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

  Perception, Power, and Religion

  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

  A SWORD WITHOUT A HILT

  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.

  Cold Open

  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.

  Stories and Superstitions

  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 st
one 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.

  Given the aura of unreliability surrounding the subject, it should not be a surprise, then, to learn that the maesters, who are some of the most educated and learned characters in Westeros, have a conflicted relationship with magic. They acknowledge it existed at one time, but few look upon it favorably. Not many study magic enough to gain a Valyrian steel link in their chain, and those who do are often regarded as strange. Still others, like House Stark’s Maester Luwin, seem almost jaded and bitter to find no substance in magic.

  There is some indication that the maesters, or a conspiratorial subset of them, may have worked to suppress magic in the world. It is unclear how the last dragons died, and while the first legends we learn say Aegon III poisoned them, Archmaester Marwyn tells Sam Tarly a different tale: “‘Who do you think killed all the dragons the last time around? Gallant dragonslayers with swords?’ He spat. ‘The world the Citadel is building has no place in it for sorcery or prophecy or glass candles, much less for dragons’” (A Feast for Crows). It’s not hard to guess that most maesters would prefer a knowable world of science and logic to a capricious one of magic and glamor. And, of course, magic would certainly be a challenge to the maesters’ established positions of power.

  All acolytes of the Citadel must stand a final night’s vigil in a pitch-black vault before donning their maester’s chains. They are permitted no torch or lamp but only a candle of obsidian; they must spend the night in darkness unless they find some way to light the candle. Armen explains, “Even after he has said his vow and donned his chain and gone forth to serve, a maester will think back on the darkness of his vigil and remember how nothing that he did could make the candle burn . . . for even with knowledge, some things are not possible” (A Feast for Crows).

  But this is not the lesson all take from the vigil. While most of the candles remain unlit, the acolytes holding them left brooding in the dark, there are others, like the one Leo Tyrell describes seeing in Marwyn’s chambers in the Citadel, that burns with an unearthly flame. Slowly, despite the weight of history and the maesters’ hope that magic is dead, the fantastic intrudes upon the mundane in ways that even the most logic-bound cannot deny.

  In still other parts of the world, magic holds an even greater sway.

  Beyond the Wall

  Stories of magic and potent superstition are especially prevalent, and far more accepted, in the desolate lands north of the Wall. This is where we first see tangible magic in the story, both in the book’s opening pages and later, once Jon Snow takes the black. When two brothers of the Night’s Watch, Jafer Flowers and Othor, return as undead wights to kill their sworn brothers, it takes Snow and his direwolf, Ghost, to save Lord Commander Mormont—an important scene because it is another early hint that magic is bubbling up at the edges of the world. Jon has seen the Wall and may understand logically that such an architectural marvel could only have been built with magic, but that’s ancient history. Facing down a dead man that struggles long after his arm has been severed makes magic, and the supernatural, real.

  Wildlings in the north speak freely of giants, wargs, greenseers, and the old gods. Wargs—or skinchangers—are more understood here, as we see in the wildlings Orell and Varamyr Sixskins. So, too, is knowledge of the Others. Mance Rayder, the King-Beyond-the-Wall, seeks a safe haven for his people from their predations, while the Night’s Watch suspects the wildling Craster of sacrificing his male offspring to the cold to keep the Others at bay.

  The reasons for the power of magic north of the Wall remain unclear, at least in the story so far. Perhaps the Wall does not quench magic in the far north, or more is retained in the weir-woods of the children of the forest; another theory is that the dark magic of the Others is not as dependent on dragons as the magic practiced south of the Wall. Whatever the cause, though, there’s no denying that magic holds a greater sway over the lands beyond the Wall.

  Essos and the East

  Stories of magic are also much more prominent in the exotic east, in Essos, than they are in Westeros. But it takes one who is part of both lands, yet also not fully of either, to unlock magic across the world. Beautiful Daenerys Targaryen, of the ancient and powerful lineage of Valyria, clings to the stories of her family’s grandeur and their magic-rich history. Her ancestral homeland, long since destroyed, is closer geographically and culturally to Essos than to Westeros, and it is said that the Targaryens have features that reflect their links to the magical, what they refer to as “blood of the dragon.” Dany never flinches from heat, and she dreams of dragons taking wing and breathing fire. When her patron, Illyrio Mopatis, gives her three petrified dragon eggs as a wedding gift, we can be certain something will hatch from them, either figuratively or literally. As the playwright Anton Chekhov wrote, “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” So, too, must Martin utilize the dragon eggs. To leave them unexplored, unfired, would be to play a cruel trick upon the reader.

  In the buildup to that revelation, Martin introduces us, and Dany, to Mirri Maz Duur, a Lhazareen victim of the rape and pillage of her village, who only survives due to Daenerys’s direct intervention. Mirri describes herself as a godswife to the Great Shepherd, and says she learned magic in Asshai-by-the-Shadow to the far east, and healing arts from a maester of the west. The Dothraki have another word for her: maegi, a woman who, according to their tales, “lay with demons and practiced the blackest of sorceries, a vile thing, evil and soulless, who came to men in the dark of night and sucked life and strength from their bodies” (A Game of Thrones).

  Dany turns to Mirri Maz Duur in desperation when Khal Drogo falls to fever and a festering wound. She believes Mirri can save him with her magic. But the reader cannot be sure. Martin’s description of Mirri’s actions as she begins the ritual to save Drogo grants them an air of mystery: “Mirri Maz Duur chanted words in a tongue that Dany did not know, and a knife appeared in her hand [. . .]. It looked old; hammered red bronze, leaf-shaped, its blade covered with ancient glyphs” (A Game of Thrones). Something important is clearly happening here. “Once I begin to sing,” the woman notes, “no one must enter this tent. My song will wake powers old and dark. The dead will dance here this night. No living man must look on them” (A Game of Thrones).

  Mirri begins the spell with a splash of blood from Drogo’s horse and essentially ends it with the blood of childbirth as Dany goes into labor. However, Dany’s son is stillborn and monstrous. Drogo survives, but he is only preserved at death’s door, leaving him a husk of the man he once was.

  Is Mirri’s magic real? Dany believes that it is—and that Mirri used it to take revenge on Drogo and his khalasar for the pain they had inflicted upon her and her village. Certainly something horrific happened to Dany’s child, born dead, reptilian, filled with maggots, and described as “dead for years.” Following Mirri’s equation of blood and sacrifice, Dany builds up Drogo’s funeral pyre with his treasure, his body, the dragon eggs, and the bound
Mirri Maz Duur, sentencing the woman to a fiery death. Then she, too, walks into the flames. By however such things are measured, the sacrifice is deemed a high enough price to pay to awaken the dragon eggs.

  And whatever doubts Dany—and the reader—might have had about the reality of magic are swept away.

  By the time A Clash of Kings begins, other fantastical things we’ve only heard about through legends begin to appear: wargs, greenseers, pyromancers. There can now be no doubt: this is a world in which magic is real, if not commonplace. The birth of Dany’s dragons may seem to herald its arrival, but magic has been there all along, if only diminished or slumbering.

  The Slow Boil

  In an April 2011 interview with the New York Times, Martin described the process of adding magic to his story as akin to turning up the fire underneath a crab in a pot: “You put a crab in hot water, he’ll jump right out. But you put him in cold water and you gradually heat it up—the hot water is fantasy and magic, and the crab is the audience.”

  From the beginning of A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin broadcasts the existence of magic in the world. By opening with the Others, he shows us that there are supernatural monsters that prowl the night, forcing us to ask ourselves: What else might be out there? But by keeping the fantastic rare and mysterious, he also allows us to be surprised when we encounter it—and allows the reader who does not usually enjoy fantasy to become swept up in the story.

  This slow boil, this insistence on mystery, does more than that, however. It lends the magic a greater sense of importance and power. It also keeps both characters and readers guessing as to the true nature of magic in the world. The aura of mystery heightens the sense that magic is dangerous, though in this case, that’s not just an illusion. Magic comes at a high price. It is dangerous, often incredibly so.