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Long winters in reality vs long winters in AsoIaF


Cridefea

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Even with kickass preservation, storing 25% of last summer harvest would not help you survive a winter winter, given that on average yearly harvest lets you survive into another year. It would rather suggest that in winter, it is necessary to have extra supplies for few months - but that there will be more harvests/opportunity for food without massive death of population.

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16 hours ago, Raisin(g) Bran 2 Greenseer said:

How would that have worked when the Kingdoms were split?

No idea.

 

12 hours ago, Slaysman said:

It is also known the various regions employ greenhouses to grow food over the winters by utilizing hotsprings.

It is known. 

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21 hours ago, Slaysman said:

I just assume that the people of Westeros have kick ass preservation methods when storing their food. It is also known the various regions employ greenhouses to grow food over the winters by utilizing hotsprings.

Apart from Winterfell and Jon's thoughts on how to grow food in winter, when are greenhouses even mentioned let alone shown to exist?

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1 minute ago, Raisin(g) Bran 2 Greenseer said:

Apart from Winterfell and Jon's thoughts on how to grow food in winter, when are greenhouses even mentioned let alone shown to exist?

In the SSM I posted before.

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On 22/8/2016 at 5:56 PM, Tucu said:

very interesting!

On 22/8/2016 at 6:56 PM, Runaway Penguin said:

In the end I think theat long winters are more a "Cool but too big to work" stuff brought up by GRRM early on before his world was built up more. Won't be the only case (heck, look at the Wall. GRRM himself admitted that he did not really think the 700 feet through and when he checked it up, he realized it is a tad too high).

I agree. It's not easy to build up, in order to preserve storylines

 

On 22/8/2016 at 6:19 PM, Raisin(g) Bran 2 Greenseer said:

How would that have worked when the Kingdoms were split?

 

On 22/8/2016 at 5:43 PM, John Doe said:

Besides the south- like as far south as Highgarden- doesn't have snow normally, so it should be possible to continue getting some food from there, as well as from across the Narrow Sea. Further North, where farming and stock breeding isn't possible except indoors, you have hunting and fishing to help a bit with the supplies, I assume

Indeed. Not only for supplies, but for migration too.

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15 hours ago, Tucu said:

 

15 hours ago, Raisin(g) Bran 2 Greenseer said:

Apart from Winterfell and Jon's thoughts on how to grow food in winter, when are greenhouses even mentioned let alone shown to exist?

In the SSM I posted before.

 

That SSM is actually very useful. It seems that the short answer to our questions is that people starve to death. 

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...which makes the entire premise of North untenable. Heck, North was able to supply a 10k standing army (the Night's Watch) - yeah, we can fantasize about Watch being supplied from southern kingdoms, but the harsh reality is that Watch was always dependant mostly on the Lord of Winterfell/North. So North has to have enough surplus even in winter to feed so many (since Gift is just beyond the wall, climate is the harshest there can be). If the situation was leading to regular starvation and massive extinction every generation por so, there would not be any wildlings N of the Wall and the line against Winter would be across the Neck.

 

EDIT: To add to it, again, the amount of surplus set aside for Winter is laughable if we presume ceaseless winter. 25% of last harvest? Heck, how much was stored for winter from normal harvests in the Middle Ages? Would have  to be at least the same in Central Europe :)

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6 minutes ago, Runaway Penguin said:

...which makes the entire premise of North untenable. Heck, North was able to supply a 10k standing army (the Night's Watch) - yeah, we can fantasize about Watch being supplied from southern kingdoms, but the harsh reality is that Watch was always dependant mostly on the Lord of Winterfell/North. So North has to have enough surplus even in winter to feed so many (since Gift is just beyond the wall, climate is the harshest there can be). If the situation was leading to regular starvation and massive extinction every generation por so, there would not be any wildlings N of the Wall and the line against Winter would be across the Neck.

It would lead to a low population density. And this is what we see in the North and more clearly Beyond the Wall. Very long winters are not common; only two are mentioned since the Conquest.

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16 hours ago, GallowsKnight said:

Heh. I remember that word from highschool

First word to learn :rolleyes:

 

11 hours ago, Tucu said:

It would lead to a low population density. And this is what we see in the North and more clearly Beyond the Wall. Very long winters are not common; only two are mentioned since the Conquest.

not three?

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12 hours ago, Tucu said:

It would lead to a low population density. And this is what we see in the North and more clearly Beyond the Wall. Very long winters are not common; only two are mentioned since the Conquest.

Depends what they mean by long winters then. The 25% increase of storage is good for few months at best.

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25 minutes ago, Runaway Penguin said:

Depends what they mean by long winters then. The 25% increase of storage is good for few months at best.

Tyrion says to Jon that he has lived through 8 or 9 winters. Tyrion is around 26 years old at that point and the summer has lasted for 10 years. Then we have 8 or 9 winters in 16 years. Most of those winters can't be very long.

That 25% only applies to grains IIRC, so it doesn't give a good idea of how much food they actually store for winter. In the SSM it also says that fishing is an important source of food for winter; the world book also mentions that the sea between the Bay of Seals and Ib is the most important fishing region in the known world.

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7 hours ago, Tucu said:

Tyrion says to Jon that he has lived through 8 or 9 winters. Tyrion is around 26 years old at that point and the summer has lasted for 10 years. Then we have 8 or 9 winters in 16 years. Most of those winters can't be very long.

That 25% only applies to grains IIRC, so it doesn't give a good idea of how much food they actually store for winter. In the SSM it also says that fishing is an important source of food for winter; the world book also mentions that the sea between the Bay of Seals and Ib is the most important fishing region in the known world.

Fishing does naught for most of the North (at least sea fishing) - heck, by hte descriptions you have pretty crappy road network even in summer. And ice fishing will not compensate, in the long run.

Since massive depopulation is mentioned only with THE Long Winter, regular long winters have to allow for harvests. So a winter does not shut down the North completely...

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4 hours ago, Runaway Penguin said:

Fishing does naught for most of the North (at least sea fishing) - heck, by hte descriptions you have pretty crappy road network even in summer. And ice fishing will not compensate, in the long run.

Since massive depopulation is mentioned only with THE Long Winter, regular long winters have to allow for harvests. So a winter does not shut down the North completely...

Fishing is a big deal according to GRRM: "The populations along the coast depend on fishing a great deal, and even inland, there is ice fishing on the rivers and on Long Lake". If you look in the official maps, most of the bigger settlements are located next to the coast, rivers or lakes.

Regarding harvest during winters, he says: "Sometimes. It is not something that can be relied on, given the random nature of the seasons, but there are false springs and spirit summers. The maesters try and monitor temperature grand closely, to advise on when to plant and when to harvest and how much food to store."

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On 22/8/2016 at 5:00 AM, Illyrio Mo'Parties said:

Realistically, how long can grain keep?

As long as it is kept in the dark, dry and pest free, dried grain can last indefinitely. There are some grains over five years in my cupboard as we speak. Legumes too. Put an absurdly large supply of mung beans in the cupboard fifteen years ago. Not so large now, but still completely edible.

When it comes to germination, though, after about five years, the number of plants that germinate will drop off more and more every year. Having said that, the actual drop off in the rate of germination depends on the species, and on the treatment of the seeds, as well as the length of time. Still working through some alfalfa purchased the same time as the mung beans. Both still sprout just fine, even though they have just been kept dark and dry in my cupboard, that varies 10-40°C (50-100°F) according to the time of day and year. In 2005 a 2000 year old seed from a date found in Herod the Great's palace at Masada was successfully germinated. It isn't the oldest - the oldest is some narrow leafed campion seeds carbon dated 31,800 years old (give or take 300 years), and the seeds of those plants all germinated, too. The results were published in 2012. Three important things though: 1/ The seeds were found in a squirrel hibernation burrow more than 100ft below the permafrost, in Siberia - the tunnels to them had been sealed with frozen river-silt and never unfrozen, so they had been kept dry and at a fairly even cold temperature of -7 °C (-19°F) . 2/ They used tissue culture to grow the seedlings from placental tissue cut from some of the seeds in vitro. None of the whole seeds they attempted to grow germinated. 3/ They chose that particular species because the modern version of this alpine wildflower shows an impressive ability to germinate and grow at the slightest provocation. Kind of has to, to survive in the climate. And the ancient seeds proved even more impressive.

All in all, the Eyrie in winter is a better place to keep seed than my cupboards. Barley, wheat, rye can keep hundreds of years and remain viable. Not so much onions, carrots, beets. King Tommen's decree on beets might become law after a ten year winter, if he survives. The things that bother me about the Eyrie granaries are a/ Condensation, in thaws or just from having the stone of one side of the granery soaking up what winter sun there was. I'm assuming the graineries are cut out of the rock, like the ones at Masada, with the grain either winched in and out from a narrow opening at the top, or, like a modern silo, winched up to the top, but acessed from the bottom, somewhere around the bottom of those steep entrance stairs. Deeper into the mountainside would be better, but if that is the only winch they have... b/  How will they access the Eyrie, and the food in it, except after the thaw, when the path to it becomes accessible again, assuming there have been no major rock slides to clear away, and that the narrow saddle hasn't cracked away completely. In both cases, there is a risk that frost and thawing might crack a granary, which could destroy the whole contents when the snow melts, or open it up to weevils, or birds. Also I'm hopeing their potted meat doesn't grow (anaerobic) botulism when it warms up after the thaw (it depends on how perfectly sterile the potting process was in the first place). 

The Eyrie granaries don't seem to separate seed corn from grain for trade and eating. At least they are up high, and hopefully not in contact with the earth, with no way for mice to get in. Or damp.

Spoiler

Winds of Winter

Spoiler

Lord Nestor Royce's granaries I don't have so much hope for - they are at the bottom of the mountain, where the precipitation ends up and the drainage isn't so good, where the climate is milder and "The vaults were large and dark and filthy."(TWoW, Alayne I) - it is the filth that bothers me, and that they are vaults, and that they descend into the vaults. Perhaps the grain is kept in damp-proof bins with legs, to keep them off the floor so the vermin can't get in, and tight lids, so they can put a lit candle-stub on top to create a low oxygen  environment that weevils can't survive in.  I suppose the Eyrie granaries are not exactly temperature-controlled silos with frictionless linings, although they seem to me to be a lot closer to that than the ones at the Gates of the Moon, that they are depending on to see them through winter.

 

Castle granaries were often built like the Winterfell library tower. The grain was winched to the top, and an external stone staircase to the first floor (or second floor, if you are American - the floor above the ground floor) where the grain could be accessed from. That kept it high and dry. Especially dry. Damp cool conditions are great for breeding Ergot, a fungus that looks like the grain. So much so, that until the 1830's, it was believed to be a natural part of the rye grain.  It contains mycotoxins that accumulate in the body of people who eat them, and cause 'the holy fire' or 'St Anthony's fire' (sometimes some other saint's fire.) Apart from the headaches, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, there is also the dry gangrene, where the extremities will die and drop off if left alone, but should be cut off to avoid it spreading.

The 'fire' comes from the agonising sensation of the gangrene-affected appendages. In addition, there are the involuntary convulsions, the mania, psychosis, hallucinations and delirium. Ergot is the base LSD is synthesised from. Ergotism tended to occur in epidemics, when everyone has no choice but to eat grain with a toxic amount of ergot in it. Some historians propose it was responsible for the bewitchment symptoms that prompted the Salem witch trials. Early in this century there was an epidemic in Ethiopia due to contaminated barley for famine relief. It has also been retrospectively blamed for the Dancing Plauge of 1518.

When Catelyn views the Vale in the Autumn she sees fields of summer wheat, corn, and barley. The wheat and barley are susceptible to ergot, although rye is the grain that it hid in best. Corn doesn't hold ergot, but is susceptible to aflatoxin, that has similar deadly effects. And the toxins can be transmitted through the milk of animals that eat it, and they get sick from it, too.

But all we have seen in Westeros so far are summer crops, brought in at harvest, to get them through winter. In feudal England, the big crops, the ones that most of the population got most of their calories from, were planted in the fall, just before the frost rose, where they would be dormant or grow very slowly in the cold earth until the thaw, when the soil would warm and the frost-melt would water it and it would germinate.

When Burns wrote "the best-laid schemes o' mice an' men/ gang aft agley"  he was a plowman, sowing fields in the autumn, to plant winter wheat, as was the narrator in his poem. Burns crops failed so badly he resorted to selling poetry to make a living. From Yorkshire northwards, successful farmers did not rely on wheat. It gets too cold, the risk of a hard frost after the thaw is too great. You can see it in the regional breads: mixing the barley, rye and oats.with their wheaten flour when making bread. Barley gets progressively harder to farm the colder the winters are. In the Scottish Highlands,  people planted a little rye and mostly lived on oatcakes and sowers rather than bread.

As soon as they harvested their winter wheat in the spring, farmers would usually get another crop of wheat in, to grab the spring rains before the summer dried everything out. This would be a smaller crop (the warmer, drier weather causing it to go to seed before it had grown as well as the winter one), but a higher protein flour.

GRRM has not really thought through the botanical consequences of his seasons. His trees seem to grow and flower just like they do in the places where seasons happen like clockwork. If you look at the flora of deserts, tropical flora, alpine and high altitudes, you get a better idea of the way plants behave when they can't depend on the weather. The idea that 25%, or 5% of a harvest, should be enough to get them through is laughable - for a start, if the current demand in local and trade economy is 75% of the harvest, you wouldn't need to be a maester to see that there is not enough land under cultivation for the people that are living off it NOW, never mind winter is coming. These maesters seem to be working from a modern, industrialized, continuous global agricultural trade, only without the storage and transport mechanisms. Also, what were these maesters telling people, for the last ten years, that barely two turns from winter, they start thinking of putting some by for the winter. Or are these endless feasts people have been having a clue that Westerosi hibernate, like bears. That in the end, it will be just Sam and the Manderleys, belting up their skirts of skin, so they don't trip over them.

Also, in real life, people (or at least, prudent farmers) spent their summers building bigger barns, tried to keep five years worth of hay on hand at all times. Cooks began their summer days sniffing jars and inspecting bladders (they used the bladders of sheep to create a vacuum seal that adjusted to changes in temperature and humidity, although they had to be kept wet, or they would shrink and crack, hence the need to check) and planning their menus according to what needed using most urgently. Farmers did eat better in Autumn, and food became cheap in the towns, because once their stores were full to bursting, there was a surplus. Note, after the graineries and larders have been filled, they start distributing the surplus. Likewise those huge yields of late summer and autumn milk, about 4 gallons per day per cow (half that of a modern cow) are not going to last forever, so there is lots of cheesemaking, butter salting, whey and yogurt and buttermilk producing, while they enjoy fresh butter while they still can. And they know the hens will soon stop laying, so eggs are pickled, or submerged in oil or clarified butter or lard, to keep some a little longer.

In North America during the Jefferson administration, I think 1803-05, and at the same time in Australia, the furious peach-orchard plantings of previous, leaner years, suddenly bore fruit, with orchardists from both, including Jefferson himself iirc, boasting back to the starving urban poor of London that fall, that fruit was so plentiful in this utopia they had created, that most of the peaches ended up as mast for the hogs. And later they boasted the infinite superiority of the hams from those hogs, sweetened with honey from the peach blossom, laid up in such profusion as to see them through to next mid-summer.

Of course, they were doing the new and improved agricultural methods, four field rotation, new types of ploughs, animals wintering in heated barns, tropical fruits grown in glasshouses, but the older methods of food preservation and storage,and the older idea that if you had land (no matter how little) you lived primarily on what you could grow on it, rather than wasting money on buying produce you couldn't be so sure about (and justly, there were no laws on food adulteration until about 1863, and even then, they were not that effective) Still, I don't think GRRM knows or cares about even some very basic things about food storage and agriculture. For example, in the autumn, the summer crops are harvested, and the fields all get ploughed. In a rural enviornment, all that bare earth is striking.

I know its not fair to compare GRRM with Austen, but really, Ch. 10 of Persuasion is one of the most exact descriptions of late Autumn in a 'riverlands' climate, that you could hope to read. Just half a sentence:

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another half mile of gradual ascent through large enclosures, where the ploughs at work, and the fresh made path spoke the farmer counteracting the sweets of poetical despondence, and meaning to have spring again

As they climb a hill to the hedgerow where the hero despicably offers a hazelnut (the blackberries being long gone) to the wrong girl. Contrast with:

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Jaime had given stern commands that no man was to depart the column without his leave. Elsewise, he knew he would have bored young lordlings racing through the fields, scattering livestock and trampling down the crops.There were still cows and sheep to be seen near the city; apples on the trees and berries in the brush, stands of barleycorn and oats and winter wheat, wayns and oxcarts on the road. Farther afield, things would not be so rosy.(AFfC, Ch.27 Jaime III)

Then Lew comes up with his helmutful of blackberries, which are offered first to Jaime, then shared around the crew.

You can see how GRRM's focus is firmly on the social structure and social interaction - has been since the fifth sentence of the prologue of Game of Thrones. He doesn't care that winter wheat is sown in the late fall, that the most plentiful supply of food in a mostly rural society is never going to be found closer to the city. You could point out that Jane Austen's seasons run like clockwork, have the neo-classical precision and balance of a Mozart string quartet, while in Westeros, nobody really knows if they are at the beginning, middle or end of autumn.Fair point.  But if you suggested that clearly, Jaime is travelling through the riverlands at an earlier part of autumn, when it was time to collect berries rather than nuts, I disagree. It is just that GRRM's food and agriculture is a mish-mash of stuff of all seasons. When he arrives at  Darry,

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Jaime wondered how many sausages his cousin had laid by and how he intended to feed the sparrows once they were gone. They will be eating rats by winter, unless they can get a harvest in. This late in autumn, the chances of another harvest were not good.(AFfC, Ch.30 Jaime IV)

Well, no, rat (and mouse) populations actually explode in the autumn (due to all that grain lying around in the fields and on the threshing floor, and along the roads where the waynes transport it) and drop off dramatically in the winter. And Jaime is worried about sausages? Seriously, the sausage making animals should still be alive, guzzling the stubble and gleanings for that extra layer of fat that makes a proper sausage. Get another litter out of them, while there is still mast. Let Lady Amerei worry about the sausages, and just bother about bringing peace to the riverlands, Jaime.  And yes, once the reaping is done, it is time to plow, and to sow, because even if you don't know when or if the next harvest will come, there is an empty field there, and while you might not get a crop if you sow them, if you don't plant what you want to grow there, its 100% certain nature will fill it with things you don't or can't eat.

Once he has done his business in the riverlands, Jaime makes his way back through the area, and sees:

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Snow in the riverlands. If it was snowing here, it could well be snowing on Lannisport as well, and on King’s Landing. Winter is marching south, and half our granaries are empty. Any crops still in the fields were doomed. There would be no more plantings, no more hopes of one last harvest.(AFfC, Ch.44 Jaime VII)

So, no, it was not earlier in the autumn than Jane Austen's nutting expedition, if anything it was later.

At Darry, Lady Amerei serves bean-and-bacon soup. It is popular everywhere, from Cersei's table in Kings Landing, to the Wall. In real life, it was the staple food of feudal peasants, and the late summer and autumn was the only time of the year they were less likely to eat it, because there were other things available. In winter, it would become the only thing, and by spring, the last of the bacon. Most likely, from a solitary hog - the lords restricted how much livestock their peasants could have, lest they overgraze the commons or lay waste to their neighbours crops. This had to feed the whole family from before Xmas, through the three months, three weeks and three days until the sow farrowed in spring, (so there was a lot more beans than bacon) and the way it was consumed was a lesson in thrift. The big cuts would become hams, rubbed, smoked, and left to cure for at least two months before starting on them. Smaller cuts would be left to age for roasts and maybe brined to make Jambon hams, which cure a little faster. Walnut sized bits of meat would be made into pickled pork, and slightly larger pieces made into pies just before Xmas, to keep (according to 17th and 18th c. recipe books) for six weeks to three months, thanks to the lard or jelly poured in through the top. Just open the pie crust, take out today's bit of meat, close it, pour in a bit more fat, 'an excellent keeping pie'. Maybe, if there is not the smallest air pocket, nor the slightest crack in the pastry case. The skin and the trotters of course made the magical preserving jelly. The jelly was also used for brawns and souse. Then the sausages (with large lumps of fat), and whatever blood and tiny scraps left over, were turned into mince pies, with the addition of apples that were starting to soften, and some candied peel, and currents. For Christmas there would usually be beef, from the calf that was killed to keep a milch cow in milk. Or mutton, if you didn't have the pasturage for cows. This was not only important for the roast, but for that quintessential Christmas dish, plum pottage. In the medieval, this was a savoury stew of minced meat and oats and/or pease, with spices and currents. Stuffed in intestines, like a sausage, it was a plum pudding.

Anyway,  I don't see this kind of frugality and good management in Westeros. And if Bowan Marsh is not a big fat liar, he is the worst steward, and ought to become a ranger. A naked ranger. Still, he is part of the general pattern of autumn idleness and wastage that we see in cooks, goodwives, cottagers and stewards all over Westeros in summer and autumn, so I don't anticipate much improvement over the Westros winter. Not that it matters, really. Most of us aren't reading for the food descriptions, after all.

Sometimes, I'm not sure if it is ignorance or deliberate. For instance, the blue winter roses - is he talking about Hellebore, or roses? The illustrators (bar one or two) vastly prefer roses, modern double and quadruple-flowered roses, such as might be grown in a greenhouse. Hellebore seems a more likely choice for Lyanna's crown of love and beauty, but it could survive outside the glass gardens in Winterfell, might even flower in a chink on the Wall. Not a rare prize that Bael might request from the glass gardens of Winterfell.

Maybe he is not confining himself to one species. Black Hellebore (the one with the blue roses) was used by herbalists to treat paralysis, gout and insanity, also as a purgative, for nausea, constipation, worms. Also to summon daemons. And to cause miscarriages. White Hellebore was used to treat gout, and cholera, but mostly as a poison. The Romans put it on the tips of their arrows. Normal roses are edible, regardless of colour. Good source of vitamin C.

Apart from the winter wheat, that in Westros is being trampled in the fields by war horses, if it isn't being harvested, or left to rot in the field, the other major crop medieval farmers grew over the winter in real life was vetch. Vetches are nitrogen-fixing legumes, that provide lentil-like high protein peason. They were the bitter herbs used in the first passover (from the food they ate, we could guess the first passover took place in February or March). They also provides hay and silage for animals, and the pease contains a lot of lysine (an essential amino acid wheat is short on), making pease and bread able to supply 'complete' protein, as long as a person ate enough. They would provide green pasture in late winter/early spring, and some varieties could be eaten as a green food or tuber by humans in spring.

They have very colourful flowers (often white or purple, but every colour of the rainbow) in spring.  The peas/lentils can be harvested in the summer, and either ploughed back into the soil as a nitrogen fertilizer, or turned over to grazing animals who will do the ploughing for you, and add their manure. There are literally thousands of types of vetches, and most parts of the plant can be eaten. While some vetches can have toxins in some parts, or under some conditions - for instance, after severe frosts, most were edible most of the time. The peas (or beans) dried and stored well, to provide food all winter. Together these were the two staple crops used in three field rotation (wheat, vetch, fallow), and these two crops were around 80% of the calories in the diet of about 80% of the population in the 13th century. Winter crops. But nobody seems to be sowing winter crops in Westeros.

The 14th was the worst century, though, in no small part thanks to the weather. It started with the end of the medieval warming period (well, really, that started petering out around 1275), but the reliably warm summer that had characterized the last four centuries didn't come in 1300, so there were crop failures everywhere, and they were just heralding in the Little Ice Age - not a real ice age, but a long period of comparatively cool summers, bitterly cold winters, and unpredictable springs, that reached it's nadir in Shakespeare's era, and that Europe only climbed out of around the time Dickens died, in the mid-Victorian era.

At the start of the 14th century, the population had grown and had grown dependant on the winter crops of wheat and beans, and the feudal system had become the only way of supplying the volume of wheat and beans needed to keep a sufficient number of serfs bodies and souls together while they sowed the next year's crop.

The mild weather of the medieval warming period (about 800-1275), had made this a very successful system for producing bulk food, and helped the large landholders control their serfs by controlling the small allocation of the land they grew their subsistence on, and the food storage and processing (increasingly the milling and storage was farmed off to the monasteries, who also took their cut), and the dole of food in hard times (also farmed out to the church, in exchange for land). The Lord also determined the amount and type of labour serfs had to provide his fields, and when, in order to be left to farm their own the rest of the time. In Iceland, they grew wheat (and barley) in the warming period, but that stopped by the fourteenth century. They only started again this century.

Iceland's traditional cuisine seems to be a good model in some ways for the North in the dead of winter. They kept and milked goats and sheep (and cows, but not so many). They made skyr, and sour butter (fresh butter can keep a few months, salted butter a few months more, clarified butter for years, but cultured butter keeps indefinitely). They used the sour whey from the skyr to make pickled meat. They also, famously, would ferment shark and skate. They also ate lots of fish, and birds like puffins, cormorants, geese, that fed on fish, and their eggs. Also the hard, dried sausage like the ones Crasters wives made. Vegetables - not so much, seaweed, moss, some crowberries to stave off scurvy, if they were lucky enough to find any (or maybe dry some, or preserve some, in autumn). The Danes brought stockfish (wind-dried cod) and salt fish, turnips, rutabaga, potatoes (these can be stored in earth, below the frost line, for up to 8 months, and probably more, if the weather continued cold enough long enough), carrots and cabbage (which can be pickled in whey to last for years). Bones and cartilage skin and sinew of animals or fish can be boiled in whey until its soft enough to eat. Maybe, if they were very lucky, a whale would beech, or (in the spring) they would be able to lure away a juvenile whale and kill it. They didn't have the boats or the technology to kill mature whales, or make a habit of killing whales.

However, they were dependant on their small milking animals getting the grass, so they could get all their whey for their lactic-preseved meats. By grass, I mean vetches and mosses as well as proper grasses. And even more than grass, they needed wood for fuel, to survive the winter. With glass gardens they could grow berrys, tomatoes, cucumber in the winter like the Russians do (although the technology to make sheet glass, suitable for greenhouses, was very much of the industrial-era), but even then they need a source of heat to trap under the glass to grow them.  Iceland used to have forests of birch, rowen, aspen and pine. 40% of the land was covered in it (now <2%). It still has lots of volcanoes, and geothermally heated springs, (and we know that Winterfell and Dragonstone at least have these too) but if the weather got so cold there was no grass for the animals, the humans would not survive them long.

If winter in Westeros is more Antarctic than subarctic, no grass, no access to geothermal, no or little access to wood, or coal, or peat, or dung, there would still be some chance of survival for those near the sea, where there are fish and sea birds, and seaweed. The inuit were able to survive on these, as well as icelanders. And Shackleton et al managed to survive a two years in Antartica on only enough food for a season (in fact, somewhat less, due to a couple of misadventures), and, when it ran out six months before their ordeal was over, they managed to catch and store enough penguin and seal meat to last them to within the week of their rescue (Frank Wild estimated it would take a month for Shackleton to get back to them and he had refused to stockpile food on the basis that Shackleton Would Prevail. Which he did. But it took him three months, because WWI, and those last two months were the dead of winter, and the penguins and seals who had, when they first left the Endurance, come flocking to see what this was now, wouldn't go anywhere near the men any more. They all survived (the men, that is), although Lewis Rickinson had had a heart attack, and Perce Blackborow's left foot had to be amputated. But they were in the warmer parts of Antartica, and half that time it was Summer, and they had less than four months of total darkness. And there were puppies killed. And Mrs Chippy. And there were only 28 of them (not counting the dogs or the cat), and food distribution was scrupulously equitable.

The 1300's in general were not like that. When the cooling climate produced reduced yields and false springs and drenching spring storms and black ice made crops fail, the result was the lowest nutrition, century on century, that feudal serfs had ever had (and it wasn't that great to start with, and the poorest - eg. widows and their children, and the aged, copped it worst). That was just softening them up for a series of real famines, including the great famine of 1315-1317, or 1315-1322, depending on where you lived. And that was just softening them up for the plague. During this century starvation and desperation forced serfs to move, even as their landlords attempted to make them stay and starve, or die of plague.

The sweet profits the lords had enjoyed were reduced, by the decrease in production, and by their participation in the hundred years wars, and the resultant higher taxes, paid at the rates per head determined by census records of serf populations and crop yields that were based on the 'good' years at the beginning of the century, before 60% of the population (disproportionately the serfs) had died of plague. Something had to give, and when there were so few surviving workers it didn't look like the wealthy would be able to sow a decent crop, let alone harvest one, the labour shortages gave serfs more bargaining power, and more mobility, as the non-free, law abiding serfs had died when their landlords had nothing to sustain them, the rest felt more or less free to move on to work for

It would be overstating it to say that the winters of the 14th century ended the feudal system (which wasn't properly put to an end until the aftermath of Word War One), but it did soften the system up a lot, enabling peasants to organise and revolt against landowners that tried to force them to stay and starve, as per the King's decree, when the other lords were enticing them away to more productive country with living wages, and offering them freedom, and hundred year leases of farms big enough to support them and their family for generations, in return for low rents (in the hope that they would breed up and supply the local lord with a good, cheap labour force when he needed it, and in the knowledge that all that land would lay in waste if he didn't). Those labour laws did give the smallfolk some explicit rights as well - for instance, servants got hired/sacked/paid each year at Michaelmas. If they didn't like their situation they had that opportunity to leave, legally. Likewise, if they were not paid. Rents were paid at that time as well, and tithes for the church (at the height of Autumn, when they could best afford them), and there was a certain security for those that couldn't make the rent in the middle of winter or spring, that they wouldn't be evicted until after summer.

And wages went up anyway, allowing the development of a renaissance middle-class, unlanded but not subsistent, able to form strong guilds and exist without dependence on the patronage of a single landowner, or even, on the patronage of which several landowners depended (eg. the Worshipful Company of Brewers). The Lords and the Church still held most of the land, the wealth, and the power, and the climate was still not as it used to be, but conditions for the other 80% had improved enough to at least establish the mythical era of Merrie Olde England, with plump freedmen and farmers wives swilling nutbrown ale and eating insane amounts of meat, and while it wasn't strictly the reality, things did get comparatively better for peasants, as can be seen by the decline of serfdom, and the steady growth of the population, until the 18th century, with industrialisation, inclosure and the black laws, and later, the new poor laws, pushed the agricultural working class back into starving indigence for the sake of their landlord's improved farming methods and political economy.

So it kind of makes sense for GRRM to concentrate more on the social and symbolic aspects of food, and simply cherrypick lots of real-life inspirations of famine and plague, to concatenate into the long winter, concentrating on his social causes rather than bending his brain to the impossible task of making the physical causes plausible.

And with his strange seasons, he gives himself the option of throwing in a cheeky thaw, enabling some southerners to get a crop in. If they can get their agricultural act together. It also allows some surprise action. One thing about Winter in the real world, it marks the end of the fighting season. (It is no accident the first Thanksgiving took place around midsummer - it was a celebration after a battle, and the war season, no matter what culture, is always the time when food is most plentiful, and crops require the least care).

It is hard to imagine how the action is going to be kept up in the next book, if he is in any way realistic. The lousy roads of Westeros become impassable, everyone bunkers down for the season, no more Brienne travelogues. The firths freeze up, leaving boats stuck in the ice, so no Ironborn invasions, no return of the Iron Bank, no more sellsword companies, and Dany's Dothraki hoard can't cross the poison water. No more endless feasts, except of course at Yule. No more siege warfare. In winter, the forces waiting at the gate, exposed in the field always lose, as crusaders have proved over and over. (and maybe we find out that Mace's siege of Storm's End was a lot tougher to maintain than he made it appear. Hopefully, we also learn that in the South they have mastered the basics of crop storage and food security. That those waynes of produce that came to Kings Landing with Margaery were only the surfeit of a long and bountiful summer, and they got a good price for them too.)

Given it is already snowing in the Riverlands and Kings Landing, Essos, the southern part of it, and Slavers Bay, is our only hope for action, really. But note that it too is temperate. It too is heading into winter.  Even Southyros seems to me to be a suspiciously Northern kind of south, more subtropical than tropical. More like the top of North Africa, or the bottom of North America. Nobody seems to have heard of any place that is always-summer (ie tropical), or places that enjoy endless summer days when the long night descends on Westeros. And neither the Northerners, nor the wildlings North of the Wall, not even the Thenns, have mentioned that they enjoyed a midnight sun in the recent past, or there were endless summer days with only short nights, in the memory of any character. Which kind of hints that, for all the ice and stuff, they are not in the kind of latitude where one would expect a long night to descend, that the long night has no natural cause.

Planetos is a very odd place. Sometimes, I think we might be misled as to where the polar regions of Planetos are. That maybe the chilled wastes of the North are that way because there are Ice Dragon slumbering there, rather than because the far north is above the 60th parallel. Maybe if it woke and flew to Essos, Yi-Ti would turn to frozen wastes instead. Or a false spring happens when they turn in their sleep and send their chill breath the other way. There is a lot of foreshadowing that indicates there are some kind of shadow-dragon made stone, that Melisandre believes she can revive, and possibly a clutch of dragon eggs as well. Maybe they, or the volcanic activity that brings them into existence, will provide the warmth needed to grow a crop or at least to stay alive a little longer when the food is almost exhausted. GRRM has denied the irregular seasons have a hard science cause, and hinted they will have a magical resolution so maybe the winter will end abruptly thanks to magic. And of course, combining ice with fire gives tepid water, just the right sort for watering crops.

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13 minutes ago, Walda said:

As long as it is kept in the dark, dry and pest free, dried grain can last indefinitely. There are some grains over five years in my cupboard as we speak. Legumes too. Put an absurdly large supply of mung beans in the cupboard fifteen years ago. Not so large now, but still completely edible.

When it comes to germination, though, after about five years, the number of plants that germinate will drop off more and more every year. Having said that, the actual drop off in the rate of germination depends on the species, and on the treatment of the seeds, as well as the length of time. Still working through some alfalfa purchased the same time as the mung beans. Both still sprout just fine, even though they have just been kept dark and dry in my cupboard, that varies 10-40°C (50-100°F) according to the time of day and year. In 2005 a 2000 year old seed from a date found in Herod the Great's palace at Masada was successfully germinated. It isn't the oldest - the oldest is some narrow leafed campion seeds carbon dated 31,800 years old (give or take 300 years), and the seeds of those plants all germinated, too. The results were published in 2012. Three important things though: 1/ The seeds were found in a squirrel hibernation burrow more than 100ft below the permafrost, in Siberia - the tunnels to them had been sealed with frozen river-silt and never unfrozen, so they had been kept dry and at a fairly even cold temperature of -7 °C (-19°F) . 2/ They used tissue culture to grow the seedlings from placental tissue cut from some of the seeds in vitro. None of the whole seeds they attempted to grow germinated. 3/ They chose that particular species because the modern version of this alpine wildflower shows an impressive ability to germinate and grow at the slightest provocation. Kind of has to, to survive in the climate. And the ancient seeds proved even more impressive.

All in all, the Eyrie in winter is a better place to keep seed than my cupboards. Barley, wheat, rye can keep hundreds of years and remain viable. Not so much onions, carrots, beets. King Tommen's decree on beets might become law after a ten year winter, if he survives. The things that bother me about the Eyrie granaries are a/ Condensation, in thaws or just from having the stone of one side of the granery soaking up what winter sun there was. I'm assuming the graineries are cut out of the rock, like the ones at Masada, with the grain either winched in and out from a narrow opening at the top, or, like a modern silo, winched up to the top, but acessed from the bottom, somewhere around the bottom of those steep entrance stairs. Deeper into the mountainside would be better, but if that is the only winch they have... b/  How will they access the Eyrie, and the food in it, except after the thaw, when the path to it becomes accessible again, assuming there have been no major rock slides to clear away, and that the narrow saddle hasn't cracked away completely. In both cases, there is a risk that frost and thawing might crack a granary, which could destroy the whole contents when the snow melts, or open it up to weevils, or birds. Also I'm hopeing their potted meat doesn't grow (anaerobic) botulism when it warms up after the thaw (it depends on how perfectly sterile the potting process was in the first place). 

The Eyrie granaries don't seem to separate seed corn from grain for trade and eating. At least they are up high, and hopefully not in contact with the earth, with no way for mice to get in. Or damp.

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Lord Nestor Royce's granaries I don't have so much hope for - they are at the bottom of the mountain, where the precipitation ends up and the drainage isn't so good, where the climate is milder and "The vaults were large and dark and filthy."(TWoW, Alayne I) - it is the filth that bothers me, and that they are vaults, and that they descend into the vaults. Perhaps the grain is kept in damp-proof bins with legs, to keep them off the floor so the vermin can't get in, and tight lids, so they can put a lit candle-stub on top to create a low oxygen  environment that weevils can't survive in.  I suppose the Eyrie granaries are not exactly temperature-controlled silos with frictionless linings, although they seem to me to be a lot closer to that than the ones at the Gates of the Moon, that they are depending on to see them through winter.

 

Castle granaries were often built like the Winterfell library tower. The grain was winched to the top, and an external stone staircase to the first floor (or second floor, if you are American - the floor above the ground floor) where the grain could be accessed from. That kept it high and dry. Especially dry. Damp cool conditions are great for breeding Ergot, a fungus that looks like the grain. So much so, that until the 1830's, it was believed to be a natural part of the rye grain.  It contains mycotoxins that accumulate in the body of people who eat them, and cause 'the holy fire' or 'St Anthony's fire' (sometimes some other saint's fire.) Apart from the headaches, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, there is also the dry gangrene, where the extremities will die and drop off if left alone, but should be cut off to avoid it spreading.

The 'fire' comes from the agonising sensation of the gangrene-affected appendages. In addition, there are the involuntary convulsions, the mania, psychosis, hallucinations and delirium. Ergot is the base LSD is synthesised from. Ergotism tended to occur in epidemics, when everyone has no choice but to eat grain with a toxic amount of ergot in it. Some historians propose it was responsible for the bewitchment symptoms that prompted the Salem witch trials. Early in this century there was an epidemic in Ethiopia due to contaminated barley for famine relief. It has also been retrospectively blamed for the Dancing Plauge of 1518.

When Catelyn views the Vale in the Autumn she sees fields of summer wheat, corn, and barley. The wheat and barley are susceptible to ergot, although rye is the grain that it hid in best. Corn doesn't hold ergot, but is susceptible to aflatoxin, that has similar deadly effects. And the toxins can be transmitted through the milk of animals that eat it, and they get sick from it, too.

But all we have seen in Westeros so far are summer crops, brought in at harvest, to get them through winter. In feudal England, the big crops, the ones that most of the population got most of their calories from, were planted in the fall, just before the frost rose, where they would be dormant or grow very slowly in the cold earth until the thaw, when the soil would warm and the frost-melt would water it and it would germinate.

When Burns wrote "the best-laid schemes o' mice an' men/ gang aft agley"  he was a plowman, sowing fields in the autumn, to plant winter wheat, as was the narrator in his poem. Burns crops failed so badly he resorted to selling poetry to make a living. From Yorkshire northwards, successful farmers did not rely on wheat. It gets too cold, the risk of a hard frost after the thaw is too great. You can see it in the regional breads: mixing the barley, rye and oats.with their wheaten flour when making bread. Barley gets progressively harder to farm the colder the winters are. In the Scottish Highlands,  people planted a little rye and mostly lived on oatcakes and sowers rather than bread.

As soon as they harvested their winter wheat in the spring, farmers would usually get another crop of wheat in, to grab the spring rains before the summer dried everything out. This would be a smaller crop (the warmer, drier weather causing it to go to seed before it had grown as well as the winter one), but a higher protein flour.

GRRM has not really thought through the botanical consequences of his seasons. His trees seem to grow and flower just like they do in the places where seasons happen like clockwork. If you look at the flora of deserts, tropical flora, alpine and high altitudes, you get a better idea of the way plants behave when they can't depend on the weather. The idea that 25%, or 5% of a harvest, should be enough to get them through is laughable - for a start, if the current demand in local and trade economy is 75% of the harvest, you wouldn't need to be a maester to see that there is not enough land under cultivation for the people that are living off it NOW, never mind winter is coming. These maesters seem to be working from a modern, industrialized, continuous global agricultural trade, only without the storage and transport mechanisms. Also, what were these maesters telling people, for the last ten years, that barely two turns from winter, they start thinking of putting some by for the winter. Or are these endless feasts people have been having a clue that Westerosi hibernate, like bears. That in the end, it will be just Sam and the Manderleys, belting up their skirts of skin, so they don't trip over them.

Also, in real life, people (or at least, prudent farmers) spent their summers building bigger barns, tried to keep five years worth of hay on hand at all times. Cooks began their summer days sniffing jars and inspecting bladders (they used the bladders of sheep to create a vacuum seal that adjusted to changes in temperature and humidity, although they had to be kept wet, or they would shrink and crack, hence the need to check) and planning their menus according to what needed using most urgently. Farmers did eat better in Autumn, and food became cheap in the towns, because once their stores were full to bursting, there was a surplus. Note, after the graineries and larders have been filled, they start distributing the surplus. Likewise those huge yields of late summer and autumn milk, about 4 gallons per day per cow (half that of a modern cow) are not going to last forever, so there is lots of cheesemaking, butter salting, whey and yogurt and buttermilk producing, while they enjoy fresh butter while they still can. And they know the hens will soon stop laying, so eggs are pickled, or submerged in oil or clarified butter or lard, to keep some a little longer.

In North America during the Jefferson administration, I think 1803-05, and at the same time in Australia, the furious peach-orchard plantings of previous, leaner years, suddenly bore fruit, with orchardists from both, including Jefferson himself iirc, boasting back to the starving urban poor of London that fall, that fruit was so plentiful in this utopia they had created, that most of the peaches ended up as mast for the hogs. And later they boasted the infinite superiority of the hams from those hogs, sweetened with honey from the peach blossom, laid up in such profusion as to see them through to next mid-summer.

Of course, they were doing the new and improved agricultural methods, four field rotation, new types of ploughs, animals wintering in heated barns, tropical fruits grown in glasshouses, but the older methods of food preservation and storage,and the older idea that if you had land (no matter how little) you lived primarily on what you could grow on it, rather than wasting money on buying produce you couldn't be so sure about (and justly, there were no laws on food adulteration until about 1863, and even then, they were not that effective) Still, I don't think GRRM knows or cares about even some very basic things about food storage and agriculture. For example, in the autumn, the summer crops are harvested, and the fields all get ploughed. In a rural enviornment, all that bare earth is striking.

I know its not fair to compare GRRM with Austen, but really, Ch. 10 of Persuasion is one of the most exact descriptions of late Autumn in a 'riverlands' climate, that you could hope to read. Just half a sentence:

As they climb a hill to the hedgerow where the hero despicably offers a hazelnut (the blackberries being long gone) to the wrong girl. Contrast with:

Then Lew comes up with his helmutful of blackberries, which are offered first to Jaime, then shared around the crew.

You can see how GRRM's focus is firmly on the social structure and social interaction - has been since the fifth sentence of the prologue of Game of Thrones. He doesn't care that winter wheat is sown in the late fall, that the most plentiful supply of food in a mostly rural society is never going to be found closer to the city. You could point out that Jane Austen's seasons run like clockwork, have the neo-classical precision and balance of a Mozart string quartet, while in Westeros, nobody really knows if they are at the beginning, middle or end of autumn.Fair point.  But if you suggested that clearly, Jaime is travelling through the riverlands at an earlier part of autumn, when it was time to collect berries rather than nuts, I disagree. It is just that GRRM's food and agriculture is a mish-mash of stuff of all seasons. When he arrives at  Darry,

Well, no, rat (and mouse) populations actually explode in the autumn (due to all that grain lying around in the fields and on the threshing floor, and along the roads where the waynes transport it) and drop off dramatically in the winter. And Jaime is worried about sausages? Seriously, the sausage making animals should still be alive, guzzling the stubble and gleanings for that extra layer of fat that makes a proper sausage. Get another litter out of them, while there is still mast. Let Lady Amerei worry about the sausages, and just bother about bringing peace to the riverlands, Jaime.  And yes, once the reaping is done, it is time to plow, and to sow, because even if you don't know when or if the next harvest will come, there is an empty field there, and while you might not get a crop if you sow them, if you don't plant what you want to grow there, its 100% certain nature will fill it with things you don't or can't eat.

Once he has done his business in the riverlands, Jaime makes his way back through the area, and sees:

So, no, it was not earlier in the autumn than Jane Austen's nutting expedition, if anything it was later.

At Darry, Lady Amerei serves bean-and-bacon soup. It is popular everywhere, from Cersei's table in Kings Landing, to the Wall. In real life, it was the staple food of feudal peasants, and the late summer and autumn was the only time of the year they were less likely to eat it, because there were other things available. In winter, it would become the only thing, and by spring, the last of the bacon. Most likely, from a solitary hog - the lords restricted how much livestock their peasants could have, lest they overgraze the commons or lay waste to their neighbours crops. This had to feed the whole family from before Xmas, through the three months, three weeks and three days until the sow farrowed in spring, (so there was a lot more beans than bacon) and the way it was consumed was a lesson in thrift. The big cuts would become hams, rubbed, smoked, and left to cure for at least two months before starting on them. Smaller cuts would be left to age for roasts and maybe brined to make Jambon hams, which cure a little faster. Walnut sized bits of meat would be made into pickled pork, and slightly larger pieces made into pies just before Xmas, to keep (according to 17th and 18th c. recipe books) for six weeks to three months, thanks to the lard or jelly poured in through the top. Just open the pie crust, take out today's bit of meat, close it, pour in a bit more fat, 'an excellent keeping pie'. Maybe, if there is not the smallest air pocket, nor the slightest crack in the pastry case. The skin and the trotters of course made the magical preserving jelly. The jelly was also used for brawns and souse. Then the sausages (with large lumps of fat), and whatever blood and tiny scraps left over, were turned into mince pies, with the addition of apples that were starting to soften, and some candied peel, and currents. For Christmas there would usually be beef, from the calf that was killed to keep a milch cow in milk. Or mutton, if you didn't have the pasturage for cows. This was not only important for the roast, but for that quintessential Christmas dish, plum pottage. In the medieval, this was a savoury stew of minced meat and oats and/or pease, with spices and currents. Stuffed in intestines, like a sausage, it was a plum pudding.

Anyway,  I don't see this kind of frugality and good management in Westeros. And if Bowan Marsh is not a big fat liar, he is the worst steward, and ought to become a ranger. A naked ranger. Still, he is part of the general pattern of autumn idleness and wastage that we see in cooks, goodwives, cottagers and stewards all over Westeros in summer and autumn, so I don't anticipate much improvement over the Westros winter. Not that it matters, really. Most of us aren't reading for the food descriptions, after all.

Sometimes, I'm not sure if it is ignorance or deliberate. For instance, the blue winter roses - is he talking about Hellebore, or roses? The illustrators (bar one or two) vastly prefer roses, modern double and quadruple-flowered roses, such as might be grown in a greenhouse. Hellebore seems a more likely choice for Lyanna's crown of love and beauty, but it could survive outside the glass gardens in Winterfell, might even flower in a chink on the Wall. Not a rare prize that Bael might request from the glass gardens of Winterfell.

Maybe he is not confining himself to one species. Black Hellebore (the one with the blue roses) was used by herbalists to treat paralysis, gout and insanity, also as a purgative, for nausea, constipation, worms. Also to summon daemons. And to cause miscarriages. White Hellebore was used to treat gout, and cholera, but mostly as a poison. The Romans put it on the tips of their arrows. Normal roses are edible, regardless of colour. Good source of vitamin C.

Apart from the winter wheat, that in Westros is being trampled in the fields by war horses, if it isn't being harvested, or left to rot in the field, the other major crop medieval farmers grew over the winter in real life was vetch. Vetches are nitrogen-fixing legumes, that provide lentil-like high protein peason. They were the bitter herbs used in the first passover (from the food they ate, we could guess the first passover took place in February or March). They also provides hay and silage for animals, and the pease contains a lot of lysine (an essential amino acid wheat is short on), making pease and bread able to supply 'complete' protein, as long as a person ate enough. They would provide green pasture in late winter/early spring, and some varieties could be eaten as a green food or tuber by humans in spring.

They have very colourful flowers (often white or purple, but every colour of the rainbow) in spring.  The peas/lentils can be harvested in the summer, and either ploughed back into the soil as a nitrogen fertilizer, or turned over to grazing animals who will do the ploughing for you, and add their manure. There are literally thousands of types of vetches, and most parts of the plant can be eaten. While some vetches can have toxins in some parts, or under some conditions - for instance, after severe frosts, most were edible most of the time. The peas (or beans) dried and stored well, to provide food all winter. Together these were the two staple crops used in three field rotation (wheat, vetch, fallow), and these two crops were around 80% of the calories in the diet of about 80% of the population in the 13th century. Winter crops. But nobody seems to be sowing winter crops in Westeros.

The 13th was the worst century, though, in no small part thanks to the weather. It started with the end of the medieval warming period (well, really, that started petering out around 1275), but the reliably warm summer that had characterised the last four centuries didn't come in 1300, so there were crop failures everywhere, and they were just heralding in the Little Ice Age - not a real ice age, but a long period of comparatively cool summers, bitterly cold winters, and unpredictable springs, that reached it's nadir in Shakespeare's era, and that Europe only climbed out of around the time Dickens died, in the mid-Victorian era.

At the start of the 14th century, the population had grown and had grown dependant on the winter crops of wheat and beans, and the feudal system had become the only way of supplying the volume of wheat and beans needed to keep a sufficient number of serfs bodies and souls together while they sowed the next year's crop.

The mild weather of the medieval warming period (about 800-1275), had made this a very successful system for producing bulk food, and helped the large landholders control their serfs by controlling the small allocation of the land they grew their subsistence on, and the food storage and processing (increasingly the milling and storage was farmed off to the monasteries, who also took their cut), and the dole of food in hard times (also farmed out to the church, in exchange for land). The Lord also determined the amount and type of labour serfs had to provide his fields, and when, in order to be left to farm their own the rest of the time. In Iceland, they grew wheat (and barley) in the warming period, but that stopped by the fourteenth century. They only started again this century.

Iceland's traditional cuisine seems to be a good model in some ways for the North in the dead of winter. They kept and milked goats and sheep (and cows, but not so many). They made skyr, and sour butter (fresh butter can keep a few months, salted butter a few months more, clarified butter for years, but cultured butter keeps indefinitely). They used the sour whey from the skyr to make pickled meat. They also, famously, would ferment shark and skate. They also ate lots of fish, and birds like puffins, cormorants, geese, that fed on fish, and their eggs. Also the hard, dried sausage like the ones Crasters wives made. Vegetables - not so much, seaweed, moss, some crowberries to stave off scurvy, if they were lucky enough to find any (or maybe dry some, or preserve some, in autumn). The Danes brought stockfish (wind-dried cod) and salt fish, turnips, rutabaga, potatoes (these can be stored in earth, below the frost line, for up to 8 months, and probably more, if the weather continued cold enough long enough), carrots and cabbage (which can be pickled in whey to last for years). Bones and cartilage skin and sinew of animals or fish can be boiled in whey until its soft enough to eat. Maybe, if they were very lucky, a whale would beech, or (in the spring) they would be able to lure away a juvenile whale and kill it. They didn't have the boats or the technology to kill mature whales, or make a habit of killing whales.

However, they were dependant on their small milking animals getting the grass, so they could get all their whey for their lactic-preseved meats. By grass, I mean vetches and mosses as well as proper grasses. And even more than grass, they needed wood for fuel, to survive the winter. With glass gardens they could grow berrys, tomatoes, cucumber in the winter like the Russians do (although the technology to make sheet glass, suitable for greenhouses, was very much of the industrial-era), but even then they need a source of heat to trap under the glass to grow them.  Iceland used to have forests of birch, rowen, aspen and pine. 40% of the land was covered in it (now <2%). It still has lots of volcanoes, and geothermally heated springs, (and we know that Winterfell and Dragonstone at least have these too) but if the weather got so cold there was no grass for the animals, the humans would not survive them long.

If winter in Westeros is more Antarctic than subarctic, no grass, no access to geothermal, no or little access to wood, or coal, or peat, or dung, there would still be some chance of survival for those near the sea, where there are fish and sea birds, and seaweed. The inuit were able to survive on these, as well as icelanders. And Shackleton et al managed to survive a two years in Antartica on only enough food for a season (in fact, somewhat less, due to a couple of misadventures), and, when it ran out six months before their ordeal was over, they managed to catch and store enough penguin and seal meat to last them to within the week of their rescue (Frank Wild estimated it would take a month for Shackleton to get back to them and he had refused to stockpile food on the basis that Shackleton Would Prevail. Which he did. But it took him three months, because WWI, and those last two months were the dead of winter, and the penguins and seals who had, when they first left the Endurance, come flocking to see what this was now, wouldn't go anywhere near the men any more. They all survived (the men, that is), although Lewis Rickinson had had a heart attack, and Perce Blackborow's left foot had to be amputated. But they were in the warmer parts of Antartica, and half that time it was Summer, and they had less than four months of total darkness. And there were puppies killed. And Mrs Chippy. And there were only 28 of them (not counting the dogs or the cat), and food distribution was scrupulously equitable.

The 1300's in general were not like that. When the cooling climate produced reduced yields and false springs and drenching spring storms and black ice made crops fail, the result was the lowest nutrition, century on century, that feudal serfs had ever had (and it wasn't that great to start with, and the poorest - eg. widows and their children, and the aged, copped it worst). That was just softening them up for a series of real famines, including the great famine of 1315-1317, or 1315-1322, depending on where you lived. And that was just softening them up for the plague. During this century starvation and desperation forced serfs to move, even as their landlords attempted to make them stay and starve, or die of plague.

The sweet profits the lords had enjoyed were reduced, by the decrease in production, and by their participation in the hundred years wars, and the resultant higher taxes, paid at the rates per head determined by census records of serf populations and crop yields that were based on the 'good' years at the beginning of the century, before 60% of the population (disproportionately the serfs) had died of plague. Something had to give, and when there were so few surviving workers it didn't look like the wealthy would be able to sow a decent crop, let alone harvest one, the labour shortages gave serfs more bargaining power, and more mobility, as the non-free, law abiding serfs had died when their landlords had nothing to sustain them, the rest felt more or less free to move on to work for

It would be overstating it to say that the winters of the 13th century ended the feudal system (which wasn't properly put to an end until the aftermath of Word War One), but it did soften the system up a lot, enabling peasants to organise and revolt against landowners that tried to force them to stay and starve, as per the King's decree, when the other lords were enticing them away to more productive country with living wages, and offering them freedom, and hundred year leases of farms big enough to support them and their family for generations, in return for low rents (in the hope that they would breed up and supply the local lord with a good, cheap labour force when he needed it, and in the knowledge that all that land would lay in waste if he didn't). Those labour laws did give the smallfolk some explicit rights as well - for instance, servants got hired/sacked/paid each year at Michaelmas. If they didn't like their situation they had that opportunity to leave, legally. Likewise, if they were not paid. Rents were paid at that time as well, and tithes for the church (at the height of Autumn, when they could best afford them), and there was a certain security for those that couldn't make the rent in the middle of winter or spring, that they wouldn't be evicted until after summer.

And wages went up anyway, allowing the development of a renaissance middle-class, unlanded but not subsistent, able to form strong guilds and exist without dependence on the patronage of a single landowner, or even, on the patronage of which several landowners depended (eg. the Worshipful Company of Brewers). The Lords and the Church still held most of the land, the wealth, and the power, and the climate was still not as it used to be, but conditions for the other 80% had improved enough to at least establish the mythical era of Merrie Olde England, with plump freedmen and farmers wives swilling nutbrown ale and eating insane amounts of meat, and while it wasn't strictly the reality, things did get comparatively better for peasants, as can be seen by the decline of serfdom, and the steady growth of the population, until the 18th century, with industrialisation, inclosure and the black laws, and later, the new poor laws, pushed the agricultural working class back into starving indigence for the sake of their landlord's improved farming methods and political economy.

So it kind of makes sense for GRRM to concentrate more on the social and symbolic aspects of food, and simply cherrypick lots of real-life inspirations of famine and plague, to concatenate into the long winter, concentrating on his social causes rather than bending his brain to the impossible task of making the physical causes plausible.

And with his strange seasons, he gives himself the option of throwing in a cheeky thaw, enabling some southerners to get a crop in. If they can get their agricultural act together. It also allows some surprise action. One thing about Winter in the real world, it marks the end of the fighting season. (It is no accident the first Thanksgiving took place around midsummer - it was a celebration after a battle, and the war season, no matter what culture, is always the time when food is most plentiful, and crops require the least care).

It is hard to imagine how the action is going to be kept up in the next book, if he is in any way realistic. The lousy roads of Westeros become impassable, everyone bunkers down for the season, no more Brienne travelogues. The firths freeze up, leaving boats stuck in the ice, so no Ironborn invasions, no return of the Iron Bank, no more sellsword companies, and Dany's Dothraki hoard can't cross the poison water. No more endless feasts, except of course at Yule. No more siege warfare. In winter, the forces waiting at the gate, exposed in the field always lose, as crusaders have proved over and over. (and maybe we find out that Mace's siege of Storm's End was a lot tougher to maintain than he made it appear. Hopefully, we also learn that in the South they have mastered the basics of crop storage and food security. That those waynes of produce that came to Kings Landing with Margaery were only the surfeit of a long and bountiful summer, and they got a good price for them too.)

Given it is already snowing in the Riverlands and Kings Landing, Essos, the southern part of it, and Slavers Bay, is our only hope for action, really. But note that it too is temperate. It too is heading into winter.  Even Southyros seems to me to be a suspiciously Northern kind of south, more subtropical than tropical. More like the top of North Africa, or the bottom of North America. Nobody seems to have heard of any place that is always-summer (ie tropical), or places that enjoy endless summer days when the long night descends on Westeros. And neither the Northerners, nor the wildlings North of the Wall, not even the Thenns, have mentioned that they enjoyed a midnight sun in the recent past, or there were endless summer days with only short nights, in the memory of any character. Which kind of hints that, for all the ice and stuff, they are not in the kind of latitude where one would expect a long night to descend, that the long night has no natural cause.

Planetos is a very odd place. Sometimes, I think we might be misled as to where the polar regions of Planetos are. That maybe the chilled wastes of the North are that way because there are Ice Dragon slumbering there, rather than because the far north is above the 60th parallel. Maybe if it woke and flew to Essos, Yi-Ti would turn to frozen wastes instead. Or a false spring happens when they turn in their sleep and send their chill breath the other way. There is a lot of foreshadowing that indicates there are some kind of shadow-dragon made stone, that Melisandre believes she can revive, and possibly a clutch of dragon eggs as well. Maybe they, or the volcanic activity that brings them into existence, will provide the warmth needed to grow a crop or at least to stay alive a little longer when the food is almost exhausted. GRRM has denied the irregular seasons have a hard science cause, and hinted they will have a magical resolution so maybe the winter will end abruptly thanks to magic. And of course, combining ice with fire gives tepid water, just the right sort for watering crops.

Excellent post my friend, very informative.:thumbsup:

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On 29/8/2016 at 0:30 PM, Walda said:

 

It is hard to imagine how the action is going to be kept up in the next book, if he is in any way realistic. The lousy roads of Westeros become impassable, everyone bunkers down for the season, no more Brienne travelogues. The firths freeze up, leaving boats stuck in the ice, so no Ironborn invasions, no return of the Iron Bank, no more sellsword companies, and Dany's Dothraki hoard can't cross the poison water. No more endless feasts, except of course at Yule. No more siege warfare. In winter, the forces waiting at the gate, exposed in the field always lose, as crusaders have proved over and over. (and maybe we find out that Mace's siege of Storm's End was a lot tougher to maintain than he made it appear. Hopefully, we also learn that in the South they have mastered the basics of crop storage and food security. That those waynes of produce that came to Kings Landing with Margaery were only the surfeit of a long and bountiful summer, and they got a good price for them too.)

Given it is already snowing in the Riverlands and Kings Landing, Essos, the southern part of it, and Slavers Bay, is our only hope for action, really. But note that it too is temperate. It too is heading into winter.  Even Southyros seems to me to be a suspiciously Northern kind of south, more subtropical than tropical. More like the top of North Africa, or the bottom of North America. Nobody seems to have heard of any place that is always-summer (ie tropical), or places that enjoy endless summer days when the long night descends on Westeros. And neither the Northerners, nor the wildlings North of the Wall, not even the Thenns, have mentioned that they enjoyed a midnight sun in the recent past, or there were endless summer days with only short nights, in the memory of any character. Which kind of hints that, for all the ice and stuff, they are not in the kind of latitude where one would expect a long night to descend, that the long night has no natural cause.

Planetos is a very odd place. Sometimes, I think we might be misled as to where the polar regions of Planetos are. That maybe the chilled wastes of the North are that way because there are Ice Dragon slumbering there, rather than because the far north is above the 60th parallel. Maybe if it woke and flew to Essos, Yi-Ti would turn to frozen wastes instead. Or a false spring happens when they turn in their sleep and send their chill breath the other way. There is a lot of foreshadowing that indicates there are some kind of shadow-dragon made stone, that Melisandre believes she can revive, and possibly a clutch of dragon eggs as well. Maybe they, or the volcanic activity that brings them into existence, will provide the warmth needed to grow a crop or at least to stay alive a little longer when the food is almost exhausted. GRRM has denied the irregular seasons have a hard science cause, and hinted they will have a magical resolution so maybe the winter will end abruptly thanks to magic. And of course, combining ice with fire gives tepid water, just the right sort for watering crops.

great post! I agree and this is why I think GRRM must find a compromise between real winters and fantasy winters. I think that he will give importance to weather events and social events connected to winter, rather than storage technique. In Asos Jaime and Bolton mention the Trident is already in flood and difficult to cross.

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