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iBook Author annotations?


QhorinQuarterhand

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I was wondering what everyone thinks about GRRM's author annotations that appear in the iBook version of the books? Has George himself ever addressed whether they are meant to be taken as fact or not? 

There's an author annotation in ADWD that says Jon was born sometime around or shortly after the Sack of King's Landing. Which seems pretty early to me...

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2 hours ago, QhorinQuarterhand said:

I was wondering what everyone thinks about GRRM's author annotations that appear in the iBook version of the books? Has George himself ever addressed whether they are meant to be taken as fact or not? 

There's an author annotation in ADWD that says Jon was born sometime around or shortly after the Sack of King's Landing. Which seems pretty early to me...

I have only the AGoT iBook, and haven't gone through the author’s notes yet. Irt Jon’s birth, that sounds about right. We know Jon was born 8 - 9 months before Dany, and Dany was born 9 months after the Sack of KL. So I think it adds up nicely.

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2 hours ago, kissdbyfire said:

I have only the AGoT iBook, and haven't gone through the author’s notes yet. Irt Jon’s birth, that sounds about right. We know Jon was born 8 - 9 months before Dany, and Dany was born 9 months after the Sack of KL. So I think it adds up nicely.

Thank you! It seems I need to find a good timeline. I was thinking this would have had Jon being born 3+ months too early. Makes me wonder where Ned was around the time of Dany's birth. 

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19 minutes ago, QhorinQuarterhand said:

Thank you! It seems I need to find a good timeline. I was thinking this would have had Jon being born 3+ months too early. Makes me wonder where Ned was around the time of Dany's birth. 

What do you mean by “too early”? 

 

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22 hours ago, kissdbyfire said:

What do you mean by “too early”? 

 

It really doesn't seem to leave Ned much time. He arrives at King's Landing some amount of time after the Sack. He has to do whatever he did between there and lifting the Siege of Storm's End, which would take him awhile to get to. Then it would probably be pretty weird if he went straight to Lyanna. Since if he already knew where she was he'd more likely tell Robert to have Varys lift the Siege for all he cared. Jon being born shortly after the Sack (at best) leaves Ned with very little time to get to Lyanna (wherever she was) in time for her to be laying in a bed of blood from birthing Jon.

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On 3/28/2020 at 1:01 PM, QhorinQuarterhand said:

It really doesn't seem to leave Ned much time. He arrives at King's Landing some amount of time after the Sack.

Sorry, I missed your reply.

Ned arrived while KL was still being sacked. Aerys was dead, and Jaime was still sitting on the throne when Ned entered the throne room. 

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He has to do whatever he did between there and lifting the Siege of Storm's End, which would take him awhile to get to.

It would take him a while to get to SE... w/ a large group on horseback roughly between 10 or 20 days, depending on how hard they were riding. And we know the siege was lifted immediately upon Ned arriving. 

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Then it would probably be pretty weird if he went straight to Lyanna. Since if he already knew where she was he'd more likely tell Robert to have Varys lift the Siege for all he cared. Jon being born shortly after the Sack (at best) leaves Ned with very little time to get to Lyanna (wherever she was) in time for her to be laying in a bed of blood from birthing Jon.

We don’t know how long it took Ned to go from KL to SE, and then to the ToJ. But as I said above, we know the siege was lifted as soon as the loyalists saw the rebel forces arriving. As to travel times, it could have taken Ned as little as 20 odd days for both legs of the journey, and I don’t think he would have lingered at SE b/c he wanted to find Lyanna. Also, I don’t think he got to the ToJ right after Jon’s birth... from the descriptions we have it seems Lyanna died of puerperal fever. Symptoms usually appear a few days after birth, and death can take a week, 10 days, even longer to occur. So, if we use the fastest travel time + the fact that Jon was born several days if not a couple of weeks before Ned got there, I think it does add up. 

More importantly, I think Martin meant for these dates and travel times to be vaguely possible, not something that must be accurate to the last mile/minute. Hence the “put down the rulers and stopwatches and enjoy the story” (paraphrasing). 

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