History and the Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire

By Williamjames Hoffer, Professor of History, Seton Hall University

The television show “Game of Thrones” (GoT) and the books upon which it is based, the “A Song of Ice and Fire” (ASOIAF) series by George R. R. Martin (GRRM), have millions of fans around the world and for good reason: It is a fascinating story full of twists and turns, mature themes, intriguing characters, and, of course, dragons. Part of what gives it such power, resonance, and realism is the very real history that inspired it. So, sit firmly in the saddle as I take you on our incredible journey through the lands of ice and fire.

Places

The first and most prominent place that history inspired is “The Wall” – the 700 foot high, magically imbued ice barrier that divides the land of Westeros into the Far North and everything else. George R. R. Martin has said that standing atop the remains of Hadrian’s Wall in Britain started his process for writing the originally planned trilogy that is now the unfinished septology. Built between 122 and 128 A.D. on the order of Emperor Hadrian (76–138 A.D., r. 117-138 A.D.), this 73 mile fortification defended the Roman province of Britannia from the tribes of Scotland just as the Wall protects the rest of Westeros from the Others, originally, and now the Wildlings.

Just as Hadrian’s Wall was a model for the Wall, many have speculated that the isles of Britain and Ireland serve as the influence for Westeros. King’s Landing is very much like London. The Irish are the Ironborn, the North is Scotland and so forth. Others argue that Martin’s Westeros and Essos are a composite of Europe and the Mediterranean World. France with its high culture and agricultural productivity is the Reach of House Tyrell, the Riverlands are the Rhineland with its gruesome history as the battlefield of Europe, Scandinavia and its Vikings are the Ironborn and House Greyjoy (“We Do Not Sow”), Dorne is a kind of egalitarian Spain, the Italian city-states such as Venice, Genoa, and Florence are the trading city-states of Lys, Pentos, and Volantis, and the other Free Cities, and the Netherlands is a dead ringer for the trading city of Braavos with its Iron Bank and multi-religious, canal-based geography.

Then, there is the less popular, but also intriguing idea that Martin is using his childhood home of New Jersey as the model for Terros/Planetos. He grew up Roman Catholic in Bayonne and still roots for the Jets and football Giants. (He went so far as to make a bet on a Giants-Cowboys football game, lost, and, as a payoff, made the giant, Wun-Wun [One, One, or 11, Giants Quarterback Phil Simms’s number] tear off the arms of Ser Patrek of King’s Mountain under a banner with a silver star [as in the symbol of the Cowboys].) The capital of New Jersey, Trenton, is known for its hardball politics and corruption just like King’s Landing. The southern part of the state is viewed as agricultural. From across the sea that is the Hudson, you can get to the financial, culturally diverse capital that is New York City, founded by the Dutch, and the Braavos of the U.S. To the far north one has the wilds of northern New Jersey, and even further, the far north that is upstate New York. Go even farther north and one reaches the land of always winter, also known as Canada. All that is missing is a gigantic wall separating the U.S. from its frozen, northern neighbor.

Events

The happenings of GoT/ASOIAF are also frequently based on historical events. Tyrion’s chain and use of wildfire to defend King’s Landing is the Byzantine deployment of a chain and Greek fire to defend Constantinople. As GRRM said, the Red Wedding and its violation of guest right is much the same as the notorious Black Dinner of 1440 where the Earl of Douglas and his brother were summarily dragged from the table, tried, and executed on behalf of James II of Scotland, and the Massacre of Glencoe (1692) where the guests violated the rules of hospitality by killing their hosts, the MacDonalds of Glencoe, who had not swiftly sworn allegiance to King William and Queen Mary. Even the invasion of Westeros in which Aegon I “the Conqueror” establishes Targaryen rule and unites the Seven Kingdoms (the North, the Riverlands, the Westerlands, the Vale, the Stormlands, the Reach, and the Iron Islands) is analogous to William the Conqueror’s overthrow of Anglo-Saxon England beginning in 1066 A.D.

Perhaps the most significant event that predominates over most of the show and books is the War of the Five Kings, which closely resembles the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487). The bitter rivalry between the Starks of the North and the Lannisters of the Westerlands certainly mirrors the bloody contest between the House of York and the Lancastrians. This English civil war was wide-ranging, complex, and created misery on all sides. Does this mean we can look forward to a Tudor style union to complete our saga? Jaimie Lannister weds Sansa Stark anyone?

Last and certainly not least, there does seem to be an analogy between the U.S.’s overseas adventure in Vietnam and Daenerys’ attempt to rule in Meereene. Although the show’s version looks a great deal more like the U.S. in Iraq with its insurgency-like Sons of the Harpy, the books’ portrayal is a great deal more complex. There is a culture clash, a confusion about the shape of the emancipation’s new order, and a question of what this role means for Daenerys’ identity. Is she a mother, a dragon, both, neither? The crisis of authority in both Essos and Westeros certainly mirrors that of the late 1960s and 1970s in the U.S. Does this mean there is a Ronald Reagan in Westeros’ future?

Societies and Cultures

There is a fair amount of debate about how much the cultures and societies of Westeros and Essos resemble those of the Middle Ages in Europe and elsewhere. What we can safely conclude is that Westeros is sort of feudal. The bannermen are the vassals. The small folk are the peasants. We have lords and ladies, kings and queens. There is a single church for all except those of the North and the Wildlings. The High Septon appears to be a kind of Holy Father or Pope. The septons and septas look very much like priests and nuns. The maesters look something like members of the monastic orders. The Faith Militant, the armed and celibate soldiers of the Faith of the Seven, recently revived under Queen Regent Cersei, are in the same vein as the Knights Templar and Hospitaller, and Teutonic Knights. As for the rest of the world of ice and fire, the Dothraki closely parallel the horse peoples of the Steppe from the Huns to the Scythians to the Mongols. Further afield in the books alone, the Yi Ti seem like the Chinese and the Southyros the Sub-Saharan African empires such as the Mali and Songhai.

The development of the R’hllor religion with its fierce dichotomy of the good fire god of R’hllor and the god of darkness and ice, the Great Other, is akin to the emergence of Zoroastrianism in the Persian Empire around the mid-fifth century B.C. This was the first major monotheistic religion and ascribed to the prophet Zoroaster. Although we can safely discount the ability of Zoroastrian priests to bring back people from the dead as Thoros of Myr does with Beric Dondarrion, its understanding of the world as the creator keeping chaos from overwhelming all life is similar to the Red Priestess’, Melisandre’s, preaching about the need to confront the ice and darkness of the Great Other.

The Children of the Forest or Singers that have helped humanity against the Others and been driven to near extinction by the First Men invaders in the pre-history to the current story are very much like the Native Americans or the Aztec and Maya of the Americas both in their respect for nature and their doom at the hands of the invading Europeans. Even the Others seem to have a sophisticated human culture and society of sorts. Their very name is a concept historians have long understood about the “othering” of societies and cultures in order to de-humanize them for political and warfare purposes. Given GRRM’s statement about the over-simplification of traditional good v. evil stories, we may go so far as to analogize the relationship between the peoples of Westeros and the Others as like that between the United States and Japan prior to World War II. Does this mean we can expect Jon Snow or the dragons to become a kind of atomic bomb?

Finally, there is the recurrent theme of the books and occasionally the show of the unreliability of narrators, particularly those who are writing the histories – the maesters. While it is fun to speculate about the significance of the “un-kiss” (Sansa in the books remembers a kiss with Sandor “the Hound” Clegane during the Battle of the Blackwater despite it never happening in her own point of view chapter covering the event.), the question of the unreliable narrator is a problem for historians as well as the general public. Primary sources have to be analyzed for their hidden meanings, biases, problems of perspective, and cultural characteristics. Secondary sources have to be placed in their contexts. There is much thought provoking material in “Game of Thrones” the show and the books of the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series, not the least of which is Ygritte’s response to much of what Jon Snow does and says: “You know nothing, Jon Snow.”