Jaime Lannister

Who is Jaime Lannister?

Jaime is Tywin Lannister's son, Cersei's twin and a knight of the Kingsguard, the royal guard sworn to protect the king. He is introduced in the first novel as handsome, arrogant and almost careless about his own cruelty, and he is played in Game of Thrones by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. For the first stretch of the story he is seen only from outside, which is the point.

From A Storm of Swords onward he becomes a point-of-view character, and readers discover that the man everyone despises has his own account of himself. That shift, from villain observed to villain understood, is one of the series' most admired moves, and it rests on a single question the books and the show keep returning to: what does a man owe an oath when keeping it would mean letting innocents die?

Why is he called the Kingslayer?

Because he killed the king he was sworn to protect. During the rebellion that put Robert Baratheon on the throne, Jaime killed Aerys II, the king remembered as mad, and the name has followed him ever since. To most of the realm it marks him as a man whose word means nothing; a knight of the Kingsguard who kills his king has broken the one vow that defines the office.

The story's interest is in what the name leaves out. Jaime never explains himself to the people who sneer at him, and for a long time readers have only their version. When his own account arrives, it changes the act from betrayal to something harder to judge, and it turns the insult into the character's private wound: the deed he is most hated for may be the one he is least ashamed of.

What does the Kingsguard oath mean to his story?

The Kingsguard is meant to be the purest form of knighthood, a small order sworn to protect the king and nothing else. That is why his act matters so much to the realm: the knights who are supposed to be beyond politics produced the most political killing of the age, and Jaime remained in the order afterwards as a living reminder of it.

Across the story he keeps being caught between vows that cannot all be kept, to the king, to his family, to the people he has promised to protect. The series uses that bind to question whether honour is a matter of keeping oaths or of choosing well between them, and Jaime is its most sustained answer, a man who broke the most famous oath in the realm and became, by stages, someone others could trust.

What does losing his hand change?

Everything he had built himself on. Jaime was a celebrated swordsman, and in the third season his sword hand is cut off, which strips away the skill that had made him untouchable and the arrogance that went with it. Without it he has to find out who he is when he cannot win by force, and the answer turns out to be someone capable of loyalty to people outside his family.

The loss also reorders his relationships. Cersei, who loved what he was, finds it harder to love what he has become, and the people who once feared him begin to judge him by what he does instead. The series uses the injury the way the books do, as the hinge that turns his story from one of power into one of character.

Why does he go back to Cersei at the end?

This is the most disputed choice in his arc. After seasons of moving away from his sister and toward a better version of himself, Jaime returns to her in the final season, and the two die together in the fifth episode as the Red Keep falls around them. To some viewers that undoes his growth; to others it is the honest end of a man who never stopped loving her.

What the ending does keep is the shape of the character's question. Jaime spent his life choosing between oaths, family and conscience, and at the last he chooses the person, not the principle. Whether that is a failure or a kind of fidelity depends on what a reader thinks his redemption was for. In the novels his story is unfinished as of the date this page was last checked.