#valonqar

I think people have kind of lost sight of it over time and made it more complicated than it actually is, at least to some extent.

I’m not dead set on one specific answer for every unresolved part of it, but I do think there is one very clear pattern running through the prophecy: whoever ends up being the “younger, more beautiful” one or the valonqar, they will be in that position because Cersei herself made it possible. That is the one thing the prophecy is very consistent about, and the thing we can’t forget. She creates the conditions for it. Sometimes she practically hand-delivers them. Over and over again, she helps make Maggy right.

Everyone gets stuck on trying to “solve” the riddle of who exactly fills each role, and in doing that, they lose the bigger pattern. The pattern is not really that Maggy speaks in impossible riddles. The pattern is that Cersei hears the prophecy, and then starts acting in ways that make it come true exactly as stated.

So if we want to think about the unresolved parts, I honestly think the easiest way is to start with the parts that have already happened and look at how they happened.

Unlike some other prophecies in asoiaf, Cersei’s is actually pretty direct.

The first part is the clearest example of this.

“When will I wed the prince?”

“Never. You will wed the king.”

There is no twist there. No hidden meaning. Cersei does not marry Rhaegar, the prince she wanted. She marries Robert, the king.

That is just straight-up what happens.

Same thing with the children.

“Will the king and I have children?”

“Oh, aye. Six-and-ten for him, and three for you.”

Again, this is pretty direct. Robert has many children. Cersei has three.

Now, this is the part where we start seeing Cersei actively working with Maggy the frog to make it happen.

“Gold shall be their crowns and gold their shrouds.”

This is where we can see the prophecy doing more than one thing at once. “Gold shall be their crowns” works as a double meaning, obviously. Yes, they wear literal crowns because they are passed off as royal children. But they also have “gold” crowns in the sense that they are golden-haired Lannister children, not black-haired Baratheons. Their gold is the proof of what they are. Bastards. And it’s the gold that puts them in danger, that will bring their golden shrouds to cover them. Their parentage is exactly what makes their lives precarious in the first place. Cersei chooses to have Jaime’s children. Cersei chooses to pass them off as Robert’s. Cersei chooses to place illegitimate children in the royal line. She sets up the exact situation that makes their deaths possible.

And then there is Melara, of course.

“Will I marry Jaime?”

“Not Jaime, nor any other man. Worms will have your maidenhead. Your death is here tonight, little one.”

Melara dies because Cersei kills her. Once more, Cersei acting as the mechanism through which the prophecy comes true.

That is what I keep coming back to. The prophecy does not just predict events. In Cersei’s case, it keeps predicting events that she herself helps bring about.

And the irony with this prophecy is that Cersei is wrong about basically everything else when it comes to her life, but not this. She is not wrong about the prophecy becoming true. She is actively working to make it happen, and it’s the one thing she’s succeeding at.

So once we recognize the pattern, we can now try to solve the rest of it applying the same concept. The real question is not “who fits this role?” The real question is: who has Cersei put in the position to fit?

The younger, more beautiful one

“Queen you shall be… until there comes another, younger and more beautiful, to cast you down and take all that you hold dear.”

This is the one of the part where I think people (mostly Reddit dudebros) narrow the wording too much. Maggy does not say a younger, more beautiful queen. She just says is someone younger and more beautiful. That leaves a lot more room.

Margaery obviously fits. Daenerys obviously fits. Arianne makes sense depending on where George goes politically. Sansa is less immediate, but still possible. I’m not gonna dwell on them because there are tons of metas about how they fit into the prophecy that have been discussed at length.

I want to talk about Brienne. I think Brienne belongs in this conversation too, for a few reasons:

First, there is the irony of her being called Brienne the Beauty.

Second, she is one of the most beautiful characters in the series. Her soul is beautiful. Her loyalty is beautiful. Her courage is beautiful. She is the antitheses of Cersei, who is rotten to her core.

Third, there’s Jaime. If her ownership of him and the absolute loyalty and devotion Cersei expects of him is one of the things she’s considers “dear”, then Brienne becomes extremely interesting, especially because Jaime has already chosen Brienne over Cersei multiple times, ultimately leaving her to die and choosing to follow Brienne instead. So this part of the prophecy might already actively be in the works, just like Cersei losing all of her children is.

With all of that said, I’m not sold on either of these options yet. I have of course some preferences and what I think it might be, but I can see it going several ways.

Valonqar

This is the part people get the most fixated on, and fair enough. It is the most dramatic one.

“And when your tears have drowned you, the valonqar shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you.”

The Valonqar = Little Brother.

The obvious options are still the obvious options. Tyrion and Jaime are both younger siblings. Both have long, ugly histories with her. Both are thematically loaded choices.

And I think the strongest common thread, again, is that if either one of them is the valonqar, Cersei herself will be the reason he ended up in that role.

Tyrion

Tyrion is still a very strong possibility, maybe the strongest.

Cersei has spent Tyrion’s whole life treating him like a monster, humiliating him, demeaning him, hating him, pushing him further and further outside the family. If Tyrion eventually kills her, he will be, in a very real sense, a monster she helped create.

That fits the pattern perfectly. Cersei fears Tyrion, abuses Tyrion, helps shape Tyrion into someone who has every reason in the world to hate her, and then one day that hatred comes back to finish her off.

That would be very clean, thematically.

Jaime

Jaime is where I part ways a bit with the more popular reading.

I get why he is such a popular choice. He is the other younger sibling, the plot twist.

But I am not fully sold on Jaime as the Valonqar, at least not in the way people usually frame it.

For one, George has gone out of his way to place Jaime geographically far away from Cersei. That does not mean he cannot get back to her, obviously, but it is still something worth paying attention to. If George wanted Jaime near Cersei right now, he could have done that. He did not.

For another, Jaime is not in the emotional place people often imagine he is, which is something that shows me that either people have truly terrible lack of reading comprehension or they haven’t truly read his chapters. He is not some scorned lover simmering in jealous rage by the point we last see him in the story. He is not obsessed with her in the way show-only readings tend to assume. He is already well past that. By this point he is disillusioned, tired, disgusted, and increasingly indifferent to her. He burned her letter and left her to her fate. One of his last thoughts about her is that he hopefully thinks she might have died already so he doesn’t have to deal with her when he tries to rescue Tommen. That is not a man heading toward a murder out of passion.

So if Jaime is the valonqar, it won’t be because he suddenly becomes consumed by jealousy or heartbreak. It will be because Cersei puts him in a position where he has to act.

And I would bet that it would have to be because she becomes a direct threat to something outside herself. The city. Tommen. Jaime himself. Somebody Jaime is trying to protect. And in this last specific scenario, if it’s Brienne, it connects two threads of the prophecy together: YMB and Valonqar.

If Brienne is the YMB, Jaime’s odds as valonqar go up a lot imo.

But without Cersei becoming a huge threat, be it to Kings Landing, Tommen, Jaime or Brienne, I am less convinced of Jaime fitting the role. Jaime as valonqar is possible, but I do not think the popular version of it (Jaime killing her in some dramatic fit of rage, jealousy, or twisted love) lines up with where his book arc actually is.

As I’m not a believer of the show’s ending for him (both Cersei’s prophecy and Jaime’s weirwood dream are clear indications they will not die together and that she dies way before he does), I think between Jaime and Tyrion, Tyrion is a more likely possibility for the Valonqar role.

Other possibilities

There are, of course, other younger brothers in the story.

Loras is a younger brother.

Tommen is a younger brother.

Even if these are less likely in the strictest narrative sense, they still demonstrate how open the wording is. But whichever little brother it is, the pattern we need to look for is: Cersei will have helped create him as her destroyer.

So what is the actual key to the prophecy?

To me, the key is simple: stop looking at it like a riddle where the only important thing is matching names to roles.

Look at the pattern.

Every major fulfilled or partly fulfilled part of the prophecy points in the same direction. Cersei helps bring it about. She either creates the conditions, sharpens them, or outright forces the outcome herself.

So the unresolved parts should probably work the same way.

Whoever the younger, more beautiful one is, Cersei will have helped put her in that position.

Whoever the valonqar is, Cersei will have helped make him into that person.

The main part of the “prophecy” is such:

“Six-and-ten for him, and three for you. Gold shall be their crowns and gold their shrouds, she said. And when your tears have drowned you, the valonqar shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you.”

Okay - first sentence seems straightforward enough. Cersei’s asking if she and the unspecified king (before Robert’s Rebellion, she would have believed it referred to Rhaegar) will have children. We know King Robert had many bastard children while Cersei only had 3.

“Gold crowns” = either literal crowns or hair (in which case, Myrcella might not outlive Tommen and/or be crowned queen in the books)

“Gold shrouds” = literally, gold burial cloth. However, we may not want to take this literally. According to Merriam-Webster, shroud is also defined as “something that covers, screens, or guards” + has an obsolete meaning of “shelter, protection”. (It’s probably safe to assume that shrouds on a sailboat/ship have nothing to do with this - though that would certainly be a fascinating use of figurative symbolism) So it may not be a given that all three of Cersei’s children will pre-decease her in the books.

“When your tears have drowned you” = since literally drowning in tears would be very difficult, we can safely take this part figuratively. The thing about Cersei is that she’s awful and unlikable and she is utterly unhappy. One might argue she’s been “drowning in her tears” since birth, cursed to always want what she does not or cannot have. She’s never happy or content with what she has. She wants and wants and wants - and yet, when she gets it, she’s still left wanting. Nothing - power, sex, money, family, etc - is enough to “fill the void”. As much as we might hate her, there’s something desperately sad about that.

Which leads to the last part - and by far the most complicated.

Now, the debate has usually been about whether the valonqar is Jaime or Tyrion.

Fair enough. But there’s two other considerations.

First, the use of “the” in “the valonqar”, which could indicate that Maggy was not referring to Cersei’s valonqar, but a valonqar. This could allude to a number of people, including but not limited to; Sandor Clegane, Loras Tyrell, Young Griff/Aegon (if he truly is Aegon, son of Elia & Rhaegar), or even Bran Stark.

The chief issue with this may be the the grammatically possessive nature of the word. The term “younger brother” implicitly refers to two individuals - the person being referred to and the person being used as the point of reference.

This is really funny with young kids who are old enough to understand that they have a brother or sister but too young to understand that they are their sibling’s sibling.

And yet we’re given no additional information or indication of who that other person might be and/or their significance (if any). The only known valonqar of someone already mentioned in the prophecy would be Stannis or Renly Baratheon. It could also also figuratively refer to Ned Stark since he and Robert were “like brothers”.

However, two of those three are long dead and buried. So unless Others raise them from dead… 🤣

Alternately, David J Peterson has expanded on the words for family within High Valyrian and there is a fascinating cultural-linguistic distinction when it comes to differentiating between fathers/mothers/siblings and uncles/aunts/cousins. If the valonqar of the prophecy does refer to a relative of Cersei; we now know that it can now refer to Jaime, Tyrion, and any son of Tywin’s brothers or Joanna’s sisters who is younger than Cersei. We know Joanna had two sisters, but they have never been named and we don’t know anything about marriages or children. However, we do know that of Tywin’s brothers, Kevan Lannister has three sons - Lancel, Willem, and Martyn - and Tyggett had one - Tyrek. All four are younger than Cersei.

However, all of this makes the assumption that the valonqar is still alive - which is not necessarily a given. It is quite possible that the strangling in question is figurative or metaphorical.

Being strangled by someone’s bare hands is often perceived as a particularly horrible way to die - a (relatively) slow, terrifyingly intimate death.

We also tend to assume that the prophecy will occur in chronological order. That Cersei’s children will die, she’ll cry, and then someone will strangle her to death.

But if shrouds doesn’t specifically refer to burial cloth and we see Cersei as someone who has already drowned in her unhappiness, she might already be in the process of having the “life choked out of her”.

So… some alternatives to Jaime or Tyrion might include:

Ned Stark = confronted Cersei about her adultery and treason. “Forced” her into a position of control and power & of having to protect and defend her own power and that of her family. Heavy is the head that wears the crown. And a crown could feel like a noose around one’s neck because when you’re at the top, there’s nowhere to go but down.

Lancel Lannister = Through Cersei’s manipulations, he gave King Robert the drugged wine that lead to Robert’s death. Tyrion uses this, and his affair with Cersei, to blackmail/coerce Lancel into providing intel on Cersei - becoming a not-insignificant part of the twisted web of intrigue that is slowly but steadily beginning to close in around Cersei. He later becomes one of her accusers when she is imprisoned by the Faith.

Bran Stark - There is a reason why the narrative of ASOIAF begins when it does. Cersei’s demand that Jaime push Bran from the tower could be seen as the definitive point of no return. While it serves as the impetus and beginning of Jaime’s character arc, it also does the same for Cersei. To put it melodramatically: She has set the board. The game begins. And the noose begins to tighten around her neck.