Olenna Tyrell
The Queen of Thorns: Mace's mother, matriarch of Highgarden, and the sharpest tongue in the Reach ÔÇö a tiny old woman who runs her house and fears no one at court.
A soul of House Tyrell, born at The Arbor.
The fuller tale
Season Four
In The Lion and the Rose ÔÇö Adjusts a necklace, tuts at violence, misses nothing.
Season Five
In Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken ÔÇö For once, the Queen of Thorns meets a man with nothing to buy. Olenna Tyrell returns for her grandchildren; the Sparrow quotes scripture back at her. In The Gift ÔÇö Learns the sparrow serves neither gold nor thorns. Littlefinger hands Olenna a weapon, and Cersei walks into the sept as a guest ÔÇö and stays as a prisoner.
Season Seven
In The Queen's Justice ÔÇö "Tell Cersei. I want her to know it was me." Olenna Tyrell drinks Jaime's painless poison and confesses to Joffrey with her last breath.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Took poison on her own terms (S7┬ÀE3)
When Highgarden fell to Jaime Lannister she bargained only for the manner of it: poison in wine, painless, on her own terms. She drank it down and then told Jaime the truth about Joffrey. 'Tell Cersei. I want her to know it was me.'
The show gives her the exit she would have chosen from a catalogue. When Highgarden's storied walls fall in an afternoon to Jaime Lannister's army, Olenna waits in her tower for the victor with the composure of a woman receiving an overdue tradesman. Jaime, in a mercy Cersei would not have countenanced, offers poison in wine over the axe or the rope; Olenna drinks it down without ceremony ÔÇö and then, payment rendered, delivers the most lethal exit line in the series: the truth that it was she who murdered Joffrey, with the request that Jaime tell Cersei it was her. She dies off-screen, on her own terms, having turned even her execution into a weapon. In the published books she is alive at Highgarden, the amethyst hairnet's secret still holding.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
Book Olenna is a smaller part played to identical effect: the lemon-cake interrogation of Sansa, the running demolition of her son, and the necklace ÔÇö the books' version is a hairnet of black amethysts ÔÇö are all page material, and the purple wedding's choreography matches nearly beat for beat, down to the reader catching her at the fatal adjustment only in hindsight. Everything after is the show's invention: in the published books she departs for Highgarden after the wedding and remains there, alive, her house ascendant rather than embattled ÔÇö no Sparrow duels, no alliance with Daenerys, no siege. The show's expansion made her a fan-favorite institution; the books' version remains a scalpel used precisely twice.
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.