House Tarly
A proud martial house of the Reach sworn to Highgarden, holders of the Valyrian sword Heartsbane and a fearsome name in war.
The fuller tale
House Tarly holds Horn Hill in the Reach and, more importantly to the family itself, holds Heartsbane ÔÇö one of the realm's precious few remaining Valyrian steel blades, an heirloom Randyll Tarly treats as more sacred than any of his actual children. First in Battle is the house's motto and Randyll's entire personal religion: a soldier of genuine, terrifying competence who has never lost a battle he commanded, and who cannot forgive his eldest son for being everything he considers weakness given human shape.
Samwell Tarly's exile to the Night's Watch is not framed by his father as punishment so much as correction ÔÇö a fat, bookish, cowardly heir, in Randyll's estimation, replaced by a more suitable younger brother, sent to a frozen wall at the edge of the world with the explicit understanding that he is never to return and never to have a claim on Horn Hill again. It is one of the story's quieter cruelties, a father discarding a living son as casually as recalling a bad investment.
What Randyll never anticipates is that the Wall would make Sam more useful to the realm's actual survival than Horn Hill ever could have. Sam's journey to the Citadel to train as a maester puts him, eventually, in the one archive with the records capable of unraveling the realm's greatest hidden secret ÔÇö a scholar's victory his father would never have recognized as victory at all, achieved entirely through the qualities Randyll spent a lifetime despising in him.
The page and the screen
The show gives Randyll and Dickon Tarly a swift, brutal end ÔÇö both burned alive by Daenerys's dragon after refusing to bend the knee following the Lannister defeat at Highgarden, a scene with no direct counterpart in the published books, where both men remain alive as of the last volume. Sam's research at the Citadel likewise moves considerably faster on screen than on the page, where his slow, methodical progress through the archives ÔÇö and his discovery of Jon Snow's true parentage ÔÇö has not yet reached the same conclusion the show dramatizes.
