Tywin Lannister
Lord of Casterly Rock and the most feared man in Westeros: the coldest, richest, most calculating lord of his age, thrice Hand of the King and master of the family that pays its debts.
The fuller tale
Every fearsome thing about Tywin Lannister was manufactured in reaction to a joke. His father Tytos was the laughingstock of the westerlands — a soft lord who loaned gold he never collected and laughed along when his bannermen mocked him to his face — and the boy who watched it happen decided, somewhere before his twentieth year, that no one would ever laugh at a Lannister again. When the Reynes of Castamere and the Tarbecks rose against his father's weakness, young Tywin did not negotiate. He extinguished both houses so completely that the realm wrote a song about it, and for the rest of his life he never needed to raise his voice: he could simply have the musicians play.
Aerys Targaryen made him Hand of the King at twenty, and for two decades Tywin governed the Seven Kingdoms while his king deteriorated beside him — the realm prospered, the court whispered that the king did what the Hand told him, and Aerys hated him for it a little more each year. The friendship curdled into insult: the king refused Tywin's daughter for his heir, then claimed Tywin's own heir for the Kingsguard, a lifetime appointment calculated to rob the Rock of its future. Tywin resigned the same day. When Robert's rebellion reached its endgame he sat out the war until the outcome was obvious, then brought his army to the gates of King's Landing flying friendly banners — and sacked the city that opened them. The bodies of Rhaegar's children, delivered to the new king wrapped in crimson cloaks, were his idea of a loyalty oath.
The one person who ever managed him was his wife. Joanna was his cousin, his confidante and by every account the source of whatever warmth he possessed; men who knew them both said Tywin ruled the realm but Joanna ruled Tywin. Her death birthing Tyrion closed something in him permanently. What remained was a family administered like a treasury — Jaime the asset, Cersei the instrument, Tyrion the writedown he refused to acknowledge — and a theory of dynasty he explains, in the show's first meeting with him, while field-dressing a stag: the family name is the only thing that outlives you, and everything, including your children's happiness, is spendable in its defense.
The War of the Five Kings is Tywin's masterclass and his humiliation in alternating movements. Robb Stark outmaneuvers him in the field again and again — Whispering Wood costs him Jaime, and no Lannister army ever actually beats the Young Wolf — so Tywin stops fighting the war on the battlefield. He wins it by letter: the alliance with Highgarden that saves King's Landing at the Blackwater, and the arrangement with Walder Frey and Roose Bolton that ends the Stark rebellion at a wedding feast. Asked afterward whether slaughtering guests under sacred protection troubles him, he offers the most Tywin sentence in the saga: explain to him why it is nobler to kill ten thousand men in battle than a dozen at dinner.
The show gives him a sequence the books never imagined and fans rarely stop praising: at Harrenhal he takes a shorn-headed northern girl as his cupbearer, never learning she is Arya Stark, and their conversations — about legacies, about the Rains of Castamere, about girls who like deadly things — let two mortal enemies enjoy each other's company across a gulf of dramatic irony. It is invented from whole cloth, and it works because Charles Dance's Tywin is a man who respects competence wherever he finds it, even in a servant girl who is very obviously not a servant girl. He can be generous with anyone on earth except the people who share his name.
His last campaign is fought against his own son. Joffrey's murder hands Tywin a courtroom in which to do what he has wanted to do for thirty-nine years — rid himself of Tyrion with the law's blessing — and he stage-manages the trial with the same cold thoroughness he brought to Castamere. It is the only war he does not understand he is fighting. Tywin spends the saga insisting that he acts for the family and never for himself, and mostly believing it; the tale's judgment is that a man who treats his children as ledger entries should not be surprised at how the accounts are finally settled.
The page and the screen
Book and show Tywin differ mainly in what surrounds him. The Harrenhal scenes with Arya are pure invention — in the novels Harrenhal's Lannister interlude belongs to Amory Lorch and the Mountain's garrison, and Tywin never exchanges a word with any Stark child. The books also keep the wound that explains the Tyrion relationship at full depth: the story of Tysha, Tyrion's first wife, whom Tywin had his guards brutalize while telling his son she was a hired lie, is cut from the show entirely — and with it the revelation that detonates between the brothers in the third novel. Book Tywin is otherwise the same man with more paperwork: his years as Aerys's Hand, the Reyne-Tarbeck extermination and the sack of King's Landing arrive as history rather than scenes, mostly through other men's uneasy memories.
The show also softens his physical presence into elegance — Charles Dance's whip-thin patriarch, forever skinning or signing something — where the books describe a heavyset man with shaven head and golden side-whiskers who feared baldness less than looking like his laughing father. The verdict on him is identical in both tellings, delivered by Tyrion in each: he made House Lannister supreme and could not make a single member of it love him.
Where they stand, season by season
Mentioned in the chronicle
- Ned reaches King's Landing and finds the crown six million in debt — half of it to Tywin Lannister. (S1·E3)
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Shot on his privy by Tyrion (S4·E10)
The books: A crossbow bolt on the privy (ASOS, ch. 78)
The great lion died on the privy in the Tower of the Hand, shot twice with a crossbow by the dwarf son he'd sentenced to death. He went insisting to the end that Tyrion was no son of his. A Lannister's debt, paid in full.
He dies on a privy, which the entire realm agrees is the joke he spent his life making impossible. In the show, Jaime frees Tyrion from the black cells on the eve of his execution; Tyrion, instead of fleeing, climbs to the Tower of the Hand, finds Shae in his father's bed and strangles her, then takes the crossbow from the wall and finds Tywin in the privy chamber. Tywin tries to command him, then to bargain, and finally spits that Tyrion is no son of his; the first quarrel is for calling Shae a whore, the second for a lifetime. He dies mid-sentence, still certain the crossbow will not fire.
The books stage the same scene with a crueler key turned in the lock. On the climb out, Jaime confesses the truth about Tysha — she was no hired woman, just a crofter's daughter who loved a boy — and Tyrion goes up the ladder with that in his ears. He asks his father where whores go; Tywin says the word one time too many. A single bolt takes him in the bowels, and the epilogue of his life is the funeral in the Great Sept, where the corpse of the most feared man in Westeros putrefies so spectacularly that mourners flee the smell, and the body seems, in the candlelight, to be smiling. In both tellings the realm's order dies with him — everything Cersei inherits, she breaks.