Lady Lysa Arryn, née Tully, was the wife of Jon Arryn and the mother of Robert Arryn. She was also the younger daughter of Lord Hoster Tully and the sister of Catelyn Stark and Edmure Tully.
Appearance and Personality[]
As a young woman, Lysa was apparently extremely beautiful, with thick auburn hair, blue eyes and a slender figure. Now older and weathered by her experiences, Lysa has become thick-bodied due to several pregnancies, miscarriages and stillbirths that she has suffered. Even though Catelyn is older than her, Lysa looks like she has aged ten years and has become pale and fat-cheeked, which she tries to remedy with scents, paints and powders. She has an aggressive look to her, with a petulant mouth. She tends to dress in the blue clothes of her husband's house.
While Lysa had been sweet and kind, if shy and nervous and delicate as a girl, tending towards fits of giggles and nervous silences, she has become both hardened and complicated as a result of her life in King's Landing. A number of people in the Crownlands have low and demeaning opinions of her, thinking her to be eccentric, frail of mind and petulant. Men like Grand Maester Pycelle describe her as 'undisciplined', and claims that she sees enemies in every shadow. There is some truth in this, since Lysa was excruciatingly paranoid and fearful to an extreme about those who surround her. She had a cold and uneven opinion of her bannermen and supporters, and those of her husband, thinking of them as vultures who are trying to pick her world apart - in fact, she saw almost everyone in this regard.
Lysa is supremely, almost dangerously protective of Robert, her only surviving child, and will go to extreme measures to protect him and keep him close - even though she did not love Robert's father. Lysa has developed an intense hatred of her remaining family, going so far as to threaten her own sister upon the suggestion that her son be fostered and refusing to take part in the War of the Five Kings despite the violent effect it has had on her family. She is quick to anger, and temperamental, sentencing Tyrion Lannister to death on the grounds of personal prejudice and rather thin evidence. She has spoiled her son his entire life, but her obsession with him has gone to such an extent that she breastfed him for an unnaturally long time.
When Sansa finally meets Lysa, she realises that the woman has become effectively insane, prone to ferocious mood swings and fits of rage and hysteria. She treats Sansa, her own blood, extremely cruelly and gives her no respect. Her main weakness is the fact that she is obsessively in love with Petyr Baelish, and has been since she was a girl - her blind love allows him to easily manipulate her into murdering her own husband and bringing chaos to her family. She was stupid and blind enough to believe that he loved her. This led to Lysa instinctively believing that, when she learns of Petyr kissing Sansa, she interprets it in reverse and believes that Sansa is trying to steal him from her. This led to her completely losing her mind and outright physically threatening to throw Sansa through the Moon Door. She reveals herself to be blind of the following - that Petyr doesn't love her (hence kissing Sansa, whom he sees as an extension of Catelyn), and never had (since Petyr has been obsessed with Catelyn his whole life and, even when she gave him her maidenhead, he called her by her sister's name) and that Petyr is far more dangerous than she could have possibly imagined (since he managed to exploit her so easily).
Biography[]
She grew up with Catelyn at Riverrun, where she fell in love with Petyr Baelish. When the girls grew older, Lysa went to a drunk Petyr and had sex with him. He thought she was Catelyn. Baelish is thrown out when a pregnant Lysa went to her father and asked to marry him. Instead her father married her to Jon Arryn of the Eyrie, a man old enough to be her grandfather and the keeper of the Vale of Arryn. Lysa's father, Hoster Tully made marriage to a soiled Lysa as the price of the Riverrun alliance and troops for Robert's Rebellion. Lysa believed that marriage would give her child a name, but her father gave her a potion to cause a miscarriage. This maybe why she is so obsessive a mother, and she has never forgiven her father. Lysa had many miscarriages and only gave Jon Arryn one son, Robert Arryn, who is a sickly child. After Jon Arryn died in King's Landing, Lysa took Robert and fled to the Eyrie, where she has been cowering since.
Lysa sent a message secretly to Catelyn Stark (it was in a coded message hidden in the false bottom of a box left in the chamber of Maester Luwin of Winterfell). In the letter she accused the Lannisters of being responsible for her husband's death. This was a good part of the reason why Lord Eddard Stark accepted the position as Hand of the King, to investigate the plot. There was also the information from Petyr Baelish that the knife used in the assassination attempt on Bran, was owned by Tyrion Lannister. These facts culminated in Catelyn Stark taking Tyrion Lannister prisoner and putting him on trial, which began the first fighting in the War of the Five Kings. She has refused to send the Eyrie's troops to help anyone in this war, though she did nearly execute Tyrion Lannister when Catelyn brought him to her as a captive.
As a wealthy, still fertile widow, with only a sickly child, Lysa is seen as a very eligible match by all her bannermen. Since the death of her husband she has been continually surrounded by suitors, try to court her favor. She enjoys the flattery, but her heart belongs to another.
In A Storm of Swords, Petyr Baelish takes Sansa to the Eyrie. Lysa meets him on the way, at the Fingers and it is revealed that they have long planned to be married. They do immediately. At the Eyrie, Sansa learns that Petyr convinced Lysa that he was in love with her, so she murdered Jon Arryn herself. Jon had been planning to separate her from Robert, sending him to foster with Stannis Baratheon at Dragonstone.
When Lysa sees Petyr Baelish impulsively kiss Sansa Stark, she attempts to kill her niece. She takes Sansa to the Moon Door and tries to throw her out while her minstrel sings loudly to drown out Sansa's calls for help. Petyr comes and talks her into freeing Sansa, but when Lysa starts confessing to how they murdered her husband, he realizes that she is now a liability and pushes her out of the tower, killing her. He then blames the singer Marillion.