Randyll Tarly
Lord of Horn Hill and the finest battlefield commander in the Reach — a cold, iron-hard man ashamed of his bookish eldest son.
The fuller tale
Randyll Tarly, Lord of Horn Hill, is the finest soldier in the Reach, and the tale never lets the compliment sit comfortably. His proof is the rebellion's awkward footnote: at Ashford he handed Robert Baratheon the only defeat of Robert's career, breaking the rebel van with his own before his nominal commander Mace Tyrell could waddle up to claim the laurels. He carries the Valyrian greatsword Heartsbane, five hundred years of House Tarly down its fuller, and governs his lands, his levies and his family by the same doctrine: hardness is the only inheritance worth leaving, and softness is a defect to be cut out — bred out, or beaten out, or starved out.
The tale's interest in him is what that doctrine did at home. His eldest son Samwell — bookish, gentle, fat, everything the doctrine forbids — received the full program: the chains meant to sweat him thin, the swordmasters, the ritual humiliations, and at last the ultimatum the story hands down like a verdict on the man: take the black and renounce your inheritance, or meet a hunting accident. It is delivered coldly, over a breakfast, with the mother and sisters kept ignorant — and it makes Randyll the saga's cleanest specimen of a recurring species: the excellent commander who mistakes his household for a garrison and his son for a siege problem.
The war years show the professional at full competence and the man at full temperature. In the books he takes Duskendale, holds Maidenpool, and dispenses the war's rare honest justice from its fish market — hands for thieves, restitution for the wronged, a rough fairness even Brienne of Tarth's chapters concede while he is telling her, with precise contempt, that a woman in mail is an obscenity and her road will end in a ditch. The show gives him the same edge at a dinner table: the scene at Horn Hill where he inventories Samwell's failures over his wife's protest is the series' most efficient portrait of a certain kind of father — and the reason the audience receives his later choices the way it does.
His last allegiance is a self-portrait. Offered the choice between the Tyrells his house has served for centuries and the crown that flatters his soldiering, Randyll marches with Cersei's cause against Highgarden — the show has him name loyalty as the reason, to a queen his own oaths never ran to — and it delivers him to a field where the age of soldiers like Randyll Tarly is ending overhead on leathern wings.
The page and the screen
Book Randyll never faces the choice the show built for him: in the published pages the sack of Highgarden has not happened, and Randyll — master of laws on the boy king's council, with custody of the imprisoned Margaery — is positioned as the Reach's kingmaker rather than its casualty, his army camped where it can decide several futures at once. His justice at Maidenpool and his flaying contempt for Brienne are book-only textures; the Horn Hill dinner is show-only staging of an ultimatum the books deliver years earlier and crueler. The show's field execution has no book counterpart; in the novels the hardest man in the Reach is alive, armed, and holding hostages the plot badly wants.
Where they stand, season by season
Mentioned in the chronicle
- At Maidenpool Lord Randyll Tarly dispenses iron justice and contempt in equal measure; Brienne takes on a squire in truth and a septon's road west. (AFFC 21)
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Fell after the Reach campaign (S7·E5)
Sam's iron father chose Cersei over the queen who beat him at the Blackwater Rush, and refused the knee with his son beside him. Daenerys gave the order; Drogon's fire left two suits of armor in the ash.
The show ends him on principle — the only currency he ever respected. Captured after Daenerys's Dothraki and her dragon annihilate the Lannister-Tarly column at the Goldroad, Randyll refuses the knee with his heir at his side: he will not trade his loyalties at spear-point, he tells the foreign queen, and declines the Wall's mercy on the grounds that she has no authority to send him there. Dickon steps forward to share the sentence over his father's one flicker of protest. Daenerys gives the order; Drogon's fire takes them both, and the ashes blow across a field that used to be an army. Tyrion, who argued for mercy, and Samwell, who learns of it later from a kindness-blunted Jorah, both carry the scene forward as a question about their queen. In the published books Randyll Tarly is alive and consequential, a sword still hanging over several plots at once.