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.

The fuller tale

Barristan Selmy is what the songs mean when they say knight, which is precisely why the tale keeps using him to test whether the songs mean anything. Born to a modest house of the stormlands, he was a tourney prodigy so young that at ten he donned borrowed armor as a mystery knight — the origin of the name Barristan the Bold, bestowed by the prince who indulged the boy’s madness. Knighted at sixteen, he unhorsed champions all his life and performed the deed that made him legend: during the Defiance of Duskendale he went over the town walls alone, in the dark, and carried King Aerys out of his captors’ dungeon, an exploit men still measured courage against decades later.

His life’s tragedy is that he served his vows better than his vows served the realm. A white cloak at twenty-three under the greatest Kingsguard of the age, he stood post for Aerys through the burnings and the cruelty, honoring his oath while the oath’s meaning burned in front of him — a thing the books let him revisit with an old man’s unsparing hindsight. He fought superbly for the losing side at the Trident, was wounded nearly to death, and was pardoned by Robert Baratheon, who valued the man too much to punish the allegiance. Barristan repaid the pragmatism with seventeen years of faultless service to a king he privately judged half-unworthy of it.

Joffrey’s court discards him in a single scene that the whole audience is invited to find obscene: the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, the finest sword of his age, dismissed with a pension and a sneer to make room for a Clegane. Barristan’s exit — flinging down his cloak, carving through the gate guards sent to seize him, and vanishing from the capital — is the moment the tale states one of its recurring theses: institutions bleed legitimacy every time they cast out the people who actually embody their values. The old knight looks at the kings on offer, finds them all wanting, and crosses the sea to the last Targaryen.

In Daenerys’s service he becomes the thing she needs most and has least of: living memory. He knew her father — and tells her the truth of him, gently but without varnish, when she demands it. He knew Rhaegar, and gives her the brother-legend as a man instead of a myth. He is her sworn shield in the fighting at Meereen, her conscience on the days Jorah’s counsel curdles, and — after the reveal of Jorah’s spying, which Barristan himself precipitates — the last of her Westerosi knights, teaching squires and freedmen the old forms in a city that has never seen a joust. The books deepen all of this enormously; the show, needing his sword more than his memory, keeps him mostly as a splendid presence at her shoulder.

The books then do something the show never attempts: they make him a point-of-view character and, in Daenerys’s absence, a ruler. When Drogon carries the queen from the fighting pit, it is old Ser Barristan who arrests the poisoner-king Hizdahr, takes up the governance of Meereen as the Queen’s Hand, and prepares the city’s defense as the slavers’ siege closes in — all while interrogating, in his own weary head, sixty years of kings served and vows kept and the question of whether a true knight may ever set his own judgment above his oath. A Dance with Dragons ends with the old man buckling on his armor before dawn, leading Meereen out to battle.

He matters to the saga as its long-baseline instrument: Barristan has personally served or fought every regime from Aerys to Daenerys, and his approval is the closest thing the story has to an objective standard of worth. That he gives it, at the end of his life, to a girl-queen of freed slaves — and withholds it from every crowned man in Westeros — is as clear a verdict as the tale ever renders.

In the books' telling

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.

The page and the screen

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.

In the show, season by season

Season Five. In Sons of the Harpy — The Bold, dying as he lived: outnumbered and unyielding.

In the books

A Dance with Dragons. In The Harpy's Bargain — The old knight rules the queen's city in her absence — in armor, not a tokar. In For the Watch — The last chapter of the white book he'll write with a sword.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Joffrey's first court: Barristan Selmy is stripped of his cloak, Janos Slynt is raised, and Sansa is promised mercy for her father — if he confesses. (AGOT 58)

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The show: 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.