There’s a popular theory that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Ser Duncan is related to Hodor from Game of Thrones – and it’s not just because they’re both tall.
Set a hundred years before GoT, the prequel series follows the lowborn knight, Duncan the Tall, and his squire, Aegon Targaryen (better known as Dunk and Egg).
Expect plenty of familiar family names and connections to the other shows, but this long-running theory connects Dunk with Hodor, one of the most beloved Game of Thrones characters.
Why Dunk could be Hodor’s ancestor
Hodor’s real name is Walder (Wylis in the show), and he’s Old Nan’s great-grandson. The common belief is that Dunk met (a young) Old Nan in Winterfell, the two got on very well, and Hodor is Dunk’s great-grandson.
Game of Thrones Season 6’s “hold the door” scene showed the heartbreaking way that Walder became Hodor, but in the books, we see a bit more of the past. After Bran eats weirwood paste and peers into the past, here’s what he sees at Winterfell:
“Then there came a brown-haired girl slender as a spear who stood on the tips of her toes to kiss the lips of a young knight as tall as Hodor.”
Now, there’s not much connecting this brown-haired girl to Old Nan, but “a young knight as tall as Hodor” is particularly interesting.
Hodor in the books is described as seven feet tall, and Dunk is “an inch shy of seven feet,” so it certainly lines up – not many others in Westeros are that tall.
It goes further, though, as we know that Dunk and Egg visit Winterfell. As revealed in a 2014 George R.R. Martin blog post, the fourth novella “was indeed set in Winterfell, and involved a group of formidable Stark wives, widows, mothers, and grandmothers that I dubbed ‘the She-Wolves.’”
“The She-Wolves of Winterfell” was only ever a working title, and won’t see the next Dunk and Egg story get published until after The Winds of Winter is finished.
We don’t know exactly when this would be set, but it’d be roughly 80 years before the events of Game of Thrones, which makes the theory plausible.
If we ever do get a confirmation of this connection in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, expect it to be several years down the line – George R.R. Martin hasn’t written the novella in which Dunk visits Winterfell yet, and we don’t know whether the show will continue beyond the books.
However, it’s not just Hodor, as we know that Dunk is related to another popular Game of Thrones character.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Dunk is directly linked to beloved Game of Thrones character