What makes this tricky is that there is a lot of sexual violence in A Song of Ice and Fire (actually more of it than in the show) and so a reader might argue that this is just how things are in this fictional universe. The Dothraki account for 12 of the 117 (!!) rape victims in A Song of Ice and Fire in that counting (which I’d argue is an under-count, as it omits what happens to the dancers at Daenerys’ wedding, AGoT, 84-5), about 10% of the total. This is despite the fact that the Dothraki appear (with their traditional culture) in just 11 of the 344 currently published chapters, just 3.1% of the books. Very roughly then, the Dothraki are three times as rapey as the average culture in A Song of Ice and Fire.

So while on the one hand, all of the books are shot through both with Martin’s decision to build a fictional world with lots of rape and his deeply troubling tendency to, as one writer put it, “write from the point of view of the rapist,” on the other hand, the Dothraki seem to get more of this treatment than any other culture save perhaps the Ironborn. Consequently, compared to the other cultures of Westeros and Essos, the Dothraki are disproportionately associated with rape and sexual violence; it is hard not to notice how this plays into bad old cringe inducing Hollywood stereotypes of Native Americans as a threat to white women on the frontier.

Of course the other defense that gets offered is that all of this rape is historically correct. And to be clear, that defense gets offered, because George R.R. Martin offers it. And as should surprise no one who has been keeping track of Martin’s dismal record of understanding actual historical societies, that defense is wrong. I am not going to rehearse the reasons it is wrong here, but merely note that we’ve discussed it on this blog, it has been discussed on other blogs, and by other scholars. The idea, advanced by Martin, that the truly stunning amount of rape – most of it not in the context of war – in A Song of Ice and Fire somehow reflects medieval social norms or a true vision of the past or particular cultures is to be rejected. Needless to say, it is not considered OK to just begin raping dancing women in either Great Plains Native American or Mongol cultures.

Finally, Martin’s Dothraki murder each other at an exceptionally high rate. I want to be clear here that what I am looking at are not acts of war, but rather killings in the settling of private disputes within the polity (that is, the khalasar). I have, for instance, excluded Drogo’s killing of two other khals in battle. We’ll deal with warfare in the final essay of this series. Instead, this is about the characterization that nearly all disputes within Dothraki society are settled by violence, that such violence is extremely common and consequently, the Dothraki treat life very cheaply indeed.

Again, keeping in mind that the entire Dothraki society as we see it is contained within just about 3% of the corpus of A Song of Ice and Fire, we are told: “A Dothraki wedding without at least three deaths is deemed a dull affair” (AGoT, 85), that there at a dozen murders at Daenerys’ wedding, evidently primarily over sexual access to the dancers (AGoT, 85). At Khal Drogo’s nightly campfires he sat “watching women dance and men die” (AGoT, 191), reiterating the paired activities of a Dothraki wedding – women dancing and men killing each other over sexual access to those women. Jorah kills a Dothraki who insults him for wearing armor (AGoT, 556). Jhogo kills a Dothraki for not obeying Daenerys’ order not to rape the Lhazareen women, Aggo kills another moments later for the same reason (AGoT, 558). Then the burst of murderous violence as Drogo is ailing. Quaro is killed by Qotho (AGoT, 596) before Qotho is killed by Jorah (AGoT, 597), and then Rakharo kills Haggo and Aggo kills Cohollo (AGoT, 597). Later Mago and Jhaqo rape and murder Eroeh (AGoT, 634). And of course, Drogo has Viserys murdered quite brutally (AGoT, 418). That is a lot of murder. In just the year or so that we are with the Dothraki, nearly every named male character in the khalasar murders someone else in the khalasar.

Crucially, none of those murders are treated as even so much as a breach of decorum, much less a serious crime. Instead, again and again, we see that the way the Dothraki settle disputes is that they spit insults at each other and then the weapons come out and someone ends up dead.

That this is nonsense from a historical perspective should be fairly obvious to anyone who read the previous post on subsistence systems closely. Nomadic societies (either Plains or Steppe) had extremely low population densities, but also engaged in warfare where the raw number of warriors (nearly all free adult males) was the primary determinant of security. Consistently outnumbered, often dramatically so, by their sedentary neighbors, these societies were always pressed for good warriors or just population (male or female) in general. The big tribe was the safe tribe. Consequently, adoptive or assimilative warfare was important both on the Great Plains (McGinnis, op. cit. 42-3) and on the Eurasian Steppe (Ratchnevsky, op. cit. 12-3). Good humans (especially ones who already knew how to survive as nomads) were a valuable resource not to be wasted! Moreover, raising a child to adulthood represented a substantial investment in resources in a subsistence system that always teetered on the edge of failure; throwing away that investment in a dispute would mean wasting all of those scarce resources. In short, nomadic societies could not afford the insanely high rates of internal violence and murder we see with the Dothraki.

That is not to say nomadic life was safe – there was (as we’ll get to next time) quite a lot of inter-nomadic warfare between different ethnic and tribal groupings. But within those groupings, it will surprise no one to learn that murder was frowned upon (and by ‘frowned upon’ I mean ‘punished harshly’). By way of example, Temujin (who would later become Chinggis Khan) might be expected, given his rise to power, to have been involved in at least his share of of murders if not more. But while he brought about the deaths of many people in war, Temujin seems to have only ever murdered once, when he killed his half-brother Bekhter over a theft. The result? Temujin and his other brother, Jochi-kasar were condemned as murderers by their mother and the episode may have led to Temujin’s captivity with the Tayichi’ut. In any event, the affair was sufficiently shameful for Chinggis that it was concealed in the official histories and only described – with some face-saving obfuscation – in the Secret History (Ratchnevsky, op. cit. 23-7). Temujin’s later ally Toghrul had also killed a brother in a power-struggle and been exiled for it by his uncle and which remained a stain on his honor subsequently (Ratchnevsky, op. cit. 32). Murder was hardly an approved of thing, because of course it wasn’t, because these are humans and humans don’t like murderers as a general matter!

But this characterization goes beyond just the legal matter of “can you just murder people in this society” to a question of how disputes are resolved. Among both Steppe nomads and Great Plains Native Americans, there were systems for resolving disputes without violence. The Sioux had ‘shirt-wearers’ whose job was, among other things, to resolve disputes between family units. In Mongol society, restitution for a slight or crime could be made with a fine (Ratchnevsky, op. cit. 45) or resolved through the intervention of the khan or other tribal leaders. And – as discussed – both Mongol and Great Plains native American society have lots of councils and kurultais and peace meetings and other ways of diffusing conflict by talking in deliberative gatherings. Again, that is not to say that there was no violence, only that these societies were very interested in controlling the violence and channeling it outwards against external enemies in war.”