Oldtown

City of the Citadel

The oldest city in Westeros, where the maesters forge their chains at the Citadel beneath the Hightower's beacon.

The fuller tale

Oldtown is the city King's Landing wishes it were: older than the Andals, cleaner than anywhere, and lovelier by every account than any other city in Westeros ÔÇö cobbled streets, stone guildhalls, and the Honeywine winding through beneath bridges built when Valyria still stood. No one knows who raised the fused black stone fortress on Battle Isle that the Hightower now stands upon; the maesters have theories, the theories have footnotes, and the footnotes disagree, which locals find fitting for a city whose principal export is learned argument. The Hightower itself ÔÇö beacon, palace and sigil in one ÔÇö has guided ships up Whispering Sound for so long that House Hightower's motto is simply what the building does: We Light the Way.

Two institutions make Oldtown the realm's second capital, and the quieter power of the two is not the one with the swords. The Starry Sept was the seat of the Faith for a thousand years ÔÇö it was here a High Septon anointed Aegon the Conqueror, in the bargain that saved the city from the fate of Harrenhal ÔÇö until the office followed power to King's Landing. The Citadel never followed anyone. The maesters are forged here, chain by chain, and dispatched to every keep in Westeros to heal, teach, count and advise; which means the order's quiet opinions ÔÇö about magic, about dragons, about what a rational realm should contain ÔÇö travel out with every grey robe, and have been shaping the Seven Kingdoms for centuries from a city most kings never visit.

The tale mostly feels Oldtown at a distance ÔÇö every maester at every castle is its ambassador, from Luwin's patient lessons to Pycelle's calculated doddering ÔÇö until Samwell Tarly is sent to become one, and the story finally walks the Citadel's halls. The show plays the visit for scale and comedy first: the Sweeping shot of the library's chained galleries, archmaesters serenely uninterested in the apocalypse, and Sam doing the actual work ÔÇö curing a greyscale case the experts had written off, thieving restricted books, and deducing more from marginalia than the order has from centuries of ravens. The joke has a sharp point. The realm's institution of knowledge, faced with the return of everything it catalogued as legend, files the warning and asks for the dishes to be cleared.

The books' Citadel is stranger and darker. Sam arrives at the end of a long sea road to find the city already humming with wrongness ÔÇö a novice's dead body politic, glass candles burning that should not burn, an archmaester of the occult who says out loud what readers have long suspected: that the order's rationalism may be less a temperament than a policy, and that the dragons did not merely die. Between the marble and the mysteries, Oldtown closes the fourth book as the tale's most loaded unfired weapon, with the ironborn's mad king sailing for the Whispering Sound and the city of light straining to pretend the age of wonders is not coming back up its river.

What Oldtown means in the story is memory ÔÇö the realm's long memory, professionally kept, selectively edited. Winterfell remembers with crypts and Oldtown with catalogues, and the tale trusts neither completely: the Citadel's archives hold the answer to nearly every riddle the plot poses, and the order's genius has been deciding which answers the realm is ready to hear. The beacon on the Hightower has burned through every one of the realm's dark ages. What the city underneath it chooses to illuminate is another matter.

The page and the screen

The show's Oldtown is essentially the Citadel with a skyline ÔÇö no Starry Sept, no Hightower politics, no sense of the city as the Faith's old heart ÔÇö and Sam's stay is compressed to a season of montage before he abandons the chain for the war. The books give the city a full point-of-view life the show never touches: the prologue murder among the novices, Marwyn the Mage and his glass candle, a Dornish sphinx studying under a false name, Hightower intrigues in the tower's high chambers, and Euron Greyjoy's fleet bearing down on the Whispering Sound with intentions the sample chapters make sound less like conquest than ritual. Show-Oldtown is where Sam learns the dead walk; book-Oldtown is shaping up to be where the war for the dawn has a second front.

The chronicle here

In Oldtown's shadowed taverns the novice Pate trades a stolen Citadel key for a golden dragon ÔÇö and dies with the coin in his mouth while a stranger picks up his face. (AFFC 1)
Jon commands Sam south: Maester Aemon, Gilly, and a babe that is not quite the babe everyone believes ÔÇö bound for Oldtown and a maester's chain. (AFFC 6)