Hello! I love your blog! As a fan of asoiaf and lover of art history I've been very interested in regional art styles of westeros and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on it?
Hi! Thank you so much! I’m not sure that I know enough about art and art history to really have any thoughts about this tho :( Like, I imagine that the Westerlands would favor extremely ornate styles, and for the Reach, I always think of medieval France, and Dorne makes me think about Moorish Spain or Morocco or Palestine or India, and for the North, I imagine much simpler, rougher styles, but that’s pretty much the extent of my thoughts :( I’m sorry!
However, I do have a tag for #art history in westeros that might be of interest to you? @asoiafuniversity also has a tag for #art. Also some of my friends, like @bidonica and @alamutjones and @goodqueenaly and @him-e and I know I’m forgetting people but my friends are great at this kind of thing, so friends, do you have any thoughts?
I THINK I may know why GRRM has the childbirth figures so high. It just occurred to me. GRRM may have seen the commonly bandied about figure of "1/3 of medieval women died during their childbearing years" (more or less true, if a rough estimate) and misunderstood what it meant. We know he's rubbish at maths!
depending how you count it (do you count Lyarra, do you count Brienne's mother...we have no confirmed cause of death for them, but it's a fair assumption) somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of his POV characters have mothers dead in childbirth
he's taken the one-in-three number and run with it, but he's misunderstood that "dying in your childbearing years" could be ANY death between the ages of fifteen and forty five - illness, accident, violence in warfare or murder. MY mother died in her childbearing years, but it wasn't in childbirth!
basically, he's combined "I'm shit at numbers!" with "tropes I already like, whee!". with a side order of "everyone will believe me, it's the Dung Ages!"
Thank you, this is really interesting to consider!
We don’t know how maesters are chosen for their castles. If a lord made an investment in a boy, would he then get first pick on having that boy back ten years later, so the investment pays off for him directly? Is it names drawn out of a hat whenever an opening comes up?
Either way, being a former patron to a maester may mean that you have someone in another castle (ideally your overlord’s castle or the Citadel itself, but a castle is a castle) who would have some residual loyalty to you, and may be able to advance your interests.
We don’t know yet how maesters are chosen for castles, yeah. But I kinda got the impression that a maester doesn’t have much say in what castle he is assigned to, and I also got the impression that a maester isn’t assigned to the castle (or even region) he was born in. Like Maester Theomore Lannister of Lannisport was assigned to White Harbor, which under normal circumstances in Westeros doesn’t give the Westerlands much influence over House Manderly. And Maester Tybald is in service to the Dreadfort, but that Ty- prefix is very popular in the Westerlands and it’s popular among people connected in some way to the Lannisters (like the Lannister-Freys).
I think whatever system the Citadel has in place is designed to minimize this sort of outside influence you’re proposing, so that the maester will work toward advancing the Citadel’s interests rather than the interests of any particular lord. (Which is another reason I don’t think House Lannister was involved in Pycelle becoming Grand Maester.)
And tbh, I’m really not sure that patronage at the Citadel is a widespread thing, outside the general patronage of House Hightower. (I don’t think that House Hightower typically sponsors an individual novice.)
Also a lot of the lords of Westeros look down on the Citadel even though they need the maesters (think of Tywin, think of Randyll Tarly). (Like basically think of BATB’s Gaston as a typical Lord of Westeros. Rodrik Harlaw is the exception, not the rule. There’s definitely this idea that maesters are sissies.)
The Citadel gets funding because lords have to pay a lot of money for a maester to be assigned to their service, and the Citadel sells (expensive) books, and it offers the services of scribes. It also gets some tax revenues from Oldtown. (Please see this post by @nobodysuspectsthebutterfly and this SSM entry.)
OR it may mean that the maester in your own castle owes you a debt, and would be unlikely to work against you - we know that not all lords trust their maester, but if your maester owes his education and position to you directly…that problem of split loyalty becomes much smaller.
OK, I know this isn’t necessarily relevant to ASOIAF, but in one of GRRM’s other books, Windhaven, there is an independent group of people similar to the maesters who are responsible for delivering all the messages between all the lords (the difference being that the flyers of Windhaven use mechanical wings and fly the messages themselves rather than use ravens) and GRRM himself says that he is a recycler of story elements (and GRRM has recycled A LOT of things from his earlier works and put them in ASOIAF). So anyways, the system on Windhaven is designed so that the messenger people are not indebted to the lord of the castle, and that was my impression with ASOIAF’s maesters too. Specifically, the maesters say it is the castle they’re loyal to, not the lord of the castle. So I don’t think it would work like what you’re proposing.
Plus, if you’re a lord and you want some maester to “owe” you in the future, I think there a more certain way to do it? Go father a bastard and don’t treat him like shit, and when he turns 8 or so, send him off to the Citadel and keep sending him a bit of money and make sure he knows who is responsible for his upkeep. I think that ensures more loyalty (and blood loyalty!) than going out and finding some random peasant to sponsor, particularly when a lot of lords view the smallfolk like cattle? Like it must be sort of absurd to them that they would *give money to a random peasant* to go *read books* for five or ten or fifteen *years* for the small chance that the random peasant might get assigned to a castle that could be strategically useful to the lord.
(Like, fuck, what if Randyl Tarly sponsored a peasant to study at the Citadel, and House Reed drummed up enough money to buy the services of a maester, and they get Randyl’s pet maester. Fuck, that was a waste of money. You said “a castle is a castle” but nah, not all castles are the same. The risk-reward payoff here isn’t good.)
I agree most Citadel candidates are probably wealthy, sons or bastard sons of nobility or potentially wealthy merchants. For those few who aren’t, having a patron may explain how they did it.
I hope that I didn’t say that “most Citadel candidates are probably wealthy” in my previous post because I don’t think that’s true. We only have the names of, what, maybe 50? maesters/acolytes/novices and we don’t know the backgrounds of these initiates, but we already know at least a handful who were smallfolk (Maester Erreck, Maester Torquin, Maester Yandel, Novice Pate). So I’m personally not ready to say, like, “60% of the initiates of the Citadel are wealthy” or like “80% of the initiates of the Citadel are wealthy” especially because I think we have sufficient evidence to say that candidates for a maester’s chain come from all walks of life.
However, I would go so far as to say that there is a glass ceiling for non-noble initiates. We know already that the Conclave isn’t going to make a peasant into a Grand Maester, even if they won’t admit that fact outright. And we know that novice Pate is having a much harder time forging his chain than Leo Tyrell, so it might be the case that some sort of discriminatory classism is going on, or it might be that Pate, as one of the smallfolk, started the educational race at a point so far behind someone like Leo Tyrell (who probably had a maester since birth) that educational opportunities just aren’t equal at the Citadel. (I mean, this is a problem with the American education system today, with some students at a significant disadvantage compared to others.)
Like, I feel like what GRRM is saying is that some really smart peasants like Erreck can advance to become maesters, but they can advance no further, and if you’re a peasant but you’re not really genius level smart, like Pate, you can become a novice or an acolyte, but you’re never going to complete your maester’s chain and be a full maester.
I feel like Pate would have lamented not having a patron in the AFFC prologue if it was A Thing for individual students with non-noble backgrounds to have patrons.
Like. I’m not saying no, cuz it’s possible! But I’m saying you and @poorshadowspaintedqueens are moving a little too fast for me on the speculation bandwagon, and I think we should temper our enthusiasm re: Citadel funding until we get twow.
(For example, if I personally was writing a fic that I wanted to be canon-compliant, I wouldn’t make individual patronage a big thing until GRRM said it was a big thing.)
I have a question for you. You're such a foodie, and yet the vast majority of what you describe about your family's (and especially your father's) tastes is pretty bland and not adventurous at all...how did you start developing this interest? How'd you learn to cook like that, in an environment that really doesn't match it?
Yeah that’s a good question, in part because I...really don’t have a solid answer? Like, I really don’t fucking know?
This said, my whole family cooks a lot. My whole family really loves to eat. It’s just a matter of what they cook, and what they like to eat.
My mum in particular actually trained and worked as a chef and hotel manager and stuff before I was born, so she’s got a whole load of cordon bleu technical shit down. And she got me learning to cook when I was about 9, with her help, knowing that if she played her cards right with me, she’d be taking a lot of jobs off her hands later on down the line.
My mum’s clever and adventurous and big into inventive combinations of flavours, so long as none of those flavours are too intense or extreme. No chilli, no sichuan pepper, no alcohol, horseradish, wasabi, no overuse of mustard seeds, etc.
My dad I probably give a worse rap than is quite fair. Basically because he’s a funny one and there’s no real rhyme or reason to the combinations of flavours or even whole cuisines that he takes exception to. In his way, he’s into a much wider range of flavours than one might expect, particularly to hear me talk about him. But in another way entirely, he’s predictably a Standard British Dad Type: he likes curry (Thai, Indian, Nepalese, whatever), likes standard anglicised Chinese restaurant stuff, and is starting, admittedly, to take more of an interest in the details and cooking behind more traditional or authentic versions of things he already likes.
But there’s other whole areas of food he just won’t touch or will just make grumpy noises at the idea of, because he doesn’t like the idea, or has a readymade assumption of their being silly and expensive, or whatever... And of course making too much effort to actually investigate traditional versions of things, or get too far into regional cuisines? That’s making too much effort, taking too academic an interest, and makes him feel like he might have at some point in his life been wrong about something, so that’s not allowed...
Anyway, my point is, they both cook a lot, and taught my sister and I to cook, and got both of us cooking for ourselves and got us into food. But there was always a strong sense of the white western european default --- specifically a British default, which is like...not cuisine, just food, and sometimes some pastry.
But basically they got me hungry and they got me curious and they got me learning my way around a kitchen, and I’m really grateful for that. The rest I think came down to me having an appetite for escapism and novelty and liking to experiment? And doing restaurant reviews for a few years, so I got to eat out and try a lot of interesting things. And living alone while I was at university. And also just, taking a big interest in like world history had a big impact on the kind of stuff I wanted to learn more about, food-wise, as well. As did working in food-and-wine related service jobs for like four years.
TL;DR --- Idk lmao, just did. Thanks for the question.
beradan replied to your photoset “I’m pretty sure I actually did four miles today, but 3.84′s pretty...”
Ooh, *multiple* Tom Lehrer songs! Excellent :)
Yeah, in general I’ve worked out that “oh, this is a funny song” will trigger my stop-and-walk impulse, so I use him and other humor songs for my walking intervals. Helps that humor songs are usually quite short. :D
alamutjones replied to your photoset “I’m pretty sure I actually did four miles today, but 3.84′s pretty...”
Sam, I have to ask, what are YOU doing in your activewear? :P
I honestly don’t own that much, so I save it for Being Active :D But once in a while I watch streaming movies in my active wear
alamutjones replied to your photo “Me, eating a hot dog: Huh, I’m out of honey mustard, I better buy some...”
Sam, you know those Red Rock Deli chips you wanted to try? They have - I've just seen - Mustard & Cheddar flavour. I'll add it to the package :P
Oooooooh mustard and cheddar. I mean I’ve eaten that in real life but never as a chip flavor....
apriljoy97 replied to your post “I was reading the other ask about succulent popularity and found it...”
Cactus is delicious! Especially the fruit, that's my fave!
I had a little cactus in grad school that fruited, and it was a really nice fruit -- it was tiny, just a bite, but it was like sweet and smoky, really lovely.
paxfelis replied to your photo “See but all I can think is “You sailed the Atlantic, walked across...”
Does earning the Japan badge mean you've successfully outwalked Godzilla pursuit?
I feel like if Godzilla was feeling lazy, like he didn’t go very fast and didn’t go more than five kilometers, I could outrun him?
amy-vic replied to your post “How safe is it to send you chocolate during the summer? I don't think...”
Where do you find butter rum Lifesavers, Sam? Those are my favourite, but I haven't seen them in years and years. (Maybe bc I'm Canadian and live in a tiny town?)
They’re usually seasonal -- I’ve really only ever seen them around Christmas, and frequently only in those “holiday book” lifesaver packages where you get four rolls of lifesavers in a little gift box.
Come to think of it I don’t think I’ve had butter rum Lifesavers in a few years, I wonder if they discontinued them.
alamutjones replied to your post “How safe is it to send you chocolate during the summer? I don't think...”
Sam, have you ever had musk-flavoured Lifesavers? They're sort of like eating grandma perfume... :D
I’ve never even HEARD of Musk Lifesavers, that sounds TERRIBLE.
