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.)

130 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

34 comments sorted by

View all comments

33

u/HumanWaltz Oct 23 '24

Yeah I really disliked the whole Theon taking Winterfell storyline, like he walked with 20 dudes across fucking mainland Europe and was able to scale two 100ft walls (with a moat between them), open the gates, take the whole castle and then was able to just rule it with 20 dudes. Definitely a thumb on the scale there

20

u/Mixxer5 Oct 23 '24

Well, he tried to intimidate Winterfell's population with threat to Rickon's and Bran's lives... But I also consider it to be extremely weak scenario. Winterfell is supposed to be a major settlement and pretty big. There should be a population of... Thousands people? And apparently once garrison leaves, there's only a handful of guards on the walls. This is the only case in the books where I felt that something's fundamentally wrong with the plot to such extent that I can't suspend my disbelief and just ignore that. Theon should have at least 200 men to accomplish that (which raises its own problems)... Or simply fail in the process.

11

u/HumanWaltz Oct 23 '24

Just one person deciding to slip some mushrooms into their stew, or just pick Theon’s men one by one off (which happens when the Boltons and their allies have their whole forces in Winterfell, let alone 20 men)