Reading the Wars of the Roses: The Original Game of Thrones

Posted by Paul Cool on Mar 6, 2015 in The Books That | Comments Off on Reading the Wars of the Roses: The Original Game of Thrones

Let us… tell sad stories of the death of Kings (Shakespeare’s Richard II, Act III, Scene 2) Take away Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons, the superhuman White Walkers, and their the zombie-like minions, and George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire has a lot in common with England’s Wars of the Roses (1455-1487), an epic event Martin himself has identified as a key historical inspiration for his fantasy saga. Both stories involve complex, multi-generational, personal, dynastic, and military conflicts for multiple thrones. The Kings of Plantagenet England were also the sovereigns of Wales, Lords of Ireland, and, though the claim was already hollow by 1455, the asserted Kings of France. Both sagas, the fictional and the historical, have delicious characters aplenty, including tragic heroes, brutal, malevolent villains, ambitious, greedy, fractious, and scheming nobles forever changing their colors, and women...

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