Confirmed: House of the Dragon dagger is same one from Game of Thrones

The horns are sounding and the banners are being called. We’re just over a month out from the premiere of House of the Dragon, which means we’re learning more about the highly-anticipated Game of Thrones prequel showy. Will the show begin with the Great Council of 101 AC? How many dragons will we see flying the skies of Westeros? Winter is coming again, people.

Just like week, Entertainment Weekly did a sizable feature on House of the Dragon. Now, they’ve released some info about an intriguing scene we’ve glimpsed in the trailer: where Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) walks through what looks like the Iron Throne room wielding a dagger.

But it’s not just any dagger; it looks like the “catspaw dagger” from Game of Thrones, Valyrian steel dagger that an assassin used to try to kill Bran Stark in season 1, and which Arya later used to shank the Night King in season 8.

The dagger in House of the Dragon is the same one Arya used to kill the Night King in Game of Thrones

According to showrunner Ryan Condal, this is the very same dagger that cropped up during Game of Thrones. The production decided to use the iconic weapon to provide a visual connection to Game of Thrones, since “there’s a ton of shared history here.”

“There’s gonna be a lot of linkage in terms of places you go and buildings you see,” Condal explained. “That’s 200 years before the original show. So there’s gonna be a ton of shared imagery.”

"It’s a line to walk in terms of things that you bring back from the original show and pass in a different way. I think that it’s important to have connective tissue there to show people that it is the same world and history reflects on objects and cast of people and sigils as we move on down through time without it becoming too self-referential."

Story-wise, this is the same dagger, although the prop itself is new. The Game of Thrones catspaw dagger prop was actually shipped to the House of the Dragon production team, but showrunners Condal and co-showrunner Miguel Sapochnik felt that it didn’t quite fit the aesthetic for the new show. A new dagger was designed from the ground up to look like the original, which is kind of fitting; Valyrian steel weapons last through the centuries and were sometimes reset with different hilts and adornments.

“It’s a technology that doesn’t exist anymore. Their blades are not made anew,” Condal said. “So all the Valyrian steel is a fixed number of assets in the world. Even in a time when Targaryens are in power, they themselves as Targaryens are not able to make Valyrian steel. So they’re going to take care of it. So it’s believable that something that did exist in the original show would’ve existed here, perhaps in a slightly different packaging.”

Whatever tweaks were made to the design of the catspaw dagger, these kinds of visual cues are going to be a nice treat for the Game of Thrones super-fans. Who knows what other nods to the original series await? We’ll find out when House of the Dragon premieres on HBO and HBO Max on August 21.

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