Lommy Greenhands

A dyer's apprentice with green-stained hands, one of the King's Landing orphans on the road north with Yoren's recruits.

The fuller tale

Lommy comes to the story pre-dyed: an apprentice from the dye-works of King’s Landing whose hands are stained green to the elbow, which the orphans of Yoren’s recruit column convert instantly into a name. He is one of the gutter-swept — an orphan bound for the Wall not out of vocation but because the city had nowhere else to put him — and he compensates the way small boys in rough company do, by needling anyone smaller. Arya, traveling as the boy “Arry,” gets the worst of his tongue, including the nickname Lumpyhead, until her wooden sword renegotiates their relationship.

On the long march he settles into the little pack at the column’s tail — Lommy, Hot Pie, Arya, and quiet Weasel — where his contribution is a philosophy of survival stated with a boy’s certainty: when soldiers come, you yield. Fighting is for knights and fools; sensible people put up their hands and say the words. It is the creed of every small person the war rolls over, offered by the smallest person in the column, and the story lets him voice it without mockery, because the story knows exactly what the war does to the people with no other option.

He is kept minor on purpose — a boy with a joke name and one idea, sketched in a handful of scenes — because his function in the tale is to stand for the thousands like him: the swept-up, marched-off, unconsulted children of the realm’s wars, remembered by the great only when a girl who knew him starts keeping a list.

The page and the screen

The tellings differ only in the hand that fails him: the ambush on Yoren’s column, the leg wound, and the fatal question are common to both, but the show gives the moment to Polliver and the books to Raff the Sweetling, two of the Mountain’s men cut from the same rotten cloth. The choice matters later, because Arya’s memory is long in both directions — the show settles the account in the inn scene where she reclaims Needle from Polliver, and a sample chapter released ahead of The Winds of Winter strongly suggests the books intend the same arithmetic for Raff, right down to the borrowed words.

Mentioned in the chronicle

• The captives are marched to Harrenhal; when Lommy Greenhands cannot walk, Raff the Sweetling answers his plea for carrying with a spear. (ACOK 20)

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The show: Killed on the road (S2·E4)

The books: Killed on the march (ACOK, ch. 20)

A dyer's apprentice bound for the Wall, too lame to walk after the ambush on Yoren's column. Polliver asked if he could walk, then put Needle through his throat and carried the sword away.

He dies on the march, helpless, and the manner of it is engineered to be unbearable. Lamed in the leg during the ambush that kills Yoren, Lommy cannot walk; when the Mountain’s men sweep up the survivors, he does exactly what his creed prescribes — yields, and asks to be carried. In the show Polliver asks whether he can walk, hears that he cannot, and drives Needle — Arya’s own stolen sword — through his throat as the efficient alternative. In the books it is Raff the Sweetling, and the exchange is crueler still: told the boy must be carried, Raff answers “carry him, is it,” and carries the spear to him instead. Either way a child dies for the crime of a wounded leg, and Arya is watching. Polliver later returns Needle point-first at the crossroads inn; Raff’s name stays on a list that has never yet gone uncollected.