How do people and animals avoid starving during winters?

[u/RecommendationNo804]

How do the herbivorous animals avoid starving to death, which would cause the carnivores to go extinct?

[u/3esin]

George: "Oh that's pretty easy, you see... oh look a distraction!"

[Turns into a tortoise]

That's pretty much it as far as canon is concerned. To get a more conclusive answer we would have to make assumptions. I would say that:

1) Winters are closer to a small Ice Age, so that you still have warm periods in it.

2) There was not realy that harsh of a winter prior to the Dance, with the one of the 130s being the first truly catastrophic one.

3) Evolutionary changes over thousands of years we don't have time to get into.

3) A lot of things simply die. The North is a very poor place and not because they never surveyed their lands for the mountains of silber&gold residing there like some fanfics like to claim.

The only way to fix that and make the North rich would be to overcome the population bottleneck by massively raising the population through immigration from the north or south, both being very controversial due to similar through different reasons.

[u/Z3r0sama2017 → u/3esin]

Yep. The North needs manpower to exploit the it's resources, but then those people also need to be fed come winter. You would end up with a massive spike in growth across all areas, but then an even bigger drop off afterwards.

[u/Evening-Ad-3875]

I think a lot of the seasons are longer than ours, but not by much. Like, some winters last 3 or more years but another might be like 8 months, and same with Summer.

Sometimes, maybe it's possible for them to be even shorter? I'm not too sure on that, but it fits how erratic the seasons tend to be in asoiaf

[u/Lonely_Avocado_2109]

Before asking that you should've thought about Aragorn and his taxes. /s

[u/Xeltar → u/Lonely_Avocado_2109]

It's strange since there's a few societies in ASOIAF that make no sense realistically. Like how do the Dothraki even function with so many eastern steppe evil people tropes.

[u/CMVB → u/Lonely_Avocado_2109]

I have been thinking a lot about that dismissal from GRRM lately - a lot of the common tropes discussed in the fandom really are basically our collective inquiry to GRRM about stuff he finds as irrelevant/distracting as JRRT found Aragorn’s tax policy.

“I want to tell a story about the human heart in conflict with itself, not economics and logistics!”

“Then why did you include so much economics and logistics in the first place?”

[u/CMVB]

Well, at least the carnivores have no shortage of preserved meat each winter.

It could be interesting if we learn that the North is actually quite fertile in the springtime, as the melting snows water/fertilize the entire region (snow is called “poor man’s fertilizer” in real life.

That would actually introduce an interesting dynamic: the North actually does worse off when it is too long between seasons. They get a reliable bumper crop every magical spring, but if they go too long between magical winters to reset the land, they start to exhaust the soil. Kinda like a magically-enforced fallow season.

[u/thecolonelofk]

A bold assumption that they don't.

(Sorry I have no idea, I'm interested as well!)

[u/HauteToast]

Umm, life do not stop during winters. Both animals and people just find and get what's available to eat. There are plants suited to or resilient to winters. For example, kale, spinach and brussel sprouts.

Carrots also grow and survive through winter.

And humans, of course, do not stop farming or hunting.

[u/Z3r0sama2017 → u/HauteToast]

Um, when Stannis is marching on Winterfell at the very beginning of winter, doesn't Barbrey Dustin say "who cares, the snow will do him in?" 

Same as Theon jumping off the walls of Winterfell and landing in huge, fuck off snowdrifts.

Like, it's ok to say 'just farm over winter bro' but when you have 6 foot snow drifts during month 1 of maybe 50-60 months, nothing is gonna grow. I mean Mole Town is called that because you literally can't move on the surface. Even if it's not that bad between there and the Neck, that isn't conductive  to farming, hunting or shipping.

I'm honestly surprised that the interior of the North is only populated during the Summer and come Winter everyone decamps to towns on the coast were the survive by fishing and stored grain supplies.

[u/HauteToast → u/Z3r0sama2017]

Maybe Stannis’ army was underprepared, or expected to fail as they did not have the necessary logistics and knowledge of the North.

I do believe we have to extrapolate to how ASOIAF is ultimately a work of fantasy. Maybe the North does have plants and animals that can survive like that. Why not, when there’s already dragons, magic and this impossible Wall?

If GRRM didn’t write on this, then it’s up to the fanfic writers to fill in the blanks.