Inside Game Of Thrones - Season 1 - Episode 8

4 years ago

Inside Game Of Thrones - Season 1 - Episode 8

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Ned told them that their prince was dead, and that an army was on its way to their King’s city to see that he went to join his son, hoping that they would lay down their swords, but the two knights made it clear that, in life or death, they served their king and his family.

The knights of the Kingsguard put on their helms, and the fight was on.

The three knights were outnumbered more than two to one, but even so the fight was a close one. The knights who served in the Kingsguard were the best of the best, after all. But the odds were insurmountable at the end, and Ned and his men cut down both knights. And even so, their victory came at a cost. Of all the seven men who rode to Dorne, only two, Ned Stark and Howland Reed, were left standing.

But by the time they made it inside, Ned’s sister was dying from illness. She was afraid. She knew she was going to die. Her dying wish was to be la!d to rest beside her father and elder brother in the crypts of Winterfell.
Ned had ridden South to save his sister, and he ended up returning to the North with her corpse.

When Ned returned to King’s Landing, the city had already been taken, Aerys had been killed, and— this one is one of the reasons he came rue their alliance with Lord Tywin —both children of Rhaegar had been brutally and savagely murdered, wrapped up in crimson cloaks and given to Robert as an ascension gift. Even Rhaegar’s harmless wife, the mother of the children, Elia, had been raped and murdered.

Both of those atrocities were carried out by Tywin Lannister’s men. Even Aerys, the Mad King, had been killed by the sword of Jaime Lannister, a son of Lord Tywin who was a knight of the Kingsguard and a sworn protector of the King.

All that had happened before either Ned or Robert had gotten married, some fifteen years ago, far too long a time for two close friends to have seen each other last, so Ned was happy that his friend was returning.
When the King rode in on his horse, however, Ned could barely recognize him. The tall, strapping young man he used to know had now put on a lot of weight. Too much weight. Robert had lost none of his height, however, so he looked like a tall mountain of fat with an enormous beer belly to go with his frame. Even when he crushed Ned in a bear hug, he caught an odor of sweat on him.

Behind Ned, the knights who had followed him from the capital poured in. For every knight came one or two squires, many freeriders, and uncountable servants, so that Ned found himself recieving hundreds of guests instead of the family of five he had been told was coming. Five included Robert, the King himself, Cersei, his wife, and their children Joffery, Tommen and Myrcella.

Robert came in on horse, while his wife and children came in a huge one-storey wheelhouse pulled by forty pack horses, so big it had to remain outside because the gates of Winterfell were too small to let it fit.
“Where is Lyanna? I need to pay my respects,” Robert told his friend after both families were properly introduced. And so Ned led Robert to a long set of steps descending into the crypts, an extensive, three-level sarcophagus where the remains of all the dead lords who ever sat in Winterfell lay buried in stone caskets beside statues of each one, with stone direwolves sitting at their feet and iron longswords across their laps to protect them against evil spirits.

Ned is holding a torch to light up the pitch-black darkness of the crypts as he leads his King down the middle of the statues, past rows upon rows of pillars holding up the roof of the crypts. His friend is panting beside him from the short walk, and once again Eddard has to wonder at what his friend has now become.

They finally get to Lyanna’s statue, beside those of Brandon and Rickard Stark. It’s very obvious from the tender way Robert touches the face of the cold, hard stone likeness that his love for the sister of the Lord of Winterfell never died. He berates Ned about burying her in such a dark, bleak place as this, but Ned assured him that it was her dying wish to be brought here; he had no choice but to honor it.
I think Eddard just had to bring up the issue of Robert’s new stature. The King has no shyness about admitting that it comes from whoring and drinking and sitting all day in that damnable Iron Throne. He even makes a joke out of it, but Ned doesn’t laugh. No surprise.

Ned Stark is a kind of man that is old-school, reserved, and good to a fault, even when doing good seems like cruelty to others, a good instance of which is the way he performs his executions himself. The kind of person people today call “God’s own righteous man”.

People say that it’s because of the place he lives, that it’s because of the cold of the North that Ned Stark isn’t much different from ice himself, and that Northmen are so grim because the cold freezes the laughter before it gets out of their lungs. He worships the old gods, the gods the First Men— the original people of the seven kingdoms —worshipped, not the new gods the Andals brought across the sea when they defeated the First Men before the time of Aegon, the ones majority of the other people of the seven kingdoms worship.

The old gods they worship reside in a place called “the godswood” in Winterfell, a bone-white tree called a “heart tree” with red leaves and a face carved into its trunk, a face whose eyes the worshippers of the old gods claim to see all.