If you’ve watched House of the Dragon and read the chapters of Fire & Blood it’s based on, you’ve been let into a knowledge of the past usually found only in people that read history widely.
History is a thing that, in the present day, we see ourselves as the shapers of. There’s something I think of as an inevitability filter, which makes it so that whatever happened becomes, often, the only way things could have happened. An event that shocks and blindsides today will, five years from now, seem natural and inevitable, the logical end-result of processes and dynamics that we can’t see right now.
It is, also, in the ideal, our best attempt at reconstructing the truth from a record that, with each passing year, shrinks and becomes more confused, because even in that time period, interpretations and understandings can vary dramatically.
Now let us turn to George R.R. Martin’s tale of Targaryens in decline.
House of the Dragon purports to be the true telling of the Dance of the Dragons, the intra-family civil war that lead to the end of the Targaryen dragons, and, eventually, dynasty. And, comparing it to Fire & Blood, one sees many differences—not least because Fire & Blood, pitched as an in-universe historical text, is itself drawing from differing and contradictory sources.
Consider episode 9, “The Green Council.” In Fire & Blood, after King Viserys dies, the Small Council moves swiftly to secure the Red Keep and the Iron Throne for Aegon II. It’s left to question whether Lyman Beesbury’s death was accident or intent, but the rest of them are united. In House of the Dragon, however, the council is not so united—though Lyman Beesbury’s death is still ambiguous. Alicent, fearing that if Rhaenyra became Queen that she would put her sons to death, never considered that, if she wished her son to become King, that she’d have to do the same to Rhaenyra and her children. (Such is how palace coups work—not that Alicent seems to realize this.) And she is shocked to find out that the Small Council has been planning behind her back for years to usurp the throne. What’s more, Aegon II is nowhere to be found, and Alicent and her father Otto are in competition to be the first to find him and so determine how the usurpation will be conducted.
If House of the Dragon is indeed the true version, then Fire & Blood, which presents the history version, reveals something else about the nature of history. It turns accident and chance and desperate improvisation into intent and choice. Those who step onto the world-historical stage are no more than the world’s worst jazz musicians, their instruments the levers of power. If they seem to shape history, give it time. The further they recede in the past, the more they become history’s instrument, and the less it becomes theirs.
History, in short, becomes a consumptive force, eating the world that actually is and, at least in the popular memory, presenting it back to us as a directed thing, the only possible world. And if, somehow, it fails in this task, there is the fallback of the conspiracy theory. But the truth is that the world is chaotic and rudderless. However true the events history records, still, we don’t quite know what really happened. History is always moving, evidence is always partial, intent can only be guessed at and interpreted, not truly known.
In the end, history will eat us all. It ate Alicent Hightower, and she’s not even real. Try and become one of history’s actors, and it will eat you, too, and it is you who will dance to its strings.
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