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George R. R. Martin’s typical fantasy trope

George R. R. Martin has done something new in fantasy. He has created a world in shades of gray. This is in contrast to the modern template of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, where what is good and what is evil were as clear and distinct as black and white. In addition, A Song of Ice and Fire transcended fantasy’s traditional appeal to adolescent males. This latter tendency is pretty evident in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, which was simply not moving beyond its juvenile origins by book seven or eight, when I gave up (I was moving beyond my juvenile origins by that point). It isn’t as if the Jordan-style, geared toward adolescent male virgins, can’t be done well. I’d argue that Brandon Sanderson pulls this off very competently.

One of the aspects of A Song of Ice and Fire in the books is there isn’t a Dark Lord who is the literal personification of evil. No Sauron. Even the primary antagonists become less dark with deeper exploration, and their motivations are often complex, and comprehensible in their own way.

But there is a major exception to this: Ramsay Snow and House Bolton. The Boltons are the great rivals of the Starks in the North, and before they were vassals they were kings. And they are evil in a straightforward sense without nuance. One stupid “fan theory” (these are the television show watchers) even posited that Roose Bolton was an immortal vampire.

Though Martin is careful to suggest that people should not take the antiquity of the dynasties in A Song of Ice and Fire literally, it is clear that the Bolton’s are not parvenus. Their lineage is old, and it has persisted. And yet the Boltons which are highlighted are basically without any redeeming qualities over their history. Ramsay Snow is basically the protagonist of a snuff film come alive.

When it comes to mining history perhaps the best analog to the Boltons were the Assyrians. Like the Boltons they flayed their enemies alive. The Assyrians also famously were totally destroyed by their enemies because of the ill-will their cruelty in conquest generated. Martin is a student of history, and there is no way that a lineage of such unmitigated evil could persist down the centuries. The Boltons exist as witness to the long tradition of fantasy antagonists which readers love to hate.

18 thoughts on “George R. R. Martin’s typical fantasy trope

  1. Can a unmitigated evil and cruel lineage generate a stable equilibrium necessary for a long-standing dynasty?

  2. Ramsay is just too mad and evil, even for Roose’s taste. But Roose seems to be a kind of “good king”, one that asks more than demands something to his subjects and a little bit concerned about commom people’s needs.

  3. Agreed with Lê. Roose came from a line where the flayed man was remembered, but Roose wasn’t one to flay a man himself unless he had to. Think Edward II.

    Ramsay was also a “natural son” (fitz, as Robin Hobb would have it), not the heir; and it’s heavily hinted in the book and the film that Roose DID have a legitimate heir and that Ramsey murdered him. So maybe Ramsay was atypical.

    And even if the Bolton line had some sadists, lots of European lineages had mad kings and bad kings, and were able to move past them. Here, think Ivan IV; succeeded by Fyodor, his son, uneventfully.

  4. I always found Roose Bolton likeable. He was also an ally of the good leader for a large portion of the series, which is an unusual, not unprecedented but unusual, trait for a dark lord.

    Ramsay Snow strikes me as a believable outlier on your bell curve of human cruelty. I’m sure there were quite a few very unpleasant people fighting in medieval wars. Logically, you’d expect a few to be truly horrifying. (Note that Ramsay is an only a little worse person than Gregor Clegane is).

  5. and it’s heavily hinted in the book and the film that Roose DID have a legitimate heir and that Ramsey murdered him. So maybe Ramsay was atypical.

    in world of ice and fire it is made explicit.

    as for “good guy” roose: ramsay was conceived when roose killed his mother’s husband and raped her (he was a miller or something). when the mother brought roose’s bastard to the castle, roose was about to kill the infant until he saw ramsay’s eyes and saw they were his own. roose had his ethical qualms of kinslaying so he let the infant live.

  6. It’s funny you say that about Roose. I thought he was the most interesting minor character in the series. He wasn’t a psychopath, not like Ramsay. I get the impression that the earlier Boltons, the ones that brought the family into prominence, were also much more like Roose than like Ramsay. I loved the idea of the ultimate costly signal: the family banner of the flayed man. I have a feeling that Boltons didn’t historically do too many actual flayings, and never arbitrarily. But in a region where incentives to free-ride were often stronger than incentives to cooperate, a family like the Boltons makes sense. Forget ‘The Prince’ – think instead of Hobbs’s Leviathan. When all goes well, the Leviathan doesn’t have swing that great sword very much. He just needs to instill confidence that he will, as soon as someone gets out of line. That’s why having a leading family like the Boltons, with a family banner as unsubtle as theirs, might have made The North a less violent and more cooperative place on balance. I doubt they were ever good guys, but I can easily imagine them having been good lords.

  7. TV watcher here. At least on TV, the Night King would definitely have to count as a Sauron figure! It wasn’t until I did a little reading just now that I realized the TV Night King doesn’t correspond to anything in the books. Hmm…, so the TV show could easily end with a decisive final one-on-one duel that destroys the Night King, while the books probably won’t end quite that simply.

  8. I have wondered if there is a connection to the remarkable passivity of the middle east under the Seleucids

  9. Is it a coincidence that the core territory of the Neo-Assyrian empire is quite similar to the peak of ISIS controlled territory? Maybe not.

    I’d written a blogpost (linking to that now) that the Mitanni were the road-warriors of the Bronze Age. The aristocracy spoke Hurrian but were culturally Vedic. Down to the para-Sanskrit terms they used for horses and chariots. With the advantage in transport, they could rule the wastelands between the cities. And, thereby, the cities.

    I am using the -ic in “Vedic” as one might use -ish in other contexts. I do not mean to imply that the Rig Veda in its presently-edited form was literally known there.

  10. the Night King would definitely have to count as a Sauron figure

    yes, i can’t blame grrm for that. that being said i think there are ambiguities about the night king as pointed out by some commentators.

  11. Martin is a student of history, and there is no way that a lineage of such unmitigated evil could persist down the centuries. The Boltons exist as witness to the long tradition of fantasy antagonists which readers love to hate.

    I am familiar with the novels. But didn’t the Boltons keep their heads down for a few centuries under the Stark rule in the North? I’d imagine that’s how they survived down the centuries.

    It’s funny you say that about Roose. I thought he was the most interesting minor character in the series. He wasn’t a psychopath, not like Ramsay. I get the impression that the earlier Boltons, the ones that brought the family into prominence, were also much more like Roose than like Ramsay.

    One thing we should keep in mind, too, is that highly destructive, long-lasting wars tend to bring forth a lot of psychopathic leaders who would otherwise not survive or rise to the top during the more stable times. Without the social stresses of all these wars, I doubt that the likes of Ramsay would have been able to break all the social conventions and acquire power.

    One of the saddest aspects of long wars is that they – all of them – eventually degenerate into barbarism that would have been unthinkable prior to the wars. People slide down and start tolerating all manners of evil in pursuit of survival and victory once they become inured to suffering for a long time.

    That’s another reason why I find a lot of alt-righters very unwise. They are discontented with the present and think some sort of a revolutionary war would be a great cure-all. In reality, if such a thing were to occur, most of them would likely not survive and even if they were to survive, would find the new order not much to their liking. Violent social tumult has a habit of defying prediction and empowering the worst kind of people, whom even the initiators of the said tumult would find abhorrent.

  12. “George R. R. Martin has done something new in fantasy. He has created a world in shades of gray.”

    That’s fairly shortsighted, Gene Wolfe and Glen Cook were doing grey shades decades before ‘A Game of Thrones’. Heck, even Jack Vance in the 50’s was devoid of clear good and bad sides.

  13. Yes, have to agree, on the whole, most pulp fantasy and “Sword and Sorcery” and its offspring (New Weird, etc.) didn’t really go in for the good and evil of Tolkein’s high fantasy. Mike Moorcock and his Elric has law and chaos at best, rather than stories of good and evil. Conan the Barbarian is not particularly morally admirable, though at the same time, he is written as strong, honourable and admirable (and all that Iron Dream stuff).

    What Martin, I think, did that was quite unusual was marrying this up to a quite grounded, pseudo-historical saga with many viewpoint characters, rather than a central protagonist (which tends to complement exploring character). It’s all at a place in the nexus of historical fiction and fantasy which is relatively unusual (most historical and alt historical fiction is more historically grounded, most secondary world fantasy is less like historical fiction) and has an unusual level of ambition and size. It’s also by general acclaim at least somewhat better written than forays by similar writers with similar models written at the same time (Dave Gemmell springs to mind, though I haven’t read him, or really much of any fantasy, since secondary school). Builders of “big” secondary worlds did usually tend more to follow the Tolkein school, as he was the author that innovated them.

    (As much as I guess I still find GoT pretty inferior to the historical epics and histories that are one of its parents).

  14. That’s fairly shortsighted, Gene Wolfe and Glen Cook were doing grey shades decades before ‘A Game of Thrones’. Heck, even Jack Vance in the 50’s was devoid of clear good and bad sides.

    this is fair. and i love wolfe in particular. that being said, some of this stuff is pretty weird and non-mainstream. grrm fused low and high fantasy, and then it broke into pop culture in a way only matched by lotr.

    (no surprise martin names vance as one of his top interests)

  15. I do think there’s going to be either a “dark lord” or “dark god” in the books, probably tied into the whole “Heart of Winter” thing that Bran sees in his first vision. The Night King in the show feels like a cheaper version of that with a more succinct origin story, whereas the Others in the book are more like Omnicidal Ice Elves being powered by some greater magical force (the “blue eyes” thing).

    That said, the human characters and storylines are certainly almost all shades of gray. Even the Boltons, I think – Roose Bolton is a sociopath and his son is a monster, but Roose Bolton’s murdered legitimate son Domeric was supposedly an all around decent, likable person.

  16. That’s another reason why I find a lot of alt-righters very unwise. They are discontented with the present and think some sort of a revolutionary war would be a great cure-all.

    I agree with this completely, but I’d like to point out that it is far from limited to the alt-right. When I was a teenager, I used to fantasize about being involved in an armed revolution against the government. At the time, my politics were standard issue liberal Democrat, with vague pacifistic leanings. It’s hard to imagine how to square that political agenda with violent revolution. I pictured a scenario in which it became necessary for vague reasons. I think it’s simply that young men like the idea of fighting for glory. What the specifics of “glory” are determined by culture and idiosyncrasies. For Muslim radicals, it’s repelling the infidels, for me as a teen it was “vague, underspecified scenario”, for rowdy alt-righters it’s “Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace — but there is no peace. The war is actually begun!”

  17. Surprised no one’s brought up Smeagol, Boromir, or the most gray-shaded character from LOTR, Denethor.

    I’d say that Tolkien played with shades of gray for a few supporting characters, while GRRM makes it central to almost all his characters.

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