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.

Chris Valentine Asks: Crownlands Economic Development

I haven’t seen any economic plans for the Crownlands or the Iron Throne itself. To be sure, its harder to develop a single systematic approach for the entirety of the 7K, but I’m curious if you do have any particular thoughts on the matter.

Were I on the Iron Throne, my first course would be three of your canals: Mander-Blackwater, Harrenhal, and Seaguard. Between those three, direct waterways are opened to four of the eight realms’ capitals, as well as the bulk of their economic potential.

My next would be a standing professional army built out of the Gold Cloaks. Call them the Gold Guard or King’s Watch or whatever you want. Hire more men, and train them, rotating them between garrisoning King’s Landing, drilling, and patrols of the 7K, particularly the major roads.

Politically, I would adopts a permanent parliamentary style council that represents, at minimum, each of the Lords Paramount, and hopefully all the major noble houses. I woukd expect each house to be represented by a full blood member, which would also serve as a valuable political hostage. Actually authority would be granted to it, though how much, I’m not sure.

Chartering royal cities would also be on the agenda. Ideally, I want them looking directly to the crown, though how much that can be done with the more established cities, I’m not sure. These chartered cities would, ideally, not be governed as feudal fiefs, but by elected councils.

So, this isn’t a bad start, but I do have some suggestions and corrections. The first of which is that you have to remember that if you’re going to do Crownlands economic development, that’s not the same as national development. It means economic development focused on boosting the economy of the Crownlands and King’s Landing, sometimes in ways that help other areas and sometimes in ways that don’t.

Infrastructure

So let’s start with the canals. A Mander-Blackwater canal is a good idea for the Iron Throne, because it means that more traffic will flow through King’s Landing, which enriches the Crownlands and the monarchy specifically. A Seaguard canal should be discouraged, because that would redirect trade from Blackwater Bay to the Bay of Crabs. (This is the same reason why the crown built roads connecting Maidenpool to King’s Landing and not to Lord Harroway’s Town) A Harrenhal canal might be a good idea, but it’s a secondary objective.

However, we’re still not done with infrastructure – namely, bridges. It’s a major limitation that there are no bridges over the Blackwater, which slows down traffic on the Kingsroad, the Roseroad, and the Goldroad. I would once again recommend swing bridges, which would allow river traffic to continue, but also allow me to dictate when land and river traffic could take place (which makes tolls easier to collect, but is important for warfare as well. If you’re dealing with riverrine invasion, you want the bridge blocking the river; if you’re dealing with a land army heading to the capital, swing the bridges away to deny them a crossing).

And down the road, I’ve got some projects in King’s Landing to take care of.

Finance

Now, an army has to come after you’ve got the finances for it. Which means the next step has to be building up the monarchy’s finances. This is where timing becomes an issue: it’s a lot easier to turn the Crownlands into a financial center in 283 AC than it is in 297 AC, thanks to Littlefinger’s embezzlement. Assuming for the moment a fairly stable royal finances, building a Royal Bank of Westeros shouldn’t be that hard. Because in addition to the resources the King gets from King’s Landing and the Crownlands, they also get the taxes they assess both from their vassals and from ports throughout Westeros, making the King one of the wealthiest individuals in Westeros.

Whether the king’s yearly income is 200k a year or 2 million a year, the royal incomes are clearly sufficient to provide the reserves of a bank. Beyond that, the crown also has two advantages that would endow that bank with the genuine power of a central bank: first, as with the regional banks we’ve discussed, the fact that the Royal Bank’s reserves would be funded with tax revenue that will keep coming in in perpetuity as long as I avoid being overthrown gives it the ability to be a true lender of last resort, with the added advantage of drawing in tax revenue from across a continent rather than a single region.

Second, as King I have the unique power of seignorage, both in the sense of having the right to make coins and the profit I can derive from the difference between their face value and their metallic content. This means two things – first, until I distribute the coins I mint, I can count them as part of my reserves, and secondly, the bank’s notes are legally money. Not only does that greatly add to my ability to be a lender of last resort, but as long as I don’t abuse this power to the extent that those notes lose their value, I can print money and spend it.

As with the infrastructure above, this is something I want to make sure doesn’t happen elsewhere. A Lannister bank is all of the sudden a real threat to the sovereignty of the king, because a Lannister banknote now threatens to become an alternate currency. So I will insist quite heavily that a royal charter is necessary to form a bank and very carefully not give one to any house that could challenge me, while using charters to woo the merchant class. However, loyal vassals might want to petition me for permission to operate a branch of the Royal Bank, which I would be happy to grant so that I can count Casterly Rock’s gold reserves as part of my reserves, while still keeping control over monetary supply and policy in Westeros.

Production

Another thing that the Crownlands has going for it is an unusually high concentration of skilled workers. Some of the best smiths, weavers, tailors, cobblers, and tanners, to say nothing of bakers and fishermen, work in King’s Landing. That’s a good industrial base to be getting on with.

However, all of this production is on a typically medieval small scale and it’s not the best in the world. So with all of this finance behind me, it’s time to start expanding production in scale by building large-scale industrial suburbs (which will also help a good deal with pollution in the city). At the same time, it’s definitely time to start practicing some of the immigration and industrial espionage policy I’ve discussed before to start improving the quality of our goods.

Another thing that large-scale industrial policy is good for is to upgrade the quality of my military forces. The Crownlands may only have 15,000 men, but if I can outfit all of my infantry in full plate and have them fight like dismounted knights, while improving the training of the Goldcloaks so that they can actually fight effectively as a military force, they will wipe the floor with the infantry of every other region.

Political Development

So, politically, I’m pretty much in agreement. Basically, the idea is to move to a Parliamentary system by way of Versailles and Edo – generating political consent, but also creating hostages.

Militarily, I disagree. A large standing army is politically controversial (smacks of tyranny) and is expensive. (Remember how ruinous Cersei’s tripling the Gold Cloaks was?) I would instead create a new order of knighthood several hundred if not several thousand strong. A royal order is politically attractive – look at the response to Renly’s Rainbow Guard and the Brotherhood of Winged Knights – and it gets me highly trained soldiers who I don’t have to pay wages for.

Ioseff: Hi, me again, one thing that was misunderstood

I didn’t mean why Daemon Targaryen was a bad person, that, as you exposed long time ago, is quite obvious. What I meant is how was he developed into such an awful person?

For example, we pretty much know Joffrey’s background, how Cersei encouraged him to think himself higher than anybody as Targaryens thought themselves higher than anyone (in a suicidical way, not like others), and how she herself thought so high that she would threaten the wetnurse, and other things, all because Tywin promised her from little to make her even more than Lannister, to make her Targaryen.

So, I hoped that you could provide some insight in how Daemon the Mocker of newborn’s corpses came to be this person. His brother was a “happy go-by” boy, why was Daemon so warlike and even deranged (even though equally charming and “sociable”)?

I see what you mean. I don’t know if there’s a straightforward answer. We know that “In his youth, Daemon Targaryen’s face and laugh were familiar to every cut-purse, whore, and gambler in Flea Bottom,” so clearly he liked to slum it to ward off boredom and enjoyed breaking social mores. We know that during the Council of 101, Daemon assembled a private army to fight it out if the Council didn’t name Viserys (and thus making him the heir to the throne).

I don’t think this is a case of nurture beating out nature – rather, I think Daemon was always temperamentally aggressive and an adrenaline junkie and never burdened much by a sense of conscience.

Steven Xue Asks: How can the Wildlings still be speaking the Common Tongue?

One thing I’ve never understood is even though the people living Beyond the Wall have been sequestered from the rest of Westeros for the past eight thousands years, somehow the Common Tongue is still widely spoken by many of its inhabitants. Not only that but there’s also no discrepancy from their vernacular compared to the rest of the continent. In fact quite a few Wildlings we’ve encountered such as Ygritte, Mance and Tormund are able to speak the Common Tongue better than many smallfolk and Mountain Clans in the Vale who seem to speak a completely different dialect from their unsophisticated lingo and gibberish.

Now I get that for Jon’s story to work he has to be able to communicate with the Wildlings, hence we have this Aliens speak English trope going on in his arc. But realistically this shouldn’t be possible. I mean it only took a few centuries for Latin to evolve into completely new languages of many distinct variations such as French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese etc, and the people who spoke these languages were still more or less in contact with one another after Rome fell. Yet even after eight thousands years of being cut off from the rest of civilization without much interaction with the people south of their region, many Wildlings can still speak the Common Tongue unaltered and indistinct from their southern neighbors.

Do you think there is an explanation for this?

This is a case where narrative convenience seems to have trumped coherent worldbuilding, but I say seems because I’m not clear on why or how necessary it was. GRRM’s got no problem inventing multiple languages in Essos, although he does cheat a bit with how Valyrian dialects are mostly mutually coherent, after all.

(However, if I was to give a No Prize, I’d say that because the wildlings steal women all the time from the North, they’re constantly importing women who teach the Common Tongue to their kids.)

So how hard would it have been to decide that, because the North held off the Andal invasion, the Old Tongue survived north of the Neck, although after thousands of years where Andal was an incredibly useful linga franca for trade and diplomacy with the rest of the continent, and three hundred years of Targaryen unification, they’ve gradually merged the Old Tongue and the Common Tongue into a creole like Scots, but where the nobility learn to speak proper Old Tongue (to keep up their traditions) and a more Received Pronunciation Common Tongue as well? That way, Jon could speak easily with the Wildlings because he can speak their language, whereas your average Night’s Watchman might not speak their language at all if they’re southron (hence adding to the Othering going on), or only haltingly in a limited pidgen if they’re a Northerner.

Likewise, why isn’t the Common Tongue in Dorne absolutely peppered with Rhoynish loan words and grammatical constructions, as well as having a distinctive accent? Why don’t the residents of the big cities use a bit of Valyrian loan-words which are handy in commerce, which the rural folk find a bit too foreign for their liking?

WOIAF

Your thoughts on the WOIAF? On one hand it fleshes out certain characters and time periods and has some great art. On the other hand it sometimes seems contradictory and sloppy and certain areas (ie. 3rd Blackfyre Rebellion) have been completely skipped, leading me to the feeling that GRRM’s rough notes from the upcoming “Fire and Blood” were sold to us with a new title slapped on it.

Well, I won’t say that there isn’t editing that needed to be done.

But the wealth of knowledge that is included is, as you can see from the podcasts I did with @unspoiledpodcast and my own analyses, incredibly rich, allowing us to understand far more about the historical development development of Westeros and Essos than we did before.

That being said, there are some omissions – we don’t know a lot about the North post-Andal invasions through to Torrhen Stark outside of their war with the Arryns, we know almost nothing about the Riverlands pre-Andal invasion, we know almost nothing about the Vale between the Dance and Robert’s Rebellion, there’s some significant gaps in the history of the Iron Islands from the Blackfyre Rebellion to the present, we don’t know what happened between the reigns of Garth the Painter and Mern IX in the Reach, other than Lyonel’s Rebellion we don’t know much about the Stormlands between the Dance and Robert’s Rebellion, and we don’t know much about Dornish history outside of its various foreign wars.

My hope is that a lot of those blank spaces will get filled in through Dunk & Egg, Fire and Blood, and the like.

Anon Asks: Manderly’s Davos decoy

“ The man had your coloring, a nose of the same shape, two ears that were not dissimilar, a long beard that could be trimmed and shaped like yours. You can be sure we tarred him well, and the onion shoved between his teeth served to twist the features. Ser Bartimus saw that the fingers of his left hand were shortened, the same as yours. The man was a criminal, if that gives you any solace. His dying may accomplish more good than anything he ever did whilst living.”

When Manderly mentions that, is that not supposed to bother the reader a little? From the sound of it Manderly executed what was possibly a thief not for the crime he committed, but to serve a purpose in his plan.

Isn’t that kind of Manderly’s whole shtick, though? Killing people and baking them into pies, then eating them and tricking their relatives into eating them, “had he lived he would have grown up to be a Frey,” etc.

The character of Wyman Manderly in ADWD is borrowing pretty heavily from Titus Andronicus – a tragic protagonist whose family has suffered, who no one takes seriously because he’s feigning disability, and who’s engaged in a grand guignol revenge against those who done him wrong.

Steven Xue Asks: Why didn’t the Ironborn reave an independent Dorne?

I’ve been going through the World Book and I find it strange how during the first century and a half of living under Targaryen rule when Dorne was still an independent kingdom at that time, the Ironborn didn’t take the opportunity to go there for pillage and plunder. I can understand that after submitting to Targaryen rule the Ironborn stopped raiding lands that are under the protection of the Iron Throne as they would not stand a chance against the combined might of the Seven Kingdoms (as Balon Greyjoy would later learn).

However during the time Dorne was still a sovereign country it was outside of the Crown’s jurisdiction so it wasn’t off limits. Surely Dorne should have been the perfect hub for Ironborn raids during the years before it was finally integrated into the Seven Kingdoms. It is closer to home than the lands beyond Westeros and it’s very rich. Its coastal regions especially like Planky Town which brought in a lot of trade seem like ideal targets for eager Ironborn captains as there is plenty to plunder there and they could take their chances with the Martells as there would have been no interference from the Iron Throne.

Given how tenacious the Ironborn have proven themselves to be throughout history when it came to sating their desire to pillage and plunder and attacking pretty much anywhere that’s vulnerable (eg. The North), what was stopping them from conducting full scale raids in Dorne?

They probably did raid Dornish trade in the Narrow Sea, but the thing about Dorne’s southern coastline is that it’s really not good for sailing: “Nor is the long southern coast of Dorne more hospitable, being for the most part a snarl of reefs and rocks, with few protected anchorages. Those ships that do put ashore there, whether by choice or chance, find little to sustain them; there are no forests along the coast to provide timber for repairs, a scarcity of game, few farms, and fewer villages where provisions might be obtained. Even freshwater is hard to come by, and the seas south of Dorne are rife with whirlpools and infested with sharks and kraken.”

So the basic problem is that the Ironborn couldn’t really raid anywhere in between Skyfall and Plankytown because there aren’t really any coastal villages to raid. Also, the trip to Plankytown is a pain in the ass – if a storm blows up, you’re going to be wrecked and unable to repair your longboat or find food and water, and that’s assuming you don’t get eaten by sharks and krakens.

So my guess is that what the Ironborn would do instead is to run the gauntlet to the Narrow Sea and then prey on Dornish shipping there.

WarsofASOIAF Asks: A Successful Aegon V Reformation

Couple days back I was asked a question about how an Aegon V reformation would go down. Let’s say you’re the Hand of Aegon V. The Fortunate King has been able to successfully get all four of his marriages to go off without a hitch. I’m sure some form of your EDP’s will make their way into it, but what sort of acts would you do to reform and restructure the government for the sake of the smallfolk?

Cheers,

-SLAL

As I talked about a while back, it’s very hard to know what Aegon’s reforms consist of, because GRRM is very unspecific about them and because a lot depends on what precisely is the legal status of westerosi smallfolk.

But if I had to guess, I would say that there probably would be a lot of legal reforms – royal judges and sheriffs, eliminating the right of pit and gallows, the right to a jury, etc. – given the lawlessness of the period (especially in the Westerlands), Egg’s experience with local conflicts between nobles in the Reach, and so on.

Given that he gave food to the North during winter (which may also have been prompted to his trip to Winterfell), I think he was definitely focused on charity during natural disasters and the like.

But beyond that, I don’t know.

Simon Rumble Asks: Nobility – – > Officer class

Can you explain more about how the nobility became the officer class? I know it has something to do with the rise of artillery. Thanks!

Well, in a sense the nobility had always been the officer class, in the sense that premodern armies were largely made up of (and led by) the nobility.

But at the same time as the military revolution, when European armies got much bigger and thus needed professional officers to keep them organized and effective in the field, you also had economic transformations that hit the smaller nobility pretty badly.

Without the capital to get into the commercial revolution or the industrial revolution, and unable to engage in trade lest they lose their social standing, one of the major career paths open to these lesser nobles was the military. They had just enough money and education to get the training and equipment, they had enough social privilege to keep out ambitious bourgeois social climbers (or at least keep them to the lower ranks), and military service was considered honorable.

And of course, these petty noblemen were some of the most conservative forces in Europe, because their social privileges were really the only things keeping them above the peasantry, let alone the haut bourgeois (who tended to be far richer).