If a bastard got married, would his children carry his bastard name

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You'd think so. But then after 8,000 years give or take there would a sh!t ton of Snows and Stones etc. who aren't bastards. Even if only a small fraction of them get married over thousands of years that would really add up. The whole distinction would have completely lost meaning by now. And the stigma would be almost gone. Because no one can know for sure if it means you are a bastard.

Like how fitz doesn't mean anything special now. If my last name is Fitzpatrick it doesn't mean I'm the son of someone named Patrick. And it certainly doesn't mean I'm a royal bastard. No one would even make that connection now.

So I guess not?

I don't know.

There are cases where legitimate children take the mother's name in show (Mormonts for example) but it's not clear what the dad situation is there.


No wonder Jesus quit carpentry. It's so much harder than talking on a donkey.

There is no answer to that question. The invention of an imposed generic name for bastards is just another stupid impractical fantasy from that underdog lover.

Long may she reign http://i.imgur.com/BxJJSJZ.jpg

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In most cases they'd keep the surname but in some cases the child may choose to change it.

Source: http://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Entry/2999/ (third paragraph from the end)

Note as well the special naming of bastards only applies to high-born families not common folk.

All this is just book lore of course. With the show we don't actually know which things are still canon unless specified in the show itself or the HBO website.

I assume if who said bastard married were a woman of very high birth they would get her name, such as the Mormonts like Lyanna and her sisters. But if not, they'd have no name at all, like Gendry. There are plenty of no-name characters, I don't think Davos or Bronn had family names when they were born either.


Do you even know what honor is?
- A horse.

Thank you guys , here I think I found the answer from the article that wolf shared

You ask about names. Several different questions here. Maege Mormont is called Mormont because no one knows her husband's name, or even if she has one. There is all the talk that she beds with a bear. She prefers to keep her own counsel. Most of the ladies of Westeros do change their names when they wed, although usage varies. If the wife's family is significantly higher born than the husband's, she may use his name little, if at all. The Dornish have their own customs. The full surname of the ruling house of Dorne is Nymeros Martell, and the ruling pricesses keep that in its female form. They do not take the name of their consorts.

Bastard names are given only to bastards with at least one parent of high birth. So the bastard child of two peasants would have no surname at all.

Thus a bastard name like "Snow" or "Rivers" is simultaneously a stigma and a mark of distinction. The whole thing with bastard names is custom, not law.

The highborn parent can bestow the usual name, a new one of his/her own devising, or none at all. Most legitimate sons of bastards keep the bastard name, but there are cases where a later generation fiddles with it to remove the taint. There's one such case that you will meet in the next book, a minor character descended from a Waters (a bastard name along the shores of Blackwater Bay) whose great grandfather changed the name to Longwaters for just that reason.

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