The Heroic Journeys of Bran, Arya and Sansa
Joseph Campbell in the first paragraph most famous work, âThe Hero with a Thousand Facesâ said of all the hero stories of the world:
It will be always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.
That âsuggestion of moreâ is the catalyst that causes the story of the hero to be constantly reinvented and re-imagined. Whether itâs the modern English Harry Potter and the Sorcererâs Stone, the Greek Perseus, the Indian Prince Guatama, or the Inuit hero Kiviuq, all the heroic stories of the world âboil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.â
It is now generally agreed that Campbell overreached; when applied too broadly, the idea of the Heroâs Journey, what he called the Monomyth, becomes almost meaningless. This is especially true for stories that lack a clearly defined hero who is a warrior or leader, and those stories that donât originate from Indo-European culture. He also used psychoanalysis as a basis for connecting many myths together in his research, but this is no longer very common among those who write about the Heroâs Journey.
Indeed, in modern fiction it is arguable that the idea that there is a Monomyth has had as much of an effect on writers as perhaps any actual structure that its embedded deep in the human psyche that shapes our mythology (read: Star Wars).
Within ASOIAF, the Heroâs Journey is a structure that serves an essential purpose, its presence in the character arcs of Bran, Arya and Sansa uniting them as a triad.
The structure of the Heroâs Journey reinforces their overall narrative unity. They are the heirs to House Starkâs future and its leaders, the tale of its rebirth both made possible and embodied in their shared coming-of-age. Each passes through at roughly similar times the stages of the Heroic Cycle:
The World of the Ordinary: A relatively carefree childhood of naive beliefs and dreams (often even more romanticized in memory after   enduring their heroic trials and horrors).
The Call to Adventure: A mentor beckons them to go and enter a strange and unfamiliar world or path (in Bran and Aryaâs case, Â Â supernatural and magical) that frightens them.
The Refusal of the Call: the Stark children initially resist the call and refuse to go to their destinies.
The Passing of the First Threshold: Guided by new mentors, they are   taken across a perilous and symbolic boundary that separates the world  they know from the one beyond, which is magical, alluring and dangerous.
Trials and Temptations: The Stark children endure horrific suffering, including starvation, violence, enslavement, and sexual assault and are tempted by anger, self-pity, depression and dissociation.
The Abyss: The Heroes reach a point of almost total hopelessness   and despair, believing that they will never see Winterfell or their families again. It is while in the Abyss that the transformation begun by the heroic trials is completed as they are trained by their mentors in new magic, skills and wisdom. It is a time of death and rebirth, their old identities broken down and made new.
The Coming Return: After their transformative time in the Abyss, the Heroes are set up to return to the North with the magic, knowledge, and courage to save their people from the invasion of the Others. Joseph Campbell referred to what variously is to the archetypal hero the artifact, power or knowledge they return with as the âultimate boonâ, which they can bestow on humankind to save them from damnation or destruction.
Because Campbell scoured the entire world and its largest cultures in search of a common structure in heroic mythology, he also believed that the Hero came in a handful of different forms. Two of them are relevant here and influence the characterization of Arya and Bran: The Warrior and The Emperor. Some have pointed out that Campbell was misogynist in his skewing his focus towards male mythological figures. Campbell simply did not analyze what cultures see as the feminine aspects and archetypes of their mythology: the princess, the moon, water, motherhood or sisterhood. Â These feminine aspects are vital to the analysis of Sansa and Arya Stark, and thus I will incorporate them in due course.
And once again, I owe a huge thanks to kittenbalerion, who helped me edit and restructure this piece.
The Childhood of the Hero
The Stark children each begin their journeyâs as exactly that: truly, children, with childish ideas, beliefs, and attitudes.
Bran and Sansa have idealized visions for what they will be as adults. He desires knighthood, and she has a very dreamlike idea of what her life in Kingâs Landing will be like:
âBran was going to be a knight himself someday, one of the Kingsguard⌠Bran knew all the stories. Their names were like music to him.â âBran, AGOT
âShe needed no wine. She was drunk on the magic of the night, giddy with glamour, swept away by beauties she had dreamt of all her life and never dared hope to know. âSansa, AGOT
In order to survive, these hopes and dreams are brutalized out of them. Bran is crippled forced to take up the mantle of the Stark in Winterfell, and Sansa is betrayed and abused by the southron people she trusted and idealized.
âHis eyes stung. He wanted to be down there, laughing and running. Angry at the thought, Bran knuckled away the tears before they could fall.â- Bran, AGOT
He speaks more gently than Joffrey, she thought, but the queen spoke to me gently too. Heâs still a Lannister, her brother and Joffâs uncle, and no friend. Once she had loved Prince Joffrey with all her heart, and admired and trusted his mother, the queen. They had repaid that love and trust with her fatherâs head. Sansa would never make that mistake again. âSansa, ASOS
Arya, despite the sense of inadequacy she feels over Sansaâs, Jeyneâs and Mordaneâs insults (and even more importantly, her parentsâ tacit allowance of this) is also quite bubbly, carefree, adventurous and naive:
âOne day [Arya] came back grinning her horsey grin, her hair all tangled and her clothes covered in mud, clutching a raggedy bunch of purple and green flowers for Father.â âSansa, AGOT
Arya could reveal herself to Lady Whent, and the knights would escort her home and keep her safe. That was what knightâs did, they kept you safe, especially women.ââArya, ACOK
Arya values loyalty and companionship above all else, and her experiences with knights and like-minded adults, especially adult men, is betrayal after betrayal:
âArya had loved nothing better than to sit at her fatherâs table and listen to them talk⌠freeriders tough as leather, courtly knights and bold young squires, grizzled old men-at-arms⌠She hated the sounds of their voices now, the way they laughed, the stories they told. Theyâd been her friends, sheâd felt safe around them, but now she knew that was a lie. Hot Pie and Gendry had left her just as soon as they could, and Lord Beric and the outlaws only wanted to ransom her, just like the Hound. None of them wanted her around.â -Arya, ASOS
The Starks receive their calls to adventure only after they are beginning to enter into a state of mind to embrace them; that is, one of sorrow and disillusionment, after their father and then motherâs murder, Sansaâs imprisonment, the horrors on the forced march to Harrenhall, and Branâs fall from the Tower.
The parallels are incredibly specific at this stage: they receive the call to adventure from figures who are emissaries or representatives of the mentors whose tutelage they enter into in AFFC/ADWD and also escort them across the Threshold later on.
For Bran, the call to adventure comes early on and he hears it repeatedly, first in dreams from the Three Eyed Crow, and then from Jojen (Maester Luwin also acts a mentor who propels his growth as Bran the Builder reborn):
Now, Bran, the crow urged. Choose. Fly or die. âBran, AGOT
âI dream of a tree sometimes. A weirwood, like the one in the godswood. It calls to me. âBran, AGOT
Arya hears the call from Jaqen, a representative of the Faceless Men and the Kindly Man, in the same way that the Three Eyed Crow is for Bloodraven and the Singers in the Cave: âIf you would learn, you must come with meâŚFar and away, across the narrow sea.â (Arya, ACOK)
Ser Dontos is an agent, however, bumbling and ultimately somewhat pathetic, of Littlefinger, and he gives Sansa the call to âadventureâ and will eventually escort her across the symbolic boundary into the world of intrigue and deception that Littlefinger wishes to make her truly a part of, a âplayer of the gameâ: âCome to the godswood tonight, if you want to go home.â âSansa, ACOK
It rather unexpectedly but well expresses the reality the Starks face: the journeys they take end with home, but itâs not the path they want. HenceâŚ
While Campbell initially described this stage as usually being a permanent one, in much of modern thinking and interpretation of the Heroâs Journey, it is considered normal, even necessary for dramatic tension, for the Hero to be reluctant and even actively resist heeding the call to adventure. For the Stark children, this more or less means that they are very reluctant, and in fact, only leave when their circumstances leave them no other actual choice.
He was making Bran angry. âI donât have to tell you my dreams. Iâm the prince. Iâm the Stark in Winterfell.â
âWas it Summer?â
âYou be quiet.â
âThe night of the harvest feast, you dreamed you were Summer in the godswood, didnât you?â
âStop it!â Bran shouted. Summer slid toward the weirwood, his white teeth baredâŚ
âJojen is making him angry.â
Meera shook out her net.
âItâs your anger, Bran,â her brother said. âYour fear.â
âIt isnât. Iâm not a wolf.â Yet heâd howled with them in the night, and tasted blood in his wolf dreams. âBran
And there it is; a denial of the implications of what it means to be Brandon, the Stark in Winterfell, and the denial to know. This choice is not framed in opposition to his place as an heir and lord, but instead in opposition to the childhood dream of knighthood:
âA knight is what you want. A warg is what you are.â-Bran, ACOK
âI was a prince, Jojen,â he told the older boy. âI was the prince of the woods.â
âYou are a prince,â Jojen reminded him softly. âYou remember, donât you? Tell me who you are.â
âBran,â he said sullenly. Bran the Broken. âBrandon Stark.â The cripple boy. âThe Prince of Winterfell.â-Bran, ASOS
Aryaâs refusal of the call is phrased somewhat differently; she seeks not to stay where she is when she receives, but to go to safety, to her family and her brother Jon most of all:
âI canât. I have to go home. To Winterfell.â-Arya, ACOK
âI want to go north, to the Wall. Here, I can pay.â She gave him the purse. âThe Nightâs Watch has a castle on the sea.-Arya, ASOS
Sansaâs refusal is also not so literal. She lies so extensively, even herself, that her lack of agency is almost an unspoken fact of the situation, because it doesnât need to be spoken. Itâs taken for granted: âI never asked to play, the game was too dangerous. One slip and Iâm dead.â-Sansa, AFFC.
In some sense, she takes advantage of this, letting others become so confident in their decisions around her fate that they begin to underestimate her. As she begins to play the role of âAlayne Stoneâ, she tells Baelish, âIâm Alayne, father. Who else would I be?â She invites him to apparently let him make a decision to alter her identity, hiding her true feelings.
This is directly parallel to her little brotherâs thoughts about his own evolution into Bran the Rebuilder: Bran had never asked to be a prince. It was knighthood he had always dreamed of; bright armor and streaming banners, lance and sword, a warhorse between his legs.
By inflicting such agony and suffering on his heroâs through the dramatic tension between the necessity and the loss caused by their transformation, GRRM creates a very moving and sad image of the Hero and their journey. It feels less triumphant than tragic.
The Crossing of the Threshold
Like other stages of the Heroâs Journey, the thresholds they cross into the world of adventure, the unknown and the magical are tailored by GRRM to fit into themes that stretch across their entire arc: Bran passes through the Builderâs two greatest structures: first the walls of Winterfell, and then the Wall itself, boundaries that are intensely magical and designed as weapons against humanityâs greatest enemy, the Others; Arya, whose story is full of moon and water imagery, is literally ferried across a ânarrowâ body of water; Sansa takes a path once taken by her father, but it was the beginning of a new life, whereas for him it was a an end, towards yet another set of suitors who either want to sexually exploit her or her social status.
[Jojen]: âThe gods give many gifts, BranâŚand to you⌠you could be more than me, Bran. You are the winged wolf, and there is no saying how far and high you might fly⌠if you had someone to teach you.â
If they stayed here, hidden down beneath Tumbledown Tower, no one would find them. He would stay alive. And crippled.
Bran realized he was crying. Stupid baby, he thought at himself. No matter where he went, to Karhold or White Harbor or Greywater Watch, heâd be a cripple when he got there. He balled his hands into fists. âI want to fly,â he told them. âPlease. Take me to the crow.â-Bran, ASOS
Branâs situation most literally illustrates the illusion of choice for the Stark children not just for the passing of the threshold, but for the Heroâs Journey as a whole. Nominally, he is given a choice by the Reeds to stay in Tumbledown Tower, but they never could survive there during the Winter of the invasion of the Others. Bloodraven has done everything that his magical abilities to haunt Bran and draw him to his destiny that increasingly insistent:
âFly or die!â cried the three-eyed crow as it pecked at him. He wept and pleaded but the crow had no pity. It put out his left eye and then his right, and when he was blind in the dark it pecked at his brow, driving its terrible sharp beak deep into his skull. He screamed until he was certain his lungs must burst. The pain was an axe splitting his head apart, but when the crow wrenched out its beak all slimy with bits of bone and brain, Bran could see again.â-Bran, AGOT
âYou are the winged wolf, Bran,â said Jojen. âI wasnât sure when we first came, but now I am. The crow sent us here to break your chains.â-Bran, ACOK
Once Arya reaches Saltpans, she feels (and is almost certainly right), that going to Braavos and finding the House of Black and White is the only option she has left:
Her home was gone, her parents dead, and all her brothers slain but Jon Snow on the Wall. That was where she had wanted to go. She told the captain as much, but even the iron coin did not sway him. Arya never seemed to find the places she set out to reach.-Arya, ASOS
âYou are,â he said, âbut the House of Black and White is no place for Arya, of House Stark.â
âPlease,â she said. âI have no place to go.â-Arya, AFFC
The most powerful image in invoked in Aryaâs crossing is that of a departed soul being ferried across the River Styx to the Underworld. Like a departed soul, Arya is granted a special coin to give to the ferryman, and of course, Him of Many faces is a god of death.
User joannalannister mused that Branâs crossing evokes rebirth, and in contrast, those of sistersâ evoke imagery of death as it appears in Greek Mythology. There is Arya and the moon, the ferryman and Him of Many Faces, evokes imagery associated with the crossing of the river Styx into death; for Sansa, Petyr Baelish and his offer of pomegranate seeds evokes imagery of Persephoneâs kidnapping, which augments the thematic tie to death in Sansaâs arc that has existed since her father killed Lady by the Trident at the beginning of AGOT.
In-universe, the most important parallel for Sansaâs escape from Kingâs Landing, taking the same path her father took to the brothel. Her relationship and conflict with Baelish is defined by her parentsâ history with the man; sexualized and objectified by him (per Cat), a reluctant friend and ultimately a victim of his mechanizations (per Ned).
âNed studied the rocky face of the bluff for a moment, then followed more slowly. The niches were there, as Littlefinger had promised, shallow cuts that would be invisible from below, unless you knew just where to look for them. The river was a long, dizzying distance below. Ned kept his face pressed to the rock and tried not to look down any more often than he had to.â-Ned, AGOT
âWe must climb down,â Ser Dontos said. âAt the bottom, a man is waiting to row us out to the ship.â
âIâll fall.â Bran had fallen, and he had loved to climb.
âNo you wonât. Thereâs a sort of ladder, a secret ladder, carved into the stone. Here, you can feel it, my lady.â He got down on his knees with her and made her lean over the edge of the cliff, groping with her fingers until she found the handhold cut into the face of the bluff. âAlmost as good as rungs.â-Sansa, ASOS
User Starbird1 comments on how Sansaâs crossing is a new beginning, with a life ahead of her, a new age, while Nedâs is the beginning of his end (his heroic deeds behind him) by noting that, âNed sees the Targaryen armor as a relic of the past, Sansa sees it as something evolving.â
After the Hero has passed the threshold, and endured the trials and temptations of the magical world they have entered, they reach what is both the nadir of their life, and the farthest extent of their magical explorations. That Abyss is crafted to be their personal hell, the final experience that is meant to totally break them down so that their new identities, that of legendary figures, can emerge. It is agonizing death with, in their final AFFC/ADWD chapters, the smallest hint of a light at the end of the tunnel: Rebirth.
Campbell describes âThe Abyssâ as a place, in his own psychoanalytic and somewhat strange language:
âThe well is the World Navel, itâs flaming water the indestructible essence of existenceâŚthe sleeping castle is the that ultimate abyss to which the descending consciousness submerges in dream, where the individual life is on the point of dissolving into undifferentiated energy: and it would be death to dissolve; yet death, also, to lack the fire. The motifâŚof the inexhaustible dish, symbolizing the perpetual life-giving, form-building powers of the universal sourceâŚâ
Among such âuniversal sourcesâ or âultimate boonsâ he names the World Ash of Nordic myth, Yggdrasil.
Celtic myth, which includes Branâs real-world forebearer in the Fisher King tradition Bran the Blessed, also has trees as symbols of life and magical energy. Oaks were worshiped because they were the oldest trees in a forest, and as Bloodraven tells Bran, âa weirwood will live forever if left undisturbed.â
Bran once again, has the most literal parallels, beyond it being an actually dark abyss. Campbellâs phrase âthe sleeping is castle is that ultimate abyss to which the descending consciousness submerges in dreamsâ has direct echoes in Branâs chapters: You have to wake, he would tell himself, you have to wake right now, or youâll go dreaming into death.â(Bran, ADWD)
It is the Cave that Bran stares directly into the vast magical void of power and immortality that his ancestor has bound him to by blood (âyour blood makes you a greenseerâ), and what it means:
[Jojen]: âEarth and water, soil and stone, oaks and elms and willows, they were here before us all and will still remain when we are gone.â
âSo will you,â said Meera. That made Bran sad. What if I donât want to remain when you are gone?-he almost asked, but he swallowed the words unspoken.-Bran, ADWD
Bloodraven encourages him to absorb into his being the darkness from which those magical symbols of life and power, the weirwoods, grow:
âNever fear the darkness, Bran. The strongest trees are rooted in the dark places of the earth. Darkness will be your cloak, your shield, your motherâs milk. Darkness will make you strong.â-Bran, ADWD
It wouldnât be the first time that time in a dark place caused Bran to take a leap forward in magic:
âHe remembered who he was all too well; Bran the boy, Bran the broken. Better Bran the beastling. Was it any wonder he would sooner dream his Summer dreams, his wolf dreams? Here in the chill damp darkness of the tomb his third eye had finally opened.-(Bran, ACOK)
The basis of his misery in the Cave above and beyond his crush on Meera (ââDonât cry,â he said. He wanted to put his arms around her, hold her tight the way his mother used toâ) his disability, (âbut who else would wed a broken boy like him?â), Branâs exile seemingly kicks out from under him what the thing that he felt gave his life value, meaning and dignity after his fall from the tower:
âWhat was he now? Only Bran the broken boy, Brandon of House Stark, prince of a lost kingdom, lord of a burned castle, heir to ruins.â-Bran, ADWD
That is to say, his place as a prince and a lord, The Stark in Winterfell:
âAs you will, my prince,â said Ser Rodrik. âYou did well.â Bran flushed with pleasure. Being a lord was not so tedious as he had feared.-Bran, ACOK
He had never feared the crypts; they were part of his home and who he was, and he had always known that one day he would lie here too.-Bran, ACOK
Men crowded shoulder to shoulder on the benches. âStark!â they called as Bran trotted past, rising to their feet. âWinterfell! Winterfell!â
âŚit made him swell with pride. For so long as it took him to ride the length of that hall he forgot that he was broken.-Bran, ACOK
The essence of Branâs hell is disinheritance and powerlessness.
For Arya, the Abyss is defined by loneliness and existential despair; she has lost her âpackâ, and also faces the values and ideology represented by the Faceless Men. They do not believe in loyalty to friend or family, or any kind of justice in this life for the powerless over the powerful other than the shared experience of death.
Arya faces the Abyss in the form of an idea: the nihilism that can one draw from the inevitability of death, represented in the phrase âValar Morgulis â and embodied by Him of Many Faces:
âIn Qohor he is the Black Goat, in Yi Ti the Lion of Night, in Westeros the Stranger. All men must bow to him in the end, no matter if they worship the Seven or the Lord of Light, the Moon Mother or the Drowned God or the Great Shepherd. All mankind belongs to him⌠else somewhere in the world would be a folk who lived forever. Do you know of any folk who live forever?â-ARYA, AFFC
For the Faceless Men, this is the ultimate justice, as described in their story of the first Faceless Man, who brought âthe giftâ first to the slave who pleaded for release, then later to the masters. But itâs not enough for Arya, who says, âHe killed the slave?â That did not sound right. âHe should have killed the masters!â
Arya recognizes this philosophy for what it is: a kind of spiritual nihilism (although the Faceless Men, again, see this as both justice and the fundamental reality), and the fate of her family, her home and her enemies seems only to have confirmed that: âJoffreyâs dead! She knew it ought to make her happy, but somehow she still felt empty inside. Joffrey was dead, but if Robb was dead too, what did it matter?â(Arya, ASOS)
The good die with the evil, the former a way that seems cruel and heartbreaking, the latter in way that is anti-climatic and ambiguous. For her, House Starkâs defeat is both intensely personal and symbolic triumph of evil over good, leaving her a wolf alone:
âThe old gods are dead, she told herself, with Mother and Father and Robb and Bran and Rickon, all dead. A long time ago, she remembered her father saying that when the cold winds blow the lone wolf dies and the pack survives. He had it all backwards. Arya, the lone wolf, still lived, but the wolves of the pack had been taken and slain and skinned.â-Arya, ASOS
The reason Arya hates Dareon, and eventually kills him, is that it is her lashing out, trying to hold onto her code of the pack:
He is a man of the Nightâs Watch, she thought, ⌠the singer should be on the Wall⌠He is fair of face and foul of heart, thought.â-Arya, AFFC
The girl was not sorry, though. Dareon had been a deserter from the Nightâs Watch; he had deserved to die.â-Arya, ADWD
Arya doesnât kill Dareon for some great sin by any other Westerosi code of conduct (though even in the North, itâs desertion and abandonment of duty that would earn Dareon an execution), but for abandoning his own pack.
Everything about Sansaâs Abyss is an inversion. Rather a descent to a dark place below the earth, or being ferried across a body of water as if to the underworld, Sansa makes an ascent to a place high above, that is disconnected from earthly or outside concerns. In the vast empty blue skies around the Eyrie, and in its empty, quiet and lifeless halls, Sansa sees a kind of physical representation of her dissociation from the traumatic facts of her circumstances (and the invention of more pleasant ones that didnât happen). It the âsleeping castleâ that Campbell refers to.
The Eyrie, much like the mentally ill Lysa, has through the very characteristics of its construction separated itself from the reality of the outside world. It is the opposite of the place Sansa long to be: Winterfell. The Eyrie is small and elegant and built far above the ground and its worldy attachments, Winterfell is massive and sprawling, âitâs roots sunk deep into the earth.â The Eyrie, up on its lofty place on the Giantâs Lance, has a godswood whose soil is so barren (probably from the lack of blood sacrifice) that âno matter how much soil was hauled up from the Vale, they could not get a weirwood to take root hereâ, that symbol of (brutal) life.
Whereas Winterfell is a place that bustles with life and activity, âthe men drilling with wood and steel in the yard, the cooks tending their vegetables in the glass garden, restless dogs running back and forth in the kennels, the silence of the godswood, the girls gossiping beside the washing wellâ, Sansa describes the Eyrie as having a haunting stillness:
There was no quieter castle in all the Seven Kingdoms. The servants here were few and old and kept their voices down so as not to excite the young lord. There were no horses on the mountain, no hounds to bark and growl, no knights training in the yard. Even the footsteps of the guards seemed strangely muffled as they walked the pale stone halls.
As Lysa locked away the roiling dissent of her bannermen, who wished to go to war against the Lannisters, Sansa has locked away her exact memory of her fatherâs execution (among other things). And Lysa of course, is a perfect representation of Sansa had fate and circumstances been less fortunate, with many parallels between them.
When her aunt forces her head out the Moon Door, Sansa sees the physical manifestation of her detachment from reality, âwhite sky, falling snow, and nothing else.â
House Arryn is everything House Stark is not: Andal rather than First Men; itâs motto, âHigh as Honorâ speaks of a refusal to embrace the unpleasant and brutal choices of ruling, where âWinter is Comingâ comes from a place of a will to do whatever it takes to survive hard times.
Because of this, Sansa describes the Eyrie most of all as being empty, having âa godswood without gods, as empty as me,â and as a place she does not truly wish to be, âa pure world. I do not belong here.â
The time in the Abyss is invaluable and what it teaches or gives to the Hero. Campbell writes that, âIt is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.â
What sort of hero, and what sort of person, do our character become after their time in the Abyss? Joseph Campbell and Valerie Frankel, the writer of a theory on mythological heroines, didnât just describe the stages of the journey; they formulated what they viewed as different categories of heroes and heroines, and thought of them as having fundamentally different goals, both because of their gender but also among those of the same gender due to different abilities, challenges and enemies.
Bran Stark & The Emperor Archetype
The archetype that dominates Branâs narrative is that of the Magic King (with parallels to King Arthur and his Camelot and Avalon, Bran the Blessed as well as his own ancestor Bran the Builder), an image that Campbell dubs The Emperor.
Campbell contrasts the Warrior with the Emperor by saying, âThe symbol of the first is the virtuous sword [read: Needle], of the second, the scepter of dominion, or the book of law.â The adventure of the Emperor âis going to the father-the father is the invisible unknown.â
The Father in the context of Branâs story is Brandon the Builder and the Old Gods. His name is rarely spoken, but his greatest works and the sacred office he created (The Stark in Winterfell), loom as large in the narrative as they do on the very landscape of Westeros, so fundamental to it that they are taken for granted and barely understood, magical works that are in effect nearly invisible:
âThousands and thousands of years ago, Brandon the Builder had raised Winterfell, and some said the Wallâ-Bran, AGOT
A face had been carved in the trunk of the [weirwood], its features long and melancholy, the deep-cut eyes red with dried sap and strangely watchful. They were old, those eyes; older than Winterfell itself. They had seen Brandon the Builder set the first stone, if the tales were true; they had watched the castleâs granite walls rise around them.-Catelyn, AGOT
[Tyrion] remembered their godswoodâŚat the center the heart tree standing like some pale giant frozen in timeâŚThat wood was Winterfell. It was the north.â-Tyrion, ACOK
The songs said that Stormâs End had been raised in ancient days by Durran, the first Storm KingâŚSome said the children of the forest helped him build it, shaping the stones with magic; others claimed that a small boy told him what he must do, a boy who would grow to be Bran the Builder.-Catelyn, ACOK
âThere must always be a Stark in Winterfell.â
Together with the suggestion of a connection between the Builder and the Last Hero (even that they might have been the same person, given that the formerâs works achieved the latterâs goals), the parallels between Branâs current journey and the Last Heroâs search for the Children of the Forest, and evidence that the Builder was a greenseer and Winterfell is a literal fusion of weirwood and castle, Branâs character becomes that of the son reclaiming the legacy of the (very distant) father, the âsecrets long forgotten in Winterfellâ, the pact he made with the Singers in exchange for their magic to fight the Others.
Bran is repeatedly called âthe heirâ, âprinceâ, and the only character to be called the âThe Stark in Winterfellâ on page:
Iâm the Prince. Iâm the Stark in Winterfell.â
âYou are the Stark in Winterfell, and Robbâs heir.â
He was the Stark in Winterfell, his fatherâs son and his brotherâs heir, and almost a man grown.
âYou are our prince as well, our lordâs son, and our kingâs true heir.â -Meera Reed to Bran, ASOS
Jojen gazed up at him with his dark green eyes. âThereâs nothing here to hurt us, Your Grace.â-Bran, ASOS)
âYou are a prince, remember?â-Jojen to Bran, ASOS
âHeâs our prince.â-Meera to Samwell Tarly, ASOS
And in the climax of that journey, in the Abyss, he confronts that magical legacy and the primordial unknown that defines the Old Gods:
When they died, they went into the wood, into leaf and limb and root, and the trees remembered. Maesters will tell you that the weirwoods are sacred to the old gods. The singers believe they are the old gods. When singers die they become part of that godhood.â-Bran, ADWD
Time is different for a tree than for a manâŚa thousand human years are a moment to a weirwood. âBran, ADWD
It is in the Abyss that the Hero (warrior, emperor, redeemer or otherwise) taps into the ultimate boon, and brings back a piece or symbol of that boon by which he is âblessed by the father to represent the father among men.â This idea of a human chosen by the gods to hold divine power and by doing so become a king is also somewhat represented by Theon Greyjoyâs intoning of the Ironborn saying, âItâs gods that make me but men that make crownsâ, in reference to their own mythological founder, the Grey King (after his death, kings were typically elected on the Iron Islands for thousands of years). Thus, the Stark words âWinter is Comingâ, are not just a warning but a claim to a divine right to rule that Bran has inherited, one first earned by protecting the North from the Others with âthe ultimate boonâ: greenseeing, and thus the secrets of Winterfell and its use as a weapon against the Others.
Looking Beyond Campbell: Sansa and Heroine Archetypes
Campbell ignored heroines; more extensively, he ignored what the mythologies of the worldâs cultures consider to be feminine; that is, ideas, rituals, and imagery that are domain of women. To understand the heroine and her journey, I turned to Valerie Estelle Frankelâs work, From Girl to Goddess: The Heroineâs Journey through Myth and Legend.
What separates the journey of the Heroine from the Hero is not so much the stages, but the goal.
â[In very ancient mythology] the archetypal goddess, or Great Mother, dominated all mankind. She was the earth, the sea, the font of all life. Along with her feminine qualities of beauty, imagination, and compassion, she also offered death and savageryâŚgirls emulate that path on their journeys by forming a family circle they can rule as supreme nurturer and protector. The true goal of the heroine is to become this archetypal, all-powerful mother. Thus, many heroines set out on rescue missions in order to restore their shattered families...they redeem beloved family members or potential husbands.â-From Girl to Goddess
If the separated pack, âslain and skinnedâ is something that haunts Arya, then two images dominates Sansaâs story and shape her princess narrative: The Beauty and the Beast in the form of her relationship to Sandor Clegane (and men in general), and an incarnation of the Wicked Stepmother in the form of Cersei Lannister, each helping to shape her into a very classic Princess in the Tower.
âThe Beauty and the Beastâ is of course an idea that is reflected in many different fairytales throughout the world in such legends as Bluebeard, and others where maidens are kidnapped by wild animals such as bears and bulls. âOn first meeting, these lovers are bloodcurdling and grotesque, making the maiden fear for her life.â
In Sansaâs case, the beast is a âhoundâ, or rather, âTHE Hound.â And he does frighten her:
Strong hands grasped her by the shoulders, and for a moment Sansa thought it was her father, but when she turned, it was the burned face of Sandor Clegane looking down at her, his mouth twisted in a terrible mockery of a smile. âYou are shaking, girl,â he said, his voice rasping. âDo I frighten you so much?â
He did.-Sansa, AGOT
True to form, GRRM plays with this idea (he has even commented that he is aware of fans shipping Sansan and âplayed with it a little, in the booksâ) and adds layers to it. Sandor is man who is both beastly in appearance and behavior. He is drunk and rude to her more than once, (and the scene after the Battle of the Blackwater is all kinds of ânot coolâ but more on that later), but it is Sandor, more than any other person in Kings Landing, who shows empathy for Sansa and develops a sincere personal connection with her:
âHere, girl.â Sandor Clegane knelt before her, between her and Joffrey. With a delicacy surprising in such a big man, he dabbed at the blood welling from her broken lip.-Sansa, ACOK
Outside of the action itself, Sandor does something else important by the manner of the action. He makes himself into a shield between Sansa and her abuser, and also between her and her fatherâs head.
Sandor backs up her lie about killing on oneâs nameday, he refuses to side with Joffrey about the incident in Wintefellâs training yard (lying about what he said), and when she is stripped and beaten in front of the whole court, he says to Joffrey, âEnough.â And then offers her his cloak to cover herself with.
Of all the men that Sansa has romantic connections too, Sandor is the one who appears to be a beast but ultimately isnât, while Joffrey, Loras and Harry are handsome, as people they turn out to be cruel or violent or both.
[Sansa]âYouâre awful.â
[Sandor] âIâm honest. Itâs the world thatâs awful.â-Sansa, ACOK
Sandor may not be the most intellectual man, but fans of his character have noted that he is oddly poetic, and in that moment he expresses that he, like Sansa, can see Westerosi society for what it is: violent, cruel and heartless.
âAnimal bridegroom stories embodied the real-life fears of women promised to total strangers in marriage, who did not know if theyâd find a brute or gentle lover in their marriage bed.â
Sansa is promised to total stranger in marriage, and finds that her prince is a brute. That is where the scene after the Battle of the Blackwater comes to be very important, in all of its emotional complexity.
The original version of the Beauty and the Beast, from Mademe Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve in 1740, âthe final transformation does not occur until after the beauty weds her beast, waking up in her marriage bed to find a human Prince beside her.â In the Vale after Marillion assaults her and says he will make her âsingâ just as Sandor demanded (in the literal sense of the word), she falls asleep and dreams that Sandor is lying beside her.
And she dreamed of her wedding night too, of Tyrionâs eyes devouring her as she undressed. Only then he was bigger than Tyrion had any right to be, and when he climbed into the bed his face was scarred only on one side. âIâll have a song from you,â he rasped.
If there is one thing Sansa would rather not deal with it, itâs ambiguity, and both in her romanticization of Sandor (âHe was no true knight, but he saved me all the sameâ) and with the unKiss, she removes ambiguity. That in turn connects to another facet of Sansaâs connection to fairytales and their heroines.
Much as in the case of the animal bridegroom, Sansa does not truly come to see Sandor in a romantic or appealing light until after her symbolic bedding, and thus in her mind transforms from a beast to a prince.
Sansa is a liar; the most consistent, pervasive and skilled liar among all the POV characters. But as is the case of the unKiss, when Sansa lies about her reality, she tells lies that have a certain ring of truth, or uses a truth to create a lie. Another example is when she tells Petyr Baelish, âI am Alayne, father. Who else would I be?â The answer for herself and the reader is obvious; Sheâs Sansa Stark, but Petyr is meant to take and does make an entirely different meaning from that statement.
By her experience, Sandor was the only true knight she met in Kingâs Landing, protecting the innocent from harm and fighting valiantly. She forgets his character flaws not to the effect of distorting the truth, but trying to highlight it. If Bran and Arya are the vessels of much more specific fairytale figures, then Sansa, with layered inversions of stereotype and formula, creates a myth within ASOIAF. Bran the Builder and Queen Nymeria are established and preexisting, but itâs Sansa who writes Westerosâs version of The Beauty and the Beast.
Sansaâs narration touch upon aspects of storytelling in a metatextual way, and among them is the idea that lies and exaggeration are instrumental to bridging the gap between an experience and the audience to which the experience is narrated. Inside every story is a kernel of truth, a basis of fact, but the fact alone isnât enough to make the reader feel as the character does. When GRRM talks about his fiction, he clearly expresses this idea. He says,
âMy philosophy as a writer, since the very start of my career, has been one of âshow, donât tell.â Whatever might be happening in my books, I try to put the reader into the middle of it, rather than summarizing the action. That requires vivid sensory detail. I donât want distance, I want to put you there.
Rightly or wrongly (and in the case of ASOIAF record of sexual assault against women, I believe the latter), GRRM believes that to faithfully depict the violence, inequity and woman-hating of medieval western Europe, you have to cartoonishly exaggerate it. Like GRRM, Sansa believes in lying your way to the truth. This was the sort of lie she told Tyrion about why she did not want to sleep in the Tower of the Hand, among others. It is also expressed when she says, âLife is not a song. But all the stories canât be lies.â
Sansa also is mentored by, and conflicts with, an incarnation of The Wicked Stepmother in the form of her would-be mother-in-law, Cersei Lannister. Frankel describes the relationship between the princess heroine and the Wicked Stepmother,
Notably, [they] only show up to bully the passive princesses. The stepmother supports her own daughters⌠but this upstart stepdaughter, this ugly duckling in her nest, must not be allowed to inherit-not her fatherâs love, not her princeâs kingdom. When she marries and becomes queen, the dowager stepmother will have nowhere left but the croneâs tower.
While the heroine understands the natural world, singing to her animal friends and picking flowers, the evil queen dominates the adult world: castle, servants, and politics. She clings to her position fiercely by keeping the princess a child or pawn. These stepmother-witches often represent the heroineâs internalized denigration of the feminine-these marriage-hungry, power thieving sexpots are dark parodies of women, devouring what they donât control.
Though cast as the princessâs deadliest foe, the witch-queen offers priceless knowledge of sensuality and lust that virginal heroine must embrace.
This is more or less exactly who Cersei Lannister is. She fears being sidelined as an older widow by her sonsâ brides-to-be, and in hates the women around her, especially Sansa, for being âweakâ a.k.a being feminine:
She had a warriorâs heart but the gods in their blind malice had given her the feeble body of a woman.
âI would sooner face any number of swords than sit helpless like this, pretending to enjoy the company of this flock of frightened hens.â-Sansa, ACOK
She has total physical power over Sansa for a great deal of her time in Kings Landing, and like the Wicked Stepmother, Cersei tries to also position herself as a mentor to the younger girl and impart to her several bitter lessons about adult womanhood, as when she says, âTears are not a womanâs only weapon. Youâve got another one between your legs, and youâd best learn to use it. Youâll find men use their swords freely enough. Both kinds of swords.â This is the knowledge of sensuality to which Frankel refers, and which Sansa uses during her first dance with Harry the Heir. Of course, Sansa lies and makes Harry believe she has more sexual experience than she actually has.
Arya Stark: The Warrior and the Feminine
 Arya acts in many ways as a narrative bridge, and much like the Titan of Braavos, will often have a foot in two different worlds but also exist in a very distinct space between them. The historical figure within ASOIAF that she is connected to, Nymeria, is neither so ancient as to become legend like the Builder, but is recent and more well described than the fictional Jonquil. The element which Arya is associated with as a âwaterdancerâ, is between earth and air in solidity but radically different from both; the degree to which magic effects her story is less than that of her younger brother but much more than that of her older sister, but that magic is very unique; most of her story has as of yet happened directly in the geographic center between the North and the South. More profoundly, Aryaâs mythological connections are both to the male Warrior with the virtuous sword, and the primordial Mother Goddess (though the latter is more important to her). By the same exact mythological connections, Aryaâs character fuses imagery of both life and death.
Campbell describes the Warrior Hero as committing their heroic deeds in a time and place where
âvillages and cities have expanded over the land. Many monsters remaining from primeval times still lurk in the outlying regions, and through malice or desperation these set themselves against the human communityâŚFurthermore, tyrants of human breed are the cause of widespread misery. The elementary deeds of the hero are the clearing of the field.â
This is an accurate description of Westeros when the story begins. As the land is tamed by human settlement and control, while wild animals and magic have receded.
âPerhaps magic was once a mighty force in the world, but no longer. What little remains is no more than the wisp of smoke that lingers in the air after a great fire has burned out, and even that is fading. Valyria was the last ember, and Valyria is gone. The dragons are no more, the giants are dead, the children of the forest forgotten with all their lore.-Bran, ACOK
Before the First Men came all this land that you call Westeros was home to us [the Singers]âŚThat was in the dawn of days, when our sun was rising. Now it sinks, and this is our long dwindling. The giants are almost gone as well, they who were our bane and our brothers. The great lions of the western hills have been slain, the unicorns are all but gone, the mammoths down to a few hundred. The direwolves will outlast us all, but their time will come as well. In the world that men have made, there is no room for them, or us.â-Bran, ADWD
Human civilization, especially the South, is massive, decadent, cruel and amoral. Its most respected generals are largely war criminals, its kings unworthy and incompetent. Tyrion Lannister describes his fatherâs military campaign as â[living] off the fat of the riverlands.â Our warrior hero witnesses the atrocities Tywin orders first hand numerous times,
Eight days she had lingered there before the Mountain gave the command to march, and every day she had seen someone die.
No one ever survived the Ticklerâs questioning; no man, no woman, no child. âArya, ACOK
Tywin is just one of the major forces by which Westeros self-destructs: the Ironbornâs revolt and the pillaging, the outlaws all over who are joined by military deserters, the coming famine, Robb Starkâs campaign in the Westerlands, and more.
Westeros is in a period of change and devolution, and it is in this period of chaos that Arya, as a warg and pack leader, comes into her own, more suited to its wildness and lawlessness than even her own father. She is both the result and the soon-to-be-cause of the Iron Throneâs fall. Jaimeâs hyperfocus on getting Riverrun and Raventree to surrender while ignoring the threat of Nymeriaâs wolf pack and the Brotherhood without Banners represents the myopic view and obsolete nature of the Iron Throne. It is this arrogance where, as Campbell describes, âresides [the tyrantâs] doom.â
âFor the mythological hero is the champion not of things become but of things becoming: the dragon to be slain by him [sic] is precisely the monster of the status quoâŚFrom obscurity the hero emerges, but the enemy is great and conspicuous in his seat of powerâŚHe is Holdfast not because he keeps the past but because he keeps.â
Aryaâs role as the Warrior Hero is actually secondary and only meant to support what is feminine in her story. Needle, the virtuous sword, is important to Arya not because of who it kills or what it can do but the lost family it represents, the agony of many mythological heroines. More physically powerful than Needle and just as meaningful is her direwolf, who is named after Queen Nymeria. It is both by the direwolfâs gathering and leading a massive wolf pack, Aryaâs leadership of her own human friends, and the much bigger part she will play in the Long Night that Arya imitates the primordial Mother Goddess Frankel sees as the model for heroines.
Through ACOK and ASOS, Arya finds herself in the role of pack leader, relying on cunning, deception and evasion to survive. Like Nymeria, her most courageous and clever deeds are not those in which she herself kills or commits violence; indeed, Aryaâs killings are understated in their description: brief, done in self-defense, and/or against an enemy that was already wounded or off their guard. Sheâs not the professional and enthusiastic kind of killer you see in full-grown and trained warriors such as Sandor Clegane, the Mountain, Bronn and Oberyn Martell:
She stuck [the stable boy] with the pointy end, driving the blade upward with a wild, hysterical strength.
Needle went through his leather jerkin and the white flesh of his belly and came out between his shoulder blades. The boy dropped the pitchfork and made a soft noise, something between a gasp and a sigh. His hands closed around the blade. âOh, gods,â he moaned, as his undertunic began to redden. âTake it out.â
When she took it out, he died. âArya, AGOT
He was bald and scared-looking, with missing teeth and a speckly grey beard, but even as she was feeling sorry for him she was killing him, shouting, âWinterfefl! Winterfell!â while Hot Pie screamed âHot Pie!â beside her as he hacked at the manâs scrawny neck. âArya, ACOK
[The Tickler] moved swiftly, light on his feet, never taking his eyes off Sandor Clegane. It was the easiest thing in the world for Arya to step up behind him and stab him.
âIs there gold hidden in the village?â she shouted as she drove the blade up through his back. âIs there silver? Gems?â She stabbed twice more. âIs there food? Where is Lord Beric?â She was on top of him by then, still stabbing. âArya, ASOS
TWOIAF specifies that while Nymeria wore armor, led her armies on the field and was an excellent strategist, she herself did not really do much hand-to-hand combat.
Aryaâs time in Harrenhall also has imagery of the heroine princessâs enslavement, in which she has conflict very wicked stepmother-like figure: Goodwife Harra.
The actual relationships she develops in Harrenhall are not so important for Arya as much as the manner in which she escapes her captivity (Gendry and Hot Pie were important long before this): Both Arya and Sansa are given the option or the power to possibly escape by older, warrior men. Sansa is naturally afraid of Sandor as he appears to her in that moment after the Battle of the Blackwater: drunk, a moment ago was holding a blade to her throat, and also having a mental breakdown, and uncertain how far they would make it. Believing that she might be liberated by Stannisâs forces anyways, she does not go.
But Arya takes what sheâs learned and chooses a different path. To describe it as âviolentâ is misleading, because she doesnât commit some sort of mass slaughter or go toe-to-toe with another warrior. Rather, she arm-twists an actual killer into orchestrating a coup, and then uses trickery to cut the throat of a postern guard.
After Arya drags Gendry and Hot Pie along on a shared escape from Harrenhall, and cut the throat of the postern guard, she remarks that, âHot Pie seemed almost as terrified of her as of the men who might becoming after them. He had seen the guard sheâd killed. Itâs better if heâs scared of me, she told herself. That way heâll do like I say, instead of something stupid.â (Arya, ASOS) This is paler reflection of the righteous, angry mother Goddess that Frankel describes, who scolds her children while saying, âI know whatâs good for you better than you do.â It is a matter of life and death that her âpackâ obeys her, and thus she makes herself the ultimate authority on right or wrong. From what can be gathered from references to Nymeriaâs pack, she rules it with an iron fist, killing males that try to mate with her, hunting down the Bloody Mummerâs that are sent after Arya, and even attacking soldiers. One armed traveler remarks âthey kill as they like, and they got no fear of men. Itâs worth your life to go into those woods by night.â(Arya, ACOK). In the woods, at night, is exactly where Arya encounters them to go the bathroom, and the refuse to do anything more than growl at her; because they know who she is, and that makes her untouchable.
One commentator described the heroineâs journey as such: âWoman loses everything she thinks she needs, discovers her own power, and builds a family who will fight with her to the bitter end.â This is the agony of Aryaâs journey, the sense that her companions always abandon her, that she is condemned to be a lone wolf for so long. If Sansa remarks that âno one will ever marry me for love,â then it is in her darkest, loneliest time that Arya says,
âBut that was just stupid, like something Sansa might dream. Hot Pie and Gendry had left her just as soon as they could, and Lord Beric and the outlaws only wanted to ransom her, just like the Hound. None of them wanted her around. They were never my pack, not even Hot Pie and Gendry. I was stupid to think so, just a stupid little girl, and no wolf at all.-Arya, ASOS
In this way, they embody the different halves of the Goddess archetype: the Maiden who cannot find a truly noble and gentle suitor, and the Mother who trying to rebuild her family.
Like Bran, we can expect to see Arya absorb a part of this Abyss into her being, but without letting it become her. As darkness has âawokenâ Branâs magical powers twice already (First in the crypts, and then in Cave), Aryaâs witnessing of death are catalysts of her transformation. Arya sees more death than either of siblings, and was present at the killing of both their parents.
The Kindly Man says that âonly a few of His servants have been women. Women bring life into the world. We bring the gift of death. No one can do both.â
This may be the heart of why the story has taken Arya to the Faceless Men; more than just to learn stealth and cunning, she is meant to be a very special kind of hero that Campbell calls âThe Master of Two Worldsâ, a figure who represents the magical and divine among mortals, and can move freely across the boundary. Arya as a Queen of Wolves is meant to have the power to preserve life and deliver death.
In many world mythologies, especially those of the West, the moon is imagined as a female deity, and the sun is male. Some anthropologists have suggested that lunar calenders were first created by women who noticed how it coincided with their menstruation. Because of its presence in the dark night sky, the moon is at once associated with ability to create life and also with death, and thus these things are imprinted with femininity also. One historian of the deeply and violently patriarchal Russian peasantry noted this strange duality in their culture:
âRussian peasants identify death with women. The Psalter readers, body washers and mourners were often women, death was represented in Russian folklore as a woman with a scythe, and the Russian word for death, âsmertâ, is feminineâŚ.This ârepresented the real world turned upside down. While on earth the patriarchy controlled and subordinated women, in the world beyond women were in control and took their revenge on the patriarchy by snuffing out life.â
And they are not alone in this respect. In Westeros, the Silent Sisters prepare the dead for the afterlife, while the Stranger is neither male nor female. When the Long Night finally falls, the moon, and Nymeriaâs wolf pack will be a fixture of the landscape, as will Arya.
This is the stage where our knowledge of the Stark childrenâs fates goes from being based in pure analysis of what has happened to so far to investigation of foreshadowing that GRRM has left for us to explicate. As an author, he has structured his fiction on maintaining a critical balance between the suspension of belief that ultimately our heroâs will survive and return (that is, that they could die or a meet a similarly terrible fate), but not âcheatingâ us. As he explained in a one interview:
[GRRM] As long as the twist was justified. You canât just arbitrarily throw in twists and turns that make no sense. Things have to follow. You want the thing in the end where you say, âOh my God, I didnât see that coming, but there was foreshadowing; there was a hint of it here, there was a hint of it there. I should have seen it coming.â And that, to me, is very satisfying. I look for that in the fiction that I read and I try to put it into my own fiction.
[Interviewer] Like with Bran getting pushed, you foreshadow that, too, so the reader doesnât feel cheated. Same with the Red Wedding.
Thereâs always this tension between fiction and life. Fiction has more structure than life does. But we have to hide the structure. We have to hide the writer, I think, and make a story seem like it was true.
Because of this, the Stark children once in the Abyss, enter a state of almost total hopelessness about ever seeing home or their family again. We are meant, as readers, to have the same fear. That is the thrill of fiction. In the new Alayne chapter, GRRM gives us a taste of a Stark who has returned from the Abyss:
Below the mountain the autumn lingered and winter wheat was ripening in the fields. Outside the window she could hear the laughter of the washerwomen at the well, the din of steel on steel from the ward where the knights were at their drills. Good sounds.
Alayne loved it here. She felt alive again, for the first since her father⌠since Lord Eddard Stark had died.-Sansa, TWOW
With her feet on solid ground, Sansa is able to smile, joke, tease and mock (in her thoughts) the nobles around her, and plays with her friend Myranda. She feels confident, and is more cunning and mature in her dealings with Harry the Heir.
Thereâs also the matter that Sansa appears to be being set up as a âdark horseâ among the swirl of intrigue around her. She was the one who engineered the knights of the Vale being brought to the Bloody Gate, and is surprisingly successful with manipulating Harry the Heir during the feast. There are potent and explosive plot elements around her: Sweetrobinâs poor health, Baelishâs food stores, the coming tourney, the Mad Mouse, Sandor nearby at Quiet Isle, suggestive historical parallels, and more but two things are almost certain: Baelishâs fall and the revealing of Sansaâs true identity.
Aryaâs future path is even less certain, beyond that her time with Faceless Men is running short. Her ADWD and TWOW chapters affirm this. Her warging bond with Nymeria is intense, and is pulling her home:
I should not be dreaming wolf dreams, the girl told herself. I am a cat now, not a wolf. I am Cat of the Canals. The wolf dreams belonged to Arya of House Stark. Try as she might, though, she could not rid herself of Arya. It made no difference whether she slept beneath the temple or in the little room beneath the eaves with Bruscoâs daughters, the wolf dreams still haunted her by night⌠and sometimes other dreams as well.â-Arya, AFFC
âI can see the truth in your eyes. You have the eyes of a wolf and a taste for blood.â-Arya, ADWD
She woke with a gasp, not knowing who she was, or where.
The smell of blood was heavy in her nostrils⌠or was that her nightmare, lingering? She had dreamed of wolves again, of running through some dark pine forest with a great pack at her hells, hard on the scent of prey.
She took a breath to quiet the howling in her heart, trying to remember more of what sheâd dreamt, but most of it had gone already. There had been blood in it, though, and a full moon overhead, and a tree that watched her as she ran.-Arya, TWOW
Many speculations have been made about how exactly Arya will return home: with the Hardhome Wildlings that were enslaved, a meeting with Daenerys, possibly wielding Dark Sister, returning through the Wall or the Riverlands or both, but whatever the route, Nymeria, her pack, Winterfell and the undead will be waiting.
Bran, too, has a foreshadowed return, in the form of a story related by Ser Bartimus, a soldier in the service of Lord Manderly, to Davos Seaworth (who will soon find himself as a cog in the formerâs scheme to overthrow the Boltonâs):
When old King Edrick Stark had grown too feeble to defend his realm, the Wolfâs Den was captured by slavers from the Stepstones.
âThen a long cruel winter fell,â said Ser Bartimus. âThe White Knife froze hard, and even the firth was icing up. The winds came howling from the north and drove them slavers inside to huddle round their fires, and whilst they warmed themselves the new king come down on them. Brandon Stark this was, Edrick Snowbeardâs great-grandson, him that men called Ice Eyes. He took the Wolfâs Den back, stripped the slavers naked, and gave them to the slaves heâd found chained up in the dungeons.â -Davos, ADWD.
Meta writers looking at A Dance with Dragons rightly look to this passage as yet another hammering-home on GRRMâs part that the Northmen, including the Starks, gave human sacrifices to the weirwoods and in general were more savage, brutal and primitive than the most recent Stark patriarchs: Ned and Robb.
This passage describes a situation with similarities to the current siege of Winterfell, and a king to our current Bran Stark.
The Wolfâs Den has been taken by enemies of House Stark, with non-northerners involved.
Was lost due to the weakness of a predecessor.
Its defenders are snowed in, unable to see whatâs going on outside the walls, and the blizzard is described as and probably is magical in nature.
Like our Bran Stark, the Ice-Eyes:
Was newly crowned when he made his appearance (or the rightful heir).
Shares the name of House Starkâs legendary founder.
Bran has the Tully coloring, meaning that his eyes are bright blue, which in the narrative are often described as looking like ice.
Appears to have had an especially close relationship with the Old Gods beyond just the normal worship and prayers.
It thus serves much more than just detailing blood sacrifice (which other parts of ADWD, including Branâs weirwood visions), made clear anyway. This passage is about Branâs return, likely as a savior for his people when Stannis triumphs over the Freyâs at Long Lake but still cannot get over the walls and is on the brink of death from starvation and exposure.