An Invite to The Red Wedding

Why does a murder at the dinner table feel worse than any other? The Red Wedding’s true story begins at two Scottish feasts.

By Jack Malacat

Content note: This article discusses murder, historical massacres, and cannibalism in myth.

When I designed the Death Cards for Serial Killer, “An Invite to The Red Wedding” came straight from Game of Thrones. I never asked where George R.R. Martin found the idea. Coming back to the card for this article, I finally did, and the Red Wedding’s true story begins at two real dinners in Scotland, two and a half centuries apart. Martin has said he combined them and threw in a wedding. What surprised me more was how the Scots judged them. Their law had a name for killing someone who had accepted your hospitality, “murder under trust,” and treated it as a worse crime than ordinary murder.

The Black Dinner

On November 24, 1440, the teenage Earl of Douglas and his younger brother were invited, in the name of Scotland’s boy king, to dine at Edinburgh Castle. Their family, the Black Douglases, was the most powerful noble house in the country, and the men governing on the child’s behalf had reasons to want it smaller. Before the night was over, the brothers had been seized, accused of treason, and beheaded in the castle yard.

Glencoe

In early 1692, about 120 government soldiers arrived in Glencoe, in the Scottish Highlands, and the MacDonalds who lived there took them in, as Highland custom required. For almost two weeks the soldiers shared their food and played games with their families. On the last night, the officers played cards with the clan chief. Before dawn on February 13, the guests turned on their hosts and killed thirty-eight people. Scotland had seen bloodier days. What made Glencoe unforgivable was that the killers had slept under their victims’ roofs, the crime Scots law called murder under trust.

Older Tables

The trick is older than Scotland. In Greek myth, Atreus invited his exiled brother Thyestes home to make peace and treated him to a feast in his honor. After Thyestes had eaten his fill, a second dish arrived carrying the heads and hands of his own sons. He had just eaten the rest of them.

Egypt’s ruler, Muhammad Ali, used the same invitation in 1811. On March 1, he welcomed the Mamluk leaders, the old military elite standing between him and full control of the country, to a celebration at the Cairo Citadel. They were served coffee and sweets. When the procession began, they were sent in single file down a narrow passage between high walls, where his troops were waiting. Afterward, his army hunted the remaining Mamluks across Egypt.

I once thought I was sitting at a table like that. My partner and I used to have dinner with a woman whose husband went from sick to gone so fast that it never sat right with me. I had no evidence, only a feeling, and the feeling followed me to her table. I started watching my plate. Then I came down with a strange flu that hit only me, and my partner never caught it. All I could think about was the ricin in Breaking Bad. My imagination has always leaned toward the dark side, which is probably how I ended up making a game like Serial Killer. I have no reason to believe anyone poisoned me, or that she did anything to her husband. Sudden deaths happen every day. For a while, though, every invitation to her table felt like drawing a Death Card.

Every trap in this article needed the same thing from its victims: they had to sit down and eat. A shared meal asks you to lower your guard for an hour, and most of us do it without a second thought, at holiday dinners and other people’s weddings. Whose cooking would you think twice about eating?

About the Author

Jack Malacat is the creator of Venom Haus and the editor of The Venom Haus Archives, a one-man publication made possible with the help of AI. When he isn’t designing games or dreaming up new products, he’s here, chasing questions about the darker side of being human. He thinks the internet has enough AI slop, and he wants to show what these tools can do in the right hands, with the sources to back it up.

Sources and Further Reading

1. Edinburgh Evening News, “George RR Martin reveals Edinburgh Castle inspiration for bloody Game of Thrones Red Wedding scene,” February 2020. https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/whats-on/arts-and-entertainment/george-rr-martin-reveals-edinburgh-castle-inspiration-bloody-game-thrones-red-wedding-scene-1393905
2. Allan Kennedy, “Scottish History at a Glance: The ‘Black Dinner’ of 1440,” History Scotland, republished by the University of Dundee. https://dundeescottishculture.org/history/scottish-history-at-a-glance-the-black-dinner-of-1440/
3. Aeneas J. G. Mackay, “Douglas, William, sixth Earl of Douglas,” Dictionary of National Biography. https://thepeerage.com/e2793.htm
4. West Highland Museum, “The Massacre of Glencoe 1692,” March 31, 2022. https://www.westhighlandmuseum.org.uk/2022/03/31/the-massacre-of-glencoe-1692/
5. Brian Hughes, “The Massacre of Glencoe,” History Is Now Magazine. https://www.historyisnowmagazine.com/blog/tag/Massacre+of+Glencoe
6. “Atreus and Thyestes,” The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, Brigham Young University. https://ogcma.byu.edu/AtreusThyestes1.0000_Reid.htm
7. Seneca, Thyestes (first century AD), in any modern translation.
8. “The Mamelukes are massacred in Egypt,” History Today. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/mamelukes-are-massacred-egypt
9. “Muhammad Ali Has the Mamlūks Massacred,” EBSCO Research Starters. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/muhammad-ali-has-mamluks-massacred
10. “Last Supper: The Real-Life Massacre That Inspired the Game of Thrones Red Wedding,” Time, June 2013. https://entertainment.time.com/?p=3542462