Getty/HBOHarvard University are putting your Game of Thrones knowledge to the test with their new course.
Students at the esteemed university can study George R. R. Martin’s series and HBO TV show as part of a Folklore and Mythology class.
Sadly it’s not just watching the incredible series on the big screen, but will look at 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’, TIME reports.
HBOSean Gilsdorf, a medieval historian and director of the course, said:
Game of Thrones does dramatize 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.
There will be a particular focus on the ‘vindictive queen’ role which is filled by Cersei Lannister, as well as a comparison of the text with other medieval epics like Nibelungenlied (The Song of the Nibelungs) and Tain bo Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley).
HBORacha Kirakosian, who will be co-lecturing the class, said to TIME:
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?
HBOKirakosian said it was her students at Oxford who ‘made’ her watch the show after they drew so many comparisons to it with their course.
I wonder if you fail, you just get sent Ygritte saying ‘you know nothing’ over and over again.
