Inspired by the inquiry about peasant labor hours through the year, is there any research on the labor hours, etc. of artisans and artists? Woodworkers, painters, sculptors, architects, blacksmiths, etc. whose labor sort of varied by the seasons’ change, but wasn’t tied quite as tightly to it?

I would highly recommend checking out Baul Blyton’s Changes in Working Time, pgs 15-17 for a good overview of the literature on this. Hours varied, not so much by the seasons, but by guild regulations and customs (see Saint Monday) and economic conditions (when wages rose, hours often fell). It’s complicated, because you have to balance regulations about daily working hours against the number of holidays.

A couple questions about Illyrio. I’m unclear exactly why he is called the cheesemonger, since he seems to deal in far more rarified materials than cheese. And why does he care so much about who rules Westeros? Does it truly benefit him that much to devote some fifteen to twenty years creating a precarious plan to get someone whose ear he can whisper to whenever he wishes on the Iron Throne? The same goes for Varys, for that matter…

Cheesemonger is an insulting title, used by Tywin and people with his prejudices as a way to belittle the magisters of Essos, who by their very existance undermine the strict distinction between nobleman and merchant. Magisters deal in exotic goods, fine manufactured goods (a sign of Essos’s economic and technological superiority), and complicated financial transactions that nobles don’t understand. So treating them like common peddlars like the ones in Westeros creates a sense of the social order restored.

As to why Illyrio cares, I have a theory about that…

While I get why the Rhaegar-marrying-Lyanna-polygamously argument makes sense plotwise, I’m still kind of baffled about how/why Lyanna went along with all of this. Starks kept with the Old Gods who forbade incest, so they kind of had this private internal horror with how the Targaryens conducted themselves from the get-go. And Lyanna is shown by Ned vis-a-vis to have a solid head on her shoulders when it comes to judging peoples’ character. I have a hard time seeing her just mutely obeying.

The Old Gods don’t seem to have banned polygamy necessarily, since we have accounts of pre-Andal Gardener Kings with multiple wives.

Just saying, is all.

Considering that there were Mammoths north of the wall, isn’t the Skagosi Unicorn more likely to be the Woolley Rhino?

Nope, it’s a goat:

“Far off, he could hear his packmates calling to him, like to like. They were hunting too. A wild rain lashed down upon his black brother as he tore at the flesh of an enormous goat, washing the blood from his side where the goat’s long horn had raked him.” (Jon I, ADWD)

Do you think that in TWOW Edmure “You’re Damn Right I Let My Defenseless Smallfolk Inside The Castle Walls How Could I Not?” Tully will finally be rewarded (somehow) for being a lord who lives up to his feudal obligations to the peasants? Please say yes.

If by rewarded you mean allowed to live and probably retake Riverrun, yes.

Is Urrathon (as in Urrathon the Night-Walker in Qarth) a Greyjoy, or from the Iron Islands? A lot of their names seem to end like that…

Nope, just a cool name. But yes the names are similar.

what was the point of putting rickon on an island with unicorns if he wont learn to command unicorns tho? just an easy way of introducing more supernatural stuff towards the end of ADWD?

The unicorns aren’t supernatural, AFAWK. They’re just fauna.

And if my guess is right, they’re actually goats.

do you expect rickon to learn to skinchange unicorns?

Nope. I think the 5-year old sticks with Shaggydog.

Can you explain in more detail what do you think were the financial tricks or frauds used by LF to expand the money revenue of the king?

Sure. I wrote it all down in an essay titled “Who Stole Westeros?” which is part of the e-book “Tower of the Hand: Hymn for Spring.”

Say a peasant had a crippled child or infants to care for or nature was not cooperating or all of the above. Was it possible to appeal to his local Lord for a reprieve on his obligations? Obviously it would depend on the Lord’s character but I’m curious if there was flexibility in the system given 100% exploitation all the time seems like an impractical model yet on the face of it feudal contracts seem hilariously one sided and unfeeling.

Yep, happened all the time. Feudal obligations were very much tied to all kinds of traditions, which included things like tax or rent exemptions for a given period or privileges (collecting firewood from the lord’s forest, being allowed to trap rabbits in the lord’s deer park, gleaning grain after the harvest on the lord’s fields, etc.) or even donations (old clothes, leftovers, maybe some money).

So there was always a back-and-forth, where peasants pushed as far as they think they could get, and lords always had to shift on a spectrum from granting those favors when it suited their interests to be seen as generous to denying them if they felt their revenues were being cut into too much.

It’s actually not that different from the ways that scholars of slavery have talked about slave systems involving both resistance and accomodation as well as terror, brutality, and exploitation.