Today I was watching a documentary about the Great Fire of London in 1666. I had known it was pretty devastating, but I didn’t realize how hellish it actually was – particularly the strength of the fire itself. The combination of inadequate firefighting tools and stoking wind meant that at its strongest the fire raged at well over a thousand degrees – hot enough to melt the iron bars at Newgate Prison and make the stones of Old St. Paul’s Cathedral literally explode.
But the thing that struck me most was the very real danger the fire posed to the Tower of London, when the blaze changed course after its third day. After all, there were 9000 barrels of gunpowder stored in the Tower. I’m not a physicist or chemist or skilled in whatever branch of science would be capable of analyzing this problem, but an inferno of that scale meeting that load of gunpowder … well I suspect it would have been a pretty horrific explosion.
The reason I mention this at all is because I thought of the Jade Holocaust immediately upon hearing about this. I wouldn’t be surprised if GRRM draws heavily on the Great Fire of London, and particularly the threat to the Tower (that, thankfully for England, never materialized) for when Daenerys attacks the capital. Fire raging, a confusing and hellish inferno, and then the wildfire gets ignited and BOOM. Goodbye King’s Landing, goodbye Iron Throne, goodbye Aegon VI.
You might be surprised about the resilience of King’s Landing to a jade inferno…
One of my favorite quotes from Ben Aaronovitch:
That does suppose, however, that King’s Landing doesn’t turn quasi-radioactive in the combination wildfire-dragonfire explosion.
True. If it goes all Thin Place, the value of the real estate might turn negative.
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