Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, From A Game of Thrones to A Dance with Drago (18 page)

Of the Lannister siblings, Cersei, curiously enough, has the most faith in the divine powers. She believes that she was prophesied by the gods to become queen of the Seven Kingdoms, yet this doesn’t stop her from committing incest in a sept (in front of her son’s corpse, no less) or murdering the High Septon. And those are just her offenses specifically against the Faith of the Seven.

Even those characters who have clung more strongly to their religious convictions don’t seem to receive any particular reward for it. The most extreme examples of divine favor—the resurrections of Beric Dondarrion and ultimately Catelyn Stark—aren’t the sort of rewards that most of us would pray for.

The ambiguous status of religion in the series seems an intentional act on the part of George R.R. Martin, who described himself in a July 2011
Entertainment Weekly
interview as a “lapsed Catholic” and acknowledged that most would call him “an atheist or agnostic.” He went on to say, “And as for the gods, I’ve never been satisfied by any of the answers that are given. If there really is a benevolent loving god, why is the world full of rape and torture? Why do we even have pain? I was taught pain is to let us know when our body is breaking down. Well, why couldn’t we have a light? Like a dashboard light? If Chevrolet could come up with that, why couldn’t God? Why is agony a good way to handle things?”

Despite the fact that they rarely live up to expectations, the gods of Westeros wield immense power, even if they themselves cannot typically be bothered to show up and help move things along. In crafting his own gods, Martin has avoided the easy way out. He could have provided satisfying answers, by building a world in which gods of good grant healing and gods of evil grant dominion over legions of undead. That isn’t Westeros, though. The religions he crafts are not obviously true and accessible but are instead just as obscure and subjective as those we practice. Much like the direwolves, maybe it’s enough to know that the gods just
might
be lurking in the wings, ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice.

Ultimately, religious faith isn’t really about the end result; it’s about the
perception
of the end result. Despite the lack of evidence, we are driven to see meaning in the patterns of the world around us. Religion’s power comes, at least in part, from offering us the meaning we are hardwired to seek. Whatever else it may be, religion provides a ready-made narrative around which we can build our lives. It places our individual and group suffering and accomplishments in a more significant context. These beliefs are the ultimate source of religious power and authority in this world.

Or, as summed up more succinctly by Varys in
A Clash of Kings
: “Power resides where men
believe
it resides. No more and no less.”

       
ANDREW ZIMMERMAN JONES
is an author and editor of both fiction and nonfiction. He studied physics, philosophy, and mathematics (along with a couple of religion courses) at Wabash College and has earned a Master’s degree in Mathematics Education from Purdue University. Andrew has been a finalist in the L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future Contest, received Honorable Mention in the 2011 Writer’s Digest Science Fiction/Fantasy Competition, and previously appeared in Smart Pop Books’ anthology
Inside Joss’ Dollhouse
. He’s the author of
String Theory for Dummies
, the
About.com
Physics Guide, and a contributing editor to
Black Gate
fantasy adventure magazine. Andrew is a member of the National Association of Science Writers, American Mensa, and Toastmasters International. He lives in central Indiana with his wife, two young sons, two cats, and five chickens. Links to his work and various online personas can be reached through his website at
azjones.info
.

JESSE SCOBLE

The Dangers of Magic in (and to) Westeros

GEORGE R
.
R
.
MARTIN’S A
Song of Ice and Fire has been a success, in large part, because it has recaptured fans of the fantasy genre who had grown bored and moved away from the standard fare, and because it has reached a wide audience of those who traditionally do not read or watch fantasy genre entertainment. In an interview with the MTV Movies Blog, HBO Showrunner David Benioff said, “I think some people think, ‘Oh, I don’t want to watch a fantasy show because I’m not that into magic,’ but one of the things that is great about George’s books is that they don’t rely overly much on magic.” Similarly, Tor blogger Leigh Butler expressed the sentiment that Martin seemed almost afraid to commit, in terms of how much magic to put in the series. In her penultimate “A Read of Ice and Fire” post, Leigh’s reaction to the birth of the dragons was: “Daaaamn, y’all. So apparently magic is not so much nonexistent in Martin’s world after all!”

What’s intriguing about this is that Martin’s world of the Seven Kingdoms is steeped in magic. But it is not used in a “traditional fantasy” sense.

By “traditional fantasy,” I’m speaking of the body of tales and entertainments that traces its roots back to Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, and which has come to encompass things like
Dungeons & Dragons
and the predictable, often-clichéd yarns of elves, dwarfs, orcs, and goblins. In the 1962 essay “Conan’s Imitators,” L. Sprague de Camp called these sorts of works “sword & sorcery,” which he defined as “stories laid in an imaginary pre-industrial setting wherein, although the supernatural played an important part, the accent was on action, adventure, and heroism.”

Many readers, myself included, grew up on a diet of this kind of fantasy, graduated into roleplaying games, but then put away such “childish things” as the demands of life and the workaday world took over. One of the reasons that many fans grow out of the fantasy genre is because the bookshelves have been overpopulated with unimaginative worlds recycling the same old ideas. If every adventurer has a backpack full of enchanted swords; a magic ring on every finger; and spells to hurl fireballs and magic missiles, as well as to boil coffee, and heal pimples, and maybe even raise the dead, the world becomes boring and dull because of the ubiquitous and predictable nature of the magic.

That’s not the case in A Song of Ice and Fire. Though at times the series feels like historical fiction—many readers have drawn apt comparisons to the War of the Roses and the Hundred Years’ War—it’s the very absence of overt magic that makes the glimpses we see so effective. As Martin wrote in his essay “On Fantasy” (1996), “Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot.” Those hints of magic are key to making A Song of Ice and Fire what it is: exotic, mysterious, and dangerous.

A Game of Thrones
opens with a scene of magic. Several members of the Night’s Watch—Gared, Will, and Ser Waymar Royce—come face-to-face with the dread Others. As the reader wonders if these foes are fantastically garbed humans, some kind of recognizable “alien” like an elf or dark faerie, or something more unusual, Ser Waymar is mercilessly killed. The dead man then stands back up, eyes burning unnaturally blue, and wraps his hands around Will’s throat. By opening the series with this scene, Martin announces from the outset that magic does exist in this world and will play a major part in this epic.

After that terrifying introduction of the Others, however, Martin does something unexpected and leaves magic off the stage for many chapters. Instead, he embroils the reader in the stories of the Starks, King Robert, the Lannisters, and a host of bannermen, lesser lords, courtly ladies, and their retinues. Martin further expands the world by introducing the reader and Daenerys Targaryen simultaneously to the Dothraki horselords across the narrow sea. Yet while explicit magic is kept off the page, we see hints and references to the greater role it once played in the world. Magic, we understand, may have only gone underground. And it may well return.

Westeros is a world where magic has faded from the day-to-day world of nobles and smallfolk alike. The last dragon died out approximately a century and a half before the beginning of
A Game of Thrones
, and magic, it appears, died with it. But the world is still ripe with ritual, superstitious beliefs, artifacts, and stories that have roots in that earlier, more magical time.

In one of the key scenes, early in
A Games of Thrones
, Eddard Stark’s party comes upon a dead direwolf bitch, killed by a stag’s tine in her throat, and five orphaned puppies in the snow. The direwolf is the symbol of House Stark, and the noble families in Westeros put a great deal of faith in their house symbols and mottos. Jon Snow stays Theon from slaying the pups by suggesting to Lord Eddard that the animals are destined for each of the five trueborn Stark children. When Jon is asked about one for himself, he explains that as a bastard he is not due the same consideration as those of pure blood, but when the sixth pup, an albino outcast, is found, it is just as clear that this direwolf was “meant” for Snow. The characters understand the pups as an omen—one that only seems to be confirmed, to the characters and to us as readers, when House Baratheon, whose symbol is the royal stag, brings about Ned Stark’s downfall later in the book. Whether the death of the direwolf and the discovery of her pups is a “true” omen or not, the characters’ willingness to put stock in the idea is telling.

Early in
A Game of Thrones
, we also see the architectural wonder of the Wall, a great monument of ice and stone approximately three hundred miles long and seven hundred feet high. Stories say Bran the Builder engineered the Wall, eight thousand years past, weaving spells of protection into it to shield Westeros from the Others and monstrosities from the Lands of Always Winter. Stories tell that magic is the only way to bring down the Wall, as well. The Horn of Winter, or the Horn of Joramun, is an artifact that the wildlings say can not only bring down the Wall, but awaken the giants.

Throughout the opening of the series we see Valyrian steel blades, hear of tantalizing dreams that may be prophetic, and learn the history of a kingdom carved out by dragon fire. Samwell Tarly says warlocks from Qarth bathed him in auroch’s blood to make him brave; but he retched, and it did not take. Old Nan tells bedtime stories of the Long Night, the devastating winter where the inhuman Others swept the realm with terror, and Dany hears tales of magic in the far east—Moonsingers of the Jogos Nhai, mages from Asshai, and Dothraki spells of grass and corn and horse. In a way, these early pages are full of magic, but only as myths, legends, and rumors.