10 Facts About Westeros Game Of Thrones Won't Tell You
Actually, you know nothing.
Game Of Thrones is best described as an incredibly dense compilation of fictional history mixed with complicated geo-politics and mythology. It’s also an epic story where all of your favourite characters will die and bad guys will always triumph, but let’s ignore that for now and focus on the first point.
Since the very beginning, way back in the 1990s when the first book in the Song Of Ice And Fire saga was published, Game Of Thrones has offered fans one of the most compelling fictional mythologies of any fantasy series. The reason we love Game Of Thrones so much is because Westeros feels so real.
With thousands of years of complicated history written up by author George RR Martin and plugged into the books, it only makes sense that the HBO series can’t possibly deal with all of it. After all, the show has changed much of the books’ more complicated mythology in order to appeal to a mass audience, so it makes sense that some big facts are going to be left out.
Detail like the arrival of the First Men and the history of the Andals’ religion is necessarily left out of the show because it simply doesn’t matter to the larger story. Having said that, there’s so much about Westeros that the show hasn’t unpacked, and all of it gives us a better understanding of the world that our favourite (and least favourite) characters live in.
Some facts have been left out of Game Of Thrones simply because they would take too much time to cover, while others were excised because they contradicted something that the show already explained. Whichever way you look at it, some of the most interesting facts about Westeros are the ones you never knew, and will never be talked about on the series.
You really don't know as much as you thought, Jon Snow.
10. Humans Aren’t Native To Westeros
Considering that the known history of Westeros spans tens of thousands of years, it makes sense that Game Of Thrones won’t dedicate all of its episodes to exploring it. In fact, the only mention on the show of the pre-history time in Westeros known as the Dawn Age often comes in passing asides between charaters. And between who’s sleeping with who on the show and who wants to overthrow what, there’s already enough to focus on without trying to figure out what happened 12,000 years before the show started.
As it turns out however, the Dawn Age of Westeros was a fascinating time, as it was actually the first time that humans stepped foot on the continent. Yes, Westeros was originally only home to the race that we’ve seen briefly in Game Of Thrones, The Children Of The Forest.
When they roamed the content it was a heavily wooded and sparsely populated place, with no weapons or technology of any sort. There were no power struggles, no kings, and no White Walkers at that time. All that the Children Of The Forest had was magic, but even that didn’t help them when the First Men – a group of humans from Essos – first stumbled upon Westeros.