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.

The fuller tale

Samwell Tarly’s story begins with a father’s ultimatum. The eldest son of Horn Hill — heir to Heartsbane and to Lord Randyll’s iron reputation — was soft, bookish, frightened of blood and incurably gentle, and Randyll Tarly tried everything short of murder to correct it before settling on murder’s formal cousin: take the black and renounce your inheritance, or suffer a hunting accident. So Sam arrives at Castle Black self-described — a craven, he says, before anyone else can — carrying the precise inventory of qualities the Wall despises and, as it turns out, the ones it most desperately lacks.

Jon Snow’s protection keeps him alive through Thorne’s yard; Maester Aemon’s rookery gives him a use. Named steward to the ancient maester, Sam discovers the Watch’s true armory — its library — and becomes the order’s memory at exactly the moment its old war returns. It is Sam who digs the dragonglass cache out of the snows at the Fist, Sam who finds in crumbling annals what the Long Night was and what stops the Others, Sam who understands that the Watch’s enemy cannot be fought until it is first believed in and read about.

The Great Ranging makes him a legend against every expectation including his own. In the shattering retreat from the Fist, with a White Walker striding through the snow to take Gilly’s newborn son, the craven of Horn Hill drives a dragonglass dagger into the thing and watches it come apart into steaming ice — the first man in thousands of years to kill an Other. The brothers dub him Sam the Slayer, half in mockery; the mockery ages badly. He follows it by doing something harder still, smuggling Gilly and her son south from Craster’s Keep through a forest full of the dead, one terrified step at a time.

His other great weapon is gentler: Sam is the tale’s most effective backstage politician. It is Sam who engineers Jon Snow’s election as Lord Commander, trading whispers and counting votes while stronger men bluster; Sam who argues the free folk’s case from the annals; Sam who keeps Gilly and little Sam alive through every relocation the war demands. Love, in his hands, is a discipline. The boy who could not hold a sword builds a family out of a wildling girl and another man’s baby and defends it with more constancy than most knights defend their vows.

The Citadel ought to be his triumph and is instead his education in institutions. Sent to Oldtown to forge a maester’s chain for the Watch, he finds the keepers of the realm’s knowledge as uninterested in the apocalypse as its kings — and responds, in the show’s telling, in character: he steals the restricted books, cures Ser Jorah’s greyscale because the manual said it was possible and no one else would try, and walks out of the Citadel with the learning and without the permission. Along the way he mines from the archives the record that remakes the story — the annulment and secret marriage that mean Jon Snow is the trueborn heir to the Iron Throne — and delivers the realm’s biggest secret with the realm’s smallest fanfare.

By the end the show has seated him on the small council as Grand Maester, proposing democracy to a room that laughs him down and settling for writing the history instead. It is the right ending for the character the whole tale has been arguing for: the notion that courage counts the same in a library as on a wall, and that the fat boy his father was ashamed of would do more to save the realms of men than the whole roll of the Watch’s swordsmen. His father never understood him; the story makes sure everyone else does.

The page and the screen

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.

In the show, season by season

Season Two. In Valar Morghulis — Three horn blasts. There is no fourth.

Season Three. In And Now His Watch Is Ended — Runs into the night with Gilly and her newborn son. In Second Sons — Sam the Slayer, though no one will believe it.

Season Four. In Breaker of Chains — Moves Gilly to Mole's Town and regrets it immediately. In The Watchers on the Wall — Kills a Thenn and finds his courage isn't missing after all.

Season Six. In Blood of My Blood — Took Heartsbane off the wall. His father can come and get it.

Season Seven. In Stormborn — Peels a knight like an onion because he knew his father. In Eastwatch — Leaves the Citadel with its books and without its blessing.

Season Eight. In Winterfell — Tells the hardest truth in the crypts, by candlelight.

In the books

A Clash of Kings. In Valar Morghulis — Sounds the horn as the wights crest the ringwall.

A Storm of Swords. In Wolves at the Crossing — Killed an Other and can barely say so out loud. In The Wall Holds — Slays his second monster: the word 'no', said to authority.

A Feast for Crows. In The Crows Gather — Shipped south with Gilly, a babe, Maester Aemon, and a secret cargo of grief. In The Quill and the Quiet Isle — Aemon's last strength spent on a name: Daenerys. In The Walk of the Lion — The Citadel's door opens on a dead man's face.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Samwell Tarly arrives at the Wall, and Jon makes the bullies stand down. (S1·E4)
• Samwell Tarly arrives at the Wall, fat, craven and kind; Jon shames the bullies into sparing him and makes an unlikely friend. (AGOT 27)

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.