House Stark has ruled the North for countless years, and for
most of that time their rule has been unquestioned.
Their dominance has been such that it would be difficult for
any other House to have issued a real challenge, no matter which
of these countless years or centuries we're even referring
to. Because it's been so long and so
well kept, it's difficult to imagine a circumstance where
another Northern house could have enough support to overcome
Winterfell and its allies. Even now, in A Song of Ice and
Fire, with the Bolton's holding the castle, there's a sense that
this is temporary. I don't know many people who
think that the Starks aren't going to get Winterfell back.
The question is how. The how is what makes it
interesting. But the end result, as far as
that goes, is very few people seem to question that the time
for wolves is coming again at some point.
The conditions that allowed Roose Bolton to make his move
were highly unusual. Though.
Roose himself began as an ally, he didn't start off plotting
against Robb Stark, or if he did, he knew it would require a
lot of things going his way before the opportunity would
present itself. The opportunity did present
itself, and he was part of creating the opportunity, but it
was a lot of a lot of it was outside of him, right?
It took things like Lysa's lie through Littlefinger about John
Aaron, the near death of Bran, and then the follow up
assassination attempt with the cat's paw dagger.
So new, 2 near deaths for Bran there, the news of Daenerys's
marriage to Khal Drogo and ensuing pregnancy.
And there's just so many things, right?
Like I don't have to list them all.
You guys know I just threw a few of them out there.
Just so many factors lined up to make Winterfell fall.
And even then it took an expert plotter with extreme ambitions
and he didn't like face them in open battle.
It was still subterfuge and intrigue and backstabbing.
It wasn't like my army faces yours now and I'm going to beat
you now. They, they, the Bolton's never
had that. It was, you know, the Red
Wedding and and such like that. So somewhere in the realm of a
century ago. However, Winterfell was in
another period of relative weakness.
And while many northern houses remained loyal, as they do now,
others saw an opportunity. Dark clouds formed on the
horizon after the death of Kriegan Stark, the Old Man of
the North and his descendants faced a host of challenges and a
host of Stonebourne. That's right.
The Skagosi, there was uncertainty about the succession
after Kragen multiple times, multiple different errors.
There were issues, there were problems, internal problems.
There were strange marriages that reflect these problems,
like vaguely Targaryen, if not more than vaguely Targaryen.
And you know what I mean when I say that, yes, incestuous
entangling alliances on top of that with other northern houses
and lots of Lords of Winterfell who didn't hold the title for
very long. We got like Lord of Winterfell
for two years, Lord of Winterfell for three years, Lord
of, you know, there's really short stints after Kragen ruled
for something like 50 years, maybe.
We don't exactly know, but a long, long time.
So for a long for a time then Winterfell's lack of reach was
simply spoken of. People said Winterfell's weaker.
It wasn't a Bolton situation where they lost it and had to
get it back, but it was a ticking time bomb and eventually
it turned to blood. Weak.
Winterfell's weakness was capitalized on, and someone
tested them to tested the Starks to see if the direwolf was still
a creature to be feared. And it was Kriegan's fourth son,
Barthegan Barth, who held the lordship of Winterfell.
When the tide finally turned, when Skagos, a place even to
harden Northerners fear, went rebel.
Lord Barth, Black Sword, he was called.
He had a couple of different nicknames I guess, and today we
will tell his tale as best as we can.
For example, what's up with that super badass, maybe villainous
sounding name? The moniker Blacksword by itself
is like, what's that now? Hmm Blacksword you say?
Interesting. So we've got Unicorn cavalry
warriors who eat the hearts of their defeated foes and hang the
rest of the entrails from heart trees.
Shipwrecks and raids and ambushes.
False lights and foreshadowing for Davos and Rickon and others.
We've got Manderlys and Umbers and giants blood, and of course
lots of Starks. We might even have the only
known example of ice being wielded in battle, meaning the
Valyrian steel blade. Of course not.
You know, frozen water being wielded in battle.
All that and more on this episode of History of Westeros
Podcast. Hello and welcome back everyone.
It's time for another episode, another deep dive into the past.
Not too far into the past, though, as I said at the
beginning, this is an era that's only about 100 to 150 years
before. Some of the timelines, a little
bit uncertain, but that's part of the fun.
We're here every Sunday, just about, not quite every Sunday,
but almost every Sunday for these live streams.
But if you can't catch the live stream, you can always catch the
edited version a little tightened up, a little better
sound quality as Shea does all that good stuff.
You can find it the edited video version up on Spotify or the
edited podcast version anywhere you find podcasts.
And if you listen on Patreon, it's ad free.
Shout out to our great friend Nina goodqueenalley.tumblr.com
that's good Queen AL Y1Y in alley and her latest blog post
is on the Tyrells and what their plans were with Sansa.
Obviously we know that they wanted Sansa to Mary Willis, but
what was next? What was their plan beyond
getting Sansa into their family? What would have been the next
steps? So that's a good read, a good
question from the person that asked it.
I don't know who they were, but Nina gives a good answer.
If you have questions for us, hit us up at
westeroshistory@gmail.com or if you're watching live, go ahead
and drop a question in the chat or meet us on our Discord.
Hit us up on Blue Sky Facebook. We're on most of the social
media platforms. Shout out to Chatty Lumpkin who
sent a very large super chat here, 200 Canadian, which, well,
thank you Chatty, that's very appreciated.
It's very generous. And they say thanks for all the
hard work. Well, we'll keep them coming.
We'll keep the episodes running. And we love doing this.
So, yeah, you can count on us to keep it going.
We'll start with our trivia question, as we so often do.
Who said this line? Only heart trees ever see half
of what they do on Skagos. Who said that line?
I will mention it during the episode, and we'll reveal the
answer at the end. Good luck to you if you're
guessing. So here's what we have in store
today. I'm going to read you the little
section headers, the different parts of this episode.
I love to give them titles. Can you believe that?
I used to always give these things titles and not read them.
I gave I, I made-up creative titles for each section and like
a good third of the episodes. It was like, just for me, I
guess, and a Shea, like I wasn't reading them.
Like, why don't I read these? Some of these are kind of fun.
Anyway, so we've got our intro and set up.
Then we have why Blacksword and then why unmarried?
Yeah, Bart Blacksword was unmarried, which is very odd.
And we'll explain why that's odd.
And, well, it's odder than you might think.
Yes, it's it's already unusual that a Lord of Winterfell or any
great house didn't get married, but it's even weirder than that.
Then we're going to go through some of the timeline around this
era. It's such an interesting era.
There's so many interesting characters, so much intrigue, so
much mystery. But what we do know gives us a
lot to work with. And that'll set a lot of our
context and a lot of the the setting.
Then we'll talk about the legacy of Craig and Stark.
This section's called the old Man's legacy, Kragen's
descendants. I'll alternate calling him
Kragen and Kregan because that's how I am.
The wolf must have one head. Yes, that is a play on the
dragon must have 3 heads. But as you might guess, that is
referring to too many Stark branches, just like there might
be too many Targaryen branches. Bartheon's inheritance will
start in the second-half. So Black Sword taking over as
Lord of Winterfell, then the Skagosi Rebellion.
We'll break that down in great detail as much as we can.
The war beginning, the Black sword falls and then finishing
the war and looking forward. And then a little outro where we
talk a little bit about Davos and Rickon and how this will set
up their storyline a bit, or at least could.
Yeah. So we're dealing with a thin
slice here, a thin slice from an era with a lot of missing
details. And we've covered Kragen before,
and that's a. That was a little easier because
while there's a lot we're missing on him, there's a lot we
do have. Now, it is fair to say that what
we do have is fascinating. And it's also fair to say that
there's vast swaths of northern history not given to us.
I mean, there's thousands of years of northern history and,
and we don't know most of it. But of the ones we do know, this
one really stands out. And in part it's because it's
not that long ago from the perspective of A Song of Ice and
Fire, right? I mean my best guess is Barth
was born around 164 AC, which means during the reign of Baylor
the Blessed not long after the death of Darren the 1st and his
conquest failed conquest of dorm roughly in that era.
Elio of The Who who held Elio Garcia, who helped write the
world of ice and fire. They have their mush, their
multi user game. I think it's on hiatus right
now, but they ran that in the same era.
So they had done some guesswork on some of these dates as well.
So occasionally I'm I'll refer to what their guesses were and
occasionally in their case, they actually know the right dates.
But so much of the mush is predates fire and blood.
So and as well as world the world of ice fire.
Even so, some of it doesn't quite line up.
Anyway, disclaimer over Barth probably died in the early 2
hundreds and that's a near certainty because he died during
the reign of King Darren the good Darren the second.
So that's at least somewhat refined to a certain region of
time. Now, the prologue of A Game of
Thrones is early 298 or late 297.
So what we'll see is a couple examples where something's like
about a century ago, blah blah blah happens.
You can see it's probably more like 90 years, but whatever,
that's nothing. 10 years is nothing when you're throwing
around centuries. And of course, that era, the
early 2 hundreds, that's when Dunk and Egg were coming up.
Like literally they were boys turning into adults around that
time. The Hedge and I takes place in
two O 9 early 2O9 mid two O 9 maybe.
And Egg becomes king 24 years later and acquires the nickname
Aegon the unlikely Aegon the 5th right.
And that is a good parallel for us to start with Barth, because
Aegon the unlikely was the 4th son of a fourth son.
And there's some Barth black sword the unlikely going on here
too. He was also a fourth son.
He wasn't the fourth son of a fourth son, but he was the 9th
child, which is, yeah, you, you inherit after being the ninth
child. That is unlikely.
I think it's fair to say. Now he wasn't the fourth son of
a fourth son. He was the 4th son of a first
son, first son. But it was from his third wife.
So you can see that is really far down the line.
And yeah, it's unlikely, but unlikely is kind of a soft term
to use here because of the unspoken truth that has to be
present when you inherit over so many elder siblings.
And that truth is that they must have all died.
That's not good. That's not a a thing you want
hanging over you. Yeah, I'm the Lord of
Winterfell, but I am the Lord of Winterfell because all my
brothers and maybe even some of my sisters died, you know, ahead
of me. They didn't.
That means they didn't get to live full lives.
Barth didn't live a full life, so the Starks he inherited from
most likely didn't either, even if we have a much shorter range
for what a full life is in Westeros, right?
So things like tragedy, sadness, survivor's guilt, like why am I
the one left? Why did I survive and all my
brothers have died, or all my sisters and brothers have died?
It's the sisters. It's a little trickier because
of inheritance and all that, but still, there might still be some
guilt there and maybe their children could have had a shot
at inheriting and well, why him? Why Barth Black's Order Why one
of these other characters? And the one of the reasons this
comes to mind is because it's an absolutely fundamental, early
introduced character trait of none other than Ned Stark
himself. Quote I.
Was only 12 when my father promised me to your brother,
Brandon. That brought a bitter twist to
Ned's mouth. Brandon.
Yes, Brandon would know what to do.
He always did. It was all meant for Brandon.
You Winterfell everything. He was born to be a King's Hand
and a father to Queens. I never asked for this cup to
pass to me. Perhaps not, Catlin said.
But Brandon is dead and the cup has passed and you must drink
from it, like it or not. Notice how early this is in
terms of establishing character. Like I said, this is very
fundamental to Ned. This is Catlin, 2A Game of
Thrones, one of the first chapters in the entire book, the
entire series. But of course, we can't assume
this is how Barth, Blacksword, or any other Stark would be.
It's just a possibility. And that's a thing that you have
to do when you're imagining a character who you don't know a
lot about. A lot of you who play
role-playing games, play DND or online games, Baldur'sgate, any
sort of thing like that. If you like to role play your
character and you want to do it in a convincing, authentic way,
you have to imagine all the different stimuli and events and
things that your character or other characters would live
through and then try to honestly decide how they would react.
And that's what an author has to do with a huge cast of
characters. So we have to be open to a lot
of possibilities here. So maybe maybe Barth Blacksword
just didn't like his siblings. Maybe he was one of those types
of people. Even when you have 8 elder
siblings, you'd think that maybe one of those would work out,
like you'd like one of them or get along with one or two of
them, but not necessarily, right?
You can't make that assumption. So maybe Barth Blacksword wasn't
a very likable guy. Maybe he didn't get along with
his siblings for maybe maybe they didn't like him.
You know, maybe it was a two way St. neither of them like the
other. And if we're going a step
farther, some people are willing to kill their siblings for
power, right, or for other reasons.
So you're on, right, That's a good example.
Some people are just born off, right?
A you're on, for example, right? Some of them are tempted by
power. You're on again, right.
But if we use non Greyjoy examples, I'm sure that even
amongst the Starks, there had to be some who weren't just perfect
angels. And Ned Stark's not a perfect
Angel. So like even he isn't, but he is
a a good man overall. He is he cares, he has sympathy,
he sell, has self reflection and and things like that that we
value. So these are possibilities for
Barth Blacksword and we can only look at the circumstances of his
life and, and the details from a high level to maybe make these
guesses and theorize. And that's fun.
You know, there's a lot we can glean and triangulate and
extrapolate and infer and lots of synonyms are available to us
for things like this. In fact, it is what we've
learned doing exactly that. Which brings us to this episode
in the 1st place. Well, that and patron voting, of
course. That's one of the reasons we're
doing this particular episode. But even with so much missing,
even with so much of Barth's personality missing and so much
of this timeline missing, it's it really stands out and well,
keep listening and you'll see why.
So let's start with why he was called Black Sword.
What I'm going to do here is we're going to look at the
character as best as we can, and then look at the timeline and
interpret the events that flow through here, that the events
that transpire. And given our read on Barth's
character, we can kind of understand or at least make
reasonable guesses as to how he might have reacted to those
things or how those things might have affected him and the rest
of the Starks and the rest of the North.
So one of the first guesses we have is why he was called Barth
Blacksword is that he wielded ice in battle.
We know for a certainty that ice was not a sword wielded in
battle very often, but it's hard to believe that it was never
wielded in battle, right? It's not heavy because it's
Valyrian steel, it's just really long and that makes it difficult
to fight with. It's more ceremonial that way.
Someone like Ned would prefer a smaller sword.
It's just more appropriate for how tall he is and and just how
he was trained. He probably didn't grow up
learning how to fight with it even because, well, why would
he? He wasn't going to fight with it
later. But what if you're born really
tall? What if you're sand or Clegane
sized, or even Greg or Clegane sized?
Well, maybe not that big. That's that's really unusual.
But we you don't have to be Greg or Clegane sized to use A2
handed great sword, although you do to wield it one handed like
he does. Still, we're not imagining
something that large, although I guess we could if we wanted to,
but we the point is we don't need to.
We don't need that exceptional of a person size wise to wield
ice. We just need something very big,
you know, not insanely, unrealistically big.
Let's think about what it looks like.
Valyrian steel is almost black. It's dark, smoky Gray, right?
So from a distance, it would probably look black.
And if you didn't know better, which most people in Westeros
don't, you see the sword from a distance.
You've never seen anything like it.
Probably. Maybe you never will again,
especially if you're a peasant or some lesser Lord.
Maybe. Maybe if you're a more prominent
Lord, you might see Valyrian steel elsewhere, but a lot of
these lesser Lords would never even leave the North Ice might
be the only Valyrian steel blade they ever see, and again, they
may only see it from a distance. So it would look black, right?
It would be unique and dark. And yeah, so if and if he did
wield it in battle, then it would be seen a lot more.
It wouldn't just be seen when it's unsheathed to cut someone's
head off because that would be the only time you'll pretty much
ever see it outside of the sheath.
Like what point is there to having it unsheathed if it's
just used as a symbol of authority for doing justice,
which is the the business of the ruler.
The Lord of Winterfell is the one who dispenses justice.
Ice is the symbol of that justice.
What an interesting thing for that symbol of justice to be
used in battle against a foe that has behaved unjustly, that
has broken the laws or broken rules or or is considered
treasonous, that's kind of symbolic in its own fun way,
Nina adds. This would be a rare opportunity
for a Stark Lord to even fight in battle.
Yeah, that's a great point. Because even if there were prior
Starks who were big enough to wield it in battle, they might
not have had a battle to wield it in.
And we just got through saying at the beginning of the episode,
how? Very long swaths of these many,
many centuries that how Stark has been in charge.
They didn't have threats. As best as we can tell, they had
the North on lockdown. No one's going to stand up to
the Starks. You you're just going to lose
right now. That said, we see rebellions and
wars started that look kind of dumb.
Like why did you ever think you had a chance?
Fiction and the real world, right?
So you got to throw in some examples every once in a while.
But if these are bad ideas, then that means the Stark probably
didn't have that much problem with them.
Which means they again limited opportunity to use ice in
battle, even if you are the rare Stark capable of doing so.
I mean, compare the sword to Dawn.
Dawn's a great example. Dawn's also a great sword.
It's not valerian steel, but as far as we know it has very
similar properties, Weight, length.
Nothing that should make it differ any different to wield in
battle than Ice. And unless it lices longer,
which it it could be, but I don't think it is, I think
they're roughly the same length. They're both great swords.
We don't hear that Ice is a particularly big great sword.
It's just great swords are big. They're not for regular sized
people usually. They are for larger people
generally speaking. There are exceptions, of course.
Arthur Dayne was a large man. You know, Jamie thought of him
as stronger than him. And Jamie's not huge, but
Jamie's like 6 foot, which is very big, 6 foot one.
That's very large for Westeros. And it's well above average for,
you know, Western males in the year 2025 as well.
I think the average height for Western males is something like
5 foot 85 foot 9 maybe. So, yeah.
So these are large people we're talking about, for example,
Rickon. Rickon Stark as in the FA of the
son of Cregan, his first son, the one who was heir to
Winterfell for a long time. He died in Dorn, right?
Died during Darren's conquest with Dorn near the end.
He wasn't Lord Stark, but that's an example of someone who could
have theoretically wielded ice in battle if he were the right
size to. I doubt he was, but it doesn't
have to be the Lord Stark who wielded either.
There's potentially the air can as well.
Kind of like Dark Sisters, sometimes wielded by a Prince of
House Targaryen and occasionally even Black fire was.
No, if that's the person who's going to inherit, like Baylor
Brake Spear, we're pretty sure wielded black fire before he
inherited it. Well, he never inherited it.
He died before he inherited. But yeah, so if he ever wielded
black Fire, it was it was ahead of time.
But he did. He couldn't have really, because
that was given to Damon. But the point stands.
In theory, though, the inheritors can wield the sword.
It doesn't have to only be wielded by the Lord.
There are exceptions. He wasn't married, which is
something we'll talk about in a little more detail later.
But in line with not being married, maybe he was planning
on joining the Night's Watch again.
Ninth child, fourth son, farther down the line than Benjen,
right? Plenty of Starks joined the
Night's Watch, so maybe that was what he was planning on doing.
But then stuff happened. His brother dies, his father
died, all these things, and he's like, well, maybe I shouldn't go
running off and join the Night's Watch.
The problem with this theory is that if he had joined the
Night's Watch, he would have done it as a young man.
And we're pretty sure he didn't die as too young of a man.
I mean, he, we're pretty sure he lived to be over 30 or around
30. So there are there are some
flaws with that idea. And of course, you can see why I
would say Black Sword, Night's Watch, Black Brother, right?
I don't know, it's a little bit of a stretch, but we're trying
to come up with some ideas here. And that would also help explain
why he wasn't married, by the way, if he was playing on during
the nights Watch. Well, you're not going to get
married if that's your goal. So that that at least fits quite
well. What about temperament, like a
black mood, black humor, a guy that's just always down, like he
doesn't have the Blues, he has the the blacks.
What does that mean? You know we hear that term
thrown around a lot, though, like that color is associated
with negativity for emotions, right?
Even though the opposite isn't? You don't say white mood, right?
I don't know. Anyway, that's got nothing to do
with anything. We're just, I'm just thinking
about semantics briefly here. So he was in a black mood, and
not just because a few St. urchins wanted to pelt him with
dung, right? That's, that's a line, another
line we have. This is a poison that I hold.
She thought I ought to burn it. Instead, she cracked the seal.
A scrap of leather fluttered down into her lap when she read
the dry brown words. Her black mood grew blacker
still. Dark wings, dark words.
That is Asha receiving the skin of Theon in a letter.
That's what the little cracked scrap of leather was.
So yeah, or Nina suggests Black Walder Frey.
He is named Black Walder Frey for his bad temper.
He's also violent. His temper makes him violent.
He's also ambitious and has murdered from his own family, so
that's associated with it too. Yeah, maybe that's what we're
dealing with here. Maybe Barth Blacksword was a
Black Walder Frey type figure who was seen as an enemy amongst
his own family or a a dangerous individual who that's why he
didn't have friends or a wife or what have you.
And maybe he was downright villainous, which that probably
does apply to Black Walder Frey as well.
It's hard to call him a villain when he's murdering Frey's.
No, he is. He's pretty villainous.
Kin Slang's rough business man May, yeah.
So maybe he actually usurped Winterfell from his nephew or
his brother. Probably not, but there is
enough room for theories like this.
Well, enough room for theories like this to work.
The problem with it is if he kills his own brother, like in
the Northerner who kills their own brother, that's especially a
Stark. You're going to lose some
support. And if there's another Stark
faction, it seems like that Stark faction would benefit
greatly from a competing Stark faction being guilty of
kinslaying, right? So I don't know that's a little
that one might be going too far, but it's all it's absolutely
again, worth considering. These are all valid theories for
a character in this timeline with a nickname like this.
Nina also adds look about the quote from Sir Illifer, the
Black Bat of Loston. We did a recent episode on House
Loston. He said black is the deeds of
them that bore it, including a Manfred of the Black Hood.
Yeah. So there's a simplicity here,
but it's consistent in Westeros with seeing dark colors
associated with villainy. Or that's a segue to this
question we've been dancing around, which is why wasn't he
ever married? Let's talk about why it's so
unusual that he wasn't married beyond the fact that most Lords
get married. That's all right.
By itself, that's unusual, right?
So to start off, it's unusual because he had two older
brothers, Jonal, who became known as Jonal One Eye, and
Edrick, who didn't have a nickname.
And then a younger brother named Brandon because, well, you can
only go so long in a Stark family without getting another
Brandon in there. In fact, that Brandon is who all
the current Starks descend from, right?
Figures, right? So but all those other three
brothers got married. Brandon like I said, all the
current Starks descend through him.
So he clearly got married and he got married to a Karstark and
Alice Karstark of in fact Rick on first son of Kragen had two
daughters, Serena and Sansa. There's some confusion in the
wiki and some of the literature that George is in his notes
about which one of them was elder were we're going with
Sansa being the elder or yeah, go with Sansa being the elder
here, but it's possible their names are flipped.
It doesn't make a huge amount of difference to the way we're
going to tell the story. Just throw that out there as a
possible note on how this was designed.
So it's weird, right? You have Barth's elder brothers
marrying the two daughters of their other elder brother, half
brother, and then Brandon, his younger brother, marries A
Karstark, but he doesn't get married at all.
What's up with that? It seems like they were trying
to create plenty of Starks, trying to make marriages to have
more Starks and to make more alliances.
But this guy didn't get married at all.
And some of them got married twice, Jonel one.
I got married twice. And Brandon had a bastard before
he got married to Alice Karstark.
He had a bastard son named Lonel Snow.
So they were kids popping up all over the place, marriages,
relationships, alliances. But somehow Barth was not
involved in any of it. What's up with that?
This definitely comes back to some of the stuff we were saying
about his, the nickname and how that might indicate A darker
personality. This man may have been
unsuitable to marriage because he was too violent.
Maybe this was like a Magor type guy and you're like, what good
would it be to marry this boy to a girl from another noble house
with the intent of it being an alliance if he's going to
mistreat her so badly that it turns a potential alliance into
an enemy? Like like what Ramsay is doing
to Jane Poole, who everybody thinks is Arya right there.
Lady Dustin's like, yo, they like Arya, they love Arya and
they think that's Arya. That's the unspoken part.
Of course they hear her screaming and crying.
That's not going to make them like the Boltons.
In fact, that's going to do the opposite.
You like, you got this marriage alliance, but you're turning it
into an enemy instead of relying on them for support.
So even marriage alliances can become the opposite in such a
case. So maybe that was the concern,
Like, don't marry this guy to anyone.
He's going to make that house hate us.
He's going to mistreat whatever daughter they send, and that
won't help us build an alliance. Again, just one of many
possibilities. But it's hard to come up with
good reasons. Like, yeah, OK, maybe he was
just gay, right? That's an easy go to like.
But But again, that's not that doesn't settle it.
That doesn't solve it. He might still get married to
father to try to father children, to father father
heirs, even if he's not into women.
And he might not have a say in it.
His father would make the arrangement.
He's like dad, I don't like. He's not going to tell Cregan
Stark that he doesn't like girls.
This is not a society that works that way.
So either maybe his father figured that out and just let
his like and just unspoken like he doesn't, he doesn't like
women. We're just going to not talk
about this and not make him get married.
But I don't think it's something you can look at and be like, oh,
well, that must be it. He didn't like women because it
wasn't all in his control. It's not all his agency.
Same with like a Renly or a maybe even a Brendan Blackfish.
Now, Blackfish didn't get married, but we can't assume he
didn't get married because of his sexuality.
It's a very strong possibility, but there is no way we can be
like, oh, definitively, definitely Brendan Blackfish was
gay. No, it's a strong possibility,
but we can't be certain. It's very much in play here.
Very much in play. He also could have been planning
to get married later. He could have been like, well,
I'm waiting for a certain house to have a child.
I want to maybe this guy is dying and I want to marry this,
this widow, you know, something like that.
He he had a plan. He had a house he wanted to get
married into. And the opportunity just never
came up. Yeah.
So maybe he planned on getting married later and it just didn't
happen. And then he then he was killed.
And, well, then it became a moot point after all.
Dare on the first dare on the the young dragon, he went off to
conquer dorm before getting married.
He very likely would have eventually gotten married, but
because he never did, people say, well, maybe he wasn't into
girls also. That's also possible.
Yeah. But again, he very possibly
would have tried to father children anyway because of
dynastic concerns. So these things are tricky, very
tricky. You can't make assumptions.
But we can cast a wide net. We can present a range of
options. And with that range of options,
we can see these possibilities bloom.
And our imaginations are, are well, they're tickled, they're
inspired, they're given a good run through here.
Let's talk about the timeline, the setting and the era.
What kind of time and place Black Sword was born into, what
the North was like in this era. Some of this is a little bit
familiar, but I mean it's a little different because I have
some different takes on some of these dates.
Thin slicing. This era, like I said at the
beginning, has given me a different take on a lot of the
dates for some of these children, for some of these
Starks that came after Kragen. Kragen was born in one O 8.
His young wife, Aranori died 20 years later, giving birth to
Ricken. Ricken was growing up, was a
young boy when Kragen remarried at the end of the Dance of the
Dragons to of course, Black Alley Blackwood in the year 132,
roughly to the year 140. Sometime around that range would
have been when Kragen and Black Alley had their four daughters,
Sarah, Alice, Raya, and Mariah. Now, probably sometime in the
one 40s, maybe early one 40s, maybe mid one 40s, maybe even
later, but definitely before the conquest of Dorn in 157, Black
Alley would have died so well before her time like this is she
was 16 ish when the dance broke out.
So this is we're talking, you know, probably she might not
have made it to her mid 30s. So that's tragic.
Most likely certainly not a good thing, right?
So Kragen would have been deeply impacted by that, assuming their
marriage went as well as the beginning of their relationship
seemed to have gone. Certainly having four daughters
implies their relationship was going pretty well.
They were certainly sharing each other's bed frequently.
At least you can imply that at least at the beginning.
So around maybe the same time, maybe a little later or roughly
around the same time, Ricken would have married Jane
Manderly, right? And there would have been
pressure for them to have kids because Craig and he's the only
Ricken's the air and there's no other boys.
There's no other heirs. There's just there's girls,
which now this is a a funky conversation to have about women
inheriting in Winterfell. We all here agree that a woman
should be capable of ruling Winterfell.
I think most of us agree on that anyway.
And we may even see it by the end of the series.
It may be Santa who's in charge at the end that may that may be
where we at. We may finally, that streak may
finally be broken. But here's a guy, Kragen, who's
just saw the Dance of the Dragons play out.
He might have seen Rainier as capable.
He backed her. He backed Jace, her son.
He was ready for it. He's like, yeah, we did.
We took our oath. We're following through with it.
But what what actually happened was a whole half of the realm
was like, no, we don't want a woman to rule.
That's not really why they rose up.
They rose up because they wanted to be on the side of the Greens,
and the Greens we're using woman as an excuse to take the throne.
It was about power. That's the real bottom line
here. But that's not what most people
saw it as. The cover story was, we can't
have a woman ruler or we can't have bastards inherit thrown
after all these reasons, right? But the bottom line is it's all
about power. So the same thing is happening
in the North. Kragen's like, I could have one
of my daughter's inherit Winterfell.
I know she's capable or, or maybe he doesn't, but let's say
he did. They were raised by Black Alley.
So maybe they were at least one of these four daughters was like
had her gumption, her toughness, her strength, her her bravery,
you know, her ability to exist in a man's world of power and
and hold her own. But if she wasn't around to
imbue that in her daughters, or none of them were cut from the
same cloth, then there's that's a problem.
It's like, well, theoretically, Cragen's fine with the idea of a
woman ruling Winterfell, but not maybe one of these particular
four women. Maybe they weren't cut from that
claw. They they weren't Lady of
Winterfell material like a Sansa or a black alley or he just
like, this is just too much trouble.
I think they're capable. I think one of them's capable,
but the North is not going to accept it.
And I'm not about to just have another war.
Better to just have a son and avoid all that nonsense in the
1st place. Yeah, we should have women in
charge, but maybe we just can't afford to have a war over it.
Either way, the pressure is there to have kids.
I mean, you're the heir to Winterfell, you're going to want
to have kids regardless. So there's there's double
pressure on Ricken and Jane Manderly to have kids in the
early to mid one 50s. So we're not quite to the
conquest of Dorn yet, but we're a few years before it.
We're still in the reign of Aegon the Third.
Santa and Serena are born to Ricken and Jane.
No boys, 2 girls in 157. Ricken presumably with a bunch
of other northern kids his age. Think of Brandon going off with
his companions. Ricken isn't going to go fight
in a war in Dorn without a bunch of other nobles from the North
his age in his contingent in his retinue, right?
Maybe some of them died too. But he definitely died near in
Sunspier near the end of the war or near the end of the first
part of the war. So there's no male heir to
Winterfell now we've got Sansa as the heir presumptive.
A boy could still be born to Kragen.
Now only if he remarries, which apparently he did.
Well he definitely did. I'm saying the apparently is.
Apparently he did right around this time.
He probably married almost immediately after the death of
Ricken because the problem would be staring him in the face
either. I allow one of these women to
inherit and face the possible issues of the North rejecting
her, let alone she may not be capable, or remarry, try to have
a son and pass the crown of the throne of Winterfell, the seat
of Winterfell, to this unborn child.
That is apparently what he decided to do, to have to
remarry and try to have more sons.
What he did was marry someone named Lenara Stark.
Pauline, another Stark. So it sounds like incest.
It's actually not that incestuous, even though she was
a Stark. Lenara Stark descended from
Brandon the Boisterous. Brandon the Boisterous was the
son who inherited from Torin Stark.
So this branch broke apart like 160 years before.
So they haven't they you have to go back like 100 and 6000 and 50
years to find a common ancestor between Lenara Stark and Craig
and Stark. So that's actually quite that's
not incestuous. They have the same last name,
but that's far enough for me in the in the past.
No, no conjoined bloodlines for over 150 years.
That's good enough for me. I wouldn't call that incest.
Nina has a very interesting theory here that it's something
like a Viserys the first Allison scenario where you have a sad
widower, in his case, a twice widower who has an uncertain
succession situation going on. Even maybe he doesn't see it as
so uncertain, but maybe he does. But Sarah's didn't.
Maybe he should have. And Craig seems to have had a
type. Aranori was was a hill Klansman,
a daughter. So she was probably pretty
tough, Probably certainly not a court a woman of of dresses in
court as from what we could gather from that upbringing.
Alison Blackwood, Black Alley also not she's a warrior woman,
an Archer, a battler, A campaigner, a fighter.
So yeah, not another not a a courtly woman either in terms of
that. So maybe this is the kind of
maybe this is what Lenara was or maybe she was the alternative
that he had never had a relationship with.
Either way, the fact that she was a Stark is telling in in the
terms of. Establishing a new Stark branch.
That's very Stark, right? And he may have been feeling a
little bit like Robb Stark. He was so distraught in the loss
of Ricken that he looked to someone else for comfort.
And Lenara was there, this cousin who was already, say, had
a job at Winterfell. She was part of court.
You know, it's pretty easy to imagine that being the case,
just like it was with Allison. And, yeah, Jane Westerly
comforted Rob after he found out about what happened to
Winterfell and and the news that Brandon Ricken were killed.
Obviously, that's not what happened, but he heard about it
and and he had no reason to doubt it at the time.
So, yeah, maybe Craigen was suffering here.
He's lost his son. He's worried about the future of
the North. And here's Lenara Stark,
presumably a lot younger than him because if the goal is to
have children, well, you're probably not going to marry
someone whose childbearing years are are sun setting.
So yeah, she's probably a lot younger.
And especially the the evidence given how many children they did
have, which is several, 5 actually.
Yeah. That also implies that she was a
bit on the younger end. So that's what happens.
They she he gets married to Lenara Stark and they just start
having children. It's like the opposite of the
problem they had before. They're like, are we ever going
to have a son? All of a sudden?
They have a bunch of sons. So roughly around the late one
50s, early one 60s, Jonel was born, then Edrick, then Serena
was betrothed or married to Lord John Umber around this time.
Now you were like, wait, Aziz, you said Serena got married to
Edrick. Yes, but not right away.
First she married John Umber in the then in the 161, the young
dragon died in Dorn at the parlay, right?
And soon after, based on our guests, their sister Liana was
born. So we have a John ol Edrick and
now Liana and then roughly 2 years later, Barth, again, our
subject Black Barth, no being Barth, Black Sword rather is
born. And then maybe another year or
two later, Brandon is born. Now, we said at the beginning
that Aegon the Third was close to Krigan and he that proximity,
that relationship gave a lot of benefits to House Stark.
We don't know what any of those benefits were, but I'm pretty
sure that's gone by this point. I'm pretty sure that closeness
to House Targaryen is falling off Egan the Third's dead.
His heirs weren't ruling the throne any at all the way he
was. He might feel a little
bitterness after what Daron took his son and got him killed and
Dorn. And then the next ruler is
Baylor the Blessed, who we have several episodes about him now,
three of them out. Shout out Nina for all her work
on that. Baylor's only interest in the
North that we know of was negative.
He had negative interest in the north.
He didn't like the old gods. He didn't like the way they
worship. So that's not going to make
Kragen feel any better. That's not going to make their
relationship stronger. So not only is there reason to
think that this had expired through reasons of time passing,
but there's active negativity coming from the Iron Throne
towards the north in the early mid one 70s.
This is when it gets really weird.
This is when the marriages start to get strange.
And this is when we the the theories get interesting too,
because to explain these things, I don't mean weird like it
doesn't make sense. I mean like, stuff must have
been really going on here to make these decisions happen.
What was going on? Jonel married Sansa.
OK, this is a uniting of the two branches, Rickon's elder
daughter and eldest child and his next oldest brother.
Or if you're looking at it from Kragen's perspective, who
probably arranged this marriage because he was probably still
alive. He was marrying his
granddaughter through his first wife to his son through his
third wife. Say that again.
Kragen arranged the marriage of his granddaughter through his
first wife to his son through his third wife.
Yeah. That's not very Stark like, is
it? When else have we seen Starks
get married with that much consanguinity?
Consanguinity. Ricard Stark, father of Ned and
Brandon and Liana and Benjen, married his first cousin Liara.
Right. That's the closest one we know
of. Now.
Again, we've said how many thousands of years of stark
history we just don't have a a single iota of information on.
So it's possible we have, it's possible the Starks have a
higher threshold for what counts as incest than we thought.
That's might be what's going on here a little bit.
But still, this is still the most extreme example we have.
And I'm not just going to set that aside, be like, meh, that
probably doesn't mean anything. No, I think it means something.
I think they were trying to prevent problems from happening
and maybe even prevent some current problems from developing
even farther. I think there's a lot of
forethought in these, but it's it's a difficult to figure out
exactly what they were trying to worry about and what what
alliances they were shoring up, things like that.
Well, we will continue to bring up some theories though
throughout the episode. Then in the year, in the year
170, here's something very interesting happened.
It was a great melee at Last Hearth, which is of course the
seat of house Umber and here's what happened.
Quote. Northmen fight a horse with war
lances but seldom tilt for sport, preferring melees that
are only just this side of battles.
There are accounts of contests that have lasted half a day and
left fields trampled and villages half torn down.
Serious injuries are common in such a melee, and deaths are not
unheard of in the great melee at Last Hearth.
In 170 AC, it is said that no fewer than 18 men died, and half
again that number were sorely maimed before the day was done.
That type of result has maker of blood feuds written all over it
in blood, right? Which means conflicts, which
means potentially generational conflicts.
Things that last for the lives of multiple family members maybe
20406080 years, these kind of stories.
So this is potential context if not outright setup for the sort
of factionalism in the North. Even at Winterfell present in
this post Cregenstark era. Nina says think about the
tournament in two O 6 AC in King's Landing when Otho Bracken
murdered Quentin Blackwood, presumably using the pretext of
turning violence like the guy bashed his skull in and he's
like, yeah, what could I do? It was.
It's a tournament. All's fair in tournaments,
right? Yeah.
Even though you're bludgeoning this man's skull in.
Yeah, Yeah, No, it's all in the. Yeah.
So these are things that we've seen before.
Look at. Look what Gregor did.
And people use tournament violence as an excuse for real
violence. It was literally a plot point in
early Game of Thrones, trying to trick Robert through reverse
psychology into entering the melee so that someone could kill
him and be like, I don't know who did it.
We don't know this this sudden, you know, a sword swing, you
know, errant hit him. You know, you who knows?
You can't blame anyone for that. So yeah, it's it's an abattoir,
right? So, well, this is Blackwood
Bracken, this example that Nina gives.
So you it's really hard to believe that it was an accident,
right? He may have even entered the
tourney specifically to kill this man.
He's like otho Bracken's like, I'm going to enter the
tournament and kill Quentin Blackwood.
That's my purpose here. That was his need.
That was the reason he did it. What about the tournament held
for Rainier and Laynor when Kristen Cole just took it all
out on Joffrey? Lundmuth?
Just beat the guy to death, basically, right?
I mean, we all know what really happened there.
He was mad, and he used the tournament as an excuse to
extract violent revenge. It's interesting to speculate
whether this Grant melee in 170 was organized by Serena.
Serena Stark married to Lord John in this era.
They might have held this tournament with the explicit
reason of getting rid of some of the excess Starks.
And this comes back to against Cersei and the Tourney of the
Hand and maybe offing Robert in a sneaky method that no one
would be able to trace to her, or at least they wouldn't be
able to pin on her. They might suspect it, but there
wouldn't be any way to prove it. So very case like this great.
These melees are more violent than tournaments.
It would be easier to pull something like this off in this
setting than it would be in a regular tournament because it's
more normal for this level of violence.
So we got 18 men killed. And these are remember, these
are you don't have a lot of regular rank and file folk
entering these terms. These are like the scions of
noble houses are the ones who enter these things.
It's the the big prominent folk, the ones that can afford a full
set of armor and horses and all the stuff you need.
There's not a lot of, you know, free riders entering these types
of events, so it is very much a setup for potential sneaky
murders. And this lady Serena is somebody
we're going to keep in mind as someone that might have made
moves, might have felt like, hey, I was cheated out of my
inheritance. I should be the Lady of
Winterfell. I'm the first born or you know,
I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm descendant of the heir to Winterfell, Rick and
Stark. And it shouldn't have passed
over me. This is how Searcy's are made.
People who are cheated out of power based on silly things like
gender. So this also could have been
where John Umber died. John Umber never actually had
children with Serena, which is part of the reason she
remarries. And it's a little simpler than
it could have been because, you know, and she has having
children with two different houses that can get a little
entangling. But but anyway, they didn't have
kids. And maybe he was the victim of
this. Maybe he was killed during this
melee by someone that wanted her detached from that marriage or
just someone that didn't like Lord John Umber This could be an
attempt even by Edrick Jonnell's younger brother to kill Serena's
husband and seize her claim, right?
Because eventually Edrick is going to marry her and have a
bunch of children with her that Lord John Umber never did.
So you can see how these these these machinations, how these
gears are ticking. We don't think Barth was old
enough to fight in this great melee.
But if he was, if our timeline is off by enough and he did
fight in it, then it's potentially where he earned the
nickname, you know, kind of bearish in the bold.
Got the bold when he was 10, right?
So you can get these nicknames pretty young.
Not, not most people don't get those nicknames so young, but it
can happen. And a good example of an
inferral here. That melee.
Yeah. How often these things happen?
When do we have other examples of a great melee?
Nowhere. The answer is nowhere.
We have no other examples of these things.
Apparently they happen, but we have no other specific examples.
And it doesn't sound like they're terribly common.
So that makes it stand out even more that this event was
organized around the time of a lot of these troubles and may
have been part of the troubles itself, kind of a underhanded
way for to get rid of some people.
So it might be on the way out as a tradition.
Can you imagine Ned Stark, like, agreeing to something like that?
I mean, he might not stop it, but he certainly wouldn't hold
it himself. He wouldn't be like, yeah, let's
let's have a great melee where people kill each other.
And this sounds great. Sounds like a really good use of
our our time, especially after the new War for the dawn.
If you imagine an era in the North after the others are
defeated, are they? They're really not going to want
to do violence for fun, right? They're like, OK, every living
person that's an adult faced the others, or at least the damage
they caused. Like we do not need play
fighting. We've we've faced actual death.
We're good so late one 70s, early one 80s.
This is this is when it gets even trickier.
John ol marries Sansa and Edrick marries Serena.
You would expect John ol marry. And this is part of why it's so
weird is Sansa's might be the younger ones.
You might have the older brother marrying the younger
granddaughter and the second son second brother marrying the
older sister. So a a granddaughter.
It's so weird. You don't have to understand all
the insurance and outs of it. Just get that it's weird you
would expect John L and the younger girl to have more kids
'cause she's the younger girl there's more opportunity to have
kids. But no John L and Santa had no
kids. Edrick and Serena however, lots
of kids roughly we'll say is starting in the early one 80s
Kriegard was born, then Torim, Arana and Erigel around this
time as well. Probably is when that Brandon
Stark the the next brother, the younger brother to Barthagon had
Lonel Snow with a a woman named Willa Fenn, a Krannig woman
potentially or just a woman from the neck.
And soon after that he got properly married to Alice Karr
Stark and started having kids there as well.
Rodwell Stark was born maybe around the same time and then
Baron Stark around the mid late one. 80s is probably when Kragen
finally passed. He was called the Old man of the
North and well, old man. His tricky in Westeros because
their standard for old is a lot lower than ours.
Like we don't. Most people won't call someone
in their 60s particularly old, but it's pretty old for
Westeros. The old king was Jairus and he
died in his 60s. So that's the great example.
So I wouldn't. I'm guessing Craig had at least
made it to his 60s, but quite possibly made it to his 70s or
80s anyway. That would put him, his death
roughly in the middle, middle late one 80s.
And that would put John all one eye in charge of Winterfell, the
first Lord, the first new Lord Stark of Winterfell since the
early 120, the mid the late 120. So 50 years or more of one guy
ruling Winterfell. And though no one knew it at the
time, they were going to have something like 7 or 8 Lord
Stark's over the next about 25 to 30 years.
Just a no one. No stability whatsoever.
No consistency. The opposite of Kriegan's time,
basically. But, yeah, they couldn't have
possibly seen that coming. Why would they have?
You know, Winterfell is eternal. It's been there for so long.
They've never lost it. They've always gotten it back.
Things have always worked out. Yeah.
So John, the one I ascends again.
We'll say the late one, 80s. And in the early one, 90s,
though, things start to change. Edrick dies.
He is again the second son from Kragen's third wife, Lenara.
So this is Barthegan's older brother and Jonal's younger
brother, the second brother of four.
And not long after that, presumably Sansa dies.
We know she dies, and probably around the same time.
And this is when Serena's kids start to have other marriages.
New alliances start to form. Arana married Lord ozrich Umber,
who was probably the son of Lord John or the brother of Lord
John, Probably the brother actually, because John Umber
didn't have kids with his Stark wife.
So, and he's so he's probably just the next one.
Lord Osric is described by George R Martin as loyal.
So that is important. Loyal to who?
Probably to Winterfell. I mean, that's generally what it
means, right? That's what they're supposed to
be loyal to. That's the the default.
No reason to suspect otherwise. So we'll go with that.
So that's pretty interesting that this family's getting
smaller. All of a sudden there was all
these opportunities, all these marriages, and then some really
important people died, not just Cregan, but Sansa and Edrick,
and more marriages start to happen.
Then a big global event happens, 196, the first Blackfyre
rebellion. As best as we know, the Starks
weren't terribly involved. And that's interesting because,
well, we just got through saying how they had that period of, of
closeness where Aegon the Third and Craig and Stark were pretty
close and, and good friends and all that.
And then that fell off, you know, because he, Aegon dies.
And as we said, Deron and Baylor and now we have this, the next
Deron and it's just many more kings have passed.
There's so much time has passed. But the Black Fire Rebellion is
interesting, not just because the Starks may not have
participated in it, but because of the why they didn't
participate in it. It might be because of this.
It might be because of so much embroiling somewhat.
Last time they got involved, look what happened.
It didn't go very well. Maybe they should just stick to
their own problems. And as we're seeing, as we're
discussing, they had quite a few, There were things going on.
There was instability at Winterfell.
We are told without detail that the this was a troublesome era.
Well, we do have some detail, but there's a lot more detail
that we're not getting. We know that the troubles go
beyond what we know in the late one 90s after the Black Fire
Rebellion. We have probably another
betrothal. Well, it definitely happened.
It may have happened before the Black Fire Rebellion.
This is Erigel, another daughter of Serena Stark with Edrick
Stark. And they had this marriage is
Erigel to Lord Robard Serwin, another person that George RR
Martin calls loyal. So that's telling that both of
these two daughters of Serena and Edrick were two loyal Lords.
So this may be a sign of rewarding loyalty rather than
shoring up someone that you already think is loyal.
Like if they're already loyal to you, you might not need to do
the marriage alliance because you might want to say, hey,
let's, let's bring someone else into the fold that's only half
loyal. A marriage alliance will make
them fully loyal. We can already count on these
loyal numbers and servants. But that's not what they did.
They gave the marriages to the prior, the previously already
established loyal Lords. At least that's how I interpret
it. So Jonal remarries, He's like, I
still don't have any kids. I never had any kids with Sansa.
I want to have kids. He marries Robin Rizwell.
The Rizwells are another very powerful house in the North.
And it's the first mention through all all of this of
anyone in the western part of the North.
We've heard a lot about. We've heard Manderley, we've
heard about Karstark, we've heard about umber of course.
But the houses on over to the West haven't been mentioned.
Mormont hasn't been mentioned. Well, at least except for that
they're large people. But yeah, so Barreton and the
Dustins and the Rizwells hadn't come up at all.
So here they are. This might be another attempt to
bring an important house into the fold after some of these
other things weren't working out.
And the Serwins, that's really important because the Serwins
are the most proximate to Winterfell.
They're the closest house to Winterfell.
Their castle is like a day and a half away.
That's something that marks them as a, as very loyal to the
Starks because of that proximity.
They are very dependable. There's, there's, as far as we
know, that's kind of an unbroken line of loyalty.
They're like the Cassells or something like that, where
they're basically a house whose entire existence depends on
their loyalty to House Stark. But what happens if House Stark
is split, right? Which, which half of the house
do you stay loyal to? You know, it's not always so
simple. So Jonal wasn't able to have
children. He was still trying.
As we said, he remarried to Robin Rizwell, but the pressure
would have been off a bit. You know, maybe this is also why
Bars never married, because by then Edrick and Serena had a lot
of kids and Brandon and Alice Karstark had as well.
There were a lot of Stark kids now.
They went from no sons or one son to a bunch.
So they they solved that problem, but they may have
overshot. Because.
Too many Starks might be a bigger problem than too few
Starks. Which is?
That's certainly what happened with the Targaryens, isn't it?
It sure did. So moving forward, Jonel dies in
the early 2000s or 2000s. Early 2 hundreds most likely.
Black sword ascends. Barthegan is now Lord of
Winterfell. I'm going to guess it was about
the year 2O42 O 5:00-ish, which puts him.
Our guess was that he was born in 164, so he would have already
been about 40 years old at this time.
So not a young man at all. And that's a difference from
what I had said before. If attentive listeners will
recall some of my takes on the guesses of some of these
characters ages in the Kregan episode, I've changed my mind.
I think I undershot most of them.
Most of these Starks were older than I thought.
And the the thing, the mistake I made was not giving enough
leeway for the marriages of Rickens daughters, Serena and
Sansa, to their own uncles, uncles who were probably younger
than them, or at least the same. It's again, just the weirdness
of this all. Yeah.
You got John all and Edrick marrying their own nieces who
were probably older than them. Yep.
What did I say? Weird marriages, Right.
This is not Stark. Like from from what we know
about the Starks. Yeah.
I mean, we're introduced to Starks that were so weren't even
marrying in the North. Like Ned married Catelyn Tully.
She's a Riverlander, let alone marrying other Starks, right?
Rodwell and Baron, who are again Barthegan's nephews through his
younger brother Brandon. They probably get married around
this time. Baron Stark ended up having
seven children with his wife Laura Royce.
Yeah, bring a Royce into the mix.
Another outside the North type character.
And that's interesting in and of itself.
It certainly implies potential add on to the factionalism
situation, you bringing in a major outside power that might
be able to supply support threats.
Just don't mess with us, we get the veil on our side.
Or if if it actually came to blows then you've got maybe veil
Knights or at least veil gold flowing in to do some do some
good for whatever side is receiving it.
Which in this case would be the Baron Brandon faction of Starks
two O 6 is when Barth dies in Skagos, and this is where we'll
get into a lot greater detail once we're done with this little
timeline section, which I'm calling little.
It's not very little, is it? This is a lengthy section, but I
think it's a lot of fun. So that's what we'll basically
cut it off there minus. I'm going to give you a couple
of of dates that happened just after this to show you what this
kicked off. Because as I said at the intro,
Barthagon's death seems to kick off the reign of, hey, it isn't
just an idea that the Starks are weak.
Let's prove the Starks are weak and do something about it.
We had maybe 20 to 30 years of people going.
The Starks might be not as strong as they used to be, but
no one actually tested them. Barthagon Black Sword is when
that first Test came and he died and more tests came from other
threats. And let's go through that real
quick. Brandon Stark takes over after
Barthagon doesn't last very long either.
Rodwell Stark takes over for his father.
Brandon doesn't last very long either.
We're talking 2-3 years at most for either of these guys.
Rodwell's younger brother Baron takes over.
Baron, who I just said had seven children.
Baron we've heard of before. Baron is dying at the beginning
of the She Wolves of Winterfell, which was originally planned to
be the 4th Dunkin Egg story. Now it looks like it's going to
be the 5th or the 6th, which might change the timeline
slightly. Originally we had Baron dying
around the year 212 or 213. Maybe we should push that a
year, but one year's not a big deal for our purposes here.
Either way, he's killed trying to push the Ironborn out of the
North. Dagon Greyjoy's Ironborn.
Dagon Greyjoy was active for perhaps the better part of a
decade, raiding up and down the West Coast, mostly harassing the
Starks and Lannisters. The Starks and Lannisters worked
together against Dagon and still couldn't stop him.
It took the intervention of the throne under Bloodraven to stop
him under circumstances that are still mysterious to us.
But you can see the weakness in the North that enabled Dagon
Greyjoy to do this. If the if, if we still had a
strong leader like Kragen in the north, would Dagon have even
tried? Maybe.
We don't know, but I doubt he would have had the success he
had if it had. They'd had stronger, more
consistent leadership. And only about 11:50 to 13 years
later, King be on the wall. Raymond Redbeard, a name that
should be familiar to all y'all, comes over the wall and does
battle with Stark LED forces without the nights watch.
The Nights Watch was late under Sleepy Jack was the Lord
Commander, but with the support of Lord Harmon Umber.
So you have Lord Willem Stark with Lord Harmon Umber fighting
against King Beyond the Wall. Raymond Redbeard, what happens?
Lord William Stark is slain and beheaded at the Battle of Long
Lake. Yes, he was defeated and killed
and there was time enough to parade his head around on a pole
like they it wasn't like a touch and go kind of thing.
They had time to do that, maybe not a lot of time because
Willem's younger brother Artos the implacable, avenged him and
killed Raymond personally, so he didn't have much time to enjoy
that head on a pole before his own head ended up on a pole, or
at least at the mercy of whatever Artos wanted to do with
it. Willem's very young son Ed While
would eventually inherit with Artos as region.
Presumably Ed While was Ned's grandfather.
So that gets us pretty close to the current timeline.
But of course that's beyond our story because Bartheon died
about 20 years prior to that Battle of Long Lake.
But again, the point was to show how the Scagosi rebellion was
the first of several problems that show the weakness of
Winterfell for the next 20 to 30 years following it.
So you have a lot of Starks dying in short succession to RE
for reasons unknown, and then a lot of Starks dying in short
succession for reasons of violence of of invasions from
beyond the Wall, from the Iron Islands, and from their own
territory of Skagos. Skagos was part of the North.
Now think about this, the implied weakness here.
The Starks and their allies, even without the Night's Watches
help, they should be able to handle an army of the Free Folk,
given how undisciplined and technologically inferior the
Free Folk are. Look what Stannis did to them.
Hey, hey, hey, the free folk advocate here will stand up for
them. No, you're probably right.
Yeah, I mean, they were, to be fair, it was they were caught
off guard. It was a surprise.
It was an ambush by Stannis and Mel Saunder was blowing up
eagles out of the sky with their powers.
But still, he only had like 300 nights.
It was a it was a very small. He had 1500 men total and you
just wrecked them. So the point is, Winterfell was
repeatedly and sorely tested in this era, and they came up short
frequently. It's like Willem Stark was
killed in battle against the Free Folk.
Barth Blackser was killed in battle against the Skaggs.
Like that's that's a big deal. Like what's going on here?
And again, we have other Starks who died maybe to violence.
All those Starks died in short succession.
Are we supposed to believe all of them just like had heart
attacks or something or got sick?
There was probably some other deaths to violence that would,
you know, spice up the situation even more.
So again, that's why Barth is important because he's he's
seems to be the apex of this. This is he.
He's when this turned from theoretical to yeah, the Starks
really are weak. It was probably unstable when he
took over, but there hadn't been rebellions as far as we know.
So yeah, that's that's really important.
And this toll would be taken repeatedly by all these
invasions, like the loss of so many thousands of men.
I mean, one war weakens you for the next war.
And we, we hear that thousands of men were killed on scaggles.
That's a lot. We'll get to that after our
break. Now, interestingly, the man who
broke the cycle was, I said Artos the implacable.
He's the one who beat the, the, the, the free Folk.
And then we don't hear about much trouble after that for a
while. He was not a Lord of Winterfell.
He was a son, a second son and did get his own statue though,
but that's the end of the timeline.
Let's go back to a little bit at the beginning and a little more
of of Kragen's legacy and his descendants.
But first let us briefly talk about some other things our
friends over at the show. Hit points not required.
That's our good friend Chuck Lazarow, Chuck Chuck Laws,
destroyer of evil, our good friend with the nickname Night
Blood. Do you like Critical Role and
other similar TTRPG channels? They are dedicated to all things
TTRPG that is hit points not required.
They have a mixture of actual play streams and chatting
centered around adding more role play into RPGs.
They have some really nice graphics that their live stream
looks really nice. It's almost everything Chuck
does looks really nice so that's to be expected.
In March 2025 they did Point of Pride which I believe was a
charity. A pride charity.
Is that right for trans folk? OK, cool.
And December 24 and January 2025 they did the Atlanta mission.
There's a lot of charity stuff. They're they're being a
supporter of their channel is also supporting the mini
charitable endeavors that they are engaged in.
They're at twitch.tv hit points not required and you can catch
the replays on YouTube at Hit points not required.
I wanted to also let you all know that our friends on
Patreon, well those of you who support us on Patreon, many of
you participated in Topics Moot 2025, where 16 episodes were
chosen out of a list of, I don't know, 100 or so.
We had a whole lot of poles, and typically what we did was we
have one pole on Monday and then another on Wednesday, and the
top three finishers from each of those pole poles would face off
on a Friday pole. So six different episodes that
did that made the finals, would then face off and the top three
would win. So we had 16 episodes chosen and
those are the Winterfell murders, meaning, you know,
Little Walder and Yellow Dick and all those killings that
happened while the Boltons and Frays and Manderlys are there.
My champion is fire, which was already out.
That's the killing of Ricard and Brandon by Aries.
The killing of Kevin, Kevin Lannister by varies.
We've already released that one too.
The 4th 1 chosen was this one Barth Black Sword.
Yay so we're doing that right now.
Also to come, Benjen Stark, a full deep dive on 1st Ranger
Benjen Stark, Danis the Dreamer, the Prophet and Targaryen who is
responsible for them being the only dragon rider family to
survive the doom. Dark Star dominated a pole and
is a gets a deep dive of his own alongside Danis and Benjen and
Barth. The Brotherhood without Banners
gets an episode this year, so does House Frey.
And also shout out to my twitch channel twitch.tv History of
Westeros where we are currently playing House Frey and that's a
lot of fun. It's fun to play a villainous
house. The 10th episode chosen in
Topicsmoot was Norse Myth and the Long Night.
This gets into one of our historical deep dives where new
archaeological evidence and what I mean by new meaning in the
last 10 to 15 years, so pretty new as far as archaeology goes,
purports to tell why so much of Norse myth is the way it is.
Like how it relates to things that were really happening in
the real world at the time. And how that relates to
potential theories about the long night and volcanic activity
and starvation and the kinds of things that societies do when
things are that bad. So it should be really
interesting, backed by a lot of real world research.
That one will probably be later in the year because, well, it
involves a lot of real world research that I need to refresh
myself on and dive deeper into. So in other words, things
outside of A Song of Waste Fire. A Tale of Three City States is
also a historical deep dive. It is basically the Game of
Thrones of ancient Greece. Athens, Sparta and Thebes are
the three city states in question here, and I'm a huge
fan of that time period and studying that time period, being
a fan of it has shown me just how much Game of Thrones is in
there. And y'all I think will enjoy it
very much later in the year. Pretenders and Imposters is
another one that was chosen. That is basically the idea of
people like, well, Fagon or people who either are or might
be who they purport to be in both within the world and
outside. It's sort of a follow up to the
Wars of the Roses episode because there are there were
pretenders and impostors in the wake of the wars of the Roses.
So that is where some of where George got some of his
inspiration. But of course, it's a a thing
all over history, there's been false claims and the term
pretender doesn't mean you are pretending to be somebody, but
it relates to the conceptually. So it's confusing.
But anyway, that'll be a fun episode.
The prophecies of Patch face was a very popular choice and that
will be an episode this year. Deep dive into a man who
drowned. That's appropriate.
Deep dive. Yeah.
So what's his deal? His prophecies are some of the
weirdest, and that is fun. The ghost of High Heart, another
prophet. Her prophecies are a lot more
straightforward, but she's not. And she might still have a role
to play, which is interesting as well.
Same as Patchface. While we're at it.
A question of Quaithe, a very A Song of Ice and Fire type title.
And another prophet who we are very curious about.
And y'all voted more so than others.
And finally, the 16th topic, though not necessarily the order
these will be made. Who knows the Song of Ice and
Fire? As in who knows that prophecy in
world or who did know it? Who are different characters
throughout the years that have been aware of that prophecy?
And what have they done with it? All right, let's get back to it
here. Winterfell.
As we said, Winterfell went from very stable under Kragen Starks
to with his 45 to 60 years and three marriages to very
unstable. The North learned a lot from the
Dance of the Dragons, though it didn't suffer a lot of
casualties to its nobles. There were a lot of people
killed. A lot of the Winter's wolves
died, but these were grizzled warriors.
Greybeard. These weren't like the Founder,
these aren't like the Lords of Houses and Science of Double
houses. These are people who didn't
stand to inherit as part of why they're out there fighting in
the 1st place. How Stark didn't suffer any
deaths during the dance for example.
So Craig and helped end the dance with the Hour of the Wolf.
Or perhaps his actions did less to end it and more to dispense
justice to those who started it. That may be more accurate.
Either way, the damage was done, and it's best to make sure that
doesn't happen again. And he's so familiar with this.
He had to wrest power from his own uncle when he came of age.
So he's very familiar with people usurping Thrones and
seats from each other. It happened to him.
It happened to the Iron Throne. Yeah.
It's a lifetime full of experience.
So he had to see these things coming when he made the
arrangements he did when he married his own granddaughter to
his own son. This was very likely to prevent
outcomes like the ones that he lived through.
He didn't want to have a dance of the direwolves.
Maybe things looked good to him when he died.
Maybe he thought, hey, I'm leaving things in a good place.
I I've shored up the family. I've prevented a lot of the
things that could go wrong. He might have died thinking, all
right, everything's fine. But he was wrong because it
didn't stay fine. It went turns sour very quickly.
And perhaps he did see that. Maybe when he died, he was like,
my work is unfinished. I I don't like how I'm leaving
things. Yeah, George likes that
archetype, Nina says, and I think I agree with her here.
It's a pattern that she's noticed, which is that the good
man who ultimately fails and leaves his land in disarray,
right? He has good intentions, but
those good intentions don't work out.
It's not necessarily their fault that they didn't work out, but
they didn't work out. Jahari's the first good example.
Egg on the 5th. Egg on the unlikely, who we've
already likened to Barth Blacksword here.
Kraken could be a good example of that.
Ned's dark to a lesser extent, someone like Viserys the First
who is a wasn't a good king, but as far as Westeros goes, it's
hard to call him a bad man compared to other people, you
know. And so he's a variation on that
theme, maybe maybe not quite as good of a man, but certainly not
a villain. And things went way worse than
his intent. Let's get some more historical
context, some more historical takes from from Krugen and what
this set up here. Let's get a quote from The World
of Ice and Fire. Here it is.
After the Dance of the Dragons, the Starks were more overtly
loyal to the Targaryens than previously.
Indeed, Lord Cragenstark's son and heir fought beneath the
Targaryen banner. When the young dragon sought to
conquer Dorn, Rickenstark fought bravely, his deeds sometimes
reported by King Daron in his conquest of Dorn, and Rikon's
death outside of Sun Spear in one of the final battles, was
lamented in the North for years to come because of the troubles
that dogged the reins of his half brothers.
Nina points out a glaring error in that quote.
Instead of dogged the reins of half his half brothers.
Did you say wolved the reins of his half?
I mean, come on. Dire Wolved.
Yeah. Come on, George.
Come on. Yeah.
So as we said before, Rick, and had those two daughters, Serena
and Sansa, and we've discussed their marriages and children and
all that, but it reminds me of this great one liner from Tywin
talking about what's going to happen to Sansa.
They want to control Sansa and they're talking about all the
different outcomes. And he says, send her north and
she will be wed to some manderlier Umber before the moon
turns. There you go.
And this brings us back these particular marriages, brings us
back to an old political strategy, one that has been
present ever since the founding of White Harbor about 1000 years
ago. And the strategy is 1.
It's a term that I've coined, but I think it's present and
very visible. So if you have your, if you have
a video feed or you can switch it on briefly, Take a look at
this. The strategy is called Box in
the Dread Fort. Make sure Umber and Manderly and
or car struck are on your side. And the Dread Fort is boxed in
by the coast and White Harbor and Winterfell and those other
houses. They, they, they are trapped.
It's harder for them to do anything and they can't reach
out for alliances. It keeps them in check.
That said, the Dread Fort plays little to no role in this story
at all. They were kept in check in this
area. It wasn't their time.
Their time was much later when Roose Bolton came along.
But those alliances are still very important.
That Umber and Manderly are still very prominent, and
Karstark as well, and they're obviously a huge part of this.
You can see why Kragen wanted to reduce the branches of House
Stark to fewer because of what we just said.
Of course, what he lived through, seeing the multiple
branches of House Targaryens like, well, we don't want that
to happen to us either. Yeah, we don't have Dragons, but
war is devastating enough without Dragons.
And we will definitely want to avoid that to reduce the number
of claimants, to reduce the number of factions, you unite
these factions. And that's why we called the
section the wolf must have one head.
Think of the she Wolves of Winterfell as a scenario and why
it doesn't necessarily make sense if things are normal,
which is this OK? The she remember the setup for
the She Wolves of Winterfell again, Probably the 5th Duncan
Egg story. Which of course means it's not
out yet. The situation there is that
Baron Stark is slowly dying from a mortal wound he suffered at
the hands of the Ironborn, and there was a succession crisis
where 4 Stark widows were pushing their children above
Baron's eldest son. What, how?
Why are they pushing their succession of Baron's?
His cause 'cause he was a boy I presume.
That's really the only thing that makes sense.
His name was Donor. Donor Stark.
He did end up inheriting. The succession crisis resulted
in the person you would expect to inherit did inherit the
eldest son of the Lord Stark who just died.
But why was it even a question? It should, that's unusual.
Why were they even not considering the eldest son of
the of the Lord of Winterville? Because that's how it goes 99.9%
of the time. So why was it even a question?
Why were somebody else even considered for that seat?
The only reason I can possibly come up with is that he was too
young and it was a time of trouble and you need a man in
charge. You need an adult in charge if
of Winterfell, not a Regent, not a a mother, a Lord of adult age.
And that's a reasonable argument.
I think clearly didn't work. But the she wolves of Winterfell
tells us the fact that this was even a question in in the year
212 or 213 implies that it very may have very well may have been
a question 40 years prior as well in the after the death of
Kragen when there was so much uncertainty.
So we don't have to know the answers to why it was a
question, why it was possible for someone other than Don or
Stark, the heir to Winterfell or inherit Winterfell.
But the fact that it was a question is unusual, that we
don't have to know why this question existed to know that
something's up. If things were fine, then it
wouldn't have been a question at all.
If things were normal, then Yep, Don or Stark inherits.
Doesn't matter that he's not old enough yet.
We'll take care of him until he comes of age and then he
inherits when he's 16. Go forward and prosper.
That's normal. But why are they and instead
what we have is these unusual marriages, these of of with high
levels of consanguinity and threats to remove the legal
error based on tradition and law.
So weird stuff happening here. I don't I don't quite know what
the deal is and definitely questions, but very interesting
questions. Nina points out, to be fair,
that the current Alice Karstark was pursued for marriage by her
own uncle, and she didn't complain about that part.
She complained about the forcing of it all, but not the fact that
it was incestuous. So yeah, maybe the North has a
lesser threshold for incest as as we were indicating earlier,
this is more examples of that. To summarize some of this stuff
before we move into the actual war, and as much of Barth's rain
as we can, which was very short. We have houses Umber very
involved, House manually, very involved.
Now, why of course, because Serena's first marriage was to
Lord John, and then her elder daughter Arana married azrich
Umber. So that's a seemingly an intent
from Winterfell to keep the Umbers in the fold.
And that's really important because of Skagos is the closest
to umber to Last Hearth. So they may have, they may have
already been suspicious, may have already been worried about
what was going to happen with this, with this Cummings Kagosi
rebellion. And these marriages to house
Umber might have just happened anyway because how marriages how
umber happened. But it may may have been of
prime importance in this era because of the potential for
rebellion from, from Skagos. Or if we're going even farther,
if we're taking this theory that Serena might have been a Cersei
ish figure, someone passed over and bitter about it and not
sitting back and taking it, trying to push power through her
own male children. Well, shoring up an alliance
with the Umbers on her side, having a hand in that, taking
control of that would be a big step.
So that's pretty important. But we also have two Manderly
Stark marriages in this era, so White Harbor was also very
implied. We have we have Miriam Manderly
marrying 1 of Brandon's children.
Both Santa and Serena are Manderly daughters through
through with their Stark father umber and Manderly don't get
along that well though. Do you all remember Clash of
Kings? When Roderick Cassell basically
had to get a little tough with them and they were, they didn't
want to work together. He's like, y'all can cut some
trees down and give them to the Manderlys and they'll make some
ships out of it and that'll be really good for King Rob's war
effort. And they're like, I don't want
to work with the Manderlys. They're, you know, lazy and, and
corrupt and all whatever they said, you know, fat, you
probably called them fat or something, but because that's
what they would do. And, and the Umbers and, but,
but he's like, no, you're going to work with them or King Rob
will hear why. And they're like, all right,
fine, we'll work with those stupid Manderleys.
And the Manderleys, of course, are willing to work with them.
We do later hear about these ships having been built that
that Wyman Manderley has built a whole lot of of a whole Navy
basically that's just sitting there waiting and it's like
whoa, ready to unleash this. So and that's important because
they would have probably needed some ships to invade Skagos.
You need ships and that's coming.
And they may again we brought up House Royce as a potential
involved being intentionally involved here.
Their their naval support may have also been involved.
Maybe maybe some support from the sisters.
I'm very proud House Stark is facing a lot of things that they
were not. Here's a comment from Dornish
Dame. I just think of the Walders
knowing exactly who was ahead of them in line of succession and
who is not. Yeah, that's because when you're
a, a, a Walder Frey, you what, are you going to memorize all 40
people ahead of you in the exact order they're in?
No, probably not. You're probably just going to
know the few in front of you and the few behind you.
That's a good point. But I think don't understand the
point is that probably some people in House Stark were very
aware when they were all these Starks.
That's a good point. Like when there's only a couple
you could you couldn't not know. But when there's a lot of
Starks, you would you it would be detailed.
And the fact that you would, that most of them would know
those details in itself is telling.
Yeah, I agree with that. That's a great point.
Yeah. Like, I love getting into these
details. Like what are the little things?
What are the little conversations they would have?
What are the like insurance and outs of of this existence?
Yeah. Like imagine you're talking to
your brother and he like, let slip Like, Oh yeah, I'm ninth in
line and you're like. You'll have the, the exact count
from, you know, look, that makes me 8th now.
Like we're at the funeral. Like maybe you don't say that at
the funeral of your, of your sister or your brother or
whatever. Like I'm #8 now like, no, I'm
moving into single digits. That was 10th in line.
No 9th. All right.
Yeah. That is the kind of things that
happened at a Frey funeral real quick.
The the idea of a name, Bart and Barth and Black Sword.
It just reminds me of a couple of real world examples.
There was a gentleman bandit in the 1800s named Black Bart.
His, his real name was Charles Bolton, a Bolton, Hey.
And he was like, he wouldn't curse, you know, even as he was
like robbing stagecoaches and and things like that.
He he wrote and he would rob, I think it was Wells Fargo, I
think was his main target. I forget.
Anyway, more famously, there was a Bartholomew Roberts, a
Welshman who is the inspiration for the Dread Pirate Roberts
from The Princess Bride, whom George has used conceptually as
the Shrouded Lord, Right. Many people have been the Dread
Pirate Roberts. It's not a it's an identity
that's passed on from different people, different people, just
like the Shrouded Lord. Bartholomew Roberts's nickname
was Black Bart. So instead of Barth, Black
Sword, we have Barth, we have Black Barth, right?
Bart. The death of Black Bart marked
the end of the Golden age of Caribbean piracy.
He was the most successful arguably of the Western pirates.
He took over 400 vessels. He had an early variant of the
skull and crossbones Jolly Roger flag with a large sword.
Maybe these are accounts, not, you know, not photos.
He he invented one of the early pirate codes and he was killed
at age 39 in the year 1722 by grapeshot.
Got him in the neck. Unlucky.
Only three people were killed in that battle, and he was one of
them. His body was thrown overboard
because they didn't. The pirates didn't want anyone
parading his head around. They didn't want the law being
like, we got him, you know? He flung in like Nope, you won't
have that body. Anyway, back to our subject,
Bartheon's inheritance. As we said, Jonel and I never
had children with either of his wives, but did he actually name
his brother Barth as the heir? Was he officially the heir or
just everybody knew he was because that's how the law
works. And the reason we have to ask is
because all sorts of traditions and norms were being broken in
this era. Normally would say, well, no, he
was the heir because he was the next eldest male in line.
But we cannot assume that in this case, because of all these
other weird things that were happening, all these other
spikes and unnatural unusual behavior, Jonal would have had a
choice. If he did name and air, would
he? He would have had a similar
perhaps choice to what his father Craig and had.
Should I allow Serena to inherit?
Should I take the chance of, of having a woman inherit?
And, and maybe that destabilizes the North.
Maybe people rebel against Winterfell over that.
Or maybe it goes well. And if it does go well, then
that opens the door for more women to inherit, which
potentially removes all sorts of awkward succession crises.
I mean, I'm absolutely team just if you're going to do monarchy,
go eldest. Gender should be irrelevant
because it was removed so many of the confusing situations that
turn into civil wars. If it's always the oldest, then
it's simple. So that may have been an
opportunity, but not one that they were actually able to get
to pass. Serena may have been the de
facto heir for a while, though, which is super interesting.
And what did the North think of that?
Was there panic? Was there up?
You know, some, maybe some people thought it might be a
good thing. They were like, oh, that might
be good for a change. Thinking about the North and
how, you know, old school they are probably not.
But if it was a time of peace, people might have been open to
it. But it was not a time of peace.
It kind of. This brings me to a kind of a
weird realization about incestuous marriages.
If it's a little bit incestuous at all, the more confusing it
is, the more incestuous it is. What makes things confusing is
when they don't follow the normal lines of when you don't
marry members of your own family, you marry everyone but
that everyone else is on the table except them.
It's the one place you don't marry.
When you add that into the mix, it's like, well, there's no
rules at all. So again, this brings us back to
Barth. Not married at all.
Strange. Was it because there were enough
Starks around, he just didn't feel necessary or didn't feel
required? But then why didn't he get
married when those other Starks weren't around in a time when
there were very few Starks? So, yeah, that remains a big
question. So coming back to the
possibility that he was large, a big man, there's nobody, right?
Can you think of any other large people, any other large Starks?
I just, there's no examples. I have none, not a single one.
King Torin, Brandon the Builder, Ned, Rickard, Benjen Brandon,
any of the other Brandon's, Rob, John, They're not that big.
These are like maybe slightly large individuals, but none of
them are huge, large men In the North, again, that's usually
mormont Umber and Skaggos. Skaggos is known for big dudes,
possibly Giant's Blood or Ebenez Blood, or both.
And those things could extend to house Umber who are probably the
largest mainland northerners. Maybe Barth was that rare guy
who was actually huge. And that itself has value as a
leader, as an imposing figure. If you're a big man, you know,
in a warrior culture, that might be something that balanced out
what might have been a bad personality, right?
And certainly balanced out lack of marriage alliances.
Like Barth doesn't have in laws that are in his corner 'cause he
has no in laws period. So that might have created an
additional bit of instability. He's like, well, the Lord of
Winterfell in this era doesn't have any other northern house he
can lean on for extra help, whereas that normally is a
thing. Even Ned Stark had the Tullys to
lean on a bit. And the list is endless.
Like his elder brothers had Manderly and umber potentially
on their sides. So he doesn't have either of
those. And those are huge things to not
have Manderly and umber like Barthegan would have been
growing up as a near contemporary to Damon Blackfyre
too. We have to consider the impact
of a LED living legend, a famous man with kind of a similarish
name, Black sword, Black fire. I mean, black fire is a black
sword ice. So he may have, even if he's a
little younger than we thought, he might have been inspired by
Damon Blackfyre because Damon Blackfyre was born in the year
170. Right now, we think Barth was
born in the mid one, 60s. So he would have actually been
older than Damon Blackfyre. But Damon Blackfyre was still
very much like a man's man, an ultimate fighter who had lots of
children, you know, and was Targaryen on both sides.
So like got all the things going for him, a lot of things that
other men would look up to. So yeah, it's kind of hard to
miss that similarity with Black sword and Black Fire and warrior
cultures and crossovers. But again, the, the North wasn't
involved in the first Black Fire rebellion, so maybe we need to
maintain some distance there. I don't know.
It's tricky, right? It's very tricky.
But maybe Bart Blacksword wanted to go fight in the Black Fire.
But maybe he did. Maybe there were a few Starks
that fought it, just they didn't fight in an official capacity.
But there were a few individuals that lent their swords to the
case, to the 'cause maybe they they weren't a lot of soldiers
coming down, but a few individuals, you know, that's
something like that. Maybe to summarize the state of
the North that led to this war, the lack of stark unification,
the lack of strong leadership and or the lack of strength,
possible depopulation from other events was likely all part of
the contributing, contributing factors rather for this
bloodshed that followed. It's unlikely to be just one or
two events. It could be a whole lot of
things. It's very likely because what
happened was very unusual. A certain savage and mysterious
island took their shot at independence.
Yes, scaggos tried to become independent while Winterfell was
seemingly occupied and or weakened, but man, what a thing
to try to do to defeat Winterfell when you're scaggos.
It was either very bold, very stupid, or there were some
really major things going on in the North that gave them an
unprecedented opportunity because it on paper it seems
like such doomed failure. Again, I'll repeat my point from
the beginning that some rebellions just look stupid on
paper and from the beginning, and that's just how it is
sometimes, including in the real world.
So that's always possible. But I don't think that's how
George prefers to write it. I think he wants to have reasons
and details and break this all down, even if he hasn't done so
yet. So that's the result was the
Skagosi Rebellion. Let's talk about that in detail,
starting off with a quote. Skagos has often been a source
of trouble for the Starks, both as kings when they sought to
conquer it, and as Lords when they fought to keep its fealty.
Indeed, as recently as the reign of King Daron the Second
Targaryen, Daron the Good, the Isle rose up against the Lord of
Winterfell, A rebellion that lasted years and claimed the
lives of thousands of others, including that of Barth against
Stark, Lord of Winterfell, called Barth Blacksword, before
finally being put down. Hey, spoiler alert, What are you
doing though? Yeah, just kidding.
Keep in the back of your mind what this means for T.
Wow. We'll come back to that in a
minute, because you were going to see Skagos and this
engagement, this war, this rebellion is some of the only
things we know about Skagos. They in the north is well known
and we've seen it, that the mountain clans, the hill tribes
are very loyal to the Starks. The Skagos see are not.
They are mountainous and they are clannish, but they are not
invested in how Stark like the other mountain clans are.
So can we even count on them? Can Davos expect to go there,
get Ricken and maybe even a small army and come back with
that? Or will it go badly?
Will he have to rescue Ricken from them?
Is this like the way the umber plot went on TV where they
actually were the betrayers? Are the Skagosi the betrayers in
the book version of this? I don't really want to bring up
the show too much, but every once in awhile you know it comes
up. So if so, that could be how
Ricken is killed. I really don't think Davos dies
there, but maybe Ricken dies and that's who's responsible, or at
least is there when it happens. Maybe they're not responsible,
but they're part of the engagement.
Maybe they're even on his side and he's killed anyway or
whatever. That's really quite serious
though, isn't it? We talked about how Winterfell
has been so dominant for so long, yet it took them years to
defeat Skagos and thousands of lives.
OK. And of course, the Lord of
Winterfell, our subject, Black Bart.
What the heck? That's wild.
I mean, so it proves what I was saying earlier that this Gagosi
had a good read on the situation.
It wasn't good enough. They failed ultimately, but they
weren't stupid in thinking that they had a chance.
I don't think because it looks like they maybe could have won
this. They might have been able to
draw out a stalemate. And in the long run, I suppose
there's almost no way they could have held out.
But the fact that they did this, well, it really says a lot
because Winterfell should have been able to, in most
circumstances, I think, shut it down a lot quicker.
But that's not what happened. Now, if someone told me that
only 10,000 people lived on Skagos, I would believe it.
I'd be like, yeah, that sounds about right.
I could see it being less. Like if someone gave me that as
an over under, we'd say, are there more or less than 10,000
people on Skagos? I'd be like, that's tough.
I could easily see it being less.
I could see it being more. I don't I wouldn't think it's a
lot more. So when you say thousands of
people died in this war, I'm like, well, they're I bet most
of them were not Skagosi. I bet this.
It was just it's really hard to invade their island and they
have such a strong home field advantage.
That's a sports term that implies that your fans are on
your side. The the very terrain is on your
side. It's like Dorn.
Skagos is like the Dorn of the North.
Where? Invading armies have a hell of a
time with the terrain and the the people and the raids and the
ambushes and the the weather. I mean, you got tough ass
northerners going up there going whoa, this is more northern than
I've ever seen. This is more northern than I
thought the north could be. Skagos is like a microcosm of
like a time capsule of what the whole N used to be like.
In some ways. It's, it's a, it's a land that
time forgot. And there's another factor that
makes the rebellion odd in the 1st place, which is that George
has straight up said that Winterfell rules them, but
nominally they're left alone. They just kind of get ignored
and they just do their own thing.
So they're risking a lot to be free when they're pretty much
free already. Like the Lord of Winterfell
isn't out here demanding lots of troops and money from them,
mostly just demanding like fealty and don't raid the
shoreline. They're mostly demanding that
you not be violent towards everybody else.
That's really what their loyalty, the extent of their
loyalty is required for. It's like, yeah, you know what,
You all do your own thing. Just don't attack every anybody
else, you know, just leave everybody else alone.
But they didn't even do that. They didn't even, they're not
even OK with that. So they must have been, again,
this, this really shows they must have been really confident
or really pissed off or some combination of the above,
because that status quo for them was pretty good.
And they still risked everything to for what looks like a slight
improvement, you know, at best. But they're also kind of a
backwater. George has called them that too.
So they might be ignorant about how strong the rest of the North
is. They might be really fired up
about notions of honor and independence, and it might mean
a lot to them. If so, why was this the only
time that they ever rebelled that we know of and and in fact,
we have a pretty good sense. It is the only rebellion of
significance that ever came from Sky Goes because, well, it's
mentioned in context and there was no mention of any other ones
in the World of Ice and Fire. Now they and they haven't been
independent in probably 1000 years or more.
It's probably a different king, like a Brandon the 9th is the
one who banned them from using the sea because they were
Raiders and they would they would do the false light stuff
that the sistermen do. And so they're basically like a
combination of the Ironborn and the Sistermen, but bigger and
hairier so that you can see why that would be a problem,
something that needed to be handled or kept, kept under
control. But they had, it's not like,
hey, we need to go back to the old times when we were
independent, you know, a few generations ago.
No, this is a long distant pass. It's not like the old way where
they're bringing something relatively recent in their
history back into the fold. Now we're talking about
something that's been gone for centuries.
So the more you dig into the external details of this, the
surrounding details, the more unusual it seems, which is
fascinating to me. Let's also take a quick look or
or slash reminder of what kind of people we're dealing with,
because I keep saying they're more northern, more.
It's a microcosm of the ancient N, but it's not quite that
simple. There's maybe a cultural and
ethnic divide here as well. The Skagosi are pretty fearsome
people. Let's let's put it that way.
Here it is from the World of Ice and Fire quote.
The Skagosi who reside there are little regarded by the other
Northmen, who consider them little better than Wild Wings
and name them Skaggs. The Skagosi call themselves the
Stone Born, referring to the fact that Skagos means stone in
the Old Tongue. A huge, hairy, foul smelling
folk. Some maesters believed the
Skagosi to have a strong admixture of Ebony's blood.
Others suggest that they may be descended from giants, clad and
skins and furs and untanned hides, and said to ride on
unicorns. The Skagosi are the subject of
many a dark rumor. It is claimed that they still
offer human sacrifice to their weirwoods, lure passing ships to
destruction with false lights, and feed upon the flesh of men
during winter. Left out that last part when I
was sitting there. Like ironborn mixed with sister
men because of the the false lights and the raiding.
But they also are cannibals, so yeah.
So. You can see that's not all the
North is like that. I mean, some of the North used
to be like that, but most of the North didn't lure passing ships
to destruction. Most of them aren't descended
from the Ibanez, and some of them might be descended from
giants. But yeah, the clad in skins and
furs, that's more like the free folk.
That's, you know, that that's a bridge to the ancient north of a
different type. So yeah, it's pretty they're
they're different. The cultural ethnic divide was
significant. And of course, there's that
isolation, right? They're on their own island in
the far north. Not a lot of ships going back
and forth between them and other places.
Most of the trading that Scugosi do is them leaving to trade and
come back. You know, people don't really
stop there to trade. There's no ports, the reputation
is bad, people don't want to go there.
There's not much money to be made there.
When Davos was coming up as a smuggler, his his first, the
first captain he worked under was willing to do some really
daring things. He went to trade with the Free
Folk, which got him killed. He was beheaded for trading with
trading weapons to the Free Folk.
He wasn't afraid of taking that chance, though.
He was willing to do that. It was he thought that the
rewards of training with the Free Folk were worth the risk of
running a foul of the Night's Watch.
He did not take that risk for Skagos.
Davos says even this guy, his nickname was the Blind Bastard,
was Afraid of Skagos. And in that quote, the maesters
aren't exactly kind in their writing about them.
A huge, hairy, foul smelling folk.
Yeah, OK. Is that a good thing for
peaceful relations if the rest of the North is looking down on
them like throwbacks, like low tech bumpkins, you know, as as
yokels or whatever, Like that's not good for peaceful relations
when everyone looks down on you. So that might be part of the mix
here. The being looked down on is not
not good for for peace. And again, we go back to the sea
power thing. Maybe they wanted to re
establish themselves as a sea power.
It was Brandon the 9th that banned them from doing that and
and kept them from rating. Well, yeah, they might want to
return to that. This might be the point.
They're might like, yeah, again, the whole point of fealty to
Winterfell isn't what they give to Winterfell.
It's what they don't do in terms of inflicting violence on the
mainland. So that might be a big part of
the motivation. They're like, Hey, we want to
have ships and go back to raiding and and be who we were.
We want to cut out our own destiny.
We want to carve out our own lives and not be subject to
Winterfell, even though it's risky, even though we already
get to mostly self govern, we want all of it.
We want it all for ourselves. Now, who would they be raiding
if they were raiding with with ships that they may or may not
have any more? And and you got to think that
this ban can't be absolutely. You can't both not pay close
attention to Skagos and enforce this total ban of of shipping,
right? There's probably some ships that
they just, you know, keep quiet about that.
And when they were in their raiding days, they would be
raiding the Umbers and the car starts because that's who's
close by. That's they don't have fancy
sailing vessels. They can't go sail all the way
halfway around the world or all the way to Essos or something to
go raiding. No, they can only hit what's
close by. So again, more echoes of
Ironborn and Sisterman here. More of that now.
They were probably never expert sailors like those folk, but
whatever sailing skill they did have would be lost because
they've been at least two centuries.
Probably a lot more since the Starks had them bend the knee.
Probably more like 1000 years, like I said.
So put all that together, you've got a very isolated people who
don't have a lot of back and forth with the mainland, which
is why they're isolated, which which keeps them in a state of
being backwards because they're not brought forward by traffic
and commerce with the rest of the realm.
They're looked down on. There's that cultural ethnic
divide enforcing some of this. And consider that this was also
an era where Dorn was recently incorporated into the Kingdom
with, after many years of fighting, the main independence.
And as I've already compared Doran to Skagos in terms of how
difficult it is to invade and and tame, were they looking at
themselves as similarly, say, hey, if Doran is independent or
if they can have their independence, shouldn't we have
ours? You know, we're, we're not even
on the same continent. You know, we have an island
separating us. Why shouldn't we be independent?
You can see the arguments there. Even if they are wise arguments,
you can see them. Surely they didn't just send a
letter right when the war began, they didn't just say, hey, we're
independent now, deal with it. It almost certainly started with
violence. A sneak attack on house Umber or
Karstark, or maybe Manderly or or both.
Probably Umber or Karstark because they're the closest.
Maybe both. Again, I think that seems most
likely. Do as much damage as you can
before they know you're doing damage.
If you're going to strike at a greater foe, you need to hit
them while they're weak. And the element of surprise
would have been on the Skagosi's side for a little bit.
So that early first few weeks or months or whatever would have
been about accomplishing as much as possible and preparing for
the inevitable kickback, the inevitable N getting its act
together and say, hey, what the hell are you doing, you
rebellious Skagos Stonebourne, you Unicorn riding jerks.
It would be slow for them to gather all that together.
They'd have to form an army, get some ships to be able to even
land on Skagos, get a battle plan together, you know, figure
out things like who's in charge, who's second in command, the
things that Rob had to deal with when he was marching S to deal
with Tywin. Just the petty things that Lords
fight over. You know?
Like no, I'm my guys March 1st or my guys March here or no I I
get the place of honor. Just pet petty BS that nobles
argue over that that someone like Barth Blacksword would have
to manage. And what we can glean from
everything we've said in this episode is it was probably a
very difficult job for Barth Blacksword because there was so
much factionalism from what we can tell in this era.
And when there's a lot of factionalism, these things
really come to a head because they, no one wants these, the
other faction to get even the slightest advantage or honor or
notice or anything that they're not getting.
You know, it's like, oh, everything is like, we can't let
them get an inch on us. We have to, if they get one, we
get, we have to get 2. You know, I just, it's very
tense. It's very difficult.
It's one of the things where you can't please everyone, but you
need them. You know, Winterfell by itself
clearly wasn't strong enough to do these things alone.
They needed their allies. They needed the rest of the
North. So what would they, what would
this look like for the Skagosi? Probably burning ships, probably
burning, destroying the things that would be a problem for them
later in the war. Ships are going to be what
invades them later, so they want to maybe destroy whatever ships
they can to make that effort more difficult.
Maybe hostages, maybe capturing some other nobles, something
like that. That might keep a house or two
on the sidelines. Like, Yep, we're not, we're not
going to war with you. Sorry, Lord Barth, they have my
son captive. I can't take that risk, you
know, Go rescue my son, please. And then I'll give you some
money, but I can't send my troops now or they'll kill my
son. So you can see there's a lot of
things they could pull off. Raiding, sneak attacks,
hostages, destroying military gear, destroying food.
Like what if it was about to be winter?
That would be a very interesting timing if they timed their
rebellion right around winter when landing ships on Skaggos
would be just hellish and nightmarish and nearly
impossible. It's already really hard to land
ships there. All they have to do is defend
the very few places where you can land a ship and just heavily
defend those areas. And the the Starks could just
throw manpower at it and just be like trying to invade the veil
through the bloody gate. It would be extremely difficult
bloody business. That would be hellish for the
soldiers involved. So that's I think what it would
look like the beginning. A lot of quick attacks, a lot of
quick strikes, a lot of maybe hoping to keep sidelining some
of the houses and doing everything they could to give
themselves a lot of leeway. A lot of time.
And winter may have been part of that.
Like if winter strikes and N is weak and that gives us years
potentially to re establish ourselves as independent.
And then after that they get to rely on Skagos itself being so
difficult, like the mountains and the terrain and the lack of
food. And just imagine how hard it
would be to go inland and Skagos and expect to be able to forage
and you're subject to ambushes and strange noises at night and
you don't want to get separated from the rest of the again.
This is why I keep comparing it to Dorn, because that's what it
would have been like for the invaders.
Northern invaders going to Dorn. Of course, everyone's northern,
but from the perspective of the Dornish conditions, they weren't
used to just hard to sleep animals you've never seen
before. Instead of the extreme heat, you
have the extreme cold. And it's extremely cold even for
northerners who are used to the north.
I mean, it's farther north and it, and if it's, and if my guess
about winter is right, then it would be as bad as it ever gets.
It might have been the coldest some of these men had ever
experienced. So, yeah, as far as landing, oh,
God, it would be. Let me go back to that briefly.
You also have horrible storms and choppy water constantly
outside Skagos. It's impossible nearly to land
ships when that's being contested.
It's difficult to land ships when they want you to come.
But when they're trying to stop you, they can be shooting
arrows. They can be doing cavalry
charges with their Unicorn riders.
They can just barricades can be built on the shore with, you
know, wooden spikes and sticks and all rocks.
They can drop rocks into the harbor, make it really difficult
to land ships, tear out the hulls, things like that.
There's so many things that they can use to make it really hard
for the Starks to invade them. And who's going to be really
enthusiastic about this? Like, yeah, let's go get them.
I don't know, maybe the Umbers, because that's just how they
are. But the Stoneborn are downright
frightening. What did we say before about
them being huge and hairy and the this is a true survival of
the fittest environment that these men live in on Skagos.
Like the weak people don't live here, weak people die.
And it's like you're doing that for.
Like what? What ganging?
What do you, what prize do you get for that?
Yeah, nothing. Yeah.
Well, I guess you could say I I defeated the Skagosi.
That's some people would be like to add those yokels, like no,
they're freaking giants, man. They're hairy beasts with
Unicorn. Like it's hard.
This is a it's a time capsule. I said it already, but this is a
place with like no Andol blood. Like no Andols have ever made it
to Skagos. They barely made it to the
north. So yeah, they would look down on
the north in their own way, like you all are.
You all are polluted with those Andols.
So let's go back to the question of Unicorn cavalry.
Why do we actually know this exists?
Why is it not just a rumor? Why is it not just a thing?
How do we know for sure that Unicorn cavalry is a thing?
Let's let's go through the evidence, starting with Exhibit
A quote. It is also said that those
seafarers brave enough to trade on Skagos have glimpsed the
Stoneborn Lords riding great shaggy horned beasts.
Monstrous mount so sure footed, they have been known to climb
the sides of mountains. A living example of such a
creature, or even a skeleton, has long been sought for study,
but none has ever been brought to Old Town I.
Could see why you might think that quote actually suggests the
opposite, that it said it kind of disproves the existence of
the Unicorn riders because of the lack of evidence.
A skeleton or certainly a living specimen.
But actually it is a curious mystery why they had, why there
hasn't been a skeleton. Because we know for a fact that
the answer is not because they don't exist.
We do know they exist because of Exhibit B John A Dance with
Dragons one. The white wolf raced through a
black wood beneath A pale Cliff as tall as the sky.
The moon ran with him, slipping through a tangle of bare
branches. Overhead, across the starry sky.
Snow, the moon murmured. The wolf made no answer.
Snow crunched beneath his paws. The winds sighed.
Through the trees far off, he could hear his packmates calling
to him, like to, like they were hunting, too.
A wild rain lashed down upon his black brother as he tore at the
flesh of an enormous goat, washing the blood from his side
where the goat's Longhorn had raked him.
You. Can pretty easy tell that's a
ghost because of the snow and the white wolf and the fact that
he's running along the pale Cliff as tall as the sky, which
is the wall. There's other evidence too, but
I don't need to sell you on that.
The part that matters, of course here is the black brother
tearing at the flesh of an enormous goat, washing the blood
for his side. Where from his side where the
goats? Longhorn horn, singular,
singular goat. We already think goat when you
hear of being so sure footed. They can walk up the side of a
mountain. So yes, they're probably not
unicorns. They're probably 1 horned goats.
Same thing. I mean, you can call that a
Unicorn if you want. Unicorn just kind of means one
horn. So, so snow in that voice there,
that's the Raven trying to wake him.
Mormont's Raven. And then so the moon's kind of a
neat symbol there. We know Rickons on Skagos,
though we don't know. We don't actually.
George is being tricky here because when you first read that
chapter, you don't know Rickons on Skagos.
You find that out way later in the book.
So on reread or if you listen to podcasts like this or whatever,
you find out that Rickons on Skagos.
So that black brother shaggy dog tearing at the flesh of an
enormous goat is on Skagos with one horn.
Yeah, that goat with one horn. So that's pretty definitive.
Carl Carr Snark says unicorns were real.
They're actually just angora sheep whose horn buds are
surgically rotated such that the horns grow and twist into one
horn. Circuses used to have them, too.
There's medieval manuscripts that depict depict them clearly,
and they have Billy goat beards, cloven feet and a shaggy coat.
They were put into flocks of real sheep to protect them from
predators. And it worked well.
Today I learned. They also said really neat
cornice is Latin for horn. Unicorn slash Unicorn, Yes.
Nice. All right, Well, that makes
sense. Yeah.
Like something like a. Yeah.
Horns are organic, So. And anything like that can be
shaped. You can turn it and twist it,
and that fits. That's neat.
How about that? Thanks, Carl.
Car snark. Figures we'd learn that from a
car snark. They would know a lot about
Skagos. So the early stage of this war
would probably be the landing. The Skags would do everything
they could to stop it, and the Starks would be as.
Dead set on achieving it. Once they have some sort of
beach head, once they are landed and defended and can hold a
spot, then they can continue to bring ships to that spot and
continue to bring more men and food and supplies.
If they don't have a place on the mainland, they can't
establish any sort of base, They can't have a safe place to bring
more men and troops in. So it's vital to the war effort
either way. It's both vital for the Skags to
stop it and for the Starks to achieve it.
Let's recall that there are three noble houses on Skagos,
Crowell Stain and Magnar Stain, STANE, not like, you know, blood
stain, but kind of makes you think of that.
These would likely be the houses at the forefront of the defense.
I can imagine there being, you know, three safe landing spots
for ships around the southern edge of Skagos.
And each of these noble houses took charge of one of them.
And I can imagine that these houses are located near these
safe anchorages because it would be one of the things that you
would want to build a castle or a keep near in the 1st place,
because that's a, a source of power within the natural
environment. You know, a place where ships
can land is something you would want to control as a Lord.
That's, that's where taxes come through and trade goods.
And that's where the power is, right?
You build a castle in a place where it's going to achieve more
power, where it defends things that have value, whether it's
farmland, rivers, ports, etcetera.
So I can kind of imagine that's like that.
Now, of course, it's not a a seafarer.
They're not a seafaring race overall or people.
So maybe some of these castles are pretty far inland, which if
if which if true, makes it all the more difficult for the
Starks to achieve conquest, especially if they're high up in
the mountains, which is likely. Just picture this, let me go all
Dan Carlin on y'all and try to imagine what it's like for a
rank and file soldier recruited into a northern levee to go to
Skagos and fight the Stonebourne.
Imagine you're on some ship trying to land.
Picture it breed like hard home, the ships and the the fleeing of
hard home and getting out of there during those storms and
the others. Picture that.
But you're going towards it instead of fleeing from it.
Instead of the undead, you have the Skagosi, which, yeah, to be
fair, that's one of the few ways I can make the Skagosi seem less
fearsome is to compare them to the undead.
But it's still pretty darn scary, right?
You, you're fighting all those weather conditions and these
horrifying opponents. So there would be crashing and
yelling, bitter cold, wind and waves, rain or snow, maybe both.
You would be very cold. There's mortal danger here
without considering the enemy. The weather alone can kill you,
the terrain can kill you, slipping on the rocks, the
there's probably shadow cats and other dangerous animals.
This is a not just a survival of the fittest region for humans,
it's a survival of the fittest region period.
And these are animals that survive in this hellish, cold
region. They are strong, tough and don't
get regular meals. So there would be some familiar
elements, perhaps heart trees. But even these would be
different. The heart trees might be carved
differently. The faces might have unfamiliar
expressions, more horrifying, more terrifying, more ancient.
Maybe some mixed feelings, maybe less than mixed.
If you're a White Harbor man and you still worship the Seven, you
might be thinking, has anyone of Andahl blood ever set foot on
these shores with violence in mind?
Maybe some traders have, but that's about it.
But Andahl's landing on Skagos on Skagos with the intent to
help conquer it might be unprecedented.
Not the kind of thing you want to be thinking about, but these
are kind of intrusive thoughts that might be coming as you are
exiting that ship, heading towards your uncertain fate, but
you might not have a lot of confidence in.
To get deep into Skagos, to get to their control centers, their
power, where the authority lies, the house, the seats, the the
keeps. You have to penetrate deep into
this extremely difficult landscape that has no food.
You have to bring your own food, which means more ships, which
means supply lines, which means warriors spread thin because
that's what the Skagosi will try to do.
They will try to hit those supply lines.
They will try to kill your food bringers, kill your hunters,
kill the guy, kill the people who aren't actively engaged in
fighting, hit them when they're not looking, guerrilla raid
style. Again, doesn't this really sound
like Dorn? Those of y'all who listen to our
Conquest with Dorn episodes, and when I tried to put it from the
perspective of the Northern, like nights from the Stormlands
or from the Reach and just how alien and horrific this land
was, they might have gone in with bravado and then realized
it was hellish and like, what are we getting into?
I don't think that would have been the case for this for the
Northerners. I think the Northerners have a
better idea of what they were getting into and they knew it
was going to be terrible. Escagos's reputation is a little
maybe more closely linked to the rest of the North, and Dorn's
separation from the rest of the Seven Kingdoms is larger.
Those Red Mountains are a lot larger than a lot larger of a
geographical barrier than the the Bay of Seals or the Bay of
Ice, Whichever one it is, I forget.
So yeah, even hardened northerners could be overmatched
by Skagos, I think and, and, and anyone can be overmatched by
starvation, right? Can.
I tell you how funny it is for you to say that when you could
literally look to your to your over your shoulder.
Oh, yeah, it's right here. Yeah, it's on the.
Other side. See, I don't even look in the
right place. Seals.
Yeah, it's the Bay of Seals. Yeah, we got the bite here.
And the Bay of Seals up here, which was the Bay of.
Oh, yeah. The Bay of Ice is the way.
Is the western the Bay of Seals at the eastern one.
Yeah. Cool.
All right. Good call, Shay.
And shout out to Michael Clarfeld for those great maps.
The other most scarier thing about the Skagos as compared
when we're comparing it to Dorn, is the Dornish won't eat you,
right? They won't eat you afterwards.
And because we hear two things about this.
One is like they we hear that they're just regular cannibals,
that they sometimes resort to cannibals when it gets really
cold, but they also eat the hearts and livers of their
defeated enemies. They're very grim warrior
culture kind of thing. If you know that about your
enemy, if you know that's what they do to you, would you allow
yourself to be captured? Would you take your own life if
they were closing in around you and you knew their intent was to
try to take you captive and eat you?
I think I would kill myself. I don't think I would allow that
to happen, especially if I was a warrior that that was, you know,
tough enough to do that sort of thing to be like, yes, I'm, I'm
strong enough. I'm a strong enough of mine to
realize that I'm going to die and I my only and I would rather
die painlessly then roasted over some fire.
You know, I mean sacrifice of their heart trees, you know, is
there a. Reason you think they're doing
it alive? No, but you might be worried
about that. You don't know.
You're like, yeah, maybe they chop a piece off and eat that,
save the rest for later, you know, slow, like, do vargo
haute, you know, kind of thing where they, like, leave him
alive. The meat stays fresh.
You know, like, I think your imagination could get pretty
wild there when you're thinking it's all about to end.
So yeah, I think yeah, you just don't want to face that.
You don't want to be sacrificed to a heart tree or eaten or any
of those things you like. I'm jumping, I'm jumping into
the sea. I don't want them to eat me at
all. Just let me go.
Can we get another perspective on this Gagosi?
From none other than Sam Tarly quote.
They lived in caves and grim mountain fastnesses.
Sam had read and rode great shaggy unicorns to war.
Skagos meant stone in the Old Tongue.
The Skagosi named themselves the Stoneborn, but their fellow
Northmen called them Skaggs and liked them little.
Only 100 years ago, Skaggos had risen in rebellion.
Their revolt had taken years to quell and claimed the life of
the Lord of Winterfell and hundreds of his sworn swords.
Similar but different information than we got before.
The earlier quote said thousands of lives total.
This was hundreds of sworn swords.
It's just as telling. So these are warriors, not, you
know, villagers or things like that.
Would we assume there were casualties like that as well?
But I think it was mostly armies clashing or soldiers clashing,
Warriors clashing. Hundreds of sworn swords.
That's a lot, right? I mean, Winterfell's entire
complement of sworn swords is probably in the hundreds.
Like you don't have. They don't carry standing armies
around. Like this is not a feudal
system. Doesn't know how it works.
When people aren't fighting, they're tending to land for the
most part, with some exceptions, only the higher nobles
generally. So that's a really big deal.
With years of this war lasting, you can imagine that there were
attempts to invade Skagos that then failed, and then they had
to try again. And then once the day had a
successful landing, it took a really long time to penetrate
deep inland and defeat this Gagosi in their own keeps and
and to bring them to heel. And because it doesn't sound
like they would be very willing, even like the Dornish, like you
beat them and then they just bend the knee and say psych
we're we didn't actually bend the knee.
We just pretended we came out of our caves and hit you in the
stabbed you in the back. So the death of Barth Blacksword
in battle also tells you not only that wow, the Skaggs were
successful. They must have won several
battles for this, for the war to have lasted as long as it did,
for the lives that it were lost to have been accounted for.
They would also have just been all the more motivated after
this. Like, wow, we just lost the Lord
of Winterfell in a war that started because we look weak.
This makes us look weaker. Damn it, This is the opposite.
We, if we beat the Skagosi handily, it would shut down the
notion that we are weak. But the Lord of Winterfell just
died in the war. That sends the opposite message.
So it kind of tells me that they're going to try even
harder, They're going to punish the Skagosi even harder to
prove, hey, we're not weak, right?
That's when you can't overcome your enemies through strength.
You punish them afterwards. You punish the ones who can't
fight back as a show of strength.
That's all, too. It's all too common in this
world and other worlds, real worlds.
It's just a it's it's a deterrent.
You say, Look, yeah, this was really hard for us to shut down.
But we did win. And we're going to punish the
hell out of the survivors to keep you from doing it again.
We're going to make sure you remember that.
I do think they would have been very vicious to this Gagosi
after the death of Barth, if they weren't already, because
you got to look strong in the face of the death of the Lord of
Winterfell, and the only way to look strong in a war is by
killing and winning. You have to make examples.
You got to probably parade some heads on Pikes.
The Lords of Crowl and Stain and Magnar might have to be put on
the gates of Winterfell to remind people, to prove that the
Skagosi were defeated, that this is the price you pay for
rejecting Winterfell's rule. There would have been other
Starks with him, right? What would would his younger
brother Brandon, Would he have been fighting along at his side,
or would he have stayed back to make sure there's a Stark in
Winterfell? Well, it wouldn't have to be
Brandon, because there's other Starks.
We've got Serena and Edrick's kids.
We've got Kriegard, Torin, right?
Those are the two older brothers.
We've got Lonel Snow, Brandon's bastard's son and Brandon's
trueborn children, Rodwell and Baron.
Baron may have cut his teeth against the Skaggs before
fighting against the Ironborn, right?
Or maybe he was too young. We're not sure.
The, again, the ages are all over the place in terms of
possibilities here, but it's unlikely that Barth Blacksword
was the only start to fight in this war, and thus it may have
been a case of Brandon being right there when his brother
fell and just battlefield promotion to Lord of Winterfell.
All of a sudden, just, well, there's an arrow in my brother's
throat or a Unicorn horn in his chest, Pick up ice.
OK, I can't wield this, but pick it up and keep going, right?
Something like that. And just picture that, though,
this tall, imposing Stark fighting with a great sword
surrounded by his sworn swords, Unicorn horns flashing.
And I don't know that Barth would be on a horse 'cause
they're having to land from the sea.
I don't know if they brought horses even with them.
I don't know if that's was part of their battle plan or not.
Either way, imagine him out front whipping that sword around
many people. We ought to see it, especially
if he was a big guy, that sword going up and down and all of a
sudden it just doesn't come back up again and it falls and stays
down. And that's a grim feeling if
you're being, if you're the following the Lord of Winterfell
into battle and all of a sudden he's gone.
Uh oh. You know, it may have been one
of his entire armies might have been wiped out at the same time.
It might have been like a oops, like I said earlier, an arrow to
the throat or just an accidental kind of thing, or may have been
an ambush Overwhelming. There's a lot of ways this guy
could have died. You know, it's just like the
list of ways to die in war is immense.
You know, he could have drowned trying to get off the ship
there. And or since we're talking about
Dorne, maybe they agreed to a parlay and then cheated.
And we're like, we're not, this isn't a parlay.
We're going to ambush you. You know, something like that.
Besides other potential Starks, there would have been the
Cassells, you know, Jory Cassell, Martin Cassell, people
who that house has been loyal to the Starks for countless
generations. Any Cassells capable of fighting
would have been there at Barth's side, and they might have seen
it as a great dishonor that he fell while they were with him.
They may have died at his side. Like I said, it may have been,
they may have died with him. It may have been like a dare on
the the young dragon where at the parlay or not.
His Kingsguard were slain for the most part -1 who was
captured? Eamon was definitely captured.
I think one other one surrendered.
But regardless, same. The point stands either way,
that there's a lot of ways for him to fall.
And no matter which one of them it is, it's very embarrassing
for the North. It's very embarrassing for his
sworn swords. It's very embarrassing for how
Stark. It's just embarrassing.
It looks weak. Maybe he fell trying to take one
of the major seats deep down Driftwood Hall or King's House.
Those are the three seats of Crowell, Stain and Magnar.
I don't think they're grandstone fortresses, but they could be
built into the side of a mountain.
You know, they might have caves they might be connected to.
They might be difficult despite not having modern technology.
And they would certainly be fought bitterly over.
They would certainly not. They'd certainly be held by an
opponent that was that knew they couldn't couldn't expect to win
quarter. This was an all or nothing kind
of engagement, especially after the death of Barth Blacksword, I
think. So after his death, whatever the
circumstances were, Brandon took over.
And as I said, all current Starks descend and descend from
this Brandon. So unless Barth died during like
the final battle, or you know, something that was really close
to the end of the war, it would have have to be Brandon that
carried the flag to the end and finished the war off.
Unless his vassals did it for him.
You never know, Maybe this Brandon just wasn't a a war guy.
But either way, I repeat that there would have been extra
pressure to win decisively to show that this isn't worth it to
anyone else. No one else should be thinking
rebellion because look, you failed.
Yeah, you got close, but you failed.
That lesson would not be learned by the Ironborn and by Raymond
Redbeard. Indeed, this remains, as we said
at the beginning, the start of a lot of uprisings and problems in
the North. Remember as well that I said
Brandon didn't last very long after Barth, nor did his eldest
Rodwell. Either of them could have died
to the great Spring Sickness, which was in 209, and that could
have been a a factor in reducing the overall population of the
North as well. That could have made them weaker
that you first you lose to this, first you lose thousands of men
in the Skagosi rebellion, then the great spring sickness
happens, then Dagan Greyjoy's Ironborn come, and then you have
the she Wolves of Winterfell incidents.
So yeah. And then you have the Battle of
Long Lake at 2:26 with Raymond Redbeard.
So the North was probably very low population, given all these
things that happened outro. Watch out, Davos, as little as
we know about Skagos, what we do know is a combination of
exciting and terrifying. It remains, like we said, a bit
of a time capsule, but it's a time capsule to a fascinating,
interesting time. The North, the old N, the
ancient N, isolated and northern by nature, and I do mean nature,
it has a mystical and dangerous quality to it, and perhaps extra
dangerous to a Southerner. And consider that we are going
to see it through the eyes of a southerner.
Our POV in Skagos is going to be Davos, Not, you know, not
Ricken, not John or someone else in the North.
Something that's a device we've seen George use in the
beginning. Catelyn was our first insight
into a lot of the strangeness of the North, because she's not
from there. All the strangeness from Bran's
eyes, from Ned's eyes, from John, it's not as strange to
them because it's what they grew up with to Catlin's the outsider
in the North. And so her perspective is really
important to showing us the strangeness of the place from an
outsider's perspective. We're going to get that through
Davos on Skagos, and that's awesome.
So keep. Hearing what you said from I
think it was Valerie Rita's, Yeah, pack your bagos for
Skagos, Davos. Keep hearing that for some
reason I. Know me too honestly, Yeah, not
to toot my own joke, but yes, I was proud of myself for that
one. So yeah, so we have we have like
other characters going north, which is things like George is
setting this up for a lot of PO VS to be showing as a lot of
northern things through non northern eyes because yeah, we
already had Catelyn and she's kind of not in the picture in
terms of that anymore. Sam has gone north and then gone
back S he may go back N again, but we also have Asha and
Melisandre, who has a lot of insight into the supernatural.
So Asha, Melisandre, Davos, maybe Sam comes back.
It's almost as if a lot of Southern POV characters are
headed north. OK, actually scratch the almost
a lot of southern POV characters are headed north or already
there. It's already.
Yeah. Anyway, the Stoneborn are just
too bad ass and fun and they're like Chekhov's cool side race
from the North. They have to be important.
They got to be part of the battle of for the Dawn or a
problem in the North uniting something.
I don't know exactly what, but my point stands.
They are too cool to be left out.
Davos is going to get us there. We're going to see a lot of
echoes of what we just talked about with Barth Blacksword and
the the types of dangers that they present or the type of an
ally they can be for both and. That's great, but we also will
get by filling in these things through A Song of Ice and Fire.
We will also be back filling a lot of this.
We'll also learn more about the history of House Stark, which is
a grand goal that we can only inch further forward on because
we'll never get it all. We'll never get all the history
of House Stark. That's ridiculous. 8000 plus
years of history is never going to happen.
But characters like Barth, Black Sword are a big reason why we do
want more, why we want to get as much as we can get.
Even if it's only inches, we want it.
Trivia question. Who said the line?
Only heart trees ever see half of what they do on Skagos.
Roose Bolton said that one. Yes, he did.
None other than Roose Bolton. I see.
I said there wouldn't be much Dread Ford in this one, but I
had to get a little in there. A little.
Bolton snuck in there. That's right.
That is our episode. My friends.
I hope you enjoyed this northern deep dive into an old ancient
place and Winterfell and the succession crises and a lot of
characters that we want to know more about but we already know
quite a bit about. If you want to stay immersed,
check out our Hard Home episode or our Skagos episode.
We have one, it's really old, but it talks about a lot of
these things in a different light and some new other things
as well. Hour of the Wolf Craig and Stark
episode focused on him rather and then another one, actual
Lord Craig and Stark focused on his whole life and not just the
hour of the Wolf. Hour of the Wolf being such a
being a separate incident that's important within his life.
We have two scripted episodes on House Manderly.
We have an episode on House Karstark.
Honestly, I couldn't list all the ones that this one touched
on. There's a lot.
And of course, Ashea even mentioned Valerie.
That's where we cover quite a lot of Northern stuff as well.
So really, you have a lot of options.
My friends and I do appreciate you sticking with us.
We have so much more to do. As you heard during the halfway
point of this episode, we have a lot of great episodes coming
this year and a lot more. That is not the full list.
It's only the full list of topicsmoot.
We have some that we're coming up with on our own.
We've always got more ideas. And of course, later this year
they'll be ATV season. So 20252025 is continuing to
shape up great. We'll keep it going, and one of
the best ways you can keep it going and maximize your
enjoyment is to Valar reread us. Thanks to Nina, thanks to
Michael Klarfeld, thanks to Joey, and thanks to you all
again, Valerie Ritas.