The Hedge Knight by George R.R. Martin vs. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms vs…

Everybody seems to agree that season one of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is pretty good.  Critics that usually hate everything from the last ten years are saying it’s good.  Some of those critics are even saying that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is great, that it can save television.  The worst that I’ve heard is that the show is good, but since everything else on television/streaming sucks, it just seems great when it’s really just pretty good.  Considering how everything is so polarizing today, it’s good to see something that a lot of people can agree about.

So let’s ruin all that with some fake controversy.

Season one of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was based on a short story called “The Hedge Knight by George R.R. Martin, author of A Song of Ice and Fire (commonly known as A Game of Thrones, but if you call it A Game of Thrones, some purists will get mad and try to have you removed from social media platforms).  I first read “The Hedge Knight” in a fantasy short story anthology that compiled short stories from various fantasy series of the late 1990s, Legends edited by Robert Silverberg.

Because I wanted to read a new fantasy series in the 1990s but wasn’t sure where to start, (even back in the 1990s, there were too many fantasy series getting published at once to keep track of), I decided to try the short stories in this book and make my decision from them. After reading this short story compilation, I decided to just read The Lord of the Rings trilogy again. There was nothing wrong with the short stories. I just wasn’t willing to commit to a bunch of long novels because of them.

 I’m not going to give a synopsis of either “The Hedge Knight” or A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms because you can get that everywhere else. I’m here to give you my opinion without any proof that I know anything more about the topic than anybody else.

Here’s my review of “The Hedge Knight” by George R.R. Martin:

“The Hedge Knight” is a decent story. I liked it.

That’s it.  That’s my review.

Here’s my point. If HBO-Max can make a really great show (according to the critics) out of a good but somewhat mediocre story like “The Hedge Knight” (‘mediocre’ isn’t an insult!  I actually finished reading “The Hedge Knight,” so that mediocrity puts it above 90% of what’s out there, but it is ‘mediocre’ compared to the other stuff that I finish)… ugh… I just lost my train of thought.

How did a decent but nothing special story inspire such a highly-acclaimed season of a television series? First of all, the show stuck with the source material. That usually helps. Sometimes television/movie writers think they know better than the original writer(s) of the source material and make a bunch of unnecessary changes that actually ruin everything. That didn’t seem to happen with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Season one of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms had a bunch of details/scenes that weren’t in the original story “The Hedge Knight,” though. Maybe these scenes/details/flashbacks were in other George R.R. Martin stories (I haven’t read the other Dunk and Egg stories), but they weren’t in “The Hedge Knight,” but that’s okay because these scenes were actually good. Plus, the acting was good, maybe great.

This seems to be circular analysis. What made A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms so good was that the writers and directors made good decisions and the acting was good. That’s all you have to do in life, make good decisions and be good at what you do. I could save the world with that advice.

If HBO-Max can make a really popular show out of a somewhat mediocre story like “The Hedge Knight,” then it could make a really awesome series from a great Conan story like “Red Nails” or “Beyond the Black River.” by Robert E. Howard. That’s just the start!  There’s so much literary material out there that’s way better than George R. R. Martin’s stuff, but he’s getting a lot of attention.  Again, nothing against George R. R. Martin (except that he led people on for far too long about ever finishing A Song of Ice and Fire).

I kind of want shows/movies based on George R.R. Martin’s books/short stories to be successful because I like the genre. Even though A Song of Ice and Fire is considered fantasy, I think of it as sword & sorcery, a sub-genre that usually combines a medieval setting with adventure, sorcery, horror, and scantily-clad women who get themselves or are put into dangerous situations. “The Hedge Knight”/A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was more like a basic legendary tale without a lot of the elements that go into sword & sorcery. It reminds me a little of the old pulp short story “By This Axe I Rule” by Robert E. Howard, another good sword & sorcery story without sorcery/horror elements.

Both “The Hedge Knight” and “By This Axe I Rule” are set in fantasy/sword &sorcery worlds established by these authors, but neither of these stories rely on the sword & sorcery elements. The protagonist Dunk/Duncan in “The Hedge Knight” struggles with living up to the ideal standards of a knight while the protagonist Kull in “By This Axe I Rule” struggles with his limitations as a king. One key difference was that Robert E. Howard was unable to get “By This Axe I Rule” published because of that lack of fantasy elements. He chose instead to rewrite it as a Conan story with a different title “The Phoenix on the Sword” (which I don’t think is nearly as good, but a lot of Conan fans disagree with me), adding the necessary sorcery and horror to get it published in Weird Tales magazine in the early 1930s.

Enough of this! Season one of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is waaaaayyy better as a television series than “The Hedge Knight” is as a short story. If television can do something this good with a story as mediocre (it’s not bad, it just doesn’t stand out), then there’s no reason for movie/television adaptations of good/great books to suck.

So if you ever need an example of where a movie/television series is clearly better than the book or short story, go with season one of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms over “The Hedge Knight” by George R.R. Martin.

For more Dysfunctional Literacy, see…

What was the deal with…? Bloodstone by Karl Edward Wagner

Robert E. Howard’s Letter to Two Nerds in the 1930s  

The Only Real Conan Is The Robert E. Howard Conan! 

 Old Man Reviews Manga: Vinland Saga Books One to Eleven by Makoto Yukimura