Author: stevenattewell

Is it possible Jorah has more experience with slave trading than with the poachers which got him exiled? Isn’t his advice about where to get the best prices for the children a bit suspicious? Do we know all he did before he showed up to swear to Viserys?

We don’t know how long he was in the business of slave trading while Lord of Bear Island, and he’s been living in slave-trading Essos ever since, so he’s had plenty of opportunity to learn by osmosis. 

After seeing last weeks episode I have to ask why are so many people determined to love Jaime and hate Dany considering Jaime at his best is morally ambiguous and at his worst villainous while Dany has freed tens of thousands from slavery?

Because Dany’s also kind of morally ambiguous? In the books, she’s ordered people tortured because she was pissed off about the murder of a freedwoman she liked and didn’t care how she got intel on the Sons of the Harpy. On the show, she’s had people roasted alive by dragons to prove a point. 

I’m less on the Jaime redemption train than others, but he is not the only morally grey character in ASOIAF. 

How do you think the Brackens and the Blackwoods are so strong to influence in the riverlands politics so much for so much time? Looking at the map their lands seem not to be so vast. From where it come their wealth and forces?

I think it’s more vast than you think, given how many different areas of land it includes:

Lord Jonos drained the last of his ale and tossed the horn aside. “What of the lands and castles we were promised?”

“What lands were these?”

“The east bank of the Widow’s Wash, from Crossbow Ridge to Rutting Meadow, and all the islands in the stream. Grindcorn Mill and Lord’s Mill, the ruins of Muddy Hall, the Ravishment, Battle Valley, Oldforge, the villages of Buckle, Blackbuckle, Cairns, and Claypool, and the market town at Mudgrave. Waspwood, Lorgen’s Wood, Greenhill, and Barba’s Teats. Missy’s Teats, the Blackwoods call them, but they were Barba’s first. Honeytree and all the hives. Here, I’ve marked them out if my lord would like a look.” He rooted about on a table and produced a parchment map.

Jaime took it with his good hand, but he had to use the gold to open it and hold it flat. “This is a deal of land,” he observed. “You will be increasing your domains by a quarter.”

Bracken’s mouth set stubbornly. “All these lands belonged to Stone Hedge once. The Blackwoods stole them from us.”

“What about this village here, between the Teats?” Jaime tapped the map with a gilded knuckle.

“Pennytree. That was ours once too, but it’s been a royal fief for a hundred years. Leave that out. We ask only for the lands stolen by the Blackwoods. Your lord father promised to restore them to us if we would subdue Lord Tytos for him.”

The entire bank of a river, two ruined strongholds and one ruined town, a valley, four villages (maybe five depending on whether Honeytree is a village, a town, or a stronghold), a market town, two woods, three hills…and all of this is just the disputed lands between House Bracken and House Blackwood that would represent a fourth of House Bracken’s current holdings. 

To me, this suggests that House Blackwood probably holds most of the lands between the Red Fork and the Blue Fork (there’s not a lot of other Houses from that region – notably Fairmarket and Oldstones don’t seem to have houses associated with them) and a fair bit of land on the southern bank of the Red Fork, given Lord Bracken’s complaints. For their part, I think House Bracken controls most or all of the hill country east of Pinkmaiden and west of Harrenhal and from the south bank of the Red Fork to however far north Harrenhal’s demense runs. 

In other words, between them the Bracken and Blackwoods likely control most of the central Riverlands, making them extremely difficult to control, especially if they temporarily band together against an outside intervention.

In the books, do you think Euron Greyjoy is the Night’s King, the Great Other or whatever the name of the main antagonist of history?

To use a metaphor that I don’t know whether @poorquentyn will agree with, Euron is the Saruman of ASOIAF rather than the Sauron of ASOIAF: he’s a magic user who fell to the temptation of power without the constraints of morality, and stared too deep into the palantir, until he was seduced by Sauron.

image

In other words, he’s not the main antagonist, he’s the intermediary antagonist the heroes have to deal with before they can get to the main antagonist; he’s the one who besieges Helm’s Deep to prevent the Rohirrim from riding to the rescue of Gondor, not the one who besieges Minas Tirith. 

In a pre-modern society how many people need to be farmers to support a non-farmer? Like whats the percentage? More than the 99 to 1 for soldiers, would 9 farmers for 1 non-farmer make sense?

9 to 1 is way off. 

A knight’s fee was a common metric used for fiefdoms – larger estates were usually calculated in multiples of knight’s fees, smaller estates in fractions that led to the imposition of scutage – which is meant to represent the size of land needed to support one knight. 

A knight’s fee works out to five or more (I’ve seen 12 cited most often) hides, and a hide of land was supposed to support ten families. So a knight’s fee would have around 50-120 families living on it, and given an average household size of around five people during the Middle Ages, that works out to 250-600 people to support a knight. 

Why couldnt the lannisters raise a new army during the dance like Tywin tried to do with stefford lannister?

Good question!

And ultimately this is why I have a problem with the army sizes during the Dance, which in turn are part of my overall problem with the Dance as military history. Where we have numbers to tell, the armies of the Dance are pretty small by the standards of later Westerosi wars:

  • Battle of Rook’s Rest: >800 greens, 100 blacks.
  • Battle of the Gullet: ~100 ships on both sides.
  • The Fishfeed: At least 2000 greens, at least 3,100 blacks.
  • The Butcher’s Ball: 3,600 greens, ~7,000 blacks.
  • First Tumbleton: >9,000 greens, ~7,000 blacks.
  • Second Tumbleton: <= 9,000 greens, 4,000 blacks.

While one could argue that, post-Aegon’s Conquest, the Westerosi had shifted to a model of having multiple smaller armies rather than one big host to avoid losing everything to one dragon, this creates another problem. 

We know from later wars that the various regions of Westeros can field much larger armies in the several tens of thousands, so if that is the case, the various regions of Westeros should have had more armies in the field at one time, and should been able to raise new armies and be ready to keep fighting. 

Moreover, these numbers create new problems for historical consistency: if only 2,000 or so Westerlanders marched east with Jason Lannister, then the Westerlands couldn’t have been “thinly defended,” and so Dalton Greyjoy’s reaving should have been met by 43,000 Westermen ready to defend their homes against the 15,000 Ironborn. But since we know the Westerlands were “thinly defended,” then the casualties at the Red Fork and the Fishfeed should have been larger by at least an order of magnitude. 

Different anon, but in regards to Lannister and the gold market, how likely is it that they insisted upon ALL taxes being paid in gold from at least the bannermen with mines if not all of their principal houses, while most other Kings/overlords were fine with whatever combination of precious metals, food, timber, etc… their subjects could provide.

opinions-about-tiaras:

racefortheironthrone:

Almost certainly, yes. 

This seems like it would produce a lot of… I think economic velocity is there term?

Like, if their bannermen need to pay taxes in gold, they’re going to concentrate on either mining it (which is going to require paying workers or letting them keep a share of it or something) or on producing things they can then sell for gold to pay their taxes.

The Lannisters, in turn, cannot eat gold or sleep on it or make armor or swords out of it or whatnot. They’re going to turn around and immediately spend a lot of that gold on stuff that isn’t gold, pumping it right back into the economy they just extracted it from and once again encouraging people to accept payment for things in currency rather than in kind.

Absolutely agree. I would imagine, therefore, that the economy of the Westerlands is more economically “advanced” than a lot of its neighbors, in several ways:

  • You’d see much less barter and trading “in kind” and almost all transactions are made in currency (not getting into bills of exchange just for the sake of clarity). Even without a Golden Bank, I would expect to see more in the way of a financial sector, with goldsmiths and merchants acting as moneylenders using gold stocks as reserves for loans. 
    • In the Riverlands or the Reach, where the most common thing you have to exchange is agricultural products, I imagine you’d see the reverse, where there’s more barter and trade in kind and fewer transactions in currency – and a lot more of the phenomenon where prices in currency change rapidly during times of crisis when people’s liquidity preferences would change b/c you can’t eat gold. 
  • You’d see mining, processing (smelting), and smithing of gold and silver as a much bigger percentage of the economy (I talk about Westerlands guilds here), and correspondingly a lower percentage of the economy working in agriculture. That’s not to say that there’s no farming in the Westerlands – those vast herds of cattle Robb’s army rustled were tended by someone, and Cornfield clearly suggests that the southern Westerlands grows a fair bit of cereal crops – or that agricultural workers aren’t in the majority, but I might expect to see 75-80% as opposed to 90% everywhere else. 
  • Moreover, I imagine there’s a good bit of interregional trade between the Westerlands and its immediate neighbors – the West has the gold, the Reach and the Riverlands have the food, it makes sense. I also wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of wars between these three regions have broken out over changing terms of trade, if one side gets too greedy or decides that it would like to horizontally integrate instead of trade.
  • And finally, we have textual evidence from WOIAF that there’s a lot of international trade from a very early period. This might explain why Lannisport is such a big city despite being on the wrong coast, because the gold was such a lure to foreign traders that they were willing to sail west across the Summer Sea, and then the city grew to serve foreign trade. It sort of reminds me a little of the trade imbalances between Europe and China in the 18th and 19th century, but in reverse, where the Westerlands has the gold and Essos has the manufactured goods and luxury items and so Essos gets the hard currency it needs to have a large banking sector. 

(And velocity is exactly the right term…)

Despite the show messing up themes and character arcs (#neverforgetstannis), would you say they’ve done okay with Jaime by showing that he’s not on a redemption quest?

I think they’ve leaned too far away from that angle, because now we have a Jaime who has conspicuously ignored Cersei crossing over what ought to be huge red lines for his character: she used wildfire to murder thousands of people, she tortures people to death for her pleasure, she’s acting increasingly paranoid and sees only enemies around her, and of course, she doesn’t care that their children are dead except as an attack on her to be avenged.