In the Beginning...

I -- and, I'm certain, many contemporary writers with even a passing familiarity in the fantasy genre -- grew up on The Lord of the Rings. It has been foundational to my conceptualization of fantasy and, perhaps more importantly, worldbuilding. The depth and detail Tolkien poured into Middle-Earth is frankly astounding, and only becomes more so the more you look into it and learn. Every ruin has a name and, somewhere in the extensive lore of the world, a people it was built by, when it was built, when it was destroyed, and who destroyed it. But it goes so much deeper. Tolkien didn't just write who built each building, he wrote down who and how the very world was built. The gods of his setting -- the Valar -- are not abstracts or debatable, they are very real, even if they are largely absent the main trilogy.

Now contrast with how, say, Martin writes A Song of Ice and Fire, a series that, while not as foundational to my understanding of worldbuilding, has been perhaps nearly as formative. Even as he's expanded upon the mythos of Westeros and Essos, he writes entirely from an in-universe perspective, all of his "historical" books penned as though written by a maester during the events of his primary novels, making much of his world shrouded by mystery and superstition. Myths are our foundation for the earliest accounts of Westeros, and no attempt is even vaguely made to explain how the world began or the magic that some characters display. Each religion -- of which there are several -- has its own version of events, and none are ever presented as being more valid than the others. And yet questions of religion and the source of magic weigh more heavily on the characters scrambling for the Iron Throne than they do on those trying to destroy the Ring. 

I find it an interesting juxtaposition, and it raises some interesting questions about how worldbuilding and story intersect. Chiefly, though, I find it interesting how it informs how each author deals with the question of morality. 

Westeros is a morally gray world. The ends tend to justify the means and the few instances of any kind of divine intervention we see don't all stem out of the same religion. Each character we are introduced to has complex motivations for what they want and how they go about pursuing it, and none of them are presented as objectively wrong in the text. Martin uses the ambiguity of the spiritual aspect of his setting to highlight the subjective morality of his characters. Terms like "good" and "evil" do not find much purchase, and indeed a strict code of morality is more a chain that weighs one down than a liberating thing. Martin uses his worldbuilding to make an argument for a complex narrative in which winners and losers, good and evil, and the worthiness of any given cause is determined by the reader and their relationship to the text.

 

On the other hand, in Middle-Earth there is a clear and sharp distinction between "good" and "evil," the titular antagonist -- the Lord of the Rings, the Dark Lord Sauron -- serving as a literal embodiment of the latter. Tolkien then explores how that good/evil, white/black dynamic plays out among characters who are largely painted in gray; every character is tempted and twisted by the overwhelming power of the One Ring to the point where no amount of inherent goodness can save the day -- its corrupting influence proves to be its own destruction. Well, that, and two small acts of kindness. Tolkien, then, wanted to communicate that there is good and evil, that good is best empowered by small kindnesses, and that the power evil seeks to gather ultimately will destroy itself. He leaves little room for interpretation or nuance, but it moral meshes well with the setting; attempting to cast doubt on the lines between evil and good is counter-intuitive when the supernatural is very real and clearly follows along those lines.

More could be said about how the way they built the foundations of their respective worlds relates to how they built their stories and settings, and perhaps I will expand upon them, but today I will leave it at this: the solidity of the spiritual can determine the solidity of moral alignments. When there are plainly "good" and "evil" deities, and they are upheld as absolute and incorruptible, there can be very little question about the good or evil of any given action, and less so the more heavily involved in the narrative the deities and/or their representatives are. On the other hand, when there is no clear spiritual aspect to the world or it is heavily debated, and the foundations of the setting are the subject of superstition and myth, there is much more room to debate motivation. There is nothing inherently wrong with either, it all depends on the kind of story you wish to tell.