“I’m the lord of the Vale,
and the lord of the Vale is a very important person.”
The House Arryn sigil
is a flying white falcon and a crescent moon,
over a blue field.
So everything about this sigil reminds us the house is high up,
both in spirit and in its literal location.
The Arryn seat, the Eyrie, is located on top of the Mountains of the Moon.
"The Eyrie.
They say it's impregnable.”
"Give me ten good men and some climbing spikes,
and I'll impregnate the bitch."
And likewise, in its attitude, Arryn is the lofty house
defined by its noble ideals of honor and virtue.
“Life is more elegant here.”
When the show begins,
we’re told that Jon Arryn, Robert Baratheon’s Hand of the King,
has died,
and Ned Stark is deeply upset.
“I know he was like a father to you.”
If Lord Arryn was the father figure whom
the staunchly moral Ned Stark looked up to,
“The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.”
then we can only imagine how idealistic and moral Jon himself was.
“The Hand was loved by all.”
The death of this revered character
is what sets off the whole chain of events
we witness in Game of Thrones.
“I loved that man.
We both did.”
“He never had to teach you much, but me?
You remember me at 16?”
After Arryn dies, Robert comes to Winterfell
to ask Ned to be his new Hand;
meanwhile the suspicious circumstances that surround Jon’s death
foreshadow that something foul is rising.
“Why kill him?”
“He started asking questions.”
Since Jon is presented as this faultless beacon of integrity,
the story begins by signaling to us that HONOR ITSELF is under attack.
Entering Game of Thrones’ final season,
House Arryn’s region the Vale is ruled by Jon Arryn’s young son, Robin,
who’s kind of an off little boy.
“Mommy, is that a bad man?”
The house has declared allegiance to King in the North Jon Snow,
“King in the North!”
but now that Jon has bent the knee to Daenerys,
the Vale presumably serves House Targaryen.
However it plays out,
the powerful Knights of the Vale could make a difference in battles to come.
As we saw, they saved the day in the Battle of the Bastards.
So let’s look closer at the Arryn symbols to understand what this house tells us
about honor, idealism, and why it can be a problem to remain above it all.
“Does Winterfell have a Moon Door?”
“No, I'm afraid not.
It's not high up in the mountains.
It's down on the ground.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
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House Arryn’s words are “as high as honor.”
This motto sparks an immediate question –
can any mere mortal reach so high as honor itself?
This somewhat impossible claim gives us
a hint that the Arryns are extremely proud people.
“Calm, proud…
a world of high honor undisturbed by armies and men of low birth.”
One source of their pride comes from the fact that
they can trace their ancestry all the way back to the Andals.
“Through their veins runs the blood of the oldest Andal nobility in Westeros.
But through their veins runs an even older folly –
that blood matters.”
And their boastful motto betrays that this house
is a little arrogant about its virtue –
the point of honor shouldn’t really be to feed one’s pride
or announce to the world how honorable one is.
High up on the Eyrie, the Arryns might forget
that even if their setting looks like heaven,
that doesn’t make them gods, superior to the rest of their fellow humans.
House Stark is also defined by its honor, yet its words are,
“Winter is coming.”
So that tells us that the Starks display honor not in their words but in their actions.
They walk the walk, while the Arryns talk the talk.
“My Lady, I beg the honor.
Let me be your champion.”
“The honor should be mine.
For the love I bore your Lord husband, let me avenge his death.”
“I’ll fight for you, my Lady.”
And at times, the Arryns’ tendency to put on a show of honor
can get in their way,
as we see in Tyrion’s trial by combat
after he’s wrongly accused of trying to kill Bran Stark.
Tyrion’s champion Bronn freely uses crafty and unscrupulous fighting tactics,
and that’s why he carries the day over the Vale’s Ser Vardis.
“You don’t fight with honor.”
“No, he did.”
Meanwhile, for all we hear of the honorable Jon Arryn,
there’s a striking disconnect between the house’s reputation
and what we actually see of the Vale on the show.
“He killed your father.
He murdered the Hand of the King.”
“Oh, and I’ll kill him too.”
Presumably, when Jon was alive, this House did embody its high ideals,
but by the time of the War of the Five Kings,
its values have been corrupted under the leadership of Jon’s wife Lysa.
“Is this how justice is done in the Vale?
You accuse me of crimes.
I deny them.
So you throw me into a cell to freeze and starve.”
Lysa is a Tully by birth, and the sister of Catelyn Stark,
but the Arryn environment has evidently not made her noble.
“Open the Moon Door.”
Instead, it has fed her arrogance and sense of superiority
without teaching her that true honor must be earned.
We eventually learn that Lysa betrays her most honorable husband
(Ned Stark’s role model),
for the most cartoonishly dishonorable man in the story,
Petyr Baelish a.k.a. Littlefinger.
“You gave me those drops and told me to pour them into Jon’s wine.
My husband’s wine…
And you told me to write a letter to Cat…”
Seduced by Littlefinger, Lysa killed her husband
and then wrote to her sister to accuse the Lannisters of his murder.
“It says Jon Arryn was murdered… by the Lannisters.”
It seems odd that this woman links these two men
who are total opposites on the morality spectrum.
Her marriage to Jon was actually arranged
to unify the Arryn and Tully houses during Robert’s Rebellion,
just as Catelyn’s marriage to Ned was arranged
to bring together the Tully and Stark houses.
While Ned’s and Catelyn’s union did grow into a mutual love and respect,
Lysa didn't love Jon.
“She confessed to me she never loved Lord Arryn.”
The fact that the real object of her affections
is the despicable Littlefinger symbolizes that,
while it retains the high-minded rhetoric,
House Arryn been penetrated by dishonor and become rotten to its core.
“A successful courtship would make Lord Baelish acting Lord of the Vale.”
“Titles do seem to breed titles.”
So we might read the Arryns as representing both good and bad versions of pride.
“My father, my husband, my sister, they all stood between us
and now they're all dead.
That's what happens to people who stand between Petyr and me.”
Ultimately, though, Lysa’s fate reinforces the importance of true honor
because it illustrates that you reap what you sow.
If you engage in betrayal and deceit,
“I lied for you, I killed for you…”
this is what comes back around to you.
“I have only loved one woman…
only one my entire life…
your sister.”
As in the end, the flattering Littlefinger proves as faithless to Lysa as she was to
Jon.
“You pushed her through the Moon Door and watched her fall.
Do you deny it?”
“I did it to protect you.”
“You did it to take power in the Vale.”
Meanwhile Littlefinger’s own treachery finally comes back to bite him as well.
“You had Aunt Lysa send a letter to our parents
telling them it was the Lannisters who murdered Jon Arryn
when really it was you.”
The Arryn house colors, blue and white,
evoke the sky.
In the books the Arryn blue is distinctly sky-blue.
So this imagery associates Arryn with the space above the earth,
with the heavens themselves.
And the House feels removed
from the earthly concerns and conflicts of the rest of the realm.
“The arrogance of isolation.”
For much of the War of the Five Kings, House Arryn has acted “above it all”
as Lysa claims neutrality despite her sister’s pleas for help.
“Knights of the Vale will stay in the Vale,
where they belong,
to protect their Lord.”
Of course we come to learn this claim is hypocritical,
as Lysa helped start all of this trouble and she’s never been “neutral” by any
means.
“The conflict between the Starks and the Lannisters,
it was you who started it.”
And during Robert’s Rebellion,
Jon Arryn did not hide behind any excuse of isolationism.
“I doubt Jon Arryn had even prepared for civil war when he raised his banners
instead of handing over his young wards,
Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon, to the mad king.”
“Honor demanded and Lord Arryn obeyed.”
So this tells us that its isolationist instincts
do not represent House Arryn’s better nature.
Blue is associated with consciousness, intellect, and calm tranquility,
and the majestic Eyrie captures this mood.
The color has connotations of loyalty and truth,
the qualities that Jon Arryn was known for.
When he died, he was investigating the true parentage of Cersei’s three children,
not content to accept the lie that Robert was their father
and that’s why his final words were about Robert’s black-haired genes.
“The seed is strong.”
White is associated with innocence, faith, purity, and cleanliness,
again getting at the house’s aspirations of nobility.
In fact, blue and white together
are the two colors most associated with the Virgin Mary.
So its colors link the Arryns to virtue,
but this righteous image can yield a false piety,
as we’ve seen with Lysa.
And the house’s constant looking toward the sky
can also make the house feel out of touch with the common folk.
When Tyrion is leaving the Vale, he meets the region’s Hill Tribes,
who are the opposite of the Arryn image in every way –
they’re uncivilized, mercenary, savage fighters.
"They do seem rather ferocious."
"Ferocious?
Last night, a Moon Brother stabbed a Stone Crow over a sausage.”
The Lannisters, on Tyrion’s initiative,
leveraged these tribes’ dissatisfaction under House Arryn
“I give you this.”
“What is this?”
“The Vale of Arryn.”
and channel their fighting power on the battlefield.
So we sense that the Arryn’s superior attitude can make their rule in the Vale insecure.
There’s even an implication that a sky-minded life
can make people go a little crazy.
“She's changed.
She was always a bit touched, but now…”
The Lysa we meet is oblivious and delusional,
unable to see Littlefinger’s blatant manipulation
and lack of love for her.
“I do think we can wait until –“
“I’m done waiting, Petyr.”
Evidently, living up in the clouds, removed from reality,
can take its toll on the mind.
What wife would trust you the way I trusted you?”
House Arryn’s animal is the white Falcon.
“A falcon!”
“A gyrfalcon.
The greatest and rarest of birds.”
Their family history says that Ser Artys Arryn, known as the Winged Knight,
rode on a huge falcon to conquer the Vale
“Ser Artys Arryn, the Andal general, flew on the back of a falcon
and slew the Gryffin king on top of the tallest mountain.”
The Falcon builds its nest very high up to protect its vulnerable young
and likewise, Lysa Arryn is obsessed with protecting her son.
She spoils and infantilizes her little Robin,
“Shh shh shh, my sweet boy.
He’s just trying to frighten us.”
as symbolized by her breastfeeding the boy for many years beyond his infancy.
“Feeding him from her own teats when he was 10 years old.”
In the books, we learn that Lysa has lost a number of other babies,
so this sheds some light on
why she’s paranoid about her only child’s safety.
(And, in fact, it’s not that crazy to want to hide your young away
out of reach in this world
where anyone with a claim to power
should fear that their children will be mercilessly attacked.
“Of course, I fear for the safety of my son.
Are you an idiot?”
As the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid…
[Singing] “Don’t mean they aren’t after you.”
All the same, Robin is ruined by overprotection.
“She loved her son so much, she became overprotective.
He needs to learn how to swing a sword.
How to ride a horse.”
He’s weak and unskilled at fighting,
“Lord Arryn will never be a great warrior.”
“Great warrior?
He swings a sword like a girl with palsy.”
and seems intellectually stunted, too.
[Shouting] “Make the bird man fly!”
The falcon is a bird of prey,
just as the Knights of the Vale are a skilled, impressive army.
Arryn’s fearsome bird reminds us that the house’s beautiful appearances
mask a deadliness.
The Arryns use their height as a weapon.
“Look down!
Look down!”
They put Tyrion into a Sky Cell
where he's terrified of falling asleep and rolling over the edge,
adding an element of psychological torture to the usual stress of being a prisoner.
And the Arryns kill people through their Moon Door.
While it may appear more elegant
to throw someone through a scenic hole in the floor,
instead of chopping off their head,
this is in fact an especially gruesome and inhumane way to kill someone
due to the terror of the long fall before the victim’s life actually ends.
“Do you know how far the fall is?”
“No.”
“Neither do I precisely.
Hundreds of feet.”
Thus the Moon Door captures a key aspect of Arryn.
This House is stunningly beautiful,
so high up above our normal world it feels almost supernatural.
Yet behind this enchanting exterior there’s a treacherous, lethal temperament.
“It’s fascinating what happens to bodies when they hit the rocks from such a height.
The impact breaks them right apart.
Like eggs dropped on the floor.”
Arryn’s symbol is a falcon volant, which means the bird is mid-flight.
Due to its amazingly high location,
the Eyrie is nearly impossible to capture,
at least without a very powerful bird or dragons.
Even during Aegon Targaryen’s War of Conquest, the Eyrie wasn’t technically taken.
House Arryn bent the knee peacefully,
knowing they couldn’t fight off the Targaryens indefinitely.
So we might interpret the falcon volant to represent
the glory of Arryn’s uninterrupted rule in the Vale, which takes no rest.
This image also makes us think of the way that the Arryns are not grounded,
but permanently removed from everyone else’s earth.
Arryn is the only Great House besides House Targaryen
whose sigil features an animal capable of flight.
This gives them a tactical advantage –
they can perceive a bigger picture and see a longer game than others can.
Like the Targaryens with their dragons,
House Arryn almost feels like it has something magical about it.
The views from the Moon Door or Sky Cell
are presumably just of the ground from very high up,
but they feel like they commune with some transcendental, mysterious power.
For all the perils of living so high up,
this does offer an unusual, truly gorgeous perspective.
Through the shadow of Jon Arryn,
Game of Thrones emphasizes that having a code of honor
is as crucial as it is perilous.
“Jon Arryn and Ned Stark were good men.
Honorable men.
But they disdained the game and those who played.”
Honor gives purpose to one’s life,
but blind honor, which refuses the council of intelligent strategy,
can lead to an early grave.
“Afterall, the Vale’s isolation does breed an abundance
of honor and pious bleating,
which governs their decisions instead of foresight.”
Still, even if he died prematurely, Jon Arryn lived the life of a deeply good
man,
“Lord Arryn was a kind and trusting man.” and he gave the people 17 years of peace.
We know that’s no small feat given this crowd.
So making honor your target,
aspiring to reach its heights even if you must fall short,
yields worthy contributions.
And as Ned Stark points out,
to some, honor does mean more than a long, cosy life…
“Do you think my life is some precious thing to me?
That I would trade my honor for a few more years?”
We must always be careful when climbing a mountain,
lest we fall,
or end up “touched” after spending too long with our heads up in the clouds
“I'm Lord of the Vale.
When I grow up, I'll be able to fight anybody who bothers me.”
Yet in the end, we can take inspiration from the true Arryn
who strives for an impossible standard of goodness –
to live as “as high as honor” itself.
“Lord Arryn gave wise and prudent advice, but I fear His Grace doesn't always listen.”
“Hi guys, it’s Susannah and Debra.
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