All Men Must Die

Power and Passion in Game of Thrones

Carolyne Larrington

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350141537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

'All men must die': or 'Valar Morghulis', as the traditional Essos greeting is rendered in High Valyrian. And die they do – in prodigious numbers; in imaginatively varied and gruesome ways; and often in terror within the viciously unpredictable world that is HBO's sensational evocation of Game of Thrones. Epic in scope and in imaginative breadth, the stories that are brought to life tell of the dramatic rise and fall of nations, the brutal sweeping away of old orders and the advent of new autarchs in the eternal quest for dominion. Yet, as this book reveals, many potent and intimate narratives of love and passion can be found within these grand landscapes of heroism, honour and death. They focus on strong relationships between women and family, as well as among the anti-heroes, the 'cripples, bastards and broken things'. In this vital follow-up to Winter Is Coming (2015), acclaimed medievalist Carolyne Larrington explores themes of power, blood-kin, lust and sex in order to draw entirely fresh meanings out of the show of the century.

1 Institutions and the family

Immersion fantasy begins in world-building, in the establishing of the social, geographical and historical framework within which the narrative will unfold.¹ Medievalist fantasy starts from a point where that world is already half built, through the audience’s existing understanding of the medieval and its knowledge of the relevant genre conventions. The audience knows what castles, places of worship, knights and peasants are like, it already understands in principle the ideologies of chivalry, of lineage and its relevance to social rank and the functions of monarchy. All these give shape to medieval fantasy worlds. The opening moves of the fantasy text are usually staged within a world that appears to be calmly at peace with itself – the cosiness of the Shire in The Hobbit, for example, or the well-established social order of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea.² Alternatively, the fault-lines of coming crisis may already be visible. So, in the first episode of Game of Thrones the medievalized nature of this world, with a fortified castle (Castle Black), officers and men riding out on horses and a dark and snowy landscape in which the supernatural suddenly erupts, is established even before the opening credits are seen.³ And once the different revolving, interlocking centres of the Known World, rising and falling across the map, have been shown, the episode takes us straight into the heart of Winterfell, introduces us to the Stark family and confirms the familiar conventions of castle society (Figure 4).⁴

FIGURE 4 Castle Ward, Northern Ireland, Winterfell. © Carolyne Larrington.

The opening scenes of the main episode conform to medievalist normality: Bran is practising archery in the courtyard while Sansa is embroidering under the watchful eye of Septa Mordane. Yet suddenly, from nowhere, Arya’s arrow is seen striking the target more accurately than her brother’s; this then is not as traditional a medieval world as it might first appear. Moments later, news comes of Will the deserter’s defection, and his improbable claims about seeing a White Walker. Ned takes Bran, Robb, Jon and Theon to witness his execution of the Night’s Watch man, demonstrating both the rule of law and the unpreparedness of even the most northerly of the Seven Kingdoms to give credence to the coming threat. On the way back from the execution they find the dead direwolf mother and her cubs, a clear portent, for ‘there are no direwolves south of the Wall’ (1.1) (Figure 5).

FIGURE 5 Tollymore Park, Northern Ireland, where the direwolf cubs were found. © Carolyne Larrington.

Next comes a change of scene to King’s Landing, and a mysteriously allusive conversation between Cersei and Jaime in the gallery of the Throne Room. This establishes the other key pole in the Seven Kingdoms’ power structure: the capital, the Iron Throne as the seat of the monarchy and the talk is of a secret that may – or may not – have died with Jon Arryn. Shortly afterwards, the action crosses the Narrow Sea to Pentos as Daenerys prepares for her wedding to Drogo, and the Dothraki arrive in full, yelling splendour. The parameters of this medievalized world: its northern and Gothic, southern and aristocratic and its (highly Orientalist) barbaric Other dimensions are sketched with deft, economic strokes.⁵ Families: the Houses of Stark, Lannister, Targaryen and Baratheon and the key social institutions of the Seven Kingdoms; the throne, lordship, gender roles and the importance of rank and legitimacy are all clearly laid out in the first episode, ‘Winter Is Coming’, and so it is with these building blocks of Westerosi culture that we shall begin.

Houses and bloodlines

Unlike much other modern medieval fantasy in which a protagonist from a humble background overcomes social and educational disadvantage to triumph over evil of various kinds, the major characters who contend at all levels in the ‘game of thrones’ are nobly born, even if their bloodlines are sometimes obscured. The bastards – Jon Snow, Gendry – still have royal blood flowing in their veins. There are no merchants, lawyers, doctors or poets active in Westeros, it seems, nor other representatives of what historians like to call ‘the rising bourgeoisie’.⁶ Society is stratified into two main ranks: the nobility and the smallfolk, with the Maesters (and, arguably, the septons and septas) comprising a ‘third estate’. Like the medieval church, the Citadel seems to be a place where younger noble sons could be sent to make their careers, removing them from the intrigues of House and national politics. Nevertheless, their detachment from their families does not alter the essentially conservative and narrow-minded attitude that they bring to the production of knowledge in the Seven Kingdoms.⁷

Who you are in Westeros then depends on several factors: of these social rank is the most important. If you are a member of the smallfolk, life is much the same wherever you live in the Seven Kingdoms. Life is spent scratching a living, as a labourer, miner, fisherman, or small-trader, as a housewife or servant. These smallfolk appear in the show largely as victims of the ceaseless raiding perpetrated by the armed bands who roam through the Riverlands, or as the volatile inhabitants of King’s Landing, ready at any moment to reform as a mob, one which tears the High Septon limb from limb (2.6), or pelts Cersei with refuse during her Walk of Atonement (5.10) (Figure 6).

FIGURE 6 View of Dubrovnik, King’s Landing. © Tim Bourns.

Only occasionally do we hear the perspective of smallfolk, for example in the wry comment of Ser Davos, who notes to Stannis that the great lords look down on him, because ‘My father was a crabber. Sons of lords don’t like to break bread with sons of crabbers. Our hands stink’ (2.8). The lives of the Riverlands smallfolk are epitomized by the sad little tale of the farmer and his daughter who give hospitality to the Hound and Arya on their journey to the Vale in Season Four. Believing Arya’s hastily invented story that she and the Hound are also father and daughter, and that the Hound is a knight in the service of the Tullys, the kindly and pious man shares his food with them: ‘We don’t have much but any man that bled for House Tully is welcome to it’ (4.3). Hospitality to travellers and strangers is a key value for the farmer, whose conversation over dinner gives a good sense of the popular reaction to the Red Wedding:

Walder Frey committed sacrilege that day. He shared bread and salt with the Starks. He offered them guest-right. The gods will have their vengeance. . . . Frey will burn in the seventh hell for what he did. (4.3)

Notwithstanding their host’s generosity, the next morning the Hound breaks that selfsame moral contract between guest and host. He robs the farmer of his meagre savings and, when Arya remonstrates with him, retorts that both father and daughter will die when winter comes. The circle is closed when in Season Seven the Hound, now travelling with the Brotherhood without Banners, comes back by chance to the cottage and finds the father and daughter are indeed dead, having committed suicide, or so he thinks, to escape a slow death from starvation. It’s a marker of how much the Hound has changed that, during the night, he begins privately and quietly to dig graves for them, aided by Thoros of Myr (7.1). When their paths cross those of the great lords of Westeros then, the lives of the smallfolk are of little worth. Left to themselves, as Jorah Mormont says, they ‘pray for rain, health and a summer that never ends. They don’t care what games the great lords play’ (1.4).

It is striking how much less the smallfolk seem to matter in later seasons. King’s Landing is rocked by explosions as Cersei blows up the Great Sept of Baelor, but we see no evidence of the city-folk’s response to this; the urban populace – of about a million, so Tyrion informs us – has become strangely quiescent in the face of such demonstrations of crude monarchical force. In some ways, the failure of popular resistance to Cersei’s brutal assumption of power underlines the show’s general lack of interest in everyday religious belief (see Chapter 5). And these same indifferent civilians will die – horribly – in their thousands in King’s Landing, as Daenerys firebombs the city in vengeance for Rhaegal and for all the wrongs she perceives as done to her family. As is often the case in the show, one individual’s fate is made to stand for many. In ‘The Bells’ (8.5) the tragedy of all the innocents massacred by Daenerys is epitomized by the story of Nora and her little daughter, whom Arya tries to help. Nora’s daughter clutches a small wooden horse in her hand, evoking the stag that Davos tenderly carved for Shireen, another innocent victim of the flames. Beyond the world of the show the toy horse calls up in miniature the fall of Troy: a catastrophe that gave fundamental shape to the medieval European vision of the total destruction of a city and culture.⁸ The visual grammar of ‘The Bells’ is stark indeed; in long-shot the ruined city evokes the blackened rubble of Hiroshima, or the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo. In detail, the charred corpses, contorted in agony, unrecognizable in death, recall the victims of Pompeii, whose world came crashing down as Etna exploded above their prosperous town; their fates are thus linked with those of the people of Old Valyria.⁹

The show’s other smallfolk are the various non-Dothraki peoples of Essos, such as the peaceful Lhazareen, raided by the Dothraki for slaves. Their fierce spokesman, Mirri Maz Duur, unflinchingly exposes the saviour mentality that prompts Daenerys first to rescue her – and then to burn her alive. Daenerys’s expectation of gratitude is one that will repeatedly be disappointed in her dealings with the slave populations whom she liberates. Although their lot is at least temporarily improved when Daenerys conquers their cities, the economic imperatives are inescapable; slaves sell themselves back to their old owners when they realize that the vicissitudes of a low-wage economy make the certainties of slavery seem attractive. Whenever Daenerys quits a city – whether Astapor, Yunkai or, finally, Meereen – the old order speedily reasserts itself.¹⁰ At the end of the show the future of the two principal Essosi social groups remains unclear. We do not know where the surviving Dothraki have gone, whether they hav e been transported back to Essos or remain marauding in Westeros, while Grey Worm and his Unsullied have riskily set sail for Naath, Missandei’s homeland.¹¹

If you are of noble rank, your destiny is closely linked to membership of a House, whether that is a small House whose main role is to support one of the Great Houses, or one of the major dynasties engaged in the ‘game of thrones’. Which House you belong to determines your religion, your primary allegiances, your perception of history, and your ethical values. If you are born a (male) Greyjoy, you will feel the call of the sea, and spend your life raiding widely over in Essos, or, in the latter stages of the aftermath of the War of the Five Kings, you’ll begin once more to sail up the rivers of Westeros in order to attack neighbouring kingdoms such as the Reach.¹² If you belong to House Martell in Dorne, you live in a tolerant society that allows women more freedom, both socially and sexually, where inheritance rules are different (women can inherit equally with men), and where the warm climate eliminates fear even of the arrival of winter.¹³

Membership of a Great House brings many advantages then in terms of social standing, riches and the power of self-determination when the land is peaceful. Before the death of Jon Arryn the most Ned Stark has to worry about, it seems, is disciplining the odd deserter from the Night’s Watch and watching his young family grow up. Houses have long histories, from the still-remembered tales of Brandon the Builder, the Stark ancestor who raised the Wall, founded House Stark and was the first King in the North, to the Targaryens who invaded Westeros 300 years before the events of Game of Thrones. The fortunes of the Great Houses rise and fall; the Lannisters are one of the oldest and wealthiest Houses in the Seven Kingdoms and were independent ‘Kings of the Rock’ before the Targaryen invasion. Defeat by Aegon meant a significant decline in their status. When the disguised Arya, Tywin’s cupbearer at Harrenhal, pointedly asks Tywin if he grew up with his father, he answers: ‘I did. . . . He loved us. He was a good man. But a weak man . . . a weak man who nearly destroyed our House and name’ (2.6). Tytos’s lack of reputation encouraged House Reyne of Castamere to rise against him; learning from his father’s poor example of leadership, Tywin personally oversaw the extermination of the dynasty, giving rise to the plaintive popular ballad, ‘The Rains of Castamere’, punning on the name of the luckless Lannister enemies. By contrast, the Baratheons – who would now be extinct, had Daenerys not legitimized Gendry – are a much newer House. Their founder was a general in the Targaryen army who defeated the then ruler of Storm’s End and married his daughter (Figure 7).

FIGURE 7 Castle Ward, Northern Ireland, the sigils of the Major Houses. © Carolyne Larrington.

The sigil and Words of each of the main Houses tells us something about their enduring character and beliefs, from ‘Hear Me Roar!’ – the appropriate Words of the Lannisters with their lion sigil, golden good looks and indomitable spirit – to the Starks’ ‘Winter Is Coming’ and their direwolf sigil. The wolf image provides an important metaphor for the way the younger Starks see themselves.¹⁴ One of the show’s most poignant scenes comes when Sansa, Bran and Arya are reunited at Winterfell: Sansa’s callback to what Ned used to say in the last moments of Season Seven, as she and Arya stand on the battlements once more, gazing down into the snow-covered courtyard. ‘In winter when the snows fall and the white winds blow; the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives’ (7.7). The Stark pack have regrouped (except for poor Rickon, and long-dead Robb), wonderfully changed by the journeys they have each undergone. House Baratheon’s black stag rampant is rampant no more, and its Words, ‘Ours Is the Fury’ now ring hollow for Stannis’s fraternal rage at Renly’s power-grab for the throne underlies his ultimate loss of everything he held dear. The Greyjoys’ Kraken is not a traditional medieval symbol; rather the inclusion of the cephalopod in the Seven Kingdoms’ range of archetypal beasts looks to be a borrowing from H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, the monstrous cosmic entity, whose tentacled face resembles an octopus.¹⁵ The House’s proud boast, ‘We Do Not Sow’, describes exactly the underlying principle of ‘the Old Way’, the customs of ‘reaving, roving, raiding and raping’, as Daenerys describes the Ironborn way of life, which Yara has promised to abandon (6.10).¹⁶ By the end of the show most of these Houses are greatly reduced; the Lannisters are represented only by Tyrion; the Tyrrells and Martells are gone, as are the Freys. House Mormont has lost Jorah and Lyanna; House Baratheon is constituted only by Gendry, thanks to Daenerys. Among the Great Houses, only the Starks and the Tullys have come through the decade of turmoil in numbers, and there is no ma le heir in the Stark line unless Sansa decides to risk marriage once more.

Trueborn members of each House inherit its expectations and they come under pressure to maintain or enhance its prestige, to marry strategically and to reproduce, providing the next generation. Illegitimate children may rise in fortune – Orys, the founder of House Baratheon, was rumoured to be Aegon Targaryen’s half-brother – and be promoted by unofficial routes in order to support their fathers and siblings.¹⁷ Their status varies by kingdom: Oberyn’s illegitimate daughters are known as the Sand Snakes, the eldest three of whom are fairly effective warriors, trained personally by their father. They occupy a prestigious position in Dorne.¹⁸ Other bastards are less fortunate; Robert Baratheon’s many offspring are slaughtered on Joffrey’s orders in a kind of Massacre of the Innocents, with only Gendry escaping.¹⁹ Gendry indeed finally makes good; his elevation to lordship makes him bold enough to propose to Arya. He embodies perhaps the only successful example of Daenerys’s aspiration to ‘break the wheel’; the former blacksmith’s apprentice rises to become ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Episodes
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Institutions and the family
• 2 Identity
• 3 Power and knowledge
• 4 Love, desire and hate
• 5 Gods, demons and monsters
• 6 Us and them: Gender and marginalization
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright