Beric Dondarrion
A lord of the Marches sent to bring the king's justice to the Riverlands, who became instead the outlaw leader of the smallfolk's own brotherhood.
The fuller tale
Beric Dondarrion enters the story as the war's most promising young lord — the Lightning Lord of Blackhaven in the stormland marches, betrothed to a Dayne, dashing enough that Sansa's circle sighs over him at the Hand's tourney — and is promptly spent like a coin. Ned Stark, sitting the Iron Throne for a fortnight, sends him with a hundred good men and the king's own banner to arrest Gregor Clegane for the raiding of the Riverlands. At the Mummer's Ford the Lannister trap closes; the mission dies in the water — and so, for the first time, does Beric.
What gets up from the ford is the story's strangest institution. Thoros of Myr, a half-lapsed priest along for the ride, speaks the old words over his friend's body and to his own horror they work — and keep working. The mission's survivors become the Brotherhood Without Banners: a hedge-army of broken knights, orphaned smallfolk and village priests fighting for no throne at all, holding trials in a hollow hill for whichever war criminals of any allegiance they can catch. The Hound is their most famous defendant — judged by combat against Beric's flaming sword, and released when the god's verdict says released, because the Brotherhood, uniquely in Westeros, abides by its own rules.
Each return costs him. Six deaths in the books — a lance, a noose, a knife in the eye among them — and every resurrection files something off the man: memories first, the taste of food, the girl he was to marry, until what remains is less a lord than a purpose in a scarecrow's body, lit from inside like a jack-o'-lantern. Beric is the story's walking question about what the fire god's mercy actually is — he describes each death as a diminishment and calls himself the Lord of Light's mistake — and his courtesy about it, unfailing and mild, is somehow the eeriest thing in the Riverlands.
The show extends his watch northward and gives the question an answer. Purpose, it turns out, is exactly what he is: he survives the wight hunt beyond the Wall, loses Thoros — his tether to resurrection — and spends his final loan of life without hesitation when the Long Night comes. The books keep him in the Riverlands and give him a darker ending to his arithmetic, trading his last life for someone else's first — but that is the fate section's story to tell.
The page and the screen
The show's Brotherhood is a band of likable rogues; the books' is a tragedy in institutional form — founded on a dead king's justice, slowly corrupted after its founder's final gift into something that hangs first and tries never, under a leader the show chose not to create. That choice is the great divergence: book Beric's ending is inseparable from Lady Stoneheart, and cutting her rewired his entire meaning — the show's Beric becomes an instrument of the Lord of Light's long game against the dead, while the books' Beric is a cautionary miracle, proof that what comes back is never all of what went in. The show also softens the Brotherhood's low point: selling Gendry to Melisandre is its invention, book readers note, and rather against the books' Beric's character — though the books' Brotherhood ends up somewhere worse.
Where they stand, season by season
Mentioned in the chronicle
- Sitting the throne, Ned sends Beric Dondarrion to bring the Mountain's head and summons Tywin to court. (S1·E6)
- The Hound fights Beric Dondarrion's flaming sword — and Beric dies. Then gets up. Again. (S3·E5)
- Ned sits the Iron Throne in Robert's place, hears the ruin Gregor Clegane has made of the riverlands, and sends Beric Dondarrion for his head. (AGOT 44)
- In the hollow hill the brotherhood tries the Hound before Beric Dondarrion: trial by combat against a flaming sword — Sandor walks free, and a dead man is kissed back to life for the sixth time. (ASOS 30)
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Fell in the Long Night (S8·E3)
The books: Gave his last life at the Trident (ASOS, ch. 82)
The Lord of Light's oft-returned knight spent his last resurrection the way the god apparently always intended: holding a corridor of wights off Arya Stark's back. The flaming sword went out for good, purpose served.
In the books Beric dies for the seventh and last time at the Trident, and no part of it is in battle. The Brotherhood pulls a woman's three-days-drowned corpse from the river — Catelyn Stark, thrown to the water after the Red Wedding — and Beric gives her the kiss of fire that Thoros cannot bring himself to attempt, passing the flame that has kept him walking into her. He stays dead; what rises is Lady Stoneheart, and the Brotherhood that follows her is his kindly court of the hollow hill curdled into a hanging judge. In the show he spends his last resurrection at Winterfell during the Long Night, taking wound after wound in a torchlit corridor to wall the dead off Arya Stark's retreat — and when Melisandre says the Lord brought him back for a purpose now served, the story, for once, has no rebuttal: the girl he died shielding ends the Night King within the hour.