The new season of HBO’s epic fantasy series House of the Dragon is about to release its fourth episode. The show is set in the fantasy land of Westeros, which is loosely inspired by England in the High and Late Middle Ages. The story is based on the second half of George R. R. Martin’s 2018 fantasy novel Fire & Blood, which describes a fictional civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons, which is, in turn, loosely inspired by the real medieval English civil war known as the Anarchy (lasted 1138 – 1153), in which Empress Matilda, King Henry I’s daughter and appointed heir, fought over the English throne with her cousin Stephen of Blois. House of the Dragon takes the general premise of this war and adds many fantastic elements; most notably, in this story, both sides have dragons that they deploy in battle against each other.
Because the series draws both aesthetic and narrative inspiration from medieval England, and dragons appear in medieval legends, many viewers may assume that the dragons they see on screen in House of the Dragon resemble what medieval people imagined when they told stories about dragons. This assumption, however, is incorrect. The dragons in Martin’s novels and the television shows based on them are awesome to read about and watch on screen, but they bear only a partial physical resemblance and essentially no behavioral resemblance to dragons in real medieval literature and art.
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