Author: stevenattewell

While your note about chainmail under plate armour was informative, I can’t help but wincingly imagine that people sometimes got hit really hard in those flexible places and got rings of chainmail buried in their skin. Do we know much about what kind of injuries knights and similarly armoured fighters sustained in the course of battle?

Well, people did wear heavy quilted gambesons between the chainmail and their skin, but yes, having chainmail rings driven into someone’s flesh absolutely could and did happen. 

As to what kinds of injuries could happen, let me introduce you to a favorite of medieval surgical manuals, the Wound Man:

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The Wound Man was supposed to teach surgeons and other medical professionals all the different ways that someone could be injured. To take a quick inventory by body part:

  • Head: hit by a club, hit by a rock, stabbed by a poinard/misericorde, stabbed by a knife.
  • Shoulders/arms: slashed by a saber, hit by a rock, shoulder broken by a hammer, elbow broken by a club, hand cut off by a cannonball, hand partially cut off.
  • Torso: shot with an arrow, stabbed by a javelin, run through with a sword, stabbed by a poinard/misericorde.
  • Legs: boils, shot with an arrow with the shaft intact, arrowhead left embedded after shaft breaks, leg pierced by a spear, foot stabbed with a spear, treading on a thorn, leg broken by a cannonball. 

What do people in the North do when Winter cones around besides try and survive?

Great question! I can hazard a few guesses as to some areas of activity, based on cultures that have short(er) growing seasons and long winters. 

One would be handcrafts – Scandinavian farmers, for example, historically would often spend the winters building boats for sale to fishing villages (a practice known as beredskaparbete, which later gave its name to Sweden’s system of jobs for the unemployed) – so I wouldn’t be surprised if smallfolk in the North spent the long winter making new (or repairing old) farm equipment, housewares, clothing, and so on and so forth.

Another would be animal husbandry – European farmers in winter were advised to lop trees for fodder to help keep animals alive through the winter, for example, and in regions with lots of marginal land, animals would be herded from their normal fields to “preserved grass” land.

One that shows up a bunch in ASOIAF is story-telling: Old Nan’s “hearth tales” seem to be part of a practice of oral culture in the North that has preserved memories of the Old Night and similar ancient truths that the Maesters scoff at. While the North isn’t the only part of Westeros with a folk culture, I would imagine the tradition of story-telling is much deeper in the North than in other places, simply because they have so much time in the winters to gather together for warmth and while the time away. 

How do Blackfyre partisans view Aegon IV? Do they gloss over his entire reign beyond the sword? Is he a case of ‘yeah he wasn’t that great but he knew who the right king was’?

We don’t know, tbh. 

Certainly, I think most of it comes down to the sword and Aegon’s comments about Daeron not being his son. For some of them, the Marcher Lords and Reachermen, war with Dorne might be part of it too. 

But I think for a lot of them, they cared far less about Aegon than they did about Daeron and Daemon.

In Spiderman: Homecoming, was Peter’s question to Tony at the end “Is this a test?” a reference to Steve Rogers in First Avenger asking Dr. Erskine the same question?

Would you go further and say Peter is a mixture of Stark and Rogers: Rogers’ working-class background with Stark’s technical skills?

1. I could see that one going either way.

2. I could see that too, although he’s very much his own man.