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Hey, two questions: why aren’t you writing about the Crownlands in your Politics of the Seven Kingdoms? Also, how did you manage to write A Laboratory of Politics without TWOIAF and asearchoficeandfire? (to check the backstory and all that… I don’t think it existed in 2014?) Really love your work!

1. I find the Crownlands rather boring, sorry. Also, as far as the Politics of the Seven Kingdoms goes, there is no chapter on the Crownlands, so it only appears as a bit player in other stories. 

2. Hah! The answer is: extremely laboriously. I still had A Wiki of Ice and Fire and the app, which gave me hints of where to look, but mostly what I did was use the search function on my e-book copies of ASOIAF and look for every single mention of each of the Free Cities and compile lists of page numbers and then type out quotes manually. 

This may be a stupid question, but whenever a character says, (or GRRM) has it written that a character is “simple” is that their way of saying that that character is mentally retarded/handicapped? People like Helicent Uffering, Jaehaera Targaryen, Gael Targaryen, and “Jinglebell” Frey, etc.?

I’m not an expert in the surprisingly voluminous subfield of mental health in the Middle Ages, but if I recall correctly from what I’ve read, it could be some form of handicap, it could be mental illness, it could be trauma, it could be general non-confirmity of behavior.  

And it gets doubly complicated in GRRM’s world, because of the way that magic intersects with all of this. Prophecy is definitely something that can seriously damage the mind, as we see with Patchface. So it’s quite possible that some Targaryens known to be “simple” – thinking of Rhaegel, for example – might have inherited the family gift for prophecy too strongly. 

Unfortunately, my S.O. is a Clan Campbell descendant, and would like to know more. Do you have any book recommendations on these traitors and sheep stealers?

First of all, let me just say thank you for what has to be the most Scottish ask I’ve ever gotten.

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Second of all, I have found some sources that might help you to understand the Clan Campbell point of view. To start off with, you’ll probably want the Oxford Companion to Scottish History as a reference tool. Next, Edinburgh University published a three-volume History of Clan Campbell by Alastair Campbell, which covers the history of the clan from the founding to the present.

If you’re looking for material specifically on Clan Campbell’s many feuds, there’s Oliver Tompson’s The Great Feud and Ronald Williams’ The Heather and the Gale. 

And if you still need more material, there is in fact a Journal of the Clan Campbell Society put out by the Clan Campbell Education Association, which runs to more than 30 volumes. 

RFTIT Tumblr Weeklyish Roundup

RFTIT Tumblr Weeklyish Roundup

Hello everyone! Work continues on the High Spider Part II, and there’s going to be a cool Kickstarter/book announcement later today, but in the meantime we’ve got some Tumblrs: How do the Free Cities communicate long-distance? On the Cornwell Starbuck series: Part I Part II Byzantium as a slave society. A conversation on Varys’ theory and praxis.  A conversation on medieval booze vs. water: Part…

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Did the faith of the Old Gods allow for multiple wives? It’s seems like Garland the Bridegroom had multiple wives before he married Lymond Hightower’s daughter. Would they have been “wive” wives? Or would there have been one main wife and several concubines, sort of like what the Ironborn have with their Rock Wife and Salt Wives.

We don’t have any evidence of how these marriages were thought of on the mainland – to be honest, we barely have any evidence of multiple wives to begin with – so I don’t know. If I had to guess, I would say that there would probably be a complex social hierarchy, with seniority and the influence of the wife’s family among the factors involved. 

Another interesting question is how this interacted with primogeniture, because the two practices don’t combine easily. My guess is that, unless the first marriage was childless, subsequent marriages were more likely to be with younger daughters and/or from more juniior families, as the wife’s family isn’t getting long-term influence with the next lord but rather only short-term influence with the current lord.