Samwell Tarly
The plump, bookish, self-described craven eldest son of a hard father, packed off to the Night's Watch — where his wits and his reading prove worth more than any sword arm.
A soul born at Horn Hill, sworn to The Night's Watch, House Tarly.
The fuller tale
Season One
The fat, frightened son his father would rather bury than look at, sent to the Wall with a choice that was never really a choice: the black cloak or a hunting accident. He arrives unable to fight, unable to ride, and becomes the butt of every drill until Jon Snow decides that isn't funny anymore and makes the other recruits leave him be. He confesses to Jon that he's a craven, plainly, without asking for pity, and it wins him the truest friendship the Wall has to offer. He takes his vows under a heart tree in the snow, sworn brother to men who would have laughed him out of Horn Hill.
Season Two
North with the Great Ranging, made keeper of Castle Black's ravens because he can read and write better than men twice as hard as him. Craster's Keep unsettles him more than the march itself did — the missing boys, the daughters who are also wives — but he says nothing, the way everyone there says nothing. At the Fist of the First Men he watches the Old Bear's army dig in on open ground with the dead massing beyond the firelight, and understands, before most of the officers do, exactly how much danger that is.
Season Three
The Fist falls in the night and Sam survives by luck and by lying flat in the snow while a White Walker walks past him. Fleeing alone he stumbles into Gilly, hiding with her newborn son at what's left of Craster's Keep after the mutiny, and when a Walker corners them both he stabs it with a dragonglass dagger and watches it shatter into nothing — the first man in a generation to learn, by accident, how to kill one. He gets Gilly and the baby through the haunted forest and in at the Wall's gate, half-dead on his feet.
Season Four
Hides Gilly and her son at Mole's Town before the wildling assault reaches Castle Black, then stands the wall itself with a crossbow and a hoarded store of dragonglass, killing at least one more of the dead before the night is over. He speaks for Jon Snow in the vote for Lord Commander — plainly, the same way he confessed his own cowardice back in season one — and it tips a deadlocked room. Gilly survives the massacre at Mole's Town hidden in a woodpile, and comes back to him.
Season Five
Settles into something like a life at Castle Black — Gilly, the baby, small kindnesses that feel enormous behind a wall of ice. When Thenns and mutinous wildlings storm the keep after Jon's parley goes wrong, Sam fights past his own fear to protect Gilly with a dragonglass blade, and it earns him a different kind of respect than his father ever gave him. Maester Aemon dies at his side, and it decides him: he'll go to Oldtown and become a maester himself, useless with a sword but not with what he actually knows. He leaves by ship with Gilly and the baby.
Season Six
Detours home to Horn Hill on the way to Oldtown and gets a season's worth of his father in a single dinner: Randyll Tarly can barely look at the wildling girl or the bastard child, and makes his contempt for Sam's whole life a matter of table conversation. Sam says nothing to his father's face and everything with his hands afterward, stealing the family's ancestral sword, Heartsbane, before he and Gilly slip out in the night. At the Citadel he starts the tedious, unglamorous work of becoming a maester — copying, shelving, emptying chamber pots — while the world outside gets no less dangerous for his absence.
Season Seven
Buried in Oldtown drudgery, forging his own father's signature to get past a locked archive and reading himself hollow-eyed by candlelight. He drains Jorah Mormont's greyscale by hand against every rule of the Citadel and cures him, the kind of stubborn decency that nearly gets him expelled rather than thanked. Deep in a stolen record, he and Gilly turn up a High Septon's account of a prince's marriage annulled and quietly remarried — the sort of detail no one was ever supposed to write down — and Sam, of everyone who might have found it, is the one who carries it north.
Season Eight
Learns at Winterfell that his father and brother were executed on Daenerys's order for refusing to bend the knee, and has to keep marching toward the same war she's fighting anyway. He stands the line at the Battle of Winterfell with a sword he still isn't very good with, goes down under a pile of the dead, and lives only because Edd puts a spear through the thing on top of him and dies doing it. Afterward he sits on the small council that rebuilds Westeros, proposes letting the commons choose their own rulers to a room that laughs at him, and writes the history everyone else in this story will be remembered by — a stack of pages he calls A Song of Ice and Fire.
How it ends for them
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.
Their chapters, book by book
A Game of Thrones 1 chapter that name them
A Storm of Swords 5 chapters of their own
A Feast for Crows 5 chapters of their own
Where the page and the screen part
The books leave Sam earlier on the same road, and give the road more weight. His voyage to Oldtown is an odyssey — Braavos, storms, grief — undertaken with Gilly, Aemon, and a secret cargo of sorrow: Jon has swapped Gilly’s baby for Mance Rayder’s to keep the king-beyond-the-Wall’s son from Melisandre’s fires, and Gilly’s grief shadows every league. Aemon dies at sea deciphering prophecy; Sam arrives at the Citadel to find a novice who is not what he seems and a war for knowledge already quietly underway. None of the show’s later inventions — Heartsbane taken from Horn Hill, the greyscale cure, the parentage revelation, the Grand Maester’s chain — exist yet on the page.
The tellings also weigh his family differently. The show stages the Horn Hill dinner and gives Randyll Tarly a face and a firing squad of insults, then has Daenerys burn father and brother alike — handing Sam a grief the books have not dealt him. Book-Randyll remains a distant, dreaded fact rather than a scene partner. And the screen’s Sam is braver sooner; the books keep his terror closer to the surface for longer, which makes each act of courage — the Other, the wights at the weirwood grove, the election scheming — cost visibly more.
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.