“There has been a veritable Maker Faire of commentary on the iconic and addictive show, falling mainly into three genres:”
“straightforward conjecture about how the tangled plot lines will come together (and whether they can);”
“literary theorizing about the ways the show mixes and revises genres and deals with race, gender, and imperialism;”
“and political commentary that fingers the threads linking Westeros to Washington in our age of cynicism, heroic (or nefarious) outsiders, and alarming changes in the weather that people in power keep trying to ignore.”
“These fixations are on point: the series is high political drama and broke into high-middlebrow chatter by subverting the fantasy genre in a series of appealing ways (psychological realism, novelistic kinds of moral ambiguity and character development, willingness to kill the audience’s darlings) that neatly dovetail with the most fashionable conventions of prestige TV.”
“But in one respect, the world of Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire is just as traditionally fantastical as the worlds of Grandfather Tolkien, Pious Uncle C. S. Lewis, and Skeptical Cousins Philip Pullman and Ursula Le Guin.”
“The books’ pleasures are not just narrative and political, but cosmological.”
“All of these authors engage in world-making in a deep sense: they are interested in the organizing principles of their imagined universes, and the moral and historical meanings of their elements and landscapes.”
“Both the books and the show have, so far, put cosmology at the center while leaving it mysterious, with many open questions about what sort of world this is.”
“So far, the cosmology of Game of Thrones, following that of the books, is what you might call magical-ecological. The kingdoms and houses of Westeros have deep and obscure affinities with their environments, from the animals on many of their sigils to the custom of giving bastards the surname of their kingdom’s element: Snow, Sand, et cetera.”
“These ties have grown nominal and rote, like the words of lifeless rituals, in the “present” when GOT begins. They grow stronger, though, as the story moves, and the kingdoms splinter and reassert their old independence. All of this is prefigured at the very start, when the Stark children, who come as close as any set of characters to tying together the narrative and cosmological elements of the series acquire the flesh-and-blood direwolves that revive an ancient bond between their house and its emblem.”
“This revival is one part of a renewal of magic more generally. Dragons, which had withered into smoky iguanas during their centuries of domestication in King’s Landing, the Westerosi capital, are reborn as the most terrifying creatures of their world — and, like the wolves, linked to their human allies, the exiled House Targaryen.”
“The Fire God of the East, R’hllor, whose decadent priests brandish faux-magic flaming swords and at first seem to be leftover frauds from an exhausted court religion, begin producing waves of reincarnations, from the bastard Stark brother Jon Snow (named, of course, for the elements of the North), who is murdered in a mutiny, to the Lightning Lord, leader of a band of masterless knights who call themselves the Brotherhood Without Banners, who returns, a bit more battered, after each of a series of defeats in single combat.”
“As magic waxes, so does the vitality of religious belief, part of a general revival of obscure powers. Only one of the religions in Martin’s pluralistic world shows no sign of being rooted in something deeper than the everyday: the state religion of Westeros, the faith of the Seven archetypes (Father, Mother, Warrior, Stranger, et cetera).”
“A kind of Jungian riff on the official paganism of ancient Rome, the faith of the Seven seems to be a purely human creation, a body of ritual, institution, and wisdom literature that promotes pro-social behavior and deference to established authority.”
“It promotes deference, anyway, until its tepid ritual life is swelled, then swept away, by grassroots zealots — the “sparrows” of the Church Militant — reminders that the orderly canals of religious observance are watered by great floods of passionate, often destabilizing belief.”
“Throughout, the forms of religious, political, and legal life overlie more basic energies, which can be violent and disruptive, but are the ultimate sources of order and event in this cosmology, as well as the long-dry springs of religious and magical energy.”
“Up to the beginning of this season, viewers have met three elemental forces, two of them named in the Song of Ice and Fire.”
“The forces of Ice, the armies of the blue-eyed ice-demon known only as the Night King, stand for an end to human (and perhaps all warm-blooded) life.”
“Fire comes in the form of the dragons that are bound to Daenerys Targaryen (“Mother of Dragons” to her followers), who were once the source of political authority in Westeros, after enabling earlier Targaryens to conquer the island and unite its kingdoms.”
“If there is promise of a balance or integration of elemental forces, it is in the earth-based powers that the aboriginal Westerosi, the Children of the Forest, knew intimately. These powers are concentrated in the red-and-white Weir Trees, which the First Men, the early colonist ancestors of some modern Westerosi, adopted into their remnant regional religion, focused on the Old Gods.”
“If fire is the life-force so proudly strong it can consume life itself, then earth seems to be its counterpoint, humble and rooted in a more than metaphorical sense, alive with consciousness that links humans, their animal alter egos, and the trees that serve as spiritual cellular towers for devotees of the Old Gods.”
“What it means to bring these forces together will say a lot about how Game of Thrones imagines order in general.”
“The implication so far is that death lies in division, hope in ever higher-order commonality.”
“The deeply felt animus between the Southrons of the civilized kingdoms and the tribal, semi-anarchic Wildlings is a kind of confused substitute for the misremembered struggle against White Walkers: the degenerated, depopulated Night’s Watch, guardians of the Wall separating North from South, imagine that the Wall was built to keep out Wildlings, and no longer quite believe in Walkers — until they meet them.”
“Don’t mistake your element for the world: frequently, the tragedy in Game of Thrones pivots on characters who wholeheartedly believe in principles that are noble but parochial and incomplete, and fail when they enter wider fields.”
“The defense of a dynasty has become something else, the vanguard of the human — even the terrestrial — struggle for life.”
“Ecologically speaking, of course, earth is where life and death meet: soil is the product of decay and the source of new life. Fire is change brought to point of self-consumption, ice the end of change in stasis.”
“Alternatively, both are forms of stasis: the Fire God’s worshippers seem to seek the victory of immortality, the Night King the triumph of extinction.”
“Living soil is something between the two extremes, matter in motion but also in pattern, dying into new life.”
“If the story retains Martin’s tragic awareness, the final season will recall that people and peoples rarely want to die into new life, and great violence often comes with the rage against the dying of (one’s own) light.”
“We’ve had indications that the White Walkers were first created by the earthy Children of the Forest, perhaps as a super-weapon against invaders, so maybe even a culture that elementally resembles soil has its parochialism and pride.”
“Our own game of thrones has taken a terrifying turn. Winter is other people.”