I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to write about one particular part of this book: the fight between Bronn and Ser Vardis Egen. If you haven’t already noticed, A Song of Ice and Fire doesn’t actually include that many fight scenes, or at least, as many fight scenes as you might expect from a series of fantasy books as thick as this one. Adam Serwer said it well in talking about the Game of Thrones show (don’t worry, this is a short clip. Even so, please excuse the mixing of mediums):
To refine Serwer’s points in terms of the books, I think it’s somewhat similar in print too. True, there are battle scenes and fights where there aren’t as many in the show but like many aspects of this story, they’re not glorified, or, at least, not romanticized. The Bronn-Ser Vardis Egen fight is one such example. It’s an awesome scene to be sure. It’s probably my favorite fight scene of any book I’ve ever read, but it’s definitely not one where the shiny knight wins —hell, it’s exactly the opposite of that. I think the fight scene reminds the reader (if the reader hasn’t gotten it by now), that the really good players in the game of thrones are not the ones who follow the honorable route like in the songs and do the honorable thing. Bronn wins because he fights in, perhaps, not a dishonorable way but not a way that is praised and sung about later. He dodges and craftily uses Vardis’s armor against him. It’s not a way of fighting that’s honored in Westeros. Ser Vardis’s death isn’t exactly noble either (“Catelyn heard the knight groan as the sellsword lifted his blade with both hands and drove it down and in with all his weigh behind it, under the arm and through the ribs. Ser Vardis shuddered and lay still.”) but Bronn fights that way because that’s how he can win. There’s nothing honorable about this in the way people in Westeros understand honor. But truthfully, honor doesn’t get you very far in this world does it?
You know, in a way I can see how Bronn and Tyrion are a perfect match. Both are social outcasts. Both are ostensibly weaker or handicapped compared to the strapping armored knight. But neither are any less powerful. They’re more powerful because they use the skills they have (intelligence, strategy) which exist or are used so rarely by others in Westeros. Bronn and Tyrion get along because they actually share some of the same traits and even though Bronn is baseborn, as long as he doesn’t bow to the obligations involved in being “honorable” he’ll go far. All that honor really does is keep the lowborn low and the highborn at the mercy of the dishonorable.
Which is what makes it clear, given the world that characters like Tyrion and Catelyn live in, that Catelyn and Lysa aren’t going to last long. Throughout the visit to the Eyrie one thing kept nagging at me: are there any mothers in these books that are sane and competent? Seriously now, liking or disliking Catelyn aside, she was pretty quick to assume that because the dagger was Tyrion’s, that he wanted Bran dead, and that the knife wasn’t placed in the hands of the assassin by someone else. As a result, she acted incredibly recklessly while rationalizing her behavior simply as a mother protecting her child. And Lysa, clearly, is even worse. She’s outright crazy. It’s a little early to say exactly how bad Cersei is but it’s clear that she’s either a lunatic, a fool, or some combination of both. I suppose Dany is the exception to this rule but we actually don’t know what kind of mother she is, only that she will be a mother.*
I’m not convinced that this has to be the case though. Surely women in these books are capable of being master players of the game of thrones, so it’s not like the mothers’ sex obligates them to be incompetent or highly immoral in some way. But so far the only mothers we’ve met are so paranoid they’re driven to do horrible things (like drop Bran from a tower and then try and murder him again) or jump to conclusions that have extremely serious political implications.
*I’ve read the books already but I’m reading them like I haven’t so please don’t use any future events in your responses. We’re going to strive for a spoiler free discussion damnit!
P.S. A spoiler thread is here for those of you who might want to spoil something.
Surely women in these books are capable of being master players of the game of thrones, so it’s not like the mothers’ sex obligates them to be incompetent or highly immoral in some way. But so far the only mothers we’ve met are so paranoid they’re driven to do horrible things (like drop Bran from a tower and then try and murder him again) or jump to conclusions that have extremely serious political implications.
Its an unfortunate implication. But a running theme in the series seems to be that love does not redeem, rather it damns (rather consistently I might add. I’m not aware of any one situation where love redeems). In one way, this makes the book really dark. But it also makes it interesting to subvert what seems to be a sacred trope of western literature.
Doing your duty, on the other hand is a mixed bag. Since this is a spoiler free thread, I’ll refrain from adding examples.Report
Hmmm, hadn’t thought of that but that sounds about right. So far we really haven’t seen love produce anything for the better in the book.Report
Great post. In a sense, this fight really does symbolize the broader struggle. Then again, the right man wins. Justice is actually served, if not honorably. And maybe that is a portent of things to come as well.Report
Re: Not much to add. Good thoughts. The rules of honor are a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, it restrains the powerful. On the other hand, the rules are written by the powerful, so you know it’s not going to restrain them too much.
Re: The Women of Westeros. This is one of the areas where the genre can be uncomfortably sexist. It’s where men are men and women are… there. And the ways that they can assert themselves are often unflattering. Manipulation. Deceit. Background. Objects of plunder. It doesn’t stop me from enjoying it (neither does Women in Refrigerators with comics, though that’s more avoidable than what fantasy is up against), but it’s there and it makes me understand why men are typically more appreciative of the genre.Report
Women in Refrigerators? Whatnow?Report
It’s the tendency in comics to use the death of women as a plot device to motivate the hero. It’s named off Green Lantern Kyle Rayner’s first girlfriend, Alex, who ended up dismembered and in a fridge in order to give Rayner a mortal enemy. Someone started a website listing just some of the many, many times this sort of thing has happened and named in Women in Refrigerators.Report
Ah gotcha.Report
I think the rules of honourable combat are a good example of how honour allows the nobility to oppress the commons. You’re supposed to whack at each other and rely on your armour to stop the enemy’s blade, not dodge around. But plate armour in the real world (and I presume in Weteros as well) was fearsomely expensive – that’s the likely reason Bronn doesn’t have any.
It’s a bit like the ban the Catholic Church put on crossbows (at least it banned the use of them against Christians). War’s no fun if the peasants can fight back.Report
Oh no doubt that’s true. Did you get the sense from my post that Bronn fully chose not to have a nice suit of armor? That wasn’t my intention. Bronn seems to just be fighting with the tools he has.Report
No, I was just using his lack of armour as evidence to support my contention that armour was too expensive for commoners in Westeros.Report
Ah yes, exactly. It’s a definite barrier to entry for commoners.Report
I think I can do this without spoiling anything, so here goes.
Yes, I do think that this scene captures some of the tension with which the series views the relationship of the commons and the aristocracy. On one hand, honor seems to do little more than get people in trouble, to do things which even at the time look incredibly foolish–and frequently turn out to be exactly that. Here, we’ve got a knight who may or may not have actually fought anyone, ever, but trained in the ways of honorable combat, going up against a sellsword who kills not only casually, but with fearful efficiency, “trained” through hard experience to do whatever is necessary to survive. It’s entirely possible that while Vardis knows exactly how many men he has killed, Bronn as forgotten.
It doesn’t really come as a surprise that Bronn wins. This is my second pass through the series, but it didn’t surprise me the first time around either. But it was somehow disappointing, because Bronn is a fearfully unpleasant and not terribly moral person. Sansa is already learning that things aren’t the way they are in the songs; things are far meaner and more cruel. Many knights are not “true knights,” to be sure, but they’re almost uniformly worse men as a result.
If anything, the vibe I get from the book is that these high moral ideals aren’t the way the world works, but that this is really a shame, because there don’t seem to be many good alternatives.Report
Again trying not to spoil things, but if you think about the people (outside her immediate family) who care about Sansa and try to help her, most of them are not true knights.Report
Funny, I was never disappointed with Bronn. Yes he’s morally ambivalent at best but he’s honest about who he is. He’s a straightshooting sellsword looking out for number one. This is a world where that’s pretty rare. On the surface a lot of the famous knights seem like “true knights” but look a little closer and it’s clear they really aren’t.Report
Rare as in it’s rare that a person is allowed to consistently be who they are at face value.Report
Daniel: I want to forward these posts to a friend, but you don’t link to other GoT Bookclub posts from within — and you haven’t tagged the posts in such a way that there’s an archive of GoT Bookclub posts that I can link to.
Please make sharing your posts easier.
To mangle a quote from Wallace Stegner: Hard blogging makes easy reading.Report
Silus,
I’m pretty sure what you’re looking for can be found here:
https://ordinary-times.com/blog/Categories/game-of-thrones-2/
Simple enough, yes?Report
Thank you, yes … exactly what I was looking for.
But I don’t see it anywhere in the post? Normally blog posts are clearly marked with their categories … Report
…Go to the front page of this website. Scroll down and on the lefthand side you’ll see “Game of Thrones” click on it and all those posts will show up.
Honestly dude, were you even trying here? It’s not that difficult.Report
Every blog post I’ve ever seen that uses categories has an in-post statement along the lines of “Posted under ‘category one’, category two’.”
Which, from a usability standpoint, is brilliant. It means the user doesn’t have to guess on category names.
So, yeah … I was trying to find information that wasn’t there.
No need to be an ass.Report
And speaking of standard ways of using metadata, this blog doesn’t even hotlink author bylines so it’s easy to find other posts they’ve made.Report