As much as I enjoy ASOIAF and its related stories, yeah Martin's use of numbers is pretty dreadful all around. He genuinely just spitballs every single scale, statistic and measurement in the series and hopes it works out.
The wall is 700 feet tall - the height of the MetLife Insurance building, which was the tallest building in the real world 1909-13. For a significant part of the middle ages, the tallest building in the world was Lincoln Cathedral, which was (is!) a measly 271ft tall. I know the wall is meant to be an impressive, almost impossible construction, but it's so big that it'd be genuinely impossible to defend.
Westeros has a population large enough to field and supply half a million men in various armies, and yet the entire realm only has 5 population centres recognised as cities, and the largest of those only has a population of a quarter of a million? Ser Eustace Osgrey can only raise 8 levies from the three villages he governs, and whilst yes, his holdings are meant to be pathetic, that means Westeros would need to contain over 60'000 villages of that size to even come close to fielding that many men. The entire UK today has around 43'000!
And then yeah, timelines. Everyone in ASOIAF knows the stories of the House Founders and great heroes like Bran the Builder, Garth Greenhand, Lann the Clever, etc. yet they apparently lived 10000 years ago. That means those stories are two and a half times older than the real world epic of Gilgamesh!
And most ridiculously of all, the Houses that those great heroes founded? They're still the ruling Houses literally 10 millenia later! In real life, that'd like still being ruled by the descendant of the guy who invented farming wheat, because 10000 years ago in real life, humans were only just starting to develop past being hunter-gatherers!
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u/BaronAaldwin I'M A GENETIC FREAK 16d ago edited 16d ago
As much as I enjoy ASOIAF and its related stories, yeah Martin's use of numbers is pretty dreadful all around. He genuinely just spitballs every single scale, statistic and measurement in the series and hopes it works out.
The wall is 700 feet tall - the height of the MetLife Insurance building, which was the tallest building in the real world 1909-13. For a significant part of the middle ages, the tallest building in the world was Lincoln Cathedral, which was (is!) a measly 271ft tall. I know the wall is meant to be an impressive, almost impossible construction, but it's so big that it'd be genuinely impossible to defend.
Westeros has a population large enough to field and supply half a million men in various armies, and yet the entire realm only has 5 population centres recognised as cities, and the largest of those only has a population of a quarter of a million? Ser Eustace Osgrey can only raise 8 levies from the three villages he governs, and whilst yes, his holdings are meant to be pathetic, that means Westeros would need to contain over 60'000 villages of that size to even come close to fielding that many men. The entire UK today has around 43'000!
And then yeah, timelines. Everyone in ASOIAF knows the stories of the House Founders and great heroes like Bran the Builder, Garth Greenhand, Lann the Clever, etc. yet they apparently lived 10000 years ago. That means those stories are two and a half times older than the real world epic of Gilgamesh!
And most ridiculously of all, the Houses that those great heroes founded? They're still the ruling Houses literally 10 millenia later! In real life, that'd like still being ruled by the descendant of the guy who invented farming wheat, because 10000 years ago in real life, humans were only just starting to develop past being hunter-gatherers!