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Heads Up: This article includes spoilers for “Beyond the Wall,” the sixth episode of Game of Thrones’s seventh season. If you haven’t caught up yet, proceed with caution.
The demise of a dragon in “Beyond the Wall,” the sixth episode of Game of Thrones's seventh season, underscored how little viewers truly understand about Daenerys’s trio of dragons. However, for those eager to delve deeper into the show’s dragons—both living and undead—the names they bear hold symbolic meanings that shed light on their personalities and foreshadow their future actions.
The dragon that perished was Viserion. While the show doesn’t clearly differentiate Viserion from its sibling Rhaegal—Rhaegal appears slightly greener on screen—paying close attention reveals that Viserion was the one struck by the Night King’s spear.
Interestingly, this dragon bears the name of Viserys, Daenerys’s ambitious older brother. In the show’s first season, Viserys traded his sister to Khal Drogo for an army to seize the Iron Throne. However, after losing patience with Drogo, Viserys threatened to kill his pregnant sister unless the invasion commenced at once. Drogo, fed up, ended Viserys’s complaints by pouring molten gold over him. In "Beyond the Wall," Viserion met a similar fate. Like its namesake, Viserion is destined to betray Daenerys and Drogon, the dragon named after Drogo.
This leaves Rhaegal, named after Daenerys’s eldest brother—and Jon’s father—Rhaegar Targaryen. If anyone is likely to ride Rhaegal, it would logically be Jon, the only other living Targaryen in Westeros and the son of the dragon’s namesake. Jon has already shown an ability to calm dragons, as seen in “Eastwatch” when he gently touched Drogon’s snout.
The episode "Beyond the Wall" debunked the version of the Three-Headed Dragon theory that suggested Tyrion Lannister was a secret Targaryen who would ride the third dragon. Instead, the theory is now poised to take a far more ominous turn: the Night King becoming the third rider.
How Viserion will act as the Night King’s mount remains uncertain. Nerdist reported that in the books, Old Nan mentioned mythical ice dragons in tales she told Jon during his childhood. Additionally, a constellation named the Ice Dragon features a rider with a blue star for an eye, always pointing north. The World of Ice and Fire, the companion guide George R.R. Martin wrote to expand his fantasy universe, includes unverified accounts of ice dragons over the Shivering Sea north of the Wall. Sailors describe them as larger than regular dragons, translucent, and capable of freezing a man solid in an instant.
Long before A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin penned a children’s book titled The Ice Dragon (though he has clarified that it exists outside the mature universe of his later works). In the children’s story, a benevolent ice dragon defeats evil fire-breathing dragons to rescue the protagonist. At Vanity Fair, Joanna Robinson speculated whether Viserion might ultimately side with the heroes, suggesting, "With close-ups of dragon eyes in two consecutive episodes—brown and blue—could we see them turn white as Bran wrests control of Viserion from the Night King in Season 8?"
The ultimate victor in the Game of Thrones universe is still uncertain, but fans hope to find out by the time the series wraps up in June.
This article was updated in 2019.
