Seeds in Game of Thrones

     It is very apparent that women have always been inferior in the eyes of men, even in our current present day. Tracing back to Medieval times, women's bodies were considered deformed, polluted, and especially, disgusting. In an article titled, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended, Alcuin Blamires discusses two specific theories. These theories are called the one and two seed theory. Blamires details the one seed theory, stated by Aristotle, as men giving the vast majority of uniqueness to their children. Mothers are known as the vessels for children, while fathers contribute the children's overall being. As opposed to the one seed theory, the two seed theory, described by Galen, states that a child receives two seeds, but one is stronger than the other. Both theories degrade women to the bottom of the gender totem pole, but how do these theories pertain to certain instances like incest, heirs, and power, which all connect to a simple character from the Game of Thrones, Cersei Lannister.

Cersei is the widowed wife of Robert Baratheon, the Queen regent of the Seven Kingdoms, mother of Joffrey, Myrcella, and Tommen, and shares a incestuous relationship with her twin Jaime Lannister. Cersei’s role as Queen Regent to guide her sons as they take the throne and be a mother queen as the new queen steps in line. Cersei demands power in the Seven kingdoms because she has suffered throughout her life and has pushed her way to get to the top and does everything she can to remain there. Cersei considers herself Tywin’s best son due to the fact that she is the only child who takes her father’s advice and does what she’s told. Although Cersei is the only female child of Tywin, she stands as the most masculine in the sense that she uses her knowledge and gender role to get her to the throne. Another spin to Cersei’s character is that she not only has an incestuous relationship with her twin brother Jaime, Cersei’s children are also fathered by Jaime.

Pertaining this back to the seed theories, how does Cersei relate to both or one of the theories and how can that reflect on women from Medieval times? Looking at the one seed theory, our present day Biology tells us that men determine the sex of children. Comparing this to the one seed theory, since men give the vast majority of uniqueness to their children, that would mean that when females are born, the mother’s seed was stronger than the father’s. This can relate back to Cersei being Tywin’s best son because her seed was able to beat out Jaime’s seed. But if you look at the two seed theory, Myrcella would be considered a deformed, mutilated man and Cersei’s seed was stronger in the sense that it deformed one of her children. So which theory would Cersei follow? Cersei shared a womb with her twin brother, so why would her blood be different than Jaime’s? Just because her body is different to her brother’s does not mean she did not contribute the same characteristics to her children. Cersei is a great example to test the contradictions within these theories because it allows the readers to look at the one sided views on women and how those views can’t follow that men create the children and women are just the vessel.   

A Human Nugget: The Potentiality of Women's Bodies in Medieval Times through The King of Tars and Two-Egg Theory

In the tale of The King of Tars, a Christian woman and a Pagan sultan are wed and produce a monstrous child: limbless, a round of flesh with no blood or bone, no eyes or nose or other facial features, and stone cold dead. While the tale goes on (spoiler alert: converting to Christianity fixes everything), viewing the scene of the child's birth and existence alongside classical and medieval thought on the potentiality of women's bodies can, in a way, explain everything. A major feature in Aristotle's thinking of conception and women's bodies is that a child's creation required man's sperm, the uniqueness and provider of a soul, with the mother acting as a passive vessel. A woman's body in this Aristotelian concept is additionally the provider of a physical potentiality of a child -- which is a logical jump because a period is a (failed) potentiality to create life. Because this potentiality alone cannot produce a life, a period exists; but add semen to the mix, and poof! Automagically a baby is born (or so says medieval thought). However, Aristotle is not the only philosopher whose contributions make it into The King of Tars -- this is where Galen and his Two-Seed Theory comes into play. Two-Seed Theory is essentially assuming that a man's seed (sperm) and a woman's seed (ovum) fight a battle of epic proportions, and whichever emerges victorious is the parent whom the child shares its appearance. With a combination of Aristotle's view that woman is simply a physical matter-producing vessel, representing only the potential for life, and Galen's idea of the Two-Seed process wherein either parent's appearance could become the child's basic structural pattern, one option is that because a woman is incapable of producing a body with a soul or any unique features they are blessed with a human version of a chicken nugget. Granted, this not only would support Aristotle's idea of woman being unable to create life, but also follow many other medieval beliefs about where the blame of an imperfect baby stems from: the mother. In our previous text on the Man of Law's Tale we discussed that the state of an imperfect child is considered entirely the fault of the mother in medieval thought, due to either the moisture level of the womb, the temperature, the (im)purity of the mother's thoughts, or any number of reasons. One argument that could be made is that because the mother is naturally flawed, even if she has the correct moisture, temperature, and pure thoughts, she still produces offspring with a major deformity because her "seed" was victorious in Galen's understanding, but was unable to produce a normal infant because such a seed is only a potentiality without the aid of a man's sperm in Aristotle's understanding.

Of course, as the main character is a Christian woman, everyone else needs to just convert to Christianity and everyone will live in a magic fairytale land, happily ever after. Jesus will shed tears of rainbows and bless the nugget as the king of all nuggets, dubbed Nugget McDonald, ruler of McDonald Land.
                        

Nugget army of King Nugget McDonald