The House of the Dragon season 2 premiere is out now, bringing viewers back to the world of Game of Thrones at last. "A Son for a Son" launched straight into the drama, with Queen Rhaenyra (Emma D'Arcy) and her Blacks and King Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) and his Greens consolidating their forces for war. The episode culminated with a horrific child murder at the hands of the mercenaries Blood and Cheese. Now, the Dance of the Dragons civil war is poised to begin in earnest.
"A Son for a Son" also featured the return of one of the most beloved locations from the original series: Winterfell and the North, the home of House Stark. There, we met Lord Cregan Stark (Tom Taylor), who gives Rhaenyra's son Jacaerys (Harry Collet) a tour of his domain. That comes with a history lesson atop the Wall, where Cregan discusses how House Stark has a time-honored tradition of sending one men in every 10 to bolster the Night's Watch against whatever terrifying threats lie beyond.
While this whole sequence primarily served as a fun bit of fan service to get viewers back in the Game of Thrones spirit, it also featured an important bit of worldbuilding about one of Cregan's ancestors, Torrhen Stark, which has not yet been revealed in the books by George R.R. Martin.
Did Aegon the Conqueror reveal his prophetic dream to Torrhen Stark?
During House of the Dragon's first season, King Viserys Targaryen (Paddy Considine) tells his daughter Rhaenyra about the Song of Ice and Fire, a prophetic dream had by Aegon the Conqueror which inspired him to unite the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros beneath the Iron Throne. This caused a lot of commotion in the fandom, because it hadn't yet been mentioned in George R.R. Martin's books.
House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal later confirmed that Aegon's dream is something that Martin told him about, but that hadn't yet been revealed in the books. The inclusion of the dream, passed down from one Targaryen leader to the next, cleverly tied the prequel back to the original Game of Thrones show in an unexpected way, as well as delivering something new for longtime Song of Ice and Fire readers and newcomers alike. The idea that Aegon conquered the Seven Kingdoms not out of ambition, but because he foresaw the coming of the White Walkers and know that only a Targaryen ruler could lead the fight against them, adds a fascinating new dimension to the Conquest.
In "A Son for a Son," we got another piece of the puzzle. Cregan explains to Jace that House Stark sends one in every 10 men of its household to serve in the Night's Watch and man the Wall, a tradition which stretches back to his ancestor Torrhen Stark, the last King in the North who became known as the King Who Knelt after his bloodless surrender to Aegon the Conqueror.
This is intriguing, because the Wall was built thousands of years earlier during the Age of Heroes...yet House Stark only developed the tradition Cregan mentions after Torrhen's surrender.
Fire & Blood, the novel which House of the Dragon is based on, paints Torrhen's surrender to Aegon as a matter of military logic. The North is one of the last kingdoms to swear fealty to Aegon. By the time Torrhen leads his warriors down to the Neck, he finds that Aegon and his sisters are waiting for them with a massive army and three dragons. Rather than face a battle they would obviously lose, Torrhen decides to bend the knee.
House of the Dragon doesn't contradict that account, but it adds a new dimension by implying that Aegon shared his Song of Ice and Fire dream with Torrhen; or at the very least, shared enough to convince Torrhen to start sending more support to the Night's Watch. Whether this is something Aegon disclosed after Torrhen knelt, or before, it seems to have been a crucial aspect of the North's surrender to House Targaryen. The Night's Watch was already in decline before Aegon's Conquest. It sounds like Aegon and Torrhen remedying that was a key element of their alliance.
As of this writing, we don't know whether Torrhen's mandate to send men to the Wall comes from George R.R. Martin himself, or is an invention of the show (or whether Torrhen decided to start sending more Stark men to the Wall of his own accord). Hopefully we find that out at some point. But either way, this new detail adds more depth to Aegon's Conquest and the long-running bond between the houses of ice and fire.
House of the Dragon airs new episodes Sundays at 9:00 p.m. ET / 8:00 p.m. CT on HBO and Max.
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