Tales of Dunk and Egg

About the Tales of Dunk and Egg series

Ninety years before Robert Baratheon's rebellion, a huge, penniless, barely literate hedge knight called Dunk takes on a diminutive, cheerfully secretive squire named Egg, and the two of them wander the Seven Kingdoms getting into exactly the kind of trouble a good-hearted, thick-skulled knight-errant and a boy hiding a spectacular secret tend to attract. That secret — Egg is actually Aegon Targaryen, a prince of the royal house travelling incognito — gives George R. R. Martin room to tell smaller, warmer stories than A Song of Ice and Fire's court-spanning epic, while still building toward the dynastic collapse that will eventually produce the Mad King and, generations later, Dunk's own descendants serving in Ned Stark's Kingsguard.

Each novella is a self-contained adventure: a trial by combat gone wrong, a siege born from a lord's petty grudge, a tournament crawling with hidden claimants to a rebellion nobody has announced yet. Where the main series is sprawling and frequently bleak, Dunk and Egg is compact, funny, and full of genuine warmth between its two leads, even as it seeds the same slow-motion tragedy of Targaryen decline that colors everything else Martin has written about Westeros. It's often recommended as the friendliest on-ramp into the wider Ice and Fire universe, needing no prior knowledge of the main novels at all.

Martin has published three novellas since 1998 and has spoken for years about at least one more, tentatively called The She-Wolves of Winterfell, along with a second unfinished draft known as The Village Hero — neither has been completed or given a title or release date as of this writing.