How many times during your seemingly endless Game of Thrones binges did you have to justify to yourself and to your non-believing friends just why you’ve devoted so much of yourself to this fantasy world? Well, Harvard is here to your rescue with the perfect comeback. The scholars of the world are doing it.
Yep, according to Mashable, Harvard University is now preparing to offer a course that explores the treatment of the medieval era in the fictional world of Westeros.
University of California, Berkley started a summer session all about one of the beautiful, but totally made-up languages of the Game of Thrones universe – Dothraki – this year. And Harvard’s taken this very scholastic approach to the George R. R. Martin book series and HBO TV series to a whole other level.
This course will delve into the blood, guts and political intrigue of the series to inspire an unprecedented interest in medieval studies. Pursuing to explore how the show handles political animosity and uncertainty, what the show gets right about our own real world’s medieval era and where all it distances itself from reality and why, the students of this course will be justifying an entire world’s obsession with the fascinating universe that Martin created.
A course description in Time states:
[The class will explore how the series] “echoes and adapts, as well as distorts the history and culture of the ‘medieval world’ of Eurasia from c. 400 to 1500 CE” by exploring “a set of archetypal characters at the heart of Game of Thrones — the king, the good wife, the second son, the adventurer, and so on — with distinct analogues in medieval history, literature, religion, and legend.”
Damn. Studying for the exam’s going to be pretty damn awesome for these Harvard students, wouldn’t you say?