10 Craziest Things We Learned From ‘World of Ice & Fire’
If you play the game of thrones, you’re about to join the varsity team. The World of Ice and Fire is the latest book to flesh out the world of George R.R. Martin‘s epic fantasy series A Song of Ice & Fire, the basis for HBO’s smash-hit series Game of Thrones. But this one’s not a novel — it’s a fake history book, in which Martin and co-authors Elio M. García, Jr. and Linda Antonsson reveal the millennia-long backstory of the Seven Kingdoms, the Nine Free Cities, and the rest of the known GoT world. From the wildlings and White Walkers up north to the dragons and empires in the far east, the world that Tyrion Lannister, Daenerys Targaryen and the rest of the gang call home is explored in painstaking detail.
We put on our maester’s chain and came up with the top 10 biggest surprises, coolest Easter eggs, and craziest high-fantasy hijinks you can find in its 300-plus lavishly illustrated pages. All men must learn!
1. The Targaryens kind of sucked at ruling the Seven Kingdoms.
Far from the glorious dynasty their PR team would have you believe, the blonde-haired monarchs of House Targaryen did a rather piss-poor job of running Westeros ever since Aegon the Conqueror took the continent by storm some 300 years before the events of the first book, A Game of Thrones, began. Every other king was completely crazy, likely a result of incessant inbreeding among the royals — hence names like Maegor the Cruel, Aegon the Unworthy, and Mad King Aerys. Even some of the most revered monarchs were less than they were cracked up to be: Daeron the Young Dragon conquered Dorne in a flash and lost it just as quickly, while the religious fanatic Baelor the Blessed alternated acts of charity and piety with fundamentalist craziness like imprisoning his beautiful sisters so he wouldn’t be tempted to fuck them. (How many conflicts came down to people wanting to fuck their own siblings without some other person in the way? The answer may surprise you!) Daenerys’ ancestors may have unified the Seven Kingdoms, but it came at a hell of a cost.
2. Tywin Lannister was an even bigger bastard than we thought.
Before he became the not-so-proud patriarch of the dysfunctional Lannister clan, the future Lord Tywin was a fed-up heir trying to clean up his weak father’s messes. As you might expect from the future architect of the Red Wedding, this mostly involved killing a lot of people. The most famous incident involved Tywin’s slaughter of every last man, woman, and child from House Reyne, who’d risen in rebellion against their Lannister overlords. In both the books and the show, Tywin’s revenge was immortalized in the song “The Rains of Castamere”; the HBO series has featured versions by both the National and Sigur Ros, and when the band at the Red Wedding started playing it, that was the tip-off that the shit was about to hit the fan.
But we’d never learned the specifics of the massacre until now, and they’re somehow even more cold-blooded than the song made it sound. Castamere, the Reynes’ castle, was a mostly subterranean stronghold, extending deep underground into the old gold and silver mines through which the house had made its fortune. When Tywin attacked, the Reynes and their followers retreated underground, thinking the complex below was impervious to assault. It was — but it wasn’t waterproof. Tywin had his men redirect a river into the few remaining cracks and crevices. Tywin’s rain had washed the Reynes right out of existence.
3. Casterly Rock is amazing.
Once you’ve learned about Casterly Rock, the ancestral home of House Lannister, it gets easier to understand why Tywin’s such a hard-ass in defending it. The World of Ice & Fire gives us our first serious look at the place yet, and it’s astonishing. Imagine an entire seaside mountain that’s slowly been turned into a giant castle, standing three times the height of the Wall. It’s big enough to have an entire port for visiting trade and cargo ships inside the castle — you just sail right in, between enormous rocky outcroppings that look like a lion’s paws. The whole place is filled with veins of gold, just for good measure.
4. George R.R. Martin likes Sesame Street.
Maybe it’s a coincidence that House Tully was once ruled by Lord Kermit, son of Lord Elmo, son of Lord Grover. (Son of Lord Snuffleupagus?) But we doubt it. The World of Ice & Fire is actually full of little references, puns, name games, and in-jokes of this sort, most of which run to the horror end of the spectrum as opposed to the muppet one. There are creepy-sounding characters named Sauron and Lucifer; there are more tips of the hat to Lovecraft than you can count; and there’s a distant city called Carcosa, ruled by the Yellow Emperor. No mention of Lord Marty of House Hart and Ser Rust of House Cohle, but who knows?