House of the Dragon, the first of several Game of Thrones series in the works at HBO (and the only one we’re guaranteed to actually see on the air) will premiere sometime in 2022, and things are getting real. For instance, showrunner Ryan Condal recently talked with the show’s armorer Tim Lewis on an episode of his podcast The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of, which is about movie props. Their topic on this episode: swords, both in general and the specific ones we’re getting on House of the Dragon, which is set around 200 years before the original show.
If you listen to the full episode, you will quickly learn that Condal is a total sword dork, which I guess isn’t surprising seeing as how he has a whole podcast dedicated to props. It’s also encouraging to hear that he’s giving the props on House of the Dragon a lot of thought. “One of the many things I like about Tim’s work is that he really does think about the character that’s using the sword,” Condal said. “Y’know, this guy is a very high rich lord but the sword is kind of a symbol of his office but he doesn’t really fight, so he should have something kind of stately, like an heirloom. And this guy fights a lot but he’s not really fussed over the trappings of nobility, so he’s going to have something really nasty and functional.”
"There’s a specificity to the design of everything you’ve done…There is a practicality, a functionality to everything that you do. And that’s not to say that everything isn’t gorgeous, it is…We talked about this a bit when we started working together, about the difference between a really interestingly designed beautiful sword and a piece from a Renaissance Faire…It’s the valley between design and functionality and sometimes it goes a bit too far in moviemaking. I think the trick with what you do is to always walk that line so when the character is holding something it’s credible. Our world is obviously a fantasy world but the reason Thrones works so well is because it’s very grounded in reality and it’s supposed to feel real and dangerous and these are real people and this just happens to be the world they walk around in and it has dragons and magic and all these other things."
And props aren’t all Condal is concerned with. He’s very sensitive about making this world feel lived in and real in all kinds of ways. “Worldbuilding is so critically important, especially in a fantasy world,” he said. “ try to make it all feel like it wasn’t just lumped together and dropped on the plate…There’s hundreds of years of history going into this and everything evolved naturally through the people that built and designed and used these things.”
The swords on House of the Dragon are both functional and iconic
That said…man, does Condal love props. Apparently he spends more time in Lewis workshop than any other writer the armorer has ever worked with, and has already taken home at least one souvenir. “I can’t talk much about it, but I will say that it’s pointy and bladed.” As for the swords themselves, they actually had someone make versions of the blades out of Damascus steel, which is the real-life inspiration for Valyrian steel, before making the prop replicas the actors will actually use on camera. He’s knowledgable about the history of swords, their expense, and their reputation for being re-hilted…again, sword dork.
Condal wants the swords on the show to look consistent with a world that’s “a couple degrees away from…our history.” At the same time, he wants to create something iconic. “These are difficult things to achieve. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say I think we’re achieving them.” As for how close they’ll look to the blades on Game of Thrones, that’s something Condal is keeping in mind. “It’s a reasonable extrapolation — what we’re doing — of the world that came before it, or I should say, the world that will come in the future.”
What Valyrian steel blades are on House of the Dragon?
Condal didn’t give much in the way of specific teases, but he did say that the first season of House of the Dragon will include three Valyrian steel swords. “There are three Valyrian blades in this show…They do . They are named famous things.”
Now, there are a lot of important Valyrian steel blades in Westerosi history. Given that House of the Dragon is mostly about the Targaryen family, we can be pretty sure that two of these blades are Blackfyre and Dark Sister, the swords used by Aegon the Conqueror and his sister Visenya during their conquest of Westeros about 100 years before the main action. At the time of House of the Dragon, Blackfyre is used by Aegon II Targaryen, one of two main claimants to the Iron Throne. Dark Sister, meanwhile, is wielded by Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith), Aegon’s uncle. In the war for the Iron Throne, Daemon backs Aegon’s half-sister Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy), so there’s at least one Valyrian steel blade on either side.
But what about that third sword? It could be anything. Perhaps we’ll see Red Rain, a Valyrian blade kept by House Drumm. Maybe Lamentation, the ancestral sword of House Royce, will show up. Or maybe they’ll invent a new blade.
In any case, this gives us a lot to think about before House of the Dragon premieres next year on HBO. And we can expect to get a lot more info between now and then.
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h/t Los Siete Reinos