I did not become a fan of Game of Thrones. The series killed off the only character in which I had even the slightest interest at the end of its first season. It was too grim and too perverse for me.
But who would have thought that series finale of a sword and sorcery fantasy television series would have made national headline news? Somewhere Robert E. Howard is smiling.
I don’t think the Howardians believe GoT is sword and sorcery, so much as epic fantasy. There is too much courtly intrigue and not enough slash-and-stab. Lovecraft might be a more important influence because there are no meaningful acts of heroism, the universe is hostile and ultimately unforgiving.
Having read the books, but only watched a few episodes, at least some of the perversity is HBOs. The wedding scene involving the character your liked is depicted as rapey on the show, unlike the books.
It’s certainly not high fantasy like Dunsany or James Branch Cabell. Or Tolkien. The moral core at the center of Tolkien is completely missing from GoT.
How much epic fantasy really has a moral core? I think that Tolkien was a bit unusual in that respect. Agree that this is probably not really pure sword and sorcery since that genre didn’t have books that were so long, so complex and morally ambiguous. Having said that what do we do with Moorcock?
Still, I think you can make the case that Howard helped birth this genre, whatever it is.
Steve
I’ve watched bits and pieces and read the first book.
A lot of it, especially the first couple of seasons, is murder and rape porn which defenders counter is “realism” but really isn’t.
Yes, I agree there is no moral core, it’s only about power and who wins and who loses, which maybe explains why it’s so popular with modern audiences.
It is interesting how the woke brigades are up in arms about Daenerys – I saw pretty early on she was a power-hungry fascist who would kill anyone who got in her way.
The distinction that is usually drawn (first by Lovecraft, I believe) is between high fantasy, e.g. Dunsany and James Branch Cabell which most closely resemble romances like The Faerie Queene, and heroic fantasy which mostly closely resembles Beowulf or Norse legend. Howard fell into the latter category.
Sword & sorcery was a term created by Fritz Leiber to describe his Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories, which he saw as very different form of heroic fantasy than Tolkien’s, and in describing the genre he said Howard was its best writer. So mainly the distinction is that S&S is stuff like Howard wrote, as opposed to what Tolkien wrote.
Howard wrote of individualistic outsiders, mostly wanderers and adventurers; they could be morally ambiguous in gaining coin as sell-swords or thieves, but had some sort of moral code, or at least when confronted with monsters and sorcerers, fought for good, freed the damsel in distress, etc.
Tolkien’s heroes, at least the hobbits, are the most reluctant of heroes, many of the rest are simple soldiers called to arms by events happening beyond their immediate apprehension. Scale is an important distinction and Tolkien brings a whole lot of world-building to bolster it. Conan’s world had a map, but it was optional; those authors who followed Tolkien insisted on attention to the maps.
I once read that the distinction lies within Homer; the Iliad is the source of epic fantasy, while the Odyssey is for S&S.
The Iliad is tragedy; the Odyssey is comedy.
After the popular edition of the LOTR was published in the U. S. in the 1960s, practically all fantasy was a rehash of it (Two Sought Adventure, the first Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, was much, much earlier, practically contemporaneous with Howard). In some ways I think that Martin was reacting against that.