Author: stevenattewell

I saw your debate on prophecies and I think different from you. What a grace to have a prophecy if you have no chance to stop it. In the end the purpose of prophecy is completely lost. I think prophecy is to be a warning. What’s the use of being warned of something you can not prevent? At least the chance to stop has to be given. Not that it’s certain that you will succeed.

goodqueenaly:

Agreed. FWIW, I think this answer GRRM gave in an interview once is pretty telling toward how he feels about prophecy, specifically in ASOIAF:

poorquentyn:

The use of being warned of something you cannot prevent is that you’re gonna try anyway, and there are few things more human than throwing time and energy at something one cannot control, especially if you reveal yourself in the process. Cersei can’t stop the YMBQ or the valonqar from coming, but her attempts to do so suit her character. Bran can’t stop the sea from coming to Winterfell, but that he takes it so literally is part of the recurring pattern in which Bran is just a little too young to understand his own powers or what’s going on around him. Moreover, at the end of the day, the prophecies in ASOIAF are messages to us more than the characters.

Surely the plot is very unpredictable despite all the prophecies you give to help us…

[Laughs] Prophecies are, you know, a double edge sword. You have to handle them very carefully; I mean, they can add depth and interest to a book, but you don’t want to be too literal or too easy… In the Wars of the Roses, that you mentioned, there was one Lord who had been prophesied he would die beneath the walls of a certain castle and he was superstitious at that sort of walls, so he never came anyway near that castle. He stayed thousands of leagues away from that particular castle because of the prophecy. However, he was killed in the first battle of St. Paul de Vence and when they found him dead he was outside of an inn whose sign was the picture of that castle! [Laughs] So you know? That’s the way prophecies come true in unexpected ways. The more you try to avoid them, the more you are making them true, and I make a little fun with that. 

Ditto. A prophecy that doesn’t come to pass is like a joke without a punchline. 

Hi! I have a general history question, as I don’t think it think it happened in ASoIaF: if a reigning monarch was captured (in a battle, for example), who would pay ransom for him? His direct family, other Important People of the land? Or perhaps he himself (because I know it was common to let noble people go and collect their own ransom money if they swore on their honor to go back)? What if, hypothetically, he had no living family left? Random nobles would bail him out expecting future favor?

Well, when Richard I was captured outside Vienna in 1192 and ransomed by the Holy Roman Emperor, his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine organized the payment of the ransom, and contributed not only from her own income but also taxed both clergy and laity to come up with the money. (In one of my favorite moments of Angevin disfunctionality, his brother John offered half of the ransom if the Emperor would keep him in prison.) 

How did Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick got so rich and powerful? He was “only” Earl of Salisbury before his marriage. What does Salisbury had of riches? And what did the Warwickshire brought to him that he became so powerful? I am curious about how the feudal economy of the english shires worked that some were so more powerful than others.

Well, to begin with, Salisbury was a cathedral city, which made the Earldom fairly decent as a fiefdom went. But the key to Richard’s wealth was that he married Anne Beauchamp, who was daughter to Richard de Beauchamp (Earl of Warwick) and Isabel Despenser. Isabel Despenser was the daughter and sole heir to the fortune of Thomas le Despenser, Earl of Gloucester, a descendant of one of the most notorious families in England who were so grasping and venal that they provoked the entire nobility of England into a civil war against Edward II.

So Richard didn’t just get the title of Earl of Warwick, he got a huge swathe of land across south and central England and parts of Wales.

I saw your work about Dorne (and it’s amazing, i loved it) and I have one question: for me the pacific aggregation of Dorne to Westeros doesn’t make sense. The common people fought against the targaryens for the independence of their culture and nation, but accept pacificaly become part of Westeros after an bloody war (Daeron’s War) ? I understand the Martells, but there’s no opposition? Even among the noble houses? Why?

Well, we don’t know how pacifically they accepted it…

We do know that, not that long after the treaty, the Yronwoods participated in a civil war against the Targaryen/Martell bloc. And we also know that there was a Vulture King who rose up against Daeron II. 

I understand that, with a few notable exceptions, knights were generally high born, but what about other professional soldiers? Men-at-arms, crossbowmen, archers, pikemen, etc?

There was something of a class gradient among soldiers. Men-at-arms were usually of relatively high birth – the younger sons of knights or at the very least from the gentry or esquiry – specialists like Swiss pikemen or Genoese crossbowmen tended to be somewhere below them but still not among the poorest, but archers were more likely to come from the peasantry b/c of the bow’s use for hunting in rural areas.