Game of Thrones has a
Lord Borell. Coincidence?
Or is it homage?
While Martin and Zelazny were friends (Martin is probably the most high-profile booster of Zelazny's work out there), I doubt there is anything to this other than a coincidence. Dara's fencing master was Lord Borel, and A Dance with Dragons, the fifth Song of Ice and Fire book book features a Lord Borrell in a minor role. (Though, because Martin's books are so massive, he very probably has more words devoted to him than Zelazny's Borel.) They play very different roles and here is nothing to connect the two other than the name. If you bump the entire canon of a lifetime writer against the entire canon of another, you're bound to have this kind of coincidence every so often.
However, Martin's god, R'hllor,the "Lord of Light", may well be an homage to Zelazny's work.
R'hllor is one of the original colonists, I guess. Probably disguised as Patchface (Stannis' rhyming court jester that Melisandre hates in the books), just because it would make me laugh.
ReplyDeleteJacob: R'hllor is one of the original colonists, I guess.
ReplyDeleteAgni, no doubt. :)
Yay, and somebody commented on one of these! I didn't think anyone was reading them, otherwise I would have expanded on what I meant. Zelazny didn't *create* the phrase "Lord of Light", which is pretty generic when you come right down to it, but he imbued it with meaning through his work, and I, at least have come to associate it with him. I don't know the truth of the matter, but I do like to think that Martin picked the Lord of Light appellation for R'hllor, instead of a different, but functionally identical title, at least in part as tribute to Zelazny.