Fire and blood a song of.., p.78
Fire & Blood (A Song of Ice and Fire),
p.78
DJ: Costain is the second best book ever written about the Plantagenets, actually…There are some great scenes! Aegon’s Conquest at the beginning of the book—would I be right in saying a sort of version of the Norman conquest of England in 1066, but on dragonback?
GRRM: With dragons, yes!
DJ: Do you have any particular favorite characters or episodes? I mean, the Dance of the Dragons forms, in a sense, the core part of the book.
GRRM: Well, I have a lot of affection for Mushroom.
DJ: Say a little bit about Mushroom and link it, if you wouldn’t mind, to the process of writing fake history, because this is something that really struck me, that you’ve done so skillfully with this book. Explain who Mushroom is, maybe.
GRRM: Well, Mushroom is a dwarf, but he’s not a well-born one like Tyrion, he’s a dwarf of lowly birth who’s the fool at the court during the events leading up to, and during much of, the Dance of the Dragons and its aftermath. He’s a jester. There were actually a number of jesters in the Middle Ages, of course. You’ve probably seen them in many movies—fools, jesters, as they were called. Some of them were very, very clever men, who could do all sorts of witticisms and jokes, who could juggle and ride unicycles, and do other colorful things. Some of them were people who were physically deformed, who were dwarfs or hunchbacks. The people of the Middle Ages found that wonderfully amusing. So, Mushroom is a dwarf, but he’s of the clever sort, and he’s an observer.
Fire & Blood is not actually written by me, you see—it’s written by Archmaester Gyldayn of the Citadel. He’s writing a history, and like anyone writing history he has to go back to primary sources. I had a lot of fun with that, because when he gets to the Dance of the Dragons he has a number of primary sources, but three of them are most major. He has Grand Maester Orwyle’s official court records, he has the septon of King’s Landing and the Red Keep, who of course is a religious figure—so he interprets everything as the will of the gods, and what was a sin, what wasn’t a sin—and he has Mushroom, who was semiliterate and couldn’t actually write anything, but who told his story in later years to the equivalent of a monk, who wrote it all down. And Mushroom’s story, of course, is always the most scandalous, scurrilous, filthy version of events, all of which had to do with people betraying each other and poisoning each other, having similar types of fun—sleeping in places they shouldn’t sleep. I loved the idea, since this was a fake history, of not telling it as an omniscient historian sitting down to say “this is what actually happened.” I loved the idea of telling it as a historian in-world who’s trying to figure out what happened, but he’s looking at his primary sources and he’s finding contradictory accounts.
This was impressed on me many years ago, long before A Game of Thrones began. I was writing a novel that was never completed or published. It was Black and White and Red All Over, a novel about 1890s journalism in New York City, when there were fourteen competing daily newspapers, one of which was the New York World, owned and operated by Joseph Pulitzer, the great, great journalist for whom the Pulitzer Prize is named. The New York World Building, which no longer exists but which was down on Park Row, which is where all the newspapers were built, was the tallest building in the world at its time. It had a golden dome on the top. It was a very memorable building. It was built right next to The Sun, a competing paper, but it was so high that the people said Pulitzer could lean out and spit on The Sun if he wanted, spit straight down at the smaller building next to him. The thing is, when I tried to research the World Building—the tallest building in the world—how many stories was it exactly? I found three different, contradictory citations—it was twenty stories tall or sixteen, I think, or fifteen. And that really impressed on me. This is 1890 I’m looking at—this is like yesterday in comparable things—this is a simple, factual question, how many stories were in this building, and I’m getting three different accounts. If they can’t even get that right, what’s the odds that they know what happened to…Charlemagne? The odds are astronomical!
So a modern historian or someone like Archmaester Gyldayn has to sort through these stories and decide which he believes, which he doesn’t believe. I had a lot of fun being able to tell Mushroom’s accounts, which are probably all turned up to thirty-seven, and then the duller accounts, but I didn’t have to just stick to the duller accounts—I could give all three, and that was a great deal of fun.
DJ: The second volume of Fire & Blood won’t come out anytime soon but could you give us an idea of some elements that it will contain? We go up to the reign of Aegon the Unlucky here—what are some of the highlights of the putative next volume of this?
GRRM: Well, this book only goes up to the regency of Aegon and ends when Aegon III actually reaches manhood and takes control, so I have his reign to cover, which includes the deaths of the last dragons. Although Aegon III is called the Dragonbane, there are still three or four dragons kicking around when he takes the crown and there are none by the time he’s over, so that’s one thing I was going to cover—why and what happens there—and some of the troubles and rebellions of his reign. And then, ultimately, his children, who are fairly interesting. He has five, one of whom is Daeron I, the Young Dragon, who conquers Dorne. He’s a fourteen-year-old Alexander the Great kind of hero-king figure, but he dies young. And then his brother Baelor takes over, and Baelor is very religious, he’s more of a Saint Louis kind of figure—a little extreme in his religiosity. Among other things, he imprisons his three sisters—in luxurious imprisonment in the Red Keep, in the Maidenvault. But he doesn’t like them walking around the court because they tempt him. They have breasts and things underneath their clothes and he finds that very disturbing to contemplate, so he hides them away. So, I’ll tell their stories and I’ll tell Baelor’s story. And then, after him, we get the brief reign of Viserys II, and then his son Aegon IV, Aegon the Unworthy, takes over, and he’s a very colorful figure. I obviously drew on Henry VIII for him—Henry VIII had six wives, Aegon the Unworthy had nine mistresses. And they all exist in my head, I know who they all were and what happened to each of them—who had their heads chopped off and who had affairs, so there’s a lot of cool material there. And then you get into the Blackfyre Rebellions, of which there were five. I’ve referred to them frequently so I’ll get all the details on the Blackfyre Rebellions in. And ultimately we’ll get to the Mad King and Robert’s Rebellion, and that’s where I’ll draw it to a close.
DJ: I do have one more question for you. In this book we have many, many dragons and many, many Valyrian steel swords. If you could ride one dragon and wield one sword, which would it be?
GRRM: If I could ride on one dragon I might as well go with the biggest, which would be Balerion the Black Dread. He’s the megadragon in this early book. He’s the only one who remembers Valyria, up to a certain point, because he was brought over from Valyria a little before the Doom of Valyria. He’s the biggest and meanest of the dragons that exists.
If I could wield only one sword, I don’t think it would be any of the Targaryen swords, it would be Dawn, the sword wielded by the Sword of the Morning, the heir of House Dayne of Starfall, which is made from the metal from a fallen star. Who knows what magical property fallen stars bring to earth?
DJ: Well, I think you’ve got a little bit of fallen star in you. I’m very sorry that we have to go, but it has been, I think you’ll all agree, an enormous privilege and an utter joy and a pleasure to have with us the one and only George R. R. Martin. Give him a big hand!
GRRM: Thank you!
The full video is readily available online.
for Lenore, Elias, Andrea, and Sid,
the Mountain Minions
By George R. R. Martin
A Song of Ice and Fire
Book One: A Game of Thrones
Book Two: A Clash of Kings
Book Three: A Storm of Swords
Book Four: A Feast for Crows
Book Five: A Dance with Dragons
The Lands of Ice & Fire
The World of Ice & Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and the Game of Thrones
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
Fire & Blood
Dying of the Light
Windhaven (with Lisa Tuttle)
Fevre Dream
The Armageddon Rag
Dead Man’s Hand (with John J. Miller)
Graphic Novels
A Game of Thrones, Volumes 1–4
A Clash of Kings, Volumes 1-2
The Mystery Knight
Windhaven
Starport
Short Story Collections
Dreamsongs: Volume I
Dreamsongs: Volume II
A Song for Lya and Other Stories
Songs of Stars and Shadows
Sandkings
Songs the Dead Men Sing
Nightflyers
Tuf Voyaging
Portraits of His Children
Quartet
Edited by George R. R. Martin
New Voices in Science Fiction, Volumes 1–4
The Science Fiction Weight-Loss Book (with Isaac Asimov and Martin Harry Greenberg)
The John W. Campbell Awards, Volume 5
Night Visions 3
Wild Cards I–XXII
Co-edited with Gardner Dozois
Warriors I–III
Songs of the Dying Earth
Down These Strange Streets
Old Mars
Dangerous Women
Rogues
Old Venus
About the Author
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of many novels, including those of the acclaimed series A Song of Ice and Fire—A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons—as well as related works such as Fire & Blood, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, and The World of Ice & Fire, with Elio M. García, Jr., and Linda Antonsson. Other novels and collections include Tuf Voyaging, Fevre Dream, The Armageddon Rag, Dying of the Light, Windhaven (with Lisa Tuttle), and Dreamsongs Volumes I and II. As a writer-producer, he has worked on The Twilight Zone, Beauty and the Beast, and various feature films and pilots that were never made. He lives with his lovely wife, Parris, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
georgerrmartin.com
Facebook.com/georgerrmartinofficial
Twitter: @GRRMspeaking
About the Illustrator
DOUG WHEATLEY is a comic book artist, concept designer, and illustrator who has worked on such properties and characters as Star Wars, Aliens, Superman, The Incredible Hulk, and Conan the Barbarian to name just a few. Wheatley was the artist on the comic book adaptation of the film Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and contributed illustrations to The World of Ice & Fire.
Facebook.com/doug.wheatley
Twitter: @wheatley_doug
Instagram: @doug_wheatley
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George R. R. Martin, Fire & Blood (A Song of Ice and Fire)
