It really didn’t need to happen. But it did, and the fallout is both interesting and instructive.
That's another thing I've tried to do in the books is to reflect the difficulty of rule, because it is very difficult. It's hard, and you don't see that in a lot of fantasy [...] You look at Tolkien, and at the end of the books Sauron has been defeated, Aragorn is king, and Tolkien just says that, 'He ruled wisely and well for five hundred years,' or whatever. And it's easy to type, you know, ‘he ruled wisely and well,’ but then you start asking yourself, What does that constitute, ruling ‘wisely and well’? I mean, what was his tax policy? How did the economy function under him? Did he encourage trade? Did he discourage it? What about the class system, the rising peasantry and the burgeoning middle class? Were those encouraged or put down, did he give power to the aristocracy? The orcs — there are still tens, thousands, of orcs left over at the end of Lord of the Rings. Did he pursue a policy of genocide toward them? Or did he reach out to try to educate the orcs, bring them into the mainstream, and civilize them?
We never get answers to any of these questions, we just get ‘he rules wisely and well.’ What I've tried to do in showing rulers as diverse as Robert and Ned Stark, and Cersei Lannister, and Daenarys Targaryan, is show people achieve a position of power, and then what do they do with it? How do they deal with the divisions in their societies, the hatreds in societies, the violence and crime and, you know, economic matters? I have Dany trying to deal with, what the hell can we, how...she grows. You know there was a scorched earth policy when she took over the thing and they burned all of the olive trees, which were the main crops, and they take like seven years to regrow, so what's her city going to produce to survive for those seven years? All this stuff is interesting to me.
— my transcription of embedded video
Hoo boy, did that start some trouble.
George R. R. Martin picked a fight with the wrong dude by criticizing J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Not that Tolkien would have been bothered, but the professor is backed by a worldwide fanbase that went nuts when Martin’s critique of Tolkien surfaced. It got so intense (and the fan boards are still brutal) that Martin was forced to issue many mea culpas and proclamations of how much he reveres Tolkien, and the Tolkien fans are still not appeased.
At the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2014, Martin tried to explain that his problem wasn’t exactly with Tolkien; it was with Tolkien’s successors,
... [T]hey cheapened it. The audience were being sold degraded goods. I thought: “This is not how it should be done.” Writers would take the structure of medieval times – castles, princesses, etc – but writing it from a 20th-century point of view.
While what Martin said in Edinburgh was certainly true, as anyone who picked up Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shanarra after reading The Lord of the Rings can attest, this explanation doesn’t really square with the “he ruled wisely and well” critique. And Martin has returned to his “he ruled wisely and well” critique time after time in subsequent interviews. Many of them are posted on YouTube, if you want to peruse them.
Martin hasn’t been shy about his “conversation” with Tolkien. In his Rolling Stone interview, he straddles the line between arguing with Tolkien and arguing with Tolkien imitators:
From the 1970s, Tolkien imitators had retreaded what he'd done, with no originality and none of Tolkien's deep abiding love of myth and history.
A few questions later, though, he sings a different song:
Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it's not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good….[and retread of the excerpt above, which begins to feel like a stock answer] ...In real life, real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with. Just being a good guy was not the answer. You had to make hard, hard decisions. Sometimes what seemed to be a good decision turned around and bit you in the ass...
Now that Game of Thrones has wrapped up the first half of its seventh season with a blast of blue fire, this is a good time to consider what kind of fantasy George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire actually is and why in the world he picked a fight with the big dog when he really didn’t have to.
We can’t climb into Martin’s head and attempt to explain his motivation, but what we can do is consider what the argument, the basis of what Martin calls his “conversation” with Tolkien, means for fantasy, for readers and writers. Because, at least the way his interviews have been edited, he conflates two complaints: sloppy successors seized on medievalism and Manicheism for their inspiration; and Tolkien himself wasn’t sufficiently realistic in building his world.
Those two things are not the same. And frankly, although I agree that the first generation of Tolkien imitators were often pale reflections of the real thing, that’s not on Tolkien. And, because it’s something that we can all agree on, I rather suspect it’s cover for the real complaint, that Tolkien didn’t write about the real world, but about something else. Tolkien wrote the kind of book he wanted to read, a kind of book that no one was writing at the time. Martin writes about “real men”; Tolkien writes about heroes.
But I don't necessarily think there are heroes. That's something that's very much in my books: I believe in great characters. — Rolling Stone
It’s no secret that A Song of Ice and Fire was inspired more by the War of the Roses than Sauron’s war; Martin has said often that he thought about writing a historic novel, but the trouble with historic novels is that everyone knows how they turn out. So he set the War of the Roses, with a healthy dose of the Hundred Years’ War, in a fantasy setting, to sustain the tension and keep readers guessing about who will survive. He certainly succeeded. The question remains, though: is the series still really fantasy?
Of course it is, you’re probably thinking. Unless you missed the dragons and blood magic and shadow assassins and faceless men and freaking ice zombies????
Except I’m not so sure. King Lear set in Faerie is still King Lear with a few ancillary decorative touches. You can’t say the same with The King of Elfland’s Daughter. Lift Dunsany out of Faerie and set him in Spanish Harlem: doesn’t work. The War of the Roses is still the War of the Roses; Martin has already said that his primary purpose in setting the series in a fantasy world so that no reader wouldn’t know in advance who wins. Early on he didn’t even plan of using dragons except as a heraldic symbol. Now, if you can lift the story out of the fantasy setting and keep the story coherent, is it fantasy? Does it survive Ursula LeGuin’s Deryni test?
Martin’s primary criticism of Tolkien is that he wasn’t realistic enough. Is realism the purview of fantasy? LeGuin pretty effectively put paid to that idea when she wrote:
[Fantasy] is a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence. It is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic, but surrealistic, superrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary, not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes….Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. (1, p. 84)
Next week I’ll lay out my theory of how the novel form developed, to better tease out the strains of fantasy from realism (yes, I’m going to subject you to pedantry!). Then I want to explore the ways that Martin’s criticism might more properly be directed at Joseph Campbell than J. R. R. Tolkien, if any criticism is warranted at all. For now, though, here are the points I want to consider:
Martin’s primary interest is in the exercise of power (see the Rolling Stone interview, or any of the dozen long interviews that he’s done; they all say about the same thing). He wants to explore character to expose human nature. We have realism for that. Also I can’t help but observe that what Martin says he’s doing might be different from what he actually accomplishes; the world building in ASOIAF often displaces both the characters and the plot.
Does fantasy serve a different essential reality? Must it? Must we constrain fantasy behind a fence along with poetry, mysticism and insanity just because LeGuin says so? Or does LeGuin distill something essential about the need for fantasy and myth, because we have a mental itch that no other form can scratch?
I ask a lot of questions. Because I really don’t know. I’m not sure that Martin is the most successful practitioner of hyper-realistic fantasy, even though he is the most prominent one right now. Can you have “hyper-realistic fantasy”? Is that even a thing? I’m drawing a bright line between HBO’s Game of Thrones and Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. The books are very different from the series. In the books, at least from my reading, Martin’s interest in world building is encyclopedic but unprioritized. The details come so thick that they hinder interest in the characters and stop the plot. Identifying with character is what drives the heart of any novel, and every novel needs its plot.
I’m also not sure that A Song of Ice and Fire is fantasy at all; there are two books to go, so the jury is still out. It might be but, then again, maybe not. A dragon or ice zombie, no matter how menacing, does not a fantasy make — the ground of fantasy lies elsewhere, and so far, I’ve read the War of the Roses with the Yorkists and Lancastrians wearing masks. If you can dispense with the trappings of fantasy—the magic and ice zombies and dragons—and you haven’t touched the central plot, I have to think that what you’re reading is alternate history. It can be great fiction, but it may not be fantasy.
Although fantasy can be many things, and one of its great strengths is the ability to consider huge human problems like racism and violence and the will to war without becoming enmeshed in the politics of history, it seems to me that Martin’s disagreement with the “he ruled wisely and well” line (which Tolkien does not, as far as I remember, write) is beside the point, and not merited in the first place. Unless his objection lies in that Tolkien finished The Lord of the Rings where he did instead of chronicling Aragorn’s difficulties in ruling. In the context of LOTR, Aragorn’s administration of Gondor is entirely irrelevant to the main story. Besides, I seem to recall that Tolkien tried to continue with a new story about Aragorn’s reign, and abandoned it because it bogged down in mundanity and “politics.” Which means that he considered Martin’s model (long before Martin formulated it) and rejected it. It remains for us to figure out whether the both visions can both fall inside the purview of Fantasy, or are irreconcilable.
Next week, some talk about the development of the novel, what the novel accomplishes and how different goals and driving ambitions worked their way through the form, so we can plot realism vs fantasy on a graph. Maybe it’ll clarify things.
Notes
1. Ursula Le Guin, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” in The Language of the Night, ed. Susan Woods, NY: Putnam, 1979, pp. 83-96.
You might want to look up this previous Language of the Night diary for a refresher.