“All I Ever Wanted Was to Fight for a Lord I Believed in. But the Good Lords Are Dead and the Rest Are Monsters”: Brienne of Tarth, Jaime Lannister, and the Chivalric “Other”

Abstract

Although George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series and the accompanying HBO television show Game of Thrones are set in the fantasy land of Westeros, there can be little doubt of their correlation with the medieval world. The importance of medieval chivalry as an underpinning for the narrative of these texts is therefore clear. But rather than privileging the chivalric ideal, Game of Thrones instead deliberately deconstructs and ultimately undermines the construct of the medieval chivalric hero. A chivalric hero should be honourable, loyal, and brave, and while some knightly characters in Game of Thrones appear to possess these qualities, it is repeatedly revealed that their adherence to the chivalric ideal is largely superficial. Jaime Lannister is one such example. Over the course of the narrative Lannister does, however, go through something of a transformative process. The catalyst for some of this change is arguably the shared experience and companionship of Brienne of Tarth as she escorts Lannister from Stark captivity to King’s Landing. It is the purpose of this chapter to examine the depiction of these two knightly figures, and in particular their shared relationship. Considering the place of chivalry as the belief system that links the two together, this chapter analyses the extent to which either character represents the medieval chivalric warrior, or something other.