Your essay on the first BFR and it’s lack of Starks got me thinking: What do you think was going on in the North between the Dance and Dagon Greyjoy’s rebellion? That’s 80 years and all we’ve got is Rickon Stark dying in Dorne and Cregan fighting the Dragonknight. I assume we’ll get a quick history lesson in the next D&E story, but do you have any theories about Cregan’s reign? Think the succession crisis after Rickon’s death might have sparked some kind of War of the Wolves?

Given how long he ruled, I definitely get the sense of Cregan as this incredibly imposing patriarch who you did not cross if you wanted to live. I get sort of a Peter O’Toole in the Lion in Winter vibe, heraldic animals aside, a powerful warlord, a cunning manipulator, a man with a serious weakness for women, and someone who probably drove his kids crazy playing them off against each other as they waited for the Old Man of the North to die. 

Given Cregan’s many wives and their many, many offspring, it could not have been easy to keep House Stark in line. Rickon Stark with his hill clan kin and his Manderly wife vs. the Blackwood Starks (did they ever marry? did they have ambitions to rule despite their gender? did they have the same kind of magical affinities Bloodraven had?) vs. the quarrelsome Stark Starks (seriously, it cannot have been easy living having the lusty Brandon, Jonnel One-Eye, Barthogan the Blacksword, and Edric all under the same roof). It gets even weirder when you consider that Cregan married his cousin and then both Jonnel and Edric did the same thing.  What happened to the line of Edric and Senna, which combined the Stark Starks with the Norrey Starks?

And of course the irony of all this is that despite all of this heir-making, the modern Stark line all descends from from the second son of Cregan’s fifth son, the Beron who died fighting Dagon.