Harvard Now Offers a Class All About Game of Thrones
As if you needed another reason to wish you went to Harvard, the prestigious university is now teaching a class about your favorite TV show. According to Time, the Ivy League university is offering a class all about Game of Thrones this fall.
The course will be called “The Real Game of Thrones: From Modern Myths to Medieval Models,” and it will study how George R.R. Martin’s mythical world “echoes and adapts, as well as distorts the history and culture of the ‘medieval world’ of Eurasia from c. 400 to 1500 CE” by exploring “a set of archetypal characters at the heart of Game of Thrones—the king, the good wife, the second son, the adventurer, and so on—with distinct analogues in medieval history, literature, religion, and legend,” according to a description of the course.
Basically, students will learn how the fantastical tales of Westeros compare and contrast to our own world history.
“When I read medieval verse epics with my students, they’d say, ‘Oh, that’s like in Game of Thrones,” professor Racha Kirakosian told Time. “No, if anything at all, it’s the other way around. Isn’t it partly our job [as professors] to use that interest and go deeper?
This isn’t the first time a university is offering a class about Game of Thrones—back in April, UC Berkeley announced a six-week course inspired by the fictional languages of GoT.
RELATED: There Are Actually *Five* Game of Thrones Spinoffs in the Works
The show may be ending next year, but the interest in its mystical world is certainly here to stay.
