A History of Ród Greyjoyów

The ironborn are a people apart, and their beginnings run back to the Grey King, who is to the isles what Bran the Builder is to the North — a hero swollen past all human measure by ten thousand years of song. He is said to have ruled the sea itself for a thousand years and more, to have taken a mermaid to wife, to have lit the first fire from a burning tree, and to have slain the great sea dragon Nagga and raised his hall from her bones. The Drowned God, whom the ironborn worship still, was his patron; from that faith comes their grim creed and grimmer comfort: what is dead may never die, but rises again, harder and stronger.

From such legends the ironborn drew the Old Way — a life of reaving and raiding, of taking rather than trading, of salt wives seized from foreign shores and thralls set to the work free men would not do. To pay the iron price was to win a thing by battle; to pay the gold price, by mere purchase, was reckoned less than honorable. In those days the ironborn chose their High Kings by a kingsmoot of captains, each proven by the reaving he had done. It was a hard, proud, bloody way of living, and the ironborn have never entirely forgiven the world for taking it from them.

In time the kingsmoot gave way to hereditary kings, and the greatest of the ironborn lines was not Greyjoy but Hoare — the black-blooded kings who reaved so far they carved out dominion over the riverlands of the mainland, ruling a wide realm from the sea. The last and mightiest of them, Harren the Black, spent forty years and untold thousands of lives raising Harrenhal beside the Gods Eye, the largest castle ever built in Westeros, its five great towers meant to stand a thousand years.

It stood one day. On the very morning Harren moved into his monstrous hall, Aegon the Dragon came on Balerion and turned it into a furnace, roasting Harren and all his sons within their impregnable stone. With House Hoare extinguished, Aegon did a curious thing: rather than name an overlord, he let the ironborn choose their own liege from among themselves. They chose Vickon Greyjoy of Pyke — and so a house that had been one kraken among many rose to rule all the Iron Islands, more by the conqueror's whim than by any triumph of their own.

As lords of the isles under the Iron Throne, the Greyjoys chafed against a peace that left no room for the Old Way. Now and again the old fire blazed up. During the Dance of the Dragons, Dalton Greyjoy — the Red Kraken, a savage boy of sixteen — declared for the blacks and fell upon the undefended western coast, reaving Lannisport and the sunset sea with a ferocity not seen in generations, taking gold and salt wives while the realm's dragons killed one another far away. He died, as reavers often do, with a knife in him and a salt wife's hand suspected on the hilt.

A century and more later, another kraken tried the same. Dagon Greyjoy, Lord of Pyke, took advantage of a weak and distracted Iron Throne to loose his longships upon the western seas, burning and plundering the coasts and the Arbor and defying king and Hand alike for years before the reaving spent itself. Each such rising ended the same way — checked, contained, and put down. But each also kept the old dream alive on the isles: that one day the ironborn might live again by sail and sword and the iron price, and pay the greenlanders back in full.

The dream took hold hardest in Balon Greyjoy, Lord Reaper of Pyke, who came to believe he was born to restore the Old Way and the ironborn to their reaving glory. Six years into Robert Baratheon's reign he crowned himself King of the Iron Islands with a crown of driftwood, and set his longships to burning the Lannister fleet at anchor and raiding the western shore. For a moment the kraken flew free again.

It did not last a year. The lords of the greenlands, so lately at war with one another, united against him with a speed the ironborn had not reckoned on. Robert's fleets and Stannis Baratheon's broke the Iron Fleet upon the water; Balon's stronghold of Pyke was stormed and his brothers scattered or slain; his sons were killed but for one. That last, the boy Theon, Balon surrendered as a ward and hostage to Eddard Stark of Winterfell — a living pledge of the broken king's good behavior, and a wound to a proud man's pride that would fester for a decade.