I am devoted to Game of Thrones. Somewhere,
deep within my imagination, it strokes an enduring fantasy of achieving order
through medieval valor and romance. This is an old fascination of mine that was
most fully realized during my childhood through the Narnia and Lord of the
Rings books. Though the plot and characters in these series held an appeal, it
was their nuanced place-making that captured me for good. As the stories unfolded,
their landscapes became as fully formed as any character (more so in the case
of Lord of the Rings, in which nearly all the members of the Fellowship are one-dimensional). Consider The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis’
conclusion to the seven-part series, when the remaining Pevensie children romp
across nearly the entire length of Narnia as they transcend death and ascend to
Aslan’s country, an allegory for heaven.
Game of Thrones is heir to this fantasy tradition of
geomorphological complexity, though R.R. Martin’s motive is purely to
entertain. The HBO series makes an explicitly geographical appeal to its
audience through its title sequence, a fevered birds-eye journey across
whichever cities figure prominently in a particular episode. The modeling of
the landscape is exquisite, with cities that literally unfurl before the
viewer’s eyes, while the inverted curvature of the land is shrewdly bizarre.
Most intriguingly, viewers are treated to sights of new cities, as the close-up
of the map of Westeros and its twin continent across the Narrow Sea, Essos,
shifts from one episode to the next. I am usually up and about during title
sequences, but I watch closely during Game of Thrones for new landmarks.
Curiously, the basic geography of the worlds in these three
enormously popular series is consistent in its elemental form, both
physical and cultural. The heroes of each story – Starks, Pevensies, hobbitses
– share a deep attachment to some territory in the northwestern reaches of the
known continents. In these cool, stimulating latitudes, existence is simple,
modest, and just. Food is abundant but wealth not too excessive, while
spiritual fulfillment is within reach if characters attend to community and
religion. To the south and east, however, lie treacherous lands, where dusky
inhabitants are primitive and hedonistic, yet skilled in warfare.
Calormen and its perfidious Tisrocs and Tarkaans become the chief villains in
the later Narnia books, while Khal Drogo and his savage Dothraki horde menace
Westeros in Game of Thrones. Beyond Mordor, itself occupying the southeast
corner of Tolkien’s map of Middle-Earth, live the Haradrim, who wear turbans
and fight atop Mรปmakil, a larger, more
aggressive cousin to the elephant.
Many observers flatly accuse the creators of these stories of racism. I prefer to emphasize the role that environmental
determinism, the simplistic but alluring notion that human temperament and
behavior is shaped by physical geography, plays in constructing an inherently problematic setting. The concept has an ancient, resilient
history. Aristotle theorized about the existence of frigid, temperate, and torrid
zones, speculating that humans could only survive in temperate regions. These
ideas became particularly prominent among western academics in the nineteenth
and early twentieth century, when leading geographers Friedrich Ratzel, Ellen
Churchill Semple, and Ellsworth Huntington developed a counterfeit scholarship
of determinism to buttress the systemic racism upon which western imperialism
rested.
Given the context that Tolkien and Lewis wrote in, it is not
surprising that their stories reflect underlying white anxieties about
decolonization and the world order. However, in recreating their basic
geography, particularly its cultural aspects, Game of Thrones perpetuates these discredited, corrosive theories of racial hierarchy. Their subtlety makes them
all the more insidious. No doubt, for a white viewer like myself, the show’s
geography appeals to the insecurities fostered by our deeply engrained
discourse of race. When the reign of Robert Baratheon, King of Westeros at the
beginning of the first season, dissolves in a haze of drink, whores, and boar
hunting, the geographic origin of his downfall is implicit. King’s Landing,
the capital, is a humid, languid place, home to a scheming elite and its
wretched underclass. Living in so permissive a clime, the once lean and fierce
king naturally succumbs to his baser
instincts.
