Littlefinger seems to know quite a bit more than we expect. I guess one can also learn quite a bit by hanging out in low places. Wasn’t he the one who guided Ned toward discovering the Lannister secret? As someone mentioned up thread, there were nurses at the Tower of Joy.
Well, also she is dying and may not be entirely rational. Or she could tell Ned the name she wants assuming he will conceal the child under another name.
Ned is presumably smarter than Obi-Wan Kenobi to give a hunted child a giveaway name.
Is everyone ignoring Post #428? HBO has released an Infographic outright showing Rhaegar as Jon Snow’s father. Rhaegar Targaryen: Parent. Lyanna Stark: parent. I don’t see how it can be up for debate anymore.
Right, and what she said doesn’t matter anyway. Although it would be completely pointless for her to give him a name which could never be used, and then have Ned give him a non-name that everyone calls him by. And even if he found out he had another name at this point, he would still go by Jon and we would all still call him Jon, and it would be absolutely no service to the story. What’s important is his lineage, not some name they wanted to give him but never did. And we agree on what his lineage is.
As to why they cut out the audio after she says “His name is…”, it was probably as simple as the fact that they wanted the audience to infer the connection based on the next shot of Jon rather than hitting us over the head with it. But I still think she said “his name is Jon”, because his name is Jon, not Targy McTargFace.
I don’t think this is a safe bet at all. The general population of Westeros seems to find the idea of brother-sister incest to be repulsive. Yet, the Targaryen royal family mandated it for the monarch. And we know for a fact that the founder of the dynasty was polygamous. So there’s at worst an even chance that Rhaegar could have produced a legitimate heir through a second marriage while staying married to his first wife.
Unless anything explicit is said, it’s pretty much a toss-up.
But wouldn’t a royal marriage have been a pretty big headline, even to a second wife? If Rhaegar and Lyanna were married, I would think that everyone would know and we’d have heard about it by now. If Lyanna went willingly, what purpose would it serve to keep it secret? The Targayens were the rulers, so one would think that they made the rules. I have wondered how would Rhaegar and Lyanna would even know each other to have a relationship deep enough to elope.
One reason to keep it secret would be because it upset the network of alliances that supported the status quo. Lyanna was promised to Robert and he started a war over her. The Starks also had an interest in preserving their connections with the Baratheons.
And yes a royal marriage would have been s big deal if Rhaegar and Lyanna had told anyone. Perhaps there was a reason for them to keep it secret. Or perhaps the war was already under way before they could tell anyone and after that it made sense to wait until after the war was over.
Maybe the Mad King himself was a reason to keep it secret. Maybe the Martells would have worried about their position if the heir apparent to the throne produced non-Martell issue.
After the rebellion succeeded, Ned would want to keep it secret to prevent Robert from losing his mind even more.
The absence of information doesn’t support either possibility over the other.
Well…not everybody follow threads about the show online. Many viewers are going to be unaware of the R+L= J theory. I suspect we didn’t hear the name simply to keep the reveal for the moment when the camera switched from the baby’s face to Jon’s face.
