Martin vs. Tolkien: on the Philosophy of Worldbuilding
Medievalism vs. the Enlightenment in Fantasy
George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is the preeminent statement of the Fantasy genre of our time. It is not inaccurate to characterise it as a critique of the philosophy of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, which acted as the preface to the entire genre from the date of its publication well into the 00s - the end of its monopoly on the genre coincided directly with the explosion of Westeros into public consciousness in the mid 2010s. Both of these literary works are the bases of monumentally successful visual adaptations that far outpace them in pop-cultural reach; the versions of Martin and Tolkien that have extended furthest into the collective consciousness are without doubt, that of HBO’s Game of Thrones and Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and as is inevitable, neither work made its way entirely intact from page to screen.
It’s quite remarkable how present Jackson’s trilogy remains in our minds over twenty years on and how rapidly Thrones vanished from public consciousness after the fury around its abortive final series abated. To me there is no accident in the greater lasting resonance of a work that believes in and communicates ideas of eternity than one that denies them. Thrones was doomed to being ephemeral by its own ideology.
The Philosophy
YouTuber MrBtongue made a terrific video some years back about how Game of Thrones misses the “spirit” of ASoIaF, where Peter Jackson’s films get Tolkien, for the most part, right. While I’d largely agree with this, I would suggest that the fundamentals of the nasty and Thrasymachian tone that pervades HBO’s show are more than present in their source material, and as laudably faithful as Jackson’s adaptations are, it is much easier to put across a positive spirit than a negative one when adapting a novel into a film. What “spirit” there is in ASoIaF, true to G.R.R.M.’s literary background, lends itself far more to the inquiring mindset of science fiction - the answering of posed hypotheticals - than it does to fantasy’s roots in mythology and legend. Where LoTR is concerned with transcendental “models” for existence,1 ASoIaF seeks to chart potential outcomes, as an exercise in rationality. It tries to envision the practical, political and social upshots of a world with fantasy elements.
This is a lot of the appeal of Martin’s universe as well. It’s messiness and warts-and-all characters can put across much more drama than the more archetypal figures in Tolkien’s books. It evinces a different, more immediate kind of personal involvement than LoTR, since it feels altogether closer to us and our time, in its moral greyness and focus on the mundane and the uglier regions of human life. For all of these elements, the emotional world of Martin’s fiction is modern; post-enlightenment, not medieval, as is ordinary and natural in fantasy.
In the most straightforward terms, Middle Earth, or Arda, is a universe in which ultimate justice exists and there is a clear delineation between good and evil. The World of Ice and Fire is an anarchic and chaotic setting, without cosmic order. At the very least, order has no temporal representatives; the medieval-style power structure of Westeros is fundamentally unjust - there is no just ruler like Théoden or Aragorn and what honourable men there are come to grisly ends for their lack of Macchiavellian tact. Ned Stark’s comeuppance on the back of his foolishly honourable behaviour, the very effective narrative conclusion to the first book, establishes the invertive assertion of the series. Eddard Stark is almost like an agent of traditional heroism sent into the gruesomely unrighteous world of Westeros: made an example of by the author. Martin directly acknowledges this as a response to Tolkien and Tolkienism in fantasy:
Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?2
The line in bold has become a meme by now - its repetition alone demonstrates how colossally Martin missed the point of Tolkien’s works, so the line goes, but that is not entirely fair. Yes, while it is rampantly memeable in its autistic blindness to the nature and purpose of the Legendarium, let us reflect on the following:
Martin is fully aware that Tolkien did not want to put across any kind of social investigation with LoTR, his proposition of this as a counter to Tolkien is not to miss the point exactly, but to philosophically challenge him. The questioning of these assumptions is to present an intrinsically prosaic, power political mindset to the work. Rather than meeting the world to which fantasy is so indebted on its own terms, he seeks to unseat this inherent medievalism - the problem to which his books are the answer. His works are the light of reason against the preceding dark age, though they ironically bring only darkness with them and extinguish the ultimate light of absolute truth, goodness and beauty, that reigns in Tolkien’s world. A question like “what was Aragorn’s tax policy”, is not to miss the point, but to assault the soul of fantasy - to pick it apart in the arena of speculative fiction.
[Myths are] the best way—sometimes the only way—of conveying truths that would otherwise remain inexpressible. We have come from God and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God.3
The “taxes” question is irrelevant to Tolkien’s project in that Aragorn is an archetypal hero who communicates a transcendental ideal. Tolkien did not hold that the king needed merely to be a “good man” to rule well, he had to be the rightful king. Aragorn is of a Númenórean bloodline: he was born to rule. He is kingship itself, not, or at least not only a prosaically “historical” figure. Of course, Martin could never permit a notion so hierarchical.4
Tolkien created his legendarium partially to serve as a national myth for the English, who had been robbed one in the literary disaster of the Norman conquest. He sought, as a “subcreator”, to communicate “refractions” of absolute and universal truth through his fictional world.5 The core content of his work is mythological.
[Myths] seem to develop gradually as certain motifs emerge, are elaborated, and finally are rounded out as people tell and retell stories that catch and hold their interest. Thus themes that are accurate and universal are kept alive, while those elements peculiar to single individuals or a particular era drop away. Myths, therefore, portray a collective image; they tell us about things that are true for all people.6
Mythology was sacred to primitive people; it was as though their myths contained their very souls. Their lives were cradled within their mythology, and the death of their mythology, as happened with the American Indians, meant the destruction of their lives and spirits.7
This would amplify Tolkien’s concern about the English having lost their myths even further. We could speculate that this traumatic uprooting led to the mechanistic conception of the nature of the world that came to predominate in English philosophy. Locke’s abstracted account of nationality as voluntary consociation in the atomised state of nature could well be explained by this.
While he absolutely enshrined the notion of internal consistency and created an extensive and fascinating chronicle of the background of his world, the incidental and transient details of a prosaic account of history (fictional or real) were of no relevance to Tolkien or his project. While Middle Earth has it in spades, it was never really about “lore”. The lore of Middle Earth is only relevant in advancing the greater purpose of communicating perennial themes, just as the “sacred history” of a group of people helps to ground them in a shared reality.8
As YouTuber Traditionalist Tolkienist notes, Númenor is symbolically related to the myth of Atlantis; the names Elendil, Anárion and Isildur reference the stars, the sun and the moon; Eärendil’s name is taken from the Old English Earendel; the names of the Dwarves in the Hobbit and even “Gandalf” are from Vǫluspá. The wealth of “lore” is not, as it is in Martin’s universe, a catalogue of at best intriguing historical occurrences and curiosities in a fictional universe with a fleshed out history, but in its ingenious instantiation of metaphysical themes and perennial philosophy, as well as conscious steeping in extant myth and legend. It is a work of piety, not of vanity.
To turn Gondor into a Medieval politics simulator in a world that just happened to feature magic would defeat Tolkien’s mythopoeic aims. Far from just being irrelevant, it is antithetical to the Legendarium. As I am often fond of quoting, prosaic history, which informs the tone of Martin’s telling of the events of the World of Ice and Fire, “must be contented to be ephemeral” in its value. The life which it represents “is not worth representing, except to itself.”9 It is a diversion and nothing more. Crucially, what is being represented back to us is not another world, or the medieval environment that it is based on, it is now. In applying modern philosophy to his telling of a Medieval setting, Martin is not meeting it on its own emotional and spiritual plane and is missing everything lasting about that age. Ironically, a focus on how things “really were” as if that time were now, leaves us firmly in our own time, far from transported to a fantastical other world. As we read in James A. Froude’s essay on Homer:
Homer’s pictures of life and manners are so living, so distinct, so palpable, that a whole prose encyclopaedia of disconnected facts could give us nothing like them. [...] Poetry has this power, and prose has it not; and thus the poet is the truest historian. Whatever is properly valuable in history he gives us - not events and names, but emotion, but action, but life.10
The novel and the epic poem are not only very different in form, but thematically also. Epic poetry narrates the exploits of heroes, who are representatives of archetypal and eternal forces. Novels are domestic or societal dramas, concerned with very everyday people and their affairs. We can chart in the progression of human narratives a descending trajectory of concern. Tribal groups at the very “lowest” level of societal development narrate the creation of the world at the hands of the Supreme Being, who then fades into the background of the mythos, receiving less and less worship as the tribespeople come to venerate and propitiate deities more immediately concerned with their survival: fertility and prosperity gods and the like.11
The narratives later become concerned with demigods and heroes who reflect perennial principles, but are mingled with mortality. Homer himself, as an example of this, made sure to relate how Diomedes had the strength of ten men of his own day. While the so called “Dark Ages” present something of a blip in this trajectory, when mythical thought was revived to a great degree,12 the onset of modernity furthered the earlier trend with the advent of the novel. Novels themselves became increasingly concerned with people of lower and lower social, and in medieval terms, “cosmic” standing along the Great Chain of Being. Through this, we see what Mircea Eliade terms a “progressive descent of the sacred into the concrete”.13
Tolkien wrote this very theme into the Silmarillion, in the histories of the Elves and the Númenóreans; of the involutive decline from a golden age into ever more “prosaic” times. Fantasy à la Tolkien presents a reconfiguration of the mythopoeic (a phrase he reinterpreted and popularised) that enthrones the eternal again, in an age of prose. Though technically prose itself, it is awash in profound poetry.
Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme of things not found within recorded time. It is not they that have forgot the Night, or bid us flee to organized delight, in lotus-isles of economic bliss forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss (and counterfeit at that, machine-produced, bogus seduction of the twice-seduced).
It is no accident that a philologist like Tolkien was uniquely equipped to bring this about and bring a world so much to life. A man who could, in Heidegger’s sense of originary language, dwell in word.15 The ease and aesthetic skill with which he created language itself, capturing a “piercing, high elvish beauty”16 and also wielding language with an intuitive creativity, inventing and reappropriating words like Eucatastrophe, mathom etc., is remarkable and unmatched.
While I agree that Tolkien’s derivatives are far less interesting and more stale than Martin’s works, which are well-written and engaging, his novels do not come close to Tolkien’s Legendarium in their beauty, cultural significance, or lasting value. His characters, sharing in the same cynical attitudes that he professes, are just moderns. His world, while it contains “magic”, which is skillfully left unexplained and bound up in hinted-at notions of apathetic or malevolent cosmic entities (ripped straight from Lovecraft), is ultimately just one among many semi-interesting genre fiction settings.
Game of Thrones the TV Show became infamous for its “explicitness”. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were accused of gratuitously dwelling on scenes of violence and sex and showing them in graphic detail. I’m not of the opinion that such things can never be put to screen, but they warrant a deal of care and selectiveness.
The show and especially its prequel House of the Dragon are deeply glib and unpleasant in a way that I don’t regard the books as being (the focus of MrBTongue’s video), at least not to quite the same wallowing degree, but it’s hard for me to not see this as the inevitable end point of a work that has a fundamental gripe with the period that it is depicting. To the extent that the show departs from the books, it just fulfills a tendency that was latent already within them.17 If there is no absolute moral authority, whatever questioning attitude you introduce to the idea that violence and power are all that’s left is just impotent quibbling.
What’s striking is how perfectly this problem aligns with the modern atheist liberal’s own paradoxical proposition that we live in a relative and anarchic cosmos where there are no absolute moral principles, but that human rights and other moral imperatives are utterly sacrosanct and inviolable. Why? As Roger Scruton said of this Foucaultian narrative that all truth is just an expression of power, “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is “merely relative,” is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”18
Martin negates the foundations of morality in his setting, to undermine the moral authority of a Great Chain of Being, medieval setting, which is fundamentally unjust since all of its truths are just man-made justifications of arbitrary power relationships. But what justice can there be in such a world? What difference does it make if there is no right and wrong anyway? This intractable problem prevents any satisfactory conclusion to his work, as
noted in a video some years ago. As we will explore in the next section, this is just one negative upshot of the ideology of the work in the quality of its realisation.Ultimately, however diverting they may be, G.R.R.M.’s books do not come close to the Lord of the Rings because, in a certain respect, they don’t try to. The philosophy of Game of Thrones does not think that human life, the world and the universe itself are things with eternal significance, that anything really matters. This is one way to characterise the inherent smallness that appertains to anything made with the philosophy I have described, especially anything that is made in a spirit of critique. Martin is by no means the first fiction writer to level such scorn at the Middle Ages.
(Umberto Eco) probably wrote his novel (The Name of the Rose) with exactly the opposite intention of the other two authors (Marion Zimmer with Mists of Avalon and J.R.R. Tolkien with The Lord of the Rings): namely; with the intention of portraying the Middle Ages as darkly as possible, in order to allow the light of reason to shine that much brighter. It was an attempt that no doubt came up short.19
The profane light that Martin “shines” into the world of fantasy might bring the soil and dirt of its world into sharper focus, but the firmament - the eternal and ungraspable light that stands above - is blotted out. Martin does to fantasy what his philosophy has already done to the real world.
The Worldbuilding
It would be one thing if Martin’s rationalist crusade were carried through in the creation of a logically consistent world, rich with anthropological detail and deeply realised social tensions. Unfortunately, his world is in many ways nonsensical. There is no retreat to the convenient obscurance of the mysterious fantasy world, either, because his whole project is to undo that mystery.
“What’s the tax policy” is now a valid question; one of supreme validity, since the premise of Martin’s hypothetical playground is that the world at hand is one of complicated, “gritty and realistic” social consequences. All the details that would be missing the point in Tolkien are now important to get right and to consider - if you’re going to launch a critique of a medieval society, you need to do so in a world that makes sense… Buckle up.
First of all, the scale of the world is nonsensical. Westeros is supposedly the size of South America, but is ruled by a single king in a world of medieval technology. No magic is employed to accomplish this. The thing is, GRRM himself doesn’t treat the setting as this big! People show up wherever required at a time and pace dictated by the needs of the plot. The setting simply isn’t as big as he has said it is. It’s fitting that in lieu of real nobility and royal glory, which Thrones seeks to denounce as nonsense, GRRM just has to scale everything up to absurd sizes. How very American…
This apparently continent sized kingdom is home to at most three or four ethnic groups, who all inexplicably speak the same language with barely noticeable dialect differences.20 Think about how nutty that is, and this is all in a world whose selling point is its “gritty realism”. Across the narrow sea things are more interesting and diverse, although you can tell transparently as anything that GRRM designed the two at different times.
This drastic gap in the diversity of different groups on the continent of Essos and Westeros makes no sense, unless seen in the light of creative pitfalls and oversights. At a certain point G.R.R.M. “coloured in” the parts of the world that he hadn’t fleshed out yet and the content written about them. While they feel like individually intriguing settings, it never feels like something that arose organically or with much of an overall vision. So much of the World of Ice and Fire feels like after the fact filling-in of gaps. I mean, names of locations in the east are transparently inspired by Lovecraft’s Doom that Came to Sarnath. “Mossovy” is also a treat. It feels like he filled in the map one afternoon, I’m sorry. I say this as a teenage lover of the series.
There’s also the matter of the notion of the same noble houses, already endowed with completely bonkers amounts of land, having held onto it for 8000 years, almost invariably. You can pull any after the fact justification you like from the arse dimension, but it’s just lazy and was clearly not done for any other purpose.
It strikes me, as someone who dabbles in conlanging and worldbuilding fiction (which may or may not ever see the light of day), that one ought to enjoy this whole process. I have a world that, although it’s completely unrecognisable now, dates in its earliest forms to when I was about four. I add to the world, its history and its languages periodically for my own amusement - it’s fun. While I’d absolutely be sure to clean it up and get things straight before setting a story in it if I ever did, Martin not only doesn’t seem to take his primary creative joy from this process, but the thing that comes first, the story, did so in the chronological sense as well. It remains his priority; poorly thought-out ideas that become a barrier later on (unavoidable for worldbuilders) are visible throughout his world. Further examples would only labour the point.21
The plot is key and the world and its history transparently exists in service of it. I remember hearing Martin say in an interview that the scene in the first book, when the Starks find the dead direwolf and pups, birthed the entire setting. From the get go, narrative comes first, the setting is secondary.
By contrast, Tolkien’s world was born first out of the need for a world to set his Elvish languages, and for speakers to speak them.22 Tolkien’s languages are themselves built to communicate mythic and poetic beauty. They are not, like the languages which Martin and the showrunners farmed out to a third party to create, largely incidental props to the world that do not cohere in any proper sense with it. The result is far more organic. Rather than building the “lore” backwards from an initial “present” moment, Tolkien’s world preceded the stories that were set in it. The world did not have to be hastily assembled just ahead of the progress of its characters.
Yes, I did just compare the two most successful fantasy authors of all time to a scene from Wallace and Gromit.
As Martin himself said of his worldbuilding:
A lot of fantasy takes its lead from Tolkien […] But most of the people who followed Tolkien, including me, were faking it. Tolkien was the proverbial iceberg, where nine tenths of the structure is below the water. My iceberg when I started out was some ice piled on a raft. So it gives you the illusion of the iceberg but there was nothing below the surface.
Despite not being wedded to “realism” and having arguably a lot more leeway with his setting, Tolkien’s Middle Earth is actually a far less ridiculous or outlandish setting on the same grounds.
In fact, far from seeing fantasy as a free-for-all, the “believability” of his fictional world was of great importance to Tolkien.
The story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed.23
The detailed chronologies of the peoples of Middle Earth, the linguistically consistent annals of various noble dynasties reward looking further into Tolkien’s setting. However rich and impressive this detail is on its own merit, as we saw earlier the “lore” is not the point.
All of his fictional history is imbued with symbolism and rich mythic significance. A more prosaic writer’s lore, however complicated and “complete” it were, would just remain a lump of ultimately meaningless fake information. Since it is ultimately fictional, worldbuilding is only really worth doing if it is given this significance and symbolism. Once again, Tolkien’s approach provides a kind of timeless and lasting value that Martin’s cannot hope to. Tolkien began working on the first version of Elvish in 1910 and continued until his death. The Legendarium was the work of a lifetime.
The Enlightenment can’t do Fantasy
So, is this all incidental? Or do the differences in the philosophies of these two authors have anything to do with the quality of their worldbuilding craft? It’s easy to imagine someone who shares Martin’s modern sensibilities building a world that was far more complete, fleshed out and coherent than he has managed. Is it not interesting, however, that the author who created the most beloved and, I would argue, the most complete and richest fictional world of all time, saw the world as he did? For all his interest in it, Martin fundamentally despises the medieval period and what it stands for, so of course he would not build his fictional straw man of it up with the same love and effortless joy that a medievalist would.
There are intriguing details in Martin’s world, but the big picture does not cohere to an overall statement of anything. Tolkien’s does. For all of its “unrealisticness”, Middle Earth remains far more internally sensical, by no accident. An author who believed in absolute truth and cosmic order managed to create a secondary world that has internal consistency and stands up to scrutiny. Another, who assembled a frankly half-baked secondary history as fluff for his novels that needed a setting, did not.
Tolkien, in his Catholicism and traditionalist outlook, understood that there are ultimate truths and that the world is governed by unbreakable cosmic law. He also believed in the inherent reality of beauty. As a result, his work is not only beautiful, but ordered. He could not abide it being chaotic or nonsensical. Martin, on the other hand, thinks that everything is ultimately arbitrary, so he treats his world as such. I won’t quite accuse GRRM of propaganda (or worse, allegory), that would be too far, but his world absolutely does reflect his views, as we’d expect. The critique that he launches of a notion of the European Middle Ages is fundamentally undercut by the fact that his world seems to have no internal rules or even consistency. The only thing that is consistent is the chaoticness of his worldview and that of his world.
A rational atheist, Martin would dismiss many Tolkienian notions as woo-woo mysticism, but rationality can never account for all outcomes. Tolkien, in embracing a Tradional understanding, did not prescribe some original philosophy, instead he showed humility in accepting what Traditional Man has always understood and received as perennial wisdom. He was subcreator, not able to create a world that did not accord with his view of the ultimate truth of things. The strength of his worldbuilding is in large part down to this attitude and its rootedness in heroic literature, whereas the weakness of Martin’s world is a product of its arbitrary assembly in ignorance (or flouting) of traditional ideas and mythology. If you do away with cosmic order, you are inviting in inconsistency, and incoherence.
Whatever value there is in Game of Thrones and Martin’s novels, and there is some for sure, like all prosaic history or fiction, “must be contented to be ephemeral”.24 After his critical project is forgotten, people will still be talking about Tolkien for a long, long time.
Mircea Eliade. Myth and Reality, p145.
George R.R. Martin in an interview with Rolling Stone.
J.R.R. Tolkien.
Martin’s Valyrians, the closest thing to a superhuman precursor race like the Númenóreans are just like any other men, only endowed with the power of dragons.
J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories.
Robert A. Johnson, She, px.
Ibid. He, p1.
Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, p6/145.
James A. Froude. “Homer and Homeric Life”, in Essays, p87-8.
Ibid., p87.
Mircea Eliade. Patterns in Comparative Religion, p24.
Ibid. Myth and Reality, p174.
Ibid. Patterns in Comparative Religion, p52.
J.R.R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia.
Heidegger, On the Way to Language and Poetry, Language, Thought.
C.S. Lewis. Review of “the Lord of the Rings”.
When you can’t make “content” out of beauty and nobility, there’s not much left that has the same potency (apart from drama, which the show does well), so I think it’s little wonder why, cinematically, the showrunners choose to emphasise these elements.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: A Survey, p6.
H.T. Hansen. Foreword to Julius Evola’s, The Mytstery of the Grail, px.
Look forward to my upcoming video on the Linguistics of Game of Thrones for a more detailed look.
While the author is nauseatingly smug and his writing style makes me want to punch my laptop, this article tackles the poor design behind Martin’s setting.
Quendi “Elves” in the Elvish language “Quenya” means “those who speak”.
J.R.R. Tolkien On Fairy Stories
James A. Froude. “Homer and Homeric Life”, in Essays, p87.
Fine work. Also appreciated b/c I never read Martin. If you have a taste for 60s rock, you might like my most serious discussion of Tolkien I've yet attempted, an essay centered around the early Tolkien n' Lewis-evoking Pink Floyd song "Matilda Mother." https://pomocon.substack.com/p/carls-rock-songbook-no-104-pink-floyd You also might like my comparison of Lucas and Tolkien in my unkind review of The Force Awakens. https://www.nationalreview.com/postmodern-conservative/tired-betrayal-force-awakens/
Tolkien didn’t write or create the “Legindarium” for money or even publication as his primum mobile he did it because he felt the creative urge to do so. I suspect that Martin’s motivation was money and fame. Tolkien already had sufficient money and fame in his work and vocation at Oxford.