Rivaliteit 'Lord of the Rings' en 'Game of Thrones' is waanzin

Religion Dispatches

HBO'due southGame of Thrones returned for its third season on Sunday having already inspired a diverseness of media, from a Helmut Lang line of clothing to satires like School of Thrones, Game of Cats, and a '90s version of the opening credits (fix, of course, to Queen'south "I Desire It All.") Like the novels on which the show is partly based,Game of Thrones has resonated with viewers in a fashion that just a handful of shows have.

Among nerds and an assortment of geeks, "the American Tolkien," to quote Lev Grossman, has always held a degree of involvement, but it took HBO's Emmy honour-winning adaptation of George R.R. Martin's work to make information technology a fashionable topic among the wilder shores of journalism and academia. In fact, Wiley, the same publishers who brought u.s. titles similarTransformers and Philosophy, released an addition to their "And Philosophy" book series called—you guessed it—Game of Thrones and Philosophy.

As refreshing as it might exist to meet intellectuals taking an interest in popular civilisation, their approach tends to be overly reverential, unconcerned with the quality of the work itself. Information technology took the writers ofSaturday Dark Live to uncover the adolescent-boy ideology at piece of work in the frequent and gratuitous nudity and violence, depicting Martin'south collaborator in the HBO serial as a thirteen-yr-erstwhile male child past the name of Adam Friedberg.

Regardless of Friedberg's influences, the HBO series and peculiarly the novels collectively referred to asA Song of Ice and Burntake not gained currency merely past speaking to capitalism'southward ever-increasing demand for gore and female objectification. Rather, Martin's work speaks to the progressively complex power dynamics nosotros must navigate and make sense of in a post-Cold War world.

If J.R.R. Tolkien and his work exemplify the Christian idealism that embodied the Cold War era, then George R.R. Martin illustrates the logic of a theology that has seen the collapse of the Soviet Spousal relationship and the disappearance of clear oppositions, which in one case enabled piece of cake discrimination between friend and enemy. As theAmerican Tolkien, Martin'south piece of work illustrates the blurring of this friend/enemy dichotomy that is non necessarily unique to this era's state of perpetual disharmonize. Indeed, the series tin can exist read as an statement for Reinhold Niebuhr's Augustinian realism, a philosophical perspective that was reacting to what was seen every bit the naïve work of the Social Gospel move in negotiating the antagonistic dimension of social and political situations.

No Place for Hobbits

InThe Lord of the Rings, two hobbits, whose kind are "neither renowned as great warriors, nor counted among the very wise," defeat the Dark Lord Sauron through what can only be described equally hobbit-boiler. A story arc that concludes with the good and humble triumphing over the evil and powerful reveals Tolkien'due south clan with the ethics that are exemplified in the Beatitudes.

While dazzler, truth, and goodness are neatly packaged in elven queens and Dúnedain rangers, filth, cant, and evil are clearly stabilized in orcs, goblins, and the dark-skinned "Men of the East." Written partly during Globe War 2,The Lord of the Rings predicts the logic of the Common cold War, which was designed to maintain stability by simplifying complex relations in terms of ideal oppositions like East/W, communism/capitalism, evil/skillful, faithless/faithful, etc. This logic frames the world in terms of a strict idealism (ideal in the political sense), where walls—whether they be literal, ideological, or rhetorical—defined identity: the Berlin Wall, the Black Gate of Mordor, etc. With the increasing irrelevancy and impotence of such walls, however, Tolkien seems increasingly anachronistic.

To be sure, if the dense Samwise Gamgee and the softhearted Frodo Baggins were to ready off in Westeros—the continent where Martin's series largely takes place—their tender hobbit hearts would bring them, and almost likely everyone effectually them, to disaster. Not that strong and noble figures like Aragorn would fare much meliorate; for as Martin'southward novels make articulate, defined principles and the potent conviction to attach to them tin often exist tantamount to stupidity.

Ironically, Sean Edible bean, the same actor who played Boromir in the flick adaptation ofThe Lord of the Rings, plays the central protagonist of the outset season—in so far every bit a protagonist tin exist in such a series. In place of the aggressive and easily corrupted Boromir, Bean cultivates an honorable and selfless highborn in his portrayal of Lord Eddard Stark, the newly appointed Paw of the King.

If in that location is a clear paradigm for understanding the stardom between Tolkien's Christian idealism and Martin's Christian realism, the office of the Manus of the Male monarch is information technology. For information technology is here that we locate a Tolkienesque grapheme with all the Manichean logic of an Aragorn forced, by his close friend the rex, into an office that demands i to "play the game." And every bit the tagline of the evidence says, "In the game of thrones, you win or y'all die."

For those who have seen the offset season, it begins as practice many fairy tales with the brave soldier (Eddard Stark) setting out to defeat the wicked queen (Cersei Lannister). Over the class of the season Eddard discovers that his sometime friend the king has no legitimate heirs, though the queen has given nascency to 3 illegitimate children through her incestuous couplings with her brother. And what is a noble man practise with this data, but to privately inform the queen and so that she might flee with her children, of form. Shortly thereafter, the male monarch is assassinated under the pretense of a hunting accident, and Eddard is imprisoned as a traitor earlier (spoiler alert!) he is executed in front of his ii daughters.

Your Mercy Killed the King

Placing traditional theodicy aside for a moment, the question after all this misery is simple: Why did Eddard die? At the outset, identifying Eddard'southward death as a unproblematic tragedy misses an important indicate that is oftentimes fabricated by Christian realists. Tragedy, as Reinhold Niebuhr observed inThe Irony of American History, elicits "adoration as well every bit pity" for a man similar Eddard. Nosotros pity him for such a terrible finality while nosotros admire his conviction and compassion for Cersei and her children.

Nevertheless, tragedy does not account for the style in which, to quote Niebuhr in one case again, "virtues are vices." This lack of dialectical thinking, according to which man agency is substantially either virtuous or sinful, is unthinkable in Christian realism. An idealist who chop-chop classifies an event every bit tragic fails to take into account the evil that is an "inevitable consequence of the practice of homo creativity": the evil that is in the good.

Irony, however, notes that the very quality that made Eddard worthy of praise ultimately led to his downfall. For Niebuhr, irony is fundamentally a religious category, presupposing a divine approximate who "laughs at human pretensions without beingness hostile to man aspirations." The Christian realist interpretatively locates irony in spaces of "hidden pregnant" that "elicit not but laughter but a knowing smile." This "knowing smiling" in turn acknowledges the failings in the virtues themselves by revealing cool juxtapositions of "strength and weakness; of wisdom through foolishness; or foolishness as the fruit of wisdom; of guilt arising from the pretensions of innocency; or innocency hiding backside ostensible guilt."

Lord Varys, the rex's master of spies, makes this very Augustinian signal when he visits Eddard in prison to ask what kind of madness could have prompted him to tell the queen that he'd learned of her fornication. Every bit an idealist who hasn't yet learned politics' nearly vicious lesson, Eddard answers, "The madness of mercy. That she might save her children." To which Varys responds: "Ah, the children. It's e'er the innocents who suffer. Information technology wasn't the wine that killed Robert, nor the boar. The wine slowed him down and the boar ripped him open, simply it was your mercy that killed the rex."

Upon the execution of Eddard Stark, in possibly the major juxtaposition of the serial thus far, Tyrion Lannister is then appointed to the newly vacant office of Hand of the Male monarch. Eddard's moral sentimentalism prompts his trusting of those who would ultimately betray him, whereas Tyrion devises elaborate ruses to trick would-be enemies. Unlike Eddard, Tyrion is non deluded by moral illusions and therefore capable of predicting the direction of cocky-interest in the pursuits of those effectually him.

Where he criticized Eddard, Lord Varys commends Tyrion, proverb, "Y'all're quite good at beingness Hand, you know. Jon Arryn and Eddard Stark were good men, honorable men. Just they disdained the game and those who play it. You bask the game. And you play it well."

The nature of such juxtapositions is precisely what Niebuhr analyzes inThe Children of Low-cal and the Children of Darkness, in which he argues that the children of night (Tyrion) are wiser than the children of light (Eddard) considering they take all "factors in a social and political state of affairs, which offer resistance to established norms, into account, particularly the factors of self-interest and power."

What one should resist concluding at this point, still, is a purely egotist alliance with ability and the children of darkness at the expense of any moral dimension. People tend to read the lesson of Christian realism without its religious dimension, as if one is adamant, or mayhap doomed, to live in the world of ability politics. Such is the case withRealpolitikstrategies, which invariably destroy their very reason for beingness, revealing the nihilism of pure power politics.

It'due south the charge of thetranscendent that differentiates Christian realism from pure realism. Which is to say that Christian realism's emphasis upon transcendence, provides an indelible, critical judgment, centered on the Gospel, upon any adaptation of the ideal in politics. In Simon Critchley's conception, this imperative is experienced as an "infinite demand" that interrupts the politics of adaptation that and so frequently weigh downward realist efforts. Christian realism, in other words, finds its fulfillment in a synthesis between the two Hands of the King, Eddard Stark and Tyrion Lannister.

Perhaps this synthesis is embodied in the liberationist figure of Daenerys Targaryen (for the true Martin nerds out there, possibly the 2nd coming of Azor Ahai—the "prince[ss] that was promised"), who frees slaves, liberates cities, and claims whole groups of conquered women as handmaidens to forbid them from being raped by Dothraki warriors. What we notice in the figure of Daenerys is an interruption of pure realism (both politically and metaphysically) by fashion of an eruption of the transcendent.

Retrieve, for example, the episode "Valar Morghulis" (valyrian for "all men must die"). Weeping tears of joy in the presence of the married man and kid she thought dead, Daenerys hears the echo of her fledgling dragons' cry. This telephone call past her ultimate concern disrupts the virtual space generated by the bluish-lipped warlocks of Qarth (known equally the Undying), which allows her to sublimate her egoistic impulses and leave behind the illusion of her breathing husband and child whom she could have chosen to stay with.

Having been told that entering the House of the Undying to rescue her dragons was incommunicable, Daenerys' faith in "her ain magic" and her love for the "only children [she] will e'er take" allows her to do what the pure realist says cannot be washed. Perhaps Martin is not simply showing us the necessity of realism, simply also the style out of it.