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Clues about Jon Snow’s fate hidden in the prologue of AGOT

We all know that GRRM has filled ASOIAF with symbolism and foreshadowing of things that will happen in the books to come. Robb’s death, Cat’s death, Theon’s transformation into Reek, Ned’s death and Bran’s transformation into a greenseer and skinchanger were all foreshadowed in Bran I AGOT, Arya I AGOT, Bran I AGOT, Eddard I AGOT and Bran II AGOT respectively for example, if one has the eyes to see it.

What really shook me though was the realization that Jon’s death in ADWD has been foreshadowed in the prologue of AGOT through the recounting of the events that led to Ser Waymar Royce’s death.

In the prologue, we have three men of the Night’s Watch on a ranging beyond the Wall. Their commander is a young man named Ser Waymar Royce who was described in the following manner:

He was a handsome youth of eighteen, grey-eyed and graceful and slender as a knife.

A Game of Thrones - Prologue

As we can see, Jon Snow’s description, which came in the first chapter of AGOT, is identical to that of Ser Waymar’s:

Jon’s eyes were a grey so dark they seemed almost black, but there was little they did not see. He was of an age with Robb, but they did not look alike. Jon was slender where Robb was muscular, dark where Robb was fair, graceful and quick where his half brother was strong and fast.

A Game of Thrones – Bran I

The other two men who accompanied ser Waymar were Gared and Will. Gared was a seasoned ranger, who has been in the Night’s Watch for 40 years and Will was a young poacher sent to the Wall for his crime.

Will’s description was the following:

Will had been a hunter before he joined the Night’s Watch. […] No one could move through the woods as silent as Will, and it had not taken the black brothers long to discover his talent.

A Game of Thrones - Prologue

And when Gared spoke about himself he gave us the following information:

“I’ve had the cold in me too, lordling.”

A Game of Thrones – Prologue

By the end of ADWD Jon Snow has been left with only two protectors. One of them is Ghost, his direwolf, who is always described as a silent hunter:

Ghost bounded toward the trees, slipped between two white-cloaked pines, and vanished in a cloud of snow. He wants to hunt, but what? Jon did not fear for the direwolf so much as for any wildlings he might encounter. A white wolf in a white wood, silent as a shadow.

A Dance with Dragons - Jon VII

Jon Snow’s other protector is Lady Melisandre of Asshai, who, right before glimpsing Jon Snow’s death in the flames, claimed that:

The fire was inside her.

A Dance with Dragons - Melisandre I

Now let’s get back to the prologue and the three rangers.

When they reached their destination, Gared warned Waymar Royce of a danger Will could feel as well, yet their young commander could not sense or see:

“There’s something wrong here,” Gared muttered.

The young knight gave him a disdainful smile. “Is there?”

“Can’t you feel it?” Gared asked. “Listen to the darkness.”

Will could feel it. Four years in the Night’s Watch, and he had never been so afraid. What was it?

“Wind. Trees rustling. A wolf. Which sound is it that unmans you so, Gared?”

A Game of Thrones - Prologue

In ADWD, Lady Melisandre gives Jon Snow a very similar warning:

Do not refuse my friendship, Jon. I have seen you in the storm, hard-pressed, with enemies on every side. You have so many enemies. Shall I tell you their names?”

“I know their names.”

“Do not be so certain.” The ruby at Melisandre’s throat gleamed red. “It is not the foes who curse you to your face that you must fear, but those who smile when you are looking and sharpen their knives when you turn your back. You would do well to keep your wolf close beside you. Ice, I see, and daggers in the dark. Blood frozen red and hard, and naked steel. It was very cold.”

“It is always cold on the Wall.”

“You think so?”

“I know so, my lady.”

“Then you know nothing, Jon Snow,” she whispered.

A Dance with Dragons - Jon I

Waymar’s and Jon’s reaction to the warning is identical. They deny the danger exists and proceed as before, ignoring the advice.

“That’d be sweet, m’lord,” said Fulk the Flea, “but your wolf’s in no mood for company today.”

Mully agreed. “He tried to take a bite o’ me, he did.”

“Ghost?” Jon was shocked. “Unless your lordship has some other white wolf, aye. I never seen him like this, m’lord. All wild-like, I mean.”

He was not wrong, as Jon discovered for himself when he slipped inside the doors. The big white direwolf would not lie still. He paced from one end of the armory to the other, past the cold forge and back again. “Easy, Ghost,” Jon called. “Down. Sit, Ghost. Down.” Yet when he made to touch him, the wolf bristled and bared his teeth. It’s that bloody boar. Even in here, Ghost can smell his stink.

A Dance with Dragons - Jon XIII

Ghost, like Will in the prologue, could feel that something was wrong as well. He could feel the threat to Jon.

Back in the Prologue of AGOT, we see Ser Waymar Royce leave Gared behind and continue ahead with Will, in order to find the dead wildlings. When they get there though the corpses are gone, so Royce orders Will up a tree to search for them.

Only when Will had climbed a fair distance did Ser Waymar feel that something was wrong:

Down below, the lordling called out suddenly, “Who goes there?” Will heard uncertainty in the challenge. He stopped climbing; he listened; he watched. […]

Will opened his mouth to call down a warning, and the words seemed to freeze in his throat.

A Game of Thrones - Prologue

As we saw above, Jon trapped Ghost similarly when he locked him in his room, rendering the direwolf powerless to help him. Also, Ghost is a “mute”. He never makes a sound, so he couldn’t howl in warning, just like Will couldn’t cry out to Waymar.

When the Other emerges from the woods, Will notes that:

It was very cold.

A Game of Thrones - Prologue

Note that this line exists only in two places in the books. One is in the Prologue of AGOT, right before Ser Waymar Royce’s death. The other is in Jon I ADWD, as presented above, while Lady Melisandre describes to Jon his coming death.

After that, in the Prologue of AGOT, Ser Waymar Royce proceeds to fight with the Other, while Will notices more White Walkers pour into the clearing:

They emerged silently from the shadows, twins to the first. Three of them… four… five… Ser Waymar may have felt the cold that came with them, but he never saw them, never heard them.

A Game of Thrones - Prologue

When the Other’s sword cuts Ser Waymar:

Blood welled between the rings. It steamed in the cold, and the droplets seemed red as fire where they touched the snow.

A Game of Thrones – Prologue

And then, when Ser Waymar’s sword failed him, the following happened:

A scream echoed through the forest night, and the longsword shivered into a hundred brittle pieces, the shards scattering like a rain of needles. Royce went to his knees, shrieking, and covered his eyes. Blood welled between his fingers.

The watchers moved forward together, as if some signal had been given. Swords rose and fell, all in a deathly silence. It was cold butchery. The pale blades sliced through ringmail as if it were silk. […]

Royce’s body lay face down in the snow, one arm outflung. The thick sable cloak had been slashed in a dozen places. Lying dead like that, you saw how young he was. A boy.

A Game of Thrones - Prologue

Now let us examine Jon’s death in ADWD:

When Wick Whittlestick slashed at his throat, the word turned into a grunt. Jon twisted from the knife, just enough so it barely grazed his skin. He cut me. When he put his hand to the side of his neck, blood welled between his fingers. “Why?”

“For the Watch.” Wick slashed at him again. This time Jon caught his wrist and bent his arm back until he dropped the dagger. The gangling steward backed away, his hands upraised as if to say, Not me, it was not me. Men were screaming. Jon reached for Longclaw, but his fingers had grown stiff and clumsy. Somehow he could not seem to get the sword free of its scabbard.

Then Bowen Marsh stood there before him, tears running down his cheeks. “For the Watch.” He punched Jon in the belly. When he pulled his hand away, the dagger stayed where he had buried it.

Jon fell to his knees. He found the dagger’s hilt and wrenched it free. In the cold night air the wound was smoking. “Ghost,” he whispered. Pain washed over him. Stick them with the pointy end.

When the third dagger took him between the shoulder blades, he gave a grunt and fell face-first into the snow. He never felt the fourth knife. Only the cold …

A Dance with Dragons - Jon XIII

The two men’s deaths are eerily similar, to the point where the exact same phrases are being used to describe them. But it’s not only the wording. It’s also the whole sequence of events that is identical.

Both have a silent companion and a sage mentor who were not there to help them as they faced death. Both dismissed the advice of the mentor and ignored the instinct of their silent companion. Both could not feel the danger until it was too late. Both got slashed at by their first opponent. Both of their swords failed them. Both fell to their knees. Both had the “watchers” stab them. Both ended up face-down on the snow. Both were mere boys…

But all this has already happened, so why does it even matter?

Well, it matters because the prologue of AGOT does not stop at Waymar’s death, but continues past it. And since there are no coincidences of that scale in ASOIAF, I believe the events that followed Waymar’s death are a foreshadowing of what happened/will happen after Jon’s death.

Jon states that he never felt the fourth knife, only the cold, but was there a fourth knife? The number of “knives” has been an object of speculation many years now in the fandom, but I believe Waymar’s death can shed some light to the matter. Both Jon and Waymar got slashed at by their first opponent, but then Jon felt only two stabs, while Waymar Royce got significantly more once he fell. Will counts the first five “watchers” to emerge from the woods and then stops, but later he tells us that Waymar’s cloak had a dozen slashes.

His counting could have been inaccurate, since it was night and he was frightened out of his mind, but I believe we can safely assume the number was somewhere close to twelve.

Since Jon and Waymar’s deaths have been so similar thus far, I believe that, in TWOW, we’ll find out Jon had been stabbed multiple times as well after he fell. I have two theories regarding the number of people who participated in the mutiny and their identities, but they are both highly speculative and, sadly, I am no Sherlock Holmes, so I decided it was best to leave them out.

Moving on, another prominent thing that happened in the prologue of AGOT was Waymar losing his left eye during the swordfight with the Other, when his sword shattered.

Will rose. Ser Waymar Royce stood over him.

His fine clothes were a tatter, his face a ruin. A shard from his sword transfixed the blind white pupil of his left eye.

The right eye was open. The pupil burned blue. It saw.

The broken sword fell from nerveless fingers. Will closed his eyes to pray. Long, elegant hands brushed his cheek, then tightened around his throat. They were gloved in the finest moleskin and sticky with blood, yet the touch was icy cold.

A Game of Thrones - Prologue

Nothing like that happened to Jon during the mutiny, but it is probably something that we’ll see later on, possibly as late as in the last book… Who knows? Maybe it will even happen in a similar manner. There is another meta about Jon losing an eye here, with more textual evidence to support this theory.

The next piece of foreshadowing is Waymar Royce’s “resurrection” as a wight shortly after his death north of the Wall. Since Jon perished south of the Wall instead, I believe he too will be resurrected, but as a living person. And since “ice magic” was used to resurrect Waymar Royce, I believe “fire magic” will be used to resurrect Jon Snow for things to stay balanced.

This time though the resurrection will be different than the other two we saw with Beric Dondarrion and Lady Stoneheart, because Jon Snow has something they had not. He is a warg.

Lady Melisandre has seen Jon warging inside Ghost right before his death in her flames:

The flames crackled softly, and in their crackling she heard the whispered name Jon Snow. His long face floated before her, limned in tongues of red and orange, appearing and disappearing again, a shadow half-seen behind a fluttering curtain. Now he was a man, now a wolf, now a man again.

A Dance with Dragons - Melisandre I

And Varamyr Sixskins described what death is like for a warg in the beginning of ADWD:

A sleeping direwolf raised his head to snarl at empty air. Before their hearts could beat again he had passed on, searching for his own, for One Eye, Sly, and Stalker, for his pack. His wolves would save him, he told himself.

That was his last thought as a man.

True death came suddenly; he felt a shock of cold, as if he had been plunged into the icy waters of a frozen lake. Then he found himself rushing over moonlit snows with his packmates close behind him. Half the world was dark. One Eye, he knew. He bayed, and Sly and Stalker gave echo.

A Dance with Dragons - Prologue

Jon’s last thought as a man was his direwolf and his pack as well, so, like Varamyr, he warged inside his wolf Ghost right before his death.

Now back to Waymar Royce and Will. When Waymar got resurrected, he brushed Will’s cheek and then he tightened his fingers around his throat.

If Will symbolizes Ghost, does this mean Jon will kill Ghost after he comes back? I find that impossible. On the other hand, it could be that Ghost will have to die in order for Jon to return to his human body.

A better explanation in my opinion though is that Will, somewhere along the line, stopped symbolizing Ghost. That moment was when he consciously decided to stay on the tree and remain silent.

“Will, where are you?” Ser Waymar called up. “Can you see anything?” He was turning in a slow circle, suddenly wary, his sword in hand. He must have felt them, as Will felt them. There was nothing to see. “Answer me! Why is it so cold?”

It was cold. Shivering, Will clung more tightly to his perch. His face pressed hard against the trunk of the sentinel. He could feel the sweet, sticky sap on his cheek.

[…]

Will had to call out. It was his duty. And his death, if he did. He shivered, and hugged the tree, and kept the silence.

A Game of Thrones - Prologue

At that moment, Will betrayed Waymar. So maybe from then on Will symbolizes the mutineers/traitors instead. If yes, then that means that the first thing Jon will do when he comes back to life will be to choke the life out of them.

Obviously, I don’t mean he will choke them with his bare hands. I meant that he will hang them.

And why would Jon hang his murderers?

First of all, because the punishment for treason/oathbreaking at the Wall is hanging:

The wildling woman Val turned to face them. “I’ve heard the queen’s men saying that the red woman means to give Mance to the fire, as soon as he is strong enough.” Jon gave her a weary look. “Mance is a deserter from the Night’s Watch. The penalty for that is death. If the Watch had taken him, he would have been hanged by now, but he’s the king’s captive, and no one knows the king’s mind but the red woman.” “I want to see him,” Val said. “I want to show him his son. He deserves that much, before you kill him.”

A Storm of Swords - Samwell IV

Secondly, beheading is reserved only for highborn lords and knights who committed treason/oathbreaking:

Your father died by the sword, but he was highborn, a King’s Hand. For you, a noose will serve.

A Storm of Swords - Jon IX

And thirdly, for those of you who think a true son of Eddard Stark would never resort to hanging, let me remind you that Robb Stark, the firstborn, trueborn son of Eddard Stark and the King in the North, hanged Karstark’s men for killing prisoners of war and beheaded only Rickard Karstark:

“Greatjon, keep Lord Karstark here till I return, and hang the other seven.”

The Greatjon lowered the spear. “Even the dead ones?”

“Yes. I will not have such fouling my lord uncle’s rivers. Let them feed the crows.”

A Storm of Swords - Catelyn III

To sum it up, the prologue of AGOT reveals the following for Jon’s fate:

He got stabbed repeatedly by his brothers after he lost consciousness.

He will be resurrected with “fire magic”.

He will hang the mutineers when he comes back to life.

He will lose an eye.

#meta #jon snow

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