Highlights
- House of the Dragon succeeds in carving out its own identity from Game of Thrones, adapting from Fire and Blood.
- George R.R. Martin expresses discontent over Targaryen sigils in adaptations, insisting on anatomically correct dragons.
- Martin’s attention to detail, even on dragon anatomy, showcases his talents as a fantasy writer and sets him apart.
House of the Dragon has arguably made it out of the massive shadow cast by Game of Thrones, but one prominent detail from the original show that managed to stick around has now come under fire from the original creator for a humorous reason.
House of the Dragon has been a massive success, managing to live up to the hype of its predecessor series Game of Thrones, which itself is arguably the most successful show of its kind to date. While both books are adaptations of George R.R. Martin’s written works, with House of the Dragon adapting its story from the 2018 work Fire and Blood, the newer show has managed to find its own identity in many ways. Notably, House of the Dragon has a fascinating excuse to change details from the source material, giving the show a distinct role in the universe of Ice and Fire.
While House of the Dragon got the nod from Martin just like Game of Thrones did, neither adaptation is perfect and Maartin recently pointed out another gripe he has with both shows. Sharing his discontent with fans, Martin would take to his Not A Blog blog to complain about the sigils of House Targaryen as they’re seen on the widely successful existing adaptations of his work. Revealing that he designed the dragons in his works with great care and envisioned them with an anatomically sensible set of two legs and two wings, Martin expressed his distaste for the four-legged version of the Targaryen emblem seen in the shows, despite the creatures being real and available for scrutiny. “Dragons DO exist in the world of Westeros…” Martin insists. “So my own heralds did not have that excuse. Ergo, in my books, the Targaryen sigil has two legs, as it should. Why would any Westerosi ever put four legs on a dragon, when they could look at the real thing and [count] their limbs?”
I designed my dragons with a lot of care. They fly and breathe fire, yes, those traits seemed essential to me. They have two legs (not four, never four) and two wings. LARGE wings. A lot of fantasy dragons have these itty-bitty wings that would never get such a creature off the ground. And only two legs; the wings are the forelegs. Four-legged dragons exist only in heraldry. No animal that has ever lived on Earth has six limbs. Birds have two legs and two wings, bats the same, ditto pteranodons and other flying dinosaurs, etc.
Martin also pointed out that this was not he way the shows started out, revealing that there was a change for the worse at some point. “FWIW, the shows got it half right (both of them). GAME OF THRONES gave us the correct two-legged sigils for the first four seasons and most of the fifth, but when Dany’s fleet hove into view, all the sails showed four-legged dragons. Someone got sloppy, I guess. Or someone opened a book on heraldry and read just enough of it to muck it all up. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” He also briefly bemoaned the choice by the House of the Dragon showrunners and others to pick the six-limbed version when striving for consistency with the original show, noting that even some print covers of his written work feature this erroneous version. This is just the latest in a series of insightful posts on the blog, where he recently commented on the Elden ring adaptation rumors circling around.
For many fans, this would be a perplexing complaint on the face of it, but it might also stump the sort of fantasy enjoyers that might otherwise share Martin’s disapproval. Dragons often have four legs and a set of wings in fantasy, with two-legged dragons being referred to as wyverns, a distinction Martin makes in a different way in his work. In reality, neither dragons nor wyverns exist, and the distinctions between them were arbitrarily decided upon via heraldry. In Martin’s universe, Wyverns indeed exist alongside dragons, but are smaller and more aggressive than dragons and native to parts of the map much further south than Westeros. This sort of varied storytelling is par for the course with someone as gifted as Martin, a trait that was reflected in Elden Ring and the stellar reviews that followed its release and got back to the author.
While fans of the shows probably won’t mind this inaccuracy, this sort of detail is why Martin has been so successful as a fantasy writer, and deservedly so. Fans of his written work will certainly appreciate that he still has that eye for detail when his next project finally reaches the shelves. Martin says he’s making ‘steady progress’ on The Winds of Winter, so hopefully that happy day comes soon rather than later.
House of the Dragon is available to stream on Max, and on linear TV on HBO.
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