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

by James Lowder

  Reading well-crafted dialogue is like eavesdropping. A few telling physical details and small actions are enough to let the reader create a full, complex, and satisfying experience of the scene; Viserys’s lilac eyes as he sniffs disdainfully at Dany’s gift of Dothraki clothing and Eddard testing Needle’s edge with his thumb during his talk with Arya happen within the context of longer conversations, and not every exchange includes details like these. Graphic novels, by contrast, require a full visual component, and the natural fit for two people having a conversation—a long series of pictures of the person or people talking—gets dull fast. Dialogue that crackles with life and vitality in prose gets tedious when it’s rendered as page after page filled with pictures of talking heads and staggered word balloons. In a project that relies on dialogue—and most novels rely on dialogue—reframing the action so that more of the information is given to the reader through images is a challenge, and it encourages the adaptor to reimagine the scenes in ways that simplify and condense conversations, while amplifying action and the images that take the place of physical description in prose, even when that means doing some violence to the story.

  Narrative voice is also a serious and related structural issue in the translation between media. It also brings in the collaborative nature of the adaptation. In prose, the narrator is an additional and often unnamed character with an idiosyncratic voice and manner that sets the essential tone of the story and provides information to the reader. In transitioning to comic books, those two functions are split.

  The basic feel of a comic book isn’t provided by the narrator’s imagined speaking voice but by the artist’s visual style. Whether we are to take a story—or even a scene within a story—seriously or lightly is signaled by the way in which it is drawn and the palate used in coloring it. This is very similar to the way that word choices and vocal rhythms of a narrator’s voice cue a reader how to interpret action in prose. Imagine, for example, Winterfell drawn as a Disney princess cartoon as opposed to the style of Ted Naismith. The way that the artist approaches the image is the mood of the piece and exists with its own set of constraints, including the skill and interests of the artist and the time pressure of production. While the scripter can specify that an image be more stylized or realistic and describe the effect that an image or scene should convey, the actual drawing has to rely on the skill and, more importantly, the judgment of the artist. The images, however carefully conceived by the person making the script, are the necessary subject of the person drawing the lines, and the choices made at the drawing table are as important as the ones made at the keyboard. The role of the narrative voice as a cue on how to approach the project is actually taken out of the writer’s hands. Even if the script gives lengthy, specific instructions to the artist in the best Alan Moore tradition, the artist will still interpret it and make decisions that sometimes differ from the script. But what the visual style can’t do that a prose narrator can is provide abstract information, like exposition.

  Exposition is always a problem. How well an author manages exposition is one good litmus test for quality. By having an engaging narrative voice, a text can move away from the literal and concrete action in a scene—the cinematic aspects of the story—to give background information, history, or philosophical and thematic grounding. A Game of Thrones in particular features passages that cover the history of Westeros and the complex backstories of the characters engaged in conversation in the scenes. When Eddard and Robert descend to the crypt below Winterfell to visit Lyanna’s grave, for example, there’s a wealth of information in the text about how the three of them were related, how Brandon Stark and the Tullys fit in, and the history of the rebellion that put Robert on the throne. There is no graceful way to take that abstract information and present it in a purely visual form. The options are to reprint the prose exposition (either entirely or in summary) with some limited illustration, omit the exposition and lose the depth and background, or take the information that was presented in exposition and shoehorn it into the action of the story, often using dialogue, with all the attendant trouble that creates.

  A third strictly technical issue is the pacing of the plot. A Game of Thrones is built in chapters of varying lengths with the dramatic high points and resting places coming where they fit organically within those units, both individually and combined as a full novel. Recasting the same tale as a series of four graphic novels requires that the dramatic high points fall evenly and the quarter, half, three-quarter, and end marks even to the specific page. Furthermore, since each of the graphic novels is a concatenation of six comic book issues, lesser concluding moments come in at regular and prescribed intervals, which may or may not coincide with the source material.

  We had some freedom in shaping the project at the beginning, when the structure was being set. The decisions made at that juncture—how many issues of the comic book would there be, how many pages in each issue, how many issues would be gathered into each graphic novel, how many graphic novels would there be—affected every subsequent decision. A Game of Thrones could be condensed and simplified down viciously by omitting subplots, characters, and scenes, rewriting characters’ relationships and motivations. It could also be expanded out into an epic to rival the original Akira, with the art being given more territory to expand and the more visual scenes playing out over the course of pages rather than panels. Either approach could be good, but they couldn’t be equivalent, and how each of the other decisions played out would be impacted by the shape of the scaffold erected in those early meetings.

  So with those specific issues as a kind of sampler, we can come back again to the central question: when adapting from prose to sequential art, what am I trying to preserve and what am I willing to sacrifice?

  It would be great if all the issues militated for one answer, but in practice, any one concern can find another that seems to oppose it. If I remain faithful to the original story, I face the problem of how to preserve the exposition, the dialogue, and the age of the younger characters. If I let the original story fall by the wayside and reimagine Westeros—adding new characters and plotlines or recreating ones that already exist—I have to confront the unfinished nature of the original and the expectations from the reader based on the novel and the other adaptations.

  The first extreme, and the one that is in some ways the most tempting, is to preserve not the story itself, but the sense of wonder and grandeur and scope that comes from reading A Game of Thrones for the first time. A Song of Ice and Fire has been described as an epic retelling of the War of the Roses without the burden of history. Would it really be a violation of the spirit, then, for the graphic novel version to be a retelling of A Game of Thrones without the burden of the novel? If we rebooted Westeros, took the names and general plot, but changed the details and their echoes, and let the story as told in the graphic novels become its own tale, it would also participate in a longstanding tradition inside comics. How many versions of the Batman story have been told without doing violence to the underlying creation of Bob Kane?

  The other extreme approach would be to remain perfectly faithful to the original text. One editor called this the “Classics Illustrated” approach. Where there are stretches of exposition or dialogue that didn’t fit gracefully into a visual composition, put in pages of the original text, perhaps illuminated like a medieval manuscript. Risk legal action with the underage sexuality, or else replace the images with the original text and leave the rest to the audience’s imagination. In this version, the graphic novels become less of an independent project and more of a special edition of the original book. The problem of not knowing what happens in the final, unwritten volumes of the series is solved by including everything, no matter how apparently insignificant.

  In practice, the course we’ll take will rest between the two options, but nearer—and I think significantly nearer—to one than the other. Charting our best course depends on what A Game of Thrones in particular and A Song of Ice and Fire in the
larger scheme is.

  And we don’t know that yet.

  For me, the single most important fact about A Song of Ice and Fire is that it will end. Daenerys Targaryen will have a last scene and a last word. Because of my participation in this project, I know the fate of several major characters, and have a good idea of the final plot arc. Even so, the details of where the many, many characters end—where, in fact, Westeros itself ends—aren’t all available to me. They may not even be available to George.

  My experience writing my own novels suggests that even at this late stage in the project, the best writers are in an ongoing process of discovery. Even with the last scenes firmly in mind, the process of reaching that place is full of surprises. Some of the ideas and intentions for The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring will change in the telling of the tale, because that is the inevitable process of creation. Especially as we near the end, the events at the beginning will take on new significance. Prophecies will unfold in ways that may be as surprising to the author as they are to the reader. Things that are foreshadowed will come to be, or else they won’t. Until the ending comes, recreating Westeros—adding new characters, remaking old ones, taking action from perspectives different from those already in the books—isn’t an act of translation or adaptation. It’s just making things up.

  It’s possible that once the whole project is complete, a faithful adaptation could be done at some greater level of abstraction. The story of Tyrion Lannister could be rewritten in a way that serves the same overall function in this different medium. The effect of Viserys’s or Drogo’s deaths on Daenerys could be reached in some other way that was still true to the character that she is presently still in the process of becoming. Until the tale is told through to its ending, those deeper levels are still unavailable for judgment or consideration. Recreating Westeros as George intends it to be may not always be impossible, but it is at the moment.

  I remember reading an essay about the art of copying paintings, especially as it is practiced in China. The epitome of that art, the writer argued, was the invisibility of the copier. Ideally, the reproduction and the original should be indistinguishable. I’ve thought about that aesthetic often in the course of adapting A Game of Thrones. In most of my professional career, my job has been to create and present my own vision as clearly and powerfully as I could. I like to think that my own novels carry my vision to readers in ways that are idiosyncratic to me. I imagine myself as the painter of some original work. In adapting, I become a copier.

  The constraints on how I can do it are real. I have chosen to age Daenerys up to match our legal standards, even though it means telling the story of an immature, controlled, and sheltered young woman rather than a powerful, exploited, and complex child. I have summarized conversations and removed exposition that worked very well in the book because I thought it wouldn’t work in the new format. I’ve reordered some chapters and actions to better fit the page counts of the comic books and the collected graphic novels. But the guiding principle is always—and necessarily—that the reader of this new work see Tommy Patterson’s art and George R.R. Martin’s story. My job is to be invisible. If no one sees or considers the decisions I’ve made and instead they fall into George’s story and Tommy’s art, I will have succeeded.

  DANIEL ABRAHAM is the nationally bestselling author of thirteen novels and thirty short stories, including the critically acclaimed Long Price Quartet and Hunter’s Run (with George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois). He also writes as M.L.N. Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S.A. Corey. He has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, and been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. His current projects include the epic fantasy series The Dagger and the Coin, the space opera series The Expanse, and the ongoing urban fantasy series The Black Sun’s Daughter. He also writes occasional nonfiction columns for io9, SF Signal, and Clarkesworld.

  ADAM WHITEHEAD

  AN UNRELIABLE WORLD

  History and Timekeeping in Westeros

  IN ANY SETTING WITH a complex history and mythology, it is common for the author to reveal and explore the backstory at the same time the main storyline is driving forward. This is true in A Song of Ice and Fire, where even as the central plot unfolds and we witness Westeros’s descent into the chaos of the War of the Five Kings and Daenerys Targaryen’s tribulations in the distant east, we learn more about the events that came before. We learn about the reign of the Mad King, the Targaryen conquest, the flight of the Rhoynar to Dorne, and the raising of the Wall to defend against the Others. Even as the story moves ahead, it also moves back, giving more depth and resonance to current events by showing how they were set up decades, centuries, or even millennia earlier. But we also learn that the accounts of time and history in the books are not to be trusted, with doubts raised over when events happened, or even if they ever happened at all.

  Tracking the Years

  One of the defining characteristics of the setting for A Song of Ice and Fire is that the seasons last for years at a time and are unpredictable: a decade-long winter can be followed by a substantially shorter summer. As well as introducing logistical difficulties for the characters of Westeros, it also causes problems for the tracking of history and time. In A Song of Ice and Fire, characters live in a world whose very history is uncertain and ill-defined, where myth and legend are hopelessly and inextricably entwined with accounts of real events. The predominant feature of Westerosi history is vagueness.

  Early in A Game of Thrones we are shown the Wall, a vast edifice that stretches across the northern border of the Seven Kingdoms and holds back the threats that lurk beyond, both supernatural and mundane. We are told that the Wall is eight thousand years old. This is a vast number, enough to give even hardened fantasy readers pause. In reality, eight thousand years is almost twice the age of the Great Pyramids, and even with modern archaeological techniques our knowledge of our own comparable historical period (c. 6000 B.C.) is sketchy at best. In a fantasy world lacking such technology, where frequent long winters threaten to destroy civilization entirely, the notion that these people would have any idea what happened eight thousand years earlier seems fanciful.

  Some critics have complained about the vast spans of time referenced in the series, calling them “unrealistic.” This criticism is answered—or at least addressed—in the text itself. The spans of time are vast, but they may also be illusory. Over the centuries, tradition and myth petrify into accepted fact; the truth may be very different, in this case, involving much shorter spans of time. When Jon Snow sends Samwell Tarly to research the history of the Night’s Watch in an effort to learn more about the Others, a confused Samwell reports that the number of Lord Commanders to which he can find references is far smaller than less formal histories suggest.

  “The oldest histories we have were written after the Andals came to Westeros. The First Men only left us runes on rocks, so everything we think we know about the Age of Heroes and the Dawn Age and the Long Night comes from accounts set down by septons thousands of years later [. . .]. Those old histories are full of kings who reigned for hundreds of years, and knights riding around a thousand years before there were knights. You know the tales [. . .] we say that you’re the nine hundred and ninety-eighth Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, but the oldest list I’ve found shows six hundred seventy-four commanders.” (A Feast for Crows)

  This is an important statement, confirming the notion that the history of the Seven Kingdoms is based on myths and legends much more than on hard historical facts. Before the Andals came to Westeros, the First Men used runes chiselled into rocks and oral storytelling traditions to pass information on from one generation to the next. There may be some truth in these stories—some of Homer’s account of the Trojan War in The Iliad, drawn from older, oral traditions in our world, has been backed up by archaeological findings at the real site of Troy, for example—but there is also a lot of hyperbole and fantastical invention. Even the Andals’ historical r
ecords are inexact and prone to creative flourishes and outright errors, especially since even their arrival in Westeros is impossible to date reliably. “[N]o one knows when the Andals crossed the narrow sea,” Hoster Blackwood explains in A Dance with Dragons. “The True History says four thousand years have passed since then, but some maesters claim that it was only two. Past a certain point, all the dates grow hazy and confused, and the clarity of history becomes the fog of legend.”

  It’s worth noting that the appendix to A Game of Thrones actually suggests six thousand years have passed since the Andals’ arrival, whilst Hoster Blackwood’s remarks to Jaime in A Dance with Dragons suggest it could be as little as two thousand. An “error margin” of some four thousand years leaves significant room for doubts, mistakes, and miscalculations.

  Seasons of Uncertainty

  The enormous difficulty in calculating history in Westeros is down to the lack of regular seasons. When one season might last for a few months and the next for years, records of harvests, plantings, summer festivals, and so on become highly unreliable. Even the maesters of the Citadel, with their exacting measurements and timelines, find themselves arguing over dates and details. Neither has it been revealed in the books how long the maesters or the Citadel have been around. They are just one more example of the fog of uncertainty shrouding the entire backstory of Westeros—one more example of how history itself is an unreliable narrator in the series.

  The unpredictable seasons also answer another common criticism about technological stasis in Westeros. The kingdoms in A Song of Ice and Fire have seen historical epochs pass much as in real history, just at a slower rate. We are told that the First Men brought bronze to Westeros some twelve thousand years before the start of the books. By tradition—which, as we have already seen, may not be entirely reliable—the Andals followed with iron and horse-riding some six thousand years later. In reality, the Bronze Age in Europe lasted from roughly 3200 to 600 B.C., a period of twenty-six centuries. The following Iron Age overlapped it, extending from 1200 A.D. to 400 B.C., a period of sixteen centuries. If we take into account the slowing of technological progress due to the long winters, effectively mini ice ages occurring up to several times a century, the corresponding technological ages in Westeros only last two to three times longer than their real-life counterparts.