Brienne of Tarth

The Maid of Tarth: a huge, plain, earnest young noblewoman who wants only to be a knight, mocked by men she could best with either hand, and truer than any of them.

The fuller tale

Brienne is the only living child of the Lord of Evenfall Hall, heir to the sapphire island of Tarth, and a lifelong disappointment to every expectation attached to that sentence. Too tall, too broad, too plain — the story never flinches from the cruelty of how she is seen — she failed at being a lady with the same thoroughness with which she succeeded at everything knightly, and her father, to his lasting credit, let her trade the needle for the sword. The suitors are the books' bitterest early chapters of her: one contracted match died, one groom found excuses, and one young knight presented her a rose as a public joke. She kept the rose longer than the lesson deserved.

Renly Baratheon danced with her once, at a ball where everyone else was laughing at her, and was simply kind. That is the entire transaction — and it purchased the fiercest loyalty in the story. When Renly crowned himself, Brienne fought her way into his service on merit, unhorsing the realm's finest in a melee at Bitterbridge in the books (and besting Loras Tyrell himself in the show) to win a place among his handpicked guard. She was holding the king's armor when Melisandre's shadow came through the tent wall, and she has carried two burdens from that moment since: a grief she never quite sets down, and a murder accusation she can only outrun by being visibly, relentlessly better than the people repeating it.

Catelyn Stark, the other witness, becomes her second oath — and Catelyn's errand becomes the story's oddest couple. Ordered to deliver Jaime Lannister to King's Landing, Brienne walks the war's length chained to the realm's most beautiful cynic, and the road remakes them both: she takes his mockery and returns competence, he takes her measure and returns, eventually, respect, a sword, and his own rescue leap into a bear pit. The bath at Harrenhal — where the Kingslayer hands her the truth about the day he earned the name — makes her the first person in nineteen years to hear it, and the only one who never needed it to think him more than his worst act.

The sword is Oathkeeper, Valyrian steel forged from Ice, and the errand it seals — find the Stark girls, keep them safe — becomes her defining quest in both tellings. The books send her on a devastating tour of the war's aftermath: the Riverlands as the smallfolk live it, burned mills and hanged inns, a running fight that costs her half her face to a monster's teeth, and at the end of the published road, a choice between nooses offered by a dead woman she once served. The show's road is shorter and luckier: she finds both girls, is refused by each in turn — a scene the show plays as failure and means as foreshadowing — and is standing in the right courtyard when Sansa Stark finally runs through the snow toward her oath.

The last act gives her everything the first act said she could not have. She fights the Long Night on the walls of Winterfell — knighted the evening before, by firelight, by Jaime Lannister, in the story's warmest scene: no septon, no ceremony, just the oldest words and a room of soldiers standing to applaud Ser Brienne of Tarth. She ends the show as Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, the first woman to hold the office, filling in the blank pages of Jaime's White Book entry with the fairness he never got from the realm and could not give himself. The girl who was a joke to every suitor outlasts and out-honors the entire institution that laughed.

The page and the screen

The books' Brienne is a point-of-view character on a road the show never takes: her fourth-book quest through the ruined Riverlands — with Podrick Payne, a conscript guide, and a trail of the war's orphans — is the saga's long meditation on what knighthood owes the smallfolk, and it ends on the story's most argued cliffhanger: captured by the Brotherhood under its terrible new leadership, sentenced for carrying a Lannister sword, and shouting a single unrecorded word as the noose tightens. The show cut the entire arc, spent her instead on found scenes — the duel with the Hound, Stannis's end, Riverrun's siege — and resolved her story with honors the books still hold hostage. Her face, too, diverges: book Brienne carries a mauling that the show never inflicts, part of the books' insistence that her road pays its tolls in flesh.

In the show, season by season

Season Two. In What Is Dead May Never Die — Wins a place in Renly's Kingsguard with a sword's argument. In The Ghost of Harrenhal — Watched a shadow with her king's face kill him. In The Prince of Winterfell — One prisoner, one oath, one very long river.

Season Three. In Walk of Punishment — Survives the night because a Lannister lied for her. In The Bear and the Maiden Fair — A tourney sword against a bear; help arrives all the same.

Season Four. In Oathkeeper — Rides out with a Valyrian blade, new armor, and Podrick Payne.

Season Five. In The House of Black and White — Two Stark girls, two refusals — the oath holds anyway.

Season Six. In The Red Woman — "I swear that I shall always keep her secrets..." Accepted, at last. In No One — Failed to move the Blackfish; kept the sword and the mission.

Season Eight. In A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms — Arise, Ser Brienne of Tarth, a knight of the Seven Kingdoms. In The Iron Throne — Lord Commander; finishes a certain white book's page properly.

In the books

A Clash of Kings. In Kings in Every Corner — Swears to the only person who saw the shadow too.

A Storm of Swords. In Wolves at the Crossing — Sworn to bring him whole to King's Landing — and trade him for two girls. In The Bear, the Wall, the Bath — A tourney blade against a bear, and a one-handed rescue.

A Feast for Crows. In The Crows Gather — "I'm looking for a highborn maid..." The riverlands answer with corpses. In The Quill and the Quiet Isle — Every rumor of Sansa turns out to be another dead girl. In The Walk of the Lion — "Sword or noose" — her scream in the dark says a word we don't hear.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Catelyn treats with Renly's hundred thousand at his tourney camp — and meets Brienne of Tarth. (S2·E3)
• One last night: songs by the fire, wine, Podrick singing — and Jaime knights Brienne of Tarth. (S8·E2)
• At Bitterbridge Renly plays at war amid tourneys and peaches; a woman in blue armor wins the melee and asks only to guard her king — Brienne of Tarth. (ACOK 23)

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

The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.