serdog

Robert E. Howard reference:

In A Dance with Dragons, while Tyrion is playing Cyvasse with Young Griff, he uses a metaphor about Daenarys's 'sandaled feet' that Howard used for Conan:

“… I know she is proud. How not? What else was left her but pride? I know she is strong. How not? The Dothraki despise weakness. If Daenerys had been weak, she would have perished with Viserys. I know she is fierce. Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen are proof enough of that. She has crossed the grasslands and the red waste, survived assassins and conspiracies and fell sorceries, grieved for a brother and a husband and a son, trod the cities of the slavers to dust beneath her dainty sandaled feet."

And this is how Howard opened the very first Conan story (it was also used often in the Marvel versions as a general epigram, if I recall correctly):

“Know, O prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars…. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.”

That quote is well-known (and made of awesome in my opinion) and I have no doubt that GRRM is referencing it here. Clearly there is a general similarity between Conan's world and Essos, particularly the cities of Slavers' Bay and Qarth, and also Valyria before the Doom.

GRRM notes in Dreamsongs that that quote got him into fantasty in the first place

Maybe not a reference but rather an interest link

Seashell are tied to the Spencer Family( the Earls Spencer arms bear a band of Seashells and Diana, Prince of Wales(and her sons the Duke of Cambrige and Prince Henry of Wales use Seashell as marks of Cadency on their personal arm) its interesting that Seashell are also linked to the Westerlings I will not make comment on the paralles in the marriage but its a interest little link

the Reyne of Castamere's arms are an invertion (with the Lion regardent) of those of the Simon de Montfort Earl of Leicester