House Greyjoy
Ironborn lords of Pyke and the bleak Iron Islands, who follow the Drowned God and the Old Way of reaving, taking their wealth and their salt wives at the point of a sword. A golden kraken on black, they hold that 'What is dead may never die,' and bow to the green lands only when they must.
The fuller tale
The Iron Islands worship a different god and keep a different law than the rest of Westeros, and House Greyjoy governs both by right of an origin story that predates even the Andals: the Grey King of legend is said to have slain a sea dragon and ruled the waves wearing its bones as a crown, and every Greyjoy since has understood kingship as something wrested from the sea rather than granted by it. The Drowned God demands drowning and rebirth rather than blessing, ironborn priests intone that what is dead may never die, and the old way of the islands ÔÇö reaving, raiding, taking wives and wealth at the point of an axe rather than growing or trading for them ÔÇö survived Aegon's conquest more or less intact, because there was little on the Iron Islands worth a dragon's trouble to burn.
Balon Greyjoy tested that independence directly, twice. His rebellion against the newly crowned Robert Baratheon ended in the kind of defeat the ironborn rarely suffer ÔÇö the Iron Fleet burned, his sons dead or hostage, his crown surrendered in all but name ÔÇö and Theon Greyjoy, the surviving son, was carried off to Winterfell as a ward who was also, unmistakably, a prisoner. Balon tried again decades later, this time simply to seize what he could while the rest of the realm tore itself apart in the War of the Five Kings, on the ironborn's oldest working theory of strategy: better to take by iron what you cannot win by gold, especially while everyone else is looking elsewhere.
That second rebellion is where the house's real tragedy plays out, and it plays out inside one man. Theon, raised half a Stark in all but name and never trusted as either Stark or Greyjoy by the people who mattered, seizes Winterfell in his father's name to prove an ironborn loyalty he does not actually feel, loses it just as fast, and pays for the attempt with a captivity and torture that strips away his name entirely before what is left of him ÔÇö called Reek, taught to answer to nothing else ÔÇö claws back enough of himself to help the very Stark family he betrayed. It is the bleakest character arc the story tells, and also, against most expectation, one of its genuine redemptions.
What comes after Balon's death is a contest for the driftwood crown as old and violent as the islands themselves ÔÇö a kingsmoot, the ironborn's ancient method for choosing a king by acclamation rather than inheritance, called and contested between Balon's daughter Yara, who wants alliance and survival, and his brother Euron, a pirate lord returned from voyages no one else survived, who wants conquest and does not much care what it costs the islands to get it. The house's fate splits along that same line by the story's end: a chastened, more modest independence under the family member who wanted to keep her people alive, purchased at the cost of the chaos the other one very nearly cost them everything to unleash.
The page and the screen
Euron Greyjoy is one of the widest gaps between the two tellings. The show's Euron is a chatty, charismatic loose cannon, prone to speeches and court intrigue, who woos Cersei Lannister in King's Landing and dies in single combat with Jaime. Book Euron is something closer to a legend the other characters are afraid to say out loud ÔÇö mostly offstage, rumored to have sailed past the edges of every map, said to have cut out his own crew's tongues so his plans could never be repeated, wielding a Valyrian steel horn called Dragonbinder that supposedly can bind dragons at the cost of the blower's life. His brother Victarion's entire subplot ÔÇö a voyage across Slaver's Bay to court Daenerys Targaryen for himself, horn in tow ÔÇö has no equivalent in the show at all, an entire ironborn storyline the adaptation simply never adapted.
