House Arryn, root and branch — 34 names across 7 generations, seated at The Eyrie in The Vale of Arryn. Each band below is a single generation, eldest first; the mono line beneath a name gives its parents, so the descent reads down the page. Dates follow the maesters, and where the songs outrun the records the chronicle hedges the legend as legend.
Styled First King of Mountain and Vale
The Andal victor of the Seven Stars, where King Robar II Royce and the old First Men kingdoms of the Vale were broken. The singers would also have him ride a giant falcon and slay the Griffin King, feats the Citadel gently returns to an older Winged Knight of First Men legend.
Styled Lady of legend
She watched husband, brothers, and children slain and never shed a tear, so the gods decreed she would not rest until her weeping watered the Vale; Alyssa's Tears falls from the Giant's Lance yet, never reaching the valley floor. That an Arryn should predate the Andal ships by millennia is a difficulty the singers do not pause over.
Styled King of Mountain and Vale
It was Roland, grandson of the Falcon Knight, who looked up at the Giant's Lance and commanded a castle be raised upon it, thereby committing generations of his descendants and their treasuries to the folly-made-marvel we call the Eyrie.
Styled King of Mountain and Vale
Great-grandson of the first Roland, he preferred war and wenching to masonry, halted work on the Eyrie, and spent the savings invading the riverlands, where Tristifer IV Mudd broke his host; the Andal lord he fled to for shelter sold him back, and some four years after riding from the Vale he lost his head at Oldstones.
Styled King of Mountain and Vale
Roland II's younger brother inherited a crown, an unfinished castle, and a cautionary example; he let the riverlands be and set the masons back to work upon the Eyrie.
Styled King of Mountain and Vale
Whatever his girth, his reach sufficed to take the isle of Pebble into the Arryn domain.
Styled King of Mountain and Vale
His hopes were rewarded at least once, for the Paps fell to him and stayed fallen.
Styled King of Mountain and Vale
Wed Arwen Upcliff
He won the Witch Isle not by storm but by wedding Arwen Upcliff, proving that in the Vale as elsewhere a marriage bed conquers more cheaply than a war galley.
Styled King of Mountain and Vale
When the Sistermen groaned under northern rule they appealed to the Eyrie, and Mathos — who told his queen he would sooner have a pirate than a wolf for a neighbor — sailed for Sisterton with a hundred warships. He never sailed home, and the Three Sisters have been passing between wolf and falcon, with small profit to either, ever since.
Styled King of Mountain and Vale
He carried the Vale's long quarrel with Winterfell across the Bite in the interminable War Across the Water, a conflict that outlived him as it outlived most who fought it.
Styled King of Mountain and Vale
Parents Osgood Arryn
The Old Falcon's son pressed the war against the Starks with rather more fire than his father, burning the Wolf's Den on the White Knife to prove the point.
Styled King of Mountain and Vale
He raised the Bloody Gate anew in stone, and the mountain passes have been charging that toll of blood to would-be invaders ever since.
Styled Queen Regent of the Vale
Regent for her boy king, she offered Aegon the Conqueror her hand along with a portrait said to flatter; Visenya declined on his behalf by landing Vhagar in the Eyrie's inner courtyard, where Sharra found her son already in the dragonrider's lap and wisely bent the knee.
Styled Last King of Mountain and Vale, then Lord of the Eyrie
Parents Sharra Arryn
He traded a crown for three turns about the Giant's Lance on dragonback, which the boy accounted a fair bargain. His brother later gave him a shorter flight through the Moon Door, without the dragon.
Styled Usurper of the Eyrie
Parents Sharra Arryn
He seized his brother's seat and put him out the Moon Door, then learned that a castle famous for being impregnable is merely a prison when a dragon perches on the roof; his own garrison delivered him to a kinslayer's end.
Styled Lord of the Eyrie
Wed a lady of House Royce
A cousin raised up when the kinslaying had emptied the high seat, he wed a Royce and set about refilling the nursery, a duty he discharged with commendable thoroughness.
Styled Lord of the Eyrie, Warden of the East
He pursued mountain clan raiders too far into their own country, a lesson the Vale's lords must apparently relearn each generation, and paid the customary tuition.
Styled Knight of House Arryn
Lord Darnold's younger brother died beside him in the Mountains of the Moon, leaving his young son Rodrik to inherit an uncle's seat and a father's caution, if not his luck.
Styled Lord of the Eyrie, Warden of the East
Wed Daella Targaryen (his 2nd wife; a first wife gave him four children)
Parents Ser Rymond Arryn
Lord at ten and a widower with four children at six-and-thirty, he wed the Old King's gentle daughter Daella in 80 AC; she died of childbed fever within two years, leaving him the infant Aemma and the Old King's lasting grief.
Styled Queen of the Seven Kingdoms
Wed King Viserys I Targaryen
Parents Rodrik Arryn
Wed at eleven and queen at one-and-twenty, she gave the realm Rhaenyra and died on the birthing bed delivering the short-lived Baelon; every grief of the Dance may fairly be traced to that chamber.
Styled Lady of the Eyrie, Defender of the Vale
Lady of the Eyrie from the age of three, when the Stone Crows slew her father and elder brothers, she held the Vale for her cousin Rhaenyra through the Dance and never took a husband, having observed what ambitious men did with wives' inheritances. She died of a chest cold in Gulltown, her deathbed testament lighting the very succession fire she had spent a lifetime damping.
Styled Claimant to the Eyrie
Jeyne's cousin twice tried to unseat her and twice earned a cell, in which his wits did not improve; nearest in blood but furthest from trust, he was passed over in her will, to his son's loud and armed objection.
Styled Claimant to the Eyrie
Parents Ser Arnold Arryn
He pressed his mad father's claim through the succession war of 134 AC, until Ser Corwyn Corbray, having ruled that the dead lady's will must stand, gave the young claimant a headsman's answer.
Styled Knight of the Bloody Gate, then Lord of the Eyrie
A fourth cousin who had spent ten years holding the Bloody Gate against the clans, named heir in Lady Jeyne's testament; the crown's regents upheld the will, and the falcon passed to the man who had actually been doing the work.
Styled Lord of the Eyrie, Defender of the Vale
He led King Daeron's vanguard at the Redgrass Field in 196 AC, where Daemon Blackfyre cut his van to pieces; that Lord Donnel's line continued at all is owed to Ser Gwayne Corbray's timely and celebrated interruption.
Styled Lord of the Eyrie, Warden of the East
Of Lord Jasper the chronicles record chiefly his three children — a lord, a knight, and a lady — which is more posterity than most lords manage and less ink than most demand.
Styled Lord of the Eyrie, Warden of the East, Hand of the King
Wed Jeyne Royce (d. childbed); Rowena Arryn, his cousin (d. of a winter chill); Lysa Tully
Parents Jasper Arryn
These partings name deaths, endings, and roads not yet ridden in the books. Unveil them only if both roads are known to you — or if you do not fear to know.
Styled Lady of House Arryn
Wed Ser Elys Waynwood
Parents Jasper Arryn
She bore Ser Elys nine children — eight daughters and one son — and the fates of that brood read like a septon's cautionary sermon: pox, silent sisters, Burned Men, and one horse's kick. Through her youngest daughter, dead in childbed, her blood carries the falcon's best remaining hope.
Styled Knight of House Arryn
Wed a lady of House Belmore
Parents Jasper Arryn
Lord Jon's younger brother wed a Belmore and died young of a bad belly, having first performed the one service history required of him: fathering Elbert.
Styled Heir to the Eyrie
Parents Ser Ronnel Arryn
Lord Jon's nephew and heir rode to King's Landing among Brandon Stark's companions to demand Lyanna's return; King Aerys heard the demand as treason and answered it with fire and rope, fathers made to watch sons. His death left the Eyrie's cradle empty and Lord Jon in want of a wife.
Styled Lord of the Eyrie, Defender of the Vale, Warden of the East
Parents Jon Arryn
These partings name deaths, endings, and roads not yet ridden in the books. Unveil them only if both roads are known to you — or if you do not fear to know.
Dashed cards mark bastards and baseborn lines. Names shaded behind the veil belong to the present tale; unveil them only if you do not fear to know.
Younger sons and daughters whose blood struck out on its own — some founding houses of their own name, some withered to a line in the annals, some disputed to this day.
Styled Head of the Gulltown Arryns
When his branch parted from the Eyrie's line no chronicle troubles to record; that it went into trade is certain, a scandal that made them the richest men in Gulltown. In 134 AC he pressed his golden claim to the Eyrie, and found that coin buys many things in the Vale but not, that year, a high seat.
Styled Knight of House Arryn
Wed the eldest daughter of Ser Elys Waynwood and Alys Arryn
A distant cousin, a famous jouster, and the Vale's favorite son, he fell to Jon Connington's blade at the Battle of the Bells; his young widow and their infant son soon followed him to the grave, and with them died the last near male line of the Eyrie save old Lord Jon himself.
Styled Heir presumptive to the Eyrie
These partings name deaths, endings, and roads not yet ridden in the books. Unveil them only if both roads are known to you — or if you do not fear to know.
Where the records quarrel, contradict, or fall silent, this chronicle sets the arguments down rather than settling for you what the texts leave open.
Whether Ser Artys Arryn the Falcon Knight ever bestrode a giant falcon or slew a Griffin King: the Citadel holds these to be First Men tales of a far older Winged Knight, grafted by singers onto the historical Andal victor of the Seven Stars.
The legend of Alyssa Arryn places an Arryn in the Vale six thousand years before the present, which is to say several millennia before any Andal keel touched Westeros; the maesters cough politely and move on.
Whether the succession of 37 AC ran lawfully through Lord Hubert: that he was a cousin of the murdered King Ronnel the chronicles allow, but how near a cousin is nowhere set down, and the Eyrie's records from those bloody years are conveniently thin.
The great quarrel of 134 AC: whether Lady Jeyne's deathbed testament could pass over Ser Arnold's nearer blood in favor of a fourth cousin; the crown ruled for the will, though Ser Corwyn Corbray's sword arguably ruled first.
The present tangle: young Ser Harrold Hardyng stands heir through a sister's daughter's son, while male-line Arryns yet sit in Gulltown; the heralds answer that the Gulltown falcons gilded their blood with merchant marriages long ago, and the Gulltown falcons answer with their ledgers.
What manner of sickness carried off Lord Jon Arryn in 298 AC is a question the attending maesters answered one way and subsequent events another; this chronicle notes only that the question exists.
This tree gathers every named Arryn the novels and their histories record — kings and lords, daughters and bastards, cadet offshoots and all. The maesters count only what the texts preserve; where a name survives without its deeds, the chronicle says as much rather than inventing the rest.
Each band down the page is one generation, eldest first. Beneath a name, the mono line names that person's parents, so descent reads from the top down. Dashed cards mark bastards and baseborn lines; cards behind the veil hold fates from the present tale, revealed only if you choose to unveil them.
House Arryn holds The Eyrie. The tree opens with the earliest forebears the records name — legendary where the singers outrun the maesters, firmer once true dates begin — and this chronicle marks the myths as myths, never dressing a song up as a certainty.
A good many. Contested parentage, missing generations, bynames left unexplained, and legends the singers embroider all appear under 'What the maesters dispute' at the foot of this page, where the arguments are set down without pretending to close what the books leave open.