Barristan Selmy
Ser Barristan the Bold: Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, the greatest living knight of the Seven Kingdoms, who has guarded kings since he was a boy.
A soul born at Harvest Hall, sworn to The Kingsguard.
The fuller tale
Season One
Lord Commander of the Kingsguard and the last of Robert's circle who still looks the part — old, plainly built, and visibly bored by a peacetime court that has no use for a soldier's skills. He talks jousting with Ned Stark at the Hand's tournament with real longing, a man who would rather be unhorsed in the lists than stand guard over squabbling lords, and is otherwise exactly where a Lord Commander should be: silent, armored, and background to everyone else's plot.
Season Three
Joffrey decides an old knight is a decorative knight and strips Barristan of his white cloak in open court, replacing him with a returned, one-handed Jaime Lannister and delivering the news with the same casual cruelty he hands out everything else. It is meant as a humiliation and lands as one, but Barristan does not slink off to die quietly the way Joffrey clearly expects; a lifetime of service just got taken from him for nothing, and he leaves King's Landing looking for a cause that will actually value it.
Season Four
That cause turns out to be Daenerys Targaryen. Barristan has been traveling under the name Arstan Whitebeard, working alongside Jorah Mormont as a supposed old family retainer, close enough to the queen to protect her before she even knows who he really is. When his identity comes out, so does Jorah's — years ago he sent reports on Daenerys to Robert's court, a betrayal that should be a death sentence, and it is Barristan who argues for exile over execution, though Daenerys decides it for herself either way. He settles into Meereen as her sworn shield and one of the only advisors old enough, and honest enough, to tell her when she is wrong.
Season Five
Daenerys' longest-serving conscience: he pushes back on her harder justice with the patience of a man who served three kings and watched all three go wrong in different ways, arguing for mercy in the matter of the Meereenese nobles' sons and for restraint generally, not always successfully. When the Sons of the Harpy ambush the streets, Barristan goes out with Grey Worm to protect Meereen's people rather than waiting inside the pyramid, and the old knight who once complained about a peacetime court finally gets the fight he always said he wanted. He goes down surrounded, blade still moving, having spent his whole final battle exactly the way he told Ned Stark years earlier he wished he could.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Fell in Meereen (alive in the books) (S5·E4)
Barristan the Bold, the finest sword of his age, died in a Meereenese alley with a dozen Sons of the Harpy dead around him. He fell defending the city of a queen he'd crossed the world to serve.
In the show Barristan dies in the fifth season, ambushed in the winding streets of Meereen when the Sons of the Harpy rise. Finding Grey Worm’s Unsullied cornered in an alley, the old Lord Commander joins the fight one final time, and the choreography is written as a thesis: one aging knight against a dozen masked insurgents, and it is nearly enough. He kills and kills, takes his wounds from behind and beside, and falls among a heap of his enemies — Barristan the Bold, dead on foreign stone for a queen he served barely two years, mourned by a court that only half understood what it had lost. His death hardens Daenerys toward Meereen’s old blood and shoves the whole storyline toward the fighting pits.
In the published books he is alive and at the height of his consequence — Hand of the Queen in Daenerys’s absence, leading Meereen’s sortie against the Yunkish siege as A Dance with Dragons ends. Whatever end Martin writes him, the show’s version bought its shock at the price of the character’s last act; the books are still spending it.
Their chapters, book by book
Ser Barristan the Bold: the greatest living knight of Westeros, who crossed the world under a false name to serve the last Targaryen — and in the books stands as her Hand, alive and commanding Meereen.
A Game of Thrones 1 chapter that name them
A Dance with Dragons 4 chapters of their own
Where the page and the screen part
The divergence here is total after a point. In the books Barristan comes to Daenerys in disguise, as the humble squire Arstan Whitebeard attending the Astapor-bound merchant party — a deception that lasts a full book, ends in the dramatic double unmasking of himself and Jorah, and colors everything after; the show, reasonably, spends the disguise in a single scene and has him declare himself on a Qarth street. Far larger: book Barristan is alive, a POV character, and effectively the ruler of Meereen — Hand to an absent queen, jailer of Hizdahr, commander of the city’s defense as the fifth book closes. The show killed him in a fifth-season alley specifically to raise the Sons of the Harpy stakes, a choice that remains one of the adaptation’s most protested cuts, not least because the actor had reportedly been told his biggest material was still coming.
The books also give him one of the saga’s quietest running themes: an old man auditing his own legend, chapter by chapter, and finding that boldness was always the easy part — it was the standing post outside the wrong doors that stained. None of that interior audit survives to the screen; what survives is the sword, and the scene where he tells Daenerys the truth about her father, which both tellings agree no one else would have dared.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.
🛡 Their folio in the White Book →