Although he is working as a gardener at the beginning of the story, it is also Sam who gathers together the history of the War of the Ring. The Lord of the Rings may have started out as a story about Frodo, but by the time it was finished, as Tolkien himself said in his letters, the “chief hero” of the story was not Frodo but Sam. On the surface, their characters are not very similar – Samwell is noble-born and claims to be a coward (though he isn’t really), while Samwise is working class and extremely brave from the start (and unlike Samwell, Samwise is never described as fat, either – that detail comes from the Peter Jackson films).īut underneath that, the two characters play a similar role in the two stories. Samwell’s name is an echo of Samwise Gamgee from The Lord of the Rings.
There is another Tolkien-inspired character name that is a lot more significant, though – Samwell Tarly. This may come to have special significance later in the story, but so far it just seems to exist to contrast Arwen’s legendary beauty with poor Brienne’s more homely looks. In A Song of Ice and Fire, the title belongs to Brienne’s father as it is a hereditary title of the Lord of Tarth. In Tolkien, the title is a very significant name used for Arwen, the “evening star” of the Elves, who gives up her immortality to marry Aragorn and is one of the last Elves in Middle-earth by the time she dies. That probably does not mean anything too significant, though if we see more of Oscar in the planned Fire & Blood Part 2 we might expect him to be rather grumpy.Īnd so Martin’s use of Tolkien’s title “Evenstar” probably does not mean too much. There are, for example, three generations of Tullys in Fire & Blood (the book H ouse of the Dragon is based on) who are all named after Muppets (Grover, Elmo, Kermit, and Oscar). We should not read too much into this, as sometimes Martin uses well known names for characters just because it amuses him to do so.
We can start in the most obvious place, with the names of people and places. In 2014, for example, he told Rolling Stone that when Tolkien gives his story a happily ever after in which Aragorn rules wisely for a hundred years, Martin wants to know, but how? What is his tax policy? And what did he do with all the Orcs still living in the mountains? “Real history,” Martin observed, is “not that simple.” (Tolkien, incidentally, did start a sequel set shortly after Aragorn’s death but gave it up as it was too dark and miserable for his tastes – so he was not unaware of these issues himself). On the other hand, Martin has also talked about the ways he writes differently from Tolkien, and the questions he likes to ask about the story presented in The Lord of the Rings. He has spoken many times about his love of The Lord of the Rings and how he thinks Tolkien did what he wanted to do brilliantly, and the debt he and other fantasy authors owe Tolkien. On the one hand, like every other fantasy author of the 20th and 21st centuries, Martin has been heavily influenced by Tolkien and is more than happy to say so. Martin, the author of A Song of Ice and Fire books upon which Game of Thrones is based, has a double-edged relationship with J.R.R. It is pretty well known among fans that George R. This article contains spoilers for both The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones.
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