The Rose Of Winterfell - Tumblr Posts

hi there! I was wondering if you could explain to me why a lot of people think that the passage you have in your sidebar (about the blue flower from ice) means Jon x Dany? When I read the passage I always assumed it was about Lyanna

Hi there!

It’s about Jon’s identity as Lyanna’s son, and how Dany interprets the introduction of that idea.

The first time we are introduced to Blue Roses, it’s through Ned’s memories of Lyanna:

Her eyes burned, green fire in the dusk, like the lioness that was her sigil. “The night of our wedding feast, the first time we shared a bed, he called me by your sister’s name. He was on top of me, in me, stinking of wine, and he whispered Lyanna.”

Ned Stark thought of pale blue roses, and for a moment he wanted to weep. “I do not know which of you I pity most.” (Eddard XII, AGOT)

“Promise me, Ned,” Lyanna’s statue whispered. She wore a garland of pale blue roses, and her eyes wept blood. (Eddard XIII, AGOT)

Robert had been jesting with Jon and old Lord Hunter as the prince circled the field after unhorsing Ser Barristan in the final tilt to claim the champion’s crown. Ned remembered the moment when all the smiles died, when Prince Rhaegar Targaryen urged his horse past his own wife, the Dornish princess Elia Martell, to lay the queen of beauty’s laurel in Lyanna’s lap. He could see it still: a crown of winter roses, blue as frost. (Eddard XV, AGOT)

It’s clearly laying a trail here–that we are supposed to associate Lyanna with these blue roses.  But, more specifically, we are supposed to associate Ned’s guilt with Lyanna’s blue roses.  They are, to Ned, a symbol of her love, her death, and the promise he made to protect her son and lie about his identity for years.  The roses are a symbol that Jon is Lyanna’s son.

This gets compounded in A Clash of Kings when Ygritte tells Jon (Jon!) the story of Bael the Bard:

“North or south, singers always find a ready welcome, so Bael ate at Lord Stark’s own table, and played for the lord in his high seat until half the night was gone. The old songs he played, and new ones he’d made himself, and he played and sang so well that when he was done, the lord offered to let him name his own reward. ‘All I ask is a flower,’ Bael answered, ‘the fairest flower that blooms in the gardens o’ Winterfell.’”

“Now as it happened the winter roses had only then come into bloom, and no flower is so rare nor precious. So the Stark sent to his glass gardens and commanded that the most beautiful o’ the winter roses be plucked for the singer’s payment. And so it was done. But when morning come, the singer had vanished…and so had Lord Brandon’s maiden daughter. Her bed they found empty, but for the pale blue rose that Bael had left on the pillow where her head had lain.”…“Lord Brandon had no other children. At his behest, the black crows flew forth from their castles in the hundreds, but nowhere could they find any sign o’ Bael or this maid. For most a year they searched, till the lord lost heart and took to his bed, and it seemed as though the line o’ Starks was at its end. But one night as he lay waiting to die, Lord Brandon heard a child’s cry. He followed the sound and found his daughter back in her bedchamber, asleep with a babe at her breast.“ 

“Bael had brought her back?”

“No. They had been in Winterfell all the time, hiding with the dead beneath the castle. The maid loved Bael so dearly she bore him a son, the song says… though if truth be told, all the maids love Bael in them songs he wrote. Be that as it may, what’s certain is that Bael left the child in payment for the rose he’d plucked unasked, and that the boy grew to be the next Lord Stark. So there it is—you have Bael’s blood in you, same as me.”(Jon VI, ACOK)

So you have this story about a secret stark baby who is also strongly associated with blue winter roses.  This story, told to Jon, is undoubtedly allegorical about Jon himself, for what matters is that this little bastard Stark (for as far as we’re aware, the young lady Stark and Bael didn’t marry) became Lord of Winterfell after he was kept secret and his mother had been “abducted.”  In this case, that blue winter rose is symbolic of the exchange of the mother for the son, the maiden for the next Lord Stark.

So we have this blue flower symbol that’s staggeringly heavily laden with weight about how Jon’s Lyanna’s son, and then we have Dany, in the house of the undying:

A blue flower grew from a chink in a wall of ice, and filled the air with sweetness…

There’s a lot of symbolism in that chapter, and what everything means is something that’s still very up in the air.  But given 1) the blue flower symbolism for Jon’s identity as Lyanna’s son and 2) the wall of ice (ie, the Wall where he became Lord Commander), it’s fair to assume that it means him, and that that subsequent “filled the air with sweetness” is Dany’s own interpretation of what that flower physically leads her to feel.  It’s wistful, it’s longing, it’s loving, and it means Jon.

In GRRM’s books, he seems to hold true to the expression of ‘Third time’s the Charm’ and the results are different the third time something happens…

So if we take the Pact of Ice and Fire, which was :

The Pact of Ice and Fire was an alliance between Houses Stark and Targaryen arranged during the Dance of the Dragons.

At the start of the civil war, Prince Jacaerys Velaryon flew to Winterfell to gain House Stark and the North for the cause of his mother, Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen.[1][2]

According to Mushroom, Prince Jacaerys secretly married Lord Cregan Stark’s bastard sister, Sara Snow, which led to the pact. It was agreed that the firstborn daughter of Prince Jacaerys would marry Lord Cregan’s son and heir, Rickon.[3] Lord Roderick Dustin led the Winter Wolves to join the blacks, while House Manderly also contributed knights to Rhaenyra’s side.[1] Lord Cregan himself led a host to King’s Landing near the end of the war, but they arrived after the death of King Aegon II Targaryen.[2] Cregan briefly governed in the capital as Hand of the King during the Hour of the Wolf.[4]Although a royal princess never did marry into the Starks, Cregan gained many rewards for his support of King Aegon III Targaryen.[5]

Then we have Rhaegar and Lyanna and that ended in disaster.

Maybe Jon and Dany will finally make the pact of Ice and Fire and this time they will marry and actually make that alliance official….