That’s not was he was hinting at all. Selmy was saying that there’s a good bit of luck involved in tourneys, and a lesser combatant who’s unusually motivated (as Jorah was with the favor) might perform above their usual abilities, but over the long run, talent wins out.
Certain racist fans are angry that Marvel and Sony have reportedly cast a black actress as Mary Jane Watson in the new Spider-Man movie because “Mary Jane has to be a red head”. Aside from the fact that some black people have red hair. Aside from the fact that red hair dye exists and lord knows an aspiring actress is probably going to care a lot about fashion Aside from all of that, if you’ve…
There isn’t any evidence one way or another, but I lean towards somewhere on Massey’s Hook, which would help explain how Ser Joffrey Lonmouth encountered and become so close to Laenor Velaryon.
So back in the day, I tried to figure this out by working out the ratio of cavalry to foot in the armies where we have good figures. Here’s what we know:
Taking Robb’s army at the Twins as our example, we see that 27% of the North’s army was cavalry (6 out of 22k) and 73% was infantry. (You can even go pre-Twins to cancel out the effect of the Freys, as 500 was 10% of the Stark cavalry, meaning that Robb had 5,000 cavalry and 13,000 infantry when he arrived at the Twins).
Combining Tywin and Jaime’s armies together, we see that the Lannisters had ~10,500 cavalry out of a total Lannister force of 35,000, which gives us a ratio of 30%.
Renly’s army at Bitterbridge was 80,000 strong and 20,000 of them were cavalry, which gives us a ratio of 25%. This is part of what started to make me suspicious about Renly’s numbers, because the Reach being the center of chivalry should have a higher percentage than the North, and even if we took 25% as our figure, should have more than 20,000 by itself, and then you have the Stormlands, which should have at least 6,000 cavalry by itself. This is why I’ve come to suspect that a lot of the Reacher lords and Stormlords did not answer the call (at least a third, depending on how much credence you put on Renly’s claim to have 10,000 at Highgarden) and that Renly was, characteristically, overstating his support when talking with Catelyn and Stannis.
So I would put the ratio of cavalry to infantry at ~27-30%. This would suggest that the numbers look like this:
The North: 9,450-10,500.
The Vale: 8,000-10,000.*
The Westerlands: 12,000-13,500.
The Crownlands: 4,000-4,500.
The Riverlands: 5,400-6,000.
The Reach: 27,000-30,000.
The Stormlands: 6,750-7,500.
Dorne:
6,750-7,500.
Ironborn: none.*
* – The Vale might be a special case, in that its army is described pretty much always as just “the knights of the Vale.” So it’s possible they have a higher ratio than normal, which would explain why all these noble houses are in debt. Likewise, the Ironborn have almost no cavalry due to the vagaries of geography, although things were different back when they ruled the Riverlands.
Now, granted, not all cavalry are knights. Northern heavy cavalry are essentially knights when it comes to social class, equipment, training, etc.
even if most of them aren’t given the title.
Squires aren’t knights, but they do fight as knights do on the battlefield, many if not most of them will become knights or are of the social class who become knights. But what about the people who don’t fit that mold?
If we look at Tywin’s army at the Green Fork, we can get a decent picture of how many are which:
The right wing was all cavalry, some four thousand men, heavy with the weight of their armor. More than three quarters of the knights were there, massed together like a great steel fist. Ser Addam Marbrand had the command…
This wing too was all cavalry, but where the right was a mailed fist of knights and heavy lancers, the vanguard was made up of the sweepings of the west: mounted archers in leather jerkins, a swarming mass of undisciplined freeriders and sellswords, fieldhands on plow horses armed with scythes and their fathers’ rusted swords, half-trained boys from the stews of Lannisport … and Tyrion and his mountain clansmen.
So Marbrand’s 4,000 men make up more than 75% of the Westerlander chivalry, which means that Tywin has around 5,333 knights out of 7,500 cavalry – making knights ~70% of his cavalry. If we extrapolate the same percentage across all of Westeros, we would see something like:
Guest-right is reciprocal, so it’s not like you could kill someone under someone’s roof and then scream breach of custom if the host puts you under arrest. At the same time, torture is a more serious violation, because it involves physical harm to someone who is supposed to be sacrosanct.
So I would say that it’s probably acceptable in Westerosi custom that if the guest is suspected of breaching guest-right, they can be arrested but must be given a trial. As Catelyn did with Tyrion. And prisoners should not be harmed, as Catelyn insisted.
I’ll get into this more when I get to the respective essay, but you can tell from looking at a map and comparing the Andal Houses listed in WOIAF and the location of their holdfasts.
After I did this post, @joannalannister asked if I could do a similar set of estimates for the other Great Houses, so I figured I might as well knock them out.
@racefortheironthrone, so what would you say is the actual figure for annual Lannister income?
Lannister revenues are approximately 4 million dragons per year
say the Casterly Rock mine yields (roughly) 2 million dragons per year (I use this figure because 2 million ounces is the annual yield of the best modern day gold mine, the Grasberg mine, using modern mining techniques; the Lannisters use medieval mining techniques but Casterly Rock is supposed to be the best in Terros, and Terros is the real world turned up to Eleven, so I figure it’s a wash.)
Castamere – for argument’s sake, say Castamere yields 1.75 million dragons per year, which goes directly into the Lannister coffers
the Golden Tooth, Nunn’s Deep, and the Pendric Hills – say each of these yields 1 million dragons, for a total of 3 million – but how much do the Lannisters get from this yield? How much goes to the families whose seats these are?
Can you talk more about this? Would you argue that these (very rough) guesses of gold mine yields are too low? How much gold would vassal houses have to surrender to their overlord house? Or does House Lannister own all the gold mines and the vassal houses just get a small portion of the yield? How much annual income do the Lannisters have???
Sure I can talk about this.
About those proposed yields:
Casterly Rock sounds about right, being worth a kingdom in its own right would explain why Essos thinks of it in the same way that people in the 19th century thought of the California gold rush.
I don’t think Castamere itself is a working gold mine, though – the lands around it still produce tax revenue (possibly from lesser mines?), but the mine proper was flooded by Tywin, so I don’t think it produces anywhere near that much.
I don’t think the Golden Tooth is supposed to be a mine. That info appeared only in the AGOT appendix and dropped out of further appendices when it started showing up more prominently as a castle in a mountain pass.
As for Nunn’s Deep and the Pendric Hills – they’ve got to be substantial enough to be worth sacking, but not so substantial that the houses that own them are important enough for us to have heard of them. So maybe a million between them?
Now, in terms of who owns what. This is tricky. Real-world historical examples would say that the Lannisters own all of it and then lease mining rights to people for a percentage. However, WOIAF suggests otherwise – the Reynes owned Castamere’s mines outright, etc. So I would guess instead that the Lannisters just exact feudal taxes as per norm, but with the Westerlands being unusual in that most taxes are paid in gold rather than in kind.
In terms of House Lannister of Casterly Rock’s income…four million in taxes is taking the very high end of estimates, assuming that the Westerlands is a third above the hind end of estimates for smallfolk income. I would guess that total incomes is probably closer to 5 million than 6.
Why can’t Golden Tooth be both a mine and a castle? Didn’t the Worldbook say that Westerlands castles started out as mines and that most of the castles are actually underground?
Well for one thing, it’s a castle in a mountain pass, i.e the space between two mountains. There’s no there there to mine. You could do panning, I suppose, but the Red Fork and the Tumblestone where you might see gold flake coming down from the mountains are far away from the Golden Tooth itself.
And no, the WOIAF said that Casterly Rock and Castamere were built out of mines, not all Westerlands castles. In fact, Castamere was distinctive because it was underground, otherwise it woud be commonplace.
After I did this post, @joannalannister asked if I could do a similar set of estimates for the other Great Houses, so I figured I might as well knock them out.
@racefortheironthrone, so what would you say is the actual figure for annual Lannister income?
Lannister revenues are approximately 4 million dragons per year
say the Casterly Rock mine yields (roughly) 2 million dragons per year (I use this figure because 2 million ounces is the annual yield of the best modern day gold mine, the Grasberg mine, using modern mining techniques; the Lannisters use medieval mining techniques but Casterly Rock is supposed to be the best in Terros, and Terros is the real world turned up to Eleven, so I figure it’s a wash.)
Castamere – for argument’s sake, say Castamere yields 1.75 million dragons per year, which goes directly into the Lannister coffers
the Golden Tooth, Nunn’s Deep, and the Pendric Hills – say each of these yields 1 million dragons, for a total of 3 million – but how much do the Lannisters get from this yield? How much goes to the families whose seats these are?
Can you talk more about this? Would you argue that these (very rough) guesses of gold mine yields are too low? How much gold would vassal houses have to surrender to their overlord house? Or does House Lannister own all the gold mines and the vassal houses just get a small portion of the yield? How much annual income do the Lannisters have???
Sure I can talk about this.
About those proposed yields:
Casterly Rock sounds about right, being worth a kingdom in its own right would explain why Essos thinks of it in the same way that people in the 19th century thought of the California gold rush.
I don’t think Castamere itself is a working gold mine, though – the lands around it still produce tax revenue (possibly from lesser mines?), but the mine proper was flooded by Tywin, so I don’t think it produces anywhere near that much.
I don’t think the Golden Tooth is supposed to be a mine. That info appeared only in the AGOT appendix and dropped out of further appendices when it started showing up more prominently as a castle in a mountain pass.
As for Nunn’s Deep and the Pendric Hills – they’ve got to be substantial enough to be worth sacking, but not so substantial that the houses that own them are important enough for us to have heard of them. So maybe a million between them?
Now, in terms of who owns what. This is tricky. Real-world historical examples would say that the Lannisters own all of it and then lease mining rights to people for a percentage. However, WOIAF suggests otherwise – the Reynes owned Castamere’s mines outright, etc. So I would guess instead that the Lannisters just exact feudal taxes as per norm, but with the Westerlands being unusual in that most taxes are paid in gold rather than in kind.
In terms of House Lannister of Casterly Rock’s income…four million in taxes is taking the very high end of estimates, assuming that the Westerlands is a third above the hind end of estimates for smallfolk income. I would guess that total incomes is probably closer to 5 million than 6.
Pet peeve time: for the contingent out there who sneer at heroes like Superman and Wonder Woman and Captain America, those icons who still, at their core, represent selfless sacrifice for the greater good, and who justify their contempt by saying, oh, it’s so unrealistic, no one would ever be so noble… grow up. Seriously. Cynicism is not maturity, do not mistake the one for the other. If you truly cannot accept a story where someone does the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, that says far more about who you are than these characters.
To integrate the wildlings into the North, they need land to settle on. Having them remain nomadic is not going to work – the rest of the North are settled agrarian people and they are not going to put up with wildlings migrating through their land taking whatever they want. It’s a recipe for cattle raids and bushwhacking and endless conflict.
The problem then becomes, what land do you give them? The Gift is the only “unclaimed” land in the North – giving them any other land means taking it away from the people already on it, and that’s not going to happen without a fight.
The hill clans make this point very very clearly when they show up in Jon XI of ADWD:
“Lord Snow,” said The Norrey, “where do you mean to put these wildlings o’ yours? Not on my lands, I hope.”
“Aye,” declared Old Flint. “You want them in the Gift, that’s your folly, but see they don’t wander off or I’ll send you back their heads. Winter is nigh, I want no more mouths to feed.”
Settling the wildlings in the Gift is the least bad solution, as Torghen Flint recognizes. It means the wildlings will be on their own land, and so won’t be making incursions into anyone else’s land. It reduces as far as possible the chances that violence will break out between the two groups.
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