Who was Lyanna Stark?

That is a million dollar question. When the book started, it had been 14 years since Lyanna died. Lord Eddard’s sister, King Robert’s old flame, Lyanna is a mystery. She was the driving force behind the Rebellion. Robert wanted his bride back, Ned his sister.

We meet her in the crypts for the first time and it is made very clear that there is a curious disconnect between how she is thought of. Ned and Robert can’t even agree on the burial place for resting her dead body.

Lyanna had only been sixteen, a child-woman of surpassing loveliness. Ned had loved her with all his heart. Robert had loved her even more. She was to have been his bride.

“She was more beautiful than that,” the king said after a silence. His eyes lingered on Lyanna’s face, as if he could will her back to life. Finally he rose, made awkward by his weight. “Ah, damn it, Ned, did you have to bury her in a place like this?” His voice was hoarse with remembered grief. “She deserved more than darkness…”

“She was a Stark of Winterfell,” Ned said quietly. “This is her place.”

“She should be on a hill somewhere, under a fruit tree, with the sun and clouds above her and the rain to wash her clean.”

“I was with her when she died,” Ned reminded the king. “She wanted to come home, to rest beside Brandon and Father.”

And isn’t it interesting that Robert saw what he always wanted to see in Lyanna. The girl who loved sunshine and flowers. Who belonged to the light. While Eddard saw the north in her. Dark crypts, cold winds. She was after all a Stark of Winterfell.

But that is not where the dichotomy ended. Throughout the book we saw that the opinions regarding Lyanna differed. She was defined by her wolfblood. But what is wolf without pack. Compared to Arya constantly. But at the same time she shows different colors. She is the girl who would have carried a sword, if she could. She would beat three squires and cry when the silver prince sings a sad song. She would run away for love and freedom. Condemn Robert for not sticking to a bed while becoming the other woman herself.

‘The wolf blood,’ my father used to call it. Lyanna had a touch of it, and my brother Brandon more than a touch. It brought them both to an early grave.

“She was,” Eddard Stark agreed, “beautiful, and willful, and dead before her time.”

You saw her beauty, but not the iron underneath.

I don’t think Lyanna was like Arya. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think her like Sansa either. I think she is bit of both. She is Arya with her wolfblood and her sword and she is Sansa with her romanticism, with her songs and her ability to risk everything for love and freedom.

He could still hear Sansa pleading, as Lyanna had pleaded once.

Sansa risked Eddard’s plan for her love of Joffery. Lyanna risked the entire realm for Rhaegar. Whether he represented love or freedom. Both traded one gilded cage for another.

“Love is sweet, dearest Ned, but it cannot change a man’s nature.”

If we go by everyone’s impression of Rhaegar then he did not kidnap Lyanna. And therefore Lyanna was an equal participate in the ‘Kidnapping’.

I think that real Lyanna was somewhere between Robert’s Lyanna and Eddard’s Lyanna. What is left of that girl’s legacy is a statue and a bastard. Perhaps we will never truly know that girl but the impact she had on westeros is still being felt. She and Rhaegar had a lot in common.

It was said that no man ever knew Prince Rhaegar, truly.