The Realm: The True history behind Game of Thrones

by Ed West

  It involved Thomas Grey, who sat on the King’s Council, and whose son was betrothed to the four-year-old daughter of the Earl of Cambridge, the king’s cousin and another of the conspirators. Cambridge, the brother of Edward of Norwich, had married Anne Mortimer, brother of Edmund, and was beheaded along with Grey and three others. Anne had died four years earlier, soon after the birth of their second son, Richard, at the family home of King’s Langley. Richard of York, as he would become after his uncle Langley's death on the battlefield, would begin the rebellion against the mad king 40 years later.

  That same year Henry V, having reignited the war with France, won a spectacular victory at Agincourt where an English army destroyed a French force four times as large. After his victory, Henry V was recognised as heir to the French throne, and King Charles of France agreed to a marriage with his daughter, Catherine of Valois. But before his son’s birth Henry V had been told by a soothsayer that ‘Henry of Windsor shall long reign and lose all’ and warned his wife not to give birth there, but while out on campaign she ignored his advice and a son, Henry, was born in 1421. The following year the king of England died, of dysentery, followed a month later by the King of France. And the prophecy would turn out true.

  The First Men

  The world that George R.R. Martin created is composed of four known continents: Westeros, Essos, Sothoryos and Ulthos. The latter two we hear little of in the series. Between Westeros and Essos lies the Narrow Sea, on the other side of which are a group of city-states called the Free Cities, and to the east of them are ancient fallen civilizations as well as nomadic peoples such as the Dothraki.

  Westeros is 900 miles long, and with a wide range of climates; the southernmost kingdom, Dorne, is equivalent to the Mediterranean, while the north is snowbound, even in summer. The Realm, covering the southern portion of the island, is protected by a 300-mile wall, beyond which are the Free Folk, or Wildlings, descendants of the original inhabitants of the island, who speak the Old Tongue. At the very far north is the Land of Always Winter, from where the feared White Walkers are supposed to hail, although the existence of these ghost-like creatures is disputed.

  The first inhabitants of the island were the Children of the Forest, a human 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. They were smaller than men, dark, freckled and with large ears, and arrived on the island during ‘the dawn age’.

  The First Men arrived on Westeros 12,000 years before the current era, via the Arm of Dorne, a land crossing linking the continents. In an 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. 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. For 4,000 years they lived in peace, and the newcomers even adopted their tree gods.

  The First Men used runes and spoke a harsh-sounding language 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.

  The Pact was ended after 4,000 years by the Andals, blond-haired people who hailed from a peninsula on the north of Essos by the Shivering Sea. They used iron, and conquered six of the kingdoms, with only the North holding out, and they destroyed the last remnants of the Children. The North, although part of the Realm, still maintains much of the culture of the First Men, including aspects of its religion.

  The Andals worshipped anthropomorphic gods called The Seven: the Mother, the Warrior, the Maiden, the Smith, the Crone, the Stranger and the Father Above, the last being head of the gods as well as god of justice, depicted as a bearded man who carries scales (the gods are also described as being seven aspects of one god). However the new gods are themselves challenged by R’hllor, the ‘Lord of Light’ followed by Melisandre, a priestess who has turned Stannis Baratheon over to her new faith. Her religion is dualist, with the priests believing in two gods at war.

  In turn new invaders came to Westeros; the Valyrians had also originated in Essos, and crossed the sea after their kingdom, the Valyrian Freehold, was destroyed in a cataclysm. They were led by Aegon I Targaryen and his two sister-wives, with the aid of three dragons, and originally held Dragonstone, a small island in south-east Westeros.

  Alongside him on his daring and risky invasion was his half-brother Orys Baratheon, ancestor of Robert. Aegon allowed lords who bent the knee to keep the land, but those that didn’t he destroyed, and he won Westeros with extreme brutality. The conqueror established King’s Landing, which had 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 4 in 10. Four centuries later, and the Targaryens and Baratheons would be on opposing sides in the War of Five Kings.

  Both the Yorks and Lancasters could trace their line to Edward III a century earlier and through him to William the Conqueror, who had won the kingdom four centuries earlier after crossing the Channel. They also descended from the old Saxon kings of the House of Wessex, and even further back a thousand years to the semi-mythical Hengest, Horsa and Cerdic, warriors who had come from the eastern continent and overpowered the native inhabitants. 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 the island, so did the people of the Realm of England.

  Until 6000BC Britain had been joined to the continent by a peninsula called Doggerland. It was over this land, and the ice sheet that covered the Channel, that various waves of people arrived from the tenth millennium before Christ until the first, their obscure tongues clinging on to rocky outposts much later.

  The first men left their pottery, their stonework and their bloodlines; DNA tests of Cheddar Man, a skeleton from approximately 7150BC, showed a direct maternal link with a number of local people in Somerset. Another group, called the Beaker People, set foot on the island in the third millennium BC during the Bronze Age. Their world was violent, as can be seen from the various massacre sites that dot the island, and they spoke an alien pre-Indo European language, part of a family of tongues that only survives in northern Spain among the Basque people. Over the millennia several waves of people crossed over, some up the coast of Iberia and France and others from across the North Sea.

  Among them were the Picts of Caledonia, who lived beyond the Wall of Hadrian, as the Wildlings live beyond the Wall of Ice. The ancestors of the Gaels of Ireland and Scotland, and the related Britonnic speakers of southern Britain, arrived between 1000 and 500BC, during the period when Greek civilization flourished across the Mediterranean world. The Gaelic culture and language survived in the mountains and islands of Scotland until the 18th century and the Highland clearances, at which point their clannish society was crushed forever and their tongue driven to near extinction.

  The Phoenicians and Greeks had been aware of the Cassiterides, or Tin Islands, located on the very edge of the known world; its new name came from Pytheas, a Greek sailor from what is now Marseilles who in 330BC sailed all the way to northern Scotland. Noting the tattoos with which the natives covered themselves, he named it Pretani, or land of the Tattooed People.

  Then came the Romans, who conquered the island under Emperor Claudius in AD43. Among the 20 or so tribes they encountered were the Hammerers, the Hill Folk and the People of the Deep, although we know them by the names given to them by their conquerors – the Ordovices, Brigantes and Dumnonii respectively. Their gods carried clubs and were mysterious even to those who followed them: Dagda the lord of knowledge, Lugh the god of arts and crafts, and Lud (or Nud) the closest thing the barbarians
had to a supreme deity, and whose temple may have been on or close to the current site of St Paul’s cathedral. The Britons, like their near relations further west, celebrated Samhain (later Halloween) during the time of year when the animals were slaughtered for winter.

  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, with their piercing cries. It is thought that much of Irish mythology has its origins in the migrations of different peoples to the island, with the myth of the leprechauns, or little people, supposedly based on the small and dark Tuatha de Danan, who moved to the hills when later Bronze Age Celtic migrants arrived, while the newcomers lived in the valleys.

  Likewise the presence of birds in Martin’s books, crows and ravens being heavily prominent in Celtic as well as Nordic mythology. Babd, the Celtic goddess of war, turned herself into the birds and like the birds followed armies into battle, in the expectation of corpses to eat in its aftermath. 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.

  After a number of rebellions against the Romans, the most famous of which took place in AD60 and was led by the Iceni widow Boudicca, Britannia had been pacified, with Londonium home to 60,000 people, and the province protected by a large army in the north. About 10,000 troops were stationed on the wall, named after the Emperor Hadrian, who in 122 had decreed that the Empire’s borders should be fixed and secure. At its completion Hadrian’s Wall was 80 miles along, eight feet thick and 15 feet high, with a fort every 15 miles and a ditch on each side. But the wild men beyond the wall were a constant source of anxiety, and the Romans also began importing mercenaries to police the country, including up to 5,500 horsemen from Sarmatia, in what is now Russia, and more ominously, Saxons from Germany, who first appear in the third century.

  By now the western half of the Empire was in terminal decline. In 378 the Romans suffered their first major defeat, at Adrianople, at the hands of the Goths. It was the beginning of the end: from that year coins in Britain start to become rare, and by 430 they had been abandoned altogether in favour of bartering. Pottery production had stopped in 410. Beyond the fortresses and forests to the north various population changes were occurring, and what would become known as the Völkerwanderung – the movement of peoples – had begun. Germanic tribes had sprung from southern Scandinavia around the year 1000 BC, spreading south and then fanning out, pushing the Celts in the west across the Rhine and the Slavs east of the Oder. By the 5th century barbarian tribes in war bands of up to 80,000 were sweeping across the continent, among them the Vandals from the Great Hungarian Plain who sacked Rome in 455, and the Visigoths from beyond the Danube who marched into northern Italy and sacked Rome in AD410. To the north, in Angeln, the ‘thin peninsula’, which jutted out into the icy Baltic Sea, land shortage was placing pressure on the Angles and their neighbours the Saxons and Jutes.

  The blond-haired Angles crossed the narrow sea and conquered at first the eastern part of Britain, later spreading west. The Jutes settled in Kent, having been invited by a tribal king, Vortigen, in AD430, and were led by two brothers, Horsa and Hengest, ‘the Horse’ and ‘the Stallion’, who came with three boats. The Jutes returned with 20 boats, and soon after with 60, and like the Valryians first settled on an island, Thanet. The Britons panicked; Vortigen told them to go elsewhere, and refused to pay them. But the Jutes returned in greater numbers and conquered Cantium, which they pronounced Kent, driving the natives west.iv

  The Saxons took the land north of the Thames, and settled along the south coast too; in 577 they completed their conquest by capturing the Severn Estuary, ending native resistance by splitting their lands in two. Those remaining on the island the invaders called Welsh, ‘foreigner’ or ‘dark stranger’; in turn the Cymraeg (‘people’) referred to the country conquered by the Saxons as Lloegyr, literally ‘the lost lands’.

  The Old Gods and the New

  The world of Game of Thrones is pagan, inhabited by people worshipping a number of different gods, although from the second book there emerges the influence of a mysterious new religion spread by a sinister foreign woman demanding the sacrifice of humans. This is true to the pattern of real history, although in real life the mysterious eastern religion spread by women across the isles proclaimed the end of sacrifices, and certainly not human ones.

  Like the Andals, the Angles were polytheists. The old gods they worshipped included the goddess of war, Freyja, her brother Frey the god of peace, and four others whose legacy lasted longer – Tiw, Woden, Thor and Frigg, commemorated in the days of the week. Among their other deities were Eastre, the goddess of fertility who was worshipped each spring, her name stemming from the direction in which the sun rose. Back in the eastern continent it is believed that her festival may once have involved human sacrifice. Iron Age people, the Angles and Saxons also honoured Weland the Smith, Norse god of ironwork who, like his Greek equivalent Vulcan, was crippled – although in the cruel world of the north Weland had been deliberately maimed by a king to make him stay in his service. In revenge Weland murdered the man’s son and raped his daughter.

  The Westeroi worship seven gods, a number with significance in almost all religions; the Catholic and Orthodox churches have seven sacraments, seven deadly sins and seven archangels, while in Islam there are the seven circuits of the Kaaba and seven destructive sins. The Babylonians had seven gates of hell, and in Greek mythology there were seven daughters of Atlas; the Hindus have seven stages to their wedding and the Bahai seven ‘valleys’, or experiences.

  As in Westeros, a new and mysterious faith was emerging from the east, which claimed there was just one god. As in Westeros, it was a religion espoused by women; in the case of Angla lond it was Ethelbert of Kent’s Frankish wife Bertha who helped spread the faith, against much native superstition.

  The story begins in Rome towards the end of the 6th century, the former imperial city a shadow of its former self, and now home to a few thousand people. Sacked by the Lombards, barbarians from the north who had crossed the Alps as the empire’s borders collapsed, the eternal city had however emerged as the centre of one of a number of religions that had sprung up in the Near East in the centuries approaching the age of migration. Among them was Mandaeism, which believed in a world separated between darkness and light, with spirits guiding the righteous to the world of light after their deaths. This faith, which resembles that of the Red Priests of Westeros, still barely clings on in Iraq, with a few thousand believers remaining. Another group, the Yazidi, followed a religion strongly resembling Martin’s ‘new gods’; they believed in one deity who had entrusted the world to seven holy beings, the ‘Heptad’, most pre-eminent of whom was Melek Taus, the peacock angel. Like the Mandaeans they still survive mainly in Iraq, although suffering persecution.

  Christianity had emerged as a sect of Judaism after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth around the year AD30; the new religion promised eternal life for the poor and virtuous, and an end to sacrifice, the Judean God having made the final sacrifice with his son. Within a few years it had its first martyr, Stephen, killed on the orders of an official zealously hunting down the new group, a Greek-speaking Jew by the name of Saul. Soon after, on his way to Damascus in Syria, Saul was struck blind and joined the followers of the ‘messiah’, in the Greek language Christos. By the end of the second century the sect had spread across the eastern and soon the western Mediterranean, the first Latin Christian text appearing in AD180v and the Empire abandoning the old gods in the fourth century. Now Pope Gregory pledged to return those distant isles back to the faith.

  The barbarians lived within 12 tribal kingdoms, although by Augustine’s time a series of conquests had reduced this to eight: Jutish Kent, the South, East and West Saxon kingdoms (S
ussex, Essex and Wessex), and the Angle lands of East Anglia, Mercia, Bernicia and Deira. When the last two were united and called Northumbria this became known as the Heptarchy, or seven realms.

  In 597, when Augustine finally finished his long trip, Kent was ruled by Ethelbert, great-grandson of Hengest and recognised as bretwalda, the most powerful of the kings, a title that would shift between the kingdoms over the centuries. To the Jutes of Kent, the Italian missionary appeared a strange and frightening figure. For Augustine the experience must have been far more terrifying, and he had almost given up on his hazardous trip across Gaul, now occupied by the Germanic tribe the Franks, before crossing the narrow sea. The Jutish king was suspicious, and only agreed to meet the stranger under an oak tree, which was believed by various European peoples to have magical powers. He insisted that Augustine remain on the Isle of Thanet.

  Ethelbert was under the influence of his Frankish queen Bertha, a Christian who had agreed to the match on condition she was allowed to maintain her exotic religion and bring her own bishop. It was Bertha who persuaded Ethelbert to speak to the stranger, and allow him to baptize a large number of Jutes, eventually himself converting in 597. Kent’s capital Canterbury became the seat of the English Church, as it remains today.

  Essex had come under the influence of the stronger kingdom south of the river that flowed into the German Sea. Its king, Saberht, was the son of Ethelbert’s sister, and he became a Christian in 604, with the first St Paul’s cathedral in London being built under his rule. In 616 Edwin, the king of Northumbria, was brought around to the new faith by his wife.