Author: stevenattewell

Is there a copper to stag, stag to dragon ratio that’s known? Traditional fantasy rules is an easy 10 copper to 1 silver, 10 silver to 1 gold but that doesn’t hold up with the way the value of a gold dragon has been worked out. (sorry if you’ve answered this, link plox)

Decimalized currency is something of a modern convenience, and it’s not an accident that it spread rapidly about the same time that the metric system, a decimal system of measurement, was being spread by the French Revolution and its belief in human perfectability through reason.

Westeros’ currency is not decimal at all. One dragon is worth:

  • 30 silver moons.
  • 210 silver stags.
  • 1470 copper stars.
  • 2940 copper groats.
  • 5880 copper halfgroats.
  • 11760 copper pennies.
  • 23520 copper halfpennies.

This is a rather bizarre system:

  • you have two separate silver coins, which is a complication to the minting process (you now need two sets of dies for the silver coins, and you also have to cast the blank planchets in different sizes and/or purities), and probably means you’re losing money that you could have made through seignorage of the more valuable silver coin.
  • you have no less than five separate copper coins in circulation, which as with the silver means additional sets of dies and different planchets, all for the least valuable of coins and therefore the least possible amount of profit. 
  • the conversion rates are not particularly intuitive. At first I thought the fact that it’s seven stags to a moon and seven stars to a stag was a bit of religious symbolism, but that breaks down quickly because it’s two groats to a star and four pennies to the groat, and so on.
  • Also, because of the large amounts of smaller coins that go into a larger coin, I imagine it’s easy for vendors to cheat people while making change because it’s pretty difficult to eyeball whether you’ve been given 49 stars for a moon and so forth.

GRRM is absolutely borrowing from the pre-decimalized British currency of pounds, shillngs, and pence, where you had 12 pence (i.e pennies) in a shilling and 20 shillings (or 240 pence) in a pound. If that wasn’t confusing enough, you also had coins that were smaller than a penny  (farthings were worth ¼ of a penny, halfpennies were eponymous) and coins that were more than a penny but less than a shilling (groats were worth two pennies and there were also half-groats, threepenny bits existed, as did silver sixpence coins), and coins worth more than a shilling but less than a pound (florins were worth two shillings, crowns were worth five and there were also half-crowns, there were half-sovereigns worth ten shillings, and a half-guinea coin as well). And to cap off this insanity, in addition to the pound, you also had guineas worth one pound one shilling so that gentlemen could pay people with their own special currency. 

RFTIT Weekly(ish) Tumblr Roundup

RFTIT Weekly(ish) Tumblr Roundup

Hey folks! With Davos III and Avengers: Infinity War out of the way, there is a huge backlog of some really good Tumblr content to tide you over while I get to work on Jon III and the Elections essay. So let’s get into it:

ASOIAF:

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When the Mountain Clans attacked Cat’s party in the mountains Tyrion thinks that they might spare Catelyn as she was still young enough to bear sons and they carried off one of the Arryn ladies as well I believe. Do you think that this is just something GRRM threw in or is it meant to be the darker less romantic side of going off and ‘stealing a bride’.

My guess is that it has to do with Timett son of Timett seizing the Eyrie when the Knights of the Vale leave for the North, and the irony that he may have Arryn blood in him (and possibly dragonrider blood too, if the legends are correct). 

A WicDiv Theory

So over the past couple of issues, especially once we got the Rules, something’s been bothering me about how the “children” work, specifically their identities. And this got me thinking…

See, we’ve had a few cases (1923 Set, 2014 Amaterasu and Morrigan, 2014 Ananke, I’m probably forgetting a bunch) where the "children” claim to remember things from previous incarnations, or who have a strong connection to their assigned god (2014 Sakhmet, for one). But then again, we’ve had other cases where the “children” either don’t know their god (Tara) or reject their god (Baphomet/Nergal), or who are lying about their identity (Baal, Baphomet, Woden). And Baal has manifested both electricity and fire, i.e both Hadad and Hammon. 

So does it matter who the specific god is? And this brought up some other doubts: if the Game/Story goes back 6,000 years, why are we calling the two women in #34 Ananke and Persephone, when those names wouldn’t exist for another thousand years at least? Why is Lucifer in the Pantheon, when Lucifer/Satan doesn’t go back nearly that far? And why the crazy mix of pantheons?

And this got me thinking about something from Volume II:

Robert Graves’ whole thing was about syncretism: his thesis in the White Goddess was that there were certain pan-cultural deities who span millenia and huge distances under different names, chiefly the Maiden/Mother/Crone Goddess he associated with the waxing/full/waning moon. And Graves was deeply influenced by James Frazer’s Golden Bough, which did much the same thing with the idea of the dying-and-rising god he associated with Osiris, Tammuz, Dionysus, Adonis, and Jesus Christ.

This could explain all of these issues: Ananke isn’t literally Ananke, nor is Minerva literally Minerva. Rather they are Crone and Maiden, just as Persephone isn’t actually Persephone but Mother. Baal isn’t either Baal, he’s all the Baals. It doesn’t matter who Cameron says he is, because all he needs to be is the underground king to Morrigan’s underground queen. (Which also explains why a Mesopotamian undeworld god is the “spouse” of an Irish war goddess.) Lucifer is in the Pantheon because there are trickster/tempter figures in a lot of religions – I imagine if we’d seen the Lucifer of the 8th or 9th century, they might have been calling themselves Loki instead of anything Christian. Tara is so confused because she’s trying to pin down a specific goddess when she’s actually a broad archetype. 

As far as we know, was First Men society feudal? If so, what does the structure of a feudal society look like when polygamy is widely practiced?

I talk a bit about it here, but part of the problem we have in assessing whether First Men society was feudal is that a lot of the sources (although not all) are non-contemporaneous and written down by Andals who were bringing something more recognizably feudal with them (iron armor, better castles, knights, and lots ot feuding warlords, kings, lords, and knights all struggling to claim their own bits of land). 

Based on what we learn from the WOIAF and the ways in which the culture of the mountain clans of the Vale or the wildlings beyond the Wall have maintained certain aspects of First Men culture with as little admixture from the Andals, I think “the ancient Kings of the First Men [had] far more in common with Agamemnon or Hammurabi than they would with Edward III.” Consider, for example the Thenns:

“The Thenns were not like other free folk, though. The Magnar claimed to be the last of the First Men, and ruled with an iron hand. His little land of Thenn was a high mountain valley hidden amongst the northernmost peaks of the Frostfangs, surrounded by cave dwellers, Hornfoot men, giants, and the cannibal clans of the ice rivers. Ygritte said the Thenns were savage fighters, and that their Magnar was a god to them. Jon could believe that. Unlike Jarl and Harma and Rattleshirt, Styr commanded absolute obedience from his men, and that discipline was no doubt part of why Mance had chosen him to go over the Wall.”

“Aye, my lady. The Thenns have lords and laws.” They know how to kneel. “They mine tin and copper for bronze, forge their own arms and armor instead of stealing it. A proud folk, and brave…”

Think about the way that a lot of the Heroes who founded Great Houses have a connection to the divine – whether we’re talking about Brandon Stark learning the wisdom of the Old Gods, or Durran the First’s war with the gods of sea and storm, or Garth Greenhand being a fertility god – and I think you can see a model of early First Men kings who were a lot like the Magnar of Thenn. Add onto that the way in which the clans of the Mountains of the Moon or the Northern hill country operate more on the basis of “fictive kinship” than strict hierarchy between the social orders of feudalism, and I think you have a good picture of what the early First Men societies looked like.

However, it’s not like there was nothing between the king and the rank-and-filer, as we see in WOIAF, there was a process in pretty much every kingdom where the petty kings were beaten down by stronger kings and made to submit, initially as vassal kings to high kings and then eventually as lords to kings. 

As to polygamy, well it’s got advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that you can marry into multiple families at once, which allows for more dynastic alliances. The disadvantage is that you then have heightened competition within the royal dynasty as to which half-sibling will succeed, which can potentially lead to infighting. This is why having some combination of primogeniture and acclamation is quite useful. 

How do you think the Lannister deal with the workforce for the mines at Casterly Rock? – Do they go in an out every day and live at Lannisport? – Are they quartered at the Rock? – Or are they quartered in barracks outside just outside the Rock?

That’s a great question!

There isn’t an answer in the text, but we do have some idea of how premodern miners lived. 

As mining developed from seasonal labor done between planting and harvest to a specialized craft (especially as increased demand due to population growth and frequent warfare made mining increasingly lucrative), miners tended to live in their own settlements originally built immediately around mine shafts. As H.J Habakkuk puts it: “Whether the mining community formed part of a town or not, it was generally a sort of a state within a state, with laws and regulations of its own…”

This leads me to believe that the miners would probably live in or around the Rock. There’s another reason why this is the case. While miners did have certain legal privileges regarding taxation and their own courts, there were extremely harsh penalties for stealing ore (or more accurately, since lords and kings alike taxed a certain percentage of ore, evading taxes by concealing ore about their persons):

“…If he be attainted of carrying away ore a third time, his right hand shall be pierced by a knife through his palm and pinned to a windlass (1) up to the handle of said knife. There he shall remain until he be dead or shall have freed his hand from the aforesaid knife. And he shall forswear his franchise of the mine and if he have a meer (2) in the mine it shall be forfeit to the lord.“ (source)

If miners regularly commuted to and from Lannisport, with all of its many goldsmiths and merchants, you’d have a wide-open vector for stealing and then processng stolen gold for easy money for any miner looking to make some cash under the table. Given their reputation as tightfisted bastards, I would guess the Lannisters would prefer to have miners live on site or in a mining village where they could more easily “inspect” their workers (strip searches and cavity searches are not uncommon down to the present day in gold and diamond mining) and notice any signs of pilfering. 

Knowing GRRM’s penchant for high romantic fantasy, I would guess the miners live a morlock-like existance deep within the bowels of Casterly Rock, far from sunlight and air, kept under strict discipline by the Masters set above them (literally) under the threat of the cisterns above them been loosed to flood their tunnels and make a second Rains of Castamere. But it’s not all bad. Living close enough to the forges and smelteries would no doubt allow one to laugh at the very idea of winter (or even doubt its very existance), and there’s always the possibility for the strong and clever to work their way up (literally) to better work at the port of the Rock where you’d get to see the sky and smell the salt air, or as a guard or soldier and get to see the world outside. 

If all land is granted in feudal society does that mean that a household knight who is very lucky in the realm of ransoms, say, couldn’t buy himself a small country estate?

Not in the sense of hiring a realtor and going out on the open market, no. 

However, there were ways of parlaying a windfall of cash into acquiring land: 

  • you could use the money as a dower for a marriage to a noble family that’s cash-poor but land rich, 
  • or you could use the money as a bribe to some lord to grant you one of their manors (which was not uncommon for magnates who owned multiple manors).
  • or you could take the money to court in the hopes of buying your way into royal favor and from there into a fiefdom. 

Where does the Westeros opposition to polygamy come from? Is it just from the Seven Gods religion, or were the First Men monogamous as well?

kittykatknits:

doublehex:

Wait, First Men practiced polygamy? For real?

…I should actually read WOIAF and not just stare at the pretty pictures.

It wasn’t always one man/two wives either…..

racefortheironthrone:

Definitely came in with the Seven, since we have plenty of examples of First Men polygamy. 

“FLORYS THE FOX, the cleverest of Garth’s children, who kept three husbands, each ignorant of the existence of the others. (From their sons sprang House Florent, House Ball, and House Peake).”

“HARLON THE HUNTER and HERNDON OF THE HORN, twin brothers who built their castle atop Horn Hill and took to wife the beautiful woods witch who dwelled there, sharing her favors for a hundred years.”

“Garland [II] accomplished the same in the south, bringing Oldtown into his kingdom by wedding his daughter to Lymond (the Sea Lion) of House Hightower, whilst putting his own wives aside to marry Lord Lymond’s daughter.”

”The tide turned again when Morden II named his baseborn half brother Ronard as his castellan. A fearsome warrior, Ronard became the ruler of the stormlands in all but name and took King Morden’s sister to wife. Within five years, he had claimed the kingship as well. It was Morden’s own queen who placed Morden’s crown on Ronard’s head. If the songs be true, she shared his bed as well. Morden himself, deemed harmless, was confined to a cell in the tower.

His usurper ruled for nigh unto thirty years as Ronard the Bastard, smashing rebel bannerman and petty kings alike in battle after battle. Never a man to confine himself to a single woman, he claimed a daughter from every foe who bent the knee. By the time he died, he had supposedly fathered nine-and-ninety sons. Most were bastard born (though Ronard had three-and-twenty wives, the songs say) and did not share in their father’s inheritance but had to make their own way in the world.”
(WOIAF)

The First Men were definitely down with poly.

In your Davos III Chapter Analysis why do you refer to James II’s son as James III even though as far as I’m aware he’s never been considered such by English history? I’ve only ever heard him referred to by hiss full name as he was never an actual King of England and Ireland.

hedrigal:

racefortheironthrone:

Well, he certainly claimed the title as did the Jacobites who followed him, but I mostly used that title to make it clear that James III folllowed the claim of James II. 

Jacobite.

To be honest, I can’t think of a member of the Jacobite line who wasn’t feckless and incompetent, and they were generally undeserving of the loyalty showed to them by their followers. Then again, the Hanoverians were just as bad. I’m Team Smallfolk. 

Thankyou for the analysis of Davos III, a chapter that was interesting to begin with and takes on more meaning on re-read, in context of both Melisandre’s chapter and the knowledge that Davos will, with the best intentions, act against Stannis’ wishes when he is Hand of the King. Did your opinion change on re-read? Vaguely related- I wonder if Shireen’s status as a greyscale carrier and likely fate foreshadows a greyscale plague being burned away by the great fire of Lond- King’s Landing?

You’re very welcome!

Certainly, my thinking around Melisandre was influenced by her ADWD POV chapter. 

Nah, I think a greyscale epidemic would be over-egging the pudding.