account for why it’s a trope in their literature and visual media to reveal a character’s falling in love through having then call the beloved by their name.

We have ample proof that Martin is as skilled at this technique as Dunnett from our book examples, and capable of doing it for both outcomes, romance and respect. We have Jaime/Brienne and Arya/Sandor already done and completed, so there is no reason why Martin wouldn’t be currently doing the same for Sansa, too, and it’s only a matter of time that he’ll take the pattern to its logical conclusion, which is still in the future. If so, what lies ahead is to look up for just “Sandor” in a POV of hers in the book to come; because that’ll mark the moment Sansa consciously acknowledges what she has in her heart instead of just signaling it through all this subtlety, hints, and small clues we are left to pore over and interpret.

Murder as a plot device and its impact on bias

05 Wednesday Aug 2020

Posted by brashcandie in General ASOIAF

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agot, analysis, rereading sandor, sandor clegane, the hound

bubug

Official poster by the artist Bubug for the Rereading Sandor project 

In 2015, Pawn to Player embarked on another major reread project, this time centred on Sandor Clegane, aka the Hound, who plays a prominent role in the narrative and character development of the two Stark sisters, Sansa and Arya. The project was conducted at the Westeros.org forum, and led by our resident Sandor expert Milady of York, whose essay we are featuring below.  Joining in the project as co-hosts were myself and PTP member Doglover. As outlined in the introduction to our examination of the Hound’s character:

In starting this reread, our central preoccupation is with discussing Sandor on his own terms and for his own sake. By this we mean to establish the authority of Sandor’s viewpoint: delving inside the man’s unique characteristics, the conflicts, the controversies and, of course, the connections he is able to foster with others. We fundamentally believe that while the Hound may be dead, Sandor Clegane is still alive, and still has a significant part to play in how the rest of the drama unfolds in Martin’s fantasy epic. The Will to Change is concerned with his personal journey, with looking at the experiences that have defined the man we meet, but also at the ones that eventually challenge and transform him.

It’s taken a while, but we’ve finally uploaded our Sandor reread summaries and analyses here at the blog for readers to easily access (see top menu). There’s a wealth of valuable insight contained in this material, pertaining to the central POV characters that Sandor interacts with, and crucially, for anyone interested in a deeper understanding of the man himself, who occupies pride of place as one of Martin’s most vivid and memorable secondary character portrayals. An examination of the infamous non-knight elucidates core themes of the ASOIAF universe and challenges readers to reassess our first impressions and biases, leading to a greater appreciation for the complexity of human nature and interaction that make the series such a hallmark of the fantasy genre.

The following essay was completed as part of the Rereading Sandor project, written as a “Featured Commentary” in the A Game of Thrones section.  It offers very relevant insight into how child murder functions as a mechanism to elicit varying reactions and degrees of empathy from readers, via our identification with the victims of the crime, and how it factors into the redemptive arcs of the perpetrators of these violent acts in different ways. We hope you enjoy reading it and welcome your feedback.

 

FEATURED COMMENTARY:

Murder as a plot device and its impact on bias

To the extent that I’ve been able to make the characters real, people invest in them emotionally, they identify with them, and they like or dislike other of the characters. They argue about them—I find that very gratifying. It’s one of the things that suggests to me that what I’m doing with the characters is working. When I hear from different fans who have varying opinions about a character, about who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy, and who they’d like to live and who they’d like to die—it’s not always the expected ones, and they disagree sharply with each other. That’s a good sign. In real life, people don’t always like the same people. People make moral judgments that differ sharply with each other—witness some of the arguments we see going on about the current election. People should respond to fictional characters in the same way. If you introduce a character who everybody loves, or who everybody hates, that’s probably a sign that that character’s a little too one-dimensional, because in real life there’s no one that everybody loves, and there’s no one that everybody hates.

—— George R. R. Martin, in an interview

by Milady of York

When discussing personal change-based arcs in ASOIAF like those of Sandor, Jaime and Theon, the most divisive topic is probably that of child-killing. In broad strokes, the diverging sides will argue either in favour of discernment through attenuating surrounding circumstances and contextual liability, or will argue based on questions of morality and justice that provide cause for impeaching and judging them. However, there’s one factor that doesn’t get discussed as much yet does have considerable influence on the matter on a meta-conscious level, and that does mould people’s opinion to variable extents, wheresoever they may stand.

This factor carries the name of Identifiable Victim Effect that psychologists have given it, and is really more comprehensible than its scholarly-sounding classification tag implies. In fact, some might already know of it from somewhere by name or by description.

“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”

This phrase mistakenly fastened onto Soviet Union dictator Josef Stalin, but likely from earlier and by someone else, condenses quite well what the Identifiable Victim Effect is and also gives the phenomenon its pop-culture denominator of A Million is a Statistic: it refers to the natural tendency of individuals to sympathise with, defend and offer greater aid when a specific, visible and identifiable person—the “victim”—is observed under hardship, as contrasted to a large, vaguely defined and unseen group of several people undergoing the same hardship, as clinical therapist Rebecca Collins explained it, because of proximity, for these “vivid, flesh and blood-victims are often more powerful sources of persuasion than abstract statistic.”

The same researcher also points out that this doesn’t end at simply empathising with and helping the victim, but is furthermore a two-pronged effect: its other spearpoint is directed at the perpetrator. There’s greater motivation towards doing something to them in the name of the victim, towards defensive attack and punishing, be it verbal or physical, and when the opportunity for punishment appears, then we’re more likely to dispense it, and often more harshly, if/when punishing the specific and identifiable victimiser of an specific and identifiable victim.

This would be due to neurologically imprinted and outwardly nourished cognitive processes shared by all humans. People possess three types of empathy: cognitive empathy, that is to share what the other thinks; then affective empathy, meaning to feel what the other feels too; and finally sympathetic empathy, which is a mix of the former two, conjoined with the impulse to take action and do something. And empathy is a finite quality, it has a limit and a defined breaking point. Such a limit to the ability to empathise is the so-called Dunbar Number effect, explained by anthropologist Robin Dunbar as a psychological phenomenon that restricts the amount of a person’s significant relationships to a certain number (which for him is 150 within a 100-200 range, but others have given different numbers), because the innate ability to handle meaningful and emotionally-fulfilling relationships is less optimal and falters past that limit, as the close network fades into the abstract, crowded mass of people. As a result, the amount of sympathy that death, cruelty, injustice and suffering evoke is inversely proportional to the magnitude of its effects, and it’s our knowledge of the affected person that has the major impact. Paul Slovic, who did some studies to confirm this, calls it “psychic numbing” and declares that the problem with anonymous statistics is that they don’t activate moral emotions, because the mind can’t grasp suffering on such a massive and abstract scale. And so, for example, people can be riveted easily when media show a child suffering, but empathy is turned off when the news talk of thousands of little ones suffering.

Applying this to bias in literature, historically the murder of the innocent and the weak as a vilification method to make the Bad/Evil One out of someone is a very ancient rhetorical technique that seems to have been always there, from the Old Testament to the rousing speeches of Classical playwrights to Shakespeare’s works and the modern examples in any Top Fictional Villains list. Regardless of the evolution of customs and ethics across epochs, victim identification by proximity remains constant for reasons of the stable cognitive traits earlier mentioned, an ages-tested effectiveness that accounts for its extensive employment. To create the perception of a character as a villain—or an anti-hero, depending—in the readership’s mind, or at the very least make a case for interpreting a scene as an indictment of the character as deeply-flawed, the ideal writing device is to have them inflict suffering on and/or kill an innocent. This is quite effective in writing because:

  1. The victim is innocent, an absolutely pivotal component for the effect to be present. Or they must be presumed to be guiltless. And if furthermore they’re defenceless, the intensity of loathing for the perpetrator is higher; which is why little children, women and the crippled are chosen by default.

  2. When the bad act resulting in the death or suffering happens on-page, whether in the perpetrator’s POV or the victim’s, we get to “witness” the act as it unfolds. Generally, this is the best option for maximum emotional impact, both because the character who suffers pain and the character who inflicts it are more memorable, and even when readers don’t necessarily feel what the character feels, the intensity of it intensifies the readers’ own feelings.

  3. Vividness and proximity matter more than magnitude. Due to the victim identification repercussions, how bad the deed is isn’t impactful by itself, for even if it isn’t comparatively as heinous or as sadistic as what happens to other characters in the same story, it will affect the reader nonetheless. For this reason, minor transgressions such as slaps, crude words and the like can matter a lot if directed at the identifiable victim the readers are partial to.

  4. The POV character’s reactions penetrate into the readers and influence their own reactions, often more than the narrative itself. This is especially true in three instances: when the deed is done off-page, because then we only have the POV’s post-facto reaction to build ours on; when the victim is a non-POV, because here it falls on the POV to pass judgement, and whichever path is chosen after the initial shock: vindictiveness, justice, forgiveness, indifference, etc., is likely to be shared by the readers; and finally, when the perpetrator is a non-POV, in which case the possibility of bias is so high as to be a certainty for most cases. Because, as there’s only one version and even when it’s true in essence, not getting to know the perpetrator’s motivations (be it selfish or understandable), essentially creates a deceptive appearance, and we judge the perpetrator’s motives on this apparent “proof.”

The off-stage/non-POV option leaves more room to a writer for subversion than when it happens to be on-stage/POV, which is still possible provided it applies certain counterweight measures. In GRRM’s books, only one of the three cases when a character acquires a villainous reputation through murder of a child occurs in present-time in a POV: the throwing of Bran out the window from the tower at Winterfell in AGOT Bran II:

Bran’s fingers started to slip. He grabbed the ledge with his other hand. Fingernails dug into unyielding stone. The man reached down. “Take my hand,” he said. “Before you fall.”

Bran seized his arm and held on tight with all his strength. The man yanked him up to the ledge. “What are you doing?” the woman demanded.

The man ignored her. He was very strong. He stood Bran up on the sill. “How old are you, boy?”

“Seven,” Bran said, shaking with relief. His fingers had dug deep gouges in the man’s forearm. He let go sheepishly.

The man looked over at the woman. “The things I do for love,” he said with loathing. He gave Bran a shove.

Screaming, Bran went backward out the window into empty air. There was nothing to grab on to. The courtyard rushed up to meet him.

Somewhere off in the distance, a wolf was howling. Crows circled the broken tower, waiting for corn.

From this incident, a couple things stand out: On the pro, it’s Bran’s second POV, we already know a fair bit about this boy and what we know is that he’s a sympathetic sweet boy, and facts like that he’s daydreaming about what a great Kingsguard knight he’d wish to be add to the tragedy of being maimed by a Kingsguard knight. On the contra: we don’t have a POV by Jaime, and what we know of him from others is unflattering; plus he willingly and consciously put himself at risk of discovery for engaging in incestuous adultery in a foreign castle. The knowledge of the reasons Jaime had for throwing Bran out the window that comes later is contrasted with the fact that the woman and children he’d be protecting with this crime are also more crimes of his, which makes this a very complex moral issue. To cement the bias, the first version we hear from the guilty duo comes from Cersei, who claims to have never wanted Bran to be thrown, just intimidated into silence, and blames all on Jaime’s impulsiveness. Thus, by the time we get to read about his version, it’s too late to completely revert this perception: we already know fairly accurately what happened and why, we spent two whole books in the victim’s head reading about the painful post-traumatic mourning of the child, we see the consequences of that action blow off, and Jaime’s initial apparent lack of repentance and attempt at latching blame on Bran by insisting the boy wasn’t innocent as he’d been spying on them in his first chapters in ASOS pre-maiming are damning too. In other words, readers are wholly and deeply identified with the child victim. It appears impossible to modify that somehow. Yet it’s done nevertheless through the humanising of Jaime after he loses the hand that caused the paralysis of Bran.

But there’s a catch: having Jaime lose his hand by itself isn’t as effective a tool for reverting the negative perception. Following the principle that the reaction of the POV or victim counts greatly for the readers, Bran’s side of the tale is annulled by means of depriving him of any memory of who did that to him. The fact that Bran doesn’t remember it was Jaime and his weak clues are quickly shooed away by the Three-Eyed Crow make it possible for Jaime to gain in sympathy through his own POV unhindered by a counterbalance POV of his victim. We don’t get to read what Bran’s reaction would be, we can’t be certain whether he’d react with hate or with forgiveness, no idea on how it’d affect him to know. Therefore, authorial plot reasons for erasing Bran’s memory notwithstanding, the end result is that the beneficiary of this writing method was Jaime at the cost of Bran, as his “redemptive” arc in ASOS wouldn’t have had the same impact with Bran’s memory intact. For this reason, it should be interesting to read the child’s thoughts when he finds out whether by recovering his memory or through use of his powers.

Theon’s murder of the two miller’s boys is another interesting study with unique characteristics the other examples don’t possess, that bring it closer to the A Million is a Statistic analogy than the others, because it’s the only one that actually has anonymous victims. Those two boys are faceless and nameless, never glimpsed on-page and not described in detail or called by their names. This is also the only case in which the perpetrator has a POV that reveals in present-time all his emotions and his motivation for the crime, which are selfish and convey revulsion, and also brings to view in-world reactions like Maester Luwin’s quiet distress and Asha’s scorn:

“Well, I’m no great warrior like you, brother,” She quaffed half a horn of ale and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I saw the heads above your gates. Tell me true, which one gave you the fiercest fight, the cripple or the babe?”

Theon could feel the blood rushing to his face. He took no joy from those heads, no more than he had in displaying the headless bodies of the children before the castle. Old Nan stood with her soft toothless mouth opening and closing soundlessly, and Farlen threw himself at Theon, snarling like one of his hounds. Urzen and Cadwyl had to beat him senseless with the butts of their spears. How did I come to this? he remembered thinking as he stood over the fly-speckled bodies.

Only Maester Luwin had the stomach to come near. Stone-faced, the small grey man had begged leave to sew the boys’ heads back onto their shoulders, so they might be laid in the crypts below with the other Stark dead.

“No,” Theon had told him. “Not the crypts.”

“But why, my lord? Surely they cannot harm you now. It is where they belong. All the bones of the Starks—”

“I said no.” He needed the heads for the wall, but he had burned the headless bodies that very day, in all their finery. Afterward he had knelt amongst the bones and ashes to retrieve a slag of melted silver and cracked jet, all that remained of the wolf’s-head brooch that had once been Bran’s. He had it still.

“I treated Bran and Rickon generously,” he told his sister. “They brought their fate on themselves.”

Yet the miller’s boys still remain a statistic by virtue of their anonymity that precludes emotional investment in them for themselves. This becomes a scenario in which these boys are overshadowed by the two Starks they are passed off as, given that Greyjoy’s other victims—Bran and Rickon—have had enough time on-page for the readership to form an attachment to them and have already endured enough tragedies to elicit sympathy; more importantly: unlike with Jaime, there’s a counterbalance POV from Bran showing the other side, thereby “broadcasting live” what Brandon thinks and feels about the perpetrator he grew up with. Which would account for why Theon’s actions towards the Stark family are more likely to be judged harsher than towards the peasant boys.

In the third case, Sandor, we again have a distinctive feature: both victim and perpetrator are non-POVs, so both are by necessity filtered through the POVs connected to this murder, and therefore readers will absorb the POVs’ reactions to it in absence of reading at least one of the involved viewpoints. To complicate matters, no POV was near to witness the killing of Mycah; it happens off-page and the victim is a minor enough background extra as to have been tagged as a statistic if not for GRRM’s efficacious use of literary countermeasures. Those were:

  • The butcher’s boy isn’t anonymous. He has a name and a face due to Sansa and Arya respectively. From hearing the younger girl say things like “Mycah and I are going to ride upstream and look for rubies at the ford,” we know that the boy is her friend and that she loved playing with him along the slow-paced trip to King’s Landing; and thanks to the elder girl, we saw him onstage in AGOT Sansa I at the fight by the Trident, wherein we saw him be hurt and be terrified of the Crown Prince.

  • He is killed by and because of unsympathetic non-POVs. Not only have we verified that the boy is innocent of the charges, which heightens our sense of injustice, but we’re also aware already from before that Joffrey and Cersei are horrible people of whom not even the only Lannister POV in the first book thinks highly. So, too, is their Hound perceived as such by association atop of his own acts.

  • His death elicits revulsion from a POV. In the wake of the prescribed technique that a main character’s reactions will influence our opinion, Lord Stark is the one that gets to see first the dead body and gauge the morality of the perpetrator, in AGOT Eddard III:

He was walking back to the tower to give himself up to sleep at last when Sandor Clegane and his riders came pounding through the castle gate, back from their hunt.

There was something slung over the back of his destrier, a heavy shape wrapped in a bloody cloak. “No sign of your daughter, Hand,” the Hound rasped down, “but the day was not wholly wasted. We got her little pet.” He reached back and shoved the burden off, and it fell with a thump in front of Ned.

Bending, Ned pulled back the cloak, dreading the words he would have to find for Arya, but it was not Nymeria after all. It was the butcher’s boy, Mycah, his body covered in dried blood. He had been cut almost in half from shoulder to waist by some terrible blow struck from above.

“You rode him down,” Ned said.

The Hound’s eyes seemed to glitter through the steel of that hideous dog’s-head helm. “He ran.” He looked at Ned’s face and laughed. “But not very fast.”

  • The butcher’s boy has a POV champion. The killing could’ve been one more unjudged and unavenged Lannister crime against smallfolk in-universe and easily slid into becoming a statistic if this hadn’t been developed as an expanded plotline, and a way to ameliorate the characterisation of both Sandor and Arya. The latter’s is the reaction following Ned’s, and given her closeness to the victim, it resonates with the readership. We get to read the whole long process towards becoming Mycah’s champion, from her father’s rueful thoughts that she “was lost after she heard what had happened to her butcher’s boy” to her own recounting of the over-exaggerated version she got in AGOT Arya II . . .

They’d let the queen kill Lady, that was horrible enough, but then the Hound found Mycah. Jeyne Poole had told Arya that he’d cut him up in so many pieces that they’d given him back to the butcher in a bag, and at first the poor man had thought it was a pig they’d slaughtered.

From her guilt-ridden talk with her father in the same chapter . . .

Arya desperately wanted to explain, to make him see. “I was trying to learn, but . . . ” Her eyes filled with tears. “I asked Mycah to practice with me.” The grief came on her all at once. She turned away, shaking. “I asked him,” she cried. “It was my fault, it was me . . . ”

Suddenly her father’s arms were around her. He held her gently as she turned to him and sobbed against his chest. “No, sweet one,” he murmured. “Grieve for your friend, but never blame yourself. You did not kill the butcher’s boy. That murder lies at the Hound’s door, him and the cruel woman he serves.”

. . . to the spat with her sister in AGOT Sansa III, the point where we see the initial reaction evolved into a desire for retribution:

Arya screwed up her face in a scowl. “Jaime Lannister murdered Jory and Heward and Wyl, and the Hound murdered Mycah. Somebody should have beheaded them.”

“It’s not the same,” Sansa said. “The Hound is Joffrey’s sworn shield. Your butcher’s boy attacked the prince.”

And at the end of the road, the culmination of the process is that Arya decides she wants to kill all those who wronged those that matter to her, starting the death prayer in ACOK Arya VI, and including the Hound specifically for Mycah:

Arya watched and listened and polished her hates the way Gendry had once polished his horned helm. Dunsen wore those bull’s horns now, and she hated him for it. She hated Polliver for Needle, and she hated old Chiswyck who thought he was funny. And Raff the Sweetling, who’d driven his spear through Lommy’s throat, she hated even more. She hated Ser Amory Lorch for Yoren, and she hated Ser Meryn Trant for Syrio, the Hound for killing the butcher’s boy Mycah, and Ser Ilyn and Prince Joffrey and the queen for the sake of her father and Fat Tom and Desmond and the rest, and even for Lady, Sansa’s wolf. The Tickler was almost too scary to hate. At times she could almost forget he was still with them; when he was not asking questions, he was just another soldier, quieter than most, with a face like a thousand other men.

Every night Arya would say their names. “Ser Gregor,” she’d whisper to her stone pillow. “Dunsen, Polliver, Chiswyck, Raff the Sweetling. The Tickler and the Hound. Ser Amory, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, King Joffrey, Queen Cersei.”

All four factors contribute in tandem, but the third and fourth are by far the most important when it pertains to bias formation because of the non-witness POVs involved. With regard to this, there can be no doubt that GRRM does consciously use writing methods to evoke certain reactions in his readership, to which he’s alluded in interviews like the opening quote in this write-up, and when he said the following: [http://web.archive.org/web/20001005212114/eventhorizon.com/sfzine/chats/transcripts/031899.html]:

When I write a POV, after all, I am trying to put you in that person’s head so you will presumably empathize with them, at least while reading the chapter.

In view of this, the structure of Eddard’s account is of particular interest to analyse its genesis, not only because it mirrors a similar scene in which he also jumped to hasty conclusions on sight without knowing the circumstances yet (the killing of Aerys), but also because the abrupt ending of the scene right after the Hound’s words is very eye-opening: GRRM puts the full stop after the “‘He ran.” He looked at Ned’s face and laughed. “But not very fast’” line without giving the reader a chance to find out what Eddard said after, or whether he ever did, what Sandor said or did after, etc. So as a direct product of this deliberate cliffhanger, the details that stick are those that shocked the most, like the cleaved-in-half state of the boy’s body, Eddard’s judgemental stance and the Hound’s laughter.

Standing on that foundation, Arya’s reaction keeps it vivid and current throughout her POV from Book I until the Hound “dies,” and because the author doesn’t go point-counterpoint like with the other two child-killer characters, her view of the killing predominates. For a while at least, because Martin didn’t let it lie with any of the three cases and provided with details that would allow moving past initial bias. His intention when writing the “redemptive” arcs was, in his own words, to explore the concept of forgiveness and whether a person can be forgiven [http://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Entry/1405], about which he explains:

One of the things I wanted to explore with Jaime, and with so many of the characters, is the whole issue of redemption. When can we be redeemed? Is redemption even possible? I don’t have an answer. But when do we forgive people? You see it all around in our society, in constant debates. Should we forgive Michael Vick? I have friends who are dog-lovers who will never forgive Michael Vick. Michael Vick has served years in prison; he’s apologized. Has he apologized sufficiently? Woody Allen: Is Woody Allen someone that we should laud, or someone that we should despise? Or Roman Polanski, Paula Deen. Our society is full of people who have fallen in one way or another, and what do we do with these people? How many good acts make up for a bad act? If you’re a Nazi war criminal and then spend the next 40 years doing good deeds and feeding the hungry, does that make up for being a concentration-camp guard? I don’t know the answer, but these are questions worth thinking about. I want there to be a possibility of redemption for us, because we all do terrible things. We should be able to be forgiven. Because if there is no possibility of redemption, what’s the answer then?

We can safely assume that the Hound is amongst those “many of the characters,” and that the road trip across the Riverlands and the Vale with Arya did serve to explore the topic in his own arc as well as hers, using Arya in the triple role of champion of the victim, judge and executioner. And this is why details like her three chances to kill him and hesitating before first stab, thinking of him by his first name after a while in his company, taking him off her death prayer, and needing to resort to childish rationalisation when leaving him to die are of utmost significance in our future analysis, because of their antithetical function when taken into account in conjunction with his actions and words during that period.

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The Mythical Astronomy of Ice and Fire

Wars and Politics of Ice and Fire

Political, Military and Historical Analysis of A Song of Ice and Fire

Radio Westeros

ASoIaF Podcasts

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