The Mad King: Tournament at Harrenhal

A. Aziz Al Doory (0:48)

The tournament at Harrenhal is without a doubt one of the most important, if not the most important, event leading up to Robert's Rebellion. Perhaps the one thing that kicked off the most other events that culminated in the actual war.

And on its own, even without all that connective tissue, it's one of the most compelling chapters in A Song of Ice and Fire history. Rarely have the personal, the political and the prophetic come together so expertly, but in the book, so much of it is missing. It's mysterious and meaningful, but a lot of it we have to fill in the blanks. We have to imagine the dialogue and the characterizations. The Mad King play takes everything from the source material and it features these characters, the ones that we've had this urgent need to learn about for 20 years or so or more.

Rhaegar, Lyanna, Ashara, Dane, Howland, Reed, Elia Martell, and of course Aerys himself and plenty more. Characters we've long theorized about actually given dialogue brought to life and it fits really well. It really scratches that itch and in a sense, it's like the Night of the Seven Kingdoms in a way where they didn't have to change very much. It's a larger scale story, so there's a little bit more of the adaptation process at work. But they were able to take just about every piece of dialogue and scene that we had already from the books, and then fill in the blanks around that. It's really, really excellent. This is our coverage of the first half of the play, which is set entirely at the tourney of Heron Hall. We have all the spoilers, all the details we could remember and take notes on right after we saw it several times, and all the analysis that accompanies all that. Plus again, quotes from the books to tie it all together. All that and more on this episode of the History of Westeros Podcast.

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A. Aziz Al Doory (3:41)

Hello and welcome back everybody. I'm Aziz with me as always is Asheya. You can check us out at historyofwesteros.com. That is one of the best places to keep up with us in between episodes. But you can also just download our episodes every week and do that whole thing. That works pretty well too. But if you want to do more, if you want to get more involved, if you want to get bonus episodes, you can also go to our site on Patreon. That's patreon.com/history of Westeros and check out what we've got for you over there. We've got a lot to talk about today, so I want to get to it pretty quickly. It's funny though that we've never actually covered The Tourney of Harrenhal. I went through that intro saying how important it was, and we've never actually covered it prior to this. Not in full, we've obviously referred to it a bunch of times. We've covered Rhaegar, and Lyanna, and Brandon, and Rickard, and Aerys, and a variety of other episodes, stuff that overlaps some of this, but we hadn't actually focused on The Tourney itself.

So that's kind of neat. So we're going to do that now, right? We're going to be able to do the plays version while also pointing out where it differs. And that works because it doesn't have a lot of differences. We don't have to have a whole episode like we have, or multiple episodes like we do with House of the Dragon, where we have so many differences that we can't even do it all in one long episode. This episode is long because the tournament and the events are long, not because there's so many differences. So that's awesome.