Did ‘Game of Thrones’ Viserys Targaryen Know Something About Dragons That We Don’t?
We still don't like him, but we'll allow this.
Watching Paddy Considine’s Viserys I return to our screens within Daemon’s Harrenhal hauntings in House of the Dragon has been fun. But his namesake, the Viserys Targaryen from Game of Thrones, would totally awaken the dragon in all of us if we had to see him again, right?
You’re probably wondering why we’re thinking of this “days of future past” Targaryen when we have a Dance of the Dragons to worry about. We hate Viserys for his list of atrocities against his sister Daenerys, don’t we? We absolutely do. But he’s back in our conversations thanks to an interesting little Game of Thrones scene that someone has once again brought up, which might indicate that the man knew something about dragons that even we don’t know yet.
A fan on X (@Jinzolol) shared a clip of a scene from episode 4 of Game of Thrones season 1, “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things,” where Viserys is in the bath with Doreah, Dany’s handmaiden. She asks him about the wonders of the world he has seen, and he tells her about the dragon skulls in the Red Keep that he would visit with his father, the Mad King Aerys II. Viserys talks about how the skulls closer to the door were smaller, but as you kept going inwards, they became bigger. He then goes on to recount the names of some of the dragons that he would recite when he walked by them as a child.
“There was Ghiscar and Valryon, Vermithrax, Essovius, Archonei, Meraxes, Vhagar, and Balerion the Dread whose fire forged the Seven Kingdoms into one.”
– Viserys Targaryen (Game of Thrones)
He names some eight of them, ending with three dragons we’re quite familiar with—the big three of Targaryen history, Meraxes, Vhagar, and Balerion, on whose backs Aegon and his sisters conquered Westeros.
But who are those other five dragons that he mentions before Meraxes? Who is Ghiscar? Was he named after the region Ghiscar? We know that dragons were often named after Valyrian gods, so were Vermithrax and Vermithor named after the same God (or the dragon from the 1981 film Dragonslayer?!) So many questions!
The ASOIAF and Game of Thrones wikis list these dragons as “pre-Conquest dragons,” which means they lived before Aegon’s Conquest. And we might just know when.
In case you aren’t familiar with the Targaryen origin story in Westeros, they didn’t always live on this side of town. They were inhabitants of a kingdom called the Valyrian Freehold, and Valyria, an ancient city, was their capital. But they fled from their city all the way to Dragonstone on Westeros because a dream alerted them of the Doom of Valyria—which would destroy everything—12 years before it happened.
The Targaryens flew to Westeros with five dragons, including Balerion the Black Dread. But even the books don’t mention what these other four dragons, who died soon after, were called. The Targaryens would’ve surely remembered, though, and someone as obsessed as Aerys II was with bringing dragons back to Westeros would definitely have boasted about them.
Some fans in the replies to the post pointed out that maybe Aerys II was just making these dragon names up for a child. But even so, as one other X user pointed out, unlike Westeros, Essos might have had records about Valyria before the Doom, and that could include information such as the names of the dragons that lived in Valyria.
And who lived in Essos, or more precisely, Pentos, since he was a child? Viserys Targaryen! With no family except a baby Dany, Viserys would’ve been obsessed with any lore or family history that he could find that might help him revive the glory days of his House. And that’s where he might’ve stumbled upon the names of these dragons, whose stories he would’ve often told Daenerys and anyone who’d listen to him boast.
Or, you know, the original tweet was right, and he could just be making up names because you wouldn’t put it past Viserys to think that women like Doreah were gullible and easy to impress. Smooth move, I guess? *rolls eyes*
NGL, I’ve been quite fascinated by the dragon lore from A Song of Ice and Fire and the way of life in Valyria. The above scene was probably written before George R.R. Martin fleshed out Fire & Blood and the other books he has now written, but he might’ve definitely had notes that he could’ve shared with David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.
It would be cool to find out more about dragons, though perhaps from a more reliable source than Viserys. Maybe House of the Dragon will dig a little deeper in the future, seeing as how it has been dropping interesting lore about dragons and their nature with every episode!
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