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Praise for Game of Thrones versus History: Written in Blood

By unlocking the history behind the hugely popular books and TV series, this collection demonstrates how pop culture can be just as important as scholarship in defining what we mean by the “Middle Ages.”

‐Matthew Gabriele, Associate Professor of Medieval Studies,
Department of Religion and Culture, Virginia Tech

Game of Thrones versus History takes Martin’s novels back to their avowed roots in medieval history, revealing the supports underpinning one of the most remarkable cultural phenomena of the past decade. In doing so, the authors illuminate not only the novels themselves but also a wide variety of episodes from our own bloody and conflicted past.

‐Ross King

Fantasy isn’t born in a vacuum; it’s actually a studied tweaking of the real, the recognizable, and the historical. This collection masterfully explores that artful blurring, unlocking Martin’s world‐making wizardry.

‐Benjamin Woodring, Ph.D., English, Harvard University,
J.D., Yale Law School

This thoughtful and thought‐provoking work clearly demonstrates the power of popular culture to simultaneously educate and entertain.

‐Kristine Larsen, Professor of Astronomy,
Central Connecticut State University

Game of Thrones versus History

Written in Blood

 

 

Edited by Brian A. Pavlac

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Notes on Contributors

Danielle Alesi received her BA in history and political science at Hartwick College, New York, and her MA in Renaissance, Reformation, and Early Modern Studies from the University of Birmingham. She is currently a PhD student of history and Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Nebraska‐Lincoln, studying queenship and female power.

Maureen Attali is senior history teacher and PhD candidate in history and anthropology of ancient religions at Paris–Sorbonne University in France. She has published several articles about history and religion‐related themes in fantasy fiction, most notably “Rome in Westeros” and “Religious Fundamentalism and Demonic Feminity: Remarks on the Character of Lilith in True Blood.

Shiloh Carroll teaches in the writing center at Tennessee State University. She is currently working on a book examining the medievalisms and neo‐medievalisms of Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and HBO’s Game of Thrones. She has previously published work on A Song of Ice and Fire and the works of Joss Whedon.

Daniel J. Clasby is assistant professor of history and coordinator of the global studies general education curriculum at King’s College in Wilkes‐Barre, Pennsylvania, where he teaches European Mediterranean history and Jewish studies. His research focuses on Jewish diasporic questions of cultural identity and expressions of religiosity.

Brian de Ruiter earned his PhD with a dissertation on North American indigenous cinema and identity. He frequently attends popular culture conferences in Canada and the United States and is currently examining depictions of the North in popular culture.

Jacopo della Quercia is a scholar with the New York Council for the Humanities and the author of two books: The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy (2014) and License to Quill (2015). His work has been featured in the New York Times bestseller You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News (2011), BBC America, CNN Money, Cracked.com, The Huffington Post, Reader’s Digest, Slate, and Princeton University’s Electronic Bulletin of the Dante Society of America, among other places.

Kavita Mudan Finn earned her PhD in English Literature from the University of Oxford and has taught Medieval and Renaissance literature, Renaissance history, women’s studies, and writing at several universities, including Georgetown University and the University of Maryland at College Park. In 2012 she published a book on fifteenth‐century queens; she is now working on a second book, on representations of premodern women on television. She also edited Fan Phenomena: Game of Thrones (in press).

Giacomo Giudici recently completed a PhD in history at Birkbeck, University of London. His research on the relationship between textual practices, sociopolitical practices, and material culture has received awards from both the Royal Historical Society and the Society for Renaissance Studies in the United Kingdom. He has held visiting fellowships at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and at the Huntington Library of San Marino, California.

Mat Hardy is senior lecturer in Middle East studies at Deakin University, Australia. His research interests include the use of role‐play in teaching political science and aspects of leadership in Libya. A youth misspent in pursuit of fantasy role‐playing games and fiction has also encouraged him to marry fantasy with academic writing about the East.

Robert J. Haug is assistant professor of Islamic world history before 1500 in the Department of History at the University of Cincinnati, where he has taught a course titled “Playing the Game of Thrones: Kingship and Court Politics in the Premodern World.” His research interests focus on the eastern frontiers of the Abbasid caliphate and its successors throughout eastern Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia; and on the continuity of local elites from the pre‐Islamic period until the arrival of the Seljuqs.

Helle Strandgaard Jensen is assistant professor of contemporary cultural history at Aarhus University in Denmark. She is the author of From Superman to Social Realism: Children’s Media and Scandinavian Childhood (2017). She has written on the history of children’s media, media history in a digital age, and the epistemological failures of “moral panic” theory. Her current research project, funded by the European Commission, is entitled “Shaping Childhoods through Television: The Transfer and Demarcation of Sesame Street in 1970s’ Europe.”

Janice Liedl is professor of history at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. She co‐edited and contributed to The Hobbit and History (2014) and Star Wars and History (2012). She also researches English women’s struggles with both royal courts and law courts since the time of Henry VIII.

Nicole M. Mares is associate professor of history and director of women’s studies at King’s College in Wilkes‐Barre, Pennsylvania. There she teaches the history of western civilization, women’s and gender studies, and British and European history. Her research centers on the nineteenth‐century British imperial history of southern Africa and on questions of race, gender, and identity.

Steven Muhlberger, before his recent retirement, was professor of history at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario. He has researched and published in a variety of areas, including chivalry and warfare in the later Middle Ages, democracy as a worldwide phenomenon, and the chronicles of late antiquity.

Sonia Murphy is an amateur medievalist and a long‐time fan of Game of Thrones.

Brian A. Pavlac lives a dual life as professor of history at King’s College in Wilkes‐Barre, Pennsylvania, and priest‐in‐charge of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Pro‐Cathedral. Published books authored by him are A Concise Survey of Western Civilization (2010) and a general interest work on Witch Hunts in the Western World (2010); he also translated a medieval biography, A Warrior Bishop of the 12th Century by Balderich (2008). His research interests include witch hunting, medieval Germany, and prince bishops of the Holy Roman Empire (for example Nicholas of Cusa).

Joseph Percer is currently the chief heraldic and onomastic officer of a worldwide medieval non‐profit organization devoted to the study of the Middle Ages.

Gillian Polack is currently based at the Australian National University. Her recent books include The Middle Ages Unlocked: A Guide to Life in Medieval England (2015); The Time of the Ghosts (2015; novel); and The Art of Effective Dreaming (2015; novel). Her monograph History and Fiction: Writers, their Research, Worlds and Stories was published in 2016.

Magnus Qvistgaard, an independent scholar, holds a PhD in history and civilization from the European University Institute in Florence. He works on processes of cultural exchange and on how public negotiations of aesthetic concepts shape cultural values. He has previously published on Scandinavian drama and on the interplay between theater and literature in the late nineteenth century.

Don Riggs studied myth at Dickinson College, where he focused on the mythical underpinnings of both ancient and modern literature. At UNC‐Chapel Hill he earned degrees in comparative literature, which included the study of the French, Latin, and English Middle Ages. He has since published on Renaissance astrology, medieval and modern literature, and Tolkien. He has also translated, with Jerome Seaton, Chinese Poetic Writing by Francois Cheng (1984).

Kris Swank is library director at Pima Community College, Tucson, Arizona. She holds master’s degrees in library science, international management, and language and literature with an emphasis on Tolkien studies. She has published in the field of fantasy literature, in the journals Tolkien Studies and Mythlore and in the edited collections Fantasy and Science‐Fiction Medievalisms: From Isaac Asimov to A Game of Thrones (2015) and Harry Potter for Nerds II (2015).

Sara L. Uckelman is lecturer at Durham University in the United Kingdom and is affiliated to the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute. She is the editor‐in‐chief of the Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources.

Foreword

William Irwin

What a great idea! Game of Thrones versus history. Historians are storytellers, and the best historians, like the best storytellers, have ways of making their subject matter come to life. The challenge for the historian in the classroom is to find a hook or produce an example that will speak to a captive audience of students.

It’s particularly effective when a teacher can start from something everyone thinks they know to be true, and then proceed to show that it wasn’t exactly true. Something like “people think Columbus believed the earth was flat, but really he knew it was round.” In this sense, a negative example can be just as effective as a positive example.

All too often, though, students do not know much about the past and so do not have incorrect ideas about it to be supplanted. Thus the historian’s task becomes even more challenging. She needs to both explain and intrigue. This is where connections to popular culture can come in handy. When we can draw on what students are already interested in and knowledgeable about, we are halfway to the goal of engaging them with history.

I had a similar experience while teaching philosophy in the late 1990s. That’s why they asked me to write this foreword, so please forgive the self‐reference as I explain. Practically all my students were familiar with my favorite television show, Seinfeld. Many of them were even bigger fans than I was and could quote lines and cite episodes like scholars. It was only natural, then, to use the show to jump‐start explanations and discussions of philosophy. Jerry Seinfeld’s stand‐up routine and observational humor could be compared to Socrates’ questioning of his fellow citizens in the marketplace of Athens. It wasn’t a perfect comparison, but that was part of the point. Seeing the initial similarity, students became interested in the differences as well.

I wasn’t alone in doing this. Far from it.

Philosophers have always looked for vivid examples to illustrate complex ideas, and lots of professors were seizing on Seinfeld. When it was announced that the show was going off the air at the end of its ninth season in 1998, I was saddened as a fan and worried as a teacher. No longer would George, Jerry, Kramer, and Elaine deliver new philosophy resources. There was nothing left for me to do but build a memorial. There would be many tributes to mark the end of the show, but my idea was to capture in a book what had been happening in the classroom, not just in my classroom but in classrooms all over the country.

Seinfeld and Philosophy and the many books that followed have all been team efforts, in which many writers and editors brought diverse points of view together between the covers of a book. A recent success among the books is Game of Thrones and Philosophy: Logic Cuts Deeper Than Swords, edited by Henry Jacoby. As you might expect, the volume includes essays about understanding Westeros in terms of the political philosophies of Plato, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche. But the book also includes musings on the nature of happiness, magic and metaphysics, moral luck, and just‐war theory. Like other books in its genre, Game of Thrones and Philosophy works because it speaks to fans. The writers are fans who can quote Tyrion Lannister and speak Dothraki. They relish the chance to discuss Game of Thrones as much as they appreciate the chance to spread philosophy. This same infectious enthusiasm pervades the pages of the book you hold in your hands.

Despite its subtitle, Game of Thrones versus History is not actually written in blood. It is, however, written instead with verve, insight, and enthusiasm, displaying love for both history and literature. Connections to the kings and castles of medieval England would be expected in a book of this nature, but other, less likely connections also lurk in what lies ahead. There were no real dragons in medieval Europe, of course, but examining the Seven Kingdoms reveals surprising insights into cultural history concerning the nature of childhood, the lives of powerful women, pagan religions, and forgotten celibate societies.

We can learn history by comparing it to Game of Thrones, and Game of Thrones can teach us something about history by making us reconsider it in terms of alternative possibilities. Historians face the difficult task of constructing a narrative from multiple sources that sometimes conflict with one another. The authors of this book face a similar problem concerning their sources: the differences between the accounts given by the books and the television show. What really happened in Westeros and the rest of the known world?

Game of Thrones versus History works brilliantly, not just because its authors are excellent historians, but also because their source material is wonderfully rich. The smart, compelling writing in the books and on the television show takes us on flights of imagination and keeps us at the sword’s end of excitement. Appealing to a mass audience well beyond readers of fantasy literature, Game of Thrones is a pop culture force. Indeed, with its huge following of intelligent and devoted fans, Game of Thrones wins Emmy awards and takes the ratings crown. George R. R. Martin may be an American J. R. R. Tolkien, but he has created a global phenomenon. As evidence, consider the contributing authors in this book, who hail not just from the United States and our wintry neighbor to the north but from far‐flung kingdoms in Australia—and from Europe as well. Take my advice and let them be your guide through worlds of fantasy and reality. If you read carefully, you may even get to keep your head.

Acknowledgments

In my tender years, my brother, Ross R. Pavlac, lit a fire in me for fantasy and science fiction. Despite several efforts, though, I could not follow him into that strange world of fandom, where he met George R. R. Martin long before A Game of Thrones was written. Tragically, my brother’s life ended far too early: he died from cancer 20 years gone. I, meanwhile, pursued a path to academia, which by good fortune led me to my position as a history professor at King’s College in Wilkes‐Barre, Pennsylvania. There I watched my friend and colleague Bill Irwin launch a book series comparing popular culture and philosophy. The series “Philosophy and…” made me think about “History versus…”—and I am indebted to Bill for his help with this project. My daughter, Margaret Mackenzie Pavlac, got me watching the series. I am also grateful to Janice Liedl, whose books on Harry Potter and on the Hobbit and history caught my attention and led to my proposal for this volume. I offer thanks to Andrew Davidson, who welcomed my proposal with enthusiasm. My appreciation goes to Denisha Sahadevan, my editor at Wiley, and her assistant, Maddie Koufogazos for bringing this work to the world; to the commissioning editor, Haze Humbert; to the erudite editing of Manuela Tecusan; and also to the production editor, Nivetha Udayakumar. Much credit, of course, goes to the many authors of this book, who took the time and the risk to offer their hard work and scholarship to make it a reality. What virtues exist in the essays are theirs; what deficiencies appear are mine, as editor.

Lastly, this book’s appearance owes a great debt to my spouse, Elizabeth S. Lott, PhD, without whom it, and much else in my life, could not have been accomplished. Her advice, her discipline, her editing, and her inspiration have been treasures beyond compare. Yer Jalan Atthirari Anni—You are the moon of my life.