Does George R. R. Martin write grimdark?

A brief consideration of the categories of grimdark and whether they apply to Martin.

Feb 22, 2025

I have often said though I cannot directly recommend George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, if I discover you’ve read it, I’m happy to talk about it at length. Similarly, I personally will never watch the TV show Game of Thrones because I’m painfully aware, after how I spent my late teens, there are simply some things I cannot unsee. There are scenes from the book that I absolutely, positively do not want stark photographic memory of in my mind.

Both of these personal policies arise out of the nature of the grimdark genre and my attempts to be as courteous as I can be to fellow readers. Three articles ago, I wrote about Our Violent Shadow of Tolkien and showed how grimdark simply carries out a project that Tolkien himself had begun and abandoned.

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black and brown leather horse saddle — Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash

What follows will include spoilers for major events within A Song of Ice and Fire. I’m assuming if you’re reading any further, you’ve either read the books or don’t care about spoilers.

Ian Betteridge's law of headlines claims: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." If we apply it to this title, we immediately end with, “No, Martin doesn’t write grimdark.” But I think Betteridge may miss a nuance: any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no, but not necessarily to the exclusion of other answers.

“It depends,” for instance.

Certainly Martin uses the trappings of grimdark. Before we get much further, let’s define grimdark. The phrase comes from Warhammer 40,000:1

In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.

As a subgenre of speculative fiction, it’s often marked by dystopia, amoral false dilemmas, extreme violence in every category, and a brutal nihilistic vision of humanity. It is often ahistorical, overly psychological, and bleak. Damien Walter said it requires, “bigger swords, more fighting, bloodier blood, more fighting, axes, more fighting” as well as a “commercial imperative to win adolescent, male readers.”2

I suppose that’s one way of thinking about it. Genevieve Valentine considered it "a dismissive term for fantasy that's dismantling tropes, a stamp unfairly applied."3 Perhaps, again, it’s a both/and proposition. It depends.

In a conversation over text after the Tolkien piece, an old friend and I compared Martin’s use of grimdark to Nabokov. Nabokov, you’ll remember, would often take all of the trappings of a genre and completely repurpose them for his own ideals, his own points. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight takes the form of a mystery novel, but assumes there’s an absence at the center: an impossible to solve mystery. It’s a statement on, if anything, apophatic theology and a kind of prophecy of postmodernism. Pale Fire is a romantic poem and a work of criticism that ends up endangering the very authors of the poem and the critique.

And so on.

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Dr. John Granger has perhaps the largest body of work as a critic of J.K. Rowling and has pointed to the Nabokovian connections in her work at length, the man she called “her favorite writer.” It’s a fascinating move to consider how the now-infamous author made parodies of gothic, fantastic, portal, parochial school, and mystery novels.

I link to John’s observations here to tee up a similar move: Martin is writing grimdark only insofar as Nabokov was writing mystery with Knight, romantic poetry with Pale Fire, or romance with Loilita. It’s not that he’s not. It’s merely that he’s making it clear that tropes ought to be earned. Too many have written about Martin’s subversion of tropes. That’s the wrong way to think about it: he doesn’t subvert tropes at all.

He earns them.

In this way, Martin’s very similar to Tolkien, though he has several philosophical differences with Tolkien that irritate me to no end. That’s about the only time that an author grates on my nerves: sometimes bad ideas are not merely bad to me, they’re galling. In any case, I also admire his similarities to Tolkien. Tolkien, for instance, kept all of the trappings of the epic hero in every single one of his heroes. But it was the hobbit — basically the equivalent of today’s lower middle class suburban housewife experiencing midlife crisis in Nowhere, Nebraska — who won the day. Whatever tropes grew out of Tolkien’s work, it wasn’t Tolkien who yielded to them.

And so almost every fantasy trope in Martin — including even knightly virtue — is earned after a significant grimdark purging. If there’s anything lacking in it, it’s the assumption that we all need to go through Guantanamo Bay in order to be good. Though, ironically, some medieval schools of thought who — according to Rome — heretically overextended mortification would agree with Martin.

In any case, I promised spoilers. I want to think about the way that Martin not only subverts grimdark in a Nabokovian parody, but actually uses it as a means towards alchemical solve et coagula (dissolve materials into the constituents and reassemble them into something else).

If you’ve read Game of Thrones, you know about these moments. And thanks to that unnamed friend for sending them to me in the conversation (this is as much of a collaborative post as anything, but he doesn’t like his name attached to things). If you haven’t, the context will be ripped bare. I’ll try where I can to insert context to each. But each of these are profound redemptive moments in the lives of these characters that follow significant grimdark moments — earned tropes.

Beyond this point? Here there be spoilers:

Seven, Brienne thought again, despairing. She had no chance against seven, she knew. No chance, and no choice. She stepped out into the rain, Oathkeeper in hand.

Brienne is an ugly woman who rises to the level of knighthood and all of its courtesy and virtue, always at the moment of testing. Here, she and those she’s protecting are being threatened by seven brigands. There is absolutely no way she can win.

“No chance and no choice,” is one of the greatest lines in the series because of this: it is virtuous to try and defend them anyways.

“What’s the life of one bastard boy against a kingdom?”

“Everything.” Davos said softly.

This is about as opposed to one king’s “greater good” nihilism as humanly possible. Stanis was prepared to sacrifice his nephew, Edric Storm in order to raise the stone dragons and conquer the Iron Throne. Davos, the knight who saved a siege by shipping in onions, steps in. And Stanis stays his hand.

Even in soiled pink satin and torn lace, Brienne looked more like a man in a gown than a proper woman. "I am grateful, but...you were well away. Why come back?"

A dozen quips came to mind, each crueler than the one before, but Jaime only shrugged. "I dreamed of you," he said.

Jaime Lannister is a brutal man unworthy of any knighthood. He’s also arguably the most beautiful man in the kingdom. His whole journey is a wild redemptive arc, but here — in the face of someone who has repeatedly been called ugly — Jaime chooses not meanness, but courtesy. “I dreamed of you.”

The stone is strong. Bran told himself, the roots of the trees go deep, and under the ground the Kings of Winter sit their thrones. So long as those remained, Winterfell remained. It was not dead, just broken. Like me, he thought. I'm not dead either.

I honestly can’t remember which part of Clash this is, but I can tell you that Bran as a child was thrown from a window in the first chapter of the first book. He’s crippled, but not dead.

Part of me thinks this is after Bran “dies” and becomes a sort of enlightened spirit and learns how many of the Kings of Winter reside in the trees — which is why the living kings serve the old gods in the trees.

In any case, it’s an extremely hopeful note for a crippled boy surrounded by the dead. One that whispers of resuscitation, if not resurrection.

I know about the promise ... Maester Theomore, Theomore, tell them! A thousand years before the Conquest, a promise was made, and oaths were sworn in the Wolf's Den before the old gods and the new. When we were sore beset and friendless, hounded from our homes and in peril of our lives, the wolves took us in and nourished us and protected us against our enemies. The city is built upon the land they gave us. In return we swore that we should always be their men. Stark men!

These men come to rescue those in an incredibly bleak situation, keeping a thousand year old vow. A one thousand year old vow.

Think about that. That’s some medieval stuff right there, that kind of promise kept. It’s absolutely indiscernible in spirit to the vow kept by those in the halls of the dead in The Return of the King.

He raised his eyes. "Sister. See. This time I knew you." Asha's heart skipped a beat. "Theon?" His lips skinned back in what might have been a grin. Half his teeth were gone, and half those still left him were broken and splintered. "Theon," he repeated. "My name is Theon. You have to know your name.

Theon has an incredibly brutal person who has been broken and splintered. It’s his name that brings him back.

And helps him do the most honorable thing imaginable in the situation.

Sandor “at rest” at The Quiet Isle Oberyn wanted vengeance for Elia. Now the three of you want vengeance for him. I have four daughters, I remind you. Your sisters. My Elia is fourteen, almost a woman. Obella is twelve, on the brink of maidenhood. They worship you, as Dorea and Lorezaworship them. If you should die, must El and Obella seek vengeance for you, then Dorea and Loree for them? Is that how it goes, round and round forever? I ask again, where does it end? I saw your father die. Here is his killer. Can I take a skull to bed with me, to give me comfort in the night? Will it make me laugh, write me songs, care for me when I am old and sick?

Sandor — called The Hound — is perhaps one of the most brutal men in the whole series. He rescues a little girl in the midst of one of the most brutal battles in the whole series, one following the betrayal at a wedding.

The Hound ends up washed down river on an Isle at the mouth of the river where monks serve. He serves them, serves the wounded, and becomes nonviolent.

Not unlike Veterans for Peace.

Again, after grimdark brutality comes a reconfiguration of the self into something new entirely. What other examples can you think of? Let me know in the comments:

Lancelot of Little Egypt

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