The Lord of the Rings Twist George R.R. Martin Borrowed Must Return in The Winds of Winter

In a resurfaced interview, George R.R. Martin credits J.R.R. Tolkien’s understated magic in The Lord of the Rings for shaping the slow-burn sorcery woven through A Song of Ice and Fire.
George R.R. Martin has always said he likes his magic like a smoke machine: you feel it in the air, but you rarely see it blasting in your face. That worked beautifully in the early books. Now that his story has ballooned to continental scale with ancient ice demons and a pirate dabbling in nightmare rituals, that old rule is getting stress-tested.
Martin’s north star: Tolkien-grade restraint
Martin fell for J.R.R. Tolkien as a teenager and zeroed in on one specific thing: Middle-earth feels thick with wonder, but there’s not a lot of onstage spellcasting. In an old interview archived on YouTube (it’s the one Wikipedia points to), he said he took that approach to heart and built A Song of Ice and Fire to keep magic present but tightly leashed.
He’s repeated the philosophy over the years: magic should be mysterious, rare, and never run like a train schedule. He’s flat-out rejected installing a formal "magic system" in Westeros because, to him, magic isn’t a tidy part of the natural world you can chart like chemistry. It’s the fog around the edges.
"Fantasy needs magic in it, but I try to control the magic very strictly. You can have too much magic in fantasy very easily, and then it overwhelms everything and you lose all sense of realism."
Early on, you can feel that restraint. Dragons exist but don’t solve every problem. Melisandre plays with fire and prophecy, but nothing ever turns into a fireworks show with rules you can look up on a wiki. It’s vibes over blueprints.
Where the seams start to pull
As the plot sprawled, that low-key philosophy became harder to maintain. The Others (the books’ White Walkers) are, by definition, magical beings. In the HBO series they eventually moved to center stage; in the novels, they’ve mostly been an ominous presence, more symbol than villain. But with The Winds of Winter looming, Martin can’t keep them in the fog forever. He’s going to have to explain more about what they are and what they can do, which naturally drags magic out of the wings and under the spotlight.
And then there’s Euron Greyjoy. Preview chapters suggest he’s dabbling in forbidden, eldritch nonsense that feels a lot less like grounded medieval politicking and a lot more like the universe knocking on the door. That doesn’t exactly scream "strict realism."
Put bluntly: the bigger the canvas, the harder it is to keep the paint from spreading. Martin has said he’ll keep the magic on a short leash, and I believe him, but the story he’s telling now almost requires him to show more of the leash than he used to. You can see why wrangling that balance might be one of the many things slowing the next book down.
So what should we expect in The Winds of Winter?
Based on everything he’s said (and how he’s written so far), expect the magic to stay enigmatic and unsystematized. But we’re also at the point where the Others can’t just be rumors and whispers anymore, which means more explicit magic is coming whether he loves it or not. The trick will be keeping it eerie and unpredictable rather than turning it into math. If anyone can thread that needle, it’s the guy who made shadow babies feel like political commentary.
The book timeline, for quick reference
- A Game of Thrones — 1996
- A Clash of Kings — 1998
- A Storm of Swords — 2000
- A Feast for Crows — 2005
- A Dance with Dragons — 2011
- The Winds of Winter — TBA
- A Dream of Spring — TBA
Where do you land: high magic that swings for the fences, or low magic that lurks and haunts? Tell me what actually keeps you turning the pages.