"We should start back,” Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them. “The wildlings are dead.”

“Do the dead frighten you?” Ser Waymar Royce asked with just the hint of a smile.

Gared did not rise to the bait. He was an old man, past fifty, and he had seen the lordlings come and go. “Dead is dead,” he said. “We have no business with the dead.”

“Are they dead?” Royce asked softly. “What proof have we?”

“Will saw them,” Gared said. “If he says they are dead, that’s proof enough for me.”

Will had known they would drag him into the quarrel sooner or later. He wished it had been later rather than sooner. “My mother told me that dead men sing no songs,” he put in.

“My wet nurse said the same thing, Will,” Royce replied. “Never believe anything you hear at a woman’s tit. There are things to be learned even from the dead.” His voice echoed, too loud in the twilit forest.

So I got myself into another epic (in scope and in page count) fantasy series. A Game of Thrones is the first of seven books in George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, five of which have been published already, the latest one just this month, but with five to six years between the releases of the last two, which could mean that I am in for an uncomfortable wait again (I have already finished the first three volumes).

I have read somewhere that this was "fantasy for grown-ups", "with no elves, fairies, wizards, ancient curses, young men on quests or supernatural forces of evil", "soaked in blood and sex". The part about no supernatural forces being involved is not true: While A Game of Thrones is mostly about lords and ladies, knights and squires, trueborns and bastards, tournaments and battles, weddings and funerals, politics and sword-play, alliances and conspiracies, it also features walking dead, hatching dragons, and wolf dreams, elements that start playing bigger parts in the later books. But there is indeed plenty of killing, plenty of dying, and plenty of sex here. That may sound like a medieval "bodice ripper" with gallant acts of sword-play through into the mix, but the Song of Ice and Fire is much more grim and gritty, with the full range of adultery, rape, incest, child abuse, prostitution, beheadings, burnings, falls, flayings, hangings, mutilations, tramplings, poisonings, drownings, freezings, stranglings, guttings, throat-openings, throat-rippings, batterings, and maulings. The seven kingdoms of Westeros are not a place you want to dream yourself into.

The story has a great number of protagonists, taking turns with each chapter dedicated to (and named after) one of them. Interestingly, many of them are children. Disturbingly, they also get the full share of killing, dying and sex. In the beginning, I was concerned about the characters being too obviously cast as good or evil, but this goes away as you spend more time with them, as back story and motivations for the evil villains are revealed and the honourable heroes start doing terrible things as well (or just die, which is not something fairy tale princes are supposed to do either).

Kindle notes: