The 'GOT' Premiere Had A 'Harry Potter' Reference You Definitely Missed

OK, so Sunday night was a pretty exciting night for a lot of people. Fantasy-fiction fans, HBO fans, (apparently Ed Sheeran fans), and, most notably, Game of Thrones fans, came together to celebrate the Season 7 premiere of our favorite fantasy drama.

Naturally, given how much goes on in any given episode of GOT, it's expected that we might miss a thing or two here and there (hell, I'm still piecing together details that I missed from the second season).

So, while we were focusing on the savage opening scene with Arya or on Ed Sheeran's cameo later in the episode, it might've been easy to miss a pretty cool reference to another famed fantasy series, Harry Potter.

That's right, it looks like Hogwarts met Westeros on Sunday night's episode after Samwell Tarly asked the archmaester about the library's restricted section, which he often sees while performing his duties as he is working towards becoming a maester.

Back to "restricted section," though. Does that term ring any bells? I thought so. The Hogwarts library had a "restricted section," as well. What's even more convincing than that, though, is that the archmaester in GOT is played by Jim Broadbent, aka Professor Slughorn in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

If you're a HP fan, you'll recall Professor Slughorn had a whole lot of business with the restricted section of the Hogwarts library. In fact, he was the one who told Tom Riddle about Horcruxes, information that would only be available in books in the restricted section.

Of course, sneaky Samwell Tarley went snooping around in the restricted section and found a clue on how to defeat the White Walkers.

I'm interested to see if this subtle HP/GOT crossover will setup some drama to come later in the season. I'm also interested to see if there are any other small Easter eggs we may have missed during the first episode while we were busy paying attention to Daenerys's return to Westeros.