SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.
As I’ve discussed here, here, and here, the Manderlys went into exile with a good bit of portable income and were looking for not just land to settle on but royal protection (they were for all intents and purposes exiled fugitives), and the Starks were looking for a House with ready income to take over the Wolf’s Den and solve the tricky problem of the security of their eastern border:
“A thousand years before the Conquest, a promise was made, and oaths were sworn in the Wolf’s Den before the old gods and the new. When we were sore beset and friendless, hounded from our homes and in peril of our lives, the wolves took us in and nourished us and protected us against our enemies. The city is built upon the land they gave us. In return we swore that we should always be their men. Stark men!“
As for a House migrating, we’ve definitely seen some examples of this: the Blackwoods moved from the North to the Riverlands, and lots of Andal Houses would have moved from the Vale to the Riverlands to the Westerlands and the Reach.
It’s a bit tricky, because prices do fluctuate a bit. Let’s say a ransom is equal to the price of a horse and a suit of armor:
Horse prices: in 209 AC, Dunk sells Sweetfoot for three gold plus some silver, whereas 299 AC one gold per horse is the going rate. So let’s go with 1.5 gold on average.
Armor prices: in 209 AC, Dunk buys a set of plain steel armor for 800 silver (~3.8 gold), although this is mail, gorget, greaves, and greathelm rather than a full suit of plate, which one would guess would go for substanially more. The semi-canon RPG books give a price of around 14 gold for a suit of plate. So let’s go with an average of 9 gold.
So I would say that a tourney ransom is somewhere around 10-11 gold minimum, which means that Ser Humfrey made around 140-154 gold on the first day of the tourney. (Ransoms in times of war are a good deal higher – Brienne’s father offered 300 gold, which Jaime considers a good ransom for a knight – since there’s something of a disincentive to return an enemy combatant to the field.)
Now, how much is that worth? Well, given that a good income for a smallfolk works out to between 3.5-5 gold, that would certainly set an adult peasant up for the rest of their life. However, it’s not that extravagant by noble standards.
In terms of how much it’s worth by today’s money, that’s about $140,000-154,000 U.S dollars, which is quite a sum but not exactly “set for life” money.
It’s much more about naval control over the Bite than fishing rihgts, and the Worthless War came about in the wake of a series of naval conflicts between the North and the inhabitants of the Three Sisters:
“Even before the coming of the Andals, the Wolf’s Den had been raised by King Jon Stark, built to defend the mouth of the White Knife against raiders and slavers from across the narrow sea…During the wars between Winterfell and the Andal Kings of Mountain and Vale, the Old Falcon, Osgood Arryn, laid siege to the Wolf’s Den. His son, King Oswin the Talon, captured it and put it to the torch. Later, it fell under attack from the pirate lords of the Three Sisters and slavers out of the Stepstones. It was not until some thousand years before the Conquest, when the fugitive Manderlys came to the North and swore their oaths at the Wolf’s Den, that the problem of the defense of the White Knife—the river that provides access into the very heart of the North—was resolved with the creation of White Harbor.
…The last isles to be wedded to the Vale were the Three Sisters. For thousands of years, these islands had boasted their own cruel kings, pirates and raiders whose longships sailed the Bite, the narrow sea, and even the Shivering Sea with impunity, plundering and reaving as they would and returning to the Sisters laden with gold and slaves. These depredations finally led the Kings of Winter to send their own war fleets to seek dominion over the Sisters—for whoever holds the Three Sisters holds the Bite.”
So it’s absolutely the case that the Three SIsters *used* to be pirates and slavers, and shifted to becoming wreckers when more powerful forces cracked down on them, although they clearly still do a bit of piracy, because Stannis hanged twelve Sistermen for piracy when he was Master of Ships.
As for attempted invasions, well, where do you think Osgood and Oswin Arryn based and resupplied their ships from when they attacked the Wolf’s Den?
A handful of maesters, influenced by fragments of the work of Septon Barth, hold that Valyria had used spells to tame the Fourteen Flames for thousands of years, that their ceaseless hunger for slaves and wealth was as much to sustain these spells as to expand their power, and that when at last those spells faltered, the cataclysm became inevitable.
Of these, some argue that it was the curse of Garin the Great at last coming to fruition. Others speak of the priests of R’hllor calling down the fire of their god in queer rituals. Some, wedding the fanciful notion of Valyrian magic to the reality of the ambitious great houses of Valyria, have argued that it was the constant whirl of conflict and deception amongst the great houses that might have led to the assassinations of too many of the reputed mages who renewed and maintained the rituals that banked the fires of the Fourteen Flames.
Do you think that like the Night’s King made sacrifices to the Others, the Valyrians made sacrifices to beings (maybe fire versions of the Others) in Fourteen Flames in exchange for learning sorcery?
If the FM whacked the mages, then the shortage of sacrifices could have pissed those beings off enough to cause the Doom.
I don’t think that’s quite how it worked. The Valyrians were not the kind of people to sacrifice to a metaphysical entity; as the WOIAF puts it:
“Some scholars have suggested that the dragonlords regarded all faiths as equally false, believing themselves to be more powerful than any god or goddess. They looked upon priests and temples as relics of a more primitive time, though useful for placating “slaves, savages, and the poor” with promises of a better life to come.
The Valyrian practice of human sacrifice was squarely focused on blood magic (as Marwyn puts it “All Valyrian sorcery was rooted in blood or fire.”) rather than religious ritual.
For their own, Unseelie, reasons, the Others are actually not that unwilling to take dominion over destruction, for at least the period of a mortal’s lifespan:
He remembered the hearth tales Old Nan told them. The wildlings were cruel men, she said, slavers and slayers and thieves. They consorted with giants and ghouls, stole girl children in the dead of night, and drank blood from polished horns. And their women lay with the Others in the Long Night to sire terrible half-human children…
“He was a wildling,” Bran said. “They carry off women and sell them to the Others.”
“He gives the boys to the gods. Come the white cold, he does, and of late it comes more often. That’s why he started giving them sheep, even though he has a taste for mutton. Only now the sheep’s gone too. Next it will be dogs, till …“ She lowered her eyes and stroked her belly.“
“The gathering gloom put Bran in mind of another of Old Nan’s stories, the tale of Night’s King. He had been the thirteenth man to lead the Night’s Watch, she said; a warrior who knew no fear. “And that was the fault in him,” she would add, “for all men must know fear.” A woman was his downfall; a woman glimpsed from atop the Wall, with skin as white as the moon and eyes like blue stars. Fearing nothing, he chased her and caught her and loved her, though her skin was cold as ice, and when he gave his seed to her he gave his soul as well.
He brought her back to the Nightfort and proclaimed her a queen and himself her king, and with strange sorceries he bound his Sworn Brothers to his will. For thirteen years they had ruled, Night’s King and his corpse queen, till finally the Stark of Winterfell and Joramun of the wildlings had joined to free the Watch from bondage. After his fall, when it was found he had been sacrificing to the Others, all records of Night’s King had been destroyed, his very name forbidden.“
Where I think most people in the fandom go wrong is they misunderstand the motivation and method of dominion; there are no examples of stable arrangements, formal treaties, or genuinely symbiotic relationships between men and Others. Rather, all the examples we have show such interactions as parasitical and corruptive, spiralling and intensifying at every step until they’ve wrung as many sacrifices as they’re going to get and turn on the person who’s served them.
This is what makes them like the Unseelie: if you lay out milk, throw salt over your shoulders, and stay away from fairy circles, they might not kill you in your bed; but you can do everything right and they might steal your children anyway for some unfathomable, inhuman reason.
If I had to guess, Robb’s terminology is based on a historic formulation of the boundaries of the Riverlands, which tended to be somewhat more fluid than those of other kingdoms.
Prior to the advent of modern surveying techniques, natural features tended to be used quite a bit as boundary markers – hence part of the reason for the Mexican-American War was that Mexico and the U.S disagreed whether the U.S/Mexico border was at the Rio Grande River or the Nueces River, or why France historically tried to expand its borders to the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the Rhine even though its linguistic borders are considerably to the west, and why the Germans tried to do the same for the territory between the Rhine and the Danube.
Moreover, the phrase that Robb uses is somewhat more complex: it’s the lands “watered by the River Trident and its vassal streams (emphasis mine).” To figure out what he means by this requires looking at a map:
Note that the Trident and its vassal streams snake up to that disputed territory between Greywater Watch and the Twins in the north, and significantly into the Westerlands territory up by Ashmark and Hornvale if you compare it to the political maps (hence why he’s also claiming the Golden Tooth), it might even include Wickenden in the Vale if you push if far enough.
The bigger issue is what about that territory between the Red Fork and the Narrow Sea south of the Trident? Well, arguably it’s “watered” by the eastern bank of the Red Fork from the Mummer’s Ford north to Riverrun along its western border and then again on the southern bank of the Red Fork from Riverrun to Darry, and then you have the Trident Proper which runs from Darry to Maidenpool all the way out to Cracklaw Point (which historically was something of a border territory). Harrenhal down to Stony Sept would be a bit tricky, since Harrenhal itself isn’t bordered by the Trident (although its lands probably are). Likewise, where does the waterline end: Antlers? Sow’s Horn? Duskendale? (It was once part of the Riverlands, after all.)
Back at Winterfell, they had eaten in the Great Hall almost half the time. Her father used to say that a lord needed to eat with his men, if he hoped to keep them. “Know the men who follow you,” she heard him tell Robb once, “and let them know you. Don’t ask your men to die for a stranger.” At Winterfell, he always had an extra seat set at his own table, and every day a different man would be asked to join him. One night it would be Vayon Poole, and the talk would be coppers and bread stores and servants. The next time it would be Mikken, and her father would listen to him go on about armor and swords and how hot a forge should be and the best way to temper steel. Another day it might be Hullen with his endless horse talk, or Septon Chayle from the library, or Jory, or Ser Rodrik, or even Old Nan with her stories.
Arya had loved nothing better than to sit at her father’s table and listen to them talk. (Arya II, AGOT)
As you can see from the quote, Ned talked to them about their jobs and learned a bit about their work, as part of his philosophy of enlightened paternalism.
This is something of a classic move of noble/commoner interaction; before the term “condescension” became a pejorative, the ability of a nobleman (especially a king) to be polite to the lower orders without erasing the social distance between them (such “overfamiliar” behavior, it was believed, would give rise to either contempt and the loss of aristocratic mystery or overfamiliarity and social climbing) was seen as a necessity for elite behavior. Hence, it’s something of a cliche in the U.K to write about royals pressing the flesh with their subjects and saying things like “Hello, what’s your name? And what do you do? That’s so interesting! And how long have you been a(n) ______? Jolly good!”
Ned’s better at it than that caricature, but there’s still a political motive behind his custom: from later in the chapter, “Her father used to say that a lord needed to eat with his men, if he hoped to keep them. “Know the men who follow you…and let them know you. Don’t ask your men to die for a stranger.” As I’ve said elsewhere, Ned’s person-focused theory of politics is a disadvantage when it comes to being Hand of the King, but if you look at the long run, it inspired loyalty from beyond the grave.
In terms of where he learned it, I don’t think he learned it from Jon Arryn – the Vale is far too socially conservative for that to be Jon’s M.O. Rather, I think it’s something that Ned learned from his father, that it’s part of the Starks’ unique relationship with the people of the North. I think Cat was initially scandalized, but eventually accepted as part of the Northern way.
“If the little crannogman could visit the Isle of Faces, maybe I could too.”
Synopsis: Bran is told one story by the Liddle and one story by Meera.
SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.
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