Historical Realism in Worldbuilding: Some Lessons from George R. R. Martin

I've been pretty straight here about being a Thrones fan, and I don't really see the point of turning up one's nose at the HBO series. Both the show and the books are epochal - to me, as a partisan of epic fantasy, and I have no problem with regarding Martin as the Tolkien of our time.

Epochal does not, however, mean he is without sin - which is exactly the attitude Martin adopts toward Tolkien himself. In a famous Rolling Stone interview where Martin lays out his vision of epic fantasy (which is close to what I have been referring to here as historical fantasy), he specifically faults the genre's founder for his lack of political, economic, and ethical realism:

Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it's not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn't ask the question: What was Aragorn's tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren't gone – they're in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles? 

In real life, real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with. Just being a good guy was not the answer. You had to make hard, hard decisions. Sometimes what seemed to be a good decision turned around and bit you in the ass; it was the law of unintended consequences. I've tried to get at some of these in my books. My people who are trying to rule don't have an easy time of it. Just having good intentions doesn't make you a wise king.

Few fantasy worldbuilders today would reject the gist of Martin's critique. The style of fantasy centered on a struggle between the forces of Good against the forces of an aesthetically evident Evil, an in the absence of a context formed by political, economic, psychological and sexual factors does has become cliché, and does not answer the demands of a mentality that struggles to come to terms with the contemporary world - always the touchstone for our fantastic extrapolations.

However, just because Martin does wonder about the Lannisters' tax rate, the terms on which they borrow from the Iron Bank of Braavos, and strategies that lead less-than perfect geopolitical contestants to success against their enemies does not mean his own construction is devoid of outlandish elements that don't resonate with historical experience. It would be easy to categorize Middle Earth as a fundamentally Romantic, philological construction with Martin's world as an essentially social-scientific one, but this is not the case, strictly speaking. Martin has been clear that unlike Tolkien (and like many GMs), he is a situational world-builder. While Tolkien started with languages, cultures, and mythology, only a small part of which become manifest in the novels (the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings) as a tip of a largely submerged iceberg, Martin's own world is the iceberg tip that floats on a raft. In other words, Martin starts with characters and a story, and only fills in blank geographic or structural blanks spots as it becomes necessary to do so. This situational approach might make narrative sense, but such a haphazard method can also lead to a simplistic and nonviable constructions. In certain respects, Tolkien's Middle Earth is actually more realistic than Westeros.

Three key issues in Martin's worldbuilding stand out for me as failures of historical imagination.

La Très Longue Durée

Historical structures can be quite long-lived, and dwarf individual or even familial memories. Imperial dynasties and regional divisions of labor may persist for roughly half a millennium. Beyond that scope, structures rarely survive intact, and if they do endure, they often have little impact on most people, and are beyond their ken. If a more long-term temporality does exist, it is, in the words of Fernand Braudel, a time of the sages.

I actually think that Braudel was a bit blinkered in his estimation of social structures. Surely, despite mutations and reconfigurations, Imperial China has survived, both structurally and in memory, for over 2000 years, while Pharaonic Egypt lasted for 3000. Commercial entities, such as the Silk Road, lasted for 1500 years, or perhaps 2000. Religious or cultural systems such as Buddhism have persisted for 2500 years.

But beyond that, social structures wear out - migrations, tectonic environmental and geopolitical shifts, and the full working out of systemic possibilities - the growth of social systems to such an extent that they become unbalanced and decentered - eventually take their toll. Beyond the examples cited above - which are all exceptionally durable - few if any continuities persisting for over three millennia can be found.

Yet, in Martin's world, the Wall separating the Seven Kingdoms from the wild lands beyond has stood for 8000 years. For the purposes of comparison, imagine a fortification built between the Neolithic settlements of Jericho and Çatalhöyük, still standing, and in continual use until our own day. To be sure, the Wall was built with magic, and in response to the existential threat represented to all living beings by the Others/White Walkers. The maintenance of such a structure would have been a priority, given its purpose, but how long could it have lasted as the danger receded?

More incredible than the maintenance of the physical/magical structure is the the persistence of the social institution of the Night's Watch, The order is also 8000 years old, and Lord Commander Jon Snow is the 998th since its inception. This mind-bogglingly long institutional durability has no precedent in our own world. As there have been no issues with the White Walkers during that span of time, it's reasonable to assume that the order would have long passed out of existence due to irrelevance. And indeed, the neglect of the Wall by established authorities during the period in which Martin's epic is set suggests that it would likely have perished long ago (if it were unneeded for narrative purposes). If we assume that a symbolic system durable enough to preserve knowledge with some degree of accuracy over that enormous length of time existed, and that a dedicated group of people were capable of devoting significant resources to keeping the Watch alive also survived, the Watch would have turned into the governing institution of Westeros (likely with strong religious overtones), rather than a peripheral grouping made up of society's rejects. But we see that the pharaonic monarchy, created, according to Egyptian religious conceptions, for a roughly analogous reason - to maintain order on earth after the gods withdrew to heaven - lasted less than half that time. The purpose of its most impressive monuments - the pyramids - was forgotten soon thereafter. And the Pharaonic monarchy was exceptional in every way in the context of the world that surrounded it.

Bran's big, beautiful 8000-year old Wall. Paid for by the Wildlings.

Worse still, the person credited with constructing the Wall - Bran the Builder, was also the founder of House Stark, that has similarly survived for 8000 years. Several other ruling houses, including the Arryns of the Vale, and the Lannisters of Casterly Rock trace their origin to the Age of Heroes, which concluded a respectable 6000 years before the present time. Of course, these fabulous lifespans can be explained away by saying that the founders, along with the Age of Heroes itself, is the stuff of legend, but that doesn't really clinch the case. The period known as the Age of Heroes in Greece, which at least partly informs Martin's notion, lasted six generations. In more recent times, dynasties in Georgia and Ethiopia have claimed descent from the Biblical House of David, which (assuming it existed) dates back around 3000 years. Having a 6000- 8000 year old dynasty would be the rough equivalent of an actual ruling house in 1800 CE claiming descent from Ut-Napishtim (though perhaps even this would be a stretch - it's not clear how old the legend actually is). A cultural region like India is dealing with much larger time-scales than Europe or Western Asia, but even here, there, there is no House of Pandava ruling during historical times. Appropriately, the protagonists of the Indian heroic age are of divine origin, which would make sense when dealing with memories of such great antiquity. In Martin's world, the human and divine spheres are much more strictly delineated, and foundational heroes are clearly human, whereas the gods (on which more below) are fairly abstract entities.

Why this matters. Martin's main conceit - that people in fantasy worlds that are suffused with wondrous elements like dragons and functional magic should still be motivated by factors that readers can understand - the need for survival, greed, power, lust - ultimately derives from a pragmatic anthropology that understands humans as imperfect beings driven by the reality of being mortal. We compete for scarce resources, try to pass them down to our descendants, wish to connect with (or possess) other people while we still draw breath, and so on. These motivations are a singularly bad fit for a culture with an astoundingly long historical memory, and incredibly long-lived institutions, which, if they existed, can be reasonably expected to impress a much different sort of mentality - one much more oriented toward eternity. Most probably, this would be a society not governed by a warrior aristocracy (as Westeros is) or an oligarchy (as are most of the cities of Essos), but by some sort of priestly or administrative elite, which would socialize people into paying much more deference to ancestors or the hereafter (even if selfish motivations still make their demands felt).

Conversely, societies much closer to the ones Martin describes would have far less memory of their own historicity, and would merge any remembered and not clearly recorded past with myth in a few generations. If any undistorted memory of heroic ages is retained, it would probably be in possession of a long-lived people with an entirely different set of motivations than normal humans. The retention of very long-term historical memory by an immortal race like the elves of Middle Earth is actually a much more realistic construction than what we see in Martin's world (where, significantly, the elves' analog - the Children of the Forest - are virtually extinct). Leaving room for such a race - perhaps more noble if more inscrutable - makes more sense and creates more dramatic tension (if GMs and players are able to sustain it) in a fantastic environment.

As Many As The Grains Of Sand On The Seashore

If the temporal canvas of Martin's world is too uniform to be useful for realistic worldbuilding, the same evaluation also applies to Westerosi demography. It is too undifferentiated, with too few distinct ethnicities (it's likely no accident that the main political units are associated with ruling dynasties and not with distinct identity groups), no clear conception of the relationship between urban and rural populations, and impossibly large armies given the continent's social structure and level of development. It is the latter I want to focus on here, as military matters occupy a significant amount of Martin's attention, and army sizes are discussed in much greater detail than other Westerosi structures (some fans in fact use these as the baseline for calculating Westeros' overall population).

The War of the Five Kings involves far larger armies than are probably warranted by Westeros' demography and political order. The North - the least populous of its major realms, is able to field an army of 20,000 people - and this for a kingdom roughly analogous to Scotland, whose ruling family has just lost its dynast, and is in open rebellion against the central authority. The Lannisters muster an army of over 60,000, which they can split into two, while Renly Baratheon's army includes an astounding 100,000 men - and that figure does not include those (admittedly few) bannermen who stayed loyal to his brother Stannis. These armies, significantly, are raised by calling upon personal relations with one's vassals, and are not mercenary groups or standing armies maintained by the state (which also makes it a mystery why the state is so deeply in debt to the Iron Bank: war-making is the main cause of state indebtedness, but the phenomenon only dates back to early modern times in our own world, because that is when large states began to depart from the practices of feudal warfare).

For the purposes of comparison, in major European conflicts prior to the 16th century, the warring sides were only able to field a fraction of such forces. The Battle of Agincourt - a decisive engagement of the Hundred Years War between two powerful Western European kingdoms - featured 6000 - 9000 soldiers on the side of the English against a French force that is estimated to have numbered anywhere between 12000 and 36000 (along with the Holy Roman Empire, France was the most populous realm in Europe, numbering around 15 million people). Nearly simultaneously, at the other end of Europe, the Battle of Grunwald pitted between 16000 and 39000 soldiers of the Polish-Lithuanian Commowealth against 11000 to 27000-strong army of the Teutonic Knights (whose defeat ended their career as a power in Eastern Europe). If we go by average sizes, the larger sides in each of these conflicts would be significantly smaller than than either the Lannister or the Baratheon army. For purposes of comparison, the Battle of Bosworth Field - the decisive contest of the Wars of the Roses - the conflict often cited as a major inspiration for Game of Thrones - had no more than 12000 combatants on either side. And several centuries earlier, the enormous and potentially civilization-altering Mongol invasion force that subjugated the Russian principalities, and decisively defeated Polish, Hungarian, and German armies likely consisted of roughly 40,000 Mongol mounted archers (not counting allied auxiliaries, which probably doubled the size of Batu's force).

Clearly, the Iron Bank needs to impose austerity policies on Casterly Rock

One notable effort to evaluate Martin's army sizes by a professional demographer unequivocally concludes that they were overinflated:

Westeros is allegedly based on Medieval Europe. You wouldn’t know it from the army sizes. We’ve seen or heard about dozens of battles with 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, or more combatants, sometimes that many on each side. For comparison, the historically decisive Battle of Agincourt probably had under 30,000 soldiers. The Battle of Hastings had 25,000 at most. The incredibly vast Battle of Tours, where Charles Martel turned back the Arab advance, may have had 60,000 combatants. But crucially: these battles were decades or hundreds of years apart, rarely involving the same armies. The Battle of Yarmouk, after which the Caliphate siezed the entire Byzantine East, had just 50,000 fighters or so, with the result that the Caliphate conquered the entire region. Crucially, it should be noted that contemporaries gave much higher numbers: the Byzantines were routinely asserted to be fielding 100,000 men, while Muslims were depicted as leading hundreds of thousands. Conveniently, the sum total of GRRM’s descriptions of armies would suggest that Westeros can field between 200,000 and 650,000 soldiers, depending on conditions. Those numbers are almost certainly too large, with too robust an ability to recover losses. Medieval armies were small, except in cases where they were extremely professionalized, like the Byzantine armies, or Charles Martel’s Frankish army. Holding a Medieval army together was very hard, as was supplying it. The frequency with which there are large armies in Westeros is just ridiculous. The most reasonable explanation is that GRRM is an unreliable narrator, as he is for land area: these armies probably are not as big as he claims in many cases, and losses probably are not as steep.

Why this matters. People's worlds can contain armies of any size without necessarily detracting from anyone's enjoyment of playing in it. But if a fantasy world is recommended precisely on the basis of its realism, armies larger than the economy or political system can sustain stand out as incongruous elements. To quote again from Lyman Stone's blog:

what bothers me, as a really picky nerd, is when people think that it’s a particularly well-crafted setting. It is not. Westeros is shoddily assembled as far as political, cultural, or demographic realism goes. There is too much dynastic stability, too little cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity, the basic size of the world seems to change to fit the immediate exigencies of the plot, the cities and armies are implausibly large in many cases, and even careful analysis makes it hard to determine even a wide ballpark for population. None of these criticisms matter in a setting not trading on its claims to a kind of “realism.” But for a setting whose market value in some sense depends on its “realism,” yeah, it’s an issue.

Aside from expecting verisimilitude, there is another reason why overmilitarized Westeros is problematic worldbuilding. A region capable of fielding such large armies is a region in social flux, where change is relatively fast-paced. Westeros, as we have just seen, is socially static, with few significant demographic shifts, a very uniform ethnic structure, and the predominance of very durable temporal mentalities. A heavily militarized world would feature frequent and profound social shifts, the sudden disappearance of durable groups, and the appearance of new worldviews. Such a world would look a lot less like medieval England, where vassal "bannermen" are subinfeudated to big lords, and a lot more like the 1st millennium BCE Near East, where strong states were able to field large standing armies, wars were highly destructive, and sent long-established peoples like the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and the Medes into historical oblivion. Armies during this period attained sizes, as well as destructive and transformative power that would not be seen again until the Napoleonic Age.  Such a fast-changing world would not be one where even dragons are discounted as a decisive military factor within a mere century of their (rather inexplicable) disappearance. And such a world would be one where strange new religions sprang up nearly overnight to help people adjust to a transformed reality.

Which brings me to the last point I want to discuss here - Martin's religions.

Bad Religion

Despite claiming to agree that 'religion is an important element in fantasy-type societies', Martin does display a certain amount of discomfort (1:03:38) in discussing it. He prefers to steer clear of questions about religion in general (e.g. how religion is interrelated with ethnicity), and approaches his religions, like other key aspects of his world, situationally. It is therefore not surprising that a one-time interviewer clearly implies that in comparison with medieval Europe, Westerosi religion is much more in the background, much less determinative of what motivates people to act.

The established religions in Westeros do seem rather pale in comparison with medieval Christianity, and with other historical religions. The Faith of the Seven, though it does have a hierarchy (and, as Martin legitimately points out, a 'pope') is about as generic a religion as one can conceive. A godhead in the form of a Septad - Father, Warrior, Smith, Mother, Maiden, Crone, Stranger - is so boring that even its officiants can't bear to recite each divine person's attributes at key public ceremonies. Not only do these "gods" lack decent names and personalities, they also don't appear to have immanent servitors or messengers in the form of saints, angels, or demigods. Nearly all expressions of piety by people - especially peasants, who are obviously suffering under the oppression of a fairly rapacious and impious nobility, and even moreso after the outbreak of war - are formulaic and devoid of passion. The seeming lack of tension with the older faith of the First Men (whose gods have no names at all) speaks to the tepid character of the Faith of the Seven, which Westeros could probably do without. A more sanguine variant - the cult of the Sparrows, and its transformation into a Faith Militant - is a little closer a historical religion, with the character of the High Sparrow being reminiscent of Savonarola, but even that is weak brew, that is easily dispensed with by Cersei's one act of incendiary violence. The religion of the Lord of Light bears the hallmarks of Zoroastrianism, and its practitioners actually possess power (as one would expect in a fantasy world). But this cult is a foreign import - from Essos - the part of the world currently least subject to historical change!

May the Father lull you to sleep with dad jokes...

I would expect the religion of the Lord of Light, and heretical sects like the Sparrows to occupy center stage in a world like Martin's, rather than clawing away at the margins. A world featuring erratic seasons which do not have uniform duration, and which can last for years, is a world in which static faiths like the Faith of the Seven - much better suited for conditions of regular season cycles - wouldn't survive. In fact, religions heavily focused on divine unpredictability, millenarian expectations, saving, and calculation would likely have developed much faster in Martin's world than in our own (though admittedly, the Citadel and the institution of the Maesters speak to the fact that Westerosi science is quite advanced in comparison to medieval science).

Why this matters. Worldbuilders, including many RPG GMs, are just as uncomfortable with religion as Martin is. As a result, religious institutions in game settings are frequently simplistic caricatures - they are either ridiculously pious to the exclusion of any other human trait or emotion, or ridiculously corrupt, and led by hierophants who believe only in the pursuit of power. Aside from dogmatic preaching, religious establishments are wall furniture - it's where you go when you need healing that party members are incapable of providing. To my mind, worldbuilding can only benefit by drawing from more historical exemplars which represent religions as a fundamental part of most people's worldview that is evident in everyday life, passionate and contemplative, as well as morally complex.