Unrealistic long time span

[Dragonsmurf]

Is there anyone else getting annoyed by the unrealistic long time spans in ASoIaF and GoT? I mean, the wall was built 8 000 years ago, and the Night's watch has been around since. House Stark can aslo track their line 8 000 years back in time. If that doesn't sound unrealistic by itself, here's some real world-comparisons:
 

1. The pyramides were built about 5 000 years ago. 8 000 years ago we had like... Jericho? Can you imagine a sworn brotherhood being around since the days when Jericho was built? You know, 5 000 years before the Israelites destroying it according to the biblical story.

 

2. The ancestors of all indo-european people propably lived in present-day Iraq until about 6 000 years ago. Celts, scandinavians, greeks, persians and hindi-speaking people shared ancestors 6 000 years ago. The northerners and the free folk are supposed to have been seperated 8 000 years ago. Their cultures should be as different as the german and the hindi culture. Nobody think Germans and hindi-speaking people belong to the same ethnic group, nor does anyone talking about these two peoples "sharing blood" or anything like that.

 

3. Do I even have to comment about the Stark lineage? No family in the entire world has a lineage as long as that. There are some jewish rabbinic families who claim that they belong to the tribe of Levi, which would make their lineage 3 500 years, but that is very uncertain claims and still not half as old as the Stark claim.

 

Either Martin hasn't thought this time span thing really out, or the history of Westeros is waaay shorter than the inhabitants themselves believe.

 

Besides, how can there be one(1) language in all of seven kingdoms? The only place in Westeros with linguistic diversity is beyond the wall. This doesn't make sense, especially since there was seven independant kingdoms until 300 years ago. Why do the northerners speak common tongue when they weren't even conquered by the andals? The only rational reason should be that they are andals rather than first men, but that doesn't make sense either.

[Beorn Snow]

There are a few hints that the timelines are off. However the Westerosi and Essosi wouldn´t be the first civilisations with chronological inaccuracies. The Sumerians thought their civilisation was 100 of thousands of years, with some mythical kings ruling for more than 10 thousand years. Europeans also thought the world was only 6000 years old. Don´t take it too seriously what characters in the books think. If the POV´s get to be inaccurate so should the historians at the citadel.

[Dragonsmurf]

There are a few hints that the timelines are off. However the Westerosi and Essosi wouldn´t be the first civilisations with chronological inaccuracies. The Sumerians thought their civilisation was 100 of thousands of years, with some mythical kings ruling for more than 10 thousand years. Europeans also thought the world was only 6000 years old. Don´t take it too seriously what characters in the books think. If the POV´s get to be inaccurate so should the historians at the citadel.

The europeans thinking the world was 6 000 years old was actually logical in one way, because that is about how old the big civlizations we know about are. People during the middle ages just assumed that civilization was as old as human kind.

[slant]

yes, apart from Sumerian, there are extremely long life spans in ancient Egyptian and Indian dynasties as well. 

In India all family trees start when time starts, so there is no question of tracing it backwards to so many years ago, it is more about filling in the gaps in the middle to reach the current time, because the starts of these trees are accurate and impossibly ancient. The different reckonings of the dates of the reign of Magadha kings for example, are off by millennia. 

but still, the timelines do seem to be too distorted, the march of civilization does seem to be suspended for thousands of years. The night watch records do seem to point at this. 

[falcotron]

This problem is pervasive in the story. History (including social change, technological advancement, language evolution, etc.) seems to happen at a timescale 10-12x what you'd expect--except for the history of the last 300-400 years, which seems a lot more realistic. I have another thread where I document a whole list of things that are off by the same factor.

Some people try to dismiss this by saying there are hints in the books that some of the dates are wrong, and that the history in the distant past is not really that well documented. But this really doesn't work. Yes, the Andal invasion may have been 3000 years ago rather than 6000, so it's only 6x too long instead of 12x. Yes, the only records we have before the Andal invasion are a smattering of runic inscriptions, so it's only a few millennia that are 6x too slow, not all of history. But a few millennia going 6x too slow isn't an answer.

Maybe the timescales are off by far, far more than any of the hints implied--the Andal invasion wasn't 6000 years before Aegon as we're told, or 3000 as hinted in the story, or even 2000 as some fans claim to have discovered based on more subtle clues, but only 300. But there's absolutely no evidence for that, and it seems pretty unlikely.

Some people draw parallels with real-world civilizations, like the Babylonians inflating their own history by a factor of 10. Except the Maesters have written historical records going back for thousands of years, while the Babylonians had basically no records at all. It's pretty easy to be off by an order of magnitude when you have no information but the memories of living people; it's a lot harder when you have a warehouse full of scrolls written thousands of years ago. Even with the the fragmentary records left by the Egyptians, nobody got their chronology off by more than a factor of 2 or so.

Some people say, "That's what fantasy does, just like Tolkien did". Those people are misunderstanding Tolkien. Tolkien had elves (and, before them, Valar) deliberately preserving the world, keeping it as static as possible for fear it would otherwise degenerate. In other fantasy series, there are recurring cataclysms every 1000 years that mean people spend most of that time just rebuilding to their previous levels and never get ahead, or evil forces that deliberately interfere with cultures, or other explanations. Only hack fantasy writers--of the kind GRRM despises--just copy from Tolkien without understanding him.

So, what other possible explanations are there? Here's everything I can think of:

• GRRM just doesn't understand history.
• GRRM is playing a clever game with something like Fomenko's New Chronology, a crackpot theory of our world's history, where everything we think we know before the late Middle Ages is actually just a series of progressively-more-distorted reflections of the same events. In Planetos terms, that could mean the Andal invasion is just misinterpreted records of Aegon's invasion, and so is the Long Night, and so is the First Men invasion.
• GRRM is deliberately introducing some mystery, but even he hasn't decided what, if anything, it will lead to.
• GRRM has a specific in-universe reason, but he's not planning to reveal it ASoIaF, except by giving hints here and there, as part of building a mysterious and deep world, leaving us wanting more, and leaving himself something to write about in the other stories he plans in the same universe.
• GRRM has a specific in-universe reason that is related to something in the story (e.g., to the explanation for the magical seasons, which he's promised to give us in the last book), but we don't have enough information to figure it out yet.
• GRRM has a specific in-universe reason, and he's left clues that we should have been able to figure out by now.
• GRRM has actually done something more radical/magical than what it so far appears to be. For example, most of the evidence could be explained by positing that history moves normally, except that it was completely frozen for nearly 5000 years.

As much as I like #2 and #7, my actual best guess is #5.

[Beorn Snow]

So, what other possible explanations are there? Here's everything I can think of:

• GRRM just doesn't understand history.
• GRRM is playing a clever game with something like Fomenko's New Chronology, a crackpot theory of our world's history, where everything we think we know before the late Middle Ages is actually just a series of progressively-more-distorted reflections of the same events. In Planetos terms, that could mean the Andal invasion is just misinterpreted records of Aegon's invasion, and so is the Long Night, and so is the First Men invasion.
• GRRM is deliberately introducing some mystery, but even he hasn't decided what, if anything, it will lead to.
• GRRM has a specific in-universe reason, but he's not planning to reveal it ASoIaF, except by giving hints here and there, as part of building a mysterious and deep world, leaving us wanting more, and leaving himself something to write about in the other stories he plans in the same universe.
• GRRM has a specific in-universe reason that is related to something in the story (e.g., to the explanation for the magical seasons, which he's promised to give us in the last book), but we don't have enough information to figure it out yet.
• GRRM has a specific in-universe reason, and he's left clues that we should have been able to figure out by now.
• GRRM has actually done something more radical/magical than what it so far appears to be. For example, most of the evidence could be explained by positing that history moves normally, except that it was completely frozen for nearly 5000 years.

As much as I like #2 and #7, my actual best guess is #5.

Yeah #5 or #4 I´d guess.

[falcotron]

yes, apart from Sumerian, there are extremely long life spans in ancient Egyptian and Indian dynasties as well.

But mythic king lists are not even remotely similar to the king of documentation we supposedly have since the Andal invasion. The historical documents the Sumerians left are less than even the scattered runic inscriptions Sam complains about in the First Men era. If you want to throw out everything from the Age of Heroes and before as pure myth, fine; that still leaves you with thousands of years of people speaking the same unchanging language, building the same kinds of castles and ships, using the same communications techniques, using the same social systems, following the same religion, etc.

But none of that is even remotely similar to a culture leaving written records of a continuous culture in the exact same language people speak and write today.

The Bible is one of the oldest such records we have, and, while the first few chapters are obviously more myth than history, it's pretty close to accurate history to about 2800 years ago, and not hugely far off to about 3200.

Even the Egyptian records, which don't document a continuous civilization but rather three separate civilizations separated by dark ages, in a language that's long since been lost and had to be reconstructed, and with a lot less in the way of surviving complete stories, were still good enough to date things back to about 4500 years ago within a factor of +/- 50% even before modern techniques in archeology and philology.

Even if you add all the plausible-sounding excuses together and stretch them all as far as you can, the history of Andal Westeros is still way, way too long.

[Bennis of the Brown Shield]

Is there anyone else getting annoyed by the unrealistic long time spans in ASoIaF and GoT? I mean, the wall was built 8 000 years ago, and the Night's watch has been around since. House Stark can aslo track their line 8 000 years back in time. If that doesn't sound unrealistic by itself, here's some real world-comparisons:
 

1. The pyramides were built about 5 000 years ago. 8 000 years ago we had like... Jericho? Can you imagine a sworn brotherhood being around since the days when Jericho was built? You know, 5 000 years before the Israelites destroying it according to the biblical story.

 

2. The ancestors of all indo-european people propably lived in present-day Iraq until about 6 000 years ago. Celts, scandinavians, greeks, persians and hindi-speaking people shared ancestors 6 000 years ago. The northerners and the free folk are supposed to have been seperated 8 000 years ago. Their cultures should be as different as the german and the hindi culture. Nobody think Germans and hindi-speaking people belong to the same ethnic group, nor does anyone talking about these two peoples "sharing blood" or anything like that.

 

3. Do I even have to comment about the Stark lineage? No family in the entire world has a lineage as long as that. There are some jewish rabbinic families who claim that they belong to the tribe of Levi, which would make their lineage 3 500 years, but that is very uncertain claims and still not half as old as the Stark claim.

 

Either Martin hasn't thought this time span thing really out, or the history of Westeros is waaay shorter than the inhabitants themselves believe.

 

Besides, how can there be one(1) language in all of seven kingdoms? The only place in Westeros with linguistic diversity is beyond the wall. This doesn't make sense, especially since there was seven independant kingdoms until 300 years ago. Why do the northerners speak common tongue when they weren't even conquered by the andals? The only rational reason should be that they are andals rather than first men, but that doesn't make sense either.

 

The Proto-Indo-Europeans actually are likely to have come from the Pontic Steppe, i.e. present day Ukraine and southern Russia. From there they eventually spread out into Asia and deeper into Europe, possibly because they were the first people to domesticate the horse and invent the wheel. This is the most accepted model for the origins of indo-european languages today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis 

 

Falcotron offers some good possible explanations for the pretty unrealistic time span. 

 

Though I would guess that the real reason is that GRRM just likes big things and big numbers, and adds a lot of this stuff to the series without really thinking through what these things should entail. Some examples.

 

*The Starks are lords of a domain that is like 30% the size of Europe, yet live like they'd be a normal middle ranking noble house in England or Scotland or something (almost as if that had been the inspiration!). 

*The Wall is over 200 meters high, yet people can still shoot arrows at men on top of it, climb it, and generally besiege it much as if it had been a normal wall. 

*Westeros at large is the size of a continent, yet they all speak the same language and there are only really 4 or so distinct ethnic groups. Almost as if it had been a relatively normal sized medieval kingdom. 

*The military campaigns stretch out over extreme distances compared to most historical examples, due to how large Westeros is. For the most blatant example the Ironborn are said to mainly raid the Stepstones during peacetime so that they don't get into conflict with the Iron Throne. That would be like if the Vikings had been able to sustain their piracing culture by only plundering Egypt and Arabia, and not touching anything in between these locations and Scandinavia. Pretty unrealistic when you think about it. 

 

So the incredibly long history is just another part of an overarching theme of huge numbers and sizes of everything, in my opinion. 

[A Bastard Snow]

Morgoth built fortresses that lasted thousands of years.Tens of thousands of years.

[slant]

Even if you add all the plausible-sounding excuses together and stretch them all as far as you can, the history of Andal Westeros is still way, way too long.

yup. It should not be off by so much. It's still too long after compressing the time to 1/10th.

Believe most of your reasons. That there is a magic related reason for this, and that civilization has frozen. The remains of even more ancient civilisations are another clue. 

 

people who say GRRM is doing what Tolkein does, have no idea what Tolkein has done. 

It is complete, accurate history, and one of the most central aspect of the Tolkein Legendarium is the evolution of the languages across time, the exact thing GRRM has seemingly overlooked. 

 

still, find it hard to imagine any kind of mechanism that would keep an entire planet of people suspended in time somewhere between an agricultural and an industrial society for thousands of years 

[falcotron]

Though I would guess that the real reason is that GRRM just likes big things and big numbers, and adds a lot of this stuff to the series without really thinking through what it entails.

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:

Westeros at large is the size of a continent, yet they all speak the same language and there are really only 4 or so distinct ethnic groups. Almost as if it had been a normal sized medieval kingdom.

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.

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?<sup>1

1</sup> Well, I guess I have an answer for that (besides just bad writers). Douglas Adams. He wrote large bursts of unplanned story, and then tried to duct-tape it all together. Which means that some of the ideas that he was obsessed with in one section are completely ignored in others. And that was fine--he never cared whether the different parts of his universe fit together, as long as they all worked on their own, and his style made it possible for him to get away with that gloriously. But I can't picture a writer who works that way spending months carefully plotting history with a pair of collaborators so they can create a detailed in-universe history book...

[The Marquis de Leech]

Martin as an author prefers drama over logic, or in the case of languages, convenience over logic. The time spans of ASOIAF are just one issue among many.

 

Morgoth built fortresses that lasted thousands of years.Tens of thousands of years.

 

You're dealing with supernatural creatures at that point. Not comparable.

[falcotron]

Morgoth built fortresses that lasted thousands of years.Tens of thousands of years.

As I already explained, that's a world that supernatural powers were intentionally keeping static. And at the time you're talking about, it was populated entirely by supernatural people who didn't even have a concept of years except the one they made for themselves by creating magic trees to light the world--humans didn't even exist yet. Time didn't flow the same way.

Some hack writer who vaguely remembers LotR and has heard people talk about the Silmarillion might use Angband as an excuse for Winterfell, but not someone who actually knows anything about Tolkien, as I assume GRRM does.

[slant]

Maybe it helps to look at it from the other way. If the breaking of the Arm of Dorne was the end of the ice age, and the invasion of the First Men can be considered the Bronze age because they had Bronze weapons, then planetos civilization is ahead of earth civilization by about 7000 years

[falcotron]

still, find it hard to imagine any kind of mechanism that would keep an entire planet of people suspended in time somewhere between an agricultural and an industrial society for thousands of years

Other writers have come up with such mechanisms, and I think GRRM is just as creative as most of them.

But really, even Tolkien's Third Age isn't too far away from what you're describing.

[Dragonsmurf]

Morgoth built fortresses that lasted thousands of years.Tens of thousands of years.

Tolkien too has very long time spans, but it's in-universe logic because there are elves that live for thousands of years. Planetosi humans lived for like 200 years, the time span of Westerosi history would be more accurate.

[StarkofWinterfell]

Maybe it helps to look at it from the other way. If the breaking of the Arm of Dorne was the end of the ice age, and the invasion of the First Men can be considered the Bronze age because they had Bronze weapons, then planetos civilization is ahead of earth civilization by about 7000 years

Perhaps so. Our own species was stuck at the hunter gatherer level for tens of thousands of years

[Mithras]

In the real world, dating is the most important problem.

 

Have you ever asked yourself what is the basis for the estimate of the most Egyptologists that the Great Pyramid was built some 4500 years ago for a pharaoh named Khufu?

[Faydra]

We don't have magic and therefore we searched technological advancement instead of sticking with tradition. When a lot of people fight to remain the same they succeed.

[SevasTra82]

I've often thought the same thing and felt it was a tad unrealistic.  I don't think ANY surname can be traced back 10,000 years in real-life.  Even in fantasy, just use common sense.

 

Take the Starks for instance.  They can be traced back 10,000 years.  Really?  So in 10,000 years, *every single generation* had a male heir that had a bunch of kids, with at least 1 male heir (to keep the name alive) for 10k+ years?  There was never a war that wiped them out, or a disease/plague that ravished through their ranks?  Their last name didn't evolve over time, like many surnames in past history?  The same goes with the Boltons, Lannisters etc who can all trace their surname back to the Age of First Men.

 

Something just seems very....off about it all.  Now I realize (and do believe) that the world history that we currently know in the story may be proven false, and that there will be changes to what we know...but I don't think GRRM has set it up to be a major genealogy-type of change.