"Men have scars, women mysteries": Blood magic in ASOIAF as a reproduction of Aristotle's blood hierarchy

In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle wrote about blood hierarchies. He believed that all bodily fluids were the same, just more or less purified versions of blood. He named semen as the top of this hierarchy, calling it "the final form of nourishment," the pinnacle of purification. Of course, he placed menstrual blood at the bottom of the hierarchy:

Now the weaker creature [woman] too must of necessity produce a residue greater in amount and less thoroughly concocted, and this, if such is its character, be of necessity a volume of bloodlike fluid... the secretion in females which answers to semen is the menstrual fluid.

This idea that men's bodily secretions were somehow cleaner and more refined than women's (shockingly) prevailed in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. This resulted in a lot of, let's just say, interesting tall tales—my personal favorite being the myth that women with irregular or no periods could shoot acidic menstrual blood out of their eyes like lasers.

I dunno, watching election news kinda makes me think that myth didn't go away.

Interestingly, in George Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, women's menstrual blood isn't construed as acidic or bile-like, or really even (all that) disgusting. It's another form of blood, and the only time men concern themselves with female blood at all seems to be when they're concerned with whether a girl is old enough to marry, and as proof of her virginity on her wedding night.

But George doesn't get off the hook that easily. See, in his world, women's blood may not create deep trenches in the earth or poison babies, but it is the only blood explicitly used in magic and prophecy. And, in a series comprised of 5 books and roughly 1,770,000 words (so far), that connection isn't to be ignored.

Blood magic starts off in the first book of the series, A Game of Thrones, when the maegi Mirri Maaz Duur uses both horse's blood to force a miscarriage onto Daenerys—a bloody affair in and of itself—to keep Khal Drogo alive, in a vegetative state. The magic Dany had begged the witch to do involved her own blood and her child's to do, and it gave her only a husk of her husband. 

The next interaction with blood magic isn't much better: A Feast for Crows opens with a young Cersei going to Maggy the Frog (also a maegi—white people just can't pronounce foreign words) for her fortune. The witch requires Cersei's blood to tell her, and the future she reads is dark, haunting Cersei to the present day.

Even in sheer prophecy, not even blood magic, women's blood is key. In the third book, A Storm of Swords, Patchface (the court fool of Stannis Baratheon) sings a lunatic song that later turns out to prophesy the Red Wedding, one of the biggest turning points of the series' main military conflict, the War of the Five Kings. He sings:

Fool's blood
King's blood
Blood on the maiden's thigh
But chains for the guests
And chains for the bridegroom
Aye, aye, aye 

Thus, the Red Wedding, at which the war loses its best contender at his uncle's wedding, it is still of some fundamental importance to mention that a woman, and a maiden nonetheless, will bleed. Even in the magic of prophecy, far removed from blood magic, blood is vital, and the blood of women is essential.

So George doesn't write about women's blood being disgusting, or lesser, in any such terms, but he instead writes another iteration of the same perspective: women's blood is the only blood imbued with magic, and women's blood should be feared for it. There is as much a blood hierarchy in ASOIAF as there is in medieval literature and thought—when men are wounded in battle, it's honorable, but when women bleed, it's often sorcery.

In A Clash of Kings, Cersei Lannister tells Sansa Stark, "A woman's life is nine parts mess to one part magic, you'll learn that soon enough... and the parts that look like magic turn out to be the messiest of all." Little does Sansa—or most readers—know just how right she is.

“There are fights no sword can win”: Catelyn and Sansa Stark as (Better) Representations of Medieval Noblewomen

If there’s anything A Song of Ice and Fire (and Game of Thrones) have, it’s a lot of characters. Enough to justify 25+ page appendices at the end of each book, and infographics across the internet for show-viewers. 

I wonder if GRRM has a wall of his house devoted to keeping track of this stuff.

Thus, both series include a range of female characters (though the narrative treatment of the women arguably doesn’t vary that much), fitting many roles familiar to us as so-called ‘strong female characters’ (I’m setting the critiques of that idea and those portrayals aside for the sake of this post).

Among the women in the series are many fan favorites and favorites-to-hate, like Daenerys Targaryen, Cersei Lannister, Brienne of Tarth, and Arya Stark. Daenerys and Cersei mirror one another in their use of marriage and childbearing to claim power in their own right—Daenerys as khaleesi of what will become her own (small) khalasar, and Cersei becoming Queen Regent over Joffrey, followed by Tommen. Brienne and Arya take the opposing route: rather than using their femininity to work around men, they forego it instead, dressing masculinely and learning skills only taught to men (fighting, swordplay, survival skills, etc.)

Game of Thrones, more like Game of "Who's that again?"

These are all larger-than-life women (and girls) who openly defy their societies in ways we recognize and love today, because the ways they claim agency are familiar tropes to modern audiences. They remind us of the Katniss Everdeens, Hermione Graingers, and Blue Sergeants of the modern book-to-movie machine. Because of the Westerosi and Dothraki societies they inhabit, they may not hold power in the way a man could, but they do hold agency over themselves in ways many of their fellow female characters cannot.

But, despite these characters’ popularity and their compelling narratives, the texts we’ve read so far—Chaucer’s The Man of Law’s Tale and the Encomium Emmae Reginae—don’t lead me to believe that these larger-than-life, openly defiant, openly powerful women were common in the actual medieval era. Instead, I think the characters audiences tend to overlook are the more realistic representations of female power in a medieval patriarchal structure. Particularly Catelyn and Sansa Stark.

Hard to believe there was a time when things didn't suck for the Starks.

In a 2012 interview, George R. R. Martin was asked why he kept coming back to ASOIAF. His response was—shockingly—long-winded, but within it, he discussed Sansa, saying,

“So many of the people dislike her because they are just like her—they cannot understand characters who do not fit into predetermined roles. Women in fantasy are allowed to be strong in only a few ways—evil seductress, tomboy lady knight, etc.—and it frustrates so many readers that Sansa develops her strength not by rejecting her courtesy or her traditional femininity, but my making those things into armor… Once Sansa’s [personal narrative] has been torn down, has been eradicated completely, her only narrative, if you can call it that, is a will to survive. By the end of A Feast for Crows, she’s seeing her world more clearly than almost anyone else, even if she’s basically powerless to do anything about it.”

Now, I wouldn’t say that she’s powerless, as both Emma and Custance were not completely powerless. I argue instead that their defiance can only work within the power structures in which they live. For example, Emma’s contract with Cnut, giving their songs inheritance of his English throne before his elder sons is similar to Catelyn’s working as negotiator for Robb (in his capacity as King of the North) to Renly Baratheon and the Freys. Custance and Sansa also follow similar paths, namely, being sent to marry men without regard to their own will. And they each go through with it as part of their duty, as made evident when Custance (sorrowfully) prepares herself to leave Rome (lines 264-271), and when Sansa is forced into marrying Tyrion. They then both manage to defy the systems in their own ways, without wild disobedience, but rather spirituality and courtesy—Custance remains a Christian, and Sansa refuses to kneel for Tyrion Lannister at their wedding.

Basically, in these kinds of distinctly patriarchal systems, women are bargaining chips, and from a woman’s position in their society, even a royal position, little could be done to change it. And while I, like many others, enjoy the narratives of women who openly defy that positioning, characters like Cersei and Brienne remind me of a quote from American Gangster: “the loudest one in the room is the weakest one in the room.” Because, by claiming their own power through defiance, they make one major mistake: they make noise. And in a world where women are kept quiet, making noise makes them fast targets. On the other hand, those who defy quietly, cleverly, and with courtesy—characters like Emma and Sansa—retain more freedom than their louder counterparts. 

Until they become vengeance-seeking Zombies, anyway.