Characters / A Song of Ice and Fire - Valyrians

This is a listing of Valyrian characters in A Song of Ice and Fire and its supplemental materials.

For the main character index, see here

Valyrians

They held each other close
And turned their backs upon the end.
The hills that split asunder,
And the black that ate the skies;
The flames that shot so high and hot
That even dragons burned;
Would never be the final sights
That fell upon their eyes.

A fly upon a wall,
The waves the sea-wind whipped and churned—

The city of a thousand years,
And all that men had learned;

The doom consumed it all alike,
And neither of them turned.

— A poem about the Doom of Valyria

The Valyrians are a race of people who lived in south-central Essos and founded the greatest empire ever seen thanks to their dragons, beasts native to their mountainous homeland that the Valyrians learned to tame and harness as weapons of war. Once the dominant cultural and military power in the world, their empire was mostly wiped out four centuries before the events of A Song of Ice and Fire in a cataclysm known as the Doom of Valyria.

Valyrians are known for their platinum-blond hair, violet eyes and extreme beauty; their descendants are found scattered in the Free Cities, especially in Volantis (comprising the city's nobility) and Lys (occupying various berths in the city's social strata). Four remaining Westerosi noble houses are of Valyrian descent, namely the Targaryens, the Velaryons, the Celtigars and the Longwaters. Extinct Westerosi houses that claimed Valyrian descent included the Blackfyres and House Qoherys. Houses that have tangential ties to Valyria, though with otherwise unconfirmed descent (through their distinct appearance or by mere rumor) include the Daynes, the Baratheons and the Hightowers.

Out of all Valyrian families to survive the Doom, only the Targaryens had been one of the forty houses of dragonlords in Old Valyria, and only they have retained the ability to breed and ride dragons.

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• Ambiguous Situation:
  • Early in the Freehold's rise to power, they visited Westeros before the arrival of the First Men and traded with giants. During this time they learned something that caused them to wash their hands of the entire continent, never going further than building Dragonstone and few other island outposts. When the Andals and Princess Nymeria both fled to Westeros to avoid enslavement by the Valyrians, the Freehold refused to follow and allowed the Seven Kingdoms to develop unhindered. Even after the Doom, it took the Targaryens three generations to leave Dragonstone and begin their conquest of the Seven Kingdoms. In-universe, it is believed that the Valyrians either suffered some kind of forgotten tragedy that caused them to shun the continent or that their priests prophesied that the "Doom of Man" would emerge from the area.
  • Despite the Valyrians conquering half the known world, for some reason there are few credible surviving records about them or their history and culture. Apparently all their archives, ideas and blueprints for their magic and technology were jealously guarded in Old Valyria and this didn't diffuse to their colonies. Volantis is implied to store large volumes of information behind its black walls, but others are equally in the dark.
• Arch-Enemy: The Ghiscari Empire and later the Rhoynar.
• Artistic License – Biology: Played with. The Targaryen practice of consanguineous incest was inherited from the Valyrian dragonlords, who practiced it for centuries. Much like the Targaryens, for this practice to be sustainable and widely used, the Valyrians must have had a supernatural resistance to genetic disorders and inbreeding too. While it is possible in real life for incestuous unions to result in perfectly healthy children, the chances of something going wrong get steeper and steeper the more the inbreeding goes on. Practicing it on a widespread, societal scale means that the statistical averages of such a thing should really start appearing. Given that the instabilities and deformities are seen increasingly in the Targaryen and Blackfyre lineage, especially after the death of the dragons, and that the Valyrians were infamous blood mages known for biological manipulation, it's possible that they used magic as a workaround - and its lack led to a Surprisingly Realistic Outcome.
• Apocalypse How: Class 0—Regional, Societal Collapse. The Doom, a cataclysm of an unspecified nature, which destroyed Valyria and formed the Smoking Sea. Valyrian magic, knowledge and recorded history was lost. Now the area is said to be haunted by demons. The few brave enough to venture to Valyria's ruins don't come home.
• Asshole Victim: Not everyone feels bad about the demise of old Valyria, that empire of blood and fire built on the suffering of countless slaves.
• The Beautiful Elite: The Valyrians were supernaturally beautiful, with purple eyes and Mystical White Hair.
• Blood Magic: Blood was one of the Valyrians' two principal sources of mystical power, along with fire. Metalworkers of Valyrian steel from Qohor are said to employ Human Sacrifice in order to enhance their craft; this raises the question of what the Valyrians themselves did to craft their own weapons of the famed metal. There's also mention of Valyrian bloodmages in Gogossos mating slave women to animals to bring forth half-human offspring.
• Brother–Sister Incest: Among the Valyrian dragonlord families in particular, apparently both to keep the bloodlines pure and to retain their ability to breed and bind to dragons. It's not known whether the common folk carried out the same practice, however.
• Chekhov's Volcano: When the apex of your civilization is surrounded by a chain of 14 volcanoes, something bad is bound to happen. The explosion of the aforementioned volcanoes is one of the possibilities that is most considered regarding the mysterious wiping of the Valyrian civilization.
• Comically Lopsided Rivalry: They waged war against Old Ghis six times. The first five times, they won handily (because, you know, dragons). The sixth time, they made sure there was no more Old Ghis.
• Dragon Rider: The early Valyrians discovered dragons in the Fourteen Fires, a ring of volcanoes, and tamed them.
• The Dreaded: In the present, the smoking ruin of Valyria is the scariest place in the known world.
• The Empire: In all but name, instead using the less threatening name Freehold.
• Exotic Extended Marriage: Polygamous marriages such as Aegon I's with both of his sisters were not unheard of in Valyria, though they were apparently rare even there.
• Expy: Beautiful, nigh-elfin, dragon-riding people with a vanished empire and Lost Technology, notorious for being brutal slavers? Valyria seems eerily reminiscent of Melniboné.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Primarily Ancient Rome with a bit of Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt in the whole dynastic incest thing, and with their historical role in Westeros mirroring the Normans under William the Conqueror. Their rough geographical position and the fact they were destroyed suddenly by a natural disaster also associates them with the Minoans. Finally, the concept of Valyria being a beautiful, prosperous, and highly advanced civilization that was sunken into the sea brings to mind Atlantis. Furthermore, legends usually describe Atlantis sinking as a result of the Atlanteans' hubris and decadence; Tyrion Lannister muses to himself that Valyria was an empire built on fire and blood, and the Valyrians reaped the seed they had sown.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Went from a race of shepherds to an empire that conquered two continents.
• Functional Magic: Their skill at magic was as useful to building their empire as the dragons were. They had some of the most powerful and creative wizards in history.
• He Who Fights Monsters: The Freehold adopted slavery from Old Ghis, the previous preeminent empire in the world and one of their first major conquests.
• Historical Hero Upgrade: Are generally regarded positively as a great lost civilization despite the fact that they were incredibly brutal and conquered and destroyed lands like nobody else. Tyrion at least feels that the Valyrians were Hoist by Their Own Petard but even Daenerys has few reservations about proclaiming her Valyrian ancestry despite the fact that her Slave Liberation is entirely the opposite of her ancestors' practices.
• Industrialized Evil: They brutally forced slaves to work in appalling conditions in the mines of the Fourteen Flames. Eventually one of them became the first Faceless Man.
• Laser-Guided Karma: One theory about the cause of the Doom of Valyria is that the Faceless Men (who first arose amidst the millions of slaves that the Valyrians exploited and abused) assassinated enough of the mages who controlled the Fourteen Flames that the volcanoes went out of control.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: The Doom happened 400 years before current events, but the hauntedness of the Valyrian ruins, the severity of the catastrophe and the amount of people that have disappeared while attempting to venture into the broken peninsula have led people to avoid Valyria altogether, even in conversation; still, it manages to come up from time to time as a cautionary tale of sorts.
• Lost Technology: Almost all of the Valyrians' great accomplishments were lost in the Doom. The knowledge of forging Valyrian steel was lost, as was knowledge of magical architecture that allowed for the building of monuments like the Valyrian roads, topless towers and the Long Bridge of Volantis. That being said, the books and The World of Ice & Fire strongly hint that the smiths of the Free City of Qohor actually know how to forge Valyrian steel, though it's a secret they jealously guard.
• Made a Slave: They enslaved the people of the lands they conquered, forcing them to mine gold and silver underneath the Fourteen Fires.
• Master Race: They certainly thought so.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane:
  • In a world where a mystical race of beings (the Children of the Forest) destroyed with magic a geographical feature like the Arm of Dorne, the possibility that the Doom was intentional and artificial in nature is not altogether outrageous.
  • It's not known whether the Valyrians always had their unusual characteristic appearance and their preternatural beauty from the start or these are due to their dabbling in the practice of magic.
• Meaningful Name: "Valyria" is pronounced the same as "Valeria", a Latin name derived from the word valeo, meaning "to be strong". Valyria was the strongest nation in the Known World when it still existed.
• The Missing Faction: Even 400 years after the destruction of Valyria, the dust hasn't settled in the lands and peoples they left behind. Their destruction led to an Evil Power Vacuum that still plagues the Free Cities and the Seven Kingdoms, who were the biggest subjects of the consequences of the event. They were that important and that powerful.
• More Dakka: When the magic of the Rhoynar water wizards proved an effective countermeasure against their dragons the Freehold responded by sending over three hundred dragons against them, all at once.
• Mysterious Past: Basically everything related to them. The Valyrians began as unassuming shepherds, and then somehow harnessed dragons to do their bidding. How did they do that? Who knows. Then the Doom fell on Valyria. What triggered the Doom? We have only guesses. What about the details of their history, customs, technology, and recorded events? All lost.
• Noodle Incident: It seems that they had some plans for Westeros and explored the continent, but whatever they found there was so frightening that they swore off the idea of conquering it and never looked back, save for building the small colony of Dragonstone.
• Our Elves Are Different: While they were human, the Valyrians fit the "High Elves" position in a fantasy series perfectly and have most of the trope trapping. They were a race of pretentious, inhumanly beautiful, white-haired purple-eyed people who were naturally gifted in magic, hailed from a highly advanced civilization, and ruled the world for quite some time.
• Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: While the Valyrians did have an original pantheon of gods, all religions were tolerated within their vast domains — some from conquered peoples, others that sprang up over time. So long as your priests didn't actively encourage rebellions against them, the dragonlords didn't care what gods their subject peoples worshipped. Many of the dragonslords even switched to other religions, or didn't believe in any gods at all. Some scholars believe that the country's ruling class regarded them all as false and saw religion as a primitive relic, but they still encouraged it among their subjects to keep the lower classes divided and unable to rise against them. This of course fits The Roman Empire motif as noted by Edward Gibbon^note The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.
• People of Hair Color: Almost universally, Valyrians have platinum-blond hair, violet eyes and nigh-elfin beauty. They were unusual-looking even when there was a whole race of them still alive. Now that most of them are gone, those who remain stick out like a sore thumb.
• Playing with Fire: Besides the breath of their dragons, fire magic was one of the two principal sorceries the Valyrians practiced, along with Blood Magic.
• Precursors: The pinnacle of the civilized world in its day, before it was totally destroyed, leaving only legends, monuments, and some Lost Technology.
• The Remnant: The Targaryens primarily, particularly as they were the last surviving line of dragonriders, despite not having been particularly major among the dragonlord houses while Valyria was still standing. But the blood of Valyria is also strong in Lys and bits of their culture are practiced all over Essos. The Volantene nobility or "Old Blood" also boast Valyrian descent (though not from the dragonlords), ape many of their practices and consider their city state the true heir of Valyria.
• The Republic: In theory, the Valyrian Freehold was a republic in which the lords freehold, freeborn landholders, all had a say in governance. In practice, politics were dominated by the dragonlords, an oligarchy of the forty most powerful noble families.
• Took a Level in Badass: From simple shepherds to unstoppable dragon-riders who conquered most of Essos.
• Ultimate Blacksmith: One of their secrets was the method of creating Valyrian steel, a magic steel sharper, stronger, and lighter than any other in the world. The method was lost with the Doom of Valyria, making any remaining Valyrian steel objects even more valuable and precious. In particular, a hereditary Valyrian steel sword is an object of great pride for a noble house and none will willingly part with one, even for the prospect of a marriage alliance with a powerful house like the Lannisters (as Tywin Lannister found to his chagrin). While present-day smiths have managed, with some difficulty, to melt down and reforge Valyrian steel from pre-existing artifacts into another shape, none has yet happened on the secret of creating new Valyrian steel. All that's known is that it probably involved spells, dragonfire, and possibly blood sacrifices.

Jaenara Belaerys

Jaenara Belaerys

A female dragonlord from Old Valyria, she is famous for her exploration of the continent of Sothoryos.

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• All for Nothing: In spite of venturing to Sothoryos, where she pushed further south than anyone else ever did, she found nothing but endless jungles, mountains, and deserts.
• Bold Explorer: She flew her dragon farther south of Sothoryos than anyone had ever gone before.
• Dragon Rider: She flew the dragon Terrax.

Aurion

Emperor Aurion

One of the few surviving dragonlords after the Doom, he proclaimed himself Emperor of Valyria and tried unsuccessfully to rebuild the Freehold.

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• Bavarian Fire Drill: His entire "reign" was one gone horribly wrong. Valyria never had any emperors before, and he wasn't even a governor of Qohor, merely a visitor. His entire claim to Valyria was based on him sitting on his dragon, acting important and shouting at the already frightened populace.
• Dragon Rider: The fact that he still had his dragon lent him legitimacy in his imperial claim.
• The Emperor: He claimed this title for himself in his quest to rebuild the Valyrian Freehold.
• Riddle for the Ages: His disappearance and that of his army is a great mystery.
• Uncertain Doom: He led an army of thirty thousand men from Qohor to reclaim what was left of Valyria. None of them were ever seen again and their fate remains a mystery.

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