I’m a big Game of Thrones fan, team John Snow …
As any respectable GOT fan, i was curious and researched a bit the history of westeros…
I came across the event called “The Andal Invasion”.
Here’s a small video that explains it in a simple way:
While i was reading the article in the Game of thrones wiki, i came across this passage:
Given that author George R.R. Martin has said that the story loosely parallels the War of the Roses in fifteenth century Britain, the Andal Invasion is loosely comparable to the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain. Just as the First Men were able to stop the Andals from expanding to the North in Westeros, the Celtic people living in Scotland were able to repulse Anglo-Saxon expansion from the south. However, the real-life Anglo-Saxon invaders followed a polytheistic religion and destroyed the Christianized Romano-British society that existed in Britain up to that time. In an inversion, the Andal Invasion introduced the pseudo-Catholic Christian “Faith of the Seven” which supplanted the polytheistic, nature-worshiping religion of the Old Gods.
I have reasons to believe that the Andal Invasion is comparable to an entirely other invasion, so let’s start examining my points:
The Andals were a tall, fair-haired race whose original homeland was located across the Narrow Sea on the western coast of the continent of Essos, in a region known as Andalos.
First, Andalos sounded very familiar to my ear, and for a reason Andalus is considered the peak of the Islamic expansion, Andalus is the name given by the Muslim invaders to the territory they controlled in modern day Spain.
Then there’s 3 small points that poked my curiosity:
– Andals were a tall fair haired race, thus a different phenotype from the 1st men.
– The Narrow Sea, thus there was a sea separating the 2, and the invasion happened from the narrow part.
– Westeros sounds a lot like “West” Essos like “East”
Arabs were the opposite to the above phenotype description, and the Muslim invasion happened from the narrow sea between Morocco and Spain. It seams that GRR Martin just flipped the image. It’s not that surprising from someone who names a dragon : drogon !!
then there’s this part:
According to Andal legend, the God of Seven revealed itself to them in the Hills of Andalos, and from this they developed a new religion, the Faith of the Seven. Not long afterward, spurred on by the zeal of their new faith, the Andals set sail across the Narrow Sea to conquer Westeros.
Andal God revealed himself in the hills, a bit similar to the Islamic first revelation that took place in a cave on a hill near Mecca.
The Andals developed a new religion that rapidly expanded, spurred by the zeal of the new faith. Again, Islam is the only religion that after it was developed rapidly expanded, spurred by the zeal of the believers. And another point, Islam expansion, is the only conquest that was really motivated by religion.
So here we go, i think the Andal invasion loosely parallels the Islamic invasion rather than the Anglo-Saxon one.
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