Westeros

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s image reveal, the celebration of the 10th anniversary since the publication of The World of Ice and Fire continues, and Rudolf Hima did a fantastic job giving fans—and us—another dragon. This time, it’s the young dragon Tyraxes, the dragon of Joffrey Velaryon, who on House of the Dragon is much younger and much smaller at this point in time than he is in the books.

The Dragonpit is, once more, the scene of this image. We think Rudolf did a fantastic job of capturing the magical hue of the dragon’s fire, a feature that George has described but which the TV shows have not made use of so far.

The dragons are back, and so is Ertaç Altınöz, as we continue commemorating the 10th anniversary celebration since the The World of Ice and Fire. Before, he gave us Sunfyre, the golden dragon in his splendor. And now? Morning, the dragon of Rhaena Targaryen ... at least in Fire and Blood, because House of the Dragon seems to have removed the dragon from the show, alas.

And not Morning as fans have tended to see it, a young creature riding on her shoulder, but the dragon now large and strong and able to carry Rhaena on long journeys. When we wondered at a setting, we thought that it’d be appropriate to contrast the dragon—one of the very last living dragons—with the ruins of the Dragonpit, and Ertaç kindly obliged.

Four and final teasers for the art we’ve commissioned to celebrate the tenth anniversary of The World of Ice and Fire. Starting tomorrow, one will be released each weekday, with a final two images on October 28th to close off the celebration. The artists—all professionals—who’ve worked with us have created some fantastic artwork which we thinks fans will enjoy seeing. We certainly have!

Yesterday, we wrote a long post about the 10th anniversary since the publication of The World of Ice and Fire, and shared our first teases of twelve new pieces of fan art we commissioned by professional artists (most of whom are veterans of The Rise of the Dragon, or of the A Song of Ice and Fire calendars and official illustrated editions). This post will be shorter. Here’s four more mysterious glimpses at the art we’ll begin to release on a daily basis from the 14th through to the October 28th anniversary date!

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of The World of Ice and Fire. When it hit shelves in the US, UK, and elsewhere, it debuted on multiple bestseller lists. It had been 8 long years in the making—more, if you count when George first mentioned the possibility to me over dinner in 2004—and, on arrival, launched thousands of new conversations in the fandom, and has contributed to a dizzying amount of podcasts, vlogs, cosplay and other fan works.

It also, pretty directly, gave birth to Fire and Blood, as something like 80% of the material in that book was originally written by George for The World of Ice and Fire. And so there is a direct line, from George asking me if he thought Linda and I would like to help him on a world book, to House of the Dragon today. And, for that matter, to a number of the HBO projects that are or have been under development: the Ten Thousand ships, the Nine Voyages of Corlys Velaryon, an animated show about the Golden Empire of Yi Ti, Aegon’s Conquest, and who knows what else that hasn’t yet been revealed. Even a play, The Iron Throne (formerly known as Harrenhal), is likely to pull from the Year of the False Spring material George created for the book which gave fans never-before-revealed insights into how and why Lord Whent’s great tourney came to be. They all sprang from George’s pen for the book, and our role in many of these pieces was to help organize and excerpt and compress it down to fit within the bounds of a book that was originally contracted to be 50,000 words long (and ultimately weighed it at more than 180,000.)

Linda and I have been, and will always be, grateful for the opportunity to work with George in providing an expansion of the knowledge fans had about the world he’d created, and all the opportunities it’s given us. We’ve been invited to hold talks in more libraries across Sweden than we can count, have visited wonderful countries like Spain, Northern Ireland and Ireland, the Netherlands, and more to make appearances or sign books or take part in convention programming, attended an art exhibition in Berlin dedicated to works inspired by the book, we filmed numerous segments for Sky’s Thronecast in the UK, we’ve attended premieres, and much, much more. Along the way we’ve made many new acquaintances and friends, and that’s made this all the more gratifying to us.

It has been quite a ride, one we could never have imagined 25 years ago when we were just fans who wanted to run a little game based on these books we loved, and who started a small website to collect information about the books to share with fans the world over.

(This month also, not coincidentally, marks our 10th wedding anniversary—we decided it was an auspicious time to finally tie the knot, after spending 15 years together in Sweden.)

So, thankful to all the fans who have enjoyed the book, who have enjoyed all the art it contains and has inspired, Linda and I took it upon ourselves—entirely on our own initiative; this is not some secret marketing ploy or an attempt to hint at anything other than our love of George’s world and the fandom that shares that love!— to approach a number of professional artists to add just a few more illustrations for fans to enjoy. These works range from things that could well have been included in the original The World of Ice and Fire, or in The Rise of the Dragon, and are guided mostly by things we wanted to see done by these artists in particular.

Today, and over the weekend, we’re going to tease the twelve pieces of art we commissioned, posting them at about 7PM Swedish time each day… and over the following weekdays, leading up to the precise anniversary of October 28th, we’ll be releasing a new piece of art at 7PM our time as well. To get us started, you’ll see the first four teasers below. These teasers are randomly selected, and do not reflect the order we’ve planned for the final pieces.

Yesterday, we said that we wanted to make sure we could get the name of all the contributing artists out there, and the team over at Ten Speed Press put that together quickly for us. In total, there are 38 artists who’ve contributed to The Rise of the Dragon, and below you’ll find the full list as well as links to their websites or online portfolios. We’re very proud to have worked closely with all the artists on this one, providing notes, references, etc., and they’ve delivered art that we think will please fans.

The Rise of the Dragon hits shelves in October 2022!

Balerion, the Black Dread, from the cover of The Rise of the Dragon. By Ertaç Altınöz, for Random House