Hello, People who don’t have maesters are seen as if they were not important. (Barbey Dustin) Aside from smallfolk who else would likely not be able to get or have a maester? The Dornish? They are the rivals of the Reach. The Iron Islands? Quellon just imported them. The North? Thanks.

The Dornish have certainly had maesters for some time, at least as long as the Targaryen conquest, so I doubt they’d have none.

The Iron Islands is tricky. WOIAF doesn’t say that Quellon was the first Ironborn to bring in maesters necessarily, just that he brought in dozens of them. My guess is that Harmund the Host probably was the first Ironborn to bring in maesters, but that they didn’t stick around due to the Shrike’s rebellion and the war of the Famine Winter. (Similar to how Balon banished maesters from his court.)

The North has had maesters for at least 500 years, based on the maesters’ records at White Harbor. It’s probably been longer than that, because there were maesters at the Wall since the Feast of Skane. If I had to guess, I’d say that maesters have been in the North at least since the Manderlys came from the Reach, so at least the last 1000 years.

Beyond regions, I think it comes down to the bottom reaches of the nobility, the least lords, poor landed knights, and the like, who couldn’t afford the fees.

So Maesters get paid for their services? I always thought of them as being a bit like largely secular priests, like those who served as advisers, educators, and administrators for minor and major lords in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. If they do get paid, I expect some of what they’re paid goes straight to the citadel rather than to the maester himself?

In a recent post you mentioned lords paying for the services of a maester. Did they actually pay a stated fee, make a “not so voluntary” contribution to the citadel, or just pay for the maester’s upkeep? Did the citadel “sell” maesters with a higher ‘gpa’ for more? That quote really turned the gears in my head and got me wondering and I would love to hear a follow-up, thanks!

According to a So Spake Martin:

4. How does the Citadel get financed?

Lords pay for the service of the Maesters and the Citadel collects some of the revenue of Oldtown via taxes.

So the lords have to pay the Citadel to receive the service of a maester, and they also have to provide for the maester’s upkeep (I doubt that maesters have personal incomes, given their vows, but they undoubtedly have budgets to pay for necessary supplies like medicines, paper and ink, and the like). We don’t know exactly what the terms of these agreements are; however, it stands to reason that that lesser lords don’t have the same ability to pay as the Great Houses, so the fees probably aren’t uniform.

We also can tell how many areas of expertise various maesters have (and how deep their expertise goes by the number of links of each kind of metal): Luwin has a relatively short chain, but he knows history, healing, herblore, ravenry, architecture, astronomy, and the higher mysteries (which is pretty rare); Pycelle has multiple links in ten different subjects (including warcraft, mathematics, ravenry, medicine, astronomy, history, but noticeably not the higher mysteries) indicating extensive expertise in a number of areas; Aemon has multiple links in medicine and either math and economics or whatever red gold indicates, as well as warcraft, ravenry, and a number of other subjects.

Beyond that is supposition: I would assume that these additional services are more in demand by the Great Houses, since they have need of more complicated services (if you only have the one castle, you probably don’t need a maester who knows how to design castles; if you’re the lord paramount of a kingdom, you might well need a maester to design new castles for you), and they have a higher expectation for the education of their children. Moreover, since maesters with more subjects on their chain means acolytes spending more years being trained at the expense of the Citadel, I would imagine the Citadel would charge more for their services.

Hello, What kinds of links in the Citadel would you find wise to get? (Imagine that you are a very extra son and not going to get the family seat without murder) I would want to get a comfortable life in a nice castle. Or at least make myself very useful and hard to replace. Not sure if you would have the same priorities. Ravenry and economics are important. I would think warfare wouldn’t be the most pragmatic choice. The nobles would think they know better than a weak man of education. Thanks.

I would argue that ravenry and medicine are the bare minimum for service outside the Citadel; no lord is going to pay for a maester without getting those base services. I’m sure there’s plenty of maesters who prefer an academic’s life who get by without those skills, but they can really only earn a living at the Citadel itself.

Everything beyond that is about making yourself a more attractive advisor and teacher: so it’s not that learning warfare is important because you want to advise your lord on strategy, it’s important because you can teach his sons that while you’re teaching them to read and write. Likewise, learning math and economics and/or astronomy means that you can keep the account books and tell people when it’s best to plant and when to harvest, so that you can assume the role of a steward, giving you more influence in the lord’s household. Metullurgy or history or architecture or foreign languages might not be necessary for a marcher lord, but they would be useful to a great lord.

And so on.

Shouldn’t Halfmaesters like Haldon be a lot more common than the series suggests? People who study at the Citadel but don’t make it to Maester for whatever reason (sick family member, insufficient funds, etc). People who are not bound by a maester’s chains but are still literate and learned in some fields would be hugely sought after as scribes, officials or what have, right?

Well, it definitely does happen, as we see from the Prologue of AFFC:

“Perhaps he would do better to remain on this side of the narrow sea. He could buy a donkey with the coin he’d saved, and he and Rosey could take turns riding it as they wandered Westeros. Ebrose might not think him worthy of the silver, but Pate knew how to set a bone and leech a fever. The smallfolk would be grateful for his help. If he could learn to cut hair and shave beards, he might even be a barber. That would be enough, he told himself, so long as I had Rosey. Rosey was all that he wanted in the world.”

However, I don’t think it’s that common, in part because the Citadel has a strong institutional incentive to maintain its monopolies. The Citadel does seem to have certain exceptions: acolytes who’ve gotten their link (and thus maintain the monopoly) are allowed to work as scribes for the general public:

“Just beyond stood Scribe’s Hearth, where Oldtowners came in search of acolytes to write their wills and read their letters. Half a dozen bored scribes sat in open stalls, waiting for some custom…” (AFFC)

But I think the Citadel would probably come down hard on anyone practicing more refined specialties than mere writing and reading; I would imagine medicine and ravenry would be particularly jealously guarded because they are some of the more important services that the nobility need. So Pate might be able to ply his trade as a barber-surgeon among the rural smallfolk, but he might well be hauled up before the lord of a significant holdfast or town for practicing without a license (if only because the lords don’t want to be blacklisted by the Citadel).

How do ravens work? Do most ravens need to be carried back to their castle by land after flying?

The ravenry system of the maesters is a very complicated point-to-point communication system, based on the historical use of homing pigeons. As with homing pigeons, most ravens are one-directional and have to be transported back to their homes to be used again, and the system as a whole works because maesters in each castle have a bunch of ravens trained to go to different castles, which they then share around to maintain contact.

However, there are some birds that are an exception:

The maester mopped sweat from his brow with his sleeve. “N-not entirely, Your Grace. Most, yes. Some few can be taught to fly between two castles. Such birds are greatly prized. And once in a very great while, we find a raven who can learn the names of three or four or five castles, and fly to each upon command. Birds as clever as that come along only once in a hundred years.” (TWOW)

Evidently, the Citadel haven’t figured out the historical trick that you can reliably get homing birds to go in two directions “by placing their food at one location and their home at another location.”

How many links does a student of the Citadel need to obtain in order to be officially recognized as a Maester? Some like the Valyrian Steel link seem to be optional but I can’t imagine the Citadel providing a Lord with a Maester who doesn’t have, say, a gold or silver link.

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.

Why do you think the Andal tongue was crucial to your proposed agreement between the Faith and the Citadel?

So here’s my thinking: there’s something really weird about the way that the WOIAF has the Maesters be a pre-Andal instituion but goes back and forth on the First Men having a written language.

So here’s my thinking. I think the runic writing of the First Men was quite complicated and difficult to learn, requring one to learn thousands and thousands of easy-to-confuse runes – and that the pre-Andal maesters thus relied as much more on memorizing oral traditions, similar to the traditions of the Celtic druids and bards.

And then come the Andals, but instead of overthrowing the system and burning the Citadel, they get incorporated into the power structure of the Reach and Oldtown more specifically. And so the maesters encounter these new Andal lords and knights, and there’s cultural sharing and intermingling going on.

Now, my headcanon is that the “Common
Tongue” is so named because it’s a relatively easy language to learn (atonal,
regular conjugations, no complicated system of cases and agreements,
straightforward grammar that doesn’t have the verb at the end of the sentence, etc.)
and a writing system that’s alphabetical rather than character-based, so it’s much easier to read and write and to teach people to read and write.

So early after the Andal incorporation into Oldtown, I think the maesters decided to adopt the Common Tongue and, with the help of the septons of the Faith, write down everything that had previously had been preserved orally, thus why “the tales we have now are the work of septons and maesters writing thousands of years after the fact,” and “the septons who first wrote them down took what details suited them and added others.”

Thus, we have a reason for the Maesters to compromise with the Faith.

About 8 months ago, SLAL mentioned you had an idea of ‘link schools’ throughout Westeros, where the sciences are taught to a larger public. Can you elaborate on that? Like, where would you get the funds? Who’s your target for this increased education? Where would these schools be built?

Well, they weren’t purely for the sciences, but the idea I had as part of my economic development series was that, rather than having a system in which graduates of higher education were required to be polymaths (i.e, you need enough links on your chain to go around your neck and become a maester), you have schools set up where the objective is to train someone to competence in only one or two areas, and essentially create a new category of half-maester as credentialed specialists.

So for example, if you need more doctors, it makes sense to have schools where students go only to train to get silver links; or if you want to expand the communication network of the ravens out further, have people who only study to get black iron links; or if you need more accountants, have people who only study to get yellow gold links, and so on.

In terms of financing and location, my original idea was that a Lord Paramount would essentially subsidize the construction and operation of these schools by way of a payment to the Citadel, with schools located in cities/towns/major castles, in return for having their people educated at a reasonable price. And the target is essentially to build up the human capital of a given region, so that I have more literate people, more specialists in needed areas (not just doctors, but also lawyers, accountants, metallurgists, communications experts, teachers, etc.), and thus a more productive economy, although I imagine these halfmaester positions would probably be more attractive to the merchant, artisan, and wealthy peasant classes as a way to get their children a respected trade than to the nobility per se.

So the Citadel was founded by Peremore Hightower in the Age of Heroes thousands of years before writing existed in Westeros? Are we to take that as historical embellishment? I’m tempted to chalk it up to a mistake on Martin’s part but that seems like a really obvious and silly one if that’s the case. Could an order like the Maesters exist in any meaningful way before the invention of written records? It seems like the answer would be no.

The issue of the literacy of the First Men is one of the biggest inconsistencies in ASOIAF worldbuilding – although it’s possible to parse one’s way to coherence. On the one hand, Sam says in AFFC that:

“The oldest histories we have were written after the Andals came to Westeros. The First Men only left us runes on rocks, so everything we think we know about the Age of Heroes and the Dawn Age and the Long Night comes from accounts set down by septons thousands of years later.”

And in WOIAF, Maester Yandel omits the First Men from the list of “lettered races” who left behind written records from the Dawn Age. So that’s the evidence we have that writing post-dated the Andals.

However, there is counter-evidence. WOIAF also repeatedly mentions “runic records” that were “written in the Old Tongue” which Maesters from the Citadel can read and have translated into the Common Tongue. A lot of these records go back into the Age of Heroes, and some even go back into the Dawn Age…and if you think about it logically, in order for the records of the Night’s King to have been destroyed, there must have been written records of some kind back in the Age of Heroes.

(Further confusing the issue, the WOIAF has a rather ambiguous statement that the Starks’ “legends came before the First Men had letters” – which suggests that the First Men gained writing at some period, although whether pre- or post-Andal it doesn’t say.)

Here’s my theory: Sam doesn’t speak the Old Tongue and probably most Maesters don’t, unless they’re among that rare breed of Maesters interested in ancient history and archaelogy who took the time to learn how to speak the Old Tongue and thus read the runic records of the First Men. So Sam’s being a bit of an Andal cultural supremacist, in that he’s treating translations of surviving First Men records that were done after the Andal invasions as the only real records. But if you think about it, the Citadel is the one place in Westeros where, because it’s been kept safe by the Hightowers, First Men records and the ability to read them have survived.