“None the Citadel can confirm from the printed page.”
The seat, the words, the line, and the tale of House Selmy — drawn from the novels and the Citadel's fuller histories, with the television series set aside wherever it parts from the books.
A modest marcher family whose entire claim on the realm's memory rests on a single son who left home for a white cloak, gave up his own inheritance to wear it, and went on to serve four kings across sixty years without, by most accounts, ever losing a fight he was determined to win.
Harvest Hall sits among the greater marcher seats of the Dornish Marches, its arms three stalks of yellow wheat on brown — a modest, agricultural sigil among neighbors who favor lightning bolts and nightingales, and about as much attention as the family itself seems to have wanted before one of its sons made that impossible.
Ser Lyonel Selmy's eldest son Barristan was already a knight of some renown — knighted in his sixteenth year by King Aegon V himself, after riding as a mystery knight at the winter tourney in King's Landing and unhorsing both Prince Duncan the Small and Ser Duncan the Tall, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard — when King Aerys II's half-year captivity in Duskendale gave him the chance to become a legend outright. While Tywin Lannister assembled an army to storm the town and very possibly kill the king in the attempt, Barristan went over Duskendale's walls alone, found Aerys still living, and brought him out — a piece of unsupported, unauthorized heroism that earned him the epithet the realm still uses without irony: Barristan the Bold.
In the chronicle
Barristan gave up whatever claim he held on Harvest Hall's succession the day he took the white cloak, and the decades since have been a chronicle unto themselves: wounded fighting for Rhaegar Targaryen at the Trident, spared and pardoned by the victor, and kept on as Kingsguard through Robert's reign, Joffrey's, and the brief regency around each — before Cersei Lannister, this chronicle records with some distaste for the manner of it, dismissed him from the Guard for his age in the same public breath she named Jaime Lannister's replacement.
What the crown discarded, Essos was glad to take up. Barristan crossed the narrow sea under a false name and found his way, eventually, into the service of Daenerys Targaryen at Meereen — a queen he serves, by every report reaching this chronicle, with the same undiminished stubbornness he once brought to a captive king's rescue. Harvest Hall's succession, meanwhile, has passed to kinsmen this chronicle has too little on to name with confidence.
In the chronicle
The lords, ladies, and branches of Selmy the books name — the notable, the infamous, and the merely unlucky.
Barristan's father, Lord or landed knight of Harvest Hall
d. before 298 AC
knight of the Kingsguard under four kings; later a sworn sword to Daenerys Targaryen
b. c. 236 AC
Members
A modest marcher family whose entire claim on the realm's memory rests on a single son who left home for a white cloak, gave up his own inheritance to wear it, and went on to serve four kings across sixty years without, by most accounts, ever losing a fight he was determined to win.
House Selmy holds Harvest Hall, in The Stormlands. The chronicle traces the house from its founding down to its part in the present tale, marking legend as legend wherever the songs run ahead of the record.
Book canon. This history follows George R. R. Martin's novels first, then the histories — Fire & Blood and The World of Ice & Fire — and does not follow the television series where it diverges.