‘I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can’t do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory—they’re all blood, you see.’
— Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
‘I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.’
— Rodrick ‘the Reader’ Harlaw to Asha Greyjoy, in A Feast For Crows
CREDIT: All screencaps come from So Obsessed. Thank you! ❤
Writing in the early 1580s, the famed English poet Sir Philip Sidney observed of literary depictions, specifically tragic depictions, of historical events:
‘Do they not know that a tragedy is tied to the laws of poesy, and not of history; not bound to follow the story but having liberty either to feign a quite new matter or to frame the history to the most tragical conveniency?’
The Defence of Poesy, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones[i], ll. 1292-96
He also drops some delightful snark on historians, pointing out that:
‘And even historiographers (although their lips sound of things done, and verity be written in their foreheads) have been glad to borrow both fashion and, perchance, weight of the poets. So Herodotus entitled his History by the name of the nine Muses; and both he and all the rest that followed him either stale or usurped of poetry their passionate describing of passions, the many particuliarities of battles, which no man could affirm; or, if that be denied me, long orations put in the mouths of great kings and captains, which it is certain they never pronounced.’
Defence, ll. 79-86
That one’s for all the Mushroom purists out there.[ii] Or anyone who wants to claim that written history represents what actually happened. As I’ve said many times, there are multiple interpretive layers to any history; hell, there have been legal studies proving that eyewitness statements, even those taken soon afterward, are not always trustworthy, and prone to bias, misinterpretation, and straight up error. So why would we expect historical texts, which are designed not just to describe what happened, but to interpret, contextualize, and make sense of it, to be any more accurate? In short, a historical text best represents not the events it’s writing about, but a combination of what people recall about those events, how culturally important they are, and what the individual writer believes about them.
What I most want to highlight here is the idea of ‘fram[ing] the history to the most tragical conviviency’. In short, that is exactly what the production team behind House of the Dragon are doing with George R.R. Martin’s source text, Fire & Blood. They are picking up this faux history, itself framed as having been written long after the events depicted, with an obvious misogynist slant, based on three primary sources that, while contemporary, suffer from bias and simple unreliability. As I have discussed before, this is Martin playing with a specific type of literary genre—that of the universal chronicle, compiled from a vast selection of earlier sources, framed and recontextualized to appeal to a later audience.
Because it’s worth pointing out that the narrative as presented in Fire & Blood (hereafter F&B) is not, strictly speaking, a tragic one. It is a dynastic narrative with tragic elements embedded[iii] throughout, but lacks the shaping of those events and the deepening of the personages it moves across its proverbial chessboard into characters with real interiority. It’s the difference between reading Edward Hall’s Vnion of the Two Noble & Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & York and watching Shakespeare’s Richard III murder his way to the English throne while winking at the audience the whole time. These are radically different experiences[iv]—and, as Merry on Learned Hands pointed out the show erases the narrative distance between F&B and the reader, and brings the events of the book viscerally to life.
I talked about how this worked in Episode 4 after it aired, so I’m going to focus on other instances across the series. I’ll also be chatting with the Learned Hands about this topic tonight, so please tune in!
But hang on for now, because this is going to be a long one.
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Dr. Kavita Mudan Finn 
