Tonight I will be continuing my recap of the ten things I enjoyed the most about this season of Game of Thrones. Spoilers and all that. You have been warned. Oh, and there will end up being a part three of this because I found that I needed to say a lot of stuff about guest rite.
6. In all of the sadness and chaos of the Red Wedding, one almost forgets how absolutely funny Edmure has been all season. Edmure Tully, Catelyn's younger, basically useless brother, bumbles along perfectly in the show. The Blackfish comments that the gods love a fool, and this is quite true with Edmure. His introduction into the show is him failing to shoot an arrow onto his father's funeral pyre . . . three times. The next encounter with him involves him bragging about a victory that he basically screwed up.
Edmure is also the red haring part of the Red Wedding. The RW plays out like a Shakespearean tragedy, with most of our main cast (for that story line) dead by the end. Edmure's part of the wedding, however, lulls the viewer into thinking this is more like a Shakespearean comedy.The evil old lord is forcing our hapless hero to marry one of his daughters (most of whom are not attractive) and then, much to his delight, he is married to the beautiful one. Edmure's lighthearted doofiness leads us right down the path into the more serious horror that is to follow.
7. The Red Wedding is one of many examples of a theme that plays throughout the season, and that is the sacredness of Guest Rite. In any society that is only somewhat civilized, customs and traditions are needed to keep people from killing each other constantly. One of these is the idea that you do not harm a guest in your home. If you are a guest in someone's home, you do not harm your host. Usually this rite was enacted by the mutual consumption of something. The Freys offered Robb and his party bread and salt. Dany offered the sellsword captains wine. Once this happens, the guests and host are protected against one another.
Roose Bolton welcomes Jaime and Brienne at Harrenhall and treats them as honored guests. He tends to Jaime's wounds, he allows them to bathe, and they have dinner with him. Of course with Roose, guest rites will only go so far. They extend completely to Jaime, who has a powerful family, but not so far to Brienne. Despite being uneducated in many ways, Dany understands about guest rite. When one of the sellsword captains insults her, her warriors offer to kill him but she says no, because the man is their guest. Even Craster, for all his awfulness, understood Guest Rite. He told Mormont he allowed his men to stay because of his fear of the gods. It's too bad for Craster that the Night's Watch don't feel the same way.
When Craster's daughter is brought to Castle Black, Maester Aemon welcomes her as a guest. I like the scene because it ties two of the themes of the season, guest rite and powerful old people, together in a really nice way. Aemon questions Sam about why he brought her there, more wanting to understand Sam's reasons than be convinced. Once he welcomes Gilly into the castle, she shows visible relief. Even as a wildling, she understands the sacred nature of being a guest.
It could be said that Stannis almost violates guest rite (saved from it by Davos, as always), but I don't think it quite counts. When Mel brings Gendry to Dragonstone, she's the one who insists that the boy be fed, cleaned, and given a room. Stannis never welcomes his nephew at all, so he's never really Stannis's guest. Mind you, as obtuse as Stannis can be, this is probably more from his lack of social grace than it is from some clever way to try and get out of guest rite.
Robb Stark's season revolves around two cases of guest rite, both of which go very wrong. The first one happens at Riverrun. When Edmure won his pointless battle, he captured two Lannisters. The boys were only 14 or 15 and held no real political value. Even though they are kept in a cell, they are given food and comfort. Their wounds are tended. In the middle of the night, Lord Karstark kills the boys because they are Lannisters and he wants vengeance for Jaime killing his sons. Because he violates guest rite (and kills children who had nothing to do with his sons' deaths and disobeyed orders), Robb cuts off his head.
Then, of course, there is the Red Wedding. Lord Frey extends safety to Robb and all of his people while he is under the old man's roof. Bread and salt are eaten as a token of this vow. It is, truly, witnessed by the gods. Then Lord Walder has Robb, his wife, his mother, his direwolf, and almost all of his men slaughtered during the wedding feast. He watches the whole thing and laughs, never even bothering to worry about what it might mean for him and his house in the future.
But there will be future consequences. In the last episode, Bran tells a story about a cook at the Nightfort. The cook hated the King and when the King came to visit, the cook baked his son into a pie. The gods were so angry over this violation of guest rite that they cursed the cook to become a giant white rat who always ate his own young. This story, coming at the end of a season where aspects of guest rite were obeyed or violated, served as an interesting hint of what may be in store for people like Walder Frey.
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