A Stop at Oxford

November 13, 2024 at 8:13 am

Oxford is a legendary place. One of the world’s great universities, and the literary capital of England, rich with history, it has figured in more novels than I can count, including many classic works of fantasy. Philip Pullman’s amazing trilogy HIS DARK MATERIAL is set there. So is BABEL, OR THE NECESSITY FOR VIOLENCE, R.F. Kuang’s Nebula-winning bestseller. It was the model for Hogwart’s in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, and a lot of the Potter films were shot there. And of course J.R.R. Tolkien lived and taught there.

Somehow I never made it there on any of my previous visits to the UK, but I was determined to not it miss it this time around. When the Oxford Writers House invited me to join Pullman for a panel discussion on Writing Fantasy, I had to say yes. I had never met Pullman … though I’m a huge fan of HIS DARK MATERIALS, with its daemons and armored bears. (Armored bears! So cool!!) It would have been a thrill to share a platform with him. I also wanted to pop into the Eagle & Child as well, the pub where Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and the Inklings got together to share a pint and talk about books.

Alas, it turned out that the Bird & Baby (as the Eagle & Child was nicknamed by the locals) was closed for renovations. And then Philip Pullman got ill, and had to cancel, so I was left to fend for myself.

Fortunately I have lots of practice with fending for myself.

Instead of panel, the event turned into an interview and booksigning. We had a sold out crowd (about 450, they told me) lots of eager students and aspiring writers, and more questions than I could possibly answer if I had been there for a week instead of a day. And beforehand I got a short tour of Oxford itself, which was just as magical as I thought it would be. The library was astonishing, and they even showed me some of J.R.R. Tolkien’s working papers… including his first vision of Helm’s Deep, which he drew on the back of a student essay he was grading.

Oxford was kind enough to record the session, and upload it to YouTube.

After the questions, we moved to the side of the room to sign books. We had a wonderful group of fans and readers on hand. Not all of them were Oxford students; we had people there from all over England, and some from across the Channel as well. Several presented me with handwritten fan letters, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciated that. The letters were heartfelt, thoughtful, and very knowledgeable about my work. The sort of letters that Tolkien himself might have been moved by.

I had a wonderful time. I only wish our visit had been longer. Oxford was just as fascinating as I hoped it would be, and I could easily have spent days exploring it. But the road goes ever on, and I had promises to keep, so the best we could do was spend the night, and then head off back to London…

But not before we made a stop on the outskirts of town, to visit the graveyard where Tolkien and his wife were laid to read. I could not leave town without paying homage to the greatest fantasist of all time.

But I’ll save my thoughts about that for the next installment of my “travel blog.”

I hope I will be able to return to Oxford the next time I make it over to England. There’s so much left to see.

Current Mood: pleased pleased

Tags: a song of ice and fire, signed books, signings, travels, worldcon, writing

Here There Be Dragons

July 11, 2024 at 7:06 am

I trust you all caught “The Red Dragon and the Gold,” the fourth episode of season 2 of HOUSE OF THE DRAGON. A lot of you have been wanting for action, I know; this episode delivered it in spades with the Battle of Rook’s Rest, when dragon met dragon in the skies.

Has there ever been a dragon battle to match it? I seem to recall that REIGN OF FIRE had a few scenes where a dozen dragons were wheeling through the skies. So, okay, maybe that was a bigger scene, with more dragons on screen… but a better battle? I don’t think so. Our guys knocked this one out of the castle. I think they took it as a challenge. And the dragons…

Dragons are mythical, of course. In the real world, the one we live in as opposed to those we like to read about… dragons never existed… though similar creatures can be found in legends all around the world. Some believe that maybe the stories were inspired by the discovery of dinosaur bones by farmers plowing their fields. Regardless of where the stories originated, they have been a huge part of fantasy for centuries. And I’ve been fond of them for as long as I remember.

Hell, I’m named after a dragonslayer — St. George, of course — and he’s still a saint, when a lot of other saints were thrown out a couple decades back… which I suppose means that dragons have papal approval. I started writing my own dragon tales long before A GAME OF THRONES. “The Ice Dragon” and “The Way of Cross and Dragon” were two of my best.

Every culture has its own version of dragons; Chinese dragons are wingless and do not breathe fire. They bring good luck. Traditional western dragons bring mostly fire and death… but modern fantasists have played with that a lot too. The dragons of ERAGON and HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON are very different from mine own. (Toothless is even cute).

Tolkien’s dragons were always evil, servants of Morgoth and Sauron. They were akin to his orcs and trolls. JRRT did not do friendly dragons. His dragons were intelligent, though. Smaug talks. He also has a huge horde of gold, a very traditional dragon trait… and he sleeps on his treasure, for months and years at a time.

Before Peter Jackson’s Smaug, the best dragon ever seen on film was Vermithrax Pejorative in DRAGONSLAYER. Two legs and two wings, dangerous, fire-breathing, a flyer, does not talk, does not horde gold. An inspiration for all dragonlovers.

At the other end of the scale is the dragon in DRAGONHEART (voice by Sean Connery). Fat, four-legged, talking, a good guy who befriends the hero. A much inferior dragon in a much inferior film. Bah.

In A SONG OF ICE & FIRE, I set out to blend the wonder of epic fantasy with the grittiness of the best historical fiction. There is magic in my world, yes… but much less of it than one gets in most fantasy. (Tolkien’s Middle Earth was relatively low magic too, and I took my cue from the master). I wanted Westeros to feel real, to evoke the Crusades and the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses as much as it did JRRT with his hobbits and magic rings.

I would have dragons, yes… in part because of my dear friend, the late Phyllis Eisenstein, a marvelous fantasist and science fiction writer in her own right, now sadly missed… but I wanted my dragons to be as real and believable as such a creature could ever be. I designed my dragons with a lot of care. They fly and breathe fire, yes, those traits seemed essential to me. They have two legs (not four, never four) and two wings.
LARGE wings. A lot of fantasy dragons have these itty bitty wings that would never get such a creature off the ground. And only two legs; the wings are the forelegs. Four-legged dragons exist only in heraldry. No animal that has ever lived on Earth has six limbs. Birds have two legs and two wings, bats the same, ditto pteranodons and other flying dinosaurs, etc.

Much of the confusion about the proper number of legs on a dragon has its roots in medieval heraldry. In the beginning both versions could be seen on shields and banners, but over the centuries, as heraldry became more standardized, the heralds took to calling the four-legged beasties dragons and their two-legged kin wyverns. No one had ever seen a dragon or a wyvern, of course; neither creature actually existed save in legend, so there was a certain arbitrary quality to this distinction… and medieval heralds were not exactly renowned for their grasp of zoology, even for real world animals. Just take a look at what they thought a seahorse looked like.

Dragons DO exist in the world of Westeros, however (wyverns too, down in Sothoryos), so my own heralds did not have that excuse. Ergo, in my books, the Targaryen sigil has two legs, as it should. Why would any Westerosi ever put four legs on a dragon, when they could look at the real thing and could their limbs? My wyverns have two legs as well; they differ from the dragons of my world chiefly in size, coloration, and the inability to breath fire. (It should be stressed that while the Targaryen sigil has the proper number of legs (two), it is not exactly anatomically correct. The wings are way too small compared to the body, and of course no dragon has three heads. That bit is purely symbolic, meant to reflect Aegon the Conqueror and his two sisters).

FWIW, the shows got it half right (both of them). GAME OF THRONES gave us the correct two-legged sigils for the first four seasons and most of the fifth, but when Dany’s fleet hove into view, all the sails showed four-legged dragons. Someone got sloppy, I guess. Or someone opened a book on heraldry, and read just enough of it to muck it all up. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. A couple years on, HOUSE OF THE DRAGON decided the heraldry should be consistent with GAME OF THRONES.. but they went with the bad sigil rather than the good one. That sound you heard was me screaming, “no, no, no.” Those damned extra legs have even wormed their way onto the covers of my books, over my strenuous objections.

RIGHT

WRONG

Valyrian dragons differ in other ways from the likes of Smaug and Toothless and Vermithrax as well.

My dragons do not talk. They are relatively intelligent, but they are still beasts.

They bond with men… some men… and the why and how of that, and how it came to be, will eventually be revealed in more detail in THE WINDS OF WINTER and A DREAM OF SPRING and some in BLOOD & FIRE. (Septon Barth got much of it right). Like wolves and bears and lions, dragons can be trained, but never entirely tamed. They will always be dangerous. Some are wilder and more wilful than others. They are individuals, they have personalities… and they often reflect the personalities of their riders, thanks to bond they share are. They do not care a whit about gold or gems, no more than a tiger would. Unless maybe their rider was obsessed with the shiny stuff, and even then…

Dragons need food. They need water too, but they have no gills. They need to breathe . Some say that Smaug slept for sixty years below the Lonely Mountains before Bilbo and the dwarves woke him up. The dragons born of Valyria cannot do that. They are creatures of fire, and fire needs oxygen. A dragon could dip into the ocean to scoop up a fish, perhaps, but they’d fly right up again. If held underwater too long, they would drown, just like any other land animal.

My dragons are predators, carnivores who like their meat will done. They can and will hunt their own prey, but they are also territorial. They have lairs. As creatures of the sky, they like mountain tops, and volcanic mountains best of all. These are creatures of fire, and the cold dank caverns that other fantasists house their pets in are not for mine. Man-made dwellings, like the stables of Dragonstone, the towers tops of the Valryian Freehold, and the Dragonpit of King’s Landing, are acceptable — and often come with men bringing them food. If those are not available, young dragons will find their own lairs… and defend them fiercely.

My dragons are creatures of the sky. They fly, and can cross mountains and plains, cover hundreds of miles… but they don’t, unless their riders take them there. They are not nomadic. During the heyday of Valyria there were forty dragon-riding families with hundreds of dragons amongst them… but (aside from our Targaryens) all of them stayed close to the Freehold and the Lands of the Long Summer. From time to time a dragonrider might visit Volantis or another Valyrian colony, even settle there for a few years, but never permanently. Think about it. If dragons were nomadic, they would have overrun half of Essos, and the Doom would only have killed a few of them. Similarly, the dragons of Westeros seldom wander far from Dragonstone. Elsewise, after three hundred years, we would have dragons all over the realm and every noble house would have a few. The three wild dragons mentioned in Fire & Blood have lairs on Dragonstone. The rest can be found in the Dragonpit of King’s Landing, or in deep caverns under the Dragonmont. Luke flies Arrax to Storm’s End and Jace to Winterfell, yes, but the dragons would not have flown there on their own, save under very special circumstances. You won’t find dragons hunting the riverlands or the Reach or the Vale, or roaming the northlands or the mountains of Dorne.

Fantasy needs to be grounded. It is not simply a license to do anything you like. Smaug and Toothless may both be dragons, but they should never be confused. Ignore canon, and the world you’ve created comes apart like tissue paper.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Tags: a song of ice and fire, canon, dragons, fire & blood

A Couple of Rocks

December 23, 2022 at 5:37 pm

So… about Casterly Rock…

The seat of House Lannister has been mentioned hundreds of times in the five published novels of A SONG OF ICE & FIRE, but the story has never actually gone there… yet. Oh, from time to time Tyrion or Jaime or Cersei have thought back to something or other that happened at the Rock in years past, but aside from those memories and quasi-flashbacks we have never actually seen the Rock… or Lannisport, the city that has grown up near its feet.

This seems to have led to a certain amount of confusion as to what Casterly Rock looks like.

Let me put that to rest.

Here is Casterly Rock, as painted by Ted Nasmith for the Ice & Fire calendar for 2011, the “castle” calendar. The same images were also used in the worldbook/ concordance THE WORLD OF ICE & FIRE. Nobody does castles better than Nasmith. He and I consulted frequently when he was doing the art. There are a few of the images that are not quite as I imagined them… but he absolutely NAILED Casterly Rock.

Take a look. (And if you’d like to see a larger, crisper image, it’s there in the worldbook).

Lannisport is not in the image, you will note. If this were a photograph rather than a painting, one could say that the picture was likely taken from the docks and/or city walls of Lannisport; the angle is correct. This is just the Rock itself.

Ted got all the little details right. The great stone stairway on the south face, in the shadow, leading up the Rock’s main entrance. The sea gates at the base, large enough for galleys and cogs to sail into the caverns under the stone, where the Lannisters have their own (protected) docks. The two rocky protrusions jutting out into the sea on either side of the caves; looked at from the south, they evoke a lion’s paws, and the Rock itself resembles a crouching lion, one of the inspirations for the heraldic imagery of the Lannisters and the Casterlys before them. There’s also the watchtower on top of the Rock… and if you look very closely, here and there scattered up and down the face of the mount, you can see windows and arrow slits. They seem small, but that is part illusion. The Rock itself is very large. Massive.

As I have mentioned in half a hundred interviews over the years, when I am doing my worldbuilding, I often start with some real world event or location, and “turn it up to 11.” That’s a SPINAL TAP reference, of course, and maybe not precise. In some cases I turn it up to 111, or 11,000. The Wall, for instance. Inspired by my visit to Hadrian’s Wall, but three times as long and way way taller, made of ice and magic.

The origins of Casterly Rock are somewhat similar. This time my inspiration was the Rock of Gibraltar.

A depressing number of people only seem to know Gibraltar as the trademark for Prudential Insurance.

I grew up with that image myself. But believe it or not, the Rock of Gibraltar is not just a stony version of the Geico Gekko. It is a real place, a unique place, with thousands of years of history. To the ancients it was one of the Pillars of Hercules (the other pillar is far less impressive), the gateway between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic. Today it is a British outpost at the bottom of Spain, one of the last remnants of an empire that once spanned the globe. I visited there some years ago, on one of my tours through Spain and Portugal, and found the place just as fascinating in person as I had in print. It’s the home of the Barbary apes, who will hop on your back and steal your hat and eyeglasses if you let them. There are British pubs and fish-and-chip shops all over the town at the Rock’s foot, as well as some amazing Spanish restaurants. And INSIDE the Rock… it’s not just a big hunk of stone, y’see… are 34 miles of tunnels, more than 150 halls, chambers, and caves, Napoleonic gunports and cannons looking out over land and sea, stalagmites and stalactites, World War II bunkers, a concert hall/ ampitheatre, a hospital (WWII era), and ancient mines.

The Rock of Gibraltar is three miles long, seven-tenths of a mile wide, and almost 1400 feet high at its highest point. (That’s twice as tall as the Wall, for those who want a Westerosi reference).

Casterly Rock is larger. Two leagues long from west to east… that’s approximately six miles, compared to three for Gibraltar. Its peak is about 2100 feet high, or about 700 feet higher than Gibraltar. I am not certain I have ever given the width of Casterly Rock, but I’d venture to say that number is greater too, say around two miles north to south. And inside? Yes, the Lannister stronghold has all the passages, halls, stairs, caves, mines, galleries, tunnels, chutes, and wells that Gibraltar has… and more, and more, and more. It is thousands of years older, after all.

Turned up to 11. Or 11,000.

Here’s the most important part. See that little watchtower on the Nasmith painting, up on top of the Rock? That’s the only thing on top of the Rock. And that’s as it should be. (The maesters keep their rookery up there).

The Lannister castle is not ON TOP of the Rock. It is INSIDE the Rock. All of it. Barracks, armories, bedchambers, grand halls, servant’s quarters, dungeons, sept, everything. That’s what makes the Rock the strongest and most impregnable seat in all of Westeros. The Eyrie, Winterfell, Storm’s End, they all have formidable defenses… but none of them can match Casterly Rock. When Harren the Black built Harrenhal, he thought his immense new castle could defy even dragons. Stone does not burn, he reasoned. But stone does melt, and dragons fly, and… well, you know the rest. And Balerion’s flames proved hot enough to turn Harren’s massive towers molten.

But Casterly Rock is a mountain, and its chambers and halls are buried deep inside, under tons of solid stone. No curtain wall in Westeros, however thick, can even come close.

What does this all mean?

Maybe nothing. I just wanted to set the record straight. Give you all something to think about.

(And maybe put an end to all these pictures of a little rock with a castle on top).

Casterly Rock will not remain forever offstage, I hope. I have two more novels to go, and my plan is to have one or more of my viewpoint characters visit the Rock in THE WINDS OF WINTER or A DREAM OF SPRING, so I can show you all the wonders and terrors and treasures of House Lannister first hand. Meanwhile, feel free to ponder… could Casterly Rock stand against dragons?

We know it can be taken by apes.

Current Mood: geeky geeky

Tags: a song of ice and fire, artwork

A Winter Garden

July 8, 2022 at 10:53 am

I have done a lot of interviews over the years, more than even I can possibly keep track of. Inevitably, a lot of them touch on the same subjects. One of the things I have been asked about most is my writing process. If you have seen any of those interviews, you have probably heard me talking about the two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. I have given that same spiel numerous times. Here’s one of the most thorough explanations:

Another question that I get a lot, especially since the end of GAME OF THRONES on HBO, is whether A SONG OF ICE & FIRE, will end the same way. An architect would be able to give a short, concise, simple answer to that, but I am much more of a gardener. My stories grow and evolve and change as I write them. I generally know where I am going, sure… the final destinations, the big set pieces, they have been my head for years… for decades, in the case of A SONG OF ICE & FIRE. There are lots of devils in the details, though, and sometimes the ground changes under my feet as the words pour forth.

(Another question fans and interviewers alike ask a lot if “Where do you get your ideas?” Honestly, I wish I knew. When confronted with the same question, Harlan Ellison used to say, “Schenectady.” The ancient Greeks spoke of the muses. Freud talked of the conscious and subconscious minds, the id, the ego, the superego. More recently, we hear about the right brain and the left brain, one analytic and rational, the other imaginative and creative. I am pretty sure the answer is not Schenectady, but aside from that… hell, I don’t know. Yes, there are some instances where I know the seed from which something in my garden sprang. The Wall sprang from my visit to Hadrian’s Wall in 1981. The Wars of the Roses inspired much of GAME OF THRONES. The Red Wedding was a mash up of the Glencoe Massacre and the Black Dinner from Scottish history, turned up way past eleven. But for every instance like that, there are a hundred for which I have to say, “I don’t know. One day the thought just came to me. It wasn’t there, and then it was.” If that was the work of a muse, may she keep on musing).

Which brings me to THE WINDS OF WINTER.

Most of you know by now that I do not like to give detailed updates on WINDS. I am working on it, I have been working on it, I will continue to work on it. (Yes, I work on other things as well). I love nothing more than to surprise my readers with twists and turns they did not see coming, and I risk losing those moments if I go into too much detail. Spoilers, you know. Even saying that I am working on a Tyrion chapter, as I did last week, gives away the fact that Tyrion is not dead. Reading sample chapters at cons, or posting them on line, which I did for years, gives away even more. I actually quite enjoyed doing that, until the day came that I realized I had read and/or posted the first couple of hundred pages of WINDS, or thereabouts. If I had kept on with the readings, half the book might be out by now.

So I am not going to give you all any kind of detailed report on the book, but…

I will say this.

I have been at work in my winter garden. Things are growing… and changing, as does happen with us gardeners. Things twist, things change, new ideas come to me (thank you, muse), old ideas prove unworkable, I write, I rewrite, I restructure, I rip everything apart and rewrite again, I go through doors that lead nowhere, and doors that open on marvels.

Sounds mad, I know. But it’s how I write. Always has been. Always will be. For good or ill.

What I have noticed more and more of late, however, is my gardening is taking me further and further away from the television series. Yes, some of the things you saw on HBO in GAME OF THRONES you will also see in THE WINDS OF WINTER (though maybe not in quite the same ways)… but much of the rest will be quite different.

And really, when you think about it, this was inevitable. The novels are much bigger and much much more complex than the series. Certain things that happened on HBO will not happen in the books. And vice versa. I have viewpoint characters in the books never seen on the show: Victarion Greyjoy, Arianne Martell, Areo Hotah, Jon Connington, Aeron Damphair They will all have chapters, and the things they do and say will impact the story and the major characters who were on the show. I have legions of secondary characters, not POVs but nonetheless important to the plot, who also figure in the story: Lady Stoneheart, Young Griff, the Tattered Prince, Penny, Brown Ben Plumm, the Shavepate, Marwyn the Mage, Darkstar, Jeyne Westerling. Some characters you saw in the show are quite different than the versions in the novels. Yarra Greyjoy is not Asha Greyjoy, and HBO’s Euron Greyjoy is way, way, way, way different from mine. Quaithe still has a part to play. So does Rickon Stark. And poor Jeyne Poole. And… well, the list is long. (And all this is part of why WINDS is taking so long. This is hard, guys).

Oh, and there will be new characters as well. No new viewpoints, I promise you that, but with all these journeys and battles and scheming to come, inevitably our major players will be encountering new people in lands far and near.

One thing I can say, in general enough terms that I will not be spoiling anything: not all of the characters who survived until the end of GAME OF THRONES will survive until the end of A SONG OF ICE & FIRE, and not all of the characters who died on GAME OF THRONES will die in A SONG OF ICE & FIRE. (Some will, sure. Of course. Maybe most. But definitely not all) ((Of course, I could change my mind again next week, with the next chapter I write. That’s gardening)).

And the ending? You will need to wait until I get there. Some things will be the same. A lot will not.

No doubt, once I am done, there will be huge debate about which version of the story is better. Some people will like my book, others will prefer the television show. And that’s fine, you pays your money and your makes your choice. (I do fear that a certain proportion of fans are so angry about how long WINDS has taken me that they are prepared to hate the book, unread. That saddens me, but there nothing I can do about it, but write the best book that I can, and hope that when it comes out most fans will read it with clean hands and an open mind).

That’s all I can tell you right now. I need to get back to the garden. Tyrion is waiting for me.

Current Mood: contemplative

Tags: a song of ice and fire, writing

I’ve Been Parodied

December 10, 2020 at 8:22 am

Way way back in 1969, when the world and I were young, the Harvard Lampoon did a hilarious send-up of Tolkien and LORD OF THE RINGS, called BORED OF THE RINGS. It is still in print all these years later. Spam and Dildo, Arrowroot son of Arrowshirt, Pepsi and Moxie… a hoot.

And now, I guess, it is my turn.

The Harvard Lampoon has turned its sights on A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE and come up with LAME OF THRONES.

Yes, they sent me a copy.

No, I have not looked at it yet. I am working up the courage.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they say… but parody is right up there, so…

Thanks. I guess.

Current Mood: amused amused

Tags: a song of ice and fire, writing

Back to Westeros

November 8, 2020 at 9:18 am

Sometimes I do get the feeling that most of you reading my posts here care more about what is happening in Westeros than what is happening in the United States.

So let me assure you that, when not sweating out election returns or brooding over other real world problems, I have continued to work on THE WINDS OF WINTER.

No, sorry, still not done, but I do inch closer. It is a big big book. I try not to dwell on that too much. I write a chapter at a time, a page at a time, a sentence at a time, a word at a time. It is the only way. And sometimes I rewrite.

Of late I have been spending a lot of time with the Lannisters. Cersei and Tyrion in particular. I’ve also paid a visit to Dorne, and dropped in to Oldtown a time or three. In addition to turning out new chapters, I’ve been revising some old ones (some very old)… including, yes, some stuff I read at cons ages ago, or even posted online as samples. I tweak stuff constantly, and sometimes go beyond tweaking, moving things around, combining chapters, breaking chapters in two, reordering stuff.

None of this is even remotely new. It is how the first five books were written.

I was really on a roll back in June and July. Progress has continued since then, but more slowly… I suffered a gut punch in early August that really had me down for a time, and another, for different reasons, in early September. But I slogged on, and of late I am picking up steam again.

On other fronts… well, aside from Covd-19 slowing everything down, we are making great progress on the HBO prequel HOUSE OF THE DRAGON. Ryan and Miguel are in London, casting has begun, it is all looking very exciting.

I wish I could say that things are also going great on all the other television and film projects I am involved with, either as a producer or as the author of the original source material (i.e. novels and short stories). I can’t. Very little shooting is taking place, and almost nothing is being greenlit. Of course, development continues… but there’s a reason they call it “development hell.” Sigh.

So that’s where all that stands. Or at least, that’s as much as I am allowed to tell you right now.

Hang in there, friends.

Current Mood: busy busy