Iron, Fire and Ice

by Ed West

  By the end of 1282, all Welsh resistance was over; Llywelyn himself died in December that year, at the hands of an English soldier in Powys but Dafydd had a more gruesome fate.

  For many centuries the first thing that would have greeted visitors to London was the sight of decapitated heads, either at the Tower or at the southern entrance of the bridge, a reminder of the king’s dreadful power. It was Edward who had built a moat around the Tower and also erected its most notorious spot, Traitor’s Gate, where heads were placed on spikes.

  Among those now on display was Dafydd, captured in 1282 and convicted of treason, murder, sacrilege, and plotting against the king. As punishment, the Welshman underwent four corresponding punishments for his four crimes, respectively dragged by horses, hanged, disembowelled, and quartered. Before he was dead, his intestines were slashed from his body and burned in front of him, and his corpse was then sent to various English cities, leaving only his head to rot at the Tower of London, along with his brother’s.

  In 1284, Edward formally absorbed Wales into the Realm, ending its independence forever. To celebrate, the king held an Arthurian-style Round Table celebration, presenting himself as heir to the mythical British king and the rightful ruler of all Britain. It is recorded that the party was so popular, with attendees coming from all over the country and keen not to snub the Leopard, that the floor gave way, killing many.

  Dafydd’s grim fate was a sort of joke, a mockery of ancient Welsh tradition. For almost a millennium, since the Angles and Saxons had crossed the North Sea and driven the native Britons into the mountainous west, there had been prophecies about a Welsh king once again looking over London. Finally, to Edward’s grim amusement, it had proven true.

  4

  THE FIRST MEN

  Past a certain point, all the dates grow hazy and confused, and the clarity of history becomes the fog of legend.

  —HOSTER BLACKWOOD

  The island of Britain had once been settled by three brothers, the eldest of whom, Locrinus, had been given what is now England. This was at least Edward’s argument for why he, as successor to Locrinus, should rule all Britain, although the myth was largely the work of twelfth century cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey had also chronicled the story of a great king named Arthur, who had led the Britons against the Saxons, but of much else of their origins people knew very little.

  Lying off the far western edge of a gigantic super-continent, the island of Great Britain is just a thousand miles from the Arctic Circle, and to the first civilized people who made the journey across the chilly English Channel it must have appeared inhospitably cold, wet, and covered in fog; to others who heard of it the land was filled with monsters and Cyclops or even cannibals. Much of this folklore would remain in the collective subconscious long after the forests had been cleared and roads and cities laid down where paths and villages had once stood.

  Great Britain is by far the largest island in an archipelago often called the British Isles and which consists of over six thousand islands in total, of which 132 are inhabited, the least populated being St Kilda, off the Outer Hebrides, which has a summertime population of just fifteen.1 Britain is defined by two geographic regions, the low lying terrain of the south and east, similar in geology to the adjacent land on the continent, and suitable for arable farming and crops, especially wheat, and possessing the vast bulk of the island’s good farmland; and the upland, mountainous regions of Scotland, Wales, and the north and west of England, the highlands and islands, where the rock is much older and the climate harsher. Battered by the storms of the Atlantic Ocean, here hardy races clung on, etching out a living in fishing, sheep-raising, or occasionally raiding, and exporting excess population, often to fight in other peoples’ wars. Many of these distinctive cultures, or traces of them, survived into the modern era, always facing an onslaught from the dominance of London and the south. This division has defined British history.

  To those living through the cousins’ war, the history of the island stretched back into a distant and murky past. Men knew of different peoples who had once walked the land, and that a great race called the Romans had conquered it, supermen capable of every feat imaginable. These Latins had left large stone buildings across Britain, but many people considered them to have been a breed of giants, and some actively avoided Roman buildings as they thought them haunted.

  It was known that the original inhabitants of the island were the Welsh, who still occupied the mountainous western regions, in many parts of it living by their old laws; people knew that their ancestors had once worshiped many gods but had been successively converted to the new faith, first during the Roman period and later when the Saxon invaders abandoned their old gods.

  Beyond that any common understanding of the past would have been told by men like Geoffrey of Monmouth. In the more remote parts of the realm, they might have believed legends of green men and fairies and dwarves and other such creatures that had been passed down in folklore. It was only with modern technology, as well as modern historical methods, that we have come to know more extensive details about ancient Britain and some of the people who lived there.

  We know of one young man, no older than his mid-twenties, who died from repeated blows to the head from a blunt instrument, the killers leaving his body in a secluded place where it could not be found. Of the victim’s life we can tell very little, except that he had eaten horsemeat on his last days on earth, and that he died a rather unpleasant death. He lived in Britain in the seventy-second century before Christ, ending his days in the deep underground Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset sometime around 7150BC.

  As the man’s body was not buried or burned, it’s possible his family never found him, and there it remained, for nine thousand years, while above the cave the world transformed in an unimaginable way, night falling and sun rising over and over again, some three million times, before he would be discovered. Six millennia later he would have found the people using materials he might find incomprehensible but which we would recognise as iron or bronze; another millennium and people would have spoken a language totally alien to him but which a linguistic expert would identify as Brythonic, the ancestor of modern Welsh; another thousand years and he would perhaps see two-story buildings and men and women living in settled groups of dwellings that might properly be called villages. The tongue would have been mystifying to him, but we might pick up the odd word and understand it as something vaguely Germanic—Anglisc, or Old English. Their language, technology, and worship would have been utterly alien to Cheddar Man, but these people were his descendants nonetheless, and the ancestors of modern Britons.

  The gorge had been formed one million years before when melting glaciers dissolved the underground limestone to create a chasm almost 450 feet deep. Gough’s Cave had not been discovered, or at least rediscovered, until 1837, when a man called George Cox was digging out limestone close to his water mill and came across an underground world filled with stalactites and stalagmites, some of them brightly colored due to the iron oxide in the water that formed them. Because of their unique properties the caves are lit in a particular way, with pools also reflecting the rocks above them. Close to the seaside town of Weston-Super-Mare, Gough’s Cave became a popular tourist spot from the Victorian era, and among the many people who visited were a couple on honeymoon in 1916; the groom, a young man about to set off for the western front named John Tolkien, was so affected that he used the gorge as the inspiration for Helm’s Deep in his later masterpiece The Lord of the Rings.

  Thirteen years earlier workmen in the area had stumbled upon some bones in the cave, and these remains turned out to be the oldest complete skeleton in Britain. They were brought to the Natural History Museum in London, where they lie today. However, the story did not end there; in the 1950s came the invention of carbon dating, which allows scientists to pinpoint the age of fossils, as well as the discovery of DNA in 1951. But it was the isolation in the 1980s of mitochondrial DNA, a particular
type of the genetic material that is passed unaltered from mother to daughter, which proved the most interesting insight into Cheddar Man’s place in British history. In 1996 a team making a documentary about the ancient corpse carried out blood tests in a nearby school and found two locals carrying the exact same mDNA, suggesting a direct descent in the female line from a recent ancestor of the caveman. Cheddar Man died, but his family lived on.

  This corpse and its unlikely afterlife offer a glimpse of the first men who came to Britain, and the British history and folklore that inspired George R.R. Martin and his creation. In the back story, recalled in passages during the first five books, various characters explain that the first inhabitants of the island were the Children of the Forest, a human-like species who dwelled in caves and lived off the land; they were said to have magical powers and believed the weirwood trees were deities, “the nameless gods,” whom they would join in death. The Children were smaller than men, “dark and beautiful,” freckled and with large ears, and came to the island during “the dawn age” at the very beginning of time. In this era there were also giants, around twelve feet in height, who “knew of no better tools or weapons than branches pulled from trees,” and “had no kings and no lords, made no homes save in caverns or beneath tall trees, and they worked neither metal nor fields.”2 The Children worked with a metal, obsidian or dragonglass, a form of frozen glass used to kill white walkers.3 Their religious caste, called the Greenseers, were “the wise men of the children” who could supposedly see through the eyes of the carved weirwood. Educated Westerosi at the time of the War of the Five Kings are skeptical of this claim, just as they are of much ancient tradition and lore.

  War began when the First Men arrived on Westeros twelve thousand years before the current era, via the Arm of Dorne, a land crossing linking the continents. The First Men used weapons of bronze and brought with them strange new animals such as horses, and over a period of decades or maybe centuries migrated north and increased in number, spreading across the continent. They chopped down the forest, including the sacred weir trees of the indigenous people, and in a doomed attempt to stop the migration, the Children of the Forest used dark magic to flood the world, but to no avail; the invaders burned the weirwoods and the two groups went to war. This is what some people in Westeros supposedly believe at any rate; better-educated chroniclers suggest that flooding the Arm would have been beyond the capabilities of the Children, and that it was mostly a natural cataclysm similar to the Doom of Valyria.4

  Armed with bronze swords, the First Men triumphed, but eventually a pact was reached in which the Children stayed in the forest and the First Men had the rest of the island, agreeing not to burn any more weir trees; the treaty was signed in the presence of the sacred trees as witnesses. For four thousand years, the two groups were said to have lived in peace, and the newcomers even adopted their tree gods. Under the rule of the First Men, Westeros was divided into seven kingdoms, which survived even after newcomers conquered all but one.

  The First Men used runes and spoke a harsh-sounding language, the Old Tongue, that survives beyond the Wall and in given names. Although much of their culture was lost, it is known that they followed the laws of hospitality, that justice was meted out by a blood price, and that they worshipped the Lady of the Waves and the Lord of the Skies, who made thunder.

  However, the less educated people also believe that among the First Men were skinchangers who could communicate with the beasts and control them; in Martin’s world, myth and magic are rarely in people’s everyday lives, but sit somewhere in the back of their minds. There is also the legend of the green men, old tales about creatures with dark green skin and horns.

  The pact between the Children and the First Men was ended after four millennia by the arrival of the Andals, blond-haired people who hailed from a peninsula in the north of Essos by the Shivering Sea. They used iron, and conquered six of the kingdoms, destroying the last remnants of the Children; only the North held out, and although part of the Realm, it still maintains much of the culture of the First Men, including aspects of its religion.

  In turn, new invaders came to Westeros, the Valyrians, also originating in Essos, who had crossed the sea after their homeland was destroyed in a cataclysm. They were led by Aegon I Targaryen and his two sister-wives, with the aid of three dragons, and began their conquest with Dragonstone, a small island off south-east Westeros. Alongside Aegon on his daring and risky invasion was his half-brother Orys Baratheon, ancestor of King Robert. Aegon allowed lords who bent the knee to keep their land, but those that didn’t he destroyed, and he won Westeros with extreme brutality. The conqueror established King’s Landing, which developed into a bustling, if squalid, city between the conquest and the current era, although its population had at one point been depleted by the Great Spring Sickness, which had killed four in ten. Four centuries later, the Targaryens and Baratheons would be on opposing sides in the War of Five Kings.

  Just as the people of Martin’s world live on an island with memories of strange and mysterious peoples who still inhabit the wilder edges of their world, so did the people of medieval England.

  Anatomically modern people had inhabited the island before the Ice Age arrived 10,000 years before Christ—the oldest human remains in Britain belong to the Red Lady of Paviland, which were found in south Wales and date to 33000BC. The bones were discovered in 1823 by a vicar who sent them to William Buckland, a professor of geology at Oxford; Prof Buckland was a noted scholar, but also a creationist who believed the world to be no more than a few thousand years old, and so seeing the remains covered in red ochre (a naturally colored type of dirt) and adorned with what looked like elephant-bone jewelry, he concluded it to be the remains of a Roman-era prostitute. In fact, it was not elephant bone, but mammoth, and the Red Lady was a man who lived long before the dawn of history, as DNA tests from the 1990s finally established.

  But these first inhabitants left nothing but their bones. Around eleven thousand years ago the earth cooled down and life became impossible for the inhabitants of Britain; if any survived, it would have been by moving south to beyond the Alps. North of that no human life could exist.

  Giant glaciers arose and for thousands of years, until 6000BC, Great Britain was joined to the continent by a peninsula known to us as Doggerland (from the Dutch dogger, fishing boat), stretching from East Anglia to what is now the coastline of Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. It was over this stretch of land, and the ice sheet that covered the Channel, that small bands of people arrived from the tenth millennium BC until the first, their obscure tongues clinging on to rocky outposts much later; today, ships in the North Sea still occasionally pick up the bones of mammoth and other animals that once walked this land. (British people will recognize “Dogger” as one of the shipping regions mentioned on BBC public radio.)

  The village of Thatcham in Berkshire, in the Thames Valley to the west of London, lays claim to be the oldest continually-inhabited place in Britain, with the remains of a settlement dating back as far as ten thousand years being found, and evidence of continued later Iron Age inhabitation.

  The most outstanding—and most famous—monument of ancient Britain is Stonehenge, built on Salisbury plain and completed around 2600BC. It is possibly a sundial (or a burial site), but remains enigmatic, and whatever its purpose, it was important. It was a very violent world, according to the evidence from skeletons,5 and in among hunter-gatherer peoples studied in the modern era the proportion of males who die as a result of homicide is usually between 15 and 60 percent, as opposed to about 0.4 for Americans today.6

  Over the millennia, several waves of people crossed over, nine groups in total, some up the coast of Iberia and France and others from across the North Sea. Agriculture first reached Britain around 4000BC, and by 3700BC had penetrated into every region of the British Isles.7 Cheddar Man’s people used flint, but newcomers arrived with bronze in approximately 2500BC, a group now called the Beaker People. Current genet
ic research suggests that, since the Beaker people replaced 90 percent of the gene pool of Britain, they probably did not make very accommodating neighbors.8

  The Beaker People were part of the Megalithic Culture of the Atlantic; those living along a stretch of coastal Europe from Portugal to Denmark, and across southern Britain and Ireland, shared a way of life that involved the erection of standing stones, for what purpose we cannot tell; one can still walk among them in deserted parts of south-west Ireland in spots that feel vaguely haunted.

  When one people replace or assimilate another, they often keep the original names for rivers, hills, and other natural features, and many topographical words are the last surviving remnants of the indigenous European languages that faced the onslaught from the east, although sometimes terms from different languages would be joined to form a place name. Torpenhow Hill in Cumberland on the border with Scotland is a good example, believed to be a quadruple tautology—Tor and penn both mean hill in ancient British languages, as does howe in Old Norse.

  Aside from these few place names, the languages of Cheddar Man and the Beaker People and all the other British dialects that would have been spoken are lost to us. It is estimated that nine successive groups colonized the island before the arrival of the Romans, at least based on DNA evidence, and each would have spoken their own language, probably a number of them.

  From 4000 BC Indo-European speakers began to sweep across Europe, reaching its western shores around 1000 BC. The Indo-Europeans were pastoralists—cattle-herders—from what is now southern Russia and may even have developed a genetic advantage over the natives through a mutation that allowed adults to ingest milk (today this phenotype is found in almost all western Europeans, but is rare in many other parts of the world). These new people, who brought iron to Britain, were later called the Celts, and archaeological evidence suggests they arrived by 600 BC at the latest, on an island which already had up to one million people.