In A Game Of Thrones Summer has lated for decades. Winter is coming, and it may last as long. Or maybe not. It seems that the seasons last an inordinately long amount of time, and they are not cyclical – the lengths vary. Also, there appears to be ‘normal’ seasons as well. That is, warm months and cold months. How does this happen?
At first, I thought the planet’s orbit might be a precessing ellipse. The normal seasons happen as they do on earth, changing with the not-quite-circular orbit. The longer seasons might occur if the orbit is ‘spinning’ – moving around the primary star. But then I thought that might result in more regular ‘long seasons’. Maybe the planet orbits a variable star?
I’m pretty sure Martin based the weather on New Hampshire, where the winter is twice as long as the other seasons. If you have five year summers, ten year winters seem about right.
But really, the sun is much closer to the world in GOT, and most of the uneveness of the seasons is due to violent sunspot activity. Theron talks to one of his uncles about it while back on the iron islands in book 3.
Yeah, I’ve also heard that Martin has said don’t try to explain it with what you know of planetary motion, because he just made it up and it just is that way.
What I want to know is how years work. Like, if a character is 22 years old, how the hell is that measured if it’s not from the Fifth Month of year X to the Fifth Month of year X+1? And really, how do you come up with the concept of a year remarkably parallel to our solar year (e.g., young women “flower” around 12-13) if their seasonal variation can take decades? How the hell do you plant/grow/harvest in a 6-9 month period like we do on our planet? Does every crop take a decade to reach food status, or can every plant go through its entire life cycle in part of a single season?
Really, there are a lot of questions that result from making seasons super long. Seems hardly worth the trouble for the author to have made that decision just to make his world a little more wacky.
I’m not sure about how they deal with the massive, 5-year crop shortages (though I have noted that some regions such as Dorne have more temperate climates) but you can always divine the length of a year by counting days.
I’ve seen the show but haven’t read the books. This confused me too. How do people survive the ten year winter? Is there special magic grain that can grow and be harvested during the winter? Do people head south (or possibly north) to where the winters are not as severe? Is everybody really reliant on seafood? Do the books address how people, and I suppose most plants and animals, cope with a ten year winter? If there is an answer in the books feel free to spoil it for me.
Even in the real world, most calenders are not based on the seasons.
They mark the seasons, but that generally involves regular adjustment to keep the year and the seasons from drifting too far from each other, since the year is based on something celestial - the phases of the moon, or the transit of the sun through the zodiac, or the distance from one equinox to the next.
The Westerosi calender would not need those adjustments - a year would be 12 or 13 months long (or a full transit of the zodiac, or from equinox to equinox), with no extra days/weeks thrown in to keep the seasons coming at the same general time every year.
SecrtaryofEvil: I’m not halfway through A Feast For Crows, so you’ll get no spoilers from me.
As to the seasons, there seems to be some seasonal fluctuations within the Summer that is ending. There are several references throughout the books to snow falling. ‘She’d seen snow before, but there’s more of it this time’ style of thing. I think I’ve read a few lines about Autumn, as well. That’s the basis for my hypothesis in the OP that the planet orbits its star in roughly the same manner of Earth. On top of the normal seasons, there are also what I called ‘long seasons’. I’ve discarded the idea of a precessing orbit that causes very long ‘long seasons’ because they would be predictable and regular. The star might have seemingly random periods of sunspot and flare activity resulting in hot and cold periods that last for years or decades.
Earth has experienced a number of ice ages. Perhaps the world in the story does as well, and perhaps they occur more frequently. It seems that in living memory there have been ‘little ice ages’, but the Winter that is Coming is going to be more serious. During the Little Ice Age 500 years ago, crops failed and disease wiped out millions, but
humans survived. Hominids lived through the last actual ice age as well. So I’m guessing that on Westeros’s world times are harsh, but not so harsh that everyone dies. Crops and animals must have evolved to survive the recurring ‘Winters’. There will be food, but not as much as during the warm periods and probably not exactly where it’s needed.
In any case, it sounds like a very interesting place to be a climatologist.
Yes, I realize it’s stupid to be nit picking a magical fantasy world, but the season thing is not the biggest annoyance for me re the GOT world.
On one hand Martin is trying to make the world and characters actions more “realistic” than other fantasy tropes, but on the other hand (and it’s silly for it to bug me, and this is more of a book thing where the culture of the maester’s is more thoroughly fleshed out) he has a created a culture that has peopled with intelligent, inquisitive individuals, that has writing, and a quasi scientific guild of what amount to technology specialists (the Maester’s) that have existed for thousands of years, and yet there is almost zero technological progress over these thousands of years.
It’s a big suspension of disbelief. More so even than allowing for dragons.
In the latest book, the Night’s Watch borrows money from a bank to buy food and have it brought in by ship. There’s also a mention of glass gardens that can be used to grow vegetables even in the deep of winter.
365, give or take a handful…whatever is the closest whole number to the length of time it takes the sun to go through the zodiac. Or however long it takes the moon to go through however many cycles the person making the calender figured was significant. Or two or three growing cycles. Or the period from one solstice to the next equivalent solstice (ie, take the northern solstice as the start of the new year).
Seriously - don’t think of the year as bounded by seasons…Nobody who’s ever designed a calendar has - that’s why they all have cludges (leap days, festival weeks, extra months) included to keep the seasons coming at about the same place every time.
But why would you even have a “year” in that case? “Day” makes sense with the period of time it takes for the sun to rise and set. “Year” doesn’t make sense if you’re not talking about your planet going around the sun or the seasons changing or something.
This is low on the list of things I hated about the first book, but it constantly bothered me.
FWIW, I always read the long seasons as being more like trends, say “Summer” means several years of mild winters and extended growing seasons, while “Winter” is a stretch of severe winters and short growing seasons.
It also seems to be more of a concern to the north of Westeros – the southern portions of the realm do not seems very concerned (perhaps even during a very bad Long Winter their climate just becomes more temperate and less arid) and I am trying to remember a mention of the long seasons on the other continent.
So it may be more local than we think, and mostly of concern to the Starks, since they own the lands worst affected.
(I am speaking as a reader of the books with poor memory and have no knowledge of any changes in emphasis made in the television adaptation.)
Yeah, this is where I’m going with this. People on earth have created calendars based on dry seasons and wet seasons, or star position, or the time the earth takes to go around the sun, or the lunar cycle, or what have you. The river flooded, then receded so you could plant crops, then dried up and you harvested, there’s a year, lather, rinse, repeat. Takes around the same amount of time each time, that’s something you can base a system on. But when you talk about a season lasting 5 or 7 or 10 years, I just don’t get it. Yeah yeah, magical world magical rules dragons, I get it. Now, they obviously have days. And a moon, and the woman have menstrual cycles. So they have months. But how does anyone know how many months there are in a year, if a year has nothing to do with solar orbit or seasons? I’d take a half-assed “a wizard did it” answer from the author over nothing but “it’s magic and I’ll tell you later”.