The Rise of the Dragon artist talks designing Harrenhal

Harrenhal is a mysterious place, even to the artists who helped bring it to life on TV. The Rise of the Dragon renders it in more detail than ever before.

Harrenhal is one of the most mysterious, memorable castles in Westeros. It’s huge, to start, enormous by an order of magnitude beyond pretty much anything else on the continent. But it’s also a ruin, ever since Aegon the Conqueror blasted it with dragonfire when he was invading the Seven Kingdoms with his sisters. Many have held Harrenhal since, and most meet with ill ends. Just ask the Strongs.

Sven Sauer worked in the visual effects department on Game of Thrones and had a hand in designing what Harrenhal would look like for TV. (He also created some artwork for the beautiful Unseen Westeros exhibit.) But as he told Los Siete Reinos, he didn’t get to spend as much time working on the place as he’d like. “Basically, we made five illustrations to describe the location,” he said. “I had wanted to finish developing that castle for a long time. And then came the pandemic. And like many people, our jobs went down the drain as movie sets closed all over the world.”

But Sauer would get the chance to further develop the look of Harrenhal after contacting Elio Garcia, co-author of The World of Ice and Fire and one of the proprietors of Westeros.org. “We dissected the texts of the books and gathered all the information we could about Harrenhal,” Sauer recalled. “Elio found old letters in which George wrote more details about the castle that had not appeared in the books.”

"In fact, there is no exhaustive description of the castle. It is always in fragments, which we put together like a puzzle piece by piece. In a very detailed work, the first sketch of the castle, to scale with all its towers and salts, was created. We worked for almost six months on that model."

The work paid off. You can now see some of Sauer’s illustrations of Harrenhal in the new book The Rise of the Dragon, which is a sort of repurposed version of George R.R. Martin’s Targaryen history book Fire & Blood, complete with lots of new artwork. You can check out some of it over on LSR, in addition to sketches and models Sauer made of the castle to aid him in his work.

It’s true that we don’t spend a ton of time at Harrenhal in Game of Thrones. We’ve stopped by in House of the Dragon, and there’s a lot of story to go. Perhaps the prequel show can really give the castle the exposure it deserves.

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels