Rhaegar Targaryen

The Mad King's eldest son and heir, a melancholy, book-loved prince and peerless warrior whose abduction of Lyanna Stark set the realm on fire.

The fuller tale

Rhaegar Targaryen was born in grief and never entirely left it. His birth came on the day of the tragedy at Summerhall, the fire that killed his great-grandfather the king, and the melancholy of that beginning hung on him all his life — a prince who took his harp to the ruins to sing among the ghosts. He was bookish first, so deep in his scrolls as a boy that men joked about it, until one day something he read changed him and he walked into the yard asking to be made a warrior. He became a superb one, in the dutiful way he did everything: the realm’s beloved silver prince, peerless with lance and sword, who by every account would rather have been playing sad songs.

What he read, the books strongly imply, was prophecy. Rhaegar became convinced that the old promise of Valyria — a prince that was promised, born to stand against a darkness — ran through his own line, perhaps through himself, perhaps through his children. The conviction explains the shape of his life better than ambition ever could: his studious marriage to Elia Martell of Dorne, his naming of their children Rhaenys and Aegon after the first conquerors, his murmured talk of the dragon needing three heads. He was that most dangerous of men, a romantic with a thesis, and the realm paid for his scholarship in blood.

The turn comes at Harrenhal, at the greatest tourney of the age. Rhaegar rode brilliantly, unhorsed every challenger, and then, with the crown of winter roses meant for the queen of love and beauty in his hands, rode past his own wife and laid it in the lap of Lyanna Stark — betrothed to Robert Baratheon, sister to men who watched it happen. The chroniclers say all the smiles died. A year later Rhaegar and Lyanna vanished together, and whatever the truth of it — abduction, elopement, or something not reducible to either — her father and brother died demanding her back, and the realm went to war over the mystery.

He was strangely absent from the war fought in his name. While armies bled at Gulltown and Ashford and the Bells, Rhaegar was away south with Lyanna at the tower he called Joy, guarded by three knights of the Kingsguard who would not leave their post even as the dynasty burned. When he finally returned to lead the royal host, he is said to have spoken of changes to come after the fighting — a council, reforms, perhaps even the setting aside of his father. Whatever he intended died with him at the ruby ford of the Trident, and history got Robert’s version of him instead: the silver prince flattened into the villain of a drinking man’s grief.

The tale’s great trick is that Rhaegar matters more dead than most characters do alive. Daenerys grows up on the legend of the perfect brother she never met; Ser Barristan feeds her careful, humanizing memories of him; Robert’s whole kingship is a monument to hating him. And at the story’s center sits the secret of the tower: that Lyanna died in a bed of blood having borne Rhaegar’s son, and that Ned Stark carried the boy home and called him his bastard. Every argument about Rhaegar — rapist or lover, dreamer or destroyer — is finally an argument about Jon Snow, which is why the tale never settles it.

As a study in how catastrophe happens, he has no equal in the story. Aerys burned the realm out of madness; Rhaegar broke it out of certainty. He was gentle, gifted, universally admired, and quite possibly right about the darkness coming for the world — and the means he chose toward his prophecy killed his wife, his children, his house, and tens of thousands of people who never read a scroll. The books give the epitaph to the woods and rivers he loved: rubies from his breastplate still surface at the ford where he fell, and men still dive for them.

The page and the screen

The show and the books diverge sharply on the machinery of the Lyanna affair. In the show’s seventh season, Gilly stumbles on a septon’s record of an annulment — Rhaegar’s marriage to Elia dissolved and a secret wedding to Lyanna performed in Dorne — which makes Jon not merely Rhaegar’s son but his trueborn heir, ahead of Daenerys in the succession. The published books contain no annulment and it is hard to imagine the Faith granting one to a princess who had borne two royal children; readers who expect the novels to legitimize Jon generally look instead to the Targaryen precedent of taking more than one wife. The books also keep Rhaegar physically offstage forever — he exists only in memory and in Daenerys’s visions at the House of the Undying — while the show eventually stages him at his wedding and at the Tower of Joy, casting him with a deliberate, much-remarked resemblance to Viserys.

Book Rhaegar is also a far more developed prophecy-driven figure: the Summerhall birth, the harp, the phrase about the three heads of the dragon, and his conviction about the prince that was promised are all novel material the show trims to almost nothing. What the show keeps is the emotional core — Robert’s obsession, Barristan’s fondness, and the reveal that the rebellion’s founding story was wrong.

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Gilly reads past a footnote that unmarries Rhaegar Targaryen — and no one at the table hears it. (S7·E5)

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

Before the tale: Slain at the Trident, before the story

Rhaegar died before the story opens, and his death is the hinge the whole era swings on. At the ford of the Trident he met Robert Baratheon in the press of battle — the wronged betrothed and the prince who wronged him, close enough to single combat that the songs treat it as one. Robert’s warhammer staved in the prince’s breastplate, and the rubies that adorned it were scattered into the shallows; men were still diving for them years later, and the crossing has been called the ruby ford ever since. The books add that Rhaegar died with a woman’s name on his lips — and that Robert went to his own grave decades later still killing him nightly in his dreams.

Both tellings agree on the aftermath: the royal army broke, the capital fell within the fortnight, and everything Rhaegar had guarded — his father, his wife, his children by Elia — was dead before the moon turned. Only the secret at the Tower of Joy survived him, carried out of Dorne wrapped in Ned Stark’s cloak.