[ Game of Thrones "Main Title" Plays ]
George R.R. Martin's book series, A Song of Ice and Fire,
and it's HBO adaptation by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss
is one of the rating properties in the current zeitgeist.
Regularly drawing millions to its stories of the movers and shakers of the mythical land of Westeros,
a setting for so much death.
It's become a running joke that Martin enjoys killing characters
as Westerosi politics becomes more unstable.
And yes, anyone can die.
As in life, any character, no matter what their station, is vulnerable to death.
It would seem that Martin was moved by the late Medieval motif of the danse macabre.
Where king and commoner alike danced the dance of death.
In fact, MOST of Game of Thrones is drawn from Medieval history.
You hardly have to squint to see it.
With a wealthy port capital to the south, a hilly west, and vast northern territories blockaded by a wall,
Westeros is a lot like Britain.
And it's no secret that Martin based his song of ice and fire on the British War of the Roses.
The Cousin's War, driven by the ambitions and entitlements of multiple great houses.
York, Lancaster, Plantagenet, Tudor:
York, Lancaster, Plantagenet, Tudor: Stark, Lannister, Targaryen, Tyrell.
The origins of the main conflict began when a bold pretender usurped the throne of an incompetent fool
from a long, stable dynasty that ruled the land for centuries.
The main aggressors were a clan of rich Southerners,
and a northern family with a habit of using cold rhetoric in their speeches.
"Now the winter of our discontent is coming."
There was a queen more powerful than her king,
who engineered many of the conflict's events.
Cersei Lannister has plenty in common with Margaret of Anjou,
the slippery French bride of the Mad King, Henry VI.
Robb Stark, son of a slain duke with his head on a pike,
handsome and undefeated in battle who jeopardized his reign with an impulsive marriage,
bears a resemblance to a young Edward IV.
Robert Baratheon, fat, lazy, and lecherous with his warrior days long behind him,
bears a resemblance to an OLD Edward IV.
No Kingslayer, but a King-MAKER in Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick,
Whose deep pockets and vast connections make it easy to liken him to Petyr Baelish.
Or even Lord Walder Frey.
Like the princes in the tower, Richard and Edward,
Bran and Rickon Stark were similarly held hostage in Winterfell.
As a pawn passed around from royal marriage to royal marriage,
Sansa Stark is in a very similar postion to Elizabeth of York,
who would eventually wed Edward VII and mother Henry VIII
Speaking of the founder of the Tudor dynasty,
As a man heading an opposed house living in exile on the continent,
set to make a spectacular invasion of his homelands,
Henry VII had plenty in common with Daenerys Targaryen.
And as a solidly honorable Northerner unfairly branded a traitor by his enemies,
Ned Stark's closest analogue might be Richard III.
Of course, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had many qualities that Ned Stark lacked.
A certain ruthlessness, resourcefulness, remarkable charm, and a notable physical deformity.
In this respect, the York may be akin not to a Stark, but to a Lannister; Tyrion.
And the Lannisters themselves may not even be a perfect fit with the Lancasters.
With their powerful, Machiavellian patriarch, libertine son, and incestuous siblings,
The Lannisters may be less Lancaster than Borgia.
The Greyjoys may be equal parts Irish, Manx, and Viking.
And the Targaryens could be Plantagenets or the Norman conquerors,
or even the remnants of the Roman Empire,
in the Byzantines to the East, or the Catholic Church in the West.
A Song of Ice and Fire is a very soft adaptation of actual history,
merging many factions and many figures,
BEYOND the War of the Roses. And beyond Britain.
Here, Joan of Arc, there, Robin Hood and his Merry Men.
Here, Ragnar Lothbrok, there, William Wallace.
Here, Hadrian's Wall, there, the Court of Love at Poitiers.
In the West, the kings of England, France, Germany, and Spain.
And abroad? The doges of Venice, the mansas of Mali, and the Khans of the Golden Horde.
We accepts Westeros and Essos because of its familiarity.
This was our world once.
There were old gods, and there were new.
There were pagan faiths, and the occasional heretic cult.
There was an ominous comet in the sky.
There was even a small ice age.
There were dynastic feuds in the West with sea-faring pagans to the North
and sunny merchants states and feared nomadic tribes in the East.
All re-imagined into a broad outline of the period.
And amongst the re-imaginings of these medieval facts,
even the fantastical elements, the "Ice and Fire" that gave the saga its name,
have the air of very modern fears.
Of the Ice? The White Walkers, the impending collapse of the Wall, and the rest of the world's doubt that
winter is coming, all coincide with today's fears of climate change.
And of Fire? Those dragons owned by Daenerys Targaryen
invoke the same fear that nuclear weapons did in our parents.
And may STILL in our children.
So what in Seven Hells does this all mean?
Why look to history through the prism of fantasy?
And why is it the period between 476 and 1492 that the West calls "The Middle Ages",
that so often becomes the setting for the fantasy genre?
Well, WHAT Middle Ages?
Medieval scholar, semiotician, and historical novelist Umberto Eco
in his 1986 essay, "Dreaming in the Middle Ages",
argued that the era has been used and re-used to fit the needs of the zeitgeist.
In a cycle that began pretty much immediately after the era ended.
An aesthetic called "Neo-Medievalism".
Eco catalogued ten little Middle Ages,
each a manifestation of medieval thinking in modern thought.
The Middle Ages as Pretext: a setting in which to place modern characters in historical events,
The Middle Ages as Ironical Revisitation: the place of parody and satire.
The Middle Ages as the Age of Barbarism: a place for tales of brutality and strength.
The Middle Ages as Romanticism: stormy castles, damsels in distress, and dragons in caves,
The Middle Ages as Philosipha Peremis: the structuralists, the belief in a vast hierarchy
of interlocking systems, medieval belief informing modern belief.
The Middle Ages of National Identities: the era as the formation of the ideal nation,
before the corruption of the modern era.
The Middle Ages of Decadentism: the age of beauty and extravagance,
The Middle Ages of Philological Reconstruction: of history, scholarship, and science
The Middle Ages of "Tradition": anti-scientific by default, the belief that Masonry,
or the Rosecrutians or the Templars ran the world, and continue to do so,
And finally, The Middle Ages of the Expectation of the Millennium:
the apocalyptic sense that revelation is upon us.
Game of Thrones has elements of ALL these Little Middle Ages,
including, and especially, their most common denominator:
the era's relation to the modern world.
Eco writes:
Like in that time, we have irreparable division between rich and poor,
there are tensions between city and country,
we still have the medieval institutions of the university, the bank, the church, and the state,
repatched and rebuilt in the past centuries.
We want romance and barbarism and decadence,
and we all fear the sudden ending of the world.
But we know, with our post-modern, anti-metanarrative sensibility
that OUR REALITY can't be expressed in simple narratives.
And so George R.R. Martin gives us the gift of complexity.
No more great quests or monstrous foes,
no pure damsels or shining knights.
The quests have ulterior motives, the monsters have inner pain,
the damsels can fend for themselves, and the knights only shine
because they want you to think they do.
A Song of Ice and Fire's success comes from its foothold not in fantasy or romance,
but history.
Because history is NOT romantic.
History is the story of chaos, of people, powerful and powerless,
each with their own agendas and biases, clashing and embracing in a massive chemical reaction
that forms all of society.
And yes. Likeable characters, beacons of hope can die before their time
or they live, and fall prey to the systems they try to reform.
And as the good fall, the bad escape justice.
Or get endings unfit for the crimes they committed.
Tragedies happen in an instant. Shocking in the moment, but in hindsight, a painful inevitability.
It is in the study of that chaos that the luxury of seeing it in far Westeros, divorced form our own world,
that we hope to understand and brace ourselves for the pain of this Neo-Medieval world.
Perhaps that is why Game of Thrones resonates.
Not with escapism and a comforting narrative where evil is vanquished and good triumphant,
but with harsh honesty and plausible chaos.
This self-conscious evaluation of our past rings true in our anxious age.
As romanticism fades, and brutal reality encroaches with the foundations starting to crack,
we ALL take part in the Danse Macabre.
That very medieval reminder:
Translated roughly from the Latin:
Valar Morghulis.
[ Game of Thrones Season 1 "Finale" Plays ]