Eldest son of Lord Randyll Tarly and Lady Melessa Florent, and once heir to Horn Hill and Heartsbane. Soft, stout, and bookish from boyhood, he proved a bitter disappointment to his father, who tried in turn beatings, hunger, chainmail, and the blood of aurochs to make a warrior of him. On the eve of his sixteenth nameday Randyll gave him the choice of the black or a hunter's accident, and Sam took the black.
At the Wall he was made steward to Lord Commander Mormont and sworn brother to Jon Snow, who would prove his truest friend. He went north with the great ranging, survived the slaughter at the Fist of the First Men, and on the long retreat slew an Other with a dagger of dragonglass, for which the brothers named him Sam the Slayer. He brought Gilly and her babe back from beyond the Wall, schemed Jon's election as Lord Commander, and was then sent south to Oldtown to forge a maester's chain and study what little the Citadel remembered of the Others.