Earlier this week the 70-year-old author accepted an International Recognition Award at the Irish Books Awards. And during the Q&A afterwards, Martin spoke of the inspiration for his Game of Thrones series A Song of Ice and Fire. While owing much to medieval history, he did admit that the story “came out of nowhere”, according to RTE. And revealed that Westeros’ map was not based on Great Britain as some are led to believe.
After all, King’s Landing is in the south-east like London and The Wall above the North brings Hadrian’s Wall to mind.
Yet Martin asserts that the map is based primarily on Ireland. Well, upside-down Ireland anyway.
On his creative process, Martin said: “Initially I followed the characters but [after] certain point I said ‘I’ve got to draw a map’ and that’s when I turned Ireland upside down.”
“I needed a map, I had a piece of blank paper, what should this Westeros place look like?”