Our subject again today is Lomas Longstrider, who explored
farther and wider than any other explorer we know of.
A scribe, not a Lord. Which makes his endeavour more
impressive because he had less wealth and protection and
probably less education, though maybe not that it made his
record better. That's the important thing.
No lordly explorer is going to outscribe a scribe unless they,
you know, hire some scribes to help them along with that.
But as far as we know, that's never happened.
Only Lomas has done that, and at least as far as information
we've been given. And of course, his two books,
Wonders and Wonders Made by Man, are very important books within
the setting. Tyrion owned them both, as we
told you. He read them over and over until
they fell apart. I'm glad to know that podcasts
don't fall apart when you listen to them over and over.
In this episode we will cover, Of course Wonders, the first of
the two books, and we will need a lot of imagination.
We needed a lot of imagination for the last one, but I think we
need even more today. Definitely more guesswork
because we know less about the wonders he chose than the man
made ones. We had a lot more information on
the Man Made Ones, but we have no shortage of candidates from
all over the known world, and we'll be describing what we know
about these places, kind of comparing and contrasting within
the setting as well to the real world.
We've got lots of examples of real world wonders that are
wonderful companions or parallels to some of these, and
we'll do our best to picture them the sights as Lomas saw
them while describing what we know of the candidates we've
chosen, many of which you have no doubt imagined prior to
today. But we'll go as deep as we've
ever gone on a lot of these places.
All that and more on this episode of History of Westeros
podcast. Hello and welcome, everybody.
It's another episode of our show History of Westeros podcast Back
Again. We're usually live on Sundays.
That's 3:00 Eastern. That time schedule does change
during TV season, but if we're not during ATV season, that's
when we're streaming. Every video can be found on
YouTube in unedited format. Of course have some edited
videos too, but every live stream is an unedited format on
YouTube and an edited format on Spotify.
And of course anywhere you listen to podcast, you can find
the edited version in non visual format, audio only.
Meaning this episode does contain a lot of images though,
a lot of visuals. Now, you don't need those to
enjoy it. They're useful sometimes,
stunning or epic or whatever, but they're not required.
You know, you can use your imagination.
That's that's totally fine. Sometimes underwhelming, as in
the one image I surfaced and she was like, I don't care about
this image. Yeah, she got one from the
mother of mountains from the TV show and it just looks kind of
like a grassy hill. I'm like, that doesn't even look
like a mountain. We're we're trying to pump these
up, not make them look weak. So yeah, I was like, let's cut
that, cut that, cut that, cut that.
So anyway, but yeah, if you are listening and aren't usually
someone who watches, this is the time to remind you that if
you're listening on Spotify, you can click the video player and
the video will come on and then you can turn it right back off.
You know, it's like a toggle. So if you if you want to see
what we're talking about just for those few minutes, you flip
it back on and then flip it back off if you don't want.
So it's it's a really useful feature to have if you have a if
you prefer to listen, but every once in a while you want to take
a look because we've got something on screen that's
useful, you know, that you really want to see anyway, your
choice. But we want to throw that out
there because it does add to the experience a little bit if you
have those images. Sean, how's it going today?
So you've got a Star Trek shirt on.
I've got a Me First and the Gimme, Gimme shirt.
Shay and I saw them this last week.
I also went to Shake and Ease Festival and saw a whole bunch
of bands. It was crazy seeing a lot of my
favorite bands all in a short period of time.
I saw Queens of the Stone Age, Weezer, The Offspring, and Royal
Blood in a span of 4 1/2 hours. Crazy.
You know, I also went to a music festival this last weekend and
saw Primus Slipknot System of a Down, Alice In Chains in the
span of four. Hours.
That is so awesome. That is a heavier set than I
saw. But you know, I would have.
I love all those bands. Also, I'm wearing this Star Trek
shirt in honor of Lomas, who was trying to go where no one had
gone before. Good point exploration.
It's a nice follow up because we were episodes being recorded on
May 5th. The day after May the fourth be
with you. So you go Star Wars yesterday to
Star Trek today. Yeah, very good, very good.
Right on. So let's see here.
A good shout out to our friend Nina, Good Queen
allie.tumblr.com. Lots of great notes from her
today. We had a lot of fun discussing
some of these things and helping each other discover some
peculiar facts about the real world, as well as what's going
on in Westeros and Essos and beyond.
Check her out good Queen allie.tumblr.com.
The latest blog post she has over there is about game and
pale hair, whether he was really Aegon the Second's bastard, or
at least that Aegon the Third genuinely believed he was, which
those are. Those can both be true.
He could not be one, but the King could have genuinely
thought he was. So it's a good question because
egg on the third was lonely and believing he had some kin seems
to have been part of that whole mix.
That whole scenario there. If you have questions for us,
you can post them live during in the comments and Shay will
select certain questions during the episode will will get
answered live. And if you have questions
outside of that, send them to westeroshistory@gmail.com and
often we'll include them in an episode if it's pertinent to
that particular episode. At the end of this one, of
course, as usual, I will list off several episodes we've done
in the past that relate to this one, and it's a pretty good size
list because we're talking about a lot of different places and
and different characters and it comes up a lot.
Also, at the end of the episode will be the answer to this
trivia question, which is a three parter related.
What are the names of the three roads that pass through the Bone
Mountains? The answer will be in this
episode. If you're paying attention,
you'll hear me say it, but you might already know the answer.
Let's start with the same brief intro quote we used last time.
It's so perfect, so fitting. Let's do it again.
Lomas long strider ass duck. A scribe long dead, said Halden.
He spent his life travelling the world and writing about the
lands he visited in two books he called Wonders and Wonders Made
by Man. An uncle of mine gave them to me
when I was just a boy, Tyrion said.
I read them until they fell to pieces.
The gods made seven wonders and mortal man made nine quoted the
half maester rather impious of mortal man to do the gods to
better, but there you are. So we don't have his lists, but
we can narrow it down. As I said, just like we did last
time, we have more, we have more of a list to narrow down because
we have more guessing to do. But to build on what we said
last time, what Howden said and what Nina says, which is that we
talked about the number of seven being kind of important because
of the seven as of you know, worship.
Now we of course do 7 wonders in the real world too, and there's
nothing necessarily religious about that.
So we can't be sure that's what he was doing.
But it's a strong theory. I like the idea, and it kind of
makes sense to me that he was willing to increase the number
of wonders made by man, because those are made by man.
But he wouldn't touch this. The wonders made by that's
seven. It's got to be 7.
We're not increasing that one. So I kind of like thinking about
it that way. It's kind of a fun, fun way to
view it. I wonder if it's just a literary
thing, like 7's the only number with two syllables, so 7 Wonders
rolls out the tongue better, but when you add made by man, then
you don't need the two syllables from the number anymore.
So that's a great point, and it's similar to something I said
a a while back about the number 17 and why it comes up so often
in music. Because it's the only teen
number with three syllables, 1819134.
There's all two syllables. 17 is the only one that has another
syllable. So it comes up more in
songwriting because it gives you another option that none of the
other numbers would do. And you just you just touched on
that same thing here with the syllables.
That's, there you go. Very good.
I like that. Now if if this is the reason,
like religion, the worship of the Seven is part of why or the
entire reason why Lomas did it this way, then that's another
place we can kind of very safely assume he went to, which is
Andalos. Like he would go to the home of
the Andal's, the fount where the Seven were supposedly born.
That said there isn't necessarily much in that region
that's wondrous except for the Titan which is you know newer
and was made by the Bravosi not by Andal so so we again to recap
9 man made wonders, 2 unlisted we know seven and of the seven
made by the gods in our nature we only know one.
And I'm going to use those terms interchangeably throughout the
episode. It's it's just called wonders in
Lomas book. But we're nature the gods that's
does the same thing in in for purposes of our discussion the
Westerosi and SoC would see it as the work of gods.
We see it as the work of George R Martin right.
So it's not quite the same, but you know, he's kind of God like
to us, right? The people of Westeros might not
realize it, but he's kind of God like to them.
That's very true. He is their ultimate God.
There is only one God of it should be Monothea if they know
the truth. So there's lots of comparisons
to Mad Men wonders. Like I said in the intro, but
it's a little tricky because the real world doesn't get
categorized in the same way. Like the ancient world didn't
have natural wonders, it had man made wonders only like they
existed. There was wondrous things, but
no one made a list of the ancient wonders of the world
that were made by gods. Everything was wondrous back
then. It was like, whoa, it was the
end of the world. So yeah, so it's when nature
makes something, it's it's a little harder to be impressed as
compared to humankind making something like when humankind
makes 1000 foot statue or you're like whoa, people did that like
that seems really hard. But like what's difficult for
nature? It's not even like a matter of
difficulty. It's just unlikely or just
coincidental or. Or time passing.
Yes, time. Like, you're right.
If humans made 1000 foot statue but it took them a million
years, you wouldn't be as impressed.
That's true. That's true.
You went seven years like holy crap.
How'd you do that? I said it was still standing
after a million years, but that's different.
Still, your point? Is Stillwell taken?
Yeah, so there's There's probably less association with
these locations, too, because Tyrion is the closest thing we
have to a modern Lomas and one of the few who's read him.
But he's mostly in his travels. Visiting the man made wonders,
we think. I mean, that's.
I say that not knowing what all the natural wonders are, but I I
kind of just looking at his chapters.
It seems unlikely that that a lot of these qualify, but some
of them do for like the for example the Royne.
To help us out here too we've enlisted a a a long time fandom
friend, Adam Whitehead. He is in the books as a
character named Sir Whitehead. Sir Adam Whitehead, He's in
there. His nickname is Wurthead and
he's a Blogger in the UK. We've met him and did a panel
with him when we were in Ireland and he runs the Atlas of Ice and
Fire blogs. He's particularly dedicated to
covering geography. It covers lots of things, but
this is one of his focuses, his foci, foci.
And so he's taken on some of these inherent difficulties and
wonders. And he's done a really good job
in terms of extrapolating distance and size based on
measurements we've gotten from within the books.
So we're going to cite him quite a bit today, and I want to let
you all know where you can find him.
I'll repeat this at the end, but it's Atlas of Ice and Fire.
blog.wordpress.com. Adam Whitehead.
We're a Patreon supporter of him and if you haven't visited his
site before you might decide to sign up after checking it out.
A lot of good stuff on there. He also weighed in on the Man
Made Wonders, but we we had three hours of coverage without
anybody's help there, so we're going to use him this episode.
Not as much last time, but yeah, so let's let's get back to where
he travelled to and help. That helps us narrow down the
scope of the regions will include for where these wonders
might exist the farther E the stories emerge.
Like the the things we hear about the East, they sound more
and more wondrous and legendary. Which gives us some reason to
doubt that they're they're probably exaggerated, just like
the stories of Essos or the stories of Westeros told in the
East are exaggerated And those we can corroborate Like when
people say, oh, this casterly rock is made of gold, we're
like, well, OK, that's clearly not we know that's not true.
So what's the reverse? They say something like stories
about Ashai or things like that, like that might be a little
exaggerated given that the stories of Castley Rock over
there are exaggerated. So yeah, it goes both ways.
Literally goes both ways east to West and north to South, I
guess, but less of that because to the South it's there's a lot
less people down there. But here we also get a direct
contradiction in the world of Ice and Fire that kind of adds
to the mystery and and throws us off off a little bit.
And here's a quote that both establishes that vibe and sets
up this contradiction, that we'll show it to you.
Is there any truth to these grim fables, brought back from the
end of the earth by singers and sailors and dabblers and
sorcery? Who can say?
Lomas LON Strider never saw shy by the shadow.
Even the sea snake never sailed so far.
Those who did have not returned to tell us their tales.
That's clearly an error because not only do we have a different
quote that tells us the sea snake was in Ashai, but we have
a different quote that tells us that Lomas was in Ashai.
So there's two errors in there. So rather than the other two
separate instances being a mistake, it's probably this
instance of one paragraph with two mistakes.
Now it might be an intentional mistake, meaning that George or
Elio and Linda put that in there to to intentionally have
contradictions in their source because that would be somewhat
realistic, but I don't know if that's the case or not.
So for example, the Sea Snake one comes from, which we covered
in the Sea Snake episode, and in the Sun Chaser episode he
mentioned seeing a ship that looked like the Sun Chaser
there, so he clearly was there if he's if he saw a ship in the
harbor that looked familiar to him.
Anyway, here is the conflicting Lomas Longstrider quote
regarding Ashai. Lomas Longstrider reports that
even in Far Ashai by the Shadow, there were merchants who asked
him if it was true that the lion Lord lived in a palace of solid
gold and that crofters collected a wealth of gold simply by
plowing their fields. Right.
That's just ridiculous. We know how we know that's not
true. We've seen Castle.
Well, we haven't seen inside Castle, right?
We've heard a lot about it. We've never heard anything about
gold just in the fields. Maybe an occasional nugget turns
up there, but I seriously doubt that's a a regular occurrence.
And it's definitely not a palace of solid gold.
So you can see why it's difficult to piece some of the
things together when we're getting stories like this that
are clearly false, demonstrably and verifiably false.
Here is another quote that's awesome, but full of speculation
and perhaps half truth, but maybe seeds of truth, which
makes them all the more interesting.
Of the lands that lie beyond the five forts, we know even less.
Legends and lies and travellers tales are all that ever reach
us. Of these far places we hear.
Of cities where the men soar like Eagles on leathered wings,
of towns made of bones, of a race of bloodless men who dwell
between the deep valley called the Dry Deep and the mountains.
Whispers reach us of the Gray waste and its cannibal sands.
And of the trikes who live there, half human creatures with
green scaled skin and venomous bites.
Are these truly lizard men, or more likely, men clad in the
skins of lizards? Or are they no more than fables?
The grumpkins and snarks of the eastern deserts and even the
Shrikes, supposedly live in terror of Cadath in the Gray
Waste, a city said to be older than time, where unspeakable
rites are performed to slake the hunger of mad gods.
Does such a city truly exist? If so, what is its nature on
such matters? Even Lomas Longstrider is
silent. Perhaps the priests of Ye TI
know, But if so, these are not truths they care to share with
us. That line that even Lomas
Longtreder is silent on what's beyond the five forts pretty
much indicates he hasn't been there, because this is someone
who's read his books. And it's not like we can
speculate that Lomas went to Valyria because maybe it's just
not told to us. But this pretty much says he
didn't speak on them. We don't know if he spoke.
There's no, there's no like Lomas Lungdrider never spoke on
Valyria. We just don't know.
It might just have been omitted for authorial reasons.
This is pretty definitive, I think.
Don't you agree, Sean? Except that it's possible a book
was lost or destroyed or incomplete or something like
that. OK, a third book that no one
ever knows about. Like it probably wouldn't have
been the first book or maybe it would have been referenced in
the 1st 2:00. But if he wrote a third incident
or a follow up, yeah, that could have been lost to histories.
That's definitely, that is definitely a real thing that's
happened. And maybe could still be
discovered, right? Like, maybe.
Fun to think, unlikely, but Sam pulls it up from the the library
somewhere you know. Can I say I don't know about
you, but when they describe Cadath and the Gray Waste with
the Unspeakable Rites performed to slake the hunger of bad gods,
it makes me think of weirwood trees.
Oh, OK. Yeah.
Comparing I'm trying to compare things from the 5 fourths region
to the wall region and frankly that is what they do for the
weirwood. Trees.
They do sacrifice people to the trees and do like put hang their
entrails in the branches. Or they did and maybe still do
in some distant corners of the north.
But you're right that's that's totally like that's unspeakable.
I mean, we just spoke it, but I. Mean if you were describing what
happened around the weirwoods and around the wall to someone
on that part of the world, it would sound just as wild and
crazy and people go live in the tree like it.
It would sound just as as as exotic.
You're totally right. And like these stories about
lizard men and and people wearing skins.
Like what do people's what? What is an old Nan Tell Bran and
the other kids about the free folk.
Like the her stories are away exaggerated from there and she
lives in the North like she's not even from the you know some
other continent. Yeah.
The others though like what would people say about the
others like that what what tales of the others would exist in the
east. They would probably sound sort
of like some of this stuff like Cadath or the Gray Waste
compared to the the Frozen Waste or the the lands of always
Winter. Yeah, you're absolutely right.
Shay. Like, are they wearing skins of
lizards, or are they Are they actually lizard men?
Or are they wearing skins of lions?
Or are they actually lion man or bear bear men or whatever the
wildlings are wearing? Or are they actually undead?
Soaring like Eagle Eagles with leathern wings too.
I wonder if that is like you said, maybe it's some criminal
of truth to that. Like maybe there is some place
where they dive off cliffs, right?
Like and and over time someone realized like, hey, you can
catch a little air. With this device or whatever and
in. That glider ritual.
They have these some sort of Cape or kite or something that
they dive off cliffs and they can kind of soar.
And so in seeing that and going back and tell the tales and in
flash forward 200 years now they have wings, you know.
Yep, that fits really well. And it's it's, it's expressed
here too. Like, yeah, do they really soar
on Eagles or is this some sort of story?
Yeah, it is probably some sort of story.
Now Cadas adds to the vibe here, because if that is straight from
Lovecraft and anything straight from Lovecraft is going to be
creepy and mysterious and old. He loves doing old old and this
is and he loves mad gods and hungry mad gods and gods who are
aren't neutral. I love one of Lovecraft's things
was yeah, no, the universe isn't neutral.
It's out to get you. So that that seems to be the
vibe in this place too. So we're going to bring all this
up only to discard it because it doesn't sound like Lomas went
there. It's entirely possible that The
Gray Waste, the Dry Deep, the Cannibal Sands would be worthy
candidates, but we'll omit them because I don't think Lomas went
there, even though we do think he went to the 5 Fourths.
I just don't think he went beyond.
It's probably too dangerous. Like, how could he travel to
some of these places? It sounds inhospitable or like
the Dry Deep is no water and it's just it sounds like
something like Death Valley or something like that.
So like, yeah, don't go there. You know, there was.
AI didn't put in a document, but there was a quote by John when
he was going through the Frost Fangs.
First he's talking about the dangers and the treacherousness
and the shadow cats and such. But then he says, but there were
also wonders, you know, he was so glad that he was on this
adventure. And he described like, you know,
you know, in the midst of this ice jungle, there would be a
field of flowers blooming and there would be like frozen
waterfalls and, you know, spectacular stuff Lomas may have
never saw, probably never saw that, right.
We are humans, very few humans who probably ever saw what John
saw there. And so he might have counted it
among the the wonders if he had seen it.
But even he didn't go everywhere.
Yeah, we don't have any evidence He went beyond the wall and
yeah, I if he did, then you're right.
But he would maybe say the Frostbangs or the milk water.
I don't know. The haunted forest is awfully
large. I would be curious what he would
have said about those things, but yeah, most likely he didn't
go. He would.
Have said, yeah, yeah, he would have said that for sure.
Definitely he say that. But also in Westeros is a
curiosity that we can't answer. That I deeply like to know is
did he go to the try or try to go to the God's eye?
Like was he one of many people that tried to sail there and the
wind blew him off course or you'd think he would try, like
that was got to be on his list. But if he couldn't actually see
it, then what would he write? I was like, well, it's wondrous
that the winds blew me off course every single time.
It's like it's strange. I don't know if it's wondrous,
but that would that would get a foot in there.
That would be written about in a book probably.
Maybe not, depending on what the rules of the God's eye are.
OK, the rules. The first rule of the God's eye
is don't talk about that. God's Eye Club.
Yeah, that's right. So we're in our efforts to find
the basis. Like we we tried to come up with
some categorization thing like So what?
One of the things we can do is like best of's not really best
of's. Actually it's more like biggest.
Is it the largest, the deepest, the tallest, the longest, or?
Superlatives. Yes, any superlative you can
think of. We tried to include here for
basis for judgement here the. Smallest forest in the world.
Yeah, it's the tiniest. It's just a little tiny.
It's a single leaf on the end of a piece of concrete.
Yeah, I think that would that would mean more than 7 wonders.
So these are widely considered that we're going to list, I'm
just going to list these off, Sean and I list these off these
modern natural wonders of the world.
Of course there is no central authority on this of course.
So there's just different groups have done this.
And some of these you'll hear again because we'll compare them
to some of the ones that are in Westeros and Essos.
I'll I'll list the first group of Sean will list the second
group. This is basically the list that
CNN made in 1997. So other people kind of
corroborated it. But like I said, it might be
kind of silly to think CNN's list but you know a lot of
people made lists. It's a good list, I think.
I wouldn't argue with any of these on here.
The difficulty being it's you got to narrow it down to seven,
and maybe my list would be slightly different, but these
are all very, very worthy. None of these are like Slack.
It wasn't just like Wolf Blitzer coming up with 7, right?
Yeah, it was a panel. Effort into, you know, experts
and whatnot, so. So the list is Mount Everest,
the Grand Canyon, the Great Barrier Reef, the Northern
Lights, Victoria Falls, which is in Zimbabwe, Rio Harbor like Rio
de Janeiro, that's Brazil of course.
And then the Paracutin volcano, which is, I believe in Chile,
It's definitely in, in South America.
Mexico. OK, my bad.
Yeah. And so Central America then.
And Sean, list the other ones here.
This next seven was a group that an organization that had a a
bunch of funding and in a worldwide poll with hundreds of
millions of people voting. And this is the seven they came
up with was Port Au Princesa, the Amazon, Halong Bay, Iguaco
Falls, Jeju Island, Komodo Island, and Table Mountain.
OK. Right off the top, I want to say
one, the second one has much more Asian representation and
all too. I remember you telling me about
the phone in campaigns that they had for this.
We talked about that last week a bit how it was somewhat
swayable, which you know, fair enough, but I think it gives a
good array. The second list, but I feel like
the first list has some more household names perhaps.
So like I think I would if I if I were, if it were me, I would
combine half of half of list one with list 2 for my own natural
wonders. Yeah, it's interesting because
mountain out like only the Grand Canyon is in the US you have
Victoria Falls is in Africa, Rio harbors in South America, so is
paracut and volcanoes in Central America.
The Northern Lights are kind of, you know, in a lot of places,
but only in the far north. And the Great Barrier Reef is
obviously like Australia and Mount Everest is Nepal.
So yeah, there, I like what you're saying, a Shaya too,
because there's no island represented there.
And the I like the idea of a Bay and of course the Amazon River
is I think very worthy as well. Anyway, let's let's move on to
the actual, only confirmed Wonder of the World and
Planetos, the Caves of Norvas quote.
Close by the city walls, the norvashi work the land on the
terraced farms. Farther out, men gather behind
stout timber Palisades in holdfasts and walled villages.
The streams here are swift, running and Stony, and caverns
honeycomb the endless hills. Many of the caves are home to
the brown bears common to these northern lands, others to packs
of red or Gray wolves. In some can be found the bones
of giants and painted walls that speak of men's dwelling here in
ages past. One cavern system some 100
leagues northwest of Norvos, is so vast and deep that legend
claims it is the entrance to the underworld.
That's something that's come up in a lot of real world cave
systems like because so many of the wonders are associated with
religion or the province of gods.
Very deep cave and and and if you have a religion that has an
underworld like the Greek myths, for example, you would this
would be a portal to that. You can see why they would see
it that way. But there's so many cool real
world things to hear that we've we've seen and mixed in with the
things like that are not real world like the bones of giants.
But but almost everything else is is very realistic to the real
world like wolves living in caves.
Just the fact that there are caves that people live in them
and the idea that there are cave paintings, that's really cool.
Nina mentions The Cave paintings in Lesko.
But of course there's lots of cave paintings around the world.
Lesko is just one of the really famous ones that has some some
of the oldest and most well preserved ones.
But there's cave paintings in a lot of places around the world
that were made thousands of years ago, if not in some cases
10s of thousands of years ago. And it sounds like that's the
case here with the caves of Norvas.
Sean, you looked up some real world parallels.
Nina mentions Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, which is huge and I
know they they sometimes bands play shows in there, which is
really neat, big enough. So you could have an audience of
thousands of people, Yeah. Yeah, it's totally on our bucket
list. I want to see a show there.
Oh, I was thinking of the caverns in Tennessee.
Puerto Princesa is in the Philippines, and it's it's a
river slash cave. It's a river that flows into
like 10 miles of caves. And there's underground
waterfalls and you know, big openings of caverns and all
kinds of wildlife. And that I think it kind of
recently, maybe in the past 10 or so years, they even
discovered a whole new section and that it's still being
explored today, a massive cavern network with a river, running
fluid and everything. So, and it was one of those new
wonders of the world. Right on.
I remember us talking about I've honestly slipped my mind which
episode it was. We talked about this huge cave
system that's fairly recently discovered only in the last like
70 or 80 years that was discovered in China.
And it's so deep and wide and it has its new species like species
of monkeys that have never been seen before that live in there
and and under router underwater lakes that had new species of
fish and and other. Yeah.
So there's talk about unexplored.
Like in the real world there is a lot of stuff unexplored.
We talk about the deep sea as a frontier of of exploration, and
it is, but caves are right there with it.
They're they're in some ways more mysterious, in some ways
perhaps less. But, you know, it just depends,
right? Different kind of creatures grow
there. And it's just amazing to think
about this in terms of a place like Norvos.
I love the idea of bones, of giants, and I love the idea of
of ancient culture being preserved through not just
paintings, but I'm sure there's like tools, like an
archaeologist could have a field day finding Flint tools, stone
tools, things besides artwork, maybe some textiles that were
left behind, you know, shreds here and there, like worked
bone. All the sort of things that that
archaeologists dig into. It's also begs the question if
there's probably cave systems in the world that would maybe be
more impressive than this. Like Blood Raven's cave.
The Green Seer Cave is a potential example, but other
ones too that just we don't know about, that he doesn't know
about. Like he probably didn't find all
the biggest and deepest caves in the world and he surely didn't
exploit these like in the area chapter when they find those
caves, who else has been in those?
Like, I doubt Lomas went in that cave and it's pretty creepy
because there's like carved stuff in there and humongous
natural caverns formed by millennia worth of water and and
other stuff. So yeah, it's this is by itself
just really inspires the imagination.
And we know there's caves of sorts under the wall too, right?
It's true, the worm waves, yes, yes, I'm.
Not sure how big or explored they are, but I and I don't know
if Lomas went in there, but. And that might be relevant.
Plot directly. Plot relevant too, because you
know, you wonder about stories like Gendel and Gorn that tried
to tunnel under the wall. And is that going to come up
somehow? Is that was that meant to be
just a curious tale from the past or is that going to be
relevant? Is that going to be maybe one of
the ways the others try to get around or maybe some free who
knows, I don't know. Maybe we may be past the point
where people are trying to evade the wall.
The next thing that may happen is it goes down and that's that.
But who knows? We'll see.
Lomas must have really liked Norvos, 'cause it has a natural
and a man made wonder. The bells of Norvos are right
there, the caves of Norvos are right there, and no other city
can possibly claim that. Because this is the only
confirmed natural wonder, it's possible that there's another
city that has two wonders. We just don't have any other
confirmed natural wonders, so that's just impossible for us to
say that. So eat your heart out, cohor
neighboring Cohor. They're just they feel jealous.
Actually, don't Don't encourage the followers of the Black Goat
to eat any hearts. They might take that literally.
So let me use a different, different wording there.
So with that solitary, confirmed example, let us move on to the
joy of guesswork and theory. I would love to spend more time
on each of these, but of course we can't do that.
So again, if you want us to spend more time on any
individually, let us know what your favorite ones are.
And of course, we're curious what your guesses are as to the
Six Wonders. So let's move on to the Black
Goat Worshipping Fellows. Since they are next door and we
just mentioned them, let's talk the Forest of Cohor.
Start with a quote. The woods that surround Cohor
are the principal source of the city's wealth.
The earliest settlement here was a lumber camp, the city's
histories reveal, and even to this day it is as hunters and
foresters that the cohoric are most famed shining cities and
sprawling towns of the Lower Rhine.
Hunger for wood and their own forests have long ago been
depleted, cut down, and plowed under for fields and farms.
Huge barges heavy with timber depart the docks of Cohor every
day for the long voyage down the coin to Dagger Lake and the
markets of Selhoris, Valasar voluntaries, and old Volantis.
The forest of Kohor also yields up firs and pelts of all kinds,
many rare and fine and highly prized, as well as silver, tin,
and amber. The vast forest has never been
fully explored, according to the maps and scrolls at the Citadel,
and it likely conceals many mysteries and wonders at its
heart. Like many northerly forests, it
contains elk and deer in great numbers, along with wolves, tree
cats, boars of truly monstrous size, spotted bears, and even a
species of lemur, a creature known from the Summer Isles and
Sithorios but otherwise rarely seen further north.
Well said, Shia reads those so well.
A look at the map shows just how big this forest is.
It's easily the biggest forest we can see in essence.
Now if you distinguish between forest and jungle, there's it's
not always easy to make that distinction.
Maybe some expert could do a better job than me, but I were
separating them. I'm not sure how much they
deserve to be separated. Certainly Sothorios and Altos
appear to be entirely forest and or jungle, and we don't know
that much about Altos at all. But Satorios's jungles probably
have some hidden wonders. But they will also definitely
kill you. So that may subtract from the
wondrousness, or at least from Lomas's ability to go and
explore the place on the first you know at all to make those
distinctions and those judgments.
Now, the summer Islanders might be different.
They may have actually explored quite a bit of Satorios, but
that's a tale for another time. We also don't know how big the
Force cohort is compared to, say, the Kingdom of the
Evequivron, which is also quite large, the forest.
Both of those forests are quite possibly the two largest in the
world. Nothing in Westeros even comes
remotely close, which is really saying something because the
wolf's wood is large, very large.
But a tripling of the wolf's wood probably doesn't match the
forest cohort, at least just judging by the the size on the
maps. So truly, the forests of
Westeros are mere copses or tree stands compared to the ones of
Essos. So it's it's just gigantic.
So you can believe that it's not fully explored.
Like, yeah, I I can understand that.
However, a caveat that we're going to have to say many times
is our information is coming from the Citadel.
We know for sure that the people of Cohort, the people who live
there longer, probably know more about it than the people of the
Citadel. They haven't copied.
Every single piece of information hasn't been
transmitted to the Citadel. I'm sure they have secrets,
knowledge, books of their own perhaps that haven't made it to
the city. So if we're looking at it from
a, you know, logistical, how would it function in Planetos?
You can see where there would be more knowledge.
That's outside of Lomas's province.
He probably didn't speak Kahoric or read it, you know.
And so he may have been able to learn some of these things, but
it still would would come up short in terms of comprehensive
knowledge. Now, in real life, the largest
forest is the Amazon rainforest. No one's probably surprised to
hear that that's pretty well known.
It's 2.3 million square miles. It isn't just the largest, it's
the largest by far. No other rainforest on the
planet even comes close. But the Brazil isn't the country
with the most total forest. Their second, the most total
forest in the world by by country is Russia.
Which kind of makes sense because Russia is so huge and
large parts of it are unpopulated.
Canada is next. Same logic there.
Canada is huge but doesn't have a huge population. the US is
next, followed by China, then Australia and then Congo.
Like we named all these big, like huge countries.
Russia, Brazil, Canada, US, China, Australia, Congo.
No shade against Congo. They're just, they got a lot of
forests there. That's that wasn't, that wasn't
meant to be a negative comment. I'm just surprised to see such a
smaller country mixing with all these very large ones.
Yeah, there's lots of shade is right.
There's lots of shade. All those trees.
Exactly. Good point.
Nina adds that it's not just the size of the force of cohort,
which by itself is pretty wondrous, but the mysteries that
are hinted to be within it. The fact that it's not fully
explored or mapped would be intriguing.
So someone like Lomas at regular folk too.
I mean, I'm not an explorer and it sounds pretty cool to me.
I want to know more. It's it's just adds, you know,
makes me curious and yeah, what else is in there?
Riches of silver, tin, amber. What else is in there?
You know what other like hidden alcoves and mountains and and
creatures what what obscure fauna have hidden themselves
from the works of mankind for for so long.
I mean there's animals that have hidden from humankind in the
real world and we're way better at tracking stuff and and
locating stuff and our technology is much better.
So you got to believe there's some undiscovered things in
there. We do actually pass through it
with Danny. We pass through the core, the
force of cohort with Danny very, very early in the series on the
Valyrian roads, which is yet another example of wonders
merging. Now the well it's the first one
that where they merge and and Norvas you have two wonders in
the same basic location, but we will see other ones that
actually merge. So this is the man made Wonder
Valyrian roads going through the natural wonder candidate forest
of cohort. And we will have similar
examples like that sticking with Daenerys.
This is another one we've seen up next.
It's the mother of mountains and the womb of the world.
It's possible the two should be separated, but maybe together
using their combined powers they can become Will Wonder.
Wasn't that the name? Weren't there two superheroes?
The Wonder Twins? Yes, and with their power
combined. Wonder 20.
They were the wonder twin. That's good.
Call Sean. Yeah, they can combine.
Why not. Those were two so funny because
the the girl had such better shape shifting.
She could be any animal. And the dude would be like, I'm
a bucket, Yeah, yeah. And then she would turn into an
eagle and carry the bucket. You know, like, dude, you're you
got the short end of this one. She's way.
Cooler than you can come up. With yeah I.
Mean he had to just sit there and get carried and she had to
pull him. It sounds like he got the better
end of that. To me, she had better shape
shifting, but she also had to do more work.
Yeah, yeah. So we've seen this one, the both
of them, the Mother Mountains in the womb of the world, and
they're connected. The Dothraki connect them by a
thing called the Gods way. There's like like a long road
that leads from the womb of the world to the mother of
mountains. Now the interesting thing is,
even though they're both feminine, the mother of
mountains and the womb of the world, women aren't allowed on
the mother of mountains. Only men can climb the mother of
mountains. And I don't think men are
allowed in the womb of the world.
They're not allowed to necessarily use the water.
I'm not clear on that part, but I know the Crohn's associate it
the Crohn's of the Dosh Colleen associate.
And Danny has that dream. Of crohns coming out beneath the
mother of mountains, out of emerging from somebody of water
which could only be the womb of the world.
So that's really cool. And the road, this God's way,
that connects the womb of the world to the mother mountain is
lined with a lot of those stolen monuments that the Dothraki
have, which definitely increases the wondrousness of the place.
Though those aren't natural, clearly those are man made and
stolen from elsewhere. And that was an interesting
point we discussed on Discord with some of the Discord
regulars. Is that the Dothraki had stole a
lot of these monuments, and this collection of monuments might be
worthy of a one of consider for wondrousness.
And they wouldn't have stolen them all directly.
They would have stolen some of them from other people who had
stolen them. It was like some of them they
didn't. None of them originated in Vaste
Dothrak, but they may have stolen them from somebody who
first stole them from some other, like the Valyrians for
example. The Valyrians took things from
other cultures when they conquered dozens of other
nations. The Dothraki might have gotten
some of those and and re removed them back to the base Dothrak.
Now on the other hand, Lomas might not have seen some of
this. Like we're pretty sure he saw
the Dothraki Sea which wouldn't have been called that at his
time because he went to Sarnath. In fact we're we can be certain
he saw it because the the Sarnath is sitting right square
in the center of the Dothraki Sea, AKA the Great Grass Sea.
But did he go to the mother of mountains?
Did he go to the womb of the world?
That's not necessarily. We definitely can't assume that
he did. He might have.
Why would he have, though? Well, the Mother Mountains.
It might not be a lot special. It might just be sacred to the
Dothraki, and that's the end of it.
That's why it's special because of its sacredness.
But maybe it's special to them because it's pretty wondrous.
Maybe that's why. And I don't know.
What else explains that? Why do the Dothraki esteemed
this one mountain? What is it about this place that
is such a big deal to them? You know, I don't know.
But. And that might have drawn Lomas
there, That very question of what makes the mother of
Mountains so important? Is it a special geographical
feature or is it purely because of its sacred status to this one
culture? So it could be quite impressive.
And a standalone mountain is kind of unusual.
It's hundreds of miles from the Bone Mountains.
It's it's nearby, but it might be like a like a bump, you know,
far away from the the large, imposing Bone Mountains.
I'm not sure. Now the womb of the world is
also very interesting because it's really big.
It's much larger than the God's eye, and it might be the biggest
lake in the world. Depends on what's a lake and
what isn't. Because there's a body of water
called the poison sea in the Bone Mountains region, which I
think is a lake, but it's called the poison sea.
And that one looks to be bigger, but it might, but it's probably
not deeper because there is supposedly no bottom to the womb
of the world. Now, that's almost certainly not
true. That just means they haven't
found the bottom, but that it does imply it's incredibly deep.
The Dothraki actually believed the first man came out of the
God, the womb of the world riding the first horse.
And there's an interesting potential for buried truth in
that myth. Because remember, the Dothraki
Sea. The Great grass sea used to be
the Silver Sea, an actual body of water that has long since
vanished. The womb of the world is
probably a remnant of that. It's probably a deep the deepest
section of that former bygone body of water and the poison sea
to the South was probably part of it as well.
It's just changed dramatically over 10s of thousands, if not
longer years. So why does that associate with
the Dothraki myth of the first man coming out of the the womb
of the world? Because many people believe that
human life on Planetos began around the Silver Sea.
So it would be like that myth was passed down to those early
humans, passed down to the Dothraki who you know, emerged
from that culture in some sort of offshoot.
And those beliefs would have been passed on to them and be
associated with this region. They would associate it with the
body of water that they have, rather than the long gone Silver
Sea that they probably aren't even aware of anymore.
So I I really like how those things tie together so neatly
and speak to the same mythology, the same origins of life are
contained within these sort of complimentary myths, and that's
pretty cool. I'm not sure that we'll ever go
back there, but we might. Danny is in the Dothraki sea.
She's probably going to get captured by Kyle Joko, and that
might mean going back there and and fulfilling that vision of
the crones of the dash Khalin kneeling to her beneath the
mother of mountains after, you know, dripping wet from the womb
of the world. So this one may not be wonder
status. I think it's close.
I think it's a nominee. Maybe it's more like top 20 than
top seven, but it's got more story relevance than a lot of
the others, which which makes it special to us in a different
way. Anything to add on that one?
Y'all. I just that honestly you're
you're critique of the mother of mountains image from Game of
Thrones really took the wind out of my sails in terms of it being
a wonder like if if he I don't know what to say.
I'm like if ever it had a shot and making my list it lost its
shot. It's Dan and Dave's fault, not
yeah. We got to do our our, our
guesses, our individual guesses at the end.
But I'll say now, this isn't this one doesn't make my cut.
OK, yeah, I don't think it does for me either.
But like I said, probably top 20.
But Next up is is related. We'll talk about the actual
Great Grass Sea, AKA the Dithraki Sea.
It's also called the Haunted Lands, AKA the Great Desolation.
It's got a lot of names, which that's kind of wondrous.
That implies something, right? But that is not the feature.
We're not interested in the ruins so much.
Here's another one. We get a straightforward POV
take on with a quote. The Dothraki Sea.
Sir Jorah, Mormont said as he reigned to a halt beside her on
the top of the Ridge Beneath them, the plane stretched out
immense and empty, a vast, flat expanse that reached the distant
horizon and beyond. It was a sea, Danny thought
past. Here there were no hills, no
mountains, no trees nor cities nor roads, only the endless
grasses, the tall blades rippling like waves when the
winds blew. It's so green, she said.
Here now, Sir, George agreed. We ought to see it when it
blooms all dark red flowers from horizon to horizon like a sea of
blood. Come the dry season and the
world turns the color of old bronze.
And this is only Hirana child. There are 100 kinds of grass out
there. Grasses as yellow as lemon and
as dark as indigo. Blue grasses and orange grasses
and grasses like rainbows. Grasses like rainbows.
That is so cool. So This is why you can think of
it as wondrous because like, just imagine that it's kind of
hard to, but the varying colors and the vast size of the place
is what I think qualifies it as a potential wonder.
Danny is odd and she's odd when it's green and having been to
like Ireland and places that has this incredible greenery, it is
really spectacular. Even though it's just a solid
color and this is not a solid color, this is something you
would see all these varying colors for.
Another one the show just didn't do justice to because it really
just looks like a pretty arid, boring place it.
Looks more like a step than a true grassland.
Yeah, yeah. Which is what a lot of people
think of when they think of the dysraki, because they are, to be
fair, inspired by step peoples. But this is not, this is not the
steps of Mongolia, right? This is, this is way different.
And you should not picture that because this is far more
wondrous and beautiful from the sound of it.
And yeah, again, this used to be the Silver Sea.
So this is like what was the basin?
And many millennia later it's it's turned into this.
And that's the case with like the Great Plains of the US.
They they're not as beautiful as this, but it also used to be a
sea, you know, an inland sea or the ocean or whatever, like
long, long, long time ago. When we're talking real, real,
long, like millions of years, which might also be the case
with Westeros, probably not, because I don't think humanity
would would have a memory of it if that were the case.
When did Lomas travel here? Danny thought it was incredibly
beautiful when it was green, but did Lomas see it when it was
green, or if if he saw it when it was rainbow colored, I've got
to think it made the list or was a strong candidate.
And again, he saw the Palace of 1000 rooms, so he definitely was
there. But what season did he see it
in? Did he see it in purple season?
Did he see it in green season, red season, Did he see multiple
colors? Did green again, green alone
might have been enough, but I feel like if he saw some of
those other colors, he'd be like, whoa, there's that's just,
there's nothing like it. I don't think there's anything
else like it in the world either.
We don't have like a comparison for this, and there's nothing
like it in the real world, at least not these colors.
The size and scope of the grassland.
Yes, there is something like There are things like that in
the real world, but not with colors, not with this beauty,
not with this vibrance. You know, that's one I don't
know factor when picking out a wonder.
And again, we've talked a lot about how there's not some
consistent scientific standard for all these.
But one thing that most of them have in common is you can look
at it and see it all at once. So I think that some of the
things that are, but you know, we might name as contenders, but
they're so big, you can't really see all of it at once or
something like this that you might have to see over time.
I think it makes it harder for them to count, or most likely
for Lomas to have named them, you know.
That's fair. That's fair.
I mean like some of them we we, we feel pretty good about like
the forest of cohort. Yeah.
You're not going to see it all but that's part of why it's so
impressive. And the the Mother Royne, like
you might be able to sail up every little tributary, but good
good Lord, you don't need to to be to be impressed by it or to
see it as wondrous. The the ruin, for example, you.
There's no question of his existence.
It's not some legend from forest, you know, and you could
see some individual portions of it and and that be enough.
The forest. I'm suspicious of the forest for
partly for this reason, because if you're standing, you know, at
the edge of it, looking out, it may be wider or deeper than the
other forests, but you can't really see that.
You, you just just have to tell you this force is 3 times bigger
than anything Westeros, you know, like, yeah, sure it is.
You know, like it's even if you actually believe them, it's so
hard to process or witness that all at once.
So it's like a point. Suspicious but.
I can see that argument now. The largest real life grassland
is 570,000 square kilometers. It's called the Lanos Ianos
grassland. I'm not sure how to pronounce
it. They're near the Andes in the
Amazon River, but that's different from the largest step,
which is sort of a grassland, but not steps aren't necessarily
considered grasslands, but it's kind of debatable, I guess This
is, this is kind of unclear to me, but the Eurasian steps are
much larger, for they go from Hungary all the way to China,
and that's very similar to the Dothraki Sea in terms of its
real world parallel, not necessarily the grass, but the
region, because it's the Dothraki collective.
Meaning the various inspirations for the Dothraki are the various
step peoples that have emerged from these Eurasian steps,
whether it's the Allens, the Huns, the Kipchaks, the the
Turks, the OR the Mongols, for example.
There, it's a there's a it's a mishmash of all of these, and
these grasslands are represented here in a similar way.
Let us now move on to the next one, the Bone Mountains.
This is one of my favourites quote.
The hills grow Wilder and steeper, and soon enough the
mountains appear in the far distance, their great peaks
seeming to float against the eastern sky, Blue, Gray giants,
so huge and jagged and menacing that even Lomas long strider,
that dauntless wanderer, if his tales be true, lost heart at the
sight of them, believing that he had at last reached the ends of
the earth. Also, they're called bleak on
his inhospitable peaks. And and an immense Stonewall.
It's crazy. Now, this is a good example of
what Sean was saying. Like this is a huge mountain
range that stresses across stretches across the entire
continent. He surely didn't just like start
at the top and walk South and see the whole thing.
So what portion did he see? You know, did he go east from
the mother of mountains and then go and see that or did he had
east from Karth which I think is more likely because we
definitely know he saw the triple walls of Karth.
And so that would kind of make sense.
He would follow the caravan Rd. which you know and he but he
also went to Sarnoir which is kind of in the center of all
that, like it's it's between these two.
So he really could have seen multiple regions of the Bone
Mountains, quite possible. It's also unknown whether he
passed through them or what took ship around them.
I tend to think he took one of the pass through even though he
quote lost heart at the sight of them.
Well, once he got closer he would discover that there are
people that know the way through.
There are guys that could find him way through.
So he probably did go there and go through, especially because
we know he went to Ashai and ET, which are absolutely on the
other side of those mountains. One way or another, he got past
them. We just don't know what he
walked or not. Is it possible that he saw them
from one side and in a different voyage saw them from another
side or angle or? Whatever.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Because he definitely saw the
cities on the other side by Asabad Samiriana and Kaya
Kayanaya. He's definitely saw those.
And those are just like right up on the mountains, like carved
into them, like they're mountain fortresses, basically, mountain
cities. So yeah, he had to have seen
them from both sides. That's the image we have on the
screen is of Biasabad in the Bone Mountains.
Very nice, yeah. We've got some really good
images. A lot of them are from unseen
Westeros, which we mentioned last time.
Always deserves a shout out. So good car throws a lot of
trade to the east too. So it would also make a lot of
sense for Lomas just to like hook up with a caravan, you
know, I'm going to ride with Y'all for safety, you know,
that's it's a common way to travel for a solo person.
A lot less dangerous than a ship.
You know these caravan roads are super old and have been going
back and forth for a long way. They're pretty safe and and you
think they have the experience to protect themselves properly
against whatever might happen and know who to pay off for
protection and etcetera. You know, So it seems like,
yeah, travel with people that have gone that way before and
avoid the dangers of the sea. And one of the reasons they seem
very a very strong candidate is just Lomas's reaction is very
telling, right. He's he's like lost heart.
This is a guy that's an explorer, like he is pro going
all over the place and this made him lose heart.
That's really saying something. This isn't like you or me being
like, Oh my God, that looks really difficult.
This is a guy that lives for that sort of thing.
And it was, it was like a it was intimidating to him.
Like if you're a world traveler, a guy who just got his
wanderlust and will go just about anywhere.
If you see something that if this person is intimidated by
something, well, yeah, that that really says a lot.
That he was big in his feels when he saw that, like, Oh my
God, I'm not. How can I possibly cross that?
How can I possibly deal with that?
Maybe I can't traverse it. Maybe.
What's? What's the line?
They should have sent a poet. They.
Should have sent a poet quoted by both.
Wait, which character in contact said that?
I just remember, of course, Frank Reynolds saying it on It's
Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but.
Was it Ellie? I think it was.
That was her name. Jodie Foster's character.
Was that? Was it Jodie Foster who said it
OK? I was remember For her character
or not. Yeah, that's good.
He would have also haven't seen the Red Mountains, the mountains
of the moon, probably the Painted Mountains 'cause they're
closer to him if he's traveling E before seeing the Bone
Mountain. So he would have seen several
great mountain ranges and then be like, Oh my God, this one's
so much bigger than all those other ones.
How can this be? So?
I can see why he was so impressed and even perhaps
despondent. In Denver, just the western
horizon is just a mountain range.
It's just, you know, the Rocky Mountains and I and when I look
at it, when I I still haven't gotten used to it and I still
like in awe of how beautiful and the massive it is.
The Himalayas are five times taller.
I just can't like, like sometimes when I look at it the
way there's like, you know, waves of ranges, you know, you
could see like the the the first ones are, the lighting is a
little different. They're not quite as high.
Then next you can see the snow captain.
Like, I can't imagine that going up 2345 more levels.
I also would be daunted, like I don't understand how any human
could ever get across there without an airplane.
With an airplane even. Yeah, I mean, especially if we
think that Lomas would have done a certain amount of surveying of
other mountain ranges both in Westeros and s s before he
reached the Bone Mountains. So he had that context.
He had his, his, his Rockies in Denver, You know he was like
this like cast of The Rock is is nothing compared to this
etcetera. And it's also the longest
mountain range by far. It's also just the the sheer,
not just the sheer height, but length and girth.
And yeah, it's got, it's got all the superlatives.
It's very impressive. Oh yes, that's why they're the
Bone Mountains, right. The spine of the world I think
is an influence there. And that's this is not the only
time that we will reference Wheel of Time 'cause there's a
the spine of the world is a thing in Wheel of Time.
And yeah, we've got another parallel to to Wheel of Time
coming later. Now there another interesting
thing about them is the the way they frame what's around them.
We've talked about how the Red mountains are the reason why
there's a desert and Dorne on one side and fertile green on
the other side. This is a common real world
feature, cause mountains trap moisture.
So you have the winds blowing mostly One Direction and then
that that moisture is captured by these mountains.
And that's why the Dothraki Sea is so big.
It stands to reason that if a mountain range can do that, a
bigger mountain range will do it even more so.
So it created the Great Grass Sea on one side, or at least
supported the creation of the Great Grass Sea.
It's probably vital to its existence.
And on the other side of the Bone Mountains is the Great Sand
Sea, which is there you go. It's the same pattern of real
world, geographical or geological features.
Mountains do that. And I think it's entirely
possible that the Bone Mountains deserve to be a wonder for
several reasons, one of which is they may have a key role in
creating two of the other great world wonders, the Great Grassy
and the Great Sand Sea. So no other wonder I know of can
really claim that fame. Maybe the Royne can claim some
credit for the Forest cohort, for example, but it's hard to
that's not necessarily the case. And it's not like you have to
pick the bone mountain instead of the roaring.
It could just be both of them. Yes, exactly.
Now, we can quite possibly pick all of these, or since we have
so many candidates that we have so many slots to fill in.
But here's another quote describing those roads that
we're talking about, which is possibly how Lomas made his way
through. 1000 Roads lead into the bones, Wise men say from
karth to cohort, but only three lead out as impassable as the
bones appears from afar. There are indeed hundreds of
footpaths, goat tracks, game trails, stream beds, and slopes
by which travellers, traders and adventurers may find their way
into the heart of the mountains. In certain places, ancient
carved steps and hidden tunnels and passages exist for those who
know how to find them. Yet many of these paths are
treacherous, and others are dead ends or traps for the unwary.
Loma says the mountain warriors of Kaia, Kai, Anaya, Sumeriana
and Bayasabad are the fiercest fighters in the world.
And they're they're women. And of course, each of those
three places represents the path along one of those three roads.
Those key three roads which are the Steel Rd., the Stone Rd. and
the Sand Rd. Now with these carved steps and
paths, that sounds awesome. It reminds me a little bit of
Petra, one of the more modern man made wonders of the world
which is carved into like a this large sort of castle ish kind of
edifice that's carved into the mountains and is old.
And it's not entirely sure who made Petra, which is kind of
neat, but this doesn't refer to the fortresses, although it just
refers to steps and passages. Kind of assume there are some
fortresses there, as well as these mountain cities, These
mountain fortresses, which seems kind of similar.
But, but it's another example of where the Citadel's knowledge is
probably somewhat lacking, because this is, again, the
farther E you go, the less they seem to know.
And this is very Far East. I mean, anything on the farther
side of the bones is even farther away just by distance,
because that's it's one thing to go 10 miles or 20 miles or 50
miles. When those 50 miles or 100 miles
are across the largest mountain range in the world, it's it's a
different 100 miles than 100 miles of the grass, sea or
Caravan Rd. you know what I mean?
So it's in effect, it's even farther away once you get on the
other side of that border. Let's actually quote the Atlas
of Ice and Fire blog and and hear what Adam Whitehead has to
say here, because it's very interesting.
A colossal series of mountain ranges which start off being big
and then get even bigger, each range getting way to an even
more massive 1. Beyond it, the bones stretch for
over 2100 miles from north to South and are almost 300 miles
across at their widest point. Compare this to the Himalayas,
which extend in an arc for only approximately 1500 miles and are
about 200 miles wide at their widest point.
It is possibly on this basis, and given the greater size of
the planet, that the tallest peak of the bones are even
taller than Everest. Now I read a commenter on Adam's
blog that suggests actually since Planetos is probably
larger than Earth, that the mountains should be shorter on
average. Like the bigger the planet the
smaller the mountains will be because you have like the fault
lines would be different and they would push things up.
It's more gravity pulling in. More gravity.
Good point. It's a lot on the time when the
mountains are creating, how they're creating things like
that too. Yeah.
For example, you mentioned the Rockies, the Appalachian
Mountains, or the other great mountain range in the US The
Appalachians are way shorter and less impressive, but they're
way, way older than the Rockies, which is part of why they've had
a longer time to erode and shrink and etcetera.
Not that the Rockies are young. They're still hundreds of
millions of years old, but they're young in terms of the
Appalachians and yeah, relatively.
And the Himalayas. I'm not sure how old the
Himalayas are, but it's possible they used to be taller, too, and
they're probably not at their peak height.
Get it? Yeah, you get it.
I think the Himalayas, I probably should research this
more, but I I think they're more of the result of like land being
pushed into each other and it going up from a fault line where
they think the Rockies were like carved out by glaciers coming
down. OK.
Yeah. So there's different ways.
And and Adam, you see he got those numbers in there and
that's just from him measuring things on the map and
extrapolating distances like we know how long a wall is.
So you can measure the wall on a map and kind of compare that to
other places around the world and get a rough guesstimate
based on that. It's a pretty good way to do it.
Yeah, Rough because it's so again, it's think about our
world maps and how skewed they are.
I can't help but think that there's some element of that
that would go on there, but still you can get a rough guess.
Yeah, I appreciate the the effort for sure.
I think it's the best numbers we have.
That's for that's also for sure and and this matches the eye
test. This hugeness that Adam is is
relating here with numbers matches what Lomas seemed to
have felt when he saw them because he they just dwarfed
everything else he'd seen mountain wise before that.
Like he had probably seen the Giants Lance the tallest
mountain Westeros almost certainly like why would he have
not checked that one out? Like would he not go to the
eerie. Of course he did right that
seems almost almost impossible that he wouldn't at least check
out the sights in Westeros. You know so.
But beyond that, it's hard to assume.
So they're they're so huge as well that they really not only
do they just serve as a a huge barrier, but they to to
geographical features and affecting the climate on either
side. But it's also like a way to keep
civilizations apart, right? It's basically impassable for
most civilizations. Seafaring civilizations would be
a little different. But most civilizations are not.
Seafaring or not, it's it's not the biggest part of their
culture. So most people would have been
stuck on one side or the other for most human existence.
That by itself is a potential reason for Lomas.
To to label them was like this this thing, this natural thing
that keeps civilizations apart, that keeps cultures apart.
There's almost nothing like it. Like the Force of Cohort doesn't
do that. Oceans do that.
But for more obvious reasons, you know, that's the only other
necessarily comparable example there.
Like the the deep swamps of the neck are a deterrent to
invaders, but they don't keep like foot traffic or merchants
in and out like that. There's plenty.
It's pretty easy to go back and forth and that if you're not
like a invading or something. And like a swamp isn't a wonder
to behold either. No, you're right.
And oceans are sort of pervasive around the world too than that
That's unique thing that you come upon so.
And also, just in general, it seems like Lomas didn't do a lot
of sailing. It feels to me like he avoided
sailing whenever possible. He took the overland routes
whenever possible, partly because you're more likely to
see something impressive on land and you also have more ability
to stop and go look at it like if you're on someone else's
ship, you can be like, hey dude, can you sail over there for a
minute? Let me take a look at that.
Like, no, sorry, I'm. I got somewhere to be.
This we're on a schedule here, you know.
You know, we're not. We can't move at the speed of of
you know, world explorer charting things, you know, so he
would have more leeway to do what he wanted on foot.
All right let's let's take a little break here and come back
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Something that I meant to mention earlier in the episode
that I skipped over. We had Alt Shift X and Glidis
visiting us last week and that was a lot of fun.
We got to show them America because they're Australian
folks, and we did a podcast recording for Alt Shift XS
Channel for his patrons, and it was about the Tough voyaging
series that George R Martin has written and the first of which
has been adapted as a graphic novel by Rhea Golden, who was
one of his assistants as well as a career artist.
She's really good. And we made a joke during it
that in George's Thousand Worlds series that he loves the horror
sound like there's The Rangan's, The Hoon, the there's a few
others that are missing. And what is the what is that
grass called in the Dothraki Sea Crana.
So it was like another he loves that HR thing, he just loves for
him That sounds like good generic foreign sound that's not
you know. So yeah, George has his
favorites too. I thought y'all might get a kick
out of that. Also wanted to take the moment
to announce the winners of our RISE giveaway.
Michael McLaughlin and Jordan, of a long expected soundscape
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If you want to join RISE, you can just go to rise dot IO/U
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We started a House Tarly's campaign starting in the era of
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So he's he's really young, so I'm trying to raise him to be
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He might be. The nature part might be too
strong. The nurturer will do all our
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It doesn't seem like too hard of a challenge to make him better
now. Making him good, I don't know.
Yeah, good point. He could.
It's hard to make him worse now, but it can be fun to role play a
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It's like, ha ha, I'm an evil cruel jerk, you know, ha ha,
Take that fictional, you know, virtual characters.
So anyway, twitch.com/history of Westeros Fridays at six Eastern
hang out with fellow historians and chat about fun stuff and and
and watch this great game and participate by helping me make
decisions. When you watch, you are part of
the large council that does things like naming of children,
key decisions like whether we go to war or who we go to war with
or whether we should ally with certain people who to marry.
All sorts of things like that. Some questions from Y'all Bryson
Chung says the Himalayas are still growing as the Indian
subcontinent smashes into Asia. OK, so the Indian subcontinent
is on a fault line. It's slowly pushing into Asia.
They're kind of ramming into each other, which is how the
Himalayas got formed in the 1st place, according to Bryson.
So that's still happening. So they haven't reached their
peak. I guess not.
Good point. Yeah.
So we did it kind of answer that question.
So they might, wow, they haven't reached their peak yet.
I mean, in our lifetime they'll probably only grow a few more
millimeters. But just this goes to show that.
Woof. The world is large and moves
slowly, except when it doesn't, like when volcanoes happen,
that's quite fast, or floods, or whatever natural disasters,
Amanda M says. You think since Lomas visited
the summer Isles, the talking trees could be a candidate?
As in, just the trees themselves as the carvings.
I always envisioned them akin to the Redwood trees in California.
If they are the size of the red ones, then IA 100% agree with
you and feel like we should have included them.
We did talk about them last time so it's not like we omitted them
entirely but I feel like the carvings lean them more towards
a man made wonder. But if they are redwoods,
personally, I think the Redwood forest is a candidate for a
modern wonder of the world now. And that modern natural wonder
of the world, because those things are just so freaking big
and they're just it's incredible.
There's ecosystems in the branches.
There's animals that live in the like, there's soil layers
created by the branches of the Redwood trees, that there's
creatures that live up there their whole lives, never touch
ground. I'm not even talking about
birds, Do we think? The forest of cohort could be a
candidate for trees like that as well.
Maybe. Maybe mainly because I'm
thinking of the climate. Yeah.
The climate of the Summer Isles seems less Redwood less Northern
California, and cohort seems more like not.
Neither is exactly 1 to one at all.
But I don't know. I don't see Summer Isles as
being exactly Northern California.
You know, that's a great point because I don't know what large
trees grow in like, tropical climates, maybe banyan trees.
I don't really. I'm not.
Banyan trees are beautiful. I grew up with a Banyan tree, a
really famous banyan tree in Lahaina.
I used to climb all over it as a little girl all over the banyan
tree. It's it's very much banned now,
but I grew up all climbing is the most magical experience,
honestly. So yeah, I love that call they
do. Those do grow in tropical
climates and are very wondrous the way that they all are are
are like banyan tree. Underwater and yeah, they're
really cool, you're right. So that's and and and they're
very important as far as like the preventing erosion and other
things like that. So they also serve a great
ecological niche. I will say I haven't come
across. I might have missed.
You guys know better than me any mention of there being
particularly tall trees in any of these forests.
That doesn't seem to be pointed out as a feature of any of.
Them I agree that at least big, but maybe not Redwood big you.
Know, you know, another beautiful type of tree that
could be represented that I grew up with in Hawaii are the
eucalyptus trees, which are painted trees.
They're referred to. It's like the painted trees,
like that. When when the bark peels off of
these trees, it looks like a rainbow under there.
It's so beautiful. They had them where I grew up on
Lanai all over. I have pictures of me as a
little kid with them. But yeah, that would be also
possible to be summer like the Summer Isles and and stunning.
Anthony De Palma says what if the old man of the river itself
is a wonder, meaning the giant turtle?
Because when he appears and as the Dragons Tyrion thinks gods
and wonders always appear to attend the birth of kings.
That's a great observation. He literally uses the word
wonders and a turtle of enormous size like a dragon sized turtle
does sound pretty darn wondrous. However, I I want to consider
fauna a different category. Wondrous animals.
I feel like that belongs in a different category.
However, some people in the real world have pushed for animal
type inclusion within the natural wonder of the world.
For example, the great migrations of some of these,
these huge bird migrations are included on some of the modern
world wunderlists and so like the great migration of the red
crabs is a really fantastic and amazing thing.
So, but personally I would categorize that separately.
I think there's enough that why are we trying to jam these all
into seven? Let's just make a category for
the most wondrous animals, especially for our purposes.
If we're going to do that, an episode on that.
For West Rose and Planet Toast 100% that would be included, but
it's easier if we have a whole separate designation for it.
Fox and Bramble says. I wonder if the butterflies from
Knoth would be a contender under.
That 100. Percent, right.
So like I do think maybe in our unnatural wondering we should
have a little sub area where we just talk a bit about animals
because I actually really do like the idea of I I mean Lomas
wasn't exactly scientific with this.
So I think the idea of him being like Old Man of the River is
what represents the Roin isn't incomprehendable to me like
that. That could be the case to me,
even though like I, I doesn't make sense today to do that for
our wonders to merge them. I could see him doing that.
Yeah, he could. Although it's got the big the
big problem is he very it's he's very unlikely to have seen this
big ass turtle. You know like unlike Tyrion and
the others saw it. They were like, wow, it like the
Yandel or Yandel. Isila and Yandry, Y names like
Yallo were just awestruck. They were Gosling.
They were like, oh, we're blessed.
It's a blessing. You know, Like, doesn't seem
like they had seen that before either.
Maybe only once or something like that.
And they've been going up and down the river their whole
lives. Most of their lives, anyway.
Now, Dornish James says the quote about the caves with
Norvos makes them think of The Cave system of Gendel and
Gordon, which we also mentioned. So we're on the same page there,
especially with the wolves, bears and giants idea of Gendel
and Goren's cave network going under the wall.
Maybe they were too busy trying to find their way to make any
cave paintings such as what they say.
And that's entirely possible. But yeah, maybe there are some
cave paintings down in the worm ways that would be really cool
for for us to discover that, like a grant took John to those,
like Hot Springs. And you know, that's just one of
many cave systems that must exist in that region.
We know. And we know there's like the hot
steam vents and things like Hard Home and Winterfell.
We didn't mention any of these as natural wonders potentially,
but I also I do wonder about Hot Springs.
If Lomas would have been impressed by like for example
Winterfell's Hot Springs or any any Hot Springs that he might
have been. I think we just there's so many
to list. I don't think it quite made the
cut for any of us, but I think it might be one.
It might be wondrous to lots of people, especially without
modern heating and plumbing and all that.
It would be extra wondrous. We might take that for granted.
However, Adam Whitehead did not. He included Winterfell as a
potential wonder of the world for man made even though it's
the hot, the Hot Springs are natural.
It's it's the repurposing of those Hot Springs into into a
castle that perhaps makes it wondrous or just the whole the
whole shebang of Winterfell. So at least someone that that
we're including here did see it that way as well.
So you're right on Ishaya. Speaking of influences, Ashea
found this great text called Ludus Thronus, which is the
wonders of the ancient world, and George RR Martin's The Song
of Ice and Fire. It's from a great textbook
called Game of Thrones, A view from the humanities of Volume
one. There is a second volume with
some other really fascinating essays in it.
Yeah, it's awesome. It's a great read.
Some of the stuff in there inspired some of the takes we
have here today, but I want to particularly divert your
attention to a person they pointed out Who I didn't know
existed was a guy named Dionysius Perigetus, which means
Dionysus the Voyager or Dionysus the traveler.
And he was a regular old school world, ancient world, Lomas long
Strider. He made a point to go to the
most famous man made buildings edifices, describe them in a
book so that people who couldn't get around, which is, you know,
most everyone in the ancient world, could have a way to
interact with them or read about them or hear about them.
Like they probably wouldn't be reading a lot of them, but maybe
it would be read to them or you know people who were literate
back then could read it. And he he lived in Alexandria in
so he would have been associated with the Library of Alexandria
and like we said, with Lomas LON Strider with the Hightower.
Maybe Lomas Long Strider wasn't that impressed by the High Tower
because he grew up there. Likewise, Dionysus Peregatis
wasn't super impressed by the Lighthouse of Alexandria because
he grew up there. He still included it and wrote
about it for people. But it's, you know, it's it's,
it's comes off as like he's a little less impressed than these
places that he didn't grow up around.
And that's just like very human, you know?
And like you said too, Sean, like this isn't a scientific
text. It's rational, it's logical,
it's comprehensive. But it's not written by a
scientist or an anthropologist or someone that, like knows, has
some deeper knowledge of some of these things.
Or even who? Someone who isn't one of those
things still might come up with some parameters, right?
Even if they don't have the exact background, but they can
still decide that it needs to be at least X height or have blah
blah blah. But if any of that is in there,
we're not Privy to it. And it doesn't seem even for the
the the real world wonders. There doesn't seem to be an
exact standard that's being measured that certain things
meet or don't meet, you know? It's just it's largely
subjective. I think maybe we'll put the
links in in the description for Y'all to find that you can also
click on a map that he made, which is really cool to look at
this ancient world map. This version now a little bit
more on influences. We're talking about fantasy
influences. Lomas Longscrider might remind
some Wheel of Time readers of Jane Far Strider, an explorer
who actually lives during the events of the Wheel of Time
book. So he's an actual on screen
character, unlike Lomas. And he's in disguise.
So maybe when we talk about how maybe Lomas would have disguised
himself, although we also couldn't think of a lot of
reasons why he would need to, because he's not some famous
person. He wrote a book called The
Travels of Jane Forrestrider. So kind of similar to, you know,
the wonders and wonders of the Made by Man.
He details adventures in very far off places that most people
would never have been able to go to.
That kind of helps bring people to places that they'll never be
able to travel to. Including lands like Shara.
If you're familiar with the Wheel of Time books, Shara is
beyond the aisle waste. Even so, it's really far away.
It's a giant far. Strider went beyond the aisle
waste to Shara, which is that's really, really far.
The book actually also gets to mention giant far.
Strider's travels of giant forest rider is actually
mentioned on both mentioned in the TV show as well.
So it comes up in book and show. I appreciate that detail.
It's a Gwaine's, I said a Gwaine's favorite book both in
book and show, so that's nice. I like that.
But both Jane Far Strider and Loma's Long Strider might be
influenced by tokens. Strider AKA Aragorn himself, who
is even more an influence on Jon Snow, but still because he's
known for quite a bit more than exploring.
But he was a Ranger and he's a central figure of his story like
Jon Snow. So that's that's pretty big
good, good comparison there. Nina adds one more, which is
that George may have borrowed a bit of influence from Lomas from
Walter, the protagonist of The Black Rose by Thomas Costain,
who George has cited many times as an influence.
There is a House Costain in the Reach in the Black Rose is a
medieval historical fiction book, and it's a journey of a
guy from England to Antioch and across Asia all the way to
China. So, historical traveler book.
That's pretty darn cool. George was once asked if he cut
any Loomis long strider content from the World of Ice and Fire.
Unsurprisingly, he said yes. Like, yeah, of course you did,
George. Why didn't that person ask what
he cut? What did?
You did. You cut like, Yeah, yeah, I did.
So we'll we'll have to check back on that.
You know, to see if maybe eventually he'll release some of
those other notes that could come out here and there.
Maybe it'll be in fire and Blood, two pieces of it here and
there. Because certainly Fire and Blood
Two is after Lomas's time. So you never know what what
could make it in there. There's always a chance for
something he wrote to make it into a future piece of work.
So let's let's move on more natural wonders of the world.
Let's go with the great Sand Sea.
As we finish with the Bone Mountains and the and the
Dothraki Sea. This is the other side of it.
Let's go a vast wasteland of restless dunes.
Dry river beds and ruined forts and towns baking beneath the
sun. Water is said to boil away.
It is so hot in the deep southern portions of the sea.
Again, that sounds a bit like Death Valley, just the heat
part, which. Is you know one of the I think
the hottest place in in North America.
If I'm not sure, I'm I'm not positive about that.
There's there's almost certainly hotter places in the world, but
they aren't as coolly named as Death Valley or hotly named as
definitely so. We're told that this formed
during the so-called dry times, which I don't know what that is
or when that was, but it was surely long ago.
Sounds like climate change brought on by deforestation or
larger global events, perhaps related to the long Night,
perhaps related to the silver sea drying up, Perhaps both.
And like some of these other areas, like the caves with
Norvas, maybe the forest. Nina suggests that Lomas quite a
could have been very intrigued by the lingering mysteries of
the area. The idea of a lost Kingdom
abandoned but with remnants that remain.
There might be some archaeological finds to be made.
Definitely the kind of unsolved mystery that you can kind of
picture Lomas enjoying. Anything that would draw him
definitely has. Besides Death Valley Vibes, it
definitely has Grand Canyon vibes, which is 277 miles long
and 6000 feet deep. It's the only modern world
wonder that I've seen. Personally, I'm out of natural
ones. The Grand Canyon I, it's Shay
and I went together. It's so big.
It's like, it's the biggest hole you can have.
It's such a big hole. Pictures of me in front of it,
like you have the bit behind me. They look fake.
I look at them now, my doesn't look real.
It's like I'm standing in a green screen that someone put
Grand Canyon behind me. It just it looks fake, but it's
definitely real. And when something is so real it
looks fake, that that feels like it's achieved a status that few
real things can. It's like, now this is so real
it looks fake. The Colorado River has been
cutting through the Grand Canyon for millions of years exposing
like 2 billion years of archaeological like geological
layers. So it's a it's a wonder of for
scientists too because they can see all these layers and just
like track time back. So far it's a trove of
information. I I suspect the same would be
true for the Great Sand Sea were there modern, you know,
archaeologic, archaeological archaeologists and
anthropologists and whatever other types of isologists might
be relevant here. And so just wondrous because of
the great size of it and the great desolation, and it's got
to have a lot of beauty too. Deserts can be pretty beautiful
at certain times of day especially.
And apparently there's glass, It's so hot that glass just gets
created in some spots, which that would add to the wonder.
The place almost was aware of it.
You know. So funny story.
Nina was looking up some comparisons and and I believe
Sean you may have discovered this on your own as well.
There is a great Sansi Me too. I had to look at you.
Yeah. It was you.
I'm thinking I was thinking of you.
I'm. Sorry, there is a.
Great Sansi On Earth, it's only part of the Sahara.
It doesn't. So the Sahara's actually larger,
but the Great Sansy is like the hottest part of it.
The worst part of it. I don't know how you categorize
it, but so they stole it from Essos.
Yeah, the Earth stole this from Essos.
It's a 72,000 kilometer desert Siwa, the famous Oasis of Siwa
which has existed since ancient times.
Is there named after JoJo Siwa? Sorry, that's blasphemous.
Now it's only recently been discovered by Europeans.
It's only been like only since like the late 1800s, early 1900s
has have Europeans been allowed or able to explore it.
Of course, the locals have been there for who knows how long, so
obviously it isn't new. But in terms of people writing
about it in a way that can be consumed by the world, it's it's
a fairly recent discovery in terms of that sense, and it's
huge. It's apparently like looking at
the map, it's not as big as the Dothraki Sea, but it's pretty
darn big. It's one of the largest
geographical features on the entire planet or the known world
that we can see. That alone makes it impressive.
So you can see why it is a strong candidate for one of the
remaining 6, farther east of the Great Sand Sea, South of the
five forts. So probably at the limits of
where Lomas went is the bleeding sea, named for the quote
characteristic view of its deep waters, supposedly a result of a
plant that grows only there. This is a real world thing,
right? It's algae and or bacteria.
Scientists are trying to figure it out.
They're not entirely sure what causes it, but there are like
literally hundreds of lakes in the world that do this, that
turn red or pink, but not always.
They're not that way all year round, and they're usually very
salty. Now, the Colorado River runs red
in a lot of parts, but that's just sediment.
That's just mud, red mud. So that's fine.
But that's a different, this is clearly different.
This is not that, although maybe some of them are, but not the
bleeding sea. The bleeding sea is not mud.
It's first. First of all, it's a sea, not a
river. So it wouldn't be constantly
washing the sediment into itself, which is where a lot of
that red comes from. There's literally like hundreds
of pink lakes in Australia. If you come across that and you
didn't know it was a real thing, it might be wondrous.
But if you come across, like, if Lomas comes across one of those,
you're like, whoa, But then he sees like five more of them.
He might be like, OK, well, maybe that's not so wondrous
after all. What do you think, Sean?
Yeah, I wonder. I'm I'm imagining his his like
list. And there's like a lot of things
that crossed off, you know, like he's got like 38 things on the
list, but 30. Of them are crossed off.
Oh, never mind, never mind. That's not as impressive as I
thought. I jumped the gun with that
Norvis Bells thing. Didn't I?
Yeah, like, oops. I should have just.
I should have held off and just waited, Yeah.
So this is pretty interesting. So this is one that's like I
said still being still not fully understood by scientists in
modern times. But clearly is a natural
phenomena and not something unique to Essos.
Maybe unique to well, it might not exist in Westeros.
We don't know of any red water in well, I can't think of any
red. What is the Yellow River?
The sulphurous river in the near the Hellholt.
But we only we only have one example.
Well, we have two. Examples of red water in my in
my estimation one is the sea of size which in Valyria and we
don't really know if it looked like that before the Doom of
Valyria and that might just be a different mechanism doing that
and and just a whole different thing.
Two is definitely not one Lomas would have seen or or thought of
as Red Lake. Oh yeah, but that was just red
from the. Blood, you know, that's a
different thing. Entirely, it's not.
It's not typically red, nor would it, Nor would it have been
red when or if Lomas saw it. Yeah, Red Lake is a nickname,
apparently isn't red. It's like the.
Sunset or I think they they they make a remark that it turns red
that the. Blood has made it red.
Like it's made the way, the way exaggerating, they're
exaggerating. I think after a fight, right
after a battle, though, it isn't something that like regularly
happens. No, it has been red and it.
Might not have even happened then to be.
They might have simply just been like being exaggerating about
how many deaths happened at Red Lake, that it turned the water
red, but it might not have really been very red.
OK, OK. I don't know.
That makes sense. Yeah, like we definitely hear of
other. Battles where like blah blah,
there was so much blood. The water ran red or roaring ran
red or the God's eye ran. Yeah, there's other examples
like that. So that that's fitting, that's
fitting. We have a little more on the sea
of size in the Mantarus episode that is a patrons only episode.
We talk about concepts like magical fallout like comparing
the supernatural elements of the doom to Chernobyl and other
things like that that that kind of explain the doom and what's
still there. Because Mantaris is seated right
on the outside of the fallout zone of the Doom.
So it's kind of like right in the like right on the cusp of
being hit by the doom, but not so much that it didn't survive.
So it's kind of an unusual city that it's got a lot of the
ancient heritage of Valyria, yet it's not one of the free cities.
And it's also got that magical fallout that my inflicting at,
which explains why there might be some 2 headed people there,
which is said in a few places. So very interesting.
All right, let's move on to one of the more I think
straightforward inclusions here. But some of you all may
disagree. Let's go with Adam Whitehead
again for a quote here. Thanks Adam.
There are many great rivers in the world.
But none quite like the Royne. Starting as streams and
tributary streams forming in the Highlands, hills, and mountains
between Norvos and Braavos, these soon combine into one
colossal waterway, already hundreds of feet wide.
Even before it winds its way out of the flatlands, the river
still has 1000 miles and more to run until it empties into the
sea through 4 immense deltas. The river mouth at Volantis
alone is five times the width of the Black Water rush at King's
Landing, and that's only one of them.
The Rhine is, in fact, so wide in places you can barely see the
other side, making it more than a match for some of its
inspirations, namely the Amazon, the Nile, and, of course, the
Mississippi. The waterway that George RR
Martin previously studied in depth for his classic horror
novel Fever Dream. Nice pun there, Adam Waterway
that he studied in depth. Good one.
Yes, that last part is fun for
sure, Cuz yes, I 100% agree and Nina agrees as well.
Wholeheartedly, the enormous Mississippi River is not only an
inspiration for the Rhine, but we previously pointed out that
Volantis is inspired by New Orleans in a lot of ways similar
like rot as described by the way George described it in that
period. It's not he's not talking about
modern New Orleans, he's talking about in the Civil War era.
And the temperature, the climate, it's a very similar
climate. And of course, it's a river
delta, like a humongous river delta area.
And Nina also quotes Tyrion here, which she says yellow.
Shouted Yandri as the shy maid past the point, Tell me again of
those Westerosi rivers as big as Mother was, like being
sarcastic. Like, I did not know.
Yeah, So Tyrion was, like, downplaying it like he tends to
do because he'd only seen some of those tributaries.
But once he gets out on the main waterway, they're like, yo, what
do you think? Now he's like, all right, you
got me. This is in this is way bigger
than I thought you guys were right.
He says it's way bigger than the man or the Yeah, he just goes
off on how impressed he is. So yeah, it's a that helps its
case is an inclusion in the world Wunderlist.
I feel like true to George's form.
He turned it up to 11. It's like Tyrion knew about the
Mississippi and couldn't believe there was a bigger river.
But George's like, what if the Mississippi and the Nile ran
together? That's like, OK, I guess that's
bigger. Yeah, that's so big.
And. It also adds to the mystique.
And impressiveness of the long bridge which spans this thing,
right. We talked about the Long bridge
last time. This is an example of what I
brought up with the forest of cohort, which is is a potential
wonder of the world with another man made wonder of the world
running through it in the Valyrian roads.
Here we have a similar thing. Mother Roin, probably a natural
wonder of the world with the Long bridge, a man made wonder
crossing it or connecting both sides of it.
So that's pretty cool. Like many of the candidates
worship, religious awe and or other associated ideas are
connected because deities are often connected to these places.
Like especially that's the case with bodies of fresh water
because that's where civilizations grow from in the
1st place. And there'd be kind of a natural
gratitude for the landscape that allows human life to exist and
not just exist but thrive. Because Mother Royne is amazing.
And so the mother, like the Egyptians, worship the Nile.
And cultures in South America have worshipped the Amazon.
Lots of people have worshipped the rivers that were the basis
of their food, of their entire culture's existence in the 1st
place. And so that's very true here.
Obviously, they worshipped the turtles.
They worshipped the river. They refused to live far away
from it. You know, they had a religious
connection to it. When they had to flee, some of
them went back, which was not a good idea, but it goes to show
how connected they were to their homeland.
And that's all about mother Roy. And they wanted to return to
their mother despite the dangers, despite the near
certainty that it would go poorly.
So this is just reflected by so many real world cultures and
fantasy cultures that they have a religious awe or wonder
associated with a river or a lake of freshwater.
Basically, compared to the real world, the Nile is the longest,
4160 miles. But the Amazon has higher
volume, it runs faster and it's deeper.
So whatever. Those are both two amazing
rivers. But that's a good example of
like both of those are just they would if you were voting on
which is the most wondrous river in the world.
They're both so close that it would be they would take votes
away from each other like, well, I only want to include one
river, but which of these two in Westeros or in in in planets?
O, it's no problem. Nothing comes close to the
Rhine, as far as we know. It also has the rich cultural
history. It also not only does it create
life, but it's the basis for so much of the Roinish culture
beyond giving life like everything else comes from that
as well. And it's so embedded in their
culture, which might add to the wondrous nature of it all,
showing just how deep its connections to everything
Roinish runs. Not just their existence, but
their art, their worship, their just all all sorts of little
minutiae within their day-to-day lives.
And that would be more true than for any other culture, perhaps
because no culture gets more from their waterway than the
Roinar do. Pivoting to the people that
doomed the Roinar. Let's talk about one that Lomas
may or may not have seen, though a lot of us agree that if he did
see the 14 flames, he probably would have included them, but he
may not have. Either way, let's have a quote.
The burning mountains of the 14 Flames were rich.
With ore and the Valyrians hungered for it, copper and tin
for the bronze of their weapons and monuments.
Later iron for the steel of their legendary blades, and
always gold and silver to pay for it all.
Not just ore, however, they were perhaps supernatural power to be
harnessed. In those volcanoes, you know,
harnessing the fires of the earth, whatever they did.
Not to mention Dragons who apparently were discovered or
rediscovered by the Valyrians and are quite possibly
supernatural beings themselves. Even without all that, they're
all even take away the supernatural stuff to take away
the Dragons. It's awfully impressive.
It's kind of fun to think of them as like the the parallel to
Weirwoods in their way, because weirwoods are usually found solo
or in small groups like volcanoes.
They're rarely found in large groups like this.
They're also referred to as great volcanic mountains, which
makes me wonder just how tall they were.
We've speculated before that the individual ones probably had
nicknames like the local Valyrians probably gave each.
They probably like character qualities like, oh, old old
Smokey sure is belching extra fumes today, you know, But they
probably had names of Valyrian gods, kind of like the Dragons
do or something like that. Maybe That's kind of how I
would. That's my my best guess anyway.
Alexa Nina described it here. It's kind of where I fall on it,
although. I, if you remember from last
week, said I, I firmly don't think he travelled in Valyria.
But she says part of the question here is whether Lomas
travelled in Valyria or the extent to which he would have
gotten close. I don't think Lomas would have
put somewhere he didn't travel on the list, I agree.
But at the same time, he wouldn't have necessarily needed
to get too close to Valyria to appreciate the magnitude of the
14 flames, exactly as she says. After all, I don't think he
necessarily climbed to the top of Casterly Rock or navigated
every tributary of the Rhine. So I agree with her, as she says
here, simply seeing even from far away, 14 huge active
volcanoes all very close together, that would probably
have been enough for the 14 flames to become a wonder.
I don't think you need to get very close to Sea Tyrion and
what he was sailing. On the stinky Stewart, the
celisory Koran Maccoro told him about Valyria.
He's like, yeah, the captain doesn't like being even this
close to Valyria, and he could see it from a distance, and it
was it was inspiring in a foreboding and dark way, but it
was wondrous even from shipboard, pretty way farther
away than than Nina is suggesting that Lomas might have
come. But even that would have been
enough, potentially. So yeah, I could see it.
Yeah, even after the even after they all blew their tops, it
could still be a wonder. Although I might argue that's
falls in the unnatural wonders of the world because of the the
the the Remnants feel very supernatural, or at least partly
supernatural. Yeah.
But I don't know what I think Lomas thought of it when he saw
it. He would have.
Just been like, wow, look at those big volcanoes.
That's a great point. What I was about to say, we have
developed that perspective. But I.
Don't know if the people. Of Planetos have, or even if
they have, if they had winter, how quickly they did at the
point that Lomas is looking at it.
That's true cause 'cause our best guess, which isn't
necessarily. Shared by Nina but but is my.
I think is our best guess personally is that he traveled
during the century of blood which would have mean that yes
the doom would have been very recent and a lot of the like
rumors of what's still going on and the and the destroyed
continent wouldn't have necessarily spread yet or
developed yet. Well, I guess my other question
is if you think that the the. Volcanoes would be obscured by
like ash and smoke still, you know.
Do you think? Do you think he could see their
full glory or do you think they were going off more than than
they are now? It might make it even more
impressive because they would have like the Ash and the and
the Lightning would be. Flashing through because we
talked about that, how that creates huge amounts of static
electricity. All those like the spewing of
ash and like seeing these distant, half destroyed peaks
with giant clouds and lightning and flame that might even look
more impressive. You know, in a way I think Shia
might be saying it. What if you couldn't even see?
Oh, I agree. I agree.
The sky. You know, if they were obscure,
that would. That's a negative, but it but
it's possible that it would frame them even more
impressively anyway. Yeah, but that's just
speculation. I think if he saw them pre or
post destruction, they would be a strong candidate.
Casterly Rock. We devoted a full episode to
Casterly Rock and the process of going through it in such detail
definitely made it worthy of wonder status.
The real life inspiration is the Rock of Gibraltar.
Of course, the Rock, it's still the Rock, not Dwayne Johnson,
but you know, Casterly Rock is called the Rock.
So similar thing. So, and we say this, the natural
beauty and just suitability for human habitation without any
change to it is impressive. Yes, it has been heavily altered
by humanity, but I'm pretty sure just the way it started by
itself is wondrous. Yeah.
It's not a whole mountain range like the Bone Mountains and it's
kind of maybe kind of falls into that talking tree category where
it's a little of both. Like it's partly wondrous
because of humanity, partly wonders because it just came out
that way by the gods or by nature or like the Erie where
the the Giants Lance is a candidate we have today.
But we talked about the Erie last time as a candidate was
like, well, which the castle on top of a mountain like those are
those two things kind of work together.
It's also the view that makes special sense.
Yeah, that's also kind of a hybrid example where the beauty
is partly natural, partly man made.
So Cassidy Rock kind of falls in that category.
But I think it's the only one out of these that has a strong
candidacy without the man made elements.
Because I just think of some of these qualities.
It's taller than almost every skyscraper in the real world.
Like it's 3/4 the size of Burj Khalifa, which is the tallest
building in the world. It's taller than the Hightower.
It's three times higher than the wall.
It's a 200 foot high cavern that serves as a natural port that's
unbelievable for a human habit that's so perfect.
It's like you found a castle that was already built.
It's like this castle just dropped out of the sky and was
just waiting for humans to discover it and just move in.
It's it's so perfect for humanity.
It's not like an Everest where it's just foreboding and like
people die. Like 300 people a year die
trying to climb Mount Everest. Like no one dies trying to climb
cast with the Rockets. It's pretty well suited for
humans. You know, maybe you get lost in
those tunnels, can't find your way back, but you're not going
to freeze to death or die of oxygen deprivation or whatever.
Yeah, so it's also super wide 7 miles from east to West, just as
a stand alone mountain. Which it's maybe not completely
stand alone mountain, but it's amidst the western mountains and
hit which are mostly hills. It really is by far the largest
point as far as we know. Visenya was awestruck by it.
She's like and this is a person that's not easily intimidated,
she's like, woo glad we didn't have to besiege that.
Good thing we caught that Lannister before he got back
inside, so that is pretty huge. It's also the fact that it's
even even the fact that it's mentioned in Ashai, despite the
fact that it's mentioned wrong or like it's a whole thing made
of gold. And the fact that they've heard
of it at all is kind of telling. You know, they probably, only
people in Ashai have probably heard of like I don't know, the
Hightower, Castley Rock, the Wall, that's probably about it.
Maybe they've heard of King's Landing but only that's King's
Landing is only 300 years old. So even that maybe they're not
super familiar but they probably are because it's a huge trading
port and they're they're a trading port.
But yeah, like Ashai people wouldn't be very well known
about Westerosi geographical features but they've heard of
Castley Rock. It's so legendary slash mythical
slash well known. Do you think there's an aspect
where Lomas would have wanted to represent?
Westeros. Well, and so he might have been
like, well, you know, maybe some other mountains are technically
better. But let's play up for our
Westerosi pride. This is the best.
Like, if it's that. If that's the only natural
wonder, for example in Westeros, he might have chosen it when he
might not have. Otherwise, just to give Westeros
something. That's a good point.
But there's one other feature I didn't even mention, which is.
That not only does it so well suited for human habitation in
both in like land and sea, the great natural harbor, the
defended port, all the tunnels, all the all the water and all
the natural stuff, the gold, it has that too.
It's also got enormous wealth, the best according to George R
Martin. Lomas wouldn't have necessarily
known this, but he would know the gold mines are amazing.
He wouldn't necessarily know that.
According to George, they are the best gold mines in the
world, which is already incredible.
And don't forget folks, don't think of the show.
Tywin says in the show that the gold mines are exhausted.
That's show only the the book Castley Rock is still churning
out gold like it always did. So Nina says this is a literal
mountain of gold plunked down next to the sea with with easy
landing and all that. So yeah, just just really
impressive, even without the the human carving out of tunnels and
halls and caverns which would add to it, I'd say.
So yeah, check out our episode on Casually Rock.
For more on that, let's move on to the giants.
Lance. Sean Yeah, just sort of a segue
between Castle Rock and Giants Lance.
A couple points is it, you know, because both of them have a
little bit of the combining man made element connected to them.
And so I'm thinking about in in the real world, Christ the
Redeemer statue at the top of the the Bay of Rio de Janeiro
and that was chosen as a natural wonder.
And Christ the Redeemer also is one of the new man made wonders.
And so the combining of the two might help get get the count,
you know? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that's something I think, Castle Rock and.
The giant. Slants have in common, you know,
but they're both mountains with man made structures incorporated
into them and I think Castle Rock, another factor when you're
talking about mountains. Like, you know, like the Bone
Mountain seems so much more immensely massive, right?
But whatever the tallest peak in the Bone Mountains is, it
doesn't stand out on its own as much because it's just part of
this huge mountain range where casted rock and a giant slants
might stand out. A little bit more.
Maybe casted rock even more so because I think the giant slants
is more part of a mountainous area, right?
And casted rock kind of rises up on its own.
But it is interesting to note that is one way or I guess
there's multiple ways to measure mountains.
Like, everyone kind of knows that Mount Everest is the
tallest mountain, but it is part of the Himalayas.
And so some mountains appear larger because they're more
independent. And that's like another measure
of mountains is how tall they are relative to the land around
them. Mountain Everest is still the
tallest, by the way. That's amazing.
And there's another. Mountain.
I think it's. In Ecuador, which in a way is
taller, like if you were from in space looking at the profile of
Earth, it would jut out more than Mount Everest.
Just cause Earth isn't a perfect circle.
And so that the sort of the warp of Earth toward the equator
actually makes it like closer to space or closer to the sun.
And I hope I'm saying this right, a shade.
But Mauna Kea is a mountain in Hawaii.
Yeah, Mauna Kea and all those other measurements.
Are above sea level. But from base to tip, most of
Mount IKEA is below the ocean. But if you measure it from the
base of the ocean to the top, it's the tallest above ground
Denali. In Alaska, is the tallest.
But I pulled all this out because there's different ways
you could measure or even observe whatever the
measurements are. Like, I don't think George or
the people Westeros know these exact measurements.
No. Yeah, definitely not.
Look at it kind of like we're saying this is kind of.
Subjective, so we know. Which of these looks more
impressive? And I I debate back and forth a
lot between I think the castle at the top of the Erie puts it
over over the top over the giants.
Lance puts it over over the top of Castle Rock for me.
But interesting. All right, cool.
That's a that's a fair argument and and you're right.
Like, you're right. To to talk about relative wonder
compared to just the region, not compared to the each other.
Like there's two different ways to to categories.
Like you compare a Castle Rock to the bones, but you compare
the bones to the rest of the bones and it's different.
Or as or to consider for example Greg or Clegane the Mountain,
the real world actor half Thor Bjornsen.
If I think I said that right, if you see him next to his wife,
you're like, well, he could pick her up with one hand.
And literally he does this. He's picked her up with one
hand. But if you see him next to his
father and brothers, you're like, he's just a little bit
bigger, you know, Like those dudes are also enormous and
they're like, they're like hills and he's the mountain.
But still, yeah, it's like when you're watching a basketball
game. One guy in the team is like the
short. Guy.
But then you see him be interviewed by the reporter and
you're like, Jesus, he's a foot taller.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And Sean, you bring up a great
point here as. Well, is that one of the real
world wonders we we mentioned early on was Victoria Falls.
It's an incredible world, Waterfall.
Alyssa's tears you bring up here is the really the only like
Waterfall we really hear about. And so that's it's a potential
candidate for inclusion because of that.
I didn't say that, but that is the reason.
In the end, I'm going to pick the giant.
Slants, because there's no other waterfall represented on our
list, and there's a bunch of waterfalls that are contenders
in real life. They're all even ones that
aren't the biggest or whatever still are beautiful, majestic
when people come upon them. And I think the one in the giant
slants and everything else combined, I think it puts it
over the top. That's a good argument.
Like you. It's, it depends on what you
value more, I think. Nina.
Would take the opposite side
here because of just Castle rocks, the sheer amazingness for
human habitation and the gold and all that.
You're going more about the natural beauty of the place,
which I think is a totally fair argument.
Like, so yeah, that works. But also goes to show how
subjective this whole thing is, which is why we brought up the
beginning. Like CNN has their list, and
then these other people have their list and then yeah, which
is why the guesswork is both fun but hard to take too heavily.
Like, no, it's got to be this one.
Blah blah blah, Let's move on. We've talked about forests,
waterfalls, mountains. Here's a jungle ET or the
jungles. Not just a jungle, a fabled land
even in the Seven Kingdoms ET. Is a large and diverse country,
a realm of wind swept plains and rolling hills, jungles and
rainforests, deep lakes and rushing rivers and shrinking
inland seas. Its legendary wealth is such as
to allow its Princess to live in houses of solid gold and dine on
sweetmeats powdered with pearls and jade Lomas.
Longstrider awestruck by its marvels called Yiti the land of
1000 gods and 100 Princess ruled by one God Emperor.
See this castley Rock rumor in reverse here.
Oh, the Castle Rock is a. Castle made of solid gold.
We have Princess that live in houses of solid gold here.
This just feels like the the same.
You know, it's funny because it makes me think of how our rich
people do eat like gilded food. Like gold covered food or
whatever. That's true.
I haven't heard of people eating pearls and jade, but oh really?
Cleopatra did it. Cleopatra dissolved pearls and
vinegar and drank them. I did know about her, but what
about Jade? I don't know about Jade or.
Doing that, Yeah, the pearls are bio.
Organic. So.
So it's different like you can dissolve in vinegar or jade.
I don't know. It's got to like powder it with
force, I don't know. But the jungles of ET are
definitely on the list. But I tended, I think they maybe
come up a little short. They're they're amazing.
They got all sorts of variety of flora and fauna.
Cohort isn't a young city, but it's so much younger compared to
ET. So they have they explored their
vast jungles as much as Cohor has not explored the forest?
Maybe, I don't know, They've had a lot longer to do it.
But also, it's not like it's a static thing.
It's these vast jungles that will change over time.
Different animals will evolve and have their time.
And does that make does the mystery or lack of mystery make
the jungle more wondrous? That's another point.
Like does mystery increase the wonder of a place?
Or does sometimes learning about it and realizing how amazing
those facts are make it elevated?
It kind of depends. Sometimes mystery does enhance
the one to replace. Sometimes removing the veil of
mystery makes it less interesting.
But sometimes those facts are so interesting that it's more so.
I guess you just can't say it's it's never so easy.
Well, sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Sometimes more mysteries are revealed.
You, like lift the veil of this? Mystery and like wait, there's
four more mysteries. Yes River, reveal the curtain.
Pull the curtain back to find. More curtains?
Oh no. Yeah, a smaller Amond.
That was right. Good.
Reference to our last reference from our patron call.
Yeah, it was really funny. I just want to share it.
It was. It was.
Everyone was shocked to to discover that when Eamon took
off his eye patch, what was underneath it?
A smaller Eamon. Yeah, it wasn't a sapphire, it
was a smaller Eamon. It cracked me up.
And then that Eamon took off his eye patch and they were a
smaller. Eamon and below that.
Was a Cheeto or something? Yeah, it was.
Not real silly, yeah. It's not infinite.
It does end with a Cheeto, yeah. Now, roughly looking at the map,
the jungles. Of ET are roughly.
The size of the Force of Cohort, but the jungles of ET are
nothing compared to the Sothorios and Altos jungles,
which probably weren't explored by Lomas, but they do exist, so
we're looking at the map. It's like kind of hard to choose
that one when there's that one just South of it that's just so
much larger. As cool as they sound, it sounds
like they might be beaten by less explored, more mysterious
jungles that are nearby. But anyway, It's a worthy choice
though, because jungles can contain more flora and fauna
than forests. They're more there's more
biodiversity more just life in general and that in a fantasy
setting can just there's just more that can happen with that.
Especially with sorcery existing in ET you've probably got
similar things to Valyria where they've probably people have
experimented on animals and changed them permanently with
sorcery and then those animals go off and the ones that aren't
sterile might breed with real animals.
And this is something that happens in like D&D worlds where
like owl bears exist and the owl bears, just they're out there.
Now someone, some wizard created that, some crazy creepy wizard
like, what the hell were you doing, guy?
And but Bowser, now those are a thing that exists in the world
because they actually can breed. And and that's probably a thing
in in Westeros or not in Westeros, but in Essos as well,
even if it's not currently a thing that's happening, it was a
thing that happened. You know one thing about the
jungles of ET? It's kind of.
Like you were talking earlier, if you had a bunch of candidates
for wonders of the world, like in the real world, neither the
Nile or the Amazon might make the list 'cause they would steal
votes from each other. But similar contenders, I think
ET has that problem with with some of these others that force
the cohort or even to segue into the island Isle of Lane.
You know, I agree, yeah, which? Let's do, let's do that.
Well, here is what the Isle of Lange.
Which is just South of ET, used to be part of ET.
It was ruled by ET. The the people connected
anthropologically. There's some, you know, ethnic
connections, but they have diverged in some ways.
Let's hear what Lomas said about it, southeast of Yin, surrounded
by the warm green. Waters of the Jade Sea, the
verdant Isle of Lang, is home to 10,000 tigers and 10 million
monkeys, or so Lomas long Strider once claimed.
The great apes of Lang are also far famed.
Amongst them are spotted humpback apes, said to be almost
as clever as men and hooded apes as large as giants, so strong
that they can pull the arms and legs off a man as easily as a
boy might pull the wings off a family.
That's pretty darn strong if you've ever seen, like, a video
of an elephant, like, just. Pulling down a tree with a
trunk. With their trunk they can just
pull a whole tree down. Like, that's what I think of.
I think of apes that can pull legs and arms off of a person.
Think of King Kong. King Kong.
Yeah, why not think of King Kong.
It's a pretty good match. Yeah, why not so?
Lang is clearly a place of great interest.
There's lots of cool stuff there.
The jungles are impressive. It's just like ET.
The whole island is covered with jungle.
No? Probably not more impressive
than the ET jungles, although what's in them might be.
And I don't mean the fauna, but that's impressive too.
I mean like some of these ancient cities that might even
be older than some of the Yitish cities which so many of them
should have been sealed off by the rulers because people go in
there and disappear or come back mad.
Very much a Lovecraft reference. There's There's references to
the Old Ones, which are a Lovecraft thing.
That would be unnatural, however.
So not wondrous, but not man made or not.
Yeah, but not. Or is man made rather, or
perhaps made by some other creature, but not by nature, not
by the gods that we know of. And the people are unusual too.
They're kind of like a mix of the Sarnori 'cause they're the
tallest people on earth on Planetos, the the Yitish are,
but they have golden eyes, kind of like the children of the
forest. So they're like they're a very
unusual and sounds like they're very attractive people.
Tall and, you know, not obviously tall alone doesn't
make you good looking, but the eyes and all that, like that's
that sounds pretty cool. So people have spoken of that
and you know, Loma speaks of that along those lines of their
people being perhaps a world apart but still considers them
human. They're not like some other race
entirely, but there might be something else going on in their
bloodlines. You never know.
So there's a lot there, obviously, as I've said, but
does it all add up to a wonder? There's no one thing you can
point to. It's a really cool place, but I
don't know what you would say is a wonder out of all this.
I would pick Ling over a lot of the others, especially compared.
To the ET because there he talks about like, oh, there's so many
Princess in gold, but here he says there's 10,000 tigers and
10 million monkeys. Like, that's more natural.
That's in that the wildlife sometimes itself can be at least
part of why something's a natural in a life.
Komodo Island or the Galapagos Islands or something like that.
OK, that's a good point, 'cause they're very different, like you
end up on certain islands. Around the world you end up with
microcosms of evolution and things develop very differently
there. And yeah, so maybe Lang has some
of that. Maybe that's part of why the
people are the way they are. But you also have some of these
animals that are different. And so maybe as a whole it's a
very wondrous country. But it's hard to point to one
thing. If you say the the fauna of Lang
is a bit broad, especially 'cause we're trying to, from my,
from my perspective, trying to maybe separate fauna into a
separate category and say OK, well what are the most
impressive animals then you might include some of these in
that list. But if you're separating them
from like natural geographical features, I can and I can see
why it makes sense to separate that.
And I I also did argue earlier that you kind of need to be able
to see. It all at once to count it, and
I'm only kind of arguing that but that.
That would keep this from. Counting if that's you know,
it's a huge island. So Lang kind of reminds me of
like a mishmash of Madagascar. New Zealand and Sri Lanka, like
these islands that are just off the coast of much larger
continents that have some things in common with the mainland but
have quite a lot. That's not the same.
It's very different in terms of their biodiversity and some
other things, some other factors.
And they're also so big, I almost feel like it's not really
fit. You can't just say like.
Asia is a natural wonder. Well, yeah, exactly.
Yeah. That's kind of, it's a little
extreme, but you see my point. Is some somewhere you got to
narrow it down to like. Just this thing and not this
whole massive area, you know? I agree.
All right, Next up is Marahai. Perhaps the most obscure of
these, a lot of y'all, may not have even heard of it.
The sea snake's description makes it sound like it could be
a candidate, which is it's a pair of volcanoes or like
basically a volcanic island surrounded by like a Crescent
island. I'm pretty sure this is based on
the Greek island of Santorini, which is named for Saint Irene,
and it has a similar shape. Santorini is a Crescent with a
smaller island in the middle. It's part of the Saccades
Islands, but it also has a volcanic it was a volcanic
island. It was believed to be the the
volcano that blew up there 3600 years ago is believed to be what
destroyed the Minoan civilization which dominated the
Mediterranean. You know, we're talking about
the the people of Crete and it's still the most active volcanic
era, rather most active volcano in the Mediterranean region.
Yet it's also a huge tourist destination because it's not
believed to be dangerous at this point.
So that's pretty awesome. Like you imagine, like a
volcanic island that's like jutting out of the middle of the
sea with this really unusual shape and it's visible from a
distance. However, I given our guesses at
least, my guess is that I think Loma's preferred overland
travel. It's a very good chance he
didn't see this spot. It might not be famous enough
for him to have been drawn to it.
It's in the middle of the Jade Sea.
It's not the most easy place to access.
It's not like you can land there.
There's no people living there as far as we know.
So it would be like sailing there.
It'd be expensive to travel there because you'd have to sail
by it and do an expedition. Would you even land there or
would you just pass by? So it's got some logistical
flaws as an inclusion here, though it sounds like it might
be beautiful enough, I'm not sure.
What do you think, Sean? I think it might be similar to
the the 14 Flames that you might not have.
To land there and walk up to the baseball, you know, just swing
it from a distance, but still be impressive.
But did he? See it from a distance.
If he saw the 14 flames and saw this one, I don't think he would
have picked this one. It's probably 2nd place to the
14 Flames tender, but I don't know if it makes the.
List another real. World comparison would be the
Ring of Fire, which. Is a series of volcanoes in the
Pacific that are connected along a fault line.
I believe and often kind of go off together or are emitting
lava at similar rates, and I don't know a whole lot about it,
but it's an awesome name. The Ring of Fire.
We've talked about it a few times before.
Can I say a little bit of a funny thing that happened to me?
You must I. Originally made our wonders made
by man map, cropped it to 16 by 9, which is landscape style for,
you know, YouTube and whatnot as you would imagine.
And in doing that I had to make sure the wall was in it.
Cropped it, got it already, edited it, went to make this one
and realized I was like, where is Marahai?
It's exactly cropped out. Here's the wonders made by man.
I just switched to it. You can see it now that the
wall's now. Once the wall's visible it crops
out. Mara high not.
It's not possible to do a 16 by 9 crop of of of Michael
Clarifel's Westeros known world map with both the Wall and Mara
high. That's neat that they're kind of
apparent, like you got the volcanic wall and the.
Sea and the land based ice wall. They're kind of opposites.
Coincidence. Does Michael Clarifel?
Know something we don't? Our final inclusion is the 1000.
Isles, it's a distant archipelago, archipelago,
archipelago, archipelago. It's a distant archipelago far
to. The east of IB meaning.
North of Essos. It could be the site of an
ancient civilization is now gone, and it could be that they
are long gone, thanks to an undersea race like the Deep
Ones. This was more of an honorable
mention to me. I kind of doubt Lomas even went
there. Yeah, exactly.
So far north, we're not even sure he went to the.
Dothraki region and this is. North of that, and it would take
a ship to get there, and there's no ships in that region.
You'd have to go sail like from Braavos or Laura or something,
'cause you wouldn't get the Ebenezer to take you there.
They're they're pretty xenophobic and they're not going
to, OK, they're not going to. Lomas doesn't have the money to
pay some Ebenezer whaler to go all the way over there just for
him, so I kind of doubt he went there.
Also, even if he did, it sounds really cool as an archaeological
wonder and its association with some of these supernatural other
world, or maybe not supernatural, but just like non
human races that live beneath the sea, they're not even
necessarily supernatural, they're just not human.
But they might be supernatural. They might have sorcery of their
own, they might have the ways to get in our dreams or something
creepy like that. But the sea snake did go there
and he's like, yeah, it's not really 1000 islands, it's more
like 300. And if you compare that to the
real world, that's nothing. The Philippines is 7641 islands,
the Indonesia is over 17,000 islands.
So this is really not much my real world standards.
Then again, it's all relative Lomas.
This might be the biggest chain of islands Lomas has ever seen,
the biggest archipelago Lomas has ever seen, assuming he's
seen it, which is kind of doubtful.
So again the relative argument that Sean made so well comes up
here is like, Oh yeah, it was Sean, But that Lomas never saw
the Philippines, Lomas never saw Indonesia.
To him, this might be incredible.
So yeah, that's it's worth consideration.
Personally, I don't think it quite makes the cut.
But I but it was worth including because of arguments like that.
It depends too on you know. When you talk about the number
of islands that you know the. Philippines and Indonesia are
spread out over a huge, huge area.
That's true. So for example, one of the seven
wonders how long Bay in Vietnam it has, it only has 300 islands
and they're kind of small, but they're also kind of
concentrated, just a bunch of like little islands jutting up
just enough for trees to grow on them.
But there's 300 of them, but it's in kind of a small area.
But when I look at the map, it doesn't look like the Thousand
Islands are a small area. It seems like a similar
Philippines huge spread out area.
So it's another one of my Orient before.
Kind of against it, you couldn't.
See this all at once? You know what I mean?
Like, it's it's. Even if you did go there, I
don't think this one is going to make the cut for a bunch of
different reasons. Right on.
Fair enough. Okay.
Well, let's do our final guesses.
Start off with Adam Whiteheads. Wordheads.
He was a big resource for us throughout this episode, so
let's take his guesses first. Casually rock 14 flames The
Roin, the Bone Mountains. The Great Sand Sea those are his
top five and then he has a secondary list of for the fill
that last slot and the top of that list is the forest of
cohort. So we'll we'll say he picks
forest of cohort for his sixth one and but he had a lot of
honorable mentions as do we I'll go next these are in no
particular order the Rhine the Bone Mountains the Forest of
Cohort, the great Sand Sea the Great Grass Sea and Casualty
rock. So I differ from him in that I
don't have the 14 flames and I do have the Great Grass Sea.
Now if he saw the 14 Flames and y'all made some good arguments
to how he could have maybe seen them even after the fact and
seen them from a distance that I didn't fully consider.
But I'll stick to what I wrote here and say that if he saw
them, he picked them. But I'm guessing he didn't.
And I also kind of wanted to include the jungles, but because
of the larger winds and Sithorios and Altos, I thought
maybe they would be. That's a fair reason to keep
them just out of the top seven. I'm going to make it tough,
uneasy. OK, say you did include the 14.
Flames. What Gets kicked?
Oh gosh, if it's too hard, you don't have to probably.
The sand, sea, I think the grass.
Sea is more impressive because it's more beautiful.
But it might be the forest or Cohor, because like, the forest
sounds awesome, but if it's just like a forest in a jungle aren't
that different. And we've already got these
other huge jungles so it feels like it's got comparisons that
like, there's nothing. There's no comparing to the
Rhine. There's no comparing to the Bone
Mountains. And the Great Grassy and Great
Sand Sea are pretty unique to themselves.
Cassie Rock as well. Like, I I can't.
It's hard to not include Cassie rock.
So Forestar Cohor seems like it gets the boot, which is what
Adam apparently would do as well.
OK, here's Nina's. The Royne, the Bone Mountains,
Cast of the Rock 14 flames, Forester Cohor and Great Sand
Sea. So I think that's the same as
Adam's looks like which fair, fair play she had.
She was doing the same thing with the superlatives kind of
that we were. Which was like she wanted to
pick the deep caves of Norvas. Well, it's the deepest cave
system that he's seen. The Royne.
Biggest river, Bone Mountains, biggest mountains cast the rock.
Most impressive, like singular feature 14 flames, biggest
volcanoes, forest of cohort, biggest forest, great sand sea,
biggest desert. So yeah, like the biggest X or
whatever. Now that does leave a few out,
like the biggest jungle and the biggest grassland, but you got
to leave something out. There's no way to, right?
I'll show you you're up. All right.
Mine are pretty similar. I also did it in order of
likelihood I started. With the Roy and I just can't
imagine a way the Roy is not there bone mountains same same
deal based on how he described it and we know he saw it and and
whatnot 14 flames I I put pretty high up there because I just
think I think he did see it I think I I I think from afar he
would have seen it he would have been awed by the destruction it
would have wreaked upon such a large culture.
I don't know. I'm putting the 14 flames on
there. Casterly Rock, You know, I think
he wants Westeros to be represented in some respect.
Without Casterly Rock or the Giants Lands, there's just no
wonders in Westeros. That doesn't.
No, no, no natural wonders in Westeros and that doesn't make
sense to me. So I think there has to be a
Westeros one. OK, then I'm going to say the
Forest of Cohor, but I think Sean really convinced me against
it a little bit. Like I said it before, Sean made
his case about what would he have really seen?
I mean, maybe if I tell myself there were some really
impressive trees, like some Redwood trees or something he
that's the one after this, after this discussion, I might be most
likely to change away from forest of Kohor and I have as my
last one the bleeding sea, which I'm just partial to again,
because I think if he went to the five forts, he saw the
bleeding sea. And what a sight that would
have. Been like this, blood red, this,
this Red Sea, like a base of these crazy forts, maybe.
I don't know. I think it might have been
particularly amazing. I don't know that I think these
red seas and lakes are common throughout Essos and Westeros.
Even if we said they're common in in in our world, I don't know
that I think there's many of them there.
It might have been the first one he'd seen.
Yeah. And it would be like, whoa, it
would be very stunning, especially at the.
End of the world, You're at the five.
Forts, however, because I don't necessarily think he saw the
five forts, as I said in our last episode, I really want to
think he did, but I don't know for sure.
So assuming he didn't see the five forts or the bleeding sea,
I'm going to say the Giants Lance as my other one.
Eighth. You're all from 8th if if, if I
say no. Bleeding sea?
No. 5 forts I think. The Giants, Lance and I think
Sean again convinced me here by arguing for Alyssa's tears.
By arguing for the waterfall. The stunning waterfall.
Because it's a good argument. It's not represented elsewhere.
There's not many water features in general.
So I think I I think that's I I go back and forth between and I
can be swayed a lot and honestly just looking at the map and
seeing how things are concentrated a bit and I'm like
well I feel like it's very empty over in Westeros side and I
don't know that he would have wanted Westeros to see him so
paltry Good said. Those are good arguments you
like really getting into Lomas's head, and I like.
That that's a that's a good way to think about it.
Sean. Tell us what you think.
What are your picks? I did the hard thing and left
Casterly Rock off. That is hard.
That's. Tough was is it 8th?
Did it barely miss the cut? Yes, I think it would be eighth
there. There's a couple like a if then.
Kind of choices I'd make like 14 flames.
Assuming you saw it. Yeah, I think if you didn't see
it then Casterly Rock. It gets in there.
Bone mountains for sure. I picked the Giants, Lance, the
Great Sansi and I picked the Island of Ling.
Nice. We all picked the Roy.
But I think the Wild, I kind of talked myself into it, thinking
about all the wildlife that he was referencing there.
That made me want to pick that one.
Cool, right on. Well said everybody.
Now As for our Facebook group, I also.
Put up a poll in our Facebook group that's just facebook.com.
History of Westeros. You could find that group.
We got over 3000 members in it. It's a very pretty active group.
Lots of good discussions and occasionally fun stuff like this
to participate with. Technically that's the link to
our Facebook page, but that'll that'll get you set.
The right way. Go to our Facebook page.
You'll find our Facebook group. Yeah, Thanks for the correction.
Yeah, that's good. So the this is.
In order because this was a multi choice poll.
So in order of most picked to least picked top seven The Roy
14, Flames, Giants, Lance, Mother Mountains, Slash, Womb of
the World, Bone Mountains and Castley Rock.
So there's the the the Facebook group like Mother Mountain's
womb of the world is an inclusion unlike the rest of us.
Otherwise it was some of the similar ones.
They didn't get their image choice downplayed by Aziz.
That's true. They didn't see.
They didn't have that argument staring them in the face there,
yeah. Like like this one did.
Yeah, this one kind of got off to a false start with that for
this, for this live version. But that is our episode, folks.
That is. I hope you all enjoyed it.
It's really fun going through these and guessing.
We'd love to hear your guesses. Did we miss one?
Is there something that we didn't include that maybe
deserved it to be included? I'd love to hear that thought as
well. And I'm curious as well.
Another thing I'm curious about is it if we'll see any of these
that we have yet to see, like some of them we've seen already,
we've seen. We're definitely going to see
more of Castle Rock and we really haven't seen that much of
it. We haven't been inside it really
at all. So that's coming.
I doubt we'll see, you know, the Bone Mountains, but we might
see. And we have seen the Roin
already and we we won't see the Caves of Norvos.
We might get a little closer to 14 flames.
It's possible. It's possible we'll see the
forest with Cohor Giants Lance. I kind of doubt we'll ever see
that again actually, because it's winter now and you can't go
to the Erie in winter Lang. Unlikely we'll go there during
the book, during a song of license fire, but maybe some
other, maybe that ET show happens.
We'll get to see it there. So a lot of these we will
probably never see. We'll definitely see more of the
great grassy cause. Danny's already there again.
But yeah, so I'm curious to see what if these other will pop up
actually in A Song of Ice and Fire or in future related
properties, you know, like other TV shows or that could change
our view of it. Maybe we get a really good image
of the Mother Mountain to a place that's kind of weak one.
And maybe people will think about it differently.
Look at the shining waters of the womb of the world.
Are you sure? That's not a wonder?
What Real World Lake enhanced by modern production techniques
will they use to show that? I don't know, Shawn, a cat has
been requested. I'll see what I can do.
In the meantime, I will give you all the answer to this trivia
question. What 3?
Roads pass through the Bone Mountains.
It says 1000 roads lead in, but only three lead out.
Those three have nicknames the Steel Rd. the Stone Rd. and the
Sand Rd. This question has a little bit
in common with the three traditional offerings of the
Dothraki. I forget what they are, but they
all start with S This is like silk and seed steel Silk.
Or was it God I? Mixed it up because I did the
true I I come up, came up with the trivia options and I made it
confusing on on on per. I made it so confusing the
disease got it wrong. Yep, I got it wrong.
But one of them is definitely seed because I find it very
dirty. I know that's not what they
mean, but agriculture? Yeah, I will never forget that.
One of them is seed. Yeah.
On the other hand, the dis rock. You don't like farming, So like
why are they care about? Seeds, maybe.
So maybe it is the the version, the inappropriate version you're
thinking of. But also there is a Silk Road,
but it doesn't. It kind of merges with the Sand
Rd. The Silk Road only exists on the
Eastern side. Either way, it's pretty cool.
Episodes that we've done in the past that relate to today
include an episode on Castle Rock, The Doom of Valyria.
We've done that plus a lot of other episodes in Valyria.
We did an episode on ET, we did an episode on Cohor.
Of course the forest figures largely in that.
Mother Rhine is part one of our Nymeria series, talks a lot
about the River Mantaris patrons only episode that talks about
the sea of size and the fallout zone of the doom that is
connected to mantaris 'cause they live right on the outskirts
of that. We have various other episodes
that connect to some of these in ways as well that I didn't
mention. We have so many episodes that I
can't always remember which ones connect to what, but you all can
point out that if you care to assist on that regard.
And Sean is back with a Kitty cat in arms, cradled like a
little baby. And I got the answer.
Seed was correct. We were wrong about.
The other two? It's salt.
Silver seed salt. Silver.
Not silk at all. That's why it's so tricky.
But salt. Silver and seed.
Salt. That makes sense, yeah.
Yeah. Silver also makes sense.
Cool. All right, we have We have a cat
that is dangling by one arm and looking very cute.
Cat's so well behaved. Yet another reason for y'all to
have your video. Option occasionally enabled to
see. This cute cat jet's so good.
Oh, look at those those glowing eyes.
Yeah, thanks as well to Nina for her.
Thoughtful guesses and assistance on takes on each
wonder as well. Thanks to Joey, Jesse and Bran
for helping us with our intros and outros and video both music
only and video intros. Thanks to Michael Klorfeld for
his maps and his video intro as well, and Sean is really trying
to get his headphones on with one.
It was really amusing. It was really amusing to watch.
That happen in fact you did it very well Sean, I think.
Well, I didn't even quite do it, can I say.
You got one here on good enough. The Seven Wonders of History of.
Westeros are 7 cats we have. 7 cats.
We do have 7 cats between us. That's right.
Yeah, so. One day, as I said, we will do
the unnatural slash unknown wonders of the world, and as a
teaser, I'll list off what we have so far for that the giant
toad statue, yen, the butterfly Spirits, the the doom area of
Valyria, the Sorrows, the Shadow Lands, the caves of the
children, the Greensier Cave, whatever you want to call it,
the Ghost Grass, the God's Eye, and whatever else we can come up
with. This isn't a comprehensive list
because these are just things that that came to mind while
working on this other topic. If you have other suggestions
for that, hit us up. That'll be a future episode.
It won't be next week, but sometime in the future.
And we also maybe we'll do a fauna episode of some kind
Obesiary. That'll include things as well
that we talked about today, like those hooded apes of Lang and
the millions of tigers and the monkeys and all that stuff and
whatever else might make our list TBD.
Perhaps Shawn's cat Jet will make the list That we're seeing
there, because of her amazing stillness and cuteness is pretty
wondrous, I got to say. But that's a discussion for
another time. Cats, dogs, apes and other
creatures. So until next time, everybody,
on behalf of Ashea, Sean and Jet and the other six cats of
History of Westeros. We'll see you next time and
Valar re read us the.