Romerska legionerna
En av George R. R. Martins främsta inspirationer för Nattvakt är de romerska legionerna som bemannade Hadrians mur, som det är inspirationen för väggen.
Hadrian's Wall, of course, I think was the inspiration for the Wall. I've never been to China so I've never had a chance to see their Great Wall but I have been to Scotland and I have walked along what remains of Hadrian's Wall and that was actually an inspiring experience. I was travelling and we got there late, all of the tour busses were leaving, the sun was going down and so we pretty well had it to ourselves. I remember standing along that wall and it was Fall, it was late October or early November and the wind was picking up and I looked across trying to think what it would be like to be a Roman legionary, maybe someone from Italy or Sicily or Greece who was posted to this place and what would be likely to come out of those hills to attack him there on the wall, what he must have felt, it was a very kind of lonely feeling. And I've always held onto that and certainly it was a feeling I tried to tap into when I created the Wall and the men of the Night’s Watch.
But of course, the other thing about fantasy is [that it is] bigger than real life, so you don't just take Hadrian's Wall and write something, you have to have something bigger than Hadrian's Wall. Hadrian's Wall is like, I don't know, 20 feet tall, if that, 10 feet tall, and my wall is like 700 feet tall and built of ice and it's much more impressive. I think that's true of all the castles. There are no real life castles that can match the castles of Westeros. That being said, they are still modest compared to some of the things in Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien's castles. Then again, there is less magic in my world, so it would be harder to build.
So Spake Martin, Second Life Appearance
George, som med de flesta författare, inspirerar från sitt verkliga liv och har kommenterat Wall / Night's Watch inspirerad av hans erfarenheter under Chicago Blizzard 1967.
One young woman asked Martin if the frozen far North of his fantasy world was anything like Chicago winters.
"The coldest winter was in Chicago, let me tell you about cold," Martin said of his freshman year at Medill. He leaned forward.
"There was so much snow that winter, you couldn't see, all snow, all ice, and it was so very cold," Martin said.
The old storyteller stared her in the eyes and made a whooshing motion with his hands, conjuring Chicago wind and ice, and I could see the frozen drifts of the Wall begin to grow.
It was the great Chicago blizzard of 1967 he was talking about. Some 23 inches of snow fell in one 48-hour period, and when it was all done, the Chicago area was paralyzed.
There were mountains of snow and 10-foot drifts. People had carved out little pathways in the snow, and as more snow fell, the walls of snow began to grow as tall as a tall man. Then they grew taller still, and the snow walls froze into solid ice.
"It was like the trenches during World War I, but they were trenches of ice," Martin said. "I remember walking through the trenches and the tunnels of ice, the wind blowing so you couldn't even see. It's an experience that never left me."
Martin said he supposed that was where the Wall began in his mind, years later, when he began to write "Ice and Fire."
Chicago Tribune, Chicago's blizzard of 1967 and its connection to 'Game of Thrones'
På en sidotal, även om George inte gillar att ha en en till en kartläggning av hans berättelser / tecken / platser till någon historisk händelse. Det finns några tecken som huvudsakligen är inspirerade av en person, men sedan har en vridning in för att ändra dem lite men ingen verkar vara en direkt jämförelse. Med det i åtanke är det troligt att Night's Watch är en kombination av olika verkliga exempel.
I don't like to just take a character from history, whoever it is, and just change his name, kind of file off the serial number and present him as my own character. What I much prefer to do is perhaps take 2 or 3 characters from history and mix them up together or do juxtapositions that are original; I mean I don't want…I love historical fiction as a reader, but one of the problems with historical fiction, if you read a lot of history, you're always going to know how it's comes out. If you read a novel that’s actually set during the Wars of the Roses, you know what’s going to happen to those two little boys in the tower; you know who's going to win the Battle of Bosworth Fields. You know the ultimate fate of the mad King Henry VI. So I don't like that, I don’t want someone to just look at my book and know what happens because they're recognizing historical analogues, I like the stories to be unpredictable.
So Spake Martin, Second Life Appearance
