Iron, Fire and Ice

by Ed West

  This strength was required when battle harness weighed up to sixty pounds, a mass of heavy and highly-expensive metal. A knight’s outfit would include not only a shield, sword, lance, and maybe an axe, but a vast array of protective clothing: mail hauberks and mail leggings and plate armor above their lower legs and forearms; steel gauntlets, kneepads, and steel plates over the forearms; steel skullcaps to which they attached an aventail, and a curtain of mail hung over the neck and shoulder, as well as the various paddings worn underneath, including the gambeson, a thick, woollen padded jacket similar to that worn by dog handlers, as well as breastplate and backplate.

  Cavalry had also led to chivalry, from chevalier (horseman), the code of conduct that defined how medieval men viewed the world and themselves; the laws of chivalry demanded that enemy prisoners were captured rather than killed, and in fact fatalities among knights were low. In Flanders during the whole twelfth century only five knights died on duty, and only one of them in battle; one of the others was killed after blowing his horn too vigorously. Yet that all changed suddenly at the fateful Battle of Courtrai in 1302, when hundreds of French chevaliers were cut down in one day by ten thousand Flemish infantry.

  Many of the Frenchmen were hacked to death by a long spear called a geldon, from goedendag, “good day,” a sort of Dutch joke—essentially a baseball bat with spear points, which the defenders used to lethal effect after digging hundreds of ditches to lure French horsemen to their doom in the mud. However, the decisive Flemish weapon was the arrow—an old weapon but used in numbers not seen before.

  An infantry soldier cost one-tenth as much as a horseman, and so anyone could fight, while any state with sufficient tax-raising abilities could gather large armies, especially from cities filled with men for hire. The Flemish discovered that sufficiently large numbers of archers and infantrymen could overpower a cavalry force, especially if well-drilled and disciplined. The Flemish victory was a military revolution, and led to the expansion of infantry, so as a result battles became bigger and bloodier, dwarfing anything seen before. It was the beginning of the end for chivalry—afterward, so many spurs were taken from the dead that it became known as the Battle of the Golden Spurs.

  This was one of three battles that shocked the European order. On November 15, 1315, archers from the Swiss Confederacy, calling themselves the Everlasting League of the Three Forest Cantons, defeated an Austrian army at the Battle of Morgarten, so confirming Switzerland’s independence. Swiss history reached its most exciting phase, although that is admittedly quite a low bar, and the only well-known figure who emerges from this period is William Tell, although whether he actually existed, let alone fired an apple above his son’s head, is open to question.

  The third was the Scots victory at Bannockburn, where an English army was wiped out in 1314. In March that year the Scots had captured Edinburgh castle, the force led by William Francis, a local who had become skilled at climbing the castle scarp in order to visit his girlfriend. In response, King Edward summoned a huge army of 21,640 men from England and Wales and 4,000 from Ireland. Although his internal enemies, among them Lancaster, Warwick, Surrey, and Arundel, had sent the bare minimum of soldiers, so confident were the English that before invading Edward II hired a troubadour to “write an ode commemorating the coming victory.”16 Alas, it did not go to plan.

  Edward’s army also consisted of 2,500 cavalrymen, including more than 1,000 knights (the highest rank of cavalry soldier), and 3,000 archers. They crossed into Scotland on June 17, 1314 and soon met a Scots force half the size on a spot close to Stirling called Bannock Burn. This now-famous location lies just a few miles away from Doune Castle, which was partly destroyed during this war and substantially rebuilt in the 1380s and is where Winterfell is filmed (it was also used in Monty Python and the Holy Grail).

  The Scots were outnumbered, and they were also arrayed in less effective armor as they lacked metal-forging capabilities (another similarity with the Wildlings); most Scots also had a lighter type of horse, a courser, than their English opponents. Before the battle, the English knight Henry de Bohun, nephew of the fantastically rich Earl of Hereford, was yards ahead of the rest of the army when he saw Robert the Bruce on a gray horse inspecting his divisions about one hundred yards ahead. There was an old grudge between the men, the de Bohuns having been given Bruce family lands when he was a fugitive, and now Henry couched his lance and charged at his enemy with the full momentum of his powerful horse. And yet by the time he had covered the boggy slope on top of which Robert waited, his horse was exhausted; King Robert, on a lighter animal, swerved and dodged the blow, turned around, and, with one swing of his axe, split de Bohun’s skull open.

  Bruce addressed his men: “You could have lived quietly as slaves, but because you longed to be free you are with me here, and to gain that end you must be valiant, strong, and undismayed . . . You know what honor is. Bear yourself in such fashion as to keep your honor.”17

  The Scots were arranged in four schiltroms, walled in by shields and with hedges of eighteen-foot pikes facing each direction. The battle was fought in “an evil, deep and wet marsh,” and by its end one thousand Englishmen were already dead, many drowned in the mud, and many more would perish in the pursuit that followed. Twenty-two English barons fell, along with sixty-eight knights; the Scots lost just two knights and five hundred pikemen.

  In the course of the battle, Edward had one horse killed underneath him, but despite “fighting like a lion,” eventually Pembroke grabbed the reins of the king’s second mount and dragged him away to Stirling Castle, alongside five hundred surviving cavalrymen, eventually heading to Edinburgh and Berwick. Edward had left his shield, arms, and the privy seal, symbol of his power—a humiliation. The Earl of Hereford was captured, to be exchanged for Bruce’s queen, sister, and his daughter Marjorie. It was a huge shock to the realm of England, and many blamed the king.

  But worse was to follow. Much worse.

  9

  THE OLD GODS AND THE NEW

  Earth and water, soil and stone, oaks and elms and willows, they were here before us all and will still remain when we are gone.

  —JOHEN REED

  The Romans were horrified by the religion of the Britons, one that involved the worship of nature but also—if they are to be believed—human sacrifices. It was a clash of cultures that has strong parallels in Westeros, which borrows from aspects of British folklore, early nature-worship, anthropomorphic paganism, and the Middle Eastern religions that came to replace all of them. Although the world of Game of Thrones is polytheistic, inhabited by people worshipping many different gods, from the second book there emerges an alien religion proclaimed by a sinister foreign woman from the east who’s rather keen on burning people alive. However, in real life the mysterious eastern faith spread by women across the British Isles proclaimed the end of sacrifices, and certainly not human ones.

  There are four main religions in Westeros—the Old Gods, New Gods, the Lord of Light’s faith, and the Drowned Gods worshipped by the Iron Born. In the earliest days, the Children of the Forest believed spirits could inhabit the bodies of animals or inanimate natural objects. The Children followed a faith that resembles the first religions found on earth in that it had few formal rules, no organized belief system, and no temples to worship; the Old Gods are similar to the deities usually found in pre-agricultural societies, being attached to elements. The closest thing there is to formal religion are the forests with weirwood trees, which members of the Stark family still go to visit. (Cut a weirwood tree and they appear to bleed, one of many rather strange aspects of the religion that has parallels in Celtic folklore.) The singers of the forest had no books and no writing and when they died, it was believed only the trees remembered their actions. Likewise ancient Britons saw the natural as sacred, including rocks, mountains, and trees. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, said of the Celts: “They choose oak-woods for their sacred groves, and perform no sacred rite without using oa
k branches.”1

  Druidic ceremonies were held in such sacred groves, and the Celts “also revered yew, rowan, and mistletoe, whose red cones and berries echo the red leaves of the weirwood groves.”2 Likewise, in one of his visions, Bran Stark sees his ancestors offering human sacrifices in the godswood, as was most likely carried out in ancient Britain, judging by various mass graves dating from the Iron and Bronze Ages. Since the eighteenth century, hundreds of well-preserved bodies have also been found in marshes across northern Europe, suggesting humans killed for ritual purposes, either by garroting, hanging, beating, or drowning.3

  The White Walkers resemble creatures from Celtic folklore, such as the Sidhe or Aos Sí, a fairy-like race that lived in burial mounds in ancient Irish mythology. Among the most frightening of the Sidhe are the banshees, bearers of bad omens and messages from beyond, noted for their piercing cries (in the west of Ireland the howling wind at night can make one understand how such stories would have sent a chill down the spine).

  One theory is that much of Irish mythology has its origins in the migrations of different peoples to theisland; folk tales about leprechauns, or the little people, stemmed from older beliefs in the Tuatha Dé Danann, mythical short and dark fairy-like creatures with magical powers. The Tuatha Dé Danann may be lingering folk memories of the country’s pre-Christian gods, although another theory is that such creatures represent indigenous inhabitants who moved to the hills when later Bronze Age Celtic newcomers with superior technology settled in the valleys.

  The Walkers also bear a resemblance to the ice giants of Scandinavian mythology, thought to be a big influence on Martin. In the Norse epic Ragnarök, the world is plagued by a long winter, known as a Fimbulvetr, during which the gods Loki, Odin, Thor, and Hel (Queen of the Dead, from which our word Hell comes) do battle.4 Loki lives out in the wilds with a group of animals, and has the ability to take on their consciousness, using his third eye. This is repeated in Westeros where Bran Stark is taken on by Brynden Rivers, known as the Three-Eyed Crow, who can warg into a variety of animals, including crows, and is played by Scandinavian actor Max von Sydow.

  The Vikings believed in draugr, or walking dead, who would be cursed to tread the earth if not given a proper burial.5 Later medieval Europeans were similarly terrified of revenants, “the returned,” and although part of folklore, this fear was sometimes encouraged by the Church, which was keen that everyone have a proper burial.

  Twelfth century abbot Geoffrey of Burton wrote a striking account in his Life and Miracles of St Modwenna about two peasants living in Stapenhill, Derbyshire; trying to escape serfdom, they ran away to a nearby village, Drakelow, but the next day the two men dropped dead and their bodies were returned to their home village for burial. However, “soon one evening they appeared to villagers in Drakelow, while the sun was still up, carrying on their shoulders the wooden coffins in which they had been buried. . . . The following night they walked through the paths and fields of the village, now in the shape of men carrying wooden coffins on their shoulders, now in the likeness of bears or dogs or other animals. They spoke to the other peasants, banging on the walls of their houses and shouting.”6

  This terrifying spectacle was repeated each night until soon an unexplained disease spread through the village, killing all but three people. The lord of the manor, Count Roger the Poitevin, gave money to the abbey in compensation for having accepted runaway serfs, and the Church exhumed the bodies of the two men. So Geoffrey records:

  They found them intact, but the cloths over their faces were stained with blood. They cut off the men’s heads and placed them in the graves between their legs, tore out the hearts from the corpses, and covered the bodies with earth again. They brought the hearts to the place called Dodecrossefora and there burned them from morning until evening. When they had at last been burned up, they cracked with a great sound and everyone there saw an evil spirit in the form of a crow fly from the flames. Soon after this was done both the disease and the phantoms ceased.

  Of course, a serf who fled his home could become a free man on another manor or a city, where his labor was often in demand, and so there was social pressure for lords not to accept runaways. One might see this ghost story as a convenient cautionary tale: try to escape your miserable life as a serf, and something even worse will befall you. Employ a fugitive serf, and you’ll bring bad luck on your manor.

  Orderic Vitalis tells the story of his dead brother who, as punishment for a life of fighting, had to travel with an army of the dead “bearing red-hot weapons and wearing spurs of fire.”7 His near-contemporary Walter Map recalled a wicked man in Herefordshire who came back from the dead and took to wandering through the village at night, calling out the names of villagers who all fell ill and died within three days. Eventually the local bishop had the man’s body dug up and the head cut off with a spade sprinkled with holy water, and then reburied.8 William of Newburgh described a similar case in Berwick of a reanimated corpse where: “the simpler folk feared that they might be attacked and beaten by the lifeless monster, while the more thoughtful were concerned that the air might be infected and corrupted from the wanderings of the plague-bringing corpse’.”9 Everywhere there was “widespread acceptance of the idea that the dead, especially the wicked dead, could return to do harm.”10

  Shape-changing was also widely believed. Gervase of Tilbury, writing in Essex in the years either side of 1200, thought werewolves not uncommon—although he also believed women could turn into snakes. There was a popular French tale, Bisclavret, about a werewolf, and Yonec, a Breton lai—a short-rhymed play, usually about love and the supernatural—concerning a lover who comes to a woman in the form of a hawk.

  Other mythical beings abounded: the grant was a long-legged, bright-eyed creature that looked like a foal, and its appearance in villages warned of fires. There were portuni, small creatures with wizened faces who wore tiny clothes and were fond of humans, and who toasted frogs on a fire; they helped around the house but would sometimes cause mischief, snatching a rider’s reins late at night so their horse went into the bog, after which it would run off laughing. And there were giants. Ralph of Coggeshall, a well-educated man with access to a growing body of literature, nevertheless wrote “what is read in old histories about the bodies of giants” is true.11

  However, by the late medieval period there was far more scepticism about such folklore, and most chroniclers would have agreed with Tyrion that the Watch are there to defend Westeros from “grumkins and snarks and all the other monsters your wet nurse warned you about.”12

  The presence of birds in Martin’s books is another northern European influence, crows and ravens being prominent in Celtic as well as Nordic mythology. Badb, the Celtic goddess of war, turned herself into a raven or crow and, like real birds, followed armies into battle; intelligent crows have long been known to do this, in the expectation of juicy corpses to eat in its aftermath. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that, after the Battle of Brunanburh in 937, in which the Saxons beat a combined army of Vikings and Scots, King Athelstan left the “corpses for the dark black-coated raven, horny-beaked, to enjoy.”13 Which they surely did. Across the North Sea, the Scandinavians believed that ravens served as messengers between this world and the “Otherworld,” with Odin, the head of the gods, having two ravens as pets, Thought and Memory.

  Likewise with other beasts. In the first book, A Game of Thrones, Jon Snow notices a white wolf cub hidden in the snow that will become Ghost, mirroring Celtic myths in which white animals from the Otherworld appear: “from King Arthur’s white deer to Pryderi and Manawydan’s gleaming white boar and the mysterious White Hound of the Mountain” in the words of one author.14

  Celtic legend and folklore also included shapeshifters, called faoladh or conroicht, just as is believed to exist in Westeros. There were tales of strange tribes of werewolves out in the remote countryside of County Tipperary, beings that were called on by ancient kings to help them in battle. Gerald of Wales recor
ds one story,15 after his visit to this strange wild country with the future King John in 1185, a trip that ended disastrously when the mentally unbalanced playboy prince spent all his soldiers’ wages on alcohol and prostitutes.

  Gerald recalled a tale that took place a number of years before, about a priest and a young boy, a novice in training. They were on their way from Ulster in the north to Meath in the midlands and traveling along side roads. With night falling they made a camp at the edge of the forest, and soon they were surrounded by darkness. The older man became aware of a strange noise and gathered his courage to approach; a voice called out, warning the priest that if he were to see the man with his eyes he would be terrified. After some time, the priest convinced the owner of the voice that he was protected by God, and so a wolf-like figure emerged from the dark. He told the priest and the novice he had been cursed for seven years to appear as a wolf, and there were others like him; his tribe, the Clan Allta, had been jinxed by an Abbot Natalis soon after the time of St Patrick (a whole six centuries earlier). These creatures would often find the urge to attack sheep but once disturbed would run away and return to human shape.

  Likewise, the Anglo-Saxons had their own monsters, the Scaedugengan (literally “shadow-going”), shapeshifters who are neither alive nor dead, and who can take the form of children, often moving in on a compassionate family who take them in. They feature in the epic poem Beowulf, and this belief lasted long after the arrival of the Christians, especially in the north.

  THE LORD OF LIGHT

  Folk religions developed in relatively small, rural cultures, but as human societies became bigger and more complex, and with the need to cater for larger communities of more distantly related peoples sharing more important resources such as wells and rivers, their religions necessarily became more moralizing and their gods more anthropomorphic. And so, in sophisticated polytheistic societies such as Greece and Rome, human-like deities would punish wrongdoers in this life or the next, even if the gods themselves acted in a way we might find less than perfect, trying to impregnate everything in sight and using devious and eccentric means to achieve this goal.