It’s not a secret that George R.R. Martin he was inspired by certain events in English history to write his ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’. So some events that we later saw in ‘Game of Thrones’ are based on events, and the bloody Red wedding It is one of them.
The Lannisters send memories
The Red Wedding is one of the most raw moments of the series, and look what ‘Game of Thrones ‘ it has plenty of moments to test the weakest of stomachs. ‘The rains of Castamere’, the ninth episode of the third season, marked a turning point in the development of the series due to the turn it took in the political conflict in Poniente.
And it is that what seemed like it was going to be a very quiet festivity with a wedding to strengthen a political alliance that was barely sustained ended up giving rise to a whole massacre. The Freys and the Boltons betrayed the Starks in one of the bloodiest sequences of ‘Game of Thrones’, eliminating several of the most popular characters along the way and also relevant to the plot.
The tragedy could have simply remained fiction, but to write the fateful Red Wedding, Martin was inspired by a story that occurred in Scotland in the fifteenth century.
By 1440, the Scottish clan of the Douglases was becoming an ever stronger threat to their rivals. According to legend, the young Earl** William Douglas was invited to dine with the King, James II**. At some point during dinner, a black bull’s head appeared on the table, and the Douglases’ enemies took advantage of that moment to pounce on the young earl and his brother, drive them out of the place and kill you.
This event became known as the Black Dinner. Although many historians doubt the details, it is certain that the Douglases were killed at some point and their armies besieged Edinburgh in response.
James II was not a bloodthirsty king and in theory he would have asked mercy for his guests, but there are some similarities between the fateful legend of the Douglases and the Red Wedding.
The first is that it has always existed a certain parallel between North Westeros and Scotland, especially for the history of the country. Beyond this, William Douglas and Robb Stark were 16 when they died (at least the Robb in the books, mind you), and their murders were preceded by some kind of foreshadowing: the bull’s head for Earl Douglas, and the musicians playing ‘The Rains of Castamere’ for the Starks.
Scotland’s bloody history
Martin has admitted that this Black Supper was not the only event that inspired the Red Wedding we saw in ‘Game of Thrones’, but also drew on another bloody event in Scottish history.
“It doesn’t matter how much I make it up,” Martin said in 2013, explaining how he wrote this event into his novel. “There are always things in history that are just as terrible, or even worse.”
In 1692, certain Scottish clans were not very diligent in swearing allegiance to the new King William III of England, so that the groups most faithful to the monarch began to fear a revolution.
So several supporters of the king led by the Captain Robert Campbell traveled to glencoe and they stayed as guests of the MacDonald clan, one of the potentially most dangerous groups.
When they had been in the place for almost two weeks,Campbell and his 120 soldiers attacked their hosts, who did not see the attack coming.. Those of the Scottish clan who did not die during the first attack eventually perished in the storm outside the castle.
Campbell’s goal was to eliminate the MacDonalds and the possible threat they presented completely, just as the Freys do with the Starks. Although in this case it was the guests who turned against the hosts, both in the Glencoe Massacre and in the Red Wedding, the laws of hospitality were violated, something that was seen with very bad eyes.