American Tolkien? How about American Hobbes: a comparison of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones

Blog Song for the Moment

Marian McPartland, Willow Creek, Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz Fest (2002)

(WARNING!  Some spoilers for those who haven't moved beyond the first season of HBO's Game of Thrones)

A couple of years ago I wandered through the five (soon to be seven I gather) Game of Thrones volumes, and found intriguing the characters, the story-line, and the grim political realism.  I also watched HBO's adaptation, and enjoyed them more since the screen-writers pared away George R. R. Martin's often turgid prose and sometimes tedious dialogue.

Lev Grossman at Time dubbed Martin the "American Tolkien" when reviewing the first book of the series--A Feast for Crows--back in 2005, and said

Martin has produced--is producing, since the series isn't over--the great fantasy epic of our era. It's an epic for a more profane, more jaded, more ambivalent age than the one Tolkien lived in.

The "great fantasy epic of our era?"  That's rather overblown and, really, later generations will have to determine that.  Will Game of Thrones be as widely read and appreciated sixty years from now, as is the case of Lord of the Rings trilogy today?  Doubt it.  Martin's writing is not in the same ball park as Tolkien's.

That said, Martin does give us a fully-realized fantasy world, as did Tolkien (both highly derivative).  And his characters are more multi-dimensional than those in LOTR--capable of right and wrong and everything in between, along with making whopping mistakes that are inevitably fatal for them, or those close to them.

And in contrast to Tolkien's rather static characters (good ones generally stayed good, the bad, bad) the Game of Thrones characters sometimes change in surprising ways--those that live long enough to do so, that is.  There's Tyrion Lannister, a remarkable character in the book--full of witty repartee and whose brain and heart are bigger than those of most anyone around him.

The Hound

There's the Hound, Sandar Clegane--no one can accuse Martin of coming up with boring names--one of my favorite characters, an intriguingly confusing mix of selfish brutality and nobility.

Jaime Lannister

Or there's Jaime Lannister, who seems to be growing a heart once he lost his hand.  You know, "It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell..." (Matthew 5:30).

Melisandre, the
Lord of Light's
high priestess

Despite efforts to create a totally "pagan" world, Martin can't escape his Western Christian heritage. Actually, he sort of trashes religion in general.  There's the bland "Faith of the Seven"--a state religion full of regalia, but of little substance apart from sanctioning royal marriages, and providing priestly fodder for raging urban mobs.  There are the "Gods of the Forest," who don't do much more than offer quiet solace to the various Stark family members who are wondering why their author is picking them off like flies.  The "Drowned God" in the Iron Islands is really just a set of rituals designed to confirm over-the-top macho violence.  The one religion that so far demonstrates tangible power is the "Lord of Light," who gives the dead life and provides demons to kill the living, a twisted version of the Jesus myth ("Light of the World"), and I doubt it's an accident that the one clearly nasty religion is monotheistic.

Tyrion Lannister

George Schmidt, over at Religion Dispatches, caught this difference in a thoughtful discussion of the "moral universe of the Game of Thrones."  Though there is no overt religion in LOTR, it is, as Schmidt notes, suffused with early Cold War Christian idealism.  Holding onto one's principles, whatever the cost, does matter.  The good guys win because they are good.  The evil-doers pay--even the good who momentarily lapse into evil (poor Boromir, for example, and even Frodo loses a finger when he briefly lets the temptation of the ring get to him at the end).  Drawing on the Protestant realist, Reinhold Niebuhr, Schmidt suggests that Game of Thrones is all about the tragedy of trying to do good in an evil world.  Hence anyone with a lick of idealism in the land of seven kingdoms finds out that virtue at times can be a vice, and vice-versa.  Thus the awful end of the "Hand of the King," Eddard Stark, the idealist.  His replacement in contrast, the diminutive and brilliant Tyrion, cunningly manipulates those around him on behalf of the royal household, but also himself. But are these the choices, blind idealism or cold-hearted realism?  Schmidt muses that Christian realism would be some sort of blend of both, and wonders if Daenerys Targaryen might be that blend.  She's a "liberationist" who frees women and slaves, yet is not above subterfuge and violence to achieve her ends.

I don't know.  Perhaps Schmidt, currently working on his Master's degree at Union Theological Seminary, is so immersed in his theological studies that he sees it everywhere (I remember doing the same in my grad school days).

Queen Cersei, who tried to school
Lord Stark in the Game of Thrones

For me, Martin's take on religion is just too relentlessly cynical.  It is not much more than an instrument of politics.  That is a rather simple way to view an aspect of human life that has been around since the ancients took time out from surviving to wonder about the meaning of things.  But then, everything in Game of Thrones is just a playing piece, even those trying to avoid that role.  As fervent fans like to quote, "When you play the game of thrones, you win, or you die."

Wow.  Like, deep, man...pass me the pipe, and are you up for some DnD, or what, man?

And that's sort of how I read Game of Thrones.  A really smart Dungeons and Dragons player with enough writing ability to get some adventures down in print, drawn from a DnD world where it's all about winning.  Rather than being reminded of Niebuhr, the story makes me think of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1651) in which he argues that in a state of nature, there is no power (no "Leviathan") to restrain people from constant "quarrel" due to their ambitions, self-interest, and mutual suspicion.  In this state of nature

No arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm enjoying the HBO series based on Martin's story-telling.  As with previous HBO series (e.g. The Wire, Deadwood), these are well-crafted shows with great acting.  And its array of distinctive, fascinating characters, and all the political intrigue, have me hooked.  But watching the story on the screen makes Game of Thrones seem more epic than it does on the page, and the story does not (so far anyway) leave us much to dream about or for--which is what I suspect caused LOTR to become such a phenomenon in the US starting back in the Age of Aquarius.

That said, LOTR has its own problems, namely in the areas of race and gender.  Game of Thrones does, too, but I'll leave these matters for another day...