Fireside this week! I find I have my thoughts more or less together for the last part of the Imperator series, but I have not yet gotten them into a satisfying order – a common hazard of writing – so they will have to wait for next week. It’s not yet clear to me if Part III will be split up. I have two major threads to follow (how Imperator understands non-monarchic internal politics and how it understands stability and the fall of the Roman Republic) which overlap but which I’m not sure if I can fully split up. In any case, that will be next week.
For this week’s musing, I want to ruminate a bit more on military motivation and what we might call ‘frontier maintenance,’ following up on a semi-viral Twitter thread I posted lately.
For those who aren’t on Twitter, what I argued there was that the Night’s Watch from A Song of Ice and Fire (and derivative products) doesn’t actually really work as described as an institution. In particular, and I’ve gestured at this before, it has the structure of a ‘military order,’ which is to say a knightly religious order – they’re ‘brothers’ who take vows, live communally in difficult circumstances on a distant frontier – but lacks the thing that makes those military orders work, namely a single religious creed and consequent religious practice.
Instead, the Night’s Watch is a mostly secular organization with no prominent religious rituals beyond the oath which recruits members of two different faiths. This, as I’ve noted before, is a repeated weakness with George R. R. Martin’s worldbuilding, in that it often struggles to grasp the implications of people in the past (or fantasy versions of the past) believing their religion and acting accordingly. Without a religious creed holding them together, there’s really not a lot of reason this highly trained, cohesive band of armed men wouldn’t just turn south and set up shop as a group somewhere more hospitable (or stay where they are, but just begin ruling as secular elites with wealth, wives and inheritance, like Albert von Preußen).
One response to this was to simply note that the Night’s Watch is, at the time of A Song of Ice and Fire, a decaying, weakened institution, with only around a thousand men at arms at the outset. This answer doesn’t work for me, because the Night’s Watch has been only slowly decaying over centuries. The Targaryens ruled for nearly 300 years and this institution trucked on through all of that without major issue. Three centuries is a long time! Highly cohesive bodies of men who lack a reason to be loyal to the polity that employs them tend to go rogue in periods of time measured in months, not centuries. This is the same reason I don’t think the existence of the ‘Night’s King’ renders this any more plausible, because it is so deep in the past. Indeed, one of the things that prompted this thought was the realization that the Watch plays basically no role in the Dance of the Dragons (the focus of House of the Dragon), despite being a large (at the time) body of full-time soldiers in a kingdom in the midst of civil war!
But the more interesting responses were those trying to justify the system within its own logic: the brothers stay on the wall because they would face punishment otherwise, because they were sent there for petty crimes, or because on the wall they get (very basic) lodgings and food, or because of the abstract threat of the Others and so on. What I find interesting about these responses is they’ve made the same misstep I think GRRM has perhaps also made: they have only considered the problem from the elite perspective. I’ve noted elsewhere, though I now cannot find where, that it is striking that all of the point-of-view characters so far with more than a single chapter (invariably a prologue or epilogue) in A Song of Ice and Fire are members of the aristocracy (indeed, nearly all members of the high aristocracy – mere knights are rare!). This series is, for all protests to the contrary, far more relentlessly focused on the elite perspective than something like Lord of the Rings, where we at least have one non-elite main character (Samwise Gamgee).
And sure, from the elite perspective, this all makes sense. Someone needs to stand on the wall, so we’ll send someone (over time, increasingly low-status, disposable someones) to do it, provide them very minimal comforts necessary for minimum survival and decree harsh punishments should they ever leave their military-penal colony. For a Warden of the North in Winterfell or a King in King’s Landing, that all makes sense.
But consider it for a moment from the perspective of the brothers of the Night’s Watch. Sure, someone needs to stand on this wall, but it doesn’t need to be them. Fear of the Others or Wildlings is useless here: that answers why someone needs to be here, but not why I need to be here. Some people will self-sacrifice for the community with no thought to other rewards (money, prestige, status), but they are very, very few.
And sure, before they were sent to the wall, they might have been a petty criminal. But now they are a trained soldier, in the company of other trained soldiers with whom they share interests, well-armed and cohesive. Why should they stay on the wall, instead of heading south to knock over some minor lord and set themselves up in his place and live in far greater comfort? I must stress the moment you hand these men weapons and training, motivating them is a new game, because they’re no longer thieves and outcasts, they are armed and trained soldiers, professional purveyors of violence in a society that values skill at violence at lot. And they can command payment (again, in money or status) commensurate to that valuable skill (especially in a political context where power is so fragmented that they will always find someone who needs a few hundred good men at arms). Early modern European states sometimes did empty the prisons into their professional armies, but once you handed those men a pike or musket and taught them to use it, you had to pay them or someone else would.
This is a thing – bands of armed men, made cohesive through shared suffering turning on civilian society – that happens with astonishingly regularity and the fuse on that bomb, historically speaking, is short. Given the age of the institution, we might have expected that particular bomb to have gone off many times over the previous three centuries!
So how do actual historical societies resolve this tension? By promising the men on the wall something after their tour of service.
A religious order promises those men salvation. It builds cohesion because the men of the order are bonded together in religious practice: praying together, singing hymns together, observing mass together, and so on. Of course that only works if most of these men believe – in a strong, immediate, emotional sense, believe – in the promises of their religion. And the salvation is personal: you cannot get into heaven by having someone else join a monastery for you, but you can absolutely hold off the Wildlings and Others by having someone else stand on the wall for you. The shared religious aspect is thus both what holds the order together (cohesion) and keeps it on the wall (morale), which is why most religious orders do not include non-co-religionists or indeed, even members of different denominations of the same religion: they need to share the same binding belief. The protestant reformation basically vaporizes many of the knightly religious orders it touches because uniformity is so important for this reason.
Another solution, as I noted in the original thread is long-service paid professionals. But here, and this is important: you have to let them retire. Military life, after all, is difficult and unpleasant and if all you can promise is more of the same, that is a poor reward: it doesn’t matter if you’re paying them if they can never spend the money. Indeed, it was actually very common in both antiquity (e.g. with Carthaginian wage-troops, Polyb. 1.68-9) and in the early modern period with professional soldiers for pay and wages to remain almost entirely notional until discharge at which all of the arrears needed to be paid.1 When the Roman army professionalizes, soldiers were famously promises a praemia, a retirement bonus (literally ‘the prize’) of more than a decade’s worth of pay, delivered as a single massive lump sum on retirement.
This avoids what we may call the ‘Bane Problem‘ that payments made yesterday do not give you power over someone today. By holding most of the pay in arrears or as a retirement bonus, you incentivize continued loyal service and indeed, create a ‘sunk cost’ to that effect. Your soldiers, in the meantime, justify putting up with present discomfort – the miserable cold of being on that wall – because, if they survive (and perhaps roughly half of Roman soldiers probably did, in the imperial period), they’ll get a chance to start a family with financial security in their retirement. Of course the life-long vows of the Night’s Watch make this system impossible. Martin has a fascination with these sorts of life-long, no children, no wives, no inheritance, no titles vows (the Maesters and Kingsguard do the same thing) but in practice the only institutions that could ever command that kind of devotion were religious ones.2 Once again, it is hard to escape the suspicion that Martin, as a secular agnostic does not appear to understand the role that religious devotion plays in institutions very well, which is a problem when his source material is medieval Europe, particularly Britain in the War of the Roses (1455-1487), a period in which religious devotion mattered a great deal. Instead, professional military service often held forth at least the promise of upward social mobility.
The remaining option for this sort of frontier-guarding work was traditionally military settlers: create communities on the frontier where the men who farm the land (with their families) have an obligation to serve in the army. Some early Roman colonies worked like this, as did Hellenistic military settlements. Often military settlers of this sort acquired some legal or economic privileges – elevated into the ‘ruling class’ – and were ethnically distinct from the peoples they held off (or down), as a way of ensuring long-term loyalty. That said, in the very long term, these sorts of fellows tend to be hard for the central state to keep control over: the failure of the diwan-system is a classic example.
I should note that those long-service professionals and military settlers overlap more than you’d think. Generally, retiring long-service professionals don’t move back into the imperial core – they settle (with their money and land) on the frontier, near their former bases, marrying local and having families (whose sons often end up in the army!). Meanwhile, a military settler gets to enjoy his retirement whenever there isn’t a war, but can also look forward to his children holding his lands after him.
But the main point I want to make here is that for any of these systems to make it out of the first generation there has to be a source of loyalty and morale from the perspective of the common soldiers standing on the wall. And that source generally has to be future oriented because service on the frontier is rarely pleasant and crucially is generally less pleasant than how well-trained, armed men might be able to live somewhere else, either as soldiers or as bandits. A system that is ‘all stick, no carrot’ – what many folks suggested – just produces bandits at a high rate. So there has to be a future-oriented carrot to make these systems work, be it spiritual salvation (for religious orders) or a comfortable retirement (for professional soldiers or military settlers).
And simply watching a whole bunch of people thinking through the problem at the same time, it is suddenly no surprise how frequently polities that try to set up these systems – especially non-state polities like those in Westeros – instead end up creating time bombs with extremely short fuses. Successes, like the legions of the Roman imperial period, or the Han dynasty’s increasingly professional frontier armies, are rare. Catastrophes like the endlessly predictable Mamluk revolts, the Army of Flanders sacking Antwerp, the Great Catalan Company’s ‘Catalan Revenge,’ the Victual Brothers and so on are distressingly common. Of course, that GRRM’s readers don’t realize that the Night’s Watch is such a time bomb isn’t necessarily a worldbuilding problem – such time bombs regularly caught rulers by surprise. What puzzles me is that I cannot see that Martin understands it as a time bomb either: with the caveats that the books are not done, he seems to understand the problem to be that the Night’s Watch is too weak to fulfill its stated purpose, not that a Night’s Watch remotely strong enough to do so would rapidly become a much more immediate problem for everyone else.
For what it is worth, the outcome I’d expect for the Night’s Watch is not a slow decline, but rather that the inclusion of recruits with the Faith of the Seven would lead to the secularization of the order, leading fairly rapidly to a revolt which would either end up with the Watch going the route of Albert von Preußen and becoming a secular polity (and thus ditching the asceticism) or being disbanded and replaced by one of the other solutions above.
On to Recommendations!
I want to start with a series of posts over at Liv Yarrow’s blog, adventures in my head, working through some questions about Roman coinage production in the mid-first century. The discussion here is fairly technical, but it is a good example of an expert working through a set of interconnected questions about the precise dating of coin issues and their quantity and as a result of also a good example of how our understanding of the past often comes down to highly technical work by specialists to resolve a lot of questions that seem small and unimportant but which collectively add up. After all, as you can pick up from the posts, the production of Roman coinage interweaves with both our understanding of the Roman economy (both as money, but also in terms of silver production) and Roman politics and coins, precisely because they can often be dated securely, are particularly valuable. This sort of research work only happens in academic setting – you’d never be able to ‘crowdfund’ it – but without this kind of meticulous effort, a lot of the history you can crowdfund is made much weaker.
At The Vital Center, fellow UNC alumnus Joshua Tait, a historian of American conservatism and in particular the effort to intellectualize that movement, lays out some thoughts on the ‘professional managerial class’ and how opposition to this new socio-economic class animates (in different ways) critiques on both the left and right and then in a subsequent post on his blog, To Live if to Maneuver, he expands this by looking at some of the history of conservative approaches to the managerial class in particular through conservative thinker James Burnham (1905-1987). Like any sort of intellectual history or critique, it can be a bit dense, but a rewarding reminder that ideas have contexts and history.
Meanwhile, the publication of the Ancient World Mapping Center’s Livy Study Maps: Book 21 (noted on this month’s Pasts Imperfect, also always worth a read) is as good a time as any to shout out the AWMC and their Maps for Texts series, which match together a few key ancient texts with carefully and scholarly produced maps. Book 21 of Livy is the one which covers Hannibal’s siege of Saguntum, his crossing of the Alps and his victory at the Trebia, a useful set of events to make maps for!
Meanwhile, a bit of very big classical news from earlier this month, scholars have identified two new fragments of the Athenian tragedian Euripides, short sections of plays where before now all we really had were titles (likely the Polyidus and Ino). Antiquity does not deliver us next texts – even in such short fragments – often, so it is always big news when we get them.
For this week’s book recommendation, I want to recommend N. Rosenstein, Rome at War: Farms, Families and Death in the Middle Republic (2004). This is something of a variation from my normal recommendations, so I want to lead with a necessary caveat: this book is not a light or easy read. It was written for specialists and expects the reader to do some work to fully understand its arguments. That said, it isn’t written in impenetrable ‘academese’ – indeed, the ideas here are very concrete, dealing with food production, family formation, mortality and military service. But they’re also fairly technical and Rosenstein doesn’t always stop to recap what he has said and draw fully the conclusions he has reached and so a bit of that work is left to the reader.
That said, this is probably in the top ten or so books that have shaped me as a scholar and influenced my own thinking – as attentive readers can no doubt recall seeing this book show up a lot in my footnotes and citations. And much like another book I’ve recommended, Landers, The Field and the Forge: Population, Production and Power in the Pre-Industrial West (2003), this is the sort of book that moves you beyond the generalizations about ancient societies you might get in a more general treatment (‘low productivity, high mortality, youth-shifted age profile, etc.’) down to the actual evidence and methods we have to estimate and understand that.
Fundamentally, Rome at War is an exercise in ‘modeling’ – creating (fairly simple) statistical models to simulate things for which we do not have vast amounts of hard data, but for which we can more or less estimate. For instance, we do not have the complete financial records for a statistically significant sample of Roman small farmers; indeed, we do not have such for any Roman small farmers. So instead, Rosenstein begins with some evidence-informed estimates about typical family size and construction and combines them with some equally evidence-informed estimates about the productivity of ancient farms and their size and then ‘simulates’ that household. That sort of approach informs the entire book.
Fundamentally, Rosenstein is seeking to examine the causes of a key Roman political event: the agrarian land-reform program of Tiberius Gracchus in 133, but the road he takes getting ther eis equally interesting. He begins by demonstrating that based on what we know the issue with the structure of agriculture in Roman Italy was not, strictly speaking ‘low productivity’ so much as inefficient labor allocation (a note you will have seen me come back to a lot): farms too small for the families – as units of labor – which farmed them. That is a very interesting observation generally, but his point in reaching it is to show that this is why Roman can conscript these fellows so aggressively: this is mostly surplus labor so pulling it out of the countryside does not undermine these households (usually). But that pulls a major pillar – that heavy Roman conscription undermined small freeholders in Italy in the Second Century – out of the traditional reading of the land reforms.
Instead, Rosenstein then moves on to modeling Roman military mortality, arguing that, based on what we know, the real problem is that Rome spends the second century winning a lot. As a result, lots of young men who normally might have died in war – certainly in the massive wars of the third century (Pyrrhic and Punic) – survived their military service, but remained surplus to the labor needs of the countryside and thus a strain on their small households. These fellows then started to accumulate. Meanwhile, the nature of the Roman census (self-reported on the honor system) and late second century Roman military service (often unprofitable and dangerous in Spain, but not with the sort of massive armies of the previous centuries which might cause demographically significant losses) meant that more Romans might have been dodging the draft by under-reporting in the census. Which leads to his conclusion: when Tiberius Gracchus looks out, he sees both large numbers of landless Romans accumulating in Rome (and angry) and also falling census rolls for the Roman smallholder class and assumes that the Roman peasantry is being economically devastated by expanding slave estates and his solution is land reform. But what is actually happening is population growth combined with falling census registration, which in turn explains why the land reform program doesn’t produce nearly as much change as you’d expect, despite being more or less implemented.
Those conclusions remain both important and contested. What I think will be more valuable for most readers is instead the path Rosenstein takes to reach them, which walks through so much of the nuts-and-bolts of Roman life: marriage patterns, childbearing patterns, agricultural productivity, military service rates, mortality rates and so on. These are, invariably, estimates built on estimates of estimates and so exist with fairly large ‘error bars’ and uncertainty, but they are, for the most part, the best the evidence will support and serve to put meat on the bones of those standard generalizing descriptions of ancient society.
- This gets discussed at some length in G. Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567-1659: The Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries’ Wars (1972, 2nd ed. 2004). And if you are thinking, “this system seems like it could blow up very badly if the funds aren’t available when discharge time comes” – yes, that’s usually how it becomes visible to us, by blowing up dramatically when the army has to be dismissed and there’s no money to make up pay and discharge bonuses. But as long as the state can pay at discharge, the system works well.
- For secular rulers, of course, there was the option of making men eunuchs, but this both didn’t render them nearly as a-political as was thought, but also critically was permanent and frequently non-voluntary. Eunuchs were very frequently already slaves or otherwise non-free.
skill at violence at lot -> a lot
And don’t characters like Bronn and Rose count as non elite main(ish) characters? At least in the first few seasons, the fact that such characters either get promoted in social status or simply die off is one of the many, many things that led to the show getting progressively worse.
I wouldn’t count Bronn and Rose as main characters. Bronn’s pretty much just a guy who follows Tyrion around, and I don’t remember Rose at all.
(Caveat: I’m much more familiar with the books than the show.)
Rose the Exposition Whore isn’t in the books, she’s there in the show to have exposition told to her while naked.
The show featured rather more happy, enthusiastic prostitutes, and rather fewer brutal rapes, than the books. Chacun a son gout.
The POV characters in the books outside the doomed prologue characters are very elite. Most of them are born into power, and the ones that aren’t – Davos, Barristan, Melisandre, and Hotah – are all the most important advisers to Princes or Kings.
POV characters in the books, not counting the prologues and epilogues:
15 who were born as the child of the Lord of one of the 7 (actually 8) Kingdoms, of whom:
1 starts the series as the Lord of one of the 7(8) Kingdoms
1 starts the series as the Lord of one of the 7(8)K
1 starts the series as the Queen of the 7(8)K
and the remaining 12 are all of elite social status, with the adults generally in positions of influence and power
Plus
1 daughter of a King of the 7(8)K
5 children of lords of various rank
3 characters who as far as I can recall came from poverty
OTOH, just considering _Game of Thrones_ (the book) since it’s the only one I finished: it has 8 POV characters, *4 of whom are female*, and *5 of whom are children/teens*. ASoIaF POVs tend to be ‘elite’ yet subaltern elite: female, child, dwarf, odd knight (I think we get Davos, not Stannis as POV). I think Cersei becomes a POV character _after_ she losers power and gets into trouble (though conversely, Dany stays POV after gaining power.)
Ned: actual noble adult man
Bran: noble boy, soon crippled
John: teen boy and (noble) bastard
Tyrion: rich noble but despised dwarf
Cat: noble adult woman:
Arya: noble tomboy girl
Sansa: noble tween girl
Dany: deposed royal teen girl being sold off by her brother
None of them are peasants, but a lot of them don’t have much if any real power of their own.
In the next two books, we don’t get Robb Stark’s POV, we see him through Cat.
The thing is, people who don’t have much power but are part of the noble class will still tend to share the noble perspective. Someone like Tyrion Lannister or Catelyn Stark absolutely does accept the premise of “well, someone’s got to hold the Wall, so we might as well send our criminals up there so they can die usefully. Fear of punishment and powerful oaths will hold them up there.”
Someone like Bronn would immediately point out that taking a bunch of criminals, handing them swords, training them to use them, and leaving them up on a giant ice-block for a couple of years is a great way to get them to turn around and march south to carve out lordships for themselves in whatever bit of the Seven Kingdoms looks vulnerable.
*shrug* I wasn’t saying GRRM covered all social viewpoints, just that his POVs are less plugged into power than they seem at first. It’s an interesting narrative choice.
If anything, those of noble status who haven’t had to do the work of nobility are (on average) more certain of the way things work. They haven’t seen the situation breaking down.
My guess would be that, despite the show (GOT) focusing often on non-Northerners sent to watch (like Samwell Tarly or maester Aemon), the common man of the Night’s Watch is a Northerner (we get an indication of this in HotD when Cregan Stark talks about every tenth man of Winterfell being sent to Watch), and Northerners, both commoners and nobles, appear to take their religion and the mission of keeping away those lying beyond the Wall quite seriously (and the said religion is, to some degree, more true than the faith of the Seven).
The biggest issue I see with this is that those nobles will (and plainly do) wield outsized influence over the Watch and its activities. Furthermore, neither the Seven nor the Old Gods promise any rewards to the men of the Watch, so we still have a “But why *me*” problem
The answer to this is quite obvious: you are weak or a bastard or criminal. People within the setting tend to get this. And if you attempt going south – lord of Winterfell is quite capable of dealing with the trouble
But this doesn’t solve the problem, because once they’ve been on the wall for a while, they are now a soldier with lots of soldier friends.
Could the Lord of Winterfell stop the Night’s Watch if they decided to up and march south? Probably not, because the Watch is a professional force whose soldiers are on duty year-round. Winterfell depends on a system of vassalage where the army must be slowly assembled from disparate communities.
With a little cunning, or convenient geopolitical timing, the Watch could probably get its entire force to the gates of Winterfell before any Stark bannermen showed up to help the opposition.
I don’t think the faith of the Old Gods even has salvation. All they’ve really got is fear of what will happen if they break their oaths, and people in this setting break oaths all the time.
This was my thought. It’s all about belief in Oath-breaking, but we see some other characters breaking their oaths, some more casually than others.
Religion seems to work in certain ways when it’s plot convenient.
Now, we do see reference to “The Seven Hells”, so there may be *some* kind of belief in an afterlife retribution for “bad people”.
“Seven hells” is from the faith of the Seven, which certainly does offer salvation.
I think that when Jon takes his vows they mention that they have a godswood as if it’s not an option that most take. It’s implied that the vast majority of recruits swear on the Seven.
The interesting question, then, is how the Night’s Watch navigated the transition between the old northern faith and the faith of the Seven.
This would seem reasonable and also point to combination of a devastating civil war and a long summer meaning the Nights Watch recieved too few northern recruits in recent decades, hence their state of decline – Fire and Blood highlights how northern men, particularly the old, are given over to military service because the north starves during their world’s long winters. It’s even more missing from the show, which forgets that winterfell is built around a series of hotsprings and greenhouses.
If that was true, you’d essentially have had a full 50 years or so where the north’s general support of the nights watch was depleted by Ned Stark marching them south in the winter, and no-one needing to leave their farms to save their families in the summer (it also sort of makes sense in that the nights watch has ‘the gift’- if you join during a hungry winter, you do basically get something like 45 square miles of farmland for free, given the watch has authority over the 45,000 square mile region of Brandon’s Gift).
I had no idea bout the Euripides fragments being discovered. I’m a big, big classical theater fan (although I’m more of a Sophocles guy myself) so this is amazing for me. Just hearing about this a highlight for my week.
The point about scarcity occurring because fewer Romans farmers were dying in battle feeds into a point Bret made a couple weeks ago: how we tend to lose sight of the problems that society *has* solved in favor of new or unresolved ones. In this case, solving the old problem actually created the new one: the Romans state got só good at protecting its citizens in battle that it had more people than it could feed. I feel like there’s parallels there to a lot of modern problems– climate change comes to mind, where humanity has gotten a little too good at harnessing energy, something that historically was desperately important but extremely difficult to do.
I’d add that the decrease in military mortality isn’t so much that the Romans are winning a lot, but that Roman hegemony eliminated the endemic wars between different italic polities that had been happening before. Those resulted in a lot of Italian farmers dying in battle (or as a consequence of pillaging) no matter who won. The Romans completely eliminated this by 200BC, and replace with much rarer (if larger) wars overseas where the Italian peasantry is not at risk unless they’re serving. That, when they do, they do so in heavy armour in mostly successful armies is just the cherry on the cake.
oooo good point! I would also imagine that the consolidation of Italy under the Roman eagle means you run out of land &/or loot to give to successful Roman soldiers (tho I don’t know how significant this is relative to the other factors)
The frequency at which Latin / Roman colonies were founded in the middle republic, and then dried up (until they were founded outside Italy during the empire) suggests that’s probably important too.
Perhaps another example is civilian control of the military – western people not even considering the possibility that the Night Watch would turn against their king. Even though we all know military coups frequently happen even in today’s world.
I recalled you had a comment on Xtwitter regarding the lack of Wasteland Warlord games where Bannerlord was the nearest thing*. Have you ever tried Kenshi? It doesn’t look like my thing, and it’s quite janky and bizarre. But you start off as a one-armed beggar hated by everyone and wind up destroying all the powerful states with your small army of cyber-ninjas and insectoid crossbowmen, backed up by the roboskeletons with gigantic swords.
*I like Bannerlord, but Bannerlord does not like me in return. And the game has a great many real faults which the developer is remarkably disinterested in fixing, plus numerous areas for improvement, which the developer is remarkably disinterested in updating.
In a further discussion on this vein, I would like to recommend Rebuild, by Sarah Northway.
Now, it’s a zombie apocalypse instead of a nuclear apocalypse. But you have a self-insert character leading a small group of survivors in a city. You need food and in the early game have to scavenge for it before later moving to a more sustainable agricultural model (although the game’s agriculture mechanics are a bit wonky, presumably to make things a bit easier for you). Along the way, you’ll have to deal with other gangs of survivors and of course, the ever-present zombies.
You do this by managing your people. The game has a surprisingly robust system for a tiny, Indie game, especially with a ridiculous premise like a zombie apocalypse. But your people will have individual personalities and skills, and even a set of other survivors that they like or dislike which can change depending on their interactions (most commonly being sent on the same mission). You really do feel a bit like a warlord, since while your main character is usually tougher than the run of the mill survivors, when you get your community up to even as many as 15 folks, it’s really about how well you can juggle who does what to keep the zombie hordes out and everyone fed.
In a spirit of pedantry, ‘disinterested’ is not the same as ‘uninterested’.
Disinterested can correctly mean something along the lines of “neutral”. However, in this context one valid meaning is, in fact, “Not interested; indifferent.” This usage is entirely accurate and proper.
Cite: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
Kenshi is interesting. It’s mostly on outgrowth of the limitations of the game, being mostly developed by a single person over it’s decade long development, but your ability to influence the world state is limited. When you knock out states what you get is areas that get depopulated, fracture into smaller polities, neighbors grab some of their territory, etc. The United Cities gets a famine because their agriculture runs on slavery and those run away when you kill the slavers. You can become a warlord capable of dealing legendary amounts of violence but you cannot improve the world by killing people no matter how good you get at it. It’s weirdly refreshing after a million games where you play the hero.
How did military morale work historically in societies that had two or more official religions (say, like, Confucianism and Taoism in China, or Buddhism and Shinto in Japan?)
In the Japanese context, the answer is that, by about the start of the Heian period at least, there is no real dividing line between Buddhism and Shinto in Japan. Shinto jinja and Buddhist tera merged architecturally and often occupied the same building complexes. There’s not an effort to divide them again until the start of the Meiji period, as part of modernization, and in practical terms, a substantial proportion of Buddhist temples today will have Shinto architecture like torī gates and komainu statues, and Shinto shrines will similarly have Buddhist architecture like rōmon gates, bell towers, and pagodas.
Part of this is that Buddhism has historically been fairly adept at incorporating local religious traditions into its cosmology without obviating them entirely- you can make offerings to an Inari shrine and chant the nembutsu to Amida Buddha without them conflicting in any sense, because they accomplish different things for you.
I think this is not totally wrong, but it’s also very far from right. Japanese religion is difficult to pin down in a way that makes external sense with hard lines: absolutely true. But it’s definitely not as simple as suggested they simply integrated.
Buddhism has (…very often) elite connotations. This is somewhat weird in itself because the Imperial family is (kind of) the very icon of Shinto, except the Imperial family over the centuries imported Buddhism, supported Buddhim and become prominent Buddhist leaders. And yet again Buddhism was much more strongly associated with & promoted by the elite classes and even the Shoguns themselves, and was partially suppressed in the Meiji era.
Thanks, that was very helpful!
Would it be fairer to say that Shinto was then the “popular” religion of the Japanese masses? Or were most of the population not that interested in either one?
Yes & no. Shinto is not exactly a religion as most Westerners (even including atheists) understand it. It’s an Animist belief system thoroughly ingrained in society and culture. Some divinities may be widely worshiped, while others are highly local. There are also Household Gods.
Shinto was something that nearly everyone, high or low, could participate in. But it was much more an everyday feature of culture and tied to local life patterns. There’s are priests, but not real authority or structure.
The best way to understand Shinto is to play Pokemon. I… don’t think I am joking.
Yes & no. Shinto is not exactly a religion as most Westerners (even including atheists) understand it.
I mean, I’d be interested to hear more? I’m from a partially Hindu and partially Christian background (and the aspects of Hinduism that I like are much more the folk/popular/animistic elements than the philosophical ‘Brahminic’ side of the religion), so it might make more sense to me than it would to westerners in general. I’m very much interested in general in any elements of animism that have survived (or been revived) in the modern age, so I’d very much appreciate your comments on the subject.
I was curious about the topic because the two religions in Westeros seem to have an interesting relationship- less amicable than say Buddhism and Shinto, but less antagonistic than, say, Catholicism and Protestantism in Europe, or Hinduism and Islam in South Asia? (or maybe more fairly, about as amicable as Hinduism and Islam during the peaceful periods). Like, the worshippers of the Old Gods and the Faith of the Seven seem to not participate in each other’s religious rituals, but also don’t seem to have any open hostility, each of them more or less does their own thing?
“Historically,” the Faith of the Seven was violently hostile to Old Gods. They got converts at swordpoint and cut down or burned godswoods. Then that fizzled out for some reason. Much later, in the aftermath of a civil war, a lot of northern men settled down in the south, and a lot of southerners took an interest in the Old Gods without actually converting. That’s when it became fashionable for castles to have godswoods regardless of the inhabitants’ religion.
Buddhism was also popular in the lower class
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikk%C5%8D-ikki
I responded to Margeret Gill concerning Japan.
In China, Confucianism and Taoism are not… exactly… religions, even though they’re arguably more than philosophies in that sense. To a strong degree the military was in any case conceived of as a separate space where neither would be of much importance. However, this does not mean there was no martial religion, as China had specialized divinities and semi-divine heroes for warriors and soldiers. Additionally, Confucius” himself was a teacher of martial skills such as chariot-driving.
Mostly, it *didn’t* work. Multi-religious societies where both are fervently believed by their respective adherents either secularize (the modern west) or become sectarian bloodbaths (Europe in the centuries after the reformation.)
The two examples you cited worked (to the extent they did) because those particular religions are very amenable to either secularization or syncretism.
Across religions, most of them are amendable to syncretism; hard religious conflict is mostly an Abrahamic trait.
In China both Confucianism and Taoism looked down on military so morale was kept by “you serve the emperor or you lose your head!”
that kind of thing certainly works well for a while, but it seems to me that it’s hard to keep up in the long run, without some kind of additional economic, social, ideological or religious motivation?
social and ideological, yes. Confucian emphasis on loyalty to the monarch was a part of pre-modern Chinese worldview. Imagine some Chinese try to go against the CCP nowadays, it was the same risk trying to rebel against the emperor back then. There was a Chinese saying: “If the ruler wanted you dead, it would be disloyal to not dying”
Of course military mutinies still happened when the empire was weak.
Well yes, it IS hard to keep up in the long run, and the general decay of the military due to it being low-status under the prevailing political philosophy of the time is often seen as one of the reasons the Song Dynasty (for example) collapsed. Because the Song emperors were dark-comedically distrustful of their own military, at a time when steppe nomads were coming at China from the north in a big way.
Korea, likewise ruled under largely Confucian lines, had similar problems when invaded by Japan in the very late 1500s. The military had been rather severely neglected. It took considerable strokes of luck, a legendary military genius in the form of Admiral Yi, and a truly unreasonable advantage in willingness to use cannons in naval warfare for the Koreans to eventually drive off the invaders.
On the other hand, one can observe that for much of Chinese history, the military was, in practical terms, more likely to be a destabilizing threat to both the rulers than to protect them against foreign invasions.
Which is odd, considering that a few centuries earlier Korea was that strong it had required the Mongols, out of all people, a dozen or so attempted invasion of Korea before the country had submitted to them.
And even that required internal political conflicts and Korea’s position had still been strong enough that it only became a vassal.
Or at least, that was something I vaguely recall having once read on r/AskHistorians.
Confucianism and Taoism were both elaborated and promulgated by the gentry/scholar class. For Chinese sources of martial morale and devotion (and China was militarily very successful) you have to look elsewhere. Lower?
martial prowess was respected by the outlaws though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youxia
It’s very easy to say that, it’s a lot harder to actually behead a general hundreds of miles away who commands his own army.
Of course it is hard. The same can be said about a vassal of an European king, or a grandmaster of a zealous military order.
That’s why many Chinese dynasty kept the best armies in the capital to suppress any rebellion far away, gave military command of border armies to civic officials, kept families of generals in the capital so if they rebelled, their loved ones lose their heads instead…
Yes, but that is a much more complex system than “you serve the emperor or you lose your head!”
And you are probably still going to need to reward the loyal soldiers at some point.
There were rewards, of course. Punishment is just to prevent treason and mutiny.
I think Bret only claimed that celibate, vowed-for-life, poorly paid orders could only exist if inspired by a unified and unquestioned religious faith. Rome had multiple religions, but the legions got along fine, because they were not vowed-for-life. Likewise, I don’t know much about Chinese or Japanese military organizations, but presumably they weren’t celibate, lifelong, and impoverished. Neither is the religiously diverse US military.
I think it can be extended, but of course the US military (and US society) has a unifying secular ideology that can take the place of a state religion in terms of encouraging self sacrifice.
Yes, but even apart from that, American soldiers receive pay & benefits, social respect, access useful education and job skills, and can reasonably leave the military for a fruitful career elsewhere. While some do choose a lifelong military career, most soldiers do not and have a larger “identity” that binds their interests to the Republic.
I don’t think it works in the context. Secular ideologies don’t tend to promise an afterlife.
It’s the same point about “keeping out the Others” that Dr. Devereaux made in the post. *You* need to fight to receive eternal salvation in heaven. *You* need to fight to collect on your retirement package. But the defence of the United States and its values does not require that *you* fight, merely that *someone*, preferably not you, does.
Which is why the United States has a professional paid military that discharges you after a fixed term of service, and *not* a religious order that demands you swear your life to Lincoln and the Constitution.
My understanding from the books too is that the Night’s Watch predates the Seven Kingdoms and is an institution that goes back not hundreds but actually thousands of years. I think that is one of the unrealistic aspects of the books — how long institutions can last (most of the Houses we meet seem to have existed, almost functionally unchanged, for millennia). That being said, I do appreciate the charm to it. The only mutiny I recall the Night’s Watch ever having was a supernatural one when their Lord Commander married an Other and set himself up as the Night’s King–not really the normal sort.
I think the only “headcanon” explanation to the problem our host identifies here is that oaths in Westeros are treated almost as an independent religion from the Old Gods and the Seven (I appreciate though that they are still oaths made to the specific gods of the oath-givers). I know you had an excellent post on oaths and how media often get them wrong. That said, I think we have to assume that in the GoT an “oath” is something sui generis and not really an analog to our oaths. It is almost like a religion of itself and creates the same feeling as a religious order. Otherwise I think it is hard to explain the Maesters, Kingsguard and Night’s Watch.
That being said, I am not sure if what we see in the books actually supports that the Night’s Watch is a quasi-religious order that could last millennia. We get the impression that the Lord Commander Mormont was a strong believer in his oath, but he was also just a very honourable fellow. A lot of the people almost feel like a convict battalion, very quick to mutiny when things go poorly at Crastor’s keep.. Hard to see how it lasted so long!
> (most of the Houses we meet seem to have existed, almost functionally unchanged, for millennia)
This really weird. Loads of Houses rule over same land and castle for millennia on end, but we also see that it’s easy for a House to lose their land. For example, if a lord has a daughter but no sons, his son-in-law inherits. And lords sometimes lose their land as punishment for fighting on the wrong side of civil wars. And Houses sometimes just die out.
Another weird thing that’s probably on purpose: Houses often have a distinctive physical appearance that they keep over centuries or millennia, no matter who they intermarry with. The Lannisters are still blonde after eons. Every Targaryen king has the Targaryen look; whenever the heir is someone without the look, he dies before he can inherit. One novel has an obscure House who have had webbed hands for eons.
> For example, if a lord has a daughter but no sons, his son-in-law inherits.
Do we know this? Dorne explicitly has more egalitarian gender norms, but do we know if the rest of Westeros follows Salic law or male-preference primogeniture or something else?
As for the houses lasting for thousands of years, I think we have to either conclude that all history before the Targaryen conquest is extremely muddled (and that Westeros has really only been feudal for a few centuries beforehand), or else that some supernatural force keeps families stable far longer than they really should be.
In Dorne, the oldest legitimate child inherits regardless of gender, and if a woman inherits she exercises the power herself.
Elsewhere, the oldest legitimate son inherits. If there are no legitimate sons or heirs of legitimate sons, the oldest daughter inherits. If a woman inherits, her husband is lord; she only exercises power herself if she’s single. (In my interpretation, her husband is only acting lord, not a true lord, but the books never actually say this part.)
The Targaryen dynasty has a special rule that women don’t inherit at all, nor can a man inherit through his wife or mother.
I can go into more detail if you want. This stuff takes up way more room in my brain than it should.
“The Targaryen dynasty has a special rule that women don’t inherit at all, nor can a man inherit through his wife or mother.”
the Targaryens themselves never seem to be *wholly* crystal clear about that, which is what the Dance of the Dragons (and the previous succession dispute) was about. The eventual surviving claimant, after all, does inherit the throne through his (dead) mother, and if there was a crystal clear ban on queens then Danerys wouldn’t have any claim at all.
It was never a crystal clear rule, because crystal clear rules do not lead to exciting civil wars, but it was a rule.
There’s another rule that your heir is whoever you say it is, though almost always they name whoever would have been heir anyway.
The king just before the Dance of Dragon put these two rules in conflict. He tried to have sons, then gave up and named his daughter heir, and then had a son after all. And then he deliberately avoided clarifying whether the son should take his daughter’s place as heir, in order to avoid alienating either child’s partisans.
The rule about women not inheriting comes from earlier royal indecisiveness. There was an old king who heir should have been his oldest son’s son’s daughter’s son. (Lots of dead people in that family line.) But the king’s second son’s son claimed to be heir, on the grounds that the actual heir had the wrong last name. Even though it was just a rule that the second “heir” made up on the spot, and the actual heir had a powerful father, the king refused to name the proper heir; instead he called a meeting of all the lords in the realm and had them vote, and they elected the second guy. This was then interpreted as precedent for the second guy’s made-up rule. IIRC, this second guy is the same king as the one in the previous paragraph.
It was never a crystal clear rule, because crystal clear rules do not lead to exciting civil wars, but it was a rule.
I mean, in the last analysis, the whole Targaryen right to rule in the first place was based on raw force & magic (specifically, the dragons), so any rules about legitimacy were ultimately going to be kind of fragile and subject to challenge based on “who has more dragons”.
(and of course, was also going to be subject to challenge once all the dragons were dead).
Fan theory is that after a house losing their land, the replacing house will adopt the previous house name.
GRRM don’t seem to explain it that way though. Mostly he doesn’t seem to care.
This sometimes happens (and I should have mentioned it earlier). It happened to House Lannister around the time Andal culture was spreading; an Andal knight inherited the Lannister throne from his father-in-law and changed his name. And surely it must be happening in Dorne, where women inherit half the time. But there are also examples (which I don’t remember anymore) of it not happening. Just up to the guy who inherits, I guess.
One example is when Orys One-Hand became lord of Storm’s End, he formed a new house, House Baratheon. However, this was during a time of major political change, and incorporated a lot from House Durrandon, including their coat of arms, motto, and even marrying the former Storm King’s daughter, Argella Durrandon.
zilla117 August 17, 2024 at 11:47 am
Another case is when Tywin rewards his brother by giving his son Lancel Castle Darry and lands. Kevan thinks it is very important that Lancel marry a woman with Darry blood, which he believes will help reconcile the smallfolk to the change of lordship.
I think it’s at least implied that there is something actually supernatural going on to keep the ruling families’ appearances unchanged over centuries.
This is why something like “children of Baratheon-Lannister marriages always have black hair, so Cersei Lannister’s children being blonde is proof that King Robert isn’t the father!” actually works as a plot point. Something like that would just be ridiculous in real life.
Not disagreeing with you or OGP, but there is another mutiny in the books. There were Seven-based religious orders back in the first century of Targaryen rule, but they were violently suppressed. Many of the survivors were sent to the Nights Watch, where they soon revolted and tried to set themselves up as lords based in the Watch castles they’d been unwisely assigned to as groups. And were violently suppressed again.
Which might suggest that the NW of that era was more of an Old Gods based religious order, who did not get on with the influx of Seven worshipers. Of course, by the time of the main books, Jon Snow wanting to swear to Old Gods rather than the Seven is considered unusual.
I mean, the Kingsguard can be explained without it. They’re explicitly a religious order of knights after all. The Old Gods and those who follow that faith don’t do knights, so they’re all members of the Faith of the Seven.
There are only seven Kingsguard, so they’re all immediate companions of the royal family, with a great deal of prestige and wealth. That’s a big reward right there.
Yeah. And the Kingsguard are, importantly, small. This makes it relatively easy to select for people who mostly won’t mind the vow of chastity. You can find knights who are just really, really intense about it being a big honor and take that seriously (Barristan Selmy, Arthur Dayne). You can find knights who are just plain asexual, or who are gay and aren’t worried about their relationship falling afoul of the oaths (Loras Tyrell would have been happy to serve in the Kingsguard as long as Renly was the king).
And because you only need seven of them, and they serve for life with, usually, not a lot of need to find replacements in a hurry, this works. It even works if once in a while you stretch the boundaries by using the Kingsguard as a political tool to prevent a specific nobleman from fathering heirs, because you can make that ONE knight a member of the Kingsguard and then just watch him very closely for the rest of his life. He’s only one man.
This kind of approach doesn’t work when you have to scale it up to hundreds or thousands of people who guard forts on the remote periphery of your empire, as opposed to literally seven guys who spend most of their time just chilling in the imperial palace.
Also, the Kingsguard are, notably, hardly infallible in their commitment to their vows. Criston Cole got heavily involved in politics, Rhaegar had partisans within the Kingsguard, a number of members seem to have taken the vow of chastity as more of a suggestion, etc…
Mostly it seems to be close enough for government work, and as you say the crucial thing is that you’re picking a handful of people for loyalty and paying them in prestige (+ job security). Whether or not they cleave to the letter of their vows is less important than whether or not they can be counted upon to not stab you in the back.
About the munity at Crastor’s keep, they had been planning it all the way back at the Fist of the First Men. The Others merely attacked first.
In weak defence of Martin, consistent world-building is hard (I write fantasy and am forever discovering my own contradictions). One of the delights of history – as the post illustrates – is discovering connections that are not obvious but then bring a chain of other understandings.
This seems to me to be a problem with pseudo-“feudal” systems in fiction. They’re (ostensibly) incredibly messy, fragmented, and fluid time periods (which is why they’re fun settings), where fiction generally requires consistency and clarity. “Epic” fantasy exacerbates this by frequently stretching time periods over centuries, leading to either an unusual amount of stagnancy, or a convoluted mess of history.
From the ground-level, a person would only be concerned with the system as it affected him.
Doesn’t help much when he’s a high muckety-muck, to be sure.
And twice that view has changed dynasties.
Liu Bang, minor magistrate, was in charge of moving prisoners. Some escaped, which brought the death penalty. Instead, he freed the rest and fled with them, starting the chain that ended with his becoming Emperor Gaozu of Han, the founder of the Han dynasty.
The Dazexiang uprising, led by officers who faced the death penalty for being late with their troops, ended in failure, but its weakening of the state and example helped lead to Liu Bang’s success.
Notice they happened together. This dynasty was notorious for strict laws, so the policy was not so strict in other eras.
Historically, there are two kinds of religion.
One kind does not come with theology and metaphysics. It’s flexible, syncretistic, ill-defined, and generally internally inconsistent. It often does not have a name because it’s just part and parcel of life, you know, the part where you deal with the gods — at least until a second one comes long.
The second type does come with definitions, leading to theology and metaphysics and all that jazz. It defines itself in contrast to other religions. Buddhism in India, Judaism and then Christianity, etc.
The first type tends to get annoyed at worship only when it’s the worship of foreign gods. After all, those gods got their own people worshipping them, why you are dropped the rites of your ancestors?
Martin’s religion has the problem that he has given us two religions of the first kind, lacking the trappings of the second, and made them act like the second.
Except that Buddhism does have at least some history of integration and syncretism with other “religions of the first kind” in places like Japan and Southeast Asia.
I think the trait of being rigidly codified with a strict theology and metaphysics goes hand-in-hand with the tendency to exclude other religions… but that all these traits are more or less unique to the Abrahamic faiths.
Buddhism absolutely does have theology and cosmology, but it’s not rigid; it doesn’t demand that entire regions abandon the worship of all gods not explicitly part of Buddhism.
Except that Buddhism does have at least some history of integration and syncretism with other “religions of the first kind” in places like Japan and Southeast Asia.
In the Himalayan nations too- it’s incorporated, to some extent, both Hindu and native Tibetan animist deities.
Christianity has some history of syncretism, too. Still, both are defined by rejection, because you must reject everything else to have a clear standard. (And in both, the syncretism is frequently decried.)
The first type also tends to get annoyed at worship of the second type. The Romans were not particularly fond of the Jews and Christians shitting on Roman gods.
They have no objection to worship of the second type. What they have objections to is not worshiping after the customs of your fathers.
Strathen in _Unearthly Powers_ did define two types of religion, immanentist (like your first kind) and transcendentalist (more concerned with ultimate truth and purpose, salvation, and moral behavior), but transcendentalism isn’t inherently opposed to other religions; Buddhism was good at simply roping existing gods into its metaphysics.
(Also, the two types aren’t in strict opposition: transcendentalist religions all have immanentist features in real practice, despite occasional reformation attempts, and such religions can easily make conversion headway because the immanentist people don’t necessarily see a conflict, with Jesus just one more god to turn to, whatever the priests say.)
I’m dividing it along different lines.
Despite all the speculative explanations and justifications in this thread that try to explain this it really comes down to this: it’s a common trope in fantasy to have really long timelines where things stay relatively static and unchanging. The writer(s) will have the occasional upheaval to shuffle up the status quo a bit, but it’s not the real world and trying to it equate how a fantasy world works to it is doomed to failure.
Many people believe that history is chock full of long periods of stasis. In an era with little literacy and few writings, this would probably be exaggerated.
In an extreme case, Ronald Hutton cited a fair that revived an “ancient” practice that had been first instituted within the lifetime of people still alive.
I think this is fairly common among human beings. We tend to imagine that anything that was in place when we were younger, long enough ago that the memories have blurred into “back when times were better and my knee didn’t ache all the time,” counts as a tradition.
Quite a few modern people believe that it is important to adhere strictly to ‘traditions’ that emerged only within living memory.
Like, perhaps, the structure of American higher education that developed after World War II.
Speaking as a citizen of a former colony, one interesting subset of this phenomenon is when people are committed to their “national” or “cultural” traditions, which after close historical examination are actually discovered to be a tradition *of the colonising power* that they brought with them to their colonies.
One that we discussed here the other month was school summer vacations which weren’t at all standardized until relatively recently, and the standard explanation for why is more a just-so story than anything else.
Or on the reverse, I remember my parents being amused shortly after my brother started at the same university as they’d met at to see complaints of something being an outdated tradition that continuing showed how determined the institution was to cling onto the remote past…. that hadn’t existed yet when they’d been.
Though I suspect universities are particularly prone to such, at least amongst students – time studying is effectively a lifetime for institutional memory purposes…..
One funny point about the Watch is that these problems frequently arise in some form in the Crusader Kings mod. The mechanics attempt to enforce the Watch’s cannon behavior but all AI and human players rebel against this and tend to grab land, become a regular duchy, fall under some lordship, meddle in wars, or even (in the AFFC scenario) attempt to install their leader as a high lord or king!
For that matter, many of these world building issues come up. The Seven Kingdoms are difficult to assemble and easy to fracture both as a single polity and separately, the turn over rate on dynasties is much higher, etc
It feels instructive to compare Martin’s Night’s Watch to the Eternal Guard in Glen Cook’s Black Company novels- the latter are explicitly military settlers put there initially to guard over the prison/tomb of a deposed sorcerer-king and sorcerer-queen and their servants, they have direct reminders of their task in the form of magical defenses around the tomb which they need special gear to pass through, and an implicit religious purpose.
Nevertheless, 370 years later, they’ve set themselves up as an independent-ish political entity, they’ve lost most of their magical equipment, and they primarily shake down relic scavengers trying to find remnants of the great battle that overthrew the sorcerer-king. And then the tomb is breached, and they’re almost immediately taken over by the escaped sorcerer-queen, who integrates them into the empire she builds.
I suspect some of the difference may be that Cook wrote the first books when uninflected fantasy wasn’t so closely tied to a simulacrum of medieval Western Europe, and so he treats many institutions in them as similar to his experience of the US Navy.
It may also be that Cook took a lot more thought about his worldbuilding.
Martin seems to be building his world more or less on the “This is how I think it should be”. He doesn’t think through “Well, if it were like that, then what?”
There was an earlier example of the nomad types who eat their horses (and pretty much that’s all they eat). Martin wanted a people who were quintessential “horse nomads”, but didn’t follow through and figure out what that actually meant.
And putting oath-taking in as a substitute religion? That’s just ridiculous. Not to mention that if they actually took oath-taking seriously, there would be a lot less breaking of those oaths in the books.
Not a fan of Martin. I did read books 1-4. Couldn’t get past episode 4 of season 1 of the TV show. People read his writing and think it’s really neat, but he’s just pandering to their prejudices about “How people lived in the past”. It works especially well on people who detect Christian influences in Lord of the Rings and react as though they’re vampires presented with a cross.
People read his writing and think it’s really neat, but he’s just pandering to their prejudices about “How people lived in the past”.
Yep. I like to put it this way: Imagine if someone in the 26th century wrote a fantasy novel set in a 20th-century Earth analogue and they had the Holocaust, the Holodomor, WWI, the Spanish Influenza, the Taiping Rebellion, and a genocidal version of the American Civil War all happen simultaneously, and then said “That’s how the 20th century really was. In fact, I toned it down.”
That is the relationship of GoT to real history.
Black Company mentioned!
It’s hard to pin down what historical period Cook was using from, but generally it seems like a mix of classical and Renaissance influences, rather than medieval. Certainly it’s much more _urban_, with little mention of standalone noble castles; we don’t see many cities in detail, but the fighting is usually over and around cities.
The historical Black Company was a unit of knights and peasants that fought in the Peasant’s Revolt in 1520s Germany. Cook said in an interview many years ago that he reads a lot of history and that’s what inspires his writing and gives him ideas. So not surprising that the setting (and state capacity of the Empire) are more early-modern Europe, when castles do become militarily obsolete. It’s kind of like if the Carolingian empire kept going and was ruled by an immortal sorcerer-Empress. There’s a bit of amusing lampshading when the locals of a backwater town that owes fealty to a petty noble located on the periphery of the Empire can’t comprehend its capacity for both violence and public works until it rolls into town. Kind of how Prof. Devereaux states in his series on the phalanx vs the legion that the various successor states to Alexander’s empire didn’t seem to grasp Rome’s state capacity for violence.
Tangentially related to Prof. Devereaux’s work, Cook wrote a stand-alone space opera, The Dragon Never Sleeps, that’s inspired by the Roman legions. The Guard Ships are the legions (and named after the legions), the Web is the network of roads, etc.
[ “Generally, retiring long-service professionals don’t move back into the imperial core – they settle (with their money and land) on the frontier, near their former bases, marrying local and having families (whose sons often end up in the army!).” ]
This is as true currently as it was then. When I lived in the Southwest US so many people I knew were the children of retired officers from the many, many military bases located in the Sun belt, who married local mom.
And internationally, too! I’m an Army brat, and tons of my classmates had a German or Korean parent because tours there were common. I’m sure other services would see different nationalities represented.
Yeah the major problem here is Martin’s lack of sense of time: The basic concept (a formerly high prestige organization that as the threat they’re supposed to be guarding against gets less and less prestige until it basically ceases working) is basically sound: The problem is that it happens over centuries rather than say, a couple of decades.
I note that the history of Westeros has the Nights Watch relatively often doing exactly what you suggest: Revolting, having Lord Commanders try to set themselves up as rulers, etc. Traditionally that’s the reason the castles aren’t fortified on the southern side. It being a *reoccuring* time bomb is absolutely part of the narrative.
If that were the case, you’d expect them to fortify the southern side! There are enough moments of Stark weakness that they could get away with it.
Yes, reading the first books in the series, the Night’s Watch came through to me as historical guff, along with so much else. One of the many reasons I stopped reading these books.
That religious faith mattered to people was even more unitary in the time of the Anarchy, When Christ and His Saints Slept — the war that finally made the Plantagenet Dynasty — to which House of the Dragon has far more resemblance than GOT ever had to the Wars of the Roses.
I object to the assumption that Merry and Pippin are elites in LOTR. Sure they are extremely wealthy by the standards of a European peasant but so is every other person depicted in the story, including many people who don’t appear to be elites. Discussions of LOTR seem to default to the assumption that Middle Earth is as materially poor as pre-industrial earth but that assumption does not fit the actual text well at all.
Whether they were especially more wealthy than anyone else matters less than the fact that they were, at a minimum, landed gentry, making them elites in Hobbit society.
All of the major hobbit characters, except for Sam, come from the Shire’s wealthiest families. None of the major hobbit characters, except for Sam, have ever worked for a living.
Pippen is a Took. The Tooks are the wealthiest family in the Shire, and the head of the family is the Thane; the closest thing the Shire has to a king. Merry is a Brandybuck. The Brandybucks rule Buckland.
All of the major hobbit characters, except for Sam, are related, because they come from a handful of elite families who only marry each other. Sam isn’t related to the Bagginses or Tooks, even though they’re his neighbors and have been for many generations, because he’s not the in the same social class.
I would object to your objection. If you consider Bilbo and Frodo to be elites within the society of the Shire, then you definitely should include Merry and Pippin. The Tooks and the Brandybucks are considerably wealthier than the Bagginses (in fact, the Hobbit notes that Bag End was partially funded with money gained when Bungo Baggins, Bilbo’s father, married Belladonna Took). They also have political influence in a way that we don’t see with the Bagginses.
The Tooks are the hereditary Thains of the shire, the hobbits left in charge from back when this was part of the kingdom of Arthedain, and while the title has mostly fallen into disuse, when Saruman sets up shop, it’s the Tooks who revolt against his quisling Lotho, explicitly saying that the Thainship gives them superior status. And Buckland is described as an “independent colony” of the shire, inhabited by the Brandybucks and their dependants.
These guys are very much at the top of the proverbial food chain of their societies. They are elites by any reasonable definition of the term.
Merry is Meriadoc Brandybuck, heir to the Master (that is, ruler) of Buckland, described as a small country, semi-independent of the Shire.
Pippin is Peregrin Took, son and heir to the Thain (that is, ruler) of the Shire.
They are not called Princes for the same reason their fathers are not called Kings (and that Denethor is not called a King). Nevertheless, they have as much reason to expect to inherit rulership as Boromir or Eomer.
If you are a crown prince, I think we can reasonably call you a member of the elite.
Note that at the end of the book they are able to raise a small army almost by themselves. That is not something that just anyone could so easily do.
I’m currious as to whether the poster is going entirely by the movies. In the books, it is quite clear that Merry and Pippin aren’t just members of the elite, they are members of the (very) top subclass of the elite and heirs to two very important titles. I’m not remembering if this is nearly as clear in the movies.
The movies don’t go into their backgrounds. But Merry and Pippin couldn’t get away with half their mischief if they weren’t scions of elite families.
The squire’s son could get away with a lot that the blacksmith’s can’t. Does the squire’s son have a title? No. But he’s certainly elite.
In the main text, Merry and Pippin are just Brandybuck and Took; elite families, but no more special than that. I don’t think it’s until “Scouring” that we learn Pippin’s father is the Thain, and then the family trees make clear that both are the only sons of the Shire’s non-elected leaders (such as they are.)
I do wonder if this is something Tolkien revised as he wrote, without changing his earlier chapters much. You’d think Frodo at least would have some qualms about hauling the heirs of the Shire off with him, or at least ask if maybe they didn’t have some family responsibilities to go back to.
For a good part of my life I imagined that Merry and Pippin ended up on top for the merits of their deeds, like Sam getting elected Mayor; only later did I realize “holy carp, they were the crown princes all along.”
The prologue (which I read last week) explains who the Tooks and Brandybucks are, without mentioning which specific people are heir to their titles.
Pippin is exactly Boromir’s peer on the org chart, if not in practice, which I always find a fun aspect to his interactions with Denethor.
There’s actually a note in one of the appendices, that the dialect used in Minas Tirith is one of those with a formal/familiar distinction in conjugation. Pippin, being both from a place with no such distinction and a somewhat indifferent student of languages, invariably used the familiar conjugations when talking to absolutely everybody, from the Steward on down.
It’s part of what lead to that rumor of him being a halfling prince and bringing an army of hobbits with the Rohirrim, because the locals assumed that anyone who talks to even the not-quite-king in casual tones, and of course not being ripped in half for his rudeness, must be someone hugely powerful and important.
There’s kind of a deep irony that if Pippin had the ability to accurately convey his position in Shire politics to the men of the Tower Guard, they’d likely just conclude that they were right about him being a Prince of the Halflings despite his protestations.
We and Pippin both know that doesn’t mean what the men of Gondor would assume it means, but that’s mainly the difference between the social structure of the Shire’s bucolic ideal and Gondor’s semi-feudal garrison society.
If we’re being technical, isn’t Pippin’s father Denethor’s superior since he’s the actual hereditary ruler, whereas Denethor is merely temporarily borrowing the authority of the king to rule?
Steward may be a hereditary noble title, but it’s not a title equal to that of a king.
In real life for example, the Prime Minister of England is the one actually in charge of the government and with all the power. The king of England is essentially ceremonial.
But the Prime Minister does not outrank the king – or any other monarchs from other countries – and officially the King is the ruler and the Prime Minister serves at his pleasure, even if for practical purposes the reverse is closer to the truth.
The Thain of the Shire isn’t a king. He’s a substitute king, because the actual kingdom fell. So he’s kind of like the Steward.
I’d say the Steward outranks him, because the Steward rules the entire old kingdom (or at least enough of it to keep the name).
You know, now I’m wondeting if there wasn’t a mini political crisis in the Shire when the heirs to 3 of the most powerful houses all disappeared at the same time with no explanation.
Hobbits are chill enough that I imagine it would mostly be eyerolling that some a Took, a Brandybuck, and a Baggins (all families with reputations for being more adventurous than a hobbit ought be) have apparently adventured off again.
OTOH, Frodo’s absence did allow Lotho to consolidate resources and influence; if Bilbo and Frodo had still been around, it likely would’ve been harder for Saruman’s flunkies to get their hooks in.
Well, for starters, while the Bagginses are definitely landed gentry, the impression I get is that there’s a big difference in wealth and power between them and the Tooks and Brandybucks. I’m not really sure how families like the Boffins and Bolgers and similar families measure up, but it’s certainly possible they’re richer/more influential than the Baggins family.
Secondly, while Pippin is heir to the Thainship, he technically isn’t heir to the head of the Took family. The former is a male-only position, but the latter is gender egalitarian, and Pippin is the fourth child of Paladin and Eglantine, with older sisters Pearl, Pimpernel, and Pervinca. As far as I know, only Merry has a solid claim to being ‘heir to one of the most powerful families in the shire’.
One other thing I often thought was weird, although maybe just inevitable if hobbit ‘high society’ is a fairly small group, is that Pippin is technically a child when he goes off on his adventure (29 years old. Age of majority in the Shire is 33), and his best friends are decades older, Frodo is starting what the hobbits consider middle age when they head to Rivendell.
Bilbo and Frodo are best friends, and are exactly 78 years apart. It probably helps that all these guys are related.
Bullseye, Frodo was Bilbo’s nephew and eventually adopted son.
Best friends is not an appropriate description of their relationship.
Bilbo and Frodo are “friends” like I (ae. 66) am friends with my geeky niece (ae. 21). There are things we can share (like the Three Body Problem), things I can introduce her to (like Asimov’s three laws), and millions of things we don’t have in common and can never share.
To be fair, modern society changes much more rapidly than a medieval society like the Shire. Bilbo and Frodo had a lot more in common than a modern-day 65-year-old and 20-year-old would.
Well, these were large extended families, in a society where it’s rare for people to die except of natural causes. I would imagine that the Tooks and Brandybucks have “an heir and a spare,” and probably a goodly number of spares after that if you count cousins and collateral relations.
Bilbo, meanwhile, had no heir other than Frodo, who in turn had no heir at all, and this DID lead to a power vacuum in Hobbiton, with Lotho Sackville-Baggins being able to take over and sell the place out to Saruman.
I had understood your discussions before about labor surplus on small farms, but hadn’t connected t to the Romans being able to have the manpower supplies they did.
Was this inefficiency something unique to Roman/Italy, or were the Romans just able to take advantage of it in a way no on else was? If it is unique, what was the basic cause? Elites accumulating too much land? High population density leading to less land availability?
My understanding is that almost everywhere in the premodern world was like that. After all, your claims to farmland and protection were mostly personal in nature – they depended on who you were related to and owed you support. To walk away from your family was to walk away from those things.
Note that walking away from the family farm meant walking away from your right to eat, so it was something people were reluctant to do. A place that people are reluctant to leave, is going to be overpopulated.
Constant low-level violence (feuds, disputes over honour) and young male out-migration are long-standing patterns in human societies (and out-migrants often died). In this respect humans are very similar to baboons.
AIUI, female outmigration has historically been more common: women tended to leave their families on marriage, rather than men.
After all, the family’s land was generally inherited by its sons, not its daughters.
Of course, in western Europe the aristocracy tended to have primogeniture, and in England the entire population did. So they would have had a lot more younger sons leaving the family landholdings to find their fortune, or at least their subsistence, elsewhere.
I tend to imagine that was why slavery died out in those societies, rather than elsewhere.
The picture is very much mixed – even in England. A serf who had no available sons would pass on the holding to a daughter and son-in-law, younger sons often migrated to towns or where land was available (clearances were common from 1100 – reclaiming forest or marsh), sometimes moving long distances (Poland and Hungary were keen on adding peasants). And then there was near-constant warfare – going for a soldier.
Urban areas and war were population sinks for young men.
There were regions even in England where they practiced ultimogeniture
PeterT and Mary, I’m generalising of course, but its a more accurate generalization to say that women left the family farm and men stayed, than to say the reverse.
Female out-marriage was the common practice. Female out-migration much less so. The usual pattern is that young men go out, find opportunities (or fail to or die), send back, bring women and then older folk.
What Peter T said. “Exogamy”–marrying a nearby boy and living on his family farm–is not the same as “out-migration”–joining the army, moving to a city etc.
TBH, my understanding is that genetic evidence suggests faster extinction of male lineages (as you would expect from greater variability of reproductive success), but faster geographic spread of female lineages (as you would expect from women marrying – or at least reproducing – further from their birthplace).
But it is just an understanding – I have no reference to point to.
I think it worth pointing out that in a long settled agricultural area there are few opportunities to start a new farm, as the useable sites are generally already in use. Roman pacification of an area could create some – but they would be taken quickly, on a timescale of generations.
I’ll amend this – the genetics (and a great deal of the history) points to female dispersion via capture (Iceland is a good case in point – the male line dna in largely Norse, the female Irish/Scottish). But how common and how far back that goes is much less clear.
You make a pretty good case against the Night’s Watch. If I was determined to defend it, I guess I’d have to retreat to fantasy’s last resort of scoundrels… *magic*.
The Wall itself is explicitly magical. Maybe, something-something, oaths to join the Night’s Watch made at the Wall have a real, magical effect on people’s minds that make them much less willing to break them? Yeah, I know, it’s a terrible answer but at least “it’s magic” is an answer.
One benefit of this hack is that it helps explain the dwindling of the NW, since magic in general has been weakening in the last century due to the extinction of dragons.
Yeah, Magic was an alternative I considered as well.
On concept that shows up, probably in fiction, but I mostly know through tabletop role-playing is that vows (often misnamed as oaths) can give you power.
Make a vow to a divinity, or a cosmic principle, or even the metaphysical weight of a nation or institution, and receive magical benefits in return for your service. That’s kinda what a D&D Paladin is.
Of course, if the Night’s Watch were modeled as being like D&D Paladins (even without the requirement to be of “Good” alignment or with a less stringent Code of Conduct), they would NOT be the grimy, dour, unhappy lot that GRRM wrote. Having magical bennies is great, and if you’re a third son of a peasant with nothing to look forward to this sounds like an awesome deal.
So, if we want to watch to remain the miserable brothers-in-black, it can’t be the sort of vow that people seek voluntarily.
Instead, it’d have to be basically magical coercion. Be that mind control, or a geas that harms or kills you if you violate the commands it binds you to.
D&D Paladins only gritty and realistic.
Gritty isn’t more realistic. That’s always been a horrible brainbug.
Yup.
I think that this isn’t reflected in the inner monologues of the four separate members of the Night’s Watch (two of them some of the very few representatives of the peasantry we see from the perspective of) or the general understanding of within the assumed worldview of characters. Individual members run away every so often and are executed when caught. The characters don’t appear to experience any noticeable and uncanny resistance to thoughts or actions contravening their oaths- and certainly, the Watch doesn’t even try to enforce restrictions on sexual activity because it seems impossible.
And of course, “this organization functions by subtle magical mind-control” would run very strongly counter to the thematics of the Watch and the worldview of Martin’s fiction- the Watch is intended to be a noble concept at its root, after all, one that has gone wayward in the interim.
I think the obvious solution would be to have the “magic of the wall” give members of the Watch better health and longer life spans. Not dramatically so, perhaps, but enough that they would notice after they took their vows.
These benefits would also disappear if you left your post and travelled too far south, meaning that any Watch army that tried to march on Winterfell would be effectively crippled by disease and rapid aging long before it got there.
IMO, it would also be a fun plot point where the Watch’s members themselves didn’t fully understand the “rules” of this magic and weren’t sure which behaviors would rob them of the gift.
Magic has to be in the book — and preferably consistently — to really be a suitable fix. Fanon can be fun, and sometimes more logical than the author’s explanation, but the fiction is still flawed.
Magic was the answer I came up with too. The oath created a magical contract that could only be broken with devastating results.
It’s a great fan-fix, and if someone were doing an “Ice and Fire, Resung” fanfiction, it’d be a great choice. But within the canon, it invites the question of why deserters from the Night’s Watch are so widely known as a phenomenon. Granted, it’s the norm in the North to put such men to death, but that is described more as a social penalty than as a magically enforced outcome.
plus, in a society as sparsely populated as the North, “law enforcement / policing” doesn’t seem like a super effective means of keeping people on the wall, at least not by itself.
Plausibly deniable magic is the best kind of magic. Why should the god receiving the vow bother to smite a deserter with a lightning bolt, when it is sufficient to make a few bushes rustle to lead a peasant to the deserter attempting to hide? Or to insert/twist a few conversational cues so that the cover of the deserter attempting to pass as something else is blown?
As someone who just got back from Hadrian’s Wall this really resonates. It seems to me that the milecastles and turrets and walled settlements were as about as encaging the soldiers as protecting them.
And as someone who’s also rewatching GoT season 6, it also resonates because while the show does take into account the punishment for leaving the wall in not just the first episode, but the show’s entire inspiration (a father takes his son to watch an execution), it doesn’t deal with the psyche of the prisoners in their one-walled prison. Most are screwed over (Flint) or discarded (Sam) or criminals (the guys with Jaquin) or otherwise aggrieved (Jon Snow); they would HATE the Seven Kingdoms and likely want to strike back at their live sentences; only Maester Aemon has a reason to stay for something larger than what’s beyond the wall. In addition, Winterfell never seems to worry that there’s this army that could pounce on the North right above them, and no one else worries the North and the Night Watch might ally themselves to pounce on them. I mean, the Walkers are a threat now, but what about the previous 300 years? That said, the Wall itself is classic narrative architecture, designed as a locus of conflict, not to actually do its job well, so I give the Night’s Watch a bit of a pass.
“the North and the Night Watch might ally themselves to pounce on them.”
Well, there’s the whole distance thing.
Pre-Aegon, the North would have been a bigger threat by itself than the Watch was, assuming it wanted to go south at all despite being rather too big by itself already.
Post-Aegon, pre-Dance: you don’t rebel against dragons if you’re wise.
Post-Dance, eh, that’s just 150 years.
There is very little indication that the Roman garrisons on Hadrian’s Wall felt ‘encaged’ by their positions. The Wall in Martin’s fiction bears little resemblance to the real Wall of Hadrian in any particular.
What we see in the Night’s Watch is that the hierarchy still comes from the elite, not the commoners. Jeor Mormont is a noble, and so is Jon Snow; near-Lord Commander Janos Slynt was the commander of the King’s Landing city watch. To the hierarchy, especially the Northerners, the Watch is less a life sentence than a place for surplus sons of the nobility, one granting them a measure of respect when they get leave to travel south (like Benjen Stark) and giving their families additional prestige.
Members of the nobility turning against other members of the nobility when they get the chance to improve their own position is rather common though. And with the election system, the Lord Commander would probably be mostly aligned with the interests of the rank-and-file. And, furthermore, a surplus son pushing his claim would even serve as a nice casus belli.
So that isn’t really a way to keep the Night’s Watch loyal.
Besides, for the Night Watch commoners – even if they DO stay on the Wall, why not just do it as secular lords, having wives and children, just as their neighbours do?
For the kingdom in general, it makes sense to not have wives and children on the Wall. The strip of Gift that the Stewards farm can feed so many mouths. If the women and children are excluded then the number of the rest – Rangers and Builders – will make a bigger fraction of the total mouths fed on the spot.
But that same argument would count for excluding cripples and elders. Therefore, it would make perfect sense to recall old and crippled brethren back South – and provide them the future motivation by allowing better retirement, marriage and children for veterans with honourable discharge.
Women and (except for the very youngest) children are not unproductive members of a medieval community. While effective fighting men must spend significant time training for combat, and their equipment has costs that require several workers doing civilian jobs to support each full-time soldier, the wives and children of those soldiers can be among the civilians doing those jobs.
A world in which the Night Watch have wives and children who help to farm the Gift and maintain the equipment and so on would make considerably more sense than a world where the Night Watch are a theoretically chaste and in practice celibate religious order with at least a thousand men under arms who have no families and nothing to look forward to except death in the line of duty or a decrepit pseudo-retirement on the Wall itself.
“nothing to look forward to except death in the line of duty or a decrepit pseudo-retirement on the Wall itself.”
Not much of a retirement. A typical 25-year-old landowner in mediaeval England had a life expectancy of 23.3 more years. Dead at 48.
https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/34/6/1435/707557
And he wasn’t living a life of hardship and occasional combat in a sub-arctic environment.
Martin gets this in the books, but all the characters are aged up in the series. Ned Stark is 36 when he dies (but he’s played by Sean Bean, aged 52).
“What I find interesting about these responses is they’ve made the same misstep I think GRRM has perhaps also made: they have only considered the problem from the elite perspective.”
I suspect that the misstep is to fail to consider the problem from the Bane perspective: They are so used to a world in which sending someone to prison or getting a signed agreement gives you control over someone, that they don’t really think about what happens when there is no one to enforce the rules for you. The businessman in that clip never considered how to control Bane AFTER paying him to build an army. He was used to a world in which other people made sure that if you paid someone to build something for you, they would give control of it over to you. He was blindsided by the discovery that armies don’t work that way.
(See also the kind of person who thinks that Hitler or Putin or Xi must be controlled by rich people, without ever realising that people with money can always be controlled by people with secret police and concentration camps.)
It varies a bit. Hitler was always at least fairly respectful of the interests of the German industrialists. While he theoretically had the power to break any one of them, his system was not set up to make this very practical. Especially since he was headed full-tilt for a major war and couldn’t afford disruption of his industrial base.
Fascist Italy, where things were a bit less total and slightly less murderous, had slightly more power go to capital.
Putin, upon climbing to power, took down all the rich men in Russia who didn’t support him. Because Russia was not fighting any significant wars, he had plenty of time to consolidate resources and redistribute them to his cronies.
Xi is the leader of a party system that predates the entire current class of Chinese billionaires and has made sure it can break them if it feels the need. Thus, Xi is relatively immune, despite having done nothing much personally to curtail the billionaires.
Four different countries, three different situations.
A dictator can be controlled by rich and powerful men or corporations. But it usually relies on the rich individual living outside the country and outside the immediate reach of the dictator’s goon squads.
Let’s say you use your computer to work. You can break it, but you never do that because you won’t be able to earn money anymore. So do you control your computer, or does it control you?
Power is a complicated thing. It’s not simply just who is controlling whom.
“Hitler was always at least fairly respectful of the interests of the German industrialists.”
From the wikipedia article on Hugo Junkers:
“When the Nazis came into power in 1933, they requested Junkers and his businesses aid in the German re-armament. When Junkers declined, the Nazis placed him under house arrest in 1934 and eventually seized control of his patents and company. He died the following year.”
Would you wish to be treated with similar respect yourself? I think it is pretty clear who had the power, and it wasn’t Junkers.
Yes, that seems a bit silly to me considering history.
Looking at Fascist Italy’s behaviour, I do not have the impression that Mussolini had asked rich people what they thought of his plans to join WWII without first warning Italy’s merchant navy which was then seized by the British, or invade Greece from Albania without even bothering to first station enough troops in Albania.
Or Francoist Spain. At first Franco had ruined his country so much with his corruption and autarkic economic policies that it took until the 1950’s before his country was more prosperous than it had been before it had been ruined by the Great Depression and destroyed by civil war. That also does not scream ‘secretly controlled by rich people’ to me.
I like “Albert von Preußen”, it is a nice compromise! In English, he is “Albert of Prussia”, and in German, he is “Albrecht von Preußen”, but no need to quarrel, let’s all use the Engdeutsch!
If we went with ‘Albrecht of Prussia’ we wouldn’t have to try to figgure out how to type an SZ.
The scharfes s, ß, is transliterated as ss when the exact typeface is not available, never sz as far as I’m aware. In fact, between different versions of German (German, Austrian, Swiss, endless local dialects…) and different spellings reforms the movement between ß and ss is very free. Using one or the other wouldn’t be considered a spelling mistake by all but the most hardcore purists.
> The scharfes s, ß, is transliterated as ss when the exact typeface is not available, never sz as far as I’m aware.
Yes, but it’s also named “Eszett,” which literally means SZ.
Huh, I’d only ever heard it called “scharfes s”. Turns out it’s a North-South divide, and it has lots of other names too. Having lived in Austria and Switzerland, I’d never heard it called Eszett at all, even by German teachers.
The other big issue I have with the Night’s Watch is that it should be absolutely rife with abuse. New recruits (of the criminal variety) have basically no rights; they’re on their last chance and if it doesn’t work out for them in the Night’s Watch they’re literally dead. They would have very little chance to complain to the Night’s Watch leadership if they were being mistreated, and no reason to think that said leadership would care about the mistreatment of the petty criminals sent to them.
Even if the leadership *did* care about more senior members mistreating more junior members, their options to deal with it are limited. In canon the Lord Commander admits this (albeit about a different issue), when he comments that if he punished everyone who visited the local brothel he’d have nobody left. Short of execution, the question of how to punish armed men who are already in a penal colony is a difficult one. And I would expect that if abusers were punished with anything short of execution, the very next thing that happens is that the person who “ratted them out” has an unfortunate accident. In short, abuse in the Night’s Watch should be common, for many of the same reasons that it’s common in modern prison systems that have not taken deliberate and extensive measures to prevent it.
Now I will admit that I’m torn on this break from reality. On the one hand, really the last thing that Game of Thrones needed was *more* sexual violence. On the other hand, the fact that the sexual violence of Martin’s world is essentially always directed at young women is one of the things that shows that Martin doesn’t fully understand sexual violence, what conditions it happens in, and what guardrails exist in any society to (try to) stop it from happening.
(I realized right after I posted this that I’m used to having these discussions in fanfiction spaces. Please replace “in canon” with “in the text”)
Do we know that there isn’t widespread abuse? Most of what we see of the NW is from the perspective of Jon and Sam, who both would get some measure of protection from being noblemen.
That’s true — it would be realistic for there to be a lot of abuse going on that Jon is shielded from.
But, if there’s *Shawshank Redemption*-level abuse happening, then that’s a very different story than the one we’re given. This now isn’t a story about an underdog bastard fighting through adversity to command the Night’s Watch, before being brought low by treachery. This would be a story of a privileged noble who is ignorant of the hardships the men under him are dealing with, who does nothing to address them, and goes to his death remaining ignorant.
And I think that’s a valid story, but I don’t think it’s the story Martin had written.
And even then Jon absolutely gets abuse from the other watch members (and several attempts at murder)
I mean, we see that the guy in charge of training new recruits to the Night’s Watch is abusive and not very good at his job (though he is a brave and capable soldier), and the Lord Commander can’t really be bothered to do anything about it.
And we see that in the very first book. New recruits are always trained by Ser Alliser Thorne, the Master-At-Arms of the Night’s Watch. He has a very harsh method of training new recruits.
This harsh method isn’t about building cohesion or training them to become better warriors, but simply a method of bullying the powerless in front of him because he’s resentful of his position and takes it out on those powerless to do anything about it. He is woefully ill-suited for being in his role to the point where it not only is needless cruelty, it negatively impacts the NW in the form of poor training and lower morale.
And when Tyrion points this out to LC Mormont, his response is basically a shrug and “Eh, it is what it is. Whatcha gonna do?”
That’s true, but the tone the story presents it in is similar to, like, that one teacher that everybody hates but the school can’t fire. There’s not much sense of any real ingrained bullying. There’s no system of favors being passed up to those with more seniority in exchange for protection, we don’t hear of anyone being seriously assaulted, etc.
Now maybe that’s all going on without Jon’s knowledge — but I think that makes this a different story than the one we’re given.
The problem is “armed men who are already in a penal colony”.
These two things are contradictions. A penal colony will have armed guards; it will not have armed prisoners – or it won’t be a penal colony or have guards for long.
The part about new arrivals having no rights. Again, you don’t hand spears to a bunch of people and then tell them they have no rights. At least not unless you’re tired of living.
Even in today’s armies, there are many controls on arms and who can be armed and when. Mostly due to past revolts.
Organisation matters a lot more than raw violence. The Red Army had all the guns and yet was completely powerless to resist Stalin purging its leadership in 1937.
Abuse of poorly-connected armed soldiers by other, higher-ranking or better-connected, armed soldiers is absolutely rife in a lot of modern militaries, not to mention historical ones.
Until and unless you break the victim to the point where they’re willing to throw their life away to do a mass shooting, the perpetrators can get away with that absolutely scot-free.
One thing that i am wondering about is this: Is the nightwatch meant to be a meaningfull military force?
Because i am not sure we are meant to. I am wondering if this is a scale issue. Martins armies tend to be comically large for the society he wrote. I am not sure the nightwatch is meant to be a force at a size where they CAN threaten winterfell, in which case the fear is more them shiving their commander and deserting in mass.
If memory serves, the notional military strength of the North if a Stark calls in all his lords to bring a full muster and waits for them all to arrive at Winterfell is about 35k. At its peak the Night’s Watch was about 10k; if they planned in secret for a coordinated departure on the wall to race for Winterfell, they would be a serious threat. Of course in the series they’re down to 1k, and had to shut down most of their fortifications because they didn’t have enough men to man them.
I’m not sure how secret it would need to be. The impression I get from the story is that the 35k Lord Stark can call is mostly the lords under him conscripting their peasants to fight. Against 10k trained, experienced fighters, that might not be enough even at full strength.
In canon, the way it works is that it *used* to be a meaningful military force. A long, long time ago, they all actively feared the nightwalkers and had something like 10,000 members. But over time they lost all fear of the nightwalkers, and the watch lost most of its strength. Down to something under 1000 in the books, so not nearly enough to threaten Winterfell. The Nights watchmen spend a lot of time grumbling about how pointless their job is, since “the wall defends itself,” and they mainly seem to be “protecting” against the free folk who are not that bad, and in fact many of the Nights watch leave to join them.
So I feel like it actually dodges most of Brett’s complaints. Yes, being on the Nights watch is shitty. But there’s not nearly enough of them to be a real military threat (which ends up becoming quite a problem when they are actually finally needed). Instead they just leave and desert their post.
There’s also the point that there’s a couple of incidents mention where the Lord Commander of the Nights Watch *did* try something and got smacked down for it, one of the plot points/things is that the Watch Castles are forbidden from fortifying the southern side, precisley so that if they try something whoever rules the North has an easier time taking them down.
Now that I think about it, don’t the Rangers in LotR have the exact same problem? They’re clearly not military settlers, since they’re nomadic, and obviously no one’s paying them. Maybe there’s a religious aspect to their mission that I missed, but if not, then why haven’t they conquered the Shire generations ago?
They get paid by Rivendel to keep the road to the sea safe. I think most of their women and children are there to.
There is no evidence of either claim, and rather evidence against their women and children being at Rivendell.
The Rangers aren’t at all historical but the Dunedain in general aren’t; they’re kind of ‘blessed’ and not behaving like real grubby humans. Not that they’re perfect (second half of Numenor; Kin-Strife), but still, they’re kind of idealized humans.
I wouldn’t say that there is no evidence.
In the Appendix, it says after the ruin of the capital and the Forochel disaster that the last king’s son, widow, and what remained of the treasury went to Rivendell. This practice is apperently repeated each generation for a thousand odd years.
“I reserve the right to personally educate your cheiftain’s heir and also hold onto your royal secpter for safe keeping.” smells a lot like overlord-ship.
Furthermore, let’s look at where the Ranger focus their military activity: the Shire, Breeland, the mountain passes (Rivendell’s lines of communication). Other areas, like the old north/south road, Rhudaur, Cardorlan, are neglected and become very wild and dangerous for travelers.
When they finally mobilize for war, their equipment is upgraded and suplimented by Rivendell craftsmen (probibly they maintain that equipment during peacetime). They also operate hand-in-glove with Rivendell elf-units (probibly not the first time for joint operations).
The Chieftains being fostered in Rivendell is evidence _against_ their women and children living there normally. Aragorn and Gilraen only go there when he’s 2 because his father had been killed.
Elrond is heir to two elven kingships which he hasn’t tried to invoke; he doesn’t seem very overlordy. “I’m pulling rank as your great-uncle” and “sure, you can store your valuables in the last safe place” give the same result.
We don’t know that much about Ranger foci, nor the chicken and egg ordering. By Frodo’s time, spending their time guarding the Shire and passes would make sense because those are where the people are, and trade comes from. Could be that they tried guarding more but fell back to the Shire after they failed to prevent trolls from eating all the minor villages.
I don’t remember equipment upgrade in the book, unless you mean Anduril being reforged. There’s obviously some cooperation, but “paid by Rivendell” is a leap, and “the women live there” is basically wrong. Tolkien’s wording on that was “the Dunedain became a secret and wandering people”, and some alleged scribbles about living in the Angle (not too far from Rivendell, if true).
If you’re talking about the Rangers of the North (There’s technically a second group of Rangers, the Rangers of Ithilien, but those guys are explicitly Gondorian ‘special forces’ and presumably paid to do that), yeah, I would say it’s religious devotion of a sort.
Remember, these people are the highest of high nobility of the former kingdom of Arnor, and they have a number of prophecies that when everything is said and done, the ultimate heir of Isildur is going to go south and overthrow Sauron and rule over the reunited Kingdom. A bunch of the other rangers would necessarily become senior members in that administration. And hey, it actually works out!
Also, I’m not sure about ‘no one’s paying them’. They seem to get money from somewhere, at least enough to head to places like Bree and stay at Barliaman’s tavern and stock up on pipeweed. Maybe like Ike said, they get paid by Elrond and the folks at Rivendell?
A parallel might be the Hashashin and other Shi’ite military orders: originating merely as the followers of a deposed royal line (the Alids / Isildur), they eventually develop into a religious tradition devoted towards the messianic restoration of the divinely-appointed king.
(I’m not sure who the equivalent of Aragorn is in this analogy, maybe the Aga Khan IV?)
The rangers might recovered part of the North Kingdoms treasure after the Witch King was driven out. Also they might have traded with Bree folk bringing in a wild boar or something they killed for meat.
The stick may be that their numbers are too small. The 30 Rangers that meet Aragorn in Helms Deep are “all that could be gathered in great haste”, so their total numbers may be in the low hundreds. The citizen militias of the Shire or Bree could probably be able to expell them if they became unwelcome.
The carrot may be gifts and hospitality. Is there any information on if Aragorn is paying in the Prancing Pony? Maybe the Rangers kill monsters that threaten the people of Eriador, and some communities in Eriador give them lodgings and gear from time to time in return.
Add to that the ideological motivation that Adam describes, and it could work.
(LotR is more idealized than ASoIaF, so I am more forgiving about some things there, for example the long time scales.)
The Bree-folk generally treat the Rangers with suspicion and contempt, suspecting them of being troublemakers. Barliman warns Frodo repeatedly about “Strider”, and only seems to relent once Mordor is namedropped with regards to the black riders.
I may be mistaken, but the impression I got from the Scouring of the Shire was that a few hundred well-armed and well-trained men could very likely take over the Shire.
It’d be a bit touch-and-go for only a few hundred men to take over the Shire. Just to administer the place they’d need local sympathizers, and they’d be at considerable risk of the established “squirearchy” who are dug into relatively strong delvings that act as hillforts (the Tooks and Brandybucks being the biggest examples) rallying the masses against them. I’m not saying it would be impossible, but… touch-and-go.
And, of course, once word got around that you’d done it, someone else might gather up a few hundred fighting men and come after you with the same idea.
There are mentions that the rangers have villages and such tucked away where their families live. (though Aragorn specifically was raised in Rivendell)
The Watch is culturally and religiously Northern, although they tolerate members of the Faith (and the Faith of the Old Gods and the Faith of the Seven are syncretistic and ecumenical in a way that wasn’t true of Catholicism or Protestantism). We know that the North doesn’t view the Watch as a dumping ground for criminals, but as a valuable calling for men without land or property and especially surplus sons of the aristocracy. That’s going to be the “core” of men that holds them together, especially since there’s no open conflict between the Faith and Old Gods religion anymore – even the southern lords have both a godswood and their septs.
I actually think they should have a problem with deserters to the Wildlings, since that’s not a death sentence like trying to desert southwards.
As for heading south, there’s only a few hundred fighters among them of mixed quality (some very good like Qhorin, others pretty green like Jon’s friends), and they’d be trying to march through lands filled with people who are well-acquainted with violent strangers raiding into their lands. They’d probably get as far as sacking one of the Umbar’s small lord’s castles before word gets out to him and House Stark gets a raven, and then they’d find themselves up against a force far, far greater in number than theirs and probably better equipped.
Or the northerners among them would kill them first.
“I actually think they should have a problem with deserters to the Wildlings, since that’s not a death sentence like trying to desert southwards.”
They do. That’s Mance Rayder’s entire origin story.
A point that suggests the Watch should be more likely to ally with a Wildling invasion than defend against it, which to my mind is not the behaviour you want in a border guard.
So here’s a thought: does the Watch actually have to have any military skill? As someone on Twitter said, their main job is defending a 700 foot high wall of magical dce. (And maybe adding to its height, over the millennia?) Seems to me like all they have to do is hold the gates, and drop rocks or ice blocks on attacks from _700 feet up_.
Do they have horses? Or many horses, and cavalry? Do they have armor? Did they have armor when there were 10,000 of them? Do they actually have cohesion as a field infantry force maintaining anything like a shield wall? Do they have any siege equipment or knowledge of siege? On Twitter, Bret kept tweeting about “they would sack Winterfell”, but could they really?
Real questions, here: I read 1.5 books several years ago, so most details have escaped me. But even if GRRM described contradictory details, seems to me that the fix might be as simple as “it’s a garrison force for a giant fortification (toward the north), with a hobby of ‘ranging’, if they tried anything else they’d get slaughtered.”
The Watch has armor, and some of them are highly capable fighters for the type of fighting they do. But they only fight against stateless peoples with no castles. Some, though not most, probably have relevant experience from before joining the watch.
Yeah. The Night’s Watch turning around, marching south, and succeeding is about as plausible as, say, the US Border Patrol launching a successful coup d’etat.
As a side note, desertion to the Wildlings is something that comes up in the books–Mance Rayder, the “King Beyond the Wall,” is a deserter from the Night’s Watch, and that Jon Snow pretends to be a deserter when he goes to act as an undercover agent and the Wildlings think it’s a plausible enough story that they don’t kill him on the spot implies that such desertions happen with some frequency.
If the Nights Watch is strong enough to fight off a significant threat to Westeros, it is strong enough to *be* a significant threat to Westeros. If it is not strong enough to fight off a significant threat, it ought to be disbanded and the resources concentrated on the kings armies.
The point of the king’s armies is to support and extend the kings rule: there is no point sending resources to an army that doesn’t do that. An army that is not strong enough to be a threat is not an army worth having.
If the threat from the north is regarded as so negligible, the Wall should be manned by the border lords.
Why is the monarch in Kings Landing sending troops to the Wall on the strict understanding that they swear an oath to never come south and fight for the king in Kings Landing?
The Night’s Watch is stronger when fighting invaders than they would be if they became invaders, because the Wall itself helps them. The Wall (unlike real walls) is a difficult obstacle even when unmanned, and even more difficult when manned.
As for the King sending men to the Wall instead of recruiting him for his own armies, the only men the King sends are criminals he can’t trust.
“it is strong enough to *be* a significant threat to Westeros”
That doesn’t follow. Fortifications are a force multiplier for defenders, and the Wall is a huge fortification. And the northern threats are ice zombies or wildlings, neither of whom has much in the way of siege engines, let alone anti-Wall siege.
A military that can hold the Wall may still not be much threat to a continent supposedly the size of South America.
For a smaller example, the Twins and Moat Cailin both allow a small force to choke off land traffic between the North and South; that doesn’t make the garrison of either an active threat to anyone else.
In that case, as I said above:
“If the threat from the north is regarded as so negligible, the Wall should be manned by the border lords.”
(And notice, by the way, that if you are depending on a wall to defend you, the gates in that wall should not be held by men you selected on the basis that you think they are criminals, and that they are not loyal to you.)
Also, if the Watch managed a collective mutiny, while the Wall castles are intentionally unprotected towards South (which makes them vulnerable in case of counterattack against mutiny – but also against Wilding attack that breaches an undermanned section taking the bases from the rear), they do have Builders. They might build these protections against South – or rearrange the gate protections to make gates defensible against South, and retreat North, defecting to Wildings.
Something we see in the internal view of the lower class Watch members: they are not unwilling to desert (but with poor prospects – Westeros means certain execution if identified, Wildings might accept deserters but not so readily, overseas to Essos would be reasonably safe but hard to reach), but they seem to have trouble uniting for collective mutiny. We have examples of a few like Craster´s Keep, but they tend to not succeed. And we hear of many losing Watch mutinies.
Chinese dynasties also sent condemned criminals to guard the northern border. However the border military was also directly commanded by the empire.
It should also be noted that even the Chinese were not immune to their border fortifications blowing up in their face. Most notably of course the An Lushan rebellion that broke the Tang dynasty.
Or the general meltdown of the Song Dynasty’s ability to defend itself against nomads from the north.
A propos “short fuse” for this kind of political fracturing, here is how the Han Dynasty ended:
188 – The emperor decrees that his local magistrates are granted the power to collect taxes and command armed forced raised from their domains.
189 – Several of those magistrates storm the capital and slaughter the up-until-then powerful court officials, with one of them ending up as the power behind the throne, who poisons one child emperor to get the more tractable other child emperor.
191 – Any semblance of a unified empire is gone, the emperor is just a political token passed around by the warlords to claim legitimacy.
There is possibly something interesting going on with how A Song of Ice and Fire’s celibate orders differ from their historical inspirations. The Night’s Watch, the King’s Guard, and the Maesters are all not particularly religious in their practice and don’t seem to be in it for a better shot at salvation. Instead, they seem to follow and ideal of service as a form of selfless duty. And the ideal of selfless duty appears at other points: Stannis thinks that it is irrelevant if he wants to be king, he is the rightful heir which means that it is his duty. Ned’s honor seems to be more linked to moral duty than to his reputation.
Service, Duty, (moral) Honor – as far as I can tell these are values more at home in the 19th and 20th century. At least in their abstracted, universal form. In the Middle Ages these were embedded in reciprocal social ties.
Worldbuilding-wise one could ask if it is plausible for a society like Westeros to give rise to or adopt these as its primary values. Storytelling-wise it seems clear that Martin wants to write about characters who grapple with those values and one has to wonder if the setting is really suited for that. (And now I am thinking about Steampunk Westeros as an alternative setting.)
In limited defense of the concept, the books indicate that the Night’s Watch didn’t used to be a punishment position. The noble families of the men sent their had a tradition of being generous in providing for their supply and entertainment and in its salad days it functioned as a feast hall and hunting lodge for nobles in internal exile as much as an armed force.
Which also is related to the reason for the Watch’s decline. The previous system of endemic warfare in Westeros created a need for military men to be made socially dead so they were no longer a threat to someone who defeated them, without the blood feud with their family that comes from killing them. Hence the tradition of offering membership of the Watch as an alternative. You get to live up there as a military noble, but give up your previous life so are a dead man in political and dynastic terms. In effect they resemble the professional option above, you don’t get the benefits of retirement, because the point is social death, but presumably the life in the exile noble lead watch was pretty nice for both leaders and rank and file despite the bad weather which lead to reasonable job satisfaction.
The coming of Pax Draconia to Westeros ending the regular warfare was effectively the end of the Watch as an effective institution. Martin’s usual bad tendency to inflate how long social processes take is why this is a centuries long problem when it should have played out in decades.
One thing I wondered about in the context of the Twitter thread was the impact of Raven communication on the society. I have the suspician that quick long-distance communication with minimal disruptions during war would have a big impact on the government structure. Westeros would probably look very different from any society in earth history, because it is sort of a society that has the telegram but not the printing press and steam engine. I have difficulty figuring out how such a society would look like.
Messenger pigeons are a real thing, and were used historically though. Not sure how raven communications would be substantially different.
You take a messenger pigeon somewhere, attach a message, and it flies back home. But ravens in ASoIaF are different; somehow you can tell them where to go, and any castle is a valid destination.
The book wiki says ravents aren’t _that_ smart:
“Most ravens are trained to fly to a specific castle, but some can be taught to fly between two castles and are therefore greatly prized. Maybe once a century, a particularly clever raven might be able to fly to as many as five castles upon command.[14] ”
But getting any ravens to fly back and forth between two locations would be a huge win, compared to having to schlep one-way birds between Winterfell and King’s Landing, say.
That said, the raven network does seem suspiciously complete, given how many different castles there are.
As for differences… _The Crusades Through Arab Eyes_ said that the Crusaders in fact didn’t have homing pigeons, and this was a military disadvantage vs. the Arabs. Arab cities could call for help despite a siege, Arab scouts could send messages back to home city (but _not_ to a field general). I don’t know if there was a big pigeon-derived difference in general administrative capacity, though.
Hello I just wanted to give an answer why George has made so many orders where nobody marries or holds lands. They are all supposed to be symbolic forms of undeath and mirror the wights the Others make for their war on the living. I recommend David Light Bringers youtube channel for all the symbology, mythology, and astronomy that is prevalent throughout the story but what becomes clear is George is very good at constructing a fantasy world and story with deep internal mythology and symbolism. I think its one of the reasons the actual historical part of the world just doesn’t make it because the Night’s watch being a symbolic army of the living dead but for the actual forces of life who fight an army of dead living beings who fight for the forces of death is really cool for a mythology and creates a very cool story but just doesn’t make sense historically because like that never happened. It is obviously not the only thing that causes these historical flaws but I think it does explain a lot of decisions George made, ie its cooler for the worlds mythology and symbology and themes and story rather then being historically accurate. Which is totally fine when we remember its a fantasy universe and only bad when people try to argue this fantasy universe is totally realism yo. Saying that continue the great work love your stuff.
I can kind of see the Night’s Watch as being symbolically undead, but that’s not really the impression I get from the Maesters or the Kingsguard.
I have no familiarity at all with these fantasy books, but regarding the commentary about professional mercenaries and the society sponsoring them, in a modern context, I couldn’t help but think about the French Foreign Legion. Is anyone here a scholar of this elite unit? There seem to be many parallels with what is described in the essay. The Legion is famous for inculcating a sense of loyalty to the formation — “Legio Patria Nostra” is the motto, after all — and that has placed it in a c;ass of its own for most of its history. Apart from a quasi-mutiny among a few units and individuals in Algeria at the tail end of that colonial war, and some conflicted loyalties during WWII when some units obeyed the Vichy government and some joined DeGaulle’s Free French forces, it has served France loyally and steadfastly throughout its history. One of the inducements for “good behavior” is French citizenship at the end of the basic enlistment period (five years). No land bounty tho’!
Maybe this is completely my own head canon, but back when there was more Magic in the world of Westeros, those Night’s Watchmen were a religious order, that defended the realms of humanity from literal ice demons. You do not need much religious ritual to convice you that your watch is justified, if you literally can see those deamons.
Also it is implied that the Starks at that point had some magic powers themself, since they pulled of stuff like creating an ice wall spanning the continent. So it wasn’t that easy for the watch men to just go south, and take some land for themself.
I think it is not completly clear when the White Walkers disapeared, but I guess it was around the time of the fall of Valeria, and the conquest of Westeros by the Tagerians. Who started to use the Watch as a dumping ground for problematic nobles and criminals.
And they still had a very good reason to not go south, for on the one hand, marching south would have been met with dragons. And on the other hand, those in the Watch that liked the idea of pillaging (and all of the horrible stuff that comes with it), had far easier pickings in the new Wildling communities to the north.
Yes, the Watch makes no sense, because it is the ruin of a repurposed derlict, of an institution, that was created for a problem gone since centuries. That part is great Worldbuilding in my eyes. The problem here is more Martin’s utter lack of sense for scale in both space (i.e. Westeros size) and time (the Watch is basically out of a function for centuries, every threat forcing them to stay in the north has gone for decades, why are they just sitting in those castles freezing their ass off)
Correction: It has been *several millennia* since the Long Night (when the White Walkers last interacted with the Westerosi). The Doom of Valyria occurred ~4 centuries prior to the events of GoT, Aegon’s Conquest ~3 centuries.
Of course, this only makes your point about GRRM’s lack of sense of scale of time more valid.
I think you’re mostly right about the Night’s Watch but my only quibble with it is this bit: “this highly trained, cohesive band of armed men”
Is it highly trained?
Is it cohesive?
It doesn’t appear particularly cohesive to me, especially with the garrisons so far apart.
Although the bulk of the men of the watch are random criminals the people in charge tend to be volunteers from relatively high class backgrounds and they’re motivated not to rebel by:
-Not feeling like they have that much in common with the regular men in the Watch.
-Being loyal to their families and wanting to do things to bring honor to their family and not dishonor it.
-Being motivated to get promoted within the structure of the watch.
Then those elites would work to keep the rest in line.
Is that enough to make everything work? No, not really. But at least there are a few things that keep it from immediately collapsing.
I think the point is that if the Night’s Watch isn’t cohesive, then it’s sufficiently pointless that some Stark would have insisted upon it’s dissolution and the return of the Gift and New Gift to them so the lands could be put back into productive use.
Meaning that the Night’s Watch has to be cohesive, or else it realistically wouldn’t just be a declining institution, it would be a former institution that had been replaced by the border lords of the North.
“Is it highly trained?”
Compared to what they’d likely come up against, yes.
A lot of the members come from warrior-aristocrat ranks of society. Snow had been training essentially since birth to fight, and others weren’t far behind. And the peasants, thieves, and jail-rats had a long, long, long march before they even got to the Wall during which they’d experience some training, plus whatever training they’d get on the Wall. After their first fight (if they survived) they’d be amply incentivized to train–nothing motivates you like your life depending on the thing! Most of what they were fighting were essentially levy soldiers from non-state groups, meaning that while they weren’t a minimal threat they certainly wouldn’t have withstood a stiff resistance (if nothing else, supplies would run out). After a couple of years you could treat any member of the Night Watch as a highly-trained soldier.
“Is it cohesive?”
More complex, but I’d say probably. After a couple of years they’d be so separated from “normal” life that they’d have trouble relating to it. A good comparison is conscripted sailors in the 1800s–even if they hated it at first they didn’t have any options, so they became sailors and were loyal to their ship (as various fights on shore demonstrate). If you want a case-study on this from the inside, check out “Two Years Before the Mast”–while the author didn’t quite go all the way, he certainly walked fairly far down that road. A similar thing would go on in the minds of the Watch.
There would be factions within the Watch, with the heads of individual strongholds being relatively independent of one another. On the other hand, as I say elsewhere there’s no one else that can really relate to the Watch. What would likely happen (assuming rebellion is off the table) is that individuals would be loyal to their stronghold commanders, who in turn would be loyal to one another and to the head of the Watch. You see this in, for example, the Cluny monastery family–monks were obedient to the abbot (in theory anyway), and the abbots all were obedient to the head of the order.
Distance would also help. The Watch absolutely HAD to rely on one another, there was no one else. And personality would play a part. A commander that could win the hearts of the men in the Watch could maintain a surprising amount of loyalty in the sort of society the Watch presents.
It may have been addressed in the books (I gave up on them early), but I don’t recall anything in the TV series about what happens to men of the Night Watch who get too old or disabled to serve. It’s always implied that service is for life, so do they just get pushed over the Wall and left to the direwolves, or is there a ante-room-to-death infirmary somewhere on the Wall, or what?
In contrast, the medieval military orders quite routinely moved members who were no longer fit for active service to their establishments in peaceful countries, where they could continue to fulfil the order’s purely religious function by praying, while younger and fitter men did the fighting. For example, the records of the post-1307 investigation into the Templars in England make clear that the English preceptories were effectively retirement homes for crocked Templar knights, and very nice too. Fairly austere, no doubt (the poor old Templars really do seem to have taken their Rule about poverty, chastity etc. more seriously than many medieval orders, including the Hospitallers, which makes their fate all the more unfair), but safe, comfortable and honourable, with the bonus of being able to feel that as long as you could say the daily office you were still doing your bit.
There’s a guy in the Night’s Watch in the books who’s senile. He can’t do anything useful, but they still feed him.
I suspect that the first step of semi-retirement is probably becoming a Wandering Crow that handles recruitment, since at least then the majority if the time you’d presumably be staying in some lord’s castle.
For the ones too old for that, it’s worth noting that the elderly don’t handle the cold well, so they presumably end up dying some cold winter.
Since nobody has brought it up yet, I feel the need to mention that the history of Westeros is highly suspect in-universe. For example, the Coming of the Andals is dated anywhere from 6000 to 2000 years before present, depending on who you ask. The historical record beyond roughly a thousand years ago becomes hazy and impossible to verify with certainty. It is thought that historical accounts may have become embellished in the telling. After all, “a thousand years” sounds more impressive than “a hundred years”. It may well be that many institutions such as House Stark, the Night’s Watch, etc., are actually much younger than they are claimed to be.
Having said all that, I think that this bit of historical plausible deniability was just inserted by Martin as a way to cover his ass. A bit of chocolate coating to help the bitter pill of his flawed worldbuilding go down easier. Having read both this blog, and A Wiki of Ice and Fire, I’ve come to the conclusion that Martin is actually not very good at writing about history, economics, culture, science and technology, indeed pretty much anything other than the character drama for which he is renowned. Of course, the same is true of countless other authors and worldbuilders, and it wouldn’t be such a problem if Martin didn’t imply (or outright declare) that his fantasy universe is more “true to life” than most of his competitors. Martin asks “what was Aragorn’s tax policy?” To which I would retort, “what was Robert Baratheon’s?”
However, I will say this for Martin, at least he has put some thought into his fictional universe, which is more than I can say for a lot of contemporary sci-fi and fantasy screenwriters. As near as I can tell, they just run with whatever fantastical image pops into their heads because it looks awesome, without even taking a New York minute to think through the implications.
I agree that the idea Sam forwards, that maesters doubt the true antiquity of some of these historical events, is a red herring, and kind of a bizarre one because I don’t know what purpose it’s supposed to serve.
1) The basic aesthetic of Martin’s world is to take his idea of medieval Europe, and then not only add in fantasy but supersize everything. The realm is bigger, the wall is bigger, the castles are bigger, the lineages more ancient, etc. It’s all self-consistent, and the idea that the true history is shorter than commonly believed doesn’t fit.
2) Further, it’s a recurring theme both in ASOIAF and, from what I’ve read secondhand, the faux-histories Martin has published, that the skeptics are always wrong and the fantasists are always right. When Maester Luwin and Old Nan are in disagreement on a question of ancient lore or the metaphysical underpinnings of Westeros, you should trust Old Nan. So I’m prime to not believe maesterly skepticism on this topic.
3) I can’t imagine what practical purpose this idea would serve to the story. We haven’t been told some kind of chronological mechanic which would be affected by inaccurate counting of the millennia. There’s no “The Prophecy said this event would happen every 10k years,” so there’s no grand reveal if they’ve been counting wrong.
4) There’s what certainly looks like a deliberate countdown to the 1,000th Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, and what’s the point if that’s not even true?
The other thing to consider is that the Targaryen’s might well have liked the idea of the Night’s Watch as a ticking time bomb, and may well have cultivated it.
The Starks were one of their principle threats, having The Night Watch perched on their northern boarder likely kept the Stark’s from considering adventures in the south.
If the Night Watch rebels, it’s the Starks that mostly suffer
Isn’t the Night’s Watch thousands of years old, and most likely established by some ancient Stark (or “Stark” King of the North)?
“And the salvation is personal: you cannot get into heaven by having someone else join a monastery for you…”
Someone else may have mentioned it (I haven’t read all the comments), but this part is not true. At least not in European Christianity. A major reason why monasteries grew was that you could, in fact, get into heaven by having someone else join a monastery for you. You could even found a franchise of the monastery and get an even more sure-fire way in–not really “buying your way into Heaven”, but rather, with that many people praying it’s sure to work. It’s worth noting that thoughts on this get complicated really quickly!
My favorite monastery is Cluny, and they had this issue all the time, in spades. It became a real problem. They were powerful, respectable, had a noble purpose (by the logic of the time; for my part how they lived sounds like an unmitigated hell to me), and it was fashionable to support them. Because of this, several times the Cluny family of monasteries became essentially a small, somewhat diffused, and highly-respected nation, including a substantial military. This ran afoul of their Rule (the ideal Benedictine was supposed to be in training for being a hermit), and they went through fairly regular reformations (including two by St. Benedicts, which means you need some extra care when researching this). Which didn’t help matters AT ALL. They were so dedicated to their noble purpose that they gave up temporal power multiple times, which only made people respect them more and give them more material, land, and people.
All of this because, as you say, people of the past believed their religion. If I’m a military aristocrat I’ve done some reasonably horrible things, and ordered worse. I’m now getting on in years, and thinking about how I’m going to spend Eternity. And I’ve got a spare son or two that are rather bookish, or those bastards (technically speaking) that could be inconvenient….And there’s that land that got burned in that fire last year, no one’s using it but it’s good cropland….Sending people to a monastery or starting one yourself becomes a very attractive option. One that many, MANY nobles, from hedge knights to kings, took advantage of.
For the Night Watch, in a fantasy setting, I think there’s a simple solution: magic. Options are highly varied.
“Dune” has the Golden Path, where Leto II takes his kin and shows them what he sees, binding them to its purpose. Something like that–a little foresight, enough to know there’s going to be a problem but not enough to know when–could create an immediate enough threat to keep the Night Watch loyal. If you add that it comes from the Stark line (which is already established as magical) you also neatly deal with the fact that the Stark LINE is what people in the North are loyal to, rather than individual rulers the way the rest of Westeros functions.
You can also have a magical compulsion put on them. There was a book series I read once (and which I cannot remember the name of!!!) where the ceremony of joining a particular order included a spell that technically killed them (sword through the heart, but they survived it) and which laid a magical compulsion on them to protect the Crown. You don’t need to make it that showy, but having the ceremony of joining the Night Watch actually be effective would provide the cohesion necessary.
Another alternative is to have the Night Watch engage in some sort of combat that others do not and/or cannot. People who share experiences build cohesion, after all. And an order that routinely kills abominations is going to view itself as apart from the run-of-the-mill soldiers. It wouldn’t ensure they don’t go rogue, but it would give them a sufficiently different perspective that they wouldn’t be able to function in a spear-and-shield military structure. Make it an issue of being unable to re-integrate with normal society, the only people who understand are our Brothers on the Wall, that sort of thing.
One of the Watch’s problems is that the abominations they were founded to fight haven’t been seen in millennia. Lots of people, including in the Watch itself, don’t think they were ever real to begin with. Their mission has changed to just fighting off Wildling raids. Once the monsters return, Jon is one of the few people to realize that they’re actually supposed to *protect* the Wildlings, because the Wildlings are fellow humans threatened by the monsters.
It’s the King’s Blades series by Dave Duncan that you’re thinking of, with the sword-through-the-heart thing.
Very much so. Before the reformation England was dotted with chantry chapels – erected so that monks could pray for the soul of the patron who endowed them.
I think that you could justify the night’s watch’s loyalty in that GRRM’s inability to grasp the size of things when describing the wall means that the night’s watch technically rule an area of land 50% bigger than the entire island of Ireland. Southern elites might view being sent to a social backwater, made to give up inheritance (it’s stressed that the nights watch often have kids, but they do forfeit inheritance), and living on a cold fronteir to be a punishment, but it’s possible that the average murderer was simply a bit perplexed when it turns out the punishment for stabbing your wife in a run-down flat in east london was ‘promoted to lifetime member of parliament in Malawi’. Sure, you have to move away from home to an unfamiliar place you may have heard bad news stories about, but on the other hand, you are part of a national government now.
It’s also possible that the lack of maintenance of the night’s watch would have worked better if it was described as having fallen apart rather more recently – Brandon’s Gift (the official name for the 45,000 square miles of territory that the nights watch function as the government for) has apparently suffered a large-scale population exodus, meaning that the watch probably can’t recruit locally in even vaguely adequate numbers, and with Ned having taken last winter’s excess population (neatly tying into one of your recommendation topics) to the south to fight in Roberts Rebellion rather than sending them up to the wall, they may simply be ‘currently so short staffed that each man has to patrol 3 miles of wall by themselves’.
The “life service, total celibacy” provision in the Night’s Watch seems particularly silly in light of both the manpower crisis and the large area of the Gift, much of which has been left to go to waste because they don’t have the men to farm it.
If instead they treated the Watch as a 20-year term of service at the end of which you were rewarded with a patch of land in the Gift and the ability to take a wife (and/or with the option of re-enlisting, for true “lifers”) then this would solve the motivation problem, as well as returning the Gift to productivity and potentially alleviating the manpower crisis, since younger sons of those men will automatically (though not exclusively) look to the Watch as an opportunity when they themselves grow to maturity.
This is tangentially allied to what struck me as a huge worldbuilding hole in Song of Ice and Fire when I tried to read it (got about 4 books in and haven’t bothered with the TV show, so this might have been answered somehow and somewhere): Why are the feudal military aristocrats still… um… feudal military aristocrats? The story starts not long after the end of a 300-year period of Targaryan rule, which was enforced, at least in the early period, with un-answerable super-weapons (dragons). Surely they should have centralised power and suppressed the warrior ethos of the aristocracy both actively, in that they don’t want warrior aristocrats running round causing trouble by warrior-aristocrat-ing in ways that disrupt the peace, and passively, in that by creating an environment with no endemic mid-to-low-level warfare, the aristocrats aren’t going to bother maintaining expensive fortifications, weapons, armour and training when other less-troublesome means of elite display are open to them. Yes there were civil wars under the Targaryans and their writ did not run (somehow) throughout all of Westeros (see the faintly ridiculous barbarians/bandits who capture Tyrion in book 1, and seem to be part of a culture which has been doing this for ages who dwell very near the centre of power for one of the kingdoms, or more sensibly the Iron Islanders which I understand weren’t really incorporated into the Targaryans’ empire). But ultimately, there should have been the kind of peace and unity which encourage feudal warrior aristocrats to beat their sword into ploughshares (or fancy furniture) and take up poetry and flower-arranging instead. But in the novels and show, they are ever-itching to spring into action as elite, well-trained, experienced knights and warlords as though they had been living in conditions of endemic warfare.
In his world-building, George R R Martin seems to me to have built a situation which would far more resemble late-period Tokugawa Japan: maybe lots of fancy ‘warrior-aristocrats’ with really nice shiny armour knocking around showing off, but none of them really with any experience or training for real war and when the rulers really need serious violence to be done they look to other solutions (arguably permanent religious orders deracinated from the feudal hierarchy, such as the Night Watch make quite some sense in this context!)
I would welcome people’s thoughts – am I misunderstanding things?
I should probably add that the Targaryans seem to me to have had a reasonable bureaucracy in the Maesters, Master of Coin etc. etc. so don’t need to use feudal aristocrats in the “too much land, not enough administration” conditions that required feudalism in Western Europe.
And apologies for using the term ‘feudal’ when as we all know it’s not the best term. But it is probably the one George R R Martin would use to describe the system, so I guess it’s in-universe appropriate.
the funny thing is the westerosi aristocrats don’t seem wanting to increase their land. Every house seems to own one castle and that is enough for them. All they care about is marrying their daughters to the king.
The “Dunk and Egg” books, set about 100 years before “Game of Thrones”, make it clear that the Seven Kingdoms, even in time of “peace”, are actually in a state of constant endemic warfare. There’s an entire story about a tiny war between a landed knight, Ser Eustace Osgrey, and his more powerful neighbour Lady Rohanne Webber, with armies of a dozen or so peasant levies on either side. There are various fairly large houses that are constantly fighting – the Blackwoods and the Brackens most obviously. There are various rebellions by houses against their overlords (the Reyne-Tarbeck rebellion for example).
Not to mention that there are also many very large wars throughout the 300 years of Targaryen rule. You’ve got the Conquest itself, and the failed conquest of Dorne. You have the massive civil war The Dance of the Dragons a century later. A century after that you have First Blackfyre Rebellion, followed by the Second, Third and I think Fourth Blackfyre Rebellions. There are endless wars on the periphery, including many in the Stepstones. There’s the second, successful Conquest of Dorne. There’s a violent religious uprising by the Faith Militant.
Given that, it’s entirely realistic that the military aristocracy has kept its skills sharp.
Okay, thanks.
But that leads to the question of ‘why do the Targaryans put up with constant low-level warfare among their vassals when, especially at the beginning of their reign when they have legendarily powerful dragons, they could stop it?’ Low-level endemic warfare is very bad for a productive and prosperous kingdom. And it risks large vassals forming who might get ideas. And don’t say “well, they are embedded in a cultural context that valourises low-level endemic warfare”, because my understanding is that historically, the rulers of systems which – as systems – encouraged such conflict would try to get out of that cycle if possible: see the restrictions on castle-building in Late Medieval England.
Secondly, several of the examples you give don’t seem to be relevant: the internal strife is a very good argument for the Targaryans to suppress aristocratic military power. The conquest is of course before the Targaryans come to power. The external wars can be fought with other forms of military more efficient than vassals calling up their bannermen.
Collateral damage. Send in the dragon for every squabble and soon you reign over a burnt wasteland.
Oh no, you only need do it the once. Then you have the threat of it to hold over the rest. True you need to find a few nice carrots to go with the stick, but the threat is all you really need.
Once is never enough. Particularly in an era where news from afar is mistrusted.
OK, I’m exaggerating they’d only need to do it once, but if the Targaryens have just come to power in a war that has seen a large number of recalcitrant houses getting char-grilled by dragons and their lands redistributed to loyalists, they are in a very good poistion to bully squabbling houses into using alternative dispute resolution mechanisms other than private wars. And I don’t think you’d need to turn too many Houses into barbeques to hammer the point home: they are an interrelated and (reasonably) homogenous aristoctacy covering Westeros and news of “What happened to House Snodgrass when they refused to settle their inheritance dispute through the courts” will spread, and get everyone thinking “Assemble the bannermen!…no, wait! Assemble the Lawyers!”
In ASOIaF, are courts and lawyers mentioned at all aside from Trial by Combat?
“Oh no, you only need do it the once. Then you have the threat of it to hold over the rest.”
Good news, everyone, I’ve explained why the Vietnam War never happened.
Just because you have enough firepower to win a war with whoever has displeased you, doesn’t mean you have enough information to know that you ought to be displeased by that someone.
It’s like COIN operations: just because the army has enough firepower to defeat the insurgents doesn’t mean it has enough information to recognise them.
Having said that, a regime that depended on control of a handful of superweapons would look very different to a regime that depended on a retinue-of-retinues.
“But that leads to the question of ‘why do the Targaryans put up with constant low-level warfare among their vassals when, especially at the beginning of their reign when they have legendarily powerful dragons, they could stop it?’
I think the books do address this issue a bit. Dragons are not invulnerable, and they aren’t always a war-winning weapon; the Targaryens try to conquer Dorne along with the rest of the continent, and they lose a dragon plus rider and most of an army, and accept defeat.
And there is also, and this is brought out in the “House of the Dragon” series, a real reluctance to escalate across the draconic threshold, because they aren’t a precision weapon, or very scalable. (Scaly but not scalable.)
Let’s say the Blackwoods steal a few Bracken cattle and the Brackens respond by burning a few Blackwood barns. And then the Blackwoods raid a Bracken village and kill a few peasants, and the Brackens do the same.
Should the response of the King of the Seven Kingdoms really be “exterminate them with dragonfire”? An entire house? (And which house?) And you’d have to exterminate them root and branch, otherwise you’ve just created a load of dispossessed rebels.
Every house, big or small, has quarrels with its neighbours from time to time – if you resolve those with dragonfire, you’re rapidly going to run out of houses. And a lot of the time your resolution is going to be seen as arbitrary or even biased; yes, the Brackens burned some barns, but the Blackwoods stole those cows first! Why do the Brackens end up as ashes? What if that happens to us next?
And finally, sometimes they do use dragons to stop it! The Faith Militant uprising gets stopped by a dragon burning hundreds of rebels. The Conquest of Dorne fails despite use of dragons.
So if you break down the question “why don’t the Targaryens use dragons more?” into the various situations when dragons might be used, we have:
“Why don’t they use dragons to suppress minor inter-house wars?” Because dragons are far too destructive and indiscriminate, and also by intervening in these you are undermining the local Lord Paramount, whose job it is to rule his area.
“Why don’t they use dragons in wars of succession?” They do.
“Why don’t they use dragons in wars of conquest?” They do.
“Why don’t they use dragons against internal rebellions that threaten their rule?” They do.
And it’s worth remembering also that a lot of the time they don’t have dragons, or at least not very many.
The last dragon of all is dog-sized and dies in 152.
On the eve of the Dance of the Dragons there are more dragons than at any point before or since, and that’s only twenty – and of those three are too young to fight and three more are wild and unridable, leaving 14.
By 131 AC (After the Conquest) there are only four left alive and of those only one is under Targaryen control and combat-ready. You’re going to be very, very careful about using that!
Culturally, it doesn’t make sense to think of dragons as gunships used for imperial policing – they’re dreadnoughts, and you absolutely don’t want to risk them within reach of coastal guns or torpedo boats unless you have to. (The TV show captured this quite well; the shock of the city folk of seeing a severed dragon head dragged through the streets reminded me of accounts of Londoners with tears in their eyes telling people in the street “The ‘Ood’s dahn, mate. The ‘Ood’s dahn.”)
No, I am not suggesting jumping in to incinerate anyone and everyone at the drop of a hat. I agree, that would be dramatic, but stupid and unworkable (arguably quite fitting in with George R R Martin’s worldbuilding, then). If the Brackens and the Blackwoods tell their peasants to nick a few cows from each other, of course you don’t leap to burn them all indiscriminately. You summon them to a court and tell them to stop killing each other and abide by royal justice in future. You only have to bring the dragons out if and when the two houses are flagrantly disregarding this and have tooled up to go to war – but the threat “I will use this scaly monster in this instance” has to be there to get both sides to back down. It’s about using the threat of violence – among other tools – to change norms of behaviour so that the Great Houses are suing rather than murdering each other as the resolution to their quarrels. This way 1) the barns get taxed, not burned, 2) the vassal houses who can make trouble for you get used to using their lawyers rather than their swords. The Targaryans have 300 years to do this before the Baratheon rebellion 15 years before the plot kickes off. I absolutely understand your point about them not wanting to cross the draconic threshold if they can avoid it, but as with nuclear weapons, their presence, and the knowledge that they can be used if a line is crossed has to play into their calculations.
Essentially it is the same process as happened over the course of medieval and early modern Europe as part of the whole movement towards state-formation: powerful centralising monarchs all tended to clamp down on feuding and private violence, using the threat of violence as necessary to prevent it until it became customary to eschew violence as part of private quarrels (i.e. going from using state violence to state power). One historical example would be from an earlier one of Bret’s posts where Bertran du Bourn rides off with a few of his lads to take a disputed castle, and his lord, not wanting violence between his vassals says “Oh no you don’t, sunshine!” and summons him home. This process was pursued until the final manifestations of violence-as-dispute-settling – duels – went from technically banned but basically winked at, to a ban being enforced, to becoming socially unacceptable (or degrading into a non-fatal ritual).
One difference between Westeros and medieval Europe is that historically a recalcitrant baron in this position could say “I’m safe in my castle, so eff off!” and was probably in a position where winkling them out of said castle was a very trickly proposition. In ASOIaF and GoT, however, dragons are shown as being very good at turning castles into flaming deathtraps. Therefore, the Targaryans, I submit, would have a very strong arm in this process of preventing and thereby (in time) delegitimising private violence, which would I think be something they would naturally tend towards doing, but have not done. Of course this would not make Westeros a peaceful utopia, but it would make the early-to-high Medieval aristocrats who seem to populate the novels be very, very outdated.
“The Targaryans have 300 years to do this”
But as someone mentioned, they don’t. They don’t have dragons at all after 150 years, and are pretty much out after 130 years. After that they’re just conventional feudal overlords of an absurdly large realm.
One could just as well say that the Seven Kingdoms should have fallen apart long before Robert Baratheon was even born, once the flying WMDs were out of the picture. Not to mention falling apart with the actual wars of the series. The North, at least, breaking away, was way overdue — giant realm, handy chokepoint, different culture and religion…
It’s an interesting question!
Simplest answer might be that the Targs just didn’t care enough to try. As long as the tribute kept coming in, and nothing got too out of line, “eh, go have fun, nobles will be nobles”.
Recall that Westeros is supposed to be _huge_[1], and there were originally only 3 Targs on dragons, and I think at most never more than a dozen or so (which promptly had a deadly Anarchy-war with themselves.) And Aegon’s whole conquest policy seemed to be about keeping a light touch, subduing the kings (or burning them until someone knelt) and turning them into Lords Paramount. Except then Dorne resisted somehow, so would have soaked up much spare attention until after he died.
Aegon did have some troops, but I think not that many, and maybe not the large pool of trusted ‘companions’ that a strong king would tap for administrators.
Also, even if they wanted to Keep The Peace at a low level, _can_ they? Stopping the Reach and Dorne from fighting, sure. But the kind of small private war like in the Dunk stories? First they’d have to hear about it at all, then they’d have to decide which side to take, unless they go “burn them all” which would make it even less likely that they’d hear about future little conflicts.
I think a tributary approach is plausible; it doesn’t even have to be more likely than trying to build a state, just plausible enough to not strain the imagination.
Oh, and AIUI, the maesters are a pre-existing network, kind of like a secular Catholic Church. They advise the local ruler, they keep communications going by raven, but they’re not a state bureaucracy.
I think the right answer is that Martin’s picture if the middle ages is all castles and retinues. Of course it wasn’t – these are things from c1000 to c1200. Before there were emperors, appointed (not hereditary) counts, missi overseeing the counts, no castles and smallish aristocratic households. There was plenty of personal violence and constant border war against the Slavs etc, but the political contest revolved around royal favour. You might whack your neighbour over an insult but then be summoned by the count or – if part of a powerful kin network – before the emperor or one of his son-kings. Do penance, pay fine, do not repeat on pain of loss of lands and favour. The emperor owned a lot of land and held the allegiance of all free men through local, regional and court assemblies.
The wars were over succession disputes, not between noble families. That would be a more plausible picture for the Targaryens – conquer, keep a lot of land, keep nobles judging each other and switch favours around but then gradually lose control as succession disputes weaken the throne.
One of the more interesting (and thought-out) excuses for millennia of stasis in high fantasy that I’ve read was the one in Belgariad/Mallorean; which was, basically, “because the metaverse keeps resetting the metaphysical status quo, and the gods are lazy and hate change.” Yes, these are two separate things in-universe; one explains why Things Keep Happening, the other explains Why Things Don’t Change.
I think part of the issue is that in the past, for the majority of humanity, things WERE stable. Having things be stable long-term in fantasy is a reflection of that.
When we talk about societies we tend to think in terms of the top 10%–the people who live in cities, buy imports, and the like. Changes in castles, armor, weapons, and the like are easy to spot. But the majority of humanity was subsistence farmers using muscle power (either their own or that of animals). And while there were changes between Roman agriculture and Medieval agriculture (heavy plow, increased use of wind, water, and treadmill power, different animals), they were tweaks to the system, not the world-altering changes that have become normal since the Industrial Revolution.
Put another way: If we ignore language barriers and religious customs not relevant to farming (separating religion from normal life in past societies is well-nigh impossible, they didn’t think like that), you could take a Roman peasant/slave farmer (ie, the ones actually doing the work), put them in a 700 CE field pretty much anywhere in Europe, and they’d pretty easily fit in. (Yes, I’m deliberately making a comparison to the Universal Warrior idea). Cattle-drawn plows, broadcast seeding, manual thrashing, and the like pretty much are what they are and have been what they have always been. Same with the women–while preference for specific tools changes through time, wool’s got to be washed, combed, carded, spun, and woven, and most of the principles were discovered sometime around the time beer was.
In contrast, taking even a pre-WWI farmer and putting them on a modern farm would require a fairly significant amount of training. This was identified as early as WWI, in fact–a poor 1918 farmer would struggle to work on a not-poor farm.
This is kind of a “yes, but” for me. You’re right; daily life was pretty static for very large stretches of history but in a lot of fantasy series, the high-level stuff is relatively static too (Same kingdoms, dynasties, noble families etc) and that was not true historically.
I am surprised that in those discussions about whether the Night Watch could be kept loyal nobody has yet mentioned the relationship between Poland and the Teutonic Order.
IIRC, a King of Poland had originally granted the Teutonic Order a piece of land if they in exchange would protect his country against the pagan Lithuanians.
Then the Teutonic Order turned out to be so bad that the Polish and Lithuanians decided to ally with each other against the Teutonic Order.
Wait on the cover of “Rome at War: Farms…” That silhouette image is from an illustration in Warry’s “Warfare in the Classical World”. It was in my Junior HS library. I loved it so much the Librarian gave it to me when I graduated since nobody else ever checked it out. Anyway nice to see Kindle versions make at least some academic press type books more affordable (although they often seem to render maps and illustrations hard to read I have noticed compared to print).
I agree with a lot of what you say about why the Night’s Watch might revolt but the thing is that they have, on multiple occasions. The most famous was under the guy who became the book version of the Night’s King, but it happened a number of other times. Shortly before the Dance, there was one that killed a Stark or two putting it down for example. You can argue that these revolts should be even more frequent and/or more successful but it’s factually incorrect to claim GRRM hasn’t considered the possibility.
You need to point another thing is that the targaryen, velaryon, etc… and all surviving valyrians magically lose all their knowledge and culture and didn’t even try to preserve it lmao
The Targaryens were the _only_ dragonlord family to survive the Doom, and had been a lesser house to begin with. By Aegon’s time, there seem to have been only 3 Targaryens. That allows plenty of room for losing knowledge. And I’m not sure how much we know of how much magic the Targaryens had at their peak; Bloodraven was a powerful mage, at any rate. But tiny numbers, and the decline of magic that took out the dragons and made maesters think magic was gone, can explain just about everything.
The Velayrons are Valryian-descended but from further back and apparently lower down in social class; they might never have had magic. And again, the decline of actual magic power was world-wide.