By Samuel Kronen
Monday, February 23, 2026
This winter, HBO took us back to the world of Westeros
with its new series, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. The show follows a
humble everyman hedge knight and his weird little squire as they travel around
the continent looking for people to save and end up getting caught up in all
sorts of shenanigans and scenarios connected to the larger fate of the kingdom.
The story is about how much good can be done with a strong will and heart, and
it explores what it means to be a true hero in a broken and complex world.
Unlike Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon,
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is much more contained in its scope, lighter
in spirit and tone. Taking place about 90 years before the events of Game of
Thrones, we are introduced to a young man named Dunk, an orphan bastard
from the slums of the capital who is raised and trained by a hedge knight. (In
this world, hedge knights are roaming mercenaries.) When his father figure dies
at the beginning of the story, Dunk takes up his master’s sword and hits the
road as a traveling hedge knight to participate in a tourney under the false
title Ser Duncan the Tall. Dunk is not very smart or talented, but he’s big and
strong and truly wants to be and do good. On the road, Dunk meets a fellow
traveler named Egg, a strange child with a bald head and a sharp tongue, and
together they form a kind of odd couple dynamic. But Dunk is not a real knight,
and Egg is not a peasant despite presenting as one, and their adventures have a
huge impact on the later story of Game of Thrones.
The success of George R.R. Martin’s books and shows is a
testament to the reality, complexity, and depth of his characters and stories,
balancing human political drama with an air of prophecy and myth and magic. The
Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, a proxy for the Western world and where most of the
story takes place, are constantly devolving into chaos and warfare—and they
were only able to be united by the judicious use of gigantic fire-breathing
f–king dragons centuries prior by the ruling family, the blonde and
purple-eyed Targaryens. In this world, seasons can last years, magic is real
but obscure, whole empires have literally erupted in a flood of apocalyptic
flame, and entire continents are left unexplored and filled with ungodly
creatures like giant worms and monkeys and dinosaurs: People exist at the mercy
of an unforgiving environment and its natural and unnatural forces.
Yet in a world of such instability and uncertainty, with
pain and death waiting around every corner, people hold to the things that give
life firmness: sacred duties and traditions, and the vows that transcend time.
In our own history, the notion of knighthood emerged from
the broken feudal system of the Dark Ages, in which individuals with martial
prowess were tasked with restoring law and order and keeping the peace in
exchange for land and titles. Knights were meant to dole out justice and defend
the vulnerable and innocent, taking sacred vows to be courageous, honorable,
and humble. In practice, however, they were often marauding agents of chaos and
wielders of brutal oppressive power: As the historian Barbara Tuchman has
written, “by the 14th century, the violence and lawlessness of men of the
sword had become a major agency of disorder.”
But just because knights didn’t always live up to the
ideal doesn’t mean it was the wrong ideal. Being a hero and a knight is about
more than noble titles and ceremonies. It’s about certain essential human
qualities that anyone can access—loyalty, bravery, honor, inner power—to
navigate suffering well and carry on despite adversity, qualities which imply a
kind of purity and wholeness of being.
The modern imagination is fascinated with medieval
history, knighthood, and heroism, with countless recent
films and shows centering
around these periods and themes.
There is clearly some sort of unconscious longing at play, a yearning to
connect with the values and beliefs that carried our ancestors through much
harsher times. As the Gen Z writer Freya India has observed,
what many young people seem to crave today is to be humbled and bound, to be
tethered to something that lasts. And so while stories of knights and heroes
may be antiquated on the surface, we can’t seem to totally shake off the ideas
at their centers.
The mythic hero’s journey follows an unmistakable cycle.
An individual is pulled from obscurity and away from home, their journeys and
struggles bring about great inner change that culminates in a
confrontation—with the darkness, the dragon, chaos—before returning home to
renew the larger community and restore balance to the world. As Joseph Campbell
put it in his classic Hero with a Thousand Faces, “A hero ventures forth
from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous
forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: The hero comes back
from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow
man.”
What makes both a hero and an actualized human being is
the ability to change reality by facing it. The hero absorbs the
darkness, pain and death and time and evil and chaos and fear, and alchemizes
it into a source of light and life and fire, standing for what is human against
the alienation and adversity and absurdity of the natural universe.
This alchemizing is not easy: It demands wrestling with
difficult realities, often represented in film and literature by the dragon,
the monster, the darkness. The suffering built into facing reality is a call to
heroic action; how one bears and uses that suffering is what makes a hero.
***
The ideal of an independent individual—relying on their
own strength and savvy, committing and devoting themselves to higher
principles, moving with purpose and despite pain—still resonates because it’s a
profoundly human idea. The whole point of vows and oaths and promises is that
they test your honor and faith, holding you to something against the chaos of
reality.
The closest equivalent to modern knights in contemporary
media and culture would be superheroes, cloaked in armor and cape, concealing
their identities to stand for a larger ideal and risking life and limb to
protect and serve. The best iteration of these themes is Christopher Nolan’s Dark
Knight trilogy, which gives a more modern philosophical take on the Batman
saga. In the films, Bruce Wayne is a tortured billionaire wrestling with the
trauma of watching his parents’ murder as his city comes apart at the seams
from crime and social decay.
Bruce leaves home to undertake a metaphorical hero’s
journey, surveying the world’s criminal underbelly to understand the true
nature of evil. He studies martial arts, joins a mercenary group of vigilante
ninjas called the League of Shadows, learns to embrace his fears to use against
his enemies—in his case a childhood terror of bats—and returns to Gotham
transformed into a symbol of justice, a dark knight to be feared and lauded.
Justice to Batman is not about personal revenge and
evening the scales, but defending the sanctity of human life no matter what. As
an initiation into the League of Shadows, Bruce is asked to kill a captured
criminal, but he refuses. “Compassion is a weakness your enemies will not
share,” he is told. “That’s why it’s so important,” he says.
There’s something archetypal and human about putting on a
mask to embody an ideal, and the concept of masking is a major touchstone of
the trilogy. As Bruce tells the butler Alfred upon his return to Gotham,
“People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy. I can’t do that as
Bruce Wayne. As a man, I’m flesh and blood. I can be ignored, I can be
destroyed. But as a symbol, I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting.” As
he later says when asked his true identity, “It’s not who I am underneath, but
what I do, that defines me.” Bruce weaponizes his suffering, his fears
and vulnerabilities and rage and personal darkness to spare others suffering
and save the city—a true hero and a knight.
In the second and most successful installment of the
trilogy, The Dark Knight, Batman faces an adversary of pure chaos and
nihilism: the Joker. At one point, the Joker is killing innocents to force
Batman to take off his mask/ When Bruce asks Alfred for advice, the butler
tells him, “Endure, Master Wayne. Take it. They’ll hate you for it. But that’s
the point of Batman. He can be the outcast. He can make the choice no one else
can make: the right choice.”
In the final installment, The Dark Knight Rises,
Batman is forced to return after a long time away, only to be physically bested
and crippled by the villain Bane. Bruce has to embrace his fears once again and
rise back to the surface. “Why do we fall?” an earlier phrase from his father
rings out in his dreams. “So we can learn to pick ourselves up.” A hero keeps
coming back, rises. And Bane’s plan is foiled by the knight.
***
In the novel A Game of Thrones, an old maester
tells a young warrior that love is the death of duty.
What is honor compared to a
woman’s love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms ...
or the memory of a brother’s smile? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only
human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and
our great tragedy.
But maybe duty is
the highest form of love. Maybe what it means to be a hero lies somewhere
directly between our human brokenness and fallenness and our highest and
noblest ideals. Maybe people need those ideals and values and archetypes and
stories to pull them out of the earthly muck, and it is this constant rising
that defines the human condition. Maybe it is only there, on the cutting
edge of reality where life meets death, that one discovers the means within
oneself to do what is necessary: the will to do and act and change. Because it
is not who someone is underneath, but what they do, that defines them.
Because it is the qualities a person embraces—dignity, honor, sacrifice,
courage, humility—that, when the crucial moment comes, make someone who and
what they are, that turns a messy human animal into a lasting ideal, a hero.
The heroic ideal reminds us of our potential for great
heights and depths: There are potential and actual heroes all around us, in the
small and quiet places. Young people, especially, who are so spiritually and
morally exhausted by our digital hellscape, might benefit from hero stories;
they might learn that it’s still possible to stand for something, to live and
die for something, to become more than what you are by committing to an ideal.
There’s a Hunter S. Thompson quote that we turn ourselves into beasts to avoid
the pain of being a man. But maybe a related truth is that we turn ourselves
into heroes to overcome that pain.
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