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It's Always Summer Under the Sea is a song in the world of Game of Thrones. It was apparently made up by Princess Shireen Baratheon.
History
Season 3
Princess Shireen Baratheon is singing this song to herself in her chamber at Dragonstone, when her father King Stannis Baratheon arrives to see her.[1]
Lyrics
- It's always summer, under the sea
- I know, I know, oh, oh, oh
- The birds have scales, and the fish take wing
- I know, I know, oh, oh, oh
- The rain is dry, and the snow falls up
- I know, I know, oh, oh, oh
- The stones crack open, the water burns
- The shadows come to dance, my love
- The shadows come to play
- The shadows come to dance, my love
- The shadows come to stay
Behind the scenes
Actress Kerry Ingram (Shireen Baratheon) sings the full song over the end credits of "Kissed by Fire", the fifth episode of Season 3. Ingram is an accomplished singer in real-life, and before joining the series was best known for her starring role in the stage musical Matilda (2010-2011).
In the books
In the A Song of Ice and Fire novels, the song was actually made up by Stannis' court jester Patchface, whose mind became broken after he survived a shipwreck but spent three days lost in the sea before washing ashore. Patchface was kept around as a mercy, though the rhyming jests he sang ever since have tended to be strange and gloomy. Sometimes upon closer analysis, however, his ominous rhymes seem to possess a deeper insight into events around him (for instance, the Red Wedding), but no one else notices. Thus his seemingly nonsensical song about life under the sea is actually a vague reference to whatever he experienced in the shipwreck during which 100 men died and he nearly drowned.
Patchface struck up an odd friendship with Shireen Baratheon, and for many years he was her main companion. As a slave in Volantis , the jester's face was tattooed in an alternating pattern of green and red squares, earning him his nickname "Patchface" - it is possible that Shireen feels comfortable around him due to also possessing a facial disfigurement (from greyscale).
Writer Bryan Cogman stated that he did want to include Patchface in the TV series, and he was even present in early drafts of the script for "Kissed by Fire", but was later cut out out for fear that it would overwhelm the audience to introduce too many new characters into Stannis' storyline at once (as his wife Selyse and daughter Shireen were also only first introduced in that episode). When asked, Cogman officially stated that the existence of Patchface within the TV continuity is currently in an undetermined limbo-state, as they would still like to include him. Cogman therefore pointed out that if Patchface is never established to exist in the TV series, then the song was just made up by Shireen, but if Patchface is later introduced into the TV series, then it will retroactively be established that Shireen learned it from Patchface.
The song was sang by Patchface in the prologue of "A Clash of Kings", not in one piece but brokenly:
- Under the sea, the birds have scales for feathers
- I know, I know, oh, oh, oh
- It is always summer under the sea
- The merwives wear nennymoans in their hair and weave gowns of silver seaweed
- I know, I know, oh, oh, oh
- Under the sea, it snows up and the rain is dry as bone
- I know, I know, oh, oh, oh
- Clever bird, clever man, clever clever fool
- Oh, clever clever clever fool
- The shadows come to dance, my lord, dance my lord, dance my lord
- The shadows come to stay, my lord, stay my lord, stay my lord
- The shadows come to dance, my lord, dance my lord, dance my lord
- The shadows come to stay, my lord, stay my lord, stay my lord
- Under the sea, you fall up
- I know, I know, oh, oh, oh
- The shadows come to dance, my lord, dance my lord, dance my lord
- Here we eat fish
- Under the sea, the fish eat us
- I know, I know, oh, oh, oh
- Under the sea, no one wears hats
- I know, I know, oh, oh, oh
Shireen giggled at the line of the merwives, but the lines about the shadows scared her. She told Patchface to stop singing that, but he wouldn't. Maester Cressen told Shireen not to take the fool's words at heart.