Westeros

For those who’ve been keeping an eye on Valyrian Steel—the only official producer of replica weapons based on A Song of Ice and Fire, with direct input from George R.R. Martin—their latest creation, King Robert’s warhammer, is finally up for pre-order. It’s a massive thing, and there’s a nicely illustrative video that gives a sense of how hefty it is and what sort of damage it could do (note: no, you shouldn’t actually use this to hit anyone!)

Besides the warhammer, they’ve created Longclaw and Needle, as well as Ice (including an extremely limited “Damascus” version). I believe their future plans include Khal Drogo’s arakh, an obsidian dagger, and more.

Since our last report about actor and singer Guðmundur Ingi Þorvaldsson having auditioned for a role for the next two seasons, some more details about the shooting in Iceland has appeared.

The latest update from HBO’s Making Game of Thrones site and production assistant Cat Taylor, is an interview with stand-in and trainee Assistant Director Graeme Livingston. It’s brief, but it does contain a couple of quite interesting bits:

• Strangest Moment on Set: “Talking at length about the Star Wars movies with another AD and the conversation being picked up by the director Neil Marshall and his First AD Gerry Gavigan, who actually worked on the original Star Wars. Surreal!”
• A Hint About Season 2: “There’s been quite a lot of sword fighting in this season, a lot more than last one. There’s a lot more combat. Anything with a sword fight keeps me happy. And a bit of blood.”

Unless I’m mistaken, Gavigan has not been involved in the first season of the show. I’m guessing he may have been brought in specifically by director Neil Marshall. Looking at his very extensive AD credits—going back almost 40 years, including (yes) the original Star Wars film—it looks like we’ve even more reason to expect something special out of the Marshall-directed, George R.R. Martin-written penultimate episode, “Blackwater”.

As to sword fights? We know a few people who will be quite pleased about that.

The first hint of this was when AKA_Qthulhu tweeted that Dark Horse was being provided as the source of a number of new Game of Thrones items, according to Big Bad Toystore, which led to my asking HBO... and they confirmed, and said a press-release would be out within the week.

And don’t you know it? Here it is:

Via a tweet from thremnir, we’ve come across this article from August which seems to have slipped under the radar. A good part of it concerns Icelandic actor and musician Guðmundur Ingi Þorvaldsson (some photos and information on his blog).

Hot on the heels of the USA Today report that revealed details of the browser-based MMORPG and social game, the publisher of Cyanide‘s official Game of Thrones RPG has sent out a press release and unveiled the (sparse) official site for the game.

Here’s the press release below:

Goodreads, the massive social book site, is running their annual Choice Awards, and wouldn’t you know it? A Dance with Dragons is on the shortlist, not just in Best Fantasy but also the overall Favorite Book of 2011 category. Many other fine works are on both lists, so checking it out (and voting!) is certainly a good idea if you want to support your favorite books of the last year.

As an aside, GRRM’s assistant Ty Franck and writer Daniel Abraham, who together write as James S.A. Corey, are also up for an award in the Best Science Fiction category with the novel Leviathan Wakes. Congratulations to the both of them—it’s well-deserved for a book that’s been quite well reviewed indeed.

As previously reported, the publishers of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire in the UK, Voyager, have finally gotten into a position where they can re-release the first four novels of the series in matching hard-covers. This is the first time that the novels have been made available in hardcover since their initial releases (my understanding is that the first edition of the A Game of Thrones hardcover is very valuable, in part due to this fact).

You can order A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings presently, with A Storm of Swords (in one volume, no less!) and A Feast for Crows due in December.

We’ve previously reported on the hints and news related to various games in production based on HBO’s Game of Thrones, but some clear details have finally come out thanks to this report from USA Today.

Thanks to a tweet from HBO UK, we realized that quite a few things have been added to the HBO Store in the last weeks, items prominently featured on our store page for fans of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Some hoodies have turned up—I guess this is the right season for them—and there’s quite a few collectables, from house posters to shot glasses(!) and now what strikes me as the coolest of them all, a dragon egg paperweight that looks rather cool.

HBO’s finally listing the Bluray and DVD as well, though without any box art or release information. We’ll be keeping an eye on that, to say the least. (And before you ask, the US HBO Store remains US-only so far—sorry!)

We’ve no idea whether any will actually show up on camera, but according to production assistant (and Making Game of Thrones writer) Cat Taylor, there’ll be a number of Game of Thrones actors at the MTV European Music Awards. The EMAs don’t seem to be airing in the U.S., from what I can see, but the red (actually, rather more pink) carpet pre-show is airing right now, and apparently Alfie Allen and Oona Chaplin were on the carpet a bit ago; Chaplin had recently tweeted that she was out shopping for clothes for the event, in fact.

Just yesterday, several of the young actors—Aimee Richardson (Myrcella Baratheon), Isaac Hempstead-Wright (Bran Stark), Maisie Williams (Arya Stark), and Art Parkinson (Rickon Stark) tweeted that they were hanging out with members of Snow Patrol (who happen to hail from Northern Ireland), as apparently they shared a hotel with the actors. Apparently, quite a few other performers were staying at the hotel, as the kids tweeted that they were spotting more stars.

Besides their brush with Snow Patrol and other musicians, one wonders if there’ll be some sort of official presence of actors—perhaps as presenters?—during the EMAs. We’ll just have to wait and see.

The latest update at HBO’s Making Game of Thrones site isn’t contemporaneous—the filming it’s referring to happened back in September or early October—but it’s a nice look into the filming of the penultimate episode, “Blackwater”, directed by Neil Marshall and scripted by George R.R. Martin.

Via Bleeding Cool, we’ve learned that Marvel Comics—famously stingy with its back catalog of trades, apparently due to Scrooge-like marching orders from CEO Isaac Perlmutter—is letting a large catalog of trade paperbacks go out of print. That means that for the foreseeable future, no more trades will be in print, limiting supply to what’s currently out there.

On the list of titles to go OOP? The Hedge Knight II: Sworn Sword, the Ben Avery and Mike S. Miller adaptation of Martin’s second Dunk & Egg novella, “The Sworn Sword”. As Bleeding Cool notes, Marvel’s habit of letting titles go out of print means that in many cases, the titles may eventually sell for many times the original retail price… so now may be a good time to get a hold of the comic, if you’re at all interested. “As New” copies of the first graphic novel, which is out of print, are being listed starting from $95, so who knows where this book will go after major resellers run out of copies. With increasing interest in Martin’s work thanks to the TV show, and the occasional fan hope that the Dunk & Egg stories might end up being optioned by HBO as between-season miniseries or HBO Go-exclusive original content, it’s probably a good time to buy.

The word’s been getting aroundthat the Northern Irish leg of filming for the second season of HBO’s Game of Thrones will wrap around November 18th, which is an earlier wrap date than last year. All in all, it sounds like filming has largely gone off without a hitch, excluding the gale that led to some minor injuries and delayed filming of scenes involving Renly Baratheon and his camp until a later date.

Subterranean Press reports that they’ll begin taking pre-orders of A Dance with Dragons from next week. Those who’ve purchased A Feast for Crows previously had first shot at pre-ordering, and it looks like “a handful” of the deluxe limited lettered editions and about 80 of the numbered editions remain. Dance‘s art comes by way of artist Marc Fishman, who has continued to post illustrations and paintings from the book to his gallery (including one as recently as yesterday); note that the illustrations can be rather spoilerish, and in some cases may be considered marginally not safe for work.

According to Subterranean, they’ll hold a lottery for the remaining lettered editions, as demand will certainly outstrip supply. As a further update, it looks like some more book design work is left, plus a final proof, and then it’s off to the printers. With that, they’ll start turning their eyes towards their own limited edition of A Game of Thrones to be illustrated by Ted Nasmith.