Tag: asoiaf meta

Was the Pink Letter the catalyst for murdering JS, or were the moutiners going to kill him anyway?

The Pink Letter was the excuse, but there is no such thing as a spontaneous mutiny/assassination – first you have to identify and organize those of your peers who agree with you, second, you have to create a plan for how you’re going to kill your commander and not be executed afterwards, and do all of the setup; third, you have to execute that plan. 

And this is where I depart from a good number of ASOIAF fans who basically argue that Jon’s assassination was justified b/c of his reaction to the Pink Letter, because all of that work I discussed above had to have happened before the Pink Letter. Which means that the conspirators had already decided Jon had to die before he broke his vows openly, which is convenient for them, but in no way gets them off the hook for when they were making the call. 

Which brings me to something I feel gets left out of a lot of Pink Letter theorization – predicting the fallout from that letter is pretty damn impossible. The letter gets sent to Jon and arrives “sealed with a smear of hard pink wax.” Unless someone cracked and then remade the seal, and that’s unlikely (Clydas isn’t the kind of guy to do that, and he’s not one of the conspirators), no one other than Jon at the Wall knows its contents. And no one can predict what Jon’s reaction is going to be – hell, even Jon doesn’t know what he’s going to do before he does it. 

So all of the theories that rely on Jon bringing men south to Winterfell as the purpose for the Pink Letter are bunk. Ramsay wrote the letter operating on (mostly) bad information. Period. 

Warwick the Wild: Regional Nationalism in Westeros

Dornish nationalism gets a moderate amount of discussion, but are there other regions of the Seven Kingdoms where there is meaningful nationalist/proto-nationalist sentiment? E.g. the North or the Vale, or is it still too bound up with personal loyalties?

I’ve talked a bit about Northern nationalism here and here.

I can see some other sources of proto-nationalist sentiment – the Reach has it’s fixation with chivalry, the Vale has its snobbishness and emphasis on codes of honor, and of course there’s the toxic nationalism of the Iron Islands. 

Steven Xue: How does the Night’s Watch get their Maesters?

One thing about the Watch I don’t get is how they receive their Maesters? We know that for Aemon, he already had undergone training as a Maester when he volunteered to join the Night’s Watch so I suppose in his case it made sense for him to take over when his predecessor died (assuming they had one at all at the time). He was a rather special case since he was already qualified but in other times I don’t think that is how the Maesters at Castle Black are normally replaced.  

In any case I have no doubt that whoever becomes Maester to the Night’s Watch will have to be one of their comrades (eg Aemon). This makes me wonder if whenever the Watch needs a Maester they would just send the most learned of their order to the Citadel to be trained as one (as was the case with Sam) or like everywhere else the Citadel just appoints one for them who then gets initiated into their order.

I also wonder why despite his advanced age Aemon never took on an apprentice to take over in case he suddenly passes away. Even though he had stewards aiding him with his day to day duties, he didn’t seem to have an understudy until Sam came along. Did he expect the Citadel will send a replacement when the time comes?

I think it’s more common for the Citadel to just send a new one. Aemon is a bit of an unusual case – as you say, he was already a maester and volunteered, but he also lived an extraordinary long time, so there wasn’t a need for replacements in a long time. 

However, I would push back on the apprenticeship point, because that’s not how maesters work. Remember, you have to build your chain by studying under different maesters and then be judged by an archmaester chosen by the conclave as an expert in that field. This way, the order as a whole controls the certification of maesters, and the loyalty of a maester is to the institution rather than to their former master. 

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. 

Simon Rumble Asks: Cheesemonger

How rich is Illyrio? Where does it all come from?

Extremely rich, although less rich than Xaro Xhoan Daxos. But enough to become a Magister of Pentos and marry the sister of the cousin of the Prince of Pentos. So he’s definitely in the top 1% if not the .1%. 

In terms of where the money comes from, he took the nest egg he and Varys built from their various schemes and invested it into “spices, gemstones, dragonbone, and other, less savory things.” 

Anon Asks: Ironborn hypocrisy

 In the distance, half a dozen of southron longships were racing back toward the Mander. Let them go, Victarion thought, let them tell the tale. Once a man had turned his tail and run from battle he ceased to be a man.

Isn’t it a bit hypocritical for Victarion to think that given he did the same thing at Fair Isle when he turned his tail and fled when he saw the battle was lost?

It’s hugely hypocritical. Because Victarion is an enormous hypocrite. Because the “Old Way” is riddled with hypocrisy. 

Simon Rumble Asks: Pyrrhic Victory

Dorne entered the 7 Kingdoms on her terms but paid for it through 100 years of intermittent warfare, massive damage to its infrastructure, civilian deaths, etc.

Should they have just capitulated peacefully like the Starks & Tyrells? Was it all worth it?

At the end of the day, that’s really only a question the Dornish themselves can answer. And historically, it seems that the majority of the population of Dorne said yes, because they were the ones who kept fighting when the political elite wanted to give up. 

Simon Rumble Asks: Alphabets

Should Dorne and the North have a slightly different alphabet/linguistic system compared to the rest of Westeros due to Rhyonish/First Men influence?

If we’re going to start with the idea that all of Westeros speaks the Common Tongue as their primary language as GRRM does, then there’s a limit to how much variation there should be.

A different alphabet? That really depends. The Old Tongue of the North had a runic script but was primarily an oral tradition, so in a scenario in which the Old Tongue survives, I’d imagine it would be transliterated into Andal script. Given that the Rhoynar were a more technologically advanced and literate culture than the First Men, I would expect a Rhoynish script to survive if the Martells hadn’t banned the Rhoynish language. 

A different linguistic system? Well, given that the Andals had been in Dorne for thousands of years when the Rhoynar arrived and then there was an intense period of intermarriage and cultural borrowing, I would expect the emergence of a creole language that combined lexicons and grammars from the two language, with perhaps the elite learning “proper” Andal or Rhoynar or both (depending on the House’s heritage or their desire for political advancement at Sunspear). Given that the North avoided Andal invasion altogether, I would expect bilingualism to be the more likely scenario, with Andal becoming the language of trade and diplomacy, spoken by merchants, sailors, the nobility, and more common in the White Harbor area due to the transplantation of the Manderlys, but as a secondary language, with the Old Tongue as the primary language and the only language of the vast majority of the population in the interior. 

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Jon VIII, ACOK

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Jon VIII, ACOK

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They glimpsed the eagle twice more the day after, and heard the hunting horn behind them echoing against the mountains. Each time it seemed a little louder, a little closer. Synopsis: a grizzled veteran and a rookie agent are on the run from enemy military forces and hit the end of the road. The rookie agent is ordered by his superior to defect to the enemy. SPOILER WARNING: This chapter…

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