#king tristifer iv mudd

[jonsnowunemploymentera]

JON SNOW FORTNIGHT EVENT 2023

Day 10 - Echoes of the Past

For today’s prompt, I want to look back at Westoros’ history in order to parse out some interesting parallels Jon shares with two little known kings of the Trident: Benedict Justman and Tristifer IV Mudd.

Benedict Justman (born Benedict Rivers) was King of the Trident and founder of the now extinct House Justman. He was born to a union between a Blackwood and a Bracken, two historically antagonistic powerhouses in the Riverlands. Though he grew up despised, he became a noted warrior and rose to power through his martial prowess. Very little else is known of his reign or character, but there’s still enough to glean meaningful parallels with our favorite bastard, Jon Snow.

The most meaningful parallel between them is the theme of balance. Benedict was born of a union between two houses that have historically warred against each other. And if theories are correct Jon, as the son of Prince Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark, is born of a union between ice and fire - two states that are traditionally opposed to one another. Not only that, but recent history has these two houses fighting on opposite sides of a civil war.

Both Jon and Benedict represent the coming together of two opposing sides, and it’s even more poignant that both are (presumably on Jon’s part) born bastards. Just as a Benedict grew up a despised boy, Jon has grown up with the stain of bastardy all his life and earned the ire of his lord father’s wife. But bastardy does not hinder either man from greatness or kingship. Benedict founded his own house and came to be known as one of the wisest and most successful kings in the Riverlands. And there is extensive foreshadowing for Jon’s rise to kingship.

While there’s little about King Benedict in the main series, there’s another great King of the Trident who has been implicitly linked to Jon in the text, King Tristifer IV Mudd.

We first hear of King Tristifer in ASOS, coincidentally when Robb and Catelyn argue about the legitimization of Jon Snow. This fateful conversation is held right at Tristifer’s tomb.

Yet in the center of what once would have been the castle's yard, a great carved sepulcher still rested, half hidden in waist-high brown grass amongst a stand of ash. The lid of the sepulcher had been carved into a likeness of the man whose bones lay beneath, but the rain and the wind had done their work. The king had worn a beard, they could see, but otherwise his face was smooth and featurless, with only vague suggestions of a mouth, a nose, eyes, and the crown about the temples. His hands folded over the shaft of a stone warhammer that lay upon his chest. Once the warhammer would have been carved with runes that told its name and history, but all that the centuries had worn away. The stone itself was cracked and crumbling at the corners, discolored here and there by spreading white splotches of lichen, while wild roses crept up over the king's feet almost to his chest.

[...]

She had not forgotten; she had not wanted to look at it, yet there it was. "A Snow is not a Stark."

[...]

Grey Wind leapt up atop King Tristifer's crypt, his teeth bared.

- Catelyn V, ASOS

There are several interesting metaphors within this short snippet that relate to Jon’s story. The first is that there is a story of a forgotten (or lost) king half-hidden in a stone tomb. This is quite the parallel to Jon’s mother, Lyanna Stark, whose tomb in the Winterfell crypts has been implied to hold secrets of a promise - a promise related to Jon’s birth.

He was walking through the crypts beneath Winterfell, as he had walked a thousand times before. The Kings of Winter watched him pass with eyes of ice, and the direwolves at their feet turned their great stone heads and snarled. Last of all, he came to the tomb where his father slept, with Brandon and Lyanna beside him. “Promise me, Ned,” Lyanna’s statue whispered. She wore a garland of pale blue roses, and her eyes wept blood.

- Eddard XIII, AGOT

There are other visual metaphors. There is brown grass spread amongst ash which could point to Jon whose Stark coloring hides his Targaryen heritage. Not only that, but the mention of wild roses calls to mind the imagery of blue winter roses, which have been used to symbolize Jon in the story.

A blue flower grew from a chink in a wall of ice, and filled the air with sweetness…

- Daenerys IV, ACOK

Another interesting parallel is that this tomb is placed in Oldstones. Another important figure from Oldstones is Jenny of Oldstones, whose love affair with Prince Duncan Targaryen mirrors that between Prince Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark, Jon’s parents.

But perhaps my favorite parallel between Jon and Tristifer comes from their names. Snow and Mudd both evoke elements of nature, especially of some substance mixed with water. And the element of water is present with all three men, as Benedict Justman was named “Rivers” before his ascension to kingship.

Given the nature of GRRM’s writing, no one parallel is purely incidental. It seems that these two kings could serve as indicators of who Jon is and who he is meant to be. Based on the tales of these two kings, there is the possibility that Jon will come to be known as one of the wisest and longest reigning kings in Westeros. As we know, both Benedict and Tristifer are associated with Justice: Benedict is known as “Benedict the Just” and Tristifer earned the epithet “Hammer of Justice”. And if Bran’s words are anything to go by,

“You did well,” Jon told him solemnly. Jon was fourteen, an old hand at justice.

- Bran I, AGOT

[goodqueenaly]

@diegoedil replied to your post “House Words Wednesdays: House Mudd”

But is Mudd House really extinct? In episode 4 of season 1 of HOTD, one of Rhaenyra's suitors apparently belongs to that House, as you can see his sigil on his chest.

I'm reposting this as a reminder to everyone that I am not talking about That Other Show and will be blocking anyone using my posts to talk about That Other Show.

As far as the books are concerned, House Mudd went extinct millennia ago. See, for example, this conversation between Catelyn and Robb in ASOS:

Robb studied the sepulcher. "Whose grave is this?" "Here lies Tristifer, the Fourth of His Name, King of the Rivers and the Hills." Her father had told her his story once. "He ruled from the Trident to the Neck, thousands of years before Jenny and her prince, in the days when the kingdoms of the First Men were falling one after the other before the onslaught of the Andals. The Hammer of Justice, they called him. He fought a hundred battles and won nine-and-ninety, or so the singers say, and when he raised this castle it was the strongest in Westeros." She put a hand on her son's shoulder. "He died in his hundredth battle, when seven Andal kings joined forces against him. The fifth Tristifer was not his equal, and soon the kingdom was lost, and then the castle, and last of all the line. With Tristifer the Fifth died House Mudd, that had ruled the riverlands for a thousand years before the Andals came."

As well as this academic discussion from Yandel in TWOIAF:

The penultimate and greatest of the river kings to stand before the Andals was Tristifer IV of House Mudd, the Hammer of Justice, who ruled from a great castle called Oldstones, on a hill by the banks of the Blue Fork. The singers tell us he fought a hundred battles against the invaders and won nine-and-ninety of them, only to fall in the hundredth, when he rode to war against an alliance of seven Andal kings. Yet it seems convenient that there are seven kings in the songs; likely this is another tale concocted by the septons as a lesson in piety. Before the Mudds, there had been other kings near as powerful. The Fishers are said in some chronicles to have been the first and oldest line of river kings (in others, they are accounted the second dynasty, and the fragmentary Annals of the Rivers from the ancient septry at Peasedale suggests they were third). The Blackwoods and Brackens both claim to have ruled the riverlands at various times during the Age of Heroes. The Mudds succeeded in unifying more of the riverlands than any of their predecessors, but their reign was not to last. The Hammer of Justice was succeeded by his son, Tristifer V, or Tristifer the Last, who proved unable to stem the Andal tide and failed even to hold his own people together.

To be sure, there was at least one other would-be claimant to the Mudd legacy in Westerosi history: Marq Mudd, the so-called "Mad Bard", one of those "dozen pretenders from as many houses would adopt the style of River King or King of the Trident and vow to throw off the yoke of the stormlanders". However, both his reappearance millennia after the fall of House Mudd as a royal dynasty as well as his "mad" epithet suggests to me that this Marq was less a late-appearing heir to a long-gone royal dynasty and more an ambitious adventurer canny enough to play on the mystique of a storied old name but uncertain enough not to be widely accepted as such. Indeed, Jon Connington himself links use of the "Mudd" name, among others, within the Golden Company with vaulting, specifically unearned dynastic pride:

Some of the sellsword captains bore bastard names, as Flowers did: Rivers, Hill, Stone. Others claimed names that had once loomed large in the histories of the Seven Kingdoms; Griff counted two Strongs, three Peakes, a Mudd, a Mandrake, a Lothston, a pair of Coles. Not all were genuine, he knew. In the free companies, a man could call himself whatever he chose.

See also this comment from GRRM:

A question that crops up concerning the two old River King dynasties -- is it wrong to assume that one of them was the line of the final River Kings, ended by the ancestors of the Storm King Arrec, and that the other (as Theon recollects in his first chapter in Clash of Kings) is the line ended by the old King of the Iron Islands whose slaughter of the then River Kings sons led to the naming of the Bloody Keep? A logical assumption, and maybe half true. There were actually more dynasties in the riverlands than these two ... [sic] but so far I've only come up with two names. The riverlands have been much warred over. The Mudds were the last of the First Men to rule the Trident, I seem to recall; it was Andal invaders who put an end to that line.

[ladystoneboobs]

just thinking about how songs appear in asoiaf and how they relate to the stark ladies. specifically with jenny of oldstones being introduced first in arya’s then catelyn’s povs in the riverlands through the song about her.

"She[Arya] will leave on the morrow, with us," Lord Beric assured the little woman. "We're taking her to Riverrun, to her mother."

"Nay," said the dwarf. "You're not. The black fish holds the rivers now. If it's the mother you want, seek her at the Twins. For there's to be a wedding." She cackled again. "Look in your fires, pink priest, and you will see. Not now, though, not here, you'll see nothing here. This place belongs to the old gods still . . . they linger here as I do, shrunken and feeble but not yet dead. [...]” She drank the last of the wine in four long swallows, flung the skin aside, and pointed her stick at Lord Beric. "I'll have my payment now. I'll have the song you promised me.”

And so Lem woke Tom Sevenstrings beneath his furs, and brought him yawning to the fireside with his woodharp in hand. "The same song as before?" he asked.

"Oh, aye. My Jenny's song. Is there another?"

And so he sang, and the dwarf woman closed her eyes and rocked slowly back and forth, murmuring the words and crying. -Arya VIII, aSoS

[Cat, to Robb:]"Oldstones, all the smallfolk called it when I was a girl, but no doubt it had some other name when it was still a hall of kings." She had camped here once with her father, on their way to Seagard. Petyr was with us too . . .

"There's a song," he[Robb] remembered. "'Jenny of Oldstones, with the flowers in her hair.'"

"We're all just songs in the end. If we are lucky." She had played at being Jenny that day, had even wound flowers in her hair. And Petyr had pretended to be her Prince of Dragonflies. Catelyn could not have been more than twelve, Petyr just a boy. -Catelyn V, aSoS

without any real context yet for jenny’s story, it’s clear from the first mention of her song that it was a sad one. this adds to the tragic atmosphere of the stark-tully riverlands story even before the red wedding, as both mother (with robb and edmure and co.) and daughter (with first the brotherhood without banners and then the hound) move ever closer to doom at the twins. the lack of detail makes it more subtle than the more fully-told story of the tristifer iv mudd with his grave in oldstones and its ominous foreshadowing for robb. easier to remain blind to the upcoming tragedy if one focuses on the romantic aspect (flowers in her hair) and ignores the hint that the song is a romantic tragedy, one of several coloring the setting of the riverlands.

the next we hear of jenny and her song is in a return to oldstones, this time with an undead cat and tom o’ sevens and the rest of the riverlander outlaws traveling with her instead of with arya. by this time, the red wedding is past, the time has come for vengeance, and the tragedy of the song and the setting is unmistakable. it is now clear how both the story of the fallen “hammer of justice” and the story of jenny of oldstones relate to the tragedy of the young wolf.

Fallen leaves lay thick upon the ground, like soldiers after some great slaughter. A man in patched, faded greens was sitting crosslegged atop a weathered stone sepulcher, fingering the strings of a woodharp. The music was soft and sad. Merrett knew the song. High in the halls of the kings who are gone, Jenny would dance with her ghosts . . . -Epilogue (Merrett Frey), aSoS

[warsofasoiaf]

The Mallisters first appear taking the Cape of Eagles from Torgon, so perhaps they were FM. However, the driftwood kings likely lasted til at least the Andals' Vale conquest (Greyiron dynasty lasting "1000 years" max), if not the Riverlands (Andals were already invading it decades before Tristifer IV). If not already there, it'd make sense for the ironborn to claim the Cape with the Mudds' demise & then more for ascendant Andals (Mallisters?), than FM (say Blackwoods), to retake it from them.

The ironborn era in the worldbook has its own continuity snarls, but we know that the First Men houses are usually stated as such. It also makes sense for an Andal house moving out in search of land to conquer would take advantage of the weakness of the Greyiron kings to carve out their own lands. If it was a First Man house, perhaps displaced by the Andals, I think that would have been mentioned.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[she-wolf-of-highgarden]

All the times Jenny is mentioned

“And so Lem woke Tom Sevenstrings beneath his furs, and brought him yawning to the fireside with his woodharp in hand. "The same song as before?" he asked."Oh, aye. My Jenny's song. Is there another?" - Arya VIII, ASoS

“Oldstones, all the smallfolk called it when I was a girl, but no doubt it had some other name when it was still a hall of kings." She had camped here once with her father, on their way to Seagard. Petyr was with us too . . ."There's a song," he remembered. "'Jenny of Oldstones, with the flowers in her hair.'""We're all just songs in the end. If we are lucky." She had played at being Jenny that day, had even wound flowers in her hair. And Petyr had pretended to be her Prince of Dragonflies. Catelyn could not have been more than twelve, Petyr just a boy.” - Cat V, ASoS

“Here lies Tristifer, the Fourth of His Name, King of the Rivers and the Hills." Her father had told her his story once. "He ruled from the Trident to the Neck, thousands of years before Jenny and her prince, in the days when the kingdoms of the First Men were falling one after the other before the onslaught of the Andals. The Hammer of Justice, they called him. He fought a hundred battles and won nine-and-ninety, or so the singers say, and when he raised this castle it was the strongest in Westeros." She put a hand on her son's shoulder. "He died in his hundredth battle, when seven Andal kings joined forces against him. The fifth Tristifer was not his equal, and soon the kingdom was lost, and then the castle, and last of all the line. With Tristifer the Fifth died House Mudd, that had ruled the riverlands for a thousand years before the Andals came." - Cat V, ASoS

“Fallen leaves lay thick upon the ground, like soldiers after some great slaughter. A man in patched, faded greens was sitting crosslegged atop a weathered stone sepulcher, fingering the strings of a woodharp. The music was soft and sad. Merrett knew the song. High in the halls of the kings who are gone, Jenny would dance with her ghosts . . .” - Merrett, ASoS

“If the Eyrie had been made like other castles, only rats and gaolers would have heard the dead man singing. Dungeon walls were thick enough to swallow songs and screams alike. But the sky cells had a wall of empty air, so every chord the dead man played flew free to echo off the stony shoulders of the Giant's Lance. And the songs he chose . . . He sang of the Dance of the Dragons, of fair Jonquil and her fool, of Jenny of Oldstones and the Prince of Dragonflies. He sang of betrayals, and murders most foul, of hanged men and bloody vengeance. He sang of grief and sadness.” - Sansa I, AFfC

“She came to court with Jenny of Oldstones. A stunted thing, grotesque to look upon. A dwarf, most people said, though dear to Lady Jenny, who always claimed that she was one of the children of the forest.” - Dany IV, ADwD

“Better for Daenerys, and for Westeros. Daenerys Targaryen loved her captain, but that was the girl in her, not the queen. Prince Rhaegar loved his Lady Lyanna, and thousands died for it. Daemon Blackfyre loved the first Daenerys, and rose in rebellion when denied her. Bittersteel and Bloodraven both loved Shiera Seastar, and the Seven Kingdoms bled. The Prince of Dragonflies loved Jenny of Oldstones so much he cast aside a crown, and Westeros paid the bride price in corpses. All three of the sons of the fifth Aegon had wed for love, in defiance of their father's wishes. And because that unlikely monarch had himself followed his heart when he chose his queen, he allowed his sons to have their way, making bitter enemies where he might have had fast friends. Treason and turmoil followed, as night follows day, ending at Summerhall in sorcery, fire, and grief.” 

[game-of-style]

House Vance of Atranta, sworn to Riverrun - Chrystelle Atallah

House Vance of Atranta is one of the two great branches of House Vance in the riverlands, the other being House Vance of Wayfarer's Rest. Armistead Vance was the mightiest of the Andal conquerors who defeated King Tristifer IV Mudd. In the century after the downfall of House Justman, the Vances were among the petty kings who disputed the riverlands. The Vances joined the rebellion of river lords against Harren the Black during Aegon's Conquest.

House Vance rules over wider domains and can field a much larger army than their overlord of House Tully and they supported Robb Stark until the Red Wedding. 

[warsofasoiaf]

The Andal invasion of Westeros seems to have begun in a strange place, with regards to the exact location of the landing. The Vale is a bottleneck, yet sailing up the Bay of Crabs would have immediately given access to fertile lands in a constant state of political upheaval (and was probably what they ended up doing anyway). Given this lack of advance planning (for what amounts to a crusade), do you consider the invasion to have been more of a "run for your life, the Valyrians are coming"?

House Mudd did rule the Riverlands, so it’s unknown exactly how disunified the Riverlands actually were. We only know of Tristifer IV, we don’t know anything about the earlier Mudd kings. House Darry is on the Bay of Crabs and it has historically been a very strong house. Fighting them might have meant not getting a beachhead. Plus, the Riverlands can field more troops. The Andals had it hard enough against the less-populated Vale, imagine fighting the Riverlands.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King