Khal Drogo the Barbarian

Mongol General: Conan, what is best in life?
Conan: Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentations of their women.

Conan the Barbarian (1982)

I will take my khalasar west to where the world ends, and ride the wooden horses across the black salt water as no khal has done before. I will kill the men in the iron suits and tear down their stone houses. I will rape their women, take their children as slaves, and bring their broken gods back to Vaes Dothrak to bow down beneath the Mother of Mountains. This I vow, I, Drogo son of Bharbo.

A Game of Thrones (pg 594)

Khal Drogo is a power fantasy wrapped up in a million “barbarian” clichés. I will never stop being disappointed that he doesn’t get to speak more or have more of a personality in A Game of Thrones before he dies in order to provoke Dany’s character growth, because like most other characters who play the “game,” he’s a complicated and morally ambiguous figure. Also, he’s a badass.

His physical appearance, which is most of what we get to know about him, mixes images of strength and virility with images of strangeness and foreignness. When Dany first meets him, he describes him as a head taller than the tallest men around him. He spends the entire show bare-chested to show off his muscles. What’s interesting is how Dany’s perception of his physical size shifts: at first, she is almost more afraid of Drogo than of Viserys (which is impressive), but over time her reaction shifts from “that’s scary” to “that’s sexy.” There’s an uncomfortable way in which his physical strength and his capacity for violence may be tied to his race, like the sultan in The King of Tars is implicitly compared to a huge black hound attacking the princess, but although Martin shows us Dany’s fear, he spends more time showing Khal Drogo as a more heroic figure.

The braid that Khal Drogo wears is perhaps the most perfect mix of strength and foreignness he has. The symbolism of the braid recalls a variety of different cultures, but isn’t particularly Western. During the rule of the Qing dynasty in China, all men were required to wear their hair in a long queue, or braided tail. The penalty for refusing was death, and it is sometimes said that if a man emigrated away from China, he could not return if he had cut his queue off. American Indian children who were forced to go to government-run boarding schools to be “acculturated” had their long hair forcibly cut. Certain religious traditions, including Sikh traditions, require their adherents to grow their hair naturally and not cut it. A man’s hair is also important to his masculinity in a variety of cultures, just as a woman’s hair is important to her femininity. Samson, a character in the Old Testament, famously lost his divine power when his hair was cut. More bizarrely, the Dothraki custom of taking another khal’s bells when you defeat him recalls the giant Arthur fought in HKB who wore a “fur clock [made] from the beards of the kings whom he had slain” (240).

Previously in this class, we’ve discussed the idea of giants as over-sexed, representing some sort of monstrous, uncontrollable sexuality. Unfortunately, Khal Drogo seems to resemble a giant in this respect, too. All the Dothraki men, in fact, are characterized by excessive sexuality. In some ways, Martin portrays this as an exaggerated stereotype: it’s not actually true, from what we see, that they sleep with their horses, and men in Westeros rape captured women as much as Dothraki men do. But the Dothraki are constantly having sex in public, including during Dany’s wedding; Khal Drogo has sex with Dany pretty much every time they’re in the same space; and a lot of their rhetoric blends violence together with sex, as when Dany’s child is described as the “stallion who mounts the world.” The portrayal of all this public sex, both in the book and the show, I argue, always has a tinge of the exotic and the barbaric. At worst, it’s used to portray the Dothraki as a dangerous and animalistic people, driven by their worst instincts and devoid of civilization or restraint. At best, it’s an excuse for Martin and the show writers to titillate the reader/viewer with more women’s breasts and more sex scenes. The fact that these people are darker-skinned apparently means you don’t even have to bother with giving some context for the sex or showing the woman’s face. This goes back to the idea of Drogo as a power fantasy. Partly, he's a fantasy just in that he gets to have a ton of sex. In addition, his strength and manliness are inherently intertwined with virility--there's some sort of evolutionarily-programmed feeling of, "this guy can kill people really well, if we had kids he'd be able to protect our kids really well."