Author: stevenattewell

Maester Steven, I do not understand why there should be confusion over the status of Lady Waynwood; as the Andal Custom states that “a daughter comes before an uncle” and The Vale is the beating heart of those Ancient Traditions, why should Lady Anya not be the Lady of Ironoaks in her own right? (as Lady Rhea ruled Runestone, husband or no, and Lady Jeyne ruled The Vale).

That’s a fair point.

What is surprising is that this suggests male lines failing a lot.

Why did soldier get paid in land rather than gold?

As I discuss here and here and here, paying soldiers in gold requires substantial state capacity – you need a large bureaucracy that can collect taxes in cash (which requires significant record-keeping, valuation, and enforcement capacities), you need the logistical ability to mint the necessary amount of coins and ship them to the army in time for pay day, you need both the authority/legitimacy and economic development to ensure that coin can exchanged with civilians for food and other supplies, and so forth.

Thus, even in the late Roman Empire, you see this system begin to break down – the commercial economy is weakening and urban centers are declining, which means the state is having a harder time extracting the necessary amounts of gold to pay the army (especitally when the army has gotten a sense of its political power and starts demanding more and more gold), the currency is becoming less valuable as a result, which means fewer people are willing to take coins (they’re not trading as much and now you see how all of these factors are mutually-reinforcing)

So the late Roman Empire begins to shift to a proto-feudal system. First they shift to a system of direct requisition of supplies from provinces by the army (which means the army is collecting the taxes itself so you don’t need a bureaucracy to do it for them) and taxes being paid in kind (which means that you don’t need to worry about currency as much). Second, from there it’s not much of a jump to just hand over land to armies in return for military service – whether you’re talking about the limitanei under Diocletian and Constantine or the stratiotika ktemata of the Byzantines, etc.

And in the West, once the Roman Empire falls completely, it was similarly an easy shift for ring-giving kings to start giving out land, now that the Roman bureaucracy and economy that let them get their hands on gold to turn into rings to hand out went away.

How come widowed Anya Waynwood is still in charge of Ironoaks and her son is still Ser Morton, not Lord Morton. I assume she was a Waynwood by birth, but it still seems like she would lose her status as ruler of Ironoaks as soon as Morton was of age, if her husband died before then. It means she was somehow the lord when her husband was alive, which I thought would be a huge no-no, especially in the stuck-up Vale, unless it was absolutely necessary.

It is an interesting question, and Lady Waynwood is not the only case like this – there’s Barbrey Dustin (albeit without an heir), Arwyn Oakheart (whose youngest son was Ser Arys), the Hornwood Crisis, Delonne Allyrion (who has an adult, and indeed married, son), Larra Blackmont (who has two I think adult children), and so on and so forth.

Trying to reconcile this with what we know of Westerosi succession laws is tricky. In some cases, I would guess that a lot of those situations are ones in which an heiress of a house continues to rule until her death (same as a male lord would do), whereas the widow of the previous lord would normally hand over the title to the lord’s heir (although, as we see with Lady Hornwood and Barbrey Dustin, there are widow’s use–rights in cases where there isn’t a clear heir.

So I wanted to run this by you. I think Lady SH’s plot is gonna be resolved in TWOW by either the end of Sansa’s plotline or the end of Arya’s. LF manages to flee the Vale and goes to Harrenhal in the case of the former, & chasing him leads Sansa there in time to see Lady SH get vengeance on him. For Arya, it’s either the same deal with LF and SHE’s going to kill him and finds her mother doing it, or she tracks down the BwoB for some reason. W/ Arya, I see more room for character growth, but

(Lady SH 2) but I don’t know if Arya’s Braavos plot finishes in time for her to be in the Riverlands by the end of TWOW. Then again, Sansa might simply decide that LF can be dealt with later if he escapes, or he doesn’t escape, & she goes right North. Or maybe it’s both & this is how the sisters meet up again. I just feel Lady SH’s plot needs to be finished by one of her children somehow, and that for Arya it might be the most important, since she’d see revenge personified, and it’s real ugly.

It’s possible, but as of late I’ve been leaning away from LSH’s plot linking back to LF’s. He just seems too peripheral to LSH’s story, which focuses much more on the Freys and Lannisters and the Red Wedding. 

Regarding my previous question of the Long Night, what i meant was if you think the Children of the Forest knew about the Others before they came in force on the Long Night? I think it’s possible they at least knew they were there, but before the arrival of humans to Westeros, the Others couldn’t create enough wights to attack on the scale of the Long Night, since humans were easier to surprise and kill than individual Children, Giants or wild animals like wolves.

Doesn’t seem like it:

“Before the First Men came all this land that you call Westeros was home to us, yet even in those days we were few. The gods gave us long lives but not great numbers, lest we overrun the world as deer will overrun a wood where there are no wolves to hunt them. That was in the dawn of days, when our sun was rising. Now it sinks, and this is our long dwindling. The giants are almost gone as well, they who were our bane and our brothers. The great lions of the western hills have been slain, the unicorns are all but gone, the mammoths down to a few hundred. The direwolves will outlast us all, but their time will come as well. In the world that men have made, there is no room for them, or us.“ (ADWD)

Leaf is pretty comprehensive in her listing of primordial lifeforms of Westeros there. 

Are people like Xaro and the slave masters of astapor completely delusional? Why do they think that they can take a dragon as dowery or barter and just have it obey them? The warlocks and Euron have sorcery that might have worked but these guys have nothing, why do they think it would work for them.

No one’s seen a dragon in over a hundred years, and as far as they know dragons can be tamed. So it’s not an unreasonable assumption based on the information available.