When the first episode of Game of Thrones aired ten years ago this week, it was an instant hit, critically and commercially, seen as one of the greats from the golden age of television, beginning with the Sopranos in 1999 and taking in The Wire, Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Two more books in the series are expected… at some future date. More from this author Harry Potter and the importance of soft powerĪ further four books in the A Song Of Ice and Fire series followed, and by the fifth Martin was being called the “American Tolkien” and had sold tens of millions of copies meanwhile Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Films film trilogy had provoked renewed interest in fantasy and the medieval. He called the book, which would be published three years later, “a cycle of plot, counterplot, ambition, murder and revenge, with the Iron Throne of the Seven kingdoms as the ultimate prize.” These ancient myths would form part of Martin’s novel A Game of Thrones, an idea first laid out in a letter to his agent in 1993. The walking dead were a part of northern European folklore, across Britain and Scandinavia the Vikings talked of draugr who would rise up and attack livestock and people, ripping their bodies apart with their sheer brutal strength, and killing their victims so they, too, turn into draugr. What if, he wondered, it wasn’t barbarians they faced, but something altogether more frightening?Ĭenturies ago the people who lived by the ruins of that wall did fear such things. Here they stood, staring into the darkness of Caledonia, not knowing what terrors existed beyond in the vast cold wastelands. Here Martin visited Hadrian’s Wall, and as the darkness drew in he looked north and wondered what it must have felt like to be a Roman legionary, many of whom came from old cities bathed in the Mediterranean sun. Tolkien’s epic The Lord of the Rings, set in a fantasy world heavily influenced by Anglo-Saxon England.
Martin, already an established author who at 13 had read J.R.R. They don’t come for the weather or food.Īmong the many American tourists visiting the country back in the 1980s was George R.R. No other nation knew its past as entertainment - not even America - and it is one of the reasons for England’s cultural power, drawing in millions of tourists to breathe in the air where Bolingbroke toppled his cousin, where Hotspur fought Prince Hal, and where monstrous Richard III murdered his nephews in the Tower. William Shakespeare is central to English identity in a way unlike writers in less happy lands his history plays, chronicling events from the overthrow of Richard II in 1399 to the series of wars and regicides that were doomed to follow, have long been part of the historical vocabulary of everyday life. As Robert Tombs argued, it is the only country in which the national story is part of popular theatre.
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