There's something that's simultaneously unsettling and
compelling about people who live in places where it's barely
possible to live. Partly this is because of how we
talk about them, the way information flows amongst
humans. Information flows from larger
places to smaller places, less so than the other way.
For example, millions of people live in or have been to New
York, Tokyo, Beijing, King's Landing, Lanisport, Old Town.
There's rumors and falsehoods said about all places.
Every place is subject to rumor, but there's millions of people
who have experienced those places.
New York, Beijing, King's Landing, first hand, millions of
people who know the truth or at least some form of it.
This is way, way less true about the remote places few people
have been to. There's far fewer people who
have experienced it, but a lot of noise about what people think
about it. There's rumors and a lot of
things that aren't from first hand experience, just it's just
rumor and talk. And when people repeat these
rumors, well, there's rarely a person with first hand
experience to set them straight because there aren't a lot of
people to set them straight. People who live in these remote
places, well, they're not common to encounter, are they?
And rumors grow the more people repeat them.
The bigger a population center is, the more almost any
discussable subject will be discussed.
They're bigger places or rumor mills, right?
And that tamps up, increases the level of exaggeration or just
straight up mistakes or even lies.
It's a telephone game, basically.
Someone may claim the members of House Far Wind, our subject
today, are different or strange or both, or they're they're skin
changers. But the vast majority of people
who speak about the far Winds know little about them.
Never been there, have probably never had a meaningful
conversation with someone from there, right.
What about academic texts? And that same thing goes,
really. There's no indication the
Maestris have gone out of their way to study Lonely Light or the
rocks around it. I mean, there must be some
maesterly writing on it. They are a noble house, so
they've got to have a maester. I mean, unless there's an
exception here we haven't heard of.
But even among the maesters and arch maesters, this, this, this
kind of text would be on the fringes.
These wouldn't have a lot of other maesters interested in the
subject in the 1st place. And that's true not just with
the noble houses there, but the noble house, House Farwin.
But they're subjects. They're, they're small folk.
They're a little different, too, So what people think about the
fringes of the world often come from places that are nowhere
near those fringes, so the information is less readily
available, more subject to inaccuracy.
Mystery, rumor, all that. But that's fun, isn't it?
Houses like Far Wind. And I use the term lightly
because there aren't truly houses like House Far Wind
really. But there are houses that fit
into that general category of hard to explain remote touched
by the supernatural or several of the above, or just different
right in terms of houses that have the least in common with
other houses. If that's a category, Far Wind
would be in it. And the Ironborn in general are
a people apart from the rest of Westeros.
They've had a long time to grow culturally separate from most of
the rest. Now, how's far when is a house
apart from even the Ironborn? So they're like a house apart
from the houses apart. Their sigil is a long ship with
a sunset behind it. Raiders of the Sunset.
See, it says it all right there. Long ships, it's what you
expect. Usually when they're coming from
the Ironborn, it's, it's about attacking.
Sometimes it's about trade or what have you.
But if you're going to be trading, you want to use a ship
different than long ships. They don't have that much space,
but they're strange, they're isolated, they're dreamy,
they're possibly supernatural, possibly holding deep knowledge
of the West or of the depths, or both, or other things that we
haven't even fathomed. How many houses are rumored to
skin change into sea creatures? Honestly, I think this is the
only one. It's not something we hear of in
the North, other than green seers who can supposedly slip
into the skin of any animal. Right, but Bran hasn't done
that. Bran has done birds and animals,
and we haven't seen him slip into a fish or a squid.
I mean, that would be cool, and it's presumably possible, but he
hasn't much reason to do that. What's down there for him to
look at? It would be pure curiosity, I
suppose. Which, hey, that's a good
reason. But plot wise, maybe there's not
such a reason to go there. This is a supernatural realm we
haven't really seen first hand. Maybe if you count Patch Face,
but he's not exactly able to describe it well, but he is a
candidate. That's a weird connection,
right? Patch Face and the Far Winds.
Yeah, it's it's not very grounded as an idea, but it you
can see where I'm going with that, I think.
And this type of topic in general is close to my heart and
my geeky brain because it's very wide open, as I said, for
theorizing, for imagination, for expanding the boundaries of
George's world building, for the enjoyment of mysteries of the
sea. We're dealing with the vast,
wide oceans of the West. But it's a sandbox, a big
supernatural sandbox that this all fits into.
And it's the sort that doesn't exist anywhere else in in this
world that we know of. Sunset skin changer pirate
Raiders that live farther W than anyone in Westeros and real more
territory than you probably thought.
Just one example of what you might not know about how far
wind that we expect to set straight in this one.
All that and more on this episode of History of Westeros
podcast. Hello and welcome back
everybody. So happy you could be here.
If you're attending live, it must be 3:00 PM Eastern on
YouTube because that's when we do that.
Sundays, we're live most Sundays at 3:00 Eastern.
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And you can find that on any platform that has podcasts.
And if you listen on Patreon as a member, it's ad free.
Shout out to our good friend Nina.
She of course is our most valuable contributor by far.
And her blog is at Good Queen Alley with 1l.tumblr.com.
Her latest blog post is a comparison of the death of Hagon
Blackfyre. That's the one who was killed in
the third Blackfyre rebellion. The the king that wore the crown
and bore the sword, the comparison is to him and Edward
of Westminster, Prince of Wales. He was the only son of King
Henry the 6th and Margaret of Anjou.
Yes, so that is an interesting one.
We talked about for this this particular Prince Edward and
several other Edwards during our episode on the Wars of the
Roses. So check that out if you're so
inclined. But first, read this blog post
so you can find your bearings and see what Nina has to say.
If you have questions for us, send them to
westeroshistory@gmail.com or just put them in the live
stream. If you're here watching, then
put them in the chat. At the end.
I'll mention some episodes that relate to this one so you can
stay immersed if you so choose. Let's get it going with the
trivia question. There's been Alyssa Farman,
there's been Brandon the Shipwright amongst famous
Mariners. But which Greyjoy wanted to
explore the West beyond the Lonely Light and find those
potential lands for the West? What was their name answer at
the end? Let's have our section headers.
These are the different subtopics that we'll be dealing
with today. Our first mention and 1st
appearance, which is something we almost always do with houses
and characters. Next, founding in Geography,
then the Lonely Light, then seal Skin Point, then addressing the
rumors. That's when we'll talk about
skin changing and stuff like that.
Then we'll take a quick break and come back with visions of
the Sunset Lands and then some talk about IRL in real life,
Remote Islands discovered by chance or wind, similar real
life circumstances to Lonely Light.
Then accent marks. We're talking a little bit about
accents and and things like that that develop when you're in an
isolated location. The Far Wind timeline in
history, which will help us understand their place in
history. It's a little imprecise, so
we're going to take some take some guesses and try to narrow
that down The black Line, which refers to house horror, which is
probably when the far winds came to be during that dynasty's
existence. Then we'll talk about the
Conquest and beyond post Targaryen, including Baylon's
Rebellions and the King's Moot, where we see Gilbert Farwind,
and that will be a lot of good stuff.
Let's get to it, starting with a pole.
Have the Farwinds actually discovered lands to the West?
Are they skin changers? Or two different questions you
can answer yes, yes, yes, no, no, yes or no, no, So no to
both, yes to one depending on which, or yes to both.
Let us know what you think. Or hold off on that until you've
heard our takes on these. You may.
We may change your mind. In general, House Far Wind
reminds me in terms of other episodes we've done of Mentaris,
Gagasos, maybe Hardhome, other remote places with supernatural
stuff going on that's not well tracked, researched or
understood. Yeah, fun stuff like that
differently than those houses. How far when annoys the map
makers, you got to like make the map a lot wider just to include
them. And they they're so small, like,
so a lot of times you see like an arrow saying lonely light
this way and you don't actually include it on the map.
So just yeah, the the people that aren't included on the map,
isn't that kind of symbolic? Isn't that kind of telling
there? They're so isolated, how they?
Do the little box where you like, put it on the map like
they do for Hawaii and stuff like that.
Yeah, yeah. In Alaska.
Yeah. You see that?
You're right. AUS maps often have Alaska,
Hawaii, like at the bottom or in a corner.
We're like, this is part of it too.
That's what the lonely light would be if if the if Westeros
drew maps like that. Yeah.
So our word of the day is probably fringe.
You'll probably hear that one a lot.
Maybe remote. You'll Yeah, we'll, we'll be,
we'll be using those words a lot.
Well, our first mention, you know, we always like to start
with that the far winds actually appear first in the appendix of
A Storm of Swords. But interestingly, it's the
junior branch, at least the branch we think is the junior
branch of them. There's two branches that we'll
talk about. The the list is a principal list
of Greyjoy vassals, though parsed by island.
The Far Winds in this appendices context are listed among the
five major houses of Great WIC. So yeah, the the Far Winds of
Lonely Light are not exactly a major vassal.
So you can understand why only the Far Winds of Great Wick are
listed, because Great Wick is an important location and they just
wanted to list the important houses on that Isle, which they
are, even though they might be the least important of those
five and the most interesting. So yeah, those things don't
always go together, do they? Yeah, there wouldn't be much
much reason to mention rather the Far Winds of Lonely Light
because they're not a big military power.
And that's usually what is being brought up.
That's usually what makes things relevant in this context, unless
they're also a big part of the story, which they're not, at
least not to this point. And so they wouldn't be very
interesting to someone like Balon Greyjoy when he's hosting
his longship, he's getting ready to have a rebellion.
He's not like, well, I sure hope the far winds are are with me.
You know, he's he's forgotten them for the most part maybe.
Or like a lot of other kings or Ironborn, he doesn't really want
to think about them too much. Kind of just pretends they don't
exist or doesn't spend a lot of time wondering.
Just kind of thinks about other things, how unique they are,
their characteristics and what that tells us about the world
and the world building. The the suggestions, the reading
between the lines. That's what make them
interesting. The mysteries of the Seas to the
West, that's what makes them interesting.
And those are very interesting topics.
These are big, enduring mysteries of the world of
Westeros and beyond. So yeah, it's not their military
power. It's not their role in the wars
to come, yet their role, their placement is still fascinating
first appearance when we first see them.
It's And of course, the King's Moot, A Feast for crows right at
the beginning, as Aaron first asks who would be king over them
quote. The crowd began to stir like men
waking from a dream. Each man looked at his neighbors
to see which of them might presume to claim a crown.
The Crow's Eye was never patient, Aaron Dampier told
himself. Mayhaps he will speak first.
If so, it would be his undoing. The captains and the kings had
come a long way to this feast and would not choose the first
dish set before them. They will want to taste and
sample a bite of him, a nibble of the other, until they find
the one that suits them best. Euron must have known that as
well. He stood with his arms crossed
amongst his mutes and monsters. Only the wind and the waves
answered Aaron's call. The Ironborn must have a king.
The priest insisted after a long silence.
I ask again, who shall be king over us?
I will. Came the answer from below.
At once a ragged cry of Gilbert. Gilbert King went up.
The captains gave way to let the claimant and his champions
ascend the hill, to stand at Aaron's side.
Beneath the ribs of not a this would be King was a tall spare
Lord with a melancholy visage, his Lantern jaw shaved clean.
His three champions took up their position, 2 steps below
him, bearing his sword and shield and banner.
They shared a certain look with the tall Lord, and Aaron took
them for his sons. One unfurled his banner, a great
black long ship against a setting sun.
I am Gilbert Farwind, Lord of the Lonely Light.
The Lord told the King's moot. It's somewhat fitting that a far
wind isolated, disconnected from a culture that's already a world
apart from most of Westeros might have missed the implied
strategy here. He may not have been aware of
the whole don't go first aspect of things.
It's it's appropriate to assign to a yeah, a house that is not
included in as much. They're isolated.
They're not as a part of these cultural traditions, these
ideas, these common thoughts, and it doesn't work right.
It he if he if he was thinking that maybe he would try
something different. Yeah.
It didn't work. Not at all.
He's has poor gifts. He speaks about exploring Lens
to the West. He's not talking about the kind
of things that Ironborn normally want to talk about, conquest and
domination and glory. Yeah.
He's speaking to some entirely other thing that they don't
really get. And he seems odd to them.
I mean, he calls him, he's sort of like an anti Euron, the
inverse Euron. He is also mystical and somewhat
distrusted like Euron, but he has faraway experiences or
claims to, and has promises of a land of plenty.
It's just to the West rather than the east, right?
And Aaron goes on to describe in his internal monologue the far
winds as a queer folk. I mean, he should talk, right?
More on that later. But Lord Farwin's Lantern jaw.
Let's talk about this description briefly.
It's kind of subtle, but maybe telling.
Generally, a Lantern jaw just means it's angular or protruding
or both. It's the jaw either is thin or
it sticks out beyond the the upper jaw.
Now, a mild Lantern jaw can be a good thing in terms of classical
attractive masculine features. And this guy's tall.
He doesn't appear to be like frail or weak.
So it doesn't, he's not described necessarily as like a
unattractive thing. It can make your face look
narrower when your chin is long. And Gilbert is described as
having a melancholy visage. So I think this would enhance
the effect. He's maybe a little bit gaunt.
Nina says it's a bit of a death's head effect too, which
fits with Aaron's distrust of him.
And presumably a lot of other people around don't trust the
far ones either if if Aaron doesn't.
Clean shaven is a bit of a subtle feature here as well,
because clean shaven is rare in Ironborn culture, so this is
something that marks the Far Winds as different, even though
it comes off as mundane. You might miss that.
Easy to miss that. Like how many Ironborn are
shaved? It's pretty rare.
Carl the Maid is called Carl the Maid because he's beardless.
So I don't know that you'd acquire a nickname for something
that's particularly common. Like, how many of the maids are
there? Coral the maid.
You got bail on the maid. You got Victorian the maid.
No, it's just him. Now.
It it also seems that Gilbert's sons are clean shaven too.
So it's like the whole family does that.
And yeah, well, an unusual thing to see among the iron board and
all of them here are doing it. So George is using subtle
methods as well as the more frontal approach with describing
them as skin changers and having this mad speech and all that.
But there's all a little details.
There's a lot going on there, too.
As for the Lantern jaw, a little more on that.
There's a possibility that what George is saying is that this
guy is, despite being isolated and stuff, he's not like
undernourished or something like that.
He's not malnourished. He's not weak.
He's weird. He's mad.
They use the word queer a lot, but it isn't necessarily
weakness that I don't think that's necessarily what they're
contributing. Poor.
Yeah, OK. And in that sense, they're not
militarily strong, but when you have an extreme Lantern jaw,
that's the Habsburg chin, right? So that's inbreeding, which
really isolated location like this, they might have a little
bit of that. I suspect there's some far win
cousin marriages and and the small folk marrying or marrying.
The gene pool isn't super diverse though might be more
diverse than we would immediately guess.
Because of, well, because of reaving, they would bring
thralls and and people that they stole from elsewhere.
And a lot of those people would become permanent residents of
Lonely Light or Sealskin Point. And thus some of them would
breed, you know, they would have children and the thralls have
children. That's not uncommon.
So yeah, that's kind of a a weird little angle to that.
Let's get the founding and geography.
Let's look at, let's get a look at what we're dealing with in
terms of location and all that quote.
A secondary island grouping lies 8 days sail to the northwest in
the Sunset Sea. Their seals and sea lions make
their rookeries on windswept rocks too small to support even
a single household. On the largest rock stands the
keep of House Farwind, named the Lonely Light for the beacon that
blazes atop its roof. Day and night.
It's. A stirring image to have a
lighthouse that never goes out. You know, there wouldn't seem to
be a lot of reason to have a lighthouse during the day.
Maybe there is more than I think.
I'm not a mariner by any means, So what do I know?
Certainly it would, I can say without having to guess that
it's more valuable at night. But anyway, it's not cheap to do
that, I guess. But there's one thing they would
have in abundance is, is blubber oil, right?
Seals and, and whales and sea lines and all that.
There's plenty of marine animal fat for that.
I don't suppose it's the other kind of oil or another kind of
oil. And the light would be vital.
I mean, you've got this remote location where there's nowhere
else to go, so you really would maybe find yourself getting lost
easily without that beacon. It's probably very important to
the surrounding Isles. And it's, as we're told,
there's, it's not just lonely light, It's not by itself.
There's a bunch of rocks, a bunch of small islands around
it, some of which are inhabited, some of which aren't.
It's not clear on which is which is which, how many, but there's
definitely some of each, it seems like.
And Nina suggests it's possible, too, that like the Three Sisters
and the Botleys, there's a use of the lighthouse aggressively,
like they lure people to false into traps and steal their
stuff. I would not put that past
Ironborn Raiders. Right.
Like you, surely they wouldn't do that.
No, they, they, they would do that.
I don't know that they do, but they would, you know, it's
nothing, nothing moral or ethical stopping them from doing
that. Not in their world view.
So it's very possible. Let's let's get another let's
get a little more precise here though.
Fire and Blood gives us a little bit more information.
Quote. Map makers tell us there are 31
Iron Islands in the main grouping off Iron Man's Bay West
of the Cape of Eagles, and 13 more clustered around the Lonely
Light, far out in the vastness of the Sunset Sea, the major
islands of the chain #7 Old Wick, Great Wick, Pike, Harlow,
Salt Cliff, Black Tide and Orkmont.
So 13 islands plus lonely light. I wonder if all of them can see
the lighthouse. I would suspect they can.
I mean, there's nothing else on out there and just a little bit
of light, even if you can't see the whole thing, just a look
like a glow in the distance would be telling, you know,
unless that's unless you're seeing the sun, which I presume
these Mariners and folks that live way out there could tell
the difference. So that's kind of wild, right?
You've got all these as as isolated as the fire winds.
Are some of these other people living on these even smaller
islands, whether they're all so far winds or just small folk of
the far winds, what are they? The farther winds, they're
shunned even harder. Even the far winds shunned the
farther winds except by the farthest winds, whoever the
farthest out West is right. So I don't think all thirteen of
those are inhabited, but it sounds like some of them are.
And those people might be even queerer than the than the far
winds. But like I said, maybe they are
also far winds. It's unclear whether to the far
wind cousins. Are they scattered all over
these islands or are they all kind of in the the two major
locations of Lonely Light and Sealskin Point?
Probably, I would guess the former.
It's probably it's probably scattered a little bit, but I
don't think there's lesser lordlings, but there might be,
you know, people that have authority over others.
I doubt it's just far winds of nobody else.
And of course, let's not forget how the Ironborn operate on a
ship. Every captain is king, that kind
of thing. So there's always there's a
little bit of little bit of different set of hierarchy among
the Ironborn anyway. And with these islands so
isolated, maybe they do some things a little bit differently
in terms of, of all that. Maybe the, the a captain is even
more a king on their own ship, given how vast and empty and how
important it is. But that's part of the, the
guesswork we're doing here, the exploration, the imagination.
Let's talk about lonely nights specifically.
So 1000 years after Brandon the Burner, which we'll talk about
that a little more in detail later, but for now, I'll say we
don't actually know when that was either.
But 1000 years after Brandon the Burner, the first Farwind found
the aisles they now call home, as detailed here.
Quote. Their captain built a tower and
a beacon there, took the name of Farwind, and called his seat the
Lonely Light. His descendants lived there,
still clinging to rocks where seals outnumbered men 50 to 1.
Even the other Iron Men considered the Farwins mad.
Some named them Selkies. Selkies.
If you recall, Selkies have come up a few times in our episodes,
almost always to do with island houses.
They're mentioned at the Shields and in a few other legends
around Westeros and elsewhere. Selkies are a thing.
In the real world they are that just that.
Seals half seal, half people or people that can change from one
to the other. Shape shifters that can turn
from seal to human. So that's interesting. 8 days
sail northwest of Great Wick. That's pretty far.
We earlier speculated they probably do have a maester, but
they might not have Ravens because I don't think a Raven
can fly 8 days sail without taking a break.
I really doubt that it's possible, but I kind of doubt
that. So that makes them even more
isolated than we would have first thought because at least
with Ravens you get news. But they can't get news by
Raven. They can only get it by ship, I
think. And ship 8 days sail, that's
slow. And then eight days back of
responding and all that. I mean, yeah, there is something
that was going to come up later that I want to bring up now.
A real world method to do with Ravens.
There was a guy who was nicknamed Raven Floki.
Yeah, Floki, kind of like Floki from the show Vikings.
But this guy was nicknamed Raven Floki because he used Ravens in
much the way they showed Ravens being used to discover land in
the early episodes of that show, which is you go out to sea, you
have Ravens in cages, and every once in a while you let them go.
If they come back, you're not in your land.
If they don't come back, you must be near land because why
would they come back to the ship when they can go to that land
and, you know, land in a tree or get away from the people that
were keeping them in a cage? Like they would obviously choose
to go be free, but if they can't land anywhere else, well,
they're not going to just dive into the sea and die.
They'll go back to the ship where they fled from and then
hopefully get a better chance later.
So this was a real method developed by this guy whose
nickname was Raven Floki. That's how he found Iceland.
He knew Iceland was there because someone else had found
it first. And he was like, well, I want to
find it. And this is this is what helped
him rediscover it from the description given by the first
people. So anyway, so that might have
something to do with how some of this was done.
George doesn't mention that, but it's a real idea that happened.
It's kind of a natural idea that someone figured out.
So it's entirely possible that someone in the amongst the
Ironborn figured the same method out.
They would have a very shallow population base, of course, not
a large population in the 1st place.
But as I mentioned earlier, there's a couple of push and
pull here, factors that would both lead towards maybe genetic
issues and then the other that would push against that, which
is, well, yeah, such children would intermarry with each
other. And it's a small population
base, right? But on the other hand, as I
said, salt wives, they, they capture people from far away and
bring them against their will. There.
Now, obviously this isn't a good thing.
It's a terrible thing, but it does have the effect of reducing
the odds of them having problems with interbreeding and
borderline incest, if not actual incest, things that they don't
have a full concept of the dangers of.
It's, it's a prohibition. They think it's gross.
Planets, the far winds are going to do things differently.
They're going to do what they have to do that.
We can't have a diverse population base.
We don't have room for that. And I don't know that they're
particularly interested in it either, because they may not
know how important it is. So it's a series of islands all
presumably paying homage to House Far Wind.
And House Far Wind pays homage to the Greyjoy's.
So earlier I said they probably have a maester, but I don't know
what these. What about these other Isles?
They probably don't because I don't think those are Lords.
If I'm wrong, though, boy, that's the most obscure place
you can be sent as a maester. You must be very unpopular at
the Citadel to get sent to Lonely Light.
They're like, yeah, who do we really hate?
That one guy? Let's send him to Lonely Light.
That is the worst place to get sent.
Like, you don't want to be a maester assigned to any Ironborn
castle, but this one shit, you don't want to go there.
And because it's so far away and somewhat shunned and
misunderstood and people just don't want to think about it,
that gives them a little more power over their own people.
There's just no oversight from elsewhere.
No one's paying attention to what they're doing.
No one cares the that's the silver lining to them for them,
not for their small folk. The opposite for their small
folk, because they could get away with doing things that
they're not supposed to. They could break laws and go
against traditions. And who's going to find out
their small folk are going to go run to Pike and tell the the the
Greyjoy, I probably won't even care.
And if he does, he won't care much.
You know, like, what are they? It's just this, this fringe
location so far away. He doesn't want to deal with
that. Every Ironborn king has been
focused E on attacking the mainland or conquering the
mainland or getting glory and wealth from the mainland.
They don't care about the far winds.
They want some help from the far winds.
They expect homage, but other than that, just leave them
alone. And Farwin's can use that to
their advantage. There's a there's a, there's
power in being left alone. There is an advantage to being
ignored sometimes, if you know how to capitalize on it.
Now, Gilbert Farwin maybe isn't that type.
He seems dreamy and and yeah, weird and and I often say weird
meaning good, but I don't know about this case.
He's just, yeah, just weird. Weird, regular weird.
But we shouldn't assume that all far winds are like that.
His sons aren't necessarily like that just because they lose him.
They are, I mean, just because they look like him.
Rather they're Iron War. Let's not lose sight of that.
He didn't come off as like a very violent guy in his speech.
He seems like a dreamer and explorer, visionary.
But these are Raiders and pirates.
Let's not mistake it, right? They that's what they do.
And in some ways, they might have to be more vicious than a
lot of other Raiders because they have a greater need.
They don't have nearly as much provided to them by their own
soil. They don't have industries, They
don't have jewel Smiths and artisans of all kinds.
Art. Yeah, there's not going to be
much there, right? Poetry, higher minded
civilization thing. Maybe they don't even care about
that. But you're definitely not going
to find it at Lonely Light, right?
Again, this is the extension of the extension of the Ironborn,
who were generally not interested in that.
And this is a extreme subset fringe of that.
So they're definitely Raiders and pirates, though they
obviously the trading and fishing and such, also all the
other things you do with ships. But raiding and piracy top of
the list, partly by necessity, partly because they don't have a
lot of other options, which I guess is kind of a similar
point. In fact, I will make the case a
few times throughout that it just matters to them more.
It's a bigger part of their economy that they they need to
raid, kind of like the free folk, right?
The free folk steal things that they can't make or acquire on
their own. Not that that makes it OK, but
it's different than stealing just for personal gain.
It's it's a different category. It's still stealing, it's still
wrong, but it is. I would categorize it as
different when you take things that you kind of need to live
versus things that you just want, right?
There would be a lot of scarcities at the Lonely Light,
like they're not going to have all the things you would want,
all the things you mainlanders would have day-to-day.
And this is still, we're talking about a medieval setting where
people don't have a lot of stuff.
Lonely light. We're talking scarce, scant, all
the, all the different adjectives, all the different
similar words that describe that.
Yeah. And this was all even more true
before the unity among the Iron Isles, which isn't that long
ago, historically speaking. Although to be fair, the far
winds don't go back to the beginning, the far winds, as we
said, 1000 years after Brandon the Burner.
So they're not. We don't go all the way back to
like early first men times. This is post and all invasion
era. So now there's also a religious
prohibition against Ironborn fighting other Ironborn.
If anyone's tempted to break that, it would be these guys
because, well, they could get away with it or because they
need have more need. They could sail.
What happens very often when the Ironborn raid the mainland, they
smash and grab and get away and people are like, we can't even
follow them because they they sailed off into the sunset and
we don't want to go all the way. We can't follow them like
they're too fast. Even if we wanted to follow
them, they're we're going into hostile territory.
The same kind of thing could happen with the Ironborn raiding
other Ironman. The far winds could raid, I
don't know, Orkmont or something or or Pike even.
And it would be very difficult for the people rated by the far
winds to get back at them. You know, like, you're going to
go all the way to Lonely Light and steal their bronze.
Like, you're going to steal back the food that they stole from
you. I mean, yeah, like, what's the
point? You might be mad, and you might
want to go after them to make sure they don't do it again.
But it's chintzy, right? You got to go a long way even to
do that, and you might not win. So yeah, they can get away with
a lot. This is this point that I keep
building on it, it it it comes from a lot of different angles.
They also might be left out of a lot of civil kind of conflict.
If the Ironborn take sides against each other, which has
happened a few times. The Farwins could just sit out.
They don't like me. Like now you guys go ahead and
fight over it. We'll just hang back and not get
involved. Or they could choose to be
involved when they want it without being drawn in
automatically. They could say, hey, let's take
the side of the winning side. They're winning, let's join
them. All right, let's send our 12
long shifts to join them or something.
Ever huge amount of ships they have.
Yeah, they would be among the most tested sailors, even though
they're shunned, even though they're seen as strange.
I mean, they got to sail 8 more days than even the farthest
Ironborn just to get home and then bat 16 days of sailing
there and back on top of whatever else.
They just spend more time at sea just from sheer time on a ship.
They would be the most experienced if, if that's a
bearing at all, if that's a basis at all.
So the sheer amount of time, yeah, that's just, I think that
would be valuable. That might be some rare thing
that other iron board might reluctantly give them credit
for. So now the iron price is a
factor, right? You're not going to.
They're not sailing all that way to to buy things.
That's not how the Ironborn work.
Yeah, some of them do. Not all Ironborn are bound by
the iron price concept. It's the more militant ones, the
ones that the story tends to focus on.
But we we know there's other types of Ironborn that aren't
all about that. There's, I mean, just like it's
just the way, it's the same way that real world perceived
Vikings, the Vikings are the one that gets all the stories, the
stuff talked about them. They're the exciting ones, but
they made-up a very small percentage of the North
population at that time. There's plenty of just farmers
and fishers and traders just like there would be here.
But the Lonely Light would be different in that regard because
of again, because of the extreme isolation, the difference in
culture as a subset and all that.
The sunset is significant for them as well.
It isn't just a symbol of who they are, a fact that they are
the farthest West to the sunset. The sun rises in the east, sets
in the West. It's very germane to their whole
iconic idea, their whole basis, their, their sigil is very
representative, representative of who they are.
But also, I think if you're, if you take the, the example, the
concept of the Ironborn smash and grab, then fleeing back to
their aisles, they're fleeing into the sunset.
It's, it's not only dangerous to follow the Ironborn because
they're good at sea. It's dangerous to fight them at
sea. But they're experts at timing,
especially someone like Euron. We've seen that like they attack
when the sun is just right to make it harder to see you coming
and to make it harder for you to follow.
They're sailing off into the sunset.
They know where they're going. You don't.
It's hard. It's, it's hard to fall in the
1st place. But even if you were going to
try to follow, they're going to make it hard for you.
They're sailing into the sunset. You know that in a little while
it's going to be too dark to follow, and they're still going
to know where they're going basically, and you won't.
So it's just kind of hopeless. He's like, ah, they got us
again. What can we do?
Well, what they did over the long term was they just upped
their defenses very, very long ago.
It was much easier to raid because Westeros wasn't as built
up, it wasn't as developed. The defenses weren't strong.
But of course, that changed over time.
More on that later. And as in general too, the
Ironborn like to hug the shore. We've seen that when Euron did
something different and attacked out of from open water, some of
the Ironborn thought he was using magic.
And we've been saying for years that no, that wasn't magic.
That was just good seamanship. That's just understanding how
things work. That's just, that's completely
mundane. It's just a mundane in a way
that a lot of Ironborn hadn't figured out.
And So what they do is they hug the coast.
This is something Victorian thinks about this lonely light.
Folks can't do that. They are 8 days away from the
other Iron Islands, let alone the coast.
So they would by experience and by necessity have less fear of
and less ability on the open water.
Better at navigating by stars, better at navigating by other
factors. I don't think they have things
like sextants for measuring, but they do have whatever methods
they have. They would have better than the
rest of the Iron, the rest of the Iron Isles and the other
Ironborn. Wouldn't want to admit that, but
it's probably true. So we're told from those earlier
quotes that the founder of Lonely Light, the guy who built
that keep and that lighthouse took the name Farwin.
So he's that makes him the founder the sealskin point far
winds came after, which is interesting is like, well how
did these obscure distant dudes acquire land on great Wick?
Yeah well first let's examine the mundane options, which is a
family dies out and then they get it granted to them.
You have a family like a family completely dies out.
Let's give it to another noble house or raise someone else in
their place. Giving the West the northern
West Coast of great Wick to the far winds.
That's not a problem in terms of empowering a house too much
'cause these these aren't powerful lands, at least not
that we know of Sealskin point doesn't sound very powerful.
Sealskins like watch out for that.
It sounds remote and isolated, though not as much as lonely
light. So maybe that's why they got it
because hey, their experience with that sort of thing.
Or maybe they inherited it through the matriarchal line
right. They there's a far wind who's
descent, whose ancestor was part of the family that just died
out. So they're the one that
inherited it. That kind of thing happens.
Or they could have just earned it for great service.
It could be like a like a Bear Island situation where the
Mormons not only got their island because of a Stark so
supposedly beating a Greyjoy in a wrestling match.
Or maybe it wasn't a Greyjoy, but an Ironborn king in a
wrestling match. And then somehow, the great then
somehow the Mormons got a Valyrian steel blade, you know,
a 500 years prior to the start of the books.
That has to be some sort of service they performed because
there's no way the Bear Islanders could afford a flaring
steel blade. So that's a a reasonable option
here that the Farwins did something to earn it, you know,
in some bygone era because we don't know how long they've had
Sealskin Point and it, but it probably wasn't too recent.
But we do have some ideas. We'll get to that as we move our
way through this episode. Let's now focus on Sealskin
Point. They are the other branch of
House Farwind. They're the, like I said,
they're the northern coast of Great Wick, almost the farthest
W amongst the main island group. Great Wick is basically an L and
the the lower part of the L here would be where Pebbleton is.
And this is up here where the Far Winds are, where Sealskin
Point would be. So obviously they're not as
isolated as Lonely Light, but except for Lonely Light, they
might be the most next isolated. So the two branches of Far Wind
might be the two most isolated branches of Ironborn there are.
And of course, we're told this so-called scattered aisles
beyond Great Wick. It's unclear whether the
scattered aisles beyond Great Wick refer specifically to
Lonely Light or if there's other aisles that are close to the
West Coast of Great Wick in addition to Lonely Light, which
is northwest of Great Wick. Hopefully all that made sense.
There's either one set of of extra islands that all surrounds
Lonely Light or two with the other being off the coast of
Great Wick. I think it's the latter.
I think there's a bunch of other aisles here and again, what is
this is their specialty, right, living on managing existing on
unnumbered unnamed Isles. That's the far wind vibe, right?
As we said, they're kind of poor.
Probably if you go by what Gilbert far wind offered the
other captains and kings at the kings moot.
They shunned it. You know the the men of means,
the greater captains just turn their heads, turn their turn
their backs on what his offerings were.
Still, this adds up. If you're 2 branches of house
far wind and yeah, each these little individual rocks that
subject to lonely light or sealskin point maybe doesn't
have much power. But if we're talking like 2025
aisles and maybe 2/3 of those or a half have a household with a
ship or two that could add up to something significant.
You might get up to 3040 long ships.
That's probably too high, but and we're talking about
centuries and centuries of history.
Maybe at certain points their power is waxed and winged.
Maybe that's maybe they've gotten to that point at in some
era. And it wouldn't be surprising,
you know, if they could manage to get that strong.
Great Wick is the largest of the iron aisles.
So even though they're so remote, they are connected to
the biggest of the aisles. It's ruled by mostly by house
good brother these days. And I say ruled by I mean
they're the most powerful house on great Wick hammer horn being
the most powerful castle there. But they also have the good
brothers have corpse lake, crow spike keep and down delving.
So they got 4 castles. House Merlin has Pebbleton house
spar has spar, I guess, and then there's there's the far winds.
Now there's also whore castle as in house whore Harwin, whore
Harwin hard hand, all those guys hair in the black.
It was destroyed well before Heron the Black and Harwin
Hardahan and it wasn't rebuilt. So one theory I have is that the
destruction of Hor Castle is related to the Far Winds
acquiring land on Great Wick. Maybe this was related.
Maybe the maybe the the Good Brothers got the majority of the
good territory that the horrors gave up.
But Sealskin Point might have been part of all that and the
far ones may have been able to grab it, maybe because the Good
Brothers didn't care about it. Like, yeah, you can have
Sealskin Point. What do we care?
Great Wick is the richest of the Isles.
That's important too, even though it is in in terms of
mineral wealth, Harlaw probably has the most actual money and
they're the closest to the mainland too, so they can they
have more trade opportunity. But Great Wick has lead, tin and
iron in great amounts. It also has timber in the
mountains. Timber on the mainland used to
be plentiful, but it's long since been cut down for long
ships. So maybe the far winds of Great
Wick are less strange than the lonely light ones, but maybe
not. Maybe they're all just so
connected to each other that they're all lumped in one group.
How did again? So we're going to keep, as we
continue, we'll come up with maybe a few more ideas of how
the far winds got this, this land on Great Wick.
But probably it's related to this, this this stuff with house
horror, which we will go into more detail on in a little bit
later. Kimber Lafay sends a super chat
and says, was there an actual light of some kind that drew
them there? Why did they stay if there are
so little resources? Good question.
Well, if you they weren't already nobles, the cap, the
captain of the ship was not from some other noble house.
Or if he was, it's not mentioned and he would have been a second,
third, fourth son, someone that didn't have a land of his own.
I think that's the base, the basic simplicity of it.
Yeah, it's poor land, but it's land they didn't have.
This is a captain who only had a ship.
He didn't have any land of his own.
And so he decided, well, I can continue to be a person with no
land, or I can have this crappy land that it's far away, it's
isolated, but it's land and it can be mine.
I think that's really it. And and maybe some kind of
actual light drew them there. It's possible.
I definitely have some stuff in this episode coming up about
stuff that might have already been there.
Yeah, they found it, but that doesn't mean they were the first
ones to find it. Someone else could have found it
long ago. Someone could have found it and
still been there. More likely, someone found it
and is long gone, but they might have left evidence of
themselves. The far winds might not be too
keen on sharing that. They might have found some
valuable things they would rather keep to themselves, or
stuff that the maesters simply don't know about.
Let's discuss the addressing the rumors, Which in this case
refers to things said about the far winds, in particular,
supernatural things said about the far winds.
Aha, fun stuff. In other words, now a man that
many consider mad weighs in on the supposed queerness of the
far winds. Yeah, it's really one thing to
be a madman calling other people mad, isn't it?
Aaron Greyjoy quote. Aaron knew some far winds, a
queer folk who held lands on the westernmost shores of Great WIC
and the scattered Isles beyond, rocks so small that most could
support but a single household. Of those, the lonely Light was
the most distant eight days sail to the northwest, amongst
rookeries of seals and sea lions and the boundless Gray oceans.
The far winds there were even queerer than the rest.
Some said they were skin changers, unholy creatures who
could take on the forms of sea lions, walruses, even spotted
whales, the wolves of the wild sea.
It's like the chicken of the sea.
As you can have the sea, the chickens of the wild sea.
Yeah, the chickens of the wild sea have to run from the wolves
of the wild sea. It's dangerous.
People thinking island people are different and strange is
nothing new. That happens in the real world
all the time and and and vice versa too, to be honest.
But this is island people thinking other island people are
different and strange. So they must really seem strange
to the mainlanders. By the transitive property of
strangeness, of course, which I know you're all very familiar
with. So I wonder if it makes a
problem for them in terms of marriages.
I would think so, yes. Back, very likely.
They would probably have trouble finding brides from important
houses, from other Ironborn noble houses.
Brides in general, no, because again, they are land holders.
They're noble. Even if they're kind of at the
bottom of the totem pole, so to speak, they wouldn't seem as
strange to other people in their vicinity.
Richer Ironborn who aren't nobles might be candidates here.
Other Farwin cousins might be candidates here.
So all that would serve to make them even more insular, even
more, yeah, incestuous in a way, if it's if we're going that way.
So I suspect that's a thing. But also you just wouldn't see
other houses clamoring for far wind brides.
If we're looking in the other direction.
It's one thing to bring brides there.
It might be a little easier to send them away because, well,
they're coming to you. That's always a little easier to
accept. You're bringing a new woman in
from some other house to live with you rather than sending
your own daughter to live with someone else.
That's that's you're usually as as the more powerful house, you
get more say in the matter when the fire winds are rarely going
to be the more powerful house. They're only going to be more
powerful house when it's them marrying into someone that isn't
a house at all, like a a non noble situation.
Nina adds that even more so than their skin changing power, the
marriage prospects would be limited just because of
distance. Like the sheer logistics of
making the arrangements in the 1st place is a barrier and
there's just not much they could bring to the table in terms of
power. Or like we aren't well
positioned to make money together or we're not well
positioned to, you know, expand our trading opportunities or to
be to use to raid together. It's just, yeah, they don't.
Other houses would be able to offer more in that regard.
So unless you have the very rare Ironborn Lord that wants this,
it's like, you know what, I want to bring this into my family.
I want skin changing or this hidden knowledge or what have
you. They actually want that, which
is going to be pretty rare, but might be.
We're talking about a lot of history here.
We're not talking 810 thousand years, but we are talking
several thousand years. So that's a lot of time for
unusual things to happen, for rare things to happen.
And that seems to be something that would maybe happen from
time to time. Here's what the World of Ice and
Fire has to say. It's another little tidbit for
us to talk about quote. Queer things are said of the far
winds and the small folk they rule.
Some say they lie with seals to bring forth half human children,
whilst others whisper that they are skin changers who can take
the forms of sea lions, walrus, even spotted whales.
The wolves of the Western sea. Sorry, strange tales like this
are common. At the edge is strange tales
like this are Comp Puck. I'm so sorry it's been so long.
OK, OK, I'm so sorry. I just keep thinking about
George loving the turn of phrase Wolves of the Western seas and
like you sing it again. Sorry disease, you might have to
read this whole quote. Hold on.
OK, I got it. Strange tales like this are
common. Just start over and read it for
me. I got only one.
Sentence it's been like 6 months.
Queer things are said of the far winds and the small folk they
rule. Some say they lie with seals to
bring forth half human children, whilst others whisper that they
are skin changers who can take the forms of sea lions, walrus,
even spotted whales, the wolves of the western seas.
Strange tales like this are common at the edges of the
world, however, and the Lonely Light stands farthest West of
all the lands known to us. It sounds familiar to what's
said about the Free Folk, but with seals instead of the
others. Remember what Old Dan says?
The Free Folk or the what he calls them the wildlings.
The wildlings would lie with the Others, desire half human
children. Yeah, it's the same concept.
It's which is being referred to. Strange tales like this are
common at the edge of the world. Yeah, this is a different edge
of the world, just the West instead of the North.
But it's a similar concept, Right.
The same concept here with lying with seals to bring forth half
human children too. That's again, we're coming back
to Selkies and they're called batting fire and blood on the
section on Alyssa Farman right there.
And let's use it as an example. Now this says nothing about the
Selkies rumors, but in in general, whether they're true or
not, but but both branches of Farwin live amongst quite a few
seals. According to fire and blood, the
ratio of seals to humans around there is 50 to 1.
So they definitely live amongst the seal.
That doesn't mean they that's not a reason to believe they
necessarily skin change with them.
But if they do skin change, and I'm very open to the idea that
those are the animals that are there, they're not going to be
bonding with some wolf on the mainland, you know, hundreds of
miles away. They're going to be bounding
with whatever animals are there. That's who they bond with.
And it's mentioned twice. And we know what we say about
something mentioned twice by George.
If it's a if it's a tidbit of lore and it comes up more than
once, then it's more likely to be true or more likely something
George wants us to notice and think about or imagine.
This was already pretty fun to think about, but it's also got
this backing the twice mentioned backing.
Like think about the extreme potential here for skin
changing. This gets pretty fun even if
it's a little tin foil. Y it's got to be possible.
Sharks, whales, Kraken. Can you imagine a skin changer
using a Kraken? Right?
Like could Bran do that? Like I think he could if he
really wanted to. I doubt the story takes us to
that. But if you can go into any
animal, why not a Kraken? And if you could do that, if you
could skin change into any deep sea creature, whether it's a big
one or a small one, it would give you literal eyes into the
depths. Like if there's merlings, if
there's deep ones, if there's other mysteries, if there's
shipwrecks or the drowned God's watery halls, for God's sake,
the God being the drowned God in this case, or the storm God, you
might go looking for that, right?
If you're a Iron Born believer, you believe in the Drowned God,
you're faithful, you have you're devout, you're pious, but you
also have skin changer powers. Well, first of all, you would
probably thank the Drowned God for the skin changer powers you
wouldn't like, also thank the old gods.
And you would probably attribute it to the Drowned God like
everything else in your religion.
And if you could see under the sea, if you could see down
there, then yeah, that's what you want.
You want to see that. It's really, I just feel like
that would happen. You know, you're a zealous
Farwin skin changer. Look for the Drowned God's
watery halls. You might think that's why you
were given that power. That's why the Drowned God gave
you this, that you could be the one to reveal it.
You could be the one to see it. Like, hey, maybe I'm maybe the
Drowned God has made me a prophet of types and there's got
to be some some priests of the drowned God that live on lonely
light or that were born there. They can't all come from old WIC
or great WIC or the other places.
Priests are born where they're born.
Devout men are born where they're born.
Zealous people are born where they're born.
This is there's no nothing saying that they can't be born
on lonely light or sealskin point.
In fact, they might be more likely to because it's such a
barren location. You know, there's like less
other aspects of civilization to be distracted by.
It's it's just the basics. It's the sea, the religion of
the drowned God and living and dying.
You know, there's what else is there when you're that far West,
you know, life is simpler now. Wolves of the Western seas.
This phrase comes up again a couple of times.
That's meaningful. Maybe like it's used in a in the
context of skin changing wolves, like that's the number one
animal in the north that skin changing happens with.
Those are wargs. They're the one type of skin
changer that has their own sub name Wargs only a wolf skin
changer. There aren't, you know,
nicknames for bird skin changers or boar skin changers or the any
of the other animals. That's it's only wargs that are
have a their own special name for it.
So this is Nina suggests this is intentional by George to make
the like a subconscious connection between skin changer
concepts. Wolves are the most important
skin changing animal, the most common.
And so we get this mention of both the iron borne are referred
to as wolves of the western seas and these basically killer
whales, spotted whales are probably orcas.
They're not called orcas, but they're basically the Westeros
or the Planetos equivalent of killer whales, which by the way,
would be a, a wicked fun thing to imagine as a, as a thing to
skin change into a killer whale amidst a pod of others.
Like take over the the leader of that pod, have a whole army of
killer whales behind you. What kind of power would that
make you feel like you have if you're a person doing that?
So that's, I think that's a good catch by Nina identifying the,
the language George uses across spanning across both these
Ironborn concepts and attaching it to this northern concept,
which is skin changing is a very northern thing.
But here it's kind of an exception.
Why do we have this? Where else are skin changers
talked about? Nowhere pretty much.
There's there's ancient tales of skin changers, a place like
places like Red Lake and maybe elsewhere in Westeros from way
long gone times. But now it's it's purely a thing
of the North, you know, maybe the occasional Blackwood or
something like that. We don't actually have evidence
of that. We just suspect it.
So yeah, like, that's a big deal, right?
That's a it's very notable. And actually, Needham points out
here that the enhanced edition of a piece for crows explicitly
identifies spotted whales as orcas.
So that it's not just a guess. That's that's that's revealed as
truth now. Orcas can swim really far.
Real life killer whales, they can go really, really far.
Like they can go the span of a continent in like 10 days.
So if a person can skin change into an orca, they could really
explore far, really far West without any danger of shipwreck
or anything like that. So when Gilbert Farwin talks
about exploring the far West, he says he's like, had these
visions. Are they dreams?
Are they skin changing visions? He's seen them through the eyes
of a a sea creature, potentially a spotted whale.
It's a compelling idea. But yeah, there's no skin
changers elsewhere. Even if we just focus on the
Ironborn, there is not even a hint that I can recall of skin
changing on any other island or any other Ironborn house.
So this is a real exception, and that makes it meaningful and
curious and fun. Could it be something on the
island itself? Could it be some sort of
northern connection or something there?
Something they found? I wouldn't go so far as to guess
that there's a weirwood tree there because that would be
mentioned. I think the maestros would point
that out. I wouldn't.
That wouldn't be kept hidden. And why would they keep it
hidden? They'd be like, yeah, there's a
werewood here. What's what's the big deal?
If maybe there was 1 long ago that they got cut down or
something. Anyway, something else, maybe
some sort of relic or left behind evidence of another
civilization. Who knows, Maybe there were
already small folk there. Maybe there's some leftover
small folk. Nina has a great idea here.
If there weren't people there from long ago, like thousands of
years back, you know something, maybe even something that came
from the the far West. There could have been shipwrecks
or castaways or maroons or even colonists from Brandon.
The shipwrights fleet. They went W to explore and they
never came back. It doesn't mean they didn't find
this on the way. They could have found it and
they would have reported it had they ever made it back to
Westeros. But since they didn't, whatever
knowledge they had disappeared with them.
But it's entirely possible that some people were like, hey,
lonely, this is a new place, let's live here.
It didn't go very well. It's a crappy colony.
And they didn't raise a lighthouse because that came
from the far winds. But if you look at the history
of people in the real world trying to make bad land work,
there's a lot of it, and a lot of it comes from the people who
are most related to the Ironborn, the Norse, the
Scandinavians, the Vikings, whatever name you assigned to
them. There is no perfect catch all
phrase for that. Like many Viking peoples tried
to settle in places like Greenland and a lot of these
other islands that are just without the magical element,
though they probably believed in some magical elements, they
believe in supernatural things. So it certainly guided their
decisions, even if it wasn't literally impacting them from
from that aspect. But there were just a lot of
attempts to find new places to live.
Even if the land is is bad. The Norse were pretty stubborn
as far as settling goes. They would, once they committed
to living somewhere, they would really see it through.
There's a lot of examples of failed Norse settlements and
just in not only in the sagas but from archaeology finding
them. And it's not just the Norse to
do that, but they're a particular example, not just
because they're the most similar we have to the Ironborn, but
because their methods would be similar, because they're sailing
and finding islands and because they have this similar
stubbornness about, well, land is land, y'all.
There is not a, there is an not an unlimited amount of it.
And who knows when we'll find more on uninhabited land.
If you're living in the 9th century, you might be thinking
there isn't a whole lot of good land left in the world to claim.
Whether that's true or not is a matter of perspective, but you
can see why where they're born, you're born in mainland
Scandinavia, you're born in Norway or Denmark or Sweden.
You're like, well, they're all the stuff here is taken.
So finding a new islands is very compelling.
Even if those islands are crappy, at least you're living
free. At least no one's telling you
what to do. And that matters a lot.
So it's definitely tempting to think people were there already
that Nina's idea. I really like that.
Now another idea is frequent rating in the north.
What if the far winds just attacked the Stony shore a lot
and captured a lot of northern people.
I, I, I like bringing this idea up, but I don't think it takes
us anywhere because, well, this other Iron born houses do that
too. And then they don't have skin
changing. So that probably doesn't make
it, that probably doesn't answer the question.
Also, George just said that he's pushed back on skin changing
being a genetic thing anyway, Like all the Starks have it and
all this, this current Stark generation that doesn't, that
doesn't argue for genetics, that argues for some other sort of
magic going on now. He doesn't say it's not genetic.
He just doesn't want to define it that way.
So there might be some genetic element to it, as Nina says, but
it's just not a guaranteed trade.
It's just something that it's a fringy rare thing that pops up.
It may have something to do with genetics, may have something to
do with other things, other supernatural forces that we
can't pinpoint. But the genetic tendency, if
there is a little bit of a genetic tendency, well, this is
again, this is a very isolated inbred population.
So if if it is a little bit of a genetic component to it, that
genetic component would be maintained more likely than it
would somewhere else because of the closeness to inbreeding, if
not actual inbreeding. Now, what about the value of
skin changing when doing the thing we said the fire winds
would have to rely on, which is raiding, reaving, having a skin
changer in your midst. Honestly, I think that would be
more useful for straight up piracy than raiding the mainland
because, well, if you've got a whale or just some smaller, like
a fish that you're using to skin change into, you could find
other ships. And if it's a larger animal, you
could even like inhibit it like a whale could.
A Gray whale or sperm whale or killer whale could actually do
severe damage to another ship and then you could come up and
loot it or something like that. Or so not just the scouting, but
the actual attacking of the ship.
How what's a whale going to do for you if you're attacking some
village, you know, one mile offshore, maybe nothing.
Whales couldn't even get that close.
They risk getting beached or what have you.
Now if you're a skin changer that can use multiple animals
like a varamir or someone really powerful like Bran, then that's
not a barrier either. Use a whale to get close to
shore, then to skin change into some bird that's on land and spy
on this village you're about to attack and be like, yeah,
they're they don't see us coming.
Now is the right time to attack. Very valuable.
A skin changer in a raiding party, both at sea and on land,
if they have sufficient power, they'd be invaluable, very
invaluable. Navigation, scouting, all these
things, finding the right moment to attack, which they rely on,
right? The Ironborn aren't big on
frontal assaults. They'll do it.
They don't back down easily. I just got to saying how
stubborn they are. But they prefer to start fights
that are easy for them to win. They are very much bullies in
that regard. And skin changing could be
valuable for just surviving, right?
For in this is an isolated environment, right?
Can the far winds, let's say, again, using the orca or large
animal example, large sea creature, Can you drive a school
of fish towards a fishing boat or a fishing fleet?
Yeah, maybe things like that. Dr. Seals close to shore for
getting speared. Yeah, why not?
You know, it's an interesting thing to think about skin
changing being used for such mundane activities.
But these folks might be on the fringes of survival, and whether
it's used to chase ships or rather chase seals or fish, or
to ram ships that are carrying loot, I think all these things
are in the realm of possibility without stretching very much at
all. Or or literally at all.
It is a little weird and and a little bit spooky if not creepy
to imagine. How does this bond develop in
the 1st place? Right.
Like often it comes with proximity.
The the the direwolves bonding with the Starks had a lot to do
with day-to-day contact and them having a fondness for their
animals and really bonding with them.
How does that happen with a fish or a shark or something like
that? You're like, I, I feel the call
of the sea. You got air on walking out into
the into the surf and feeling the call of the drowned God,
maybe something like that. But you're still not like
necessarily getting a lot of physical contact with this
creature. Probably maybe some though.
But it's it's creepy, right? Thinking about that.
Like the call of the ocean, you have this connection to some sea
creature. Yeah, that's kind of creepy.
A voice from the depths that might be interpreted by some
ironborn as the call of the drowned God himself, even if no
one else would see it that way. A a devout or even semi devout
ironborn person might think that way.
Easy to think of it that way. Yes, this could all be rumor as
it's as this the maester suggests that it's just, well,
people say weird things about people who live on the fringes
and well, these are people that these are some very fringy
living people. So the stories about them would
by definition be amongst the most wild, the most fantastical,
the most rumor mongery. But that doesn't mean it's not
true. Strange tales are not always
just tales. Strange things happen in our
world, and this is a supernatural world we're talking
about. So the maesters are wrong way
too often for us to just say, yeah, the maesters are probably
right. Let's just toss this out.
It's also just way too fun to to toss out, right?
We It's way more fun to imagine some truth, or a lot of truth to
it than just to call it all rumor.
I don't even think George would want to do it that way.
Guilty. Undertaker asks.
Orcas are sometimes called, or says rather, Orcas are sometimes
called the wolves at the sea in our own world.
Oh, I didn't know that. That's cool.
They do hunt in packs. That makes a lot of sense.
Kimber Lafacius, Wolves of the Western Sea is going to be my
new band name. Nice, that's a good one.
What kind of sounds like a metal band, right there's a there is a
band called the wolves in the throne room, which is already
sounds kind of Game of Thrones. That's a that's a black metal
band. So I don't actually recommend
them unless you're really into that sort of thing, which which
I'm not I like metal, but not black metal anyway, y'all
appreciate the comments. If you are thinking of
supporting us, it's a great time to do it this time of year is
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there's times where it's a little less active.
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us to rely on y'all even more than we normally do because,
well, we ebb and flow with the fandom.
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Why don't you do better? But in another way, it makes us
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If you want to join us on Patreon and become a supporter
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But we also have things like access to our scripts and notes
and a few other things that are described there at
patreon.com/history of Westeros. Our next section, Visions of the
Sunset Lands. This is what Lord Gilbert
actually says during the King's Moot quote.
Lord Gilbert began to speak. He told of a wondrous land
beyond the Sunset Sea, a land without winter or want, where
death had no dominion. Make me your king and I shall
lead you there. He cried.
We will build 10,000 ships as Nymeria once did, and take sail
with all our people to the land beyond the sunset.
There every man shall be a king, and every wife a queen.
That's wild. Like what the heck is this guy
talking about? Sure, we've heard tales of the
West, and there are some. Maybe Alyssa Farman found it.
Maybe she circumnavigated the globe.
Maybe somebody else did. But this actually came.
Lord Gilbert's speech was published somewhere around 2002
or 2003, long before Fire and Blood.
Long before The World of Ice and Fire.
Like, well over a decade before either.
Like 15-16 years before Fire and Blood.
And that's because George published most of the Iron Born
chapters in A Feast for Crows in something called Arms of the
Kraken. Some of you all remember that it
was published in Dragon Magazine.
Oh, we should have grabbed your copy.
Yeah, I do have a copy over here.
And I did I, I did go to a Barnes and Noble the day that
was published. Took an extra long lunch break
from my job read it twice and Lord Gilbert yeah he was in
there This this quote was in there so 2002 ish.
We've had it that long the the far winds have been around have
been described that long of course they were in the Storm of
Swords appendix in 2001. But this is when they actually
appear and this is when George brings starts developing this
idea of lands beyond the sunset sea.
This wasn't spoken of very often.
Alyssa Farman had never been mentioned Brandon the shipwright
had but that's about it right. There's just, George had barely
scratched the surface with this, and this is a very early entry
into that journal of concepts about what's to the West.
The Ironborn weren't all even that well defined at this point.
Remember, the Ironborn storyline didn't really start until A
Feast for Crows. It was basically just a little
bit of Theon. You know, Theon went there and
that's he was our eyes into what was going on there.
But then Theon goes back to Westeros pretty quickly to
attack Winterfell and do the Sony shore and all that.
So it made sense in a way for George to expand that.
He expanded it a lot. He went really deep with the
Ironborn, and for better or worse, we have a lot more
Ironborn than we may have predicted back in the day.
And we didn't have Victaria or Asha chapters until this, let
alone the Forsaken. What's that?
Aria Asha? I mean, obviously Aria.
We definitely had Aria chapters. No, I think you said Victaria or
Asha. Did I heard victaria?
I said victaria. That's called Victorian.
Yeah, Victoria. That would be what she was
called if she had been female. So very I I want to impress on
you how new this was when it was first released and how far ahead
of some of the other related concepts it was.
His sons are named in the appendix.
They aren't named in the in the actual chapter, they're Giles
Egon and Jan Jan Egon is YGON and Jan is like bronze Jan
Royce. Do they agree with him?
Are they like, yeah, lands to the West?
Are they like, man, Dad just will not shut up about that
weird ass lands to the West stuff like he is nuts.
Maybe they share it though. Maybe they're like, yeah, we saw
that vision too. He or we believe him.
He's our father and we trust him.
You know, we have no idea. They I sort of lean towards the
ladder. I mean, it's they're brought up
in the same isolated culture too.
And they look like him. They shave like him.
They're they seem to be his champion.
So they're probably following his beliefs as well.
Now, there was an Alton Greyjoy who wanted to sail to the West
as well. He was Lord Reaper of Pike maybe
80 years before the books, but that's a guess.
His nickname was the Holy Fool. So he was very devout, but
obviously to the Drowned God and for some reason that made him
think they were lands to the West.
So Quelon, Bailon, Euron, these are his descendants, right?
These are these guys are related to the Holy fool.
Nina even suggests Alton may be married.
A far wind. That's a good theory.
He would have maybe inherited their beliefs or their ideals,
their visionary concepts of what's to the West, and he may
have been bought into that whole vision.
Maybe even he married a Far wind and that's why he got so close
to them. Now I wouldn't guess that the
first born son of the Greyjoy, the Lord Reaper of Pike, would
marry such a smaller house like the Far Winds.
But maybe Alton was a second or third son who ended up
inheriting due to some deaths in front of him, and so you ended
up with a far wind at the top. Anyway though wasn't the intent,
it's interesting to consider that this is where Euron's
supernatural angles come from. If this passed down to him some
way, whether genetically or some other connection his, I mean his
dreams of flying right? There's a lot of theories around
Euron and him being like a failed green seer, an experiment
or some. Maybe they blood Raven and his
children friends thought that maybe he was the last green
seer, the one that they, the brand turned out to be when they
were looking for brand. Well, Euron came along 1st and
they, they entertained the idea that it was him before
realizing, oh, this guy is evil. It's it's not him.
At least we hope it's not him. So there's a lot of overlap
there, a lot of similar magical speak.
And it's tempting to connect to Euron, given his unusual
magical, shall we say, connections, even if none of
that is inborn. Maybe it's all just things he's
acquired through artifacts and research and going to weird
places. But if any of that's in him, if
he has like some magical bloodline or something like
that, something taught to him by a cousin or a distant kin, well,
the far winds are at the top of the list for that candidacy for,
for being that source for Euron, whether it's internal, whether
it's bloodline related or whether it's passing information
to him. There could be, there definitely
could be something there. So if we're, if we're being
clear, there are definitely lands to the West.
There's no doubt. Unless the, as the planet isn't
a globe, then it's, well, maybe you'll just fall off the edge
then, then maybe not. But I, I'm pretty sure we can,
we can call it a globe. So the question is just how far
West, how far is it to Ash Eye? You know, like is it insanely
far? Is it less far than we think?
I mean, the Ironborn don't have great long sailing vessels.
They they esteem the Mariner. They they, they're proud of and
respect people that are explorers, but their ships
aren't great at it. Long ships are not good
exploring ships. There are rating ships.
They're decent for trading and for going places that are hard
to reach. They can go up river.
That makes it really useful both for attacking and for trade, but
it does not make it useful for going on into the open ocean,
especially for vast distances. In fact, it's quite bad for
that. It's it's it's capable, but not
good. Not good for that, not for the
kind of distance we're likely talking about.
I mean, yeah, I mean, definitely Viking long ships went from, you
know, Norway to England, that you're going over some pretty
choppy seas there. That's the North Sea that can be
pretty dangerous quite far. But I think we're talking about
a much larger distance here. Plus they don't know where
they're going. The Norse people knew where
England was. There was trading there long
before there was raiding there. So it was a kind of a known
commodity where this is not no one.
If there's a known route, it's by no means public, at least on
this side of the ocean. Maybe the people over there know
it, but if If so, then why aren't they ever seen?
I guess they're like, yeah, we don't want to go over there.
We know the route. It's too dangerous and
worthless. You just end up facing the
Ironborn. Now, that wouldn't be true.
You could face Old Town that way.
But yeah, apparently it's just not a thing.
It's too far. But if we're thinking, if we're
casting our memory long, long ago, the idea is different.
If there were people to the West who came E to settle or explore
or to establish trading outposts, that's very
believable. Something like a transatlantic
trade operation, long, long gone.
Spain had a very long period where they did this.
They looted the heck out of the New World, grabbing gold and
silver from the natives who cared very little about it,
though they cared quite a lot about what the Spanish were
doing to them in the process of taking all that loot and sending
it back to Europe to fight wars, usually against England, but
against other people, and to just be wealthy.
So why would that be possible then and not now?
Well, I mean, we're, we're talking a long time before.
I mean, there, there may have been a great empire, the Dawn
back then or back even farther, and there may have been
something before them even. But let's just stick with the
idea of the great empire of the Dawn because they're a little
more tangible if they're responsible for the oily
Blackstone. Well, there's oily Blackstone on
Pike, There's oily Blackstone at Old Town at the base of the high
Tower. So there is some, there is some
evidence that people from Far East made it to the West, not to
live maybe, but to trade, maybe to live, but to trade for sure.
That would be a lot more likely. And why though?
What would you trade with in Westeros in this era?
There's nothing. There's no, there isn't evidence
of a lot of civilization in Westeros in this era.
Elsewhere, yes. Essos and beyond, sure.
Not Westeros. There was.
This is the era of children and giants and that's it.
Untamed. The humans on Westeros at this
point would have just been on the fringes, on the outsides of
the continent. Lake like like where Old Town
is, for example. So what would they be coming to
trade for magic? They'd be coming to trade for,
for that kind of technology. They're not trading for metals
and things like that. Gemstones, well, because they're
that's not being produced at Westeros in this era.
Maybe Obsidian, maybe they have A use for that.
Maybe some other things like amber.
But like for the most part, it would be magical knowledge going
back and forth if anything, because I don't know what else
they'd be interested in. And that is suggested.
This isn't just my idea. The World of Ice and Fire
suggests this sort of thing. Not connected to the Far winds,
not even necessarily connected to the Great Empire of the Dawn,
but connected to something that's long gone, which might be
the Great Empire of the Dawn. It might be something that
predates them even. But if there's this little, if
there's a little bit of oily Blackstone on Pike and there's
some of the high tower, there might be smaller amounts that
have gone undetected elsewhere. Maybe there's some on the Lonely
Light in that territory. Maybe it's a tiny bit.
Something that too small to to have captured the notice of the
maesters. And most of the maesters don't
care about it anyway that so it would it'd be there.
Or maybe it's very telling. So someone like us would be
like, wow, the only Blackstone is on Lonely Light.
That's huge. Hardly anyone else would care
about that. Not in world.
So, yeah. And now the idea of
transatlantic trade also, you would need the idea of, well,
maybe they just had better magic and that's that's how they could
navigate that far. Or maybe they just had better
ships, right? We just got to talk about how
long ships are not particularly well equipped for this.
Alyssa Farman, she made one of the best ships ever seen.
She did all sorts of research and used all her experience to
make an incredible ship the likes of which has not been seen
since. So that goes to show that's like
we're talking about cutting edge technology that Westeros has for
sailing. But this long gone race might
have gotten to that point either through mundane technology,
through magic, or through both. And again, it's not far fetched
because on the real world, you've got places that people
have been living unchecked for thousands of years.
Like some places are just that well made, made.
They turned out that well in terms of habitation for humans
or our ancient cousins like Neanderthal and Denisovans, for
example, there's a place called Diyar.
Bakir probably said that wrong. It's in what was Mesopotamia,
now called, now part of Turkey. People have been living in that
area uninterrupted since 8000 BC for 10,000 years.
That's a massive scale of time. But when we're talking about
Westeros and Essos, the scale seems to be a little larger.
The sale seems to be what we're faced with on Planetos is
something like, well, this. The scale of human civilization
is bigger. Humans have been building cities
for longer on on Planetos and than they have on Earth.
So extrapolate that if they've been doing it longer than on
Earth and we have people that have been living in the same
place for 10,000 years on Earth. Well, how long have people been
living in the West? How long have people lived where
Ash I was? How long have people lived in
ET? More than 10,000 years.
Most likely one of the, just as one other example, Argos that
came up a few times in our Grease episodes, Argos people
have been living in Argos in that region, in that little area
where that city is since 5000 BC.
So that's another like 7000 years.
So yeah, this isn't, there aren't few examples.
There's a lot of examples like this, not that many that go back
7 or 10,000 years, a lot more that are 563, whatever, but
there's thousands of year examples all over the place.
What knowledge was passed down it?
It might not be an object or something like heart tree or
some oily Blackstone that the far winds found.
They could just have knowledge passed down from their benefit
from their forebears. One particularly powerful skin
changer among the far winds could have discovered an awful
lot by themselves, and that could be passed down through the
through the years to future fire winds.
It might not be something they want to spread knowledge of.
They wouldn't necessarily want to share that secret with other
people. It makes them seem even weirder.
It makes them even more isolated.
It makes people shun them even more.
Why talk about all this magical stuff that no one's even going
to believe them on? Keep it to yourselves.
I mean, what do other Ironborn think?
If they really are skin changers, wouldn't that make
them think, Yeah, that's just not part of their world, right.
Iron Born aren't skin changers except maybe these guys.
So that, yeah, what a huge thing to keep them separate from the
rest of the iron bore. It also just think about it from
a cynical point of view. Or or not, maybe it's not even
cynical. You have crappy lands.
Yeah, we said it's land. Any land is better than no land.
But if you're the fire winds, you might be like, yeah, I'll
take any opportunity to find something better than this.
Maybe that means we got to go all the way West.
If anyone's more likely to want to believe in stuff to the West,
it's the people that have the most vested interest in, you
know, climbing the ladder to better lands.
You know, they're, they're among the they are land holders, but
they are among the poorest land holders amongst noble houses and
certainly the farthest separated from the rest.
So this dream Gilbert Farwin has, it's like, yeah, well, he,
his people would benefit among the most.
Like, well, everyone's going to be a king or queen.
That's a bigger jump for them than for a lot of other folks.
And if we're talking about this standard telephone game, the
rumor mill, Well, if this supposed far wind skin changer
who lived 1000 years ago and learned all this information by
skin changing into animals beneath the sea, seeing things
going to the far West, all these things that he told his family
that they passed down how many generations of telephone games
has gone down through the tails would grow over time.
They wouldn't be they wouldn't be under exaggerated.
They they wouldn't get the story wouldn't get weaker over time.
It would get more fanciful, more out, more exaggerated, more
outlandish. But there may be a shred of
truth to it. There may be a core truth within
all that, as there often is with these myths, these legends.
Here's a description, another bit of description for Gilbert
Farwin that I think is worth talking about.
Quote. His eyes, Aaron saw, were now
Gray, now blue, as changeable as the seas.
Mad eyes, he thought. Fool's eyes.
The vision he spoke of was doubtless A snare set by the
Storm God to lure the Ironborn to destruction.
Speaking of a kernel of truth within something that's a little
crazy because, well, I doubt it was a snare set by the storm
God, but the sailing W could definitely be disastrous.
It could lose the entire fleet that way, especially given what
I said about the capability of some of the Ironborn ships.
Now, the Ironborn do have larger ships, especially after with
Bailon's efforts, but they were still larger ships meant for
war. They weren't built for long
voyages, so they're still not particularly well equipped for
it. But yeah, so he could be half
right about that, that the the vision.
The vision is a bad idea because it could get them killed.
It would be very dangerous. But yeah, this whole Storm God
business. I don't, I don't know about
that. I, I don't know about his eyes
either. This is curious.
I want to think there's something going on with this
guy's eyes other than just, you know, sunlight changing the
angle of where he's looking and it makes it look differently.
It's not linked to any other magic we've seen.
Like who has changing eyes like this?
I can't think of anyone that's that really fits like this.
So it doesn't neatly fit into another magical discipline or
magical area as changeable as the seas.
He says Aaron does. Well, Aaron, if it's changeable
as the seas, then that's not the storm God, that's the drown God.
If it was this changeable as the skies or the clouds, then you're
dealing with the storm God. See, he's contradicting himself.
But like I said, Aaron is crazy too.
This is a madman interpreting the actions of a matter man.
Maybe, Maybe. Yeah, maybe Aaron is the matter
of the two. I don't know.
He doesn't sound like a skin changer.
This guy, not the other. We've only got the one far winds
talking here, so we can't extrapolate everything about the
family just from this one guy. He sounds more like a visionary,
a prophet, a dreamer or or a legit madman or some combination
of the above. He doesn't come off like a skin
changer. Even with the eyes changing
color. That's not something we
associate with skin changing. Like, you know, the show did
stuff with the eyes with changing color and then going
like the going all white. And even that isn't the same as
this going from grey to blue. Yeah, that's not really like the
skin change your eyes going white on the TV show.
It's it's a different thing entirely.
So, yeah. So Aaron is crazy.
And this guy seems crazy to him. Aaron thinks some pretty sane
things are crazy, to be honest, Like, you know, shoes and are
you drinking regular water or washing your hair?
Like, he thinks all those things are crazy, but I'll still go
with him on this. I still think that Gilbert is
also a madman of sorts. Or just maybe, for lack of a
better term, he's a little off at bat.
You know, something like that. John Merkel sends a super chat
and says, you said my super chat point while I was typing it.
So now I'll just say y'all rock. And thanks for leading us deeper
into the song of ice and fire. Minds, the minds.
That's a good way to put it. This one feels more like depths
because it's, it's so, you know, nautical A themed.
But the minds, that's a good. That's a good metaphor.
And we are, we are mining for Nuggets of fun here deep into
the mind, the George RR Martin minds, the germ minds.
Yeah, but there's a lot of good stuff down here, isn't there?
So, yeah, we got to go deep, but it's it pays off.
Thanks, John. Real remote islands discovered
by chance or wind. A a brief history of the real
world and especially of Norse explorers.
If we're going all over the place, there's plenty of other
explorers that we could talk about.
But we'll we'll limit ourselves to Scandinavians for this
exercise to keep the topic manageable.
Iceland. Starting with Iceland though
most likely discovered by Irish priests.
They didn't really write write it down the the first Viking to
find it was a guy named Nadod. I don't know how to say that but
wow. His name is 7 letters and four
of them are DS. It's NADDODD.
That's a lot of D man. He was trying to go to the
Pharaoh Islands, which are north of England.
Those had already been settled in this era, which was 861 AD.
Just for reference, 861AD is 10 years before Alfred the Great
became king. Around this era, Harold Fairhair
was forging Norway into one Kingdom that's supposedly dated
872, so 11 years after this. There's a lot of issues with the
historicity of Harold Fairhair, so that date might be wrong.
Either way, it's around this era.
Charles the Bald was king of France.
He's the grandson of Charlemagne.
This is around the time that France split into two.
Western Frankia ended up becoming France.
Eastern Frankia became the Holy Roman Empire and then Germany.
So this NADOD guy found it and he went back and told people
about it and he was blown off course, right.
Iceland is really far from the Faroe Islands.
It's the Faroes are closer to England than Iceland by a lot.
So when someone can be blown off course, when you hear the story
or hear that phrase blown off course, the real world supports
blown off course occasionally being really far.
Ironically, it's called Iceland. Now this first guy, Ned Dog
called it Snowland. So his name didn't stick, but
something very similar to it. This guy was actually related to
Eric the Red and Leif Ericsson. Well, Eric the Red was the
father of Leif Ericsson. Such related to one.
You're related to both. So not long after Naddad found
this place, people went looking for they're like, oh really?
There's another island up there, Let's go find it.
The first one to go there on purpose, meaning the first guy
after the discovery by accident via Naddad.
This guy, the first one to go after was that Raven Floki guy
that I mentioned earlier, the guy who used the Raven method to
find land when he was exploring. He stayed there over winter,
which must have been tough. The winters in Iceland are bad.
But he he survived and his people survived, at least most
of them. And when the winter was over, he
was shocked at how green Iceland became and was like, whoa, this
place is during the winter. He must have thought, what a
horrible mistake we've made. Why did we come here?
But then when the winter was over, he's like, actually, this
place is livable. After all, with three seasons of
preparing, we could get through that winter if we had enough
time to, you know, get ready for it.
You know, they don't need to get fancy with the terminology
there. Just prepare for that horrible
winter and you'll be fine. Be fine, relatively speaking.
Now, many people moved to Iceland after this, after this
guy found it. This other guy, Gardar
Svarvarsson. Svarvarsson, That's really hard
to say. He was the second Viking guy to
go there on purpose, Although there's they didn't stay there
permanently that we know of. A lot of these guys were.
Yeah, they were. They were trying to escape the
the burgeoning kingship of Harold Fairhair.
Iceland was a place very dedicated to keeping people
independent. This guy named in golfer in
Arson. ARN Arson.
Yeah, the word arson and golfer are in this guy's name.
In golfer ARN Arson and his wife Halvag Fraudes's daughter were
the first permanent settlers there in a place they called
Smoke Cove. That's cool, right?
Smoke Cove. The other name for Smoke Cove in
Icelandic is Reykjavik. Yay.
The capital, Right. So that's cool.
They actually the first settled place is the current capital.
That's pretty amazing. There is some evidence that the
Gardars Varvarsson, some of his people actually stayed behind
and lived there first. But whatever.
We're not trying to take anything away from Gardars
Varvarsson's men, even though we don't know their name.
The reason we don't know this for sure is because almost
everything written about Iceland in the early days was written
centuries later. But archaeological evidence does
confirm that there was a settlement in 870.
So that absolutely lines up with this story.
However, there are more finds. There's actually a long house
found that apparently carbon dating or whatever dating
process they're using dates into about 880, so several decades,
70 years prior to these other instances.
So there may be the history on this on Iceland may be off.
There may have been Vikings that came there even sooner.
And certainly there were, as I said, Irish priests that found
there. If y'all remember the show
Vikings, This is the second time I brought it up.
Floki, not Raven Floki, but the character Floki in the show goes
to Iceland and just thinks it's Asgard.
He thinks he's found Asgard, the home of the Norse gods.
And a nod to this, the historicity of Irish priests
finding it first and just going there to be hermits because it's
empty and talk about a place to be a hermit.
There's nobody there. So in the show, Floki lives
there for a while, thinks it's like I said, thinks it's Asgard,
thinks he's in the home of the gods.
One day he goes into a cave and he finds like a cup and a
Christian cross. And he freaks out so hard he's
like, what the hell is a Christian cross doing in Asgard?
Well, the answer is it's not Asgard.
But that just goes to show, even though that show wasn't very
historically accurate, that's a, you know, a pretty cool way to
show what might have happened. Some Viking explorer, some
Scandinavian might have found a Christian cross line.
That's not unrealistic at all, right?
Because they did live there before the Vikings.
So now some guy named the son of Gardar named Uni.
He was Uni the Dane. He tried to win Iceland for
Harold Feinhair, Harold Fairhair.
Both those names are attributed to him.
But the locals found out. And I remember what I said.
Iceland was big on independence, maintaining its independence.
Kind of like every king is every captain is a king on their own
deck. Iceland was in the early days
was like every landowner is a king on their own land and no
one's going to rule over them. They, they all kind of agreed on
that part. So this uni the Dane tried to
win it for King Harold in secret.
He was plotting, but they found out and they killed him.
So Uni the Dane, he was done. Now he his, he had a son named
Hror and Hror married ARN Gunnor, who was the sister of
Gunnar Hammondarsson, who was one of the main characters in
the longest N Saga, Nyal saga. So a little trivia for you
there. And these sagas were all were
mostly recorded in Iceland. So in in general, Iceland's
isolation, it's distance from Norway made it easier for them
to maintain their independence. It's really hard for some Viking
king, whether Harold or someone else that came after him, to
subdue Iceland. You got to go a long way to go
there and then fight these very independent minded people.
So there's been a lot of Viking kings that claimed Iceland
without actually having any control over.
They just said it. There's like, yeah, it's like,
it's like how Aegon claimed Doran when he didn't rule it.
There's been a lot of Viking kings or Norse kings that said,
Yep, Iceland's mine. But it wasn't they actually
didn't give them anything. They just couldn't gainsaying
like, well, you don't actually rule us, but we can't stand up
on a pulpit and say that no one's listening to us.
We don't have social media. Well, before I get to Greenland,
actually, one more point Now, the long consider the long
night. This is a reason why people
might have been on these islands and then died out.
If the Long Night occurred and you're living in a place that's
fringy in terms of human habitation, it become, it goes
from fringy to impossible. We use this example and we
talked about Ragnarok in the Long Night, how a lot of the
Norse world lived on the fringes of what's possible for humans to
live on. So if it gets a little bit
colder, it gets a little bit worse.
All of a sudden you can't live there.
So take that idea and apply it to lonely light.
What if during the Long Night there were people living there
long before the fire winds? Because the fire winds didn't
exist during the Long Night. What if they were there and they
all died out? And then when the Farwins did
move there, well maybe they didn't find oily Blackstone or
any magical artifacts or heart trees, but they might have found
evidence of people living there before and it would have
potentially been the long night that wiped them out.
Could have been anything else too.
Other possibilities for getting wiped out.
Places hard to live on. Maybe they just failed.
The colony could have just failed, but it's also possible
they've been multiple colonies there in thousands of years ago.
Wait long times long gone? To be fair, a lot of island
nations had it easier during the long Night because fish.
They're still fish. The oceans didn't freeze over
and there, should you know, still be the oceans would be
affected by the long night. That it affects plankton and the
sunlight does matter. So their catches would be
impacted but they wouldn't be nothing.
I don't think Greenland is the last or not the last, but one of
the the second to last. Nope sorry, 3rd to last island I
have here. It was discovered by Gunbjorn
Olfsson in the early 9 hundreds. And guess what?
It was someone trying to sail to Iceland, blown off course.
So Iceland was discovered by someone blown off course trying
to go to the Faroe Islands, and Greenland was discovered by
someone trying to go to Iceland, blown off course.
This was in the early 9 hundreds.
So, you know, 40 years, 50 years after this guy Snabyarn Galti.
So you have Gunbjorn and Snabyarn.
He led the earliest intentional voyage there.
So we had discovery of Greenland and then the first people that
moved there on purpose, just like the process that happened
in Iceland. So Snapyorn started a colony,
but it went poorly. If you saw the the portrayal of
Greenland and the show Vikings, once again, it went poorly.
I don't think they know what details to use here because they
made-up their own details. Just the the colonists there
didn't get along. They kind of, one of them kind
of went mad and they started fighting each other and they
didn't have enough food. Something like that really did
happen in this colony. The Snapyorn guy was murdered
and the colony failed and only two of them got back to Iceland.
So yeah, bad. Now, Eric the Red went there for
banishment because he was murdered.
I mean, because he committed murder rather.
And this, he went there because he had heard the tale of this
gun, Bjorn Olson. He was like, you found an island
over there, Greenland, and he went there because he was
banished. So he's like, well, I'm going to
go to this place. This gun Bjorn guy discovered
now in Greenland near Greenland Rather is Grassland Bay, which
is a part of Newfoundland. The northernmost tip of
Newfoundland is is this Grassland Bay.
It's called Las Al Meadows. It's a French English name which
translates as Grassland Bay. It's the most remote site that
we know for a fact to be settled by Norse.
It's the only confirmed Norse settlement area in North America
that isn't in Greenland. It's maybe referred to in the
Vinland sagas, which I've read and they're fascinating.
The the Vinland Sagas are, you know, sagas written in Iceland
about the attempts that. Places discovered in North
America that aren't described in a way that we can be sure of
where they are. But there is a description,
there's a layout of the settlement at Grassland Bay that
gives us a little bit of an idea of what the basics would be.
And we can port some of that over to Lonely Light and assume
that some of these basics would be there too.
Because they would have, for the most part, only the basics,
right? They wouldn't have a lot of
fancy stuff. They would have the subsistence
structures that you need and maybe not a whole lot else.
There were leftover at this Grassland Bay site were three
halls, including one of the halls that was clearly for the
leader, so for the Chieftain or whatever title they had.
There were a bunch of houses, some connected to the halls,
some just scattered here and there.
There were also huts that were for poor people to live in or
for work to get done. There was an iron Smithy for
forging iron, which is important.
That's a big deal which that absolutely aligns with the
Ironborn. I mean iron Smithies would be
pretty common around the Iron Islands not just to forge
weapons but to exploit mineral wealth and sell the iron ore.
Which is something that in particular the the horror
dynasty did. They made extra wealth by
selling iron ore and being more putting more of an effort into
extracting it in the first place.
There's also evidence that these Viking settlements, they
travelled S to supplement their resources because they found
butternuts, butternut like shells and husks, which you
cannot grow there in Greenland or in Newfoundland.
They must have been going South to trade with someone to get
these butternuts, which is kind of an interesting little tidbit
there, right? Vinland Saga mentions to other
sites. This could be like I said,
Vinland Saga describes these things, but they don't.
There's not a map. So there's a place called
Leifsboudair, which is where Leif Erickson founded a colony
after Greenland. And that's, again, that's the
son of Eric the Red. He's portrayed in the show
Vikings Valhalla, but not very accurately.
And there's a place called Hope, which was founded by
Greenlanders as well, so that that could be a reference to
this grassland Bay. Finally, we have Baffin Island.
It was discovered by Bjarne Hurlielsen.
Bjarne, yes, Bjarne, the purple dinosaur.
He was travelling from Iceland to Greenland.
And of course, what happened, he was blown off course.
So really, folks, being blown off course is a tried and true
method of discovering new lands in our real world here.
This site is believed to be Helluland, which is something
referred to in several different N sagas.
Baffin Island is the 5th largest island in the world.
It took being blown off course to find it though.
Like people just. Yeah, well, the world is a big
place, y'all. It's the largest island in
Canada, the second largest island in the Americas overall,
and Greenland being first, I guess if you count.
Yeah, because Greenland. No, the Greenland wouldn't be
the first, would it? I guess it has to be, but it but
this is the largest in Canada. Isn't Greenland part of Canada
anyway? I don't know.
I don't know what's going on here.
Regardless, the Baffin Mountains are all named after Norse gods.
There's a Thor, an Odin, and an Asgard.
And the Thor Mountain has the greatest sheer Cliff face drop
on Earth. A 4100 foot sheer face Cliff
drop, that is. Wow, it's almost a mile.
So it's fitting that George RR Martin made the Ironborn
similar, because they're already similar to Vikings in a lot of
ways. A similar level of discovering
things, discovering land by being blown off course, or other
similar methods. Though not necessarily as
aggressive settling places, definitely as aggressive in
finding them. A little bit about accents.
Island folk can have accents. In fact, it's common.
As we said, the the farther out you are, the more extreme the
accents might be. You know, the, the, the far
winds having kind of their own dialect of Ironborn might be
might be there. I mean, Ironborn isn't a
language, but they would have an accent or a dialect too.
Tarth, the people of Tarth probably have a bit of an
accent. Maybe only a Stormlander would
notice that. Like to a lot of us, you go to
Ireland, there's a lot of different Irish accents, but if
you don't know them, they all just sound Irish to you.
A dative would go, we would be able to identify a variety of
different Irish accents. So I think that is what we
probably are dealing with here. It's not something George gets
into a lot of detail on, but it's likely because this is just
how humanity works. So there's probably even a great
Wick dialect of sorts and this would be an offshoot of that.
So it's like a dialect of a dialect.
So it might be kind of off to some people, but it's not.
It's not portrayed that way. Like Aaron doesn't describe
Gilbert Farwin is having like a weird voice, but he just does
think of them as weird in general and that would be kind
of fitting. I don't have an actual sound in
mind, but I do I do imagine them having an accent.
Farwin timeline in history. It's our best guesses.
So long the light was discovered 1000 years after the time of
Brandon the Burner. That doesn't tell us a lot, like
I said, because we don't know when Brandon the Burner time was
either. But we do know that Brandon the
burner's time was thousands of years before the conquest.
So if we take 1000 years minus thousands of years, we have at
least 1000 left. Wyman Manley actually says the
burning of Brandon's burning was centuries ago, which is he's
clearly under selling it a bit. But it does imply that we're
talking about maybe 2 to 3000 years rather than some larger,
you know, 4 to 5 or 6000 years ago.
The heyday of the Ironborn was long before 1000 years ago.
I briefly touched on this at the beginning, perhaps halfway
through the Age of Heroes. Roughly, it was when they were
actually at their peak. That's when they ruled large
portions of the entire West Coast.
Cord the Cruel sacked Old Town and won battles in the field,
pitched battles. So yeah, the First Men hadn't
really figured out the best ways to defend against the Ironborn,
or even against each other really.
There weren't a lot of stone castles yet.
Even so, the world was Ripper for them.
So even though the Far Winds didn't grow power or proceed
from that era or stories, certainly the Ironborn advanced
and set the stage for future houses like them.
After Chorad, Ironborn power declined slowly.
Chorad was the the peak. They lost Casey, they lost Fair
Isle, they lost the Arbor, they lost Flint's Finger, they had
Bear Island. The mainland kept getting
stronger, more stone castles, more savvy defense, more
understanding of Ironborn tactics.
The Ironborn still had victories, but the decline was
was apparent. This focus to the east maybe
helps us explain why Lonely Light was never discovered.
Or maybe it was discovered and just got ignored because it's
poor and no one wanted to live there.
No one's like ah, I want to live there.
Even even though people did eventually move there and this
era, maybe they didn't care to. Maybe the first person to find
it already had land and couldn't be bothered to care about this.
Or maybe there's just some other reason, maybe just shunned for
some reason that's been lost to time.
Moving forward a little bit was the era when you're on Red Hand
of House Gray. Iron ended King's Moots until
the time of the books by killing everyone there, and that
basically created the Kingdom of the Iron Isles.
From then it was the Sea Stone Chair or the Crown of the Iron
Isles, whichever. Then came the Andols and even
the Iron Isles were overrun as much as the mainland was, though
little later, and then he. From there we can Fast forward a
bit to the Black Line. This refers to the final dynasty
of Ironborn kings. The Black Line were the horror
kings Hoare, who ruled for quite some time, but most likely were
the ones in charge when House Farwin was founded.
They had the throne for a long time, and they were the last
ones to hold it when the conquest came.
So they were the last Ironborn dynasty.
Basically. They have a complicated
reputation. Most famous to us are the ones
at the end of the dynasty, Harwin Hardhand and Heron the
Black, who built Heron Hall and died to Valerian A Harwin's
owner took the Riverlands from the Storm Kings.
So those guys don't give the house a good reputation.
But in the earlier days for an Ironborn house, which the bar is
low, they were actually somewhat progressive and pushed the
Ironborn to be more humane and to be more ethical, which is,
hey, it didn't really work and they didn't call it ethical or
humane. Those words don't register among
the Ironborn. But it it is the bottom line of
what was happening. They were trying to bring the
Ironborn more into the fold with the rest of Westeros.
Not as again, not as a path to being more humane or being high
minded. No, it was a power thing.
There's more power in the mainland.
The horse wanted some of that. That's part of where that's
that's resulted in things like the conquest of the Stormland or
the the Riverlands and the building of Harrenhal.
So there was a lot of things like this.
They tried to push the seven. They tried to push this and
that. There was a lot of things that
way. The more trade, more travel,
they discouraged reaving. Yeah.
They were the cultural bridge between the two, which made them
unpopular with some parts of the Ironborn community and more
popular with others. They were first from Orkmont the
the horror dynasty, but over time they acquired land all
throughout the Iron Isles, which includes the castle on Great
Wick. That was that is now no longer
there that was destroyed. There was a a time when ships at
Orkmont became common Atlantis port, Old Town in the free
Cities. Trade was for a while was a big
deal for the iron when they were fully moving in that direction,
less reaving, more trading. Everybody's probably like yay,
finally they're not doing that. What a great thing, obviously,
that that they were some backsliding there, but this is a
great candidate for when the far winds came to be.
A time when there was more exploring, more time for things
other than fighting. That's a sensible time, since it
also fits the chronology for this discovery or rediscovery of
the aisles that are now Lonely Light.
So yeah, it's a huge amount of guesswork here, but it's a
pretty fitting place to imagine it falling.
House horror even married into House Lannister for a while.
Ironically, this marriage, which was intended to further that
bridge, to close the gap between Ironborn and the mainland,
actually started a big set back, started a chain of events, a
domino effect that ultimately resulted in, well, the
connection getting worse rather than closer.
The distance grew because there was a lot of pushback from the
Devout. The Shrike, a priest of the
Drowned God, LED a religious revolt which included mutilating
Dowager Queen Layla Lannister, which upset the West,
understandably, which led to an invasion of the Iron Isle,
something that's happened very few times from the mainland.
And this guy who led it, Aubrey Crakehall, who was in charge of
the mission also, oddly, rather than just vanquishing the
Ironborn and returning home, decided, you know what?
Why not make myself king of the Ironborn?
What a strange decision. Yeah, like a Cray Call could be
King of the Ironborn. The Shrike got him too.
Yeah. He's he was killed pretty
quickly. He only he only lived about six
months, But before Aubrey Cray Call was put down by the strike,
he had Hoar Castle destroyed. So it was a way to push back
against them, a way to establish himself probably, which, you
know, he wasn't able, he didn't stick around for the long term
to work on that, but he did do something pretty meaningful
there. Now House Hora kept the crown
after this. They got it back after this Cray
call business was done, but they didn't rebuild that castle.
Which again this fits really well as a candidate for a shake
up on Great Wick. Which is how the far Winds of
Sealskin Point were created because the far with the Seals
game point definitely came along after the far winds of Lonely
Light. So we have to ask ourselves, how
did the far winds of Lonely Light acquire land on Great
Wick? Well our best guess is during
this era when the whores lost their possessions there and
decided not to reclaim them, they were still kings.
They could have taken it back, they just didn't care for some
reason. Probably because their focus was
so very much on the east. They were, they were way more
concerned with with the mainland.
Great Wick is as far West as the Iron Isles get except for Lonely
Light. So you can see why they just
said I don't care. I don't want to spend all this
money to rebuild a castle when we're trying to establish
ourselves on mainland Westeros which is way more potential for
us. The conquest and beyond The
conquest massively reduced the infighting and warring between
the major kingdoms. For the Ironborn it was a bit
different. Right, though they have
certainly had wars in their history.
Plenty of them. Mostly they just raid and get
people mad at them. That's not really a war, that's
just a constant state of affairs that is violent and you know,
inconsistent, but certainly doesn't stop except for very
short periods of time. They don't usually get into full
scale wars, and when they did it was usually long ago.
Nowadays that happens less. It did happen somewhat under the
horror dynasty because they were trying to conquer parts of the
mainland. So they definitely had mainland
wars, but those were mainland wars.
That isn't going to involve their Navy very much, which
would keep people like the Fire Winds not very involved.
So the growing strength of various kingdoms by this era,
which is 100 years before the conquest, 50 years before the
conquest, that time the strength of various kingdoms was way
beyond what it had been when the Iron Born in their heyday.
All that slow development of the Kingdom, the slow addition of
more and more stone castles, which generally don't go away.
Most castles, once they're built, they stick around.
So just over time, it just got harder and harder for the
Ironborn to do their thing, but it didn't stop them, it just got
harder. So the conquest stopped it all
together. Now we're told that already the
rating in the mainland had slowed down because of the
growing strength of the mainland.
So a lot more Ironborn were rating far away from Westeros,
sailing to places like the Basilisk Isles, the Stepstones,
maybe the Summer Isles, maybe even farther E than the Basilisk
Isles, what have you. So that was an extra adaptation
or an extra thing they'd have to change under a gun.
They're like, well, we're already banned from, we were
already not raiding the mainland very often, Now we're banned
from doing it. And we're not going to piss off
the Dragons. Even the Greyjoys were smart
about that. There may still have been a
little here and there, rating a small village here and there,
fishing village, what have you, something that wouldn't get a
lot of attention. But yeah, the rating of the West
Coast and anywhere in Westeros came to a screeching halt with
the conquest, and it was already going pretty slowly.
So again, this takes us back to the Far Winds being probably
quite skilled at long distance travel, even for people that use
long ships, which are in some ways not ideal for that because
they had to by necessity, you have to travel from the Iron
Isles all the way around Westeros to get to the Basilisk
Isles of the Stepstones. And well, for the far winds,
it's even farther. They have the farthest trip of
any of that group, so they have an extra week or two built into
any trip they plan. So that's difficult, right?
The Iron Border very are known for capitalizing on civil
conflict whenever the there was a civil war, whether it was
Megor versus Aegon or whether it was a Dance of the Dragons.
Later when the Red Kraken made a very lasting example of this
concept. When the mainland gets to
fighting itself when it's distracted with itself.
Perfect time for the Ironborn to make their moves.
The Far Winds would be involved in this as very much as anyone
else you would think. In fact, they might be more
looking for such opportunities given their scarcities and the
things that they need and the lack of resources.
On the other hand, they might be slow to find out that there's
these opportunities because they're not getting Ravens and
they have such a long distance between the mainland and
themselves. One benefit of silver lining of
being isolated is they would certainly feel the pinch or the
pain or the suffering of things like the shivering or the great
spring sickness, less they would be able to cut themselves off
from such things. Once it arrives on your island,
you have a hard time dealing with it.
But if you can avoid it coming to your island in the 1st place,
maybe by shutting the port down or just nobody traveled to the
mainland for a while, you get a better chance of avoiding it or
the worst of it, or avoiding it entirely.
And once the country recovers a bit from the plague, once the
plague isn't running rampant, but people still the the
setbacks are still there. Perfect time to go reaving,
isn't it? You might be surprised to learn
that the Great Council of 101, where Viserys was chosen over
Lenore Valerian was attended by the far winds.
So they were kind of an example of showing how far and wide the
Lords traveled to make it to the Great Council.
They're like, even the far winds came like it's hard to name
someone that would have had to travel farther.
So that's kind of cool. We're we're told the Lord of
Lonely Lights showed up, but we don't get his name.
I bet they voted for Leonor, right?
Favor the Seabourn guy, favor the Valerian, savor the favor
the sailors, you know. So nowadays, do they still sail
to raid the Basilisk Isles, the Stepstones and elsewhere?
Probably. Asha did it as a child, as a
younger person, she and she thinks of her going with Carl
the maid to raid Lyseny. Pirates, you know, steal.
The pirates steal from other people and they steal from them,
so why not Raiders from Lonely Lighter, Shieldskin Point doing
that sort of thing? If Asha's doing it, why not
them? In fact, it seems more likely
given once again their needs are greater now.
Baylon's rebellions were not very successful.
They were an attempt to get back to pre conquest times.
The old way, right? The very old way.
This was kind of impossible because pre conquest, the Seven
kings were not one. He he he wasn't going to get
things back to the time when there was no Iron Throne.
That kind of rebellion wasn't happening.
But his idea was that the Iron Throne wasn't what it was, that
Robert would not be able to get the kind of support that the
Targaryens did. He was wrong, but that was his
idea. But I think the far winds were
probably pretty enthusiastic about this because again, they
really need raiding. They want to raid and it's hard
to punish them for it because they're so far away, right?
And what are you going to do tax them more?
Like what packs is it even paying in the 1st place?
You know, sail all the way to their islands to, to root them
out. It's just just a pain for, for
very little, right? So I think that they were
probably pro Bayland's rebellions, unless they
realized, like a lot of other people did, that it was a bad
idea. They wanted the result.
Maybe they didn't think the idea was good, but that's that's
probably that was probably their dilemma, but maybe they were
crazy about it, like Baylin himself.
But Baylin gave up Theon the war came to Pike.
The fireworks probably suffered for this war, probably the
second one too. They're probably suffering for
Baylin's second rebellion as well, which is still ongoing,
which Euron is taking over. Maybe less though.
Maybe it's coming. Let's finish with the actual
Kings mood, which is the where we kind of where we started.
Aaron announced the mood at Pebbleton, as I said, which is
the opposite end of Gritwick from Sealskin Point.
He stopped by hammer horn, which is right by sealskin point.
He didn't go there, which Aaron doesn't think much of the of the
Farwin. So it makes sense that he would
avoid them. He wouldn't make a special stop
just for them. An angle to the King's moot that
is oddly familiar that even Gilbert Farwin is suggesting.
Is it So many of the claimants have a plan to move elsewhere.
Aaron wants to give them all of Westeros.
He's like, yeah, well, let's, I'm going to give you all of
Westeros. It's a grand, a highfalutin
scheme, but it is an idea, a plan to move, you know, to
migrate. And under him, they've had some
success so far. They got, they got the Shields.
You know, that's something that's a case in point, even
though he's probably going to lose them and expects to lose
them and kind of wants to lose them because he put people there
that he wanted to get rid of. Asha as well.
She was like, yeah, let's make friends with the Northerners.
Let's give them back most of the North, but keep some of it and
settle there. So Gilbert's suggesting a
similar thing, even though it's a crazier version of this, he
still is like, yeah, let's move. Three different claimants that
the King's move were like, let's move.
Well, an irony could be that while Gilbert is wrong about the
lack of winter, surely about this Lance to the West, he might
actually be telling the truth just in a very dreamy and away
filtered through all these dreams and visions that he might
be having or seeing it through skin changing.
Maybe he's a skin changer. Maybe he saw through the eyes of
a wolf of the western sea. So maybe that's just this is a
fact of them being rare, right? An ancestor of his, a powerful
skin changer. Even though we're open to the
idea of some far wind skin changes here and there, they'd
still would be very rare, just like they seem to be anywhere.
So we're not saying it's a common thing, but when it does
happen, assuming it does, then you've got something pretty
memorable to the house. The other Firewinds would, yeah,
they would remember this, this rare occasion, especially if
this powerful skin changer brought them wealth or power or
prestige. We assume they accept Euron as
their king. Not the entirety of the Iron
Islands has. We don't exactly have a list, do
we? If there is a connection between
Firewind and Euron, then that's even more likely.
Otherwise he's a different kind of madman and dreamer than
Gilbert, one that they might actually kind of grok with.
But maybe not because his vision is to the east and they want to
go West. But still, this is a man with a
grand vision for the future of the Ironborn.
And if they're open to grand plans like Gilbertson, maybe
they like Eurons. And he also gave away so much
loot. There's there's always something
to be said for giving a bunch of reavers and Raiders loot to make
them happy. He surely did that.
But afterwards, when Euron is all said and done, presumably he
fails. But after doing a whole lot,
causing a lot of damage, some of that kickback may hit the Iron
Islands and they might, they might be like, yeah, maybe we're
done with grand visions for a little while, but maybe not.
The Red Kraken didn't turn them off and the the backlash to his
era was horrible and the things that happened to the Ironborn
after the Red Kraken fell were terrible.
But they don't seem to blame him for that so.
So maybe they wouldn't blame your Euron either.
Hopefully we get more about this unique and creepy house.
Is there a connection to Euron? Is there a connection to
something in the West? Do we truly have this unique
situation with maritime skin changers?
The ideas alone have a lot of potential even without real
answers. Even though this is a house with
scant details for storing, for storytelling potential, there's
a lot here. George once again makes his
fringiest characters houses locations more compelling than
the main locations of a lot of other popular fantasy worlds.
His fringy stuff is better than a lot of people's main stuff,
and that says a lot. That's why we love it so much.
It's it gives us this opportunity to to play in the
sandbox, even though it's more of an ocean.
And those of you who are into world building, if you play like
role-playing games, this stuff is just manna from heaven.
Like George is, is a great supplier of ideas for campaigns,
for characters, for realms. There's so much here.
Jumpin Slash says Greenland is Danish territory.
Oh yeah. I think I used to know that and
forgot that explains it. Yeah.
Greenland is Danish territory of Denmark.
So yeah, it's not Canadian. So that would make sense.
Even though it's right next to Canada.
That's why it's not included as Canadian territory.
So new new Finland or Baffin Island is the biggest in Canada.
Cool trivia answer. The question again was there was
Alyssa Farman and Brandon the Shipwright, but which Greyjoy
wanted to explore the West beyond the lonely light.
As detailed in this episode, it was Alton Greyjoy, the holy
fool. A grandfather great, great.
Well, a great grandfather to Baylon, Euron, Victoria and all
those guys. We don't know how many greats to
put on that Great great grandfather, Great, great, great
maybe, but not super far in the past.
Somewhere in the in the vicinity of the two hundreds, something
like that. Sometime after Dagon Greyjoy and
Daga Greyjoy's heyday was like 2:10 to 2:18-ish.
So this guy is probably in the 30s or 40s.
So yeah, maybe only like 50 years ago.
How did our poll go, Cher? What do people think there are?
The question again was, are they actually skin changers?
And are are, are they actually connected to Lance to the West?
I forget which order I put it, but you'll tell me.
Here we go. The answer is drum roll please.
While I scroll back. Here it is.
Have the far winds discovered lands of the West and are they
skin changers? 45% of you said yes to both.
Almost half say yes to both. 8% of you think no to both. 28% say
yes to the lands of the West, no to skin changers. 19% said no to
lands of the West, yes to skin changers.
That's pretty cool. I'm I tend to lean yes, yes,
partly because it's the most fun.
But hey, it's all guesswork here, so why not have fun with
it? Everybody answers this question
the way that I think appeals to them the most because it's all
very imagination based. It's all rooted in that and
we're all supposed to be having fun here.
Some episodes that I named that are related to this one Great
Empire, the Dawn or Aschai episodes which related to that
one, House Valerian, House Mormont.
And we've done some episodes on Old Town that relate to the
Hightower that is vaguely related as well as some of the
history of Old Town and the Reach is very connected to
Ironborn history. As far as other skin changers,
we've got episodes on Blood Raven.
Quite a few of those, especially the third one because the the
first ones on Blood Raven deal with his time as more of a
political operator. But the third one, the Three
Eyed Blood Raven, deals with his life after going to the wall.
I'm sure there's some other ones I'm forgetting because our
catalog is just so very deep these days.
We got hundreds and hundreds of episodes.
I'm sure we talk about some of these concepts elsewhere, but
that's a start for you. And that's all we have for you
today. Thanks to Nina for her great
takes. Thanks to Joey Townsend for our
intro music. Thanks to Michael Klarfeld for
our video intro. And for the maps you see behind
us, That's KLARADOX. Clara dox.de if you want to get
your own copies of his maps. And on behalf of Ishaya, I'm
Aziz, and we'll see you next time you know what to do.
Until then, Valar, Ririus.