Game of Thrones and Dark Age history

Game of Thrones started broadcasting in 2011, about the same time I started teaching at Durham University, so over the last few years my students have got used to me peppering lectures and seminars with gratuitous references to the show.

It says a lot about the vibrancy of George R. R. Martin’s fantasy world that it can resonate with an early medievalist, even though his main inspiration is from later medieval history, especially the Wars of the Roses. But I’ve noticed a few interesting parallels between Martin’s world and the period commonly (and unfairly) known as ‘the Dark Ages’.

Jamie Adair has an excellent blog which mainly focuses on Game of Thrones parallels with later medieval history, and Brittany Garcia has recently written a great essay on parallels with Roman history, so I thought I could help fill in the intervening centuries...

Weirwoods and sacred oaks

While the southrons of Westeros tend to follow the Faith of the Seven (loosely based on the Roman pantheon), many in the north follow what they call ‘the old gods’. These nameless deities are part of an ancient, nature-focused religion strongly associated with the sacred trees known as ‘weirwoods’.

Weirwoods appear throughout the show – large oak-like trees with white bark, red foliage and faces carved into their trunks. This is very reminiscent of the pre-Christian religion of northern Europe. Sacred trees, in particular oaks, were important to the peoples who lived in the forested lands in what is now Germany.

There’s a famous story of a Christian missionary, St Boniface (right), who destroyed such a tree in 723:

[Boniface] attempted to cut down, at a place called Gaesmere, a certain oak of extraordinary size called by the pagans of olden times the Oak of Jupiter. Taking his courage in his hands (for a great crowd of pagans stood by watching and bitterly cursing in their hearts the enemy of the gods), he cut the first notch.

Naturally enough, the tree instantly collapsed and the pagans all converted to Christianity. I'm not sure the Starks would be so impressed if someone tried to burn down their godswood. Which brings us nicely on to...

Iron Islanders and Vikings

Jamie Adair has written a couple of blog entries on the Vikings (on castration and female warriors), so I can keep this brief.

Of course the Iron Islanders are based on Vikings. Longships. Raiding and pillaging. Warrior culture. The Greyjoy family motto of ‘we do not sow’. Need I go on?

Okay, as an early medievalist I might complain that Martin is inadvertently helping perpetuate an old-fashioned and one-sided perception of the Vikings as rampaging thugs, but this is fantasy, after all. Besides, part of the joy of the show is watching the Iron Islanders themselves (especially poor Theon Greyjoy) desperately try to live up to this über-macho image, bless their angry little hearts.

The Dothraki and the Huns

Jamie Adair has written some fun blog entries drawing parallels between the death of Attila the Hun and the death of a certain hated Lannister. There’s a further Hunnic echo in the Dothraki hordes of Essos – Martin’s direct inspiration is probably the Mongols (just replace ‘khal’ with ‘khan’), but the Huns work just as well.

Little is known about the Huns until they gallop onto the stage of history in the late fourth and fifth centuries. It’s clear that they were a nomadic people from the vast grassy plains of the Eurasian steppes, and it’s clear that the Romans were horrified by them.

Rome was used to dealing with barbarians, but the Huns were something else. Their appearance and whole way of life were utterly alien. The Roman writer Ammianus Marcellinus describes the Huns as ‘a race savage beyond all parallel’, and goes on to describe them thus:

They are certainly in the shape of men, however uncouth, but are so hardy that they neither require fire nor well-flavored food, but live on the roots of such herbs as they get in the fields, or on the half-raw flesh of any animal, which they merely warm rapidly by placing in between their own thighs and the back of their horses. They never shelter themselves under roofed houses, but avoid them, as people ordinarily avoid sepulchres as things not fitted for common use.

Concerning horses he writes:

They are not well suited to infantry battles, but are nearly always on horseback, their horses being ill-shaped, but hardy; and sometimes they even sit upon them like women if they want to do anything more conveniently. There is not a person in the whole nation who cannot remain on his horse day and night. On horseback they buy and sell, they take their meat and drink, and there they recline on the narrow neck of their steed, and yield to sleep so deep as to indulge in every variety of dream.

And their attitude towards farming?

None of them plough, or even touch a plough handle; for they have no settled abode, but are homeless and lawless, perpetually wandering with their wagons, which they make their homes; in fact, they seem to be people always in flight.

Finally, this is how the Huns introduced themselves to the European world:

This active and indomitable race, being excited by an unrestrainable desire of plundering the possessions of others, went on ravaging and slaughtering all the nations in their neighborhood... 

There’s obvious ignorance and exaggeration in Ammianus’s account. What he saw as aimless and lawless wandering was clearly a highly successful way of life for the Huns – so successful that Attila managed to establish total Hunnic domination over a vast swathe of Europe, terrorising his neighbours and bullying the empire into supplying him with endless piles of gold and silver. Needless to say, this should all be sounding familiar by now.

I have a couple more Dark Age parallels to explore in a future post, but in the meantime check out the blogs of Jamie Adair and Brittany Garcia, and subscribe to my mailing list above for updates!

Images from Wikipedia Commons

Translations:
C. H. Talbot (trans.), The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany (London, 1954)
James Robinson (ed.), Readings in European History, vol 1 (Boston and New York, 1904)

When was Offa's Dyke built?

It's one of the great monuments of early medieval Britain, and one of the most mysterious.

Image from www.cpat.org.uk

Offa's Dyke is a linear earthwork (bank and ditch) that runs roughly along the English-Welsh border. It isn't continuous, but the surviving stretches (shown on the map to the left) add up to 129 kilometres.

These stretches are part of a 283 kilometre-long National Trail between Sedbury and Prestatyn that I walked in 2010 (and can recommend!).

It's named for King Offa of Mercia (757-796) basically because a hundred years after he lived a Welsh monk called Asser attributed the building of the dyke to him. No source from Offa's lifetime actually mentions the dyke.

Archaeologists love a good argument. There are debates not only about when Offa's Dyke was built and why, but about whether it even ran 'from sea to sea', as Asser claims. Probably it didn't. If it did, a lot of it must have been destroyed.

But very recently the Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust has uncovered evidence that the dyke was built much earlier than Offa - perhaps 200 years earlier. This is based on radiocarbon results from a northern section of the dyke near Chirk in Wrexham (Wales), which give a date range of 430-642. A best guess would therefore place the building of dyke at Chirk in the later sixth century - a period about as dark as the Dark Ages get.

A hiker on a section of surviving bank. The kingdom of Mercia lay on the left side, Powys on the right.

Isolated C-14 dates should always be taken with a fistful of salt, but if they turn out to be reliable this really upsets the apple cart. Could the dyke really be this much earlier? If so, who built it, and why did Asser give Offa the credit? Maybe parts of the dyke were built long before other parts, and no single king was responsible. Could it be that Offa only refurbished and extended an older earthwork?

Most likely, this is just one new piece in a highly complicated and mysterious puzzle...

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Jesus Christ, magician and emperor

It’s easy to forget that we have no idea what Jesus Christ actually looked like.

The earliest accounts of his life were written a generation or more after his death, and none of the Gospel writers ever knew him. His face was essentially a blank.

In the early centuries, when Christianity was a small, occasionally persecuted cult, its adherents didn’t even try to depict Christ visually. The earliest portraits only date from the third century, and explode in number from the fourth century, when Christianity became an official religion of the Roman empire.

What does Jesus look like in these early portraits? Nothing like our modern image, that’s for sure. He normally appears youthful and beardless, a kind of idealised, Apollo-esque hero. And for good measure he sometimes carries a magic wand. Less Christ Pantocrator, and more Harry Potter (except without glasses).

Roman hero 

Take a look at this late fourth-century ivory panel from Rome. It depicts the two Maries discovering Christ outside his open tomb after the Resurrection. No wand in this image – but if you look closely at Christ in the lower left, you can see he’s clutching a scroll in his left hand. A Roman looking at this image would instantly understand the scroll as a standard symbol of literacy and education. (Statues of Roman emperors and aristocrats often show them holding scrolls.)

Likewise the two-finger gesture comes from Roman oratorical tradition, and was adopted into Christian art as a symbol of blessing.

In fact almost everything about this ivory panel makes Christ look right at home in fourth-century Rome. The upper frame shows his tomb as a grand circular mausoleum, not unlike those of Augustus, Hadrian and Constantine’s daughter Constantina. The dozing soldiers are wearing the tunics and distinctive box-hats (pillei) of the late Roman military. On the lower frame the doors of the tomb are carved with images from the Gospels, just like the famous fifth-century doors of Santa Sabina.

The only obvious Christian symbols are the winged ox and man at the top of the upper panel, representing the Gospels of Luke and Matthew. Otherwise this particular Christ is sitting quite happily in the late Roman world, a long way from first-century Palestine. He looks almost as content as he does in this fourth-century villa mosaic from Hinton St Mary (Dorset).

Magician

A magic wand is a curious addition to early iconography of Jesus. In depictions of the wedding feast of Cana, for example, Christ is shown touching the jars of water with his wand to turn them into wine. This ‘Christ the Magician’ appears especially on sarcophagi and catacomb paintings, but is also carved on the doors of Saint Sabina and on the ivory Andrews Dipytch (click on links for images).

Of course, none of the Gospels describe Jesus wandering about with a magic wand. Fourth- and fifth-century Romans, though, clearly thought he needed one. They effectively turned him into the sort of magician they associated with eastern mystery religions.

Emperor

After his stints as Apollo and Harry Potter, Jesus settled down as Emperor of the Universe.

Christ probably looks more familiar to modern eyes in this mosaic from the apse of Santa Pudenziana. It dates from between 401 and 417, a period which saw savage suppression of paganism and the final triumph of Christianity as the sole Roman state religion. The Church now identified itself powerfully with the Roman state; as a result, religious images were swamped with imperial symbolism.

In the mosaic, Christ is no longer a youthful magician, but an emperor: bearded, stern and distant, wrapped in folds of golden cloth, sitting on a jewel-encrusted throne.

He holds a book displaying the words ‘Lord Protector of the Church of Pudentia’. Behind him are depicted drapes of Tyrian purple and gold thread, as one would see in the audience hall of a Roman emperor.

The imperial iconography continues around him. The Apostles are seated to either side in the tunics and togas of Roman noblemen, looking for all the world like the members of a heavenly Senate.

Saint Peter and Saint Paul, meanwhile, are being crowned by female religious figures inspired by the traditional goddess of Victory depicted on Roman coins. Even the architecture, intended to represent the Heavenly City, looks suspiciously like Rome, with its marble arcades and gilded roof tiles.

We’ve become so used to this ‘Romanised’ way of depicting Christ, it seems natural. Take the portrait on the left, which is pretty typical of how Christ is portrayed for a modern audience (image from jesuschristsaviour.net).

Even if the imperial pomp has been put to one side and Jesus has been given a more compassionate, ‘human’ face, he’s still wearing the toga, and he still has that two-finger gesture of benediction. The essential elements put in place during the fourth and fifth centuries have clearly stuck. Sadly the wand never caught on.

I think Jesus has been wrapped in that toga for so many centuries, it would be hard to depict him wearing anything else. But his hand gestures? No reason we can't update them...

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• Image of ivory panel from John Beckwith, Early Christian and Byzantine Art (1979), fig. 36