A history book turned into television
House of the Dragon is a prequel to Game of Thrones, set almost two hundred years earlier, when the TARGARYEN family ruled WESTEROS from the Iron THRONE with a small air force of dragons. It is based on Fire & Blood, a book George R. R. Martin published in 2018 that is written like a history textbook, as if by a scholar inside the story, who sometimes admits that his sources disagree. The series began on American cable television in August 2022, and around ten million people in America watched the first episode on its first night, the biggest start for a new series in that channel's history.
Like the original, it is violent and made for adults, so this grid sticks to names, places and dragons. Our Game of Thrones page covers the show that came first.
Greens and Blacks
The story is a civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons. King VISERYS names his daughter, RHAENYRA, as his HEIR, but after he remarries, his new queen, ALICENT, has a son, AEGON, and her father, OTTO HIGHTOWER, the king's chief adviser, pushes for the boy instead. The kingdom splits between Rhaenyra's supporters, the BLACKS, and Aegon's, the GREENS. In the book, the names come from a tournament at which Alicent wore green and Rhaenyra wore the Targaryen red and black.
Rhaenyra's claim has an echo in her own family. Princess RHAENYS was passed over for the throne years earlier because she was a woman, and is remembered as the Queen Who Never Was. She is married to Lord CORLYS VELARYON, the richest man in the REALM, whose fleet makes him a powerful ally. The first series covers about twenty years, so halfway through, Milly Alcock and Emily Carey handed the parts of the young Rhaenyra and Alicent to Emma D'Arcy and Olivia Cooke.
A real war behind the invented one
Martin based the Dance on a real civil war in twelfth-century England, known as the Anarchy. King Henry the First's only legitimate son drowned in a shipwreck in 1120, so Henry made his barons swear to accept his daughter, Matilda, as their next ruler. When he died in 1135, many of them backed her cousin Stephen instead, and the two sides fought on and off for nearly twenty years. It ended in a compromise: Stephen kept the crown for life, and Matilda's son became King Henry the Second.
Riding a dragon without leaving the ground
In Game of Thrones the dragons hatched as babies and grew slowly over several series. The prequel has many from the start, each designed with its own shape, colour and personality. VHAGAR is the oldest and largest dragon still alive, CARAXES, nicknamed the Blood Wyrm, belongs to Rhaenyra's uncle DAEMON, and SYRAX, a golden-yellow dragon, is Rhaenyra's own. For flying scenes the actors sat on a motorised saddle rig that tipped and rolled along flight paths planned in advance on computer, and the dragon was painted in around them afterwards.
The Targaryens came from VALYRIA, an ancient empire destroyed in a single catastrophe called the Doom, and they were the only family to bring their dragons out of it. A second series followed in 2024, and the story is planned to end after four. Our mythical creatures page covers the dragons of real legends.