The Rhoyne

The mightiest river in the world, so wide along her lower reaches that a man midstream sees no bank on either side. Her people, the Rhoynar, built wonders on her waters until Valyria's dragons came; Princess Nymeria fled down her length with ten thousand ships and wed her people to Dorne. The Free Cities' barge trade still calls her Mother Rhoyne ÔÇö and her mists still hide the Sorrows.

The fuller tale

The Rhoyne is the greatest river in the world, and the world built accordingly. Rising in the hills north of Norvos, gathering tributary after tributary ÔÇö Noyne and Qhoyne, Lhorulu and Selhoru ÔÇö she runs the length of western Essos and reaches the sea at Volantis so wide that a man midstream sees no bank in any direction. To the people she raised she was not scenery but a goddess: the Rhoynar built cities of song and fountains on her waters, worshipped Mother Rhoyne, and their water wizards worked her currents and mists in ways the world has not seen since. For a thousand years the river was a civilization ÔÇö until her daughters caught the eye of the young dragon empire to the south.

The wars with Valyria destroyed the Rhoynar by degrees and then all at once. Prince Garin the Great led a quarter of a million spears against the Freehold, won his battles, and drew three hundred dragons down on his host; the river cities emptied, Chroyane drowned under its curse, and Princess Nymeria gathered the survivors into ten thousand ships and sailed the length of the known world to Dorne, where her peopleÔÇÖs laws and stubbornness outlive their river to this day. The Rhoyne herself became a thoroughfare through her own ruins ÔÇö Volantene river towns on her banks, barge trade on her waters, and the drowned palaces of Ny Sar and the fog-bound Sorrows standing in her stream like unswept graves.

The books give the river the sagaÔÇÖs great travelogue. Tyrion descends her aboard the Shy Maid in the company of a hidden prince and his exiled protector, through mists and ruins and river-lore ÔÇö the dwarf turtles and the huge Old Man of the River, the Rhoynish orphans singing to the Mother, the shrouded Sorrows where the stone men wait ÔÇö a voyage that carries half the eastern plot and nearly all its atmosphere. The show never films a mile of it, which makes the Rhoyne the largest thing on the map that screen-only audiences have never seen: the drowned mother of a lost civilization, still carrying the storyÔÇÖs traffic through the middle of the world.

The page and the screen

The river is a casualty of adaptation. The show sends Tyrion from Pentos to Volantis with the journey elided, cutting the Shy Maid, the Rhoynish crew, Young GriffÔÇÖs conspiracy and the Sorrows in one stroke; Jorah absorbs the greyscale that the riverÔÇÖs stone men deal to Jon Connington in the books, and the encounter is relocated to Valyria. Readers rank the Rhoyne voyage among the novelsÔÇÖ finest stretches; viewers get its plot resolved in a kidnapping and a sea lane.

The fallen of this place ÔÇö if any, they are named here. Spoilers.

No death the chronicle records has come to this ground ÔÇö or none the maesters have set down.