Maester Aemon

The blind old maester of Castle Black, a hundred years in service on the Wall — and, though few now remember it, a son of a Targaryen king who once stood near the throne.

The fuller tale

The blind old man in the rookery at Castle Black is the tale’s best-kept secret hiding in plain sight: Aemon of House Targaryen, son of King Maekar, brother of King Aegon the Fifth — the boy the family called away to the Citadel because a king’s third son needed an occupation. He forged his chain, and then the succession did what successions do: deaths and abdications marched the crown down the line until it stopped at his feet. Aemon refused it — quietly, absolutely — and took the black so that no faction could ever raise his name against his beloved younger brother Egg. It is possibly the single most consequential renunciation in Westerosi history, and he spent the rest of a century declining to mention it.

By the time the story finds him he has served the Watch for the better part of seventy years, outliving his eyes, his dynasty, and every man who remembered why his name mattered. What remains is the order’s conscience. Recruits know him as the gentle old maester who tends the ravens and the wounded; the attentive notice that Lord Commanders make no great decision without sitting with him first. His counsel runs on one hard-won theme — that the Watch’s vows exist precisely because love is the death of duty, a lesson he delivers to Jon Snow with the unanswerable authority of a man who chose duty three times and paid full price each time.

His bond with Samwell Tarly is the old man’s last apprenticeship. In the fat, frightened steward who reads to him by candlelight, Aemon finds a mind worth furnishing, and Sam finds the first father figure who values him for exactly the qualities Randyll Tarly tried to beat out. It is Aemon’s judgment, exercised at the crucial hour of the Lord Commander election, that helps put Jon Snow at the head of the order — the last great act of kingmaking by the man who refused to be a king.

The news from the east reaches him like sunlight through a closed door. A Targaryen girl across the sea, dragons alive in the world again — and Aemon, a hundred years old and blind, grieves that the last of his blood sits alone among enemies with no kin to counsel her. “A Targaryen alone in the world is a terrible thing,” he says, and the line lands twice: once for Daenerys, and once for the old man saying it, whose entire family has narrowed to a rumor on the wind.

He is the tale’s argument that renunciation can be a form of greatness. Every other Targaryen in the story reaches for the crown or burns in its vicinity; Aemon put it down and lived a century in service instead, and the order he served survives the Long Night substantially because of the men he shaped. The maester’s chain, the black cloak, the empty sockets that see further than most men’s eyes — he wears a life’s worth of surrendered things, and carries them more lightly than any king in the story carries a crown.

The page and the screen

The show keeps Aemon at Castle Black to the end; the books send him on one last journey. When Melisandre arrives hunting king’s blood, Sam smuggles the old man south by sea to keep him out of her fires — through Braavos, where the news of Daenerys reaches him, and out onto the long water aboard the Cinnamon Wind. Dying, he burns bright: it is book-Aemon who works out that the prophecy of the prince that was promised may point at Daenerys, that the dragon must have three heads, and who charges Sam to reach the Citadel and send help to her. The show, having no Citadel voyage to give him, folds his farewells into Castle Black and hands his prophetic function to other mouths. Both tellings agree on the essentials: the refused crown, the blindness, Egg, and a death gentler than any other Targaryen is granted.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Jon rides for Hardhome; Maester Aemon dies at the Wall with Egg's name on his lips. (S5·E7)
• Tyrion says his farewells at the Wall, pisses off the edge of the world, and promises Maester Aemon he will send help that never comes. (AGOT 22)
• Maester Aemon calls the question at last: Sam's quiet lies bring Cotter Pyke and Denys Mallister to withdraw in favor of a compromise no one saw coming. (ASOS 79)
• Jon commands Sam south: Maester Aemon, Gilly, and a babe that is not quite the babe everyone believes — bound for Oldtown and a maester's chain. (AFFC 6)
• The Cinnamon Wind is still far off: storms batter the small ship south while Maester Aemon fails a little more with every league of salt water. (AFFC 16)
• On the Cinnamon Wind, Maester Aemon Targaryen dies at sea at one hundred and two, laughing at last: the dragon has three heads, and Egg dreamed he was old. (AFFC 36)

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

The show: Died of great age (S5·E7)

The books: Died at sea (AFFC, ch. 36)

Aemon Targaryen, maester of the Watch for sixty-seven years, died old and blind and gentle in his bed at Castle Black, laughing with his brother Egg in his last dreams. 'And now his watch is ended.'

On screen he dies as he lived, in his bed at Castle Black, ancient past reckoning, laughing softly with people sixty years dead — “Egg, I dreamed that I was old” — while Sam and Gilly keep the vigil. The Watch burns him with full honors, and even Alliser Thorne’s eulogy is gentle: a hundred years of service ended without an enemy in the world.

The books give him a sailor’s death instead. Carried south to escape the red woman, he weakens past Braavos, and at one hundred and two years old dies aboard the Cinnamon Wind, tended by Sam and Gilly, dreaming of his brother and murmuring about dragons — the last work of his life, the riddle of the three heads, spilling out with his final breaths. The crew commits him to the sea. In both tellings the same words close the account, and nowhere in the saga do they land harder: and now his watch is ended.