White Ravens, Winter Roses - Part One
It is no secret that ASOIAF is influenced by various facets of Norse and Celtic mythology, especially in regards to the Long Night and the North. I want to discuss here parallels between ASOIAF and the Welsh epic, the Mabinogion. Specifically, the parallels between Lyanna, Sansa, and Branwen, Daughter of Llyr.
Branwen, Daughter of Llyr by Alan Lee
Branwen ferch Llŷr is the second branch of the Mabinogion, which was compiled sometime in the 12th to 13th century in the White Book of Rhydderch, but is likely far older and part of a greater oral tradition, and has connections to the Arthurian mythos which is Welsh in origin.
Here is a summary of the story of Branwen, Daughter of Llyr by Owen Sheers in his novella, White Ravens.
Bendigeidfran, son of Llyr, is the king of the island of Britain, invested with the crown of London. One day, while sitting at one of his courts in Harlech he sees several beautiful ships approaching from southern Ireland. The ships bear Matholwch, king of Ireland who asks to marry Bendigeidfran’s sister, Branwen, daughter of Llyr. Bendigeidfran agrees to the union, but during the celebrations, Bendigeidfran’s half-brother, Efnysien, objects and viciously maims Matholwch’s horses. Bendigeidfran offers Matholwch compensation in the form of a magic cauldron that can bring men back to life but without the power of speech. Matholwch and Branwen go back to Ireland where they are at first welcomed and Branwen has a son, Gwern. But after a year rumours spread about Efnysien’s insult and Matholwch has to reject Branwen to stop the uproar. Set to cook for the court, she rears a starling that, after three years, she sends to her brother with a message about her treatment. Bendigeidfran raises an army that sails to Ireland while he wades, because no ship is big enough for him. The Irish see him coming and retreat over the Liffey, destroying the bridge. But Bendigeidfran makes himself a bridge for his army to cross, and to appease him the Irish build a house, because no house has ever been big enough for him before. But they hide a hundred warriors inside. Efnysien secretly kills the warriors, and when the two sides meet openly peace is restored and Branwen’s child Gwern is made king. Calling Gwern to him, Efnysien throws the child into the fire; fighting immediately breaks out, with the Irish replenishing their ranks by throwing their dead warriors into the cauldron. Seeing this Efnysien repents and throws himself into the cauldron, stretching out to break it and his heart at the same time. Bendigeidfran, who is wounded with a poison spear in the foot, escapes, as do Branwen and seven men. Branwen dies of a broken heart. Bendigeidfran orders his men to cut off his head and carry it to the Gwynfryn in London to be buried with its face towards France. It was said no oppression could come to the island while the head was in its hiding place.
There has been some speculation that Bran Stark is connected to Bendigeidfran, whose name translates to “Magnificent Crow” or “Blessed Crow” and is usually anglicized as Bran the Blessed. Bran the Blessed had a reputation for wisdom and was the owner of the cauldron that revives the dead, and was grievously injured by a poisonous spear. Scholars have also noted connections between Bran the Blessed and the Fisher King, keeper of the Holy Grail (which in some legends can restore the fallen), who is also speculated to be connected to Bran Stark as the Fisher King is gravely injured by a spear, unable to sire children or hunt. But that’s another meta.
I want to talk about how Branwen’s story mirrors Lyanna’s and Sansa’s. Lyanna and Branwen leave home, resulting in feud between their husband/lover and their brother(s), are isolated from their home and family, lose their sons, and die after their brother rescues them. Branwen’s death from a broken heart, after both of her brothers die, echoes Lyanna’s own death in childbirth following the demises of her father, brother, and Rheagar.
Sansa goes south in order to marry the prince, just Lyanna went south, and Branwen went across the sea to Ireland, and bitterly regrets it in the end. Joffrey frequently punishes Sansa’ for her brother’s victories and her family’s opposition, bringing to mind Branwen’s own unjust punishment from her husband because of her brother’s actions, which included being banished to the kitchens and daily beatings. Both Branwen and Sansa are put aside by their husband/betrothed because of the enmity between them and their brothers.
What is most striking is the deep longing for home Branwen and Sansa express.
“Verily, lord,” said his men to Matholch, “forbid now the ships and the ferry-boats, and the coracles, that they go not into Wales, and such as come over from Wales hither, imprison them, that they go not back for this thing to be known there.” And he did so; and it was thus for no less than three years.
And Branwen reared a starling in the cover of the kneading-trough, and she taught it to speak, and she taught the bird what manner of man her brother was. And she wrote a letter of her woes, and the despite with which she was treated, and she bound the letter to the root of the bird’s wing, and sent it toward Wales.
- The Mabinogion, tr. Lady Charlotte Guest
Branwen is almost always depicted as looking across the sea to Wales, sending the sterling to her brother.
From the high battlements of the gatehouse, the whole world spread out below them. Sansa could see the Great Sept of Baelor on Visenya’s hill, where her father had died. At the other end of the Street of the Sisters stood the fire-blackened ruins of the Dragonpit. To the west, the swollen red sun was half-hidden behind the Gate of the Gods. The salt sea was at her back, and to the south was the fish market and the docks and the swirling torrent of the Blackwater Rush. And to the north… She turned that way, and saw only the city, streets and alleys and hills and bottoms and more streets and more alleys and the stone of distant walls. Yet she knew that beyond them was open country, farms and fields and forests, and beyond that, north and north and north again, stood Winterfell.
Sansa is trapped in King’s landing, yearning repeatedly to go north, to go home.
I pray for Robb’s victory and Joffrey’s death … and for home. For Winterfell.
Branwen and Sansa are both forced to wait for their brothers to rescue them, again paralleling Ned traveling South for his sister, Lyanna. It’s could be interpreted through Ned’s dreams of Lyanna screaming for him while the kings guard block his way to the tower, that in the end Lyanna too wanted to return home, and became an unwilling prisoner.
“And now it begins,“ said Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning. He unsheathed Dawn and held it with both hands. The blade was pale as milkglass, alive with light."No,” Ned said with sadness in his voice. “Now it ends.” As they came together in a rush of steel and shadow, he could hear Lyanna screaming. “Eddard!” she called. A storm of rose petals blew across a blood-streaked sky, as blue as the eyes of death.“Lord Eddard,” Lyanna called again.”
-Eddard X, AGOT
That Sansa, Lyanna, and Branwen are unwilling imprisonmened by men who were ostensibly romantically involved with them could be just a case of a common trope, but the fact they went willingly at first and are waiting to be rescued by their brothers unites them into similar narratives.
There is also a motif of birds that connect Branwen and Sansa. “Branwen” translates as “white raven,” bringing to mind Sansa’s own monikers of “Little Bird” and “Little Dove.” Birds are traditional symbols of freedom, and it is situational irony that Sansa and Branwen both take on the roles of caged birds
“Some septa trained you well. You’re like one of those birds from the Summer Isles, aren’t you? A pretty little talking bird, repeating all the pretty little words they taught you to recite.”
Branwen’s freedom comes about from a bird, a starling she sends to her brother, whereas the letter Sansa writes is the opposite of Branwen’s secret message detailing her terrible circumstances. Cersei essentially dictates Sansa’s letter to Robb and Catelyn, cementing Sansa’s hostage status. It also recalls Lyanna’s isolation at the Tower of Joy, unable to communicate with her family.
So lovely. The snow-clad summit of the Giant’s Lance loomed above her, an immensity of stone and ice that dwarfed the castle perched upon its shoulder. Icicles twenty feet long draped the lip of the precipice where Alyssa’s Tears fell in summer. A falcon soared above the frozen waterfall, blue wings spread wide against the morning sky. Would that I had wings as well.” - Alayne I, AFFC
Here we have Sansa’s desire for freedom laid out in a wish for wings, a wish for flight. She wants to be free as a bird, or rather “a wolf with big leather wings like a bat” (Arya XII, ASOS). Unlike Lyanna and Branwen, Sansa has been able to make her escape, first from KL, where the wold with bat wings quotes comes out of, and as of AFFC, she is descending from the Eyrie, which literally means a nest of a large bird of prey. But even now, she is still captive in all the most important ways, at the mercy of Littlefinger.
There is also the tragedy of all of their lives, affecting both the women themselves and bringing about the destructions of others.
“Alas,” said she, “woe is me that I was ever born; two islands have been destroyed because of me!” Then she uttered a loud groan, and there broke her heart.
-The Mabinogion, tr. Lady Charlotte Guest
Branwen puts the blame on herself, despite having her agency routinely seized from her by her brothers and husband. She is the cause of the war, just Lyanna was the cause of Robert’s Rebellion, and Branwen’s fate is constantly defined by the men around her, just as Lyanna acts a symbol.
Lyanna as the beautiful woman causing a war immediately puts in mind Helen of Troy, but there’s another figure that is similar to both Lyanna and Branwen: Deirdre of the Sorrows.
Deirdrê by Helen Stratton
Deirdre was prophesied to bring ruin upon all of Ireland with her beauty (similar to “two islands [being] destroyed because of [Branwen]), and does so by running away with her lover, Naoise, slighting the king she was betrothed to, Conchobar. The spiteful Conchobar’s revenge results in the deaths of Naoise and his brothers, and Deirdre ultimately commits suicide.
Prince Rhaegar loved his Lady Lyanna, and thousands died for it.
Lyanna deeply echoes women like Branwen and Deirdre, who are fought over, imprisoned, and die.
Sansa herself considers suicide after the death of her father, connecting herself to Branwen who dies of grief and shame, and Deirdre, who cannot bear life with the man who killed her lover.
Perhaps I will die too, she told herself, and the thought did not seem so terrible to her. If she flung herself from the window, she could put an end to her suffering, and in the years to come the singers would write songs of her grief. Her body would lie on the stones below, broken and innocent, shaming all those who had betrayed her. Sansa went so far as to cross the bedchamber and throw open the shutters … but then her courage left her, and she ran back to her bed, sobbing.
Here, Sansa is directly connected to all the beautiful dead women in the songs, be that Branwen, Deirdre, Lyanna, and even Ashara Dayne and Elia Martell. Ashara Dayne threw herself off a cliff because of a broken heart, again echoing the deaths of Branwen and Deirdre. Whether or not Ashara really did so or even why, is again, another theory, but the story is there. Elia Martell’s forced stay at King’s Landing and her children’s death is deeply reminiscent of the captivity of Branwen and the murder of her son Gwern.
Many have criticized GRRM for the deaths of many of the women of the previous generation of ASOIAF, and leaving them uncharacterized and nebulous figures. See the Dead Ladies Club metas for more on this subject. I have hopes that we will get more characterization of these women in future books, especially in the case of Elia.
@lostlittlesatellites wrote a meta about Sansa acting as a deconstruction of “The Princess in the Tower” trope, and I would like to echo her sentiment that Sansa is trapped physically, but is also isolated by the constraints the world of ASOIAF puts on girls and woman.
And this brings me to my idea that Lyanna is the trope played straight, while Sansa subverts it. Lyanna dies after her brother reaches her, just as Branwen does. But Robb never saves Sansa.
He could still hear Sansa pleading, as Lyanna had pleaded once.
“You never knew Lyanna as I did, Robert,” Ned told him. “You saw her beauty, but not the iron underneath.”
My skin has turned to porcelain, to ivory, to steel
It has to be noted that Sansa and Lyanna disobeyed their fathers for “love” and ended up as the princess in the tower.
And in terms of character, Lyanna has quite a few similarities that she shares with Sansa rather than Arya (though there is something to be said about how the two Stark girls are two different aspects of Lyanna.) Lyanna weeps when she hears Rhaegar plays the high harp, and ran off on a romantic adventure. All very Sansa like traits.
But while Lyanna ends up meeting her death in Tower of Joy, Sansa’s own story has been much more complicated at the books continue. Her imprisonment is as much mental as physical. She cannot rely on her brothers, who are dead or disappeared or bound by other duties. And even her “love story” with her southern prince is cut short and diverted from Lyanna’s story, as she is cast off by Joffrey in the end. Sansa remains unrescued, passed from captivity to captivity, but in the end, she will be the one to save herself. I believe that Sansa will escape during or just after the Tourney of the Winged Knights, and bring her subversion of Lyanna’s story, which began at the Tourney of Harrenhal, full circle, as she has to rescue herself in order to truly fly free.
