I mean, yes, there should be a city on the Mander, or at least two, which is why my econ dev plan had that happen.
However, I would caution against cities being seen as costless. A city is a large population that does not produce its own food in a world in which 90-95% of the population are needed to do agricultural labor, which requires a lot of food to be imported to it and riots if it that doesn’t happen, and which does not have a positive population growth rate, historically speaking, which means you need to continually import people as well.
So while cities are certainly highly valuable, they are also something of a luxury commodity. (Which, fyi, is part of where GRRM’s math fails him again: cities of 500,000 are orders of magnitude bigger than almost all medieval cities.)
There are as many answers as you have imagination: they’re all undead, they’re all infertile due to magical radiation, they sacrifice all their children to Moloch, they eat babies, a monster comes and steals them all, etc.
Ultimately, it comes down to that Asshai is a Thin Place more than almost anywhere else in the world:
…beyond the walls of Asshai little grows save ghost grass, whose glassy, glowing stalks are inedible. If not for the food brought in from across the sea, the Asshai’i would have starved.
The ships bring casks of freshwater too. The waters of the Ash glisten black beneath the noonday sun and glimmer with a pale green phosphorescence by night, and such fish as swim in the river are blind and twisted, so deformed and hideous to look upon that only fools and shadowbinders will eat of their flesh.
Every land beneath the sun has need of fruits and grains and vegetables, so one might ask why any mariner would sail to the ends of the earth when he might more easily sell his cargo to markets closer to home. The answer is gold.
Beyond the walls of Asshai, food is scarce, but gold and gems are common…though some will say that the gold of the Shadow Lands is as unhealthy in its own way as the fruits that grow there…
The dark city by the Shadow is a city steeped in sorcery. Warlocks, wizards, alchemists, moonsingers, red priests, black alchemists, necromancers, aeromancers, pyromancers, bloodmages, torturers, inquisitors, poisoners, godswives, night-walkers, shapechangers, worshippers of the Black Goat and the Pale Child and the Lion of Night, all find welcome in Asshai-by-the-Shadow, where nothing is forbidden. Here they are free to practice their spells without restraint or censure, conduct their obscene rites, and fornicate with demons if that is their desire.”
This is a place where “nothing is forbidden everything is permitted.”
This is a common misconception. Melisandre is “of” Asshai but she was not born in Asshai, because “there are no children in Asshai.” Rather, Melisandre was sold into slavery in Asshai:
“The red priestess shuddered. Blood trickled down her thigh, black and smoking. The fire was inside her, an agony, an ecstasy, filling her, searing her, transforming her. Shimmers of heat traced patterns on her skin, insistent as a lover’s hand. Strange voices called to her from days long past. “Melony,” she heard a woman cry. A man’s voice called, “Lot Seven.” She was weeping, and her tears were flame. And still she drank it in…
Dawn. Another day is given us, R’hllor be praised. The terrors of the night recede. Melisandre had spent the night in her chair by the fire, as she often did. With Stannis gone, her bed saw little use. She had no time for sleep, with the weight of the world upon her shoulders. And she feared to dream. Sleep is a little death, dreams the whisperings of the Other, who would drag us all into his eternal night. She would sooner sit bathed in the ruddy glow of her red lord’s blessed flames, her cheeks flushed by the wash of heat as if by a lover’s kisses. Some nights she drowsed, but never for more than an hour. One day, Melisandre prayed, she would not sleep at all. One day she would be free of dreams. Melony, she thought. Lot Seven.”
Moreover, we have no idea what ethnicity the Asshai are, since “those who walk the streets of Asshai are masked and veiled.” So I think people are being far too conventional by assuming that any real world ethnicity applies to the Asshai, or humanity for that matter.
Finally, why white should be assumed as the default for Melisandre, I don’t know – she was a slave in Essos, so she could be from as far west as Lys to as far east as Qarth, I suppose. We know she has pale skin, but that’s it. And she speaks with a distinctively Eastern accent, so there’s that.
Technically, as many as are needed to go around their neck, so some maesters have more links than others:
He fingered the collar of his order; a heavy chain worn tight around the neck beneath his robe, each link forged from a different metal…
His maester’s collar was no simple metal choker such as Luwin wore, but two dozen heavy chains wound together into a ponderous metal necklace that covered him from throat to breast. The links were forged of every metal known to man…
The old man touched the maester’s chain that hung loosely around his thin, fleshless neck…
Maester Colemon stood beside him, his chain of many metals hanging loose about his long, skinny neck…
Marwyn wore a chain of many metals around his bull’s neck. Save for that, he looked more like a dockside thug than a maester…
As to which are essential, I would say that black iron would be essential, since without that you’re not connected to the ravenry network and that’s a main reason why lords have maesters. Probably silver is also essential, because there aren’t really alternatives for trained medical care.
But the others…yellow gold is perhaps not always necessary if one has a skilled steward (and indeed, I’ve never been quite clear on the division of labor between Maester Luwin and Steward Vayon Poole), iron is perhaps useful but it always seemed to me that military training came more from masters-at-arms and a lordling’s father, bronze or Valyrian steel seem definitely optional.
Based off a long conversation from Twitter, but I’ve started to have some ideas about the Horn of Joramun, one of the more significant objects in the series if assumptions are right that it will bring down the Wall.
The Horn is a curious object, because it seems to have a strong duality about it: it’s known as both the Horn of Winter and the Horn of Joramun, and it is supposed to have "woke giants from the earth” and it’s also supposed to have the power “bring this cold thing down.” And yet, even through Joramun was a King Beyond-the-Wall “in ancient days,” whom Jeor Mormont places as coming before the Horned Lord and the brothers Gendel and Gorne, and describes all of them as having “broke his strength on the Wall, or was broken by the power of Winterfell on the far side,” the Wall still stands.
Why did Joramun never use the Horn to bring down the Wall?
The answer, I think, lies in the other thing we know about Joramun – his involvement in the legend of the Night’s King (the real one, not the one from the show):
“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.”
This cooperation between a wildling King and a Stark of Winterfell is unprecedented, which further emphasizes that the Night’s King was an abomination (binding “his Sworn Brothers to his will” with “strange sorceries” should be a hint) rather than some sort of marriage alliance to cement an imagined Pact between White Walkers and humans (which theory constantly ignores that the wildlings have always been living north of the Wall). It certainly demonstrates that Joramun clearly viewed the White Walkers as an existential threat so great that it involved allying with one ancient enemy (the Starks) to free another ancient enemy (the Night’s Watch) from sorcerous bondage.
Here’s what I think happened: Joramun was an early King-beyond-the-Wall who “broke his strength” on the Wall and, looking for a solution to this strategic problem as so many KbtW did, turned to magic. Specifically, he created a horn which was imbued with the magic of giants, which could both wake them from their slumber (perhaps giants are prone to hibernation?) and bring down the Wall. On a sidenote, it’s possible that these two things are linked, if GRRM is a fan of Attack on Titan and has giants walled up inside the Wall whose awakening would shake it down from the foundations. (Just laying down a marker in advance of TWOW…)
Regardless of how the thing worked, Joramun was interrupted by the crisis of the Night’s King before he could bring down the Wall. And what he saw and experienced in fighting the Night’s King convinced him that the White Walkers were such an existential threat that the Wall had to remain to keep humanity protected, even if that meant his own people had to remain in exile. (Perhaps this lesson is why the Horned Lord had his maxim that “sorcery is a sword without a hilt. There is no safe way to grasp it.“) And so he had the Horn buried with him to keep it from ever being used.
To me, this version of events works on a number of levels: it reconciles both aspects of Joramun’s history, it explains why the Horn has never been used before, and it fits the “human heart at war with itself” model of GRRM’s writing, as Joramun is caught between his love for his people and his humanity
I don’t know if I’d go with gender equality notions per se, after all Ned is still the one who says this:
Arya cocked her head to one side. “Can I be a king’s councillor and build castles and become the High Septon?”
“You,” Ned said, kissing her lightly on the brow, “will marry a king and rule his castle, and your sons will be knights and princes and lords and, yes, perhaps even a High Septon.”
Arya screwed up her face. “No,” she said, “that’s Sansa.” She folded up her right leg and resumed her balancing. Ned sighed and left her there.
I think the thing with Ned is that he cannot help but see Lyanna in Arya’s face, and so he can’t bring himself to outright forbid Arya to pursue those things she has in common with Lyanna. It’s a personal thing, founded in his specific relationship with Lyanna, as opposed to a general commitment to gender equality as a concept.
Squaring the circle between Ned’s allowing Arya to have a “dancing master” and telling her that she can’t follow a male-gendered “career” path is that Ned is also someone profoundly marked by his past:
“It has a name, does it?” Her father sighed. “Ah, Arya. You have a wildness in you, child. ‘The wolf blood,’ my father used to call it. Lyanna had a touch of it, and my brother Brandon more than a touch. It brought them both to an early grave.”
“Lyanna was beautiful,” Arya said, startled. Everybody said so. It was not a thing that was ever said of Arya.
“She was,” Eddard Stark agreed, “beautiful, and willful, and dead before her time.”
So while Ned can’t bring himself to stop Arya from mimicing Lyanna, he also feels strongly that Lyanna’s “wolf’s blood,” her “willful” nature lead to her early death and doesn’t want Arya to go down that path. Thus, he’ll allow her indulgences like swordfighting training, but he wants her to be safely married and live a long and conventional life.
Seemingly for the first time in recorded history, lords from all over Westeros had gathered together. The greatest Targaryen king in history had summoned them together to provide a peaceful mechanism for deciding the succession of the Iron Throne. And thanks to the fecklessness of Viserys I, their work would make a peace that would last only 28 years.
(more…)
hiddenhistoryofwesteros asked: Why is the Faith so weak in comparison to the RL Catholic Church? Different paths of historical development, basically. The IRL Medieval Catholic Church benefited from a number of factors: It was the only pan-Western European (pan-European, when Rome and Constantinople could agree that I + I = δύο) institution when the Roman Empire fell and the first medieval…
I wrote a long post about this which just got eaten by a browser crash, so I’m a bit annoyed. Premodern MPR statistics are not comprehensive, ultimately estimates based on how much you trust partial, sometimes noncontemporary, and often biased sources.
However, the stuff I just read suggested that premodern MPR was at its lowest in the 12th century, highest in the 17th century, and even then rates of 1.7% (in France under Louis XIV) or 3% (in Sweden in the 17th century) were quite astonishing compared to the norm.
So Flodden…could be the sources are wrong, could be the Scots hired a bunch of mercenaries, could be that 30,000 men represented a sudden intense mobilization of every able-bodied man as opposed to the number of men who could be normally trained and equipped for war as professionals.
The most telling blow was struck by King Garth VII, the Goldenhand, King of the Reach, when he drove the ironmen from the Misty Islands, renamed them the Shield Islands, and resettled them with his own fiercest warriors and finest seamen to defend the mouth of the Mander…
Soon after, he turned his attention to the sea and drove the last ironmen from their strongholds on the Shield Islands. Thereafter he resettled the islands with his fiercest fighters, granting them special dispensations for the purpose of turning them into a first defense against the ironborn, should they return. This proved a great success, and to this day the men of the Four Shields pride themselves on defending the mouth of the Mander and the heart of the Reach against any and all seaborne foes…
Most seagoing vessels dared not sail beyond Highgarden, but longships with their shallow draughts could navigate as far upstream as Bitterbridge. In ancient days, the ironborn had boldly sailed the river road and plundered all along the Mander and its vassal streams … until the kings of the green hand had armed the fisherfolk on the four small islands off the Mander’s mouth and named them his shields.
Two thousand years had passed, but in the watchtowers along their craggy shores, greybeards still kept the ancient vigil…Warhorns would echo across the waters, from Greenshield and Greyshield, Oakenshield and Southshield, and their longships would come sliding out from moss-covered stone pens along the shores, oars flashing as they swarmed across the straits to seal the Mander and hound and harry the raiders upriver to their doom.
They’re longships rather than galleys, but there’s 50 or more of them. Perhaps not enough to take on the Iron Fleet, although they did a fine job against Quellon Greyjoy, but enough to slow it down and allow the Redwyne Fleet to mobilize…if Euron hadn’t tricked them.
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