The Religions of A Song of Ice and Fire
Spoilers for all five novels, through A Dance with Dragons.
Catelyn Stark was anointed with seven oils at Riverrun. At Winterfell, Ned builds her a small sept where she can pray to the Seven. He keeps his own gods in the same castle. After an execution, Catelyn finds him in the godswood washing his sword in a black pool beneath a white tree. She has a godswood at Riverrun, too, but the one at Winterfell makes her feel watched. The first chapter Martin gives her puts a sept and a heart tree inside one set of walls, then asks us to look at Ned’s place of prayer through the eyes of someone who worships elsewhere.
That arrangement is a good way into the religions of A Song of Ice and Fire. A court can house more than one faith, a god can travel with a priest, and two people can witness the same event and disagree about what has happened. In these books, a religion can tell us where someone will pray, who can crown a king, and what a character thinks they saw in a fire. Those are three different kinds of knowledge.
Where the faiths meet
Faith | Where to look | People, rites, and institutions |
Old Gods | Winterfell, the lands beyond the Wall, and Raventree Hall in the Riverlands | Ned Stark prays in his godswood. Jon Snow and Samwell Tarly swear their Night’s Watch vows before weirwoods. House Blackwood keeps the Old Gods south of the Neck. |
Faith of the Seven | Across much of southern Westeros, including King’s Landing. Catelyn also has a sept at Winterfell. | One god with seven aspects. The High Septon leads the Faith. Its religious life includes septs and anointing, and its restored military orders are the Warrior’s Sons and Poor Fellows. |
Drowned God | The Iron Islands | Aeron Damphair initiates followers in the sea. At the kingsmoot on Old Wyk he presides over the gathering that chooses a king. |
R’hllor, the Lord of Light | Volantis, Dragonstone, and the Riverlands | Benerro preaches at the red temple in Volantis. Moqorro, Melisandre, and Thoros of Myr are red priests. The fire visions and rites of these priests enter very different settings, from Stannis’s court to the Brotherhood Without Banners. Their faith sets the Lord of Light against the Great Other. |
Many-Faced God | The House of Black and White, Braavos | The Faceless Men serve a god they identify with death under many names. Arya enters the temple as a stranger and learns its practice from the Kindly Man. |
Mother Rhoyne | The Rhoyne in Essos and the Greenblood in Dorne | The Orphans of the Greenblood keep the memory and worship of their ancestral river. Yandry and Ysilla, born on the Greenblood, return to the Rhoyne. |
Dothraki horse god | Vaes Dothrak and the Dothraki Sea | The dosh khaleen preside over Daenerys’s stallion-heart rite. The Stallion Who Mounts the World is a prophesied leader. The horse god is the deity. |
Great Shepherd | Lhazar | Mirri Maz Duur is a godswife and healer. Her image of all people as one flock helps explain the duty she invokes when she offers to treat Drogo. |
Black Goat | Qohor | The city’s god appears on the standard in Jorah’s story of the Unsullied who defended Qohor. In Braavos the Kindly Man gives the Goat another place in his own theology. |
Gods of Ghis | Meereen | The Green Grace, Galazza Galare, leads Daenerys and Hizdahr past the gods’ images inside the temple for their wedding. |
Moonsingers | Braavos | Denyo credits the Moonsingers with guiding the city’s founders to refuge. Arya passes their temple on her way to a different one. |
A tree can look back
Jon Snow and Samwell Tarly swear the same Night’s Watch oath in the same grove beyond the Wall. Jon chooses the weirwoods because he was raised with the Old Gods. Sam, who grew up with the Seven and could have sworn in the sept, has another reason. He doubts his old gods ever answered him and thinks of the Watch as his new house. Even before we reach Braavos, the vows complicate the idea that a person’s faith can be read off a birthplace. Later, beneath the Nightfort, Sam speaks part of that oath to a white door with a face, and it opens.
Winterfell’s heart tree gives us a slower change of perspective. In A Game of Thrones, we enter the grove with Catelyn and feel what it is like to stand before the face carved in the bark. Four books later, Bran looks out through the heart tree and sees a younger Ned praying. He tries to speak. Ned lifts his head, and the sound Bran makes is like leaves in the wind. The first scene makes a carved face feel like someone looking. The second puts Bran behind the face, watching the father who cannot see him. Ned keeps praying. From his side of the bark, nothing tells him who has tried to answer.
What a crown buys at the Great Sept
The Faith of the Seven can change a king’s prospects without any sign from the heavens. Outside the Great Sept of Baelor, the sparrows pile the bones of people killed in the war and ask for protection. Inside, their High Septon has sold his jeweled crown to feed the poor. Cersei offers to restore the Faith’s right to arm itself. In return, the High Septon will bless Tommen and forgive the crown’s debt to the Faith.
Read the scene in the order Martin gives it to us. We pass the bones first, then hear Cersei reckon the price of the agreement. She works out what an armed Faith can do for the crown. The people outside have already told us what they want it to do for them. Later, Cersei goes to the sept herself and the Faith detains her. In the Hall of Lamps she meets knights of the order she allowed the High Septon to restore.
Dragonstone and two kinds of return
At Dragonstone, Melisandre circles the burning wooden figures of the Seven. She prays in the speech of Asshai, in High Valyrian, then in the Common Tongue. Davos understands only the last prayer. When Stannis draws the sword she calls Lightbringer, Davos can see the flames and the blackened blade. Whether it is the sword of prophecy is another question. Salladhor Saan has his doubts, and Stannis tells Davos that he stopped believing in gods long ago. The public rite makes a new allegiance visible even as the people present give us several reasons to read it differently.
In the Iron Islands, a boy named Emmond struggles as Aeron holds him under the sea. The drowned men carry him ashore and work on his body. Aeron breathes into his mouth until the boy coughs up water and gets enough breath back to answer him. Martin stays with Aeron through the work of reviving him. From inside the priest’s point of view, every part of that work belongs to the Drowned God.
When Thoros brings Beric Dondarrion back after his fight with Sandor Clegane, we have Arya’s eyes instead. She sees Sandor’s sword go into Beric. Thoros follows the men who carry Beric away, and she loses sight of them. She hears Beric speak before she turns and sees him upright. Later, Thoros explains that the first time it happened he was giving a dead friend the customary last kiss. Beric no longer remembers the color of his betrothed’s hair.
The Brotherhood called on the Lord of Light to judge Sandor by combat. Sandor wins, and Harwin takes the victory as an acquittal. Sandor then admits again that he killed Mycah. Beric’s return makes the night stranger without resolving what the fight supposedly proved. Martin lets Arya see a man stand who had taken a sword blow that reached his breastbone. The men who called for judgment still have to tell her what they think that means.
The two faiths eventually share a ship. When Moqorro treats Victarion Greyjoy’s wounded hand, Victarion decides he has two gods. Moqorro calls the Drowned God a demon. The alliance works for Victarion precisely because he can credit a new power without surrendering the one he already serves. Moqorro’s allegiance admits no such addition.
The gods that cross the Narrow Sea
The Mother of the Seven and Mother Rhoyne both have worshippers in Dorne. In the chapter called “The Queen Maker,” the Orphans of the Greenblood carry the latter faith in song. When Yandry and Ysilla appear in A Dance with Dragons, the direction is reversed. They were born on the Greenblood and have come back to the river their people remember as their mother. The tradition has survived the distance between two rivers, and it gives the couple a reason to travel back across it.
Braavos tests the idea of religious territory in another way. On her way to the House of Black and White, Arya passes the Moonsingers’ temple, having heard from Denyo what the city owes them. The pale weirwood and black ebony doors of the House of Black and White share a carved face that reminds her of Winterfell. Inside she sees a great black goat among the statues. Later, the Kindly Man teaches her that the Black Goat of Qohor, the Lion of Night of Yi Ti, and the Stranger of Westeros are names for the same god. That is what the Faceless Men teach. The other communities have their own ways of speaking about the figures he gathers into one house.
In Meereen’s fighting pit, Daenerys has time to think of three sets of gods before Drogon roars in her face. She remembers the heavens and hells named by Westerosi septons, imagines riding with Drogo in the horse god’s starry khalasar, then wonders whether the gods of Ghis will send their harpies for her. Earlier in the book she had walked past the images of those gods on her way to marry Hizdahr. With the dragon’s jaws open in front of her, Dany weighs the possibilities in the order her life has given them to her. One would bring her back to Drogo. In another, the dead queen would have to answer to the gods of the city where she stands.
Sources
George R. R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire, Bantam e-book editions. Publisher’s series page. Roman numerals indicate a character’s chapter sequence within the book. Chapters with their own titles are listed by title.
A Game of Thrones — Catelyn I, Jon VI, and Daenerys V and VII.
A Clash of Kings — Davos I, for the public introduction of Melisandre’s faith at Dragonstone.
A Storm of Swords — Davos III, Daenerys I, Arya VI–VII, and Bran IV.
A Feast for Crows — “The Prophet,” Arya I, “The Queen Maker,” Brienne V, “The Drowned Man,” Cersei VI, “Cat of the Canals,” and Cersei X.
A Dance with Dragons — Tyrion IV and VII, Bran III, Jaime I, Daenerys VII and IX, “The Iron Suitor,” and “Victarion.”
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