Winning the Game of Thrones: The Host of Characters and their Agendas (17 page)

Jon was armored in black ice, but his blade burned red in his fist. As the dead men reached the top of the Wall he sent them down to die again. He slew a greybeard and a beardless boy, a giant, a gaunt man with filed teeth, a girl with thick red hair. Too late he recognized Ygritte. She was gone as quick as she’d appeared. (V:769)

     
Other mashed-up Julius Caesar quotes abound in the fifth book, emphasizing this parallel between stories: “Cowards die many times before their deaths/ The valiant never taste of death but once” (II.ii.32-37). Jojen Reed in turn tells Bran: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies…The man who never reads lives only one” (V:452). Varys says, “Those who die heroic deaths are long remembered, thieves and drunks and cravens soon forgot” (V:311) compared with Marc Antony’s funeral words: “The evil that men do lives after them; /The good is oft interred with their bones (III:ii:74-75).

Television, Comics, Football, and More

     
When Catelyn drags Tyrion along to the Vale, “Lharys, Mohar, and Kurliket,” Lord Bracken’s men-at-arms, come along. Martin has revealed these are the Three Stooges, Larry, Moe, and Curly.

     
Lord Tommen Costayne of Three Towers references Thomas B. Costain, a favorite historical fiction writer of Martin’s. The arms are a black rose quartered with a silver chalice, for his books
The Black Rose
and
The Silver Chalice
.

     
The knight Courteney Greenhill references Greenhill, the minaturist who produces toy knights from the legendary Courteney molds, which Martin collects.

     
A sailor comments, “Hacking off some boy’s stones with a butcher’s cleaver and handing him a pointy hat don’t make him Unsullied. That dragon queen’s got the real item, the kind that don’t break and run when you fart in their general direction” (V:325). This last comes from
Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

     
The array of brazen beast masks at the book five pits contains “lions and tigers and bears” from a certain film.

     
In the fourth book, some hedge knights wear a blue beetle, a thunderbolt, and a green arrow. Here we find the DC Justice League: Blue Beetle, Green Arrow, and the Flash.

     
House Grell, with a green arrow, may reference
Green Arrow
comic writer/artist Mike Grell.

     
Triarch Belicho of Volantis is noted for his run of undefeated victories until he was torn limb-from-limb by giants, like Patriots coach Bill Belichick, who had a similar run of 2007 victories until defeated by Martin’s beloved New York Giants.

     
Ser Patrek of King's Mountain is slain by the giant Wun Wun. Patrek’s sigil, a blue star on silver, echoes the Dallas Cowboys, while quarterback Phil Simms’s player number was 11, one-one.

Martin’s Other Works

     
The Fever River echoes Martin’s novel,
Fevre Dream.