Talk:Kingdom of the North

Interesting new sample page circulating around from World which gives some more background info on the North:

--The Dragon Demands (talk) 07:30, October 18, 2014 (UTC)
 * The Starks and Boltons have allegedly been fighting each other since the Long Night itself.
 * More detail is given about the "Age of a Hundred Kingdoms" era, before each of the Seven Kingdoms were unified as large "kingdoms". Early on, when the Starks were mostly just kings of the area around Winterfell itself in the center of the North, they called themselves "The King of Winter" - apparently often leading alliances of other Northern Houses against wildling attacks and such.  But as they grew in power and unified more of the North under them, in later times they called themselves "The King in the North" - claiming rule over all of it.
 * Stretching back to the scale of the Long Night 8,000 years ago, a lot of this is more than half legendary. One King of Winter allegedly led a campaign to drive the last giants out of the North.  Another local King of Winter - back when every hill-lord was a king, and what we call a "lordship" now was a kingdom - fought a long and savage war for domination against House Greywolf, called the War of the Wolves.
 * After that, things get a bit more historical. The Kings of Winter then fought against the Barrow Kings (presumably House Dustin?), who had taken to claiming to be kings of all of the First Men.  Songs call it the Thousand Year War but it was really a series of related wars that lasted about one hundred years.  Ended with the last Barrow King submitting and giving his daughter in marriage (a lot of wars ended that way over time).
 * A couple of other petty local kingdoms that the Starks defeated and turned into vassals (or united with marriage) were the Umbers of Last Hearth, Lockes of Oldcastle, and Glovers of Deepwood Motte, and a couple of others.
 * As we know from before, Jon Stark built the Wolf's Den at the mouth of the White Knife (future site of White Harbor) to defend against pirates. His son Rickard Stark defeated the Marsh King of the Neck, annexing his lands, and sealed it by marrying his daughter.
 * House Blackwood of Raventree Hall claims that it is actually originally from the North, and controlled the Wolfswood, but got driven out by the Kings of Winter (sort of like how the Manderlys were driven out of the Reach but ended up in the North).
 * The Kings of Winter had a hard time taking Sea Dragon Point, allegedly ruled by a "Warg King", who was allied with a surviving pocket of the Children of the Forest. This was before the Andal Invasion, when there still were surviving pockets of the Children here and there.  But eventually they wore them down and wiped them out.
 * By far the Starks' greatest rivals were always the Boltons, and as they aggregated up the smaller petty kingdoms the two clashed in many wars for domination over the North. This is a step up from "petty lordship" kingdom, to "rules a large sub-region" kingdom at this point.  The Bolton kings ruled an area stretching from the Last River to the White Knife, down to the Sheepshead Hills.  The Umber petty kings were on the other side of the Last River (and later absorbed by the Starks), and in modern times the Sheepshead Hills seem to mark the northern limit of Manderly rule as the lands of House Hornwood are north of that, so the Boltons used to rule the lands now ruled by House Hornwood.  No mention is made of the Boltons ruling the region that later became Karhold...it was never outright stated, but most ASSUME that when Karlon Stark was awarded lands "for helping put down a rebellion", and because Karhold lands are just next to Dreadfort lands, it must have been a Bolton rebellion and formerly Bolton lands.
 * The Durrandons called themselves Storm Kings, and the Starks were the "Kings of Winter", but the Bolton kingdoms' rulers were known as the Red Kings of the Dreadfort. They fought many major wars against the Starks across the centuries.  Red King Royce II Bolton succeeded in taking and burning Winterfell.  Three centuries later, Red King Royce IV Bolton did the same - he was known as Royce Redarm, owing to his arms being literally covered in blood from ripping out the entrails of his enemies.
 * The last Red King was Robar Bolton, known as Robar the Huntsman. The Starks forced his submission and made him swear fealty, and had his sons taken as hostages to Winterfell...even as the first Andal ships were beginning to invade the Vale.  So the Boltons only really submitted 6,000 years ago, and even then there were many rebellions.  Also the "Andal Invasions" were a process lasting many centuries, not one instance conflict - they took the Vale first, then only gradually spread to other regions of Westeros.  Apparently after a couple of generations since the first landings, the Starks had rallied the rest of the North (that they hadn't conquered yet, or they strengthened their rule) to the point that it was a unified kingdom, and they took to calling themselves "King in the North".
 * As we already know, control of the Wolf's Den (Proto-White Harbor) was passed to various younger sons and cadet branches of House Stark. The longest lasting of these was House Greystark, which lasted five centuries, but then joined in a Bolton rebellion and were ultimately destroyed.  It changed hands a lot after that too:  House Flint held it for one century, House Locke for almost two.
 * Then about 2,000 years ago the North went to war against the Vale for control of the Three Sisters, leading to 1,000 years of wars fighting over the islands.
 * Then 1,000 years ago, the Manderlys were driven from the Reach and the Starks gave them White Harbor.