Reading Both Lotr and Game of Thrones
What Is Game of Thrones' Legacy in Epic Fantasy?
"The world is indeed total of peril, and in it there are many nighttime places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands dearest is now mingled with grief, it grows perchance the greater."
―J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Band
"The things nosotros love destroy us every fourth dimension, lad. Remember that."
―George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
No work of art tin can be entirely separated from its time. Whether in its medium, its subject matter, or only the feel of history available to the artist and audience, the real world seeps into everything. And works of fine art that capture the public imagination tend to be even more intimately linked to their fourth dimension.
We are currently experiencing a media hailstorm leading up to the terminal season of HBO'southward Game of Thrones, the worldwide television striking based on George R.R. Martin'due south A Song of Ice and Fire books — a serial still unfinished by its author. The split between book and television show is important hither considering while the beginning volume of Martin's story was originally published in 1996 and somewhen became extremely pop, its "modernistic miracle" condition really came with the huge success of the HBO version, starting in 2012.
Inevitably, any fantasy ballsy that becomes vastly popular will be compared to J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (which had its own moment of modernistic media attention with the success of Peter Jackson's flick version in the early 2000s). And every bit the time comes to consider the legacy of Thrones, comparing the 2 can exist an instructive exercise. LOTR and GOT are vastly unlike stories that speak to entirely different worlds and eras.
When Tolkien produced his masterpiece in 1954, there was no such thing as "ballsy fantasy" or modernistic fantasy fiction. It was not a commercial genre, and in fact had existed to that point primarily as a gentleman's game: Most of the early fantasy authors were inventing worlds as a sort of literary hobby, and very few of those stories had any large effect on popular civilisation, especially compared to other seminal fantastic works like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or Bram Stoker'due south Dracula.
During the late Victorian era, William Morris, famous designer and socialist, wrote a series of pastoral, pseudo-medieval fantasies that certainly influenced Tolkien. He too knew and admired the darker fantasy stories of Lord Dunsany. And other writers before Tolkien — Poe, Hawthorne, George MacDonald, Promise Mirrlees, Lucy Clifford, and James Co-operative Cabell, to name a few — had contributed important writings to what nosotros would now call "fantasy fiction." But none of their works really deserved the title "epic." Fantasy fiction before J.R.R.T. was still largely a parlor game, not a war game.
Mayhap the first truthful epic fantasy published in the mod era was E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, a story about the warring kingdoms of Witchland and Demonland and their various more-or-less-human heroes — larger-than-life figures who would have been comfy lifting a tankard in Valhalla while waiting for the next twenty-four hour period's never-ending boxing to begin. In fact, although George R.R. Martin has talked almost how much discovering Tolkien affected him, his GOT world is much more than like Eddison's Worm than it is like Tolkien's Centre -earth, with contending monarchs, behind-the-scenes allies and enemies, lashings of court intrigue and treachery, and even magic used to set on from a distance. Tolkien was impressed by Eddison and named him "the greatest and most disarming writer of 'invented worlds' that I accept ever read."
But it remained for Tolkien himself to single-handedly create the subgenre we now call epic fantasy, with the 1954 release of The Lord of the Rings. It'southward probably not coincidental that a work so influenced past the horrors of the kickoff World War and published so presently after 2 of Tolkien's sons fought in the second should have become so popular among readers who grew up in the postwar years. Cynicism most the Common cold War — a potentially endless geopolitical conflict — replaced the paradigm of the "skillful war" but won. LOTR helped fuel a counterculture among postwar youth who would somewhen unite behind the words peace and dear — the very contrary of cynicism.
And although Tolkien was occasionally startled to discover that a after generation of hippies and bloom children had made a totem of his life'southward work, their love for it is understandable. LOTR combines a belief in the ability of small, seemingly unimportant people and the ultimate purpose of humankind with a linked belief in a Creator who — at least subtly — works on humanity's behalf toward that ultimate purpose. In one of Tolkien's near famous passages, Gandalf the wizard tells reluctant ring bearer Frodo, "At that place are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides that of evil. Bilbo was meant to detect the Ring, in which case you were likewise meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought."
And so Tolkien'due south not bad story, as he afterward fabricated explicit in The Silmarillion, is based on a worldview with humanity at its center and a Creator, at least ultimately, in charge. This made it an almost platonic piece of work for those who no longer trusted an Establishment that had taken the whole world to war twice, and was still sending young soldiers to die for questionable ends in places like Korea, People's democratic republic of algeria, and Vietnam. "Frodo Lives!" became a pop slice of graffiti amongst the counterculture folk, and Tolkien himself was often roused in the middle of the night by calls from stoned fans in the United states of america who didn't sympathise time zones, but actually, really, really wanted to talk to the man who invented Center-earth. The professor might have been bellyaching, but the aforementioned Zeitgeist that led to those calls helped sell millions of books and brand hobbits a worldwide byword for "petty people standing upwards to powerful evil."
But if we leap forward 50 years from LOTR, the earth — and the popular stories that reflect that world — becomes quite different. Considering on September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists hijacked iv planes and managed to damage the Pentagon and destroy both towers of the World Merchandise Centre, killing thousands of innocents.
This kind of literal and figurative leveling affected people in the U.S. most of all — America'due south unspoken belief in its isolation and safe from violent world events was the first casualty. But people in every nation were stunned by the fashion a comparatively tiny group of people could cause such destruction, could shock the most powerful country in the world right down to its foundations. (In fact, in many means, 9/11 could exist seen every bit a nasty perversion of the central idea of LOTR, that the small and "insignificant" peoples of the globe could rise upwardly and shake the foundations of the mighty.) In the backwash of the attacks, a myth of everybody pulling together for the common good was promulgated, and in some cases was happily true. But a rise in violence and discrimination confronting Muslims showed that "pulling together" was non the just story.
The novelist Don DeLillo wrote presently later the attacks that 9/eleven would change "the way we think and act, moment to moment, calendar week to week, for unknown weeks and months to come, and steely years." It'southward hard to deny that he was right. Several pop-culture phenomena sprang up in the years after nine/11, HBO'south Game of Thrones being one of the most important, only past no means operating in a vacuum. The runaway popularity of The Walking Dead and The Hunger Games in the 2000s also signaled a different sort of sensibility from Tolkien's postwar years. The enemies were closer, and sometimes they were even friends — or had been. Nothing was entirely trustworthy, not family, not community, and certainly not the government. The anti-establishment cynicism of the '60s and '70s had been replaced by a cynicism almost near everything, and certainly nearly all institutions. Priests and teachers were now seen as potential molesters. Presidents were no longer just incorrect every bit far as their opponents were concerned — they were actual criminal enemies. George W. Bush was labeled a murderer and Barack Obama was called a fascist. Political and cultural media were weaponized.
Into this new and more broken-hearted world burst HBO'due south Game of Thrones. Interestingly, the showrunners chose to ignore Martin's series title, A Song of Ice and Fire (which seemed to speak to his long-term plans with the series), and used the name of the first book instead. And indeed the "Game of … " trope quickly went viral, becoming autograph for contest and often treachery in innumerable articles and reality television shows' titles.
A lot of the drama and struggle of GOT came from one of Martin's inspirations — the State of war of the Roses, a deadly, often personal struggle for family power in 15th-century England betwixt two branches of the ruling Plantagenet dynasty, the Yorks and the Lancasters. Those who know a little history know that there were no philosophical differences backside this struggle. Neither the Yorks nor the Lancasters wanted to change things in any major way — they were fighting purely for the power of the throne.
With Westeros, Martin similarly portrayed a world where the fiercest conflicts were non for ideals, but for power. The book and its successors became best sellers, but it was the afterwards tv set testify, like most Zeitgeist-hugging phenomena, that plugged into the confusing, troubled tenor of the times — America mail service–Monica Lewinsky, mail service-impeachment, post–disputed 2000 election, and particularly, post–September 11, 2001.
In the long wake of the 9/11 attacks, America has go a troubled superpower. Bipartisanship, collegiality, and respect seem to have left our political life for adept. One-half of the people in the country believe the current president is a crook, and possibly a tool of Vladimir Putin's Russia. Before that, a smaller just every bit devout percentage believed the previous president was a foreign Manchurian candidate, fifty-fifty a stalking equus caballus for Islamic fundamentalism. Science is at present openly subjected to purely political judgment, and the dubious simply sturdy idea of an objective news media is long gone. Many people would propose that America has non been this divided since the years leading up to the Civil State of war. Europe, awash in its ain racial backlashes and economic anarchy, is no better off. Nosotros're living in a Game of Thrones earth.
J.R.R. Tolkien seemed to believe that if we had backbone, faith, and did the right thing without concern for personal toll, God would protect united states and humanity would triumph.
G.R.R. Martin, at least in his famous piece of work of fiction (abetted now by the showrunners who are finishing the story for him), has made information technology very clear that non merely is innocence or a good eye no defense, in many cases they are magnets for disaster. The strong will destroy the weak, proclaims the Westeros philosophy, and only cunning and moral flexibility thing. No one tin can be trusted completely, nor should be. The globe is without form except for that which human agency can give it, and ability is the only protection, though fifty-fifty that protection can turn out to exist insufficient, every bit various assassinations in Game of Thrones have made all too articulate.
Did Martin invent this worldview? No, no more than Tolkien invented the postwar milieu in which his work became so popular. But both writers spoke to the fears and hopes of their ain time, and if Tolkien's piece of work came to us in a time with more promise than at present, that is not Martin's fault.
Tad Williams writes fantasy and science fiction, including the twoOsten Ardbook series and the virtual-reality epicOtherland.
Source: https://www.vulture.com/2019/04/game-of-thrones-george-r-r-martin-legacy-epic-fantasy.html
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