Another part of ASOIAF I have to think is a nod to The Accursed Kings:
Back out in the Hall of Lamps, the mourners buzzed about them thick as flies, eager to shower her with useless condolences. The Redwyne twins both kissed her hand, their father her cheeks. Hallyne the Pyromancer promised her that a flaming hand would burn in the sky above the city on the day her father's bones went west. Between coughs, Lord Gyles told her that he had hired a master stonecarver to make a statue of Lord Tywin, to stand eternal vigil beside the Lion Gate. Ser Lambert Turnberry appeared with a patch over his right eye, swearing that he would wear it until he could bring her the head of her dwarf brother.
Which I think is an allusion to this part of the sixth novel, Le lis et le lion (The Lily and the Lion):
Robert halted in front of each diner in turn, while the viol played and the girls sang a little to give the knight time to prepare his oath and select his enemy. The Earl of Derby, the father of the young woman who had made so daring a vow, promised to defy the Count of Flanders; the new Earl of Suffolk selected the King of Bohemia. Young Gautier de Mauny, in his excitement at having recently been dubbed knight, much impressed the assembly by promising to reduce to ashes all the cities in the neighbourhood [sic] of Hainaut belonging to Philippe of Valois, even if he was to see the light with only one eye till his vow was accomplished.
‘Be it so,’ said the Countess of Salisbury, who was sitting next to him; and she covered his right eye with two fingers. ‘And when you have fulfilled your oath, then my love will be his who loves me most; that is my oath.’
As she said this, she looked at the King. But the ingenuous Gautier, who thought the promise made for his benefit, kept his eye shut when she had removed her fingers, and then took a red handkerchief from his pocket and fastened it round his forehead over his eyes.
On July 16th of that same year, 1338, Edward III set sail from Yarmouth with a fleet of four hundred vessels. He landed at Antwerp the next day. Queen Philippa accompanied him. Many of the knights, emulating Gautier de Mauny, had covered one eye with a patch of red cloth..
In The Lily and the Lion, the exiled Robert of Artois, welcomed to England by the young King Edward III, declares Edward to be the rightful King of France, rather than King Philip VI. Yet while Edward sends an official defiance to King Philip, he does not immediately go to war with France. So Robert, having brought down a heron while hawking, presents the heron to King Edward, declaring that the cowardly heron represents the hesitant king. Edward in turn takes an oath to go to war against Philip of France. Robert, delighted, then approaches various English courtiers, encouraging each of them to take an oath alongside King Edward against the French.
Of course, as Druon notes, “[t]he moment of true grandeur ... [passes]” rather quickly, as each aristocrat tries to outdo the other in the grandeur of his vow or selected target, This is the context of Gautier de Mauny’s oath, the promise of chivalric heroism taken to an outrageous, indeed impossible degree; no one person could hope to “reduce to ashes all the cities in the neighbourhood [sic] of Hainaut belonging to Philippe of Valois”, still less if he voluntarily limited his sight by half. Only the new queen’s uncle, Jean of Hainaut, provides a sober reminder to cut the extravagance, that “[w]hen we are sitting round drinking wine ... it costs us little to make oaths and acquire the approbation of the ladies”; rather, he notes, when “we are campaigning, charging on our war horses, our shields slung and our lances in rest”, those “boasters would prefer then to be in the safety of a cellar!”.
So I can see why GRRM might have thought this a fitting scene to adapt for this brief moment in “Cersei II”. This is, after all, a moment filled with “useless condolences” for her, hollow acknowledgments of Tywin’s passing and her accession to the full power of rule. Just as Hallyne’s fiery hand would not replace the political Hand Tywin, and just as Gyles Rosby’s promised stone statue would not replicate the flesh and blood man Tywin had been (however much Tywin might have wanted to project an image of stoney coldness and solidity), so Ser Lambert’s vow does nothing to actually bring Tyrion to (what Cersei imagines as) justice. Indeed, just as Gautier de Mauny would only have been hindered in sacking and destroying those French-allied cities with self-imposed partial blindness, so Lambert would hardly have been aided in finding and decapitating Tyrion with a similar limitation to his eyesight. Too, just as Guatier’s vow promises an impossible (and, certainly at least to modern eyes, unconscionable) level of personal destruction - completely destroying all those cities, with presumably all their innocent citizens - so Lambert’s vow commits him to a virtually impossible and (certainly to readers, at least) completely unjust goal (not only would Lambert have had no idea where Tyrion went, but he certainly seems to have done nothing to continue his investigation, given that he lives full-time at court as one of Margaery’s favorites and eventually accused lovers). Rather, to paraphrase Jean of Hainaut, it cost Ser Lambert little to make this oath and so acquire the approbation of one lady in particular; in the grand context of chivalric tradition (heightened, no doubt, by Lambert’s Reach upbringing), Lambert could vow easily and take an extreme, even self-defeating symbolic action to represent it, never bothering to actually fulfill it.
