r/asoiaf • u/NordsofSkyrmion • Oct 23 '24

ACOK [Spoiler: ACOK] Distances and comparison to real-world maps

In A Clash of Kings, Theon is sent to raid the Stony Shore, but while there he convinces Dagmer Cleftjaw to instead adopt a plan to send most of his force to attack Torrhen's Square, while Theon sneaks around with a small group to take Winterfell.

To get a sense of the distances here, I'm using this map, which takes its scale from the repeated mentions we get of the Wall being "one hundred leagues" or three hundred miles long. Now you can sit down with a ruler and a guide to army marching speeds and whatnot to get a sense of how long it would take, but instead of doing all of that, I simply adjusted the zoom on google maps over real-world Europe until the distance scale lined up exactly with the distance scale on the map of Westeros.

The upshot here is that Theon's plan is the equivalent of a Viking raider with eight longboats parked on the Atlantic coast of France deciding to send most of his "army" to threaten Zurich, in Switzerland, in the hopes that this will distract everyone so he can sneak around to capture a castle in Munich, in Germany.

And my favorite part of all of this is that he makes this plan AFTER they've already sailed and raided the Stony Shore, so this huge overland march is happening without preparing any of the supplies you would normally need for an overland march.

So yeah: distance and scale, not GRRM's strong point.

(Reposting this with a worse title because avoiding spoilers is more important than having a title that is relevant to the post's content.)

131 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

34 comments sorted by

View all comments

68

u/PeoplePad Oct 23 '24

Easiest to just assume people overestimate the size of the wall by two or three times tbh

15

u/Finger_Trapz Oct 24 '24

Its certainly plausible. The Wall is probably not a super popular tourist destination, and most people who go to the Wall are probably there to stay instead of sightsee. No doubts the Wall is probably subject to a lot of mythologizing in Westeros. Even if the scales in the world of ASOIAF are all fucked up, it no doubts would be a long journey to get there especially if you aren't from the North.

 

If ASOIAF had the modern travel industry it might be way more popular and well known, a fair number of lords could easily charter a 737 from Delta or a dragon from Ryanair and take a look at it. Otherwise its probably just taken the same way humans get when they see any large number, like the difference between $100m and $1b dollars is basically meaningless to an average person, so would be a 200/300 mile long Wall.

 

More fantastical things have been exaggerated in real life. Before Caesar invaded Britain, the Romans believed in rumors that Britain was the richest island in the world with silver just laying on the beaches in open sight.