Author: stevenattewell

Do you believe that there was English revanchism after they began to lose most of there lands in France that led up to the invasion of Edward the third?

To quote Wolf Hall:

“I hope he doesn’t think still of invading France.”

“God damn you! What Englishman does not! We own France. We have to take back our own…Mind you, you’re right…We can’t win,” the duke says, “but we have to fight as if we can. Hang the expense. Hang the waste – money, men, horses, ships. That’s what’s wrong with Wolsey, see. Always at the treaty table. How can a butcher’s son understand-”

“La gloire?”

So yes, if you look at English politics from the 15th century on, there was a good deal of revanchism. A good deal of the Wars of the Roses began as a split between the peace faction of the Duke of Somerset, his brother the Cardinal, and the Duke of  Suffolk, and the war party of Richard Duke of York and Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, who blamed Suffolk and Somerset’s military incompetence for the loss of much of England’s territories in France.

And you see the same tensions outlasting the Hundred Years War. When Edward IV went into exile in 1470, he went to Burgundy which had been England’s ally against France and where the Duke was Edward’s brother-in-law. Burgundy gave Edward the cash he needed to return to England when France declared war on Burgundy, making a friendly Yorkist king in England a useful check on French aggression. (Meanwhile France was a major supporter of the Lancastrian claim, due to their links to Marguerite d’Anjou.)

In 1475, Edward IV actually went to war with France and landed in Calais with 16,000 troops, but when Burgundy failed to follow through with military support, the French paid him 75,000 crowns plus a yearly pension of 50,000 crowns to forgo his claim to France and abandon Burgundy. Charles the Bold died two years later at the Battle of Nancy, leading to the collapse of the independent duchy of Burgundy and its incorporation into France. 

Richard III hadn’t been a huge fan of Edward IV’s deal with France, going so far as to refuse the pension that France had agreed to pay him, especially when France renewed its Auld Alliance with Scotland to keep the English busy, leading to war with Scotland in 1480. Richard’s well-known anti-French sympathies led the French government to provide troops to Henry Tudor to overthrow him. 

Henry VII repaid his French assistance with some rather spectacular double-dealing. When France supported Perkin Warbeck the imposter in a bid to keep England divided, Henry invaded Brittany. On the other hand, he was happy to be bought off with the French dropping Warbeck and giving him 742,000 crowns, even if this meant betraying Britanny, since he didn’t really care about regaining England’s lands in France. On a third hand, he allied himself with Spain and signed a peace deal with Scotland (in both cases through dynastic marriages) in an effort to isolate France. His more romantic son Henry VIII was very much interested in regaining England’s lands in France, and went to war with France in 1512, 1513, 1521, and 1544.

Note that the Kings of England maintained their claim to the French throne until 1i902. 

Why don’t migrations to Westeros leave anyone behind? There are no Andals or Rhoynar or Valyrians left in Essos, but in the real world there are plenty of Saxons still in Saxony. Is it just a coincidence, or are other Essos cultures particularly good at assimilating the stragglers?

I don’t know where you got that idea. There absolutely are those peoples still living in Essos, just changed somewhat due to 400 years of history going by. So if we go looking for the Andals, we find them in Pentos:

“Pentos is the nearest of the Free Cities to King’s Landing, and trading ships pass back and forth between the two cities on an almost daily basis. Founded by Valyrians as a trading outpost, Pentos soon absorbed the hinterlands surrounding it, from the Velvet Hills and the Little Rhoyne to the sea, including almost the whole of the ancient realm of Andalos, the original homeland of the Andals. The first Pentoshi were merchants, traders, seafarers, and farmers, with few of high birth amongst them; perhaps for this reason, they were less protective of their Valyrian blood and more willing to breed with the original inhabitants of the lands they ruled. As a consequence there is considerable Andal blood amongst the men of Pentos, making them perhaps our closest cousins.”

They just intermarried with the Valyrian colonists. But they’re still there, living in the same hill country that Hugor of the Hill did. 

Likewise, if we’re looking for Rhoynar, we can find them on the Summer Isles, on Abulu the Island of Women, where “A few thousand of [Nymeria’s] followers
chose to remain behind, however, and their descendants remain on the Isle of Women to this day.” We can find them on the Stepstones, where “even now there are isolated pockets of Rhoynar on the Stepstones, claiming descent from those who were shipwrecked.” And more unhappily, we can no doubt find them in chains in the Volantene empire, tilling their ancestral fields to benefit the Old Blood. 

If we’re looking for Valyrians, we have of course “eight of the Nine Free Cities are proud daughters of Valyria that was, still ruled by the descendants
of the original colonists who established themselves there hundreds or thousands of years ago. In these cities, Valyrian blood is still greatly prized.” Now, over 400 years, there’s going to be some change, and there’s a good deal of variation. So in Lys, they say that “here more than anywhere else in the known world the old Valyrian bloodlines still run strong…The blood of Valyria still runs strong in Lys, where even the smallfolk oft boast pale skin, silver-gold hair, and the purple, lilac, and pale blue eyes of the dragonlords of old. The Lysene nobility values purity of blood above all” whereas the Myrish interbred with another people: “Myrmen are believed by certain maesters to be akin to the Rhoynar, as many of them share the same olive skin and dark hair as the river people, but this supposed link is likely spurious. There are certain signs that a city stood where Myr now stands even during the Dawn Age and the Long Night, raised by some ancient, vanished people.” And of course, in Old Volantis, you have the Old Blood of the city who dwell within the Black Walls, such that “many Volantenes regard themselves as the natural and rightful successors to the dragonlords of old Valyria.”

And then at last you have Braavos, which from the beginning was a melting pot of every possible ethnicity in Essos:

“Since the escaped slaves came from many lands and held many faiths, the founders of Braavos created a place where all gods were given their due and decreed that none would ever be made paramount over another. They were a diverse people, whose numbers included Andals, Summer Islanders, Ghiscari, Naathi, Rhoynar, Ibbenese, Sarnori, even debtors and criminals of pure Valyrian blood.”

So there you have it. 

Does keeping Jalabhar Xho in the court harm Westeros’s relations with the current regime in the Summer Isles?

It could, but it depends on how likely they think the Iron Throne is to actually fund him. Chances are, the current regime in the Summer Isles prefers to have Jalabhar Xho kicking his heels in King’s Landing than trying to stir up a rebellion at home. So if I was the Summer Isles, I’d bung a bit of money to the Iron Throne just to keep him there. 

apensivelady:

Seriously, why did they take this scene from the final cut? It is so very important! And not only to explain why Steve lacked the cowl in the end of the movie, but because this tiny moment is extremely important to Steve’s development as a character. He came to be seen as a fascist, as exactly that which he fought to destroy. Captain America, who sought to fight bullies his whole life, is now seen as one. Imagine the impact that had on his head. The meaning of his actions after he saw this. Steve began to give up the Captain America identity right here. This is why in Civil War he has no problems giving up the shield. He and Captain America have long been drifting apart. In fact, they were never one to begin with:

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Steve went through his whole life trying to show people he wasn’t what they thought of him. Becoming Captain America was one way to do it, and giving this identity up is another one.

Steve isn’t unaware of the symbolism Captain America entails. For good and for bad. In The First Avenger he uses the symbol in his favour, transforming it. In The Winter Soldier he owns the symbol he became, working in favour of the greater good through his public image. However, in Civil War he has to give the symbol up, for it has come to represent something he is not.

When Tony tells him he doesn’t deserve the shield, Steve is tired of having to “prove” that his actions are those of Captain America. People put Captain America in a box that doesn’t fit Steve Rogers. Tony tells him he is not worthy of being Captain America, of carrying the shield his father made, as if he had betrayed what Howard Stark worked for, as if somehow Howard was responsible for the making of Captain America, and Steve became unworthy to be part of Howard’s legacy. This is just one way people created a general idea about who Captain America is, forgetting the man behind the shield.

Steve will be that which he has to be. That which he feels in his heart and head to be his duty, the right thing. He became Captain America for that reason, and for that same reason he threw cowl and shield aside.

Oh, this pisses me off that it didn’t make it onto the movie. 

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Davos II, ASOS

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Davos II, ASOS

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“Ser Davos, and undrowned. How can that be?”
“Onions float, ser.”
Synopsis: “Sing to me, oh muse, of the man resourceful, who, storm-buffeted far and wide…”
SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.
(more…)

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do you think the ironborn and the greyjoys offer a real parallel to american conservatism? victarion seems the perfect portrait of the dutiful authoriatrian, aeron the religious right, euron the populist interloper, and so on…

It’s tempting to go looking for parallels, I know, but it’s easy to get led astray – the Ironborn are pre-capitalist, so you’re not going to have neoliberal economics there; likewise, their attitude to foreign relations is imperialistic in a way that neoconservatism isn’t quite, and there’s certainly no anti-statism/ibertarianism there because the state doesn’t really exist. And so on. 

To me, it’s more that both the Ironborn and modern conservatism share a common element of DNA – cultural revanchism. Victarion, Aeron, Euron (in so far as it’s in his campaign speeches) are all deeply anti-modernists who want to go back to a golden age which was taken from them in a stab-in-the-back from modernizing reformers. 

Likewise, there’s a huge strain of cultural revanchism in American conservatism. The southern part of that goes all the way back to the Civil War, but there’s also a northern conservative part of it (the whole “constitution in exile” thing) that goes back to the New Deal if not to Teddy Roosevelt, and a family values part of it that got going in the 1960s (highly recommend David O. Self’s All in the Family) as backlash against the rights movements and cultural liberalization writ large.