Lord Browndodd

It's simpler than that - he gets himself an army (the Golden Company).

...and Joff drinks the best part of it in one go. Given that he was properly blootered already, that would surely have been enough to put him on the floor, regardless of whether or not he had been poisoned.

I hope he proves to be afraid of mice, or something similar.

Yes but presumably dependent on the relative wealth of the family - I doubt Gawen Westerling would have as much of the really high-end stuff in his cellars as the Lannisters, for example.

Also, you'd think it would interest Tywin to know who has just murdered a member of the Lannister family.

I grow citrus under glass in a climate not too far removed from Winterfell; the orangeblossom is coming into flower at the moment. Whether GRRM would agree that this is possible, however, I don't know.

It's not Quentyn that is necessarily the problem, the one Dany shouldn't trust - it's Doran, as Quentyn is basically there as Doran's ambassador/agent.

Maybe it's just an ironborn thing. They're not over-fond of literacy, after all.

Just a few thoughts from this - apologies for failing to format this properly, the software is not behaving itself today... Mediterranean - whatever he felt about the language, the chapters set in Ithilien suggest he either loved the landscape there from personal experience or he had a good idea why it might appeal to an Englishman. There's also a surprisingly good analogy for Cirith Ungol hidden away in the southern French Alps - I do wonder if he visited it, or more likely heard about it. Eomer was the possibly mythical founder of the Angle royal house of Mercia. The Visigothic king Theodoric met a very similar end to Theoden. The Gothic language is not too far removed from Old English - I'm an English speaker with limited knowledge of German, and whilst I certainly could not translate a Gothic text, I do have a sense of what it is saying - far more so than Danish or Swedish, for example.

Wasn't the Tyrell in question one of the alleged murderers of Edward V? If so, that makes two Tyrell kingslayers in English history, as it was also the name of the archer who supposedly shot dead William II.

In the case of Aegon I, who would have been presumptuous enough to carry it out?

There is a herb called valerian, one of whose folkloric properties is to keep dragons at bay.

Found some old notebooks of mine earlier today, from long before I came across GRRM's work. They are festooned with line-drawings of dragons and various other lizards, including one of the three-headed beast King Ghidorah from the Godzilla movies, which looks startlingly like the Targaryen sigil. I wonder if Martin was a fan, too? (I also like hot baths. You have been warned)