Colleges are offering classes for essentially anything these days. When I was at Rutgers, a couple of chicks I knew took a Beyonce class. My buddy at Monmouth College took a South Park class. In fact, I just wrote about a Game Of Thrones class being offered UC Berkeley earlier this year.
According to Time, Harvard will begin offering a Folklore and Mythology class that will look at the way the George R.R. Martin’s series and HBO TV show based on those books “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.”
The class will be taught by Sean Gilsdorf, a medieval historian and Administrative Director and Lecturer on Medieval Studies. Gilsdorf will be co-teaching the class with Racha Kirakosian, an assistant professor of German and the Study of Religion.
via Time:
Gilsdorf says that medieval biographies of queens will be prime source material. “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,” says Gilsdorf.
Kirakosian, meanwhile, points out that the character of the “vindictive queen” is something shared by both Cersei Lannister and Kriemhild, the main royal character in the medieval German epic Nibelungenlied, which gives students an idea of family rivalries in the Middle Ages. A few other themes are shared by the show and the epic, she says: both stories involve female rulers whose husbands were killed in a hunt and competition with foreign queens at court, for example.
So for all you young bloods out there, if you’re trying to decide between schools, give Harvard a look. Now that they’re offering a Thrones class, I’m starting to think it may be a pretty good school afterall.
