“None the Citadel can confirm from any printed page. This chronicle notes the omission and moves on, as the family itself appears content to.”
The seat, the words, the line, and the tale of House Tarth — drawn from the novels and the Citadel's fuller histories, with the television series set aside wherever it parts from the books.
Seat
Evenfall Hall
Region
The Stormlands
Founder
Unrecorded, and the family does not especially want it recorded — the Lords of Tarth have styled themselves the Evenstar since before written history reaches back, claiming kinship in turn to the old Storm Kings, to House Baratheon, and, more recently and more quietly, to the dragons.
An island house that once, by its own long telling, ruled in its own right — sapphires under the hills, an old name still carried with a straight back — House Tarth spent most of its recorded history being called Evenstar rather than Lord, and all of its most recent history being defined by a single daughter its Lord never expected to need.
I
The Evenstar's Long Claim
Tarth is an island house in more than geography: set apart in the narrow sea south of the mainland stormlands, it has kept a title — the Evenstar — that predates the Storm Kings it later served and the Baratheons who succeeded them, and the family's own account traces blood to both, and more recently, through marriage, to the Targaryens as well. The Citadel's own scholars decline to adjudicate how much of this is descent and how much is a very old house's very old habit of claiming the best available ancestors.
What the record confirms without dispute is sapphires — mined from the island's hills in a trade old enough that Tarth's wealth, unlike its lineage, needs no hedging.
The present tale
This chapter carries the house's fortunes into the novels' events — veiled until you choose to read on.
§
The Last Child of Evenfall
Lord Selwyn Tarth buried three of his four children before any of them reached an age to be remembered for much beyond their deaths: two daughters, Alysanne and Arianne, died in infancy, and a son, Galladon, drowned at eight years old within sight of his own family's hall. What remained to him was a daughter, Brienne, taller and stronger than most of the knights her father might once have hoped would marry her, and entirely uninterested in being married to any of them.
Brienne's own ambitions ran to knighthood rather than a husband — an ambition no law of the Seven Kingdoms formally permitted a woman, and no custom of the stormlands much encouraged either. She found her way instead into the entourage of Renly Baratheon, whose newly formed Rainbow Guard of seven hand-picked household knights made room, unusually, for a woman who could outfight most of the men proposing to protect him.
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 present tale
This chapter carries the house's fortunes into the novels' events — veiled until you choose to read on.
§
Oathkeeper
Brienne stood nearest Renly Baratheon when he died in his own tent — killed, by her account, by something with Stannis Baratheon's face and no body the guards outside ever found — and was, inevitably and unfairly, the first person his household suspected of the murder. She fled the accusation rather than answer it, and found a different oath to keep instead: sworn sword to Catelyn Stark, and after Catelyn's own death at the Twins, bound by that same oath to search the riverlands for Sansa Stark on Jaime Lannister's authority and, this chronicle notes without further comment, increasingly on her own account as well.
Jaime armed her for the search with a Valyrian steel blade forged from what had been Ned Stark's own sword, and she has carried it — renamed Oathkeeper, a name this chronicle finds unusually direct for a house otherwise fond of hedging its own claims — through a search this chronicle cannot yet report the end of. What she has found along the riverlands' back roads, and who she may since have found leading outlaws there, remains, as of this writing, beyond any page this maester will commit to print.
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 Tarth
The lords, ladies, and branches of Tarth the books name — the notable, the infamous, and the merely unlucky.
Selwyn Tarth
Lord of Tarth, called the Evenstar
fl. late 3rd century AC
Brienne of Tarth
Selwyn's only surviving child, sworn sword and self-made knight
fl. 298–300 AC
Galladon Tarth
Selwyn's son, drowned young
d. as a child, before 298 AC
Alysanne and Arianne Tarth
Selwyn's daughters
d. in infancy, before 298 AC
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Members
What is House Tarth known for?
An island house that once, by its own long telling, ruled in its own right — sapphires under the hills, an old name still carried with a straight back — House Tarth spent most of its recorded history being called Evenstar rather than Lord, and all of its most recent history being defined by a single daughter its Lord never expected to need.
Where is the seat of House Tarth?
House Tarth holds Evenfall 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.
Is House Tarth 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.