Help someone got me ranting on how Westeros’s economy and agriculture make NO SENSE WHATSOEVER before bedtime
how am I supposed to go to sleep now
Okay basically:
You get the European High Middle Ages by achieving agricultural surplus.
NOT having agricultural surplus means: You just barely have enough food to make it through the winter. Producing food is the highest agricultural priority. Everyone who CAN make food DOES make food. Major agricultural events like harvest, planting, fishing, roundup, and butchering are all-hands-on-deck events where the entire community has to work together to make sure you last the winter.
These are Earth winters in Northern Europe. Winters that last a couple of months.
The High Middle Ages in Europe were made possible because agriculture got good enough that some places could produce WAY more food than was necessary, which allowed others to specialize. You need a LOT of agricultural surplus to get:
- Cities full of common people who don’t contribute to agriculture at all
- (As opposed to: a village-based economy)
- A class of idle rich whose women focus entirely on decorative handicrafts and whose men use massive amounts of metal to pretend to fight each other
- (As opposed to: Noblewomen who were intimately involved in organizing the production, distribution, and storage of food and clothing for the entire community; warriors wearing armour made of leather and using weapons like spears that required less metal)
- Wars that economically devastate an entire region by killing massive amounts of peasantry
- (As opposed to: War that is deliberately focused between combatants because agricultural workers are expensive and necessary)
The last one is the especial kicker. That kind of economic and agricultural devastation is very characteristic of the Hundred Years War, which ASOIAF is mostly based on. It arose when you got so much agricultural surplus that you could literally set fire to crops and mills and kill peasants and still make it through the winter.
So Westeros is, essentially, an incredibly food-secure society.
And then
You tell me
THAT WINTER LASTS ANYWHERE FROM A FEW YEARS TO ALMOST A CENTURY???
And all the Starks do to prepare for it is sound ominous and put glass greenhouses in a stone castle?????????????
Man so much this.
I never got involved with GoT because I’d been warned it was grim in a way I find unfun, but I heard it was about a bunch of people competing to be ruler of a region defined by periodic multi-year winters, of which the first in a while was coming up soon. And that the writer had described his goal as ‘like Tolkien but with more realism.’
And I assumed for actual years that a core element of the entire drama was the different would-be leaders and factions having different logistical plans to prepare for the Ice Zombie Climate Change Decade (including presumably at least one ‘That’s Fake Haha’) and how much of what kinds of supplies are to be stored in what ways, for whose benefit, and the constant loss of precious time as everyone backstabs each other, while the constant shifting of power means that no one’s infrastructure plans get fully realized, so Westeros has about 20% of the necessary granaries and Winter Is Coming.
Until I casually asked a fan who’d been explaining the ice zombies and the Crazy Big Wall to me what the culture’s norms for caching food for the long winters had been, traditionally, only to find that nothing of the kind had ever come up.
For admittedly neither the first time nor the last, I was so bitterly disillusioned in a cultural phenomenon in which I had steadfastly declined to participate.
#i know#this is not the first time i have ranted about this on this blog#but!#but!!!#i just cannot get over#he ripped off Pern and bragged about his realism and couldn’t be arsed to care about the agricultural economy in any meaningful way#and he wants to talk his worldbuilding up contra TOLKIEN?#man that guy may have stylized his politics#but at least i understand how people in middle earth#are alive#anyway
I love it when people are Mad About Worldbuilding. Those are my kinda people.
