The rich visual history of Medieval and fantasy sigils in Game of Thrones
The enhanced edition of George R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords has been released on ibooks, and along with new annotations, interactive maps and family trees, it also explores the delightful and complex symbolism of the sigils Martin assigned to each one of his story’s houses. Martin didn’t just invent his sigils in a vacuum: he understands the ancient visual history of these images and how they have been used in the Medieval era and in more modern fantasy settings.
Martin has often talked about how his story is partly inspired by The Wars of the Roses, where the House of Lancaster (the winners who would produce the Tudor ruling line) used the red rose as its sigil in opposition to the white rose of the House of York. Martin knows the device of the sigil immediately applies a certain type of identity to characters, and since the images carry multiple and sometime nebulous meanings, they fit perfectly into the complex world of A Song of Ice and Fire.
Let’s look at the the Stark direwolf, for example: on the practical level, the direwolf sigil acts as a signpost to mark Stark territory, identify bannermen and serve as a standard on the battlefield. The direwolf is a solitary northern creature, and the Starks are quickly split up and isolated in Game of Thrones. Martin also uses the direwolf as an otherworldly messenger and agent, specifically in Summer’s relationship to Bran. Underlying all of this is the reader’s own, often subconscious, understanding of what the wolf represents to human beings: a mysterious, dangerous beast of the wilds that also impresses us with its power, resilience and loyalty to its own pack.
It’s easy to pinpoint some of Martin’s inspirations for his house sigils in ASOIAF, such as the flayed man for the sadistic Boltons and the twin towers connected by the bridge as the strategic home of the of the Freys, but you can also dig deeper into history and psychology to understand, as Martin does, how much these symbols mean to the people wear them.
A page of Westeros’ sigils from the enhanced edition of A Storm of Swords Courtesy of iBooks
And what of those magnificent dragons? In medieval heraldry the dragons rarely breathed fire: their images represented guarding of treasure, sacred places and, of course, the strongest of all the mythical beasts. The 16th century print below shows the Ismenian Dragon from Greek mythology, who guarded an Ares-dedicated spring near Thebes. Ismenian was killed by the Theban king and first Greek hero, Cadmus, but it wasn’t easy. The primal fury of the dragon in the old print is well represented in Martin’s sigil for house Targaryen.
A dragon devouring the companions of Cadmus, Hendrick Goltzius, after Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem, 1588 Courtesy of The Rijksmuseum
As Martin states, “Families are at the heart of the soul of A Song of Ice and Fire,” and it is fascinating to see how much care, study and multilayered meaning he has applied to the symbols of his houses.
H/T – Atlas Obscura