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Whats beyond the Lonely Light


Ser Danyel Mortimer

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We have almost no information to go on.

We know that you can sail a pretty good distance beyond Lonely Light without finding anything. We know that one person mounted an expedition thousands of years ago and never came back. We know that others have tried to go as far as possible in the other direction, but nobody (that the Maesters have heard from) has made it past Asshai in the south or the Thousand Islands in the north. And we know (although from out-of-universe only) that Planetos is round like our planet.

So, it's pretty clear that if you go far enough west, you will eventually find one of:
  • Asshai and Ulthos and the rest of the eastern edge of the map of the known world, or
  • Some further-eastern part of Essos that we don't know about, or
  • One or more entirely new continents (Americos) in between the two.
But we have no idea which of them you'd find. Or how far you'd have to go. Or if there are any trade winds that make it a feasible journey with the naval technology of the day. Or if there are any large-enough islands to serve a way stations to make it easier.

We don't even know if Brandon the Shipwright failed to cross the sea, or crossed it but couldn't get back (because there are trade winds in one direction but not the other, or because he couldn't find them in the other, or because he was killed by skraelings, or because he found the islands of Polynesios and decided it was more fun to settle down with the hot naked chicks than to go back to the North, or whatever).
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I like the idea of Bran finding islands of naked chicks.

There was supposedly an early explorer who discovered lands across the sea before even Gunnbjörn Ulfsson's discovery of the shoals off Greenland, but he and his men never returned to report on the discovery because all of the women were beautiful and the land was too warm for clothing. Which makes you wonder how anyone knew the story to write a saga about it.
 

the iron born may also have gone there which probably didn't leave them with a good impression.

Yes. Thorfinn's settlement in Vinland had to be abandoned because the native Skraelings didn't understand such civilized practices as raising cattle, enclosing fields, and enslaving people in thralldom, and so attacked them with spears, arrows, and what sound like catapults.

ETA: And the Inuit still had stories about the Vikings (kavdlunait) hundreds of years later. If you kill them, they return in the winter and exact revenge. There's even a story that the cold years of the 15th century were the revenge of the kavdlunait, who sent the cold ahead of them.
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I did know about the Vinland settlement

Yeah, I kind of thought you might even have been specifically referring to Vinland when you said the Ironborn may have left a bad impression on the natives, but I figured even if you knew about it, many of the people reading your post wouldn't, so it was still worth mentioning.
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