HBO’s latest Game of Thrones spin-off, the appealingly small-scale prequel series A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, has author George R.R. Martin back on the interview circuit, talking about the show, revisiting the seemingly endless process of writing The Winds of Winter, and mentioning that he wants to write several new novellas about Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ protagonists. That last one won’t come as a surprise to longtime fans who’ve followed his past updates on his work: At one point, Martin suggested he might have as many as a dozen stories about down-on-his-luck hedge knight Dunk and his 10-year-old squire Egg in the works… just as soon as he finished The Winds of Winter.
“It has always been my intent to write a whole series of novellas about Dunk and Egg, chronicling their entire lives,” Martin wrote in a blog post back in 2014. “At various times in various interviews I may have mentioned seven novellas, or ten, or twelve, but none of that is set in stone. There will be as many novellas as it takes to tell their tale, start to finish.”
He notes in that post that he’s only finished three Dunk and Egg novellas so far — The Hedge Knight, The Sworn Sword, and The Mystery Knight, which were all originally published in themed anthologies, and collected in one volume in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms in 2015. He says he started writing a fourth for inclusion in the 2013 anthology Dangerous Women, but couldn’t finish it by his deadline, so he set it aside.
“The unfinished novella was indeed set in Winterfell, and involved a group of formidable Stark wives, widows, mothers, and grandmothers that I dubbed ‘the She-Wolves,’ but The She-Wolves of Winterfell was never meant to be more than a working title,” Martin writes. “The final title, when I finish the story, will be something different. There’s also another Dunk & Egg novella that I’ve got roughed out in my head, with the working title The Village Hero. That one takes place in the Riverlands. There’s no telling when I will have time to finish either of these, or which one I will write first. I don’t expect I will know more until I’ve delivered The Winds of Winter.”
He also laid out ambitious plans for how those two stories and the rest of the installments he was planning would be published, as “a series of Dunk & Egg collections, each comprised of three novellas.”
It’s odd how closely his current language around those still-incomplete fourth and fifth novellas parallels that old blog post, as if he hadn’t initially started work on them more than 12 years ago. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter recently, Martin said, “I have a lot more stories about Dunk and Egg in my fucking head. […] I began writing two at various points in the past year. One is set in Winterfell and one set in the Riverlands.” That certainly suggests he hasn’t made progress on those stories since he first mentioned them — and possibly that She-Wolves of Winterfell not only wasn’t finished in time for 2013’s Dangerous Women, but that he never even started writing it.
The connection between Martin’s awkwardly public struggles with meeting deadlines and the Dunk and Egg stories go back further than that, though: In the past, Martin has recounted how he only barely made his deadline for the first novella in the series, which Science Fiction Grandmaster Robert Silverberg commissioned from him for the 1998 anthology Legends. On an episode of The Official Game of Thrones Podcast, Martin describes how Silverberg reached out to him after A Game of Thrones was published, as Martin was working on the sequel, A Clash of Kings, “which of course was late.”
Legends was meant to collect newly written novellas by the biggest names in fantasy, set in their most familiar worlds: a new Dark Tower story from Stephen King, a new Pern installment from Anne McCaffery, a new Wheel of Time story from Robert Jordan, “and me, who really didn’t belong in there at that time,” Martin says. In 1997, Martin was a successful Hugo, Nebula, and Locus-winning writer with several published novels and short-story collections under his belt, and a writer-producer on the fan-beloved TV fantasy Beauty and the Beast. But it was a stretch to call Game of Thrones’ Westeros a familiar, established fantasy setting equal to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld or Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea (two more of the worlds represented with new stories in Legends).
Silverberg made it clear to Martin that the book had to be completed by the end of the year, and that his Westeros story would be cut from the roster if he couldn’t make that deadline. So Martin managed to get his story in on Dec. 31st — though he says Silverberg later told him that three of the other writers in the anthology also turned their stories in on the last day of the year.
In that interview, Martin credits Legends with boosting his profile among fantasy fans in a way that may have springboarded the later worldwide success of the Song of Ice and Fire franchise. He says he heard from many fans at the time that they’d never heard of him before reading the first Dunk & Egg story in Silverberg’s anthology, which may help explain why he’s so fond of the characters and wants to write more about them, someday.
Maybe that’s just one more reason to free George R.R. Martin from The Winds of Winter.
