If Tywin drops dead before the Purple Wedding, who gets the Rock?

If Tywin died suddenly before AGOT starts, who would inherit Casterly Rock? Jaimie is out, so would it go to Tyrion or Kevan?

ravenking1771 said:Hey there I saw the recent question about the Casterly Rock inheritance and I wanted to know how firmly did the medieval aristocracy adhere to inheritance I.e. Tyrion is Tywin eldest eligible make child and thus from a legal perspective his heir but Tywin does not consider him and if Tywin died before the events of the novel Tyrion would no doubt be challenged if not passed over by his family, so I wanted know how firmly did these governments respect inheritance rights?

Since I’ve gotten a couple questions about this, I figure I should probably consolidate them into one response rather than repeat myself. It depends on what Tywin set out in his will, and the balance of political power when it comes to both the claimants and whoever might enforce and/or recognize the validity of the will.

Certainly, Tyrion would have a very strong claim under Westerosi law; he is the oldest eligible male child of the deceased, and he had done nothing that would make him ineligible (like joining the Night’s Watch or the Citadel or the Faith).

However, whoever Tywin named in the will would also have a claim, and that claim would be buttressed by that person’s own lineage – if it’s Cersei, proximity would no doubt be stressed as well as the will; if it’s Kevan, then he’d be pointing to being the son of Tytos as well as Tywin’s brother as well as the wil. And so on.

But the balance of power is important: if Tywin dies pre-AGOT, Cersei is going to lobby for her own line (whether for herself or one of her children), and Robert might give in or he might give it to Tyrion out of spite, or he might want to give it to Kevan b/c Kevan fits his mental model of a strong Warden of the West (in the same way that he didn’t want a sickly boy to hold the Wardenship of the East). At the same time, Jon Arryn’s wishes would play a large role in that situation; he’s more of a traditionalist, so he might want it to go to Tyrion because Andal law says so and wills that go against the law lead to civil war and disorder.

If Tywin dies pre-Purple Wedding, it depends when exactly. If it’s after the Battle of Blackwater, Cersei is Regent and Tyrion has lost his handship, so he’s at a disadvantage. If it’s before the Battle of Blackwater, Tyrion has a significant advantage.

However, a lot would depend on how the Lannister lords at the Rock or at Harrenhal or at King’s Landing decide to jump: do they take their cues from Kevan as the oldest male Lannister on the spot, and does that mean he gets to play kingmaker or does he go for the Rock himself? Is their misogyny stronger than their ableism or vice versa? Do they fear that Tyrion’s heirs would inherit both the Rock and Winterfell, or that Cersei’s children would inherit both the Rock and the throne and/or Storm’s End?

It occurs to me that Jaime’s sulky act surrounding his regicide might have less to do with breaking his oath to avert a holocaust than with his own dysfunctional relationship with Tywin. Have we ever seen an account of Tywin’s reaction to Aerys’s death?

I don’t think it’s got a lot to do with his relationship with Tywin – Aerys ordering Jaime to kill his father is the catalyst that gets Jaime to finally act on his feelings, but the feelings that were already there before Tywin enters into it were primarily about the conflict between his romantic conception of knighthood and the horrific reality of serving a mad king who got his rocks off on burning people alive.

As for Tywin’s reaction to Jaime killing Aerys specifically, I think he would have seen it quite similarly to how he saw the death of Rhaenys and Aegon:

“We had come late to Robert’s cause. It was necessary to demonstrate our loyalty. When I laid those bodies before the throne, no man could doubt that we had forsaken House Targaryen forever.” (ASOS, Tyrion VI)

For Robert to become king, Aerys needed to die. Jaime killing Aerys was another example of the Lannisters demonstrating their loyalty to the new regime, and was thus the necessary and practical thing.

OTOH, I think Tywin would have felt very differently about what Jaime did after. Sitting the Iron Throne ahead of Robert could have jeopardized the Lannister-Baratheon alliance; if you’re going to sit the throne, you only do it if you mean to rule and have a plan that you’ll ruthlessly pursue to make it happen.

And so on.

I know Tywin was in a bit of a tough place when Robb went west but shouldn’t his first priority still have been Kings Landing? If Stannis overthrows Joffrey, Tywin knows Stannis will have Tywin’s head. Sure, staying put places a lot of stress on his men (many might desert) but going west seems like a doomed strategy (but for GRRM’s heavy thumb). Wouldn’t it have made some sense to at least send some reinforcements to KL and/or strong diplomacy with the Tyrells? We don’t really seem that yet.

So I talked about this a lot in my coverage of ACOK. In many ways, Tywin is in a no-win scenario: if he abandons the west, he might arrive in King’s Landing without an army; if he heads west, he might lose the capital, the king, and thus any sense of a political sentiment. My guess is that he was banking on King’s Landing being able to last long enough in a siege situation for him to get to the Westerlands and back.

Splitting his army would have been very dangerous indeed, because in that scenario he wouldn’t have had the numerical advantage against Edmure’s army, which raises the odds that Edmure win a much more decisive victory at the Red Fork and/or go on the offensive and catch Tywin’s army before it can get to King’s Landing.

Diplomacy with the Tyrells worked out in OTL, but was very much a “heavy thumb” moment. Keep in mind the Tyrells have been the major threat to King’s Landing, blockading grain supplies and besieging it from a distance, and gradually moving up their army to attack directly. Up until Renly unexpectly dies, they have no reason to make a deal with Tywin rather than overthrow his regime.

Could Tywin have asked Robert to release Jaime from the Kingsguard immediately after the rebellion? And send him back to Casterly Rock. Also if the answer is yes, I don’t understand why he didn’t do it.

He could have asked, but Robert wouldn’t have necessarily said yes…

However, the way Tywin phrases it here suggests that he did see Jaime’s vow as binding until recently:

Lord Tywin glanced at Jaime’s stump again. “You cannot serve in the Kingsguard without a sword hand—”
“I can,” he interrupted. “And I will. There’s precedent. I’ll look in the White Book and find it, if you like. Crippled or whole, a knight of the Kingsguard serves for life.”
“Cersei ended that when she replaced Ser Barristan on grounds of age. A suitable gift to the Faith will persuade the High Septon to release you from your vows. Your sister was foolish to dismiss Selmy, admittedly, but now that she has opened the gates—” (Jaime VII, ASOS)

So it may well have been that he thought at the time that it was unthinkable that a member of the Kingsguard would be dismissed from office, but once it happened, he was happy enough to use the precedent (and a fair bit of bribery) to get what he wanted.

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Tyrion III, ASOS

“Too many strange faces, Tyrion thought, too many new players. The game changed while I lay rotting in my bed, and no one will tell me the rules.” Synopsis: Tyrion attends a Small Council meeting and finds out he’s engaged. Mazeltov? SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.…

View On WordPress

“The Boltons are planning to betray the Lannisters when they get a chance” Wait, what?

See here and here. Tywin’s original plan always had tension between the interests of the Lannisters and the Boltons:

“Why, do you plan to mistreat her?” His father sounded more curious than concerned. “The girl’s happiness is not my purpose, nor should it be yours. Our alliances in the south may be as solid as Casterly Rock, but there remains the north to win, and the key to the north is Sansa Stark…Come spring, the northmen will have had a bellyful of krakens. When you bring Eddard Stark’s grandson home to claim his birthright, lords and little folk alike will rise as one to place him on the high seat of his ancestors.” (Tyrion III)

Lord Bolton will wed the girl to his bastard son. We shall allow the Dreadfort to fight the ironborn for a few years, and see if he can bring Stark’s other bannermen to heel. Come spring, all of them should be at the end of their strength and ready to bend the knee. The north will go to your son by Sansa Stark … if you ever find enough manhood in you to breed one. Lest you forget, it is not only Joffrey who must needs take a maidenhead.” (Tyrion VI)

“The price was cheap by any measure. The crown shall grant Riverrun to Ser Emmon Frey once the Blackfish yields. Lancel and Daven must marry Frey girls, Joy is to wed one of Lord Walder’s natural sons when she’s old enough, and Roose Bolton becomes Warden of the North and takes home Arya Stark.” (Tyrion VI)

So the Boltons would have the Wardenship and Arya, Tyrion would have Sansa and Winterfell, but that’s not a tenable situation over the long-term because only one of these houses can rule the North. So Tywin wants to wear down Roose Bolton’s power by having him fight the Ironborn and the Stark loyalists, and then turn on him to consolidate power in the person of Tyrion’s Lannister-Stark son.

Roose Bolton realizes this, but he also realizes that once he’s up in the North with his carefully-hoarded Bolton-Frey army, there’s really nothing the Lannisters can do to him all the way down in King’s Landing:

“Lord Bolton aspires to more than mere lordship. Why not King of the North? Tywin Lannister is dead, the Kingslayer is maimed, the Imp is fled. The Lannisters are a spent force, and you were kind enough to rid him of the Starks. Old Walder Frey will not object to his fat little Walda becoming a queen. White Harbor might prove troublesome should Lord Wyman survive this coming battle … but I am quite sure that he will not. No more than Stannis. Roose will remove both of them, as he removed the Young Wolf. Who else is there?” (ADWD, Prince of Winterfell)

If the Lannister-Baratheon dynasty and its major supporters survived the War of the Five Kings, how do you think Tywin’s “divide and rule” doctrine would have worked long term? How manageable would the Riverlands have been with the Freys in control of the Twins and Riverrun and the lord paramount based out of Harrenhal, or the North with the Lannister of Winterfell as lord paramount and the Dreadfort holding the title of Warden of the North, compared to the previous centralized models in each?

I don’t think it would have worked well:

The Riverlands are going to be incredibly unstable, since the Freys are hated, over-extended (with half of their forces sent North, and the rest trying to hold the Twins, Riverrun, Darry, Seagard), and likely to face a rebellion. On top of that, the de jure Lord Paramount (who’s also Lord Protector of the Vale) is looking to overthrow the Lannister-Baratheon dynasty.
At the heart of the regime, the Tyrells want to become the power behind the throne as the Lannisters were for the Baratheons, which includes assassinating inconvenient monarchs to replace them with a compliant child monarch; the Martells want to violently overthrow the current regime and restore the Targaryens; and none of Tywin’s children want to cooperate in his plans, which means that there’s.
The North is in a state of chaos, the Boltons are planning to betray the Lannisters when they get a chance while the Lannisters were planning to do the same to them, Stannis is in the field and slowly working towards an alliance with the Stark loyalists and the wildlings, etc.
The Ironborn aren’t in-pocket at all, and are destabilizing the whole system by attacking the Reach at the time when Tywin needs the Reach as his muscle.

How many men do the brave companions actually have? And how does such a seemingly large multinational company come together, and where did Tywin find these evil fuckers?

They’re not that big, around 300 men. They’re a pretty recently-founded company, although they predated Vargo Hoat.

As for where Tywin found them…although it’s not stated particularly clearly, Tywin clearly put the word out for mercenaries when he called the banners at Casterly Rock.

Tywin didn’t seem to get very good/many mercenaries, for various reasons. My theory is that Tywin has a bad reputation among mercenaries for using them as arrow fodder to keep the wages bill down.

Among those he did get, the Bloody Mummers are in Tywin’s army after the Green Fork but we don’t hear of them before that although logically that means they would have had to be at the Mummer’s Ford and Tywin’s rampage across the hills of the southern Riverlands.

Steven Xue Asks: Was Tywin really a slaver?

You have criticized Tywin on numerous occasions of “breaking one of the oldest Westerosi taboos” which is slavery. Now I hate to nitpick on this issue because I am no expert in this matter but isn’t what he did in Harrenhal a form of state bondage in a time of war rather than actual slavery? Weren’t the captives at Harrenhal technically POWs? And usually in any war, don’t captured prisoners (whether they are enemy soldiers or civilians) get conscripted into doing forced labor without pay and had few if any rights at all during their time of involuntary servitude?

I don’t really see a distinction between “state bondage in a time of war” and “actual slavery,” I guess. At the end of the day, it’s still involuntary labor extracted through force and threat of force.

POW status is usually reserved for enemy soldiers, not civilians, and the taking of large numbers of civilian prisoners is highly unusual. And there really is no precedent for this in previous Westerosi wars – we’ve seen attacks on civilian populations before, but we haven’t seen peasants kidnapped and forced into servitude before.

The only thing that comes close is “Lord Lymond Hightower, the Sea Lion, who revived the practice of thralldom in Oldtown just long enough to set the ironmen captured during the battle to hard labor strengthening the city’s walls.” But even then, that’s enemy soldiers and temporary.