All bastards get the Storm/Snow/Rivers/etc. last name, not only the ones that are recognized by their fathers.
I thought it was only bastards with noble blood. If you’re not recognized, what are you doing even claiming that much?
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Do people who’s aren’t the children of at least knights even get last names?
I thought the books made it seem like Gendry’s existence was a secret. Robert’s other bastards are recognized. Gendry, on the other hand, was taken by Yoren to keep him safe from Cersei’s men, including the Mountain, right? Why?
Hmm.
Does Davos talk about picking a surname, or just about picking his crest? I can’t think of any commoners with last names off the top of my head, now taht you mention it.
Dolorous Ed has a last name, doesn’t he? Tollet? Is he from a noble house?
Robert being a cock-hound was an open secret. Everyone knew he had a bunch of bastards, but most people didn’t know who they were.
Gendry probably pretty typical. He was never told who his father was, and was set up with a reasonably promising future. Anyone who really cared could have found out, (his master figured it out without too much trouble, Littlefinger had a laundry list of them) but what does it matter? A bastard has no claim, an unacknowledged bastard has less than that.
I’m reasonably sure Littlefinger mentions that Edric is Robert’s only acknowledged bastard.
Gendry was only spirited away when Cersei started having Roberts bastards killed, after he died.
I actually looked at my copy of the paperback of GOT. The story is a little over 800 pages. The first season is set up to have 10 episodes. Well If you read page 80 and page 160, the story on both (page 80 has Bran begin his climb… while page 160 has the beginning of the chapter that ends with Bran waking up) it really seems that they took 1/10th of the book and made an episode out of it each time. (oddly enough page 240 is in the midst of another Bran chapter…).
Well in the real world if you were the son of the town smith you might be know as “John, the smith’s son” and when you grew up and became the smith, you became know as “John the smith”…it is just a short jump to “John Smith” or you might have been “Salvatore, from Blasio ( a village in southern italy)” that gets shorted to “Sal deBlasio” and then “Sal DeBlasio” (a shout out to my grandfather). With out a family name, your profession of home sort of stood in as one until the concept of a family name was more formalized. And If you were from a small village or region, odds were that you were related to everyone anyway, so when family names become formalized, you all had the same last name anyway
Davos becomes Davos Seaworth after he becomes a knight, I don’t think he had a family name before that.
One possibly is that while any bastard CAN use a bastard’s name, there’s no reason to do so unless you’re claiming noblilty, what with the whole ‘bastards are born traitors’ thing.
On that note, a last name might just mean that, sometime in the past, you’re claiming decent from a knight or better.
Very few of the commoners seem to have, or at least use, last names. Ed might be one, or he might be from a petty noble house. Him and the pompous jailer who claimed dragon blood are the only two I can think of. The others are all experates from the Free Cities, like Gendry’s master.
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Hedge knights often seem to lack family names. A lot of them use Ser Me of Placename.
Last names are pretty pointless unless you’re trying to get noticed, or the king needs to keep track of you for tax purposes.
Turns out House Tollett is a house in the Vale.
Loyal to the Royces.
When Robert was dying, Ned mentioned (in his thoughts) a list of Robert’s bastards that he would look after as his own children. I don’t know how many were officially acknowledged or whatever, but seeing as how none of them have any claim at all, why kill them? Apparently I forgot Cersei having all the bastards killed, but it makes no matter.
The gold cloaks came for Gendry on his way to the Wall in the 2nd book. In the 1st book Gendry mentions that Stannis and others were asking him a lot of questions about his mother, who he believed died when he was little, but he did remember her having yellow hair and working in an ale house. I don’t know where I’m going with this other than I just can’t wrap my mind around why Gendry was so important that the kingsguard was sent up the road to kill him even though he was an unkowledgable bastard on his way to spend the rest of his life at the Wall.
As for Sansa…Sansa is sheltered. Her father was a traditionalist who did his best to instill in her virtues of honesty, honor, loyalty and idealism, and her mother did her best to instill in her the feminine qualities of courtliness, beauty and obedience. And those lessons stuck.
Sansa at the beginning of the series is naive, but it’s because her parents wanted her to be. She’s actually, of all the Stark children, the most like her father, only without the experiences he’s had to toughen him. But I don’t think she’s dumb. On the contrary, she’s smart, and she survives in Joffrey’s court (also not restraining myself to the first book) because she is smart. She knows that her only weapons are her courtliness and her naivety, and she, stuck in a place surrounded by her enemies and the plaything of a spoiled, sadistic boy, uses them to her advantage, winning over Sandor Clegane, and, so she thinks, Ser Dontos Hollard.
So, no, I don’t think she’s stupid or cruel.
Gendry, and the rest of the bastards, are evidence that the Lannister kids are the result of incest and therefore not heirs. Cersei is trying to protect her offspring’s claims by getting rid of the evidence agaisnt them.
You think her courtesy is a judged response to get her way? Hell no. The Hound had it right, she’s just a trained bird chirping what she was taught.
Cersei was having them killed for the same reason Stannis went to look at him with Jon Arryn, and why he later went through so much trouble to get his hands on Edric Stone. All Robert’s bastards look like him, and none of his legitimate children do. Anti-Joffery types can point to them and say, ‘look, Joffery’s not Robert’s son!’
Hardly hard evidence, but they don’t really need an iron-clad case. Once people seriously start to consider Jamie+Cersei, it’s going to start making sense to a lot of people, especially the one who’s opinion really matters, Robert. Post-Robert, it still causes a lot of trouble for the Lannisters, and had Stannis won the war, it would have given him legitimacy enough.
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Not to be confused with the bastards she had killed in Casterley Rock. That was just Cersei being Cersei.
Unless you mean cocksman or poon-hound, we are reading very different books you and I. (I will not google for ASoIaF slash fanfic… but I suspect Robert might be a cock-hound there…) :eek:
No talk of Martin apparently finishing Dance With Dragons today?
That’s not an official announcement!
Maybe it was just a tough chapter.
Now really. He doesn’t actually SAY he finished it. He may be claiming to have killed King Kong.
Which is more likely?
I dunno. Perhaps it just means he really wants a King Kong vs Dragons fight in the next book.
Anyway I do think we will get the book this year. I just hope the HBO series make him speed up with the remaining two books. I really don’t want to wait another ten years.
Twenty quatloos on the big ape.