Liam Cunningham has stated that his character’s reading scene with Shireen in Season 3 of Game of Thrones was an Easter egg inserted by the show-runners. For those who are unfamiliar with the scene, it saw Shireen teaching Davos to read by using a history of the first king of a united Westeros, Aegon the Conqueror. With better framing, it might have served as an excellent example of foreshadowing, but under the circumstances, calling it an Easter egg is the best that it can hope for.
Why Jon Snow’s “Real” Name Was a Bad Choice
With that said, it seems probable that the reveal of Jon Snow’s “real” name will not happen in the same manner in the books, assuming that he even has a “real” name. Theoretically, it is possible that either Lyanna or Rhaegar named him something else before Ned named Jon Snow “Jon” for his foster father Jon Arryn, but “Aegon” would have been a strange choice for either one of them.
For Lyanna, Aegon would have been a strange choice because Rhaegar had a son with his wife Elia Martell named Aegon, who was believed to have been killed in the Red Keep when the Lannisters launched a surprise attack on King’s Landing towards the end of Robert’s Rebellion. If Lyanna had named her child before the fall of King’s Landing, “Aegon” would have been a blatant challenge to the legitimacy of Elia’s son, which would have resulted in an inevitable break in the Targaryen loyalists even if they had managed to win the war. In contrast, if Lyanna had named her child after the fall of King’s Landing, “Aegon” would have made him seem like nothing but a cynical replacement for his older brother. While Lyanna might have made some rather questionable choices over the course of her short life, there is no real reason to believe that she was so cluelessly malicious.
As for Rhaegar, most of the fans of the books suspect that he would have wanted Jon Snow to be named “Visenya,” assuming that he even had a name planned out. This is because Rhaegar was a believer in the prophecy of the Prince that Was Promised, which may or may not have been referring to the same figure referred to by other messianic prophecies in the setting. As a result, since Rhaegar had a Rhaenys and an Aegon with his wife Elia, a lot of fans of the books believed that he would have been expecting a Visenya to complete the reference to Aegon the Conqueror and his two sister-wives who founded the Targaryen dynasty by uniting the continent. In this light, Rhaegar eloping with Lyanna might have been motivated in significant part by the fact that Elia’s health was so bad that she could not have further children after the two, which would have been rather problematic for Rhaegar when he believed that the Prince that Was Promised would be needed sooner rather than later.
Finally, it should be mentioned that Jon Snow being named “Aegon” is improbable because it would make matters more confusing than they need to be in the books. After all, his older brother has just launched an invasion of Westeros with the Golden Company, which is making real progress in the Stormlands. Granted, said individual is probably an imposter like the numerous imposters who showed up in real medieval history, but whether he is that particular Aegon or not, he is still certainly an Aegon. Furthermore, it should be noted that from a thematic perspective, Jon Snow is a Stark to the core, meaning that even if he was named Aegon Targaryen at some point, it would not be his real name in the sense that matters to most people in modern times.
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