This chapter examines Martin’s iteration of the stock fantasy trope of a medievalist setting. His suspicion of those who use the trope without rhetorical intent has given rise to a concerted and at times confrontational effort to emphasise his own polemic ends. Firmly rejecting the romantic medievalist school identified by medievalist scholars, Martin employs a contrapuntal gothic medievalism, interrogating the Middle Ages and their fitness as a source of folkloric glamour or proverbs about moral purity or security. This has the side effect of greatly complicating arguments that the subplots of the novel set outside his medievalist regime are orientalist or colonialist, since the occident to which these plot threads may be compared is itself presented as radically different, and in many ways inferior, to the world of the reader. Martin does not wholly reject notions of medieval romanticism, but he certainly encourages readers to rethink the trope.