Nope, Book-Jon's hair is long and brown. D&D made it coal-black instead of silver... Pretty interesting, no?
A Game of Thrones - Sansa I Alone and humiliated, Sansa took the long way back to the inn, where she knew Septa Mordane would be waiting. Lady padded quietly by her side. She was almost in tears. All she wanted was for things to be nice and pretty, the way they were in the songs. Why couldn't Arya be sweet and delicate and kind, like Princess Myrcella? She would have liked a sister like that. Sansa could never understand how two sisters, born only two years apart, could be so different. It would have been easier if Arya had been a bastard, like their half brother Jon. She even looked like Jon, with the long face and brown hair of the Starks, and nothing of their lady mother in her face or her coloring.
I stand corrected. That may change things, a little, in my mind. I always assumed Jon, who is described as "dark where Robb was fair", was darker than Ned and Arya... thereby supporting the common belief that he is part Dornish. But with grey eyes and brown hair, he is just the prototype of a Stark, with no evidence whatsoever for who the second parent may be.
Okay, I completely missed that. We have Hodor's potential giant blood mentioned in the show by little Benjen. And his name is southern: Walder in the books, Wylas in the show. But I had never thought of his being a dragon. I'd rather liked the idea that Nan was kissing Duncan the Tall. And that might be how Hodor got his largesse.
But if Hodor's origins are southern, the idea that he could be descended from a dragon seed would be interesting.
He could still be Duncan and Old Nan's child: Old Nan would be the one providing the dragon blood. In fact, if she was a dragonseed, that might explain how she knew Ser Duncan in the first place...
We know of three incredibly old people who lived in the North of Westeros for much longer than a normal lifespan. Two of them are dragons... why not the third?
Old Nan seems to be no stranger to dragons. She alone accurately discerned that the Red Comet brought dragons.
Exactly!
A new crackpot growing in my mind (which hasn't been researched, so the timelines could be way off) is that Old Nan is the daughter of Ser Duncan the Small Targaryen (who was supposed to be Aegon's heir) and Jenny of Oldstones. Through her mother, she learned about the COTF and all the old legends... and through her father, she got the dragon blood. I know this would make her quite a bit younger than Ser Duncan the Tall, so maybe at WF she kissed one of his sons? That he sired before he was a KG? I don't know, but I like the idea of Old Nan as a dragonseed.
A different theory (and one that is not mine originally) is that she is Shiera Seastar. She doesn't seem to have mismatched eyes though, so that's a potential problem. Then again, Shiera was a sorceress and this would be a simple glamor to perform. The cool thing about this theory is that maybe, just maybe, with magic having returned to the world through Dany's dragons, Shiera succeeded where other Targs had failed: she was the guardian of Winterfell, and when it was taken, rather than let Ramsay keep it, she let him be the lord of ashes, and she herself rose from the inferno as the great winged serpent whose breath was a river of flame (as seen by Summer in ACOK).
As a side note, the fact that Hodor is so hairy actually argues against his father being Ser Duncan the Tall. IIRC, Dunk the Lunk was big and not very bright, but he wasn't covered in hair... so maybe she found herself a real giant? The WB makes it seem as though this is physically impossible though (all half-giants were sired by human men onto giant women, not the other way around), so maybe a hairy Mormont? Or maybe The Lunk was hairy and just didn't often think about it...
ETA: Come to think of it, I am almost certain Ser Dunk is not the father of Old Nan's children. Because she had multiple children - and Dunk was in the KG. One secret love child I could buy, but several? We were told this guy was honorable, lol! Besides, there is no indication that her children were bastards or of unknown origin. So she seems to have been married to someone at some point, and that couldn't have been Dunk. Probably someone in the south, and after he died (or was sent to the Wall?? ) she became a wet nurse at WF. She never left b/c she had nothing to go back to...