Age of Heroes

The Age of Heroes is a remote era in Westeros’s past, known here through traditions and retrospective accounts rather than a precise chronology. Its name lends legendary depth to places such as Jonquil’s Pool, while the historical record surrounding the early kingdoms resists any single, settled timeline.

Place in the chronology

The text locates the Age of Heroes thousands of years before the Conquest through the story of Brandon the Shipwright, who built a fleet and sailed west, never to return. His son burned the shipyards and became known as Brandon the Burner. The episode places the Shipwright’s voyage in an ancient past, but does not supply a precise date or establish a fuller chronology for the age.

Legends and remembered places

At Maidenpool, Jonquil’s Pool is associated with the tale that Florian the Fool first saw Jonquil bathing there during the Age of Heroes. The pool’s legendary association endures into the later history of the realm: its waters are famed for their supposed healing properties, and a stone bathhouse has long stood around it. The reference makes the age present not as a documented political period, but as a store of stories attached to places.

The early kingdoms and the limits of the record

Lord Albin Massey’s account of Westeros before its unification emphasizes how unstable its political divisions had been. Before there were seven kingdoms, he writes, there had been eight; earlier still, the number might be ten, twelve, or thirty. The phrase “Hundred Kingdoms of the Heroes” therefore does not describe a fixed count: Massey gives examples of ninety-seven kingdoms at one time and 132 at another, with the number changing as wars were won and lost and heirs succeeded their fathers. The Age of Heroes emerges from these scattered traditions as a remembered world of shifting realms, not a neatly bounded or consistently numbered historical era.