Dragonkin

Dragonkin is Maester Thomax’s history of House Targaryen from exile to apotheosis, with a study of the life and death of dragons. Its importance lies not only in its subject but in its precarious material survival: the book is a surviving vessel of knowledge at a time when the oldest records are crumbling, incomplete, or uncertain, and when the return of dragons gives its history renewed practical force.

Identity and Scope

Dragonkin presents the history of House Targaryen as a movement from exile to power. Its title and full description indicate that the book does more than recount a royal genealogy: it also considers dragons as living forces whose history is inseparable from the rise and decline of the Targaryen dynasty. The pairing of dynastic history with the life and death of dragons makes the volume relevant to both political history and the fading memory of the world that once produced dragonlords.

The book belongs to the Citadel’s written tradition, but it is not treated as an infallible record. Samwell Tarly’s work among the annals shows that historical knowledge in Westeros is fragmentary. Older books have fallen to pieces, their pages crumble when handled, and some records may have been buried or lost altogether. The oldest surviving histories were written after the Andals came to Westeros, while the First Men left mainly runes on rocks; accounts of the Age of Heroes, the Dawn Age, and the Long Night therefore pass through later writers and are subject to doubt. Dragonkin survives within this damaged archive rather than standing outside its limitations.

Samwell Tarly’s Copy and Its Damage

Samwell Tarly had been ordered by Maester Aemon to find Dragonkin. He carried it through the Night’s Watch’s quarters together with Colloquo Votar’s Jade Compendium, a thick collection of eastern tales and legends. When Sam dropped the books, he knelt in the dirt to gather them. The Jade Compendium appeared undamaged, but Dragonkin had fallen open and several pages had become muddy, including a page bearing a colored-ink image of Balerion the Black Dread.

The damaged illustration gives the volume a concrete link to the dragons it records. Sam was distressed by his clumsiness and carefully smoothed and brushed the pages, but the incident also exposes the vulnerability of the knowledge he is trying to preserve. Dragonkin is not merely consulted as an abstract authority: it is a physical object whose pages can be spoiled, whose images can be lost, and whose survival depends upon the care of readers working under pressure.

Sam’s handling of the book occurs while he is flustered by Gilly and hurrying to answer Jon Snow’s summons. The scene places scholarly labor beside bodily embarrassment, military duty, and the ordinary disorder of Castle Black. Dragonkin’s historical importance therefore emerges through an unheroic act of preservation: a frightened, awkward reader salvages a muddy book because the information inside it may matter to the future.

Historical Knowledge and the Others

Although the supplied material does not quote Dragonkin directly, Sam’s research through the Citadel’s books and annals establishes the evidentiary world in which the volume is used. He has searched for references to the Others and admits that the surviving record is far thinner than he expected. Some histories are unreliable, preserving impossible reigns of hundreds of years and placing knights in eras before knights existed; even the recorded number of Lord Commanders differs sharply between lists.

Within that uncertain archive, Sam finds recurring traditions about the Others. The tales associate their appearance with cold, snowstorms, and night. They are said to avoid sunlight, to ride the corpses of dead animals such as bears, direwolves, mammoths, and horses, and to leave the dead capable of rising again as thralls unless the bodies of fallen men are burned. Other accounts mention giant ice spiders, though Sam does not know what those creatures are.

The books also preserve possible means of resistance. Ordinary blades are said to be ineffective against the Others’ armor, while their own swords are so cold that they can shatter steel. Fire may dismay them, and obsidian is effective. Sam remembers killing one in the haunted forest with a dragonglass dagger made by Jon Snow. One account of the Long Night further describes a last hero who slew Others with a blade of dragonsteel, prompting Sam and Jon to consider whether dragonsteel might mean Valyrian steel. Dragonkin belongs to the same endangered body of written knowledge that makes such connections possible, even when the evidence remains incomplete.

Dragons, Valyria, and Material Power

The book’s subject connects it to the surviving remnants of Valyrian power. Glass candles are said to have been brought to Oldtown from Valyria a thousand years before the Doom of Valyria, while Euron Greyjoy claims to have found a dragon horn in the smoking ruins of Valyria. He describes the horn as bound with red gold and Valyrian steel and enchanted so that it can bind dragons to the will of its possessor; he also claims that three dragons still exist and can be found.

That claim gives a historical work about dragons an immediate political charge. Dragonkin records the dynasty that made dragons instruments of conquest, while Euron Greyjoy presents a relic that he believes can restore control over them. The book consequently stands at the meeting point of memory and attempted revival: it preserves knowledge of a vanished order even as ambitious figures seek to turn that knowledge, or objects associated with it, into present power.

The same world contains other objects whose meanings depend on the communities that preserve them. Arya Stark is ordered to surrender her possessions, including Needle, during her training in the House of Black and White; Jaime Lannister’s golden hand becomes a public emblem that others interpret as the sign of Goldenhand, while Jaime insists that he will remain the Kingslayer. A glass candle in Archmaester Marwyn’s chamber is three feet tall, slender as a sword, ridged, twisted, and glittering black; its flame does not flicker, burns without being consumed, and alters the appearance of light and shadow. Like Dragonkin, these objects carry knowledge, identity, and power across institutional boundaries, but Dragonkin does so through written memory.

Survival and Narrative Significance

Dragonkin represents the Citadel’s attempt to make the past legible, yet the surrounding narrative repeatedly questions whether any archive can preserve the past intact. Accounts conflict over dates and rulers, books physically decay, and even major histories are mediated by writers who lived long after the events they describe. Lord Rodrik Harlaw’s reading of Haereg’s History of the Ironborn leads him to compare Euron Greyjoy with Urron Greyiron, while the age of the kingsmoot itself varies depending on which historian is trusted. Written history is therefore both a resource and a contested instrument.

For Samwell Tarly, this uncertainty does not justify abandoning research. He continues searching for records about the Others, dragonglass, dragonsteel, and the Long Night because partial testimony may contain the distinction between survival and extinction. Dragonkin’s damaged pages and its image of Balerion embody that urgency. The book preserves a past that appears legendary, but the return of dragons and the approach of an older enemy make the legendary newly consequential.

Its deepest function is thus connective. Dragonkin links House Targaryen’s exile and ascent to the biological and political history of dragons; it links Oldtown’s scholarship to Castle Black’s military emergency; and it links fragile pages to powers that may once again shape the world. The book does not erase uncertainty. Instead, its value lies in keeping threatened knowledge available for comparison, correction, and action.