Unrealistic long time span

[Ser Arthur Hightower]

 

Not really. If we take the Anglo-Saxon invasion of present day England as an example (which is probably what the Andals are inspired by) then the settlement phase there started around the 450s and ended around the year 600, and most of Brtain got thoroughly Germanized not long after that, excepting Wales and Scotland of course. There is no need for a thousand year time span for things like these to take place. 

 

Also considering that there are still lots of First Men houses around in southern Westeros, some of which even follow the Old Gods, the cultural assimilation hasn't been absolute either. 

 

I was using the Anglo-Saxon invasion as the basis for my estimate, I believe you have underestimated the timespan, Germanic settlements in England started before the Romans left, and continued to expand culturally until the late 600s at least.

 

Since Westeros is 20 times the size of England and the north and Iron Islands have been culturally altered as well the andal invasion taking place over close to 1,000 years works okay.

 

I don't know how long it took for the Saxons to begin affecting Scotland and Wales culturally (my internet connection is a bit too crap for lengthy searches right now) but it was probably well into the second millennium AD.

 

Many houses are First Men in origin, but very few of them keep any of their cultural heritage, all but the Blackwoods keep the Seven, they fit into the largely Andal social structure.

[l3ol3o]

What bothers me the most is the Starks. If their line really goes back that far there would be thousands of descendants. In the books there is the main stark family and that seems to be it. Where are all the cousins and distant cousins? 

[Free Northman Reborn]

What bothers me the most is the Starks. If their line really goes back that far there would be thousands of descendants. In the books there is the main stark family and that seems to be it. Where are all the cousins and distant cousins? 

So too the Daynes, Hightowers, Boltons, Umbers, Dustins, Blackwoods, Royces and every other House.

Fact is pretty much everyone has blood from pretty much every old House in their veins by now. That's why being trueborn is so valued, and why such a distinction is made between a trueborn heir and a bastard.

I view it as some kind of "annointing" taking place when the mantle of heir passes onto someone. And for those outside the immediate family of that heir, well, they might as well be strangers, irrespective of their genetics. Hence the Karstarks are not Starks at all, despite branching off from them 700 years ago.

As soon as you are not in the annointed line anymore your Stark blood is meaningless.

For example, should Bran become Lord of Winterfell and produce offspring, then Rickon's line of future Starks will be irrelevant within say 100 years.

All that matters is that golden thead running from Bran the builder, through every ruler of Winterfell to the present day, and on into the future.

[Dragonsmurf]

What bothers me the most is the Starks. If their line really goes back that far there would be thousands of descendants. In the books there is the main stark family and that seems to be it. Where are all the cousins and distant cousins? 

Not to mention how many tombs there should be in the crypt.

[Free Northman Reborn]

 
I was using the Anglo-Saxon invasion as the basis for my estimate, I believe you have underestimated the timespan, Germanic settlements in England started before the Romans left, and continued to expand culturally until the late 600s at least.
 
Since Westeros is 20 times the size of England and the north and Iron Islands have been culturally altered as well the andal invasion taking place over close to 1,000 years works okay.
 
I don't know how long it took for the Saxons to begin affecting Scotland and Wales culturally (my internet connection is a bit too crap for lengthy searches right now) but it was probably well into the second millennium AD.
 
Many houses are First Men in origin, but very few of them keep any of their cultural heritage, all but the Blackwoods keep the Seven, they fit into the largely Andal social structure.

Small correction. The North is 20 times the size of England. Westeros as a whole is more like 54 times the size of England.

[Free Northman Reborn]

Not to mention how many tombs there should be in the crypt.

About 500-800 I would guess.

[Dragonsmurf]

About 500-800 I would guess.

That depends on if only the Kings of Winter/wardens of the North are buried there, or the whole family. That has been discussed on this forum before. Only the Kings of Winter/wardens of the North get statues(with the exception of Brandon and Lyanna), but a lot of people think other Starks are buried there as well, but without statues.

[Free Northman Reborn]

What would also help normalize the long timespan is to view each long Winter as a mini-cataclysm that society has to recover from, but just as they do, then the next mini-cataclysm arrives during which huge numbers of people die off and they have to start the recovery process all over again.

So instead of just having the Long Night that brought civilization to its knees, they have a catastrophe every 5 years or so that makes the continuation of society a struggle on an ongoing basis.

Just look at the impact of just one or two summerless years on the real world, for example when massive volcanic eruptions obscured the sun for just a single season at various times in our past. Crop failures, famines and even entire civilizations collapsing are theorized to have been the result.

So in Westeros this could well be one of many good reasons why their history does not match ours.

[Dragonsmurf]

So too the Daynes, Hightowers, Boltons, Umbers, Dustins, Blackwoods, Royces and every other House.

Fact is pretty much everyone has blood from pretty much every old House in their veins by now. That's why being trueborn is so valued, and why such a distinction is made between a trueborn heir and a bastard.

I view it as some kind of "annointing" taking place when the mantle of heir passes onto someone. And for those outside the immediate family of that heir, well, they might as well be strangers, irrespective of their genetics. Hence the Karstarks are not Starks at all, despite branching off from them 700 years ago.

As soon as you are not in the annointed line anymore your Stark blood is meaningless.

For example, should Bran become Lord of Winterfell and produce offspring, then Rickon's line of future Starks will be irrelevant within say 100 years.

All that matters is that golden thead running from Bran the builder, through every ruler of Winterfell to the present day, and on into the future.

But shouldn't Rickon's offspring still be Starks?

[Dragonsmurf]

What would also help normalize the long timespan is to view each long Winter as a mini-cataclysm that society has to recover from, but just as they do, then the next mini-cataclysm arrives during which huge numbers of people die off and they have to start the recovery process all over again.

So instead of just having the Long Night that brought civilization to its knees, they have a catastrophe every 5 years or so that makes the continuation of society a struggle on an ongoing basis.

Just look at the impact of just one or two summerless years on the real world, for example when massive volcanic eruptions obscured the sun for just a single season at various times in our past. Crop failures, famines and even entire civilizations collapsing are theorized to have been the result.

So in Westeros this could well be one of many good reasons why their history does not match ours.

But wouldn't a catastrophy every 5 years cause instability to the realm, which would make it even more unrealistic for the Starks to hold the North for 8 000 years? And wouldn't it make history recording harder?

[Free Northman Reborn]

That depends on if only the Kings of Winter/wardens of the North are buried there, or the whole family. That has been discussed on this forum before. Only the Kings of Winter/wardens of the North get statues(with the exception of Brandon and Lyanna), but a lot of people think other Starks are buried there as well, but without statues.

Sure. But that is provided for by Bran stating that the underground tombs - apart from having many deeper levels - extend far beyond Winterfell's walls. So the tombs are far larger than the settlement that sits on top of it.

[Free Northman Reborn]

But shouldn't Rickon's offspring still be Starks?

Well, look at the Karstark and Greystark examples. One would think that keeping the Stark name would have been a prestigious goal of theirs, but it seems they were keen to claim names of their own as soon as they could.

Maybe being called a Stark if you aren't part of the ruling dynasty is undesirable in their society.

[Free Northman Reborn]

But wouldn't a catastrophy every 5 years cause instability to the realm, which would make it even more unrealistic for the Starks to hold the North for 8 000 years? And wouldn't it make history recording harder?

Again, lets take the Karstark and Greystark examples. It appears from the evidence that it is frowned upon to keep the Stark name if you are just a petty lord or knight who happens to be descended from the Lord of Winterfell from 200 years ago.

But, should the main line of Starks be wiped out for some reason - through war or disease or whatever - then that annointing will pass back to you as the next heir, and YOU will now be the legitimate Stark in Winterfell.

I am sure this would have happened over the course of 8 millenia. So the extra, nameless Starks provide a level of insurance to the main branch's survival.

[falcotron]

Why the hell should the pace of social and cultural development in any way mirror ours?

The fact that the pace of social and cultural development in the last 300 years has mirrored ours is one the hell reason.

The fact that GRRM has said his world is influenced by an amalgam of real-world historical influences is another the hell reason.

But the fact that people act recognizably like people from our world, and their social and cultural systems clearly parallel systems from our world, is probably the best the hell reason. After all, we also assume that they eat by putting food in their mouth rather than shoving it the hell up their asses, even though GRRM never actually says so in the text.

[falcotron]

What bothers me the most is the Starks. If their line really goes back that far there would be thousands of descendants. In the books there is the main stark family and that seems to be it. Where are all the cousins and distant cousins?

That one is easily explainable, even if it's not explained.

Sometimes, the younger brothers of a lord will be granted their own fief and set up a cadet branch, and occasionally they'll marry into another inheritance. Some of them join the Watch, the Citadel, or (in the south) the Faith; some go off to seek their own fortunes (e.g., as sellswords in Essos). And of course it's not that rare for a Lord to die young and pass the seat to his next brother. So, that takes care of a pretty good percentage of potential offshoots.

So, the only question is, what about the rest?

For one thing, maybe the traditional pressures to join a celibate order or seek your own fortune are a little stronger in Westeros than in feudal Europe, or the number of lords who die young may be a little higher. It really wouldn't take that much of a difference to make offshoots pretty uncommon.

And then there's the factor that everyone else mentioned: Maybe the excess brothers just manage some lands for their brother, and then they have kids that aren't lords anymore (and apparently aren't even considered for succession beyond a generation or so¹). If that's true, then there would be many thousands of people with Stark blood in their veins, some of whom may even use the last name Stark, but they're not considered part of House Stark.

¹ Otherwise, they presumably could have found some distant Hornwood cousin, and nobody even thought to look for one. This isn't at all implausible. It's not the way the English crown or the coastal French counties worked. But for most other feudal titles, despite the complex laws they had in some countries (like France), if there wasn't an immediate-enough heir, more often than not the liege would appoint a new lord--or, for a crown, the nobles would elect a new king, or invite in a foreign prince.

[Annara Snow]

This is really just a variation of the "GRRM doesn't understand history" explanation. And the problem is that there's so much that he clearly did think through and get right. For example:

And yet, Dany, with her Pentoshi Valyrian dialect, can't even tell for sure that the Astapori dialect is supposed to be the same language. And the divergence of bastard Valyrian appears to have taken place in only a few centuries--roughly equivalent to the divergence between, say, French and Romanian.

Imagine if there were a real life continent the size of Westeros with multiple nations, where just two languages are nevertheless dominant, as opposed to some other continents that have many different languages with sharp differences over much smaller territories...

Oh wait...

What kind of writer puts in enough thought to build a realistic parallel to the development of the Romance languages, but completely fails to notice that his parallel to English has changed less in 6000 years over 3 million square miles than English did in 600 years over 80 thousand square miles

Wait, how the you know that the Common Tongue hasn't changed in 6000 years? Or that it even existed as such back then? Do we even know what they spoke thousands of years ago?

And English is not a good example to use, since it changed much more in the medieval period than most languages do, because of the specific historical and cultural circumstances: the Norman invasion and the interaction of two different languages, Anglo-Saxon (aka "Old English") and Norman French. The massive vowel shift in 15th century is also a more extreme fast change than most linguistic changes. In the last 500 years, English hasn't changed that much - late 15th century English and certainly 16th century English would be quite understandable today, more like a different dialect. And the vastness a territory would be more likely to give rise to different dialects, but it's really the existence of different cultural influences that is the main agent of change. (Languages in relative isolation can remain almost unchanged for a thousand years - see Icelandic.) Westeros has had far fewer human cultures than Essos, but I would expect Dorne to be linguistically different from the rest of Westeros due to the Rhoynar. It's also surprising that the Old Tongue hasn't had a bigger impact anywhere and that the First Men descendants are all speaking the Common Tongue (though that's GRRM probably using Scotland as a model). And the Targaryens got assimilated to a surprising degree, leaving Valyrian and their old religion behind.

[Bennis of the Brown Shield]

Why the hell should the pace of social and cultural development in any way mirror ours?

Who says our model of history is inevitable for every hypothetical world?

 

There is a lot of difference between mirroring our world's history, and being in what seems like a high medieval stasis for 4000 - 8000 years. 

 

Considering that GRRM prides himself on the realism of his series ("what were Aragorn's tax policies like" etc) he should in fairness at least try to explain why his world has had such an extremely strange social and technological development, where they have first advanced to a level that is actually very high (similar to 14th century Europe's) and then seemingly remained frozen there for an incredible amount of time. 

 

Harsh winters do not really explain it. If anything you'd think that these would in fact encourage technological innovations and social change, especially the latter. 

[falcotron]

Wait, how the you know that the Common Tongue hasn't changed in 6000 years? Or that it even existed as such back then? Do we even know what they spoke thousands of years ago?

The Citadel has records from the early days of the Andals that they can read. The even older Book of the Seven is read by less educated people than Maesters. And we're told there are folk songs that go back thousands of years that even the smallfolk still sing and understand. (Sure, we're not actually told that they still scan and rhyme today, but it seems like a pretty safe assumption that they do.)

And English is not a good example to use, since it changed much more in the medieval period than most languages do, because of the specific historical and cultural circumstances... I would expect Dorne to be linguistically different from the rest of Westeros due to the Rhoynar...

This paragraph appears to start off arguing that Common being unchanged for 6000 years is perfectly reasonable, and then end up arguing that Common existing for even a few centuries is completely implausible, so I'm not sure what your point is here.

[Annara Snow]

The Citadel has records from the early days of the Andals that they can read. The even older Book of the Seven is read by less educated people than Maesters. And we're told there are folk songs that go back thousands of years that even the smallfolk still sing and understand. (Sure, we're not actually told that they still scan and rhyme today, but it seems like a pretty safe assumption that they do.)

This paragraph appears to start off arguing that Common being unchanged for 6000 years is perfectly reasonable, and then end up arguing that Common existing for even a few centuries is completely implausible, so I'm not sure what your point is here.

Which paragraph? It's not surprising that you are not sure what my point is, since you've just told me that I argued two things, neither of which I ever actually argued. Could you please point me to where I ever have said that 1) Common being unchanged for 6000 years is perfectly reasonable or that 2) Common existing even for a few centuries is completely implausible? Or were you thinking about some other post and got confused?

[falcotron]

Which paragraph?

The one I quoted.

It's not surprising that you are not sure what my point is, since you've just told me that I argued two things, neither of which I ever actually argued. Could you please point me to where I ever have said that 1) Common being unchanged for 6000 years is perfectly reasonable or that 2) Common existing even for a few centuries is completely implausible? Or were you thinking about some other post and got confused?

1) You start off talking about how English is not a good parallel, and then how English didn't change much for 500 years, and Icelandic twice as long as that. All of that sounds like you're arguing that there is no problem here, especially since it's in response to me explaining why there is a problem.

2) You then turn to saying that you would expect Dornish to be much more different than it is because of the Rhoynar, and then going on to talk about the First Men and the Valyrians. You don't call it "implausible" using exactly that word, but you say that it's "surprising" multiple times, and that you "would expect" the opposite of what's in the story, which makes it sound like you're arguing that there's an even bigger problem, rather than no problem.

Let's look again at what you were responding to:

What kind of writer puts in enough thought to build a realistic parallel to the development of the Romance languages, but completely fails to notice that his parallel to English has changed less in 6000 years over 3 million square miles than English did in 600 years over 80 thousand square miles?¹

Now, how am I supposed to interpret your paragraph in response to that? What is the point you were trying to make?