Euron Greyjoy's apocalypse in the Game of Thrones books

In the Game of Thrones TV show, Euron Greyjoy is a violent shit-talking pirate who wants to “fuck the queen” and rule the world. But in the book series, Euron’s a totally different character – he’s a scary manipulative murderer, a charismatic politician, and a psychedelic sorcerer hungry for apocalyptic power. He’s got a magic dragon horn, and warlock “slaves”, and Valyrian steel armour.

He’s connected to the mysterious magic of Bloodraven, the Faceless Men, and Valyria. Euron doesn’t just want a throne, he wants cosmic eldritch power, and plans a blasphemous blood sacrifice to make himself a Lovecraftian god. The fan community, especially Poor Quentyn, theorise that Euron will bring apocalypse to Westeros.

At the start of the story, Balon Greyjoy rules the Iron Islands. He rebels against the Iron Throne, and declares the Islands his own separate kingdom – his daughter Asha and his son Theon attack the north. Balon also has three brothers.

Victarion is a warrior – he’s strong and loyal and kinda stupid . Aeron is a priest of the Drwned God. He used to be a party boy, until he was born again as a religious man.

And then there’s Euron Crow’s Eye. Euron was exiled from the Islands years ago, and has since been sailing far-distant seas in his infamous pirate ship, the Silence – its crew are mutes, with their tongues ripped out. Its sails are black, and its decks are painted red to hide the blood that soaks them.

The Silence is feared all across the east, from Ib to Asshai. But Euron doesn’t appear in the story right away – he’s introduced slowly, like the monster in a horror movie, with just rumours and memories to build tension and mystery – “men say terrible things” of Euron Greyjoy. Victarion and Aeron hate and fear Euron – Aeron thinks “the storm is coming”, “and its name is Euron Crow’s Eye”.

In Book 3, King Balon suddenly dies – he falls to his death from a bridge on Pyke. And the very next day, Euron returns after years away, and claims Balon’s throne. It’s very suspicious, so Asha thinks that Euron murdered Balon.

In the TV show, Euron does straight up murder Balon, but in the books it’s more complicated. Arya meets a witch called “the ghost of High Heart”, who makes a bunch of accurate predictions and prophecies. And the witch sees “a man without a face” on a bridge that sways and swings.

On his shoulder perches “a drowned crow with seaweed hanging from his wings”. Presumably, the “man without a face” is an assassin of the Faceless Men, and the “drowned crow” is Euron “Crow’s Eye” – meaning that Euron hired a Faceless Man to kill Balon. Hiring a Faceless assassin is expensive, especially if the target is an important person, like King Balon.

But it’s implied that you can pay the Faceless Men with something other than money, if you sacrifice something that’s important to you. Euron claims that he once had a dragon egg. He tried to make it hatch, but got frustrated, and threw the egg in the sea.

Drgon eggs are super valuable and rare, so would Euron really throw one away? Some fans believe that Euron actually gave the egg to the Faceless Men as payment – so that they would throw Balon in the sea. One way or another, Euron secretly hired a magical assassin to murder his own brother.

But publicly, he hides his evil behind a charismatic persona. The real Euron is “hidden”, which is symbolised by Euron’s eyepatch. His right eye is described as his “smiling eye”, the charming, swaggering, magnanimous side.

But the eye behind his eyepatch is his “blood eye”, where he hides his full cruelty and sorcery and ambition. By the time the ironborn see Euron’s true face, it’s too late. After King Balon dies, the ironborn hold a “kingsmoot” to choose a new king.

And Euron uses a combination of politics, murder, and swag[yolo] to win the [driftwood] crown. He rolls up in his infamous ship the Silence, with an entourage of “mutes”, “monsters” and “wizards” from the east. He hands out treasure from his years of piracy, bribing some rivals , and murdering others.

He makes grandiose speeches about how badass he is – how he’s raided, raped and looted all over the world , which is the kind of thing the ironborn respect [as qualifications for office]. In his election speech, Euron says he’ll make the Iron Islands great again, evoking their glorious past as “conquerors”. He shows off his magic horn, Drgonbinder, and says it has the power to bind dragons to his will.

Euron plans to sail across the world to Meereen, and to steal Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons, and use them to take over Westeros. It’s a totally crazy plan, so naturally the ironborn love it, and make Euron their king. Euron leads the ironborn to conquer some nearby islands, cementing his power by giving them some glory.

But privately, Euron doesn’t care about these islands, or the ironborn – he cares only about himself, and everyone else is just a means to an end. Euron wants “The world”, he wants dragons and “Woe”. And he wants to marry Daenerys – “When the kraken weds the dragon … let all the world beware”.

So Euron sends his brother Victarion with Drgonbinder to fetch Daenerys. Victarion hates Euron because years ago, Euron had sex with Victarion’s wife. Then, because of Victarion’s fucked-up male pride, Victarion beat his wife to death – this is why Euron was exiled.

So Victarion agrees to sail east, but he secretly plans to take Daenerys for himself, as revenge for Euron taking his wife. But Euron knows all about Victarion’s resentment, and he exploits these feelings to manipulate Victarion. Victarion’s like a “puppet” – “blind to the tentacles that grasp” him.

So he’ll probably fail to outsmart Euron. We’re told that Drgonbinder brings dragons not the person who blows the horn, but to the horn’s true “master” – and Euron is the master here. So one way or another, it looks likely that Victarion will die so that Euron can get at Daenerys – Euron might steal the dragon Viserion, like the Night King does in the TV show.

So this is how Euron operates – he exploits peoples’ hopes and fears to make them his slaves in his quest for power and woe. Euron uses and abuses his family, and his people – and now he wants the world. But how did Euron Greyjoy, an ironborn reaver, become obsessed with dragons and world domination?

How did Euron become the “Crow’s Eye”? Euron says that when he was a boy, he dreamed that he could fly. When he woke, his maester said he couldn’t fly.

But what if he lied? Maybe we all can fly. “How will we … know unless we leap from some tall tower?

”. This story is almost identical to how Bran Stark discovers magic. When Bran is a boy, he falls from a tall tower.

Then he dreams that he can fly – the “three-eyed crow” visits his dream, and opens Bran’s third eye to his magic. When Bran wakes up, he can’t fly, his maester says he can’t learn magic. But the maester is wrong, and Bran learns magic from the three-eyed crow, aka Bloodraven, who is way creepier in the books.

So these flying dream stories are too similar to be a coincidence – Bloodraven is called three-eyed crow, and Euron is called the Crow’s Eye. Bloodraven has “one red eye”, and Euron’s sigil is one red eye, with crows. So the theory goes that Euron, like Bran, was visited in his dreams by the three-eyed crow.

In Bran’s dream, he sees “the bones of a thousand other dreamers”. So it looks like Bloodraven has tried out a bunch of potential students, but most failed or died. Maybe Euron was one of those students.

Maybe when Bloodraven visited Euron’s dreams, he saw how crazy and cruel Euron is, and decided not to teach him magic. But the damage was done – Euron went rogue with his third eye opened. Bloodraven and Bran are greenseers, with the power to skinchange – to enter the mind of another creature.

We don’t know if Euron has that power, but it would make sense if he did. Cause Euron gives Victarion a mute “dusky woman” to go east with him, and fans speculate that she’s spying for Euron – like maybe Euron is skinchanging into her from afar, to see what Victarion’s up to. Skinchanging a human is seen as an evil abominable act – so it’s exactly the sort of thing Euron might do.

Skinchanging might also explain how Euron controls his mute crew on the Silence – like, how else could you co-ordinate the crew of a ship if they can’t talk? And skinchanging isn’t just a Stark thing – we’re told that some ironborn skinchange into sea creatures. So Euron might just be a skinchanger.

Bran and Bloodraven can also magically enter peoples’ dreams – and after Euron says he’ll marry Daenerys, Daenerys has a creepy sex dream of a man with “blue” “bruised” lips – Euron has blue bruised lips because of a drug he takes, so that’s probably him in her dream. Euron also enters Aeron’s dream, later on. So it’s just speculation, but Euron might secretly have the magic powers of a greenseer.

Either way, a visit from the three-eye crow could explain Euron’s motivations. In Bran’s flying dream, he sees “The whole world” “spread out below him” – he sees Winterfell and Asshai, sees dragons, and “the heart of winter”. Maybe Euron saw the same things – and when he saw dragons and magic and the whole world spread below him, he wanted it all.

Euron tasted godlike magic power, and will stop at nothing to get more. Euron travels to some of the most magic and mysterious places in the world. He says he “sailed to Asshai by the Shadow”, right at the edge of the map, and saw “wonders and terrors beyond imagining”.

Lots of the most powerful sorcerers in the story learned magic in Asshai – Melisandre, Quaithe, Marwyn, Mirri Maz Duur. Asshai is like Hogwarts for edgelords – full of “shadowbinders” and “bloodmages” casting dark spells in the night”. And right by Asshai is Stygai, the mysterious “heart of darkness” where even shadowbinders fear to tread – maybe Euron dared to enter the “corpse city”, and found some evil power there.

Euron also says he sailed to Valyria – the smoking demon-haunted ruins of the ancient dragonlords. People say it’s impossible to visit Valyria and survive, but Euron does have that Valyrian steel armour and that Valyrian horn. The old Valyrian empire used dragons and slavery to conquer the world – which might have inspired Euron to do the same thing.

So it seems that after Euron dreamed he could fly, he travelled the world in search of magic power, and developed his ambitions for world domination. And at some point, Euron captured some warlocks from Qarth. The warlocks had just been defeated by Daenerys, and they were out to get revenge.

But Euron captured them, and took their shade of the evening. Shade of the evening is a psychedelic drug, that gives visions of pasts and futures. Euron gets really into the shade, to the point where it stains his lips blue and bruised.

Euron says the shade opens his eyes, that there’s “more truth in it than all the gods of earth”. Euron believes that gods and morality are lies – and he commits horrific crimes just to prove that no god can stop him. It’s revealed that Euron murdered three of his own brothers – as well as Balon, he killed Harlon and Robin Greyjoy when they were young.

The ironborn see kinslaying as the most evil crime. So after Euron choked the life from Harlon, he “pissed into the sea”, waiting for a god to strike him down, and “None did”. “gods are lies”, he says, and “Men are meat” – by breaking the laws of gods and men, Euron feels like a god himself.

So Euron constantly mocks and perverts everything that people believe in – he kinslays, blasphemes, breaks every taboo just cause he can. It turns out that the reason why Aeron is so afraid of Euron is that when they were young, Euron sexually abused him. Euron says he taught Aeron how to pray, cause Aeron would pray in terror when Euron came to “visit” in the night.

Euron learned that sadistic cruelty gets him worship. When he terrorises the east in the Silence, murdering and raping, men “pray”. And so, Euron says, he is ”the godliest man ever to raise sail”.

If “All gods are lies”, Euron decides to become his own god. And to become a god, he needs blood. The Forsaken is a chapter from the upcoming Winds of Winter, read at a convention by George Martin – and it’s one of the darkest most terrifying chapters in the series.

Euron imprisons Aeron, and tortures him physically and psychologically. He forces him to drink shade of the evening, and Aeron has nightmarish visions of dead brothers and dead gods. Euron appears and says “These are the last days, when the world shall be broken and remade.

A new god shall be born from the graves and charnel pits”. Euron’s hidden “blood eye” is finally revealed, in all its horror and ambition – “I am your king”, he says. “I am your god”.

After the vision, we see Euron imprisoning priests of all different religions – as well as Aeron, he has priests of the Seven, with their tongues ripped out. He has a red priest, with a burned-off face. He rips the legs off a warlock.

And he has this girl Falia – Euron seduces her, and impregnates her, and says she’ll be his wife, and she’s happy and excited, but then Euron rips out her tongue. Euron ties Falia and Aeron and the priests to the front of his ships, as Euron and the ironborn sail into battle against an enemy fleet. “blood is power” – in this world there’s magic in death and sacrifice – so Euron plans a blasphemous massacre of unimaginable scale.

This battle will kill his imprisoned priests, and his brother, and kill Falia and their unborn child, it’ll kill the enemy fleet, and his own fleet in a catastrophic orgy of death – Aeron dreams of ironborn ships “burning on a boiling blood-red sea”. This carnage might “summon krakens from the deep” – In Aeron’s vision, krakens come at Euron’s command. And we’re told that krakens can be drawn to the water’s surface by blood – these visions show a blood-red sea.

But Euron wants this massacre to make him a god. He knows that death and fear give him power and prayers. He knows there’s magic in the “holy blood” of priests, and in the king’s blood of his unborn child.

This battle is a giant blood magic ritual – Euron will gorge on the deaths of thousands, to transform into a terrible godlike being – Moqorro sees “A tall and twisted thing with one black eye and ten long arms, sailing on a sea of blood”. Aeron sees Euron as “no longer human”, “more squid than man”, “his face a mass of writhing tentacles” – so basically Cthulhu. Maybe the Drwned God that the ironborn worship is actually an eldritch monster, and Euron’s blood sacrifice will wake it from ageless slumber.

Or maybe Euron really did throw that dragon egg into the sea, and all this magic blood will make it hatch into a monstrous sea dragon. There is all sorts of crazy scary imagery here, and it’s not clear what exactly will happen – but there will be death and horror and blood which Euron thinks will give him the godlike power to break and remake the world. And it’s hinted that he’ll use this power against the city of Oldtown.

Euron’s close to Oldtown now, and his ironborn have been raiding towards the city. Melisandre has a vision of “towers by the sea, submerged beneath a black and bloody tide”, “rising from the depths”. It makes sense that Euron would want Oldtown, because it’s full of secret magic.

Oldtown’s Hightower is built on an ancient foundation of strange black stone, which some say was built by a Lovecraftian fish people called Deep Ones, which connects to the Cthulhu stuff. Oldtown has the Citadel, the university of the maesters, which holds magic Valyrian artefacts called glass candles. A Faceless Man just infiltrated the Citadel, possibly searching for a secret “blood-soaked tome” called “The Death of Drgons”.

The city is ruled by Leyton Hightower and his Mad Maid, who for the last ten years have stayed in the Hightower, “consulting books of spells”, possibly to “raise an army from the deep”. Oldtown is a powder-keg of dormant magic powers just waiting to explode into an eldritch clusterfuck – and Euron’s coming for it with a lit match, “sailing on a sea of blood”. And the most dangerous power in Oldtown, the one that could spark apocalypse, might be in the hands of Sam Tarly.

In the books, there are legends of the Horn of Winter, an ancient artefact with the power to destroy the Wall. Mance Rayder claims to have the Horn, but that turns out to be fake. So “where is the true horn?

” In Book 2, Jon finds an old horn. He gives it to Sam, who takes it to Oldtown. Sam and Jon don’t think this horn’s important, but the books keep subtly reminding us that Sam has it.

So fans suspect that Sam’s horn at Oldtown is the Horn of Winter, with the power to bring down the Wall, and let the white walkers in. Euron might want the white walker apocalypse – he says wants to break the world, and the Forsaken chapter’s full of apocalyptic imagery. Euron may have learned about the white walkers in his flying dream, just like when Bran sees “the heart of winter” “at the end of the world”.

It’s said the white walkers will bring a Long Night that never ends. And Euron’s often described in terms of night and darkness – his hair is black as a “midnight sea”, his sails are black as a “starless sky”, he says “we shall feast before the fall of night”. At the kingsmoot, Euron’s dragon horn sounds three times – at the Night’s Watch, three horn blasts means white walkers are coming.

Euron may be the harbinger of apocalypse. According to eastern legend, the first Long Night was caused by the Bloodstone Emperor. And this ancient Emperor is very similar to Euron.

The Emperor murdered his older sibling to take her throne – just like Euron murders Balon for his throne. The Emperor practiced “dark arts”, “torture”, slavery, and cannibalism, just like Euron practices dark arts, torture, slavery and cannibalism. The Emperor “cast down the true gods”, like Euron mocks and attack the gods.

And the Emperor worshipped a creepy black stone – just like the ironborn throne, and the Hightower foundation, and the city of Asshai are all made of creepy black stone. --The Bloodstone Emperor married a “tiger-woman”(? ), which might be kind of like Euron wanting to marry the dragon-woman Daenerys.

The sister who the Emperor usurped was called the Amethyst Empress, and as Euron points out, Daenerys’ “eyes are amethysts”. Euron’s hidden eye is called his “blood eye”, which fits with the Bloodstone Emperor. So there are lots of strong connections between Euron and the Bloodstone Emperor, the guy who caused the first Long Night, when the walkers came for the first time.

It’s all happening again. Rodrik the Reader warns that “history is a wheel”, and “What has happened before will … happen again”. Euron is the Bloodstone Emperor reborn, a figure so addicted to power and blasphemy that he’ll bring darkness to the world.

Fan theorist Poor Quentyn writes that Euron will climb the Hightower in Oldtown – another “tall tower” – and will sound the Horn of Winter, breaking the Wall, bringing the Night, and sparking the apocalypse. And after the storm, there’ll be silence. The Game of Thrones book series is called A Song of Ice and Fire – lots of Martin’s stories are named after songs, because songs to him represent life and love and memory.

Euron represents the opposite of a song – he is silence. His ship is named Silence, he makes people mutes, he silences his brothers with shame, trauma and murder. He brings literal silence – the first time he enters the story, “a sudden silence” falls, and when he leaves, silence lingers.

Euron’s apocalyptic ambitions threaten to silence the song of ice and fire itself. And sure, the white walkers are the true danger – but it’s Euron who’ll unleash them. Which means the white walkers aren’t just a magical fantasy threat – it’s more like climate change, a threat that humans bring onto themselves.

Book 2 and Book 3 in the series are called A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords, because they’re about war – five kings fight to control Westeros, and thousands of people die for them. But all of these kings die or fail, so what did the war achieve? Book 4 explores the aftermath of war, and it’s called A Feast for Crows – cause in the end, the only people who benefit from all the death and chaos are the outlaws and opportunists, the monsters and betrayers who exploit the war for their own gain – like crows feasting on the corpse of Westeros.

The Bloody Mummers raid and rape, Lady Stoneheart murders for vengeance, Littlefinger and the Boltons take over kingdoms – and Euron Greyjoy arises. “Westeros is dying”, he says. “Those who follow me shall feast until the end of their days”.

Euron Crow’s Eye is the Crow of the book’s title – an embodiment of all of the greed cruelty and pride that drives all the conflict of the series. Cause like any politician, Euron isn’t dangerous by himself – we never see him swing a sword, or cast a spell, [he just takes drugs and talks shit]. Euron’s powerful because people are scared and ignorant and greedy enough to follow him – the people chose him at the kingsmoot, the dark lord was democratically elected.

His evil is our evil, his power comes from the fear hope and hate inside of us – that’s how he manipulates his family, his people, and the world, that’s how Westeros is reduced to corpses and crows. So Euron’s story isn’t just about dragons and krakens – though those bits will be fucken sick – it’s also about how real human impulses lead us all into self-destruction, and silence. So tl;dr, that goofy pirate on the dragon show who talks about fingers in bums is actually the most scary smart magical mysterious evil motherfucker in Westeros – but we’ll have to wait for the next book to see what happens next.

George pls. Come on George. If you wanna truly appreciate the message and mysteries of this story, you’ve got to check out the books.

As well as the main series, there’s the worldbook, and Fire and Blood, and the Dunk and Egg stories – and you can get any one of these on audiobook for free right now by signing up for a trial with Audible. Members get an audiobook each month, and if you cancel, you keep the audiobooks. You can listen in the car or the gym or while you sail from Ib to Asshai.

Sign up at audible. com/asx. Many thanks to the artists – links are all below, and check out the linked essays and videos for more on Euron.

This video topic was chosen by supporters on Patreon – thanks to Patrons Nolan Strout, Kenneth Weeks, Jess Simpson, John Padgett, Michele Canevarolo, Scarlett Farrokh, and Tímo. Cheers.