Abstract
This paper examines the Targaryen chronicles, consolidated in Fire & Blood and its predecessor novellas, as the third major vector of fragmentation in A Song of Ice and Fire. Unlike the main sequence, which fragments through expansion, and unlike the Dunk and Egg cycle, which fragments by design into discrete episodes, the Targaryen chronicles fragment through a deliberate narrative frame: the pseudo-history composed by the fictional Archmaester Gyldayn, drawing on sources that openly contradict one another. This device permits the author to present multiple versions of the same events without adjudicating between them, producing a text that is internally fragmented at the level of every contested episode. The paper traces the cycle from its seed novellas through the 2018 consolidation in Fire & Blood Volume I, considers the unwritten Volume II and its relationship to the main novels, examines the Gyldayn frame and its interpretive consequences, and assesses the pressure now placed on the chronicles by the House of the Dragon adaptation.
1. Predecessor Novellas as Seed Texts
The Targaryen chronicles did not originate as a single project. They emerged piecemeal across roughly a decade, in anthology novellas that Martin wrote to accompany other short work and that were not, at the time of their initial publication, presented as installments of a larger pseudo-history.
“The Princess and the Queen” appeared in 2013 in Dangerous Women, a cross-genre anthology co-edited by Martin and Gardner Dozois. It narrates the opening years of the Targaryen civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons, from the death of King Viserys I through the major early engagements of the conflict between the rival claimants Rhaenyra and Aegon II. The novella is presented as an excerpt from a longer historical work, with the in-world author identified as Archmaester Gyldayn, and the prose register is that of a chronicle rather than a dramatized narrative.
“The Rogue Prince” appeared in 2014 in Rogues, another Martin-Dozois anthology. It functions as a prequel to “The Princess and the Queen,” covering the years of tension that preceded the Dance, with particular attention to the figure of Daemon Targaryen. Together the two novellas bracket the Dance itself, with the earlier years of the conflict dramatized in the later-published piece.
“The Sons of the Dragon” appeared in 2017 in The Book of Swords, edited by Dozois alone. It moves backward to the reigns of Aenys I and Maegor the Cruel, the two sons of Aegon the Conqueror, and it completes the rough coverage of the Targaryen dynasty from the conquest through the Dance that would be consolidated the following year.
These three novellas are the seed texts of the chronicles. Each was published as a standalone piece, each was received initially as a supplement to the main property rather than as part of a coherent project, and each used the Gyldayn frame that would become the organizing device of the eventual consolidated volume. The pattern will be familiar from the preceding paper on the Dunk and Egg cycle: anthology publication first, consolidation later. The difference is that the Dunk and Egg novellas are complete short narratives, while the Targaryen novellas are excerpts from a larger history, and their consolidation into that history was always the intended endpoint.
2. Consolidation in Fire & Blood Volume I
Fire & Blood Volume I was published in November 2018. It covers the Targaryen dynasty from Aegon’s Conquest through the regency of Aegon III, the boy-king who inherited the throne in the wake of the Dance. The seed novellas are incorporated into the volume, sometimes with revision, and the surrounding material fills in the reigns and events they did not cover.
Several features of the consolidation deserve note.
First, the volume is long. It runs to approximately seven hundred pages in most editions, and it covers roughly a century and a half of in-world history. The density of material per page is substantially higher than in the main novels, because the pseudo-history form permits Martin to summarize years of events in paragraphs that a dramatized narrative would have to unfold across chapters. This density is one of the reasons the chronicles have proven so generative for adaptation: a single page of Fire & Blood can yield an episode of television, because what the page reports as a few sentences of historical record becomes, in dramatization, a sequence of scenes.
Second, the volume is illustrated. Doug Wheatley provided black-and-white illustrations throughout, depicting persons, places, and events from the chronicles. The illustrations are part of the pseudo-historical frame: they are presented as images that might accompany a real historical chronicle, with the artist functioning as a kind of documentary illustrator rather than as a conventional fantasy artist. This visual presentation reinforces the chronicle register of the prose.
Third, the volume is explicitly Volume I. The title page and marketing materials made clear from the beginning that a second volume was planned, covering the period from Aegon III through the reign of Aerys II, the Mad King whose deposition by Robert Baratheon opens the backstory of A Game of Thrones. The consolidation of 2018 was therefore not a completion but a halfway point, and the reader who finishes Fire & Blood finishes only the first of two projected volumes.
Fourth, the reception of the volume was shaped by the announcement, shortly after its publication, that the Dance of the Dragons would be adapted for television as House of the Dragon. The novellas and the consolidated volume had been published in a context in which the Targaryen chronicles were understood as supplementary material. The adaptation announcement retrospectively promoted the chronicles to primary status, and the reception of Fire & Blood in the years since has been inseparable from the reception of the television series derived from it.
3. The Unwritten Volume II
Volume II of Fire & Blood has been projected since the publication of Volume I but has not yet appeared. It is understood to cover the period from the latter years of Aegon III’s reign through the deposition of Aerys II, a span of roughly a century and a half that includes the reigns of the kings from Daeron I through Aerys II, the Blackfyre Rebellions, the events of the Dunk and Egg cycle, the tragedy at Summerhall, and the Targaryen decline that sets the stage for Robert’s Rebellion.
The projected Volume II faces a particular set of pressures that Volume I did not face.
The first is overlap with the main novels. The later portion of Volume II, covering the reigns of Jaehaerys II and Aerys II, would dramatize events that are extensively referenced in A Song of Ice and Fire itself. Robert’s Rebellion, the Tourney at Harrenhal, the defiance at Duskendale, the War of the Ninepenny Kings: each of these events exists in the main novels as a memory held by living characters, and each carries interpretive weight in the plots of those characters. Volume II would be writing into a space already occupied by characters’ testimony, and the coordination problem would be substantially greater than anything Volume I faced.
The second is overlap with the Dunk and Egg cycle. The reigns covered by the later portion of Volume I and the early portion of Volume II are the reigns in which the Dunk and Egg novellas are set. Volume II must therefore be coordinated not only with the main novels but also with the novellas, and with the projected further novellas that have not yet been written. The coordination is three-way rather than two-way, and the stakes of each coordination decision are raised accordingly.
The third is the question of the authorial working schedule. Volume II is one of several large unfinished projects in Martin’s portfolio, alongside The Winds of Winter, further Dunk and Egg novellas, and various editorial and production commitments related to the television adaptations. The time available for Volume II is, by any reasonable estimate, sharply limited, and the prospects for its completion within the next several years are uncertain.
These pressures produce an interesting asymmetry in the chronicles as they currently stand. Volume I is complete and covers material that the main novels reference only lightly. Volume II is unwritten and would cover material that the main novels reference extensively. The completed portion is the portion the main novels least need, and the needed portion is the portion that does not yet exist. This asymmetry is itself a form of fragmentation, and it will persist until Volume II appears.
4. The Gyldayn Frame
The organizing narrative device of the chronicles is the fictional authorship of Archmaester Gyldayn, an in-world historian of the Citadel whose work is presented as the basis of the consolidated text. Gyldayn is not a neutral compiler. He has opinions, he weighs his sources, and he sometimes declares one account more credible than another. He also declines to adjudicate in many cases, presenting competing versions of contested events and leaving the reader to judge between them.
Three principal sources recur throughout the chronicles. Septon Eustace, a cleric attached to the royal court, is presented as a source with access to the Red Keep and a tendency toward moralizing interpretation. Grand Maester Munkun, whose True Telling is cited frequently, is presented as the official court chronicler of the period he covers, with the biases of official chroniclers everywhere. Mushroom, a dwarf jester, is presented as the author of a salacious and frequently scandalous Testimony that contradicts the more respectable sources at many points and that Gyldayn treats with a mixture of skepticism and guilty interest.
The effect of this framework is that the reader, on reaching a contested episode, is given not the episode but the disagreement. A royal death may be presented as a natural illness, as a poisoning by a queen, and as a revenge killing by a former paramour, each with its proponent among the sources, and the text does not choose. The reader who wants to know what happened must decide, on the basis of plausibility, consistency with other evidence, and the known biases of each source, which version to prefer.
This is a genuine artistic achievement. It models the way real historical knowledge works in the absence of definitive evidence, and it permits the chronicles to sustain a density of incident that a dramatized narrative could not sustain. It also, however, fragments the text at the level of nearly every contested episode. A reader of the chronicles does not read a single history. The reader reads a selection of histories, presented side by side, and the work of synthesis is left to the reader rather than performed by the text.
The Gyldayn frame therefore represents a distinctive form of fragmentation that does not appear elsewhere in the property. The main sequence fragments through expansion. The Dunk and Egg cycle fragments by episode. The chronicles fragment by contested episode, at a much finer grain than either, and the reader is required to do more interpretive work per page than in any other portion of the property.
5. Adaptation Pressure
House of the Dragon premiered on HBO in August 2022 and is, as of this writing, continuing in further seasons. The series adapts the Dance of the Dragons as presented in the novellas and in Fire & Blood Volume I, with the showrunners Ryan Condal and (through the first season) Miguel Sapochnik making interpretive decisions about the contested episodes that the source text deliberately left open.
The adaptation has produced a distinctive pressure on the chronicles. Because the Gyldayn frame presents multiple versions of key events without adjudicating among them, the showrunners have had to choose versions, and their choices become, for the audience of the television series, the effective canonical version. A viewer who has seen House of the Dragon but has not read Fire & Blood will typically believe that events happened as the show depicts them. A reader who has read the book but has not seen the show will typically remember the contested versions as the book presented them, with the competing accounts intact.
This produces a fragmentation that cuts across the audience rather than across the text. The text remains what it was: a pseudo-history with competing sources. But the audience now divides into those who have received the text through the show and those who have received it through the book, and the two halves hold different beliefs about what happened in the fictional world. The show has not replaced the book, but it has produced a second version that coexists with the book and that, for many members of the combined audience, takes precedence.
A further effect deserves attention. The showrunners have spoken publicly about their approach to the Gyldayn ambiguities, describing their interpretive choices as informed by their reading of the source material and their judgments about dramatic plausibility. The choices are not arbitrary, and in some cases they are defensible as readings of the text. But they are choices, and each choice forecloses, for the television audience, a reading that the book held open. The show is, in this sense, a reading of the book in the strong literary-critical sense: it selects, emphasizes, and resolves, and its selections are consequential.
The pressure on Volume II, when it appears, will be correspondingly greater. Volume II will be written in the knowledge that any Targaryen material adapted for television will be subject to further interpretive resolution, and the author will face the choice of writing the chronicle as he would have written it regardless or of writing it in a way that accommodates or resists the choices the adaptation has already made. Neither option is neutral, and the pressure is real.
6. The Prose Register and Readership Divergence
One further feature of the chronicles deserves treatment. Fire & Blood and its predecessor novellas are written in a prose register distinct from that of the main novels. Where the main novels are dramatized in close third person, with viewpoint characters whose inner lives the reader inhabits, the chronicles are narrated in the summarizing, omniscient voice of a historian, with characters observed from outside and events reported rather than witnessed.
This difference in register has produced a readership divergence. Readers who came to the property for the dramatized interiority of the main novels have often found the chronicles cold, encyclopedic, or difficult to sustain. Readers who came for the worldbuilding, the genealogical depth, or the historical texture have often found the chronicles the most rewarding portion of the property, richer per page than the dramatized novels. The two readerships overlap substantially but are not identical, and the chronicles have accumulated a particular constituency that prizes exactly the features the main-novel readership sometimes resists.
The register also affects the adaptation question. The dramatized form of the television adaptation converts the chronicle register into the dramatized register of the main novels, which is to say that the adaptation translates the chronicles into the form the main novels already use. This translation is part of what makes the adaptation feel continuous with Game of Thrones despite the differences in source material. The chronicle register exists only in the book; the television version reads more like a main-sequence novel than like its actual source.
For readers interested in the formal particularity of the chronicles, therefore, the book is the only place to find it. The adaptation, whatever its merits, is a different kind of object, and the chronicle form does not survive the translation. This is another axis along which the audience is divided: readers who value the register itself cannot substitute the show for the book, while readers indifferent to register can treat the two as largely interchangeable.
7. Conclusion
The Targaryen chronicles occupy a distinctive position in the architecture of the property. They are fragmented at a finer grain than any other portion, through the deliberate device of competing sources within a pseudo-historical frame. They have been published in stages, from anthology novellas to a consolidated first volume to a projected second volume that remains unwritten. They have generated a major television adaptation that is now producing canon in parallel with the book, and they have accumulated a distinct readership shaped by their chronicle register.
The chronicles are, in several respects, the most artistically ambitious portion of the wider property. The Gyldayn frame is a genuine achievement of form, and the density of material per page exceeds that of any other portion of the work. They are also, for precisely these reasons, the portion most exposed to the pressures of adaptation and to the divergence of audiences. The book asks more of the reader than the main novels ask, and the television adaptation asks less, and the gap between what the book provides and what the adaptation provides is wider for the chronicles than for any other portion of the property.
The fourth paper, on the supplementary worldbuilding texts, will examine a further body of material that shares the chronicles’ encyclopedic impulse while extending it in different directions. The chronicles represent the dramatic edge of the pseudo-historical mode; the supplementary texts represent its reference edge, and the relationship between the two will occupy the next paper.
