There’s this tired, baseless argument that is bandied around certain areas of the ASOIAF fandom regarding Rhaegar’s treatment of Elia. That for a man as gentle and as chivalrous, there must have been a reason for him to mistreat his wife so, and that too in such a public manner. That he had found true happiness elsewhere that his marriage failed to provide and that justified everything that came with it. The oft drawn conclusion is that Elia was the problem: she was either a wicked, unfaithful woman that drove him to the arms of a fourteen year old or a dull, insipid wife that couldn’t inspire any feeling in a man, so of course he had to go get the kind of woman he deserved. But the text already addressed that argument way back in “A Storm of Swords”.
“But that was the tourney when he crowned Lyanna Stark as queen of love and beauty!” said Dany. “Princess Elia was there, his wife, and yet my brother gave the crown to the Stark girl, and later stole her away from her betrothed. How could he do that? Did the Dornish woman treat him so ill?”
Daenerys is Rhaegar’s most ardent and blind supporter (aside from Jon Connington). I almost take her as a stand in for the Rhaegar adoring readers here. She (understandably to a degree) idolizes her brother, views him through the most rose tinted of glasses, even going so far to romanticize his supposed kidnapping of a betrothed teenager- at sword point, no less. And yet, so appalled, even she cannot rationalize his impossibly cruel humiliation of a pregnant Elia at Harrenhal. She cannot reconcile the Rhaegar of Viserys’ gushing stories and the Rhaegar who publicly disgraced his wife for every major lord in Westeros to witness in favour of another. Her only explanation, like some readers, is that Elia must have been to blame.
From “Princess Elia”, she becomes “the Dornish woman” who must have ill treated her gallant and devoted brother. From the butchered mother who pleaded for her son’s life as Daenerys remembers her in AGoT, she becomes the stranger who helped bring her humiliation and suffering upon herself. She must have been the cruel, unloving spouse who practically left him no other choice but to find affection elsewhere. For her idealized version of Rhaegar to hold up, Elia must become the villain. Yet that is dashed in the very next line.
“It is not for such as me to say what might have been in your brother’s heart, Your Grace. The Princess Elia was a good and gracious lady, though her health was ever delicate.”
Barristan Selmy, the Targaryen loyalist and vice president of the Rhaegar fan club, firmly states that Elia was in fact a good woman (in a later book also describing her as “kind and clever, with a gentle heart and a sweet wit”, someone that Rhaegar actually liked). She had done nothing to provoke Rhaegar’s mistreatment of her, a worthy spouse in every way, crushing Daenerys’ argument of a mean Dornish wife. There is no mention of affairs or discord as fans like to speculate. And when Daenerys then wonders if things would have been different if she had married Rhaegar instead, making him happy where poor, deficient Elia could not (once again putting the blame on her shoulders to absolve her brother, not dissimilarly to fandom), Barristan replies:
“But I am not certain it was in Rhaegar to be happy.”
If it was simply not in Rhaegar to know happiness or contentment, no woman could have succeeded where Elia apparently “failed’. The onus is not on Elia, she was not the source of his discontent, she was not fundamentally lacking in pleasing her husband. His issues were his own and Elia was not to blame. And so his actions at Harrenhal, abandoning her and their newborn baby as she lay in her sickbed, absconding with another woman to Elia’s homeland, leaving her defenseless to die- they cannot be laid at her feet, with her bizarrely being made responsible for suffering a spectacle of public shame and humiliation at the hands of her own husband.
Every facet of this argument is debunked in no more than half a page yet still Elia is vilified by Rhaegar fans who know there is no other way to justify his choices. She was not some evil thorn at the saintly Rhaegar’s side, not some scheming shrew, waiting to be exposed. Elia is the price paid for his so called love story, Rhaegar and Lyanna’s grand romance came directly at her expense and she- along with her infant children- suffered the horrific consequences of hischoices.
It’s clear that, just like those who cling to this argument, it’s Daenerys who doesn’t truly know or understand her brother here. Not when he’s still so deeply buried in this twisted romantic narrative that absolves him of any wrongdoing. His actions are what led us here, and so his actions must be the ones to examine. And if the only way to maintain your pretty illusions of Rhaegar is to make a villain out of Elia… Well. I think that tells you all you need to know.
You murdered her. You killed her children. Now say her name. I will hear you say it. She was Elia of Dorne. Say it! Elia of Dorne! If you die before you say her name, ser, I will hunt you through all seven hells. (requested by jeyre)
Honestly noah fence or disrespect or anything but why do people care about Elia so much on this site?? Her main purpose in the book is to be a sad character and that’s literally it. I don’t even get why people are upset about the annulment cause we all know D&D don’t understand or care about the source material and this would never happen in asoiaf. But honestly theres a strange amount of stans for this specific character with almost no real purpose in plot.
I’m not sure that’s all she is.
admittedly, the reason I get so defensive about her has a lot to do with the fact that the way she’s treated is undeniably racialized, both within and without the narrative.
as a woman of color, it does get grating.
at king’s landing, she was disrespected and isolated from all sides, by her husband and by the court. in fandom spaces, she’s too often reduced to a stereotype, the accepting dornish scorned wife who was totes okay with her husband cheating!! of course she was!! I mean, he humiliated her, left her all alone in a court in which she wasn’t safe, she ended up defiled, raped and murdered but she was just peachy!! after all, she could have been a better wife!! if only she had been more like lyanna!!
it’s a very common sort of nonsense people sprout about her (even in the text, just look at barristan’s povs) and for those of us who care deeply for the martells, there’s bound to be a huge divide between that false perception and what we know for certain about her, which then cause people to defend her.
still, there’s so much more to her than just being a sad character who deserved better, even though that fact may warrant love on its own imo.
elia may not seem overtly relevant but she’s still a disabled woman of color, whose memory is fiercely guarded by her kins, someone who’s constantly referred to as kind, dignified and compassionate. the love oberyn and doran feel for her, their grief is what is driving their actions in the books, which is definitely moving.
there’s also the way her death is framed, which is something I’m more than willing to critize but the effect can’t be denied. her death was violent and needlessly barbaric. it caused a rift between robert and ned, it’s always talked about with disapproval and regret and it marked the moment when tywin’s gratuitous ruthlessness finally antagonized ned to all lannisters, an antagonism at the root of the events in agot. she’s at the heart of the tragedy that started it all, a tragedy that still drives our story forward years and years after the fact.
moreover, her plight, the fact that she was forgotten, brushed aside in life while her loved ones rage in her name is very much thematically coherent with asoiaf as a whole, as a series that champion the value of life, of legacies and the importance of striving for justice, even if it feels hopeless.
when oberyn is shouting at the mountain to say elia’s name, he’s challenging the lannisters and their willingness to destroy and erase all that oppose them, that will liken them to the others so strikingly. he’s standing for life, for a woman that should have lived but never did and for that waste to be acknowledged and respected.
if the point isn’t to root for that, to stand for that and defend her name too, then I don’t know what it is.
These last couple of paragraphs deserve a standing o, honestly.
There is a tendency to minimize Oberyn’s fight with the Mountain to be solely about Oberyn’s death as if that was the point of the scene, which was not at all aided by the show’s “he got sloppy and that’s why he died”. But death is never the point of any story in ASOIAF. Everyone is going to die eventually, every character is going to end up dead at one point or another. But it’s not their death that defines them. It’s what they died for that is important. It’s what they lived for. “Men’s lives have meaning, not their deaths”; the choices they made, how they lived their lives, what they stood for, is what matters and what defines them. That has always been the point from the very first book when Ned’s execution did not define him. Ned Stark’s significance does not boil down to the moment he was flung down on the executioner’s block, but to the legacy he left behind; how he sacrificed himself to spare his daughter’s life and how the memory of this kind and decent man whose first priority was to defend the young and the innocent reverberated so much through the entire North that the Northmen are willing to die in his name. Gosh, this has been the point starting from the AGoT prologue when Waymar Royce bravely stood against a foe out of a legend and chose to fight even when he knew fully well that he had no chance in winning. That choice is what defines Waymar Royce, not that he met his end on the sword of an Other but that he stood against an Other. The abyss stared him in the face and he defiantly told it: “dance with me then”.
So it really rubs me the wrong way when the significance of that scene between Oberyn and the Mountain gets minimized to be about Oberyn’s death. NO. Good god, no. That scene was Oberyn putting the Lannisters and Gregor on trial in the only way that was afforded to him. He was holding them accountable for a crime they have evaded justice for. This was not just vengeance, it was not just about killing Gregor for killing Elia and Aegon. It was about justice, about publicly announcing that he was fighting in Elia Martell’s name, about demonstrating that he was trying to serve justice by making that trial of combat a trial for Gregor, and by extension the Lannisters who named him champion. Oberyn could have killed Gregor right away, but that did not serve his purpose. Oberyn put Gregor on trial and waited for his confession so that his death would be publicly recognized as justice for Elia.
That was the point of that scene, not that Oberyn died in it but that he ultimately extracted a confession from Gregor and a public condemnation of the Lannister\Baratheon regime even as he died. But more importantly, that trial was Oberyn forcing the characters and the readership alike to acknowledge Elia Martell, not as the mother of Rhaenys and Aegon, not as Rhaegar’s wife, not even as Oberyn’s and Doran’s sister but as a person whose suffering and death and very existence was brushed aside as if if didn’t matter, as if she did not matter. Oberyn was challenging the tendency to treat Elia as an afterthought whether in-universe or IRL. He was challenging the narrative itself for treating her as a plot device. Say her name. Acknowledge her personhood and importance as a human being. Don’t be the Lannisters.
elia of houses martell and targaryen, first of her name, queen consort of the andals, the rhoynar, and the first men, lady of the seven kingdoms, and princess of dorne
under the cut: initial sketch from ~a year ago and first digital version from ~six months ago
Robert had been jesting with Jon and old Lord Hunter as the prince circled the field after unhorsing Ser Barristan in the final tilt to claim the champion’s crown. Ned remembered the moment when all the smiles died, when Prince Rhaegar Targaryen urged his horse past his own wife, the Dornish princess Elia Martell, to lay the queen of beauty’s laurel in Lyanna’s lap. He could see it still: a crown of winter roses, blue as frost.
- Eddard XV, aGoT
Upper row: Horton Redfort, Jon Arryn, Robert Baratheon, Eon Hunter
Middle row: Brandon Stark, Lyanna Stark, Benjen Stark, Ned Stark
Lower row: Jon Connington, Arthur Dayne, Ashara Dayne, Elia Martell
“I am not blind, nor deaf. I know you all believe me weak, frightened, feeble. Your father knew me better. Oberyn was ever the viper. Deadly, dangerous, unpredictable. No man dared tread on him. I was the grass. Pleasant, complaisant, sweet-smelling, swaying with every breeze. Who fears to walk upon the grass? But it is the grass that hides the viper from his enemies and shelters him until he strikes.”
Princess Elia, Princess Rhaenys, and baby Prince Aegon.
There’s no way I would draw character’s from pre-Robert’s Rebellion and not draw these three. (And kitty Ballerion of course). Initially Elia’s dress was really challenging, I wasn’t sure how much Targaryen fashion would influence her wardrobe. Since this is the Mad King we’re talking about, I ended up mostly skewing Targaryen with the dorne sari/sash, neckline, jewelry and orange-reds instead of purple-reds.
Rhaenys is dressed in fairly classic Targaryen fashions but with mostly gold accents and some Dornish jewelry. (She’s also accompanied by Ballerion the Cat). And baby Aegon is chillin in some Targaryen red-purple.
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