Literary medievalism and fan response to ‘Castamere’

The song ‘The Rains of Castamere’ has a long history. George R.R. Martin first penned its lyrics in A Storm of Swords (2000), the third novel of his ongoing series A Song of Ice and Fire. The song, which tells the story of a rebellious vassal, is one of 70 referenced in the book series so far (Hintersdorf Reference Hintersdorf2016, p. 10).Footnote ¹ The lyrics themselves point towards Martin's elaborate world-building, which draws from ideas both historical (a medieval world governed by ‘feudal’ politics and vengeance) and fantastical (no vengeful lord would have entirely wiped out a noble family and left their castle in ruins without rewarding the title and seat to another vassal). In the book, the travelling minstrel Tom of Sevenstreams plays the song accompanied by a harp, and the story told in the song itself is simple, but powerful. In two stanzas the ballad establishes one of the main noble families (the Lannisters) in A Song of Ice and Fire as formidable antagonists. According to the song, years earlier, Roger Reyne, the ‘proud lord’ of Castamere, had defied the authority of the fearsome Tywin Lannister (played by Charles Dance in the television series). Reyne claimed that his claws were as ‘long and sharp’ as Tywin's, referring to the lions that adorn the crests of both their Houses. Tywin was merely, after all, ‘only a cat of a different coat’. Tywin, in an overwhelming display of ruthlessness, quashed Reyne's rebellion and destroyed his entire family, from root to stem. With Reyne gone the rains now ‘weep o'er his hall, and not a soul to hear’ (Martin Reference Martin2000, p. 538).

Unsurprisingly, reading the lyrics in the book and hearing the song played in the television series provide two different experiences. For readers, the poetic turns of folk lyrics add texture to Westeros, the fictional world of A Song of Ice and Fire, and bridge the long history of this land with the current plotline of the novels. The lyrics of ‘Castamere’ convey the political brinksmanship of a fictional people – a ballad, at its core, that reminds readers of the tyrannical role the Lannister family plays in the book series. The music, although described as ‘gloomy’ in the novel, is obviously never heard. The song is part of the scaffolding of a complex fantasy world set in a simulacrum of the Middle Ages, where Martin pays homage to a variety of medieval and neomedievalist literary traditions (Jamison Reference Jamison2017, p. 132). The title of the book series, A Song of Ice and Fire, even refers to medieval chansons de geste, songs that immortalised the ‘great deeds’ of long-dead heroes that were performed by itinerant minstrels in the 12th and 13th centuries (Weiner Reference Weiner, Rogers and Stevens2017, pp. 31–2). As works of medievalism, Martin's novels mimic the effect, if not exactly the form, of medieval epic poetry, a literary tradition that was often mobilised, even during the Middle Ages, in reinventing the past, the most famous example being the late 11th-century The Song of Roland, which tells the story of an 8th-century battle (Adi Reference Adi2012, pp. 304–5). However, Martin's novels also paint a medieval world filtered through the lens of 19th-century romanticism, which itself influenced more modern medievalist works of fiction such as J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings novels (1954–1955). As an example of literary romanticism shaping popular conceptions of music, Sir Walter Scott integrated folk songs within the narrative of his sprawling novel Ivanhoe (1819), which imagined a medieval England inhabited by minstrels who regularly played ballads that celebrated the chivalry of crusading knights and the peripatetic life of jolly friars (Scott Reference Scott2001, pp. 182–4). Likewise, the Westerosi world of A Song of Ice and Fire is specifically coded as ‘medieval’, populated as it is by minstrels and troubadours (or court entertainers) whose songs merge the distant past with the present, popular culture with high politics. The neomedievalist ballads in the A Song of Ice and Fire novels are meant to weave together the deep history of Westeros and the characters’ political machinations. In A Storm of Swords, the events of ‘Castamere’ still reside in living memory, and the now-legendary ‘deeds’ of the older, although still-living, Tywin Lannister reverberate throughout the current conflict of the novel.

In the medium of television, songs like ‘Castamere’, while helping to situate the plot in its proper history, function in a number of other ways. They communicate characterisation and a sense of the past not only through lyric but also through sound. ‘Castamere’ foreshadows events when the music is heard both diegetically and non-diegetically in the series. We only occasionally hear the lyrics. In a poignant scene, fan favourite Lady Olenna Tyrell (Diana Rigg) acknowledges the Lannister defeat of her family and imminent death by quoting ‘Castamere’, although changing the lyrics to reflect the vanquishing of her House: ‘and now the rains weep o'er our halls’ (‘The Queen's Justice’, aired 30 July 2017; Frankel Reference Frankel2014, pp. 122–4).

Much of the power of ‘Castamere’ comes through its orchestral arrangement, which was composed by Ramin Djawadi, whose fame is now indelibly linked to Game of Thrones. Before he was hired to score all eight seasons of Game of Thrones, Djawadi's career in Hollywood was already on the rise. He had composed the scores to Marvel Studios’ Iron Man (2008) and the television series Prison Break (20th Century Fox, 2005–2007, 2017). Djawadi's influences are many, but include the German film composer Hans Zimmer, under whom he completed an apprenticeship (Djawadi is also a German national). Djawadi's Game of Thrones score often features the booming percussions popularised by his mentor, but also incorporates Middle Eastern inflections expressive of his Iranian heritage (Kornhaber Reference Kornhaber2019). This type of musical ‘exoticism’ could be also understood as part of a larger trend in contemporary film and television scoring that establishes both cultural and historical distance to the Middle Ages, the Orient, or both. Djawadi's ‘Castamere’ music was deployed in key moments early on in the series’ run to pay off in the infamous Red Wedding episode. In an interview with Insider, Djawadi revealed that he was told to make the song instantly recognisable to the average viewer as a ‘new theme that will be very important down the line…[w]hich of course was [“Rains of Castamere” in] the Red Wedding’ (Renfro Reference Renfro2016).

‘Theme’ is the operative word. We first hear the show's antihero, Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), hum the ‘Castamere’ theme in the first episode of Season 2 (‘The North Remembers’, aired 1 April 2012) before entering the chambers of the small council, signifying – at least in part – the ascendancy of the Lannisters into high politics. Bronn (Jerome Flynn), a mercenary soldier in the employ of the Lannisters, sings it before a battle in the penultimate episode of that same season (‘Blackwater’, aired 27 May 2012), in which the Lannisters are victorious. Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), one of the main villains of the series, explains in detail the history of the song to intimidate one of her rivals in a Season 3 episode (‘Second Sons’, aired 19 May 2013), which preceded the now-infamous Red Wedding episode (‘The Rains of Castamere’, aired 2 June 2013). The Red Wedding episode ends with the Lannisters orchestrating the massacre of several members of House Stark (until then, the heroes of the story) during a wedding celebrating the apparent alliance of the Starks and the Freys. The wedding band – with a cameo appearance by Coldplay's Will Champion as a drummer – plays Djawadi's ‘Castamere’ theme as the doors shut ominously on the Starks, the bloodshed begins and the Freys’ treachery is revealed.

The Red Wedding, which appears halfway through the novel A Storm of Swords and towards the end of the third season in the television series, was supposed to shock both readers and viewers alike, not only with its horrific and graphic violence, but also in how it subverted fans’ expectations (Robinson Reference Robinson2013). In the scene, the Stark family is given safe passage and protection upon request of that most ancient hospitality right: bread and salt. At the moment of their slaughter, the ‘Castamere’ song becomes a weapon, interrupting the idyll of peace and the custom of guest rights when the musicians in the hall literally replace their instruments with crossbows that rain arrows down on the Starks and their wedding guests (Stanton Reference Stanton2015, pp. 56–7). In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, published the day the episode aired, Martin was asked whether he regretted writing the Red Wedding scene. ‘No’, he replied, ‘It's probably the most powerful scene in the books. It cost me some readers, but gained me many more. It's going to be hard for me to watch it [on the show]. It's going to be a tough night’ (Hibberd Reference Hibberd2013).

The fan and critical reaction was electric, and the episode a sensation. The music – slow and melancholic, more appropriate for a requiem mass than a victorious battle cry – played a critical role here, Djawadi's ‘Castamere’ theme having a palpable effect on viewers. Emily VanDerWerff of the AV Club praised the use of the ‘Castamere’ theme as an in-world device that signalled to both the characters and viewers the event they were about to experience (VanDerWerff Reference VanDerWerff2013). Laura Hudson, writing for Wired, said ‘[t]hat dawning look of horror on Catelyn's face when they close the doors to the banquet hall and the musicians start to play “The Rains of Castamere” is so chilling, especially because it's exactly how you're feeling too if you know the story’ (Hudson and Henrikson Reference Hudson and Henrikson2013). Sean T. Collins of Rolling Stone called it ‘a nightmare, top to bottom’ and ‘repulsively brutal’ when the ‘guard closes a door and the band plays the Lannister anthem and a man stabs a pregnant woman in the gut over and over and over’ (Collins Reference Collins2013). Years later, when Collins interviewed Djawadi for Vulture, he mentioned the Red Wedding rendition of ‘Castamere’ ‘fright[ening] viewers like something out of a horror movie’, prompting Djawadi to laugh and say, ‘Yeah, that's really fun’ (Collins Reference Collins2019).

Mashable compiled various social media reactions to the episode that were taken from Twitter (Grenfell Reference Grenfell2013), which ranged from mournful (‘I read the book and … understand on a cognitive level that these are fictional characters … [b]ut cannot stop crying #gameofthrones’) to apoplectic (‘i am 5000% done with game of thrones oh my god watching this series was the worst decision of my life’). On YouTube, a video titled ‘Game of Thrones: Red Wedding Compilation’ currently has over 14 million views, and contains an edited montage of over a dozen reactions to the episode, showing fans in a state of confusion, shock and terror (Horrorcirdan 2013). There are many such videos on YouTube, which in recent years has become a digital meeting place for fans of Game of Thrones (as well as other genre shows and films) to post their live reactions and reviews (Burgess and Green Reference Burgess and Green2018; Scharl Reference Scharl2016; Bourdaa and Delmar Reference Bourdaa and Delmar2016). When the ‘Castamere’ theme begins to be heard, the reaction in many of these videos is dread, best exemplified by one video posted by an unassuming, middle-aged couple. When they hear the menacing theme, they both slightly frown and say, ‘Something bad is going down’ (Motels on Mars 2018, 3:43). It is exactly this type of ‘average’ viewer that Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, as well as series composer Djawadi, were trying to reach. As Djawadi explained to Insider, ‘Benioff and Weiss said there's lyrics in the books for “The Rains of Castamere” that we would like you to write a melody for … It needed to be haunting but beautiful, and all these other criteria because the theme had to be really flexible. So just based on the lyrics I sat down and wrote it’ (Renfro Reference Renfro2016).

In the last episode of the series (‘The Iron Throne’, aired 19 May 2019), ‘Castamere’ is played one last time. A dramatic rendition on strings follows Tyrion Lannister, the last surviving member of his family, as he tearfully removes the rubble from the dead bodies of his older brother Jaime (Nicolaj Coster-Waldau) and sister Cersei, interlocked, as they had been from the beginning of the series, in an incestuous embrace. The Lannisters have been soundly defeated, and their great ‘Castamere’ theme is now a funereal motif. The melody is indeed ‘haunting but beautiful’, as Djawadi intended it to be, but the effectiveness of the ‘Castamere’ theme is its ability to be ‘flexible’ to different dramatic contexts, as it changes from a melody of intimidation and boastfulness, culminating as the soundtrack of the Red Wedding plot, to one of family tragedy and sorrow, represented poignantly in the fall of House Lannister. In this sense, the music of the show could be seen as a vehicle through which the non-modern feelings and behaviours of its medieval characters are mediated and made palatable to modern viewers (Larrington Reference Larrington2018).

The traditions of music medievalism in Game of Thrones

When asked whether he had made a conscious decision against a ‘classic medieval sound’, Djawadi explained in an interview with the German international broadcasting company Deutsche Welle:

For Djawadi, the ‘medieval aspect’ of the show was not to influence the score, which was to reflect the ‘dark’ tone of the series and not (as was expressed in a more recent profile on Djawadi) a ‘Renaissance fair’ (Kornhaber Reference Kornhaber2019). The cello does not produce a ‘medieval’ sound, as opposed to the flute, which signals (according to Djawadi, at least) the fantasy world of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, later adapted into a trilogy of films (2001–2003) by director Peter Jackson, with an Oscar-winning score composed by Howard Shore (although Shore's music was not particularly medievalist or flute-heavy).

Similar to how Djawadi wanted to avoid comparisons with The Lords of the Rings, Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire had also famously set out to subvert the fantasy tropes of Tolkien's novels. A Song of Ice and Fire was Martin's response to the way he believed Tolkien had sanitised the medieval past (Carroll Reference Carroll and Young2015, pp. 59–60). Martin has spoken at length about the great influence Tolkien had on his career as a fantasy novelist, although in one of his more recent interviews (with Slash Film) he reiterated the differences between his work and that of Tolkien. In Martin's view, Tolkien set out to mythologise Britain's past while he – Martin – had read ‘a lot of historical fiction and a lot of history about some of the actual rulers in the Middle Ages’, implying that A Song of Ice and Fire was somehow more historically grounded than The Lord of the Rings novels (Pearson Reference Pearson2019). The further insinuation, of course, is that The Lord of the Rings (and, by extension, the music of its feature film adaptations) romanticises a medieval world that never existed, influenced as it was by Richard Wagner's neomedievalist Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876), which shaped the musical language of classic Hollywood scoring that ultimately informed Shore's Rings score. In this view, A Song of Ice and Fire and the television series Game of Thrones reject an innocent medieval past that lacks nuance, gesturing, instead, towards a grittier history (Facchini Reference Facchini2017, pp. 50–4). In this reading, Tolkien's world is one that celebrates idealised images of gallant knights, just rulers and a happy peasantry (exemplified by the Hobbits), who, at least at the beginning of Tolkien's story, are innocent and bucolic. Game of Thrones, in contrast, is – in Djawadi's words – a ‘very dark series’ that depicts, despite its fantasy elements, an ‘authentic’ medieval world, defined by its perversion of justice, grotesquerie, political corruption, savagery and chauvinism (Toswell Reference Toswell2009). Djawadi's music, as a traditional orchestral score heard in many Hollywood productions, is by definition modern, although his influences, especially in the ‘folk’ songs heard throughout the series, reflect the medievalisms popularised in 19th-century literature and music. Songs like ‘Castamere’ occupy a liminal space between medieval and modern, and this is perhaps the source of its appeal to mass audiences. The reach of this song's popularity is most evident in how fans have elaborated on the orchestral and vocal arrangement of the song, added to its lyrics, changed its instrumentalisation and filmed music videos – ranging from glossy to amateur – to accompany their covers (see, for examples, Karliene 2012; Liam Dryden Reference Dryden2013; Tina Guo Reference Guo2014; Mélissa Hubert Reference Hubert2015; Grissini Project 2017; Aron van Selm Reference van Selm2017; Jonathan Young Reference Young2019).

In seeking to present a fantasy drama such as Game of Thrones as historically grounded, we may find insight within the broader debate about medieval music and authenticity, one that has animated musicologists for decades (Dell Reference Dell and D'Arcens2016, p. 65). Quite literally, no one knows what music sounded like during the Middle Ages. All reconstructions are by definition modern (and postmodern) approximations (Haines Reference Haines2004, pp. 135–8). Although we have plenty of surviving textual and notational evidence for early music, such as polyphony or lyrics of songs written for courtly audiences, medieval musical notation does not provide us with detailed information of how a piece was arranged, how instruments were tuned, or how a song was sung. Popular recreations of early music, which began in the first decades of the 20th century, were informed by 19th-century nationalist and post-Romantic movements, and shaped through a unifying ‘historical’ approach to performance and, later, deeply influenced by technologies like radio and the long-playing record (Kreutziger-Herr Reference Kreutziger-Herr2005, pp. 83, 89–98; Haskell Reference Haskell1988, pp. 112–20). Even if particular instruments are known, the sounds they produced are, at best, speculative. In Martin's A Storm of Swords, for example, a minstrel first plays ‘Castamere’ on a harp, an instrument that harkens to 19th-century medievalist images of bards that were further reified in tabletop role-playing games. As early music performer and harp enthusiast Benjamin Bagby has pointed out, we have little information on how a harp might have been played in the Middle Ages (Bagby Reference Bagby and Duffin2000, pp. 336–8). As with all other historical and literary accounts of medieval music performance, the reader of A Storm of Swords is thus invited to engage in the process of historical recreation, imagining how ‘Castamere’ might have sounded.

If Djawadi's ‘Castamere’, notable for its violin and cello, does not particularly evoke medieval music in our collective imagination, what are, then, the sounds or instruments that might conjure images of a medieval past? In his book on music medievalism, John Haines identified not only the defining features of ‘medieval’ music in film, but also the images associated with it, and narrowed his analysis to six sonic identifiers: the bell; the horn call and the trumpet fanfare; court and dance music; chant; the riding warrior; and the singing minstrel (Haines Reference Haines2014, pp. 24–5). The minstrel and troubadour, Haines noted, are mainstays of medieval cinematic music, and they usually appear briefly in film as storytellers – their songs, as a form of early music performance, convey a medieval aural past for modern viewers (Haines Reference Haines2014, pp. 88–90). In the Game of Thrones series, characters like soldiers and a travelling, drunken priest sing ‘Castamere’, which communicates to viewers in both sound and image how medieval folksongs were part of a vibrant oral culture, even within the context of a pseudo-historical fantasy (‘Two Swords’, aired 6 April 2014; ‘Dark Wings, Dark Words’, aired 7 April 2013).

Minstrels and troubadours do not appear in the television series Game of Thrones as often as they do in Martin's novels, although the performance of another song, the folk tune ‘Jenny of Oldstones’, which was also composed by Djawadi, invoked the minstrel as a visual trope of medievalism. The images of minstrels, who represent the music-makers of ‘everyday life’, promote a medievalism rooted in an understanding that folk traditions were, at once, particular to a people but also popular and mainstream in medieval music culture (Yri Reference Yri2019, p. 371). This type of medievalism was memorably shown in the final season of Game of Thrones when Podrick Payne (Daniel Portman), a young squire, sits around a fire with his companions-in-arms the night before a momentous battle and belts out the melancholy ‘Jenny’ song a capella (‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’, aired 21 April 2019). As Haines (Reference Haines2014) noted, the singing of folksongs around fires is an image redolent of medievalism because it evokes a pre-modern form of entertainment in the popular imagination – how our ancestors may have passed down old stories before the advent of modern technology (p. 104). Martin had only provided the first two lines of the ‘Jenny’ song in A Storm of Swords, leaving Benioff and Weiss to flesh out the rest based on Martin's extensive corpus of Westerosi lore (Hibberd Reference Hibberd2019).

Despite Game of Thrones’ aesthetic and thematic differences with The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, Pod singing the ‘Jenny’ song is a scene reminiscent of The Return of the King (2003). In that film, Peregrin Took (Billy Boyd) tearfully sings ‘The Edge of Night’, which was adapted from a different song in Tolkien's novel The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), as a battle rages on and ends in tragedy (Robinson Reference Robinson2019; Neilan Reference Neilan2019). Boyd's rendition of the song was universally praised and almost overshadowed Annie Lennox's ‘Into the West’, which also adapted lyrics from Tolkien's work. Lennox's song (as a post-film commentary on the ending of The Lord of the Rings trilogy) was played during The Return of the King's end credits, winning her an Oscar for Best Original Song in 2004 (Lennox Reference Lennox2003; Ford and Reid Reference Ford, Reid, Bogstad and Kevany2011, p. 181). Similarly, Florence Welsh of the English indie rock band Florence + the Machine covered ‘Jenny’, as she described, in the manner of a Celtic folksong or lullaby, which ended up being played over the closing credits of the episode featuring Pod's ‘Jenny’ song (GameofThrones 2019; Vineyard Reference Vineyard2019; Kaufman Reference Kaufman2019). Celtic music, as James Cook notes, has a particularly long tradition of conjuring a sense of an ‘authentic’ medieval past (Cook Reference Cook, Meyer and Yri2020, p. 735). Welsh's version of ‘Jenny’ became a hit and garnered millions of hits on YouTube alone when it was released as a single on all platforms the day the episode aired.

Medievalism and popular music in television and film

Much like Florence Welsh's rendition of ‘Jenny of Oldstones’, the popularity of ‘Castamere’ and other neomedievalist folksongs found in Martin's novels has benefitted from a trend, since Season 2, of indie rock acts and musicians reinterpreting Djawadi's melodies and even appearing on the show (although an Ed Sheeran cameo as a Lannister soldier was derided as a distraction). As music scholars have noted, rock ’n’ roll itself is a type of modern interpretation of folk music, which, as it relates to Game of Thrones, allows the medievalist traditions of the show to travel to the current music landscape (Frith Reference Frith1981, p. 159). The Hold Steady, for example, did a rock cover of ‘The Bear and the Maiden Fair’, a folk tune sung on the show by Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody, who appeared in a cameo as a soldier in Season 3 (‘Walk of Punishment’, aired 14 April 2013; Vineyard Reference Vineyard2013). The trend itself began when showrunners Benioff and Weiss had wanted Florence + the Machine to cover ‘Castamere’ for the end credits of the Season 2 episode ‘Blackwater’, although Welsh declined and later regretted it, agreeing to cover ‘Jenny’ years later as a sort of mea culpa (Vineyard Reference Vineyard2019). The American indie rock band The National stepped in, singing a ‘Castamere’ cover later released on the Game of Thrones Season 2 soundtrack (2012). The Icelandic experimental post-rock group Sigur Rós also covered the song, which ended up on the Season 4 soundtrack (Reference Rós2014). The group also appeared in the so-called Purple Wedding episode as musicians (‘The Lion and the Rose’, aired 13 April 2014). The Season 8 soundtrack (Reference Djawadi and Tankian2019) also included a new rendition of ‘Castamere’ performed by Djawadi on piano and Serj Tankian, the frontman of the Armenian–American heavy metal band System of a Down, on vocals (although this version never aired on the show). The National and Sigur Rós ‘Castamere’ covers were, significantly, played over end credits and never during the episodes, probably to avoid disrupting the historic verisimilitude of the show, which depended on soundscapes, both natural and fantastical, to maintain a certain aesthetic commensurate with an environment rooted in popular conceptions of a ‘medieval’ reality (Verma Reference Verma2015). As James Cook, Adam Kolassa and Adam Whittaker have observed, ‘rock [music], because of its own peculiar medievalist traditions, has extra power to collapse a sense of historical distance between our fantasy past and today’ (Cook et al. Reference Cook, Kolassa, Whittaker, Cook, Kolassa and Whittaker2018, p. 244), thus making the placement of rock covers in the end credits a ‘liminal’ space that bridged a fantasy past with the modern present (pp. 243–4).

Rock bands that fuse medieval themes into their music have a long lineage stretching back to the 1960s and 1970s, with high points such as Simon & Garfunkel's ‘Scarborough Fair’ (Reference Simon and Garfunkel1966) and Led Zeppelin's ‘Stairway to Heaven’ (Reference Zeppelin1971), and into the 1980s with the Dead Can Dance (too many to list), all of which draw from modernist notions about what constitutes medieval music of the folk variety (Garrido and Davidson Reference Garrido and Davidson2016; Spracklen Reference Spracklen2018; Yri Reference Yri2008). The rock covers of Djawadi's folk tunes stand out because of their melding of the medieval with the modern, although that fusion has also been seen in cinema. A Knight's Tale (2001), starring Heath Ledger in a postmodern interpretation of the Chaucer tale, is certainly a prominent example of this practice, with its soundtrack of hits by Thin Lizzy, Queen and David Bowie (among others) that plays both in the background and diegetically in the film (Burwell Reference Burwell2001; Walker Reference Walker, Bernau and Bildhauer2009, pp. 149–55). The more recent Jeanette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (2017) – an original heavy-metal rock musical composed by Igorrr that also features hip hop, electronica and head-banging actors singing slightly off-key – garnered significant attention at the Cannes Film Festival for its unconventional take on the early life of la Pucelle (Mac Reference Mac2017). According to Game of Thrones showrunners Benioff and Weiss, the goal of commissioning rock bands to perform covers for the show was to provide ‘full, memorable version[s]’ of the songs and serve the show's larger story, not the other way around. For Djawadi, it was ‘cool if we took this [“Castamere”] theme and had a band do it’ (Vineyard Reference Vineyard2013). Viewed this way, the artists who cover these songs occupy the roles of modern troubadours, taking neomedievalist folksongs and integrating them into their current music culture (Haines Reference Haines2004, pp. 138–9).

The admittedly cool trend of commissioning indie rock acts to cover songs for the end credits and soundtrack of the show is symptomatic of the advent of new distribution and revenue-generating models in current popular music, where the prospects of traditional album sales and radio play for an artist's long-term viability in the marketplace are, at best, uncertain (Klein Reference Klein2008, pp. 465–71). The licensing of popular music has been widespread practice for decades but, with the decline of sales and the rise of media conglomerates monopolising radio play, it has become crucial to the bottom line. Soundtracks for film, and television programmes more specifically, have opened up new sources of revenue for alternative rock bands and pop artists (Donnelly Reference Donnelly2002; Taylor Reference Taylor2012, pp. 208–12). In some extreme, but fortunate, cases, television allows bands to make considerable fortunes from licensing their music. One only needs to look at the opening theme songs and end credits of long-running, syndicated shows like Friends (Bright/Kauffman/Crane, Warner Bros, 1994–2004), Smallville (Warner Bros., 2001–2011) and Grey's Anatomy (Shondaland/ABC, 2005–) to recognise that the members of the relatively obscure bands that composed the originals – The Rembrandts, Remy Zero and Psapp, respectively – will probably be collecting royalties for a long time. The now-iconic, orchestral opening theme of Game of Thrones was already spoken for, and so the end credits became the creative space for showcasing new rock covers of Djawadi's neomedievalist folksongs. Benioff and Weiss had also not shied away from licensing music from artists they admired. Even before her involvement with the show, Welsh let HBO license Florence + the Machine's ‘Seven Devils’ (2011) for a Season 2 trailer (Hibberd Reference Hibberd2012).

There is a difference, however, between accumulating financial capital (the type accrued through licensing) and accruing the kind of cultural capital that comes from an association with a popular television series. As some have argued, the outsize roles of television music supervisors have transformed them into modern-day DJs, not only because they curate music and give precious exposure to artists, but also in their ability to commission (and thus co-produce) songs in ways that had been reserved for record companies and producers in years past (Taylor Reference Taylor2016, pp. 70–1, 129; Klein Reference Klein2008, p. 467; Lewandowski Reference Lewandowski2010). During the third season of Game of Thrones, Eyven Klean, the music supervisor, was entertaining offers from Soundgarden, Garbage, the Shins, Band of Horses, Sun Kil Moon, and Portugal. The Man to contribute songs to the show's end credits (Vineyard Reference Vineyard2013). As Klean explained to Vulture, ‘We're not chasing bands because we think they're big bands, like, “We have a bunch of money. Can we get you to do this for us?” It's not about the money. It's about doing something cool for the show’ (Vineyard Reference Vineyard2013).Footnote ² Rock bands, such as those that sought exposure on shows like Game of Thrones, can only hope to stimulate attendance at concerts. In a neoliberal music industry in which much of the profits from sales and streaming (though not necessarily touring) go to large, impersonal corporations, appearing on a beloved television series also accumulates a type of cultural capital that is difficult to quantify in financial terms.

The cachet of a ‘cool’ show like Game of Thrones lay in its ability to centre much of the conversation about popular culture at any given moment, and with coolness comes a type of power to shape new directions in popular music. For a series like Game of Thrones, because of its worldwide popularity and passionate following, artists framed their competition for a spot on the show's soundtrack as a creative challenge rather than a self-interested, commercial endeavour. Welsh told the New York Times that she had missed the first two seasons, but thereafter ‘binge-watched’ the show and felt ‘grateful’ when Benioff and Weiss had asked her to sing ‘Jenny’ after she had turned them down for ‘Castamere’ years earlier (Vineyard Reference Vineyard2019). The frontman of The Hold Steady, Tad Kubler, who appeared on the show in a cameo playing a mandolin and whose band covered ‘The Bear and the Maiden Fair’ (2013), insisted that he was a fan of the show after he began watching it because of his personal friendship with the actor Peter Dinklage. He also wanted reassurances that the respect was mutual and that Benioff and Weiss had actually wanted The Hold Steady on the soundtrack (Vineyard Reference Vineyard2013). In both cases, Welsh and Kubler were given a wide berth to reinterpret Djawadi's melodies, although Kubler was told to go for a ‘drunk Pogues’ sound. For ‘Castamere’, Djawadi had already sketched out the melody before members of The National were approached to develop the song in a way that was faithful to their musical tastes. ‘I had done my demo mock-up minus the vocal’, Djawadi said, ‘And then we shaped it a bit, took the instruments out, and [The National] did their treatment, with a cool vibe to it’ (Vineyard Reference Vineyard2013). The collaboration between Djawadi and The National is indicative of the new possibilities of the co-production of popular music moving forward, and the relationship between composers, showrunners and music supervisors to artists seeking exposure on television (Anderson Reference Anderson2013). The end-credits songs featured on Game of Thrones sounded like elaborations on the folk tunes sung by characters on the show, but they also had the distinct, personal style of their cover artists, who imbued a modern edge to the show's collection of neomedievalist songs.