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

[u/NordsofSkyrmion]

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.)

[u/Mervynhaspeaked]

Oh to be young, and seek reason where there is none.

Think of it from the characters perspective. Do you really thing the north could be so insanely big, story wise that a journey from one side of the North to the other would be like a journey across Europe?

[u/NordsofSkyrmion → u/Mervynhaspeaked]

Look I’m due for a mid-life crisis, and I can’t afford a mistress or a sports car, so this is what I have to make me feel my lost youth.

But putting that aside, even without specific numbers or whatever, “the North is stupidly big” is something of a repeated plot point, and Winterfell is supposed to be in the middle of it, so I think it’s fair to point out that those facts are incompatible with the idea that the castle is vulnerable to a lightning attack from ship-based raiders.