#grrm and old norse literature
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What draws you to incest ?
*sighs* Ok, here we go. I'm a real card carrying Jonsa now aren't I?
Anon, listen. I know this is an anti question that gets bandied about a lot, aimed at provoking, etc, when we all know no Jonsa is out here being all you know what, it really is the incest, and the incest alone, that draws me in. I mean, come on now. Grow up.
If I was "drawn" to incest I'd be a fan of Cersei x Jaime, Lucrezia x Cesare, hell Oedipus x Jocasta etc... but I haven't displayed any interest in them now, have I? So, huh, it can't be that.
Frankly, it's a derivitive question that is really missing the mark. I'm not "drawn" to it, though yeah, it is an unavoidable element of Jonsa. The real question you should be asking though, is what draws GRRM to it? Because he obviously is drawn to it, specifically what is termed the "incest motif" in academic and literary scholarship. That is a far more worthwhile avenue of thinking and questioning, compared with asking me. Luckily for you though anon, I sort of anticipated getting this kind of question so had something in my drafts on standby...
You really don't have to look far, or that deeply, to be hit over the head by the connection between GRRM's literary influences and the incest motif. I mean, let's start with the big cheese himself, Tolkein:
Tolkein + Quenta Silmarillion
We know for definite that GRRM has been influenced by Tolkein, and in The Silmarillion you notably have a case of unintentional incest in Quenta Silmarillion, where Túrin Turambar, under the power of a curse, unwittingly murders his friend, as well as marries and impregnates his sister, Nienor Níniel, who herself had lost her memory due to an enchantment.
Mr Tolkein, "what draws you to incest?"
Old Norse + Völsunga saga
Tolkein, as a professor of Anglo-Saxon, was hugely influenced by Old English and Old Norse literature. The story of the ring Andvaranaut, told in Völsunga saga, is strongly thought to have been a key influence behind The Lord of the Rings. Also featured within this legendary saga is the relationship between the twins Signy and Sigmund — at one point in the saga, Signy tricks her brother into sleeping with her, which produces a son, Sinfjotli, of pure Völsung blood, raised with the singular purpose of enacting vengence.
Anonymous Norse saga writer, "what draws you to incest?"
Medieval Literature as a whole
A lot is made of how "true" to the storied past ASOIAF is, how reflective it is of medieval society (and earlier), its power structures, its ideals and martial values etc. ASOIAF, however, is not attempting historical accuracy, and should not be read as such. Yet it is clearly drawing from a version of the past, as depicted in medieval romances and pre-Christian mythology for instance, as well as dusty tomes on warfare strategy. As noted by Elizabeth Archibald in her article Incest in Medieval Literature and Society (1989):
Of course the Middle Ages inherited and retold a number of incest stories from the classical world. Through Statius they knew Oedipus, through Ovid they knew the stories of Canace, Byblis, Myrrha and Phaedra. All these stories end more or less tragically: the main characters either die or suffer metamorphosis. Medieval readers also knew the classical tradition of incest as a polemical accusation,* for instance the charges against Caligula and Nero. – p. 2
The word "polemic" is connected to controversy, to debate and dispute, therefore these classical texts were exploring the incest motif in order to create discussion on a controversial topic. In a way, your question of "what draws you to incest?" has a whiff of polemical accusation to it, but as I stated, you're missing the bigger question.
Moving back to the Middle Ages, however, it is interesting that we do see a trend of more incest stories appearing within new narratives between the 11th and 13th centuries, according to Archibald:
The texts I am thinking of include the legend of Judas, which makes him commit patricide and then incest before betraying Christ; the legend of Gregorius, product of sibling incest who marries his own mother, but after years of rigorous penance finally becomes a much respected pope; the legend of St Albanus, product of father-daughter incest, who marries his mother, does penance with both his parents but kills them when they relapse into sin, and after further penance dies a holy man; the exemplary stories about women who sleep with their sons, and bear children (whom they sometimes kill), but refuse to confess until the Virgin intervenes to save them; the legends of the incestuous begetting of Roland by Charlemagne and of Mordred by Arthur; and finally the Incestuous Father romances about calumniated wives, which resemble Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale except that the heroine's adventures begin when she runs away from home to escape her father's unwelcome advances. – p. 2
I mean... that last bit sounds eerily quite close to what we have going on with Petyr Baelish and Sansa Stark. But I digress. What I'm trying to say is that from a medieval and classical standpoint... GRRM is not unique in his exploration of the incest motif, far from it.
Sophocles, Ovid, Hartmann von Aue, Thomas Malory, etc., "what draws you to incest?"
Faulkner + The Sound and the Fury, and more!
Moving on to more modern influences though, when talking about the writing ethos at the heart of his work, GRRM has famously quoted William Faulker:
His mantra has always been William Faulkner’s comment in his Nobel prize acceptance speech, that only the “human heart in conflict with itself… is worth writing about”. [source]
I’ve never read any Faulker, so I did just a quick search on “Faulkner and incest” and I pulled up this article on JSTOR, called Faulkner and the Politics of Incest (1998). Apparently, Faulkner explores the incest motif in at least five novels, therefore it was enough of a distinctive theme in his work to warrant academic analysis. In this journal article, Karl F. Zender notes that:
[...] incest for Faulkner always remains tragic [...] – p. 746
Ah, we can see a bit of running theme here, can't we? But obviously, GRRM (one would hope) doesn’t just appreciate Faulkner’s writing for his extensive exploration of incest. This quote possibly sums up the potential artistic crossover between the two:
Beyond each level of achieved empathy in Faulkner's fiction stands a further level of exclusion and marginalization. – pp. 759–60
To me, the above parallels somewhat GRRM’s own interest in outcasts, in personal struggle (which incest also fits into):
I am attracted to bastards, cripples and broken things as is reflected in the book. Outcasts, second-class citizens for whatever reason. There’s more drama in characters like that, more to struggle with. [source]
Interestingly, however, this essay on Faulkner also connects his interest in the incest motif with the romantic poets, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron:
As Peter Thorslev says in an important study of romantic representations of incest, " [p]arent-child incest is universally condemned in Romantic literature...; sibling incest, on the other hand, is invariably made sympathetic, is sometimes exonerated, and, in Byron's and Shelley's works, is definitely idealized.” – p. 741
Faulkner, "what draws you to incest?" ... I mean, that article gives some good explanations, actually.
Lord Byron, Manfred + The Bride of Abydos
Which brings us onto GRRM interest in the Romantics:
I was always intensely Romantic, even when I was too young to understand what that meant. But Romanticism has its dark side, as any Romantic soon discovers... which is where the melancholy comes in, I suppose. I don't know if this is a matter of artistic influences so much as it is of temperament. But there's always been something in a twilight that moves me, and a sunset speaks to me in a way that no sunrise ever has. [source]
I'm already in the process of writing a long meta about the influence of Lord Byron in ASOIAF, specifically examining this quote by GRRM:
The character I’m probably most like in real life is Samwell Tarly. Good old Sam. And the character I’d want to be? Well who wouldn’t want to be Jon Snow — the brooding, Byronic, romantic hero whom all the girls love. Theon [Greyjoy] is the one I’d fear becoming. Theon wants to be Jon Snow, but he can’t do it. He keeps making the wrong decisions. He keeps giving into his own selfish, worst impulses. [source]
Lord Byron, "what draws you to—", oh, um, right. Nevermind.
I'm not going to repeat myself here, but it's worth noting that there is a clear through line between GRRM and the Romantic writers, besides perhaps melancholic "temperament"... and it's incest.
But look, is choosing to explore the incest motif...well, a choice? Yeah, and an uncomfortable one at that, but it’s obvious that that is what GRRM is doing. I think it’s frankly a bit naive of some people to argue that GRRM would never do Jonsa because it’s pseudo-incest and therefore morally repugnant, no ifs, no buts. I’m sorry, as icky as it may be to our modern eyes, GRRM has set the president for it in his writing with the Targaryens and the Lannister twins.
The difference with them is that they knowingly commit incest, basing it in their own sense of exceptionalism, and there are/will be bad consequences — this arguably parallels the medieval narratives in which incest always ends badly, unless some kind of real penance is involved. For Jon and Sansa, however, the Jonsa argument is that they will choose not to commit incest, despite a confused attraction, and then will be rewarded in the narrative through the parentage reveal, a la Byron’s The Bride of Abydos. The Targaryens and Lannisters, in several ways excluding the incest (geez the amount of times I’ve written incest in this post), are foils for the Starks, and in particular, Jon and Sansa. Exploring the incest motif has been on the cards since the very beginning — just look at that infamous "original" outline — regardless of whether we personally consider that an interesting writing choice, or a morally inexcusable one.
Word of advice, or rather, warning... don't think you can catch me out with these kinds of questions. I have access to a university database, so if I feel like procrastinating my real academic work, I can and will pull out highly researched articles to school you, lmao.
But you know, thanks for the ask anyway, I guess.
#cappy's thoughts#I'm still on my break/hiatus#i just had some of this already written#jonsa#jon x sansa#anti bs#grrm and medieval literature#grrm and william faulkner#grrm and the romantics#grrm and tolkein#grrm and old norse literature#grrm and his literary influences#was this petty lmao?
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under a cut because long, disorganized, self-indulgent
ok so the Lende Empire isn’t really feudal; I despise feudal stasis in fantasy, like even the shortest timeline puts the Andal invasion at more than 2,000 ybp in Game of Thrones, you really think in all that time everybody on the continent is dumb enough to not invent a better plough? or glass just good enough to grind lenses? or make small improvements in windmill design? and all that shit adds up and BAM before you know it, you've got metallurgy good enough to make a steam engine with, so no matter what BS magical physics you come up with, if things work at the human scale even remotely like they do in our world, your age of knights and castles and dragons not having to contend with antiaircraft guns has a limited shelf-life.
(and that's interesting! And more people--by which i mean people besides Terry Pratchett, who did this wonderfully--should write about high fantasy worlds before they reached Medieval Stasis Mode, and after they left it! I would fukkin kill to read a good high fantasy book that also had, like spaceships in it. Insofar as genre conventions have evolved not according to the internal logic of the worlds they depict but according to how and for what reason they serve as commentaries on specific aspects of our own world and its history, and are aimed at evoking certain emotions, it's understandable why such generic mishsmashes are relatively uncommon. But people also definitely read speculative fiction because they like internally cohesive worlds very different from our own, so it is my fondest hope that this sort of thing becomes more popular going forward)
(you can of course also have fantasy worlds which are *not* very much like our own world at human scale. Greg Egan actually does this in a science fiction mode, but as long as you're positing a world where dimensions of space are hyperbolic like time or where humans change sex every time they have sex because trading a detachable symbiotic penis is part of having an orgasm, whether you call this stuff "different science" or "magic" is really beside the point. I have an idea I've been batting around for a while about a world divided, like Evan Dahm's Overside, or the two parallel worlds in Fringe, except part of the division is not just physical, but metaphysical. Morality itself in each subworld is defective, because each subworld got a different part of a morally and metaphysically unified whole: thus, for reasons nobody can understand, almost every ethical system derived by people resident in only one subworld is deeply defective, and would be horrifying to us--as though, perhaps, our own complex and nuanced moral landscape that we wrestle with was a kind of grand unified theory whose symmetry had been broken, and which was only understood piecemeal, as totally separate concepts. And of course, if you live in one subworld everyone from the other subworld is a horrifying monster whose morality is totally incomprehensible to you, so you reflexively treat them as an enemy.)
History isn't just one thing after another. I mean, okay, it is, but it's *also* the aftereffects of those things, the things that stick around forever and can't be gotten away from. And just like how if you want to understand our own world you need to look at what it was like five years ago, and to understand what it was like five years ago you need to look at what it was like ten years ago, and fifteen, ad nauseam, until you're suddenly back at World War II, or the Holy Roman Empire, or Sumer, or struggling through the ever-increasing fog of a steadily more ambiguous archeological record, well, this is as true for politics and language as it is the material aspects of society. In the same way maps feel insufficient when the artist doesn't think about what's beyond the edge of the page (not to knock on GRRM too much, but if you put all the continents and seas in his world on the same map, you notice they're all really... rectangular. Like he drew them to fit individual pieces of paper. Rivers and island arcs get compressed when they near a margin. Seas are just voids. Nothing ever has to be moved to a little box in a corner to fit. there's no attempt at verisimilitude), I think invented worlds feel insufficient when the writer asks you to take them seriously as a reflection of our own, or an aspect of our own, but neglects to at least suggest their place in a larger whole.
I wanted with the Lende Empire to have something that still let me have a lot of early centuries of sword-and-horse style adventures (because i started writing about Lende when I was thirteen and had just finished the Silmarillion for the second time), and I wanted when writing its history to still be able to take big chunks of story I stole from Norse legends and medieval poetry and dump them almost whole into the setting, but I also wanted the history not to read like a fantasy history--or not just a fantasy history. What I mean is, when you read something like the Silmarillion, or when a character in a fantasy world relates some legend to you, even if it's referred to as an old and ambiguous tale, you still often feel like that's really what happened. Like, for me, one of the chief emotional attractions to something like the tales of the wars of the Goths and Huns, or Beowulf's description of Migration Age Denmark filtered through Anglo-Saxon poetic tropes, or the Icelandic family sagas, is that we really have a hard time knowing how much of it is true, how much of its is plausible embellishment, and how much of it is anachronistic nonsense or pure bullshit. Is the Njala based on a faithfully recounted tradition passed down orally for a few hundred years? Who knows! Not us. We know a guy named Njal got burned in his house around 1000 AD, but much of the mystery and the poignancy of stories like that for me lies in the difficulty of ascertaining their relationship to the truth.
What I want(ed) was something that when you read it made you think "ok, obviously the narrator is trying their best, but even they don't know exactly what the fuck happened; this is probably one third ambiguous tradition, one third solid, one third bullshit." So the Chronicle of Lende has some stuff in it that's intentionally difficult to reconcile. It has weird tonal shifts. The first third owes a lot to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the sagas and the Hildebrantslied; the middle is closer to the Silmarillion, or the history of Rome when told more from the Great Man perspective than the Impersonal Forces one, and the last third starts out that way but goes some weird places and veers off at the end to what is obviously a symbolic and highly abstracted mode of narration which, in relating the destruction of the Empire imitates the way in which its beginning is related (for in-universe Thematic Reasons), *but* while all this is going on, the hope is that the reader is *also* able to glimpse through these ambiguities and stylistic quirks, and incompatibilities, and weird digressions involving talking animals or the spirit world, a society that's undergoing familiar demographic and social and technological transitions: moving from oral culture agrarianism to the beginnings of a real urban civilization, with a centralized state and the written word, and like Western Europe having to figure out a social structure in the absence of any good nearby imperial models (they end up with something more like fraternal warrior societies being deputized to control land rather than feudal lords, but the essential logic is the same); but then moving to a real model of administrative statehood, as infrastructure and technology improve, before industrialization kicks off, the population explodes, social tensions inherent in that begin tearing at the seams of society, and the horrors of industrialized warfare are unleashed.
There are meant to be striking differences, too, of course. Lende history is only about a thousand Earth years long, and it's confined mostly to the western side of a continent split by a huge, Himalayan-like mountain range. Its rapid rise and increase in technological sophistication are due to exogenous factors (genuine divine intervention in some cases), and equally even the True Secret History of the empire's destruction has no real-world parallels, at least not since the Channeled Scablands formed 14,000 years ago. It's also teeeechnically science fiction and not fantasy, though that distinction really rests on tone and not on setting IMO. But I don't think it's possible to tell what feels like a real history of a world without sometimes radically changing genres: our own history goes from dry science (geology, paleontology, archeology) to legend and myth and scripture, to dusty old classical history and books penned by ancients who sometimes have startlingly different notions about what merits mention in a story and how to tell one, to tales of kings and queens and conquerors, before emerging blinking in the sunlight of dry matter of fact narration again. I have always believed conventions, including those of genre and style, should be tools and not straightjackets. The best worldbuilding literature I have read steals from a huge variety of sources (and Pratchett deserves a mention here again, alongside Susanna Clarke, and Ada Palmer, and the people who wrote the Elder Scrolls backstory, and Sofia Samatar, and Angelica Gorodischer).
#have you read a stranger in olondria?#go read a stranger in olondria#now#fucking do it#it's so good#'a book' says Vandos of Ur-Amakir 'is a fortress; a place of weeping; the key to a desert; a river that has no bridge; a garden of spears.'
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If the new gods are based on Christianity (that's what I'm assuming), then what are the old gods and Rhollor based off of?
The Faith of the Seven is not based on Christianity as such (no messiah who died for your sins), but rather the complex hierarchy of the medieval Catholic Church: a High Septon (the Pope), the Most Devout (cardinals), septons and septas (priests and nuns), septs and grand septs (churches and cathedrals) complete with stained glass and statues, septries and motherhouses (monasteries and nunneries), penitent and silent and begging brothers (variations of monks), the Faith Militant (Knights Templar and other crusading orders), holy days, institutionalized misogyny (“shame!”), etc. The Seven themselves, which as aspects of the one god that are prayed to individually, are analogues of the Trinity (also with an influence of the pagan Maiden, Mother, and Crone); possibly some elements of Mary and the saints there as well.
The religion of the Old Gods is basically Celtic animism, with elements of paganism (Celtic and Norse), and also an influence of how druids were interpreted in literature and medieval cultural beliefs (worshipping trees, occasional human sacrifice). Bran’s vision of the past, with the priestly woman slicing a prisoner’s throat with a sickle before a heart tree, is very telling here.
The religion of R’hllor, according to GRRM, is inspired by the dualistic beliefs of Zoroastrianism and Catharism. There’s an excellent essay about R’hllor and Zoroastrianism and GRRM’s other influences over here on asoiafuniversity.
And since you’re interested, here’s a wonderful interview with GRRM where he talks about his worldbuilding of ASOIAF religions. Hope that helps!
#lyannas-ghost#asoiaf#asoiaf meta#asoiaf religions#the faith of the seven#the seven who are one#the old gods#r'hllor#asoiaf worldbuilding#grrm interviews#zoroastrianism#catholicism#animism
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To think that Tolkien wrote an ending that's hopeful but also extremely sad. And ending that makes me melancholic without having to be grimdark.
And that's why he is the master still.
Hi! Sorry for the late response to this 😅 I've had it in my drafts half-written for a while, but better late than never...
Yes, I completely agree. And as we all know, GRRM has mentioned how he is very much a fan of Tolkein’s ending, in particular the scouring of the Shire (as much as he goes on and on about Aragorn’s tax policy, etc.):
I’ve said before that the tone of the ending that I’m going for is bittersweet. I mean, it’s no secret that Tolkien has been a huge influence on me, and I love the way he ended Lord of the Rings. It ends with victory, but it’s a bittersweet victory. Frodo is never whole again, and he goes away to the Undying Lands, and the other people live their lives. And the scouring of the Shire—brilliant piece of work, which I didn’t understand when I was 13 years old: “Why is this here? The story’s over?” But every time I read it I understand the brilliance of that segment more and more. All I can say is that’s the kind of tone I will be aiming for. Whether I achieve it or not, that will be up to people like you and my readers to judge. [source]
But what is Tolkein’s ending based on? Where are these themes of "bittersweetness" in Lord of the Rings drawn from? Tolkein's pal and collegue C. S. Lewis once commented that:
If we insist on asking for the moral of the story, that is its moral: a recall from facile optimism and wailing pessimism alike, to that hard, yet not quite desperate, insight into Man's unchanging predicament by which heroic ages have lived. It is here that the Norse affinity is strongest: hammer-strokes but with compassion.*
*As usual, academic citations will be listed at the end.
Elaborating on this statement, Gloriana St. Clair adds that "the concept of fate in Northern works, the need for courage, a conception of evil, the tragedy of mortality, the doom of the immortals, and the paradox of defeat are themes common to Northern literature and The Lord of the Rings." She goes on to note that "heroic ages have lived through courage, and courage is one of the great lessons of The Lord of the Rings." Likewise, one could argue the same of ASOIAF, because, as stated by Wyman Manderly:
"[...] not every man has it in him to be Prince Aemon the Dragonknight or Symeon Star-Eyes, and not every woman can be as brave as my Wylla and her sister Wynafryd [...]" – ADWD, Davos IV
And yet, we do have courageous figures in ASOIAF — case in point, the Manderly sisters — just as in LoTR, because courage is important. Far more important than pain and suffering. In all its bittersweetness, despite everything, it is important and worth upholding... even if things change, even if you can never be what you once were. Because "evil in The Lord of the Rings" and ASOIAF "is just as complex as courage is." That's why we have the bitter with the sweet. Indeed, what Tolkein (a professor of Anglo-Saxon Studies) says of Beowulf could equally apply to Aragorn and others, and in turn could be said of many of GRRM's characters:
He is a man, and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy [...] It is the theme in its deadly seriousness that begets the dignity of tone: lif is læne: eal scæceð leoht and lif somod [Life is transitory: light and life together hasten away].
In Tolkein's view, and in the view of the Old Icelandic saga writer, a person's courage becomes more worthy in spite of apparent hopelessness. E.g. in Njáls saga, the author values Njáll's sons' decision to go into their father's house despite knowing that their attackers will more than likely burn them alive there. Indeed, as noted by Marjorie J. Burns, "an important aspect of Tolkien's borrowing from the North is his attachment to the Nordic world view, to the Nordic emphasis on imminent or threatening destruction, a destruction which, in Norse mythology, appears to be in motion even at the dawn of creation, with Black Surt sitting in the fire realm, Muspell, 'already waiting for the end' and the Frost Giant Ymir, 'evil from the first,' oozing from his armpits a sweat that gives form to humankind." And we can see that kind of sentiment present in the fight against the Others and the Long Night, which I theorise draws a lot from descriptions of the Fimbulvetr and later Ragnarök in Norse mythology. In both Norse mythology, and in LoTR, you get a vivid sense of life cycles, "with an awareness that everything comes to an end, that, though Sauron may go, the elves will fade as well."
So, likewise, in ASOIAF the threats of ice and fire will be defeated but there will be a cost. The Starks will reunite and rebuild their home but there will have been a cost: those they lost along the way and the trauma they had to go through to reach this ending. It is sad, you're right, but just as you noted, that doesn't mean it isn't entirely devoid of hope, or that hope and happiness take a backseat. Because like my earlier comments on the importance of courage, hope arguably becomes more admirable and precious despite all the hurt that has gone before. In the Gylfaginning section of the Prose Edda we have this discussion on the aftermath of Ragnarök:
52: Then Gangleri asked, “What will be after heaven and earth and the whole world are burned? All the gods will be dead, together with the Einherjar and the whole of mankind. Didn’t you say earlier that each person will live in some world throughout all ages?”
And Third replied, “There will be, at that time, many good places to live. So also there will be many evil ones. It is best to be in Gimle in heaven. For those who take pleasure in good drink, plenty will be found in the hall called Brimir. It stands at the place Okolnir [Never Cold]. There is likewise a splendid hall standing on Nidafjoll [Dark Mountains]. It is made of red gold and is called Sindri [Sparkling]. In this hall, good and virtuous men live. [...]
Like in LoTR, losses have occured, major ones in fact, like the deaths of both Þórr and Óðinn — an ending to the old ways of living. And I think the conclusion to ASOIAF will have a similar reflective tone. The bittersweetness in the above passage is best summed up by the observation that whilst there will be "many good places to live [...] so also there will be many evil ones." The Long Night and the Others might be vanquished, the despots deposed, but inevitably hardships will come again, just like the Long Night happened once before, and is about to happen again, yet still... we find reasons to keep living.
53: Then Gangleri asked, “Will any of the gods be living then? Or will there be anything of the earth or the sky?”
High said, “The earth will shoot up from the sea, and it will be green and beautiful. Self-sown acres of crops will then grow. Vidar and Vali survive, as neither the flood nor Surt’s fire destroyed them, and they will inhabit Idavoll, the place where Asgard was earlier. To there will come Thor’s sons Modi and Magni, and they will have Mjollnir with them. Next Baldr and Hod will arrive from Hel. They will all sit together and talk among themselves, remembering mysteries and speaking of what had been, of the Midgard Serpent and the Fenriswolf. Then they will find in the grass the gold playing pieces which the Æsir had owned. [...]
“In a place called Hoddmimir’s Wood, two people will have hidden themselves from Surt’s fire. Called Lif [Life] and Leifthrasir [Life Yearner], they have the morning dew for their food. From these will come so many descendents that the whole world will be inhabited. [...]
“There is something else that you will find amazing. The sun will have had a daughter no less beautiful than she, and this daughter will follow the path of her mother [...]”
I mean... if the above description isn’t "a dream of spring" after a Fimbulvetr [Extreme Winter], then I don’t know what is! In the Gylafinning account of the aftermath of Ragnarök, like in the ending of LoTR, there is "victory, but it’s a bittersweet victory." This is "the kind of tone [George] will be aiming for." So, in a way... I kind of know how ASOIAF ends, because I know how LoTR ends, and perhaps more crucially, I know how the Gylfaginning ends:
A "green and beautiful" springtime after an extreme winter.
Notable loss, but also survival — Vidar and Vali are notably the sons of Óðinn, so you have this new generation taking over, which has been described as an allegory for the conversion to Christianity... but that's besides the point here.
The new powers will pick up the mantle of rulership ("the gold playing pieces") and will inhabit (and rebuild?) a notable place of previous power — if GRRM is using this Norse material as a big influence... could it be that this translates into forming a Great Council at Harrenhal as @agentrouka-blog has suggested?
"They will all sit together and talk among themselves, remembering mysteries and speaking of what had been, of the Midgard Serpent and the Fenriswolf" — if that doesn't sound like a council...
From Life and Life Yearner will come many descendents — Gee, I wonder who will be tasked with that? I wonder whose foreshadowing matches up with themes of regeneration and restoration, with desires for love and family?
"The sun will have a daughter no less beautiful than she, and this daughter will follow the path of her mother" — Again, themes of new powers taking over, descendents, etc., though perhaps more specifically alluding to the Young and More Beautiful Queen prophecy 👀👀👀 It depends on who we interpret as the sun in this equation... I can think of someone who fits in pretty well...
But in conclusion, to quote the Eddic poem Skírnismál, "fearlessness is better than a faint-heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors. The length of my life and the day of my death were fated long ago." This is the Northern spirit that Tolkien takes for the end of The Lord of the Rings notes Burns. In other words, "endings are inevitable, change will always come, and evil is never fully deposed." But likewise, neither is hope and courage ever fully extinguished. "The best that any of us can do is simply that: our best, and do it against all odds, having left our hearths and our comforts for the sake of ourselves and the world." So, we can learn a huge amount from Tolkein's ending and the Gylfaginning in regards to the probable conclusion of ASOIAF, and it's why I'm never in doubt about what "bittersweet" means. It's all laid out for us to see 😉
Thanks for the ask! I kinda just rambled on, but I hope it made sense what I was getting at 😅 any excuse to talk about Norsey things...
Academic Sources:
Burns, Marjorie J., "J. R. R. Tolkien and the Journey North," Mythlore: A A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkein, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature, (1989), 4(15).
Lewis, C. S., "The Dethronement of Power" in Tolkein and the Critics, ed. by Neil D. Issacs and Rose A. Zimbardo. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1968.
St. Clair, Gloriana, "An Overview of the Northern Influences on Tolkein's Works", Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkein, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature, (1996), 2(21).
Tolkein, J. R. R., Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. London: British Academy, 1937.
#cappy's thoughts#grrm and norse mythology#anti grimdark!!#sneaky bit of jonsa foreshadowing in there if you can spot it#jonsa#jon x sansa#just a sneaky bit not majorly so#mostly f u to grimdark#grrm and j rr tolkein#a bittersweet ending#grrm and medieval sources#literary references
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Didn’t grrm himself said he hate show sansa? Why are you assuming she gonna end up similar to her show counterpart let alone having the same ending if he hates it
I’m assuming? I'M assuming, anon? Dearie me.
Just… just hold your horses there buddy… I'm guessing (NB: not assuming!) that the part of her show ending you take issue with is Sansa ending up as QiTN. *sighs* ... ok, that's your opinion, your own assumption you might even say. Doesn't have to align with mine.
"Didn't grrm himself said he hate show Sansa?" Umm, I don’t think he did? Maybe I'm just ASSUMING here but I believe the only thing he's said explicitly in relation to show Sansa, which expresses any disapproval, is that book Littlefinger would never wed Sansa to Ramsey… I think it's a bit of an ASSUMPTION to interpret that to mean he "hates" show Sansa as a whole. It's even more of an ASSUMPTION to understand that to mean Sansa's ending won’t involve her in a position of power and influence (most likely queenship) in the north... because GRRM "hates" it.
Look, I could find you sources and whatnot, and we could potentially debate back and forth… but I don't want to, lmao 😅 It's been a long day and I haven't yet done my Norwegian duolingo practice... I've got better things to do, quite frankly. Anyway, this is my little blog with my fun little thoughts and, amongst other things, I like to make predictions about asoiaf on it and I like to base those predictions on textual analysis… so I take a bit of issue with you saying I'm "assuming" anything. Anon, as an MA student in a humanities subject, working on "assumptions" is not how I operate, thank you very much 😒 I appreciate that you're not really being rude but... still.
Besides, it's my interpretation (NB: not assumption). And you're welcome to yours, anon. If you think I'm wrong cool, fine, ignore me! If a narratively satisfying Sansa ending for you is not to have her in a position of power in the north, knock yourself out! Clearly, I very much don't share that opinion. But that's the fun thing with literature and speculating on an unfinished series like this... we just don't know for sure until it's finished. Only GRRM knows.
Now, I can't tell if you're a Sansa and/or Jonsa anti, but whether you are or not, like I said anon, I'm not interested in battling it out in the asks. We think differently. All my asoiaf musings are tagged as "cappy's thoughts" — so it's all there for you to read, should you wish, and then privately and respectfully disagree with, should that be the conclusion you come to. If you want to create an angry you think vs. I think kind of discourse or discussion I suggest you look elsewhere 👋
I'm not here for that. I'm just here to post good scenery, Jonsa + Old Norse metas... and to thirst over Ben Barnes. It's really that simple.
If anything, thanks for this ask anon, because at the very least I did enjoy finding and using these Ben Affleck memes, lmao.
#cappy's thoughts#was this my first anti?#pretty tame tbf#jonsa#sansa stark#queen in the north#only chill vibes here#only answered because it was somewhat polite... ish#rude or mean anti asks will be deleted coz no thank you!
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Hi! I don't know much about Norse mythology but I wanted to ask you that is fenris wolf, companion of Hela is similar to direwolves in asioaf?
Hello! :D
Hmm that’s a good question! The Fenris wolf, or Fenrir, is an interesting figure in Norse mythology and I do think he has served as somewhat of an inspiration in ASOIAF, though I think more for one particular character, rather than the direwolves themselves...and I did start writing about that but then thought better of it. It makes more sense if I save that to post with my ongoing Norse meta. Also, it wouldn’t really answer your question about the direwolves!
But let’s have a brief look — purely description-wise, discounting his later deeds/participation in certain myths — at Fenrir in the Prose Edda, before I move onto what I think is a possible inspiration for the direwolves:
(34) But Loki had other children. With Angrboða [Sorrow Bringer], an ogress who lived in Giant Land, Loki had three children. One was the Fenriswolf, the second was the Midgard Serpent and the third was Hel. When the gods discovered that these three siblings were being brought up in Giant Land, they learned through prophecies that misfortune and evil were to be expected from these children. All the gods became aware that harm was on the way, first because of the mother’s nature, but even more so because of the father’s.
[...] The Æsir raised the wolf at home, but only Týr had the courage to approach it and feed it. But the gods saw how much the wolf grew every day and knew that all the prophecies foretold that it was destined to harm them.
So, I guess in terms of size, there could be some inspiration taken from Fenrir (though he is cosmically huge), and also the fact that he was raised by the Æsir — somewhat similar to the direwolves being raised by the Stark children? Also, the Fenriswolf is connected to certain prophecies involving the Æsir — specifically the coming of Ragnarök — which we could read as vaguely comparable to “the gods had sent these wolves” (AGOT, Eddard IV). Otherwise, we don’t really get a more detailed description of Fenrir’s appearance, and I think that’s where the comparison possibly stops, because Fenrir isn’t a protective guardian like the direwolves are...he/it is bad news. One of my favourite descriptions in Old Norse literature is of Fenrir, after being freed from his fetters, swallowing the sun at the start of Ragnarök:
(51) [...] The wolf will swallow the sun, and mankind will think it has suffered a terrible disaster. Then the other wolf will catch the moon, and he too will cause much ruin. The stars will disappear from the heavens.
[...] Meanwhile, the Fenriswolf advances with its mouth gaping: its jaw reaches to the heavens and the lower one drops to the earth. He would open it still wider, if only there was room. Flames shoot out of his eyes and nostrils.
But I suppose one of the most distinctive characteristics of the direwolves in ASOIAF is their connection to warging, which is the ability to skinchange specifically into either a wolf or dog. This term is straight out of Norse mythology, and it’s where Tolkein got it too. The origin of warg comes from Old Norse vargr, which means (1) wolf; (2) thief, robber, miscreant; (3) outlaw. We see it as the stem for a number of Old Norse-Icelandic words, also to do with wolves:
varg-hamr, m. wolf’s skin
varg-rækr, a. who is to be hunted down as a wolf
vargs-hold, n. wolf’s flesh
varg-skinn, n. wolf’s skin
vargs-líki, n. likeness of a wolf
varg-stakkr, m. a cloak of wolf’s skin
varg-úlfr, m. were-wolf
varg-ynja, f. she-wolf
Fenrir is a vargr and he is most likely the inspiration behind Tolkien’s wargs, which also may incorporate Old English wearh (m. criminal) — the wargs in LOTR are especially large, evil and ridden by orcs. In the case of GRRM though, I think he is taking inspiration from the Old Norse concepts of the hamr vs. the hugr when it comes to his interpretation of wargs being a specific kind of skinchanger. Neil Price’s The Children of Ash and Elm (great book, very accessible + by a very big cheese in the medievalist world!) explains these concepts really well:
If you met a Viking-Age Scandinavian in the street, you would have seen their hamr—her or his ‘shell’ or ‘shape’—essentially what for us is the body. Conceived as a container for other aspects of the person, the hamr was the physical manifestation of what somebody was, but, critically, it could alter. This is where the concept of shape-changing comes from, in the sense that the actual structures of the body were believed to flow and shift. But this was not true for everyone, only for the gifted (or, perhaps, the cursed). Most people stayed as they appeared, but some, in special circumstances—on certain nights, when stressed or frightened, in anger, or at times of extreme relaxation—could become something else.
This also most likely explains the origin of the werewolf, the varg-úlfr in Old Norse — though interestingly, úlfr is also another word for wolf, which suggests that there is something different about vargr, distinctive from úlfr, which is connected to Icelandic úlfur, Norwegian + Danish ulv, Old English wulf, and Modern English wolf. Indeed, a common shape to shift into was a wolf:
For men with these abilities, the alternative form was most often a large predator, such as a bear or wolf [...] Women seem to have borne a special affinity with water creatures, particularly seals, as we learn in tales of sea-wives and selkies that have parallels in many Northern cultures. Some women could change into birds. Whatever the form of these shifters, their eyes always stayed human.
Varamyr Sixskins — a very Norse inspired name if I ever saw one! I see you George, I see you — for example, can inhabit three wolves, a snowbear, a shadowcat (all large predators), and he also took Orell’s eagle after he died. It is also potentially interesting that Price notes a connection between female shapeshifters and birds, no doubt related to the goddess Freyja and her falcon cloak — I wonder if this could play into Sansa’s future abilities? People like to discount her warging abilities, due to the loss of Lady, but I’m not so sure...she’s one to watch, I think. Though we are warned in ASOIAF that shifting into a bird can be dangerous, as you may never want to stop flying...but anyway!
Although the wargs/skinchangers in ASOIAF don’t retain their human eyes in their animal forms — my god, that would be terrifying! — there is still this sense of a human-like awareness expressed through the eyes:
Can a bird hate? Jon had slain the wilding Orell, but some part of the man remained within the eagle. The golden eyes looked out on him with cold malevolence. – ASOS, Jon II
But as Price notes, this ability to shapeshift is a very unique skill, not possessed by everyone. This is comparable to the way skinchanging is described by Bloodraven to Bran:
Only one man in a thousand is born a skinchanger, and only one skinchanger in a thousand can be a greenseer. – ADWD, Bran III
Price, in a little aside, also notes that this ability could also be viewed as a curse by some. Like skinchanging in ASOIAF, it illicits a degree of fear/apprehension:
The free folk fear skinchangers, but they honor us as well. South of the Wall, the kneelers hunt us down and butcher us like pigs. – ADWD, Prologue
The difference between shapeshifting and skinchanging seems to be that with the former you actually physically shift shape, wheras with the latter, some part of you enters a different skin. But what is this “part” exactly:
They say you forget. When the man's flesh dies, his spirit lives on inside the beast, but every day his memory fades, and the beast becomes a little less a warg, a little more a wolf, until nothing of the man is left and only the beast remains. – ADWD, Prologue
It is the spirit of a person, which in Old Norse is most comparable to the concept of the hugr, as explained by Price:
Inside the ‘shape’ of a person was the second part of their being, the hugr, for which no modern translation really suffices. Combining elements of personality, temperament, character, and especially mind, the hugr was who someone really was, the absolute essence of you, free of all artifice or surface affect. It is the closest thing the Vikings had to the independent soul found in later world faiths, because it could leave the physical body behind.
It is very likely that Jon Snow’s hugr has left his “physical body behind”, and has entered the body (or hamr) of his direwolf, Ghost, after his fatal stabbing by his Watch brothers at Castle Black:
Jon fell to his knees. He found the dagger's hilt and wrenched it free. In the cold night air the wound was smoking. "Ghost," he whispered. Pain washed over him. Stick them with the pointy end. When the third dagger took him between the shoulder blades, he gave a grunt and fell face-first into the snow. He never felt the fourth knife. Only the cold... – ADWD, Jon XIII
So yeah, TLDR: I personally don’t think Fenrir, as a character/figure in Norse mythology, is the most major Norse influence on the direwolves, but I do think he was quite possibly the starting point for GRRM, since wolves are so prominent in Norse literature/mythology. But what, IMO, makes the direwolves so interesting, beyond just being big wolves, is their connection to skinchanging/warging...and I’m pretty sure GRRM has taken a lot of inspiration from Old Norse mythology in that respect, the hamr vs. hugr especially. It really is strikingly reminiscent, as in you would have to have read up a bit on it...which I’m sure he did. I SEE YOU GEORGE!!!
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