The seat, the words, the line, and the tale of House Tarly — drawn from the novels and the Citadel's fuller histories, with the television series set aside wherever it parts from the books.
Seat
Horn Hill
Region
The Reach
Founder
Herndon of the Horn and Harlon the Hunter, twin sons of Garth Greenhand, if the oldest songs may be trusted
Marcher lords of the Dornish frontier, the Tarlys hold Horn Hill in the Reach and answer to Highgarden with a promptness their neighbors sometimes lack. Legend credits their line to twin sons of Garth Greenhand, though the Citadel keeps its opinion of woods-witch marriages to itself. What the histories agree on is plainer: House Tarly fields some of the hardest soldiers south of the Neck, wields the Valyrian steel greatsword Heartsbane, and expects its heirs to be soldiers first and everything else a distant second — an expectation that has cost the house more than one son.
I
Twin Sons of the Green Hand
The oldest songs — and the Citadel repeats them with its customary reluctance to vouch for anything that predates ink — hold that two sons of Garth Greenhand carved Horn Hill out of the Reach's dornish marches between them: Herndon, who is said to have blown a hunting horn atop the hill to claim it in his father's name and left both the horn and the hill their names, and Harlon, whose skill at clearing the wilds of the beasts that troubled the Reach's southern edge earned his line the huntsman striding on green that still flies over Horn Hill. Whether two brothers or one embellished ancestor lie behind the tale, no maester now living can say with any confidence Garth Greenhand himself would recognize as evidence.
What the record trusts more readily is the position the tale explains: Horn Hill sits closer to Dorne than to Highgarden, and for the centuries before Daeron the Good married a Martell and ended the border wars by treaty rather than by sword, House Tarly's swords were the Reach's first answer to any raid that crossed the mountains. The habit of fielding hard soldiers on short notice, which the family has never since lost, was not bred for comfort. It was bred for a frontier that no longer exists in quite the shape that made it.
In the chronicle
II
The Defeat at Ashford
Randyll Tarly was already Lord of Horn Hill and already known for a temper that outlasted most men's patience when Robert Baratheon's rebellion reached the Reach, and he did what almost no other commander on either side of that war managed: he beat Robert Baratheon in the field. At Ashford, Tarly's forces checked the rebel advance and inflicted a defeat sharp enough that the maesters who logged it did not need to embellish the account to make it sound decisive. It did not decide the war. Robert reorganized, marched north, and ended the dynasty Randyll had fought to preserve on the banks of the Trident a short time later, a battle Horn Hill's levies were not present for.
Highgarden bent the knee once the Trident made the rebellion's outcome plain, and House Tarly bent with it, losing nothing at the peace table that its one battlefield victory had not already been spent buying. What the defeat at Ashford earned Randyll instead was reputation: proof, repeated by soldiers and songs alike for a generation after, that the one field commander who had actually beaten the eventual king was a Reach lord most of the realm still had to be told how to pronounce.
The present tale
This chapter carries the house's fortunes into the novels' events — veiled until you choose to read on.
§
Maidenpool and the Wall
When the War of the Five Kings reached the Reach, Mace Tyrell put Randyll Tarly in command of the host that answered for it, and Randyll spent the war doing methodically what he had always done: winning the battles he was given room to fight. He retook Maidenpool from the scattered northern forces still holding the riverlands after the Red Wedding, took Lord Rickard Karstark's surviving son Harrion captive in the fighting, and held Maidenpool afterward with the same flat refusal to tolerate disorder that had once made him send his own eldest son away rather than raise a soldier he judged unfit to be one.
That eldest son had, by then, already found the Wall. Samwell Tarly took the black at seventeen not for love of the Night's Watch but because his father gave him the choice of the black or a hunting accident dressed up as one, and the Wall got, in the maesters' later estimation, rather more than Randyll Tarly had bargained to be rid of: a steward who killed a wight with fire and an Other with dragonglass, salvaged a horn out of the haunted forest that the Watch still argues the meaning of, and carried Lord Commander Mormont's last letters south when older, harder men would not go. Horn Hill measures its sons by the sword. The Wall, for once, measured one by something else, and did not find him wanting.
In the chronicle
These partings name deaths, endings, and roads not yet ridden in the books. Unveil them only if both roads are known to you — or if you do not fear to know.
The people of House Tarly
The lords, ladies, and branches of Tarly the books name — the notable, the infamous, and the merely unlucky.
Randyll Tarly
Lord of Horn Hill
fl. 283–300 AC
One of the few commanders to hand Robert Baratheon a defeat in the field, at Ashford, and no gentler with his own blood than with his enemies. He disowned his firstborn son for want of a soldier's stomach, then spent the War of the Five Kings retaking Maidenpool and dispensing the sort of justice that leaves no outlaws left to appeal it.
These partings name deaths, endings, and roads not yet ridden in the books. Unveil them only if both roads are known to you — or if you do not fear to know.
Samwell Tarlythe Slayer
of the Night's Watch
b. 283 AC
Sent to the Wall at his father's insistence rather than his own inclination, he proved better with books than blades — until a dragonglass dagger and a dying Other proved otherwise. Steward, sometime slayer, and reluctant courier of secrets between the Wall and Oldtown, he carries more of his house's actual cleverness than his father ever credited him with.
These partings name deaths, endings, and roads not yet ridden in the books. Unveil them only if both roads are known to you — or if you do not fear to know.
Dickon Tarly
of Horn Hill, heir to Horn Hill
fl. 298–300 AC
Randyll's second son and, since Samwell took the black, the heir Horn Hill was left with — present at his father's side when Jaime Lannister came calling to hear, from Randyll's own mouth, why his firstborn had been sent to the Wall instead of Horn Hill's hall.
Talla Tarly
of Horn Hill
fl. 298–300 AC
Randyll and Melessa's only daughter and, by Samwell's own account in his letters home, the one Tarly under Horn Hill's roof who never once made her disgraced brother feel unwelcome in it.
Melessa Tarly, of House Florent
Lady of Horn Hill
fl. late 3rd century AC
Randyll's lady wife, drawn from the Florents of Brightwater Keep and remembered by those who have met both spouses as the considerably warmer half of the marriage — mother to Samwell, Dickon, and Talla, and no small part of the reason any of the three speak of home with affection at all.
What the record disputes
Where the sources disagree or a song outruns the maesters, the chronicle marks the doubt rather than settling it.
"First in Battle" circulates as the Tarly words in supplementary and semi-canon material, but no novel puts the phrase in a Tarly mouth or a maester's chronicle; the Chronicle treats it as unconfirmed.
The precise span of years Heartsbane has sat in Tarly hands is given only loosely in the sources consulted; the Chronicle notes centuries rather than commit to a number the record itself does not fix.
Explore further
Members
What is House Tarly known for?
Marcher lords of the Dornish frontier, the Tarlys hold Horn Hill in the Reach and answer to Highgarden with a promptness their neighbors sometimes lack. Legend credits their line to twin sons of Garth Greenhand, though the Citadel keeps its opinion of woods-witch marriages to itself. What the histories agree on is plainer: House Tarly fields some of the hardest soldiers south of the Neck, wields the Valyrian steel greatsword Heartsbane, and expects its heirs to be soldiers first and everything else a distant second — an expectation that has cost the house more than one son.
Where is the seat of House Tarly?
House Tarly holds Horn Hill, in The Reach. 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.
Is House Tarly in the books or only the show?
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.