George R.R. Martin explains the cute/creepy origins of Game of Thrones

A while back, the Bayonne-borne A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame alongside several other noted New Jerseyites, including Jason Alexander, Harry Carson, Bart Oates, Martha Stewart, Bon Jovi, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. He recently wrote about the experience on his Not a Blog, and posted a link to the video of his acceptance speech, which is worth watching for Game of Thrones fans wondering where Martin’s yen for warring families and bloody battles came from.

It’s a nice speech — Martin talks about his early dreams of baseball glory, thanks his family members in the audience, shouts out the teachers at the Mary J. Donohoe School, and more. But mostly, I think I’m going to remember his account of a childhood experience that should sound very familiar to any Game of Thrones fan.

You see, when Martin was a kid growing up in the projects in Bayonne, he wanted a pet, but his building didn’t allow cats or dogs. So instead he got turtles and put them in a little castle in a tank. In fact, he got rather a lot of turtles, because the ones he had kept dying. “I don’t think the food they give you — the little shakers of turtle food — were really very nutritious.”

But as a kid, that explanation wasn’t cutting it. “I had to come up with some explanation as to why they were dying, and I decided that they were murdering each other,” he recalled. “They lived in a castle. And obviously they were knights and kings and princes and they were competing for the Turtle Throne…So long before Game of Thrones, Turtle Castle was one of my first fantasy epics.”

Is this adorable or creepy? I honestly can’t decide. In any case, Martin also explained that this is why he often wears a little signet on his hat or lapel, as a tribute to the turtles that jump-started his creativity way back when. And I can never look at Game of Thrones the same way again.

Martin also recalls a time in high school where his teacher asked the students to rewrite the ending to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, a short story about a guy in a pit of full of rats about to be cut in half by a great blade that’s swinging ever lower and lower. But at the end of the story, a trumpet sounds, it’s announced that the Inquisition is over, and the guy is spared. “Totally undeserved rescue of the lead character,” Martin said. Again, I’m sure this makes a ton of sense to Thrones fans.

Anyway, Martin diligently rewrote the ending and read it to the class. “I wrote the end where he does get cut in half and the rats eat him.” The class loved it, and Martin credits that praise with inspiring him to get more into writing.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s that inspiration can come from anywhere. And maybe that Martin was kind of an odd kid. It all worked out.

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