Official Game of Thrones page names Jon Snow “The Prince That Was Promised”
By Dan Selcke
Who is the Prince (or Princess) That Was Promised in Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire? Does it matter? HBO picks a horse.
George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels like to play with the idea of prophecy. There are several that get tossed around often. There’s woods witch who told Cersei that the “Valonqar” will one day kill her. There’s the mysterious Quaithe, who tells Daenerys, “To go north, you must journey south. To reach the west, you must go east. To go forward, you must go back. To touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow.” And there’s the legend of the Prince That Was Promised, a messianic figure destined to save the world from the coming of the Others.
Some of these prophecies made their way into HBO’s Game of Thrones, although not all did. The Prince Who Was Promised prophecy was mentioned only in passing; remember when Melisandre brought it up to Daenerys when they met at Dragonstone?
In the end, the identity of the Prince — or Princess — Who Was Promised didn’t have a ton of weight on the show. It’ll probably matter more in A Song of Ice and Fire, but even there, Martin loves to flip things on their head, so anyone hoping for some kind of savior narrative is probably going to be disappointed. That said, the idea of the savior narrative has a powerful pull on the human imagination, which I suspect is why the idea of the Prince That Was Promised is talked about so often in the fandom.
Besides Daenerys, another popular candidate to be the Prince That Was Promised is Jon Snow. Just the other day, the official Game of Thrones Facebook page seemed to throw its weight behind that theory in a new post:
"Lord Snow. 998th Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch. King in the North. The Bastard of Winterfell. The Prince That Was Promised."
Who says that Daenerys is the only one who can have a long list of titles?
Will the identity of the Prince Who Was Promised be definitively nailed down in The Winds of Winter, the long-in-coming sixth book in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series? If it is, will it matter? We’ll cross our fingers that we won’t have to wait too much longer to find out.
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