Apr 17, 2015 03:02 PM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

20 Northern Illinois University (NIU) students are currently drawing parallels between our own world and its history with that of Westeros.

According to the DeKalb Daily Chronicle, "Game of Thrones, Television and Medieval History" is an NIU Honors Program course currently winding down in the spring semester. One of the course's two instructors, Valerie Garver, said it is mostly made up of seniors and juniors, with the exception of one freshman.

The course came to fruition when an NIU post-baccalaureate art history study named Jennifer Wegmann-Gabb introduced Garver to Jeff Chown, a professor who had taught a class on AMC's acclaimed drama series "Mad Men."

"It's really nice as a student you can give a suggestion or put two people together and watch them work their magic," Wegmann-Gabb told the Chronicle. "It makes an impact on your learning experience. For me personally, I'm going into grad school to teach at the college level. Seeing how a class is created from idea to completion gives me ideas for when I'm able to create my own classes and coursework."

In a news release earlier this month, NIU described the course as one that analyzes television adaptations of literature, the story's social impact, literary and filmmaking elements, as well as history - both real and imagined.

The fifth season of "Game of Thrones" premiered on HBO this past Sunday with a viewership of eight million people, the largest ever for the show's first episode of a season. Not even counting this past episode, "Game of Thrones" also became HBO's most watched program ever, surpassing "The Sopranos."

The show is based on the novel series "A Song of Ice and Fire" that George R.R. Martin debuted in 1996. The books have now sold nearly 60 million copies and have been translated into 45 languages.

"'Game of Thrones' doesn't claim to be an accurate representation of history," Garver said in the release. "But it ends up conveying some aspects of the Middle Ages, such as family relationships, far better than do other popular sources that purport to be historically accurate. Disability is another example. The show does a good job of showing that if a person in the Middle Ages had a disability, they often still had a function in society, some type of work role. Some historians theorize disabilities would have been more common during that time because injuries and disease were so difficult to treat."

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