![]() ![]() The New Way was built upon a deliberate deception, or perhaps more accurately a masquerade. We can see the Old Way’s life in the fact that every now and then a Hoare king would find himself imitating Urron Redhand and slaughtering a bunch of religiously motivated dissenters so that progress could continue! We can see the Old Way’s life in how these very same rulers continued to pretend they were good and faithful believers even as they killed their god’s priests. The sacred kingdom it demanded might no longer have been possible, the priests might have been out of power, and the new ruling class somewhat removed and more than a little foreign, but this did not mean the Old Way was dead. Tradition changed with time and events, but its transmission remained continuous – it never broke, it never died. The Old Way is in the myths, the sacred geography, the words of the priests, the drownings on the beach, the cycle of storms and sea bounty, the tales in the taverns, the taboos of the Iron Price, and the submission of the few remaining thralls. This New-Old Revanchism exists in total opposition to the broadly successful New Way, repeatedly undermining it or leading it astray, resulting in calamity after calamity that the New Way then returns to cleanup.īut the Old Way was more than a form of government and after Urron Redhand it continued on in the daily life and ceremony of the Islands. In Steven’s interpretation, the Old Way died with Redhand’s revolution and everything that came after is not an authentic continuation of past traditions but rather some sort of zombie revanchist culture that he calls the New-Old Way and compares to the wholly invented traditions of Slavers Bay. Naturally the people of the Iron Islands have little loyalty to a system that only improves their lives in the strictly negative sense of avoiding famines and calamitous wars and which oral tradition (accurately) tells them is inferior to the deal their ancestors got during the Golden Age.īut Steven does more than overestimate the benefits of the New Way, he also gets the New Way’s relationship with the Old Way wrong. The elite developed themselves by keeping the rest of the population where they were. The lives of the common people remain as poor, impoverished and primitive as they were when Urron Redhand took the Seastone Chair. There is no broad social base supporting the New Way because all of its economic gains have been systematically swallowed up by a voracious elite that wants to live like greenlander lords. Rather, its intent has always been to expand the personal wealth and power of the Iron Island’s semi-Andalized ruling class and most especially its kings. There is a much simpler explanation: the New Way’s elite origins meant that it was never intended to help the common people. Given the large numbers of Ironborn who work as merchants, artisans, and fishermen, this seems like an obvious mistake - what is needed here is some sort of Reformation-like event that combines ideology and social group formation to permanently mobilize and organize these potential forces in society into a constituency. One of the underlying problems seems to be that the New Way is largely a project of elite reform (revolution from the top down, if you will) that lacks a firm social base. ![]() Steven’s explanation is that the New Way was a successful elite reform project that somehow failed to mobilize its beneficiaries behind it, leaving it vulnerable to attack by traditionalists:Īt the same time, one of the dynamics that’s impossible to miss in the Historical Development of the Iron Islands is that the New Way is constantly undercut by the Old Way’s appeal to tradition until a crisis point is reached in which its progress is completely reset by a sudden resurgence of the Old Way that leads to a complete disaster. The central disagreement is just why the New Way has repeatedly failed to win popular support and been continuously undercut by the Old Way. ![]() Since one should never let a good argument go to waste, we now sally forth from our long hiatus in order to reply. Steven Attewell has published an essay over at the Tower of the Hand that puts forth an interpretation of Ironborn history which differs rather dramatically from our own. ![]()
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