Well, until now we have been only watching Game of Thrones on Television and reading its novel.
The bizarre part begins with the announcement of Harvard University, which has decided to offer a medieval history course inspired by HBO’s fantasy drama ‘Game of Thrones’.
As per the report of TIME magazine, the course is due to be introduced in autumn under title ‘The Real Game of Thrones: From modern myths to medieval models’. As part of the new introductory course, it is going to be a huge uptick in the interest of the younglings. Therefore, it is time to brace yourself for something extraordinary.
The folklore and mythology course will examine the HBO TV show based on George R R Martin’s books ‘A Song of Ice and Water’. It will study the distorted version of history and culture of the medieval world of Eurasia from C. 400 to 1500 CE.
A medieval historian and Administrative Director and Lecturer on medieval studies, Sean Gilsdorf, explained that the course would study various conventional characters of the show, including, the king, the good wife, the second son, the adventurer and so on, who will be further compared to the analogues in medieval history, literature, religion and legend.
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The course is being offered at the introductory 100-level and will be a “recruitment tool” for medieval studies and humanities courses at a time when students are losing their interest in these fields.
An Assistant Professor at Harvard, Racha Kirakosian, said, “Game of Thrones does dramatise nicely some fundamental things going on in medieval courts. Tensions between a queen and the younger women who marry their sons are some ‘Real Housewives of 10th-century Germany’ kind of stuff, where you see these women going after each other”.
“When I read medieval verse epics with my students, they’d say, ‘Oh, that’s like in ‘Game of Thrones’. No, if anything at all, it’s the other way around. Isn’t it partly our job (as professors) to use that interest and go deeper?”, she added.
