Tyrion Lannister

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25th April 2012

Tyrion Lannister

The epicurean Imp: Tyrion Lannister

“Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.”

Tyrion Lannister (Game of Thrones)

In Game of Thrones the character who attracts attention from the first moment he appears on the screen is the Halfman Tyrion Lannister. The fact of belonging to the golden lion house gives him a big power he wouldn’t even dream about it if he were from the plebs, but he is badly thought of by his family, except his own father. His mother died when she gave birth to him. All the possible Freudian conflicts come to the surface in him. In TV series, it is inevitably the jokes about the size of his phallus and about his love capacity; definitely, the essential pillars about his supposed manliness. His way of life distances him from the typical image of somebody who is short in fantasy stories such as Hobbits, naughty gnomes or frowning dwarfs.

Tyrion is a crippled man, like Dr. House, a Halfman and he acts living life, not with resignation, but saying “yes” to life, being full of conscious of it, as the philosopher Nietzsche advised us. Although his evil tongue approach him more to priests that the German philosopher deplored in The Antichrist than to the blond beast he praised with his deafening rhetoric. (Is Jamie Lannister an example of the blond beast, superman with aristocratic and incestuous moral?) Tyrion lives a significantly epicurean life. He clings himself to bodily pleasures, seduces and enjoys the delicacies that his condition can provide him with. But he doesn’t scorn intellectual pleasures; reading and oratory, arts in which he is a master. One chapter which is very eloquent is one in which a man reproaches him for his pleasure for books. The dwarf confesses that someone who is weak, like him, has his own weapons. He is not the only character in the books who confesses the same weakness. Did George R. R. Martin become wizard of words because he couldn’t be a warrior? We’ll never know it.

The little Lannister cultivates friendships, good food and knowledge, all with moderation, although I don’t believe the Greek approves his relationship with prostitutes and courtesans; but he lives an ethic life according to his lineage and family education.  In a doubtful moral world we can’t reproach him, because his first experience of love was very traumatic which is narrated in a Freudian moment par excellance in Tyrion’s tent by Bronn, the warrior, and Tyrion’s courtesan when they were in a torrid scene before Lannister and Stark’s entrapment. There is in Tyrion a strong will of power. Without any doubt Alfred Adler would have found a great patient on who to prove his well known psychoanalytic theory based on Nietzsche’s work. According to Adler adult life consists of converting the fragility and vulnerability we felt in our childhood, to a hard and sore ego that Tyrion is supposed to have and who will have a great intriguing future as a Hand of a King in King’s Landing.

If the reader find this analysis very forced, he or she can close the blog o remember Tyrion’s father died and think about Oedipus the king and his tragic end. The shadow of Freud is greatly extended, in spite of all the subtle nuances of his work...

Hand of the King