Last week brought a slew of news as Warner Bros confirmed plans to turn HBO Max into, simply, Max – announcing a whole raft of new projects set to launch on that service down the line. One of which was a fresh Game Of Thrones spin-off series titled A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, which like House Of The Dragon before it will explore a different era of Westeros while drawing from George RR Martin’s writings on the fantasy world. Now, Martin has updated on the project in a blog post, getting into what the approach for the series will be.
Writing online, Martin confirmed that the first season of A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms will focus solely on ‘The Hedge Knight’ novella, likely consisting of six episodes – and that future seasons would look to adapt fellow ‘Dunk & Egg’ stories ‘The Sworn Sword’ and ‘The Mystery Knight’. All three of those individually-published stories have been collected in a book titled A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms. “The pilot script is already written, and I think it’s terrific,” writes Martin. “It was written by Ira Parker, who is no stranger to Westeros. He was part of Ryan Condal’s writing staff for the first season of House Of The Dragon, and wrote the fourth episode of HOTD’s first season, ‘King of the Narrow Sea’.” Condal and Martin will both serve as Executive Producers on the show, which has already been picked up for a full season order.
For now, work is moving forward on getting the rest of the scripts written. “Ira has assembled a small but very talented team, and they are at it already, building on the foundations laid down last year in previous creative summits… and of course on the original novella,” writes Martin. “The Dunk & Egg novellas are fully-fleshed narratives more like the novels of A Song Of Ice & Fire than the imaginary history of Fire & Blood; the stories are right there on the page, and our goal is to produce faithful adaptations of those tales for the screen.”
Martin, too, acknowledged the sheer volume of Westerosi stories he still plans to write – with more Dunk & Egg stories to come, another volume of Targaryen history, as well as the final books in the main saga. “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,” he states. “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.” If only Samwell Tarly was on hand to help him write it all out.