Untangling Prehistory: Clues to the Timeline

[Alester Florent]

TWoIaF gives us the most comprehensive information yet, although still very vague, as to the length of the Westeros prehistory, a cause of some debate both in and out of character.

Convention has it that the Long Night occurred about eight thousand years before the Conquest and the Andals arrived four thousand years ago, although the latter date in particular is disputed.

The book is rife with phrases like "many millennia", "long centuries" and the like, which in most cases I'm going to ignore. I'm interested in more specific information.

I'm not sure where to start chronologically, but let's go with the beginning, more or less.

Before the Andals

The Shetts of the Fingers claimed the title "King of the True Men", said to be ten thousand years old at the time of the Andal invasion. (p.163) Assuming this is even halfway accurate, this would put the end of the Dawn Age around 10,000 years before the arrival of the Andals. But it most likely isn't.

There is a wildling story of Gendel and Gorne, brothers who lived three thousand years ago (p148). They are also suggested to have brokered a deal between the Children and the giants (p7). But the Wall was already arisen by the time the brothers supposedly lived, which places the Long Night before this date. That would suggest that the Children and giants were still relevant at the time, and therefore that this was before the Andal invasion.

The oldest sections of Winterfell are believed to be about 2,000 years old, although that doesn't preclude older building. (p.143)

There was a war between the Dustin Barrow Kings and the Starks lasting between 200 and 1,000 years. There was also a war between the Starks and the Bolton Red Kings likely lasting at least 300 years and almost certainly longer (300 years between the Boltons who killed a Stark). The Boltons swore to the Starks at the same time as the Andal arrival. (p.137).

The first great king of the Iron Islands was the Grey King in the Age of Heroes. He ruled for a thousand years. Then centuries passed with no High King. Ultimately another High King was created by kingsmoot, of whom 111 are listed (the driftwood kings). The latter of these overlap with the Andals. (p.178-181). Eventually this was replaced by the hereditary system under the Greyirons. (p.183)

Qhored the Cruel was the greatest of the Driftwood Kings and destroyed House Justman. Later his gains were lost by his successors. Theon III Greyjoy and at least three further kings followed and battled Gerold Lannister. Another century followed before the Greyiron takeover. (p.182).

Garth VII of the Reach was one of the last kings before the Andal invasion.(p.211)

Andals and Rhoynar

There is a legend about Alyssa Arryn, who is reckoned to have lived 6,000 years ago. But, being an Arryn, she is an Andal. The date is disputed, and it's mentioned it could be 4,000 or 2,000 years ago. (p.173).

The wars in the Vale between the Andals and the First Men lasted for "generations". However, Yorwyck IV was the most notable of the early First Men kings to oppose the Andals, and it was his grandson, Robar II, who was overthrown and killed by Artys Arryn, who became the first King of the Vale. (p.168)

It took the Andals a thousand years after their arrival before reaching the Iron Islands. This ended the Greyiron dynasty and started the Hoares. (p.183).

The Manderlys are said to have arrived in White Harbour 1,000 years before the Conquest. They were the last of a series of houses to hold the White Knife for the Starks for a period lasting "centuries" (of which seven houses are listed). (p.138).

The war between the North and the Vale over the Sisters lasted a thousand years. (p.168).

The grandson of Robar II founded the Eyrie. His son Roland I was killed in battle against Tristifer IV, the last great First Men king. (p.172).

Six kings of the Reach are listed as having had dealings with the Andals to some extent before a settlement was reached, including the Three Sage Kings. (p.211)

After the defeat of Tristifer IV and death of Tristifer V it was "centuries" before another house arose to rule the Riverlands. (p.152)

The next house to rule the Riverlands was House Justman, who ruled for 300 years. They were killed off by Qhored the Cruel of the Iron Islands. He was a driftwood king. (p.181)

After House Justman it was another hundred years before another house became king in the Riverlands. That was House Teague. The book is suggestive of anarchy, and houses rising and falling in rapid succession, but it was still a Teague on the throne when the Riverlands were conquered by Arlan III of the Stormlands (p.153).

The Durrandons ruled the Riverlands for more than 300 years before being driven out by Harwyn Hoare. (154). Harwyn's grandson was Harren, who fought Aegon the Conqueror. (p.185).

The Rhoynar are said to have been driven out by the Valyrians 1,000 years ago. (p.20)

However, Nymeria's voyage cannot have been more than a few years as she was already queen at the time she left and had several children by several husbands after her arrival in Westeros. The Dorne history says, with unusual precision, that House Martell has held sway in Dorne for 700 years (p.240).

Miscellanea

Mern I was a Reach king roughly contemporary with the arrival of the Andals on the borders of the Reach. The king at the time of the Conquest was Mern IX, so a further eight of that name, as well as an unspecified number of non-Merns (of whom only a couple are known, although one did rule for nearly 90 years).

The Andals left Andalos before the Rhoynar did, but given it's suggested the Rhoynar were already fighting the Valyrians at the time, can it really have been that long?

Putting it all together

It seems to have taken the Andals eight generations (seven if being conservative) from arrival in the Vale to conflict with Tristifer IV. Splitting the difference of a generation, that is likely to have been about 150 years, and if Tristifer was able to hold them off for a couple of decades, possibly as long as 200 before they finally conquered the Riverlands.

Meanwhile in the Reach at least six generations of kings were aware of the incoming Andals, and at least eleven Storm Kings. Taking the view that the Storm Kings first encountered them roughly contemporaneously with Yorwyck, and that they had no great successes after the fall of Tristifer (the last great First Men king) it probably took about 200 years for the Andals to take over the Stormlands and the Reach not much longer. The Westerlands do not seem to have resisted long, and Dorne hardly at all.

Placing the end of House Mudd at a generous 200 years after the Andal arrival (AA) there's then a substantial unknown period before the apperance of House Justman, who rule for 300 years, followed by a further 100 years of anarchy. That's then followed by House Teague, who ruled until Arlan III's conquest. The Stormlands history offers us some of our best dates, and that conquest was in about 350 BC (Durrandon rule lasted 300 years in the Riverlands, and ended under Arrec Durrandon, grandfather of Argilac, who was a relatively old man during the Conqest).

There is also the war between the Arryns and the Starks for control of the Sisters, which lasted about a thousand years on and off before the Starks withdrew. By this point the Arryns were presumably established as High Kings in the Vale.

That all sets a minimum period between Andal arrival and the Conquest as about 1,000 years. That would mean there were around 300 years between the arrival of the Andals and the Rhoynar, but that the Andals were only in Dorne in force for less than 100 years before the arrival of Nymeria.

The two big gaps, where any number of centuries could be inserted, is the period between Mudd and Justman in the Riverlands, and the length of the Teague reign.

Taking "centuries" to mean "at least 200 years" so observing the letter but not necessarily the spirit of the thing, that would give us a minimum of 600 years from the end of Mudd to the start of Teague, and probably another 200 of Teague, so 800 years in the Riverlands from the conquest by the Andals to the conquest by Arlan III, then another 350 years from there until the Conquest, plus the 200-odd years in the Vale before the Andals encountered Tristifer, for a total timeline of at least 1,350 years.

This is where the Iron Islands come in.

The Iron Islands Anomaly

The average length of a monarch's reign throughout European history has been about 17-8 years and this figure is remarkably consistent across countries and pre-modern time periods. The average length of a Targaryen reign in Westerosi history is 16.6 years, which suggests GRRM has his finger roughly on the pulse here. The 111 Driftwood Kings could thus reasonably be anticipated to have lasted a shade under two thousand years. Before that there was a typical period of anarchy, and before that supposedly the thousand year reign of the Grey King.

Urron Redhand's line is said to have lasted a thousand years when the Andals ended it by invading the Iron Islands. (p.20). This immediately follows on from the end of the Driftwood Kings. However we are also told that the Andals took a thousand years to get to the Iron Islands, and the Driftwood Kings overlap substantially with the Andals in the Riverlands and the Westerlands.

There are some of the few obvious inconsistencies in the history here, where we are told that the end of the Driftwood Kings occurred during the Age of Heroes, and yet a Driftwood King was responsible for ending House Justman. The Iron Islands history also has them battling First Men Gardener kings after fighting Andal kings like Gerold Lannister and the Justmans. The Iron Islands history appears to be the least reliable of those available, but it's also one that interacts more with its neighbours than many others.

The first of the Hoare kings coincided with the death of Rognar Greyiron, and we know of at least eleven Hoare kings before Harwyn Hoare, who drove the Storm Kings out of the Riverlands.

The Driftwood Kings reached their peak under Qhored, who ended House Justman, so it would be reasonable to assume he was closer to the end than the beginning of their rule. We know of at least six further kings, including a 100-year period (or six plus an additional fifty), which gives us around 150-200 years. Then supposedly a thousand years of Greyiron rule followed that, before the arrival of the Andals and the replacement by the Hoares. I think it's clear that the Greyirons did not rule for a thousand years, if it also took the Andals a thousand years to reach the Islands. Counting backwards from the fall of the Riverlands, the Hoares were placed on the throne at least 200 years before that (at least eleven of them).

If we take that as our minimum date for Andal conquest of the Islands (i.e. 250 BC) then if the thousand-year figure for the conquest of the Islands by the Andals is correct, they arrived in 1250 BC and House Greyiron did not rule for a thousand years. On the other hand, if the thousand-year rule for House Greyiron is correct, the line of the Driftwood Kings ended in 1250 BC and the Andals had been in control of the Riverlands for at least 500 years by that point, giving us an arrival date of about 2000 BC.

The Iron Islands history however suggests that it took "centuries" for the Iron Islands to recover after the devastation wreaked on them by the Lannisters under the last Harmund Hoare. Even taking "centuries" to have its minimum value as earlier that pushes the dates back further, to 450BC + rule of the Greyirons.

Another option is that the Iron Islands history is in fact completely correct. The Driftwood Kings did fight Garth VII more than 300 years after Tristifer Mudd perished against the Andals, and House Justman was destroyed by Qhored before Garth even ruled. It just took that long for the Andals to get to the Reach at all. The Age of Heroes in both the Iron Islands and the Reach was relative and extended until the Andals took both regions. While this seems unlikely, it can't be discounted altogether.

A Clue?

Although it appears throwaway, the legend of Aryssa Arryn might actually be instructive. It is accepted that she lived, and that there are three claimed dates for her lifetime: about six, four and two thousand years ago. Her story indicates that the Eyrie had at least started construction by the time she lived, and her story might fit the wife of Roland II, who was killed by Tristifer and succeeded by his brother, suggesting his sons might have died with him. On that assumption, and on the basis at least one of the suggested dates for Aryssa's life is accurate, we're looking at an Andal arrival in about 2200 BC, 4200 BC or 6200 BC.

At the very least, Aryssa's life serves to give us a minimum date for the Andal arrival, as she cannot have lived before Roland II. So the Andals must have arrived at least two thousand years ago.

Conclusion

It is obvious that this is not a puzzle that is likely to be solved definitively, and that there is IC disagreement invites us to doubt the figures we are given.

I think it's probably hopeless to try to work out the date of the Long Night or anything much before the Andal invasion. It could be anything from 2,000 to 10,000 years ago, or possibly longer. Dates before the arrival of the Andals are even vaguer than those after it. An argument could be made for the period between the Long Night and the arrival of the Andals being shorter than assumed, based on the age of Winterfell and the Gendel and Gorne legend, but it's all very thin.

When it comes to the Andals, though, things are a bit easier. I think to come to a timeline of substantially more than 2,000 years would require us to insert an awful lot into the available gaps, and extrapolate the three points where "centuries" are left blank - between Mudd and Justman, and the reigns of Teague and Hoare - into some very large numbers. Considering some of the evidence from elsewhere: no Storm Kings are named between Ormund III (who made peace with the Andals) and Arlan I (grandfather of Arlan III); that there were only eight Merns between the arrival of the Andals and the Conquest, considering how the Reach appears to like to reuse names - I think we are looking at a situation where we want to take the shortest possible explanation rather than the longest.

The latest possible date for an Andal arrival is about 1000 BC. That cuts speculative "centuries" to decades, and assumes that the Rhoynar held out only about 300 years after the Andals left; it also completely ignores the supposed thousand-year rule of the Greyirons, the alleged millennium between Andal arrival on the mainland and Iron Islands, the thousand-year war over the Sisters, the migration of the Manderlys, and the Aryssa Arryn legend. The earliest likely date is about 4000 BC, as argued by some maesters. That requires expanding "centuries" to millennia, and adding at least 2,000 years to the known chronology.

Most likely I think is an Andal arrival in about 1700-2000 BC; i.e. 2,000 years before the "present" of ASoIaF, with some margin for error. It still requires the Rhoynar to have survived over a thousand years against the Valyrians after the Andals left, but then the Andals were little more than nomadic tribes and the Rhoynar a great civilisation, so perhaps that is not unreasonable. An argument could be made for an even shorter timeline, with an Andal arrival in about 1500 BC, but the 1700-2000 BC figure matches the IC "short chronology".

The book certainly does not answer the question for certain, but seems in its vague way to point in that direction.

[Crowfood's Daughter]

I appreciate you putting this together for the forum and it would be nice if there was more forum collaboration for the pre-history timeline in one spot. That being said, I wanted to mention that it is not specifically expressed that the murder of Alyssa's family was during the Andal incursion. The Vale Kings and the Starks were fighting each other and Alyssa could have been around the time of that era which was particularly heated which was about 2,000 years ago.

[Alester Florent]

I appreciate you putting this together for the forum and it would be nice if there was more forum collaboration for the pre-history timeline in one spot. That being said, I wanted to mention that it is not specifically expressed that the murder of Alyssa's family was during the Andal incursion. The Vale Kings and the Starks were fighting each other and Alyssa could have been around the time of that era which was particularly heated which was about 2,000 years ago.

Thanks for the feedback. You are right of course. What the Aryssa legend is however useful for is giving us a minimum range for things. Since she was associated with the Eyrie, she can't realistically have been earlier than Roland II, and if the story is at least two thousand years old, that means the Andal invasion must have been before 1700 BC at the latest. (I have edited the OP to clarify).

Of course there are problems with taking legend at face value. However, unlike the Winged Knight and Serwyn of the Mirror Shield, Aryssa's existence is acknowledged IC as beyond doubt with the only debate being over dating, and there are no other obvious inconsistencies.

(Having said that, the Winged Knight might be worth marginally more consideration than he's given in the book, not that it helps with the timeline. I'm reminded of Cerdic, the first king of the West Saxons, who had a British name - and question whether as with the Lannisters and the Durrandons the Arryns actually came to rule the Vale by other means, and if they're really as pure-blood Andal as they like to think).

[joluoto2]

I don't Think the birth of kingdoms is a good way to measure where the Dawn Age end and the Age of Heroes begins. Firstly, these ages are made up names, created millennias after the ages they describe, and are very arbitrary. Some FM kingdoms probably appeared around the middle of the "Age of Heores", some late in the period, some very early, and probably some kingdoms within the time called the Dawn Age.

Edit: regarding the Age of Heroes: when it ends seem to differ from region to region depending on when Andals got political influence in an area (either through conquest or through an agreement with the FM king). So the Age of Heroes would end later in some places than other.

[Alester Florent]

I don't Think the birth of kingdoms is a good way to measure where the Dawn Age end and the Age of Heroes begins. Firstly, these ages are made up names, created millennias after the ages they describe, and are very arbitrary. Some FM kingdoms probably appeared around the middle of the "Age of Heores", some late in the period, some very early, and probably some kingdoms within the time called the Dawn Age.

Edit: regarding the Age of Heroes: when it ends seem to differ from region to region depending on when Andals got political influence in an area (either through conquest or through an agreement with the FM king). So the Age of Heroes would end later in some places than other.

Yes; I think trying to work out a date for the end of the Dawn Age, the Long Night, and so on, is almost entirely hopeless. There might perhaps be suggestions that it wasn't quite as long before the Andal arrival as some of the histories suggest, but really any kind of specificity in the dates disappears altogether once you get back before the Andals: only a couple of specific events or individuals have timescales attached.

I think the end of the Age of Heroes is likely to be pretty vague, yeah. But the extent of the overlap with the Iron Islands is very significant, and implies a further major overlap with the Reach too, with the kings there having no knowledge of the Andals long after the Westerlands had gone full Andal. While I think this does give us reason to compress the overall timeline a bit rather than taking some of the "thousand years" and "centuries" at face value, I do think it's most likely that the Iron Islands history is, at least on some of the details, simply wrong, especially given that IC they are the most likely to have an unreliably-recorded history before the Andals.

[Mithras]

You have significant errors in some of your assumtptions such as:

There is a wildling story of Gendel and Gorne, brothers who lived three thousand years ago (p148). They are also suggested to have brokered a deal between the Children and the giants (p7). But the Wall was already arisen by the time the brothers supposedly lived, which places the Long Night before this date. That would suggest that the Children and giants were still relevant at the time, and therefore that this was before the Andal invasion.

The giants and elves were active during and after the Andal invasion too.

The oldest sections of Winterfell are believed to be about 2,000 years old, although that doesn't preclude older building. (p.143)

Winterfell was sacked and burned by the Bolton Kings twice before the coming of the Andals. So, Winterfell should have been rebuilt several times. We cannot expect the buildings from the time of Brandon the Builder survive as they were.

Another issue is Alyssa Arryn. Her story is probably based on much older First Men legends as in the case of Artys Arryn. So, the histrocial Alyssa might have lived very long time ago whereas the First Men Alyssa (if that was her true name) lived even before that.

[Alester Florent]

You have significant errors in some of your assumtptions such as:

The giants and elves were active during and after the Andal invasion too.

Winterfell was sacked and burned by the Bolton Kings twice before the coming of the Andals. So, Winterfell should have been rebuilt several times. We cannot expect the buildings from the time of Brandon the Builder survive as they were.

Another issue is Alyssa Arryn. Her story is probably based on much older First Men legends as in the case of Artys Arryn. So, the histrocial Alyssa might have lived very long time ago whereas the First Men Alyssa (if that was her true name) lived even before that.

The giants and Children were active during and after the Andal invasion, but not so much south of the Wall, and not to the extent that you'd expect them to be negotiating property deals: they were fighting for their lives. If the brothers lived three thousand years ago it is highly unlikely - albeit not impossible - that the Andals arrived significantly before that.

Winterfell was burned a couple of times by the Boltons, but does not appear to have fallen since then. The end of the Bolton wars seems to have coincided with the arrival of the Andals, so if the oldest sections are about 2,000 years old that seems a reasonable benchmark. The book does mention (as did I) that there may have been older building there but that is the earliest that can be reliably dated.

With Alyssa Arryn, it might well be a throwaway legend, but since - unlike the First Men legends - it has an attempt at specific dating attached and, unlike the Winged Knight, she is accepted as an historical figure, I thought she was worthy at least of consideration.

[aryagonnakill#2]

^Yes the Giants and Children were not active south of the wall after the Andal invasion, but Gendel and Gorne were north of the wall.

[Alester Florent]

^Yes the Giants and Children were not active south of the wall after the Andal invasion, but Gendel and Gorne were north of the wall.

I may have recalled the legend incorrectly, but didn't they travel south of the wall to perform their trickery?

That is probably one of the more inaccurate dates in any case.

[TheSovereignGrave]

I think the deal with Qhored Hoare is simply a mistake, and that the Qhored Hoare who ruled over the Ironborn at their peak and the Qhored Hoare who killed the last Justman Kings were two different Qhored Hoares. After all, the Driftwood Kings ended by Urron Greyiron, and House Greyiron was exterminated during the Andal Invasion. So a Driftwood King couldn't possibly have ended the Justman Kings, since they ruled after the Andal invasion.

[Alester Florent]

I think the deal with Qhored Hoare is simply a mistake, and that the Qhored Hoare who ruled over the Ironborn at their peak and the Qhored Hoare who killed the last Justman Kings were two different Qhored Hoares. After all, the Driftwood Kings ended by Urron Greyiron, and House Greyiron was exterminated during the Andal Invasion. So a Driftwood King couldn't possibly have ended the Justman Kings, since they ruled after the Andal invasion.

This is indeed at the root of the issue: as you say, the timeline doesn't appear to work. However it is noted that the Iron Islands were the last part of Westeros that the Andals reached, with up to a thousand years between their arrival in the Vale and the conquest that destroyed House Greyiron, so the Age of Heroes may have continued longer there.

The book does fairly clearly indicate that Qhored was a Driftwood King, and some of his successors (some of whom are non-Hoares) are also recorded as battling both Andal kings from the Westerlands (like Gerold the Great) and First Men kings from the Reach (Gyles II and Garth VII), so it's not just Qhored that's out of place. It is entirely possible that this is a mistake, but the book is otherwise pretty consistent in the rough scope of the timeline and the Iron Islands stand out for sitting slightly awkwardly with the rest of it. Of course we have to assume this is an IC mistake but it might be an OOC one.

I don't think there are any definitive answers to be found, unless there are other clues in ASoIaF which can be cross-referenced with the World book; I think anything we come up with will be speculative. Just hopefully slightly more accurate speculation than having to guess completely.

[joluoto2]

^Yes the Giants and Children were not active south of the wall after the Andal invasion, but Gendel and Gorne were north of the wall.

Sure about that? There are legends about Children and Giants fighting the Andals. They might just be legends of course.

[TheSovereignGrave]

This is indeed at the root of the issue: as you say, the timeline doesn't appear to work. However it is noted that the Iron Islands were the last part of Westeros that the Andals reached, with up to a thousand years between their arrival in the Vale and the conquest that destroyed House Greyiron, so the Age of Heroes may have continued longer there.

The book does fairly clearly indicate that Qhored was a Driftwood King, and some of his successors (some of whom are non-Hoares) are also recorded as battling both Andal kings from the Westerlands (like Gerold the Great) and First Men kings from the Reach (Gyles II and Garth VII), so it's not just Qhored that's out of place. It is entirely possible that this is a mistake, but the book is otherwise pretty consistent in the rough scope of the timeline and the Iron Islands stand out for sitting slightly awkwardly with the rest of it. Of course we have to assume this is an IC mistake but it might be an OOC one.

I don't think there are any definitive answers to be found, unless there are other clues in ASoIaF which can be cross-referenced with the World book; I think anything we come up with will be speculative. Just hopefully slightly more accurate speculation than having to guess completely.

Well it could be both an IC and OOC issue. I remember someone once saying that there were some issues with the Iron Islands' history, but GRRM didn't think we'd notice. Or something like that. But you could also theoretically chalk it up to the fact that the Iron Islands are largely illiterate (even for Westeros) and didn't seem to have maesters until recently if I recall correctly.

[Mithras]

I think the deal with Qhored Hoare is simply a mistake, and that the Qhored Hoare who ruled over the Ironborn at their peak and the Qhored Hoare who killed the last Justman Kings were two different Qhored Hoares. After all, the Driftwood Kings ended by Urron Greyiron, and House Greyiron was exterminated during the Andal Invasion. So a Driftwood King couldn't possibly have ended the Justman Kings, since they ruled after the Andal invasion.

Agreed. Qhored the Cruel was a High King chosen in a kingsmoot and the line of the high Kings ended when Urron Greyiron made the title hereditary much later than Qhored the Cruel. After Urron Greyiron, the title canged to Iron King instead of High King. Qhored the Justman slayer lived much later than even Urron.

[joluoto2]

I think the deal with Qhored Hoare is simply a mistake, and that the Qhored Hoare who ruled over the Ironborn at their peak and the Qhored Hoare who killed the last Justman Kings were two different Qhored Hoares. After all, the Driftwood Kings ended by Urron Greyiron, and House Greyiron was exterminated during the Andal Invasion. So a Driftwood King couldn't possibly have ended the Justman Kings, since they ruled after the Andal invasion.

Still, the Riverlands was the second region to fall to the Andals, while the Iron Islands was the last. We have several generations of Iron Islanders between the Andal kings in the Riverlands and the Andal invasion of the Iron isles. It's not impossible that the Iron islands still had Driftwood kings while the Riverlands was Andal, and the Iron Islands became hereditary under the Greyirons during the Andal era.

However it's all guesses of course.

[Alester Florent]

It is not just Qhored, though. The Driftwood Kings are subsequently mentioned as losing a war to Gerold the Great of the Rock (also a post-Andal king, from the Westerlands history) before the Greyiron coup. The Greyirons are also mentioned as losing the Shield Islands to Garth VII (a First Men king) after the coup, for that matter.

It may well still be a mistake by the maesters, but if so it's one made at least twice. And if this were an IC matter where there was a name confusion, I would half-expect a maester sidebar, as with the Artys Arryn business.

I think as joluoto says it might well be that the Driftwood Kings did in fact overlap with the Andals quite substantially. In which case it is probable that House Greyiron's "thousand-year rule" was much inflated and was more in the matter of a few centuries. Either that or it took the Andals a lot longer than the purported thousand years to reach the Iron Islands.

[Ramsay's Penguins]

I think a major part of this is disregarding the "Greyiron 1000 years" sort of thing.

Qhored (Driftwood)->Urron (Iron)->Hoares (including a Qhored who fought Justmans) is how I see it.

[LmL]

Hey Adelstein, great post, I really enjoyed reading it. I've focusing exclusively in the Dawn Age and Long Night events myself, so it was really good to see someone put this together as close as possible.

Two things I want to add: one about the NW, and one about the Age of Heroes.

The oldest histories we have were written after the Andals came to Westeros. The First Men only left us runes on rocks, so everything we think we know about the Age of Heroes and the Dawn Age and the Long Night comes from accounts set down by septons thousands of years later. There are archmaesters at the Citadel who question all of it. Those old histories are full of kings who reigned for hundreds of years, and knights riding around a thousand years before there were knights. You know the tales, Brandon the Builder, Symeon Star- Eyes, Nights King we say that youre the nine- hundred- and- ninety- eighth Lord Commander of the Nights Watch, but the oldest list Ive found shows six hundred seventy- four commanders, which suggests that it was written during

What was Sam about to say??? Wouldn't we like to know. But using your average length of the reign of a monarch and applying it to the Lord Commanders (shaky but the only thing to really go off of), we get 17.8 x 674 = 11,997! Even if you use an average of 10 years, unreasonably short, we have approx 7,000 years. Now I think it's clear that the Nights Watch dates back to at least the Long Night itself, so using your logic, that sets an earliest possible date at 6500 BC, if those NW records are worth anything. The problem is that no one wrote anything down before the Andals, which you've pegged pretty reasonably around 2000-2300 BC.

So.. I guess maybe they carved stick figures into a wall? One for each LC? They must have done something, and we know they had runes. Runes are usually used for astronomy and magic (more mystical purposes), or else simple tallies, signs of ownership, etc. Surely the reigns of Lord Commanders would be among the things recorded this way. In the real world, people without writing general rely on oral traditions which use rhyme, meter, and verse to ensure accuracy, and such methods of information transmission a re actually very accurate. The Vedas of ancient India are probably the best known example of such, but we do not really have a suggestion of anything like that on Westeros. I do notice that TWOIAF repeatedly heaps scorn on to the words of "singers," as well as sailors and septons, but as I've said songs can actually be quite reliable in their own colorful way. The wildlings songs in particular contain old truths forgotten by others.

But returning to the issue of the NW records, I do suspect the LC commander count of at least 600+ is probably right, and I've always pegged the Long Night at about 10,000 BC for various reasons, among them the dates we have for Atlantis and the dates which the Great Pyramids and associated temples seem to be aligned to astronomically (I'm referring to Graham Hancock stuff there). This means there was quite a long period of post-LN Westeros before the Andals arrived. Quite a damn lot, if you consider history.

As for the "Age of Heroes." My opinion about the Ahe of Heroes and Dawn Age is essentially this: everything that happened before the Long Night is a hazy memory at best. If the Long Night lasted even five or six years, we are talking about the death of most life on earth - plants, animals, people, Giants, dragons, Deep Ones, Winged Men, Wyverns, Brindled Men, all of them. This is an evolutionary bottleneck we are talking about. All organized civilization would collapse amid mass starvation and anarchy. Compound natural disasters would have made many areas instantly uninhabitable and forced long, desperate migrations. There is a lot of evidence of this very thing throughout the eastern sections of TWOIAF. So, essentially, the "Dawn Age" simply means "everything that happened before the Long Night," and possibly some stuff that happened soon after and was confused together as mankind picked themselves up off the mat and put civilization back together. Thus, everything that supposedly happened before the Long Night is totally up for grabs chronologically.

The Worldbook draws the line between the Dawn Age and Age of Heroes at the God's Eye pact between the FM and the cotf. After this was a period of thousands of years before the Andals arrived - this matches with the NW records, and the general opinion of the maesters.

The Long Night is strangely disembodied, chronologically. It is not really placed inside the Dawn Age or the Age of Heroes. Because of the nature of the Long Night as I see it, I tend to put it in the Dawn Age. I don't think anything but the most general common knowledge would make it through the bottleneck of the LN. The survivors would have been concerned only with food and shelter for decades afterward. The little dark age in Ancient Greece is a great example of a much smaller collapse which took 200 years to recover from - Greece forgot how to write, and plunged into savagery for 200 years, and all the stories they have from before that date are much harder to pin down historically. So all the Gardener Kings and Durrans and such, the Kings of a Winter - I see them as likely living after the Long Night. I suspect the very earliest legends of the main peoples of Wetseros - that of Durran Godsgrief, Bran the Builder, Garth the Green, the Grey King, and a few others - are stories about the first leaders to organize mankind after the LN, or those who may have done heroic deeds during the Long Night (since we know this is a fantasy story, obviously Azor Ahai, Last Hero, etc had something to do with ending the Long Night). It's certainly tempting to think of the "Last Hero" as the end of the age of heroes, but maybe not.

The Maesters are curious - they have existed since the LN, it seems, as Uthor Hightower, the founder of house Hightower, seems to have been amongst the first known people in Wetseros, and his taking of a daughter of Garth the Green to wife testifies to this. Garth is an important guy, potentially the First King of the First Men - probably the same guy as the Barrow King, who was also supposed to be the First King of the First Men. It's possible the Shett's "True King" monicker refers to this. But the maesters have existed since the earliest days of house Hightower, long before writing came with the Andals. How does an organization of men dedicated to the accumulation of knowledge function for thousands of years without writing? Did they have oral traditions? Runes? I mean, what? Glad candles? Greenseers? Were they just a bunch of hack alchemists until the Andals came along with writing? Because they are the ones who draw this line between the Dawn Age and Age of Heroes. It may be a totally arbitrary distinction. They may simply be putting more fanciful stuff into the "Dawn Age" pile and the things that sounds a bit more credible into the "Age of Heroes" pile. Thus, some of the inconsistencies in the dates that you see with the Ironborn Driftwood Kings and the Gardener Kings may be the result of maester bias pushing certain events back because they sound fantastical, or vise-versa.

[Alester Florent]

Glad you found it interesting, Lucifer. I'm glad to see someone is taking on the Dawn Age/Age of Heroes, too - I gave up on it fairly quickly!

I too am however inclined to look at all the heroes whose names we know, with the possible exception of Garth Greenhand, as having lived after the Long Night.

Two things I want to add: one about the NW, and one about the Age of Heroes.

What was Sam about to say??? Wouldn't we like to know. But using your average length of the reign of a monarch and applying it to the Lord Commanders (shaky but the only thing to really go off of), we get 17.8 x 674 = 11,997! Even if you use an average of 10 years, unreasonably short, we have approx 7,000 years. Now I think it's clear that the Nights Watch dates back to at least the Long Night itself, so using your logic, that sets an earliest possible date at 6500 BC, if those NW records are worth anything. The problem is that no one wrote anything down before the Andals, which you've pegged pretty reasonably around 2000-2300 BC.

...

But returning to the issue of the NW records, I do suspect the LC commander count of at least 600+ is probably right, and I've always pegged the Long Night at about 10,000 BC for various reasons, among them the dates we have for Atlantis and the dates which the Great Pyramids and associated temples seem to be aligned to astronomically (I'm referring to Graham Hancock stuff there). This means there was quite a long period of post-LN Westeros before the Andals arrived. Quite a damn lot, if you consider history.

On the Night's Watch specifically, a shorter average term might be reasonable, given they run an elective system. In normal monarchies (and even the HRE, though nominally elective, still had long dynastic periods where it looked a lot like any other monarchy) short reigns of monarchs who come to the throne late in life are often balanced by long reigns of child kings. In an electie system, however, it's rare for very young candidates ever to get selected. Jon Snow might not be the first but is almost certainly exceptional in being elected before the age of twenty: had it not been for Janos Slynt and Stannis, most likely it would have been Cotter Pyke or Denys Mallister. Perhaps a closer model than a normal monarchy from history is the reign of popes, with the likelihood of lords commander being elected young being balanced by an increased chance of death through hardship or violence - and that's only seven and a half years. So ten years might not be unreasonably short for a Lord Commander on average and that 7,000-year figure looks a bit closer.

As you say there are some questions that really need to be answered about the maesters and what they've been up to all this time. Getting into the realm of the largely speculative it might be that the maesters were not originally intended as repositories of knowledge but rather with a purpose not dissimilar to that of the Night's Watch, with whom they may have been founded contemporaneously, and possibly even as some kind of "witch hunters" to eradicate the legacy of the Others south of the Wall where the NW were the obvious, militant side of it. Then as memory of the Others receded the maesters needed to find a new role for themselves and discovered that their previous activities had made them relatively learned in comparison to the rest of the population and so became the sages we now know - while also conveniently worming their way into every noble household in Westeros. This might explain the slightly odd relationship the maesters have with magic, writing it off as a fairytale while secretly studying it quite closely, their close monitoring of the turning of the seasons, and the persistent rumours that they killed off the dragons one way or another.

Or maybe they even originally formed a "neutral" party between the NW and the Others, their grey cloaks symbolising a halfway house between the NW's black and the Others' white (as in white walkers). But all this is, of course, highly speculative.

[LmL]

Glad you found it interesting, Lucifer. I'm glad to see someone is taking on the Dawn Age/Age of Heroes, too - I gave up on it fairly quickly!

I too am however inclined to look at all the heroes whose names we know, with the possible exception of Garth Greenhand, as having lived after the Long Night.

On the Night's Watch specifically, a shorter average term might be reasonable, given they run an elective system. In normal monarchies (and even the HRE, though nominally elective, still had long dynastic periods where it looked a lot like any other monarchy) short reigns of monarchs who come to the throne late in life are often balanced by long reigns of child kings. In an electie system, however, it's rare for very young candidates ever to get selected. Jon Snow might not be the first but is almost certainly exceptional in being elected before the age of twenty: had it not been for Janos Slynt and Stannis, most likely it would have been Cotter Pyke or Denys Mallister. Perhaps a closer model than a normal monarchy from history is the reign of popes, with the likelihood of lords commander being elected young being balanced by an increased chance of death through hardship or violence - and that's only seven and a half years. So ten years might not be unreasonably short for a Lord Commander on average and that 7,000-year figure looks a bit closer.

As you say there are some questions that really need to be answered about the maesters and what they've been up to all this time. Getting into the realm of the largely speculative it might be that the maesters were not originally intended as repositories of knowledge but rather with a purpose not dissimilar to that of the Night's Watch, with whom they may have been founded contemporaneously, and possibly even as some kind of "witch hunters" to eradicate the legacy of the Others south of the Wall where the NW were the obvious, militant side of it. Then as memory of the Others receded the maesters needed to find a new role for themselves and discovered that their previous activities had made them relatively learned in comparison to the rest of the population and so became the sages we now know - while also conveniently worming their way into every noble household in Westeros. This might explain the slightly odd relationship the maesters have with magic, writing it off as a fairytale while secretly studying it quite closely, their close monitoring of the turning of the seasons, and the persistent rumours that they killed off the dragons one way or another.

Or maybe they even originally formed a "neutral" party between the NW and the Others, their grey cloaks symbolising a halfway house between the NW's black and the Others' white (as in white walkers). But all this is, of course, highly speculative.

Ah, some good ideas there. Highly speculative is where good theories start, they only need scrutiny to separate the wheat from the chaff. ;) In any case, the use of color is highly symbolic in many, many places in ASOIAF so I wouldn't be quick to dismiss your observation about the maesters wearing grey. If they are watching for anything, I'd suspect dragons. Don't know if you're familiar with my astronomy theories but I definitely think there were ancient dragon lords who made a beachhead at Oldtown, specifically that fused black stone fortress at Battle Isle which forms the base of the Hightower. The "battle" for which Battle Isle took its name traces back to a confrontation with these ancient, proto-Valyrian dragonlords. I think the Order of the Green Men / Green Hand was involved, as well as cotf, and both magic swords ("Dawn," which I think was the original "Ice," and "Lightbringer, the red sword of Azor Ahai, who I think is the invading dragon lord). I think House Hightower was set up to keep watch on the sea, by whence the ancient dragonlords came (all according to theory of course). The Citadel was started by the son of the first Hightower, Uthor, and so is tied to this time as well.

There are however, I believe, Church of Starry wisdom infiltrators who are pro-magic within the citadel - Marwyn prays at those queer dockside sailor's temples, so he's the prime suspect. Also, it seem the current Lord Hightower is into sorcery with his wife and doesn't leave his tower - a bit Sauromon-like if you ask me, very creepy. So our southern watch may be as inept as our northern watch, if this line of speculation has any merit.