Unrealistic long time span

[falcotron]

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

How do you get that?

Since you seem to be taking the "traditional" dates, they started off at least 7000 years ahead of us--they were already in the middle of their bronze age when the current interglacial period started, while ours was still 7000 years off. But somehow, in the intervening 12000 years, they went from 7000 years ahead to 700 years behind. Where did the missing 7700 years go? (And if you look at it more carefully, most of that missing time happens during the historical era--after the founding of the Andal kingdoms and the Valyrian Freehold. It somehow took them 5000-6000 years to get from Rome to feudalism.)

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

But it makes sense to be stuck at the hunter-gatherer level; it doesn't make sense to be stuck at the cusp of industrialization. Progress builds on progress. For example, until you have the idea of agriculture, you can't have large settlements, organized religion, technology beyond what one band can keep alive, etc. That's why each era takes exponentially less time to cover about the same amount of social, political, and technological change: the paleolithic age was 100000 years (depending on where you count the start of humanity); the neolithic age about 7000; the bronze age about 2000; and so on through the iron age, the ancient age, the classical age, the postclassical age--all the way up to the space age lasting about 25 years.

Of course there are periodic "dark ages" that break the pattern, but real dark ages are only a century or two long, and nowhere near as "dark" as in popular imagination (except in cases where civilization completely collapses and never recovers until replaced by a newly-arriving civilization, as in central America). No post-stone-age culture is static for anywhere near thousands of years.

[Tucu]

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.

The name seems to be more important than the male blood line. Remember the tale of Bael the Bard, whose bastard son with a Stark was still a Stark and a Lord of Winterfell

[slant]

 

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.

yes, sure, in the way that the progress of technology seems to be suspended

but Tolkein Legendarium does not have the problem of languages and ethnic group evolution also being suspended 

and that is still about 1/3 of the time period since the coming of the first men over the Arm of Dorne

 

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

hmm maybe, but it accelerates pretty fast after agriculture. 

[Faydra]

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

It could be so. 

[StarkofWinterfell]

How do you get that?

Since you seem to be taking the "traditional" dates, they started off at least 7000 years ahead of us--they were already in the middle of their bronze age when the current interglacial period started, while ours was still 7000 years off. But somehow, in the intervening 12000 years, they went from 7000 years ahead to 700 years behind. Where did the missing 7700 years go? (And if you look at it more carefully, most of that missing time happens during the historical era--after the founding of the Andal kingdoms and the Valyrian Freehold. It somehow took them 5000-6000 years to get from Rome to feudalism.)

But it makes sense to be stuck at the hunter-gatherer level; it doesn't make sense to be stuck at the cusp of industrialization. Progress builds on progress. For example, until you have the idea of agriculture, you can't have large settlements, organized religion, technology beyond what one band can keep alive, etc. That's why each era takes exponentially less time to cover about the same amount of social, political, and technological change: the paleolithic age was 100000 years (depending on where you count the start of humanity); the neolithic age about 7000; the bronze age about 2000; and so on through the iron age, the ancient age, the classical age, the postclassical age--all the way up to the space age lasting about 25 years.

Of course there are periodic "dark ages" that break the pattern, but real dark ages are only a century or two long, and nowhere near as "dark" as in popular imagination (except in cases where civilization completely collapses and never recovers until replaced by a newly-arriving civilization, as in central America). No post-stone-age culture is static for anywhere near thousands of years.

It could have been GRRM's reasoning for coming up with his timescale. He maybe thought that we have had our own static periods of history and could explain it away that way.

I still think something else is going on entirely, either a Riverworld type scenario with the Others/CotF acting as world managers to something more far-fetched like the entire planet being a preservation or stage to show off feudal society for an intergalactic civilization. That is if you believe Planetos is in the Thousand Worlds (I sure have a vivid imagination)

[falcotron]

It could have been GRRM's reasoning for coming up with his timescale. He maybe thought that we have had our own static periods of history and could explain it away that way.

But we don't have static periods of history, and GRRM clearly knows enough history to know that.
 

I still think something else is going on entirely, either a Riverworld type scenario with the Others/CotF acting as world managers to something more far-fetched like the entire planet being a preservation or stage to show off feudal society for an intergalactic civilization. That is if you believe Planetos is in the Thousand Worlds (I sure have a vivid imagination)

If we're going science fiction, I'd rather go with Faction Paradox than Riverworld. The Valyrians discovered time travel, and ended up being used by the Faction, so the Celestis retroactively prevented that. The first strike was sending conceptual agents into their culture to subtly manipulate their memetics so that every paradigm shift left them no farther ahead that they started. The second was turning the Faction's own strategy against them: driving the Valyrians mad for magical power to the exclusion of all else (which still lingers in their Targaryen descendants). The more the Faction tried to help them, the worse the feedback loop, until there was no way of preventing the Things Man Was Not Meant to Fuck With horizon (aka, the Doom). The Celestis left the world to its own devices; the Doom happened; there was a brief hiccup when the people who adapted most quickly got a disproportionate advantage (especially since one such people were the Dothraki, who almost destroyed civilization); but since then, history has been on track.

EDIT: But I don't think things are going to be science-fictional at all. I don't believe Planetos is in the Thousand Worlds, much less in some other author's SF universe. At least Lawrence Miles's universe has room for really-sufficiently-advanced technology, but it's still not magic, and I think Planetos magic is real magic, beyond the ken of even super-advanced species who've evolved beyond matter and energy to pure culture.

[Raving Stark the Mad]

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:
 

 

No.  It's a fantasy.  I self-explain it by noting the fact that winters keep the population down, you have a single organization with a strange-hold on education, and there is very little interest in tech progress.  Honestly, I'm more bothered by the problems of scale.  Westeros is the size of Europe but has very "local" feeling politics.  But even THAT doesn't bother me.  Because the verisimilitude is quite good, due mainly to the characterization.  Maybe someone else can build a better feeling world, but I doubt that they would write as good characters.  World building is important, but you have to take it with a grain of salt, or at some point you're going to turn into Noah Antwiler. 

 

Is that you Noah?  Go back under your hole. 

[mediterraneo]

snip

 

 

The name seems to be more important than the male blood line. Remember the tale of Bael the Bard, whose bastard son with a Stark was still a Stark and a Lord of Winterfell

 

Well, even for the name, 8.000 years are really a lot of time.
And Westeros really a big place.
Probably the time is shorter, as some have suggested. There are hints in that sense in Sam's chapters about the lists of commanders of the Night's Watch.
And I bet it will never totally clarified, as we are looking from the perspective of quite ignorant people from a middle age tech level society.
People which had actually no way to measure the age of any object beyond "old", and had to take for good any source they had, unreliable as it may have seemed.

[StarkofWinterfell]

But we don't have static periods of history, and GRRM clearly knows enough history to know that.
 
If we're going science fiction, I'd rather go with Faction Paradox than Riverworld. The Valyrians discovered time travel, and ended up being used by the Faction, so the Celestis retroactively prevented that. The first strike was sending conceptual agents into their culture to subtly manipulate their memetics so that every paradigm shift left them no farther ahead that they started. The second was turning the Faction's own strategy against them: driving the Valyrians mad for magical power to the exclusion of all else (which still lingers in their Targaryen descendants). The more the Faction tried to help them, the worse the feedback loop, until there was no way of preventing the Things Man Was Not Meant to Fuck With horizon (aka, the Doom). The Celestis left the world to its own devices; the Doom happened; there was a brief hiccup when the people who adapted most quickly got a disproportionate advantage (especially since one such people were the Dothraki, who almost destroyed civilization); but since then, history has been on track.

EDIT: But I don't think things are going to be science-fictional at all. I don't believe Planetos is in the Thousand Worlds, much less in some other author's SF universe. At least Lawrence Miles's universe has room for really-sufficiently-advanced technology, but it's still not magic, and I think Planetos magic is real magic, beyond the ken of even super-advanced species who've evolved beyond matter and energy to pure culture.

 

 

If you turn out to not be far off, I am going to give you props. But as for things not turning out to be science fiction, I am not sure GRRM will make it obvious in the text. There have been no hints so far that things are secretly technologically advanced so I don't think he'll pull a deus ex machina and say Valyrian swords are actually lightsabers or something else in that respect. It would be interesting though because you can fit Faction Paradox to the story as well as numerous other universes with a little mental magic.

[Arakan]

What others have already said: drama before logic. Simple as that. Frankly, I don't get why some people think GRRM has a super-sophisticated masterplan for evth. when he obviously doesnt have that. He basically admitted it (gardener).

Yes, maybe he is retconning some stuff (e.g. timescale in AFFC, ADWD) but that again is proof that he didnt have a masterplan.


Just take a look how rather illogical all the scale issues are, esp when it comes to troop movements in the war. Compared to that time is a minor issue.

[Kyll.Ing.]

As an engineer working with building materials, I think one of the worst examples of "way too little happening in way too much time" is when the Shy Maid nearly crashes with a half-submerged wooden tower in Chroyane, which allegedly sunk into the river more than a thousand years prior. The wood is stated to be overgrown with moss, but that would happen in 20-50 years. Wood submerged in water, unless periodically treated and carefully maintained, will rot away completely within 400 years or so. There's absolutely no way a submerged wooden tower - in a flowing river, mind you - would be standing upright for more than a couple of decades at most.

[Arakan]

Indeed, originally (AGOT-ASOS) GRRM was interested in worldbuilding as platform for the story he wanted to tell and only that much. Which is fine. All the other stuff came afterwards when he tried to build a more coherent world.

Time, scale, languages, cultures (Dothraki!) is really not that coherent when looking beneath the superficial.

Everyone knows that the Dothraki or Unsullied are not really badass but GRRM wants us to think so.

[Bennis of the Brown Shield]

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.

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...

 

I thought that Astapori dialect was more due to their language being influenced by what the old Ghiscari spoke, rather than language evolution. 

 

Either way, this was in ACOK. It could easily have been that someone who had read AGOT pointed out to him that it was strange that everyone in Westeros both spoke the same language and seemingly didn't even notice distinct dialects among one another, and he went "shit, too late to change anything in Westeros now. But I can add some of this stuff to the Essos chapters I'm going to write". 

 

As other posters have said, GRRM is no Tolkien. 

[~~~~~~~~~~~~~]

I do not have a problem with a mythical line of people being 8,000 years old.

 

Our own world goes back millions of years and we are only just discovering some things that go back further than we ever knew was possible.  8,000 years is a drop in the bucket really.  I wouldn't say no one's family tree goes back that far, we only have recorded time to go by and that is where the problem lies.

[Kyll.Ing.]

^Well, obviously family trees go back thousands and even millions of years. I mean, everybody has a mother.

 

The fact that it is recorded is the problem, though. In the real world, there are hardly records of anything older than 4000 years. And the keepers of those records only stayed around for a millennium or so. Institutions, families, and even countries are rarely kept in the same state for more than a few hundred years, before succumbing to war, catastrophes or something like that. The Starks managing to keep their records, name and ancestral seat for eight millennia is wildly unrealistic. Keeping the Night's Watch around for equally long is also quite a feat. I mean, not even most religions manage to keep a coherent belief in supernatural events for more than a couple millennia, and the NW is supposedly twice as old as Judaism.

 

 

In a similar vein, if the White Walkers turn out to have any sort of resemblance to the detailed stories told by Old Nan (passed down orally over four hundred generations), I'm going to slam my head into my desk a few times.

[The Wolves]

I don't care that most of the houses and all the great houses are 6,000-10,000 years old I actually like that they're that old. I don't care about the unrealism of this part of the story, I can live with it. Plus it's cool

[Jasta11]

The technology also advances at a glacial pace.

 

By the accounts we get, the First Men were about Bronze Age-era, with no writing on paper but the ability to construct castles and produce bronze weaponry (as well as build the Wall, which is an incredible outlier tech-wise, but maybe it was built by giants/magic so I'll let it slide for now). Westeros today is squarely Late Middle Ages. So using our history, about 2 000 years separate these 2 eras. Yet Westeros has existed for thousands of years more, whenever it's 6 or 8 thousand. It can't be much less if Sam is able to gather the names of more than 750 LCs of the Watch, unless al lthose LCs lived only two years on average or something.

 

And to put this in perspective, 8 000 years is the time it took the human race to go from the very beginnings of civilization, small city-states in Mesopotamia and Turkey, to the modern era. In that timescale, Westeros has merely advanced at a fourth of our pace at best. 6 000 years is a bit more than the time it took to go from the very first organized nations (ancient Egypt) to, again, today.

 

I mean, I could understand some discrepancies due to the harsh winters, but Martin goes even further and has single dynasties and organizations (Watch, Citadel) date into thousands of years. Then, in the mere 3 years where the book series happen, three Great Houses are in danger of extinction, the Watch is almost dismantled, and radical change happens all over the also static Essos. It seems a bit jarring that events in the book series happen at such a rapid pace, when the backstory seems so incredibly static.

[Brian Powers Of Palantíri]

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

Tolkien was a philologist, think I spelled that right, which is someone who studies languages, and their histories and evolution. The point is that Tolkien loved the study of and creation of language, I say George didn't have the knowledge to create a different language for every different group. What Tolkien did in creating the languages in the LotR is the work of an entire lifetime. I believe most everything we have heard about history is flawed in many ways, without a written language everything gets passed down through oral tradition.
It's like a game of telephone played across many generations,(a group sits in a circle, the first person whispers a sentence to someone, and by the time the tale passes through ten peoples whisperings in this way, it is very distorted.)

[A Bastard Snow]

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.

We don't know enough about Planetos lore.For all we know the heart of winter is the place where cold shadows gather.
The Others have been around for a long time I bet they have an epic Citadel in the north.

Also alot of the locations in LoTR are not built by men dwarves or elves.Yet are occupied by them.And you can't exactly Carbon Date WF to know how old it is.

[Arrow of the Morning]

The A Song of Ice and Fire have a unrealistic long time span for a single reason: it would be a hell to do a realistic time span. For example, the fact the Starks ruling the North for thousands of years. A realistic time span would bring several houses ruling the North with some dynasty lasting for 300 years (500 maximum), George would have to make dozens and dozens of northern houses, their sigil and motto, castles, history and genealogies. Try to do it and you will get mad. The "unrealistic long time span" of the books is complex enough.