We’ve heard before about Game of Thrones actors getting to take home select props from the series. Sophie Turner took home one Sansa’s corsets while Harington snagged Jon Snow’s vambraces. But as George R.R. Martin revealed on a recent episode of the podcast The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of, he got something especially cool: one of the three dragon eggs presented to Daenerys Targaryen at the start of the series, which later hatched into her loyal, deadly children.
"David Benioff and Dan Weiss each took one and they gave me the third. It’s the black egg, so I guess it’s Drogon that I have. That’s pretty cool."
David Benioff and Dan Weiss are the showrunners behind Game of Thrones. Drogon’s egg is indeed the coolest of the three, so it’s nice that Martin — the inventor of this world — got to keep it.
George R.R. Martin describes his miniature collection
That’s not all Martin discussed on this podcast. The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of is about collecting, and it may not surprise many of you to discover that Martin, the author of A Song of Ice and Fire, has a very specific collecting passion: miniature knights, both from history and from fantasy fiction.
“I knew I was lost when I started going to the old toy soldier show in Chicago and buying them from dealers and buying custom ones and all that,” Martin remembered. At first he only had enough of the figures to fill “one little case,” but eventually had enough to pack “an entire room of hundreds if not thousands of these things.”
Martin likes how the knights are unique with their own heraldry. Anyone who’s read A Song of Ice and Fire knows who he likes to describe sigils and such. And he knows his stuff, too, telling podcast hosts Ryan Condal and David Mandel about the most highly sought after figures (those made by Richard Courtney, FYI). This is a man who knows his tiny knights.
Martin even got into miniature castles at one point. “I even commissioned some to be built.” But he backed off from that cause they take up too much space. “I don’t rid of things. I’m a pack rat. So I don’t purge my collection.” That rule also applies to his huge collection of books.
George R.R. Martin's tiny knight collection, from his Not a Blog: https://t.co/CCkzAam1ts pic.twitter.com/l8AErBZsi6
— Crown_For_A_King (@Crown_ForAKing) September 24, 2021
George R.R. Martin hates when comics do reboots
Martin also spent some time reminiscing about his time in comics fandom, recalling attending “the very first comic convention ever held in New York City, 1964. I was the first person to ever register for it. So my badge actually said ‘No. 1.'”
"I’m the first comic fan…There were like 30 of us in one room, one day in Greenwich Village."
While there, he talked to Steve Ditko, the co-creator of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. So his fandom goes way back, although he’s soured a bit on modern-day mainstream comics. “I hate the whole idea of a reboot,” he said. “It feels like all these issues that I read, they didn’t happen now, and now new things are happening, and the characters are different. I didn’t like that. I like the idea of building on what went before. How can I get emotionally involved in these things when I know anything that happens can be wiped out by the next writer to take over the strip or the book?”
He also hates the idea of sealing comics away in plastic to preserve their value, a process that I now know is called “slabbing.”
"A comic book is not a baseball card. There’s more to it than the cover, there are pages with a story, and if you encase it in plastic you can’t read the story anymore!"
The whole podcast is worth a listen! Naturally, he also talks a bit about the upcoming Game of Thrones prequel show:
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