ASOIAF Confessions

[The Wolves]

I find a lot of the characters POVs repetitive. Catelyn, Jon, Sansa, and Ned are the only interesting POVs because they are constantly changing with characters. 
 

Tyrion and Theon were interesting but theirs got tiring quick. The Boltons made Theon POVs boring. 
 

Robert and Jaime are more alike than we think. 
 

Ned is one of the best characters in the series. 
 

All the Baratheons suck except for Shireen and Robert’s bastards. I’m glad they fought among themselves and helped along their house’s destruction. 
 

Cersei is a character I have never pitied. I have many emotions when I read about her like seething hatred, irritation, impatience, disbelief, etc… but never pity and I feel the same exact way about every Lannister(except Tyrion)in the series. 

I was happy when Joffrey died and I need Tommen and Marcella to hurry up and go too, preferably in front of Cersei. 

I hate house Frey and since I’m not emotionally attached to any character from that house I can honestly say I want the house extinct. Everyone can go, even the children and Roslyn during childbirth. 
 

Dragonstone is ugly. 
 

I have become very apathetic towards this series in the past two years. The Starks, Targaryens, and a few other characters are what’s keeping me a little interested. 

[Northern Sword]

6 hours ago, Alester Florent said:

A common misconception. Life expectancy at birth was often around 30, but that's because ot's a mean estimate and infant mortality was high. Life expectancy at 5 was much higher. If you made it through childhood then living to your 60s was a reasonable expectation...

...unless you were a woman. The biggest cause of premature death for adults was death in (or immediately following) childbirth. Having a whole bunch of kids was a danger for the mother and starting before she was fully grown particularly so. Of course in a world without reliable contraception, accidents (and resulting shotgun weddings) happened.

Not sure how you can call it a misconception, then use the same number I did, and then cherry pick the exception. (infant mortality and life expectancy isn't that bad if you survive to 5... haha, come on, that's not how it works) History is littered with examples of high born people losing 1/2 of their kids before adulthood. It was much worse for the common people. 

And, yes. For woman, childbirth was a killer. But you cant forget the reason Life Expectancy was so low because of conflict, disease and famine contributing to this as well. Men/boys were dying in wars as teens. Everyone was dying of disease, and famine was always a threat for the poor.

And the term child bride in this series, and the way I am using the term is of a teenager(teenagers are kids to me).  Teenage marriages were common, they were the rule, not the exception. Above I provided links to 3 different eras that state this. Also, important not confuse marriage and consummation.

The arrangement of marriage was done by the bride and groom’s parents. In the middle ages, girls were typically in their teens when they married, and boys were in their early twenties. https://www.medievaltimes.com/education/medieval-era/marriage#

Only the most fortunate lived to 60. Survival to this age was like a standard deviation of 2 or 3. Again the exception and not the rule.

[Alester Florent]

2 hours ago, Northern Sword said:

Not sure how you can call it a misconception, then use the same number I did, and then cherry pick the exception. (infant mortality and life expectancy isn't that bad if you survive to 5... haha, come on, that's not how it works) History is littered with examples of high born people losing 1/2 of their kids before adulthood. It was much worse for the common people. 

And, yes. For woman, childbirth was a killer. But you cant forget the reason Life Expectancy was so low because of conflict, disease and famine contributing to this as well. Men/boys were dying in wars as teens. Everyone was dying of disease, and famine was always a threat for the poor.

...

Only the most fortunate lived to 60. Survival to this age was like a standard deviation of 2 or 3. Again the exception and not the rule.

It's a misconception because of the way it's calculated. It's a mean average derived from a very lumpy data set, undifferentiated by sex, and mean averages are famously misleading in this context, generally producing output that is nowhere near the modal average. So yes, the "life expectancy" figure may be only around 30, but this is a meaningless statistic.

It doesn't tell us anything useful about the way people lived or, critically, how they thought about the way they lived. It's misleading because anyone old and aware enough to have any "expectation" about the length of their life will already expect to live well beyond it.

It also implies, and many/most lay readers infer, that since life expectancy was say 30, people who lived to or beyond that age were considered "old" or that senescence was advanced by that stage, which isn't the case. Yes, of course, life was generally shorter in those days, because of disease, violence, malnutrition, all those other factors, and this will have raised the death rate right through the sample set: it's the reason why, even once infant mortality is corrected for, life expectancy in say England or France was still markedly lower than it is today. But it wasn't as low as the commonly-bandied about figure of 30-ish would have us believe.

So when it comes to modelling a society and trying to derive any insight into how they behaved (e.g. the age people got married), such a stat is arguably worse than useless because it leads us to false conclusions. It's one of the main reasons you won't find uncorrected mean life expectancies for historical societies used in academic contexts.

Moreover, infant mortality, while horrifyingly high by modern standards, was not so high that living to age 5 could be considered an "exception".

 

Anyway and on the subject of age at marriage specifically, this could vary quite widely by period and by region. In Lincolnshire (England), average age at (first) marriage for women was 25 from 1252-1478 - higher than for most of the 20th century. Men were older, about 31. But in contemporary Florence, the figures for women were very different: under 16 prior to the Black Death and increasing only to about 18 thereafter. (Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2174029)

It does seem that GRRM is following more of a "Mediterranean" model with his own fictional brides.