Featured in but two chapters of George R.R. Martin’s multi-volume A Song of Ice and Fire, brutish Craster may seem a minor character, peripheral to the larger thematic concerns of Martin’s sweeping and bloody Game of Thrones. Indeed, entrenched in his ramshackle keep in the Haunted Forest, well north of the Wall that marks the end of Westerosi civilization, defined by a predatory incest that leaves him with nineteen daughter-wives and no living male heirs, Craster appears in every way a figure beyond the pale, the very antithesis to the more courtly domains of Starks and Lannisters. Yet even if he is, in the words of Dywen of the Night’s Watch, “a kinslayer, liar, raper, and craven,” such crimes fail to distinguish him from leaders of Westeros’s noble families. Lannisters, Freys, and Tullys do not balk at stratagems or kin-murder; cravens can be found in the white of the Kingsguard. Even in his incest, Craster breaks taboos wildlings acknowledge, only to emulate both Targaryen rulers who “married brother to sister” and the scandalous love of Jaime and Cersei Lannister, whose illegitimate fruits become the seeds of the Song’s protracted wars. It may well be true, then, as wildling Ygritte tells Jon Snow, that “Craster’s more your kind than ours.”
It is precisely this hypothesis I propose to take seriously here. Indeed, I maintain that Craster, far from being a minor addition to Martin’s formidable gallery of grotesques (on par, say, with Vargo Hoat), is a crucial cue to what the novels treat as the pathological self-regard of the Westerosi dynasties. In its endogamous self-reproduction and its dedication to cruel self-culling, the House of Craster discloses, I argue, the true economy of the Game of Thrones, highlighting how the great Houses’ insistence on purity and power sees them not only devouring their own, but reducing the realm to a feast for crows. Craster distils the truth of great seats like Riverrun or Casterly Rock, not just because his paternal incest evokes a fraternal form central to such great lines as Lannister or Targaryen. Rather, the Craster who takes all his female issue to wife and leaves the sons he sires on them to “[t]he white shadows,” reveals a deadly social narcissism that lies at the heart of Martin’s great families, one that establishes them as institutions at odds with themselves and as effective allies to the forces that threaten Westeros.
What lies at the heart of the Houses’ strife and the realm’s ruin, Craster’s example teaches, is not merely incest nor even the Oedipal strife of fathers and sons, but a foundational narcissism that can imagine both family and society as only the pure extension of self. Martin offers Craster as a stark illustration of this phenomenon so as to highlight how the whole of Westerosi society is rooted in and ravaged by this violent narcissism. It is not only Craster who refuses to brook any rival master, or libidinal agent, under his roof; it’s nor just he who enforces an identification of self with House, with society, through familial bloodshed. If the Targaryens wed their siblings, it was in service to purity of blood, after all, and if Tywin’s twins are pledged to one another, it is because, as Cersei says, “Jaime and I are ... one person in two bodies.” In both cases, love of kin only as self involves ready violence against both relations who thwart such identification and those alien to the bonds of blood: Dany must fear waking the dragon, and Bran’s fall is very long, indeed.
The narcissistic cast of familial ties and its tendency to ruin both Houses and the realm is, I argue, the very pith of the bloody Game of Thrones, a fact well delineated by three consequential instances: Samwell’s repudiation and near-murder at the hands of his father, Randyll Tarly; Tywin Lannister’s sadistic dissolution of Tyrion’s marriage to [Tysha]; and Hoster Tully’s destruction of his grandchild, Lysa’s unborn bastard, for the crime of having lowly Petyr Baelish as sire. In each case, a drive to purity tears Houses apart. Moreover, the latter two examples highlight how such narcissism stokes civil war and so abets the mortal threats of rising winter and the Others’ return.
D. Marcel DeCoste, “Beyond the Pale? Craster and the Pathological Reproduction of Houses in Westeros,” in Mastering the Game of Thrones: Essays on George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (eds. Jes Bettis and Susan Johnston)
