Winning the Game of Thrones: The Host of Characters and their Agendas (16 page)

     
House Cordwayner may reference science fiction writer Cordwainer Smith.
Hammer
hal, their ancient seat, makes a logical smith’s home.

     
Two of Brienne’s mock suitors from her youth include Harry Sawyer and Robin Potter. Brienne beats them both, unhorsing Harry and then giving Robin 
Potter
a nasty
scar on his head
. Perhaps Brienne doesn’t care much for the
Harry Potter 
books.

Classics

     
In the fourth book, some mummers are performing The Lord of the Woeful Countenance, a nod to Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the Knight of the Woeful Countenance (IV: 507).

     
Cersei comments that for all she knows, Tyrion could be hiding in Baelor’s Sept, swinging on the bell ropes to make that awful din. This sounds like Quasimodo, the deformed bell ringer in Victor Hugo’s
The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

     
“You were made to be kissed, often and well,” Jorah says to Daenerys versus “You should be kissed and often and by someone who knows how,” as Rhett Butler says to Scarlet in
Gone with the Wind. 

     
The “Queen of Love and Beauty,” a mystery knight defeating the other combatants, an unexpected, unmarriageable romantic heroine, and other trappings of the Tournament at Harrenhal are historically based but most familiar to modern readers from Walter Scott’s
Ivanhoe.

     
Beric Dondarrion, the renegade lord hiding in the woods and proclaiming loyalty to the one true king, while robbing knights on behalf of the commoners, has strong parallels with Robin Hood. He even has a fighting priest – Thoros of Myr – a minstrel, and a man with a colorful cloak (Lem Lemoncloak) fighting beside him.

     
In an interview, Martin discussed why his saga is called
Ice and Fire
, saying that the Wall and the dragons were “the obvious thing but yes, there’s more.” He noted:

People say I was influenced by Robert Ford’s poem [clearly, Robert
Frost
’s poem is meant], and of course I was, I mean... Fire is love, fire is passion, fire is sexual ardor and all of these things. Ice is betrayal, ice is revenge, ice is… you know, that kind of cold inhumanity and all that stuff is being played out in the books.
^[40]

Fire and Ice

by Robert Frost, 1920

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.
^[41]

This suggests two kinds of apocalypse—fire is as destructive as ice. A balance must be reached between the fire of volcanoes and dragons that caused the Doom of Valyria and the perils of the endless winter.

     
Jon’s friends express their book five anger with him in a moment straight out of Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
. Martin borrows quotes from the play as Dolorous Ed warns Jon of danger, telling him his friends “have a hungry look about them…” (V:517), similar to Caesar’s comment, “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look/ He thinks too much; such men are dangerous” (I.ii.190-195).

In both stories, the hero receives dark omens and warnings, from “Beware the Ides of March” (I.ii.18) to Melisandre’s vision that “daggers in the dark” are coming and Jon must keep Ghost nearby. Around Jon, his raven and wolf act agitated. In Caesar’s story, the graves open and the dead pour out, echoing the White Walkers. Calpurnia, Caesar’s wife, dreams that his husband’s statue, “Which, like a fountain with an hundred spouts/ Did run pure blood; and many lusty Romans/ Came smiling, and did bathe their hands in it” (II.ii.77-79). Jon’s dream may be just as interesting and prophetic: