Into the Night: George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and the Early Icelandic Night Time
Abstract:
In A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin has pulled heavily from early Icelandic history and Norse mythology to construct an imaginative recreation of the medieval world. In doing so, he has positioned the early Icelandic night to be terrifyingly dark, cold, and physically inhabited by evil supernatural creatures. The reality of the early Icelandic night, however, was that it was not as dark as modernity tends to believe. Rather, the circumstances surrounding the composition of Martin’s source material as well as how the night as a concept has evolved over time has conditioned modernity to assume that an era of natural darkness was extremely dark, and that people of the Middle Ages believed the supernatural to physically inhabit the night.