Part four of my ongoing series in which I examine the themes and symbols present in the "Rat Cook" story, as relayed in ASOS Bran IV, and how those elements reappear throughout ASOAIF.

Ideally, each of these essays is able to stand alone, but it's better to read the preceding ones first, because each of these posts builds on the ones before it. Links to: part one, part two, and part three.

To anyone who is reading this part first, "Revisiting the Rat Cook" is a series that is built on the understanding that GRRM's use of metadiegetic legends provide a "road map" of symbols and meaning, used in their abstract form, which we, as readers, can use to better understand the relationships between symbols, motifs, and themes as they reoccur throughout ASOAIF as a whole. The Rat Cook story is about a rat which eats rats, or a cook who serves kings; The Rat Cook story is about fathers and sons, about cannibalism, about trust, about vengeance, and about damning one's legacy.

"Fresh rats"

In the last two parts, I talked about the use of “pork” as a way to talk about the idea of eating human flesh as well as the social contract of guest right. The importance of guest right is, in part, the trust in a power dynamic, and the “Rat Cook” story shares an example of what it means when that trust is violated, especially in regards to becoming an unwilling cannibal.

However, looking at the scene of Coldhands offering the suspicious “sow” meat in ADWD Bran I, we might wonder whether Jojen is aware of the cannibalism after all. He seems uniquely contemplative when Bran sees him eating:

Jojen Reed nipped at his own joint with small bites, chewing each chunk of meat a dozen times before swallowing.

Later on, Jojen’s burden of knowledge is nearly made explicit:

Only Jojen seemed aware of what was happening as Coldhands turned his head to stare at Bran.

Taken at face value, Jojen is only “aware” of Bran asking the question, but we might understand that this sentence carries a double meaning in which Jojen is also aware of what Bran’s question implies. Jojen is not naive. He knows how believable it is that Coldhands stumbled across a sow in the frozen north. Even if Coldhands is being dishonest here, Jojen may be making a conscious decision to turn cannibal nevertheless, because their situation is simply so desperate that he feels it is the only remaining choice.

Elsewhere in ASOIAF, especially as circumstances steadily get worse in the later books, we see people turn cannibal in response to similar conditions.

When Astapor falls, the people inside turn to eating the flesh of their fellow Astapori, now devoid of trade, agriculture, economy, and just rule. Dany first hears of this in ADWD Daenerys V:

“Inside we starved. We ate cats and rats and leather. A horsehide was a feast. King Cutthroat and Queen Whore accused each other of feasting on the flesh of the slain. Men and women gathered in secret to draw lots and gorge upon the flesh of him who drew the black stone.”

They have no food, save the very last of what’s edible. Like Jojen, we might imagine the severity of their circumstances drive the Astapori to cannibalism even as they recognize how terrible it is.

At the edge of survival, they are driven to eating cats, leather, and, interestingly, another symbol we recognize from our story about the “Rat Cook”: rats. This manner of recounting equates these ideas: starvation means eating rats and leather, which means some even choose to engage in cannibalism. This scenario of drawing lots to eat or be eaten is also a cannibalistic covenant with the self; like Victarion sacrificing his pork crackling arm, these are people who are willing to be eaten for their own chance to eat.

All of this is repeated in the next Dany chapter, ADWD Daenerys VI, when the starving Astapori arrive outside Meereen, bringing with them even further tales of being driven to eating rats, and then, subsequently, to cannibalism:

Suffering was the only thing they did not lack. "There is scarcely a horse or mule left, though many rode from Astapor," Marselen reported to her. "They've eaten every one, Your Grace, along with every rat and scavenger dog that they could catch. Now some have begun to eat their own dead."

In this account, again, the detestable “rat” is the last remaining source of food, the last remaining step before the Astapori refugees turn to eating their own dead.

In the “Rat Cook” story, the old gods punish the titular cook by not just transforming him into a rat, but with a lifetime of “eating rats” in the Nightfort. For him, this is cannibalism, and the two are equated, but for the purposes of the story, there is also the implication that “eating rats” in any context is a circumstance so despicable as to be punitive. The “Rat Cook” story tells us that eating rats is a legendary punishment in itself, and yet it is also the reality that the Astapori are experiencing.

It’s not just in Astapor, either. Martin shows people eating rats whenever there are signs of incredible desperation or suffering. Every account of Stannis’ infamous siege at Storm’s End, for example, contains the act of eating rats, beginning with Ned’s recollection of the event in AGOT Eddard VI:

Ned found it hard to imagine what could frighten Stannis Baratheon, who had once held Storm's End through a year of siege, surviving on rats and boot leather while the Lords Tyrell and Redwyne sat outside with their hosts, banqueting in sight of his walls.

In an identical circumstance as the destitute Astapori, Stannis’ men in Storm’s End are down to “rats and boot leather”. Martin’s use of food to illustrate a power dynamic is unsubtle here, as the victims of the siege, who starve and eat rats, are put in direct comparison to their powerful assailants feasting “in sight” of Storm’s End.

This image of Storm’s End under siege and eating rats is repeated twice more when we finally meet Stannis and his associates in the ACOK Prologue. Both accounts are much alike, and one such is this memory from Maester Cressen:

Even the sea was closed against them, watched day and night by Redwyne galleys flying the burgundy banners of the Arbor. Within Storm's End, the horses had long since been eaten, the dogs and cats were gone, and the garrison was down to roots and rats.

Similarly to Ned's telling, Cressen contextualizes the story of Stannis’ siege against the extremity of the conditions that lead to eating rats, and therefore, how low and how dire the rat situation is meant to be. Cressen draws a line down the hierarchy of desperation: first horses, then dogs and cats (like we see with the Astapori as well) and finally rats at the very bottom. Cressen leaves it unspoken here, but the only remaining place to go lower is cannibalism.

While Ned and Cressen leave it unsaid, though, there is someone who makes the connection explicit: Renly, who perhaps was too young during the event to internalize the same severity of horror. In Renly’s telling of the story in ACOK Catelyn IV, Davos saved them not only from starvation, but also from turning to cannibalism.

"Maester Cressen told Stannis that we might be forced to eat our dead, and there was no gain in flinging away good meat."

Maester Cressen left that detail out of his memory, but placing rats last on his litany of desperate meals did not mean it was the final option. The revelation from Renly comes after three tellings of Stannis’ siege, but the weight of that unspoken threat of cannibalism retroactively transforms every earlier account of that siege into an even darker tale.

Stannis later leads his men into similar conditions again when his army is stranded in a blizzard en route to Winterfell. Camped in a crofter’s village aside iced-over lakes, Asha learns of men turning to cannibalism in this new desperate situation in ADWD The Sacrifice:

Asha had been as horrified as the rest when the She-Bear told her that four Peasebury men had been found butchering one of the late Lord Fell's, carving chunks of flesh from his thighs and buttocks as one of his forearms turned upon a spit, but she could not pretend to be surprised.

To Asha’s credit, perhaps, she understands the reality of the situation with an iron cynicism. Men turning cannibal is a realistic possibility in times like these. In this blizzard, though, we don’t see the step of people eating rats first, as Stannis’ men are moving through conditions where even rats are not accompanying them. Unlike the freedom allowed in the legends of ASOIAF, like the “Rat Cook” story itself, Martin is beholden to the reality of the plot to some extent. However, the mention of rats—and a particularly interesting comparison to cannibalism—appears nonetheless, later in the same chapter:

"I know them lakes. You been on them like maggots on a corpse, hundreds o' you. Cut so many holes in the ice it's a bloody wonder more haven't fallen through. Out by the island, there's places look like a cheese the rats been at.”

The ice lakes are their only source of food, playing the role that the rats played in the siege or in Astapor, and that same ice is cheese beset by rats, it is a corpse beset by men. The two are one and the same. Starving men cutting desperate holes in the ice to eat is akin to eating human flesh and is akin to rats—and so Martin keeps the imagery present: starvation to the point of cannibalism means rats.

Back in ACOK, the repeated tellings of Stannis’ story are juxtaposed against the desperate conditions just beginning to affect King’s Landing. We get a glimpse of the smallfolk’s conditions as soon as Tyrion arrives in ACOK Tyrion I:

What little produce he did see was three times as costly as it had been a year ago. One peddler was hawking rats roasted on a skewer. "Fresh rats," he cried loudly, "fresh rats." Doubtless fresh rats were to be preferred to old stale rotten rats.

King’s Landing starves, suffering the combination of no trade with the burned Riverlands, no trade with the defecting Reach, and the migration of hungry peasants fleeing the war. Like with so many other instances throughout the series, starvation means being driven to eat rats.

As with every situation so far, eating rats here in King’s Landing also carries that same unspoken threat, which Tyrion only alludes to later in ACOK Tyrion IV:

Prices had risen sickeningly high on greens, roots, flour, and fruit, and Tyrion did not want to think about what sorts of flesh might be going into the kettles of the pot-shops down in Flea Bottom. Fish, he hoped.

Again, the quote focuses on the extremity of eating rats, and how all else is gone. For now, the threat of truly turning cannibal can still exist as only an implication, even in Tyrion’s thoughts… but the luxury of that ignorance does not last as circumstances worsen.

In ASOS Tyrion IV, as Tyrion talks of killing Symon Silver Tongue, Bronn speaks of places that, in their desperation, are less scrupulous with their meat choice, using nearly the same euphemism:

"The rest of him should never be found.”

Bronn grinned. "There's a pot shop I know in Flea Bottom makes a savory bowl of brown. All kinds of meat in it, I hear."

Tyrion arranges the serving of his “singer’s stew”, and of course, this singer’s fate is another clear mirror to the Rat Cook story, as Tyrion—albeit indirectly—becomes a “Rat Cook” figure himself as he serves human flesh to unwitting diners in an act of vengeance, of a sort, against the singer attempting to blackmail him. While eating rats might signify the prospective road towards cannibalism, the certainty of that stew, along with the shadow cast by the ease of those arrangements, makes the specter of cannibalism loom over all of King’s Landing alongside every rat eaten.

The symbols present in the “Rat Cook” story are only further explained by the fact that rats are the last tier on Astapor’s, Tyrion's, and Cressen’s hierarchy of desperation, exceeded in distaste only by cannibalism itself.

Why is the cook a rat, after all? The choice of the cook becoming a rat specifically must be significant; since the "Rat Cook" is only a story within the story, Martin could have made the cook turn into anything. This repeated marriage between eating, rats, and cannibalism affirms the same symbolic linking we’ve examined so far, and affirms a second layer in which the Rat Cook’s cannibalistic rat-eating is inherently present in the other instances of eating rats. To eat rats is to be so desperate that cannibalism is the apparent next option. When people eat rats in ASOIAF, it is understood that those moments coexist with the present threat of people eating people, and the connection between the two ideas is as inseparable elsewhere in ASOIAF as it is within the Rat Cook story.

Even better, we might put the fate of the Rat Cook another way, and we might say that for the Rat Cook, “eating rats” is cannibalistic because he was made into a rat. The Andal King ate his own son without question, but for the Rat Cook it is his magical “rathood” that makes the act cannibalistic. If we trust that the "Rat Cook" story offers a blueprint to understanding the meaning of these symbols, we might expect that the smallfolk, too, eating rats like the Rat Cook himself, have a connection to being rats as well.

In fact, to corroborate that expectation, the connection between “eating rats” and cannibalism in every instance discussed goes beyond the literal threat of cannibalism and exists on a metaphorical level too, especially in regards to the specific populaces that suffer.

After all, the lords in the Red Keep eat well through it all, and it is only the smallfolk of King’s Landing who quietly eat their own, just as it is only the freedmen refugees of Astapor that suffer and starve. While Stannis’ men exist in lord-led armies or within keeps, they too are essentially without power. In both the siege and in the march on Winterfell, Stannis’ men move in opposition to the crown and in the face of an opposition that waits and feasts; both scenarios, both using food, represent the same hierarchies of power that disenfranchise the smallfolk and the freedmen. The conditions of destitution that lead to “eating rats” exist along class lines–-as it is only the lowest tier of people who are driven to this point—and this is where the symbolism of the rat becomes even more meaningful.

From the perspective of the Red Keep, and the highborn within it, “eating rats” might as well already be cannibalism, because to them, the smallfolk are “rats”. In AGOT Arya III, the guards of the Red Keep believe Arya to be one of the smallfolk of King’s Landing, and therefore to be like one of the rats:

Boy, how did you come here? You have no business in this part of the castle."

"You can't keep this sort out," one of the red cloaks said. "Like trying to keep out rats."

Similarly, The Hound, who names himself a dog, makes the explicit derogatory comparison a book later in ACOK Sansa IV:

“A dog doesn't need courage to chase off rats.”

The smallfolk themselves are considered rats, and are called so by both the castle guards and by a particularly honest member of the Kingsguard, two institutions which represent the de jure power of the Red Keep and the lords within it; this is the military force that maintains the hierarchy of lords and smallfolk. For Clegane and the guards to name the smallfolk rats is for that heirarchical institution itself to name the smallfolk as such—and, as was pointed out by Cressen, and as was made implicit by the tales of the starving Astapori, rats are beneath all else. Rats are the last in the hierarchy of what even a starving man would eat, below horses, below dogs, below cats and on par with leather, not even food.

If these smallfolk similarly are rats, then we are seeing a reappearance of the “Rat Cook” dynamic in yet another way. The Rat Cook himself is one of the smallfolk—he is only a cook, serving his Andal King. If we can take Sandor’s word for it, he may have been a “rat” from the perspective of the Andal King even before he was transformed into a literal rat. Here we see the “Rat Cook” story gain new meaning once again; it is not just cannibalism that ties the “rat” symbol to the story, but also the hierarchy of power, and how it is perceived.

The “rats” here, the lowest on the hierarchy of food, are also the lowest of the hierarchy of de jure power in the world, also the first to suffer the worst conditions, also first who are forced to eat rats. If the smallfolk are rats already, then being pushed to the point of eating rats is, in effect, equivalent to being pushed to the point of cannibalism—and if, as the Rat Cook story would suggest, “eating rats” is a serviceable punishment for a grievous sin, what sin have the smallfolk committed to be experiencing this punishment now?

Moreover, Sandor’s words are particularly damning, because Sandor proclaims this directly following a riot in a starving city, a moment where the smallfolk have been pushed to their limit and—for once—rise against their (Andal) King.

In this, the resonance with the “Rat Cook” story takes on more dimension yet again. Despite being one of the smallfolk, perhaps considered a “rat” already, this lowly cook dares to make an act of outright defiance, reversing the assumed power dynamics, killing the son of the King and boldly serving that corpse to the King himself. The serving of the “prince-and-bacon pie” is an act of service, but it is also an act of defiance, an act that is a perversion of the contract that keeps kings in charge and cooks in servitude even as it is a parallel perversion of the contract that keeps hosts and guests at peace. In turn, the punishment, perfectly fit to the crime, is for the Rat Cook to “become a rat” and to “eat rats”... two fates that the smallfolk of King’s Landing seem to be suffering already, before the crime.

​

In the next part, I’ll talk about the next step of this thought process: the “Rat Cook” story is a story about social trust and cannibalism, but it is also a story about hierarchical power, one in which a cook dares to defy a king in the same way that the smallfolk of King’s Landing once dared to riot against the crown. If the smallfolk are rats already, after all, if they are eating their own already—what more punishment is there for them? They might have nothing to lose if they were to become “Rat Cooks” themselves and eat the princes rather than their fellow rats. To examine that, we’ll look at Bran in the cave, Theon-as-Reek, a warning Edd gives Jon, Blackwoods under siege, and more.