Since winter can last for years, I’m just assuming the Westeros year is longer as well, thus somebody who has had 14 namedays has actually lived 17 Earth years.
Because not to think that is icky. (On the TV show Tyrion referred to Joffrey as 16, so the showrunners think it’s icky too.)
No, a year is not measured by the turn of seasons. So far as we know, a year is roughly equivalent to our own year.
As for it being icky. Remember that this is set in a very pre-industrial society. In our own history, people did become full adults, including sexually, as soon as they reached puberty.
Also, the nobility tends to get married at a much younger age, because marriages are the way that families cement alliances. So you are married off at 13 years old to someone you’ve never met, because the family patriarchs made that decision. And the nobles have to produce children as soon as possible, so there are heirs from both families. Luckily the tedious work of actually raising the brats can be handed off to wet nurses and nannies and servants.
A peasant boy isn’t getting married at 13 because there’s no way he can support a family at that age, and his parents need him to work on the farm.
I don’t think that Sampiro was necessarily positing that years were being reckoned by the turn of seasons, only that on whatever planet Westeros is on, it may not be 365.25 days for a full revolution around their star. Maybe it’s 480 or so days, which would put someone at 13 Westeros years the same biological development of our world’s 17-odd years. There’s no evidence for or against this bit of fanwanking, far as I know, but then there’s no working model to explain their periodic mini ice ages, either.
The reason for the mini ice ages is clearly ice demons, also known as “Others”. You know, the ones they built The Wall to keep out?
You mean the White Walkers? They’ve been saying for some time now that the White Walkers had been in hibernation for over 1000 years.
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As for it being icky. Remember that this is set in a very pre-industrial society. In our own history, people did become full adults, including sexually, as soon as they reached puberty.
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Only nobility usually married that young, and even for them they usually waited until later to actually consummate it. Most were like the marriage of King John and Isabella de Angouleme, who wed when he was in his 30s and she was 12 but waited for years to consummate it; same with numerous other pubescant but child brides.
An exception was Margaret Beaufort, who married Henry VI’s half-brother Edmund Tudor when she was 12 and he was in his 20s. This marriage was consummated and she gave birth to her only child, the future Henry VII, when she was 13.5 years old, by which time she was also a widow. This was considered sick even at the time, and the birth almost killed her and probably left her unable to have any more children.
Ned may be honorable, but to think that he didn’t have his own reasons for seeing the mad king dead is probably incorrect. He might have done it after a trial, but he’d have been happy to kill the king himself, IMO.
King Aerys had killed Ned’s father and brother pretty spectacularly - Rickard (Ned’s dad) he had roasted in his armor above a fire while Brandon (Ned’s brother) watched, all trussed up. Brandon was tied up such that his struggles to grab a sword to help his burning father caused his own slow strangulation.
Yeah, but like you said, honor would make him go through the “proper” channels to achieve justice. Ned “By The Book” Stark was no vigilante.
Again, this assertion that Ned was hampered by his dedication to “honor” is something I dispute. Ned did plenty of things that violate the strict application of honor. Among them:
Covering up for Lyanna. It hasn’t been revealed, but it’s pretty clear to me that Lyanna did something that wouldn’t look good and Ned is keeping a secret. He also let Robert believe that Lyanna was abducted and raped against her will by Rhaegar and that Robert was her true love.
Covering up Jon’s parentage and raising him as a bastard child in his own household and forcing his wife to raise her own trueborn children alongside her husband’s bastard.
Giving Cersei a chance to flee King’s Landing so that her children would not be made to suffer.
Consenting to declare himself a traitor and to declare Joffrey a true king to save his daughters’ lives.
Ned, in the end, doesn’t make important decisions because of honor. He makes them because of things that we would consider very modern—love, sympathy, protecting the innocent.
Ned is in a way an embodiment of the Father of the Seven Gods—a protector. He’s not a rock-headed adherent to notions of honor. He’s a humanist, a softie.
Good points, Ascenray. He also helped lead a rebellion and tried to buy the goldcloaks, too. Not very honorable then, either.
In the books several characters state that, in their opinion, its all Ned’s Fault. All he had to do is sit on the throne at the end of the rebellion and it would be his, but he walked away and went back to Winterfell. Their argument is that Ned would have been a much better king than Robert, who just wanted to fight, f**k and hunt and couldn’t be bothered with all the dull administrative stuff of being a ruler.
I think he liked alcohol more than all those things.
Actually. when you come down to it, it was all Rhaegar Targaryen’s fault.
It all depends on what you choose as the point of departure. Maybe it was the invasion of Aegon the Conqueror. Maybe it was Lyanna. Maybe it was Littlefinger. If you ask Varys, he might say that the fault lies in the system.
Not really. Yes, he was irresponsibly impulsive about Lyanna, but Lyanna didn’t WANT to marry Robert in the first place (mostly because she saw what he was really like). I’m firmly in the “Rhaegar did not actually kidnap and rape Lyanna because she was completely complicit in all of it” camp. Aerys was a dangerous nutcase, but if Robert hadn’t started his rebellion in the first place, it was likely that Aerys would never have actually taken the hostages he took and killed them.
All in all, it does look a lot like Robert is firmly in the nexus point of all of the blame vectors…
And the genius of Martin is that you start the series with that possibility completely out of sight. It’s only by Martin’s gradual reveal of other POVs that you start to get a full picture of what actually happened 15 years before.
I’m not sure this fits the timeline as I’ve come to understand it—although I could be mistaken:
— Robert and Lyanna are betrothed
— Rhaegar “abducts” Lyanna.
— Rickard and Brandon Stark go to Aerys to demand her release. Aerys responds by torturing and killing them.
— Robert begins his rebellion.
Feel free to correct. Or—if you like—start another thread on the timeline of the usurping of the Targaryens and the ascension of House Baratheon.
I think Varys is right. Some of the Targaryans were good kings–Rhaegar might have been one, if he’d lived. Some were very bad; Aerys was one–but was he always that way? Some details of that rebellion remain obscure, in either source available.
Even a good king can have a cruelly insane son. Nature or nurture? Jaime has huge faults but is hardly a psychopath like little Joff. Robert admitted to neglecting “his” son.
Robert was a good soldier but was not cut out to be a good king–or a good husband. Could he blame it on “heartbreak”? Ned was a better man but wasn’t even trained to lead the North–he was a younger brother. Would he have succeeded as King? Besides, Robert had a hereditary link to the Targaryans–the Northerners were always a bit “apart” from the other former kingdoms.
And the name “Seven Kingdoms” means that the One Kingdom was rather fragile. Only the Targaryans united it; it was ready to fall apart. Especially with external factors at work. And greedy, villainous folks seeking power within…
I’m sure tons of noble women didn’t want to marry the people they ended up marrying in Westeros, but that’s the way you cemented alliances and princesses were basically property to be used to do that.
So, in the end, one can say it was Lyanna’s fault (or, back to Rhaegar’s fault because you were supposed to have secret affairs, not take the woman away).
It’s not just running off with Lyanna. By all accounts, Rhaegar would have been a good king, and *that’s *what makes it his fault. He chose to remain loyal to his father, mad as he was, instead of putting the country’s benefit first. Think about it: the only person who could have ended this whole thing before it started, by bloodlessly deposing Aerys, was the prince. He didn’t do that. He knew what his father was, and yet chose to obey him anyway. That’s what makes it his fault.
Robert, Ned and even Aerys were all limited men who did the best they could, in their own ways. Rhaegar wasn’t.