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Collaboration, sub-creation, inspiration and evolution in fantasy literature

Richard Pinner

Introduction

The history of fantasy in literature is a rich seam of highly imaginative works which could arguably be a reflection of the deeper, embedded narrative values of society. Although fantasy literature is sometimes seen as second rate, pulp, or even inferior literature (Swinfen), this attitude is based on the inaccurate stereotype that literature which is highly fantastical or divergent from reality has nothing to say about our real lives or no connection with the corporeal society in which we live. This is an understandable assumption, although it is misplaced for the same reason that any literature can have cultural value. Works are elevated to the status of literature through a complex and unofficial process, which Terry Eagleton explains is based on “value-judgements [which] have a close relation to social ideologies” (14). How one decides what is literature is based on a complicated number of factors, but the term needs to be explained if I am to proceed with this essay any further, because the works I am looking at should, I argue, be considered as having literary merit. One influencing factor in the judgements we make about ‘what is literature’ relies on the particular branch of literary theory we ascribe to. This may be overt or implicit; a person may not know that they hold the views of reader-response theory, but nevertheless that person may judge the literary merits of a book by imparting ‘real existence’ into a book or by seeing the act of reading as a kind of unique performance in which the reader interacts on a personal level with the text, that would unofficially render their analysis as coming from the perspective of reader-response criticism. These value judgements are inherent in society as a whole and members of a society, culture or even sub-culture will all share and interact on these judgements. Although fantasy literature may not yet occupy the same esteemed position in the world of literary criticism as, say, Shakespeare or canonical works such as Milton or Joyce, it is worth noting that even Shakespeare himself produced plays which were, for all intents and purposes, fantasies. The Tempest is a clear example, as is A Midsummer-Night’s Dream and

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even Macbeth all feature magical elements (Brown 162-76). This highlights a further point that until relatively recently, say shortly after The Age of Reason which began in the late 17th Century, some of the ideas present in many fantasy books would have been held in widespread belief by ordinary people. In other words, people believed that witches, magic and fairies were real. The Salem Witch Trials of 1692-3 show that people believed in magic to the extent that they would burn their neighbours alive at the suggestion that they could work magic. But, even much later, and still to this day to some extent, people entertain the idea that magic may be real. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was convinced by the case of the Cottingley Fairies, which caused a great stir around the early 1920s.

1 Source http://www.cottingleyconnect.org.uk/photos/fairies.jpg

Conan Doyle was so convinced by the photographs, supposedly depicting fairies which Frances Griffiths and her cousin Elsie Wright played with in their garden, that he wrote a book about it supporting its legitimacy called The Coming of the Fairies (1922). Conan Doyle even publicly fell out with Harry Houdini when the latter revealed that his escapology was based on tricks and not magic (Kalush and Sloman 375 - 496). Even today, there are many who believe in superstitions or that certain magical elements are present in real life.

Another aspect of fantasy literature is the way in which it often draws on established myths, folklore and legends to provide familiar and at the same time fantastical elements. Fantasy and mythology are intricately linked, and mythology and society are symbiotic. According to Joseph Campbell “It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation” (3). Myths are part

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of our cultural sub-conscious, and they reflect valuable and universal truths that transcend context and culture and permeate into the fabric of human existence. To put it another way, far from being an inferior form of literature fantasy literature is a valuable form of literary expression. Today, Fantasy, like Science-Fiction, has now become one of the most popular genres for Hollywood movies and novels based around works which are subsequently turned into films are amongst the highest grossing and most widely read stories on the face of the planet.

Moving on to the central theme of this paper, I will address how both individuals and societies are now interacting in the act of creating fantasy worlds in literate. I will look specifically at several well established fantasy series; Lord of the Rings and the other mythopoeic works of JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, the Song of Ice and Fire series by George RR Martin, which is currently still being written and is also the basis of the immensely popular television series Game of Thrones, the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling and some lesser works which are much further off the literary radar, based more in the realm of a sub-culture of literature which spans from the horror/fantasy works of HP Lovecraft, the manga inspired world of The Transformers, the graphic novels of the Marvel fantasy world and even the bleakly dystopian universe of the Warhammer 40K franchise. Personally, I might not consider all these sources to be of high literary merit (such as Transformers) but what I am analysing here is not the literary merit of the works so much as the way the works are created by either individual authors or through the collaboration of multiple authors in a community of social-sub-creation. The two types of fantasy I will examine in this paper are secondary worlds created by a sole author and secondary worlds which are created by multiple authors. In this paper I will describe how these two very different seeming approaches to the authorship of fantasy worlds actually have much in common, when viewed from the perspective of fantasy writing as a collaborative endeavour.

To describe the act of creating a fantasy world or secondary world, I will draw on Tolkien’s concept of sub-creation of secondary worlds.

What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful “ sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “ true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken;

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the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended

(or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed. (Tolkien “ On Fairy-Stories” 132)

Tolkien viewed the act of creating and writing in his secondary world as a process which almost seemed to resemble mediation, as if he simply channelled the stories into existence, rather than them being the product of his solitary consciousness. I will argue that this is an important concept in the creation of fantasy literature, especially when considering the collaborative nature of creating such environments.

Individually authored secondary worlds

In this section I will examine the secondary worlds of JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, JK Rowling and George RR Martin. The four main examples of individually authored secondary worlds are amongst some of the most famous books in the world. The Lord of the Rings trilogy has sold over 150 million copies worldwide and is translated into dozens of languages, and the Harry Potter series has sold 450 million copies worldwide (distributed over seven volumes). All of the books I will mention here have been turned into multi-million dollar grossing Hollywood blockbusters, with the exception of A Song of Ice and Fire which is a television series produced by HBO (Home Box Office) with an average gross audience of 9.3 million1 which excludes those who watch the show illegally online – something worth mentioning since Game of Thrones is considered the world’s most pirated show in history (McGregor). These books and the worlds they take us to are a vital part of modern popular culture, particularly (but not exclusively) in the western hemisphere. They are a source of cultural capital for people across cultures, as demonstrated by the very wide and multilingual fan-base of each. There are numerous online websites dedicated to fan’s discussions of the works, as well as collaborative informative Wikis and a host of literary criticism

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and published works. Despite this very social element to these secondary worlds, each one is the product of a sole author. However, I will explain now how this might not be as straightforward as it seems.

First, I will deal with the secondary world of Middle-earth, created by JRR Tolkien, which provides the setting for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, amongst others. It is an established fact that Tolkien created his worlds based on his wide knowledge of medieval myth lore (Chance Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader; Flieger Music). His stories borrow many images and draw many parallels with themes found in Norse mythology and the Finnish Kalevala. One example is the Two Trees which were one of the original sources of light in Tolkien’s secondary world. After the destruction of the two trees by the first dark lord Melkor, a fruit from the golden tree and a nut from the silver tree become the sun and the moon respectively. The two trees on Tolkien’s mythology can be seen as an axis mundi, to use the Eliadian term, in that they form a direct connection with the physical world and the spiritual or divine world. The destruction of these trees is a key even in his mythology, but the image of the universe being connected by a tree bears many resemblances to the tree Yggdrasil in Norse mythology, which represents the universe. Yggdrasil contains and connects the heavens, the earth and the underworld. There are other referents in Tolkien’s work too, such as the flooding of Númenor bearing much resemblance to the story of the lost city of Atlantis. In some sense then, this could be seen as a collaboration with the ancient cultures who, were it not for Tolkien’s scholarly work and incredible knowledge of ancient languages, would be lost to most readers. It was certainly Tolkien’s life work to create “a mythology for England” Chance Tolkien's Art: A Mythology for England) and it is certainly worth noting that, despite his immense success, he was never able in his life-time to fully realise his vision. His magnum opus which details the history of his legendarium, The Silmarillion, was published posthumously in 1973. It required the careful editorial work of his son Christopher Tolkien, who himself is without a doubt the foremost scholar of his fathers’ work. Where JRR Tolkien spent his life creating the secondary world, Christopher spent his life making sense of it for a wider audience, devoting his life to scholarly and critical study of his father’s legacy. This would also seem to me to be a collaboration of sorts, and now Adam Tolkien (JRR Tolkien’s grandson) is continuing that work, as exemplified by his input on The Children of Húrin (2007). It is further worth noting that Tolkien

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was interested in languages, and in fact his secondary world was created for his invented languages to have an ‘inner consistency of reality’:

Language, then, came first, and his development of it forced him to realise that there can be no language without a people to speak it, no people without a culture that guides and expresses them, no culture without a myth that informs and shapes it – through the fantastic device of language.

(Flieger Light 61)

Because language is essentially socio-interactional in its purpose (Vygotsky) this too plays a role in our understanding in the sub-creation of Tolkien’s individual secondary world as a collaborative endeavour. Finally, Tolkien collaborated with the possibly hundreds of other people through his interaction with them and discussions about his craft, justifications or explanations of his secondary world. Tolkien’s biographer, Humphrey Carpenter (320) notes that towards the end of his life after retirement the author spent little time working on The Silmarillion because he was constantly distracted by letter writing and correspondence. He also developed his work considerably through collaboration in informal groups like The Inklings, of whom CS Lewis was at one time a member. Discussions with members such as Owen Barfield have been shown to be crucial in developing Tolkien’s philosophical and spiritual understandings, and these in turn underpin his work and make it so important (Flieger Music 147). These were an essential part of Tolkien and the development or sub-creation of his secondary world.

So, although Tolkien’s secondary world is undoubtedly his life work, a fantasy world imagined and created by a single individual of great literary vision and accomplishment, it is also a product of collaboration and to a large degree sociocultural in its execution. The same is also true of CS Lewis’ Narnia secondary world, which borrows much of its central themes and even characters from Christian belief and The Bible, making overt and specific reference to the story of Jesus, his death and rebirth. This is embodied in Narnia by the lion Aslan, who sacrifices himself and then rises again for the greater good of the people. This was an intentional reference by CS Lewis and, although Narnia is a world of great imagination and wields a lot of literary merit, the basis for key events in the story show that he is drawing on and making connection with socially shared cultural

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capital in order to carry his message across to a wider audience. It should also be noted that, whereas Tolkien’s world belongs to the realm of High Fantasy, Lewis’ Narnia does not quite fit this definition since Narnia is a secondary world which sits parallel to our own normal world. In Narnia, the children enter the secondary world by going through a magical wardrobe, whereas in Tolkien’s creation there is no ordinary world or this world, there is only the fantasy world of Middle-earth. This is the distinction that makes Tolkien’s world High Fantasy, as oppose to ordinary fantasy fiction or Low Fantasy (Wolfe 52). Therefore one could argue that the secondary world is reliant on the primary world, or our own real world, thus giving it direct social connotations. CS Lewis’ interactions with Tolkien and other members of The Inklings, as well as other important influences on his work prove that his secondary world is also one which has been constructed in a social context, drawing on the religious beliefs of the society to whose literature he wished to make a contribution.

JK Rowling’s secondary world in which Harry Potter resides would also be classed as Low Fantasy, in that the secondary world sits atop our own, and it “contains supernatural intrusions into the ‘real’ world” (Wolfe 52). There are also a great deal of parodies drawn between that world and our own, with issues such as racial cleansing, bureaucratic dogma and media censorship which directly parody issues very much alive in contemporary society. It is especially situated in British society, with ‘real’ Prime Ministers being spoken to by the ‘fictional’ Minister of Magic, and also making specific allusion to the Caste system. Thus, unlike in Tolkien’s High Fantasy world where there are no specific references to contemporary society, Low Fantasy works like Harry Potter and Narnia are less discrete in their attempt to make a connection with the cultural capital of the society of their intended readership. This is certainly not a bad thing, and indeed it makes those worlds all the more enchanting as they exist in parallel, indeed they are only a step away from, our own world. It is also notable that Rowling achieved a huge amount of success with the Harry Potter series as she was writing it. Hollywood movies were already in production and a contract signed for the entire body of work, really by the time she had written the third of the seven books of the series. This means that she was subjected to pressure and external influences from Warner Brothers and her publishers in the UK and US to finish the books in time, and to bear in mind that they would become films later on. She may have imagined Harry Potter to be a certain way, but no-doubt the filming

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process inevitably superimposed the imaged of Daniel Radcliffe (the young actor playing Harry Potter in the series) onto her imagined creation (see Mendelsund for a discussion of how words create mental images which change and adapt through experience). Thus, this was a kind of indirect pressure from society, a by-product of her success and the demand for her work, and this will undoubtedly have had an influence on her writing process, although the extent of which can only be conjecture. I would not call this collaboration as such, but I draw attention to it here because it certainly adds a socio-interactional aspect to the act of sub-creating a secondary world. JK Rowling’s work draws on a huge amount of cultural capital, and although it is certainly the product of a creative and imaginative individual, it is also essentially social in its attempt to define reality, albeit a fantastic reality.

The final work I will examine in this treatment of individually sub-created secondary worlds is that of George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, a work which possess a lot of historical accuracy and realism, despite belonging to the genre of High Fantasy. What this means is that the fantasy world is so convincing and bears so many resemblances to our everyday experience of reality, that although the work is High Fantasy it smacks of realism and as such it is extremely convincing (Vike). Martin reads copiously and draws explicitly on his knowledge of medieval history and life to breathe this realism into his writing. His Game of Thrones which was the first in the series, draws parallels with the War of the Roses (an English civil war fought from 1455 to 1487) and features vocabulary items which place us back in time to a world where there were as many names for horse as there are now for car. He talks of destriers, coursers, chargers, palfreys and garrons (horses) the way modern people might talk of saloons, convertibles, hatchbacks, 4X4s and estates (cars). This is but one of the devices he employs to immerse the reader into the convincing secondary world, and clearly it draws on the preserved archives and documents of history. Another device Martin uses is to sew scepticism, doubt and paranoia (all very modern concerns) about the gods and the existence of magic amongst his characterisations of society. People struggle with and alter their beliefs rather whimsically, which rather counter-intuitively makes the fantasy all the more believable. This is a subtle way of sewing the temperament of today’s societies amongst those of his imagined world, and is no doubt why the secondary world is so popular and convincing. However, there are more overt ways in which Martin’s secondary world shows direct links and collaboration with society. A recent article reports how the author was auctioning the chance to be written into his books and

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subsequently killed off. This plays on his rather macabre reputation for merciless violence towards the characters in his book. One recurring theme in discussions about his Song of Ice and Fire saga is that any character can seemingly be killed at any moment. Martin auctioned off two ‘Martyr’ level experiences (of being written into the book and killed) as a reward for donating $20,000 to the Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary. Wolves play an important role in his books, and the author wanted to use his fame to raise money for a wolf charity. A Facebook employee named David Goldblatt was one of the two to pledge enough money to feature in his books. The author said:

Despite my sinister repute, I actually find it hard to kill off characters that I've been writing about for some time. Good guys or bad guys, they're all my chil-dren. But this time the slaughter should be easy, since the victims will be laying down their lives in a good cause. I will do my best to make their ends memo-rable. (George RR Martin in Beaumont-Thomas)

As humorous as this is, it is clearly relevant to the central thesis of this paper in that it shows direct collaboration with real people and the sub-creation of the secondary world. Further collaboration is evidenced by the huge amount of fandom which exists around the author, his work and the adaptation for television (which Martin himself actively participates in as an executive producer and screen-play adapter). The fandom exceeds even that of Tolkien’s in many ways, since fans have worked together to unlock certain as yet unrevealed secrets in the story arc. These, which are commonly referred to as ‘spoilers’ and sometimes even ‘mega-spoilers’, are frequently discussed in online forums, to the extent of which Martin has even been forced to confirm some of them. In an interview he even explained that he considered changing his planned story arc in light of the unlocking of the central mystery by the fan-theorists (Dodds). It is hard to imagine society playing a more active part in the sub-creation of a secondary world. Further to that, wikis and collaborative book projects (such as a cook book and a detailed history of his secondary world) have also been published, and criticised for taking the author’s time away from the actual project of writing the next book to be released in the series. The phenomena is a fascinating one and this is perhaps the key impetus for the thesis which I am trying to lay down in this paper; that secondary worlds are not the product of individuals acting in isolation, but of individuals contextualised within a society and cultural capital, in constant interaction with the real world.

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In the now famous quote by Tolkien, in a letter addressed to his publisher Milton Waldman at Collins, he mentions his desire to create a mythology which he could dedicate to England, one that would draw ‘splendour from the vast backcloths’ of a ‘high’ body of connected legends. He explained that:

I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. (Tolkien “ Letter to Milton Waldman”)

In mentioning ‘other minds and hands’ he seems to be strongly advocating the continuation of his work through the very fandom which still surrounds his work. This fandom takes the form of both literary criticism and creative writing, as well as in other media such as art and film. For example, a recent independent film The Hunt for Gollum directed by Chris Bouchard draws on fan-literature and between-the-lines interpretation of events that took place in and before The Lord of the Rings, involving Aragorn’s search for the creature Gollum. Examples of this have been in existence around literature for centuries, although often disdained. For example, Henry Jenkins (508) described fan created stories as ‘nomadic poaching’.

There are other works written in Middle-earth, not to mention the discussions of missing pieces of the tapestry (such as the un-named members of the Istari wizards) and the mining of Tolkien’s notes by his son all fall under the category of social collaboration, and it seems Tolkien actively encouraged this. Antithetically, George RR Martin has said, in his advice to aspiring authors:

The more you write, the better you’ll get. But don’t write in my universe, or Tol-kien’s, or the Marvel universe, or the Star Trek universe, or any other borrowed background. Every writer needs to learn to create his own characters, worlds, and settings. Using someone else’s world is the lazy way out. If you don’t exer-cise those “ literary muscles,” you’ll never develop them. (Martin)

However, clearly Martin is not adverse to collaboration with his secondary world, on the contrary he seems to encourage it, but he does not advocate that

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people create within the world that he has created. This is quite understandable, as few authors or critics tend to look favourably on fan-fiction.

Perhaps what is happening here is that people are, in some sense, living in the fantasy worlds or at least they have a strong image of the fantasy world which is not unlike the memory of a real place which the imagination can visit. Flieger talks about standing in and breathing the secondary world of Tolkien, and how that in itself is often a motive for further critical study of the text.

If you stand in Tolkien’s world and breathe its air (and you do, or you wouldn’t have read this far), then you must be interested in his languages, whether you know it or not. (Light 73)

And yet, there are examples of secondary worlds where collaboration is not so much an external factor in the primarily individual process of sub-creating the fantasy universe, but a central and driving force in the evolution of the imagined reality. I will discuss such collaborative fantasies in the second section of this essay.

Collaboratively sub-created secondary worlds

Unlike the more famous works which I touched on above, many of the worlds I will look into in this section are the product of distinct sub-cultures of literary appreciation, or even sub-cultures of other fields wholly outside of literary criticism. The first that I would mention is the Warhammer 40K universe, which was created by the British company Games Workshop, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange. This company, founded in 1975 originally as a mail order company run from a domestic property, has now expanded to producing its own miniature table-top war games, as well as role-playing games, board games, computer games and literature. The Warhammer 40K was created by Rick Priestley in 1987 (Appelcline). The universe is vast in its history and level of detail, and is no longer recognisable as the work of a single author. Collaboration and creative evolution is actively encouraged by Games Workshop, first through the magazine Inferno! which was dedicated to short stories and fiction set in the fantasy world, and now through the larger operation called The Black Library, which publishes novels and eBooks, as well as a monthly online magazine of short

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stories entitled Hammer and Bolter. Collaboration is clearly an implicit part of the nature of this particular secondary world, since the sub-culture is based around table-top board games in which players actively participate in creating their own scenarios with their own autonomously determined outcomes. What is particularly interesting about this universe is the sheer scope and depth that has been given to it by the hundreds of collaborating fans. It would be impossible to summarise the immensity of the stories and settings, but there are a multitude of worlds and races, each with specific culture, history and characters stretching for millennia of story arc. One of the most developed narrative branches is the story of the Imperium, and particularly the Horus Heresy, which details the betrayal of the Warmaster Horus against his father and leader, the Emperor. Horus is corrupted by the malign powers of Chaos and leads a rebellion which divides the galaxy and the human race. This has been turned into an epic series of novels, with now over thirty volumes and still expanding.

Similarly, HP Lovecraft’s creation of the Cthulhu mythos has led to a massive sub-cultural evolution of the original stories into something which could almost resemble its own religious cult. Elements of the mythology have been fleshed out by contributors who publish their theories or developments in online discussion forums. The mythos is now much more developed than it was by Lovecraft as a sole author. For some reason his writing captured many people’s imagination and would not let them go, so they felt moved to continue sub-creating in this secondary world. Lovecraft is credited as having redefined the landscape of horror fiction by presenting a world of unknown ancient and cosmic powers with a malign indifference to the human race. His influential works strike terror and fear into its readers by inspiring them to reconsider the inconsequential nature of the human race and its short time in existence. One interesting branch of literature to arise from Lovecraft’s mythos is a series of hoax historical documents, such as the Necronomicon, which were first mentioned in his stories, which are an attempt by fans to add weight to their belief that Lovecraft’s mythos is actually real and that Lovecraft himself was merely a medium through which the so called ‘Old Ones’ of his mythos were communicating (Loucks; Woodward).

Multiple authors of comic books and graphic novels, as well as active collaboration with fans and responding to feedback or answering questions, has led to the very complex development of the Marvel action universe as well

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(Carter). The complexity and depth of these universes is astounding. Just as an encyclopaedia is dwarfed by the breadth of Wikipedia, these collaboratively shared and organically developed secondary worlds are living and growing all the time. The history expands and new content is constantly being produced. The fact that people are used to collaborating is beginning to show more and more with not only collaborative secondary worlds such as these, but also with the individually authored secondary worlds of JRR Tolkien and George RR Martin, although it seems to a lesser extent with works of Low Fantasy like Harry Potter or Narnia. This is an emergent social phenomena, which I would argue has developed in tandem with information communication technology and reflects the very different and much more active role readers are taking in the secondary worlds they participate in.

Conclusion

William Wordsworth himself already recognised the literary value of science-fiction, even before the genre even existed. This was based on an observation about society which he made during the time in which science began to chase away superstitions or belief in magic and fantasy from the minds of the general population. As I stated in the introduction, this was due to the scientific discoveries made during The Age of Reason, which paved the way for The Industrial Revolution which Wordsworth witnessed first-hand, and which once and for all helped to establish the division between the real world and the fantastical one.

The change about which William Wordsworth speculated nearly two hundred years ago has come to pass. Science and its muscular sibling, technology, have transformed the world and the way human beings see it and behave in it. This change first spawned an entire branch of [literature]. [This has] led to a growing recognition of Wordsworth's essential assertion that the mainstream of literature must embrace the precepts and influence of science and engender a vision of man that takes account of our science-laden times in both style and subject matter (Brigg 5).

However, just as Brigg has noted that Science-Fiction is now an essential part of the literary canon due to the way society has been shaped by and has

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evolved with technology and scientific understanding, so too fantasy literature has also been effected by technology and our changing society. As collaboration and interaction has become a central tenet in our lives and how we facilitate understanding, this has caught onto and been integrated into the writing process for the creation of fantasy literature.

Tolkien’s coinage of the term ‘secondary world’ to mean the fantasy world created through literature has been an important term in the central theme of this paper, but once again it is important to stress that this secondary world is not isolated from our own or without direct relevance to it.

This secondary world has an ontological status radically different from the real (or "primary") world, but I would not go so far as to say that it is totally inde-pendent or self-referential. Indeed, it may have a strong resemblance to what we think of as reality, mainly by conforming to certain rules that are assumed to govern the natural world (Petzold 14).

I would argue that the creation of these secondary worlds is as dependent on social interactions and collaborations as the language used to create them. Such works of literature should not be easily dismissed, and in fact they have much to offer for study and analysis.

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Notes

1　"HBO Renews "Game of Thrones" for Fourth Season" (Press release). HBO. April 2, 2013. Retrieved August 23, 2014.