#guest right

[goodqueenaly]

Did Roose Bolton break guest right? I know he participated in the Red Wedding but in his case he was a guest killing another guest instead of the host. Does this count?

I don’t think it really matters? Remember Tywin’s reaction to the Red Wedding:

“So Lord Walder slew him under his own roof, at his own table?” Tyrion made a fist. “What of Lady Catelyn?”

“Slain as well, I’d say. A pair of wolfskins. Frey had intended to keep her captive, but perhaps something went awry.”

“So much for guest right.”

“The blood is on Walder Frey’s hands, not mine.”

This is, of course, nonsense. No matter how much Tywin wants to claim in this moment that because he did not literally shove a dagger into Robb’s back, he is not in breach of guest right, Tywin and his line were very much cursed following the Red Wedding.

So no, I don’t think Roose would be able to go in front of the Westerosi tribunal of fate, so to speak, and defend himself by saying “I was only a guest at the Red Wedding, I wasn’t the host”. Roose actively plotted with the Freys to murder or imprison not just Robb but all the Stark loyalist retainers and their forces at the Twins, with such attention to detail that Merrett remembers Lothar and Roose planning “all the way down to which songs would be played”. Roose was, in other words, the chief co-conspirator in likely the largest example of violating guest right in Westerosi history; the fact that he purported to be a guest at the same event I don’t think is relevant for the purposes of deciding who would be subject to the violation’s curse. The hand of judgment is coming for Roose as much as it did for Tywin - and just as Tywin was murdered by his son, so I think Roose’s son has his sights set on his father.

[m0dernchr0n1cles]

Wonder Woman & Xenia

@gaaralover55

I've been listening to EPIC: the Musical and Absolute Wonder Woman.

I've also been watching MadNBooks, a Classics Nerd who reacted to EPIC: the Musical, comparing it to the original Odyssey and provides the historical/cultural context.

I love how Al Ewing has been including old Norse mythology and poetry in his Immortal Thor run, with Odin being a wandering trickster and references to The Elder Edda by Saemund Sigfusson.

I'd love to see someone do the same thing for Wonder Woman. Specifically, I want to introduce Xenia to Wonder Woman stories.

Xenia - Ancient Greek concept of sacred hospitality. It functions as a sociopolitical aspect of everyday life. It involves a social contract between Host and Guest: The Host will not harm the Guest and provide the latter with food and shelter The Guest will not burden the Host and will give gifts/stories/news about the outside world

Diana is a diplomat, an ambassador, so her traveling

Circe is a major antagonist in The Odyssey because she breaks the rules of Xenia: she invites Odysseus' men into her house as her Guests, gives them food and drink, and she, the Host, harms them.

It is only when Odysseus confronts her, with Hermes' help, that she rights the wrongs and behaves like a decent host. She offers them food and lodging, and the sailors mostly behave except poor Elpenor.

It's sad that Circe, despite being a major Wonder Woman villain, loses the Xenia thing in the mainline comics.

There are hints of Xenia in Absolute Wonder Woman #2-3. Steve Trevor washes ashore the Wild Isle, where Circe and Diana welcome him as a guest.

Diana calls Steve's arrival and guest right "a gift". They feed him, and he does not burden himself onto them.

He stays with them for quite a while, helping out, and eventually, Diana and Circe help him get home.

It's not a perfect integration/representation of Xenia, but I'm grabbing crumbs when it comes to Wonder Woman.

She hasn't been treated the most charitably by DC.

I'm looking at you Tom King

[thelandswemadeofpaper]

[stromuprisahat]

Rat Cook

The Rat Cook had cooked the son of the Andal king in a big pie with onions, carrots, mushrooms, lots of pepper and salt, a rasher of bacon, and a dark red Dornish wine. Then he served him to his father, who praised the taste and had a second slice. Afterward the gods transformed the cook into a monstrous white rat who could only eat his own young. He had roamed the Nightfort ever since, devouring his children, but still his hunger was not sated. “It was not for murder that the gods cursed him,” Old Nan said, “nor for serving the Andal king his son in a pie. A man has a right to vengeance. But he slew a guest beneath his roof, and that the gods cannot forgive.”

[warsofasoiaf]

Do you think the Dornish would view guest-right as strongly as the North does? On the one hand, they seem the least likely to share cultural attitudes given the geographical difference and other cultural influences, but on the other, they also live in a hostile environment where shelter can mean life or death and seem to have their own predilections for personal violence that they'd want customs in place to temper. Also, what about the Ironborn on guest right?

One notable custom that the Northmen hold dearer than any other is guest right, the tradition of hospitality by which a man may offer no harm to a guest beneath his roof, nor a guest to his host. The Andals held to something like it as well, but it looms less large in southron minds. 

The worldbook explicitly says that no other region of Westeros holds so dearly to guest right as the North does. There's further proof too - given that House Uller takes its banner for the burning of men under guest right, I do not think they would hold the custom as strongly as the North - no Northern family would take pride in that sort of action so as to carry it as their sigil.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[asoiafuniversity]

Offer, Acceptance, Bread & Salt: A Legal Analysis of the Guest Right Contract

Offer, Acceptance, Bread & Salt: A Legal Analysis of the Guest Right Contract

The Rat Cook had cooked the son of the Andal king in a big pie with onions, carrots, mushrooms, lots of pepper and salt, a rasher of bacon, and a dark red Dornish wine. Then he served him to his father, who praised the taste and had a second slice. Afterward the gods transformed the cook into a monstrous white rat who could only eat his own young. He had roamed the Nightfor ever since, devouring his children, but still his hunger was not sated. “It was not for murder that the gods cursed him,” Old Nan said, “nor for serving the Andal king his son in a pie. A man has a right to vengeance. But he slew a guest beneath his roof, and that the gods cannot forgive.” Bran IV: ASOS

Introduction

Suppose you live in Westeros and you want to visit your neighbors. Great! But your neighbor also lives in Westeros, and Westerosi folks can get a little stabby. Yet, it’s important that you and your neighbor have a peaceful conversation about uhhh crops or the State of the Realm or whatever bullshit WITHOUT losing an appendage. Luckily for you, Westeros has a plan for that. It’s called “Guest Right”. This practice of allowing guests safe conduct while under a host’s roof in exchange for a cessation of hostilities is an entirely contractual relationship. One person gives something to another, and that person gives something right back in exchange. Like other contracts, there are certain formalities that must be observed for the contract to be properly binding.

In this essay I will do the following things

Explain the legal elements of guest right and how it is similar to a legal contract

Show instances where Guest Right is different and distinct from a contract

Discuss the cultural, religious, and legal implications of the guest right contract, and

Try not to talk too much about, well… you know. THAT.

Guest Right is a Contractual Relationship

So! You knock on the door to your neighbor’s holdfast and you ask to come inside. He says “Be my Guest, come Right on in!” Are you protected by Guest Right because he said both words? No, you are not. There’s quite a bit more to it.

Let’s explore!

Read more

[nobodysuspectsthebutterfly]

Forgive me if you've answered this question before (I looked through your Bloodraven tag but couldn't find it) but I'm confused as to the conflict between Bloodraven killing Aenys Blackfyre after offering hospitality and then becoming a greenseer and slowly merging into the weirwood/Old Gods consciousness network. Isn't a crime against guest-right the worst thing you could possibly do in the Old Gods' eyes? How could BR transition into his current tree self with that black mark on his record?

When Aenys Blackfyre requested to attend the Great Council of 233 AC, Bloodraven didn’t offer hospitality, he offered a safe conduct, there’s a difference. Safe conduct is a term for an exceptional procedure by which a person is permitted to freely enter or leave a jurisdiction in which he would normally be subject to arrest, harassment, execution, or the like. It’s often granted to enemy envoys who wish to negotiate – for an ASOIAF example, see the Yunkish envoy and Stormcrow captains who came to Daenerys’s camp before her attack on the city. Mind you, sometimes safe conduct does overlap with guest right, such as when the Lords Declarant came to the Eyrie to negotiate, and Sansa made sure to have food for them to eat so that they would also be considered guests and thus could not attack their hosts without breaking the laws of hospitality.

But Aenys Blackfyre never became a guest of the Red Keep to receive hospitality; he was arrested by the gold cloaks as soon as he entered King’s Landing and was executed shortly thereafter. Guest right is not instantaneous as soon as one enters a place, there must be certain procedures followed (eating bread and salt or the equivalent). Furthermore, hospitality can be explicitly denied. For example:

In the center of the room the dwarf stood with his servants, and four strangers in the black of the Night’s Watch. Bran could sense the anger in the hall the moment that Hodor carried him through the doors.

“Any man of the Night’s Watch is welcome here at Winterfell for as long as he wishes to stay,” Robb was saying with the voice of Robb the Lord. His sword was across his knees, the steel bare for all the world to see. Even Bran knew what it meant to greet a guest with an unsheathed sword.

“Any man of the Night’s Watch,” the dwarf repeated, “but not me, do I take your meaning, boy?”

–AGOT, Bran IV

Being greeted with an unsheathed sword certainly applies to Aenys Blackfyre.

Now, if Bloodraven had followed through with his offer of safe conduct, and Aenys had been welcomed to the Red Keep as an honored guest, feasted, given fine rooms… and then had his throat cut in his sleep, that would have been breaking guest right. Or if in the night Aenys had been seized from his bed and executed under some trumped-up charge of planning treason or other offense against his hosts (like how the Freys are now claiming Robb and the Stark men attacked them first), that too would have been a crime against guest right.

But Brynden Rivers did not break the laws of hospitality, he broke a promise of safe conduct. A sacrifice of his honor, not a sin against all the laws of gods and men.

Mind you, even if it wasn’t breaking guest right or a crime against the gods, does such a breach of promise, a huge stain against one’s honor, require any sort of penance? One might consider Brynden’s nearly 20 years of service to the Night’s Watch a bit of an attempt to balance the red in his ledger. Or alternatively, one could consider that becoming the last greenseer, being bound to a weirwood tree for 50 years while your body degrades and roots and branches grow through you and fungus grows on your skin, witnessing the end of all your kinsmen and loved ones, seeing lives pass, potentials fail, knowing that the true enemy is coming but without any certainty that you’ll ever be able to stop them from destroying all living things… well, that just might be penance indeed.

[fedonciadale]

if was a honest question really!, mmm i kinda disagree. I think that if you do not make a feast, it would not necessarily be an insult, I think you have to remember that they are in winter, and they do not have enough food to waste it at a feast, even for a queen, who most of the north does not want by the way , especially when you consider all the people who bring dany in her army who also have to be fed, and this season dany personally invited Jon, but she never prepared a feast for him even

(2) though he was a king too and she was also looking for a alliance.            

Dear nonny, you had me thinking about this. You know, if the show were consistent with the world-building as GRRM is (at least in regard to the society) the preparing of feasts and the sharing of food would be way more important. You know in the books it is established that guest right is very important and anthropologically speaking the sharing of food is very, very important. Children learn from an early age on to part with some of their own food to share with others and human children are way more ready to do that than say little apes. This is very important because the sharing of food creates a bond. That’s why we have feasts at important occasions. Weddings, funerals, baptisms or any kind of ritual that welcomes a child. In the books there is this little tidbit of Bran on his way North who meets one of the clan peoples and they share food and fire. It is pretty obvious that the man from clan Little knows that it is Brandon Stark before him, but he doesn’t let on so Bran can keep his secret. It is guest right. The guest is guest and may hide his identity. When Bran awakes the next morning, the ‘Little’ left food, and Bran decides to repay him. Jon shares food with the wildlings and that is also important.

In the show we have Arya sharing fire and bread with the Lannister soldiers, and it has been pointed out, that her sharing their meal means that she can’t kill them - as she indeed does not.

I have digressed, but the point I was aiming at, was that if the idea of sharing of food and guest right is part of the show as it is part of the books, the fact that Da€nerys does not give a feast or at least a meal for Jon is extremely significant. It means that Jon was not a guest at Dragonstone (just as I have argued the whole season). His status as semi-guest, semi-prisoner is deliberately left ambiguous and up until episode 5 it is never addressed. Now if Da€nerys had invited Jon for tea - or bread and salt for that matter - his status would have been that of a guest. So, I must come to the conclusion that hist status of guest was never acknowledged as such. And I am not insinuating that Jon did get nothing to eat, he just was not invited officially and that might mean something.

Now, you might argue that the show is just not consistent enough about little details like that, but I could name a number of instances where Da€nerys at least drinks with her counsellors, but we never see her share a cup with Jon. If you think about the importance of bonding over shared food, this might be an important detail, even if you think that the show doesn’t need to be that consistent with the guest right as the books are. Jon and D never eat together. That means that they do not bond!

And just as an aside: Who does share a cup of ale and soup just after reuniting (and a fire on top of that?)

Now, you see, your question really had me thinking. Now as to your question about a feast in Winterfell next season. I would argue that it is entirely possible that it would be a ‘meagre’ feast with winter upon them, but it would be a matter of courtesy and of Northern style to at least share ‘bread and salt’ with Da€nerys. So, there might not be an opulent feast, but there should be some kind of official food-sharing to show the welcome and the good will. If this does not happen that might be a hint that there is no bonding, no alliance, no common ground for them to act upon. Not necessarily because the writers make a conscious decision about that. As I have said, this food sharing is something we have learned from early on it is something that defines as a social being. And now, just imagine someone you don’t like in your own house and try to picture inviting him/her to have food….

So, if the show will go towards a break of the alliance as I believe they will, they might even subconsciously leave out a feast or ‘bread and salt’. I’ll certainly stay alert and look out if there is a hint of ‘food sharing’.

So, nonny thanks for the ask. I got sidetracked a bit, as usual. But I love my nonnies who always make me ponder.