A Laboratory of Politics Part III ~ Tower of the Hand

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8/25/2014 12:00:00 PM ET

Contents

History
The City Today
Differences and Similarities
Historical Parallels
Comments

Race for the Iron Throne's Steven Attewell will be sharing some of his work on Tower of the Hand, offering his historical and political insights on A Song of Ice and Fire. Steve began with a five-piece analysis of the Hands of the King, and followed that with his five-part look at Hollow Crowns and Deadly Thrones. Now he turns his attention toward the great continent of Essos. In Part III: The Secret City, Steve focuses in on Braavos, the city-state that we have the most textual evidence to go on, and how this metropolis is both exemplary of and different from the other Free Cities.

This post discusses the fifth book of the series, A Dance with Dragons (published 2011). If you've completed the book, set your scope above to ADWD. Otherwise, we advise you to avoid reading this post as it may contain spoilers.

Steven Attewell is the author of Race for the Iron Throne, a blog that provides political analysis of every Song of Ice and Fire chapter and Game of Thrones episode.

Footnotes

Warning: Footnotes may contain spoilers from later chapters or books.

1 - While it's possible it's a typo (although on whose part is unclear), it's possible that the Otharys are the same family as the Otherys, the infamous courtesans of Summer Islands, Targaryen, and Sealord ancestry. The westeros.org Concordance uses "arys" for both keyholders and courtesans, while the same site's wiki uses "erys" for the latter.

Comments

Warning: Discussions are not subject to scope. That is, commenters can and often do discuss events from the most recent book. We recommend avoiding these discussions until you're caught up.

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