I want to emphasize that I wrote this post because I had been thinking a lot about Daenerys’ title of Mother of Dragons and her relation to fire because the dragons are consistently described as fire made flesh.
She utilizes this title politically because those dragons give her a lot of power but her relationship with her dragons goes beyond politics.
Then there’s the psychological aspect. She thinks of the dragons as her children and she is emotionally invested in them in a way that IS unhealthy. This is most definitely due to trauma. Dany never really address the enormity of her loss. Not only did she lose her husband, she lost her unborn child as well in a deeply traumatic way. There also has to be a lot of repressed guilt because she unwittingly paid for Drogo’s “life” with her son’s life. This must be incredibly painful for her but she never really addresses it. Not to mention that she believes herself to be barren because of this act of blood magic (whether this is true or not is beside the point in this context). Instead, she latches onto this role as Mother of Dragons. The show actually address her unhealthy attachement to the dragons through Jorah in season 2 (ep08):
Jorah: They are not your children. I know they call you the Mother of Dragons and I know you love them, but you didn’t grow them in your womb. They did not suckle at your breast. They are dragons, Khaleesi.
Dany: They are my children and they are the only children that I’ll ever have.
However, in the books they actually suckle at her breast right after the hatching - as Dany still has milk, so there’s also a kind biologial aspect that probably has influenced her identification of the dragons as her children.
The cream-and-gold dragon was suckling at her right breast, the green-and-bronze at her right. Her arms cradled them close. The black-and-scarlet beast was draped across her shoulders, (AGoT, Daenerys X)
The dragons aren’t her children in a biological sense and her emotional attachement to them isn’t entirely healthy. However, they ARE her children in a mystical sense because she performed a sacred marriage with fire itself as I’ve outlined in the original post. This is what I find so fascinating.
The Sacred Marriage, or Hieros Gamos as it is called in the study of comparative religion/mythology, is an ancient concept that often pertained to fertility in the religions of the ancient mediterranean and middle eastern world. There are many aspects of the Hieros Gamos/Sacred Marriage but one of them is about a mortal human communing with the divine through ritual (those rituals often had a sexual and political aspect - temple prostitution was an aspect of this, which the cult of R’hllor actually practice in the Red Temple in Volantis).
The sacred marriage is a shadow in GRRM’s text - and not just in Dany’s final chapter in AGoT. The idea of a mortal communing with a divine/magical force comes up in one of Bran’s chapters in ADwD:
“Your blood makes you a greenseer,” said Lord Brynden. “This will help awaken your gifts and wed you to the trees.” (A Dance with Dragons - Bran III)
This is right before Bran learns to warg into the weirwood trees that are sacred to the Old Gods (he eats weirwood paste to faciliate this). Bran weds the weirwood to access his magical powers, just like Daenerys weds fire itself in order to transform her petrified dragon eggs to living dragons. Both of them communes with a magical force that may be of a divine nature and in both cases their relation to the magical forces is described in a language that specifically likens it to marriage. In that sense, Bran is Dany’s counterpart. If she is wedded to R’hllor, Bran is wedded to the Old Gods through the Weirwood trees. Interestingly enough, this process is facilitated by either taking something of the divine into oneself, or merging with the divine. Bran ingests weirwood before slipping into the skin of the weirwood tree and Dany steps into the fire that hatches her dragons.
There’s a kind of melding of the human and the magical going on in both instances.
