The Realm: The True history behind Game of Thrones (3 page)

Likewise the presence of birds in Martin’s books, crows and ravens being heavily prominent in Celtic as well as Nordic mythology. Babd, the Celtic goddess of war, turned herself into the birds and like the birds followed armies into battle, in the expectation of corpses to eat in its aftermath. Across the North Sea the Scandinavians believed that ravens served as messengers between this world and the ‘Otherworld’, with Odin, the head of the gods, having two ravens.

After a number of rebellions against the Romans, the most famous of which took place in AD60 and was led by the Iceni widow Boudicca, Britannia had been pacified, with Londonium home to 60,000 people, and the province protected by a large army in the north. About 10,000 troops were stationed on the wall, named after the Emperor Hadrian, who in 122 had decreed that the Empire’s borders should be fixed and secure. At its completion Hadrian’s Wall was 80 miles along, eight feet thick and 15 feet high, with a fort every 15 miles and a ditch on each side. But the wild men beyond the wall were a constant source of anxiety, and the Romans also began importing mercenaries to police the country, including up to 5,500 horsemen from Sarmatia, in what is now Russia, and more ominously, Saxons from Germany, who first appear in the third century.

By now the western half of the Empire was in terminal decline. In 378 the Romans suffered their first major defeat, at Adrianople, at the hands of the Goths. It was the beginning of the end: from that year coins in Britain start to become rare, and by 430 they had been abandoned altogether in favour of bartering. Pottery production had stopped in 410. Beyond the fortresses and forests to the north various population changes were occurring, and what would become known as the
Völkerwanderung
– the movement of peoples – had begun. Germanic tribes had sprung from southern Scandinavia around the year 1000 BC, spreading south and then fanning out, pushing the Celts in the west across the Rhine and the Slavs east of the Oder. By the 5th century barbarian tribes in war bands of up to 80,000 were sweeping across the continent, among them the Vandals from the Great Hungarian Plain who sacked Rome in 455, and the Visigoths from beyond the Danube who marched into northern Italy and sacked Rome in AD410. To the north, in Angeln, the ‘thin peninsula’, which jutted out into the icy Baltic Sea, land shortage was placing pressure on the Angles and their neighbours the Saxons and Jutes.

The blond-haired Angles crossed the narrow sea and conquered at first the eastern part of Britain, later spreading west. The Jutes settled in Kent, having been invited by a tribal king, Vortigen, in AD430, and were led by two brothers, Horsa and Hengest, ‘the Horse’ and ‘the Stallion’, who came with three boats. The Jutes returned with 20 boats, and soon after with 60, and like the Valryians first settled on an island, Thanet. The Britons panicked; Vortigen told them to go elsewhere, and refused to pay them. But the Jutes returned in greater numbers and conquered Cantium, which they pronounced Kent, driving the natives west.
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The Saxons took the land north of the Thames, and settled along the south coast too; in 577 they completed their conquest by capturing the Severn Estuary, ending native resistance by splitting their lands in two. Those remaining on the island the invaders called
Welsh
, ‘foreigner’ or ‘dark stranger’; in turn the
Cymraeg
(‘people’) referred to the country conquered by the Saxons as
Lloegyr
, literally ‘the lost lands’.

The Old Gods and the New

The world of
Game of Thrones
is pagan, inhabited by people worshipping a number of different gods, although from the second book there emerges the influence of a mysterious new religion spread by a sinister foreign woman demanding the sacrifice of humans. This is true to the pattern of real history, although in real life the mysterious eastern religion spread by women across the isles proclaimed the end of sacrifices, and certainly not human ones.

Like the Andals, the Angles were polytheists. The old gods they worshipped included the goddess of war, Freyja, her brother Frey the god of peace, and four others whose legacy lasted longer – Tiw, Woden, Thor and Frigg, commemorated in the days of the week. Among their other deities were Eastre, the goddess of fertility who was worshipped each spring, her name stemming from the direction in which the sun rose. Back in the eastern continent it is believed that her festival may once have involved human sacrifice. Iron Age people, the Angles and Saxons also honoured Weland the Smith, Norse god of ironwork who, like his Greek equivalent Vulcan, was crippled – although in the cruel world of the north Weland had been deliberately maimed by a king to make him stay in his service. In revenge Weland murdered the man’s son and raped his daughter.

The Westeroi worship seven gods, a number with significance in almost all religions; the Catholic and Orthodox churches have seven sacraments, seven deadly sins and seven archangels, while in Islam there are the seven circuits of the
Kaaba
and seven destructive sins. The Babylonians had seven gates of hell, and in Greek mythology there were seven daughters of Atlas; the Hindus have seven stages to their wedding and the Bahai seven ‘valleys’, or experiences.

As in Westeros, a new and mysterious faith was emerging from the east, which claimed there was just one god. As in Westeros, it was a religion espoused by women; in the case of
Angla lond
it was Ethelbert of Kent’s Frankish wife Bertha who helped spread the faith, against much native superstition.

The story begins in Rome towards the end of the 6th century, the former imperial city a shadow of its former self, and now home to a few thousand people. Sacked by the Lombards, barbarians from the north who had crossed the Alps as the empire’s borders collapsed, the eternal city had however emerged as the centre of one of a number of religions that had sprung up in the Near East in the centuries approaching the age of migration. Among them was Mandaeism, which believed in a world separated between darkness and light, with spirits guiding the righteous to the world of light after their deaths. This faith, which resembles that of the Red Priests of Westeros, still barely clings on in Iraq, with a few thousand believers remaining. Another group, the Yazidi, followed a religion strongly resembling Martin’s ‘new gods’; they believed in one deity who had entrusted the world to seven holy beings, the ‘Heptad’, most pre-eminent of whom was Melek Taus, the peacock angel. Like the Mandaeans they still survive mainly in Iraq, although suffering persecution.

Christianity had emerged as a sect of Judaism after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth around the year AD30; the new religion promised eternal life for the poor and virtuous, and an end to sacrifice, the Judean God having made the final sacrifice with his son. Within a few years it had its first martyr, Stephen, killed on the orders of an official zealously hunting down the new group, a Greek-speaking Jew by the name of Saul. Soon after, on his way to Damascus in Syria, Saul was struck blind and joined the followers of the ‘messiah’, in the Greek language
Christos
. By the end of the second century the sect had spread across the eastern and soon the western Mediterranean, the first Latin Christian text appearing in AD180
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and the Empire abandoning the old gods in the fourth century. Now Pope Gregory pledged to return those distant isles back to the faith.

The barbarians lived within 12 tribal kingdoms, although by Augustine’s time a series of conquests had reduced this to eight: Jutish Kent, the South, East and West Saxon kingdoms (Sussex, Essex and Wessex), and the Angle lands of East Anglia, Mercia, Bernicia and Deira. When the last two were united and called Northumbria this became known as the Heptarchy, or seven realms.

In 597, when Augustine finally finished his long trip, Kent was ruled by Ethelbert, great-grandson of Hengest and recognised as
bretwalda
, the most powerful of the kings, a title that would shift between the kingdoms over the centuries. To the Jutes of Kent, the Italian missionary appeared a strange and frightening figure. For Augustine the experience must have been far more terrifying, and he had almost given up on his hazardous trip across Gaul, now occupied by the Germanic tribe the Franks, before crossing the narrow sea. The Jutish king was suspicious, and only agreed to meet the stranger under an oak tree, which was believed by various European peoples to have magical powers. He insisted that Augustine remain on the Isle of Thanet.

Ethelbert was under the influence of his Frankish queen Bertha, a Christian who had agreed to the match on condition she was allowed to maintain her exotic religion and bring her own bishop. It was Bertha who persuaded Ethelbert to speak to the stranger, and allow him to baptize a large number of Jutes, eventually himself converting in 597. Kent’s capital Canterbury became the seat of the English Church, as it remains today.

Essex had come under the influence of the stronger kingdom south of the river that flowed into the German Sea. Its king, Saberht, was the son of Ethelbert’s sister, and he became a Christian in 604, with the first St Paul’s cathedral in London being built under his rule. In 616 Edwin, the king of Northumbria, was brought around to the new faith by his wife.

The Angles reverted to the old gods after Edwin’s death in battle, but were restored to the Church when Oswald came to power in Northumbria, later becoming the first English king to be canonized. Some rulers hedged their bets; Redwald, King of East Anglia, recognized as
bretwalda
after Ethelbert and a man self-confident enough to claim descent from the Caesars, had two shrines built next to each other, one for Christ and one for the old gods. Even Alfred the Great, living in the 9th century, claimed descent from both Woden and Noah. The religion spread across the seven kingdoms, and the Anglo-Saxons in turn converted the Saxons Overseas, as they called the Germans of the continent.

Most of what we know about this era was recorded by the Venerable Bede, a monk from Northumbria who was born in 672, orphaned as a child, and at the age of 12 sent to the monastery at Jarrow. Bede lived in the kingdom of Bernicia, and he almost certainly coined the term Northumbrian to describe the people of the north, to distinguish them from the Angles south of the Humber, but in
The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation
, written in Latin sometime around 731, he was also the first to refer to the people of the seven kingdoms as the
Anyclyn
, or English. To the people of the north and west they were, and are,
Sassanachs
, Saxons.

The Seven Kingdoms

Just as the ruling houses of Westeros traced their lineage back to obscure and distant kings, in medieval England those of royal blood descended from the rulers of Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria, the ancient kingdoms of the Realm, which were eventually united before being conquered by William the Bastard.

Bede lived during what was later called the Northumbrian golden age. The showpiece of this flowering of culture was the Lindisfarne Gospels, a multi-coloured masterpiece (most books at the time only used three colours) laboriously written and illustrated in the Irish style by a monk called Eadfrith, and completed around 715. In time Northumbria was eclipsed by Mercia, literally ‘the boundary’, which had been founded by the most ferocious settlers on the frontier with the British. By the end of his reign in 796 its king, Offa, effectively ruled most of England from his court in Staffordshire, styling himself ‘king of the whole fatherland of the English’.

The Saxons were part of the German Sea, as they called the ocean around which the German peoples all lived. Beyond that world they knew little, only of travelers’ tales at the court of the kings, of voyages by the fjords of Norway up to the Arctic Circle and its midnight sun, and across to the land of the mysterious Finns and their shamans, and down the waterways where the Rus lived; and to the glories of Constantinople, like Rome a gilded, ancient city that filled the imagination.

Although English missionaries had made great efforts in spreading the faith in Frisia, by the banks of the great river Rhine, and in Saxony, further north in the original homeland of the Anglii the people still worshipped the old gods. These were facing hunger, and would export some 200,000 people between the 8th and 11th centuries.
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The seamen who terrorized neighbouring lands the English called
Denes
or heathens; since the 19th century we have known them through the Icelandic sagas as ‘raiders’, or
Vikings
. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
records the first of these
pagani
from 792 and the following year it noted that ‘dire portents appeared over Northumbria and sorely frightened the people’ – immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons, were seen flying in the air. That year the Danes raided the monastery at Lindisfarne in Northumbria. The Vikings returned in the 830s and in 865 King Ivan ‘the Boneless’ invaded with his great host; he captured the Northumbrian capital Eoforwic and established it as a permanent Danish kingdom. Unable to pronounce the name, they called it Jorvik, York.

By the late 860s all but one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had been conquered. Then in 871 the Vikings invaded Wessex. Within a few months its young king was hiding in the Somerset Levels, with only a small band, desperately fending off the invaders. His name was Alfred, grandson of
bretwalda
Egbert and from the line of Cerdic who had founded the kingdom in 519. The youngest of King Ethelwulf’s five sons, his reign began with the death of his last surviving brother, Ethelred, and soon afterwards the Vikings defeated his army in battle.

By the end of 877 his situation was desperate. On Twelfth Night, January 6, 878, the invaders beat the Saxons once again at Chippenham, and the last English king barely escaped with his life, fleeing with his army, or
fyrd,
to the Isle of Athelney in Somerset. During his darkest moments it was said that dead saints visited the king. Anonymously wandering through the woods, he came to a poor woman’s house and was allowed to sit by the fire if he would watch the bread (or cakes). Alfred, with his mind understandably on other matters, let the bread burn, and so the poor woman scolded him.