Episode 13: A GAME OF THRONES, EDDARD II “Affairs of the State” Show Notes!

Hello and welcome to the Not A Cast, the one true chapter-by-chapter podcast going through A Song of Ice and Fire one chapter a week. I’m one of your hosts Jeff better known as BryndenBFish. 

And I’m your other host, Emmett better known as PoorQuentyn. 

Welcome to our lucky thirteenth episode of the Not A Cast entitled: “Affairs of the State: An Analysis of AGOT, Eddard II” where bros Ned and Robert go off riding together only to argue and reminisce bitterly over their shared sad history. This episode is brought to you all by our Lords Commander Mark N and Timothy W. Thank you, gentlemen!

Spoiler warning: All published books - 5 novels, 3 Dunk and Egg novellas, histories, interviews, and TWOW sample chapters, as well as Game of Thrones the TV show, anything and everything!

Question(s) of the week. As we said last week, for those of you who contribute to our patreon, (and thank you very much to all of you that do!), those who contribute $10 or more a month get the opportunity to ask us a question. 

Ser Travis M, one of our Sworn Swords asks:

Best “Star Trek” Captain and Starship?

Ser Rob L, one of our sworn sword patrons asks:

Can you extol a particularly good section of writing without crapping on Grimdark? Asking for my friends Logen Ninefingers and Monza Murcatto. 

Dusk found them on the fringes of the rainwood, a wet green world where brooks and rivers ran through dark forests and the ground was made of mud and rotting leaves. Huge willows grew along the watercourses, larger than any that Arianne had ever seen, their great trunks as gnarled and twisted as an old man’s face and festooned with beards of silvery moss. Trees pressed close on every side, shutting out the sun; hemlock and red cedars, white oaks, soldier pines that stood as tall and straight as towers, colossal sentinels, big-leaf maples, redwoods, wormtrees, even here and there a wild weirwood. Underneath their tangled branches ferns and flowers grew in profusion; sword ferns, lady ferns, bellflowers and piper’s lace, evening stars and poison kisses, liverwort, lungwort, hornwort. Mushrooms sprouted down amongst the tree roots, and from their trunks as well, pale spotted hands that caught the rain. Other trees were furred with moss, green or grey or red-tailed, and once a vivid purple. Lichens covered every rock and stone. Toadstools festered besides rotting logs. The very air seemed green.

Jeff Synopsis

Robert Baratheon wakes Eddard Stark from his dreams to go riding with him an hour before dawn. Ned encourages Robert to come inside his tent. But no. Robert is restless. He wants to explore the northern country. So, Lord Eddard Stark dresses, mounts his horse and rides off with King Robert Baratheon.

They rode in silence as dawn broke around them. When Robert finally stopped, Robert exclaims, “Gods, it feels good to get out and ride the way a man was meant to ride!” He then complains about Cersei’s carriage, jokingly threatening to burn the thing to the ground if it breaks another axle. Robert then wistfully wonders whether he and Ned should take the road as sellswords and leave all this behind. Robert brings up wenches and asks Ned for the name of his bastard’s mother. 

Her name was Wylla, and I would sooner not speak of her, Ned replies cooly.

Robert presses him for more information, but Ned flatly refuses, claiming that he dishonored his marriage with Catelyn. Robert grumbles but lets it be.

They ride on father, and Ned points out mounds to Robert, and Robert wonders: Are they in a graveyard? 

“There are barrows everywhere in the north. This land is old.”

The short history lessons complete, Robert explains his reason for rousing Ned so early in the morning. Varys the Spider has sent word from King’s Landing. Daenerys Targaryen has wed Khal Drogo. Ned asks for the source of the information. 

Do you remember Ser Jorah Mormont?

Would that I might forget him, Ned replies

You see, Ser Jorah was once bannermen to Ned Stark, but he was caught selling poachers to slavers. As Jorah was a prominent member of House Mormont, his crime was against the North. So, Ned had taken it upon himself to ride out to bring justice to Ser Jorah. But before he could, Jorah fled across the Narrow Sea. And now he works for Varys as a spy hoping to gain a royal pardon and a return to Westeros.

Anyways, Robert wants to send a hard knife after Daenerys and her brother Viserys, and this doesn’t surprise Ned. He remembers back to the end of Robert’s Rebellion when Tywin Lannister had presented Robert with the corpses of Rhaegar’s wife and children. Ned called murder. Robert called it war, stating that he didn’t see children, only dragonspawn. This nearly ended Robert and Ned’s friendship. Only the death of Lyanna had reconciled them.

Back to the present: Ned counsels caution, stating that Dany is only a girl. Robert counters with This child will soon spread her legs and start breeding more dragonspawn to plague me.

Ned and Robert then engage in a very similar argument from Robert’s Rebellion: is the murder of children ever justified? Ned says no. Robert says yes. The argument builds and builds until Robert shouts: I will kill every Targaryen I can get my hands on until they are as dead as their dragons, and then I will piss on their graves.

Let no one dare call Robert unemotional over the Targaryens. 

Anyhow, Dany and Viserys are being sheltered by Illyrio Mopatis, and Robert is unable to get them. And now Dany is married to Drogo. Robert fears the Dothraki will invade Westeros. Ned replies that the Dothraki hate and fear the open sea. Robert’s fear of the Dothraki remains, and Ned uses this as an opportunity to try to persuade Robert to name Robert Arryn or Robert’s brother Stannis as Warden of the East.

But Robert has named Jaime as his Warden of the East. Ned dislikes Jaime, and he has reason to. Not only does naming Jaime Warden of the East essentially put half of the armies of Westeros under Lannister control, there’s some history between Ned and Jaime as Ned explains to Robert. During their completely, 100% justified rebellion against Aerys Targaryen, Ned and his men marched into the Red Keep. There, they found Aerys II Targaryen dead and Jaime Lannister sitting high above everyone on the Iron Throne. No one spoke until Jaime laughed and told Ned that he was just keeping the seat warm for Robert. 

To Ned’s chagrin, Robert thinks this is hilarious. His laughter booms. Finally, Robert kicks his horse and urges Ned to come with him. And for the first time, Ned wonders about the wisdom of what he was doing coming south instead of staying with Catelyn and Bran at Winterfell.

A man could not always be where he belonged though, Ned thinks glumly before riding after Robert.

And that’s a not-so-short summary of AGOT, Eddard II. 

These summaries are not getting any shorter.

Emmett Depth

Eddard II is another character-centric chapter, giving us a strong sense of the dynamic between Ned and Robert so their later struggles in King’s Landing have some weight. This is how Robert thinks, this is how Ned thinks, this is how those thoughts bounce off each other. For the first time, they are trying to relate to one another not as friends, but as the King and his Hand.

• Robert Baratheon, born to run
  • Trying to recapture his lost youth
  • His best self connected to athleticism, his worst self connected to his self-indulgence
  • So worried about the Targs, yet he’s letting the Lannisters shove a knife into his back
• Eddard Stark, born to restrain
  • “You were never the boy you were"
  • Like Robert, he’s frozen in the past, but manifested differently
  • First sign of his support for Stannis
• “The camp is full of ears” and the first mention of Varys
  • How much does Robert realize about the corruption and conspiring? Flatterers and fools…
  • Varys linked to info from Essos in his first mention
• Dany’s wedding and Jorah’s backstory
  • Robert’s anger that will lead to the assassination attempt
  • Contrast with why Ned wants Jorah dead--out of repulsion at slavery
  • And of course, that anger freaks Ned out because...
• Wylla and R+L=J
  • ...he knows it would lead Robert to kill Jon
  • Here we get a sense of multiple competing narratives: we already heard about Ashara
  • That contradiction and Ned’s anger in both cases should lead us to suspect that there's something else going on…
  • Contrast Catelyn’s point:
    
    Many men fathered bastards. Catelyn had grown up with that knowledge. It came as no surprise to her, in the first year of her marriage, to learn that Ned had fathered a child on some girl chance met on campaign. He had a man's needs, after all, and they had spent that year apart, Ned off at war in the south while she remained safe in her father's castle at Riverrun. 

Likes/Dislikes

Like: The intimate dynamic between the bros, the tight connection between plots (bringing up Dany’s wedding right after we saw it in the previous chapter)

Dislike: Would’ve been nice to get more of the non-Winterfell North here; this area gets fleshed out in ADWD when we spend a chapter in Barrowton and meet Barbrey Dustin

Like: The blending of history, Ned/Robert’s memories into a cohesive, gripping narrative, like Emmett the Ned/Robert dynamic: feels real. Love this writing: “The rising sun sent fingers of light through the pale white mists of dawn.”

Dislike: Jaime as Warden of the East subplot. Did a little more digging on this one, and early on this was building into a legitimate conflict with the Lannisters putting their hooks into Westeros in advance of their coup, with Robert admitting in this chapter that he was naming Jaime as Warden of the East, but it takes a backburner in the rest of AGOT with Lysa declaring Sweetrobin “The True Warden of the East.” Thereafter, it fizzles with Tyrion later deciding, “I’ll name Robert Arryn Warden of the East after all.” An unsatisfying narrative conclusion. Seems like it’s a leftover of the original pitch letter that GRRM couldn’t or didn’t abandon for whatever reason.

Groundwork/Foreshadowing

“I’ve half a mind to leave them all behind and just keep going.”

A smile touched Ned’s lips. “I do believe you mean it.”

“I do, I do,” the king said. “What do you say, Ned? Just you and me, two vagabond

knights on the kingsroad, our swords at our sides and the gods know what in front of us,

and maybe a farmer’s daughter or a tavern wench to warm our beds tonight.”

Easy to think that Robert’s joking here, but when we get to Eddard VII and his confession that he’d abdicate were it not for Joffrey, it becomes clear that at some level, he meant it.

Was the Ned description of Jaime on the Iron Throne intended to work more as foreshadowing of Jaime’s original role from the 1993 letter?

Jaime Lannister will follow Joffrey on the throne of the Seven Kingdoms, by the simple expedient of killing everyone ahead of him in the line of succession and blaming his brother Tyrion for the murders.

Theory Discussion: Structure/Story Depth

Ned vs. Jaime’s POV of kingslaying. 

In this chapter, we get Ned’s perspective on Jaime’s kingslaying in his argument with Robert:

"Seven hells, someone had to kill Aerys!" Robert said, reining his mount to a sudden halt beside an ancient barrow. "If Jaime hadn't done it, it would have been left for you or me."

"We were not Sworn Brothers of the Kingsguard," Ned said.” 

And then later in the conversation, you get the real sense of Ned’s disdain for Jaime:

Aerys was dead on the floor, drowned in his own blood. His dragon skulls stared down from the walls. Lannister's men were everywhere. Jaime wore the white cloak of the Kingsguard over his golden armor.

Ned seems to believe that Jaime had no right to murder Aerys because of his sworn loyalties. He was of the Kingsguard, and morally, Jaime had no right to kill the king he swore his sword to, or at least Ned seems to believe as much. And this perspective makes a lot of sense to the character of Ned who holds loyalty and duty as among the highest of virtues.

However, when we get Jaime’s perspective in ASOS, we get, in my opinion, an entirely justifiable reason for why Jaime became the kingslayer. As he tells Brienne, Aerys had monstrous ambitions in mind:

The traitors want my city, I heard him tell Rossart, but I'll give them naught but ashes. Let Robert be king over charred bones and cooked meat. The Targaryens never bury their dead, they burn them. Aerys meant to have the greatest funeral pyre of them all.

So, Jaime knew that Aerys’ intent was to burn King’s Landing to the ground with wildfire and kill 500,000 people. But even as the city gates were opened and Tywin Lannister’s soldiers sacked King’s Landing, he tried one last time to dissuade Aerys from his monstrous act:

"It fell to me to hold the Red Keep, but I knew we were lost. I sent to Aerys asking his leave to make terms. My man came back with a royal command. 'Bring me your father's head, if you are no traitor.' Aerys would have no yielding. 

So, Jaime was left with two choices: uphold his vows to a king who planned to murder hundreds of thousands or kill the king. So, Jaime made his choice: he killed the king to the horror of the honorable Ned Stark and earned the sobriquet that he would forever be known to Westeros by: “The Kingslayer”. 

This is one of my favorite aspects of ASOIAF: getting our perspective of events uprooted and overturned as we get new point of view characters. So far in AGOT, we really only have Catelyn’s, Ned’s, Viserys’ and Robert’s perspective from the rebellion itself. When we turn to future volumes, our POV of Robert’s Rebellion widens. We get the perspective of Stannis and Davos, Jaime, Oberyn, Tywin, Doran Martell, Jon Connington and Ser Barristan (who we’ll be talking about soon!) 

It’s just a whole lot of fun to read a multi-faceted account from multiple, different, unique perspectives on the rebellion as the story progresses. It almost makes me wish that George RR Martin would keep expanding his cast of POV characters to get more perspective. Alas, the story must come to a close at some point, and GRRM has said that he won’t be adding any new POV characters into the story.

I’ll close with this: in this Eddard chapters, did you notice the disdain that Ned has for Jaime sitting on the throne? Let me recap:

I stopped in front of the throne, looking up at him. His golden sword was across his legs, its edge red with a king’s blood. My men were filling the room behind me. Lannister’s men drew back. I never said a word. I looked at him seated there on the throne, and I waited.

And then we get Jaime’s POV of the event from his sixth chapter in ASOS in his spooky weirwood dream:

He remembered Eddard Stark, riding the length of Aerys's throne room wrapped in silence. Only his eyes had spoken; a lord's eyes, cold and grey and full of judgment.

I love it. I love that Jaime consciously captures the truth: that Ned disdains him, that he judges him for what he did. And in the perspectives merge into objectivity about what actually transpired in the Red Keep. Gone are the unique perspectives of Ned and Jaime, replaced by Ned’s judgment and Jaime’s anger at Lord Stark’s honor.

Conclusion

• Thanks for listening!
• Rate and review us on itunes, google play, etc
• Patreon/advertise/where we can find our work/social media
• Follow us on social media (Make sure to mention @NotACastASOIAF and our e mail: NotACastASOIAF@gmail.com
• Join us next week for a roadtrip in the opposite direction with Tyrion II!
• Sign off