George R.R. Martin says we'll learn more about the dragonrider bond in The Winds of Winter, Fire & Blood 2

George R.R. Martin has been on a blogging spree of late. Over the past few days, the author of A Song of Ice and Fire has praised the actors on HBO's Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon, discussed travel plans including this summer's Worldcon in Glasgow, discussed the right and wrong way to depict the Targaryen dragon sigil, and more. There's been a lot to parse, which has been nice for fans of Martin's books who love to dissect everything he says about his work.

His latest blog post was centered around that Targaryen sigil business (dragons have two legs in Westeros, "not four, never four"), but also lots of other intriguing details. Martin discusses at length how he created his dragons. "In A SONG OF ICE & FIRE, I set out to blend the wonder of epic fantasy with the grittiness of the best historical fiction. There is magic in my world, yes… but much less of it than one gets in most fantasy," he wrote. "I would have dragons, yes… in part because of my dear friend, the late Phyllis Eisenstein, a marvelous fantasist and science fiction writer in her own right, now sadly missed…  but I wanted my dragons to be as real and believable as such a creature could ever be."

Martin goes into a lot of depth; if you enjoy delving into the etymology of how he designed his dragons, this blog post is very much worth a read. But something in particular that caught me eye is when he began talking about the future...and some new things about his dragons and their dragonriders we'd learn in his long-awaited book The Winds of Winter.

George R.R. Martin's future books will explore the bond between dragon and dragonrider

After discussing a few different movie dragons, including shading the talking dragon played by Sean Connery in Dragonheart, Martin dropped the hint we're interested in: "My dragons do not talk. They are relatively intelligent, but they are still beasts," he wrote.

"They bond with men... some men… and the why and how of that, and how it came to be, will eventually be revealed in more detail in THE WINDS OF WINTER and A DREAM OF SPRING and some in BLOOD & FIRE.  (Septon Barth got much of it right).   Like wolves and bears and lions, dragons can be trained, but never entirely tamed. They will always be dangerous. Some are wilder and more wilful than others.  They are individuals, they have personalities… and they often reflect the personalities of their riders, thanks to bond they share are. They do not care a whit about gold or gems, no more than a tiger would. Unless maybe their rider was obsessed with the shiny stuff, and even then…"

George R.R. Martin

Yes, I know. At this point we've all been waiting for The Winds of Winter for around 13 years, so no one is really holding their breath for its release. In a post earlier this week, Martin clarified that when the book is done, there will be a big announcement about it. So until that happens, we continue to treat words as wind.

But, it is still pretty cool to think about what's been revealed about the dragonrider bond so far in A Song of Ice and Fire, and what hasn't. At this point, Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon have delved into that bond a bit more deeply, showing how close a dragon and rider could get in ways that Martin's books simply haven't been able to yet, since the last dragon scenes Martin published where we were actually in the rider's perspective were Daenerys flying Drogon for the first time out of the Pit of Daznak in Meereen, and the fallout where she and Drogon encounter the Dothraki. We simply haven't spent much time up close and personal with dragonriders yet in the books.

But one thing neither the books nor shows have covered is how the Valyrians first came to ride dragons. That's something it would be extremely exciting to read more about in The Winds of Winter, or A Dream of Spring, or Blood & Fire, which is the planned sequel to the Targaryen history book Fire & Blood.

But Martin does drop one other clue for us in that statement to mull over in the meantime: "Septon Barth got much of it right." What does that mean, exactly?

Septon Barth's Unnatural History may be one of the most accurate books on dragons in A Song of Ice and Fire

Septon Barth is a fascinating figure in the lore of Westeros. He was one of the closest advisors to King Jaehaerys the Conciliator, a blacksmith's son who rose to eventually become the Hand of the King and one of Jaehaerys' closest friends. Despite this, Barth remained relatively uncorrupted by the political struggles of King's Landing; he even advocated against being raised to the position of High Septon earlier in his life, despite King Jaehaerys' desire to put pressure on the Church of the Seven to name him to the office.

This all makes Barth's rise even more fascinating. Often, he was interested in honest counsel and the mysteries of the world, first and foremost. Because of that, Barth ended up being the sole person to write about the horrific demise of Aerea Targaryen, one of Jaehaerys' children who was accidentally whisked away to Valyria by Balerion the Black Dread, and returned to King's Landing only to die in an extraordinarily gruesome fashion from whatever she came into contact with there.

Following the death of Aerea, Barth wrote a book titled Dragons, Wyrms, and Wyverns: Their Unnatural History, known more widely by the common name Unnatural History. This is one of the few real authoritative tomes on dragons which exists in Westeros, and posits some interesting theories, such as the fact that you cannot kill a dragon by shooting arrows down its mouth, or that dragons can change sex in order to mate.

In The World of Ice and Fire, it's revealed that Barth gathered various sources about the origins of dragons for his book. Some of those were histories which claimed dragons came from Asshai, and that the Asshai'i taught the Valyrians to harness their power. Others, such as the Qarth tale of a second moon which broke open to unleash dragons, are closer to folk tales. But Barth comes to the conclusion that if any of those accounts were actually true, dragons would have been utilized by some other people first before the Valyrians, or at the very least would have been widely sighted elsewhere in the world.

Instead, he believes dragons were birthed in some way from the volcanoes of Valyria, known as the Fourteen Flames. The Valyrians' close proximity to the volcanoes is why they discovered these great beasts first, which led to dragons becoming a cornerstone of their society.

As for what else Barth wrote...it's hard to say. Baelor I Targaryen, also known as Baelor the Blessed, rose to power around half a century after Barth's death, and while he was renowned for piety and good deeds, one black spot on Baelor's reign is that he burned many books he deemed controversial. That includes the Testimony of Mushroom, the salacious account of the Dance of the Dragons from the dwarf fool which features in Fire & Blood, as well as Barth's Unnatural History. Barth had a reputation for studying arcane mysteries which rubbed many in the church the wrong way, including Baelor himself. So for as much knowledge about dragons as was contained in Barth's book, by the time of characters like Tyrion Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen, only scattered fragments of its pages remain.

By the sounds of things, we'll hear more about some of those fragments in future works from George R.R. Martin. Until then, there's always the chance we'll get to learn more about dragons and their riders in House of the Dragon season 2, which is airing now on HBO and Max.

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