S+L=J (Yes. That's right. Be afraid).

Well... What can I say? Poor Rhaegar. He tried so hard at the ToJ to have a third dragon's head with Lyanna. He wasn't told she is pregnant already.

Thank you kingmonkey for writing this. Honestly this is a strong possibility to me.

Again to each his own,but to go to the bolded,it wasn't hard for Ned to figure out Cersie was banging Jamie.Sansa's statement along with Arya clicked with how intimately Cersie defended Jamie.Ned needed only to look at those and recall how close the two are and bam.



Well we know the Starks aren't all good guys,we only have to look at their past to know they aren't.They are flawed,this has nothing to do with morality.Brandon is proof of that,so is Ned and Benjen.They've done suspect crap and things that are downright awful.But in the case of Ned when faced with the Queen and Jamie's incest he betrays nothing and i mean nothing that this hit him personally or hints that this was something that hit his family.



You are right,it is possible for someone to cheat and not want to get cheated on i'm not saying no but as i said before you have no but have not laid the foundation that the incest angle is something that the Stark boys did.I'm saying based on their beliefs i dismiss that.As to you other point about Lyanna being unfaithful she would be just as he would be because they were "bethrothed".Ofcourse she was upset KM read that convo again,its not her buisness then that Robet had fathered a child on "some girl" in the Vale....Oh yeah she was upset.

The above isn't really the point,as i said before the fundamentals is flawed here with regards to how much these people depise incest.You do it at your peril religiously being cursed and all that and again nothing betrays intimately that this is what went down.Atleast what you put down.



It was in a Sansa chapter that we get Ned saying the famous lines :Father looked at her strangely. "Gods," he swore softly, "out of the mouth of babes . . . " He shouted for Septa Mordane."

But it was after Sansa talked about Joff's hair which when put together with what Gendry told him about what Arryn and Stannis were asking him about his mother and her hair.

Ned then said in his chapter the next: "It was queer how sometimes a child's innocent eyes can see things that grown men are blind to. Someday, when Sansa was grown, he would have to tell her how she had made it all come clear for him." At that point it really wasn't such a leap to figure it was Jamie.

I disagree,it was Cersie's mouth that led Ned to Jamie,the intimate way she spoke about him


"If you truly believed that, you would never have come." Ned touched her cheek gently. "Has he done this before?"

"Once or twice." She shied away from his hand. "Never on the face before. Jaime would have killed him, even if it meant his own life." Cersei looked at him defiantly. "My brother is worth a hundred of your friend."

"Your brother?" Ned said. "Or your lover?"



This isn't anything new for GRRM the Targs did it all the time,Jamie and Cersie have been at it for years so it is well present in the story.The point is Given the beliefs of the Starks and Northen people on a whole when it comes to incest is it something they would have engaged in? Do we get a hint of that from any of them?

The Sansa/Arya statement gets nowhere on its own. They observe the lack of similarity between Joffrey and Robert. That's enough to suggest to him that Robert isn't the father, fair enough. Joff is "not the least bit like that old drunken king". Ned confirms from that genealogy text that he should. Lannister looks get lost when one parent is a Baratheon, which tells Ned that Joff's father is not a Baratheon, but nothing more. Joff's appearance is all lion, but Jon's appearance is all Stark. If Jon's parents are both Stark, then Ned has a reason to wonder if Joff's appearance has a similar reason. If Jon's parents are not both Stark, he has a reason to NOT consider that as evidence. That leaves us with Cersei defending Jamie. Well, they're family. They're twins. Of course they are close.


Actually there is a comment that suggests it hits him personally. "Ned felt sick". Is that because of the disgust you suggest he would feel about their incest, because "these people despise incest"? If so, wouldn't we expect to see a more negative view of her from Ned? Isn't it odd, if he's just realised that she is something he despises on top of being an evil Lannister, that he's not demonstrating how much he despises her? Instead, he's almost sympathetic. He touches her cheek gently, offers her sympathy for Robert striking her. When she admits to having Jaime as a lover, he doesn't display disgust or surprise, he calmly asks her to confirm that she and Jaime were responsible for Bran's fall. He no longer hates her, he says he feels pity for her.

We know what the standard view of incest is -- Catelyn tells us. We do not know that view was shared by Lyanna, Benjen or Brandon, because we never heard. Is it shared by Ned? It seems that when Ned is faced with the incest of Cersei and Jaime, his reaction is not to be appalled and disgusted, but to change his view of them from hate to pity, as if he sees their incestuous relationship not as being something to despise but instead a tragedy. He proposes exile, and that's interesting when you consider the idea that he may have suggested Benjen's exile to the wall for the same thing.


You don't think that's a remarkable jump of logic? That Cersei thinks so highly of her twin brother surely doesn't lead to the assumption that they must be shagging. Yet Ned jumps straight there. That looks to me like Ned had come to this conclusion before this discussion. It's not a bolt out of the blue when he asks her if Jaime is brother or lover, it's is way of getting her to confirm what he already suspects. The next line is "'Both.' She did not flinch from the truth." He doesn't seem surprised at the truth, only that she doesn't flinch from it. 

Look a little further down the page:


Ned's thoughts aren't about the way Cersei talks about Jaime, they are on his research into appearance. "The truth was there in front of them all the time, written on the children's faces." How can the truth have been written on their faces if the full truth only came from Cersei's words? It's the appearance of Cersei's children that Ned considers the clue. The same characteristic -- apparently having only taken the appearance of one parent -- that Jon shares. A characteristic that GRRM has focused on several times. If the truth is written on the children's faces, has the truth of Jon's parentage been in front of us all the time too?

I absolutely agree that Jon's appearance in itself is not enough to prove a thing. Of course this is not case proven, as I said in the essay. However, we should consider the context. There are two characters, Jon and Joff, who are repeatedly contrasted with each other, yet turn out to be more similar than we realised (the golden prince vs. the dark bastard, yet it turns out the golden prince is a bastard too). For both characters, there is a significant focus on their appearance. In the case of Jon, his appearance is repeatedly brought up in relation to his parentage. In the case of Joff, his appearance is also brought up in relation to his parentage and specifically in discovering that he is a child of an incestuous relationship.

There is unquestionably a clear parallel going on here. The only question is how far the parallel goes. Is it simply to show that Jon's parentage is, like Joff's, not what we thought? Or is it more specific than that? If Jon is a child of incest it's the latter, if not then the former. I don't really see how this can even be questioned, unless you believe that Jon is Ned's son and all the dozens of clues that there's something up with Jon's parentage is one massive red herring.


How's it not hard? Where's the connection? Cersei thinks very highly of her golden brother, and despises Robert. That's not news. It's exactly what you'd expect if the father hadn't been Jaime too, so how do you get from there to incest? I'm pretty sure that Tywin would say that Jaime was worth a hundred of Robert too, but I'm equally pretty sure that Tywin and Jaime weren't shagging.


His lack of negative reaction is because he'd already figured this all out, and he wasn't shocked by what Cersei was saying. He got confirmation of what he'd suspected already.

You are right that the Starks belong to a group of people that regard incest as an abomination. That doesn't mean they didn't practise it. Jaime and Cersei also belong to that group of people who regard incest as an abomination, but it didn't stop them. Why should it argue against one case but not the other?



Given that incest is regarded as an abomination, as you say, you'd require a good reason to suspect it happened. Jaime and Cersei being close means nothing; they're twins. It's a fair bet that the large majority of siblings who are close to each other are not having sex.

How does the fact that they tried to kill Bran give any hint at all that they were having an incestuous relationship? For Bran to learn that Cersei's children were not Robert's is entirely enough reason to want to silence him. Why would Ned assume that Bran learned this by seeing Cersei having sex with one of her brothers? There were plenty of other people in the King's party who might have been there with Cersei at the time. Bran might simply have heard Cersei talking to Jaime about her lover rather than actually witnessing a sexual encounter. Unless they already had some reason to suspect incest, which as something considered an abomination is presumably fairly rare, why would anyone assume incest had anything to do with it?

Ned has figured out that Cersei's children are not Robert's, and that Bran must have stumbled on this truth. That gives him an entirely sufficient explanation for the attempted murder of Bran, regardless of who the father was. It adds nothing to the deduction, it can only serve as evidence to help confirm the suspicion.

Ned knows that Cersei is very close to Jaime, but then they are twins, and that's to be expected. For her to be very close to her brother doesn't mean she couldn't have someone else as a lover, and indeed in the vast majority of cases where a woman is very close to her twin brother, they aren't having sex. Consider Ned's feelings for Lyanna -- not even twins, yet they were certainly close. Hell, Ned was willing to break thousands of years of Stark tradition and bury her in the crypts, he loved her so much. Does that mean that Ned and Lyanna were boinking? I'm presuming you'd say this is NOT evidence for them boinking, so how could it be evidence for Cersei and Jaime boinking that they too are close? This also adds nothing to the deduction, it can only serve as evidence to help confirm the suspicion.

Where else can the initial suspicion come from? What's left? The appearance of the children. Not only are there no signs of Baratheon traits in the children, as history suggests there always would be, there's nothing in them but Lannister appearance. This appears to be the only thing that Ned can have based his deduction on. Yet Ned knows from personal example that a child can take after one parent. Arya, who is half Stark and half Tully, is similarly pure Stark in appearance - a counter example. Jon is also similarly pure Stark in appearance. If both of his parents are Starks, then in the case of one of his two personal examples, incest is the reason for that pure appearance. That would give him the inspiration to consider the possibility in regard to Cersei's children. If only one of Jon's parents is Stark, then both of Ned's examples are contrary to the conclusion he draws. In which case, where did the initial inspiration to suspect incest come from?



Precisely so. Ned's evidence shows that the kids aren't Robert's. His evidence is about the expectation that the Baratheon look would be dominant. Instead, the Lannister look is dominant. Is this something that could only occur if both parents are Lannisters? Nope. Baratheon genes trump Lannister genes, but that doesn't mean all genes trump Lannister genes. Therefore the kids appearance alone is not evidence for incest. I agree!

The idea I am proposing here is that Ned already had the idea in his head that such a pure appearance could be the result of incest, from Jon's example. Thus, even without any evidence of who the father is from the appearance of the kids, Ned has a reason to consider Jaime as a possibility, and sees that it fits. If he did not have that prior example, why would he jump to that conclusion?

There is a missing step in Ned's deductive process that leads him to Jaime, which we never see in the books. Maybe Ned had heard rumours in the past and never given them any credence until that time, and for some reason that never got mentioned. Maybe Jon Arryn left some notes in the margin, and for some reason that never got mentioned. Maybe it's just a plot hole -- that kind of gap in a character's deductive process is an extremely common writer's slip. Or maybe Ned had a good reason to make the deductive jump, and the fact that GRRM never gave us that reason is a massive red flag that we should have seen waving long ago.

Both of these certainly could have provided the initial spark of inspiration that allowed Ned to make the jump. There's also the possibility that there were rumours going around court. Certainly it seems that someone -- probably Littlefinger -- whispered in Stannis' ear. Ned might have paid no attention to such rumours as there are always scurrilous rumours knocking about court, until he had reason to suspect the kids' parentage.

The key takeaway is that we, the readers, never get to see the reasoning. If it was any of the above reasons, there should have been something in Ned's thought processes to tell us. Instead we are left with a gap in the deductive process. GRRM may know how that gap is filled, but we do not. There really are only two possibilities I can see that explain this omission.

1. That Jon gave Ned the example that inspired his deduction is a good explanation. It provides a very strong reason why GRRM would exclude this part of Ned's thought process from the PoV, and be a subtle and really rather smart clue to the reader.

2. GRRM made a mistake. Yes, even the mighty GRRM makes mistakes. He may have intended to provide some insight into one of the explanations above or something similar, but forgotten. He may simply have not noticed the missing step in the deduction. That's a very easy mistake to make. We are presented the evidence first and the conclusion second, while the author starts with the conclusion and has to come up with a story that provides the evidence. It's really hard to evaluate in your own mind whether you have given sufficient reason for a character to know something you the author already knows. A sharp editor would pick up on this and point out the omission to the author, but an editor can easily miss something like this too. We're talking about the first book here, so nobody knew it was going to be a best seller and the editors may not have been given as much time as they'd really like to work on it.



There is. I put it in the essay, but here it is again for reference.



Of course it's easy to come up with other possibilities that explain this -- Benjen being involved in Lyanna's scheme to run away with Rhaegar, for example. I think it's one of those things that any x+y theory ought to have at least a reasonable answer for, though. This theory certainly fulfils that requirement.

It's so strange that the thought of that potential romance makes me feel all kinds of ill, and yet if you said the same about Aegon and his sisters I wouldn't bat an eyelid