The realm of fantasy is a peculiarly polarizing place in literature. It seems that, to paraphrase Kyle from South Park, either it’s all okay, or none of it’s okay: people devote their entire reading schedules to vast fantastic tomes, or they dismiss the genre entirely. To read “a bit” of fantasy alongside, say, some “literary” fiction, some contemporary poetry, and some classics, seems rather freakish. Similarly, works in this genre either achieve global renown or utter esotericism. They become implanted in the popular imagination like The Lord of the Rings, or become the preserve of fantasy-heads—  it’s very rare that people have heard of fantasy authors they haven’t read, unlike, say, Jane Austen, or Jonathan Franzen, or John Ashbery.

This is a strange situation, because a bit of digging across different languages reveals that fantasy literature, if we’re to be as generic as publishers and libraries, is produced in especial quality and quantity in the English language— there isn’t a similar tradition in French, or Russian, for example. There are a number of reasons, which I’m sure all play a part. There’s the nerd/geek stigma attached to fantasy: non-existent Elves and Orcs in the Tolkeinian tradition and wizards casting spells contrary the our laws of physics. There’s the sheer vastness of the fantasy universes: you can sit down and read a long Dickens novel, then put it to one side, reflect upon it, and move on. You sit down to read Peter Jordan’s The Eye of the World, well, that’s novel one of a fourteen novel sequence that the author did not live to complete.

With the cinematic success of The Lord of the Rings (which is, without adjusting for inflation, the highest-grossing movie series of all time at just under $3 billion) and The Hobbit (which, with two of the planned trilogy released, has grossed nearly $2 billion), and the televisual success of Game of Thrones (the third season had an average gross audience of 14.2 million, making it the most viewed HBO season save The Sopranos season 5, and the fourth season looks set to break that record), perhaps fantasy has constructed a large enough siege tower to break the fortifications of popular imagination. A peek at any major social network following the premiere of a new Game of Thrones episode would suggest as much.

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I’m one of the freaks who’s read a bit of fantasy. And I took a circuitous route toward reading it, watching but not really getting The Lord of the Rings movies, studying verse at university and, truth be told, not really grasping the central appeal of the novel. After hearing a couple of my friends chat for two hours straight about Game of Thrones, I did as any sane person does in the twenty-first century: I did what the TV told me to do, and after watching the first season of the show, I started on the novels the series was adapted from, A Song of Ice and Fire, whose first volume is called A Game of Thrones. Note the indefinite article— all of the novels follow the pattern of A (singular noun) of (plural noun), maintaining a careful ambiguity, and for a stickler like me it was kind of annoying to see the article chopped off for the TV adaptation, though it probably benefitted from the blunt force of “GAME OF THRONES”.

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Fair warning: I’ll be including mild spoilers from this point on. They’ll mostly relate to the first season of the show/the first book, but if you haven’t checked either out yet, do so and come back.

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George R. R. Martin mentions history and historiography frequently in interviews, and is evidently a potent and imaginative reader of it. He weaves together strands from sources that might seem too various to form a cohesive whole, but has the writerly authority to pull it off: the universe of A Song of Ice and Fire. It’s one of the most vividly imagined and imaginable worlds that I’ve encountered in literature. This is because, I think, it strikes such an acute balance between groundedness in reality and flights of fantastical fancy.

The most important historical influences in the early novels, structurally speaking, are the medieval European civil wars between different factions of nobles vying for their respective crown. These include the English Wars of the Roses, and the French battles between the Capets and the Plantagenets. Midway through the first novel, the reigning king Robert Baratheon is killed in a hunting accident, and this precipitates the War of the Five Kings: five different claimants to the throne look to seize it, resulting in all-out civil war, not dissimilar to the protracted clashes between the Houses of Lancaster and York in fifteenth century England.

Martin’s noble houses are carefully drawn. There are the Starks, through whom we see much of the action: serious, sensible and Northern, they adhere firmly to a code of honor, often to their extreme disadvantage. The Lannisters, of whom Robert Baratheon’s wife Cersei is one, are gold rich, devious, and desperate for power by any means necessary. The Targaryens, whom Robert deposed from the throne, are otherworldly and alluring: hailing not from Westeros but from the Asia-like Essos, they once conquered all before them with magic and dragons, but the magic and dragons are all gone (“or are they?” becomes a pretty important question, answered resoundingly, in the first few novels) and were all but wiped out by Robert after he’d seized the throne. Other families come further into shot as the series progresses: there are the Tyrells, not quite as rich as the Lannisters (their money comes from agriculture) but equally devious, and the Freys, whose many unmarried daughters provide the hinge of one of the books’, and shows’, most infamous incidents.


In an interview with John Hodgman, Martin gives us a peek at the way writers of good fantasy work:

    That's the general process for doing fantasy, is you have to root it in reality. Then     you play with it a little; then you add the imaginative element, then you make it     largely bigger. Like the Wall in my books, of course, was inspired by Hadrian's Wall,     which I visited on my first trip to the United Kingdom back in the early 80s.

He downplays the writer’s craft: I’m sure there’s a lot more to creating a fantasy universe than playing with reality a little, and that in fact it involves a very delicate balancing act between the real and the unreal, and getting this balance right in an original way is one of the hallmarks of A Song of Ice and Fire. In the first novel, the influence of magic and dragons is negligible. They’re not off the table entirely, but the characters in the novel don’t believe in them— they existed once upon a time, but have now become extinct. We start off, then, with the same skepticism about magic as the characters inside the fictional universe: a clever, and effective, authorial strategy.

The world (if it can be called that) of A Song of Ice and Fire has been highly praised, too. Each book comes with maps of the north and south of Westeros (Essos remains tantalisingly uncharted), and selected other locations:

The TV adaptation of the novels, commissioned by HBO and created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss (Martin is on board as an executive producer, and occasional episode writer), is largely excellent. It’s what enabled me to get over my prejudice against fantasy: the casting and acting is very well executed, with Peter Dinklage, who plays Tyrion Lannister and heads up the cast from Season 2, coming in for particular critical acclaim. The world of the books is vividly recreated, with ornate costumes, and locations as far afield as Northern Ireland and Dubrovnik. Minor characters and plotlines from the books have been conflated or eliminated, which seems fair: the books have turned into sprawling behemoths, and the TV show must cater for a slightly more casual audience. Most importantly, it does some kind of justice to Martin’s dramatic flair, his knack for surprises, and his propensity for the epic.

As the TV series rolls on, and the novels get longer and longer (both in terms of gestation time, and actual length), some fans, looking at Martin’s frequent convention appearance and numerous other projects, have become impatient for him to finish up the series. Presumably they’re unfamiliar with the process of artistic creation, which is shame— I’m just happy to have my mind wallow in the power struggles of Westeros a little while longer.