Who are Jon Snow's parents?

What does the show reveal, and in which episodes?

The answer arrives in two pieces, a full season apart, and the split does real work. The sixth season's finale, first shown in 2016, settles only the maternal half: Jon's mother was Lyanna Stark, the sister of the man who raised him, which makes him a Stark by blood and not merely by Eddard's word. Viewers were left to supply the father themselves, and most supplied Rhaegar, because readers of the novels had suspected him for a long time.

The seventh season's finale, in 2017, completes the picture with two further facts. Rhaegar's earlier marriage to Elia Martell had been annulled and he had then married Lyanna, and the child she bore was named Aegon Targaryen. Those two details change the meaning of everything before them. A royal bastard would be a footnote in a family crowded with them; a lawful son of the crown prince is, by the show's own logic, the rightful heir to the Iron Throne.

Why did Eddard Stark raise him as a bastard?

Because the truth would have made the baby a target. By the time Lyanna died, the realm belonged to Robert Baratheon, who had risen against the Targaryens in the belief that Rhaegar had carried Lyanna off by force. A son of Rhaegar's, with a claim to the crown Robert had just taken, was the most dangerous child in Westeros to leave alive. Passing the boy off as a bastard of his own gave Eddard a story nobody at court would think worth testing.

The cover story is also the engine of the character. Jon grows up at Winterfell as the one child of Eddard's household without the Stark name, and that outsider's place is part of why the Night's Watch, where birth counts for little, draws him in. The irony the series leans on is plain once the truth is out: the boy brought up as the least of the family was, by birth, the most important person in it, and the man who hid that fact paid for it with his own reputation for honesty.

What do the published novels actually say?

None of the five published novels states who Jon's parents are. Eddard presents Jon as his son to everyone, Jon included, and A Game of Thrones gives readers only fragments around Lyanna's death to work with. Readers pieced those fragments into an answer and gave it a shorthand that stuck: R+L=J, meaning Rhaegar plus Lyanna equals Jon. It became one of the best known fan theories in modern fantasy long before the television series weighed in.

The show's version is now widely assumed to be where the books are heading as well, and nothing in print contradicts it. But a page that is careful about its sources has to separate the two plainly. On screen, Jon's parentage is a revealed fact with episode numbers attached. In the novels, as of the date this page was last checked, R+L=J remains a theory with a great deal of support and no confirmation, and it will stay that way until a further book says otherwise.

What does it change for Jon and for Daenerys?

On paper it puts Jon ahead of Daenerys Targaryen in the line of succession, although she is Rhaegar's sister and therefore Jon's aunt. The final season uses that to pull at the alliance between them: for Jon the claim is something he never sought and does not want, while for Daenerys it is the one fact that could undo the cause she has staked everything on. Who learns the secret, and whom they tell, becomes a test of loyalty for the people around the two of them.

It also explains why the reveal lands where it does. Jon has already served in the Night's Watch and been named King in the North before he learns any of it, so the story can set what he chose against what he was born to. Read that way, the name Aegon Targaryen matters less as a claim than as a question about what Jon wants, and his answer to that question is the shape of the character's ending.