Would it have been possible for Roose to join the Battle of the Fords and take the Lannisters in the rear? Assuming that Bolton remained loyal, of course.

Not really. Roose took Harrenhal almost simultaneously with the Battle of the Fords.

Do you think Highgarden ever tried to build a fleet of its own to be stationed at the mouth of the Mander or the Shields? To lessen its reliance on the Arbor and Oldtown for a navy

It does have a fleet on the Shield Islands:

The most telling blow was struck by King Garth VII, the Goldenhand, King of the Reach, when he drove the ironmen from the Misty Islands, renamed them the Shield Islands, and resettled them with his own fiercest warriors and finest seamen to defend the mouth of the Mander…

Soon after, he turned his attention to the sea and drove the last ironmen from their strongholds on the Shield Islands. Thereafter he resettled the islands with his fiercest fighters, granting them special dispensations for the purpose of turning them into a first defense against the ironborn, should they return. This proved a great success, and to this day the men of the Four Shields pride themselves on defending the mouth of the Mander and the heart of the Reach against any and all seaborne foes…

Most seagoing vessels dared not sail beyond Highgarden, but longships with their shallow draughts could navigate as far upstream as Bitterbridge. In ancient days, the ironborn had boldly sailed the river road and plundered all along the Mander and its vassal streams … until the kings of the green hand had armed the fisherfolk on the four small islands off the Mander’s mouth and named them his shields.

Two thousand years had passed, but in the watchtowers along their craggy shores, greybeards still kept the ancient vigil…Warhorns would echo across the waters, from Greenshield and Greyshield, Oakenshield and Southshield, and their longships would come sliding out from moss-covered stone pens along the shores, oars flashing as they swarmed across the straits to seal the Mander and hound and harry the raiders upriver to their doom.

They’re longships rather than galleys, but there’s 50 or more of them. Perhaps not enough to take on the Iron Fleet, although they did a fine job against Quellon Greyjoy, but enough to slow it down and allow the Redwyne Fleet to mobilize…if Euron hadn’t tricked them.

Might the Maesters adoption of the Common Tongue and abandonment of the Old Tongue (and its associated works) have been part of their whole conspiracy to get rid of magic?

I don’t think so.

Are you sure you’re not confusing runes with glyphs/characters? IIRC runes are an inherently alphabetical writing system, at least in real life.

Not always. They can be characters or pictographs.

On the subject of the Andal language being key to the compromise between Citadel and Faith, does that mean that the Citadel may have been responsible for the loss of the Old Tongue and its script?

Partially, but the reality of the Andal invasion played the dominant role.

I have just finished reading “The name of the rose” and I personally enjoyed it immensely. I don’t know if you read it but I would be interested in hearing your thoughts about it!

Oh, that’s an amazing book. Umberto Eco really taxes one’s mental abilities, especially when he refuses to translate the Greek and Latin and other languages that these monks are quoting to one another all the damn time. But I love the way that Eco combines medieval philosophy and detective mystery.

Why do you think the Andal tongue was crucial to your proposed agreement between the Faith and the Citadel?

So here’s my thinking: there’s something really weird about the way that the WOIAF has the Maesters be a pre-Andal instituion but goes back and forth on the First Men having a written language.

So here’s my thinking. I think the runic writing of the First Men was quite complicated and difficult to learn, requring one to learn thousands and thousands of easy-to-confuse runes – and that the pre-Andal maesters thus relied as much more on memorizing oral traditions, similar to the traditions of the Celtic druids and bards.

And then come the Andals, but instead of overthrowing the system and burning the Citadel, they get incorporated into the power structure of the Reach and Oldtown more specifically. And so the maesters encounter these new Andal lords and knights, and there’s cultural sharing and intermingling going on.

Now, my headcanon is that the “Common
Tongue” is so named because it’s a relatively easy language to learn (atonal,
regular conjugations, no complicated system of cases and agreements,
straightforward grammar that doesn’t have the verb at the end of the sentence, etc.)
and a writing system that’s alphabetical rather than character-based, so it’s much easier to read and write and to teach people to read and write.

So early after the Andal incorporation into Oldtown, I think the maesters decided to adopt the Common Tongue and, with the help of the septons of the Faith, write down everything that had previously had been preserved orally, thus why “the tales we have now are the work of septons and maesters writing thousands of years after the fact,” and “the septons who first wrote them down took what details suited them and added others.”

Thus, we have a reason for the Maesters to compromise with the Faith.

Thank you for debunking the most annoying misconception about Robert’s Rebellion! But hearing your voice kinda takes away from your mystique. :)

I’m glad you liked it, although if the voice weirds you out, imagine what the video podcasts I’ve done would do to you…

Is the relative lack of smallfolk POVs in ASoiaF evidence of a lingering classism built into the genre?

Yes.

Why is the Faith so weak in comparison to the RL Catholic Church?

Different paths of historical development, basically.

The IRL Medieval Catholic Church benefited from a number of factors:

It was the only pan-Western European (pan-European, when Rome and Constantinople could agree that I + I = δύο) institution when the Roman Empire fell and the first medieval kingdoms of the Franks, the Lombards, etc. were forming. Not only did that give it a certain amount of prestige, but it also meant that it was the only institution that could coordinate across borders, the only common authority that feuding kingdoms might appeal to.
It was the largest landowner in Europe at a time when land was the major source of political, economic, social, and military power. And because it was a corporate landowner, unlike with feudal lords, land wasn’t given away as dowries or split between sons or sold off to pay for ransoms, and there were no cases of the land falling into escheat because the only heir died intestate. The corporate entity kept growing and growing, century after century, and so the estates consolidated and could take advantage of economies of scale and do really long-range investments, making the Church a real economic engine of the Middle Ages.
It was also almost exclusively the source of literacy, learning, and communication. Churchmen were the literate class, especially early on, so in every court in Europe there were clergy serving as officials of state, bureaucrats, scribes and secretaries, as well as their religious duties. Since Church Latin was the only common tongue in Europe – the lingua franca well before diplomats started speaking French – the Church was immensely important in international communication. Up until the invention of the printing press, monks copying out manuscripts was basically the only source of books.

The Faith had none of these advantages.

When the first fair-haired Andal pirates landed on the shores of Westeros, they brought the Faith of the Seven with them, but no institutions – there was no High Septon and no council of the Most Devout to exercise managerial control, no network of septs and septries dotted across the continent for the Faith to draw revenue and manpower from. Instead, the warlords and adventurers very much followed their own truth, carving the seven-pointed star on their chests and letting the Seven speak to them (and surprisingly, the Seven told them to go forth and carve themselves kingdoms). While holy men no doubt would have influence on religious matters, as long as the Andals were smiting the heathen and cutting down their weirwoods, there’s not a lot they could say to shape the actions of the warrior caste they were dependent on.

For a brief period, the Faith could exercise some influence through the Arryn Kings’ patronage, but once the tide of Andals spilled out into the Riverlands, the petty kings and warlords and adventurers had no reason to listen to the King of the Mountains and Vale. And so the Faith would have to follow in their wake, building as they went.

And then the Andal tide broke, first on the rocks of Moat Cailin and the equally stony shores of the North, and then again on the stable, powerful, and dynamic kingdoms of the West. Here were these foreign power structures, thousands of years old, who were assimilating into the Faith to be sure, but on their own terms and following their own interests, rather than the Faith’s terms and the Faith’s interests. So the Kings of the Rock and the Reach would become patrons of the Faith, but there would be no “Donation” of “Constantine”, no independent state.

Moreover, the Faith would also have to deal with competition from another pan-continental corporate institution, one which had been operating for thousands of years, which controlled access to literacy, learning, and communication, and which had advisors whispering into the ears of every lord in Westeros: the Citadel of Maesters. Now, I believe that there was a compromise between the Faith and the Citadel (incidentally, if someone could send me an ask to remind me to explain why I think the Andal language was key to this compromise…), but it was one where the Citadel’s monopolies and jurisdictions would be respected. Septons and septas could teach basic literacy and the tenets of the Faith, but the rest would be the domain of the maesters.

So when I talked about the Dictatus Papae and the Walk to Canossa in previous asks, it’s actually a good example of how the two institutions were different. Here was Gregory VII, one of the most important Popes in history, laying down the law to cement the authority of the Catholic Church vis-a-vis the Holy Roman Emperor:

The Church is autonomous. Bishoprics and other offices belong to the Church alone, even if these positions had become mighty feudal states, Imperial Electors even. Only the Pope had jurisdiction over Church officials and lands, legal disputes involving the Church had to be settled by him in Rome, and so on.
The Pope is supreme over secular officials. Here Gregory really ran wild, stating that “all princes shall kiss the feet of the Pope alone,” and “it may be permitted to him to depose emperors.“ This, when Emperors had previously appointed and deposed Popes.
The Pope can dissolve the bonds of feudalism itself, through proclamations of excommunication, interdictionn, anethema, and so on. As Gregory put it, “He may absolve subjects from their fealty to wicked men.” And Gregory would do so, punishing Emperor Henry IV for attempting to assert authority over the Prince-Bishoprics of the Holy Roman Empire.
“The Roman Church has never erred. Nor will it err, to all eternity–Scripture being witness.“ That’s the origin of Papal infallibility, although less immediately relevant to the crisis.

This was somewhat controversial, to say the least. Henry IV responded by declaring Gregory “at present not pope but false monk,” calling for a new election of the Papacy, and challenging Gregory: "I, Henry, king by the grace of God, with all of my Bishops, say to you, come down, come down!” And while the Papally-sponsored rebellions in 1073-1075, and then again from 1077-1088 did force Henry IV to do penance in the snow at Canossa, in 1080 Henry IV was ready to fight back.

In 1080, Henry IV proclaimed Clement III to be the true Pope, reasserting Imperial authority to name the Pope, after Gregory had blessed Rudolf von Rheinfeld, the elected Emperor of the rebels. The next year, Henry invaded Rome and when Gregory VII called upon his Norman allies from southern Italy, they promptly sacked the city and Gregory was forced to flee when the citizens of Rome rose up against him, and died in exile.

If that’s what happened to a Catholic Church that was far more powerful than the Faith ever was, imagine what would have happened to a High Septon who tried to pull a stunt like that against the Lord of Oldtown and the King of the Reach. It wouldn’t have been the first time a High Septon was assassinated, and it wouldn’t be the last.