When it comes to all things Game Of Thrones, I’ve taken the word “hope” and stabbed it through the heart, then shot it full of crossbow bolts and lopped off its head, crudely stitching a direwolf’s in its place. When I hear the words The Winds Of Winter all I hear are The Rains Of Castamere.
“Hope in reality is the worst of all evils,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, “because it prolongs the torments of man.”
I have drunk deep from that poisoned chalice. For years, I hoped for another in Martin’s series A Song Of Ice And Fire, and for years I have seen my hopes dashed on the ground, killed as surely as Elia’s children were by Gregor Clegane. For years, I watched HBO’s Game Of Thrones hoping that somehow the show would tell the story we all so badly longed to hear and give us a satisfying conclusion. But a day came when all my joy turned to ash in my mouth and, well, you get the picture.
Still, I remain the eternal optimist. Perhaps it’s a tendency toward masochism, those of us who cling to hope against all reason. And so I am happy to report that the next Game Of Thrones spinoff will arrive sooner than expected. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, based on the novellas by George R.R. Martin, will land on HBO and Max in 2025 according to Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav.
“George R.R. Martin is in preproduction for the new spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which will premiere in late 2025 on Max,” Zaslav said Friday. The show is set to begin production later this year.
“Looking ahead, we’ve got one of the best lineups in the history of HBO,” Zaslav also noted. “This next quarter, we’ll have Hacks and House of the Dragon, followed by DC’s The Penguin and the new Dune series. Then in 2025, we’ll kick off the year with the new season of The White Lotus, followed by The Last of Us and Euphoria, just to name a few.”
Oh, and not long after there’s the new True Detective to look forward to . . . .
The Dunk and Egg novellas that this new spinoff is based on are some of my favorite bits in the whole Westerosi catalogue. As much as I do love ASOIAF and the House Of The Dragon show and book, what The Hedge Knight does best is Medieval pageantry. It really is much less epic fantasy and less about the grand political schemes and more about a knight errant on his quests, out jousting and riding about the countryside and so forth. Yes, the plot thickens (they always do when you add cornstarch) but the point is they’re just quite lovely adventures and a little less dark and a little smaller scale, and it really works. And I hope that when Martin finishes the main books he writes more of them.
Here’s the blurb:
A century before the events of Game of Thrones, two unlikely heroes wandered Westeros … a young, naïve but courageous knight, Ser Duncan the Tall, and his diminutive squire, Egg. Set in an age when the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne and the memory of the last dragon has not yet passed from living memory, great destinies, powerful foes and dangerous exploits all await these improbable and incomparable friends.
For now, we can look forward to 2025 and, of course, this summer’s release of House Of The Dragon Season 2.
P.S. This blog used to be called ‘The Hedged Knight’ as a bit of a play on these stories and the whole notion of hedging in business (or gambling).
