The Duck of Minerva

The Khal’s Speech

by Charli Carpenter

2 June 2011, 1707 EDT

Khal Drogo‘s earlier lines in Game of Thrones consisted mostly of occasional Dothraki grunts and a few mono-syllables of broken English. Then we arrive at the visceral war speech scene in the latest episode… either Geoffrey Rush has been secretly coaching the horse-lord,* or the directors intentionally downplayed Jason Momoa’s talents as an actor to build up to this:

*Actually, the coaching is probably done by David Peterson. For more on how you too can curse and threaten in Dothraki, click here or here or follow this. For more on invented languages generally, here is a great summer read.

Charli Carpenter is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of 'Innocent Women and Children': Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Ashgate, 2006), Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights
Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond (Columbia, 2010), and ‘Lost’ Causes: Agenda-Setting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security (Cornell, 2014). Her main research interests include national security ethics, the protection of civilians, the laws of war, global agenda-setting, gender and political violence, humanitarian affairs, the role of information technology in human security, and the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security.

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