"Are their gods all deaf?" : EN LITTERATURANALYS AV GUDOMLIG AGENS I GEORGE R.R.MARTINS ”A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE”.

Sammanfattning: Creators of popular culture, especially in the Fantasy- and Science Fiction-genres, has oftenused religious inspiration in the form of symbolism of the divine to form their own religioussystems and beliefs. The gods in these works ranges from actual physical beings to lofty ideasof transcendent powers in the sky. Readers have consumed these aspects of divinity, that doesn’tstray that far from their own world’s deities, and many of them have probably done so withouta thought on if this affects their own view of the divine. The first step towards this realizationrequires some form of analysis over how popular culture has depicted gods and religion. Thefollowing study treats how one of the world’s most well-known Fantasy series, George R.R. Martins A Song of Ice and Fire, portrays divine agency in three of its religions. The religionsin question are The Seven-Pointed Star, the Drowned God, and The Lord of Light. Thetheoretical approach has been built upon Pierre Machereys thesis on how to reveal a textsideological project to accomplish this goal. The study has shown that the religions with a clearinspiration from western religions, such as Christianity, are portrayed with a weaker divineagency than those religions based on religions without an apparent western inspiration. Thestudy concludes that this implies that the ideological project of A Song of Ice and Fire can beseen as a critique on how religious people use the divine and construct it for their own gains.