We might not have Game of Thrones if it weren’t for Dunk and Egg, the lead characters of HBO’s new series A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
The duo first appeared in a novella called The Hedge Knight, tucked in the back of a 1998 fantasy anthology titled Legends. Its author, George RR Martin, who'd won awards for A Game of Thrones a year earlier, was not yet a genre all-star and writers such as Stephen King, Robert Jordan and Raymond E Feist took top billing.
But the underdog story proved so compelling that it brought tens of thousands of new readers to Westeros when the second book in the series, A Clash of Kings, was published several months later.
“For that I credit Dunk and Egg,” Martin wrote on his blog in 2025.
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