A green bowl of fertile valley walled in on every side by the Mountains of the Moon, reached only through the Bloody Gate — which has never once needed to prove why it carries that name to an invader who got past it.
The First Men who first climbed into the Vale found it already the province of the mountain clans, and it was the Andals, crossing the narrow sea in their thousands, who made the Vale one of their earliest and firmest footholds in Westeros — a claim the descendants of House Arryn have never let anyone forget. The Falcon Throne long predates the Iron Throne it eventually knelt to, and the Arryns count themselves among the oldest continuously ruling houses in the Seven Kingdoms.
What the mountains give the Vale in safety, they take back in isolation: no army has ever taken the Eyrie by storm, and the Vale has a long history of arriving to the realm's wars fashionably, sometimes decisively, late. The clansmen of the high passes remain a private matter the Arryns have always preferred to settle themselves, generation after generation, with steel and the Moon Door both.
In the timeline
SourcesTWOIAF · The Vale of ArrynAGOT · Catelyn
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Where is The Vale of Arryn?
A green bowl of fertile valley walled in on every side by the Mountains of the Moon, reached only through the Bloody Gate — which has never once needed to prove why it carries that name to an invader who got past it.
Is The Vale of Arryn from the books or the show?
Book canon. This entry follows George R. R. Martin's novels and histories, and notes where the television series diverges rather than following it.