Feasts and Families

Unlimited meat and sweet wine. HOMER, ODYSSEY 9.557

The world of Game of Thrones is one of visceral, sensual experience. Across the Seven Kingdoms, the extreme conditions of war and coming winter reduce a once prosperous society to basic human impulses: food, sex, killing, and for the well-to-do, the scheming required to obtain, disperse, or withhold any of the above. What food, sex, and murder all have in common is a basic sense of transgression: they all involve the importation of foreign objects into the body, and they are experienced first and above all by the body and the senses. They are also each important in the formation and maintenance of alliances: marriage and rape both characterize two sides of victory in war, or, as often in the convulsed world of Westeros, provide a reason to go to war. Food, meanwhile, is a measure of success; in a world where winter lasts for years and years, prosperity, as the Tyrells demonstrate, is a matter of agriculture.

This chapter is about food, and while we'll come back to food as plain comestibles at the end of the chapter, the bulk of it is concerned with food in a very specific setting: the feast or heroic banquet. The word 'feast' conjures up visions of vast halls, a multitude of guests, and food spectacular in both quality and quantity. But feasts can be had in more humble circumstances, where hunger makes the best condiment. Crucial to all these occasions is the idea of communal eating, which consistently invites us to think about where the meal is happening, with whom, and how much of the food each person is getting. Feasts, as any bride planning her wedding can tell you, are a microcosm of society: some people get the best food at the best table and earlier (while it's still fresh and hot), while others settle – or are forced to settle – for less and later, when the best bits are gone, cold, or rotten. Food also needs to be sourced and acquired, and this too holds up a mirror to society: who can afford to buy what and in what quantity, and conversely, who has it in surplus to sell? Who hunts, and who gathers? Who eats meat, who eats fish, grain, or nothing at all? Feasts, especially when food is scarce, as it was in antiquity and as it increasingly becomes throughout the wars in Westeros, are a matter of politics and economics, and the places where people sit to eat together tell us a lot about that place and its values. Nor are these just questions that we impose as readers or as students of antiquity: the characters within Game of Thrones are acutely conscious of the semantics of food and eating.

In the prologue to A Clash of Kings, a feast is held on Dragonstone. For Stannis and his bannermen the feast is just another part of being a nobly born lord, but for the aged Maester Cressen, it is the end of a long day, in which the infirmity and indignity of his old age as well as the family drama of House Baratheon have been weighing heavily on his mind. The keep has recently been assigned a new young maester, come to aid Cressen in his duties, and Cressen says he does not mind. But it is at the feast, where he finds Pylos sat in Cressens own seat, that he feels the final indignity, and where Stannis turns from a just lord to a cruel one, forcing the old man to wear a fool's motley helmet. The feast emphasizes Cressen's fall from grace in other ways too. The whole prologue is, for Cressen, a long and tiring trek down one tower and up another, a distance he is forced to traverse to be close – and therefore useful and important – to his lord. In the world of the court, proximity is everything. Tired by the effort, Cressen takes a nap before the feast, but is allowed to oversleep, and arrives at the hall only after festivities have begun. As he stands at the doors, he thinks, 'They did not summon me. He was always summoned for feasts, seated near the salt, close to Lord Stannis' (CK 22). Salt was a precious commodity in antiquity as in the Middle Ages. Salt was important for many reasons in antiquity, chief among which was the fact that it allowed the ancients to preserve their meat for long durations of time. A contributing factor to the city of Rome's importance throughout the history of the Roman empire was its position along the Via Salaria, the 'Salt Road,' which was one of the major Western trading routes for this most precious of commodities. In fact, Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, says that the Latin word salarium, from which we get the English word 'salary,' originally came from their word for salt, sal (Pliny, Natural History 31). Westeros seems to follow suit, since sitting by the salt here clearly implies sitting alongside the high and mighty, and especially near the lord himself. Indeed, Stannis and his bannermen are seated at an elevated high table, while knights and sellswords are sat at the lower tables, further and further away from the center of power. The feasting is only a small part of the chapter, but even so it offers a perfect snapshot of the situation on Dragonstone: the lord is at the center, with his followers spreading out beneath him. The only intruder is Melisandre, and her presence dislodges the old maester just as her religious ideology aims to dislodge the Faith of the Seven.

But this feast also has a sinister side to it, as Cressen attempts to reveal Melisandre for the evil he thinks her to be. Under her influence, we are led to imagine, Stannis changes from what he once was, and allows Cressen to be humiliated and eventually sacrifice himself in vain by sharing a poisoned cup with Melisandre.

Feasts aren't just a convenient site for poisoning, they're also a site for knowing the people and world around you, whom you can trust and whom you cannot. In fact, the very act of eating is one of trust: you're more vulnerable when seated, when your hands are full, when you're distracted by drink and entertainment; above all, you're placing your trust in the various people – largely out of sight – who prepare and serve your food, as well as those sitting nearby. As we shall see, classical mythology frequently deals with the themes of testing and trust involved in feasting, from the consumption of polluted food to the murder of a victim caught unawares. It's at a banquet, appropriately enough, that Odysseus punishes the greedy suitors of his wife, who don't realize who he is until it's too late. Feasting, knowledge, power, and revenge come together in the myth of Atreus, too: the king of Mycenae gets the better of his brother – and secures his royal power – by tricking Thyestes into eating his own sons. Although the act of feasting might seem like a simple celebration, an opportunity for a writer to engage us with descriptions both luxurious and grotesque, the occasion is also a microcosm of society, when we find ourselves among a diversity of people and interests, and we have to use our wits to navigate the social and intellectual...