Ashford Tourney Predicts Sansa's Next Suitor?

Hmmm, interesting. Did I see some whisperings somewhere that Dunk might be an ancestor of Sandor? Or at least of Brienne? Might indeed be an interesting foreshadowing of what might go down with Aegon IF somehow he does end up being yet another (yawn) suitor for Sansa...

I think we can be sure that Brienne is Dunk's descendant. The shield in itself is proof enough to make this clear and she is so much like Dunk both in character and appearance that it seems crystal clear he was her ancestor. He was quite attractive and she is called ugly but perhaps this is only because she is so far from the ideal image of female beauty they have in her world. Perhaps if she was male she would fit in and she would be considered a great knight and also attractive,like Dunk. They don't take her seriously because she is female and doesn't conform to the norms. She is the purest and most honourable knight in the story,though, and also a ramarkable fighter. She deserves far more credit than she gets.

Some people think Dunk could be Sandor's ancerstor too but that is not so clear as with Brienne. There are parallelisms between Dunk and Sandor that you can see when you compare ASoIaF with Dunk&Egg novellas. Also,Sandor's height and his northern looks make some people think that Dunk had a child with a northern girl and the Cleganes may descend from her. In their last novel Dunk and Egg talk about travelling north and in one of Bran's dreams he sees a girl kissing a young knight as tall as Hodor. So this idea that The Cleganes might descend from Dunk doesn't sound so weird,it could make sense.

One of the parallels between Dunk and Sandor is that we are introduced to Dunk digging a grave in a high place,on a meadow beneath a tree,the earth is soft and it isn't difficult for him to dig,but Sandor, on another high place on the QI has to struggle to dig another grave because the earth is so hard. As if everything was hard for Sandor in his struggle to regain faith in himself and his own worth.It is no easy task for him to reconcile himself with the world and the goodness in it after a whole life learning that he was a worthless sinner in a miserable shitty world devoid of hope.

While Dunk is digging the grave he remembers the old man he is going to bury used to sing a song a about stealing a kiss from a girl at knife point. But, surprisingly enough,it is a cheerful song,as if stealling a kiss like that could be romantic or at least acceptable. This is the key to understand Martin's imagery when Sandor uses swords and daggers to approach Sansa. They are used as sexual innuendo by the writer and they are not so much about violence (though Sandor is a violent man)but about unresloved and uspoken sexual tension.

This is the beginning of "The Hedge Knight"



The old man used to sing this song about a man who goes to Gulltown to see a fair maid (a maiden fair) and in the song the man steal the kiss with a knife. It is an old song, by the way,so the idea might seem as acceptable for them as stealing girls for the wildlings. For them it is romantic although it wouldn't be for us in real life. This is a literary image which by no means implies violence is all right or that the author thinks it is,it is just an image that has been used in the literary tradition before.The image is not about treating women badly,it is about the sexual attraction a man feels for a woman.

In another part of the novellas Dunk, who is then older,draws a knife on a young woman and cuts her long hair to remember her by and he also kisses her passionately. She also likes him and only circumstances make their romance impossible. Dunk is never violent,on the contrary, he is a very nice and honourable man,so this use of the knife is an image of their desire not a sign of any violent intentions on his side.

Some time before that last scene where he kisses the girl (a redhead,by the way)Dunk has this dream:



It is an erotic dream and those arrows make me think or Cupid's arrows striking home on poor Dunk. I guess nobody would doubt Dunk is attracted to this girl the way some readers doubt Sansa is attracted to Sandor after dreaming of him naked climbing on a marriage bed with her,or after she has imagined a kiss with him so many times. George uses dreams and daydreaming to convey what and who Sansa and Dunk desire. If you have a look at how George describes this dreamed kiss,you will notice how much it resembles the scene where Sandor yanks Sansa closer and she thinks he wants to kiss her:



I think the words speak for themselves, don't you think?



He kissed her hard and drew his dagger but he only cut her long braid to remember her by, he didn't harm her. And she liked him but couldn't marry him because her marriage had already been arranged. He says her horse is too good for him and she blushes because he seems to be comparing the horse to her,implying that the mare is too good for him to mount,just like she is too good for him to have sex with. The horse was bred for beauty and not speed, which reminds me of Sansa,who was trained for beauty like highborn girls used to be and then is expected to know about things nobody taught her,poor kid.



There are even more things because neither Sandor nor Dunk have been knighted or taken the vows but both become KG and their behaviour is more honourable than that of most knights. They are both in love with a redhead they can't have because she is highborn and betrothed and then married to another (several,in Rohane's case,and also Sansa's). The use of swords and lances in D&E is used several times to imply male sexual desire,even from another man who desires Dunk. There is a conversation where Dunk is with another man and this uses sexual innuendo on him but Dunk,like Sansa,is so young and innocent that he doesn't take it. He doesn't understand what it is about but feels uncomfortable when the other man touches his shoulder,Dunk is not into him or men in general,and feels uncomfortable without even picking up that the other guy is flirting with him.

Sansa doesn't realise Sandor is flirting with her on the Serpentine steps but she doesn't usually find his touch uncomfortable,only when it is painful because he grabs her wrist or chin too tight.She doesn't feel it is undesirable when his touch is gentle,or not ungentle,as she describes it. She also touches him to comfort him though she knows he is like a mean dog that bites the hand that tries to pet him. He doesn't bite her though, but he growls,like a dog. When she says thank you because she saved him form the rioters,he is mean to her,he growls and scares her away. He tells her to leave him a alone and go away. She is not frightened,not even for a second, and she even tells him off for being awful and hateful. Their conversation takes place on a roof,like Dunk's conversation with the other man (the fiddler)on another roof. There is also fighting imagery used as sexual innuendo. In the case of Dunk and the fiddler it is obvious,not with Sandor and Sansa on the roof of Maegor,but he puts a sword to her throat and she doesn't even flinch,which wouldn't be normal if the writer's intention was to convey danger or threat from Sandor,I think this naked sword on her skin is hinting at something else,at his sexual desire for her that is not so unwelcome on an instinctual level. She is attracted to him in that way too but she is too young to realise. It is too early for a romance then, so it is unspoken and is not approached,but it is latent and will make itself clear later when she thinks of him in the Eyrie and when he can't take her off his mind while travelling with her sister. His last words and thoughts are for her with longing and regret. I think this is romantic in a subltle unusual way,but very romantic.

Oh wow, I really need to read the Dunk & Egg stories! (I'm planning to once the consolidated volume of all three stories is published later this year.) It makes me happy to see that there is an actual honest-to-goodness LOVE story involved, something so lacking in ASOIAF (so far). Maybe Dunk is not an ancestor of Sandor but just meant to be a symbolical parallel character? I do remember Brienne finding the shield with his coat-of-arms (I knew it was significant when I read it, so I looked it up).

Oh, and it might be worth mentioning that that song that Dunk sings, about meeting a fair maid in Gulltown and stealing a kiss with a blade, was the song that Tom Sevenstrings was singing when Arya first encountered him...

eyesofmist, I like your idea of the Hand's Tourney meaning more for Sansa's storyline, especially with Sandor being the eventual winner, which falls in line with my (maybe-crack) theory that GRRM is foreshadowing their endgame romance through the structure of the text by always placing him last in her thoughts (katemarzullo.tumblr.com/post/103793645301/is-a-sansan-endgame-foreshadowed-in-sansas). She WAS his Queen of Love & Beauty by default, and she later thinks back on that with some pride during Joff's Name Day Tourney ("He [Sandor] had won her father's tourney.")

Still, though, the Dunk & Egg stuff leaves a lot of food for thought!

I'm sorry, gurl, I wasn't paying attention! Forgive me, I shall edit it!

And yes, the Rule of Threes seems very present not only in the story in general but in Sandor & Sansa's storyline in particular, most notably with the cloak -- he has given Sansa his cloak twice...

I think you guys are right - there could definitely be some foreshadowing going on here. I feel like Sansa's reactions to the tournament in general said a lot about her character and may have been foreshadowing what was to come for her.

Sandor comes up so often in Sansa's internal narration and like you pointed out, is often the last thing she thinks of.

And with regard to the importance of Sansa's place as the "metatheatrical center of this series":


So any link to the chivalric tradition in her story is more likely than not to be significant and potentially symbolic foreshadowing - that is built into the structure of her narrative. 

Yes, she IS living her own epic story/song, but I think she took for granted how ANGSTY those songs are, LOL. I think it was the romance that she got swept up in, not realizing that a whole lot of pain and sorrow comes with these songs too. So even though everyone tells her "life is not a song".... well, it IS, she just didn't count on all the BAD parts she'd have to endure to get to the good. And of course the ultimate irony being that Sandor was her "true knight" all along even though he doesn't fit her head-canon for what her true knight "should" be, LOL.