Rhaegar's Reading
A bookish prince decided prophecy required something of him, and the realm burned for the conclusion he drew.
The prophecy
The strangest entry in this collection, because the prophecy at the centre of it is one nobody has ever read. What is known is the effect. Rhaegar Targaryen was a solitary, bookish boy who preferred the library to the yard, who read constantly and had to be coaxed into holding a sword at all ÔÇö and then, at some point in his adolescence, he found something in a scroll and came out a different person. He went to the master-at-arms the next day and announced that he would need to learn to fight, because it appeared that he must be a warrior. Nobody was ever told what he had read. He simply began to train, and went on training until he was one of the finest lances in the realm.
There was no seer involved and no vision. This is a young man alone with a manuscript in the library of the Red Keep, working on a text his family had kept for centuries, and reaching a private conclusion about what it required of him. Everything downstream ÔÇö a tournament, a garland of flowers, a war, a dynasty ending ÔÇö proceeds from an act of reading that took place in a quiet room with nobody else present.
What can be reconstructed of the conclusion comes from what he said afterwards, in scraps, to a small number of people. He was working on the prophecy of the promised prince, the Valyrian strand of the material covered elsewhere in this collection: the expectation that a particular figure would be born of the Targaryen line and would stand between the world and the returning dark. His first belief was that the figure was himself, and he seems to have been quite certain of it for years. His second, arrived at after the birth of his son, was that he had misread his own place in it ÔÇö that he was not the promised one but the promised oneÔÇÖs father, and that the child born of his own line was the one the texts described. He is reported to have spoken over that infant of a song of ice and fire, which appears to have been his name for what he had found.
The third and final movement of his reading is the one that emptied a continent. He concluded that one child was not enough; that the familyÔÇÖs three-headed dragon was a requirement rather than a memory, and that a third was needed. His wife could bear no more children. Whatever he decided to do about that arithmetic, he did not explain to his father, his wife, his friends or the realm, and the version of events the Seven Kingdoms received afterwards was assembled by the men who won the war that followed.
Where it comes from
The Targaryens brought their prophecies with them from Valyria and kept them in the family the way other houses keep plate. Dragon dreams are the founding story of the dynasty: the reason there was a Targaryen house left to conquer Westeros at all is that a girl dreamed the Doom of Valyria and her family got out in time. Within the house, dreaming true is regarded not as a religious gift but as a hereditary trait, like a nose. A prince raised in that tradition would not have thought of prophecy as superstition. He would have thought of it as a family responsibility.
The particular text Rhaegar was working on has never been named or described, and the reticence looks deliberate. What can be said is that the Red KeepÔÇÖs library held Valyrian material the Citadel does not have and would not approve of, that the promised-prince tradition was in it, and that a great deal of the same body of material appears to have been consulted by the last several Targaryen kings with varying degrees of enthusiasm and success.
The immediate background is a woods witch and a fire. In the generation before Rhaegar, a witch brought to court by a princeÔÇÖs low-born wife told the royal family that the promised one would come from a specific pairing within their own line ÔÇö and the king of the day rearranged his childrenÔÇÖs marriages accordingly, wedding a brother to a sister on the strength of it. Rhaegar was the product of that marriage. He was, in the most literal sense, a child conceived to fulfil a prophecy, born into a family that had told him so.
And then there is Summerhall. Rhaegar was born on the night his great-grandfatherÔÇÖs summer palace burned, in a fire that appears to have been started by an attempt to hatch dragon eggs, and which killed the king, his heir and a good part of the court. The prince grew up going back to the ruin alone with a harp. Whether he read his own birth into the prophecyÔÇÖs requirement of smoke, and what he made of arriving in the world through a catastrophe caused by somebody else reading the same texts, is not recorded ÔÇö but it is difficult to believe he never thought about it.
How it has been read
The first thing to be clear about is that the realmÔÇÖs version of Rhaegar is propaganda, and everybody in the story knows it. Robert BaratheonÔÇÖs account ÔÇö a rapist and an abductor who took a girl by force and had to be killed for it ÔÇö is the official history of a rebellion, and official histories of rebellions are written by rebels. Set against it are the accounts of men who knew him: Barristan Selmy, Jon Connington, Cersei Lannister and DaenerysÔÇÖs own inherited memory of him, and none of these describes anything resembling RobertÔÇÖs monster. What they describe is a melancholy, courteous, gifted, rather cold young man who loved sad music and did not much enjoy being looked at.
Neither portrait is a defence, and it is worth resisting the temptation to swap one for the other. A man can be gentle, cultured and a fine harpist and still put a garland of winter roses in the lap of another manÔÇÖs betrothed at the largest gathering of the realm in decades, in front of his own wife, for reasons he declined to give to anybody. That act is not disputed by any source. What is disputed is everything about why.
The central interpretive question is whether he was right. If the promised prince is real and the texts meant what he thought they meant, then a man of good intentions correctly identified the most important problem in the world and set about solving it. Many readers hold to a version of this, and point out that the story has since produced a great deal of evidence that the dark he was preparing for is real. Others argue that being right about the danger does not license anything he did about it, and that a prince with an army, a throne and a realm at his disposal had roughly ten thousand better options than the one he chose.
The most damning reading is the simplest and does not require any prophecy at all: that a young man in an unhappy arranged marriage fell in love with somebody else, and that a lifetime of believing himself the subject of a prophecy supplied him with an elaborate reason to do what he wanted to do anyway. This reading has the advantage of explaining the one detail the prophetic reading struggles with, which is the secrecy. A prince who genuinely needed a third child for the salvation of the world could have said so out loud. A man in love could not.
There is also the question of competence, which gets less attention than it deserves. Rhaegar changed his mind twice about the identity of the promised one, and was demonstrably wrong at least once, because he cannot have been both the prince himself and the princeÔÇÖs father. A reader of a text who revises his interpretation each time events fail to match it is not decoding a prophecy. He is being led by one. Every other figure in this collection who did that ended badly, and none of them had a kingdom.
The problem with prophecy
Rhaegar is the clearest case in the books of prophecy functioning as a licence. The text did not tell him to do anything; texts never do. It offered a shape, and he supplied the actions, and the actions were then justified by the shape. That is not a supernatural process ÔÇö it is what happens whenever a person with power convinces himself that the ordinary rules are suspended because of something larger, and the story is exact about the mechanism.
The second problem is the one that makes his case genuinely tragic rather than merely culpable: he could not test his reading. There was nobody to check him. His father was mad, his wife was ill and had every reason to argue against the conclusion, his friends worshipped him, and the only institution in the realm competent to argue about texts was an order that regards the entire subject as nonsense. A man with a private manuscript, a hereditary conviction and no peers is going to arrive at whatever conclusion his temperament prefers, and he will arrive at it with total confidence.
The third and coldest point is about the arithmetic of prophecy in this world. Suppose he was right in every particular. Suppose the child was necessary and the world could not have been saved otherwise. He still ruined tens of thousands of ordinary lives to get there, and the prophecy offered no mechanism whatever for weighing that against what it promised. This is the recurring shape of the thing across every entry in this collection: prophecy never tells anyone the price, and the people most eager to pay it are never the ones who end up paying.
How it has played out ÔÇö open at your peril
The tournament at Harrenhal
The great tournament held in the false spring, at the largest castle in Westeros, drew nearly every house in the realm ÔÇö and the crown prince won it. What he did with the victory is the hinge of the entire backstory: he rode past his own wife, who was sitting in the stands, and laid the championÔÇÖs garland of blue winter roses in the lap of Lyanna Stark, who was betrothed to Robert Baratheon. The books describe the silence that followed as the sound of a thousand people deciding not to say anything.
Both tellings treat this as the moment everything turned, and neither explains it. The show handles the tournament in retrospect, briefly, through BranÔÇÖs sight and through other charactersÔÇÖ recollections; the books have circled it for five volumes without once showing it directly. It remains one of the most conspicuous gaps in the narrative.
The disappearance and the war
Some time afterwards Lyanna Stark left, or was taken ÔÇö the sources do not agree and the story has never settled it ÔÇö and Rhaegar went with her. Her brother Brandon rode to KingÔÇÖs Landing shouting for the prince to come out and die, and was arrested; her father Rickard came to answer for him and was granted a trial by combat, which Aerys II conducted with fire. Both men were killed in the throne room. When the king then demanded the heads of Eddard Stark and Robert Baratheon from their guardian in the Vale, the guardian refused and called his banners, and the realm went to war.
Rhaegar was absent for the first part of it and returned to lead the royal army at the Trident, where he met Robert in the ford. He was killed there, and the rubies from his breastplate scattered downstream; the shallows are still called after them. He was about twenty-four.
The sack of KingÔÇÖs Landing
What his reading cost the people closest to him is worth stating without softening. When Tywin LannisterÔÇÖs host was let into the city, the Mountain killed RhaegarÔÇÖs daughter Rhaenys and his infant son Aegon ÔÇö the child he had named as the promised one ÔÇö and Elia Martell, who was there because she was his wife, died with them. Their bodies were wrapped in crimson cloaks and laid before the new king as a gift. Aerys was killed in the throne room by his own Kingsguard, which is a matter covered elsewhere.
Three hundred years of Targaryen rule ended within a year of a man deciding what a scroll meant. His mother died in childbed on Dragonstone as the fleet came for her; his surviving brother and sister were carried across the narrow sea into an exile that shaped the whole eastern half of the story.
The third head
The show answered the question the books have not. In its account RhaegarÔÇÖs marriage to Elia was set aside and he was wed to Lyanna Stark in a septonÔÇÖs ceremony in Dorne, and the child born at the tower in the Dornish marches was trueborn, legitimate, and the heir to the Iron Throne ahead of anybody ÔÇö Jon Snow, raised as a bastard by a man who lied about him for eighteen years to keep him alive. BranÔÇÖs sight and a maesterÔÇÖs recovered record supplied the proof, and the revelation is the engine of the last two seasons.
On the page none of this is confirmed. Ned StarkÔÇÖs dream of the tower, his sisterÔÇÖs dying words to him, and a promise he never described are all the reader has. The annulment, the wedding and the parentage remain inference ÔÇö very strong inference, and inference the showÔÇÖs writers say came from the author, but not text. It is the largest open secret in the novels.
Whether the third head was ever born, then, has one answer on screen and none on the page. It should also be said that the showÔÇÖs Jon Snow, having been established as the legitimate heir and a Targaryen, was in the end permitted to do almost nothing with the fact except kill the woman he loved and be sent north. Many readers regard that as the final joke of RhaegarÔÇÖs reading: he was right, and it did not help.
The verdict such as it is
The most reliable summary in either telling comes from Barristan Selmy, who served him and who has no obvious motive to flatter him: Rhaegar was the finest man Selmy ever knew, and Selmy has spent his old age wondering whether he should have stopped him. Jon Connington, who loved him, has spent his exile concluding that his prince was a man who lost because he did not want the throne badly enough. Robert went to his grave hating him. Daenerys, who never met him, has had to assemble a brother out of other peopleÔÇÖs contradictions and has more than once found the assembly disturbing.
The one thing the books put beyond argument is the arithmetic. A prince read a text, drew a conclusion, and told nobody. The bill for the conclusion was paid by his wife, his two eldest children, his father, his house, the woman he took with him, her father and brother, and something in the region of tens of thousands of people who had never heard of the promised prince. If he was right about the child, the story has so far declined to say whether it was worth it.