Martin is the author of the ginormous, multi-volume epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire<\/em>, which is the basis of the hit HBO series Game of Thrones.<\/em> And, yes, I came across this video while googling around about various theories \u00a0involving that story and where it\u2019s headed, scratching that itch in between episodes of the addictive show.<\/p>\n But you don\u2019t need to be a GoT<\/em> fan to appreciate this discussion as the point here applies more generally to any<\/em> text.<\/p>\n The interviewer, Laura Miller, asks Martin if there\u2019s anything from the early books in his series that he now regrets \u2014 that makes him feel like he\u2019d written himself into a corner. Martin responds by admitting that there are \u201ccertainly mistakes in the earlier books.\u201d He mentions a horse that he describes inconsistently \u2014 sometimes as a stallion, sometimes as a mare, and \u201csome eyes that change color\u201d in his descriptions of some of the story\u2019s massive cast of characters. And he talks about the acrobatic introduction of one character that he later realized was misleading and uncalled for.<\/p>\n But the really interesting thing is not the simple existence of those mistakes, which Martin calls \u201cirritating.\u201d The interesting bit is what he says about the way those mistakes undermine other, deliberate inconsistencies in the text:<\/p>\n These are simple mistakes, but they irritate me because I don\u2019t want to make any mistakes, and also because there are in the books deliberate inconsistencies where I\u2019m using the device of the unreliable narrator or using the point-of-view structure that I do where two people remember something that happened in very different ways and may not be remembering it accurately. And because there are these other mistakes, some readers tend to assume that those things are also mistakes, when they\u2019re not. They\u2019re me being very clever.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So then, in other words, readers of these books will encounter two very different types of inconsistencies or discrepancies in the text. Some of these are \u201csimple mistakes,\u201d but others are deliberate. Some are artless and meaningless, while others are artful and meaningful. And getting those two types of inconsistencies confused can mislead readers in either of two ways. They may, as Martin says above, dismiss and overlook the deliberate, meaningful inconsistencies, wrongly assuming they are simple mistakes. Or, as he goes on to describe, they may mistakenly assume that some of his simple mistakes are meant to be significant and meaningful, and may thus obsessively seek some meaning in them, spinning off into wild and elaborate theories to account for them.<\/p>\n This problem is not unique to George. R.R. Martin and his readers. The same thing happens with any large and ambitious text written and read by mere mortals and fallible humans. Everything that Martin says here about his series is just as true of, say, Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em>.<\/p>\n That\u2019s unacceptable heresy for a certain type of Joyce-obsessive literature professor, but it\u2019s true all the same. James Joyce was a masterful artist, but he was not perfect or\u00a0infallible. He wrote some perfect sentences. You could argue that he wrote some short stories that sustained such perfection over several pages. But over the course of hundreds of pages in a big, sprawling epic like Ulysses<\/em>, even he couldn\u2019t bat 1.000. Most\u00a0of that masterpiece\u2019s multitude of inconsistencies are deliberate, artful and meaningful. Some of them are not. Some of them are simple mistakes.<\/p>\n And that means that readers of Ulysses<\/em> face the same danger that readers of A Song of Ice and Fire<\/em> do \u2014 the danger of confusing the two kinds of inconsistency and thus dismissing meaningful discrepancies as meaningless errors or, in the other direction, reading too much into simple errors and fabricating meanings where none was intended.<\/p>\n This is true of any long text written and read by us humans. And, yes, that includes the Bible.<\/p>\n Admitting that about the Bible tends to upset some people. But the people most upset by that suggestion do not tend to be biblical scholars, most of whom will read Martin\u2019s description of the problem and nod, saying, \u201cAye, there\u2019s the rub.\u201d And this is true not just of \u201cliberal\u201d scholars at divinity schools, but also of most \u201cconservative\u201d evangelical-type biblical scholars. They recognize the reality of this two-pronged problem and studiously work to avoid both potential pitfalls, and they\u2019ve been doing this long enough that they understand it to be a tricky, troubling business.<\/p>\n But while stating this won\u2019t be upsetting to biblical scholars \u2014 certainly not as upsetting as the above comments about Ulysses<\/em> will be to many Joyce scholars \u2014 it tends to make other<\/em> Christians very upset indeed. Our fundamentalist friends at Southern seminary, for example, would adamantly deny that the Bible includes any kind of inconsistency. The suggestion that this text includes any simple errors and mistakes is an idea they find appalling, but they\u2019re nearly as adamantly opposed to the suggestion that the Bible might also include deliberate inconsistencies, disagreements, or differences of perspective that should rightly be read as meaningful.<\/p>\n For these fundie friends, the Bible exists in a separate category from every other large text read by humans because, in their view, the Bible was not written by humans<\/em>. Or, if they\u2019re feeling particularly expansive, they might say that it wasn\u2019t written only<\/em> by humans, but by \u201choly men of God\u201d who \u201cspake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.\u201d George R. R. Martin and James Joyce may have been fallible humans prone to unfortunate mistakes, but those holy men who wrote\/dictated the Bible were micromanaged by the supervising Spirit of God, and thus the Bible is a text without error, without inconsistency, without difference.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a lovely, logical theory that can seem quite compelling right up until one actually opens the Bible and starts reading. Consider, for example, the beginning of the New Testament, which opens with Matthew\u2019s Gospel, followed by three other, different<\/em> Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are not identical. Some of the differences there \u2014 the inconsistencies \u2014 are deliberate and by design. Others seem to be actual conflicts of the sort that suggest one or the others, or all four, may be mistaken. This is true at the granular level of particular facts \u2014 see, for example, the conflicting genealogies of Matthew and Luke. And it\u2019s true at the larger level of the narrative as a whole, as in the way Matthew and Luke both enlist, adapt and re-purpose\u00a0whole chunks of Mark.<\/p>\n As that interview with Martin reminds us, this calls for discernment. The New Testament quite deliberately presents us with four different Gospels. This is, as Martin says, \u201cvery clever,\u201d and we\u2019re obliged to understand that cleverness and to try to figure out what the differences and discrepancies are intended to mean. But some of these differences may also be unintentional or not deliberately meaningful. They may be something more like \u201csimple mistakes,\u201d and thus we must be careful to avoid constructing elaborate theories based on them in order to find or create meaning where none was intended.<\/p>\n Another example Martin gives from his series is from a scene early in the first book, an account of a gathering at Winterfell with all of the Stark family in attendance. Alas, in writing that scene, Martin simply forgot to include young Bran and so did not mention him. That\u2019s easy enough to explain \u2014 Bran could have simply slipped away to climb the walls of the castle, as he loved to do \u2014 but Martin says he still gets letters from fans who assume that Bran\u2019s absence was deliberate and charged with meaning.<\/p>\n Even with the horse\u2019s-mouth denial of such meaning, it can be fun to join those fans in their wild speculations.* There\u2019s a puzzle-solving challenge to that that can be exciting and absorbing in the way that every sufficiently imaginative conspiracy theory can be exciting and absorbing.<\/p>\n The thrill of that, I think, accounts for some of the appeal of fundamentalism. Here we have a massive text full of various differences and discrepancies. We could approach that with the dull, grimly responsible work of scholars, probing the meaning of the meaningful inconsistencies while carefully distinguishing them from other, less meaningful accidents and errors. Commit to that path and you\u2019re going to have to learn Greek and Hebrew and maybe even Latin and Aramaic. You\u2019re going to have to immerse yourself in centuries of debate and discussion. You\u2019re going to wind up with student loans wholly disconnected from any professional path that promises to pay them off someday. Who has time for that?**<\/p>\n Far easier \u2014 and far more fun \u2014 to take the alternative path. Decide and declare that this text contains no actual differences or discrepancies, only apparent ones. Now the task before you becomes strictly one of speculation \u2014 of devising theories, no matter how wild or unwieldy, that can force all these disparate pieces of the puzzle to fit together.<\/p>\n Take a look at the massive output of a group like Ken Ham\u2019s Answers in Genesis. Their \u201cwork\u201d is indistinguishable from the work of a thousand Game of Thrones<\/em> fan sites, concocting elaborate theories about why Bran wasn\u2019t mentioned in that scene at Winterfell, or why the changing eye color of some tangential character is really the Key to the Whole Thing<\/em>. Both of those \u2014 the Genesis fan site and the TV show fan sites \u2014 have stopped treating the text as a story, treating it, instead, as a puzzle to be solved. And for both the cleverness of the story has been eclipsed by the cleverness of the puzzle-solvers. Invested in that cleverness, they mine the text for clues, disregarding the story and its meaning and anything else that can\u2019t be redeployed as a piece of their grand puzzle.<\/p>\n \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013<\/p>\n * This is Bran<\/em>, after all, the possibly time-traveling and time-altering<\/em> child who shares a name with figures from mythic history, and who has been, inexplicably so far, the object of great concern for the king of the white walkers. Bran might just be the Tommy Westphall<\/a> shaping the past and future of all of Westeros, so his absence at an event in the past could mean that he hadn\u2019t yet arrived then. And \u2026<\/p>\n Or maybe Martin just forgot to mention him.<\/p>\n![\"George\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/52\/2016\/05\/George.jpg\")