After Belfast, the next stop on our summer travels was Ashford Meadows, where I’d heard there was a tournament going on. No way I was going to miss that, so off we went. Rumor was that some Targaryen princelings would be attending.
Yes, I am talking about the newest GAME OF THRONES spinoff show. It’s an adaptation of “The Hedge Knight,” the first of my Dunk & Egg stories. There were two more after that, “The Sworn Sword” and “The Mystery Knight.” They have all been collected in a book called A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS. That’s probably going to be the title of the show as well… unless we go with THE HEDGE KNIGHT. That’s still under discussion. Filming wrapped not long ago, and Ira Parker and his team are now in post, looking toward a debut some time next year. Spring, I am hoping, but that’s just a guess, no date has been set yet.
If you haven’t read the Dunk & Egg stories– you ought to, you can grab a copy from your favorite local bookshop, or a signed copy from my own Beastly Books here in Santa Fe — well, “The Hedge Knight” is set some ninety years before A SONG OF ICE & FIRE, during the reign of King Daeron II. You may find the tone quite different from that of GAME OF THRONES or HOUSE OF THE DRAGON; smaller in scale, more personal, with more humor, more focus on character… but there is danger and death as well. Lords and ladies and princes it has, but they share the stage with more smallfolk this time around.
“The Hedge Knight” is a novella of about 30,000 words, much much shorter than the huge novels that make up A SONG OF ICE & FIRE. It was written for LEGENDS, a landmark original anthology edited by Robert Silverberg back in the 90s. Bob invited ten of the leading fantasists of the day to write original never-before-published stories set in their own worlds. It was an all star lineup, featuring Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Robert Jordan, Orson Scott Card, Anne McCaffery, Terry Goodkind, Tad Williams, Raymond Feist, Ursula Le Guin, Silverbob himself… and me. I am still not quite certain how I got in. At the time, A GAME OF THRONES was the only one of my Westeros novels that had been published, and while it had done okay, its sales did not come close to matching that of the other contributors. LEGENDS was a great book to be in, however, and being in such company won me a lot of new readers.
I had no idea what I would write when I accepted Silverberg’s invitation. A Westeros story, certainly, that was the concept. It could not be a sequel, not without spoiling the things I had in mind for A CLASH OF KINGS and the later volumes. I could do a sidebar, perhaps. A stand-alone story featuring one of my supporting players, maybe. Robert Baratheon before he was king, say. Barristan Selmy might do, or one of his brothers of the Kingsguard… maybe the Sword of the Morning. I could write about Robert’s Rebellion or the Ninepenny Kings, or maybe set something in Oldtown at the Citadel. I mulled all the possibilities. but in the end I decided to go back even further, to a period of Westeros history I had not yet explored at all… virgin territory. And the setting would be…
… a tournament.
Back way when, I saw IVANHOE — the MGM version from 1952, with Robert Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor (she never looked more beautiful), Joan Fontaine, George Sanders, and the best jousting scenes ever put on film — and it left a huge impression on me. The tilts, the battles, the heraldry. I’d featured a tournament in A GAME OF THRONES, to be sure, but that was a sideshow of sorts. I wanted to make the tourney the center of my novella. I did not think any of the other writers in LEGENDS would be doing that.
That was how Dunk & Egg were born.
It may shock and surprise my long-time readers, but I actually delivered “The Hedge Knight” by the deadline Silverberg had given us.
(Barely. Stories for LEGENDS were due by the end of the year, and Bob was very very serious about that. He warned us that anyone who did not have their story in on time would be out of the book. “The Hedge Knight” landed on his desk on December 31. And that only because I used express mail. Whew. Later, Bob told me that three of the other writers came in on the last day too, though, so at least I wasn’t last).
By the time I finished the story, I was in love with Dunk & Egg. Still am. I have written a lot of stories over the decades and created a lot of characters. They are all my literary children… some m0re than others… but Dunk & Egg were special. I mean to write the rest of their tales as well … in my copious spare time after I finish THE WINDS OF WINTER, yes, yes, I know.
Heading up to the shoot, I was as anxious as I was eager. KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS is a smaller show than either GAME OF THRONES or HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, with a much smaller budget, but I really want it to be great. Ninety per cent of the story is set in a field, surrounded by tents, we would not need the huge sets the other shows had featured, but it couldn’t look fake or cheap either, and the costumes and the heraldry and the fights all had to be splendid, and…
I was so so happy when I got there, and saw what Ira and his team had built.
The tourney grounds were one of the first things I saw. The three days I visited were grey and rainy, so there was mud everywhere, but the lists were so real, just right for a place like Ashford, far from the big cities and the great seats of power. As in IVANHOE, multiple jousts could be run at once, rather than having one contest at a time, as in A KNIGHT’S TALE or the tourneys in GAME OF THRONES and HOUSE OF THE DRAGON. Meeting the cast and crew was also a thrill. Despite the drizzle and the mud, the excitement on the set was palpable. Everyone I met seemed to be in great spirits, and loved what they were doing.
And Dunk and Egg — Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell , respectively — looked as if they just walked out of the pages of my book, and the chemistry between them was just perfect.
The rest of the cast were wonderful as well. Below is the scene where Dunk first encounters the Fossoway cousins — Ser Steffon (Edward Ashley) and his squire Raymun (Shaun Thomas).
And below we have our director Owen Harris, yours truly, Peter Claffey (Dunk), and showrunner Ira Parker.
And here’s me again, this time with Tanzyn Crawford, who will be playing Tanselle Too-Tall.
And here’s Ti Mikkel, a writer producer on the Dunk & Egg show and part of Ira’s team; also a writer of HOUSE OF THE DRAGON. Ti has been a big part of all the other spinoffs HBO has been developing. She probably knows more about Westeros than I do.
I could go on and on. Tanselle’s dragon puppet was very cool as well; can’t wait to see it in action. The various Targaryen princelings were not working on the days we were visiting, but I saw some scenes with the Laughing Storm (played by Daniel Ings), and he was outrageous and fun and Baratheon through and through.
Ashford was one of the highlights of our travels.
A few weeks after I got back home, I saw a rough cut of the first episode. I loved it. I can’t wait to see more.
Current Mood: 
excited
restless
