The Dragon Has Three Heads

The sigil has three heads, and something in the family's prophecies insists the dragon must too.

The prophecy

This one has no seer at all. It is a sentence, repeated inside a family for three centuries, and nobody can say who said it first or what they meant. The House of Targaryen has borne a three-headed dragon on a red field since before the Conquest, and the usual explanation given for the arms is simple history: Aegon the Conqueror took Westeros with his two sisters, three dragons and three riders, and the sigil records them. What complicates it is that the family also speaks of the three heads as a requirement rather than a memory ÔÇö as something the dragon must have, in a tense that points forward.

It surfaces in the story from two directions at once. The first is Rhaegar Targaryen, in the years before the rebellion, working through the Red KeepÔÇÖs scrolls and arriving at a private conviction about the promised prince. He is reported to have said, after the birth of his second child, that the dragon required three heads ÔÇö meaning that a third child was needed, and needed from him. That is the entire recorded content of the utterance: no signs, no conditions, no date, and no explanation of what the heads are for.

The second is Daenerys, half a world away and a generation later, hearing effectively the same words in the House of the Undying. In one of the visions a dying man says it over an infant, and the phrase recurs in the mouths of the Undying themselves. She did not know the man in the vision and had never heard the saying before, which is the detail that turns a piece of family folklore into something harder to dismiss: two people who never met, on two continents, working from the same line.

What the words actually claim, stripped of everyoneÔÇÖs hopes about them, is only this ÔÇö that whatever is coming will require three of something rather than one, and that the three are related as the heads of one beast are related: not three rivals, but three parts of a single thing. The natural reading is riders. It could as easily be children, claimants, or aspects. The saying does not say, and the difference between those options is the difference between a war and a nursery.

Where it comes from

Targaryen heraldry is the obvious root. Before Valyria fell, dragonlord families used personal banners rather than the Westerosi system of house arms, and the three-headed dragon belongs to the Targaryens specifically from the Conquest onward. On the plainest account the arms commemorate Aegon, Visenya and Rhaenys, and every later invocation of three heads is a family talking about its own founding myth in a slightly mystical register ÔÇö which noble families do constantly, in every culture, without anyone treating it as scripture.

The competing account is that the phrase belongs to the promised-prince tradition and has simply been attracted to the sigil because it fits. The Targaryens kept prophetic material privately for centuries; the dragon dreams that warned them to leave Valyria before the Doom are the origin story of the entire house, and dreaming true is treated within the family as a hereditary trait rather than a religious gift. If the three heads belong to that body of material, the sigil is the coincidence and the prophecy is the substance.

Maester Aemon, the last Targaryen of his generation and the most careful reader of these texts anyone in the story has access to, treated the phrase as serious and unfinished business to the end of his life. He had been raised on the familyÔÇÖs expectations, had watched his own relations chase them, and concluded late that the promised one would need two others beside her. That he was still working on the problem as an ancient blind man on the Wall is the best evidence that within the family it was never regarded as mere heraldry.

How many times has it been claimed? Less often than one might expect, because unlike the Azor Ahai texts it offers nothing to a claimant ÔÇö there is no glory in being a third of something. It has been invoked seriously perhaps twice in the story: once by a prince arranging his own family around it, and once by an old maester trying to tell somebody before he died.

How it has been read

The dominant reading is the literal one: three dragons will need three riders, and a dragon of any size cannot be ridden by someone without the blood. That reading is attractive because it is checkable. There are three dragons in the world; one of them has a rider; the arithmetic does the rest. Its weakness is that it assumes the heads are people at all, and that dragonriding depends on ancestry in the strict way the Targaryens themselves have always insisted it does. The books have quietly raised doubts about that insistence more than once.

The second reading is RhaegarÔÇÖs, and it is worth separating from the first because it is about births rather than riders. He appears to have believed the three heads meant three children, that his son was one of them, and that a third was required ÔÇö a conclusion that dictated his behaviour and, in one widely held view, cost several thousand people their lives. Nothing in the saying requires this reading. It requires only that a man who wanted a particular answer went looking in a text that could not argue back.

A third reading treats the heads as roles rather than individuals: the conqueror, the warrior and the diplomat, or the king, the sword and the seer ÔÇö a division of the ConquestÔÇÖs three siblings into functions that must be filled again. Under this reading the three need not be Targaryens at all, only that they act as one. It is the least popular reading and the hardest to disprove.

The candidate lists are where most of the argument happens, and they are almost entirely speculative. Daenerys is on everyoneÔÇÖs list. Beyond her, readers commonly propose Jon Snow, on the strength of the questions about his birth; the young man being presented in Essos as RhaegarÔÇÖs son; Tyrion Lannister, on a theory built from his fatherÔÇÖs open loathing, his interest in dragonlore and a queenÔÇÖs history at court that the books have deliberately left underexplained; and various ironborn who have gone hunting dragons with horns and ambition. None of these is confirmed and several are mutually exclusive. It is entirely possible that the third head is a person the reader has not been introduced to.

The honest position is that this prophecy is the least resolved item in the collection. It consists of six words of unattributed family lore, it has produced one catastrophe and a great deal of speculation, and the books have not stated who or what the heads are.

The problem with prophecy

There is a strong case that this is not a prophecy at all, and that the entire tradition is a house reading its own coat of arms back to itself as revelation. Heraldry is designed to be memorable and symbolic; it invites exactly this kind of over-reading. A family that had painted three heads on its banners for three hundred years would find three-ness in anything, and a prince raised inside that family would naturally arrange his life into threes without noticing he was doing it.

If so, then the most consequential act in the backstory of the entire series rests on a man over-interpreting a piece of decoration. That is a bleak joke, and it is exactly the kind the books like. The counter-evidence is real, though: the phrase was spoken to Daenerys by things in a Qartheen tower that had never heard of Westerosi heraldry, and a woman who had never heard the saying carried it out of that building intact. Somebody, somewhere, meant something by it.

How it has played out ÔÇö open at your peril

What Rhaegar did with it

Rhaegar had two children by Elia Martell and was told there could be no more, and his response was to go looking for a third elsewhere. What followed ÔÇö the tournament at Harrenhal, the crown of winter roses given to Lyanna Stark, and the disappearance that set the realm alight ÔÇö is covered elsewhere in this collection. The relevant point here is that the three heads were the stated reason.

The cost is not disputed by anyone. His wife and both of those children were murdered in the sack of KingÔÇÖs Landing, his father was killed by his own sworn shield, his own body went into the Trident with rubies scattering from his breastplate, and three hundred years of dynasty ended within a year of his death. Whether the third head was ever born, and whether the child at the tower in the Dornish marches was it, is answered plainly by the show and left maddeningly unsaid by the books.

The showÔÇÖs three riders

The screen produced a tidy and rather literal solution. Three dragons hatched; three beings ended up riding them. Daenerys rode Drogon. Jon Snow, who had been raised as a bastard and turned out to be RhaegarÔÇÖs trueborn son, mounted Rhaegal and flew ÔÇö the moment being treated as proof of blood as much as courage. And Viserion, killed by an ice spear beyond the Wall and dragged out of a frozen lake by the dead, was raised and ridden by the Night King, who used him to bring down the Wall itself.

Whether that counts as fulfilment is one of the more argued questions about the ending. Three riders existed, briefly and never simultaneously on the same side, and the arrangement had no visible connection to whatever the phrase originally meant. Many readers regard it as a plot outcome that happened to produce the right number rather than an answer to the riddle.

Aemon TargaryenÔÇÖs last correction

Books only, and one of the most quietly devastating scenes in them. Aemon, dying aboard ship on his way south, works out three things too late: that the promised one was never required to be male, that Daenerys is the one, and that she will need the other two heads and has nobody to tell her. He begs for word to be sent to her and dies before anything can be done about it. Samwell Tarly, who is the only other person in the room, has no dragons, no ship and no standing to be believed by anyone.

This is the sharpest statement in the books of what prophecy in this world is actually for. The one man alive who had solved the riddle spent his last strength trying to pass it on, and the information got no further than a frightened boy on a boat.

What is still open on the page

In the books nobody but Daenerys has ridden a dragon, and her two younger ones spent a long stretch chained in a pit under a pyramid in Meereen after one of them killed a child. There are at least four figures in play who have been arranged by the narrative to look like candidates: the young man calling himself Aegon, landing in Westeros with the Golden Company; Jon Snow, whose thread breaks off unresolved at Castle Black; Tyrion Lannister, who has crossed the sea and made a study of dragons on the way; and Victarion Greyjoy, sailing for Meereen with a horn he believes will bind a dragon to whoever sounds it.

None of these has been confirmed, several of them are being actively set against each other, and it is possible the author intends the riddle to be answered by nobody. Readers should treat any confident list of the three heads ÔÇö including the showÔÇÖs ÔÇö as a reading rather than a resolution.