Odds and Ends: How historically accurate was the Battle of the Bastards?

It’s the question that comes up every time Game of Thrones does a major fight scene. At the Tower of Joy, an expert swordsman broke down the fight between Arthur Dayne and Ned Stark. With the Battle of the Bastards episode, questions about it were far more widespread, and everything from Reddit’s /askahistorian to Vulture sat down and tried to answer them.

The production itself admitted that they moved away from more medieval-aged battles and back towards Roman times to find an example to follow for the “double envelopment pincher move.” The expert on Reddit summed it up thusly:

"I suppose the tl;dr [too long; didn’t read] of this is that a battle from Game of Thrones can never be historically accurate, because Game of Thrones is not history. It’s accuracy must be on some level judged based on how it fits into the world constructed by the books, not whether it would have happened the same if it happened in our own world."

Meanwhile, over at Vulture, their experts criticize Jon’s leadership.

"Medieval battle wasn’t fought with one heroic man running around. It was fought in units….One of the things that got lost at the battle was that Jon was the commander of the overall forces, but you don’t see him giving a single order. He doesn’t have any impact on the direction and the movement of soldiers, he just becomes a combatant. Most of the time — not 100 percent of time — commanders in those types of settings wouldn’t put themselves in the middle of the battle to fight. They had the responsibility of organizing and directing different elements."

For the record, that was what we saw Ramsay doing. The fact that Ramsay stayed on his horse and stayed pristine and clean was the proper thing for him to do. Jon Snow? Not so much.

But Game of Thrones is having it’s own impact on medieval reenactments. The BBC reports this week that the jousting tournaments that re-enactors have been holding have changed their rules recently to allow women combatants, partly because of Brienne of Tarth’s example.

Here’s what Emily Sewell, English Heritage’s head of events, said on the subject:

"Historically, the knights who took part in jousting tournaments were an elite band, the best of the best. No women were amongst that group. Now they are, and in order to bring our visitors the opportunity to witness some of the most accomplished knights on the circuit, it made complete sense to invite the leading female jousters to join us this summer."

And finally, over at Late Night with Seth Meyers, the Game of Thrones obsessed host, who has had Jon Snow over for dinner parties and Melisandre come for baby showers, invited Leslie Jones over to watch with him.

For the record? I too want a dragon for my birthday.