Any universe as sprawling and full of lore as George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is bound to be full of unanswered questions, narrative gaps, and unconfirmed theories. Granted, the smaller scale of something like A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms doesn’t lend itself to the scope of the theories fans regularly debated so vigorously on Game of Thrones (R + L = J, Maggy the Frog’s prophecies, Cleganebowl), but that doesn’t mean there aren’t similar lingering questions from the original novellas that readers are hoping the show might one day clear up. And one of the biggest (no pun intended) centers around Ser Duncan the Tall.
No, it’s not whether he’s actually an ancestor of Brienne of Tarth, one of Westeros’ other famous tall knights. (That seems pretty well confirmed, actually.) It’s the question of whether he’s actually a knight at all. The show opens with the death of Ser Arlan of Pennytree, the knight whom Dunk served as a squire. But while he almost immediately begins referring to himself as a knight in his former master’s place, we never actually see the ceremony that made him one. This is, of course, because it may not have happened at all. Or, it might have. We just don’t know. And that’s on purpose, apparently by way of a direct request from Martin himself.
“There is no confirmation, one way or the other, coming out of that scene.” Knight of the Seven Kingdoms showrunner Ira Parker said during a recent interview with Collider. “That’s exactly how Mr. R.R. Martin requested it. It remains [ambiguous], and people can decide for themselves.
The series is very careful to never commit to either answer. Dunk tells people Ser Arlan knighted him, but offers no actual proof. He’s called away before he has to knight Raymun Fossoway prior to his trial of seven, leaving the duty to Lyonel Barathoen and allowing the show to neatly avoid the question of whether he can even perform the task legitimately. In the season finale, we see a flashback in which Dunk asks an ailing Ser Arlan why he’s never knighted him, a question Pennytree doesn’t answer. But that’s not the end of Ser Arlan’s life or of their story together. There’s every possibility he knighted him later, in the gaps between this moment and the one in which we saw Dunk bury him. In short, it really could go either way.
