Game of Thrones was known for its battles, backstabbing, dragons, and more, but one element of George R.R. Martin's books it was short on was tournaments. That's all set to change next year with the new spinoff A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Based on Martin's novella The Hedge Knight, the first season of the show takes place almost entirely at a tourney, where knights joust for honor, money, and renown.
But you know how Game of Thrones television shows go; when they do something, they go all out. Since The Hedge Knight features one of the raucous tourneys which Martin so loves to sprinkle throughout the history of Westeros, he couldn't resist urging A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms showrunner Ira Parker to make it as spectacular as possible.
"I set [the show's team] a challenge, which I think Ira and his people have delivered," Martin said earlier this month at New York Comic Con. "I said, 'Let's do the best jousting sequences that have been ever put on film.' A modest little challenge for Ira and his crew."
"I think my favorite previous was 1952’s Ivanhoe,” the author added. "They don't have much jousting sequences, but what they have are really good. So that's the standard. You guys will judge how we did. but I think we did really well."
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms does something "no one's ever seen before"
Martin appeared at Comic Con on a panel alongside Parker, and stars Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell, who play the heroes of our tale, the knight Ser Duncan the Tall and his diminuitive squire Egg, respectively. The first trailer for the series dropped there, and we've been sifting through the highlights ever since.
Martin's decision to set The Hedge Knight at a tournament predates the show by quite a while; he wrote this novella, the first of his Tales of Dunk and Egg series, back in 1998 as part of the Legends anthology. It was a good opportunity to differentiate the setting for Dunk and Egg from the vast, often bleak locales of A Song of Ice and Fire.
“I've always loved Medieval tournaments in other pictures, and of course, we had several tournaments in Game of Thrones. But they were in the background, they were not the center," Martin said. "But I said...'I want to do something that's entirely set during a tournament,' because I found tournaments were very exciting."
"The jousting was a lot of fun," said Parker. "We also did something hopefully no one's ever seen before, which is a jousting tournament at night...which looks badass. So I'm very excited for everybody to see that."
The Targaryens are "on the decline" in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is set during an intriguing era in Westeros, roughly 100 years before Game of Thrones and 100 years after House of the Dragon. It's a time of great change. In the original series, dragons are long extinct and the Targaryens have been ousted from the halls of power. In House of the Dragon, we see the dragonlords begin to ensure their own destruction by going to war with one another. In A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the Targaryens still rule, but their power is slipping as they try to adjust to a world without dragons.
"This story takes place between two shows that everyone has seen and everyone loves, in a time where the Targaryens don't have their dragons anymore," Parker explained. "They're very much on the decline, finding themselves in this weird middle place of, 'Okay so the thing we used to conquer this kingdom doesn't exist anymore.' And everybody starts asking, you know, 'Why are they still in charge?' So maybe [the Targaryens] feel that they have to come to a tournament at Ashford Meadow, in this backwater of a place that they probably wouldn't have gone to before, to show faith, to show up, to shake hands. And obviously that kicks off our story in a very interesting way, bringing them into a head-on collision with our young Ser Duncan here."
As anyone who's read The Hedge Knight knows, that collision will certainly provide the chance for the show to make good on Martin's challenge of filming the best jousting scenes ever. It should be thrilling to watch.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premieres January 18, 2026 at 10:00 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max. Its first season will run for six half-hour episodes.