Having said that, it does have many quaint and romantic elements in it to recommend it. The Others are, I'm sorry to say, something of a disappointment. But the Night's Watch, the Old Gods, Winterfell, the direwolves, the old Kings of Winter and the words of the House of Stark - 'Winter is Coming' - altogether more than make up for the stories' dramatic shortcomings. It's also tersely and very readably written. The plots twist and coil ecstatically. A lot of characters are well fleshed-out and fully three-dimensional. The descriptions of mediaeval life in Martin's faux mediaeval world, from the clothes people wear to the food they eat, are simply glorious.
It was a friend who originally put me on to the TV series. Not having seen it, because we didn't have Sky at home (and we still don't), I had been inclined to dismiss it as just so much more schlock of the Peter Jackson variety. To be specific, it was actually the phrase 'the Iron Throne' that made my ears prick up. And so, the DVDs being at the time still long in coming, I gave the books a try.
The King in the North, with a crown of iron and a great wolf at his side, and whose restoration forms the culmination of A Game of Thrones, is of course an image from Tolkien.* The King in the North in The Silmarillion though is Morgoth, at the foot of whose dark throne slinks Beren, in wolf's form, and at whose gates lies the great werewolf Carcharoth. The only real difference between of course is that in Martin's world the North is the land of the good guys, whereas in Tolkien's it symbolised, as has always been traditional in north European literature, all that is dark and wicked.
As it happens, the reversing of images of good and evil - and even holiness and profanity - for dramatic purposes came just as naturally to Tolkien as it does to Martin. A fairly neat example of this in Tolkien would be the Iron Crown of Morgoth in The Silmarillion, which is a cross between a evil version of a Swedish Lucia candle-wreath and a sort of dark reliquary or monstrance (monstrous in both senses of the word), in which the silmarils - the glowing holy jewels of Valinor - are both displayed and imprisoned.** The inversion is because there is an Iron Crown in real life that did indeed belong to the old Kings in the North - north, that is, of Rome. The Lombards were the successor kings of the Roman Emperors after the Western Empire fell to Odoacer, but the crown of the Kingdom of Lombardy, which no man could wear, was forged from the holiest iron in the world - specifically from the nails that pierced the hands and feet of Our Lord when He hung upon the Cross. The crown could not be worn of course because it was too small, and so it was itself, like the silmarils, placed inside a larger crown, which was worn by the Kings of Lombardy and their successors in the Holy Roman Empire.
When it comes to "Iron Kingdoms" though, in both Tolkien's and Martin's work, there is no such inversion. Martin's world has the Iron Islands, which are the poor but (dis)honest isles north-west of Westeros, where it is shame to wear any ornament that has not been bought with "iron" - in other words, taken from fallen foes on the field of battle. In Tolkien's world, the fortress of the King in the North, who is the Dark Lord Morgoth, is Angband or 'the Iron Prison'. Though I have not read it anywhere, it seems not unlikely that the "real world" inspiration for an Enemy from a far-off Kingdom of "Iron" in the North (and East) was almost certainly Prussia, the so-called 'Iron Kingdom' that Otto von Bismarck, the so-called 'Iron Chancellor', had made into the capital of the new German Empire that Tolkien found himself at war against when he started writing what became The Silmarillion. Again, I haven't read it anywhere, but the fact that Tolkien started with 'The Fall of Gondolin' - the story of an ancient and beautiful city being utterly destroyed by fire-breathing dragons and monstrous armoured soldiers and other creatures - was no accident. Indeed, in the earliest version of his story Tolkien has not just Orcs, and fire-breathing dragons, but also artificial metal dragons 'filled in their innermost depths with the grimmest of the Orcs'. In real life, Tolkien himself saw the aftermath of the German Army's assault on the mediaeval town of Ypres. There can be no doubt that it had a profound effect on him. (John Garth has made the case almost conclusively that it was Tolkien's experiences in the Great War that kick-started The Silmarillion.)
For Tolkien, what he called "the Machine" was both the cause and consequence of the Fall of Man and indeed the decline of Christendom, in what he called (with a phrase borrowed from Galadriel) a 'Long Defeat'. For Tolkien the modern world was the world of the Machine, and the risen threat of an industrialised, militaristic, protestant Prussian empire was in 1914 merely its latest manifestation. In thinking of the discovery of iron has having been a misfortune for mankind though he was following in an ancient tradition. In the first book of Herodotus' Histories, in the story of the finding of the bones of Orestes, iron is equated with woe, in the explanation of a riddle from the Oracle at Delphi. The Old Norse for 'woe' or 'distress' is of course angr, and in Tolkien's invented language Sindarin ang is 'iron'. In The Lord of the Rings itself, the old witch-realm of Angmar, 'the Iron Home', which appears to the north in the maps at the back of the book, is a sort of dark memory of an evil echo of Angband itself.
*One could of course say the same of the whole idea of 'Winter is coming'. In 'Galadriel's Song of Eldamar' in The Fellowship of the Ring, the Elven-queen of Lothlórien sings 'O Lórien! The Winter comes, the bare and leafless Day; / The leaves are falling in the stream, the River flows away.' It is actually early Spring as the Fellowship leave Lothlórien: Galadriel's "Winter" refers to the coming dissolution of the Elvish kingdoms in Middle-earth - inevitable whether the Ring-bear fail in his quest or succeed.
** In much the same way, the Eye of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings is the spiritual antidote to that which for Tolkien summed up all that was holy - the Blessed Sacrament, exposed and enthroned. The purpose of the Eye is to see rather than to be seen, and its essence is not "eucharistic" but malicious.
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