As the wait continues for House of the Dragon Season 2 later this year in the 2024 TV schedule, HBO has some big news for the world of Westeros on the small screen. A second Game of Thrones spinoff is set to debut on HBO in the foreseeable future now that a premiere date has been announced, and there's plenty of time to catch up on George R.R. Martin's novella source material ahead of the A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms' arrival... but I'm not sure I want to do that this time around after Game of Thrones.
This spinoff is set a century before Game of Thrones begins with the Targaryens still in power, but well after the timeline of House of the Dragon. It'll tell the stories of Ser Duncan the Tall and his squire Egg, a.k.a. future King Aegon. Now, let's look at the latest about the show!
A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms
Of all the upcoming Game of Thrones projects in development, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is set to arrive in late 2025, according to Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav during the company's Q4 earnings call. The project was already ordered to series, but the premiere window as well as Zaslav's confirmation that preproduction has started is encouraging for the prospect of the company debuting a season of Game of Thrones spinoff action each year. Zaslav said:
George R.R. Martin is in preproduction for the new spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which will premiere in late 2025 on Max.
It remains to be seen if the specific mention of Max means that it will only stream for people with Max subscriptions and not air on HBO at all. Considering the wait of almost two full years between the last two seasons of GOT and the first two seasons of House of the Dragon (depending on how late in the summer it premieres), I'm on board with the idea of more content in the form of a second spinoff to make up for any prolonged hiatus. Fortunately, HOTD Season 2 wasn't affected by the WGA writers strike for some key reasons, which is not the case for many other series.
And as somebody who read A Song of Ice and Fire after the first season of Game of Thrones hooked me on the world of Westeros, as well as somebody who really enjoyed comparing the story of House of the Dragon to the Fire & Blood fictional history book, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms getting some very good news would normally motivate me to want to check out the source material. That's not the case this time around, though.
George R.R. Martin's Source Material
George R.R. Martin has published three novellas as part of his A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms work, all centered on Dunk and Egg, with the first season of the spinoff based on the first of the novellas, called The Hedge Knight. The pilot was penned by House of the Dragon writer Ira Parker.
On his Not A Blog website back in 2023, Martin said that the "hope would be" to adapt The Sworn Sword and The Mystery Knight, presumably one per season, which would "take a few years." At the time, he wrote:
Before we reach the end of the published stories, I will need to find time to write all the other Dunk & Egg novellas that I have planned. There are… gulp… more of them than I had once thought. There’s 'The Village Hero' and the Winterfell story, the one with the She-Wolves, and maybe I need to write that Dornish adventure too to slip in between The Hedge Knight and The Sworn Sword, and after that there are… ah… more. I just need to finish THE WINDS OF WINTER, and then do either A DREAM OF SPRING or volume two of FIRE & BLOOD, and slip in a new Dunk & Egg between each of those in my copious spare time… and that will keep me ahead of Ira and his merry crew… for a few more years.
And therein lies the reason why I'm not falling over myself to grab a copy of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: George R.R. Martin has a lot on his plate and Game of Thrones famously outpaced the A Song of Ice and Fire source material due to the long delays in the release of The Winds of Winter. The previous book in the A Song of Ice and Fire saga, A Dance with Dragons, was released in 2011.
Looking at the dates for the releases of the three Dunk and Egg novellas, it seems all too possible that it could happen again. The Hedge Knight released in 1998, followed by The Sworn Sword in 2003, then followed by The Mystery Knight in 2010. With The Winds of Winter still on the way along with the second volume of Fire & Blood, I find it difficult to be optimistic about A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms not running out of novellas to adapt.
None of this is to say that I won't watch or enjoy the show when it releases in 2025, and you don't need to have read Fire & Blood to follow House of the Dragon, so the same is likely true for Dunk and Egg's adventures. Still, I was previously always up on the source material for the Game of Thrones world, and that won't be the case for Dunk and Egg unless something changes over the next year or so.
For now, you can always revisit every season of Game of Thrones and the first season of House of the Dragon streaming on Max now, and wait for updates on what's coming to HBO and Max from the world of Westeros in the coming years.
