Palacký University in Olomouc Philosophical

Planetos

Martin’s secondary world still does not have a name, which made some of his fans come up with their own unofficial name – Planetos (based on the names of known continents – Westeros, Essos, Sothoryos and Ulthos) to refer to it.

4.3.1.2.1. Westeros

Majority of Martin’s story is taking place in Westeros – the westernmost continent of the planet. The long and narrow continent offers almost all kind of lands, from the deserts of Dorne to the Lands of Always Winter – lands far North beyond the Wall, where the snows and ice never melts. The lands south from the Wall used to be divided into seven independent kingdoms before Aegon the Conquerer united them all under the name of Seven Kingdoms.

The largest region of Westeros is the North, described as consisting of “great forests, windswept plains, hills and valleys, rocky shores, and snow-crowned mountains”. ⁵⁴ Given the cold weather the region is far less fertile than the rest of the Westeros, the snow sometimes falls there even in the summer. It borders the Wall in the North and the Neck in the South. Southeast from the North lies the Vale, beautiful and rich region surrounded by the mountains and southwest from it the Riverlands, the region devastated by every war that has even taken place in the Westeros, due its unfortunate position in the middle of the continent. The westernmost region is called the Westerlands, a place of “rugged hills and rolling plains, of misty dales and craggy shorelines, a place of blue lakes and sparkling rivers and fertile fields, of broadleaf forests that teem with game of every sort,


⁵³ John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, The Letters, No. 190, 267.
⁵⁴ George Raymond Richard Martin, Elio M. García and Linda Antonsson, The World of Ice and Fire: the Untold History of Westeros and the Game of Thrones (New York: Bantam Books, 2014), 135.
where half-hidden doors in the sides of wooded hills open onto labyrinthine caves that wend their way through darkness to reveal unimaginable wonders and vast treasures deep beneath the earth”.⁵⁵ To the south from the Westerlands we can find the richest and the most populated region – The Reach, which borders the Stormlands in the east and the Dorne in the southeast. A small part of the country, east from the Westerlands and north from the Stormlands is called the Crownlands and it surrounds the capital city of the Seven Kingdoms – King’s Landing.

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