Grand Maester Elysar

Grand Maester Elysar was an outspoken scholar who served Jaehaerys Targaryen after succeeding Grand Maester Benifer. His brief appearances reveal a court adviser whose bluntness could make him unpopular, but whose clear-eyed assessments proved useful: he recognized a possible scholarly future for Prince Vaegon and helped the king see where the prince might belong. His candid observations also give the histories of the reign a sharply personal edge, from the private grief of Queen Alysanne to the public scandal surrounding Princess Saera.

Appointment and Character

Elysar arrived in King’s Landing after the Shivers had run its course, as the Citadel’s choice to succeed Benifer. He was twenty years younger than the man whose chain he took up, and had a reputation for speaking every thought that came to him. Some at court suspected that the Conclave had sent him away to rid itself of an irritating presence. The account does not establish whether that suspicion was true, but it captures the impression he made: learned and confident, with little inclination to soften his judgments for the comfort of those around him.

His candor could be pointed without being merely dismissive. When Jaehaerys and Alysanne considered what course to set for their book-loving son, Elysar distinguished between the ordinary duties of a maester and the rarer abilities of an archmaester. He did not assume that a passion for books made Vaegon suited to every aspect of a maester’s life. Instead, he considered the practical demands of the calling before identifying the Citadel as a place where the prince’s particular gifts might find room to develop.

Counsel on Prince Vaegon

By Vaegon’s fifteenth nameday, in 78 AC, the king and queen had begun to consider whether their son might become a maester. Elysar rejected that possibility in its conventional sense. Vaegon, he argued, was unlikely to teach a lord’s children basic reading and arithmetic, keep a raven, tend an injured man, or deliver a child—the varied tasks expected of a maester. The assessment was frank, but it did not reduce the prince to his limitations. Elysar saw instead the makings of an archmaester, and recommended sending him to the Citadel, whose library might suit his deep and wide-ranging interest in knowledge.

His distinction gave the king and queen a practical way forward. Three days after speaking with Elysar, Jaehaerys summoned Vaegon and told him he would sail for Oldtown in a fortnight. The Citadel would take charge of him, the king said, while Vaegon himself would determine what became of him. The prince accepted the decision curtly; afterward, Jaehaerys told Alysanne that he thought Vaegon had almost smiled. Elysar could not guarantee that the Citadel would change the prince, but his advice made the destination a possibility rather than treating Vaegon’s difference from an ordinary courtly life as a problem to be forced away.

The Queen’s Grief and a New Birth

Elysar’s record also preserves a small, unsparing observation amid the royal family’s losses. After Princess Daenerys died, Alysanne learned, before the moon had turned twice, that she was pregnant again. During the winter she withdrew to Dragonstone for the lying-in, and late in 60 AC gave birth to a daughter named Alyssa, in honor of the queen’s mother. Elysar remarked that the late Queen Alyssa would have appreciated the honor more had she still been alive, but did so outside Jaehaerys’s hearing.

The remark is characteristic of the sharpness attributed to him, though its setting matters: it belongs to the account’s private margin around a family’s grief, not to any public confrontation. The child Alyssa initially resembled the dead Princess Daenerys so strongly that Alysanne often wept at the sight of her. As the girl grew, the resemblance faded, and her mother came to see more of Baelon in her. Elysar’s aside registers the distance between the solemn meaning of the name and the painful timing of its bestowal, while the account’s fuller attention remains on the queen’s loss and the child who followed it.

The Blue Pearl Affair and the Chronicle

In 84 AC, a prank associated with Princess Saera led to a disturbance at the Blue Pearl, a brothel in King’s Landing, and the City Watch brought three young lords before the king. The affair widened when Queen Alysanne questioned two young women connected with them. After she told Jaehaerys what she had learned, guards brought squires, grooms, and maids before the Iron Throne for questioning; the questioning continued until dawn. Only then did the king and queen send for Saera. The Lord Commander of the Kingsguard and the commander of the City Watch escorted her to the throne room, where Elysar and Septon Barth had been summoned as witnesses. They represented the Citadel and the Starry Sept, and the king sought their guidance in a matter he wished to keep from the rest of his lords.

Elysar also supplied a written comparison for the scandal’s emergence, likening the exposure of a hidden wrongdoing to lancing a boil: the extent and unpleasantness of what emerged could not be known in advance. His image frames the revelations as an uncovering, not an isolated incident. In the throne room, Saera appeared to know what had happened and admitted that she had proposed the prank, while maintaining that she had not expected her companions to carry it out. Elysar’s presence as a witness and his recorded metaphor place him at the intersection of royal judgment and historical account: he was not the investigator, but his writing gave the episode a memorable measure of how far the inquiry had spread.