Westeros/Europe size comparison.

[Werthead]

Nice.

Took this from a Civ4 forum where someone had said they felt the existing size for Westeros - GRRM has said it's the size (or length, rather) of South America - was unbelievably vast so he'd scaled the continent down to a more believable size.

Of course, he hadn't realised that GRRM's comment had included the unknown hundreds or thousands of miles of territory north of the Wall as well. Actually, going by the size of the Wall (about 300 miles long), the size comparison he uses here is almost dead-on. Maybe a little too small, but given that we're not working with hard figures here, well within acceptable margins of error

It still makes the Frostfangs about two-thirds as long as the Urals, which is fricking huge. Dorne is about the size of Italy, which I can believe. The Reach about the size of France and the North about the size of Scandanavia was about what I was thinking anyway, whilst the Iron Islands cover an area about half the size of Ireland, which is still a decent size (and importantly big enough to support a reasonable size of population).

 

[TK-421]

Bigger than I thought. Here I kept picturing the island of Great Britain as the size of Westeros but when I give it more thought, it makes sense.

 

[Ursa major]

If anything, it's veering towards the too small size for me, if only because it means we have seen such a small part of the ASoIaF world (or that that world is itself small with, presumably, an enormous metal core to provide the gravitational attraction).

On the scale of that map (and others I've seen), the far eastern coast of Essos would be no further than Kashmir**. No wonder no-one has circumnavigated this would: they've 30,000 kilometres of (open?) see from Essos all the way back round to Westeros.


On the other hand, Westeros is now much more in scale with the mechanics of the story.





** - While Westeros is quite long on a north-south axis, it's relatively narrow east to west.