OOTS #1215 - The Discussion Thread

[pendell]

"He sat down on the ground, and taking the dagger-hilt laid it on his knees, and he sang over it a slow song in a strange tongue."

Either he's doing something pointlessly superstitious, or he's doing something magical.

Now, the limited perceptions of the Hobbit viewpoint don't get to see what's really going on there. But something is.

There's also using the Palantir, and there's also summoning and army of the dead, then dismissing it once done. He wasn't necessarily a magical practitioner, but he had a certain magic about him because he's King.

Likewise, while Aragorn uses Athelas, his healing abilities are a callback to Royal touch , the belief that kings had the special, miraculous ability to heal. And if you read closely in "The houses of healing", he doesn't just use herbs. He calls both Faramir and Eowyn back, and they come to him because he's the king. Faramir says as much.

"My Lord, you call. I come. What does the king command?"

Aragorn as king is both the lawful king and a morally upright man. Because of this he has abilities and powers of right ordinary mortals do not have. This is exactly the sort of attitude the old English song When the King Enjoys His Own Again invokes.

It's also an attitude anathema to people who , to say no more, have a strong anti-monarchical tradition. In modern American tradition, as in Star Wars or SOIAF, the king is someone like Palpatine. Star Wars portrays a revolt against a tyrant. Sure, you have princesses and Queens, but you'll notice they don't do much actual ruling. Instead they spend most of their arcs fleeing for their lives or chained up in slave pens or tossed into arenas with bare midriffs. They don't do much actual ruling. And Queen Amidala is democratically elected in any case.

Kings and queens can be sympathetic figures when they're on the run. Kings and queens who are ruling on their thrones are not sympathetic characters. Aside from Palpatine, the closest characters we get that fit that mold are Boss Nass and Jabba, neither of whom are sympathetic.

In ASOIAF, GRR Martin lifted a fair amount of kingly and queenly behavior directly from Shakespeare and from medieval and ancient history. So we have one king who's the product of generations of incest and mad. You have another king, born to privilege, who thinks nothing of cutting out the ears or tongues of minstrels who displease him. All of which makes the point that choosing a lifetime ruler based on his/her parents is a pretty bad idea.

I think that's part of why ASOIAF is a modern answer to the somewhat romantic LOTR. It's not just that.. As a rule,, when a named good guy dies in LOTR they've done something to bring it on themselves. Thorin hoards his gold and plots war against men and elves. Boromir falls to the lure of the Ring. Theoden is an exception, but he gets a glorious death.

GRR Martin is a lot closer to real war; in his stories, when there is fighting , people die. Good characters die, and so do bad ones, sometimes randomly out of the blue. Not good deaths, either. Some people are shot down in the privy like dogs. Because that's what real war does. Real war isn't a morality tale, and virtue makes a poor substitute for solid cover as a protection against bullets.

There's a certain irony there, because Tolkien knew real war a heck of a lot better than Martin did, but he chose not to pass that particular part of the story on in his tales.

Respectfully,

Brian P.