While the flashback on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 1 Episode 5 was a little long, it did bring an interesting reveal.
Ser Arlan knows Dothraki, a language that is spoken on the other side of the Narrow Sea.
Out of all the characters on the series, Ser Arlan is the one with the most intriguing backstory, and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms needs to go into it.
(Photograph by Steffan Hill/HBO)
Don’t worry if you didn’t catch that Ser Arlan was singing in Dothraki on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 1 Episode 5.
You needed to have the closed captions on, as that’s where it told us that he was singing in the language.
Since the episode was released, David J. Peterson took to his Archive of Our Own account to share the translated lyrics. Peterson is the creator of the Dothraki language on Game of Thrones, so he definitely knows what the song was about!
Not only did he translate the song, but he also included the original lyrics as well.
The song delves into the ropes of hell binding the singer, and “ungodly men” making the singer afraid.
(Photograph by Steffan Hill/HBO)
It’s clear later on that the song is dedicated to the Dothraki god, the Great Stallion, with the singer asking him to make him stronger and more courageous.
Getting this confirmation makes it clear that there is far more to Ser Arlan than we’ve been led to believe.
This is a man who has traveled the world, and he’s a man who has accepted people of all different races and faiths.
He has to have done to learn a song in Dothraki.
It does raise a lot of questions, though, and it could explain why it was so much harder for Dunk to find someone to vouch for Ser Arlan compared to other knights out there.
(Photograph by Steffan Hill/HBO)
Ser Arlan is a wanderer, and it’s clear that he must have been in Essos at some point.
It would make sense for him to be a mercenary, considering the way he fought in Fleabottom during the flashback, which hinted at him having skills taught by non-knights of Westeros.
Maybe this also explains why Dunk was immediately drawn to Tanselle, who appeared to be from Essos.
Not only would Tanselle remind Dunk of Rafe, his friend in the flashback, but Ser Arlan would have taught him to be accepting of all — we all bleed red.
One thing that is clear is that we now need Ser Arlan’s backstory from A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
(Photograph by Steffan Hill/HBO)
He is a man of travel and honor, taking in a young squire with barely any questions and proving that he wants to protect the innocent without knowing the full story.
While so few people of note remember him in Westeros, that doesn’t mean he didn’t do great things.
It just means those great things were done on a smaller scale, maybe helping people of lower notability, so Ser Arlan’s story wouldn’t carry too far.
Dunk got to see some of those great things over the years while being his squire, but there is more to Ser Arlan’s story, including when and how he learned Dothraki.
(Photograph by Steffan Hill/HBO)
Is it just the song that he knows, or did he learn more of the language? After all, we can all learn the lyrics of a song in another language without learning the whole language itself.
Dunk has always told us that Ser Arlan lived a good life. He didn’t have a castle or much to his name, but he acted like a real knight and protected the innocent.
We’ve seen that more with the flashback on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 1 Episode 5, but there is so much more that we don’t know.
There’s a whole life Ser Arlan had before Dunk met him, and that’s the life that clearly has meat and grit.
(Photograph by Steffan Hill/HBO)
It’s the story of how he became a knight, and the story of how he traveled the world.
That’s the story that will also help us understand why he took Dunk in without question.
The problem is that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is only really told from Dunk’s POV — although there are moments from Egg’s POV as well — and that means it can only tell us anything he knows about Ser Arlan.
With that in mind, we need another Game of Thrones spinoff series. It would only need to be a limited series, telling the story of this man who raised Dunk to be a squire and inspired him to be more than that.
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