The Great Houses of Westeros, Explained

Game of Thrones is a war story with a family tree for a plot. Nearly every claim to the Iron Throne is really a claim about parentage — who married whom, who was born to whom, and who lied about it — which is why keeping the houses straight is most of the work of watching it. So we drew them: Stark, Lannister, Baratheon, Targaryen and Tully, and the marriages that knot them into one family.

How to read this tree

Each circle is a character, coloured by the house they were born into: grey for Stark, blue for Tully, crimson for Lannister, gold for Baratheon, violet for Targaryen. Lines run from parents to children and between spouses. One warning before you drag anything — this tree draws the parentage the story eventually admits to, not the one the characters believe. Cersei's children hang off Jaime; Jon Snow hangs off Rhaegar. If you are three seasons in, the shape of the graph will tell you things the show has not.

House Stark — the wolves of Winterfell

Winterfell's tragedy is structural, and you can see it in the top row. Rickard Stark had four children — Brandon, Ned, Lyanna and Benjen — and by the time the first episode opens, only Ned is left in the North with anything to inherit. The generation he and Catelyn Tully raise gets scattered across the map before the first season is out, and spends the rest of the series trying to walk home.

House Lannister — gold and secrets

Tywin Lannister spent a lifetime turning his three children into instruments of the family name, and the series spends eight seasons watching that backfire. But the Lannister branch of this tree is drawn around a single fact the realm is never told — and it is the fact the whole plot rests on.

House Baratheon — the storm kings

Robert Baratheon takes the throne by force and then has nothing to hand on. His marriage to Cersei produces three children who are not his, and his own blood survives only in bastards he never counted, like Gendry. So when he dies early in the first season, his brothers Stannis and Renly each crown themselves, and House Baratheon spends the war dismantling itself.

House Targaryen — fire and blood

The Targaryens are the house the story starts after. The Mad King Aerys II and his sister-wife Rhaella held the throne until Robert's Rebellion swept them off it, and their two surviving children grew up across the sea with nothing but a name. That name is the whole of Daenerys's claim — right up until she hatches three dragons and it becomes something else entirely.

House Tully — family, duty, honour

House Tully is barely on screen and holds the tree together anyway. Hoster Tully married his daughters into two of the other great houses — Catelyn to Ned Stark in the North, Lysa to Jon Arryn in the Vale — which is why half the realm's claimants turn out to be cousins, and why the Riverlands end up in everybody's war.

The secret at the heart of the realm

The series' biggest reveal has been sitting in plain sight on this graph the whole time. The boy raised as Ned Stark's bastard, Jon Snow, is the son of Lyanna Stark and Prince Rhaegar Targaryen — born of a marriage nobody was told about and hidden in the North so Robert would not kill him. That makes him a trueborn Targaryen with a better claim than Daenerys, and it makes the two of them aunt and nephew, which the show lets them find out several episodes too late.

Two boy-kings, one war

Put two of the rival crowns side by side and the show's argument gets blunt. Robb Stark is proclaimed King in the North by men who loved his father. Joffrey Baratheon holds the Iron Throne on the strength of a lie about who fathered him. Neither of them survives the war they are fighting over.

Two tellings of the same tree

This tree follows the television series. If you came from the books, two of its branches are the wrong shape — and both differences are about who married whom and who stayed dead, which is exactly what a family tree claims to know.

Who is left when it ends

Attrition is the show's real subject. Of the forty characters on this board, the ones still breathing in the final episode fit on a single row — and most of them are the children you met in the first. The dead below are the ones this article followed; the full list is very much longer.

House by house