A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin has called out HBO’s Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon for messing up the House Targaryen sigil.
Martin outlined his philosophy behind the dragons present in Game of Thrones in a blog post, saying they’re designed to be realistic and thus have two legs and “not four, never four,” just like bats and birds and winged dinosaurs and every other real animal. “No animal that has ever lived on Earth has six limbs,” Martin said.
He therefore designed the Targaryen sigil as a dragon with two legs and two wings (and admittedly three heads, but this was a “purely symbolic” reflection of Aegon the Conqueror and his two sisters).
“For what it’s worth, the shows got it half right,” Martin said. 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 added.
The popularity of the Game of Thrones show even created some new covers for the books that placed the wrong Targaryen sigil directly on Martin’s work, and it’s seeped its way into House of the Dragon too.
“A couple years on, House of the Dragon decided the heraldry should be consistent with Game of Thrones, but they went with the bad sigil rather than the good one,” he said. “That sound you heard was me screaming, ‘no, no, no.’ Those damned extra legs have even wormed their way onto the covers of my books, over my strenuous objections.”
Martin’s outcries might stop the sigil being used in the next Game of Thrones spin-off, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. This series, expected late 2025, follows Ser Duncan the Tall and Aegon V Targaryen around 100 years before Game of Thrones takes place.
The author will perhaps spend a few words hammering home the two-legged design in his next novel too, The Winds of Winter which is also set to explain the relationship between dragons and humans.
Martin still hasn’t revealed when fans will get to discover those secrets, as The Winds of Winter is so far 10 years late and seemingly making slow progress. He said in November 2023 that he’d written 1,100 pages of the highly anticipated book, the same number he’d written a year earlier.
No writer is blessed with producing a perfect first draft, of course, and Martin’s “writing” of The Winds of Winter will also encompass re-reading, re-writing, editing, planning, and so on, so there’s still plenty of work to be done without actually increasing the page number total.
Martin said in October 2022 the book was around three quarters of the way done, noting he’s completely finished some characters’ stories but still has others to weave throughout them. The overall progress of The Winds of Winter has become somewhat of an ongoing gag within the fiction community though, with even Martin himself getting in on the joke.
An estimated release window for The Winds of Winter was first given in 2011 when the previous book, A Dance With Dragons, was released, as Martin said it would take three years to finish at a good pace. That set expectations for a 2014 release date, but year after year, and delay after delay, Martin still isn’t ready to release the penultimate A Song of Ice and Fire entry.
Fans can at least enjoy the current books (which are about to get a refreshed cover design) in the meantime, alongside House of the Dragon despite its slight inaccuracy. Regardless, Martin said the latest episode features the best dragon battle in entertainment history.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
