“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.”
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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