Gorgeous fan-made map of Westeros long before Game of Thrones, during the Age of the Hundred Kingdoms

One of the fun knock-on effects about setting a story in a completely invented fantasy world is that you get to create, if you want, a new map for your new geography. J.R.R. Tolkien's maps of Middle-earth from his Lord of the Rings trilogy are very well-known. The opening credits to Game of Thrones became famous for swooping over maps of Westeros and Essos to show what locations we would be visiting each episode. And it goes on and on.

Author George R.R. Martin created maps of Westeros and Essos for his Song of Ice and Fire series, but he also invented a long and complicated history involving lots of wars and power struggles, meaning that the maps looked different in ages past. House Stark didn't always control the whole of the North. At one point, King's Landing wasn't on the map, etc.

At one point, Westeros was in an era called the Age of the Hundred Kingdoms. This was after the Age of Heroes, which ended with the building of the Wall after the White Walkers invaded for the first time (which would have been the setting of the cancelled Game of Thrones prequel series Blood Moon), but before Aegon I Targaryen invaded with his sisters on their dragons and consolidated all these disparate kingdoms into seven, with Aegon as the king over all. On Reddit, a fan named Alister Sinclair mocked up a map of what Westeros may have looked like during this time. Check it out below:

We see the names of lots of houses we know, including Stark, Lannister and Arryn, but also many others that were not yet subsumed under the wardens of the North, West and East.

The information available on this part of history, shared in books like The World of Ice and Fire, is incomplete by design, and Alister Sinclair admits to filling in some blanks. "This map doesn't align fully with canon, as the chronology was too vague for me to make something completely accurate, so there are some headcanons and speculations," they write. "For instance, House Mudd and House Justman didn't coexist like this, and several houses have no canon location so they were just placed wherever. Also, the North wasn't nearly as divided when the Andals arrived in the lore. However, I am a believer in the idea that the 12000 years of history stated to exist in the lore is not accurate, and the events actually happened over a much smaller timespan. As such, I'm putting any canon inaccuracies down to that lol. Hope you enjoy!"

Martin includes a ton of detail in his books, but he intentionally doesn't fill in everything, which leaves room for fans to use their imaginations to round everything out. We'll return to Westeros onscreen pretty soon, in the new prequel series A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which premieres on HBO and Max sometimes next year. Then the third season of House of the Dragon will be along the year after that.

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h/t Los Siete Reinos