Samwell Tarly–Maester Aemon

Samwell Tarly–Maester Aemon is defined by a reversal of dependence. Samwell Tarly begins as Maester Aemon’s steward and assistant, yet his devotion to books, ravens, and endangered knowledge gradually makes him more than a servant. Maester Aemon recognizes that the Night’s Watch needs Sam’s literacy and judgment, while Sam learns from Aemon how scholarship can become a form of duty. Their bond reaches its fullest expression when Sam escorts the blind, aging maester away from the Wall, cares for him through illness in Braavos, and publicly preserves the meaning of his life after death.

Apprenticeship in the Night’s Watch

Sam’s service to Maester Aemon is practical before it becomes openly intellectual. Samwell Tarly spends long hours in the vaults and tunnels of the Night’s Watch, absorbed in books until he loses track of time. He remembers that Aemon, before blindness took his sight, loved books in much the same way. Aemon understands the experience of falling into a page as if it opened into another world, and this shared attachment to reading gives the relationship an affinity deeper than formal rank.

That service also has a material dimension. Aemon has grown weak and needs assistance, particularly with the ravens. Sam considers himself younger and better with the birds than Clydas, and his usefulness is measured not by physical strength but by patience, literacy, and care. When Sam enters Jon Snow’s solar carrying books, the Lord Commander’s raven flies toward him crying for corn; Sam feeds it from his hand, though the bird pecks hard enough to make him snatch his wrist away and scatter the kernels. The comic inconvenience belongs to the same world as his serious duties: Sam’s knowledge is embodied in repeated, exacting acts of maintenance.

Knowledge as a Shared Duty

Aemon’s influence directs Sam’s reading toward the threat beyond the Wall. Sam searches old accounts for evidence about the Others, and what he finds converts scattered tales into practical instruction. The Children of the Forest supposedly gave the Night’s Watch a hundred obsidian daggers each year during the Age of Heroes. The Others are associated with cold, snowstorms, darkness, and dead animals used as mounts; the dead killed in battle must be burned lest they rise again as thralls. Their armor resists ordinary blades, their swords can shatter steel, fire dismays them, and obsidian harms them. Sam also finds an account claiming that the last hero slew Others with a blade of dragonsteel.

The investigation matters because Aemon’s mentorship does not encourage learning as private escape. Knowledge is meant to answer danger. Sam has personally faced an Other and remembers it melting away when he stabbed it with a dragonglass dagger made by Jon Snow, so his scholarship joins testimony to archival fragments. In this relationship, books do not merely preserve the past; they become instruments for survival, and Aemon’s trust helps transform Sam’s fear and awkwardness into a specialized form of courage.

The Mission from the Wall

When the danger around the Wall becomes more immediate, Aemon helps determine Sam’s next vocation. Jon Snow orders Sam to travel to Eastwatch-by-the-Sea aboard the Blackbird, then continue toward Braavos and Oldtown. Dareon is to join him at Eastwatch and use his songs to win support in the south. Sam is also told that Gilly and the child may be sent to Horn Hill, or that Aemon can find Gilly a servant’s place at the Citadel. The plan therefore binds the personal and institutional dimensions of their relationship: Sam must protect Gilly’s child while carrying Aemon toward the center of learning.

Jon Snow tells Sam that the Night’s Watch has hundreds of men who can loose arrows but only a handful who can read or write. He therefore expects Sam to become the Watch’s new maester. Aemon’s example makes that command intelligible. Sam is not being sent away because his service has failed; he is being redirected because his abilities have become too important to remain confined to one dying institution. His apprenticeship with Aemon becomes the foundation for a larger succession of knowledge, even though Sam has not yet completed it.

Illness, Separation, and Final Counsel

The journey away from the Wall exposes the cost of removing Aemon from the place where he has served for decades. A chill enters his chest during the voyage and settles there; by the time the party reaches Braavos, he is so weak that he must be carried ashore. Sam spends their remaining silver on a healer from the House of the Red Hands, who offers only half a flask of dreamwine and explains that no treatment can make an old man young again. Aemon sleeps through the night and day, then struggles to sit because he remains determined to go down to the ships and learn which vessel will depart for Oldtown.

Aemon’s fever gives his final instruction the atmosphere of both warning and uncertainty. He says that he dreams of a red star bleeding in the sky, shadows on snow, leathern wings, and hot breath, while recalling that his brothers also dreamed of dragons and that those dreams killed them. Yet he refuses to make certainty out of prophecy: he allows that the visions may be wonders and terrors beyond comprehension, or merely the delirium of an old man who is feverish and dying. He regrets leaving the Wall and invokes the contrast that fire consumes while cold preserves. Knowing that death waits outside the door, he asks Sam to go to the ships and learn everything he can about the dragons.

Sam cannot refuse him. Although he tells Gilly to bar the door and leaves the inn to search the docks and canals of Ragman’s Harbor, his departure is also an act of obedience to Aemon’s last scholarly command. The relationship is therefore severed physically before it is completed emotionally: Sam must leave the dying mentor in order to carry out the mentor’s work. The separation turns service into inheritance.

Death, Memory, and Continuation

Aemon dies before Sam can fulfill the immediate promise of returning with food, wine, wood, and a warm fire. On the Cinnamon Wind, off the southern coast of Dorne, Sam performs the words of passing because the ship has no septon. He begins by calling Aemon a good man, corrects himself to call him a great one, and remembers him as a maester of the Citadel, chained and sworn, as well as a sworn brother of the Night’s Watch who remained faithful through the terms of a dozen lord commanders. Aemon had counseled kings and might have been king himself, but when offered the crown he directed it to his younger brother.

Sam’s eulogy gathers the separate identities Aemon carried: scholar, counselor, sworn brother, dragon’s blood, and self-denying prince. He names him Aemon Targaryen and declares that his watch has ended. Gilly repeats the words, and the crew echoes them in both the Common Tongue of Westeros and the Summer Tongue. Sam then breaks down in grief, while Gilly supports him and weeps as well. The scene shows how Sam’s apprenticeship has changed him. He cannot save Aemon’s body, but he can give the dead man an accurate public meaning, translating private affection into communal remembrance.

Their bond also illuminates the novel’s wider struggle over endangered knowledge. Glass candles are said to have been brought to Oldtown from Valyria a thousand years before the Doom; the Citadel’s four candles are described as one green and three black, tall and twisted, while acolytes traditionally keep a vigil with an obsidian candle that they cannot light. Later, Archmaester Marwyn’s three-foot black candle burns without being consumed, its motionless flame turning colors unnaturally bright and shadows almost solid. These objects connect ancient history, prophecy, scholarship, and power. The same is true of dragonglass, whose use against the Others links Sam’s reading to lived danger, and of the dragon horn Euron Greyjoy claims can bind dragons to his will. Against such competing claims to forbidden knowledge, Aemon’s relationship with Sam represents a quieter transmission: knowledge preserved through trust, service, reading, and remembrance rather than possession.

Aemon is therefore both Sam’s mentor and the standard by which Sam’s future is measured. He teaches that learning must answer the world’s mortal emergencies, that vows outlast personal ambition, and that even a life ending in weakness can remain heroic through counsel and fidelity. Sam’s appointment as a prospective maester and his later farewell show the relationship’s decisive movement: the frightened reader becomes the custodian of a dead teacher’s testimony, carrying Aemon’s watch into a future neither of them can see.