“The piles of bodies aren’t going to get that big without some sort of barrier, because without those barriers, the battle can move around the obstacle of the corpses” Isn’t Ramsay’s army the barrier?

turtle-paced:

No, because in that field, Ramsay’s army isn’t static. It’s part of the movement of men and horses going on. 

Think path of least resistance – on an open field, it is easier and safer for the combatants, regardless of the side they’re fighting for, to step around prone bodies (which may or may not be dead and definitely have pointy metal on them) than to climb over same. Where the fighting’s over a chokepoint, it’s easier to climb over the corpses than to go around.

The battle for Winterfell took place on reasonably flat and open ground, plenty of space for both sides to move. Those corpse piles looked as though someone had raked them up like dead leaves.

Amen!

Seriously, giant walls of bodies are a phenomenon of war that you can find in many places and many times, but they happen in very specific circumstances: a breach in walled defenses through which a Forlorn Hope has to attack or a particular location in trenchworks where the spearpoint of an assault gets bogged down (they were quite common during Grant’s Overland campaign during the American Civil War, for example). 

If they had wanted that phenomenon in Episode 6×09, it would have made way more sense as part of the storming of Winterfell than out in the open fields.