Every once in a while in my A Song of Ice and Fire journeys I come across an essay that I feel I must respond to. This time, it was part one of four of an essay about the Dothraki people, posted three years ago by a genuine historian on his blog.
The essay is prompted by a quote from the author of ASOIAF, George R. R. Martin, that Martin made in the year 2012. Here’s the quote.
The Dothraki were actually fashioned as an amalgam of a number of steppe and plains cultures… Mongols and Huns, certainly, but also Alans, Sioux, Cheyenne, and various other Amerindian tribes… seasoned with a dash of pure fantasy. (GRRM)
The thesis of the essay is that Martin is a big fat dumb liar. Okay, here were the historian’s own words.
Because – and this is going to surprise literally no one who reads this blog – that claim to historicity is fundamentally empty. The Dothraki are not an amalgam of Steppe and Plains cultures, they are an amalgam of stereotypes about Steppe and Plains cultures. There it is, that is the thesis for the next three to four weeks of the blog! All of the angry hurt-fan-commenters can just go shout angrily into the void of comment moderation right now.
For the rest of us grown-ups, we can start with how the Dothraki dress.
And here’s the line where I decided I would respond.
But we’re given some context to interpret that description in the passage that surrounds it, the event has “barbaric splendor” (AGoT, 82; this is a statement, I should note, delivered by the narrator, not a thought of Daenerys’),
This comment demonstrates that, while it may be true that Bret Devereaux has read ASOIAF entirely, he is not especially familiar with ASOIAF. Because everyone who has pored over the story and its mysteries for a length of time sufficient to earn the moniker of die-hard fan can tell you that, excepting for exactly one moment (and possibly not even that one) [Victarion Greyjoy’s transformation], every single word and sentence in ASOIAF must be understood to be occurring in perception of, or the mind of, the POV character of the chapter in which it appeared.
In other words, ASOIAF does not have a storytelling narrator the way Bret means it. Ever. The “barbaric splendor” line is, in fact, happening in the thoughts of Daenerys herself. Which means that, for the purposes of the story, we must treat it as though Daenerys, rather than George R. R. Martin, formulated it in her thoughts.
With the story written this way, the very structure of the story depends upon the reader either forgetting or not consciously noticing that every unspoken word is happening in the thoughts of the POV character (insofar as it’s fair to call un-articulated thoughts words), and is therefore suspect unreliable narration. Recognizing this characteristic of the story is often revelatory for the reader, because it demands a radical transformation to the way he engages with the story. Suddenly he is questioning every sentence he reads, challenging and testing each line and word for ways that its truth might be compromised by the POV character’s particular perspective, misunderstandings, biases and more. In order to find out what’s really going on, the reader has to seek a second opinion or perspective from a different character’s point-of-view and reconcile the conflicting perspectives to produce a third and more complete canon of the situation. This is how ASOIAF conveys its core ethic and trains its readers to become better at conflict resolution.
Coming to grips with this feature of ASOIAF is considered a rite of passage by its veteran readers, because we all went through the same transformation ourselves. Resisting the tendency to slide back into a passive acceptance of the narrative as though it were a factual, objective and omniscient account of events is an everlasting challenge in both the academia of ASOIAF interpretation and the game of predicting its futures and conclusions.
As one such ASOIAF academic and fan, I can’t let Bret Devereaux off the hook for this one. This misapprehension of ASOIAF is the biggest deal of all big deals in ASOIAF interpretation. Though not particularly uncommon or damning in a casual environment, it’s the most reliable marker of unfamiliarity with the story that exists in ASOIAF discourse. There’s no question in my mind that as I continue reading his essay, I’m going to find him criticizing his misinterpretation of events, where he has taken events at face value unquestioningly while the truth of them is actually quite different when unearthed, rendering his criticism off-point at best, and opposite to the truth at worst.
Another thing I notice is an irony happening between Bret’s not noticing that the story requires its reader to read it critically in order to fully understand it, and his purpose to inoculate people against misinformation by teaching them critical reading skills.
(Of course, more broadly, doing this as a practice exercise is a key part of building up that skill – what we may term ‘critical reading’ – more generally, rendering the alert reader more resistant to this sort of thing, both in its unintended form (as, I suspect, in this case) or in its more dangerous intended form. Put another way, developing critical reading skills is one important way to make one’s self a harder target for misinformation, including historical misinformation.)
It’s a contrast that shows me that the critical component in Bret’s critical reading is aimed more outward than inward, where his preoccupation with historical accuracy is, in the most significant of ways, causing him to miss the point of fiction — that fiction is ultimately an exploration of the self, the reader’s internal world. It has to be, because at the end of the day the people and worlds in fiction do not really exist, no matter how much or how little they were inspired by things in the real world. This remains true regardless of any of the author’s utterances. Had the author said outright that his story is an accurate depiction and account of the real history of steppes and plains people, it would not change the fact that it is not.
When a reader of fiction comes across a part of Dothraki culture that is at odds with the real world history of comparable people, it is more appropriate to ask ‘In what ways is this change from reality doing a better job of conveying the story’s philosophies,’ rather than ‘In what ways is it making the story worse?’ More often than not, a complementary consideration of the change will yield a better understanding of the story’s philosophies than a noncomplementary consideration. A noncomplementary consideration often leads to a complete abandonment of canon in favor of historical record, as Bret does throughout his essay. The underlying recognition is that fiction is meant to convey values, while history is meant to relate what happened. The authors of fiction and history are working from two different purposes, so comparisons of their works leave most audiences with a sense that the comparer is, in some meaningful way, missing the point of the fiction.
On balance, historians such as Bret feel the same way when fiction readers laud historically inaccurate depictions for their historical accuracy, or the historically inaccurate story as a whole. They feel as though the more important lessons reside in real history, and that fiction writers damage those lessons and our accessibility to them when they change things, especially for a purpose as nonessential as entertainment.
Well, try convincing the millions of ravenous ASOIAF and Game of Thrones fans that their beloved piece of entertainment is nonessential, and you might have a war on your hands. The sheer magnitudes of the audience and its passion for the story should indicate to even the stuffiest of historians that something other than historical accuracy is at the heart of peoples’ love of it. Of course, the thing they’ve fallen in love with is the story’s ethic. A critique of the story’s historical inaccuracy as “misinformation” threatens the survival of the ethic by threatening the survival of the story. Because when you call something misinformation you’re calling it harmful. And when you call information harmful you imply that it should be changed or censored.
Bret Devereaux would probably not say that the story should be censored, but his criticisms suggest loud and clear that the story would necessarily be better if it were changed to be more of a one-to-one copy of history. If the Dothraki wore linens and buckskin in place of leather, for example, Bret’s contention appears to be that that would be an all-around improvement to the story. But a good storyteller knows that it’s just as important to omit details from a story as it is to include them, because a story is supposed to show the audience only the information that matters for the purpose of conveying its ethic. Or as George R. R. Martin once put it, “everything serves the almighty theme.” You don’t want to waste the audience’s time with details that don’t matter toward that end, or else you’ll dilute the story’s efficiency to convey its ethic to people like us.
But changing the story to be more historically accurate doesn’t necessarily need to make the story longer. It might make the story shorter, or leave it the same length. So to give Bret’s implicit prescription for ASOIAF a full consideration, let’s set aside concerns about length by assuming Bret would only prescribe changes that do not make the story longer. Even in that case, changes in favor of historical accuracy can make the story worse, because the things Bret describes as harmful stereotypes are actually timeless archetypes.
His inability or neglect to distinguish between stereotypes and archetypes is unsurprising in some ways, because it’s constant with his overall attitude that quasi-racist impulses are the root explanation for a “stereotype’s” existence. And it is surprising in some ways because it is inconstant with his complaints that, when the author gives the Dothraki dull clothing, the author is treating historical steppes and plains people as though they lacked our sophistication and means rather than just our means. (And even our means they lacked less-so than most people think.)
It is not difficult to see how this assumption flatters the person who holds it, nor to identify the impulse to self-flatter as a likely explanation for the assumption’s existence. However, self-flattery explains Bret Devereaux’s treatment of fiction and ASOIAF more than it does yours, mine, or George R.R. Martin’s “treatment” of historical people, as I’ll highlight in a moment.
The “Fremen Mirage” trope that Bret Devearux references, and that is at the heart of his criticisms of ASOIAF, contains most densely the richest ironies between what Bret thinks ASOIAF is like and what ASOIAF is actually like. He summarizes The Fremen Mirage this way:
“The Fremen Mirage is a literary trope, unconnected to historical reality, which presents societies as a contrast between unsophisticated, but morally pure, hyper-masculine and militarily effective ‘strong men’ societies honed by ‘hard times’ (that is, the Fremen of the term) and a sophisticated but effeminate and decadent ‘weak men’ societies weakened by ‘good times,’ frequently with an implicit assertion of the superior worth of the former.”
That Bret could not even describe this trope without using the words strong and weak is noteworthy in relationship to the criticism in its conclusion. Between the two traits strong and weak, which one is superior? Which one would you rather be? And which one do you admire? The answer is the same across the board. So what are the derangements that blind Bret to the obvious fact that being strong is intrinsically and universally better than being weak? What does he think is wrong about asserting that strong men are higher quality than weak men?
Apparent to most people, the reason the author dressed the Dothraki people in leather rather than linen and buckskin is because the author knows that a modern American audience sees history through The Fremen Mirage, and he’s writing his story to convey its ethic specifically to a modern American audience. Had George R. R. Martin lived and written this story hundreds of years ago as a member of Mongolian society, he would have tailored the story to Mongolian attitudes instead, in order to convey its ethic to the Mongolians. Perhaps the Dothraki would have worn loincloths instead of leather vests.
As so often happens in critiques like Bret’s, the acknowledgements that should have been central to the essay were made and haphazardly discarded right at the beginning of it. The purpose of dressing the Dothraki in leather rather than linen and buckskin was obviously to better convey the archetype of ‘strong men during hard times’ to modern people. Likewise, the purpose of dressing the Qartheen in silks and satins was obviously to better convey the archetype of ‘weak men during good times’ to modern people. The specific details such as the materials, their acquisition, the crafting process and ubiquity are all interchangeable with any other details that can convey the same archetype to the same audience, because the essential point of them is that ‘the Dothraki are strong people during hard times.’
So whether you lived in 12th century Mongolia or 21st century America, the archetypes of ‘strong man during hard times’ and ‘weak man during good times’ survive. While it’s certainly true that the abstraction itself is in some ways “unconnected with history” because it never existed at any pin-pointable place and time, it’s also profoundly connected with history because it depicts what everybody in history at all places and times had in common. Every people at every time was able to look back into history and see harder men who lived in harder times, and look at the present and forward into the future and see weaker men who live in better times. This centuries-long progression from strength to weakness is depicted in every culture in ASOIAF, because it’s part of the story’s built-in commentaries on real world civilizations and its audience — commentaries that shed some light on Bret Devereaux’s inexplicable contempt for strength and over-sensitivity to stereotypes.
Bret is trying to preserve the lessons that reside in factual history. If we forget history, those lessons will be lost. That is, unless you can convey the same lessons in a more memorable form, like a colorful story. And that’s what fiction inspired by history is. When you want to preserve a lesson of history so that future generations can better access it, you have two options. You can record every painstaking detail that your little hands can record in one lifetime, or you can distill history down to its gist — its ethic — and you convey the gist. Future people will be much more likely to read and remember it when it’s fun and to the point. In the end, The Fremen Mirage is really The Devereaux Mirage — an insistence that, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, people across vast spans of time can and should be expected to remember, learn and be interested in every detail of history that anybody ever cared to record. What conception of the written tradition could be more flattering to a historian than that one? Compared to A Song of Ice and Fire, The Devereaux Mirage is the bigger fantasy.
Bret Devereaux’s awareness of this shortcoming in his ASOIAF criticisms is demonstrated by his need to move between criticizing the books and criticizing the show in order to keep his criticism alive.
And of course, that is exactly how the show has opted to read Dothraki clothing:
An honest broker would handle the books and the show separately, and with consideration to the differences in format, author and audience. Though he promised to do that very thing at the beginning of his essay, he has done little or none, and comments like this one show me that his true intention with including the show is to play musical chairs with the goalposts.
His awareness of the shortcomings of his criticisms is demonstrated again by his need to move between condemning the depiction of barbarians as morally pure, and condemning the depiction of modern people as morally impure. Which is it, Bret? Are modern authors bad people for implying that modern people are less moral than historical people? Or are they bad people for implying that historical people are less moral than modern people? They can’t be implying both, not as a generalization the way you mean it. That doesn’t make any sense. You need to either distinguish one author from another, one work from another, and stop generalizing, or keep the generalization and decide which of these completely opposite criticisms you want to make.
One of Bret’s criticisms of George R. R. Martin’s Dothraki people is that horsehair leggings are “deeply improbable.”
This is, in terms of material, very clearly not what the ‘vests’ the Dothraki in the show are wearing. Buckskin would also be used to make trousers, as opposed to the “horsehair leggings” of Martin’s wording, which also strike me as deeply improbable. Haircloth – fabric made from horsehair (or camel hair) – is durable, but typically stiff, unsupple and terribly itchy; not something you want in direct contact with your skin (especially not between your rear end and a saddle), unless you just really like skin irritation. It is also a difficult material to get in any kind of significant quantity – and you would need a significant quantity if you intended to make most of your trousers out of it.
To someone who thinks writing a good fiction story is mostly about copying and pasting historical facts into your own book, the deep improbability of horsehair leggings is a big problem. But to someone who thinks writing a good fiction story is mostly about expressing philosophical truths about human life, the deep improbability of horsehair leggings is little or no problem. To the former type of person, the hypothetical leggings are interfering with reality. To the latter type of person, the significance of the leggings does not seem to reside in their material relationship to reality at all. It must reside somewhere else. And it does. So let’s walk through the reasons why the story is better with horsehair leggings rather than linen or buckskin leggings.
The first question is, what is the effect of the leggings being made out of horsehair rather than linen or buckskin? It makes the Dothraki people more dependent on horses. Absent a lot of horses, the Dothraki won’t know how to make pants anymore, and will have to learn a new way or be pantless.
Now the question is, why does the author need the Dothraki to be extremely dependent on horses? Because it adds validity to the Dothraki peoples’ fear of the ocean and their belief that bodies of water that their horses can’t drink are poisoned. Though ocean water is not technically poisoned, drinking it is deadly nevertheless. Additionally, no other place in the world has wild horses as abundantly as the Dothraki sea. So this Dothraki superstition is true enough to protect the Dothraki people from being deprived of pants, among other things, whether by preventing their horses from drinking salt water or preventing the Dothraki from traveling outside the environment they’re adapted for, regardless that the superstition is false in a technical way.
Now the question is, why does the author need to add validity to the Dothraki peoples’ fear of the ocean? Because Daenerys is dismissive of their fear of the ocean.
Savage beasts he did not fear, nor any man who had ever drawn breath, but the sea was a different matter. To the Dothraki, water that a horse could not drink was something foul; the heaving grey-green plains of the ocean filled them with superstitious loathing. Drogo was a bolder man than the other horselords in half a hundred ways, she had found … but not in this. If only she could get him onto a ship … (AGOT Daenerys VI)
She considers it a silly superstition, and insists on compelling the Dothraki people to cross the ocean anyway. How do you think the Dothraki people are likely to fare when removed from the plains and the abundance of horses that their expertise is centered around?
Dothraki were wise where horses were concerned, but could be utter fools about much else. (ADWD Daenerys I)
With this topic recurring across five books, it didn’t take long to see that a complementary consideration of the story’s break from historical reality was more useful in developing my understanding of the story than an uncomplementary one. The horsehair leggings are one ingredient in the recipe of this cautionary tale about being too dismissive of long-standing cultural beliefs that you don’t fully understand yet. If someone were deliberately trying to reduce the clarity of that lesson, changing the horsehair leggings to linen or buckskin would be a good start. Because linen leggings are never made out of horse products, buckskin leggings may or may not be made out of horse products, and horsehair leggings are always made out of horse products. In other words, horsehair leggings remove any possible ambiguity in the interpretation about the Dothraki’s dependence on horses for leggings.
I am not a formal student of literature. I dropped out of college after one semester. But I actually think, in a strange sense, this is useful, because my own initial unfamiliarity with the topic has demonstrated to me just how basic the level of understanding and reading necessary to avoid the failures of Bret’s interpretation are.
In the comment by George R. R. Martin that Bret has set his crosshairs upon, Martin was obviously relying upon a shared understanding that fiction is, by definition, not real. At least, not in the same way we mean real when we say history is real. Martin was describing the Dothraki within the confines of that shared understanding, which is most prominent in his own mind, as the person who conjured every bit of the story, and to whom the cracks in its hypothetical reality look like canyons.
Unfortunately, Martin didn’t account in his “dash of pure fantasy” comment for the reality that there are people like Bret Devereaux out there who will ignore the obvious to complain for the length of an eighth of A Game of Thrones on the basis of an offhanded cooking metaphor. When Bret is missing the point of fiction this severely, I don’t have to wonder from where his frustration originates about the masses of “angry hurt-fan-commenters” who would rather reread an eighth of A Game of Thrones for the eighth time than read his critique of it so that, ostensibly, they may finally mature into the intellectually liberated “grown-ups” that Bret Devereaux and the disciples of materialism everywhere believe themselves to be. The origin of his frustration and criticisms alike is plain old fashioned envy. If you can’t write something great that millions of people want to read, the next best thing is criticizing something great that somebody else made.
I have no doubt that after I’ve read Bret’s essay in its entirety and if I absorb it unquestioningly, two things will happen to me: I will become smarter about the real world history of steppes and plains people, and I will become dumber about whichever philosophies are being seductively conveyed by, and that attracted me to, A Song of Ice and Fire.
If the lives of historical people contain valuable lessons for modern people to learn, surely a better way to honor those heroes and villains of history is to preserve the lessons for as many generations as possible, even though that means that one day so many details will have been lost that all that remains is an “inaccurate and demeaning stereotype.” If a culture as colorful and complex as the Dothraki are a depiction that’s demeaning to historical nomads, how much more complex or historically accurate must a fictional culture be to escape a category so damning? And who made Bret king to dictate how complex or culturally accurate somebody else’s fictional culture has to be? How many fictional cultures has Bret written? To somebody who sees and has taken it upon himself to remedy the ‘dangerous unconscious prejudices’ behind the most popular story of this moment in history, there must hardly exist a history-inspired story that does not look like an existential danger in his eyes. It’s either that, or the rest of us have been terribly misled by our senses that this story is great.
The conflict that is happening between Bret’s and my approach to the story is not new. It’s ancient, as old as recorded history itself. It has never resolved, and it never will, because it never can. Both Bret and I are championing values that absolutely cannot be abandoned when human well-being is the priority. Well-being for human beings is a rare and precious condition that emerges from these two approaches to story being at an irreconcilable equilibrium, each unable to completely dominate the other, such that neither mode of interpretation can carry its humans with it off the cliff of its pathology.
To give Bret’s approach its due credit, stories effect how we imagine history to have really been. The things people believe about the past effect how they perceive the present and envision the future. So the problems of and associated with forgetting the factual version of history in favor of a popular fiction are real, and they happen all the time. Some of the things about history that the best historians consider the hardest of hard facts are fictions that replaced the facts through popular belief. That is the pathology and fate of societies and people such as myself who readily suspend interest in the real world in order to explore value in a hypothetical one. To put it simply, people like me need people like Bret, and people like Bret need people like me, to keep one another’s ideas accountable to the human beings who employ them to solve a problem set that is never entirely literal or entirely philosophical.
So what should we weigh more important? Fact or myth? The answer always depends on what you mostly want to know. What happened? Or why? Each inquiry is indispensable for fully understanding the other, so enjoy both if you can. But don’t fall for the rhetoric that either nonfiction or fiction is a superior mode of study for a superior kind of person. They’re as different and as married as men and women, light and shadow, and ice and fire.
Created Apr 4, 2023
Updated Apr 6, 2023
Apples and Dragons 