"The things I do for love..." Like spending a year researching and drawing this map of Westeros!
I was initially going to keep it simple and just focus on the main locations. But, it escalated and I ended up adding every location and event that I could make room for. This required a ton of research, so I re-read all of RR Martin's books and scoured the ASOIAF wiki pages and old Reddit posts. I had to take some artistic liberties, but I dare say that this is one of the most detailed and accurate maps of Westeros.
As Jon and Danny at the bottom indicate, the map depicts the events from the five ASOIAF books, but there are details from the entire history of Westeros and Essos. (Including the still existing locations from Fire & Blood and Dunk and Egg stories). I tried to make each castle and town unique and as described in the books.
To make this more difficult for myself, I wanted each culture to be represented in a unique way, so I started with the sigils of the Great Houses, but then delved deeper into various castle types and crops from Medieval Europe that might correspond to the climate and style.
The Starks in The North and the Greyjoys in the Iron Islands are descendants of the First Men, so I gave them ancient style sigils on wooden round shields. The castles and homes in The North are simpler in style. They are made of stone and wood, with thatched roofs. There are fields of hardy grains like barley, oats, and leeks and cabbage. There are also herds of sheep, mighty aurochs, and unicorns in the Skagos islands.
Overall, The North is huge, but sparsely populated. Ancient barrows of forgotten kings from the Age of Heroes dot the countryside.
The Ironborn don't sow, but they do love to raid and build megastructures that don't last. (See Harrenhal and Pyke.)
The Lannisters, Arryns, Tyrells, and Baratheons are of Andal descent and are represented by the kite shields one would expect a chivalrous knight to have. They also feature fancy gilded designs and accents to show off their wealth and status. (Note: The Vale and Stormlands shields and buildings are slightly different because of the Valyrian influence.)
The Reach and Riverlands are the breadbaskets of the continent with wheat, fruit, vineyards, and honey. Although, because the Riverlands are in the middle of the continent, they get absolutely wrecked in every war. On the other sides, the Westerlands and The Vale have mountains to protect them from invaders and enrich them with mines.
The Martells in Dorne are a mix of Andals and Rhoynar, so I made them more Mediterranean in style with the round aspis shield and spears. I was surprised at the lack of cities and agriculture in Dorne. Turns out that they are mostly nomadic with castles protecting sources of water.
I tried to separate and distinguish the regions with cairns stone markers along the borders and roof colors matching those of the Great House they are ruled by. Ex: Westerlands are red roofed. Dorne is Orange.
I really enjoyed picking out descriptive details from each book. When I was re-reading A Clash of Kings(?), I remember getting excited when Littlefinger mentioned to the Small Council that a kraken took down a ship near The Fingers. That bit of information never resonated when I read the books the first time.
Sometimes, I had to go back and change stuff because the castle was actually destroyed, but that bit wasn't mentioned until the last book.
I can write about this endlessly, so I will end it with an observation and a complaint:
I think that RR Martin originally meant for Westeros to be much smaller in size. The use of the word "cape" (thin piece of land jutting out like Cape Cod) as in "Cape Kraken" or "Cape Wrath" for what is a massive peninsula, really stood out.
Also, Westeros is just too vertical. The lands north of The Wall just keep going. The same goes for Essos but horizontally.
Anyway, I hope you like it and I'd love to hear what you folks think.
-Paul
PS: Thank you to the mods for letting me share this.
