Game(s) of Thrones: Medieval Literature and Popular Culture

This week's reading comprises diverging sets of texts: Monty Python and the Holy Grail, John Mandeville's The Book of John Mandeville, and Game of Thrones. For this week's short forum post (about 250 words), I invite you to write about either of the topics listed below or raise questions/concerns of your own. Try and get these forum posts in by Thursday at midnight (no need to make these super formal--think of this more as class discussion where you test out ideas, raise questions, explore concepts). Then, by Sunday night at midnight, respond to at least two other forum entries. At the end of the week, I'll post a short forum post of my own synthesizing the discussion.

1.) What did you think of Monty Python? It satirizes the culture of chivalry and Arthurian literature that we've spent so much of the course discussing. Consider how humor effects the tropes of chivalric literature and literature of King Arthur. Does it critique chivalric codes? praise them? And why might a film in the 1970s bother satirizing medieval arthurian literature?

2.) Mandeville's Travels written in the 15th century, (which you can read more about here) concerns the fictional global wanderings of a (likely fictional) knight, Sir John Mandeville. Game of Thrones is also structured around global political movements—every episode even starts with a map! Consider the two images of the world we get in both Mandeville and Game of Thrones.  How does each text and film imagine their respective worlds?  To get you started, you might even try drawing a map of Mandeville's travels or of the world of Game of Thrones.  What do you notice about each map? What's at the center and what's at the outer edges of the world?