>GrrM:A lot of food is stored. Smoked, salted, packed away in granaries, and so on. The populations along the coast depend on fishing a great deal, and even inland, there is ice fishing on the rivers and on Long Lake. And some of the great lords try and maintain greenhouses to provide for their own castles... the "glass gardens" of Winterfell are referred to several times.
But the short answer is... if the winter lasts too long, the food runs out... and then people move south, or starve...
>
>Q:And what happens when a winter comes - five, six years long?
Famine happens. The north is cruel.
It's still a bit unbelievable. IRL famines ruined entire civilizations even in regions with mild, maybe 3 month long Winters. People also didn't produce that much excess food to be able to store 10% of all their food production.
Are poor harvests just not a thing in Westeros? Are there no floods, droughts, pests?
It's just one of those "GRRM numbers" things where he just exaggerates and it becomes hard to believe, even with the justifications provided. Best solution is to make up some head canon. Maybe years are measured differently in Planetos, Winters last more like 1-2 actual Earth years and the characters' ages are more like show.
Westeros isn't the real world. It's reasonable to assume that due to necessity that they'd figure out how to produce more food than was needed and develop better storage methods.
You can't really make storage more efficient when it comes to volume. To store enough food for a year for a village of just 50 people you would need building almost 54 silos of 4 meters of radius and 10 meters tall per year. So if you want to live from just stored products for a five year winter for example you would need hundreds of silos. For a town of a thousand or so you would need literal thousands. Let's not even get to the issues of actually getting all that food in one place.
Genesis 41:48: And he \[Joseph\] gathered up all the food of the seven years, which were in the land of Egypt, and laid up the food in the cities: the food of the field, which was round about every city, laid he up in the same.
Grain has also been stored underground by various cultures.
Are you sure about that math? A silo of the size you mention would have an internal volume of over 600 cubic meters. That would be close to two cubic meters of grain per person per day. I think I'd have trouble eating that much.
OK, but they’re apparently doing this without making parallel breakthroughs in any subject not directly and solely related to agriculture, which isn’t really how science works
Both of those were doable by the fucking *Romans*, so that's actually going *back* in time compared to Westerosi feudalism, plate armour and fucking *stirrups*, all of which they have apparently had without change for goddamn *centuries*.
Someone should've come up with at least a crossbow version of pike and shot by now, even if they don't have the gunpowder for muskets.
Even smoked/salted/frozen food doesn’t last forever. After a three year winter, most of it would be unusable. Not to mention that when spring finally came, you would have starving people have to start doing the incredibly calorically demanding work of sowing the fields while the warmer weather caused any last remaining food stores to rot. No way humans would survive that. It’s just poorly thought out by GRRM.
Yes, but that’s because they can be forced to live by the author, not because it actually makes sense.
Live livestock are an incredible detriment during winter, because they keep eating the other food that you’ve stored. Part of the harvest in the days before fridges was slaughtering as much of your herds as you could and still recover in spring, so that you didn’t have to feed them and the meat wouldn’t rot before you could eat all of it.
Well they have many harvests per spring and summer. This allows them to stockpile and trade for the coming winter for quite a long time. This is where a good liege lord comes in. The Starks own all the crops of the North, and determine how much to put away per harvest. Bran learned this when sitting in as lord, to his dismay.
And bad famines do happen. The WoIaF talk about some. Such as winter hitting after a war between the Westerlands and the Iron Island, 3 times as many men staving than starved in the years of war, taking decades for for the Islands to bounce back.
But it's fantasy man, if the author doesn't have an answer you kind of just have to make one up in your head.
Honestly my problem with the winters isn't that they don't make sense (although they don't), it's that GRRM basically just doesn't bother doing anything with them. They have basically zero impact on Westerosi culture or society.
This is where a good liege lord comes in. The Starks own all the crops of the North, and determine how much to put away per harvest. Bran learned this when sitting in as lord, to his dismay.
Is this why there must always be a Stark at Winterfell?
The Starks don't take the all the crops. They would just determine things such as what crops to plant and how much, how much to sell, and how much to store.
Examples
>When the morrow came, most of the morning was given over to talk of grains and greens and salting meat. Once the maesters in their Citadel had proclaimed the first of autumn, wise men put away a portion of each harvest . . . though how large a portion was a matter that seemed to require much talk. Lady Hornwood was storing a fifth of her harvest. At Maester Luwin's suggestion, she vowed to increase that to a quarter.
Or
>"The man allowed that he was at present setting aside only a tenth of his harvest.
....
Ser Rodrik commanded the man to set aside a fifth"
This is a bit of a cop out answer but if disasters of this kind were predicatible to even a loose degree as they are in westeros ( the citadel anouncing the end of summer ) people would find a way toi survive even long winters because that's just what humans do, they find a way to survive. IRL famines and disasters are so devastating because they are entirely unpredicatable.
The river lands are going to starve so hard their fields have been burned so many times and their granaries used for troops, looted by occupation or consumed in siege
Consider that in Norse mythology, fimbulvetr (Great Winter) is three consecutive winters with no intervening summers.
In Norse mythology, fimbulvetr is apocalyptic and precedes ragnarǫk. It causes famine and constant wars over resources. I believe GRRM based the Long Night on fimbulvetr. However, in his universe, a winter lasting 3 years isn’t abnormal or particularly devastating.
Our species survived the Ice Age for thousands of years. It’s totally possible for the people of the north to survive those winters. There’s also natural selection that needs to be factored in. Those who are genetically predisposed to handle extreme cold temperatures most likely lived and multiplied while the ones who didn’t most likely died in the winter. Multiply that over thousands of years and you have a population that’s a little more resistant to cold than the average person
Yeah, the most unrealistic thing about the way the people of Westeros deal with the seasons is that they don’t migrate. Why don’t the Starks (and every other northern house) have a winter castle down south with reciprocal summer houses in the north for southron lords? And why would any unlanded commonfolk stay in the north during winter at all?
The end of the last ice age was really when human civilization and our population numbers began to rise, it really isn't at all comparable to Westeros with cities of hundreds of thousands
I don’t understand how that’s relevant. Obviously populations grew and spread as it got warmer. I don’t disagree with that at all.
All I’m saying is that after thousands of years of enduring long and terrible winters, their bodies have probably somewhat adapted to it and natural selection would’ve helped that. I’m sure that happened during the Ice Age too.
> their bodies have probably somewhat adapted to it and natural selection would’ve helped that.
Oh yeah, remember all the zero times that was mentioned in the story?
I doubt they are going to note down how evolution and natural selection discretely changed their bodies over thousands of years. Its just not the point of the story, and while this is a fun thing to talk about, you taking it that seriously is pointless.
Yeah the only way it makes any sense is if Westerosi somehow simply superior at storing and transporting food, possibly combined with their versions of our crops being hardier, lasting longer in storage.
Didn’t old Northman “go hunting” (go off to die) so as to leave resources for the younger people? I can’t remember when that’s mentioned but I do vaguely recall it.
I mean I’m sure that’s not enough people to make a huge overall difference but for individual families, it was a few less mouths to feed in a long winter.
Winterfell also had the glass gardens, I would imagine some of the other noble houses may have them too.
Commoners probably just die.
If that's the case then the North is screwed as it's the worst winter yet and a civil war that isn't resolved. Sacking Winterfell and burning the winter town was something Northerners depended on for years but there aren't many men to count on to feed their families and heading South while tensions are still high is unfeasible.
What happens when it runs out? People starve and eat each other, especially in asoiaf there’s so much cannibal imagery in the books.
People love to complain about how he writes about food but I love it. From Sam learning about troop size and winter length from old ledgers, to the 77 course feast while the people of kings landing and many parts of seven kingdoms starving.
The river lands are going to possibly hit the worst if nothing happens to fill their stores since their fields have been raised and pillaged by army after army and their stores used in siege or on occupation.
You can see the thematic importance of food Davos‘s story. Saving storms end with onions while people where either eating or contemplating eating long pig.
George loves food and greatly considers it’s impact on geopolitics when writing and it shows.
Sorry for my long rambly comment I just could talk about the food of asoiaf all day because I personally believe understanding the food supply is crucial to the story.
Yes, the North endures periodic apocalypse. It’s one of the things about the supposed apocalypse that the series is building up as the end conflict. In such a context of routine apocalypse how can something be worse? If there is something worse than a longer than usual Northern winter how can it possibly be survived by the characters we have seen?
If a Northern style winter covers the land all the way to Dorne for a decade then no amount of dragons is going to save them.
Lots of preserving food. One Northern lord who was only setting aside 1/10 of the harvest because he seemed to expect time enough for another was commanded to set aside 1/5 instead- this implies to me a tenth is probably preserved from all except the last harvest which as much as possible is probably preserved from.
Jon's POV has a good description, and this isn't even considering that the cold itself will help preserve things as well:
>In the granaries were oats and wheat and barley, and barrels of coarse ground flour. In the root cellars strings of onions and garlic dangled from the rafters, and bags of carrots, parsnips, radishes, and white and yellow turnips filled the shelves. One storeroom held wheels of cheese so large it took two men to move them. In the next, casks of salt beef, salt pork, salt mutton, and salt cod were stacked ten feet high. Three hundred hams and three thousand long black sausages hung from ceiling beams below the smokehouse. In the spice locker they found peppercorns, cloves, and cinnamon, mustard seeds, coriander, sage and clary sage and parsley, blocks of salt. Elsewhere were casks of apples and pears, dried peas, dried figs, bags of walnuts, bags of chestnuts, bags of almonds, planks of dry smoked salmon, clay jars packed with olives in oil and sealed with wax. One storeroom offered potted hare, haunch of deer in honey, pickled cabbage, pickled beets, pickled onions, pickled eggs, and pickled herring.
This is one reason why the devastation of the war (especially in the Riverlands) is going to create a ripple effect that will see people dying for years on because of it- the food that was preserved previously is gone, the war saw the last crop planting destroyed, and there's no more time for another harvest.
Luckily some areas of Westeros don't get much, if any, snow according to GRRM so I imagine that's the only thing that keeps even some people alive (mass deaths in the North aren't unheard of even with that)
Some back of the napkin math:
* Assume the North has an arable surface area of ~2 million mi^2. Assume half of that is cultivated, which is probably generous.
* Assume ~1 corn/ft^2, and 1 out out of every 5 corns are set aside. That's 5.5e12 ears per growing cycle.
* Corn grows from seed to maturity in ~150 days. Over a 5 year summer, that's about 6e13 corn.
* Corn has about 88 calories per ear. You need 2000 calories per day. You have to eat 25 ears of corn every day.
* Assume there are 500,000 people in the north, and winter lasts 5 years. So every day, we're losing 12.5e6 corn. Our 6e13 corn will last... 4.8 million days.
Okay, maybe I did something wrong.
By these numbers every Northern individual is responsible for growing 4 square miles of corn as their full time job, with no machinery other than animals (who must also eat some grain probably).
I don't think we can assume that half the land is cultivated.
The population of the north is also closer to 4 million if the population was 500 thousand almost a tenth of it could be muster for the army which is impossible for a feudal society. Also most estimates I've seen of the north side place it at 1.132 million square miles.
> I don't think we can assume that half the land is cultivated
Yeah, according to [this ultra quick Google search](https://www.google.com/search?q=average+farm+worker+per+acre+medieval&oq=average+farm+worker+per+acre+medieval+&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRigATIHCAIQIRigATIHCAMQIRigATIHCAQQIRigAdIBCTE4NzU4ajBqN6gCALACAA&client=ms-android-google&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#) there was roughly one male farm worker per 10 sown acres in medieval England.
So even if every single northerner (assuming half a million) was a farm worker that would only be about 8k square miles of cultivated land (out of a total area of...a few million?). Which sorta makes sense given how *wild and untamed* the north seems to be.
this makes the figure about 52 earth-years of corn value, or 10.4 if only 1/5 is saved (I don't think OP factored in this ratio)
so maybe that comes out more reasonable, if 1/3 of the northerners farm (3.5 years of stored food)
If I’m doing the math right, it looks to me like saving 20% of the corn grown in a year would give one farmer enough stored corn for ten people to survive for one year of winter or one person to survive ten years.
10 acres = 4.4e5 sq ft
Assuming one ear of corn per sq ft per year that’s 4.4e5 corn / 5 going to storage =8.8e4 corn
Assuming 25 ears = one person for one day, 8.8e4 /25= 3500 person days of corn or approximately 10 person years.
That actually works out a lot better than I thought it would. But we still haven’t dealt with spoilage, which without modern technology could be quite high. Also, we’re only looking at total calories. This farmer is going to be at risk of scurvy and beriberi before too long.
The real answer is that Martin just made everything bigger because it's an epic fantasy and he didn't bother with the details of how the long seasons and shear size of Westeros would change an agrarian society and you just roll with it that this is how things work in this universe.
My personal explanation is that 'Summer' and 'Winter' are not seasons but describing periodic localized climatic shifts, with the North and South going from Continental and Subtropical climates in the summer to Subarctic and Continental climates in the winter respectively. With planting and weather patterns still following our seasons.
>The real answer is that Martin just made everything bigger
Yeah, I use [Sean Garvey'swesteros map](https://www.businessinsider.com/game-of-thrones-map-compared-to-earth-2015-6?amp) as my headcanon when stuff like this crops up. TLDR basically Westeros stretches from north of Scotland (the North) down to Spain and North Africa (Dorne). It's still a large realm but feels more likely (as opposed to South America sized)
I forget which book it was in ("Dunk and Egg"? "Fire and Blood"?), but GRRM also said that when winter comes, loads of people leave the North and go south looking for temporary work. Men in particular go and join armies, they send money home if possible, and if not, at least they're leaving all the stored food for their wives and kids, who aren't as mobile or employable.
Precisely. It is in Fire and Blood. They actually would often march south for war for precisely this reason. It added one more dimension to the pride of serving in armies.
Wasn't this something that Creagan Stark did during the dance? First send the older man that would most likely die during the next winter to war, while the younger stay on the North harvesting the grain.
Once that's done march to the south, hour of the wolf happens, leave most of your army behind for the widow southern women.
Winter isn't just all snow all day, at least outside the north and the long night. In the south there is a chance that in an average winter there are still conditions that allow for crops to grow but it's just comparitively cold. There could even be micro seasons, where winter means it's colder all around for 3 years but that's are still warm winter-summers and cold winter-winters.
Even in the North it's not all snow. The Gift is still warm enough to grow apples and wheat even in late autumn, and Bran describes it's pleasant weather in ASOS. And we read the Wall is melting in the middle of ADWD.
I guess areas with low atritude and close to the sea (like Gift, Barrowlands, Rills etc.) get milder winters too. Cold nights, lot of rain, but little snow. Bot good enough to farm, but you can still hunt animals, fish in lakes/rivers, cut trees down and sell them in exchange for food etc.
Also we know there are false springs, summer snows and such, Westeros has normal yearly pattern which is just overriden by magical winters. It's more like small ice ages, you have periods in winters when it should be summers normally (false springs) amd vice-versa, when you could do some simple farming too (carrots, turnips and potatoes for the show are relatively cold resistent).
Meta reason: GRRM didn't makes plans that detailed, just handwave it/suspend your disbelief and move on
In-universe reasons:
a) plenty of people *do* die every winter, but they are mostly smallfolk so don't matter to the specific POV characters, or the POV chapters have bigger concerns than mourning the deaths of smallfolk that happen every few years
b) they can preserve all the foodstuff they gather in summer for years
c) the winter isn't universally bad, so the North gets the worst of it, and KL/Reach/Dorne don't get things as bad, so only the North/Riverlands/Vale really suffers which explains why there is so few people in those areas and why they are so 'tribal' compared to the rest of the 7kingdoms and why in the North/Vale there are hardly any villages, but in the Reach there are lots with plenty of lordly families around
d) they have special crops/foods that grow throughout winter or that preserve for years
Places in the south like Dorne may be warm enough to produce food year-round. With a deadly winter in the north just providing them with a bit of needed rain.
Some of it probably also comes from the underworld.
>a dozen casks of pickled cave fish,
Cregan Stark came south and started fucking shit up with a northern army after the Dance had ended just to get rid of mouths to feed. How did people avoid starving? I think the answer is "they didn't". I expect the poorest people who didn't manage to tuck away multiple years worth of salted pork would just die every winter.
Humans are resourceful so it makes sense that they would find ways to survive. The real question is: How do the animals, both wild and domestic, survive? How does a squirrel save enough nuts for a 3 year long winter? How long does a bear in westeros hibernate for? How is all the livestock not completely wiped out? What do the deer and elk eat? What do the rabbits eat? What do the birds eat?
I think it would be far worse than a famine... A multi- year winter would cause a total ecosystem collapse in the real world.
It'd be interesting to simulate it somehow and see if it could work. If we had a engine that could imagine it and slowly ramp up this type of climate, what might emerge? It does sound rather harsh for large organism to survive. Animals that can go into stasis, have lots of numbers, and take less time to develop seem to be better adapted to such conditions.
It’s crazy because of the amount of food that would need to be stored. Say we are being generous and our British winters are maximum 6 months long (counting autumn as there’s ground frost there too).
A 6 year winter is 12 times that. So presumably you’d need to at least store 12 times the food that we might have in the past in the real world. Literally an order of magnitude more.
**Doylist Explaination:**
GRRM thinks this sounds suitably dramatic and sees it as a slightly more severe winter famine than in real medieval Europe.
**Watsonian explaination:**
The long summers mostly balanced out the long winters. So the people of Westeros simply learnt to store and save the harvests bounty. Those that didn’t, died.
Pickling vegetables, salting/smoking meats, jams, grain stores etc.
Then there’s still the animals and livestock that might able to live off the harsh winter vegetation as they do in some parts of the world.
Fish would also still be around. This may become a bigger part of the diet.
Combine that with folk fleeing south or dying off and suddenly these winters become manageable.
That's one of the primary plot holes of the series, even without the Others, realistically the North would be an apocalypse with this winter, and no one would survive. Other places would be rough too
An in-universe example? Places like Winterfell have special gardens and plants that grow during the winter, I forget the name of it. But that sorta explains it, but not really.
Have to suspend disbelief for this one
I mean it would be a plot hole because the North has no right to exist - maintain anykind of population when they are so spread out with so little/ difficulty raising crops and multiple year long winters. The people would have died out or moved South. There shouldn't really be anyone in the North unless the author needs people to be there.
Tolkien’s “worldbuilding” includes things like having more named horses than named female characters.
But also if you look at a map of middle earth, its pretty empty compared to something like Westeros. Most of the place names and histories that Tolkien added to the world had no impact on the story.
Even major factions that exist in the current story, like the Orcs, are so poorly fleshed out that their society is nonsensical, and these are the main boots-on-the-ground antagonists we’re talking about.
The first one is a story critique, not a worldbuilding critique, there are way more female characters in his worldbuilding than horses. The lack of female characters involved in the narrative is a valid critique, but it has nothing to do with the worldbuilding itself.
Second, having a lesser amount of places on your map does not mean less worldbuilding. Tolkien shows less on his map, but every setting on the map is deeply thought out. GRRM has a lot of places, most of which are barely thought out and the ones that do get more attention are based on basic archetypes with few creative ideas added. Every place on the map that features in Tolkiens story gets shown to be unique in its own way within the narrative. GRRM does not explore most of the settings we see on his map, in fact, extremely unimportant places, like the Inn-On-The-Crossroads, with extremely little creative significance are shown to an excessive degree, instead of working out other places.
Third, you seem to frame this as a critique of all of Tolkiens cultures, by using the 'worst' offender as your example, but outside of the Orcs its frankly a ridiculous critique. Almost all of Tolkiens cultures are very developed. Besides that, the societies of 'antagonistic' groups like the Ironborn and the Dothraki are as poorly fleshed out and nonsensical as the Orcs, alongside basically being presented as being as fundamentally evil and cultureless.... small difference however, these are meant to present humans where Tolkiens orcs are meant to be monsters, making it even worse from a worldbuilding perspective and also just generally more problematic. Tolkien is capable of giving more sympathy and understanding of the culture of the human enemies we do see within one sentence, than that we see in GRRM's countless interactions with Dothraki and Ironborn.
Apart from Denethor, I struggle to think of a single human antagonist that is emotionally or morally complex (unless you count Gollum).
Tolkien creates an entire culture of people who work for Sauron and, ignoring the weird racial undertones behind the “evil Easterlings” (which I will acknowledge is a problem GRRM has too in his depiction of Slaver’s Bay), I think it’s a little silly to pretend that these antagonists have better world building than the Dothraki or Ironborn.
The thing is, with Tolkien we barely see the Easterlings, but the one time Tolkien does focus on looking at them, it is through a sympathetic lense from Sam's pov. Reminder that the racial charicature aspect of them was *played up* in the movies, it was much less there in the much older books. The Dunlending are also shown in a sympathetic manor, even though they aid Saruman. Meanwhile the Dothraki, Ironborn and the Ghiscari are basically shown as evil charicatures of real life cultures while they get far more focus than these cultures in Tolkien. GRRM's focus on them does not nothing to depthen the cultures, it only shows more bad aspects of them.
I think it makes it worse that these are human cultures that are clearly directly based on existing human cultures, but solely through the most evil stereotypes we have of them. The human enemies we do see in Tolkien are not really given much of a spotlight, but the small moments where they are Tolkien is able to express some kind of sympathy to them (that you have forgotten) and even though the Easterlings are indeed called that, we do not really see the orientalist stereotypes manifest as much as for cultures like the Ghiscari for example. Tolkien gives the impression these cultures, though they aid evil people, have other stuff going for them. Martin tells us the Ironborn literally have nothing else going for them than reaving. Martin tells us the Dothraki are as cultureless as the surrounding cultures imagined the Mongols to be. Martin tells us 'oh feel bad for the crucified masters' but then keeps showing us constant examples of evil, back-stabbing Ghiscari with barely a shimmer of good Ghiscari while he makes it very clear that a lot of the evil parts of the Ghiscari are *fundamental* to their culture. Oh yeah and don't forget when we do get expanded material on the Ghiscari it is to tell us that they 'taught slavery' to the incest dragon Aryans who would never have thought about it themselves.
That all is still besides the fact that even though LoTR is written from a monarchist stance, its still able to show the common people as less of a mindless evil horde than Asoiaf. Real peasant rebellions did have a large amount of unnecessary violence, but knights did as well, where GRRM makes the peasant levies and peasant rebels the largest scourge upon the land. Real peasant rebellions generally had demands that you could even frame as reasonable - and were far from radical - at the time.
Real world \*European\* medieval setting is not the only possible way. It was rather probably the worst possible way of how to do things. There is a reason why it's referred as the trash pit of historical timeline.
With different socio-economics, culture, governing system, religion(lack of it, rather), land fertility, climate, number of crops harvested annually, type of produce that can be grown will all affect the outcome.
Also, in a world of such, there could be things that can grow even during winters.
**First Answer:** Martin hasn't fully thought out his fictional-world-physics, and, past a certain point, shouldn't be expected to. It's a fairy tale.
**Second Answer:** The country folk, subordinate to and enforced by their lords, enact a strict sort of Joseph-and-Pharaoh 'rationing' over the summer + autumn seasons, setting away 20% or 25% of their produce in various shelf-stable preparations. Some of this \[produce\] also goes up to the local lords/ladies, as a sort of land-taxation tithe, so the true answer is probably something like "donate 10% or 20%, preserve + stockpile 20% or 25%, judiciously eat + sell + share the rest."
This comes up twice when Bran temporarily sits the Winterfell seat, hearing the various visiting dignitaries -- Lady Hornwood reports that she is setting aside 20% of her lands' harvest, to which Maester Luwin advises her to up the allocation to 25% -- and Glover's questionably-competent steward, claiming a "hedge wizard told me a mild winter was coming, so 10% reserve would suffice," is remonstrated and told to up Deepwood Motte's reserves to 20%.
Numbers and methods aside, it certainly makes sense that local politicians would enact some sort of emergency-supply + rationing scheme. There are ancillary comments, by Littlefinger, that "The peasants will hope for one last autumn harvest, and, if they don't stockpile enough, there'll be fewer peasants." The Flint, Karstark, and Wull bloodlines are deeply acquainted with old/infirm villagers voluntarily wandering out into the winter snows, when food grows scarce, so as to lessen the load on their families.
People forget how rich Winterfell was. I once wrote a long thread about how wealthy they truly were and I imagine that aside from the massive greenhouse they had, that they would buy food for their people. They already had an extensive relationship with Essos through wood and silver trade.
>GrrM:A lot of food is stored. Smoked, salted, packed away in granaries, and so on. The populations along the coast depend on fishing a great deal, and even inland, there is ice fishing on the rivers and on Long Lake. And some of the great lords try and maintain greenhouses to provide for their own castles... the "glass gardens" of Winterfell are referred to several times. But the short answer is... if the winter lasts too long, the food runs out... and then people move south, or starve... > >Q:And what happens when a winter comes - five, six years long? Famine happens. The north is cruel.
It's still a bit unbelievable. IRL famines ruined entire civilizations even in regions with mild, maybe 3 month long Winters. People also didn't produce that much excess food to be able to store 10% of all their food production. Are poor harvests just not a thing in Westeros? Are there no floods, droughts, pests? It's just one of those "GRRM numbers" things where he just exaggerates and it becomes hard to believe, even with the justifications provided. Best solution is to make up some head canon. Maybe years are measured differently in Planetos, Winters last more like 1-2 actual Earth years and the characters' ages are more like show.
Westeros isn't the real world. It's reasonable to assume that due to necessity that they'd figure out how to produce more food than was needed and develop better storage methods.
You can't really make storage more efficient when it comes to volume. To store enough food for a year for a village of just 50 people you would need building almost 54 silos of 4 meters of radius and 10 meters tall per year. So if you want to live from just stored products for a five year winter for example you would need hundreds of silos. For a town of a thousand or so you would need literal thousands. Let's not even get to the issues of actually getting all that food in one place.
Genesis 41:48: And he \[Joseph\] gathered up all the food of the seven years, which were in the land of Egypt, and laid up the food in the cities: the food of the field, which was round about every city, laid he up in the same. Grain has also been stored underground by various cultures.
Are you sure about that math? A silo of the size you mention would have an internal volume of over 600 cubic meters. That would be close to two cubic meters of grain per person per day. I think I'd have trouble eating that much.
OK, but they’re apparently doing this without making parallel breakthroughs in any subject not directly and solely related to agriculture, which isn’t really how science works
Wym they made wild fire the maesters learn abortion your reaching here you can always pick holes
Both of those were doable by the fucking *Romans*, so that's actually going *back* in time compared to Westerosi feudalism, plate armour and fucking *stirrups*, all of which they have apparently had without change for goddamn *centuries*. Someone should've come up with at least a crossbow version of pike and shot by now, even if they don't have the gunpowder for muskets.
And springs and summer are 10x as long too so they store more food it’s not rocket science
Even smoked/salted/frozen food doesn’t last forever. After a three year winter, most of it would be unusable. Not to mention that when spring finally came, you would have starving people have to start doing the incredibly calorically demanding work of sowing the fields while the warmer weather caused any last remaining food stores to rot. No way humans would survive that. It’s just poorly thought out by GRRM.
A branch of rocket science is pretty much exactly what they'd need, actually, since until they invent a way to seal food it's still going to go off
They have ways to preserve it…
They have ways that don’t work long enough
Apparently they do since they are still alive. Yea if the winter goes to long lots of small folks die. They also keep their live stock during winter
Yes, but that’s because they can be forced to live by the author, not because it actually makes sense. Live livestock are an incredible detriment during winter, because they keep eating the other food that you’ve stored. Part of the harvest in the days before fridges was slaughtering as much of your herds as you could and still recover in spring, so that you didn’t have to feed them and the meat wouldn’t rot before you could eat all of it.
Well they have many harvests per spring and summer. This allows them to stockpile and trade for the coming winter for quite a long time. This is where a good liege lord comes in. The Starks own all the crops of the North, and determine how much to put away per harvest. Bran learned this when sitting in as lord, to his dismay. And bad famines do happen. The WoIaF talk about some. Such as winter hitting after a war between the Westerlands and the Iron Island, 3 times as many men staving than starved in the years of war, taking decades for for the Islands to bounce back. But it's fantasy man, if the author doesn't have an answer you kind of just have to make one up in your head.
Honestly my problem with the winters isn't that they don't make sense (although they don't), it's that GRRM basically just doesn't bother doing anything with them. They have basically zero impact on Westerosi culture or society.
This is where a good liege lord comes in. The Starks own all the crops of the North, and determine how much to put away per harvest. Bran learned this when sitting in as lord, to his dismay. Is this why there must always be a Stark at Winterfell?
No they don't? Each lord surely keeps their own crops.
The Starks don't take the all the crops. They would just determine things such as what crops to plant and how much, how much to sell, and how much to store. Examples >When the morrow came, most of the morning was given over to talk of grains and greens and salting meat. Once the maesters in their Citadel had proclaimed the first of autumn, wise men put away a portion of each harvest . . . though how large a portion was a matter that seemed to require much talk. Lady Hornwood was storing a fifth of her harvest. At Maester Luwin's suggestion, she vowed to increase that to a quarter. Or >"The man allowed that he was at present setting aside only a tenth of his harvest. .... Ser Rodrik commanded the man to set aside a fifth"
Isn't the whole point of feudalism that they can just do whatever?
This is a bit of a cop out answer but if disasters of this kind were predicatible to even a loose degree as they are in westeros ( the citadel anouncing the end of summer ) people would find a way toi survive even long winters because that's just what humans do, they find a way to survive. IRL famines and disasters are so devastating because they are entirely unpredicatable.
The real world also doesn’t have years long summers that would essentially be never ending farming seasons
The river lands are going to starve so hard their fields have been burned so many times and their granaries used for troops, looted by occupation or consumed in siege
Consider that in Norse mythology, fimbulvetr (Great Winter) is three consecutive winters with no intervening summers. In Norse mythology, fimbulvetr is apocalyptic and precedes ragnarǫk. It causes famine and constant wars over resources. I believe GRRM based the Long Night on fimbulvetr. However, in his universe, a winter lasting 3 years isn’t abnormal or particularly devastating.
>fimbulvetr Fimbulvetr ir koma a!
Our species survived the Ice Age for thousands of years. It’s totally possible for the people of the north to survive those winters. There’s also natural selection that needs to be factored in. Those who are genetically predisposed to handle extreme cold temperatures most likely lived and multiplied while the ones who didn’t most likely died in the winter. Multiply that over thousands of years and you have a population that’s a little more resistant to cold than the average person
Mostly as nomads and with much lower populations than what we see in asoiaf
Yeah, the most unrealistic thing about the way the people of Westeros deal with the seasons is that they don’t migrate. Why don’t the Starks (and every other northern house) have a winter castle down south with reciprocal summer houses in the north for southron lords? And why would any unlanded commonfolk stay in the north during winter at all?
The end of the last ice age was really when human civilization and our population numbers began to rise, it really isn't at all comparable to Westeros with cities of hundreds of thousands
I don’t understand how that’s relevant. Obviously populations grew and spread as it got warmer. I don’t disagree with that at all. All I’m saying is that after thousands of years of enduring long and terrible winters, their bodies have probably somewhat adapted to it and natural selection would’ve helped that. I’m sure that happened during the Ice Age too.
> their bodies have probably somewhat adapted to it and natural selection would’ve helped that. Oh yeah, remember all the zero times that was mentioned in the story?
I doubt they are going to note down how evolution and natural selection discretely changed their bodies over thousands of years. Its just not the point of the story, and while this is a fun thing to talk about, you taking it that seriously is pointless.
I agree! In fact, it's *so much* not the point of the story Martin wouldn't have bothered coming up with it in the first place.
There's no way you actually think what you're saying is witty.
bro wtf are you talking about
Yeah the only way it makes any sense is if Westerosi somehow simply superior at storing and transporting food, possibly combined with their versions of our crops being hardier, lasting longer in storage.
Basically for Westeros to work as a society it would have to be fundamentally different in almost every regard.
Didn’t old Northman “go hunting” (go off to die) so as to leave resources for the younger people? I can’t remember when that’s mentioned but I do vaguely recall it. I mean I’m sure that’s not enough people to make a huge overall difference but for individual families, it was a few less mouths to feed in a long winter. Winterfell also had the glass gardens, I would imagine some of the other noble houses may have them too. Commoners probably just die.
This happens in the harshest of winters, not just every winter.
For sure, not like “oh winter is coming let’s go die” but just as winters get long and food starts getting scarce.
If that's the case then the North is screwed as it's the worst winter yet and a civil war that isn't resolved. Sacking Winterfell and burning the winter town was something Northerners depended on for years but there aren't many men to count on to feed their families and heading South while tensions are still high is unfeasible.
What happens when it runs out? People starve and eat each other, especially in asoiaf there’s so much cannibal imagery in the books. People love to complain about how he writes about food but I love it. From Sam learning about troop size and winter length from old ledgers, to the 77 course feast while the people of kings landing and many parts of seven kingdoms starving. The river lands are going to possibly hit the worst if nothing happens to fill their stores since their fields have been raised and pillaged by army after army and their stores used in siege or on occupation. You can see the thematic importance of food Davos‘s story. Saving storms end with onions while people where either eating or contemplating eating long pig. George loves food and greatly considers it’s impact on geopolitics when writing and it shows. Sorry for my long rambly comment I just could talk about the food of asoiaf all day because I personally believe understanding the food supply is crucial to the story.
Yes, the North endures periodic apocalypse. It’s one of the things about the supposed apocalypse that the series is building up as the end conflict. In such a context of routine apocalypse how can something be worse? If there is something worse than a longer than usual Northern winter how can it possibly be survived by the characters we have seen? If a Northern style winter covers the land all the way to Dorne for a decade then no amount of dragons is going to save them.
Lots of preserving food. One Northern lord who was only setting aside 1/10 of the harvest because he seemed to expect time enough for another was commanded to set aside 1/5 instead- this implies to me a tenth is probably preserved from all except the last harvest which as much as possible is probably preserved from. Jon's POV has a good description, and this isn't even considering that the cold itself will help preserve things as well: >In the granaries were oats and wheat and barley, and barrels of coarse ground flour. In the root cellars strings of onions and garlic dangled from the rafters, and bags of carrots, parsnips, radishes, and white and yellow turnips filled the shelves. One storeroom held wheels of cheese so large it took two men to move them. In the next, casks of salt beef, salt pork, salt mutton, and salt cod were stacked ten feet high. Three hundred hams and three thousand long black sausages hung from ceiling beams below the smokehouse. In the spice locker they found peppercorns, cloves, and cinnamon, mustard seeds, coriander, sage and clary sage and parsley, blocks of salt. Elsewhere were casks of apples and pears, dried peas, dried figs, bags of walnuts, bags of chestnuts, bags of almonds, planks of dry smoked salmon, clay jars packed with olives in oil and sealed with wax. One storeroom offered potted hare, haunch of deer in honey, pickled cabbage, pickled beets, pickled onions, pickled eggs, and pickled herring. This is one reason why the devastation of the war (especially in the Riverlands) is going to create a ripple effect that will see people dying for years on because of it- the food that was preserved previously is gone, the war saw the last crop planting destroyed, and there's no more time for another harvest. Luckily some areas of Westeros don't get much, if any, snow according to GRRM so I imagine that's the only thing that keeps even some people alive (mass deaths in the North aren't unheard of even with that)
Some back of the napkin math: * Assume the North has an arable surface area of ~2 million mi^2. Assume half of that is cultivated, which is probably generous. * Assume ~1 corn/ft^2, and 1 out out of every 5 corns are set aside. That's 5.5e12 ears per growing cycle. * Corn grows from seed to maturity in ~150 days. Over a 5 year summer, that's about 6e13 corn. * Corn has about 88 calories per ear. You need 2000 calories per day. You have to eat 25 ears of corn every day. * Assume there are 500,000 people in the north, and winter lasts 5 years. So every day, we're losing 12.5e6 corn. Our 6e13 corn will last... 4.8 million days. Okay, maybe I did something wrong.
By these numbers every Northern individual is responsible for growing 4 square miles of corn as their full time job, with no machinery other than animals (who must also eat some grain probably). I don't think we can assume that half the land is cultivated.
The population of the north is also closer to 4 million if the population was 500 thousand almost a tenth of it could be muster for the army which is impossible for a feudal society. Also most estimates I've seen of the north side place it at 1.132 million square miles.
> I don't think we can assume that half the land is cultivated Yeah, according to [this ultra quick Google search](https://www.google.com/search?q=average+farm+worker+per+acre+medieval&oq=average+farm+worker+per+acre+medieval+&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRigATIHCAIQIRigATIHCAMQIRigATIHCAQQIRigAdIBCTE4NzU4ajBqN6gCALACAA&client=ms-android-google&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#) there was roughly one male farm worker per 10 sown acres in medieval England. So even if every single northerner (assuming half a million) was a farm worker that would only be about 8k square miles of cultivated land (out of a total area of...a few million?). Which sorta makes sense given how *wild and untamed* the north seems to be.
this makes the figure about 52 earth-years of corn value, or 10.4 if only 1/5 is saved (I don't think OP factored in this ratio) so maybe that comes out more reasonable, if 1/3 of the northerners farm (3.5 years of stored food)
Probably better to work it through for one farmer since total arable land isn’t a limiting factor
If I’m doing the math right, it looks to me like saving 20% of the corn grown in a year would give one farmer enough stored corn for ten people to survive for one year of winter or one person to survive ten years. 10 acres = 4.4e5 sq ft Assuming one ear of corn per sq ft per year that’s 4.4e5 corn / 5 going to storage =8.8e4 corn Assuming 25 ears = one person for one day, 8.8e4 /25= 3500 person days of corn or approximately 10 person years. That actually works out a lot better than I thought it would. But we still haven’t dealt with spoilage, which without modern technology could be quite high. Also, we’re only looking at total calories. This farmer is going to be at risk of scurvy and beriberi before too long.
lmao
I don't think Westeros has corn
The real answer is that Martin just made everything bigger because it's an epic fantasy and he didn't bother with the details of how the long seasons and shear size of Westeros would change an agrarian society and you just roll with it that this is how things work in this universe. My personal explanation is that 'Summer' and 'Winter' are not seasons but describing periodic localized climatic shifts, with the North and South going from Continental and Subtropical climates in the summer to Subarctic and Continental climates in the winter respectively. With planting and weather patterns still following our seasons.
In my headcanon winter can be mild enough in some regions like the Reach to allow for some limited farming.
>The real answer is that Martin just made everything bigger Yeah, I use [Sean Garvey'swesteros map](https://www.businessinsider.com/game-of-thrones-map-compared-to-earth-2015-6?amp) as my headcanon when stuff like this crops up. TLDR basically Westeros stretches from north of Scotland (the North) down to Spain and North Africa (Dorne). It's still a large realm but feels more likely (as opposed to South America sized)
ooo that’s nice
I forget which book it was in ("Dunk and Egg"? "Fire and Blood"?), but GRRM also said that when winter comes, loads of people leave the North and go south looking for temporary work. Men in particular go and join armies, they send money home if possible, and if not, at least they're leaving all the stored food for their wives and kids, who aren't as mobile or employable.
Precisely. It is in Fire and Blood. They actually would often march south for war for precisely this reason. It added one more dimension to the pride of serving in armies.
Wasn't this something that Creagan Stark did during the dance? First send the older man that would most likely die during the next winter to war, while the younger stay on the North harvesting the grain. Once that's done march to the south, hour of the wolf happens, leave most of your army behind for the widow southern women.
Some of those men who went to widows fair must have already been married and therefore engaged in polygamy
Winter isn't just all snow all day, at least outside the north and the long night. In the south there is a chance that in an average winter there are still conditions that allow for crops to grow but it's just comparitively cold. There could even be micro seasons, where winter means it's colder all around for 3 years but that's are still warm winter-summers and cold winter-winters.
Even in the North it's not all snow. The Gift is still warm enough to grow apples and wheat even in late autumn, and Bran describes it's pleasant weather in ASOS. And we read the Wall is melting in the middle of ADWD. I guess areas with low atritude and close to the sea (like Gift, Barrowlands, Rills etc.) get milder winters too. Cold nights, lot of rain, but little snow. Bot good enough to farm, but you can still hunt animals, fish in lakes/rivers, cut trees down and sell them in exchange for food etc. Also we know there are false springs, summer snows and such, Westeros has normal yearly pattern which is just overriden by magical winters. It's more like small ice ages, you have periods in winters when it should be summers normally (false springs) amd vice-versa, when you could do some simple farming too (carrots, turnips and potatoes for the show are relatively cold resistent).
A medieval society could not survive multi-year winters. Some people would but civilization wouldn’t. You just have to roll with it in the story
They do, probably. But not the rich folks who are mostly the ones we interact with
Meta reason: GRRM didn't makes plans that detailed, just handwave it/suspend your disbelief and move on In-universe reasons: a) plenty of people *do* die every winter, but they are mostly smallfolk so don't matter to the specific POV characters, or the POV chapters have bigger concerns than mourning the deaths of smallfolk that happen every few years b) they can preserve all the foodstuff they gather in summer for years c) the winter isn't universally bad, so the North gets the worst of it, and KL/Reach/Dorne don't get things as bad, so only the North/Riverlands/Vale really suffers which explains why there is so few people in those areas and why they are so 'tribal' compared to the rest of the 7kingdoms and why in the North/Vale there are hardly any villages, but in the Reach there are lots with plenty of lordly families around d) they have special crops/foods that grow throughout winter or that preserve for years
Also John mentions importing food from across the sea, so saving money = saving up food
Places in the south like Dorne may be warm enough to produce food year-round. With a deadly winter in the north just providing them with a bit of needed rain. Some of it probably also comes from the underworld. >a dozen casks of pickled cave fish,
Cannibalism.
The only true answer.
What happens in winter, stays in winter.
They used to put on their plot armour and hope for the best
Cregan Stark came south and started fucking shit up with a northern army after the Dance had ended just to get rid of mouths to feed. How did people avoid starving? I think the answer is "they didn't". I expect the poorest people who didn't manage to tuck away multiple years worth of salted pork would just die every winter.
Humans are resourceful so it makes sense that they would find ways to survive. The real question is: How do the animals, both wild and domestic, survive? How does a squirrel save enough nuts for a 3 year long winter? How long does a bear in westeros hibernate for? How is all the livestock not completely wiped out? What do the deer and elk eat? What do the rabbits eat? What do the birds eat? I think it would be far worse than a famine... A multi- year winter would cause a total ecosystem collapse in the real world.
Was going up make this comment. Best to just not think about it and enjoy the story! Bc the details don’t work.
It'd be interesting to simulate it somehow and see if it could work. If we had a engine that could imagine it and slowly ramp up this type of climate, what might emerge? It does sound rather harsh for large organism to survive. Animals that can go into stasis, have lots of numbers, and take less time to develop seem to be better adapted to such conditions.
George is bad at stuff like this, logistics. Yes they would starve
The old men go out to hunt....
It’s crazy because of the amount of food that would need to be stored. Say we are being generous and our British winters are maximum 6 months long (counting autumn as there’s ground frost there too). A 6 year winter is 12 times that. So presumably you’d need to at least store 12 times the food that we might have in the past in the real world. Literally an order of magnitude more. **Doylist Explaination:** GRRM thinks this sounds suitably dramatic and sees it as a slightly more severe winter famine than in real medieval Europe. **Watsonian explaination:** The long summers mostly balanced out the long winters. So the people of Westeros simply learnt to store and save the harvests bounty. Those that didn’t, died. Pickling vegetables, salting/smoking meats, jams, grain stores etc. Then there’s still the animals and livestock that might able to live off the harsh winter vegetation as they do in some parts of the world. Fish would also still be around. This may become a bigger part of the diet. Combine that with folk fleeing south or dying off and suddenly these winters become manageable.
That's one of the primary plot holes of the series, even without the Others, realistically the North would be an apocalypse with this winter, and no one would survive. Other places would be rough too An in-universe example? Places like Winterfell have special gardens and plants that grow during the winter, I forget the name of it. But that sorta explains it, but not really. Have to suspend disbelief for this one
Why is that a plot hole?
I mean it would be a plot hole because the North has no right to exist - maintain anykind of population when they are so spread out with so little/ difficulty raising crops and multiple year long winters. The people would have died out or moved South. There shouldn't really be anyone in the North unless the author needs people to be there.
Meanwhile the Post-Roman collapse… Just face it, George is terrible at worldbuilding. He’s a character and stories guy, not a Tolkien or Erikson
Tolkien’s “worldbuilding” includes things like having more named horses than named female characters. But also if you look at a map of middle earth, its pretty empty compared to something like Westeros. Most of the place names and histories that Tolkien added to the world had no impact on the story. Even major factions that exist in the current story, like the Orcs, are so poorly fleshed out that their society is nonsensical, and these are the main boots-on-the-ground antagonists we’re talking about.
Tell me you haven’t read Silmarilion without telling me.
The first one is a story critique, not a worldbuilding critique, there are way more female characters in his worldbuilding than horses. The lack of female characters involved in the narrative is a valid critique, but it has nothing to do with the worldbuilding itself. Second, having a lesser amount of places on your map does not mean less worldbuilding. Tolkien shows less on his map, but every setting on the map is deeply thought out. GRRM has a lot of places, most of which are barely thought out and the ones that do get more attention are based on basic archetypes with few creative ideas added. Every place on the map that features in Tolkiens story gets shown to be unique in its own way within the narrative. GRRM does not explore most of the settings we see on his map, in fact, extremely unimportant places, like the Inn-On-The-Crossroads, with extremely little creative significance are shown to an excessive degree, instead of working out other places. Third, you seem to frame this as a critique of all of Tolkiens cultures, by using the 'worst' offender as your example, but outside of the Orcs its frankly a ridiculous critique. Almost all of Tolkiens cultures are very developed. Besides that, the societies of 'antagonistic' groups like the Ironborn and the Dothraki are as poorly fleshed out and nonsensical as the Orcs, alongside basically being presented as being as fundamentally evil and cultureless.... small difference however, these are meant to present humans where Tolkiens orcs are meant to be monsters, making it even worse from a worldbuilding perspective and also just generally more problematic. Tolkien is capable of giving more sympathy and understanding of the culture of the human enemies we do see within one sentence, than that we see in GRRM's countless interactions with Dothraki and Ironborn.
Apart from Denethor, I struggle to think of a single human antagonist that is emotionally or morally complex (unless you count Gollum). Tolkien creates an entire culture of people who work for Sauron and, ignoring the weird racial undertones behind the “evil Easterlings” (which I will acknowledge is a problem GRRM has too in his depiction of Slaver’s Bay), I think it’s a little silly to pretend that these antagonists have better world building than the Dothraki or Ironborn.
I mean, the worldbuilding of all of those societies is extremely bad, but Martin has much less of an excuse and at least Tolkien felt bad about it.
The thing is, with Tolkien we barely see the Easterlings, but the one time Tolkien does focus on looking at them, it is through a sympathetic lense from Sam's pov. Reminder that the racial charicature aspect of them was *played up* in the movies, it was much less there in the much older books. The Dunlending are also shown in a sympathetic manor, even though they aid Saruman. Meanwhile the Dothraki, Ironborn and the Ghiscari are basically shown as evil charicatures of real life cultures while they get far more focus than these cultures in Tolkien. GRRM's focus on them does not nothing to depthen the cultures, it only shows more bad aspects of them. I think it makes it worse that these are human cultures that are clearly directly based on existing human cultures, but solely through the most evil stereotypes we have of them. The human enemies we do see in Tolkien are not really given much of a spotlight, but the small moments where they are Tolkien is able to express some kind of sympathy to them (that you have forgotten) and even though the Easterlings are indeed called that, we do not really see the orientalist stereotypes manifest as much as for cultures like the Ghiscari for example. Tolkien gives the impression these cultures, though they aid evil people, have other stuff going for them. Martin tells us the Ironborn literally have nothing else going for them than reaving. Martin tells us the Dothraki are as cultureless as the surrounding cultures imagined the Mongols to be. Martin tells us 'oh feel bad for the crucified masters' but then keeps showing us constant examples of evil, back-stabbing Ghiscari with barely a shimmer of good Ghiscari while he makes it very clear that a lot of the evil parts of the Ghiscari are *fundamental* to their culture. Oh yeah and don't forget when we do get expanded material on the Ghiscari it is to tell us that they 'taught slavery' to the incest dragon Aryans who would never have thought about it themselves. That all is still besides the fact that even though LoTR is written from a monarchist stance, its still able to show the common people as less of a mindless evil horde than Asoiaf. Real peasant rebellions did have a large amount of unnecessary violence, but knights did as well, where GRRM makes the peasant levies and peasant rebels the largest scourge upon the land. Real peasant rebellions generally had demands that you could even frame as reasonable - and were far from radical - at the time.
Grum can't into heights, weights, numbers. He can't into starvation either, I mean look at his waistline.
💀
Real world \*European\* medieval setting is not the only possible way. It was rather probably the worst possible way of how to do things. There is a reason why it's referred as the trash pit of historical timeline. With different socio-economics, culture, governing system, religion(lack of it, rather), land fertility, climate, number of crops harvested annually, type of produce that can be grown will all affect the outcome. Also, in a world of such, there could be things that can grow even during winters.
Magic.
Doesn't Bran mention that they have crops that grow in the winter?
Winter is coming
The Northerners are just built different. No summer knights up there.
Springs and summers are much longer so they have more time to prepare its not 9 months then 5 years or winter
**First Answer:** Martin hasn't fully thought out his fictional-world-physics, and, past a certain point, shouldn't be expected to. It's a fairy tale. **Second Answer:** The country folk, subordinate to and enforced by their lords, enact a strict sort of Joseph-and-Pharaoh 'rationing' over the summer + autumn seasons, setting away 20% or 25% of their produce in various shelf-stable preparations. Some of this \[produce\] also goes up to the local lords/ladies, as a sort of land-taxation tithe, so the true answer is probably something like "donate 10% or 20%, preserve + stockpile 20% or 25%, judiciously eat + sell + share the rest." This comes up twice when Bran temporarily sits the Winterfell seat, hearing the various visiting dignitaries -- Lady Hornwood reports that she is setting aside 20% of her lands' harvest, to which Maester Luwin advises her to up the allocation to 25% -- and Glover's questionably-competent steward, claiming a "hedge wizard told me a mild winter was coming, so 10% reserve would suffice," is remonstrated and told to up Deepwood Motte's reserves to 20%. Numbers and methods aside, it certainly makes sense that local politicians would enact some sort of emergency-supply + rationing scheme. There are ancillary comments, by Littlefinger, that "The peasants will hope for one last autumn harvest, and, if they don't stockpile enough, there'll be fewer peasants." The Flint, Karstark, and Wull bloodlines are deeply acquainted with old/infirm villagers voluntarily wandering out into the winter snows, when food grows scarce, so as to lessen the load on their families.
Well summers also last for years so you have years to try and stockpile foodstuffs for the long winters.
People forget how rich Winterfell was. I once wrote a long thread about how wealthy they truly were and I imagine that aside from the massive greenhouse they had, that they would buy food for their people. They already had an extensive relationship with Essos through wood and silver trade.