Do you think you’ll ever do a CbC (or something like it since they don’t have chapters) of the D&E stories?

That was one of the Kickstarter bonus essay series, but I’ll get to it after Politics of Seven Kingdoms is done. ATM, I have some stuff half-written on Hedge Knight.

Are Walder Frey and House Frey based off of any specific historical analogue? Were medieval Lords known to have castle bridges like the Twins?

Fortified bridges were a real thing and lots of people built them; I don’t know that they particularly distinguish one noble house as an analogue to the Freys, necessarily.

Rather, I think the correct analogue to the “Late Lord” Walder Frey is the perfidious Thomas Stanley:

”Lord Stanley…came from a staunch Lancastrian House, but was married into the Yorkists through the Earl of Warwick. At the Battle of Blore Heath, one of the opening battles of the war, Stanley raised 2,000 men at his King’s command but then withheld them just a few miles away as a Lancastrian army was defeated by a smaller Yorkist force. When Edward IV took up the Yorkist cause, Stanley defected and fought alongside the new King; when Warwick defected from Edward IV, Stanley fought to restore Henry VI for the last time. Remarkably, he managed to get appointed to Edward IV’s royal council even after his betrayal. He then married Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry Tudor, while helping Richard III fight the Scots. Famously, Stanley held back his forces at Bosworth Field despite Richard III holding his son hostage, and then charged Richard’s rear once the King was fully committed, personally crowning Henry VII to make sure he ended up on the right side.”

As his reward for conspicuous disloyalty to both sides and general amorality (Stanley is one of the candidates for having actually killed the Princes in the Tower), Stanley was raised from a baroncy to the Earldom of Derby, was made a knight of the Garter, Lord High Constable of England, High Steward of the Duchy of Lancaster, Chamberlain of Chester and North Wales, and many many other honors, offices, and lands.

And what makes it worse is that, as his family prospered quite well under the Tudors, his descendants were patrons of William Shakespeare, who made Stanley out to be a righteous and loyal vassal in his plays. Just goes to show that it really doesn’t matter who writes the histories as much as who pays for the histories to be written.

Is there any castles that compare in size to the gates of the moon

The Gates of the Moon are a thoroughly averagely-sized castle:

The Gates of the Moon served well enough in that regard, but there was more of fort than palace about it, and those seeing it for the first time have been known to remark that it is a fine castle for a lesser lord but no fit abode for a king.

So take your pick?

I read your posts on the pre-Andal Citadel, and is it possible that they used the greenseers’ powers to see through weirwoods to record history? According to the wiki, marriages and ceremonies are performed in front of the trees, so greenseers would’ve been witness to all the lords’ important business. It would explain the current Citadel’s lack of records from the time since they would’ve lacked that magic and no desire to preserve evidence of such magic.

I mean, I don’t see any evidence that there were greenseers among the first maesters of the Citadel. WOIAF is pretty comprehensive about what kinds of scholars were among that group, including “wizards, alchemists, and sorcerers,” but not greenseers.

Ironborn and Thralldom

Hiya!! Great work on the newest Politics of the Seven Kingdoms as usual! One thing that I thought kinda went underplayed in your analysis of the Ironborn was the effects of thralldom on military development. Using Sparta, chattel slavery, or manoralism as examples, it seems like there would be a serious concern amongst “Old Way” adherents about thrall revolts, especially since their reaving drastically expands the population of thralls. This would mean that the next time they sail, they would leave more people behind to maintain their caste system which would in turn reduce the number of men they had available for reaving in a stagnating cycle unless some “New Way” king comes to power to clean up. Do you think this would help address some of the concerns regarding the Ironborn’s numbers? I often see it put up that thralldom would increase the Ironborn’s military strength, but honestly this seems backwards compared to a lot of historical examples, where these kinds of systems hamper military mobilization due to fear of revolts (which can be seen even as late as the terror of European aristocrats at the strength of Revolutionary France’s levee en masse). Even in universe, Braavos rapidly developed and seems to have achieved parity with the rather unstable slave societies of Valyria’s ancient colonies and has a glut of ship builders and bravos hanging around, while Volantis is paranoid about having enough guards to prevent a R’hllor led slave revolt. At a fundamental military level, it just doesn’t seem entirely suprising that the Ironborn’s biggest successes (apart from plot power) come from singular strikes after a New Way king reduces the thrall population (freeing up guards and increasing available population) and increases the number of available men closer to its 15000 man limit for Balon or Harwyn Hardhand.

I felt I’d addressed it enough via the Sparta comparisons, but this is a fair point. Generally speaking, keeping a large segment of your population bound to unfree labor means having to hold back a significant number of soldiers to keep them in place.

Just one of the many ways in which slavery warps slave societies.

How is it that Steffon Bratheon failed to find a single possible wife for Rhaegar in Volantis “of noble birth from an old Valyrian bloodline”? Surely there was at least one woman who fit that definition? And why go to Volantis when the Rogares in Lys (or another Lysene family) are much closer with more precedent (Larra Rogare and Viserys II)?

We don’t know why Steffon failed.

There’s a couple possibilities: one is that, given the repeated failures of such unions (the downfall of the Rogares during the Lyseni Spring, Kiera of Tyrosh’s misfortunes, Rohane of Tyrosh involving the city with the Blackfyre Rebellions), the nobility of the Free Cities decided to take a pass on marrying into the Mad King’s family. Alternatively, it could be that Aerys’ specifications were so ridiculously exacting (I’m thinking a mix between really racist and princess and the pea, or some HUGE dowry) that no one could qualify.

As to why Volantis, “the king sent Lord Steffon across the narrow sea on a mission to Old Volantis.” Not to the Free Cities – specifically to Volantis. Who knows why; my guess is that Aerys liked their apartheid policies.

Loved your recent answers of the Maesters’ mysterious background, especially since it now makes Sam’s potential arc in Oldtown even more interesting. Do you think they deliberately destroyed records of once having been a much more magical order? Or would it have been more like “clearing out the junk” once the magic stopped working and centuries had passed?

Or it’s in a hidden archive.

Wait, what do you mean bran talked to stannis through ravens when did this happen?

Theon I of TWOW.

Re: the improbably longevity of the Maesters, is it possible that the sources are simply… unreliable? I mean, it wouldn’t be the first time an institution claims to be more venerable than it really is.

Is possible that there were no maesters before the Andal invasion, and they’re just inventing their pre-Andal history to increase their status? There are stories in Westeros about “knights” who are thousands of years too old to be knights.

That would be the simplest, rational answer. Except that, as we’ve seen in ASOIAF, the simplest rational answers that the modern maesters insist are the truth are wrong. Most maesters insist that ravens cannot speak and consider Barth a quack, but we’ve seen Bran talking to Stannis through them; Maester Fomas argues that:

“the Others of legend were nothing more than a tribe of the First Men, ancestors of the wildlings, that had established itself in the far north. Because of the Long Night, these early wildlings were then pressured to begin a wave of conquests to the south. That they became monstrous in the tales told thereafter, according to Fomas, reflects the desire of the Night’s Watch and the Starks to give themselves a more heroic identity as saviors of mankind, and not merely the beneficiaries of a struggle over dominion.”

But we’ve seen the White Walkers in the flesh. Maesters believe that “the higher mysteries, the arts of magic, were and are beyond the boundaries of our mortal ability to examine,” but with Bran, Melisandre, Dany, etc. etc. we have seen that the higher mysteries are quite real and achievable.

Maester Steven, “something really bad happened that caused a massive break in historiographical continuity. . ” could you please explain what this means (not my first language) Thanks

Well, with a persistent institution like the Citadel, one would expect continuity of records, albeit with some transcription errors over time, some losses of original documents due to physical degredation or minor fires, etc. But the complete loss of pre-Andal records would take something akin to the burning of the Library of Alexandria…

Or some sort of deliberate destruction or hiding of evidence, a la Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose…