The world of George R Martin, called Earth generically in the
text Planetos Terros, or Martin World by US fans, is nowhere
near fully explored, as far as we know.
From the perspective of the people of Westeros, though,
that's absolutely true. It isn't even close, and it's
pretty much the same for us readers.
The map ends and we don't know what's beyond it, and there's
things on the map that aren't fully explored.
Who knows what's out there? What did the ancients explore
long ago? What have they learned?
What have that knowledge has been lost, maybe rediscovered
after all? People such as the Ghiscari, the
Valyrians, the Ebenez summer Islanders, have been sailing the
world as long or longer than most anyone else, and some of
them have really good ships and sailors, especially the summer
Islanders. What they know, the maesters of
Westeros often do not. But there have been attempts to
expand that knowledge, and often, as it is in our own
world, a singular personality sometimes advances the
boundaries of what's known by leaps and bounds, or rather
strides within a single lifetime.
When we think of explorers, we think of the Sea Snake and
Alyssa Farman, who had an urge to discover, or Nymeria and her
Roinish followers who were basically refugees who were
forced into seeking new lands. The refugees aside, Nymeria
included, though these are nobles, and a lot of the
refugees got left behind because they didn't have enough money to
flee. So that's a big difference.
These are noble people with money compared to Loma's
launched rider, who was a scribe, right?
That's he didn't have necessarily his a crew, a ship,
much funding, all the safety and security that comes with that.
It seems like he lacked it, but yet he explored farther and
wider than any of the above individuals.
Again, as far as we know, he was a scribe, not a Lord.
That's really cool. More interesting than the
character though of Lomas are the places he went or may have
visited. We're not sure in some cases,
which is part of the fun here. He wrote two books based on his
travels, wonders and wonders made by man.
Tyrion owned them both and read them over and over until they
fell apart. A lot of us can relate to that,
reading a book so many times that it's fallen apart.
In this episode, we'll cover the latter of the two books because
covering it all is too much for one episode.
The tale grew in the telling. We sort of planned it to be one,
but you know, as many times it's happened in the history of our
show, that was not enough. So we broke it into two and we
have thoughts for a third one. That's goes beyond even Lomas
strides, which is a big point here.
We're going to cover the latter of those two books, but we also
expect our collective imagination to take us as far as
Lomas long striders, long strides.
All that and more on this episode of History of Westeros
podcast. How's it going, Sean?
You look like you have something ready.
You're ready to say something here.
Here is an exciting topic, isn't it?
This episode is one of the wonders of the history of
Westeros. Podcast.
It would be nice. I like it.
Yes. Welcome everybody.
We do have live streams almost every Monday at 3:00 PM.
Unless it's TV season, keep that in mind.
You can catch these episodes on YouTube in an unedited form, or
you can go to Spotify and catch the edited video, or to any
podcast platform and catch the edited, non visual version.
This episode does contain a lot of images though, a lot of
visuals. You can still enjoy it without
those. They're useful, often beautiful,
you know, sparking the imagination.
Sometimes they're stunning or epic, but they're not required.
Feel free to just keep listening if you that's what you usually
do. But this is a good time to
remind folks that on Spotify you can switch to video mode on any
podcast that has a video feed, which ours do.
These days, every episode we put out has a video feed.
Older ones, not all of them do, but since you know early mid
23/20/23, that is. Every episode we make comes out
in video. Though not all of them have
extensive images like this one, so keep that in mind.
Good time to remind you all that.
We also got a lot of help as we so often do from our good friend
Nina. You can check her out at good
queenalley.tumblr.com. The latest blog post over there
is a testimonial to Stephen Atwell.
I mentioned his passing last week.
We're still feeling it. We will be for a long time.
But she also, in addition to providing her personal thoughts
on it, provides a lot of links and places you can read Stevens
works which are more relevant than ever now and a lot of you
probably or maybe never checked out his writings and only heard
the podcasts. Well, this is a good time to do
that. Check him out and let's make
sure his his memory lives on, which I'm very confident it will
because he was so good at what he did.
And if you have questions for us, this is a big, wide open
topic. So very important for me to set
the stage with that Westeros history@gmail.com or if you're
watching live, send your questions in the chat and
there's a decent chance we'll bring that up, get you a shout
out or something like that at the end of this episode.
There's a lot of other episodes I'll bring up because we're
touching on so many things in this one.
And well, that's always fun. So trivia question to get
started. That's also going to be at the
end of the episode. The answer to this, we know
seven of the 9 wonders made by man, according to Lomas, that's
his book, Wonders made by Man, right?
And there's nine wonders in it, but we don't know two of them.
So of the seven, we know one of them has been destroyed since he
wrote the book. Six of the seven are still
standing, one is not. Which one has been destroyed?
That is the trivia question. This was the first document I
started when the World of Ice and Fire came out.
And The World of Ice and Fire came out in 2014.
That's right. This document has been in our
Google Drive for a decade, A decade.
Nina added notes back then, and she's added notes, you know, in
this past week, just to give you an idea of how long we've been
messing with this one. And that's partly why it grew to
be more than the original plan. But let's get right into it with
a quote that really describes quite well what we're in for
today. Real quick for the quote I want
to add. That's part of why this is a
wonder. True that.
Lomas Longstrider Ask duck.
A scribe long dead, said Halden. He spent his life travelling the
world and writing about the lands he visited in two books he
called Wonders and Wonders Made by Man.
An echo of mine gave them to me when I was just a boy, said
Tyrion. I read them until they fell to
pieces. The gods made seven wonders, and
mortal man made nine quoted the half maister.
Rather impious of mortal man to do the gods to better, but there
you are. That's all the elements right
there. The basic elements, who he was,
his influence on Tyrion and others.
And well, you don't have all the list of the wonders, though
Tyrion claims to have memorized them.
I kind of wish he had listed them there, but that's the
discussion. And guessing is a big part of
the fun. We kind of doubt there's wonders
of the world we haven't been told about.
Like there's there might be some wonders out there that have just
never been mentioned. The problem is, which ones have
been designated? Most people in Westeros would
not have heard of Lomas Long Strider.
So it's not like they're like, oh, this is the one Lomas Long
Strider wrote about. No, most people haven't read
that book. Most of Westeros isn't literate.
Most of them don't read travelogues, explorer books.
Tyrion and Halden are a little more unique.
A lot of maesters would have, but outside of that, you just
don't expect most people to have read it.
So yeah, that's a that's a big deal, but but still.
That said, there might even be something out there that we
haven't heard of. Probably not a man made wonder.
That might be something more for the natural ones, because you
never know what deep, dark places of the world have never
been discovered, but among things that have been built,
probably have a handle on everything that's at least in
the conversation. But even that's not a sure
thing. I suspect that there might be
some others. I I'm not.
I don't have any confidence. But just comparing it to the
modern world, Pliny and I think there was another guy before him
that was writing about the the idea of these seven wonders.
One, they were kind of Mediterranean centric.
Yes, there's no nothing in China.
Yeah, exactly right. They didn't know about the Great
Wall of China or Stonehenge, or to whatever extent they might
have known they didn't want to. They remember they're trying to
prop up their own world, their own culture and everything.
So they weren't aware of or didn't want to give credit to
some foreign ones. And the same might be Loma seems
to be going beyond that, right? That seems to almost be the
point of what he's doing. But I still think that he might
have done more than what the rest of our mostly Westerosi
perspective would be aware of, right?
Even other educated people, if they didn't read his books,
might not have heard of some of the things he would might name
so. Good point, Good point.
So even though we don't have his lists, we can narrow it down
pretty well. But there's also some places
that we'll bring up here and there and perhaps discuss in
another episode with greater detail, places that maybe are
wondrous that we know for sure he didn't ever see, like
Bloodraven's Cave, The Greens Here Cave, whatever you want to
call that. It's pretty wondrous, it's
pretty epic and incredible. But Lomas was never in that
cave, so it's not really a candidate for his wonders.
So we'll have a a things like that in this episode as well.
Also, I want to point out something.
It's neat to consider that there were seven, and in reference to
half, master half. Maister's quote there about
saying it was rather impious of the mortal man to do the gods do
better, and you wonder if that was part of why he chose 7
because you know he's Westerosi. The Seven are a thing.
You know this is #7 is kind of sacred to Westerosi and also of
course it matches the seven ancient wonders of the real
world. But that might have just been a
nice convenient well, everything fits for for George when he was
creating that. Now who was Lomas Longstride,
let's start with the character and then we'll move into his
travels and then the specific wonders.
That's basically our road map for today.
We only have one other person named Lomas so a sample size of
one for comparison, he was his name is Lomas Estermont.
He's in the storm lands, so I don't know.
That probably isn't an indication that Lomas Lontrider
was a Storm Lander, but you know, whatever, that's, that's
what we have on Lomas Estremont. If you had to bet, if you had to
guess, that would be your best. One, yeah, it wouldn't be a high
confidence guess, but it's yeah, if you forced to guess you would
just gun to your head you'd be like storm lands.
By the way, Lomas Estremont's son Andrew Estremont is the one
keep in charge of keeping watch over Edrick Storm right now and
lease. So there's also an arch Maester,
Phomas, not less, you know, kind of like Lomas, you know, Phomas,
Nina jokes. This guy is the faux Lomas
because this guy is is the one that supposes the others were
just humans that the Starks exaggerated to make themselves
seem tougher. You know, we're like, well, that
guy's wrong. We've we've seen the others in
in the prologue, like, we got that out of the way quickly.
So yeah, we're shut up, Thomas. Anyway, it's unlikely that Lomas
was from or grew up in an overly rural or remote area because he
was literate, right? That's just kind of suggests a
little something about education probably wasn't born into
poverty. That can't be assumed either,
though. You know, people rise from from
very little. He could have been one of those
types. He's certainly an impressive
person, so you can't put that past him.
This is a strong case to be made.
He was born in Old Town or lived there because it's a center of
knowledge. It's, it's how you might expect
to learn about all these wonders in the 1st place.
Like where the place that would spark your imagination.
You know, you could just be sitting there and be like, you
know, the world must be full of wonders and that would be
enough. But if you read some books and
we know this guy could read, that might just really spark
your imagination. Like Tyrion, Tyrion read this
specific book and it sparked his imagination to go see some of
these places. So there you go.
I mean it's it's it's very human, very, very natural, very,
very. And Old Town also would have
been more cosmopolitan. He might have heard stories.
That's true, right? Travellers from all around.
And I think there's another argument for him being from Old
Town. Now there's some, there's some
holes in this argument, but again, you know, making some
best guesses. He didn't name the Hightower,
which I think is a worthy wonder, and I think it's a
strong parallel to the Lighthouse of Alexandria, and he
may have named it. He didn't specifically say it
wasn't. It might be one of the two that
we don't know. But if it's not one of the two
that we don't know, then I think it makes sense that he might be
from there because he might not think of it as a wonder because
it was just part of his daily life.
He wasn't that impressed by this thing that he sees every day.
Like if you live in New York City, the Empire State Building
might not seem as impressive, but if you're from Greensboro,
NC, and you go to New York City, you'll be blown out of the
water. So he might have thought of it
as to typical of his daily life and and maybe even saw the
utility in it and not just the grandeur and impressiveness of
it which a lot of times wonders typically wonders don't have
specific utilization right? The monuments and statues and
impressive works of engineering and such, but don't necessarily
have a specific use which the old the Hightower does, which
again might have kept him from considering it as such so.
I agree. And that's.
Not have been as standard as you travelled the world too.
Is this better than the Hightower?
Or that might have been what gave him appreciation for, you
know, it's like, wow, I have gone all over the world and I
have not seen anything as tall or impressive as high or or that
very little that's close. Yeah, it might have been like
returning after all his travels that made him appreciate it
more. But either way, it's a good
point and I like the idea of of it.
You know, something you grew up in the shadow of doesn't seem
quite as impressive. Another place he could have
grown up is like High Garden. You know this other place that
has a lot of books, you know, a lot of access to, to, to
materials, because I'm wondering about this a little bit because,
yeah, scribe, that makes a lot of sense for Old Town, but a lot
of books are only for like maesters and septons and of
course nobles. So you wonder like a scribe
might be. One of the few exceptions to
some of that is access to to the the written word and places that
might keep that under wraps. You know, because most people
don't know how to handle a book. You know, it's like don't let
the regular folk touch a book. Like, you know they'll just tear
it or get grease on it or something.
They don't know how to properly respect the book.
Do you respect books so that a lot of things that make sense
for I think him reading books is what got him started and he
probably also already had the itch to travel and wander the
wanderlust or what have you. The quote from Haldon and Tyrion
said he was a long dead scribe who wrote 2 famous books.
But how long ago? Scribe seems kind of to
undersell it a bit though, right?
Like this guy travelled vast distances across the world,
isn't he? Isn't scribe kind of secondary?
It's like this guy was a world explorer and a scribe, you know?
I think that's the part that comes next.
But that is really important. The scribe is what is huge.
The sea Snake didn't write a book.
You know, Alyssa Farman didn't write a book.
We those people are inspirations.
They're amazing, but they didn't pass their knowledge down, even
as 10th as well as Lomas LON Strider did.
So that's that's still important.
The scribe part still important. Secondary, but still very
important. It's like saying Neil Armstrong
worked for the government. Technically true, but yeah, it
really buries the point. You're right, A.
Little bit more than that though.
Yeah, like he, Lomas wasn't risking his life scribing, but
the going around the world. Like, like Neil Armstrong, he
risked his life. Yeah, but not for work.
Not because he worked for the government specifically.
Like, Lomas could have had some money, you know, he had to have
some or he wouldn't have been able to travel.
But being referred to as a scribe doesn't exactly imply
significant. Well, so maybe he was like a
middle class job, middle class guy.
That might be the way to think of him.
Certainly not the kind of guy that made the kind of money you
could retire early on. But you know, the guy that had
to make his way in the world and and did so probably better than
any scribe I've ever heard of. But we also don't know the whole
story. Like Halden said, some things
about him and they know what they know about Lomas from his
writings and they may not know actually a whole lot about the
person, you know? I mean, we know a lot about
George R Martin, right? But you could name a lot of
authors out there which their writings are really well known,
but the person not so much. Lomas is kind of in that
category print. Most of what we know about him
is is kind of an assumption. Educated guesses really for a
lot of them. And you know, his job of Scribe,
that's what does that even mean? Like you have to work for an
organization that employs scribes?
I mean that's that's that's more of a career than a specific job,
I guess. But people like Howden.
Could be a freelance scribe. It could be like Scribe for
hire. People like Howden might sort of
associate with him in a sense because he's the half master,
you know, it's he's got sort of comes from that academic
background, but he's also travelled around a lot.
He's not just a guy that's SAT in a tower and and with books
and and scrolls and never seen the world.
This guy, this is someone who really went out and saw the
world. And Howden's kind of like that
too. And there are a lot of people
who go to study at the Citadel without becoming maesters.
You know, we hear that about nobles like Oberon and his
daughter Sorella. Maybe that's what Lomas was.
Someone that went there to study but without the intent of
becoming a maester, had some other things.
Marwin's another good example. An arch maester.
Absolutely. Guy willing to go out and travel
at the drop of a hat. Like that's literally what we
saw him do. He's like, I'm here.
I'm here. Wait, what's now?
What? That Daenerys Dragons.
I'm hopping on a ship now. I'm going to the docks now,
heading out. That sounds like a Lomas type,
like Marwyn and Lomas would have.
They would at least could have swapped stories, right?
And maybe Lomas had a benefactor, someone you know,
like a rich guy, that was willing to pay him to go and do
some of these places, pay his passage.
Now it probably wouldn't have been that big of an expense for
a rich person, given Lomas wasn't like traveling with an
entourage or buying a ship or anything like that.
But he may have had to like work.
He may have had to like be on the crew, you know, like pull an
oar or sow some sales or I don't know what, just do work to get
by to make his enough money to make his next travel, to make
his next journey. And maybe a scribe from Westeros
could Some fancy people might be interested in that.
You know, he might have some knowledge.
They might want to interview him, get some dirt on him and
hear news from somebody that's clearly knowledgeable.
I don't know, but there'd be a lot of and.
And maybe he did have a a companion with him, you know, a
a swordsman. Or maybe he did have a maester
with him, Some of the new languages, you know, something
like that. Someone that would help him
avoid pirates, You know, something like that.
He may, too, like the idea of books and scribes and such.
Now it's you know. Now it's even more It's just on
your phone. You can just have.
I can't even think of what to say how amazing phones are like.
You could take notes in your phone.
You could have. You could have all the knowledge
of the world in your phone, in your pocket, even if you go back
50 years, a book and pen and paper and keeping it dry.
It might have taken some material and some package for
him to lug around. He might have needed one or two
assistants to help carry stuff and keep notes and keep stuff
safe and find his way. He might have just been doing it
all on his own. It's hard to say.
He might have written everything after he got back and not as he
was doing it. Maybe he.
Had a great memory. Yeah, yeah, photograph the
memory. I wonder too if he might have
had a person or maybe different people over time sending them
out on these missions. And especially, I started
thinking of him as maybe more of an Indiana Jones type character.
Like Indiana Jones is a professor.
Well yeah, but that's not the cool part, right?
He might have been a scribe and had some job and some library.
But he might have also been ambitious and daring and
intelligent and someone might have recognized it and sent him
out like hey, go check out this thing and he comes back with
awesome stories like well now check out this thing.
You might have been sent out by some, like you said, a
benefactor. Yeah.
I might be stretching a little bit more, but I also wonder if
it's possible, If Lomas wasn't just one person, if it was a
group of people, if it was like the Dread Pirate Roberts or
Brandon the Builder, someone who's efforts kind of got rolled
up into one person over a couple generations or something, you
know? It's possible.
Absolutely possible. Can't dismiss the idea.
It's a, it's a, it's a workable theory.
Obviously, with as little as we know about him, we can't really
go one way or another. But it's a fun it's a fun
possibility, for sure. Like think about his name being
Long Strider, right? Is that?
Did he really call himself that? Who gave him that name?
Did he take that name on or that get a scientist persona?
Or is it just because his name was long Strider is more likely
to do it just like John Crintest obviously becomes a dentist so.
Clearly. This is easel site.
Later we do have at least one conflicting report on Lomas in
fact, which would point to something amiss there.
So yeah. Could just be an error, but
could be an intentional error by George to show the difficulty of
of of words like this. Or it might just be a regular
error like that. You know, the editor's messed
up. But either way, it works.
It fits the setting. Whatever it kind of is, we can
we can incorporate it into the world and make sense of it,
discuss it as if it was intentional.
Nina had a great take here too, comparing Lomas to someone we
discussed in just a recent episode.
In our Hard Home episode, we discussed Maester Willis, who
traded some of the skills that he had learned at the Citadel,
like healing and counseling for protection from one of the
Hardhome chieftains. And he got to do a little
ethnography about Hardhome and its people.
And so the idea that Lomas himself would also have skills
and and ability and yeah. I I appreciate that comparison a
lot. Lomas Lomas is more about the
the the wonder like the the edifices and the natural wonders
where Willis is more focused on people.
But it's a very similar concept of of academic person who really
does field work and focuses, gets you know, gets their hands
dirty and goes, goes out and does things rather than just
writing. Not that the writing is
important, but we we respect the one of those who do both.
So he probably had skills well beyond just scribe.
It's kind of the point here, like a a summary of of some of
what we discussed. He probably was multi talented,
had a lot of skills, maybe he wasn't a warrior, maybe he
wasn't a master linguist, but he definitely got by somehow and it
was very impressive. However, he pulled it off.
He was good with the whip. Good with the whip.
Yeah. Indiana Lomas.
Well, one of the wonders we're going to talk about is the 3
Bells of and Norvos, and one of them is Noom.
So they could be Lomas Long Strider and the bell that goes
Noom. Like the Temple of Doom.
Yeah. So this is a man who set out to
open up the world to many Westerosi who had previously
known so little. He wanted to expand knowledge,
right? He wanted to write.
He set out to write this book and and let people know and in
some ways save them, maybe from having to make the journey
themselves because it's really hard to do that.
But also maybe you encourage them to make the journey if it's
possible. It's a little both.
And of course it's not just Westeros on some of our he had
an impact on, of course of Tyrion, but a lot of other
people as well. Now, did he set out with to name
7 wonders or just kind of arrive at that conclusion afterward?
That's kind of what I was getting at when we brought up
the religion aspect. Maybe he was trying to do Sevens
because of the Seven Gods, but that's kind of a random guess.
So let's talk about where he went.
Let's do an overview of where he travelled and then get to the
actual wonders. He went all over Westeros.
We should be able to assume that much, though I'm not sure he
went like beyond the Wall. Maybe he did, but that's more of
an assumption. And I wouldn't be so sure about
that now that he went to like every single corner, every
island he may not have gone to like the Island of House, Far
Wind, you know, or Lonely Light, that is.
And he certainly didn't go to the New Dragon Isles that hadn't
been discovered by Alyssa Farman yet.
But Westeros is pretty well known by the time of his birth.
But people been living there for thousands of years, so there
wouldn't be a lot of like, hidden things.
He would know where the important things are.
It'd be overseas where he would have to, like, read more books
and and gather knowledge, where he would have less idea of
what's out there. So in Westeros, he's more like
judging what's already there and and seeing it maybe because it's
closer. We don't think he went to
Sothorios or Olthos, which are the 2 southern continents that
we know of, neither of which we know the full extent of.
And he may have been warned off Sothorios before the before he
even started because of travelers who went there before.
After all, we know of Genera Belarus, the Valyrian explorer
who flew her dragon so far South, she never even found the
end of the continent and said it was not good.
You know, like it's just disease and jungle and yeah, just don't
go there, don't go there. So I really doubt Lomas went
there is a guy you know, trying to live not, you know, he was
willing to take some risks, but the therios is so hostile.
Just the the fauna enough, let alone the flora.
I mean, it's just bad. It's just bad.
He's looking for wonders, not dangers.
Good point. Now there might be some
crossover in the Venn diagram, but you get the the the wonder
side of the Venn diagram before you go to the middle area I
think. And life's only so long these
travels he took. Long he would have.
Taken a lifetime, you know what I mean?
Yeah, like. I agree.
Like super long, some of these must have taken like years.
I mean, it supposedly takes two years to go to Ash Eye and back
just just as a traitor, not as someone who's like recording
information along the way, you know, and stopping.
And I guess traders would stop at a lot of different places
along the way, but they wouldn't go inland very like many, many
miles to check out, you know, a temple or something like that.
You know, they would pretty much do all their business at the
port and then move on. So yeah, this is, this would be
extremely lumpy business we're talking about here.
He did go to the Summer Isles though, which is, you know,
maybe the far the South. He went, he spoke with their
sages. I suspect he considered the
talking trees as a potential wonder made by man.
And we'll make the case for that when we get to the end, which is
when we will make all of us will make our guesses as what we
think. Numbers eight and nine are
talking, trees will be a candidate.
With Essos, it's more complicated.
We can assume he went nearly everywhere in Westeros.
Essos, no chance. There's no way he couldn't have
done that in one last time. And we don't even know the whole
continent. And we know for a fact there's
he just didn't go farther than the 5 fourths.
He may not have even gone to the 5 fourths, but he definitely
didn't go beyond them. He definitely didn't go beyond
this map you see behind me. You know he didn't go beyond
what we have there. He did go to the ruins of Croyne
to talk to the survivors of the Roynar.
It's unlikely he chose any wonders from that area since
it's all ruined, but if not there would have been
candidates. Check out our episode Nymeria
Mother Roin for that, and here's a quote from that.
Lomas Longstrider and his Wonders Made by Man, recounts
meeting descendants of the Roinar in the ruins of the
festival city of Croyne, who have tales of a darkness that
made the Roin dwindle and disappear, her waters frozen as
far South as the joining of the Selhoru.
According to these tales, the return of the sun came only when
a hero convinced Mother Ruin's many children, lesser gods such
as the Crab King and the Old Man of the River, to put aside their
bickering and join together to sing a secret song that brought
back the day. It's a nice way to bring Lomas
into the title theme, meaning A Song of Ice and Fire and
bringing him into the ideas A Long Night.
He's one of many historians and I'm classifying him as a
historian in this anecdote because he's adding to the base
of knowledge regarding the long Night.
We don't hear about anybody else interviewing the Roinar
survivors to for this information.
It's possible others have, but Lomas is the one we hear about
doing it. He also writes about the
grayscale, the stoneman, the foul fogs and water which Tyrion
saw first hand, and the bridge of dream, which Tyrion saw
twice. You would think that if Lomas
also had that weird repassing of the the just, you know, this is
inexplicable, this really strange double passing of the
bridge or dream that happens. He might have counted that as
wondrous. So I kind of guessed it.
That didn't happen to him. It only happened to Tyrion and
those that group and maybe some others, but but not Lomas.
Tyrion wonders how amazing and beautiful Croyne must have been,
how many weddings must have happened at the Palace of Love,
which he thinks must be 10 times larger than the Red Keep and
just beautiful. And well, now the region's
called the Sorrow. So it's really changed to the
flip. It's the reverse.
It was the Palace of Love and now it's called the Palace of
Sorrow as a ruin. In line with that, Tyrion's
wonderment turns at the love of the place.
He's like imagining all the love that must have been there.
And then pretty quickly he starts to think of Taisha and
that turns his thoughts to sorrow as well.
So it's really the whole the emotion of the scene is gets
that full circle there. And had Loma seen the Palace of
Love when it was whole, it sounds like it would have been a
very strong candidate. But this is, and this is a
conundrum for us. Our wonders are ruins eligible
to be wonders under the scheme auto.
Like we have two to guess at, and one of them in particularly
is fairly ruined. That doesn't mean it isn't
really wondrous and impressive, though.
Like what? At what point is it too ruined
to be considered a wonder? You know?
So that's a trick for us to kind of figure out and for you all to
weigh in on what you think as well.
One of my thoughts on that on that line was the classes of
roads. After only about 50 years I
think was toppled over by an earthquake, but it's still this
massive statue laying on the ground like anyone who heard of
it or wanted to go see it could still go.
And even though it was ruined and over time metal, bronze and
such from it was stripped away for different projects and I
don't know if that made it less grand or less big.
At what point is it not the closest anymore, or not grand
enough to be a wonder? Yeah, that's exactly so.
This is a bit of a conundrum. And so the the pyramid of geese,
we don't even know what state exactly it's in, right?
Like it, let's say it was merely the foundation, you could just
see this outline of the base of it, but it didn't have any
height. But if you could imagine the
height from the pyramids of marine and see how big the base
the geese was, would is that enough for Lomas to consider it?
Maybe. Yeah, it might have been.
It's super tough. You're right.
You bring up you. You've you've shown why this is
tricky. Like can we know he went to
Slavers Bay? There's a note about him looking
at at a Ghiscari obelisk with Valyrian writing which depicts
the freehold defeating the Ghiscari in the fourth of the
five Ghiscari wars. The 5th war is when they said no
more. Valyria is sacked.
The the capital and the pure Great Pyramid which is sitting
right outside was partly destroyed.
We're not sure how much, but the city near it was destroyed.
So that meant the pyramid was no longer inhabited.
No one went there anymore because the the supporting city
was gone. But yeah, we don't even know how
much of it was destroyed. So that's we're going to, that's
going to be one of our candidates for for voting on
later. So this is something we all
talked about a lot offline. Like what counts as a ruin?
At what point is it? So yeah, and we're not even
sure. To further confuse the issue,
we're not sure it went in the timeline.
He saw some of these things which might affect what state it
was in when he saw it, right? We're not even sure of things
like if he necessarily needs to have seen it, could it?
Would it be enough to have heard stories and seen paintings like,
OK, that's And how much would his opinion change as he saw
each one? Would his bar go higher?
Are there any he named But later thought, Never mind I that's
when isn't worthy anymore, you know.
He could have his emotion at the moment, or the enthusiasm of
people presenting it to him, or the perspective of what he had
seen so far. All these could be factors too.
I I really like that idea because I figure he went out to
do 7 and he ended up with 9 because he just couldn't narrow
it down. Like he maybe he had like 15 and
he managed to get down to 9. He's like, no, I just can't get
it any smaller than this. These are these are too amazing,
too wondrous to to leave off. Yeah, he's seen the Bone
Mountains, that huge mountain range that separates the
Dothraki Sea from everything on the other side of it, which is
by Azabad and and South of that is ET and etcetera, lots of
things over there, the the, the dry, deep and all that.
And he of course did go to ET and he did go to Lang.
And Lang is the, you know, an island West of the Shadow Lands,
South of ET. He might have gone to Great
Morak, which is the Isle South of Karth that forms the southern
half of the Jade Gates. It's a very large island, so
it'd be kind of odd for him to skip it entirely, since he did
go to Lang, which is also an island not too far to the east,
and Lang is hostile to outsiders, and we don't hear
anything about Great Morak that way.
But Lomas just, it's kind of just a missing piece.
Like, Morak is probably the least talked about region in
that general area, so we'll just have to leave it for now.
He did go to Ashai, but we're not sure if he ventured into the
Shadow or if he went all the way to the 5 Fourths, which is also
going to be on our list, and it's kind of hard not to see him
choosing it if he saw it. And it's also possible the Five
Forts are one that he only read about, and that would be enough,
because it's so darn impressive. But he might be like, really?
Is it really that big? I got to see for sure you know.
I wonder if he had any sense of journalistic integrity.
You know, like needed to see it with his own eyes to count it.
If that might have been a because imagine in these books
that Tyrion read till they fell to pieces.
It probably wasn't just a seven page book, right?
I can imagine he'd listed all the other candidates and maybe
his adventures along the way and details.
People told Da da Da he might have listed 50 candidates for
Wonders of the World, but only designated nine that Tyrion
memorized, you know? Yeah, yeah.
All right, let's skip ahead to what time he lived in.
We know he's from Westeros, like I said, but we don't know what
time frame he lived in. But I think we can narrow it
down pretty well. There's no evidence he visited
Valyria, but he did visit a number of places near it, and he
considered the Valyrian Dragon roads as one of the wonders of
the world. So it somewhat defies belief
that he would avoid the freehold itself.
So we can surmise he was born after the Doom, or he just
wasn't allowed there, or George just didn't want to write about
Valyria yet. So he kind of just authorial
license and just didn't include anything about that's.
That's got to be a possibility. We got to consider the real
world potential that George just didn't want to do that because
Valeria is so special and he didn't want to just casually
treat that. Maybe he wanted to take more
time with that. I don't know about y'all, but I
strongly like the idea that you put forward here that he was
living in the century of blood. I think it all lines up really
well actually to give us a pretty clear like 100 year
window or whatever of when he lived.
So let me lay out what as Shea is saying here.
Yeah, I I I feel pretty strongly about it as well.
I'm pretty confident in this century of blood guess, But
there are, you know, some possible flaws with the idea.
But let me lay it out. So he saw the palace of the 1000
rooms and Sarnor that was destroyed during the century of
Blood. So we have a he didn't write
about Valyria. He did write about this thing
that was destroyed during the century of Blood.
So he couldn't have lived after it.
Like, there's almost no chance because he saw it.
It is one of the things that he just wrote about It explicitly
says he saw it. So that means he was alive
before the Century of blood or during it, right?
Very much so. That at least puts an end point
on that, going back before he saw the Titan of Bravos.
The Titan of Bravos isn't super, super old and it was hidden.
Bravos was even hidden from the world until the famous unmasking
of Uthero. So Bravos is the least ancient
of the Free Cities. The Titan isn't like something
they built right away. We don't know exactly when it
was built. It's been standing for several
100 years at least, But to have, he has to have been between
those two days. He has to be between the Titans
building and the destruction of the Palace of 1000 Rooms.
And given that he didn't write anything about Valyria, it kind
of feels like that's our best guess, that he travelled during
the Century of Blood not long before the fall of the Palace of
1000 rooms. But maybe, well, maybe like 10
to 20 years before that. Maybe even as much as like 30 or
40. We don't know when In the
Century of Blood, the Palace of the 1000 Rooms was sacked.
Probably later on, because the wars of the the Iraqi gradually
destroyed the Kingdom of Sarnor. It wasn't just like overnight
and and Sarnor, the capital Sarnath, You don't suppose that
fell first, right? It was pretty far down the line,
so yeah. Anyway, all that's to say feels
like this is our best guess. Nina, of course, has some other
thoughts on it, but let's see what she says here.
Yeah, Nina. I don't know if I agree, but I
think I see a good point here. And she says she thinks that
probably Lomas traveled when the Valyrian Freehold was still
extent, in that its existence would have facilitated his
travels through Essos. It would have been easier.
In other words, it would have been a single coinage, maybe
single state. And so if she thinks it would
have been harder for him to travel across Essos, not just
when the Valyrian Empire was gone, but in the immediate
implosion of it and the. Lawlessness and.
Yeah, then she thinks it would be harder.
And I think that's a fair enough point, but I still just don't
see why he wouldn't name of unless we're saying it's some
Valyrian location is one of the two remaining wonders made by
man. I just don't think he went to
Valyria and I don't know why he would be banned from Valyria.
Yeah, that's it's hard to say why he would be banned.
Like why would they ban what? Maybe they don't because of the
the prophecy that says Westerosi gold or Castle Rock gold, but
why would that associate with Lomas?
Yeah, it's it isn't. There isn't an obvious reason
why he would be banned. It's it's it's possible but it's
not I. Don't know.
There may be just some prejudices.
There may be, if he stated his reason was to to take note of
their wonders, they might not like the idea.
They want to keep it secret. This is all very speculative,
but but I It's also possible that he went there many times,
right? Maybe he went there so many
times. Kind of like if he's from Old
Town, he doesn't think of the Hightower as being a Wonder
because he's so right. Maybe he spent so much time
there that those didn't even seem like Wonder's name.
He's trying to find things better than that.
Maybe his benefactor might have been from Valyria and you know
what's in the rest of the world and send him out to these other
places. You don't.
You don't need to write about this.
Already know about this. I can think of lots of reasons,
but I do think it's a default theory.
That is the time that Century Blood is when he was traveling.
I have another answer for you, Sean.
This is the wonders made by man. Valyrians are better than men.
They're they're like gods. Talk about the wonders made by
gods and you'd have a whole book of Valyrian wonders.
Well, those dragon roads should be wonders made by Dragons then,
right? Yeah.
I was going to say they are cheated by using Dragons.
You wonder if it might be easier, not easier, but easier
to travel as a nobody in a time like the Century Blood.
It sounds like it's chaotic, but we can't assume the entire hunt.
Like the 100 Years War wasn't literally 100 straight years of
war. It was off and on.
Of every village across the whole planet, right?
So maybe I doubt as well like Nina does.
It's that he travelled immediately in the aftermath of
the fall of Valyria, the Doom of Valyria.
But maybe 50 years after that, when things have calmed down a
bit and the wars are maybe a little more isolated in certain
places. Or maybe they flare back up
again. But I wonder if he had to travel
like Incognito. I don't think he did, because
he's a nobody. That's interesting because we
think about our POV characters. They almost always travel
Incognito. Like almost half the POV
characters have travelled Incognito or with a false
identity. Catelyn, Arya, Well, Arya's had
like 20 false identities, you know, with more, with more come,
more to come. You know Sansa of Yes.
Tyrion. Yeah, multiple times.
Barristan Selmy? Yes.
Quentin. Yep.
It's like, wow, like so many. That's just PO VS too.
Like if you go out. Of POV to find Incognito, Brian,
Yeah. Sure.
Maybe even Jamie. You know he.
Shaved his head to be Incognito. Yeah, he tried.
He tried to hide himself. Yeah, like you're like almost.
It's like more than half the PO VS have travelled Incognito at
some point. You know, it's pretty.
It's actually kind of funny when you think about it.
That was like, yeah, because they they they're they're kind
of famous. And some of them have, like a
look like Starks have a look like Jon gets recognized as a
Stark beyond the Wall by people who have never seen him before.
It's like, whoa, yeah. So you can kind of see why they,
they want to conceal their identity.
But Lomas, as far as we know, he's a nobody.
I guess that might that might be good.
Like, well, that guy's not rich. He's not worth anything.
Who cares, you know? He's not a target of kidnappers
or slavers or whatever. Well, slavers he would, because
everyone's their target. But well, maybe everyone would
be active. But other than them, you know
he's not he's not a valuable hostage.
He's he could be a valuable, you know, employee.
Forced employee, I suppose. So that'd be the one thing he
would have to to look out for would be slavers.
And disguise wouldn't stop slavers, right.
They're like, well, you're a person.
You're a person, so we want you. Unless he disguises himself as a
tree. They won't, you know they won't.
Like Sean said, war wasn't raging everywhere.
Instability wasn't everywhere. There's things you can do.
It still takes a certain level of bravery, though.
A certain level of like I want to go out and explore or I want
to do this and that. It's it's still very impressive.
I'm I'm someone who likes to stay at home so this is this
kind of personality is really really is impressive to me
something that's very different. I really seek to understand that
psyche so I'm very fascinated by the explorer personality.
All right, we're we're going to take a short break and come back
with the actual wonders. We'll get into the the meat of
the discussion and our guesses and and all of our descriptions
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That's right. We'll be doing starting a new
campaign. So would I get in while it's
early? So we talked a lot about Lomas
as a person, but surely it's his travels, his places that he's
been to that are the greater point of interest.
Let's get into the wonders of the world, our thoughts on
whether he saw Valyria aside. Because if he did, we have no
writing about it, so we can't really do much more with that.
But it is absolutely the Valyrian roads which prompt
Tyrion's thoughts of his idol in the 1st place quote.
Come moonrise, they were back in their saddles, trotting eastward
under a mantle of stars. The old Valyrian Rd. glimmered
ahead of them like a long silver ribbon, winding through Wood and
Dale. For a little while, Tyrion
Lannister felt almost at peace. Lomas LON Strider told it true.
The roads of wonder. The stone roads of Valyria were
one of LON Strider's nine, the 5th I believe.
The fourth said Tyrion, who had committed all 16 of the wonders
to memory as a boy. His uncle Jerion liked to set
him on the table during feasts and make him recite them.
Jerian had a bit of explorer in him as well, getting lost, you
know, trying to search the ruins of Valyrian.
Well, we never heard from him again, but we talked.
We talked about him in our episode The Lost Valyrian Steel.
Yeah, too bad. Tyrion.
We don't have like a Bran, like a vision of Bran, like seeing
Tyrion reciting 16 wonders or something like that.
That's. I don't know.
Of course then we'd lose the fun of of guessing.
So we we went either way. What's a bit unusual about this
conundrum is that even though we don't know which sites he
specifically designated his wonders, we almost surely know
what he was choosing from. At least you know, not from
long. Lomas, Longstreider.
We always we might learn about things from other people.
It's something I said I touched on at the intro, like, Lomas
considered the caves of Norvos as one of the natural wonders of
the world. But again, what would he think
of the caves that blood Raven's caves?
Would he say, Oh, this is even fancier?
So yeah, a reminder that we would keep those things in mind.
Like what else does the Children of the Forest scene or the giant
scene? Like the Lands Beyond Winter?
Lands of Always Winter. Like, I don't think he went
there, but that might be pretty wondrous.
What do you say? Fancier or creepier.
Yeah, fancier is definitely not the right word.
I don't know why I said fancy. There's bones everywhere.
I mean, that's not fancy. Like bones on the ground.
There's dying things. It's too dark.
Yeah. How could you tell it's fancy?
You can't see a damn thing in here.
Yeah. So let's, let's lay out what we
know of the nine man made wonders of the world.
There are two unlisted, like we said.
And at the end of this episode we'll we'll take our guesses of
those seven one for sure is in Westeros with other candidates
being there as well and then which we'll talk about in a
separate a separate episode of the seven made by gods and or
nature. We only know 1/2, so it's a lot
harder for does that'll be a little be a lot more guesswork
when we do Part 2 of this. And so we don't know.
In other words, to reverse that, we don't know two of the man
made and five or six of the natural ones.
And he travelled to places that he didn't quite deem worthy of
wonder status. Which is why we have so much
material here, 'cause we have places he went to and maybe
named a wonder, but we don't. We're not even sure.
So some of these will be like wonders that made it, and
someone will be like wonders that didn't quite make the cut.
And some of that's kind of up for us to decide.
And kind of like our episode last week on the missing.
We're not doing deep dives on any of these.
We don't have time to do a deep dive on any one of these, since
we're trying to do more of an overview.
So you out there, if you want us to do a deep dive on any one of
these in particular, all of them is a viable option, then let us
know. Sometimes the item, the wonder,
is represented by what's around it, not just what it is.
Like. Need to suggest that it's not
just the Wall, but the whole institution of the Night's Watch
That adds a little boost to the the wondrousness of it all.
The the men of the Night's Watch are part of what makes it
wondrous. Their dedication, their
devotion. They're they're vigil, they're
endless vigil. But also the freaking 700 foot
Wall ice itself, you know, but that's the main part.
But I think the history and the length of time and the people
associated with it are part of it.
I think that's part of what makes it wondrous.
Don't would would you agree with that, Sean?
You think this is a point made by Nina, and I think it's a very
good point. Yeah, I think similar the think
of Karth right? It it's the walls of Karth, I
think is what he names. But what if the walls weren't
there? The city of itself is still
pretty impressive. Maybe it doesn't get named as a
wonder, right? But say the walls are there with
the city, but none of the artistic carvings are on the
walls. Does it still get it?
It's the conglomeration of all those different things.
I think that does it. And again, like I was kind of
saying earlier, this isn't exactly scientific in the real
world. It wasn't either.
It wasn't like a group of leaders and scientists and
engineers from across the world came together with with a list
of standards and then searched out everything that met those,
you know, it's just people saw it, thought it was impressive,
threw it on the list, you know. So the the, the combined efforts
that make it or maintain it could be as much a factor as how
far away it is or how it's being presented to you.
What if when he got the cars, people ran out shooting bows and
arrows at him and he? Had to run away, like, yeah,
yeah, name that place. You know, like the land of angry
Bowman. Yeah.
And on some level, it seems like historically in the real world
it was. It's like a kind of a a modern
thing now to travel, like travel agents and travel guidebooks and
destination weddings and all this different stuff that that
would have been more difficult in ancient times for most
people, but it still would have been fun and exciting to read
about these places you don't really have the ability to
visit, and someone who maybe did have the ability to visit might
not know where to go. But when someone says these are
the seven wonders, well, that's where I'm going.
Especially if we almost did have some benefactor who is trying to
promote. Who wanted their own?
Country or their own shipping services or whatever else you.
Know there may have been a thing behind.
It it's hard for us to account for that might have caused them
to choose one over another, but I I I don't necessarily
completely expect that, but I I am to your point, I don't think
it's just the image of the physical structure.
I think there's all these other things involved.
Yeah, I I think that's important.
Yeah. Like when we choose wonders in
the real world. You're right, there's no single
governing body like the Guinness picks picks wonders, but there's
UNESCO picks, World Heritage sites and like USA TODAY did a
thing where they picked new wonders and they had judges who
were like experts. It wasn't just like TV
personalities only, but still, like, yeah, these things just
come out of nowhere. There's no central authority for
any of this stuff. There are 7 modern Wonders of
the world, but it was just an organization that decided to
take a poll and they had billions of dollars and gave out
prizes and it was a whole thing. It lasted years, although it was
just people calling in and like South Korea incentivized its
population to call in to to, you know, they I think they gave out
the equivalent of like millions and millions of dollars to
people to call in. And sure enough they got Jeju
Island as one of the seven natural wonders of the of the
world. So again, it's not that it isn't
a fantastic spot, but it's not totally scientific, even in
modern times. Right, right, right, right.
Well, maybe Sean. The 8th natural wonder of the
world is the motivational speakers and spirit of South
Korea. Yeah, right.
We'll have to, we'll have to put that one in the in the thinker
again, ponder it for a while. So we don't know what order
Lomas put them in, not even sure that matters.
But it's possible one day that that he put them in some
specific order. For that, we only know that the
roads are #5, so we'll do that ourselves.
We'll start with the most familiar, the one that features
by far, in the most chapters. It's the wall, 300 miles long, 7
feet high. It stretches from one side of
the continent to the other. Yeah, you know it.
You know it. 700 feet high. You might have misspoke there.
Just Oh yeah. OK, either way, yeah, 700 feet
high. We discussed the wall recently
in our Song of Ice and Fire in Rome episode because the wall
was inspired by Hadrian's Wall and not the initial edifice
itself, though that was part of it so much as the feeling that a
legionary standing atop that wall would have.
That's the thing George was trying to capture.
The edifice was secondary to the feeling a person would have a
legionary wondering what might emerge from the frozen
wilderness to the north, and Tyrion reflects that.
Ah, here. When he had donned his glove
again, Jon Snow turned abruptly and walked to the low, icy
northern parapet. Beyond him the Wall fell away
sharply. Beyond him there was only the
darkness and the wild. Tyrion followed him, and side by
side they stood upon the edge of the world as he stood there and
looked at all that darkness, with no fires burning anywhere.
With the wind blowing and the cold like a spear in his guts,
Tyrion Lannister felt as though he could almost believe the talk
of the others, the enemy in the night.
His jokes of grumkins and snarks no longer seemed quite so droll.
Yeah, he was expecting to, you know, repeat off the wall.
He didn't. He didn't even think of it
because he was but wondered you know he was like wow this is
amazing and he but it was tinged with with fear you know as well.
It wasn't just wonder. It was those two those two
emotions together. We've discussed the wall plenty
of times of course. Perhaps most prominently in our
episode on Brandon the Builder and our patrons only episode The
buildings of Brandon where we discuss how it was built and the
potential of using giants as slaves and or friendly workers
maybe one or the other. So yeah, Hadrian's Wall is a
real life comparison. So is the Great Wall of China.
This is probably the most obvious of the man made wonders
just on the sheer size of it, right?
It's it's also the oldest that we know of.
It's possible the High Tower is a wonder, and the High Tower's
foundation is probably older than the walls, but the
completed version now isn't. Yet again there should be a
book, Wonders Made by Giants. Made by giants.
That's right, That's. You know, you're you're joking
there, but I, I, I actually meant to make this point
earlier. There literally could be more
books. There could be more wonders that
Lomas LON Strider named, like wonders of Essos or wonders of
Westeros that either Terry never got or they were destroyed, like
they just got wet in a storm at sea.
Or, you know, yeah, it's true possible that there's more.
Yeah, I mean, we we certainly know of a lot of real books in
the real world that we know the titles of, but there's no copies
of them. Culinary wonders.
Culinary wonders, George. George was already written that
one. Yeah.
So the Wall, it's not it's not hard to figure out how he got
there, right. There would be no Kings Rd.
So he may not have just walked up through the neck.
He may have just taken ship to White Harbor.
That's probably the simplest thing And we'll see a pattern
there with the the Westerosi options which we'll come back to
cause the rest of our set known Seven are not in Westeros but
several of the ones that we're considering for the missing ones
are. So as well Nina points out when
he visited the Wall, even though we're not sure when it was, it
would have been a lot larger than it was today because it was
the conquest that saw the decline of the Wall and he
definitely was there before the conquest.
So when he went to the Wall it might have been even more
impressive because there would have been a lot of people.
If he went now it would maybe look a little rundown.
It might not be so the the edifice is still impressive, the
looking out over the wall which would be but the people it it
might not seem so impressive anymore.
Like you got hardly anybody there.
You know there's a lot of criminals.
The number of like Knights and Lords that population has
declined severely so. Part of the impressiveness might
have been, as we were saying, beyond just the physical
appearance of the wall, but the process of feeding all the
people manning it. Yeah, you know, that's true
Upkeep and bustling and and supply and everything to
maintain. That might have added to the
impressiveness. Yeah, the fact that the the
North supports it, that might be, yeah, that's that's a
wonder. It's kind of unique in that
sense, semi unique anyway. I don't know.
Y'all, even with me to bring up the thing about the Nights Watch
adding to it. I think if you came upon that
wall completely unmanned, no one is there.
Nothing's going on at all. I think it's a wonder.
It's still a wonder. It's.
Still a wonder. I guess you're right.
You don't need the people there to make it wondrous.
It just, I think it adds to it. But you're right, you could it
could be completely abandoned. You could be like whoa, like
like the five fours seem to be. They seem to be completely
abandoned and are probably on the list too, but not explicitly
so. So the Valerian roads.
Let's come back to that. We've already quoted the roads
when we introduced this topic through Tyrion, so here's a
different. Take.
Though Yiti is a vast land, much of it covered by dense forest
and sweltering jungles, travel from one end of the empire to
the other is swift and safe for the great web of stone roads
built by the eunuch emperors of old have no equal in all the
world, save for the dragon roads of the Valyrians.
So he's talked about how impressive these are and then
says, but these are even more impressive.
It's the second wonder we see. We see the wall first, like
what, chapter six or seven when John goes there.
But we see actually, maybe we see these first.
And I'm thinking about it because Danny goes out on a
branch of the Valyrian roads in her third chapter, right after
wearing Khal Drogo, and it's only barely mentioned.
It's just, you know, kind of just part of the scenery and
they go really far. Like these are also called the
dragon roads and the real life comparison is just, well,
asphalt or the Roman roads to get to use something ancient
that lasted a long time. The Roman roads maybe are more
like the Yitish roads 'cause they're more like a regular
stone Rd. that required a lot of upkeep, but that upkeep was done
and they lasted forever and some of them are still there.
The Valerian roads apparently are different than asphalt and
that they don't require upkeep other than keeping them clear,
which no Rd. can self clear itself.
You know, self clear, like a tree falls over it.
You still got to move that out of the way.
If some rubble falls, you still got to do that.
But the road itself doesn't crack, doesn't wear down from
rain or heat or anything like that asphalt does, but it's
remarkably strong at at handling the elements.
So this is just a kind of a magical version of Asphalt, I
think. Or dare we say more
sophisticated version if it's not not magical, but I think it
probably is. Yeah, I think that this is
another example of something that that we take for granted in
the modern world is roads. That I mean not only that we
have them all over the place and the amount of traffic that they
manage and all the different weather they have to be built
in, but sometimes these massive bridge on bridge of circular
like it's just incredible what humans have done when it comes
to roads. And we kind of take it for
granted. We don't realize how impressive
if Tyrion saw it or if someone from once again, you don't have
to go back to like 2000 years. If you just go back 100 years
and let someone see the roads that we built now it's just mind
boggling. Amazing they are.
There's probably like parts of your any, like any one of you
out there listening right now. There's probably parts of your
community that you lived in or have lived in that was not
accessible few 100 years ago. Like the the community exists
because of a bridge that connects them, like otherwise
this the city wouldn't be viable because it's just too remote.
But this bridge makes it not remote, right.
And that's. Yeah, you're right.
So roads kind of do the same thing.
They they create connection where there maybe wasn't some.
And these roads are special because they have lasted
thousands of years, which is like even the Roman roads.
Well, maybe 2000 years is the most you could say for those.
These are way longer lasting and have required far less upkeep.
So that's pretty pretty amazing. And like you said, it's it's not
necessarily impressive right away, especially the modern
world. And it might not have been that
impressive right away to lo miss long strider.
But as he saw how straight they were, how durable they were, how
extensive they were, how far they went and how many square
miles they covered and and then learned how durable they were
which he might not have known that right away And then see
wow, none of these are broken. These are all and that it's the
building of that that gradually makes it more wondrous when he's
like, wow, this is incredible. When he realizes a a combination
of what it took to build the roads and what they are
enabling, like the longer he travels on them and the more
connections he sees they create. Like think of what it would have
taken for him to get to the Wall right?
Like we were just talking about he wouldn't have had the Kings
Lord to travel on. So think about what an ordeal it
would have been for him to get to the Wall.
Now over here he's travelling that same distance in a week
instead of three months or. Something right and sees.
All the other people also travelling this distance with
such. Ease.
That's a good point. That would shift his gears in
realizing how valuable it was and how much to change the
landscape, never mind the effort that went into creating it like.
That's a great point, because if he had travelled Westeros when
the Kings Rd. existed, which he didn't, this would still be
really impressive by comparison. But he traveled it when there
was just like a lot of dirt paths and there been some roads.
But like, they'd be nothing like this.
So this would be this would be an order of magnet.
Like, whoa, I didn't he wouldn't have even necessarily have known
such a thing was possible. Maybe he read about it in
advance, but yeah, this is one of those ones that it might have
looked pretty impressive right away, but probably wasn't a
wonder. Like, right off the bat, you
know? But, like, over time, he's
probably like, Damn, this is wondrous.
Like you said, another thing that would happen over time is
you would witness the rain, not shut everything down once again.
Like traveling to to the wall or just from any almost any two
places in Westeros of you know more than a few days travel.
The first time it rains, suddenly you just shut, OK, we
can't go now, we have to wait until it stops raining.
But the, the and the longer you have to travel, the more likely
you are to hit rain. So these roads you can travel so
far, so quick and when it rains you still don't get shut down
and so many people get to do it. It's.
And and he would speak to people that know the difference because
those roads don't cover everywhere.
So in Westeros you don't have any roads like that.
In in Essos you have crappy dirt tracks and the Valerian roads.
So you really are like, damn it, I'm going to have to take the
crappy tracks. But like, yeah, so he would hear
that from people like, oh, these things are incredible.
Like the first time he sees, like, multiple wagons, just,
like, cruising down. He'd be like having been used to
seeing wagons stuck in the mud and all these other things.
You're like, OK then, yeah, so it's really just a the body of
knowledge builds and it becomes more impressive over time.
OK, let's move on to the Triple walls of Karth, starting it
right off with a quote. Three thick walls encircled
Karth, elaborately carved. The outer was red sandstone, 30
feet high and decorated with animals, snakes, Slytherin kites
flying, fish swimming, intermingled with wolves of the
red waste and striped sources, and monstrous elephants.
The middle wall, 40 feet high, was grey granite, alive with
scenes of war, the clash of sword and shield and spear,
arrows in flight, heroes at battle, and babes being
butchered pyres of the dead. The innermost wall was 50 feet
of black marble with carvings that made Danny blush until she
told herself that she was being a fool.
She was no maid. If she could look on the grey
walls, scenes of slaughter, why should she avert her eyes from
the sight of men and women giving pleasure to one another?
The outer gates were banded with copper, the middle with iron.
The innermost were studded with golden eyes.
All opened at Danny's approach. Wait, what?
All eyes opened at her. That last part is like, wait,
what? What is going on there?
Is that some sort of strange artifice, like a trick of the
light? Or is it some sort of actual
sorcery going on there? It's either way, it's amazing.
It sounds incredibly spectacular.
I think it meant all the gates open, just not all the eyes, all
the studded eyes open. Maybe.
But yours is cooler. So that's possible.
Yeah, all opened, all the gates up.
You might be right, The gap might might be referred to the
gate. Either way, a 30 foot red wall,
a 40 foot Gray wall, and a 50 foot black marble wall.
Now, the only other place we know of a black marble wall is
in the the black walls of Volantis, which keep the blood
of Valyre from mingling with the lesser folk, right?
Well, at least according to them, obviously I I don't cosign
that statement. But this wall, the cart is huge,
and each of these three walls encircles the entire wall, and
there's carvings the entire way around.
That's absurdly amazing. Like, the level of artwork here
is incredible. And like you said, Sean, though,
I really do think that if you don't have a city there, if it's
just these walls, which would be weird, but if you did, it might
still be wondrous, but it might, let's say that adds more to it
than say the the people of the Nights watch add to the wall.
You know, also being such a huge city, being a port city, this
wouldn't be very hard for him to get to, you know, like take a
ship there. It's a long journey, but it's
not like how the heck am I going to get to Karth?
It's just mostly just a matter of having money, having the the,
the fare to pay your way there. Especially if you're like
leaving from King's Landing or Gull Town or Old Town where
there's going to be plenty of ships.
So the city of Karth is is also really amazing.
I wonder what Lomas thinks of it.
No other particular wonder there's is almost certainly the
most wondrous thing about it According to him, but Danny was
really blown away by it. I kind of doubt he saw anything
like it, though. ET might be something that
Trump's it, and if he saw Valyria then that might be
another one that does. But what I mean by the reason
it's so impressive is that it's been a mostly uninterrupted,
massively wealthy place that's been so for eons with a an
entrenched hierarchy that's been there just as long.
So they've just been growing fat and rich for so long and just
outdoing each other with it's an ultra wealthy place that has
been ultra wealthy for so long. Like, imagine the gilding on top
of gilding on top of gem encrusted, gem encrusted
gilding. If you just like, this is what
rich people do with their extra money, They just put another
layer of gilding on it, right? He's like, what am I going to
do? Well, I have all this money,
Let's let's make our place fancy.
Well, how do we do that? Well, let's outdo other rich guy
that lives down the street and they just keep outdoing each
other with displays of wealth. And this has been going on for
thousands of years. So yeah, it's pretty insane.
Like, Danny thinks Zarro's palace makes Illyrio's Mance
look like a quote. Swineherd's hovel, Illyrio's
mats. The guy with rings on every
finger jet, like, more precious than the last.
The guy that. Yeah, I mean, this guy is
ridiculously wealthy, but Zara apparently has orders of
magnitude more wealthy. And this palace is the size of a
market town. The palace the size of a town.
Yeah. But it's the walls that he
marked as the wonders that really says something like this
was not more impressive to him than the walls, which is like,
wow, yeah, it's really, really must be substantially expensive
walls here. So the walls of Constantinople
are maybe our best real world parallel.
Constantinople actually has a lot in common with Karth.
Istanbul, not Constantinople. Yeah, Istanbul.
That's right. Constantinople was famous for
its walls, and there have been so many walls around.
I looked this up. This is kind of funny.
Check this out. There was a wall when it was
founded. We don't know what that was
called. But then there were the
Constantinian walls, the Theodosian walls, the Black
Herni walls, the sea walls, the Golden Horn wall, the Prepontus
wall, the Anastasian wall and the walls of Galata.
These are all walls at Constantinople before Istanbul.
So it's a valuable location, extremely rich from trade.
It's settled in ancient times. It's not a world wonder,
Constantinople isn't, but it's yeah, it's it's a very similar
situation where it sits, sits in a really rich natural port.
Location controls, trade. The carvings all the way around
the wall remind me of one of the modern world wonders that I've
seen. It's not that modern.
It was built in what like the year 1000 or something was Angor
Watt. So it wasn't ancient, but it's
not modern either. It's kind of in that tweener
location. Angor Watt is a huge palace
complex in Cambodia. Like I said, it's beautiful.
It's astonishing. There's just carvings all around
it, just bass reliefs, just everywhere.
It's just impressive. So many of them.
It's like the size of a city block, right?
Am I? Yeah, it's enormous.
A massive structure that's ornately designed all around the
whole thing. Yeah, and Cambodia is is a is
benefiting greatly from new satellite technology, kind of
like the jungles of the Amazon which they're using.
They can now use lasers to discover ancient ruins by like
looking for density in the jungle because they can find
stone that way. And there's like 2000 temples in
Cambodia, only about 500 of them have been excavated, but it's
only in the last like 20-30 years that a lot of these have
been revealed. So they're just just now getting
to it. That's also where the original
Tomb Raider with Angelina Jolie was shot, because those temples
just look so cool. They look like a they look like
something that would be fitting for that.
So anyway, it's kind of things I think of when I think of this.
You know, this is making me think of another factor of what
might be chosen as a as a wonder is it is rolled up in a couple
of things, but how remote the location is, right?
Like you got to travel far through wilderness to finally
come upon the wall, right? And Karth is kind of the same
way. I guess it's a little easy to
get there by ship, but it's surrounded by a massive desert,
true. And so not only does it maybe
add some contrast when you have to go on this great journey to
get to the place, but also think what it took to build the place
given how isolated it is, like in the middle of the jungle, how
do they get all the people and supplies there and feed them
while they were working on it and everything?
It's just a massive undertaking. It I I'm just so impressed with
how some of these real world things were built, especially
before computers and steel. There, I knew this is like
people. Like thinking about it and
breaking her back in the sun all day, you know?
So already you all can see how George was very inspired by a
lot of real world wonders. There's already several strong
parallels and that's going to continue.
It's also not just the exact edifices, the exact wonders, but
kind of the purpose of them. Like there's there's there tend
to be categories here like a lot of these are built for defense
or religious purposes or authority purposes or for just
getting around like the roads and the bridges expansion of
Creek connection like connectivity so authority,
religion, connectivity and defense.
And those things often overlap like authority and religion go
hand in hand. Let's be honest, like those two
things are very connected. Like people use religion to
control and use. Yeah, that.
Well, we all know that. I don't have to explain that
one. One of the people who mentions
Karth is Penny of all people. She brings it up and says we
can, you know, she she kind of tries to pull a Jora with Tyrion
where where Jora tries to get Danny.
Just let's just go east and leave all this behind.
Penny is kind of the same. She's like, let's go to Karth.
They have fancy cool walls there.
You've heard of that, right? And Terence's like, I'll just
read about it in Lomas book. I don't need to go that way.
I got. I didn't mean to come this Far
East. Yeah, I'm not going farther.
To be fair, Lomas Long Strider didn't have Casterly Rock to
claim, you know, so he's he's got a claim to some big which
which arguably is a wonder if it's like well screw seeing the
wonders I might own one so let's let's move on to that yeah.
Anyway. To be fair, on the other side of
that coin, Lomas didn't have Cersei to escape, right, as far
as we know. As far as we know, yeah.
Yeah, he didn't. He didn't.
Maybe he maybe he had a wife he really didn't like.
Yeah. Or maybe Lomas is a maybe Lomas
is a woman. No, I don't think so.
I think it says he. Yeah.
But anyway, no, you know, he should have been Lomas.
He should have been Romas, because he's Roman everywhere.
Romas wrong. Strider, you know.
No, no, he roam. He He strided Right.
He. Strode, Right.
He Strode, right. It's not.
That was a shoe company. He was a secret.
He. Was a secret.
Strong. He's Lomas strong.
Strong striker, strong writer. He is a strong writer, yeah.
Anita writes that Karth might be another example of just like we
said, it might be the the the wondrous of Karth.
Wondrousness of Karth itself might add to why the walls were
chosen, but it's quite possible they'd be chosen anyway.
Real quick, I could follow up the The way Karth presents
itself to Lomas might also add to him choosing it as a wonder.
It seems like. It does it on its own anyway,
but the people there are like, oh, you're naming wonders of the
world. Well, let me show you all the
reasons you should choose us. Here's some foods, Stay in our
Mans. You know, like if he was
welcomed and greeted and treated to the the wonders of the city,
he's more likely to choose it as a wonderful city.
That's true. They want to, yeah.
They want to get famous. You know, they're like, yeah,
let's let's wine and dine. This guy's not like we can't
afford it. We're rich as hell.
Yeah. They have a certain amount of
pride. They want to show off their
wealth. Clearly so.
We saw like when Danny was there, they were very proud of
it, like they were all Carth, most ancient city.
They were so proud of their city.
That's that's true. So that that that's probably the
attitude Lomas met as well, even though it was probably hundreds
of years before Karth is known. Is is is somewhat famous for
being somewhat static how it's been this way for so long so
that it would make sense that it would still have that attitude.
But let's move on to the Titan of Bravos.
Let's have its quote. With his proud head and fiery
eyes looming close to 400 feet above the sea, the Titan is a
fortress of a type never seen before or since.
Passed in the form of the huge, giant straddling 2 seamounts.
The Titan's legs and lower torso are black granite, originally a
natural stone archway, carved and shaped by three generations
of sculptors and stone Masons, and wrapped in a pleated bronze
skirt above the waist. The Colossus is bronze with
green dyed hemp for hair. When seen from the sea for the
first time, the Titan is a sight terrifying to behold.
His eyes are huge beacon fires lighting the way for returning
the ships back inside the lagoon.
Within his bronze body are halls and chambers, murder holes and
arrow slits, such that any vessel that dared to force the
passage would surely be destroyed.
Enemy ships can easily be steered onto the rocks by the
Watchmen inside the Titan, and stones and pots of burning pitch
can be dropped onto the decks of any that attempt to pass between
the Titan's legs without leave. This has seldom been necessary,
however. Not since the century of Blood
has any enemy been so rash as to attempt to provoke the Titan's
wrath. Love that detail.
There's something very cool about the Titan in that it it it
encapsulates several of the wonder types at once.
It's both for defense, but it's also a lighthouse, and it's also
just a really cool statue. So there's a little bit of the
authority element there too. Not so much the religious
aspect, but it also guards the past.
So it is sort of a travel thing. It doesn't extend travel, but it
protects the existing travel. It's you can get in if you're
allowed, you can't if you're not.
And if you seek the protection of Bravos via ship and you're a
friendly ship, you can use it as a refuge.
So that's kind of neat. And the the natural stone
archway added to over time is really cool. 3 generations of
sculptors and stone Masons, That's awesome.
I love the the torches and each eye seen from far off.
We talked about how cars just emerging out of the desert would
look really impressive. Or the wall, But this one is, as
it says, on a different level because it's it looks like a
being. It looks, it's it's
anthropomorphized. That's a hard word.
And if you had never seen it before, you'd be like, oh hey,
so this is one that Lomas, when he saw immediately, might have
been already been like, this is a very strong candidate for the
Wanderers list, just from the distant, the distance.
And then he gets closer to it. He realizes just how big it is.
He probably read about it in advance.
Bravos not at all remote, at least probably not in his era,
Certainly isn't now. It's the most powerful, the Free
Cities these days and ships go back and forth from it
constantly better going to Westeros and elsewhere.
So Bravos is just known worldwide.
It's it's there was a time when it wasn't.
But we're pretty sure Lomas didn't live in that era.
And the green hair with the with the ropes, that's just really
neat too. That's just a fun detail.
I don't know where George got that idea from.
I don't know of any, like, where that idea comes from.
Like the bronze, like the Statue of Liberty turned kind of green.
Like bronze turns green over time, I guess.
And maybe that's where the green idea came from.
I don't know copper. Turns green, maybe bronze, says
2. Oh yeah, you're right.
Copper, I mean bronze is copper is made from bronze and tin.
So sort of stand to reason, but I don't know that for sure.
I wonder how long that would last?
How Mil Dewey it would get no like the moisture and the
exposure to the elements if it if they have to, if they have to
maintain, if they have to repair replenish the hemp hair every
now. And yeah, the hair you would
think for sure would have to be, but maybe let me say the other
stuff. That's just how good hemp is.
It could last for eons. It could last for thousands of
years. Still, it can last.
At least 420 years. Yeah, Happy Belated 420.
It's green already, Yeah, yeah, it's got the color.
So the real life comparison is pretty straightforward.
It's the Colossus of Rhodes. Sean already touched on it
briefly. It was built.
It finished in 280 BC. They started it in 292, so it
took 12 years. The the Titan of Braavos took a
lot longer, but it was not built consecutively.
Apparently the Colossus was built after the city defeated
Demetrius, the besieger, someone whose name has come up several
times in the history of history. Westeros because he's got such a
cool name and he was a big name in this era.
The post Alexander the Great era, he left.
He abandoned his siege partly because his father called him
off to do something else more related.
Attack some other place, I forget which, but Demetrius had
to leave in a hurry. He left behind a lot of siege
equipment which was repurposed into the closet.
They took it all and melted it down and made the colossus.
It was so it was like a victory statue.
It was of their patron God, Helios and was 108 feet high.
So that's 33 meters. So the colossus, I mean.
So the Titan of Braavos? Quite a bit taller, quite a bit
taller. So Demetrius really wasn't
sieging him there, I guess. No, he he be leaving, not
besieging. He was.
He was besieging before that but.
The Titan of Braavos is about 400 feet tall, right?
Or that's that's our approximation, which
incidentally, that's about the size of the tallest statue in
the real world, which was only built 15 ish years ago.
And it's so preposterously large.
I would not have believed it if like someone filmed it in a
movie or showed me a picture. I would have thought it was
Photoshop or CGI. I just, it's crazy.
It's like literally four times bigger than the Empire State or
not the Empire State, but the Statue of Liberty, it's probably
two or three times bigger than Empire State Building.
And it's just this guy. It's used, I guess, one of the
founders of modern India, you know?
Yeah, he was the. Statue of Unity.
Yeah, he was connected to Gandhi, yeah.
Yeah, I don't know. I'm just all you should Google
it. I just can't believe it's it's.
So freaking bad. You're right, Sean.
And it's like what? And you're and I think it was
only finished in 2018. I think it started in 2013 and
it's it's pretty new where else it was being.
There's a there's another statue that's similarly large.
It's one thing is that they measure statues.
They didn't. They include like the base or
the pedestal or whatever, But the spring statue, the physical
human form is almost the same size.
You know, maybe 80% the size, but it doesn't have nearly the
size of the pedestal. But it's also preposterously
large. But one thing I want to point
out is this Titan Bravos was built with no computers and no
steel and. All the things that would.
Take in the modern world to build these massive statues.
They supposedly did it without that so.
There's like concrete if it took a little.
Extra long. Yeah, now we've said concrete is
an old substance, but modern concrete is a lot better than
old concrete. Yeah, so it.
Is reinforced with steel and all these other things they can,
yeah. So as you said, Sean, the Titan
or the Colossus of Rhodes, by the way, Titan is a Greek word.
It's kind of appropriate for George to use that term, given
that it relates to a Greek wonder.
It was of their patron God, Helios, the sun God, and it like
it stood for only 54 years because an earthquake snapped it
at the knees and they were too superstitious to rebuild it.
They're like, well, the earthquake is from the gods, so
let's not put that back. Oracle told them.
Or something? They asked the Oracle.
The Oracle was like, Nah, don't do that.
And even though Rhodes had earthquakes like twice a
century, like kind of like clockwork.
But Nope, it's the gods. He just that's when he wakes up.
It's just snoring maybe. The Oracle is just a wise
person. You just have to build it again.
You took up so many resources. Cut it out.
Stop it. Yeah, well, the Oracle was
definitely wise when Alexander Great threatened to kill them if
they didn't give the Oracle he wanted.
So, you know, that's the form of wisdom, old wisdom.
Like, I die if I don't do this. OK, I'll do that.
Yeah. And yeah.
So Sean's also pointed out that it was still there for 8:00, 100
years. There were still people going to
see the collapsed colossus for 800 years after.
It was just lying on the ground. And there's a quote about it.
Here we go. This is neat.
This statue, 56 years after it was erected, was thrown down by
an earthquake. But even as it lies, it excites
our wonder and admiration. Few men can clasp the thumb in
their arms, and its fingers are larger than most statues.
Where the limbs are broken asunder, vast caverns are seen
yawning in the interior. That was written by plenty.
The elder the the. He just keeps coming up in our
episodes. That's the same guy who who
volcanic eruptions. A certain type of them are named
after the guy who died in Vesuvius.
So this couldn't happen with the Titan of Bravos 'cause if it was
snapped at the knees, it would fall into the sea.
It wouldn't be sitting there for anyone to see it afterwards.
But it looks like there just aren't earthquakes there.
It's been there for like 400 years or so.
We don't know how long, but centuries.
So it's probably either strong enough to held up to an
earthquake or it's just not on a fault line or yeah.
Also, by the way, I don't know how deep the sea is around
bravos, but you might still be able to see it it's so bad.
That's true. Maybe it would stick out.
Still have his arms. That would be kind of neat.
Like, yeah, just one arm sticking out.
The Statue of Liberty and Planet of the Apes, right?
Yeah. So we also backing up just a
little bit, Sean, you mentioned the Spring Temple Buddha that's
like the second highest statue in the world right now.
It's that was finished in 2008 and it's I got 1000 tons of
copper in it and it's 420 feet tall.
So you know we were recording this on 4/21, so almost almost
the day after there. Nina says if Lomos was riding
and travelling during the Valyrian Empire, would have been
pretty bold to highlight the Titan of Bravos, because the
Titan, you know, the Bravosi were like breakaway slaves from
Valyria. That's how the whole nation was
founded. The city State was founded by
escaped slaves, and so it's kind of flaunting the existence of
this play. So you kind of have to assume
that it probably didn't happen. He probably wrote about it after
the unmasking of Uthero, which we already kind of our favorite
guess is Century of Blood anyway, which fits this.
But in case we're wrong about that, we still want to guess
that, well, it it probably still wasn't like 300 years before the
Century of Blood, it would have been maybe 2 or 100 years
before. You know, that is another
purpose, I guess, of a wonder like these.
In addition to like travel and connection and authority and
defense. It's also sort of a an
exemplification of the the the potential of your culture and
your people. Like that's true.
Yeah, we built this Titan you you had us enslaved and we
achieved this greatness. Don't underestimate us.
That's a good point. Yeah.
Like that is that is often what a wonder communicates to the
world is shows you what this civilization is capable of and
and that's something that can be very proud of having done it.
Yeah, that's a great point. Great point.
Anita has. Maybe Lomas was getting back at
the if the Valyrians did, like, refuse to let him in for
whatever reason, then then he was getting back at them.
He was. He's like, Oh yeah, well, I'm
going to talk about the Titan of Bravos then, you know, so that
that's the third of three that are defensive so far, right?
The wall, the triple walls, and the Titan.
Those are all defensive. Although as we saw with the
Titan, that's not the only purpose of it.
The next one is decidedly not the Palace with 1000 rooms.
Here's a brief quote. The greatest of these cities was
Sarnath of the Tall Towers, where the High King dwelt in his
fabled palace with 1000 rooms. Now given we don't know what the
8th and 9th wonders are, it's possible one of one of those was
destroyed. But this is the only one we know
for sure was destroyed. And I say I say probably because
yeah, we're not sure, but in in in.
In a way this is a reverse of the real world, because in the
real world, only one of the original 7 Ancient Wonders of
the World stands. It happens to be the oldest one,
the Great Pyramid. But in our case we have only one
of them destroyed, rather than the than all but one.
And to be clear, it wouldn't have been destroyed, we don't
think when he visited it. True, true.
True. No, I don't think possible at
all based on what he said about it.
I don't think it was destroyed. Yeah, I don't either.
And thinking ahead, though, the wall might come down during the
books, so it might be one that is now down.
It's not currently down, but by the time the series is over,
maybe two of the wonders are destroyed and who knows, maybe
another one. I mean, we've pointed out that
we're in a new age of gods and wonders.
It's like the age of heroes come again, a time for wonders to
rise and fall, perhaps, potentially.
So we'll see about that. What Lomas's work might be a
snapshot of a time before a new era.
And that's makes it even more special which helps it preserve
the memory of what things were there and in wonders way made by
man. We have perhaps one of the only
writings in Westeros in you know, cut the common tongue
about this palace of 1000 rooms which will fade from world
memory if people don't record it right now.
We know this is also perhaps the one we know the least about.
It's just the palace of the 1000 rooms.
It's fancy. It was amazing.
But like, in what way? It's the mark of a high
civilization, honestly. This one, if you compare it to
the real world, George likes to go big.
The wall is maybe unrealistically large, but 1000
rooms, that's not, that's not that big for for a palace
compared to the real world. I mean, it's not small by any
means. Like the ancient royal palace of
Nassos on Crete was started in 2000 BC and reached its peak in
1500 BC and it had 1300 rooms, I mean and that's that's 1500 BC
so. They were small rooms.
They were rooms fit for cretins. You look at the square count.
Every closet, they were really cheating.
Yeah, you look at the square footage and the palace with 1000
rooms, it's bigger and better than every other palace you
think of just as. Sean They don't cheat and Crete.
So Mary Renault, an author I've referred to a few times, shout
her out again. She depicted this ancient royal
palace of Nassos in her historical fiction novel The
Bull from the Sea, which I've read along with.
It's it's a sequel. The Bull from the Sea is a
sequel to The King Must Die, which of course, I've read that
too. Both novels follow the life of
Theseus, the the legendary mythical king Theseus.
So really good. She does a really good job of
drawing out the Super ancient Greek world with that and in and
in other her other works as well where she mostly writes about
ancient Greece. So the royal quarter of the city
of Alexandria was said by the geographer, ancient geographer
Strabo, to be quite literally 1/4 of the city.
Normally when you hear the word quarter quarters, it's a living
space. It's not actually 1/4, but in
this case it really was 1/4 of the whole city, the royal.
So the people get one 3/4 of the city.
The royal palace alone accounts for 1/4 of Alexandria.
That's a huge amount of the city.
Hadrian, who's come, has also come up a lot in the last few
weeks because of his wall and stuff like that.
He had a villa of over 30 buildings on 250 acres, but
there's not a room count because it's actually not excavated.
It's still unexcavated to this point.
So we don't know how many rooms there are, but it could easily
be more than 1000 rooms. Maybe not.
The current Royal Palace of Madrid has 3418 rooms.
It's a terrorist site. It's not really used as a royal
pal. I mean, the King of Spain
doesn't have a lot of power these days.
It's so crazy to think about that construction.
Like what? What it would take to piece that
together and maintain it And if you visited, I don't know, maybe
some of the rooms are just empty storage closets, but I'm just
trying to think how long it would take to just go in each
room. If you could just get from 1:00
room to the next in one minute each, it would take you days and
days, you know. Can you imagine living in a
place where you haven't been in all the rooms?
I've lived this place 20 years and there's rooms I've never
seen. There's rooms I don't even know
about, like it's a world wonder just to draw the blueprints for
that place, let alone the actual place.
There's also the Yeah, but wait, there's more.
Yeah. I guess it would be like if you
went to 600 homes and went in every room of those homes, you
know what I mean? Like if you.
Split and we split that by 5:00 rooms in a house, which is
really small actually, but regardless it would be it would
be going on a survey of a lot of homes.
And that's a great segue to the next example, which is the
Forbidden City of China, which is considered a palace complex.
Even though it's a city, it's called the Forbidden City
because it's like it's only it's the Emperor's like domain.
But it's it's gotten thousands of buildings like thousands of
buildings of 909,999 rooms which appears to be intentional like
we're we're not going to go, we're going to keep it 1 below
10,000. I don't know why but it's a very
specific number. And then Wei Yang Palace which
was built by Emperor GAO Zhu in 200 BC was the largest ever.
It was 11 times the size of Vatican City and seven times
this Forbidden City which has 9999 rooms.
It was destroyed though. Currently, one of the best
matches for the Palace of 1000 rooms is the Patala Palace in
Tibet, which has exactly 1000 rooms.
So there you go, Palace of 1000 Rooms.
It used to be the winter residence of the Dalai Lama and
was included on a list of new 7 wonders.
So some people consider Patala Palace modern Wonder of the
World, although it's not. It wasn't built, you know,
recently, but it's not ancient either.
Did you ever consider that he got it wrong?
This was a palace with 1000. Brooms.
It's a very clean place, yeah. It's a witch's palace, yeah, So
this would have been an interesting visit, unlike a lot
of the other ones. For Lomas, it's not so
straightforward. In some ways it is because back
when he was travelling, he could probably just have gone to Kohor
and taken the Valerian Rd. East to Sarnath.
You know, before the Dothraki were over running the area.
So it might have been relatively simple, even though it would
have been a very long journey, a lot longer than getting to the
Wall. Even if you're considering
starting in like Old Town to the Wall.
Like I think Old Town to the Wall is probably no, it's cohort
of Sarnap is not as far as Old Town to the Wall.
But anyway, it's it's very long, and Lomas must have had a lot to
write about that. Like Sarnor as well as when he
wrote about ET and Karth, Sarnoor would have been a he
probably compares all these places and and we don't know
which he thought was the fanciest or or most impressive,
and whether even Valyria would have been in the mix for that.
But it's a sure thing that he wrote about it, because he went
there and this is actually kind of ominous.
This one might have some foreshadowing to it.
Remember how Sarnath was destroyed, which is that the
Dothraki pulled a maneuver like they did a feigned retreat and
suckered the Sarnoor army into a trap and destroyed it, and then
destroyed Sarnath and, well, Sarnoor and then all the, you
know, surrounding region that they hadn't already destroyed.
I kind of think this might be foreshadowed.
What happens to Highgarden? Highgarden is to me the closest
thing to Sarnor. The kingdom's sarnor of fancy.
Long running, well built, beautiful, very susceptible to
burning. You know, it's garden, I mean
it's full of trees and greenery and you know, Danny is not going
to have the Tyrells on her side, I don't think.
And there could be battles in that area.
Yeah, like this. Highgarden could be a thing of
the past, just as the wall might be, or in part.
So there's a plant in my flag there.
Next time someone gets to ask George a question, they should
ask him how many rooms are in Highgarden.
Is it 1000? Yeah.
Actually. You know, Ashea and I have tried
to make an art of what questions we can ask George R Martin.
We've had some success over the years.
And I would, this is one I thought of during this episode,
maybe he would answer, how did Lomas Long try to go to Valyria
that might be like within the range or something.
He would. It's not that spoilery.
Or it's not spoilery at all, really.
He might be willing to answer. Yes, I am quite decided that the
next time I get to ask George a question, I'm going to ask him
something about Lomas Long Strider.
So I will workshop it for quite a while before I'm at AQ and A.
It's like you have to be so precise with your words, these
wheels out of every little thing, so you have to be very
precise. Maybe it's best to just go
straight forward. Did Lomas Long Strider go to
Valyrio when it was before The Doom?
Before the Doom, did he go Blair before the game?
Because he could. He could just try to.
I got how he reads a lot as well.
No, it was he. It was destroyed.
Let's talk about the next one, The Long Bridge of Atlantis
quote. In time, the lawless city on the
West Bank became such a cesspit of crime and depravity that the
triarchs had no choice but to send their slave soldiers across
the Rhine to restore order and some semblance of decency.
Strong tides and treacherous shifting currents made the
crossings difficult, however, so after some years, the Triarch
Velasso, the Munificent commanded that a bridge be built
across the Roy. Those same tides and currents
and the river's width made the building an epic task requiring
more than 40 years and many millions of honours.
Priork Velasso did not live to see what he had wrought, but
once completed the Long Bridge had no rivals save for the
Bridge of Dreams in the Roynar Festival city of Croyenne.
Strong enough to support the weight of 1000 elephants or so
it is claimed, the Long Bridge of Volantis stands today as the
longest bridge in all the known world.
And I want to say a moment. The art that we have on screen
is by Christina K Sugar Light Art there, who is often in our
live stream chats. She did this for us years ago
for the Loma's longest writer episode we were working on and
finally we are debuting this art from her, which is lovely.
Christina Yes, it is very nice. Yeah.
This, this, this episode has some great ones.
And this is, this is definitely near the top, if not the top. 40
years is a time we've seen before.
It's the also the length of time it took to build Harrenhal and
some of those other times where it says two or three generations
to build that's could be 40 years ish.
The mention of the bridge of dream here is really interesting
because it seems to indicate that the time the long bridge
was built, the bridge of dream was not broken because when
Lomas Longshider would see the bridge of dream it was broken.
There were stone men already on it.
The fogs and humors were already there.
So this he wouldn't have been able to make that comparison in
his lifetime because he didn't see a complete bridge of dreams.
It was it was quite destroyed. But it is bring, it does bring
us back to our discussion about Tyrion and and imagining what
the Royner was like. And if we were doing an all time
wonders of Essos and Westeros that some of these things would
be included because before they were destroyed they they sound
like they would have been more wondrous than some of the things
that are still around now. Now it's a bit ironic with
almost everything in Volantis. The Long Bridge is it's linked
to the dependence on slavery, and it's very much a a thing
that enables travel and trade now, and it's probably a good
thing mostly. But at the time it was purely
just as an extension of Volantis's authority, and they
were just trying to dominate the other side, The West Bank, as
it's called over here, 'cause it was there was a city there and
it was destroyed by Valyria, and before the rest of the North was
destroyed before the rest of the full destruction of the Roinar
came later. So that shows how it was sort of
a military purpose originally, a dominance purpose of an empire,
An imperial purpose maybe is the best way to put it.
Now there is no empire. Volantis is wants to be an
empire, but they're not. You know, they can they can
dominate their neighbors, but they can't really go that far.
So they do have the the, the region that the bridge leads to,
they do have control over. But it's still different than
its original purpose in that it's being used for so much more
than just that. It's it's a mostly a commercial
thing now like there's when we see the long bridge when
Clinton's on it there's merchants set up on on its sides
it's just like wall to wall businesses and and stuff
happening. So it's definitely far beyond
just a military thing now, but that is what got it built in the
1st place. This one like a lot of the like
like Karth or even easier than Karth to get to.
In fact he may have gone to Volantis on his way to Karth
because it's just the southern coast there of of Essos and lots
of ships going from Volantis to wherever and up the Rhine.
Like he may have gone to Cohor then down the river to to
Volantis. This could have been on one
trip. Our best real life comparison
might be the Golden Gate Bridge, but keep in mind that the Golden
Gate Bridge is a suspension bridge, which is not at all.
There's no such thing as a suspension bridge in Westeros or
Essos. There also aren't Valyrian
Dragon roads in the real world. So there's but they both have
technologies that don't exist. On the other side of the
parallel, the Golden Gate Bridge was built in 1937.
At the time, it was the longest and tallest suspension bridge in
the world. It's no longer either.
The longest is in Turkey, the tallest though Sean, you think
that might be wrong. It's a there's different
standards. There's like length and whether
it's a suspension bridge or not. So you think the longest total,
the actual longest bridge in the world is in China, whereas the
longest suspension bridge might be in Turkey, I think that's
that might be it, yeah. I'm a little less sure of the
longest suspension bridge, but I know the longest bridge.
It's over 100 miles long. That goes from bang from
Shanghai to Beijing 102. Miles, that is crazy.
Preposterous to me. One reason the Golden Gate
Bridge is so well known is because it it was for it's kind
of like the Empire State Building.
It was for so long, the biggest one it was for like 50 ish years
and then all of a sudden for one reason or another technology and
needs of transportation. Like every other year a new one
gets built that out does it. But for the long, long time,
it's interesting that the first bridge ever built over a mile
long was in 1884, and it was 6 miles long.
Whoa. So that's just one like we're
going. To It was in New Orleans
interestingly enough fidget goes just a waterway probably to
transport goods maybe in the early days of steel and
railroads and but but I I thought that was really
interesting yeah but yeah the tallest bridge they they some
measurements are like from the base of the structure to the
height of the structure versus from the platform that you
travel on to the ground underneath.
Like, those are slightly different measurements, and
there's lots of different ways you can measure a bridge, But
the Golden Gate is probably the most iconic in the world, and
that Chinese one is definitely the longest.
Yeah, it might be in time. The Chinese one might overtake
the Golden Gate. But yeah, for the longest time,
the Golden Gate. And probably still holds the
title. It's probably going to lose that
title, but it's the most photographed bridge, at least at
least to like Westerners. We don't, we don't know for sure
about that. But it's another one where the
natural beauty of the area really enhances the the, the
whole picture, the whole package.
Getting back to the Long Bridge is one thing that helps stand
out about it is that it's one of the ones that we actually see.
Some of these other ones we don't see.
We've several that we've talked about.
We've only briefly seen or don't see it all, and some of the ones
that we haven't gotten to we won't see or or maybe or haven't
seen and may not ever see, such as the Bells of Narvos which is
Next up quote. No account of great Norvas is
complete without a mention of the city's 3 bells, whose peels
govern every aspect of city life, telling the norvashi when
to rise, when to sleep, when to work, when to rest, when to take
arms, when to pray often, and even when they are permitted to
have carnal relations rather or less often.
If the tales be true, each of the bells has its own
distinctive voice, whose sound is known to all true Norvashi.
The bells bear the names Noom, Nara and Nile.
So 3 ends. It's our second set of three
Carth's triple walls, Norvas's 3 bells.
Yeah. Now this is interesting.
We talked about how these things would have seen, been seen when
you approach the city. This would be different 'cause
you would hear it instead of seeing it, he would hear it.
And that's such a different sense.
That's being sort of well hit with wonder.
You're like, wow, that's really loud and clear from really far
away because they ring often there.
It governs every aspect of city life.
They ring frequently. There's there's basically no
chance he wouldn't have heard them coming up.
It's also not that hard to get to court to to Norvasc.
It's it's on the Rhine, you know, so not super remote.
It's one of the nine Free Cities, and he probably heard
about these bells in advance. They're probably somewhat
famous. Bells are very often associated
with religion. There's a long history in the
real world from a variety of places all over, east, West,
north-south, that bells are associated with prayer or with,
you know, waking up in the morning or, you know, or warning
the city of defenders. There's the the the Bell of the
Malisters that warns when the Ironborn are coming, right.
That's a good example. Now that one's not religious,
that's pure defense. But a lot of them have more than
one purpose. And in this case you have three
different bells that you know, maybe two of them ringing at one
time means one thing, maybe one of them ringing alone means one
thing, maybe all three of them ringing together.
So there's like they can do harmony and melody and so that
they just George is taking this concept and built on it by
adding just basic musical concepts.
That allows a lot more options to you've already got rhythm and
tone, now you've got multiple tones, multiple rhythms.
So it just adds so much more to it.
It's like it's like 1 instrument versus 3, right?
You can do so much more with that.
The largest real life bell ever known as the great belle of
Damazetti. It was 300 tons and made of
copper, gold and silver. The King of Myanmar gave it to
the Schwadagon Pagoda of Dagon. Dagon.
Not like not Lovecraft's Dagon, but this is the most sacred
Buddhist pagoda in Myanmar. And legend says it was built
when the Buddha was alive 2500 years ago.
So that's that's pretty impressive.
Now here's a little story and a story in reverse.
The Portuguese warlord Philip Debrito sacked this pagoda and
tried to steal the bell. This 300 LB bell.
Yeah, he's like, let me run off with that, shall we?
But he intended to melt it down to make cannons.
But the boats he tried to carry it off with sank, and it's still
in the Bago River to this day. That Bill like good luck getting
that out of there. 300 ton? You said 300 lbs.
Did I really? Oh my God.
Yeah, 300 tons. Yeah. 300 lbs is nothing, right?
It's like 300 lbs. Like, come on, that's like a
person, you know, like a large person, right?
Yeah, 300 tons. So the reverse part of the story
is the Australian bill. Old Pomeran.
It's it was made after Vienna repelled a Turkish Muslim siege
in the year 1683. They captured 200 of the
invaders cannons and made a bell from it.
So you have this this mercenary warlord who wanted to make a
bell into cannons and these guys made cannons into a bell.
I did did it in reverse and it's that's the bell Old Pomeran.
Old Pomeran unfortunately is no longer around it was destroyed
and now they have new Pomeran. They made a new one in Austrian.
It's something like Josefinishke Glaka.
I'm sure I'm butchering. That's pernicious, but I love
that cause it's Glock. It's like people talk about
Glocks, you know, like there's a lot of rap lyrics.
You mentioned a Glock and maybe some other places, you know,
it's like pull out the Glock. It's like, yeah, I pull out my
300, my 200 cannon sized Glock. You know, like your gun is small
compared to that. There's a bell from 771 common
era. That's 25 tons.
The bell of King Seong Dock that's in South Korea.
And there's the Great Mingun Bell, also in Myanmar.
Something about Myanmar and bells.
They love their bells in Myanmar.
It's the largest in the world recently, but the Chinese
surpassed it with the bell of good luck, which is inside the
Folkwan Temple, which is located near the aforementioned Spring
Temple Buddha, which is that 420 foot copper statue that is among
the tallest in the world. So again, you see the
association with religion, the bell is associated with that
Buddha, So boom. Nina points out as well what is
probably closer to George's personal experience, life
experience with religion, being a Catholic person.
A person was raised Catholic. He's not a practicing Catholic.
He was. He was raised Catholic, and
prayer bells are a big thing in Catholic religion.
And of course they are in other things, right?
Bells. In these examples we've given,
we've got bells in a pagoda, bells in a cathedral, bells in a
temple. Like all these different.
And there's surely other ones we didn't mention, like mosques.
But Muslims use prayer bells too.
There's just bells are a big thing for that, and Nina wonders
if those are like Norvashi gods, Noom, Nara and Nael, or named
after them. It's a real I really like that
idea. It's entirely possible.
We don't know a lot about the worship of We know they're a
very religious society, but we don't really have a big clear
picture on what that religion is like.
The details of it are kind of sparse to us.
Nina also notes how similar they are to Kiev and Ruse or
Muscovite. Like some of these Russian
influenced religious say buried priests are certainly a a big
association there, which is obviously a big part of Norvos.
I wonder how much that works for foreigners right.
Like the quota she read. It was like, well they tell
someone to do everything basically like all the basic
human functions. I wonder if there's a bell for
using the bathroom. I mean jeez, so it's like Nope,
you can't go until the bell rings.
Like man, I really need to go. You wonder if like Lomas, like,
does that work for foreigners? Like, does the bell apply to
him? He's like, you can only eat
during. Or does that only apply to
people who follow their religion?
Like, yeah, that would be something he would have probably
written about how that, you know the inner workings of how that
applies to to people who aren't locals.
When in Rome when in Norvos, what does the Norvos you do?
Yeah, seriously. I wonder if he'd let his beard
grow out a little more, or if he had one in the first place.
I don't know. And that's that's it's something
that has in common with the Titan as a noisemaker.
The Titan is the other one that can actually make noise, right?
And it. But the Titan only roars on
special occasions like feast days and victory and things like
that. The unmasking.
Where's the bells that are like every every day, several times a
day. So that's a lot.
OK, those are the seven we know. Time to get into the unknown
wonders made by man #8 and #9, in no particular order.
We're just going to get, we're going to, we're going to list
off all the ones we think are candidates with brief
descriptions and then Ashea, Sean, myself will weigh in on
what we think they are. Plus Nina has added hers as
well. So we'll all, all four of us
will weigh in with what our guesses are.
So none of these have been particularly remote so far.
None of them are like, wow, how did he get to that here?
It gets a little tricky with that.
Some of these are just as easy, like some of them are in
Westeros, but some of them are particularly remote.
And that adds to the difficulty of wondering if he actually went
there And I was like, well, no, that might be why maybe he
didn't go there, because it's so far away.
We'll start with the mazes of Laura.
We had a whole episode on Laura. It's one of the nine free
cities. We talked about the mazes and
the Maze makers quite a bit. The trick here is, are they man
made? The Maze Makers?
We're probably human, but they might not have been.
They might have been some other species, which is a semantic
trick here, right? Like, well, they definitely
aren't gods either. That's the two categories that
Lomas gives us. Is man made and natural
Basically. And well, this is not, this
isn't either. If it's if it's not man made, it
certainly isn't natural. So it was it was constructed.
For you, in our Our potential third Lomas episode, where we
talk about unnatural wonders, would the Mazes of Laura be on
that list for you? Would you include it?
I think so. I think we would have to include
it probably. But I sort of have it as my
honorable mention for like my tenth choice for here because
I'm not sure like I think if Lomas considered the man made,
it's hard not to include them but he if he admitted them that
would be why is that he didn't consider the man made or or I
don't know it's it's tough. It's very tough.
It's kind of semantics. So you're but but again Esha
brings up the the need for this alternate categorization and
you'll see there's this isn't the only one that kind of fits
in that alternate categorization of like, well, man made natural,
like the Shadow Lands are like, well, that's not natural.
That seems very supernatural. So that might be so it doesn't
really fit. It's wondrous, it's amazing, but
it doesn't it's not. AI don't think it fits into
either category necessarily. The wall seems supernatural to
me, and also maybe supernatural. How much Lomas realizes or
believes that it is. He put it on his list of man
made but. And you're right to bring that
up, because some of these there is that overlap.
Like there is there's absolutely there's magic in the wall that's
not doubtable. But is that what enables it to
stand 700 feet tall? Probably not, you know, but it.
But it definitely adds to the wondrousness of it that the dead
can't pass and that Dragons can't pass or or whatever,
whatever, exactly how it works. So man, that's tricky.
Like, say, all the art on the walls of Karth were made through
magic. Oh, OK.
OK. Does that mean the walls don't
count the glory of the city? Good point.
So did the magic just randomly happen one day, or did a
magician have to stand? There, but still man made.
Still. And have a vision of what the
art would be. It's called Man made.
Right. Humans using magic.
Is that would I? I could see why you'd call that
man made. But in the case of something
like the Shadow, we don't know the origin of that magic.
So that's like, well, it could be man.
It could be a magical accident done by humans, right.
The doom of the current state of Valyria.
You could call that maybe like the the magical fallout of
Valyria that you could call that man made.
Maybe, you know. But that's the that's the trick.
Like we we, we were missing some details.
It was part of the fun though. One of the other interesting
things about the Maze of Laura is it might be the oldest, it
might be older than any of these.
It might even be older than the five forts, which is wild to
think about because those are super old and like the
beginning. The Hightower might have been
started 10,000 years ago. So like, if this is older than
that, that's really something. Now I we don't even know for
sure that he went to Laura, but it seems likely because of this
feature and because he seems to have gone so many places and
it's not super remote. I mean, Laura Ath is.
He's right by it when he's in Norva.
Yeah, yeah. It's not even that far away.
He's in Bravos too, yeah. He's right by there.
So I suspect he went there and it just, it's just not one of
the things that we get. We know for sure there's more
that George wrote about Lomas that wasn't included in The
World of Ice and Fire. Perhaps this is one of those
things, The Hightower, Let's talk about the Hightower.
We've already talked about it a little bit because we framed it
as a potentially the thing that he left off the list because he
was used to it, a place he may have been born because of all
the books there. Also because it has such a great
real world parallel that we mentioned the Lighthouse of
Alexandria, which is also a lighthouse like like the
Hightower, and there they also have the association of the
knowledge there. The Lighthouse of Alexandria
coexisted with the great Library of Alexandria, just like Old
Town has the Citadel along with the high Tower.
So very cool. We know the High Tower is the
tallest tower in the known world.
That by itself is very impressive.
We don't actually know how tall it is though, it's just more
than the wall. So the wall is 700 feet more
than that. We don't know how much more
though. And part of the difficulty there
probably is that the high Tower has been added to.
It's changed. It hasn't had a static height,
although maybe it has been for a while.
For all we know it hasn't changed in a century or even
more. But that's pretty, pretty cool.
Must have an amazing view. We have not been inside it.
It's amazing. We've been near it.
We've but but not in it which is kind of interesting in that
we've been you know we've seen the triple walls of Karth, we've
seen some of these really remote ones.
But we haven't been inside the Hightower, which is just right
there in one of the biggest population centers of of of
Westeros. The tallest tower, not tallest
building on Earth right now is the Tokyo Sky Tree which is 2080
feet or 634 meters. The tallest building is the Burj
Khalifa which is 2717 feet and these two like.
Crazy. That's like half a mile.
It's so tall. Those are, Yeah, it's almost
literally. It's almost exactly half a mile.
You're right. Like, isn't a mile 5000, 400
feet, something like that, I forget 5 * 200.
Yeah, you're right. So I think I'm a little over
half. That's that is crazy.
Yeah. So like several of these, it's
it's changed over time. Like, obviously the Tokyo Sky
Tree hasn't been the tallest for all that long, but the Wall and
the Hightower, they probably have held.
Like the Hightower has held this title probably for a huge amount
of time, unless something else was taller and fell, like maybe
the Sarnath, you know, something like that.
It's possible. Maybe something in Valyria.
Valyria is very possible, but not anymore.
And it started as a 50 foot wooden tower.
So it's definitely like, it wasn't obviously Lomas didn't
live that long ago when it was, you know, the dawn of man, the
Dawn age we're talking about, but super old.
How tall is the High Tower? We don't know.
It's not given. It's just taller than the wall.
It's more than 700 feet tall. That's all we.
Know I did a Google search and so I don't know how where this I
this maybe shouldn't count but it says 800 feet so I don't
know. I don't think getting that from,
I don't. I think that's just a
guesstimate, yeah. OK.
Yeah. But part of why I bring this up
and we'll get there, but I mean, do you think it's 10%, twenty,
30% higher than the wall? Do you think it's 1000 feet?
Well, I think the guess there is that it's 100 feet taller than
the wall, just like. Is that a rough guess or is it
actually 200? I don't think it's 500 feet
taller, but I think it's within 200 feet taller than the wall.
I'm bringing it up because the forts are 1000 feet tall.
There's five of them, and. They're all taller.
Yeah, I know. That's so insane.
And the five forts. We can believe that assuming
that's. True, right?
Which, And does that count as a tower?
I guess not. This is probably what it's
saying, so like I think. It's easier to make a tower tall
than it is to make a building tall.
Yes, Especially because these aren't buildings designed for
heart. They're they can hold like
10,000 men each or something, right?
These aren't just like barely getting this narrow tip.
To a spot. These are massive at the base
so. Yep, So it might have started
more like the Five Forts when it was a fortress made of
Blackstone, because that's the base of the Hightower.
Now. It's nowhere the size of one of
the Five Forts, but it's made of this very mysterious Blackstone,
the fused Blackstone, or that that that we associate with the
great Empire of the Dawn and or the Deep Ones and or the Maze
Makers, or maybe even Valyria. So a lot of ancient mysteries
wrapped into one location 'cause it's also associated with
Brandon the Builder. So it's just like this.
All the old stuff, all the old building people, all the old
civilizations are associated with Old Town one way or
another, And with the Hightower. There's even stories of ancient
Dragons there and a trading post where Valyrians and other races
would come to maybe trade with the children of the Forest.
I mean, there's a lot of ancient history here that we don't have
a lot of depth on, just tales and and rumors.
But it sounds like this is a hotbed and it would make sense
for there to be, for something to be recognized as wondrous
there. If even if not the Hightower,
maybe the whole city. But I think the high tower, it's
a strong, strong candidate. Nina says she taller than the
wall. It's hard for her not to include
it. That's that's her logic and I
tend to agree with that. It's it's hard not to include
it. I like that logic because that
means you should include the five fourths.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. My, my argument against
Hightower, I still argue. I think I I will say I think I'm
still going to say I think it is.
The Hightower is one of the eight, one of the 9 wonders.
The argument against it is when Sean brought up, which is that
if you grew up in the shadow of the Hightower, is it still
wondrous to you? It's funny that you brought it
up, Sean, because I read a a really interesting academic
paper that brought up that same concept that that's the Library
of Alexandria and the Lighthouse were not on original one lists
of Wonders of the World 'cause they grew the the person writing
it was living around there, so, so.
That's where that concept came from.
It's really neat to see that a real person that named Wonders
really did that, the thing that you were describing.
They were like, this is nothing. And then other people were like,
no, no. This is a wonder, though, man.
Oh, OK all right. You got me.
Convinced me. Yeah.
That also requires Lomas to be from Old Town or near Old Town.
At least, which is reasonable, but by no means a a sure thing.
These next two are very familiar to us all, but they're a little
confusing in how to categorize them because they are both man
made. There's aspects of them that are
man made, but the natural element is potentially the more
important part First. One of them is Casterly Rock.
It's similar to the arguments for the mazes in some way, which
is that they're impressive, but the natural start to it all
might be more impressive. The rock itself is so unusual,
with all that gold being so tall and an area that's more hilly
than mountainous. And in this amazing natural
harbor with the the wide open cave system and all that, it's
the Lannisters and Casterlys before them repurposed it and
did a lot of carving which made it more wondrous.
But I think it's pretty wondrous without the man made aspects.
So this is where the debate gets framed as well.
The Rock is a great candidate, but for which list?
Probably more the second one. Yeah, I lean towards natural
wonder. I think I if someone argued for
it as man made, I would, I would see it.
But I think if we're already bursting at the limit to trying
to come up with the AT at fit, the two spots might as well just
put Cassidy rock and natural wonders and make it easier for
ourselves. Yeah, I agree.
It is simpler to put it there because, yeah, it's hard to put
it above the high tower of the five fourths, which I think are
two of our better candidates. And there's other ones too that
are maybe just as good as casted rock, if not to the level as
other ones. And yeah, what do you think,
Sean? Unsuspicious of it making either
list. I think that the man made
portion of it is hard to witness and be in awe of.
Right from the outside it's a big mountain, but then you go in
and now you're just in a cave or a hallway here and there.
There might be some luxuriously decorated room, but there's
thousand decorated rooms and you know, like it's hard for any one
piece of it to really jump out and be that outstanding compared
to the other things that is competing with same thing.
Even as a natural wonder. There's bigger mountains.
You, you know, like it's, you know, maybe as an individual
mountain. That is another thing.
In the real world, they measure mountain heights not just by
elevation from sea level but also the relative height of
what's around it. But neither of those get
included in the marvels of the natural world like Mount Everest
isn't one of them. You know what I mean?
The Grand Canyon is kind of the opposite of a mountain, but it's
not one of them either. So.
Some people say it is, but. I guess depends on wait list.
But you're right. But you're right, that's not a
universal thing, so good point. The other candidate here, which
has a lot in common with the Rock for similar reasons, is the
Erie. Extremely beautiful, both by
itself and because of the unbeatable views.
But it's the natural elements that really make it.
Probably even, maybe even more so than Castley Rock because
it's probably less work was done to make the Erie though it's
more visually stunning from a distance.
It's it's the imported marble. It's beautiful to behold.
It's atop the Giants Lands, which is the tallest peak in the
Mountains of the Moon in the Veil of Aaron.
It's one of the highest peaks in all the Westeros probably, and
they built this tall tower series of towers on top of it
took several generations to build.
It's not the tallest building, but it's definitely the highest
up, I think at least amongst maybe maybe some watchtower here
or there might be higher, but nothing of nothing of of
acclaim. It's also it.
It meets a standard I was mentioning earlier is that it's
how spectacular of a a, a build or whatever it is for how remote
of a location Like how could you even build that how that you
know you're already on this mountain.
It's hard to get there just a a skilled climber on their own.
How did you get enough climbers with enough skill to get all the
material? It that that adds to it for me,
I think maybe even more so than Castle Rock, although I'm still
suspicious. I still don't know if it if I
don't think I counted. I think there's other things
that are. I tend to agree.
Potentially more impressive. I think it would be like if we
did a top 20 it would make it, but I don't think it's in the
top 9 maybe. Even Top 10.
Or it might. It might could be 10th or yeah,
it's it's very impressive. There's no doubt it's another
one of the ones that we get to see.
We get to see a pretty good amount of it.
We could see the approach to it as well, not just inside, but
like they see it from a distance.
They're like, whoa, that's that's pretty impressive.
We see the climb there, we see how remote it is, We see how
difficult it is to reach. Even though it's the the home of
one of the great houses, or at least the the summer home of one
of the great houses. They don't live there in winter.
It is kind of small. It's the smallest of the great
castles. That is an argument against it.
Like I said before, one of the things that makes it so
impressive is just so the beauty of the the view being up there.
It's an incredible view of Alyssa's tears and the valley
below. It might be the most beautiful
natural view that we know of in the entire world of Westeros and
and Essos, but the Planetos, but so that you know that, but that
that kind of argument is something you would say about
natural wonders and not about a castle.
It's not the castle part that's that's you could just stand up
on that peak and look down and you would get that same effect,
you know, It's just nice to have a castle there too.
Something to potentially parallel this to is the Christ
the Redeemer statue in Brazil one's.
Enormous, isn't it? It Well, it is, but it's nowhere
near as big as those other. It's more than the Statue of
Liberty, but to get it built on that mountain peak, you know it.
Appears to be taller than it is. And then you have this massive
statue there, like, how did you build that there?
That's A and it does get included in the modern list, the
modern marvels. Yeah, it's it's a it's a big
one. That's also one that has
incredible views. Like you, if you were up in the
spot where it is. The statue itself is.
I haven't been there, but I've seen the, like, people taking
pictures from it. It's like, whoa, that's that's
awesome. You can see the the coast and
the all the the trees and everything the city below.
All right, so here's one that we perhaps one we that we may have
debated the most offline here. This is the Great Pyramid of
Geese. It's mentioned in the World of
Ice and Fire app and in the book, but it's not confirmed as
a wonder. We're not sure, but it's
definitely discussed a lot. Here's a quote.
The Great Pyramid of Marine had been built as an echo to the
Great Pyramid of Geese, whose colossal ruins Lomas Longstrider
had once visited. Like its ancient predecessor,
whose red marble halls were now the haunt of bats and spiders,
the Mirenese pyramid boasted 3 and 30 levels, that number being
somehow sacred to the gods of Geese.
And it's hard to miss the real world Parallel Great Pyramid of
Geese. Great Pyramid of Giza Pretty
similar. They're very similar in age.
The Well, sort of in, in a sense, the Great Pyramid of Giza
is 4600 years old. The Great Pyramid of Geese was
destroyed 5000 years ago. So the destruction of the Great
Pyramid came around the same time that the real world Great
Pyramid was built. So The Who knows how long the
Great Pyramid of Geese stood before it was destroyed 5000
years ago, but it's not clear just how destroyed it was.
And this is part of our difficulty when we were debating
this offline. We know Valyria after the 5th
Giscari war, sacked and destroyed old gifts the city and
what damage they did to the Great Pyramid is unclear.
It sounds like it's it's unused because the population center
nearby is gone, but how much actual destruction did they
level on the pyramid itself? Well, it says there's still red
marble halls that are the haunt of bats and spiders, so clearly
isn't fully levelled if there's some red marble halls that are
still there. But does it still have its
point? Does it still look like a
pyramid? Or is it more like a some
strange rhombus, You know, that's kind of.
What I figure is that yeah, it doesn't have the 33 levels, but
it might still have 20, It might still have 10.
It it still has enough to have multiple levels, it's not one
level. I agree.
Yeah. It sounds like it's not just the
base only you know. And even if it was just the base
only, I kind of made this point before.
That might be enough to envision the rest of it, especially if
there's paintings and people to tell stories.
But if there are multiple levels and someone side of it might be
still hundreds of feet tall or something, Especially when you
consider in the real world, there are some time periods
during the Renaissance when they were updating the Seven Wonders
of the World. And again, there's no central
body or scientific method to this, but some of them included
Solomon's Temple and Noah's Ark, which they could not have
possibly have ever seen. So not not existing at all or
being visible at all can still potentially make a list.
So the rooms being there, especially if the rooms are
still there to a certain extent, and especially with the close
parallels that George has created to the pyramids in Giza
and that you could infer what the size would be from marine
too, right? There are other pyramids too.
All these things it make it's a strong candidate for me.
I I I think it would be one of my final guesses if I was pinned
down. Cool.
Yeah. It is very impressive.
And you wonder that Lomas would have probably tried to imagine
what it was like as a whole. And you also wonder if he lived,
if the Great Pyramid of Marine existed when Lomas went to visit
this one, whether he could go to see it as comparisons, like this
is the one they built as an echo of the old one.
And he would get an even better idea of what the old one looked
like by seeing the new one, because it's apparently built
very similarly. And that also stands out because
I don't think we have any other examples of rebuilt wonders like
they're trying. They like they built this one in
honor of as a replica of the old one.
I don't think any of the other ones we've listed have anything
like that. Maybe I'm missing something I
I'm just now this is just now occurring to me.
So I didn't prepare that particular thought, but I think
that's it's worth a mention. I think like a lot of these
other ones, it's from a distance, it's like, wow, you
could see that and be like, Oh my gosh, that's really big.
Even if it's in partly in ruins, you'd still be able to see it
from far away. He how he got there is probably
similar to his other ones. It's still the southern coast of
Essos. It's not that difficult to go to
old geese by ship, I don't think.
My thoughts on that, on what you were saying about things being a
replica or similar to another wonder.
Yeah, I think the only one that I think, I don't think it's a
replica at all, but the only one that comes to mind for me is
that the question of whether the five forts or the wall predates
one another. O2 very different structures
but. Both used.
To keep things out, you know. They are like, yeah, they are
like kind of similar parallels but with some some things in
reverse but. And I don't know which one I
think is more ancient. I kind of.
I think 5 Fourths is, but yeah, I really don't know.
Honestly, I I couldn't say. Let's move on to the next one.
Actually, one other note about that, I would say he probably
took ship. I did say that rather than
crossing like the Demon Road or something like that.
So how he got to Slaver's Bay? Because I imagine he didn't just
see old Geese, but it's possible he only did because maybe he
didn't want to get enslaved. I don't know.
It's probably not that he probably wasn't in that much
danger of that, but it might be a reason to steer clear.
The next one is interesting because it in some ways it's
more important than all the others, but it's maybe less
wondrous. And this is the talking trees of
the Summer Isles. We know for a fact that Lomas
went there, he talked to their wise people, and he learned
about this. These are a series of trees, and
there's got to be a really huge number.
We have no idea how many, but they're carved with the
histories, laws and commandments from their gods on them.
There's all, some of these are form, are carved in the form of
song, and there's maps. So like, whoa, this is like a
vast trove of knowledge that's just carved onto trees.
So in some ways it's got the same sort of value as the
Citadel or any sort of ancient library.
Well, I think of it as a counterpoint, like a mundane
counterpoint to Wehrwoods and Green Seers, right?
Because in that case they're actually just storing it in the
trees, but in this case, like they're they're doing.
It's the same function, but but just written there.
I don't think it's magical in this.
Case it's a non supernatural version of that.
Yeah, it's associated with the tree though.
That's great call. Yeah I love that idea but it.
But unlike some of the other ones, the reason maybe it's not
a wonder as much as this knowledge is like wow, they were
able to keep all this. It's really amazing.
It's wonders. It's more valuable than a lot of
these other things in terms of its its role in society.
But it's not like you don't see it from a distance.
You know you don't sail up and be like oh what's that?
You wouldn't only you don't kind of only be able to see it when
you get close to it. It's not an edifice you know
it's not. So it also has that struggle of
this this is partly natural and you know it's it's definitely
the carvings are man made clearly.
But you know it's it's it's a combo like like some of these
other ones that makes it tricky to categorize.
And it's also the only candidate on this list that's constantly
changing. Sure, all these have had
changes. Cashly rockets, new tunnels.
The long bridge gets new. I don't know businesses moving
on and off of it. That's that's not a change to
the structure necessarily. But it you might count that as a
change. Maybe some of these other places
have added rooms or subtracted rooms, I don't know.
But but this one is constantly they're adding new history, new
law, whatever. Like, that's this is an ongoing
thing, but it probably isn't an engineering marvel, You know
what I mean? Like that might be why it
doesn't quite make the top 9. I say you try writing all of
your history on a tree Aziz, and call that not I.
Can't do any of these things though.
Engineering Marvel. Like, I wonder how they deal
with logistically over time. Is the cheese as the trees grow
do they get too tall to read what was written longer?
And do they have some sort of ladder system to get up higher
or some way to control the growth?
Or are they slow growing? No, no, actually, that's not how
it works. We learned this.
We talked about weirwoods. That's why the face of the tree
stays at the bottom. That's not how trees grow.
Trees don't grow from the base like that.
Yeah, so they might carve up higher, but they but the history
wouldn't like, go up. It wouldn't move up with it.
It would stay at the base, yeah. So that I'm glad you brought
that up with that same thought process that.
Might be my favorite thing I've ever learned through doing our
podcast. I always thought that of Trees
and oh. I forget why we learned that.
But it was like an arborist that told, like someone that knew it
was like, oh, no, that's not how trees work.
I'm like, OK then, all right, cool.
We know now. Yeah.
So the more you know, knowledge is power.
Yeah. Obviously never second guessed
it. I just thought they grew from
the. I don't know, I don't know.
I didn't second guess it at all. But it makes sense like we have
a tree out there on our backyard that's like leaning into our
deck and it's got a carve out for that and that has stayed the
same spot, like the tree is risen, but that hasn't.
Yeah, you're right. That's in the exact same spot.
So it does stand to reason with my own real world experience and
yours. So yeah.
So the talking tree is worth a mention but you can maybe see
why it's maybe another top 20 but not top nine.
But your mileage may vary. You know these are we're
guessing here we don't. This is not we're we're not
we're not in authority we're we know we have we have strong
opinions here. We have done a lot of work on
this but you know we're just guessing ET let's talk to ET
briefly. We talked Karth, we talked the
potential of Valyria. We talked Sarnath.
ET deserves a mention. We'll talk about ETA little more
as well on the other episode because we'll have reason to.
But he was extremely impressed by it said their cities are far
grander than those of Westeros. What I wish he had done is
compared the cities of ET to Sarnor and FLIR and that's I
don't want Westerosi comparisons.
We know those are like, that's the one we need.
The like equals like, not the, you know, like does not equal
far away, he said. Even their ruins put ours to
shame, which is like woo Dang. So yeah, it is a much, much,
much older culture and we covered them separately in an
episode with Chris Stewart of the History of China podcast,
who is a person that lives in China and and does the, you
know, he knows quite a lot about Chinese history given his
podcast and all. And this is part of why Nina is
on the five fourth side as a wonder of the world, because he
was awestruck by its marvels. Yet nothing is on his list that
we know of Like what he's awestruck, yet nothing made the
cut. Well, if the five forts made the
cut, that would sort of solve that minor issue here.
And the five forts would be a great way to show, like, the
capability of a culture we talked about, Hey, this culture
is proud of what they did here. Well, what's more impressive
than this? You know, like these gigantic
edifices, which let's go ahead and talk about.
And here's one of the only cases where I could maybe see Lomas
including it without having been there.
But he might just have to verify this for with his own two eyes,
because it's like, really? Is it really that big?
Here's the quote. I want to say I really don't
like the idea of him including anything on the list that he has
not seen with his own two eyes. That that's my take on.
It yeah, I kind of, I'm kind of with you there, but this is the
one I'm willing to maybe maybe say otherwise on.
Yeah, I don't like the idea that, but I still think it might
be the case here right on. Now here's the quote.
No discussion of ET would be complete without a mention of
the Five Forts, a line of hulking ancient Citadel's that
stand along the far northeastern frontiers of the Golden Empire
between the Bleeding Sea, named for the characteristic hue of
its deep waters, supposedly a result of a plant that grows
only there, and the Mountains of the Morn, the Five Forts are
very old, older than the Golden Empire itself.
Some claim they were raised by the Pearl Emperor during the
morning of the Great Empire to keep the Lion of Night and his
demons from the Realms of Men. And indeed, there is something
God like or demonic about the monstrous size of the forts.
For each of the five is large enough to house 10,000 men, and
their massive walls stand almost 1000 feet high.
As I said at the beginning, this one has a lot in common with the
wall, and that's why we're finishing with it.
So like a bookend, we started with the Wall, We're going to
finish with the five Forts. Each one, as it says, monstrous
in size. Yeah, each seems to be carved
from a single block, which is probably not the case.
It's just some sort of technology or fusing the
Blackstone stuff that he just doesn't have an explanation for.
Almost certainly not carved from one solid slap.
That's even crazier than magic, given magic exists in this
world. So if this is the if, this is
the sort of fused stone that was made by Dragons like the
Valyrian dragon roads, It was a different dragon riding culture
because these forts predate Valyria for sure.
It's not like maybe they predate Valyria, We're like 99% sure of
that. So that argues that this is at
least as old as the Wall, and might be older.
ET has existed since the Long Night and it seems like
civilization dawned in the East sooner than in Westeros.
Like Westeros came, maybe came along later as a civilized place
given it was the haunt of children and and giants and
stuff before the First Men came. Well, the First Men came from
Esos. That definitely shows that Asos
had people before Westeros, so ET very possibly existed before
the First Men came to Westeros. The Great Empire of the Dawn
perhaps predates all that, which could mean the five Forts are a
lot older than the Wall, like potentially 1000 years or more,
and as Sean said, almost 1000 feet high.
That's 300 feet taller than the Wall, which is.
George already said that probably made the Wall too big.
Well, what excuse does he have for this thing?
Because this was 2014, so he had already decided to.
The wall was too big. He's like, you know what, I'm
going to go even bigger. Screw it.
And it's also worth noting that these forts, we don't know the
exact dimensions, but the five of them and their surrounding,
Oh well. Entrapments are 300 miles
across, right? So that even if there were only
seven, how far across is the wall A?
100 miles. So three times farther across as
a collective construction, yes. Wait, wait, 300?
Sorry, 300 miles, 300 miles. It's 100 leagues. 100 leagues,
300 miles. Yeah, that's right.
Yeah. So, similarly as long, right?
Yeah, probably deeper. Probably deeper.
Yeah, how wide the wall is from one side to the other, but it
seems like these structures are at least similarly as deep, and
they're not as continuously as tall, but they get to a greater
height overall. And also, it's worth noting, the
wall isn't an even perfect 7. 100 feet all the way.
You're right, it's higher. At its highest point.
Yeah, it's it's higher when it like it's that's the the measure
of the wall itself. But yeah it gets a little higher
when it cools over walls, walls, hills and stuff like that.
So this this is more like a desert region.
So there's not as maybe the ground is a little flatter in
general, but there's there's hills maybe and stuff like that.
And yeah, we don't know if there's like a a a wall that
these forts are connected to. It doesn't look like that on the
map. It just looks like there's forts
there and they're just spaced out facing this region of the
the land of the Shrikes and all these crazy creepy beasts that
we hear coming out of very similar to the legionary
standing on Hadrians wall that George was imagining is like,
what's going to come out of this wasteland, this frozen.
This is similar, except it's not a frozen wasteland.
It's a desert wasteland, But has just as much if not more
reputation for strange creatures that live out there.
Lizard men, which might just be humans wearing lizard scales we
don't know. Winged men, all sorts of crazy
creepy stuff that's like, you know, edge of the map type
descriptions that the five forts are holding back just like the
walls holding back the others. But also things that are just
like the free. The free folk have a reputation
that's undeserved. Like you hear like early on in A
Game of Thrones, You hear like, oh, they're drinking blood and,
you know, enslaving people and all the stuff that isn't really
true about the free folk. And since you got to dial some
of this back down too, which is why Ashea made the good points.
Like he would have to verify this cause.
Like the Shrikes and the Lizard people, like.
So if they're exaggerating about that, then why not exaggerate
about the size of these buildings?
Although it might be easier for him to accept it having seen the
wall. OK.
Fairpoint. Fairpoint.
I have seen a 700 foot 300 mile long thing I guess.
Guarding an expanse, dark expanse of of unknown horrors.
Yeah, yeah, you're right. He would have already had that
experience. Very good point.
How many the the wall has 14 towers. 19 No more than 17
active at were ever active at one time.
OK, all right. So and so let's say each of them
were manned by 1000 people. Yeah.
That reasonable could be. I think that might be on the
high end 'cause that would be as many people as two of the forts.
Yeah. If on some level we're
considering that that the maintenance of the population
around the wall as part of its marvel, well, it would be
multiplied by four or three or whatever.
For. The at least I think for the
five, four. Now he wouldn't have seen that
even if he did go there and see the force, all those people
wouldn't have been there. But again, having seen that at
the wall, he could imagine, just like I see in the Pyramids or
Marine, he could imagine what these would have been like.
Maybe he didn't see it, maybe he didn't name it.
But if if I think even if everything we know about the 5
fourths is cut in half, it's not exaggerated by when they say
it's almost 1000 feet and that doesn't mean 900, it means 600.
I still think the five fourths would be 1.
Yeah, they're super impressive. Of course is whether he saw it
or needs to see it to count it. Yeah, agreed, agreed.
So it's it's it's a strong candidate You can see why we've
we've made our our point here and it's it's one of those where
this is pretty easily the least likely for us to see during the
events of the Song of Ice and Fire.
But it's possible we hear about it like if the others are
invading the wall we might hear something.
You know it's something's coming on the other side of the world
as well and that might be a fun thing for George to do to be
like, yeah, the Lion of Knight, the Other.
There's a connection there. Who knows?
Probably not, but it's a fun idea and it could happen.
And I I'm. I like thinking about that.
I like the possibility. Yeah, I'm more partial to the
idea that they came out of that region.
They faced a similar threat to the others on that side of the
world at a different point in time, and that's not where it's
gonna happen now, but it has happened there and.
That's a great idea. Like the five forts might be
what the wall will look like after this.
Books are over when the walls broken and no longer useful as
defensive thing, but it's still standing for the most part.
Like it's got chunks missing or whatever, but well.
I have two questions. One, do we know for a fact that
the wall is solid ice all the way through?
Or like is there like a core of? There's a lot of rocks, there's
a lot of gravel and rock in it, so.
Like the idea that you have all the ice melts.
There's still like that anyways, for one, But yeah, I think if
you I think the point, the place where we speculated most on this
might be in our many faced Azora High episode disease maybe.
I believe we speculated at length about this particular
thing because I think there's it's, there's so many parallels,
there's so many myths about about the Savior during the Long
Night in Essos, and in this and in these areas, I can't help but
think that it had to happen as well on this side of the world.
Yeah, I really like the odd idea.
I mean it's probably not it's this is probably going too far,
but using Sean's idea of like the wall just or your idea of
the wall just melting and that showing that there would have
could have been something there that connected the these
castles. It's like these castles just
sitting there facing this wasteland.
But what if there was another edifice that those fortresses
were supporting that is something like the wall of
Westeros. Maybe not an ice wall, but
something that's no longer standing.
Who knows? And maybe an ice wall, Maybe the
maybe the climate changed so much that they had an ice wall
and that's where they got the idea for building the one in
Westeros. Like, hey, they had one over
there. Well, definitely changed a lot
in that time because I mean we have the bleeding sea on its
own, we have, we have the great sand sea and we have multiple
seas that are no longer seas there.
Yeah, you're right. And the Silver Sea supposedly
existed in in Dothraki Sea, which is even farther West.
So yeah, there's a lot of this stuff was underwater.
So you're right that 10,000 years ago, the climate, the
geography, a lot of things could have been substantially
different in terms of what the world looked like, what the
weather looked like and and where like that might not have
been a desert, you know. So yeah, that that we can't
assume when you go, when you're going back that far in time, you
have to, you have to castle your imagination has to be very broad
as to what the in the land what are you looking.
At here's my idea. Then it was the five forts were
built by the squishers who were lived underneath the water, and
it started at the underneath. It started underwater, and only
recently. Like it used to only be like 500
feet above water and 500 feet below water.
Yeah, they were. There was a big Moat.
I'm joking to be clear, but the idea of how ancient it is, it
isn't necessarily built by humans.
Right. I'm not joking about that.
That's another one that might not be made by man.
That's true. This is definitely built by some
beings, but not necessarily humans.
Yes, that's a great point. Yeah.
And also could be built at least partly by magic, humans or
giants using magic. Or Dragons.
Or both. Yeah, and back to your point
about number of people on the wall.
I want to. I just thought of something,
Sean. When Aegon Conquest began, there
were 30,000 men in total, apparently on the wall all
throughout the entire place. So still less than 50,000, yeah.
Yeah. And that also is just those
buildings. It doesn't count anything
surrounding those buildings. It might have been manned or
housed people or whatever else too.
Right on with. 100 miles. Worth.
So, all right, let's sway in with our final guesses of what
number 8 and #9 are. Are you folks in the chat?
Feel free to do the same if you're listening after the fact.
Weigh in in the comments. The podcast episode should have
a place to weigh in as well. We are.
We often have a little spot for that.
If you just check the episode, you'll see.
Click on the episode in your podcast player.
You can find a spot for that. OK.
My guess is yeah, 5 forts in the Hightower.
Honorable mention to the mazes. I think the mazes are maybe #10.
I'll put them at #10. I'll put the Hightower at number
95 forces. They're not really in an order
though. So I'll say the mazes are my top
pick. That doesn't make it.
OK, so you say 5 fourths in Hightower?
Nina also says 5 fourths in the High Tower, but her honorable
mention is the Erie, so she's got a different #10 than me.
I'm saying the High Tower and the Great Pyramid of Geese
Ruins. I'm saying he saw Ruins and he
still put it on the wonders. And honestly a lot of people
just assumed that it was one of the wonders when I looked up
like documenting if I looked at like Adam Whiteheads old post
about it and he just had it as #8.
So I think a lot of people kind of just assumed that I want it.
I want my answer to be Hightower in the five forts.
I don't know that I think he saw the five forts.
I want him to have seen the five forts.
Because if he saw the five forts, he saw the bleeding sea.
And the bleeding sea is one of my main guesses for the natural
wonders. But I'm going to dig into that
more in our Part 2 where we talk, where we talk about that.
But I really think the bleeding sea should be a natural wonder.
But if he didn't see the five forts, he didn't see that.
So I want to say both. I'm gonna just choose to to say
the Great Pyramid, 'cause I I kind of just assumed it was for
a lot of years too. So I I I don't know.
I'm. Sean, I say the the pyramid of
geese and the five forts, those are my top 2 picks.
And of you know, of course they're dependent.
They have astracies, right? And my number three I I'm
hesitant to pick. I think it should be, on some
level, the high tower, but my theory is it's not only 'cause
that's where he's from. But I like that idea, you know,
I guess if I do pick that one, that means he's not from there,
you know? Yeah, I.
I like that that idea is represented SO33 votes for the
five forts out of the four of us.
Three votes for the Hightower, 2 votes for the Great Pyramid, one
vote for no. That's it.
Yeah, and then several on different Ongold mentions.
We all we had some different Ongold mentions there.
So Sean, why don't you get a cat?
While I read our outro, there you have it folks.
As a group, the the wonders mostly fall into a few basic
categories. Like I said earlier, religion,
defense, authority, and transportation.
These things are often linked. Transportation of armies can
create authority and our defense, religion and authority
are often very linked. You perform core societal
functions in wondrous fashion, like the Bells, things like
that. Honestly, I want to give an
honorable mention to Harrenhal. It's pretty amazing, but we're
pretty sure as well it was built after Lomas's time, right?
It may have been close though, because we're guessing Lomas was
born and lived during the century of Blood.
Harenhal was finished basically the end of that era.
It's kind of like Aegon's conquest marks the end of the
century of Blood. Well, the building of Aronal
coincides with the conquest of Heranal or with the the Aegon's
conquest. Regardless, it might be the most
impressive place built in the world since Lomas's day.
Since he lived, Winterfell maybe deserves a mention as well
because of the Hot Springs and the glass gardens.
It's pretty amazing. It's it's less wondrous to us
perhaps, but it's pretty darn impressive in a low tech world.
All that growth and and heat in a wintry place is it might make
the top 20. Winterfell also serves us,
serves to remind us what a huge topics this is.
And the wondrousness of Winterfell may increase as we go
forward and see how it holds up in, you know, in the depths of
winter. But also this reminds us of why
this is such a big topic and why we had to split it.
Several comments from some listeners here that we'll get
through here. Good questions, Maxim Howard
sends a super chat and says why do you think Valerio was unable
to find Bravos? They've got a 400 foot foot
Titan for a front door and Valerio was actively looking for
them with Dragons. Fog seems like a bad excuse.
I'm thinking that the Titan was not built that in that era.
I think maybe they would have built, maybe built it later
after the unmasking. That's not clear though.
We don't know for sure about that and I don't know that they
were looking that hard for Braavos.
That's what I think. I think they weren't looking for
them. They weren't.
They weren't a rebellious country that was trying to, they
weren't a revolutionary country. They were just doing their own
thing. And yeah, I think they weren't
weren't actually looking for them actively really.
It was a it was a refuge for escaped slaves, which they
didn't like that, but it they're they had so many slaves.
Like, you see that when when Bravos offered to pay for the
ships that they stole, when they absconded with them, when they
had their, when they founded Bravos.
They're like, we're not paying for the slaves, 'cause we don't
believe in slavery, but we stole your ships.
We'll pay for that. And Valeria, like, they hardly
cared. They're like, yeah, sure, we
don't care. That's fine.
They're so rich, they just didn't care.
I see where you're coming from, though.
Like, it's maybe a little hard to explain how a city was
concealed for so long, but there may have been some other things
they did to keep themselves concealed that that we're not
aware of yet. Joe Magician says.
And hey, Joe magician, shout out Joe magician, Check out Joe
Magician's channel. Good friend of ours, he says.
I think hemp air is probably a reference to how a lot of
ancient Greek and Roman statues used to have clothes but on them
like mannequins to make them seem alive.
Oh yeah, good point. Good point.
That could be related to that, although green hair wouldn't
make me think of real people in ancient in the ancient world.
But hey, maybe it does there because you got you got green
haired. People in that world?
Exactly. They dye their hair.
Yeah, you got green hair. Tirashi and other.
Yeah. So, yeah, OK.
It works. Yeah.
All right, Joe Magician says wonder what the summer Islanders
do when they repeal a law. Do they Do they have to carve it
off the tree or put like this is no longer an an functional law?
Yeah, I guess. He's cut down a whole tree.
You cut the. Tree.
Over. That's hilarious.
Probably not very many fires in the Summer Isles, I would
imagine. Yeah, they got to keep that
under lockdown they got. They probably have some people
whose job it is to make sure the tree's.
So I was going. To say they probably have a
dedicated force of firefighters and maybe rules about having
campfires. Around no open flames.
Yeah, same same rule like similar to the laws you would
have at any library, but much stricter, You know, like don't.
Yeah, no open flames in the in the library.
Keep your coffee away from the the old books.
Don't bring anything that has bugs, that'll eat trees, you
know, like invasive species or a real no, no there.
Keep those moths away. Yeah, you're right.
Keep the rats out. Yeah, good point.
There's a lot of those things that we don't worry about as
much or. Whatever, right.
Like mites. Yeah, termites.
That's a good point. You definitely want cats around
your around your books, because they'll eat those rats.
I'll even tell you that it's a little, there's a little bit
more of awareness or concern of like fires, wildfires and stuff
here in Colorado than in Georgia.
There's more signs and rules. Oh yeah.
Weather alerts and stuff like that jet is in a room knocking
things down now. We.
Yeah, we know. You're right.
Like we're not worried about wildfires in Georgia.
Here. It's just too humid.
We're like, how could that even. Yeah, right.
It's just not gonna happen. Like, it wouldn't.
It couldn't burn. Like it would just get stuff out
by the committee. Either.
That's not the difference out here you get when build more
momentum goes farther distances. Our trivia answer the question
was, which of the known 7 wonders has been destroyed in
Palace of 1000 rooms. There you go.
Discord user Minotaur pointed out that Vase Dothrak might have
some minor wonders. Probably nothing that's in the
top 9, or maybe in the top 20. But they've stolen so many
statues from places, they've destroyed and hauled back so
many things like that. There might be some pretty cool
things there, you know they Stothrak by itself probably
doesn't qualify, but it might because it has so many gods and
goddesses in statue form that have been hauled there.
Danny is awestruck by having them all in one place, and Lomas
probably didn't see this 'cause this is something that came
along after the unleashing of the Dothrak.
He would not have seen this. Yeah, I I thought of that when
we first started getting his topic that that might be one,
but then realize, no, I don't think the timing adds up so.
Can I give you what this makes me think of Dothraki taking
wonders of the world? There's a good future drama bit
where they go like to the beach and they all of, like the world
wonders or like all these monuments are all at one beach.
And they're like, yeah, New New York City had had a super
villain mayor for a while and he stole all of the monuments.
And then there's like great guy, great guy, great guy.
He put himself on Mount Rushmore, like.
That's those are Dothraki vibes right there for sure.
Yeah, they don't have the technology the same way, but
they like, screw it, we'll haul that thing all the way.
Well, rather, our slaves will haul that thing all the way
there. Lincoln Washington Drogo.
Nice. So the mother of mountains,
though, might be a candidate for a natural wonder, however, which
maybe he did go there before that.
That might have been a known thing before the Dothraki
emerged as these great conquerors and destroyers, they
they certainly existed before that.
They just were kind of contained by the Valyrians and and and
etcetera. Yeah, I think the Dutraki lands
and and and province would have been one of the more difficult
places for him to travel. Yeah, it's it's easier to go
there now, ironically. But he's not around now and.
Yeah, I don't know. I think it would have been well
miss long. Strider would not have have been
striding so long, I think. I don't think they would have
drawn his interest in that era because they're like he might
have been curious but they don't sound like the kind of people
that would have wonders you know because they're they're horse or
people they just they don't like planting farm like they think
planting crops is is against their religion.
So yeah, they're not likely build large edifices if that's
their that's their attitude. Cultures don't, yeah.
Don't build large structures. Yeah, exactly.
So he they they would not be. And and especially because he
might not have, he might have barely heard of them.
They would have been a not well known culture in his time.
So yeah, he might have kind of passed them over, but maybe not,
maybe not. We will certainly discuss the
possibility of the Mother of Mountains as a candidate, along
with all the other ones when we discuss Lomas, LON Strider and
the wonders made by gods. And as I said, we'll be
exploring and developing a third episode, which will not have
much to do with Lomas, though he'll surely get mentioned where
we talk about the unnatural wonders of the world.
Because going through this process has drawn up a lot of
examples that fit that, and we're going to want to compile
that and put it in episode form for you all to enjoy.
Should be good times. Can I say, Can you believe we're
at about we're at almost two hours and 50 minutes yeah.
And we thought we would do the wonders made by man and the
natural wonders in one episode of. 10 Silly of me.
Yeah, exactly. So silly.
What was I thinking?
So here we go with some episodes that relate to the topics we
talked about today. There's quite a few.
The Doom, of course. The Freehold of Valyria.
The Wars of Valyria. Those are all relevant to the
destruction of the Slavers Bay, to the wonders that may have
been present in Valyria itself. Nymeria, Mother Roy, and also
related to Valyria since they destroyed that.
The Century of Blood. The fall of Valyria kicked off
the Century of Blood and we think that's when Lomas may have
lived. It's our best guess anyway.
The Kingdom of Sarnor. We did a whole episode on them.
That's where the Palace of 1000 Rooms was.
We talked about the Roman roads, which compares to the Valerian
roads as well as the wall in the A Song of Ice and Fire in Rome
episode. We talked about giants and
building things, giants being used for that and the bones in
the caves of places like Norvas which will come up when we
discuss the caves of Norvas. So When Giants Roamed is our
first episode in that series, but also Brandon the Builder and
Patreon episode The Buildings of Brandon.
We have an episode on ET. Like I said, we have an episode
on the Great Empire of the Dawn which is about the same length
as this one and it talks about a little bit more about the Five
Forts and Ash Eye and the Fused Stone and several related
things. We have an episode on Castley
Rock. We have an episode on The Many
faced Azora High where we talk about the various myth cycles
related to saving the world that have a lot in common and the
possibility that Azora High is multiple figures.
And talk about the five forts. Yes, 5 forts comes up in that
one as well. So yeah, we've had plenty of
time, plenty of occasions discussed the five forts, none
terribly recently, but they're there that.
Was one of the most exciting things to me in like my history
of Beat, of of A Song of Ice and Fire was when the world of Ice
and Fire, not the world of Ice and Fire, came out, when the
maps of ice, the Lands of Ice and Fire came.
Out and we. Saw the five forts on there and
some of these other stuff and we dug in and then like, we only
got more, more fuel for those theories as as the world of ice
and Fire came out and so on and it still transfixes me.
I always say I'm not much of A theorist.
It's not really my passion when it comes to loving this world.
But I love the world building theories.
I love that type of theory. World building theories are fun.
And that's yeah, it is some of our bread and butter.
We love that. And you we love hearing from you
on that as well. If you have theories about any
of these places or want us to cover them in in more depth, let
us know. One or both, or anything else
you want to let us know or comment on.
Feel free do that in the comments section of either the
video or the podcast episode. Or send us an e-mail.
Or join our Discord or our Facebook group and start a
discussion that involves a lot of your fellow W Orians, and not
just those of us speaking into the microphones.
Thanks for coming, everybody. We certainly do appreciate your
presence, you're listening, your support, and we yeah, we
wouldn't be here without you. Thanks to Nina, whose notes were
super invaluable. As always, definitely check out
good queenalley.tumblr.com for more takes related and
otherwise, Thanks to Joey, Jesse Bran and Michael Klarfeld for
work on our theme songs and our video intro and our maps.
Those things all make our show look and sounds so nice.
So nice. Extra thanks to Michael Klarfeld
for his maps today because we used them a lot and we used his
art of Castor the Rock. And extra thanks to Christina
Kay who did the long bridge art for us a long time ago and we
finally got to debut it. And thanks to all the other
artists and a special shout out to the Unseen Westeros project,
which is where I got some of the artwork I used from.
Which was if you look up unseen Westeros you will see all of the
art from it. But it was just like kind of a a
fan made project that was approved by George but isn't is
non canonical. But it's really a great look at
some of these far-flung locations.
I have quite a few. I have a rotating desk, I have
rotating desktop art, and a lot of them are from unseen
Westeros. Yeah.
Yeah, me too. Oh, I I make our.
Yeah, you did. You put them on my computer.
You did that for me, Yes. And I thank you for it because
my computer, my background is awesome.
And it it actually occasionally inspires me When I'm writing.
I'm like, oh, yeah, there it is. There's one of those things I'm
writing about right now, like the maze maker image came up
like this morning when I was putting the finishing touches
on. I had a couple last ideas I
wanted to throw into this document and it was like, Oh
yeah, look at that maze maker stuff.
Yeah. Keeps me in the world.
Those visuals really help keep you immersed.
It's mostly about the thoughts, the imagination, but those
visuals really help fire that and give it some more dimension.
Yeah, we'll have a lot to talk about with the natural wonders
and the unnatural wonders and all the other topics that are
yet to come on History of Westeros podcast, in the future
of which we consider that to be an endless amount.
Until next time, you know what to do well.
Are rereadus None?