Ser Uthor Underleaf

The Snail: a plain, balding knight who jousts for a living, not for glory — takes his falls where they pay and his victories where they're bought cheap. Business, he'd tell you, is good.

The fuller tale

Known to most of the tourney circuit as the Snail, Ser Uthor Underleaf jousts the way other men keep shop — professionally, unsentimentally, and with a clear eye on the ledger rather than the glory. Plain-featured and balding, he has made a career of taking his falls where they pay and claiming his victories where the odds favor him, treating the whole romantic apparatus of knighthood as, essentially, a business with unusually specific overhead costs.

That candor sets him apart from the wedding tourney’s more earnest competitors, and gives the tale one of its wryer commentaries on chivalry’s economics: business, Uthor would tell anyone who asked, is good — a plain-spoken admission that most knights would rather dress up in loftier language, even when their actual motives are not so different from his.

The page and the screen

As with the other Mystery Knight figures, Ser Uthor Underleaf’s story has not yet been adapted for the screen, and no casting has been announced. The character’s wry, mercenary honesty about the tourney economy would offer a welcome counterweight to the show’s more idealistic knights whenever the production reaches Whitewalls.

In the books

The Mystery Knight. In The Mystery Knight — The Snail: jousting is his trade, and business is good.

Mentioned in the chronicle

• The tourney opens with the lists full of old Blackfyre men. Ser Glendon Ball — the Knight of the Pussywillows, Fireball's angry son — unhorses all comers; Dunk falls to the craft of Ser Uthor Underleaf, the Snail, and wakes with a dented head and a ransom owed. (TMK 5)

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.