Author: stevenattewell

How well do westerosi/medieval lords understand/do lobbying?

Great question!

The answer is they do it quite a bit. Except during those rare times in which the Great Council is in session, there are no legislative politics per se – governments take action through the decrees and decisions of the king and his ministers, so if you want anything from the government, you have to do it through lobbying. 

And we have a lot of examples of this in the series, leaving aside the omnipresent chivvying for lands and titles:

…the septa could not have known that today’s court would be anything but the usual tedious business of hearing petitions, settling disputes between rival holdfasts, and adjudicating the placement of boundary stones. (Eddard XI, AGOT)

Lord Redwyne asked only for thirty years’ remission of the taxes that Littlefinger and his wine factors had levied on certain of the Arbor’s finest vintages. When that was granted, he pronounced himself well satisfied and suggested that they send for a cask of Arbor gold, to toast good King Joffrey and his wise and benevolent Hand. (Tyrion III, ASOS)

Jalabhar Xho was the first to petition her that day, as befit his rank as a prince in exile. Splendid as he looked in his bright feathered cloak, he had only come to beg. Cersei let him make his usual plea for men and arms to help him regain Red Flower Vale…Lord Hallyne of the Guild of Alchemists presented himself, to ask that his pyromancers be allowed to hatch any dragon’s eggs that might turn up upon Dragonstone, now that the isle was safely back in royal hands…(Cersei VIII, AFFC)

Indeed, one could argue that courtiers are essentially lobbyists with better fashion sense. 

Have the Manderlys ever shown a desire to go back to the Reach? At ASOIAF time it seems like their political ambitions are set in soldifying the bonds to the Starks and staying in the North. It is okay if they want to keep their religion, but why stuff their lord’s titles with Reach references if they are more interested in having more power in the North? Wouldn’t it help them better to be identified as northmen and have North-related titles?

We don’t know. Not lately, but it could be the case earlier.

As to why they stuff the titles, they do it b/c otherwise that would be admitting they had lost, were in the wrong, etc. 

Got a question for you Steven. In a previous ask you agreed that the length of wars under the Targaryens is implausible. My question then is what would be a more realistic timespan for the Conquest, Dance of the Dragons, First Blackfyre Rebellion, Robert’s Rebellion, and the War of the Five Kings? Thanks.

Hoo boy, that’s kind of a can of worms I’m not sure you want to open, because it’ll play merry hell with the timeline. 

See, all of GRRM’s wars are very short: the Conquest was one year, the Dance was three, First Blackfyre was one, Ninepenny Kings was one, Robert’s Rebellion was one year but across two, Greyjoy Rebellion was one, and the War of Five Kings is three and counting.

But to give a few examples from medieval warfare:  

  • FIrst Crusade (4 years)
  • Second Crusade (3 years)
  • Third Crusade (5 years)
  • First War of Scottish Independence (32 years)
  • Hundred Years’ War (115 years)
  • Wars of the Roses (30 years)

And that’s just a handful of cases, you can find many many more. 

So GRRM’s longest wars are Medieval history’s shorter wars. 

I apologize if this question is considered to be “dumb”. I’ve only just recently started. Anyway, the Manderly’s have been a Northern house for the past thousand years, and obviously there have been other Northerns that have married into their house. Possibly even Stark women have married into the family. So the present day Manderly’s in the books have quite a bit of First Men Northern blood running in their veins. So why do they still practice the Faith and have knights? Thanks. -Emma

Yeah, you can see this even from their titles:

goodqueenaly:

The Manderlys are grateful to House Stark for taking them in when they were cast out of the Reach, and they’ve established themselves as a northern power, but I think there’s still a strong feeling within House Manderly as being a displaced southron House, rather than a born northern one. After all, it would be a difficult thing to abandon completely the faith and cultural identity that had been with the family for thousands of years before they first laid eyes on White Harbor. The Manderlys were too long at the center of reacher politics for that; there are too many centuries of Manderly history in the courts of the Gardener kings, too many old family heroes remembered for their deeds in the Reach, too many ancestors buried in graves by the river that still bears their name. They would still be reachlords today if not for the scheming of those no-good-very-bad Peakes, as they might think, and while they love the Starks for taking them in when no one else would, too much of the Manderly heart is probably still in the Reach. To give up the Seven and chivalric tradition might seem a deep betrayal of those old ancestral ties – a rejection of their identity.

You stand before Wyman Manderly, Lord of White Harbor and Warden of the White Knife, Shield of the Faith, Defender of the Dispossessed, Lord Marshal of the Mander, a Knight of the Order of the Green Hand,“

Yes, Lord of White Harbor and Warden of the White Knife are recognizing where the Manderlys are now, but look at the rest. Shield of the Faith tells you straight-up that the Manderlys are not going to convert to the Old Gods any time soon, Defender of the Dispossessed shows you how they are very much still mad about losing Dunstonbury, and the fact that they still refer to themselves as Lord Marshal of the Mander more than a thousand years after having to flee from the Reach and Knights of the Order of the Green Hand three hundred years after that entire order perished on the Field of Fire demonstrates how much the Reach remains in their minds. 

(Thursday @ Graphic Policy Radio Podcast) Spider-Man: Homecoming: On diverse NYC, Public Schools and Teen Movies

elanabrooklyn:

I got a fellow real New Yorker and comics critic (hey @theblerdgurl ) and a real big city magnet High School teacher. And we all love comics and we aren’t afraid to use it! 

What do you want us to discuss? 

Listen live 10pm Thursday or download us from iTunes later

Going to check this out tomorrow…

(Thursday @ Graphic Policy Radio Podcast) Spider-Man: Homecoming: On diverse NYC, Public Schools and Teen Movies

Personal question: How in the world do you remember as many details about the series as you do? People throw random questions at you about houses that are only mentioned maybe twice in some obscure passage and you come through with answers with zero hesitation.

That’s very flattering! 

A big part of it is that I’ve worked hard to have good research skills, so if I get sent an obscure question – like that one about House Osgrey of Leafy Lake – I go straight away to asearchoficeandfire to find every time the key words show up in GRRM’s writings (before that I would do word searches in my Kindle versions of the books, so asearch has made my life MUCH easier), then I go to the Wiki of Ice and Fire and Tower of the Hand to look for context so I don’t miss any pieces of the puzzle. And if that doesn’t work, I know a lot of smart people like @goodqueenaly or @warsofasoiaf or @poorquentyn or @nobodysuspectsthebutterfly or @joannalannister who I can bounce questions and ideas off of. And if it has to do with history instead of ASOIAF specifically, one of the things that eight years of grad school has taught me is how to research historiographical issues in a hurry by consulting JSTOR and doing the right keyword searches in Google Books and Google Scholar, etc.

Another part of it is that my brain is wired in weird ways. I have a hard time remembering things I directly experience – someone’s name, what I needed to get from the shop, etc. – but I have a really good memory for anything I’ve read, watched, or listened to. Character names, dialogue, plots, lyrics, stick in my mind for years and years, in part because the way I remember this stuff is by constructing fictional “historical narratives.”