Content Warnings: Discussion of a misogynistic culture, discussion of child marriage and underage pregnancy, discussion of power imbalances in sex
Okay! Eddard I, where the main plot of Westeros (at least, the political one) really starts to kick off, and where we get a bit more of a view of the past of Westeros; the events which brought about the current order of things, and continue to shape history going forwards through the books.
We start with the arrival of the King's party to Winterfell, and the brief introduction of several central characters; Jaime and Tyrion Lannister are named, as is Sandor Clegane, while Joffrey isn't named but is described. The central figure, though, is unquestionably the king - who Ned literally doesn't recognize at first until Robert calls out to him. I believe the line in the show is "You got fat", but that doesn't come up here; Ned's too tactful to say that out loud, though he thinks it real strongly. His mental comparison between the present and past Robert is very interesting in light of
@Shane_357 's point
here, as the past, more masculine version of Robert which Ned remembers and, to a point, admires, is very specifically described in context of his martial prowess and sexual qualities:
Fifteen years past, when they had ridden forth to win a throne, the Lord of Storm's End had been clean-shaven, clear-eyed, and muscled like a maiden's fantasy. Six and a half feet tall, he towered over lesser men, and when he donned his armor and the great antlered helmet of his House, he became a veritable giant. He'd had a giant's strength too, his weapon of choice a spiked iron warhammer that Ned could scarcely lift.(1) In those days, the smell of leather and blood had clung to him like perfume.
While the present version is presented in deep contrast to that:
In those days, the smell of leather and blood had clung to him like perfume.
Now it was perfume that clung to him like perfume, and he had a girth to match his height. ... [In the last nine years] the king had gained at least eight stone. A beard as coarse and black as iron wire covered his jaw to hide his double chin and the sag of the royal jowls, but nothing could hide his stomach or the dark circles under his eyes.
In short, the king is rather described as being ruined by laxity and his vices - and, as we learn later, by his feelings of loss, despair and betrayal by the world. He fought a war for a girl and the kingdom, in that order, and only got the kingdom, and found he didn't much like ruling it, but couldn't give it up. Anyway, we'll dig more into this characterization of Robert later.
The queen, Cersei, is introduced along with the note of the massive carriage she and her children have ridden in to reach Winterfell, and ceremonial greetings are made between the two families. As soon as these formalities are completed, though, Robert asks to be taken to the Winterfell crypts to pay his respects to the dead. Eddard loves Robert for the care he still shows his sister - but we get a look at the coldness of his actual marriage as Cersei objects, Robert glares at her, and her brother draws her away.
Ned and Robert descend to the crypts, small-talking along the way about the size and coldness of the North. Robert extolls the richness, beauty and pleasures of the south, in terms which rather make me think that he's never considered that he only goes to the places where "Everyone is fat and drunk and rich" and doesn't see the rest of his kingdoms, where people aren't so much that - though it does seem that this long summer has been a time of prosperity for the kingdoms. He also rambles about girls 'losing all modesty in the heat' and 'swimming naked', in a way that honestly sounds more like an asshole teen boy talking about peeking into the girl's changing room than a 36-year-old king. Eddard notes that Robert was always a man of appetites, but that his pleasures have eaten away at him.
Reaching the crypt itself, Eddard leads the way down to the far end, past statues of past lords and kings of Winterfell, with carved stone direwolves at their feet and iron swords on their laps. They reach the tombs of Ned's father, brother and sister, and we learn that there are already tombs prepared for Ned and his children. Robert kneels down before the graves to pay his respects, then bemoans the sculptor's work on the statue of Lyanna's tomb - Eddard's sister, and Robert's betrothed. It's painfully obvious he's still in love with her - or, rather, with the image of her he has in his head. Robert wishes she were buried on a hill under a fruit tree, out in nature, and Eddard reminds him that she wanted to come home. Ned has something of a flashback to Lyanna's death, and we're introduced to a very interesting character we won't learn much about for a long time to come: Howland Reed, a Crannogman.
Standing up again, Robert waxes lyrical about how he wishes he could kill Rhaegar Targaryen, Lyanna's kidnapper, again and again for what he did, and we get a little history lesson about the duel between Robert and Rhaegar. Ned suggests they should go back to Robert's wife, and he curses her. Ned asks to hear about Jon Arryn's death - a man they're both closely-connected to. Robert says that Jon took ill suddenly and died within two weeks, the sickness burning through him. Ned asks about Jon's wife, Catelyn's sister, and how she's taking the death. Robert says not well, and that against his wishes and in spite of his promise to foster the boy with Tywin Lannister, Lysa has taken her son back to her castle in the Vale. Robert seems to feel a genuine connection to Lysa's son (Robert Arryn; named for the king - I'll call him Sweetrobin from here, as it's a common nickname and makes the characters easier to distinguisj), talking about how he'd sworn to protect the boy but can't do it due to Lysa's actions (putting his own feelings above that of the child's mother's). Ned proposes fostering Sweetrobin himself, the king says no because it would offend the Lannisters, Ned says he cares more for the child than Lannister pride, and Robert decides to broach the subject he's been meaning to all along.
Ned tries to draw the king into conversation on the Wall, and matters he sees as practical, while Robert redirects to the matter of Sweetrobin's inheritance. After a small diversion around the inheritance of the title of Warden of the East, Robert gets to his real point: He wants Ned to be his Hand of the King, as someone he can trust and rely upon. Robert openly admits, though, that this isn't for the sake of honoring his friend - it's to complete the work of pushing off the duties of the crown to someone else so he can "eat and drink and wench [himself] into an early grave". On the other hand, he also proposes a marriage between Ned's oldest daughter Sansa, and his own heir Joffrey, and even explicitly says this would be a kind of replacement for the bond between their two houses that would have been had Robert wed Lyanna:
"You helped me win this damnable throne, now help me hold it. We were meant to rule together. If Lyanna had lived, we should have been brothers, bound by blood as well as affection. Well, it is not too late. I have a son. You have a daughter. My Joff and your Sansa shall join our houses, as Lyanna and I might once have done."
This, and Ned's protests about Sansa's young age, bring up a point I want to address regarding the age of marriages in Westeros. Martin has a lot of child marriages - like, seriously a
lot. And it seems to be the case that this is a deliberate thing on his part, trying to un-whitewash fantasy in some sense, and make a point of horrifying practices which generally get left out in fantastical works based on this or that historical time period. However, while very young marriages did occur in the middle ages and historical cultures generally, and betrothals were often made
very young in the kinds of contexts Martin draws inspiration from, it's important to understand that throughout basically all of history, people have known that trying to have children too young is
extremely dangerous for both the mother and the child. Accordingly, given the fact that people in the past were not idiots, marriages at the ages Martin has happening fairly routinely were
notable exceptions, and frequently a point was made of them not being consummated until a more suitable age was reached. In my opinion, this slots into a wider pattern in Martin's work of taking exceptions or outliers and putting them as the rule; we can look at the sheer destructiveness of the wars he depicts, instances of particularly shocking blasphemy or societal transgression (e.g. the Red Wedding), the age of marriage and so on - Bret Deveraux has done a lot of work on assessing the historical verisimilitude of the setting, and does it a lot better than me.
In any case, Ned begs for a little time to talk to his wife about these great honours, which Robert grants him with a warning not to take too long. Ned has a bad feeling, and the chapter ends.
For a moment Eddard Stark was filled with a terrible sense of foreboding. This was his place, here in the north. He looked at the stone figures all around them, breathed deep in the chill silence of the crypt. He could feel the eyes of the dead. They were all listening, he knew. And winter was coming.
Overall, Robert gives me the impression of essentially a kind of man-child; a person trapped in the past, never having really mentally progressed beyond a kind of adolescent self-centredness and a lack of self-control. He became king while he was an angry, passionate teenager, and very few people were ever able to tell him 'no' - so he never really learned to moderate himself, or to understand others; why should he need to when he can simply order them? In many ways, I think he's more similar to Joffrey than he'd care to admit - the only difference is that Joffrey is more actively malicious, rather than blithely uncaring and depressed about his losing a love he deeply felt to a person he never really knew.(2) And it's going to kill him; both because of the toll his lifestyle (enabled by those around him) takes on his body, and the way his uncaring and cruel attitude towards the people in his life (particularly Cersei) have bred resentment towards him. He's domineering, wields power casually and without thought (with his friends, with his female 'conquests', who I sincerely doubt he considers as victims, but are they going to say no to the king? We specifically know he often goes after low-born women rather than nobles.) and, like a bull in a china shop, he breaks things. His hope to have his friend nearby is going to kill both of them and plunge the kingdom into a devastating civil war.
So it goes.
Next chapter, we get to climb inside the head of an edgy teen boy in
Jon I, though admittedly our Snow has more things to be genuinely resentful about than many (though he's still pretty privileged).
1: It's been said elsewhere, but historical warhammers usually weren't terribly big - they were meant to punch through armour, and often resembled picks moreso than mallets. This is a rather pop-culture idea of a warhammer as a massive, heavy weapon, when most real ones were relatively small.
2: It's pure speculation on my part, but there's a part of me which wonders, if Robert and Lyanna had actually married, whether they could have gotten along quite well - with some character growth on Robert's part. Lyanna is renowned for loving riding, hunting, hawking and fighting, all things which Robert also loves, and if he could accept that, and curb his pursuit of other women and dedicate himself to her, they could have been a bit of a wild couple together. Which all just really just adds to the tragedy of what actually happened, even if I think actually achieving this hypothetical state of harmonious marriage would probably require some pretty hefty therapy from someone, and possibly someone (maybe literally) beating Robert's head into the fact that he can't keep dishonoring his wife and expect her to love him back.
