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Why is the Red Wedding considered such an atrocity given that Robb was willing to abandon the riverlords and all their smallfolk, vassals, etc to certain death at the hands of the Lannister-Tyrell alliance? It appears to be a logical self-preservation that saves lives in the long run.

I feel like I’ve covered this one before:

1. the Freys decide to betray him long before Robb makes the decision to retake the North. So there’s not really a two-rights-make-a-wrong argument here.

2. the Freys murder thousands and thousands of Northern soldiers, along with the wedding guests. So it doesn’t really save any lives. 

3. the Freys make war on their fellow Riverlords, including their own liege lord, and seize their lands by conquest. So I don’t think Riverlander nationalism can really been invoked here. 

4. the Freys violate guest-right, one of the few customs that keeps Westeros away from the war of all against all. So no one bats an eye anymore when people murder Freys indiscriminately. 

How far has armor technology developed in Westeros? The descriptions of Tywin or Loras in their armor for example made me think that Westerosi knights had developed full plate, but they’re still using shields, which as I’d understood it were rendered superfluous by full plate and fell out of use with its arrival. But on the other hand, we know that some knights are using greatswords, which I believe would also imply full plate was in use?

I hadn’t heard the superfluous thing. There’s reasons other than trying to avoid being cut to use a shield – you can use shields to push people’s swords out of line and open them up for attack, you can use them to knock people off balance, etc. 

Does the timeline work out for Melessa Blackwood (mother of Brynden Rivers) and Melantha Blackwood (mother of Lord Edwyle Stark) being sisters?

Good question! This sort of stuff isn’t my strong suit, but it’s always a good idea to stretch one’s muscles. 

Sisters is a little unlikely. Brynden was born in 175 AC, so his mother would have been born 156-160 AC. By contrast, Melantha’s husband Willam died in 226 AC at the Battle of Long Lake, and it’s unlikely that he was 66 at the time. 

More likely, Melantha was Melissa’s niece. 

In The Sworn Sword, Ser Eustace is able to assemble a dozen fighting-men from his three tiny villages composed of no more than “a handful of hovels”. According to the 1% rule, this would mean he rules over a population of 1,200 people. Surely that can’t be the case?

I wouldn’t call that a dozen fighting men, I’d call it a dozen complete amateurs with no training or equipment. Yes, some levies are like that (see Septon Maribald) but most at least have a spear with a metal blade, a proper wooden shield, and a helmet. What Eustace is doing is taking much more than 1% of the available adult male population to make up for his lesser lands, which would potentially be ruinous to those villages if they die.

Compare his forces to the Red Widow’s thirty-three fighting men, including twelve heavy cavalry (six knights and six squires), and a dozen mounted crossbowmen. This suggests that the Red Widow has ~3k-4k people. 

And since Coldmoat has 20x the number of smallfolk as Standfast, Eustace has a population of 160-odd smallfolk. Divide that by half to get the number of men, and then divide that by about a third to get the number of military age men, and you’ve got 27-28 men. Eustace is risking almost half his adult male population in this fight. 

Hiya! I was reading your take on Bran VII ACOK and was just wondering: where do we see that Bran is learning earth magic from the Children? His magical arc so far is all about the third eye, and the training in Bran III ADWD is all about greensight. I get the sense it’s the Children, not just Bloodraven, that intend for Bran to take over as Last Greenseer. And surely the Children know what’s necessary to fight the Others. Am I missing something?

I think that’s part of the earth magic. The greenseers were the wise ones of the Children of the Forest, and the true name of the CotF are “those who sing the song of the earth.” And the CofF could use that song to bring the hammer of waters down on the Arm and the Neck, among other things. The WOIAF states “the children of the forest…would contribute their magic to the construction” of the Wall. 

So my guess is Bran’s going to learn in TWOW. 

Don’t know if you’ve touched on this one before, but why do you think that the Kings of the Rock never adopted more advanced financial instruments? Tywin seems to pretty easily serve as a continental financier for the Iron Throne using his extensive gold reserves. But you don’t really see any state bank or IB-like reserve banking that would allow the Lannisters to create more functional wealth through lending and develop more extensive bureaucracy. They seem to just leave their gold in a vault.

Here’s why: because the Lannisters are noblemen and not merchants.

 A couple quotes on this point:

“A coin is as dangerous as a sword in the wrong hands.“

His uncle Kevan looked at him oddly. “Not to us, surely. The gold of Casterly Rock …”

“… is dug from the ground. Littlefinger’s gold is made from thin air, with a snap of his fingers.”

Lord Tywin had always held the Free Cities in contempt. They fight with coins instead of swords, he used to say. Gold has its uses, but wars are won with iron.

Tywin Lannister was a very intelligent, well-educated man of his class, but that class was of a warrior aristocracy. He wouldn’t have been educated in more accounting than was needed to understand what his steward and his maester were reporting to him, because book-keeping is for women and servants. And that stuff is basic household accounts, not business accounting. And no Lannister would ever, ever learn finance, because that’s for merchants, and merchants are a lesser class of people who are concerned about gold rather than glory, who care more for probity than for honor. Look at how the Spicers are looked down on for coming from people “in trade.” 

But I don’t want you to get the idea that Tywin was ignorant. It’s more about how he thought about money. Take a look at the essay I wrote about Tywin’s economic policy – Tywin’s father was looked down on because he loaned money to “common merchants,” even though that makes a ton of economic sense for the economy of the Westerlands, because it’s acting like a merchant. Tywin is a pretty classical mercantilist in a lot of ways – he wants to keep as much gold on hand as he can, because he thinks physical possession of gold makes you more powerful, he’s much more worried about getting his principal back than the income he might be forgoing in interest payments. And most of all, Tywin uses the gold of Casterly Rock for political purposes, not for economic purposes – he acts as Aerys II’s bank in order to make himself indispensable as Hand, he does the same thing for Robert in order to keep extending Lannister influence at court, etc. As the quote above points out, for Tywin, gold is a means, not an end in itself. 

Tyrion, in part because he’s unusually well-read and perceptive, comes the closest to breaking out of this mentality, especially when he becomes Master of Coin and starts taking a really close look at the royal accounts. And even he, one of the smartest men in Westeros, can’t quite grasp what Littlefinger’s been up to. 

And as I discuss in my “Who Stole Westeros?” essay here, Littlefinger is counting on this hole in the education of the Westerosi nobility to make his schemes work. Jon Arryn and men of his class don’t know about finance, so they wouldn’t think twice about what he was telling him about increasing revenues tenfold, and even if they investigated him, they wouldn’t understand what to look for.