Balon Greyjoy
Lord Reaper of Pyke, twice a would-be king, whose failed rebellion nine years past cost him his sons — all but the youngest, given to the Starks as a hostage.
The fuller tale
Balon Greyjoy ruled a kingdom of rock and salt spray and was certain it was the better part of the world. Lord Reaper of Pyke, head of a house whose words are We Do Not Sow, he was raised on the Old Way — the creed that iron men pay the iron price, taking what they own with axe and boarding-hook rather than coin — and he took it not as nostalgia but as policy. Lean, hard, humorless, flint all the way through: of the four sons of Quellon Greyjoy who survive into the tale, Balon is the one with the crown, the grievance, and the least imagination.
Nine years before the story opens he wagered everything on the Old Way and lost. Judging Robert’s new-won throne to be weak, Balon crowned himself King of the Iron Islands and rebelled; the war made his brother Euron’s cunning and Victarion’s axe briefly famous, burned the Lannister fleet in its harbor, and then collapsed — the Iron Fleet smashed off Fair Isle, Pyke stormed, two of Balon’s three sons dead in the fighting. Robert let him live and keep his lordship. The price was his last boy: Theon, carried off to Winterfell as Eddard Stark’s ward and hostage. Balon spent the next decade on his sea-tower nursing the arithmetic of that humiliation.
When the story brings Theon home with an offer of alliance from Robb Stark — a crown for the Iron Islands in exchange for ships against the Lannisters — Balon delivers one of the tale’s coldest homecomings. He sneers at his son’s bought finery, mocks the gold chain paid for with coin instead of blood, and makes it clear that the boy standing before him is a Stark creature in Greyjoy skin. He will not be handed a crown by a wolf pup, he says; he will pay the iron price. Then he takes the crown anyway and strikes not south at the Lannisters but north — at the undefended coast of the family that raised his son.
As strategy it is almost perfectly self-defeating, and the tale knows it. The North’s coasts can be raided but never held; the ironborn seize Moat Cailin, Deepwood Motte and — through Theon’s freelancing — Winterfell itself, and gain from all of it nothing but the undying hatred of the mainland and the ruin of Balon’s own son. His daughter sees it clearly; his captains see it; Balon sails on regardless, because the point was never conquest. The point was to be a king again, and to owe it to no one.
His meaning in the story is the dead hand of the past. Balon commands men to be what their grandfathers were, in a world that has moved on; he demands a son’s loyalty while despising everything the boy had to become to survive; and every Greyjoy in the tale is bent around the shape of his approval — Theon breaks chasing it, Yara hardens earning it, and his brothers inherit the wreckage of it. Twice a king, never a conqueror: the driftwood crown fit him exactly.
The page and the screen
The tellings agree on the man and differ on the murder. The show puts his death on screen and in the family: a confrontation on a rope bridge in a storm with the exiled brother he banished, ending with Balon thrown to the sea. The books stage the same fall with no witness at all — the old king crossing his swaying bridges in a gale as he always did, found broken on the rocks days before Euron’s Silence just happens to sail into Lordsport — and let the ironborn do the math themselves. Aeron believes his brother arranged it; readers have gone further, noting how conveniently death travels ahead of the Crow’s Eye. The show spends the ambiguity to buy a scene; the books keep it, and it curdles the whole kingsmoot.
Where they stand, season by season
Mentioned in the chronicle
- Balon Greyjoy chooses crowns over kin: the ironborn will reave the North, and Theon must pick a family. (S2·E3)
- Melisandre leeches king's blood from Gendry over three names: Robb Stark. Balon Greyjoy. Joffrey Baratheon. (S3·E8)
- Balon Greyjoy meets his brother Euron on a rope bridge in a storm — and only one walks off. (S6·E2)
- Three leeches fat with king's blood go into the fire: the usurper Robb Stark, the usurper Balon Greyjoy, the usurper Joffrey Baratheon. (ASOS 37)
- The Damphair rises from the sea with hard news: Balon Greyjoy is dead and the Crow's Eye sits his chair; Aeron calls a kingsmoot to drown Euron's claim. (AFFC 2)
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Fell from a bridge (S6·E2)
The books: Fell from a storm-swept bridge (AFFC, ch. 2)
The Lord Reaper of Pyke met his long-lost brother Euron on a rope bridge in a storm and told him to get off his islands. Euron threw him from the bridge into the sea he'd made his god.
In the show, Balon meets a hooded figure on one of Pyke’s rope bridges in the middle of a storm and finds his brother Euron under the hood — the brother he exiled, come home smiling. Balon tells him to get off his islands; Euron mocks the old man’s failed rebellions, announces himself as the storm, and hurls him from the bridge into the sea their god lives in. The kingsmoot that follows crowns the killer.
In the books he simply falls — a frayed rope bridge, a howling gale, a body washed up bloated and broken two days later — and the timing does the accusing: the Silence, crewed by mutes and captained by his banished brother, appears the very next day. No one saw anything. On the Iron Islands, where the Drowned God takes whom he pleases, hardly anyone believes it was the god. Either way the throne of salt and rock is empty, and every terrible thing the Greyjoys do afterward pours through the gap he leaves.