Spoilers for Game of Thrones, season 7 below.
On the second episode of Game of Thrones season seven, Samwell Tarly took a break from peeling off oozing, diseased skin and emptying poop buckets to have a conversation with Archmaester Marwyn:
"If you're going to write histories, Tarly, you have to do the research," he lectures during a stroll through the library. "If you want people to read your histories, you need a bit of style. I'm not writing, A Chronicle of the Wars of Following the Death of King Robert I so it can sit on a shelf unread.'"
Cue Samwell's face of disgust.
"What? You don't like the title? What would you call it then?"
"Mm, possibly something a bit more poetic?"
"We're not poets, Tarly."
Hmm, a book chronicling the wars following the death of King Robert? What would you call that? Maybe, "Game of Thrones?" Or even, "A Song of Ice and Fire?" (If you don't know, that's the name of the book series the show is based on.)
And the meta reference to the series title might be more than just a cheeky wink at the audience. The eagle-eyed folks over at the A Song of Ice and Fire subreddit asked if this conversation iswasa hint about a long-standing theory: that the series is actually a historical text written by Samwell Tarly.
John Bradley, the actor who plays Samwell, himself spoke on this theory last July. Via The Hollywood Reporter:
One theory is that what we're seeing now and how we're experiencing Game of Thrones is Sam telling the story of Game of Thrones. If you take the logic of the story now, the story of Westeros and the story of the battle for the Iron Throne, it would be a book in that library. The visual motif of that is you're about to be told a story — the sense of an idea of being told a story, and people gaining that knowledge, the way Sam is absorbing knowledge in the library.
So based on last night's episode, we know that Samwell Tarly would consider a more poetic title for his master text. A Song of Ice and Fire definitely fits the bill...
If this is at all true, at least we know Samwell survives his feces apprenticeship to write the book.
