Early in “The Morrow,” the season 1 finale of the Game of Thrones prequel A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, battered knight Ser Lyonel Baratheon (Daniel Ings) tells even more battered series protagonist Dunk (Peter Claffey) “The gods don’t favor a fraud.” “Then why have they favored me?” Dunk responds.
Viewers who’ve followed the show to this point will understand what Lyonel is talking about — Dunk is despondent over the death of Baelor Targaryen (Bertie Carvel), the heir to the Iron Throne of Westeros, who was mortally wounded while defending Dunk in a trial by combat. Lyonel is furious at Dunk’s response, insisting that Baelor “risked nothing” in the fight, since the men on the other side were his family members and Kingsguard “sworn to protect him.” Even though Baelor died from the beating he suffered in that fight, Lyonel still feels the prince’s participation was a sham, and that the gods punished him for it.
But the reason Dunk calls himself a fraud is more complicated — and it involves a secret that subtly runs throughout all of George R.R. Martin’s stories about Dunk and his squire Egg, aka future Westeros king Aegon Targaryen V. The Knight of the Seven Kingdoms finale foregrounds that secret more directly, though it only comes out in a few lines of dialogue. The truth is that Dunk was never actually knighted, and is lying about being a knight.
That’s slightly ironic, since a lot of the early emotional power of Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (and Martin’s first Dunk and Egg novella, The Hedge Knight, which this season of the show adapts) comes from Dunk desperately trying to prove that he’s a knight to various cold, indifferent people in power. Immediately after the death of his mentor Ser Arlan Pennytree, Dunk decides to enter a jousting tourney nearby, at a place called Ashford Meadow. If he wins a joust, he might earn enough prestige, reputation, and wealth to keep himself fed and clothed, or even earn his way into service with a reputable lord. But first, he has to prove that he’s a knight, with the right to compete at Ashford, and not just a bandit who stole Ser Arlan’s weapons and horses.
Even though Ser Arlan served under many of the nobles attending the joust, and alongside many of the knights there, none of them remember him, or care. A lot of the weight of the first half of the story comes from Dunk realizing that the man he’s been loyally serving and learning from since childhood has already been dismissed and forgotten — and that Dunk can expect the same contemptuous treatment in his own career, if he can’t find a way out of poverty, obscurity, and the itinerant life. There’s also a fair bit of pain to Dunk’s newfound understanding about how heartless and haughty most of Westeros’ elite are, even the ones only slightly above him in station.
And yet, as it turns out, they’re right to dismiss him as a possible fraud that they can’t vouch for. Because in spite of his good-heartedness, nobility, and sense of honor, he is a fraud.
In both The Hedge Knight and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Martin indirectly hints at Dunk’s non-knight status with a small detail in the story: During a key moment before a battle, when he needs knights to fight alongside him, his new friend Raymun Fossoway, a squire from a minor noble house, asks Dunk to knight him so he can join the fight. Dunk hesitates and says that he shouldn’t, and another knight steps forward to do the deed instead. That event just looks like a moment of nerves — unless you know that Dunk is fully aware of the old Westeros adage “Any knight can make a knight.” He realizes in that moment that since he was never knighted, Raymun’s knighting won’t be valid if Dunk performs it. Maybe no one but the gods will ever know, but Dunk does clearly believe they exist, and that they judge human failings.
The Hedge Knight suggests Dunk’s unknighted status in a particularly subtle way. When Dunk learns Egg isn’t actually the low-born stableboy Dunk took him for, but is secretly a prince, he quickly realizes he has to forgive Egg’s lies of omission in letting Dunk’s mistake go unchallenged. Martin writes, “He knew what it was like to want something so badly that you would tell a monstrous lie just to get near it.”
Other small lines scattered throughout the story similarly could look like self-doubt, unless you’re looking for the specific meaning: “Dunk the lunk, thought he could be a knight,” Dunk thinks during a pivotal moment in the trial by combat. A little later in that same fight: “I’ve failed them. I am no champion. I’m not even a hedge knight. I am nothing.” And finally, after winning the bloody battle: “I am a knight now in truth? he remembered wondering. Am I a champion?”
Since A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms can’t share Dunk’s inner secrets as easily as a written story can, the show addresses the detail more squarely. During a flashback in the finale, Dunk sits under a tree in a windy field with Ser Arlan, who’s telling a story he’s clearly told Dunk dozens of times. Dunk interrupts to ask, “Why did you never knight me? Did you think I’d leave you? I wouldn’t have. Or was it something else?”
Ser Arlan doesn’t answer — after a glazed-over pause where it seems like he’s died, he returns to his story without acknowledging that he even heard the question. Optimistic viewers might hope he knighted Dunk shortly thereafter, in a scene between the ones we’ve seen on-screen. But the moment clearly takes place in the field where Arlan does die, beneath the tree Dunk buries the old knight under at the beginning of the show. It’s clear that little time passes between this moment and Arlan’s death, and Arlan’s unwillingness or inability to address the question isn’t promising.
Martin himself has reportedly confirmed that Ser Arlan never knighted Dunk, at least according to fans who documented him speaking on the subject at a convention in 2004. He hasn’t written or posted anything more overt on the subject — but quite possibly that was a reveal he was seeding throughout the three Dunk and Egg novellas he’s written so far, and saving as a bigger story point in one of the many still-unwritten stories about them that he’s been teasing for more than a decade now.
Possibly we’ll see that story in a future season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, since showrunner Ira Parker has committed to working with Martin on bringing the unwritten stories to the screen, if the show lasts long enough to move beyond Martin’s published stories. It could potentially be a dramatic moment, particularly if Ser Duncan the Tall doesn’t admit to the lie until he’s about to be inducted into the Kingsguard for his former squire — something we know will eventually happen, according to the concordance The World of Ice and Fire. Oops, possible spoiler for something that might happen 12 seasons from now.
All six episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms season 1 are now streaming on HBO Max.
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