Talk:Timeline/@comment-109.240.30.58-20160719080257/@comment-188.238.16.139-20160720110445

Whoops. I just recalled a couple of things that make me to take back my words a bit about all the other dates matching.

I'll start with the easy one. In the Time of Contempt, Keira Metz estimates Ciri's age at "perhaps fourteen" during the Thanedd coup. But if the rest of my chronology is anything to go by - then Ciri should already have turned 15 shortly before those events.

But like I said, this is easy to handwave. Keira's number is an estimate - she does not actually know Ciri's exact age. If there's a problem here, it's metanarrative in kind. The reader has no reason to assume the estimate is off unless explicitly stated so. When he was writing the Time of Contempt, Sapkowski probably meant Ciri to be fourteen. This is reinforced by another fact from the same book - fourteen is also how old a minor character estimates *False* Ciri to be (while thinking she's the real one). But again, this character neither knows the actual age of either Ciri or her double, so it's somewhat easy to consider these as simple estimates that are a bit off. Especially since they're directly at odds with what Crach says about Ciri's age two books later. If she was nearly 12 by the time of the skating contest, she can't be 14 during events that take place more than three years later. If he didn't mean Keira's estimate to be intentionally off, Sapkowski nodded off here.

The issue that's more difficult to disregard comes from the Lady of the Lake. In it, when the Peace of Cintra is signed, Meve recalls that it's been "five years" since the Nilfgaardian invasion and Calanthe's death. This is in direct contradiction with the rest my chronology, which only works if it's been four years between those events, not five.

Meve's recollection is not at odds with Crach's however, since the latter uses Hjalmar's age to establish the passage of time from the skating contest, not Ciri's. We're never given Hjalmar's exact birthday. So it may as well be four and a half years since the skating contest, not three and a half as the chronology here assumes.

And adding that extra year between the slaughter and Peaces of Cintra is relatively easy - that may have happened while Ciri was in Ellander under the tutelage of Yennefer (or possibly in Kaer Morhen). This would, however, mean that Ciri is already 16 by the time of the Thanedd coup - and close to 17 by the end of the saga. This is naturally at odds with what Hotsporn says about Ciri's age. But like Keira, he's not necessarily a character who knows her exact age.

Both Keira's and Hotsporn's estimates do become correct if we assume that Crach made a mistake - and Ciri was really in the 10-11 range instead of 11-12 during the skating contest. However, out of these three characters Crach is the least likely to not be aware of Ciri's age. (Not to mention this brings a bit of extra ickiness with the prospect of a romance between a 15-year-old boy and 10-year-old girl - even if it was established that it never went physical. But then again, this may not have looked nearly as inappropiate from medieval perspective.) So if these three are at odds, Crach wins in my opinion.

Yet we're still not in the clear. If we assume that both Crach and Meve got their numbers right, then there's a third character who got them wrong - Duny. His "it's been 16 years" (since he and Geralt last met) is now off if we add an extra year between the slaughter of Cintra and the Battle of Brenna, since it's been actually more than 17.

So. Even if we disregard the estimates of Keira and/or Hotsporn, one of these still holds true: Either Crach misremembered Ciri's age or Meve or Duny counted their years wrong.

In my opinion, the easiest way to amend this is to simply pretend that Meve was heavily rounding up. It knocks the least dominoes down. Adding an extra year into the chronology also means that Dandelion's age during those early adventures becomes even more reachy. Not to mention it adds some implausibility to Radovid's age during the game trilogy. (Its severity again depends on whether we look at things from modern or medieval perspective.) He was stated to be 13 years old when the Peace of Cintra was signed, so he can be no older than 18 when Geralt meets him during the events of the first game - and that's assuming there truly was five years between the events of the books and the games. He's even younger if the gap is less. (Not to mention he seeks to marry Adda, who's in her mid-thirties by the time the first game takes place. The witcherverse just loves throwing these curve balls at you.)