If Robert should’ve traveled more across the Seven Kingdoms, settling disputes and dispensing justice, how would he go about it (logistically speaking)? What places does he travel to? In what order? How frequently does he do these progresses?

warsofasoiaf:

Well, it’s tough to determine the exact frequency, because there was never a kingdom as large as the Seven Kingdoms are in the medieval era, but he should follow the mode of Aegon I, visiting the major cities to include the North, guesting in the castles of Lords Paramount, both receiving gifts from and bestowing lavish gifts upon his host, stirring up patronage of craftsmen. An active king stresses the royal presence.

Ideally, you’d also get rid of Littlefinger and have a Master of Coin who actually has the realm’s finances at heart too, but ideally, he should make a circuit of the kingdom (as long as it’s summer, of course) in his first ten years or so. @racefortheironthrone, would you have a better idea of how often he should do it? I’m at a loss when Westeros is as large as it is.

EIDT: To clarify, he wouldn’t make one circuit, it would more like, visit this place, then return, visit another place, then return. Key places to visit would be the Eyrie, Storm’s End, and Casterly Rock, with Riverrun being a nice and convenient stop.

Thanks for the question, Too High.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

Well, let’s take Henry VIII as our jumping off point. Henry VIII went on royal progress every summer, from around August through October. The royal party would travel around 10 miles a day, and would stay in various residences in between for anywhere from a night to a fortnight. So let’s do some basic math: 92 days at around 10 miles a day makes for a maximum of 920 miles travelled, although obviously longer stays are going to knock off some good bit of those miles.

Now, how far does that get you in Westeros?

Storm’s End: 385 miles from King’s Landing.
Casterly Rock: 830 miles from King’s Landing.
Riverrun: 655 miles from King’s Landing.
Highgarden: 760 miles from King’s Landing.

So you could reasonably do a progress to most of the south on an annual basis, weather permitting. Trips to Winterfell (2,010 miles from King’s Landing) or Oldtown (1,305 miles) or Sunspear (2,055 miles from King’s Landing) are not within the normal scape, but as we see from AGOT are possible.

Adding to the ship questions: where do dromonds fit on, and is Aurane Waters’ treachery plausible?

Dromonds were a Byzantine improvement on the Mediterranean galley. They had an above-water spur rather than an underwater ram, lateen (triangular) sails which are easier to use to tack into the wind, providing superior mobility in adverse winds, and had a full rather than partial deck, which provided additional protection for the rowers from missile fire.

As for Aurane, yes it is. For example, Warwick the Kingmaker was the Captain of Calais and Lord High Admiral of England, which gave him control over England’s largest standing military and its navy. Warwick repeatedly used the navy to conduct pirate raids against the Castillians and the Hanseatic League, which made him very popular with the London merchants he fenced the booty to (and who were competitors of the Castillian and Hanseatic merchants).

(A cool animatronic at Warwick Castle, which I visited when I was a youngun…)

And when fighting between York and Lancaster broke out, Warwick used the navy both defensively (allowing him and the Duke of York and his family to escape into exile) and offensively (his invasion of June 1460 which led to the Battle of Northampton where he captured Henry VI). The garrison stayed (mostly) loyal to him because Warwick was the richest man in England and offered them pirating loot to boot.

Moral of the story: make sure your admirals are loyal, because ships are a very mobile asset.

Does a cup-bearer have to be at a certain age? From what I understood, it was a grown man position in medieval times. Yet, we see Tywin becoming a royal cup-bearer at 10 or 11. Also, did the Mistress of the Robes have to be unwed like the ladies-in-waiting?

Ah, this one I can answer!

So GRRM has somewhat fused the office of cup-bearer with the office of page (although it’s complicated by the fact that he also uses the term page), which is creating the confusion.

From the ancient world through to early modern Europe, the office of cup-bearer was indeed an adult position of respect and influence. In order to prevent poisoning, monarchs appointed trusted men (or women, we have examples of female cupbearers in Beowulf as well as in the Bible) to serve them drinks and ensure they weren’t poisoned (sometimes doing double-duty as food/drink-tasters as well). Indeed, a sign of how important the position could be is that Sargon of Akkad, the founder of the Akkadian Empire, began his career as cup-bearer to the king of Kish, and that the King of Bohemia was given the office of Arch-Cupbearer to the Holy Roman Emperor during coronation rituals. Or for a less exalted but no less important version, you have the gentleman below, Sir David Murray, cup-bearer to King James VI of Scotland and future Lord Scone and Viscount Stormont.

By contrast, the office of page was an age-gated one, which sons of the nobility would likely occupy from age 7-14 before they graduated to be squires and then knights. Pages did odd jobs for their knight or lord – carrying messages, cleaning stuff, helping to arm and dress their master, etc. and for the purposes of this post, fetching food and drink for their master especially at table. In return, pages would be given room, board, livery, and education in the fundamentals of horse-riding and associated sports, combat, basic literacy, music and other pastimes, and above all, manners.

As for the Mistress of the Robes, no she didn’t have to be unmarried: see Harriet Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, Duchess of Sutherland, Mistress of the Robes to Queen Victoria, who held the post before and after her marriage. However, ladies-in-waiting don’t have to be unmarried either; there were in fact different titles used to describe married vs. unmarried ladies in waiting, so that in England an umarried lady-in-waiting would be called a “Maid of Honour”; in France it would be “dammes” vs. “damoiselles”; in Germany it would be ”staatsdame”

vs. “

hoffräulein,” and so on.

How do you envision a time skip in the series would have played out if GRRM had somehow managed it?

That’s a good question. From what we can tell from his comments, the main drive of the five-year gap was to skip the bildungsroman section of Arya’s, Bran’s, and Sansa’s stories specifically.

In this fashion, GRRM could use flashbacks to do a training montage that explains how Arya became a badass assassin, Bran became a greenseer/shaman/wizard ‘arry, and Sansa became a Machiavellian politician, without having to spend a lot of time describing the incremental process of maturation in detail.

It would also have changed their ages. Arya would re-enter the narrative as a 16-year old, Bran as a 15-year old, and Sansa as a 19-year old. This obviously would change what kind of stories he could tell about them: 15-16 is still a pretty young adolescent, but within the world of ASOIAF Robb Stark was King in the North at their age, so the reader would be more accepting of them changing the course of world events. Likewise, as adolescents, anything having to do with sexuality would feel very very different than it would without the gap.

The problem, as GRRM found out, is that the gap doesn’t work as well for everyone else who isn’t those three characters, sending them on Odysseus-like extended sojourns where they would inescapably experience extended character stagnation. Tyrion’s drunken depression works in ADWD because (for him) it’s right after he’s killed his father and his lover – it would wear much much more thin if it had been five years. Jon and Daenerys’ ultimate failure as leaders make sense if they’re adolescents who have no experience in government and came to power way too early, it doesn’t work for people in their 20s who’ve been ruling their respective kingdoms for five years.

So overall, I think he made the right call. If I were to have advised GRRM, I would have said it’s a lot easier to go back to your earlier books and do a find and replace on the ages of your younger characters, adjust your timeline a bit, so do that instead.

About the “Common Tongue”: With his otherwise incredible attention to detail and realism in all aspects, doesn’t seem like a pretty typically anglo-saxon AND presentist trope to have the Westerosi language be A) called the “common” tongue and B) somehow happen to be spoken fluently by so many all the way to Qarth? Why no mention of Qartheen or Asshaii languages (or accents)?

Yes and no.

GRRM has said in interviews that he had the vast majority of characters be fluent in the “Common Tongue” because A. it’s easier if all of the characters can communicate with one another, and B. he’s not an Oxford don linguist who can come up with new languages at the drop of a hat. So I think it’s more just for convenience’s sake than anything else.

On the other hand…I think you’re also painting with too broad a brush. Planetos is a place with many languages – Valyrian and not the Common Tongue is the lingua france of Essos, and even then it’s already breaking down into separate dialects on the way to separate languages in the various Free Cities and Slaver’s Bay, there’s the Slaver’s Bay dialect with its loan words that are all that remain of Ghiscari, and so on.

So to take Qarth as an example, when Dany is greeted by the three:

The pale man with the blue lips replied in guttural Dothraki, “I am Pyat Pree, the great warlock.”

The bald man with the jewels in his nose answered in the Valyrian of the Free Cities, “I am Xaro Xhoan Daxos of the Thirteen, a merchant prince of Qarth.”

The woman in the lacquered wooden mask said in the Common Tongue of the Seven Kingdoms, “I am Quaithe of the Shadow. We come seeking dragons.” (Dany I, ACOK)

Two out of three don’t speak to her in the Common Tongue. Pyat Pree takes a look at a small khalasar and speak to them in Dothraki, the merchant speaks to them in Valyrian because that’s what traders speak in, and the only one who uses the Common Tongue is a prophetess and shadowbinder who can see the future and who already knows who Dany is.

As far as accents go, they definitely exist. We know that Melisandre’s speech is “rich with the accents of the east” (Davos IV, ASOS), we know that the people of the Free Cities speak Westerosi with a “lilt of the Free Cities” (Arya II, ACOK), also described as a “liquid accent.” But we also know that the different accents of Braavos, Tyrosh, Myr, Norvos, Pentos, etc. are distinct.

The intended amounts of food cached for winter seem far too small relative to the populations they must support and uncertainty of winter’s duration. Does this suggest that the primary strategy is to buy food, with the winter stores as more of a backstop?

You raise a good question, and all I can say is

GRRM seems to think it’s enough.

Well, that’s not exactly true, there’s a bunch more I can say:

There’s an underlying world-building problem here, which is that the multi-year seasons don’t really make sense when you consider the ecology of the life cycle of flora and fauna. If winter was just unrelenting night and cold and nothing else, you’d expect 100% die-off as seeds wither in the frost and animals run out of plants to dig up from the snow. (Either that or there are some truly baroque evolutionary adaptions that you’d think we’d have heard about by now) Likewise, it doesn’t matter how much you store and how cool your cellars are, there are hard limits to how long you can store food in a pre-modern context.

So the way that I’ve rationalized it is that the seasons are really closer to climate cycles than what we think of as seasons – summers are extended warm periods, winters are mini-ice ages. While agricultural productivity is going to be much much higher in the “summer” than in the “winter,” it’s not the case that there’s no growth at all during the winter.

Because even within the “winter,” you’re going to get variation in temperatures – your “false springs” and “spirit summers” – that allow for short bursts of agriculture productivity. Those little bursts are vitally necessary to stretch out your supplies, replenish fodder for whatever livestock and game is still around, repair some of the damage done by malnutrition, etc.

But I would imagine that those are very chancey – if the lull in the snows and the cold ends before you can harvest whatever crop you’ve been able to get into the ground, you’re going to lose it all.