“Nothing's more hateful than failing
to protect the one you love.”
Brienne of Tarth attracts
a lot of mockery in her world.
“Did you just bow?”
“Apologies, Your Grace.
I never did master the curtsy.”
That’s because while she embodies
the virtues of knighthood like strength,
service and loyalty,
she’s a woman.
“A great beast of a woman.”
‘Game of Thrones’ is based on
subverting the obvious tropes
of fantasy and medieval history.
So we’re first introduced to
the perfect image of the
white knight in shining armor
in Jaime Lannister,
but we’re immediately told
he’s anything but.
“Old Lord Karstark
doesn't seem to like me.”
“You strangled his son
with your chains.”
“ He was in my way.
Any knight would have
done the same.”
Then in Season Two we meet Brienne,
who is the laughingstock for her
‘wrong’ appearance,
“I see my men have finally found you
something appropriate to wear.”
but underneath that,
she is the real thing.
“You're the best fighter I've ever seen.
You beat the Hound.
I'm proud to be your squire.”
The story brings together Jaime and Brienne
to peer deeply into the question
of what being a true knight really means,
“I will shield your back and
keep your counsel and
give my life for yours if need be.”
and whether the ideals of
noble service and oathkeeping
are even possible in a compromising,
brutal, grey world.
“No matter what you do,
you're forsaking one vow
or another.”
As the recognized orders of the
Seven Kingdoms start to fall apart,
Brienne’s authentic knightly qualities
become far more important than
any superficial name or title.
“Maybe you were as good
as people said once.
Or maybe people just love to
overpraise a famous name.”
So let’s look at how Brienne reminds us
that,
even in a world that routinely rewards
insincerity and falsehood,
there’s unmatchable power
in being the real thing.
“Aren’t you just marvelous.
Absolutely singular.”
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“Where did you find this beast?”
“She is a truer knight
than you will ever be.”
Jaime and Brienne’s intriguing relationship
centers on the identity of the knight
and the ideal of honorable service.
“Bit of a complication.”
“A complication does not
release you from a vow.”
Today we associate knights
with noble behavior,
but in medieval times
they were not necessarily
the most honorable figures.
In fact, the chivalric code,
or knightly code of honor,
was established to
rein in aggressive knights
who weren’t acting respectably.
So in the eyes of history,
Jaime is probably the more
historically accurate knight.
Meanwhile the morally upright Brienne
is like an ideal of a knight,
taken from a literary fantasy and
dropped into this dirty, ugly world.
“I ask the honor of a place
in your kingsguard.
I will be one of your seven,
pledge my life to yours and
keep you safe from all harm.”
And at first she does come across
like a ‘Don Quixote’ of sorts,
“Soon I'll fight for him
on the battlefield.
Die for him if I must.”
just like Quixote wants to be a knight
in a world where chivalry has
faded out of existence,
Brienne’s idealistic
conception of knighthood
doesn’t really exist for
the most part in Westeros,
and perhaps never has.
“What kind of knight
beats a helpless girl?”
“The kind who serves his king, Imp.”
When they first meet,
Jaime himself is amused and intrigued
by Brienne’s self-seriousness.
“It’s wonderful to watch you wrestle
with these dilemmas.
Which will she choose?”
His role in the early seasons is to challenge
the traditional conception of the knight
and reveal its contradictions.
“Defend the king, obey the king,
obey your father, protect the innocent,
defend the weak.
But what if your father
despises the king?
What if the king
massacres the innocent?”
And he’s such an intriguing character
because he’s not a bad knight,
he’s a knight living in a complex society.
In fact, he has always stayed loyal
to one vow he placed above the others:
“I’ve only ever been with Cersei,
so in my own way I have more honor than
poor old dead Ned.”
Still, it becomes clear that underneath
his shell of arrogance and moral relativism,
some part of him relates to Brienne’s
simple and earnest faith in these ideals.
He, too, once wanted to be a knight
because he believed in what it meant.
“You’re a knight, Ser Jaime.
I know there is honor in you.”
Through his time with Brienne,
Jaime reveals that he’s always had
the ‘Real Thing’ inside of him, too.
“Lord Selwyn would pay his daughter's weight
in sapphires if she's returned to him.
But only if she's alive,
her honor unbesmirched.”
On some level the purity of Brienne’s
commitment to her vow has moved him.
“I know what you did for me.”
We also get hints that –
just because Jaime is worldly –
that doesn’t mean that deep down
he approves of this world.
“If you were a woman
you wouldn’t resist.
You’d let them do
what they wanted.”
“If I were a woman
I’d make them kill me.
I’m not, thank the gods.”
Moreover, with Brienne,
we come to realize that
he’s actually been
a good person all along.
“If your precious Renly commanded you
to kill your own father and stand by while
thousands of men, women,
and children burned alive,
would you have done it?”
It says a lot about the world he’s grown
up in
that he feels he has to hide this fact –
it’s almost like his honor is a dirty secret
he covers up with
the conceited, careless facade.
But his long period of captivity –
culminating in the loss of the hand
which gives him his warrior identity—
“I was that hand.”
chips away at the emotional armor
he’s long hidden behind.
While a man like Ned Stark,
whose persona is defined by his honor,
looks down on Jaime
privately Jaime has looked down
on the overly simplistic Ned, too.
“By what right does
the wolf judge the lion?”
Jaime did the harder thing by
forgoing the credit for his noble act,
and letting himself be the villain.
“You are no knight.
You have forsaken every vow
you ever took.”
But over time Brienne helps Jaime
own his honorable side.
She tries to get him to honor
his promise to Catelyn Stark,
even if there’s no earthly upside to doing
so.
“You made a promise.”
“To return the Stark girls to their mother
who is now dead.”
And when he gives Brienne armor
and the Valyrian Steel sword
his father meant for him,
he is finally agreeing to uphold
his end of the bargain.
“Lady Stark's dead.
Arya's probably dead, too,
but there's still a chance to find Sansa
and get her somewhere safe.”
She names the sword:
“Oathkeeper.”
an inversion of Jaime’s nickname,
‘Oathbreaker’.
“You know what they call me?
Kingslayer.
Oathbreaker.
Man without honor.”
She herself is obviously
an Oathkeeper to the extreme.
“My Lady if both Stark girls
refused your service,
maybe you're released from your vow.”
“I swore to their mother
I would protect those girls.”
“But if they don't want your protection…”
“Do you think she's safe with Littlefinger?”
But her sword’s name is really
a correction to Jaime’s moniker,
sending a message that in her eyes,
he’s a man who keeps his promises.
Meanwhile, the ultimate insider Jaime
extends to this outsider Brienne
the protection, means and legitimacy
that his Lannister name and wealth
can sometimes provide.
Like when he uses his leverage
to bargain for Brienne’s freedom,
“I’m taking her to King’s Landing,
unless you kill me.”
outfits her with the right-looking
knightly equipment,
“I hope I got your measurements right.”
and finally uses his traditionally authority
to bestow on her the title.
“Arise, Brienne of Tarth
a knight of the Seven Kingdoms.”
And on the personal level,
he helps her to expand
her black-and-white outlook,
to admit a little more complex grey.
“Please my lady,
if I could explain.”
“I saw you at Joffrey's wedding
bowing to the king.”
“Neither of us wanted to be there.
Sometimes we don't have a choice.”
This broader understanding comes in handy
when she’s hit by a confusing crisis of
faith
after she finds the Stark girls
she swore to protect,
but both refuse her help.
“I swore to your mother
by the old gods…”
“I don't care what you swore.”
Her original straightforward
understanding
of what it means to
keep an oath is challenged,
and by extension, so is her worldview.
Having witnessed the depth
of the pain Jaime experienced,
she’s more prepared to grapple with
the complexity of her situation.
Thanks to this inner fortitude,
she weathers the test and
doubles down on her faith
that it still matters to keep a promise,
even if no one asks you to.
“Sansa’s in danger even if
she doesn’t realize it.”
And this pays off when Brienne is there
at the right moment
to save Sansa and Theon
from being recaptured by the Boltons.
“Lady Sansa,
I offer my services once again.”
So these two opposite knights
make each other better by believing
in the other’s knightly nature.
“You would fight beside him?”
“I would.”
As Jaime says in season eight:
“Any knight can make another knight.”
while he’s talking about
the formal ceremony,
on a deeper level
this gets at how these two
have made each other
the best knights they can be.
“Well I’m proud of you, I am,
you fulfilled your oath to Catelyn Stark
against all odds.”
After he takes Joffrey’s Valyrian steel
sword,
their twin swords represent that
they are two halves of a whole,
they complete each other.
And the name ‘Oathkeeper’, too,
represents their implied oath to each other,
“Tell me that's not Lannister gold.”
“Jaime Lannister gave me this sword.”
which Jaime finally makes explicit.
“I'd be honored to serve
under your command,
if you'll have me.”
Brienne is the most pure knight we meet,
but for most of the story she’s not allowed
to be called one.
“You're not a knight?”
“Women can't be knights.”
So she’s a reminder
that in this messed-up world,
the perfect appearance
belies a corrupt interior,
while the actual thing doesn’t get
to go by the authentic name.
“Maybe you were as good as people said,
once,
or maybe people just
love to overpraise a famous name.”
Once Joffrey becomes king,
the other most honorable knight
we spend time with –
the prestigious Ser Barristan Selmy,
for whom Jaime once squired –
is kicked out of the Kingsguard,
signaling that this rotten world
is just getting worse.
But in season eight
when Jaime finally corrects
the tradition that’s kept Brienne
from her rightful title,
“Ser Brienne of Tarth.”
this act is a gesture toward
giving things their rightful names,
a key step toward repairing the connection
between appearances or titles,
and the actual nature of the things they signal.
“Their mother’s dead.”
“That doesn’t release me from an oath.
I served Lady Catelyn,
I serve her still.”
Most characters on ‘Game of Thrones’
are desperate to rule on the Iron Throne,
but Brienne lives to serve.
“All I ever wanted was
to fight for a lord I believed in.”
In feudal society, knights served lords
in return for land, food and lodging.
So this relationship is very much
based on an exchange.
When Brienne makes her vow to Sansa,
Sansa tentatively makes the vow back
like her mother did before her.
“And I vow that you shall always
have a place by my hearth and….”
“Meat and mead at my table.”
“Meat and mead at my table.”
It's a two-way relationship,
the person the knight serves
has to be worthy.
“I shall ask no service of you
that might bring you dishonor.”
This person who knows in her bones
that her purpose is to serve
struggles for a while to find
that right person to serve.
“Must be exciting to flit from
one camp to the next
serving whichever lord
or lady you fancy.”
Yet the people she makes vows to
share an underlying goodness
that moves her.
While she may not be aware of it,
Brienne serves people who are
underestimated or unconventional
in some sense.
Renly was not the Baratheon with
the best blood claim to the throne.
But while people assume
she was loyal to him
because she was in ‘love’,
“Close your eyes.
Pretend they're Renly.”
eventually she shares that it was because
of
his acceptance and generosity of spirit.
“He danced with me because he was kind
and didn't want to see me hurt.
He saved me from being a joke.”
Both were an ‘other’ in some form,
and accepted that about each other.
“Yes, Pod, he liked men.
I'm not an idiot.”
After Renly dies and
she pledges herself to Catelyn,
she’s again inspired by
the valor of an individual
who’s not the traditional
male king in power.
“You have courage.
Not battle courage, perhaps, but,
I don't know, a woman's kind of courage.”
Like a classic knight,
Brienne has a squire.
Just like Brienne,
Podrick doesn’t start out
with all the trappings of
a prestigious squire.
“Mostly I poured wine.”
Yet Podrick becomes
the real thing, too.
After a rough start,
Brienne tries to realease him
from her service.
“I swore an oath, my lady.”
“I am releasing you from that oath.
That means you could leave.”
But he refuses, showing
that he takes his oaths
as seriously as she does.
He gains her respect when he tells her
that he killed a man defending his previous
lord.
“He tried to kill Lord Tyrion
at the Blackwater.”
This proof of his loyalty
sparks Brienne’s interest
because it shows
he has this moral code,
and for her, the fighting,
strength and other skills
all come second to
the core knightly values.
Podrick’s faithful service is a key part
of what gets her through her dark period.
“I'm sorry I'm always snapping at you.”
“If you didn't snap at me,
I wouldn't learn anything.”
And while Brienne doesn’t
think of herself as a leader,
“I don't want anyone following me.
I'm not a leader.”
she ends up being
a powerful mentor to Podrick.
“Starting tomorrow,
we'll train with a sword twice a day.
Before we ride in the morning and
after you make camp in the evening.”
In an unconventional way,
Jaime and Brienne
are one of the show’s great love stories.
“I don't serve your brother,
Your Grace.”
“But you love him.”
Many of our modern ideas of romance
stem from ‘courtly love’,
the topic of Medieval literature in which
knights demonstrate love through acts
of daring and chivalry.
So it’s fitting that at his core
Jaime Lannister is a lover,
defined by the woman whom he serves.
“The things we do for love.”
For most of his life
that woman is Cersei.
“I've never been with
any woman but Cersei.”
Yet as we watch Jaime longingly staring
at Brienne in Season 8,
we might be reminded of the actor
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s comments
that he believes the two are in love,
even if they’d never act on it.
“I think they are soulmates and I think
that
maybe in a different world they would
be able to act on that
weird attraction they have,
but again there would have
to be a different world.”
These two lady loves of Jaime’s life
represent the two sides of him.
When he was devoted to Cersei,
he was a haughty, semi-villainous inversion
of the traditional Knight in Shining Armor
trope.
But now that he’s pledged
his service to Brienne
this underlines
that he’s openly embraced
his better nature.
“The perils of self-betterment.”
Jaime’s two soulmates
are inverses of each other.
Both have an “ugliness” of sorts:
Brienne's is on the surface,
at least as far as her world is concerned,
“And I realized I was the ugliest girl alive.
A great lumbering beast.”
while Cersei is very beautiful on the outside
but has an ugliness within.
“You're a hateful woman.
Why have the gods made me
love a hateful woman?”
It’s this combination of dark and light,
of surpassing excellence mixed
with something that is hated,
that makes Jaime feel so connected to them.
He loves Brienne for embodying the ideals
that he felt forced to compromise on,
but also relates to the fact
that she’s belittled by the world,
as he, the Kingslayer,
is the ultimate misunderstood type.
“You served him well,
and serving was safe.”
While Jaime and Cersei have
an intense sexual connection,
Brienne has a chaste quality about her,
“Don’t worry,
not interested.”
and their bond is emotional
rather than physical.
It’s also interesting that
Brienne and Jaime’s friendship
grows stronger after he loses his hand,
while the loss of his manly power
and warrior’s virility
is a big turn-off for Cersei.
“You come back after all this time
with no apologies and one hand
and expect everything to be the same?”
Jaime and Brienne’s love story
also has some classic inspirations.
According to actress Gwendoline Christie,
George R.R. Martin told her he wanted to,
quote,
“Take the traditional format
of Beauty and the Beast
and change the roles,
and also the genders.”
The beauty sees through
the beast’s fearsome exterior
to the kind soul underneath.
Is Jaime the beauty seeing past
Brienne’s beastly appearance,
or Brienne the beauty seeing through
Jaime’s beastly persona?
Really - it’s both.
“We don’t choose who we love.”
Jaime once thought it was his fighting hand
that made him a knight,
but Brienne shows him
it’s his steadfastness, humility,
and keeping your word even when
the entire world is telling you
you’re off the hook.
“Catelyn Stark would be proud.
You kept your vow.”
“I did next to nothing.”
If Brienne can transform
the ‘Kingslayer’ into the ‘Oathkeeper’,
this proves that being the ideal you believe
in
has the power to win hearts
and change the world.
“All my life men like you
have sneered at me.
And all my life I've been knocking
men like you into the dust.”
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