• By
  • John Jurgensen
The epic trial by combat in ‘Game of Thrones’
Macall B. Polay/HBO

Over the course of four seasons, “Game of Thrones” viewers have gotten used to blood sprays, beheadings and all manner of grisly spectacle. The climactic duel in Sunday’s episode seemed to raise the lance on the level of violence depicted in the show.

Historians see parallels to medieval history in the fictional world of Westeros, so how do accounts of violence from the Middle Ages compare to the high-definition gore on screen?

Steven Isaac, a professor of medieval military history at Longwood University in Virginia, came up with some historical duels that echoed the action of last night’s showdown, when Oberyn “The Red Viper” Martell fought Ser Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane.

For example, in the 1150s, King Louis VII of France ordered a duel to settle a land dispute between Stephen of Massy and the monks of Saint-Germain-des-Près, outside Paris. The anonymous warrior who fought on behalf of the monks prevailed by snatching out the eye of his opponent. Eye gouging is nothing new for “Game of Thrones,” but last night’s iteration was especially gory. By comparison, the account from the 12th century reads like a highfalutin police blotter.

“And then, when they had struck each other repeatedly for a long time and had each managed to wound the other gravely by turns, at last our fighter–with the help of God–manfully and audaciously got inside and was able to force out an eye of the other man. By this great effort, he so aggravated the other that that man confessed himself defeat and conceded the victory to our man.”

In an interview Monday, Professor Isaac chuckled over the matter-of-fact description, which he translated for us from Latin. “Oh, really? He lost an eye and admitted that he’d been done in?” Isaac had uncovered the scene in a cartulary, a medieval manuscript of legal documents, in Paris. Despite the neutral tone of the account, he said it leapt out from the otherwise numbing collection of lawsuits and countersuits.

But even the official historical narratives of the time rarely got graphic in their descriptions. That’s because they were written by monks. “If they were going to take time off from praying, they had to make sure that their writing was an act of godliness. If you went to extremes in the writing, your superior monk would wrap your knuckles for it,” Isaac said by phone from France, where he’s spending four weeks on research about medieval mercenaries and cities under siege.

However, the grisly facts often spoke for themselves. In his essay comparing the Mountain vs. Viper matchup to some from the Middle Ages, Isaac cited a trial by combat between two men named Iron Herman and Guy of Steenvoorde. Herman lived up to his name with a rope-a-dope maneuver similar to the one that the Mountain pulled on the Viper, though it involved a different part of the body.

Here’s a blow-by-blow written around 1127 in the journal of the Flemish cleric Galbert of Bruges (as translated by Jeff Rider at Wesleyan University and sent to us by Isaac):

Iron Herman fell prostrate on the ground, and Guy threw himself on top of him, pounding the knight’s mouth and eyes with his iron gauntlets…the prostrate man gathered strength bit by bit from the coolness of the ground and slyly made Guy think he was certain of victory while he rested. Meanwhile, having raised his hand very smoothly to the lower edges of the mail coat, where Guy was unprotected, and having grabbed him by the testicles, he collected his strength for a single effort and threw him from him, breaking open all the lower parts of his body by this grabbing throw so that the prostrate Guy grew weak and cried out that he was defeated and was going to die.”

Guy, who had been accused of murder, was executed hours after the battle, in keeping with the trial by combat. “He probably welcomed the hanging,” Isaac said.

For the latest entertainment news