Evidence that the fate of some A Song of Ice and Fire characters was inspired by the Divine Comedy's contrapasso?

Question

In the [Inferno](http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/index2.html) in Dante's *Divine Comedy*, sinners are punished by a process that either resembles or contrast with the major sin they committed. For example, the violent are submerged in a river of boiling blood: true tyrants are fully submerged; those who were less violent aren't completely submerged. Usurers crouch on the sand with heavy bags of money around their necks. Those who cause discord are punished by being cut asunder with a great sword, and the process is repeated when they are healed. Gluttons get attacked by a three-headed dog that tears off and parts of their body.In *A Song of Ice and Fire*, Bran Stark loves climbing but becomes paralysed after being pushed out of a high window, so he can never climb again. Ned Stark greatly values honour and loyalty but ends up getting executed on a charge to treason. Jaime Lannister self-identifies with his sword-fighting skills; after Locke chops off Jaime's "sword hand", one of Jaime's later comments is that he *was* that hand.At the [Game of Thrones 2017 conference](https://www.herts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/183796/GOT-2017-delegates.pdf), Matteo Barbagello presented a paper which > [showed] how the simple assumption that Westeros is in truth the embodiment of Hell relates to Dante Alighier’s depiction of Hell in the Divine Comedy, a place where, according to the law of contrapasso, the punishment fits the crime. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find Barbagello's paper "The One we are Living in: Westeros and the Dantesque Interpretation of Death". However, finding such relationships is one thing; it is something else to claim that George R. R. Martin drew inspiration for this from Dante's *Divine Comedy*. So my question is, is there any evidence, e.g. from interviews, that the [contrapasso](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrapasso) from the *Divine Comedy* inspired George R. R. Martin in this way?

Answer 1

While I have not done research into the relationship between Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire and The Divine Comedy, I have done research on the relationship between GOT/ASOIAF and Homeric epic (The Iliad and the Odyssey). And the short answer is...it does not matter if he drew direct inspiration or not.

Nobody writes a story in a vacuum; by your sheer existence in society, you consume media that can be traced all the way back to Dante, and Cicero, and Virgil, and Homer, and all the other great writers that have lived throughout the last three thousand years. You can draw upon them directly (i.e., the Rat Cook story in GOT draws from both the Odyssey and the myth of Tantalus); you can draw on them indirectly (GRRM drew upon Tolkien, who drew upon Norse, Finnish, and Roman mythology; you can even try to avoid drawing upon them - but by the act of deliberately avoiding them, you allow yourself to be shaped by the story.

GRRM may have drawn directly from Dante the conception that the punishment fits the crime, with the examples you listed being primary evidence. But it's also a trope in modern-day storytelling that people should "get what's coming to them" in ways that are reflective of their flaws: in Return of the Jedi, the Emperor's hubris prevents him from seeing Darth Vader's inner conflict and redemption; in Stranger Things, Dr. Brenner is killed by the monster he tried to control via Eleven; in Captain America: The First Avenger, the Red Skull is defeated by the power he tried to harness to defeat the Allies. I can't tell you for certain if George Lucas, or the Duffer Brothers, or the Marvel writers were drawing directly from Dante, but they were very clearly following in a literary tradition that can trace itself back to Dante. And at its core, that is what matters.