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Mastering the Game of Thrones This page intentionally left blank Mastering the Game of Thrones Essays on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire Edited by Jes Battis and Susan Johnston McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina Also of Interest Blood Relations: Chosen Families in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, by Jes Battis (McFarland, 2005) Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Mastering the Game of thrones : essays on George R.R. Martin’s A song of ice and fire / edited by Jes Battis and Susan Johnston . p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-9631-0 (softcover : acid free paper) ISBN 978-1-4766-1962-0 (ebook) ♾ 1. Martin, George R. R. Song of ice and f ire. I. Battis, Jes, 1979– editor. II. Johnston, Susan, 1964– editor. III. Game of thrones (Television program) PS3563.A7239S5935 2015 813'.54—dc23 2014044427 British Library cataloguing data are available © 2015 Jes Battis and Susan Johnston. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover images © 2015 iStock/Thinkstock Printed in the United States of America McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com For my mother, who watches from beneath her wolf blanket.—Jes For Marcel, shekh ma shieraki anni.—Susan Acknowledgments As the first of its kind, this volume was a challenging if rewarding endeavor. There are a number of people whose support and patience made it possible. Thanks to all of our colleagues in the Department of English at the University of Regina, who offered guidance and kept us sane while we worked. Thanks as well to our extraordinary contributors, who shared their ideas with us, and responded to our queries with grace. It is a privilege and a pleasure to present their fascinating work. Jes would like to thank Bea for keeping him in one piece, Lynda Mae for her medieval knowledge, and Alexis for the many spirited con- versations at the Fireside Pub (where we own the leather couches). Susan would like to thank Marcel, for never letting it show that he was sick of the whole thing, for the insights, and for the coffee; Katy, Elizabeth, and Maggie, for the patience; Nick Ruddick, for unflagging encouragement and holding the oxygen bottle; and Brian and Bridget and David and Susan and all the rest of the Albu- querque gang. These acknowledgments would not be complete without the folks at Tower of the Hand, The Citadel, and the Wiki of Ice and Fire, whose unfailing and unpaid work has made the impossible task of fact- checking merely improb- able. To David Benioff and D.B. Weiss: thanks for transforming adaptation and bringing our imaginations to life. And to George R.R. Martin himself: thank you. Now write like the wind. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgments vi A Note on Editions ix Introduction: On Knowing Nothing Susan Johnston and Jes Battis 1 Language and Narration The Languages of Ice and Fire David J. Peterson 15 “Sing for your little life”: Story, Discourse and Character Marc Napolitano 35 What Maesters Knew: Narrating Knowing Brian Cowlishaw 57 Histories “Just songs in the end”: Historical Discourses in Shakespeare and Martin Jessica Walker 71 Dividing Lines: Frederick Jackson Turner’s Western Frontier and George R.R. Martin’s Northern Wall Michail Zontos 92 Philosophies “All men must serve”: Religion and Free Will from the Seven to the Faceless Men Ryan Mitchell Wittingslow 113 “Silk ribbons tied around a sword”: Knighthood and the Chivalric Virtues in Westeros Charles H. Hackney 132 vii viii Table of Contents Bodies Cursed Womb, Bulging Thighs and Bald Scalp: George R.R. Martin’s Grotesque Queen Karin Gresham 151 “A thousand bloodstained hands”: The Malleability of Flesh and Identity Beth Kozinsky 170 A Thousand Westerosi Plateaus: Wargs, Wolves and Ways of Being T.A. Leederman 189 Intimacies Sex and the Citadel: Adapting Same Sex Desire from Martin’s Westeros to HBO’s Bedrooms David C. Nel 205 Beyond the Pale? Craster and the Pathological Reproduction of Houses in Westeros D. Marcel DeCoste 225 Adaptations The Hand of the Artist: Fan Art in the Martinverse Andrew Howe 243 “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies”: Transmedia Textuality and the Flows of Adaptation Zoë Shacklock 262 About the Contributors 281 Index 285 A Note on Editions For ease of reference, we have used the U.S. first edition of each novel of A Song of Ice and Fire, as follows (in order of publication), and abbreviated each title as such: Martin, George R.R. A Game of Thrones. New York: Bantam, 1996. GoT ____. A Clash of Kings. New York: Bantam, 1999. CoK ____. A Storm of Swords. New York: Bantam, 2000. SoS ____. A Feast for Crows. New York: Bantam, 2005. FfC ____. A Dance with Dragons. New York: Bantam, 2011. DwD In addition, all references to the novels will be presented as follows: GoT 42 Jon 5: 376 First is the novel, then the chapter number, the name of the character from whose point of view the chapter is written, the count of the chapter from that character’s point of view, then the page number. In the example above, the quote is from page 376 in Chapter 42 of A Game of Thrones, in the fifth chapter nar- rated by Jon. The initial chapter numbers (e.g., GoT 42) are based on the chapter tables from Tower of the Hand: http://towerofthehand.com/books/101/. References to HBO’s Game of Thrones, the television series, are abbreviated Thrones and followed by season number and episode number, then episode title, as follows: Thrones S1: Ep.6, “A Golden Crown.” ix This page intentionally left blank Introduction: On Knowing Nothing Susan Johnston and Jes Battis “You know nothing, Jon Snow”—A Clash of Kings In George R.R. Martin’s universe of ice and fire, the learned men of the Citadel wear great chains of office, to mark them as “maesters”: as scholars, sci- entists, teachers, statesmen. Their ponderous chains are “forge[d]”—as is this book—“with study” and “[t]he different metals are each a different kind of learning” (GoT 42 Jon 5: 376), from history to herbalism, “but two links can’t make a chain… . A chain needs all sorts of metals, and a land needs all sorts of people” (376). This is also, we propose, both the purpose and the practice of this book; we wanted to bind together different kinds of learning and, like the maesters themselves, to serve with them the realm. And like the novices of Old- town’s Citadel, we have discovered in the process that the realm is larger and more various even than we had dreamed of in our philosophies, from the show- firsters who belatedly jumped on board the HBO adaptation in spring of 2013 just in time to reel in horror from the thirteen- year-old Red Wedding, to the undergraduate who has clutched his signed first edition of A Game of Thrones itself ever since the mid- nineties, to the linguists, the Shakespeareans, the psy- chologists who inhabit both Martin’s world and our own. That is the audience, the disparate realm, we hope this book will serve. If we have learned a great deal of the reach of our subject here, though, we have also learned, in view of this reach, humility. This too is as it should be: as Brian Cowlishaw notes in his essay here, “What Maesters Knew: Narrating Knowing,” the potent learning of the maesters is, in the end, barren. What they “know” doesn’t matter much, and what they should know, they don’t. This is so despite the important fact that they are precisely the people designated in their world to know things. Thus they are singularly incompetent at what they do. After all, farmers know farming, blacksmiths smithing; septons know theology, soldiers warfare. Maesters fail spectacularly at their culturally designated specialty. Maesters, you know nothing [Cowlishaw]. 1 2 Introduction (Johnston and Battis) Cowlishaw, importantly, reads the maesters’ ignorance in terms of the interplay of power and knowledge, and here his work intersects with that of Marc Napoli- tano, whose “‘Sing for your little life’: Story, Discourse and Character” remarks upon the ways that the point- of-view characters control the presentation of the story but are nonetheless rendered powerless in the face of that story’s progres- sion. They appear to have power because they seem to control what readers know, but their power is limited to discourse; they do not control their own stories. Yet, as Napolitano shows, discursive power is vital to the meaning of A Song of Ice and Fire. Outside of the Citadel, where George R.R. Martin’s universe of ice and fire stretches for thousands of years back in time and thousands of miles to hint at its own unexplored margins, the maesters are too often reduced to the stature of the adolescent Jon Snow, on the wrong side of the Wall, the wrong side of knowledge, perhaps even the wrong side of history. Like Jon, like the maesters, we have learned enough to know that after all, we know nothing. This is so, of course, in part because of the sheer complexity of Martin’s world: with well over a thousand named characters, hundreds of place names, and a fictive history stretching back into the mists of millennium- old legends, the problem of fact- checking alone becomes nearly as insurmountable as the Wall itself.