Lannisport real world comparison
Caution: This post contains minor spoilers from "Game of Thrones" and "A Song of Ice and Fire."
Still reeling from Sunday's season 5 finale of "Game Of Thrones"? Understandable. It was brutal!
One mental exercise useful during every traumatic episode of the reveal or moment in George R.R. Martin's book series, "A Ballad of Ice and Fire," is to remind yourself that Westeros, and the people living there, are not real. It's all fiction! Nothing happening on the screen or page actually happened to a living human.
This is easy, of course, when there are dragons or White Walkers on screen. Yet Martin has made it clear that he did use historical events, people and places as the inspiration for some of his planet.
With that in mind, we at The Huffington Post decided to play a fun small game: If Westeros did remain, what real world countries would correspond to each of the Seven Kingdoms?
This was not a completely straightforward exercise. One obvious question: Does Westeros illustrate Great Britain or Europe? It's shaped like Great Britain. (Or, more accurately, like a conglomeration of Great Britain and Ireland.) And it's right across a narrow straight of ocean from
Economics of Ice and Fire
Money and Society
In addition to discussing the essence of government, the series contains other economic ideas as adv. One prominent example is the narratives strong understanding of the role money plays in culture. In particular, the unfolding story provides snapshots of different stages of economic development, and these are closely tied to other cultures perceptions of economic exercise and money.
Obvious examples are the Dothraki horselords, the decentralized group of warring tribes who roam the eastern continent. The Dothraki do not trade at all, and the closest they come to peaceful social interaction is a somewhat vague system of gift exchange. They therefore use no money, and their civilization thoroughly reflects this fact.
Without a system of indirect exchange, they are unable to develop capital goods, relying instead on the redistributive gains from conquest in order to endure. They are largely nomadic, lacking the ability (or desire) to produce or trade. In evidence, the only permanent structures in the city of Vaes Dothrak are constructed by foreign slaves, using plundered materials. The lack of a complex society can be att
Moving from the North to the heart of the South this week. Some really interesting stuff…
The Westerlands:
- BTW, I welcome any corrections by Joanna Lannister on this section. My grasp of Westerlands history is not the best.
- the map: gold and silver, duh. I’m surprised there aren’t more castles along the southern border with the Reach, tho.
- Lots of caves in the Westerlands…
- First Men Houses: Hawthornes, Footes, Brooms, Plumms, Farmans, Greenfields, Reynes, Westerlings.
- Houses from legend: Crake the Boarkiller from Crakehall, the Hooded Man of the Baneforts, The Blind Bowman Alan o’the Oak of the Yews, and Pate the Plowman of the Morelands. Those are some awesome figures.
- Corlos son of Casterly bearding the lion in the den. Hmmm…I wonder if the Casterlys were lion-wargs?
- The Rock of Casterly Rock as a hollowed-out gold mine. We knew that already, but you do have to wonder how subterranean it is.
- Lann the Clever:
- everyone agrees he came out of the east.
- Lann very much in the trickster role from myth and fairy tale – coating himself with butter the comedic touch, psychological warfare as the darker side, gory deaths, and s
Atlas of Ice and Fire
One ask that arises more than almost any other in truly nerdy discussions about A Song of Ice and Fire relates to the population of the Seven Kingdoms and how many people live in each region, in the lands beyond the Wall and in the cities. That’s quite a big discussion and there’s been lots of conclusions drawn over the years.
The Seven Kingdoms, with approximate population levels in each region. Also shown are the major cities and towns.
How to determine the size of the population? Elio Garcia of westeros.org has an terrific video which outlines several methods of doing so. The first involves extrapolating from the military figures we are given. These figures vary due to George R.R. Martin having characters using guesswork, estimates and sometimes (as in the case of Dorne) misinformation in their figures. But certain trends have emerged throughout the books that have allowed some fairly accurate military figures to be gained and thus a civilian population to be extrapolated. Another method involves mapping the square mileage of Westeros (in a similar manner to what we have already done) and then comparing that to the population
Yes, geographically, it’s a bit odd.
But Lannisport seems to be a case of urban development around industry - namely that it’s the major harbor near a really really big mining, smelting, and smithing complex that includes gold, but also steel and likely copper and silver as well. Add to the industrial population the people who labor in services around that industry (you’ll need assayers for the gold, you’ll need lots of guards and locksmiths for security, you’ll need merchants to deal with transactions and clarks to note things down, you’ll need warehouse workers to store the stuff, you’ll need bakers and butchers and grocers to feed the population, you’ll need tavernkeepers and bartenders to get them drunk, you’ll need a city monitor to keep order).
Then because it’s the major port near the city, and sea transport proposals advantages in terms of transporting your heavier cargo, you contain longshoring and shipbuilding and local merchants who decide to branch out from just handling local commerce, etc. Then you add on that, given that gold and gold products are a high-value commodity, and that a lot of places need it for their currency as well as for decorative purposes, merchants