What do people in the North do when Winter cones around besides try and survive?

Great question! I can hazard a few guesses as to some areas of activity, based on cultures that have short(er) growing seasons and long winters.

One would be handcrafts – Scandinavian farmers, for example, historically would often spend the winters building boats for sale to fishing villages (a practice known as beredskaparbete, which later gave its name to Sweden’s system of jobs for the unemployed) – so I wouldn’t be surprised if smallfolk in the North spent the long winter making new (or repairing old) farm equipment, housewares, clothing, and so on and so forth.

Another would be animal husbandry – European farmers in winter were advised to lop trees for fodder to help keep animals alive through the winter, for example, and in regions with lots of marginal land, animals would be herded from their normal fields to “preserved grass” land.

One that shows up a bunch in ASOIAF is story-telling: Old Nan’s “hearth tales” seem to be part of a practice of oral culture in the North that has preserved memories of the Old Night and similar ancient truths that the Maesters scoff at. While the North isn’t the only part of Westeros with a folk culture, I would imagine the tradition of story-telling is much deeper in the North than in other places, simply because they have so much time in the winters to gather together for warmth and while the time away.

How is it that all the wars during the Targaryen era last between one to two years only? Given the size of Westeros and the travel distances therefore involved shouldn’t the Dance, the Blackfyre Rebellions, etc. have been longer?

opinions-about-tiaras:

“Seasonal fighting” may mean something much different in a world where the growing season can last six years as opposed to six months.

(Seriously, you want to talk about significant worldbuilding issues? The goddamn inconsistent seasons not really having much effect beyond “oh, during hard cruel winters people die in the north” are Exhibit A.)

alittleonward said:Wouldn’t the length of seasons be a major reason for the brevity of wars on planetos? Campaigns only need to end for winter and many don’t stop for that (Cf Battle of Ice)

Adding this one on to talk about the topic.

So here’s how I’ve rationalized the long seasons, because beyond the question of how wars would work, there is a bigger problem of how everyone isn’t dead. I’ll quote this in full b/c it’s a complicated argument:

racefortheironthrone:

Yeah, this is a pretty significant worldbuilding issue. Leaving aside Westerosi travel distances, most real-world wars in the Middle Ages and before were pretty long-lasting affairs. Sieges lasted a long time, fighting was seasonal, etc.

Anonymous asked: The intended amounts of food cached for winter seem far too small relative to the populations they must support and uncertainty of winter’s duration. Does this suggest that the primary strategy is to buy food, with the winter stores as more of a backstop?

You raise a good question, and all I can say is GRRM seems to think it’s enough.

Well, that’s not exactly true, there’s a bunch more I can say:

There’s an underlying world-building problem here, which is that the multi-year seasons don’t really make sense when you consider the ecology of the life cycle of flora and fauna. If winter was just unrelenting night and cold and nothing else, you’d expect 100% die-off as seeds wither in the frost and animals run out of plants to dig up from the snow. (Either that or there are some truly baroque evolutionary adaptions that you’d think we’d have heard about by now) Likewise, it doesn’t matter how much you store and how cool your cellars are, there are hard limits to how long you can store food in a pre-modern context.

So the way that I’ve rationalized it is that the seasons are really closer to climate cycles than what we think of as seasons – summers are extended warm periods, winters are mini-ice ages. While agricultural productivity is going to be much much higher in the “summer” than in the “winter,” it’s not the case that there’s no growth at all during the winter.

Because even within the “winter,” you’re going to get variation in temperatures – your “false springs” and “spirit summers” – that allow for short bursts of agriculture productivity. Those little bursts are vitally necessary to stretch out your supplies, replenish fodder for whatever livestock and game is still around, repair some of the damage done by malnutrition, etc.

But I would imagine that those are very chancey – if the lull in the snows and the cold ends before you can harvest whatever crop you’ve been able to get into the ground, you’re going to lose it all.

BTW, I forgot to add GRRM’s So Spake Martin that supports my theory. One of the main occupations of the Citadel of Maesters is tracking the seasons, trying to predict how long they’re going to last and when they’re going to change, and providing advice about “when to plant and when to harvest and how much food to store” to take maximum advantage of the “false springs” and “spirit summers.”

So you still have the problem of needing your manpower on hand to sow and to reap every year, which is going to produce seasonal fighting. And we even have evidence of this happening: “we have lost men in battle, and others to the harvest.” (Catelyn II, ACOK)

The intended amounts of food cached for winter seem far too small relative to the populations they must support and uncertainty of winter’s duration. Does this suggest that the primary strategy is to buy food, with the winter stores as more of a backstop?

You raise a good question, and all I can say is

GRRM seems to think it’s enough.

Well, that’s not exactly true, there’s a bunch more I can say:

There’s an underlying world-building problem here, which is that the multi-year seasons don’t really make sense when you consider the ecology of the life cycle of flora and fauna. If winter was just unrelenting night and cold and nothing else, you’d expect 100% die-off as seeds wither in the frost and animals run out of plants to dig up from the snow. (Either that or there are some truly baroque evolutionary adaptions that you’d think we’d have heard about by now) Likewise, it doesn’t matter how much you store and how cool your cellars are, there are hard limits to how long you can store food in a pre-modern context.

So the way that I’ve rationalized it is that the seasons are really closer to climate cycles than what we think of as seasons – summers are extended warm periods, winters are mini-ice ages. While agricultural productivity is going to be much much higher in the “summer” than in the “winter,” it’s not the case that there’s no growth at all during the winter.

Because even within the “winter,” you’re going to get variation in temperatures – your “false springs” and “spirit summers” – that allow for short bursts of agriculture productivity. Those little bursts are vitally necessary to stretch out your supplies, replenish fodder for whatever livestock and game is still around, repair some of the damage done by malnutrition, etc.

But I would imagine that those are very chancey – if the lull in the snows and the cold ends before you can harvest whatever crop you’ve been able to get into the ground, you’re going to lose it all.