If you’ve ever spent countless hours debating the scientific reality of fantasy worlds, the stuff the authors may have only hinted at in the text, and you and your likely incredibly high friends extrapolated out to the point of lunacy, just know that you’re not alone. You have like-minded folks publishing official versions of those conversations in scientific journals.
For instance, climate scientists publishing their findings in my new favorite niche scientific journal, Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, used climate modeling to analyze the worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth and George R.R. Martin’s Westeros.
J. R. R. Tolkien designed the setting as a mythic version of Earth in the distant past, so modeling it required using geographic descriptions and maps from The Lord of the Rings and simulating its regions’ climates and conditions with those of Western Europe and North Africa, its closest earthly analogues.
Do Middle-earth and Westeros Have Realistic Weather?
Mountain ranges like the Misty Mountains produced realistic rainfall patterns, with wetter climates on the western slopes and dry regions to the east. The hot and barren land of Mordor is lined up with a hot, desert-like climate comparable to the Sahara.
Westeros posed a bigger challenge. The setting of A Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin is a world where seasons can last for decades, and their timing is unpredictable. Obviously, that’s not a seasonal pattern we can easily correlate on Earth, since our home planet is, thankfully, in a stable orbit and its consistent axial tilt keeps seasons predictable enough to plan your upcoming spring outfits well in advance.
To explain Westeros’ wacky climate, the researchers had to get creative by testing it as a planet with an axial tilt that wobbles unpredictably. In the model, that instability could produce extreme seasonal shifts, with one hemisphere experiencing prolonged summer while the other freezes in extended winter. If the planet’s axis periodically flipped over time, the long, irregular seasons described in the novels would become plausible.
The study is all in good fun, and the scientists hope that using fantasy settings helps make complex climate science easier to explain to a broader audience. Applying real physics to imaginary worlds is both a nerdy pastime that will never go away and a fun, fascinating way to explain how, as in this case, planetary systems work, even if those planets are filled with magic and dragons and monsters and dark lords.
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