Do you think Ned ensuring Lady made it to Winterfell will be mirrored by Sansa securing Ned’s bones, and having them properly buried in the crypts? 🤔
I don't know!
It would be a proper mirror to how Arya is likely to reunite with the "remains" of Catelyn after her death, and it would be a nice mirror to her confrontation with his severed head.
(Some quotes and Ned/Cat-related speculation under the cut.)
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.
“What are you looking at?” Joffrey said. “This is what I wanted you to see, right here.”
A thick stone parapet protected the outer edge of the rampart, reaching as high as Sansa’s chin, with crenellations cut into it every five feet for archers. The heads were mounted between the crenels, along the top of the wall, impaled on iron spikes so they faced out over the city. Sansa had noted them the moment she’d stepped out onto the wallwalk, but the river and the bustling streets and the setting sun were ever so much prettier. He can make me look at the heads, she told herself, but he can’t make me see them.
“This one is your father,” he said. “This one here. Dog, turn it around so she can see him.”
Sandor Clegane took the head by the hair and turned it. The severed head had been dipped in tar to preserve it longer. Sansa looked at it calmly, not seeing it at all. It did not really look like Lord Eddard, she thought; it did not even look real. “How long do I have to look?” (AGOT, Sansa VI)
(This passage, btw, has a lot of language mirrors to Bran's coma dream.)
The heavy-handed foreshadowing that she will return to Winterfell is directly connected to Ned’s “bones”. So is her defiance, and her self-sacrificial rage.
Barbrey is lurking and wants to serve Ned’s bones to her dogs, just as she helped serve Jeyne Poole as “Arya” to Ramsay, who had come the same way through the Neck. Jeyne Poole escapes. So will the bones, I wager.
If Arya is the one to give Catelyn peace, after Nymeria recovered her desecrated body, then it would make sense for Sansa to be the one to collect Ned’s bones from their enemies and help them complete the journey home.
But I kind of also like a competing scenario.
His regency would be a short one, he reflected as the wax softened. The new king would choose his own Hand. Ned would be free to go home. The thought of Winterfell brought a wan smile to his face. He wanted to hear Bran's laughter once more, to go hawking with Robb, to watch Rickon at play. He wanted to drift off to a dreamless sleep in his own bed with his arms wrapped tight around his lady, Catelyn. (AGOT, Eddard XIII)
Which mirrors...
They had dressed the bones in Ned's surcoat, the fine white velvet with the direwolf badge over the heart, but nothing remained of the warm flesh that had pillowed her head so many nights, the arms that had held her. The head had been rejoined to the body with fine silver wire, but one skull looks much like another, and in those empty hollows she found no trace of her lord's dark grey eyes, eyes that could be soft as a fog or hard as stone. They gave his eyes to crows, she remembered. (ACOK, Catelyn V)
Both long for each other’s embrace. In theory, they could reunite in death.
I wonder if there is going to be some kind of compromise, if Catelyn and Ned will reunite in death, in a way that doesn’t privilege one tradition over the other.
Let the kings of winter have their cold crypt under the earth, Catelyn thought. The Tullys drew their strength from the river, and it was to the river they returned when their lives had run their course. (ASOS, Catelyn IV)
Either Catelyn is given a proper Tully burial to make up for the horrible mockery commited by the Freys, or she will sacrifice her tradition - and Ned as well - and both will have something different - ancient - together.
There’s an interesting conversation happening in the crypts between Ned and Robert.
"She was a Stark of Winterfell," Ned said quietly. "This is her place."
"She should be on a hill somewhere, under a fruit tree, with the sun and clouds above her and the rain to wash her clean." (AGOT, Eddard I)
Later again, they talk in another graveyard, the barrowlands - Barbrey Dustin’s lands - amid the ancient graves of the Barrow Kings.
The rising sun sent fingers of light through the pale white mists of dawn. A wide plain spread out beneath them, bare and brown, its flatness here and there relieved by long, low hummocks. Ned pointed them out to his king. "The barrows of the First Men."
Robert frowned. "Have we ridden onto a graveyard?"
"There are barrows everywhere in the north, Your Grace," Ned told him. "This land is old." (...)
He belonged in Winterfell. He belonged with Catelyn in her grief, and with Bran.
A man could not always be where he belonged, though. Resigned, Eddard Stark put his boots into his horse and set off after the king. (AGOT, Eddard II)
The barrows are older than Winterfell’s crypts. A tradition of the first men.
And interestingly enough, there is this:
"Catelyn Tully dispatched Lord Eddard's bones north before the Red Wedding, but your iron uncle seized Moat Cailin and closed the way. I have been watching ever since. Should those bones ever emerge from the swamps, they will get no farther than Barrowton." She threw one last lingering look at the likeness of Eddard Stark. "We are done here." (ADWD, The Turncloak)
I am torn.
If Ned and Cat are to be reunited in death, it cannot be in the crypts, because that would unfairly privilege Ned’s traditions. Cat has made it clear she values her own, as she should.
So it’s either something completely new for both of them, or it’s separate burials. But don’t ask me how or why. Maybe the crypts are going through remodelling. Something.
Thoughts, anyone?
