War and violence are common themes throughout much of world literature.
From time-honored works such as the Bible and Homeric poems to more popular
contemporary productions of science fiction and fantasy, such as Star Wars
and Game of Thrones. The perennial struggle between the forces of good
and evil have long held a deep fascination for audiences across cultures. War,
it would seem, is the stuff of epic. Violence is what makes heroes and forges
nations…or so we are led to believe. Yet, beneath the surface of such works of epic
literature, which are often seen as glorifying and validating war, there is sometimes
something deeper going on. If we are attentive, we can perhaps discern thematic
elements that reflect upon and problematize our preconceived notions of
violence and conflict. This is certainly the case with two very prominent
examples of epic saga—Homer’s Odyssey and George RR Martin’s Song of
Ice and Fire, upon which the popular HBO series Game of Thrones* is based. Both of these narratives
address the issue of war and violence in some surprising, even subversive,
ways.
In both worlds, the protagonists are dealing with the aftermath of large-scale
war and are faced with issues such as rebellion, civil strife, usurpation, and
regicide. The old established order has been violently swept away and the aftershocks
of violent upheaval are being felt by succeeding generations. As a result, an
intense desire is felt by the key players to re-establish a sense of balance
and equilibrium—to bring order out of chaos. In the case of Homer’s poem,
Odysseus finds himself as one of the few surviving heroes from the ill-fated
siege of Troy, while his son Telemachus seeks to prevent the usurpation of his
household by a gang of would-be suitors vying for his mother Penelope. Meanwhile,
in Westeros (which plausibly resembles the world of Homer) a long-established
dynasty has been overthrown and replaced by an unstable new regime of upstart
houses. Political intrigues abound as rivals compete for the Iron Throne.
Tellingly, both stories involve a coalition of rulers declaring war on a
greater power due to the abduction of a woman. In Homer’s case, it is Helen,
wife of the Mycenaean king Menelaus, who was carried away by Paris, a Trojan
prince, as a reward for declaring Aphrodite the most beautiful of the Olympian
goddesses, while in Westeros it is the abduction of Lyanna Stark by prince
Rhaegar Targaryen, even though she had already been betrothed to Robert
Barathaeon. In such heroic universes, even though the honor of women has been
violated, it is the men who claim even greater offence, deprived as they are of
their marital property. Since the men’s only response to this kind of offense
is to declare war, violence inevitably begets more violence.
The two stories also take place in what anthropologists might term
“honor and shame” societies. As such, in both Westeros and the Homeric world,
honour and shame are understood as hereditary. Sons and daughters regularly
pay for the sins of their parents or are accorded a respect that they
themselves did not earn. Why else would Telemachus feel such an urgent need, obligation
really, to defend the honor of a father he has never known? Or, why do the
Stark children risk their own lives to avenge their father’s murder? Offenses to
honor, real or imagined, serve to feed the warrior ethos.
Moreover, the two epics are filled with restless spirits of the dead.
The Westeros saga is haunted by the memory of Aerys Targaryan, the so-called
“Mad King”, while the Odyssey is haunted by the spectre of Agamemnon,
chief ruler of the Mycenaean coalition. Some of whose actions are no less mad.
For instance, when the gods are preventing the Greeks from sailing to Troy,
Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter, Iphigenia, in order to receive favorable
winds. On his return home from the conflict, he brings with him a captured
concubine, Cassandra, only to be murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her
lover. In response, the royal couple’s exiled child, Orestes, must return to
avenge his father’s death and execute his own mother. In the Odyssey, this
sort of decisive action is repeatedly presented to Odysseus’ son, Telemachus,
as a model to be emulated. Yet, it is such ghosts, combined with the ethos of
honor and shame, that perpetuate the cycle of violence throughout the
generations. In Westeros, as in ancient Greece, the response to war is more war;
murder is met with murder. On it goes seemingly without end or resolution.
Yet, appearances can be deceiving. As much as Game of Thrones
employs a fairly gratuitous amount of explicit violence (it is a HBO series
after all), the real heroes are not in fact the warriors and lords of the great
houses—most of whom wind up meeting rather gruesome ends. Instead, the fate of
Westeros appears to rest in the hands of some rather unlikely individuals—a
disabled boy with visionary powers, a bastard exile with no real name, and an
orphaned girl who bends great cities to her irresistible will. Similarly, the
protagonists of the Odyssey are equally atypical. Odysseus himself is
not the usual Homeric hero. He is more inclined to use his wit rather than his
sword when faced with adversity, while Telemachus is characterized as an
indecisive youth. Penelope, for her part, who is equally as crafty as her
husband, is instrumental to the poem’s climactic resolution. Moreover, since
all of Odysseus’ warrior companions die during the homecoming, he has to rely
on a series of female characters (Nausikaa, Circe, Calypso) and servants
(Eumaios and Eurykleia) to restore his household and his honor. In both
stories, it is people who are normally obscured and victimized by war and
violence that are brought to the foreground and who are the central focus of
the narrative arc. In this way, both the Odyssey and Game of Thrones
work to subvert the traditional heroic narrative in unique and often surprising
ways.
In the Odyssey nowhere is this subversion of the heroic ethos
more poignantly expressed than in Book 8, where the singer Demodokos recounts
the story of the Wooden Horse and the sacking of Troy. Strikingly, Homer then
compares Odysseus' emotional reaction to the story, in which we might expect him
to take pride, to the fate of a woman weeping over the dead body of her husband
and conquered city as she is carried off into slavery (8.523-530). Such a
juxtaposition shifts the emphasis from the conqueror to the conquered and
undermines the traditional epic narrative. Later in Book 22, when the nurse Eurykleia
rejoices over the slain bodies of the suitors, Odysseus rebukes her, saying:
“It is not piety to glory so over slain men” (22.412 trans. Lattimore). Here,
we might imagine, Odysseus is seeking to halt the cycle of violence—unavoidable
at times, but not an end in itself.
Obviously, in the case of Game of Thrones, the plot has yet to
play itself out. So we cannot be sure how the saga will eventually resolve its deeply
rooted violence. Will the Mother of Dragons return to Westeros and burn her
enemies to ashes? Perhaps. Or will Jon Snow restore some kind of balance to the
North, ushering a new Golden Age? Will the writers troll everyone and leave
only Ramsay Bolton alive? (Edit: clearly not) If there’s one thing we do know, Game of Thrones
has always toyed with its audience. The series is constantly undermining our
expectations and dashing our hopes. From the startling execution of Ned Stark
in season one to the slaughter of his apparently worthy successor at the Red
Wedding. We, as the audience, are consistently deprived of the heroes that we
think we want, only to get the villains we more probably deserve. Still, the
primary focus of the series so far has not been on glorifying the great
battles between the houses, but on exploring the suffering and confusion of
those caught in the middle and brutalized by war and blood-feud. To be sure,
the scenes of violence (particularly sexual violence) are often gratuitous and
grotesque, but they shouldn’t distract us from some of the more implicitly
important themes. At times, the regret and disillusionment with such savagery
is palpable, as when Jon Snow says to Sansa Stark in “Book of the Stranger”
(S06 E04): “we should have never left home.”
Perhaps they shouldn’t have. Nor should the Greeks have ever sailed to
Troy. Still, in both stories the protagonists find themselves in situations and
dynamics well beyond their control. How they respond is key. Will they be
corrupted by the violence of war, or will they over come it? Will they allow it
to destroy their humanity, or will they be transformed? Only time will tell. In
the interim, it is useful to reflect how some of our core cultural narratives present,
explain, and even sometimes work to undermine the savage impulses of the human
heart.
*My discussion is
restricted to the HBO series.
