Harvard Students Can Join a New Folklore and Mythology Game of Thrones Class
According to Time, this fall Harvard students will have an opportunity to join a new real medieval history class, “The Real Game of Thrones: From Modern Myths to Medieval Models”. Students will take a look at how George R.R. Martin’s series of books “echoes and adapts, as well as distorts the history and culture of the ‘medieval world’ of Eurasia from c. 400 to 1500 CE”. The program will also explore “a set of archetypal characters at the heart of Game of Thrones — the king, the good wife, the second son, the adventurer, and so on — with distinct analogues in medieval history, literature, religion, and legend”.
According to Sean Gilsdorf, a medieval historian and Administrative Director and Lecturer on Medieval Studies:
Game of Thrones does dramatize nicely some fundamental things going on in medieval courts. Tensions between a queen and the younger women who marry their sons are some ‘Real Housewives of 10th-century Germany’ kind of stuff, where you see these women going after each other
The Linguistics of Game of Thrones
However, this is not the first time Game of Thrones became an object of serious research and study. David J. Peterson, Dothraki developer, also held a linguistic course at the University of California. “The Linguistics of Game of Thrones and the Art of Language Invention”.
David Peterson stated:
There’s precisely as much value in creating a new language as there is in creating a new fictional story. If you see no value in something like As I Lay Dying or To the Lighthouse, then I probably can’t convince you there’s value in creating a new language. Otherwise, they’re both works of art, and have no value but what the valuer gives it, or the user/experience takes out of it. For some, that will be no value. For others, the value is tremendous, as the created language can not only be appreciated for what it is, but can also be used to generate new art, using words that are unique to some fictional context, or have immense personal value for the creator. It’s a bit like writing a song on an instrument the writer created.
