How many years are supposed to have lapsed in the show?
298 AL: The events of Game of Thrones begin with Season 1, seventeen years after the end of Robert's Rebellion
302 AL: The events of Game of Thrones Season 5:
Source:
Timeline
and:
But fantasy fans are nothing if not extremely detail-oriented, and many of them have attempted to work out a universal timeline of the saga, regardless. Their work has rested on two main assumptions:
1. Days, weeks, months, and years are as long in Westeros as they are for us, which is handy for keeping this discussion from going completely off the rails.
2. A human gestation period still takes around nine months.
From there, we know that Daenerys got pregnant near the start of the book
A Game of Thrones and was nearing the end of her term at its climax, so that novel must take place over the course of a little less than a year. And since Roslin Frey was impregnated at the Red Wedding in
A Storm of Swords and had not yet given birth by Jaime Lannister's chapter in
A Dance With Dragons, the last three books proceed at a slightly faster pace, even considering the timeline overlap of
Dance and
A Feast for Crows.
Because he's not a
total sadist, Martin is also kind enough to include characters' ages from time to time. Sansa starts the series at 11 years old, is almost 13 when she marries Tyrion in
Storm, and ages herself up to 14 while posing as Littlefinger's daughter in
Feast. Joffrey's 12th nameday takes place shortly before the beginning of
Thrones, his 13th is at the beginning of
Clash, and he's still 13 when he dies in
Storm. Arya is 9 at the beginning of
Thrones, 10 at Harrenhall in
Clash, and is "almost eleven" when she arrives in Braavos in
Feast.
Add that all together, and you get various guesses at the total time elapsed since the saga began, with many of the discrepancies coming from everyone's best guesses of how long sieges, marches, and ship journeys take. (There's a lot of timeline fuzziness around travel in particular, so Martin can have coincidences like Tyrion and Catelyn running into each other at the inn in the first book.) For years,
this massive forum post, published in 2008 before the publication of
Dance, was the timeline to beat; it figures three-and-a-half years from Daenerys meeting Drogo in
Game (season one) to Arya going blind at the end of
Feast (season five), an event which seems to happen way later in the timeline than everything else. Its successor is
this gigantic crowdsourced Google spreadsheet, with hundreds of citations, that comes up with a three-year span, with
Thrones starting in mid-297 A.C. and Jon's assassination in
Dance coming eight months into 300 A.C. But again, there isn't one definitive answer;
this Quora user estimates a little more than two years for the whole thing. Generally, two or three years seems to be a good ballpark estimate.
Of course, as both
George. R.R. Martin and
the show's producers will tell you, at this point the book is the book and the show is the show. Though they've diverged most sharply in recent years, the two versions have had different timelines since day one; the show increased the number of years since Robert's Rebellion from 14 to 17, aging up many of its characters in the process. For what I assume is the sake of simplicity as much as anything else,
the show's Wiki assumes that each season takes place in a different year; since season one was 298 A.C., the upcoming season will take place in 303 A.C. Storywise, that might not make a ton of sense — Jon's story line in seasons two through four really didn't seem like it was taking place over the course of three whole years — but it solves the aging problem for the child actors at least. Anything else would be a wild guess. Hopefully, when winter finally comes, it will arrive with a very detailed calendar.
. It's not knighthood. It's not glamorous, and your only come up is getting on their small a$$hole council or a ranger, where you kill most of the people like you, like an a$$hole. Ygritte hipped him to this, and he won that killa p*ssy from it. In the meantime, you have to live with grunts, who are what I listed earlier, who likely HATE you for being from a noble house. They did.
....
"
I'll issue permission slips next time on what I can get to talk about when I have "lists".
. I'm discussing Y, and people need to bring up C, just because they disagree with y. 
. It's cool. I'm just in the wrong venue. I need a place that always keeps it light and fun, if that's the tone. This place takes themselves way too seriously for a fantasy show 
. I can see Smalljon thinking his dad is an idiot for being a Stark dikkrider and not getting anything out of it.
