"I can't say I've done a complete medieval mindset. I haven't. In fact, if I had I think it would be too alien."

This is a fascinating statement and I'm going to take it apart. Don't get me wrong: I enjoy Game of Thrones. But I don't enjoy it as a medievalist - I enjoy it as entertainment.

1. GRR Martin and whoever the interviewer is clearly had some discussion about a 'medieval mindset' in total ignorance of medieval ideas. The idea that Martin has an understanding of the 'medieval mind' in the barest sense (but couldn't go 'full medieval') would be a surprise to anyone with academic training in Medieval studies. He is interested in telling a story, but the same story could have been told with any era. The relationship Martin's books have with the medieval world are weapons, castles, and half-baked stereotype of 'feudal' relations.

2. Further to point 1, but with more emphasis: there was no 'medieval mindset' anyway. The medieval world spans 1000 years, spans diverse peoples, and saw extreme transformations across both. So what 'medieval mindset' are we talking about? The inhabitants of post-Roman Merovingian Gaul in 600 AD? The minds of the 'heretics' of Occitania in 1195? And that's just western European middle ages. Martin says his ideas are inspired by the events of the Wars of the Roses - and generalization of these 'events' are the only relationship his books have.

Let's put it simply, before entering the castle that is the medieval mind there is one toll that must be paid and of which GRRM has not paid one dinari : consider the complex facets of the Christian God in experience, beliefs and institutions as inseparable from daily life.

The western medieval mindset, which was agricultural, was concerned with increasing tillage and make it more productive. Where is the Martin's concern for the plow? The medieval mindset was concerned for the place in heaven. Where is Martin's consideration (at least even in allegorical form) of the place of Christianity in his world? Where is the transformation of landscape and society through the efforts and institutions of monks? Where is the engagement of ideas which so thoroughly permeated the medieval experience and transformed the lives of even most peasant of peasants?

This doesn't have much to do with George RR Martin, but an interesting book which deals with how Medieval people viewed the world is Johan Huizinga's The Autumn of the Middle Ages (also known as The Waning of the Middle Ages). One thing which isn't all that surprising is that most people in the later European middle ages really did view the world as being structured hierarchically. There was an order to existence leading from heaven to hell, with this world in between, and a part of that was the order of humanity. Some people were higher than you, some lower, by birth and by divine plan. (Obviously in practice things were a bit more fluid, but this was the the mindset.)

Far more alien to me was the fact that people viewed the world symbolically. By this I mean that they took things, not empirically as we would, but as symbols of the divine plan. To put it crudely, if something was shaped like a cross, it symbolized the cross; God made it that way to tell us something, and that was its reality, a more important reality than the simple physical facts of it. I can't pretend to be more specific than this, or to speak about the subtleties of this kind of thinking, because, well, it's alien to me. I'm not medieval. But it's interesting.