A Song of Ice and Fire... and Geeks

[Bugbear]

A while back, a friend started reading the novel series, A Song of Ice and Fire, and suggested I read the novels, as well.

We both found George R. R. Martin's writing style, or perhaps his story telling style, to be a bit irritating. I suspect this is intentional, however, he did make up interesting mythologies, superstitions, and beliefs for his characters.

Now that I have read, A Dance with Dragons, the last book, I've started trying to pick out parallels between Martin's mythologies etc, and other mythology's. I also did this after reading the Katherine Kurtz Adept series, only she was fairly directly using sources of modern esoteric mythologies; some of which had actually been accepted by academics at one short time, Frazer et al; as well as, using a lot of old Scottish folklore and legend. We talked a little about that here on the forum.

I think Martin used bits and pieces of mythologies and folklore, world wide, along with his own creations, throughout the novels, and it does seem to give the stories a distant but slightly familiar feel. In some ways, like an adult Grimm's Fairy Tales. They remind me of some of the things you might find at Ren Fair events, as well.

That's my take so far.