#big walder frey is even younger than joffrey but grrm does not afford this child death-likely by another child-w the same pathos

[ladystoneboobs]

anyways, speaking of cannibalism, wrt frey pies in particular, it just hit me that the rat cook song is not just a way for wyman to slyly telegraph what he did w/o any of his in-world foes noticing, it could also be his justification just as much as inspiration. let's look back at how we learned of the legend through bran:

"It was not for murder that the gods cursed him," Old Nan said, "nor for serving the Andal king his son in a pie. A man has a right to vengeance. But he slew a guest beneath his roof, and that the gods cannot forgive." -Bran IV, aSoS

so, in other words: 1) violating guest right is the most heinous of crimes and 2) if guest right is not violated then murder and even cannibalizing the murdered to feed to their own kin is a-ok so long as the motive is personal revenge. by giving guest gifts to the 3 frey envoys to end any guest rite bond asap and get to the killings, wyman not only gets just a feeling of moral superiority by at least not committing the same type of crime as the enemies he killed, he also ensured that his vengeance could be divinely sanctioned as a natural right correctly exercised, unlike how the rat cook did his. he learned his lessons from this northern legend and improved upon the actions of this nightfort cook accordingly. thing is, the justified right to vengeance has to be just an old gods thing, not fitting in with the seven (which house manderly had converted to 1000s of years ago back in the reach) as the christainity stand-in, which is just evidence of the depth of manderly northern assimilation and/or that old dark ways never entirely disappear, no matter the religion. wyman manderly can still worship the "new" gods with just as much urge toward old-fashioned bloody revenge as any old gods worshipping northman, not so different from his vassal ser bartimus in the wolf's den who bragged to davos that his ancestors were likely among those who once hung slavers' entrails in a heart tree as a bloody offering to the old gods.