game of thrones - Where does the background story in A Song of Ice and Fire come from?

As I can read, the author of the series created several books in the series starting with the book A Game of Thrones. I'm watching the series on TV (I haven't read the books).

When I watched something in the show that I do not fully understand or want to brush up on, I go search the web and usually find the information in Wikipedia. Often I also find a full timeline from before the first book, and I wonder where does this information come from? Whoever wrote this must have this information from somewhere - I just don't seem to understand where, since the first book starts around the same time the first episode of the first series in the TV show?

Answer

There's a lot more history (both ancient and recent) discussed in the books than on the TV series, since if you're adapting close to 10,000 pages of novels (including the as-yet unpublished ones) to maybe 70 hours of TV you obviously have to leave a lot out. While the action starts in the same place, the characters spend a lot longer talking about the history that has got them to this point. There's also a series of novellas by George R R Martin (the "Dunk and Egg" stories) that's set in Westeros around 90 years before the beginning of A Game of Thrones and fills in a lot of historical background from that period.

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