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HBO’s latest Westeros TV show, which Martin co-created with showrunner Ira Parker, adapts his Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas, and should be much more pleasing in terms of fidelity to the source material. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Episode 2 introduces the Targaryens – Baelor, Maekar, Valarr, and Aerion – and with them, we get to see their sigil. Crucially, the three-headed dragon only has two legs, which is how Martin always intended it. The first five seasons of Game of Thrones used the two-legged dragon, but then it switched to four legs, which House of the Dragon stuck with. The author complained about the Targaryen sigil change back in 2024, writing:
“I designed my dragons with a lot of care. They fly and breathe fire, yes, those traits seemed essential to me. They have two legs (not four, never four) and two wings.. Four-legged dragons exist only in heraldry. Much of the confusion about the proper number of legs on a dragon has its roots in medieval heraldry. In the beginning both versions could be seen on shields and banners, but over the centuries, as heraldry became more standardized, the heralds took to calling the four-legged beasties dragons and their two-legged kin wyverns. No one had ever seen a dragon or a wyvern, of course; neither creature actually existed save in legend, so there was a certain arbitrary quality to this distinction… and medieval heralds were not exactly renowned for their grasp of zoology, even for real world animals.
“Dragons DO exist in the world of Westeros, however (wyverns too, down in Sothoryos), so my own heralds did not have that excuse. Ergo, in my books, the Targaryen sigil has two legs, as it should. Why would any Westerosi ever put four legs on a dragon, when they could look at the real thing and could [count] their limbs? My wyverns have two legs as well; they differ from the dragons of my world chiefly in size, coloration, and the inability to breath fire. (It should be stressed that while the Targaryen sigil has the proper number of legs (two), it is not exactly anatomically correct. The wings are way too small compared to the body, and of course no dragon has three heads. That bit is purely symbolic, meant to reflect Aegon the Conqueror and his two sisters).
“FWIW, the shows got it half right (both of them). GAME OF THRONES gave us the correct two-legged sigils for the first four seasons and most of the fifth, but when Dany’s fleet hove into view, all the sails showed four-legged dragons. Someone got sloppy, I guess. Or someone opened a book on heraldry, and read just enough of it to muck it all up. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. A couple years on, HOUSE OF THE DRAGON decided the heraldry should be consistent with GAME OF THRONES, but they went with the bad sigil rather than the good one. That sound you heard was me screaming, ‘no, no, no.’ Those damned extra legs have even wormed their way onto the covers of my books, over my strenuous objections.”
A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms Perfectly Adapts GRRM’s Book
There is a sense of irony in this being the TV show to get the Targaryen sigil show right. After all, there are no dragons in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, unlike its two franchise predecessors. Indeed, there haven’t been dragons for over 50 years by this point. And despite that, the people making the heraldry in-universe can get it right, though no one in House Targaryen would’ve seen a dragon themselves.
The sigil change may seem fairly minor in the grand scheme of things, but it does speak to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms‘ approach to the books. There is clearly a good working relationship between Parker and Martin, and while there are changes, they’re done in a logical manner. Many of the shifts thus far in the series, such as the sequence of Dunk drinking and dancing with Lyonel Baratheon, are an expansion of things written on the page or things that could easily exist between the lines. The novellas are short, and many characters aren’t fleshed out in the way they need to be for actors to inhabit those parts, but they still feel very true to the spirit of the source material.
