78 pages • 2 hours read
George R. R. MartinA Dance With Dragons
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Series Context: The Universe of A Song of Ice and Fire
In this fifth volume of A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin’s epic fantasy series, Martin gives readers dragons, more intriguing details about potential claimants to the Iron Throne, and more detailed portraits of the locales and cultures in the series. The series books in order are: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance With Dragons.
The central system of magic in A Song of Ice and Fire has to do with dragons—where they come from and who can control them. By the time of A Dance With Dragons, Daenerys has three dragons, and they are vicious and dangerous creatures that even she struggles to control. Two of the dragons are chained beneath the Great Pyramid where Daenerys lives as the ruler of Meereen, but Drogon is flying free. Martin includes scenes of Meereen’s people pleading in court for recompense for Drogon’s killing of their livestock and even a little girl to indirectly represent the power of the dragons. Martin makes the world of Westeros more concrete by showing fans what they’ve finally been waiting for—Daenerys flying on a dragon. That flight comes after her failed effort to hold on to a kingdom on the continent of Essos. Her struggles call into question whether there can be any such thing as a kind and effective Targaryen ruler. Martin’s study of how Daenerys comes to embrace the power of dragons and violence is essential to his development of her character, one of the most richly imagined women in the series.
Although it is clear that Daenerys will be the one riding dragons, A Dance With Dragons is also a book full of marriage plots driven by men who see Daenerys as a means to getting a throne or dragons of their own. Martin uses the suitors’ quests to reach Daenerys to give the readers a close-up look at the politics, culture, and systems of magic that exist in places like Pentos, Meereen, and Volantis. Martin portrays the Slaver Cities of Meereen, Astapor, and Yunkai as corrupt societies where large armies of mercenaries, the slave trade, and trade in goods lead to constantly shifting alliances.
While plots in other volumes in A Song of Ice and Fire bear similarities to episodes out of Northern European history, Martin also draws on the history of Southern European city-states like Venice and the old empires of Asia and Southeast Asia for additional inspiration. Elephants and pyramids, instead of dragons and castles, occupy the continent of Essos. The treachery that characters like Tyrion, young Aegon, Quentyn, and Daenerys face rivals anything Martin writes for the plots that unfold in Winterfell and at the Wall. Martin sticks to representing power as a corrupting influence that requires would-be powerbrokers and rulers to be clever and political if they want to survive.
Genre Context: Fantasy, Magic, and Religion in A Dance with Dragons
Like any good epic fantasy, A Dance with Dragons is rich with religious and magical belief systems that shape how characters and readers see events and themselves. Martin engages readers by including details about the belief systems associated with the old gods of the North and R’hllor in particular. The central prophecy in both faiths is that a long winter full of an existential threat is coming, and that some champion will arise to meet that threat. This concept of prophecy, as well as the intimate connection of the prophecy with religion, is a standard motif in the fantasy genre.
Where Martin steps a little outside the standard for dealing with magic and religion is the almost covert nature of both. While magic and religion are often central ideas in a fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire is a character-driven narrative, which leaves the magic on the periphery. In fact, many of the characters in the series parallel the reader’s real-world attitude toward magic—it is the realm of fairy tales, and dragons no longer exist. Many characters are also largely secular and often only claim to adhere to any religion for political purposes. The magic in Martin’s work is relatively subtle and often exists somewhere between mystery and science.
This light touch creates a sense of safety in the characters’ understanding of their world, which then allows the horrors of the wights and the Others, or White Walkers, to be all the more terrifying in comparison. A significant part of the tension in the entire series is borne from the fact that many of the most influential characters, i.e., the ones who can do something about it, refuse to believe the White Walkers are anything more than stories the Northmen tell to keep their children in bed at night. Likewise, Daenerys’s dragons are taken as hyperbole in the reports of her movements until the spies from King’s Landing see them with their own eyes. Because Martin’s characters drive the plot, the readers experience their comfort in the consistency and normalcy of the world around them as dramatic irony. The reader knows the magic is real and will continue to grow more and more dangerous the longer the characters deny that these things exist. This technique is more often used in horror novels than in high-fantasy epics like A Dance With Dragons.
Related Titles
By George R. R. Martin
