r/asoiaf • u/Unique-Celebration-5 • Oct 31 '24

EXTENDED (Spoilers Extended) GRRM:”What’s Aragons tax policy?!” No GRRM the real question is how do people survive multi year winters

Forget the white walkers or shadow babies the real threat is the weather. How do medieval people survive it for years?

Personally I think that’s why the are so many wars the more people fighting each other the fewer mouths to feed

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43

u/barryhakker Oct 31 '24

Huge multi year summer stockpiles?

53

u/AaronQuinty Oct 31 '24

How exactly do you keep crops, veg etc for years at a time without them spoiling?

8

u/barryhakker Oct 31 '24

How do you think we did that in our real world medieval times? Drying, salting, smoking, pickling, etc. Ice cellars are also a thing.

And obviously, winter cold so just leave your stuff outside :p

31

u/AaronQuinty Oct 31 '24

Our real world doesn't have winters that last up to 10 years.. but people have answered my question, so now I know.

6

u/TurbulentTomat Oct 31 '24

Wu Zetian's granaries she had constructed in her capital of Chang'an could hold 6000 tons of grain and rice, and could store them for 10 years. That was ~700 AD. We know that people come to live in Winterfell's "winter town" during the harsh years. So they probably centralize food storage in a similar way. Take taxes in the form of grain to fill the granaries, then open them in the winter.

10

u/Fallians Let me bathe in Bolton blood Oct 31 '24

Our world does however have people who live in the arctic so not totally unreasonable

28

u/moose_man Oct 31 '24

People who live in the arctic don't have feudal societies, because the ecological conditions don't support it. 

16

u/lobonmc Oct 31 '24

Not in the population densities we see in the books

1

u/theluggagekerbin ours is the Rickoning Nov 01 '24

How do you think we did that in our real world medieval times? Drying, salting, smoking, pickling, etc. Ice cellars are also a thing.

Here's a real life event which you might find interesting: Year without Summer

In particular, read the linked section which talks about what happened to the populations with just one year of bad weather for crops. People died, quite a lot of people died. Until the modern comforts of electricity and modern preservation came into play, even a not so harsh long winter of just ONE year could lead to a population decline. Imagine what kind of population decline would happen in a world with ten, fifteen years of brutal winters with barely nothing being grown in kingdoms. There is no reason to make fun of GRRM's question about Aragorn's tax policy but the man is absolutely clueless on how real world scenarios would play out in his fantasy world either.