Game of Thrones season's question

[Bedlam]

I'm just starting to watch the TV show of game of thrones and I've been wondering about how the seasons are supposed to work (outside of maybe, it's magic, and there doesn't seem to be much of that around). The seasons are apparently much longer than on earth and apparently the length various considerably (one summer being 9 years and a winter of 3 years seemingly being quite long compared to others recently), both of these I can sort of get my head around but the characters refer to seasons as lasting several years, so are they not connected to the tilt of the planet at all? As there yearly seasons within the years themselves (Sort of summer / winter, summer / spring, etc)? I would guess the orbit of the planet is in some way randomly wobbly and the distance between the planet and the sun varies considerable, that might work but how significant would the difference have to be and would such an orbit be possible? I guess it might work better if the planet in some way orbited between a binary, but there only seems to be one sun.

Another question is the wall, its 700 feet tall, I think and stretches for a hundreds (?) of miles. Its rumoured to have been built by magic, could such a construction actually be within the capability of the civilisation shown (Late medieval?) (I know it was supposed to have been built thousands of years ago but I don't know if there was supposed to be any technological development since then)?

[Koolaidkirby]

There is no scientific reason for the odd seasons, its purely a magic part of the world. The world of game of thrones is meant to be another/different Earth, so it still has a normal orbit.

there are some cool theories where people have tried to figure out weird ways for it to work but the author confirmed it's not that complicated.

[Elheru Aran]

The Wall is more or less straight-up magic in its construction, but it was also built back in the very-old-times when giants and mammoths and such were much more common. It may also have been built with the assistance of the Children of the Forest and perhaps also the wild men of the North, but I can't say for sure about that, it's more myth than anything else. That's part of the 'verse-- there's a looooong history involved to the point where events like the building of the Wall are pure myth.

The seasons thing is sometimes attributed to having a very elliptical orbit-- much more of a squashed oval than a normal planetary orbit. Thus you would have longer periods of 'summer' and 'winter. There's no serious explanation for it, though, IIRC.

[Simon_Jester]

The seasons are apparently much longer than on earth and apparently the length various considerably (one summer being 9 years and a winter of 3 years seemingly being quite long compared to others recently), both of these I can sort of get my head around but the characters refer to seasons as lasting several years, so are they not connected to the tilt of the planet at all?

Correct, by all appearances.

There's a correlation between climate and latitude. North of the Wall you ultimately reach lands that never thaw at all; in the northlands it can snow in 'summer;' in Dorne it's pretty darn warm at all seasons, at least normally.

But aside from that, the seasons do not correlate to anything we would recognize; my working theory is that the planet's axial tilt is zero and the magical seasons' effects are superimposed on a constant level of sunlight striking the planet.

As there yearly seasons within the years themselves (Sort of summer / winter, summer / spring, etc)?

There is no evidence for this.

I would guess the orbit of the planet is in some way randomly wobbly and the distance between the planet and the sun varies considerable, that might work but how significant would the difference have to be and would such an orbit be possible? I guess it might work better if the planet in some way orbited between a binary, but there only seems to be one sun.

Orbits would be more predictable in advance, and the maesters would long since have learned how to predict the seasons even if no one else could, if that were true.

So basically, yeah. The season cycle is explicitly magical, with summer and winter taking turns at more or less arbitrary intervals, possibly driven by the struggle between the fundamental magical forces of heat/cold or fire/ice.

Another question is the wall, its 700 feet tall, I think and stretches for a hundreds (?) of miles. Its rumoured to have been built by magic, could such a construction actually be within the capability of the civilisation shown (Late medieval?) (I know it was supposed to have been built thousands of years ago but I don't know if there was supposed to be any technological development since then)?

It's not really plausible that anyone could have built a wall of ice 200 yards high, 30-40 yards thick (at least?), and 500000 yards or so long, using pre-modern technology. That's got to be at least several billion tons of ice.

The Wall's construction is implicitly magical, although at least some of its great height is apparently the result of many generations of systematic building-up and expansion by the Night Watch. The Watch had a lot more resources to do things like quarry ice blocks and add them to the Wall in centuries (and millenia) past. Magic may or may not have been involved in that part of the process.

There has been technological development in historic times; the First Men were explicitly Bronze Age or Neolithic peoples, while the Andals who invaded the continent more recently (i.e. the past 1000-2000 years) had more advanced tools and military techniques.

Meanwhile, the fallen Valyrian Empire had technology and/or magic superior to anything now known; it is uncertain how much of that was purely technical sophistication, and how much was sorcery that cannot be duplicated in the less magical era of the Targaryen Dynasty and its immediate aftermath in Westeros.

The seasons thing is sometimes attributed to having a very elliptical orbit-- much more of a squashed oval than a normal planetary orbit. Thus you would have longer periods of 'summer' and 'winter. There's no serious explanation for it, though, IIRC.

Except that an elliptical orbit would produce predictable seasons of summer and winter, of constant length, unless the magic were altering the orbital speed of the entire planet. Which would be considerably more difficult than screwing with the seasons by, for example, screening out 10-20% of sunlight striking the planetary surface, or tampering with the greenhouse effect or whatever.

[Raw Shark]

GRRM has gone on the record that he probably made the Wall too big.

There's a fan theory that I'm particularly fond of that the ultimate plan of the Others is to draw enough people north of the Wall with feints, kill them, and assemble a large enough army of wights to simply lemming them up the snow drift and each other "when the snows pile hundreds of feet deep" as Old Nan would say, clearing the top, securing the lift, and then kamikaze-bombing the Watch with zombies until there is enough of a zombie cushion that they can survive the fall.

[Bedlam]

GRRM has gone on the record that he probably made the Wall too big.

There's a fan theory that I'm particularly fond of that the ultimate plan of the Others is to draw enough people north of the Wall with feints, kill them, and assemble a large enough army of wights to simply lemming them up the snow drift and each other "when the snows pile hundreds of feet deep" as Old Nan would say, clearing the top, securing the lift, and then kamikaze-bombing the Watch with zombies until there is enough of a zombie cushion that they can survive the fall.

That sounds a bit excessive, with that much zombie power it's probably easier to just break into one of the tunnels through the wall or even cut a path yourself.

[Elheru Aran]

There's only one tunnel through the whole of the Wall, IIRC; there's tunnels *in* it that act as hallways and such, but only one actually goes through AFAIK, hence the wildlings having to climb the wall to get over because they couldn't figure out a way to get through the tunnel.

The Wall is specifically made to stand against the Others; they can't go through it, so it has to be broken before they can pass through.

[Guardsman Bass]

It's mentioned in one of the books that Tyrion was born in an unusually harsh Winter, one which lasted for 3 years. That probably means that most Winters don't last that long, especially since it's hard to see how they'd maintain food supplies for more than 1-2 years in the North even if they're saving 25% of their harvest. The Winters don't seem to be too bad under normal circumstances south of the Neck, aside from the Vale of Arryn (where the Eyrie). Someone asked Martin years ago how much snow falls in Westeros during the Winters, and he said it rarely snows in the Reach and almost never snows in Dorne or Oldtown.

As Simon Jester pointed out, they're explicitly magical in source and likely involve planetary-scale magic manipulating the sunlight and appearance of sunrises/sunsets that the planet has. I don't think you can think of a physical cause for them that explains both the relatively fixed stars (such as the polar star) and the shorter days.

As for the Wall, even if you figure that there's a substantial amount of rock in there (they layer rock and ice IIRC), there's got to be magic involved in it holding together as it does. A Wall of that size probably couldn't support its own weight.

[Elheru Aran]

If you think about it, the Wall is essentially an artificial *mountain range* all of its own, with the entire north-facing side a huge, sheer cliff. Redonkulous.

That does bring into focus just how dangerous the inhabitants of Westeros decided the Others were, though... Perhaps the climate is a result of duelling spells between the Others and the humans? The Others try to lay down winter over the world, the humans' old magic pushes it back?

[LaCroix]

What if the sun has more variation in sunspot activity?
A fluctuation of .25% in luminosity as in the Maunder Minimum (Little ice age) was enough for a significant cooling. Have it a bit more pronounced and having a random cycle, and it could explain the random seasons, while an planet with only minimal axial tilt explains why the "seasons" stay otherwise stable for long time.

[Bedlam]

GRRM has gone on the record that he probably made the Wall too big.

There's a fan theory that I'm particularly fond of that the ultimate plan of the Others is to draw enough people north of the Wall with feints, kill them, and assemble a large enough army of wights to simply lemming them up the snow drift and each other "when the snows pile hundreds of feet deep" as Old Nan would say, clearing the top, securing the lift, and then kamikaze-bombing the Watch with zombies until there is enough of a zombie cushion that they can survive the fall.

Another idea, wouldn't it be easier to go around? There's a sea to the east and a mountain range to the west, both are difficult but hardly impassable to an undead army, they may well be able to walk under the water and although they'd probably take losses in the mountains but not that great.

[Raw Shark]

Another idea, wouldn't it be easier to go around? There's a sea to the east and a mountain range to the west, both are difficult but hardly impassable to an undead army, they may well be able to walk under the water and although they'd probably take losses in the mountains but not that great.

Probably. So far we haven't heard anything about the Others and wights trying to circle the western end of the Wall in the mountains (though there has been heavy fighting against Wildlings there), but there is word of, "dead things in the water," from Cotter Pyke, commander of Eastwatch by the Sea, or more properly from his maester via dictation, as Pyke is an illiterate bastard (but they love the guy out there).

[Simon_Jester]

GRRM has gone on the record that he probably made the Wall too big.

I like the wall's impossible hugeness. It's the first explicitly magical thing we see in the series, and it proves that there was once immense, impressive magic in the world... but at the same time, it proves that this magic is really, truly gone, because the Wall is unique.

It also helps explain how the tiny, deplorable, ignored state of the Night Watch doesn't result in the wildlings just rushing right over it. The thousand or so men they have, particularly with many of them being semicombatant or noncombatant, can't possibly hold a hundred miles (or leagues) of wall realistically... Unless that wall is so high and strong that for all practical purposes it cannot be bypassed by normal-ish means.

There's a fan theory that I'm particularly fond of that the ultimate plan of the Others is to draw enough people north of the Wall with feints, kill them, and assemble a large enough army of wights to simply lemming them up the snow drift and each other "when the snows pile hundreds of feet deep" as Old Nan would say, clearing the top, securing the lift, and then kamikaze-bombing the Watch with zombies until there is enough of a zombie cushion that they can survive the fall.

Presumably. That, or start a winter nasty enough to tip the continent over into an outright Ice Age and let actual glaciers reach the Wall and overwhelm it. But that would take longer.

[Also, wights aren't mindless zombies, or at least they can act as though they have minds when under the control of the Others. They could presumably be ordered to perform manual labor like constructing gigantic ramps or whatever to ascend the Wall. A literal ramp of corpses wouldn't be very practical, because a stack of dead bodies hundreds of feet high is a LOT of dead bodies.

That sounds a bit excessive, with that much zombie power it's probably easier to just break into one of the tunnels through the wall or even cut a path yourself.

This is true. So far as we know there's nothing actually stopping a determined man with lots of time on his hands from just digging through the Wall with a pickaxe, and wights don't need to eat or sleep.

On the other hand, it's made fairly explicit that the Wall is somehow warded against the forces of icy darkness and evil, so they might have to do something esoteric to get through it.

There's only one tunnel through the whole of the Wall, IIRC; there's tunnels *in* it that act as hallways and such, but only one actually goes through AFAIK, hence the wildlings having to climb the wall to get over because they couldn't figure out a way to get through the tunnel.

Well, I think there are one or two other tunnels at other points along the Wall. Basically, each of the castles sited to secure the Wall has a tunnel under the Wall... but as the castles were abandoned with the shrinking of the Watch, the tunnels were blocked up. However, at least two groups have managed to pass under the Wall: Samwell and Gilly during the retreat from the Great Ranging, and Bran and the Reeds (and our favorite giant with a one-word vocabulary) on their way north to meet the children of the forest. And as far as I can tell, they didn't even use the same tunnel to get there.

The Wall is specifically made to stand against the Others; they can't go through it, so it has to be broken before they can pass through.

However, this is not true of their wight minions, which function just fine on the south side of the Wall.

It's mentioned in one of the books that Tyrion was born in an unusually harsh Winter, one which lasted for 3 years. That probably means that most Winters don't last that long, especially since it's hard to see how they'd maintain food supplies for more than 1-2 years in the North even if they're saving 25% of their harvest.

Well, the nigh-legendary harshness of the northern winters probably helps explain why they're so sparsely populated, why "winter is coming" is the Stark motto, why the Starks have actual greenhouses that must have been quite expensive... but yeah.

Another possibility is that at least in the coastal areas there is substantial fishing or importation of foodstuffs from the lands south of the Neck.

The Winters don't seem to be too bad under normal circumstances south of the Neck, aside from the Vale of Arryn (where the Eyrie)...

It's not so much that the winters are bad in the Vale as far as I can tell. It's just that the Eyrie itself is totally uninhabitable in winter, because when the snowline drops low enough it becomes suicide to make the climb up to the Eyrie in the first place. The footing on the path is bad enough in summer.

So basically, during winter, the Eyrie can't be resupplied with food or (especially) fuel, and it's pretty drafty being halfway up a mountain so it's not a warm or comfortable place. You'd be cut off from the outside world, unable to govern your own people, and if the winter were long enough to run you out of food or (more likely) firewood, you'd die and no one would even KNOW until your newly thawed, decomposing corpse was found next spring.

As Simon Jester pointed out, they're explicitly magical in source and likely involve planetary-scale magic manipulating the sunlight and appearance of sunrises/sunsets that the planet has. I don't think you can think of a physical cause for them that explains both the relatively fixed stars (such as the polar star) and the shorter days.

Shorter days are not explicable. Dimming sunlight would be; my intuition would be that the magical seasons affect the amount of sunlight striking and warming the world, rather than the axial tilt of the planet... but that would contradict a changing day length.

As for the Wall, even if you figure that there's a substantial amount of rock in there (they layer rock and ice IIRC), there's got to be magic involved in it holding together as it does. A Wall of that size probably couldn't support its own weight.

Not sure. Ice is fairly sturdy; the real question is how high a vertical cliff of ice can get.

[Ralin]

However, this is not true of their wight minions, which function just fine on the south side of the Wall.

Once brought through by humans. And Night's Watch brothers no less. No telling whether that would work for the Others themselves, though admittedly getting someone to bring a 'dead' ice Sidhe south would be harder.

I like the wall's impossible hugeness. It's the first explicitly magical thing we see in the series, and it proves that there was once immense, impressive magic in the world... but at the same time, it proves that this magic is really, truly gone, because the Wall is unique

And it sets up the big joke for at least the first book where everyone with actual power is preoccupied with their stupid political squabbles while there's a goddamn zombie army marshalling out past the Wall.

The seven hundred foot tall wall of magic ice that everyone thinks is there to keep out some yahoos who didn't want to bow to a king

[Irbis]

As for the Wall, even if you figure that there's a substantial amount of rock in there (they layer rock and ice IIRC), there's got to be magic involved in it holding together as it does. A Wall of that size probably couldn't support its own weight.

Wall of that size couldn't support its weight if it was made from reinforced concrete. 700 tall ice structure would quickly look like this:



Adding rock would in fact make the problem worse, IIRC, due to little cohesiveness between the two, unless it would be something like coarse gravel. The highest rock-ice cliff in real life goes would be 15-25 metres, 50 would be stretching it.

But aside from that, the seasons do not correlate to anything we would recognize; my working theory is that the planet's axial tilt is zero and the magical seasons' effects are superimposed on a constant level of sunlight striking the planet.

The problem with that is you'd have uninhabitable equator and colossal ice hubs at the poles producing a lot of icebergs. Since life in Westeros doesn't seem confined to small band in one hemisphere (unless the planet is larger than Earth and the entire world map is above equator) that doesn't seem to be the case.

I like the wall's impossible hugeness. It's the first explicitly magical thing we see in the series, and it proves that there was once immense, impressive magic in the world... but at the same time, it proves that this magic is really, truly gone, because the Wall is unique.

Though, civilization capable of building wall would leave other marks of their engineering. Sadly, the second largest object of Westeros, Harrenhall, is not only much later, but tiny compared to wall. If you can build Wall, why not a city? Castle? Or anything, really?

Then, there is a question of labour. Great Pyramid was built for decade by 100.000 workers. Now try to imagine building something twice as tall and ten thousand times as wide.

It also helps explain how the tiny, deplorable, ignored state of the Night Watch doesn't result in the wildlings just rushing right over it. The thousand or so men they have, particularly with many of them being semicombatant or noncombatant, can't possibly hold a hundred miles (or leagues) of wall realistically... Unless that wall is so high and strong that for all practical purposes it cannot be bypassed by normal-ish means.

But even 30 meter tall wall is pretty much impassable for humans. See this:



This is barely 30 meter tall. Now try to imagine getting to the top with just a rope. Flat surface more than 10 meter tall is pretty much not scalable without modern tools.

On the other hand, it's made fairly explicit that the Wall is somehow warded against the forces of icy darkness and evil, so they might have to do something esoteric to get through it.

Like blowing a horn conveniently hidden on wrong side of the wall?

When I got to that part it was like "let's build Death Star with reactor right on the surface".

[Raw Shark]

GRRM has gone on the record that he probably made the Wall too big.

I like the wall's impossible hugeness. It's the first explicitly magical thing we see in the series, and it proves that there was once immense, impressive magic in the world... but at the same time, it proves that this magic is really, truly gone, because the Wall is unique.

Me Too, for the record.

There's a fan theory that I'm particularly fond of that the ultimate plan of the Others is to draw enough people north of the Wall with feints, kill them, and assemble a large enough army of wights to simply lemming them up the snow drift and each other "when the snows pile hundreds of feet deep" as Old Nan would say, clearing the top, securing the lift, and then kamikaze-bombing the Watch with zombies until there is enough of a zombie cushion that they can survive the fall.

[snip] [Also, wights aren't mindless zombies, or at least they can act as though they have minds when under the control of the Others. They could presumably be ordered to perform manual labor like constructing gigantic ramps or whatever to ascend the Wall. A literal ramp of corpses wouldn't be very practical, because a stack of dead bodies hundreds of feet high is a LOT of dead bodies.

I know, I just think it's a funny visual. Eddison Tollett emerges from his barracks at dawn, stretches, and remarks to nobody in particular, "Looks like rain today." Suddenly, the first ice zombies come tumbling down as he's stumbling to the latrine to piss and he sighs, "Well, that figures."

The Wall is specifically made to stand against the Others; they can't go through it, so it has to be broken before they can pass through.

However, this is not true of their wight minions, which function just fine on the south side of the Wall.

Our only example of this involved them crossing under the power of members of the Watch, not their own.

The Winters don't seem to be too bad under normal circumstances south of the Neck, aside from the Vale of Arryn (where the Eyrie)...

It's not so much that the winters are bad in the Vale as far as I can tell. It's just that the Eyrie itself is totally uninhabitable in winter, because when the snowline drops low enough it becomes suicide to make the climb up to the Eyrie in the first place. The footing on the path is bad enough in summer.

So basically, during winter, the Eyrie can't be resupplied with food or (especially) fuel, and it's pretty drafty being halfway up a mountain so it's not a warm or comfortable place. You'd be cut off from the outside world, unable to govern your own people, and if the winter were long enough to run you out of food or (more likely) firewood, you'd die and no one would even KNOW until your newly thawed, decomposing corpse was found next spring.

The residents of the Eyrie mothball and abandon it for luxury housing in the Vale during winter. The Vale is relatively mild as it is sheltered by the surrounding mountains, and has extremely fertile volcanic soil, but is far enough north that nobody typically campaigns there in winter, so they just live there in the winter and keep the castle for when they're likely to get attacked. Petyr discusses it with Sansa in one of her latter half chapters of AFFC if I remember correctly.

[Ralin]

This is barely 30 meter tall. Now try to imagine getting to the top with just a rope. Flat surface more than 10 meter tall is pretty much not scalable without modern tools.

Someone neglected to tell GRRM that

But then, he also had wildlings shooting arrows up the seven hundred foot wall of magic ice.

Though, civilization capable of building wall would leave other marks of their engineering. Sadly, the second largest object of Westeros, Harrenhall, is not only much later, but tiny compared to wall. If you can build Wall, why not a city? Castle? Or anything, really

My guess would be because it took a huge effort, of a sort that they couldn't repeat as desired. Pretty much everyone seems to agree that building the Wall took magic, so presumably it wasn't a matter of dedicating X laborers and Y engineers for so much time and with so much money.

There's only one Wall because they were really, really scared of what was on the other side, to the point of doing and sacrificing whatever it took to throw the thing up.

Plus it's not the only example of magical architecture. Storm's End isn't as large, but Melisandre said it had some sort of wards capable of keeping her shadow babies out. I can't remember any other examples of the top of my head, but I expect that they're there.

[Raw Shark]

[snip] There's only one Wall because they were really, really scared of what was on the other side, to the point of doing and sacrificing whatever it took to throw the thing up.

Plus it's not the only example of magical architecture. Storm's End isn't as large, but Melisandre said it had some sort of wards capable of keeping her shadow babies out. I can't remember any other examples of the top of my head, but I expect that they're there.

The rarity factor is further compounded by the fact that both are legendarily claimed to have been the fruits of the labor of the same guy, Bran the Builder, for whom many northern lads are named. There's a popular fan theory that one particular Bran in the spotlight of the narrative is the second coming of that guy, who will rebuild the Wall after it falls.

[Pelranius]

[snip] There's only one Wall because they were really, really scared of what was on the other side, to the point of doing and sacrificing whatever it took to throw the thing up.

Plus it's not the only example of magical architecture. Storm's End isn't as large, but Melisandre said it had some sort of wards capable of keeping her shadow babies out. I can't remember any other examples of the top of my head, but I expect that they're there.

The rarity factor is further compounded by the fact that both are legendarily claimed to have been the fruits of the labor of the same guy, Bran the Builder, for whom many northern lads are named. There's a popular fan theory that one particular Bran in the spotlight of the narrative is the second coming of that guy, who will rebuild the Wall after it falls.

I thought that Storm's End was built by the first of the Storm Kings, with Bran the Builder being mentioned as having helped him?

[Irbis]

But then, he also had wildlings shooting arrows up the seven hundred foot wall of magic ice.

Yeah, sorry, not even modern compound bow with composite arms and 150 pound draw will send arrow that high...

My guess would be because it took a huge effort, of a sort that they couldn't repeat as desired. Pretty much everyone seems to agree that building the Wall took magic, so presumably it wasn't a matter of dedicating X laborers and Y engineers for so much time and with so much money.

There's only one Wall because they were really, really scared of what was on the other side, to the point of doing and sacrificing whatever it took to throw the thing up.

Huge effort, sure. But since it was equivalent of what, 50.000 Great Pyramids, it's a bit inconceivable that no one used 1/100.000 of its resources to build something that would still be terribly impressive in real life. It's like reading of ancient Greek phalanx that somehow was armed with swords, spears, and nuclear missiles (though to be fair energy needed to simply raise the ice Wall is made of to 700 feet is probably not just equal, but far larger than energy of entire hydrogen bomb arsenal we have today).

[Ralin]

Huge effort, sure. But since it was equivalent of what, 50.000 Great Pyramids, it's a bit inconceivable that no one used 1/100.000 of its resources to build something that would still be terribly impressive in real life. It's like reading of ancient Greek phalanx that somehow was armed with swords, spears, and nuclear missiles (though to be fair energy needed to simply raise the ice Wall is made of to 700 feet is probably not just equal, but far larger than energy of entire hydrogen bomb arsenal we have today).

Again, of the sort that they flat out can't do again, or at least not outside of specific circumstances. What that means I don't know, but this shit literally be magic, so who the hell knows how it works? I mean, other than that it probably involved killing someone.

[Kingmaker]

Though, civilization capable of building wall would leave other marks of their engineering. Sadly, the second largest object of Westeros, Harrenhall, is not only much later, but tiny compared to wall. If you can build Wall, why not a city? Castle? Or anything, really

The Wall and Winterfell were built by Bran the Builder with the aid of giants and the Children of the Forest as part of the post-Long Night preparations against the return of the Others. It's quite probably that if Bran had rolled out his plans for the city of Brandonburg, they would've told him to fuck off. The Children of the Forest did not otherwise exhibit much interest in building things, nor do the giants apparently.

If you want a real piece of absurdity: if Bran the Builder was real, the Starks have ruled the North continuously for 8,000 years.

Like blowing a horn conveniently hidden on wrong side of the wall?

One of Old Nan's stories suggests that one of the prerequisites for the magic of the Wall to work is that the men of the Night's Watch remain true to their oaths (and there are some other hints that the Watch's oath is more than significant than a swearing in ritual).

[Irbis]

The Wall and Winterfell were built by Bran the Builder with the aid of giants and the Children of the Forest as part of the post-Long Night preparations against the return of the Others. It's quite probably that if Bran had rolled out his plans for the city of Brandonburg, they would've told him to fuck off. The Children of the Forest did not otherwise exhibit much interest in building things, nor do the giants apparently.

Well, if Bran the Builder contributed anything at all to the project (and it wasn't just 100% work of non-humans) I am puzzled why he didn't use his share to leave city of Brandonburg or whatever once wall was finished. Or even Brandonrushmore.

Isn't littering countryside with impossibly big and expensive vanity projects main job of your ancestors in any fantasy book, starting with LotR?

If you want a real piece of absurdity: if Bran the Builder was real, the Starks have ruled the North continuously for 8,000 years.

Meh, that's kind of dumb, but there are other long lived civilizations. Ancient Egypt lasted what, 4000 years?

Hmm, maybe going by that line of thinking, they ruled 8000 years without progressing because an army of 1 million workers spent 7500 years building the wall instead of doing anything useful?

[Pelranius]

Well, I think Samwell Tarly read a book suggesting that the 8,000 years probably was hyperbole, and another character (one of the Starks) was musing about the lack of actual continuity over the 8,000 years since Bran the Builder (it's been an awfully long time since I read the books myself, so I might be inserting in figments of my own imagination).

[Simon_Jester]

However, this is not true of their wight minions, which function just fine on the south side of the Wall.

Once brought through by humans. And Night's Watch brothers no less. No telling whether that would work for the Others themselves, though admittedly getting someone to bring a 'dead' ice Sidhe south would be harder.

Good point, but far from certain. There is at least reasonable evidence to support the idea that the Others can control humans on the south side of the Wall.

The seven hundred foot tall wall of magic ice that everyone thinks is there to keep out some yahoos who didn't want to bow to a king

Well, the legends are still pretty explicit that the Wall is there to defend against the Others. The problem is that it worked too well; the Others have been at bay for longer than the lifespan of the civilization the Wall is now protecting, so knowledge of its actual role and purpose have decayed into oral tradition.

Adding rock would in fact make the problem worse, IIRC, due to little cohesiveness between the two, unless it would be something like coarse gravel. The highest rock-ice cliff in real life goes would be 15-25 metres, 50 would be stretching it.

Coarse gravel sounds like what's actually being used. And, yeah, magic may well be involved to give the Wall a near-vertical outer (and, in some depictions, inner) surface. I don't know what the compressive strength of ice is or what the 'angle of slide' equivalent for a solid block of ice is.

But aside from that, the seasons do not correlate to anything we would recognize; my working theory is that the planet's axial tilt is zero and the magical seasons' effects are superimposed on a constant level of sunlight striking the planet.

The problem with that is you'd have uninhabitable equator and colossal ice hubs at the poles producing a lot of icebergs. Since life in Westeros doesn't seem confined to small band in one hemisphere (unless the planet is larger than Earth and the entire world map is above equator) that doesn't seem to be the case.

An axial tilt of zero (or very small) wouldn't cause that kind of problem necessarily. For that matter, the northern polar cap region does seem to be both large and arguably uninhabitable... and the evidence suggests that all lands we've seen (with the possible exception of the Summer Islands or whatever) are north of the equator. Certainly there's no evidence of a southern 'land of cold' to match the North and the area beyond the Wall in Westeros.

I like the wall's impossible hugeness. It's the first explicitly magical thing we see in the series, and it proves that there was once immense, impressive magic in the world... but at the same time, it proves that this magic is really, truly gone, because the Wall is unique.

Though, civilization capable of building wall would leave other marks of their engineering.

The process by which it was made may be magic on a scale such that other signs of its use would be indistinguishable from natural terrain features (i.e. the fallen 'ruins' of Valyria, or the multiple areas of Westeros that were effectively destroyed or partially submerged as part of prehistoric wars for control of the continent).

Also, if it was in fact magic, it may well be that the people who used it simply had no incentive to use it for any lesser purpose. Say, if it requires fifty thousand human sacrifices to construct something like the Wall... who would build anything like it for any purpose not of existential importance to the survival of civilization itself?

Then, there is a question of labour. Great Pyramid was built for decade by 100.000 workers. Now try to imagine building something twice as tall and ten thousand times as wide.

Clearly not something that could have been done by human hands.

But even 30 meter tall wall is pretty much impassable for humans. See this:

With a thirty meter wall, you can build a wooden ramp to the top in a relatively short amount of time (i.e. days; compare to comparable engineering feats like the bridge Caesar put across the Rhine in two weeks). You can climb it and throw down a climbing rope that's heavy enough to lift a man but short enough for one climber to carry.

With a two hundred meter wall, things get a bit trickier. Especially one that may shatter or partially melt while you're climbing it, as a wall of ice is prone to do. The wildlings can, and do, scale the Wall with the aid of tools, but it's not easy.

Like blowing a horn conveniently hidden on wrong side of the wall?

I suspect that the Horn of Joramund (the wall-breaking magic item) was not constructed by the same people who built the Wall itself. If they HAD constructed it, I suspect it would have been on the 'right' side of the Wall.

For that matter, the Horn may actually be a legend, not a real thing, we don't know.

The residents of the Eyrie mothball and abandon it for luxury housing in the Vale during winter. The Vale is relatively mild as it is sheltered by the surrounding mountains, and has extremely fertile volcanic soil, but is far enough north that nobody typically campaigns there in winter, so they just live there in the winter and keep the castle for when they're likely to get attacked. Petyr discusses it with Sansa in one of her latter half chapters of AFFC if I remember correctly.

Exactly. My point was directed at the idea that the Vale's winters are anywhere near as bad as the North's.

This is barely 30 meter tall. Now try to imagine getting to the top with just a rope. Flat surface more than 10 meter tall is pretty much not scalable without modern tools.

Someone neglected to tell GRRM that.

But then, he also had wildlings shooting arrows up the seven hundred foot wall of magic ice.

Well, two hundred meters is unmanageable unless someone gave those giants bows. Two hundred meters sideways is within (long) bowshot, but straight up? Not so much.

The rarity factor is further compounded by the fact that both are legendarily claimed to have been the fruits of the labor of the same guy, Bran the Builder, for whom many northern lads are named. There's a popular fan theory that one particular Bran in the spotlight of the narrative is the second coming of that guy, who will rebuild the Wall after it falls.

Well, frankly, Bran shows no sign of architectural skill. I think Brandon the Builder is just a legendary figure such that where another culture might say "giants built it" or "a god did it," they say "Brandon the Builder did it."

If Harrenhal hadn't been built well within historic times, there'd probably be people saying Brandon the Builder did that, too.

If you want a real piece of absurdity: if Bran the Builder was real, the Starks have ruled the North continuously for 8,000 years.

It may not actually have been 8000 years since that time; the historical record past, oh, 500-1000 years in the past seems jumbled in Westeros.

Like blowing a horn conveniently hidden on wrong side of the wall?

One of Old Nan's stories suggests that one of the prerequisites for the magic of the Wall to work is that the men of the Night's Watch remain true to their oaths (and there are some other hints that the Watch's oath is more than significant than a swearing in ritual).

Perhaps. Although if the story of the Night King is true... that did NOT cause the Wall to fall down.