Magic in ASOIAF as a force of nature and God of the Gaps

[GoT_Academy]

The fantasy elements in ASOIAF are somewhat in the fringes of the main plot. Especially when we compare the story to others in the fantasy genre. The Others and Children of the Forest and giants and wights are all behind the wall. Most of the power of R'hollor seems to be in Asshai. The dragons are not fully grown yet and remain in Slavers Bay.

In GoT magic appears in the prologue, the epilogue and at the wall when a wights tries to kill the Lord Commander.

It think it says a lot about magic's place in the story. It's more of a force of nature, just part of this world that is not necessarily a winning card. Dany still needs to play the game of thrones, even though she has dragons.

magic also seems to play the role of God of the Gaps/Magic of the Gaps: what we cannot explain about the world is considered God/magic. Once you can explain it in other ways (as the maesters do), it's no longer magic.

What role do you think magic plays in the story?

You can watch our video for more details - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdeKwA2z7tg

[Jm4n68]

First off; Highly recommend checking out the video, one of if not the best Youtube channel for ASOIAF discussions and content.

What role does magic play in the series?

I am no fantasy buff, so I can't really speak to its role relative to other stories. I think it is more prominent than just the fringes of the main plot though. To what extent each instance can be explained as a "God of the gaps" is up for debate. Warging and Weirwoods do seem to hold significant magical power. Other than that, its hard to say for certain but I think a lot of things can be reasoned out, like Ironborn and their crude CPR, with context.

The existential threat of the White Walkers has been looming large for the readers. Around the wall, we have Coldhands/Bloodraven/the magical potentiation Melisandre experiences at the Wall. Resurrection via human sacrifice will be coming back into play with Lady Stoneheart/Robert Strong/Shireen.

[GoT_Academy]

Ow, thanks man :)

First off; Highly recommend checking out the video, one of if not the best Youtube channel for ASOIAF discussions and content.

[falcotron]

In GRRM's own words:

He doesn't have a magic system specifically. Some authors do but too like D&D for him. He went back to Tolkien when he got into the book seriously. Thinks Tolkien is still the master. What you discover when you read Tolkien with eye to magic is there is very little magic. Gandalf is wizard - wise but he doesn't whisper a spell and slaughter an entire army. He thinks fantasy needs magic as a seasoning. Too much seasoning and you can overwelm the dish. Too much magic can ruin a fantasy. Magic has to be magic - something that violates law of nature. "Unknown" - published between the two World Wars writen by Campbell - a real rationalist with a particular brand of fantasy. Campbell treated magic as science. GRR enjoyed reading them but that approach to magic and the aproach in role playing games is...just science, not magic. Magic has to be more mysterious than that. He wants less Campbell and more Lovecraft. It has to be dark stuff we can't fully comprehend. Use it sparingly so it has impact.

For the first half of your point, I think that magic is "on the fringes" in the sense that, while it's important to the story, it's never the whole story. As you put it, "Dany still needs to play the game of thrones, even though she has dragons."

For the second half, "once you can explain it in other ways (as the maesters do), it's no longer magic" seems to fit out-of-universe, I don't think it's right in-universe. I think ASoIaF's magic is not just sufficiently advanced science that hasn't been discovered yet, but inherently undiscoverable. It doesn't just appear to violate law of nature, it actually does. I don't want to go into long detail here, because I've already written up my thoughts in another thread (although that thread also gets into what GRRM's Lovecraftian references mean, which is way off-topic here).

[Knight and Dayne]

Really excellent series of videos - These guys do a lot to show how learning about a fictional world can teach us more about the real one.

I tend to view ASoIaF as more similar to alternate history, rather than historical fiction. That is, I think the "god in the gaps" idea makes sense anachronistically, if we were historians evaluating the books as historical artifacts, but as a narrative, the magic is clearly more real than that - not just something that defies understanding, but as an actually-existing force in Planetos.

There are some examples of tricks masquerading as magic - Melisandre's powders and minor glamours, a blacksmith's "spells" - but those contrast with dragons, wights, shadow babies, and such.

The more interesting question the series raises is, what would the return of magic to a late-medieval society mean for what we think of as normal historical progression? If the Tudors had dragons, would there be a European Renaissance?

[LmL]

My view of how George treats magic is as a personification of nature. Ancient man often saw forces beyond their control as divine - of course the sun and moon, but also more specific nature forces which are important to a given culture. The Egyptians have a god, Hapi, who is a personification of the seasonal Nile floods. Everything you need to know about managing the Nile floods is encoded in the lore of Hapi.

I think that George has made this personification real. The Others come as a magical manifestation of winter winds. The dragons are like flying volcanoes, fire made flesh. Dragonglass is really obsidian, which is cooled volcanic glass, so George imbues it with the properties of fire magic.

The magic, of course, breaks the normal laws of nature, as falcotron noted. That's because it is beyond nature, a MAGICAL personification of the forces of nature. Thus, magic is unpredictable in the way that natural forces are when man first tries to tame them. Try to damn a river without any machines - it's trial and error. Try to tame the fires of a volcano... yeah that's bound to blow up in your face.

But on the other hand, magic is not completely haywire and unpredictable. The Warlocks have learned to make shade of the evening from the Warlock Trees, a magical substance which seems to be controllable. The cotf obviously have the rules of the tree magic down, as they know how to make weorwood paste, know what the paste will do, and are able to teach others how to use their magic. Clearly, the Valyrians DID successfully learn how to harness the 14 fires for thousands of years before it blew up, which shows there is some level of law and consistency which magic follows, to some extent.

However, George never gives us much in the way of specifics, or he doles it out in drips and drabs, precisely because he does not want it to be one those kinds of fantasy novels with complex D&D type magic systems. But I have also seen people go to far in the opposite direction, asserting that magic is totally without rules or consistency of any kind, and thy George just pulls stuff out of thin air and calls it magic whenever he needs, and I would disagree for the reasons outlined above.

[falcotron]

Clearly, the Valyrians DID successfully learn how to harness the 14 fires for thousands of years before it blew up, which shows there is some level of law and consistency which magic follows, to some extent.

Sorry for skipping over most of your message to reply to only this small part (I'll just summarize by saying that, of the rest, I agree with most of it, and find the rest of it at least plausible and interesting), but this brings up a fascinating possibility.

GRRM has implied that believing you control magic is at least dangerous, and possibly even a fatal tragic flaw. But there are clearly counterexamples to that. So, what does that mean? What if they aren't counterexamples, just evidence that sometimes things don't happen on a human scale?

Say the Valyrians believing they understood and could control the 14 Fires really did seal their doom--but it took 4700 years for it to come about. I'm sure if you told just about any leader, "This action will lead to your people ruling half the world uncontested for almost 5 millennia, but it will eventually destroy them", that leader would say, "OK, that's a no-brainer, let's do it".

Similarly, some readers suggest the Maesters facilitating the death of the last dragons under Aegon III is what ultimately led to the ice and fire imbalance and the coming Long Night and so on. If so, it's not the Maesters who did so that paid the price, or anyone else they knew, but people living 150 years later.

What that would mean is that you can't even predict unpredictability, I guess. :) In other words, even taking at face value the fact that magic is always dangerously uncontrollable, you still can't predict a negative in-story outcome from someone trying to predict or control it. (That doesn't mean we have no reason to believe that Mel's magic will lead Stannis to a tragic end, of course, because we still have all the other hints in the story. Just that you can't predict it solely based on the fact that magic is dangerous.)