The World of Ice and Fire is the semi-canonical title for the universe built by author George R. R. Martin in his book series A Song of Ice and Fire and in the television show Game of Thrones, based on that series. The world is an epic fantasy taking place in two continents, Westeros (in the West) and Essos (in the East). Most of the conflict in the series revolves around a Westerosi power struggle between several different families vying for the “Iron Throne,” the seat of power on the continent. Westeros is divided into two distinct sections: the Seven Kingdoms, which encompass the majority of the known land in Westeros, and the Land of Always Winter, a sprawling expanse of arctic ice and snow far to the north.
Dividing the Seven Kingdoms from the Land of Always Winter is the Wall, a seven hundred foot tall megastructure stretching across the entirety of the continent in the far north. The Wall serves to protect the Seven Kingdoms from what lies north of it, from tribes of men called Wildlings to ominous ancient demonic ice creatures called White Walkers or Others, and the Wall is guarded by the Night’s Watch, a celibate brotherhood of former criminals and men with nowhere else to go.
The Seven Kingdoms are as follows:
The North: A cold gray country of rolling green moors and sparsely populated villages. It’s the largest of the kingdoms stretching from the Wall to a strip of marshy swampland called the Neck.
The Riverlands: Directly below the North and technically encompassing the swampy Neck, they’re a land of soft hills and flowing rivers stemming from the Trident, a major river in Westeros and a large tributary for other smaller rivers.
The Vale: A mountainous land east of the Riverlands and occupied by the steep Mountains of the Moon, which are virtually impassable by enemy armies.
The Westerlands: A hilly and wealthy country where most of the gold in Westeros comes from, making whoever occupies it extraordinarily rich.
The Reach: The largest of the southern kingdoms and the most populated. Most of the agricultural product comes from the Reach, which means the land is beautiful and the climate is temperate.
The Stormlands: The rocky and damp eastern coast of Westeros south of the Vale, where storms usually rush up into the land and break ships along the rocks.
The Crownlands: A small kingdom encompassing the mouth of the Blackwater Rush, another major river in Westeros. The Crownlands contain King’s Landing, which is where the King and Queen of Westeros rule over all the other kingdoms.
Dorne: The most independent-minded of the Seven Kingdoms, aside from the North. Dorne is a dusty and sandy desert at the southern tip of Westeros marked by dunes and red mountains.
The main focus of the World of Ice and Fire is the history that author George R. R. Martin has laid out. In the development of the story, he created an expansive backing history stretching thousands of years into the past. Most of the history he wrote takes direct inspiration from real life English, Scottish, Welsh, and German historical events from the middle ages and beyond.
In the book series A Song of Ice and Fire, the primary conflict revolves around what Martin calls the War of the Five Kings, a war spanning across the country concerning the legitimacy of the current king of the Seven Kingdoms. Each of these five kings believes that they have the truest claim to the Iron Throne and fights the rest of them for that seat.
The two “main characters” of the story are Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen. Jon Snow is the bastard son of Lord Eddard Stark, the lord of the North. Eddard’s family, the Starks, have ruled over the North for thousands of years, and now they’re loyal to the crown in King’s Landing. Jon Snow is a brother of the Night’s Watch, the brotherhood guarding the Wall far to the north.
Daenerys Targaryen along with her brother Viserys are the last living members of House Targaryen, which used to rule all of Westeros before they were overthrown a few years before the beginning of the story. Daenerys is living in Essos, the continent to the east of Westeros, ruling as the Khaleesi, basically the queen, of the Dothraki, a nomadic horse-riding warrior people who rule a large part of the continent. Her husband, Khal Drogo, is the king of the Dothraki. Daenerys and her brother seek to return home and reclaim the throne from the man who overthrew their family, King Robert.
During the War of the Five Kings, a conflict in the Land of Always Winter, beyond the Wall, is growing. Ancient unknowable ice demons called Others (or White Walkers in the show) are gathering in the night and moving southward to wipe out all life in the world and bring a “Night that Never Ends,” an icy apocalypse to kill everyone alive. The White Walkers hold a special power in that they have the ability to make the dead rise again and fight for them as sort of ice zombies.
There’s so much stuff in this world that it’s hard to encapsulate all of it effectively. So far, I haven’t even mentioned House Lannister, whose antagonism with House Stark is the inciting incident for the War of the Five Kings and the focus of the war as a whole. The world is enormous and the history traverses thousands of years, making it ineffective to try and cover all of it.
The key identifying feature of this world for people viewing it from outside of the story is that it’s a darker and more violent version of other common fantasy worlds. Extremely violent events, actions, and characters permeate the entire story. The characters that Martin writes are incredibly conflicted, often resting in the gray area between good and bad. Bad characters often do good acts and vice versa, making the reader or viewer feel conflicted about who these people are. Martin himself once wrote that the only thing worth writing about was the human heart in conflict with itself.
The World of Ice and Fire takes the history of our world and some of the inaccurate portrayals thereof and uses the fantasy mode to ironically demonstrate a more realistic form, in which people aren’t black and white figures of good and evil. Martin’s favorite stories growing up were high fantasy medieval tales and superhero stories in which the good guy beats the bad guy and always wins in the end. In the World of Ice and Fire, however, Martin makes sure to let the reader know that people aren’t just good and evil, that it’s not always just good and evil fighting against each other, and crucially that good people don’t always win in the end.
Martin tells a story of overlapping alliances and deeply historic conflicts between houses and families going back thousands of years. The focus of these conflicts is not that one side is objectively good and one side is objectively bad, but that each side is neither good nor bad, but fighting for reasons entirely their own. It lets the reader determine if fighting for yourself and for survival is good or bad, and if fighting for a family is good or bad. The actions done by sympathetic characters might be reprehensible taken out of context, but within the context of why these characters did what they did, things become excusable for the reader or viewer. People aren’t a binary system in which someone is either purely good or purely evil, and Martin uses a fantastical scenario in order to demonstrate this very realistic symptom of the human condition.
Discussion questions:
- How do the circumstances, context, and motives of a situation affect the assumed morality of what a character does? Can any amount of context or motivation change the fundamental morality of certain actions, and, by proxy, the morality of certain characters?
- Why do readers still love characters despite them doing things that could be seen as morally reprehensible or evil?
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