R+L=J v.89

[PrettyPig]

baking the dragon... ...again :/ Only they removed the Egg before.

Finally, someone brought it up! Please expound on this. I have been kiln-firing this particular pot for a while and would love to hear some other thoughts on it.

[Ser Creighton]

"Fear is the mind killer," and "I am dead to everyone unless I become what I may be," are definitely part of the patterns of monomyth, and while I think Herbert was influenced by Campbell, I think he was also more influenced by outside forces as well,( i.e., environmental exploitation and the rise of cult of personalities -not to be confused with the song), :P

But I agree the monomyth is a little too simplistic because while I think there are certain templates of behavior present in the human condition that cause us to repeat the same behaviors over and over, (driven of course by our passions which are not logical), hence history and cycles repeating themselves, it doesn't take into account the individual behaviors which will always be an unknown variable.

I like that Martin does make Jon "covet," to some degree, though he ultimately does turn down offers and keeps his vows, but I think the interesting question is, (and busting the monomyth formula), are we certain he would turn down the IT if he finds out who he is? He was raised at Ned's knee with a heady diet of duty, and after a life of deception and rebuke as a bastard, can we be so certain he would just give it all up?

At what point would he come to think of himself as the "greater good?"

Robert Kirkman of "Walking Dead," does a similar thing with his protagonist, Rick Grimes, because at least in the graphic novel, Grimes is not nearly the "hero" he is on the show, but of course, he is in the process of evolving, or "devolving." ;), though he remains the "savior," of mankind.

We do see that Jon does have his moments of being an "everyman," and even bored aristocrat, (reflections of Rhaegar?).

We also see it in Arya as she is able to survive and create her own "pack," wherever she goes, but she does have those moments where she turns into "Lady" Arya very quickly as evidenced when she is trying to get back into the City, (and as much as people like to ship Gendry and Arya, it is pretty evident to Gendry the social chasm between them and he resents Arya and Edric).

As for Rhaegar and prophesy, I try and give him the benefit of the doubt, but if you know the authors POV on such things as religious fanaticism and zealotry, prophesy and magic, can we assume the author doesn't write the character obsessed with prohpesy with a cautionary bent?

Martin seems to have the ability to take all the good things from his potential influencers from history, to other writers and make them uniquely his own, so I think he will keep his own promise on keeping us breathless and guessing.

Campbell was a fraud he just wanted to label something that already existed and try to take credit for it.

Simply put he took similar types of mythology and religious mythos and said hey they have similarities. The study of the archetype goes back to Plato, Aristotle and man imitating nature is early work on mans cyclical nature, Dionysis use of imitatio.

He didn't do anything original back in the 30's you have Tolkien and what did he do?

"Mythopoeia (also mythopoesis, after Hellenistic Greek μυθοποιία, μυθοποίησις "myth-making") is a narrative genre in modern literature and film where a fictional mythology is created by the writer of prose or other fiction. This meaning of the word mythopoeia follows its use by J. R. R. Tolkien in the 1930s. The authors in this genre integrate traditional mythological themes and archetypes into fiction."

Then of course he wrote there and back again a hobbits holiday.

Sound sort of familiar? Traditional archetypes go back to Plato.

"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man."

Basically he just took well established concepts and generalized them. But this was nothing new. A hero goes on a journey, which predates him by several thousand years. Though he did attempt to put a structure on it. Though structure in writing is also nothing new. How did his structure work?

"Campbell describes 17 stages or steps along this journey. Very few myths contain all 17 stages—some myths contain many of the stages, while others contain only a few; some myths may focus on only one of the stages, while other myths may deal with the stages in a somewhat different order. These 17 stages may be organized in a number of ways, including division into three sections: Departure (sometimes called Separation), Initiation, and Return. "Departure" deals with the hero's adventure prior to the quest; "Initiation" deals with the hero's many adventures along the way; and "Return" deals with the hero's return home with knowledge and powers acquired on the journey."

So it can come down to just one stage and he is going to say it's the same story. Not all the stages will be present they won't be in this order but there will be a protagonist in the story and he will do something. Well gosh.

People use his structure and that is fine but it didn't invent the genre, the archetype, the journey etc... He didn't discover anything he just pointed to what was already known and slapped a structure on it that really doesn't work all that well. His life is a journey metaphor has been around for thousands and thousands of years. Of course he tried to generalize life and put a structure on it so he could claim it as his great discovery but in truth everything was already done. He added nothing. He didn't create Oedipus he just said hey look at Oedipus, now let me put my structure on it, well part of my structure. He didn't create the archetype just said hey look archetypes in mythology. Really there are archetypes in mythology. Is there also tragedy in greek tragedies? Thank god he never figured out Allegory or he would running around saying hey I think there may be some hidden meaning in mythology and religious mythos. Holly crap I discovered Allegory.

Take Harry Potter, sure it appears to use his structure but is that the whole story? Did his structure create the charm, wit, world, dialogue, angst, discovery, romance, themes, designs, characters, nature, Bildungsroman, the journey, language, narrative devices, and so on? No it didn't do any of that.

Basically he took the idea of certain Mythologies and concepts that had been around for thousands of years and tried to label it and structure it as his own. But it already existed and it was already there and people like Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and the subsequent Latin rhetoricians had already been using the literary method of copying and improving on material provided by previous writers and that was thousands of years ago.

I mean I may as well run into MIT and say I discovered math because for thousands of years people have been using number, symbols and formulas to create things. I call it monomath, and what you need is some numbers, symbols and formulas established by other people and when you put them together you get the same basic outcome that they discovered thousands of years ago. 2+2 in fact is always 4.

The monomyth is based off the mythology not the other way around. Yet today people say oh Harry is based off the monomyth. Like the monomyth created anything, it never came up with the hero or the archetype it didn't invent the structure, it copied it and now gets credit for it. People don't want to read all that mythology, they just read this one book and get a general idea of it. It's mythology for dummies.

Tolkien didn't base the Hobbit off the monomyth, it didn't even exist when he wrote it. The structures he used had existed for thousands of years. Combining mythology with fantasy? He did it right there and had his own name for it, which pre-dates the monomyth by more than a decade. But he did not invent it either, it was a common practice in writing going back thousands of years.

So what exactly did Campbell do other than label and jumble together traditional concepts, that already had labels and were already connected and already had structure? He didn't create the structure it just repeated for thousands of years, it was already labeled. He just repackaged it over generalized it and said look what I discovered. Can''t stand him.

Frank Herbert

""While Frank Herbert's Dune on the surface appears to follow the monomyth this was in fact to subvert it and take a critical view, as the author said in 1979, "The bottom line of the Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes. Much better [to] rely on your own judgment, and your own mistakes."[17] He wrote in 1985, "Dune was aimed at this whole idea of the infallible leader because my view of history says that mistakes made by a leader (or made in a leader's name) are amplified by the numbers who follow without question.""

Scholars have questioned the very validity of the monomyth, its usefulness as a tool for critical investigation and interpretation of narrative, and its male bias. According to Lesley Northup, the theory does not have much support in the mainstream study of mythology, which currently tends to view highly general and universal claims with suspicion. Donald J. Consentino remarks, "It is just as important to stress differences as similarities, to avoid creating a (Joseph) Campbell soup of myths that loses all local flavor." Marta Weigle rejects the idea of a "monomyth" in which women appear only exceptionally, and then as indistinguishable from men. Others have found the categories Campbell works with so vague as to be meaningless, and lacking the support required of scholarly argument: Muriel Crespi, writing in response to Campbell's filmed presentation of his model characterized it as "...unsatisfying from a social science perspective. Campbell's ethnocentrism will raise objections, and his analytic level is so abstract and devoid of ethnographic context that myth loses the very meanings supposed to be embedded in the "hero." In Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth (1984), editor Alan Dundes dismisses Campbell's work, characterizing him as a popularizer: "like most universalists, he is content to merely assert universality rather than bother to document it. If Campbell's generalizations about myth are not substantiated, why should students consider his work?"

That's all have to say about him, people can like him and think he invented this and that, but I give him no credit.

Everybody here talks about all the indirect parallels that Martin uses, history, mythology, greek, Norse, Hindu, other fantasy works, classical literature. That stuff I think is great, because it's honest, it goes to the source, we look at his pros and his literary devices, his structure, pretty much anything we can think of. Don't generalize it into that pile of unsubstantiated crap, the intellectual debate that already exists is so much better than that already. Your all already better than Campbell because you don't generalize you look for the truth in what he is doing to understand it. Campbell tried to make mythology into what he wanted so he could get credit for something.

[Jon Weirgaryen]

Really? To me a sea-side castle doesn't scream Dorne to me. Though, I know there are Dornishmen and women living near the sea who are different than those inland.

Absolutely, and are you talking of the Daynes? Anyway, Starfall and Sunspear just to mention the two most prominent places besides the Water Gardens are a castle and a town bordering the sea.

In the real world, in arid countries just the same as anywhere else, people settle where water can be found... Lakes, Rivers, and most of all, the Seaside.

Reported.

I tried that two pages ago.

[BearQueen87]

Absolutely, and are you talking of the Daynes? Anyway, Starfall and Sunspear just to mention the two most prominent places besides the Water Gardens are a castle and a town bordering the sea.

In the real world, in arid countries just the same as anywhere else, people settle where water can be found... Lakes, Rivers, and most of all, the Seaside.

Right those two castles come to mind. Though I thought for the most part they were sticking with Spain as their Dorne? GRRM allows for differences in Dorne in his text and fleshes out differences, I'm just not sure if HBO wants to say "in this part of Dorne we have X kind of people. And over here we have these kind of Dornishman!"

(sorry this went off topic...)

[MtnLion]

Riding with 7 he could easily have outpaced the main host, but that doesn't mean they didn't come behind does it? Do we "know"?

* or he gets the story from Ned at Robert's coronation and writes it.

Ned objected to Robert forgiving Jaime and not sending him to the Wall. Robert could only do so after his coronation. I believe that Robert's coronation was either the day of the sack or early the next day, since the blood on the Lannister cloaks had not turned dark enough to be seen when they were presented to Robert as coronation gifts.

To answer your question, Ned charged Stannis with taking Dragonstone which required the building of warships capable of the assault. The Tyrell fleet was sent to besiege Dragonstone in the mean time. Ned left his main army with Stannis to help build the ships, and eventually man them.