From My Fantasy Writing Desk
Saturday afternoon I’m teaching a session on “Making the Fantastical Real,” at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writing Conference that the Virginia Piper Center for Creative Writing holds each year.
For one of my examples to demonstrate how authors use history to create fantasy worlds, I took excerpts from the opening of George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones. As a little taste of my talk, here’s the passage and my analysis.
Excerpts from Prologue, Game of Thrones:
“. . . but that was not a feeling to share with your commander. Especially not a commander like this one.
Ser Waymar Royce was the youngest son of an ancient house with too many heirs. He was a handsome youth of eighteen, grey-eyed and graceful and slender as a knife. Mounted on his huge black destriēr, the knight towered above Will and Gared on their smaller garrons. He wore black leather boots, black woolen pants, black moleskin gloves, and a fine supple coat of gleaming black ringmail over layers of black wool and boiled leather. Ser Waymar had been a Sworn Brother of the Night’s Watch for less than half a year, but no one could say he had not prepared for his vocation. At least insofar as his wardrobe was concerned.
…Royce…drew his longsword from its sheath. Jewels glittered in its hilt, and the moonlight ran down the shining steel. It was a splendid weapon, castle-forged…
A shadow emerged from the dark of the wood. It stood in front of Royce. Tall, it was, and gaunt and hard as old bones, with flesh pale as milk. Its armor seemed to change color as it moved…
Will heard the breath go out of Ser Waymar Royce in a long hiss. “Come no farther,” the lordling warned. His voice cracked like a boy’s. He threw the long sable cloak back over his shoulders, to free his arms for battle, and took his sword in both hands. The wind had stopped. It was very cold.
The Other slid forward on silent feet. In its hand was a longsword like none that Will had ever seen. No human metal had gone into the forging of that blade. It was alive with moonlight, translucent, a shard of crystal so thin that it seemed almost to vanish when seen edge-on. There was a faint blue shimmer to the thing, a ghost-light that played around its edges, and somehow Will knew it was sharper than any razor.”
My analysis:
At this opening moment, there are many things a first-time reader doesn’t know, what the Night’s Watch is or the Wall, for example, or what makes the two more experienced, non-commander men so fearful. That will come gradually because Martin is skillful and doesn’t dump in a giant backstory about those key items. What he depends on instead to stave off reader confusion, the kinds of questions that you don’t want your reader to ask in the opening chapter, is a collective historical knowledge.
Notice the micro-tension of the conflict between the commander and the two other men. It isn’t the main point of this scene, the significant arc—that lies in the conflict between the living Men and the dead Others. But the supernatural enemy must be hooked into what we know for us to fear it, to build the palpable terror that permeates this scene.
Martin uses the structure of early medieval society as that base to hook into. So the lordling commander’s fancy clothes are described in detail, at first to make vivid the source of this small conflict between a high and mighty inexperienced commander, a lordling, and his two underlings about whom Martin adds enough detail so that we trust their judgement over the commander’s. For example, “No one could move through the woods as silent as Will.”
This is a conflict we understand instantly, the bigshot ignorant boss forcing his workers to do the stupid thing, and it’s set in a social structure we recognize and know enough about to fill in coherently, and one we find romantically appealing—a knight on his war horse (destrier) with his armor (ringmail) and sword, riding out fearlessly with his men. Lots of targeted markers set the time and place—longswords, castles, lords and knights, and even the kinds of horses… (Scottish longsword above photo by Halflang Wiki)
Martin’s built a known baseline so cleverly, all in the guise of that micro-tension conflict. Thus Martin places us in a familiar conflict in a familiar social construct in a familiar natural setting with familiar weapons on familiar animals, etc. Then he defines the supernatural element by starting in that known world—armor and a longsword—but he draws the magical contrasts. Martin starts the supernatural description of the Other’s weapon with “In its hand was a longsword.” It may be utterly different, but we know what shape and size it has. We know what style of fighting it will involve. We can instantly visualize and accept its reality and move on believably to the magical qualities.
You’ll have to attend my session to get the whole story of how to build believable worlds and emotional engagement, but that’s a snippet.
Archaeology I Enjoyed
Early Practices of Human Sacrifice
Human sacrifice in the ancient world fascinates us and disturbs us, much like our modern obsession with serial killers. This interesting post in Ancient Near East Today discusses this complex subject.
Early dynasties in both Mesopotamia and Egypt engaged in large scale human sacrifice in the context of burials. It is hypothesized that this slaughter served, on the one hand, to mark the power and authority of the rulers and, on the other hand, to provide the servants, musicians, warriors, etc. that the ruler would need in the next world.
I don’t think it’s surprising that these practices did not last for long in these cultures. Good way to cause a revolt, I would think. Symbolic representations such as ceramic figurines appear in later Egyptian tombs to provide the “staff” for the afterlife of the dead. That strikes me as a good example of metaphoric human thought used to come up with a pragmatic solution to the problem of “how not to kill off a ton of people every time a king dies.” Such figurines/symbols also occurred outside Egypt–a friend reminded me of the ceramic warriors in China, for example. Mesopotamian views of the afterlife tended to exclude continuation of awareness and functioning of the social roles of life, so having a work crew buried with you would have less appeal and I think the overall practice passed away rather than shifting to the symbolic. Click here for Ancient Near East Today “Human Sacrifice in the Ancient Near East and Egypt”
Surprising Insides of an Egyptian Coffin
Hidden treasure. Professors at a Harvard museum lifted a lid off a 3,000 year-old Egyptian outer coffin. Inside they found an image of the sun god Ra-Horakhty, partially obscured by a thick, tar-like coating.
It “was a heart-stopping moment,” said Peter Der Manuelian, Barbara Bell Professor of Egyptology and director of the Harvard Semitic Museum, of the discovery his team made last month after opening the coffin of Ankh-khonsu, a doorkeeper in the Temple of Amun-Ra.
The body of Ankh-khonsu had been removed more than 100 years ago when the coffin was brought from Egypt to Cambridge, and the container was reopened about 30 years ago. But for reasons unknown, “there was no modern documentation of the coffin’s interior, so we had no idea what to expect, plain wood or an exquisitely painted deity staring back at us,” said Manuelian.
How’s that for a happy surprise? Seems like the museum might want to carry on with some careful documentation of other neglected pieces in the collection. Click here for Archaeology News Network “Painting Of Deity Found Inside 3,000-Year-Old Egyptian Coffin”