What I Learned on My Vacation to Westeros

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/magazine/game-of-thrones-northern-ireland-brexit.html

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The first time I saw a map of Westeros, I was struck by how much it looked like an inverted map of Ireland. There were some differences, of course. Size, for one thing: Westeros is a sprawling continent, whereas the entire island of Ireland could fit snugly inside the state of Indiana. And the northern part of Westeros looked as if Britain had been clumsily grafted onto it. There was also the fact that Westeros did not technically exist — that it emerged fully formed in the mid-1990s out of the volcanic imagination of the American fantasy writer George R.R. Martin — and that Ireland and Britain technically did, though their borders persisted in a state of ontological flux. My curiosity about this cartographic relationship led me to enter the terms “Ireland Westeros map” into Google, where I learned that my observation was not an original one. Martin himself had confirmed as much in an interview at Comic-Con in 2014. “Westeros began,” he said, “as upside-down Ireland.”

Some time ago, long before I ever watched an episode of “Game of Thrones,” I became fascinated by the relationship between my country and Westeros. This fascination had its origins in a trip I made to Northern Ireland in 2017. My first book had just been published, and I was invited to do an event at a small literary festival in Enniskillen, a town about 12 miles north of the border with the Republic. Although the border is less than an hour and a half from where I live in Dublin, this trip to Enniskillen involved crossing it for only the second time in my life. My ambivalence toward the region was hardly unique: It is extremely common to hear Dubliners say that they have never been to Belfast, the next-largest city on this tiny island, and that they have no special sense of urgency about ever going.

Since the removal of border controls after the Good Friday Agreement, crossing between the Republic and Northern Ireland has been a frictionless experience. And there was, on that trip to Enniskillen, something about the nature of that transition — of being in one country one moment and another the next, and yet also sort of not — that forced me to consider the sense in which a nation is a work of fiction, an ongoing project of collective imagination. I found myself thinking often of the political scientist Benedict Anderson’s description of nations as “imagined communities.” (To be strictly accurate, what I found myself thinking about was the title of his book “Imagined Communities”: I was assigned it in college, but got no farther than the cover.) And then, as I was waiting in the hotel lobby for a car to pick me up, my gaze was drawn toward a leaflet stand. Among the fliers promoting bus tours to various sites of natural beauty and historical interest, I noted one advertising a company called Game of Thrones Tours. The show films all over Europe, from Iceland to Croatia, but a majority is shot in Northern Ireland, either on location or on soundstages in Belfast. This company offered guided bus trips to the real-world filming locations of the show, which were dotted all over the pamphlet’s little map.

I plucked one of these leaflets off the stand and, scrutinizing the map, was struck by how Westeros had been superimposed over this troubled and ambiguous region of the island. It was an uncanny reflection of the process by which colonialism had redrawn the map of Ireland, and at the same time it seemed to offer a way of seeing the North that had nothing to do with its own dark and violent history. It was a way of being there while also being somewhere else entirely: of proceeding from one level of collective imagination to another, more fantastical and abstract.

[Read our recap of the ‘Game of Thrones’ Season 8 premiere.]

Less than half an hour after the tour bus left the pickup point, I realized we were no longer in Northern Ireland, but had entered the realm of Westeros. We were passing Stormont Castle, on the outskirts of Belfast. This was theoretically the seat of Northern Ireland’s government, but for over two years now this executive office — jointly controlled by the right-wing loyalist (and largely Protestant) Democratic Unionist Party and the left-wing republican (and largely Catholic) Sinn Fein — had languished in a state of indefinite suspension thanks to a densely complex sequence of disagreements. The tour guide made no mention of this notable landmark, and the reason he made no mention of it, I further understood, was that it had nothing to do with “Game of Thrones.”

The guide, a man named Robbie, with a graying beard and a high voice, had appeared some years back as an extra on the show. This was one way in which Game of Thrones Tours distinguished itself: Just about all the company’s guides had some connection with the production. The region’s status as “the home of ‘Game of Thrones’ ” was, according to the Tourism Northern Ireland agency, worth about 65 million dollars a year in tourism alone. There were bus tours, walking tours, cycling tours, helicopter tours, boat tours, private luxury-car tours. In downtown Belfast there was a dedicated “Game of Thrones” escape-room experience. You could even visit a 17th-century castle on the Antrim coast for a “Thrones”-themed afternoon tea, where you would be served Littlefinger Mini Chicken Caesar Wraps and Kingslayer Cupcakes.

As we passed Stormont, Robbie was deep into a long and polished monologue about his experiences on set.

“They taught hundreds of us extras how to sword-fight and how to die,” he was saying. “I reckon I was one of the best at how to die, because I died seven times in one episode. At the Battle of Blackwater Bay, I got shot in the back by a Lannister arrow. They changed my uniform, and then in another scene I got killed by a rock falling on my head. Then I got shot in the back again.”

Like some restless spirit who had taken command of the bus’s P.A. system, he continued to cheerfully enumerate his many violent deaths and resurrections. Then the road began to run alongside a large body of water. This, he said, was the Narrow Sea, which separated Westeros from Essos to the east. In real life, he clarified, this was known as Strangford Lough, but for our purposes here what we were looking at was the Narrow Sea, and it was from here that we would be crossing to Winterfell Castle, principal noble house of the North and ancestral seat of House Stark.

When it wasn’t starring as Winterfell on the show — with the aid of a little C.G.I. enhancement — this estate was known as Castle Ward. I took out my phone, looked it up and learned that dating back to the 18th century it had been the home of the Ward family, local aristocrats; because of its symbolic connection to British rule, it was the site of a botched I.R.A. bombing attempt in 1973, in which two people, one of them a teenage girl, were killed when an explosive device they were priming detonated prematurely. Feeling suddenly self-conscious, I angled my phone away so that the woman next to me on the bus couldn’t glance over and see me reading about the real history of the place. I felt that I was somehow transgressing an unspoken agreement to forget, for the duration of the tour, the actual cartography of conquest and violence that lay beneath the superimposed map of Westeros. That was the thing about Northern Ireland: Knowingly or otherwise, you were always grazing against the ghost of some horror.

[The complete guide to “Game of Thrones”]

I’ll admit that this is not a particularly sophisticated view to take of the historical and cultural complexities of the region, but whenever I am there I can’t help thinking of Northern Ireland as a place that has been no less imagined into existence than Westeros, only more thoroughly and concretely. Even before the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty that ended Ireland’s War of Independence with Britain and divided the island into two distinct political entities, the province of Ulster — comprising nine counties, six of which now make up Northern Ireland — was different, at least in a demographic sense. It was the only one of Ireland’s four provinces with a majority-Protestant population, most of whom were descendants of 17th-century colonial settlers and committed to the country’s union with Britain. That distinction was a major reason for the partition, and for the decades of ethnonationalist violence referred to, with rueful Irish stoicism, as the Troubles.

I experience the North as a realm of deep cognitive dissonance, beginning with the uncanniness of crossing a largely invisible border. I’ll see the Union Jack flying from a lamppost, or pay for something using pounds rather than euros, and I’ll find myself wondering why everyone is just going around acting as if they were in Britain. The invisibility of the partition as an infrastructural phenomenon reinforces this niggling sense that some kind of collective fantasy is being enacted. If you didn’t know anything about the context, you could almost wind up thinking there was something vaguely whimsical going on, some gigantic and inscrutable performance-art piece that maybe had something to do with the fictionality of nationhood.

It was Ireland’s and Britain’s membership in the European Union that allowed for the dismantling of the hard border in the first place. And then came the Brexit vote in 2016, leaving us with an apparently insoluble problem. If Britain is to leave the E.U., it will, in all likelihood, have to enforce its border with Europe — a border that now lies, inconveniently and intractably, between Northern Ireland and the Republic. There seems to be no way of honoring the Brexit vote without reinstating its hard infrastructure (customs checks, guards) and thereby reopening that imperfectly healed wound running athwart the Irish landscape. The fear is that such a regression could plunge the entire island back into the nightmare of history from which it has only recently begun to awaken.

Britain’s decision to leave the E.U. was taken with little apparent consideration of this entirely predictable problem. It was as if, for the British electorate, the question was immaterial. Brexit wasn’t about Northern Ireland — a region that, for obvious reasons, voted against it. It also wasn’t really about the E.U., or at least not only about the E.U. You could say it was about Britain’s vast and growing inequality, and the widening cultural and economic rift between London and the rest of the country. You could say it was a democratic protest against the union’s stultifying authority. You could say it was a reactionary fantasy, stoked by the right-wing press, of a great and ingenious people who had been hoodwinked into vassalage by a faceless bureaucracy hellbent on forcing Britain’s fishermen to wear hairnets and introducing strict regulations ensuring the straightness of bananas.

You could say all of this and pretty much anything else you liked about Brexit, and it would not be untrue. And yet for all their complexities, both Northern Ireland and Brexit have a way of making plain the extent to which nationhood is bound up with fantasy. Despite the widespread tendency to think of them as immutable geopolitical facts, states are structured on stories, and sustained through acts of collective imagination. Over the complex and tedious reality of Britain’s relationship with the European Union, Brexit superimposed, among other things, a fantasy of tyranny and liberation, a return to a great national past of heroism and glory. And this imagined nation was threatening to radically affect the shape of my own. Fiction, at a number of points, was exerting an existential pressure on the structure of reality.

“We now know,” Robbie said, “exactly where we are.”

In a strictly technical sense, we were standing in an earthy hollow in Tollymore Forest Park, about 40 miles south of Belfast, clustered around Robbie, who was cuing up a clip for us to watch on his tablet. But in another sense, we were in what was known as the “Wildling pit,” where in the very first scene of the very first episode, three rangers of the Night’s Watch find the dismembered corpses of a group of Wildlings — tribespeople who inhabit the savage territories north of the realm. This was, in terms of “Game of Thrones” tourism, the holy of holies. It was the Omphalos of Delphi. It was the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Maybe I was reading into it more than was warranted, but that, in any case, was what I took Robbie to mean when he said that we knew exactly where we were.

He held aloft the tablet in one hand and a Bluetooth speaker in the other, and a reverent hush fell upon the group as we watched the scene in the very place where it had been filmed. There, right ahead of us, was the tree on which the Wildling child had been impaled. If you looked closely you could see where the production crew had put a bolt in the trunk to connect to the girl’s harness. And here, right where we were standing, was where one of the rangers was killed by a White Walker, which slaughter we were watching unfold on Robbie’s tablet, allowing us to witness two realities at once, the real and the fictional. A sudden breeze stirred the birches above us, and there was an urgent whisper in the leaves. I myself didn’t much care much about “Game of Thrones” per se, and even I felt it, a numinous shiver running through the forest.

There were perhaps 20 of us. The group was largely couples in their 20s and 30s, a surprising fact that I chalked up to the centrality of binge-watching to the modern relationship. It was a fine day, clear and strangely warm for mid-February in Ireland, let alone Westeros. We walked a narrow path alongside a river, clear water rushing over moss-covered rocks. It was all preposterously idyllic. But the beauty of this forest in itself was not really the point of our being here. The point of our being here was that its beauty had led to its being featured on “Game of Thrones.” There was a sense in which we could have been anywhere. There was a sense in which we were nowhere.

All of this — this situation in particular, the relationship in general between Northern Ireland and Westeros — made me think of Jorge Luis Borges’s ingenious story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in which the discovery of a fictional encyclopedia from an invented world called Tlön causes the real world to give way beneath the pressure of the intricate fiction. In the story’s haunting postscript, he records the flooding of the earth with the textual evidence of Tlön’s invented history. The language of Tlön, he reports, is already being taught in schools, its “harmonious history” already eclipsing the chaotic and bewildering history of the actual world. The appeal of Tlön, in all its imagined order and man-made coherence, is too powerful to be resisted. “Almost immediately, reality yielded on more than one account,” Borges writes. “The truth is that it longed to yield.”

“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” was published in 1940, at a time when Europe was consumed by a war of unprecedented scale and violence, but the postscript is written from the future vantage of 1947. For all that the story is rooted in a speculative conceit, it demands to be read as a political fable about the ease with which reality yields to the coherence of fantasy. “Ten years ago,” Borges writes, “any symmetry with a semblance of order — dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism — was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet?”

It was two weeks later, and we were in the cave where Melisandre had given birth to a shadow creature, and our guide, Brian, a wiry man with fervent eyes and a volatile wit, was talking about the varied quality of some of the other “Thrones” tour operators that were out there in the early days of the boom. One week he’d notice a guy on his tour taking photos and jotting down notes, and the next week he’d arrive at a location to find the same guy giving a tour himself, regurgitating Brian’s material, messing up his jokes. Like his colleague Robbie, Brian took great pride in his stint as an extra on the show, and the repertoire of anecdotes he had thereby accrued.

Since the peace process, Belfast had developed a cottage industry in so-called black-cab tours of loyalist and nationalist neighborhoods, and of the elaborate murals variously honoring terrorists, hunger strikers, political prisoners, colonial conquerors and so on. Many of the guides on these tours, Brian noted, were themselves former paramilitary members. It was his contention that a lot of them had sensed the change in the prevailing market winds and pivoted away from Troubles tourism to “Thrones” tourism. He himself had been in some borderline-hairy situations with these guys, he said. There was, for instance, an unpleasant incident a while back at Ballintoy Harbour, the location for the Iron Islands scenes on the show, He’d been on the beach taking a photo with his tour group, all dressed up in cloaks and broadswords, and one of these new tour guides showed up with his own smaller group — plastic swords, chintzy cloaks — and asked if he could get in on the photo. Brian suspected his competitor was planning to use the photo for publicity on his own Facebook page, and declined the request, at which point the man drew his gift-shop cutlass and challenged him to a duel. What seemed like a playful gesture, Brian said, was palpably the vector of a sincere threat. But he wasn’t afraid of these men. If you’d done time on the set of “Game of Thrones,” he said, there wasn’t much that could scare you.

Brian’s guiding style was very different from Robbie’s. For all I knew, it was entirely unique. Of all the consumer-facing tourism sector workers I had ever encountered, he was by some distance the most foulmouthed. Within minutes of leaving the pickup point that morning, he was delivering an unexpectedly gritty monologue about the importance of punctuality with respect to the day’s itinerary. He wasn’t going to miss a location, he intoned, because someone had decided to take time into their own hands. “I don’t drop locations,” he said. “I drop people.”

Nobody in the group seemed unsettled by this kind of talk; it wasn’t hard to recognize Brian’s hardboiled-tour-guide routine as high-concept, finely honed shtick. It seemed in any case unlikely that fans of a show notorious for its eye gougings and skull stavings, its lavish simulations of incest and rape, would be offended by a man swearing into a bus P.A. system. Whereas on the previous tour, Robbie never referred to the actual history of violence that lay beneath the fictional significance of the locations — he was all Tlön, all the time — Brian had a habit of alluding to the reality of the place where we happened to be.

“I’m very glad ‘Game of Thrones’ came here,” he said. The bus was slaloming along a narrow road, the glistening expanse of the Irish Sea to our starboard side. “Before ‘Game of Thrones,’ my country was known for two things: the Titanic and the Troubles. The international perception was riots, bombs going off, blood in the streets. None of this was great for tourism.” Brian made a joke then about how the paramilitaries on both sides had handed in their weapons, and the “Game of Thrones” tour operators had swords now, and it struck me that there was something strange, and even wonderful, about the way in which real violence had been replaced by fantasy violence. This new dispensation was fragile, though, and contingent on wider political events.

The relationship between Westeros and our own reality goes deeper than mere cartography. In plotting his story, Martin draws heavily on the intrigue of the Wars of the Roses, a series of 15th-century civil wars, lasting 30 years, between rival claimants to the English crown. His invented world gets much of its texture from the real history of medieval Europe as well, though its dragons and assorted monsters are real, and its politics vividly legible in our current time.

When “Game of Thrones” first aired in 2011, Barack Obama was midway through his first term, and despite the recent global financial crisis it seemed as if the technocratic international order would maintain its implacable composure indefinitely, that we were destined to remain in the cul-de-sac of history. The show, by contrast, imagined a world of Machiavellian scheming set against the darkening backdrop of climate change. It was also a world in which power and legitimacy were radically untethered, in which a former cohesion and strength had given way to decadence and endless crisis. If the show’s success could be accounted for by a latent cultural desire for a return to a politics of violence and treachery, then the world had since received in abundance what it didn’t quite realize it wanted.

For all the complexity of its motivations, the campaign for Britain to leave the E.U. also traded on a regressive and fantastical vision of the country’s past: that of an indomitable island nation that had conquered the world, that had faced down fascism and that would never bend the knee to the petty bureaucratic tyranny of Brussels. The Leave campaign, for all its transparent fraudulence, demonstrated the potency of this ahistoric fantasy. It demonstrated the extent to which nations are works of imagination. Britain, in this sense, had become its own Tlön: an alluring invention imposed upon the darkness and chaos of an actual history.

In March, my wife and I decided, more or less spontaneously, to take a trip up to Belfast with our son and our baby daughter, thinking it might be the last time we’d be able to do it without having to reckon with a border and all that went with it. My wife had never even been to Belfast. To our son, who had just turned 6, we pitched it as a trip to the Ulster Museum, where there were dinosaur bones and ancient weapons and an exhibition of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, with whom he had lately become obsessed.

I was aware of a certain tension gathering in the gut as we approached the invisible partition, a tension that was unjustified by the crossing itself, frictionless as it remained for now. “Welcome to Northern Ireland” said the road sign, about 20 minutes north of Dundalk. Someone had flung paint at the sign, five or six splashes, blood-red against the white background.

“Nice,” my wife said.

The E.U.’s most recent deal with Britain has secured an extension to Brexit until Oct. 31. But at the time, things seemed to be deteriorating at alarming speed. A no-deal Brexit, until recently an unthinkable prospect, had become all of a sudden feverishly, luridly thinkable. That morning, a document arrived in the mail from our motor insurance company — a “green card” we would need to keep with us while driving across the border, which in the event of a no-deal Brexit would validate our insurance in the North. A couple of weeks before my first “Game of Thrones” tour, a dissident republican group exploded a car bomb outside a courthouse in Derry. Shortly thereafter, package bombs were found in London airports and a train station, mailed from locations in Ireland. It was hard not to consider a grim cascade of possibilities: a no-deal Brexit, a return to a hard border and an armed republican response to same.

On the top floor of the museum, we came to a large and dimly lit room, more crowded than any other section of the museum. Its sole exhibit was a handwoven tapestry, 263 feet in length, mounted along the curves of a display wall. In the style of the Bayeux Tapestry, which related the history of the 11th-century Norman Conquest of Britain, it consisted of a seamless series of panels illustrating scenes of a violent history. A child pushed from a tower by a man with golden hair. A hooded figure savaged by a gigantic wolf as a woman with bleeding hands looked on. A knight beheading a horse with his sword. A woman in a cave, naked, giving birth to a creature made of shadows. These neatly delineated horrors went on and on, becoming more and more vivid as the tapestry progressed. (Luckily, my son hadn’t stuck around long enough to be subjected to these images. He’d taken one look at the tapestry, pronounced it “just a big cloth going around the room” and demanded to be taken to the toilet on a lower floor by his mother.)

The tapestry, I realized, was now further along in the history of the show’s War of the Five Kings than I myself was. I was midway through Season 2, having lately gotten into it in the most absurd manner possible: Witnessing for the first time the beauty of Northern Ireland on those location tours, I wanted to see it transformed into Westeros. In its recording the episodes of an imagined history, the tapestry was also a gantlet of spoilers. What it really was, of course, was a clever marketing device, dreamed up by HBO and Tourism Ireland and made real by a group of highly skilled Belfast linen weavers. For every episode, a new panel was added, so that shortly after the series finale aired in May, the “Game of Thrones” tapestry would be longer than the Bayeux Tapestry itself.

I didn’t know whether I found the tapestry ingenious or horrendous or some volatile combination of both. But mostly I just couldn’t discount the sense that what I was looking at was in fact some form of historical artifact, further evidence of the encroachment of the realm of Westeros upon our own. I arrived at the end of the tapestry, at the point where recorded history gave way to an uncertain future, and I thought again of Borges, of Tlön, of the way in which a complex and confusing reality yields to the man-made order of a fictional world. Given the fragility of digital records compared with physical artifacts, it was possible to imagine future historians misunderstanding this cross-promotional tie-in as a real historical document. It was possible to imagine, in fact, that this would not be a misunderstanding at all.

I came to a scene of a banquet massacre, lavishly rendered. Throats slit, torsos pierced with arrows, a pregnant woman daggered in the belly. The terrible violence of the image was rendered appealingly neat, even pretty, by the skillful weaving. The red of the blood gushing from the wounds, pooling on the banquet-hall floor, reminded me of the paint splashed on the “Welcome to Northern Ireland” sign at the border. Ahead of me, a bearded man in his late 20s had been glossing each panel for the benefit of his female companion, who seemed less impressed by his historical knowledge than he did himself. He inclined his head now toward the woven scene of butchery. “That’s the Red Wedding,” he said, his face set in a performance of stern scholarship. “One of the all-time great episodes.”

The woman said nothing, only nodded equably. It was unclear how interested she was in any of this. The world, I thought, was already yielding to Westeros. The truth is that it longed to yield.