Dragons and Credible Commitments [Warning: Dubious Economic Theory and Game of Thrones Quasi-Spoilers]

There haven’t been dragons around in living memory. Even though you are probably right in your analysis of dragon loyalty, it’s not certain that the slavers are aware of this and understand the problem fully, since they’ve never dealt with one. Blinded by the allure of owning a dragon, they may naïvely think that dragons are slaves.

No, I think MY pretty much gets it right. Kraznys doesn’t realize he’s about to be scammed by a young woman. That’s the only way this transaction goes through. Now, you are right about the overall market for dragons and the problems with it, but as Guan Yang points out nobody knows anything about dragons at this point. As you say, it’s not that the dragon is a lemon but that you’re not trading what you think you are (loyalty). At this stage of the game, that’s an information problem.

And since dragons mature, and fully grown dragons can more or less do whatever the hell they want, Daenerys and the dragon are essentially too powerful (PDF) to make bargains that they have a long term incentive to keep.

In the short term, though, the situation is different. Right now the dragons are fairly small, certainly not combat sized – and, presumably, fairly killable. What you’re buying, then, is not a combat asset, but a hostage – rather a wise precaution when you’re dealing with a young woman from a conquer-happy family background with an army and some dragons, both growing at a rapid pace. It doesn’t matter if they have to keep the dragon chained up underground; what matters is that, as long as they have it under their control, they can threaten to kill it if Daenerys comes back and tries to capture their city.

Even though you are probably right in your analysis of dragon loyalty, it’s not certain that the slavers are aware of this and understand the problem fully, since they’ve never dealt with one.

Well, if they’re slavers, then they must be aware that occasionally some slaves rebel or run away and have to be brought back by bounty hunters or law enforcement, and then made an example of to intimidate the others into doing as they’re told. Wouldn’t it occur to them to wonder how that works for a dragon?

Westeros has neither the technology nor a sufficient number of dragons already socialized to obey orders to put down a dragon uprising if it started, I don’t think. But then, I haven’t read far enough into ASoIaF to know whether dragons in that universe are intelligent enough to be capable of something like that.

Now I’m imagining a crossover where Temeraire shows up to let them know that even if they *are* slaves in this society, they don’t need to stay that way…

Anyway, you’re not really buying the loyalty of a human slave, you’re buying the legal right to have society and the law enforce your ownership rights over that slave. Usually this is enough to get the slave to do what you want, if the law will actually back you up on this, because one human can’t fight a whole society and win and they know it. They don’t have to like it, and aside from some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, probably won’t, but they don’t really have a choice.

But if the dragons are powerful enough to be outside the law, then they can’t really be owned either; at most they can be recruited or allied with.

P.S. The one *modern* example of “trading” people I can think of, professional athletic teams, works because league rules say that if you’re traded, you accept the trade or quit the league and give up your career. So everyone accepts that as normal and goes along with it. Again, this doesn’t seem to generalize well to dragons. Power politics isn’t a league with rules; someone is highly likely to be willing to offer employment to a renegade dragon, maybe on better terms than they had with their previous employer, and possibly even send agents to subvert them to turn coat in the first place. The rewards of having a dragon the enemy thought was on their side turn coat in the middle of a battle could be large. This is bound to occur to someone.

Two things I would add:

The other difference between dragons and Unsullied is that you can always make more Unsullied. They are a renewable resource whereas dragons are not. It’s not clear to me that Kraznys is motivated by the desire to use a dragon for continental domination (though I haven’t read the text recently, I could be wrong).

Second, it’s not the transferable loyalty of the Unsullied that allows Daenery’s doublecross, as I understand it. What binds the Unsullied to Daenerys is that she frees them. That’s what allows her to give the command to strike down the slavers. It’s safe to say that such a move is literally unthinkable for Kraznys.

Selling Unsullied presumably comes with a codicil that their new loyalty does not encompass obeying orders to attack the Astapori. It’s only the granting of freedom that allows Daenerys to use them against their former masters.

The proverb about owning a lion probably applied to dragons.

Scott P. –

I don’t remember the precise order of events from the book, but in the show Dany doesn’t free the Unsullied until after she’s ordered them to kill the slavers; she confirms that they are under her control, and then she uses them and the dragon to wreak havoc. Kraznys and his ilk presumably wouldn’t conceive that Dany, having bought all the Unsullied, would turn them against the slavers because they can’t conceive of why there’d be a point – as Hob says, they don’t imagine that she would want to upend the social order of an entire corner of Essos. Besides which that kind of codicil goes against the whole point of the Unsullied as conceived by the Astapori – they are supposed to be literally thoughtless. You could contrive circumstances where, if there were such a standard rule, intrigue amongst the powerful of Slaver’s Bay led to all kinds of strain and interpretation of those binding obligations and get a whole Asimovian-robots kind of tension out of it … except that having that all play out in the heads of groups of men raised for nothing but battle, in the heat of the moment, would compromise their efficacy as warriors.

What’s stupid, aside from Kraznys’ personal biases, are the short memories of the slavers re: the history and legacy of the Valyrians and dragons; the Valyrians had a unique ability to control dragons, and the historical impact of dragons that we’ve been privy to is that they’re game changers. You should assume someone who commands dragons can do and desire things beyond your petty ken.

“they can’t conceive of why there’d be a point – as Hob says, they don’t imagine that she would want to upend the social order of an entire corner of Essos. ”

I don’t see it. They don’t have to imagine that someone wants to upend the social order; they only have to imagine that someone wants to go back on a deal that they just made. The slavers presumably can’t just kill and rob their clients, because they have a reputation to uphold or they won’t get any more clients. But the people who they sell to have no such reputation, except for being greedy would-be looters. Presumably the slavers normally never come near to selling their whole stock at once, and therefore keep enough slaves to protect themselves.

Rich Puchalsky –

Well whaddaya want? They’re DUMB. They’re dumb to sell their whole stock of Unsullied. They’re dumb to think they can control a dragon. They’re dumb to think Daenerys would consider one dragon for 8K troops a fair deal. They’re dumb to not be worried about her intentions and attitudes. I’d say they’re dumb to be so dismissive and insulting of her just because they think she personally can’t speak the language, but while we’re at it they’re dumb to think she can’t speak the language.

If you’re in the armed-slaves-for-plunderers business, I bet that visible hands do a lot of selecting against the dumb as well.

Oh FFS. Y’all really know how to sap every last drop of joy from Fantasy fiction. (Fwiw, I’m a fan of both Martin’s books and HBO’s series.)

I would never suggest that this literary genre doesn’t offer larger wisdoms and insights for us to chew on. But as much as I genuinely appreciate wonks and geeks, and I do, it’s precisely this kind of stuff — an insistence on pounding the square peg of fiction into the round hole of reality — that makes me want to slap you.

That said, I can easily forgive the folks here for it. In fact, this is exactly the kind of place that should feel free to explore such … stretches. Yglesias, otoh, has no excuse. I mean, he’s paid to be a serious commentator at a major news site. Now I have a doubt or two about his seriousness.

the sale of the Unsullied could never occur in equilibrium

The whole feudal political system of Westeros and the isolated commercial systems of Essos could scarcely sustain social, political and economic equilibrium: the whole imagined world is presented as roiled by furious, self-destructive dynamics, but, at the same time, as resting upon foundations of continuity, tradition and reproductive stability going back hundreds and thousands of years, punctuated by distant, barely remembered cataclysms.

Doesn’t this assume perfect rationality? Kraznyz got greedy and got burned, in part because he was assuming Dany bought into the social conventions of slavery. You don’t kill the man who trains the Unsullied, because a. you’ll need more Unsullied later to replace your losses, and b. he’ll buy the people you capture.

Also, there is a market in dragon eggs as an ultra-luxury item, since they have to be brought all the way from the Shadowlands beyond Asshai, which is all the way to the east of the known world. Illyrio buys three for Dany to show off how filthy rich he is, we know from Viserys that 1 egg will buy a ship (a fleet I should think, but he’s using synecdoche), or an army, and 2 will buy a huge army.

From the single correct point of view on the universe (the cold-bloodedly economic) isn’t the problem that Daenerys is being irrational by opposing slavery? Of course, since no one can be motivated by anything other than profit (and there can’t be a $20 bill on the ground), the invisible hand must crush her for having human values in addition to cash values. And all those crispy slavers will be vindicated (in the long run) for assuming that Cash Rules Everything Around Me.

lets be honest – the big problem with books like this is that the authors write things that don’t happen in real life, because there is no way anyone would act like that.

That is, dragons, or magic are ok, but people still need to act in a realistic manner – the first rule of fiction writing, ca I imagine someone saying that.

It is not possible to imagine selling totally loyal slaves tht would turn on you

Martin is a good enough writer that this is an issue; other writers, far less talented (Eddings/belgariad, jordan/wheel of time) don’t have this problem because they can’t write well enough to create real characters

All this reminds me of why I hate rationalist IR.

Urrgghh — I despair when people take wise and insightful social science, and sully it by comparison with fairy tales…

…Economists:hands off A Game of Thrones!

@shah8 Trivial research of actual slave soldiers like Mamluks probably would have resulted in more interesting (if a bit more complex for the low reader) plot narrative/twist

Gad! I can only imagine how much better the books would have been if Martin had done some minimal research on mamluks and Mongols. So far, not one of the Astapori or Dothraki characters is has any individuality or depth. In that part of his setting, it feels like he’s constantly floundering. The Slave Cities and the Dothraki are the social/historical grumpkins and snarks of Martin’s world. On the other hand, the Westerosi characters and society have enough complexity (based on Martin’s obviously substantial reading of Medieval history–to the point that he can write inside jokes) that I don’t see how adding a little complexity/realism to Dothraki and Astapori would make the books more difficult than they already are.

As for the stupidity of the sale, Rich Puchalsky @28 makes a good point about the tired orientalism–but while I think it’s pertinent in this scene, I don’t think the slave cities are so clearly meant to read as ‘eastern’. They seem to be based much more on ancient Greece and Rome than on any Middle Eastern models. Not only the fact that the society/economy is so heavily dependent on chattel slavery, e.g. for agriculture, but the Republican system of government, and (in the TV series) the overall look and feel–the costumes, armor, weapons, sound of the language. Though no doubt a lot of American readers think of them all as generically Eastern (does Asia still begin at the Pyrenees?) and are probably very ready to believe that pre-modern Middle Eastern societies had all of the same vices, with none of the virtues.

But then again, if this does even a little bit to help Euro-American audiences see ancient Greek and Roman society as part of a cultural world centered much more on the Eastern Mediterranean, and not simply ‘western’, that is a big step in the right direction.

I despair when people take wise and insightful social science, and sully it by comparison with fairy tales…

Unsullied, economics a fairy tale . . . wait, I’m confused . . .

Although I have to confess, I’ve only read the first in the series.

And to be honest, I struggled with the whole unreliable narrator conceit.

Although I’ll concede Mankiw was a very regal sounding name.

I know that I for one will only be satisfied with rigorous realism in my descriptions of the sale and purchase of giant fire-breathing flying lizards.

Just consider, for example, the supposed scale of things: Westeros is Great Britain scaled up to the size of a continent — it is roughly the size of North America! — and yet, somehow, a feudal system scaled to medieval Britain and horses and sailing ships works.

“Works”, though, only in the sense of “repeatedly collapses into catastrophic civil war”. It is, after all, undergoing one in the period in which the books are set. Fifteen or so years before that it had another one (Robert’s Rebellion) and the books mention a number of other smaller rebellions that happened within living memory. Before that, there was a period of (at most) a couple of centuries in which things were fairly peaceful because the ruling kings tended to incinerate anyone who rebelled by means of giant flying fire-breathing lizards – though, even then, there were various dynastic struggles and rebellions.
And before that it wasn’t a single continent-sized feudal state, it was lots of different countries – it’s still called the Seven Kingdoms.

A Westerosi reading the history of, say, the Roman Empire or Han-dynasty China might be a bit sceptical that an empire could survive for centuries without falling apart into civil war – without even the aid of dragons!

The improbable bit is not that the Seven Kingdoms hold together, because they don’t. The improbable bit is the persistence of dynasties – that House Stark can spend millennia ruling the North without being usurped. (Though there are scattered hints that much of the earlier history of the great houses is, frankly, as made up as the lineages of the Old Testament, and the Starks etc may not have been there nearly as long as they like to think.)

Now that we know dragon’s eggs can be hatched and are not mere pretty baubles to be admired I won’t be satisfied until we see a futures market and other derivatives spring up. And what’s Astapor’s Standard & Poor rating?

And while we’re picking at nits (and lions and dragons), what’s with that ridiculous Dothraki sword, the arakh? Its size and shape preclude it from being wielded effectively from horseback and it has the look of a weapon derived from an agricultural implement such as a sickle and the Dothraki supposedly despise sedentary agriculturalists (and sedentary pastoralists for that matter). I’d expect something more like a yataghan or a sabre.

What they’d use would be bows and lances, with swords as back-up, is my guess.

And I haven’t been following things closely, but is the idea with the Unsullied that the slavers can sell them to Daenerys, and they’d immediately become obedient to her until death? That’s a bit odd.

Second sentence lost me?

ajay @ 43: That was might thought as well. Westeros is not a natural single kingdom but a few centuries of rule by dragon lord got people used to the idea. Pretty soon it will be seven kingdoms again. Unless a new dragon lord arrives. But the longevity of the major houses is totally impractical. Maybe we should stipulate that in Westeros, childhood mortality is much better than feudal Europe, infertility is much less common and child-bearing is less dangerous for women. Then, perhaps, with great lords having a minimum of 5 children, the likelihood of the survival of their name would be substantially improved (ignoring other factors). But even this doesn’t work as many of the families only have 2 or 3 children.

One of the things that irritated me reading the book is the idea that an unreliable minor lord like Frey would be allowed to retain a strategically valuable position. After Robert’s rebellion, Frey would be replaced by someone very loyal to Baratheon or Stark.

I agree that there is in fact a hold-up problem here, but I still agree with Yglesias’ main points. The sale likely could have been made in equilibrium. Commenter ajay has the mechanism down: the dragons are small–more investments than weapons–and easily made hostages in any “renegotiation” (i.e. any attempt by Daenerys to use the unsullied against what’s-his-name). The only assumption you need to make this work is you have to believe (more specifically, what’s-his-name has to believe) that Daenerys would rather part with the dragon than let it die… which is reasonable.

You can argue that the existence of Daenerys’ plan is ipso facto reason to think that the hold-up problem should have doomed any sale, but I think the behavioral considerations have to come into play–what’s-his-name discounts Daenerys because of her gender. This is on top of the fact that he understands that he’s safe the moment he’s in possession of a dragon (as above). Even if he were to anticipate the danger from Daenerys’ instant control of the unsullied, he would likely think his (sufficient) control of the dragon would be immediate as well (he only needs to be able to kill the hostage).

In the long run, he must think that he is investing in an asset whose long term value rivals that of an entire kingdom, and he has no idea how rare handlers are. Its a risky asset to be sure, but from his perspective–for the low price of a few unsullied–the trade’s a bargain.

I’ve got it! Let’s assume we have a dragon.

The events in the books scale Westeros in terms of UK size. If Westeros is actual continent size, well then…things don’t happen this way. People might worship the Targayens for owning dragons, but a few dragons is only about as useful as a few horses in Mesoamerica circa early 16th century. Might work against Montezuma and the Tarascans, and the Incas, but if you’re trying a few dragons with a small army against the Southern Song (unmolested by Mongols of course) or the Tang, for that matter, your fucking dragon would be crispy critters and your head be chopped off. Those guys can round up gargantuan armies, lose a ton of battles learning all the while. If need be, guerilla war. A conquest of England, William of Orange style is pretty feasible. Alexander the Great, though, started off with about 30-35k military personnel. This is a lot more than some foreigner who had to move troops via boat with no city on the shore to be conquered. There ain’t no super-weapon that can counter that, other than maybe an army of Scanners. Dragons are just the human fascination with air power beyond their utility.

An aside, nobles that do what the river noble did, especially since the river noble is rather newly made, do get killed off. Nobles within actual great empires do get killed, regardless of the noises from other nobles–there are plenty of socially acceptable means of doing so. Nobles in a situation where the king is merely the biggest noble and the country is rather loosely bound can be hard to act against.

Thinking of the Unsullied as child soldiers illustrates the problem with the whole concept. How many battles do child soldiers win? How many cities won and sacked? How many horrific tragedies happened, from Iranian children running over minefields, or the European poor, held up to be childlike and innocent, struggled in the Children’s Crusade? Why would the author think this is compelling?

“Tolkien’s dragons could be slain via their exposed underbelly”

Which they took measures to protect. Tolkien may be the only author to explain *why* a dragon wants a huge pile of coins and gems to lie upon.

@59 I’m sure there is a thesis to be written somewhere about how in English language map fantasy written by UK authors, if the map has a country that stands in for the UK, it won’t have one for the us. Pratchett is most obvious – the Discworld has a wales and an Italy and an australia, but no America. But also Tolkien, Moorcock, Richard Morgan, Warhammer, and probably more.

Whereas in map fantasy by us authors, there will commonly be a land with something of the politics, history and location of England, but the dimensions, linguistics and commonly social attitudes of the US, with which a us reader is expected to identify.

Probably something to do with why you don’t see a lot of Westerns being written any more….

I’m sure there is a thesis to be written somewhere about how in English language map fantasy written by UK authors, if the map has a country that stands in for the UK, it won’t have one for the us. Pratchett is most obvious – the Discworld has a wales and an Italy and an australia, but no America.

Tolkien has a stand-in for the US – Valinor, the mysterious land in the Far West, which everyone interesting keeps emigrating to. I vaguely remember (it’s been about 20 years) that the Warhammer world has a New World continent over the not-Atlantic from the Old World.
And the Discworld doesn’t have a UK stand-in. It has stand-ins for lots of different bits of the UK – like Llamedos (which is Wales) and the Ramtops (which are, depending on preference, the Highlands, the Peak District, Yorkshire or possibly also Wales) – but it also has stand-ins for bits of the US, like Genua (which is fairly definitely New Orleans).

Tolkien may be the only author to explain *why* a dragon wants a huge pile of coins and gems to lie upon.

The obvious answer is that dragons have really powerful stomach acids and so the only thing that survives the digestive process is the victim’s personal jewellery and pocket change. It’s not that they’re greedy, they’re just unsanitary.

Shah8 is right about dragons being a satire of air power in general. Absolutely, terrifyingly devastating and uniquely capable of attacking in depth to hundreds of miles, but it’s never available when you need it, it’s somehow unpredictable in its effects and general behaviour, it regularly kills the user, the dragon-farmers are completely untrustworthy and their promises are worthless, and it needs constantly feeding with treasure or it won’t fly. And if you think the dragons are problematic, you haven’t met the dragon-handlers.

69: the trouble is that, in Game of Thrones, dragons actually can achieve everything that people think they can.
It would be rather fun to read a story in which everyone is convinced that dragons and dragon-riders are awesome war-winning weapons, but they are in fact not much use.
“The dragon will always get through!” roared Bomberharys Targaryen.

Tolkien has a stand-in for the US – Valinor, the mysterious land in the Far West, which everyone interesting keeps emigrating to.

That’s not the US, it’s Tir nan Og.

As to the efficacy of dragons, as long as he’s consistent he gets to decide how powerful they are in his fictional world. In particular – and I’m not certain if anything’s been laid down in the books about this – he gets to decide how vulnerable they are to physical attack.

OK, but they can still only be in one place at a time (each) and probably they need to eat and can get tired. (And will probably be more vulnerable when asleep, after all, everything else is.)

Furthermore, if they’re intelligent enough to understand and carry out plans themselves then you have to secure their loyalty somehow, and if they require a human to direct them, that human can be killed or subverted.

That’s not the US, it’s Tir nan Og.

Basically. I find it interesting that while Tolkien was not in general reluctant to acknowledge his debts to folklore, and specifically credited the beauty of the Welsh language to his ear as an inspiration on the development of Sindarin, he rather hostilely rejected the suggestion of an influence of Celtic myth on his storytelling. Valinor does seem more like Tir na nOg than anything else though, particularly as he’s rather clear (IIRC – I’m actually partway through The History of Middle Earth right now, so my mind is on the early conceptions of these things) that it’s NOT the final resting place for Men, who presumably go on to Catholic heaven.

re: ASOIAF dragons … maybe they never sleep. Maybe the sleep atop unreachable mountain crags, when left to their own devices. Or when they rest they were guarded by fifty men. I’m only a little of the way into the fourth book, and I haven’t read any of his prequelish novellas set 100 years before the series, but the actions of dragons in conquering Westeros, a few hundred years after they dominated Essos, are recently recorded history. Only those of Valyrian blood have ever shown the ability to control them – which is one of the many reasons the Astapori slavers were dumb – and it’s made clear that this link has some magical property. I mean, for humor’s sake I get the complaints in this thread, but there’s lots of problems and apparent holes in GRRM’s fictional construct here, and the specific feats attributed to dragons don’t seem to be among them.

While I agree with your base premise, I am not certain that a phalanx has the ability to stand against a heavy Calvary charge. The novels seems to model knights based on the French/Byzantine Cavalry and the Unsullied based on the Greek/Roman phalanx.

Exactly.

Medieval spearmen were able to stand against heavy calvary charges. The Scots did it to the English several times (they lost when the English responded with massed archery) and the Flemish did it to the French. Supposedly, it’s really hard to get even trained horses to charge into a tightly-packed group of men holding spears who don’t run away. It’s the not running away that’s the hard part.

It also relates to dragons in A Song of Ice and Fire. Aegon the Conqueror unleashed his three dragons together in one battle and they killed a lot of men, but it seems like they mostly worked by terrorizing the armies into running, just like masses of mounted knights were mostly able to send footsoldiers running. Later, the Targaryens fought at least one civil war that involved dragons versus dragons. In the far past, it’s suggested that the Valyrian Freehold (Rome plus dragons) was able to beat all comers, but it took them a long time for them to beat other empires that didn’t have dragons, like the Rhoynar (who fled to Westeros and settled in Dorne) and the Ghiscari (forrunners of the Slavers Bay cities). They didn’t sweep them away just because they had dragons.

I always think of Danerys vs. the Slaver Cities as analogous to Cortez versus the Aztecs. He came in with some radical outside assumptions that the Triple Alliance just didn’t share (Mesoamerican war and conquest was highly ritualized). Cortez, coming from outside, was able to see the angles and cracks and exploit them. That allowed him to win, as much as having a small force with better military technology did.

Alex 69 – Autonomous killer robots seem closer to raising the problem mentioned in the OP – of course many of these will be airborne ‘drones’ (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles), so most problems associated with air power apply too.

They are topical at present too, with the campaign for an international ban in the news, and protests currently under way against RAF personnel operating drones (‘mostly’, we are reassured, for reconnaissance) from the UK.

The Lockheed Martin/USAF ‘Low Cost Autonomous Attack System’ is openly in the final stages of development, using AI to identify and strike targets. This isn’t really different in kind from pattern-matching technology used in the self-guidance systems in Tomahawk missiles (which are actually unmanned bombers, since they can attack multiple targets with their 20 ‘bomblets’).

Combine this kind of technology with the policy of ‘signature targeting’ (star jumps = terrorists) of drone strikes, gait recognition and similar biometric techniques used in surveillance of domestic populations and we have all the ingredients for automating the important work of vaporising wedding parties etc.

That’s the public-domain situation, and the media and campaigners all state that autonomous killer robots (let’s say those which, without human input, select and attack human targets based on generic characteristics) do not yet exist. This negative existential statement seems unwarranted to me, when one considers that new weapons are commonly developed and implemented in secrecy, especially by the CIA (e.g. reportedly, bioweapons programmes whose nature is secret) which is the main driver of the drone programme, has a long and inglorious history – even going only on such records as have been preserved and released to the publoic – of developing lethal technologies unconstrained by any discernible ethical contraints, is known to habitually evade oversight, and has a ‘black budget’ which has been estimated at about a $trillion p.a.

In view of all this, I don’t think one should suppose that the US (and Chinese, Russian) military and paramilitary capability really extends only as far as the state-of-the-art-according-to-Popular-Mechanics.

So the chances are that fully-fledged mechanical dragons already exist, with the 3rd law of robotics taking the place of ‘loyalty’ in the OP (needless to say the 1st and 2nd laws, and the provisos their priority places on the 3rd, are not even in the running, which is nice).

the media and campaigners all state that autonomous killer robots (let’s say those which, without human input, select and attack human targets based on generic characteristics) do not yet exist.

Depends on your definition of “robot”, though. Sophisticated autonomous weapons that kill without a human in the loop, and make no distinction between soldier and civilian, have been used in Afghanistan and elsewhere for a long time. They’re called “mines”.

“Tolkien has a stand-in for the US – Valinor, the mysterious land in the Far West, which everyone interesting keeps emigrating to.”

Nah. If Valinor were the U.S., the Valar would intervene every other year.