|
http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/ask-the-maester-sansas-horrific-wedding-the-bolton-stark-alliance-and-the-sand-snakes/
The short answer is that allies aren’t necessarily friends. The longer answer, as you might expect, is that the lord-and-vassal relationship between the Starks and the Boltons is complex, rife with conflict and quite a bit of foreshadowing. The Starks ruled the North — first as Kings, then as high lords and Wardens of the North — for about 8,000 years, and a house doesn’t expand its control over the whole of a region like the North by asking politely and campaigning on a platform of good governance. Though we view their house through the tragically heroic lens of Ned “Bring Your Honor to a Sword Fight” Stark, over that vast ocean of time there have been good Starks and bad Starks, strong Starks and weak Starks, just Starks and rapaciously warlike Starks. The ancient North, just like the rest of Westeros, was made up of numerous petty kingdoms. The Starks’ rise from local warlords to Kings in the North necessitated the subjugation of these minor kingdoms, not to mention occasionally grappling with warg armies and greenseers and giants and various inhuman creatures native to the North and beyond. Many of the notable houses of the North today were once rulers in their own rights who bent the knee — the Flints, the Slates, and the Glovers, for example — and others who refused were wiped out and lost to history.
Of these ancient kingdoms of the North, the Red Kings of the House Bolton — who ruled the lands between the Last River and the River Whiteknife from the Dreadfort — were among the most powerful and definitely the most antagonistic to Stark hegemony. King Royce II was the first Bolton to sack and burn Winterfell. The Starks rebounded, only to have their home destroyed again 300 years later by King Royce IV Bolton, known as “Redarm” for his habit of thrusting his arm into his enemies’ stomachs and tearing out their intestines. Cool family. Also: Make your castle stronger, Stark homies. Roughly 6,000 years ago, King Rogar “the Huntsman” Bolton bent his knee to the Starks, ending the contest-of-equals phase of the relationship between the two and ushering in the mostly-loyal-vassal-with-occasional-bouts-of-bloody-insurrection phase. As subjects of Winterfell, the Boltons took part in the Starks’ wars, most notably between the North and the Arryns of the Vale. That war, to hear the Arryns tell it, was not lacking in Northmen atrocities: children killed and boiled in pots; entrails torn out and roasted before the eyes of their owners; the head-Bolton-in-charge at the time supposedly making a headquarters tent out of the skins of his captives. It isn’t clear whether any of these things actually occurred and, if so, who took part in them; Northerners dispute the accounts. But considering the documented scope of Bolton depravity, it’s fair to surmise that these horrors did occur and that either the Boltons hid them from the Starks (it wouldn’t be the first time, or the last), or the Starks pretended they didn’t know.
There’s some evidence that, during this time of relative amity, Winterfell pursued a strategy of containment in order to dissuade the Boltons from rising from their knees. A fortress called the Wolf’s Den (which has since grown into the city known as White Harbor) was established at the mouth of the White Knife by King Jon Stark. The Den was ostensibly raised to guard the river from invasion, but it’s hard to ignore that the fortress and its attendant lands also happen to hem the Boltons in from the south. The Wolf’s Den was kept under direct Stark control, and some Kings in the North actually preferred to use the Den as their seat over Winterfell. To the East of the Dreadfort, Karlon Stark, an ancient second son of an unknown King in the North, built the castle of Karhold with lands that may or may not have been taken from Bolton domains. Over time, as the Wolf’s Den and Karhold were passed down within various branches of the Stark family, offshoot branches appeared. The branch that sits at Karhold calls themselves the Karstarks; you might recall Robb Stark beheading the Lord Karstark for going rogue and killing the young Lannister hostages a few seasons back. At the Wolf’s Den, various cadet branches appeared, the longest-running of which were the Greystarks. They reigned for 500 years — until they joined with the Boltons in yet another Dreadfort rebellion against Winterfell and were exterminated. It is said that over the years of outright warfare and simmering resentment (which occasionally bubbled over into insurrection), numerous Stark kings and lords were flayed, their skins worn as Bolton cloaks or hung as drapery.
Then there are the darker whispers, the folktales that the fabled Night’s King — the power-mad former 13th Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, who fell in love with a strange pale woman, possibly begetting the White Walkers — was, perhaps, a Bolton. Or a Stark or a Norrey or a Skagosi cannibal. At any rate, Bolton is always the first name on the list.
So why do the Starks put up with this? Well, basically, war in Westeros is prohibitively expensive. The majority of the soldiers who make up the armies in Westeros are simple peasants, small folk who normally would be working their lord’s fields, milling their grain, or doing some other needed service. In addition to the common footsoldiers, there are the landed knights and lords and their noble squires, and their armorers, all in the field risking their lives when they could be at home working. When King Harlon Stark laid siege to the Dreadfort to put down yet another Bolton rebellion, it took his army two years to starve the Dreadfort into submission. That’s two years of economic and agricultural activity basically ground to a halt. This is why Westerosi wars usually end with the losing side capitulating and agreeing to terms rather than the ultimate extinction of a noble house, though that does occasionally happen. (See: Reynes, Castamere.) Once a side knows they can’t win, they pay a few hundred pounds of silver, maybe give up a few sons as hostages, maybe marry off a few daughters, hand over a few parcels of land, and promise never ever ever to do it again. Ninety-nine percent of the time, all is forgiven because everyone just wants to fucking go home and not die when the other side is willing to surrender. It’s just easier that way, and most of the time the system works. Up until the Red Wedding, the Boltons had been more or less loyal to the Starks for a thousand years. Sure, they might still flay people now and again, and, yes, Ramsay is insane. But that’s nothing worth calling the banners over. ______
gnap.
|
Printer-friendly copy 
Email this topic to a friend
General Discussion
(1 votes)
(7 votes)
(3 votes)
#/media/File:Firefly.png)
