There’s something... idk, something sort of “goddess of spring” about Jon Snow.
First off, there’s the obvios seasonal motifs of his character. His family’s house words are “winter is coming,” and his role, as a man of the night’s watch, is to sound the alarm and take up arms against the cold. And his name is literally Snow.
This cold our boy has to fight is something akin to death. The prologue of agot forewarns us that “the real enemy is the cold,” and that exposure to the elements is the leading cause of death among Night’s Watch rangers. The NW has to fight against an army of the dead and some weird ice people, who seem to be the same threat. Bran’s first chapter introduces us to Ned’s greatsword Ice, which is used exclusively as an instrument of execution. Cold = ice = winter = death.
The Greek goddess of spring was Persephone, which translates to “bringer of death.” In her myth, she is kidnapped by the god and king of the dead, Hades (who was told to do so by Zeus, as a prank), and taken to the underworld to become his wife, making her queen of the dead. However, due to circumstances, Persephone must return to the land of the living every spring, and only stay in the underworld during the winter. Through our modern, largely Christian worldview, we tend to conflate Hades with Satan, and thus associate him and his underworld with fire, but in pre-Christian times that wasn’t the case. He was not fiery to the ancients, he was just “the gloomy one.”
This is noteworthy because Jon is also involved in a slightly ambiguous kidnapping/marriage situation. He is forced to pretend to join the faction that his love interest, Yggritte belongs to, and to do so convincingly, he has to enter into a romantic and sexual relationship with her. She also sees him taking her hostage when they first met as him kidnapping her, in a way that implies they are now in a relationship. Either way, as a result of a confused kidnapping, Jon and Yggritte become functionally married.
And then of course there’s the scene where Jon and Yggritte have sex in a cave. Yggritte tells Jon she never wants them to leave. The cave, a warm and wet hookup spot, is probably some sort of anatomical metaphor, but Yggritte also tells Jon a legend about an army of ghosts endlessly wandering about somewhere further in. Altogether I think this links it pretty strongly with the Greek underworld.
But what does this mean for Jon? For Persephone the passing of the seasons is a literal death and rebirth. Is this cave a symbolic death for Jon? Or is his time beyond the wall, or his time in the Night’s Watch? Will he be resurrected after his literal death, in order to bring spring? I don’t know, but I like the idea of Jon Snow being analogous to a goddess of spring, and I hope he outlasts the winter.
