#guyard morrigen

Ser Guyard Morrigen, The Green.

"By rights it should be one of the seven who strikes the first blow."

"It takes more than a pretty cloak to charge a shield wall. I was leading Mace Tyrell's van when you were still sucking on your mother's teat, Guyard."

I feel like Guyard is a character with 8 million times more cool characteristics than his place in the narrative necessarily requires. His name is Morrigan, he has a "black crow on a storm green sky" as his sigil, he's a green knight... and he's kind of a chump. One of his two lines of description on the wiki is "he fancies himself a singer" - brutal. I also there's an inherent awkwardness to having a green rainbow knight and also having a super fancy suit of green armour for yourself... feels very on brand for Renly.

Hi! I’ve been working on a bit of a project to build up some tabletop-wargaming versions of ASoIaF characters for a couple of years, so figured I might as well share what I’ve been working on here! I’ve been posting on a thread on the LeadAdventureForum for a couple of years, so these are also posted there!

So for a start here, here’s Renly Baratheon’s Rainbow Guard from A Clash of Kings, the figures are mostly builds from the Perry Miniatures Agincourt Mounted Knights set, with some added cloaks, while Loras is a War of the Roses man-at-arms. I tend to imagine ASoIaF as being sort of...fantasy 15th-century so I try to keep things in-line with that sort of period (minus the anachronistic heater shields!) 

And here’s their rainbow cloaks from the back

And here’s some pictures of the individual knights

The unfortunate Robar Royce and Emmon Cuy

Bryce Caron, Guyard Morrigen and Parmen Crane (who is apparently still alive I guess?), who defect to King Stannis 

Brienne of Tarth, with Renly’s standard

And finally Loras Tyrell 

Hopefully I’ve done them justice! free-handing the sigils is slow going! 

Welcome to House Words Wednesdays! Each week, I take a House without known canon or semi-canon words and present what I think could make sense as that House’s motto. You’re free to suggest more as well, if your favored House has not yet been suggested; take a look at this link to see what has already been suggested, and shoot me an ask through Tumblr if you have another House you’d like to see done. 

House Morrigen of Crow's Nest is a noble House of the Stormlands, one of the principal Houses sworn to Storm's End. While the Morrigens are as a family at least as old as the Targaryen Conquest (Dickon Morrigen was one of King Argilac Durrandon's warriors in the Last Storm, a commander of the vanguard who fell to the grounded Meraxes' flames), given that it was supposedly Durran Godsgrief himself who conquered the rainwood, it's probable the Morrigens are a very old family indeed. Unlike their Durrandon overlords, the Morrigens survived past the death of Argilac, as it was Ser Damon Morrigen, Captain of the Warrior's Sons, who faced off against Maegor and his champions in a trial of seven at the beginning of Maegor's reign - although, unfortunately for Damon, only Maegor of the 14 combatants survived that ordeal. A Lord Morrigen was later briefly mentioned in the context of Jon Connington's stop at Griffin's Roost with Prince Rhaegar Targaryen, with Lord Armond Connington spending the entire evening trying to win the prince to his side in his dispute with the Lord of Crow's Nest (it's a pet headcanon of mine that JonCon's mother was a Morrigen, and that this dispute was over some dower property of Lady Morrigen's which Papa Armond wanted to keep for House Connington). 

The most notable Morrigen in the main series, however, is undoubtedly Ser Guyard Morrigen. A younger brother of Lord Lester Morrigen, Ser Guyard joined his House when it declared for Renly at the start of the War of the Five Kings, and was chosen by Renly as one of his seven Rainbow Guard members. As Guyard the Green, Ser Guyard is seen by Catelyn at the feast at Bitterbridge, “diddl[ing] a harp” and making up a song about tying lions’ tails in knots. Guyard is not present when Renly is killed, but immediately thereafter joins Stannis (alongside his fellow Rainbow Guard veteran Bryce Caron). Given command of the vanguard (which he had wanted in Renly's army, but been passed over in favor of Ser Loras) during the Blackwater, Guyard is slain in single combat by “Renly's ghost” - Ser Garlan Tyrell, wearing Renly's armor. (The remaining Morrigen men, however, seem to be still loyal to Stannis, with at least Lord Lester apparently joining Stannis at the Wall.)

Both the sigil (a black crow in flight on storm-green) and the name of House Morrigen are an obvious reference to the Morrigan, a figure (well, a three-in-one figure) out of Irish mythology. A shapeshifter with strong magical powers, the Morrigan would often transform into a crow or raven, hovering over battlefields waiting to feast on the corpses below. Her presence in this form was said to foretell both the outcome in that battle and the fates of the warriors fighting in it, giving the Morrigen a role as a goddess of fate as well as battle and death Given this background, I decided to make the Morrigen words No Dread of Death. A crow does not dread death, but rather welcomes it where it finds it; to a crow, a corpse is a welcome sight, sustenance for its own life. In the same way, the Morrigens of Crow's Nest might wish to boast that they welcomed the work of the battlefield, and would make a (hopefully metaphorical) feast of their enemies in victory. Like the Morrigan which inspired their name and the crow on their banners, the Morrigens are at home amongst the carnage and death of war, relishing in the bloodshed. Certainly, neither Ser Damon nor Ser Guyard dreaded death, with Damon challenging the terrifyingly monstrous Maegor and Guyard leading Stannis' van in the devastating Battle of the Blackwater. Of course, for both situations, the Morrigen crow on their banners might as well have been the Morrigan herself, foretelling their doom in their combat.