Westeros

HBO Max has given fans a pleasant surprise with a first look at House of the Dragon, in the form of a Matt Smith-narrated teaser showing a number of scenes and characters from the show, as well as confirming several significant new cast members. See the video below, and the press release about new cast following that.

Blackfyre looks great, we have to say. So, too, does Daemon Targaryen’s tournament armor with the dragon wings on the helm (an idea we used on our game, Blood of Dragons, for Aemon the Dragonknight, grandson of Prince Daemon). And, perhaps the biggest surprise at all, a revised vision of the Iron Throne and its dais to try and bring it more in line with George R.R. Martin’s actual vision of as a monstrous, twisted construction. There’s even a tourney scene featuring Criston Cole (distinguishable by his coat of arms, ten black pellets on red, on his shield) and a knight of House Tarly (possibly the future Lord Alan Tarly, who sides with the blacks?), though the array of banners there are rather curious: Lannister and what looks like Lefford, perhaps Corbray… but also Bolton, Stark, and what might be a take on Manderly (the latter at a southron tourney seems okay to us… but the Boltons and Starks would be incredibly unlikely to appear at a tourney in what appears to be the Reach.)

We plan to screen cap and go in more detail at some of the images and scenes later this evening, for those curious.

The press release follows:

Although we’re not generally planning to track details of filming of HBO’s House of the Dragon, a recent report from Cornwall Live caught our attention for a couple of reasons. One, we did not know that the famous Mont-Saint-Michel has a Cornish cousin in St. Michael’s Mount (apparently in close vicinity to Penzance harbor, of The Pirates of Penzance fame!) Secondly, and more to the point, one of the photos revealed what appears to be the show’s version of the heraldic arms of House Velaryon… and they don’t fit what George R. R. Martin confirmed to us over 20 years ago.

This mail, from our first year of correspondence with GRRM, refers to the fact that he had been visiting Westeros.org to look at the heraldry we had been producing from the books and then from his own notes. Though my original mail to him is lost, from context I think I must have remarked that we took a guess that he meant an actual seahorse and not the mythical or sea-horse (confusingly, both are also known as hippocampus).