Enduring the Long Winter
It’s been a… remarkable journey! I pissed off the edge of the Wall. I slept in a sky-cell. I fought with the Hill-tribes! So many adventures, so much to be thankful for!
-Tyrion Lannister
Like a white raven arriving from the Citadel, the credits at the end of The Dragon and the Wolf signaled the start of a long winter for Game of Thrones. Rather than the usual 7–8 months between seasons, nearly 20 months will have passed between the season seven finale and the season eight premiere. While Thrones fans haven’t been quite as famished as Stannis during the seige of Storms End, the long gap between seasons has been a quiet one on the Thrones front.
For my part, this Long Winter actually came at a fortuitous time. Just a few months after I wrote my “Thinking Thrones” column for the season seven finale, RaleighCo.com announced it was ceasing to publish any new content. Suddenly without a platform to write about Game of Thrones and with radiology boards studying looming in the spring, thoughts of pitching the column to another outlet quickly turned into doubt as to whether I would write the column at all.
Fortunately the extended gap allowed me to put the thought from my mind as I endured a winter of a different sort with boards studying in the first half of last year. Yet, the light at the end of the tunnel of a grueling six months spent with review books and practice questions happened to have a hint of a Thrones — a weeklong trip to Iceland.
While I didn’t choose Iceland as a post-boards vacation specifically because it was featurwd in Game of Thrones, that awareness did add to the excitement of planning our trip. A couple days after I finished my two day 700 question exam in June, we hopped on a plane and headed to Iceland. Over eight days my girlfriend (now fiancee) and I drove over 800 miles around the “ring road” of the country.
Though we didn’t plan the trip around Game of Thrones shooting sites, we did manage to see a handful of familiar locations from the show. We walked the trail through the canyon of Thingvellir National Park which served as the “Bloody Gate” up to the Eyrie in the Vale of Arryn. We walked along the black sand beaches of Reynisfjara Beach & Dyrhóaley, the backdrop for Eastwatch by the Sea. We walked through Mance Rayder’s wildling camps in the Dimmuborgir lava fields — though instead of hordes of wildlings we were forced to contest with the midges that infest the area in the summer.
But most memorably, I FELL IN THE WATER AT JON SNOW AND YGRITTE’S SEX CAVE! While only the entrance to the Grjótagjá is used in Game of Thrones, the cave does in fact hold a geothermal pool. Apparently volcanic activity in the 1970s caused the water in the pool to be too hot to safely bathe in, and thus swimming is banned.
However while hopping between rocks on the edge of the pool I lost my footing and fell knee deep into the water along the periphery of the pool. Luckily since I am a true dragon I wasn’t burned — okay so in actuality the water if anything was lukewarm, though I might have just been lucky to slip in near the edge. I definitely don’t advise intentionally getting in the pool as other areas may very well be scalding. It did make for a good laugh and a funny story though.
The sites familiar to Thrones fans is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what Iceland had to offer. The degree and variety of natural beauty on that island is well worth the trip.
Once back stateside, the summer and fall came and went without much thought of Thrones or if I would continue writing about it in some form or fashion. Perhaps poetically, it wasn’t until this Winter that the fire of my Thrones passion was lit anew. Among the Christmas gifts I received from my now fiancee was the Ommegang Royal Reserve Collection Gift Pack — four Game of Thrones inspired and officially licensed beers and a collectible Game of Thrones Chalice. Also among those gifts was Fire and Blood, George RR Martin’s recently published seven hundred page account of the Targaryen dynasty.
The former helped kick off a Game of Thrones series rewatch with my fiancee where we celebrate reaching the finale of each season by sharing with one of the beers (and yes we have enough because she bought herself a second gift pack so she too could have her own chalice). The latter allowed me to truly rediscover my love for the Martin’s storytelling prowess and his unparalleled world building…but I’ll go more in depth on the book in another post.
The rekindled passion for Thrones happened to perfectly coincide with discovering the best way forward for writing about it. I learned that Medium — a platform I had used for writing frequently in the past — would allow me to import all of my old columns to their platform so that all of my Thrones writing could be found in the same place. Several hours of importing later Thinking Thrones was reborn as its own site. What is dead may never die.
And so here we stand. The final season of Game of Thrones is just two months away. I will be writing about it here every week once it starts and also intend to write several more pieces in the meantime. The end of the long winter is now within view… and with it, a dream of spring.
