Since Game of Thrones is in its final season and general interest will likely not ever go higher than it currently runs, it’s with some trepidation on my part that tonight we start talking about George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and its HBO counterpart. We can talk about either or both, as you wish, and for as long as you wish. I’ll make a few observations to start with, and offer a little bit of grounding that I’m sure you already know very well.
Let’s get on with it.
George R.R. Martin carved himself an interesting niche when he started by picking a fight with J.R.R. Tolkien, outlined briefly here. By defining himself in opposition to Tolkien, Martin planted a flag in the hyper-realistic camp of fantasy, putting himself in company with Joe Abercrombie, Robin Cook, Scott Lynch, etc. They make for a pretty decent cohort of grim and gritty fantasy writers. Not really to my taste, but that’s no one’s problem but my own. Martin has a devoted fan base dedicated to gaming out all kinds of theories from R+L=J, to Bran is the Night’s King, to the 13th Lord Commander’s healing and who is really Azor Ahai and on and on. There’s a GOT whole industry on YouTube and you could spend days there. It’s a kind of devotion to admire. My main point is, though: emphasis on realism and grittiness.
We know how Martin started A Song of Ice and Fire — what inspired him. He’s mentioned it often enough in interviews: history, and specifically the War of the Roses, that dynastic battle between two arms of England’s royal family that involved every prominent noble house in the realm and bled away the treasure, hopes and fortunes of several generations. It started with a weak and unstable king (Henry VI) who couldn’t hold his throne or secure the country, and finally ended after most of the participants were dead. The war concluded with a union of opposites: when the heir of the Lancastrian side (sigil: red rose) married the daughter of the Yorkists (sigil: white rose), and started the Tudor line (sigil: pink rose).
If you want to examine power politics in history, you could do worse than pick the Yorkist/Lancastrian civil war. Although Martin’s original series pitch from 1993 (I won’t link to the leaked version because it’s not a polite thing to do) modeled fairly closely on the War of the Roses, the series as written evolved so substantially from the original that the pitch is no longer at all accurate. The series thrust is pretty clear: Martin set out to chronicle a breakdown of civil order.
The English war ended with a marriage and the founding of a new line. It’s reasonable to assume that originally Martin intended something similar for A Song of Ice and Fire, although that, too, has been subject to evolution. And Martin has said in interviews that he’s tempted to end the series with “wind whistling through a graveyard” as the controlling metaphor. His views have changed over time, as the tale changed in the telling. In other words, all bets are off, and anyone who says now that he knows how it ends is guessing.
If you look past all the individual scrabblings over power that’s going on in the novels and the HBO adaptation, something beyond mere power politics is going on. The series examines how society collapses, how the pillars underlying civilization are interdependent and, when one goes, it’s the first in a cascade of dominoes. We start with the end of legitimate power: the end of a rightful king, (whether it’s The Mad King Aerys Targaryen or the equally awful Robert Baratheon is a matter of debate) but for argument’s sake, let’s say it’s King Robert. Cersei’s murder of her husband is the first unforgiveable deed. This is Clytemnestra’s crime; it’s regicide and a complete inversion of order, and it starts the pillars crashing. (Yes, Jaime pushes Bran out the window before this, and yes, Lysa murders Jon Arryn before this — both are crimes, but neither destroys the social fabric because neither strikes at the stability of society itself.) The last pillar falls in the Red Wedding, when the Freys betray the foundational guest/host relationship that civilization is built on. This is the sin of Sodom — the sin of turning on a guest. After that, everything has to crash to ruin. Just in time for winter and the army of the dead.
Which brings me to another work that I think is more useful to inform a discussion of ASOIAF, and that’s Shakespeare’s King Lear, where essentially the same process happens although it’s a good bit more economical.
In the beginning of Lear, the old king subverts the natural order; he refuses his ordained responsibilities and takes off his crown. From this one vain act, civil war, regicide, kinslaying, and all manner of betrayals follow. As social stability fails, everything falls apart. Lear flees to the heath in the middle of a storm and rages at an uncaring universe, descending into madness and learning that he, like every man, is nothing more than a “poor, bare, fork’d animal” (Act III, sc. iv), barren of comfort and bereft of illusion.
King Lear can’t end until Lear learns what he really is: no more than a man, and until Edmund, Regan, Gonriel, Gloucester, Cordelia, the Fool, and the old king himself are all dead, and Kent is on his way out to follow his master. The stage is swept. It’s irredeemably gloomy. Almost.
Because Lear is also a Christmas story. It was first performed for James I on December 26, 1606, at Whitehall.
At first blush, it makes no sense that such a painful and dark vision of human nature would be a Christmas play, but there you have it. The tragedy is set in pre-Christian Britain, and at the end, Lear’s realm is in shreds, his legacy wasted, his heirs dead. The best that man can do on his own is come to ash. Everything is ready for the rise of a new governing principle, a nativity, if you will. Shakespeare’s audience would have understood this implicitly.
Does this implication transfer to ASOIAF? We don’t know yet, but I would think there has to be some sort of redemptive reset. To end with nothing more than “wind whistling through a graveyard” sounds a nihilistic note that fundamentally betrays the thrusts of history and memory, and cheapens the striving and suffering that the characters have invested in the narrative, to say nothing of the suffering of the readers and viewers. It’s bad literature, in other words.
I’m not going to discuss the novels in much detail because I’ve only read them once and don’t plan to read them again anytime soon. But you can — discuss them in detail, that is.
Not taking anything away from Martin’s worldbuilding, I don’t much care for the books. I do very much like the series, though. It takes what is best in the books and builds on it, strengthens and streamlines it. In brief, I object to the sadism and misogyny, and can add examples in comments if anyone is interested. Also I tend to think that Martin expanded his narrative out so far that he lost control of its threads; anyone would with that many skeins of yarn in the air. He lost focus and let the story meander. The HBO showrunners have combined characters, changed fates in service of the larger themes, and streamlined a lot of clunky exposition (goodbye, Dorne!).
If Martin finishes the series, it will certainly happen with the diminished pressure from fans, since the HBO version wraps up in a few weeks. But I think it’s possible that he may be finished already. Since A Dance with Dragons was published in 2011, Martin’s followed it up with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the Dunk and Egg stories, and two other collaborative works, The World of Ice & Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and the Game of Thrones in 2014 and Fire and Blood just a few months ago. Both are encyclopedic and, well, it’s not a stretch to call them stylistically dry. Fire and Blood purports to be written by a Maester, and all its lack of compelling narrative is due to the fact that the “author” is a bad writer. Too cute by half. It’s tempting to think that Martin’s interest in finishing the series has rather cooled and he’s moved on to other projects.
If that’s the case, HBO has done him a great service. If it’s not the case and he’s still writing the final volumes, HBO has done him another service by taking off the pressure and giving the us a stylish and beautifully-wrought version to go by in the meantime.
I’m going to finish tonight with one of my favorite scenes from the series. It’s probably yours, too.