Game of Clones:
Wedding massacres, dragon queens, ice walls, palace coups – Game of Thrones is back for a seventh series. Is it pure fantasy? No, says historian Dan Jones, who collaborated with the show’s producers, it’s rooted firmly in reality.
how the TV juggernaut is based on history
Hundreds of years ago, in a kingdom somewhat like our own, a knight called Sir Erec thunders through a forest on horseback. Near the edge of the woodland, he comes across a warrior of an ancient, noble house being dragged on horseback as the captive of a pair of giants. Each giant carries a square-headed club and a whip with which they have beaten their captive so cruelly that the flesh on his back is flayed to the bone and the horse beneath him is soaked in blood down to its belly.
Erec calls on the giants to stop, hand over their prisoner and be gone. They turn on him, laughing at first, then warning that he is insane. “You could do no more against us than a lamb between two wolves,” says one. Erec shrugs: so be it. The battle begins.
The first giant charges. Erec lines him up with a lance, spearing him through the eye so that blood and brains spurt out from the back of his head. The second, enraged, now swings at Erec with his club. Erec dodges, parries, feints, then hammers the monster with his sword, the blade cleaving him literally in half.
Erec has won. Dazed and bruised, he receives the thanks of the freed knight, then rides to see his (hot, British) girlfriend.
This scene could easily be drawn from any episode of Game of Thrones, the pseudo-medieval fantasy drama now in its seventh season. Equally, you could lift it from one of the many unfilmed pages of A Song of Ice and Fire, the series of novels by George R.R. Martin on which Game of Thrones is (increasingly loosely) based.
In fact, Sir Erec’s fight with the giants is taken more or less word for word from the works of Chrétien de Troyes, who wrote some of the first romances of King Arthur 850 years ago. Like Game of Thrones, these were not sword-in-the-stone capers of heroes, villains and tidily resolved plotlines, but rather dark stories set in a world of monsters and kings.
De Troyes’ works introduced readers to timeless characters, such as Sir Lancelot, and legends like the quest for the Holy Grail. Sexy, fast-paced, witty and often quite nasty, they were wildly popular. In other words, long before there was Game of Thrones, there was Game of Thrones. As one of Martin’s characters says in the novel A Feast for Crows, “History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again.”
A vision for Game of Thrones
The concept for Game of Thrones was first described in 1993 in a letter from Martin to his then agent, the late Ralph Vicinanza. By that stage, the then 45-year-old author and screenwriter had written 13 chapters of what he called “an epic trilogy – a cycle of plot, counterplot, ambition, murder and revenge, with the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms as the ultimate prize”.
The world he had begun to imagine was Westeros, a loose tribute to the British Isles at some unfixed point in the Middle Ages, where the mood of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy is mashed together with the merciless family feuding that engulfed England during the 15th-century Wars of the Roses. In Westeros, leading members of the noble House of Lannister compete for supremacy with their rivals among the House of Stark, a dizzyingly complex tussle that drags in other high-born families.
On the fringes of Westeros lie dangerous hinterlands, which also have the tinkle of real history to them. In the north is a huge ice wall, imagined after a visit Martin paid to Hadrian’s Wall. This is guarded by chaste warriors of the Night’s Watch, an organisation superficially similar to the Knights Templar, who guarded Jerusalem during the Crusades. The Night’s Watch literally hold the fort for civilisation against a frozen wasteland habituated by “wildlings” and a gathering army of homicidal, undead ice creatures. Meanwhile, far away across the sea, at the other end of Westeros, lies a baking desert and city-states populated by barbarous nomads, slave traders, assassins and (as comes to pass) giant, fire-breathing dragons. A huge cast of characters passes between these worlds: feuding, plotting, slaughtering and, as often as not, shagging each other’s brains out.
Taken together, this is a mishmash of fantasy, history and, to be frank, pornography that delights in human squalor and features graphic scenes of torture, prostitution and worse.
The ethical framework of the world is opaque and none of the hundreds of people who live there is safe from being maimed or killed.
The only real rule is “valar morghulis”. Translated from the fictional language of High Valyrian, this is the one immutable rule of history: all men must die. “I want the reader to feel that no one is ever completely safe,” Martin wrote to Vicinanza in 1993. “The suspense always ratchets up a notch when you know that any character can die at any time.”
Game of Thrones the television show, which debuted on HBO in 2011 and is set to conclude with its eighth season in 2018 or 2019, has stayed true to Martin’s vision, even as it has detached from his plotlines. (The books are unfinished and no longer a trilogy; a fifth volume was published before the show launched, but the sixth has yet to appear.) Stories meander. Characters are tormented mercilessly, often to no apparent end.
Meanwhile, the historical reference points have burst the banks of the English Middle Ages, mimicking everything from the Punic Wars to the Spanish Inquisition. With dragons. And zombies. Incredibly, this is now the biggest upmarket TV show in the world, with a budget of $10million
These are dark stories set in a world of monsters and kings.
per episode. An average of 25 million people worldwide watched each episode of the last season, with millions more downloading it illegally.
Historical drama is a hard genre for historians to enjoy. Mistakes and anachronisms jar, and it is easier to spot what is wrong than what is right. Game of Thrones makes no claim to accuracy. It is historically literate without ever claiming to be history.
Historical parallels
Yet there is a deeper draw, too, which stems from the show’s unblinkered amorality, in which historical narrative is presented not in terms of a battle between “good” and “bad”, but as a complex, heaving, shifting web of human hope and failing, upon which the posturing of would-be great men and women is frequently mocked by forces and events far beyond their control.
In mid-April 2015, I took a flight from London to New York. I had been invited there to take part in a documentary exploring the historical influences behind Game of Thrones.
I was told by the producers that Martin had asked for me to be involved and that he had a copy of my book The Plantagenets – a history of medieval England – on his desk in his house in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
I still have my notes, which consist of questions such as, is the stern warmonger Tywin Lannister (played by Charles Dance) based on Edward I? Is the psychopathic child-king Joffrey Baratheon supposed to be Richard II? Who is Jon Snow exactly? When they tell us that “winter is coming”, is that a reference to the ancient Norse concept of Fimbulvetr, three winters in a row with no summer. The answer to most of these questions was “maybe”, “kind of”, or “yes, but there’s much more going on there, too”.
Take the likeness between the scheming dwarf Tyrion Lannister and Richard III, the crooked-backed prince who schemed his way to the throne of England in 1483, but was defeated at the Battle of Bosworth and whose reputation was thereafter shredded by Shakespeare’s play. No doubt there are superficial similarities between Tyrion and Richard.
Yet to clutch any harder at the likeness is to feel it falling, sand-like, through your fingers. For one thing, Tyrion is a Lannister – Martin’s proxies for the House of Lancaster – whereas the real Richard III was a son of York. Tyrion is a louche, fornicating drunkard; Richard appears to have been neither. As season seven begins, Tyrion has murdered his father, fled his family and teamed up with Daenerys Targaryen, the “mother of dragons” played by Emilia Clarke. History-sniffers have likened Daenerys to Richard III’s nemesis, Henry Tudor, who gathered an army in Brittany to challenge Richard and marched beneath a flag emblazoned with dragons, if not the real thing. So Tyrion’s defection is quite a departure from the original material. In real life, Richard and Henry were irreconcilable enemies who eventually faced off at the Battle of Bosworth. Whatever inspiration Martin found in the Wars of the Roses, it is only inspiration.
This pattern is repeated with almost every other character in Game of Thrones who seems at first to be borrowed from history. Yes, you can see Daenerys as Henry Tudor, but when she rides at the head of an army, she looks rather more like Joan of Arc.
When she takes up residence in the Great Pyramid of Meereen or arrives in a Roman-style amphitheatre in season five, the name that springs to mind is Cleopatra. The romantic – near-spiritual – devotion she inspires in her sometime consigliere Ser Jorah
Mormont is very much from the Chrétien de Troyes school of Arthurian legend. Is she any of these? All of them? None?
Martin’s answer is beautifully brazen and agreeably simple. “I’m interested in all of history,” he says. “It’s all endlessly fascinating. There are so many things you would be hard-pressed to make up. And then, of course, I don’t make it up. I take it, I file off the serial numbers, then I turn it up to 11 and change the colour from red to purple, and I have a great incident for the books.”
This explains the most notorious event in the whole series, the Red Wedding of season three, in which members of the Stark family are massacred at a banquet. The model for this is said to be the Black Dinner, a blood-spattered feast in Edinburgh Castle in 1440, when guardians of the Scottish king James II killed the teenage Earl of Douglas and his younger brother.
As Martin has said, the Red Wedding was also written in homage to the Glencoe massacre of 1692, when in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, several dozen members of the Clan MacDonald of Glencoe were murdered in their own home by guests who had accepted their hospitality. The two events, 250 years apart in Scottish history, have been twisted, blended, heavily seasoned and made to fit Westeros politics.
An epic production
It helps that, with such a large budget, the show is epically well resourced. The Battle of the Bastards, the climactic set piece in season six, took more than three weeks to shoot. The show also has its own supporting ecosystem. Weapons, for instance, are not hired, but built to order in a dedicated armoury run by Tommy Dunne, the weapons master. “You want 50 crossbows, you call Tommy,” says Mark Taylor, the first assistant director who worked on seasons two to six. “The massive crossbow on the wall they shoot giants with at Castle Black? Tommy built it. It took him two months, but he did it.” The overall effect is a world that is steeped in historical influences, but fiercely, inimitably its own.
Like Martin, Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have never regarded themselves as bound by history. “You can take parts of history and reweave them in a way that is seamless and organic
– all the assets of history without the liabilities and dull bits,” says Weiss. History without the boring bits? Game of Thrones is more than that, but it’s not a bad ambition all the same. Indeed, the formula has worked for eight centuries and more, ever since tales of Arthurian knights hacking giants in two were entertaining some of the very people whose own lives have now been recycled in the Seven Kingdoms. As Game of Thrones accelerates towards its denouement and the Starks and Lannisters face their fate, the Wall shudders and the dragons beat their wings, it is pleasing to think that although all men must die, at least in Westeros some can be born again.
All the assets of history without the dull bits.
Dan Jones is the best-selling author of The Plantagenets and The Hollow Crown. His new book, The Templars, is published by Head of Zeus on September 7.