Read Online Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, From A Game of Thrones to A Dance with Drago by Unknown - Free Book Online

found shows six hundred seventy-four commanders.” ( A Feast for Crows )
     
    This is an important statement, confirming the notion that the history of the Seven Kingdoms is based on myths and legends much more than on hard historical facts. Before the Andals came to Westeros, the First Men used runes chiselled into rocks and oral storytelling traditions to pass information on from one generation to the next. There may be some truth in these stories—some of Homer’s account of the Trojan War in The Iliad , drawn from older, oral traditions in our world, has been backed up by archaeological findings at the real site of Troy, for example—but there is also a lot of hyperbole and fantastical invention. Even the Andals’ historical records are inexact and prone to creative flourishes and outright errors, especially since even their arrival in Westeros is impossible to date reliably. “[N]o one knows when the Andals crossed the narrow sea,” Hoster Blackwood explains in A Dance with Dragons . “The True History says four thousand years have passed since then, but some maesters claim that it was only two. Past a certain point, all the dates grow hazy and confused, and the clarity of history becomes the fog of legend.”
    It’s worth noting that the appendix to A Game of Thrones actually suggests six thousand years have passed since the Andals’ arrival, whilst Hoster Blackwood’s remarks to Jaime in A Dance with Dragons suggest it could be as little as two thousand. An “error margin” of some four thousand years leaves significant room for doubts, mistakes, and miscalculations.
Seasons of Uncertainty
     
    The enormous difficulty in calculating history in Westeros is down to the lack of regular seasons. When one season might last for a few months and the next for years, records of harvests, plantings, summer festivals, and so on become highly unreliable. Even the maesters of the Citadel, with their exacting measurements and timelines, find themselves arguing over dates and details. Neither has it been revealed in the books how long the maesters or the Citadel have been around. They are just one more example of the fog of uncertainty shrouding the entire backstory of Westeros—one more example of how history itself is an unreliable narrator in the series.
    The unpredictable seasons also answer another common criticism about technological stasis in Westeros. The kingdoms in A Song of Ice and Fire have seen historical epochs pass much as in real history, just at a slower rate. We are told that the First Men brought bronze to Westeros some twelve thousand years before the start of the books. By tradition—which, as we have already seen, may not be entirely reliable—the Andals followed with iron and horse-riding some six thousand years later. In reality, the Bronze Age in Europe lasted from roughly 3200 to 600 B.C ., a period of twenty-six centuries. The following Iron Age overlapped it, extending from 1200 A.D . to 400 B.C ., a period of sixteen centuries. If we take into account the slowing of technological progress due to the long winters, effectively mini ice ages occurring up to several times a century, the corresponding technological ages in Westeros only last two to three times longer than their real-life counterparts.
    That said, we are also given conflicting information about technological and sociological matters: the appendix to A Game of Thrones tells us that the Andals brought the concept of chivalry to Westeros, but in A Feast for Crows , Samwell Tarly suggests that the institution of knighthood is a more recent one and highlights the fact that some stories speak of knights living a thousand years before they could have existed. This is, of course, a nod to the legend of King Arthur, where knights in the medieval tradition are depicted as living and fighting a clear half-millennia before such fighting men came into being.
    A wild card in this matter is the existence of magic. The degree to which magic was