{"id":19416,"date":"2013-05-16T08:39:39","date_gmt":"2013-05-16T12:39:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/?p=19416"},"modified":"2013-05-16T08:39:39","modified_gmt":"2013-05-16T12:39:39","slug":"game-of-thrones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/game-of-thrones\/","title":{"rendered":"Game of Thrones"},"content":{"rendered":"

From here<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In Game of Thrones we\u2019re shown a world of medieval technology, accoutrement, and honorifics, but without chivalry (some lame pretense is made here and there, but it plays no part even in the life of the nobility, and the tale is told solely through their eyes) because there is no Christ to inspire it and no Church to encourage it. The denizens of the land claim a belief, of whatever sort, in \u201cthe gods,\u201d who are never specified, whose mythology is never told, and of whom worship seems virtually nonexistent. The latter is the one significant breach with real-world paganism, which always involved true belief and often extravagant liturgics. There is also (as there was with Rome) a most implausible dearth of numinous awe for the natural world. One may have to pledge one\u2019s son in marriage to the daughter of the castle-holder controlling a vital river crossing in order to get one\u2019s army across, but of the necessity of offering a she-goat or woodcock to the river god himself in order to be granted safe passage there is nary a trace.<\/p>\n

This is a significant oversight and makes the world a more modern one that the filmmakers should be comfortable with. Nevertheless, we are presented a generally accurate (for Hollywood) portrayal of what theologian David Bentley Hart calls the \u201cglorious sadness\u201d of ancient paganism in which life was short, or at least wildly precarious, and relatively meaningless while it lasted, and death both all too common and all too horrid to contemplate. Pleasures were to be grasped in whatever form they may be readily at hand, and whether they involved cruelty or kindness was a matter of relative taste. Joy may flit briefly by, but only in such a manner and measure as to enhance the agony of its loss and the poignancy of its ephemerality.<\/p>\n

We in fact, live \u2014 and have lived \u2014 in a world significantly shorn of such things. Christ has come, hence the actual medieval world was very different from its portrayal in Game of Thrones<\/em>. We do not fear death \u2014 or indeed life \u2014 as our pagan forbears did. We in the West have inhabited a world steeped in divine transcendence, with the clear moral order and attendant theological virtues of faith, hope, and love as the concomitant of God\u2019s self-revelation and Christ\u2019s sacrifice. Atheism in our day is seldom if ever properly Nietzschean \u2014 it\u2019s more a form of cafeteria Christianity, the selections of which simply do not include God or Christ. The generally pathetic efforts to revive paganism are far too hopeful and, well, Christian, to be of any real account. (Not that the occult is benign: 1 Peter calls Satan a \u201cravening and roaring lion\u201d against whose attacks we must vigilantly guard.).<\/p>\n

Why should Christians watch Game of Thrones<\/em>? There\u2019s no necessity, and some will find the gratuitous sex and violence dangerous and damaging. It\u2019s not for all. By God\u2019s grace the world remains Christ-haunted; faith, hope, and love, when they are not subsumed into wastes of superstition, optimism, and sentimentality, still signify. And yet we live in another dark and superstitious time in which virtue increasingly lingers as a vestigial effluvium, while transcendence is ignored or positively rejected. Seeing the hopelessness and savagery of what this age threatens to become may serve to shake us from our torpor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have read the first three instalments of Game of Thrones and have watched the TV adaptation; perhaps it\u2019s because I occasionally doze off in front of the TV, but I have no idea how someone viewing the series keeps track of everything without having read the books.<\/p>\n

Fantasy and science fiction used to be mercifully devoid of the pornographic extravagances of other modern fiction; no longer, it seems. The Game of Thrones novels aren\u2019t particularly well written so they can\u2019t lay claim to the literary pretensions of, say, Henry Miller: nor can excursions into the\u00a0titillative be a striving for realism \u2013 this is fantasy, after all. The reason is probably the usual one: an attempt to be different from what came before with the inevitable result of a monotonous conformity to the scribbling of the author’s contemporaries.<\/p>\n

The novels do tell an interesting story, though, so I will probably find myself reading the fourth volume at some point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From here: In Game of Thrones we\u2019re shown a world of medieval technology, accoutrement, and honorifics, but without chivalry (some lame pretense is made here and there, but it plays no part even in the life of the nobility, and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[779],"class_list":["post-19416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-game-of-thrones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19416\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}