(urth) The Book of the New Sun vs. A Song of Ice and Fire

[David Stockhoff]

On 8/1/2012 8:32 PM, James B. Jordan wrote:
>>
>>
>>     From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
>>     To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
>>     Sent: Wednesday, August 1, 2012 2:19 PM
>>     Subject: Re: (urth) The Book of the New Sun vs. A Song of Ice and
>>     Fire
>>
>>     I'll also speak out in favor of Martin -- he wrote what I consider to
>>     be THE best rock'n'roll novel of all time, THE ARMAGEDDON RAG. The
>>     ASOIAF books, to my mind, are brutally honest depictions of the kind
>>     of society that generic fantasy readers & writers like to, well,
>>     fantasize about.
>>
>>     The Society for Creative Anachronism likes to say that it recreates
>>     "the middle ages as they should have been." Martin describes a
>>     medieval fantasy world as it really would have been.
>>
>
> Well, but without the Church and Christianity. So it's not actually 
> medieval at all.
>
> JBJordan

That's a good point---Westeros is plainly far more pagan that our world. 
I'd guess that there are reflections of elements of myths that went into 
Christianity (Osiris' rebirth and so on), but no Christ. He seems to try 
to keep it vague, and yet offers a remarkable amount of detail.