‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’: Who Is Ser Duncan the Tall? Explained
I’m looking for a man in finance. Trust fund. 6’5″. Blue eyes. Could Ser Duncan the Tall be a fit? Who is he? What is A Knight of The Seven Kingdoms? And just HOW tall are we talking here?
What is A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms?
George R.R. Martin has been very busy not writing The Winds of Winter and instead churning out spinoff stories and lore. Love it AND hate it. Give me The Winds of Winter, but give me everything else, too! A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms falls squarely in the “everything else” category. It’s a spinoff tale set about 90 years before the events of Game of Thrones. Though dragons are (as far as Westeros is concerned) extinct, the Targaryen line still controls the Iron Throne.
Meanwhile, off in the woods, the young Ser Duncan the Tall has just been made a hedge knight. What’s a hedge knight? Essentially it’s a pejorative term for lower class knights who were made by other lower class knights. These knights don’t come from noble lineages or landowning families. They come from the hedge. The sticks. The boonies. They have less of a pedigree than landed knights, and therefore are looked down upon as inferior. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms recounts the adventures of Ser Duncan the Tall, who teams up with a young squire named Egg.
Abandon all hope of no spoilers, ye who scroll past here …
Egg, whose real identity is a major spoiler.
Who was Ser Duncan the Tall?
For those of you who have read The Hedge Knight and spend your free time pouring over the Wiki of Ice and Fire, you’ll know allllll about the mighty Ser Duncan the Tall, most famously known as the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard during the reign of Aegon V Targaryen. But where does his story begin?
A place worse than the hedge … a place known as Flea Bottom.
Flea Bottom is the armpit of King’s Landing. It’s a shantytown. A slum where the poorest of the poor live. Poor Dunk’s earliest memories are the mean streets of Flea Bottom, running around with his three urchin friends Ferret, Rafe, and Pudding like some kinda Charles Dickens novel. Duncan had a hard life, and his only advantage was his enormous size. As an adult, he would be just shy of seven feet tall. As a child, he was a big boy. He was able to use his size to his advantage who he got into scrapes with the other neighborhood urchins, and became a formidable barroom brawler in his youth … a skill that he would later put to good use throughout his career.
Dunk eventually became the squire of a hedge knight named Arlan of Pennytree to replace his old squire, who died during the First Blackfyre Rebellion, when a group of highborn and dubiously legitimized Targaryen bastards attempted to seize control of the Iron Throne. Ever since Ser Arlan pulled Dunk out of the mud, the little big guy dreamed of becoming a member of the illustrious Kingsguard. But first, Dunk had to learn how to use a sword. He was instructed by Ser Arlan, and accompanied the knight for about a decade traveling around Westeros, seeking glory, finding little. While on the road to a tourney held at Ashford, Ser Arlen died of a chill, knighting Dunk before he did so. The now 16- or 17-year-old Dunk went to the Ashford tourney alone, where he met a baldheaded little boy who called himself Egg and asked to become Duncan’s squire. Dunk accepted, not knowing that the little scamp was actually …
Prince Aegon Targayen, heir to the Iron Throne.
And thus a beautiful friendship began. Dunk’s skill, size, and newfound connection to royalty allowed him to scale the social ladder and accompany the young Prince Aegon on all sorts of adventures. There were tourneys fought, wars waged, and glories won. When Prince Aegon ascended the Iron Throne as Aegon V, he made his lifelong friend Ser Duncan the Tall the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, where he served honorably for the rest of his days. How did those days end? Badly. This is Westeros, after all. Ser Duncan the Tall died alongside Aegon V during the Tragedy at Summerhall, a massive fire at Summerhall castle that claimed the lives Aegon, his heir, and his beloved friend Dunk. While the source of the fire is unknown, rumor has it that sorcery was the cause.
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