Introduction: Castles and Inspiration

Carrickfergus Castle in Northern Ireland is one of the best surviving Norman castles in
Britain.

Medieval themes, aesthetics, and culture provide much inspiration to modern writers. A picturesque late medieval castle in N. Ireland, Dunluce Castle has inspired C.S. Lewis and Led Zeppelin, among others.

What is a castle? While this question seems easy enough to answer, a concrete definition is hard to come by, at least in academia. The simplest answer is that a castle is a fortified residence, although like most simple answers, this is only partially correct. While academics still debate the intricacies of the term “castle”, most people have a very clear idea in their head of what a castle is: a big stone building, with lots of towers, battlements, usually a moat or a drawbridge, and filled with knights, troubadours, and all the other quasi-medieval characters  so often seen in literature and film.

This exhibit will examine this association, the castle as intrinsically “medieval”, and in turn all of the implications that come with that connection. Martin’s world, represented in both A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones, represents perfectly the medievalism of castles in modern imagination.

In the context of this exhibit specifically, medievalism refers to the modern perceptions of the Middle Ages, or the interpretation of medieval culture in modern fiction or imagination.¹