The Wall is too damn big....

D

Duff_Omathum

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I'm having a real problem with the scale of the Wall....

700 feet high, sheer stone face, a few hundred miles long. It's JUST TOO BIG! More like a mountain range....How would you build it? The Great Pyramid is huge at 480 feet and could be seen over 500 miles away in it's heyday.

GRRM made a huge error in scale here I believe, especially when he talks about fighting the Wildlings from such a height.

Let's see...700=200+meters? That's about...66 stories high right?

How do you aim from that height? How can you see arms or legs from that height?

HOW CAN A SHORT BOW SHOOT ARROWS UPWARDS 200+ METERS WHEN A LONGBOW IS PUSHING 240 METERS ON A WINDLESS DAY OVER A CALM FIELD?

So now I always think of the wall as about 100 feet high, and that is pretty damn huge all the same.

Size DOES matter! :D
 
Magic is more-or-less explicitly mentioned as being part of the Wall's construction. And Westeros has other fantastic structures, like the Eyrie, Dragonstone, and Storm's End, which are similarly incredible.

As for the battle with the wildlings, opinion is divided on whether it would be possible to shoot arrows that far up... but I'm willing to ignore it for the sake of a good story. ;)
 
Logic suggests that the optimum angle would be 45 degress (discouting air resistance) therefore let's put our highly trained English longbowman into an airless vacuum and see what we get (apart from a gruesome death)

45 degrees - a perfect parabola (therefore not as high as an arc really)

But hey, let's say he got lucky and gravity wasn't real (magic) and he shot a perfect arc. Maximum height = 240/2 = 120 meters.

So in a world without air resistance/proper gravity a highly trained English longbowman MIGHT hit The Wall halfway up...

Opinion may be devided, but only between those who can use math and those who can't...

I like a good story too...but wouldn't you be a bit fazed if people suddenly started jumping 10 feet high and picking up 300 pound rocks and throwing them around like marbles?

Magic should never be used as an excuse for a gaping flaw in logic.
 
Wrt the height of the Wall, magic is not being used to excuse any logical flaws, IMO, but to add a dimension of the fantastic to the setting. I mean, it would change the story not one whit to have the Wall be 150 ft high, except to make the Wall less impressive and otherworldly.

Because there is a high degree of realism in ASOIAF, people do sometimes forget that Westeros is a fantasy world as much as Greyhawk or Middle Earth is. But Westeros has dragons, impossibly grand structures like Harrenhal, magic unbreakable swords that never lose their edge, necromancy, fortune-tellers and visionaries, shadows that can kill, jewels that protect the wearer from poison, magical horns, you name it. And that's all without getting into the wonders Dany sees in Quarth and elsewhere.

As for the bow-range issue, I'm no expert, not even an amateur on the topic. ;) All I know is what I was told... which was that, of several hundreds of arrows loosed at the defenders on the Wall, it is conceivable if not likely that a couple of dozen reached the top of the structure through freak shots. But, as I say, I could well be wildly wrong.

In the end, though, I don't care about that much. It's like arguing that the Eyrie can't possibly hold sufficient supplies to stand a siege, or that Dany's dragons aren't aerodynamic or couldn't possibly breathe fire, or that the House of the Undying's layout makes no sense. Not worth worrying about, IMO.
 
I'm with Raven. Don't overthink it, and it won't be a problem. Maybe they just have really good bowstrings beyond the Wall. Perhaps the nature of the Wall creates strong updrafts to assist the arrows in their flight. I don't really care. It's a great scene in a great series that has captured my imagination like none before it. For that I'm eternally grateful to George, and if he says that damn Wall is a hundred thousand feet high I'll believe him.
 
Whilst I've never read the series (I tried, I drifted off, I did something else less productive) I am aware of a form of West African bow capable of adding onto the Longbow range by over a third. This would still fail to explain reaching the wall's top. Don't ask me what it's called, though.

The same book also had a piece about the razor-women of Dahomey. Dahomey was a strange place.

I must also agree that, even if only from a "Hah hah, look at the author's goof" perspective, that seems a pretty silly err on Martin's part. He could have at least given the northeners mysteriosuly-potent bows. What with all the realism.

Still, Dahomey.
 
Raven said:
Because there is a high degree of realism in ASOIAF,
Click to expand...

It's realism that makes the fantasy more engaging IMO, realistic characters, motives, plots, and yes, even things like air/gravity/heat.

I love action movies, but impossible scenes always seem to be a let down (ie. Mission Impossible helicopter ending anyone?) It's like a kick a in the head saying HEY ITS NOT REAL BECAUSE THAT IS JUST STUPID PHYSICS!

Magic swords dont fall under that catagory for me somehow, as I have no standard for magic - and honestly, I like to escape into a world which is founded in Swords, Knights, and heroism. I know it's not real, but there is a degree of believablity that makes it possible to escape into.

I DO know something about scale though, and when something is blatently wrong you just can't forget it. A 150 foot high wall is HUGE BTW. Great authors go to a LOT of effort to research their weapons/horses/ships/food/armour well in order to get the full effect.

GRRM is great at realistic knights/battles, but he got confused when it came to the Wall I think. Defending errors as Fantasy is like pulling a George W Bush on readers IMO (It dodges the issue)
 
That's an interesting catch. When I imagine the wall I always think of a structure around 200 feet tall. 700, just seems too big.

I have no problem with it being built. Fantasy novels are littered with structures built in the distant past that seem to defy construction. But the combat stuff seems fairly valid.

When they are fighting is it explicitly stated that they're fighting from the top of the wall? Or is it from platforms/ledges only part of the way up. Also if I remember correctly is the wall tapered, and the bottom section not so sheer? So the arrows could be ebing fired from part way up the hil at the base.

As people have said, it's not something that would ever spoil my enjoyment of the book, but it does seem to be an uncharacterstic error or miscalculation.
 
Just to point out, yes the wall is 700 feet high but the land it's built on and surounded by is very up and down, with hills and valleys etc. So most of the time the diferance between the top of the wall and the highest point of land is nowhere near 700 feet.


It's still a bit far fetched tho.

:D
 
I said:
I was under the impression that ice formed a big part of the wall's construction...
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It is. I think most of the wall is made out of ice, with only the top third or so being stone (and the heights and ratios varying along it's length).

That's just from memory though. I think I need to reed some of this stuff again now!
 
All of the Wall is basically ice: there are stones caught in amongst it, and in one place it's noted that the crushed stone scattered on the paths on top for centuries has been absorbed into it, so the top part is likely very stony.

There are also other things. The story about the sentinels buried up to their necks in ice, for example, and the stories about there being giants in the Wall. There could be anything in there. ;)
 
I must mention that the height of The Wall didn't bother me when I read the books. It's a Fantasy, it has dragons in it and other strange creatures. So the wall is too tall, GRRM's books are great with or without that aspect.:)
 
It's not so much of a problem if it's made of ice - and I seem to recall it's been building higher over the centuries. So it's basically a case of taking the natural environment and shaping it. Strange and different, but much easier to suspend belief than an entirely stone construction.
 
Hey, it's GRRM's world, he can do what he wants. Perhaps a foot is less than twelve inches in his world. And when it comes down to it, who cares? This is one really long tall tale, after all. I'm not going to read about warg children and dragons and red-eyed sorceresses, and then throw down the book in disgust because there's this UNBELIEVABLY tall wall.:p
 
We need to remember the wall is close to 9000 years old and made of mostly ice. It's the builders jobs to repair the castles and add onto the wall. During Winters the temperature probably drops so that if a man were to spit it would freeze before it hit the ground. Maybe the builders just tossed out buckets of water onto the stone covered ice and allowed it to freeze, the entire wall doesn't need to be big ice blocks and it is often described as smooth and whole. After 9000 years i'm sure the Wall could've reached that height especially with it's wide base.

Castle's like Harrenhal and Winterfell which has a shirt inner wall, only 300 feet high, are more difficult to explain and storms end which is hundreds of feet thick in it's widest parts.
 
I like I, Brian's response.

I've been to the Great Wall of China. I don't think it's more than 100 feet high at any point, though it is up to thirty feet wide at the top. The absolutely remarkable thing about it is that it is built on the tops of mountains. Visibility from the heights is very good and the defenders would have plenty of time to organize while the enemy lumbered up the ascent.

In my mind, the Wall in ASOIAF is primarily over flat ground. Sure, Martin mentions that it goes over hills, but it's not at the top of a mountain range.

The most mind boggling thing about the Wall to me is that they actually have a hand pulley system to get people and materials up and down. If I'd been the guy who hauled up Tyrion seven hundred feet in the middle of a freezing night, I'd have thrown either him or myself off the edge. They need horses or some huge counterweights on their pulleys.
 
cercar said:
We need to remember the wall is close to 9000 years old and made of mostly ice. It's the builders jobs to repair the castles and add onto the wall. During Winters the temperature probably drops so that if a man were to spit it would freeze before it hit the ground.
Click to expand...

9000 years of spit would definitely amp it up a lot. :D Especially since back in the day there were thousands more men manning the Wall.
 
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