[BOOK SPOILERS] Is TV Westeros smaller than Book Westeros?

[Werthead]

In the ASoIaF novels, Westeros is approximately 3,000 miles in length from the Wall to the south coast of Dorne, based on the scale bar of the Wall being 300 miles long (which GRRM used to suggest wouldn't work, but has more recently agreed is broadly accurate). Based on that, it's roughly 1,500 miles from King's Landing to Winterfell, a journey of many weeks on horseback, even longer using Cersei's monstrous wheelhouse.

However, in the TV series people make the journey from Winterfell to King's Landing in about a month. Even given that Cersei's TV wheelhouse is not as insane as the book one, it still seems rather unlikely. That's 50 miles a day, which is at the upper limit of what someone could push a horse to do a day without killing it, and even then would require changing horses very frequently. Plausible from KL to the Trident, maybe, but less so further north.

This appears to be backed up when Eddard orders Tywin to appear in KL within the fortnight. The book distance from Casterly Rock to King's Landing appears to be about 900 miles, so Tywin would need to do about 65 miles a day to get there! He can take ship and use the Blackwater Rush to speed up the last leg of the journey, but it still seems inordinately tight (unless Ned deliberately gave him a timetable he couldn't meet, which seems unlikely).

These things appear to only be reconcilable if the scale of Westeros in the TV show is less than that in the books. That doesn't seem too onerous (no-one's said how long the Wall is yet), but it still seems an odd thing to do. Maybe they just wanted to cut journey times down a bit whilst leaving the continent big enough for all the action to take place?

[Ratty]

I've always wondered if George had the choice to rewrite the series whether the scale is one of the things he would change. I think he has said he would have aged the kids up much like the show has done. Scale is another thing, personally in my head I pretty much halve everything, westeros at half the size is still massive with plenty of room, but not as overwhelmingly so as the actual size makes it. As you point out the travel distances even by horse are excessive and unrealistic in terms of ability to govern I would have thought.

[Frumpus]

I think the tv show writers just did not do a good job of conveying the passage of time. Although I still think it's crazy that Ros travelled from winterfell to king's landing overnight. I don't care how fast her boat was, that shouldn't have happened.

[Prankster]

Maybe I'm missing something here--I'm certainly not a horse expert--but the general consensus from what I've seen seems to be that at their slowest, a horse tends to get up to 4 miles an hour on even terrain. So even if we assume that the king's train moved at its slowest, if they traveled a little over 12 hours a day, 50 miles is entirely doable. You'd have to assume that Robert wanted to get there as fast as possible, and wouldn't stop to hunt or get drunk during the day, though last I checked the king could get as drunk as he wanted in his carriage or whatever. It's summer, so I don't see why they couldn't start early and ride as long as the light lasted. And that's being very conservative about the speed--5 mi/hour really doesn't seem unreasonable. That's a brisk walk for a human.

Certainly, for a single rider, 50 miles a day is apparently pretty reasonable--I don't think that's the upper limit at all. The world endurance record is something like 99 miles in a little over 6 hours.

It stretches credibility a bit, perhaps (maybe when characters say it takes a month, they're rounding down?) but I don't think it's that farfetched.

[Spring Bass]

However, in the TV series people make the journey from Winterfell to King's Landing in about a month. Even given that Cersei's TV wheelhouse is not as insane as the book one, it still seems rather unlikely. That's 50 miles a day, which is at the upper limit of what someone could push a horse to do a day without killing it, and even then would require changing horses very frequently. Plausible from KL to the Trident, maybe, but less so further north.

We had a timeline thread a few years back that talked about that. Even the book timelines aren't completely right, since they get from Winterfell to King's Landing far faster than you would expect (2-3 months instead of 4 or more).

Maybe I'm missing something here--I'm certainly not a horse expert--but the general consensus from what I've seen seems to be that at their slowest, a horse tends to get up to 4 miles an hour on even terrain. So even if we assume that the king's train moved at its slowest, if they traveled a little over 12 hours a day, 50 miles is entirely doable.

That's on good roads and even terrain, both of which are not present for the whole trip from King's Landing to Winterfell. Moreover, not all of the King's Court would be on horseback; there's Cersei and friends in the wheelhouse, a baggage train, and so forth. Not to mention all the delays involved in resting the horses, making and breaking camp, stopping for meals, stopping at friendly courts on the trip northward (like what they did stopping at Darry on the way southward), and so forth.

You see similar issues with medieval armies, which is why they usually got far less mileage per day than what might be possible for a guy riding on horseback.

You'd have to assume that Robert wanted to get there as fast as possible, and wouldn't stop to hunt or get drunk during the day, though last I checked the king could get as drunk as he wanted in his carriage or whatever.

With Robert? I wouldn't be surprised if they frequently stopped to hunt or the like. If it was getting Ned's answer ASAP, they could have just sent ravens.

[Hyper]

Although I still think it's crazy that Ros travelled from winterfell to king's landing overnight. I don't care how fast her boat was, that shouldn't have happened.

What in the world makes you think she traveled overnight? The show is not doing a great job with showing a timeline, but that's a pretty absurd interpretation. The same could apply to any other trip any character has taken.

But back to the Westeros size - yes it is a problem in the show. But it is also a problem in the books, even if the scale is not the same. So at least the show is accurate in that regard. :)

[Basileus777]

I don't think Westeros is smaller. The writers probably just aren't overly concerned with timeline issues that can be fudged or ignored.

[The hairy bear]

I believe they havbe made TV Westeros conciously smaller, and I think they've made a good decision here. They won't be able to show us the fifty thousand strong armies of the books, so they'll need a continent that's consistent with those smaller armies.

Take the size of the khalasaar, for instance: would it be credibla that an horde of the size depicted in the series would reperesent a menace for a continent with a population several millions high?

[Basileus777]

I believe they havbe made TV Westeros conciously smaller, and I think they've made a good decision here. They won't be able to show us the fifty thousand strong armies of the books, so they'll need a continent that's consistent with those smaller armies.

Jaime's half of the Lannister host is 30k strong, so I see no evidence they are limiting army sizes. The Dothraki horde has been described as having 40k warriors, so they haven't drastically reduced the size of that either. What they show on screen isn't really indicative on anything other than the budget. And the difference between 10k men and 40k men is insignificant because neither of those amounts of men will ever be shown on screen.

I really don't think there is any deliberate change in the size of Westeros. Small inconsistencies in the timeline are just something the writers probably aren't all that concerned about. The show is giving very little indication as to how much time is passing between events, so it's easy for them to fudge these kinds of things.

[Greylander]

If ASoIaF has a significant flaw, it is one of scale. The wall is too tall (which GRRM recently realized when he saw the 400 foot cliff face at the quarry being used by the production to stand in the the 700!! foot wall in the books). The Eyrie is too remote and inaccessible for anything other than a refuge-of-last-resort. The continent is too large by about a factor of 3. And in most references to the ancient (pre-conquest) history of Westeros, you should replace "thousands of years" with "hundreds of years" to get something more reasonable.

This is not a matter of "fantasy" being "bigger than life". It is a matter of internal consistency. The whole "feel" (for lack of a better word) of Westeros is of a region roughly equivalent to British Isles + France + Spain, with culture, politics, and population density roughly circa 1200-1300 A.D. Maybe tack on a bit of Morocco in the South for desert-like Dorne, and a chunk of Scandinavia for the region north of the wall. This size would also be more compatible with travel times.

Think of it this way (very loose geographic/cultural analogies -- don't flame me with nitpicks, please): the North is an over-sized Scottland, with White Harbor as Edinburgh. The Riverlands are England with King's Landing as London. The Vale is Wales (on the wrong side, so to speak). The Arbor, The West, and Part of the StormLands are "France", with Old Town (very loosely) equal to Paris (most educated/sophisticated city). Dorne is Spain, but a bit more like North Africa (Morocco). The Wall is an over-sized Hadrian's wall, but moved north of Scotland (instead of separating England and Scotland), and the region north of the wall is a chunk of Scandinavia. The Iron Islands are a broken up Ireland, with the Irish population replaced by Vikings.

As to army sizes, if anything, the armies in the books are too small, and suggest a population density much too low for a thriving civilization encompassing a continent the size of South America. But the armies are about right for a region and time period as I've described.

I find it easiest to just ignore it when GRRM puts numbers on time and distance.

[Greylander]

I think the tv show writers just did not do a good job of conveying the passage of time. Although I still think it's crazy that Ros travelled from winterfell to king's landing overnight. I don't care how fast her boat was, that shouldn't have happened.

Obviously the fact the Ros was in King's Landing tells you that several weeks had passed since the turnip-cart scene.

I don't offhand recall the order of scenes, but you can assume for reasons of dramatic pacing, that scenes in very distant places are not necessarily in chronological order.

I have notice a trend over the last couple decades of movies & tv presenting stories with ever more compressed time-lines, as if viewers are unable to fill in the time-gaps on their own (and maybe that is becoming true).

You just have to assume enough time has passed for the scene cuts to make sense, and unless it is *obvious* that very little time has passed, you should assume that quite possibly hours/days/weeks have passed since the last scene.

Even when cuts seem "immediate" within the same scene, you can readily suppose that some of those cuts might represent jumps of a few dozen seconds or a few minutes (like skipping over the time it take gold to melt).

[Thefalconemperor]

Yeah I never quite saw Westeros the size Martin portrayed it. First of all it is simply too big to keep together considering medieval logistics, even if local lords hold most of the power.

Besides, it is likely north-south realms like Westeros have an element of inherent unstability, so to speak. Noticeable cultures and thriving nations tend develop along east-west routes for basic reasons.

You think in the past, the lands between Europe and the Yellow Sea got the best over Africa and the Americas because of a more temperate climate? Pigs and wheat do well in both France and China, but Mexican corn took centuries to adapt to Ohio. The only exception I can think from the top of my head is the Incan Empire, but altitude often conquers latitude.

[Ran]

I'm not sure Westeros is smaller, as such. I think it's the nature of television, and not doing the whole transitioning thing.

[Xenophon]

Yeah, I don't know if they ever made a conscious decision to shrink the world, but they definitely don't seem worried about keeping the scale as GRRM described it. Of course, you could say he didn't really stick to his own scale either, so it's probably more a matter of their following the story rather than stated distances. As someone mentioned above, the Wall is not 700 feet high, but it fits the story. Similarly, giving Tywin 14 days to appear at court feels right, IMO, anything longer would make the Westlands seem too remote. If that means Lannisport has to be closer than in the books, then so be it (although it's not completely impossible at book distances--the pony express went almost 2000 miles in 10 days).

[Spring Bass]

If ASoIaF has a significant flaw, it is one of scale. The wall is too tall (which GRRM recently realized when he saw the 400 foot cliff face at the quarry being used by the production to stand in the the 700!! foot wall in the books). The Eyrie is too remote and inaccessible for anything other than a refuge-of-last-resort. The continent is too large by about a factor of 3. And in most references to the ancient (pre-conquest) history of Westeros, you should replace "thousands of years" with "hundreds of years" to get something more reasonable.

It's strongly implied in A Feast for Crows that the "official" dates and timeline are extremely unreliable. Sam mentions in his first chapter in AFFC about how all the stories of events from the War for the Dawn were written down by septons thousands of years after they supposedly happened (the First Men had runes, but were otherwise a non-literate society), how the history gets more and more inaccurate and anachronistic the farther back it goes, and so forth. Rodrik the Reader mentions that estimates of the time elapsed since the last Kingsmoot vary enormously.

The Wall was probably not anywhere near that tall to begin with, but was built up over time when the Night's Watch was stronger (it didn't really start to spiral into permanent decline until after Aegon's Conquest).

The Eyrie is definitely weird. It makes you wonder how they even built the damn thing, considering that it sits a vertical six hundred feet up from the third checkpoint along the road to it. It doesn't even have a staircase up to it - you have to climb up that six hundred feet using handholds, or ride in a basket with the turnips.

As to army sizes, if anything, the armies in the books are too small, and suggest a population density much too low for a thriving civilization encompassing a continent the size of South America. But the armies are about right for a region and time period as I've described.

Part of that is because of the Winters. They're not so bad in the South (and I do think population numbers and density in the South are too low), but the North would be severely impaired by the need to store large quantities of food for 1-3 year periods every couple of years. Given medieval food surpluses (plus possible crops that real-life medieval societies didn't have), you'd expect very few permanent towns in the North, and that's what we see (there's White Harbor, but it's both on the sea and more of a big town/small city).

[Greylander]

Yeah, I don't know if they ever made a conscious decision to shrink the world, but they definitely don't seem worried about keeping the scale as GRRM described it. Of course, you could say he didn't really stick to his own scale either, so it's probably more a matter of their following the story rather than stated distances. As someone mentioned above, the Wall is not 700 feet high, but it fits the story. Similarly, giving Tywin 14 days to appear at court feels right, IMO, anything longer would make the Westlands seem too remote. If that means Lannisport has to be closer than in the books, then so be it (although it's not completely impossible at book distances--the pony express went almost 2000 miles in 10 days).

Actually, I think the wall in the show is about 700 feet high... freeze frame on opening sequence and use man on horse as about 8 feet... compare to wall. But 700 feet in book is not consistent with how the wall is treated in the book (go up, whether by winch or stairs, is treated *much* too casually, for example... and forget about shooting arrows up from the ground with any effectiveness).

Pony Express may seem like a good comparison, but while the "technology" (horses) may be no different from horses circa 1200A.D, the pony express was only possible in the context of the logistical resources of 19th century United States, in which steam engines, advanced farming technique, and other aspects of industrialization had fully taken hold.

I agree that a "fortnight" feels just about right for the travel time between Casterly Rock and King's Landing... longer would imply to great a remoteness, as you say.

[Werthead]

They won't be able to show us the fifty thousand strong armies of the books, so they'll need a continent that's consistent with those smaller armies.

Nope. The armies in the show appear to be larger, if anything:

Very minor Episode 7 spoiler:

From a summary, Tywin gives Jaime 30,000 men, which is half the Lannister host. So the Lannisters in the show have an army of 60,000, which is what, 20,000 more than in the books?.

I'm not sure Westeros is smaller, as such. I think it's the nature of television, and not doing the whole transitioning thing.

It is simply not possible for a slow, horse-pulled cart to travel 1,500 miles in one month. Even six weeks is pushing it. So either people in Westeros have an extremely loose rounding-up or rounding-down period, the continent is smaller or the writers made an error. I don't really see other options.

[El-ahrairah]

When I think about geography I just ignore the official "South America" line and picture Westoros as Britain + France + Spain.

[Scythian]

Given the length of the Wall, Westeros is more than twice as small as South America but substantially larger than Western Europe.

[jlk7e]

What others have already said. The supposed size of book Westeros is completely unworkable; Westeros ought to be about the size of western Europe.