Jump to content

Arthur Dayne's features


Vaedys Targaryen

Recommended Posts

I'm not quite sure if this belongs here, but I'm just wondering, do we know what Arthur Dayne looked like? Like what his hair colour, eye colour and skin colour are? Because almost all fanart of him depicts him with dark hair, purple eyes and somewhat pale skin, inarguably because of Ashara Dayne, his sister, but I don't recall ever reading a description of him, which allows for a wide interpretation of him.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It is speculation that the family has prototypically Valyrian features, because of Ashara. I've always imagined the Daynes to be pre-dragon Valyrians who in very ancient times travelled west on the quest that led them to Starfall, since family bloodline traits hold up so well on Planetos (has anyone come up with a better name for the world?), but that's all strictly speculation around Ashara's features, which might be the result of something as trivial as some Lysene noblewoman having been the wife of a Dayne a couple generations ago. Or, indeed, perhaps they are from ancient Valyria. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Turandokht said:

It is speculation that the family has prototypically Valyrian features, because of Ashara. I've always imagined the Daynes to be pre-dragon Valyrians who in very ancient times travelled west on the quest that led them to Starfall, since family bloodline traits hold up so well on Planetos (has anyone come up with a better name for the world?), but that's all strictly speculation around Ashara's features, which might be the result of something as trivial as some Lysene noblewoman having been the wife of a Dayne a couple generations ago. Or, indeed, perhaps they are from ancient Valyria. 

Aren't the Daynes suspected to be twice as old as Old Valyria? Dawn and Starfall are said to be 10.000 years old right? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

19 minutes ago, Ethelarion said:

Aren't the Daynes suspected to be twice as old as Old Valyria? Dawn and Starfall are said to be 10.000 years old right? 

Well, we may assume the Valyrian ethnos is much older than Old Valyria as a city-state and Empire. But to be honest, I don't consider any time before the Rhoynish landing in Westeros to actually be reliable, because there isn't any cross-dating possible before that point--at that point, we have Westerosi, Rhoynish and Valyrian sources in concurrence, as far as I can tell. It's just like how until we could compare Assyrian/Babylonian diplomatic records with the Egyptian Pharaoh's list and sync the calendar calculations, we didn't actually know when anything older than roughly Herodotus had happened with any reliability at all.

 

As far as I am concerned, there isn't a plausible way to make Westerosi dates before Nymeria's seaborne Rhoynar Völkerwanderung remotely reliable, and that's held out in numerous sources. Maesters and others variously date the Andal Invasions to 6000 b.p., 4000 b.p. and 2000 b.p! I note that it's said the Andals were driven out by the expansion of Valyria by the Maesters, and personally I think the Andal invasion was indeed driven by the rise of Valyria, and Valyria is probably only circa 2,500 years old as a major power, so the Andal invasion is the 2000 b.p. date, and the Daynes may have settled in Dorne as recently as 3,000 b.p. Broadly speaking, all dates in the ancient history of Westeros are intentionally uncertain and filled with speculation, as dates, until quite recently, were about ancient times on Earth, and I take 10000 in particular to mean "a really long time".

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

With all his mentioned and physically described known relatives, Ashara, Edric, and Gerold, all of them have purple eyes, so it's not a leap to imagine that Arthur did too, but it doesn't guarantee it. Of the three we know about, we're given three vey different hair colors, dark brown, ash, and glacier white with a streak of black. I personally see him with Edric's ashen colored blond hair, but who knows.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...