A Medievalist Watches Martin: Ten Years Late
I’ve been trying to figure out how I wanted to start off content on Medium, because there are so many things I want to write about and share. But somehow The First Post feels like it carries a lot of weight or sets the tone or . . . name any other excuse to avoid taking the first step.
In my fretting and brainstorming, I got access to HBO Max and realized that I could finally watch HBO’s Game of Thrones series. You’ve probably heard of it. It was that flashy pop culture hit show that took over Twitter for eight seasons, until it ended in a big ball of fan rage and dragon fire in May 2019. You know the one? I thought so. Anyway, I figure that if I am watching all 8 seasons of Game of Thrones, that I can write a series of Medium posts responding to each episode. It will give me a chance to opine on American pop culture, talk about popular medievalism, say many things about race and gender, hold forth on disability theory, explore representations of pain/grief/trauma, and also talk about the Middle Ages themselves. It is the perfect intersection for my interests, if I’m being honest.
This watch through will be my first time watching it. Since I didn’t have HBO, I didn’t really, technically watch it. I watched the first two episodes with a friend when I was visiting her, and then I checked the first season out of the library on DVD. But I was studying for PhD exams and writing a dissertation and raising small children and trying to keep up with Phase 3 the MCU (I think it was that — the MCU), so it sat on my shelf until the library started to charge me late fees and I never made it past the first episode. I really wanted to watch it, but the moment was always wrong for me.
Instead of watching the show, I worked my way very slowly through George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire book series, which, as I’m sure you know, Game of Thrones is based on. I managed to complete the entire (incomplete) series, even though A Feast for Crows was a slog and A Dance with Dragons infuriatingly introduced far too many new point of view characters. And (spoiler alert) heirs. While Martin has famously described his writing style as more gardener than architect (like in this 2011 interview with The Guardian), the last two books show less gardening, to me, and more letting the flora grow unattended and enjoying the unmitigated wildness. When I encounter bloated books late in a pop fiction series, I often wonder about the editors’ role in guiding the author. Where’s the balance between giving the author autonomy over their own work and telling them that readers will not respond well to this bloated back end? Famous examples of this tendency toward late-series bloat include Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and Stephenie Meyers Twilight saga. And Martin is in the generation of authors and publishing at the height of popular serial fantasy. For some reason, I find the plot structure and pacing of A Dance with Dragons a particularly egregious example of this pop fiction habit. I can’t say I wasn’t warned, because I was, by all of my friends who read it ahead of me.
Despite my criticism and the resultant grudge-reading of books 4 and 5, there are things that I enjoyed about the Martin’s books. I tried doing a private “live-tweeting” (but on Facebook) for friends who read the books or followed the series, but I’m incredibly private and sometimes forgot to post. In my mostly private reading, I found that I had strong feelings about different characters and their situations, which is honestly what popular entertainment is supposed to do. Over the course of HBO’s series run, I saw that many, many people on Twitter felt the same way about the characters and show. This is all part and parcel of pop culture in our current Internet Era / Information Age.
Before I continue, I know that many medievalists have engaged with this show. In fact, the explosive popularity of Game of Thrones has provided a bridge for medievalists to discuss the Middle Ages with a popular audience. Just take a look at The Public Medievalist’s Game of Thrones tags to see some of the ways medievalists have used the show to discuss medievalist tropes in modern entertainment, medievalism and racism, the idea that the Middle Ages were dirty, and medieval warfare. David Weinczok used the popularity of the series as a lens for his book on Scottish history, The North Remembers. Carolyne Larrington, an expert on Scandinavian and Arthurian literature, has written two books and multiple articles on medievalism in Game of Thrones. And many medievalists and early modernists have debated exactly how medieval the world of Game of Thrones really is, for example Benjamin Breen has argued that the world itself is actually very early modern rather than medieval.
I know that my writing a series on the show isn’t going to break new ground for anyone but me. However, I am very interested in the intersection between pop culture and medieval studies that grew up around this show. I think it will be fun and interesting for me to use my first watch to practice translating the sometimes arcane, often removed world of scholarly Medieval Studies for a popular audience.
My current plan is to watch one episode per week and post my response on Fridays. I hope you’ll join me for my journey through Game of Thrones, whether it’s your first time through as well or whether you are still recovering from the disappointment of the final season!
